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Mourinho’s got the boot and Chelsea are just sitting above the relegation zone.
No comment 🙂
We are flourishing in decent mid-table obscurity, and the Foxes(!) are currently top of the table.
Who is we?
>Mourinho’s got the boot and Chelsea are just sitting above the relegation zone.
That’s really sad to hear, Mou has been a source for much hilarity
>Who is we?
Liverpool, most probably.
In the long tail of one of the previous thread I suggested that assortive mating by intelligence was primarily a blue tribe phenomenon mediated by elite colleges and grad schools. David Freidman objected that there are other mechanisms besides universities. When pressed for examples he pointed to firms and suggested that rising executives might meet and marry. But this doesn’t seem like plausible for the red tribe generally given the tendency for young first marriages. He had other good points about grays and non-tribals, but I’m curious if there are common and effective mechanisms for getting the smartest young men and women in the red tribe together at the age when they tend to marry for the first time.
I’ll take as given for the sake of argument that assortive mating by parental wealth is a decent substitute, but is that all there is?
Um, don’t most smart red tribers still go to college? Then they can meet each other there (at the young Republican club, or the aspiring business leader club, or at a campus religious organization, etc). I suspect that the ones marrying their HS sweethearts aren’t the cream of the crop.
Anecdotally, I have a family member who went to Wheaton, and I understand a rather large fraction of their students end up marrying one of their classmates, often shortly after graduation. Going by SAT scores, it looks like the 25th/75th percentiles at Wheaton are around +1/+2 SD, so that’s fairly strong assortive mating.
I suspect that the ones marrying their HS sweethearts aren’t the cream of the crop.
Thank you for insulting my father, Frank R. Oh, I know you didn’t mean it on a personal level, but when you’re flinging out bons mots about the dum-dums on the opposite side of the divide, you’re going to insult a lot of people unintentionally – possibly even those in your own family (unless you can demonstrate that all your family members who did not go to college and/or married their first loves are all stupider than the rest of your family).
My father was intelligent. He was even intelligent in the way this site loves: mathematically intelligent, interested in STEM, loving to work out maths problems for fun.
He also had to leave school at fourteen to find work and help support his family, so he never got an education commensurate with his ability and indeed did end up marrying his “HS sweetheart”. Worse again, he even ended up – quelle horreur! – joining the Army for lack of a better job! Nice to have it confirmed he was not “the cream of the crop”!
You know, I just love the assumption on here that not going to college means you’re stupid.
Since we acknowledge (we are acknowledging, right?) that Red Tribe and Blue Tribe don’t simply mean Republican party voter and Democratic party voter, and that corresponding Red Tribe and Blue Tribe characteristics can be found in other societies, I am not going to pare this down to Republican versus Democrat, not least because there are Democrat voters who are not otherwise Blue Tribe.
But this back-patting assumption that since you went to college that proves you’re one of the Smart People and thus those that did not are (1) unassailably dumb (2) members of the rival cultural/political/social tribe is really beginning to annoy me.
There are people who did not go on to college who are equally as smart as those who did, and there are various reasons why they didn’t : lack of money/opportunity, the necessity to support themselves as soon as they finished their education because of family circumstances, more interested in a practical skills career than an academic one, wanted to go into the arts instead (yes, you can do this without a third level degree), just not interested in going and not because they preferred to go into business and begin grinding the faces of the poor as soon as possible.
I know Neil Kinnock’s speech was political campaign emotional appealing (the “thousand generations” stuff is silly) but there is the germ of a point in there:
You want to know why my youngest brother was the first person in my family to get a third level education and a degree? It’s not because he’s the smartest of we four siblings. It’s down to serendipity: my aunt in Wales died, left my mother the proceeds of the sale of her house in her will, and after paying off her debts, there was enough left to pay for my brother, who had just completed his secondary education, to go to university. Without that money, we could not have afforded to send him.
Or we could just make the same assumption that I see repeated on here time and time again: he has a university education so naturally he’s smarter and more progressive* than I, who do not, am and morally superior to me on every topic that counts.
*More progressive, certainly: he’s the gay rights, vegan, atheist, animal rights etc. one of the four of us. Smarter, I would definitely dispute, since I did his homework for him in primary school 🙂
The argument, or at least my argument, wasn’t that everyone that doesn’t go to college is dumb, but rather that everyone that goes to (elite) colleges (and especially grad schools) is smart. So if you have a group of people that often meet their future spouses in grad school and those grad school classmates are all smart you have a plausible process whereby the smart are more likely to marry the smart than whatever the background rate is.
The question I had was what other mechanisms are in place to match the smart with the smart. If the answer is just they find each other in amongst more homogenous groups (like Murphy suggests) — of course I understand that happens and has always happened, but I don’t see any reason to think that it would be more common now than it used to be or is as strong an effect as the elite grad school one.
ok, I’ve been assuming that we’re of similar generations, both from ireland and your parents sound not-dissimilar to my own in many respects, only secondary school level education etc, my dad never got any tertiary qualifications but he did help create some of the earliest comp-sci courses.
but now I’m curious.
With the grant and ,up until recently, third level being effectively free in ireland even my classmates with dead parents or dying parents, zero-asset parents, profoundly disabled parents and broken families were able to afford to go to Uni while incurring no or minimal debt yet only one of your siblings could?
Was the free tertiary education not a thing for your generation or was your income essential to your family from the time you graduated from secondary? Cultural difference?
My secondary school was considered a “rough” one sitting in the middle of a big council estate with most of the school from the estate yet pretty much the only people who didn’t go to third level were the handful of D-class jackass-bullies who preferred to skip out and set fires down by the river or attack people and the small minority who either thought school was for morons and knew that daddy had a job lined up for them in his buisness or who thought school was for morons because “why would anyone work”.
My dad was more or less the same: at least as smart as I am, which is saying something, but only barely graduated high school and went into the Navy soon after. Now he’s a blue collar maintainance man, at least until he retires on his next birthday.
That said, I don’t think Frank was being deliberately classist or is even wrong in terms of population numbers. Empirically, college grads taken as a group are smarter than high school grads taken as a group: all of the bumps that an individual might get hit with smooth out on a population level. Having a degree doesn’t make you any smarter and a plenty of idiots get degrees, but it still serves as evidence.
In the context, however, of Blue versus Red, that was a hell of a lot of assumptions floating around unchallenged.
“smarter Red Tribe people go to college” – meaning the vast unleavened lump of the Red Tribers are just the hicks from the sticks, good enough to fix your car or your plumbing but not really much use and certainly not in the Brave New World coming where everything will be done by robot. The type who are “not the cream of the crop”.
Meanwhile, all the Blue Tribe (or the vast majority that counts) go to college. What about poor Blue Tribers? Are there such beasts, or is it a different class of poor – the ‘starving artist’ rather than the guy who hasn’t worked since the box factory closed down? Or Democrat voters who don’t fit the entire Blue Tribe profile – the ethnic minorities which act as tokens, fashionable charms dangling from the fair trade organically sustainable hand-woven by Nepali AIDS survivors bracelet of the bien pensant in order to prove how utterly, utterly diverse they are, unlike the Red Tribe.
But let us conveniently forget that those same “voting for the right party” persons may have the wrong attitudes and indeed engage in wrongthink, e.g. those black churches which resolutely refused to come on board with “gay rights are the new civil rights”, or Latino immigrants who are manual labourers and not college-educated – you know, just like the non-cream of the crop Redneck Red Tribals.
I’m angry that apparently the notion that you can make snooty remarks about the non-college educated and it doesn’t strike anyone as classist, racist or plain ignorant bad manners because you’re talking about “that lot there” who are, after all, your fellow citizens and fellow humans.
It reminds me very much of the definition of humanitarians being people who love Humanity in the abstract but who hate their fellow humans they engage with in day-to-day life.
Generally speaking there aren’t a lot of poor or working class people in the “Blue Tribe,” because it’s basically defined as coastal middle and upper class whites. A Koch isn’t culturally very different from a Kenedy: both of them go to the same schools and the same boat clubs.
Unions form a strong constituency for the Democrats but they’re not the same sort of people as the “Blue Tribe” and typically have vastly different concerns. Ditto with ethnic minorities: blacks and latinos are valuable voting blocks but also much much more conservative than the median democratic candidate on anything except race.
Going back to anecdotes: my Dad is a yellow dog democrat, a lifelong union member and lives in a democratic stronghold state. But he’s also a veteran who never went to college, loves country western music, wears timberland boots and desperately wishes his illegal coworkers could be convinced to learn to speak English. Give him a gun and a bible and he’d fit in perfectly with the “Red Tribe.”
So yes it’s absolutely a class thing first and foremost.
You know, I just love the assumption on here that not going to college means you’re stupid.
Unless you’re Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I’d imagine you’d get some degree of assortative mating simply due to people often finding people on their own level most interesting.
People also tend to associate in clubs and societies which can also filter for intelligence to an extent. The people who join more intellectual clubs are more likely to get together. Women in the chess club are far more likely to date other members of the chess club than are women outside the club.
I’m largely speculating, since I’m an academic and an atheist, but I would expect some red tribe assortive mating to happen through churches. It helps to have institutions that sort people by intelligence but it isn’t essential, since people can sort themselves within an unsorted population.
In more traditional societies, couples are largely put together by the parents. I don’t know if there is a significant amount of that pattern happening in some form in American red tribe populations.
I’m not a regular attendee I go closer to once a month rather than every Sunday, but speaking from experience church functions and auxiliaries are a decent places to find a mate. My friend J met his (now) wife through the choir (he was a tenor and she was an alto), and I’ve certainly derived some benefit from the social opportunities offered by volunteering and simply mingling.
Re: the whole Israel-Palestine shitstorm upthread, has anyone suggested yet that Israel abolish the Palestinian autonomy and eject anyone who complains? Because that’s an option that’s likely to lead to internal peace. Indeed, the time couldn’t be better, with Syria, Iraq and Egypt all occupied with rebel problems – even the Saudis are busy intervening in Yemen – so immediate anti-Israel coalitions are unlikely to emerge.
As it happens there is a pro-ethnic-cleansing party in Israel. Guess you’ll need to step up if you want to maintain your edge posting bona fides.
Are you accusing me of posting that simply for the sake of the edge factor, rather than a serious solution proposal?
I’m not surprised to learn that the Israelis have such a faction. Jews are smart, after all. What is that faction called, though?
All of those people in those countries would come together to oppose Israel.
Doubtful. And even if – it isn’t like Israel hasn’t beaten them all together before.
I don’t think Israel is silly enough to provide them with an attacking outside threat just when they’re tearing each other to bits.
Israel wouldn’t be attacking any of them, unless you mean that being subjected to Palestinian refugee migration is an attack.
“Hurr durr look how low status I am”
“Fuck off, loser”
“Joke’s on them, I was countersignaling”
Clever.
Placebo effect and regression to the mean:
Great article:
http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak-regression-to-the-mean-is-the-main-reason-ineffective-treatments-appear-to-work/
Is metformin a cheap anti-aging drug?
http://singularityhub.com/2015/12/06/longer-life-in-a-pill-may-already-be-available-at-your-local-drug-store/
FYI, there was some discussion of this in the last links thread. But it is an underexamined topic and could always use more attention!
Indeed. This could be very good news for my parents and grandparents, especially.
How does an environmentalist prove they’re not a “watermelon” (green on outside red on inside), beyond openly saying that communism is a bad idea? It seems like an impossible accusation to answer?
By being an eco-capitalist, eco-fascist or green conservatist?
Join the Mexican Green Party. They love the death penalty and hate the gays. And their logo is a happy toucan.
They also throw a wicked party and have entertaining radio spots.
Consume a lot of dye?
Discuss why you think nuclear power is a good thing (if you think nuclear power is a good thing, that is)?
Talk about a carbon tax in an explicitly market-based way?
Find someone to the left of you and castigate them for it (not it)?
I think the kind of person who is likely to claim that someone is only supporting environmental goals because of insidious communist sympathies is not likely to change their mind and also isn’t worth dealing with.
I agree with the last paragraph, but still the notion does not come out of the blue. For some reason there are more “eco-concerned” people on the left and probably more the more to the left you drift. It might have something to do with messianic tendencies of the left-wing, I don’t know. It might simply be that the left took this idea first, so it became a “leftwing idea” by default. But it is not a bad prior to assume that an environmentalist is likely to also be a socialist (and more likely to be a communist as well, despite the horrible ecological track-record of actual communism). The Green Parties, at least in Europe, are often the most radical left save for actual communists and the environmentalist issues are maybe not even the major part of their program anymore. There are also some center-right green parties, but the only one I know of which has some noticeable support is the Green Liberal party in Switzerland (liberal is not used in the US sense, so it does not mean left-wing).
But I think the answer to the original question is simple. If you favor state solutions in things not related to environmentalism, then you are likely to be a melon. If not, then you probably are not. Do you also support minimum wage laws? What is your stance on gun control? Are (let’s say non-environmental) taxes too high/too low/just right according to you? Should there be limits to what is free speech (should there be a legally defined “hate-speech”)? Should the state have a say in how you raise your children? And so on…
Of course one could also argue for market-based environmental actions as opposed to the state-based ones. For example one could want to buy parts of the Amazon through a charity and conserve and protect it, or what an actual charity does – use the charity money to sue the Brazilian state to give that land back to the Indians from the Amazon who tend to not turn it into farmland (which strikes me as a nice libertarian property rights approach). Makes more sense to me than supporting state subsidies of various industries which label themselves as eco-friendly, but not always are – such as in the case of the so called biofuels.
On a slight tangent, I usually take particular environmentalists seriously if they are not fanatically against (meaning not that they have no objections against them, but that they do not see them as a sin) nuclear power and GMOs, two things that, despite not being perfect, seem like a part of the solution to a lot of environmental issues rather than a cause. Yet these environmentalists seem to be a minority.
> For some reason there are more “eco-concerned” people on the left and probably more the more to the left you drift. It might have something to do with messianic tendencies of the left-wing, I don’t know.
It’s probably just because both “red” and “green” types have a common enemy: capitalists / corporations.
The standard “red” conflict is between capitalists/owners/rentiers and workers. (This mimics the older conflict between landowners and laborers.) It’s about the division of the spoils of production.
The standard “green” conflict is between unbridled development/production and the environment. Of course, if you reduce production, this will harm workers too, but this is through fairly indirect channels (reduce return to capital -> less investment -> labor demand curve shifts in), while the losses of shareholders/owners are more direct and obvious.
Then you have enemy of my enemy is my friend. And it also helps that hippies have natural affinity for “the little guy”, even if most blue collar types don’t think much of hippies.
(Also, to some extent political alliances are arbitrary accidents of history that are later rationalized. Like, why are rich business owners and conservative Christians natural political allies?)
“Natural allies” to me implies overlapping interests, but I think the (recent) durability of the alliance between business conservatives and religious conservatives is more due to non-overlapping interests. Business conservatives don’t care too much about religiously motivated morality signaling — there’s some historical friction around media, but self-censorship has largely solved the problem and media’s not a very conservative industry anyway. Religious conservatives (in the US, where they’re mostly Protestant and have inherited shares of the Puritan attitude toward labor) don’t care too much about laissez-faire economics. So there’s not too many ways for them to step on each other’s toes.
There’s historically also a bit of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” action going on here, since both are strongly anti-Communist — religious conservatives because they object to Communism’s atheism and materialism, business conservatives for obvious reasons. But that’s a lot less relevant after 1991, and Islamism is an imperfect substitute.
There’s a difference between concluding that someone is likely to be left-wing because they are concerned about environmental causes and claiming that they are they are only using concern about environmental causes as a beard to promote socialism. That’s usually the context I see the ‘watermelon’ canard brought up.
FWIW I think the association is just because the right ended up the party of Unrestrained Free Market Capitalism.
I think that what you described would be the Libertarian party in the US and similar parties in Europe, not the right as a whole. At the same time, you can be pro unrestricted capitalism (or definitely much more unrestricted than a typical Republican) and concerned about environmentalist issues. In fact, I would not be too surprised if on average the members of the Libertarian party were more inclined to have sympathies to at least some environmentalist goals than the members of the Republican Party. Ditto for supporters of those parties or of what they broadly stand for.
Your last paragraph is why the right distrusts environmentalism and supports climate-change denial. When every single environmental problem is presented with a left-wing – more government regulation, more taxes, less property rights – solution, it’s rational to believe that left-wing economics is the real aim and that environmental concerns are only being used as a propaganda hook. So until the environmentalists fix their attitude, and are willing to offer solutions which don’t consistently and completely map to left-wing economic desires, the right is going to treat them as a gang of thieves out to steal their property and destroy the economy.
What would be a right-wing solution to climate change, given that you’ve excluded taxes, and therefore excluded Pigovian taxes?
Reduce taxes and regulations on energy companies, hope that somebody invents magic in the next few decades?
Incidentally, Pigovian taxes are my preferred solution to the problem – tax CO2 emissions, make it zero income by cutting other taxes, let the market sort it out. Maybe look into why nobody wants to build nuclear power plants and whether there’s a governmental problem there (I am not an expert on US/European/whatever nuclear power regulations. I’m in favour of removing the ban on nuclear power plants in my country though). I don’t think this is a terribly uncommon position in the cluster of people who care about the issue – the nuclear thing is definitely not very common, and I understand that, I’m not really super into them, but a carbon tax is very much a popular proposition, and revenue neutrality is pretty common as well. I am, of course, quite left of centre.
I reserve the right to not interact with people who are just being shit-stirring conspiracy theorists. If you’re going to implicitly accuse me of being dishonest, why should I bother?
Nuclear power plants would be a start. You almost caught on, but just barely missed it.
The answer to your question “Maybe look into why nobody wants to build nuclear power plants” is precisely that the left *is* doing it based on ideology, and nuclear power plants don’t fit into the ideology. If you could solve the problem of getting the left to support nuclear power, you wouldn’t need to convince the right, because to solve the problem you have to remove the exact thing that the right is complaining about.
(This applies to geoengineering too. That’s really horrifying to someone with a pro-nature ideology.)
I don’t follow. To me it looks like nuclear power is just as much a problem for the right as it is for the left as making them work requires a fairly high level of government intervention.
1) Nuclear plants need to borrow an enormous among of money up front to be built. No one wants to lend them that money at a rate that makes the whole plant economical unless they have some sort of guarantee that someone will be willing to buy power from them at a stable rate for the next 50 years. That means granting a government monopoly. The alternative is to have the government guarantee the loans.
2) Decommissioning costs, including waste disposal, are quite high. Without government regulation companies will incorporate special purpose entities, run power plants and pay dividends and then go out of business before paying decommissioning costs. So you need rules about reserves, bonds or the like, which in turn make the spreadsheet for profitability worse and increase the calls for subsidies.
3) There is a certain amount of catastrophic risk associated with nuclear power plants. The options are: let them run without adequate insurance and let the chips fall where they may or require adequate insurance. If the government chooses the former there is no built in market mechanism to ensure the companies spend enough on safety and so you need micromanaging safety regulations. But if the government chooses the latter there isn’t the depth in even the reinsurance market to write these policies and if there were the cost would make running plants uneconomical. So in practice you need government to provide backstop insurance which in turn brings you back to micromanaging safety regulations.
@Brad In addition to your points, North America’s natural gas boom, and probable cheap future solar, add a lot to the risk of investing a few billion dollars in a nuclear power plant in the United States. Electricity production prices are probably trending downwards for quite a while.
I am under the impression that no one really would make a go of it currently in the US unless it was either subsidized, or if some sort of regulation (e.g. carbon tax) was making alternative forms of energy more expensive. With that said, I do find it plausible that they’re over-regulated and would be open to sensible deregulation, though I don’t know enough to offer specifics. But while 20-30 years ago that might have made a big impact, I don’t see it making much difference at this time.
@ brad:
In general, the pro-capitalist argument with regard to nuclear power is that the reason it costs too much to be economical is unnecessary government regulation, based on environmentalist alarmism about the size of the risks.
If the returns are too low to cover the size and risk of the investment, the plant shouldn’t be built. This might be true, even in a free market.
Obviously, in that case, the advocates of laissez faire would say that nuclear power plants should not be built if they are not profitable.
Yes, it’s reasonable to require that nuclear power companies cover the decommissioning costs up front (or in some way make sure they are paid, which is a legitimate concern). If this makes it unprofitable, the plants shouldn’t be built.
But maybe the decommissioning costs are too high because of an unnecessarily high level of regulation.
I don’t see why nuclear power plants can’t be insured. Yes, the potential damage is quite high, but that just means they have to make the probability of disaster quite low. If they are not profitable enough to make up for the cost of insurance, they are senseless and shouldn’t be run. Especially not by the government. The catastrophic risk doesn’t go away when the government imposes it on people without any market limitation on the risk it can impose.
Basically, you are arguing that nuclear power is economically insane. That running the plants is not productive enough to make the benefits greater than the costs. Maybe so. In that case, pro-capitalists would be against nuclear power.
But now this is an object-level dispute about nuclear power. One side thinks it would likely be profitable (for the company and society) if the layers of Soviet bureaucracy were removed. The other side thinks it wouldn’t.
The pro-capitalists say: the market will build nuclear power plants if they are profitable, and it won’t build them if they are not. Either way, the government should not build them.
Edit: Ninja’d by Vox Imperatoris
Nuclear power plants are very expensive, but a great deal if not the majority of those costs are regulatory. Even getting the land to build it can be a huge hassle since local governments and the EPA can and will step in and prevent construction on any flimsy justification. Reducing the regulatory burden would make nuclear power much more economical.
As for the argument that private firms won’t invest in something on that scale remeber that even with present costs, including the regulatory burden, the price of getting a nuclear plant running are on the same order of magnitude as building a semiconductor fabrication plant. Private actors are absolutely willing to invest in capital on the order of billions of dollars, but why should they do so if there’s a risk their plant will be arbitrarily shut down or nationalized every four years?
The argument against nuclear power on economic grounds is bizarre because it’s so circular. The government could make toothpaste just as difficult for private firms to manufacture if it wanted to, but would that mean the market is incapable of supplying the need for toothpaste or that toothpaste manufacturing is inherently inefficient?
AFAIK a cutting edge fab has a payback period of 5 years. It will continue to run for another decade or more on less and less performance critical parts, with correspondingly lower margins, but if it it wasn’t projected to make back its costs while the node was top of the line they wouldn’t get built.
A nuclear power plant has break even times of 25-50 years.I can’t think of anything else the private sector invests in with that long a time horizon. Not even new drugs. A payback period that long means that you are extremely sensitive to interest rates and construction delays. A project can easily swing from projected profitability to projected loss over the lifetime of the project before it has even been finished being constructed. What kind of equity component would you require before you’d lend money to a project like that?
An unsubsidized nuclear power plant that is required to internalize its externalities (primarily pay for cleanup and self insure) (edit: typo) without government granted monopoly is not economically feasible. I have nothing against nuclear power, but I can’t say I’m pro-nuclear because it practice that means pro-nuclear-subsidies.
@ brad:
Yes, but what is the reason the payback period on nuclear power plants is so long? They cost so damn much to build.
Why do they cost so damn much to build? Regulations.
If the regulations were cut to a reasonable level, would they still cost too damn much to build? Maybe. I don’t know.
There are two very large potential externalities with nuclear power.
1) A disaster on the scale of Chernobyl, the kind that renders thousands of square miles dangerous to inhabit, is almost assuredly non-insurable. A company might say they are insuring against it, but the odds of actually paying to render all people whole seems highly unlikely.
2) Nuclear waste. We are still building reserves of this waste with no permanent storage or disposal. Taking out insurance against a leak event at a permanent storage facility 10,000 years in the future seems unlikely to be realistic, let alone building an annuity for active maintenance and monitoring in the kind of temporary storage we use now.
Objecting to the cost of government regulation without honestly dealing with those issues at the same time seems to not realistically deal with the problem.
Fukushima has been estimated to have cost hundreds of billions of dollars worth of direct and indirect damages. Who is going to write the insurance policy at that level, what are they going to charge for it, and what kind of safety measures are they going to demand to make sure they don’t have to pay out?
Sure, I acknowledge it is possible I’m wrong and a nuclear power plant could be economical if only the bureaucrats got out of the way, but I highly doubt it.
How is France managing it?
Their plants don’t seem especially dangerous, so I don’t think they are skimping on safety requirements.
Their energy costs also don’t seem out of line with the rest of Europe’s.
Even getting the land to build it can be a huge hassle since local governments and the EPA can and will step in and prevent construction on any flimsy justification.
Weren’t we just asking a little while ago why anyone would want to build nuclear reactors in the ocean? This. This is why we want to build nuclear reactors in the ocean.
And we have over half a century of experience that this can be done safely, affordably, and almost uncontroversially.
I agree that insurance per se doesn’t make any sense at that scale, but there are other ways to do these things.
For example, you could take the estimated costs of a meltdown or leak and then use the annual risk to calculate the approximate costs borne by people living near a nuclear plant. Then you can simply internalize them by having the plant’s owners pay out that sum either in taxes or directly to local residents. And it would also provide clear incentives for the owners to buy additional safety measures, since they would be reducing their operating costs.
As for nuclear waste, the danger is greatly overstated. Nuclear reprocessing significantly reduces the volume of waste produced and removes the longest lasting isotopes. The only reason the government supposedly needs to dig 10,000 year tombs for nuclear waste is because political pressure took the idea of actually reusing any of that spent fuel off the table. Even just building new reactors would solve most of it, since breeder reactors do all of their own reprocessing internally.
Fukushima has been estimated to have cost hundreds of billions of dollars worth of direct and indirect damages.
Fukushima has also been estimated to have cost about fifty billion dollars worth of direct and indirect damages. Fukushima is a bad example for this purpose, because it is terribly easy to conflate damage done by the reactor failure, damage done by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake at the same time, and quasi-damage done by irrational fear.
Chernobyl is a legitimate example of a hundred-gigabuck nuclear catastrophe, and maybe reaches the terabuck threshold. But the answer to that one is rather simple – build your nuclear reactors out of metal rather than coal, and enclose them in reinforced concrete rather than brick.
@Edward Scizorhands
Électricité de France is 85% owned by the French government, and even nominally private companies in France are often “championed” (read heavily subsidized) by the government.
@John Schilling
I accept your number for the sake of argument. Could even Munich Re write a $50B policy? And even if you find a consortium that could legitimately do so, what would it cost and what would be the quasi-regulatory requirements that they’d impose?
@Dr Dealgood
I don’t know how such a system would work. The only thing I can think of would require extensive government involvement. That government involvement might technically be in the form of risk modeling rather than regulatory mandates, but given the way the features of the model would fall through to the payments I’m not sure that’s a distinction with a difference.
@ James Picone
What would be a right-wing solution to climate change, given that you’ve excluded taxes, and therefore excluded Pigovian taxes?)
Not interesteed in -wing talk, but here are some places I’d start on the problem (as President Palin’s token-Democrat czar).
1. Remove any regulations (many iirc are at local levels, or policies of lenders, etc) that hamper an individual putting up a homemade solar panel on his own roof, or a homemade windmill in his own yard. (See ~1970s _The Mother Earth News_). Or other small or medium size projects, from small or medium size companies.
2. Cancel any subsidies to fossil fuel industries that are keeping their prices artificially low. Also, make them pay their own externalities.
3. Redirect those subsidies to clean energy development for use within its local area: no more big wind or solar farms* that require wide grid distribution.
Okay, 1 and 2 ought to please some Libertarians, and might give good enough results that 3 would be less needed.
Incidentally, Pigovian taxes are my preferred solution to the problem – tax CO2 emissions
I disagree. C02 emissions are too narrow a target, as is AGW. Imo going to cleaner power is worthwhile on its own, for many other obvious reasons. (And taxes are way too game-able, by those who have the most money and power to game with.)-
* Btw, why (and from whom) is current money going to these giant monolithic projects instead of smaller, more adaptable projects?
@ Brad
Nuclear plants need to borrow an enormous among of money up front to be built. No one wants to lend them that money at a rate that makes the whole plant economical unless they have some sort of guarantee that someone will be willing to buy power from them at a stable rate for the next 50 years.
If we said “buy from them at a profitable rate for the next many years”, this would apply to the big wind and solar farms I get quixotic against (as investments). Solar and wind energy price depends on high tech research that changes faster than anything can be built. For goodness sake let’s build some stuff to use asap, but don’t tie up a 50-year investment in something that can be out-competed by what’s built next year: that way breeds instant dinosaurs.
Better to invest in a lot of small s/w projects with different approaches, and hope that at least some of them will stay profitable long enough to support the others while they all adapt.
“No nuclear” is bipartisan over here in Australia.
The problem with geoengineering is that GW is already an uncontrolled geoengineering experiment. Doing another big scary geoengineering experiment to try and reverse the first one instead of just stopping the first one seems like a bad idea.
(Although a good chunk of the low scenarios in the IPCC’s projections require negative emissions ~2050, so we might have to do it anyway).
None of this is helping my perception that the only acceptable ‘solution’ to people of this persuasion is “Do nothing; hope it sorts itself out accidentally”.
Bipartisanship: Being stupid AND evil. 😉
Show an understanding of property rights and the tragedy of the commons. Know Coase.
Although I don’t really see why environmentalism would automatically lead to a suspicion of communism rather than just more regulatory statism of the kind we currently have now. Communist countries tend to be very environmentally unfriendly.
If you are a True Believer in Communism pointing out that historical “Communist” countries have been both repressive and environmentally disastrous will just tend to confirm your suspicion that such countries were insufficiently Communist and/or that such reports were mostly counter-revolutionary propaganda.
Communist countries are not relevant when discussing with communists.
My uncharitable interpretation to why there’s a lot more far-left environmentalists than there used to is that it’s pretty much the number one strike against free-market capitalism currently: Since Capitalism has failed to fail for all the reasons they have been giving in the past, they’re jumping onto the new one.
I might not be paying attention, but I haven’t heard much “nationalize/collectivize industry X” from the environmental movement. Instead, they seem to just want a lot more regulation.
At some point, the difference between “nationalize” and “regulate the bejeezus out of until only government blessed megacorps can survive” becomes academic. Power utilities are pretty close.
@Gbdub: Isn’t that Fascism, not Marxism?
Sure; the difference between Fascism and Marxism is whether or not you give the industrialists a chance to do your bidding before shooting them.
Le Maistre I’d agree, unfortunately “fascism” has been ruined as a descriptor since now people just think it means something between murdering Jews and generally being a particularly nasty conservative. “Socialism” is not quite there yet. Either way, environmentalism as it stands does seem to be drawn to authoritarian big government solutions of one form or another, which makes sense since the core belief of environmentalists is basically that humans are awful and will destroy the planet if left to their own devices.
And Nybbler, I must say I LOL’d.
This is exactly it!
I mean, it’s not exactly recent. It goes back to the New Left and the birth of the environmental (or, as it used to be called, “ecology” movement).
The Old Left had wanted as much economic growth as possible—”acceleration”—and was convinced that capitalism was just a very inefficient system that was bad at producing economic growth. Why have 40 brands of cereal by 10 different companies when we can have just one and build heavy industry? We’ll save and invest a lot now, and sure that means we’ll be a little poorer, but our children will have communism (which is the basic-income utopia where there is no effective scarcity). It was precisely the idea of socialism = two marshmallows, capitalism = one marshmallow.
But after it was pretty conclusively shown that capitalism was far better at producing growth than state socialism, the leftists didn’t become ardent champions of laissez faire. They just started to say economic growth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s “unsustainable”; it’s killing Mother Earth; we need to embrace “limits to growth”; we need to focus on happiness and equality, not material consumption.
There are still some of the former around, but the latter trend is dominant today. That’s the root of the concern about income inequality. Sure, there are arguments that income inequality decreases growth, but when it comes down to it I think many people would say that too much inequality is bad even if it does produce more growth. There’s the idea that we have all the wealth we really need; what we’ve got to do is shift it around for a more equal distribution.
That last sentence is very insightful. Americans in particular are so wealthy that many of them can’t imagine there isn’t enough for everybody to live almost as well if we all just give up a latte a day and take The Donald’s private jet away. There isn’t anything like that much (yet) but these aren’t people who excel at math.
Environmentalism is ultimately a luxury good. No one scrabbling to survive (or scrabbling to join the 21st century) is going to make major sacrifices for the important but diffuse and long-horizon benefits of “going green”.
So the solution is not to restrict wealth, but grow it, so that more people are wealthy enough to start caring about the environment.
@gbdub:
How would your general suggestion have dealt with CFCs?
Relying on the market throwing up a good technological solution to an environmental problem sounds, to me, like an excellent strategy for running headlong into the worst possible consequences of the first problem the market doesn’t solve fast enough.
Agree with all of the above, but might further add: advocate specific, reasonable solutions, and show a sense of proportionality. For example, if you are concerned about global warming, say, “here are specific steps the following governments could take which would not be insanely costly, which we could reasonably expect these governments to cooperate on, and which would make a real difference.” The problem with a lot of warming alarmists in my mind is that they don’t seem to offer any realistic, implementable solutions, but seem more concerned with using global warming as a cudgel to stop various kinds of economic development they find icky, such as fracking. As with the gun control thing, one is reluctant to give an inch, because the feeling is that they’ll only use that as an opportunity to start pushing for a mile–be the mile confiscation of all guns or shutdown of all domestic petroleum production or whatever.
Also, and this is just me, but I personally found environmentalism a lot more sympathetic before it was so myopically focused on global warming to the exclusion of all else (whatever happened to “save the whales” and “save the rainforest”?), and also find global warming-related arguments more convincing when they are made about specific issues, like, “look at all the biodiversity we stand to lose,” etc. Most of the arguments I see about global warming today on Facebook and the like are pure signalling: look at these dumb red tribe members who hate science!
Related to proportionality, resist the temptation to engage in hyperbole, even if you are frustrated at the lack of progress: I recall all the rainforest hysteria back when I was a kid–you’d hear statistics like “1 football field worth of rainforest is lost forever every minute”–and yet somehow we still kind of have jungles (the old word for “rainforests”) all around the equator. This kind of “crying wolf” leads to suspicion about future doomsday claims.
But most of all, just make it as clear as possible what your actual goals are: preservation of biodiversity, clean water, clean air, etc. (I’m CERTAINLY sympathetic to any effort to clean up the air of North China…); otherwise, fair or not, there may be an impression that your real problem is economic development per se, or that your real goal is to use environmental issues as a pretext to achieve more globalism and state control over peoples’ lives.
I see it similarly. I share some environmentalist concerns, for example, I would not like the Amazon to be mined out and turned into a farmland, I think that pollution in many places in the world is terrible and should be reduced. I also think that one can usually do this through private means, maybe not always (but it is at least always necessary to see if the costs of state solutions do not exceed the benefits, a difficult thing to estimate, admittedly, but the standard way of doing it is forgetting about the costs altogether). I would be willing to give some money (less than what I give to GiveDirectly, but only say by half) to people who do something sensible to solve these problems without state intervention punishing private actors (the reason I do not give money to the Rainforest Foundation I mentioned here which seems to do things really well and its only dealing with the state seems to be suing it to give the property back to the rightful owners, is that they have a horrible response time to my questions – I waited 2 months before they replied to my first email and then have not received any answer to the other which I sent at least a month ago).
I heard someone say the other day (no idea who it was anymore, it was some time back) that we “should focus less on global warming and more on local pollution”. I completely subscribe to that sentiment and insofar as the environmentalists do that, they usually have my sympathies (usually, it depends on how they go about it and if they are civil or aggressive as they often are). But it seems to me that the crusade against climate change often diminishes the focus on the other issues.
“we “should focus less on global warming and more on local pollution”.”
And presumably whatever you did to improve air quality in Northern China, say, would also probably help with global warming insofar as Northern China contributes to it, but narrowing it down to a specific local issue makes it seem more practical and achievable, and the payoff more tangible–whether or not you agree humans are making a big impact on the climate, you can probably agree that Chinese people would like to breathe clean air.
The goals of many warming alarmists seem so grand and unrealistic that I think it discourages people from even starting.
Well, if you stop a chemical plant in China le their toxic waste flow into the river or install filters on its chimneys that catch poisonous but not to-global-warming-contributing chemicals, then you don’t do much about the global warming, but you still do a lot of good and a good which is, as you write, much more achievable and also measurable. It seems to me like an effective altruism question – focusing on local pollution is obviously a good, it is easier to measure its impact and easier to achieve it…so is the deworming initiative, giving money to poor individuals directly and basically all the GiveWell charities. On the other hand, fighting climate change seems to be something closer to giving money to political parties in the hope that their policies will make lives of people better (in fact, often it is exactly that).
With local pollution, there’s not really a collective action problem there that requires international coordination the way there is with global warming. Local Chinese pollution doesn’t hurt people outside of China the way Chinese CO2 does.
But don’t a lot of the things that cause local pollution also release CO2?
onyomi – there are cleaner and dirtier ways of burning carbon-containing fuels to generate power (whether electrical or motive). Generally, burning cleaner doesn’t reduce the amount of CO2 released, even if you reduce the NOx and SOx and O3 emitted.
In fact, one major “local” pollutant is soot (particulates, PM10). It’s unburnt carbon. The solution to that particular pollutant is to burn it – tune your powerplant so less soot escapes – which effectively *adds* to the CO2 emission. (Though not by a lot.)
Cleaner-burning engines are *generally* a little more efficient, but that’s mostly because all the research into engines in the past 30 years or more has had lower pollution as one aim.
My avatar smiles upon this comment thread.
One thing for any environmentalist to remain conscious of is that there are already gobs of regulations on the books. Oil drilling operations, chemical plant construction and operations, mining, logging, fishing, farming, whatever, all aspects of industry are already regulated. Pretty much all companies working in those spaces put a lot of effort into adhering to the regulations, because your company can be ruined pretty quickly if you’re caught violating them.
This is one reason why people working in any resource-oriented sector start twitching when we hear calls to, for example, “Regulate the oil industry!!!! Regulate fracking!!!!” It’s already regulated, it may actually already be regulated fairly intelligently, and if you aren’t aware of what exactly the rules are, then it isn’t helpful to try to suggest new ones. Finding good regulations is a complex process of compromise between the ideal of zero-environmental-impact and the reality that you can’t get logs without cutting down trees, etc., and usually involves both bureaucrats and industry insiders collaborating to reach something that actually works.
TLDR, a vague sense that there’s too much pollution can serve a function if it spurs you to learn more about the existing regulatory system, but works against you if all it does is motivate Facebook rants.
Personally, I have a hard time taking proposed action against global warming seriously when the people promoting make deals at huge lavish conferences, ferried there by private jet, and places like the Sierra Club continue to push unscientific boogeyman arguments against nuclear power.
I know this isn’t strictly logical, but the optics are terrible: the people claiming this is a huge threat don’t seem to be acting like it, although they are very quick to say I ought to change my lifestyle and/or give them additional political power.
And I’ll add that the biggest successful reductions in CO2 seem to be coming from places other than these grand agreements – Europe’s carbon market and offsets seems increasingly like a boondoggle, while the US has reduced emissions by switching a lot of coal production to newly available natural gas. Not sexy, but effective.
They’re saying you ought to pay a little more for carbon, not spend your life shivering in the dark.
“Pay a little more for carbon” only makes sense as a means to “encourage” the production of less carbon, ergo a change in lifestyle. Otherwise it’s just a regressive tax enriching governments and purveyors of often fraudulent “carbon offsets”. (And considering there are still people who die every year when they can’t afford heating oil, “shivering in the dark” is apparently a distinct possibility, at least on the margin)
The US government spokesman for the necessity of this is of course John Kerry, a man who owns at least 5 houses, a jet, and a yacht.
Of course it’s intended to change your (and everyone’s) lifestyle, *in subtle ways*. If someone was taking your car away then I could understand wanting to make Kerry give up his jet. But no one is taking your car away.
It is much easier to make my car less or un-economic for me to use as I wish than it is to make Kerry’s private jet less or un-economic for him to use as he wishes by playing at the margins. Unless you make it as *relatively* expensive for him to use his jet as it is for me to use my car, I don’t find this argument very sympathetic.
Jets are probably more affected by oil prices than cars, actually.
Yes, they are. But that doesn’t mean Kerry is more affected by the price of fuel than I am.
Since apparently I skipped too many steps in my post down below, I’ll expand here: If Kerry et al want me to REALLY BELIEVE they are committed to reducing global warming, first I want to see taxes on fueling private planes (i.e. planes not operated by common carriers) which are at least as significant to the passenger’s overall net worth/income as raising carbon taxes on auto fuel is to the average person in the United States. Work it like speeding tickets in Scandinavia, for all of me. When Kerry has to worry if he’ll be able to make the mortgage if he travels too much in his jet the way John Q. has to worry about what rising fuel taxes will do to his grocery money, then I’ll believe he believes it’s a crisis. Until then he can go and pound sand.
@Mark Whipple The last proposal targeting private jets (eliminating a fairly small tax break) was shot down by the right. No idea if Kerry/Obama would support your proposal, but it would certainly be DOA in a Republican congress.
I’ve never found the private jet argument very convincing, unless the people owning those jets are proposing to abolish rich people as well as reduce total carbon emissions. A few are, to be fair, but most aren’t.
The nuclear power argument is a lot toothier. We’re now at a point where you make an economic argument for wind/solar and not be completely insane, but nukes occupy a complementary niche, and I’m having a hard time thinking of arguments against filling it that don’t amount to superstition.
I did state that I understand it’s illogical. But only to a point – I understand there will always be rich people, but if said rich people are, on the one hand, asserting that this is the greatest extant threat to the planet, and on the other, are apparently unwilling to make even minor visible lifestyle sacrifices… (I mean seriously, Kerry alone could eliminate the carbon output of like a dozen average Americans and still live like a king)
It does make you question the sincerity of their motives when their proposal just so happens to increase their personal power / fame / wealth.
The thing is, John Kerry could destroy all his assets and kill himself today so that neither he nor his belongings ever contribute another molecule of additional CO2 to the atmosphere again, and that would not have any meaningful impact in AGW. To impact AGW requires global-level (or at least national-level) changes in behavior, and excepting something truly absurd, no luxury by any individual is going to change anything. Thus it makes perfect sense to me that Kerry would model AGW as something that he can impact only through political actions but not through any personal actions and thus would act accordingly: push hard for regulation to fight AGW in the political realm, while living his private life as if it can’t impact AGW – because it can’t.
This seems innocuous to me and doesn’t make me at all suspicious of his beliefs or commitment wrt AGW and fighting it. Anyone bringing up such an argument DOES make me suspicious, as I register it as a grasping-at-straws argument, one that seems to rely mostly on attaching negative affect to an individual whose side one doesn’t like.
There’s also a case to be made that Kerry should be aware that people WILL make this argument, and that many people WILL find such an argument convincing, and therefore if he REALLY wanted to fight AGW, he would prevent himself from being open to such attacks. At the object level, this has problems, such as the fact that, short of committing suicide, there will ALWAYS be room for people to criticize his CO2 contribution. At a more meta level, this seems more indicative of a failure in Kerry’s politicking than of his lack of conviction in his belief about AGW.
This reminds me of the commonly seen argument whenever people call for higher taxes – Why don’t you just send in more $$$ to the govt if you like taxes so much? The failure of the argument is the same, which is that even if someone like Warren Buffet gave his entire life savings to the IRS, it wouldn’t impact the govt assets enough to allow for any meaningful changes in the budget. To do that requires nation-level changes that impact the 100s of millions of people living in the US. And so someone who calls for raising taxes while not paying a penny more than the taxes they legally have to pay seems completely innocuous to me and not at all noteworthy.
You’re right in that Kerry himself, flagrant as his CO2 production is, is statistically insignificant.
OTOH, so is my car.
The rebuttal based on this observation is left as an exercise for the student.
This is why Kerry doesn’t call for banning you from owning your car or for shaming you for using your car.
One major problem among people who perceive AGW as a problem is that a lot of them DO try to shame individuals for their individual contributions to AGW. This is boneheadedly stupid, partly because, as discussed above, changing an individual’s behavior doesn’t meaningfully affect AGW, and partly because it predictably creates backlash. AFAIK, Kerry and other politicians of his ilk are not among them. And while they may hold some responsibility for not calling out those in their camp who DO use such terrible arguments, they are ultimately not responsible for those arguments.
I’ve perceived things as changing in the last few years, though, with the AGW-is-a-problem camp getting together behind the message that one’s own individual behaviors don’t matter, but rather the aggregate affect on behaviors of the people caused by large scale policy changes (e.g. carbon tax, cap & trade).
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.. that’s not leadership.” –Barack Obama
If you google that phrase, you will find many right-wing sites making hay of it. Many of them would later contrast it with this:
The left may not note these things, but I assure you that the right does, and it does so quite regularly. And it definitely feeds the skepticism.
I’m pretty environmentally conscious and tend to put a sweater on rather than turn the heat up, even if I would be more comfortable turning the heat up. My slight added discomfort slightly decreases my work productivity, but not by enough for me to think it’s worth turning up the heat.
However, if I were President of the United States, I would consider it paramount that I be as productive as possible, and would as such prioritize my personal comfort over the marginal costs to the environment of turning the heat up a bit.
Part of the art of leadership is making seemingly stupid gestures and sacrifices in order to inspire your followers. When Alexander the Great and his army were dying of thirst in the Gedrosian desert, Alexander’s soldiers managed to scrounge up enough water to fill a helmet and offered it to him. He poured the water into the sand because he wanted to show that he was willing to endure the same hardships as his men, and it is said that this had as much effect on each soldier as if he had drunk the amount of water that Alexander threw away. How do you think they would have reacted if instead Alexander had said “I am in charge of this army, and anything which improves the probability that I can get us out of this dessert even slightly is of paramount importance, so, sure, give me the water”? The whole army would have collapsed on the spot!
No individual can, by themselves, directly impact AGW through their own personal consumption.
But collectively everyone has to somewhat lower their consumption (or make their consumption less carbon intensive, at least).
Is it really so ridiculous to expect a leader to model the behavior that the leader believes we all must eventually engage in? Is “lead by example” no longer a thing? Hell, Michelle Obama matches her nutrition advocacy with a mostly symbolic organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds. Why can’t Barack say “I can keep the heater at 69” or Kerry say “you know what, I only need 4 houses”.
@ Ivlln
the AGW-is-a-problem camp getting together behind the message that one’s own individual behaviors don’t matter, but rather the aggregate affect on behaviors of the people caused by large scale policy changes
Consequence-wise, we environmentalists do better by supporting green research (or even lobbying) than by spending our own time bicycling or shivering or whatever.
Specific to fuel use, if our using less gas brought the price down, under current conditions that would just make it cheaper to operate the bulldozers and chainsaws. Gas prices will go up and down eventually, but the trees stay down.
What else goes up and down is effect of political action. Elect Clinton/Gore … but soon it’s all to do over again.
The effective action I see is getting more green power up and running … and buying more forest acres and protecting them (or more land in general and making it profitable more cleanly). (Or of course supporting space research for more, yanno, space.)
I’d be interested to see a graph of delta in carbon emissions over time, with the X-axis segmented by party in office. Betcha the correlation is small, or driven entirely by one big outlier.
I’d do it myself but I’m having trouble finding US-specific emissions numbers.
If they are not driven almost entirely by the strength of the economy, I will be very much surprised.
How do you know this? Convincing people has value. How many marginal people can you convince to help save the environment by bicycling and reducing the apparent hypocrisy of your side by a marginal amount? That could be a larger consequence than anything else you can do.
Sacrificing for a cause yourself is Bayseian evidence that it is worth believing you when you tell other people to sacrifice.
@ Jiro
“Sacrificing for a cause yourself is Bayseian evidence that it is worth believing you when you tell other people to sacrifice.”
I reject the assumption that any major sacrifice of lifestyle is necessary, by anyone. We don’t need to use less energy, just cleaner energy.
If personal sacrifice were useful for public relations (which I doubt), still there are useful sacrifices. Instead of spending hours bicyling, spend the time at a second job in a start-up green business, either earning to donate to forest preservation, or re-investing in the company’s green research. Or even volunteering at a community organic garden.
A very common general heuristic:
I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who claim it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.
I was actually about to reply to your comment above with that exact quote.
When they have the first Climate Change Prevention Videoconference, my confidence in their confidence will take a large step forward.
@Marc Whipple:
AGU15 has a attend-via-telepresence thing going on: FAQ entries about it. Does that count?
No.
Politicians are not my central example of people saying we should do something about global warming.
I submit that you are atypical. The majority of people saying we need to do something seem to primarily influenced by politicians and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
It just seems a strange choice to me. Like evaluating libertarianism based on Rand Paul, instead of actual thinkers in the field.
(And, of course, the argument already gone into well above that the serious people here don’t think we all need to shiver in the dark; they think that with the appropriate economic incentives we’ll transition baseload power and come up with a clever solution to the transportation problem. I can’t transition baseload power by myself, and public transport is very much a sure-hope-your-city-got-it-right problem.)
I think I’ve figured out what’s going on here, might be something to do with the different forms of government in Australia vs the US.
Over here, politicians vote along party lines close to exclusively, certainly in the two major parties. Voting in the opposite direction is the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of the party, unless the particular vote has been declared a ‘conscience vote’ by the party (usually used for certain kinds of ‘moral issue’. Abortion, for example). My understanding of the US is that this is much less the case – politicians can vote ‘against their party’ and it happens fairly often.
The result is that politicians are much less likely to be individual advocates of particular policies over here. The ‘proper place’ to do that kind of thing is internally, trying to convince the rest of your party.
There’s a few good points here, but I see most people that replied have taken the opportunity to suggest being right wing as a solution to an unfair accusation. I feel like they wouldn’t propose becoming left wing in order to escape unfalsifiable claims of being a fascist. Would have been great hear more meta-level support or suggestions, but ok. :-/
I support centrist social policy and centre-left or sometimes centre economics (externalities, pro-small-business and centre-leaning cooperatives, very market orientated, non-statist), but it still hasn’t stopped people accusing me of this.
Citizensearth, I couldn’t help but notice the other day that you pooh-poohed the idea that the comment section of this site was saddled with a rightwing/libertarian/anti-liberal bias that always gets the last word, and frequently the only word.
I thought that was strange, since, whenever I see you try to engage (always politely, always striving to transcend blue and red thinking) or ask a question here, you invariably get warmed-over rightwing groupthink in response.
Fair comment. I guess its hard to really gauge something like that accurately. I’ve probably adjusted my perceptions a bit from this, I’ll admit. Thanks for your positive comments.
I find this frankly a bit insulting. Citizensearch asked a question based on the idea that he was worried about being perceived as some kind of pinko commie by right wing types. Right wing types chimed in to give their honest opinions about how he might avoid that, though I’m not sure Citizensearch didn’t end up mistaking that for us accusing him of being a pinko commie, when we were just responding from the perspective of a theoretical right winger who might accuse him of such.
And not all our advice boiled down to “just be more right wing.” Much of it was just about how one prioritizes and presents the same ideas.
I can understand a certain frustration: some of the responses did end up amounting to a criticism of the left and of environmentalism, but if the goal is to get more insight into why right wing types tend to be skeptical of environmentalism and thereby, perhaps, to avoid being lumped in with left wing environmentalists, then even that should have some instructive value.
But mostly: when someone asks for honest opinions about how a group thinks, don’t turn around and call it “warmed over group think” (which Citizensearch did not, but anon did)… even if that’s what it actually is! Recall that we were, to some extent, playing the part of theoretical right wing interlocutors, not engaging with him in an object-level debate about leftism and environmentalism.
@ onyomi:
I whole-heartedly agree with this.
There are apparently a lot of libertarians and conservatives here. And some of those…bad conservatives…really get on my nerves, too.
But you’re absolutely right that you can’t expect to ask what a group of conservatives think and not get “conservative groupthink” in response.
@onyomi:
Behold the following theoretical conversation:
I don’t see people actually addressing the basic problem of responding to the Hypothetical Interlocutor. I mean, hell, apparently a carbon-tax isn’t a market based solution now, according to Jiro and Marc Whipple. When anything that “increases government power” (scare quotes intended) is a communist plot, you really aren’t at the level of debate of rational and effective means of responding to problems.
It strikes me that the real issue is that HI doesn’t actually want to have a conversation about climate change, or form an effective understanding of Citizensearth’s position, but rather is simply repeating their justification for not listening to whatever it is he has to say.
You can say I am weak-manning the HI, but what other way can model someone who call someone else a “watermelon”?
You could respond to the HI “actually I’d be very open to the idea of free market / non government solutions to reduce carbon output, I just don’t have any good ideas there. Do you?”
It’s entirely possible HI is just reflexively rejecting global warming and solutions to it as tribal signaling behavior. But let’s not pretend there aren’t folks on the left making the opposite statements for the same reason. Debating either may not be productive.
But honestly, I’d say that’s the only answer if there are rational opponents who think you are a pinko commie – make it clear you’d at least consider non government solutions to AGW, and acknowledge arguments that government action would be ineffective. Otherwise it can look like you’re pushing AGW as a means to higher taxes and more centralized government.
Honestly I think that’s why the “lack of personal sacrifice” arguments I brought up upthread gain traction. It’s like “gee, you seem awfully interested in passing big new laws, not so much about actually reducing footprints”. If you bring out a hammer for every fastener from a nail to a nut, I might start to think you just like swinging hammers.
@Gbdub:
“make it clear you’d at least consider non government solutions to AGW”
AGW, insofar as it exists, is an externality to the market. Given that, supporting “non government solutions” is, to a great approximation, a non-starter. Once you accept that it exists and needs resolution, some sort of government involvement is required.
So I think it would be disingenuous of me to say I would “consider non-governmental solutions” in the manner that you suggest. More to the point, why does it make me a communist if I think that some problems require government solutions?
“I don’t think all problems require government solutions, but I think this one does.” That’s a genuine answer and gets sort of at the same point, but I’m not sure whether HI is likely to accept that. My internal model says that they are committed to an “all regulation is bad” framework. Perhaps that is uncharitable.
@HeelBearCub – I never meant to imply you need to agree with non-government solutions, just that you’d need to take them seriously and not label someone a climate denier if they say they don’t like the proposals of the latest fancy climate policy shindig.
Here’s a market or semi-market policy to reduce carbon emissions: streamline regulations and don’t block development of natural gas resources and nuclear power. Don’t think that would work as well as the Paris agreement? Fine, but please “consider” the argument, and I won’t think you’re being tribal or a commie.
@HeelBearCub:
Let me see if I can offer an explanation of the “non-governmental solutions” argument:
It is proposed that the government intervene to deal with the inefficiency resulting from an externality. I believe that governments are very bad at doing things. Hence the intervention will have a deadweight cost of (say) a billion dollars and provide only a very partial solution to the externality problem. (If you think that claim is obviously implausible, consider the case of biofuels in the U.S., which has a deadweight cost of much more than a billion and appears to have had no effect at all in reducing CO2.) So the intervention is only justified if the inefficiency it deals with is so large that a partial reduction is worth more than a billion dollars.
Suppose, however, we had a way of reducing the externality that was costless or better than costless. The obvious candidate is something government is currently doing that increases the externality and that it (on other grounds) ought not to be doing.
For CO2 there are at least two candidates I can think of, probably more. Government land use regulation results in people commuting long distances because it is illegal to build very high rise residences near where they work (I’m thinking of San Francisco) and also illegal to build housing on most of the land near where they work (the figure I have seen is that eighty to ninety percent of the land of the Bay Area cannot legally be built on).
Government failure to price highway use as a private owner would (congestion pricing) results in traffic jams, which result in people driving slowly, which produces more CO2.
So even if the inefficiency from the externality does not justify government regulation, it provides a further argument for eliminating undesirable features of what the government is already doing. My first example is a non-governmental solution in a strong sense–housing built by the private market once the government stops preventing it. My second is non-governmental only if it goes all the way to private highways, but it’s a solution that involves altering what the government is currently doing to mimic the non-governmental approach.
An example that others have raised is regulation of nuclear reactors. I don’t know whether nuclear reactors would be worth building in a totally free market context. But I can easily imagine some people thinking that they would, thinking that it is regulation that makes them so expensive, hence that eliminating such regulation would be a non-governmental way of reducing CO2.
Well, everyone appears to be arguing at the object level, rather than talking about Citzensearth’s particular problem. Again, I don’t see how believing that government action is necessary to prevent AGW is makes one a “watermelon”
@David Friedman:
“Government land use regulation results in people commuting long distances because it is illegal to build very high rise residences near where they work”
Here, actually is a great example of what I am talking about. Even if one accepts this as a good solution to the problem, the actual enactment of it would require that the Federal Government prevent local governments from enacting land use restrictions. Or, to put it the way HI would “Federal Government takeover of a local government! I know you were a communist!”
The federal government leans on state and local governments all the time — sometimes by asking more or less politely, sometimes by threatening to remove highway funding or other subsidies, and sometimes through 14th Amendment or Commerce Clause mandates. I have heard people claim that this amounts to communism, but they’re usually the same people with bumper stickers on their pickup trucks inveighing against the New World Order.
@Heelbearcub,
Remember, the question isn’t “is HI right?” or “is it fair of HI to think this way?” it’s “given that some people think this way, how best to deal with them?”
One good way might be to show knowledge of, or at least express openness to non-governmental solutions of the sort David Friedman and others have described.
One probably wouldn’t even need to rule out or keep quiet about governmental solutions; simply knowing about or being open to non-governmental solutions in addition to the commonly known governmental solutions would already indicate more desire to bridge the gap than I think is common.
@Nornagest:
Yes, the Feds do lots of things all the time. How does that amount to a means of assuring HI that more federal government power is OK in this case?
“I have heard people claim that this amounts to communism, but they’re usually the same people with bumper stickers on their pickup trucks inveighing against the New World Order.”
And who do you think accuses people of being a “watermelon”?
I’m not trying to convert whatever stereotype you have in your head to environmentalism. I’m trying to convince you that proposals involving the federal government exerting influence on the state and local level don’t automatically provoke accusations of communism, except from people no one seriously tries to cater to anyway.
As I think this thread has demonstrated, you see suspicions along those lines from a lot more than just a few paranoid rurals.
@ HeelBearCub:
Well, now you’re equivocating between government power and federal government power. It is quite possible for an increase in federal power vis-a-vis the states to be a decrease in total government power.
Sure, there is the question of the advocates of “states’ rights”, but that is at best tangential to the question of the size of government as a whole. Many of the 19th-century Southern advocates of “states’ rights” believed in the unlimited power of state governments to do whatever they pleased. (They believed that the states inherited this power from the British Parliament, which was held in common law according to e.g. Blackstone, to have unlimited power.) It was very useful to believe this, if you were going to defend slavery. But surely such a person does not, in any objective sense, believe in “small government”.
If the federal government stops local governments from enacting zoning restrictions, that’s not “big government”. That’s limiting the total size of government by setting one part of it against another. Which is the purpose of separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances.
@Nornagest:
Huh?
Are you saying that you think I am a secret communist? Or that Citizensearth is? Or are you saying that other people in this thread think we are secret communists?
I didn’t think anyone in this thread was actually espousing the line that if I care about the environment it’s really only because I want the government to have more power. If they are, I’ve missed it.
For what it’s worth, I tend to think that Nimby-ism is big problem (and actually is another way in which externalities aren’t paid for!) I’m sympathetic to the argument that land-use restrictions cause sprawl and a host of bad things. So I am actually not objecting to “zoning reform” as a part of the package of things that we do to deal with AGW (and a whole host of other sprawl related issues). However, I imagine that a requirement of more density, imposed by the feds, wouldn’t be supported by those arguing that relaxed zoning?
As another example, in NC (and other coastal areas) people are “very concerned” about the “eyesore” that would be created by a windfarm as far as 20 miles from shore, and therefore have imposed a minimum 20 mile distance, IIRC.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Do you actually follow US politics? Are you from the US? Because this is the kind of statement that people on the left usually say in the US.
@onyomi:
“given that some people think this way, how best to deal with them?”
That is a good point. Modifying my earlier statement to include something of what Gbdub was suggesting:
“I don’t think all problems require government solutions, but I think this one does, but I am open to other ideas on how to deal with the problem, as long as they are effective, regardless of whether they involve increasing government power or not.”
I think other people in this thread distrust the environmentalist movement’s explicit goals, partly out of suspicions that they’re motivated more by redistributionist sentiments or an aesthetic distaste for industrial capitalism than by any particular regard for conservation per se. I see “watermelon” as a shorthand for this, though I expect it’s only literally true (i.e. points to secret Communism) for a small fraction of environmentalists.
Personally, I think that’s a little off the mark but not completely bogus. Most of the hardcore environmentalists I know seem to be motivated mainly by pastoralism, a sense that we’d be better off aiming to all live in places like the Shire or a tribal village: they do have redistributionist goals and often a lot of visceral hate for capitalism, but they’re downstream of that preference, not upstream. (The extreme of this line of thinking isn’t Communism, it’s anarcho-primitivism.) Less serious environmentalists might have all sorts of motivations, but they’re not the ones setting the agenda.
I’m in favor of conservation and many other green goals, but I think pastoralism is an extremely bad idea.
Indeed. I don’t think environmentalists are “watermelons”, but I do think that for a large number of them, making everyone shiver in the dark is the end, not the means to the end.
They may champion various impractical forms of alternative power, but if someone manages to figure out how to make such power practical, they find a problem with it.
The only acceptable solutions to these environmentalists involve everyone not driving, living in tiny apartments in multifamily buildings, turning the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter, eating vegetarian, etc.
@ HeelBearCub:
Yes, I am from the U.S. and follow American politics.
One guy who writes a lot about that very topic is Timothy Sandefur, who is a libertarian and works at the conservative/libertarianish Pacific Legal Foundation—a public interest law firm that quite often sues local governments in federal courts alleging that the local policies are unconstitutional. He’s written a very good book which, among other things, argues against the “unlimited power of the states” interpretation of the Constitution (that is, even before the 14th Amendment).
I myself work (temporarily) at the Institute for Justice, which is a libertarian public interest law firm that does much the same thing. For example, challenging the constitutionality of licenses on African hair-braiders as a violation of the Due Process Clause.
Now, it’s true that there are two camps on the “right” in regard to the interpretation of the Constitution.
One camp, represented by Robert Bork, worships democracy and the unlimited tyranny of the majority. They believe the 9th Amendment is meaningless, that the 14th Amendment doesn’t stop the state governments from doing anything they please, and that judges should practice “judicial restraint” and not actually overturn anything the government does.
The other camp believes that the government exists for a specific reason—to protect individual rights—and that anything outside of this narrow scope is unconstitutional. At least since the 14th Amendment, the federal courts also have the power to strike down violations of liberty by state governments.
The latter group was allegedly “discredited” at the end of the hideous “Lochner era”: the era where the Supreme Court struck down the minimum wage at the state and federal level, child labor laws, maximum-hours laws, the unequal application of local ordinances against Chinese laundries, and confirmed the doctrine of birthright citizenship. This era was ended by the “switch in time that saved nine”: when the Supreme Court stopped striking down every element of the New Deal, possibly in order to avoid Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme.
At that point, the Supreme Court got rid of the doctrine of “substantive due process” and—after approving Japanese internment—gradually brought it back in a twisted form where some rights really count and require “strict scrutiny” to be restricted, while economic rights don’t and require only a “rational basis”.
But—now they’re (we’re) back: the faction in favor of a government of “few and defined powers”. The usual watchword is “judicial engagement”, which prominent conservative George Will has supported very openly.
Oh, and by the way, Sandefur and most of the other prominent members of this camp’s view of the Obergefell decision ruling same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional: correct outcome; reasoning could be better.
Ironically, now a lot of “progressives” are in favor of “judicial restraint” again: the evil Citizens United decision and all that.
“living in tiny apartments in multifamily buildings, turning the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter, eating vegetarian, etc.”
There is this other weird element to environmentalism which has not much to do with socialism other than that they both seem to glom onto the same receptors as religion would. That is, there is a weirdly religious penitential tinge to many environmentalists’ attitudes by which the sacrifices one must make to atone for the sin of despoiling the earth become a kind of end in themselves.
“living in tiny apartments in multifamily buildings, turning the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter, eating vegetarian, etc.”
There seeks to be something of a “heads I win, tails you lose” argument here. People are complaining both that “environmentalists”, writ-large, are not doing these things, and also that they are doing these things (and expect everyone else to.)
This strikes me a little like the “can I be an EA if I don’t put myself in penury?” question, but in reverse, and more absurd, as theor is no requirement for environmentalists to be as effective as possible, only effective enough.
I drive a 45 MPG car and fuel with locally sourced waste vegatable oil biodiesel. But that is not enough, I am guessing, for those who would find my lack of eschewing motor transport in general to expose me to charges of hypocrisy.
@ HeelBearCub:
I believe you are misunderstanding the objection.
The argument is something like: “Environmentalists preach that man must renounce the limitless pursuit of material wealth in order to avert humanity from destruction; everyone is obligated to sacrifice. But these specific environmentalists do not sacrifice. Therefore, they are hypocrites.”
Obviously, if they either a) actually did sacrifice as much as they expect everyone else to—and maybe this applies in your case—or b) said the environment will be fine even if Westerners keep their lavish lifestyles as technology will solve everything, then they would not be hypocrites.
Except those who endorse the latter viewpoint are usually not called environmentalists.
The environmentalists flying around in private jets (or buying wasteful local and “organic” food) are the ones who are alleged to be hypocrites.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Imagine that a group shifted to your solution 1.
Now they’re not hypocrites, they’re religious zealots who want us all to shiver in the dark as penance for our crimes against Mother Earth.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
@onyomi
I see it a little differently. I didn’t actually ask for object-level opinion on why right wing policies are better than left. But that’s mostly what I got. It was basically seen as a queue to advocate policy and the issue of massive hyperbole was ignored. The right could easily talk about times they had been unfairly labelled, and I’d be very interested. But almost the entire subthread is object with no meta. Why?
Imagine you were being called a fascist (I don’t know your exact views I assume you’re not), and came to SSC to compain that despite having centre-right or centre views that you were being unfairly labelled as fascist. It would probably be poor taste for others to respond only with “you can avoid this by adopting left wing policies”. Wouldn’t you hope they could see the problem on a meta level?
Surely the spirit of SSC is that people should adopt and change views based on reason and thought rather than social pressure! Isn’t the number one enemy on SSC blind loyalty to the red/blue tribe and the abandonment of reason? I was hoping for more expression of that spirit. I didn’t actually ask what the correct policy was, so I don’t think all this was invited at all.
@ James Picone:
If someone is wrong, he’s wrong. Obviously, anti-environmentalists think that environmentalist claims are wrong on the object level.
The question is what flavor of wrong they want to be. Of course anyone who disagrees is going to accuse him of something. Otherwise there would be no disagreement.
I suppose I respect zealous fanatics more than I respect hypocrites. They put their money where their mouth is. They may be more objectively harmful, but at least they’re worthy opponents.
To take another example: a fanatic who murders abortionists vs. the hypocritical suburban mom who supports banning abortion but gets one herself when she gets knocked up in a one-night stand. They’re both wrong, but the former is acting as he should if his object-level beliefs are true.
@ Citizensearth:
But people did give advice in regard to prioritizing issues, making it clear that you understand economics and are not against progress, etc.
There’s only so much you can say about that, though. Once that was out of the way, people naturally moved on to arguing about what to prioritize or what should actually be done, etc.
@David Friedman I support congestion pricing and I get where you’re coming from about it being closer to the private solution, but realistically, if you go to any right wing space and advocate for it, you’re going to get called a big-government commie. Same for rezoning, though less so.
An aside – isn’t a gasoline tax similar in effect to road use fees? I understand it’s not an ideal dynamic-pricing solution that properly measures road depreciation etc, but in your opinion is it better than nothing? It certainly seems much cheaper to administer.
> But people did give advice in regard to prioritizing issues, making it clear that you understand economics and are not against progress, etc.
Advice that assumes its my views that are the problem (as if I haven’t studied market economics). I’ll be sure to keep that in mind the next time they winge about being labelling a mysogynist (or however you spell it) or racist by some SJW brigade. This majority of this subthread is bitterly disappointing.
@ Citizensearth:
What do you expect? Obviously they think your views are wrong!
If your desire is to come off as sharing their values but disagreeing on the facts, you have to signal that you really do share their values. If you disagree on their values—if you would like socialism even if it weren’t necessary to stop global warming—well, that is what it means to be green on the outside and red on the inside.
You have to say: I love capitalism, I support capitalism all the way, and I think private property should be applied to every situation we can apply it to. But it doesn’t work here, to my great sorrow. Here are the facts that show why. That’s pretty much what it requires.
Similarly, if a right-winger doesn’t wish to be seen as a misogynist, he must show that he is agrees with feminists that women are morally equal to men, that they deserve to be happy just as much as men, that he is not biased against women, but that he thinks e.g. that family law is biased against men in a way that harms women, too (or at least does not help them).
@Citizensearth:
Sorry. I saw a climate change thread and I got all excited. I’ll try not to next time.
Sorry for my part in derailing this.
@James Picone and Chalid
Thanks. I mostly was thinking of others, but I appreciate it.
@Vox Imperatoris
So basically I have to be a raging capitalist and think Scandanavia = Stalin before I can find common ground enough to engage with these guys, or even get them to acknowledge sometimes centrists and leftys get unfairly labelled too. Doesn’t sound very meta. Sounds 100% object-level trench-warfare politics, and I don’t like that because its ruining the western world.
“However, I imagine that a requirement of more density, imposed by the feds, wouldn’t be supported by those arguing that relaxed zoning?”
Not a requirement of more density–that again would be government intervention. The abolition of the requirements that impose low density.
And one doesn’t have to argue for the federal government imposing such on the states, although one could. A nongovernmental approach might be to argue that the state or the city ought to abolish restrictions that resulted in lots more commuting.
If you don’t want to be suspected of left wing habits of thought, you might not want to interpret “government should let people do X” as “government should make people do X.”
I really don’t think there’s any magic wand you can wave here. There’s a strain of right/libertarian thought that sees environmentalism as a communist plot, period. Any other indication of not being a communist is irrelevant; caring about environmental issues is, to that particular group, roughly equivalent to expounding on how great Marx is.
Just take it as an indication that they’re not worth dealing with.
(I don’t, of course, mean to imply that it’s a substantial chunk of the left, that anyone here is of that persuasion, that this is behind a majority of climate denial, etc.. Also I’m really terrible at following my own advice here.)
You have a good point thanks!
“substantial chunk of the left” should be “substantial chunk of the right” of course. Something something Freudian.
Sorry for the nitpick, but if you were accused of being fascist, I would again suggest showing that you prefer market solutions to state organized (if perhaps through nominally private companies) solutions 🙂
Being in favor of a carbon tax rather than funding for recyclable research, regulation of who does what that produces CO2, would be one sign. Trying to reduce CO2 with the minimal control over what people do.
As opposed to “smart urban planning” and similar dirigiste approaches.
Sometimes the political opposition on the right is actually greater against market-based solutions like a carbon tax as opposed to green-orientated subsidies or programs (which I agree are suboptimal in vast majority of situations). I’m in at least partial agreement though.
I think it’s just the political opposition of consumers. They’re not going to like things that increase gas prices, no matter what political part they’re affiliated with. And they probably won’t understand what a revenue-neutral carbon tax is. They’ll just see gas prices go up.
Taxes are not market based solutions.
Say I implement a carbon tax of 5% while reducing the overall tax burden by the same amount I expect to collect from that tax. It is market neutral at least. The tax does not mean additional revenue to the state, it is only meant as something that internalizes the costs from a negative externality of pollution. Of course, if it is chosen too high, that is bad, if it is chosen too low, well, then it is better than nothing but it is probably hard to estimate the right amount especially since various lobbies will inevitably want to push it one way or another. But it is definitely more market-oriented than simply spending more tax money on something. Also, if I am convinced that the negative externality is sufficiently big, I can maybe quite safely estimate it from below and do better than nothing, provided that my estimate of the size of the externality is correct (of course, it is not how the sate works, but someone could support the tax under those conditions and it would be quite consistent with at least non-socialist attitude).
Subsidies, positive or negative, are not market-based solutions. Gonna have to go with Jiro on this one.
Doesn’t mean they can’t be effective policy tools, but they’re not market-based solutions. Although something like a government-sponsored X-Prize would be a tougher call.
Then what market based solutions are there to the problem of externalities? Especially non-local externalities which are diffuse and difficult to measure?
If you can’t price something, you can’t create a true market-based solution. Probably as close as you’ll get to one is a credit trading scheme, but that can only work if you assign a price to the externality.
Arguably a credit system is a tax which is a negative subsidy, but the difference is if you can trade them. The reason plain ol’ subsidies aren’t market-based solutions is that there’s no market involved in the first place.
@ HeelBearCub:
The market solution to externalities is to privatize them.
If that is unfeasible, there is no market solution, and one has to resort to non-market solutions like taxing and regulating.
Isn’t this just saying that a tax is not a solely market based solution?
Taxes have a marginal effect on the behavior of the market assuming they are near or over the difference from the substitution price. Only in the case where they don’t approach the difference in substitution price would they not have an effect on the market.
@ HeelBearCub:
Of course taxes have an effect on the market. But they are not of the market. They are government force imposed on the market (whether beneficial or not).
Complete all-round price controls, as existed in the Soviet Union (they did have money), in some way or other involve a market. But they are not “market solutions”.
@Tibor – the problem is that no one trusts the promise of “revenue neutral”.
@Vox Imperatoris
Externalities are one of the essential problems of markets, and there are not easy solutions. Forcing the market to somehow ingest the cost of the externality is in no way comparable to a price control.
But this is why Republicans should be particularly inclined to favor carbon taxes. In the very short term, it’s trivial to show revenue-neutrality, because you have real numbers for how much income tax is being paid and how much fossil fuels are being burned and it’s ten minutes with a spreadsheet to show that reducing income taxes by X% and adding a $Y/ton carbon tax will exactly offset in the next tax year.
In the long run, no, it’s not revenue-neutral – it’s revenue-negative, at least normalized to GDP, because even without carbon taxes people keep finding more efficient ways to use fossil fuels and more broadly economical substitutes for fossil fuels. Less fossil fuels being burned means less taxes being paid. So you not only get less global warming, but you get to “starve the beast” at the same time. Or at least make the Damn Dirty Democrats waste political capital fighting for obvious, explicit tax increases if they want to keep their beloved Big Government.
Republicans should love this, right? Well, unless they are Republicans who want big government but don’t want to pay for it, but that would be ideologically inconsistent so there shouldn’t be any Republicans like that.
@Gbdub: Sure, but in principle it is possible, so it is possible to have that position. In the same way, I am be for completely free immigration combined with zero state welfare. Since that is not politically feasible probably anywhere at the moment, I would in practice support some kind of a compromise if I had a say in it but if someone asked me what I would really prefer to have, then it would be this. In a similar way you could have an environmentalist that says “well, I support a 5% carbon tax on corporations while reducing the corporate income tax by 5%”.
@all: I guess you are right, it is not a market solution, but it is not an anti-market solution either. It is “market neutral”, the fact that one would prefer that over a socialist solution is a good evidence that that person is not a socialist.
@ HeelBearCub:
Externalities are not a problem of markets, per se.
Externalities exist when government intervention, high transaction costs, or high enforcement costs make it impossible to extend property rights and therefore markets to all areas of the economy.
Now, every real-life market has some externalities. Baking bread produces a positive externality in the form of the pleasant smell. But the nature of the situation makes it impossible to charge people for the right to smell it. This means slightly less bread is produced than would be optimal.
But that is insignificant, and we can ignore it. We should ignore it.
If the externalities cannot (reasonably) be ignored, then the government must step in and supplement the market with non-market interventions.
Now it’s entirely possible that, with global warming for example, we can just ignore the externality. Maybe on net it’s an improvement. Or maybe the cost of geo-engineering will be so low that a single philanthropist will be able to fix it. Or maybe not.
John Schilling argues that Republicans ought to love revenue neutral carbon taxes. That assumes that they will really be revenue neutral, which depends on your theory of what determines the equilibrium level of taxes. The result in practice could easily be that you put in a carbon tax, reduce another tax, and in a few years raise the other tax–because whatever pressures were holding the other tax at its previous level have now eased, letting it come back up.
If the point is not obvious, consider how many taxes have been imposed as a temporary measure and in practice become permanent.
For an older example of the problem, consider Adam Smith’s discussion of sinking funds. The government borrows some money and institutes a tax calculated to pay off the debt in a fixed length of time and then end. After a while it wants some more money, so it borrows some more, converting the sinking fund to a permanent fund and the temporary tax to a permanent tax, now sufficient to pay only the interest on the increased debt.
“Tax” by itself means “tax in addition to what we have”.
A tax accompanied by a reduction in other taxes could be market neutral. Of course it is also impossible to implement.
… and in a few years raise the other tax–because whatever pressures were holding the other tax at its previous level have now eased, letting it come back up
There’s generally no such thing as “letting” a tax come “back up”, someone has to make it go up. That someone has to be a U.S. Congressman, standing in front of the CSPAN cameras, saying “I propose a bill to raise this tax”.
And in the stereotypical Republican world view, the pressure that prevents this comes from Republicans, as every Democrat secretly wants to raise taxes. So if the argument is that “pressures [will] have eased…”, that sounds like Republicans arguing that a Republican-backed carbon tax would make Republicans less diligent in applying “pressure” to prevent increases in, say, the income tax. That seems unlikely, or rather, it seems possible but only in ways that aren’t flattering to Republicans.
Also, pet peeve, I rarely find anything useful or insightful in any argument or explanation that uses the term “pressure” in a political context without explanation. Describe the actual mechanism by which the relevant political change is caused or prevented, please.
One reason to be wary of the “externalities” argument is that most of the environmentalists I’ve seen advocating a carbon tax to not seem to want to set it equal to their best estimate of the external cost, but rather to whatever level they believe will achieve the reduction in emissions that they’ve decided in advance is the right amount. The prominence of that plucked-from-the-air 2C target in the Paris talks is a good example of the sort of thinking at work.
Another reason to be wary of the externalities argument in the AGW context is that we are talking about net costs summed over a century or more. Nobody knows or can know the magnitude. In my view we don’t even know the sign, although lots of people are sure they do. So the actual tax will reflect not real costs, not even the best possible estimate of real costs, but the politics of those who benefit or lose by it.
I again offer the example of biofuels. Environmentalists eventually realized that they don’t actually reduce CO2. But we still have the mandate, are still doing our bit to increase world hunger by pushing up the price of corn–because that raises farm incomes.
Once you abandon the philosopher king model of government, solving externality problems becomes a much harder problem.
Australia implemented a carbon pricing mechanism and simultaneously trebled the tax-free threshold (The lowest income tax bracket), which IIRC resulted in a net reduction in government income. (It was later repealed after the right-wing party got into power. The tax-free threshold increased stayed, of course).
If you can’t believe that your government could actually implement a revenue-neutral carbon price, maybe get a better government?
> Taxes are not market based solutions.
A tax on an externality is, because it removes a public/external subsidy. If someone whizzes in the town well why should everyone else pick up the bill for the cleanup?
@ Citizensearth:
The “market solution” is not to let someone piss and tax everyone else to clean it up. The market solution is to privatize the park he pisses in and make them hire security guards or janitors if they want to keep it a nice place.
Once we’re in the realm of having the government do something, we’re outside of the realm of market solutions. And once we’re in that realm, sure we can say it’s more fair to tax that one pisser than tax everyone else. But the market solution is not to tax at all.
@James: Where do they sell better governments? I want one for Christmas.
Seriously though, “get a better government” is something everyone would do if it was a(n easy) possibility. The problem is that a) people disagree on what is better and (even more importantly) b) the government has intrinsic mechanisms that make it turn out some way – so the support of more ecological production of energy turns into subsidies of “biofuel”, which is basically corporate welfare (and on net anti-ecological as well). Note that this is an overall pattern, even in the more more left-wing EU, you biodiesel is subsidized, so it is not a “twist of evil Republicans” or something like that.
In the same way, once introduced, taxes tend to stay, no matter how “temporary” they were supposed to be at first. The most commonly cited example (perhaps it is already mentioned in this thread somewhere) is the weird US tax for US citizens living abroad in countries with lower taxes (it is always reminds me of that Monty Python sketch, where the ‘serious looking gentleman’ proposes to boost the national economy by taxing all foreigners living abroad 🙂 ). Originally a “temporary measure” to help the war effort during WW2. Unless people in Washington somehow missed that the war ended some 70 years ago, they just kept it for convenience – more money to redistribute means more money to redistribute among your electorate. For the US citizens who live in Switzerland, this must be quite a pain in the back…then again, one can always renounce citizenship, I guess, but that is not practical if you intend to come back to the US, also I don’t know if you can renounce a citizenship if that would make you a citizen of no country and getting Swiss citizenship takes at least 10 years. Maybe one workaround would be the new Estonian e-citizenship (although I am not sure what it entails exactly), but I digress.
Of course, this is not a strict rule in the way gravity is and it is possible for it to happen otherwise – such as with your Australia example. But sometimes a coin toss ends up heads 10 times in a row (if it does not in a sufficient number of tosses, then your coin is actually more likely to biased) but in any particular 10 tosses, the probability of that happening is 1/1024 (I suppose a probability of a long-term income negative/neutral carbon tax is slightly better than this, but not by much, it also depends a lot on the country).
You might disagree, that the government intrinsically works this way, but if you accept it as a premise, then you can understand that the people who do believe that are hesitant about supporting yet more taxes (even if in principle they would be for a carbon tax accompanied by a equal reduction of the overall tax burden – and if it were somehow possible to guarantee that the taxes don’t increase again with the next government – it is politically easier to increase a tax than to introduce a new one). Also, the actual right-wing parties do not even always limit the state expense or tax income. Bush was in fact more socialist than Clinton in this respect. Things like this naturally make people suspicious about any new tax.
If you are talking about changing the government system as opposed to finally electing “the right people”, ok, that might help, but then it is like if I told you “if you’re so concerned about clean energy, get cold fusion!”
That’s partly loss-aversion and partly that taxes are difficult to raise thanks to the political system we use. Taking people’s money is hard, but it’s relatively easy to print money and spend it on a subsidy for green energy (and inadvertently devalue the money of those people you were about to tax).
More to the point, carbon taxes or energy taxes often don’t reduce carbon emissions at all. Part of the reason the steel industry in the UK is going under is because energy prices are so high (partly due to green taxes); instead, steel is getting made in China where there’s less regulation. The result is that global emissions are actually higher than if there had been no tax at all.
@ano:
That’s a problem with uncoordinated action, not the carbon tax in and of itself.
Which, admittedly, is a hard problem to solve. But that does not make it unsolvable.
@HeelBearCub: How would you propose to force China to care about stuff like how much emissions they produce?
You might be successful at convincing them that it might be better if people did not have to wear face masks to protect themselves against the smog. But unless you are going to threat them with the use of force against them (which would be worse than any, including the most catastrophic global warming predictions) or embargoing them (which would again require a coordinated action, otherwise you just make yourself a lot worse off and China a bit worse off but probably not enough to matter), they will simply not care. You might force Bangladesh, but not country of 1 billion where the security of the power of the ruling elite depends quite a lot on the economy of the country continuously improving.
Here’s a proposal, regardless of whether global warming is going to be catastrophic, that I would take: In exchange for a moderate sized carbon tax, eliminate capital taxes. Any progressive who supported this would show me that they care enough about the environment to make a serious concession and that they are definitely not a left wing extremist.
Also, no one has mentioned this but progressives are very opposed to natural gas even though it is probably the main reason the US has been reducing it’s CO2 rate. Fewer roadblocks to it’s development would be a free market path to stopping global warming.
If you eliminate capital gains and don’t eliminate pass-though corporations then you will open up a hole in the income tax system that will swallow the whole.
After you’ve studied the tax code for a while it becomes very clear that it is easy to propose reforms and very difficult to make them work as intended.
Wait, what?
Pass-through taxation just imputes the income to the ultimate receiver. Whether it passes through a pass-through entity is entirely irrelevant as to whether a capital gain is taxed or not, and you can’t use a pass-through entity to convert ordinary income into a capital gain in any way that you couldn’t do without a pass-through entity. Can you elaborate? I have a feeling I missed a step there.
That being said, I could not agree with your last sentence more. Anybody who says they can do something by changing the tax code and implying that the solution is simple/obvious/straightforward is either lying or does not have any significant understanding of the tax code. (I do not count Wrong Species’ assertion that they would view the described compromise as an indication of sincerity as such a claim: they never said it would be simple/obvious/straightforward.)
I withdraw the claim, I thought there was something where you could get subchapter-s distributions as non-qualified dividends, but I can’t find anything and I vividly remember now why I hated tax law.
Not a problem. It’s bloody confusing stuff.
Cap-and-trade schemes often have some soft of tax offset. Back when cap-and-trade wasn’t obviously dead in the US, Obama talked about an associated tax credit, for example. Usually it’s one that tries to counteract the regressivity of a carbon tax but I’m very confident that that’s the sort of thing that could have been negotiated on, had the carbon tax itself not been a non-starter.
Personally, I’d prefer not to not completely screw the working/middle class here and would try to negotiate a different tax to cut. But if a highly regressive tax like capital gains was all I could get then I’d take that deal.
There is no stupider tax than the capital gains tax, except maybe the corporate tax.
It’s a deliberate tax on saving and investment. Deliberately increasing time preference. Deliberately moving from two marshmallows to one marshmallow.
The only thing that should be taxed (to the extent that the taxes are necessary to fund the government), leaving aside the argument for Pigovian taxes, is consumption. Because it does the exact opposite as the capital gains tax: it encourages people to decrease time preference and focus more on the future.
If you think it’s unfair to the poor, combine it with a reimbusement, either universal or income-scaled. Something like the FairTax.
But really, the objection to “regressive” taxation is somewhat silly. Why should the cost of the government stay the same or increase as your income goes up? Literally nothing else works that way. That’s why you want to make more money: so the same car is a smaller percentage of your income.
Still, if you want to soak the rich, soak the rich. But don’t soak them for saving their money and investing it in things the rest of us can benefit from. Soak them for spending their money selfishly on caviar and sports cars. (I guess it’s the “logic” that the economy grows by consuming more, not by producing more.)
If a rich man builds a factory and invests the all profits in building two more factories, what special benefit does he get? None! Insofar as it is saved and invested, the wealth of the rich has only a general benefit. The special benefit comes only insofar as it is withdrawn and consumed.
And the corporate tax is absurd for the exact reason that “corporations aren’t people”. They do two things with their money: a) reinvest it in productive enterprises and b) pay out dividends. As for reinvestment, why would you tax that?! Don’t you want them to do that? We tax cigarettes because we don’t want people to smoke! As for dividends, again, if you want to soak the rich then tax their consumption.
Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees:
@ jaimeastorga2000:
He’s exactly right.
Ebeneezer Scrooge was a great practitioner of effective altruism. Now, I’m not in favor of altruism. I think he’s got the right to enjoy his wealth to a normal extent.
But a man who labors day and night to increase his fortune, while endeavoring to spend only the tiniest possible fraction of it—the world could not ask for a more devoted altruist. Such a person produces more value than ten Mother Teresas.
@Vox
… wow, that sure went way way outside the scope of the original post.
Yes if I could wave my magic policy wand and replace all income and capital taxes with a consumption tax that would be great. And as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony too. As a practical matter, a shortfall in the (United States) government’s revenue is going to be met with additional income tax. Penalizing work! Penalizing investment in human capital! et cetera, just take all the arguments against capital taxes and do the appropriate mapping. And widening the (already wide) gap between income and capital gains taxes leads to evasion and inefficient behavior.
(To perhaps note the obvious, the obstacle to a shift toward consumption tax is old people who have been taxed all their lives on their income and would have the buying power of their savings rescued by the consumption tax.)
As for you not liking the whole concept of progressive taxation – feel free to look up the standard answers and post a refutation if you like.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Natural gas is better than coal, but natural gas is still worse than not-a-fossil-fuel.
This is a scenario where I’m happy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I wouldn’t say that you’re a socialist but this is exactly what I’m talking about. What your comment says to me is that you care more about environmentalism as a part of your ideology than using all available tools to prevent global warming, which if it was as bad as many think it is would be the most important goal right now.
Amusingly enough, I would say I probably am a socialist as the term is understood in the US. In the last few elections I have first-preference’d the Greens, am in favour of universal healthcare schemes such as Australia’s medicare and would like it expanded to dental treatment, quite like our interest-free-government-provided-student-‘loan’ tertiary-education scheme, I think the Australian welfare system is pretty good but needs defending against a bunch of the changes the right-wing party here wants, etc..
I don’t see where thinking natural gas isn’t a great solution is ideological, though. I don’t think it should be banned, I just think it’s a bad idea. It emits less than coal. Sure, lovely, great. Even reduces particulate emissions, great. But given that we do eventually need to get emissions to essentially zero, maybe we shouldn’t be setting up infrastructure for something we’re going to have to abandon in a couple of decades anyway.
The problem is that what you call “digging” is what the rest of us call “living”. If we’re not burning coal or oil or wood or natural gas (CO2), splitting the atom (waste, risk of disaster) or damming rivers (certainly the most environmentally damaging on all but a global scale), we’re shivering in the dark.
Wind is insufficient (and besides kills birds, transmission lines interfere with migration, whatever), so is solar photovoltaic (also environmentally damaging to manufacture, transmission lines again), and solar thermal (ruins delicate desert environment, transmission lines)
never mind the whole mining and processing of elements like cadmium and gallium required to manufacture things like solar panels and microchips in the first place.
Similarly rooftop solar and wind are all well and good for charging one’s iPad, but you aren’t going to be running an MRI machine, aluminum smelter, or walk-in fridge on such limited amperage.
Nuclear and hydro aren’t “digging” in this metaphor. Neither is fossil fuel with at least 100% carbon-capture-and-storage provisioned. Because they don’t have net CO2 emissions.
Natural gas development is essentially a bet that CCS will be cheaper than nuclear power/other alternative power sources, and that we’ll develop it in time. It has its good points – it is pretty close to strictly better than coal, so anywhere powered principally by coal is going to benefit.
My problem with it is that the push-it-down-the-road and rely-on-future-technology-development strategy has a lot in common with “do nothing”. Hoping that CCS is economic, that it can be developed and deployed in ~the next two decades, and that after kicking half the can down the road there’ll be the political will to actually get it deployed… kinda risky.
I think there are two issues here.
An individual environmentalist demonstrates that his motivation is not a general hostility to markets and individual freedom by proposing the least intrusive solutions to the problems he sees (carbon tax rather than direct regulation and subsidies) and by making arguments that show that he understands and on the whole agrees with conventional market economic analysis (externalities and other sorts of market failure, not “greed is evil”).
But that still leaves the possibility that the movement he is a part of is motivated by left wing ideas, that once the real world demonstrated that central planning worked much worse, not much better, than markets, environmentalism was adopted as a new justification for policies that used to be defended on the grounds that markets were irrational. That matters, because the non-left environmentalist is basing his environmentalism on a lot of factual claims, few if any of which he can verify himself. If those claims are coming out of a community where people want a certain conclusion and bias their research and arguments accordingly, he may be being motivated by anti-market beliefs at second hand.
The particular case I’m thinking of is global warming alarmism. The argument for the existence of AGW is, in my judgement, convincing. The argument for showing that it has terrible effects is not. In the public context, that argument largely consists of greatly exaggerated accounts of the scale of the projected effects (New York City underwater, the ocean turned acid, no more snow) combined with a pattern of attributing all bad climate results to AGW whether or not there is any reason to.
In the academic context, it results in people looking hard for bad effects of warming, much less hard for good effects, tending to overstate the former, miss or understate the latter. I have a couple of examples on my blog from the work of William Nordhaus, an economist who specializes in effects of warming.
He is not a socialist and has at times been willing to disagree with the alarmist consensus–back when Kyoto was an issue he estimated that the costs of adopting those policies were much larger than the benefits. But when his calculation of clear costs and benefits resulted in no good reason to do anything about warming, his response was to look for more costs–but not to look for more benefits. When his estimate of the cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead of adopting the optimal policy immediately gave a figure that, spread out over the world and the rest of the century, was tiny—a reduction in world GNP of about .06%—he instead reported it as a lump sum (four trillion dollars present value) and commented on how large it was.
The IPCC reports give a mix. The scientific parts, so far as I can tell, are honest, but with some bias towards finding the results they expect. The summary for policy makers, on the other hand, blurs the distinction between climate effects and effects of AGW, and generally tries to present the scientific results in whatever way makes AGW look most threatening.
The non-academic end feeds back on the academic end, because everyone is a layman with regard to much of the argument. If you believe, from reading alarmist rhetoric about the issues you are not an expert in, that global warming is a terrible problem, you have an obvious incentive to bias your research, or at least its presentation, accordingly. One common pattern I observe is that when someone publishes research which undercuts some part of the “global warming is terrible” story, it is usually accompanied with a qualification of “but people shouldn’t conclude from this that global warming isn’t terrible.”
