OT38: Brighter Than Threaday

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

1. I will be at the New York Solstice tomorrow. I’ll see some of you there. There will probably be a big meetup Sunday at the Brookfield Place Mall at 1 (last minute change of time!), although details beyond that are sketchy. Head to the mall and look for the group of people who look the way you would expect rationalists to look. It’s not subtle.

2. Comment of the week is this poem, even though it’s from several months ago, because I only just found it.

3. In case you missed it in yesterday’s links, you may be interested in the MIRI fundraiser, the CFAR fundraiser, and the Giving What We Can Pledge Drive.

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1,190 Responses to OT38: Brighter Than Threaday

  1. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #4
    This week we are discussing “The Gentle Seduction” by Marc Stiegler.
    Next week we will discuss “Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I was incredibly disappointed with the way this story brought up the concept of reconstructive uploads and failed to do anything interesting with it. Seriously, all Stiegler says of the em is that “it was not Jack” and that “such simulations always failed” and leaves it at that? What a cop-out! I understand that discussing the themes involved would have taken over the story, or perhaps required a whole novel of its own, but I would have found it far easier to suspend my disbelief if he had just not brought it up.

      Also, I don’t think the use of teleprecense to visit Jupiter from Mars would work; speed-of-light delays should have ruined the immersion.

      • Max says:

        The story is masturbatory power fantasy about magical technology giving everything and the main character remaining the same thing (in many ways reflection of an author)

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        The fact that no mention was even made of the light-speed lag between Earth and Mars, or the even worse lag between Mars and Jupiter, was very difficult for me to get over. The telepresence is totally impracticable any further out than, say, one of the moons. Bah.

        • jeorgun says:

          Untrue— “The linkage between her mind on Mars and her robot body on Jupiter had delays; to have a completely satisfying experience, she would need a temporary residence that didn’t require such a commute.” Maybe it’s hand waved a little, but it is acknowledged.

    • Deiseach says:

      It’s cleverly done (though I tend not to believe that the main character has some indefinable wonderfulness of her character that makes her an inspiration and trailblazer for those still coming after her).

      It’s very accurate in how we can’t imagine changing, but as time goes on, we succumb to those changes. When you’re twenty and fit and healthy, you can’t ever imagine needing reading glasses or not being able to climb the stairs much less hike up the mountainside. Get older and creakier in the joints and you find yourself reconsidering all the things you said you’d never take up.

      That happens with ideals and politics, too.

      Where the story lets itself down is not taking a look at the shadow-side of the Wonderful World of Eternal Change and Progress. Every step along the path of technology and moving from the organic to the techno-transcendent is a positive, unshadowed by any loss or regret. Indeed, the changes make past experience richer, more vivid, detailed, and meaningful than when actually experienced initially.

      But is it really human not to have some regret, some longing? Some temptation to abuse of power or forgetfulness of the weaker? Everyone is better, nicer, smarter? Nobody tries cheating or stealing or exploiting other entities and/or the situation for their own benefit?

      The point of the story seems to be that we can be easily, gradually, gently seduced into the most momentous of changes one small step at a time – and that this will turn out great. I agree with the first part, but not necessarily the second: after all, it would be as easy to persuade the main character bit by gradual bit to use her abilities to become part of a conquering army seeking other civilisations to absorb and abuse, as her early objections to force and war were eroded away the same way her objections to becoming a cyborg and then an upload were eroded.

      • Eli says:

        But is it really human not to have some regret, some longing? Some temptation to abuse of power or forgetfulness of the weaker? Everyone is better, nicer, smarter? Nobody tries cheating or stealing or exploiting other entities and/or the situation for their own benefit?

        Sure, why not? Why would you want to abuse or forget others? Why would you want to cheat, steal, or exploit, especially more than others can actually take? There’s a point where cruelty might be fun because people can “take it”, but we’re really not at that point in most important matters.

        Are you really so utterly incapable of believing that some people’s impulse to good dominates their impulse to evil most of the time?

        Oh, right, theology of original sin and anti-empiricist epistemology.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          I agree completely with your point.

          Deiseach‘s post reminds me of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground”. Which makes about the best case as can be made for that point of view:

          For man is stupid, phenomenally stupid. That is, although he’s not really stupid at all, he’s really so ungrateful that it’s hard to find another being quite like him. Why, I, for example, wouldn’t be surprised in the least, if, suddenly, for no reason at all, in the midst of this future, universal rationalism, some gentleman with an offensive, rather, a retrograde and derisive expression on his face were to stand up, put his hands on his hips, and declare to us all: “How about it, gentlemen, what if we knock over all this rationalism with one swift kick for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to hell, so that once again we can live according to our own stupid will!”

          And, the best part:

          What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…

          The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity — in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it’s advantage all the same,” you will retort. But excuse me, I’ll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything…

          One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy — is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

          Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases… for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important — that is, our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason… It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason … and … and … do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?

          I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! …And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?

          You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!

          Twice two makes four without my will, indeed. As if free will meant that. As if free will meant wanting what is true and right, independently of your opinion.

          • Eli says:

            Dostoevsky seems to me insufficiently imaginative.

            For instance, let’s go ahead and grant at least the moderate version of his point: sure, free choice, including free fucking stupid choice! Go ahead and get it out of your system! Or don’t! Destroy yourself utterly through deliberately, maliciously stupid choices!

            But the very principle of free choice means that you can’t be entitled to destroy others. The trade-off to which free will must conform is that between “freedom from rational interests” and the Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

            Now let me present a poeticized argument for my position:

            No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

            And in my own words, again: why should I want to hurt you? What interest of mine can malevolence serve? Why should I be moved to enact ugliness or cruelty?

            Why bother with evil when you can have good?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            But the very principle of free choice means that you can’t be entitled to destroy others. The trade-off to which free will must conform is that between “freedom from rational interests” and the Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

            No, it doesn’t imply at all that you can’t be able to destroy others.

            We’re not talking about political freedom here. We’re talking about metaphysical freedom. In the Gulag, you are still free to shout at the top of your lungs that you hate Stalin and everything he stands for. The consequence will be that they will kill you, but you’re still free to do it.

            You’re still free in America to kill people for no reason in this sense. (And even if the police were 100% effective, you’re still free to want to.)

            And in my own words, again: why should I want to hurt you? What interest of mine can malevolence serve? Why should I be moved to enact ugliness or cruelty?

            Why good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come down to the rational determination of one’s interests? Benevolence is in my self-interest, without my will. As if free will meant that.

          • Eli says:

            What rational determination? Why isn’t it free will if I want to choose the good thing?

          • Deiseach says:

            Eli, as St Thomas Aquinas puts it, nobody thinks they’re bad. Nobody thinks they are choosing evil. Everyone thinks they are doing what they have to do, or what is good for them.

            The guy who kicks a man to death in a drunken row doesn’t think he’s evil or wicked; very often he’s not thinking at all! And if he does think anything about why he gets into fights and resorts to violence, it’s something along the lines of ‘might makes right’, ‘the rule of nature is the strong win and the weakest go to the wall’, ‘I’m only doing what I have to do’, ‘I can’t let anyone disrespect me’ and the like.

            What interest of mine can malevolence serve? Why should I be moved to enact ugliness or cruelty?

            EDIT: Eli, I don’t have to imagine that, I’ve seen it. About ten years back in a former job, I worked as clerical support in a national programme for early school leavers (one reason why I never, ever, again want a job having anything to do with children/teenagers).

            About a quarter of the kids were great, participated in the programme, would benefit and go on to make something of their lives. About a third were not interested/had problems that needed addressing and either would or wouldn’t get something out of it without further support from outside. Some of these kids were straight on the trajectory to jail because of various problems (again, another reason I’m not in favour of legalising drugs: way too many first dropped out because weed was nicer than school work, and they got sucked into petty criminality and then harder drugs, and at least one has gone on to do a jail sentence for stabbing another person in the stomach during an altercation).

            And there were a few who were nothing but troublemakers and had no intention of doing anything, and you could tell they’d end up doing jail time if they were lucky; if they weren’t lucky, eventually they’d hit up against the kind of hardened criminal that they couldn’t manipulate or weasel their way round and they’d get the shit kicked out of them, or be stabbed, or even shot.

            One eighteen year old was like that. Too sly and cunning to do anything that could be directly traced to him; he used another kid, who had anger-management problems and was troubled but basically decent as his cat’s paw. He’d make a few well-aimed remarks that would wind the angry kid up, get him to blow, and then the angry kid would start yelling and roaring and throwing chairs and tearing up the place and the whole morning was taken up with the staff calming him down, clearing the debris, and restoring order.

            Angry kid, of course, was the one who got into formal trouble while sly kid skated. What did the sly kid get out of it? Ostensibly, having the disruption meant no lessons, etc. But you could tell he enjoyed his exercise of power: being able to make angry kid his puppet, disrupting the place, ‘making fools out of the staff’. (Why wasn’t he dealt with? Because the programme was run on all the latest Social Work principles of no physical discipline, no authoritarianism, mutual respect and discuss your problems and use talk not a clip round the ear, participation, empowerment, buy-in and all the rest of it. Which meant sly kid could rules-lawyer his way out of trouble.)

            So this was the kind of guy who was going on to a criminal career because he was not one bit interested in living a ‘decent’ life. And just as surely you could tell he’d get too big for his boots, run into a guy who lived by ‘might is right’ and not ‘let’s all sit down and discuss this rationally’ and end up with his head kicked in or a stabbing.

            So your question is the very question I am posing, the very question the story ignores as everyone in the new future is naturally nice and wonderful.

            As you say, you can’t be entitled to destroy others. So at the very least that implies in the future someone or something (be it a government agency – the NSA ramped up to unimaginable levels of access and unfettered activity – or the AIs running the Terran Empire or whomever) is monitoring and suppressing such choices and such acts (and possibly either humanely brain-altering or humanely making sure retrograde entities are destroyed). It’s not, and it can’t be, all jaunting to Mars to enjoy the sights via telepresence!

            But the story never goes near that. It’s all Progress, Glorious Progress, and the heroine’s objections and qualms are gently overcome one by one, and nothing ever goes wrong. Each time a former limit comes up, and she passes it despite having previously made a firm resolution that this is the thing she would never do, and it always works out for the better.

            That’s unrealistic.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Eli:

            Well, I (Dostoevsky speaking) grant that choosing the good thing is wise and rational, You could never have a reason to do otherwise. But evil, inexplicable, and senseless things also have their own merits, and a man might just as well want to choose those.

            “And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            Why, I, for example, wouldn’t be surprised in the least, if, suddenly, for no reason at all, in the midst of this future, universal rationalism, some gentleman with an offensive, rather, a retrograde and derisive expression on his face were to stand up, put his hands on his hips, and declare to us all: “How about it, gentlemen, what if we knock over all this rationalism with one swift kick for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to hell, so that once again we can live according to our own stupid will!”

            Donald Trump?

          • Mary says:

            And in my own words, again: why should I want to hurt you? What interest of mine can malevolence serve? Why should I be moved to enact ugliness or cruelty?

            Why bother with evil when you can have good?

            Because you do.

            Here’s a look at the people who could have good and bother with evil:
            http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html

          • Jiro says:

            Here’s a look at the people who could have good and bother with evil:

            UK homicides are at their lowest since 1977 and crime at its lowest since 1981.

            Not only is this article from over 10 years ago, he’s comparing crime rates from 1921 and 1941. Furthermore, Wikipedia points out that there was systematic underreporting.

            He also seems to think that depression isn’t a legitimate medical condition.

          • Mary says:

            snort

            When the claim was that there is no reason to commit crime, that crime is LOW is hardly an argument.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Given the repeated failure of political programmes which depended on everybody being nice to each other, I don’t think Deiseach is the one being anti-empiricist here.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Is the position merely:

            a) A society where everyone is rational all the time is unrealistic, given what we know about human behavior? If so, I agree. But I think we can have institutions that encourage people to behave in more rational ways, and perhaps even improve human intelligence and capacity for self-control so that they will be better able to do so.

            Or is the position:

            b) A society in which everyone is rational all the time would not be desirable because it would allegedly be “inhuman” and contrary to “free will”? That is the position I take Dostoevsky to be defending, and the one I am objecting to.

            If Eli is saying that we can merely take people as they are now and tell them to be good rational people (and maybe good communists, in his opinion), and expect it to solve all society’s problems—I agree this is a naive position.

          • Deiseach says:

            I haven’t read whatever story you’re all kvetching about

            So you haven’t read the story but you know my objections are based on nothing more than “theology of original sin and anti-empiricist epistemology”.

            Mmm-hmmm. I see you subscribe to the Sydney Smyth school of review 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            Vox (if I may be so familiar), option A is the one I’m basing my objections on. Option B may or may not be a good idea, pace whatever definition of “rationality” is being used, but if that is what Dostoevsky is defending, then I disagree with him: reason as a basis for judgement is a good, not a defect.

          • Mary says:

            “A society in which everyone is rational all the time would not be desirable because it would allegedly be “inhuman” and contrary to “free will”? That is the position I take Dostoevsky to be defending, and the one I am objecting to.”

            Then what was the “anti-empiricist ” crack about?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Mary:

            That was not me.

        • Deiseach says:

          You have never seen acts of public vandalism, Eli? You’ve never, as I have, seen newly-planted trees snapped in half by somebody or group of somebodies, for no reason other than pleasure in destruction or whatever reason somebody likes breaking things?

          I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there is a con where pensioners are cheated out of (and indeed intimidated into handing over) large sums of money, oftentimes their life savings, by people who persuade them into unnecessary works and repairs for their homes, then keep extorting money out of them. Old people are chosen because (a) they are more likely to have nest eggs built up over their lives (b) they are vulnerable (c) they are easy targets and can be threatened with violence. Or not even violence, simply manipulated psychologically.

          That’s happening all the time, everywhere. You don’t need “theology of original sin and anti-empiricist epistemology” to conjecture it, you can search online news for instances. The kind of mindset that does not have respect for the old and vulnerable and thinks of them as easy targets – that mind, that character, is not going to exist in the new future of the story? And yet our heroine is an original non-engineered human from the 20th century who simply takes the new technology for self-improvement as it comes along. All the criminals and warlords of her time have either been brain-conditioned out of it, or they conveniently never got the upgrades so they can become immortals like our main character?

          There aren’t even Internet mobs engaging in destroying their opponents or rivals online? Nobody leaking celeb sex tapes and blackmailing them? No future equivalent of RequiresHate?

          Medicine will finally have cracked it, we will know exactly what tangle of neurons means you like to kick over street planters and smash in windows and we can tweak them so you prefer to listen to the birdies singing in the park instead?

          Maybe the tech magically makes you a better person, simply by allowing you to develop empathy because your newly-expanded neural connections awaken a conscience in you. However, that aspect is not shown, nor any explanation given (apart from “That is how it is”) for how this future world has done away with crime, war, and the other less pleasant aspects of human nature.

          Well, that would be wonderful. But you get what I am saying backwards: I am not saying some people’s impulse to good dominates their impulse to evil, I am saying has every single person in the future become (or has been made) so good that nobody from the Bad Old Days of naturally-produced humans with less perfect friendly loving downhome values than our heroine remains active and unchanged? (Remember, the point of the story is that our heroine has valuable personal qualities that mean that she can lead and guide others even though she’s a relic from The Old Days; her descendants and the new humans born or otherwise coming into existence in later decades and centuries don’t share that special magical spark of whatever it is that makes her a trailblazer and leader. So if her basic character remains unaltered, what about the basic character of a serial rapist, or a murderer, or someone who needs to dominate and bully others in order to feel power and feel secure?)

          I’d love to think “In the happy days of brain and sensory augmentation, there are no people with the impulses to rape, murder, abuse, bully, steal and otherwise try and get one over on their fellows” but I wonder how that is going to happen.

          But as you say, that’s probably only my deficient epistemology talking. When AI comes along, all of us will turn into perfect flawless angels just because!

          • Eli says:

            There was a time when Genghis Khan was actually a fairly normal person for many societies, inclinations-wise, but more competent at raping and murdering his way through the landscape than most others. And now he’s deeply abnormal. Now you complain about how our ever-so-progressive societies are still afflicted with vandalism and swindling instead of the rape, murder, and slavery that were normal in actually-existing past societies.

            As moral progress has happened somewhat already, it can happen more.

            I haven’t read whatever story you’re all kvetching about, but I do find it really suspicious that you’re choosing to pick on the possibility of moral progress rather than the possibility of immortal cyborg dogs or whatever the hell the gimmick is.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            There was a time when Genghis Khan was actually a fairly normal person for many societies, inclinations-wise, but more competent at raping and murdering his way through the landscape than most others. And now he’s deeply abnormal.

            Really?

            I mean, I don’t doubt there have always been (and still are) warlords who like raping and murdering. But there have also always been large numbers of normal people who just go about their lives, working and raising families. The idea that they all fantasized about raping/murdering/pillaging, that this was considered a culturally normal desire, and that most of them just didn’t get the opportunity to do so seems kind of weird to me.

          • NN says:

            This idea is also hard to square with the historical fact that contemporary writers among groups that fell victim to the Mongols used stories of Mongol armies murdering, raping, and pillaging their people to demonstrate how bad the Mongols were.

          • Jiro says:

            The victims of the rape and murder always think it’s bad. What’s different is that people of the time didn’t think it was absolutely bad; they only thought it was bad when done to themselves, but thought it was fine when done to tribes who have something they want.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Anecdotal, but there was briefly talk between the Pope and French king of an alliance with the mongols against the Muslim armies in the holy lands. This never transpired in any meaningful way, and in fact Christians in the Holy Land itself briefly allowed Muslims to pass unmolested to attack the mongols but it is an interesting view of how they were seen.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I think that is more ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’; people the Mongol are poised to invade don’t like being invaded by said Mongols. That said the Mongols were exceptional… if you count ‘civilized’ society. In terms of nomadic raiders, not that unique in the whole brutal massacring business.

          • Mary says:

            “What’s different is that people of the time didn’t think it was absolutely bad; they only thought it was bad when done to themselves, but thought it was fine when done to tribes who have something they want.”

            All of them? What is the evidence for this?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            The fact that breakdowns in law enforcement almost always result in large-scale looting and crime suggests that, if modern people are more law-abiding, that’s largely because it’s harder now to get away with committing crimes, rather than any greater innate morality.

          • Deiseach says:

            I congratulate you, Eli, for you have me doing something I never thought possible: I am now going to say something nice about Genghis Khan 🙂

            I was broadly aware that the empire he founded, and particularly his successors, adapted the civilisation of the conquered (especially the Chinese) and became a successful rule not of barbarians but of civilised people.

            According to this book, Khan did not rape and murder his way to victory, so much as engage in organised and crushing total war. We should regard him more in the light of Alexander the Great, who also created an empire by virtue of superior military power, but more successful as he managed to create a dynasty and lasting empire where Alexander could not:

            Weatherford resurrects the true history of Genghis Khan, from the story of his relentless rise through Mongol tribal culture to the waging of his devastatingly successful wars and the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed.

            Explosion of civilisation? say you. According to the reviews, Khan was pro-trade, lowered taxes, encouraged learning, and “He made it law that women are not to be kidnapped, sold or traded”, and the stories of rapine and massacre were propaganda both encouraged by the Mongols (after all, if you pitch up outside a city to besiege it, that’s a long-term commitment and very inconvenient, whereas if the citizens are terrified by the scare-stories of what happens if they resist, they will surrender pretty much immediately) and used by Muslim jihadists, and in later centuries exaggerated, misattributed, or turned to their own purposes by “Enlightenment” figures (just as Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome on Christianity, Voltaire used Khan as a bogey-figure for the French monarchy).

            Warning: (a) I haven’t read this myself so I don’t know how good, bad or indifferent it is (b) it’s revisionist history, so naturally it’s going to go overboard on the “No the traditional accounts are all completely wrong” (c) I don’t really think the Mongols created a vast empire by being traders and encouragers of the arts and sciences, so there probably was a good bit of rape and pillage going on. But the Empire and the Great Khans were not barbarians.

          • keranih says:

            The degree of damage done by Khan (and his successors) was modified by the technology in the conflict area and how badly the locals resisted. To use one example – agriculture in the arid Central Asian region depended on rather extensive water tunnels and canals, which were also used as hiding places for local fighters (and their stuff.) In rooting out the resistance in Afghanistan (which has never taken well to outsider rule) not only were the cities damaged, but also the rural waterways of the most prosperous (and easily reached) agriculture areas. This had the practical effect of forcing the population even further out of the cities and into the hills. Around 1500, the Mughals (Khan v 3.4 or some such) repeated this, which hampered Afghan development until the Brits came along and…failed to make anything better.

          • Jiro says:

            According to this book, Khan did not rape and murder his way to victory, so much as engage in organised and crushing total war.

            Engaging in organized and crushing total war, just because you would like some territory and tribute, is still at least murder.

          • John Schilling says:

            The fact that breakdowns in law enforcement almost always result in large-scale looting and crime suggests that…

            That nobody wants to see themselves as a chump, no more and no less. Almost no moral rule will long endure the sight of other people profiting by its violation without being punished for it.

            If you want to see how committed people are to “Thou shalt not steal”, you need to watch them in secret when they think they are alone with some unguarded valuables, not when they are in the company of looters. And there will always be a first looter to kick things off.

    • keranih says:

      Ah! I remember reading this when it was first published. And the end parts with the alien contact were as unappealing now as they were then.

      As Deiseach said, it’s a story of having ones perspective change and eventually embracing the temptations of novelty – only with all the upsides. Quite a progressive perspective.

      (I wonder if the author of this story read Appleseed, or was familiar with the Japanese shift towards mechanical assist machines. The most real part of the story, to me, was the old woman with the snow drift, the ugly loud machine, and the unknown and feared pill in her hand.)

      I am a bit put off by the man = tech /woman = nature characterization. (Did this 25 year old woman not have a job, or did I miss that?) The protagonist is fearful, hesitant, and a follower throughout the story, as well, and that was likewise unappealing. As the story went on, the protagonist became more and more bland, less and less interesting, even as the story would have made me think that she was transforming into some wise “elemental” being.

      None of her choices are wrong, in no place was her caution either excessive nor inadequate. Her specialness makes humanity unique and wonderful.

      (Oh, and we go from ‘three small children and two big dogs’ to twenty(?) years later, the kids have moved away and the dogs die? What, were they doing life extension treatments on canines first? And decades later she manages to reconstruct that dog’s genetic profile, clone it, and *still* she expects to get a carbon copy of the original dog?)

      (And just how much did those anti-snow-blower pills cost? No mention of the economics? (Yes, they talk about costs of other items later, but only skim over it.))

      To me, the disconnect between replicating the mountain, replicating the dog, and replicating Jack (or, even, saving the mamoset vs the mountain) bugs me the most. Granted, the text tells us that she’s not that introspective, but she gives rather little thought to any of this.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      A couple of meta-comments. First, I’ve updated the list of stories to be discussion in the near future. The first story I selected was the fairly recent “Crystal Nights”, but every story we have discussed after that has been a classic, and I’m starting to run low on classics. Going forward, I think I’ll take a leaf out of C.S. Lewis’s “On the Reading of Old Books” and select an alternating sequence of new stories and old stories, at least until I run out of one or the other.

      Second, I’m gonna need a Second for this thing who can post the discussion comment in the Open Thread if I’m not around. Technically, anybody can do this, but nobody did it in OT37 until I got around to it, so it looks like I’m gonna have to single someone out in order to avoid diffusion of responsibility. The Second will also be the obvious Schelling Point to continue selecting new stories if something happens to me long-term (I get hit by a truck, I enter a fugue state, I decide to quit the internet, etc…). I’m thinking Deiseach, who is a well-known regular, has participated admirably in the discussions so far, and seems fairly knowledgeable of skiffy. Yo, D, you up?

      • Deiseach says:

        Although appreciative of the honour of the nomination, I must decline. Nolo episcopari! 🙂

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        I would volunteer for the task, but I typically don’t get to these threads until some days after they are posted, at which point the commentariat has largely moved on.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Welp, I guess I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, I’d like to remind everyone who enjoys these discussions that anyone can make the story of week post; just look at the list to see which story is up for discussion and which story is to be discussed the following week, as well as the relevant story links.

    • When I read the story a while ago, what struck me was the way the author dodged the hard question of what a society of considerably transhumanized people would be like by making the main character a solitary person.

  2. Jacobian says:

    Remember when we all learned how to use 23andMe irresponsibly? Well they’ve started giving out a few reports that we can use responsibly, and also if you know anyone who is already registered they can get you a kit for just $149+shipping in the next few days after which the price probably goes back up to $199.

    If anyone here got the new reports, what do you think of them? Are they trustworthy or am I better off just going back to browsing SNPedia links?

    • Douglas Knight says:

      The new reports are boring. They’re mainly about whether you’re a carrier for a homozygous disease, not relevant to your own health. Totally trustworthy, though. There’s also stuff like how fast you metabolize caffeine, that I haven’t looked into. It sounds like stuff that should be better discovered by self-experimentation — you already know what coffee does to yourself.

      The old reports were exciting, but they were not useful. I doubt that they were accurate, but even if they were, the effect sizes were too small to have any consequence. That’s what you’ll get by browsing SNPedia, except that there will be even less quality control.

      • I’m one of the lucky people to have signed up before the FDA imbroglio and did some research on my own into my ‘immune to noroviruses’ superpower. The description 23andme gave was actually very good and perfectly accurate. It didn’t mention a variety of small studies showing possible other effects of being a FUT2 non-secreter but those are very speculative and I think it would have been irresponsible to bring them up.

        Of course that’s a association they give four stars of confidence to. The one star associations are very speculative indeed up they did a good job of conveying that.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          A binary effect like immune/not immune is much more likely to have practical effects, unlike most of their reports with a relative risk of 1.2. And a binary effect is much more likely to be accurately measured. Being immune sounds useful. Knowing that you are immune, however, is unlikely to change your actions and thus unlikely do be useful. Did it change your actions? Do you nurse your friends when they get it?

  3. Jacobian says:

    Question for the people involved in effective altruism: I did a bit of research showing that providing people in developing countries with access to water is way cheap, and someone immediately commented that this will only lead to everyone having a ton of kids who will be worse off. While that comment was kinda obnoxious, I wonder if there’s any discussion in EA about the danger of 3rd world health interventions (like all the Givewell stuff) being harmful in the long term because Malthus. Any thoughts?

    • Vanzetti says:

      The same argument can be used against giving people in DEVELOPED countries access to water.

      • NN says:

        Developed countries tend to have replacement or below fertility rates for reasons that have nothing to do with access to clean drinking water.

        • name says:

          What about the argument that knowing your children will survive to adulthood leads to birthing less? That certainly has to do with access to water.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            That makes intuitive sense, so a lot of people claim that it is the cause of the demographic transition, but it doesn’t actually fit the data.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            That makes intuitive sense, so a lot of people claim that it is the cause of the demographic transition, but it doesn’t actually fit the data.

            Agreed. Groups like the Amish and the Haredi don’t have less children just because they have access to a level of medicine and sanitation that all but ensures those children will survive to adulthood; they just end up with lots and lots of adult children. This strongly suggests that something else which causes the demographic transition and that the lifestyle of these groups somehow manages to avoid it.

          • onyomi says:

            The biggest correlation to my mind is the entry of women to the workforce. Places where women work people have fewer children.

          • keranih says:

            @ onyomi

            How are you defining ‘work’ and ‘workforce’?

          • onyomi says:

            Do you really not know what I mean?

          • vV_Vv says:

            @onyomi:

            I think that keranih’s question is appropriate.

            In Malthusian societies living at the edge of subsistence women most certainly work, in the sense of spending their time performing laborious activities conductive to the subsistence of their household, although this may not be work in the usual modern sense of production of goods and services to be traded (directly by the worker or by an employer in exchange of a salary).

          • onyomi says:

            My point is, I’m pretty sure Keranih knows that’s not what I mean and knows that I know that women in third-world countries do a lot of labor, even though they don’t usually have careers which take them away from their families for 40+ hours per week, so what’s the point in asking the question? To make sure I know that third-world women aren’t just sitting on the sofa watching Lifetime?

          • keranih says:

            No, seriously, I was asking what you meant by “women who work” and how much they had to be “in the workforce” in order to have a reduction on birthrate.

            I am quite comfortable supposing that you know that third world women don’t sit about watching novellas all day – what I don’t know is how we explain the differences in birth rates between upper class women who sit around discussing art and concerts all day and lower class women who are unemployed and on the government dole.

          • NN says:

            The biggest correlation to my mind is the entry of women to the workforce. Places where women work people have fewer children.

            Iran has a slightly sub-replacement fertility rate (1.92 births per woman) despite the fact that only about 16% of Iranian women work outside the home. By comparison, 57% of Bangladesh women work outside the home, and Bangladesh has a fertility rate of 2.21 births per woman. So I don’t think that the entry of women into the workforce is the primary driver of fertility rate trends.

          • onyomi says:

            Okay, well like I said, I meant the kind of society in which it is common for women to have jobs which take them away from the home for 30-40+ hours a week. I do think there can be a society-wide trend: if you live in a society where most women don’t have time to raise a lot of kids, then you may follow suit even if you do have time, simply because that’s what most people in your society do.

            I also wonder if there isn’t a reverse signalling at play: in more developed countries, high birth rates are usually associated with the poor and the irresponsible. This may lead to wealthy people, who can afford to have lots and lots of kids–and afford the nannies to raise them if they want to work–nevertheless choosing not to because large family tends to signal “poor and/or irresponsible.”

            Interestingly, the double whammy seems to occur when you have a more patriarchal society in which it is nonetheless okay for unmarried women to have careers: namely Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea. All these places have well below replacement birth rates even though they are socially more patriarchal than the US or Europe–that is, there is a stronger expectation that when women do get married, they will stay home and take care of children.

            The result is that women simply put off marriage and children as long as possible because they don’t want to be forced into the traditional gender roles which, for some reason, don’t seem to apply nearly so strongly until you’re married.

            This may also explain Iran: though I don’t know much about Iranian society, my impression is that it is pretty liberal and economically advanced as Muslim theocracies go, which would lead me to expect it to follow the pattern of Japan and South Korea: women are free until they get married, but not after, so they put off marriage and children as long as possible.

            US women seem instead to try to “have it all,” which is preferable to the East Asian situation, if not ideal, and which seems to result in a slightly higher than replacement rate.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I thought it was both children surviving to adulthood and economic security together which were negatively correlated with birth rate/population growth?

            The theory is that kids are the old fashioned version of social security.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ onyami, keranih

            Maybe two terms would be useful: ‘career woman work’ vs ‘work you do in hut and field with a baby in arms, and a 5-yr-old is really helpful’ (for short, “One mouth two hands”).

          • onyomi says:

            “Maybe two terms would be useful…”

            Another term is not necessary, because I’m pretty sure everyone knew what I was talking about when I mentioned women “entering the workforce.”

            I did mistake Keranih’s initial comment for nitpicking, but he was just asking for more details about my theorized causation.

          • keranih says:

            OTOH, I’m pretty sure that the work patterns of women are sufficiently complex historically and globally, and sufficiently complicated by other cultural and technological effects, that yes, we really do need to carefully define what we mean by the phrase “enter into the workforce.”

            How much of the explanation, for example, is that the society has taken on Western capitalism and nuclear family formation?

          • Just a guess based on a few conversations with people from Iran/who’ve traveled there, but I bet Iranians overall–including Iranian women–have more years of education than Bangladeshi women, even if that education doesn’t translate into paid employment.

            More education=>later marriage=>fewer children.

    • Bryan Hann says:

      Obnoxious in what way, and why? (I assume the comment was written rather than spoken.)

      • Jacobian says:

        You can click to see it if you’re very curious, I’m afraid that my reply also isn’t a model of charity 🙂

        I thought it wasn’t very kind (to either Africans or EA), and it wasn’t totally necessary, but charity mostly compels me to wonder whether it’s true or not.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      I don’t know about water, but people bring this up all the time about malaria.

      If people are in a malthusian situation, something has to keep the population in check. And that thing is somewhere on the continuum from abrupt to steady. Moving it on the continuum can be a big deal. It is better to die from occasional acute famine than to live in a population limited by chronic malnutrition. In a malthusian situation, you should worry less about mortality and more about morbidity. Malaria is definitely on the steady side, so eliminating it is definitely good, even in a malthusian situation. Also, malaria probably reduces intelligence, so prolongs the malthusian trap.

      But I don’t know how water keeps population in check. Probably acute droughts lead to acute famines. How improved water supply would affect the frequency and severity of droughts in equilibrium, I do not know. But if you’re only about quality, not quantity, you’re talking about disease and morbidity and I think it’s a pretty clear win.

    • Daniel Speyer says:

      If the 3rd world really is in a malthusean trap, the obvious solution is to distribute and evangelize contraceptives. Givewell has reviewed Population Services International, with mixed results, but Givewell has very high standards.

      • eponymous says:

        >distribute and evangelize contraceptives

        How much of high 3rd world birthrates are due to lack of access to or knowledge about contraceptives, rather than cultural and economic factors that make people want to have kids?

        My own suspicion is that it’s primarily the latter, and the best solution is just overall economic development, with particular emphasis on education and opportunities for women.

        • Deiseach says:

          You don’t think that there might be some suspicion on the part of local populations about a group of wealthy white people coming in saying “We don’t want you to have any more kids (because we think there are already too many of you), so here you go – free condoms!”

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Deiseach

            So some people use them and some people don’t. Some people are suspicious of vaccines from Western countries. Some are probably suspicious of malaria nets.

            I suspect there are some women who are tired of having a baby every year when they’ve got six already. If one of those women wants to skip a year, I doubt she will be too upset about the motives of the Westerners who offer the Pill, as long as it works.

            Edit: I think that’s not what Daniel meant by ‘evangelize’, you know.

          • Nicholas says:

            The long running meme is that the contraceptives are poision and the people distributing them are white supremists.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ eponymous
          “How much of high 3rd world birthrates are due to lack of access to or knowledge about contraceptives, rather than cultural and economic factors that make people want to have kids?”

          Doesn’t cost much to find out, ie offer some free contraceptives and let people know about them. Even with the US cultural and economic factors, there are still unwanted pregnancies because of problems getting contraceptives.

          • keranih says:

            Even with the US cultural and economic factors, there are still unwanted pregnancies because of problems getting contraceptives.

            You have a cite for this? Last I checked, the reasons given for not using birth control pretty much excluded “can’t get it/too expensive” as a cause of any significance.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ keranih
            Last I checked, the reasons given for not using birth control pretty much excluded “can’t get it/too expensive” as a cause of any significance.

            Where did you check?

            There might be an equivocation factor, if condoms and other non-prescription items are included under ‘birth control’.
            In that case, ‘My boyfriend didn’t want to use a condom (or didn’t give me time to use icky stuff)’ might be a cause to list.

          • keranih says:

            Link here. You’re looking for Table 5.

            As a self-reported survey, it of course has limitations. (Condoms were reported as being “too expensive” by a like fraction of the surveyed women as reported the contraceptive patch as being too expensive.) And more reported failures (ie, pregnancy) due to the pill than due to condoms.)

            In that case, ‘My boyfriend didn’t want to use a condom (or didn’t give me time to use icky stuff)’ might be a cause to list.

            Might be. But as previously discussed, the reasons people (in the USA) become pregnant aren’t because they can’t get or use contraception.

            It will be very interesting to redo the survey in another year or two, after the ACA has lowered those last “barriers” and see what shifts, if any, in contraception use, pregnancy, and abortion have occurred.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Keranih

            From Table 5 at your link (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr062.pdf)

            Women who discontinued using the method due to dissatisfaction

            $ – 3.4 .. Too expensive
            $ – 2.6..Insurance did not cover it
            10.0..Too difficult to use
            0.4..Too messy
            1.2..Your partner did not like it
            M – 62.9..You had side effects
            M – 11.8..You were worried you might have side effects
            2.6..You worried the method would not work
            M – 11.3..The method failed, you became pregnant
            1.8..The method did not protect against disease
            M – 5.7..Doctor told you not to use the method again
            M – 5.1..Decreased your sexual pleasure
            2.4..Too difficult to obtain
            M – 11.5..Did not like changes to menstrual cycle
            10.9..Other

            I added two flags:
            $ – expense
            M – medical reasons

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Decreased sexual pleasure is a medical reason?

          • DrBeat says:

            Why wouldn’t it be? It’s a biological thing that the treatment messes up.

            If it made your toes shake uncontrollably, that would be a medical reason. If it made you unable to taste foods, that would be a medical reason. How is this so categorically different?

          • keranih says:

            @ houseboatonstyx

            I have lost the point you were trying to make. You seem to be highlighting basic problems with the nature of contracetives, not “problems obtaining contraceptives which can be fixed by handing them out for free”.

            What are you trying to say?

          • TrivialGravitas says:

            I don’t think first world data is particularly relevant to third world birthrates.