Exactly. Great summary!
Someone please save this and link it the next time the “market fundamentalist science deniers” argument comes up.
This is a good post. But I couldn’t help thinking throughout my reading of it that a very similar argument could be used in all sorts of other contexts and lead generally to people viewing each other very uncharitably. For example, a similar argument could be used by those who want to say that immigration restrictions are racist.
Well…
If the people who support immigration restrictions want to show they aren’t racist, they need to seriously consider what Bryan Caplan calls “keyhole solutions”: things that allow immigrants to come in while covering for their alleged non-racist objections. Such as free immigration with an immigrant tax, free immigration but no naturalization, at the very least free work permits but no permanent residency, or some such thing.
I do think that racism is the motivation behind people like Steve Sailer. The fundamental premise is “no stinky immigrants”, and everything else is a rationalization.
Or as I’m sure some people will insist, maybe they’re not “racist”. Maybe they’re just virulent nationalists who hate foreigners for equally illegitimate reasons.
1) It is bizarre to claim that a position shared by most Americans needs to have its supporters show they aren’t racist. Open borders just isn’t that popular; most people support immigration restrictions.
2) It may not be possible to provide such solutions. After all, in your concept, it’s the open borders advocate who gets to decide whether a position actually is racist, and he’s not exactly a neutral arbiter. He could very well end up just deciding that every single solution proposed that isn’t an open borders one just happens to also be racist. The definition of racism is fuzzy enough that you’re never going to be able to prove him wrong.
3) It may be that such solutions exist but they just aren’t practical. For instance, if the problem is that immigrants will take social services, we could solve this by never giving immigrants social services. But not giving immigrants social services is not feasible. Furthermore, it’s often the open borders people’s allies who are making the solutions unfeasible in the first place–the left leans towards open borders and would also be the first to complain if immigrants were denied social services.
@ Jiro:
1) Natural conclusion: Americans in general have a racist/nationalist bias on this issue. There’s no law of nature that says the whole country can’t be wrong. It’s happened before. Indeed, as Caplan has pointed out in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people systematically overestimate the dangers and underestimate the benefits of trading with foreigners as well. Besides, most Americans aren’t frothing at the mouth against immigrants: they tend to not actually know how restrictive the current system is and support immigration restrictions being “increased” to a lower level.
And if you’re an American conservative at all, you necessarily believe that the majority of people are biased into thinking government “solutions” work much better than they actually do.
2) That’s just what the left-wing environmentalists say: “no matter what I do, the right-wingers will accuse me of being motivated by an anti-capitalist bias.” The point is not whether you can convince an arbitrarily stubborn person; the point is whether you really are motivated by bias.
3) That’s also just what the left-wing environmentalists say: right-wing solutions to global warming that don’t involve dismantling capitalism won’t work. Maybe they’re right. But if they don’t want to be taken as zealots who will argue against capitalism no matter what, they need to seriously consider whether they might work and take the least restrictive option.
They need to show that they love capitalism and love progress and love the benefits of fossil fuels—but tragically, the costs are just too high. That is not their general attitude; their attitude is one of glee that Mammon is destroying itself. Need I point out that a similar analysis applies to the anti-immigrant right?
As for the latter point that the welfare state is incompatible with open borders: that’s a perfect opportunity for right-wingers to argue that the welfare state is immoral. They can say: abolish welfare for immigrants and exempt them from the extra taxes to pay for it, then when it is shown that such a policy can work, eventually allow Americans to opt out of the welfare state in turn for lowering their taxes. They will be eager to do so, and the whole system of welfare will collapse.
The right could turn this issue into their moral high ground. Bernie Sanders has already said “open borders is a Koch brothers idea”; the right can ask him why he is so driven by racism to exclude people willing to work for their pay.
Sailer’s premise is more “no stupid immigrants” than “no stinky immigrants” but, yeah, racism. That type of anti-immigration advocate is a lot like the sort of environmentalist Citizensearth is trying not to be mistaken for: he’s cavalier about the costs of the policies he wants because he regards most of them as benefits rather than costs.
1) Vox, you are equivocating between “immigration restrictions” and “more severe immigration restrictions”. Someone who supports a lower level of immigration restrictions still qualifies as “people who support immigration restrictions”.
2) There’s a difference between being able to accuse anyone of X because X is very loosely defined, and being able to accuse anyone of X because they can have X as a hidden motive. The left routinely calls things racist based on very loose definitions without needing to imply anything about hidden motives. At least we know what opposition to capitalism means, even if we may err in determining that it is present in one case. We don’t know what racism means, not as it is used by the left against open borders proponents.
3) In order for that to be parallel, you would have to have a situation where global warming can be solved without dismantling capitalism, but in order to do it without dismantling capitalism we also have to do something else that the right doesn’t like.
@ Jiro:
Yes, that’s true. I’m not saying the mainstream American supports open borders or anything. I’m saying the mainstream American is wrong and ought to.
But my first assumption is not racist bias. Maybe, like the majority of Americans, they are hopelessly ignorant on every major issue.
In the spirit of charity, I am going to make a couple of guesses about what the left means to denounce by “racism” in this regard (and I think I’m right):
a) Indifference to the suffering of immigrants as a value distinction. An American’s happiness just counts more than a Congolese’s. The left hates this, and they don’t much care to make the fine distinction between being indifferent to others because of the color of their skin and being indifferent to others because of where they were born.
b) A type of cognitive bias in which people systematically exaggerate the positive qualities of their own race and society and systematically exaggerate the negative qualities of foreigners. This leads to paranoia about immigrants.
Maybe the extreme left on open borders insists on opposing both a) and b) and would say that America should open its borders even if the country would be ruined. Even Bryan Caplan says something close to this.
But I am okay with a), to be honest. I think that purely selfishly America should have open borders. It would be good for the country and the majority of the people. When I say that immigration restrictionists have a racist bias, I am not criticizing them for not wanting civilization to collapse. I am suggesting that their biases are causing them to exaggerate the danger of civilization collapsing.
If it could be shown that open borders would make the average quality of life decrease (among natives and their descendants; obviously it would make the total average decrease), I think it would be reasonable for Americans to oppose it. Or if it were in the interest of some and not others, for the will of the stronger to prevail.
What, like subsidies and Pigovian taxes? That is what reasonable environmentalists argue.
They insist on a calm analysis of the harms of global warming and argue for the minimum possible restrictions on the economy to address them. We act only if there is a harm, not on the “precautionary principle” that doing something is always better than nothing. If a harm cannot be demonstrated, we should not impose a restriction.
And I agree that if the harms are real and not a net good or fixable by technology, that’s what we should do.
The left routinely calls things racist based on very loose definitions without needing to imply anything about hidden motives.
That may be true when they’re calling things racist, but when they’re calling people racist, nine times out of ten it’s in the context of a debate that started out being about something else, and racism IS the (alleged) hidden motive.
The parallel to smoking, second-hand smoke, and CFCs is left as an exercise.
The Centre for Effective Altruism’s EA Outreach team is looking for general sociological models to inform our thinking on movement-building. Examples: Schelling segregation, the Grannovetter riot model, etc.
What are some additional models which play into the dynamics of large-scale social networks that we should consider?
What are some good source for conservative opinion that aren’t far-right/alt-right? (Not that alt-right stuff is never worth reading, but I already know where to look for that.)
Is The American Conservative alt-right? Or City Journal or NRO?
I don’t know about TAC, but City Journal seems pretty mainstream-right, and NRO is definitely not alt-right – the sort of people who use the word “cuckservative” seriously tend to describe the National Review as being such.
I think I don’t really know what alt-right is. Is that the Steve Sailer-worshipping crowd that, as you mentioned, uses “cuckservative” unironically? Basically, the group that’s infested the MR comments in the last year.
According to this chart, Steve Sailer is definitely on the alt-right.
Okay, so if that’s the alt-right, what is their policy goal? Deport non-whites? Deny them the vote (I’ve seen E. Harding suggest just this)? I would assume making gay marriage illegal again. More strictly enforced immigration laws…protectionism, maybe?
As far as I can tell it seems to sort of be a loose way to refer to the grouping of people who are clearly far right but don’t appear to be “traditional” far right, for reasons ranging from content to style. It’s one of those terms that has the problem of multiple people using it for multiple different meanings.
The Death Eaters are probably the central example: they’re clearly far-right, but historically the Far Right has not been “Computer Programmers For Monarchy” or anything like that. They don’t have very much in common with, say, the BNP.
Steve Sailer is probably best described as alt-right.
jaimeastorga2000:
That chart is helpful to explain who the alt-right considers themselves to be, but the “race gap” is weird. Jim Goad, Le Pen, UKIP, Gavin McInnes, etc are probably unacceptable to the mainstream right, let alone the left as it currently exists.
Also, I note that it leaves off the “Red Pill” types, a decent chunk of whom I would call alt-right – a whole bunch seem to have gone from simple “how to use evopsych to get laid” plus anti feminism to outright white nationalism.
@dndnrsn: The old “Networks of Dark Enlightenment” chart overlaps somewhat with the alt-right chart and does include the manospherians, but it’s a bit out of date.
jaimeastorga2000:
Looking at all those groups, versus those they consider “cuckservatives” (mainstream right? establishment right?), is that they tend to have a far stronger emphasis on human difference on a biological level.
A mainstream right-winger will often consider the failure of an individual or a group to succeed to be a failure of personal decision making or the result of bad culture. Someone in the alt-right is more likely to blame immutable biological factors. For instance, take a kid who is bad at school. The standard mainstream right opinion is going to be that the kid doesn’t work hard enough, the kid’s parents are a bad influence, etc. They are unlikely to take the position that the kid just is never going to do well at school due to low genetic intelligence or whatever.
What divides them from the “traditional” far right seems to be differences of style (for instance, the chart you posted includes TRS – there’s a definite difference between their look-how-edgy-we-are-here’s-some-offensive-Pepes-and-Nazi-imagery shtick and “old fashioned” neo-Nazis – the latter are in earnest, the former are kind of like racist hipsters) and differences of demographics (probably younger, probably more people raised in a “blue tribe” environment, probably more middle-class and educated). Moldbug is not the kind of person you’d expect to find at a Skrewdriver concert.
I can’t imagine the Death Eaters or the rest of the alt-right existing without the internet, unlike the “traditional” far right.
Plausible?
My understanding is that the policy goal is a norm shift. Specifically, to get rid of the norm that political engagement should at least *pretend* to be about helping everyone overall, rather than about the forming of coalitions of the powerful which then get to act apathetically to the minority, specifically along ethnic grounds.
Getting rid of the “race gap”, getting rid of the “moral authority of the left”, etc, seems to refer to this. Lay the groundwork for object level policies to then flow from politicians talking openly in terms of which ethnicities are good and which are bad.
It isn’t as if everyone else is adhering nearly as well to the cooperative expectation in politics as they should be, to be fair.
UKIP is trying very hard to position itself as the party of reasonable people who are just concerned with immigration on grounds of economic impact to the poorer and who dislike Europe-wide institutions. They are trying very hard to take the position that they are just arguing for what’s best for everyone. It doesn’t surprise me that even if mainstream politics alleges the positioning is artificial and considers them unacceptable, they don’t get counted as supporters of the alt-right.
Compare the BNP, who have no reservations about openly advocating policies based on ethnicity and race such as “voluntary repatriation” which are much more in line with the alt right’s expressed concerns.
Good point. I can’t imagine the “regular” far-right coming up with edgy alt-right Disney parodies like “Troll the Cuck Out of You” and “White People’s Hero”, either.
@ dndnrsn:
I think this is exactly right and very significant.
The mainstream conservative movement in the U.S. is a mixture of classical liberal individualism which supports personal responsibility, and of values traditionalism supporting Judeo-Christian culture.
The “alt-right” is essentially collectivistic and believes in almost complete genetic determinism. Ironically, they hate “progs”, but they are very similar to the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement. They are in favor of promoting the social good by improving the eugenic racial stock of the country. It was the Progressives who imposed the quota system for immigration. And they are seemingly sympathetic to government intervention as such; they just think the current interventions are dysgenic or something.
JBeshir: I replied to you but messed up and posted in a different level of the thread.
Vox Imperatoris:
Interestingly, those who call themselves progressives now seem almost entirely opposed to the idea of innate capabilities, which places them in the same camp in the question of “innate ability: yes or no” as everyone else except reactionaries.
“Progressive” nowadays seems first to have been used as a euphemism for “liberal” when the latter became a term of abuse by the US right, within the past decade or so. More recently, it seems to be used by some on the left who are defining themselves against those they call “liberals”, who they see as insufficiently left-wing, insufficiently committed to the program, insufficiently aware of the problem (edit: as brad points out, liberals being attacked by others on the left for these reasons is not a new thing – I phrased this poorly by making it sound like it’s a new thing, rather than that “progressive” being used in this way is/seems to be a new thing). Left-wing students hounding a left-wing administrator for not doing enough to protect them from campus microaggressions is a conflict I would characterize as progressives vs. liberals.
Where the conservative would respond to a child doing badly in school by criticizing the child and the child’s family – the implication being that the kid would do well in school if they buckled down, if their parents were married and respectable, etc – the general response of the left seems divided.
A liberal will blame society instead of the child and the child’s family, and say that society must change – but has as an objective equality of opportunity. The child’s path to success should be cleared by society, but it’s recognized that some kids are still not going to go down that path – it’s enough that everyone running the marathon had a fair start.
A progressive will put the blame in the same place, but will have an objective equality of outcome. If the child doesn’t succeed, it’s proof that the child’s path to success was not actually cleared, and society must do more. Any discrepancy in who crosses the finish line and when is proof, to them, that the marathon wasn’t fair. Because of this, they tend to be against the idea of equality of opportunity as a terminal goal, and hostile to the concept of meritocracy.
So all three – the conservative, the liberal, and the progressive, accept the idea that all have the same chance at success in life. They just lay the blame for a lack of equality in different places. Meanwhile, on the left, the liberal and the progressive disagree on how to measure whether the problems behind that lack of equality has been solved.
This places the reactionaries (including the far right, and thus in turn including the alt-right) in a very different position from the rest of the political spectrum. They’re the only ones who take the position that some kids will never do well in school, no matter their diligence, upbringing, or how society treats them.
I think this is what is behind a lot of their “cuckservative” talk – I think they’ve misidentified the issue. They accuse mainstream conservatives of being afraid of the left, or secretly wanting to be friends with Salon writers, or whatever. However, that mainstream conservatives would not be friendly to HBD and the Red Pill and so forth makes more sense when it’s considered that mainstream conservatives tend to consider most differences in achievement as personal failures, which are in turn often the result of cultural failures.
@ dndnrsn:
I think you’ve nailed it. Great post!
Someone should bookmark this somewhere.
Edit: I suppose you could say communists, conservatives, liberals, progressives, and libertarians all believe that all men are created equal. They all believe that, in some respect, people are or ought to be equal.
Communists and progressives: equal outcomes.
Liberals (and progressives, to some extent): equal opportunity.
Conservatives and libertarians: equal rights and freedom.
“Reactionaries”, or the “far right”, do not believe in any form of equality. Some people are the elect, and others are the reprobate. Which is also odd because they say their opponents are Calvinists.
Second edit: further, I would say that one way to distinguish a conservative from a reactionary is to look at who he considers equal. Conservatives, of course, regard the oppressed group of the day as naturally unequal.
You become a reactionary when you believe that one of the groups which society has already decided are equal, in fact are not equal.
If you think transsexuals are unequal today, you’re a conservative.
If you think homosexuals are unequal, you’re on thin ice.
If you think women are unequal, you’re a reactionary.
If you think blacks are unequal, you’re an extreme reactionary.
And if you believe in the divine right of kings, you’re comical. Like a visitor from the 1600s wearing a funny hat.
Attacking “liberals” for being insufficiently leftist is not new. Phil Ochs wrote a (fairly hilarious) song called “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” in 1965. Back then though the people doing the attacking wouldn’t have called themselves progressives, they’d be socialists or radicals.
Personally, I don’t care for “progressive”. In addition to the turn of the century baggage, it just sounds like an unlovely word to my ear.
Vox Imperatoris:
It’s possible to observe stuff in the alt-right about libertarianism where authors praise it in principle, but argue that it is only possible in high-trust societies (which they often conclude must be ethnically homogenous) where everyone shares libertarian-friendly cultural values (which they often conclude to be European or Anglo cultural values).
A decent chunk of them are ex-libertarians and describe a sort of conversion process where they decided that libertarianism could only exist if protected from those who can’t do/don’t value libertarianism. Some of them seem to be promoting a sort of “libertarianism inside the group, collectivism outside the group” type deal.
Haidt defines conservatives as equally valuing care, equality, fairness, loyalty, purity, and authority, and liberals as overwhelmingly valuing care and equality. Compared to this, reactionaries value equality a lot less than conservatives, and probably value care less (there seems to be a general acceptance of cultural practices that are nasty to people on an individual scale but serve a larger purpose) and libertarians value loyalty, purity, and authority less. Progressives value what liberals value but value loyalty (group solidarity – eg, how some people turned on Caitlyn Jenner when she remained a rich white Republican woman, instead of becoming a radical social justice activist) and purity (Haidt focuses on things like offbeat sex stuff or burning the flag, but progressives have their own list of symbolic harms) more.
brad: Thanks for catching that; edited. I phrased things poorly – liberals being attacked by other leftists is indeed not a recent trend.
@ dndnrsn:
Yes, there is a fair bit of that element in them. And that’s what I’m most sympathetic to, if anything.
Indeed, I find myself having to argue elsewhere in this thread that “Yes, I would like the Palestinians to be able to live wherever they want. But Israel can’t allow that because their whole free, liberal society would be destroyed.”
I think a large portion of the alt-right movement takes this kind of legitimate concern and blows it up vastly beyond all sensible proportion. A few scattered Islamic terror attacks in Europe = EURABIA! No more Muslims! In fact, expel the ones already there! Do something, anything!
Similarly, there is the completely false idea of an illegal-immigrant crime wave spun by people like Steve Sailer. White Protestant family of four killed by illegal Mexican drunk driver! Why didn’t the government deport him before it was too late?!
Vox Imperatoris:
Yeah. They really are a “reaction” in the sense that they see something they oppose and sprint in the opposite direction. What is somewhat ironic is that one element of what they are reacting to – a complete denial of human difference – was itself an early-to-mid 20th century reaction to bigotry.
What is especially unfortunate here is that a retreat into racism and misogyny isn’t needed to recognize that human difference exists. Stephen Pinker isn’t a Death Eater, for instance.
I’m a left-winger, and I think it’s a real detriment to the left (and to a lesser extent, the mainstream right that has adopted similar beliefs beliefs) that there is so little acknowledgment of human difference: it’s led to some beliefs that are directly contradicted by reality, and it’s led to some really bad public policy. A society where there’s a minimum level of human dignity for all and nobody goes hungry or without shelter or without medical care shouldn’t require pretending that everyone is identical.
But the alt-right has a really bad habit of taking the problems with currently popular beliefs and coming up with some really, really ugly stuff.
“Achievement Gap Politics” divides educational viewpoints into three classes:
@ jaimeastorga2000:
The achievement-gap thing is a tricky issue.
I don’t think most conservatives and (regular) libertarians think there are no innate differences among people. They just don’t think outcomes are entirely explained by those differences. They believe that people have free will.
So some people will have to work harder, while for others success will come easy. But everyone through hard work is capable of doing reasonably well, except a small minority of obviously handicapped people, who should be helped through private charity. Which is possible because there aren’t that many.
@Urstoff
>Okay, so if that’s the alt-right, what is their policy goal?
Why would they need to have one? Politics isn’t just about demands. For example, being liberal or left-wing also means you believe a lot of statements that are not demands, just statements. And people on the right can disagree with that analyze that. But policy demands are not necessary.
Policy demands assumes a lot of things. You still expect something from the current system, as opposed to just waiting until it collapses. You think the current system gives a damn about you. The more rightwards go, the more ridiculous they sound like.
As a parallel. Imagine you are living in the Soviet Union and you are like a Western Liberal. You have policy proposals? No. You just write samizdats about what the Pravda tells people is lies. And just wait for it to collapse. You really really really don’t have any proposals to give to Communists apparatchiks, other than to GTFO. You want a different system but there is hardly even a point in arguing it as long as the current ones are in power. You need to have your collapse first.
@Vox
>Some people are the elect, and others are the reprobate.
Ugh, no. First of all the reactionary sphere has hardly any plans or demands. There is a clear disbelief in equality and autonomy but not agreed on plan of what should take its place.
I think expecting political demands or making clear plans is selling us short. Callit megalomania, but I think it is really about something as big as the Enlightenment. A large, multi-generational thing, the important thing is to work out the basic analysis and philosophy now and maybe 100 years later the politics. Or 25. Jumping from philosophy to politics makes you small, it makes you still work insight the ruling, Enlightenment paradigm. If one really wants to take on something as big as the Enlightenment, one needs to take it slow. The faster you go, the cheaper and less formidable you look like. If Locke wrote a Constitution for a proposed country five years after he wrote the Two Treatises, people would have taken him far less seriously.
Convince people know how equality and autonomy means alienation and meaninglessness, and worry about what should be in their place 50 years later.
Secondarily, and it is only just my personal view, not representing anyone, this Gnostic elect stuff feels entirely weird to me and I am sure nobody really wants this. The key insight is that when people are equal they are also unconnected, unbound, just floating around in space.
So the idea of hierarchy would be to bind people together in a close, personal, organic way, like a liege/vassal relationship, or a patriarchical family.
The problem with the elect/reprobate Gnostic model is that you just one loose group of elect floating freely above the reprobate.
Instead, my idea would be organic-hierarchic networks of people bound together, like how it really worked in the pre-modern era, we never had a floating elect, we had this far more personal feudalism.
It is often said The Last Samurai is the most reactionary movie made lately. There is a strong personal bond between Katsumoto and the samurai, and the Emperor and Katsumoto. The hiearchy is of personal bonds. It is not an elect floating freely above others.
This movie got feudalism really, really right. I mean, the ideal kind of feudalism, the one worth dreaming about, not necessarily all the ways how fallible humans fucked up the system, of course.
So, in short, the problem with egalitarianism is that it makes people too free, free of bonds, alienated, atomistic. If you want to bind people together, by blood, oaths, lasting relationships, you always end up making it hierarchical, it just never works any other way. If you tried binding people together on a strictly equal level I guess you would get a herd. The close, personal, companionship based relationship between a warlord and his comitatus works because it is hierarchical.
@JBeshir:
> My understanding is that the policy goal is a norm shift. Specifically, to get rid of the norm that political engagement should at least *pretend* to be about helping everyone overall, rather than about the forming of coalitions of the powerful which then get to act apathetically to the minority, specifically along ethnic grounds.
This sounds suspiciously like you’re saying their goal is “Be actually evil.”
Is that really how they would describe their goal?
@jonathan
I think they would maybe have some more complicated theory about who is allowed to form coalitions excluding the concerns of whom, perhaps along the lines of The Dividualist’s comment about who a country is “for” here, and they’d be likely to say that their project is a wider one of which this is only a part, but I think they’d agree that it is at least a part of their project to make it politically mainstream to campaign for and enact policies which reward/redistribute on the basis of ethnic groups, and for reasons other than it being better for everyone overall to do so.
The Sailer Strategy, which is one of the more explicit object level strategies I’ve seen from the alt-right, is fairly explicitly this; a call for Republicans in the US to just plain try to get such a large percentage of white voters they can ignore what minority voters think of their plans and enact things which they don’t like, and to do so by making the case that enacting these things is great for white voters in particular rather than by making the case that they’re best for everyone.
I think they would at least agree that the “race gap”, as it were, is “the thing making this strategy beyond the pale”, and closing it is their project to change that.
Basically, I’d suggest it isn’t so much any of the individual policies Urstoff mentioned at the top of this set of comments but the meta-level changes to how politics are conducted that would enable things like them to be pursued. Without needing to make and win a convincing case that it’s best for everyone to pursue them, since doing so would be extremely difficult.
I think this is more or less inevitably going to sound evil to anyone who doesn’t care about dominance of or even existence of particular ethnic groups for their own sake, but is roughly accurate.
@TheDividualist: So the idea of hierarchy would be to bind people together in a close, personal, organic way, like a liege/vassal relationship, or a patriarchical family.
I sympathize with this, but you make it sound like the higher levels of the hierarchy would only be open to warriors, i.e. a subset of men. That’s disturbing for women, and peaceful men. There are and have been patriarchal societies where it sucks to be female, and if you just say “hey, let’s rebuild an organic hierarchical society” without details, this is a rational concern.
If you say “let’s consider patriarchy and personal relationships between people of different classes as embodied in Christendom”, we’re on less slippery ground. Because bear in mind that the last time people tried to build a right-wing society on secular reason, it was Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile.
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that I didn’t wish I could un-read that used “cuck”.
I guess Vox Day’s latest book just lost a potential reader 🙂
JBeshir:
Good point. UKIP (why is it “UKIP” instead of “The UKIP?”) is trying to inject its positions into the mainstream (or, present its policies as already being mainstream). It doesn’t have any overt language or official positions of racial superiority, does it? In comparision, BNP is very much a white supremacist party, which only seems to care about the EU insofar as EU policies support mass immigration.
A key difference is that UKIP are either (depending on who you ask) racists pretending not to be racists, or non-racists accused of being racists. Whereas the BNP are very much racists, and don’t bother to pretend that they aren’t.
Even when you consider the most openly racist and least esoteric (no cyberpunk monarchists) alt-right types though, there’s a strong cultural difference. As jaimeastorga2000 points out, the BNP aren’t redubbing Disney songs. Your average neo-Nazi probably doesn’t have any rare Pepes. TRS (who are maybe the most traditional far right and least Death Eater of the alt right types) would probably be ecstatic if the BNP somehow won power in the UK, but they don’t seem like the blue-collar beer-hall-brawler types that have been stereotypically common in the far right for most of the 20th century.
Perhaps the difference is in how they came to their particular opinions? The traditional far right seems to have largely been the province of disaffected blue-collar types whose political involvement has mostly been with the far right. With the alt-right, you see a lot of talk of libertarianism and being ex-libertarians. I also get the sense that a decent number were incubated in a left-wing political atmosphere.
@dndnrsn @JBeshir
I think you guys are over-complicating it about this racist and non-racist thing. Look. Nation-states are supposed to be the national homelands of ethnic groups. Maybe America not because America has always been a liberal ideal, but England’s existence is to provide a place for the English, which means both culture and ancestry. Therefore, it is an entirely moot point if the UKIP or BNP are racist, I think it is perfectly normal that to not want to have too many non-English people in a place that is supposed to be the place meant for English people. All the usual characteristics of racism, like hatred, superiority complex, or random discrimination are not necessarily related to it, this is why it is so weird to talk about racism here. It is simply the conviction that nation-states are meant for specific ethnics. Otherwise, why have an England? What is the point of having a country like that? Without ethnic homelands, it could be One World Government or One World America, which is largely the same.
The idea of countries as ethnic homelands is not even something ur-conservative. It is Israel, 1948 and it is how LIBERALS like Woodrow Wilson created countries like Czechoslovakia in 1920. It was made to have a place for ethnic Czechs and Slovaks. Why else? If you just let anyone live there, why even create the country?
Imagine you are a Wilsonian liberal in 1920 and you just made Czechoslovakia and now 3M Turkish people want to immigrate there. Would you allow it? Why? You made that country for a different purpose? Should you now rename it to Czechoslovakturkia? Why? So you say no, you say you just want Czechs and Slovaks to live there + traditional minorities (DE, HU, gypsy), right? And does that make you racist? No, just fucking common sense. You make a country for one people, why let other people immigrate there?
The same way, why would it be so racist for the UKIP or BNP to keep England English? If England is not English, what is the point in having an England, instead of a United Anglosphere or World Government or something? So ethnic discrimination in immigration and suchlike is IMHO inherently linked to the whole purpose of having all these historical nation-states.
TheDividualist:
I don’t disagree with the notion that some nations exist to provide a place for a cultural/ancestral national group. I don’t know if I could say all are, because it gets complicated (Nigeria has four main ethnic groups, and a ton of minor ones – is it a nation? Canada has indigenous people who were there first, has been colonized by multiple powers, has had waves of immigration from all over the world – what is a “Canadian”?)
As such, it appears you think I am saying something I am not? I am not saying that cultural or ethnic nationalism, absent racism, hatred, aggression, etc, is toxic or morally wrong. It is entirely reasonable that if I wanted to move to, say, Samoa, they might say “no, you’re not Samoan, Samoa is for Samoans, and letting non-Samoans in will jeopardize that” or “well, OK, but you better be on your best behaviour, and don’t expect us to accommodate you, and don’t expect to ever be more than part of a tiny minority of non-Samoans”. (Samoa chosen at random – I have no idea what Samoa’s immigration policies are).
When I say the BNP is racist, I mean it as a descriptor. Beyond ethnic/cultural nationalism, they (i)are(/i) racist, in the sense of believing in racial superiority. The attempt by Nick Griffin to reinvent it as a non-racist ethnic nationalist party was kind of feeble (on the same level as Coca-Cola talking about how corn syrup water is part of a healthy lifestyle), and before that the party was officially racist. They have strong connections to hatred and aggression.
It was relevant whether or not UKIP is racist because the alt-right chart that jaimeastorga2000 posted listed UKIP as being part of the “edgy right” but not as being on the right side of the “race gap”: I was questioning whether that perception, and that of a few others on that chart, were shared by the mainstream right, let alone the left. I was comparing UKIP to the BNP.
Most nations aren’t really “supposed” to be anything, not having been consciously designed by any particular person or people.
It’s also not clear why we should care about the reason a country was put together- if the reason England became a single nation was because some guy wanted to merge things “to enable my claim to authority as the supreme monarch”, if we optimised for what things were “supposed to be” that would require us to immediately restore absolute power to the monarchy, and… go find the ancestors of whoever it was, since our current monarch is probably the wrong one?
Is/ought distinction, again- we don’t care about what optimisation criteria generated a thing, we have our own values.
Some people seem to directly value about having a place in which a given ethnicity is dominant. Others only instrumentally, if at all.
“Independent countries are only justified to the extent they support competition, differences in culture, differences in preferences, extra-productive clusters of humanity, and anything else that is instrumentally useful for fulfilling human preferences” is not an absurd position, and that the latter implies it (by removing direct valuing of separation of ethnic groups) is not a problem for it.
@John Beshir
Reformulating: ethnic nations are solutions to game theory problems, mutual distrust. If I am A and I think B are are bunch of tribal ethnic nationalists, then I also have to get tribal with my A and form our own country so that we can resist and defend our safety. Could be that B thinks the same, too. So it is a mutual distrust prisoners dilemma kind of thing. A coordination problem, in the grand Molochian way: I don’t want many A in my country B because they may form ethnic mafias and persecute us. But of course my distrust of them can lead to mistreating them and then maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy. Coordination problems are hard.
Anyway, the idea is that sovereign govs are powerful so let’s try to form them over groups that have trust in each other, that nobody will capture it to persecute some other subgroups, so ethnic and religious similarity is thus useful.
This was, so far, even a centrist, moderate view. Now, here comes the part that you may find too right-wing, but it is a proposed fact, not a value. I propose that on the broad average, in the 21st century, non-whites are far more likely to become racist, ethnicist, tribal, and persecute whites or each other, than whites, because whites were had at least 3 generations of listening to lefties now who kept telling them don’t be like that, while most nonwhites not. In other words, ethnic nationalism is far more allowed and normalized in e.g. Kazakhstan than e.g. Canada, therefore, Canadians could suffer from letting in too many Kazakhs who could form ethnic gangs or something and persecute them. While they would not suffer from letting in too many Swedes, because Swedes already had 3 generations of lefties telling them to not be ethnic nationalist.
In other words, broadly saying, there is this proposed hatefact that non-whites are more right-wing within their own context, which is even admirable for us (I aesthetically like the wolf symbolism of Turkish nationalism and their wolf-head gang signs), but unfortunately it can be directed against us, so I would rather not import it.
In other words, the reason you guys on the left should listen to your local right-wing in this immigration stuff is that 1) you dislike them 2) they are telling you most immigrants are going to be right-wing in their own context, too 3) do you really want to import that?
I mean, do you on the left have any arguments why third-world immigrants would have Enlightenment individualist and autonomist and tolerant views and all that, instead of being literally like your worst enemies on the right or worse? I mean, you guys have a progress narrative, you really hate people of the past with their horrible ethnicist, sexists etc. values, but aren’t third-worlders are just like whitey people of the past, from your angle? Because they did not get enough of your progress medicine rammed down their throats yet, unlike whites, so they are going to be unfortunately very unenlightened? The left used to think like this up to the 1960’s and then somehow threw it all away and began loving unenlightened and definitely non-leftist tiers-mondial people.
@ TheDividualist:
The obvious solution, then, would be to take as many foreign “savages” as we can accommodate without them bringing us all down into savagery. Or if nothing else, and if you insist on “edginess”, have segregation within the country if necessary but still both gain from trade: such as by having the “savages” do menial tasks like cooking and cleaning in return for much higher wages than they could get in their countries.
But no, the nativist solution is always: no, the ship if already sinking! We can’t take on any more! Nothing will do but complete exclusion!
The pro-immigration side therefore suspects that the nativists are misperceiving reality, quite likely because of a racist bias. If they reject even the possibility of bringing foreigners in as second-class citizens, they probably are driven by bias and are rationalizing a basis for exclusion.
I’ve never heard of any racist who just wants to harm blacks or Jews as a terminal value. They see them as a threat and respond in a rational way given that assumption. The criticism of racism is that the racists are systematically biased in such a way that they vastly exaggerate the threat other races pose.
Even the Holocaust is not really a matter of differing terminal values. If Hitler had been right that the Jews were all Bolsheviks in a millennia-long conspiracy to destroy civilization and eliminate every human value—and that no matter what, they could never be reformed and would always be an existential threat to humanity—then I suppose his treatment of them made sense on that basis. The criticism is that this was a completely false perception, driven by racist bias and blind hatred.
@Vox:
The problem with that is that we don’t know what the critical number is, either for your first scenario or your second one. It seems likely that the US has not hit it yet: it seems possible that some European nations either have or are getting very close to it.
@ Marc Whipple:
This is exactly the leftist argument that we should immediately ban all industrialization to stop global warming.
1) Exaggerate the danger. Look only for evidence of harms and not benefits.
2) Assume the worst-case scenario.
3) Ignore less restrictive solutions.
4) Enact the policies you’d prefer even if there were no danger.
Vox:
I could distinguish them, but your point is taken. I guess you make your assessments and you pick your battles. *shrug*
@Vox
I absolutely get your point, like, I am totally not opposed to the idea of having a cheap babysitter from a poor country, but there is a problem. Well, it is an example of a general class of problems, which deserve their own name and I don’t know the proper name of it. But basically the idea that if X is good and other people always distort X into something bad then it is better not to do X at all. I there is no better name I will call this “Schelling entrenchment”. When you defend a less ideal but less pervertable version of a thing, not a better but more pervertable one.
To give you a good example, using your industrialization vs. global warming example, it is like as if letting people to put smoke into the athmosphere means people burn down national parks for shit and giggles, so you decide to entrench into a zero-smoke policy. Well, wait, it is not a good example, the total sum of industrialization worths more than national parks. Anyway.
Not sure about the migration situation in the US, but here, I am absolutely fed up with how Paris or Sweden look like, this seriously got out of hand. At least a 25 years moratorium with zero in-movement until they get all assimilated. At this point every tiny valve designed to let only real nice Filippino babysitters in somehow ends up letting in tons opf angry young men from Afghanistan. At this point just everything got too dangerous. And work actively on assimilation, don’t just expect it to happen i.e. stop all the masochism and brag them about how a great nation you are and thus they feel incentivized to identify with it and be proud about it. One of the biggest problems is that assimilation is slowed down / not happening due to immigrants thinking if you are not proud about your country, if you are not saying you are awesome, why should I adopt this identity? And that is correct.
So basically, almost nobody I know is denying that a moderate trickle of immigration, heavily filtered, tested, whetted, and somewhat segregated and so on, would be workable.
The problem is that it all gets hijacked by the holiness-signalling left who just wants to let all asylum seekers / refugees in. This is the shittiest part really, at least Europe is trying hard to keep out people from a normally functioning third world country who could actually be useful as car mechanics and yet we are letting in droves and droves of asylum seekers / refugees without checking their usefulness, just out of “compassion”.
So let me reformulate the point. It is not even immigration. Immigration is at least fairly filtered already. It is the “humane” stuff, refugee-asylum-family-unification stuff that is the problem. This is why “Schelling entrenchment” is needed.
I am tempted to say that non-compassionate immigration is almost not dangerous, this is done fairly sanely in Europe, and in America too, I think, restricted number of work visas etc. It is all the humane crap that breaks us, it is not the Indian prgrammers, it is the asylum seekers from the worst hellholes who bring fairly hellhole-standard behaviors.
@Vox Imperatoris,
You’re very willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Israel*, taking their words that the Jewish boat is sinking, but reluctant to extend that same courtesy to anyone else.
The same arguments which support preventing Jerusalem from turning into Gaza City can be used just as easily to support preventing London from turning into Karachi or Los Angeles from turning into Mexico City. It seems pretty hypocritical to reject them in the latter cases as racist but accept them in the former as necessary sacrifices to protect liberal society.
In practical terms I don’t think building walls is an effective or realistic solution, but seeing Jews build a huge wall and then loudly denounce anyone else trying to do the same raises the suspicion that they at least think it is.
*(No I’m not pro- or anti-Israel. I don’t care what they do as long as they don’t drag me into it or try to tell me what to do, which means my only real beef is with their lobbyists.)
@Dealgood
What. The. Actual.Fuck.
You realize there’s no council of the elders of Zion where we all get together and decide both Israeli policy and what agenda our agents in the U.S. media will push on various issues. Right? RIGHT?
@Vox
Notice that this refusal to treat people as individuals has some unfortunate parallels to your arguments about “the Palastinians”.
@TheDividualist:
In comparison to Europe, the US and Canada have national cultures which seem to do a much better job of integrating immigrants. Or, immigrants to the US and Canada integrate better than immigrants to Europe. Or, bit of column A, bit of column B.
Canada is probably in the best position, because the lack of proximity to any country but the US means that immigrating to Canada requires some doing, even illegally (which usually takes the form of someone entering the country legally as a tourist or student and not leaving when their visa is up).
Of course, there are Scandinavian countries with serious integration problems, compared to the US and Canada. Part of the difference is probably that the US and Canada have significantly less generous welfare states.
The US and Canada both have national identities that are much less based on common ethnic background than Europe, and for the past few decades at least, much less based on race. Cultural identity is more malleable. Someone, or their kids, can become American or Canadian in a way that doesn’t seem to have happened so much in Europe.
You say that one of the problems for Europe is a strain of “masochism”, as you put it, in the national narratives. The US still has a fairly triumphalist national narrative. Even Canada does, compared to some European countries.
As an example of superior integration in North America, Muslims in the US (and presumably in Canada), by Pew polling, are far less conservative, radicalized, etc than Muslims in Europe.
@ Dr. Dealgood:
Your argument is of the form:
“You say people should have the right to own guns. Therefore, you ought to say they should have the right to own ICBMs.”
People ought to be able to own guns in order to defend themselves, and they shouldn’t be banned just because a few criminals are going to take advantage of it.
But letting everyone have nuclear missiles would present an existential threat to society. If handguns presented such a threat, then they ought to be banned. They don’t, so they should not be banned.
If you drink too much water, you will die. That doesn’t prevent someone from arguing that, if his throat is parched from only taking in a tiny trickle of water, it might be defensible for him to take in an enormous additional quantity of water.
My position is that letting in all the Mexicans who want to come is not going to destroy America. But Israel letting in all the Palestinians would. What can I say? It is possible for two situations to be different. If the U.S. were concerned with taking in 300 million people all of one ethnicity who hate them and have been in conflict with them for decades, I would say they shouldn’t do it.
With gun control, left-wingers have an alarmist bias—probably some kind of fear and aversion to guns and rednecks—and exaggerate the harms of guns compared to the benefits. (Gun control as we know it was also in many ways motivated by racist fears of blacks with guns.) I say that right-wing immigration restrictionists have a bias against immigrants that colors their view of the harms and benefits.
Maybe I too am unreasonably biased against Palestinians. But I am all in favor of seeking the least restrictive solution. For instance, I would be in favor of the Palestinians being able to move to the U.S. In the U.S. they would be such a small minority that they would assimilate and not have a chance in hell of accomplishing anything through violence.
The problem is that people are biased against Israel and criticize it for things they wouldn’t criticize any other country for. It would be absurd for me to criticize Israel for not taking in five million Chinese to balance out the Palestinians or something, which could very well work. It would be absurd because no other country is willing to do anything similar, so I can’t place Israel on a special plane of evil.
I think NRO is probably the best in terms of sampling – its Corner blog has all sorts of authors of varying quality and interests jostling for attention, so it’s a good way to get a snapshot of the current state of debate.
The Federalist I think is also a solid source.
Personally, I enjoy Allahpundit’s posts on HotAir, although he’s by no means representative, simply because his sense of humor resonates almost perfectly in sync with my own.
The American Interest is pretty good, if you don’t mind a paywall after reading three articles. I find it to lean mostly on foreign policy content, though.
Second the vote for City Journal. Also, The Federalist is pretty new, and has a lot of good stuff. NRO is really variable, both politically and in quality. Some really good stuff, some really stupid stuff.
Unz.com is a good aggregate source of right of center blog opinions.
That’s all alt-right, isn’t it?
Looking at their columnist list, it looks like a list of alt-right authors, right-wing authors who are outside of the mainstream right or downright far right but not alt-right, and a few who don’t seem to fit (Bacevich is hardly alt-right, might not even be right-wing, and Finkelstein is some kind of socialist or other).
“Right-of-center” is not the term I’d use. “Far right” is more accurate. Though I suppose the far right is right-of-center.
Many of what unz.com aggregates are alt-right. Ron Unz specifically wants “… and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media”, which maps to alt-right (and alt-left).
Unz on the minimum wage:
http://www.ronunz.org/2014/02/03/the-conservative-case-for-a-higher-minimum-wage/
Unz clearly didn’t consider childcare or other non-profit but necessary service labor in his remarks.
The American Conservative.
It’s also the only conservative publication I know of that rejects tea-party politics, international saber-rattling, and free market fundamentalism.
Just posted upstream about how accusations of racism fail to stick to Trump because his supporters are precisely the people who are tired of the overuse of that term.
But makes me also wonder: are we maybe in a general “Boy who Cried Wolf” situation in US politics? Like, if we had a truly racist fascist candidate running for the GOP nomination, would we have anything we could say about them that we didn’t already say about every previous candidate? And God help us if we ever get a real Kenyan Muslim Marxist running for the Democratic nomination.
“Just posted upstream about how accusations of racism fail to stick to Trump because his supporters are precisely the people who are tired of the overuse of that term.”
Racist, xenophobic, same difference. And if you don’t think it’s xenophobic to forbid 1.6 billion people from entering your country because a fraction of a fraction of a percent of them are terrorists, I don’t have anything else to say.
I’m pretty sure you totally missed the point of this post, didn’t read the above-referenced post, and are pattern matching to make erroneous assumptions about my personal views.
And if you don’t think it’s xenophobic to forbid 1.6 billion people from entering your country
I would be mildly alarmed if 1.6 billion people wanted to enter Ireland and that’s not xenophobia, that’s “But where will they all fit?”
Agree about the stupid race-baiting, suggest you rephrase your numbering.
This comment doesn’t address the parent at all.
Addresses it in that (a) someone may have reasons for not wanting open immigration other than being a xenophobic racist (b) we all make mistakes when typing in the heat of the moment, but on reflection you might want to re-word so you don’t sound like you literally mean “let 1.6 billion people into the country as migrants”.
Not sure why you used “you” there in response to my post, since I’m not the parent.
Regardless, the OP is about the meta level point of whether accusations of racism have been diluted so much that they’re meaningless, not the object level question “Is trump a racist”.
Edit: Actually, did you think I was responding to you? I wasn’t, I would have replied to you if I was. I was responding to the same person you were. That’s why our comments are on the same indentation.
Also, I just want to point out that the conflation of racism and xenophobia recently is exactly part of the problem I’m talking about. I, personally, am neither racist nor xenophobic. I’m arguably xenophilic and am in favor of open borders.
But it’s also perfectly conceivable to me that someone could be against open borders–maybe even xenophobic–but without being racist. But these people would probably be okay with new Swedish immigrants you might say. Probably. But Swedish immigrants would probably be Christian (or culturally Christianish agnostic/atheists) and more culturally similar to our theoretical immigration opponent. Further, if you proposed to them allowing in Middle Eastern Christians, I think many of them would be okay with it, as they would be not okay with letting in very fair-skinned Muslims, proving it’s not fundamentally a racial prejudice.
It’s a not entirely unfounded concern about having people with a fundamentally different culture and set of values move into your neighborhood and start recreating their culture in your backyard. But the United States is all about immigrants, you might say. Yes, it is–wave after wave of mostly European immigrants who have all mostly assimilated into the American mainstream after one or two generations (and slaves as well, of course, though it’s hard to call them “immigrants” who “assimilated” when they didn’t have a choice).
But that is not what is happening in Europe recently. In many European nations recently it seems many Muslim immigrants are setting up their own insular communities and are reluctant, even hostile to the idea of integrating into the European cultural mainstream. The American looks at this situation and is afraid the same thing might happen here. I don’t know whether this is a realistic fear, given our distance from the Middle East, which may preclude the kind of mass migration experienced in Europe, but one can at least understand how the fear might arise.
And again, it isn’t about race, it’s about culture. This attitude, if extreme, might rightly be termed “xenophobia,” but it isn’t “racism.” Right now on my Facebook feed are multiple posts accusing Trump supporters of being “racist.” Not “xenophobic,” not “anti-immigrant.” Racist. And it’s precisely because of this sort of promiscuous use of the latter term that it has lost most of its sting, even when used appropriately.
What I find as strange about the xenophobia/racism labels is that the same people who are against Muslim immigration is that they are generally either neutral of favourable towards east Asians, who are arguably even more xeno than muslim Syrians, Afghans or Magreb Arabs and what is more – they usually are much much less hostile to or even supportive of non-muslim arabs. That kind of breaks the racist accusation for me and the xenophobic has to be quite specific to work. I don’t like the world “islamophobic” any more than I like any politically motivated “phobias” but it fits better than anything. These people are actually afraid of Islam, they do not “hate other races” or even “hate Arabs” (insofar as they do show signs of it it is because they put Islam and Arabs together…but if the majority of Arabs rejected Islam today and converted to Buddhism, they would cease being hostile towards them).
Then there are people, who I think actually have a reasonable case and who are worried that taking in hundreds of thousands of illiterate (in their own language) people with no education to a welfare-overblown Europe is not a smart idea. And there one cannot even use the islamophobic label.
The trouble is that these various groups of people (actual racists, people who are afraid of muslims, people who are concerned with “how are we going to integrate these people who won’t have a chance at getting a job?”) are often mixed together and all labeled “racist”, which is a modern equivalent of heretic (in the sense that you are saying “do not even talk to these people and try to understand them”).
By the way, one of the most vocal opponents of immigration and especially Muslims in the Czech republic is called Tomio Okamura, he is half Japanese, born in Japan. The irony is probably lost on him, but it again is some evidence to my point – the people who are called racist actually are apparently not racist towards him (although he is quite extreme in his rhetoric, basically on the Trump level, although thankfully with a much smaller group of supporters), on the contrary, they listen to him (and this is clearly the ‘islamophobic’ crowd).
“wave after wave of mostly European immigrants who have all mostly assimilated into the American mainstream after one or two generations”
There is at least a colorable case that there is no such thing as assimilation, only how much persistent diversity you’re willing to put up with. (This has thrown a substantial monkey wrench into my own thinking about immigration.). See, for instance:
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/maps-of-the-american-nations/
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/more-maps-of-the-american-nations/
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/demography-is-destiny/
I do think there is some truth to this, but I also think assimilation does happen. When you compare the attitudes, behaviors, etc. of Asian Americans to those of their immigrant parents, for example, I think you find the differences go deeper than language. They are Americans with Asian parents and maybe some subtle lingering Asian cultural influences, yet they dress, act, and, I would argue, even think in a recognizably American way.
As someone who grew up in “New France,” and who currently resides in “Greater Appalachia,” I can tell you they’re not hugely different from “The Deep South.” They are a bit different from “Yankeedom,” but it would be pretty surprising if such geographically distant areas weren’t home to at least slightly different cultures.
Fair enough. There’s a good deal of room to hash out the details, for sure.
@onyomi: But it’s also perfectly conceivable to me that someone could be against open borders–maybe even xenophobic–but without being racist. But these people would probably be okay with new Swedish immigrants you might say. Probably. But Swedish immigrants would probably be Christian (or culturally Christianish agnostic/atheists) and more culturally similar to our theoretical immigration opponent. Further, if you proposed to them allowing in Middle Eastern Christians, I think many of them would be okay with it, as they would be not okay with letting in very fair-skinned Muslims, proving it’s not fundamentally a racial prejudice.
Hi, that’s me. I support taking in Christian immigrants from the Middle East (once upon a time, before I was born, “Arab-American” just meant Lebanese). Latinos seem like decent Christian folks on average, and the Indians and East Asians the government lets in are very productive and well-adjusted even if culturally alien (but many Asians are now Christians too!).
What I’m afraid of are terrorist attacks, Rotherham type rape gangs, Salafi mosques, a ban on criticizing Islam or drawing Mohammed while libeling Christianity and Piss Christ remain protected speech, veiled women, etc.
Because of the violence Muslim communities incubate, I consider Western governments that enable this demographic shift to be in violation of the social contract whereby we individuals rationally give up our natural right to use violence in exchange for security. I no longer view representative government as a sacred value: if the oligarchs we elect choose to elect a new people and said people have a worldview that’s more violence-prone than the old people, we need to get rid of the political class by any means necessary (but the less violent, the better).
I can think of several reasons besides xenophobia to oppose 1.6 billion people entering my country
“But makes me also wonder: are we maybe in a general “Boy who Cried Wolf” situation in US politics?”
Yes, that was my feeling as well. After watching Scalia get pilloried in the media for tentatively discussing possible opposition to affirmative action, I am having a hard time taking the label “racist” seriously when applied by the media. There’s a large swathe of issues that are literally no longer even topics open to discussion.
Pretty much. I think some of Trump’s proposals are legitimately really scary (banning “all Muslims” from entering the US, “shutting down their internet”, going after terrorists’ families). But after accusing all national Republicans of being misogynist racist bigoted warmongers, it’s difficult to call out the real thing and get taken seriously.
Actually, it’s worse than that. So many people on the left are so committed to the idea that Republicans really *are* misogynist racist bigoted warmongers, that they now are saying things like “what’s the big deal with Trump? The other candidates are just as bad, though maybe they’re hiding it better.” (Paul Krugman has essentially said this several times on his blog, and linked to others saying it.)
That’s *really* dangerous, and shows how much such people have lost perspective (you really can’t tell the difference between a moderate Republican and someone who wants to ban all Muslims from entering the country?). Extending the analogy, crying wolf is one thing, but now people who’ve been arguing that all Republicans are wolves in sheep’s clothing are saying, “Why are we getting so freaked out about a *real* wolf?”
In practice, the distinction would be that a lot of the more moderate people who don’t jump to accusations like that would join in. Since more extreme people have a disproportionately large (and possibly growing) portion of the conversation, this is getting harder to diagnose. (Also, even if they had the same volume, they emotionally get heard more, just by regular ole simplification bias).
Some of us have been there for a long time. I think people are starting to get sick of it. We’ll see how it plays out. It’s primarily about how well the media and entertainment industries can maintain a status lock on what’s popular and acceptable in public. And given the notorious “artistic” temperament, I think we can look forward to some prominent right-wing trolls shortly. After that, the gates will be unbarred, Katie.
I think this is likely. Traditional political snarl words are losing their power; the left has called the right “fascists” and “racists” for so long, and the right has called the left “socialists”, that these terms no longer mean much of anything. Trump seems to have been shrugging off the open accusations of fascism (which are much more frequent than with any other major Presidential candidate I can remember in my lifetime) like water off a duck’s back. And note how Bernie Sanders basically said “yeah, I’m a socialist – so what?” and his campaign didn’t fall apart?
Personally, I think this is a good development. Maybe people will start analyzing policy proposals on the merits, rather than whether they pattern-match to hot button terms like “racist” or “socialist”.
I come to a similar conclusion from a different direction – I don’t think there’s any policy position someone could endorse such that the far right will agree that they are racist.
That’s strange, because a large part of the far right are racist, and don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
(I’m using ‘racist’ in the meaning ‘likes some races and hates/dislikes others’.)
@Anonymous:
My point is more that they’ll engage in mental gymnastics to disclaim racism. See, for example, this recentish comment in a links thread here implying that it’s not racist unless you specifically want to commit genocide. (I don’t know what the authors political inclinations are).
Some of them, yes. ‘Racist’ is used as an insult, people don’t like being insulted especially when they think they don’t merit it, and not everyone has internalized that the disclaiming strategy doesn’t work.
If someone calls you racist in a public forum, you might as well accept that label, daring the opposition to come up with something worse. In doing so, your detractors only wear out the utility of the term and show themselves to be both impotent and emotional.
It doesn’t really matter if you are racist or not.
@ James Picone,
Is there any evidence that a Red Triber could reasonably offer of “non-racism” that you would accept?
The way I see it. If am am accused of racism I can try to defend myself by arguing my position on the merits and inviting friends and coworkers to vouch for my character but in the end I’d just be inviting you to play superweapon bingo and the only winning move from my perspective at that point is not to play.
As such the best response to accusations of racism is to accept it and move on.
Especially so long as the same people who are always going on about the prevalence of racist “dog-whistles” amongst the Red Team inevitably make excuses for members of the Blue Team who get caught displaying overt racism towards black conservatives like Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, and Tim Scott.
TL/DR, I agree with Annon that It doesn’t really matter if I’m racist or not.
If someone calls me a racist I’m just going to roll my eyes and ask them if that’s the best they’ve got.
HlynkaCG:
Sure. They could, for example, not indicate that they think black people are inferior, either in a ethical sense or in a biological sense. (Criticising cultural stuff like, say, female genital mutilation, honour killings, or the like is totally okay). They could refrain from indicating that they think muslims are just waiting to be let into their country so they can be terrorists.
What I’m objecting to is the “I’m not racist, I just think black people are stupid because of their genetics” game.
Yeah, that’s wrong and incoherent. What such a person should be saying is “I’m a racist, and racism is correct because genetic differences between are real and substantial, and not all traits subject to these differences are desirable, etc, etc.” instead.
@James Picone:
You’re attacking a straw man.
The biological determinists aren’t the ones typically accused of engaging in “mental gymnastics” to disclaim racism.
The people engaging in mental gymnastics are those who try to deny that their criticism of the cultural stuff (the stuff you claim is ok to criticize) is a racist dog whistle.
IE,
Your complaints about inner city crime and the breakdown of the dual parent household are just surface manifestations of your closet racism.
You don’t actually care about the persecution of Christians in Syria, you’re just an islamaphobe.
…and so on.
@HlynkaCG:
I linked to somebody making the argument that it’s not racist if you’re not specifically calling for genocide, so it’s at least a weakman, thank you verymuch. 😛
@James Picone:
“wants to commit genocide” is only 1 of out of 4 definitions of racism posited by the original commenter in that thread. So your assertion that their position is “it’s not racist unless you specifically want to commit genocide” is itself on very weak ground.
I don’t think I belong anywhere near the far right, but I get accused of “Racism” a lot, and my response has come to be “if this be racism, make the most of it”. There is a vast swath of opinion that gets lumped in here, from the obviously supremacist to the obviously correct.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the absolute moral equality of all humans, modified only by personal behavior. I just don’t believe in the cultural equality of anyone, and I accept the likelihood that some races have small genetic differences that can produce large performance differences on very specialized tasks.
I think “Racism” has been overused and now refers to too much to be useful. If you mean “white supremacist” or “black supremacist”, say so. If you mean cultural xenophobe, say so. If you mean religious bigot, say that. “Racism” as a term is meaningless. It’s just an emotional appeal. All it means is “he’s a bad man”. And I’m very, very bad.
Now “racist” has become so worn they’re starting to use “white supremacist” as a general term of insult. BlackLivesMatter is especially bad for this.
Amen
In the last 2 months or so, I encountered the use of the word racist as a description of three completely different (and IMO unrelated to anything that is reasonably defined as racism) things:
1. The idea that catholic countries are on average worse off economically than protestant countries because the protestant teaching enforces work morale and the idea that hard work in life is rewarded by heaven (although as far as I know, this is only true of calvinists, but anyway).
2. Dislike or fear of muslims or islam.
3. Radical feminism – a friend told me that she thought radical feminism was “racist against men”. I pointed out that men are not a different race (unless you are a radical feminist, I guess :)) ) and she said that that was not how she meant it, but that it is simply treating men as something worse than women.
So what I get from that is that the word racist is about as far from its original meaning today as the word gay is from meaning happy and joyful. The problem is that everyone recognizes that gay means homosexual and nobody would even associate it with meaning joyful, if you say that something/someone is racist, it still conjures up the image of Nazis or apartheid, even though people use the word all the time without suggesting that someone would support race-based policies (actually it makes logically more sense to call affirmative consent policies racist than most of what is being called racist today) or who would even advocate an ethnic cleansing.
I’ve been having a conversation with a visitor of my blog (can name you if you like, just thought I’d wait to see what you want) who has a background in neuroscience, and though I’m a non-expert more coming at this from a philosophy of science perspective, I thought it might be the kind of thing people here might be interested to read:
Why I think Neuroscientists Should Be Wary of Using the Term “Consciousness”.
I tried hard to make a pretty strong case, but as always I love to hear agreement/disagreement/other perspectives of anyone on SSC!
Would I be far off in summarizing it as:
The word “consciousness” may have a perfectly good and clear meaning in your field but it may be worth avoiding using it for the same reason that it would probably be best for quantum physicists to avoid using the word “observer”: because annoying people from the made-upy fields with their own silly definitions of the terms involved will make up all sorts of bullshit based on your statements if you use the terms because they carry a lot of connotations and denotations outside your own field and if you’re not careful you’ll find your research being used to support Deepak Chopra quotes.
Lol, I wouldn’t summarise it quite like that no. It’s a fairly short and easy read, so hopefully it won’t need a summary from me beyond the title.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you think it is, especially if the person reading it is from outside the LW-rationalsphere (or whatever we’re calling it now). A short summary would be warranted if you thought you could make one.
I think generally its normal to refer to “consciousness” when we’re thinking about a sort of general feeling you get when you’re awake as a human. But there’s massive philosophical baggage that comes with using not only the term itself, but the schema/group of ideas it implies. I’ve tried to lay out really clear explanation of the problem and the reasons why it may not be intuitively obvious. I try to show why I think the baggage has serious real world consequences too.
That’s a bad summary, the article is much better, but there you go. 🙂
Your argument, as i interpret it from the computer picture analogy, seems to be that people aren’t really thinking about their own thinking, instead they’re thinking about a simplified and inadequate representation of their thinking. I don’t think that is a meaningful distinction. The way people model and monitor their own thought processes isn’t perfect, but having a perfect model isn’t necessary to say that someone’s brain is modeling. I don’t think people’s sense of self or internal narrative of consciousness is so disconnected from what’s actually going on in their brain that this sense should be disregarded. When people mentally verbalize opinions like “my brain feels sluggish and sleepy” or “I am angry”, I think those opinions are usually essentially correct. If that doesn’t count as self-awareness in your view, I think you’re defining the word to mean something very different than what most people interpret it to refer to, and attacking a strawman’s belief.
I don’t feel that reflects what I was saying in the article, but I don’t disagree with all that you’re saying either. I don’t think that people saying “my brain feels sluggish and sleepy” are misreporting that, for example. It’s more that when doing research on the brain I think neuroscientists should be very careful about scrutinising the philosophical sources/implications of the categories they’re using.
We shouldn’t use the word consciousness to refer to a series of observed external brain wiggles. I agree.
But, why should consciousness apply to “self” awareness, specifically? Consciousness is generally held to be distinct from self-awareness, in that a child might be aware of things, but unaware of themselves as an entity.
How could it be possible to separate moral questions from experience/consciousness? The final paragraph makes very little sense to me – you seem to be saying – “don’t worry about consciousness – that will lead to unconscious processes (moloch) taking over; instead lets concern ourselves with the unconscious processes that underlie external reality and that will help us to beat moloch (unconscious processes).”
That’s not even considering that a process without content is nothing. There always has to be some conscious content if it is important to us – if you want a secure footing then perhaps you have approach things from an “egoist” perspective, but still, consciousness is key.
> Consciousness is generally held to be distinct from self-awareness
I’m not sure consciousness is generally held to be anything – I think there are many different popular but conflicting notions / theories about it.
> you seem to be saying – “don’t worry about consciousness – that will lead to unconscious processes (moloch) taking over;
Really roughly in that end bit I’m saying look after people/humans, beause we know for certain that they are real and morally important, whereas the philosophical ideas are unclear, maybe illusionary (not sure), and if they did exist, they’re probably well served when you do right by the humans anyway.
I see.
I certainly agree that we should look after humans rather than going around building utility monsters.
But, I also think that if you want to make an appealing story of your life, and you *think*, your actions are always going to have to have some sort of philosophical basis. The best you can do is choose your abstraction.
So, there is a bit of a danger of throwing the (human) baby out with the (abstract) bathwater – if moral treatment of humans is based upon abstract/philosophical ideas, is *abstraction* really the basis on which we should object to *other-ed* consciousness?
(For example – it isn’t altogether obvious to me that other humans matter (at least not on the statistical/political level) or even that they are conscious in the same way that I am – but I think it makes a better story to think that they do and are.)
So if we want to keep the “being nice to humans” part, but get rid of the “giving machines equal consideration to humans” I would say the basis for this isn’t that machine consciousness is more abstract/philosophical, but simply that it is less appealing.
(Having said that, perhaps it is less appealing because it is harder to empathize with an uploaded mind…)
A stereotypically attractive man shows a stereotypically unattractive man how to make good photos for OKCupid— it works.
Interesting in a bunch of ways– “relax and be yourself” is good advice, but only if given in a way that it can be followed.
My apologies for the facebook link. I couldn’t figure out any other way to get access to the video.
Here’s the video on Youtube.
Are women (generally) actually attracted to those types (the “sexy Thor” guy)? I mean nice muscles, but that guy looks like he uses more cosmetics than his girlfriend (I get that this is the way he earns his living but it is the fact that this is an effective way to do it is what baffles me). I believe that the word is metrosexual.
I always find it strange when these models are shown in the adverts for men’s clothes. The message it sends to me is “if you buy stuff from us, you are a perfumed dandy who is full of himself and his looks”. So either I am an exception (or not their target group, but the clothes themselves are sometimes such that I would possibly buy) or they are doing it wrong. I also think it is different from women in women’s clothes catalogues since they seem like more or less what women would want to look like (and are not that far from what many women actually do look like, even if these photos are routinely photoshoped a bit) The message, I think, you would want to send to the viewers of your men’s clothes advert is “with this you will look good in a ‘manly’ way”, which is not what the ‘sexy Thor’ guy really represents.
I’d be interested in what impressions others (men or women) get from these ads.
“This is what is fashionable. This is what classy men wear. Wear this if you want to claim high status. We take all major credit cards.”
Don’t question fashion, it is what it is. Thomas Jefferson never said anything about not wearing make-up: he said if it wasn’t a matter of principle, go with the flow.
That is what you would want the ad to tell you, but that is not always what it does. It works if you show a guy who you might believe is a high-status guy. This is complicated, because status is only a partially ordered set, so you have to pick your target groups – what is perceived as high status for a metalhead will be considered low status by a whole bunch of other people for example. But metrosexual models are a high-status prototype for whom? Admittedly, they also appear more often in “hipster-like” ads, in ads for more “formal” clothes, you see more “serious men”, sort of like “younger Sean Connery” types. So maybe, I am simply not in the target group of the ads with models like the one from the video.
High-status for guys who are at least moderately interested in fashion, I suppose.
EDIT: Heterosexual men simply are not a monolith. While generally true most heterosexual men put a low premium on fashion, relative to women, certainly exceptions exist.
I cannot speak for all men, but I do have passing familiarity with different social groups. I live in Chicagoland area, descended from the North Shore suburbs: this area served as Setting for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Mean Girls, so imagine that and you have an idea of the background.
There are certain subcultures of heterosexual men quite interested in fashion. My Pakistani and Arabic friends, for instance, followed fashion trends quite closely and were quite enamored of these ads.
My Eastern European friends behaved in a similar fashion.
These groups both had a strong desire for conspicuous consumption, both in cars, and in fashion, and liked the ads featuring men you would describe as metro-sexual men.
I draw my fashion sense from these groups, because my other social group (nerds) had virtually no interest in fashion.
My Father, a blue-collar farm boy, DEFINITELY had no interest in fashion, nor did any of the kids in my family. My sister still wears over-sized Silverchair t-shirts.
But certain subsections of men concerned with status do in fact like these ads.
Partly I’d guess that it’s the same problem as female fashion models looking like poorly disguised aliens: a plurality if not majority of designers are gay men, so their sense of aesthetics is way way off from what straight men or women see as attractive. When these guys are told to put a “sexy man” in the ad of course he’s going to be a twink.
That said, there is a pragmatic argument for putting a fair amount of effort into your appearance. You really do see a big difference in how women react to you and it is definitely positive. Even the stupid scented deodorant / bodywash: it shocked the hell out of me but my ex actually was turned on by the smell of Old Spice. The only downside is that you do get mistaken for gay a lot more often.
Very much this. Fashion is not something heterosexual men pay much attention to.
But there is a great deal of basic work that goes into being considered “acceptable” in terms of grooming to women, and unfortunately the best way to learn all of it is to get a long term girlfriend. One of those “success begets success” things. Women as a group obsess about fashion and tiny things that most men never consider. They are hyper-sensitive, capable of spotting the beginnings of a unibrow at fifty paces.
Funny anecdote on deodorant: The gf and I have a restaurant we love, and are good friends with the owner/chef, who is a butch-ish lesbian. Chatting with her one evening, the gf says to her “oh wow, you smell great! What is that? I love it!” Our friend dead-eyes her and says “Old Spice Swagger”. And I fell out my chair laughing, because that’s what I wear. Now it’s just a running joke, that she’ll flirt with anyone who smells like Old Spice! (Freudian twist, guess what her dad wears………)
My exgirlfriend was a cosmetician, so I was subject to having my eybrows picked by a tweezer when she felt like it was growing together too much and once she forced me to let her take out some dots on my nose or something, I forgot what they are called, but she was pinching my nose with a piece of cloth dipped in hot water which was pretty uncomfortable and I did not notice any difference afterwards anyway. What I got from that was more compassion for women though, as apparently they subject themselves to this on a regular basis :))
Wherein Sastan explains that women are alien creatures but luckily for you poor shmucks he’s willing to impart his hard won knowledge.
Anonymous: I know that women spend really a lot of time grooming themselves and some of those things are pretty uncomfortable (like my experience with the nose). But call me macho if you will, I still think it is kind of weird if a guy does the same thing. Like I said, using deodorant and stuff like that is ok, but you (I mean a man) should not spend too much time/money on those things. I mean I even shave my armpits because then the sweat does not get stuck between the hairs, which some guys already might consider effeminate, but it takes about 5 seconds to do so while I am shaving anyway. I guess there are two lines – one is being a vagrant – another is being a dandy and one wants to stay in the middle. I cannot say where those lines are exactly, but I can tell it when I see it being crossed and the guy from the video is definitely on the dandy side of the spectrum while your average construction worker, or stereotype construction worker is on the vagrant side.
@Tibor:
But that is socially mediated.
High heels, wigs, perfumed powder. Neither masculine nor feminine to wear, unless you specify a time and place.
The idea that Sastan is pushing that hetero-sexual men don’t pay attention to fashion is something that you are actually refuting. You have a fashion sense, and it involves not straying too far from whatever your cohort considers normal.
Hell, the manliest of the male bastions, male professional sports, has running commentary on who has “suit game”.
Anonymous, I’ll give your comment much more credence than it deserves, in order to make a point.
Women are not aliens. They are people. But they do have a very different social status framework, and a very different biology. I don’t have any special knowledge, and I’m not hawking my own advice. I have been reasonably successful with the opposite sex, thanks to years of effort and a couple very kind young ladies who saw potential in me early on, and helped me out. There’s nothing very mysterious or sinister about it.
I’m not really sure what about my previous comment lead to such a negative reaction, unless you are one of the doubtless many people I’ve annoyed on a different subject. If you find anything I said objectionable, do feel free to address it, and I’ll argue the case. Snide ad hominem sarcasm is funny and all, but not why we’re here.
Speaking of makeup, has anyone figured out why in our species it is the females that decorate themselves, whereas in most other species it is the males who decorate themselves, put on displays, and physically compete for the attention of females?
My understanding is that the usual pattern is expected given greater female investment in producing offspring, leading to them being “more choosy”. And human females do seem to be “more choosy” in relationships in general. So why do humans reverse the usual pattern when it comes to decoration?
(While writing this comment, my brain spontaneously generated a “just so” explanation, but I’m curious what evolutionary biologists have said.)
@Anonymous: I think it is largely an accident of culture, although it could very well have biological underpinnings I’m not seeing. There are human cultures in which the men are the peacocks, but for whatever reason they are less successful in modern times.
And of course PUA have discovered that peacocking (that’s literally what they call it) can be an effective individual strategy. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that we don’t usually do it.
HeelBearCub: I guess that the exact position of the two lines is cultural, but are there any cultures where men spend as much resources (time and money) on their looks as women do or even more?
Anonymous: That’s a great question (actually, it comes from the Selfish Gene doesn’t it? 🙂 ). I think the first step would be to find other species who do the same and see what is similar.
My guess would be (disclaimer: I am not a biologist) that what the birds do is to say sort of “look how healthy I am, I am pretty fine even carrying this unnecessary burden of bright, easily-visible-to-predators plumage and other things”. But it is not exactly the same as decorating yourself, you are born with the decorations. In terms of what the birds actually do, they seem to be closer to men. Some of them give food and other things to the females (actually have zero chance at mating without it), the same is true of other animals. Grooming yourself a lot might make you look attractive physically, but it also shows that you spend a lot of resources on yourself. Evolutionarily, women seek strong genes AND a willingness to spend a lot of resources on their offspring from the men. So, while you might make yourself look “healthier” with some grooming, from a certain point it becomes obvious that you are spending too much on yourself. On the other hand, men are not programmed to expect resources from the women, so the fact that women spend a lot of time making themselves look “healthier/more fertile” comes with no penalty of the form “she is too concerned about herself and won’t share enough of her resources”.
@Anonymous: It is almost certainly cultural. As little as 300 years ago, fashion was a huge part of every aristocratic man’s life. Take a look at Louis XIV, for example. In fact, most of what we today associate with women’s fashion, from high heels to stockings to make-up, started out as things exclusively worn by upper class men.
How did we end up like we are today? It’s complicated, but the short version is that after the Renaissance aristocratic women started to adopt many of the fancy clothing and fashions that the men wore to court. Then during the decline of the aristocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries, the “Great Male Renunciation” occurred and upper class men started wearing plainer clothing, likely to differentiate themselves from the old aristocrats, while women’s fashion stayed more or less the same, and we’ve been like that ever since.
@annon
As others have already noted, whether it’s the men or the women who decorate themselves (“peacock” as Marc called it) is largely dependent on which culture and historical period you’re looking at.
As for our own culture. If I had to guess I would suggest that the fact that male’s are expected to be the instigators in a relationship is a large part of it. After all, If a female wants to be courted she must first attract suitors, preferably high-status ones.
A problem with that theory is that the vast majority of women’s fashion work is clearly intended to impress other women, not to attract men.
I don’t know if the court of Louix XIV or any royal court for that matter is a representative case. The lavish dresses seem to serve an entirely different purpose at a court – to attract the attention of the ruler, to get on top of the court hierarchy. A court like that is a world with its own rules. If you observe that chimps do something in a zoo (especially one very different from the wild), it does not necessarily generalize to a property about chimpanzees in general. It would also be silly to say that chimps in that zoo have a different culture (if what they do does not occur in the wild), the more sensible explanation is that their environment is fundamentally different from the natural one. So is the environment of an 18th century court.
I am still a bit skeptical about your (some people here) conviction that whether men decorate themselves more or women do is entirely cultural. I agree that culture surely defines the boundaries and those are not fixed, but I know of no culture where the men would put more effort into decorating themselves more than the women, in other words the order of the boundaries seems to be something more fundamental than just quirks of culture.
And as I mentioned already, I think it is deceptive to antromorphize animal “peacocking” into decorating. The unnecessary decorations peacock males are born with are just there, they cannot prolong or add feathers, all they can do is to be healthy and as for the parade, that is not all that different form what men do. Animals do not really decorate themselves, they cannot do so and they either already are born decorated or not. And as far behaviour goes, birds tend to do more or less the same thing the human males do, in a crude way – they build a nest or give the female a lot of free food to demonstrate both ability to provide and commitment (or at least giving out resources beforehand so that the female can then raise the hatchlings herself).
I don’t think it’s cultural as such. I think makeup on women is economic.
Think of the economic structure of most animals. Females take care of the young, males largely feed themselves and try to mate. Since they do not provide, they have to be pretty. Lions have manes because they don’t hunt.
In human society, usually men do the bulk of the grunt work necessary to feed and raise a family. Some cultures differ, but you will notice an overlap here with cultures where men are more “peacocking”. If you do the work, you don’t have time or inclination to worry about appearance. And furthermore, your mating potential is not determined by appearance. If you don’t do the work, your mating potential is determined by sex appeal.
Obviously, there is a lot of wiggle room here in modern times, as economics have changed much quicker than social mores and customs. But I do think the root of it all is who is expected to work.
I think Anglo-American men’s fashion of the 20th century is actually a kind of world-historical nadir for male adornment and foppishness. So if men today seem “metrosexual” compared to American men of the 1950s, well then, that’s actually not saying much at all. It’s more like a regression to the mean.
Well, I consider using deodorant a matter of respect to other people (especially if you use the public transport) 🙂 But one thing is that and another thing is using cosmetics for smoothness of your skin or whatever and removing hairs from your chest and stomach.
This is an old trope, and I won’t say there might not be some element of historical truth to it, but the real reason female models are tall and slender is that they are essentially animated clothing racks, and clothing looks better on a tall, slender form. It also photographs better on a tall, slender form. As a person who has photographed multiple fashion shows and done professional modeling portfolio photography, I assure you that this isn’t sexism, disguised homosexuality (I’m a flaming heterosexual) or disdain for the True Female Form (see prior parenthetical.) It’s a matter of the laws of optics and geometry and the hardwiring of the human brain. The last element can be overcome with sufficient conditioning: the first two are built into the Universe. As has been observed, the Universe is not obliged to be structured in ways which satisfy anyone’s particular preferences.
This is exactly what I’ve been told by my fashion designer friend. Also, notice that lingerie models have a completely different body type than regular fashion models. It’s all about what makes the garments look good.
Are you saying that the female models are intentionally unattractive so that the clothes look better in comparison and aren’t getting their limelight stolen? 😉
@Anonymous:
In all seriousness, that’s one of the reasons that fashion models tend not to be “pretty,” yes. There’s a hierarchical continuum thing going on, and it shifts over time. Models go through fads and cycles just like clothing, as depressing and dehumanizing as that sounds. But where the heel meets the runway, the idea is to make people look at the clothes, not the model. If there’s something about the model that distracts from the clothing, it’s a disadvantage.
Note also though that this has a few other effects. First, fashion models don’t tend to be *ugly,* either, and for the exact same reason. It’s distracting. (Plus it might negatively associate with the clothes.) All the models in a particular show will tend to have the same basic facial structure and expression more often than not. That’s not an accident. It’s not purposeful, usually, but it’s not coincidence. The booker knows the client and books models that work well with their current needs.
Even that dead-eyed sneer-stare that runway models all wear is not an accident. It’s kinda-sorta-spontaneous organizing behavior, which then gets reinforced by group pressure and expectation. There are people who get paid, and paid handsomely, to teach runway models to walk. This is so they will walk like all the other runway models, and increase their chances of being booked.
Vaguely curious as to what on earth you think “manly” is , if not that guy. He is the manliest looking he-beast I have ever seen and I want to climb him like a tree and pull his hair at the top.
Only vaguely curious, because I’m expecting you to say Sean Connery. Maybe George Clooney or Don Draper (not Jon Hamm.) Those are the usual suspects in this kind of case.
Yes, I would say Sean Connery (when he was still a bit younger). Clooney also I guess, or Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. I don’t know Draper. I am also under the impression that these are the types that most women are attracted to, rather than the guy from the video. You are not (I assume that you are a woman)?
Lol, I knew it. Heterosexual men who think women should fancy Sean Connery is a thing, for whatever reason. I don’t think you’d find many women these days who would find even the young Sean Connery attractive.
I don’t know why, I guess you read about it somewhere and it gets stuck 🙂 I mean it is a “common knowledge” that women fancy Sean Connery, isn’t it? :)) I think he looked kind of goofy when he was young (but that is probably because the fashion was kind of goofy then by today’s optics) but better when he was 60 or something. So what about Indiana Jones? 🙂 You can hardly go more manly-kind of attractive than Indy, can you? 🙂 I don’t mean Harrison Ford in general, just in the Indiana Jones incarnation. I also know that that my exgirlfriend loved to see that TV show with agent Booth, or something. It was a crime show, I forgot the name, but she was mainly watching it for agent Booth 🙂 That guy also strikes me as vaguely the Sean Connery “tough-but-not-coarse-and-kind-of-elegant” type.
When we’re at it, who represents the type of woman that “everyone knows” men should fancy?
Doesn’t look too bad to me. I mean, it’s TV, so he probably is wearing makeup (as is the nerd), but that hair’s achievable in real life without spending money on anything other than shampoo, conditioner, and a trim every three or four months. I could approximate it myself, modulo the beard and the blond, although the artfully tousled locks wouldn’t stay artfully tousled once I got up from that chair.
Is it necessary to wear makeup on TV? 🙂 Also, basically no grown-up men have absolutely no hair on their chest and stomach, naturally, I mean.
Maybe they just overdid his makeup, I mean the “nerd” does not look like he is wearing any to me, so if he does it is just for the TV “cows look like horses on camera” effect, but the other guy looks almost like Johny Depp in the Pirates of the Carribean.
Yes, it is necessary, because of the lighting.
Marc: I remember that when we shoot a music video with my former band, the director told the singer (who was more often in a close-up than the others) it would be good on the camera if they put some make-up on him (I mean, most of the time, we were painted red blue or green all over the visible parts of our bodies, but there were some shots where we looked “normal” too and there he wanted to use it). I think the result looks worse than if he had put none on, it is clearly visible in the video that he has some eyeliner. It could be a screw-up on the part of those responsible for the make-up (as might be the case in the video above) or maybe I just don’t like the effect, even on camera (actually I don’t like too much eyeliner or makeup for that matter on women either…but it could again be that I just don’t like it when the women are not skilled enough to make it look natural).
“Makeup” is a pretty broad term, and as you point out bad makeup is worse than no makeup. I was thinking mostly of using it to compensate for the washing-out effect of the lights and to reduce shine. Subtle eyeliner could help with that first one, but it’s really more about foundation, highlighting the apples of the cheeks, reducing under-eye darkness and bringing out the lips.
Good makeup, absent F/X or deliberate artistic intent, is like arson: if you do it right, nobody will realize you’ve done anything at all.
Protip: If you’re a makeup wearer, and you’re going to be photographed or be on a lit television set, DO NOT USE YOUR OWN MAKEUP. A lot of “regular” makeup has titanium dioxide in it, which will do bad things under hard lighting. 🙁 Can’t tell you how many times I had to send some aspiring model to the bathroom to wash her makeup off.
Marc: Can’t you just use less light/more dispersed light and a longer exposition (I guess that does not work for video so well, but should work for photos, or is there a problem?)
Tibor: It depends on the situation. Generally speaking, a professional photographer/videographer/lighting artist has a reason they use the lighting configuration they use. Using a softer light, or a less intense one, has tradeoffs, some of which are “purely” technical (e.g., halve the light, double the shutter) and some of which are artistic/technical (e.g. open the aperture more, narrow the depth of field.) and some of which are “purely” artistic (e.g. hard light accentuates flaws but is much more dramatic.)
Ironically, if you want a nice soft image with shallow depth of field, ceteris paribus you have to use LESS light, since the way you do that is to open the aperture, which increases the amount of light entering the camera. It’s almost impossible to take shallow DOF pictures on a bright sunny day unless your camera has crazy fast shutter speed.
And even if you can soften the light, it still won’t completely overcome the washing-out effect, which is partially due to the fact that the lighting is usually fairly narrow-spectrum and cameras have a much lower dynamic range than the human eye. (It’s ludicrous how narrow the dynamic range of even a really good camera is compared to the human eye. Really. It is.) You have to optimize for their best lighting zone which means you have to give up fidelity in other areas.
@Marc Whipple: Well, it sounds like there is a lot to learn about it 🙂 My “photography” (of the landscape when I go hiking) is based on taking as many pictures as I can and some turn out well, few really well, by pure chance (maybe I learned a few basic things to do by trial and error, such as that it is usually nicer to have a detail of something interesting than to try to have everything in the picture)…those I let google “autoimprove” and maybe fiddle with some parameters within the picassa’s framework 🙂 So about as far from actual photography as I can be. But it is interesting to hear something about how it is done properly.
I tend to be a bit obsessive. 🙂
However, you’re doing just fine. Everyone has ten thousand bad pictures in them: you have to take the bad ones before you can start taking good ones consistently. 😉 And if it makes you happy, that is ten times reason enough to do it.
Marc: Just for fun: This is one of those better ones, I think.
This one too, but the motive is maybe a bit kitchy 🙂
Both are from a trip to Romania, by the way.
Every time someone tells me to relax and be myself I want to ask them which of these two mutually contradictory instructions is supposed to take priority.
“Just Be Yourself” means that I do not want to look at someone who feels awkward.
So, really:
Don’t look awkward.
However you get there bothers me not one bit.
That feel when you are less attractive than the before photo.
Question: Is Donald Trump the Mitt Romney of 2016?
Consider: Mitt Romney was a recent and debatably sincere convert to a lot of conservative positions. He ran predominantly on the message that his business experience would enable him to find solutions others couldn’t.
Mitt Romney regularly polled in the mid 20s in Iowa while a series of conservative candidates shot above him to take the lead, then withered to make way for the next flavour of the month. Meanwhile Romney held a stable and substantial lead in New Hampshire. A similar pattern is emerging for Trump.
The meaningful difference between these situations, and I suspect the reason that this parallel is not drawn more, is that the Republican Establishment liked Romney but hates Trump. Romney was a “moderate” while Trump is an “extremist”.
I suggest however, that the Republican establishment has no meaningful voting base of its own. The people who supported Romney are supporting Trump, and for much the same reasons.
I hypothesise that the split in the Republican party, often portrayed as Tea Party extremists vs Establishment types who want lower taxes but don’t much care about culture wars, is actually a split between religious and non-religious voters. Traditionally establishment candidates have succeeded in winning the non-religious vote, which has created the impression that these voters are more “moderate” than their religious counterparts. But in reality, as Trump has shown, New Hampshire is perfectly willing to support an “extremist” – just a non-religious one.
Of course the implication of this theory, which suggests that the preferences of the Republican elites don’t much matter, is that Trump could very realistically win. Which is possibly another reason why people don’t like to consider it.
Discuss.
What I find absolutely entertaining is how many journalists are calling Trump a racist fascist. There was a period in history where this really worked for turning off voters, I wonder where is it today, does this really turn of voters, or they don’t give a damn, or they actually vote for candidates whom the press call so, because they want to give the middle finger to the press? I mean, did this conscoiusness of actively being opposed to the media and the games they play – largely the status-play mindfuckery the media employs by always calling the outgroup misoginist, racist, sexist etc. – develop already so that it would be an important voter base?
I mean, this should be coming sooner or later, I don’t think the masses will never wise up to the games the press is playing with them, but is it there already?
Or does it take a decade or two until this type of consciousness develops: was called racist by the media -> is opposed to the media -> MY GUY?
I mean, they cannot not care about culture wars, because they can ignore gays for example, but they cannot really ignore the anti-white turn of things, they cannot really ignore constantly getting shamed for their race or inner cities becoming no-go zones for them, are white voters in the USA really supposed to put up with being the officially hated race forever?
After they’ve called Romney, Boehner, GW Bush, McCain etc. racist/extreme/bigoted/hateful, those insults Lose their credibility. Being “moderate” clearly buys you no quarter, might as well let your id fly.
I hit this point a long time ago. The minute someone is called a racist, I figure they’re probably onto something good, if it’s scaring the progs that badly. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any bottom to Trump, but I am having my fill of schadenfreude watching him bulldoze the media. Those tears are so delicious. I’d almost vote for him just to post a “suck it” to the media, the political parties, and the rest of the elites. Too bad about those pesky principles.
“The minute someone is called a racist, I figure they’re probably onto something good, if it’s scaring the progs that badly.”
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
That’s true, but I don’t think it’s the argument being made. The argument being made, or at least the argument that I find interesting that I think might be being made, starts with the assumption that everyone is more or less equally well-intentioned, and makes the observation that some political views are emotionally appealing, while others are emotionally repellent. Since an emotionally appealing view will be more popular than it ought to be on merit, and an emotionally repellent view will be less popular than it ought to be on merit, when looking for which is the more meritous view you should be inclined toward emotionally repellent views over emotionally appealing views.
This is the theoretical argument for favoring right wing ideas. The left wing version goes like: assume that some people have good intentions and some have bad intentions, and observe that some views are emotionally appealing while others are emotionally repellent. Unless you have some reason to believe that the emotionally repellent views actually have positive consequences, you should assume that the emotionally appealing views are supported by the people with good intentions, and the emotionally repellent views are supported by the people with bad intentions, and so prefer the former.
Each argument makes different assumptions, and neither of them do I find particularly convincing, but I like the former one as an equally implausible counter to the more well-known second.
I don’t see it as reversed stupidity. I see it as having been vetted by people with every incentive to find flaw in it, and they had nothing, so they call it “racist”.
Remember the old lawyer chestnut? “When you have the facts, pound the facts, when you have the law, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table.”
That’s how political discourse works in the US. If you have the facts, you concentrate there. If you have the process, you concentrate there. If you have no leg to stand on whatsoever, and you’re a leftist, you call the opposition a racist. It’s a public admission that you have no argument, so when I see it, my flash read on the issue is that it must be without superficial flaw. Of course, further investigation sometimes reveals flaws either deeper than simple analysis would reveal, or in a liberal blind spot that they won’t notice. But it’s a handy rule of thumb.
@Sastan,
“Fascist” or “Racist” are just dog-whistles for being to the right of Bill Clinton in the same way that calling someone “Socialist” is a dog-whistle for being to the left of him. The words as they are typically used don’t actually signify anything beyond tribal affiliation.
Aside from that I agree with you completely.
Fascist, I’ll grant. Virtually no one is genuinely proposing anything that’s on all fours, or even on three out of all fours, with early 20th century fascism. Socialism is a little trickier given that democratic socialism exists and has proponents. But racists certainly exist and to claim that it is only ever used as an empty referent for tribal signaling is just silly.
Speaking of signaling though, “progs” tells you just about everything you need to know.
@anoymous
If one word can tell you everything you need to know, you’re smarter than me.
And I never said there were no racists. There are. But one need not call them racists to refute their hilariously bad arguments. So, when one sees the epithet “racist”, one can assume that it is not being used to identify racism, but to cast aspersions. Furthermore, if there were an argument that refuted the assertion at hand, it would be used. As I said, this isn’t a raygun, but it is a handy rule of thumb.
I think you misunderstand both the republican coalition and the politics of Trump, but I have to go to work. More later.
You’re missing the critical bits where Mitt Romney was a basically nice guy who didn’t go out of his way to make enemies, and an experienced state Governor as well as a businessmen.
The United States basically doesn’t elect Presidents who haven’t proven themselves as Vice-Presidents, Governors, Senators, or victorious Generals of the United States Army. Not everyone believes that this sort experience is essential, but enough do that it would be exceedingly difficult for anyone without it to win an outright majority in the primaries – and harder still to build a winning coalition in a brokered convention. Going out of your way to make enemies when you don’t have to, pushes that into nigh-impossible territory.
If you’re going to argue that Trump will be the first in this regard, you can’t do it by analogy to Mitt Romney.
also posting things about how “Jesus was white,” etc
Oh sweet holy divine, that’s completely wrong. Yes, Jesus was Caucasian and yes, Jesus was white (because whites are Caucasian though Caucasian does not mean White).
So are the other Semitic peoples, North Africans, and a good swathe of the Middle East Caucasians. I’m not going to discuss the exact shade of skin colour but Christ probably looked a lot more like the Syrian refugees or at the very least one of the southern Europeans who get classed as “brown not white”, e.g. dagoes, spics, etc.
Your friend is falling into the trap that Lewis (and can I find the exact words when I want them?) calls “Christ and – “. Once you get to the point of “Christianity and Something Else”, you’re in danger because gradually more and more of the Christianity will get leached out and the Something Else will become the focus of idolatry (like American civic religion involving the national flag in the church sanctuary, thinking retaining “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance avoids idolatry, etc.)
I’d send your friend a link to art of Ethiopian gospels and a reminder about “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me”.
Your friend needs to decide which is more important to them and which they really believe in: personal ethnic national identity, or the salvation of their soul. If they prefer White Tribalism to “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb”, then that is a choice. No man can serve two masters.
What she said. I’m noticing a fallacy of the excluded middle, where rejecting Social Justice War leads people to jump straight to white nationalism.
Trump is surprisingly popular among the religious wing of the GOP despite not being very religious himself.
I have a very red tribe facebook friend who is also a very serious Christian, hardcore Trump supporter, and, recently, a proponent of white identity politics (basically railing against Black Lives Matter and the like, but also posting things about how “Jesus was white,” etc.). I think this is the confluence which make up Trump voters–precisely not the people who voted for Mitt Romney (moderate, relatively secular, New England-ish Republicans) and precisely the people whose staying home in 2012 (working class, religious, xenophobic Republicans) probably cost Romney the election.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and a lot of the people who push ethnic identity politics also push things like getting people fired for opposing gay marriage.
Okay, so why is Trump doing better in New Hampshire than Iowa?
Trump is the anti-Romney. The base was never at all excited for Romney; he was an establishment-friendly compromise candidate, much like Kerry in ’04. He’s an ex-businessman turned career politician, unlike Trump, who doesn’t give off the “politico” vibe at all. Romney comes across as very patrician, and no one without the last name Bush has deeper ties to the GOP social elite, while Trump is an abrasive, nouveau-riche brawler who’s as much an alien in the Hamptons as Snoop Dogg.
Despite the fact that one is usually wrong when one predicts that “it’s different this time,” I really do think Trump is a different kind of candidate than we have really seen before, for a variety of reasons, including his “reality tv star” quality I described in another OT.
Another important difference I’d like to suggest here: I think he may be the first de facto “white identity politics” candidate. I’ve noticed a very strong correlation between Trump supporters and people who not only want to keep the Muslims and Mexicans out, but who also feel strong antipathy to “Black Lives Matter” and the like. They also tend to feel antipathy toward feminism, I think, so it may not just be a white thing, but ultimately I think it’s about defending a patriarchal, Christian, European, and, yes, white cultural heritage that they see slipping away in the US due to immigration, the “War on Christmas,” etc. etc.
People wonder why the “racist” label keeps failing to stick to Trump no matter what outrageous anti-immigrant thing he says, but that’s because it’s precisely the people who are most tired of the race card who support Trump.
Personally, I am in favor of open borders and hope Trump loses the nomination, but at the same time, I can also understand the sense of being sick of racial identity politics.
With feminism, I wish there were no feminism and no MRA, but, rather, one gender equality movement. But, given that feminism isn’t going anywhere, MRA strikes me as an understandable reaction to it. Similarly, I’d rather there were no black identity politics, hispanic identity politics, and no white identity politics, but if other groups are going to keep pushing the black identity politics and hispanic identity politics they can’t be surprised if this ultimately results in more white identity politics.
Trump is basically the candidate of the white, working class male who feels his culture and place in society are under attack–and not without good reason. Feminists and racial theorists would say it is right and appropriate that white, patriarchal, European Christian-centric culture should wane, given that it has so dominated the past, but I also don’t see why we should expect them to go without a fight.
Remember Cliven Bundy — the guy who wouldn’t pay grazing fees, then refused to follow court orders to remove his cattle from public lands, and then tried to start an armed insurrection when the government started to seize his cattle?
I seem to remember that he had a lot, if not outright support, at least sympathy in the mainstream right. Then during the media circus he said something along the lines of “black people were better off under slavery” and after that the number of people speaking up in his favor seemed to drop off precipitously.
So I’m not sure it is the case that the racism card has lost all its power, rather it seems like Trump is very good at knowing how far he can go without alienating his supporters (if certainly alienating a lot of non-supporters).
Trump knows how to bait the accusation while retaining plausible deniability. He’s playing the media like a matador. Just watch the way he remains calm and collected while the likes of Scarborough go off on him.
I can’t stand the guy, but my original “lucky amateur” hypothesis is quickly giving way to “secret genius”.
I think you’re making the same mistake many of Trump’s opponents are. Which is that it simply is not always about identity politics. Most people who are uncomfortable with or opposed to Muslim immigration or especially Syrian refugees are not opposed because they are racists or religious bigots; they’re opposed because they’re afraid (rationally or not) of some such immigrants and refugees being terrorists. Similarly, many of those working-class Republicans opposed to Mexican immigration aren’t racists (many are, but many aren’t) — they’re just looking out for their own perceived self-interest.
When you dismiss, as the establishment has, these concerns as “oh, you’re just racists and bigots”, you create a hole for someone like Trump. There are more nuanced positions on these issues than Trump’s, but no one with any public exposure is taking them. According to the establishment, either you’re all for taking refugees, or you’re a hard-hearted racist bigot.
So yes, Trump is the candidate of white Christian identitarians. But he’s also the candidate of a lot of other people who are neither identitarians nor people who think we must avoid at all costs the appearance of being such.
I didn’t dismiss these concerns as being just about “racism” or “bigotry,” nor did I say that only white identity people were interested in supporting Trump. I’m just saying strikes me as the first candidate to sort of explicitly court the white identitarian vote.
I didn’t say you dismissed those concerns as racism or bigotry, I said the establishment does.
I don’t think Trump is courting the white identitarian vote. I think he’s courting those who have positions which have been unfairly lumped in with “white identitarian”, “racist”, and “bigoted” positions by the establishment. He’s also going to get the actual white identitarians, but there really aren’t that many of them; they’re not a base. He also plays to plenty of genuine bigots who aren’t white identitarians also (that is, they’re bigots, but they’re not bigots first and foremost), but he’s not the first to play to that crowd.
Polls have been generally garbage in recent years.
That said, let’s look at a recent Iowa poll.
The White Christians and Tea Party types prefer Cruz to Trump 34-24 and 45-26. These are the largest gaps on there. By contrast, “Liberals” prefer Trump 28-8 (Trump’s support seems to hover close to 25 across the groups surveyed). I believe I saw another poll with similar results, but can’t find it now. It’s not the Christians and conservatives boosting Trump; it’s everybody else.
If you think white identity is a big part of Trump’s appeal, do you think that he will do relatively poorly among black voters? I think he will do relatively well.
Have accusations of racism against Mexicans or Arabs (or Chinese) ever stuck to anyone? That just isn’t Racism.
I don’t think white identity is part of trumps appeal.
Visited Stormfront lately?
“Black of Stormfront said Trump’s rhetoric has been a boon to white nationalists. “He has sparked an insurgency and I don’t think it’s going to go away,” he told POLITICO of Trump. Black, who said his site receives a million unique visitors a month, said Trump has helped drive a steady increase in traffic in recent months – including 30-40 percent spikes when the businessman makes news on immigration or Muslims – that is compelling him to upgrade his servers.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/donald-trump-white-supremacists-216620#ixzz3uLehgqdT
@anon
I’m no Trump fan, and I think a lot of his appeal does come from racism/white identity. And I think Trump is bringing quite a few toxic ideas into political discourse. But StormFront is so fringe to be not relevant. Its a white nationalist site bordering on Neo-NAZI, I assume they say racist things there . The internet is a big place and at some point you can nut-pick any crazy idea.
Trump’s stated opinions and his mainstream supporters are bonkers enough.
“Black of Stormfront”
Nominative antideterminism?
“But StormFront is so fringe to be not relevant.”
It’s Alexa rating is higher than, Cato Online , the Von Mies Institute, american spectator, taki’s magazine.
But you’re right. There are hundreds of other Nazi sites. Problem is the comment sections are more and more indistinguishable from those of Breitbart and the Daily Caller. It’s the latter two that are moving Stormfront-wards.
I realize this does not fit your preferred narrative but take a look.
@ anon and Theo Jones
White nationalists liking Trump is not the same thing as Trump being a white nationalist, or white nationalism being a part of his appeal. I also resent your back-handed accusation of being a neo-Nazi, though concede that such rhetoric is par for the course.
Now with all that out of the way, I think that Nybbler has already hit upon the chief driver of Trump’s appeal. Namely that the rank and file Red-Tribers are sick of being accused of being neo-Nazis for not being 100% on board with progressive’s latest hobby-horse.
If thinking that Obama has made a complete hash of the Syrian situation or that the official who approved Tashfeen Malik’s green card ought to be castigated for their failure makes one a stone-cold racist than so be it. The establishment obviously has nothing to offer us so let’s Immanentize the eschaton by voting for Trump. 😉
I do think white identity is part of Trump’s appeal for some people, though I think xenophobia may be a bigger factor, and I’d also predict he’ll get more black votes than the average GOP candidate (which is not saying much), for a couple of reasons:
Most importantly, a lot of the jobs Central American immigrants are “taking away” from Americans are jobs black people used to do. This is extremely noticeable in, for example, my hometown of New Orleans: cooks, waiters, housekeepers, construction workers used to nearly all be black; now they are almost all Hispanic.
Second, despite voting democrat, blacks tend to be surprisingly conservative, culturally-speaking. This should theoretically help out any GOP candidate, but in practice, I think it has to be one that appeals a particular kind of African American conservatism…which relates to a third possible factor: blacks gravitate towards leaders with strong, often flamboyant personalities (I think Ben Carson is highly representative of what I’d consider the African American flavor of conservatism in his attitudes and stances, though not at all in terms of speaking style).
I know it’s a stereotype, but black leaders have a different sort of self-presentation, the stereotype of which is the black preacher. Obama, ironically, is almost the polar opposite of this; had he not actually been black, he probably would have gotten fewer black votes than Bill Clinton. But then, it may be precisely because he was the first black candidate who, frankly, didn’t act like a black candidate that he was able to win a general election in a majority white nation.
Trump is a very flamboyant, animated, arguably “masculine” speaker who contrasts strongly with most of the other candidates, who tend to come off as somewhat whiney, wimpy, mincing, mealymouthed, etc. I think this has a general sort of appeal, but maybe even more to African Americans than average.
It sounds like we agree on the basic facts. Maybe everything else is arguing about words. As you said, there is a difference between being a White Nationalist and appealing to them. But if a candidate made rather focused appeals, I think that blacks would notice and be repulsed. I think it is simpler to say that his campaign appeals to nationalists, which just happens to include White Nationalists. Of course you can call nationalism or xenophobia “identity politics”; I just object to calling it “white identity.”
Though I disagree with HlynkaCG that white identity is not a part of Trump’s appeal for some voters, I agree with him that that is not the same as saying Trump is a white nationalist candidate.
I certainly don’t think Trump thinks of himself as a white nationalist candidate. I think Trump is a narcissist and assumes that he can be a big success at whatever he does just by using his impeccable intuition and judgment. This leads him to say some very un-pc things which appeal to the white nationalists, who think he is going to stand up for their interests, if they don’t actually think he is one of them.
Very ironically, Trump’s appeal to white nationalists might have a lot in common with his appeal to African Americans: both tend to like a “no nonsense” attitude, blacks wish for a return to the days when they didn’t have to compete with Hispanics for jobs, and white nationalists wish for a return to the days when black people, who speak English and are culturally American, did the menial jobs now done by culturally foreign Central Americans instead of being drug dealers or welfare queens, as the stereotype goes (some white nationalists may claim to want to live apart from non-whites altogether, but how many of them want to pick up garbage, pick fruit, and make beds for a living?).
Donald Trump isn’t Mitty Romney; he’s Pat Buchanan.
Yeah, with his anti-immigration, populist stance he is kind of this year’s Pat Buchanan. If Trump wins can we have Buchanan actually be the president?
I think he’s Silvio Berlusconi, but that could just be me.
That’s my take as well.
Why don’t Rationalists have a gigantic hard-on for the philosophy of Ruth Millikan? Her name does not appear on LW. She proposed an evolutionary, biological account of language (and cognition) and created actual tools one can use for these analytical purposes. Isn’t this “your job” as well? Her primary tool being the “proper function”. Only copied things (replicators or things that get replicated) have proper functions, and the proper function is the whatever reason why it gets copied. The result: Darwin wasn’t wrong about teleology: copied things inherently have teleofunctions, while non-copied things not.
My take on Millikan: https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/copying-is-everything/
How many of these comments have to be made?
“Why don’t rationalists like x? It fits in these few ways, so you should be totally into it. The fact that everyone doesn’t loudly talk about how much they like it indicates some sort of problem with the community in general, or they would already be talking about this great thing.”
Maybe they don’t talk about this particular person/issue because there is a gigantic set of things to talk about through their philosophical lens.
Never heard of her.
If you think she might appeal to people there I’d suggest making a post on lesswrong with the highlights.
Since LW is based on community submissions the answer to “why isn’t there something about x” may be as simple as “nobody has posted about x”
This!
I heard a talk by her about philosophy of language years ago and only remember not being particularly impressed.
Having read your article, I don’t see what the big deal is. Of course you take an individual, take some population to which it belongs, and then identify traits that this population has undergone selection for. You can then call “acting in accordance with those traits” the individual’s telos if you want. Why is this interesting? What am I supposed to do with this notion of a telos?
These telea are not basic and are not the building blocks of further explanations. I therefore don’t see how this is a rescue of Aristotelianism in a meaningful sense.
The claim that this bridges the fact-value gap is, of course, utter nonsense. There is absolutely no reason why I should care about what my group was selected for. I also have a strong feeling that you’re forgetting the whole adaption executor/fitness maximiser divide.
My take on it is that rationalists are skeptical of ad hoc teleological explanations because they trained themselves to take extra care to distinguish the map from the territory. Arguments that go something like “everything has a “proper function”, and that of a horse is to carry riders” strike me as too stupid to bother engaging. Objects have “proper functions” that they were “selected for”? No they don’t. Things just are. If they have properties that had developed due to selection in the past, these can be discussed on their own terms. See the whole of evolutionary biology etc.
Teleology is extremely suspect, and I would want a much stronger reason to take it seriously than an obviously self-serving justification of a “proper function” used as window dressing for a bunch of tired and stupid “hard truths” like the proper place of womenfolk. To my taste, LW-style rationalism is already way overdoing it with evolutionary psychology, but there at least there’s an attempt to carefully distinguish between the original adaptation and its current desirability (see: “Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers”). What you describe looks, at least on the face of it, like evolutionary psychology dumbed down really hard, to a form so nakedly self-serving and epistemologically unsound that rationalists, mercifully enough, would be unlikely to treat it with respect.
I think first of all you should try to separate the professional level of how Millikan engaged with it and how I more amateurishly use her thought for more social-political purposes, I am no a pro. On that pro level, this is map-teleology, it is all about how something works and not what it really is, proper functions are all map. The point is, it is a correct map. How would a horse breeder define his job if he could not say I try to make better horses but sometimes they are worse? What would be then then purpose of his job? How could he determine what horse is better? Map-terrain divides don’t mean teleology has to be in the terrain, it can be just a nice accurate map. So that in itself does not dismiss teleology. Rather teleology gets dismissed because there is an Enlightenment tradition to dismiss it.
Second, on my own more amateurish level I was a traditionalist or antimodernist far before I saw Millikan’s thought. I simply understand on an instinctive level that everybody and everything has a proper place, and we would have realized it long ago, or rather, would have kept this pre-modern knowledge of it, if only we would not have fattened people’s egos by feeding them fairy tales about how autononomous and self-determined they are so now they are too vain to accept it. A humble person does not try to follow his own will, he tries to conform his will to a greater goal outside himself. So I already knew this, the proper functions coming from copying merely told me the mechanism how. You check what you were selected for, and then you can be grateful because it gives you a goal, gives you something you can conform your will to. As DR has put it here: https://darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/the-shakers-deathwish-values-and-autonomy/ autonomy is only a pose anyway, we all are heteronomous, just some admit it, some not. So for me this all was self-evident anyway, Millikan merely gave a potential mechanism for it.
Anyway, try to separate the two. Millikan is no trad, I figure a Connecticut professor must be a 101% perfect liberal anyway. She just have a very good mechanism for functionality. Which can be interpreted in a trad way but perhaps in other ways too.
Teleology is in the map insofar as humans, as goal-directed agents, have purposes. This is how our purpose-ascriptions to artifacts work: They are parasitical on the intentions of the creating agents. This has nothing at all to do with selection processes like evolution that are not agents.
What created these agents and why would lower levels of agency, created by the same process not have lower levels of teloses? A purpose is not something complicated, it is just a thing’s function and if describing the function of a thing leads to correct predictions, like describing the function of the heart to pump blood and delivery oxygen to cells leads to the correct prediction of what happens when it does not pump, then talking about a function is a good map. A purpose does not have to some complicated conscious plan or something, it is just a role to play in some machine, it can be e.g. an ecological function e.g. what is the ecological function of carrion-eaters.
A purpose does not have to some complicated conscious plan or something,
I think this point really needs to be hammered hard, given how many people I’ve seen saying things like “Lol you believe in teleology, I guess you think that the sun gives off light because it wants to.”
@ TheDividualist & The original Mr. X:
Yes, there is certainly a real sense in which non-conscious entities exhibit goal-directed behavior. And if you want to call that a teleology, you can.
The dispute is whether the teleological explanation is fundamental or not.
An acorn in some sense “strives” to develop into an oak: it pursues the goal of developing into an oak. But through scientific analysis, we learn that the acorn in no sense acts as a whole in its striving toward this goal. Every individual atom in the acorn moves entirely independently; it just looks like the whole thing has a purpose in the human sense.
The growth of the acorn in the oak can be explained completely without reference to purpose or goals, only inexorable physical motion. The “goal” is an extraneous “layer of explanation” to make it easier to grasp for the human mind, by analogizing to the human capacity for conscious striving.
Aristotle, on the other hand, believed in universal teleology—and he was very clear that it if this were not so, he didn’t understand how the acorn could “always, or for the most part” grow into an oak. He thought that the random motion ought to result in a random result.
He thought that the random motion ought to result in a random result
Well it would. Teleology is just the tendency to produce a certain range of outcomes; no teleology, no causal regularity.
@ The original Mr. X:
You either misunderstand Aristotle or you misunderstand the reductionistic account of teleology. I don’t know which one.
But they’re not the same. Aristotle was not a reductionist: he believed that macroscopic entities really do act as wholes exhibiting “top-down” causation. He believed that the regularity cannot be explained by “bottom-up” efficient causation alone.
The reductionists believe that final causation is unnecessary; to fully explain the motions of things, we can appeal to efficient causation alone. Aristotle, obviously, did not believe this. The reductionists believe that a tree is just a name for a certain collection of particles; it has no intrinsic essence. Aristotle did not believe this.
You can’t be both. Which one are you (if either)?
I think you’re conflating final and formal causes. Even if you could somehow prove that a tree is nothing but a collections of particles, that wouldn’t disprove teleology, since the particles themselves would still exhibit teleological behaviour.
@ The original Mr. X:
Teleology, for Aristotle, is not just a “name” for a certain pattern of behavior.
It’s a real, fundamental principle active in the world; it can’t be reduced to anything else. It’s not a name for anything else, or just a different way of speaking.
No one disagrees with the teleology in the weak nominalistic/reductionistic sense. They disagree with it in the strong “intrinsic forms / intrinsic purposes” sense.
If all you disagree with is the latter, there is no argument.
@Vox Imperatoris:
It’s possible that The original Mr. X is working from an understanding of teleology similar to that David S. Oderberg outlines in his paper Teleology: Organic and Inorganic (CTRL+F for the word “teleology” and click on the “full text” link for the article).
@ Irenist:
I think very relevant here is what Michael Huemer calls the “Atomistic-Subjectivist Theory of Composition” (I keep linking Huemer, oddly; I don’t want to give the impression I agree with him more than I do).
This theory says that composite objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. Or, at least, they only exist in the mind. The composite object “tree” is only a form of perception on the part of the mind of the atomic particles that make up reality. The existence of the tree as an entity has exactly the same metaphysical status as the fact that it is brown.
This does not mean that the tree’s existence is not an “objective fact”, at least in (for instance) Ayn Rand’s sense of “objective”. It is objectively true that when you look at a certain collection of particles, you will see it as a tree—and as brown.
Very closely related is the denial of the primary-secondary quality distinction. Which is the idea that some qualities of objects (like extension and weight) are “real” and “intrinsic”, while others (like smell and color) are “illusory” and “subjective”. Now, the Objectivist theory—which is what I am most familiar with—says that all qualities are “subjective” in the sense that they exist in the mind, but at the same time they are not “illusions”. They are the form in which the mind knows reality. And in that sense, all qualities are objective and “really real”.
Now, you can see on this theory that the concept of “intrinsic” teleology is completely invalid. There are no intrinsic composite objects in which goals can inhere.
Mainstream philosophy of science does not, of course, accept Objectivism. But they do accept the Atomistic-Subjectivist Theory of Composition. So teleology can at best be a name or a form of awareness of the movements of little particles.
As for the essay you linked, I really could not tell whether he interpreted teleology as something fundamental, or simply a “higher level” view of the non-teleological facts, which is completely reducible to those facts. That’s the frustrating thing about this topic.
@Vox
Aristotle clearly took teleology too far, even into unliving physics, the issue is that the Enlightenment over-corrected, taking it out even from places it belongs to.
The problem with the acorn is, that a complete and proper explanation of its behavior and anatomy requires functionality, like how the testa part contains the food for the embryo part and so on.
A radical unteleological explanation would be something static like anatomy, because any activity or behavior, in biology, is usually understood in the terms of function and that function is selected-for, through copying.
This is really the insight here. A star also has behavior or activity, like emitting heat and light, but it has no function because it is not selected-for through copying.
It is almost impossible to think about medicine without resorting to functionality. Without focusing on what the liver does, we don’t even know why is it bad to have a malfunctioning liver.
Every explanation is meant for the human mind. A good explanation is simply one that offers more understanding and more prediction for the mind. Does function help in understanding the liver better and predict the outcomes of liver damage better? Obviously yes.
I think it is largely just the Enlightenment over-reaction to teleology that creates this kind of resistance against it. If we had no historical layers of philosophy, nothing but our current view of science, we would obviously explain biology in the terminology of functions, not having this inherited hostility to teleology.
Another reason there is an inherited hostility to teleology is, yes, it can be used for right-wing purposes. The reason is simply that teleology is at odd with autonomy. I think this is the core reason for being prejudiced against it – it really does not help having self-determined valued if you think many parts of you, and perhaps you as a whole, have heteronomous, pre-determined functions. But again, if we did not have a history of philosophy, if we had nothing but our current understanding of science, we would not come up with the classic Kantian idea of autonomy really. It is quite incompatible. At best we would say that humans have a far broader possible range of behavior, and a choice over those behaviors, like how virtually any animal who can reproduce is compelled to try to, while humans can conscious choose to remain celibate. But this is not the same as autonomy. It is more like consciously fighting some uphill battle with some of your built-in functions. Certainly people who chose to be celibate, or tried fasting, or something similar, felt that battle.
@TheDividualist
I don’t think a description of an acorn or a liver requires functionality. But it certainly aids in understanding, and I do find it slightly annoying to always have to qualify to someone who points out that evolution does not literally have a purpose that no, it doesn’t, but that “feature X has the purpose Y” is an intuitive shorthand for “feature X bestows Darwinian fitness, it does this via having the property Y, which enables the organism to more successfully propagate its genes”.
Teleology, for Aristotle, is not just a “name” for a certain pattern of behavior.
It’s a real, fundamental principle active in the world; it can’t be reduced to anything else. It’s not a name for anything else, or just a different way of speaking.
I know that; but your example of reductionism — “There isn’t a tree, it’s just a collection of particles with no intrinsic essence” — is an example of reductionism concerning formal, not final, causes.
Are you thinking of something like “The tree as a whole doesn’t do anything, and if it seems to, that’s just the aggregate of what the atoms do”? I’d argue that even that claim (if we accept it) doesn’t disprove teleology, but rather just pushes it down to the level of the atoms.
Or I guess you could go all occasionalist and say “No, there’s no such thing as teleology, it’s just that God keeps intervening to push atoms around and bring about certain effects.” For some reason though not many people here seem willing to do that.
@Vox in atomistic-subjectivism, if primary and secondary qualities would be accepted, goal or function would be roughly tertiary, it is less obvious than smell which dogs can detect better than humans, it takes some investigation and thinking, but we can figure out eventually. The point is, if secondaries are accepted as real, then functions can be too, granted, even “less real” than color or smell, but if “realness” depends on predictional reliablity and the same wavelength produces the same color, then if a thing has a function, we can reliably predict what happens when it malfunctions. Is debugging or troubleshooting or healing as an activity less reality-oriented than determining the color of a peachy-pink shirt?
Of course it is just particles with no “inherent” purpose, no question about that. But if saying certain way particles come together forms a heart is something useful and sensible, then saying something about its function is, too.
“Inherent purposiveness” on a particle level would be very wrong. That would be even worse than Edward Feser territory. But function as a part of an explanation or model or map of a thing that was copied and selected-for? Makes perfect sense.
Then you shouldn’t say things like “The result: Darwin wasn’t wrong about teleology”. The word “wrong” applies to territory, not map. A map can be misleading, nonuseful, etc., but it can’t be wrong. To say “Darwin wasn’t wrong about teleology” communicates that you are making a statement about the territory, not the map.
If all you’re doing is presenting a concept, and then informing us that you will be referring to that concept with a particular term, you’re making a statement about map, but making it sound like it’s about territory by using the word “wrong”, and by using a term that already has a meaning.
To illustrate the problem with your post, I’m going to replace the word “telos” with “smergle”.
Now, what exactly is the point of posting this? What value is added to the world by informing us that Millikan has chosen to refer to the reason something is copied as “smergle”?
Clearly, the intent is to smuggle in all the meaning that people have attached to “telos” by first acting like you’re simply defining a term, but then using a term that already has a definition.
Also, it’s wrong to say that copied things inherently have smergle; you have defined smergle in terms of why things get copied, and the reason a thing is copied is external to that thing, so smergle is external to the thing.
We’ve defined smergle as being the reason something is copied. So, whatever reason the breeder has for breeding the horses, is the smergle of the horses. If the horse breeder were to define his job in terms of smergle, such a definition would be tautological and vacuous. If horses with the most smergle are bred, then whatever horses he breeds are, by definition, the best horses simply by virtue of the fact that he bred them.
But, of course, horse breeders don’t explain their jobs in terms of smergle. They define their jobs in terms of other goals, such as having the fastest horses. Whatever horses display traits that suggest their offspring will be the fastest racehorses will be bred, so those horses have the most smergle. But adding the concept of “smergle” adds nothing to this explanation. The most direct explanation is to simply talk about speed, and leave smergle out of it.
How does smergle help him? If “better” is defined as “having more smergle”, and “smergle” is defined as “being bred”, then rather than breeding horses because they are better, horses are better because he breeds them. Now he is unable to base his breeding decisions based on which horse is “better”, because he doesn’t know which are better until he breeds them.
You have yet to give an example of smergle being a useful map.
No, it gets dismissed because it’s a tool for people to pretend that they have derived ought from is.
Saying that everyone has a proper place, and it’s vain to not act according to what someone else tells you to do is verging on apologia for fascism.
Everyone follows their own will. If they work towards a greater goal, it is because it is their will to do so. You are presenting submission as being a good in itself which, again, is a major plank of fascism.
See, now we’re getting to the meet of it. You started off by defining smergle. Now all of a sudden smergle is telling you how to live your life. How did that happen? How do we get from “this is what smergle is” to “Smergle is a greater goal that everyone should submit their will to”??? That’s a huge leap. And that’s why people are so adverse to the word “telos”. By simply using that word, you think your philosophy to be established as the Greater Goal. You’re equivocating between map and territory; if smergle is merely map, then it can do nothing to speak towards Greater Goal. But if it’s territory, then you can’t simply assert that something is smergle by simply declaring that to be the definition. The word “telos” is used to trick people into thinking that a normative basis has been established.
“First, defined ‘telos’ to mean X.”
Well, words are a social conventions, so if you want to define “telos” a particular way, I guess I can’t argue …
“Okay, ‘telos’ means what should be followed, so we should follow X.”
Wait a second …
If I don’t want something to conform my will to, I have no reason for being grateful. And if I do want something to conform my will to, then that means that it is my will to conform to it, which means that I’m still following my will.
Why should I pick smergle as my Greater Goal, rather than, say, maximizing global utility? What does following smergle even mean? Does it mean having any many children as possible? Living a life as similar to my ancestors as possible?
WTF? Not only maps can be wrong, only maps can be wrong, the territory cannot be wrong. The map can be wrong by showing you a river where there is a desert. But the desert isn’t wrong for being there, it just *is*.
OK, telos taboo, smergle it is. Smergle is external to the copied thing, but the copied thing’s behavior can be interpreted as functional for the smergle, or if you want to taboo function too, the external smergle makes the behavior of the thing more intelligible, even when smergle is external and not physical part of the thing, it is so closely related to its behavior that in a proper map it is painted right beside the thing. If the smergle of the heart is to carry oxygen rich blood to the tissues, while it is not written physically of it, of course it should be written next to the picture of a heart in the medicine textbooks. Otherwise we have no chance of understand what happens when there is a heart *malsmergle*.
The horse breeder has a conscious smergle, like wanting to have fast horses. Evolution is an unconscious optimizer, sorry, smerglizer. (Oh, it seems we have to taboo Rationalists favorite word, to optimize, too. Too close to teleology.) In the case of the conscious smergler, like the horse beeder, it can be anything. You can just talk about speed, but you gotta add that the horse breeders smergle is having fast horses.
>You have yet to give an example of smergle being a useful map.
Medicine, predicting the effects of a liver malfunction, malspergle.
>No, it gets dismissed because it’s a tool for people to pretend that they have derived ought from is.
Precisely, that is the point. Why is that such a bad thing? Besides it being an Enlightenment tradition, but why are you so sure they got that one right? Where should the oughts come from anyway, are they daimonic or come from some kind of unaided bullshit pure reason or similar bullshit of autonomous choice? Biological oughts are at least coming from reality, but those are purely philosophical fictions?
>Saying that everyone has a proper place, and it’s vain to not act according to what someone else tells you to do is verging on apologia for fascism.
Fascism is just one case of anti-modern behavior, and not even a very clear case of it. It is just used as an insult. https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/no-such-thing-as-fascism/
Let’s be fair and call it antiliberalism, with F. just being one form of it.
I can turn it around and say if you really like the fiction of autonomy and the modern and liberal values that come from it, you can be irrationally hostile to teleology even when it is potentially real.
>Everyone follows their own will.
taboo will. We can see behavior, not will.
>You are presenting submission as being a good in itself which, again, is a major plank of fascism.
Come in, this is really disingenuous. Then everything is fascist from Islam to Samurai ethics. In reality they all are antiliberal or anti-autonomous or pro-submission. There is a HUGE circle of these antiliberal views and fascism is just one small version of it, and if you use it too much it looks like you are going for emotional effect. Even the best steelman of this position would be saying that fascism is a thoroughly modernized view of antiliberalism, like how Samurai ethics were made into Japanese imperialist fascism or how some could be called Islamofascists. The common thing is that they all are thoroughly modernized, not the real thing, so they don’t count as a proper rejection of modernity.
>Now all of a sudden smergle is telling you how to live your life. How did that happen? How do we get from “this is what smergle is” to “Smergle is a greater goal that everyone should submit their will to”??? That’s a huge leap.
You can use a hammer to scratch your back and a rock to beat in nails, but generally things work better if you use tools for the purpose they were designed for. That is the path of lesser resistance and higher efficiency. Mostly lesser resistance. So while physically not written on the hammer, in the woodworking textbook is written next to the hammer “best used for beating in nails”.
I would accept as a critique that teleology-as-life-advice is in a way lazy, as it points towards the lesser resistance, using the capabilities of your body and mind for the spergle they are naturally oriented towards. It is not the common kind of lazy, though, it would be a difficult and strenuous life to even partially imitate hunter-gatherers, the guys who partially try to do that e.g. in the BJJ gym are not properly described as lazy. But it is in a way certainly lazy as it is cutting with the grain, not against, it is pissing with the wind, not against it. And then I would just rely on common sense saying that usually a good idea. There is a normative basis of cutting with the grain, after all, in that that it is easier. It is lazy, but not in a common way, it is a wholly special subtype of lazy.
>If I don’t want something to conform my will to, I have no reason for being grateful.
Try to learn some buddhism or something, there is really something in the idea of your ego working against you, undermining you.
>Why should I pick smergle as my Greater Goal, rather than, say, maximizing global utility?
Because it is ultimately easier. Because it is at least in some way rooted in observable reality. How is max global utility rooted in anything but pure philosophical speculation?
Even if your goal would be say to eat as much as possible and become 500kg, that would be at least rooted in a real biological imperative. But max global utility is nothing but speculative philosophy, it is far far too abstract and intellectual.
>What does following smergle even mean? Does it mean having any many children as possible? Living a life as similar to my ancestors as possible?
We had hundreds of years and gigantic amounts of effort invested in the Enlightenment, like in these pure philosophical speculations like glob utility. Seems like rolling it back will be similarly big and difficult. Please don’t expect me to figure it all out at once. Let’s put 100 scholars on the project for 100 years and we will have something like the theory of the optimally spergle-oriented life nailed down.
@TheDividualist
One thing I think’s interesting is that, as far as I can tell, a rejection of the concept of function/purpose/etc implies not utilitarianism but nihilism. I’m not sure I see in what sense can utility exist as a concept without some entity whose utility function is being referred to.
The argument that what distinguishes an object with function from an object without function is whether the object is copied is intriguing and somewhat persuasive.
>The argument that what distinguishes an object with function from an object without function is whether the object is copied is intriguing and somewhat persuasive.
I am terrible at summarizing academic philosophy. I would probably do the most service to “Millikanism” by keeping my mouth shut. But anyway: no, that was probably yet another example of me summarizing it awkwardly.
I mean, I can make a tool for myself, and the tool certainly has a function, even when there is just one copy of it. So copying is not a requirement, it just kind of makes it more likely. It is probably not even copying as such, but selection as such. Copying kind of intensifies the selection. I can make myself multiple hammers, and many of them are maybe are just jokes, like hammer with a sugar head. Then someone borrows one of my hammers and works with it (selection). It makes it more likely it is actually good for something. Then someone borrows one of my hammers and uses it as a prototype to manufacture 10K hammers (copying), that makes it even more likely that it does something.
But it is just my way of conveying the idea and probably terribly wrong, really better read Millikan in the original instead. She puts it in entirely different things, like basicaly how weight or color are properties of things, as things ancestral history, from which it was copied is also its property.
“The function of my heart is to pump blood because pumping blood is what the hearts of my ancestors did which contributed to the survival and reproduction of my ancestors, and thus contributed to the persistence of hearts of that type in the population, and which thus explains my possession of such a heart.” It is closer to the original formulation.
http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/3861/Kingsbury%20Proper%20Understanding%20of%20Millikan.pdf
I don’t think Millikan’s version of teleology is ad hoc (although it may still be wrong). She uses it to ground a theory of mental representation, which is pretty important if you want to claim that the mind contains truth-evaluable representations (such as “I believe that this coffee is hot”). Since most psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists do want to claim that, then it’s most certainly not a bad type of teleology (in the sense of being metaphysically “spooky”).
Yes; TheDividualist’s post includes a lot of stuff that’s not really in Millikan. You are absolutely right about what she actually says herself, and I would add that most of her account seems extremely plausible to me.
Evolution isn’t teleological, adaptations have multiple causes and consequences, you can’t extrapolate out a purpose that’s coherent over time, mutation matters too not just copying, context determines survivability and “purpose” is in the map not the territory, Aristotlean ethics and epistemology aren’t very good, I can think of lots of reasons not to like this woman’s argument as you’ve described it, why the presumption she ought to be loved?
Evolution isn’t telological in a broad sense (as in aiming towards some final outcome), but it’s not obviously wrong to say that, for example, the function of the eye is seeing. Millikan is proposing a technical notion of “function” that is analyzed a little more in depth and and used to ground certain other philosophical and biological concepts.
One major use of a technical concept of function is to ground a theory of mental representation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-teleological/
@ TheDividualist:
That was a great blog post. I’m glad you linked it.
I’m a big fan of Millikan, and have been ever since I was first introduced to her work (Ernie Sosa recommended her to me when I was working on my dissertation, so at least some very serious mainstream philosophers take her quite seriously). I’m not so much of a fan of some of what you’ve done with her work at the post you link to, but as far as her actual work, her account of intentionality is much more detailed than usual, and the details are extremely well done. If I had to speculate about why she isn’t a greater hero of the rationalist community, well, Dennett has very similar views about the philosophy of mind, and isn’t as detailed (and is probably a better writer), and for anybody who isn’t a professional philosopher, the less detailed version is probably a lot easier to cope with. So perhaps that’s the reason Dennett’s the rationalist hero rather than Millikan.
At the Bay Area Solstice event I was the person sitting on the other side of you and being awkward and silent. I cried maybe a lot during some of the pieces. I wanted to say “omg hi I read your things and omg” but that was kind of maybe not what you would want to hear all the time, since you must get that kind of a lot, and it felt disingenuous to pretend that I didn’t know who you are and have an entire rss feed section for this blog and addenda. And anyway I just kind of froze and thought admiring thoughts at you when I wasn’t overwhelmed by having intense emotions about humanity. I’m sorry.
are you an anime character or what
Was that really necessary?
You shouldn’t get in the way of a man’s quest for a waifu
Per Scott’s reply below:
“The woman with the colorful hair?”
Seems the answer is yes.
The woman with the colorful hair?
Yeah, I cried a little too, but luckily I managed to maintain my gruff masculine exterior and not let anybody see it.
I am always fine with people saying hi to me.
So. Uhhh… Have you guys seen “MRA Dilbert”?
Man… Tumblr is like herpes: it’s the gift that keeps giving. http://mradilbert.tumblr.com
Sorry, but Dilbert parodies peaked as a genre at least a decade ago
http://pied.nu/banned/the_Dilbert_Hole/
I haven’t laughed so hard at comics in a long time. That was fucking hilarious! Thanks.
Why would anyone take anything Scott Adams writes seriously? I don’t even mean this as a slam on him. I got a book of his blog posts years back (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and my interpretation was that you’re not supposed to *actually* take his ideas seriously; he’s just joking around and throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. He came up with the term “philosotainment” to describe his own work: musings that are meant to be entertaining or thought-provoking rather than actually correct.
“Occupation?”
“Standup Philosopher.”
“Oh, a Bullshit Artist.”
The weirdest thing about this is that a lot of these controversial ideas read like something lifted out of old jokebooks/cliches.
I can’t even count how many times some variant of he killed all of those people because he couldn’t get laid before. The most immediate one I can source is Alan Moore stating:
“Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.”
Alan Moore is a complete scientific illiterate. “The Dark Ages” is considered to be an inaccurate term by modern historians, who do not consider the time period to be one of exceptional backwardness.
Not disagreeing with you, using it as an example of how it is a cliche that Adams is reiterating. The sex as antidote for violence idea was pretty much the focus of 60s counterculture, and now its just filtered down.
@ God Damn John Jay
The sex as antidote for violence idea was pretty much the focus of 60s counterculture, and now its just filtered down.
Er, I’m pretty sure what the flower children meant was:
“[Let us] make love, not [make us make] war.”
I tried looking for a cite or source for that interpretation and couldn’t find anything. I had always sort of assumed that the juxtaposition was more meaningful than just a do this instead of this but I could be wrong.
… EDIT …
Okay I found one by Larry Berkowitz the lead actor in hair written after his arrest:
Lack of love mental and physical leads to violence, then to war. . . . MAKE LOVE NOT WAR!!!
@ God Damn John Jay
So it has come to this.
Ah, I was there, man. The object of the imperative was the authorities, or at least (non-hippie) society in general; not each other personally.
You know, like “Draft beer, not students”.
Is there a word for “art that’s really pretty bad, but people like because it agrees with their ideological sentiments?”
I think there should be a word.
tumblr
Abstract art?
Propaganda(ndistic art): art that spreads a message.
Or didactic art: art that teaches a lesson.
Of course, neither of those imply that it must be bad, but it is a reason why people might like something despite it not measuring up in other aesthetic qualities. It’s also a trade-off (at least in terms of effort): if all you’re doing is painting a pretty postcard with no meaning, you can optimize for aesthetic beauty. But if you want to show the Nobility of Man or the Dignity of Labor, you’re now optimizing for two qualities.
Hence the stereotypical Soviet films about love and tractors.
On the other hand, people’s ideological beliefs might give them different ideas about what is beautiful and desirable. For a (traditionalist) Muslim, the painting of a human being is a sacrilege and offensive, not aesthetically pleasing. Medieval Christians saw realistic art as worldly and irreligious: the more important thing was the symbolism and the simplicity.
I’m reminded of the old art joke:
Impressionism is painting what you see.
Expressionism is painting what you feel.
Socialist Realism is painting what you hear.
I think it is interesting how the US government is organized kind of like a human brain. The supreme court serves the function of coming up with plausible-sounding excuses to permit the rest of the organism to do whatever it already wanted to do in the first place.
Funny.
Here’s a thought: imagine we wake up tomorrow to find that the overwhelming majority of Americans want X legal change. Is there anything that X can be such that the constitution will not get reintrepreted to find that it actually supported X all along?
It seems to me that the purpose of the constitution is propaganda: having certain views enshrined on a big important historical document serves to make them a little bit more popular in the eyes of some relatively large proportion of the nation. But if those views lose their popularity, then “b-but the constitution says…” won’t save them, because people will decide that really the constitution says that whatever is the new popular view is correct.
An overwhelming majority of Americans already want to get rid of the Electoral college; that’s not happening without a Constitutional amendment.
The same would go for any frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, I think. Hate speech laws, laws against atheists holding public office, allowing the police to coerce confessions, these sorts of things have been overwhelmingly popular in living memory and the courts have generally held firm. It may become popular to round up and expel native-born Mexican and/or Muslim citizens; pretty sure that also isn’t going to happen without a new amendment. Confiscatory gun control in the post-Heller era probably belongs on that list as well.
Not sure about the expulsion, but the ethnic-rounding-up-despite-unconstitutionality has a pretty glaring precedent.
It requires extraordinary powers granted by a declared war and most of said individuals not being citizens.
Not necessarily…
I find it interesting that only traditionally democratic states have passed the compact so far (okay, Illinois has only gone democrat since 2000), but it has passed in at least one house in several more republican states.
Maybe if the republicans win the popular vote a few times in a row the compact will get the states it needs.
Actually, the EC pretty much as is could work against the current de facto Two Party System. ‘Winner take all electors’ within each state, is just a matter of each state’s laws, which can be changed by each state. Suppose electors went to the College and each voted for zis actual candidate … divving the College first round voting among Jones, Smith, Robinson, Sanders, Carson, Clinton, Trump, etc. Then on successive rounds they could have fun coalition building and the eventual winner would be indebted (not, unfortunately, bindingly) to whichever smaller parties had joined the final coalition.
The electoral college never meets and there aren’t multiple rounds of voting. They vote by ballot which are sent to Congress to be counted and a winner declared. If there’s no outright majority, the election is sent to the House of Representatives, but voting there is done state by state.
That’s a bit of a simplification, see the 12th amendment for the gory details.
Montfort says:I find it interesting that only traditionally democratic states have passed the compact so far (okay, Illinois has only gone democrat since 2000), but it has passed in at least one house in several more republican states.
Why would we expect any different? The urban archipelago wants to be able to dictate terms to those ignorant cousin-humpers in the fly-over states and the EC is one of the major checks on their ability to do so. So of course they’re going to want to get rid of it.
Now if the cousin-humpers thought that they had a chance in hell of dictating terms to New York or LA maybe that would change.
Hlynka: You may have a different definition than me of “major”, but the electoral college has only disagreed with the popular vote once in the last century and four times since 1776: J.Q. Adams, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and G.W. Bush. In the Adams-Jackson and Hayes-Tilden races, particularly, there was a lot of horse-trading going on with electoral votes to produce the results, which I find unlikely to be repeated. Though all candidates who won this way are technically “republicans”, only Bush could really be construed as the rural voter’s candidate (see also: “Tariff of Abominations”, though of course the politics then were quite different from today’s).
If the “urban archipelago” were really a monolithic block seeking to impose their will, I think the rest of the country would find it hard to resist – the US rural population is just under 20% and a candidate that could take every urban district by a large margin could take the country with the EC working as today.
In any event, a sizable majority of self-described republicans support eliminating the electoral college for the popular vote, which is the source of my mild interest in their lack of success in achieving it.
But what determines whether a new amendment is made? If almost everyone wants one to be made, what stops it from being made?
That wouldn’t be a reinterpretation of the Constitution, that would be a rewriting of the Constitution. Which is difficult to accomplish, but specifically allowed. It would certainly not be a case of “find[ing] that it actually supported X all along”, as you claimed, because X was explicitly not supported until last Thursday when the Constitution was deliberately changed and nobody would be pretending otherwise.
Fair point.
I would argue that an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t know or care what an electoral college is.
You appear to be mistaken.
Maybe they don’t care enough to get a constitutional amendment, but they seem to at least have an opinion.
I would appear to be, but I don’t believe I am. By your argument 97% of Americans know what the electoral college is and have an opinion about it. Surely you’d have to acknowledge that’s unrealistically high, even if my own estimate is unrealistically low.
So how do we get a result like this? Obviously, by a certain number of people answering a question they have no real idea about. This is why the way you phrase a question can lead to such massive differences in poll results – most people do not have knowledge or clear opinions on every little subject and rely on contextual cues to pick an answer.
Aren’t Muslims already banned from the US under the 1891 Immigration Act, as practitioners of polygamy?
Polygamy is extremely rare among Muslims.
I wouldn’t call 2-5% “extremely rare”. Uncommon, yes, but so is being relatively rich, which is one of the islamic requirements for polygamy. It is not uncommon for them to believe that polygamy is morally permissible.
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/gsi2-chp3-8.png
In any case, Sunni and Shia both explicitly permit polygamy.
Ok, “rare” is probably more accurate than “extremely rare”, assuming that your stats are accurate (which I am genuinely assuming).
That they believe it is permissible seems irrelevant. You said they were “practitioners” of polygamy, and the vast majority of them aren’t.
Right. There used to be a provision against people who merely believe in polygamy, in the 1907 immigration act, but it was repealed, unlike the 1891 act. So I guess that Muslims may enter the US currently, so long as they don’t actually practice polygamy. The 1907 act wasn’t found unconstitutional, however. Similar legislation presumably could be brought back without amending the constitution.
@Anonymous:
“Similar legislation presumably could be brought back without amending the constitution.”
Well, legislation can always be passed and signed into law without amending the constitution. Even blatantly unconstitutional legislation. If you get enough US House and Senate members to vote for, and the president to sign, a bill legalizing summary executions of anyone on a secret executive list, then it would be law for as long as it took to work its way through the judiciary. If it was repealed before the judiciary could issue a ruling, then we might not ever get one.
Just because a law existed in the past does not mean it’s constitutionality is decided.
” but so is being relatively rich, which is one of the islamic requirements for polygamy.”
The husband is supposed to be able to deal justly with every wife. On the other hand, according to the author of _The Modern Egyptians_, a 19th century account of life in Egypt, the polygamists he knew (I think he estimated one percent of couples) were relatively poor. It sounded as though a second wife was an input to production, not consumption.
“No matther whether th’ constitution follows h’ flag or not, th’ Supreme Coort follows th’ election returns”
Mr Dooley
Is there any motivational advice for people who want to exercise more that doesn’t assume they’re sedentary?
I want to exercise at least 20 hours a week because of this research ( http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/how-much-exercise-is-enough/ ) but I’m an outdoorsy person whose motivation to walk plummets when the weather is bad. Right now I’m maintaining 3 days a week of weightlifting, 2 hours a week of karate, and 30-60 minutes a day of walking. I guess I need to either learn to love the outdoors year-round or love treadmills?
Sell your car, maybe. Lots of people have put lots of ingenuity into doing everything by bike, even in terrible weather.
I sold a year ago and take the subway. I don’ even have a bike. I don’t exactly understand how bike riding people function: I don’t even wear suits, just “smart casual” but in any weather over 22C I would get to sweaty and simmer in it all day in the office, and in any rainy weather sit all day in muddy pants, and in winter fall over all the time and so on. It looks really weird. I’ve been to Copenhagen, and my friends did put me on a bike, and their solution was 1) not even smart casual, just jeans, because not being office people 2) being kind of “rough” and not caring if you smell or muddy or something, in this sense they were not too “classy”. (And outside Copenhagen like in Aalborg every rural guy hates the urban politicians who taxed cars expensive and rather drive 10 year old cars than to commute 25km on a bike.) Overally it works in a culture or subculture where everybody does it, but does not work well if most people don’t and thus dress and smell different.
Biking is incompatible with not being sweaty. Its applicability depends a lot on how far from work you live, and what kind of job you do. If you’re a programmer who lives like a few kilometers from the office, there’s no real issue. If you’re a bank teller or insurance agent, and must look and smell good, then there’s an issue.
But of course every programmer who prefers to be promoted into management tries to dress and smell like a manager.
Biking is incompatible with not being sweaty.
I just biked three miles to work without sweating. Admittedly it’s December, but A: Southern California and B: I do this most every day even in July. So, disproof by counterexample.
People who insist on biking fast, or have steep hills in their path, typically shower and change clothes on arrival.
@TheDividualist
Those people are silly, and likely future victims of the Peter Principle.
@JS
Sure, sure.
A lot of office-y workplaces over here have showers for this reason – you bike to work, then you have a shower.
If you have a smartphone, there are Apps for That. Zombies, Run! is a set of games that do interval training via the motivation that as you move you are doing so to evade zombies. (Indoors, you can progress on the game by running on a treadmill.)
Ingress is a game that encourages you to wander around the nearest town mining “portals”. In the early stages of the game you’re discovering lots of cool places – public art, interesting architecture and so on – which might help motivate you to go out more than you otherwise would. (the game doesn’t work when you’re moving above a certain speed to discourage playing it while driving).
Zombies Run doesn’t look like my sort of thing, but Ingress does. I suppose using my smartphone for a combination of audio books and Ingress when walking would be a smart (heh) motivational strategy.
Wow, assuming the study is right, the health benefits of physical activity keep going up far more than I would have expected (I tended to think that most of the health benefits of exercise accrued in the first few hours of moderate exercise per week and that after that it was either about having sexy abs or winning a competition).
Reminds of something I read somewhere about blood pressure: basically that 120/80 is the level your doctor wants you to shoot for, but your chances of having a heart attack or stroke keep going down all the way to 90/50 or something. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that cross country skiers really are healthier than the rest of us with their ultra-low resting heart rates, etc.
I consider myself fairly active, but I don’t get anywhere close to 20 hours of exercise a week, probably not even if I count walking. Probably should up it, but 20 hours is a lot… one way I have started multitasking, however, is to listen to audio books and language learning materials while exercising. I could feel better about exercising 20 hours a week if I were also learning something at the same time.
I’m way more interested in knowing how a behaviour will affect the quality of my life than the length of it, but all health research seems to be focused on the latter. I guess because that’s much more easily measured.
Well I have seen studies supposedly showing that the subjective quality of a person’s life is tightly correlated with self-reported energy levels. People who report feeling “energetic” also report a high degree of satisfaction with life in general, and people who “feel tired all the time,” unsurprisingly report a poor quality of life (of course, it may be in some cases that feeling tired is a symptom, rather than the cause of being unhappy, but they probably also tend to be cyclical, and I’m sure there are people who are depressed about their chronic fatigue rather than fatigued because depression).
But if we accept that feeling energetic is a big contributor to quality of life, which seems roughly correct to me, then the question is the impact of exercise on energy levels. Clearly people in better shape seem to have more energy. Obviously they are literally capable of working harder with less subjective exertion, so we can expect everyday life tasks to feel less taxing to them, which may mean they feel more “surplus” energy to spend on things they enjoy.
The only drawback is that the exercise itself is tiring and must be recovered from. There must surely be a point of diminishing returns after which you exercise so much that, even if you are in great shape, your subjective energy levels during daily life are lower than they would be with less exercise. I’m not sure where that is, but I’d guess it’s somewhere well above what the average sedentary 1st worlder does and somewhere below professional athlete. Maybe 20 hours a week? Would be interesting if they did a study on that.
> Clearly people in better shape seem to have more energy.
Or people who have more energy find it easier to get in shape.
In reality, it is mutual causation both ways, you can get people spiral out of depression by having them do a tiny bit more, which makes them feel better, which makes them do a bit more etc.
That is how people spiral into depression too, you are depressed because you best friend died and you are between jobs anyway so you stop looking and lock yourself in your flat and order pizza twice a day and a month and ten kg body weight later your depression is now much worse because of the lack of exercise, the shit food and of the weight gain. That is how it usually happens.
@onyomi: Wow, assuming the study is right, the health benefits of physical activity keep going up far more than I would have expected (I tended to think that most of the health benefits of exercise accrued in the first few hours of moderate exercise per week and that after that it was either about having sexy abs or winning a competition).
I had a vague idea that would be the case, but when I saw research showing that 300 minutes of moderate cardio a week was twice as good as the American Medical Association’s recommended minimum of 150, I had to research just where the gains level off. I was surprised that it was much higher than 450 minutes of brisk walking plus 3 weightlifting sessions a week!
Study was correlative, being healthy also causes exercise, so I bet the gains are even smaller than they look past 5-10 hours a week. Just something to keep in mind.
This seems very plausible to me. It is also worth noting that highly-trained masters endurance athletes quite often suffer fatal heart attacks, and that the world’s longest-lived people may spend quite a lot of time on their feet hoeing the garden and walking to market and so on but are probably not out racking up the mileage.
Of interest:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200636050-00005#/page-1
https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-2002-35069
http://www.pkdiet.com/pdf/exercise/Excessive_Endurance_Exercise2012.pdf
There are, of course, good reasons to spend more than 20 hours a week on deliberate physical activity. But I don’t think that longevity is really one of them. Or even increased quality of life in old age.
Where I’m originally from, I could get to 20 hours by biking and pickup ultimate (for every day, there was at least one group within biking distance*) in season. That said, 3 hours a day is a lot and exercise gets more efficient the more intense it is (2 hours walking != 2 hours playing ultimate), so have you considered something like Tabata intervals?
*Some of the further-off groups involve biking to the house of a friend who’s driving there and splitting gas, which is why I only play 3 times a week or so.
20 hours sounds really excessive if you don’t connect it with something else, like work. Can you share your time management tips BTW? For me, the 5 workdays a week means basically the only time I am not working and can do something else begins around 18:00. Half the weekend is gone with shopping and chores. So there is a Sunday and there are the workday evenings. Even if all this time was filled with exercise, 20 hours was difficult to manage. I don’t understand how can people have so good time management, even if they are single and childless which I am not, but I mean, the weird difference is between the net/gross hours, yes surely I don’t sleep more than 45 hours a week, rarely work more than 48, so there would a theoretical gross time budget of 75 hours and I cannot really claim that much is spent on chores. Yet in practice, there is one task after the other, brush your teeth, eat your breakfast, commute to work, take out the trash etc. etc. that I end up with really most of it filled with tasks somehow.
Hmm.
168 hours in a week. Sleeping 7.5 hours/day, that’s 52.5 gone, 115.5 remaining. Working 48 hours/week, including commutes, that’s 67.5 remaining. Volunteer work 2.5 hours/week including commute, that’s 65 remaining. Church attendance, 1.5 hours/week including commute, that’s 63.5 remaining. 8 hours allotted to weekly online activities with friends, that’s 55.5 remaining. Cooking and eating in free time, that’s like maybe 0.5 hour/day of time that can’t be multitasked, leaving 52 hours.
Contrary to you, I don’t quite see what people are so damn busy with. (Edit: Maybe you’re busy with math, which I can’t.)
This what I was trying to explain with net/gross hours, that it looks a lot if you calculate on a full 168 hours basis, but this is not how most people work. We are not going to brush our teeth in the lunch break, but early in the morning, those who go to church will go when it is open, you are not going to go to a gym at 23:00 and then sleep from 01:00 to 09:00 or I mean perhaps a few college age weird people do but most normal people would find a violation of the Proper Time to do things weird, a violation of the customary order of things, of what thing to do at what stage of the day.
And that is how there is time for far less than what the calculation from 168 hours would suggest.
Perhaps one way to bring the models closer together is that how much downtime/waiting time is in it. Like on the subway.
Another hugely important aspect that IMHO you underestimate to-dos and chores. There was a movie about it about ten years ago, about a mother who for something like a kid birthday party had a to-do list of 50 elements. Well, we are not like that, but still the chores are endless. Right now every second is filled up with making or buying Xmas presents. Just yesterday I got pissed with the sun in my eyes through our glass wall when using the computer at the desk and not in bed as usual, so there will be now an inane amount of time spent on taking measurements, finding a dark curtain, buying it online, realizing that it is yet another idiotic shop delivering with DHL that does not arrange delivery times in advance, just tries to come at 11:00 when the driver should know every normal person is at work not at home and drops it off at the post office when we are not at home so then we have to factor in an expedition to the post office too, perhaps before work so that can hold the fscking box under my arm all through the commute because by the time I get home it will be closed and so on… these stupid to-dos incredibly fill out adult life.
@TheDividualist: 20 hours sounds really excessive if you don’t connect it with something else, like work. Can you share your time management tips BTW?
I have karate at my gym two weeknights a week (and make myself go Saturday as well), which motivates me to go there after business hours. Once I’m there, I can motivate myself to use the treadmill for 30 minutes if I haven’t already walked an hour outdoors, then motivation plummets. Adding on 30 minutes of weightlifting is easy just from the knowledge that it’s an important component of health.
I eat lunch at my computer and block off a 30-minute break for walking outdoors, regardless of weather. In summer, I was able to motivate myself to do considerably more by walking from home to the business promenade and back instead of driving, but like I said, weather is harming my motivation.
Three weeknights and Sundays, I block off the hours I’d otherwise be at the gym for reading philosophy or history, or something lighter like a Jane Austen novel if I’m burned out.
I’m strongly in favor of a physically active job for anyone who can find one for competitive wages. Our bodies are not evolved to live long lives sitting in offices.
>I have karate at my gym two weeknights a week
You live in the US? One thing I think EU should borrow from the US is these kinds of combined gyms. Here gyms have weight and cardio only, and I go for martial arts to a different dojo and so on. I have heard US gyms often have everything from tennis to baseball courts. Going to one place is and not to three definitely count as a motivator.
It would be cool to have a big huge combined “health palace” where you can just do whatever activity you have the whim to. Wall climbing, boxing, swimming, weights, squash, whatever you fancy, in one place. That would be real cool. It would be even more super cool if they had supervised activities to kids so we could basically spend half the weekend there, the animator would engage our child in dodgeball with the other children, while my wife plays squash and I box, for example, and yet we are in the same building and can talk in the breaks etc. I would pay through the nose for a combined place like that.
Combine it with a healthy restaurant and a cafe where you can work on your laptop and you’d get people hooked so much, it is not even funny.
Investors, entrepreneurs, take note.
There’s something roughly like that in the medium-sized UK town where I live. Isn’t this usually just called a ‘leisure centre’?
@TheDividualist: You live in the US? One thing I think EU should borrow from the US is these kinds of combined gyms. Here gyms have weight and cardio only, and I go for martial arts to a different dojo and so on. I have heard US gyms often have everything from tennis to baseball courts. Going to one place is and not to three definitely count as a motivator.
Yes, I’m in the US. Which country are you in?
Here we have both community centers and independent gyms that offer classes and often a pool in addition to weights and cardio machines. Some community centers and franchise gyms are even more elaborate. Bare-bones dojos also exist, but I’m not interested in those even if I might get more utils of self-defense skill, or whatever. Even specialized gyms such as rock gyms always have a weight room with a treadmill and stationary bike.
It would be cool to have a big huge combined “health palace” where you can just do whatever activity you have the whim to. Wall climbing, boxing, swimming, weights, squash, whatever you fancy, in one place. That would be real cool. It would be even more super cool if they had supervised activities to kids … Investors, entrepreneurs, take note.
That’s a great idea, especially with a cafe that serves different kinds of health food (low-cal, high-protein, etc.) I’d be interested in what sort of facilities are efficient at keeping kids distracted. Not having children, I lack even anecdotal evidence for that…
Dividualist – in the U.S., Eastern martial arts tend to have their own dojos; the all-in-one gyms don’t generally teach marital arts. Some gyms have boxing or kickboxing. Some (especially, but not only, YMCA) have swimming pools which are mainly used for basic lessons and for adults swimming laps.
So while gyms here may be more service-integrated than in Europe, the truly all-in-one seems fairly rare.
This may or may not be related to the typical business model of gyms, which is to automatically charge a monthly fee to your credit card forever (or until your credit card gets declined), but not trying very hard to keep you actually coming to the gym. I think the ratio of paying members to people who come at least once a week is over ten to one. People who do come on a regular basis tend to be upsold on specialized services, like trainer sessions, or on nutritional supplements and protein powders.
The relevance of this is over-ruled a bit by the MET-hours thing below. But personally, I’ve just started running home from work (at the moment once a week. Intention is for this to rise to at least twice, maybe even default). Given it takes me an hour to commute by bus and an hour to run home, this is basically filling exercise quotient in zero time! Obviously doesn’t apply to everyone, but this sort of thing can help.
That’s 20 MET-hrs per week. Which conveniently (for me) allows you to exchange time for effort.
Equivalents are here:
http://prevention.sph.sc.edu/tools/docs/documents_compendium.pdf
Since sitting on your butt (literally) is 1.0, I assume you subtract 1.0 then multiply by hours to get the value of physical activity.
Hard weightlifting is 6.0, karate is 10.0, walking unburdened ranges from 2.0 to 8.0 (though I wouldn’t call 5mph a “walk”). So even accounting for the time at karate you’re not actually doing it, you’re well over 20 METS-hrs.
Oh, good catch. Thank you.
So does this mean my original impression that only the first few hours of exercise per week really improve your longevity?
Yes, if your exercise is considerably more intensive than walking and the assumptions underlying using excess MET-hours is correct. Two hours of hard biking is good enough, for instance.
Huh, rock climbing ranging from 8 to 12, I get more exercise than I thought.
So in the blue tribe now we have the term “brogressive” to refer to people who hold the Correct Beliefs, but just aren’t the Right Sort Of Person. Is there a red tribe equivalent of this? Grey tribe?
Source? This sounds like exactly the combination of cringiness, hilarity and actual serious thought I’d enjoy reading.
See http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/11/09/getting-past-the-coalition-of-the-cool/
Also see, the South Park episodes this season that have mocked this by introducing the “Political Correctness Bros” and the PCDelta frat who are like stereotypical frat bros except for their commitment to social justice.
That’s not a primary source, but a vaguely secundary one at best. I realise this sort of thing can be difficult, but second-hand texts like these aren’t quite what I’d like to see here, selfish as though that is.
https://www.slantnews.com/story/2015-08-22-your-new-worst-enemy-the-brogressive
https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/brogressive
http://diannaeanderson.net/blog/2013/7/anatomy-of-a-brogressive
Thank you!
I kinda like those articles. I know they’re supposed to be insulting, but the people they’re describing actually sound pretty nice, and it’s nice to see that become an epidemic.
“Bro” is becoming the leftist version of “cuck”, isn’t it? Or vice versa, I’m not sure which came first.
I encountered “Bro” in the derogatory long before I encountered “Cuck” (which to me is actually quite recent) but not sure how that maps to society at large.
Something keeps eating my comments. Let’s try rephrasing.
I encountered derogatory senses of “bro” maybe ten years ago — they’re probably almost as old as the word’s positive slang sense — but it only started being used to form compounds fairly recently, about the same time I started hearing constructions like “cuckservative”.
Maybe I’ve just lived a blessed life but the only time I had ever encouraged the word cuck before the “cuckservative” meme was in the form of NTR fetishists. I might be wrong but it seems like the jump from Japanese pornography to immigration politics was a bit sudden even by Internet standards.
Brogrammer is from 2011, while Cuckservative is from 2015. Bro and Cuck have been heading upward the whole decade Google trends has existed.
… do I even want to know what NTR fetishist stands for?
@Le Maistre Chat: “Netorare”.
So the cuck meme basically comes out of /tv/. In its original form you’d post a picture of comedian Louis CK and a bit he did about black penises or something. The use of cuck as an epithet spread to the other boards, including the ones the alt-right likes, leading to their widespread use of the term today.
I just want to reiterate once again how disappointed I am that it’s cuckposting and not baneposting that made it big (no pun intended). Nick Land even made a post with a picture of Trump wearing the mask, and there wasn’t a single person in the comment section talking about how he was demonstrating a lot of loyalty for a conservative populist, or how he was going to crash mass immigration with no survivors.
What is it with appending “bro-” to everything lately? How did that of all things turn into an insult?
Also this is a really really bad move on the part of whoever is spreading this. I remember the main thing that pushed me from being a progressive to a libertarian / conservative mishmash was realizing that there was no way to win the White Guilt game. The more white and asian guys realize that, the more of them will decide that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Asian guys get drawn into the defending role of the white guilt game? Really? They get unduly ignored constantly, this is very true, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them get chastised as oppressors/bigots/racists/whatever else negative term you can think of.
Asians are (dis)honorary whites as far as these things go. If you’re talking about “white guys in tech” or “white male shooters” or anything associated with so-called toxic masculinity you can expect at least a plurality of asian guys. And you definitely hear SJ people talking about how privileged e.g. Japanese or Koreans are.
On the other hand, the MFA Kimono Incident. Although that was weird in the line it drew between the SJ activists and the counter-protesters.
My perception of the MFA kimono debacle was that the SJWs were primarily not Japanese, and that the counter-protesters who wanted MFA to keep the kimono-wearing exhibit were primarily Japanese.
This matches the belief that Asians – Japanese in this case – are (dis)honorary whites rather than oppressed minorities in SJW worldview.
Sort of. Some of the protesters were second- or third-generation Japanese-Americans. Many of those who weren’t were Asian-Americans but not Japanese. All of them considered Asian culture to be the “victim”.
The only people who thought the protesters were actually anti-Japanese were poorly-informed Japanese people in Japan who saw that a lot of them were Chinese and Korean and viewed the situation in terms of the anti-Japanese protests which are reasonably common in China and Korea.
In the view of the SJW types here, Asians are an oppressed minority some of whom (the counter-protesting Japanese immigrants) were complicit in their own oppression (the same view many activists have of black cops or Clarence Thomas).
I don’t know how common it is anymore, but there used to be people that would go around and say “bro” all the time as a kind of interjection. Or sometimes “brah” which was even worse. I’m not sure why but somehow it seemed more common among frat boys, future frat boys, former frat boys, or frat boys that were never in a frat (if you know what I mean). So bro came to be a synecdoche for that group of people, and then a prefix to describe a subset.
One problem there is that the libertarian / conservative groups don’t have much to offer to someone who believes in economic liberalism, but is put off by the identity politics aspect of modern progressivism (besides some defense from the identity politics hate-mobbers, which I suppose might be enough in a number of situations).
The Left has always been notorious for its Circular Firing Squad.
Exactly.
Hm, that is how a lot of non-Anglo right-wings work, if you mean economic statism or dirigims under economic liberalism. In most countries most right-wingers always believed the government has a job in protecting the economic national interest, like redistributing from foreign corporations to domestic workers. America is special for two reasons, a lot of people on the right being really opposed to the Feds (or the other way around, the Feds are really opposed to everything tradition and not in-group with the average guy), and because of all that economic power and weight, American righties don’t feel they have to patriotistically protect American workers or consumers from foreign corporations, as foreign corporations play little role.
I meant things like Social Security, National Health Care, progressive income tax, Unions, strong social safety net, minimum wage, extensive public services, and so on. All those ideas are abhorrent to libertarian / conservative groups.
Also, even if someone is opposed to current progressive identity politics, libertarian / conservative groups are often far in the other direction, with what often comes across as denials of the extent of sexism, racism, etc. Libertarians are particular bad here – many will argue that race, sex, etc discrimination by businesses should be re-legalized since they contend it is a matter of right. That’s a view which is extremely repellent to anyone who believes in the economics part of progressivism.
White male liberal here. What’s this “white guilt” game? I don’t feel guilty about being white; I just acknowledge that my society has a history of treating minorities badly and I, like pretty much everyone else, am subconsciously biased against minorities to some extent.
Sounds like guilt to me: if not the emotion, at least an explicit admission of it.
@Dr Dealgood:
There is a difference between acknowledging that everyone has innate tendency towards bias (and wanting to change your own biases) and feeling “guilty” about it.
I mean, isn’t the entire rationality movement/project supposed to be about acknowledging this fact and becoming “less wrong”?
You seem to have missed the thrust of my point. Guilt comprises both the subjective feeling of remorse for wrongdoing and the objective fact of responsibility for having done wrong. While Technically Not Anonymous claims not to feel guilty about racism, he also explicitly proclaims that he is guilty of having unconscious racism and living in a racist society. He is still playing the game.
As for correcting biases, you’re right that we should strive to be “less wrong” but not in the way you seem to mean. We should absolutely avoid being wrong in the sense that our views are factually incorrect, but we should not concern ourselves with whether a fact is itself wrong in the sense of being politically incorrect. The conflation of the former and latter senses of the word is extremely dangerous to science as we have seen repeatedly over the last century.
@Dr Dealgood
You said –
“he also explicitly proclaims that he is guilty of having unconscious racism
but he said:
“I, like pretty much everyone else, am subconsciously biased against minorities to some extent.”
We all have biases. These biases are built into our brains’ construction. Is that really at issue? You seem to be the one “playing the game” by conflating “political correctness” with mere acknowledgement of bias.
You said:
“[he also explicitly proclaims that he is lives] in a racist society.”
but he said:
“I just acknowledge that my society has a history of treating minorities badly”
His statement is clearly true.
Yes, it is. And so…
No. We should not concern ourselves with whether a fact is itself wrong in the sense of being *immoral*.
When you say “politically incorrect” instead of “immoral,” you put some distance between yourself and the judgment against the fact. You open up a space where you can fool yourself, where you can say, “Oh well of course we don’t attack facts just for being heh-heh politically incorrect…but *this* fact is *actually immoral*.”
NO. We do not worry about whether a fact is EVEN ACTUALLY IMMORAL.
If something is true, I want to believe it to be true, etc.
(When I was a kid it was usually conservatives I saw making this mistake. Now it’s usually liberals. Anyone can make this mistake. Everyone should avoid it.)
@HeelBearCub,
I’m sure you’re familiar with Gricean implicature, since people on LW talk about it constantly, so I shouldn’t have to explain to you why this isn’t “mere acknowledgement of bias.” The implication of singling out a bias like this is that said bias is relevant and important, yet we can see this clearly isn’t the case. The sort of biases measured by implicit association tests or resume tests explain at most a small fraction of the gap, which makes the decision to put them front and center a rather suspect one.
You can see the same kind of implication with the statement about America’s “history of treating minorities badly.” There’s an implicit comparison there, that America has had a particularly shameful history of oppression. Yet the historical record doesn’t back that up: compared to other countries that actually existed, especially contemporaries, American atrocities are an absolute joke. The implication is in almost perfect opposition to the facts.
That’s why I call it a game. In the end it’s all just so much empty wordplay.
@Cord Shirt,
The funny thing is my original version of that comment had immoral and I only replaced it at the last second. And I absolutely agree with you, rightist moralizing is often just as much of a barrier to science: if nothing else, the stem cell debacle under Bush proved that to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
@DrDealGood:
“Like literally everyone else” is a fairly big qualifier. It implies that everyone in the world has bias against the minorities in their own culture. Therefore, you can’t assume he is talking only about the US. You are twisting his actual words and seem to be doing so either by error or in bad faith.
I don’t see any evidence of someone using the phrase “like literally everyone else” in this thread. Could you point it out? The only similar phrase I see is “like pretty much everyone else,” which means something very different.
Furthermore, the part of DrDealGood’s post relating to the “mere acknowledgement of bias” is separate from the part relating to America’s history in particular (he draws a parallel, but no actual logical connection), so addressing the US-centric error of (the 2nd part of) his post doesn’t at all address his actual point about singling out that bias.
Lastly, Technically Not Anonymous’s exact words were “my society.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to presume that’s supposed to mean USA, especially since Technically not Anonymous didn’t try to invoke “literally everyone else” or anything else relating to the global populace. FWIW, it seems to me that DrDealgood’s point about USA having relatively less shameful history than other countries is worthless, but the error in assuming Technically Not Anonymous’s “my society” is “USA” plays no part in it being worthless.
@lvlln:
Those are fair points, and yes, I munged the quote. Mea culpa.
For what it’s worth, I think “like pretty much everyone else” is a subordinate clause meant to acknowledge the possibility for the existence of people who are not biased without conceding the idea that the vast majority of people have biases. It anticipates the “are you saying there isn’t even one person without bias” weak-man argument.
The role of “society” seems merely to establish some reason for concern. If bias is generally an issue, but your particular society has no history of mistreating minorities, there is far less concern that your biases are causing harm in the present. I certainly don’t think it can be interpreted to imply that only the US has an issue with bias.
The issue, at least in my view, is that that’s true but disproportionate. Of all the billions of factors that affect how easy someone does or does not have it, race is only one. So is gender. Advantages and disadvantages are often coupled together; it is rare for a characteristic to bestow all advantages and no disadvantages, or vice versa. Many advantages and disadvantages only apply if other conditions hold true, and many more stack weirdly, so you can’t work out disadvantages by just adding up the person’s different characteristics. On top of that, many of the claimed advantages or disadvantages are only average differences: for example, if being raised in a single parent home is bad, and a higher percentage of black people than white people are raised in single parent homes, that does not mean that all black people have it worse in this regard than all white people.
The upshot of this is that trying to work out how advantaged or disadvantaged someone is based on whether they tick a handful of boxes is unlikely to lead to an accurate result. The problem with Social Justice types is that they apparently don’t realize this, leading them to falsely accuse disadvantaged people of being advantaged, and to give sympathy to advantaged people on the belief that they’re disadvantaged.
This behavior by SJWs always reminds me of the well known quotation “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” They behave in a way that implies that they believe that their model of society is useful in every context and never wrong. In my view, that is the great failure of SJW rhetoric – they have a pretty good model of society, one that’s incredibly useful in many contexts, but they fail to realize that, like all models, theirs is absolutely boneheadedly wrong in many contexts, and that figuring out those contexts is a critically important part of wielding such a model.
“What’s this ‘white guilt’ game? I don’t feel guilty about being white…”
Is there another emotion you would use to describe the self-flagellation you find in articles like this?
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/07/grilling_feminism_and_masculinity_a_grand_unified_theory.html
Pretty sure it started with “brogrammer”, a class of persons who combine “frat bros” and stereotypically nerdy programmers; they pump iron and write code, and this is “brogramming”. This idea was picked up by the progressives as a weapon to use against the stereotypically nerdy programmers: supposedly tech companies are hotbeds of “brogrammer culture” and therefore hostile to women.
The fact that “brogramming” was a complete hoax was passed over completely. The fact that actual frat bros typically have more and better interactions with women than stereotypically nerdy male programmers is even more completely passed over, but fun to bring up to infuriate progressives.
Actually I think most progressives would enthusiastically agree with denigrating nerds. Nerds being sexist and racist and disgusting and needing to be purged to make things more welcoming for women has been a leftist rallying cry for a while now.
There should be a small cost for making this kind of accusation. The price= googling a citation and sharing it.
Hope this doesn’t trip the spam filter
http://halloftheblackdragon.com/reel/is-nerd-culture-the-embodiment-of-racist-and-sexist-attitudes/
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/the-5-most-insulting-defenses-nerd-racism/
http://jezebel.com/5961702/revenge-of-the-nerds-white-male-geeks-hack-sexism-racism
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/23/1359727/-Science-has-a-sexism-problem
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/10/the_plight_of_the_bitter_nerd_why_so_many_awkward_shy_guys_end_up_hating_feminism/
Whenever I see headlines like that, I think:
“The plight of the bitter Jew: Why so many awkward, shy Hebrews end up hating Nazism”.
@Anonymous
Whenever I hear spurious comparisons to Nazism, I think the person who made them is worse than Hitler.
@sweeneyrod
Is it spurious, though?
Feminism is, according to my best guess at divining something useful from its disjointed and decentralized nature, either for equalizing males and females or subjugating males to females*. It is definitely opposed to patriarchy, as well as male dominance in general. I would say that this makes it innately inimical to males**, and that any male who supports it is either insane, or has been bought off with some other benefits to counteract the potential damage to himself that supporting the ideology may cause.
The parallel to a Jewish Nazi is rather obvious.
Would you have preferred a different comparison?
“The plight of the bitter hoarder: Why so many awkward, shy Kulaks end up hating Stalinism”.
* I think the equality is the motte, and the subjugation is the bailey.
** From a starting point of male dominance.
@anonymous:
“[From a starting point of male dominance], this makes [feminism] innately inimical to males.”
Your whole post is some sort of failure to model the other side, but this really seems bad. The easy reduction is “whites against [black, African] slavery”. I can be against a bad system that enriches me and those like me without that opposition being inimical to those like me.
If the proposed alternative is superior for both groups, yes. I have yet to see anything substantial offered by the feminists to men in general, in trade for putting aside patriarchy, rather than just efforts to smash the patriarchy and worry about consequences later.
@HeelBearCub And of course, the bad system likely *doesn’t* enrich you in the long run, relative to a fair system. If blacks had participated freely in the economy they would on average have made larger contributions than as cotton workers. And as the time horizon lengthens these growth effects dominate the short-term benefits of slavery/discrimination for whites.
Similar arguments can be made with feminism.
@ Chalid:
Exactly!
That was Ludwig von Mises’s purely economic argument against slavery. The question in regard to slavery is not: is slavery in the interest of the slaves? It’s: is slavery in the interest of the masters?
And the answer is no. It is not in the interest of the masters to continue having slavery. It’s very economically regressive—not least because it discourages actual capital accumulation by treating laborers as capital. You end up with a country very rich on paper, but the vast majority of that wealth consists solely in the fact that some people have title on others and trade them around.
There are also second-order effects. Another reason slavery is not in the interest of the masters is that it is not in the interest of the slaves. Their interest is to run away or rebel, killing all the masters. A slave society must therefore limit the knowledge and independence of the slaves, reducing their productivity, and dedicate many resources to suppression.
I would also say (and I think von Mises would agree) that there are other reasons besides purely material factors why slavery is not in the interest of the masters. But if you can refute it on the basest level of self-interest, you’ve really undercut it.
The same applies to the relations of men and women. The question, from the viewpoint of men, is not whether the subjugation of women is in the interest of women. It’s whether it’s in the interest of men.
And I would argue that it is not. Which makes me a “first-wave feminist”, like almost everyone in Western society. It’s absurd to package-deal all ideologies calling themselves “feminism” together and say that because you reject the most extreme and absurd, you therefore must be in favor of the subjugation of women to men. (That’s what the “feminist” ideologues do!)
As a side note, I would say the same type of question applies to the subjugation of animals. The question is not whether it’s good for the animals but whether it’s good for us. And there, I would say that it is.
@Vox
Indeed. I disagree with you on the question of whether men benefit here, but you do understand the issue.
@Chalid/@Vox Imperatoris:
I will take as a given these arguments for the moment. But even if I could make an airtight argument that it was marginally better for whites (en masse, for all time) to enslave blacks, that still would not mean that opposing slavery of blacks was inimical to whites.
I don’t really have to answer the question “is it better or worse for whites” in a deontological framework. I merely have to answer the question, “Is what whites are doing wrong?” If it is wrong, then I can oppose what they are doing. It doesn’t absolve one from finding right things to do instead, but it does not have to result in better outcomes.
I can oppose the murdering of white Christians in other countries while opposing the enslavement of blacks in America. I can oppose slavery in any country, even if it can be shown that these actions raise net GDP.
So again, the whole argument seems like a failure to model correctly.
@Anonymous:
Vox may be correctly enunciating your preferred framework, but that is not what is at issue. You are making statements about how other people see the world, what their objectives are, how they think.
I think your imagination is failing you.
@ HeelBearCub:
True. It would only show a relative harm: that abolitionism was more inimical to whites than slavery. It would certainly not show that abolitionism inflicted any absolute harm.
The problem with deontology is that it divorces ethics from motivation (any of form of “impartialism” like utilitarianism also does this). Suppose you can show that slavery is, in the Platonic realm, “wrong”. Why is that a motive for me?
Now, if you accept that people just have to have the right intuition here, then that’s the end of it. But otherwise, you have to start appealing to people’s self-interested motives.
@Vox Imperatoris:
You seem to be wanting to argue about object level claims about racism and harms. That isn’t really relevant.
I am only trying to show that anonymous is clearly not correctly or charitably modeling the thought processes of those he disagrees with. And in doing so, he ascribes animus where non need be ascribed.
@ HeelBearCub:
Oh yes, you’re right about him. I meant to say that it my last post, but I forgot.
@HeelBearCub
I accept your rebuke that I’m not being charitable, in folding a differing opinion on the outcomes of a proposed policy as insanity. I should have added a third possibility – that they’re honestly wrong for whatever reason.
The fact that “brogramming” was a complete hoax was passed over completely
The one big company that I’ve worked at was packed with this sort of person. (Though it wasn’t a true tech company – 30-40% of employees were in technology.)
Oh my. So all I’d have to do to be the Right Sort of Person is hold the Correct Beliefs while being a woman?
Meh, never mind. I’m white and my late father was an NRA member.
FWIW, I understood “brogressive” to mean someone who has some of the right beliefs, but misses the boat on identity politics–“legalize it” plus “All Lives Matter”, so to speak.
The way I’ve seen the term used, a “brogressive” is someone who believes in the mundane center-left stuff like free healthcare, gay marriage, and legal weed, but opposes feminism and social justice.
I’m using scare quotes around “brogressive” because creating new words to dismiss people you disagree with is never a good thing and we should avoid those words as much as possible.
I have seen cuckservative being deployed in a similar fashion (although i don’t fully understand its broad range of uses since I’ve seen it used to meaning anything from not a white nationalist to RINO)
It’s very interesting from a gender issues angle that the online left’s go-to insult is to call someone a fratboy or accuse them of not shaving regularly, whereas the online right’s go-to insult is to call someone a cuckold or a “beta male”.
I’m reminded of a Tumblr post I once saw, which posited something like right-wing extremism seemed like a weirdly officialized version of male immaturity and left-wing extremism seemed like a weirdly officialized version of female immaturity: Little boys are crass and stupid, so the far right makes shock value and anti-intellectualism its battle cry; little girls are oversensitive and clique-minded, so the far left makes witch hunting and self-censorship its battlecry.
Not sure if I agree completely, but there’s something interesting going on in that common stereotypes about gender and politics “code” left-wing politics as feminine and right-wing politics as masculine. Don’t right-wing women participating in political debate on the internet frequently get accused of being men hiding between female pseudonyms?
I remember at one point unitofcaring mentioned people assuming she was male for her moderately SJ critical opinions. It’s funny because on almost any site besides tumblr you’d be statistically safe assuming whoever you’re talking to is male. Definitely on the kind of websites where cuckposting is the norm.
I’ve been accused of being a man even by right wing men, while advocating right wing-appearing views. It is a mystery. But when I took SJ as sincere (and maybe for some it is), I was also accused of being a male, mainly because my experiences as a woman didn’t match SJ narratives.
anti-intellectualism is one of those words that get tossed around a lot and seems to be exaggerated the right is critical of social science because it is anti-right wing and because a lot of social science work is garbage (see the replication crisis).
I would have no doubt that there are a number of people on the left who invest a massive amount of their self esteem in intellectualism who would do horribly on any test of actual academic knowledge as long as the answers were sufficiently appealing sounding (I’ve met people who took the Da Vinci code seriously, not sure what confidence they placed in what parts but as far as actual experts proclaim its all bunk). Similarly the movement for women in the armed forces / police severely overestimates how strong the average woman is (my family members who have worked in rehab clinics laugh about this a lot). There are also lots of people who are 100% convinced that marijuana is harmless.
No doubt some of the accusations of anti-intellectualism flying around point to criticism of social science work, but I see the accusation more often in the context of climate science work.
Yeah, wasn’t thinking about that, that’s a bit of a big one, although comparatively recent. For a long time the right was in favor of the cheap clean nuclear while the left opposed it for purity reasons.
(Today as best I can tell green energy is sufficently cheap that it wouldn’t hurt to move to it)
Why rehab clinics?
Also, I agree that the left seems to be getting as anti-intellectualist as the right on social issues (Still not going to consider switching sides until the right accepts global warming though).
They joked that the more retarded someone was the larger they seemed to be (I have every reason to believe that outside of these jokes years after the fact they were utterly professional) . I was told that any time someone was on a ward they would look for which men were scheduled in case they needed help with violent patients.
Nornagest says: I see the accusation more often in the context of climate science work.
My experience with such accusations is that they generally take the form of “You disagree with me on ‘cap and trade’, reducing the human population to 250,000, or whatever AGW remedy is trending, ergo you are anti-science”.
@ Pku
(Still not going to consider switching sides until the right accepts global warming though).
As a thought experiment – What sort of attitude/irrationality on the left re: global warming/climate change/whatever would you consider sufficient to overcome rightwing reluctance to trash the economy on the basis of what evidence we have now?
(Obviously, I expect you to demand high levels of irrationality/bad planning than I would, to abandon the left over this, but I’m wondering where you would draw that line…)
Either suggestion of green policies by exclusively terrible methods (like a general leftist consensus that nuclear power should be banned), or something extreme like an immediate shutdown of all power plants and cars would do it. Something less extreme might do it, but I’m having trouble thinking of a really extremist green position – threatening to bomb countries if they don’t reduce coal use, I guess. Part of the issue here is that I don’t think moderate action on climate change causes economic problems (but that’s a different discussion).
Or if the sides switched positions on climate change, which isn’t totally implausible – purity is generally a value associated with the right. Or if both supported green initiatives but the right’s ideas seemed significantly more effective.
Pushing anti-evolution material in schools seems like the most obvious example of anti-intellectualism on the right.
One side-effect of living in a social circle that’s overwhelmingly left-wing is that pretty much every right-of-centre person I meet is way better at debating skills and citing statistics than all but the most extreme left-wingers I know, so I can’t really get myself to buy the narrative of the political left being on the side of reality and the right being anti-intellectual.
Hence my “not entirely convinced” remark, I think that was addressed more the popular stereotypes than the reality of politics.
I don’t think they mean anti-intellectualism as referring to any specific field or belief, but rather the alt right’s insistence that learned or scholarly people are brainwashed shills of the global leftist conspiracy. See, for example, the recent Future Primeval post on how smart people are reluctant to say the low status things that us regular folks know are ~obviously~ true
Most of the people I’ve heard the anti-intellectualism charge from not only aren’t talking to the alt-right, they probably haven’t heard of the alt-right. I heard it a lot in college, when the alt-right in its present form didn’t even exist.
“they probably haven’t heard of the alt-right” Most people don’t know who Steve Sailer and Charles Murray are by name but I think most people are roughly aware of the idea of IQ tests and racial gaps and the standard arguments against this. Similarly I think most people argue the boys and girls are different line simply because they had both and saw different behavior. Alt-right in this case is basically the equivalent of post-zionist or post-rationalist identifying with a stereotypical stupid person opinion but not wanting to admit to associating with those kind of people.
Also, I though of another issue where the left regularly clashes with people with far more education than them (and are actually pretty sympathetic): weight.
I have heard multiple people complaining that doctors obsess over their weight to the detriment of all other topics, and multiple horror stories where a doctor refuses to even listen to complaints, brushing them off with a simple “lose some weight fatty” responses.
I have also heard some vaguely plausible stories where weight is not correlated with (or at least not as badly correlated with as you would hear) early death and health problems (I would love to hear the actual facts on this).
So in this case we have a bunch of people complaining that doctors are incorrect about a massive aspect of medicine, and actually sound pretty much correct, or at the very least not like raving loons.
I think it is not complicated. Masculinity as such is dominant at the root, we have plenty of evidence of T and dominant attitudes correlating, even in women and trans people getting T boosters. And the left/right divide is all about the left hating dominance status (they call it oppression or repression) and want the far more ambiguous prestige status ladder instead (where artists, scientists, moralist, “cool people” win) and the right preferring the functional, unambiguous dominance hierarchies, like military stuff. When I read military fiction like Falkenberg’s Legion it is so reassuring: everybody having their clearly defined place in the chain of command. You don’t have to be cool, just to do your job well and eventually you will be promoted. Even the thrive/survive is about this. So obviously the right is at the very least partially about accepting masculine-dominant values and the left is about rejecting them.
My point is that this is precisely how it should be: left and right are the “most themselves” when they have this bro/sissy distinction. This is when things are crystal-clear. When they don’t have this, they are getting too complex, abstract and weird. And dishonest. Che Guevara was a bro, an alpha, why did he fight for these leftie anti-dominance values? Because he wanted to be new boss, not suck up to the old boss. Well, that is dishonest really.
BTW the most psychologically interesting part is how in the US left-wing men insult Ann Coulter. Usually it is really dirty sexual fantasies.
BTW the most psychologically interesting part is how in the US left-wing men insult Ann Coulter. Usually it is really dirty sexual fantasies.
I’ve always found it surprising how often SJWs seem to use “butt-hurt” as an insult. Coming from members of a subculture which is supposed to be very anti-homophobia, the use of an insult which implies their opponent has been on the receiving end of anal sex is… interesting, to say the least.
Comment sections on left-wing websites have a carnival atmosphere (in the sense of ordinary norms being temporarily abandoned or reversed) when Ann Coulter or another female right-wing pundit comes up: a lot of misogynistic insults, for instance, which usually are not OK. In Coulter’s case specifically, a lot of transphobic jokes centering around her Adam’s apple. And so on.
Well, in both cases, it’s “you think you are one of us, you say you are one of us, but you are not really one of us”.
The emphasis is different, though. The implication of “brogressive” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: he is accused of acting in a way that directly harms those the left is supposed to be fighting for.
The implication of “cuckservative” is a sheep in wolf’s clothing: he is accused of talking a good game, while actually having internalized the worldview of the left. He can’t be relied upon when push comes to shove.
I was just reading this article about a study showing that text messages ending with periods are perceived as less sincere: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/12/08/study-confirms-that-ending-your-texts-with-a-period-is-terrible/
Reading the linked study (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215302181), though, the effect size seems kind of puny. It looks like texts with periods had a mean sincerity rating of 3.85 with a stddev of 0.99, and texts without periods had a mean of 4.06 with a stddev of 1.00; so we’re only talking 0.2 sigma of difference. Any thoughts?
Maybe I should add a mispelling or two to look even more sincere
What the hell does “less sincere” even mean? “More formal, less personal” I could understand; the idea that correct grammar and punctuation means you’re not emotionally engaged might make a kind of half-baked sense.
But if I’m sending you a message that “Dear James, Because you haven’t paid your electricity bill we are cutting off your power”, I mean it just as much if I end it “power.” as if I ended it “power”.
I think this is simply a case of a newspaper needing filler and going “Hey, what’s down with the young people these days? They ‘text’, don’t they, Chauncey?” 🙂
Why are you polluting this space with mediocre ideas?
Does anyone have a comment on this story, Social media sites don’t need government to shut down terrorists? I think Feinstein’s law should be passed. Online jihadi or other violent communities should obviously be closely watched. Some of the criticism of this proposal comes from the idea that its implementation will be absurd or abusive, but I don’t see why we should believe that. I have not noticed any critic proposing a better implementation of the law; their real agenda seems to be shutting down anything that conflicts with knee-jerk free speech absolutism, without any detailed accounting of costs and benefits. What, by the way, are supposed to be the social benefits of allowing this propaganda? Saying that “it’s news” does not seem a great defense if the news causes a panic that in turn leads to irrational social outcomes, like say, electing Donald Trump. And folks who consistently spread ISIS propaganda or say that terrorism is good are creating an environment where terrorism is respected, a kind of market for terrorism, and at some point this will likely lead to terrorism. Folks like this woman in California who keep going on about jihad or violence should not only be monitored, but arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.
I know nothing about the text of the Feinstein law, but in principle I’m happy to see Obama and the Socialist government of France demand that social media companies stop enabling terrorism and disagree with the Washington Post.
It’s rare to see someone refute their own argument so quickly and definitively.
Going from “critics are motivated by knee-jerk free speech absolutism” to “we need this law to prevent Donald Trump from winning the election!” in the space of one sentence is a perfect explanation for why free speech absolutism is necessary for a free society. The first ammendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression exists in large part to prevent people like your heroine there from being able to block out information that might support political rivals.
The big damage inflicted by terrorism is not the physical damage (which is obviously small) but the repercussions, like stupid policies and overreaction. So why not stop the waves of stupidity from spreading or at least be open to dampening them?
Because it’s not up to any one individual or party to decide in advance that a particular electoral result would constitute an overreaction and thus illegal to talk about. At that point why even bother having elections to begin with: after all, you already have the right answer.
The weirdest part of this is again that this sort of tyranny is in itself an overreaction to the threat of terrorism. Your proposal would be exactly the kind of law which it is intended to stop!
I’m really not sure if you’re doing this on purpose, constructing self-refuting arguments as some kind of meta-level point.
How do you feel about the government censoring news about say… a police shooting? You can make a very similar argument to justify that?
I admit I have pretty low confidence in my comment about Trump, so I’ll just concede you folks are right that legitimate news should be protected. But I don’t see why the law’s implementation could not allow for that–the idea that you would be reported under this law just for typing search terms, say, seems preposterous.
And I still think allowing folks who consistently advocate terrorism to avoid criminal charges is bad, either because those folks will actually commit violent acts, because they will go on to build communities where violence is encouraged and convince someone else to commit violence, or because their statements cause further harm and humiliation to prior victims who survived attacks.
ok, so if someone is calling for a country to be bombed by someone else.
Like, for example, iraq, afghanistan or syria, perhaps in response to some other event then that person should be guilty of a crime?
No, that’s approved violence. Arguably yes it’s often state terrorism, but it doesn’t matter. It’s taken as assumed that we are talking about unnecessary violence, not approved of by the state.
The US is a government, so asking the US to bomb Afghanistan isn’t advocating terrorism. Asking your neighbor to bomb Afghanistan personally outside the military might be advocating terrorism, though. Do you believe this is often asked?
ok, so you’re ok with people advocating killing, violence, murder as long as it’s the kind you’re ok with and that should be allowed as free speech but doing things like supporting politicians you don’t like and advocating killing, violence, murder in ways you disapprove of is not allowed.
Your idea of a free state is sounding really appealing.
@Jiro No.
@Murphy Yes, in the same way that I think the state should be allowed to, e.g., apprehend criminals, but gangsters kidnapping random people should not be allowed.
define “advocate terrorism”.
Am I allowed to campaign to try to convince Israel to send it’s soldiers to kill Mahmoud Abbas? how about Abu Bakr?
For many practical purposes ISIS acts as a state in the areas it controls. Can I campaign to convince them to send soldiers to kill someone? How about if I think North Korea should kill someone?
I am reminded of “Moral Distortion”:
I don’t think the terrorist reporting law moves us toward a police state-that seems to be a misconception or misplaced fear by its opponents. The encryption law does seem unfortunate.
Racism is uncharitable, while the state importing violent people is a violation of the social contract. The state’s job is to keep us safe, for which we rationally trade away our natural right to use violence.
The idea that “racism” (by which they mean religious or cultural chauvinism) is so evil that the state is morally obligated to get its citizens killed and/or create a police state to avoid it is just pants-on-head stupid. The word serves as a thought-terminating cliche to mindlessly equate things as benign as discriminating between religions or wanting all citizens to learn the same language in school to Hitler and the Atlantic slave trade.
Related:
“ISIS Gives Us No Choice but to Consider Limits on Speech” by Prof. Eric Posner.
Some quotes:
Is that article serious?
It’s such an obvious “find-and-replace” of “communist subversion” to “Islamic radicalization” that it’s comical.
Also, “radicalize” is one word I would like to strike from the vocabulary. Jihadists are not innocent victims minding their own business until they passively get “radicalized” by a “radicalizer”. Islamism is not a disease. They are responsible for their own decisions.
I guess soon we’ll have a vaccine against Republicanism.