        • At only a slight tangent …

          Back when people were arguing for (and against) legalized abortion, one of the main arguments for was that it would eliminate unwanted children. The assumption, explicit or implicit, was that most births to unmarried mothers were unwanted, due to contraceptive failure or non-use.

          Abortion was legalized, contraception improved and made more available–and the percentage of births to unmarried mothers went sharply up, not down. One obvious conclusion is that most of those children were not unwanted–that unmarried women mostly got pregnant because they wanted to be.

          At a further tangent … . The rhythm method is pretty good if your objective is to have four children instead of six.

          For a longer discussion of both points, see:

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-rhythm-method-and-population-growth.html

          • My experience talking to unmarried mothers in moms’ forums is that they didn’t want children, they just didn’t not want children enough to bother using contraception. Once a woman gets pregnant, various hormones tend to kick in that make her feel warm fuzzy feelings toward the fetus even if it was an “oopsie”.

            I say “tend to,” because I’ve also talked to moms who really didn’t care that much about their oops babies and thought it was probably for the best when CPS took them away.

        • stubydoo says:

          Of course the issue has been studied plenty, and there’s hardly a consensus, but there’s some pretty promising evidence that the key to decreasing third world fertility is more female education (not education specifically about how to avoid pregnancy – education in general).

          I’m inclined the hold out more hope on that front than on contraceptives availability, so accordingly that might be a more promising charity idea for those who’re looking for the escape from Malthus (if possibly a bit harder to pinpoint).

          • Anthony says:

            “the prospect of owning a motorcar is a sufficient bribe to sterilize most people” – C. G. Darwin

            (I first read it in a book by Bertrand Russell, but googling the quote leads to Darwin petit-fils instead of Lord Russell.)

        • Sometimes people just really like kids and enjoy having them regardless of female education levels. This is a partial explanation for increased female education not corresponding with a rapid crash in birth rates in (a few) parts of the Third World.

          • onyomi says:

            Maybe people in the first world aren’t bored enough to want a bunch of kids?

          • Cadie says:

            In the first world, having children is a huge burden, financially and materially, which doesn’t apply as much in places where there’s a more robust extended family structure and having two adults working away from home is less necessary for survival. It’s also a bit more difficult in the first world to become a two-adult home in the first place, though plenty of people manage so this is probably a minor factor.

            The groups who do have large families – the Amish, the Quiverfulls, some Catholics, some Jews – have cultural values that mitigate or eliminate the problem of being unable to afford child care and unable to have one partner quit working outside the home. Everyone else is going to have difficulty unless they’re particularly wealthy, and this is most marked in places where child care is the most expensive with little assistance for it available (like the USA). Day care for one child can easily run over $1000 a month. More than one and often it’s actually cheaper to hire a live-in nanny, and having a full-time personal domestic worker is not something most families can afford either (especially since this requires a larger house, the nanny will use the same kitchen/etc and possibly the bathrooms but will need their own bedroom, increasing the minimum bedroom count by 1; there’s a big gap in price between 3br and 4br houses, and 4br and 5br, all else being close to equal.) Then consider the extremely high expectations in the first world – to live in the area with the best education that you can possibly afford, cell phones and other gadgets, lavish holiday celebrations, kids enrolled in sports or other programs…

            So having children, or having more children, imposes a giant extra burden on first world families that doesn’t apply the same way in much of the third world. A lot of women want more children than they have, or want to have some when they don’t, but it’s just not affordable without a severe downgrade in lifestyle. Some aren’t willing to do that, some are but their partners aren’t, some can’t because the downgrade would require living in cramped, unsafe housing or going without some necessities even after dropping the extras.

    • keranih says:

      this will only lead to everyone having a ton of kids who will be worse off.

      “All” and “everyone” arguments tend to be weak, if not immediately refutable. But the point made is a valid one – and has been shown to hold in various other populations. Reduce the disease and mortality of a population (such as: by feeding and vaccinating a colony of outdoor cats) and the population will rise.

      Where I think the breakdown in reasoning occurs is at the definition of “worse off” – the children who do not die from childhood diarrhea will grow up, yes, and perhaps be hungrier at some points along the way. Is a life of intermittent hunger worse than being dead? Is it worse (for the parents) for their children to be occasionally hungry or for their children to be dead?

      As the comments about the Amish suggest, there is more to the having of children than just cold calculations about wealth and replacement rates.

      • Relativist says:

        I agree – “worse off” is very relative. Evolutionarily, people’s natural objective is much more about having surviving AND reproducing offspring than high (unnaturally, irrationally, narcissistically, excessively, decadently high?) standard of life for themselves or said offspring.
        WEIRD societies seem to be the sufferers of this pathology and the outliers in our obsessive pursuit of a PARTICULAR brand of high standard of life. Who’s to say that the much more vivid but also brutish and risky life is not the exalted ideal for a fair bit of the third world population? There is an evolutionarily maladaptive high price for “modern” life that is often not appreciated ….
        If there is a Malthusian Trap, there also must be a High Standard Blind Alley …..

        • keranih says:

          WEIRD societies seem to be the sufferers of this pathology and the outliers in our obsessive pursuit of a PARTICULAR brand of high standard of life. Who’s to say that the much more vivid but also brutish and risky life is not the exalted ideal for a fair bit of the third world population?

          I agree nearly 100% – with the caveat that I really really prefer that individual adults be able to choose their own version of happiness to pursue. I am uncomfortable telling people that they have to have my preferences for comfort vs deprivation.

          (Which hasn’t stopped me from giving my opinion, but I hope to draw the line at dictating the actions of others.)

    • Deiseach says:

      That’s part of what I’m banging on about re: the EA craze for malaria nets. One single huge intervention on its own may not do as much good as hoped. Once you’ve saved the lives of those thirty-seven children, then what? Leave them to a future of poverty, other diseases (there’s a lot of things you can get from bad water) and lack of opportunity?

      Once again, I am not saying “Malaria nets are a bad idea”. I am saying “You need some joined-up thinking about intervention” which, I submit, traditional charities are engaging in because they have a history; they’ve already made their mistakes and – it is to be hoped – are learning from them. Where EA falls down as a movement is that it’s a little too confident it has re-invented the wheel and is so much smarter than the other bears, it doesn’t need to learn anything from them (those old dinosaurs that operate on appeals to emotion and evoking warm fuzzies in donors, not reason-based evaluation of biggest bang for buck).

      One quick, simple, technological solution is very tempting to fall for, and indeed in the instance of malaria there may well be one quick, simple, technological solution (or not, depending on insecticide resistance in mosquitoes and replacement of one species by another due to several factors). But once you’ve cracked malaria, if you are basing your ethical and effective altruism on “saving the lives of thirty-seven children”, then you have to think about what comes next.

      Which is why I’m saying not to fall into the trap of (a) giving to malaria nets because everyone says they’re the most life-saving thing (b) using GiveWell recommendations as a substitution for investigating what is needed (c) combining (a) and (b) and only giving to malaria net charities until GiveWell changes its mind about what is now its #1 recommendation.

      Malaria nets may be sexy re: QALYs but it’s not much good being malaria-free if you then contract amoebic dysentery from contaminated water sources*. Education, employment training, sustainable farming practices – all these are good, too. And indeed, since malaria is a water-related disease, eliminating it is going to be a combination of techniques and interventions, not one simple “give everyone a treated net!” solution.

      *I didn’t drink “town” water – that is, treated water supplied through a pipe network – until I was fifteen and my family moved into town. I was damn lucky because Ireland doesn’t have the same range of water-borne diseases as tropical countries, so I didn’t end up with any horrible disease (or at least I don’t think I did) but we drank untreated, unboiled water from pumps, cisterns and springs – there’s a pecking order in where you get your water, and the lowest rung on the ladder is getting drinking water straight from the river. In my twenties I was amused by the council stoppering pumps and standpipes on the grounds that the water was unsafe to drink, as this was precisely the water everyone had been drinking for years.

      • Ariel Ben-Yehuda says:

        We would *like* to get to a stage where we have other things to think about other than malaria, but as currently malaria is not yet a solved problem, solving it in more places will lead to more good to a greater number than other courses of action.

        As, despite of their poverty, African families seem to be quite happy in their part, making their life less crappy in some way will just make them better.

        If EA had a few billion dollars to play around with, it may be worth it to try and develop infrastructure in some places (I don’t know – I hadn’t run the numbers), but currently we barely have enough to make a small dent in the malaria problem, so dreaming that we have billions of dollars will not help.

        • Notusuallysoanonymous says:

          My father has made maybe $200 million in his career and has given something like $160 million in charity and taxes, and won’t consider EA. Vexing. Great for his alma maters endowment, though

      • Tracy W says:

        Leave them to a future of poverty, other diseases (there’s a lot of things you can get from bad water) and lack of opportunity?

        What are we left with in the West? A future of growing old, other diseases (there’s a lot of things clean drinking water can’t fix) and lack of opportunity?

        People in Africa seem to enjoy their lives, on the whole. Utility may rise with income but that doesn’t mean that utility is negative at median African levels. And we are all going to die one day, maybe painfully, maybe a long dragged out process. Doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy life before then.

      • Nathan says:

        This is part of why I tend to prefer just giving people money and letting them figure out for themselves how to translate that into life improvement.

        • Cadie says:

          This is a good thing, though part of the appeal of things like malaria nets is that when they’re given out in bulk, it’s cheaper per unit than if people had some money and bought them individually. If (I’m just pulling these numbers out of thin air for illustration) it cost $10 USD for a family to buy a net, but $5 USD each if they were purchased in large amounts by a charity and distributed, then twice as many people can be helped in this way for the same cost. So it’s a matter of balancing “people allocating their money in the way that is best for them” and “maximizing the value of limited funds.” I don’t know what the right answer is or if there even is a right answer. It’s that there are two important considerations here that conflict and optimizing for one means less of the other.

    • ThrustVectoring says:

      So we deal with the problem of giving them clean water as well as the knock-on effect of population growth that that causes. Basically, it turns a cheap problem into a slightly more expensive problem.

      I’m not sure what the big deal is. It’s an argument that solving “access to clean water” is more expensive than you thought it’d be. Without numbers attached it’s basically really shitty fearmongering.

    • Adam Casey says:

      Malthus is basically universally wrong. Others have discussed this far better than I but tldr:

      1) We’re really good at growing economies faster than population. Even in Africa that happens (though it often takes external intervention), as the rule rather than the exception.

      2) Better healthcare tends to result in the demographic transition rather than a simple growth in population.

      3) The limiting factor in developing countries isn’t resources, it’s crappy government. So an increased population doesn’t actually make the problems much worse.

    • Wait, wait, aren’t birth rates falling pretty much globally across the board? For example, see http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/09/fertility-rate-africa/

      The rapidly slowing rate of childbearing will have global population peak in the early 2030s at a level in the lower 8 billions, unless there is some further change to attitudes on children that makes people have more or even fewer kids.

      I’m guessing the long-term fall in childbearing would be countered only weakly, if at all, by specific policy-driven improvements to health. And indeed, overall health is also improving worldwide, while birth rates are declining.

      • Linch says:

        Yeah…I never really understood the Malthusian appeal when reality so clearly disagrees.

        • Malthus himself had a clever and persuasive argument, although it’s implication turned out to be false. It wasn’t that the world was going to hell because of overpopulation, although that’s what a lot of people imagine it to be.

          His argument was that the standard of living of the mass of the population could never become and remain high enough so that bringing up children was not a substantial sacrifice. He was responding to Godwin and Condorcet, who had offered a utopian vision of the future. Malthus argued that people like sex, that if they engage in as much sex as they would like the population will expand geometrically at something close to the biological maximum, and although technological and economic progress might keep up with that for a while, eventually the exponential growth of population will exceed the arithmetic growth of output, driving real incomes back down to a level at which people have a strong incentive to refrain from sex in order not to have to bear the costs of bringing up more children.

          He had the bad fortune to make this elegant argument just before the beginning of (I think) the first period in history when real incomes rose substantially over a very long period.

          • Linch says:

            Yes, I should have clarified. Before the Industrial Revolution, it makes sense ex ante why people might believe in Malthus’ arguments, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense ex post.

            This reminds me, Gary Becker came to my college once and he mentioned that there was a famous economist who decried the end of a wage premium of higher education (this was right before the returns to higher education started to boom in the 1980s). I can’t remember the name of said economist. :/ Do you by any chance know?

          • I’m afraid I don’t. Stigler perhaps?

          • John Schilling says:

            He had the bad fortune to make this elegant argument just before the beginning of (I think) the first period in history when real incomes rose substantially over a very long period.

            Assuming continued population growth, there will eventually come a time when all resources within the human sphere of influence are converted to food/clothing/shelter at perfect efficiency, or asymptotically close to it. At that point, the human sphere of influence will grow linearly or perhaps geometrically, whereas population growth is exponential. Malthus was right in the past, and barring extinction or perfect stasis will be right in the end. As you say, bad timing.

            As for when this will be, at the current growth rate the human population will be roughly one hundred billion as far in the future as Malthus’s writings are in the past. Thirty quintillion (3E19) as far into the future as our nominal “year zero” is in the past, and better than an undecillion (1E36) as far in the future as the dawn of recorded history is in the past.

            We could accommodate the latter, barely, with a Dyson Shell around every star in the Virgo Supercluster. Which would buy us another 1500 years, maybe, before the universe is filled with humanity.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The easiest disproof of Malthus is to run it backwards.

            If population goes geometric and food production linearly, and they are perfectly aligned right now, why in the world were people overproducing food 50 years ago, and even more so 100 years ago?

          • John Schilling says:

            If population goes geometric and food production linearly, and they are perfectly aligned right now

            Wait, who said they are “perfectly aligned right now”? We are now, and were fifty and a hundred years ago, in one of the historically narrow windows when Malthus does not immediately apply. I don’t think anyone seriously disagrees with this, only with when that window can be expected to end.

          • @Edward Scissorhands:

            Malthus didn’t say that population goes geometric. He said it would go geometric in a world where most people were well enough off so that having children was not a significant cost to them. That doesn’t describe the world of the past fifty or a hundred years. It does describe the world that Godwin and Condorcet, who he was arguing with, projected.

            One problem with his argument, corrected in Ricardo’s version, was that he didn’t allow for the possibility that the mass of the population would substantially increase what they regarded as an acceptable standard of living, with the result that even if real incomes doubled, having children would still be a sacrifice. Another problem—I haven’t read enough Malthus to be sure of the reason for it—is that he didn’t allow for non-reproductive sex. Even the rhythm method is probably good enough to hold population growth to close to zero if people want to, at least prior to modern medicine. Add in interruptus, oral sex, etc. and his elegant argument becomes considerably less convincing, even without modern birth control technology.

        • Notusuallysoanonymous says:

          Except, you know, all the places that are already in the Malthusian trap and are just being bailed out by other places that arent

  4. Jiro says:

    What is a good dedicated MP3 player to get, now that phones have made them rare? It should have good battery life, be small (but have some sort of display that shows album art), and have at least 32G storage. It should also not be a high priced scam.

    Note: One common answer is “get a cheap phone and only use it as a MP3 player”. This tends to fail because
    — cheap phones tend to have horrible battery life
    — cheap phones tend to be too large
    — cheap phones often have odd limitations (I ran into one which would not do *anything*, not even non-phone functions, unless activated as a phone)
    — It is generally impossible to find enough information about a particular model of cheap phone to make an informed decision about whether I want to buy it for use as a MP3 player
    — lots of phones have no SD slot and little onboard storage

  5. Douglas Knight says:

    Why is February so short?

    I think it’s because winter is shorter than summer.

    Of course, the reason February is so short is that Julius chose it to be so, probably because it was a Roman month of penance. It was easy for him to move days between January and February. But people often say that he stole a day from February to give to his month July. Such a move is not really on the table. If he wanted the winter solstice to be on 21 December and the spring equinox to be 21 March, then he had to make December+January+February be 90 days, less than 1/4 of the year. Similarly September+October+November had to be 91 days, because that’s the length of Autumn, while Spring is March+April+May=92 days and Summer is June+July+August=92 days.

    (I ignore the fact that the solstices and equinoxes are not always on the 21st. The imbalance between the seasons is even bigger.)

    Julius couldn’t get the solstices and equinoxes to fall on the same days of the month just by luck. It must be intentional. And the ancient Greeks did know the lengths of the seasons.

    Specifically, Callippus measured them and I learned about this by reading about him, but I could have figured it out several other ways. I had always heard that the Earth was closer to the Sun in the winter than the summer, from which it follows that winter is shorter than summer, but it never occurred to me that it was an appreciable amount. I probably heard that the Earth was 1% closer, which didn’t sound like much, but 1% of 365 is several days. I could have learned about the lengths of the seasons just from looking at a calendar, from thinking about the brevity of February, but I never did.

    • marc says:

      By summer I assume you mean northern hemisphere summer

    • Evan Þ says:

      Nitpick: The 25th, not the 21st. The equinoxes and solstices are on the 21st now because the Julian calendar has three too many leap days every four hundred years, and Pope Gregory only corrected the discrepancy back to the time of the Council of Nicaea.

      • Right! And in England, until 1752 when the Gregorian calendar was adopted, the year started on March 25.

        Yes, strange as it may seem, a day like March 24, 1731 would be immediately followed by March 25, 1732. The start of the year was moved to January in 1752.

        Of course, in Catholic countries, and in Scotland, the New Year’s move to the beginning of January had already been done more than a century earlier, so there was some awareness that the English system was a little screwy. Hence, dates from January 1 to March 24 would sometimes be written to express both years, in the form: February 11, 1731/2.

        When George Washington was born in Virginia (a colony of England), the English date was February 11, 1731 (or 1731/2). For biographical purposes, his birth date was later retroactively “changed” to the Gregorian date, February 22, 1732.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Thanks! I was wondering about that.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Actually, I think Julius was incorrect about the dates of the solstices and equinoxes. But if we want to know what he was trying to do, we need to know whether he thought he put them on the same date of the months. According to this he put them at 25 December, 25 March, 24 June, and 24 September. Except that Romans didn’t use dates like 25 December. They used negative dates. They were all on the same date of each month, -8. Why -8? That doesn’t sound like a round number (nor does +21 nor +25). Maybe because it was a week before the first of the month? Back on the lunar calendar he was replacing, the first of the month was a new moon, so -8 was a half moon, so maybe an important day, like the ides and nones. But that seems like a lousy reason in his solar calendar.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Forgetting Julius and going back to Callippus, one point I find interesting is that it demonstrates that the earth-sun orbit (or something) is not uniform circular motion. Another observation is that size of the sun or moon changes. It is hard to measure their sizes, let alone their changes, but it is very easy to observe that sometimes one is larger, sometimes the other. Specifically, there exist both total eclipses, demonstrating that the moon is larger than the sun, and annular eclipses, demonstrating the opposite.

    • Mary says:

      February was the ghosts’ months. You don’t want to offend the ghosts, do you? They’re trouble enough as is.

    • hawkice says:

      My understanding was that the year ended in mid-March back then, so February was sized smaller because the year didn’t have quite enough days. So perhaps it’s not why-is-February-small so much as why are the other months slightly bigger?

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Even if February were the last month and had to take whatever days were leftover, there is still the mystery of all the other decisions that left 28 days.

        One story says that the original calendar had the 10 months starting with March ending with December (hence the numeric name) and the days of winter didn’t have moons. There’s a second legendary calendar that made January and February both special in having 28 days. But by the immediately pre-Julian period January was an ordinary month with 29 days.

        The pre-Julian calendar was only 355 days, so February wasn’t everything left over. Julius chose to lengthen most of the months, even special January. If the calendar were simple, say, alternating 30 and 31, then the answer would be that February is what’s left over. But the choices of which months are 30 and 31 is complicated.

        I suppose you could say that he (1) chose not to touch February; (2) promoted all 29s to 30s; and (3) had a few extra days to promote 30s to 31s, so all his freedom was choosing August, December, and January. In fact, subject to those rules, promoting December and January was the way to maximize the length of winter, opposite to my claim that he was trying to minimize the length of winter.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      I’ve changed my mind. Julius couldn’t get the solstices and equinoxes to all fall on the same day by luck. But he got them wrong, so there’s nothing to explain. He probably just didn’t care. He put the true winter solstice on -8 January and probably just defined the other observed solstices and equinoxes to be on the -8th for symmetry. It’s probably just a coincidence that he made winter a little short (not even short enough). Maybe it’s short because he ran out of days, as Hawkice says. Probably he didn’t want to touch it because it was special. Maybe he even made December and January long to try to lengthen winter, exactly opposite to my original theory.

  6. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    In “Sexual Principles”, Free Northerner makes a great point; careerism and late marriage is fundamentally incompatible with sexual abstinence. The bottom line is that young adults are going to have sex, period. The traditional solution to this problem is early marriage, while progressives don’t consider fornication to be a problem in the first place. Mainstream conservatives, however, buy into the progressive frame that careers are of paramount importance and that young adults are not ready for marriage, so they try to have their cake and eat it too by pushing abstinence and purity. But this usually doesn’t work, and to the extent that it does work it is a cruel and unnatural solution.

    • Anonymous says:

      One theoretical alternative would be for women to marry young, have children in their 20s, then start a high flying career in their early 30s.

      • Jacobian says:

        And then once the kids grow up and the career is secure they should switch to a wild, swinging, orgiastic open marriage in their 40s to make up for lost sex!

      • Calvin says:

        This is what we did. Now we are poor because one income, and the wife is having to fight both ageism AND sexism at work.

        A lot of the ageism is institutional too. Think things like “30 innovators under 30.” No room there for moms who took time off.

      • Calico Eyes says:

        One of course, can very easily start a high flying career after showing off ones capabilities with a 10 YO, an 8 YO, and a 5 YO after less comparative work experience in a job setting where corporations shy away from relevent standardized testing and view previous work experience as a marshmellow/authority-deference test (with some validity, annoyingly), with undue praise of 60 HR work weeks…..that one can’t do due to the three young ones at home….and one would likely end up too worried about to want to consistently work long hours even in dream job settings.

      • I have often thought the same thing. It does seem like the best of both worlds, since you get the period of the woman’s highest fertility and kids with their mother at home, but you still have a few decades to do something else afterwards.

        Unfortunately, there’s a lot of institutional and cultural inertia against it, as others have pointed out.

        That said, a surprising number of the traditionalist families that I know in America have done something kind of similar, in which the mother transitions to a home business as the kids get older. This isn’t a “high flying career”, but it’s interesting and rewarding for the women, and the income involved can be substantial.

    • A says:

      “Elite young men would usually marry in their mid-twenties, after a year or more of military service and some initial experience attending cases and even pleading in the criminal or civil courts.”

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Men delaying marriage until age X and then marrying women 18 or younger has been really common historically, and seems incompatible with any education system fair to girls.
        Of course it’s not the only traditional pattern. Late pre-modern Hindus tended to marry children to each other when they were barely old enough to not Westermarck on each other and let them grow up to make babies in the groom’s parents’s house.

    • onyomi says:

      I do wonder sometimes what it would be like to live in a society with institutions which made sense, but I suppose it is a tradeoff for modernity: my guess is that the longer a society has experienced little technological and/or demographic change the more adaptive will its institutions grow to their specific circumstances; but who wants to stymie technological progress and/or freedom of movement long enough to allow that?

      Like, maybe the best society for our current demography/level of technological/economic development is one in which young people take 10 years off during their late-teens-early-twenties to pair off and raise young children with the help of their parents before returning to their careers. But by the time that institution develops technology and society may well have changed dramatically once again.

      Maybe the best alternative really is to–like the Amish–live in a reactionary enclave within a technologically advanced society.

      Or maybe I underestimate the degree to which more static premodern societies were also wracked with internal contradictions?

      • Which problem are you trying to solve?

        • onyomi says:

          I’m talking primarily about the mismatch between biology and society/economy. Mismatches like: teenagers want to pair off and start having sex, but the society/economy wants them to be responsible adults in training getting ready for a job rather than raising children and suffering VD.

          Different societies have had different ways of dealing with this and similar problems, and I’m not saying our society has no such coping mechanisms (the response to the letter in the post would be the typical one–teach them to wrap it up), just that they’re not as well developed or congruent with the other demands of society as they probably have been in previous, more static historical societies.

          • keranih says:

            That we’ve denigrated the social role of “raising kids” as only something uneducated (ie, lazy and/or stupid) women do probably doesn’t help.

            I recall (late 1970’s) my father and grandfather speaking of the son of a friend of the family, that he had “finally gotten serious, married, and was acting like an adult” in his midtwenties. That he had a job and graduated college was not an indicator of his adulthood, but his taking on the responsibility of a family was.

            We seem to hold that it is not possible to value both families and advanced education. I am not sure that we have to make this either/or, although I agree that advancing one is easier than trying to optimize both.

          • Anonymous says:

            Maybe this whole bespoke, artisanal movement will help there. From a sort-of whigish point of view, a highly educated, highly intelligent, hard working woman spending decades raising 1-3 kids looks awfully in efficient and un-modern. Why not leverage technology and specialization to have a top talent be responsible for many more children?

            But in the last ten to twenty years society has started pushing back against mass produced goods, finding the hand made ones superior even when they are objectively inferior in some ways (e.g. ugly vegetables that taste better). Of course these things cost more money but apparently that’s a luxury we can afford.

            I guess the status trick is to separate out what the upper middle class and wealthy women are doing from what illiterate poor women are doing and have done for centuries. A rebranding is needed — instead of stay at home mom, what about devopment facilitator?

          • Tom says:

            Isn’t this problem basically solved by contraception? I’m not sure I get it.

          • Its’ likely that everything since prehistoric forager bands has required people to make uncomfortable trade-offs…and that late capitalist societies are closer to the comfortable forager ideal, than earlier historical socieities. (These are standard assumptions in the Hanson sphere).

            Some specifics would be helpful. Society isn’t a great illustration of how the progressive approach works, in particular, because it implement it half heartedly compare to , say, the Scandinavian counties.

      • Adam says:

        It’s funny you identify this as an ideal society when that fairly well describes my family. Two of my sisters took their twenties off to have kids and basically stayed with my parents. I did not, and (so far) my youngest sister has not. Presumably, she and I will end up with more excess income in our 40s and 50s and can easily help out the sisters who had kids, and we all go about, happily doing what each individually prefers, reproducing on average at replacement level as a family.

        It seems to me like the biggest hurdle to doing this society-wide is that people are extremely loathe to help out women who take off their 20s to have kids when they aren’t immediate family.

        • onyomi says:

          Ideal, at least for our current society and level/kind of technological development. I think the ideal is going to be a moving target because society and technology are always changing but biology mostly doesn’t.

          As for there not being enough people around to help the young women with their children, I think this is part of the maladaption of our current society: currently most people don’t have very big families as they did in the past, and, maybe more importantly, are often spread all over the place for jobs. Hence, the likelihood of having a mother or sister or aunt (or uncle) living near you and willing to shoulder some of such burden is less.

          It is interesting, however, that your family intentionally or unintentionally hit upon this solution. If we stayed were we are for a while this might become more and more common, but if there is another huge social/technological/economic shift of some kind we may find ourselves one or more steps behind again.

          • Anonymous says:

            because society and technology are always changing but biology mostly doesn’t.

            Maybe that’s the solution.

    • Tracy W says:

      Latish-marriage is a long-standing Western European thing amongst the middle and lower classes, which were the bulk of the population.

      And of course, the combination of vicioius STDs and lack of antibiotics meant massive social pressures for chastity within marriage.

      • anon says:

        Fidelity within marriage, maybe? Chastity within marriage seems to defeat the purpose of marriage

        • The original Mr. X says:

          No, you’re thinking of abstinence within marriage. Chastity means having the right attitude towards sex, not having no sex. People tend to get confused on that point because it’s usually mentioned in the context of pre-marital sex, when chastity requires abstinence, and not in the context of marriage, when it doesn’t.

        • Deiseach says:

          “Fidelity within marriage” is getting rewritten, anon, as in the case of “Steve and Adam”; now it means “you are my main partner/the person I am committed to” and the sexual encounters outside of marriage are only for fun, immediate sexual attraction to that particular person, or to do the kinky sex my main partner doesn’t enjoy.

          So yes, chastity within marriage has a definite meaning.

      • JDG1980 says:

        Latish-marriage is a long-standing Western European thing amongst the middle and lower classes, which were the bulk of the population.

        I wonder if lack of proper nutrition meant that people in the middle and lower classes in pre-industrial Europe entered puberty later and/or had weaker sex drives than most people today.

        The elites in Europe tended to marry early. In general, the Wikipedia article you cite indicates that marriage was later among people in dire economic straits (e.g. the post-famine Irish), which indicates that people married as soon as they reasonably could. Another possibility is that lower and middle class individuals were having sex outside of wedlock on a fairly regular basis, but engaging in coitus interruptus or other primitive methods of birth control, and backing this up with infanticide when it failed. William L. Langer says that, in the Middle Ages, infanticide by exposure “was practiced on gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.” And, of course, unmarriageable young men always had the option of availing themselves of the world’s oldest profession.

        • No, they just worked very hard compared to moderns. If you go to bed super exhausted most of the time, it’s hard to partake even if you really really want to. Puberty was a bit later though, but that’s not such a big factor when you’re marrying at 27 fairly often and first marriages with the bride in her mid30s were not at all uncommon or that rare.

          Anyway, I missed the other comment pointing out that Free Northerner was wrong, but yeah, late marriage has been a thing with Western/Northern Europeans 4eva, even during pagan times and stuff (as far as we can guesstimate).

        • witchwestphalia says:

          I don’t have information for males, but the average age at menarche is now around 12 years old. That’s down from around 14 years around 1900. I have seen a paper saying that an average of 14 years old was true going back to the European medieval period.

          • onyomi says:

            I think eating a meat-heavy diet makes you hit puberty younger and grow bigger in general. For this reason, both hunter-gatherers and moderns are much bigger than subsistence farmers.

            Everybody wants to be tall, it seems, but it does decrease your longevity, and there are some pretty obvious advantages to not being able to get pregnant at 10. Ironically, we may be overnourished for our activity level and society–not just for the obvious reason that obesity-related problems are rampant, but maybe for more subtle reasons like this as well.

          • keranih says:

            Total calories has a bigger impact than protein (and it’s possible, although much more difficult at any economic level, to replace animal protein with plant sources) – but it’s possible to overstate the significance of this. While domestic animals have been bred for early puberty (most notably for cattle, who have a reproductive cycle that matches humans in several interesting but not pertinent ways) the genetic variation among humans doesn’t allow for the close comparisons that would allow us to easily observe the influence of different factors.

            A number of studies support the finding that average age at puberty (*) has consistently varied by geographic location (hence either genetic or lifestyle) and by wealth of the family. There is a 4 to 5 year “normal” variation between related people in the same region and lifestyle. In particular, in the Middle Ages, the average age in Scandinavia was around 16-17, while in France it was 15 years of age.

            (*) menarche is the easiest measured, but it comes fairly late in puberty. Breast development occurs about one year earlier. Development of pubic hair appears to come independently. Male puberty is harder to put specific markers on.

    • anon says:

      Walden II, B.F. Skinner’s book about his ideal society, had a throwaway line or two about how all the women would do most of their childbearing before they were 18, to take advantage of their youthful libidos and to get it out of the way so they could spend their 20s and 30s doing things they found fulfilling. The children would then be raised in communal nurseries (I think Scott mentioned Chesterton having a few words about this) by people who actually found childrearing enjoyable (which implicitly the biological mothers wouldn’t).

      I’m pretty sure there’s at least one Dark Enlightenment guy who unironically advocates that women have children at like 14, although I doubt it’s for the same reasons as Skinner

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        Hm. Speaking of the best bloodlines having the babies, which are immediately raised by lower bloodlines, see Victorian society: ladies and nannies. Even in Kipling, the baby sees his mother once a day to admire her dinner dress, the nanny preventing him from touching it.

    • Free Northerner clearly knows nothing about the entire history of Northern Europeans. Late marriage and female employment (due to being single for long periods of time in adulthood) has been a staple in places like Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland for hundreds and hundreds of years.

      The actual traditional solutions are not early marriage, but female economic power and discrete spheres for males and females.

    • Anonymous says:

      careerism and late marriage is fundamentally incompatible with sexual abstinence. The bottom line is that young adults are going to have sex, period.

      TIL that I don’t exist. Save me Descartes; you’re my only hope!

      • pneumatik says:

        Statistically, you’re unlikely. Certainly over a large population people have never found a way to keep young adults from having sex, but that doesn’t mean every young adult has sex, or even has a noticeable drive to have sex.

      • Anonymous says:

        I now have empirical evidence that there’s two of us.

  7. I really need some sort of centralized note taking/planning system. Any suggestions?

    How does one deal with reason as memetic immunity and keeping one’s identity small making it difficult to relate to others?

    Anyone know a good template for Facebook post for EA?

    What is a reasonable morality that doesn’t involve consciousness?

    • Anonymous says:

      Regarding point two: perhaps form an identity around being reasonable and open minded, relating to others over your shared enjoyment of debate and valuing of intellectual honesty. Or perhaps just get some hobbies where the different teams correspond to opinions, not claims about reality.

      • Hmm, I maybe I should ask more metaquestions or general questions. I’d fine with starting every conversation with “What have you found interesting recently?” or “What do you want to talk about?”.

        • Tracy W says:

          One of my favourite general questions is “did anything really surprise you?” Or “what surprised you the most?” Useful for people who’ve been travelling or the like.

        • Evan Þ says:

          Myself, I tend to go for “What’ve you been reading recently?” It tends to spark interesting discussion, since I’ve found I can talk about books I’d hate to read myself. It’s only failed once, with someone who hardly ever reads anything.

    • Max says:

      Personal diary is a great thing. you can keep it on google drive as spreadsheet, and access it from computer or smartphone

    • nonymous says:

      if seeking a formidably tentacular notetaking contraption, look no further::

      http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

    • “I really need some sort of centralized note taking/planning system. Any suggestions?

      Evernote?

      “How does one deal with reason as memetic immunity and keeping one’s identity small making it difficult to relate to others?”

      By dishonesty, presumably. It’s the solution to every other social problem

    • Re: relating to others: Broaden your social circle. ‘Diversity’ has been co-opted as a word, but it’s an amazingly useful concept. If you can set up multiple touching-but-not-overlapping social mini-circles, you can make it really easy to just drop sub-circles which demand that being an X-ist is the One True Path.

      You’re still cut out from “You’re an X-ist? I’m an X-ist too! Let’s commiserate about how terrible the anti-X-ists are!” with this and a small identity, but I don’t view that as a bad thing.

  8. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    What rule do rationalist utilitarians use to decide whether to bite a bullet (as in torture vs. dust specks) or to claim that a new model is needed which can better capture human intuitions (as in the lifespan dilemma)? It seems to me like half the time they are treating utilitarianism as the map, and the other half of the time they are treating it as the territory.

    • eponymous says:

      I don’t think there’s a simple algorithm, beyond thinking about why the output of your rule conflicts with your intuitions. You just have to think hard about exactly why they conflict, and try to figure out if this is because there’s a problem with your rule, or a bug in how your brain works (like scope insensitivity, in the torture vs. dust speck case) that throws off your intuition.

      I’m also not a big fan of bullet biting in general, assuming you don’t understand *why* your calculations are giving you something that contradicts your intuitions. Intuitions usually exist for good reasons.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Why do people insist on trying to fit ethics in to one single model instead of accepting that we have diverse, sometimes conflicting moral intuitions?

      • Creutzer says:

        Because they (mistakenly) believe that there are moral truths.

        • Simon says:

          There might be moral truths, but they can be contradictory.

          My grandfather escaped the train to Auschwitz with his brother, and they made it to the border of Switzerland. They were stopped, almost arrested, but managed to escape again and finally crossed the border a few kilometers away.

          I really doubt if anyone on SSC would say this illegal action by my grandfather is morally bad. But, on the other hand, if Switzerland would have opened its borders to all Jewish refugees, that would have had some seriously negative consequences. There’s a ton of stuff to blame Switzerland for around WW2, but not loudly welcoming Jewish refugees isn’t one of them.

          So there’s now a law (Jewish refugees not welcome) and people trespassing that law, and they’re both probably morally good from a consequentionalist perspective.

          I think Merkel’s “wir schaffen das” was probably bad, I think reducing the number of refugees coming to Europe is probably good, I think every individual trying to escape Syria and lying about their circumstances to get a better shot at refugee-status isn’t morally bad.

          Unless you want to get Kant involved in this.

          • Jiro says:

            If Switzerland took in as many refugees as it could reasonably accommodate, that means that the marginal refugee in addition to this number has an overall negative effect. It’s a real-life case of torture versus dust specks–taking in an additional refugee saves the refugee but has distributed negative effects over the whole population, affecting each person by a tiny amount but adding up to more disutility than saving the refugee brings utility. And since you admit that taking in ever single refugee would be bad, you admit there is a point where the dust specks from an additional refugee outweigh the torture suffered by the refugee being put in a concentration camp.