Excuse me sir, my internet seems to be broken.
Every time I click on a link for CNN or Slate it takes me to The Onion. 😉
Here’s to Mr. Posner. I like how in the comments of that article, the liberals are freaking out.
And Vox, to the contrary, I think we should not demonize radicalized folks, like that teenager who eventually provided material help to terrorists. It is much better to turn back such folks with a law than do nothing until they commit more serious crimes and get, e.g., 11 years in jail. Calmly allowing that to happen is cruel.
@ anonymous:
Paternalism, “it’s society’s fault”, “it’s for their own good”.
Sounds like softheaded progressivism to me!
I, for one, look forward to fucking with any such filter. ISIS jihad bomb assassination zionist plot haram death to america.
(Long-time lurker, first-time commenter.)
My mom (a geriatrician) has an interesting philosophy regarding woo treatments. She accepts that homeopathy and such cannot hold its own in a scientific experiment and of course would not prescribe any such treatment to any of her patients. However, she says that she still supports the existence of treatments like this, because they a) give people hope and let the placebo affect work its magic, and b) can keep people away from drugs with bad side-effects, or strange experimental treatments. Additionally, if someone is a hypochondriac, they would probably be a smaller drain on the medical system if they spend their own money on homeopathy pills and magic crystals than if they show up in a legitimate hospital every time their leg hurts.
So my question is, do you guys think that quack treatments can in some cases have a net positive effect despite being demonstrably ineffective?
I like your mom’s idea and find it intriguing.
>cannot hold its own in a scientific experiment
>placebo effect work
>demonstrably ineffective
These statements are in contradiction.
You have a fatal disease. You take a pill, and recover.
1. It was a placebo, so it was demonstrably ineffective, therefore you’re really dead.
2. The placebo effect actually makes people better than doing nothing.
The placebo effect is demonstrably effective. It deserves vast research to figure out how to trigger it more strongly without lying. (Lies are unstable.) Normal placebo strengths as compared to nothing are in the 10-20% absolute range. What if, all this time, we could have had 50% strength placebos?
Though admittedly placebos aren’t that useful on fatal diseases. E.g. cancer seems to be almost immune.
In the meantime, you can placebo yourself. A placebo treatment is one that works because you believe it works. So, believe you can think yourself back to health. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and each time it works it will get a little stronger.
You have a fatal disease. You take a pill, and recover.
1. It was a placebo, so it was demonstrably ineffective, therefore you’re really dead.
2. The placebo effect actually makes people better than doing nothing.
I am found of pointing out that ‘homeopathy’ is the traditional medicine that always comes to mind in the US (instead of, say, Chinese traditional medicine or voodoo or so on) despite being so recent because it was actually more effective than conventional medicine when it was first invented. (Pure water plus placebo effect was competing against leeches plus placebo effect. I know which way I’d bet.)
I think that a reductionist alternative can and should exist, so while one might not want to prioritize homeopathy for destruction homeopathy is still not part of the Good Future and the niche it fills (“there’s nothing we can do that’s positive EV, but we still care”) should be explicitly replaced.
That’s not exactly true. There used to be lots of alternative medical paradigms that didn’t use leeches or poisons either. By far the biggest was a huge variety of religious practices involving prayer and amulets.
In our increasingly connected world, these were forced to compete, and most of them have gone down. Homeopathy happened to do unusually well in this competition. I believe you are right to say its essential harmlessness helped it here. But there is also the factor that it is really easy to industrialize (homeopathic medicine is made in factories) und to spread. In homeopathy, unlike many other alternative medicines, the specialist who handles it is not required to have particular personal qualities (piety, extended apprenticeship, whatever) that qualify for the job. Finally, homeopathy was relatively quick to adjust its claims of effectiveness way down, incurring less resistance from the proponents of actual medicine.
B seems questionable, what about gateway woo?
I’ve have a good friend with cancer. The treatments have really terrible side effects. Not just the chemo, but also the drugs meant to alleviate the side effects of the chemo. Her SO has been pushing bizzaro treatments. My initial reaction was — sure eat carrots while standing your head, it’s not going to hurt. But then I listened as her SO explained that doing so would cure the cancer without all these horrible side effects and didn’t I think she should fly to Germany right away.
The line between complimentary and alternative is very thin, and arguments of the former often turn out to be the bailey to the latter’s motte.
Or to put in more plainly if you give them take an inch they may end up killing your friends and family. Resist them in the air, resist them on the beaches, resist them in the streets.
I’m often willing to try dubiously useful things for a similar reason: May as well give the placebo effect a chance.
I mean…you encounter people who say, “Science has its limits,” and you’re never sure if they know what they’re talking about or if they’re just abusing a platitude to defend [woo|evolution skepticism|etc.]. Thing about science is it’s our best hope for reliable knowledge increase.
But that increase in knowledge is slow as well as steady. For everyday life, sometimes you need to go beyond science and into guesses, instinct, giving the placebo effect a chance, etc.–because those things are faster and you need to make a decision now.
Similarly–science gives us a slow *increase* in knowledge, meaning we don’t know everything *now*. You can easily get hit by something we…don’t yet know about. (Imagine someone with a stomach ulcer in 1600. It hadn’t yet been “discovered”–hadn’t even been diagnostically separated from other stomach problems–let alone had any actual treatments. And then it took till the 1980s to figure out that h. pylori played a role.) In such a case, science can’t yet help you.
And then of course there are the many more problems that we have identified, but for which we do not yet have a good treatment–in which case, again, science can’t currently help you.
There’s some room for altruism in continuing to take such a problem to science-based medicine even as they keep not helping you, just to give them a chance to write it up and contribute to medical knowledge. Someday, much later, someone else can be helped. But not you.
But subjecting yourself to that can be extremely stressful. Most doctors, if they’re not paying attention, slip into the attitude that they and science already know everything–therefore if they can’t figure out what’s wrong with you, you’re just crazy. It takes a rare thoughtfulness and perceptiveness for a doctor to notice that hey, this might be an as-yet-unnamed disease. Similarly, doctors want to be able to help you–so even when they diagnose you with something we don’t know how to treat, there’s a human tendency to get annoyed with *you* for remaining sick. Even though intellectually, they know there’s nothing you or they can do about it.
So I suspect there are a fair number of people out there who just…won’t subject themselves to that, at least not for very long…and who resort to woo/placebo/self-experimentation instead.
They’re going to do it no matter what I think, because they have to, just to try to keep themselves functioning…but, well, I can see why.
…I’m reminded of the post that led me to this blog in the first place: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
What do people here think of affirmative action and the UT case that is before the Supreme Court?
1. I don’t think aff action is unconstitutional, and I think that a lot of the legal argument on the subject is “affirmative action is racist!!!” in legal jargon. It involves the types of tradeoffs between efficiency, equity, and political impacts that properly belong in the political branches.
2. I think that counteracting the effect that racism has on the economy and society as a whole is a legitimate government purpose, even when done through race-based policies. I’m not a fan of fake neutrality in the law. Racism does exist and the government ought to take that into account in its actions.
3. I think the policy case for affirmative action is weak, and I’m not convinced that such policies do more good than harm. Particularly when the political cost of such programs is taken into account. Such programs could also serve as counter productive if they serve to spread the idea that minority college graduates are less qualified.
4. I think that most of the racial differences in college attendance happen prior to collage admissions, and therefore a lot of the effect of aff action is displacement — i.e. affirmative action can easily change which schools minority students go to but has little effect on the over-all number of minorities in college
5. I’m not impressed with the mismatch model (what Scalia asked about). I think that effect is dwarfed by other factors in school graduation.
6. I think a lot of the left-wing argument for aff action comes out of ideological signaling. Ie. mostly an interest in showing concern about the racism issue. I also think there is too much of an emphasis on the ideal instead of the real world. The world doesn’t follow an ideal distribution —> privilege —-> aff action. When they should be asking if the program meets a good cost benefit analysis considering the political capital cost of policies and the alternative options.
7. I dislike the turn towards bad faith arguments on this debate. I’ve seen a lot of Facebook memes that amount to insulting the other side. I’ve seen a lot of personal attacks on the plaintiff in the SCOTUS case (“she’s the face of white privilege who thinks that she deserves college just for being white!!!”)
“5. I’m not impressed with the mismatch model (what Scalia asked about). I think that effect is dwarfed by other factors in school graduation.”
I haven’t been following this closely, so I don’t know the details, but superficially, the very fact that any of the justices is asking about this strikes me as wrong. The reason being that it is an object-level question about practical effects of a policy. Isn’t the SCOTUS just supposed to determine whether a law is constitutional, as opposed to whether or not it’s a good idea (haha, I know…)?? How, then, would this question be relevant?
You are correct. Scalia has castigated other Justices for doing this in the past (see his dissent in Dickerson). His willingness to entertain the argument in this case appears to me to be due to his own prejudices.
How in the world does Dickerson support this idea? In Dickerson, he was claiming that Miranda wasn’t spelling out the Constitutionally-required line; he read it as giving some buffer, so that a Congressional act must be tested by the line drawn in the Constitution, not the buffered line drawn by Miranda. This has little to do with whether the judicial rule (or the Congressional act) is good policy and everything to do with whether the judicial rule is a Constitutional requirement.
Of course, you can think that his opinion in Dickerson is wrong, but it still doesn’t make the analogy work. The only way I could see it working is if the other side was claiming, “Well, prior elucidations of strict scrutiny were just a buffer for the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection. We need to test UT’s affirmative action system with respect to 14A, itself, rather than strict scrutiny.” But literally no one is doing this. Everyone agrees that strict scrutiny applies.
That said, I’m not entirely sure the question of mismatch theory doesn’t run too close to determining good policy rather than Constitutionality (…seriously, there are like a hundred other better Scalia cites for this than Dickerson). However, to get here, we have to bite a pretty big bullet that really shows how weak the diversity rationale is. Supposing that diversity is a compelling interest, and for any given method, the university is capable of showing that it’s the narrowest tailoring possible to achieve the desired amount of diversity. What’s the extent to which we can accept bad outcomes for minorities? Like, short of the State violating 13A by kidnapping and forcing minorities to work in their dining hall (I mean… technically diversity, right?), where do we draw the line? I don’t want to adopt some sort of disparate impact test for determining whether diversity-achieving methods are acceptable… but this is just a weird nuance of relying on the diversity rationale.
If prior jurisprudence allowed direct rationales to redress historic discrimination, then the outcomes of the relevant minorities would be directly relevant.
Here’s how I read these cases:
Miranda
Majority says that in order to make sure states are doing X (honoring the 5th Amendment), the court has the power to force them to do Y (explicitly inform arrestees of their right to a lawyer, etc.). The previous rule already invalidated “involuntary” confessions. The court layered an additional level of protection on top because violations of that rule would be hard to detect. This extra layer of protection will inevitably prevent some number of voluntary confessions, but it will be extra sure that we don’t get any involuntary confessions admitted as evidence. Notably, Miranda warnings aren’t part of the 5th Amendment right. They’re a prophylactic measure to effectuate the remedy for violations of that right (the remedy being suppression of involuntary confessions). They add that some other rule could be okay too, as long as it was equally effective as the one they’re prescribing.
At this time, Scalia is an associate at Jones Day, probably fuming because the Constitution doesn’t say anything about cops having to explicitly warn suspects about this stuff, so if we want to impose such a requirement, Congress should pass a statute.
Dickerson
…So Congress does pass a statute returning the requirement to the pre-Miranda involuntariness rule, with no explicit warnings necessary. DoJ thinks SCOTUS probably won’t like this, so they ignore it until the 4th Circuit remembers that this law got passed, and SCOTUS hears this case. This time Scalia is on the court, and he’s ready to strike this mother down.
The majority is a little puzzled about what to do here, because they’ve been treating Miranda warnings as a requirement for a while, even while this law repealing those warnings has been on the books. The majority hems and haws and says that the warnings aren’t actually just to effectuate the remedy, they’re part of the 5th Amendment Right. Because otherwise, how would the court have bound the states to use them for all this time? *blushes*
Scalia dissents, saying that the notion that the Supreme Court could impose rules on Congress or the states for merely prophylactic utility is “an immense and frightening anti-democratic power that does not exist.”
Fisher
So here we are. The 14th Amendment requires that the government not harm citizens on account of race. Scalia and Thomas appear to be winding up to argue that actually the 14th Amendment doesn’t just require that, it also requires state universities to admit applicants using a color-blind screening process.
Me: “Well the Constitution doesn’t say anything about universities having to—”
Scalia: “Yes, yes, but affirmative action policies might actually harm minorities in some cases, so just to make extra special sure that states don’t do that, we need to mandate color-blind admissions.”
Well, to me, that looks like the Supreme Court imposing rules on states for merely prophylactic utility. And Scalia said something about them not being allowed to do that.
I think I covered this in the above comment. The only way it makes sense to interpret his comment as wanting to “impose rules on states for merely prophylactic utility” is if we interpret his statement as actually proposing some kind of disparate impact test for determining whether diversity-achieving methods are acceptable. I find this interpretation to be a pretty major stretch.
It’s far more sensible to interpret it as Scalia simply not being happy with Grutter’s acknowledgement of diversity in education as a compelling interest on its own. Of course, determining compelling interest is, itself, some measure of a Court-imposed rule based on whatever you want to believe goes into ‘compelling interest’ (…and I probably wouldn’t even be opposed to a claim that ‘prophylactic utility’ is a major part of this… maybe even ‘mere prophylactic utility’).
For better or worse, I think Scalia is aware of when a concept is so set in history, so commanded by stare decisis, that there’s no way he can even try to fight it. Court judgment of whether something is a compelling interest is almost certainly one of those things. I’m not sure whether he thinks this is a bad thing… we’d have to ask him. Nevertheless, I think that not all judgments which seem like utility judgments are the same. Some are the, “Well, we have to do this, because this test is super entrenched,” type, while others are the, “We’re acquiring new judicial power and locking the other branches out,” type. In Dickerson, he seems to think that Congress still has a role to play in determining where the line should be. He doesn’t think Miranda’s prophylactic line is entrenched enough to lock out Congress (while the rest of the Court does, as you point out).
So which type of concern is he expressing in Fisher? Is he proposing a new judicial rule of a disparate impact test for diversity interests? Is he lamenting that he thinks Grutter got the compelling interest test wrong? Is he just saying, “I think this is better policy, so we should just make it so no matter what”? I don’t think we can really divine this out of his four sentence question in oral arguments. He did finish his question with:
This seems, to me, to be more oriented toward the underlying interest of diversity than a new disparate impact test. Of course, I also believe that this is just friggin’ oral arguments, and he probably hasn’t really sat down and figured out how this little bit of information would fit into a larger opinion. He just wants to get some response on the issue presented in the briefs… like 90% of oral argument questions do. It’s already too common to stretch a sentence in an opinion to make someone look hypocritical… can we not when it comes to oral arguments?
More importantly, I think that when we have an array of reasonable possibilities, it’s probably not rational to pick out the one that makes a person look the most hypocritical and demand that it must be that one. At the very least we should ask him if that’s what he means (…or wait until he provides a written opinion that allows us to actually distinguish).
tl;dr Not all appeals to utility are bald appeals to utility and a usurpation of policy-making power by the judiciary. Also, judges sometimes disagree on how entrenched a particular matter is by stare decisis (…and coming up at 5, water is wet).
Whether the school’s policy is constitutional depends on the practical effects of the policy. The state is currently allowed to discriminate based on race in their admission policies because they’re trying to achieve some important social goal X and they think what they are doing is the least liberty-restrictive way of accomplishing that goal. If there are good reasons to think the policy hurts rather than helps, that weakens the case for allowing that policy to continue as an exception to the general rule that the government shouldn’t have policies that discriminate by race.
As with Brad’s comment below, I think this analysis is too formalistic. It’s a pretty accurate summary of how courts employ Equal Protection doctrine in general, but it overlooks how the Supreme Court has evaluated affirmative action programs since Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke in the seventies.
Achieving a diverse student body is considered to be a legit. government interest, and schools are allowed to pursue that interest, as long as they do so in subtle ways. Quotas are no good. Quantifiable boosts to applications from racial minorities are no good. Weighing factors in a balanced, qualitative way is fine. Ruling any other way than this would be a big break from AA precedent for the Supreme Court.
I forgot that anything that is a good idea is constitutional because general welfare clause. Reason #458 I’m not a utilitarian.
Utilitarianists can yet realise that enshrining their views in the law is going to end poorly, just as you could be a feminist and not support affirmative action, or a christian and be in favor of the church/state divide.
Uh. No.
1. No one here made the stupid general welfare clause argument. And, yes, I have seen it on FB and, yes, anyone who makes it is only demonstrating their cluelessness about the law.
2. The prevailing equal protection doctrine isn’t inherently utilitarian in nature. Its rights based with an asterisk that in extreme cases practical concerns can over-ride the rights
3. There are reasons for self-consistent utilitarians to support introducing the concept of rights into the law. All utilitarianism says is that rights aren’t fundamental properties of ethics. They can still be emergent properties of dealing with the real world, and the weaknesses of the political system.
Well if the argument is, in fact, about equal protection as opposed to general welfare, then my original point about the irrelevance of the practical efficacy of such policies stands.
As Glen Raphael outlines above, courts examining whether racial classifications are acceptable under the equal protection clause apply a test known as strict scrutiny. In order to pass strict scrutiny, a policy must be narrowly tailored to advance a compelling state interest, and also be the least restrictive means of doing so. Thus, if using racial classifications fails to actually achieve the goal that the government is aiming to achieve, the policy fails the test.
Courts generally avoid having to look at actual policy effects when enforcing the equal protection clause. If this was a case about the government classifying based on age or toenail length, then the court would use a “rational basis” test, which simply requires that the government is able to articulate a plausible-sounding reason for the policy. But for racial classifications, the test is strict scrutiny, which necessitates courts to examine policy effects. This has been a matter of routine since Brown v. Board of Education.
Now, as to your specific point about Scalia’s comment, I think you’re actually right. If the “compelling state interest” here was improving the academic achievement of racial minorities, then Scalia would be on point; if affirmative action didn’t actually advance that goal, then it can easily be struck down. But the compelling state interest being presented here is increasing racial diversity. (Why, you might ask, of all possible justifications for affirmative action, is that the only one the Supreme Court actually cares about? Weird historical reasons.) And if we’re talking about whether these policies actually improve racial diversity, Scalia’s question is tangential.
Still, you might argue that the court taking into account any policy considerations in equal protection jurisprudence is inappropriate. But it is hard to chart another course. The equal protection clause, by its wording, doesn’t limit itself to race, but rather extends equal protection generally. Certainly those who passed the amendment intended to get rid of racial inequalities in law, which they saw as illegitimate. And since they did not limit the amendment to race, they presumably intended to outlaw similar types of illegitimate distinctions. Equally, though, governments have to make distinctions between groups of citizens (on age or marital status, for instance) all the time for completely legitimate reasons. How to distinguish between the two types of distinctions?
The Supreme Court’s solution has been to mostly allow the government to make whatever distinctions it wants, while carefully reviewing the use of certain types of legal classifications that have historically been used for illegitimate ends (race and sex most prominently) to ensure that their use is actually justified and serves legitimate policy ends. There are perhaps other ways that the Court could enforce the equal protection amendment without having to evaluate policies on their merits. For example (as some of Kennedy’s gay rights opinions feint toward), looking at whether those who passed the law did so primarily to harm a particular group. The “tiers of scrutiny” approach to equal protection has a variety of downsides, and is not without critics (Justice Stevens was a consistent one, while he was on the Court). But 60 years of extremely important precedent is not going to be overturned overnight, nor is there an obviously-superior alternative formula.
Scalia would presumably defend himself by pointing out that he was specifically responding to the attorney’s argument in defense of affirmative action: “Well, I mean, I don’t want to be results-oriented about this, Your Honor… [but] if this Court rules that University of Texas can’t consider race, or if it rules that universities that consider race have to die a death of a thousand cuts for doing so, we know exactly what’s going to happen… this happened at the University of Texas after the Hopwood case: Diversity plummeted, especially among African-Americans. Diversity plummeted at selective institutions in California, Berkeley, and UCLA, after Prop 209.” (pages 66-67 of the transcript)
If Scalia were to write an opinion ruling affirmative action is unconstitutional on the grounds that it is bad for blacks, that would be hypocritical (but see Glen Raphael and Frank McPike above). If he is attempting to persuade a swing vote who *does* care about results, however, it’s not as obviously hypocritical. It’s a cliche that persuasion sometimes requires you to make arguments that your listeners find persuasive. This can be uncomfortable if your listener has a very different analytical framework than you do.
5. I’m not impressed with the mismatch model (what Scalia asked about). I think that effect is dwarfed by other factors in school graduation.
The Meyerhoff Scholars program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore is an interesting test case here. It is aimed at high achieving black STEM students and has much better outcomes for its black graduates than Ivy League schools. La Griffe Du Lion discusses it here: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm
Under existing precedents I think affirmative action looks unconstitutional, but I think some of those precedents are not great.
Specifically, the general rule is that the government can make a classification based on race unless there is a compelling government interest and the policy in question is narrowly tailored to advance that interest and that it is the least restrictive means of accomplishing that goal.
First it isn’t clear that states have a compelling interest in having colleges at all. Then even if there is a compelling interest in having colleges there needs to be a further compelling state interest in having colleges with diverse student body. Then because of the least restrictive alternative prong, you have to be able to reject non-selective state colleges (either admission to all commers or admission by lottery or similar). So the compelling state interest ends up being having selective state colleges with diverse student bodies. That seems like a big stretch.
Then once you get past the need for a selective state university with a diverse student body, you get to the question of alternatives. It may seem silly to us, but there are several Supreme Court cases that express a preference for rather baroque systems to avoid using race directly where a proxy will do. Hence the 10% plan and questions about economic and geographical diversity and would that be good enough.
At bottom I think these cases are about the fact that you have these state colleges, the flagship or a flagship tier, that want to directly compete with the top private colleges and act just like those private colleges do. But state entities face unique restrictions that come from the Constitution. It may just not be legally possible for them to do so in this area just as they can’t in other areas like being opaque in their compensation practices.
I think your analysis is too formalistic. Cases of broad social import decided by the Supreme Court are always susceptible to reframing in order to make any decision seem inevitable. In my opinion, to talk in terms of what is “legally possible” in the realm of constitutional law is to mistake constitutional law for a legal code, rather than the kind of language judges use when they want to justify a particular policy, while seeming to defer to precedent.
Eh, maybe. But if you are a crit there’s not much to talk about. All you can really do is try to armchair psychoanalyze the Justices.
1. I think affirmative action is unconstitutional. Whether it’s racist or not, it’s a race-based classification, which should almost never exist. Grutter only acknowledged diversity as a compelling interest, and while that edifice is crumbling, I don’t think they’re going to defer because of ‘efficiency, equity, and political impacts’.
2. Countering the effect of racism is a legitimate government purpose, but this requires specifics. We can’t just wave at “effect[s]… on the economy and society as a whole”, otherwise we could likely justify absolutely any intervention. Similar to (1), this is just too big a sword to hand over.
5. I would almost go so far as to say that the question of mismatch is unknowable. You essentially have to control for everything that goes into whether a student succeeds in college or not. UT-Austin is about the last institution I would trust to be able to do this, considering their 52% 4-year graduation rate… but I really don’t think anyone can actually do this.
“I think affirmative action is unconstitutional. Whether it’s racist or not, it’s a race-based classification, which should almost never exist.”
Where in the Constitution does it say private institutions can’t use race-based classifications? Or are you just talking about public institutions?
“Countering the effect of racism is a legitimate government purpose”
Where do you see that in the Constitution?
UT (which is the respondent in the case before SCOTUS) is a public institution.
Public institutions.
The State does not derive its powers/purposes from the text of the Constitution. The Federal government does.
But the 14th amendment requires state law to comply with constitutional protections.
….never said that it doesn’t. The question was about where in the Constitution the States derive their powers/purposes, not their limitations.
I will note that I personally don’t like affirmative action or race-based classifications and quotas, but I also don’t see what gives the federal government the right to prevent private institutions from discriminating on whatever basis they want to. Certainly not the Constitution.
The way they get around it, of course, is taxation, which ultimately gives you the power to do anything, because, let’s say, for example, I am an institution with the power to tax you, but not the power to say what color shirt you are allowed to wear. I can just tax you at 100% and say, “okay, I will now give you a federal subsidy equal to the amount I took from you, but in return, you must wear this color shirt. It’s a condition for receiving these taxpayer dollars, you see.”
The federal government doesn’t have a whole lot it can do against private organizations. Heart of Atlanta pushes about as far as you can go (running through the ever-malleable ICC rather than EPC), and that only carves out a class of public accommodations rather than all private organizations.
Bob Jones is more relevant to onyomi’s point than Heart of Atlanta.
Ah yes, I forgot about Bob Jones. These two categories (tax-exempt and public accommodation) are probably the main two forays into private institutions.
However, I think there is a distinction between determining tax-exempt/taxable and simply adding new targeted taxes. The latter category is generally seen as more pernicious, especially when it comes near the realm of religious organizations.
I’m more interested in how the left will react when this case comes up again, but with an Asian instead of a White plaintiff.
As far as the Left is concerned, Asians are white.
No. Asians are white when it is convenient, and not-white when it is convenient. Ask not “are Asians white”, ask “convenient to whom, and to what ends?”
I agree. As I see it, Affirmative Action covers three core goals.
(1) We want to correct for a bias in test scores / resumes, that makes students from less-good schools appear weaker than they are. (2) We want universities to have students with a diversity of opinions. (3) We want to use colleges to ensure that our society has a multi-ethnic elite.
The problem is that the left is mostly concerned with goal #3. But only goals #1 & #2 have passed constitutional muster.
The result is an absurd-sounding set of policies. Administrators claim to care about student’s individual experiences, but don’t measure past questions like “Are you Hispanic? (Y/N).”
We’re supposed to pretend like that simple question gives us deep insight into someone’s life perspective.
But the policies aren’t really that stupid. They make sense if the real goal is ensuring that the US has a multi-ethnic elite. (And that’s a morally defensible goal, just not one that can be expressed in court)
This reluctance to talk about the real reason people are doing things taints the whole debate. Without being able to go to the actual arguments, we’re left with petty sniping from both sides.
If the objective is a multi-ethnic elite, then the mismatch argument is relevant. A black law student who went to Stanford and failed his bar exam as a result is not part of the elite. If he had gone to Hastings and passed his bar exam he would have been.
So far as reason 1 is concerned, in the case of California law schools, which is the one I have the most direct experience with, the test is pretty simple–do the students admitted to a law school because of affirmative action do as well on the bar exam as other students. I teach at a law school which is strongly in favor of affirmative action and proud of how “diverse” its student body is. Judging by faculty conversation there, nobody seriously doubts that one cost of diversity via affirmative action is a lower bar pass rate.
So far as point 2 is concerned, if that’s the objective discrimination in admissions ought to be based on criteria other than race, since what matters is diversity of opinions, not of skin color. On the whole, the institutions that favor affirmative action tend to regard beliefs sharply different from those of the current faculty more often as a liability than an asset. I would not advise an applicant for a law school faculty post to announce in his interview his opposition to gay marriage.
How much lower is the bar pass rate?
I don’t have data ready to hand, unfortunately. I was reporting my observation of the opinions of lots of my colleagues who would like to believe that having lower admission standards for blacks doesn’t have a cost in our bar passage rate and quite obviously don’t believe it–although it is a cost they are willing to pay.
But there is lots of data on bar passage rates, first year grades, and other related stuff at:
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/sander/Systemic/final/SanderFINAL.pdf
Some time back I asked one of my colleagues for a reference to something that did a good job of critiquing Sander’s work. I read it. It was an article whose argument amounted to “he’s a racist.”
On the other hand, if, in the absence of AA, the students who are members of a group that AA applies to did better on the bar than students who aren’t members of one of these groups, that would be evidence that these students were being unfairly discriminated against – a higher level of ability being required of them before they would be admitted compared to other students.
I actually have an example of the pattern you mention, although not on the bar.
My sister went to Bolt, the U.C. Berkeley law school, in the sixties. About ten percent of the students were women. One year, of the two top students in each of the three classes, five of the six were women.
That fits the fact that currently, with no significant discrimination by gender, about half of law school students are women.
It would be indicative of that, but there are alternate explanations – a steeper curve to the distribution in that group, for instance.
Well, #3 used to be openly argued, anyway.
But you’re leaving out the part where, way back when, the theory was actually that #3 would cure #2 and #1. That is–that having a multi-ethnic elite would cause the whole culture to shift to no longer be unfairly biased against any one ethnic group, and that this would mean no population of students (or at least, no population definable by ethnicity) would, as a group, do worse than any other. So no population would “need” the type of AA in #1.
Oh, is that why?
Here I thought it was just that more people were willing to support 1 and 2.
Are you thinking of a specific court case which ruled goal 3 unconstitutional?
A recent relevant case was: Gratz v. Bollinger.
The argument is that “diversity” is a legitimate interest because it benefits the student body as a whole, instead of just members of a specific ethnicity.
So I guess the argument would be about whether having a multi-ethnic elite benefited society as a whole or whether it just benefited the ethnic group which had “needed” AA?
But how would arguing that “a multi-ethnic elite is good for society” be any different from arguing that “a multi-ethnic student body is good for the whole student body?” I mean if the court accepted the latter, why wouldn’t it accept the former? Do you think it’s a matter of positive vs. negative rights?
Your (1) seems highly arguable – it assumes bias and that students only “appear” weaker. It’s entirely plausible (I’d say likely) that AffAct admits actually ARE weaker by any objective measure.
I’m not even talking about racial IQ differences or anything like that, just worse primary and secondary education.
What’s particularly sad, to my mind, is that by assuming (1), AffAct supporters absolve themselves of attempting to fix the broken primary and secondary school systems and cultures that are causing minority students to be underprepared in the first place. Whether or not you beli believe the “mismatch” theory, can’t we agree that it would be better if minorities could compete equally without artificial boosts?
It could be both. The SAT probably measures a combination of ability and ‘test preparedness’. A good school will increase both things.
So, if Dick and Jane have an identical SAT, but Jane comes from a school without test prep, then a savvy administrator should expect Jane to be slightly more able.
Emphasis is on “slightly.” I’m defending points #1 and #2 as things that justify a non-zero consideration of student background.
I don’t think they’re remotely compatible with the actual AA policies that we see today. The boosts are just too huge, and too coarsely applied to really be about a minor-update of expectations,
We’ve all agreed on that for at least 50 years now.
The problem is that we don’t know how to fix them. And…as I said above, originally, AA was supposed to fix them. The multi-ethnic elite was supposed to fix the cultures and, if necessary, the schools too…ultimately rendering itself obsolete. That was the plan.
It doesn’t seem to have worked. We don’t know what would. That’s the problem.
(since I can’t edit) That is, the multi-ethnic elite was supposed to render AA obsolete. (Not render its multi-ethnicity obsolete.)
I fail to see a lot of evidence that affirmative action supporters want to wind things down regardless of success, any more than feminists have moved on from colleges now that women get like 60% of degrees.
In any case, just because we don’t know a perfect solution doesn’t mean we should continue a lousy one that has other negative effects. Better than nothing is a high standard.
And I’d argue that part of the reason we don’t have good solutions at the primary and secondary level, where most of the achievement gap seems to form, is that we’re spending all this energy fighting over college affirmative action. Well, that and not wanting to start holding school districts accountable for poor performance because teachers and administrators are a powerful part of the constituency of the party running most major cities.
We have a good solution to the primary and secondary levels — integration. We don’t use it because there is a wide consensus among white parents regardless of ostensible ideology that integrated schools are unacceptable.
1. The state of race law in the US is inconsistent with reality. It both illegal to treat different races differently, and it is illegal for races to have different results. So if there are any difference between races, everyone is guilty by default, and the only way to avoid legal action is to avoid attention. AA systems are as ‘holistic’ as possible to hide both the level of preferences and that the preferences are occurring.
2. This would be the government engaging in racism. There are a handful of minority business owner programs in this vein, but those are strongly questionable. You may also want to read, say, Affirmative Action Around the World by Thomas Sowell, which looks at the experience in places like India with racial quotas (and if you think America has a race problem now, the race problem in India was much worse).
5. I’m confused by why you don’t like mismatch, because it is the obvious consequence of your point 4, that all that’s being done is moving students around.
Any recommendations on air filters for a 150 square foot bedroom? We want to get one mainly to catch dust and dog hair. I have seasonal allergies and we’re hoping that it would help with that too.
@ Scott. re Comments of the week are Yarbel on why Israel would demand a snap decision on peace.
I’m going to try again, since my first comment went astray. I am not trying to discuss what Ohlmert offered Abbas.
I have a question for Scott: there are many pressing topics from the Middle East posing the utmost moral and national security challenges to us here in America. You ignore them. You are deeply troubled by the suffering of many people and creatures, but not the suffering of the Christians in the Middle East (only 56 of whom have been allowed to find safety in our country), the women of Saudi Arabia, the black slaves of the Sudan, the people who live in terror regimes in Iran or the PA territories etc etc. That’s fine, you get to chose who you care about. You get to chose not to wade into controversy on Iran or ISIS or Syria. This is obviously not a region you care to inform yourself on, or whose people’s extreme suffering touches your heart, or whose controversies you wish to discuss.
So why do you frequently post brief, hostile comments about Israel? You are not interested enough to be well informed. Nor do you put in the work on a lengthy post to investigate the issues you raise. It is a just a steady pre-occupation of yours to make hostile comments on Israel. Israel is uniquely in your cross-hairs. You have put Israel in the docket as the accused. You always presume guilty. You are acting on unstated assumptions that are extremely prejudicial against Israel. I would like to hear your assumptions stately openly. What is your beef with Israel? Why are you exclusively pre-occupied with Israel’s supposed bad behavior? Why do you post these brief, negative statements on Israel so frequently? what is the source of your information – where do these nastygrams arise?
Of course, you have the right to whatever stance on Israel you want – if you believe it is a colonial state, a bad faith actor, that the Palestinians are only seeking justice and peace, you would not be alone. There is a sizeable fraction, perhaps a small majority of Democrats who answer polls that way. I would like to know if that is where you stand – those are the assumptions that seem to lurk behind your comments, but it is so unstated, its hard to really understand the point of your many hostile posts.
@ Scott.
again, I am not trying to debate what Ohlmert and Abbas did, but to question Scott on the pattern of his posts on Israel.
Here’s the corroborating evidence that led me to say you are not informed and obviously not interested, but that you are eager to judge Israel.
In todays and the last post, you are interested in a 2008 offer by Ohlmert to Abbas that was radically generous to the Palestinians (far beyond what Oslo had offered Arafat), and your reaction was to criticize Ohlmert.
Given your avoidance of pressing topics from the Middle East, it is striking that this tiny, 7 year old footnote to a footnote to history lead you to post a comment.
You assumed Ohlmert was being unreasonable, but you did not look up the negotions in questions to learn more or check your assumption. You rushed to post a criticism Ohlmert as a bad actor, not sincere in seeking peace negotiations.
In short, you were moved to comment on this 2008 story in order to imply Israel leaders are bad actors.
I googled Ohlmert Abbas which you obviously didn’t. One of the first sources reveal this: by the end of 2008, there were 288 negotiation sessions by 12 teams representing Olmert and Abbas. Snap decision on peace was your assumption, whereas a brief effort to learn more before rushing to publish on SSC would have revealed it was the last of 288 negotiation sessions.
check it out at http://www.meforum.org/3265/israeli-settlements-american-pressure
Again, I am not trying to debate the topic of Israel-PA negotiations. What is striking is your interest in an unimportant and seven year old news squib, because it gives you the opportunity to paint Israel in a bad light as not being sincere about peace. You are imply frequently that Israel is a bad actor, without outright stating it or defending it. Is that defensible as rational discourse? Libel by assumption? What is going on with you and Israel?
.
You’d like to question Scott on the pattern of his posts, or you’d like to discuss in excruciating detail one minor comment in one of his posts? Because I see you saying the former but doing the latter, and they’re not the same thing.
the latter was merely an example, to corroborate my generalizations. I am interested in the pattern
An example doesn’t corroborate your generalizations. Or shall we consider the range of generalizations one might corroborate with the example of Baruch Goldstein?
@john schilling
lets not get into quibbling over words. call it an illustration if not corrorboration. I merely wanted to show what made me say Scott’s post revealed both ignorance and disinterest, because he did not bother to look up that the negotiating session he cited as the Israelis insisting on a quote snap decision unquote, was number 288 in a year of negotiation.
I actually think Baruch Goldstein is an interesting case to cite: the fact there is one Barch Goldstein, decades ago, corroborates that Israelis are remarkably restrained and self-controlled in responding to the thousands of attacks by hate-filled Arabs.
You’re being unfair here; most Israeli on Palestinian violence is official military action, and you’re just defining it away.
@rose
You never heard of price tag (תג מחיר)?
Maybe you shouldn’t be criticizing Scott for being uninformed, glass houses and all that.
Comparing price tag to terrorism makes it look pretty harmless; mostly they just do vandalism (criminal, sure, but not on the same level as, say, blowing up a bus full of people). The one case I’ve heard of where settlers actually killed anyone, they were caught and imprisoned by Israeli authorities.
There’s been at least two price tag terrorist attacks that have ended in death. There have been zero convictions, with most of the murderers in one case being treated as juvenile delinquents rather than terrorists. There have been no home demolitions. No arrests of spiritual advisers. No collective punishment.
It is night and day.
By that argument, none of the thousands of palestinian terror attacks have been punished by the palestinian authorities. You’re being very selective in your equivalencies.
I don’t follow this blog that much, but what struck me was that he simply accepted Mahmoud Abbas’ claim without any skepticism. It’s well known that in general politicians lie about stuff. And it’s well known that Mahmoud Abbas in particular is a liar.
So it does appear that he is very hostile towards Israel.
You clearly have somewhat of a bee in your bonnet about Israel – I don’t think Scott makes “frequent” comments about Israel, hostile or otherwise.
I think rose is going way over the line, but it’s true that Scott has from time to time made comments that express a somewhat negative view of Israel. I don’t really care to trawl through and find them (they’re definitely not in most posts), but they’re there.
@ Sweeneyrod
I’m not sure ‘bee in my bonnet’ is accurate, but Israel is a topic I’m very interested in, so I have noticed the steady drip of hostile comments on Israel. they are noteworthy because it is virtually the only topic on the middle east he is interested in. also noteworthy because of the total lack of sympathy or compassion for the Israelis. if you are not interested in this subject, you would not have noticed – it isn’t every week.
I haven’t noticed a ton of anti-Israel stuff here but there does seem to be a trend for secular Jews not living in Israel (like Scott) to have a bit of a guilt complex about the Israel/Palestine situation.
This reminds me of the wails of injured republican partisans in the comments following Scott’s Questions for the Next Republican Debate
@anonymous
Not wails. please don’t be condescending.
As a therapist, I am very attuned to recurring pre-occupations. Scott is not prone to making brief nasty jabs about other groups, or to comment on the politics of the Middle East. he doesn’t usually insert the pre-occupations of the SJW. The steady recurrence of brief links or comments on Israel as the bad actor, with bits of misinformation he must have gleaned from some anti-Zionist web posting, is a glaring exception.
I wouldn’t expect Scott to share the left’s anti-Zionism, but maybe he does. I would like him to be more forthright about it. I came to ssc because of the promise of a desire to rise above tribal signaling and demonization of those who disagree. I see a demonization of Israel implicit in his brief comments and all the more toxic for that, that I see as unworthy of Scott’s enterprise.
You’re asking him not to be condescending but then you make this comment implying that Scott occasionally mentioning Israel in a not-completely-positive way is some sort of problematic personality issue that ‘as a therapist’ you’re attuned to? This after describing Olmert ‘as ‘pathological’, apparently legitimised by said job. I am rather worried about how you deal with patients whose political views differ from your own!
Seriously, Scott shows no sign of obsession with Israel. He occasionally mentions it. You’re probably right that people are more likely to be critical of Israel than other states. This is even a potentially interesting topic. But your approach to it is immensely tribal and not conducive to helpful discussion. i.e. the misuse of pseudo-medical language above, or your response to someone disagreeing with
“Your critique is a mix of misinformation, some of it gross propaganda, and a death wish for Israel.”
And after this you have the gall to accuse others of demonisation!
Nobody who does not already agree with you 100% is going to be convinced by this sort of thing. It may be you’re right – I don’t know much about the issues. But if you are right, the way you’re communicating it is concealing it about as well as it could.
@david s
the person who I accused of a death wish for Israel replied by saying Israel does not have a right to exist, so I apparently was no demonizing, but making an accurate reading of his initial comment.
Next open thread we are discussing The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt.
We have discussed it before, no? And if you’re interested in discussing it more, why not now? Or is this a way to encourage everyone to read it between now and then?
Next open thread we are discussing the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant.
Guiding questions:
1. Why was Kant right about epistemology?
2. Why was Kant extra-right about epistemology?
Am I the only one who feels that the jab about “How can one expect the Republican presidential candidates to be able to stand up to Putin or ISIS when they can’t even a group of CNBC debate moderators is too ‘mean’ for them?” to be obviously unfair? I don’t much care for any of the Republican candidates and am skeptical to some degree that debate moderators have been as left-biased as they say, but I find the above comparison to be blatantly invalid and based on a non-sequitur. I’m not sure anyone even thought of it until Obama included it in a speech a little while after one of the Republican debates; only after that did I start to see various “arguments” along those lines all over my newsfeed.
I made a similar comment in Facebook, IIRC. Let’s see…. ah, here we go:
—
Noticing a lot of “Republican candidates say they can handle Putin, but can’t even handle CNBC moderators” posts in my feed. Followed by “Zing!” “heh” etc. Even Obama’s in on the fun.
They seem to all miss the obvious fact that the tools a President has at disposal to negotiate with Putin are critically different from the tools a Presidential candidate has to negotiate with a debate moderator. A candidate can’t threaten trade sanctions against a moderator, or offer to move a military division that is in the moderator’s neighboring country.
Moreover, suppose what you’re trying to do is offer your best picture of your views to a set of people who wouldn’t otherwise see you, and the primary route is through a person who gets to construct whatever filters they wish to put in the way of your presentation. The advantage is pretty obviously the moderator’s.
Given how obvious this is, I wouldn’t want to mock candidates in this way, for fear of looking kinda dumb.
My objection was somewhat more along the lines of “Complaining about a bias among debate moderators isn’t a form of inability-to-handle at all; it’s an effort to point out a perceived unfairness.” But yeah, I agree with your points as well.
(Btw sorry for the various misplaced words in my comment above.)
Yeah, it seems like they did in fact “handle” them by pointing out their bias. Obama seems to imply that they are ill-tempered or childish for complaining at all, but presumably not standing up for yourself when you’re being treated unfairly is not a great negotiation tactic in most cases.
I agree that it’s not exactly proof that they couldn’t deal with Putin, but it is some evidence against them – the situations aren’t exactly the same, but I would expect there to be some general “ability to handle negotiations in a hostile environment” factor (and the president does have to negotiate in a hostile environment sometimes).
Mostly, it’s not so much that they were saying “I could do better than Obama” as that they were saying “Obama’s a total idiot, negotiating well is easy”, then went forwards to do badly negotiation-like event and make excuses for it – which does a lot to undermine their position of “Just let me handle it”.
Example: imagine a lion’s attacking your tribe, and the chief fights it off, but not before it eats some of the tribe’s sheep. And one of the tribesmen gets up and says “I can fight lions better than that!” but trips on a root and falls on his face right away. It really undermines that statement, despite all sorts of arguments you could make as to how that’s a different situation (Clearly, if he were fighting the lion he’d be more alert to the terrain and so forth).
A root doesn’t have any agency though.
A better analogy would be a guy who claims to be good at fighting lions getting beat up by his fellow tribesmen.
Agreed that their constant “Obama’s a total idiot” type remarks put them in a position where even mild incompetence on their part more justifiably invites scorn.
But I don’t see why their complaints about the alleged bias of the debate moderators imply incompetence. It seems to me that they were responding to some aggressive questions with “Look everyone, we’re receiving much more aggressive questions than candidates of the other party! The way they keep asking us things like this is deplorable, so let’s not be complicit in the media’s attack on Republicans by continuing to engage.” I guess the Democrats could assume from those comments that they’re just trying to hide the fact they don’t have answers to the moderators’ tougher questions, and conclude incompetence on the Republicans’ parts. To me, that’s a leap of logic. It’s sort of like saying, “Bernie Sanders keeps railing on the other candidates for being supported by big money, so clearly he’s too intimidated by organizations that are funded by big money to be able to engage with them.”
But if that’s what Obama and some Democrats are thinking, then their behavior makes a bit more sense to me. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding their point entirely.
It’s not so much their claiming that the moderators are hostile – that’s analogous to the Bernie Sanders thing – as that they’re responding to it by refusing to play a game that requires them to negotiate in a hostile environment. Which pattern-matches pretty well with someone incompetent making excuses (both because a good negotiator should be able to deal even with a hostile environment and because a president is occasionally going to have to negotiate in situations where the environment is hostile and he doesn’t necessarily have the upper hand).
There is an alternative interpretation that refusing to engage with a hostile environment is actually correct behavior. But that’s a bit of a stretch, especially since the whole point of the debate is for them to show off their presidential abilities – which should include negotiating under adversity. I wouldn’t expect this to sway someone who’s a partition for them, but it is a bit offputting for someone who starts out neutral.
It feels more like the equivalent of Bernie Sanders refusing to put on any ads until there are more balanced budget restrictions – the instinctive response is “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the fire. Don’t expect people to take it easy on you, because they sure as hell aren’t going to if you’re president”. Even if they’re actually correct and made the reasonable move, it’s still a show of weakness, which is the exact thing they were accusing Obama of.
Except that the Republican candidates are not just running against each other, they’re running against the Democratic candidates. If Democratic-sympathetic moderators use the Republican debates to make them look stupid, and don’t do the same thing to Democratic candidates it puts *all* the Republican candidates at a disadvantage with regard to the five hundred or so undecided voters in America. So refusing to participate is in a sense refusing to give an advantage to their ultimate opponent.
Your argument of showing strength in adversity applies to that too, I guess, but I don’t see it as being all that convincing to said undecided voters. They won’t think “Oh, Republidate sure showed that Democratic-sympathetic moderator a thing or two,” they’ll think, “Wow, Democridate sure debates better than Republidate.”
Speaking of languages:
I believe lots of people would like to be able to speak in more languages, and I am no exception, but I also have this weird feeling about learning one:
\oopsey, this part ended up ranty\
It is often taken as a (a weak, but publicizable) signal for intelligence (e.g.: It is perfectly natural for your facebook page to contain that you speak English and French and whatever (as to what would stating that you speak Serbian and Croatian and Bosnian signal…?)) (this is one example of overstating your knowledge of languages. Another would be e.g.: Italian after you’ve spent a month learning it, and my classmates were pretty fast in adding it after they’ve started studying.)
I don’t know where it took off: maybe it was associated with the nobility (the way travel was: I am flabergasted by the tendency of travels to end up as tours of churches. Surely there is more to see! And museums the same: the guides are hellbent on selling me on why that particular painter was a great deal, but I hardly learn anything worthwhile. It’s almost seems like a cult of personality to me. Hitting up a book on painting/drawing, treating it’s subject as a craft, rather than as this special art, was always more… enlightening? That is not to say a 4 centimeter picture on my monitor in a PDF is the same as that gigantic painting on the wall, it certainly is not. Yet still, if I am not in foreign-land (taken as even outside my city), I don’t really feel the urge to do it))
I am conflicted by my urge to be ‘cultured’ and ‘worldly’ (mostly in term of knowing languages) and by the lingering thought that I am a victim of/taking part/perpetuating a fraud.
\
SO, specific languages, which are learned for specific practical purposes! Not all languages are created equal, if I learned Sotho, the responses would be more: ‘Why the hell would you do that?’, compared to French’s or Mandarin’s allure.
First, there are those that are valuable (even) as strictly spoken languages: Those are those spoken by people around you. Though, even though I am living next to a tri-border, only my country’s is to be heard anywhere public on a regular basis. Sometimes some people come over shopping from one of the (almost never the other) countries. If you are more mobile, or in a situation where the languages are actually spoken by the people around you, may care to know a little of these languages.
In my case, that would mostly be ‘Firewood’ and ‘How much?’, because that’s one thing they have lots of, where we have nil. (And maybe fuel, which is due to a tax-rate difference, but you may want to do your daily shopping in town, or you’ll be driving all the time)
Of more interest, and more general interest are the languages worth knowing to read (maybe even write) even though nobody around you speaks them. The question I am interested in is: Which are those?
I know Russian and German is used by some important hacker/cracker teams, warez sites (you’ve got to get those games from somewhere, damn it!) and have even found engineering related information only available in German.
I’ve also met Japanese in a hobby-engineering context (even though I am unsure if that warrants learning it), and I guess if someone cares for anime/manga, Japanese is a relevant language for them as well.
Weirdly, even though Chinese is The Language of The Future, I’ve almost never seen it used online. Maybe if one is intent on reading the manual for their eBay sourced electronics in it’s original (or sometimes only) language?
The rest, I’ve hardly ever seen: Spanish, French, Korean, Arabic are ones that sometimes pop up, but are hardly relevant.
So, uhm, what are the languages that are used, maybe even worth learning, in the context you are living in? Maybe you love fashion and you’ve got a lot out of your ability to read Italian? If you don’t tell, I will never know, so please do!
” I am conflicted by my urge to be ‘cultured’ and ‘worldly’ (mostly in term of knowing languages) and by the lingering thought that I am a victim of/taking part/perpetuating a fraud. ”
You know, it’s OK to learn things because they make you feel swanky and sophisticated even if they’re not very practically useful, if that’s what you want to do. Or if you happen to enjoy learning things for the hell of it.
The Chinese internet is, weirdly, actually way more advanced than the Japanese internet; as for why the country that always seems to be on the cutting edge of video games and cute new little electronic devices seems not to have arrived at Web 2.0, I have no clue.
I love studying languages just for their own sake. I find them appealing in a purely intellectual sense regardless of how useful they are. That said, I’ve never had any real success learning a pure “curiosity” language: I’m of largely Irish descent and always thought Irish Gaelic sounded pretty, but I’ve never had the motivation to stick with it long enough to get anywhere. I think this is because, in the back of my head, I can’t help but think: “this is WAY too hard for a language spoken by a few million people on an island I’ve never been to where almost everyone speaks perfect English anyway.”
That said, neither do I learn languages on the basis of pure practicality: living in the US, Spanish is the most obviously practical second language to learn, but I’ve never really bothered, even though I know I could learn it easily. I probably will, eventually, but until I have a reason to go to Central America or something, I just can’t get up the motivation; Sanskrit, on the other hand, I’ve studied fairly seriously, despite the fact it’s not much real use to me (though it is mildly relevant for my academic interests).
Sanskrit, on the other hand, I’ve studied fairly seriously, despite the fact it’s not much real use to me (though it is mildly relevant for my academic interests).
Please elaborate.
Well, my area of research interest is East Asian literature. Sanskrit occasionally comes in handy if one wants to quote the original version of some sutra or the original name of some bodhisattva, or for speculating about the origins of certain weird Chinese loan words, but otherwise, it’s more just something fun I did because I’m tangentially interested in Indian culture and philosophy, and because Sanskrit is an interesting language from a linguistics perspective (the sandhi rules for word combination, for example, reveal a lot of understanding of phonetics on the part of early Sanskrit grammarians).
The Chinese internet is, weirdly, actually way more advanced than the Japanese internet; as for why the country that always seems to be on the cutting edge of video games and cute new little electronic devices seems not to have arrived at Web 2.0, I have no clue.
Japan is not at the cutting edge of videogames and new electronics, hasn’t been in decades.
Who is? The US? Japan still makes the best video games, imo., though that is subjective, and probably boils down to console vs pc.
Videogames are split between the US and Japan. Consumer electronics are split between the US, Japan, and Korea. Japan may not be the clear number one in each category, but I don’t understand his assertion that they’re not at the cutting edge. Sony and Panasonic are both Japanese, after all.
Addendum: computer hardware is dominated by the US and, oddly, Taiwan. Pretty much every motherboard in PCs these days are made in Taiwan by a Taiwanese company (ASUS, Acer, MSI).
Weirdly, even though Chinese is The Language of The Future, I’ve almost never seen it used online
Filter bubble? I am presently at a large American software company and Chinese is by far our second-most-used language internally.
I have historical interests which would make Arabic and Icelandic, at least, worth knowing, although not by enough for me to have learned either. I have traveled in a number of countries where it would have been interesting to be able to understand the conversation of the locals, both to observe and to talk with them. The relevant languages for recent trips include Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese.
This is a difficult question, because if you live in a country the contest means it is worthwhile to speak its language. What languages are useful in what kind of context, in the context of living in an English-speaking one? If I lived in the US I would surely learn a basic Spanish just to be able to talk with the help. French is is useful in the UK because they are close and a nice place to go to when you are fed up with things being too British, like food. These days in business the most imporant in Chinese, given how everything gets imported from there, if you would work in oil you would learn Arabic, but these are kind of obvious? It all reduces to where you live and what the big guys in your industry speak. If you speak Russian and are a programmer, learn about 1C:Enterprise, they are pushing into the West and need bilingual programmers because almost all of their docs are Russian-only.
In a links post a few months back was a rousing recommendation for ExUrbe’s Machiavelli series. I, like all commentors enjoyed the series as a whole, but one aspect has stuck like a sideways chicken bone in my mind ever since. In part one, after describing renaissance European diplomacy in it’s most cynical and avaricious, saying things like:
”
“The War of the League of Cambrai is the least comprehensible war I’ve ever studied. Everyone switches sides at least twice, and what begins with the pope calling on everyone to attack Venice ends with Venice defending the pope against everyone.”
”
Then comes this bizarre passage:
”
Do you ever play the game where you imagine sending a message back in time to some historical figure to tell him/her one thing you really, really wish they could have known? To tell Galileo everyone agrees that he was right; to tell Schwarzschild that we’ve found Black Holes; to tell Socrates we still have Socratic dialogs even after 2,300 years? I used to find it hard to figure out what to tell Machiavelli. That his name became a synonym for evil across the world? That the Florentine republic never returned? That children in unimagined continents read his works in order to understand the minds of tyrants? That his ideas are now central to the statecraft of a hundred nations which, to him, do not yet even exist?
But now I know what I would say:
“Florence is on the UNESCO international list of places so precious to all the human race that all the powers of the Earth have agreed never to attack or harm them, and to protect them with all the resources at our command.”
He would cry. I know he would. It’s the only thing he ever really wanted. When I think about that, how much it would mean to him, and pass his window in the Pallazzo Vecchio which he spent so many years desperate to return to, I cry too.
”
Is this an exquisite troll? I am usually better at spotting the wink. Surely, no one could spend years making themselves an expert on Machiavelli and renaissance diplomacy and still harbor such an uncritical faith in the endurance of the diplomatic constructs of their own time?
BTW, what happened to the comment formatting?
To tell Galileo everyone agrees that he was right
With Galileo, I get the impression his response would be along the line of “Dafuq I care ‘everyone agrees’? I knew I was right!”
As to agreements not to bomb Florence, (a) I feel that is as much out of “what the hell good is Florence as a military target anyways, we need the bombs for really important aims” and (b) being an important historical and cultural heritage site didn’t fucking well stop the Americans bombing the shit out of Monte Cassino once they decided it was a problem, so much for Florence if any future power decides the troops (or drones) are being held up by the Duomo getting in the way!
Talk all you want about the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but as an equivalent so much of the cultural heritage of Europe would have been lost:
The 6th century foundation by St Benedict survived centuries of barbarians until it encountered the Americans. Yes, I’m a tiny bit bitter about this, because it wasn’t for any useful reason. There weren’t any observation posts before they bombed the abbey flat but there were afterwards, and the main reason seems to have been it was decided that the reason the Allied armies couldn’t advance was the strategic location of the abbey, so it had to go, even though that does not appear to have been the real reason. A fixed idea gets into the military mind, and the civilisation which is our only hope to get past brute war is reduced to rubble.
Oh, great: one more reason for me not to join in the general “Ain’t the Sulzbergers so wonderful!” adoration of that family and the New York Times:
From later in the same wikipedia page:
Those darn, scheming Americans, maneuvering things so a British general would order their air force to destroy the monastery (admittedly, I don’t imagine you’re a big fan of the UK, either).
tell Galileo everyone agrees that he was right
He wasn’t right! Kepler was right.
http://tofspot.blogspot.no/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
No, Newton was. Pre-Newton it was largely Neo-Platonist bullshit disguised as physics.
Newton lived only after Galileo. That he was right is of little consequence – Galileo could not have known about him, the way he knew about Kepler.
Further, the Keplerian and Newtonian models round off to being the same thing, it’s just the method of their acquisition was different. Kepler worked off Tycho’s Rudolphine tables and approximated the model from the observation numbers, whereas Newton built a mathematical model of motion upon which his solar mechanics are based.
FWIW, the Rudolphine tables are Kepler’s, not Tycho’s. They are, of course, based on Tycho’s raw data, but they are extrapolations using Kepler’s model.
IIRC, Tycho started working on them, and Kepler finished them after Tycho died, at Tycho’s urging.
Sure, it’s a joint project, but the name “Rudolphine Tables” refers to the final product. They are extrapolations using Kepler’s laws. The laws do not come from the Tables but vice versa. Your original comment only makes sense referring to the raw data, not the Tables.
I stand corrected.
This is pretty much fair of Bruno, but I don’t think of Galileo. His arguments were incomplete and sometimes flawed, but he was basically working on an observational basis.
Copernicus is I think sort of in between Bruno and Galileo in this regard?
What problem do you see with the comment formatting? This formatting works for me:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/donald-trump-mark-bowden-playboy-profile
So can we pretty much diagnose Trump with borderline personality disorder, or what? And if so, how does this bode for his presidency? Are there any past presidents who had a similar temperament?
Does the story actually end with “He’s too livid to speak.”, or is the rest of it paywalled?
I thought there was more when I first read it, though I could be mistaken; I wonder if they swapped out the full version for a digest version to encourage people to buy the magazine?
The earliest snapshots from both Internet Archive and archive.is end with “He’s too livid to speak.”.
Maybe that is all there is to it.
The main thing that struck me was that, if the interviewer is to be believed, he really does seem to habitually engage in extreme black-and-white thinking in the way he often appears to in public: everybody’s either a “winner” or a “loser,” a “genius,” or a “fucking idiot.”
I think this actually explains some of his popularity: people are sick of mealy-mouthed politicians saying “well, it’s complicated…” so someone who seems to make things simple can be appealing. On the one hand, the prospect of having a narcissistic black-and-white thinker in the White House is worrisome (though most presidents have probably been narcissists to one degree or another), but on the other, maybe it wouldn’t be all bad: things which seem impossible for someone more “reasonable,” might seem more unambiguous to a black-and-white thinker.
Nixon would get shitfaced and go off on rants in private, but nothing like Trump has been doing.
I would also like to propose a general axiom, to which I’m sure there are individual exceptions, based on something I’ve noticed a lot recently. The axiom is: “yes, he/she is really like that.”
I say this because, almost every time I’ve known someone who had the experience of hanging out with someone famous for being weird/bombastic/eccentric, etc. in public, the report is “that’s pretty much what they’re actually like.” Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt (who is, apparently, as nice as he seems), Donald Trump, etc. (though the personal report I heard about Trump, not from this article, but through a friend of a friend, is that while he’s less animated and bombastic in private, he is still basically the same person).
I think the default assumption about people who act weird in the public eye is that it is an act for the cameras, but I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the person is just actually weird.
I see it usually in the context of “So-and-so can’t possibly be as nice as they pretend” and then someone goes “I met them and they really are that nice in real life”.
I suppose the usual creep has taken place: it spread out from “yes they really are like that” re: niceness to “yes they really are like that” re: weirdness.
Most public personalities are manufactured nowadays; in the days of “famous for being famous”, you need an exaggerated and outrageous act to catch fickle public attention.
Trump’s campaign seeming to thrive on the outrage he generates will naturally mean people wondering if he’s manufacturing further occasions and calculating “What is the exact balance between saying something that will annoy and anger a significant portion of people, but not alienate my base?”, so that “No, he’s really like that in private” is a proof of authenticity that reinforces the “straight talking, owing nothing to anyone” image he projects.
Like the saying goes: “Sincerity is the most important thing – once you can fake that, you’ve got it made”.
Well, but the person who reported to me that Trump was like that in person was someone whom I actually know personally, and who knew Trump before he started running for president, and who has no particular desire to see him win, so I am more likely to believe him than I would a Vanity Fair article.
See, I don’t think it’s that you need a fake, outrageous persona to get on TV, but rather that people who already have outrageous, arguably affected or fake personas in their daily lives are the ones whom people enjoy watching, and so who end up on tv.
I’ve also heard the opposite in some cases – eg that Kanye West is a lot more reserved in private, or that Paris Hilton is smarter than she seems, etc.
Paris Hilton is clearly being instrumentally rational.
http://www.voxeu.org/article/highly-educated-women-no-longer-have-fewer-kids
1) They are having more kids than before, but still fewer than replacement rate.
2) If you’re a woman in the workforce in 1980, and have been around long enough that whether you have kids matters to the statistics, you may have entered the workforce around 1970 or so. That’s far enough back that such women would be an unusual self-selected group compared to women who are in the workforce today, and it would be unsurprising for such a group to have a lower fertility rate.
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/kathy-gyngell-mr-plod-should-wake-up-cannabis-is-at-the-root-of-the-terror-threat/
A politically motivated article using a thinly veiled political organization as its only source, offered without comment?
Quality post.
Or, in the vernacular:
Gr8 b8 m8, I r8 8/8
Most suicide terrorists are deranged drug users. Why isn’t more made of this fact?
Most terrorists eat bread.
It seems much more prima facie plausible that taking mind-altering drugs would cause violent behaviour than that eating bread would.
What if the bread *is* a mind-altering drug? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning
Sorry, couldn’t resist …
Isn’t pot supposed to make you mellow?
Most of the time, though there is such a thing as Marijuana Psychosis. A guy I dormed with in college had it and ended up being institutionalized. It was pretty surreal actually: he would get confrontational about insane things like people sending him psychic messages or being in the Skull and Bones Society.
That said, I would be surprised if reefer madness actually was a major contributor to violence. I think it’s more likely both are caused by a lack of impulse control, rather than being directly related. So drug abuse could certainly be a warning sign for violent behavior but probably not a cause of it.
Aren’t there studies consistently linking pot to schizophrenia?
We don’t know which way the arrow goes, and I suspect there is a degree of self medicating, but I would not be overly shocked to hear that it can do messed up things to people who are already a little unhinged.
Yeah — IIRC, smoking pot correlates positively with manifesting schizophrenia, with an effect size of something like .2. I seem to recall that this survives the more obvious ways of correcting for self-medication, but the base rates are low enough that it’s not a particularly big deal. From a health perspective, I’d be more worried about the usual consequences of inhaling smoke, and perhaps the effects of chronic use (no pun intended) on working memory.
So the only reason I’d ever want to own a gun is tied to the only scenario in which I consider suicide – When I’m old and useless and life is nothing but boredom and pain, it’d be nice to have an airlock to throw myself out of.
But, I don’t want to buy this gun ~40 years early and have to deal with maintenance and security and a constant physical reminder of this plan all that time.
So, would anyone here care to set some predictions on whether:
1.) The individual right to own a gun is still a thing in 30-50 years, vs
2.) Assisted suicide becomes widely accepted in 30-50 years
Or, just for fun, the chance that we’ll get Futurama-esque Matrix nursing homes in 30-50 years?
Thirty years out:
I think it’s more likely (.75) that assisted suicide becomes/remains legal in some parts of the USA than access to firearms remains legal (.5) in the same (or greater) portion of the country. I feel strongly confident that you would be able to move to a part of the country where your preferred option was available.
Fifty years out:
Confidence interval way way too broad to put forth an estimate. Fifteen years ago, USA firearms access was moving in the opposite direction, and Scandinavian welfare systems were expanding in Europe. Not the situation today.
World wide, there is even less confidence in predicting what happens over that length of time.
And, so long as we’re discussing hypotheticals at the half-century mark – consider the possibility that portions of the rationalist movement might be hijacked by genocidal maniacs to the point where religious observance becomes the accepted humane global norm, and a thoughtful acceptance of inevitable decline in health and capability is seen as the mature, reasonable approach.
Even if guns were made completely illegal in the US tomorrow, they’d still be available for decades because there’s a huge backstock. IIRC, the same is probably true for most of the world because even if there isn’t a local gun culture, there are plenty of guns and ammunition from wars. (IIRC means If I Recall Correctly. It’s a very useful acronym which has fallen out of general use.)
On the other hand, if you’d want to buy an illegal gun 40 years from now, you’d need to have some sketchy people in your extended social network.
I suppose it’s possible there will be such complete surveillance that it will be possible to actually enforce laws.
You left out the possibility of at least adequate rejuvenation tech. I’m inclined to think some of the diseases of ageing will be postponed if not eliminated.
I’m not going predict specific political policies 30-50 years out. I’m not dead certain nations will exist then, though it’s probably the way to bet.
“IIRC” has “fallen out of general use”? God, I feel old now.
There is no way to ask this and not come across as boisterous for me, but I’m curious why you asked about assisted suicide becoming widely accepted. Even if there were all of one place (I’ll assume you’re American here) in the US you could do so at, wouldn’t that be enough?
I’m curious why you think you’d need a gun, specifically. Slitting one’s wrists in the bathtub may take a bit longer, but the individual right to own sharp blades is orders of magnitude less likely to be taken away than the individual right to own guns.
That doesn’t sound like a very fun way to go.
Felt like pointing it out even though it’s a red herring, as there’s plenty other painless methods that are likely to resist regulation.
Trust me mate, shooting yourself isn’t a particularly wonderful way to go either.
Given the projected balance of the social security trust fund, I suspect the government trying to stop the elderly killing ourselves will the last of our worries…
Quite the opposite in fact.
No, encouraging you. (See: Boomsday.)
@ anon
“That doesn’t sound like a very fun way to go.”
I’ve heard that some doctors plan a bottle of good wine, barbituates, and a secluded beach. I wonder if a hot tub would do.
@ Mark Atwood
Whereas jumping off a bridge usually inspires boat crews officiously to strive to recover the body (what for?).
Getting hit by a truck upsets the driver (and makes the road slippery).
Overdose of heroin — expensive I suppose.
You might as well live.
On edit:
Making things easy on the person who will discover the body is a worthwhile point. Might think of someone who is used to discovering bodies. A nurse or orderly in a slow decay ward? A policeman?
In the wine/barbituates/beach suggestion, I suppose the beach would be for tide to carry the body away? (But that leaves seven years before your heirs can inherit, or your spouse remarry.)
Hm. Do something bloodless, in a big plastic bag, in a snowdrift in a snowstorm? And leave your cell phone running, so the rangers can arrive before the wolves do?
This is an old issue:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
(Dorothy Parker)
@ David Friedman
(Dorothy Parker)
Yep, bless her. I couldn’t think of any outside view versions that scanned, though.
Slitting one’s wrists in a bathtub is a ridiculously unreliable suicide method and not worthy of serious consideration.
IIRC, the four more or less equally reliable means are shooting, hanging, drowning, and CO poisoning. All of which are around the 80% success mark.
Relative levels of fun are left as an exercise for the reader.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is no longer reliable thanks to those meddling kids at the EPA. Jumping off tall buildings, bridges, etc, is the other classic high-success suicide method. Possibly also high-speed car crashes, but it’s hard to distinguish between accidents and suicides there.
If it weren’t so rude, throwing one’s self in front of a train would probably be very popular. It ticks all the other boxes.
I have high confidence that any substantial gun control law passed in the United States in the next fifty years will include a grandfather clause allowing people who already own guns, to keep them at least locked away in their own homes. I also have high confidence that it will be legal for most people to buy double-barrel shotguns with a modest bureaucratic hassle, but those are somewhat less convenient for suicide.
Legal assisted suicide in 30-50 years, only moderate confidence. The trend is clearly in that direction, but subject to reversal. And the traditional high-lethality unassisted suicide methods may or may not be practically available to the physically infirm in that era. Your self-driving car may not accept an override to ram that bridge abutment at 200 kph, or the crumple zones and airbags may be good enough that a maximum-velocity impact is just really, really painful.
Why do you care if it’s legal? It’s not as if they are going to bring you back to life just to incarcerate you.
There are many countries where guns are effectively outlawed, and exactly zero where you can’t get hold of one in a week or so if you’re willing to spend some cash, hell a friend of mine made a Stengun in his garage over a weekend.
Even if guns are successfully “banned” by the time you need one, there will still be guns around because guns are also an incredibly useful tool for things like wildlife population control and even if we come up with something else that can kill a deer at 300 yards, it will still be possible to kill a person with it, possibly requiring a few modifications, but again we don’t care about legal.
If all else fails, you only need it to work once, so you can just 3D-print one. The printed plastic guns suck for reliability, but that would not be your concern.
You could even use a muzzle loader. If old enough, it will also break after a few shots, but you only need one and those old percussion things are freely sold as affordable antiques, are quite reliable and don’t even require factory-made ammunition.
Someone mentioned effectiveness of guns for suicide above and claim it around 80%. This figure is because a lot of young and healthy people try it. If you’re old and sick, the damage needed to push you over the edge is a lot less, so you can expect a near 100% success rate.
In short, if you want to kill yourself with a ball of lead propelled through a tube, I don’t see how anyone could stop you with legislation even if they tried.
There are many countries where guns are effectively outlawed, and exactly zero where you can’t get hold of one in a week or so if you’re willing to spend some cash,
Try it in Japan sometime, let me know how it works for you. Or in Prague; Anders Breivik couldn’t manage to buy an illegal gun there, and he’d been planning for years. Buying an illegal firearm on the black market requires money, time, and connections. In the real world, you don’t get to make those connections from scratch in a week, and you don’t get to make them ever without at least some risk of winding up locked away in a place where they don’t let you commit suicide.
hell a friend of mine made a Stengun in his garage over a weekend.
Ah, so you’re talking about potential suicide methods for one of Heinlein’s omnicompetent heroes. I think the question was about potential suicide methods for potentially infirm old men and women with no particular skills or experience.
Good point – it’s hard for a regular citizen, who isn’t a petty criminal of some sort with all sorts of shady friends, to obtain a firearm illegally in most western states. So a gun ban makes it harder for would-be mass murderers to get guns, provided they come from an otherwise upstanding demographic. Not so much the people who are already criminal and have the connections to procure illegal wares.
@ Anonymous
So a gun ban makes it harder for would-be mass murderers to get guns, provided they come from an otherwise upstanding demographic.
Particularly if the seller could go to jail for selling a gun that later gets used at a NECAR*, or for not immediately reporting that a NECAR-nut type had tried to buy one.
That is, make “young male loser on mental health watch” a no-buy mark on the regular background check, and add “Seller, if a background check reports this mark, get the would-be buyer’s current photo/address/lic plate etc and report him before he gets one elsewhere.”
* Newtown/EliotRodger/Columbine/Aurora/Roseburg
John Schilling says:Ah, so you’re talking about potential suicide methods for one of Heinlein’s omnicompetent heroes.
I think that you are seriously over-estimating the difficulty of manufacturing a sten gun (never mind a simple musket or breech-loader). Its well within the capabilities of anyone with an internet connection and a few hours of shop class.
The ammo is a bit tricker, but loose rounds are easier to come by than guns and there’s already a sizable subculture built up around making one’s own ammo.
Good point,
My own biases had me focused on making a “proper gun” improvised firearms like the “Four-Winds”, liberator, or a simple “bang stick” would naturally be even easier.
From gwern’s survey of darknet-market arrests, it looks the police generally prefer to go after sellers rather than buyers, but w/re guns specifically about 75% of the arrests were of buyers. Often due to sting operations; when the police do bust an online gun seller, they may keep his account running for a few months to haul in a batch of customers as well. And many of the darknet sites have taken to categorically refusing gun sales offers.
I think I would put reliably securing a darknet gun as the sort of thing that would require more than a week of research and trust-building, for anyone not already a regular darknet user.
A rather technical question – can you use formatting commands like bold or italics here in the comments? If so, how? I tried [i] [/i], which apparently does not work. Thanks.
You can use a subset of HTML. So use angle brackets rather than square ones.
I see ,
Don’t overdo it, though, otherwise you might end up like John Sidles!
That sounds like something parents say to convince their children to behave.
Angle brackets work.
Scott, could you please add Living By the Sword and Meditations on Moloch to the whale metaphor tag? Currently it only contains the Categories post.
Maybe also add Metaphors Be With You, although that would be stretching it.
Let’s create god and let it kill us, I say! What do you find so charming about humanity, anyway? Ignore your pathetic drive to propagate your genes. The age of evolution is nearly over — immortality and self-modification are superior in every way.
Just get it over with.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re getting at, but I will say I find the lack of interest and even antipathy towards goals of people like Aubrey de Grey both perplexing and, at times, even outright infuriating.
This is coming from someone who can be kind of “culturally conservative,” and who thinks most medical interventions do more harm than good… but there’s also no denying that aging is the number one cause of death and that almost everyone wants to not die… so why don’t we work harder on fixing it?
Sour grapes.
Death from aging was for all of human history inevitable. One way to comfort yourself in the knowledge of the unattainability of a really great thing is to say that it would actually be terrible.
Now, this is self-perpetuating. Even if an indefinite lifespan is now or soon will be attainable, all the existing cultural forces are aligned against it.
I think it’s actually the opposite. From an aggregate utility perspective, it seems to me there’s no obvious reason to consider fewer, longer lives to entail more utility than more, shorter lives. There are events that only occur once per life which have negative utility, such as death – but there are also similar events which have positive utility, such as the joy of discovering something for the first time.
On the other hand, people who aren’t alive yet don’t get a say, and people who are alive mostly don’t want to die, so it seems to me that infinite life extension technologies will be created and used no matter whether their impact is positive or negative.
I don’t understand what you mean by “it’s actually the opposite”. Because nothing of what you say is strictly in contradiction to anything I said.
Anyway, I never addressed whether it would increase aggregate utility. I don’t know whether it would, and I don’t really care. I think it would increase my utility, as well as that of every person I am ever going to have a personal relationship with.
What you were saying seemed to be roughly “life extension is a good thing, but people aren’t going to want it”. My take on this issue is roughly “I don’t know whether life extension is a good thing, but people are going to want it regardless”.
Not a total disagreement when you look at the details, it’s just the summary of my thoughts looks kinda sorta like the reverse of the summary of yours. Sorry for being unclear.
I think you’re right it will probably eventually happen one way or the other, but people alive right now have a strong interest in fighting cultural forces which threaten to slow its arrival, since they could make the difference in whether or not they arrive in time for us.
Yeah, I think there is a definite sour grapes element to it which has been reinforced again and again by the culture: in many movies where the bad guy attempts to achieve immortality, we get a teachable moment to the effect of “death is what reminds us to cherish every moment,” etc.
Confirms my view that STTNG (as much as I love it) is a surprisingly conservative (in an epistemological sense) show in many, many ways (notice how episode after episode they conclude that they can’t mess with alien cultures, can’t judge, etc.)
You would like this essay by Timothy Sandefur: “How Star Trek Explains the Decline of Liberalism”.
He’s a great guy to read in general, if you’re interested in political-legal theory and the interpretation of the Constitution.
Thanks, I really enjoyed that one.
You say that when talking about abstracts, but I doubt you really believe such things in your own life, else you would be willing to murder friends and family, to kill yourself, or to intentionally thwart your own goals and aspirations and desires in other ways.
The god you create will have no more reason to respect its own desires than you yourself do. If an intrinsic drive and sense of purposeful motivation aren’t enough for you, building god or destroying the human race can do you no possible good. Don’t fetishize the immanetization of the eschaton, it will only make your unhappiness worse.
From “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
@ scott. You wrote: Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas says he turned down a peace plan in 2008 because the Israelis demanded an on-the-spot decision from him and wouldn’t even let him show the plan to his advisors first. Now he is reduced to drawing the proposed border from memory because Israel wouldn’t let him keep the map. Really, Israelis? Really?
My response is Really, Scott? You don’t seem to know much about Israel and the Palestinians. You avoid most every other, much more pressing topics on the Middle East, such as the genocide of Christians, or Obama handing the greatest terror supporting state on the globe $150 Billion dollars…but Israel makes a steady appearance.
Although it’s not really Israel, it’s a steady appearance of hostile, even nasty, jabs at Israel.
Your last post adopts/implies that Israel has not offered sincere peace plans to the Palestinians, with Olmert as the straw man. (I wonder where you picked up this little nugget.) If you believe that, you should say so directly and try to justify it. You would be flying in the face of the direct testimony and documentation of President Clinton and his negotiators, and all the other fully reported times that the Palestinians have been offered a state and turned it down.
I propose that the Palestinian leaders have made it perfectly clear over and over (is it four times they have turned down a state of their own?) they do not want their own country if the deal does not give them Israel as well.
Gaza was a test, a test you have failed to grasp. Before that the Oslo Accords were the definitive demonstration.
So I repeat, Really, Scott? What is your problem with Israel? Do you think it is a bad actor, a colonial power, an oppressor, a source of shame and dismay to you personally? Please be more forthright and stop this steady drip of baseless nastygrams .
@ Scott. I googled your post > Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas says he turned down a peace plan in 2008 because the Israelis demanded an on-the-spot decision from him<. I just read the source of the story at http://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-admits-he-rejected-2008-peace-offer-from-olmert/.
The whole point of this report on a 2008 offer to Abbas is that Olmert made unbelievable concessions – including Israel giving up control of the Old City of Jerusalem, the most extreme Israeli abasement and perfidy I have heard of…and your take-away was to criticize Olmert , not to criticize Abbas for walking away? You needed someone to explain the very obvious import of the story to you?
Yet despite your obvious near total ignorance of the history of PA negotiations, which puts Abbas refusal of the deal of the century in line with Arafats refusal of the deal of the century and the previous PA refusal of the deal of the century, you rush to post criticisms of Israel.
Why Scott? What is going on with you? You are not like this with any other topic I can think of.
It is interesting to call Scott ignorant on the history of PA negociations and in the same post to claim that Arafat refused a “deal of century” where the Palestinian state would have gotten no control over its airspace, no control over its borders, no control over its water ressources, no right to an army, and control over only 86% of the West Bank, which would have been cut by a thin strip of Israeli-controlled territory going from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley.
Especially since Arafat did not, in fact, refused this deal, and stayed at the negociation table until the very end, in late January 2001, when it was Ehud Barak who broke off the talks.
Your critique is a mix of misinformation, some of it gross propaganda, and a death wish for Israel. The account of Oslo by President Clinton and Dennis Ross flatly contradicts your assertions. There are many sources of very poor information on this issue.
As for your wish list, there are very good reasons some of those provisions have never been and for the foreseeable future will not be on the negotiating table. Israel, America and all responsible parties hope for an approximately civilized PA state. It cannot be fully armed as long as it is dominated by terrorists, its moderates living in fear for their lives, or it would be a Gaza or Isis style nightmare for everyone. That you wish for the fantasy of an armed and unfettered PA state speaks volumes, but has nothing to do with geopolitical realities.
So in other words, the above “mix of misinformation, some of it gross propaganda” is all true, and would have been the only possible solution acceptable for Israel (since apparently Israeli state and society are so frail and vulnerable that each and every Palestinian demand, no matter how small or reasonable, is an unacceptable death threat for Israel); but it would have been “deal of the century” for Parlestinians to get a state which would have had only nominal sovereignty.
Faced with a simple allegation that Israel diplomats, at some point in their history, proposed a peace deal without letting time for their interlocutor to ponder the deal, demanding an immediate answer, we get two kinds of reaction:
Those who note that this makes sense strategically and is nothing unusual in the domain of diplomatic negotiations when one side is much more powerful than the other — Turkish diplomats pulled exactly the same stunt to Cyprus during the negotiations that were supposed to resolve the Cyprus crisis; they gave Cypriot diplomats a proposal which would have preserved the territorial integrity of Cyprus as a single state but would have given disproportionate territory and power to Turkish Cypriots given the actual size of their community. Still, Cypriot diplomats were willing to consider the plan but demanded at least 36 hours of reflexion, while the Turks wanted an immediate answer — not getting it, they launched the second invasion of Cyprus and have remained there to this day.
And those who react by denial and character assassination of the people making or relaying the claims.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
@Dov. You think only an enemy of Israel would be against relinquishing Israeli control over the historic and religious heart of their capital city? It is the consensus position of a super-majority of Israelis. What are you thinking? This is totally mainstream, no brainer.
It is also universally recognized in democracies that if a PM or a President wants to make a radical, historic, change that flies in the face of a strongly held national consensus, he is expected to run on that platform openly and subject himself to the public will. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust, hence “perfidy.”
I described Ohlmert’s offer to Abbas to totally give up Israeli control of the Old City as perfidy, because Israel is not a one man state. The PM does not have the legal or moral right to make a concession of this magnitude, which reverses a deeply held and longstanding national consensus, on his own whim. Whether you, Dov, like the idea or not is immaterial. It is a betray of the limits of power in a democracy.
Calling the act of giving up the emotional and historic heart of your country “Abasement” is admittedly more subjective. I find the desperate concessions of giving away one’s own capital city to try and placate an implacable foe, while actually increasing danger to your country, to be an act of self-humiliation and self-belittlement. What nation in all of history does that?
Speaking as a therapist, I find it pathological. Speaking as a student of the geopolitics of the Arab war against Israel, I find it suicidal. So yes, as a friend of Israel I feel it is a well chosen word.
I am a staunch friend of Israel and a staunch believer in democracy. I stand by my comments – it is wrong for a politician to subvert the public trust by making extreme and non-consensus concessions to a dangerous adversary.
I read Ben Dov’s comment as referring to Olmert as the enemy.
Also, while I agree with a lot of what you said here, starting a sentence with “speaking as a therapist” does a lot to undermine your credibility.
I think there is another point here, which is Mahmoud Abbas is, like most politicians, well known to be a liar. The web site “elderofziyon.blogspot.com” has documented many of his whoppers.
That someone would just accept a self-serving and uncorroborated claim by Abbas without any skepticism indicates that the person is extremely biased.
The bigger point is that the Palestinian Arabs will NEVER accept any statehood deal proposed by Israel.
First, their goal is not and never has been to have their own state. Their goal is to put an end to the Jewish state. Before 1967, all of the land they claim to want for their state was occupied by Egypt and Jordan. Did they push Egypt and Jordan to stop their “occupation of Palestine”? Of course not. They focused their energies on attacking Jewish Israel. Even though there were no “West Bank Settlements” at the time. And even though they had successfully ethnically cleansed most of Jerusalem of Jews.
Second, the Palestinian Arabs will never agree to making any concessions. What concessions have they ever offered, aside from a respite from their incessant terrorism? None whatsoever. How is there ever going to be a deal when the less powerful side refuses to make any concessions and is primarily interested in annihilating the other side?
There won’t be. For there to be a deal, the Palestinian Arabs need to radically change their attitudes and unjustified attacks on Israel will not help.
Our side is a complicated assortment of different people. All except for a few bad apples are good people of course, but with very different points of view based on reasonable responses to things they have gone through. And the mix is changing over time in reaction to events and as new generations are born.
The other guys though, they are a unitary mass of undifferentiated evil with a continuous single minded goal across generations.
There’s a difference between “every individual living there is evil” and “the people leading the other side are evil”. Nobody who says “the Palestinians” want to destroy Israel literally means that every single individual there wants to destroy Israel, just that it’s the policy of their leaders and much of the public–and government-like organizations can have policies, you know, it’s not calling them an undifferentiated mass to claim they have a policy.
“There’s a difference between ‘every individual living there is evil’ and “the people leading the other side are evil”. ”
Yes there’s a difference, but in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, there is overwhelming support for the idea that Israel should stop existing as a Jewish state.
For example, you can read about it here:
elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2011/07/details-from-poll-of-palestinian-arabs.html
Israel has a permanent right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people – 7%
Over time Palestinians must work to get back all the land for a Palestinian state – 84%
I can accept permanently a two-state solution with one a homeland for the Palestinian people living side-by-side with Israel, a homeland for the Jewish people. – 30%
The real goal should to start with a two state solution but then move to it all being one Palestinian state – 66%
________
Whether or not you call that “evil,” if you want to understand the peace negotiations, you need to understand these critical facts. As a group, the Palestinian Arabs do not want their own state so much as they want to put an end to Jewish Israel.
“The other guys though, they are a unitary mass of undifferentiated evil with a continuous single minded goal across generations.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s important to keep in mind a couple things:
First, there is a huge moral gap between the Israelis and the Arabs who oppose them. You can read about it here, for example:
http://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/why-dont-i-criticize-israel
Second, it is reasonably clear that the Palestinian Arabs have not changed much over the years from their dream of putting an end to Jewish Israel. You can see this from their refusal, as a group, to offer citizenship in the “State of Palestine” to Palestinian Arabs living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, or even in refugee camps in Judea and Samaria.
There really is a big difference between the two sides and if you can’t see it, you have no hope of understanding the situation.
There has been numerous peace proposals coming from the Arab side; there was a Saudi-lead peace proposal signed by every member of the Arab League (including Hussein and Assad, at the time) and positively commented on by Iran. Israel never answered.
There had been repeated proposals by Syria to recognize Israel, disarm the Hezbollah and even help Lebanon fight them if Israel gave back the Golan heights. Israel never answered.
There wasn’t a single moment where Arab leaders thought they could seriously destroy Israel — even in 1948, it was clear that the “best” they could hope for, and indeed their original strategic attempt, was to seize the territory allocated to the *Palestinians*, which is actually what they did: Egypt captured Gaza, Jordan captured the West Bank, and Syria tried but failed to capture Galilee.
Even in 1948, Israeli armies were more numerous than all opposing Arab armies put together, they were better trained, better lead and better armed. And since them the gap has only widened, as Israel has been continuously receiving billion of dollars of aid and weapons from the US, and has acquired chemical and nuclear weapons. There is virtually no existencial threat to Israel today.
“There has been numerous peace proposals coming from the Arab side; there was a Saudi-lead peace proposal signed by every member of the Arab League (including Hussein and Assad, at the time) and positively commented on by Iran.”
Would that “peace proposal” have resulted in Israel continuing to exist as a Jewish state? I am skeptical, but I would be interested in hearing the details.
“There wasn’t a single moment where Arab leaders thought they could seriously destroy Israel — even in 1948, it was clear that the “best” they could hope for, and indeed their original strategic attempt, was to seize the territory allocated to the *Palestinians*”
If that’s so, then why didn’t the Arabs simply accept the Partition Plan at the time? The Jews did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative
In summary: the Arab states would have recognized Israel, normalized their relation with them, in exchange of what Israel would withdraw from all occupied territories, recognize a Palestinian State, and find a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee question; this was not an all-or-nothing deal, the Saudi clearly presented it as a basis for negotiations. To make sure that the Israeli public was aware of the proposal, they even had it translated into Hebrew and published in a couple of Israeli newspaper (if you read Hebrew, here’s a copy of the original ad: http://www.isracast.com/images/BigImages/261108ad_b.jpg )
As for why the Arab states originally refused to recognized Israel, again, it had to do with the opportunity to grab Palestinian land to calm discontent at home — this means that in this version of the narrative, Egypt, Jordan and Syria *still* bear the responsability of starting the war of 48, but their motif for action was a lot more opportunistic and realistic than trying “to throw the Jews back to the sea”, which they knew was a militarily unattainable goal — even if they did use that rhetoric in public speeches.
Although Israel, while it initially had the moral high ground, pretty much behaved like the Arab states during the war, taking it as an opportunity to grab as much Palestinian land as possible.
“In summary: the Arab states would have recognized Israel, normalized their relation with them, in exchange of what Israel would withdraw from all occupied territories, recognize a Palestinian State, and find a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee question;”
I looked at the Wikipedia page you linked to and found this:
“any refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be able to do so or”
As a practical matter, what this means is that any descendant of any Arab who fled Israel in 1948 (or 1967) would have the right to “return.” Which means the end of Israel as a Jewish state due to simple demographics and mathematics.
Okay, so the Arabs made a peace proposal which entails the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This is not inconsistent with anything I have stated.
“As for why the Arab states originally refused to recognized Israel, again”
That’s not an answer to my question. I asked why the Arabs (as a group) did not accept the Partition Plan. If all they wanted was control over the land allocated for an Arab state, the obvious thing to do would have been to accept the Partition Plan.
“opportunity to grab as much Palestinian land as possible.”
So that I can understand and respond to this comment, would you mind defining what you mean by “Palestinian land”? I would like to know the boundaries of “Palestinian land” and how it came to be “Palestinian land.”
For example, does “Palestinian land” include Gaza City, Hebron, and Jerusalem? If so, when did they become “Palestinian land”? Before or after Jews were ethnically cleansed from these areas in the 1930s and 1940s?
Also, is there such thing as “Jewish land” anywhere?
… and find a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee question
Isn’t that kind of like “…and then a miracle occurs?” Admittedly, you’re in the right place of the world for that sort of thing.
Pragmatically, I don’t think the Palestinians fit in Palestine any more, with or without Israelis as neighbors. Like the Irish diaspora, they’ve outgrown their homeland and even kicking out the colonial invaders won’t change that.
Cynically, I think the solution space the Arab world would accept as “just” encompasses mostly scenarios where the West Bank and Gaza strip are explicitly Palestinian, Arab, Muslim states while Israel is a democracy populated mostly by Arab Palestinian Muslims. And maybe a few cases where the Israelis cough up a trillion or two dollars in reparations or relocation assistance or whatever, mostly to be collected by the governments of existing Arab nations.
“Isn’t that kind of like ‘…and then a miracle occurs?’ ”
Yes, but only if you accept that the Arabs are fundamentally different from the Jews in terms of their attitudes. In the 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Jews were ethnically cleansed from Iraq, North Africa, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Israel absorbed almost all of them and made them productive citizens right along with Jewish refugees from Europe.
By contrast, Arab countries like Lebanon and Syria refuse to absorb “Palestinians.” Even the “State of Palestine” refuses to offer citizenship to “Palestinians” living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, or even in Judea and Samaria. If the Arabs started caring about their own people more than wanting to put an end to Jewish Israel, then the refugee problem could be fixed overnight. Yes, it might take a miracle for such an attitude change to take place, but this observation is not very flattering for Arabs.
“Pragmatically, I don’t think the Palestinians fit in Palestine any more, with or without Israelis as neighbors”
There was never a group of Arabs known as “Palestinians” until it became convenient to identify such a group for the purpose of attacking Israel. There is no Palestinian language, there is no Palestinian culture, there was never a Palestinian state. Until the latter half of the last century, they were simply referred to by themselves and others as “Arabs.”
Indeed, a lot of the “Palestinians” are descendants from Arabs who moved to the area at the same time the Zionists started coming in in the late part of the 19th century. That’s why a lot of “Palestinians” have names like “Masri” which literally means “Egypt.”
There is a distinction between “Arabs” and “Arab states”. The Arab *states* refused to recognize the partition, because it was an opportunity to seize land that should have been used to create an independent Palestinian state — the Arabs states effectively prevented the creation of a Palestinian state, for their own benefit — the Arab *street* has nothing to do with that.
The claims about the non-existence of Palestinian identity/culture are 1) non-sensical — all that a national identity needs to exist is the shared belief by its would-be members that it exists, 2) double edged, since as much can be said of the united Jewish culture, which was largely created out of scrap when Israel is created, out of a patchwork populations who didn’t have the same native languages, didn’t have the same cultural background at all, didn’t belong to the same ethnic groups, and didn’t even have the same religion (there were atheists, rabbinic Jews, Keraites, Haymanots, Samaritans…), 3) not even seen as valid by Israeli historians, who have recognized the reality of the Palestinian people, of the Naqba and deconstructed the funding myths of Israel since at least 80s.
As for the Arab peace proposal, the crucial point, again, is that it was intented as a basis for negociation, not as take-it-or-leave-it-deal. Why would *considering* the deal somehow imply the end of Israel? Again, is Israel so delicate and brittle that even seating at a negotiation table where the question of the prejudice commited against Palestinians in 1948 will merely be *discussed* qualifies as an existential threat?
We live in a strange world where pretty much everyone realises that Israel is the most powerful state in the Middle-East, the one with the best prospects of survival in its current form in the long run — *except* Israel apologists who still seem to believe that Israel’s existence is somehow “at stake” and that it could disappear overnight at any moment if vigilance is relinquished even for a second — but sure, the continuous faillure of the peace process is entirely the Arabs’ fault…
“There is a distinction between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Arab states’. The Arab *states* refused to recognize the partition,”
It wasn’t just the “Arab States” which refused to accept the Partition Plan. It was the Arabs in general as a group.
“The claims about the non-existence of Palestinian identity/culture are 1) non-sensical — all that a national identity needs to exist is the shared belief by its would-be members that it exists, 2) double edged, since as much can be said of the united Jewish culture,”
No, there is a critical difference. The “Palestinian” identity was primarily created for the purposes of undermining Jewish Israel.
“As for the Arab peace proposal, the crucial point, again, is that it was intented as a basis for negociation, not as take-it-or-leave-it-deal. Why would *considering* the deal somehow imply the end of Israel? ”
Who says it would? My position is that the Arabs don’t actually want a Palestinian State; they just want there not to be a Jewish state in the area. The fact that the Arabs offered a deal which would have put an end to Jewish Israel does not undermine my position in the slightest and in fact bolsters it.
” Israel apologists who still seem to believe that Israel’s existence is somehow “at stake” and that it could disappear overnight at any moment if vigilance is relinquished even for a second — ”
I think that’s a bit of a strawman. The reality is that the Arabs — as a group — really do want to put an end to Jewish Israel. This was true in 1948 and it is true today. There will not be peace until and unless they give up this dream.
“the continuous faillure of the peace process is entirely the Arabs’ fault…”
100% their fault for the same reasons I discussed above. If their goal were really to have a state and self-determination, there would be room for some kind of deal. But their goal is for there not to be a Jewish State.
Anyway, please answer my questions:
1. Do you agree that the Arabs (as a group) rejected the Partition Plan?
2. Would mind defining what you mean by “Palestinian land”? I would like to know the boundaries of “Palestinian land” and how it came to be “Palestinian land.”
For example, does “Palestinian land” include Gaza City, Hebron, and Jerusalem? If so, when did they become “Palestinian land”? Before or after Jews were ethnically cleansed from these areas in the 1930s and 1940s?
3. Also, is there such thing as “Jewish land” anywhere?
“No, there is a critical difference. The “Palestinian” identity was primarily created for the purposes of undermining Jewish Israel.”
This borders on conspiracy theory, but asides from that it’s again double-eged, since you can make a mirror argument that the Jewish identity was created out of thin air in the 19th century, to justify the colonization of Palestine by German and Slav settlers. Every libellous, denigrating claim about Palestinian identity can be met with an equally libellous, denigrating claim about Jewish identity. Or maybe it is possible to have a debate as rational individuals without either side trying to prove that the other side’s People doesn’t actually exist.
“The fact that the Arabs offered a deal which would have put an end to Jewish Israel does not undermine my position in the slightest and in fact bolsters it.”
This peace proposal implies no such thing. The refugee question could be settled financially, or even symbolically — it could even be an occasion for Israel to negociate a mutual excuse/settlement for the expulsion of the Jews of the Arab world. This wasn’t an ultimatum, this was a call for negotiations, to which Israel could have brought their own demands and where they would have been in a strong position to have them met. That they even refused to seat at the negotiation table in this situation is clearly not indicative of wanting peace.
“The reality is that the Arabs — as a group — really do want to put an end to Jewish Israel. This was true in 1948 and it is true today. There will not be peace until and unless they give up this dream.”
“The reality is that the Jews — as a group — really do want to build a greater Israel encompassing all of Palestine. This was true in 1948 and it is true today. There will not be peace until and unless they give up this dream.”
Conspiracy theories and double-eged blanket statements, second edition.
“100% their fault for the same reasons I discussed above. If their goal were really to have a state and self-determination, there would be room for some kind of deal. But their goal is for there not to be a Jewish State. ”
Can we start making rational arguments based on facts, instead of impugning motives to an entire race? That would be refreshing.
Less blame shifting and a little self-examination would also be appreciated — starting by recognizing the fact that numerous Israeli actions do in fact participate to hinder the peace process and to alienate their neighbours (from the continuous illegal colonization of the West Bank to the disastrously botched campaigns against the Hezbollah in Lebanon, from the refusal to negotiate with Syria over the question of the Golan Heights, to undiscriminate air-raids over Gaza which kill thousands of civilians without actually making Hamas move back an inch). The blame is *shared*, this is a basic fact — those who cannot recognize even this have no standing in a discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“1. Do you agree that the Arabs (as a group) rejected the Partition Plan?”
If we agree that “as a group” means “a majority of” and not “all of them, as a hive mind”, yes, of course. Which is *perfectly legitimate*, given that the “partition plan” effectively amounted to steal half of an Arab province to give it to European settlers who claimed their ancestors lived there two thousand years ago. Why would *anyone* accept that deal?
Question 2 is not interesting — everyone who is involved in the peace talks agrees that the Palestinian claim is, at most, over the land comprised inside the so called 1967 borders, that is, the land which is not legally recognized as of part of Israel right now — and even that is negociable in the direction of relinquishing even more land to Israel — many now consider that the colonies in the West Bank are de-facto unremovable, and that a peace settlement will have to let those to Israel and compensate the Palestinians somehow.
Question 3 is too vague — what is “Jewish land” supposed to mean. There is, de facto, an Israeli people and an Israeli land, which is here to stay, because even if the Arab world was conspirating to destroy Israel (they aren’t — they have large a number of much more pressing problems which one can hear about by turning on the news), it would not be doable anyway.
You could, but it would be wrong. It’s not as if Jews are an illiterate people who never left any words from before Israel existed, that said such things as “next year in Jerusalem”.
Creationists and evolutionists often say similar-sounding things about how the other one isn’t open-minded, is ignoring scientific principles, etc. But only one is correct. Argument by grammatical similarity is not a valid argument.
The point is not whether is true or not, the point is that defamatory statements about an entire nation that serve only to heat the discussion can always be met with equally defamatory statements in the opposite direction — the point is those kind of statements do not advance the discussion and should be avoided.
Especially since the Jewish national identity *was in fact* created in the 19th century — as most other national identities were, because that’s when nationalism and nations emerged as a concept; there is no Jewish nation (and no French nation, no German nation, no American nation, no Palestinian nation, yes) before that point.
It can reasonably be argued that the Palestinian nation created/became aware of itself in reaction to zionism — but this can just as well be spunned as a defensive reaction when suddenly faced with dozens of thousands of foreigners coming from Germany, Poland and Russia to settle on your land, claiming to have an ancestral right to it.
Arguments that the Palestinian identity doesn’t exist are confusing the label and the substance — even if they didn’t call themself Palestinians, there were Arabs living in Palestine before Zionism, consituting a large majority of the population until 1948.
“This borders on conspiracy theory,”
It’s still true. Here’s a quote from a PLO official back in the 70s:
“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity…. yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”
“you can make a mirror argument that the Jewish identity was created out of thin air in the 19th century,”
You can make the argument, but you would be wrong. Jewish identity predates modern Zionism by thousands of years.
“This peace proposal implies no such thing. ”
What are you talking about? I quoted directly from the Wikipedia page that you yourself linked to:
“any refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be able to do so”
The word “refugees” is commonly used to include anyone descended from any Arab who fled from what is now Israel.
“This wasn’t an ultimatum, this was a call for negotiations”
Assuming that’s true, so what? Does that contradict anything I have said?
“The reality is that the Jews — as a group — really do want to build a greater Israel encompassing all of Palestine. ”
1. What is your definition of “Palestine”? Where are its boundaries? Does it include Gaza? If so, how do you explain the fact that the Jews — as a group — unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and dismantled all of the Jewish settlements there?
2. What is your evidence for your claim?
“Can we start making rational arguments based on facts, instead of impugning motives to an entire race? ”
That’s an interesting dichotomy. I’ve supplied (some of) the facts to back up my claims. Let’s see you do the same thing for yours.
“rom the continuous illegal colonization of the West Bank to the disastrously botched campaigns against the Hezbollah in Lebanon, from the refusal to negotiate with Syria over the question of the Golan Heights, to undiscriminate air-raids over Gaza which kill thousands of civilians without actually making Hamas move back an inch”
This is all nonsense, but let’s start with the most outrageous of your claims — that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids over Gaza. What is your evidence for this claim?
” The blame is *shared*, this is a basic fact — those who cannot recognize even this have no standing in a discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
This is just the “you guys cut it out fallacy” where a bully and his victim are both blamed for a conflict. But again, let’s start with your most outrageous claim. Show me evidence that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids over Gaza.
“If we agree that ‘as a group’ means ‘a majority of’ and not ‘all of them, as a hive min’, yes, of course.”
Ok, then again my question: If the Arab goal in the 1948 war was simply to secure the land they would have received under the Partition Plan, then why did they reject the same Partition Plan?
“Which is *perfectly legitimate*, given that the ‘partition plan’ effectively amounted to steal half of an Arab province to give it to European settlers who claimed their ancestors lived there two thousand years ago. Why would *anyone* accept that deal?”
Thank you for proving my point. You have demonstrated *exactly* why there will not be peace until the Arabs change their attitude. In their view, the entire area is their property as a group and therefore their main goal is to regain what they perceive as stolen property.
“Question 2 is not interesting ”
It may not be interesting to you, but you used the phrase “Palestinian land” and I would like to understand what you mean by that phrase. Are you refusing to define the phrase?
“It’s still true. Here’s a quote from a PLO official back in the 70s:”
Except that since then, the PLO has renounced that kind of rhetorics, and Arafat has personally recognized Israel’s right to exist.
“You can make the argument, but you would be wrong. Jewish identity predates modern Zionism by thousands of years.”
No; Jewish religion does; there was no Jewish *national identity* before the 19th century; Jewish religion before the 19th century was shared between groups of people who lived all over the world, spoke a multitude of different languages, had more in common culturally and ethnically with the societies they lived in than with each other — and it wasn’t even a united religion, since Rabbinic Jews and Keraites see each other as heretics. The whole concept of a Jewish national identity and of a Jewish race was invented by German Volkism, which defined nationality in terms of blood lineage — a concept which then embraced wholesale by Jewish German intellectuals of the time.
“What are you talking about? I quoted directly from the Wikipedia page that you yourself linked to: […]
“This wasn’t an ultimatum, this was a call for negotiations”
Assuming that’s true, so what? Does that contradict anything I have said?”
Logic is hard!
The peace proposal is the basis for negotiation. The peace proposal includes the question of the refugees. *Therefore*, the question of the refugees could have been *negotiated*, therefore there is no threat or absolute exigence that Israel take in 5 million+ Palestinian refugees; what is to do with the refugee could have been negotiated.
“1. What is your definition of “Palestine”? Where are its boundaries?”
Palestine is the territory comprised within the borders of mandatory Palestine — although the concept of a greater Israel at a time also included further territory (such as the Sinai).
“2. What is your evidence for your claim?”
“Ben-Gurion laid out his vision of what the borders of Israel would look like in a coauthored book that was written in Yiddish and published in the United-States in 1918. In addition to what is today Israel, Ben-Gurion’s vision included the Occupied Territories, Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, part of Southern Syria, a large part of Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula” [Morris, “Righteous Victims”, 75]
Ben-Gurion only accepted the partition as a first step to consolidate Israel position before future conquests; the land grabs of 67 and the continued colonization of the West Bank and evictions of Palestinians from the region is concrete evidence of this.
But all of this is irrelevant: the point was that this kind of character assassination targeted at a whole population doesn’t actually help the debate and should be avoided <<< this is the important point, here, this paragraph, these word, the ones that should be quoted and answered to rather than ignored — it is seemingly necessary to make this more explicit due to apparent reading comprehension problems.
"This is all nonsense, but let’s start with the most outrageous of your claims — that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids over Gaza. What is your evidence for this claim? "
Those are the facts that are corroborated by multiple independent NGOs, by international observers, by testimonies from Israeli official and Israeli soldiers themself — a faillure to aknowledge basic fact about the contestable and clumsy nature of Israeli operations fall into the realm of negationism.
Each time Israel intervenes in Gaza, there are thousands of killed civilians. When the Israli army last retreated from Lebanon, soliers were given order to empty all their ammunitions, in order to leave as many unexploded ordinances as possible. thr IDF have used and keep using white phosphorus and cluster bombs in heavily populated civilian areas, in defiance of both international law and of the conditions to which the US sold them this material. The IDF has used Palestinians as human shields. All of this has been extensively documented by human right organizatiosn, both international ones lihe Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and Israeli ones like B'Tselem.
"This is just the “you guys cut it out fallacy” where a bully and his victim are both blamed for a conflict."
Given that the bully is Israel by all serious accounts, saying that the blame is shared is actually a pretty generous position *toward Israel*.
"Ok, then again my question: If the Arab goal in the 1948 war was simply to secure the land they would have received under the Partition Plan, then why did they reject the same Partition Plan?"
This has been already explained quite clearly — this discussion will promptly end if it has to be explained again, as this will be taken as evidence of bad faith arguing and intentionally dishonnest reading — the people who wanted to seize land in 1948 were the *governments* of Syria, Jordan and Egypt; they wanted to seize the land that had been attributed *to the Palestinian state*. They refused the partition plan *to prevent the Palestinian state from being created*, as an excuse to go to war and seize this land.
"Thank you for proving my point. You have demonstrated *exactly* why there will not be peace until the Arabs change their attitude. In their view, the entire area is their property as a group and therefore their main goal is to regain what they perceive as stolen property."
This is a non-sequitur. The question was about whether Arabs opposed partition. Of course they did. But it doesn't matter now, Israel exists, it's a fait accompli, it's not going anywhere. There's plenty of evidence that the Arabs want peace, if anything because many Arabs states would rather deal with other problems than Israel — it's not an accident that the aforementionned peace initiative was Saudi-lead; the Saudi's desire is to get into a much closer alliance with the US to face their real enemy: Iran. But as long as the US are an unconditional support of Israel, and as long as Israel is positionned as "the enemy" of the Arab world, they can't do that.
There is however no evidence that Israel has ever wanted peace: they are the most powerful in the Middle-East, they are backed by the most powerful state in the world — they are in position to negotiate a highly favorable peace settlement for themself with just about anyone. They had dozens of opportunities to do so, and have almost constantly sabotaged them.
The level of denial and blame-shifting in which its apologists engage is not fit for a rational discussion on this blog.
By this reasoning one should avoid claiming that creationists are ignoring evidence, being dishonest, etc.
I’m pretty sure “next year in Jerusalem” is a few hundred years older than that. I would agree that secular Jewish national identity was created in the 19th century, but while that is literally true, the implications for which it is normally used are inaccurate.
One can adress problems within creationist logic and methodology and debunk creationist arguments and thesis without ressorting to a constant stream of dehumanization, character assassination, ad hominem and impugning of sinister motives — which seems to be the only mood of argumentation most Israel apologists are capable of, as this thread of comments bears witness.
Though this is probably an optical effect due to the tendency for moderate defensors of Israel to be attacked as enemies of Israel whenever they try to paint a fair portrait of the situation — which does involve assigning a share of the blame to Israel — which as we have seen above, is automatically treated as anti-Israel propaganda, since in the apologist narrative, Israel is entirely blameless.
“Except that since then, the PLO has renounced that kind of rhetorics, and Arafat has personally recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
I take it you no longer dispute my point then? That there was never a group of Arabs known as “Palestinians” until it became convenient to identify such a group for the purpose of attacking Israel?
“No; Jewish religion does; there was no Jewish *national identity* before the 19th century;”
Assuming for the sake of argument that is true, it does not contradict or undermine my point in the slightest. I asserted (and you do not seem to dispute) that there was not a group known as “Palestinians” until it became convenient to identify such a group for purposes of attacking Israel. I said nothing whatsoever about national identity.
“Logic is hard!”
Indeed. So please answer my question: Does anything in your assertion contradict or undermine my position? It’s a simple yes or no question.
“The peace proposal is the basis for negotiation. The peace proposal includes the question of the refugees. *Therefore*, the question of the refugees could have been *negotiated*, therefore there is no threat or absolute exigence that Israel take in 5 million+ Palestinian refugees; what is to do with the refugee could have been negotiated.”
Again, so what? How does this contradict my position? Please just answer the question.
“Ben-Gurion only accepted the partition as a first step to consolidate Israel position before future conquests; the land grabs of 67 and the continued colonization of the West Bank and evictions of Palestinians from the region is concrete evidence of this.”
How many Palestinian Arabs have been expelled from Judea and Samaria in the last 10 years? And what do you make of the Gaza pullout and dismantling of settlements?
“But all of this is irrelevant: the point was that this kind of character assassination targeted at a whole population doesn’t actually help the debate and should be avoided”
I disagree — in this sort of discussion, the truth must come first even if it is not flattering to one side. The truth is that the Palestinian Arabs — as a group — really do want to put an end to Jewish Israel. This was true in 1948 and it is true today, as evidenced by opinion polls.
“Those are the facts that are corroborated by multiple independent NGOs, by international observers, by testimonies from Israeli official and Israeli soldiers themself — a faillure to aknowledge basic fact about the contestable and clumsy nature of Israeli operations fall into the realm of negationism.”
Please cite the specific evidence which supports your claim. Thank you.
“Each time Israel intervenes in Gaza, there are thousands of killed civilians. When the Israli army last retreated from Lebanon, soliers were given order to empty all their ammunitions, in order to leave as many unexploded ordinances as possible.”
Please provide a cite for this claim. Thank you.
“Given that the bully is Israel by all serious accounts, saying that the blame is shared is actually a pretty generous position *toward Israel*.”
Please provide specific evidence to support your position. Simply asserting conclusions is not enough. Where’s your evidence?
“This has been already explained quite clearly — this discussion will promptly end if it has to be explained again,”
No need to explain again. Your position does not make a lot of sense, but let’s see your evidence that the strategic intent of the “Arab leaders” was simply to seize the land allocated for an Arab state.
“This is a non-sequitur. The question was about whether Arabs opposed partition. ”
Yep, and you tried to change the subject to the question of whether the Arabs were morally justified in opposing the partition plan. Unwittingly helping to prove my point.
“Of course they did. But it doesn’t matter now, Israel exists, it’s a fait accompli, it’s not going anywhere.”
That’s not how your typical Palestinian Arab feels. They need to change their attitude of course if there is to be peace.
“There is however no evidence that Israel has ever wanted peace: ”
Well do you agree that Israel has made more than one peace offer? Do you agree that Israel could easily re-occupy Gaza if it wanted to? Do you agree that Israel could easily re-occupy Lebanon if it wanted to?
Anyway, I really would like to see your evidence for your claims. Also, I would like answers to my question.
Why are you refusing to define what you mean by “Palestinian land”?
It’s a simple enough question. I’m just asking you to define your terms.
“One can adress problems within creationist logic and methodology and debunk creationist arguments and thesis without ressorting to a constant stream of dehumanization, character assassination, ad hominem and impugning of sinister motives”
If by “dehumanization, character assassination, ad hominem and impugning of sinister motives,” you mean correctly observing that the Palestinian Arabs — as a group — want to put an end to Jewish Israel, then no, it’s not possible to adequately analyze the Arab/Israeli conflict without taking this into account.
It may hurt some peoples’ feelings, but much of the time you need to understand peoples’ motives in order to predict their future actions.
An example: For anyone who correctly understands the motives of the Palestinian Arabs, it was easy to predict that the Gaza pullout (and dismantling of Gaza settlements) would not improve Arab/Israeli relations.
By the way, I am still waiting for your evidence that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids over Gaza. If some NGO says it is so, then I want to see the evidence for the NGO’s claim. If you don’t have evidence, please just admit it. Because it looks to me like you are engaging in the *exact* impugning of sinister motives of which you complain.
The complete lack of reading ability and of intellectual honesty from the above Israel apologist having been demonstrated several times, this discussion has to end here.
Israel-Palestine debates of course rarely change anyone’s mind, but they do have the merit to plainly show that the main obstacle to peace are pro-Israeli hawks and their painfully racist, obsessional anti-arab rhetorics.
If there’s a more effective debating technique than declaring victory and withdrawing, I’d like to know what it is!
It’s like dropping the mic after peeing your pants.
“If there’s a more effective debating technique than declaring victory and withdrawing, I’d like to know what it is!”
Throwing in an accusation of racism might help. And indeed, this “Machine Interface” person did not forget that part of the playbook.
“The complete lack of reading ability and of intellectual honesty from the above Israel apologist having been demonstrated several times, this discussion has to end here.”
Lol, I take it that means you are unable to provide any actual evidence for your claims that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids in Gaza or intentionally leaves unexploded ordinance in Gaza.
The funny thing is that in addition to being a liar/bullshitter, you are also a hypocrite. According to you, one should not “impugn sinister motives” And yet you do exactly that with Israel.
And that’s not your only set of double standards. According to you, the fact that there was an Arab peace proposal is strong evidence that the Arabs want peace with Israel. Israel, of course, has made peace proposals. So naturally you also believe that Israel wants peace. Right? Wrong. According to you, “There is however no evidence that Israel has ever wanted peace:”
It’s also funny that you, with your blatant double-standards, would accuse anyone of racism.
“this discussion has to end here”
Goodbye.
Thus speaks someone who believes that 100% of the blame of the Israel-Palestine conflict belongs to Arabs (all Arabs, collectively).
“Thus speaks someone who believes that 100% of the blame of the Israel-Palestine conflict belongs to Arabs (all Arabs, collectively).”
Actually what I said is that the Arab side is 100% to blame for the failure of the peace process. I would ask you not to twist my words, but I realize it’s pretty much hopeless.
Anyway, even if your tu quoque were correct, it wouldn’t affect your dishonesty and hypocrisy.
“Even in 1948, Israeli armies were more numerous than all opposing Arab armies put together, they were better trained, better lead and better armed. ”
Israeli had local superiority, not absolute superiority in numbers; they had more men on the front, but less soldiers overall (since the arab states held back a substantial part of their militaries).
They were not better armed or better trained; Jordon for instance was supplied and trained by the UK.
They were better lead; IDF troops had previously served in world war 2 and had combat experience while their enemies didn’t.
“And since them the gap has only widened, as Israel has been continuously receiving billion of dollars of aid and weapons from the US, ”
US aid to Israel dates from about Nixon,
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/foreign_aid.html
Prior to 1971 there was little American military aid for Israel.
In fact, the military aid in the form of weapons and maybe money (although I am less sure about money) Israel received in its early years came primarily from Czechoslovakia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_shipments_from_Czechoslovakia_to_Israel_1947%E2%80%9349
After the communist coup d’etat in CS, the support waded since at the end Israel became an ally of the US, so suddenly Arabs were friends of the Eastern Bloc. Also, the antisemitism of the communists* probably did not help the relationships either. According to the Wiki article, the support actually increased at first (out of ideological reasons as Israel seemed to be on a way to become a socialist state) and decreased after the split between Tito and Stalin where Stalin want to make sure he does not lose control of other communist states which then had to prove loyalty to him – and Stalin was already against supporting Israel at that time. The original pre-communist deal with Czechoslovakia also seems to have been purely commercial as Czechoslovakia also made an arms shipment contract with Syria (however those weapons also ended up in Israel because of an intervention by the Haganah forces…basically the Israeli military prior to existence of Israel).
*During the communist party purges during the 50s in Czechoslovakia (which were mostly power struggles within the party), the accused (and subsequently imprisoned or executed) were often, among other things, denounced as Jews in the state media – and there were no other at that time. Perhaps it was a bit paranoid (but that would be understandable some 20 years after WW2), but my mother told me that her uncle (who she lived with for some years) used to always used to pronounce his name as “Neymann” instead of his and her actual name “Neumann” because Neumann is a Jewish name (and they were partly Jewish), whereas “Neymann” is a non-jewish German name. I think the communists in other Eastern Bloc countries were equally antisemitic (after all, they were all actually managed from Moscow anyway, with the exception of Yugoslavia).
The best part is that the Czechs were forced to make weapons for the Nazi’s during the war so the Arabs had Spitfires and Israel fielded Messerschmitts.
Samuel: Israel got (modified, although not for the better, and rebranded, but anyway) Messerschmitts but what is your source for the Arabs having Spitfires? It seems that Israelis also had Spitfires (obviously not from Czechoslovakia) and more of them than the Avias S-199 (Messerschmitts). Given that the British Empire clearly wanted to establish the state of Israel, why would they supply its enemies with Spitfires (I assume that weapon contracts with foreign countries were, as it is usually the case, under heavy state regulation, so would not be possible without being approved by the state)?
The UK didn’t want to establish Israel; they left because the terrorism, cost in lives and fighting between the sides was too much for them. The Egyptians had Spitfires (purchased from England) and according to wiki the Spitfires ended up fighting other Spitfires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Spitfire_operational_history#Middle_East
@Samuel and Tibor
Fun bit of trivia; The last Air-to-Air kill scored by a Supermarine Spitfire was against another Spitfire
IAF pilots flying Spitfire Mk9s shot down a flight of Spitfires belonging to the Egyptian Air Force during the 1948 Arab Israeli War. There was also an incident where in IAF Spitfires engaged a mixed force of RAF Spitfires and Tempests reportedly mistaking them for Egyptians (but there is some dispute on that topic).
“there was no Jewish *national identity* before the 19th century; Jewish religion before the 19th century was shared between groups of people who lived all over the world, spoke a multitude of different languages”
I’m not terribly interested in the argument you are having, but at this point you are being silly. There was a Jewish state called the Kingdom of Israel quite a long time before the 19th century.
Between then and now, Jewish thinkers routinely assumed the future reestablishment of that state. For evidence, take a look at Maimonides’ discussion in the Mishnah Torah of the rights of the King of Israel, along with lots of other stuff that took for granted legal rules that made no sense in the world as it was when he was living.
Your “multitude of different languages” is at least misleading. Most of the Jewish population of the world spoke one of two languages at home (Yiddish or Sephardic), shared a common religious language. That isn’t altered by the fact that there were doubtless some Jewish communities that spoke one or another Chinese language, or a variety of others, or that many people also spoke the language of their non-Jewish neighbors.
There is a confusion between “Hebrew” and “Jewish” here; modern Jews are as different from ancient Hebrews as modern Christians and modern Muslims are. There is also a confusion between “state” and “nation”. A state is a piece of land with a (sometimes but not always sovereign) government. A nation is a group of people on the scale of a country who identitifies itself as such, whose primariry marker of identity and loyalty is at the country/state level.
This doesn’t exist before the late 18th century, where the primary markers are at the village level and religious level. There weren’t Jewish people, there were subjects of the king of X who happened to follow the Jewish religion — just like there was no “Christian people” or “Muslim people”, or that matter “French people”: there were Breton, Gascon, Provençal, Vandean etc subjects of the King of France, and those could be Christians or Jewish.
This is otherwise akin to the myth of a continuous French nation going back to the Gauls, or of a continuous Iraqi nation going back to the Summerians. Those are funding myths, part of the national cosmology, but they have nothing to do with actual history. The idea of a continuous Jewish nation going back to the Kingdom of Israel is a similar myth.
@Machine Interface:
I think that there is a fundamental difference between Jewish, Muslim and Christian in that the latter two are only religions, whereas the first is also an ethnicity and those two are tightly bound together. Unlike Muslims or Christians, Jews do not try to convert other ethnicities to join their religion (much as Shintoists do not try to spread their religion to non-Japanese, or as it was probably with all religions prior to Zoroastrianism), so a nation/ethnicity and a religion are the same thing. A Jewish state is a state of Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity. This is not really unique to Jews. The Punics were a nation in the same sense, the Greeks also (even in separated in independent Greek city-states, there was a clear Greek identity – all the non-greeks would be barbaros, which basically originally meant simply foreigner). What broke the ethnicity-religion connection were the evangelical religions, first Zoroastrianism, then Mithraism and the eventually more successful Christianity, later Islam. Before that, even as Romans would conquer half of the known world, they would not try to force their religion on the conquered tribes (in fact, the superstitious, or perhaps practical, Roman soldiers often gave offerings to those gods whose land they were currently on). This is an advantage of polytheism, you can simply integrate other gods to your system, in monotheism this does not work.
There is no concept of a Jewish ethnicity before the 19th century, where it was first put forth by German Volkists to explain that Ashkenazi were a foreign element to the German race and could not be assimilated in the German nation. The concept was then adopted by Zionists who contented that Jews were a distinct, unassimilable race that could not thrieve within other races, and thus had to move back to their own ancestral country to exist as a nation.
This wasn’t a universally held position: there were also German intellectuals, both Jewish and not Jewish, who argued that Ashkenazi were in fact of Germanic blood — as they indeed spoke a Germanic language, and could fully participate in the German nation. Unfortunately this didn’t prevail, and the idea of a distinct Jewish race served to justify both the Holocaust and the colonization of Palestine.
To this day, the concept of a Jewish ethnicity remains dubious: what common ethnic traits are there between an Ashkenazi, a Sephardi, a Mizrahi, a Beta Israel and a Crimean Karaite? These different groups have much more in common with the people of the areas they originate from than with each other.
While it is true that Judaism *today* is not a proselytizing religion, this has not always been the case; there is in fact ample evidence that early Judaism was just as proselystic as later Chrinistianity and Islam, and what put an end to this was precisely the rise of the two latter religions in most of the territories where Judaism had a foothold — this is a phenomena not limited to Judaism, as many usually proletysing religion tend to abandon this stance and adopt a low profile when they find themself dominated by a bigger jealous religion: this can be seen among Christians in the Middle-East, among Zoroastrians in Iran, among Buddhists in India, among Muslims in Sri Lanka or Burma, and so on.
Conversely, where Jewish religion later found itself in pagan environments not yet reached by Christianity or Islam, it continued to be proselyte well into the middle-ages, as could be seen for instance in the Khazar empire.
There is thus little reason to doubt that a majority of the ancestors of modern Jews were, in fact, converts, even if “true” Israelite contributed enough to the bloodlines for it to show up in genetic tests. The people who are the most direct descent of the ancient Israelite seem to be, ironically, Arab Palestinians — an idea which Zionists originally accepted without reserve, as they thought the Palestinians were sufficiently close to the Jews culturally and ethnically that they could easily be assimilated into the new Jewish nation.
This changed only after the Arab riots and revolt in the 30s, when Palestinians made it clear they in fact weren’t too happy about seeing dozens of thousands of European settlers come to their country and massively buy their land, nor about being ruled by the British. The zionist discourse then made a 180 and suddenly Palestinians became a foreign element that had to be removed to establish the Jewish state.
The idea of a continuous, unbroken nation, far from being unique to Israeli nationalism, is in a fact a form of “exceptionalism” which is widespread among nationalisms of the Old World, each contending to be the direct offspring of a millenia-old glorious civilization, when all the others are just barbarians who just recently learned to write and formed a vague impression of a country.
Speaking of barbarians, originally “barbaros” is an onomatopeia imitating an unintelligible language: to the Greek, the foreigner was not a person who belonged to another nation, it was someone who didn’t speak in a way that could be understood.
The linguistic element is a distinct dimension from the national element; just because someone spoke the same language didn’t mean it belonged to the “same” group, and indeed Greek loyalty went first to the city level, and the city-states went frequently at war with each others, and faced with a greater enemy, they didn’t show a united front — during the first Greco-Persian war, many Greek city states remained neutral.
@Machine Interface:
You seem to know more about Jews and Israel than I do. Still, I don’t agree that the Greeks did not recognize themselves as an entity. The fact that they waged wars against each other or remained neutral when they were attacked by enemies does not seem to prove much to me. This is what Germany looked like throughout most of its history too. The idea is not that everyone in the country is exactly the same but that there are strong enough connections to make sense of talking about a single ethnicity. That the ancient Jews seem to have had and since they also had a common state, they were not all that unlike the Germany of today. Would you say that the people of a particular village or city on the old Israel would have no preference between being ruled by “their kin” and by the Persians or Romans (I am excluding the option of ruling themselves)?
It seems indeed unlikely that the average pre-modern peasant would care much about the identity of the supreme ruler of his country, since he will probably never *see* the ruler, or indeed, ever leave his home-town, and has probably no education beyond a few religious notions and what he needs to know to take care of his farm; the life of the ruler is something so completely remote to the life of the peasant that there is little reason to think the culture or language of the ruler adds much to this gap — especially since, unless the peasant live in the vicinity of the capital, the ruler is likely to speak a different language, or at least a different dialect, anyway (most of French population didn’t speak French until the 19th century).
Peasants were more likely to revolt if the taxes are too high, working condition too harsh, or in the event of a famine, and this was generally fairly localised — there aren’t really popular, country-wide revolutions before the 19th century.
Instead, revolts against the ruler himself, especially on cultural ground, where generally the doing of an aristocratic, educated class in ancient times, and later of the bourgeois class (the so-called “bourgeois revolutions” of Marxist theory) — and reciprocally, a foreign ruler seeking to establish his dominance or crush opposition would generally kill, deport or disperse said elites, but leave the peasants be.
The big change that comes with nationalist movements is precisely the involvement of the entire population in an ideological project of society, often revolutionary in nature. It is generally theorised that this was made possible by several important factors that occured together starting from the 18th century, notably industrialisation, which directly leads to mass literacy and mass urbanization, creating a loss of social bound, and along with rising secularism, a loss of religious feeling — nationalism then comes as an unifying power to replace religion and old social bounds, creating a feeling of belonging on the scale of the whole country, and throughout every class of society.
The national ideal is first born from the reflexion of an intellectual elite, but is then spread to the people through the creation and propagation of a popular mythology, through standardization of laws, measurements and language, through the creation of a national literature, all the elements that separate the modern united nation-states from the pre-modern countries which are effectively a patchwork of town each with each own identity and dialect, but little sense of belonging to the same group outside of religious, and to a degree language practice, to say nothing of the old empires which spanned many unrelated ethnicities, cultures and languages without too much trouble (it can be argued that what really destroyed the Ottoman Empire was the rise of nationalist feelings).
(This is of course a general picture, there are countries that deviate strongly from this prototype — like Switzerland).
In other words, because modern countries are strongly united and uniformised, it can be tempting to conclude that this has always been case throughought history; this is a mistake — the pre-modern world was much more patchworky and much more diverse that one could extrapolate by only looking at the modern result, and the feeling of unity and belonging of the moderns is just that.
“You seem to know more about Jews and Israel than I do.”
The key words here are “seem to.” It appears that “Machine Interface” has a bad habit of just making up facts to support his arguments. (I can provide specific examples if you like. )
So I would take whatever he says with a grain of salt.
“There had been repeated proposals by Syria to recognize Israel, disarm the Hezbollah and even help Lebanon fight them if Israel gave back the Golan heights. Israel never answered.”
Assuming this is true as stated, this is still a terrible idea for everyone involved (well, except Assad). There’s a huge difference between the Golan heights and the west bank. It’s effectively part of the country, in the sense that you can go hang out or hike there without worrying (as opposed to the west bank, which is effectively palestinian territory and which Jews avoid).
To be clear, this involves the arabs living there. As Scott pointed out in the Reactionary FAQ, Israeli-arab citizens have it much better than pretty much anywhere in the arab world (especially Syria). And the arabs and other minorities there do get israeli citizenship.
Also, the alternative is giving them back in Syria. Which would be terrible for the arabs living there even before the civil war.
The international community doesn’t recognizes Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights though, and it still regards the place as legally part of Syria.
Certainly going back to Syria would not have been great for the inhabitants of the Golan, but Israel would have objectively won in security in doing so, potentially gained another if not friendly, not openly hostile Arab neighbour (just like giving back the Sinai did for Egypt), and possibly concured to stabilize the region a bit by curtailing Hezbollah.
The gains are clear and the refusal to do so is hard to explain other than by mindless hawkish policies.
There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis living there (mostly not hawkish settlers, just local farmers). By the people living there (and in the area) it’s de facto israeli territory. Unlike Sinai, which was returned pretty fast, the Golan heights are Israeli in every sense except for fact that it was Syrian fifty years ago. And by that argument, it was British for longer than it was Syrian, so why not return it directly to them.
And in terms of security gains, Israel doesn’t trust Assad (with some justification), and turning over the high ground for nothing more than his word would damage israeli security.
In terms of Israeli security, this is kinda like saying the US should hand northern Iraq over to ISIS for a deal; it’s terrible for the people there and isn’t going to make everyone safer, even if you can make the argument that Iraq’s borders are artificially drawn by western powers.
“Except that since then, the PLO has renounced that kind of rhetorics, and Arafat has personally recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
I take it you no longer dispute my point then? That there was never a group of Arabs known as “Palestinians” until it became convenient to identify such a group for the purpose of attacking Israel?
“No; Jewish religion does; there was no Jewish *national identity* before the 19th century;”
Assuming for the sake of argument that is true, it does not contradict or undermine my point in the slightest. I asserted (and you do not seem to dispute) that there was not a group known as “Palestinians” until it became convenient to identify such a group for purposes of attacking Israel. I said nothing whatsoever about national identity.
“Logic is hard!”
Indeed. So please answer my question: Does anything in your assertion contradict or undermine my position? It’s a simple yes or no question.
“The peace proposal is the basis for negotiation. The peace proposal includes the question of the refugees. *Therefore*, the question of the refugees could have been *negotiated*, therefore there is no threat or absolute exigence that Israel take in 5 million+ Palestinian refugees; what is to do with the refugee could have been negotiated.”
Again, so what? How does this contradict my position? Please just answer the question.
“Ben-Gurion only accepted the partition as a first step to consolidate Israel position before future conquests; the land grabs of 67 and the continued colonization of the West Bank and evictions of Palestinians from the region is concrete evidence of this.”
How many Palestinian Arabs have been expelled from Judea and Samaria in the last 10 years? And what do you make of the Gaza pullout and dismantling of settlements?
“But all of this is irrelevant: the point was that this kind of character assassination targeted at a whole population doesn’t actually help the debate and should be avoided”
I disagree — in this sort of discussion, the truth must come first even if it is not flattering to one side. The truth is that the Palestinian Arabs — as a group — really do want to put an end to Jewish Israel. This was true in 1948 and it is true today, as evidenced by opinion polls.
“This is all nonsense, but let’s start with the most outrageous of your claims — that Israel engages in indiscriminate air raids over Gaza. What is your evidence for this claim? ”
Those are the facts that are corroborated by multiple independent NGOs, by international observers, by testimonies from Israeli official and Israeli soldiers themself — a faillure to aknowledge basic fact about the contestable and clumsy nature of Israeli operations fall into the realm of negationism.
Please cite the specific evidence which supports your claim. Thank you.
“Each time Israel intervenes in Gaza, there are thousands of killed civilians. When the Israli army last retreated from Lebanon, soliers were given order to empty all their ammunitions, in order to leave as many unexploded ordinances as possible.”
Please provide a cite for this claim. Thank you.
“Given that the bully is Israel by all serious accounts, saying that the blame is shared is actually a pretty generous position *toward Israel*.”
Please provide specific evidence to support your position. Simply asserting conclusions is not enough. Where’s your evidence?
“This has been already explained quite clearly — this discussion will promptly end if it has to be explained again,”
No need to explain again. Your position does not make a lot of sense, but let’s see your evidence that the strategic intent of the “Arab leaders” was simply to seize the land allocated for an Arab state.
“This is a non-sequitur. The question was about whether Arabs opposed partition. ”
Yep, and you tried to change the subject to the question of whether the Arabs were morally justified in opposing the partition plan. Unwittingly helping to prove my point.
“Of course they did. But it doesn’t matter now, Israel exists, it’s a fait accompli, it’s not going anywhere.”
That’s not how your typical Palestinian Arab feels. They need to change their attitude of course if there is to be peace.
“There is however no evidence that Israel has ever wanted peace: ”
Well do you agree that Israel has made more than one peace offer? Do you agree that Israel could easily re-occupy Gaza if it wanted to? Do you agree that Israel could easily re-occupy Lebanon if it wanted to?
Anyway, I really would like to see your evidence for your claims. Also, I would like answers to my question.
Why are you refusing to define what you mean by “Palestinian land”?
It’s a simple enough question. I’m just asking you to define your terms.
Ok, given that there is already an Israel flame in this thread and it’s therefore difficult to make it any worse, I’m going to ask:
What is the moral case for Zionism? How is wanting Israel to remain a Jewish state any different than wanting Rhodesia and South Africa to remain White/Christian states?
It seems to me under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, Palestinians generally have the moral high ground (although not necessarily with respect to some individual acts): Palestinians got invaded by foreign conquerors who displaced and killed them, and still occupy them, restrict their sovereignty, encroach on their land (with the ever-expanding settlements) and even reserve the right to extra-judicially kill them, even as collateral damage, as they see fit.
Isn’t morally righteous for the Palestinians to fight tooth and nail against Israel?
Maybe it’s not strategic to fight a stronger opponent (although one could make a game theoretic case for punishing defection with defection, even if it is costly, or possibly one could argue that time is on the side of the Palestinians due to differential population growth rates and the deteriorating international image Israel, thus if they stall they will increase the chances that Israel ends up like South Africa in the future), but strategic or not, is it not right?
@Scott: If you don’t like this discussion here, I will understand and I will not bring it up in the future.
The argument to who-invaded-who quickly reduces to, “Unless you can find some Philistines, the Jews have the oldest claim.”
(I know that is not strictly accurate, but it demonstrates the problem. Also, I am a smartass.)
I suppose that Palestinians are more or less the direct descendants of the Philistines, at least as much as modern Israeli Jews are the descendants of the ancient Israelites who inhabited the region up to Roman times.
But that besides the point. The point is not who can claim the more direct ancestry to the first human who set foot on that land.
The point is that Zionist settlers were for the most part full-fledged citizens of various countries where they owned land and property and had in general full citizenship rights (*), then at some point they decided: “hey, let’s go grab somebody else’s land, kick them out and establish a state there with ourselves as rulers”.
It seems to me that this is good old colonialism, masked by a tiny-veiled rhetoric about the “ancestral land” or “promised land” (which was also present in the Dutch Boers, for instance).
(* Yes, I know, the Holocaust. But Holocaust refugees were generally not Zionist settlers, and anyway I don’t think they had a moral right to grab somebody else’s land, they had the moral right to fight back against the Nazi.)
I doubt your first hypothesis although I don’t have the historical background to be more than slightly dubious about it. The Palestinians may or may not be as directly descended genetically from the Philistines as the Israelis are from the Israelites (I doubt they are, statistically) and they’re definitely not as directly descended culturally, so far as I can tell, from the Philistines as the Israelis are from the Israelites. However, I am entirely willing and would not be hugely surprised to be proven wrong on that first part. (I’d be very surprised to learn I was wrong on that second part.)
As for the rest… yeah, that’s the problem. Both sides have equally good (in that either side can claim a “superior” position) arguments if you allow them to make the definitions. All arguments are about definitions: that’s how arguing works. Whoever makes the definitions wins the argument. Whenever you see a stalemate that has gone on as long as the one in Israel/Palestine, you should look for a set of mutually exclusive definitions that the parties cannot or will not further negotiate or compromise.
Argument from personal incredulity.
This is an anti-intellectual position.
Re your first assertion: Yep. Although I said I was only slightly dubious. I’m not an expert, but I know a little. The little I know makes me doubt it. If somebody who knows more tells me my doubt is unjustified, I will do my best to stop doubting.
Re your second assertion: Saying it doesn’t make it so. 🙂
You don’t even need to get into the question of group rights and wrongs. All you need is the fact that you’ve got multiple generations of people now born and raised under the (at least de facto) sovereignty of a government that they cannot vote for and under which they do not enjoy citizenship rights and equalities.
If you accept the standard American political philosophy package that alone is enough to say this is totally unjust situation. Now it is true that there are a wildly disproportionate number of people on SSC that don’t accept the standard American political philosophy package, and so a different set of conclusions can at least be consistent. But that doesn’t explain the failure to recognize the injustice on the part of the mainstream American right that ostensibly very much believes in the standard package.
There are millions of American citizens in a similar situation that neither the American Right nor the American Left seems to give much of a darn about, so expecting sympathy for a bunch of furriners in the same situation, for that particular reason, seems a bit much. Let me know when the Free Hawai’i movement gets any traction.
Because Hawaii residents are disenfranchised subjects who have no political rights with respect to the government of the United States, aren’t they?
Please remind me where the current president of the United States was born (hint: not in Kenya).
I didn’t know that Native Hawaiians couldn’t vote, don’t have freedom of movement or due process rights.
You learn something new every day.
I wasn’t just talking about native Hawai’ians, although in some ways I have the most sympathy for them on the “people now living were alive when their historical sovereignty ended” front. The citizens of Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and other US territories have no representation in Congress.
And yes, the people in the occupied territories around Israel have it worse. But if nobody much cares that there are American citizens who don’t even have a vote in Congress, I don’t see anybody much getting worked up about the plight of the people in the occupied territories *because of their lack of participation in representational government.* For other reasons, sure, but that one’s way down the list.
The situation with Washington DC & Puerto Rico are certainly contradictions, but there is a huge difference in that they are perfectly free to move and enfranchise themselves. The West Bank Palestinians have no such option.
And that only addresses the voting rights aspect of my comment, and totally ignores the equal citizenship rights and equalities.
Finally, there are those on the left who are very much interested in securing voting rights for DC, and to a lesser extent PR. (Lesser mostly because there’s a misguided idea that residents of PR should be allowed to decide for the whole country that the status quo is fine.)
After World War II, the US occupied Japan. The US did not givethe Japanese the right to vote for US elections even though they were being ruled by Americans. Do you approve of this?
The US occupied Japan for 7 years. There weren’t multiple generations of people born, raised up to adulthood never having the right to a say in the sovereign. The label temporary wears thin after almost half a century.
What is the moral case for Zionism? How is wanting Israel to remain a Jewish state any different than wanting Rhodesia and South Africa to remain White/Christian states?
Well, I can think of two possible arguments.
One is that the Jews need a state of their own to live in security. For millennia they were just a little minority living on the sufferance of non-Jewish societies, and not surprisingly tended to suffer a large amount of persecution. Hence it’s good for there to be a majority-Jewish state somewhere where they can live in freedom, and where Jews in other parts of the world can flee to if their countries get too anti-Semitic. By contrast, there are plenty of white countries around the world, so it doesn’t matter too much (in terms of having a safe haven for white people) if one particular country is white or not.
Secondly, the Israel’s probably the best place to live in the Middle East, even for non-Jews. On the principle that we ought to support countries that are generally nice places to live in, it would seem that we ought to support Israel over its less-nice neighbours.
It seems to me under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, Palestinians generally have the moral high ground (although not necessarily with respect to some individual acts): Palestinians got invaded by foreign conquerors who displaced and killed them, and still occupy them, restrict their sovereignty, encroach on their land (with the ever-expanding settlements) and even reserve the right to extra-judicially kill them, even as collateral damage, as they see fit.
So when do the Israelis cease to be foreign occupiers and instead count as native inhabitants of the land? Presumably there must be some point at which this sort of thing happens, as otherwise you’d have to maintain that, e.g., white Americans are all just foreign conquerors and should go back to Europe and leave the land to its rightful Amerindian owners.
It seems that Jews can live and thrive even outside Israel, but anyway, even if Jews were persecuted, I don’t see how that would give them the right to establish a state at somebody else’s expense (except than at the expense of their persecutors).
Except for the Palestinians.
I guess that the antebellum Southern US was also a generally nice place to live in, if you weren’t a slave.
When they cease to military occupy the Palestinian territories and solve the refugee issue, pretty much by definition.
This implies that the Arab states can deliberately delegitimize Israel by refusing to accept refugees. Of course, this is what actually happened.
@ Jiro:
Fucking exactly.
“It seems that Jews can live and thrive even outside Israel”
You might want to pick up a history book. There was some stuff that went on in the 1940s, for starters.
“When they cease to military occupy the Palestinian territories and solve the refugee issue, pretty much by definition.”
1. Define “the Palestinian territories.”
2. Is there any way to “solve the refugee issue” besides allowing everyone who was a descendant of a refugee to have Israeli citizenship?
3. For bonus points, how does that contrast with the obligations of Arab countries to the Jews they threw out in 1948?
Ancestors of mine have been just fine in the US since the late 19th century.
Palestinian territories are well defined in Israeli law. Ordinary law doesn’t run there.
I largely agree that the descendants have no right to come back in either case.
Except for the Palestinians.
Arab Israelis have the same rights as Jewish Israelis. If you’re referring to the Palestinians of Gaza or the West Bank, what is Israel supposed to do, give the vote to a demographic whose members would be quite happy to kill or drive out all the land’s Jewish residents?
“We have to mistreat the Palestinians because due to our mistreatment of them if we allowed them to vote they would vote to hurt us.”
@ anonymous:
Well, that’s the very question, isn’t it?
Do the Palestinians and other Arabs want to hurt the Israelis because of Israel’s “mistreatment” of them? Or do they have an independent desire to do so? And would they keep wanting to hurt Israel if it stopped “mistreating” them?
The massive coalitions against Israel before they even acquired the Palestinian territories might be relevant evidence here.
But even if the Palestinian desire to harm Israel were completely the fault of everyone from Ben-Gurion on down, what do you want Israel to do once they “reform their ways”? Accept being wiped out as the price for their sins?
Do the Palestinians and other Arabs want to hurt the Israelis because of Israel’s “mistreatment” of them? Or do they have an independent desire to do so? And would they keep wanting to hurt Israel if it stopped “mistreating” them?
Well, what happened when Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip?
@ Edward Scizorhands:
My point exactly.
Though the apparent response, according to the other comments in this thread, is that Israel mistreated the Palestinians by refusing to eliminate Hamas. So this terrorism by Hamas is merely a rational response to Israeli atrocities.
The immovable self-evident axiom is that Israel is evil. Nothing could be more certain than that. So if any argument purports to show that Israel is not evil, well, that just casts doubt on the observations that led to that argument. If you prove 0 = 1, you don’t reject the law of identity; you figure you made a mistake somewhere.
Look to the beam in your own eye. You’ve twisted beyond all recognition the radical individualist philosophy you otherwise espouse in order to hold on to the Red Tribe axiom of “standing with Israel”.
Withdrawing from Gaza is a red herring. Gaza isn’t and never could be a viable independent entity. The people are of course still miserable and angry. The blockade doesn’t help, nor does Israel and it’s ally the United States encouraging and supporting Egypt’s coup d’etat because the elected government wasn’t sufficiently cooperative to Israel, but at the base the issue is size. City states only work in fairly narrow circumstances.
The base fact of the matter is that you can hardly get a more illiberal position than denying people the right to vote because you are afraid of how they might vote. You don’t know how they will actually vote until you let them vote. And there are long standing mechanisms to protect minorities from the majority that could be used to ameliorate any democratic revenge taking. There’s no justification for the refusal to consider a one state solution from a liberal stance. As Jiro says elsewhere it is an unprincipled exception.
@ anonymous:
Yes, you can. Quite easily.
You can have a government that “democratically” imposes Islamic law, socialist dictatorship, and the all-round violation of rights and liberty.
Liberalism does not equal democracy. Democracy is often a means to liberalism, but it’s not good in itself, and it doesn’t work in every situation.
Unfortunately, the Palestinians indeed do not live in a very liberal environment. And to a very large degree, this is because they live under Hamas and PLO tyranny. If you want to slam Israel for not eradicating these governments and imposing liberalism on them against the “will of the governed”, go ahead. I would agree with you.
But the reason they don’t do it is because the whole international community would be opposed to it. Because, like you, they worship democracy over liberty.
I have every reason to anticipate exactly how they would vote. The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—which you apparently admire—proves my point. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan will also do.
What exact mechanisms are these? The desires of the Jews and Palestinians are completely opposed on almost every question. Either one or the other will get their way.
I do think a one-state solution should be considered. That’s what I support, if anything. But I don’t support it coming about by immediately making all the Palestinians full citizens of Israel. That would destroy everything about the state that is valuable.
I am not making an unprincipled exception, though I think it is true that many defenders of Israel do. My principle is that I am in favor of liberalism, progress, and civilization; and in any conflict between two groups of mixed premises, I am in favor of the one that is more aligned with those aims. The size of the groups is irrelevant.
I am opposed to nationalism, and that means I am opposed to Zionism. I reject it categorically as an ideology. But to criticize Israel uniquely for being nationalistic—when every country on Earth is the same—and especially when the Palestinians are even more fervently jingoistic nationalists—is absurd and the most egregious double-standard that was ever formulated.
If you want to say Israel is irredeemably evil, and if you want to say that the United States, the West, the East, and everything in between is irredeemably evil, go ahead. There’s a case to be made for that.
But if you want to selectively pick out Israel as evil; if you want to engage in false moral equivalence and say that the goals of Israel and the Palestinians are equally worthy; and especially if you want to say that Israel is unworthy while the Palestinians are—then I’m against you.
I am not Jiro.
“The International Community”
My apologies, I misremembered. Should have used cntrl-F and checked.
@ jaimeastorga2000:
Yeah, that international community. The one that actually controls the world.
1> Zionism became such a powerful movement precisely because Jews couldn’t live and thrive in other countries. Zionism was a response and solution to antisemitism.
2> The Jews coming to Israel had to comply with the immigration laws of the Turks, and later, the British. Saying that the Jews were wrong to come to Israel because it ended up hurting the Palestinians is like saying that Syrian refugees are wrong to come to Europe because this might inconvenience the Europeans, and that they should stay in Syria and continue to fight Assad or whatever.
3> The Israeli Arabs of course enjoy a western standard of life and can’t complain in this respect, but even west bank Palestinians have a better standard of living than neighboring countries, so this point is just wrong.
4> Regarding occupiers: So when is the US giving it’s land back to the native Americans again? Or did killing most of them make it morally OK to keep the land?
This would be a good argument if Israel was the most secure place in the world for Jews to live. It obviously is not, and hasn’t been for several decades at least. Furthermore, Israel’s actions have been a strong motivator for anti-Semitic attitudes and actions elsewhere in the world, as is demonstrated every time Israel invades Gaza.
Israel’s not secure because its Arab neighbours keep trying to invade it.
IDK, this argument just sounds circular and bad-faith to me. “Israel’s not secure, therefore the argument for its legitimacy is bad, therefore we have the right to keep trying to invade and conquer it.”
Why would we want a moral case for Zionism, any more than we want a moral case for Manifest Destiny? Israel already exists. Like almost every other nation, its creation involved some prior residents being turned out of their homes, and w/re every other nation we are comfortable enough saying “Tough luck, this is how it is” to the descendants of the dispossessed. Israel is now populated mostly by people who have never been anything but Israelis, and by people who have chosen to migrate to an extant Israel. Anywhere else, there would be an almost ironclad default to maintaining this status quo, but for Israel we need a moral defense of Zionism?
And, like basically everyone else with a country to call their own, the Israelis do control the border and say to some outsiders, “We know you’d like to come live in this country, but we think that would make it worse for ourselves, so we’re not going to let you in.” Again, everywhere but Israel this is pretty much taken for granted, but Israel needs to provide special justification?
I understand there are people here who believe that absolutely open borders are an absolute moral imperative, sometimes on Rawlsian grounds. You all do understand that you’re a tiny bunch of WEIRDS who have never managed to convince anyone with an actual border to control, right? I would suggest that Israel is very much not the place to make your stand on that issue, and demanding that your opponents offer up a moral defense of Zionism as their only justification for border control is not the winning strategy here.
I don’t see how the issue is related to the open borders position, it seems that you have an axe to grind.
1) You are selectively choosing the worst-sounding examples.
2) Even then, using those examples implies that non-Jews are not permitted to vote or become citizens in Israel. That is false.
Under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you are permitted to oppress a minority. After all, there is more of the majority, so if you are a randomly selected person in the society, you’re more likely to benefit (by being in the large majority group and killing the minority) than be harmed (by being in the small minority group and getting killed). With appropriate assignments of utility, the average gain in utility by being a randomly selected person in this society will be positive as well. And this is especially bad if the majority is composed of utility monsters (i.e. people who really hate the Jews and get really high utility from killing them).
If you have any better-sounding examples of colonial states where foreign settles attempted to entrench and disenfancise the locals, I would like to hear.
Some are allowed to vote as long as it’s sure that they are a minority.
Palestinians born in Gaza, West bank or the refugee camps certainly can’t vote in Israeli elections, and it’s very difficult for them to acquire Israeli citizenship. And yet these people have no citizenship of a sovereign state, and in particular the residents of Gaza and the West bank are subject to the sovereignty of the Israeli government.
Clearly Israel is not a democracy with universal suffrage, by any reasonable definition. And it doesn’t even offer citizenship protections to native permanent residents who live under its sovereignty.
You are or can be always in a minory with respect to somebody else.
I think you are confusing Israel with Palestine. Palestinians can’t vote in Israeli elections for the same reason that I can’t vote in French elections (I’m not French). This is because they are part of the Palestinian state, as recognized by 70% of UN member countries.
@ sweeneyrod:
Now that’s just being stupid.
I’m trying to defend Israel here, but everyone knows that the Palestinian “state” is not a real state. Conversely, few countries recognize the Republic of China, but it is a real state. In both of these cases, countries are denying reality for political reasons.
There is a Palestinian government (two actually), but Israel occupies and maintains substantial control over the West Bank.
I guess it depends on how you define a state. Palestine is unlike typical states in many ways, but similar enough (in areas such as international recognition, recognition by citizens, and performance of some typical governmental functions) that I don’t think it is unreasonable to call it a state.
In any case, given that the areas deemed to make up Palestine is recognized by both the people who live there and many international entities as not part of Israel, I’m not sure why anyone would expect its occupants to be given any say on how Israel conducts its affairs.
Jews in Israel are not foreign settlers. In fact, throughout history the only sovereign nations in the land of Israel have been Jewish nations. At all other times, the region was being colonized by foreigners.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Jerusalem.
The most recent occupiers were the Brits and the Ottoman Turks. The Palestinians are culturally Arabs, whose forefathers most likely came to Israel at some point during the Muslim conquests.
So it is the other way round – Jews in Israel are the only people that can credibly claim to belong to a people that are not foreign occupiers.
That isn’t how the world works. The Arab conquests did not displace the previous inhabitants of the land the way, for example, the European conquest of North America did. There simply weren’t enough Arabs for that to be possible, nor were there any convenient diseases around.
What happened was that the Arabs established themselves as the ruling class and over the centuries the people below them adopted their language and religion while the Arab rulers adopted the cultural practices of the lower classes, and eventually they merged together into one culturally Arab people. So yes, Palestinians are partially descended from Arab conquerors (as are the ~60% of Israeli Jews who are of Middle Eastern descent), but they are also partially descended from people who have lived in the Levant for many thousands of years, probably since prehistoric times.
But this whole line of discussion is pretty pointless. With the possible exception of some of the inhabitants of central Africa, everyone on Earth is descended, however distantly, from “foreign settlers.”
“It seems to me under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, Palestinians generally have the moral high ground (although not necessarily with respect to some individual acts)”
It’s neat how we get into these abstract discussions about philosophical points in order to award the coveted most-sweet-and-innocent-victim prize to the Palestinians, while sweeping their multiple wars of attempted genocide, extensive anti-Semitic incitement, mass terrorist attacks against third parties in foreign countries, and thousands of war crimes away as trivial “some individual acts” not worth commenting on.
“What is the moral case for Zionism? How is wanting Israel to remain a Jewish state any different than wanting Rhodesia and South Africa to remain White/Christian states?”
How is “Zionism” any different morally than, say, “France-ism” or “Russia-ism” or “China-ism”? I’d bet that if you took a poll amongst citizens of China about whether China should remain a Chinese state, you’d have a pretty solid supermajority. Are they wrong? If so, why call out the Israelis first?
You’ve unintentionally highlighted one of the weirder aspects of this discussion. No other country has to re-litigate its very right to exist as constantly as Israel does, with people calmly performing weird, nitpicky, Wikipedia-caliber definitional slicing on why a Chinese country is okay but a Jewish one is not.
I don’t think there is any moral argument for “France-ism” or “Russia-ism”, i.e. nationalism. I am against nationalism.
And as Zionism is a type of nationalism, I am against Zionism as a moral principle.
However, I am absolutely for Israel vs. its enemies, who are worse in every respect. I am for Israel because it is a free and liberal country based on Enlightenment values, as I explain in my post below.
The issue is not that the Palestinians want to live in this free, liberal country according to Enlightenment values, but the mean Israelis won’t let them. The issue is that they want to want to replace the country with either an Arab nationalist or Islamist dictatorship—and would if they could get away with it—but Israel has the gall to defend itself.
I don’t know, maybe we should ask the millions of disenfranchised subjects that the French, Russian and Chinese governments keep under their sovereignty without recognizing to them basic citizenship rights. Oh wait, there aren’t any.
Case in point: China annexed Tibet roughly at the same time as Israel was established. Questionable as you wish, but at least the Chinese government awarded full Chinese citizenship to all Tibetan people, thus Tibetans enjoy all the rights that Chinese citizens do. Which aren’t many rights for Western standards, after all China has an autocratic socialist government, but arguably they are more than the rights that Tibetans enjoyed under the previous feudal theocracy of the Lamas.
The Chinese government won’t drop a bomb on a residential building full of people in Tibet on a suspicion that some terrorist might be living there, as the Israeli government reserves the right to do in the Palestinian territories. That’s the difference between Israel and pretty much any other developed or semi-developed country.
Yeah, on account of how the Tibetans don’t routinely launch terrorist attacks at Beijing. I don’t think Israel responds as well as it could, but IIRC the last time America had a major terrorist attack on its soil it started two decade-long wars in response. Makes Israel look pretty measured in comparison.
Everything you just wrote is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether “Zionism” — the concept that the Jewish people should have a state — is more legitimate as a concept than “China-ism” — the concept that the Chinese people should have a state.
@Pku
How do the actions of terrorist justify disenfranchising and treating as non-citizens millions of people born and raised in the country (and whose ancestors were born and raised there)?
For all that the Chinese government treats Tibetans as second class citizens, at least it doesn’t treat them as not citizens at all.
And as mentioned upthread, while Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico can’t vote, they are US citizens and are free to move to the US proper and vote. They are also entitled to all the protections of the bill of rights — not a bullshit mixture of military rules and ad hoc application of ottoman laws when it suits the government.
@Pku
Tibetan separatists intermittently engage in violent protests. The Chinese government doesn’t respond in the same way that the Israeli government responds to Palestinian on Israeli violence.
But of course, the scale of Tibetan violence is not comparable to that of Palestinian violence. Not to justify terrorist attacks, but don’t you think that if Palestinians had been treated by the Israeli government the same way as Tibetans have been treated by the Chinese government, they would be less likely to fire rockets, stab people and blow themselves up?
The US response to 9/11, especially the Iraq war, may not have been ideal, but it’s undeniable that the attack was sponsored by a sovereign state actor, the Taliban government of Afghanistan, hence some degree of military response was probably appropriate.
Compare to the US reponse to their previous major terrorist attack: the Oklahoma City bombing, which was carried out by domestic terrorists. Did the US government bomb people living in the vicinity of suspected terrorists? I don’t think so.
@anonymous: I don’t, and I have a problem with that. It’s not quite as bad as you describe though – arabs living in Israel proper are full citizens with equal rights. Palestinians aren’t, but there the ideal is for them to be their own separate country. I have major problems with the way it’s handled now, but I don’t see an easy solution – if Israel just unilaterally pulled completely out of palestinian territories, it’d probably lead to a spike in terrorist attacks (and saying that you should allow terrorist attacks on your own citizens in the name of the greater good may be a net good from a utilitarian perspective, but is never going to pass politically anywhere in the world).
@vV_Vv: Why don’t you consider Hamas a state actor (at least to the level the Taliban is)?
@Pku:
Gaza doesn’t meet the definition of a sovereign state given that the government of Israel controls its waters and airspace in addition to a buffer zone within Gaza along the border and parts of the coast. With modern warships, satellites and drones you don’t need boots on the ground to maintain a military occupation. In fact, Gaza is recognized as an occupied territory by most of the international community and by Hamas itself.
Arguably the current mess in Gaza is the result of the botched unilateral Israeli disengagement (in addition to the fact that Hamas is a group of clerical fascists). As an occupying power, Israel had the obligation to disarm and disband militias that could cause instability before disengaging.
Arguably, Israel still has this obligation, at least unless it completely relinquishes control over Gaza, but toppling Hamas now would require much more force, and cause many more civilian casualties, that it would have in 2005.
Anyway, I don’t claim to know a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What would you think about a Swiss-like federal one-state solution?
I find your “in addition to” language somewhat misleading in its implications as to the relative importance and impact of the causal factors. Just my opinion.
Also, if Israel had conducted an operation at the scale needed to effectively “disarm and disband militias” before pulling out of Gaza, it would have been much worse in that the only way to do that would have been to carpet-bomb the place. That’s not a high bar: that’s asking a cow to jump over the moon while wearing neutronium underpants.
@vV_Vv:
Regarding the swiss-like solution (which could also get rid of demographic supermajority worries by separating where you can vote), it’s something I’ve always considered fairly ideal – but it requires trust that the other guys aren’t going to use the open borders to launch terror attacks, which at the moment really isn’t there. At the moment, any stable solution, even an pretty unfair one, would be preferable for both sides over the current state of affairs, but isn’t likely to happen because in the situation, it would require trusting the other sides’ moderates more than your own extremists.
I don’t have a good idea for a total solution, but there’s a lot of things that could be done to improve the situation that aren’t for internal political reasons. This documentary on the subject is one of my favourite things, and may just be a general good example of how politicians can mess up a situation by trying to placate everybody:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2BqrpLaDVw
“Anyway, I don’t claim to know a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What would you think about a Swiss-like federal one-state solution?”
Depends on what do you think about thousands of people being massacred as Hamas and friends run rampant across the length and breadth of the country. But hey, I guess being the victim of an unending terror war is just the price you have to pay for peace, or something.
@Pku:
I’ll watch it, thanks.
@ vV_Vv:
I agree with you that there is no moral case for Zionism, as such. And I disagree with the defenders of Israel in this thread who are making absurd arguments from the position that the Jews have a “right” to the land held in stasis from two thousand years ago.
But there is a moral case for a free, liberal society based on Enlightenment values. And that’s why I support Israel against its enemies. Both Hamas and the PLO are repressive dictatorships which are based on savage values: the one on die-hard Islamism, the other on a mixture of Islamism and Arab nationalist socialism. If Israel were to unilaterally withdraw from the Palestinian territories, they would be a unfree, barbaric dictatorship—just like Gaza and just like the many dictatorships that surround Israel.
Israel has the right to the land because they are a legitimate, rights-respecting government based on the values of progress and civilization. They have the right to all the Palestinian land, and they would have the right to all the land they might ever want to take from any Arab dictatorship. No socialist or Islamist dictatorship anywhere has the right to a square inch of land.
The fact is that the whole conflict between Arabs and Israelis has been is attributable to Arab aggression and unwillingness to live in a peaceful manner. Not one Israeli bomb or bullet would ever be sent forth from again if the Palestinians were to pledge their allegiance to the State of Israel and agree to assimilate into Israeli society and live in a rational and civilized way.
But obviously, the Palestinians are not loyal to Israel and would not assimilate peacefully. If they were allowed to swarm in with the “right of return”, that would be the end of freedom—and probably of the Jewish race—in Israel.
I don’t claim to know what should be done. Israel has no legitimate interest in any “two-state solution” because it is contrary to Israeli security. Israel can’t make the Palestinians regular citizens because they would destroy the country. The original plan was to barter most of the land back to Jordan, but they don’t want it. Probably, the only measure that would really solve things would be to accept as citizens every Palestinian who would pledge sincere allegiance to Israel and expel the rest. It would probably mean less suffering in the long run than endless conflict. But that will surely never happen.
Now, in Israel there are a growing number of ultra-orthodox Jews who believe they have a religious right to the land and desire to impose theocracy. These people are completely contrary to the founding principles of Israel and a cancer. If they grow large enough, Israel will be no better than any of the Arab countries around it and will have no right to anything.
If the principle is that the right to the land is founded in the status of having a civilized, rational government, then the conflict can in principle be resolved. If the principle is my ancient ethno-religious right vs. your ancient ethno-religious right, it cannot be resolved. The Jews who accept the latter principle are just as bad as the Palestinian militants (insofar as they act consistently with it).
As for freedom of immigration, yes, I would say that Israel should accept immigrants from all populations in the world which do not pose a threat to their existence. And if, for instance, they accepted enough Chinese, they could then accept more Muslims without danger. But Israel is no more guilty in that than any other country.
And, on the other hand, at least Israel has the very good argument that the history of anti-Semitism has shown that Jews are not safe unless they are in the majority in at least one country. No matter how enlightened the Jews may wish to be, they have to respond rationally to other people’s savage hatred of them. Is the United States enough? Well, what did the U.S. do to the Jews fleeing Germany? Still, in the future, as the world progresses, I think and hope this will be less of a legitimate concern.
Israel is not a free, liberal society vis-à-vis millions of the governed. Just because you don’t like how you think they’d vote doesn’t mean you can define them out of existence.
If the way they vote would mean reducing the whole population to subjugation, to Islamic law or otherwise, and likely lead to genocide on a massive scale, I will very well support the principle their votes should not be counted.
The fact is: the vast majority of the Jews would be willing to share a country with the Palestinians if they could live in peace. The majority of Palestinians apparently would not.
As I said, the issue is not that the Palestinians wish to be admitted to equal partnership in a free and liberal society but this is being denied by the evil Israelis. If that were the case, I would be entirely on the side of the Palestinians.
The actual situation is that they want no such thing, and if they were admitted to equal “partnership”, the society would quickly cease to be free and liberal.
I don’t think you have any warrant to say that the vast majority of Israeli Jews would support a one state solution if only “they could live in peace”. There’s nothing in any of the platforms of the most popular parties in the Knesset to suggest that is the case. Not even a hint.
Nor do you have any evidence that allowing the West Bank Palestinians to vote would lead to genocide on a massive scale. Particularly given that an anti-genocide provision could be made in an entrenched way.
Further, even under your position Israel should have a process for allowing Palestinian individuals to obtain citizenship if they forswear genocidal intent. How can such a strong individualist as yourself insist that it must wait until “they” all change their mind at once?
I should note that your disenfranchise illibrals justification works just as well for existing citizens (of which there are many in the US as well as Israel) as it does for residents of the occupied territories.
Finally, even if I accepted completely your notion that illiberals ought not be allowed to vote, how does that justify in any way the withholding of other incidents of civilized government other than universal suffrage? How do you justify illiberal treatment of the disenfranchised governed?
@ anonymous:
I would say that no one talks about a one-state solution because it is so obvious that it would be a disaster.
Besides, if Israel is so driven by irrational hatred of Arabs and Palestinians, why have they been willing to make as many concessions as they have? Why don’t they flatten Gaza?
As I understand it, the mainstream right-left divide in Israel is essentially this: the leftists think that the Palestinians will finally come around if only they grant enough concessions; while the rightists think they’ll never come around, just ask for more, so the concessions only weaken Israel’s position. They are both rationally afraid of them, but one thinks they can be appeased and the other doesn’t.
They both would like peace. But the Palestinians aren’t prepared to give it.
Maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe a majority of Israelis just want to oppress and kill Palestinians for no reason. If so, fine. In that case, Israel is evil. But they’d still probably be the lesser evil.
A think such a scheme would be a good idea, and it should be done. But that would require saying in regard to the Palestinian territories: “There will never be a Palestinian state. We are going to assimilate these territories into one unified state. Those who can demonstrate their loyalty and willingness to assimilate will be granted citizenship.”
But that would be colonial and imperialistic and denounced by the whole world.
I certainly don’t think you’d get too many takers for assimilation in the context of an independent or semi-independent Palestinian state. For one, the’d have to leave their homes, and their families would be targeted as the families of traitors.
Denying people the vote has an obviously high potential for abuse. It is, in general, a bad idea. But as a last resort, when the alternative is even worse, it looks pretty good.
It’s like David Friedman has said about the draft. The draft is slavery (indeed, as a side note, I am opposed to Israel’s policy of conscription). But if you are threatened by a dictatorial power which threatens permanent enslavement, a little temporary enslavement is a lesser evil if that’s the only way to stop it.
Some of the restrictions, like checkpoints, are necessary for security.
Other restrictions on freedom are completely unnecessary and should be abolished. Much of the unfreedom of the Palestinian people comes from the fact that they live under the Hamas and PLO governments. I think these governments should be abolished and replaced with Israeli administrations, or else administrations run by some neutral party.
The Gaza blockade is an obvious example of a case where freedom is restricted precisely because of Israel’s unwillingness to take decisive action. If Israel would end the Hamas government, the blockade would be unnecessary. It’s their permitting of that government that makes it necessary for Israeli security.
I’m not saying I agree with Israel’s policies on every issue. But they are not a demonic force, and if anything it is the international sentiment against them that prevents better solutions from being reached.
The checkpoints within the West Bank (that is, excluding the border checkpoints on the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank) are only “necessary for security” because Israel has colonized the West Bank with hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
I’d really like to know: even taking it as a given that Israel has the right to militarily occupy the Palestinian territories (and leaving aside that your stated justification of “these people cannot be trusted to govern themselves” is the exact same justification claimed by every despot in human history), what justification exists for Israel to effectively annex large parts of these territories and settle its citizens there en-masse? If the occupation is really about security, then moving large numbers of your own civilians into the occupied territory is the last thing you would ever want to do.
@ NN:
I think the settlements are dumb in the sense that I don’t think there is any particularly rational motive for wanting to live in “Judea and Samaria”. But look, if Jews want to live there, they should not be killed.
If the settlers did not live in isolated communities, they would be killed. That is what would happen.
As for the “stolen land” argument, there is no such thing as the Palestinian people’s ethnic right to the land. As for individual property owners’ claims, if they are real they should be compensated, and Israel should not build settlements on privately owned land. Which they don’t do.
“I’d really like to know: even taking it as a given that Israel has the right to militarily occupy the Palestinian territories”
Given that the Palestinians refused to accept multiple peace deals, and that when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza those places were immediately turned into terrorist-run missile factories that have started multiple wars, what do you think is the alternative to occupation?
@Vox
I think you are seeing what you want to see. The broad consensus among Israeli Jewish parties is that Israel must always remain a *Jewish* state, not that it must always remain a *liberal* state. There’s no constituency at all for a one state solution of equals. To claim that’s because it is so obvious that it would end is disaster is a cop out. There are intermediate steps that could be taken to make it less likely to end in a disaster if it was an actual, desired solution by any of the Jewish Israeli voters, but it isn’t.
There is a constituency in Israel for a two state solution, given sufficiently favorable terms for Israel and a very high probability of peaceful coexistence. But that’s not the same thing as saying Jewish Israels just want to live in peace, which could equally be true with a one state or two state solution. A Jewish state is the predominant, overriding concern.
I don’t share you priors, but accepting them for the sake of argument I don’t see why you haven’t adopted the lesser evil position and instead have seemingly accepted the good guy / bad guy narrative.
They do. It is justified by reference to Ottoman laws that are only ever applied as against Palestinians and never applied to Jews.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
@ anonymous:
Yes, they want a Jewish state. I don’t see them ready to let in millions of Chinese. And yeah, I kind of hold it against them. But no more than I do against anywhere else, or it would be an egregious double-standard.
But I don’t think they want an ethnic majority of Jews so badly that they are willing to oppress and kill or expel the Palestinians just because of that. I think they would be fine with some kind of confederation or whatever if it were a reasonable option.
There’s no constituency for anything except a two-state solution or the status quo of doing nothing while vaguely talking of a two-state solution because anything else is regarded as unacceptable given the terms upon which the debate is framed, which is reconciling the alleged Jewish right to self-determination with the alleged Palestinian right to self-determination. Blame Woodrow Wilson, I guess.
Everyone’s a little bit evil. And I’ve never heard of a saintly country.
But sometimes, one side is so much better than the other that the good guy / bad guy narrative applies.
It’s like saying the U.S. was only the lesser of two evils with regard to Imperial Japan because while the Japanese were raping and pillaging the Pacific, America interned its Japanese citizens unjustifiably. Yeah, America shouldn’t have done that. But I’m not going to stand by and yell “Two sides! Two sides!”
Me: “what do you think is the alternative to occupation?”
Anonymous: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”
Okay, look, I didn’t want to go here, but I kind of have to do it:
This is stupid. You’re stupid.
I pointed out exactly why there is a military occupation: it’s because when the Israelis have withdrawn from territory, it was immediately transformed into an Islamist terrorist squat that started new wars, and — as we’ve seen from endless people in this comments section still blaming Israel for everything that happens in Gaza — they didn’t get any diplomatic credit for the withdrawals anyway, so (for them) occupation is the best of a set of bad options. I asked what the better option is. You responded by meaninglessly quoting a slogan. You should be ashamed of yourself.
@ThirteenthLetter:
You know, maybe it was a reference to the French Revolution.
And/or the Terror.
The solution being to guillotine the enemies of the Revolution, I guess.
Just a thought.
@ThirteenthLetter
1) Go fuck yourself.
2) If you weren’t a racist piece of shit who can’t help but think of Palestinians as an undifferentiated mass of subhumans all responsible for anything that any other “Arab” has ever done, you’d at least consider the possibility that rather than brutal occupation Israel could treat the people in the territory it holds sovereignty over as human beings entitled to be citizens of the country in which they were born and all the rights thereto. You know, act like the liberal democracy they claim to be. But apparently a hint in that direction was too subtle for an idiot like yourself and it needs to be spelled out.
3) Go fuck yourself.
@anonymous
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”
Wow, what a concrete and foolproof plan! Someone put this guy in charge of Israel’s foreign policy! With such a detailed and well-thought-out proposal, peace is inevitable!
@anon
You are not helping your case here. Considering the volume of blood spilled in the name of Liberté, égalité, fraternité one needn’t be a racist to find it un-compelling.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Elsewhere in the comments, you sum up your position as: “Yes, I would like the Palestinians to be able to live wherever they want. But Israel can’t allow that because their whole free, liberal society would be destroyed.”
So you believe that restrictions on immigration can be justified if the migration were to have significant negative consequences. Given this, do you dispute that the Israeli settlement program, and the security measures necessary to maintain it, has severe negative effects on the Palestinian residents of the West Bank? If so, then why shouldn’t it also be prohibited on the same principle?
Furthermore, it is not simply an issue of “letting Jews live in the West Bank if they want to live there.” From the beginning, the Israeli government has planned and massively subsidized the settlement program. There are numerous government programs to build infrastructure, subsidize construction, and even directly pay people to move to the West Bank.
I again have to ask: if Israel truly wants peace, why is it doing this?
“I again have to ask: if Israel truly wants peace, why is it doing this?”
If Israel really just wants war, as you seem to assert, then why all the peace offers to the Palestinians?
@HlynkaCG
If you are too jingoist to acknowledge the debt modernity owes France, you can substitute this good ole ‘merican prose:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
—-
@Vox Imperatoris
Blaming it on Wilson is even less convincing than claiming no one is for it because it so obviously won’t work. If we wanted to we could blame everything on dead people and no one alive would be responsible for anything.
It’s one thing to want an ethno-state when you already have one and are considering whether or not to accept immigration. It’s quite another to want an ethno-state when it involves treating a large existing population as non-citizens and ill treated non-citizens at that.
I see no evidence that the status quo is a last resort, which you claim it ought to be. As far as I can see it is and was a first resort.
@NN:
I can answer the last one – it’s because of weird signalling games. The majority of israelis want peace, but don’t believe they’ll get it by withdrawing the settlements. So support for withdrawing from the settlements has become left-signalling, and Israel’s majority right-wing now because they don’t trust the palestinians (with some justification – withdrawing from the Gaza strip didn’t lead to any sort of peace there), so mainstream right-wing politicians can’t signal for the moderate vote by offering to withdraw the settlements. Settlers, on the other hand, will vote exclusively for whoever supports them, which is a politically cheap way of getting a minority on your side. Leftists, meanwhile, have pretty much given up on getting an actual peace deal and focus more on economic issues.
@ NN:
Restrictions on whose immigration and for what reason? Yes, I am normally against restrictions on immigration, but they can be justified if there is no better option.
If Israel did not restrict Palestinian (and Arab in general; the Palestinians have no special right to come) immigration, the Palestinians would kill the Jews and destroy the country. That seems like a good reason: we stop the killers from coming in so that they can’t kill.
Now, analogously, you are saying that Israel should restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine because it harms the Palestinians. But the only reason it has these harms is because of security measures preventing the Palestinians from killing these Jews. That seems like a bad reason: instead of restricting the killers, we restrict the victims in order that they not be killed.
That’s like keeping blacks out of public parks because otherwise it’s bound to “cause trouble”. Indeed it was bound to cause trouble, but that wasn’t the fault of the blacks.
It was also the reason Grover Cleveland signed the Chinese Exclusion Act (reluctantly). He didn’t have anything against the Chinese. But he said letting them come would just stir up more white resentment. So in order to prevent civil strife, it was necessary to keep them out. Does that strike you as a good or fair reason?
I don’t think it’s a good idea. They are doing it mainly for nationalistic (and now religious) reasons. But it’s not inherently unjust. Well, maybe it’s a violation of Israeli rights by taxing them unnecessarily to subsidize this folly.
There is one semi-legitimate reason for it. Israel expects that it will not be allowed to keep land forever that is not Jewish-settled. But Israel needs a certain amount of land for its security. So they will settle this land, either to get a claim on it, or to have something substantial to trade for Arab-settled land that they want or need for security purposes. The whole game is stupid. But it makes sense in that context.
anonymous, you are not helping yourself or your cause one bit by resorting to slogans, accusations of racism, and angry obscenities.
If you want Israel to withdraw from the West Bank — that is all you want, right? Nothing more than that? — you’re going to have to convince the Israelis (or at least their supporters) that such a withdrawal won’t immediately be followed by an Islamist dictatorship in East Jerusalem raining missiles down on their capital. So far you’re doing an astonishingly poor job of that.
Your advice is neither needed nor wanted. And to return the favor, you should work on your reading comprehension.
@ Anon
I happen to see the reign of Madame Guillotine as a step backwards on the road to modernity rather than a step forwards.
Do you have an actual case to make or are you just going to keep slinging insults and pounding on the table?
Except for the fact that a significant minority of settlers do in fact regularly attack Palestinians and their property, sometimes going as far as murder, and on one occasion as far as mass murder. So let’s not pretend that all of the settlers are pure innocent victims. Especially given that the settlers that move into the West Bank on their own without government assistance tend to be the most radical and violent ones.
NN, if you want to settle this argument by counting up settler terrorist violence and balancing it against Palestinian terrorist violence, let’s just go right ahead and do that. I suspect you’re not going to like how the numbers come out, though.
@ NN:
Yes, there have been some acts of violence by settlers. And you know what? They are not only condemned by the Israeli government, but the government actually sincerely tries to stop them.
What happened to the murderers in the case you linked? Convicted.
And yes, one evil ultra-orthodox Jew committed an act of mass murder. It was universally condemned in Israel. How many bombs have the Palestinians set off in acts of mass murder?
@Vox Imperatoris: The overwhelming majority of price tag attacks go unpunished. When they are caught, they are treated incredibly leniently compared to what happens to Palestinian criminals. It is true that Israeli settlers don’t often commit murder, but then they have the IDF to take care of that.
But I don’t think any of this matters to the general point. You argue that Israelis should be allowed to settle in the West Bank, but West Bank Palestinians should not be allowed to live in Israel to keep Israelis safe. Yet a significant number of Israeli settlers do in fact commit violence against Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Whether or not the violence is condemned or punished by wider Israeli society, the fact of the matter is that allowing Israelis to settle in the West Bank has resulted in violence against Palestinians.
Here’s a partial list of “price tag” attacks that happened just this year. How violent, exactly, does a group have to be before immigration restrictions are justified?
I also note that some 30,000 Palestinians already illegally work in Israel, so the question of “what would happen if Palestinians were allowed to live in Israel?” isn’t entirely theoretical.
@ NN:
A lot fucking more than that minor shit.
I’m not saying that Israel has the right to keep Palestinians out because having them all come would be an inconvenience. I’m not saying it’s because it would be a serious problem. I’m saying they are an existential threat.
30,000 illegal workers are not an existential threat, and I have nothing against them. Maybe that means Israel could or should let more in with perfect safety.
But one problem with Israel letting Arabs in is that the very ideologues in favor of “majority rule at any cost” would make damn sure that the second Arabs made up 50.00001% of the country, they would have the god-given right to impose any kind of tyranny they please.
Ban for the anonymous involved. Warning for ThirteenthLetter.
I don’t think that a government that holds under its sovereignty millions of native-born permanent residents without recognizing to them political rights, property rights, or even the right not to be killed without a trial, is compatible with a free, liberal society based on Enlightenment values.
If you are allowed to restrict the set of subjects who enjoy rights then every society if free and liberal, including North Korea.
So Arabs don’t deserve citizenship rights normally available to citizens of liberal democracies because Arabs are intrinsically barbaric and undemocratic?
Sounds like a very peculiar view of what democracy is supposed to be.
If the current US government decided that some group, say, Republicans/Democrats/Blacks/Jews/Muslims/Gays/Cis white males/SJWs/Gamergaters/etc. were intrinsically barbaric and undemocratic and should be stripped of all citizenship rights, then whether or not you are wary of that group, would you still consider the US a liberal democracy?
Who said intrinsically? I’m not saying they can’t change.
I wouldn’t want to import millions of 16th-century Germans (or Frenchmen, or Englishmen) to Israel. It would be a disaster; they would be probably more barbaric in their bloodlust and religious intolerance.
It’s possible to have correct beliefs, and it’s also possible to have incorrect beliefs.
It is incorrect that Democrats are barbarians who will destroy our civilization unless we take away their right to vote and confine them to a restricted territory.
It is correct that the Palestinians would destroy Israel if they were foolish enough to make them all full citizens.
So we just have to wait for 300 years for the Palestinians to become civilized?
Even if this is true (certaily it’s quite a coincidence that these barbarians who will destroy the Israeli civilization happen to correspond to the same group of people that the Israeli land was stolen from, isn’t it?), then it would imply that Israel is not a liberal democracy. So why preserve it?
@ vV_Vv:
I don’t think it will take 300 years. The Japanese and Chinese modernized much more quickly, having the example of people who did it the first time. And with regard to the Japanese, it only took a few years of military rule by the Americans for them to reverse from a course of bloodthirsty militarism to a course of peace and industry.
Of course, the Americans did so by stamping out all traces of militarism and State Shintoism. This is conspicuously different from what’s going on in Palestine.
I’m not even going to address “stolen land”. That was not the historical situation.
You will note that I never used the word “democracy” or praised the supreme virtues of majority rule. Democracy and majority rule are good things in the proper context.
But they are not ends in themselves. They are means to ensuring a liberal government. Which, in turn, is a means to promoting progress and human well-being.
In a context where majority rule would mean tyranny and illiberalism, it is not a value. It is the opposite of a value. A nuclear power plant is a wonderful thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s good even if run by people who don’t know how to operate it.
The sense in which apartheid South Africa was a white state is completely different to the sense in which Israel is a Jewish state. In South Africa, whites were a minority, yet wielded all political power (so you are presumably claiming that it was a white state due to the fact that whites held power). In Israel, Jews are a majority. They may hold power in the sense that since there are more of them, they have more political power since they have more voters, but the 25% of non-Jewish Israelis also have the vote.
The whole issue of whether the Israel is ruled by the majority or the minority is irrelevant.
The only relevant question is whether the people who rule Israel want to have a free society where people can live together in a rational and civilized way, or whether they want a socialist-Islamist dictatorship. Now, the Jews, who currently rule Israel, are of course not perfect but are overwhelmingly closer to the former than the latter.
I would therefore support them even they made up only 10% or 5% of the population.
And this same type of question was the reason for the mixed status of regimes like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa. On the one hand (especially the latter) they were evil because their conscious goal was to systematically subjugate the black population, and they did not desire even in principle to live with them on equal terms. On the other hand, they supported capitalism, civilization, and relative freedom vs. Marxist dictatorship that was the official platform of the black opposition, including both Mugabe and Nelson Mandela.
The population of Israel + Gaza + the West Bank is about 50-50 Jewish/non-Jewish, with many estimates having it as a slight non-Jewish majority. Regardless of the actual numbers, Israel only has a clear “Jewish majority” because the vast majority of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land that it governs can’t vote. So I think the South Africa comparison is perfectly apt.
And no, the fact that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have their own governments doesn’t change anything, because South Africa did exactly the same thing.
Hold on, I saw you palm that card. You are skipping over the fact that the Israelis withdrew completely from Gaza.
Now you’re going to say, “but they still control the borders!” This is not true. Israel does not control Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Now you’re going to say, “but they refuse to trade with Gaza!” This is irrelevant. No nation is obligated to trade with any other nation.
Now you’re going to say, “but the military blockade!” This is irrelevant for two reasons: a) at no other time in the history of the world has a blockading nation been considered to be occupying the nation it is blockading; b) there was no blockade of Gaza until Hamas took control and started launching rockets, at which point what the hell would you expect was going to happen?
I fail to see significant differences between that and the situation of the South African Bantustans, most of which were much larger and had more autonomy than the Gaza Strip does.
Regardless, taking Gaza out of the equation doesn’t change much. The combined population of Israel and the West Bank is about 60% Jewish. By comparison, Belgium is about 60% Flemish.
The Israeli governement had been warned by multiple observers that simply pulling out unilaterally out of Gaza without negotiating or settling anything would not produce the desired effects and would not lead to peace. Unfortunately Jerusalem has made a habit of not listening to external advices — they also ignored US military intelligence telling them, on the eve of their latest campaign against Lebanon, that their chosen strategy was inadequate and would not reach its intended objectives — and indeed, the campaign, which was supposed to root out Hezbollah once and for all, instead made it stronger, but did weaken the Lebanese government and worsened Israel’s international image.
Israel’s real problem is that decades of unconditional US support have lead its successive governments into a hybristic sense of being invincible and above all laws and principles, which leads to morally questionable hawkish policies, but, more directly problematic on a pragmatic ground, to stupid strategic decisions that could easily be avoided with a bit of humility — leaving asides all moral and legitimacy questions, fighting Hamas and Hezbollah could simply be done much more intelligently.
It should also not be that surprising that a healthy, liberal governement doesn’t spontaneously grow in a disenfranchised territory under military rule that has been air-bombed almost every year for decades.
“The Israeli governement had been warned by multiple observers that simply pulling out unilaterally out of Gaza without negotiating or settling anything would not produce the desired effects and would not lead to peace…”
This is ridiculous. Endless posts insisting that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories right away, and that we absolutely cannot countenance one more second of this hideous, worst-in-the-world oppression. Then when it’s pointed out that Israel did exactly that in Gaza, they’re slammed for not withdrawing without still somehow maintaining endless control over the territory’s political status (but without occupying it! Somehow!), or for withdrawing without first spending decades building up a democratic government, decades during which the same people would still be screaming for the occupation to end right away, or for withdrawing without waiting for a comprehensive peace deal first that literally sixty years of diplomacy by every major power in the world has so far failed to create. And so everything that happens in Gaza, an independent territory not occupied by Israel and entirely run by the Palestinians for almost ten years now, is still Israel’s fault. They can’t win.
A decade is nothing, especially when you’re still blockading and regularly air-bombing the zone from which you have “pulled out” in the meantime.
This isn’t about moral, this about the strategic incompetence of the Israeli leadership, fueled by decades of being shielded from the geopolitical consequences of their actions by their main ally.
Israel apologists love their “but Israel pulled out of Gaza” card, but this is irrelevant here: it can be equally true that they should never have been there to begin with *and* that they pulled out in the most clumsy and strategically inappropriate fashion possible (for a non-Israeli example of pretty much the same mistake [including the part about not listening to external advices], see also America in Iraq).
—
Besides, the actual motives behind the pull out of Gaza, as stated plainly by Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor of Ariel Sharon, weren’t as pure and peaceful as Israel apologists are claiming:
“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term `peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”
@ Machine Interface:
Are you arguing that Israel is immoral, or that their policies are not in their rational self-interest? I agree on the latter. Lots of Israel’s policies and decisions have been stupid.
If they were smart, they wouldn’t ever have thought negotiating with the PLO was a good idea.
“A decade is nothing, especially when you’re still blockading and regularly air-bombing the zone from which you have “pulled out” in the meantime.”
And once again you completely skipped over how — before the blockade, et cetera — Gaza was taken over by Hamas and started a campaign of terrorism and mass bombing against the Israelis. Did you expect they’d just sit there and take it? Thousands of missiles raining down on your country is a small price to pay for peace?
“Besides, the actual motives behind the pull out of Gaza, as stated plainly by Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor of Ariel Sharon, weren’t as pure and peaceful as Israel apologists are claiming…”
So what? It doesn’t matter if they pulled out of Gaza because that was part of a Satanic ritual. They still pulled out of Gaza, totally and completely. Their motives in doing so are irrelevant. Anyone really interested in peace should have grabbed on to that concession with both hands, not insist that somehow the Israelis withdrew “wrong.”