            So from a utilitarian point of view, the illegal action by your grandfather *is* morally bad–he avoids torture, but creates a lot of dust specks that are worse. I don’t think many utilitarians will admit this, but it seems to me like a logical consequence of utilitarianism.

            (I would personally allow it on the grounds that I am not utilitarian. Harm to yourself is more important than harm to strangers, so you are not obligated to balance utility in such situations except in extreme cases.)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Yes, there is no “contradiction in moral truths” here.

            It is in your grandfather’s interest to enter Switzerland, but it is (allegedly) in the interest of the people of Switzerland to keep him out. Since (we suppose) the negative consequences to the people of Switzerland are more severe than the negative consequences of your grandfather of being killed, it is for the greater good that he be kept out and killed.

            Therefore, if utilitarianism is true, your grandfather acted immorally, preferring his selfish interest to the good of the whole. That is, if we make the highly dubious assumption that Switzerland was taking in as many refugees as it could get away with, without Germany invading and killing everybody.

            It’s the same with Syrian refugees. If you believe (and I don’t) that each refugee causes, on net, a greater harm to Europe than the value of his own life, under utilitarianism it is moral for the border guards to stop them and immoral for them to refuse to be stopped. They ought to accept the sacrifice of their own lives to the greater good of Europe.

            I should make clear: I am not a utilitarian.

          • Simon says:

            @ Jiro & Vox

            I think there is a contradiction, and it’s a matter of scale.

            There is absolutely no reason for Switzerland to deny my grandfather and his brother entry. They’re just two guys, they were pretty moral people, the Germans won’t invade to catch these two jews. The problem is only that it’s not just these two, but they’re part of a way larger group.

            I’m a Dutch leftie (though not an open borders person) and I think my small country can easily handle hundreds of thousands of refugees. But that could never happen in a vacuum. There are already (small) riots and anti-immigrant violence by the right. Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV is polling as by far the biggest party, etc.

            Compare it to a (fictional) mother from Burundi who finds out she has breast cancer. She saves money to get to Europe, tells a made-up story about patriarchal oppression, gets asylum, and can get a life-saving operation. To me this is a morally just, feel-good story. But that completely changes when it becomes a common narrative.

            Just like Switzerland could easily deal with my grandfather, the Dutch medical system can easily deal with a couple of immigrants with health problems. It can not handle groups as easily.

            (Dutch media tries to make a distinction between refugees and ‘fortune seekers’ and I think that’s very dumb and just based on emotion)

            Ethics is really an emergent property. The media might select for emotional stories, and I haven’t read a single account from a refugee where I thought ‘we should send that person back’. But if I take all of them together, maybe we should. There was a NYT story last week about people trying to start again in Raqqa. One guy still there was a father of three sons. Two were killed by ISIS, and even though Raqqa is now supposedly freed, he sent his last son to Europe, because he didn’t want to risk losing him.

            I would never characterize that son as a ‘fortune seeker’, and think he should get refugee status until the situation in Raqqa is absolutely safe. But when I look at it in the context of the millions of others who are also trying to get refugee status, maybe my sympathy drops.

            I personally struggle with this, not in the least because of my own family’s history. But I do think that ethics on a personal level and ethics on a national level are just completely different things.

            Scale changes a lot in the maybe-not-really-existing ontology of ethics.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Simon:

            There is still no contradiction.

            Switzerland should have let in as many Jews as they could up to the tipping point where one more Jew would have caused a Nazi invasion. Since they don’t know exactly what that is, you can also say: with a margin of safety.

            Now in fact, I think that number is “all the Jews they wanted”, since Sweden let in all the Jews from Denmark and Germany didn’t do shit. Germany didn’t invade anywhere just to get the Jews. They invaded places to win the war, and rounded up Jews as a secondary priority.

            Similarly, the Netherlands should let in as many refugees as they can up until the point where one more refugee would mean society (allegedly) collapses, Geert Wilders becomes dictator, and things become worse on net for everyone. Since they don’t know exactly how many that is, you can also say: with a margin of safety.

            Now if you believe in utilitarianism, and if you believe the Netherlands has already crossed the margin of safety where they shouldn’t be letting immigrants in, then you would have to say that these refugees are immoral because they are putting their private interest above the common good.

            To deny this conclusion, you can either deny that the Netherlands has crossed the margin of safety—and therefore it’s perfectly moral for more refugees to come in—and/or deny utilitarianism: that the refugees have any obligation to put the common good over their private good.

            In fact, I do deny both. I don’t think it harms the people of the Netherlands on net to let in more refugees, and even if it did harm them more than it helped the refugees, there is no reason the refugees should care.

            The only contradiction comes in when you apply two different standards, one to the personal level and another to the national level. And this is what a lot of people do: they are soft-hearted and soft-brained on the personal level, and amoral Machiavellian bastards on the national level. They act totally inconsistently and when people call them on this, they don’t know what to do. The solution is: don’t do that.

          • “Dutch media tries to make a distinction between refugees and ‘fortune seekers’”

            I think there is a legitimate distinction between refugees, who come because they are in great risk elsewhere and would come almost whatever tolerable terms they were offered, and people who come—probably to Germany rather than Holland—because the host government offers free benefits that would be an improvement over their previous condition even if there was no conflict at home.

            But there is an intermediate case–people who are happy to come, get a job, support themselves, not because things are horrible where they came from but because Holland is a much more attractive place to live and work than Syria—and was long before the present conflict.

            My view is that you should let those people in—I’m a supporter of free immigration. But you should not offer welfare benefits or the equivalent that make immigration attractive to people who plan to freeload on the system.

            I gather the Czech Republic has more or less that policy—relatively free immigration, but no welfare benefits for immigrants for an extended period of time. It was the de facto policy of the U.S. for most of its history—until the 1920’s, with some exceptions for East Asian immigrants.

          • Jiro says:

            There is absolutely no reason for Switzerland to deny my grandfather and his brother entry. They’re just two guys, they were pretty moral people, the Germans won’t invade to catch these two jews. The problem is only that it’s not just these two, but they’re part of a way larger group.

            If they’re part of a larger group, adding one individual Jew incrementally increases the probability that the Germans will invade. The utility of Switzerland from adding that one extra Jew decreases by (extra probability of the Germans invading) * (damage caused if the Germans invade). If this utility is greater than one life worth of utility, Switzerland should keep your grandfather out.

            The decrease in utility from adding one more person is not zero just because the Germans “won’t invade” to catch the extra person–the Germans are incrementally more likely to invade. You can’t round this incremental likelihood to zero just because it’s not very large.

            @Vox:

            Switzerland should have let in as many Jews as they could up to the tipping point where one more Jew would have caused a Nazi invasion.

            No, that’s wrong. Although in hindsight the Nazis either invade or not, when you’re not using hindsight there’s a probability that the Nazis will invade. The tipping point is not the point where you go from no invasion to invasion, since that’s only knowable in hindsight. The tipping point is where the slightly greater chance of invasion (multiplied by the loss of many lives in the invasion) balances out against a life.

            Germany didn’t invade anywhere just to get the Jews. They invaded places to win the war, and rounded up Jews as a secondary priority.

            People do things for multiple reasons, and each reason affects the probability of them doing the thing. Perhaps if a place has lots of Jews it only increases their chance of invading from 50% to 55%. You still have to calculate the incremental loss of life caused by the extra 5% chance of invasion.

          • Simon says:

            @ Jiro & Vox

            I agree, that’s the correct way to view everything from an outsider perspective. But I think we all agree that it’s logical to put a little more worth on our own lives than on that of others. Unless you’re Peter Singer. It would be absurd to expect my grandfather to think of the consequences of all fleeing Jews entering Switzerland at once. He’s weighing his own life against a .0001 extra chance of a nazi invasion, and it’s an obvious choice.

            @ David Friedman

            I agree there are theoretical cases where there’s an obvious difference. But I don’t think there’s a real dividing line. Which ones would you think of as refugees, and which ones as fortune seekers?

            A. The son from the NYT article. Even though his city is now ‘safe’, his two brothers were killed and his father doesn’t want to take the risk. His city has been freed, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.
            B. A seventeen-year-old Christian who fled Syria at the beginning of the war and ended up in a Turkish refugee camp. He’s pretty smart and was about to enter university, but after a year in the camp it’s clear there is no option for further education. He can either stay here, and waste the most valuable years of his life, or go to Europe and try to get an education there.
            C. A mother in Afghanistan sees some ISIS preacher move into her community. She’s heard that there are now more and cheaper refugee routes to Europe, and knowing that her village is poor and vulnerable to religious extremism, she takes her kids with her to Turkey in the hopes of taking a boat to Greece leading to Germany.

            These three people are not in mortal danger, and right-wing blogs would characterize them as ‘fortune seekers’. I wouldn’t say they are pure refugees, but I hope it explains why I think the binary divide between opportunists and ‘real’ refugees is way too simplistic.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Simon:

            That’s called “rejecting utilitarianism”, and if we reject it at the personal level, I don’t see why we should accept it at the national level, either. So I don’t see where the contradiction comes from.

          • Simon asks:

            “Which ones would you think of as refugees, and which ones as fortune seekers?”

            The fortune seekers are the ones who wouldn’t come if no financial support, free housing, or similar benefits were being offered. The ones who would still come under those circumstances are one of the other two categories, both of which I am in favor of letting in.

          • Simon says:

            @ Vox

            I know. I’m one of those weird people who still defend virtue ethics.

            @ David

            But that seems really weird. It creates situations where someone is a ‘real’ refugee, escaping war, but if they then move to another country that offers a better future, suddenly they’re a fortune seeker. If someone whose family has been murdered by ISIS flees to Turkey they’re a refugee, but if they then move from Turkey to The Netherlands in the hope of asylum and (nearly) free college and housing they suddenly transform into a fortune seeker.

            It seems obvious to me the two overlap.

          • Anon says:

            @Simon,

            In the situation you have described, I would say that that person was indeed a real refugee when he fled to Turkey, and that he became a fortune seeker when he decided safety in Turkey was not good enough for him.

            I don’t see any contradiction here. Sure, there’s some overlap between the categories, but just because someone starts out as a real refugee doesn’t mean he can use the excuse of “fleeing violence” to head to the Netherlands when he has already made it to a safe nation like Turkey. It becomes obvious that though fleeing violence may have been his reason for going to Turkey, it is not his reason for going to the Netherlands.

            I think this person’s choice to flee from ISIS and head to Turkey was morally acceptable because his life was in mortal danger. His choice to leave a safe nation for another safe nation with a higher standard of living, on the other hand, is not morally acceptable. He has no inalienable right to live in the Netherlands, and he is not in any danger that could justify his choice to enter illegally. The fact that the Netherlands is a nicer place to live does not justify illegal entrance.

            Wanting free college doesn’t give you the right to go to the Netherlands. I’d like free college too (I’m American), but that does not give me the right to go there and expect the Dutch taxpayer to pay for it for me. And even if the United States became embroiled in a dangerous war that imperiled my life, if I were to flee to a safe nation with a below-first-world standard of living (such as, say, Mexico), I would not have the right to then enter the Netherlands illegally from there because I like its standard of living more. And if I tried to do so anyway, I would be acting immorally and it would be absolutely correct for the Dutch government to deport me back to Mexico.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        Because a huge part of this blog and intellectual debate stems from hard sciences, and when you’re used to things being relatively easily proven true, such views carry over to fuzzier matters like ethics.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        Because if you have “diverse, sometimes conflicting moral intuitions”, i.e. conflicting terminal values, you cannot rationally decide what to do, ever. That is bad because reason is the means by which human beings decide what to do and guide their lives on a level higher than that of brute animals.

        Suppose you have a terminal preference for getting the maximum amount of lemons and also getting the maximum amount of pears. Not a preference for the combined economic value of lemons and pears, not a preference for the happiness they produce, not anything else: just maximum lemons and maximum pears. Well, it’s just obvious that you can’t maximize two conflicting quantities. There is no way to rationally guide your actions, not even to do the simplest thing.

        The entire system of acting by reason implies that some of our moral intuitions are more fundamental than others, that we have some ultimate value. Every action you engage in requires that you at least act as if you do; but clearly you’re in a bad way if you act in the pursuit of one ultimate value at one moment and another at the next, with absolutely no consistency.

        • Adam Casey says:

          So I notice that in … every single field of human endeavour … we see exactly this phenomenon.

          Should the Society To Promote Music spend money on rap or classical? Obviously both, and obviously in a ratio that cannot be deduced from any rational principle, but must be determined by politics, markets, or whim.

          I don’t think that the various pro-art charities in the world are therefore incapable of using reason and must be no better than the beasts.

          We use reason to work out the best way to achieve our goals. We use reason to work out the consequences of goals on other things in the universe we care about. These things are perfectly compatible with not using reason to work out what goal to follow.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            So I notice that in … every single field of human endeavour … we see exactly this phenomenon.

            I am hardly arguing that people are incapable of being irrational.

            Should the Society To Promote Music spend money on rap or classical? Obviously both, and obviously in a ratio that cannot be deduced from any rational principle, but must be determined by politics, markets, or whim.

            “Obviously both”? Come on.

            It depends on what, specifically, they value in music. Certainly it has been argued in the past that the equivalent of the Society to Promote Music should not promote rap at all.

            If they say it should be determined by democracy, then their ultimate value is to follow the will of the majority.

            If they say it should be determined by markets, then their ultimate value is to satisfy the whims of the consumers.

            If they say it should be determined by objective aesthetic quality, then their ultimate value is whatever the philosophers determine that to be.

            If they don’t know whether it should be democracy, markets, or objective aesthetic quality (as determined by some standard), then they can’t decide whether to promote rap or classical or either or how much.

            Now, in fact, whatever they do reflects some implicit ultimate value, which they may not consciously know. And it is possible that this implicit ultimate value changes moment-to-moment. In which case their behavior is irrational and unpredictable.

            I don’t think that the various pro-art charities in the world are therefore incapable of using reason and must be no better than the beasts.

            To the extent they consciously identify a single ultimate value and act on it, their behavior is rational. To the extent that they don’t, their behavior is incoherent and irrational. It’s not all-or-nothing.

            We use reason to work out the best way to achieve our goals. We use reason to work out the consequences of goals on other things in the universe we care about. These things are perfectly compatible with not using reason to work out what goal to follow.

            It’s not about using reason to determine the ultimate value. You can’t ask “Why should I have this value?” about the ultimate value. If you could, your actual ultimate value would be the reason you gave.

            It is, as you say, about using reason to achieve your goals. But an essential part of that is to determine the hierarchical relationship between your goals.

            One goal I have is to acquire gasoline. Another goal is to get to work. They are not on an equal level. One is a means to the other. And neither is getting to work an end in itself. If I didn’t know which one was a means to the other, or didn’t know if either of them were ultimate, then I couldn’t decide what to do.

            But two conflicting ultimate values are going to imply conflicting behaviors. If it’s lemons vs. pears, at some point you’re going to have to choose lemons or pears. It’s not that you can somehow use reason to determine which ultimate value to go with; it’s that using reason assumes they can’t both be ultimate. And if you use something other than reason, such as flipping a coin, you value having consistent values more than the one you choose against.

        • “The entire system of acting by reason implies that some of our moral intuitions are more fundamental than others,”

          A particular conception of rationality, where you can come to determinate decisions, requires a clean break between terminal and instrumental values. But..

          “Suppose you have a terminal preference for getting the maximum amount of lemons and also getting the maximum amount of pears. Not a preference for the combined economic value of lemons and pears, not a preference for the happiness they produce, not anything else: just maximum lemons and maximum pears. Well, it’s just obvious that you can’t maximize two conflicting quantities. There is no way to rationally guide your actions, not even to do the simplest thing.”

          ..if you don’t have a clear terminal/instrumental distinction. you can still fulfil your values, just not determinstically. If you like lemons and pears, then you can just aim to get some lemons ad some pears on some quasi random basis. Its’ good-enough rationality.

          “The entire system of acting by reason implies that some of our moral intuitions are more fundamental than others,”

          A particular conception of rationality, where you can come to determinate decisions, requires a clean break between terminal and instrumental values. But..

          “Suppose you have a terminal preference for getting the maximum amount of lemons and also getting the maximum amount of pears. Not a preference for the combined economic value of lemons and pears, not a preference for the happiness they produce, not anything else: just maximum lemons and maximum pears. Well, it’s just obvious that you can’t maximize two conflicting quantities. There is no way to rationally guide your actions, not even to do the simplest thing.”

          ..if you don’t have a clear terminal/instrumental distinction. you can still fulfil your values, just no determinstically. If you like lemons and pears, then you can just aim to get some lemons ad some pears on some quasi random basis. Its’ good-enough rationality.

          When people hear the term “rational” they often start thinking in terms of universality and determinism, but neither of those is part of rationality defined as fulfilling ones values efficiently.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            ..if you don’t have a clear terminal/instrumental distinction. you can still fulfil your values, just not determinstically. If you like lemons and pears, then you can just aim to get some lemons ad some pears on some quasi random basis. Its’ good-enough rationality.

            That, in itself, implies that you value having some consistent way to pursue your values over either maximum lemons or maximum pears simpliciter.

            For instance, say you flip a coin for which kind of orchard you are going to plant next: heads for lemons, tails for pears, and it comes up heads. You say: “Yes, I value pears, but I value having some consistent way of pursuing my values more than simply maximizing pears.”

          • I don’t see your point. One may have meta values, but that doesn’t mean one has a clear terminal/instrumental distinction.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        1. Ethics as a guide to action: one of the things we want from an ethical theory is some sort of advice on how to conduct our lives. This will be impossible if the best we can do is rely on unsystematic judgments about particular cases. When I am unsure how to act, it is no help to tell me to trust my intuitions, because if my intuitions were decisive I would never have needed to solicit advice in the first place.

        2. As a check against bias: our moral intuitions have a suspicious tendency to ratify our own actions and reflect the prejudices of our time and culture. Abiding by abstract principles rather than running on pure intuition helps to counteract those biases.

        3. Explanatory power: in the natural sciences, a key goal of explanation is to unify as many brute facts as possible under as few principles as possible. You might think that the same holds true when it comes to ethics– it is not enough to say that it is better to act one way than another, we want some explanation of why, and the explanation that covers the widest territory with the fewest epicycles should be preferred.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          1. Ethics as a guide to action: one of the things we want from an ethical theory is some sort of advice on how to conduct our lives. This will be impossible if the best we can do is rely on unsystematic judgments about particular cases. When I am unsure how to act, it is no help to tell me to trust my intuitions, because if my intuitions were decisive I would never have needed to solicit advice in the first place.

          Yes, this is the crucial one.

          You can’t just tell me to “do what I feel”. If what I feel implied a definite course of action—if human beings had some kind of automatic instincts we couldn’t help but follow—there would be no problem. There is a problem: namely that we don’t. (Of course, this “problem” allows us to do lots of things we couldn’t if we were guided solely by instinct.)

          So I have to sit down and think about it real hard, in order to come up with the best course of action. Because I’ve got to do something. The necessity of choosing what to do cannot be escaped. Even if that choice is to do nothing, it’s still a choice.

      • eponymous says:

        > Why do people insist on trying to fit ethics in to one single model instead of accepting that we have diverse, sometimes conflicting moral intuitions?

        Because they have a strong intuition that morality should be consistent!

        More seriously, I can think of two reasons:

        (1) When confronted with mutually inconsistent choices, we must pick one. When our moral intuitions conflict, we aren’t thereby excused from picking which one to follow. Thus we can’t say “I use moral system A for thinking about decision set X, and moral system B for thinking about set Y” as long as it is possible that we may find a question in XvY about which they contradict. Because then we will have to pick one to follow.

        (2) Empirically, many things that people recognize as “moral progress” have amounted to noticing that certain principles derived from some moral intuitions were in contradiction with other moral intuitions, and then figuring out that some of our intuitions were “wrong”.

      • Jeffrey Soreff says:

        It isn’t completely crazy:

        It is somewhat analogous to trying to reconcile one’s preferences to act as if one
        had a self-consistent utility function. If one doesn’t do that, one is vulnerable
        to things like attacks that use non-transitive preferences to bleed resources away…
        Something like this can be done to someone who has inconsistent ethics and
        puts weight on their ethics when choosing their actions.

    • When the definitions of values starts to break down is when I’d be hesitant to bit the bullet. This is most prevalent when consciousness breaks down.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I don’t think there is any bullet to bite on torture vs. dust specks. Our eyes/minds are built to deal with dust specks. 1 day later each affected individual will be indistinguishable from an alternate self who was not affected. We are prohibited from consideration of follow on harms (like how many people would be expected to go blind).

      I don’t even think painfully stubbed toes with no after effects would accrue in a manner to offset the torture.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I don’t think there is any bullet to bite on torture vs. dust specks. Our eyes/minds are built to deal with dust specks. 1 day later each affected individual will be indistinguishable from an alternate self who was not affected.

        No, they won’t be indistinguishable. They will be practically indistinguishable. But one practical indistinguishability times 10^3^3^3^3^3 (or whatever it was) is a lot of distinguishability.

        This is like Zeno arguing that if you drop one speck of grain, it won’t make a sound at all. Therefore, if you drop a whole bushel of grain, it won’t make a sound either because zeroes can’t add up to something. (And therefore, he thought, helping to refute change and multiplicity.)

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Vox Imperatoris:
          Well, if the specks are all dropping on different floors at different times then none of them do make an audible sound. There is no bushel.

          Remember, we are specifically told that these dust specks do no lasting harm. We aren’t allowed to consider the idea that some very small percentage of real people would scratch their cornea when wiping away the dust and some of those would end up blind.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I really don’t see what “lasting harm” has to do with it.

            Does torture do “lasting harm”? I mean, you torture someone for 70 years, he dies, and then he’s much the same as he would have been if you hadn’t tortured him. The torture is a pain, it has more or less of an effect, which lasts for more or less of a long time, and then it’s over.

            Now, the dust speck is explicitly proposed not to be unnoticeable (as you were trying to say with the speck of grain). So there is some pain, which has more or less of an effect, which lasts for more or less of a long time, and then it’s over.

            If you can compare interpersonal utility at all, you ought to be able to add up some number of really short, small pains and have them sum to something greater than a long, severe pain.

            Now, I’m not a utilitarian. All I’d say about the situation is that the one guy has an interest in not being tortured, and the 10^3^3^3^3^3 people have an interest in torturing him.

          • Adam says:

            Of course, if the number of people suffering minor inconvenience required to make the sum of inconvenience worse than torturing one person is more than the number of atoms in the universe, that isn’t a result with any practical relevance.

            I think we all recognize the more practical tradeoffs we have to make. For instance, we could save a whole bunch of people by simply banning motor vehicles, but we don’t because it would materially harm many, many more, a lot more than a dust speck would. We accept a certain level of air pollution, battery acid and motor oil in the ocean and rivers, and fiery violent deaths and maimings as worth it. Plus, if you care about the utility of horses, I suppose we made things a lot better for them.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Of course, if the number of people suffering minor inconvenience required to make the sum of inconvenience worse than torturing one person is more than the number of atoms in the universe, that isn’t a result with any practical relevance.

            I agree. Which is why I find it amazing that people pick this of all things to object to utilitarianism on. Or to say Yudkowsky is some kind of loon because this is an obviously immoral conclusion that would have disastrous effects in real life.

            I think we all recognize the more practical tradeoffs we have to make. For instance, we could save a whole bunch of people by simply banning motor vehicles, but we don’t because it would materially harm many, many more, a lot more than a dust speck would. We accept a certain level of air pollution, battery acid and motor oil in the ocean and rivers, and fiery violent deaths and maimings as worth it. Plus, if you care about the utility of horses, I suppose we made things a lot better for them.

            Exactly. Scott’s post on health insurance is relevant here.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:

            You really think torture has no lasting effect? I would suggest reading up on torture.

            As to my point about dust specks, imagine that mamy boats, each on separate smoth lake. Now subject each boat to a head on wave that is an inch larger than the 1 inch wave it would have encountered anyway. The wave is so perfectly centered that it does not alter the boats course in any way. It has no structural effect on the boat.

            Does the impact of all of those waves on all of those boats sum?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            You really think torture has no lasting effect? I would suggest reading up on torture.

            You completely misunderstand me.

            Of course the effects of torture on a person last longer than getting a dust speck in your eye! That’s obvious.

            The effects of torture no doubt last a person’s whole life. But his life only lasts so long. The effects of torture are not infinite. They are in principle comparable to dust specks. Both the effects of torture and the effects of dust specks last a certain amount of time, and then they end. The difference in their “lasting effects” is merely quantitative.

            As to my point about dust specks, imagine that mamy boats, each on separate smoth lake. Now subject each boat to a head on wave that is an inch larger than the 1 inch wave it would have encountered anyway. The wave is so perfectly centered that it does not alter the boats course in any way. It has no structural effect on the boat.

            Does the impact of all of those waves on all of those boats sum?

            Of course they sum! Why would they not sum?

            The only difference is that the sum is irrelevant because the higher wave is not bad in itself. The dust specks cause pain, which is bad in itself.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:

            Pain is information. It warns of potential injury.

            Pain without injury (including psychological injury) is not necessarily bad. People do things that hurt all the time.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            Pain is information. It wanna of potential injury.

            Pain without injury (including psychological injury) is not necessarily bad. People do things that hurt all the time.

            Jesus Christ.

            Now we’re just moving the goalposts.

            What, exactly, do you take to be the definition of injury? It’s not bad in itself to get your arm ripped off or something. It’s bad because it causes pain, and because it makes it more difficult for you to acquire values in the future. But the pain itself is an injury: that’s why we give people anaesthetic.

            Pain is not just “information”. That’s simply false. It has an inherently negative quality.

            Even masochists who cause pain to themselves do so because they gain a greater pleasure out of it.

            The people who get dust specks in their eyes are injured: something is done to them that would have been better not to happen. It is not a large or significant injury, and they recover almost immediately. But it’s an injury nonetheless.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            No. That isn’t moving the goalposts.

            Ripping your arm off is not “bad because it causes pain.” It’s the loss of the arm that sucks. Even if your arm was instantly restored, the psychological damage would probably also be lasting.

            There are many many non-masochists who seek pain. People who work out. People who engage in contact sport. People who touch their fingers to hot wax.

            You understand how twilight sedation works, right? You are in pain (less pain, but still pain) but you have no memory of it. Did this pain cause you harm (assuming no lasting psychological effect.)

            As to the boats, I assume you admit that they were effected (a very small, non lasting effect). Given that, I don’t see where the effect being “bad” comes into the question of whether the effects sum.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Ripping your arm off is not “bad because it causes pain.” It’s the loss of the arm that sucks. Even if your arm was instantly restored, the psychological damage would probably also be lasting.

            What is the “psychological damage” but continuing pain and reduction in the ability to acquire happiness-producing values?

            There are many many non-masochists who seek pain. People who work out. People who engage in contact sport. People who touch their fingers to hot wax.

            They do so just for the hell of it? No, because they get some kind of greater pleasure. Take the bodybuilder: he endures a little pain now, but he also gets the pleasurable endorphin rush. And then he goes out and “picks up chicks” with his body, and he gets pleasure from that.

            You understand how twilight sedation works, right? You are in pain (less pain, but still pain) but you have no memory of it. Did this pain cause you harm (assuming no lasting psychological effect.)

            Sure, it does! If knew I were going to feel some kind of torturous pain, I wouldn’t feel any better about the prospect just from knowing I’d forget about it later. Any pain that I ever feel I’m eventually going to forget about because I’m going to die. That doesn’t mean I’m indifferent to the prospect.

            As to the boats, I assume you admit that they were effected (a very small, non lasting effect). Given that, I don’t see where the effect being “bad” comes into the question of whether the effects sum.

            What are you even trying to say here?

            Yes, the boats are affected. As I said. As are the people with the dust specks in their eyes.

            The motions of all the boats can, in principle, be added together. But this sum is not a quantity anyone is concerned with. It is irrelevant.

            The pains of all the people with dust specks in their eyes can be added together (well, this is an assumption of utilitarianism). This sum is precisely what utilitarianism says is the basis for morality: adding together the totality of all pleasure and pain, trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. (And yes, there are different forms, like preference utilitarianism. But this example is concerned with pain.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            “But this sum is not a quantity anyone is concerned with. It is irrelevant.”

            The sum of moments of small pain, endemic to the human condition, which everyone will suffer in some non-trivial amount, which have no ongoing effect is ALSO irrelevant.

            How many specks have you gotten in your eye in your life time where the pain was minor and lasted less than a second? Do you remember the last one? The one before that? Do actually have a clear memory of ANY of them?

            Roughly speaking, I am attacking the utility function in question. I don’t think there is anything to bite because I don’t think you have changed the net utility of the persons life. I also think that the fact that you didn’t change the net utility is actually defined within the problem.

            The thing about a number that big, if you just applied to random people at random times, it would ended in great harms caused to many people and some loss of utility to a great deal more. But we are specifically required not to consider that.

            Again, the contention is that humans are built to encounter dust specks in much the same way as boats are built to encounter waves.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            The sum of moments of small pain, endemic to the human condition, which everyone will suffer in some non-trivial amount, which have no ongoing effect is ALSO irrelevant.

            How many specks have you gotten in your eye in your life time where the pain was minor and lasted less than a second? Do you remember the last one? The one before that? Do actually have a clear memory of ANY of them?

            Why is it relevant whether you remember them?

            If I would pay money never again to experience tiny pains on the order of having dust specks in my eye (and I would), it’s relevant to my utility. Are you saying you wouldn’t mind receiving only a nickel in return for having 100,000 more dust specks go into your eye and irritate it for brief moments (which you will not clearly remember individually)?

            Roughly speaking, I am attacking the utility function in question. I don’t think there is anything to bite because I don’t think you have changed the net utility of the persons life. I also think that the fact that you didn’t change the net utility is actually defined within the problem.

            So dust specks have absolutely no negative utility. No, the setup of the problem assumes they do.

            Anyway, why didn’t you just say that from the start? Dust specks have no negative utility whatsoever, so you should not even pay a penny to get rid of a million of them, so obviously an infinite number of zeroes can never add up to torture.

            Again, I would say: a) not true, they do have negative utility, and b) regardless, the problem assumes they have negative utility, or it’s not even interesting.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            I did say it at the beginning, but you did not accept it. That was the purpose of stating that the person would be unaltered days later.

            As to whether I would like a nickel for each of 100,000 dust specks, this is essentially the same question as the original. Getting 300 dust specks in your eye, every day, for your whole life, is much like torture.

            A large enough wave will swamp a boat. Small waves have no effect.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            The negative effect of a dust speck cannot be zero if having 300 in your eye every day would be “like torture”. We’re not talking about them accumulating, in the way a one-ounce weight on your head is painless but a thousand pounds on your head will kill you.

            We’re talking about 300 separate instances of a dust speck getting in your eye. That means each one has to be a little bit bad. On the other hand, having a one-ounce weight on your head at 300 different times wouldn’t be bad either.

            Nor is it the same kind of thing as how one piece of chocolate cake is pleasant but twenty is horrible and will make you sick. The dust specks all individually have the same effect. The chocolate cake’s effect changes depending on how much you’ve already had.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            If you are willing to accept that Chinese Water Torture was actually a real torture, although not Chinese, then I think you can see how the mere sum of the experience is not correct, drops of water on the head can be quite pleasant.

            We have minds. The mind reacts to stimuli, but not all reactions are equal or proportionate. We discard a great deal of the input we can detect, we note and forget a great deal more.

            Maybe a different analogy will make my position more clear.

            If a train is on a track and encounters a penny on the track, it will make no difference to the train. With a sensitive enough gauge, we might detect that we ran over the penny, but the train won’t be affected. Over the course of a 100 mile journey, the train will encounter all manner of small detritus on the rail.

            But if you put a piece of metal on the rail that is large enough, the train may come close to derailment or even derail.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            If you are willing to accept that Chinese Water Torture was actually a real torture, although not Chinese, then I think you can see how the mere sum of the experience is not correct, drops of water on the head can be quite pleasant.

            The Chinese water torture works because each drop does not have the same effect. When they hit the same spot, the sensation with each one intensifies so that the while the first drop was pleasant, the thousandth drop is torture. (It’s like the chocolate cake example I gave.)

            But the dust specks are all individually the same.

            The train analogy is just bad. The difference between a penny and a piece of metal large enough to cause a derailment is the difference between a dust speck and getting stabbed in the eye with a knife.

            Anyway, I’ll prove that each dust speck has negative utility. Would I pay some amount of money to cause one dust speck not to hit my eye? Yes, I would. Some very small amount of money, maybe a ten-thousandth of a cent.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            “The difference between a penny and a piece of metal large enough to cause a derailment is the difference between a dust speck and getting stabbed in the eye with a knife.”

            But do the pennies accumulate? And do they accumulate across different trains traveling on different tracks? And if not, why not?

            I have a guess at your response, but I will wait and see what you say.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            But do the pennies accumulate? And do they accumulate across different trains traveling on different tracks? And if not, why not?

            What do you even mean by this?

            There is a quantity which one can calculate: “number of pennies encountered by all trains on all tracks”, yes. In that sense, they “accumulate”. But no one is concerned with the total number of pennies.

            There is another quantity one can calculate (well, not really, but this is assumed by utilitarianism): “amount of negative utility experienced by everyone”. This is relevant to utilitarians because they want to minimize the amount of negative utility experienced by everyone (or, given that negative utilitarianism calls for killing everyone, at least to create the most positive utility from it).

            Each dust speck causes some negative utility. You can prove this because it is painful and I would pay not to have it happen. I don’t want it to happen. Therefore, if the negative utility from each dust speck is not zero, a large enough number of dust specks will eventually equal the negative utility from torture. (And frankly, I would go so far as to say I don’t think the number is the mind-bogglingly huge number Yudkowsky gives. I’d say it’s a quintillion at most. But that’s beside the point.)

            Now, I personally think the number of dust specks is irrelevant because I think the “amount of negative utility experienced by everyone” is irrelevant. That’s because I’m not a utilitarian. But if I were, it would be relevant. However, the number of pennies hit by all trains is irrelevant to every ethical theory.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            Imagine a train without tracks. It encounters all of these little disruptions, pennies, grit, etc. but now instead of making it to its destination, it crashes. What makes this train and that train different? Their design parameters, how fault tolerant they are. The wheels and tracks work together to ensure that the train performs its function.

            Humans are like the train with appropriate wheels and tracks (and a complex track system with lots of switches and switching stations). There is a level of perturbation that we are designed for (less and more for each individual).

            You seem to think that the net utility of a life can simply be summed. I am saying that pain is part of our design parameters and 1 extra dust speck in your life is like one extra penny on the track, it doesn’t change the net utility of the life unless it is big enough to cause that life to change course.

            Imagine, instead of the dust speck, that you momentarily catch a glimpse, a mere 1/10 of a second, through an open door, of a color you find slightly unpleasant. This also is a moment of negative utility and therefore should, theoretically, sum. But I don’t think it affects the net utility of your life. It is inside the fault tolerance that is inherent to us.

            You are free to reject this interpretation. I simply said that I, personally, don’t think there is a bullet to bite here. This is because I reject the idea that one, and only one, extra dust speck effects the net utility of your life.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            Imagine, instead of the dust speck, that you momentarily catch a glimpse, a mere 1/10 of a second, through an open door, of a color you find slightly unpleasant. This also is a moment of negative utility and therefore should, theoretically, sum. But I don’t think it affects the net utility of your life. It is inside the fault tolerance that is inherent to us.

            Sure, I think it sums. Anyway, I would rather not have that experience. We can compare a life where I have it to one where I do, and I would choose the former. So it affects the net utility.

            You’re entitled to your opinion. It’s no more arbitrary than utilitarianism in general. But it just adds more epicycles and makes the theory less able to be applied to any real problem. Like Mill saying that one experience of poetry is of a different kind and therefore higher and better than an infinite number of experiences of pushpin (bowling).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “makes the theory less able to be applied to any real problem”.

            Well, there we most certainly disagree. But I doubt I will sway you as you seem determined not to attempt to see my point of view (even if you disagree that it is correct.)

            One other avenue I thought of: You keep saying that you would pay money to avoid dust specks.

            Would you pay money to have a single dust speck removed from your past? Knowing that you will not be able to repeat the transaction?

            Given that you will experience X dust specks in your life, a number which is unknown to you, will you pay money to make it X-1? Not knowing, and never knowing, what particular dust speck will be removed, and knowing that it could be one in your past?

          • Jiro says:

            1 extra dust speck in your life is like one extra penny on the track, it doesn’t change the net utility of the life unless it is big enough to cause that life to change course.

            This produces the odd result that there is some threshhold amount where you would prefer having a billion people harmed by an amount slightly under the threshhold to one person harmed by an amount slightly over the threshhold.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Jiro:
            You aren’t making a different argument than vox. I am attacking the assumption about the dust speck being harm. I’m attacking the assumed utility function.

            For me, the dust speck is no harm to the net utility of the life.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            Given that you will experience X dust specks in your life, a number which is unknown to you, will you pay money to make it X-1? Not knowing, and never knowing, what particular dust speck will be removed, and knowing that it could be one in your past?