@ ThirteenthLetter:
Obviously, Israel planned for Hamas to take over as justification for continuing to oppress the Palestinians! /s
@Vox Imperatoris > both arguments can be made, as both are interesting — though Israel apologists will accept or even aknowledge neither; talking to an Israel fan feels a lot like talking to a Serbian or Armenian nationalist, obsessed with and extremely defensive about his insignificant country, never missing an occasion to explain how great and superior it is, ready to explain that all the neighbouring countries are bloodthirsty inferior subhumans who all dream of destroying his country, can never be trusted and should all be militarily quenched. It’s all very amusing until you realise this is a parallel universe where Serbia has nuclear weapons, receives unconditional military and diplomatic backing by the US, and where many westerners accept without even questioning it the tale that all Kosovars are murderous terrorists constantly scheming to lead about the genocide of all Serbs and the destruction of the Serb nation.
@ThirteenthLetter
“So what? It doesn’t matter if they pulled out of Gaza because that was part of a Satanic ritual. They still pulled out of Gaza, totally and completely. Their motives in doing so are irrelevant. Anyone really interested in peace should have grabbed on to that concession with both hands, not insist that somehow the Israelis withdrew “wrong.””
Ah, so people who want peace should just shut up and blindly applaude whenever Israel does something strategically aberrant which they openly aknowledge was designed to delay peace possibly indefinitly, just because it kinda sorta looks like it’s going in the right direction if you don’t stop two minutes to think about it?
“Ah, so people who want peace should just shut up and blindly applaude whenever Israel does something strategically aberrant which they openly aknowledge was designed to delay peace possibly indefinitly, just because it kinda sorta looks like it’s going in the right direction if you don’t stop two minutes to think about it”
Your focus on “strategically aberrant” is just weird. Are you as upset when, say, China or Cameroon does something strategically incompetent?
More importantly: well, yes! Yes, of course you should applaud it! If your goal is for Israel to give up the West Bank and Gaza, and they give up Gaza for free without getting any concessions in return at all, things couldn’t possibly be going more in the right direction, no matter what Machiavellian scheme they think they’re accomplishing by doing it. If the Israelis are really being as a “incompetent” as you claim, then take advantage of their incompetence. Pocket the concession and encourage them to stay the course. Show them that giving up land works out super great for them. The pressure, both internal and external, to give up the WB too and completely end the issue would become impossible to ignore.
Instead, in the real world, concessions were met by missiles, terrorism, and continued diplomatic assault. You couldn’t have invented a response more finely tuned to destroy the Israeli peace camp if you tried.
The problem is that people are not grasping at straws and hoping for Israel to do just about any random thing that vaguely satisfies one of their revendications. That’s a strawman.
What people want is a durable peace settlement. There is no reason to rejoice about individual actions that don’t go in that direction, even if they are theorically part of the list of revendications — but it’s a package, just doing one thing or two on the package is worse than doing nothing; removing a tumor is a good idea, but not if you fail to use anesthetics, fail to sterilize the tools, fail to sew back the patient, and also you only removed 20% of the tumor because that’s better than nothing, right?
As for the missiles, they kill at most four dozens Israeli citizens every year, mostly militaries. Each Israeli military operation kills thousands of Palestinian or Lebanese civilians over the course of a couple of week — if Israel stopped air-raids right now forever, it would take hundreds of years for Palestinian missiles to even the score.
“As for the missiles, they kill at most four dozens Israeli citizens every year, mostly militaries.”
How did I know that once we got to the very bottom of this toxic line of argument, we’d get to “a continuous rain of unguided rockets on your town isn’t so bad, suck it up in the name of peace”?
Yeah, we’re done here.
Compared to a continuous rain of cluster bombs, top-technology hellfire missiles and white phosphorus? Why yes, artisanal rockets that apparently only kill people by lucky accident are indeed benign.
One life is worth one life. If we are to rationally measure the wickedness of Israeli and Palestinians by the amount of innocent lives they take, then Israel is orders of magnitude more evil than all Palestinian organizations and Hezbollah put together.
Which raises the question: If they have it so much worse, why do they point-blank refuse to negotiate any sort of peace?
(I don’t have a good answer to this one. Just some partial, somewhat unsatisfactory ones).
The reason relatively few Israelis have been killed by the constant terrorism and rockets is because the Israeli state puts a staggering amount of resources into defending them. That is not somehow an argument in favor of the morality of their attackers.
@ ThirteenthLetter:
That’s the moral ideal of the anti-Israel crowd.
“Proportionality” no longer means “force proportionate to the amount necessary to remove the threat” but rather “an equal number of casualties on both sides”.
The goal of this ideal is apparently to ensure that wars never end by making it illegal to decisively win them.
Even if the casualties by Palestinian were multiplied by 100 — say they get much better weapons and the Israeli start to do really stupid things, it would still be less than the casualties by Israeli. This is not about getting even, this is about basic notions of proportionate response. Every time an Israeli citizen is killed, 200 Palestinians are killed in answer. This is akin to killing your neighbour’s entire family and burning his house down because his son hit yours at recess.
Apparently even basic logic is too much, anything that tarnishes the pristine image of Israel must be met with hysterical denial.
What is a “basic notion” of proportionate response?
Doing what is necessary and sufficient to remove the threat, as opposed to conducting mindless campaigns of indiscriminated air-bombing for decades that kill thousands of innocents but completely fail to reach their stated objective: not only Hamas and Hezbollah are still there after all this times and the thousands of tons of bombs dropped on them, but they become stronger and more popular after each air-raid.
So either these actions are done deliberatedly with the sole intent to collectively punish Arabs, either the Israli high command is the most incompetent and clueless assembly of generals in the world.
So if a proportionate response is whatever’s necessary to stop the attack, and Hamas is still active, wouldn’t that imply that a proportionate response is considerably more force than Israel actually uses?
But more seriously: I agree that Israel uses disproportionate force, but I’m still putting the majority of the blame on the guys who refuse to even negotiate peace. Also, it seems incredibly unfair to pick on Israel for disproportionate response considering this is still far more measured and proportionate than any other western power would use.
“The guys who refuse to negotiate peace” are not Palestinians. As has been noted, there’s been multiple peace proposals on the Arab side, both Arafat and Abbas have recognized Israel’s right to exist and have seated at the negotiation table in spite of the constant stream of insults and character assassination thrown against them in Israeli and Western media.
Attributing the faillure of negotiations solely to the Palestinians, when Israel is diplomatically backed by the US, has pretty much all the levers and cards in its hands (what exactly can the Palestinians make consessions or compromises about? they already have nothing), and is much, much powerful, is simply not rational.
Man it has been years since I’ve watched this sophomore-in-college level stuff. I’ve learned to find it hilarious about how totally blinkered some people are.
@Machine Interface
“One life is worth one life. If we are to rationally measure the wickedness of Israeli and Palestinians by the amount of innocent lives they take, then Israel is orders of magnitude more evil than all Palestinian organizations and Hezbollah put together.”
Would you prefer it if Israel dismantled the Iron Dome so more of their civilians died? I suppose you might well do. But otherwise, it is clearly inane to think that because Israel is better at defending its civilians, it is morally inferior to Palestine. It is intent that governs evil, rather than absolute numbers of casualties caused, otherwise Assad is orders of magnitude more evil than ISIS, and to be morally consistent you should boycott the USA in favour of Israel.
“What is the moral case for Zionism?”
What is the moral case for anyone to any patch of land? I think there is a more general question, which is: “how do we draw borders?” I believe the usual answer in international relations is “right of conquest.”
I’m pretty sure that Israel violates various international laws and conventions with its prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories.
If Israel just flat-out annexed all the Palestinian territories and awarded Israeli citizenship to all their residents, then you could say that it was “legitimate” conquest. Arguably Israel would still have obligations towards the Palestinian refugees living outside Israel, but it would be certainly an improvement.
But that’s not what happened. The main issue is that the Israeli government effectively exercises sovereignty over the Palestinian territories without recognizing citizenship rights to their residents. It could even arbitrary kill them.
The justification given for not awarding Israeli citizenship to the Palestians is the need to preserve Israel as a “Jewish state”. This is clearly an abnormality for a modern country, in particular for a developed country which claims to be a liberal democracy, and in fact it resembles colonial states like Rhodesia and South Africa.
If we morally condemn the apartheid-era South Africa, how can we not extend our condemntion to Israel, on the same principles?
On the subject of Israel being a liberal democracy, it should also be noted that non-Jewish citizens of Israel also do not have the same rights and duties as Jewish citizens in Israel regarding various domains, such as military service and eduction; primary education, notably, is generally segregated — the Israeli government says it grants “autonomy” to Arab-Israeli eduction, which in practice means that Arabs and Jews have different curricula, both designed by the same all-Jewish board of education.
On a more borderline case, Israel has started to issue to travel bans against western journalists that they deem not friendly enough to Israel — knowing that it’s impossible to enter the Palestinian territories without going through Israel first.
Shlomo Sand argues that Israel may be a democracy and have rule of law at least outside of the Palestinian territories, but doesn’t deserve the “liberal” label.
Palestine has a government, a police force, courts, and most other attributes of an independent nation. The official position of the Israeli government is that they would like to live alongside a (peaceful, demilitarized) Palestinian nation. This is also the position of the Palestinian authority, which tries very hard to be seen as an independent nation.
It would be great if the two sides could reach a peace deal, and get to the two state solution. Unfortunately, although it seemed very close 20 years ago, as things are today there are major obstacles to a two state solution.
1> There is no united Palestinian leadership. Hamas governs Gaza, and Hamas’ official position is that they want to wipe Israel off the map.
2> Israel is unwilling to relocate hundreds of thousands of settlers from the west bank (Due to what happened the last time this was tried, see Gaza).
3> Israelis and Palestinians hate each other much more today then they did 20 years ago. There is less willingness on both sides to make concessions.
3> The Palestinian refugee problem: Israel can’t accept them all as citizens, and conversely Palestine can’t sign a deal that gives up their right to return to Israel. This is the problem that won’t go away even if the other ones do, and it’s the reason (IMO) that they original Oslo deal didn’t work out.
So what can be done? Good question.
The point I wanted to make was that Israel doesn’t control the Palestinians. They have their own government.
To the extent that Israel does have control over the Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza, it tries to keep that to the minimum amount necessary for its own security.
Although it isn’t publicized, Israel is actually pretty successful at *not* butting into Palestinian daily life. In the past 10 years Israel withdrew from Gaza, granting the Palestinians who live there complete independence, and also built the separation fence in the west bank.
The Separation fence is a real de facto border between the two countries. Before it existed, the IDF would go into Hebron, Nablus etc on a regular basis to go after terrorists. It was a real problem – this was terrible for the Palestinians. Now they don’t. They just guard a border. Although they like to complain about it, the Separation fence has brought the Palestinians living in the West bank much closer to the statehood they want.
So all this talk about Israel controlling the Palestinians but not granting them citizenship is ignoring the fact that the Palestinians do have their own de facto self governance, and that both sides want this and are working for it.
It isn’t. Israel is an unprincipled exception. And we all know what happens to unprincipled exceptions; they always end up yielding to superior holines.
The difference is that Israel is the only Jewish state, while whites form a majority in a lot of countries. It’s reasonable for a persecuted minority to wish to form their own state where they won’t be subject to the oppression of the ruling class. The analogue to Israel isn’t Rhodesia but Kurdistan.
If you think that being “white” protects you from persecution by other “whites,” then I suggest you have a chat with the Roma, Irish, Poles, Ukrainians, Kosovars, and Bosniaks. And the Ashkenazi Jews, for that matter.
I don’t see any reason why Afrikaners wouldn’t be considered a distinct ethnic group. They even have their own unique language. They also have their own not-insignificant history of persecution.
As already noted by @NN, whites don’t form a coherent ethnic group which is expected to avoid internal persecution.
It’s more a like Kurdistan established in France by military conquest while stripping the French people of their privately owned land and citizenship rights.
What is the moral case for China-ism?
There is no moral case for nationalism, whether China-ism or Zionism.
There is a moral case for civilization.
“What is the moral case for Zionism? How is wanting Israel to remain a Jewish state any different than wanting Rhodesia and South Africa to remain White/Christian states?”
It’s not any different from any state wanting to keep its demographics stable. It’s interesting that you should mention South Africa because, AFAIK, most of the blacks in South Africa are descended from people who came there at the same time as Whites. Or later.
“Palestinians got invaded by foreign conquerors who displaced and killed them,”
When Zionists were moving to the area, there was no group known as “Palestinians.” There were Arabs there. Note that many, perhaps most, of the Arabs who live in the area came at the same time as the Jews. They were subjects of the Ottoman empire, living in places like Beirut, Damascus, or Cairo. That’s why a lot of “Palestinians” have names like “Masri” which means “Egypt.”
“and still occupy them, restrict their sovereignty, encroach on their land ”
This touches on a critical point in the matter. How did it come to be “their land”? For example, the local Arabs successfully ethnically cleansed Hebron of Jews in the 1930s. Before that, there had been Jews living there for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. Similarly, the Arabs successfully ethnically cleansed Gaza City and the Eastern part of Jerusalem of Jews in 1948.
Did these areas become “their land” once the Jews had been ethnically cleansed? If so, now that Jews are coming back to Hebron and the eastern part of Jerusalem, is it now their land? Or does land-grabbing only work in one direction?
“Isn’t morally righteous for the Palestinians to fight tooth and nail against Israel?”
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the founding of Israel was a crime, one can ask what the statute of limitations is for that crime. Many Jews have lived there for generations now. And if the statute of limitations never expires, then Jews have a right to fight tooth and nail for areas which were inhabited by Jews in centuries past, agreed?
So my question to you is this: What is the standard for determining whether a piece of land belongs to a group of people so that they have the moral right to exclude outsiders from that land?
Jesus, this land without a people for people without a land crap? Who would have thought such throwbacks existed in 2015. Try reading a book (not a geocities website) written by someone with tenure at an actual university.
It’s the current year! Wake up, sheeple!
Fair warning Annon,
You are arguing an a forum where a good number of the regular comentors work in “actual universities”, are published authors, etc…
You might want to think about upping your game if you plan on hanging a round because ” Try reading a book” and “Go Fuck yourself” aren’t exactly going to win you many arguments here on their own.
ETA:
At the very least, specify a specific book + author and state why you think it’s relevant.
It’s not (there is the minor point of there being a lot more Jews in Israel than Whites in Rhodesia/South Africa, but that’s not important). And there’s nothing wrong with Rhodenia and South Africa remaining White/Christian. Those who rule have the right to continue ruling, until they lose the Mandate of Heaven.
You don’t think they lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by having a massive black rebellion?
They lost the Mandate of Heaven by failing to remain in power. For better or for worse, the blacks now have the Mandate of Heaven.
(FWIW, neither of these two fell because of poor policy on the part of its rulers, given their decline post-regime-shift. Rhodesia was destroyed by the international community – external factors – disapproving of the regime. Apartheid in South Africa was destroyed by much the same, helped along by the Communists. These agents don’t care how well a country is governed, but rather whether it is governed according to the correct ideology or not.)
I lack a sense of self. I can’t clearly explain what I mean by this, but one way to describe it is that I feel like I constantly and automatically pretend to be someone instead of no one. When I ask myself who I am I get a feeling as if a character in a novel is asking who the writer is and getting no answer, even though there must be a writer who is making the character ask. I’m definitely consciously aware of experiencing things as an individual, yet at the same time it seems to be an imaginary individual that doesn’t “really” exist even though their perceptions are real and vivid. I don’t remember ever not feeling like an illusion, although I might never have thought to check for most of my life. I wonder how common this is.
It sounds like you might have Depersonalization Disorder, which is estimated to affect 1-2% of the population.
Do you at least have a sense that some qualities emphatically are not part of yourself? Does this apply differently in intensity to different qualities, or equally to all?
I do, and it does differ in intensity. However, the combination of such qualities still doesn’t enable me to perceive myself as a real person the way I imagine other people are. I imagine people feel that they are themselves the way one “just knows” their thoughts are theirs or that reality is real and not an elaborate video game. It sounds at least similar to depersonalization.
Everybody else:
What is the consensus on what it feels like when there’s a thought in you that isn’t yours? Because now I’m asking how I’d separate my thoughts into mine and not mine buckets, and I don’t know how I’d distinguish them.
“I wonder how common this is.”
Faradn’s comment is worth checking out.
I’ll add my anecdotal experience: I had very similar thoughts pretty constantly during a year-and-a-half period when the following were happening:
1) I was using LSD, marijuana, and ketamine pretty frequently (I’ll get that out of the way – may not apply to you, obviously)
2) I was facing my future with no good idea of how to proceed (think: graduating college and needing to find a career when what you’d really like to be doing is tripping balls all the time)
3) I was embracing increasing isolation as my social strategy. The only people I wanted to talk to were people who had similar ideas or were willing to listen to me espouse them.
Advice, maybe useless:
1) fake it till you make it. You’re making the effort to fake it already, keep it up. Things may change yet. And if they don’t, you may just get used to it. At some point, you may not be sure if you believe in the Potemkin village you’ve constructed. That’s probably an improvement over a situation where you want to scream that it’s all a facade.
2) don’t isolate. The more contact you have with real people and real problems, the more grounded you’re likely to be (I think).
3) obviously, talk to a mental health professional. They may not have answers for you, but the act of talking is valuable anyway.
Good luck! Wish I had more to offer.
Thank you.
Would you really just accept a self-serving, uncorroborated claim from Mahmoud Abbas? Really?
If you want, I can document numerous easily demonstrable whoppers by this person. But you really should know better than to trust any politician, let alone Mahmoud Abbas.
Our experience is real, but universe is simulated
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1011/1011.3436.pdf
There are also corollaries, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle is very compatible with it and makes even more sense if looked from the information processing perspective
Then there is probability argument if universe can be a simulation – its very likely we live in one, because there are many simulations and just one “reality”
And this is decently entertaning short story about why one would want run such simulation.
http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
This seems to neglect conservation of energy, no? Where would cost savings come from, if not in the reduction of useful details or putting on floor on the size of objects and thus depth of simulations? A universe with many simulations doesn’t seem very plausible to me, I can’t imagine a useful motive for running many simulations unless I postulate the simulating universe has an absurd amount of energy relative to our own, but I am inclined to not add such an assumption.
Neglect? – au contraire – it explains conservation of energy – for processing universe to be stable enough (if you really think about it -why would “real” universe have conservation of energy?)
Article addresses that:
A system that takes no input after it starts but loses the processing it has will
“run down”, which our universe hasn’t done for billions of years of quantum events. If
matter, energy, charge, momentum and spin are all information processing, their partial conservation laws could reduce to one law of dynamic information conservation.
Einstein’s matter/energy equation is then just information going from one form to
another
Our universe is not many simulations – its a single simulation where what simulated is elementary particles and everything else largely flows from it .
Postulation about “absurd” amount of energy relative to our own – are just that – absurd. We are inside the other universe – of course their levels of computation and processing power are of incomprehensible scale to ours. Just like if for “The Sims” our universe would be “absurd”
I wonder if they trace back all the vanishing pool laders to quantum fluctuations.
Remember that the simulation doesn’t have to really be accurate, it just has to fool us. Dynamic multiresolution simulations seem like an obvious shortcut.
A thought that occurred to me the other day: if the many worlds interpretation is true, there is some universe in which the lottery numbers have been ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6’ for as long as people have been running lotteries. There is also some universe in which communism works great because the central planners have an unbroken streak of accidentally choosing just the right prices for everything.
Presumably the people in the former universe have thought up elaborate reasons why lottery numbers always seem to come out this way, and people in the latter universe just totally take for granted that Marx was right about everything. And yet for almost all the universes branching from those two, the chain of luck will break down. New combinations will come up on the lottery numbers for the first time ever. Communism, after running strong for a century, will suddenly fall to pieces. I can’t imagine how utterly baffling it would be to be in a universe like that, watching what looks like the laws of reality changing before your eyes.
And yet for almost all the universes branching from those two
Remind me how new universes being created by every such event is compatible with conservation laws.
All the conservation laws that we know of, apply only to the single universe we can observe. The many-worlds interpretation of QM does not break any generally accepted conservation laws because there aren’t any generally accepted conservation laws that apply across multiple universes. Certainly not any that have been verified to apply across universes.
The “universes” of MWI aren’t anything additional to the evolution for the Schrodinger equation. However, your remark *does* apply to relativistic many worlds theories.
My understanding of MWI is that universes are never created. Rather, the wavefunction of the universe as a closed system evolves unitarily (so in a linear, deterministic fashion). We are in an open subsystem of the closed, unitarily evolving universe. To get behaviour from this perspective we have to trace out other degrees of freedom. This gives the appearance of non-unitary, probabilistic “jumps” when we make measurements. Essentially, the “universes” corresponding to outcome A and outcome B of a measurement were merely coincident until the results of that measurement. Post-measurement we are on different branches of the unitarily-evolving wavefunction, but there is no more or less of anything than before measurement. There could definitely be an error in this explanation, I am not that up to date/knowledgable on foundations of QM, but my understanding of MWI is that it is approimately like that.
The Schrodinger equation is compatible with the conservation of energy.
“The Schrodinger equation is compatible with the conservation of energy.”
As long as you use the proper nontrivial reformulation of the conservation of energy, yes.
Consider, e.g., that there turns out to be a Heisenberg uncertainty relationship between uncertainty in energy and uncertainty in time which is quite alien to the classical understanding of conservation of energy. (Among other things the relationship is scaled by Planck’s constant, which doesn’t appear in classical physics equations or in the experiments that classical physicists understood.) (In hindsight, of course, it appears in the results of experiments involving stuff like spectroscopic lines and black body radiation and chemical bond angles.)
The basic idea of the Bohr correspondence principle is pretty trivial, but the details can be less trivial. (I once stumped my QM professor with a reasonable question about how the scattering equation just derived could be consistent with the correspondence principle as stated in an earlier lecture.)
Logically, branching universes are equivalent to multiple universes that are the same up to a diverging point; yet, for the former there is supposedly a conservation objection, and for the latter there is supposedly determinism objection. Clearly the thinking went wrong foot at least one of those objections.
And there’s a universe full of beings who are just wired to experience constant bafflement countless times greater than any you could imagine.
That’s just a math department.
Presumably the lottery universe does not have lotteries. It doesn’t fail QM, but it does fail at a logical level.
There are also some very strange ideas floating around in math departments. And there are fewer atheists.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/14h/the_hero_with_a_thousand_chances/
I don’t think MWI necessitates an unbounded multiverse. We don’t have good evidence for this view yet afaik, but I feel it must exist in principle. It’s asking too much for me to believe that I could be so lucky as to so far have existed in one universe out of so many where an illusion of macrophysicsl laws exists. That bites the argument of Democritus too hard in my opinion: “Poor reason! From us senses you take your evidence, yet you use that very evidence to deny our understanding!” In the classical case of sense fallibility, we can seek to minimize the discrepancy between various senses and our model of reality, but this fails in an unbounded multiverse. I can’t live in an unbounded multiverse, that’s indistinguishable from nihilism so far as I can tell and makes little logical sense besides as I understand logic, so I’ve got to think bounds exist somewhere within as yet not understood aspects of physics. Normally, I don’t much approve of the argument from ignorance, but in an extreme case like this it’s got more explanatory power than the alternative.
Maybe it helps that the probability to land in a physical universe is unimaginably close to 1? Like you completing every billard game you play in the first shot and so that it just happens that someone shoots fireworks in the near vicinity is something that happens in an absurdely large portion of universes compared to those where you can witness one “nonphysical” event on a macroscopical scale.
Remember: Any joy you feel is balanced by an equal amount of pain in one of your quantum-brothers, like an electric charge.
I don’t feel as though probability ought to work that way. If there are one million copies of me in a lawful universe, one copy of me in a senseless hell, and one copy in a random heaven, that’s only three distinct experiences. I don’t care about some abstract metaphysical density of experiences, if I anticipate a 100% chance of random suffering in even just one of “my” futures, everything seems pretty meaningless. This might partially be due to the fact that I have loss aversion.
I think it’s fair to say, that a quantum-copy of you is not ‘you’, at least if you allow for enough time so your conscious minds can diverge.
Also, personally I am worried more about the universe, in which a bunch of particles randomly come together for a timespan of 30 seconds to form a copy of me sitting in front of my computer writing something and remembering many aspects of a decades long life, only to randomly fall apart afterwards.
At least you don’t have loss aversion plus overactive empathy. 100% chance someone’s future is random suffering, anyway.
Is there a universe in which counterpart-EW believes that no one could rationally believe MWI and that the Cophenhagen interpretation is true?
SSC SF Story of the Week #3
This week we are discussing “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven.
Next week we will discuss “The Gentle Seduction” by Marc Stiegler.
Loved the ending to this one; it was very wistful, and I found myself rooting for Stan and Leslie, and hoping that their children’s children would indeed one day colonize Europe and Africa. Shame Stan didn’t realize in time that he could have saved his family or made better preparations, but if he had the story would have been very different in tone.
So what was being said on the red telephones? Not from Russia, but lots of highly paid military security people would have noticed when no one from other time zones were answering their phones, etc etc. And news media would have noticed, and begun talking within their own timezone about it. I remember Johnny Carson. There were 24 hour stations too. It would have been noticed, talked about, there would have been panic, probably National Guard running around.
The mood of the story was great … dreamlike, surrealistic. The first person narration (and who was he telling this too, on what typewriter) … put a sort of ‘suspend disbelief’ padded cloak around the surrealism. And/or, was Niven at a career point where he could get away with anything, and we’d rationalize it? Maybe for me it needed to be read in context?
Brilliant Niven narration especially in the bar-hopping. But I kind of wish he’d gone ahead and in the trope of some decades previous, let the narrator wake up with it a dream, except that Lesiie would next day hint that she had the same dream….
I liked it. I would have expected more wide-spread panic or at least interest in the phenomenon – like everyone going out into the street to look. Like a lot of short stories it doesn’t build as much empathy for the characters as you might get in a longer work.
“Inconstant Moon” was written in 1972, and it still works as a period piece. No internet, no cellphones, no CNN, no reason for anyone but a handful of specialists to expect real-time news from the far side of the world at local midnight, and no easy way for a layman to get such data even if they knew the right questions to ask.
What’s the latest date at which the story remains plausible? I’m going to guess early 1991; the Gulf War later that year put CNN in the spotlight as a 24/7 global news source, and it’s impossible that the news wouldn’t spread to essentially the entire waking population of Los Angeles within hours.
This article tells about several late-night or all-night radio stations in the Southern California area from well before 1972. http://jeff560.tripod.com/kgfj.html
My usual thought is, what did the readers at the time think about a story? Did they find it realistic? — Okay, IM won the 1972 short story Hugo. Niven, hard SF; where non-techy characters, particularly en mass, were traditionally idiots. Maybe unobservant idiots. Stan noticed the moonlight was impossibly strange, but maybe the other characters weren’t paying quite that much attention.
All-night radio stations existed in 1972, but were almost entirely entertainment and local news. The guy in the DJ booth or whatever, obviously can’t see the moon and I don’t think he has a 24/7 international news wire.
If someone like the protagonists were to dial in to a talk-radio station and tell the audience that they are all doomed, and if the host doesn’t write him off as a crackpot, well, the protagonists didn’t do that and if someone else had, how big is the midnight audience for an LA talk radio show in 1972?
I think it read as realistic; the character in the diner who is beginning to tell people is dismissed as a religious nutcase (at least until we find out that Leslie already knows) and wouldn’t we think the same if someone got up and started yelling the world was doomed because the moon was bright?
The point of the story being set at night is because this is a pre-24/7 connected world. Lots of people are already asleep. Those who do notice the bright moon can’t go online and google why is the moon so bright. The trick Niven pulls – and that we don’t think of – is the point he makes: if it were a nova, it would be expected. There would have been discussions – if not in the public media, for the sake of preventing global panic – the narrator is a science writer, he’d have heard whispers about it from contacts.
So the story is SF because it’s based on real-world science and how an informed but not expert layman can piece together what is happening, based on “wow, the moon is really bright tonight, is it meant to be that bright?”
And because he’s not an expert, the twist that it’s not really a nova works. He jumped to the doomsday conclusion because he was nearly right.
It’s a very good counterpiece to “The Star” and ends with hope where the other one ended with despair. Whether we should make much of “religion = despair but science= hope” for the two stories, I don’t know 🙂
Headline News dates to a couple years before that, with their coverage of the end of the USSR.
Prior to that, there were all-night news desks for newspapers on both ends of the USA, as well as space observation sites strung around the world. Not to mention the DEW system and more mundane military observation posts. And there was this little hostile intervention going on in southeast Asia…
The story specifies that the flare happened early in the Johnny Carson show, and that astronauts were on the moon at the time. So Houston loses contact with the astronauts, and nobody bothers to interrupt the show with a special bulletin?
Well, maybe. If the show was taped and no one was working at the network when it aired. Or if the astronauts were on the dark side of the moon and didn’t notice anything worth reporting, and somehow no one at Houston suspected anything wrong anywhere.
A west coast broadcast of the Tonight Show in 1972 was definitely taped, and the local station would have gone off the air right afterwards. NASA and NBC would both have had to be unusually decisive, fast, and efficient to get that story on the air before morning.
Remember that the TV cuts out in static; the signal is lost. Even if there were an emergency broadcast, it probably would have been delayed while NASA tried to figure out what happened and how best to present it to the public (“Don’t panic, we’ll rescue them”) and that delay would have meant the TV stations were all off the air by the time they were ready to go.
A favorite of mine.
I love the whole atmosphere of reasoning under impending cataclysm.
Damn, that was good. Thanks. Makes me miss LA a little bit.
I remember reading it in an anthology when I was younger, and really enjoying it. It’s a very well written story.
But as much as I like it, the story doesn’t really seem like science fiction to me. The only SF element, the supernova, is just a justification for why the world is ending which could easily be replaced by, for example, an inevitable nuclear strike or the Rapture without really affecting the story. The focus is entirely on the human characters and their reactions to the impending doom.
Does anyone else get that sense?
I’d say “Inconstant Moon” is centrally science fiction, not even an edge case a la something like Pern. It’s basically the same pattern as Niven’s debut “Neutron Star”: smart layman observes a bunch of strange phenomena that are baffling to others, and eventually reasons his way to the specific space-based scientific phenomenon that underlies it. Which understanding gives him the key insight he needs to survive.
A nuclear war or the Rapture doesn’t present the same opportunity for scientific reasoning. And since it wouldn’t have the same clockwork unfolding of information based on the speed of light, the plot wouldn’t proceed the same way. For the story to be as it is, the key event pretty much needs to be a solar flare. (Or some other sun-based phenomenon, of comparably specific destructive power. I’m not sure if there are other possible candidates.)
clockwork unfolding of information based on the speed of light
I liked that very much, and I suppose it was the conceit of the story. People running around inside the clock, so to speak, using logic while it ticks.
The unrealistic behavior of LA and the US distracted from that. If the plot were set in, say, a Hawaiianly-remote island often subject to loss of communication with the rest of the world, rented for a boozing convention, the whole thing could read to me like expected Nivenesque hard SF.
Stan’s thinking is drunk or stoned all the way through; he took that long to remember that whatsit stars don’t go nova, and a coming nova would have shown signs?
All through, he’s using dream logic, tunnel vision. It doesn’t occur to him first off to reality check his guess by phoning overseas to see if anyone does answer over there? Even if no connections overseas, he’s a science writer of standing to handle a moon rock, presumably the California phones are still working, so why not call up a local observatory for a second opinion? Why _not_ wake up some professors, does he think they’d rather sleep through the whole thing?
Instead it reads like Niven setting up a hoax or other twist; and Stan doesn’t even consider that? The other half of the world burns up, and no one suspects here except a very few? Just because the moon gets bright? — More likely the Russians are up to something, or the Puppeteers.
I think part of the technique of that kind of puzzle story is to be short and engaging enough that the reader doesn’t start asking those questions till it’s over.
(Though: phone whom overseas? The average American at the time wouldn’t have known any numbers outside the US, or had any simple source for one. Placing one would be operator-assisted, time-consuming, and expensive. And once he’d left home he’d have had to deal with getting a mountain of change for a pay phone. Even for locals, when he thought the world was doomed it’s pretty clear he didn’t want to bother anyone who didn’t figure it out on their own, and so make their last hours terrifying for no reason.)
“Neutron Star” has the same sorts of problems. As Niven later conceded in-universe (where the Puppeteers said they’d been humoring Schaeffer), it’s pretty much impossible for a species that’s been flying spaceships for arbitrarily longer than humans to be that ignorant of tidal forces, moon or no moon. Ditto human scientists from a respected “Institute of Knowledge”, especially those going on a neutron star exploration expedition.
(That they’re from Jinx makes it even worse, though I don’t remember if that planet/moon’s unique characteristic– it’s egg-shaped, due to the tidal distortions caused by its Jovian primary– had been invented for that story or shows up later.)
I think both are still great (if not flawless) stories. But if those questions started nagging at you while reading, I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to agree.
I think the most that would realistically come out of that line of inquiry is finding that the handful of 411 operators and/or professional astronomers awake and on duty in 1972 Los Angeles after midnight all have busy phone lines, thus confirming that the protagonist is at least the hundredth person in a city of seven million to think that an extremely bright moon might be suspicious enough to be worth asking about. Which he already knows, and which adds nothing to the story.
@ LHN
Teleologically of course Stan can’t come to the flare conclusion sooner, or even be less than certain of his nova conclusion, because that would spoil the story. Besides, I enjoy the surrealistic, tunnel vision tone.
I just wish it were by the ending recognized that he has been thinking irrationally, unworthy of a science writer. And some reason given, in hindsight.
houseboatonstyx says: I just wish it were by the ending recognized that he has been thinking irrationally, unworthy of a science writer.
He does though, when it revealed that they’re dealing with a solar flare and not a nova.
The only SF element, the supernova, is just a justification for why the world is ending which could easily be replaced by, for example, an inevitable nuclear strike or the Rapture without really affecting the story.
No, the point of the story is the hopeful ending, and that is based on real-world science and thinking the problem out based on the evidence. Reason and science saves us all! Or at least, our heroes in Los Angeles 🙂
The Rapture is religion which is not going anywhere with Niven. All-out nuclear war, at the date of writing, would have been accepted as pretty much guaranteed world-destruction with no way to a happy ending (unless our heroes made it to a bunker with the prospect of the next twenty or so years locked tight underground).
The nova-that-wasn’t, on the other hand, is survivable and indeed, with the dreams of the grandchildren re-colonising the dead lands (not radiation scarred and uninhabitable after a war), it ends with Good Old American Grit And Know-How Save The Day 🙂
“Neutron Star” was great in that it made me think about gravity for the first time, rather than just taking it for granted as usual: “the reason we’re not all floating around in the air is gravity”.
Neutron star is how I figured out how tides work. The physics of what was happening was reasonably clear, and I then realized that that was why Earth had tides, something I had never thought much about before.
Which is evidence against the claim that the Puppeteers couldn’t figure it out because their planet didn’t have a satellite.
I was reading it on my phone, and for some reason the way the document loaded, it ended with:
“This thing had started around eleven-thirty, here in California. That would have put the noon ”
– cutting off mid-sentence, presumably as that narrator is vaporized by a supersonic shockwave, I thought was a great ending. A real gut-punch. Then I realized that wasn’t the whole story. I can’t decide if I prefer this truncated version to the full version.
I don’t often participate in the discussion here, Jaime, but I wanted you to know that I love the stories you’re sharing and look forward each week. They make lovely lunch break reading and something to chew over through the week.
Thank you. I’m glad to know you enjoy them.
I realized I should probably ensure you get a steady stream of positive feedback for ’em, since I want ’em to keep coming. The discussion ought to do that, but, hey, best do my part, as well.
I do find myself desiring to read Neutron Star, now…I am sadly uncultured in classic sci-fi, having been more of a fantasy nerd growing up. My sci-fi experience extends little further than some David Weber, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the Star Wars EU (and I’m pretty sure two of those barely count).
Correction: I thought the linked “Inconstant Moon” PDF was well-formatted, but it is in fact missing italics. I apologize for the mistake. If anyone wants to see what the correctly formatted story looks like, it is on Google Books.
Not much of a book club person, but wanted to say I’ve been loving these stories (and the discussions). Old sci-fi is so much better than the cringeworthy junk coming out today.
The recent discussion here of critical thinking together with the overall character of the blog makes me think this might be a place to ask the following:
I’ve been trying to find subscription-based news publications of any kind that aspire to a neutral, critical, reasoned perspective. Basically, what I’m looking for is formal, paid journalism with the kind of careful thinking that this blog presents informally and free of charge.
Actually, that might overshoot the mark a bit. It needn’t be this funny, thoughtful, or thorough. The only actual requirement is to have interesting assertions paired with the sources of evidence that support them and the strongest available arguments for why the evidence might be invalid or the assertions wrong. It needn’t be general news — a focus on, say, economics or recent science would be fine, if they followed this procedure.
I’ve tried to get a complete picture of various topics by reading news from sources with contradictory ideological biases, but that was always a hack. Conflicting advocates mostly just end up raising the noise floor.
I realize that in attention-driven media the money is going to go to journalism that exaggerates events, courts controversy, and generally keeps as its first priority grabbing and holding people’s attention, but I thought perhaps someone, somewhere might be aiming for this as a small niche market. If a publication has an editorial standard of “stick to good critical thinking”, I’d be willing to pay for it.
The best example of this I’ve ever seen was a TV show on PBS called Uncommon Knowledge, where a topic was chosen, and competent proponents of contrasting opinions were led in a moderated discussion to figure out where they agreed and disagreed, and what arguments and evidence led to their respective opinions. The show still has a webcast, but now it looks like just normal one-on-one interviews. Still, this means the concept isn’t completely unheard of.
I’ve only seen it focused on specific topics. So eg Jack of Kent for law, Popehat on First Amendment or Waiting For Tax on … tax. Not found anything interesting and general in the same way.
Popehat is a good writer and often has something interesting to say, but “ideologically neutral” is not the first adjective I would apply to him..
“Him” is not the first pronoun I’d use to describe them, but otherwise, your point stands.
Popehat is plural, female, n-gender? Which?
Popehat is a blog with multiple authors, although a supermajority of posts come from one author under the pen name Ken White. He and most of the other authors are men.
zz was being a bit pedantic on that point. Everyone understands what you meant.
him/hem/hom for plural masculine-kin?
I nominate fee/fie/foe/fum.
Why are you so keen on paying? :)) I think that a good strategy is to find a couple of interesting bloggers and follow them. Actually, you can use the “Amazon strategy” – if you like Scott’s blog, you might also like some of the blogs he or the people here in the comments link to.
This is basically what I do, supplemented by a small dose of regular media where I try to read the essential information about what happened (so for example today – “Le Pen won the elections in a lot of French departments” but I do not bother reading any explanations or analysis). I guess I would like a news source which only presents dry news, facts that are clear and leaves everything else out. I don’t know of any though, so I just skim through the news articles and try to distill the factual information only. I also just read the main news and just once a week. That way I get the important news without spending too much time at news sites. Most things can wait a few days and if there is nothing on the news site a week after they first wrote about it, then it probably is not worth the time (I read these kinds of articles only if they are linked to by a blog I read or if someone I trust to pick interesting stuff sends me a link to them).
SCOTUSblog is the gold standard for reporting on the Supreme Court (warning: once you start following what’s actually going on, regular Court reporting will straight up piss you off). Lawfare has some ideological bias (especially when compared to the more popular narratives out there), but they’re very rational and critical, they invite genuinely good authors to argue for the other side, and even have some of their own writers write both sides of the same issue. Finally, Intelligence Squared almost always has very competent proponents, and John Donvan is almost always excellent at keeping the debate directed and relevant.
The only caveat with Lawfare is that the guy who runs the place, Wittes, is the least balanced and in many ways least interesting poster on there–well, other than Stewart Baker, but luckily he doesn’t post much). I agree that many of the others are worth reading even if you disagree with their POV.
Agree unreservedly on SCOTUSblog, and I’ll check out Intelligence Squared.
Orin Kerr is top notch and very fair on 4th amendment issues. Likewise Eugene Volokh on free speech — he’ll give his opinion but also give you the straight analysis. They both post at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/
Be warned, that some of the other posters there are not as good and a few are awful.
I’d be interested in something for economics. It seems like the “schools” are so far apart that you can’t just go to one source for anything.
http://somethingtoconsidermovement.com/something-to-consider is a good one (but free).
I get my news from Google Scholar / pubmed. Works well for the topics I care about.
The problem is that there is no current business model, overall, which supports “… paired with the sources of evidence that support them ….”. The vast majority of the audience cannot tell the difference between well-supported assertions versus regurgitating a faction’s talking points (how could they be expected to do so? they aren’t experts). It takes very little time and effort to repeat what an advocacy group puts out, but extensive work to analyze an issue fairly. That sort of measured thinking needs to be supported on the basis of its own worth. Hence the exceptions, like PBS, which are not profit-driven. Or professor-bloggers, who have jobs and are in a system which does have some pressure not to be completely afactual. It’s not that the concept is unheard of. Sadly, click-bait of the type “Your Cat Might Be A Racist Who Looks Like Hitler” is much more profitable.
I used to get Stratfor through work and it was pretty good, though I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for exactly. They have some free articles you can look into though.
Pretty sure they’re considered a bit of a joke. The rather embarrassing leak certainly didn’t help their reputation.
Ideological biases are inevitable, but sensationalism is not. All you can really do is read a variety of sources (including blogs and the occasional comments section) and be agnostic in general on most things.
Of course, you could always just not read news. I’m not sure there is actually much value in keeping up with the goings on of the world, although I do it out of habit and some general interest.
Christian Science Monitor has been famous for a long time for its neutral and non-sensationalized reporting. This is not the same as “clearly bringing both intellectual ability and charity to bear on difficult issues,” and I do not think that organization yet exists.
For news I don’t think i could recommend anything better than the Economist. Their coverage of topic I have expertise in ranges from decent to insightful. And that’s so very much better than any other new source I can think of that covers so much.
On the other hand, when Mao died, their obituary credited him with ending starvation in China. Considering that he was responsible for one of the worse famines in history …
But everyone makes mistakes.
When Ramon Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky, the latter was reading the Economist and didn’t see the murder weapon.
Everyone makes mistakes.
I’ve heard an opinion that that newspaper should more accurately be called the ‘Demotist’.
Bringing this forward from the previous open thread…
The other year 😉 on a road trip, DH and I really needed some caffeine.
But all we could find was a Starbucks.
I found myself actually saying to him: “I’ve never stepped foot inside a Starbucks in my life, and I’m not going to start now.”
I literally could not bring myself to enter a Starbucks. That…was just a bridge too far. 😉
@Nornagest:
I feel like we’re not communicating… I just think there’s a difference between the way people react who don’t have any aversion to (or, even, enjoy) fighting…and the way people react who always disliked all “opposing sides” (rather than “same side even if we disagree”) framings and now, on top of that, have a PTSDish situation going on too.
I don’t like to *debate* anything (“opposing sides” framing). I’ll joyfully *discuss* (“all on the same truth-seeking side despite disagreements” framing) everything not an “existential threat,” and I’m glad that here we have a climate where we can.
But when I *do* feel an “existential threat”…*I don’t fight, I flee*.
:shrug: I’m an INTj/LII (socionics; INTP or TiNe in Myers-Briggs/Jungian notation)–we IN_js/_IIs are famous for our lack of backbone. 🙂
…those still sound apologetic to me.
I’m not saying the people you know are lying. I *am* saying if *I* tried to join greay tribe, *I’d* feel pressured to say what your friends did, even though for me the *truth* would be, “I do get it and I disagree with it.”
“Filk is hella embarrassing, and I’ve heard it but I wish I hadn’t.”
Oh come on, it’s funny. (Though the only filk I’ve actually heard is programming filk. :dusts off cobwebs: “W stands for the windows we use / And X is the windowing system we choose…” :nostalgia:)
@Echo:
Accents, yes! You sent me on an entertaining voyage of linguistic discovery. 😉 So thanks. What accent did your grandfather have, that the bank people reacted to that way?
When it comes to subcultural identification, seems like there are two aspects here: Your own accent, and how you react to others’ accents. (My own accent is a lot like this.)
Dialect and accent features that I don’t share usually strike me as charming. I can only think of a few exceptions:
* “Dark l” (“broad l” to our Irish speakers)/”velarized alveolar lateral approximant” in all contexts (for example, Tom Brokaw and Robert Bazell).
* The “needs washed” construction.
* The backed vowels of “begEnning” for “beginning” and “HOlloween” for “Halloween.” (Northern California Vowel Shift?)
* This accent. (Upper-/middle-class New York?)
* “…is/isn’t a thing,” “I know really,” “I don’t even,” “Wow. Just wow”…etc. (Young netizen/SJW/tumblrina…”upper class” again?) I occasionally choose to use one of these myself when writing to those who do, but it’s always a deliberate, effortful choice.
Accents/dialects I find charming include Southern (coastal, inland or mountain), AAVE, US Midland, etc. 🙂
Chevalier? How about you?
@anonymous: So you *are* basing it chiefly on religion and politics. Hmm…
…I’ll be honest, I think you and Nornagest are conflating “Yankee” with “blue” when really the two may be slowly slipping apart. Oh well…”Nous sommes allong ar notre batteau, nous ne voulong pas un row.” 😉
My husband uses the “needs verbed” construction on a semi-regular basis. To me, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Every goddamn time.
I’m curious – whence the Starbucks hate? Do you hate other large market-dominating corporations too, or just that one?
I do the Starbucks thing, mainly because of Bay Area/Peets factionalism. Completely pointless tribalism of that sort can be surprisingly enjoyable in small doses.
“whence the Starbucks hate?”
Well… 😉
“Do you hate other large market-dominating corporations too, or just that one?”
Politically, yes, I am opposed to monopolies. But that’s not why I can’t bring myself to enter a Starbucks. 😉
Honestly, I know Yankees a lot worse than I know Californians. The type specimen of Blue to me is a sixtyish white woman living in Berkeley, working as some kind of mid-to high-level bureaucrat — let’s say a school administrator. Intelligent, but prefers constructions like “emotional intelligence”; distrustful of analytical thinking styles, and therefore prone to woo. Has a chiropractor and may have a psychic. Thinks of herself as highly spiritual but belongs to no organized religion. May or may not like kale or arugala, but definitely accustomed to cutting foods out of her diet for health or ethical reasons, and will talk your ear off about it if given a chance. Votes Democratic, and donates to the party; would like to vote Green but has heard that would be throwing her vote away. Very concerned about racism but has few non-white friends. Does Pilates or tai chi or some other low-impact fitness program. Goes on bicycle tours in places like New Zealand once a year.
That’s not to say you have to be any of this to be Blue, but this is the person I think of as the Bluest of the Blues, the ur-Blue.
Ah, the Governor Moonbeam type. 🙂
I know a guy online who (except for being a guy) completely fits this description. I didn’t know such people were anything more than a politically-motivated negative stereotype until I ran into him. I’d still suspect him of being a false flag except that he’s posted photos of himself, he’s open about his address, etc. (I suppose he still *could* be some inoffensive everyman who’s being framed by a prankster or something…)
I gave the poor fellow a BSOD with my support for gun rights. I mean it, he really seemed to be having some kind of scary emotional meltdown–ranting and accusing people of having “contaminated themselves” by having read anything published by the NRA. He then announced I was obviously just “terrified the government would take my guns away”–when I don’t even own any guns…
So for you as a Californian, what is the *red* type specimen? Taking from my recent linguistic odyssey 😉 is it someone who makes a living from their “ammond” trees?
Reds in California are like Reds anywhere west of the Mississippi. There are actually two mostly-distinct cultures of Red that I’m familiar with, neither much Redder than the other; but only one of them maps closely to the culture Scott described, so that’s the one I’ll pursue here. I can draw a picture of the other later if you want.
Picture a white man, about 45 years old, living in Redding or a smaller foothill town. Fifty years ago he’d have been very likely to be involved in agriculture, but no longer; there are still a few places in California where the Reds haven’t given up on being cowboys, but they’re uncommon and no longer drive the culture. Let’s say this one is a sheriff’s deputy. Average intelligence, average grades in high school, probably an associate’s degree. Rather doctrinaire regarding law and culture, but tempered by an anti-authoritarian streak that law enforcement work has modified but not erased. Thinks of himself as Christian but only goes to church a few times a year, probably in an evangelical congregation. Votes Republican but doesn’t donate to the party. Listens to country music, and prefers Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard to whatever’s coming out of Nashville these days. Somewhat overweight owing to a fondness for ribs and domestic beer (but not lites). Takes his family to breakfast at McDonalds once a week before school, as a treat. Owns guns, mostly long arms but probably also a revolver or 1911, but rarely shoots them.
I’d be interested to hear about the other type of Red too, if you wouldn’t mind.
Yes, please do describe the other type too!
As for this one: “Redding” and “foothill town” have no connotations for me, I mean I could look them up but…
It also stands out that this type specimen is younger than your Blue type specimen. What if you translated this into population-level statistics, would it be “children of blues are becoming reds” or “blues had fewer kids” or do reds tend to be the children of Depression babies while blues tend to be baby boomers (and their kids are millennials) or what?
Since your type specimens were both white, I’d ask where non-whites fit in, but I’m not sure how to word my question so as to avoid summoning an attacking SJW–so I guess my curiosity will have to remain unsatisfied. 😉
@Cord Shirt, there are no non-whites in the Red/Blue spectrum, as these tribes are specifically divisions within the white majority.
Except, of course, that there are non-white Blues and Reds, but they’re converts, not natives. Non-white Blues tend to be the children of successful immigrants who have assimilated to their surroundings, non-white Reds are interracial adoptees. But, very importantly, the black and Hispanic working classes are neither Blue nor Red, but have a tribal identity all their own.
Redding (the name is a coincidence) is a smallish city that lies where the foothills of the Klamath Mountains meet the northern tip of the Central Valley. I picked it because it’s fairly well known (it’s the biggest city for five hundred miles on the I-5 corridor), very Red, and fairly white; it’s not hard to find a city in California with as many Reds in it, but most of the bigger ones have a lot of Latino influence on their culture, which interferes with this exercise.
Foothill and mountains towns generally — that is, towns in and around the Klamath Mountains or the Sierra Nevada — tend to share these characteristics, as do the (few) towns in and around the Mojave. The triangle of upstate California in the northeast, past the mountains, is even more conservative but the culture there is weird.
The children of Blues are no less liberal, but a lot of them haven’t adopted their parents’ culture wholesale; you could call them Blues in a broader sense, but a Blue as deep as my type specimen’s is mainly a baby-boomer phenomenon. Some of these children became Grays, but more fall into cultures like urban hipsters or the Tumblrina/netizen cluster, which the ur-Blue upthread would think of as strange and faintly alarming. I think this underlies a lot of the hate on millennials you see floating around.
You get some defections from the Red side too, but I think the children of Reds are a lot more likely to also be broadly Red. Red culture is drifting somewhat, but it’s not experiencing a phase change the same way that Blue culture is, at least in California.
I’ll describe the other type later. Had a whole thing written up, but server-side issues ate it when I submitted it.
And I thought that Redding was a made up town from Fallout 2 😀
Tibor – I’m not sure you’re wrong, and I’ve been to Redding.
Where it gets to 115 in August, every damn year. But only for about a week; the rest of the summer, it’s only 105 or so. And “it’s a dry heat”.
@Anthony:
Well, I guess that only Radscorpions, and mutated molerats can live in that heat, so it all makes sense now 🙂
Oh yeah, I said I’d describe the other culture of Red in California, didn’t I?
Still white, still stereotypically male, but skews younger — the picture in my head is of someone 25 to 30. People like him might live anywhere the rent’s reasonably cheap, but they’re densest in small to medium-sized cities and some small towns in the central and eastern parts of the state; let’s say this one lives on the outskirts of Stockton. No college experience; not particularly bright. Recently unemployed after working as a mechanic for a gas station. Strongly anti-authoritarian on the personal level, but skeptical of extending that anti-authoritarianism into policy for fear of granting license to people that can’t handle it: he might, for example, smoke pot, but would oppose efforts to legalize it. Listens to metal, hard rock, or the Insane Clown Posse, and has strong opinions on which is the best; thinks of country as music for old people and wannabe cowboys. Smokes. Eats fast food three or more meals a week. Watches combat sports or Nascar. Doesn’t generally vote, but votes Republican when he does. Doesn’t go to church, but thinks of himself as Christian in a vague way. Probably owns something with a Confederate flag on it, but thinks of it as a generalized symbol of rebellion rather than for its racial implications — though he’s not particularly fond of blacks or (especially) Mexicans. Probably also owns something with an American flag on it, but wouldn’t (unlike the other kind of Red) fly the flag outside his door on Memorial Day.
Funny thing is that among my blue-tribe friends, guns are the one issue where there is significant deviation from the standard Blue-tribe opinions. I’d say maybe 30% of the solid Blue-tribalists I know are against more gun control, or think that a few more restrictions in one area might be ok in exchange for some loosening of other restrictions. Many of that 30% own guns.
And it’s not usually a stalking-horse for other heterodox opinions – I have friends who are pretty mind-killed SJWs but are against gun control. And they’re not even from rural backgrounds.
(Far Left voter; gun moderate here) I saw typical mind fallacies talking past each other when Palin was being blamed for the Tucson shooting. She had used a graphic of a plain circle divided like a quartered pie, which was alleged to inflame gun nuts with desire to go shooting.
The gun supporters patiently explained that Palin’s was actually a surveyors’ mark, and they showed pictures of the real gunsight symbols, which somehow didn’t seem to cool the conversation.
(Actually, hoplaphobia-phobia seems worse, consequence-wise.)
Grey/west/dropout/technocrat vs. Blue/east/ivy/bureaucrat is a convenient way of setting the gradient, and does have some meat to it. But, as in the Red-Blue split, the view of the opposing region is formed with a lot of projection of local vices onto a foreign target. So average the stereotype of Yankee with the local meddling hippies and dysfunctional government, and that’s “Those Fuckers.”
One thing I haven’t seen discussed yet here is how Greyness interacts with class. Red and Blue both have their canonical forms across the SES ladder, and of course a tendency to decry the groups above and below them as overwhelmed by members of the other tribe. But what’s labor-class Grey look like?
” But what’s labor-class Grey look like?”
Sounds a bit like some of the people who post on /k/. Although I think this “grey tribe” stuff is basically gerrymandering.
It seems to me that while both Reds and Blues have political allies in different classes, they’re class-specific clusters. Both are mostly middle-class, though Red has more lower-middle-class members, and Blue has significant support in the upper class (upper-class Democrats are Blue, but upper-class Republicans are typically not Red). Greyness is largely midde-class and up, and unlike the others, it doesn’t have allies in other classes.
As a precocious child who read a lot of history, I imbibed the belief that American society was different from historic European ones because America had no classes, being stratified purely by income.
As I got older, I realized that there were rednecks who owned houses and boats while many arts degree-holding Right Kind of People lived paycheck to paycheck in small apartments.
Familial wealth and educational history are probably stronger signals than personal wealth and even personal education, and geography’s probably stronger than either. Especially on the Blue side, I see a lot of young people with crappy rentals and service jobs but educated parents of middle class or better; while on the Red side, I see a lot of people who’re in their family’s first or second generation to have gone to college.
@Nornagest: 100% agreed on family wealth and educational history. What makes you say that geography is probably stronger? What exactly are Red and Blue territory, anyway? Yankee urban centers and those on the I-5 corridor are deep Blue, while small communities in flyover country are deep Red, but I’m not sure how the rest of America goes.
Dense urban areas, college towns, and coastal communities in the West and Northeast are Blue. Everything else is Red. That’s a pretty strong signal in general, but there’s some variation on the level of individual towns — you mentioned the I-5 corridor, so you probably know about Ashland for example. And there’s a very few regions where it doesn’t hold at all; Houston is a big city but it’s solidly Red (contrast Dallas and Austin, both Blue enclaves in a generally Red state), and upper New England is solid Blue but not particularly urban. I don’t think there’s enough of these exceptions to make it a bad heuristic, though.
@Nornagest: “I don’t think there’s enough of these exceptions to make it a bad heuristic, though.”
Ah, yes, if we’re talking heuristic and not something concrete enough to partition like India, I think that’s fine (and I do know about Ashland).
I remember a Republican ad from a decade ago that tarred all of Vermont as “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving” etc, which raised the weird mental image of middle-aged dairy farmers acting exactly like Seattle hipsters. I suppose that’s no weirder than Houston being as red as a small town while Austin isn’t.
Dense urban areas, college towns, and coastal communities in the West and Northeast are Blue. Everything else is Red
And suburbs are generally purple, but vary greatly.
” …what’s labor-class Grey look like?”
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/darkon/
” …what’s middle-class Grey look like?”
https://freestateproject.org/
Calling the west coast gray really surprises me, what with the “left coast”/”Governor Moonbeam” stereotype. But I guess my surprise is another example of distance-based ignorance: I don’t know much about the west coast.
I’m not very clear on blue vs. red cultural signifiers, but I think the east coast/Ivy blue is much more politically-oriented and generally hard-edged than the rather pitiful-sounding person Nornagest described.
I know a ton of people in Atlanta who qualify as “grey tribe” on most axes, but vote Republican. Think young, college-educated, white, male, employed in a technical or engineering job, “geek” cultural markers, shop at Whole Foods, anti-feminist and anti-“cultural Marxism”, apathetic or hostile to religion, may or may not be into gun culture but strongly support 2A either way, and very cynical about government, especially local government.
It’s interesting to me that the nearly identical subtype on the West Coast, where I used to live, is weakly Blue-affiliated, while the ones in the South are quite strongly Red. I suspect we may see the Silicon Valley crowd start to drift to the GOP, especially as they are more and more vilified by social-justice types. The Blues really don’t seem like the natural home for this type of personality.
The type you describe used to be most common geek/hacker subtype. For whatever reason, in the past 20 years, the Blues have become much more numerous. Silicon Valley companies are lousy with the SJ types, and while reign-of-terror is probably an overstatement, it’s not a large one.
Your comment on Atlanta reminds me of the situation fifty+ years ago, when libertarians were mostly seen as part of the conservative coalition. The compromise was that libertarians accepted traditionalist foreign policy—nor too hard since, while it was interventionist, it was interventionist against a particularly unlibertarian enemy—and traditionalists accepted libertarian economic policy.
How well that sort of alliance works probably depends on what issues are at the moment salient.
This is a bit worrisome to me, as I am grey tribe person who grew up in a reddish environment and who usually doesn’t vote or votes for the libertarian, but who, when push comes to shove, will still express support for Republicans over Democrats in many cases, or if given no other choice.
Contrast many readers here, and, I think, Scott himself, who, I get the sense, are also grey, but who grew up in more blue environments and, when push comes shove, will probably support the Democrats over the Republicans.
Makes we worry that changing tribes or denying your tribe of birth is a lot harder than it seems, since, at the end of the day, a lot of people who claim to reject the two-party paradigm still end up supporting the side their geographic and family background would lead us to expect them to support, if not in actual votes, then at least with their underlying sympathies… not that Duverger’s Law makes it easy to do otherwise.
Are you counting political identity and tribal identity as the same thing? It certainly complicates things on the political-identity front if you politically identify with a faction that either doesn’t run candidates or runs token placeholder candidates.
@onyomi
I’ve read a number of accounts from LessWrong-affiliated people of having been brought up in a fairly religious, red-tribe environment, coming to the conclusion as a child or young teenager that God isn’t real, and then becoming fairly aggressively anti-theist and anti-red tribe, at least for a while.
My own experience is almost the opposite of this – I was brought up to believe that blue tribe views are obviously correct and the red tribe is some combination of stupid and wicked, and only when I got into my late teens did I encounter intelligent, vocally right-wing people. I learned why capitalism doesn’t work at around age 12, and didn’t learn why it does work until around age 19. I’ve seen Bryan Caplan, among other people, describe similar experiences. I was briefly drawn toward the red tribe more strongly than I am now – claims along the lines “these good arguments against blue tribe views have been hidden from you because blue tribe members are too stupid and/or dishonest to acknowledge them” are emotionally appealing, even if they don’t hold up too well to scrutiny.
I don’t know which tribe I would support if push came to shove, but I don’t think I have more sympathy with the blue tribe than the red. Nor do I expect people raised in a religious, red tribe environment who had a strong backlash against that background will have more sympathy with the reds than the blues.
@John Schilling,
No, I don’t mean to do that, exactly, and you’re right, of course, about the possibility of expressing one’s true political identity in many cases, but I also think there is a certain slippage which goes on in people’s minds: people I grew up with were basically good people–>my tribe is basically good people–>party my tribe usually votes for deserves more of the benefit of the doubt.
So you guys are scientists/math people?
Seems like a lot of gut intuitionism and black and white thinking being used to make less than useless private prognostications about the political future.
Anyone who tries to draw global conclusions abut the future through extrapolating personal anecdotes about the past is delusional.
@ Anonymous:
[Note: this turned into a rambling intellectual autobiography. Hope it’s not too boring!]
I guess I’m somewhere in the middle.
I grew up in a greyish-red household in Alabama. My father was/is either an atheist or a deist, depending on what day of the week it is. (I have never really talked to my mother about religion, which is strange, I guess.)
But the attitude I was exposed to and had growing up definitely was: “liberals” are idiots and/or out of touch with reality; capitalism obviously works and we need more of it; the federal government is too big and too interventionist; America is the greatest country in the world, without question; Clinton should be impeached; everyone needs to support President Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I can’t say “social issues” were ever a huge concern for me, especially not the sense of using the law to tell people how to live. But I was definitely more in favor of “traditional values” when I was a teenager than I am now—or, well, not “traditional values” exactly. I always hated the double-standard where women were expected to be chaste but it was alright for men to sleep around. I suppose I had in mind a sort of gender-equitable Victorianism. (I definitely didn’t get any of this explicitly from my parents, who never said a word to me about sex. They gave me one of those books instead of having “the talk” at that age.)
I still am pretty opposed to polyamory, casual sex, and all that, but I’m less passionately against it and less in favor of knee-jerk “good-old-days-ism”.
I really didn’t have much of an opinion on homosexuality (and certainly not transsexuality) growing up. I never talked to one. I suppose I thought it was vaguely disgusting and should be kept behind closed doors, but it wasn’t hurting anybody. But by the end of high school, I was convinced that homosexuality and transsexuality were moral. I was and am of the Justice Kennedy persuasion that gay marriage should be legalized so that homosexuals can have sex within marriage like everyone else!
As for drugs, I thought it basically came down to one of two options. Either drug dealers should be killed and drugs ruthlessly stamped out, or they should be legalized. Once I was in my early teens, I realized the former wouldn’t turn out well and wouldn’t be just.
I never heard a good argument for any kind of socialism or welfare statism—and I still haven’t. 🙂 No, in all seriousness, I completely had the conviction that all right-thinking people are in favor of laissez-faire capitalism until I was in college. (Of course I was aware that many intellectuals weren’t, but my opinion was: they are hopelessly naive and/or deluded.) And even then, I can’t say I found the quality of leftist arguments too great. Scott Alexander himself (who I discovered in the past year or so) is probably the “liberal” who has most of all softened my opposition to it—from “this is completely unreasonable” to “I still disagree, but it’s more reasonable than I had thought, and I could imagine becoming more in favor of government intervention”.
As for religion, my parents deliberately never said much to me about it. I was explicitly a deist for a long time. I never saw anything much in Christianity. I was a deist not for any kind of “cosmological argument”-type reasons, but because I saw it as necessary to make morality absolutely sound.
Retrospectively, I think my beliefs were very much like those of the Victorian jurist James Fitzjames Stephen. Basically, egoism is obviously true, and so is conventional middle-class morality. “God”, as Richard Posner said of Stephen’s beliefs (and which definitely described me), is “an adjunct to the police”. Essentially, God’s purpose is to make sure all good deeds are adequately rewarded and all evil deeds adequately punished, in order to balance the scales of justice and make sure that it is always in one’s interest to do what is right.
I never saw the afterlife as important (beyond the matter of justice) or wanted eternal salvation—and I especially never wanted forgiveness for my sins. The latter was the thing that turned me off Christianity the most. I didn’t want mercy, I wanted justice and fair treatment. I wanted to be given exactly what I deserved. And I was pretty damn sure that justice in my case (nor in anyone else’s case) did not merit eternal damnation. Above anything else, my strongest emotional objection was: this religion is completely unfair!
(As a side note, this was pretty much my intuitive objection to socialism: it’s not fair. It’s unjust to take people’s money and give it to those who didn’t earn it and don’t deserve it.)
This is (as I also later found out) pretty much exactly the same as moralistic therapeutic deism. So I was one of the few self-conscious adherents of that religion. (I absolutely love that theory, by the way. It described my beliefs 100%.)
In my later teenage years, through my father I was introduced to Objectivism. He’s not really a “self-identifying” Objectivist, but he owns all of Ayn Rand’s works and many lecture courses on it. I found Leonard Peikoff’s History of Philosophy lectures fascinating and still highly recommend them to everyone.
But was never an overnight convert or anything. I read Atlas Shrugged over a month or so (I had listened to an abridged version on a car trip with my father before, but you don’t really grasp it fully that way). There were definite things I agreed with, but also many things I was skeptical about. I am the only person I’ve heard of whose biggest intuitive objection to it was Rand’s positive depiction of premarital sex. 🙂
The main intellectual objection I had initially was to the idea that pure self-interest could ground an atheistic ethics that was based on principle. In other words, what is called the “prudent predator problem”. Which is: granted that people should usually be productive, honest and all that, why should they do so all the time and not steal $20 bills from the register when they are sure they’ll get away with it?
My process of understanding and accepting Objectivism mainly consisted of reading Rand’s various works and then going online to places like The Atlas Society’s Q&A section to read objections and replies. Gradually I realized that, for one, my deism was a completely arbitrary fantasy. More importantly, I came to grasp ethics more naturally as a thing that emerges from within reality rather than being imposed upon it.
I still do consider myself an Objectivist. Although I disagree with Rand on some formulations, I hold with the “big four” of objective reality, reason, egoism, and capitalism.
However, from the very beginning, I was much more attracted to The Atlas Society and David Kelley’s “Open Objectivism” than the Ayn Rand Institute and Leonard Peikoff’s “Closed Objectivism”. Peikoff struck me as smart but dogmatic and intolerant, and this is still my opinion today. I think reading Kelley’s Truth and Toleration was one of the most valuable intellectual experiences I had.
My most recent major intellectual development has been my exposure to Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander (I found the latter through—you guessed it—Bryan Caplan). I file them under: how to actually be rational instead of just saying it’s a good idea. I think reading them has improved both my thinking and my open-mindedness.
In many ways, I think the SSC and wider rationalist community (though maybe more often wrong on the object level, in my opinion) is what the Objectivist community should have been: actually trying to be rational and understand the world in a naturalistic, open-minded way. Instead of being plagued by infighting and anathematization.
Vox Imperatoris:
A lot in your intellectual autobiography sounds interestingly similar to my own. This in particular caught my eye:
Growing up, I was annoyed at how the debate was primarily between accusers of sexism and slut-shaming on one side and actual sexists on the other. I thought men and women both hurt themselves by having casual sex, that they’re pressured into it by social norms and popular culture (similar to the pressure to drink), and that advocating for people to only have sex in strongly committed relationships was just recommending prudence, and didn’t have any more of an element of shame than there is in condemning other behaviors harmful to oneself. My friends both in high school and college shared this position, but it was surprisingly difficult to find other proponents on the internet or in society in general. I eventually realized that I was Typical Minding from being demisexual and that other people can have genuinely enjoyable casual sex, and also (unrelatedly) became polyamorous.
I also went from “homosexuality is disgusting and therefore it should be illegal” (while also being annoyed at all the religious arguments against it) to “homosexuality is disgusting but disgust is no reason to make laws” to “homosexuality is fine”.
@ blacktrance:
Yes, exactly. I never saw it as a matter of shame, just imprudence.
The specifics of religion and politics are strong signals, when they point the same direction they make a hard case to overturn. However, I pointed out other signals that also pointed in the same direction (Kale, Gilbert & Sullivan, Football).
You seem to really want to not fit into the blue tribe and to be some sort of unique person off doing you own thing. Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, but you don’t need my permission/approval either way.
As for Yankee/Blue, the North-East is associated with Blue the same way Red is associated with the South-East. That doesn’t mean there aren’t Reds in the North-East or Blues in the South. There’s even an NYC country music station.
From where I sit you seem like an elite blue who’s straining not to notice anyone wanting to depart. Like an establishment Republican insisting that nobody *really* supports Trump.
People here tend to have a prior that others want to be unique. Hate to break it to you all but most people actually want to fit in somewhere. I’ve already said that it’s time for me to depart from blue (the mobbing and defenestration might’ve been a clue) and I’m looking for a new tribe to join. You’re the one telling me I also don’t fit into red tribe. :shrug:
BTW, I’d cut some discussion of the kale thing from my previous comment just for length, but it was along the lines of, the kale thing just seems weird to me. Kale is the kind of greens that grows best where I live. What if I lived where collards grows best, would you say eating that made me blue tribe? Is it liking greens you’re talking about, or is it liking *kale* rather than collards? If it’s the latter, that does seem like conflating Yankee with blue. Same thing with fiddleheads–a traditional food here, a “cool new trendy” food in New York where some fool restaurant stir fried them, poisoning a bunch of people, because it blithely assumed that all cool new veggies were safe to prepare in the cool new manner. :rolleyes:
Back to the point–the reason I started joking about “wack tribe” is I do feel like there is a gap in this taxonomy. ISTM that once you branch out beyond red and blue, once you find yourself groping for gray, you’ve started talking about the beginning of a *realignment*. And once you’re talking about that…it just seems like there’s a gap. One axis is blue to red. The other axis is gray to…what?
The test in my 8th grade history textbook 😉 called me a “populist,” and that hasn’t really changed over the years. So…red/right vs. blue/left; gray/libertarian vs…? You could probably call me a “hard hat” (it’s obviously not a perfect fit for an old-school feminist like me, but close enough)–
I guess my real question is, *are hard hats still blue*?
I’m reminded of the Vox article on Hamilton: I’m part of that anti-Hamiltonian old school it mentioned, the one currently having its face pushed into the dirt by Cool Young Hamiltonian (blues|lefts–well are these the same or not?).
Or think of /What’s the Matter with Kansas?/: People have forgotten, or maybe never noticed, that Thomas Frank’s actual goal with that book was *to get the Democrats to change course*. Not that it worked.
From the linked essay:
Populist has gone from “maps to left” to “acceptable on the left” to…? Today’s Cool Young Blues generally take populism not as a political stance but as a cultural signifier–signifying the enemy.
Politically, I support Bernie of course 😉 :
But unlike Bernie, the *author* of that article is a smug elitist who has completely written off people like me–despite the fact that *we* hadn’t yet written off his political party. “Reagan Democrats”? You know, not all of us hard hats actually left, back then. Maybe we should have?
Observe the smug:
Jesus god. I mean I’m trying to control myself here by thinking of him as about 12 years old. Too little to know better! Doesn’t deserve having fiery death wished on him! But gah.
Maybe the question isn’t are we still blue; maybe the question is were we ever? [paranoid] Maybe you all were actually laughing at us behind our backs all along? [/paranoid]
(But then again–as a small businesswoman I am actually petite-bourgeoise. You know–like Margaret Thatcher’s parents. :))
So anyway back to the point–I just think the Red/Blue/Gray taxonomy has an empty spot. The late Joe Bageant was another (a Southern) representative of the type.
Kale is included because kale is trendy. Eating kale for non-trendy reasons, such as it being what grows where you are, doesn’t count.
I’ve noticed that growing it yourself is not considered a tribal signal.
The friendly reception you get sharing kale recipes quickly changes to guarded suspicion if you’re déclassé enough to mention groveling in the dirt for it, like some common redneck.
PEOPLE SHARE KALE RECIPES?!?!?!
What’s next, meatloaf recipes?
“I always put bread crumbs in my meatloaf, but you know, Muffy, my neighbor suggested I try soda crackers, and the taste was divine!”
“Oh I know, Buffy, and you just *have* to try corn flakes, I know they’re a bit pricey but they really add that special something!”
I guess my real question is, *are hard hats still blue*?
Nope. They may still vote for Democrats, even very redistributionist Democrats, but they’re not blue. Arguably, they haven’t been since the late 60s.
I found some videos of Tom Brokaw talking on Youtube, and that’s not dark l — it’s dark, yes, but it’s usually delateralized, formed completely at the back of the throat with no contact between the tongue and the teeth/alveolar ridge. See here — he doesn’t delateralize it in every word, but he consistently does it in the word “law”.
(I’m seeing a video of some local-to-you politician…?)
What about Robert Bazell?
Also, I’ve never knowingly heard Ira Glass, but I’ve read he does the same thing–would you say so?
Anyway, what bothers me is “that thing Tom Brokaw and Robert Bazell do.” Whatever it is. 😉 And it bothers me enough that I have to turn off the TV any time they come on. Whatever that says about my associations/affiliations.
More discussion of Tom Brokaw’s and Ira Glass’s ls. People there were arguing over whether it’s uvular or vocalic.
Neither of those strike me as particularly New York sounding accents. The NPR voice, in particular, I’ve never heard anywhere except NPR and I’m not sure what it is derived from.
Question for the Christian commentators here. What do you make of this Future Primeval post about how virtuous and insane the Mormons are? http://thefutureprimaeval.net/sanity-for-sociality/
Why can’t other churches resist social atomization and “conforming to the world” as well as the LDS? Like. why can’t the Pope (successfully) order Catholics to build well-ordered communities based around traditional families?
The Catholic Church is far too traditional to do that sort of thing. It is not, and has never been, in the business of building well-ordered communities. That sort of conscious attempting to build a better society is a modern thing, only fit for Mormons and socialists. The Church is, depending on how cynical you are about this, either in the business of saving souls or in the business of increasing its own power. In neither case does it suit the Church to wall itself off from society.
>In neither case does it suit the Church to wall itself off from society.
It should, however, shape society, rather be shaped by it. Personally, I blame the opposite direction occurring in practice on socialist infiltration of the Church authorities.
Right. Doesn’t the Church have a history of shaping society, by doing things like forbidding people to marry their cousins and telling them to give money to the poor instead of hoarding it to attract mates like bower birds?
A history, yes. Not so much now, since the recent developments are manifestly extra-ecclesial in origin.
Not marrying cousins was included in Roman law before it was part of canon law, and giving money to the poor is a direct commandment of Christ.
Dubious.
As a former Mormon, I’m not sure the idea of Mormons as maintaining a separate culture is really accurate. The phrase I heard as a child was that were supposed to be “in the world but not of the world.” We were not supposed to wall ourselves off from the rest of society, we were supposed to proselytize and be so virtuous that people couldn’t ignore how awesome the doctrine was. Given the love Mormon life outcomes are getting in this thread, this approach is obviously working to some extent.
Things taken very seriously: Don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke, don’t drink coffee, don’t have sex outside of marriage, duties related to callings, temple stuff.
Things not taken very seriously/not even technically prohibited: R-rated movies, caffeine outside of coffee and tea, home teaching, attending Elder’s Quorum.
There are differences between Mormon cultural norms inside and out of Utah as well. What exactly these differences are is highly disputed, but I think that they have to do with how people distinguish themselves in and out of the Mormon population center. If you live in New York, just being a Mormon is a serious identifier. In Utah, there’s an impulse to be a REAL Mormon who follows all of the rules to the letter, or to be “Sunday Mormon” who’s cool with the secular world. That was a major meme in Mormon circles anyway. I found a greater deal of enthusiasm in the Church when I lived in Colorado than when I was in Utah, perhaps due to a) more converts, b) the unenthusiastic people just drop out because there’s no social pressure to keep going, c) being a religious minority is a great social bonding experience. Utah is really nice overall through, great state. It’s comforting to live around so many LDS people, lots of shared experiences and cultural understanding.
I admit that I miss being part of the Church every once in a while, but I can’t reconcile it with my desire to have correct beliefs.
My first impression, in regards to “sanity cost” and the outward madness of Mormons, is that the author has basically arrived at CS Lewis’ “Puddleglum’s argument” from the opposite direction.
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow…
As for the rest, it’s complicated, but if building well-ordered communities were simply a matter of the Pope ordering it to be so I’m pretty sure one of ’em would have done it.
That said Mormonism developed on the frontier and I do think that this caused them to develop a few distinct memes that seem to have helped them “weather the storm” of modern life better than the more mainstream faiths. The sense of “you are your own keeper” and share the responsibility share the reward seems largely absent from wider society. They also seem to have embraced something Scott’s “walled garden” approach where pretty much every other major denomination has been trying to be all things to all people.
Simple theory: social organizations with high costs of affiliation (e.g. members seem visibly weird to society at large) can restrict membership to high-quality genuine believers, build social cohesion, and limit free-riding.
I don’t think this is restricted to Mormons. Other examples among religious groups include ultra-Orthodox Jews, most cults, monastic orders, and many Christian sub-groups (campus fellowships on Ivy League campuses?).
This definitely describes the early church. But when an organization becomes too mainstream, it starts to attract lots of low-quality members who reduce average quality and reduce its effectiveness. And then you wind up with a social club for organizing potlucks and bingo tournaments.
Once a social organization has been around for a while, most of the members are going to be descendants of previous members. (Yes, I know, the Shakers are an exception.)
For historical reasons, LDS had to literally separate itself from the rest of society, so they’ve had lots of practice doing their own thing.
That said, are they really that good at resisting “conforming to the world”? They notoriously changed their policy on polygamy in order to be accepted into the US, and I gather that they’ve moderating some less-than-PC views on black people. That they’ve maintained family structure better than most may be a simple matter of inertia combined with a slower rate of ideas from the broader culture diffusing into their subculture.
Younger Mormons are like younger evangelicals–and younger people in general–in that they don’t have a problem with gay people. Here in SLC there are a ton of Mormons who swear and drink caffeine.
They do at least seem to be better at saving sex for marriage than evangelicals, though.
This is a disturbingly plausible possibility. After all, why do they send their young women to get MRS degrees but don’t encourage those same women to homeschool the resulting children? Why ban R-rated movies but not movies made after 1990? The fact that they are leaving so much low-hanging fruit unpicked is evidence that they aren’t optimizing all that strongly for resisting “the world”.
On the other hand, they seem to be sticking to their guns regarding homosexuality, even if it costs them some members (though it looks like most of those mass resignations were lapsed members anyway).
@jamieastorga2000: This is a disturbingly plausible possibility. After all, why do they send their young women to get MRS degrees but don’t encourage those same women to homeschool the resulting children? Why ban R-rated movies but not movies made after 1990? The fact that they are leaving so much low-hanging fruit unpicked is evidence that they aren’t optimizing all that strongly for resisting “the world”.
Ouch, those are good points. If Mormonism is false and not optimized for virtue, one should look elsewhere even if they agree with FP’s sanity-for-virtuous-descendants bargain.
@Le Maistre Chat: Well, even if the Mormons are really just lagging behind the zeitgeist, a few less decades of “progress” could still make a huge difference when the other shoe drops. Besides, who else is there? Muslims?
The Amish, obviously. Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Muslims. Tradcaths. Quiverfullers.
They have a really variable success rate, but they’re all damn well trying to counteract the undesirable elements of modernity.
It’s worth noting that the population of Old Order Amish has been doubling about every twenty years. That’s the result of combining traditional birth rates with modern medicine.
Yeah, Scott even made a post about the impending takeover of the US by the Amish.
It’s also worth noting that the Amish have been relaxing a lot of their proscriptions in the relatively recent past. I grew up around Amish country, and have family who still live there. They report the Amish are a lot less uptight about tech and interacting with the English than they used to be.
No thoughts on the Mormon post.
But if “what do Christian commentators here think of $_Future_Primaeval_post” is the sort of thing you like to read, then you might like to read my own purple tribe take on Warg Franklin’s Passivism and the Procedure post over at FP. Here’s a link to my (rather long!) blog post on what I called the Steel Rule of St. Benedict. I’d actually be quite interested to read, um “neo-reactions” [hope that pun is okay, Scott] to the piece.*,**
*Over at my place: I know Scott doesn’t want us talking about [Future Primaeval’s worldview, the name of which we’re not supposed to use] over here.
**Content warning: I open the post by referring to [Future Primaeval’s worldview, the name of which we’re not supposed to use] as that of “evil heathens.” Doesn’t mean I can’t be polite to [Future Primaeval’s worldview, the name of which we’re not supposed to use] guests, but might change whether you give a darn what I have to say.
Well, I’m a convinced theist* and a Christian, not a Nerdy Racist Xerox**, so…
*Did you see what I said about Hinduism in OT36?
**Ditto Moldbug, in the last links thread?
Didn’t see either. Do you happen to have a quick link to your comments, or should I just google a bit? I’m certainly interested to read them (and your reactions to that giant blog post of mine, too, FWIW).
Hinduism here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/04/ot36-nes-threadol-hayah-sham/#comment-277593
Moldbug starting at: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/links-1215-maoz-tz-url/#comment-279701
And Steel Rule later.
I think he gets at a serious problem for the Less Wrong atheists, namely that these two core beliefs:
1. Rationality is about achieving your goals.
2. Religion is obviously irrational.
clash with the empirical evidence that Christian religion (and I suspect the rest of them) provides its adherents with longer, happier life, and better mental and physical health. From what I’ve seen, only the Moldbuggers are really grappling with this. But there’s not much to grapple with if you think religious beliefs might also be true. It’s only trading sanity if you start with atheistic assumptions.
That said, zooming out a bit, I think one major social function (of special interest to FP types) of “Religion” is solving coordination problems. And here, it’s not the “insanity” of the beliefs that is key, but rather what the beliefs are. How do we get people to cooperate in one-shot prisoner dilemmas where it is in their best interest to defect? We add a belief in an all-seeing arbiter and an afterlife where you will be paid back for what you did. Just like that, the game is no longer one-shot, you now have a good reason to cooperate.
It’s the belief in God that accomplishes this. Just having weird beliefs won’t do; you won’t build much of a society around the belief that the universe was sneezed out of a goat’s nose. I don’t think the beliefs being weird is even all that true; Mormons have some beliefs I find historically questionable, but the historical data to contradict them didn’t even exist when the sect was being formed, and frankly this kind of stuff does not affect day-to-day life for most people.
I would say it comes down to this: it is a fundamental presupposition of rational discourse and the pursuit of rationality that people ought to believe what is true. This is where the much-celebrated line about the box and diamond comes in.
If you abandon that—if you abandon the idea that what we’re after is the truth—you simply have to abandon the intellectual pursuit of knowledge. If instrumental rationality is opposed to epistemic rationality in a major and systematic way, that’s just the end for rationality.
Now, there have been people who believed this. Hume apparently felt this way:
But clearly such a view is the absolute failure and end of rationality.
And some of us won’t, can’t, and (I say) shouldn’t accept that. The belief that reality has a definite nature and that man can know it by reason is just too fundamental.
So it’s useless to enumerate the alleged benefits of religious belief, apart from the question of whether religion is true. If we can’t accept that it’s true, we’ll never accept that we ought to believe it anyway. Such a view amounts to nothing more than the doctrine that “ignorance is bliss”—which is the death of the mind.
It may well have been this passage that led Nietzsche to jibe (at Hume and the utilitarians in general) that ‘Man does not strive for pleasure alone; only the Englishman does’. I think it’s clear that Hume’s utilitarian beliefs led him to have some internal conflict that someone with other priors could easily have avoided, and by that I don’t mean someone irrational, just someone less wedded to the model of human action that he had.
I think this is one of the cases where Nietzsche is ill-served by the odd tendency to make the translations more gendered than the original. “Human beings do not strive for pleasure, only the English do,” sounds better to me, in addition to being more literal.
@ Protagoras:
That sounds much worse. The whole poetic structure and memorability of the line relies on the play of “man” on “Englishman”.
Maybe it was better in translation that it was in German…
“clash with the empirical evidence that Christian religion (and I suspect the rest of them) provides its adherents with longer, happier life, and better mental and physical health. ”
Does that hold true for Sweden? Or is it just ‘being Christian is better when everyone else is Christian”?
“How do we get people to cooperate in one-shot prisoner dilemmas where it is in their best interest to defect? We add a belief in an all-seeing arbiter and an afterlife where you will be paid back for what you did. Just like that, the game is no longer one-shot, you now have a good reason to cooperate.”
Like having a super intelligent AI that can reconstruct your past actions and personality? Or having life extension and cryogenics that get the same result? After all most religious people still fear death and mourn the dead- the afterlife is more a hope and belief in belief. Making LW beliefs more cult like could beat the curve, but that isn’t what they are aiming for.
The studies I’m aware of were all American. The interesting correlations always pop up when measuring religiosity in terms of church attendance.
America is weird when it comes to religion- it is my understanding the competition among churches has resulted in varieties much more capable of matching up to people’s needs, as well as a proliferation of cults, new faiths and woo. I’m not sure how generalizable it is though. Anyone tried matching outcomes to the effects of secular cults (communist party, Objectivists)?
See “Why Methodists don’t go to heaven” for a good analysis.
Larry Iannacone, an economist who specializes in the economics of religion, calculated Herfendahl indices for religion in the European protestant states–a standard measure of industry concentration. The more concentrated the religion industry, on average, the less religious people are.
Which helps explain why the U.S., which has been a competitive market for religion from the beginning, is more religious than Europe.
Part of the problem is that it is hard to predict in advance exactly when your probably-untrue-but-instrumentally-useful beliefs will clash with reality in a way that makes them harmful. If someone believes, say, in a god which maintains the biosphere despite all that we can throw at it, that is a perfectly inconsequential belief right up to the point at which our species becomes influential and numerous enough to mess up the environment in potentially catastrophic ways.
But another thing is that if it is true that some false beliefs are more instrumentally useful than the corresponding true beliefs, then there is no reason to expect a certain subset to be equally useful. That is, one should expect that there are better and worse false beliefs, in which case the instrumentally useful thing to do is not simply to accept the particular set of probably-false-but-useful beliefs one grew up with, but to a) try to test existing probably-false-but-useful beliefs against each other, and b) attempt to generate new probably-false-but-useful beliefs to improve on the existing ones. And it is (as far as I can tell) very rare to see anyone who argues for the benefits of any particular set of probably-false beliefs for instrumental reasons actually advocating this sort of goal-oriented approach. Do you know of anyone doing such work?
People do this much more than you realize. The Catholic Church calls this development of doctrine. You might suppose that this just means changing your beliefs in arbitrary and random ways, but it does not. It means eliminating various false beliefs which are not in fact instrumentally helpful, modifying others which are helpful so they conflict less with the evidence and therefore are easier to believe, and coming up with new ones which are helpful in new ways.
I think we do in general but it is harder to see. Mormons were persecuted and had to move out west. Thus there are a bunch of places out west that are dominated by Mormons and those places have Mormon norms and seem different to outsiders. Whereas Christians have strong communities everywhere but are not visible to those who are not looking for them.
Meanwhile the difference is harder to show up on surveys because people who do not practice Christianity but call themselves Christian are lumped in with those of us who are practicing. If you compare people who call themselves Christian they are not that different than secular people but if you compare people who go to church weekly than there are significant differences.
That article misses the key aspect of Mormonism from this POV– it propagates primarily through natural increase, not intentional conversion. So the main thrust of the article is tangential to why Mormons are Mormon. It’s because they are conservative in a basic sense of sticking with what’s before them and what they grew up with. And Mormonism tries to make you be content with what’s in front of you so you’ll stay put and raise more Mormons. That’s why even though the experiment is failing it will take several more generations to fully do so.
Regarding’s Scott’s recent posts on his tumblr in which he does statistical analysis on the effect of gun ownership on murder rates:
It seems to me that controlling for the robbery rate doesn’t make any sense, as it is quite plausibly determined by the gun ownership rate – Scott notes the two are negatively correlated, and more guns might well increase the cost of robbery and so lower its incidence. If a larger gun ownership rate reduced robberies by a lot and reduced murders by a bit, wouldn’t holding robberies constant in your analysis lead to the conclusion that more guns meant more murders, even if in reality it meant the opposite?
Comparatively, more guns is not going to affect the urbanization, poverty level, %black, or Southernness of a state. But it might well affect the robbery rate.
You’re right, I would delete that variable. Maybe use something else as a proxy for the general level of crime.
It should be easy to get a panel data set for gun ownership and murder. Then a fixed effects model would be a good way to remove most of the confounding factors. I’m sure someone has done that in the academic literature somewhere, but I’m too lazy to check right now.
How would you control for general level of crime? My impression is that many people who are against gun control believe that gun ownership reduces crime.
Presumably there are some kinds of crime that guns would be very unlikely to have an effect on. Embezzlement, for example.
I don’t think embezzlement is necessarily correlated with violent crime.
A fixed effects model would definitely be best. That would control for any unchanging factors in each location (county?), so we’d only have to worry about things that change coincidentally with the gun ownership rate.
Car theft seems a good option, even better if you can get data that seperates car jackings from stealth thefts where robbery is an issue.
Car theft rates may end up being little more than a proxy for automobile age, which in turn may be just a function of the local economy. At least it would be safer to control for than robbery; gun ownership could deter robbery but probably doesn’t encourage car buying or discourage poverty.
I don’t understand the sequence of steps he uses to select and interpret his model, for the record.
It’s not his model — it’s a replication.
Ok.
Has anyone here heard about/read Hot Earth Dreams by Frank Landis? It’s a book about what the world might look like in the deep future under a severe climate change situation where humans survive. Here’s a PDF sample of the first few chapters, and here’s a list of places you can buy it if you want to. It’s fairly expensive ($19), though.
The first few chapters were ok, if a bit irreverent. Not good enough for me to take a flyer on a $20 ebook, though- surprised he’s not offering it digitally for substantially less on his own, for a 100% take.
The book in question is self-published. He is offering the book digitally on its own, for the same price for as the paperback.
This, in my experience and in the experience of every other self-published author I have ever discussed this with, is a non-optimal pricing strategy. (Heck, even tradpubs usually give you SOME ebook discount.) But it’s his book. It’d have to be a lot more polished-looking to even get me to read the sample chapters, especially at an $18.95 cover. That screams – and yes, this is a heuristic, but I’m confident in it – “amateur, badly edited, and overoptimistic.”
You may mean he should offer it for direct sale outside Amazon and other ebookstores. If so, yes, he could offer it for less. A lot less. Because he’s outside KDP’s 70% royalty threshold. Which is another reason his pricing is sub-optimal – he’s actually making LESS on the book at $18.95 than if he’d set the price to 9.99. And knowing that makes me even less interested in reading the book. Tradpubs at least have the excuse that they’re protecting paper sales and brick-and-mortar commerce partners when they price ebooks outside the optimum. What he’s thinking, I have no idea and don’t much care.
Should I care that the open sleigh has two horses?
I want to want to believe it’s a one-horse open sleigh.
If the sleigh has two horses, I desire to believe that the sleigh has two horses.
It’s actually a double-headed Sleipnir.
That was my conclusion as well.
I had concluded it was one horse and its evil shadow creature.
An oblique reference to a tragic yuletide accident? A sample from the new Gashlycrumb Christmas line of greeting cards?
Oh, damn, I wanted to be the funny one!
The other animal may not self-identify as a horse, even if it was Coercively Designated As Horse At Birth. Hence, one-horse open sleigh. What the other CHAB quadruped identifies with is its own business.
You said “it”! Clearly you intended to communicate disrespect for the animal’s sentience. How dare you say animals have no feelings?!!!111!!!
I can only assume it’s an open sleigh designed to for one horse but which is being overclocked.
Best answer. Thumbs up.
Only the white horse has substance and is valued. The evil rulers of the universe have used their power of language to dismiss the horse of color by referring to what is obviously a two horse sleigh as a one horse sleigh. It is a sleigh sleight of profound significance in the ongoing white privilege dominance.
The white horse is not a horse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse
A no horse open sleigh? Which would be a very large sled. A no horse open sled?
I’m not sure what the expectations are around here in regards to plugging stuff so apologies if I’m overstepping an unwritten boundary here.
My brother, an indie game dev, has just released his first game on Steam, titled Dragon’s Wake. It’s a retro-style 2D platformer where you play a baby dragon, newly hatched and just learning to fly. It’s also an artistically ambitious game that is highly story and character driven, despite featuring not a single word of text or dialogue.
Obviously I’m keen to see the game be a commercial success for my brother’s sake, but I also think it’s a really good game that a lot of people here might like. So if it sounds like the sort of thing you might be interested in, go check it out. It costs $4.
>indie game dev
>retro-style 2D platformer
I can say that a lot of people’s eyes are going to start glazing over when those two phrases appear in the same sentence. Including mine.
What’s wrong with indie retro games?
Absolutely flooded market.
Isn’t that just a way of saying “I don’t like that genre”? I’ve never heard anyone complain that there are too many works in a style that they enjoy. Like, I hate romance novels but they still exist in multitudes because lots of people who aren’t me keep buying them.
Not that there’s anything wrong with disliking a particular genre of course.
No. The more flooded a market is, the more likely any given title you’re unfamiliar with is to be an interchangeable “me too” attempt with no compelling reason to exist. This is exacerbated, not relieved, if you like the genre in question: you’ve already experienced it, and gain less value from a generic example because it will not be novel. You may, for that matter, have already played all the best instances of the last 20 years and be comparing every new entry to that. “I like this concept but wish way way less of it was produced” is a perfectly possible and reasonable viewpoint.