            Yes. A very small amount of money, but yeah that sounds like a good trade. I would definitely do it if I could keep paying that amount until all dust specks were removed.

            Are you saying that at some point it changes over so that after removing (say) 100 specks, which were all bad deals you shouldn’t pay to remove, the remaining ones are good deals that you would pay for?

          • Jaskologist says:

            There are 1000 people each in individual room-temperature compartments. You have a choice: raise the temperature 1 degree on each of them, or raise the temperature 500 degrees on one of them.

            (Obviously, the second choice is the correct one. Shut up and add.)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jacksologist:

            First of all, under normal circumstances a one-degree rise in temperature does not produce any negative utility. So it doesn’t matter if it happens to 500 people or 20 trillion.

            Even if the people were all at the perfectly comfortable temperature, such that a one-degree increase slightly decreased their utility, a 500-degree rise in temperature produces a lot more than 500 times the negative utility of a one-degree rise in temperature. So the argument is fallacious and a misrepresentation of Yudkowsky’s position.

            On the other hand, it is certainly implied by utilitarianism that at some point, it becomes better to roast one person alive than to make a very large number of people slightly uncomfortable. But that’s obvious just from the statement of what utilitarianism means.

          • Murphy says:

            @HeelBearCub

            You really hold that things you don’t remember don’t count?

            Lets imagine that a sadist offered you [some small amount of money, barely more than what you’d accept to do some mundane boring task for the same period of time like licking envelopes] to be put under twilight sedation, aware and able to experience pain but unable to form memories of it and while you’re under the sadist will induce hours of blinding, mind chilling agony which you are guaranteed to not remember and which is guaranteed to cause no lasting physical harm.

            Do you accept the money?

            After all, while you’re signing up for experiencing hours of blinding agony you won’t remember it, it won’t do you any physical harm, you won’t lose any body parts.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:

            “I would definitely do it if I could keep paying that amount until all dust specks were removed.”

            But, you specifically can’t do that. We aren’t talking about removing all dust specks from humanity or even one human’s existence.

            How much would pay to have a dust speck removed from your past that you have no memory of and that would not alter your current makeup one iota? Something that happened at least 1 year ago, but could be all the way back to birth.

            And more importantly, why?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Murphy:
            I’m tempted to fight the hypothetical, as surely their would be knock on effects after the twilight sedation (just as there is with Wisdom Tooth extraction.)

            But, also, this misses the point I am trying to make. It’s about the human condition, our actual design parameters. Being tortured under twilight sedation is not something that happens naturally. But dust specks are part of the normal human condition. It’s why we make tears and have eyelashes and they cause pain if they get in our eye. Having a foreign body in your eye can cause lasting damage, but almost all of the time what we have is stimulus -> reaction -> go on without change. We remember the dust speck long enough to let us make a correlation if needed (Hey! When I walk past the factory, I get dust specks in my eye!), but otherwise they are not much different than getting goose bumps for a second or any other stimulus reaction.

            I don’t view the minor event as additive to the major event in some linear fashion. It’s like saying “this river deposits 2 trillion gallons of water in the ocean over a year” and concluding you can safely add 1 trillion gallons on January 1st all at once, as long as you reduce the flow by 1/2 the rest of the year.

            Under normal parameters we forget dust specks, without the aid of twilight sedation. The only reason I brought in twilight sedation was to show that not remembering pain was a way of eliminating the negative utility that came from the pain. In the case of dust specks, and a million other minor events, like seeing a color you don’t prefer for a brief second, they don’t have a net effect on the utility of the entire life.

          • Jiro says:

            @Jiro:
            You aren’t making a different argument than vox. I am attacking the assumption about the dust speck being harm. I’m attacking the assumed utility function.

            And I’m pointing out that attacking that utility function leads to bizarre results. If you really think that dust specks don’t cause any harm at all, but that more severe things do cause harm, there’s a threshold where two things are very similar, but you would rather have billions of one than one of the other. It logically follows from your attack on the utility function.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            But, you specifically can’t do that. We aren’t talking about removing all dust specks from humanity or even one human’s existence.

            Well, you didn’t answer my question, which is: why does it change? Why is it worth zero to remove one dust speck but worth a positive amount to remove all of them?

            Let’s say I would pay a dollar to remove all dust specks from my existence. So take one dollar divided by all the dust specks I will experience, and that’s the amount I would pay to remove each one.

            How much would pay to have a dust speck removed from your past that you have no memory of and that would not alter your current makeup one iota? Something that happened at least 1 year ago, but could be all the way back to birth.

            And more importantly, why?

            For one thing, it’s an absurd hypothetical. Some medieval thinkers argued that not even God could retroactively abolish the past: i.e. make something in the past not have happened, given that it already did happen. You can remove the effects in the present, but how can you just get rid of the past?

            Anyway, if I don’t remember it and it has no lasting effects now, I suppose I have no reason to pay to remove it. (I don’t know that it does have no lasting effects. Maybe having experienced slightly more pain makes me slightly more unhappy now.) But this isn’t how you phrased the question the first time. You said I don’t know whether it will be in the past or the future. Even if all the ones in the past count for nothing, I’ll still pay to remove the ones in the future.

            Why? Because I will experience them, and they will be unpleasant when they occur. I am able to apprehend and anticipate this unpleasantness, so I will pay now to avoid it. On the other hand, the dust specks in the past (as you frame the issue, at least) have no present or future effect on me, so they are not now unpleasant, so I should not pay to remove them.

            So the equation for the price I’d pay now looks like: $1 / (all dust specks – past dust specks). That’s still positive.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            I can’t see how the “normal human condition” under our “actual design parameters” could possibly be relevant.

            It’s not in the normal human condition to live longer than 120 years (and that’s pretty damn abnormal, to be honest). Does that mean each year after 120 is worthless and has no utility? I don’t think so.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            If you are not willing to pay to remove those dust specks from your past now, then how much affect did they have on the net utility calculation of your life so far?

            “(I don’t know that it does have no lasting effects. Maybe having experienced slightly more pain makes me slightly more unhappy now.)”

            This is explicitly ruled out by the parameters of the thought experiment. If I was allowed to take into account the likelihood of knock-on effects, than it would be a super easy call the other way.

            “For one thing, it’s an absurd hypothetical.”

            The whole thought experiment is absurd.

            “Well, you didn’t answer my question, which is: why does it change? ”

            I’ve been doing nothing but trying to answer why I think this way through the whole thread. It’s the difference between an object on the track that does no damage to the train, and one that does.

            If you could wave a magic wand, would you remove all pain from your life? All striving? All feelings of something being difficult? Every observation of a color you did not prefer?

            All of those are, in isolation, moments of diminished utility. But I don’t think you can consider each one in isolation.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            If you are not willing to pay to remove those dust specks from your past now, then how much affect did they have on the net utility calculation of your life so far?

            They decreased my utility in the past, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.

            My net utility is not defined by what I would pay to change on my deathbed. My net utility is just the sum of all the moment-to-moment utilitities I experience in my life.

            If you could somehow ask me before I was born whether I’d prefer a life with one less dust speck, I would.

            On the other hand, if it were possible somehow to sell the positive utility I had in the past (without affecting my current utility) and exchange it for money now, that would be a great deal.

            The whole thought experiment is absurd.

            The scale is absurd, but we’re not imagining anything inherently impossible like abolishing the past.

            I’ve been doing nothing but trying to answer why I think this way through the whole thread. It’s the difference between an object on the track that does no damage to the train, and one that does.

            Aah!

            I don’t know how to get this through to you. If you would pay to remove all dust specks, then it follows that each dust speck is a little bit bad. Unless there is some point at which the sign flips over, but you have not specified where this might be.

            The difference with the pennies is that the total sum of all pennies is not bad, so I would not pay to remove a single penny, or all the pennies. Please stop using this metaphor.

            If you could wave a magic wand, would you remove all pain from your life? All striving? All feelings of something being difficult? Every observation of a color you did not prefer?

            If I could keep the same amount of positive utility which normally comes from moments of difficulty and pleasantness, yes.

            It’s a fact that, in life, you have to work hard to be happy. But if I could get the same amount of happiness with no hard work, that would be great.

            Are you saying the dust specks produce some positive utility which is greater than the negative utility? If so, I find that ridiculously implausible.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            “Please stop using this metaphor.”

            Hah. That is funny. You don’t seem too intent on understanding my point of view then.

            “If I could keep the same amount of positive utility which normally comes from moments of difficulty and pleasantness, yes.”

            But that is impossible for humans as we are constructed.

            “The scale is absurd, but we’re not imagining anything inherently impossible like abolishing the past.”

            You think adding a guaranteed one and only one dust speck experience, with a guarantee of no knock on effects, to 3^^^3 is possible? Do tell.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            Hah. That is funny. You don’t seem too intent on understanding my point of view then.

            I don’t know what you think I don’t understand about your position. I think I understand it. I just think it is wrong. Those aren’t the same thing.

            I have thoroughly shown as best I can how the penny-train metaphor is completely inapplicable.

            But that is impossible for humans as we are constructed.

            Okay, fine. Is it impossible for us not to experience dust specks? It seems to me like it is possible. I don’t think experiencing dust specks is an essential part of what makes us human.

            You asked me, if I could get rid of those negative things, would I? And I said: yes, if I could keep the positive utility I have now. Otherwise, no.

            But the dust specks do not produce any positive utility. So I absolutely would get rid of them. Unless you’re trying to say something stupid like: “Ah, but then you’d have to get rid of the atmosphere, and that would be worse!”

            You think adding a guaranteed one and only one dust speck experience, with a guarantee of no knock on effects, to 3^^^3 is possible? Do tell.

            Look, it’s not physically possible.

            But it’s a perfectly coherent thing to imagine. There’s nothing contradictory about it.

            If asked you what you’d do with a million dollars, it is appropriate for you to respond: “What? How do expect me to just magically get a million dollars? That isn’t how the economy works, dumbass.”

    • Theo Jones says:

      I consider most of the thought experiments used against utilitarianism fairly useless. Utilitarianism reproduces most moral intuitions because of the constraints that apply in the real world. Of course, when you come up with a thought experiment that presupposes conditions that are impossible in the real world (ie. the dust speck thought experiment) this correspondence goes away. But that isn’t an argument against utilitarianism. Its an argument that the moral intuitions are formed under particular real-world conditions. And when those conditions go away, so does, the validity of the intuitions. But the synthetic nature of these thought experiments makes them pretty irrelevant to the real word. You won’t actually see the conditions presupposed by these thought experiments ever in the real world. I guess this puts me into the bullet biting category.

      And in the closest real world versions of these thought experiments utilitarianism outperforms deontology. The trolley problem suggests that an utilitarian should sacrifice one to save three. You will never see a trolley on the verge of hitting three next to a well-placed switch.

      But you will see cases where you have the option of tolerating harm to some to avoid even worse harm somewhere else.

      Take the case on environmental policy (ok… I have a feeling I will regret throwing this grenade.. but lets go). You can imagine a strict NAP that forbids any environmental regulations, even in the case of substantial net harm to the public (ie. from climate change or other environmental risks) . You can imagine a strict technophobic environmentalism that foregoes beneficial technologies such as nuclear energy or GMOs. Utilitarianism takes an intermediate path of weighing the harms and benefits of different policy paths based on the consequences of those paths. And in real world tradeoffs, I think consquenitlaist ethical systems will preform better than the alternatives.

      • blacktrance says:

        You can imagine a strict NAP that forbids any environmental regulations, even in the case of substantial net harm to the public (ie. from climate change or other environmental risks) .

        Or a strict NAP that defines e.g. pollution as aggression, and we end up with something like the extreme environmentalist outcome. (Unless Coasian bargaining or large-scale internalization of externalities by private property owners solves that.)

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        >And in the closest real world versions of these thought experiments utilitarianism outperforms deontology. The trolley problem suggests that an utilitarian should sacrifice one to save three. You will never see a trolley on the verge of hitting three next to a well-placed switch.

        Utilitarianism outperforms deontology only by utilitarian measures.

  9. Book recommendation / discussion request: the 1980s science-fiction trilogy The Phoenix Legacy by M. K. Wren, comprised of Sword of the Lamb, Shadow of the Swan, and House of the Wolf.

    For those that have not already read it, the story is set in a technologically advanced feudal society, which spans two solar systems; the protagonist, Alexand DeKoven Wolfe, is the heir to the First Lordship of one of the great Houses of the Concord, but that position may not be enough to avert the threat of a third Dark Age.

    I’d also be interested to hear from anyone who has already read it; it is one of my personal favorites, but seems to have largely disappeared into obscurity, and I’m not sure whether it’s an overlooked jewel or whether I’m just too easily impressed.

    For what it’s worth, my two working theories: firstly, it was perhaps in some ways too intellectual (if that’s the right word) to be broadly popular – think Lord of the Rings if it had been written by a sociologist or historian instead of a linguist, so that instead of excerpts of Elvish poetry and extensive appendices there are personal notes and transcripts of history lectures by the protagonist’s brother. I found them fascinating, but perhaps too dry for most readers? Or just unconvincing for anyone more familiar with real-life history than I am?

    Secondly, the protagonist’s romance is integral to the plot, which I think was unusual for science fiction at the time and may have been ill-received. Arguably it’s a romance trilogy with a science-fiction setting rather than a science-fiction trilogy with a romantic sub-theme. 🙂

    (Compare to the love interest in Dune, for example, which could IIRC have been edited out without changing anything of significance to the rest of the story. There are probably counter-examples, but none that spring immediately to mind!)

    • anon says:

      But then where would Leto II and Ghanima have come from?

    • pneumatik says:

      Dune is too full even without the love interest. Cutting it wouldn’t hurt the book much. It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but it’s possible the love interest is there to tie Paul to the Fremen more. There may be some particular version of the “outsider from the colonizers helps improve the lives and culture of the natives” that Herbert was telling in Dune that required that relationship.

  10. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Is the whole point of playing Truth or Dare that revealing humiliating secrets to each other and performing humiliating acts in front of each other signals trust that they won’t betray you and gives you ammunition in case they do betray you, thus enabling cooperation in future endeavors secure in the knowledge that breaches of loyalty can be retaliated against? Is this how the game bonds people?

    • Acedia says:

      Where I came from truth or dare was mostly just a thinly veiled excuse for young people to engage in sexual experimentation.

      • Adam says:

        Yes, this. I only ever played Truth and Dare with women roughly the same age as me that I found attractive, and the basic idea seemed to be an easy way of feeling out exactly how far the other was willing to go.

    • ddreytes says:

      It is a structure for allowing (a) openness / vulnerability / confessions and (b) actions that might not otherwise be socially acceptable, or that people might be reticent about.

      There’s a lot of ways you can talk about that kind of structure being beneficial. The sort of game-theoretic signaling explanation you’re using is definitely one of those. You could also talk about it in terms of emotional bonding – vulnerability and openness and mutual risk-taking brings people closer together, makes them feel closer, makes them feel they know each other better. I think you could also talk about it as part of a process of maturing – as a way to try out different ways of representing yourself, of trying to transcend the social position that you are in, etc.

      But if you want to talk about its purpose, I think it’s that people find it enjoyable (and also that it’s a means for sexual experimentation as Acedia says).

  11. A says:

    About illiberal societies. On one hand, there are obviously many countries where property rights are poorly maintained, corruption is high, institutions are opaque, the press is ineffective, etc. On the other hand, at least hypothetically, there could be countries where institutional quality is high (for the majority) but there exists a significant class of people who have hereditary second-class status-something like blacks in the American south before the 1950s. Do any such countries exist now?

    • marc says:

      The untouchables in India/Nepal?

    • Jiro says:

      The burakumin and the Koreans in Japan might count, although I don’t know how severe discrimination against them is currently, and there may not be a high enough percentage of them to count.

    • Max says:

      Malays in Singapore – although there is no discrimination. They are just slightly inferior as group to han chinese

    • anonymous says:

      Israel, though I’d probably say the institutional quality is on the low end of high even for Jewish, Hebrew speakers.

    • JE says:

      Israel I guess. The Palestinians in the West Bank are under de facto Israeli rule and live intermingled among settlers with full Israeli citizenship while not having citizenship themselves.

      • Jacobian says:

        Stop confusing Palestinians with Israeli Arabs! West Bank Palestinians have their own institutions: government, police, banks, schools, press, public sector etc. They even have their own paramilitary security forces. Their lives are affected strongly by the Israeli military, but other than using the New Israeli Shekel they don’t share many institutions.

        • smn says:

          There are a few hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank who are under Israeli sovereignty and yet aren’t allowed to become citizens and don’t have equal access to Israeli institutions.

    • Tracy W says:

      Australia, informally?

      • Nathan says:

        I’m not sure to what extent aboriginal disadvantage in Australia is due to racism and to what extent it’s driven by aborigines living in remote communities with no jobs.

        • Adam says:

          The question didn’t specify it had to be due to racism, just that people exist with hereditary second-class status. Being born into a sub-community with far fewer opportunities seems to qualify. It seems just as much the case for remote native populations in Canada, people still living on reservations in the US, and Siberian natives in Russia (though you might argue about the institutional quality of Russia).

          I’d also say the U.S. with respect to people born with severe congenital disabilities. Anyone that is actually unable to work their entire lives is going to have a rough go of it without a wealthy and generous family.

          • keranih says:

            It seems just as much the case for remote native populations in Canada, people still living on reservations in the US, and Siberian natives in Russia

            How is this materially different from being born in Ankle Scratch, FlyOver, or to an illegal immigrant family anywhere, rather than to a family in NYC?

          • Adam says:

            It’s not, and those are other good examples of structurally disadvantaged people in otherwise wealthy nations.

          • Jiro says:

            The question was about hereditary status. Being an illegal immigrant is not hereditary.

    • Relativist says:

      Almost any European country with Gypsies. Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Greece etc …. They are technically full citizens and in many countries have political representation and de jure property rights. In reality, most of them invariably live in ghettos that could be mistaken for third world slums.

      The genetic link and heredity is obvious and undeniable ….

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Excuse me, it sounds like you’re tossing out racism to sound rational and edgy.
        The linguistic and genetic evidence is overwhelming that the Roma are descended from North Indian Hindus who migrated west in the first millennium AD. The oldest surviving folk etiology, in the Shahnama, identifies them as expert musicians.
        Is there a specific genetically inferior North Indian population you have in mind, or…?

        • Relativist says:

          Not tossing out racism at all. Many Eastern Europeans are proudly and unapologetically racist (whether Gypsies are objectively inferior is an unrelated and unanswerable question in my opinion). The larger point is that one can have “structural and hereditary” second-class citizenship while technically having no legal obstacles to full citizenship. That’s what the initial thread called for in its search for examples. Many of the mentioned countries have free public education and healthcare as well as minority party representation in government and decent civil and property rights. Yet, outcomes for the Roma are nothing like those for equally poor “native” citizens.

          By the way – you are correct. The Roma are as overrepresented in the musician class as the Blacks in the US are overrepresented in the NFL. “Traditional” Eastern European weddings and celebrations often feature Roma performers. It is also a common sight to have 5-12 year old self-taught Gypsy kids play instruments quite impressively while panhandling in public.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            “Not tossing out racism at all” seems to contradict “The genetic link and heredity is obvious and undeniable” somewhat. Also, it doesn’t make sense to say “whether Gypsies are objectively inferior is an unanswerable question”. An objective question is one that does have a definitive answer.

          • Relativist says:

            @sweeneyrod: “Not tossing out racism at all” does NOT contradict “The genetic link and heredity is obvious and undeniable.”

            It’s perfectly possible for racism AND alleged genetic justification for racism to exist at the same time. Just because I’m racist does not mean you’re not inferior.

            “Whether Gypsies are objectively inferior is an unanswerable question” precisely because inferiority judgments (genetic or otherwise) are not objective unless very narrowly defined. Inferior to what? Inferior with respect to what goal/purpose?

            Racists may believe Gypsies are inferior, I settle for “they’re genetically different” in socially and economically consequential ways.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Relativist: If their different economic outcomes have an “obvious and undeniable” genetic cause, why do they have such different outcomes from recent Indian immigrants? Do you think their ancestors were a genetically distinct endogamous group when they left North India?

          • Relativist says:

            @Le Maistre Chat: Not sure how much their outcomes are different from recent Indian immigrants (not too many of those in Eastern Europe for a good sample). Not sure how distinct they are genetically. I do suppose that recent Indian immigrants are more self-selected than the ancestors of Gypsies who were expelled from their original homeland en masse.

            To your question “If their different economic outcomes have an “obvious and undeniable” genetic cause, why do they have such different outcomes from recent Indian immigrants?” – to the extent they do, I would guess mostly because of overt racism. Maybe a good deal of predisposition and preference for the typical Gypsy lifestyle also. But preference for lifestyle is a function of societal racism and objectively available options so it may be a bit endogenous …

          • Anthony says:

            Do you think their ancestors were a genetically distinct endogamous group when they left North India?

            Does that matter? They’ve been endogamous since they left North India. Being endogamous outside India gives them a much smaller effective population than the groups who remained in India.

  12. DiscoveredJoys says:

    Abstract

    A core hypothesis in developmental theory predicts that genetic influences on intelligence and academic achievement are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic privation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a Gene × Childhood Socioeconomic Status (SES) interaction. Tests of this hypothesis have produced apparently inconsistent results. We performed a meta-analysis of tests of Gene × SES interaction on intelligence and academic-achievement test scores, allowing for stratification by nation (United States vs. non–United States), and we conducted rigorous tests for publication bias and between-studies heterogeneity. In U.S. studies, we found clear support for moderately sized Gene × SES effects. In studies from Western Europe and Australia, where social policies ensure more uniform access to high-quality education and health care, Gene × SES effects were zero or reversed.

    http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/14/0956797615612727

  13. Seth says:

    Has anyone ever tried to apply some of the thinking of “evidence-based medicine” to the dilemma of how to react when subjected to a social-media hatestorm?
    There’s two schools of thought on the topic: 1) Apologize, be accommodating, try to stay above the fray and not descend to the level of the attackers 2) Blast back, never apologize, try to give as good as you get via mocking and deriding the attackers.
    It strikes me that these are parallel in some fashion to medical approaches on how to treat an injury: 1) Apply supportive measures, but fundamentally wait it out for internal healing 2) Treat aggressively, strong drugs or extensive surgery, intervene as much as possible.
    Obviously no single approach is best for every medical situation. But there’s an effort to figure out which works best in what cases. It seems to me that the same sort of analysis might be fruitful for other contexts.

    • Partisan says:

      I think organizations should at least apply a “wait 2 business days” rule before taking actions based on a social media barrage. I think we often need to re-learn some things we already know in new circumstances, and “don’t make big decisions under stress if you don’t have to” (like firing an administrator or censuring a professor) is one we should re-learn when it comes to social media.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      A possible third way – 3) Never apologize, but do explain.

      There might be a sweet spot for that — after 2 business days, or whenever the initial storm has lost interest and some backlash is starting.

    • Adam says:

      I think it helps a lot to not actually check your accounts every day. I’m sure you have other things to do, so do them. At this point, I mostly just never post anything to social media and completely avoid controversial topics, but in my younger days, I’d outrage people every now and again, but sometimes I didn’t even realize it until a week later, and a sufficient number of defenders already said anything I would have said in response anyway.

      Of course, if you are actually an organization, as Partisan seems to be thinking, I suppose you have more at stake.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      There are many more schools of thought than that, and both of those approaches are terrible. Never apologize (for the thing you were accused of). Never blast back. Both of these things extend the controversy by encouraging your attackers.

      • Of course, if you’re in a mutual-toxoplasma situation in which you have a band of followers who champion you as their symbol of defiance against the evil X-ists, and the X-ists are sending their symbol of defiance against the evil you, then you do want to blast back, and encourage your opposite number to blast back back, and so on.

        One strategy factor people often neglect here is that people are in different situations. I’m here posting my real name with plenty of identifiable details, for example, because I’m not in a situation in which I think it even remotely possible my employer will care, now or ever, what I’m saying, and take action against me. I therefore have very non-standard options for dealing with social media hatestorms.

        There is actually a book on this: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Ron Johnson. It does cover how different controversies can affect different people in different situations differently.

    • TheNybbler says:

      I think currently the evidence weighs VERY strongly against #1. The analogy to war is better than to medicine here, and #1 is the appeasement approach. If you and your detractors are basically on the same side, if you’ve actually done something you’d both consider wrong, if your detractors are actually offended by that and that is what is causing them to be riled up, and they’d accept an apology… then perhaps #1 would be a good strategy. IMO, none of those conditions are typically true in social media hatestorms.

      The usual problem with appeasement applies: if the strategy works, your detractors will be back for more.

      Most organizations seem to take a third option — either say nothing, or issue non-committal statements that can be taken any way you like. This is probably a local optimum, but I can’t help thinking that more blasting back might be better overall, to discourage further attempts.

      • Seth says:

        Well, this is why I’m wondering if anyone has ever done a systematic assessment. Of course cases and specifics vary, but that’s true in medicine too. There’s all sorts of medical issues that everyone doesn’t react the same way to very aggressive treatment with high doses of some drug, there’s possible confounding variables that people with certain diseases tend to be sicker in general, not everyone is good at complying with a difficult treatment regime, etc. But still, there’s an effort to assess what works and what doesn’t.

        It’s easy to say appeasement just encourages aggressors. But blasting back also gives grounds for further aggression. It can be argued either way, in the abstract. One would need to do an empirical assessment, “strategy”, “outcome”, and so on.

        I’m not sure the book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” is trying to be analytically rigorous. Maybe this is a potential topic for someone with the researcher mindset.

  14. peccavi says:

    I am intermittently wracked with guilt about not donating blood. The trouble is that I have in the past found having blood taken for tests very uncomfortable (swooning, etc), so it is more unpleasant for me than for the average person. Of course, if the benefit was large enough (probably in the hundreds of £s) I would do it anyway.

    My assumption is that since they are prepared to reject donations from people with risk factors for HIV etc even though the absolute risk of undetected transmission is still very low, the utility of the marginal unit of blood must be quite small. Does anyone know if this is correct?

    • Berna says:

      I don’t know how it is where you live, but here in the Netherlands, they don’t want my blood, just because I have high blood pressure. I’d think donating might do some good for me, but they say no, they just don’t really know what happens if you donate blood when you have high blood pressure, and they don’t want to take any risks. So I think that the marginal utility can’t be that high, or they’d have bothered finding out.

      • onyomi says:

        I don’t understand why high blood pressure, alone, would make one’s blood unsuitable for donation. And since people with high blood pressure have, in some sense, too much blood, it does seem like it might be good for you. Leeches?

      • Svalbardcaretaker says:

        And here in Germany they dont want my too low pressure blood. Admittedly I collapsed once, but still.

        • Daniel says:

          Every now and then I get rejected because my hemoglobin level is too low.

          • Svalbardcaretaker says:

            A veterinarian once told me of a trick involving parsley. You eat a whole bunch a few hours before the test/donation, it makes your HB spike dramatically and you are allowed to donate.

    • In most cases hospitals have enough blood and there’s some evidence that the marginal (as opposed to average) blood transfusion does more harm than good due to immune factors so I really wouldn’t worry about it. I’m good with getting needles stuck in me but I donate platelets instead which seem to be in more demand, partially because it’s easy for me to do it right at a hospital that treats a lot of cancer patients.

    • keranih says:

      The US FDA forbids donations from anyone who lived in the UK from 1980 to 1996, or visited there for more than 3 months. (WP link) Additionally, people who lived in other parts of Europe or visited there are also limited in their ability to donate. This is (thus far) a permanent ban.

      If the marginal risk from donations from this group (huge portions of the US military and their families, plus the whole population of the UK, a number around 60 million) is greater than the marginal benefit of donations, I can’t see your failure to donate being of great concern.

      It is probably of greater value to sign up for a bone marrow donor group, or to volunteer to do outreach/advocacy for such a group. The first, at least, takes relatively little time.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Yes, let us take a moment to plug for joining a marrow registry. It is easy (mail in a few cheek swabs), and if you actually get called up you’re giving somebody major utils.

        My understanding is that your donation may be especially needed if you’re a racial minority, (or mixed race), because those are harder to find matches for.

        • keranih says:

          because those are harder to find matches for

          Yes. For reasons both malignant and otherwise – including the greater genetic diversity among sub-Saharan Africans, which greatly dwarfs that of European-descent humans.

          If one were in a social position to advocate for increased enrollment among those populations (HBCs, African-American churches, etc) the multiplied effect might be even greater.

          Note: the aforementioned donation restrictions still apply, so that people at high risk for communicable blood-born disease would likely not be able to donate themselves. (It is my understanding that this sort of transplant is more subject to physician discretion, marrow not being the commodity that whole blood is. I could easily be wrong.)

        • peccavi says:

          So the thing that has always put me off that is the element of pre-commitment (e.g. “You need to be fully committed to donating your blood stem cells or bone marrow if you come up as a match.” from http://www.anthonynolan.org, although presumably they can’t actually make you consent). Suppose I came up a match at a time when I had a deadline or a pre-booked trip, for which I would recieve no compensation, even though society (via the NHS) could easily do so? Am I just pre-committing to being emotionally blackmailed? And is the fact that society is not prepared to put its money where its mouth is and (offer to) pay for something which involves substantial inconvenience and discomfort but low risk (so avoiding the “poor having their organs harvested by the rich” concerns) and is supposedly life-saving a signal that maybe the benefits at least at the margin aren’t so great after all?

          I also find it a bit strange that the Anthony Nolan Trust says that “If you’re on the register, you must be happy to donate stem cells in either way. [PBSC or bone marrow]” Isn’t someone only prepared to agree to PBSC still a net positive? Or is this an attempt to strong-arm people into agreeing to bone marrow if the need arises?

          Having said which, I’ll probably sign up despite these qualms since the cost-benefit seems so skewed.

          • Jiro says:

            nd is the fact that society is not prepared to put its money where its mouth is and (offer to) pay for something which involves substantial inconvenience and discomfort but low risk (so avoiding the “poor having their organs harvested by the rich” concerns) and is supposedly life-saving a signal that maybe the benefits at least at the margin aren’t so great after all?

            It’s unarguable that giving someone an organ has benefits that *are* that great, and yet we don’t let them be sold, so it would be incorrect to assume that not letting something be sold is a signal that the benefits are not that great.

            If anything, not letting it be sold is a signal that the market rate is typically less than the utility lost by giving it up.

          • witchwestphalia says:

            “Suppose I came up a match at a time when I had a deadline or a pre-booked trip, for which I would recieve no compensation, even though society (via the NHS) could easily do so?”

            Generally BMT & PBSC is not a same-day emergency. So if you are on deadline or have a trip planned that isn’t months in duration, your donation may still be in time for the planned recipient.

            “…pay for something which involves substantial inconvenience and discomfort but low risk (so avoiding the “poor having their organs harvested by the rich” concerns) and is supposedly life-saving a signal that maybe the benefits at least at the margin aren’t so great after all?”

            PBSC harvest doesn’t involve *substantial* inconvenience and discomfort from what I can tell. Being a marrow donor is a day procedure so I can see that an extremely busy person might find that substantially inconvenient. It absolutely *does* involve substantial discomfort. Here in the USA I think the reason for requiring volunteers is partly a legacy from blood banking — volunteer donors are thought to be lower risk for transmitting infections through blood, and partly to prevent low income PBSC & bone marrow *recipients* from being unable to afford life saving therapy due to the cost of paying the donor.

            I work close to 80 hours a week. I’m in the registry, and if they ever contact me, I’ll take the time needed to be a donor. Yes, it will involve inconvenience. but I’m OK with that. YMMV

      • Helldalgo says:

        Also anyone who was on pig insulin; my mom can’t donate blood because of this.

    • The Anonymouse says:

      If the Red Cross wants my blood, they can do what every other group does when they want something I own: pay for it. Especially if they’re going to turn around and sell it to the next entity in the chain.

      In the absence of recompense, I wouldn’t feel guilty about not giving them blood.

  15. onyomi says:

    “the way you would expect rationalists to look?”

    Nerdy?

  16. Liskantope says:

    A question for the doctors/nurses in the room: A few years ago, I tested positively for a (mild) cat allergy. I don’t notice it at all when visiting people who have cats in the house, not even when playing with their cats (although I usually keep their cats away from my face). I’m prone to allergies in general, and some other people in my family have pretty serious cat allergies. If I were to adopt my own cat, does it seem likely that I would develop a much worse allergy to them?

    • keranih says:

      Likely/not likely have limited value for individual choices (much better for population-based choices). You either will develop a much worse allergy or you will not.

      Consider volunteering to foster (temporarily) with a local shelter or rescue group. You’ll do some good, will learn if you actually like having cats around, and will not have to deal with the burden of returning an animal you pledged to care for long term.

      • PSJ says:

        This seems like an odd response. If there’s a 50% chance of developing an allergy the decision to get a cat has a significantly lower expected return than a 1% chance.

    • ThrustVectoring says:

      Allergy tests are usually done in parallel – expose someone to a bunch of possible allergens and see which ones get a reaction. A problem with this kind of testing is that a severely allergic immune system will basically go “HOLY SHIT THERE ARE THINGS IT’S TIME TO KILL FUCKING EVERYTHING” and react to things that normally do not cause a reaction.

      So if your allergy test found at least one severe reaction and a bunch of mild ones, it may be the case that the severe reactions *caused* the mild ones. This explains why the test and life experiences disagree.

      Note that I’m not any kind of doctor or nurse, I just read a *lot*.

    • When I adopted my cat, they rubbed a cloth on her for me and let me take it home to sleep on overnight. This gave me an idea of how allergic I would be to her, since I do sometimes get cat allergies. Happily, I found a cat who generally doesn’t give me allergies at all.

    • Liskantope says:

      To be clear, my fear is not only becoming really allergic to a cat I adopt, but developing a more severe allergy to cats in general because of having gotten one. Right now I may wish I could have my own cat, but I can at least hang out in cat-inhabited houses without getting sick, and I wouldn’t want for that to change.

      • Adam says:

        The opposite is true for my wife at least. She’s allergic to cats, but being persistently exposed to cats make the allergy less severe than if she is only intermittently exposed to cats.

    • Anthony says:

      One way that allergies are treated is to expose the patient to small subcutaneous doses of the allergen over time. Kittens will do this for you.

      IANAD, and this is not medical advice.

  17. theboredprof says:

    On the mundane and the mystical Apocalypse (an oblique criticism of certain recent posts):

    Western culture reacts to existential threats via eschatological narratives in paired mundane and mystical forms. The mundane Apocalypse is the body of theory that emerges from direct observation of threats in the present world. The mystical Apocalypse is a parallel story about the very near future, grounded in theory and extrapolation, that engages our highest theological and intellectual aspirations. The mundane Apocalypse is the simple and familiar story of disease, warfare, pollution. The mystical Apocalypse is an ever-changing book of revelations, a science fiction novel about the demons who will come out of the sky and thwart us for our (rational, ritual) overreach or imprudence.

    Thus, to take an example from my field, around the year 1300 cities in Europe faced widening problems with sanitation and food supply. Aspects of these problems were known and understood to contemporaries in terms appropriate for the era. Yet various learned circles preferred to speculate about the Antichrist and foresee an imminent end of days. When the collapse came, of course, it was a plague rather than demons, supported precisely by poor urban sanitation and an overextended agricultural system. Somehow the mystical Apocalypse is never realized and the mundane apocalypse is never interesting.

    Because we are just animals, the threats that we face are blunt and stupid. At base they do not mean anything, or at least they do not mean enough. If we are going to die, we do not want to die at the hands of entropy or a minuscule viral automaton that, for all its simplicity, can confound the biological processes that sustain our thought. The mystical Apocalypse displaces the events portending our demise to the near future rather than the present, and it reconstructs them to proceed from our intellect and ambition rather than the physical and biological parameters of our existence. It is a fantasy of learned culture. Read enough and you think you deserve the alien invasion. At base you are little different than the dinosaurs, and the most you can hope for is a meteor strike.

    On SSC one periodically reads about the near-future risk of a hyperintelligent general AI responding in unpredictable ways to perverse incentive structures and reducing the world to paperclips. We already have hyperintelligent entities that respond to perverse incentive structures, and they are already turning the world to ash and sand. Human bureaucracies, in their governmental or corporate forms, exceed by orders of magnitude the capabilities (intellectual or otherwise) of any individual. They have rearranged nearly all human social behavior to alter the composition of the earth’s atmosphere in ways that benefit nobody, and they will persist in this until the spiraling disorder disrupts their operation or changes the incentive structures that drive them.

    • eponymous says:

      It’s ironic that, in the context of this community, the mundane threat you speak of is named after a demon.

      “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

      (Now that I look back at that post to find a line to quote, I find that the poem is much less awesome than I remembered.)

      • theboredprof says:

        Moloch the mundane sky demon–that post also cites Bostrom.

        • eponymous says:

          But the post is mainly about various sorts of market failures that make groups of humans (very much including bureaucracies and corporations) do things that are individually rational but bad for humanity in general. Moloch is basically a personification of the “hyperintelligent entities that respond to perverse incentive structures…turning the world to ash and sand” you are concerned about.

          Many SSC readers are (like you) much more concerned about these issues than about AI. For example, Scott Aaronson (see the first paragraph of his post, “The Singularity is Far”.)

          • theboredprof says:

            No of course I understood your point. I just found the citation of Bostrom as inspiration for the Meditations post intriguing, I guess.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      This kind of reads like saying “People think there’s going to be this big ‘global warming’, but the real warming is the heat of the arguments we produce by being hostile to each other in society”

      Yes, your metaphor is creative, but the real world is still allowed to include actual literal unusual problems, even though they may sounds weird or dramatic.

      • theboredprof says:

        There are “problems” that we perceive in the present, and there are “problems” that we construct by telling stories about how things will be in the future. The latter are not actually included in the real world.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          “Would you stop pointing that loaded gun at me?”

          “The loaded gun isn’t causing you a problem now. You’re just telling yourself a story where it causes one in the future.”

          • theboredprof says:

            A loaded gun is perceived outside of narrative as a present fact; we fear what it might do on the basis of what it has done. AI risk, by contrast, has no reality outside our stories about the future. In this case nobody even has a gun. Rather, my crazy neighbor has a laser pointer and miscellaneous optical equipment, and I’m worried he’ll vaporize me as soon as he perfects his deathray.

          • Murphy says:

            Before Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should other states have been worried about the possibility of nuclear weapons being developed?

            Until they built a working bomb, nuclear weapons had no reality outside theoretical physics papers and stories about the future.

            Nobody even had a nuke, rather, their crazy neighbor had some magnets, some warm metal and miscellaneous physics equipment.

          • theboredprof says:

            In the context of my reply to SA: We must all decide for ourselves whether AI risk has been defined and demonstrated in as rigorous a manner as nuclear fission in 1938. In the context of my broader whatever: The stories we tell about the near future need not be automatically invalid, but when they accord with mythological patterns that have not proven successful or predictive in past iterations, we could be on guard.

          • TrivialGravitas says:

            @Murphy
            Atomic weapons didn’t have apocalyptic potential after Hiroshima and Nagasaki either. That had to wait for 1952, not in the creation of a weapon, but in the discovery that poor grade uranium deposits indicate high grade uranium deposits deep beneath them. Before that there simply wasn’t enough uranium to pose existential threats, even with Teller’s predictions for superbombs.

            But that may be non central, a better argument is that as of 1938 we knew almost exactly how to make a bomb, the question was primarily in the industrial capacity to produce massive amounts of U235 and/or Pu239, show that AI is dependent only on managing to get enough comptronium together and it would obviously be inevitable that AI will exist.

        • eponymous says:

          > There are “problems” that we perceive in the present, and there are “problems” that we construct by telling stories about how things will be in the future. The latter are not actually included in the real world.

          They are both generated by running models of reality forward.

          There is wisdom in saying, “Extrapolating models to regions of the domain that haven’t been observed yet is a risky business”. And this should lead us to reduce our confidence in predictions from such extrapolations. But it doesn’t follow that we should never act on extrapolations far removed from what we have observed.

          For example, we extrapolated our model of physical laws well enough to successfully send a man to the moon and bring him safely home again.

          • theboredprof says:

            >But it doesn’t follow that we should never act on extrapolations far >removed from what we have observed.

            We may extrapolate nonexistent yet future threats from present circumstance. That bare fact does not mean the present world “includes” these future threats, or that this purported “inclusion” can be cited to excuse the bizarre nature of the threats we have extrapolated. That was my only point.

    • Jeffrey Soreff says:

      Because we are just animals, the threats that we face are blunt and stupid. At base they do not mean anything, or at least they do not mean enough.

      What counts as blunt and stupid? The fission/fusion/fission warheads that are still poised to fry most of our cities are based on the Teller-Ulam invention, which was at least subtle.

      • theboredprof says:

        Munitions are an expression of the human urge to warfare, a present and longstanding threat to our existence that strikes me as very blunt indeed, technological elegance aside.

        • Fibs says:

          But don’t you see the issue here? Framed like that, you get to feel smugly superior in every instance.

          Atomic warfare is “Just warfare, which is blunt and stupid”

          Co-ordination problems on a massive scale is “just greed by the selfish!”

          viral issues is just “the tragedy of the commons, how plebian”

          global climate change? Pfh, mere capitalist by-product of exploitation. How blasé.

          Changing politlcal atmosphere that leads to marginailization of important issues? “monkey politics!”

          Inter-stellar space rays or meteors? “Physics is the most mundane science”.

          Your critique doesn’t do much but allow you to feel superior that you’ve managed to come to the light and see how blunt and stupid the rest of the planet is, the blinded fools. It’s a little… useless, I guess?

          • theboredprof says:

            I don’t think you are responding to any point that I have made. The existential threats posed by disease, pollution and warfare are “blunt and stupid” primarily from the (hypothetical) perspective of a learned culture that prefers to see intelligence, learning and academic/technological progress as the highest expression of our humanity.

            I aim only to explain why some futuristic narratives of our demise have arisen, and how they might be read as an intellectualized and humanized correction of the very real problems we face.

  18. Stefan Drinic says:

    Since I’m actually fairly early to the party this thread around, I’m going to ask something I’ve been meaning to ask for a while..

    How long does our dear commentariat think it would take for the mainstream left to altogether decide trade and commerce is a good thing?

    Anti-market attitudes and such don’t add up that well to leftist attitudes in general, whatever else some might say. As far as I can tell, said attitudes are a leftover from when Marx still wrote, and it had a thought process like so: those darn capitalists and their factories exploit people, these people operate on the markets, an ideal world would have no markets but would have people share everything because sunshine, QED markets are bad. It’s a very culturally specific trope that makes much less sense in today’s economy. Certainly there are some issues with work conditions, but it’s hardly enough for most people to give up on the idea of commerce entirely.

    What I just happen to be curious about is how long people here think this sort of attitude is even going to last. Anticapitalist attitudes aren’t especially ‘necessary’ to appeal to large voter bases, and I wager the amount of people who genuinely hold such views is very small, below 20% for sure. I could envision a political party in favour of free trade and open economies whilst holding on to leftist social issues as well as things like social security, student aid, and what have you.

    I’m also not very interested in rants about how closing off economies and whatnot is something that’s always been what those darn leftists have been doing since ever oh it is so horrible. History spans much further than any of our lifetimes, and it proves such views to be wrong.

    • walpolo says:

      I think that sort of change in the left will require a lasting perception that “capitalists” (which most people today identify as bankers and other finance workers) are not trying to fleece the common people or play dangerous games with their savings. So we will have to go a long time without a significant failure of the financial system like the one that happened in 2008.

      • ddreytes says:

        How accurate would such a perception actually be, in reference to actually-existing bankers and finance workers?

        On the broader topic: I think that this is one of those things that is probably very different between America and Europe, and where it also depends very heavily on what you have in mind when you say “mainstream left”. That said, my feeling is that, in America, if we’re thinking basically about the progressive movement and the left fringe of the Democratic Party – I don’t think those people are opposed to markets and trade as such. In favor of much more strongly regulated markets, yes. Convinced that markets are an imperfect mechanism, yes – but pretty OK with the existence of the private sphere and markets in themselves.

        There are certainly people who do still think that capitalism is doomed to fail because of its internal contradictions in America. But those people are so far removed from any position where they would worry about electoral appeal that it’s almost not worth talking about.

      • stargirl says:

        The issue with this is the financial system does have alot of very bad practices. The biggest issue is that most forms of “investment services” are bad deals for most people. Probably almost everyone should invest in various forms of index funds.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        > So we will have to go a long time without a significant failure of the financial system like the one that happened in 2008.

        The left still had the same anti-capitalist attitudes before 2008 — for example, the spectacularly destructive WTO protests were in 1999, near the end of a famously lengthy period of capitalism-associated peace, prosperity, and happiness — so I don’t think there’s any relation.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Joseph Schumpeter:

          Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

        • Brian Donohue says:

          Furthermore, the most cogent explanation of the severity of the 2008 crisis lays a lot of responsibility at the feet of the Fed.

          Same with the Great Depression.

      • > “capitalists” (which most people today identify as bankers and other finance workers)

        That’s a labelling thing. It’s not that organic farmers and mom-and-pop stores aren’t engaging in “trade and commerce”. The left are much more suspicious of high finance. Not without reason.

    • PSJ says:

      I think the left is more supportive of markets in general than is assumed, but they:

      1. Tend to think of more things as distortions in markets that require government intervention to make efficient, and

      2. Have a social welfare function that is more weighted towards equity than rightists writ large

      So they are more supportive of interventionism.

      The first point leads to pro-market solutions that rely on government involvement. For example most people on the left are strongly supportive of a tax on carbon as a way to correct a negative externality that has not been internalized by the market. Of course, because of low levels of awareness of economics, this often takes the form of “Global warming is bad for other people and the government should intervene when people do bad things for other people and don’t pay a price for it.” but that is adjacent to sound economic principles. Ditto for sin taxes and pollution controls which should lead to a more efficient allocation of resources. These things take away from individual liberties, but aren’t really anti-market. They are supportive of strong antitrust laws because they see companies having huge control over prices and are “taking advantage” of people and that is a bad thing. But again, this intuition is just an uneducated statement of sound, pro-market, pro-competition solutions to a problem. They are supportive of large amounts of government-funded, so-called “independent” research on things like climate change and health outcomes and oversight of business practices in order to create information and correct asymmetries which should improve market outcomes, (although again in less precise terms). So on the first point, it really comes down to whether you classify all government action as anti-market or you think of efficiency oriented policy as pro-market.

      Now this is not at all to say that the left is particularly capitalist and the second point is a large driver of this. I don’t think I need to provide examples of this. But I think a similar portion of leftists are principled anti-capitalists as rightists are principled protectionists or make blanket bans against any tax, none of which are really promoting efficient markets. The average voter of both sides have no real conception of what good economic policy is, and among actual policy-makers, I would argue that the left is only marginally more anti-capitalist if at all (but again, this relies on my belief that something like a carbon tax is actually good pro-market policy and weak anti-trust laws is anti-market which no libertarian/Austrian would accept).

      Anyway, this is just my conception as a leftist surrounded by leftists. I think views about the left from the right (and vice-versa) tend to be from the internet outrage machine which is obviously going to highlight bad and the most controversial ideas. We don’t hear about how the (some of the) right sensibly wants to rein in future social security spending by slowly raising eligibility ages or how the “death panels” were actually an effective way to reduce wasteful spending on healthcare.

      The fact that most academic economists are leftist at least indicates that classification of right=markets, left=anti-markets may be far over-simplified (and yes, there is the counter-point that the academy is a leftist shell in which no rightist views may even be spoken 🙂 ).

      • walpolo says:

        “But I think a similar portion of leftists are principled anti-capitalists as rightists are principled protectionists or make blanket bans against any tax, none of which are really promoting efficient markets.”

        I agree with this.

      • “The fact that most academic economists are leftist”

        Compared to other academics, I think the opposite is true.

        One point you don’t discuss is how willing people on the left are to recognize problems with government along public choice lines. The same arguments that imply market failure on private markets imply market failure on the political market–the voter who spends time and effort figuring out who is the best candidate for the country is producing a public good for a very large public.

        The underlying cause of market failure is that individuals take actions most of whose net cost is born by other people. That sometimes happens on private markets, but it is almost always the case on the political market, whether you are considering voters, lobbyists, politicians, or judges.

        Or in other words, is the difference in policy views between leftists and pro-market conservatives and libertarians due not to the leftists underestimating the attractiveness of markets but to their overestimating the political alternative?

        • PSJ says:

          Putting in terms of underestimating and overestimating seems like encouraging partisan contest. I would just say that different sides have different balances of these two values.

          • A key difference between the left and pro-market right is that the weight the left puts on equality the right puts on helping the poor. So having the rich get 20% richer while the poor got only 10% richer would be looked at as bad by the much of the left but good by the right.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ James D. Miller

            Your 20%/10% may work for a while; but somewhere around, shall we say, 99%/1%, you hit gentrification. The rich bid up the price of a limited commodity, till the poor can’t afford any.

            Plus, the more politicians and lawyers the rich can afford, makes a snowball effect in power.

          • houseboatonstyx

            I don’t think the economy is zero sum. The (relative) poor can move out of cities. In the U.S. at least there is lots and lots of cheap land. Plus, the price of housing is high in cities because of government restrictions on building.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ James D. Miller
            I don’t think the economy is zero sum.

            Land area, is. And so, at any particular time, is food.

            The (relative) poor can move out of cities.

            Till the rich have bid up the price of the current flyover acres, too. ‘Gentrification’ is a principle.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ houseboatonstyx:

            That ain’t how it works.

            One commodity in limited supply is human labor. And these rich people who own all the wealth presumably own all the businesses, and they have to compete against each other for the limited supply of workers, bidding up wages.

            The more the rich bid up land rents or whatever, the more attractive human labor looks in comparison, so this phenomenon limits itself.

            Now, if we’re talking about a society where human labor is absolutely unneeded, we’re talking about a post-scarcity utopia, and the idea of the rich owning everything is hardly a threat there. Even if the rich ended up with literally all the capital, the real price of goods would be so low that a single philanthropist could pay a nickel to keep the entire population of the poor in luxury for all their days.

          • PSJ says:

            @James D Miller

            Your 20/10 example is a straw man liberal as far as I can tell. A more accurate characterization of a normalish liberal (since I’m sure you can find a socialistish writer who would say yours) might be that a liberal would prefer a world where the rich get 10% richer while the poor get 40% richer to the 20/10 world even if that world has less total capital. Again, it’s different social utility functions with liberals weighted towards equity, not that one side is purposefully aiming to leave the utility possibilities curve towards everyone’s detriment.

            Although this was not the point your response was originally nested under which was that liberals tend to see more opportunities for the government to productively intervene in the market to correct failures than conservatives, with no claim about which is broadly correct (since it seems fantastically unlikely that government intervention in every market should optimally move the same direction, let alone policy-to-policy comparison)

        • PSJ says:

          Re: academic economists, I was simply trying to say that the fact leftist (as in American Democratic Party sort of left) economists outnumber conservative economists significantly means that the characterization of the left as widely and explicitly anti market beggars belief, not that the leftist position is “correct”. And so even if relative to other academics, economists are more conservative, the point stands. As such, some sort of more nuanced explanation of the difference between the two re: markets such as your comment seems necessary.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’ve been going the opposite direction of this and finally admitted that developing countries should institute some tariffs. I don’t know how unpopular a position this is around here but I can defend it if needed.

      I think it’s a mistake to use broad categories like anti-trade instead of thinking that some people have other goals that have to be traded off against trade.

      • PSJ says:

        I would love to hear a defense of this! Or links to other defenses. I don’t think I’ve heard convincing arguments that tariffs are ever better than targeted subsidy or redistribution. Although I guess they may solve some problems with inefficiency or corruption in government? But this sounds really interesting!

        Edit: Ok, whoops. One potential argument is that a developing country without government revenue or credit with which to implement subsidies can only encourage production through limiting trade? I think that makes sense?

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Yeah, that’s what the sources I’ve been reading say. In a free-trade situation where everyone else is developed but you, there’s no good way to develop a local industry like car manufacturing because everyone else has huge highly-advanced economy-of-scale Tesla factories while you’re still trying to build the Model T. If you try to compete with them you’ll be blown away. Have tariffs for a couple of decades and you can get your own car factories up to speed, assuming that’s something you want to do.

          I think the main reason you would want this is that otherwise you’ll default to either being a resource supplier (with associated shock once the resources run out) or cheap labor for other people’s industries with a lot of the money going back to them.

          I’d like to see an analysis of to what degree this can explain the first world/third world distinction. Right now there’s this big question of how come the First World was able to industrialize pretty quickly after the Industrial Revolution, but then after that the Third World has had a really hard time developing even though people keep throwing aid and technology at them. Right now the best theory I’ve heard is Garett Jones’ hive mind theory, but it seems possible that one big First World advantage is that they didn’t have to compete against the First World while they were trying to escape Third World status. I think this may be what a lot of leftists are getting at although they use such nonstandard and loaded language that I’ve missed it until recently.

          Although I don’t think this would explain some cases like China.

          Disclaimer: I’m not an economist and this could be totally laughably wrong.

          • Tracy W says:

            From memory, the rate of industrialisation has been increasing over time. I’m on my tablet and a brief google hasn’t helped my memory but something like Britain was probably at around 2% annual average GDP growth during the Industrial Revolution while Japan was high single digits post-WWII and China has been 10%+. (I’m excluding the USA and the other Anglo-Saxon colonies because there was a large element of opening up natural resources.)

            Which is logical enough, Britain and the Netherlands had to work it all out as they went along, while Japan could do things like copy railways and China now can copy from countries ranging from Canada to Singapore.

            [Edit: added: you also are assuming that countries compete. They don’t. Individual firms or industries may compete, but this competition, be it domestic or international, is beneficial for other producers and consumers. Rich Westerners can buy more products from developing nations than poor ones. Massive Western steel mills can produce steel far more cheaply for steel-using firms in both rich and poor countries than backyard furnaces, allowing final consumer goods to be produced more cheaply, etc. ]

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            This is the nittiest pick to ever pick, but the Netherlands never was industrialised all that much, owing in part due to its tertiary economic sector already being fairly well-developed.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Aren’t a large proportion of third world poor people who are in dire poverty subsistence farmers and domestic workers, while working in a factory is a relative step up? Especially since a large number of imports are things like machinery and medicine.

            I would guess that a lot of poor countries those that are heavily isolated from the world economy or so wracked by warfare that it is impossible to build infrastructure.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Stefan: I was reading Scott Alexander as talking about industrialisation in the sense of economic prosperity generally, because he doesn’t seem that guilt-torn over choosing to be a doctor rather than a steelworker.

          • Anon. says:

            A big unstated assumption here is that (corrupt and incompetent third-world) politicians are good at picking the correct industries to support.

            >or cheap labor for other people’s industries with a lot of the money going back to them.

            Unless tariffs encourage saving/investment, I don’t see the connection. What do you think happens to local capital?

            Perhaps there is some effect like the one you describe, but surely it is tiny compared to institutional quality and human capital.

            A recent related paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2695719

          • Adam Casey says:

            >Have tariffs for a couple of decades and you can get your own car factories up to speed,

            This seems not be true.

            1) It seems unlikely that in a world where the US, Japan, and Germany have car industries that Nigeria could even with the best will in the world compete with that. (It seems like Italy can’t, and Italy is very much developed). Specialisation between countries is important.

            2) It’s not clear to me that tariffs actually help industries in developing countries. They are unlikely to promote investment of capital from outside the country. And that’s a key source of growth.

            3) It seems like the main thing holding back economic development in poor countries is the poor market institutions within those countries themselves. And that won’t be fixed after a decade of tariffs. If anything having the country flooded with coke and mcdonadls might promote those market institutions.

            4) This seems to imply that the countries that have had high tariffs imposed on them from outside in the form of embargos would benefit from this. Which isn’t true. Unless of course the important point is for tariffs to be asymmetrical.

            I second your disclaimer.

          • Jason K. says:

            My first question would be: what is the rebuttal to comparative advantage?

            Snipped from here: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-specialization-and-comparative-advantage-international-trade.asp

            “Consider a hypothetical situation where the U.S. can either produce 100 televisions or 50 cars. China can produce 50 televisions or 10 cars. The U.S. is better at producing both in an absolute sense, but China is better at producing televisions because it only has to give up one-fifth of a car to make one television; the U.S. has to give up one-half of a car to make a television. Conversely, the U.S. only has to trade two televisions to make a car, while China has to forgo five televisions to make a car.

            This example highlights why there is almost always an economic incentive for two entities, including whole countries, to engage in trade. This is especially important for less-developed countries, who are not shut out of international markets because they lack the superior technology and capital infrastructure of wealthy nations.”

            Trade does not require that one produces goods that are superior. Look at all the cultch that is imported from China. If the party got its nose out of things, I bet China would be rapidly catching up to developed status. What keeps most of the third world undeveloped isn’t the competition of developed countries, but unrest/corruption and/or not very compatible legal/cultural structures.

          • If you impose a tariff on good X, you make it harder for your domestic industries to produce anything made with good X. If X is cars then you harm any industry that makes use of auto-transport. Successful multinational firms get each component of their products made in the country that can make them the cheapest. A poor nation that uses tariffs loses much of the ability to do this and will be placing itself at a horrible disadvantage. A poor country is going to choose to protect the most politically powerful industries, not those industries that have the most potential for long-term growth. Once a domestic industry is protected by a tariff its success depends on pleasing politicians not customers and so it’s unlikely to ever become world-class. Tariffs also distort comparative advantages in a way that probably reduces economic growth.

            Horrible political systems and lack of rule of law is a big reason many poor countries stay poor.

          • Drew says:

            Disclaimer: I’m not an economist and this could be totally laughably wrong.

            This is very much a position in mainstream econ. The term is Import Substitution Industrialization

          • Jiro says:

            How did Taiwan and South Korea manage to transition to first world at a time when first world countries already existed?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            If you impose a tariff on good X, you make it harder for your domestic industries to produce anything made with good X.

            Right. Consider actual US experience: Our steel mills weren’t competitive with the newer mini-mills popping up elsewhere so we instituted import taxes and/or quotas that made imported steel more expensive. Which might’ve been great (at least in the short term) for US steel producers, but made US cars less competitive both in the US and internationally. Because Japanese firms could use cheap/fast turnaround/high-quality steel from the good new foreign producers sold at the cheap price, but US automakers were stuck either using crappier US steel or paying the huge import tariffs we had inflicted on ourselves.

            Which meant we had to put a tax/quota on cars too, which in turn disadvantaged still other local industries.

            Or consider computer memory. Dynamic RAM (“DRAM”) chips made in Asia were being sold SO cheaply that the US wouldn’t be competitive, so we instituted huge “dumping” duties on imported DRAM…and nearly killed Apple Computer. See, Apple’s products were at the time being assembled in the US and the tariff was charged on DRAM chips imported for sale or use but NOT on products CONTAINING these chips. So a Korean generic PC maker could buy cheap DRAM chips, solder them onto their boards and import the boards or resulting PCs to the US, but Apple had to pay the duty. Apple didn’t even have the OPTION of buying from a US supplier since no such yet existed – they had to pay the tax. Ultimately Apple solved the problem by getting rid of their US manufacturing and doing assembly in Cork, Ireland. Thus an attempt to protect the possibility of a nonexistent US DRAM industry harmed an already-existing US computer-assembly industry to the point of sending all those jobs and that expertise abroad.

          • Brian Donohue says:

            FWIW, Alexander Hamilton had a similar vision for building the American economy in the face of comparatively mature, extant European economies.

            He wasn’t an economist either, but he was a smart guy like you.

            I can’t say I’ve ever made my mind up on the subject.

          • I believe Ricardo only published the theory of comparative advantage in 1817, by which time Alexander Hamilton had been dead for over a decade. So not only did Hamilton not know economics, the economics relevant to making sense of the effect of tariffs did not exist for him to know.

          • Brian Donohue says:

            @David Friedman,

            Fair enough. But my understanding of the British Empire of the time was that colonies exported raw materials to the Mother Country and imported finished goods.

            I’m sure that arrangement was consistent with the comparative advantage of England and America at the time, whether anybody knew it or not.

            And I think Hamilton probably understood that trade among nations was mutually advantageous. He wasn’t after autarky so much as a period of protection for infant industries that could never get off the ground otherwise.

            Isn’t that kind of what happened in America? I may have my facts wrong and am willing to learn.

            Anyway, yeah, I understand that these arguments are often a pretext for old-fashioned protectionism, but aren’t countries always trying to move their way up the value chain? Japan and Korea spring to mind as more recent examples. Is there an argument that they have benefited from providing protections to the home market and allowing value-add industries to grow?

          • Tracy W says:

            Here’s a graph in The Economist showing some of the data I was thinking of. It’s only a few countries, but clearly the time taken for GDP per capita to double has been shrinking since the Industrial Revolution started in Britain, which is consistent with the hypothesis that it’s getting easier to get rich.

          • vV_Vv says:

            First world countries didn’t industrialize all at the same time, in Europe, for instance, some countries had more than one century lag with respect to Britain, and countries like Japan and Korea industrialized even later. As @Tracy W pointed out, countries that industrialized later industrialized faster until they caught up.

            Also, manufacturing companies in the first world love to relocate in less industrialized countries in order to profit from cheaper labor and laxer regulations. So why do they relocate to China rather than, say, Zimbabwe, even though wages in Zimbabwe are lower than in China? Probably it’s largely a matter of political stability, rule of the law (or at least rule of predictable corruption), education of the workforce, and so on.

          • Ksdale says:

            From what I remember of political economy in college, South Korea and Japan pretty successfully used protectionism to grow their own industries. In the case of Korea, I believe it went pretty far beyond tariffs though, and included a lot of state directed investment. It worked, companies like Hyundai are household names around the world, and most people don’t even know that they make ginormous cargo ships.

            On the other hand, I recall that Brazil tried to do the same thing in the computer industry (sorry I don’t have cites) but failed miserably, spending lots of tax dollars to flood the market with barely functioning computers and preventing citizens from buying better computers from abroad.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            The problem is that the most successful industries for Japan and South Korea are the ones that don’t really work well with protectionism- after all, there is only so many cargo ships 50 million people need.

            As for Brazil, that happened in a lot of cases in Latin America. They pursued a policy of import substitution which tended to go poorly- I don’t remember if it is due to worse institutions, or because attempting to over turn gains from trade is inherently a bad plan.

          • John Schilling says:

            Subsidies or targeted investment are more flexible than protectionist tariffs. If you allocate a billion dollars in government funding to build a shipyard, you get a shipyard. Probably a crappy one at first, but you get a shipyard and you can learn from that. If you allocate a billion dollars to subsidize shipbuilding, it is highly likely someone will set up a shipyard to claim the subsidy, and they’ll at least be motivated to try and make it a good one to get another billion from commercial sales somewhere. If you set up a billion dollars in protectionist tariffs on shipbuilding, you only get a shipyard if you’ve got on the order of a billion dollars’ worth of serious customers for new ships right there in your own country.

            Also, when you set up your protectionist tariffs on shipbuilding, everybody with a shipbuilding industry will set up retaliatory tariffs on whatever it is you’re actually good at producing for export.

            Tariffs are rarely the winning move in this game.

          • vV_Vv says:

            @John Schilling

            I think it’s generally even better to subside industries with income tax breaks rather than direct government investment. This way, if somebody builds a crappy shipyard and then folds shop, they will not waste or embezzle any taxpayer money.

          • John Schilling says:

            Income tax rebates are only valuable/effective when there is income which would otherwise be taxed, which is to say when the industry is capable of generating net profits in the open market. If that’s the case, you’re well past the point of needing to protect, assist, or bootstrap industrial development and are just talking about tweaking the distribution of profitable industries in your economy.

          • multiheaded says:

            I think the main reason you would want this is that otherwise you’ll default to either being a resource supplier (with associated shock once the resources run out) or cheap labor for other people’s industries with a lot of the money going back to them.

            Dare you shun the sacred logic of Comparative Advantage! Being cheap labor builds character and helps people bond and learn rational life choices, you know. /s

          • “‘Dare you shun the sacred logic of Comparative Advantage! Being cheap labor builds character and helps people bond and learn rational life choices, you know. ”

            The logic of comparative advantage is that selling your labor to foreign capitalists results in your having a higher income, hence more food on the table, than being compelled by trade restrictions to sell your labor to domestic capitalists, who don’t pay as well. Which is why you will choose to sell your labor to foreign capitalists if the domestic capitalists don’t persuade your government not to let you.

            I don’t know whether you know that you are attacking a straw man of your own invention or are entirely ignorant of the position you are attacking.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @David: You are talking to a literal Marxist.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        I know the arguments in favor of such policies, but I think such arguments work the wrong way around. While I can’t speak for the US, the EU’s protectionist policies on agriculture especially are retardedly huge – there have been years that no less than 60% of the EU’s budget went to subsidising agriculture, and this happened even before countries like Romania and Poland joined the union. There quite literally are millions of Frenchmen making their living off of such subsidies and subsequently destroying large parts of their harvest because of overproduction, and it is well known that such products end up being shipped the world around at awfully low prices.

        Maybe Third World countries would do well at raising tariffs, but I doubt it’d be anywhere near necessary if others took down theirs first.

        • Adam Casey says:

          I’m going to vote for Brexit in no small part because of how godawful the CAP is.

        • vV_Vv says:

          There quite literally are millions of Frenchmen making their living off of such subsidies and subsequently destroying large parts of their harvest because of overproduction, and it is well known that such products end up being shipped the world around at awfully low prices.

          Indeed there are millions of farmers all over Europe who are being paid to keep their land uncultivated or to “destroy” their harvest.

          This is a huge transfer of wealth, both as taxpayer money and as artificially raised food prices, from the general population to farmers, who as a class are highly organized and have plenty of political clout.

          Since, if I understand correctly, something similar happens in the US (e.g. water subsides in California, corn ethanol subsides), this seems to be a general problem in developed countries.

          • keranih says:

            The best term for labeling the water market issues in CA is “water rights”, which is not quite the same as subsidies.

          • brad says:

            Only surface waters are subject to prior appropriation. Subsurface waters are currently a free for all and will be until 2040 under current laws. By which time it is likely that many of the main aquifers will be collapsed or subject to salt water intrusion and so unusable for the next geological epoch or three.

            Even surface “water rights” aren’t property rights in the same way as a deed to land. In particular, transferability is quite limited by several associated doctrines. That prevents the Coarse Theorem from working its magic.

            Finally, in terms of subsidy, while the water rights might be considered a form of property and not subsidies the water works are pretty clearly subsidized, and the farmers are pushing for additional capital spending on those works to the tune of $2.7B.

            Of all the terrible things that have been done with California’s initiative system, why hasn’t anything been done to reform the water mess? Isn’t initiative supposed to be about overcoming concentrated interests by bypassing the legislature? Farming interests are less than 5% of both the state economy and workforce, and a good part of that workforce can’t even vote.

          • My memory of Gary Becker’s account is that the countries of the world are divided into two groups as judged by agriculture policy.

            There are the countries where farmers are a small fraction of the population, such as the U.S. and Europe, and where the purpose of farm policy is to hold up the price of agricultural products in order to buy the political support of the concentrated agricultural interest group.

            Then there are the countries where the farmers are a large part of the population, and the purpose of agricultural policy is to hold down the price of agricultural products so as to buy the support of the urban mob at the expense of the dispersed peasantry.

            I think that, on this account, New Zealand is experimental error–it didn’t seem, when I looked into the question some years back, to fit either pattern.

          • Tracy W says:

            NZ’s unusual in that farmers and farmworkers are a small fraction of the population in terms of employment but their production is a large share of exports. Thus New Zealand has tended to tax farmers’ output and use that money to subsidise other activities, eg subsidising industry. There just isn’t the money there to subsidise farming.

            On the other hand, the small numbers of farmers mean that, as per public choice theory, they can’t be taxed *that* much because they’d notice and organise loudly against it.

            About the only time NZ farming was subsidised was in the later years of Robert Muldoon’s prime ministership, this being the man who thought The Road to Serfdom was a guidebook.

          • multiheaded says:

            Hear, hear. Unironically fuck farmers, ugh. Farming subsidies are a horrible thing that western nations do at everyone else’s expense.

          • One aspect of farming subsidies that seems to be being overlooked is the need for countries to ensure they have adequate internal food supplies in the event that imports are cut off. Britain in particular won’t easily forget World War II.

      • Do you think the tariffs they should institute will be the ones they will institute, assuming they regard tariffs as an acceptable policy? On past evidence elsewhere, a senile industry is considerably more likely to get protection than an infant industry.

        Also, what tariffs do you think they should have and why?

        • stubydoo says:

          People might be sick of motte/bailey stuff after the last thread, but oh well…

          Infant industry tariffs is the motte.

          Tariffs for politically connected non-infant industries is the bailey.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I think it’s more a case of a “baptists and bootleggers” coalition.

            There are some sincere advocates of “import-substitution industrialization” (which is what Scott describes here). These are the baptists: the ones who support this policy as a moral imperative.

            There are also the bootleggers: the owners of the industries that are going to get subsidized, whether they are infant or not.

            The actual baptists are not making a motte-and-bailey argument. They are arguing for the motte, perhaps without realizing that it will lead to the bailey.

            The bootleggers are arguing for the bailey, and when they get called on it they point to the baptists for support, who loyally defend the motte.

            Also, I do think (as he admits he might be) that Scott is “totally laughably wrong” about import-substitution industrialization. But obviously he is not arguing for subsidizing corrupt third-world industries. As for what he should read, I think George Reisman’s Capitalism has a good discussion of it.

            This is also a general instance of the point that, when people argue for a policy, they can only be considered to “support” the consequences they think will actually occur. It’s not fair to accuse them of supporting the consequences they don’t think will occur. I’ve never heard of a socialist who supports destroying the economy and lowering quality of life for no reason (as the pro-capitalists think), and I’ve never heard of a capitalist who supports reducing everyone but a rich elite to poverty and slavery (as the pro-socialists think).

      • Ariel Ben-Yehuda says:

        Theoretically, a correctly-placed direct industry subsidy should always be superior to a tariff (same gains to producers, no deadweight loss) – from what I managed to understand from Ha-Joon Chang’s book, this even worked in practice for Korea.

        A direct subsidy may suffer from implementation problems, but I am not sure whether they are worse than these faced by a tariff.

        And, of course, corruption is to red giant industries as bears are to honey, but that is a different issue.

        Incidentally, is there any serious discussion of the “civics class monopoly” – the one that hides behind a high barrier to entry and threatens to destroy any competitor that tries to start, e.g. by cutting prices? Can it really happen (it seems to me that a State’s monopoly on violence is achieved through this mechanism, but this is a quite exotic case – how correct is this?)

        • Trevor says:

          Direct industry subsidies only have no deadweight loss if the taxes used to raise the revenue to fund them have no deadweight loss. Which in practice means if you aren’t using a poll tax, which you aren’t because no one uses them, there will be a deadweight loss, probably a fairly large one.

          Also the “civics class monopoly” strategy wouldn’t work because you would have to lower prices way lower than the profit maximizing amount. At this lower price demand would be much higher and you would have to produce enough goods to satisfy this entire demand even though you are losing money on each good you produce because the price is so low. If you did not produce enough to satisfy all demand at that price then your competitor(s) could sell to the people who can’t buy your cheap product because you started rationing it. So the cost to the monopolist would be much higher than to the new entrants and the entrants could just take out loans and wait until the monopolist bankrupts themselves and is forced to raise prices again.

          • When people say that direct industry subsidies have no deadweight loss, what form are they imagining the subsidies to take? A per unit subsidy to the producers pushes price below MC, assuming the producers compete with each other. A per firm subsidy gives you an inefficiently large number of firms.

          • Trevor says:

            In new trade theory a country can make itself better off through tariffs at the expense of other countries, due to economies of scale and network effects. This is especially true if labor is not mobile.

          • “In new trade theory a country can make itself better off through tariffs at the expense of other countries, due to economies of scale and network effects.”

            In old trade theory, a country can make itself better off through tariffs at the expense of its trading partners, provided the country is a monopsony and the individual firms or consumers are not.

            One problem with both arguments, along with the old infant industry argument, is that they assume that if tariffs are a political option, the special cases where they benefit the imposing country will be the ones that are imposed, instead of the more common case where they injure both countries.

      • This, in fact, is both the orthodox Austrian and Moldbug’s position; economics is value-free, and it’s perfectly rational to impose restrictions if the predicted results are what you actually want.

        To quote Moldbug (note that I don’t actually agree with large parts – perhaps even the majority – of the post linked to above, but do think that the following point is a good one/at least worth considering):

        First, the King has no compunction whatsoever in creating economic distortions that produce employment for low-skilled humans. A good example of such a distortion in the modern world are laws prohibiting self-service gas stations, as in New Jersey or Oregon. These distortions have gotten a bad name among today’s thinkers, because makework is typically the symptom of some corrupt political combination. As the King’s will, it will have a different flavor.

        As both a good Carlylean and a good Misesian, the King condemns economism – the theory that any economic indicator can measure human happiness. His goal is a fulfilled and dignified society, not maximum production of widgets. Is it better that teenagers get work experience during the summer, or that gas costs five cents a gallon less? The question is not a function of any mathematical formula. It is a question of judgment and taste. All that free-market economics will tell you is that, if you prohibit self service, there will be more jobs for gas-station attendants, and gas will cost more. It cannot tell you whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

        Economics is, as such, a value-free science; it cannot tell you what you should do, merely what the results of doing something shall be under a given analytical model. (The applicability of that model depends on how closely the historical categories used to make such decisions actually match the reality they attempt to describe.) Depending on what you wish to accomplish, you take different actions; the model merely describes different outcomes, but does not choose between them.