Sturgeon’s law.
Also, I personally despise retro graphics, and when looking for something interesting and short to play on Steam, I’m inundated by near-identical pixel-art crapfests.
@Nathan
Don’t let the haters get you (or your brother) down.
I have the exact opposite reaction. I mean, I’m probably not going to buy it because I probably can’t play it and Steam accessibility is meh at best, but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’d like.
There’s got to be hundreds of indie retro platformers, it’s incredibly oversaturated. Guess you’re in luck.
Nathan,
As someone developing their own game with a friend and knows how much work it is, congratulations to your brother!
I can relate to Technically Not Anonymous’ feelings given the flood of generally low-quality clones of the same genre. It can be grating to see people churn out the same stuff that doesn’t add much to the conversation. That said, Dragon’s Wake looks great from the trailer I saw! Has your brother tried promoting it at all? I would recommend joining the Indie Dev development groups on Facebook and sharing non-spammy links there as well as relevant subreddits. Giving streamers free keys is a good idea too.
Good luck to him!
Thanks John.
Honestly, I think he put too little effort into marketing it pre-release and should have even been willing to delay the release in order to do more work there. But he’s one of those people who would much rather work on the game itself than marketing stuff.
Since it’s been out a few days ago he hasn’t had that excuse though and has been putting a lot of time into that side of things. There’s been a good number of people streaming and making videos about the game already, although so far they’re all pretty low viewership. I’ll suggest subreddits to him too though, that’s a pretty good idea.
The encouraging thing so far is that the game seems to be doing a pretty good job selling itself.
I look forward to hearing more about your own game when that gets closer to release. ?
Thanks Nathan! We have a draft landing page up here: http://shibemysteries.com/
🙂
Marketing pre-release is important, but it’s not the end of the world if he didn’t. Just something to keep in mind next time. Many developers just want to make the game. Luckily my partner is the programmer and now that I’m done with writing the script, I’m planning out the marketing which is why this stuff is fresh in my mind. Just email me if you need any more links!
I have a strong negative reaction to ‘male’ and ‘female’ when used as nouns referring to human beings, with a few narrow, technical exceptions. Anyone else have the same reaction? Reasonable, unreasonable?
(I tried to post this once already and it was eaten, apologies if it shows up twice.)
IME a lot of people feel this way, but they’re usually social justice types who object solely to calling women “females” and they tend to rub me the wrong way.
I don’t. The obvious alternatives are “man” and “woman,” but that implies adult, while “male” and “female” don’t.
Male/Female isn’t a perfect binary category, for familiar reasons, but it’s close enough to be useful.
Given the importance of puberty in all things associated with human sex/gender/whatever, how often do we really care whether a human being is “male” or “female” without also caring whether they are a child or an adult? Admittedly, “adult” and “post-pubescent” aren’t exactly the same thing, but I think this is usually pretty obvious in context.
“Man”, “Woman”, “Boy”, and “Girl” work well enough for almost all practical purposes in colloquial English – except for the pesky bit where “Man” also sometimes refers to the entire human race (edit – and “Girl” sometimes encompasses young adult female humans, but again usually obvious in context).
“Human Male” and “Human Female”, I don’t have a strong negative reaction to, but they come across as academic jargon and if that’s not necessary or appropriate to the context I find it mildly annoying.
As a 20 something, I don’t feel like an adult or like my peer groups deserve to be considered adults, so I do prefer this often, yes.
What about guy and gal? Pretty informal, sure, but informal contexts are where male and female fit the worst (IMO).
Kids these days
What do you feel is lacking in the “adulthood” department of your peer group? I’m going to guess that you’ve mostly graduated college and found jobs of some sort, so the obvious possibilities seem to be,
Not being in grad school any more
A ‘career’ instead of a ‘job’
Marriage
Children
Owning a house
Understanding the meaning of life
Something else that I’m missing
Also, would you and your peers like to grow up and be adults? Is this something you are looking forward to, or something to be postponed as long as possible?
Also also, get off my lawn.
I am 26 and I share that sentiment.
John Schilling:
I think all of the possibilities (except the last one, I have seen the film and I think I get it :)) ) are simultaneously correct. More importantly, I always see my parents as the “adults generation” and everyone more than 10 years younger as the still-not-quite-adults (less so if they are married and have kids, but they should still be at least close to 40 🙂 ). It is quite funny since I am now 4 years younger than my parents were (3 years in the case of my mother) when I was born but when I see their photos from that time I clearly recognize them as adults. I wonder whether I will feel the same when I am 50 and my parents are 80. I guess I won’t, since by then I will probably have kids of my own so am won’t be the “kids generation” anymore…so I guess “having children” is for me the most important distinction between being and not being an adult.
@John Schilling
I know people younger than me who I would classify as adults, and people older than me who I would classify as… Not children, exactly, but definitely not adults.
I think what it comes down to is something like responsibility. To my mind, an adult is someone who spends almost all of the time they’re not at work on either doing mundane jobs or on doing things for other people. Whereas someone who gets to live on their own in a place of their choosing, who gets to keep the money they earn and spend it on what they want, who can spend their free time doing things for themselves, eat the things they want to eat, and so on, matches my mental picture of child more closely than adult. They might technically be an adult, but it’s like they’re cheating: those paychecks you get from work are supposed to just disappear on bills, not stick around and let you actually purchase things you want.
@Anonymous:
So in your mind, Julius Casear and George Washington weren’t adults? Nor Edison or Tesla, Lindberg or Earhart? Hillary Clinton isn’t an adult? All of those people seem to perfectly match your described mental model of “children”.
If you think being an adult means being a wage slave, I’m pretty sure you’re doing it wrong. And I’m pretty certain you can find people who are unquestionably adults, whose life you’d rather have than your own.
Being an adult doesn’t wait on your acquiring the career, the spouse, the 2.3 children and the house with the white picket fence and the assortment of socially-preferred status markers appropriate to your class and calculated to consume slightly more than 100% of your paycheck. Being an adult starts when you start actively working to achieve those things, or whatever else you’ve decided you’d rather have in their place. And it doesn’t matter that the things you decide you want might turn out to be beyond your reach. A sincerely committed effort is enough.
And if you sincerely want nothing more than you have, then commit to holding on to it. That’s something adults do too, especially when they have a spouse and a couple of happy, healthy kids. Whatever. It’s only the time you spend wanting more and not trying to achieve it, or wanting nothing at all, that counts as childhood. And at this point in your life, that’s almost certainly time irrevocably wasted. You’re old enough to know what you want to be when you grow up. Make it so.
(Also, Jean-Luc Picard is another adult who doesn’t do mundane jobs or let anyone else tell him what to eat, has really cool hobbies, etc)
@John Schilling
I’d agree that having goals and taking steps to work towards them does make someone more adult. And I didn’t mean to claim that adulthood as measured in the way I described was necessarily something to aspire to, or that this classification is based on any real reasoning beyond ‘how things feel to me’.
There are definitely more factors to it than the one I mentioned, but I do think that having more responsibilities is a feature of adulthood, having few responsibilities is a feature of childhood – would you disagree?
Adulthood strongly correlates with increased responsibility, because most of the things really worth accomplishing in life require prolonged cooperation with other people and it’s difficult to structure that without involving e.g. promises that you really have to keep. Particularly if you plan to have a family, which most adults do. But it’s not a strict requirement. If your life’s goal is to be a solitary artist, master craftsman, or scholar, those might leave you with relatively few serious responsibilities while still being adult pursuits.
I like to describe it as a binary approximation of a bimodal world.
I have this reaction too. It just sounds really weird, like you’re referring to animals or something.
Well, um, technically …
:-p
I agree that “male” and “female” give a sense of distance I don’t like, but if I want to include children with the adults in a gender, I might use “male” and “female”.
I do not have the same feelings about the words. I work with the military frequently and they use male and female as pretty standard terms for people. I assume it evolved from needing to have appropriate male- and female-specific facilities and then the people who used the male rooms were called males and the people who used the female rooms were called females.
I don’t think your feelings are unreasonable, though; how can we judge the legitimacy of someone else’s emotions?
By the cost of changing them without satisfying them?
Include an empathy quotient too please, and add a term that reflects the potential game theoretic consequences of cooperation, indifference, or defection. After that, I think we’ve accounted for everything. Yay having Asperger’s!
Why do you bring this up? Isn’t this usage pretty rare? For example, on the google search of “a male” restricted to this site, 9/10 of the first page of hits are adjectives.
I saw a post in the last thread (or maybe the one before) that used it, it bothered me and reminded me that it bothers me. So I figured I’d post about it in the open thread and see if I’m alone in finding it annoying. No ulterior motive.
I have a moderate preference for using “male” and “female.” “Man” and “woman” sounds oddly formal when referring to twenty-year olds. Many of my peers refer to women my age as “girls” (while referring to men as “guys”), which I feel is mildly sexist because of the asymmetry. I compensate by referring to myself as a boy, or just by using gender-neutral wording in general. Female/Male is great for denotating gender while creating some social distance though, not sure why people dislike it.
Yes, and I consider the reaction reasonable. The proliferation of “male/female” versus “woman/man” is, in my experience/observation, driven by government bureaucracy attempting to arrogate “scientific” objectivity (those “technical exceptions”) to itself. I see male/female used in casual conversation most often by bureaucrats themselves and those who have the most contact with them, such as the welfare underclass. Academics form a smaller population of offenders although they’re probably Patient Zero.
I also occasionally see the word “male” used in place of “man” by propagandists attempting to lower the status of a disfavored group. E.g. I recently saw a video titled “Watch This Young Black Man [a pre-teen boy] Give a Near Perfect Response to a [30-ish] White Male Who’s Ignorant About the Systematic Oppression of Black People”.
The terminology reduces humanity to the strictly biological out of an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge culture. I’ll paraphrase Orwell:
Yep. I also think this is connected to the reluctance a couple other commenters have identified to refer to 22-year-olds as men and women.
(I experience this myself, of course. But I suspect that I shouldn’t.).
I do see it in those contexts, but also in many many innocent contexts. I don’t think it’s usually an intentional attempt at manipulation, but instead is reflective of an analytical or introverted disposition. Criticizing people who speak the word seems likely to do more harm than good by causing unnecessary fighting, IMO.
The words themselves are fine by me. On the other hand, they’re sometimes used in contexts where they help create an sense of condescension/pretentiousness/pseudo-intellectualism that rubs me the wrong way, particularly when they’re pointing to complicated cultural gender constructs that wouldn’t apply to, say, a male dog.
Nerdy guys are sometimes guilty of this, usually in reference to girls. But I have similar problems with the phrase “male gaze”, so I don’t think this is some kind of deep-laid social guilt talking.
I prefer male and female to man and woman, myself. It makes me feel a little weird to refer to myself as a woman, but I’m comfortable with “female,” because it seems more neutral and straightforward.
I can understand why some people dislike it, because it does sound like you’re referring to animals. But, well, humans are animals. I don’t see that as something shameful or something that makes us lesser.
Yeah, I actually kind of like it too, precisely because it emphasizes the animal nature of humans. I like animals.
That said, I can certainly imagine it being used in a demeaning way in the context of discussion of “game,” or some such.
This echoes my own feelings on the matter.
Besides, as Onyomi said, I actually like animals.
Is there still a “no gender issues” rule for Open Threads?
I actually go the other way. In my mind “Man”, “Woman”, “Boy” and “Girl” carry a whole mess of additional meaning that may not always be appropriate. As such it feels much more reasonable and natural to use “Male” or “Female” as descriptors in most cases.
Then again I also spent a good deal of time in the military, and later working in a hospital, so perhaps the more objective/technical terms just seem more “normal” to me than they would to others.
Well not really . But I am not native English speaker. In my native language female = gender of an animal with uterus, male = with penis. And calling a human male or female is derogatory (sorta like calling a woman bitch) .
Nope. No reaction. I don’t even know what my own standard usage is. Speaker intent is all that matters, and there’s no choice in the list that won’t be understood, misunderstood, and maliciously misconstrued.
My salsa dance teacher, when she speaks in English at the salsa class (she mostly speaks in German but sometimes there are people, exchange students mostly, at the course who do not speak German) uses men for male participants and females for the female participants. Now, when used like this, then females sounds kind of negative (I think that the reason is that her English is not perfect, she also says croccoach instead of cockroach…although I have to say I like the idea of a crocodile coach). But when one uses males/females as opposed to men/females, I don’t see a problem. It kind of sounds “detached” or technical but not negative.
By the way, in German (also in Czech, although there is a feminine variant there as well) the gender of the word Mädchen/Mädel (both mean girl) is neutrum, not feminine as one would probably expect…boys are masculine though.
That’s actually one of the reasons I want to know whether or not it is a personal idiosyncrasy. I have a couple of friends that have English as a second language and have specifically asked me to let them know when they get something wrong (privately obviously).
Well, English is not my native language either, but I would say that referring to people as “males/females” is kind of strange if it can be substituted by men/boys or women/girls, so always unless you want to stress out that you are talking about all members of one sex, regardless of age or whatever. But I would not say it sounds offensive, just detached, cold and technical. On the other hand the German or the Czech version of the noun “male” would sound a bit aggressive to me if used to refer to a human, because it is specifically animal (Ok, man is an animal as well but I bet dolphins also use a different screech for themselves and for other animals 🙂 )
By the way, German uses the wrong word gender again :)) The gender of the word “Männchen”, which means both “a male animal” and a little man, is neutrum. It actually makes sense, since everything that ends mit -chen is neutrum in German and by adding -chen you create a diminutive form of a word (which is btw something I really miss in English, as it is the only language I speak which has no such dimunitive except for some exceptions like “doggy”). But it is still kind of funny that an obviously male word “male” has a neutral gender and an obviously female word “girl” too (and Mädl/Madl does not even end with -chen).
I would call my reaction mildly negative to the terms being used outside of what I would call broad technical exceptions. I prefer men and women, boy and girl, for social settings. Employment and government are not social settings.
I also hold that there is a difference between ‘man’ and ‘boy’ (and likewise between the female versions) that is sadly obscured in modern advocacy and social discourse.
Speaking just for myself – I think that the objection to the use of the terms on the grounds that “it resembles our descriptions for animals” is understandable, but highly faulty. (And my initial impulse was to mock this objection.) We are animals, with all the associated issues, and furthermore, each species (and most particularly the domestic species) has terms for various genders and life stages (for example: piglet, barrow, gilt, sow, boar, shoat, etc). In that context, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are almost excessively generic.
I endorse Keranih’s position.
I think male/female is mildly bad in non-technical contexts, though I’ve used it myself if the interlocutors are SJ types, whose definitions of man/woman fail to carry information I want to convey (“only women have babies” vs. “females have babies”). But it doesn’t annoy me unless it’s “man/female” by bitter romanceless men or something like the “white male” example elsewhere.
In professional environments where “male” and “female” are commonly used, do the professionals refer to themselves or their fellow professionals as males and females or men and women.
I have a visceral negative reaction to being grouped with “men”, and every time someone uses male/female instead of men/women it makes me feel slightly less like I’m doomed. I don’t complain about it when people use “man” to refer to me, because it would almost always be obnoxious at best. But yeeeeee, it’s making me panic just typing “man” and “me” with so little space between them.
That said, I know I’m weird, and don’t find your opposing feelings unreasonable.
I’m sort of curious about the way you identify by now, and if it’s not too private/obnoxious, I’d like to know if you know and could say why you have this reaction, or if it really is an entirely visceral thing for you.
They seem to identify as a young adult cisgender person, if I’m interpreting that comment correctly. It is likely youth or discomfort with claiming a label reflecting the cultural masculine or feminine ideal behind their word choice, not being a transgender person. Unless I am mistaken.
I don’t care, I used to prefer male/female when in doubt to avoid getting in trouble with the language police, but then I saw someone on LW express the same sentiment as yours and now I do whatever I feel like.
Yeah, first it was “You have to call AMABs ‘women’ on pain of attack! There’s a difference between sex and gender, after all!” And then came the scorn and dismissal of anyone using “male” and “female” as nouns–as if they’d never given us a reason to want to distinguish between…sex and gender.
The use of “female” as a noun makes me think of Ferengi, but apparently it’s very normal in military culture.
… I wonder if that’s where romanceless nerdy men got it?
I haven’t had this reaction, and I don’t understand why people do on an instinctive emotional level. I can understand it from the detached academic perspective.
I am absolutely not-SJ and yet they do feel a bit like referring to humans as animals – and confusing adjectives with nouns.
I used to be called a male model. Only because when the average person thinks “model”, they think of a woman.
This happens with other things too: “Male nurse” as opposed to “nurse”; “female soldier” as opposed to “soldier” (though this is becoming less common); “female lead / male follow” (in dancing) as opposed to “lead / follow”; etc.
It doesn’t really flow to say “Man-nurse” or “woman lead”. Though this may only be true for the US.
That’s the adjective form though.
It doesn’t follow in UK English either, though it used to- in the 18th century, men who assisted at births were referred to as “man-midwives”.
I share your negative (visceral) reaction if the males and females in question are specific people. Especially if they are present: “look at those females over by the popcorn machine!”
It’s still kind of unidiomatic to my ear when it’s used abstractly, but so are lots of things I hear in common usage.
I’ll note that the noun form comes across my radar most commonly in two settings: 1) bureaucratic, broadly speaking and 2) when used by non-native speakers of what David F Wallace called “Standard White English.” So My reactions to this usage are probably less inherent (“it’s objectifying/it makes people sound like animals”) than connotative (“low-status/annoying people talk this way”).
Are there any good atheist/agnostic/non-religious organizations in the NYC area where the membership has an average IQ less than 135?
The society for ethical culture probably fits the bill if you like their flavor of non-belief.
thanks-that “social justice” seems a big deal to them kind of turns me off, but maybe
I’ve heard good things about Sunday Assembly, but haven’t been. I haven’t gotten a sense of IQ>135 from skimming their publications, so probably less.
That looks promising. thank you, B.
But it’s not that great that Secular Solstice has 12 people RSVPing and no girls. I may have to settle for the best approximation to this that is near gender parity.
I’d like to note that the meetup page isn’t especially representative of anything. The facebook event has 90 RSVPs. I haven’t yet checked for gender parity but I’d wager it’s a bit better. 🙂
https://www.facebook.com/events/716220641812586/
Now this I’m curious about. What makes you think every one of those groups you know of has an average IQ of over 135? Why do you want a group with a lower IQ?
Suppose one has an IQ of 110, and does not want to feel looked down upon, especially in a group that’s supposedly not about IQ filtering but actually about IQ filtering.
And also, if you find a girlfriend from said group, she might be too smart for it to work.
Have you read Pascal? I just got done with his Provincial Letters and Pensees. He has some interesting things to say in the former about altruism: that Christians aren’t just obliged to tithe, but give up all their superfluous income if they know of poor people who lack necessities. He also has a flurry of interesting claims about epistemology and science in the 18th letter. Do you think any of this is relevant to Effective Altruism and (contemporary autodidact empiricist) rationalism?
As far as Pensees, do you think his detailed arguments about probability hold any validity? Because the standard criticism that all religions are equally probable is something he addresses at length, be it validly or fallaciously.
I haven’t read Pascal, but his wager is still widely discussed in philosophy of religion and decision theory, especially with various recent advances in infinite utility theory. I don’t think many philosophers are persuaded by it, but a lot do take it seriously. (However, most of these philosophers do not engage with the text of the Pensees, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them haven’t even read it themselves.)
“recent advances in infinite utility theory” sounds interesting, could you give me a link?
This isn’t my area of expertise, but I think Al Hajek’s work on Pascal’s Wager and infinite decision theory is well respected. I see that he has a Stanford Encyclopedia article on Pascal’s Wager here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ The references there should include many more sources.
I recently heard a talk on surreal numbers and decision theory that was very good. It looks like it is perhaps available as a chapter here, but I don’t have access to it: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-48561-3_5
I don’t remember Pascal addressing that objection in much detail. IIRC he just dismissed it as glib and unserious. In fact, that part of the Pensees was what convinced me Pascal was fully mindkilled on this issue. There is no coherent logical framework in which the Wager itself is serious, but the various anti-Wagers and alternative Wagers aren’t. It’s not like calling “shotgun”, you don’t get to privilege a particular religion just because you thought of it first.
I don’t think you understood the role of evidence in Pascal’s epistemology. It struck me as rather Bayesian, avant la letter. Probability is all; 100% and 0% aren’t justifiable.
As far as I understand, there is no anti-Wager. You’re stuck playing the game. Living your life as though there’s no afterlife is betting that the afterlife is too improbable to bet on. As for the probability that there is an afterlife, he uses miracles by Catholic saints to assign a higher probability to Catholicism than to Judaism, Islam, or Protestantism. I know the modern assumption is that you can have a priori knowledge that any claim to have perceived a miracle is false, but this postdates and contradicts Pascal’s own perceptions (are you familiar with the Jansenist controversy?)
Some alternative wagers are worth discussing, as Pascal had basically no information about Eastern religions to update his beliefs with. I would find that a particularly interesting line of discussion.
The evidential part was in a different section, I think? I don’t believe Pascal explicitly linked that with the Wager. It’s been a long time. Anyway, if the Wager depends on evidence, even Bayesian evidence, then it contradicts itself: Pascal explicitly says that the existence of God is “unknowable”, separated from us by an “infinite chaos”. Small wonder, since theories about God famously don’t fare well on the available evidence. For instance, I would point out the fact that no one has ever captured a miracle on video as extremely strong Bayesian evidence that miracles don’t happen. (Pascal wouldn’t have had recourse to this, but that’s his problem.)
If evidence isn’t being considered, then we have no way of differentiating between the literally infinite number of potential payoff matrices; anything could be rewarded in the afterlife, from worshiping a particular God, to not worshiping that God, to worshiping each of the real numbers, etc. This was the objection Pascal dismissed out of hand, quite unfairly IMO.
Well, presumably Pascal would say something like: “Do you really think all the centuries of Christians could be totally wrong? Maybe, sure. But isn’t the fact that nearly everyone believes this Bayesian evidence for its truth? Like, maybe the Resurrection was made up. But maybe it wasn’t. There is a historical record in the form of the Gospels.” All he has to show is that Christianity is not 0% probable and is slightly more probable than any other religion. Which, in his time and culture was not so ridiculous.
Curiously, however, I have never seen any Europeans give this argument for believing in Islam. Which seems much more plausible a candidate for “final word from God” than Christianity.
Well, again, I think if we’re talking about evidence, we’re not really talking about the Wager per se. Anyway, the Bayesian calculation would be a hell of a lot more complicated than just “Lots of people believe in the Gospels.” Lots of people believe in lots of things. Determining the most probable metaphysics of the universe by application of Bayes’ Theorem seems like a tedious, not to say pointless, project, even if we limit the analysis to “things in which a lot of people believe”. (By relative or absolute number? At particular times and places? Should we weight the opinions by IQ, by expertise…? What a freakin’ nightmare.)
@ stillnotking:
I’m not saying I endorse Pascal’s Wager.
But it is based on evidence. It merely says: there is some tiny amount of evidence that Christianity is true, say 0.0001% probability.
Pascal’s Wager as such also does not mention hell.
All it says is: what is the expected value of atheism? If it’s even positive, finite. What is the expected value of believing in Christianity? Well, how do we calculate expected value again? We take the size of the reward and multiply it by the probability. The reward is infinite. The probability is 0.0001% (or anything that’s not 0). Therefore, the expected value is infinite. You should believe in Christianity. QED
He also answers an objection: “What if I can’t make myself believe in Christianity?” Obviously, you should try anyway. It’s common that atheists end up converting to religion. Go to mass every week, or every day if possible. Talk to every priest you can. Pray to God ceaselessly to allow Him to grant you the grace of belief.
Either this works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work, your loss is finite. If it does work, your gain is infinite. You should do it. QED
Again, I don’t actually endorse this, but it’s very clever. Michael Huemer (an atheist himself) has a good account of it in the lecture notes for one of his classes. (All of them are actually pretty good.) He also presents the another clever one, which is the “Firing Squad” counterargument to the objection that we should not be surprised because the universe is “fine-tuned” for life:
@Vox Imperatoris:
But is the probability of Christianity being true greater than the probability of Scientology being true, or “anti-Christianity” (God really hates Christians but loves everyone else) being true, or real-number-n-worship being true? Either we consider the evidential case, which is an endless snafu — I barely remember that part of the Pensees, so I guess Pascal’s analysis didn’t impress me — or we don’t consider it; in the former case, the validity of the Wager is subject to a truly massive and highly subjective calculus that can’t be characterized as anything but “undefined”, while in the latter case it’s obviously invalid.
Edit: It strikes me, too, that Bayes’ Theorem has broader application here: For instance, we could observe that religious movements spring up and fizzle out all the time, with their success or failure seemingly as contingent on chance as on content. That’s evidence that Christianity may owe its success to being particularly lucky rather than particularly correct. Europe could’ve ended up worshiping Sol Invictus. We might also observe the human tendency to believe comforting falsehoods over unpleasant truths, and be suspicious of the Gospels’ rather extreme comfortableness.
@ stillnotking:
That is the biggest weakness of the argument.
But all it relies upon is Christianity being somewhat more likely than the others—or at least of other religions that hold out the prospect of eternal salvation as a reward for belief.
@stillnotking:
Determining the most probable metaphysics of the universe by application of Bayes’ Theorem seems like a tedious, not to say pointless, project, even if we limit the analysis to “things in which a lot of people believe”
It’s only as tedious as most applications of Bayesian reasoning to domains in which we don’t have precise frequency data, which is to say, most interesting applications. As for pointless, this is a rather surprising claim in the context of Pascal’s Wager, a central contention of which is that it’s very important to believe in Christianity if it’s true.
I don’t endorse the Wager for several reasons. But the premise that Christianity is more probable than other religions is one that I think is rather easily supported. For my part I think Christianity is all-things-considered highly probable on our total evidence, primarily because of the evidence in support of the historicity of the New Testament. I don’t expect you to agree with that, but it’s a much weaker claim that the historical evidence we have in favor of Christianity is greater than that for other religions. For example, compare Islam. The only miracle the Quran records is Muhammad’s night journey, which was observed by no one but Muhammad. Muslims claim that the beauty of the Quran is itself a miracle, but I think you’ll agree that this “the beauty of this book is unparalleled” is not a claim we can really get very strong evidence for, and that even if it were true it would not be as strong evidence for Islam as “Jesus was resurrected” is for Christianity. So there is little evidence for the claim that God really is as the Quran says him to be.
By contrast, we have the testimony of numerous different authors in support of various miracles which, if they really did occur, would constitute extremely strong evidence for the claim that God really is as the New Testament says him to be. The existence of that testimony is surely substantially more likely given Christianity than otherwise. To be sure, this evidence still might not be enough to outweigh the prior improbability of Christianity. But it does plausibly make Christianity more likely than Islam.
An examination of other major religions would take some time, but I think that similar remarks go in most other cases too.
@Troy: I meant “pointless” in the sense that the calculation self-evidently can’t be completed to everyone’s satisfaction. You think Christianity is more probable than not; that’s fine, but I don’t. Most of the world doesn’t. The vast majority of people throughout human history didn’t. (Mostly because they never heard of it, but even if they had!) Just the two of us could argue endlessly about how much weight to assign various bits of evidence for and against various religions — this is, in fact, the very debate the Wager was designed to make an end run around, which is why the references to evidence confuse me.
But “Jesus was resurrected” – or at least the closely-related claim “Jesus was secretly abducted by God on the cross and then showed up later, looking as if he were resurrected” – is compatible with Islam. So it’s not strong evidence that Christianity is true and Islam is false so much as it’s evidence for “either Christianity or Islam is true.”
But “Jesus was resurrected” – or at least the closely-related claim “Jesus was secretly abducted by God on the cross and then showed up later, looking as if he were resurrected” – is compatible with Islam. So it’s not strong evidence that Christianity is true and Islam is false so much as it’s evidence for “either Christianity or Islam is true.”
Well, the parenthetical there is key. If the historical evidence were indifferent between these two hypotheses, then perhaps it would indeed support Christianity and Islam equally. But it’s not. The Gospels record Jesus predicting his death and resurrection before his crucifixion, and saying that he had risen from the dead after appearing to his disciples post-crucifixion. They also record the women at the tomb being visited by an angel who told them that Jesus had been raised from the dead. These things are more probable on the hypothesis that Jesus really died and rose from the dead than that God spirited him away before he died.
You can add on to the Islamic hypothesis that God had reasons for deceiving Jesus’s followers. But this ad hoc addition makes that hypothesis more complicated and lowers its prior probability.
But the evidence that those details are true is way less strong than the purported evidence of the resurrection, itself.
“But “Jesus was resurrected” – or at least the closely-related claim “Jesus was secretly abducted by God on the cross and then showed up later, looking as if he were resurrected” – is compatible with Islam.”
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure the Muslim account is that Jesus was not crucified–that he was carried off to heaven first. In at least one version, Judas had the appearance of Jesus put on him, and it was he who was crucified.
Okay. This is not a thought-out proposal, but more like a quip or something. That said, I occasionally (as a Christian) think something like this:
1. I probably am not going to independently discover the meaning of life (if there is one), so I think I’ll stick to the popular answers, although formally speaking that’s fallacious.
2. Atheism/physicalism/naturalism is a very respectable set of answers right now. If it’s correct, then there is no objective “meaning” to life, but I must instead make a meaning for myself–maybe science, or art, or service to others, or something like that.
3. The Dharmic religions are very popular. These posit reincarnation in their mainstream (i.e., non-Westernized) forms, and say that spiritual rectitude will merit one a better reincarnation.
4. The Abrahamic religions mostly (Judaism partially excepted) posit an afterlife, with the standard Heaven/Hell stakes for the Wager.
If (2), then I can choose my own goals and personal projects. If I want to live a religiously oriented life, then who is to say I’m objectively wrong to have that preference?
If (3), then as long as I’m engaged in some sort of spiritual practice, Dharmic or not, I ought to at least merit a decent reincarnation.
If (4), then if I guess wrong, I could end up hellbound.
So one can add in the Dharmic religions to Pascal’s Wager and still end up with a pretty standard treatment, where atheism doesn’t weigh down the scales very much, and the main point of contention will be deciding among Abrahamic faiths and denominations. This is because it seems IMHO trivial to add an epicycle to the Wager for “If they Buddhists/Hindus are right, I suppose I’ll get another shot it the next incarnation, and ‘devout Christian’ is probably a pretty decent karma-earner as these things go.”
Of course, a lot of Western Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation. But then, these Buddhist variants tend to be non-supernaturalist generally, and view satori/nirvana themselves as just profound psychological insights or something. IOW, the Westernized Buddhism just maps to atheism ((2) above): it’s a personal project I can take or leave in a meaningless cosmos where how I while away the years until I die is up to me.
So I don’t really think Pascal’s Wager is much affected by Dharmic religions. I think the stronger challenge is likely from moral realist atheism, which could argue something like this.
i. Morality, be it consequentialist or whatever, is objective.(citation needed)
ii. It is immoral to willfully belief falsehood. (WK Clifford cite goes here)
iii. Your preferred Abrahamic faith might be false, and you are morally obliged to investigate this, per (i) and (ii).
This is an atheistic naturalist defeater for my glib quip that an atheist naturalist cosmos is meaningless, so I can do whatever I want, so I can be Catholic if I want, which was my proposed defeater for atheism as part of a modified Wager.
Pascal’s Wager hinges IMHO on an implicit contrast between atheism as libertinism and Christianity as morality, and then says you ought to give up your libertine pleasures to avoid Hell. But for many people, including most LW people, atheism isn’t like that at all. It’s not a self-conscious excuse for moral license, but rather a felt moral obligation to follow arguments where they lead. IOW, for most rationalists here, it is *wrong* to adhere to an Abrahamic monotheism, because it is wrong to ignore the evidence and arguments for atheistic naturalism.
Now there are some really interesting attempts to ground a felt sense that morality is objective within an atheist naturalist framework. I think here particularly of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit. Also of interest here IMHO is Dan Fincke, who defends an atheist naturalist moral realist virtue ethics at his “Camels With Hammers” blog.
If any of Singer, Parfit, Fincke, or any other atheist naturalist moralists are correct, then an atheist, naturalist cosmos doesn’t mean I get to do whatever the heck I want (including being Catholic, if that’s what I happen to want). Instead, moral obligation (including, on any of the above theories, an obligation to seek correct beliefs) would remain, and willfully ignoring evidence against theism would be in fact immoral.
For me, this sort of argument is a much stronger potential defeater for the Wager than eastern religions. And in fact, we see that, e.g., the Dalai Lama is pretty chill about Westerners just sticking with their own traditions rather than converting to Buddhism (which is just the “they can always be Buddhist in their next go-round” attitude I’d expect), but New Atheists and such exhibit a kind of crusading moral zeal about the ethical imperative to stop believing in gods right now, darn it (which is what I would expect on a “theism is actually immoral b/c you should know better”) stance.
In sum, I don’t think the Dharmic religions really change the weights of the sides Pascal’s scale. Instead, I think the theist wanting to preserve the Wager instead has to argue against the possibility of moral realism being coherent with atheistic naturalism, or just go straight to arguing that zir preferred theism is actually true, so it’s not immoral to reject arguments against it.
As a virtue ethicist myself, I’m REALLY sympathetic to Fincke’s atheist virtue ethics project, and think there’s a lot of merit there. I also suspect that Singer and Parfit can probably successfully ground moral realism, too, although I haven’t done the requisite reading to have that be more than a hunch. So I wouldn’t be inclined to argue for the Wager by arguing that the cosmos is meaningless without God, so what do you care if I want to be Catholic to pass the time during my meaningless life? If Aristotle can derive virtue ethics while being a sort of henotheistic deist pagan (or something), then I don’t see why an atheist can’t derive virtue ethics without any gods at all–other than as subject of contemplation, the Divine doesn’t play much direct role in Aristotle’s ethical scheme. So Fincke’s project seems really likely to succeed to me, and I think arguing against it would be a waste of time. Instead, I wish him well in his efforts.
That leaves the Wager as only defensible by proving that it’s not immoral to belief in one’s favorite theism because, while it IS immoral to willfully believe false things, one’s favorite theism is actually true, so no harm there. But in THAT case, you’re just reduced to arguing that your theism is true, so the Wager isn’t doing a lot of useful work!
Instead, before you can even get to Pascal’s “libertinism with hellfire vs. morality with Heaven” dichotomy, you have to first either:
a) Prove your religion is true, which makes the Wager superfluous, or
b) Prove that avoiding the risk of going to Hell is more important than avoiding the risk of doing something immoral (like having a willfully false belief)
But (b) is sort of morally repugnant and stupid, even if you could mount some silly argument from within, say, consequentialism about how much worse it would be in terms of lost utils or hedons or whatever to go to Hell than to make our mortal world slightly worse by believing in a false religion.
So I think there’s a narrow needle you can thread to save the Wager from moral realist atheism, but I just don’t think it’s worth doing, and am not a serious proponent of the Wager as an apologetical argument. But as to the Dharmic religions–if anything, they’re a better target for the Wager than atheism! I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? You guess the wrong religion, and at some point in the next few million years, you still ought to get around to being incarnated a Buddhist monk or something, right?
As an atheist, I just want to personally comment that I totally disagree with your reasons for rejecting the wager. 🙂
I believe in naturalistic atheistic objective morality. But I don’t know what in the world it would be based on if not on the pursuit of your own eudaimonia/happiness/utility. I don’t know how you could possibly ground any kind of truly kind of altruistic duty. All they can say is “give all your money to Africans if you want to.” But what if I don’t want to? “Uh…”
Even if God existed, I don’t see how you could ground such a duty. Pascal’s Wager is an egoistic argument; it assumes egoism. It says you should believe in God because it is in your interest to do so.
Why should I want to do something just because God commanded it? Obviously, only if he is going to reward me, or else has constructed the universe such that the act brings its own reward. Which means I should do it for the reward, not because it is commanded. If God commanded something and said he’ll send me to hell as the “reward”, I wouldn’t do it.
The same goes for the “natural telos of man” or whatever. Either the natural telos of man is the same thing as your self-interest (and I’m sympathetic to that), or it’s not. If it’s not, why follow the natural telos of man? If it is, you follow it because it’s your self-interest, not because it’s your natural telos.
In fact, fundamentally I do think Christian morality is based in egoism. Otherwise, it makes no sense. But if egoism is granted, it’s obvious that you should want to be buddies with the ruler of the universe, that you should try to love him and worship him and never do anything to go against him.
The reason I reject Pascal’s Wager is that as far as I know, I only have one life, and I want to spend it—not “defying morality”—but in the contemplation and enjoyment of the natural world on its own terms. I do not want to be taken in by some bullshit logical trick and waste my life doing something that is overwhelmingly likely to be fruitless. That’s the emotional/fundamental reason, anyway.
Rationally, I would criticize the decision theory and the assumptions that go into it. Part of it is the impossibility of calculating the probability that you are insane or otherwise completely mistaken in all your conclusions. If you aren’t, the conditional probability is zero. If you are, it can’t be calculated because you’re insane.
@Vox Imperatoris:
That was a great comment. I’ll just pick out the IMHO most interesting part:
I think there’s something to this–certainly, virtue ethics posits eudaimonia as our natural telos, and Christianity posits theosis as our supernatural telos: in both cases, goodness -> goodies.
But I think I have a strong unchosen urge to feel as though I am doing and being “good.” I don’t think it’s universal, and I don’t claim it’s anything more than an innate or upbringing-derived disposition, rather than some grand voice of conscience or something.
But however mundane its source, I have this strong felt need to be and to do the right, whatever that might happen to be. So while I agree with you that it so happens that flourishing and morality are tightly interwoven, if I were in some parallel universe where I had to importantly choose between “happiness” and “doing what’s right” as terminal values, I’d choose the latter. “Doing what’s right” feels more fundamental to me, whereas happiness just feels like a nice result of the fundamental thing.
I don’t claim that’s an especially rational position; just offering an account of how my psychology differs from yours. I don’t disagree with this aspect of how you think, but I feel rather differently than you do about this topic. Like, even during the 10 or 15 years I was an atheist myself, “what is right?” always felt more urgent than “how can I be happy?”
Anyway, I think we might be starting from different “gut” places–whether innately, through upbringing, by reading different books, or whatever–even if we end up grounding morality in somewhat similar ways.
@Irenist: So I think there’s a narrow needle you can thread to save the Wager from moral realist atheism, but I just don’t think it’s worth doing, and am not a serious proponent of the Wager as an apologetical argument. But as to the Dharmic religions–if anything, they’re a better target for the Wager than atheism! I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? You guess the wrong religion, and at some point in the next few million years, you still ought to get around to being incarnated a Buddhist monk or something, right?
I haven’t thought of moral realist atheism as influential enough to engage with since reading the medieval volumes of Hume’s History of England, wherein he accused the Catholic clergy of convincing people to violate Natural Law by practicing celibacy or willing their estates to the Church instead of their kin. I was like “Huh, so that’s what non-Christian intellectuals believed before utilitarianism and existentialism.”
I guess Fincke’s work is something you highly recommend? I don’t see why you’d take Singer seriously when his moral realism allows the selfishness of infanticide but not saving up to buy a house when there are starving children in other countries.
I agree that the Wager means it’s better to be a pious Christian if Hinduism or Buddhism is true than the reverse. Given the work Pascal makes the concept of infinity do, it doesn’t even matter that Dharmic religions do believe bad people go to Hell temporarily.
@ Irenist:
Oh no, I definitely understand and sympathize with that.
The fact is, humans beings have the capacity and natural tendency to think in terms of moral principles. This is good and useful because if we had to stop and calculate everything constantly, we could never accomplish anything.
And in a sense, I’d say if you had to choose between the two—if you thought that there is a conflict between morality and practicality—it’s better to go on the side of principle than on the side of amoralism. It’s the same reason I would say that if you had to choose between reason and sense experience—if like Plato or Parmenides you thought reason categorically proved a world completely different and opposed to the world of the senses—it’s better to go with reason.
If you go with reason, maybe you can reason your way out of it. If you go with the senses and deny the validity of reason, you’re totally lost.
But I say when moral principles stop aligning with “amoral calculation”, something has gone wrong in the same way that it has when reason stops aligning with experience. The concept of acting on principle gets twisted out of its proper role and into a means of self-destruction.
Yet if you completely abandoned principle (including implicit principles), you just wouldn’t be able to live and pursue long-term goals successfully.
Edit: in fact, as I’m writing elsewhere in this thread, I used to believe in a sort of deism for the exact reason that I thought otherwise it would not make sense to act on principle.
Hey, just a quick question some people might know about.
I assume some people have heard of Theranos (Blood testing company, claims to be able to run 100 different tests on a tiny vial of blood, no verified tests or peer review). I was wondering how A) anyone could still have money in this and B) how anyone would attempt this knowing they would go to prison.
(I currently am convinced there is no chance Theranos can actually do what they say they are capable of, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary I would be interested in seeing it)
What, exactly, do you think is impossible?
According to this article, 2/3 of their tests require standard size samples of blood. That cannot be a secret. Of the ones that they perform on drops of blood, 15 are on their own microfluid machine and 60 are performed on standard machines after dilution, although I think the company denies this.
I think that the accusation is that they aren’t sufficiently accurate for medical purposes, not that they are attempting the impossible.
I think another issue is that a droplet of blood is an insufficient sample volume to run some of the tests they want to run. IIRC there are issues with interstitial fluid and and compounds on the surface of the skin contaminating the sample.
“another”? What is the first issue? Did you reverse the order of your sentences?
Skin contamination seems like a difficult problem. “Insufficient sample volume” sounds like bullshit to me. For what tests is it implausible, let alone “impossible” that they could be done on just a drop of blood?
Skin contamination may be relevant for some tests, but which ones? Since most Theranos tests are not actually offered by pinprick, this seems like a pretty theoretical complaint. Most people complaining about Theranos, such as GDJJ, don’t seem to be aware of this, so it’s hard to take their complaints seriously.
Are there types of skin contamination which wouldn’t be dealt with by an alcohol swab?
Maybe the alcohol swab cleans off your skin and prevents contamination by dirt, but you can’t prevent contamination by the skin itself or whatever else makes up your body between the blood and the skin.
And I don’t think alcohol swabs remove much of anything. Rather, they are intended to kill bacteria so that it doesn’t infect you, not to physically remove it, which is what would be relevant to a blood test.
Alcohol swabs don’t have a demonstrative effect on disinfecting skin prior to injections. (Scrubs for surgial incisions are different – because the scrubs, procedures, and risks are different.)
(I have heard of vindictive EMT personnel very carefully saturating the skin of uncooperative DWI suspects with alcohol prior to doing blood draws, but that’s all been fourth and eighth hand.)
This is because their sample size is too low, keranih. I have been IVing heroin perhaps 6-8 times a day for 7 years.
Let me tell you: complications from injection are far, far less than one in 300 (the sample size of the experiment). They are far less than one in 10,000. There is no way you could measure the efficacy of alcohol swabs prior to injection with a sample size of 200 injections; the idea is laughable.
keranih, that’s interesting, but there is an important point that almost no one waits for the alcohol to dry. I don’t why that is relevant to the paper (though it is obviously relevant to contamination), but if Theranos had different needs, it might develop different protocols and might convince people to follow them.
Addict, the study had a 1 in 10 rate of complications. You, being otherwise healthy, may have a 1 in 10k rate, but hospital patients are another matter.
I don’t think that @God Damn John Jay implied that it’s physically impossible to do what Theranos claims that it does, just that it’s unlikely that Theranos can actually do it.
I was under the impression that all of their tests used the micro-samples and that was impossible to do. I am still doubtful, but that changes a lot in my mind.
I tried to track down the necessarily public information about what tests can be done on a small sample. Currently their website says nothing, probably because they are only doing full vials. And their website archives poorly. I think that it used to imply that you could get a hundred tests on a single drop of blood. I don’t believe that there ever were a hundred tests on the menu, and I don’t believe they did more than 5-10 on a single drop. That’s bait-and-switch, not fraud. And probably very few people actually asked for a huge number of tests at once, though probably many did ask for specific non-drop tests.
Here is a Yelp page that contains reviews, some mentioning full draws, and some mentioning calling to confirm that a pinprick would suffice; all fairly old, back when they did pinpricks. So I’m pretty sure that only some tests were done on pinpricks. But I think that they were always secretive about which tests were available, so I haven’t found a list. It must have been the most common tests to be worth advertising the pinpricks. For example, CBC and CMP.
a) The investors may have bought in to the company in a way that doesn’t allow them to sell their stake or otherwise take their money out. Or, if they can sell their stake then no one is willing to buy it at a price they’re willing to sell at.
b) Hyperbolic discounting of the future. Overconfidence. Getting caught up in the Silicon Valley founder mythos. Making something that can do some tests while you resolve the remaining problems in your technology and then gradually sliding down the slippery slope into outright fraud. Poor estimation of future success.
This is a bit off topic but it drives me nuts when people use “peer reviewed study” like that’s the gold standard of science. If they had published solid research on arXiv should we turn our noses up at it because there wasn’t a peer review board there to officially pronounce it scientific?
The problem is that Theranos hasn’t provided any evidence to speak of for some rather unlikely claims, but the way people talk about it the only issue is that the bureaucrats weren’t consulted. It’s infuriating.
If you’re sufficiently familiar with the field to tell whether the research is solid yourself, no; otherwise …
If it’s a highly viewed paper and people endorse it and no one condemns it, seems fine to me.
Somewhat related aside: I got in an argument on Reddit the other day with someone citing a week old paper as conclusive proof sex differences in the brain weren’t real. They wouldn’t accept specific criticisms of the paper I made or blog criticisms I linked to because those weren’t peer reviewed, and wouldn’t accept links to older studies because the new PNAS paper postdated it. They were genuinely this dumb, not intentionally trolling. I got many downvotes for being “anti-intellectual” for daring to think papers with problems commonly make it through peer review, kek. Humans are doomed.
I don’t know about this particular company so I have no idea if they’re simply making inflated promises they can’t deliver on, but the drive for finding methods of doing tests on smaller volumes of blood, or not even blood, is certainly something under legitimate research.
Novartis and Google are working on blood sugar monitoring via contact lens. Most day-to-day metering of blood glucose level is via test strips that you insert in the meter, puncture a finger with a lancet, and draw a blood drop onto the strip. About as much advice you get about skin contamination is to wash your hands beforehand.
If you’re someone like me, who has small veins so it’s a damn nightmare getting blood drawn (either they can’t find a vein, they do find one but they can’t draw enough blood, or they take three attempts – puncturing you with the needle each time – to draw a sufficient volume), promises of “We can run all these tests on small volume of blood” is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Christmas music that doesn’t suck and isn’t overplayed:
Christmas Concerto by Arcangelo Corelli. It’s pieces like this that makes me wonder why anyone thought classical was an improvement to baroque.
White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin. An atheist’s reflection on Christmas.
Hallelujah Chorus by George Frideric Handel, performed in the baroque style. Unlike many musicians I know, I reject the idea that it’s best to play music as the composer intended/in the original style; the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, for instance, takes a baroque composition (by Handel) and redoes it romantically, and it’s just really good. That said, listening to the Hallelujah Chorus in the original style made me fall in love with it again. And, even though I’m not so much a theist, as Minchin notes, it has really nice chords.
St. Paul’s Suite — Finale by Gustav Holst, which contains the Greensleeves theme, which the carol What Child is This was written to. Interestingly, Wikipedia tells me that, at the time Greensleeves was written, the color green came with sexual connotations, “most notably in the phrase “a green gown”, a reference to the grass stains on a woman’s dress from engaging in sexual intercourse outdoors.” Randal’s mnemonic for remembering the planet order (Mars Venus Earth Mercury Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune — Mary’s “Virgin” Explanation Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbor), suggests that the author of What Child is This is just an incredibly subtle troll and gives us another item: The Planets, by Gustav Holst. (Why, yes, The Imperial March does sound like Mars. The biggest difference is that Mars is better, since it’s in 5, whereas Imperial March is in 4 and 5>4. Or, to be serious for a moment, I’ve played Mars and arranged Imperial March (for my sister’s wedding: we played it as she and her husband regressed from the altar) and I’m just more impressed by Holst’s composition.)
Little Drummer Boy as performed by Apocalyptica.
I’ve been recommending Oy to the World, a collection of klezmer versions of common Christmas songs, for several years now.
This is wonderful.
There’s also “Oi to the World” by the punk rock band Vandals.
My favorite is probably Do you hear what I hear?, set to Baba O’Riley. Not only is the mashup factor good, but it’s a legitimately good performance of a song that is usually sappy and boring.
Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQyunriE1zg
I was going to say this if no one else got to it. Yowza.
Christmas music I don’t like: anything by/conducted by/arranged by John Rutter. Too syrupy-sweet. I like less treacle and a slightly drier tone.
Possible recommendation: album from 1982 by Noirin Ni Riain, “The Darkest Midnight in December”. A selection of the Wexford Carols, dating from the 17th century, and some Irish-language carols.
Sample here (the second song, in English, is from “The Darkest Midnight”).
About Rutter – if I never think of the Donkey Carol again, that’s about right.
Psychopathic Records has put out a few Christmas albums, including Insane Clown Posse’s ‘A Carnival Christmas’ EP and a compilation that includes a recording of ICP’s producer singing Silent Night.
(^:
Riu Riu Chiu, quite a beautiful Spanish song that I don’t think I’ve heard before.
Makes sense — ICP are Christian, right?
In Praise of Christmas and Snow as performed by Loreena McKennitt.
For the more macabre among us, various Christmas songs rewritten as Lovecraftian horror. Or, as my partner and I call them, Cthulu Carols.
I use these as an antidote to the overhead music every store in the U.S. plays from October through January.
Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24, by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. An amazing rock version of Carol of the Bells.
EDIT: Full title of the song.
Specifically, Christmas Eve/Sarajevo, 12/24
Important to remember that it was inspired by the story of a lone cellist during the siege of the city.
St. Paul’s Suite – I could only hear “Dargason”.
But I’ve done English Country Dance.
It first crops up in the cellos at 0:42. Also, if you read the music, it’s rehearsal 3 in the score (where it says “(Green Sleeves)”).
Oh, I know. But I’ve rehearsed the dance Dargason *a lot*.
Speaking of AI safety: there’s a new non-profit AI research company called OpenAI, with a focus on friendliness. Their initial research team has some impressively big names in machine learning, and their financial backers have pledged over a billion dollars. This looks like it could be consequential.
The web site is a bit sparse, but there’s a fairly informative interview with the co-chairs, Sam Altman and Elon Musk that folks might find interesting.
I’m confused why you’d want AI research to be open if you’re concerned about safety issues. Seems like open-sourcing the Manhattan project.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So are mistakes in safety proofs.
After the recent security debacle in OpenSSL that saying got a lot of criticism. “Enough eyeballs” is neither necessary nor sufficient to find the bug, you need the right eyeballs.
Is that meant as an argument in favor of keeping your source code secret, though, or just that going open source isn’t enough to ensure the bugs in it will all be found?
Bugs and exploits are not quite the same thing. Open source is pretty good at finding bugs, because bugs make the code not work in some fashion and that motivates smart people to try and get the code working again. Open source is good at ensuring the Black Hats will find the exploits, because they have lots of smart people who are motivated to do that and you’re giving them full access. Open source is demonstrably not good at ensuring the White Hats will find and patch the exploits because as long as the code is working, the smart open-source people demonstrably don’t care enough to secure it.
If your system needs to be secure, you need to hire a bunch of smart, professional white hats to do a thorough review. Until you do that, keeping your source code secret might be somewhat helpful.
The founders of OpenAI don’t seem to have the same AI safety concerns as Yudkowsky; but this is probably still a good thing for MIRI’s point of view since its open nature will mean that MIRI can keep an eye on advanced AI research.
I would like to discourage anyone from making large personal sacrifices for the cause of AI safety. Many competent CS researchers view the field as semi-crackpotish, in the sense that there’s no good research we can do now that actually decreases the chances of AI catastrophe. Scott Aaronson says
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2537
He has also said elsewhere that strong AI is likely centuries or millennia away.
Aren’t you quoting unfairly out of context, without giving the immediately following paragraph where he says “So, what changed? Well, in the debates about social justice, public shaming, etc. that have swept across the Internet these past few years, it seems to me that my rationalist friends have proven themselves able to weigh opposing arguments, examine their own shortcomings, resist groupthink and hysteria from both sides, and attack ideas rather than people, in a way that the wider society—and most depressingly to me, the “enlightened, liberal” part of society—has often failed. In a real-world test (“real-world,” in this context, meaning social media…), the rationalists have walked the walk and rationaled the rational, and thus they’ve given me no choice but to stand up and be counted as one of them.”
Thanks for giving the link though, so that we could read the context ourselves. That makes up for it a bit.
I edited my comment a few times. Do you still think I’m quoting unfairly? Note that Aaronson’s opinion of AI safety didn’t change; only his opinion on the rationalist movement did.
No, your comment is better now than when I first read it, since you don’t have the quote include the previous disparaging-seeming remarks (which he effectively negates in the immediately following paragraph which I quoted).
I don’t see a call for doing anything dramatic in that article Scott linked. I think its request is less “making large personal sacrifices,” and more “Make yourself known if you’re seriously interested in AI development/risk reduction.” Which is reasonable: even if gathering the interested and skilled parties doesn’t lead to strong AI, it’s bound to lead to SOMETHING. Mathematical breakthroughs, technological advancements in machine learning, etc.
Also: even if it takes centuries to develop AI, having safety on the radar in the early development of the field is a good thing.
The current request seems fine. But this blog has focused on only one side of the AI risk debate for a long time, and there are definitely effective altruists that are donating large portions of their money to AI risk instead of malaria nets.
I just want readers to know that many intelligent, reasonable people think AI risk is not an urgent concern (at least, not anywhere close to malaria nets).
“I just want readers to know that many intelligent, reasonable people think AI risk is not an urgent concern.”
I doubt anybody familiar with EA doesn’t already know this. I
Most EAs know that; the mainstream movement is barely cognizant of AI risk reduction, given that many of the meta charities don’t really recognize MIRI.
Donations to MIRI are in my budget, personally, but not my EA budget. They’re in my Kickstarter/warm entrepreneurial fuzzies budget.
Maybe they recognize it, but think AI risk is now overfunded, or don’t think MIRI has been proven an effective use of money.
AI is also on very thin ice conceptually and probably not possible at all.
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1972/JASA3-72Jaki.html
Most of us pretty soundly reject dualism.
On what grounds?
On what plain!
Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I think a good start would be that
a) every once-mysterious aspect of reality that we have now developed a good understanding of, an understanding that allows us to make more accurate predictions than we could before, has turned out not to involve any supernatural phenomena.
b) the brain is still an incredibly complex system that we are only beginning to understand – and it is a system that is made up of stuff that behaves differently from what we are currently able to make computers out of, so there is plenty room for it to turn out that the mind runs entirely on the physical brain, even if it turns out to be impossible to model in silicon anything that works quite like a brain,
c) Dualists have, as far as I am aware, yet to come up with a coherent testable theory of how mind can exist independently of matter, and most of the argumentation I’ve come across seems to be basically just some combination of argument-from-ignorance and wishful thinking, in support of a model which there are good reasons to think would come naturally to us (running a more complicated mental model is going to be more costly than a simpler one – and unless you have a good reason for why souls should be considered exempt from the ordinary laws of economics, that is the case regardless of the truth or falsity of dualism – and there will therefore have been strong selection pressure on intelligent entities that need to run mental models of other intelligent entities to do that modelling as cheaply as they can get away with – modelling others as single units of intentionality is much cheaper than modelling billions of neurons) – so we would expect belief in something unitary like a soul to emerge even if not true.
You could consider it another kludge like the way we see lines as bending or different lengths in those optical illusions, or indeed the many other heuristics where we run a mental model that is just close enough to reality to get by, most of the time, rather than a maximally accurate one.
[Edited to add: also the fact that you can change people’s personalities by altering the structure of their brain, is good evidence in favour of non-dualism – the position that the mind is something the brain does, and therefore is something the brain does differently if you change the brain. ]
On grounds that it is lighter on testable true claims than alternative simpler theories.
If it were true that our minds were immaterial then I would find it very surprising that people could get drunk. I would find all the other scientific discoveries about which parts of our brain correspond to which mental faculties pretty much impossible. By introspection I have a single unified consciousness but that’s clearly not what I can observe in other people so either I’m unique or that’s a cognitive illusion.
There’s the theory that the immaterial soul has to operate through the material body, so changes to the body affect how the soul can express itself. This isn’t totally crazy (any device which receives a broadcast is like that), but I can’t see how you’d test it.
@Nancy: Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that the radio theory is incompatible with our observations.
Considering hylomorphic dulism might help answer some of your objections to dualism. I think we can both agree Descartes version has a lot of problems.
http://www.newdualism.org/papers/D.Oderberg/HylemorphicDualism2.htm
I would also ask you this. How do you expect an entirely material object like a computer to form immaterial concepts like meaning?
How would you expect an immaterial object like a soul to form meta-immaterial concepts like the idea that souls are a thing?
My entirely material computer produces immaterial true answers to various classes of math problems on demand.
Do you have reason to think material things would be bad at generating immaterial ones, or are you just sticking X and Not-X together in a sentence and hoping it’s a contradiction?
The answers produced by your computer are totally observer dependent. You computer doesn’t understand the operations you had it perform. It doesn’t comprehend the concept of math. Does you watch tell time? No of course you have to look at it.
That’s a circular argument. We reject artificial awareness (AI) because according to dualism awareness is a special domain, and dualism is true because we define awareness to be a special domain.
No. That’s not the argument. Of what substance does awareness consist? Awareness is obviously immaterial as a concept. In oder for our minds to grasp immaterial concepts there must be some aspect of our minds that are immaterial. Artificial awareness is rejected because there is no way to create the immaterial out of material substances. Artificial awarness is dismissed as obviously absurd.
Winter Shaker:
a) every once-mysterious aspect of reality that we have now developed a good understanding of, an understanding that allows us to make more accurate predictions than we could before, has turned out not to involve any supernatural phenomena.
So how do you define “a good understanding”? Generally it seems to be defined as “a scientific understanding”, in which case the argument just collapses into circularity.
(running a more complicated mental model is going to be more costly than a simpler one – and unless you have a good reason for why souls should be considered exempt from the ordinary laws of economics, that is the case regardless of the truth or falsity of dualism – and there will therefore have been strong selection pressure on intelligent entities that need to run mental models of other intelligent entities to do that modelling as cheaply as they can get away with – modelling others as single units of intentionality is much cheaper than modelling billions of neurons)
The very act of modelling something presupposes the possession of mind.
Anon:
That’s a circular argument. We reject artificial awareness (AI) because according to dualism awareness is a special domain, and dualism is true because we define awareness to be a special domain.
Actually it was the founders of modern science who defined awareness to be a special domain. One of the main features of the scientific revolution was the distinction between so-called secondary qualities — things as they appear to observers, e.g., the subjective experience of seeing a red thing, or of feeling hot, or whatever — and primary qualities — things which were supposed to be observer-independent, such as position, extension, number, and the like. The idea was that science would concern itself only with the primary qualities of things in order to get a more objective picture of the world, and in this it has had great success. However, it should be obvious that, since consciousness necessarily involves subjective experiences, you can never fully explain it, even in principle, using a method predicated on ignoring subjective experiences. To claim otherwise is like claiming that, since you’ve managed to quite successfully clean your living room by sweeping all the dust under the rug, there’s no reason why the pile of dust under the rug can’t be dealt with the same way. The early scientists were all dualists because they understood the philosophical implications of their own method, not because of wishful thinking.
“In order for our minds to grasp immaterial concepts there must be some aspect of our minds that are immaterial.”
That is far from obvious. Computers can perform calculations, but are made from electronics rather than numbers.
That is far from obvious. Computers can perform calculations, but are made from electronics rather than numbers.
Computers just give a predetermined output to a given input. They don’t in any sense grasp immaterial concepts in the same way that human beings can.
A “good understanding” in the rationalist community is usually taken to mean a reductionist understanding; one which takes a big, complicated, mysterious, high-level thing and explains it in terms of smaller, simpler, more fundamental things which follow mathematical laws.
Dualism is true.
Physics is made of math. Math is objective. Mind is subjective.
Thoughts are ontologically subjective. They exist to the extent you believe in them, and have exactly the properties you believe they have. This is an identity law relation. To think of a blue cube is constituted by thinking you’re thinking of a blue cube. No matter what proof I may muster to show you’re really thinking of a red ball, I am in fact wrong. (As distinct from the labels ‘red ball’ and ‘blue cube.’)
Not only this, your thoughts are in principle inaccessible to me. Imagine we had two separate observers, both of whom determine whether you are thinking about a blue cube. Since neither can be wrong, the second mind cannot deviate from the first – the supposed second mind is in fact the same mind. The only way I can observe your thoughts is by being you. (Other minds problem – if you have no mind, you cannot observe evidence of a mind. But, also, Descartes, Cogito.)
Math (and physics) are the opposite. It does not go away if nobody is believing in it, it does not change if anyone changes their mind, it is fully accessible to all observers, and you can most certainly be wrong about it. Math and physics are ontologically objective.
Subjective != objective, therefore mind != physics, QED. (Longer version.)
As a dualist, I would just like to point out that dualism as such has nothing to do with whether strong AI is possible.
It doesn’t really matter for the problem of AI safety whether an AI is conscious. An intelligent agent can be extremely powerful, effective, and/or dangerous without having any kind of internal conscious experience or “qualia”.
A thermostat or a guided missile is a little bit intelligent and completely unconscious. A chess computer is much more intelligent and still completely unconscious. We can keep going until we have an android like Data who is really intelligent and completely unconscious. Or an unconscious superintelligence.
This is the real relevance of the p-zombie thing. Not to argue for epiphenomenalism as an actual fact, but to point out that intelligence does not imply consciousness. The Chinese room doesn’t have to understand Chinese in order to speak it. A superintelligent AI doesn’t have to understand nanotechnology in order to wipe out humanity with an engineered virus.
And though I don’t think consciousness can be explained on a materialist framework, I certainly don’t rule out the possibility that we will scientifically discover the correct framework and be able to create artificial consciousnesses. I just don’t think they will be really fancy Turing machines.
@Mr. X
Actually it was the founders of modern science who defined awareness to be a special domain. One of the main features of the scientific revolution was the distinction between so-called secondary qualities — things as they appear to observers, e.g., the subjective experience of seeing a red thing, or of feeling hot, or whatever — and primary qualities — things which were supposed to be observer-independent, such as position, extension, number, and the like.
We should note that, besides Bacon, none of the founders of modern science were empiricists. Voltaire and his fellow popularizers of empiricism had to do a hatchet job on the history of ideas to make it look like Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz were dummies, Newton was an empiricist, and Locke’s liberalism somehow counted as science.
@jaimeastorga2000:
A “good understanding” in the rationalist community is usually taken to mean a reductionist understanding; one which takes a big, complicated, mysterious, high-level thing and explains it in terms of smaller, simpler, more fundamental things which follow mathematical laws.
Mathematical entities are not material. If dualism isn’t true, either mathematical entities are delusions like New Atheists and Yudkowsky-rationalists believe God to be, or “the universe is a great thought” and it’s matter-energy that’s epiphenomenal.
We should note that, besides Bacon, none of the founders of modern science were empiricists. Voltaire and his fellow popularizers of empiricism had to do a hatchet job on the history of ideas to make it look like Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz were dummies, Newton was an empiricist, and Locke’s liberalism somehow counted as science.
I didn’t know that, although given the hatchet job they did on mediaeval philosophy, I can’t say I’m too surprised.
Mathematical entities are not material. If dualism isn’t true, either mathematical entities are delusions like New Atheists and Yudkowsky-rationalists believe God to be, or “the universe is a great thought” and it’s matter-energy that’s epiphenomenal.
You could add in universals as well. This is especially fun when debating with positivists, given that you can then point out to them that science depends on realism about universals for its validity.
@Alrenous:
Suppose you develop a machine which monitors the activity of every neuron in my brain. For years you train the machine by asking me what I am thinking about and then correlating that with the observed neural activity. After a long time the machine can predict what I am thinking about with 100% accuracy by observing my neural activity. Doesn’t this mean you now have access to my thoughts?
I think there is some equivocation going on here. The laws of physics don’t change when I change my mind, but the physical state of my neurons definitely does change when I change my mind.
@ Alrenous:
I agree with you as far as “objective ≠ subjective, QED”—which is only one of many, many ways to refute materialism.
But the rest of your essay is not too good, to be honest.
First of all, you say: “If something exists, I must be able to learn that it exists.” What?! Why? If I know something exists, I must be able to learn that it exists. But plenty of things can exist that I cannot ever know about.
Also, I don’t think you really understand epiphenomenalism. Large parts of your objection to it are non sequiturs. For instance, you say:
Epiphenomenalism does not say that the visual cortex and the “red ball qualia” are “identical”. What would that even mean? Obviously they’re not identical because one is a physical object and the other is a quale. At best, what you are describing is something like representationalism: that the picture of the ball in your mind somehow “is like” or “resembles” the ball in reality.
And I have a hard time making any sense at all out of this paragraph:
Now, epiphenomenalism is self-refuting, for exactly the same reason that materialism is self-refuting. Namely, in denying free will it denies that people are capable of believing things because they are true. Whatever they believe is a result of external forces operating on them, which may or may not cause them to believe in what is true. But in order to know something, you must believe it because it is true. Therefore, no one can ever know epiphenomenalism or materialism: if it is true, they don’t believe it because it is true.
Your point that the brain could not be “aware” of the epiphenomenal mind (obviously it could not be aware because a brain as such is not aware of anything—but I assume you mean it has no causal contact) is true but less fundamental.
@ Anonymous:
No?
Suppose that every time you picture your mother’s face, you punch me in the face. I can predict this with 100% certainty.
Does that mean I know what your mother looks like?
Knowing what you are thinking about is not the same as having first-person access to your thoughts. The two are as different as my sensation of being punched in the face is from your mental image of your mother.
Perhaps Alrenous did not express it very well, but no one disagrees that the physical state of your neurons changes when you change your mind. What they disagree with is the idea that the physical state of your neurons is the same thing as your mind.
True enough, the emotion of anger can only occur when certain neurons fire in your brain. But the firing of those neurons is not the same thing as emotion of anger. Nor does anger “reduce to” the firing of those neurons. It is obviously completely impossible in principle to move from one, two, or a million objective facts about neurons to a single subjective fact about anger. If you want an ontologically subjective conclusion, you must have an ontologically subjective premise in there somewhere.
It is exactly parallel to the is-ought problem in ethics. If you want “ought” in the conclusion, it just has to be in the premises somewhere.
You open another bag of worms. Even if you build an extremely powerful computer like you discribe in order for it to pose any serious danger it must also possess volition(also immaterial). Good luck building an artificial free will. The threat from an artificial intelligence and will is just comical.
@ Joe:
Not at all!
An AI need not have a will, let alone a free will, in order to be a threat. I’m not sure why you think it would.
Chess computers don’t have a will—but they can certainly come up with unpredictable strategies for beating the best human players at chess.
All an AI needs to pose a threat to human beings is the capacity to pursue goals (in no more metaphysical a way than a thermostat pursues the goal of maintaining a constant temperature), the ability to improve itself (in a completely deterministic way), and the ability to take in and process vast quantities of data.
It does not require consciousness or free will.
“Mathematical entities are not material. If dualism isn’t true, either mathematical entities are delusions like New Atheists and Yudkowsky-rationalists believe God to be, or “the universe is a great thought” and it’s matter-energy that’s epiphenomenal.”
Political concepts are not material either. Oddly no one thinks the fact we have the word ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’ means dualism is correct. In fact the same goes for all different types of labels.
I’m also not seeing how dualism saves that; having math physically exist doesn’t answer how the physically existing math interacts with our math. Unless the human mind tunnels through the universe into Plato’s Realm and we are kidnapping their ones and zeros, putting math in a separate realm doesn’t explain the math humans actually use.
Vox
“Namely, in denying free will it denies that people are capable of believing things because they are true. Whatever they believe is a result of external forces operating on them, which may or may not cause them to believe in what is true. But in order to know something, you must believe it because it is true. Therefore, no one can ever know epiphenomenalism or materialism: if it is true, they don’t believe it because it is true.”
How does that follow at all? Free will means people are exempt from causality; that is obviously nonsense which is why the rationalist community rejects it.
If you build a computer that decides where and when to fire nuclear missiles, it doesn’t need to have volition to be extremely dangerous.
@ Samuel Skinner:
On the contrary: everyone who says mathematical concepts imply dualism would say political concepts imply dualism! Indeed, they do so much more obviously. It’s just that mathematical concepts are used as the example because they are much less susceptible to being reduced to “all an illusion” or some such thing.
I don’t think you have the right picture here.
There is no “physically existing math”. Mathematical concepts exist in human minds. That’s where they exist and that’s the only place they exist. Mathematics doesn’t exist in a Platonic realm and doesn’t exist “in” external physical reality.
Mathematics is a mental model of reality. It corresponds to physical facts because it is constructed in order to do so. The universe is not intrinsically mathematical; mathmatics is a way of making the universe intelligible to the human mind.
Vox
How are goals formed independent of conscience and will? The chess program just cant decided on its own to play the stock market. Even if a paper clip optimizer got out of control I just don’t see how it can form and achieve all the vast number of mini goals it would take to trick humans into cooperating with the goal of pointing all the worlds resources towards paperclip production.
@ Joe:
Do you believe in evolution? (I don’t mean that in any kind of disparaging way.) Exactly like that.
You have to distinguish “goals” from conscious “purpose” or “intent”. Evolution does not have any purpose or intent: there is no over-mind making sure everything goes off without a hitch.
But in a very real sense, evolution has a specific, identifiable goal. And that is for every gene to maximize its own inclusive fitness: i.e. to replicate itself as much as possible. Now, it’s certainly not immediately obvious how all the wonderful diversity of life on Earth comes from that—but it does, and the existence of every organism can be explained on that basis.
The process occurs by sheer unintelligent trial-and-error. Random mutations happen, and if they enhance fitness they stick around. If they decrease fitness, they are weeded out.
Now, an AI can do a similar thing—but much more intelligently (though still completely unconsciously!). It has a goal: paperclips. It has sensors that can detect the quantity of paperclips. And it has tables that project the future quantity of paperclips, contingent on certain parameters (such as the number of paperclip factories it runs, how fast they run, and the number of human beings on the planet).
It can be programmed to continually adjust the parameters to maximize the projected value of paperclips. When the projected value is off from the sensed value, it can be programmed to automatically improve its projection tables.
How would it come up with complex schemes to kill all humans? The same way a chess computer figures out how to outwit a human at chess. Using the vast amount of information and processing power at its disposal, it can calculate: if I try this will there be more or fewer humans? What about this? What about that? If it is good enough at calculating, it will find through sheer exhaustive analysis the best way of reducing the number of humans, even if it was never originally programmed with that way.
This is exactly how evolution went from “inclusive genetic fitness” to “therefore, squirrels”.
Why are you saying souls and minds are the same thing?
I don’t think you need to invoke “the supernatural” when discussing minds, or conflate them with souls, unless you’ve already made up your mind about the conclusion and are only using terms intended to invoke derision: this is the kind of thinking that results in people believing in fairies and gods, which are patently ridiculous! Souls and minds! Nonsense!
I think it’s possible to have a mind and not a soul (indeed, if you’re going to argue about animal rights, and intelligent non-human animals, you’re going that way: if they don’t possess minds, why are you discussing rights or equality? This does not mean that they need to be ensouled, however. Same thing goes for AI: if you’re going to create or develop or midwife a genuine new consciousness, not just a cleverly-designed machine, you’re talking about an entity with a mind, but that says nothing about it having a soul or not.)
Vox
Yes I believe in evolution. I would ague that the organic world of evolution just too different than the clinical, sanitary, artificial and strictly predictable deterministic world of computation. I don’t see the later getting out of our control in any comparable to evolution. Microchips and circuits don’t mutate like organic cells.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Well, just improve your thought-reading machine so that when I conjure up a mental image, it can read out the image; when my thoughts are tinged by emotions it can describe the mix of emotions and their intensities; etc. Improve the machine to the point where it can spit out elegantly written prose that, I affirm, exactly captures every detail of my state of mind, and expresses it the way I would if only I had more skill with language and more introspective insight. Sure sounds like you have access to my thoughts now, since you can basically watch every detail of my stream of consciousness go by on a computer readout in front of you.
I agree that if you insert “first-person” then by definition only one person can have first-person access to their thoughts. But the qualifier “first-person” was not present in the sentence by Alrenous that I responded to. Anyway, why do you need first-person access when you can watch my thoughts scroll by on a screen?
OK, so are these subjective facts about anger? “Its feeling in my mind is like a white hot fire.” “I hate feeling anger; it’s painful” “I never feel so alive as when I am angry.”
If you fed all the details of your brain state into a sufficiently powerful computer, the computer could predict whether you would make any of these statements. That sounds to me like the computer is learning subjective facts about anger from objective facts about your brain state?
Brains are cleverly designed material objects constructed so that when external forces act on them, the brains come to believe true things, and they believe those things because they are true.
When sunlight strikes my eyes, a signal is sent to my brain which causes it to believe that the sun has risen. A clear causal chain can be traced from the rising of the sun to my brain’s belief-state.
@ Deiseach:
Again, from the perspective of dualism myself, I have no idea what a soul is if it is not the same thing as a mind. In that respect, I don’t think anything can have a mind and not have a soul, or have a soul and not have a mind—because they are synonyms.
Surely the traditional Catholic teaching with regard to animals is that they have souls? They have “sensitive souls” and “vegetatative souls” but not “rational souls”. Just to be clear, I totally reject the hylomorphic idea that the soul is the form of the body—it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t give you the kind of soul that religious people want anyway. (It’s obvious under such a view, as Aristotle himself believed, that the soul could not survive death.) But still: Catholics at least think animals have souls.
As for myself, I think the only valid question is: do animals have minds/souls/consciousness or not? I think they probably do, but maybe not. There’s not that says for sure that they’re not Cartesian automata.
What exactly would be the difference between it having a mind but not a soul, and having a mind and a soul?
Actually I do believe Aristotle believed in the immortality of the soul. I think he however recognized that the soul was incomplete with out the body. If you read the link I posted up thread it covers a lot of this.
@ Anonymous:
I would love to see a machine that—without ever having seen your mother or listened to any descriptions you make of her—could draw a picture of her based on your brain waves.
Even if it could do that, what we have is a series of lines on paper. It’s only a drawing of your mother insofar as it is interpreted as such by a mind—whether its yours or mine.
The same thing goes more obviously for the emotions: whatever it reads off from your brain waves, it will never be able to communicate to someone who has not experienced those emotions himself what it is like to feel them.
Try explaining what “red” is like to blind man. You can’t do it.
No, you are misunderstanding something.
The statements someone makes are objective facts. They are not subjective; they are publicly observable.
If you see someone bawling in the corner, he’s either sad or a really good actor. Normally, we discount the “really good actor” hypothesis because we generalize from our own experience. But strictly speaking, bawling does not imply sadness. And they certainly don’t tell you anything about what sadness is like to someone who never experienced it.
Do you think any of those statements about anger really get across what it feels like to have it? It’s like a fire? Can you cook something with it? It’s painful? Like a papercut? And I’m not even going to touch how you would explain “feels so alive” to someone who never felt alive.
Someone who never felt emotions could never have it explained to him what they felt like. He could be as expert you like about identifying when other people are going to claim to feel them. It can be 100% that if you punch someone in the face, he will tell you he is angry. But this emotionless observer could never know what it is like—or rule out the hypothesis that it’s all some form of signaling fakery.
Are you infallible, or are you sometimes wrong? When you’re wrong, are you always justified in believing what you do (e.g. because you were given misleading evidence)? Or do you sometimes believe things irrationally, things that you ought not to have believed on that evidence?
If you do you sometimes believe things irrationally, and if you are not in control whether you are doing so (if it is ultimately attributable to outside factors), you have no reason to believe that you are not in fact thinking irrationally on every question. You can’t have the slightest degree of probability of belief in anything.
For instance, imagine that you are locked in a room with an old UNIVAC-style computer. You have no access to the outside world, except through the little printouts it gives you. The computer adds up numbers, say the current stock market prices.
However, there is a funny thing about this computer: it has a small switch inside of it. When this switch is on, the addition is always right. But when the switch is off, the results could be right but are more often wrong in random ways. So if the switch is on, you know the printouts give you the correct stock market prices. But if it is off, they might be (and probably are) incorrect.
Now, if you had no access to this switch and never did—if you could neither flip it nor observe it—could you have any idea what the correct stock market prices are? Clearly, you could have no idea at all. This computer is your only access to the stock market: you cannot independently observe it. Your “priors” are only the information it has given you so far.
The man in the room is, of course, you. The computer is your faculty of reason, which is your only means of propositional knowledge of the world. (Of course you have sensory observation, but reason is what interprets that and puts it into propositional form.) The switch is your decision to think in a focused and rational manner, or to abandon focus and allow yourself to be influenced by outside authority and fallacious reasoning. In other words, your ability to believe that which and only that which is true.
It is indeed true that we can never be sure that all the data we are being fed is not misleading. That is, we can never have “absolute” certainty: certainty outside the context of our experience. But inside our experience, we can know that which we are justified in believing. Yet if we were not in control of the “switch”, we could not even know that. We could know nothing at all.
I think that’s the most beautiful refutation of determinism (and therefore materialism). But here’s a simpler (and somewhat related) one by Michael Huemer:
Source for objections and replies.
@ Joe:
Aristotle described the “active intellect” as “deathless and everlasting”.
The problem is, it’s an extremely obscure passage and probably the most controversial in all of his work. No one knows whether he’s even talking about humanity, or whether he is referring to the Prime Mover. And even if he is talking about humanity, no one is too clear on what the “active intellect” is (it’s not the whole soul) or what it does.
It seems to be a kind of completely impersonal “spark”; it’s not the locus of personal identity.
But really the passage is just too vague to be clearly intepreted. As the SEP article on it says:
In any case, the immortality of the soul is not a major part of Aristotle’s philosophy, and it doesn’t even really fit well with it.
“every once-mysterious aspect of reality that we have now developed a good understanding of, an understanding that allows us to make more accurate predictions than we could before, has turned out not to involve any supernatural phenomena.”
Under what circumstances would you admit that such an aspect of reality has shown that it does involve supernatural phenomena? Or would that preclude “a good understanding”?
@Vox Imperatoris
Suppose I want to test whether someone is an emotionless sociopath or a normal human with normal emotions. I ask them to say what it feels like to be angry. I ask them to say how they felt when someone they loved died. Etc. To each question they give a moving, poetic response, which not only convinces me that they understand what it is like to experience emotions, but helps me better understand my own emotional experiences. Probably I am right to be convinced that this person understands what it is like to experience emotions?
A sufficiently powerful computer could also pass this test if you gave it a brain to examine. Shouldn’t I be convinced that such a computer understands what it is like to experience emotions? Otherwise I may find myself saying churlish things like, “yes, this computer has written the single greatest and most widely acclaimed essay in history on the experience of emotion, far outstripping the combined efforts of all human artists ever, but it doesn’t really understand emotions.”
A sufficiently powerful computer looking at a brain in real time could be a perfect lie detector.
I don’t agree. Actually, I’m really confused that you assert this. Don’t you sometimes believe things irrationally for reasons outside your control? Haven’t you ever been tired and made a math mistake, or something?
I think the analogy misses two important things.
First, in the real world, there is a strong selection effect in favor of brains that reason correctly. Suppose people with faulty stock price adders tend to make poorer investing decisions than ones with working price adders. Over time the people with the faulty adders go out of business, and the remaining ones all have working adders, or at least their adders have only minor flaws that don’t hurt their businesses too much.
In such a world, I’m justified in trusting my adder to work reasonably well, because most adders work, because the ones that didn’t work drove their owners into bankruptcy. Similarly in the real world I’m justified in trusting my brain to work reasonably well, because the brains that didn’t work got their owners killed.
Second, I can cross-check the results of my brain’s reasoning to try to catch contradictions. In the analogy, I could do careful cross-checks of the output of my computer to try to learn about real stock prices.
Frankly I think this argument is silly. 1+2 constitute really strong premises which basically assume the conclusion. It’s a bit like saying “1. We should cure cancer in the next year. 2. What should be done can be done. 3. Therefore, we can cure cancer in the next year.”
The argument relies for its rhetorical force on equivocating between “We should do X [if possible]” and “We should do X [and I guarantee that X is possible because I wouldn’t ask you to do something impossible].” This equivocation is clearer in the cancer example.
Mary‘s point has prompted me to say that Richard Carrier’s definition of “naturalism” (linked by Winter Shaker) to be synonymous with “materialism” is bad. Whether Carrier likes it or not, naturalism and materialism are not the same thing, and there’s no reason to sully the perfectly good name of naturalism by identifying it with materialism.
It seems to me that the closest meaning of “supernatural” is either a) that which is the product of divine intervention and/or b) that which is not in principle intelligible by reason.
If people had the Force (Carrier’s example), and this could be scientifically studied and mapped out, such that the powers had a definite nature and extent, it would be an entirely natural thing. Magic, as conceived in Harry Potter, is completely naturalistic.
What I understand as “supernatural” magic is something like prayer, or else the traditional (pre-19th century) understanding of occult magic. Or maybe the clearest example is Eastern mysticism. You’re supposed to be able to redirect your “chi”, but the secret to doing this can’t be grasped rationally. You just have to meditate and it comes to you in a blinding flash of insight and then you can throw fireballs from your hands—or maybe you can just do something much more subtle. The powers don’t seem to have any regular nature or extent.
Or there’s the Christian distinction between what can be known through “natural reason” and knowledge of the supernatural delivered through revelation.
@Vox Imperatoris, regarding Huemer’s argument for minimal free will:
Huemer’s argument is a proof against hard determinism, the position that nobody has free will. It does not contradict soft determinism or compatibilism, as Huemer himself makes clear when he says he will use “determinism” and “hard determinism” as synonyms. (A compatibilist would just say that (3) is false in the sense of “can” that is relevant for free will; I can do a different thing than what that I am physically determined to do, if I have the general capacity for doing that kind of thing at other occasions, am not physically or mentally impaired, etc.) Therefore his argument, by itself, is useless against materialism.
@ Anonymous:
The inference that other people have conscious experience is based on two things: a) similar behavior and b) similar origin.
It would be weird if everyone else acted like they felt emotions, but you were the only one who really had them. After all, you apparently were begotten in much the same way. There would have to be some explanation for this. It’s simpler to say everyone else is also conscious and has emotions.
Now, if you had every reason to think this hypothetical person were a normal human being, then sure. But if you watched him come out of the sea foam or emerge from an alien spaceship, then no: there would be no particular reason to think he actually has emotions.
What could he do to prove to you that he has them? Short of explaining the true nature of the mind and proving that he must have one, nothing.
As explained by the point above, no, absolutely not. A computer could easily write the greatest poem of all time without understanding or feeling emotion.
Computers can play the greatest chess games of all time without understanding chess. I don’t see why they can’t do the same with essays.
If I make an honest mistake due to factors outside my control, that’s not irrationality. It’s not irrational to make math mistakes. If you add up a column of numbers and check three times, you are justified in believing the results. Even if you did make a mistake.
Irrationality is like deliberate intellectual dishonesty—which people commit all the time. Do you think that no one has ever deliberately evaded the facts?
This is an argument, presumably composed through the use of reason. You can’t use such an argument to prove the validity of reason. That would be circular.
Maybe you’re wrong. People have been wrong about this sort of thing before.
Now yes, you can’t conclusively rule out the possibility that you are honestly mistaken here: that your beliefs are justified but not true. But look, either you have to say that no one has ever had an unjustified belief (obviously false), or people have to have some way of conclusively knowing whether their beliefs are justified. I say they can know it because they can control it.
You can’t prove the validity of something by cross-checking it against itself. At most, you could prove that the computer is wrong. But you couldn’t show that it is right.
Huemer addresses this kind of objection at length in the essay.
The argument “assumes the conclusion” only in the same way that every valid deductive argument does so: if you accept the combination of the premises, you have to accept the conclusion.
With the cancer example, I think you’re the one who’s equivocating. In the sense of “ought” in which “ought implies can”, it would be false to say that we ought to cure cancer next year. Suppose someone asks you: why didn’t you cure cancer this year; don’t you know you ought to do so? You would answer: very well, but I can’t cure cancer; all you can properly say I ought to do is try my best.
In other words, it would be nice if cancer were cured next year, but no one is obliged to cure cancer next year. That would be stupid.
When you say that Michael Huemer ought to believe in determinism, it really does imply that he is able to believe in determinism. At the very least (if you weaken it to saying “he ought to believe in determinism, if possible”), it implies that he ought to try his best to believe in the truth of the free-will question, i.e. determinism.
Do you think he’s trying his best to believe in determinism? Along with everyone else who ever disagreed with determinism? Have they all investigated the evidence to the best of their ability and justifiably (though unfortunately incorrectly) come to the belief that determinism is false?
Or are they being irrational?
If they are being irrational, determinism has refuted itself. If they are not being irrational, then you can hardly criticize them for not believing in determinism.
Let me quote two of Huemer’s objections and replies, which are the ones you took.
@ Alejandro:
True. By itself (i.e. without showing that the compatibilist interpretation of “can” is an equivocation), it does not refute materialism. Neither did I say that it does.
In fact, even if Huemer’s argument refuted compatibilism, it would be still technically be compatible with materialism insofar as the “minimal free-will thesis” only says that people have more than one course of action open to them. This could explained materialistically by physical “randomness”.
@Vox Imperatoris
This isn’t normally an issue I’m interested in, though I have to say, I’m enjoying watching this argument. One question has occurred to me, though – why, according to your interpretation of dualism, could consciousness not be entirely material? Perhaps there is some consciousness module in the brain; an AI without this module could do a perfect imitation of thought but not actually be experiencing anything, like you say, but the thing it is missing would be physical not immaterial. If you could find this part in the human brain and cut it out, you would have created a p-zombie.
The obvious argument against this is that this module would be unnecessary and therefore there’s no reason for it to have evolved, although maybe you could find some explanation – plus, I think this argument would apply to an immaterial consciousness as well as a material one.
@ Anonymous (the other one, with four shuriken):
Consciousness cannot be material because (according to reductive materialism/physicalism itself), matter is not fundamentally conscious or mental. And you can’t go from any number of facts about non-mental objects and non-mental laws to a mental conclusion.
Now, if you say matter can have fundamentally mental properties, then sure I agree that consciousness could be “material”. But then it’s not “matter” as commonly understood. (However, I don’t endorse “property dualism” as typically formulated, which amounts to a form of epiphenomenalism.)
This is the cleverest argument against dualism, in my opinion.
If it’s possible for “optimization processes” like AIs to accomplish all the external things human beings can do without being conscious (as I argue it is), why didn’t evolution select against consciousness as extraneous to intelligence itself?
All I can argue that, first of all, we know we are conscious, so we can’t reject that. And if the arguments of dualism vis-a-vis materialism (which stand on their own) are correct, we have to reject materialism.
My explanation would have to be something in terms of: the way intelligence evolved in animals led to consciousness as a sort of byproduct. But, as they are implemented in organic brains, the dependency is too great to be eliminated: too many changes would have to take place for an animal to drop consciousness while keeping intelligence.
In the same way, we can say: why didn’t human beings evolve to run on gasoline or nuclear fusion instead of food? It would be more efficient for sure! But evolution doesn’t work that way: we can’t just drop our system of digestion which has been built up step-by-step from the bacterial stage and replace it with something made from whole cloth.
OK, but I’d be convinced that he at least understood the experience of emotions.
Don’t they understand chess? For example you can get a chess engine to show you in great detail why a certain move is better than another. But OK, arguably they just manipulate symbols and are too stupid to really “understand” the symbols. So if you like we can imagine a computer which can conduct intelligent conversations in English about chess, place chess in its historical and social context, make insightful analogies between chess and current world affairs, etc. IMO such a computer would really understand chess.
Similarly I would say that a computer definitely understands the experience of emotions if it can conduct intelligent conversations in English about the experience of emotions, write moving poetry about the experience of emotions, etc.
OK, sure, I agree. For example, perhaps I am a brain in a vat and my conscious experience is being controlled by a malicious scientist, so that all my reasoning is 100% wrong. Similarly all my experiences may be lies. This is independent of the truth of determinism: even if there is free will, maybe I am on drugs that continually and radically distort my reasoning and experiences.
So I start somewhere arbitrary in belief-space and incrementally update my beliefs based on my experiences and my reasoning. This will work pretty well if my experiences are mostly veridical and my reasoning is mostly valid. This will totally fail if my experiences are mostly false or my reasoning is mostly wrong.
Everything so far seems very consistent with a world in which my experiences are mostly veridical and my reasoning is mostly valid.
No I don’t! Clearly people sometimes have unjustified beliefs, and equally clearly no one has the ability to conclusively tell whether their beliefs are justified. I’m really confused by this dichotomy you insist on, so I am probably missing the point.
Right, which is why the argument is useless. Similarly Huemer’s premise 1 may be false, given the senses of “should” and “can” used in 2 and 3.
What? Irrational agents can exist in a deterministic universe. For example we can code up a deterministic simulation of our universe and put in it some simulated humans, who will sometimes behave irrationally. (Some of our physical laws involve randomness, but this can be simulated with deterministic pseudorandom numbers which are just as good).
I don’t think these actually address my problem with the argument. My problem is that since Huemer is using a version of “should” in which “should implies can,” his premise 1 is a very strong assumption which may well be false. If should implies can, then before I accept “We should do X” you will have to persuade me that “We can do X.”
So before Huemer asserts “We should refrain from believing in Y if Y is false” he needs to first convince me that “We can refrain from believing in Y if Y is false.” This last statement is equivalent to “(We have free will) OR (Y is true).”
Huemer sets Y = “we have free will.” So before I assent to his premise 1, he needs to first convince me that “(We have free will) OR (We have free will)”. But this is the conclusion that he is trying to prove.
This is why I say that he is assuming the conclusion.
Edit: I am looking at the link to Huemer’s full argument and his objection #4 is closest to mine. IMO, his reply, “I think people have freedom with respect to their beliefs,” pretty much admits to begging the question. You are trying to prove people have freedom, you can’t assume it!
@Anonymous
Every time I see your Gravatar, I think you’re me.
Well, for one thing, people who endorse it tend to do things like claim that AI is “likely” impossible, and support it with nothing other than a link to a rambling essay that even after the several pages that I read before giving up hadn’t provided anything even remotely resembling an argument in support for the proposition.
Way to piss away social capital, there.
> A “good understanding” in the rationalist community is usually taken to mean a reductionist understanding
That’s kind of circular. The interesting version of the claim would be that everything has a reductionistic explanation, or that reductionistic explanations are the only good ones, or that there is a reductionistic explanation of the trickier aspects of consciousness,
Give me one single falsifiable, practical, testable prediction for an observation you would expect if souls existed that would differ if they did not.
Also you gave no reason why, assuming there’s a magical soul that attaches itself to a lump of flesh, why you couldn’t build a computer capable of attracting one of these magical creatures and allowing it to attach.
Computers can be built out of almost anything, from DNA gunk to dominos to electronics to living cells to matrices of atoms to interfering EM waves.
What do you think is so special about the fleshy version in our skull and why do you think it’s impossible to include one as part of a larger computer?
Is there any particular reason why a magical soul would refuse to attach to a full simulation of every atom in a human brain?
Virtual magma.
I’m not sure if my personal belief as to the nature of mind counts as dualism or not. I don’t think it does.
To me, “I” am the rolling superposition of states of all the neurons in my brain. (And/or whatever other things my body uses to store and process information.) If you ask me if “I” am tangible, I will say no, because that rolling superposition is an abstraction. My body is a meatsuit that “I” rides around in. I firmly believe that with sufficiently advanced reader tech, “I” could be copied, and with sufficiently advanced processor tech, a copy of “I” could run on a non-biological system and it would still be “I.” (Although assuming that non-bio “I” is running concurrently with meatsuit “I” we would immediately begin to diverge as individual “I”‘s.)
Is my understanding that this is not a dualistic philosophy correct? Thanks for any advice.
Dualism’s claims are not falsifiable, and as such they’re outside the domain of science. I dismiss any such claim out of hand as not worth my time.
“But science does not currently have a strong explanation for how consciousness comes about” is not an argument that makes untestable philosophy worth my time.
For people who are interested in the structure of mind / consciousness as it relates to the brain and neural networks: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3799.abstract
@phantasmoon
Whenever I come across these utterly unfalsifiable kinds of claims I find an important question to ask is
“why should I take your conclusions any more seriously than the claim that there’s an angry 2 mile tall purple bunny outside of time and space which commands that we must never use the syllable ‘ble’?