        On the specific issue of tariffs, I don’t have any data yet, but I suspect that things don’t actually work that way. I suspect that import tariffs may, in the very best case, when applied impartially to actually infant (as opposed to politically connected) industries, produce the desired results after a long time; but it’ll be at the cost of every customer of that good inside the country that institutes the tariff from the beginning of the policy till its end. You’re basically forcing everyone in the country buying the ‘protected’ good to subsidise the industry. It’s a concentrated benefit with a diffuse cost. You may make a value judgement about this; I don’t know right now which is better, and whether it is for me to make this tradeoff.

    • TD says:

      I thought the “mainstream left” (left-liberals) were in favor of markets already? Sure, they want them to be highly regulated by centralized government, but the “mixed economy” is a left-liberal idea.

      It’s really the far-left that explicitly reject private property, and usually markets (but not always; mutualists and left individualist anarchists reject private property in favor of occupancy and use, but they support free markets). Marxists, Ancoms, and Anarcho-Collectivists reject private property and markets (arguably, anarchist “free associaton” implies a de facto market between different communes, but I’ve never seen any anarchist address this idea).

      I think the mainstream left is more hostile to big business than markets per se. They are hostile to lassez faire markets or “free” markets, but it’s easy to forget that everything short of outright communist beliefs involves support for markets. Most leftists tolerate markets because they recognize that the market is the goose laying the golden social welfare egg.

      When will the mainstream left support actual free market ideology? I don’t know. The one barrier is that the left philosophically is defined by favoring equality in of itself (go far enough to the right, and inequality is “beneficial”), and I think it’s pretty clear that free markets increase inequality, even if they don’t have to increase absolute poverty. Just having people out of a situation of starving or having ill health isn’t enough. Abstract equality is what matters fundamentally to people on the left, much as abstract purity matters to social conservatives, and abstract autonomy to libertarians.

      Personally, I already hold to a position that is very much like free markets + social welfare, and I consider myself to be a moderate libertarian of a centrist orientation, not a leftist (I don’t give a crap about equality coz equality; I’m an autonomy is better than everything else guy). Follow the conservatives to lower regulations on small to medium sized business, but the progressives on welfare. I would like a basic income to be put in place to facilitate getting rid of the minimum wage, as well.

      Actually, I think the automation issue could make mainstream leftists less supporting of markets and property and push them towards a far-left explicitly socialist position. It all depends on how conservatives and libertarians respond. It is the “right” (market liberals) that needs to become more accepting of social welfare, if anything, because a basic income guarantee absolutely will be needed when automation makes the vast majority of the populace redundant. The only other options are genocide, or socialism/state capitalism.

      Universal welfare Vs Socialism Vs Genocide. I pick universal welfare, though socialism is better than a RioKneeactionary genocide of everyone with an IQ lower than 140/everyone without a CompSci degree, of course.

      This is why I try to convince more orthodox market liberals to accept the basic income guarantee. You can have a basic income guarantee and a free market (taxes are not regulations), but with automation looming, there’s going to be a big slump period where the economy will go into a downwards slide without it (no workers needed = no wages = no disposable income = no consumption = no revenue). Marx will finally be right about the decreasing rate of profit destroying capitalism, even if he was wrong about the reasons (He almost got there with the “Fragment on Machines”, but he thought it would be because mechanization would empower the proletariat by lowering labor time, not make them redundant/lumpen by rebutting the labor theory of value).

      Want to not have socialism/gommie time? Then accept welfare capitalism. It’s the Swedish model, after all, isn’t it? Both the conservative Heritage Foundation and American liberals who think Sweden is “socialist” like it, so what’s the problem?

      I think there will be resistance though. It seems to me that the right/market liberals are far more hostile to welfare than the left/social liberals are to markets.

      My counter-question then is: how long will it take the mainstream right to altogether decide that social welfare programs are a good thing, no, an absolutely necessary thing to allow property rights to ride over the automation gap?

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        My intuition about your final question is somewhere near or about ‘the exact same moment our modern populist rightists become the new mainstream’. It seemed to have worked in Rome, it might happen again.

        • Techno-Decentralism says:

          The problem with populist rightists is that while they tend to have more support for welfare compared to regular liberal conservatives/right-liberals, they correspondingly have less support for liberal rights like free speech/assembly/expression and so on. Even very soft para-fascism isn’t a terribly great outcome. They also tend to kick the military-industrial complex into overdrive.

          Well, as long as I get to privately own additive manufacturing machines (will they still be called 3D printers in 2 decades?), and own robot “slaves”3D waifus lel, I’m good, I guess.

          To segue into a related issue as to why a level of decentralization (or politically speaking; distributism, that forgotten philosophy) is important…

          I don’t believe in FOOOM like the rest of you do, and I think we are going to have really powerful specialized optimization engines converging together long before AGI (We are already on this trend; Watson was no soft AGI, but a series of programs brought together that made it out perform humans in a surprisingly human domain). Paper clip maximizers aren’t a danger because they optimize for maximizing paper clips; they are a danger because they are able to optimize for all the other kabrillions of tasks in the world it needs to accomplish in order to increase its paper clip creation efficiency.

          When we do get AGI, it will likely not be a random blot in the mindspace though, but be based off the human brain. Maybe the Human Brain Project is a dud, but something like it is far more likely to achieve generality in all domains than the scattershot of module production driven by corporations requiring narrow domain optimization, and sporadic shot in the dark government research.

          That changes the calculus immensely, flips it over even. My real worry isn’t that a stock market hobbyist will create Cthulhu.Ltd, or that AI will destroy us, but that humans can use narrow-domain AI to outperform other humans in relatively narrow-domain tasks like war, and that when AGI does come, it will be friendly – but friendly to whom? Even with today’s technology, drones with narrow-domain object recognition, trajectory calculation that has been around since forever, and reaction times of 1ms or less to stimuli (check out the rock, paper, scissors bot with similar reaction times) could decimate regular soldiers. Direct holding of territory by infantry by soldiers is useful still, but quadcopter drones forgo the need to have Terminator style robots, since they can easily have rotor shields, and open doors, and navigate tight spaces, and move in rotation back to a self-driving vehicle for charging.

          It’s that automated military tech that is the real threat. If AGI comes from human brain emulation, and not FOOOM because we optimized for a dangerous random mind, then the real danger is centralization of authority through the gradual elimination of the human military.

          Consider that much of what constrains arbitrary leadership is the military. Every politician cannot act beyond the point at which the soldiers that protect the state will go rogue. Every human army has family within the population.

          Consider instead what happens under conditions where you have artificial soldiers, modeled after the human brain, but with a full understanding of the mechanisms behind it, made absolutely loyal to a smaller and smaller group of people, whose whims can be enacted in ever arbitrary ways, because the balance of power between the concerns of the soldiers as citizens and the orders of politicians is eroded away as humans fall out of the loop.

          I think that would be the dawn of a new type of regime in history. Even in North Korea, Kim Jong Un must appease the military, and cannot treat his populace completely as puppets without any interests aberrant to his own.

          In an increasingly automated military this is not so. At first it may seem that we get more ethics advisers and men in the middle, but ultimately that possibility is only backed up by the human element in military authority to begin with. As humans recede due to automation, the humans that are left – the higher ups – gain more and more absolute power, without check or balance. Eventually, under the right conditions a single person could have power and express his purified will upon the populace in the first true dictatorship in history.

          That’s a new type of regime, maybe you could call it “Personalist”, I don’t know, but there wouldn’t be much to limit his desires. He could potentially dispense with political ideology altogether and pursue only his aesthetic interests. Wipe us all out, or make us serve his own morality without any regard to anyone else’s. Though let’s not forget that even a few hundred elites would be dangerous with a mechanism for translating their will into automated power in this way.

          That’s the potential outcome if AGI comes from the principles of a human base model, while tweaking what needs to be tweaked for perfect loyalty and concern to only the elites or even single leader. That can only be tackled with decentralization, where at least there’s a potential for balance of power within the state (between states only creates competing individual aestheticist regimes).

          If, on the other hand, AGI comes from a completely guideless exploration of the mindspace, then the risk is perhaps the classic paperclip maximizer, which can only be tackled with centralization (or so the argument goes).

          How do you avoid personalist/singleton regimes, or merely highly elitist ones, centered around the military while still avoiding unfriendly random mindspace AIs gone rogue?

          It seems to me like understanding the brain and copying its traits to then discover variants through modification seems like the more likely path to AGI, and we already have comprehensive attempts at understanding the connectome and experimentally determining synapse triggering properties and then replicating synapses and human brain structure in new hardware (like IBMs new chip).

          The strategies needed to oppose them seem opposite.

          Uh… Sorry for the incredibly long blog-post, but I thought this divergence of risk should be mentioned at some point, and it is an open thread.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            I never said it’d be a preferable outcome, I said I think it to be a likely outcome. The rest of your comment is thoughtful, but it’s also a derail, and you may try making it its separate comment rather than posting it as a reply to one of my things.

            Also, why are you worried? If everything goes the way you fear the ruinous powers will have free reign. Live up to your avatar, man

      • “and I think it’s pretty clear that free markets increase inequality, even if they don’t have to increase absolute poverty.”

        Increase it relative to what? Certainly free markets increase inequality relative to a system run by an egalitarian dictator, but that isn’t a real world option. If you look at the effect of actual government interventions, they sometimes reduce inequality, quite often increase it. If you look at the respects in which the poor in the U.S. are worst off, they are services provided by government—schooling and law enforcement.

        The extremely unequal societies in the developing world are not the relatively market ones, such as South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore (now more developed than developing). They are the kleptocracies—strong government used to enrich the rulers.

        Is your claim that having a government with the power to intervene in the market, including intervening to benefit some at the expense of others, can be expected to reduce inequality? If so, why would you expect it to be used that way?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          I agree, of course, with your point of view. Especially the point that socialist societies are the most unequal.

          But the charitable interpretation of his point is that what von Mises called a “hampered market economy”, i.e. welfare-state capitalism, decreases efficiency but increases equality. As in, he meant the emphasis on to be on “free markets”, not “free markets“.

          What do you think of that?

          Edit: I suppose you do suggest in general that intervention can increase inequality even if it is not total. But the usual retort will be “What about Norway vs. Singapore?” or something like that. You might as well pre-emptively respond.

          Anyway, I definitely agree that interventionism often harms equality as well as prosperity. But I don’t find it inconceivable that the freest society might be prosperous but more unequal than a welfare state with highly progressive taxation. In fact, I find it likely.

          • Nathan says:

            Given that waving a magic wand and doubling everybody’s wealth instantly would increase inequality, I’m fairly comfortable saying that inequality is not an actual problem.

    • Dahlen says:

      From here it sounds like you’re asking how long it will take until all that’s, er, left of the Old Left becomes widely perceived as fringe discourse. To which I’d say, 1) anti-market, revolutionary, pro-systemic-change socialism already is pretty damn fringe, to the extent that Bernie goddamn Sanders is what maps to “far left” in the mind of the average American, and 2) if it becomes any more fringe than it actually is, we might assist in this case to the disappearance of what used to be known as “left”, i.e. a quite big rightward shift. (For those of you who keep going on about metaphorical Lovecraftian monsters, this is probably good news.) Free-market progressivism is just good ole’ fashioned liberalism. For this reason I’m tempted to read your question as a proposal that liberalism be the most leftward position available (at least in the mainstream, however defined).

      While I can understand where you’re coming from, and despite usually voting liberal (under the above definition, i.e. centre-right), I at least would see it as the clearest sign of powerlessness and of resignation to “The System” that there can be. The world is already hyper-commercialised. Everything’s for sale, my friend, everything. If I had a sister, I’d sell her in a second. The Old Left in the developed world might not have been very successful in achieving power, perhaps fortunately, but at least, in a sense, it provided a sort of counterbalance to the most avid free-marketeers out there. I’m not sure I’d like to live in a world where commercialism has won its final victories over alternative manners of managing value and handling the material world, where it’s free to swallow every sphere of life previously left untouched by it, where everything that can be traded, will be traded. I’ve lived to see countries where you need money even to cross the street. I can understand the perspective that says, contrary to socialism, that trade is not an unalloyed bad and can be a very useful tool indeed, but then again there are a myriad specimens that see trade as an unalloyed good. And it’s not pleasant to think what would happen if they were to become the driving force in our societies, left utterly unopposed.

      P.S. Just the other day I was thinking about suggesting to the SSC commentariat that maybe they’re becoming too ideologised, and maybe we should stop obsessing about left and right. Then this had to come along. This here post of mine does not help my cause. Nope, not at all.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I’m not sure I’d like to live in a world where commercialism has won its final victories over alternative manners of managing value and handling the material world, where it’s free to swallow every sphere of life previously left untouched by it, where everything that can be traded, will be traded.

        Why would this be bad? And if it were bad, why would people do it?

        People don’t act under capitalism to make the most money possible. They act to pursue their own self-interest. It does not follow from the fact that it is allowed to commercialize everything, that everything will be commercialized.

        Like, okay, suppose I can prove that marrying one woman will cause me to have more money than marrying another woman. Why is that the determining factor? If I would be miserable with one woman but have more money, or be happy with another and less money, I’ll take the second. All you can show is that all else equal I will prefer the woman with more money. But I don’t see why that it is bad. It makes sense. It’s good.

        It only follows from unrestricted capitalism that people will only pursue money if selection pressures are extreme enough to exclude everything else. That is, if anything else but making the most money possible led to death. But not only is that not the case, it is the opposite of the case. Capitalism has always acted to lower the strength of selection pressures by increasing the wealth of society. It is not the system of “survival of the fittest”; it is the system which enables the unfit to survive longer and in better condition than ever. Capitalism is dysgenic, not eugenic, and that’s a good thing.

        And it’s not pleasant to think what would happen if they were to become the driving force in our societies.

        What, exactly, would happen?

        I think we could use a good deal more of marketization and commericalization in our society. Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski make the case for this in Markets Without Limits. If you want the short version, the best part of their analysis can be seen in their response to what they call the “semiotic objection to markets”.

        But I agree with you that there is an unhealthy political atmosphere in the comments.

        • Dahlen says:

          Well, I think I remember you saying that you were sympathetic to Objectivism, so even if I did explain my reasoning, the underlying differences between me and you would probably nullify any persuasive power my arguments may have had. You like it, I don’t. Two minds can be very different.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Well, you might as well put your reasoning out there for people to compare.

            What is supposed to be the reason commercialization ruins everything?

            People have values other than making money? I agree. In those ares of their lives, people will prioritize other things. And there’s no reason why capitalism will stop them from doing so.

          • Dahlen says:

            No, sorry, I was just about to go to sleep. Some things are more precious than the clashing of views.

            And please don’t twist my espoused views into “commercialization ruins everything”, it’s just not polite.

          • One way of cashing out “commercialisation ruins everything” is by noting that when one approach becomes sufficiently pervasive, others wither and become inaccessible for all practical purposes. In the middle ages, the religious framework was so pervasive that people could only see a failing sanitaton system in terms of biblical apocalypse, and not, for instance, and not an
            engineering problem.

      • “where everything that can be traded, will be traded.”

        That does not follow from the free market position having won a total victory. Believers in the free market do not believe you are obligated to sell things, only that you should be permitted to.

        Let me offer some real examples. One of my long term hobbies is the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that does historical recreation mostly from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Every summer I go to the Pennsic War and teach a bunch of classes. Teaching is part of how I make my living–but those classes are free. Not only are the classes free, if I have a handout it is free too, although the rules permit me to charge for it. When I give a slide show on historical jewelry the CD of my slides is free too.

        One of my related hobbies is lapidary work, cutting gemstones. Almost a year ago I replaced the low end machine I had been using for the purpose for the past forty years or so with a modern high end machine. It made cutting stones more fun, so I cut more–and it occurred to me that, although I also do some jewelry making, I was never going to set any significant fraction of the stones I was cutting for fun.

        So I put a notice in one of the SCA facebook groups, offering to cut stones for free for anyone in the SCA who was making period jewelry. I think at this point I have sent off packets of stones to four or five people, perhaps more. I made it clear when asked that I was not interested in cutting stones for sale.

        I am about as extreme a pro-market libertarian as you are likely to find, having argued for over forty years for a society in which all government services would be replaced by private ones. It does not follow that I believe everyone should sell everything. Only that people should be free to sell goods or services if they want to—and free to make other arrangements if they prefer. There are good reasons why some people prefer to organize some parts of their lives as gift economies, or voluntary communes, or in other ways that have not occurred to me. Doing that is in no way inconsistent with a libertarian society.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ Dahlen
        Just the other day I was thinking about suggesting to the SSC commentariat that maybe they’re becoming too ideologised, and maybe we should stop obsessing about left and right.

        Well, the comments not the commentors. But I started a post about being against giant instant-dinosaur long-term payoff projects in high-tech-dependent fields, but it didn’t seem to fit into any current sub-thread. Then I thought, big corporations don’t like to risk money on building weird stuff (unless they can tie things up with patents), and there are not enough venture capitalists to go around, so who else is going to subsidize low-to-mid-size wild stuff except a government grant to please enviro voters?

        But that’s got several big BOO lights in it, so I didn’t bother.

        Where’s Queen Isabella when we need her?

      • Tracy W says:

        I’m not sure I’d like to live in a world where commercialism has won its final victories over alternative manners of managing value and handling the material world, where it’s free to swallow every sphere of life previously left untouched by it, where everything that can be traded, will be traded.

        I don’t get this. How could commercialism win out “finally” over alternative forms of managing value? Trade depends on differing values. If you and I both only want money why would we trade? (assuming we don’t want different currencies.) But if I want food and you want art, we can trade.

      • Mr. Breakfast says:

        In contradiction to all the responses defending freedom to trade, I read Dahlen’s concern as being along the lines of:

        I’m not sure I’d like to live in a world where the corporatist mass-market has won its final victories over alternative manners of managing value and handling the material world, where people are unable to come to non-commercial or technocratically unapproved arrangements in any sphere of life previously left untouched by it, where everything that can be traded, must be supplied / obtained through the cash nexus.

        Of course, I could be putting my own sentiments in Dahlen’s mouth, in which case I apologize.

        • But then the question is how you would get to such a world. It isn’t what you get if the pro-free market position wins out. What sort of scenario are you, or is he, imagining?

        • Tracy W says:

          people are unable to come to non-commercial or technocratically unapproved arrangements in any sphere of life …

          This sounds like you think Dahlen was criticising the regulatory state, which is tending that way (eg food regulations making charities reluctant to use home-made food because it wasn’t cooked in a controlled factory-type environment.)

      • Dahlen says:

        Alright, now that wild mass guessing has commenced as to the meaning of my comment, I admit this to have been my fault and think it’s about time I explained what I meant.

        When I said I feared an outcome wherein “everything that can be traded, will be traded”, I did not mean to state this as a causal relationship. I’m talking about a shift in not just opportunities, but also mentalities. Technically there are loads of things that are not, in principle, illegal to obtain through commerce because of state intervention in the market, but still don’t get traded because that’s not how people think of the thing, it feels weird for them to engage in commerce for that reason. And my point was that the old socialist left, as a last bastion of all things anti-trade, has a certain cultural or even political contribution to that. (Example of political contribution: anti-gentrification activism. I never really got why they thought of gentrification as a problem, since I live in a lower-middle-class neighborhood and I’d sure as fuck feel better if richer folks started moving in. But from their perspective it probably makes sense.) If, as a result of everybody tuning in to pro-market ideologies, commercialism and consumerism will reach new heights, it will not be because of some sort of mass psychosis driving everyone to buy and sell. It will be for the fact that entrepreneurially-minded people are always on the search for untapped markets, always looking for something to capitalise on (because they too need money for consumption, particularly when trends towards consumption increase), and consumers can be easily influenced to participate in them (for subtle reasons like advertising, or fashion, or libertarianism in the water supply).

        The mechanism by which the span of commercial activities would increase to an unpleasant degree is that of crowding out alternatives. I’ll give a few examples right away, but first, a perspective check. The amount of things we trade is staggering, especially when compared to previous eras. Beginning with our usual material fortunes, which is the most salient benefit of capitalism, and which any human being from any culture, at any point in history, can essentially understand, as an aspiration. E.g. most people in history obtained quite a lot less than 100% of their food on the market, mostly they grew/herded/hunted/gathered it themselves. Then the services — housecleaning, barber’s, restaurants, tourism, transportation and so on. From which point you start to have specifically modern phenomena found in advanced capitalist economies. Most adults in the developed world, for instance, have some form of insurance, accrue debt, maybe have some savings. There are middle-class people who invest in stocks and bonds. It’s culturally normalised for many women to have shopping as a hobby. Fashion is a phenomenon. Men have a similar thing going with trendy tech. There is a large number (and kind) of consulting positions available, ranging from the vital to the petty, learned-helplessness-inducing. And a lot of these things have only just begun to become popular, on a historic scale. Trade really does have a much larger share in our existence, compared to the past.

        All these activities do wonders for the GDP, and, to be frank, add a plus of comfort and material security to our lives as well. But their share of our lives can’t keep increasing ad infinitum without people experiencing some drawbacks as well. The obvious consequence is the constant feeling you’re short on money, while you can’t say that you have witnessed a larger degree of satisfaction of your needs. Then you have the psychological impact. Human psychology is such that we tend to not trade with our close ones, our inner circle (indeed, with family and close friends we can behave quite like perfect little commies), and the people we do trade with tend to be strangers with whom we share superficial social bonds created by mutual interest. Naturally, a society-wide increase in the frequency of our commercial activities entails more interactions of the superficial kind. People are in this position as sellers on their job, and as buyers off their job, in their capacity as consumers. Some people find this emotionally taxing. Maybe not you, but some do. It’s the shrinking of Gemeinschaft in favour of Gesellschaft.

        Now for the examples. My most salient example is something which I think happens to every sociable person in their mid-to-late teens: the abandonment of free hangout places like parks, each other’s houses, and your lawn in favour of places where you have to pay to stay: cafes, nightclubs, malls, pubs and so on. It’s not that the State suddenly legalised cafes, it’s that your friends start thinking it’s kinda uncool to gather around a park bench and drink cola from the corner store. Free vs. pay-to-use public toilets. Inserting coins for using shopping carts. Discontinued freely-distributed newspapers. Homemade vs. store-bought gifts. Public vs. private beaches. Psychotherapy vs. talking it out with a friend. Expensive internet smartphone subscriptions vs. seeing your friends IRL. Beeminder.

        There are so many ways of inserting something new to pay for in people’s lives, through some form of crowding out or changing fashions and social expectations. Forgive me if I don’t think that only good things will come out of this.

        P.S. @ David Friedman: Cool hobby!

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          The obvious consequence is the constant feeling you’re short on money, while you can’t say that you have witnessed a larger degree of satisfaction of your needs.

          Why will people constantly feel short of money and feel that their needs are not being as well-satisfied? For one thing, this contradicts what you said before about it improving comfort and material security. But if wealth is going up, why will people feel less satisfied because more things are traded?

          Because they want to live above their means? I don’t see what money has to do with that. If there are things you can only do if you are a baron—and which simply can’t be bought with money—you can still be unsatisfied because you are not a baron.

          Now, I grant that there is a sense in which people do not any longer accept their “inferior station” as a natural fact, as they did in patriarchal, aristocratic days. Women aspire to what men have, the poor aspire to what the rich have, instead of accepting that it is naturally impossible for them to achieve it. But this is just a consequence of freedom and social mobility, not commercialization.

          Now for the examples. My most salient example is something which I think happens to every sociable person in their mid-to-late teens: the abandonment of free hangout places like parks, each other’s houses, and your lawn in favour of places where you have to pay to stay: cafes, nightclubs, malls, pubs and so on. It’s not that the State suddenly legalised cafes, it’s that your friends start thinking it’s kinda uncool to gather around a park bench and drink cola from the corner store.

          Don’t children do this because they don’t have any money? As a kid, I always kind of wished I had the money / lived in the kind of community where I could hang out in the “malt shop” every afternoon as they do in old cartoons.

          Similarly, college students drink cheap beer in dorms because they aren’t allowed / can’t afford to go to bars.

          Besides, adults spend plenty of time visiting one another’s houses. It’s probably the most common form of socialization once people get out of the “nightclub” stage (if they enter it at all).

          • Dahlen says:

            I don’t think you’re trying to listen to what I’m talking about at all. I trust you don’t need explaining on all the points which you’re asking me to explain further. Maybe some communication would take place here if you tried to take into account my larger point, either to address it or to emphasize the real disagreement, instead of going through the argument mechanistically, just for the sake of disagreeing with something out of what I’m saying.

            Switch strategies or I’m not engaging.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Dahlen:

            To be quite honest, I really have no idea what your “larger point” is, beyond “free-floating antipathy toward market transactions”.

            I understand that you are trying to communicate something. But I don’t know what it is, if it’s not “commercialism bothers me, but I can’t quite articulate why.” I assume that wasn’t what you were trying to say, so I picked a couple of the more concrete harms.

            There are so many ways of inserting something new to pay for in people’s lives, through some form of crowding out or changing fashions and social expectations. Forgive me if I don’t think that only good things will come out of this.

            What are they? What are the bad things that will come out of this?

          • Dahlen says:

            This is taking too long, and for nothing. Several people seemed confused as to what I meant, so I explained. I typed up a 900-word reply, which explicitly mentioned two kinds of negative consequences, on personal finances, and on psychological well-being (with some relation to social cohesion). Some of that relies on relatability in order to be properly understood. If you don’t get the same reaction, then props to you, but I can’t walk you through empathising with that, I can just state that this reaction exists and depict the way it looks like. What more is left to do? If the bad things I’m talking about do not look to you like bad things, what can I do about it, and what point is there in making me repeat them? I mean, I can’t even seem to make you quit misconstruing my position of being okay with trade as long as it does not become the raison d’etre of a society. What point is there, then, of talking of alienation and consumerism and the hedonic treadmill to someone for whom these words evoke nothing, or at least nothing bad?

            Like I said in our very first exchange: agree to disagree?

          • Kevin C. says:

            @Vox Imperatoris

            Now, I grant that there is a sense in which people do not any longer accept their “inferior station” as a natural fact, as they did in patriarchal, aristocratic days. Women aspire to what men have, the poor aspire to what the rich have, instead of accepting that it is naturally impossible for them to achieve it.

            And this is a problem. We tell children things like “anyone can grow up to be President” which are utter lies. “Follow your dreams, no matter how big” is lousy advice. What ever happened to:

            The rich man in his castle,
            The poor man at his gate,
            God made them high and lowly,
            And ordered their estate.

            ?

            Why not “find satisfaction and meaning in being the best you can be at whatever place in society you find yourself”? Why not an orderly social hierarchy, with clear duties and responsibilities to each relationship within it, with people called to be ever better at fulfilling those duties and responsibilities (see Confucianism)?

            There’s a part of me that just wants to tell people minohodo o shire.

          • Jiro says:

            Why not an orderly social hierarchy, with clear duties and responsibilities to each relationship within it, with people called to be ever better at fulfilling those duties and responsibilities (see Confucianism)?

            Because we’ve figured out that people who tell you your proper place in society are probably engaged in motivated reasoning and it is therefore generally a bad idea to trust them.

        • “If, as a result of everybody tuning in to pro-market ideologies, commercialism and consumerism will reach new heights”

          And part of my point was that there is no reason to expect “tuning in to pro-market ideologies” to have that result.

    • “How long does our dear commentariat think it would take for the mainstream left to altogether decide trade and commerce is a good thing?”

      What makes you think they haven’t? I think this will turn out to be about how things are labelled.

    • Adam says:

      Let me just be about the fourth or fifth or whatever to say the mainstream left, at least in the U.S., long ago decided that trade and commerce are good things. Virtually every single leader they have is, in fact, a wealthy capitalist. The major fight between left and right economically, besides the +/-5% tax policy differences, seems to be which industries on the margin have enough or not enough public goods characteristics to be either nationalized or privatized, and even then the fight seems to be over tiny degrees of nationalization and privatization, never complete or immediate in either direction.

      The people throwing Molotov cocktails at WTO meetings are not the mainstream left. Arguably, the WTO is itself leftist. Their mission statement includes protecting the environment and aiding underdeveloped countries.

    • Sastan says:

      During the enlightenment, free-market hardliners were progressives, or liberal. This was the original meaning of the term.

      Over time, the positions shifted.

      If one thinks of two forces, progress and conservation, this is politics. All the new ideas come from progress, and are resisted by conservation. Of course, the exact political layout can shift all over the place (For instance, American liberals are conservative about abortion, which they would like to maintain, while the conservatives would like to try novel financing schemes for social security).

      Good ideas tend to be adopted, and bad ones to fall away over time. Sometimes good ideas fail and bad ones persist, but it is the role of progress to suggest improvements, and conservation to prevent the obviously stupid ones. Much of what we see over time with the shifting of political positions is the conservationists moving to agree with a position they once resisted, because they see there was no horrible downside. They then wind up defending this position against whatever new innovation the other group dreams up. See: DADT, etc.

      • During the 19th century, free market hardliners were liberals. As far as I know, “progressive” as a political term dates from the early 20th century and described a position generally hostile to classical liberalism.

        But I will be happy to be corrected by someone with more information on the relevant history.

        • Sastan says:

          You are correct about the term “progressive”, I’m just trying to make it work as a generalization.

        • Brian Donohue says:

          This sounds right. The Supreme Court decision in Lochner (1905), which struck down a law limiting hours worked, was a victory for freedom of contract and a loss for progressives.

  19. Error says:

    I am curious about the mental experience of other poly people when they know their partner is having sex with someone else.

    For my part: I have a weird adrenaline rush that’s partway between nervousness and excitement but leans mildly unpleasant, a bit like having way too much sugar in a short time. I find myself inspecting it and thinking something like “huh, is this the physiological response that normal people interpret as jealousy?” except I interpret it more like stage fright: “I hope it’s going well and I’m afraid it’s not.”

    • nonymous says:

      When you say you’re anxious that it go well; Is there any upper limit to how well you would like it to go?

      • Error says:

        Not really, but I don’t think you interpreted that the way I meant it. I have fairly severe social anxiety and one of its more peculiar properties is that I experience it vicariously. “Going well” means “none of the horribly embarrassing moments that my brain insists on vomiting up are actually happening.”

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      For my part: I have a weird adrenaline rush that’s partway between nervousness and excitement but leans mildly unpleasant, a bit like having way too much sugar in a short time.

      So don’t do polyamory. It’s bad for you even on utilitarian grounds*.
      *I suspect we humans are similar enough that we can express a lot of these issues in terms of “Do this not that, if you want to flourish.” Whence virtue ethics.

      • Error says:

        I’ll make that call for myself, thanks. I was looking to compare experiences with people who’ve chosen the same path I have, for the sake of curiosity alone; I’m neither complaining about the results of that path nor looking for reasons to change it.

    • Robert says:

      That sounds very similar to the experience I had when I introduced a close friend to my employer for an interview. My experience with the scenario you describe is different – simply moderate jealousy (only when I was physically present and/or left to give them time), eventually reducing to nothing noticeable.

    • Cadie says:

      Caveat: My partner has 3 partners and I’m the “last” on the list, we’re more like close friends with benefits than partners, but of course it’s kind of complicated.

      Depending on my mood I either don’t feel anything other than “ok, good for them, I’m going to go make dinner now”, or a small twinge of envy/jealousy that is just barely enough to notice and not enough to ruin my day. By now I know that his other two relationships are long-standing and stable, our friendship-plus is also long-standing and stable enough that I don’t fear he’ll suddenly drop me just because of one minor problem or preferring to spend a Saturday with his main secondary; he’ll spend time with her and then a different day with me, no big deal. My biggest fears are abandonment, not delay or having less time together or whatever, so now that I know this won’t happen without time to try to work it out first, I don’t worry about the situation. As long as he’s happy, and we’re together enough to keep the relationship alive and have a real connection, it’s all good. I knew going into this that I was going to be #3 and that is unlikely to change. At first I was unsure, but willing to try it out. Now it’s working and I’m a lot more confident about it.

    • Adam says:

      I’m probably not much like you, certainly not at all ‘poly.’ I have no desire for multiple continuing sexual relationships with people, but my wife and I do allow and occasionally have sex outside of the marriage just because it seems somewhat arbitrary and unrealistic to draw the line at zero. As with anything else she ever does, I hope it goes well, but I don’t actively think about it at all, much less agonize over it. If you have vicarious social anxiety, that seems like a trait that will determine how you experience these types of things quite separately from how you label your sexual orientation.

  20. estelendur says:

    Have you seen stuff about the Murphy Bill? I just read Siderea’s summary and went aaagh.

    • keranih says:

      Many parts of this seemed possibly very good to me. (Note: most of my interaction with mental health care in the USA has been as a friend of the family of people with severe issues.)

      The part that would have made the most difference to people I know is the provision for mandatory taking of meds – I know multiple people whose conditions have put themselves and their loved ones through the turnip mangle over and over again – they have a crisis, are hospitalized, physically stabilized, mentally stabilized, released to outpatient/own reconnaissance status, stay on meds for a while, go off meds, have a crisis, lather, rinse, repeat.

      When on a regular med schedule, they are just as functional as the rest of us, if not a hair better. Certainly not in any condition where it is appropriate for someone else to tell this independent adult what to do. But when they slip off their meds, they rapidly move out of (their own) control and disrupt the lives around them. Creating a niche (if that’s what the law does) to give the outside management to keep them on the narrow path seems the right thing to do.

      The part about medical records of people-over-18-who-should-be-independent-adults being turned over to parents/caregivers is…well. One of those things that only makes sense, when we extend childhood out to the 26th birthday.

      The part that gives me the most concern is the money part – because that stuff doesn’t grow on trees – but the shift from “mental health care for all” to “mental health care for the most ill” makes me feel a great deal more hopeful. (I’d rather one severe car accident victim get treated on the public dime than 100 accidents with a kitchen knife.) What *is* the status of research on “preventative mental health care” along the lines of water sanitation and vaccination?

      Finally, I would also like to know the origin of the Medicare rule on same-day services – I suspect it is to prevent a patient being shuffled from clinic to clinic all day, racking up charges along the way, all working up variations on the same problem, instead of doing a stepwise diagnosis, but the rule seems overly strict (and I could be wrong). Scott, can you talk on this?

      • Jiro says:

        I really don’t like the idea of forcing people to take medicine because I’ve personally experienced a case where a doctor was incompetent at telling me what medicine to take.

        Summary: Blood pressure was high (because of something like a panic attack, it was not my normal pressure). Taken to hospital, given drug A. Pressure goes down. Go to doctor for non-panic-related somewhat high blood pressure. Given drugs B and C. B and C do not work. Complain to doctor that A worked, given A. Doctor insists on still taking B and C as well. Since I had no desire to take 3 medications for the same condition, two of which don’t work, I stopped taking the B and C contrary to what the doctor told me (I was aware that you have to be very careful of rebound effects in stopping blood pressure medication). Still taking A, works fine.

        If I had obeyed the doctor, I’d still be taking 3 medications, two of which don’t work, to this day. So I’m not very inclined to support the idea of forcing people to take medication.

        (Of course blood pressure medication is an unusual case in that a layman can easily and directly measure whether it is working.)

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Jiro

          I agree with you about forcing. But, having helped two elderly people on multiple meds, I see a need for some help on a confusion factor. “Instead of 2 each 5mg tablets three times a day, take 1/2 of a Xmg four times a day” — is just too much to deal with, and finding someone who can deal with it to deal with it is … difficult. There are regulations about who can do what. So a service where some qualified person fills a daily “Pill Minder” and sends it out to the patient, and phones to nag him to take it … would be worthwhile.

        • keranih says:

          @Jiro –

          I absolutely acknowledge the conflict with removing a person’s right to make their own decisions – on any front, but particularly with regards to medication and health care.

          I’ll bring your attention back to what I was talking about – people who have severe depression or schizophrenia, to the point of attempting suicide or harming others (like a demonstrated pattern of walking out into traffic, causing accidents) who don’t do those things when on their meds, and who have a pattern of needing a minder to keep them on their meds.

          The thought of the State ordering people to take medication gives me hives. Thinking of my friends and their struggles with their family members makes me want to weep. I am not sure that this law is a best fix, but I’m in cautious support.

    • Evan Þ says:

      One thing in the summary made me throw up my hands at Congress’s dangerous stupidity:

      A definition of “Caregiver” that is someone who meets one of four conditions and doesn’t have a documented history of abuse: immediate family members, “an individual who…”, “a personal representative…”, or someone who…”

      So, a patient’s immediate family members always get counted as caregivers and can find out his health information. No matter what. No matter if they’re across the country and he’s cut off all contact with them – unless they have “a documented history of abuse,” they’re in!

      I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the actual text of the bill is so badly-worded that I can’t figure out whether the summary got it right or wrong…

      • Murphy says:

        *Most of the time* family works ok and you have to deal with things like people who wouldn’t have any problem with their family when in a normal state of mind but who think they’re poisoning their food or that they’re witches while suffering a psychotic break and being unable to tell family members who are actual care givers things they need to know is a problem.

        If you hate your family and they turn up demanding info the situation still has to meet all these conditions:

        (a) Caregiver access to information.—In applying section 164.502(g) of title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, to an individual with serious mental illness an exception for disclosure of specific limited protected health information shall be provided if all of the following criteria are met for the disclosure by a physician (as defined in paragraphs (1) and (2) of section 1861(r) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x(r))) or other licensed mental health or health care professional to an identified responsible caregiver:

        (1) Such disclosure is for information limited to the diagnoses, treatment plans, appointment scheduling, medications, and medication-related instructions, but not including any personal psychotherapy notes.

        (2) Such disclosure is necessary to protect the health, safety, or welfare of the individual or general public.

        (3) The information to be disclosed will be beneficial to the treatment of the individual if that individual has a co-occurring acute or chronic medical illness.

        (4) The information to be disclosed is necessary for the continuity of treatment of the medical condition or mental illness of the individual.

        (5) The absence of such information or treatment will contribute to a worsening prognosis or an acute medical condition.

        (6) The individual by nature of the severe mental illness has or has had a diminished capacity to fully understand or follow a treatment plan for their medical condition or may become gravely disabled in absence of treatment.

        If you already have some other caregiver and some previous wish for them not to be made your caregivers recorded then it’d be pretty easy to argue that at least one of the above does not apply since they don’t need to know if another care giver is already seeing to your wellbeing.

  21. Alexandra says:

    Does anyone have any experience in treatment for mild to moderate ADHD? I’m almost certain that if I go in for a diagnosis I will get one, but I’m not thrilled about the idea of taking Aderalla or similar medications.

    • Error says:

      I do, sort of. I saw a psychiatrist for the same thing (among other things) recently, and she put me on Strattera. The choice of drug was partly informed by my aversion to dependency risks. I can’t even get myself off sugar without removing it from the household; I don’t want to go down that road with drugs.

      My understanding is that the Strattera takes longer to have an effect but doesn’t carry the dependency risks of Adderall et al. So if your concerns are similar to mine, well, there’s at least one alternative.

      I’ve been on it for 2-3 months. I do notice a difference, but it’s subtle enough that I can’t tell if what I’m noticing is the drug working, the placebo effect, or an artifact of paying more attention to my mental habits.

    • nope says:

      I’ve been on treatment for about 6 months, and I wholeheartedly recommend stimulants if you can tolerate them. I started out on methylphenidate, which worked well at first but pooped out on me after a few weeks, at which point I switched to amphetamine. I too had concerns about medication beforehand, but the health risks are largely overblown for the sorts of people who take meds responsibly, and the evidence regarding long term effects on the brains of patients on stimulant treatment is not only not negative, but slightly positive. Mood issues like depression/mood swings should improve on stimulant meds. Anxiety is a bit trickier, because it worsens for some, but improves for others. I have OCD-type anxiety, which amphetamine has been surprisingly helpful for. A word of caution on these is that if your weight is already low, stimulants might bring you into the danger zone. I’m not extremely active, but I went from medium-low-end-of-normal BMI prior to treatment to underweight in just a few months and would probably still be dropping weight if I didn’t make a concerted effort to eat food.

      From what I can tell, atomoxetine is garbage for most people and not worth the money. If you *really* don’t want stimulants, you could try clonidine or guanfacine, which are pretty uncommon but seem pretty safe and decently effective unless you have low blood pressure.

      Finally, on usage: this is probably obvious to you, but meds aren’t magic bullets. They’re most helpful for establishing the sort of productive structures in your life that non-ADHD people don’t have to work too hard at. There’s still a lot of work that you have to do in terms of setting plans, goals, schedules etc for yourself, but the meds make it possible to stick to these. Thomas Brown researches high intelligence ADHD patients and has written some decent scientifically oriented books on ADHD which you may want to check out. Most of them are on libgen last I checked.

    • Cadie says:

      Caffeine works for some people. My ADHD is a bit more than mild to moderate, so caffeine alone isn’t quite enough to make me as functional as I’d like to be, but when I didn’t have access to medications, caffeine was better than nothing. Now that I’m on a low dose of Adderall, I drink less coffee; just one cup in the morning. I used to drink 2 in the morning and sometimes 1 in the early afternoon (without other sources of caffeine, I’m not a cola fan anyway).

      There are non-stimulant medications available too; how well they’ll work for a person is highly individual. My brother did fine on Strattera. I had severe nausea on it and couldn’t take it long enough to find out if it would work or not, and Wellbutrin didn’t work for me. I just take 10mg of Adderall a day, 5mg twice a day, which is pretty low for an adult and it does the job with no noticeable side effects other than feeling less hungry at lunch. (Dinner seems unaffected, by then it’s starting to wear off).

      • Alexandra says:

        You’re severely under-estimating my aversion to habit forming drugs. I avoid using caffeine regularly for the same reasons I’m wary of Adderall.

    • Adam says:

      My wife’s been on Adderall for I want to say at least a decade, possibly longer, and it works basically perfectly. Dependency shouldn’t be too much of a concern, provided you have consistent access to a pharmaceutical grade supplier. The concern is tolerance. She doesn’t take it on weekends or vacations or any time she doesn’t have to work, really. That seems to be a successful strategy. When you need to be able to concentrate for long periods of time, take it. Otherwise, don’t.

  22. hellahexi says:

    Any old-school RPG folks out there? (I almost said OSR aficionados, but that can be a bit divisive.) Since I’ve gotten some free time lately, I’m working on ramping up my gaming blog. I focus on hand-drawn maps, random weirdness tables, and theme/tone commentary. You can find it here: hellahexi.

    I’m relatively rules-agnostic, with the caveat that you can’t ignore Pathfinder, and you can’t ignore the OSR. I like Pathfinder as the least-worst “generic” world out there, but the more I play the more I fear that having a rules mechanism for every action means that too much storytelling and player agency gets tossed out the window. I like OSR for my love of deep weirdness. I mean, really: you’re taking a bunch of malcontents, loading them to the teeth with sharpened steel and eldritch powers, and leading them into a hole in the earth to slaughter the inhabitants and take their stuff. Such a profession should be weird and wondrous and petrifying.

    I like maps, hand-drawn particularly, and am working on building my skills both in draughtsmanship and in GIMP. I owe a debt to Dyson for this.

    I used to think Scott was pretty neat for having such consistently good content, posted several times a week. Now that I’m trying to create content in addition to consuming it, I have updated my opinion of him to “incredible.” Maintaining a frequent, high-quality posting schedule is tough.

    • anon says:

      I’ve been running an LotFP game for a few months, though the group meets pretty irregularly now and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep getting everyone together.

      My experience with oldschool gaming has been that it’s lot’s of fun, but keeping track of things like encumbrance, how long torches last, daily use of rations, etc is pure torture. I know it’s supposed to be a crucial part of the dungeoneering experience but it’s like pulling teeth, the players hate it and I hate it. What I need is a better way to impose costs on the players for resting, taking lots of time doing things, etc. One that doesn’t require lots of tedious bookkeeping. Gygax said it was impossible to have a meaningful campaign if strict time records weren’t kept, but if I wanted to spend the whole game filling out time cards in 15 minute increments I’d homebrew a Dilbert RPG.

      One nice feature of the old school games is that there was actually a lot more going on in the setting than people remember. Cavemen, river pirates, dinosaurs, martians, the world was a lot more exciting than the suffocatingly generic elves, goblins and dwarves that infest the later editions. I’ve been running games in my own setting anyway (based on Urth from the Solar Cycle) but it’s a nice touch.

      • hellahexi says:

        I definitely get it regarding the recordkeeping. The trick–the one we’re all trying to solve, I think–is how to make dungeoneering and exploration the forefront of the experience, without feeling like you’re filling out a tax form. In real life, spelunking is scary: claustrophobia, lightlessness and risk of losing your light source, bad air, getting lost, and no hope in the event of an accident. Add in denizens who know where they are and want nothing more than to chew on your face in the darkness while you’re wriggling through a shoulder-width tunnel, and that business is terrifying. I think this tone is largely the DM’s purview, but requires buy-in from the players.

        (I have heard good reviews of Torchbearer, though.)

        How to prevent the “15 minute adventuring day” is a related problem. The classic solution is a robust set of wandering monster tables, but I like as much verisimilitude as I can get. My touchstone is to remind myself that life in the world continues along whether the PCs want it to or not, and the antagonists are intelligent actors pursuing their own goals. Then extrapolate from there. What the antagonists are not–or shouldn’t be–are static targets to be knocked down, mannequins waiting in a room for the PCs to stab them.

        • hellahexi says:

          To reply to my own post (classy move, hexi):

          Has anyone here played Torchbearer enough to form an opinion? I’d love to have some idea how it runs in actual play before disrupting my normal gaming routine for it.

      • hellahexi says:

        Cavemen, river pirates, dinosaurs, martians, the world was a lot more exciting than the suffocatingly generic elves, goblins and dwarves that infest the later editions.

        Also, isn’t it interesting how removing options can make gameplay more diverse? Never mind the fact that you can play a game full of hill bandits and dinosaurs and elves and dwarves, but keeping the trappings of modern PF/D&D seems to erase from peoples’ minds all the options available. Tolkien casts a long shadow, indeed.

        I do like the LotFP feel, and the greater OSR DIY aesthetic. I don’t care to be a Raggi fanboy, but one thing he definitely does get is the fact that what we euphemize as “adventuring” is–or should be–a fundamentally horrifying experience, and that we should embrace it as such. All fantasy RPGs should be thought of as the horror games they truly are.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        In the tabletop I’m working on, I have almost all of the basic necessities of adventuring purchasable with generic Equipment Points (which cost 3-5 GP apiece, weigh a pound or two, and each of which “buys” 1 GP of dungeon gear – balance as appropriate), which I subtract from every night. (HP and spell slot restoration overnight both cost equipment points, as well, rather than being free).

        For torches and such – don’t track time. Track plot. Don’t worry about time intervals – have their torch/lantern sputter out at a dramatic (and for the players, inopportune) moment, such as just when they enter a room/cavern with a giant spider. (If they complain, suggest they check their torch/fuel supply next time. Once they get in the habit of regularly checking, just subtract from the torch status/fuel supply as you feel appropriate.)

        As the DM, your job isn’t to enforce tedium, it’s to mediate it away.

        (As far as players just screwing around – keep background stuff happening. Make it worse if they neglect it, setting schedules – in three days, X happens, and if they wait three days, X happens, and you plan the next event for several days further out. In the major game I’m running right now, my players have neglected some drakes to the north of the village for a while now, so the next time they return to town, they’re going to encounter a lot of refugees whose farms were burned down which will have totally ruined the festival they were all looking forward to participating in, and I’m going to draw all over their maps with shame-inducing scorch marks.)

        • Jiro says:

          As the DM, your job isn’t to enforce tedium, it’s to mediate it away.

          But you just suggested negative consequences (torches running out at a crucial moment) if they ignore the tedium (keeping track of torch supplies). If you punish the players for ignoring the tedium, you *are* enforcing tedium.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            They’re not being punished for not tracking their torch status, they’re being punished for ignoring the fact that their torch status matters. The goal is balancing the tension of “We might run out of light” against the tedium of “Torches last exactly fifteen minutes, how many fifteen minute intervals have there been?”.

            Ignoring torch time entirely is eliminating tedium at the expense of tension. By having their torch go out at an inopportune moment on occasion, they’ll have that sense of tension the rest of the game, without necessarily having to enforce a sense of tedium. You don’t want them going out routinely, every time they walk into a new and dangerous cavern; but when the players find an Ever-Burning Lantern or whatever, it should mean something to them.

            It helps to be liberal with Notice-or-equivalent-skill checks (have a lot that don’t matter, and some that do, to keep your players guessing) for this sort of thing. If your players are checking every room they go into for magic spells, physical traps, hidden doors, hidden treasure, invisible monsters, or any similar list, you’ve reached the point of enforcing metagaming tedium rather than tension.

          • Jiro says:

            By having their torch go out at an inopportune moment on occasion, they’ll have that sense of tension the rest of the game, without necessarily having to enforce a sense of tedium.

            But if you make their torch go out at an inopportune moment, they’re quickly going to figure out that the way to prevent that is to constantly keep track of torches. So you ended up forcing them to keep track of torches.

            If your players are checking every room they go into for magic spells, physical traps, hidden doors, hidden treasure, invisible monsters, or any similar list, you’ve reached the point of enforcing metagaming tedium rather than tension.

            If your players are constantly doing that, it’s probably because at some point they didn’t check and they got attacked by an invisible monster or fell into a trap.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            My players don’t do that in my game. However, my players do do that in other games they participate in, and it’s a characteristic I try very hard to avoid in my own games.

            If you do the same thing to them repeatedly, yeah, they’ll quickly catch on and start trying to head them off. I bring up the Ever-Burning Lantern for a reason – if your players do start checking their torch status routinely, then it’s time to give them something so they don’t have to.

            But you should definitely get them at least once, ideally in a very dramatic fashion – but it’s only dramatic the first time you do it. And maybe a few dozen games after they get the Ever-Burning Lantern, take it away, and then wait a little while longer, and get them with it again, because then it’s dramatic in an “Echoing the past” sort of way – and interesting in that they should then have more tools in their box to compensate, and discover their earlier terrors aren’t really challenging anymore, and they’ll have an opportunity to feel their character growth in a very substantial and meaningful kind of way.

        • hellahexi says:

          I wrestle with the same questions in my games. I worry that removing tallies of provisions doesn’t much help if they are simply replaced by tallies of abstract units of provisions. (Moreover, rules really do set the tone for a game: abstract away too much detail, and you end up bloodless and unfun. Down that path lies madness… and GURPS.)

          Not many of us signed on to play a game of Aboleths & Accountants.

          I think what I’m hinting around–and you nailed–is that it’s not the record-keeping that we GMs desire, but rather the storytelling opportunities that come when those provisions fail or run out. I don’t want to keep track of every arrow you carry; what I want is that desperate moment when you’re out and you have to scrabble for a broken clothyard shaft to rush and stab it through the brigand-king. I don’t want to run an egg timer on your torch; I do want that moment when your ill-prepared axeman watches his torch gutter out and you realize that you’re under a half-mile of limestone cavern, don’t know which way is out, and every carnivore along the way knows where you are… except you.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Abstract units have some advantages:

            If none of your players are carrying a ladder, force them to buy one to get past an obstacle. Which is to say, you can deliberately deplete your players of resources. You can go further, and impose arbitrary obstacles which players with given skillsets can get past freely, and others cannot. Which is to say, you can -selectively- deplete your players of resources. And with all their resources pooled, there’s opportunity cost in each such transaction. (I love imposing opportunity costs on my players.)

            And they let you control the story to a finer degree, because the players are unwittingly handing you control over their inventory in exchange for convenience. They purchase a pint of lantern oil, three days journey and gallons of lantern oil into some caverns – and you tell them that as they rummage through their provisions, they find there is only one more pint there, and nary a torch to be found. And then you have a storytelling moment ahead.

          • John Schilling says:

            If the players want to do detailed accounting of provisions, let them – and then don’t deny them torchlight or whatever unless they screw up or you have both a plot need and a plausible in-game mechanism.

            If the players don’t want to do detailed accounting of provisions, prompt them on the common-sense issue of whether they want to buy enough generic provisions for three days of wilderness travel and one of dungeoneering, or whatever, accounting for any desire they might express to “travel light” or “be prepared for everything”. Tell them of any non-trivial cost or encumbrance penalties, but otherwise let them ignore the whole issue.

            If it matters to your plot, say because you’ve got a detour planned that will stretch three days of travel to six, you keep track of the provisions, but assume they make optimal decisions on how to use them at every step and warn them when any reasonable person would notice an impending resource shortfall. If it doesn’t matter to your plot, then you get to ignore it too.

            If your plot hinges on exactly what non-obvious decisions the players make w/re torch utilization or whatnot, then either you and your players all like doing that sort of thing or you’ve chosen the wrong plot.

          • Jiro says:

            If you “don’t want” the players to keep track of every arrow, but you put them in a situation where they’re out of arrows, then regardless of what you wanted, what you actually did encourages the players to keep track of every arrow.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you just up and tell them, “you’re out of arrows”, then A: you’re (probably) not playing fair and B: they’ll almost certainly count every arrow in every session from then on in response.

            If you tell them one skirmish earlier, “You had plenty of arrows when you started out, but now it looks like there’s only six or seven left in the quiver”, they’ll start counting from that point on – and they should, because now it’s that kind of plot.

            If they think it’s unfair that you didn’t bring that up mid-skirmish when they had a dozen arrows left so they could start counting and efficiently allocating arrows earlier, then your players are probably munchkins and you’ll have to decide whether you can all have fun in a munchkin campaign – which by its nature will involve detailed accounting for anything and everything that can make a hit point’s worth of difference in combat.

            If you absolutely don’t want an arrow-counting plot, or if your players don’t, then don’t ever tell them that they are either low on or out of arrows. If they bring it up, well, the third-to-last guy they shot was an archer with a full quiver and you thought it was obvious that a proper dungeoneering hero would scavenge every usable munition within reach.

            If you absolutely don’t want an arrow-counting plot and you also don’t want your characters to be able to shoot arrows at all of their foes without limit, your desires are inconsistent and cannot be satisfied.

          • bean says:

            There was actually a pretty good solution to this problem in a recent issue of Pyramid (the monthly GURPS e-magazine). They suggested creating an abstract space with a specified cost and weight, which the player can draw things out of with a scrounging roll. When things are withdrawn, the compartment decreases in size. It’s intended for easier starting equipment, but you could do so with provisions as well. There was also a suggestion of compartments dedicated to specific skills.
            The implementation that I’d go for if I was running this type of game (which I’m not at the moment) would be to assume the players have bought a reasonable amount of provisions, and then tell them that you’ll roll dice in cases where supplies are marginal. Give the players a bonus if they specify that they’re being careful about retrieving arrows or something of the sort. Normally, you do so, and accept the results as they come. (Some of my best gaming moments have come as a result of failed rolls that should have been easy.) If the dice come up anomalously bad, then someone tripped and broke the oil jars or rats got into most of the food. If they’re good when they shouldn’t be, someone noticed a bunch of edible plants or that goblin had a bunch of arrows.
            But every once in a while, when the moment is just right, you roll the dice behind the screen, and declare failure. The players are much more likely to accept it because there’s a mechanism, even if you’re using GM prerogative to dictate the result.

          • I vote be explicit and in-world. Dungeons are magical, and in some cases semi-sentient. Your torch didn’t gutter out because you were careless; if you were careless, you would have died of spiderbite or green slime infection a dozen dungeons ago. It guttered out despite your painstaking attention to detail because the dungeon has lair actions and just spent one.

          • bean says:

            @Robert
            That seems like an excellent way to get your players making ‘choo-choo’ noises. Or at least it would be with my players. You’d need to either have a slowly-building set of apparently random things go against them, and then reveal that the dungeon itself was behind them, or explicitly lay the mechanism out ahead of time. The first would be interesting, while the second would likely just make them even more paranoid than usual, with a consequent slowdown in their progress.

          • Samalamalam says:

            ‘(Moreover, rules really do set the tone for a game: abstract away too much detail, and you end up bloodless and unfun. Down that path lies madness… and GURPS.)’

            GURPS is too abstract now? I thought the usual criticism was that it was exactly the opposite…

          • bean says:

            ‘GURPS is too abstract now? I thought the usual criticism was that it was exactly the opposite…’
            That’s actually a really good point. What do you usually play? Rolemaster? Phoenix Command?
            Actually, I think GURPS gets a bad rap here. With a bit of practice (and some Roll20 macros) it’s not that much slower than D&D. Yes, most of my games have been GURPS for the past 5 years or so.

          • hellahexi says:

            @ Samalamalam

            Maybe abstract was the wrong word; I’ll stand by bloodless, though.

            GURPS always reminded me of my Leatherman: it’s got all kinds of useful things, but the knife isn’t as sharp as my real knife, the pliers aren’t as strong as my real pliers, and the screwdriver is harder to use than an actual screwdriver. I’d rather use a specific tool dedicated to a specific task.

            Maybe GURPS has changed, but it can’t have changed that much, as it’s still a “universal” system.

            A ruleset sets the tone for a game, far more than I used to realize. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also: without active intervention, a game will tend to be about whatever activity has the most pages of rules devoted to it.

            NB: An interesting exception seems to be LotFP. Without the art or secondary adventures (like when you download the free version of the rules without the artwork), the rules read like any other retro-clone. With the art… well, it’s obvious Raggi comes out of the metal scene, it’s manifestly transgressive, and the polarizing emphasis on deep weirdness emerges.

          • hellahexi says:

            @ Robert Liguori

            I like the idea of a sentient dungeon and “lair actions,” but having such as a constant in the game world is a level of weirdness I don’t yet aspire to. As a one-off dungeon, it sounds interesting (and would require some foreshadowing).

            I don’t think that a failure of equipment or provisioning (torches, arrows, ropes, etc.) is necessarily a mark of incompetence, however. Incompetent people fail at tasks for want of basic preparation all the time. But otherwise-quite-competent people also frequently face deprivation in the face of extraordinary circumstances, whether that be a lack of ammunition in Mogadishu or the Alamo, a lack of food in the Arctic pack ice, or lamp failure whilst spelunking. And by just about any measure, adventurers going dungeoneering is an extraordinary circumstance.

            All that said, I still don’t know what the best answer is. Handwaving basic equipment needs seems unsatisfying, and defeats the fundamental challenges (darkness, isolation, cold, gravity) that make delving into the bowels of the earth a narratively interesting proposition. Accounting for each item is tedious and unfun. Not-counting, and then enforcing consequences anyway, is both unsatisfying and a great way to incentivize your players to indulge in preventive accountancy next time. I don’t know the answer.

          • bean says:

            ‘GURPS always reminded me of my Leatherman’
            That’s an interesting perspective, and somewhat true. But there are times when the Leatherman is right there, and you don’t want to hunt down your real tools. I’ll agree that it’s worse in a lot of cases than a dedicated system, but the advantage is that once you know it, it is right there, and you don’t have to hunt down said system. My group has done three different games, all in GURPS, with very different emphasis, and we’re about to start a fourth.
            1. Space Commandos. Military Sci-Fi. GURPS worked very well from an in-game rules perspective.
            2. Space Band. Silly. Little serious combat. GURPS worked very well because we could build the characters we wanted. I’m not sure even a dedicated Space point-buy system would have worked as well.
            3. Modern Conspiracy. Moderately serious. Has also worked well, both on game and building rules sides. (And we started playing a week after the idea was first floated, which you couldn’t really do with a new system.)
            4. High fantasy. So far, we have two characters which couldn’t be built in D&D with a reasonable number of books. Everyone involved has D&D experience, and we still chose GURPS for this one.
            The advantage is that it allows you to build exactly the game you want, and exactly the characters you want in-game. If you want classic dungeon fantasy, it’s not the best, but there are so many other possibilities that nobody has covered yet. And I, at least, enjoy exploring those niches.

            ‘A ruleset sets the tone for a game, far more than I used to realize. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also: without active intervention, a game will tend to be about whatever activity has the most pages of rules devoted to it.’
            That’s a good quote, although I do have a compulsion to measure my rulebooks to verify.

            Re:Provisioning, I can’t see a good abstract solution beyond setting up the scenario so that it’s obvious that they would be in supply trouble despite reasonable precautions (Mogadishu is a good example here), and then not doing it regularly. They’re planning a 24-hour trip into the dungeon, but a cave-in strands them 4 or 5 days from the nearest alternate exit. Even if they had a big safety factor, it’s obvious they’re in trouble. Then, don’t bother them about supplies for quite a while.

          • Nornagest says:

            High fantasy. So far, we have two characters which couldn’t be built in D&D with a reasonable number of books. Everyone involved has D&D experience, and we still chose GURPS for this one.

            D&D has a lot of trouble building anything but well-worn D&D characters, even where the setting’s compatible. I think the problem’s that every class is (or at least was) designed to pastiche a specific archetype, usually derived from a single work of literature (the Dying Earth stories for the wizard, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for the thief, and so forth) and so you end up being restricted to, basically, crossover fanfic of those characters.

            Recent editions have filed off the serial numbers and given them a fresh coat of paint, but the issue’s still there.

          • hellahexi says:

            @ Nornagest

            D&D has a lot of trouble building anything but well-worn D&D characters

            Agreed. The class/level system is hella restrictive, but by now it’s so ingrained in the system (like hit points) that getting rid of it wouldn’t be an edition-shift; it’d be not-D&D. The restrictiveness is what led them to lose race-as-class, add multi-classing, add prestige classes, add feats… all kludges to address the fact that classes lead to homogeneity.

            For my money, I prefer a Shadowrun-type system: all of your abilities derive from skills, and you mix and match to make your character. It converges on common archetypes–you still get street sams and mages–but there’s much more variety. In D&D, everyone starts the same and diverges as they advance; in SR, everyone starts different and tends to converge on nebulous archetypes as they advance.

            Not having a level system also rids the game of the result of higher-level characters being better than lower-level characters at everything. A 10th level fighter will always beat a 2nd level fighter. But a 0 karma street sam could very well outbrawl a 100 karma sammie, if the latter had invested her karma in stealth and snipercraft.

            (Losing the level system also obviates the interminable verisimilitude question of ‘hey, why isn’t the king always just the highest-level dude in the kingdom?’)

            But I still love D&D. To mangle Rumsfeld, you go to the dungeon with the D&D you’ve got, not the D&D you might wish to have.

          • bean says:

            Oh, I’ve been dissatisfied with all level-based systems since the day I discovered GURPS. There is one point, and only one, on which they significantly beat point-buy systems. And that is when dealing with novice players. We had two novice players who wanted to join the conspiracy game. One didn’t end up actually doing so, partially because she couldn’t come up with a character concept. On the other hand, D&D gives a reasonable set of choices. The problem is that it also prevents what happened to me during the setup of the High Fantasy game. I started out as a Bard, but didn’t have enough points, so I ended up with a rogue with a tiny bit of magic and a violin.
            All this talk of gaming makes me think. Would anyone be interested in a Roll20 game? I’d suggest 3.5, as it’s not a terrible system, and everybody knows it.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            ‘A ruleset sets the tone for a game, far more than I used to realize. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also: without active intervention, a game will tend to be about whatever activity has the most pages of rules devoted to it.’

            That’s a good point. Some guys say things like “D&D wasn’t really based on Tolkien. It was based on pulp heroes; Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff.”
            Okay… well maybe Gygax envisioned that a Level 8 Fighter would be equivalent in abilities to Conan, and maybe Burroughs is the reason the Monster Manual had apes, cavemen, and dinosaurs. The thing is, though, character creation makes you choose whether to be a human, elf, dwarf, or halfling and a huge number of pages deal with wandering around dungeons and the wilderness having random encounters. That’s going to make every adventuring party look and feel like the Fellowship of the Ring. If you wanted it to feel anything like Burroughs, there’d be no Tolkien races, pages of romance rules, and wilderness travel would be based around trying to track the monster who kidnapped a love interest.

            D&D has a lot of trouble building anything but well-worn D&D characters, even where the setting’s compatible. I think the problem’s that every class is (or at least was) designed to pastiche a specific archetype, usually derived from a single work of literature (the Dying Earth stories for the wizard, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for the thief, and so forth) and so you end up being restricted to, basically, crossover fanfic of those characters.

            LOL, ouch. 🙂
            I don’t think it’s quite that bad. The fighter, trickster, and wizard are archetypes that appear in folk tales, epic, and romance. A class/level system shouldn’t be so myopic that the Thief looks like the Grey Mouser at every level. Bilbo Baggins starts The Hobbit at 1st and gains a few levels. Loki could be a god-tier Thief.

            Has anyone checked out “Adventurer, Conqueror, King”? It looks like the 3rd Edition SRD simplified into a Basic clone (keeping feats to differentiate characters), with worldbuilding rules built on a consistent economic model.

          • Nornagest says:

            The fighter, trickster, and wizard are archetypes that appear in folk tales, epic, and romance. A class/level system shouldn’t be so myopic that the Thief looks like the Grey Mouser at every level. Bilbo Baggins starts The Hobbit at 1st and gains a few levels. Loki could be a god-tier Thief.

            Sure, but most of the D&D classes are a lot narrower than the folk archetypes, is the point. This gets obscured a bit in practice because D&D itself now has a whole family tree of literary offshoots, but if you pick even someone described as a roguish type from older literature that isn’t Fritz Lieber’s — Silk of the Belgariad, let’s say — you’ll likely find that he can do stuff you can’t build in D&D, and also that D&D mandates (through adventure design if not through class design) features that he doesn’t have. This goes double if you branch out to “trickster” rather than specifically “rogue”, and triple when you get magic involved.

            I think ACK is one of the better retroclones out there, for what that’s worth; I like its economics and the way it handles character growth. And I’m not trying to shit on D&D unnecessarily; there’s something to be said for having archetypes you can readily pick up, especially in a murder hobo game. But you’re trading off for range.

          • Wency says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            I’m currently running a D&D 5e game, but I’ve relied on AKCS for guidance on many world-building issues. From that standpoint, it has been quite helpful. Of course, I have a very systematizing mind, and I like to be able to know things like the resources available to a local lord that the PCs may interact with. I embrace internal consistency and logic within my fantasy setting, which I recognize as a disease that many others that don’t share, but AKCS has some helpful tools for those who do.

            With AKCS, I can quickly determine the hex ownership of a lord, assign the hexes values, and then arrive at a conclusion about his resources. I can also use the demographic information to surmise the character level of the lord and/or his most prominent warriors.

            I’ve also modified prices of certain items (especially armor), since it seems AKCS has done its work on that front. Of course, some assumptions in 5e are fairly compatible with AKCS, to the degree that the designers might well have read AKCS.

            I imagine AKCS works reasonably well as a stand-alone game, though for me, I was interested in 5e and had a much easier time pitching a 5e game with houserules than I would pitching an AKCS game.

          • bean says:

            There is one D20 system variant that actually solves the ‘this class is this archetype and this archetype only’ problem. It’s the Talent system first used in D20 Modern (although handicapped there by a bizarre choice of base classes) and later in Star Wars Saga Edition. In the latter, it worked very well. You could build a Scoundrel (Rogue-equivalent) as a computer hacker, a sneak attack specialist, a pilot, a con man, or a mechanic, and it worked pretty well for all of them. The other classes were pretty much the same. It was a really nice system. And the next RPG Wizards released after this? 4.0. No, I can’t explain it either.

        • hellahexi says:

          Regarding the background stuff: yes. The world keeps happening, even when the PCs aren’t watching it. Especially when the PCs aren’t watching it. I don’t much care for high fantasy, and my PCs are never world-striding heroes.

          If the world is ugly and nasty–and it is, if your characters’ best life choices include strapping up and grubbing into cracks in the earth so as to kill other beings and rob them of their stuff–something ugly and nasty is always going on in the background. If you’re the good guys, marching south to protect halfling refugees from slavers might mean that the drakes to the north are burning crops and creating more refugees. If you’re the bad guys, garroting your way into the guildmaster’s villa to steal his emeralds means creating a power vacuum that will be filled by those most prepared to use ugly means for ugly ends.

          The PCs can only do what they can, where they are, with what they’ve got. The GM gets to decide how much lasting effect it has on the world. You can ratchet the savagery of your world up or down according to taste, but the world should never feel like a game board where everyone else stands still while the ‘heroes’ are exercising agency.

      • Aegeus says:

        Take a cue from Exalted and abstract stuff into “scenes.” Stuff that lasts a short time (minutes) lasts “a scene” – enough time for combat, and a bit more for non-combat exploration afterwards. Stuff that lasts a long time (hours) lasts a number of scenes, or perhaps “a session” – it lasts until you reach a lengthier pause in the story (Rest for the night, long march where nothing happens, etc.) I don’t recall how Exalted handles ammo (I think they assume you brought enough unless there’s a dramatic reason not to), but there’s no reason you couldn’t say “1 quiver per scene.”

        That means that a player can quickly work out what they need (“We’re probably facing 4 combat encounters before we get to the next town, so I’ll pack 4 scenes worth of arrows”), and you as the GM can say “I’ll plan out 5 combat encounters, so he learns to keep a margin of safety.”

    • Nicholas says:

      I think that Dungeon World provides a pretty good mechanism here. The first thing to keep in mind is that DW abstracts some elements of overland travel and exploration (like mapping an area that’s already been cleared) with skill checks, so this is going to be the specific example for this.
      The actual meat though, is that DW has a partial success mechanic: That mechanic goes something like “The following skills require consumable supplies such as arrows or torches. When the player scores a partial success on their roll they succeed, but must then choose: Either to take some penalty forward from the check (Like a sniper who scores his target but is then spotted, or a mapper who must take double time to correct an error in his first survey) OR they may use up one “Supply” of their required equipment. When they have used up all of their Supply they may not use that skill again until they return to town. It is suggested to the DM that the cost of certain tactics may be “You can totally do that, but it’s going to eat up your Supply of [relevant].
      Because of the cost of supplies per Supply and the randomness of their consumption, the average Dungeon World character has about three supply per relevant skill. So you get the tension of “only a few arrows left, I can’t afford to be careless” without having to track all 34 arrows.

      • hellahexi says:

        I wasn’t aware of that particular bit of crunch. I like it! From what I can see, it doesn’t remove player choices, but does make them consequential.

        I like to think of adventuring–most of the time, before PCs get to the (IMO) boring I-can-do-anything! power levels–as similar to the cycle of poverty. That is, a set of life choices or events by which precariousness, once started, is likely to continue unless there is outside intervention. You strike off into the world in search of the big score to improve your lot (trading security for upside). But most never hit the big score, and it takes substantial life-threatening risks to pursue such a path. Every step along the way there are small, incremental choices for which there is no clear good option and the more choices you make the more you’re locked into the lifestyle and locked out of stable society.

        Oddly, the older I get the less cynical I am about real life, and the more cynical I am about my gaming.

  23. anonymous says:

    Scott writes>Jewish law forbids a divorce unless both parties agree, leading to some complicated situations when one party refuses to consent. Now a New Jersey Orthodox rabbi is sentenced to ten years in prison for hiring goons to beat up Jewish husbands until they agreed to divorce their wives

    Question: what is the correct term for repeating provocative, unpleasant stories about a group you dislike or want to disparage?

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      I don’t know who you people are, but is this going to happen in every open thread from now on?

    • Dan Peverley says:

      Get your insinuations out. Call him an anti-Semite or leave, this waffling nonsense is tiresome. For the record, I read that story and thought, “Oh, so that’s how they handle that sort of thing. Practical!”

      • For a little background on divorce in Rabbinic law …

        The basic legal rule is that a husband can divorce his wife, a wife cannot divorce her husband. The destruction of the Kingdom of Israel and the diaspora resulted in a lot of Jewish communities functioning under their own law within Christian or Muslim polities. The Christian or Muslim ruler found that the easiest way to deal with his Jewish subjects was to subcontract the job to the Jewish communal authorities.

        Sometime around the tenth century, Jewish communal authorities decided that it ought to be possible for a marriage to be ended because of misdeeds by the husband. Since this was impossible under religious law, they came up (as in other cases) with a kludge, a work around. If the wife convinced the court that she was entitled to a divorce, the husband could be imprisoned until he gave her one.

        It sounds as though what Scot mentioned was a modern version of that approach. I can’t see that reporting it is evidence of anti-semitism. I discuss the older version in one of the draft chapters of the book on legal systems very different from ours that I’m currently working on.

  24. The original Mr. X says:

    So after the long argument on Israel and Palestine in the last open thread, I thought I’d pull some bits out of the Hamas founding charter to illustrate why the Israelis might be a little bit reluctant to trust them as negotiating partners. Here are the most relevant quotations:

    Introduction: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

    Article 7: The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

    Article 11: he Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

    This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

    It happened like this: When the leaders of the Islamic armies conquered Syria and Iraq, they sent to the Caliph of the Moslems, Umar bin-el-Khatab, asking for his advice concerning the conquered land – whether they should divide it among the soldiers, or leave it for its owners, or what? After consultations and discussions between the Caliph of the Moslems, Omar bin-el-Khatab and companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, it was decided that the land should be left with its owners who could benefit by its fruit. As for the real ownership of the land and the land itself, it should be consecrated for Moslem generations till Judgement Day. Those who are on the land, are there only to benefit from its fruit. This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.

    Article 13: Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”

    Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

    “But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow – verse 120).
    There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:

    “The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

    Article 22: For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

    You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

    “So often as they shall kindle a fire for war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers.” (The Table – verse 64).
    The imperialistic forces in the Capitalist West and Communist East, support the enemy with all their might, in money and in men. These forces take turns in doing that. The day Islam appears, the forces of infidelity would unite to challenge it, for the infidels are of one nation.