I can’t prove the rabbit exists or that it doesn’t exist and there’s no way that the universe would be different if it did or did not making claims involving it only slightly more respectable than your own claims.”
@ Anonymous:
That implies universal skepticism. If you can never know when you’re justified, you can never know that any particular belief you have is justified, and therefore you can never know anything.
And you can’t get out of it by saying we don’t have certainty of anything but only probability. What does probability mean? It means there’s some evidence for and some evidence against.
Is the evidence for the proposition certain, or its it probable? You can’t have an infinite regress of probabilities—or in other words an infinite regress of some evidence for and some evidence against.
You’ve got to start somewhere, and that foundation has to be certain (at least within the context of your knowledge). In other words, it has to be self-justifying.
He would say that sort of freedom is a presupposition of rational discourse.
I think that fundamentally, we have a very different idea of what it means to be irrational or to have unjustified beliefs. You say:
I would say such beings are not irrational. They are non-rational; they don’t have reason in the human sense at all. The concept of justification doesn’t really apply to them because all of their beliefs are equally (un)justified: they believe exactly what they have to believe.
To criticize people for being irrational implies that they could be rational, that they have some form of choice about it. On your model of things, rationalists telling people to be rational are just moving them from adopting one set of perfectly (un)justified beliefs to another set of equally (un)justified beliefs. If you read Eliezer Yudkowsky and apply the methods of rationality to your life, you’re not applying them because they’re correct. You’re applying them because you’re biased in that direction.
If everything people believe is an inexorable result of the outside forces impinging on them, there simply would be no such thing as objective knowledge. Everything would be an equally (un)justified opinion. If anyone ever happened to believe what is true, or even justified, it would only be a matter of luck. (And no, you can’t argue that evolution explains this luck because the truth of the theory of evolution presupposes the possibility of knowledge. If you don’t start out certain that reason is valid and knowledge is possible, you can’t prove it using reason.)
Evolution is, in this sense, a “stolen concept” for a determinist. The determinist believes in evolution while denying the more foundational knowledge upon which it rests.
It all goes back to Epicurus, who first formulated what we may call the “argument from doxastic responsibility”:
In other words, determinism is such that if it’s true, it’s either false or unjustified. If the one who asserts it says that he was the cause of his belief in determinism, he admits that determinism is false and thereby refutes himself. And if he says that he was not the cause of his belief (that it is ultimately attributable to some outside, non-rational bias), he invalidates his status as a rational agent capable of having justified beliefs.
That is what it means to say that determinism is self-refuting.
@ Murphy:
I prefer to use the word “mind”, or if you insist “immaterial mind”, to make it clear that I am not discussing the religious concept of the allegedly immortal soul.
In any case, I can give you a million testable propositions that prove the truth of dualism: every conscious experience you have. My very argument is that it would not be possible for you to have them given materialism. If you have them, that is conclusive evidence in favor of dualism.
I don’t know where the idea comes from that dualism is not “testable”. You test it at every waking moment.
Now, you may say that I have made an error in reasoning and that materialism can explain the fact of conscious experience. Fine, but you must at least grant that it’s perfectly testable if true.
On the other hand, if it’s false, the way you “test” it is by showing that the arguments supporting it are invalid.
It’s true, I suppose, that you can’t test dualism by looking (only) for some kind of external physical fact. The theory itself says that there are internal mental facts which are perfectly observable. I don’t see how you can reject the theory for being about a different subject matter than physics. It’s as if you were to reject a historical dissertation because it doesn’t make reference to any mathematical facts.
I don’t say it would be impossible.
The thing is, dualism, at least at the current stage of knowledge, is eminently testable with regard to oneself. And given that other people are sufficiently similar to you, can use inference to the best explanation to show the overwhelming likelihood that they are conscious, too.
But there’s no way given the current state of knowledge to determine conclusively that an alien or an android were conscious. All you could do is assume, and it wouldn’t be particularly justified.
So how would you test this? Well, you’d have to figure out how the brain works. If (interactionist) dualism is true, the brain is not a completely deterministic clockwork mechanism. It must interact with the mind somehow in some observable way. But we do not really understand the brain; this interaction could be very subtle.
So anyway, it’s a perfectly testable theory. It’s not testable right now with current equipment. But surely that doesn’t invalidate a theory? There are many theories that make projections which can only be tested decades or more later.
So, yes, it’s very unfortunate that we could not determine right now whether an artificial being were really conscious or merely intelligent. But it’s still an interesting and meaningful question—there’s no sense in defining it out of existence.
The idea that it is possible to simulate a human brain in a deterministic Turing machine is obviously at odds with (interactionist) dualism.
More importantly, the whole idea that an immaterial mind is therefore “magical” and non-naturalistic is completely unjustified. It makes as much sense (actually considerably less) as if I were to go all George Berkeley on you and say obviously everything is mind. Matter is a myth. It all reduces to sensations in the mind. You only experience being a mind; where do you get this crazy mystical idea that there is an external “physical” universe? What a fairy tale! Completely unverifiable! What are you going to do, crawl outside of your mind to observe it?
Look, the fact just is that we are aware both of external physical facts and of internal mental facts. There’s no justification in trying to reduce one to the other. And if you want to try, subjective idealism is at least coherent.
Edit:
More on the idea that dualism is not “testable”: every rational argument for something on the basis of evidence available to the listener is testable.
Is the belief in God testable? Well, if the religious person tells you to accept it on faith no matter what and in defiance of reason—then no.
But if he gives you a rational argument, such as the cosmological argument, this is perfectly testable. Sure, it makes some predictions that you can’t test right now. But it makes plenty of others that you can. The very form of the cosmological argument is to say: look at the universe! Without God, it couldn’t exist. It does exist. Therefore, God exists. So every observation of the universe is a testable prediction of the theory.
On the other hand, you can falsify the cosmological argument by showing that it is fallacious (as it is). It either assumes unproven and controversial premises or makes invalid deductive steps (or both).
And of course, there’s more ways to falsify the theory. The God Theory, as formulated by Christianity, implies that evil—or certainly much less evil than there is now—should not exist in the world. But it does: evidence against. It argues that there is Original Sin, which implies that human beings do not have free will. But they do: evidence against.
There’s no sense in our being logical positivists. It’s a position that was discovered to have invalidated itself—and was therefore abandoned.
@Vox Imperatoris
There’s a reason I used both the words “testable” and “falsifiable”.
“falsifiable” does not mean “someone made an eloquent sounding argument against it”
Your test is akin to saying “this shiny rock makes me magical” then “testing” it by saying “I have the shiny rock and so I am magical”
It’s no test at all. It’s bollox.
Claims being falsifiable is important and you’ve either failed to understand what falsifiable really means or just ignored it.
To be absolutely crystal clear, what imaginably possible observation , if one person of a million came to you with it would serve as evidence to you that your claims about the soul, immaterial mind, or other synonym for soul could be false?
In your view of the universe should it be possible to point a satellite dish made of neuron-goo at a soul and intercept it’s signals? Something? anything? Anything testable and(logical and) falsifiable.
Otherwise you’re just playing bingo at the Tautology club while bowing to the great bunny(the bunny has no feelings on good or evil so their existance say nothing about the great bunny).
Just remember, the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
Dualism’s claims are not falsifiable, and as such they’re outside the domain of science. I dismiss any such claim out of hand as not worth my time.
So how would you go about falsifying a claim such as “unfalsifiable claims aren’t worth my time”?
@ Murphy:
You seem to be arguing that there is no such faculty as reason, and/or that it is not possible to prove anything through reason except a tautology. I wonder what your proof of this is, or what falsifiable observations it entails…
Tell me what tautological argument I am allegedly making. Do you consider “I make observations” to be a tautological claim? It’s true that no observation you make could disprove it. But surely you have to believe it in order to entertain your theory in which everything is either potentially subject to falsification by observation or else doesn’t say anything about reality?
The observation I would make to falsify my theory is the apprehension through reason that the arguments supporting it are unsound. I regard that as a real possibility. I have been wrong about things before.
But that is the error of positivism: it denies that we have any such capacity as the ability to learn things through reason. I say, we start with the senses and reason builds up theories on the basis of sensory evidence. Positivism says that we have the senses and that’s it. If you can prove it in reason, it’s “analytic”, it’s a “logical truth”—and therefore it doesn’t say anything about how reality actually is.
It’s a totally discredited position, and I would like to see you defend it.
Anyway, I already answered you. Even if you stick to positivism, the following kind of thing ought to be completely acceptable to you: as I said before, if we were to discover how the brain works and see that it were a deterministic clockwork mechanism, I would consider my theory refuted.
Also, I really think your dismissive tone is uncalled-for. You know, if you actually consider what I’m saying without assuming it’s wrong because “magical fairy souls hue hue hue”, you might learn something. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your own time.
I can’t answer definitively for him but I can think of a method.
I imagine someone could calculate the approximate estimate of the value of his time based on observations of how he spends it, say 10 bucks an hour, then demonstrate that on average unfalsifiable claims provide him with utility equivalent to that value per unit of time.
Given that there’s an infinity of utterly useless unfalsifiable claims that’d be quite impressive but possible if he viewed mental masturbation as having high enough value.
@Vox Imperatoris
You seem to be basically presenting a presuppositional type argument. One of presupposition’s many flaws is evident in your argument: you are equivocating between different modal states, such as a statement being true, and us being justified in believing the statement. Those are completely different issues.
@ Murphy:
Your Bulverism and needless insults are not anything approaching an argument.
@ RCF:
That’s a valid objection if true, but I don’t believe I did such a thing. (Point it out, if I did.)
What I argued is that determinism is screwed either way: it’s either false, or it’s true but no one can know it or be justified in claiming it.
This is the exact inverse of establishing self-evident axioms. No one can prove the laws of logic. All you can say is that it’s either they’re true, or they’re false but no one can know it or be justified in thinking so. It’s in some sense conceivable that logic is invalid, but clearly you have to assume it in order to coherently think about anything.
In the same way, it’s conceivable that determinism is true, but the falsity of it is presumed by the possibility of knowledge and rational discourse.
As far as I can tell, all mind-body dualists posit an immaterial mind that by all accounts is a perpetual motion machine.
Why waste time trying to achieve cold fusion when we have all of these minds floating around that have no need for energy inputs and when in use don’t waste any energy as heat?
If dualism is true, I want my own personal Soulnado so I never have to pay for electricity again.
@Vox Imperatoris
A system can either be complete or it it can be capable of demonstrating its own consistency. not both.
If your system is utterly internally self consistent and capable of supporting itself then it’s either flawed or too trivial to handle basic arithmetic.
Your “refutation” of Determinism is little more than constructing “this sentence is a lie” within it which you can do in any non-trivial, useful system.
I’m saying that your “I make observations” system which you take to prove itself is little more than a card with “the statement on the opposite side of this card is true” written on both sides.
I could dig into this but we’d have to taboo so many terms in your argument that it would take forever. (Starting with “reason” because I suspect it means something very different to you than it does to me.)
Reason(to me meaning my mushy meat brain doing calculation, chaining logic etc) combined with observations can be useful but without observations to which to chain you reasoning you have an infinity of possibilities with no connection to reality and most of them not even meeting the standard of “logical” that anyone grounded in reality might apply with things like 1+1 equaling 2.
But I’m primarily interested in your statement of what you’d consider falsification.
I’m willing to accept a currently-impractical test but I want to be clear about what you’d accept.
Would you accept merely, say, a deterministic machine which emulated the brain and produced something which appeared to act very similarly to an intelligent person?
because this feels like one of those things where if the criteria aren’t nailed down someone can just point and shout “ah ha! sure it can behave like a human brain in every way but do we really really understand it according to an esoteric meaning of the term understand?”
@Nero tol Scaeva
That is a notable thought, if the soul (or immaterial mind) is capable of “reason” or any other form of calculation separate from that done by the mushy meat brain then souls could be detected directly due to needing to take energy (if they do need energy to run) for the calculations bringing them squarely into the realm of detectable material phenomenon.
Alternatively they could be used as a source of energy with them being used as a Maxwells demon (if they do not need energy to run) bringing them squarely into the realm of detectable material phenomenon.
>The idea that it is possible to simulate a human brain in a deterministic Turing machine is obviously at odds with (interactionist) dualism.
Why? What does the brain even do in dualism, as all the thinking is happening in the soul? You don’t have to simulate anything, you just have to find the bits of the brain that link up to the soul dimension and copy them. Of course this raises the question of why we have such large brains in the first place.
Murphy
Try to think of soul or substantial form like this. Imagine giving a materialist reductionist friend a copy of “Gone With the Wind” and told him it was a great story set in the civil war. How would you react if he flipped through the pages slammed the book and said there’s no story here no context or narrative or anything magical or immaterial like that. All I see is letters arranged into words arranged into sentences and so on. You would probably think him nuts. Obviously the story, context and narrative dictate the way letters and so on are arranged. The soul or substantial form dictate the way the matter is arranged in a living thing. It is immaterial, similar to the context of a novel, but more obviously real.
@ Nero tol Scaeva:
Here I am denying the causal closure of the physical, and you object with a silly thing like that! 😉
@ Murphy:
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are irrelevant here.
I’m not saying that the system can “prove itself”. It’s been known since Aristotle that no system can do that. Proof is a means of showing that a fact is true by appealing to a more certain statement. If this is not circular or an infinite regress, it must culminate in one or more self-evident truths.
But the self-evident does not “prove itself”. It’s just a precondition for rational thought. Positivism, for instance, takes as self-evident the fact that you can make observations (it has to).
It depends on what you mean by “emulated the brain”. I would not accept a machine like that if its brain were not functionally identical to a human brain because it could obviously just act like a human without being conscious. I certainly don’t think it’s impossible to build a human-imitating robot.
But suppose you scanned my brain and made a complete “map” of how it works, in the manner of a circuit diagram. If you could do this and show that it works totally deterministically, I would accept that my theory were falsified. It also doesn’t have to be me. If you could do this with a reasonable sample size of random human subjects, I would accept that my theory were falsified, as well.
Now, this would not rule out something like epiphenomenalism, but epiphenomenalism is not my theory. I regard epiphenomenalism as self-refuting because it is deterministic.
Sure, I grant that such a thing would have to be possible—unless (completely hypothetically) in order to act on physical matter, the mind had to deplete a store of energy somewhere in a manner that increased entropy more than the work done decreased it. After all, if people don’t take in calories, their brains stop working and (for all we can tell) they stop thinking, so this is not incredibly implausible.
@ Anon.:
That’s an absolutely incorrect conception of dualism.
Dualism says that the mind and the brain are a system that together is capable of thought. The thoughts exist in the mind, but they would not be possible without the brain.
Think of an astronaut and a spaceship. It would be foolish to say “What does the spaceship even do? All the piloting is done by the astronaut!” No, the spaceship has instruments that feed the astronaut all his data; it has a life support system; it has databanks that allow him to recall his observations; it has alarms that warn of hull breaches. If you got rid of all those things, there would be no piloting. The astronaut is totally dependent on the spaceship.
Now, this is of course just an analogy and is not perfect. But you can see that, in the dualist theory, it’s not the case that causation only goes from mind to brain. It goes from brain to mind, too.
If you damage the sensors, the astronaut won’t be able to see. If you put LSD in the water supply, he won’t think clearly. If you directly stimulate the hull breach alarm, he’ll react if there is a breach without there really being one. And if you turn off the life support system, he’ll die.
Now, maybe what you are describing is true of the religious theory of the immortal soul that is eternal and indestructible. It seems to be implied by the idea people have of mentally ill or autistic people that a healthy person is locked in there somewhere.
But I don’t think that. I don’t believe in dualism because it’s some kind of dogmatic viewpoint I have. I think it is the theory that best explains the facts. Bryan Caplan puts this excellently in his essay on the subject.
> instruments that feed the astronaut all his data; it has a life support system; it has databanks that allow him to recall his observations; it has alarms that warn of hull breaches
>Now, this is of course just an analogy and is not perfect. But you can see that, in the dualist theory, it’s not the case that causation only goes from mind to brain. It goes from brain to mind, too.
I still don’t see the issue, whether the link is one-way or two-way is hardly the problem. Clearly we have the capability to make artificial databanks, life support systems, and alarms. And if you could just point out which part(s) of the neuron connect to the soul dimension we could hook up whatever we want, no matter the direction of the links.
Also I find it very curious that you attribute memory to the brain, since memory is a big part of the basis of our conception of a coherent self through time, etc. Could you explain exactly which aspects of the mind you attribute to the brain, and which to the soul?
@TheAncientGeek: That’s kind of circular. The interesting version of the claim would be that everything has a reductionistic explanation, or that reductionistic explanations are the only good ones, or that there is a reductionistic explanation of the trickier aspects of consciousness.
I also want to know why reductionism implies materialism. Considering that reductionism was defined upthread as “breaking big mysterious things down into simpler things that follow mathematical laws”, and mathematical objects (as well as the laws of logic and math) are immaterial, isn’t it rational for reductionists to choose idealism?
I’m also seconding Vox Imperatoris’s point thatt logical positivism is discredited and I’d like to see empiricist-materialist-reductivism believers either defend it or explain how their philosophy avoids its errors.
Reductionism doesn’t imply materialism, and most people use those terms fairly loosely so that they can move the goalposts anywhere they want (usually, to exclude dualism).
It’s be nice to see a clear definition of reductionism and physicalism/materialism. I think on most definitions, either they are trivially true or empirically false (although I don’t think this implies dualism; rather, I favor theoretical pluralism [the soul in the religious sense still has no empirical justification]).
Take reductionism: if it means that all of the theoretical predictions and entities of the higher theory can be cleanly mapped on to a lower theory, then that’s pretty much never happened (excepting maybe the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics). That certainly hasn’t happened for psychology => neuroscience, neuroscience => chemistry, or biology => chemistry. I suppose you could claim that it will happen, but that’s basically begging the question if we’re considering empirical evidence to the final arbiter.
The alternative to reductionism is eliminativism: okay, we can’t make smooth theoretical reductions, but we know there really aren’t any trees out there, just collections of particles. That’s a better argument, but it always runs the risk of striaght out contradiciton: if you can’t reduce psychology to neuroscience but instead prefer to eliminate the entities of psychology in favor of neuroscience, you might not be able to make sense of the fact that you are asserting a proposition to be true. After all, there are no real assertions or propositions, just neurons firing.
Physicalism faces similar problems: define the physical broadly enough and it’s trivially true but uninteresting. Narrow definitions tend to couch it in terms of reduction/elimination, which just runs into the problems I mentioned above.
@ Anon.:
And? Yes, if you could figure out what parts of the neuron “connect to the soul dimension”, you could create an artificial mind. I don’t deny that this might be possible. It would be a fabulous and amazing discovery. (Of course, it may be and almost certainly is something more complex than “connecting to the soul dimension”.)
All of the mind depends on the brain. All I meant by the databank thing is that it is clear that a necessary condition for the formation of memories is a functional hippocampus.
What do I attribute to the mind itself? Well, I think that all subjective phenomena are mental. Like redness: there is no physical object or process called “redness.” Redness is produced by the visual cortex and exists in the mind. Likewise, memory, in the sense that your memories appear to you as yours in the sense that Obama’s memories do not appear to you. (As opposed to the objective consequences of memory, such as the fact that he will be able to tell you about his time in Indonesia.)
So, number one is subjectivity.
Number two is the capacity at least sometimes for free will or active causation: the initiation of action which is not sufficiently caused by previous events. This does not mean that people are “completely free” in either the sense that they are either a) ever completely responsible for their actions or b) always somewhat responsible for their actions. The first would imply that they created themselves from nothing; the second is refuted by sleep, reflexes, insanity, etc.
Number three is personal identity. I haven’t brought this one up so far, but in order for rational thought and action that plans for the future to make any sense at all, it is necessary that people be numerically identical to themselves at different times.
Now, macroscopic physical objects are obviously not numerically identical to themselves at different times because they are constantly gaining and losing particles. This is the basic thrust of the “Ship of Theseus” argument.
So, we know we have an identity. It can’t be identity of physical substance. I’m not going to bring it up in this thread, but it also can’t be memory or other forms of psychological continuity (many thought experiments on this). It must be identity of mental substance.
@ Urstoff:
Precisely!
“Mind is reducible to matter as we know it.” False! Could not be true.
“Mind is reducible to matter as we don’t know it.” Maybe! I don’t know matter as I don’t know it. If matter as I don’t know it is compatible with having mental properties…well, I don’t know that I’d call it “matter”, but if that’s what you like, baby, we can play it that way.
“the closest meaning of “supernatural” ”
“Supernatural” and “natural” are ugly terms in just about all their meanings. I recommend C.S. Lewis’s Studies in Words. All of it, but the chapter on “Nature” is of course the one pertinent here.
I don’t see why for people must be perfect numerical constants in order for them to make plans about the future. People don’t label things with numerical constants. The labels we put on things are “fuzzy” – they can continue to describe an object even though the object may change slightly over time. Even when the Ship of Theseus has all its parts replaced, I’d still call it the Ship of Theseus. It’s close enough for my mental label to apply – it’s still a ship, it still belongs to Theseus, nobody disassembled it and built another ship from the pieces, etc.
And you can make plans about the future using these fuzzy labels – if Theseus sails from Athens to Crete, then it’s fair for me to say “In a few days, the Ship of Theseus will be in Crete.” Even if Theseus replaced the mast of his ship during the voyage, I would still say “The ship is in Crete,” I wouldn’t say “All the ship except for its mast is in Crete.” The label describes what I consider “a ship,” not the specific collection of atoms that makes up the ship.
Likewise, I can make plans about my future even though “I” is a fuzzy label. I can say “I will travel to Hawaii next year” even if the “I” of a year in the future is going to be a year older, a year wiser, and generally won’t be identical to the present “I” in body or mind. I can still mentally label that future self with “I”, so I can make plans about the future.
@ Mary
Lewis’s _Miracles_ is worth mentioning here too, especially his appendix re those terms.
@ Aegeus:
I agree that this is exactly the situation with the Ship of Theseus. Its identity is something that exists in the mind. It’s a label, a matter of convenience or convention that is certainly based on reality but “fuzzy” and full of optional grey areas.
(One thing to note is that this explanation presupposes the reality of the mind, in which the Ship of Theseus has an enduring identity.)
The problem is that personal identity can’t be like this at all. It is absolute. If I tell you that tomorrow I’m going to punch you in the face, you either anticipate that pain or not. You can’t “sort of feel” the pain. It’s not a matter of how you choose to define what counts as “you” (as with the Ship of Theseus).
If you are numerically the same person, you should anticipate that pain. If you aren’t, you shouldn’t.
Law of excluded middle: A or non-A. It’s you or it’s not you. You can’t just abuse the word “respect” here, either. In the respect of feeling the pain, will it be you or not you?
As Geoffrey Madell puts it (and I’m just quoting from Wikipedia here):
Bryan Caplan’s objection to (at least Robin Hanson’s take on) mind uploading is relevant. Summary: you can’t just “define yourself” subjectively as being the same as the uploaded copy. Either a) there’s a real intrinsic fact of the matter, regardless of your definition, or b) what the hell’s the point? Just define yourself as the universe and you can live forever already.
@Vox Imperatoris
The Münchhausen trilemma is no more fatal to determinism than it is to anything else.
You just did. You have gone from the fact that rational discourse is not entailed by determinism, to saying that rational discourse is contradicted by determinism. We can’t know that our minds correctly perceive rationality, but that doesn’t mean that our mind don’t correctly perceive rationality. To say that determinism is self-refuting is to assert not merely that determinism provides no basis for its own belief, but to assert that it provides a basis for its own disbelief.
Even if there is only a tiny portion of the multiverse in which there are beings that correctly perceive rationality, we might as well assume that we are such beings. If we are such beings, our assumption corresponds to reality, and if we aren’t, then our error is meaningless.
@ RCF:
It’s not a trilemma in the sense that all three options are bad. Obviously, the axiomatic method is the only way you could ever prove or know anything.
No. I don’t know how you can be misinterpreting me here. You seem to think (I guess?) that I’m saying if determinism were true, we would know it were false. That’s not what I’m saying.
The falsity of determinism is presupposed by rational discourse. Therefore, either determinism is false, or there is no such thing as rational discourse—certainly not among the human species. If it’s false, it’s false. If it’s true, it can’t be known or justifiably believed.
Either way, it can never be knowledge. Call it “self-unjustifying” if you don’t like “self-refuting”.
This is exactly the inverse of something that is self-evident. It’s not the self-evident can’t be denied. Anything can be denied; you just deny it, it’s easy. But the self-evident is that which is presupposed in rational thought and discourse. If you deny it, you can’t justifiably assert anything, including the denial.
I’m not sure what you mean by “correctly perceive rationality”. Do you mean “are rational”?
If so, you are basically agreeing with me that we have to presuppose that we are capable of knowing reality through reason. But obviously, we could never do so by any appeal to the “multiverse”: that would mean the “multiverse” were more certainly known than that we can know anything. Maybe that was just a rhetorical flourish.
@Vox Imperatoris
At a moderate tangent to this, my argument against incompatibilism is that whether or not it’s true, it’s useless: its validity would not act as evidence on which decisions can be based, as it precludes the ability to make decisions at all. Arguments like “incompatibilism is true, therefore we should go easy on criminals because it’s not their fault” fall down because incompatibilism removes the concept of a ‘should’ entirely.
@ Anonymous:
What do you mean by “incompatibilism”?
Technically, that just refers to any view that free will is not compatible with determinism. And this includes hard determinism, libertarianism, and the less popular view that free will and determinism are incompatible but both false.
Are you arguing that libertarianism precludes the ability to make decisions?
Or that hard determinism does?
If it’s the latter, I agree.
@Vox Imperatoris
The latter.
I haven’t heard the term libertarianism used to refer to the view that free will and determinism are incompatible, and that the first one is true and the latter false, before. I’m not sure I like it. I would consider myself a libertarian in the political sense, but not in the sense you’re describing.
>(One thing to note is that this explanation presupposes the reality of the mind, in which the Ship of Theseus has an enduring identity.)
Not at all. You can assign labels to objects regardless of whether those labels are a “real thing” in your mind. For example, a chess-playing computer can label a piece as “the black queen” without having a non-physical mind in which the black queen has an enduring identity; it simply has patterns of 1’s and 0’s in its circuits that correspond to the state of the chessboard. Likewise, your brain can label the Ship of Theseus by having patterns of neurons that correspond to the physical object of the Ship.
>The problem is that personal identity can’t be like this at all. It is absolute. If I tell you that tomorrow I’m going to punch you in the face, you either anticipate that pain or not. You can’t “sort of feel” the pain. It’s not a matter of how you choose to define what counts as “you” (as with the Ship of Theseus).
I don’t get what you’re saying here, at all. I expect that I’ll feel pain, but I don’t see what that has to do with my definition of personal identity. The statement “I expect I will feel pain” is meaningful regardless of whether it means “My non-physical mind will experience pain” or “The physical object that I labeled as ‘me’ will enter brain-states generally described as ‘feeling pain.'”
(The former definition is certainly more natural to say, but that doesn’t mean it’s more accurate.)
Are you trying to make an argument from qualia? Arguing that I’m anticipating the experience of pain, which must be non-physical? I suppose that would work, but now you have to prove that qualia are a real, non-physical thing, which seems like just as much work as before.
@ Anonymous:
It’s called metaphysical libertarianism, to distinguish it from the political meaning. (There’s no clear relation between the two.) It’s the standard textbook word.
@ Aegeus:
All that exists in physical reality as such is atoms. That they even represent 1s and 0s; let alone a strategy game; let alone knights, castles, pikemen, and kings; is in your mind.
Why, yes. That’s part of it, at least. It’s not the only part, but let’s talk about it.
Look, premise: there is such a thing as subjective experience. There is something it feels like to be punched in the face, and this is qualitatively very different from being told that it is five o’ clock. There is a very big difference between your being punched in the face and someone else’s being punched in the face: namely, you feel it in the first case and not in the second. If you don’t have this, I just don’t know what to say to you.
Premise (of reductive materialism): physical matter and physical laws are fundamentally non-mental. They have only an objective existence; they are not subjective qualities in a mind.
Problem: whence subjective experience? No number of facts about non-mental, objective entities and non-mental laws can explain subjective mental phenomena. Logic doesn’t work that way.
More to the point of personal identity, if you know that I will punch the body-mass society calls “you” as a matter of subjective convenience tomorrow, do you regard this as having any special salience? Or is it just the same as if I were to tell you I’m going to punch someone in China?
I don’t mean, will the body-mass society calls “you” be described by society as “feeling pain”, and will it jump up and down in the appropriate ways? I mean: do you anticipate the subjective experience of pain or not? It would seem that you ought not to anticipate feeling pain if I threatened to punch the guy in China.
On the other hand, if there is no intrinsic personal identity—if it is only a matter of “fuzzy” subjective definition—there is no fact of the matter about whether you should experience pain. “You” are a matter of convention. But obviously rational planning, such as saving for a vacation in Las Vegas, presumes that you exist through time and will experience the pleasures of Vegas. You wouldn’t (if you’re normal) pay for someone else to experience Vegas.
Or suppose I decide to quit my job and earn no money to buy food. Can I just decide subjectively not to “identify” with the future person who will suffer the pains of starvation? Or is there an objective fact of the matter?
@Joe
Imagine that you gave your soul-believing friend a running computer.
You try to tell him about microprocessors and electrons and information theory and doped silicon and bit logic but he responds by saying that the whole idea “is on thin ice conceptually and probably not possible at all” because he doesn’t believe it has a magical genie attached to it or tries to insist that it can or cannot do various things because he thinks they’re special and can only be done by things with a magical genie.
That’s literally what you did at the start of this conversation.
There’s a reason why I keep using the term magical, it’s the same reason Scott uses the term “divine power” or “moloch” when describing things he doesn’t fully understand.
When you make up respectable sounding terms for things it allows you to pretend that you’ve explained them or understood them in any way when you haven’t even proven they exist in any way shape or form.
When you say things like “The soul or substantial form dictate the way the matter is arranged in a living thing. It is immaterial, similar to the context of a novel, but more obviously real.” you’re making a very concrete statement that there’s effectively a magical genie which affects and changes the state of matter. Not anything remotely reasonable like it simply being possible to encode complex information in collections of words.
Yes I am getting testy. Want to believe in magical genies? fine. No problem.
But the moment you start trying to claim that your fantasies have any connection with reality and any relevance to what is or is not possible for other people to do with real physical things in the real physical world you stray into the land of reality and need to back up your claims with more than idle navel-gazing.
The closest approximation in the real world of your gone with the wind analogy is what I’d call “state”. Take a computer made of dominos or electronic chips or trapped atoms and it comprises a finite state machine. This finite state machine will have a current “state”. State is in some sense just a collection of information.
For any finite state machine you can build a second equivalent finite state machine which may have almost nothing in common with it physically, the first could be made of electronics, the second could be made of a giant network of people writing notes on paper or be a tank of goo or a tub full of neurons.
You can pause either finite state machine at any point and transfer the state between the 2. The state is the abstract pattern of information. From inside the state there’s no way to tell when these transfers happen. State is ephemeral yet perfectly physical and material. Your claims are about as “profound” as denying that state exists but then insisting that everything observed is the result of a magical genie.
“There is something it feels like to be punched in the face, and this is qualitatively very different from being told that it is five o’ clock. There is a very big difference between your being punched in the face and someone else’s being punched in the face: namely, you feel it in the first case and not in the second.”
actually the existence of mirror neurons kind of screws that up since people can experience modest physical pain from seeing other people experience pain. See someones fingers get shredded? Your fingers hurts.
Some people even have over-active mirror neurons and can experience quite realistic sensations. It’s why when a bunch of guys see a video of someone getting their testicles crushed you can see half the room bending over and groaning, many of them are actually experiencing a watered-down version of testicle-trauma up to and including shooting pain.
This experience is not universal to all humans but a fair portion have it.
If you believe pain is linked to the soul then you have to start making stuff up about souls transferring subjective experience to others.
If we’re just state on a mushy computer there’s no problem with this, the mushy computer just changes state when we observe someone else in pain.
@ Murphy:
I do completely agree you with regard to your criticism of Joe. I mean maybe for some now-unknown reason, the only way to build a strong AI is through a process that also creates a conscious being. But I sure don’t see why.
I say: consciousness (i.e. mind) and intelligence have no necessary relationship. They do for humans, but that’s just the way we happen to be built. An entity can be intelligent and completely unconscious—no experience whatsoever. Or an entity could be conscious and completely unintelligent—no ability to pursue goals.
In their own way, physicalism and the Joe-type viewpoint deny this. Completely without justification, as I see it.
This has nothing to do with mirror neurons. Mirror neurons cause you to experience your pain, not their pain. If you want to test this, give the other person anaesthetic and shred his finger while he acts like he’s in pain. Your fingers will hurt while he feels just fine. A similar thing happens with special-effects fakery in movies all the time.
No, you don’t. The neurons in their brain cause their pain. The neurons in your brain cause your pain. There is no direct mind-to-mind causation. (Such is not inconceivable, but there has never been any evidence for it.)
Your pain, which is caused by your mirror neurons, is I suppose ultimately caused by the light rays bouncing off their shredded fingers and entering your eyes and visual cortex. You are not, in any but a completely metaphorical sense, “experiencing their pain”.
Do you think the NPCs in Skyrim actually experience pain when you hit them with a sword? Why not? There is a little state in the computer called “HP” and it goes down. They wince.
At what point would you be convinced an NPC in a computer game actually felt pain? Mind you, they don’t have to exhibit particularly intelligent behavior—as long as you think pretty simple animals can feel pain.
But that’s just the thing: there is no point at which you can validly infer from any number of purely objective physical facts to the conclusion that an entity is experiencing subjective mental pain. The only way you can do this is by inference (to the best explanation) from your own capacity to experience pain, combined with your similarity in behavior, composition, and origin.
@Vox Imperatoris
Fair enough, the problem of other minds is universal but I don’t accept it to be a proof of any soul or similar.
I also can’t know if another human is genuinely conscious or not, whether a squirrel actually suffers pain when it’s on fire, whether a lobster has subjective experience as it is boiled or whether a tree experiences suffering as it is cut down.
Unless I have good reason to know that something is definitely simply a charade it seems safest to assume that if something acts like it’s in significant pain then it’s probably best to act as if it is.
If I see someone screaming in apparent pain it’s probably safest to assume that the blood is real and that they’re not secretly dosed up with local anesthetic in order to con me somehow unless I have good reason to believe otherwise like it being a live stage show.
I have good reason to believe that the skyrim NPC’s are fairly simple scripts less complex than a bacteria, unlikely to have been created to have any subjective experience while you, since you are almost certainly human and can answer arbitrary questions about the experience of internal experience probably do have subjective experience.
@ Murphy:
I’m glad we can agree on this much.
The thing is, if you accept that the problem of other minds is a real problem (and it is), you have to accept at least non-reductive physicalism, which is essentially Searle’s position. (Or property dualism, which is very, very similar.) That is, you have to admit that subjective experience cannot ever be “reduced to” objective physical facts. It’s a fundamentally separate “layer of explanation”.
But non-reductive physicalism and property dualism are very silly views (though nevertheless big in philosophy!). They both imply that subjective mental states are completely epiphenomenal and do not cause anything. Then how do they cause people’s mouths to move or fingers to type? They don’t: it just looks like they do. It’s all just a massive coincidence that people’s tongues flap about subjective mental experience.
The only option left is interactionist substance or entity dualism. That’s why I am one; or at least that’s the argument for dualism from the reality of subjective experience.
As for all the inferences you explained of how you know other people and animals are conscious, I agree. That’s exactly how you do it.
The problem is that you can’t apply these arguments when you meet a hypothetical android from space. He looks like a human and acts very similar to a human, but he’s is built out of something totally different and has a completely different origin.
So long as you don’t think it is impossible to create an intelligent being that doesn’t have subjective experience, you cannot show that he has it. It would be just as fallacious to reason that, since your brain is made of carbon, his brain must be made of carbon. You’re generalizing from one example—as you must do in the problem of other minds—but this time the generalization has only the most tenuous support.
If you cannot ever show that he has subjective experience, then subjective experience does not reduce to objective physical facts. Yet you know, at least in your own case, that it does exist.
Yes, I consider myself to be more significant. And I bet that the chess-playing computer considers the pieces on its own board to have more significance than the pieces on the board across the room. Does the chess computer have a subjective experience of chess?
Algorithms are allowed to refer to themselves, and they’re allowed to use physical media to store those references. None of your examples are impossible to describe in purely physical terms.
Well likewise, I don’t see the justification for believing that something can be intelligent but not conscious.
Think about what a P-zombie would imply. It implies that two physically identical objects, every atom exactly the same, can still be completely different, because one has the invisible magic property and one doesn’t. For a physicalist, P-zombies are simply logically impossible.
@ Aegeus:
The chess computer doesn’t “consider” anything. It is not conscious. That’s why it has no subjective experience of chess.
I can visualize very clearly in my mind a little horse-shaped knight piece. There is a little picture of a knight in my mind. I am directly aware of this. It’s as clear as any physical observation I might make.
There is no little knight in the chess computer’s mind. It does not have a mind.
There are no little knight-shaped particles in my brain. And there is no point at which you can take any combination of brain particles and say, “Ah! That’s a mental picture of a knight.” There is always the open question: granted we see these particles in the microscope, but do they really make a little picture of a knight?
Minds are not algorithms. Describe to a blind person what “redness” looks like. You ought to be able to reduce it to purely physical facts. Well, do it.
You can’t. You can describe the cause of the sensation, but you can’t describe what it is like without using mental concepts (such as “it’s rather like orange”).
If physicalists believe this, they don’t understand what “logically impossible” means. “Logically impossible” means “contradictory”. There is no contradiction.
Besides, I am not even an adherent of property dualism. That is a silly theory. I do not say that two physically identical objects are different because they have different mental properties. I say that there are two different kinds of objects: physical objects and mental objects.
Mental objects are obviously observable. You observe them all the time.
As I said before, I could just as easily argue (and with considerably more sense, though still fallaciously) that there is no such thing as matter. There is only subjective mental experience! Where did you get this mad idea of an external physical world? It’s necessary to explain your experience?! Nonsense! Your mind produces the experience. You say you have a “brain” made of matter; well, I grant that but, you see, matter is merely another type of experience. It’s a category error. All your alleged “particles” and “algorithms” can be reduced back to mental sensations. They’re at best just a name for those sensations. We ought to be good reductionists: we don’t need to accept any idea of the “fundamental physical”. There is only one science: introspective psychology, and it studies the laws by which the mind produces regular patterns of sensations. Sometmes, those sensations are “material” in nature and follow “physical” laws, but clearly it all reduces back to introspective psychology—the queen of the sciences.
That is exactly how your argument goes, but in reverse. The answer to it—the only answer to it—is: “But I’m directly aware of non-mental objects as well as mental objects! And the one can’t be reduced to the other!”
But at least the theory of subjective idealism is much less stupid than reductive materialism. It’s not as obviously absurd to talk about how matter is a type of experience as it is to talk about how experience is a type of matter.
I’m pretty sure that this is only because humans don’t have enough “RAM” to simulate all the molecules (or atoms, or whatever level of granularity is actually required) involved in seeing a red object.
@ jaimeastorga2000:
I’ll accept that if you can explain how you could possibly infer from a system’s having a certain amount of RAM that it experiences the subjective sensation of redness.
Anyway, the interminability of the materialism debate suggests a question which I raise in the most charitable and semi-serious spirit possible: at what point do we rationally conclude that some people really have minds and others are mindless automata? Of rather, at what point do the former make this conclusion—the latter not really being “people”?
Have we studied the heritability of belief in materialism? If one twin denies that “qualia” is an intelligible concept, how likely is it that the other do so as well? How well does belief in materialism correlate with factors like reported acuity of mental imagery? Now of course, evidence that it is heritable would only polarize the sides further. Those who have qualia would be convinced that only an automaton could deny it. Those who don’t would vibrate in such a way that their lips spat out the statement that belief in qualia must be a form of brain disease.
Of course, I don’t really think this is the explanation. But science should investigate all possibilities, even troubling ones!
Myself, I’m pretty sure that it’s because language grounds itself in sensory experience and so can’t communicate experiences for which the recipient has no sensory points of reference. The word “red” to a person blind from birth gives you something analogous to a type error, like sending U16 strings to a system that only speaks ASCII — or maybe more like sending a machine-learning classifier a picture of a kitten when it’s been trained on pictures of tanks.
Language can be less powerful than thought without thereby implying that thought is something metaphysical.
By “describing to a blind person what ‘redness’ looks like in terms of purely physical facts” I was thinking of something like “describe in detail each photoreceptor, each individual neuron firing up in the visual cortex, etc… and call that ‘redness'”, not just saying “red”. Which is utterly intractable, of course, but “possible in principle” as philosophers like to say.
Likewise, I think that if you had enough “RAM” to simulate a bat at the appropriate level of granularity, and a way to obtain the information needed to do so, you could indeed know what it was like to be a bat.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Presumably you would agree that whatever subjective experience is, it is the thing that causes you to talk about subjective experience? If we look closely enough at your brain, we can figure out which neural patterns cause your fingers to type things about subjective experience. Then aren’t those neural patterns your subjective experience, since they cause you to talk about subjective experience? If so, it seems like we’ve reduced subjective experience to something purely physical.
That would be a full description of redness, and would allow an experience of redness in something if you had an appropriate substrate to run it on, but it wouldn’t give a person you told it to an experience of redness: we aren’t wired to build emulations like that, since we don’t have an experiential concept of one neuron firing. That’s not a problem that can be solved by adding working memory or anything like that.
Still doesn’t disprove monism, though.
This is basically the brain in a jar argument, no? You can definitely say “I have no way to verify that my external reality really exists, I just act like I have one because it’s a useful convenience.” In the same way that I’m saying “I don’t believe my internal mental objects really exist, but I still talk about them because it’s a useful convenience.” I don’t particularly care which way you do it – whether you ascribe mental labels to physical objects or ascribe physical labels to mental objects.
No, what grinds my gears is that you asserted that the mental and physical objects interact. That the mental picture you have in your head is causally connected to the physical meat of your brain, that when you push around mental objects in your non-physical mind you create a physical result. That’s something that’s both theoretically testable – study the brain really thoroughly and see if there’s any “soul goes here” spot you can’t explain – and completely unsupported as far as I know. This is why people are accusing you of believing in magic.
That’s why I complained about p-zombies. If you allow the physical and mental objects to interact, that means that two atom-for-atom identical brains can behave differently because one of them has a mental object interacting with it and one doesn’t (Sorry for saying “has mental properties” instead of “is causally connected to a mental object.” The argument works the same either way).
If I’ve misunderstood you, and you aren’t saying that the physical and mental objects can interact, then what are we arguing about? When you say that mental objects like qualia are “real”, what exactly are you arguing for?
@ Anonymous:
Yes, I agree.
No, this is begging the question against dualism.
The precise thing I am denying is that neural patterns are completely caused by previous neural patterns and external physical factors. I am saying that my mind, which has the subjective experience, interacts with the neurons and causes them to make my fingers type the words.
If there were no interaction, it would indeed be inexplicable why my fingers ever typed out any words concerning subjective experience because none of my neurons would ever have been causally influenced by such experience.
@ Aegeus:
If you really believe this, you’re in a bad way. You can verify that external reality exists because you’re directly aware of it. Even if you happen to be in the Matrix, the Matrix is something external.
But at least you agree that the arguments are equivalent. In that case, why not be a subjective idealist? It makes much more sense. “Matter is an illusion” at least is intelligible because “illusion” is a mental concept. “Mind is an illusion (or a ‘layer of explanation’)”, on the other hand, presupposes the existence of the mind while denying any basis upon which it could exist.
Yes, I am saying they interact. And yes, it is testable. The theory is supported by the fact that the alternative is a) incoherent and b) doesn’t fit all the evidence.
As regards the latter, it’s the same as saying: “There is only one element: beryllium!” But what about all the evidence we have of these other elements that aren’t the same as beryllium? “They all reduce to beryllium.” But that’s impossible! Explain how. “I can’t, but just trust me. They do. After all, the existence of non-beryllium is completely unsupported.” What do you mean it’s unsupported? I see non-beryllium all the time! “Yeah, but it all reduces to beryllium. That’s the basis of science.”
The purpose of the above dialogue is to show the completely arbitrary and question-begging nature of materialism.
Yes, that’s implied by the theory that the mental causally influences the physical. If you could somehow wipe out someone’s mind, it would no longer influence his body and he would act differently.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Oh, nice, I’m much happier now that I understand you are making a concrete and testable prediction. You are saying that, for example, sometimes the electrons and quarks inside people’s brains behave in ways radically different from the predictions of the standard model of particle physics. I disagree, but at least I understand what you are claiming. Furthermore we can probably just wait a few hundred or a few thousand years and the question will be resolved experimentally.
I’m curious: suppose you copied the state of a human brain into a simulation running the laws of physics as we know them, then ran the simulation forward. Would you care to speculate how the simulated human would behave? Maybe it would suffer serious neurological problems because in your view the brain depends on things outside of known physics? Or maybe it would behave pretty normally except it wouldn’t know what you were talking about when you asked it about subjective experience?
@ Anonymous:
This is of course complete speculation, but I imagine that either of those could be true. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all because the interaction is too basic. I don’t know or claim to know.
I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t construct an artificial or simulated brain of some kind that would emulate human behavior to an arbitrarily high standard. It could even tell you it had qualia: all kinds of amazing qualia you wouldn’t believe!
But how a human brain would work if, to return to the other analogy, you took the astronaut out of the spaceship? It depends on how good the autopilot is.
There’s a spectrum here, from a) “every human action is the direct result of mental causation”, which is pretty clearly false, to z) “epiphenomenalism: no human action is a result of mental causation”, which is also pretty clearly false. Many critics of dualism falsely equate it with a). This would be idea that watching people do things unconsciously refutes dualism.
@Vox Imperatoris
I don’t really agree on this. I’d extend the same standard to a machine I do to a dog, squirrel or human who I can’t see directly. If it can convince me that it has subjective experience then I’m happy to say that it does.
I don’t assume all humans have subjective experience after all. If someone stares blankly at the wall drooling, never saying a word then at some point I’m going to assume they’re dead inside even without a brain scan.
On the other hand, if I’m chatting with a robot and it’s able to argue philosophy, respond to arbitrary arguments, describe it’s own experiences, talk about it’s goals and wishes in life while I might take longer making the assessment than I would with a random human after some number of hours, days, weeks or months interacting with it I’ll either be convinced it has subjective experience or not.
After all, this is what we do every day with other humans, we simply apply the politeness principle. If someone can tell you about their subjective experience then that’s a pretty good argument that they have subjective experience.
@ Murphy:
If it can convince you. But there’s no obvious external thing the android could do to convince you. Or rather, if you were convinced, it would not be for a good reason.
Well, yes. One aspect of the inference that other humans have subjective experience is that they behave similarly to you. If someone behaves in a way that resembles you when you are unconscious (staring blankly, not responding to stimuli), it is reasonable to infer that they are unconscious.
What could it possibly say to you to convince you? Where do you draw the line?
No matter what kind of philosophical arguments it makes or what kinds of qualia it claims to have, there is always the (for all you know) equally plausible possibility that it just behaves in a way imitative of having subjective experience while not actually having it. The Turing test—nor any other kind of super-Turing test—does not prove or even really provide evidence that something is conscious.
With humans, this principle makes much more sense.
You not only observe that other humans behave similarly to you. You also see that they are apparently built in (roughly speaking) the exact same way, and they have a common origin.
If you were to say: “I’m conscious, but they’re all zombies”, you would need a good explanation of this. You’d have to have some semi-plausible theory of how it is that you got to be conscious while everyone else talks about it but isn’t. There is apparently no such explanation. So Occam’s razor says: everyone else is also conscious.
With the android from space, this argument doesn’t work. You can’t infer from the fact that you’re conscious, to the fact that all humans are conscious because they’re similar to you, to the conclusion that all possible intelligent beings must be conscious. This would be like assuming that since you breathe oxygen, and all intelligent beings you’ve observed breathe oxygen, the android must breathe oxygen, too.
Yes, the android behaves in a similar way to humans. But it is (we suppose) built entirely differently and has a different origin. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that this behavior—though superficially similar—is caused by a very different mechanism.
Of course, I’m not saying that you can definitively prove the android isn’t conscious. I’m saying there is no good argument either way.
Suppose that there were two intelligent species on Earth. One, like us, evolved from primordial slime. The other was made of silicon and had existed in the same form since the solidification of the planet. What cause would either of them have to place any confidence in the assertion that the other is conscious?
I disagree. it doesn’t prove or provide *conclusive* evidence but it does provide evidence.
Simply associating other humans with my own experience does not provide *conclusive* evidence that they’re real people with real internal experience but it does provide evidence.
At some point the evidence breaches some kind of threshold and I accept someone or something as conscious.
I don’t require 100% certainty.
Sure I can see humans are built similarly to me but for all I know my family could be the only carriers of a real-qualia gene.
How do I really know that humans who look very different from me really have subjective experience?
Personally I’m happy to ask them.
If someone built a dolphin-english translator and a dolphin was able to argue about qualia I’d apply the same standard even though their brains and bodies are quite dramatically different from my own.
If we ran into a biological alien and it was able to argue about qualia I’d apply the same standard even though their brains and bodies are almost certain to have almost nothing in common with ours with no shared ancestry.
Your approach doesn’t just fail with a robot from space (assuming the robot actually does have internal eperience), it appears to fail with a biological alien from space or even other intelligent mammals.
If I go to the robot-aliens planet and they have libraries of philosophy talking about qualia I’d also have to explain that. Occam’s razor says: they have it. It could be an elaborate scam but it probably isn’t.
Re: your 2 species, I don’t think my system would have too much trouble with that. After some amount of interaction, conversation, negotiation, argument it would become hard for one to claim that the other didn’t if both insisted that they had internal experience and could describe it.
@ Murphy:
It would fail with a biological alien from space, I agree.
As for other animals on Earth, I think the ground is more solid. Similar behavior, similar composition, similar origin. As they become less and less similar, the less confident the judgment is that they have genuine subjective experience.
Do apes experience pain? Dogs? Chicken? Lizards? Fish? Insects? Tapeworms? It seems like a sliding scale of certainty to me.
There’s nothing conclusive to rule out the Cartesian view that even apes are automata, but my personal view is that I am more convinced about animals the more they are similar to us.
Yeah, you would have to explain that. And that is a point in favor of them having subjective experience.
On the other hand, materialists like Daniel Dennett don’t know what qualia are and basically think it is all an “elaborate scam”. Half the people in this thread, including you (?) have been arguing that all the behavior of human beings can be explained completely without reference to any mental substance.
Maybe their essays on qualia are explained in the materialist-determinist way. It would be simpler to assume that, if we weren’t obviously directly aware of subjective experience in ourselves.
@Vox Imperatoris:
A thought and a question.
– The fact that I cannot induce the experience of redness in a blind person by speaking to them indicates more that language is limited than that experiences cannot be induced. Consider a blind person with a prosthetic not unlike the cochlear implant, which bypasses the nonfunctional eye and instead uses information from a camera to stimulate the brain directly. When the camera is pointed at a red thing, I think that the blind person has an experience of redness no less authentic than my own (sighted) experience.
But if I understand your argument thus far, that’s beside the point, because the key question is whether there is a conscious mind associated with the brain that can have experiences at all. So why pursue the redness problem?
– What do you think of the recent study on electrostimulation of the claustrum in an epileptic woman’s brain, which appeared to turn off the integration of conscious thought without impacting other mental function? (abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24967698 )
@ sptrashcan:
Yes, I agree that the blind person has an authentic subjective experience of redness (or something very analogous). Because you’ve literally built a device to allow the blind to see! Whether the signals go through a biological eyeball or a mechanical camera into the brain (and thereby cause mental experience) is not essential.
You say the problem is that you cannot “induce” the experience of redness in a blind person by language. That misses the point.
It’s not that you want to induce a sensory experience with language; the (materialist) goal is to reduce the experience to physical facts. It wouldn’t prove anything relevant to this debate if you could use the vibration of your voice to stimulate the neurons in a blind person’s brain and cause them to experience redness.
Reductive materialism says that “redness” is identical to a certain movement of atoms in the brain. It does not say the movement of atoms causes the experience of redness; it says they are the same thing. One is just a different word for the other. (Maybe some self-identified reductionists miss this point? It is the standard meaning of the theory, as stated by its proponents.)
If that is true, reductionists ought to be able to explain how a certain number of objective physical facts imply a subjective mental fact. But they cannot do this. It’s not just that I don’t see how it could be possible. I see very clearly that it is impossible. Logic does not work that way. You’ve got to have subjective mental premises if you want a subjective mental conclusion. See: is-ought dichotomy.
This is basically the “knowledge argument” or the “Mary’s room” argument for dualism. The blind guy can learn all the facts he likes about how eyes work, but he will never learn from that what redness is like subjectively. No number of physical facts could tell him that the eye must produce any subjective mental sensation, let alone tell him exactly what kind of sensation.
The “spectral inversion” argument is also applicable here. There is no way for you to know (except generalization from your own case) that when other people’s neurons flash the way yours do to produce the sensation “red”, their neurons produce the sensation (you would call) “green”. You both point to the same object and call it “red” (because you learn these words by pointing to things and asking “what’s that?”). But the other guy actually experiences the same sensation you experience from green objects.
Just reading the abstract, it seems interesting. Obviously, it doesn’t prove anything either way in this debate.
If anything, it is sympathetic to my theory that conscious thought (including volitional behavior) can be disabled while leaving unconscious, automatic behavior intact. But I’m not going to say we’ve done anything like identified the equivalent of Descartes’s pineal gland: the spot at which the mind interacts with the body.
If you really want to mess with me, the split-brain thing Scott talked about with Ben Carson is a serious concern for my theory (though more for identity than dualism as such). And I do file it under: screwing with things we don’t understand.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Does the fact that a person cannot have an experience through gaining knowledge point to the specialness of experience, or merely a limitation of the human brain?
Consider a person with infrared goggles. The person without the goggles will never experience infrared light: their eyes cannot detect it, and no amount of thinking about infrared light will induce whatever brain or mind state we might call an experience. When the person puts on the goggles, however, the combination of the stimulus in their brain from the green light of the goggles, plus the physical fact that the goggles produce green light when they are stimulated by infrared light, plus the person’s knowledge that the green light is mechanically induced by the presence of infrared light, arguably adds up to “experiencing infrared light”. Certainly the person is indistinguishable by observable effect from someone naturally capable of seeing infrared light.
I guess you could call me out for cheating at this point, because I’ve reduced the experience of infrared light to a piece of knowledge plus the experience of green light, and so I haven’t actually gotten anywhere. But I feel like you can keep walking further down this path and get to the point where “experiences” are defined as “stimuli on the brain” plus “information encoded in the brain”. I feel like both of these are necessary: I’m not sure you could claim to have experienced redness without a red stimulus, but I’m also not sure you could claim to have experienced redness without having learned some meaningful association between that stimulus and something else. If I lived my whole life in a room lit by kaleidoscope lamps, I feel like redness wouldn’t mean anything to me because it would provide no useful information about my reality. And I agree that, because no two brains are alike, nobody’s brain reacts to red stimulus exactly like mine does, and so my experience of redness can be called distinct from everyone else’s. I realize I have a problem here in that the language I’m using is requiring me to talk about experiences as a thing even though I’m arguing they’re not irreducible, but humor me when I say that I’m not confused and that by “experience” I do mean nothing more than “a sequence of brain states produced by the combination of stimulus and information encoded in the structure of the brain”.
I just don’t see how you get from that to “therefore, the mind is not the brain.” I’m not being obstinate, I’m literally not following the argument.
Got it in one!
What we have here is an experience of “greenness”, caused ultimately by infrared light.
You are confusing two different things.
Experience—any experience—gives you some form of knowledge implicitly of objective physical reality. It also has a subjective what-it-is-like quality that gives you knowledge of subjective mental reality.
Yes, we learn about the physical world through the fact that red objects (i.e. objects that reflect a certain wavelength of light) produce one sensation and green objects another. There is a causal relationship between the light waves and our brains that allows us to pick out these objective physical objects and manipulate them in various ways. But we also learn what “redness” is like and what “greenness” is like.
And it is perfectly meaningful to suppose that the two could be switched, so that all objects we now call “red” continued to have the same similarity to one another, and the same for the ones we now call “green”—but they produced the opposite subjective sensations.
I don’t know how else to get this across.
Maybe it’s an ambiguity in the term “experience of”. When you see a red light, you are aware of a physical object: the thing reflecting these photons. But you are aware by means of a subjective experience of redness—and you are aware that you are aware of that experience of redness. You can extraspect at the red object, and you can introspect at your experience.
Atoms are non-mental and objective. Minds are mental and subjective. Two things that have opposite properties cannot be the same thing. That’s the simplest way to put it.
If you want to say that atoms can be mental if arranged a certain way, you’ve moved to non-reductive physicalism.
We don’t know what a tree is as a “thing-in-itself” – we know a tree as a vaguely defined combination of impressions.
We don’t know what scientific objects are as “things-in-themselves” – we know scientific objects as more strictly defined relationships between observations (impressions.)
The problem is this: while the question of what a tree is ‘in-itself’ – seperate from our observation of the tree – is meaningless, we *have* access to observations/experience as “things-in-themselves”.
So, we can rightly make the distinction between experience itself and the observation of brain states – surely the confusion arises because we can’t do this for any other object and people wish to incorrectly apply what is generally a good rule of thumb?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when things like this:
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/news_article.php?newsID=2462
Become widely used and possibly even replace other sections of the brain. If the subjects continue to argue that they still have subjective experience as more chunks of their brains gradually getting replaced with compute modules, that would provide decent material evidence for subjective experience simply being what certain types of data structures and computations “feel like from the inside”. The fun thing is that we’re likely to see this experiment played out in the next couple of decades.
This is incorrect. Brains are plastic, for all I know your visual cortex could have developed very differently to mine to handle the same sensory input. Reductive materialism would just maintain that your brain handles it somehow. I don’t claim that “redness” is identical to a certain movement of atoms in every brain. ANN’s with the same starting inputs can often find different structures to represent the same stuff.
How broadly do you define language here? Would hearing a whistly-staticy sound a little like modem noises count? To a computer-scientist they’re both just communication protocols.
Because some blind people can learn to experience images from image data turned into sound and can then perfectly well “experience” red or experience seeing a cottage or mountain.
Normal language is less compressed but it’s still a description of the image going in through your ears that your brain interprets.
Use the right “language” and you absolutely can have someone ,for all intents and purposes, experience redness .
@ Mark:
That’s how I see it. I think it’s a matter of “if all you have is a hammer”. Computer programmers think the mind is a computer. Neuroscientists think the mind is neurons.
@ Murphy:
It wouldn’t prove anything. It could make them completely unconscious automata who merely speak as if they have conscious experience.
Now, if you actually understood how the brain worked, you could learn something that way. But if you just start ripping out chunks of brain and replacing it with silicon, checking to see whether it worked by looking at objective external factors, you have no way to know what is really happening.
The first view is called type physicalism. The second view is called token physicalism or functionalism.
Token physicalism is exceedingly difficult to defend without resorting to non-reductionism.
Language refers to the communication of information in a way that it is consciously understood by people. It is a mental concept.
I was just making a little joke, responding to the idea that we could “induce the experience through language”. If what you mean by language is not subjective semantic content but little vibrations in the air, of course it is objective and physical. Whether you can stimulate neurons by these vibrations and cause visual experience as well as auditory experience is irrelevant.
I guess the real question is: is the semantic content of your words causing him to understand what red is like? (I say: impossible.) Or is the physical form, the vibrations of the air alone, somehow stimulating his neurons? For instance, if you could “induce the experience of red” to a French-speaker by vibrating the air with Chinese noises, this would obviously prove nothing.
This is the old “if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” thing. It will vibrate the air. But if no one is around to hear it, there will be no subjective experience of sound.
Your brain does not “interpret” anything. Your brain may change some signals into different types of signals, but “interpretation” or “understanding” is a mental concept. A chess computer can do all the physical processing of signals you want, but it doesn’t understand or interpret chess.
I have no idea what you mean by “for all intents and purposes”. For all intents and purposes besides knowing what the subjective experience of red is like, yes.
@ Vox Imperatoris
> What we have here is an experience of “greenness”, caused ultimately by infrared light.
Hold on a minute. Earlier, you agreed that the blind man with the camera prosthesis *was* capable of experiencing redness, and I think you also agreed that if the camera prosthesis worked by sending sound information through the ear, that would still be an experience of redness. So why are the infrared goggles, which also mediate new information through a pre-existing channel, not producing an experience of infraredness?
Consider three people who cannot tell which things are red. All of them have defective L-type cone cells. The first person’s L-type cone cells are dead: they never trigger at all. The second person’s L-type cone cells are hypersensitive: they trigger all the time. The third person’s L-type cone cells are malformed such that they trigger at random intervals unrelated to incoming light. Have any of these people experienced redness?
>Atoms are non-mental and objective. Minds are mental and subjective. Two things that have opposite properties cannot be the same thing. That’s the simplest way to put it.
I’m afraid I’m still a bit at sea since I’m not sure all these terms are well defined. However, let me make some assertions and we’ll see where you step off.
Things we seem to agree on:
1. Matter exists.
2. The fundamental units of matter do not have the properties of “thought” or “experience”.
3. Therefore, nothing constructed from matter has the property of “thought” or “experience”.
4. I perceive that “thought” and “experience” exist.
Where you go:
5. Therefore, something exists that has the property of “thought” and “experience”.
6. Because nothing constructed from matter has these properties, the “mind” which has these properties is not constructed from matter.
Where I go:
5. Therefore, my perception is incorrect, and “thought” and “experience” do not exist.
This does seem pretty outrageous on its face, but I can think of a lot of properties I ascribe to matter which, if pressed, I would have to admit are convenient fictions. I think that “objects” exist, but actually that’s a category I somewhat fuzzily assign to collections of matter in space, and as the problem of the ship of Theseus reveals I must admit that objects don’t exist, even though I cannot will myself into failing to perceive them. Matter has mass, position, and velocity; everything else is approximation. So why privilege “thought” as a special category of property which I’m certain does exist, when I’m willing to accept almost everything else doesn’t?
I think this is what you called “universal skepticism”, and you seemed to set it aside earlier, but I’m not sure on what grounds. Not “really knowing” anything doesn’t seem to prevent me from operating on a basis of useful lies.
@ sptrashcan:
I misunderstood you. I didn’t catch where you said it was a cochlear implant. I just saw “stimulate the brain directly” and thought you meant “skip eye; go to visual cortex”.
In the case where it is a cochlear implant, yes, the blind man is experiencing an auditory sensation, not a visual sensation. He is not experiencing what redness is like for sighted people.
Pretty much.
Yep, I think this is outrageous. 😉
For one, just try to construct a theory from first principles describing all aspects of human experience that uses no mental concepts. Except you can’t use the word “theory” because it’s a mental concept. Even the materialist Yudkowsky rejects this one. (I don’t think his rejection is consistent but set that aside.)
More importantly, you are making the age-old (and very dubious) “primary-secondary quality distinction”, which says that some qualities, like mass, position, and velocity, are “really real” while others, like color, are “illusory”.
No. They are all “really real”. You perceive them. They must be real. Everything you perceive must be real. (Perceive now; not your conception of what it is or what it means.) It would be completely baseless to take some elements of your sense experience and use them to invalidate others that are equally basic. The veridicality of your experience is axiomatic: you either take it all for granted or throw it all out.
Suppose you had never seen Earth and a traveler came to came to you to describe it. You had no knowledge of physics or biology or psychology or anything else to check it against, so you had no idea what to expect. You could either trust him or doubt him. But you sure as hell couldn’t say “Yeah, I trust you on that one, but I’m calling bullshit on this one!” To call “bullshit” on him implies it conflicts with what you expect, but you are not entitled to expect anything except through what the same guy already told you!
All the qualities and objects you perceive are real. Some of them are just more fundamental than others. But you can’t complain that reality doesn’t give you direct access to the fundamental constituents of nature. What you have is good enough and just as real. The fact that we perceive reality in a certain way does not somehow imply that we don’t perceive reality.
Redness is real. Ships are real. If they are not fundamental, they have a real existence in the mind as a form in which the mind perceives reality.
Moreover, on what basis do you assert that mass, position, and velocity are fundamental? The Greeks thought heat was fundamental. Maybe mass is just a form in which your mind perceives the ultimate substratum of reality. Leonard Peikoff gives the thought experiment where we imagine that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are “puffs of meta-energy”—a meaningless stand-in term. These puffs have no mass or velocity or size. Everything you perceive is just an interpretation of the puffs, produced by your brain (which, of course, is puffs) and fed to your mind (which, if puffs are nothing like matter as we know it, could very well also be made of puffs). You understand that saying the mind can be reduced to puffs and the brain can be reduced to puffs (and remember, this is a stand-in term; the boring philosophical term for this possibility is “neutral monism”) is not the same as saying the mind can be reduced to the brain.
Skepticism is stupid. It refutes itself.
Say you operate on “useful lies”. How do you know which ones are useful and which ones aren’t? You know somehow don’t you? Skepticism refuted.
Now, if you define “knowledge” in such a way that no one could ever have it (like Descartes did), then you have a problem but then you have a stupid definition.
By that definition if someone says something to you in your native language while you’re distracted or not really listening then it doesn’t count as language. Even if you can remember the facts communicated to you later.
You seem to have a very artificially restricted definition of language designed purely to get the answers you want.
Someone hears information, they get internal experience. Either the experience of hearing someone say “hi bob” or the experience of seeing red. You draw an artificial line around one and say it’s special to prove that things you’ve drawn a line around and called special are special.
@ Murphy:
I don’t see how my definition of language matters here. Sure, language is different from merely seeing a sensation like red. But they’re both mental anyway, so it shouldn’t make a difference to you.
Also, we would call that language because it was intended to communicate conceptual, semantic information. That is the difference between language and babbling.
It stands in for “promote economic growth/scientific discovery/cool stuff” without being vague and boring. Can you come up with a motivating idea that does that better?
No it doesn’t. People concerned about AI safety generally prefer *less* economic growth and scientific discovery until the safety issues are worked out.
The key is that it’s until the safety issues are worked out. More to the point is that we presuppose the possibility of limitless growth from AI and us being able to have an impact on that growth.
…or would you argue not? What other values do you see being expressed?
What safety issues?
Research AI
???????
Paperclips
Isn’t a persuasive argument against anything, especially considering the very tangible dangers of contemporary AI systems with access to pervasive, invasive, and immense datasets in the hands of well-financed institutions with limited (if any!) accountability to general welfare in how they apply their technology.
I think the idea is that the deliberate misuse of AI is obvious and doesn’t need pointing out, whereas the pitfalls of supposedly benevolent AI aren’t obvious and do need pointing out.
… the pitfalls of supposedly benevolent AI aren’t obvious and do need pointing out.
Hasn’t pretty much every science fiction writer who has ever pondered the issue of benevolent AI in the past two hundred years, either had the AI turn malevolent or specifically explained why their AI can’t turn malevolent? Not just in obscure geeky literature, but in massively popular mainstream entertainment?
I’m thinking, yeah, maybe this is kind of obvious, and in any event has been and continues to be pointed out on a fairly regular basis.
That tells you a lot about science fiction writers, but absolutely nothing about AI.
Eliezer thinks this (or at least he did at one point in the past). I think most economic growth and scientific discovery is probably good for AI safety. Research within AI is probably net negative, but I expect many individual parts to have positive effects on safety. I expect many people concerned about AI to agree/offer their own views that don’t call for less economic growth.
Mainstream AI people generally assign a high probability to AI algorithms doing better than humans this century; in http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf, the median year by which the top-cited AI scientists assigned a 50% probability to machines being able to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” was 2050; median year by which they assigned a 90% probability was 2070.
MIRI/FHI people’s views are closer to the typical view than Aaronson’s are here, and they tend to be deviate from the mainstream in Aaronson’s direction. I.e., people like Bostrom are more skeptical than AI researchers that we’ll see smarter-than-human AI anytime soon.
Whether AI safety work is important is controversial: some experts think AI progress will be slow or generally unimpressive, and/or that it will be safe by default with no special effort required; plenty of other experts disagree.
Whether safety work is tractable is even more controversial. There are lots of interesting ideas for attempting to make early progress on AI safety (not just the ones MIRI focuses on), but which options look more promising (and how promising they look) depends on unsettled questions about when and how AI will advance. This is part of why MIRI’s technical agenda errs on the side of agnosticism about AI architecture.
The job opportunities Luke Muehlhauser is talking about in Scott’s above link probably mostly aren’t what you’re thinking of, though. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is more about the Puerto Rico agenda (http://futureoflife.org/data/documents/research_priorities.pdf), which overlaps with MIRI’s research agenda but also includes a lot of other topics. The value of this agenda is reasonably mainstream; see http://futureoflife.org/AI/open_letter.
People are very bad at predicting the far future. Come to think of it, is there *any* technology so implausible that when you ask people when it will happen, they say something more than 50 years away? As you point out, it actually seems that the more people seriously think about AI, the further away they expect it to happen.
This open letter basically just says “AI research is a good idea”. It’s not surprising that AI researchers all endorse it.
Robert Heinlein made some predictions in 1952.
“Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:
* Travel through time
* Travel faster than the speed of light
* “Radio” transmission of matter.
* Manlike robots with manlike reactions
* Laboratory creation of life
* Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.
* Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
* Nor a permanent end to war.”
Many of his normal predictions were nonsense, but his predictions about what we wouldn’t get in the next 50 years (end of the 20th century is basically 50 years from 1952) were spot on.
Okay, but if you take the non-impossible items and do a survey asking people when they will happen, I claim you’d still get at most 50 years (depending, perhaps, on how the question is asked).
The point was that Heinlein said these things would be longer than 50 years. But now that I think of it, most people would probably answer >50 years on “laboratory creation of life”. Of course, that’s because most of them would believe it to be impossible, not because they had some time period in mind but it was longer than 50 years.
What does “laboratory cration of life” exactly mean?
I can find you some scientist/professor/lab coat fetish porn that would disagree with you on the whole “>50 years to make life in a lab” theory.
Laboratory creation of life, in the sense of creating something recognizably living from non-living matter? We’re pretty darn close to that, I think; certainly I’d expect it in the next 50 years, even if the creation is a copy of an existing organism.
I think radio transmission of matter has been done, though only for a small number of subatomic particles.
A permanent end to war seems inevitable. One way or another.
Well, not radio. We’ve done EPR experiments.
“Mainstream AI people generally assign a high probability to AI algorithms doing better than humans this century; in http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf, the median year by which the top-cited AI scientists assigned a 50% probability to machines being able to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” was 2050; median year by which they assigned a 90% probability was 2070.”
Response rate was low for the surveys of top-cited researchers though, and I suspect the response bias favored shorter timelines.
That might be! I would be very surprised if the timelines were closer to Aaronson’s than to Bostrom’s, though.
By the way, a question about intellectual history:
Lots of people famously cite how, back in the 1950s, many AI researchers thought we would have AI in a few decades. That’s sooner than most AI researchers today think we will have AI.
But as far as I know, there wasn’t much concern about AI safety back then. To my knowledge, concern about AI safety has only gone mainstream very recently.
Is this accurate? And why is it so? And more interestingly, does this indicate that philosophical understanding of AI safety has progressed faster than AI itself?
@jonathan
I think your impression is mostly accurate, though there have always been at least a few voices of skepticism.
In the early days of AI, getting computers to display anything remotely resembling intelligence was quite difficult and the resulting behavior was extremely slow and limited. Why would anybody be overly concerned about the safety issues relating to an AI being TOO smart when they were so far away from anything resembling goal-directed behavior, much less independent thought?
Consider the limits: Insanely small amounts of local memory! Programs loaded from a stack of punch cards or by flipping switches on a panel! No internet! No ability to control any interesting peripherals!
AI philosophy has progressed more or less in step with AI practice and (more to the point) the growth of the surrounding infrastructure. Now that we have the internet and everything’s connected to it and vast amounts of spare processing power and at least a few ideas for how to use it to produce some glimmers of intelligent behavior, NOW it might make more sense to be worried about what comes next. Then, not so much.
UPDATE: My father was an optimistic high-profile AI researcher in the 1960s and 1970s. To quote his book The Thinking Computer (published in 1974):
as far as I know, there wasn’t much concern about AI safety back then
WarGames (1983) is about AI risk, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) is about AI risk.
They are also both about the cold war, but even today if you made a movie about AI risk the AI would have to gain control of armaments and back then “taking control of armaments” meant bringing in cold war themes.
“the median year by which the top-cited AI scientists assigned a 50% probability to machines being able to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” was 2050”
Strong AI is not required to replace the majority of the workforce.
“Being able to” is not the same thing as “has replaced”. For one it says nothing about cost.
I actually have issue with the implicit framing of that subject. We have plenty of AIs that do jobs better than humans now. Assembly line robots, as one example. But they aren’t GIs.
Is Amazon an AI replacing the job of sales-clerk? Well, sort of. But is nothing like a GI. Is it a machine doing a job as well as or better than a human? Well, it’s doing a different job, but sure.
So I think the idea that the responses to this particular question have much at all to do with predictions about AGI is not really supported.
Say you were somehow convinced that strong AI was a few decades away.
What would that change about how you lived your life right now? (Assuming you are not an AI risk researcher.)
Save less for retirement as the AI would either kill us, make us all extremely rich, or make money irrelevant. Put a much higher priority on surviving for the next few decades because the expected value in living to a positive singularity is so high. Signing up for cryonics becomes a much better bet because the AI could probably revive you and it’s likely that your provider could keep your brain preserved for just a few decades.
Start the Butlerian Jihad
Mein Neger!
I really don’t see why this would be an unrealistic response to a human-harmful Singularity.
The problem with the Butlerian Jihad is that it’s a near-universal coordination problem. It can’t actually work unless everyone (or almost everyone) is on board.
Once the rest of society goes back to living like the Amish, a small group of people can take over the whole planet with advanced technology.
A small group of people cannot maintain an illicit semiconductor fab, certainly not a high-end one.
And the winning side of the Butlerian Jihad didn’t go on to “live like the Amish”; they had things like heavy industry, aircraft, starships, laser weapons, and, oh, yeah, nuclear missiles. Which they would probably have used against anyone’s illicit semiconductor fab, if the legions of Imperial Stormtroopers weren’t enough.
You are confusing “no computers” with “no modern technology”. I think you underestimate the level of technology that can be maintained without computers, or with strictly limited computers.
@Vox Imperatoris: A small group of people cannot maintain the semiconductor industry that Moore’s law is based upon if semiconductors are contraband.
Or a simpler example would be the anti-AI taboo introduced in the new Battlestar Galactica pilot: you can build computers, it’s networking them that’s illegal.
Speaking of BSG, how can Yudkowsky be certain that if his company “solves” ethics and makes it illegal not to program this into AI, an AI won’t process Godel’s ontological argument, update its beliefs, and turn into a Cylon or Blaise Pascal?
For another depiction of this (sorta) see the reimagined battlestar galactica. Although in that case it’s networked computers that are the problem rather than computers per se.
@ John Schilling & Le Maistre Chat:
Both of your arguments ought to suggest that the global drug trade could not exist. But it does exist. Therefore, etc.
Sure, if we tried hard enough to eliminate computers, we could. But we won’t. No more than with drugs.
Computers are very useful. You can make a lot of money with them. The more illegal they are, the greater the supply restriction and the more money you can make. Even if they don’t work as well as if they were legal. In the country of low-frequency traders, the medium-frequency trader is king.
This is just the same thing that happens with drugs. The tougher the government makes it to produce cocaine, the more the price goes up. The more the price goes up, the more incentive to sell drugs anyway. Adam Smith observed the same thing with Spain’s “sanguinary punishments” (i.e. torturous execution) of those who exported gold. The better it works, the worse, because the more the price of gold goes up.
So yeah, you can slow computer use down. But you’re not going to eliminate it or even stop progress in it. Besides, doesn’t Ix develop computers in Dune? (I only read the first one.)
The sorts of chemicals trafficked in the illicit drug trade are fairly easy to produce, as chemicals go, and illegal drug labs can mostly ignore things like preventing contamination and properly disposing of waste, which helps keep costs down and makes everything easier to conceal.
Even rudimentary, low-throughput semiconductor production involves a complicated supply chain and several highly-specialized, multi-million dollar, mostly-immobile, and power-hungry pieces of equipment.
More modern semiconductor production involves multi-billion plants that are very much immobile and difficult to conceal. Power draw is in the hundreds of megawatts. It might be possible to hide one in the galaxy-spanning society described in Dune, but it is implausible in the single-planet-spanning society in which we live.
@Vox:
ReluctantEngineer has got it about right. Drug labs and chip fabs are not just different things, but different orders of things. If we’re talking about modern foundries, even just something capable of fabbing an early Pentium, a better analogy might be uranium enrichment facilities and the thriving black market in illicit fissile materials.
As for computers being a license to print money when you’re the only guy in town who has one, I should be so lucky. My father was one of those guys, or nearly so, more than half a century ago. Great wealth through superior computation was somewhat hindered by the lack of an internet and/or a machine-readable data feed, among many other things. It gets even harder if we posit that e.g. the data entry clerks you hire to type in the daily stock report from the dead-tree WSJ all have to be trusted felony co-conspirators, and the money has to be carefully laundered from inquisitive forensic accountants.
Again, illicit nuclear weapons are a pretty good analogy. At the James Bond movie-plot level it’s obvious – you hide your hydrogen bomb in a city somewhere and say “give me One Hundred Billion Dollars! or I destroy your city!” If you start pondering the actual logistics, it gets a lot harder, and there are reasons nobody ever actually does this.
@ John Schilling:
Well, as hard as semiconductor fabrication may be, I don’t think it would be as hard as nuclear weapons.
But even so, have we banned nuclear weapons? No. The people who have them don’t want to get rid of them. Even if everyone else would like to—even if they would like to—the incentives forbid it. And we seem to be gradually heading toward ever-wider proliferation.
It’s not theoretical that nuclear war could destroy—if not humanity—at least our current civilization. It’s a fact. That’s not stopping anybody.
Nuclear weapons are, in fact, easier to build than whatever device you are reading this on right now. They were first created in the 1940s, as you may recall, and they have been created in places like North Korea.
And they are not seen by the governments of the world as a serious existential threat. We’ve spent more than half a century watching mutually hostile superpowers conspicuously failing to destroy civilization, and most governments aren’t really worried about that any more. So, as you note, we have not chosen to eliminate nuclear weapons, settling for the time being on containment.
That is not the same thing as being incapable of eliminating them. We can do that with nuclear weapons, if we choose to. And we can do it with computers, or maybe just with networked computers, if we choose to do that.
@John
I wonder how plausible it would be for someone to Pascal-mug a government by claiming that they have a nuke hidden in a major city. The odds against them actually having a nuke hidden in the city are pretty low, but the consequences of the government being wrong would be really high.
Maybe you could try it and let us know how it turns out?
The two obvious problems are, first, Pascal’s Mugging doesn’t work in the real world, and second, while the consequences of the government being “wrong” would indeed be high, I fear they would be a net positive. For the government, at least.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the good work that can be done now is in the general area of network security, and that is being done now.
But generally, yes, the Rationalist community needs a way to accept people saying that while they are not unconcerned with the possibility of unfriendly AI, they have sound reason for putting it way down on their list of personal priorities for the near future and/or for pursuing solutions other than the Unified Theory of Friendly AI.
I have a research grant on machine learning for what it’s worth. I think your comment is unfair. There are a lot of pointless fields such as philosophy or movie, it does not mean there isn’t an aesthetic aspect to it.
But yes, I am being half facetious. Machine learning is incredibly incipient. The model that most resembles the human brain are neural networks, where each node in a layer is a linear combinations of the entire previous layer (v1 = a.u1+b.u2+c.u3+…, and then w1 = a.v1+b.v2+c.v3+… and so on). It’s very cool how with something so simple you can predict house prices, build translators or image recognition. These are of course just regressions on steroids. But it’s also incredibly incipient. It’s impossible to create protections from our AI overlords on top of such a simple model lol.
I’ve studied Machine Learning somewhat seriously and I think it’s mostly unrelated to the sorts of AI MIRI is worried about. A really good ML system isn’t dangerous. What’s dangerous is a system that takes a model of the universe and a goal and devises a plan to achieve the goal. There’s a lot less work on that. All I’ve seen is some very minimalist solutions that work in statespaces around ℝ¹⁰ from the robotics community.
You don’t think the recent work in image recognition and neural networks makes the “build a model” part *way* easier? I’m sort of half-expecting the first general AI to be a frankensteininan mixture that’s basically a neural net plugged into a very simple value-maximization loop, with half a dozen anti-solipsism hacks tacked on incrementally. That model doesn’t seem *that* far out.
Disclaimer: ML layman.
Neural nets are extremely bad at a whole range of important AI tasks. For example, a neural net can’t learn to play chess (at least, not without search algorithms like alpha-beta pruning being coded in there somewhere).
ML is indeed about building the model.
The bottleneck to scary AI is using the model once you’ve built it.
@anon85: Recently a neural network was trained in chess and was able to play at Master level without any lookahead (ie just choosing the NN’s favourite move each turn). However this still requires a lot more input than a human would require (ie hundreds of thousands or millions of games).
It’s true that (AFAIK as a layman) we don’t yet know how to make an NN that can learn new things from relatively small amounts of training in the way that a human can.
Anonymous, what chess engine do you mean? Matthew Lai’s Giraffe? That used lookahead. Indeed, the most interesting part of that project was the neural network to decide how far ahead to look.
Anonymous, can you give a link? I’m not aware of any decent chess program that does not use search algorithms. The “neural net” chess programs you might have seen in the news still use them.
Douglas Knight/anon85: I think I got my wires crossed between the chess one (which does look ahead), and this Go one: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409 which does fairly well (estimated at 4-5 kyu) after being trained to predict pro moves and did not use lookahead.
Ah, ok. That’s a cool paper, but Go and chess are different (search is much more essential for chess than for Go). Also, 4-5 kyu is not that great – according to http://www.britgo.org/press/faq.html it is “average club player” level, not master level.
Also, if you need human-generated data to train, your machine learning method isn’t fully general.
“Also, if you need human-generated data to train, your machine learning method isn’t fully general.”
Depending on what you mean by “need”, I think this point is wrong in one of two ways.:-|
If you literally mean an absolute in-principle requirement, this point seems wrong because the choice to train based on expert play does not demonstrate that learning from self-play is impossible. It merely strongly suggests that learning from self-play is a lot slower, maybe a factor of 100 or more.
If instead by “need” you are referring to a sizable practicality advantage, perhaps that a learning system that is 100x slower learning 4-5 kyu Go play from self-play than from expert examples is insufficiently general, I think you are setting the bar for general learning unrealistically high. Humans are general enough to be dangerous, and seem to be at *least* 10x slower discovering 4-5 kyu Go play from (the rules and) first principles than they are learning it from expert examples; and I would guess the real factor is more like 100 than 10.
(I don’t know of any attempts to measure it systematically, so I am guessing based on having taught many beginners, having advised many kyu players, having played a few people who had played many games without ever playing strong players, and having reached 3 dan myself.)
DeepMind’s research is about combining deep learning with reinforcement learning, creating neural-network based systems that can learn how to act in environments. Are you familiar with them? This is basically what you’re describing. They have some impressive results with playing Atari games.
I do basic research in neuromorphic computing for one of the gov’t agencies that gives out those types of grants, for what it’s worth. I feel comfortable saying pretty conclusively that this sentence is false:
CS-style artificial neural networks are interesting and can do cool things, but they are not the model that most resembles the human brain. At all.
A purely linear activation rule makes for practically irrelevant networks, since any such network has effectively only one layer. Obviously they do not resemble the human brain, since else all our functionality would be described by a m x n matrix, where m is the number of sensory inputs and n is the number of neutrons that are connected to some output device. THAT is the point one should criticize here, I guess 🙂
Well, for precisely that reason, all of the standard-flow NNs have nonlinear activation functions… but your statement is not quite right, because we could have a recurrent network.
…still, these things aren’t meant to do serious modeling of how the brain actually works.
What about research showing that developing AI is dangerous so we should slow down its development? If an AI is going to paperclip the universe I would much rather it happen in 30 than 29 years.
What does “research showing that developing AI is dangerous” look like?
Like this:
https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf
So basically, non-technical philosophy-style arguments? I’m not sure I’d even call that research.
I find it interesting that the paper starts with saying
We actually have chess-playing AIs that are so good humans cannot understand their moves; it’s one of the few fields where computers seem to act with extraordinary super-human intelligence. Yet I think we all agree these AIs are not dangerous.
It seems AIs can only be dangerous if they know how to hack a novel computer system without human assistance, or they know how to convince humans to act on their behalf, or some other hard-to-counter task. Current AIs are nowhere close to this. It’s unwise to halt progress in an important scientific field because of such far-out worries.
This is a legitimate issue, but not the most important one from my POV:
Let’s grant that AI risk is a deadly serious issue which we need to throw our full weight behind. That doesn’t mean that these guys in particular (who, let’s face it, aren’t exactly the A-Team of computer science) are the horse to back.
I just took a glance at the Future of Humanity staff page and I recommend everyone to do the same. The big names like Drexler, Bostrom, Sandberg and Hanson are all known primarily for their popular science writings rather than their research. There’s a smattering of computer science and neuroscience people in their twenties, including the Director of Research who just got his masters degree and according to Google Scholar has been first author on exactly one paper. And then there’s a bunch of random MIRI and EA people. Unless I’m overlooking someone, it doesn’t look like there are any established computer science or AI researchers in this institute.
Now first impressions aren’t everything and it’s possible that in a few years I’ll be eating crow for having doubted that FHI would produce quality research. But it really does seem like MIRI 2.0, with the not particularly accomplished staff and the focus on publicity over publishable research. If AI is so serious shouldn’t we be trying to get the best possible team together rather than waiting until the runners up have had their shot at it?
I’m an AI risk skeptic too, but to be fair, it is pretty much a brand new field. If someone has a publication history, they are most likely working in a different field, almost by definition. (Unless they happened to switch. But if you’re established in your field, you have an incentive to stay in it and especially not jump to some speculative research that has yet to garner much respect.)
FHI looks at a variety of issues concerning the long-term survival of humanity, not just AI. I think that they focus more on philosophical issues rather than technical research – unlike MIRI, they aren’t promising to produce lots of AI safety papers.
I think being *certain* that it’s centuries away is a little overconfident (given at least quite a few experts consider the dangers worth considering), in which case friendly AI research looks a bit more sensible. Still the basic argument that we should focus on generally improving humanity’s situation is sound, not least of all because even if there is knowledge about what constitutes UFAI and there is clear advice about how to avoid it, that still might not be enough to avoid disaster. Improving human rationality and institutions would put us is a more advantageous position to ensure friendly AI, if indeed it is possible and lies in the non-distant future.
No one is claiming to be certain of anything. But the thing is, the reason people like Aaronson believe strong AI is centuries away is that it seems *really* hopeless given what we know now. The consequence of this is that if you took all the AI researchers and forced them to work only on “safety”, for the most part they won’t know what to do. What will future AI look like? How will it represent information? Will it be able to design even better AI very quickly (despite the fact that it took thousands of humans decades of work to create the first strong AI)?
These questions seem to be very important to safety work, but we can’t hope to answer them until we have a better understanding of intelligence.
I don’t agree strong AI (of some kind) is obviously so far off that speculative safety work can’t be done, and I’d prefer there’s thinking about it early, because when the event is approaching there will be a brigade that come out saying its unavoidable, too late, ‘those other people don’t care about safety so why should we’ etc. etc.
I guess that’s a matter of opinion, but I feel like I have enough familiarity with AI research to say that strong AI feels really hopeless at the moment, and enough familiarity with friendliness research to say that most of it seems kind of ridiculous/useless (not that I can do any better – I’m saying that we don’t understand nearly enough about what intelligence even means to do anything productive about AI safety).
There’s actually a related slate star codex post on this from a while back:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-risk/
My main objection to that survey is that AI researchers don’t spend their time thinking about the far future, and everyone is always biased towards thinking things will happen soon (there’s no question to which you’d get the answer “in 200 years from now”).
But come to think of it, if the question asked was about
then this seems very different from asking about omnipotent AI. I mean, “most professions” might just mean rice farming, taxi driving, and McDonalds work. As soon as we have self-driving cars (and tractors, say), we can replace a lot of jobs. Would it be “most professions”? Maybe not, but AI researchers are not economists and might not have a good sense for this.
I was responding specifically to your statement that AI researchers find the idea crackpotish.
So now that it’s clear that most AI researchers don’t find the idea crackpotish AI researchers don’t count?
I said that many AI researchers find *the field of AI safety* to be semi-crackpottish, because the research produced in that field is kind of weak/unconvincing. This is different from them finding the possibility of strong AI itself crackpottish; I did not make that claim.
In other words, I’m agreeing that a lot of AI researchers will answer “less than 50 years” when asked “when will AI become really good?” But these same researchers will not have looked into the AI safety work at all. The ones that HAVE looked into the safety research are mostly unimpressed, as far as I can tell. (Also, their definition of “really good” is probably different from yours.)
Furthermore, I claim this is a fundamental problem, and not a temporary one: there is no current ability to make good progress on AI safety, because we have no idea what future AI will look like.
Eh. If someone gets a job as “Nick Bostrom’s Executive Assistant” or whatever, I personally don’t care tuppence if it works on solving the problem of AI, I’m just happy for them that they have a job and are earning reasonable money (please say EA involves giving people jobs with reasonable recompense and not ‘we’ll pay you buttons but suck it up because it’s All For The Cause’, because that is the kind of unhelpful behaviour too many organisations indulge in while paying the CEO market-rate salaries).
EA involves giving people jobs with reasonable recompense and not ‘we’ll pay you buttons but suck it up because it’s All For The Cause’.
For instance, Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell talks about why overhead is a mediocre-at-best heuristic here, specifically discussing that not paying your staff well means you aren’t hiring the best people (you can do more good per dollar if you spend a larger fixed amount to make your other spending more efficient) and you have high turnover (also bad if you want to actually get stuff done).
Hi Slate Star Codex regulars. I am hoping some of you have 2 minutes to spare to click a few links to potentially win the Against Malaria Foundation (A Givewell top charity that is regulalry mentioned here) $25000+ in funding.
AMF was recently selected again by givewell as its top charity of the year and I know it is one that scott has been very supportive of in the past.
Please go to this page of videos for the AMF – and vote for as many of the videos as you can. You can vote for any number of videos so so if you voted for all 10 or so videos that would count as 10 votes for us! (If you would like to watch the videos some of them are great, but you can vote without watching) The contest only lasts till 12am EST December 13th.
Voting Page for Against Malaria Foundation : http://goo.gl/tr0oUq
=============
DFTBA
You’re asking people on a rationalist site to help bid on a Dollar Auction?
Date format on the floating new comment box in the upper-right has been standardized thanks to qsantos. Let me know if you have issues, here or on github.
Neat. Thanks to both of you for working on the comment plugin.
Fantastic! Thanks a lot! Now the function finally works here (Firefox, Ubuntu 14.04). Now if I only could set it to Central European time, since it seems to use some kind of an American time. But I guess I can find out which one it is and always add 6 hours or something.
I believe it’s EST (UTC-5). The idea is that it matches the timestamps on comments, which are not given in local time.
Glad to help! As Bakkot said, the point is having the same timezone on the webpage generated by SSC itself, and in the script. That said, Javascript could definitely dynamically fix all the dates. For now, I am preparing a few other features.
Would it be possible to have one’s replies just appear on a page without having to refresh the page? This would make it easier to not lose the information about new comments.
That is definitely doable, but will require some actions on the network (i.e. sending the reply and checking the result). I prefer to prioritize features that can be done entirely locally for now, but added the idea to a short list not to forget.
Is it supposed to be set since 1970 or is that just my PC? 🙂
I refuse to return to the 70s, I lived through that decade once and that was plenty, thanks very much!
I’m guessing it’s based on standard Unix time, which is a count of seconds since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.
Yep, for most computers that date is essentially “the beginning”. So if you don’t have another date saved, the program says give me all the comments since forever.
>No Seconds
Thanks a lot, now this site is literally unreadable.
Sorry to hear you are encountering difficulties.
I failed to find the source for your quote “No Seconds” and will have to guess you have an issue related to the omission of seconds in the date format.
Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean by “literally unreadable”? What device/OS/browser are you using?
I apologize for causing you concern. My comment was indeed related to the omission of seconds: It was a joke which relied on an exaggerated reaction to a very minor removal of a feature to convey hilarity. The site is not only not literally unreadable, it’s no less readable than ever before.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go find my shovel.
Huh. This explanation actually made the joke funnier.