    “O true believers, contract not an intimate friendship with any besides yourselves: they will not fail to corrupt you. They wish for that which may cause you to perish: their hatred hath already appeared from out of their mouths; but what their breasts conceal is yet more inveterate. We have already shown you signs of their ill will towards you, if ye understand.” (The Family of Imran – verse 118).
    It is not in vain that the verse is ended with Allah’s words “if ye understand.”

    Article 27: The Palestinian Liberation Organization is the closest to the heart of the Islamic Resistance Movement. It contains the father and the brother, the next of kin and the friend. The Moslem does not estrange himself from his father, brother, next of kin or friend. Our homeland is one, our situation is one, our fate is one and the enemy is a joint enemy to all of us.

    Because of the situations surrounding the formation of the Organization, of the ideological confusion prevailing in the Arab world as a result of the ideological invasion under whose influence the Arab world has fallen since the defeat of the Crusaders and which was, and still is, intensified through orientalists, missionaries and imperialists, the Organization adopted the idea of the secular state. And that it how we view it.

    Secularism completely contradicts religious ideology. Attitudes, conduct and decisions stem from ideologies.

    That is why, with all our appreciation for The Palestinian Liberation Organization – and what it can develop into – and without belittling its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are unable to exchange the present or future Islamic Palestine with the secular idea. The Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion and whoever takes his religion lightly is a loser.

    Article 28: The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.

    Article 32: The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger eminating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

    Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. “for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither.” (The Spoils – verse 16). There is no way out except by concentrating all powers and energies to face this Nazi, vicious Tatar invasion. The alternative is loss of one’s country, the dispersion of citizens, the spread of vice on earth and the destruction of religious values. Let every person know that he is responsible before Allah, for “the doer of the slightest good deed is rewarded in like, and the does of the slightest evil deed is also rewarded in like.”

    Source: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

    • Evan Þ says:

      “…and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.”

      Looks like Spain, the Balkans, and southern Italy should be worried, then. Though given the recent Muslim immigration and falling birthrates…

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Looks like Spain, the Balkans, and southern Italy should be worried, then. Though given the recent Muslim immigration and falling birthrates…

        Give this man a gold star.

      • Sastan says:

        Actually, there was a very public argument between Hamas and Islamic Jihad some years back over whether or not they needed to expand their terror campaigns to Spain as well, with Hamas holding the line that until they had killed all the jews, they should wait on trying to reconquer Andalusia. A weird sort of moderation, but this is what is meant by “moderate” when speaking about the denizens of the mideast.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Exactly. We need to understand that Muslims like Hamas are pursuing goals abhorrent to us in “moderate”, methodical ways. ISIS is like jihad on ADHD, which might make them less of a threat.

        • vV_Vv says:

          But the super-radical groups like Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and ISIS want to conquer and Islamize the whole world anyway, they wouldn’t be content to stop at al-Andalus.

    • Machine Interface says:

      The whole “Our enemies can’t be trusted to keep their word in any circumstance” is a classic hawkish argument used to justify the refusal of negotiation or compromise and the maintenance of a hard line, but which has never produced the expected results and always proves to be a paper tiger.

      America could never possibly negotiate with a dictatorial, psychotic communist regime… and then they allied with China against the Soviet Union.

      And it’s not like Israel has a long history of always staying true to its word and never betraying its allies in any way — between being Iran’s main arm dealer during the Iran-Iraq war, to selling American military technology to China, through terrorist operations against western targets in Egypt, Israel makes about as good of an ally to the US as Saudi Arabia.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The whole “Our enemies can’t be trusted to keep their word in any circumstance” is a classic hawkish argument used to justify the refusal of negotiation or compromise and the maintenance of a hard line,

        Sometimes, your enemies can’t actually be trusted to keep their word.

        And it’s not like Israel has a long history of always staying true to its word and never betraying its allies in any way — between being Iran’s main arm dealer during the Iran-Iraq war, to selling American military technology to China, through terrorist operations against western targets in Egypt, Israel makes about as good of an ally to the US as Saudi Arabia.

        So what? Sure, Israel isn’t perfect, but until the Israelis elect a government which has genocide against Arabs as one of its founding principles, any attempt at drawing a moral equivalence between the two is mere sophistical whataboutery.

        • sabril says:

          “Sometimes, your enemies can’t actually be trusted to keep their word.”

          I agree, but I think the problem is actually worse than that. Because if it were just a matter of trust, there might be a way to do some kind of a deal using demilitarized areas; international inspections; and so forth.

          I think that Hamas’ charter exposes a more serious problem. Since Hamas’ primary goal is to put an end to Jewish Israel, any deal which benefits Israel, particularly by enhancing Israel’s long-term security, would be unacceptable to Hamas. (And indeed to the Palestinian Arabs in general) So that leaves the question: What concessions would or could the Palestinian Arabs make to Israel in order to do a peace deal? Given their goals, the answer is “none at all.” Which is why there will never be peace until the Palestinian Arabs change their attitude.

          Put another way, if both sides primarily wanted security, autonomy, and demographic stability, there would be room for a deal. Israel primarily wants these things, but the Palestinian Arabs primarily want Israel NOT to have these things. How can you have a workable deal under these circumstances? The answer is that you can’t.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Yes, given the attitudes of the international community, the very existence of a “Palestinian problem” continues to delegitimize Israel and undermine it in public opinion.

            So why should they come to the table? If they do nothing, they win!

          • Pku says:

            I mostly agree, but Just because Israel can’t unilaterally solve the problem doesn’t mean there’s nothing it can do – there are things it can do to help make palestinian public opinion less radical while not decreasing its own security (like freezing settlement construction, and being more willing to negotiate with Abbas over Hamas), and it should do those.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Pku:

            I sincerely do not believe that Israel’s being more willing to make concessions will make the Palestinians more cooperative. It’s just appeasement: giving them some concessions, especially unilateral concessions, just confirms that the current strategy is effective.

            I don’t believe either in the idea that all Israel needs to do is keep appeasing, or in the idea expressed—usually covertly but openly in this thread by Sastan and others—that there is no solution but for Israel to engage in “ethnic cleansing”. I believe that the Palestinian culture is inherently backwards and anti-Semitic in the exact same sense that the German and Japanese cultures were inherently militaristic and totalitarian: they were until someone was prepared to totally defeat them and make clear that they weren’t going to be allowed to be like that anymore.

            That is not the policy Israel has toward the Palestinian territories. Rather, Israel has a policy toward them which is quite like that of the Treaty of Versailles toward post-WWI Germany. They occupy large parts of their land, meddle in their affairs, impose harsh sanctions on them—but at the same time grant them extensive autonomy and allow the local regime to stir up anti-occupier sentiment and perpetrate injustices on its own population, indeed allow it to enforce anti-Israel ideological uniformity among that population.

            This is not a “sustainable” strategy toward peaceful coexistence.

            Israel has to decide which option it favors: to totally withdraw and wash its hands of Palestine, or to really defeat and suppress the anti-Israel resistance. There is no middle way, except the status quo of continuing conflict—which is not going to last forever.

            Now, I believe that it is not in Israel’s rational interest to withdraw and abandon all of the post-1967 Palestinian land. But if victory is what they want, they can’t just putter about trying to appease the Palestinians. They’ve got to take decisive action.

            Part of this is an inherent problem of democracy: it tends toward the “middle-of-the-road”, compromise solution, even when this is worse than either of the extremes. Peter van Doren explains this in the context of the Vietnam War. There were, in principle, two plausibly defensible courses of action: a) don’t get involved and b) as people like Curtis LeMay said, “nuke Hanoi”, i.e. maybe not literally, but do what is necessary to win the war. The third option: c) fuck around for 20 years, killing millions of civilians and 50,000 American soldiers, while accomplishing nothing—that option was not desired by anybody. But that’s what happened because that’s the average between the two.

            The same could be said for Afghanistan and Iraq. Either do nothing, or win and set up a genuinely liberal government—occupying the country as long as necessary to do so. But to invade and set up corrupt governments based on sharia law which are friendly to American enemies—and this includes the governments that are not ISIS—what is the point of that?

          • sabril says:

            “I mostly agree, but Just because Israel can’t unilaterally solve the problem doesn’t mean there’s nothing it can do – there are things it can do to help make palestinian public opinion less radical while not decreasing its own security (like freezing settlement construction, and being more willing to negotiate with Abbas over Hamas), and it should do those.”

            Freezing settlement construction would probably have the opposite effect from what you anticipate. Because it would make the Palestinian Arabs more optimistic about achieving their goal of putting an end to Jewish Israel. And at a minimum, it would not help anything.

            Just look at what happened with the Gaza pullout. Did it help things that Israel dismantled a number of settlements and left the greenhouses intact in a gesture of goodwill? Of course not.

            You need to keep in mind that there is a difference between a reason and an excuse and that people tend to lie when reporting their motivations. The settlements are a convenient excuse and nothing more.

        • birdboy2000 says:

          And sometimes they can. And I don’t think hard-line language in a charter is in itself proof to the contrary, any more than the IRA’s commitment to a 32-county socialist Irish Republic prevented them from coming to the peace table.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “And sometimes they can.”

            And in this case they have demonstrated repeatedly that they cannot.

            “And I don’t think hard-line language in a charter is in itself proof to the contrary…”

            Even if not proof, it’s certainly *evidence* for the proposition that the group is hardline, wouldn’t you agree? Perhaps we could stack it up alongside the war crimes and genocidal rhetoric and see if we can come to a provisional conclusion about the nature of Hamas.

            “…any more than the IRA’s commitment to a 32-county socialist Irish Republic prevented them from coming to the peace table.”

            And yet Hamas hasn’t come to the peace table. Odd, that.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        You’re squirting an awful lot of ink in order to not have to face the poisonous nature of Hamas’s fundamental beliefs. Why is that?

        “Israel makes about as good of an ally to the US as Saudi Arabia.”

        Oh, please. You’re full of it. Get back to me when Israeli-backed and funded terrorists bomb Washington and New York, then we’ll talk about who’s a worse ally.

        • Machine Interface says:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

          The only difference is that Israel is incompetent even there.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            You will note that Israel was not allied with the U.S. at the time.

            In fact, the U.S. was fucking supporting Nasser and his policy of pan-Arab nationalism, which was directly opposed to Israel. And this would of course lead two years later to the Suez Crisis in which the U.S. sided with the Soviet Union to stop Israel, Britain, and France from retaking the Suez Canal and deposing Nasser.

          • sabril says:

            “You will note that Israel was not allied with the U.S. at the time.”

            I agree, but keep in mind that “Machine Interface” is obviously trying to change the subject from “Can Hamas be Trusted to do a Peace Deal with Israel?” to “Is Israel Perfect?”

            So you are kind of playing into his hands here.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Sabril: Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m not surprised that he’s trying to move the goalposts as hard as he can, since “Hamas really is trustworthy, you guys!” isn’t a very defensible position.

    • Zur says:

      We can agree, the Hamas is a terrible dark movement that promotes hatred and violence.

      A simple question: why hasn’t Israel recognized the Palestinian authority as a state? Wouldn’t that be a good move, as it would strengthen the authority and weaken Hamas? It would seem to be in Israel’s best interests and to be in line with Israel’s policy of building a border (the separation wall/fence) and granting the Palestinians full autonomy on their side.

      Instead, Netanyahu has tried to block Palestinian statehood. What is the rationale for this? Doesn’t it strengthen groups like Hamas?

      • sabril says:

        “A simple question: why hasn’t Israel recognized the Palestinian authority as a state?”

        The Palestinian Authority is still bad news for Israel. But perhaps more importantly, if the areas under Palestinian Authority control were given the same sort of autonomy Gaza has, it’s pretty likely that either (1) groups like Hamas would take over pretty quickly; or (2) the whole area would devolve into civil war.

        Note that when the original elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, there was a decisive victory by Hamas.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        That might have been plausible at one point and (I’m guessing) was Sharon’s intention before his stroke, but Hamas’s rocket attacks from Gaza, along with their tunneling, rendered the idea of a wall not good enough. Another Gaza in the West Bank would drop hundreds of rockets daily on the capital and the international airport.

      • Sastan says:

        For the simple reason that under the framework of the peace agreements, recognition of the palestinian state is the final stage, the last concession to seal a final deal. To give it away for nothing would be incredibly stupid politically and useless in any case. Hamas has been the autonomous governing body of Gaza for years now, the PA and Hamas together govern the vast majority of palestinians. There isn’t that much shifting left to do before the states hit their projected parameters. But it’s like some commenters have noted. The Palestinian goal is the death of every Jew. This is fundamentally at odds with doing a peace deal. The Palestinians will never, ever stop trying to eradicate the jewish state and murder every jewish person in the world. This is the only reason for being palestinian, the thing that makes them palestinian as opposed to just another group of post-Ottoman arabs. Their entire culture is about little else. Asking them to stop is like asking the French to stop cooking, making wine and reading pretentious novels.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Oh, come on. This is just as bad as the Hamas rhetoric.

          It’s not the case that they will “never, ever stop”. It’s not like it’s written in their genetic code.

          They’ll stop if and when they are made to stop, at the point where it becomes clear that they have no chance of success. They’ll stop when it becomes the case that continued resistance will hurt their goals rather than helping them. They’ll stop in the same way the Germans stopped trying to eradicate the Jews, or how the Japanese stopped trying to take over the Pacific.

          • sabril says:

            “It’s not the case that they will ‘never, ever stop’. It’s not like it’s written in their genetic code.”

            It’s pretty deeply ingrained in their culture. There are Muslim Arabs even today who talk about re-taking Spain.

            I think that the Palestinian Arabs don’t necessarily want to slaughter all of the Jews, but I do think they would never really adjust to having a Jewish state in the Levant.

          • Sastan says:

            No, it’s not genetic, it’s cultural.

            Think for a second man. In 1947, there is no palestinian nation, no palestinian people, just a group of mixed muslims and christians who happened to all live in the same area which had been colonized for the preceding two and a half thousand years. Ottomans, Egyptians, Mongols, Kurds, Crusaders, Abbasids, Syrians, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians again.

            But today, they have a strong identity, a distinct culture. And this is based completely, entirely on nothing more than opposition to the state of Israel. Were it not for the state of Israel being created, they’d all be citizens of Jordan or Syria or Egypt, and no one would have ever heard of the term “palestinian”.

            Oddly, it seems to parallel what we know of the formation of the Jewish identity thousands of years ago, where the scattered, fractious hill tribes banded together to resist the coastal invasion of the Philistines.

            Unfortunately, this means there will never be a peace in the area. The only real chance of that was for Israel to commit some Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing back in ’67 when they could have gotten away with it. Then they could apologize profusely today, imprison a general or two, pay a symbolic indemnity to the descendants in Jordan or wherever, and sign a deal.

          • sabril says:

            @sastan

            “Unfortunately, this means there will never be a peace in the area”

            I agree to an extent, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that even if every Jew left the area tomorrow, it’s unlikely that there would be peace. Instead, there probably would be brutal civil wars and conflicts on a regular basis with periods of relative calm enforced by repressive dictatorships and theocracies. That’s the situation in Syria, for example and there’s no reason to think “Palestine” would be any different. Even now, there would probably be an open war between Fatah and Hamas if it weren’t for Israel standing in the way.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Article 7: The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

      I have to say, I always found this line absolutely hilarious. Of course it’s terrible, but the imagery is just so silly. It’s even more absurd in the full context of the hadith, which specifies: “Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

      It also definitely echoes (or rather, is echoed by) the Babylon 5 episode “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place”, in which one of the Centauri leaders behind the oppression of the Narns gets beaten to death to the tune of a Negro spiritual with lyrics in the same general theme:

      There’s no hiding place down here
      There’s no hiding place down here
      Well I went to the rock to hide my face
      The rock cried out, no hiding place
      There’s no hiding place down here

      Is there some specific passage in the Bible that depicts sinners trying to hide behind rocks or trees? Or is it just the general concept, which is shared between Christianity and Islam?

      • brad says:

        The only thing that comes to mind is Adam & Eve after eating from the forbidden tree.

        And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden toward the cool of the day; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto the man, and said unto him: ‘Where art thou?’ And he said: ‘I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’

      • The original Mr. X says:

        Is there some specific passage in the Bible that depicts sinners trying to hide behind rocks or trees? Or is it just the general concept, which is shared between Christianity and Islam?

        I can’t think of any Christian sources for the idea. It might well be original to the Koran.

        • NN says:

          It isn’t in the Koran. It’s in a Hadith, or a recorded saying of Muhammed.

          “No Hiding Place Down Here” was first written down in 1907, so while it could theoretically have been influenced by Islamic traditions, it seems unlikely. They might have been independently invented, as weird as that seems.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          Luke 19:39-40 : Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.” But Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out!”

          (I only know this from Jesus Christ Superstar)

      • Jaskologist says:

        Rev 6:15-16

        Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”

        Isaiah 2:21

        They will flee to caverns in the rocks
        and to the overhanging crags
        from the fearful presence of the Lord
        and the splendor of his majesty,
        when he rises to shake the earth.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          But did the rocks cry out, “No hiding place!”?

          This just says they will hide. No word on the rocks and trees themselves giving away their positions.

      • Deiseach says:

        Two sources for “calling out to the rocks”: first from the Gospel of Luke:

        28 But Jesus turning to them said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

        Second from Revelation:

        15 Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, 16 calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; 17 for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand before it?”

    • John Schilling says:

      So after the long argument on Israel and Palestine in the last open thread, I thought I’d pull some bits out of the Hamas founding charter

      I really wish you hadn’t done that. Are you truly foolish enough to believe that this will persuade anyone of anything, except that supporters of Israel tend to be annoying fanatics?

      You have harmed your cause, which I am normally inclined to sympathize with, and you have helped make this open thread less readable, enjoyable, and informative than it could have been. You have done nothing of value. Please go away until you understand why this is so.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Wait, what? He has harmed the cause of Israel by quoting the position of their enemies? Can I hurt Hitler by quoting the communist manifesto?

        • John Schilling says:

          Can I hurt Hitler by quoting the communist manifesto?

          You can if you’re a Nazi. Just do it in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and dial up the volume every time you notice people are trying to ignore you and go about their business.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        You have harmed your cause, which I am normally inclined to sympathize with, and you have helped make this open thread less readable, enjoyable, and informative than it could have been. You have done nothing of value.

        [Cue sad violin music in the background]

      • sabril says:

        “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

        I’m glad he did (even though I’m one of those annoying pro-Israel types), but I think his excerpts need to be combined with an important fact, which is that in the Palestinian Authority elections in 2006, Hamas won a decisive victory. There have not been serious elections since then.

        There is a distinction between the “Palestinian Authority” and “Hamas” only because Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of his party have decided to disenfranchise all of the Palestinian Arabs. (Of course if Hamas were to gain power, it would do pretty much the same thing. There haven’t been any elections in Gaza either.)

        So why does any of this matter? There is an idea floating around out there that the Arab/Israeli conflict can be seen as two groups of people who can’t get along. That there is a “cycle of violence” and that if only one side (presumably Israel) would just start making nice, the whole conflict would fizzle out and a negotiated solution could be reached. Quoting the Hamas charter helps to show people that this idea is completely wrong; the situation is not symmetrical; and for there to be peace, the Arabs need to change their attitude.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          So why does any of this matter? There is an idea floating around out there that the Arab/Israeli conflict can be seen as two groups of people who can’t get along. That there is a “cycle of violence” and that if only one side (presumably Israel) would just start making nice, the whole conflict would fizzle out and a negotiated solution could be reached. Quoting the Hamas charter helps to show people that this idea is completely wrong; the situation is not symmetrical; and for there to be peace, the Arabs need to change their attitude.

          Yes, exactly.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            “Two sides!”

            Being from Alabama, I often heard this expressed as: “The reason the Jews and Muslims can’t get along is that their religions both encourage vengeance and ‘an eye for an eye’. If only they were good Christians and understood the virtue of forgiveness, this conflict would end.”

            Though, in general, people in Alabama support Israel a lot. Partly because they want Israel to demolish the Dome on the Rock, rebuild the Third Temple, sacrifice the red hefer, and bring about the Second Coming…

          • Jiro says:

            Did you hear personally from many supporters of Israel that they support Israel because they want to bring about the Second Coming? Last time that subject came up here (may have been LW, not sure), it appeared to be mostly a myth, not believed by more than a tiny minority of Christians, and spread because it fits preexisting prejudices about Christians.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            Yes, I have personally heard it from them. I don’t know about “many”, since I don’t have a habit of engaging in long conversations with people about Israel and their reasons for supporting it, but I have heard it.

            And I get the impression that while only a tiny number of people are really serious about doing this immediately, a much larger number believe in a premillennialist interpretation of Revelations in which these things will happen inexorably.

        • John Schilling says:

          Quoting the Hamas charter helps to show people that this idea is completely wrong

          Only if they then read the relevant parts of Hamas charter, with an open mind and a willingness to reevaluate their beliefs rather than the more usual cherrypicking of fragments that will support their preexisting beliefs. Do you really believe that anyone here actually did that?

          Did anyone here actually read the quoted bits of the Hamas charter and as a result change any prior belief they had held in this matter? Anyone?

          Bueller?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            When I read the Hamas charter, it moved my views significantly towards the pro-Israeli side. So, yes.

          • sabril says:

            FWIW, the Hamas charter is one of several pieces of evidence which led me to the conclusion that the situation is essentially intractable until and unless the Palestinian Arabs change their attitude.

            I doubt you can point to anyone changing their mind based on Mr. X’s specific post any more than you can associate a specific TV ad for Coca Cola with a specific purchase.

  25. The Anonymouse says:

    Does anyone have any experience with Republic Wireless? The Moto G phone?

    Basically, I’m looking for a cheap-ass phone that doesn’t look like the slide-out dumb phone I still use. I would like a smartphone, but I’m a skinflint, and don’t care at all for having a plan that costs me $50+ a month. My primary use remains, well, making and receiving phone calls; my secondary use is dicking around on the internet. Thanks y’all!

    • Alexandra says:

      I recently got the Moto G. My only issue with it is that pages occasionally fail to load for no apparent reason, and reloading them generally fixes this.

    • Theo Jones says:

      Its not any of the carriers you named, but look at tracfone. They sell some pretty cheap prepaid phones. I got some $9 LG android (I forgot the model name). I went with that because I’m not a very heavy phone user, so, prepaid is a lot cheaper. But I want some data support (so, dumb phones are out). Its surprisingly non-sucky. Good enough for web browsing, and other light usage.

    • zolstein says:

      What’s your definition of “cheap-ass” when it comes to phones? $200? Lower?

      A good strategy when buying a budget phone is to get a used/refurbished flagship that’s 1-2 years old. The specs are typically comparable to a current mid-range model, and if they don’t have good official software support they often have an active custom-ROM scene so you can still get newer OS versions. The LG G2 has been popular for such purposes.

    • Cannon Hackett says:

      I have had a Moto G with Republic Wireless service for a year and a half (unlimited talk and text.) Overall I’m quite happy with it and plan to stay with them at least until my phone dies. The only big issue I’ve had is that one time my phone randomly switched to having another phone number for about an hour. No idea how well the cellular internet works. One great thing about Republic Wireless is that, last time I checked, you can switch plans twice a month without being charged any fee, and the cost at the end of the month will be the cost of both plans multiplied by the fraction of the time you had each one for.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Thank you, Cannon. That’s exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. The only other question remaining is how well it works in different parts of the country.

  26. anonymous says:

    On Charitable giving.
    I’m older and wealthier than most of SSC readers, so I have had a lot of experience with charitable giving. Here are some stray thoughts and experiences that may be of interest.

    When I didn’t have any money, as a teenager and person in my twenties, I gave through volunteer work. I volunteered inspecting tenements in Harlem for housing violations, in Head Start, in an old age home, in a mental hospital and via the Peace Corps. These were all fantastic life experiences for me, making me a much wiser person with broader life experience. How much did they help others? Not all that much. It is very uncomfortable to look back on efforts that were supposed to help others and helped only oneself.

    Head Start it turns out is pretty useless in terms of any long term benefits. The Peace Corps was a complete farce – all I did was provide some stimulating conversation to the people of an isolated African small town (think mud huts and a few stucco buildings at the market), but with the downside of helping make them dependent on the chimera of outside help by white people. It would be more helpful to leave them to their own devices so they more motivated to find effective solutions.

    “Helping” at the mental hospital was a total nothing as far as charity, but helped me decide on my first career as a psychotherapist.

    Visiting the old age home weekly was an act of one on one kindness that was real. This is the sort of charity Judaism and Christianity encourages. Yet it is not where my heart is. It is extremely demanding. As an older, busier person, I am not that kind.

    I came away from the Peace Corps totally cynical about African aid programs across the spectrum, which is why I think Scott’s allegiance to simple, direct grants is a worthy experiment.

    Personally, I concluded it is better to give in your own culture and even locale, where you understand what is going on and can monitor the charity for effectiveness. I mostly give to small, entrepreneurial charities or activist organizations where I know the director personally and stay in touch with them. This is emotionally satisfying and has led to meeting many admirable, interesting, self-sacrificing people who I am honored to know. These small groups are less likely to spend most of the money on themselves.

    I don’t give out of guilt or obligation for the many blessings of life as an American. My blessings f or the most part have added prosperity, freedom and beauty to the world. Besides, I’m not going to feel guilty for history or reality. I give out of love and concern, wanting to further a better world – obviously, better as I see it. This means there is a heavy dose of my personal values in where I give money, which makes it more satisfying than a generic gift, whether it be to the United Way of your grandparents’ generation or the ‘effective charity’ of your generation.

    So I choose very personally and give to things that mean a great deal to me at the time. Big drawback – I have looked back and felt some large bequests were ‘wasted’ according to my present values. This is actually extremely frustrating and discouraging. I guess you could say that is an argument for pure kindness, which is never wasted. But I am too much of a striver and would-be change agent to want to give only to help one individual instead of trying to solve a fundamental problem. Even giving big sums of money to buy land that is permanently conserved can seem wasted in hindsight, when you think of how you would donate that money now, or that the land in question was not that comparatively valuable to furthering conservation. I don’t have a solution to this dilemma.

    I hear a lot of idealism here about the right way to give, that giving in a very disengaged, intellectual way to do the most good for the most impoverished is pure and unselfish and superior. The reality is that human nature is not like that, and most giving is a mix of selfishness and generosity. Most giving is extremely social, in that it gives an entrée into the social group you want to belong to -that is undoubtedly true of effective altruism also. People give most to groups they are personally involved in – going to their fundraising parties and events, their lectures, trips – it is often how people meet their closest friends, among others who care deeply and share values. That is nothing to disparage.

  27. rose says:

    American Jewish intellectuals, journalists, organizational leaders are worse than the cowed Jews of the 1930’s. Many actively join Israel’s defamers. They work to subvert American support for Israel, pretending the problem is Israeli ‘intransigence’, not Islamic neo-Nazism. American Jews flocked to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, ignoring his viciously antisemitic “mentor,” host of anti-Israel advisors such as Samantha Powers, and sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Identification with the aggressor is a very dangerous strategy for psychological comfort.

    Victim Psychology: Being unable to escape cruel, unremitting violence damages reality testing, because reality is too painful to endure.

    The wife is in the hospital with a ruptured spleen and every bone broken in her body. The doctor pleads with her to report her husband to the police and enter a half-way house. But she knows he’ll try to kill her there. Neither “flight or fight,” nature’s two adaptive defenses, offer safety. Her mind comes up with a third solution: she caused her husband to beat her; therefore she can fix the problem by improving herself. It was her own fault for having dinner late, which of course made him lose his temper. She can go back and cook dinner on time, and it will work out. She refuses to file a complaint. The next month, he beats her to death.

    The victim creates an alternate reality, in which the victim is the one at fault. If your behavior is at fault, the solution is also in your hands. You no longer feel powerless. Unfortunately, now your life is in danger.

    For Jews, Islamic neo-Nazism, within living memory of the Holocaust, can be unbearable. Too much pain, too much fear, too much injustice. Too much helplessness, trapped in a world that will not stop killing us. Victim mentality makes all that disappear. We are no better than those Christians and Moslems who kill us. Jews are not targets, we are abusers ourselves. We have nothing to fear in Israel but our own bigotry. Isn’t that better now?

    Since this defense falsifies reality instead of coping with it, it resulted in bringing Arafat, a known terrorist, to be set up as a dictator over his people, with the crazy idea he would bring peace. It allowed him to re-arm and inculcate a generation in neo-Nazi hate. It leads us to forget that when Israel offered the P.A. half of Jerusalem and 90% of their territorial demands the Arabs walked out and began a reign of terror. It leads us to ignore Hamas firing five thousand missiles into Israel, to ignore that the current blockade is preventing the smuggling of missiles from Iran. In the alternate reality, the settlers are the problem. There is no danger, because the victim is the bad one, and can avoid murder by self-correction.

    Blaming Israel

    At the Brandeis lecture that started off my investigation the psychological use of Israel as a scapegoat was striking. Carroll was there to talk about his 750 page book on how the Roman Catholic Church destroyed its own soul by persecuting Jews. Every single Jewish discussant responded by defaming Israel.

    To understand scapegoating Israel coupled with a suicidal refusal to face Arab antisemitism, we must turn to the classic work of the psychology of trauma, Trauma and Recovery, by Dr. Judith Herman.

    Victims of abuse typically accuse themselves of being the cause of the problem, and bystanders are quick to agree. Dr. Herman, describing the psychology of an abused child:

    “When it is impossible to avoid the reality of the abuse, the child must construct some system of meaning that justifies it. Inevitably, the child concludes that her innate badness is the cause. The child seizes upon this explanation and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope and power. If she is bad, then her parents are good. If she is bad, then she can try to be good. If somehow, she has brought this fate upon herself, then somehow she has the power to change it.”

    This tactic of blaming the victim is used by both victims and bystanders in order to “preserve a sense of meaning, hope and power.” This is the psychology at work when we see liberal Israelis and Americans, especially scared Jews, blame Israel for the Arab campaign to destroy her.

    It has become common to accuse Israel of acting like Nazis themselves, to accuse Jews of using the Holocaust as justification to abuse Palestinians. According to Dr. Herman, it is a common myth that victims become abusers. Abused children do not perpetuate a cycle of abuse. They are over-protective parents. Many abuse victims are suicidal; there is no correlation with homicide. Traumatized people are far more likely to behave in self-defeating ways that harm themselves.

    Society always blames the victim and ignores the perpetrator – Dr. Herman shows this with incest, with child abuse, with rape, with wife beating. She writes, in language that could be directly transposed to the way society approaches Palestinian violence against Israel:

    “It is sometimes forgotten that men’s violence is men’s behavior….(There is an) enormous effort to explain male behavior by examining the characteristics of women.” “What struck me most at the time was how little rational argument seemed to matter. The women’s representatives came to the discussion with carefully reasoned, extensively documented position papers, which argued that the proposed diagnostic concept (which claimed battered women wanted to be beaten) had little scientific foundation…The men of the psychiatric establishment persisted in their bland denial. They admitted freely that they were ignorant …”

    Anyone who has tried to argue on Israel’s behalf by marshalling reams of uncontestable facts has experienced this wall of complacent ignorance and denial. Is this why the lies of pro-Arab propaganda work so well? It is not that Israel is at fault for ineffectively presenting their case – we are once again blaming the victim. Why should Israel need to convince fellow westerners that terrorism against Jews is not a special case, and has no justification?

    Scared Jews: “Listen to the Prophet Mohammet: Finish Off Every Jew”

    Five years before 9/11, an intermarried American Jew spoke for millions of American Jews:

    “… Jews everywhere live in constant trepidation, if only subliminally. The fear is buried below the conscious level…but when I look at my daughters, I’m aware that somewhere on this planet, at this very moment, there are people who want to murder them…Unfortunately, some of these people have the money, means and ideological connections that can transform them from … haters to real-life killers….This fear, this existential insecurity, is authentic and it sets Jews apart.” (Dr. Halberstam, Shmoozing)

    Islamic neo-Nazism is an open secret. Moslem children are taught that Jews drink human blood. Imams preach Allah wants Jews to be tortured and killed ‘wherever you find them.” Iranian mullahs call for nuclear weapons to be dropped on Israel. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that favorite Nazi book on Jewish conspiracy with its call to genocide, is turned into a TV series in Egypt. Children are trained to sing songs, starting at age 4 and 5, about killing Jews. In the official PA map, Israel has been wiped out. It was posted on their web for all to see during the entire peace process, but the sight was too depressing, and our media and most Jews turned their eyes away.

    If Palestinian society isn’t neo-Nazi , what is? If Jews can’t call it by its real name, who will?

    Google “Palestinians frustrated” and you get over five million hits. Arab neo-Nazism is rarely reported in the news, its direct links to Nazi German are never covered, and Arab hate of Jews is frequently justified. Hate and murder of Israelis is presented as an understandable reaction to those famously frustrated national aspirations. Ignore those call to to wipe out Jews – those are just angry words. The anger will disappear once they get justice. This is the same way our media whitewashed the rise of German Nazism, lulling Americans into complacency until the outbreak of World War II. The Germans are frustrated by their economic meltdown, we were told. Their grievances are legitimate. Their suffering deserves sympathy. Their scapegoating rich Jews is understandable. The extremists are a small minority.

    How can European governments and our mainstream media insist all the Palestinians want is their own country? The facts are there for all to see. When the U.N. recognized Israel in 1948, it simultaneously created an Arab state on the West Bank – which was refused. The West Bank remained in Jordanian hands until 1967, but a Palestinian state was never created by the Arabs. Remember the Arab wars to throw Israel into the sea, all before the occupation of the West Bank? Remember Israel in 1967 saying, give us a peace treaty, and we will give back the West Bank? They were refused. The Arabs have been offered a West Bank state four times from 1948 to the present, and every time refused it. The latest formula for destroying Israel is the ‘right of return’, or ‘one state solution’, which means making Israel an Arab state. Tell me again how the problem is caused by Israel denying the Palestinian Arabs their own country.

    Arab propaganda and military efforts to wipe out Israel have been consistently supported by Islamic teaching. The Jewish state is an abomination to Allah. Allah wants believers to kill and torture individual Jews, executing a world-wide Final Solution. This open goal to destroy Israel and murder Jews is not too complex to understand. It is as clear as Mein Kampf. But most people are unwilling to face unpleasant facts.

    • Ben Dov says:

      Maybe instead of armchair analyzing people you apparently don’t have any passing familiarity with, you should look into yourself and see where this bizarre obsession with Jews and Israel comes from. Sounds like some kind of variant of Jerusalem syndrome.

      We don’t need or want your “help”.

    • Zur says:

      So one interesting take on this theme is a book I recently read, “Catch the Jew” by Tuvia Tenenbom. It’s about a German/Jewish journalist who tours Israel for about 6 months and interviews everybody he can find. One interesting observation he makes is that sometimes the Jews themselves are the most anti-Israel, because they have this (racist) belief on some level that the Jews are or should be better than their neighbors.

      The idea is that Jews can accept Islamic terrorism and hatred, because they don’t have any particular expectations from the Arabs, but they can’t accept Israeli nationalism and militarism because, as Jews, they should be better then that. This explains why a Jew would be far more outraged by other Jews marching and chanting “death to Arabs” then by Arabs chanting “death to Jews”.

      Another version of this is that the fascination of the western world with Israel stems from an expectation that the Jewish nation must be the most moral of nations, because they view Judaism as a kind of ideal.

  28. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I admit I’m really late in noticing this campaign: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11470985/Are-you-reading-too-many-books-by-straight-white-men.html
    That said, I think it would be interesting to come up with the most conservative possible reading list to suggest to SJWs who are sympathetic to this campaign. Who wants to help?

    The Bible
    Plotinus’s Enneads
    St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God
    The Quran
    Al-Tabari’s History (at least the volumes on Muhammad)
    1001 Nights
    The Shahnama
    The Rigveda
    Major Upanishads
    Ramayana
    Buddhacarita
    At least Analects, Mencius, and the Book of Rites from the Confucian canon
    Dao De Jing
    Sun Tzu’s Art of War

    • God Damn John Jay says:

      Intuitively I would guess that straight would be a huge weak spot in this, since a lot of the literary canon was written by people who are either gay, very likely gay or tinged with vaguely homoerotic themes (Shakespeare(?), Ancient Athenians, T. E. Lawrence, Proust). I would imagine that you could build a collection of great western works while only nominating gay authors.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        This is tangential to your point, but Shakespeare is not a good example. In the homoerotic sonnets, bugging his male friend to marry is a major theme, and the poet’s erotic interaction with the Dark Lady is more explicit. If we calibrate our gaydar on Kit Marlowe, Shakespeare doesn’t register.
        (Kit Marlowe, gay anti-Semite who glorified the barbarian chief’s life of rape and pillage. Now there’s intersectionality for you.)

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          I put the question mark there because Shakespeare was a case that seems to be in legitimate dispute and not one where it is clear either way. (Wikipedia lists efforts to edit the poems in 1640 to change masculine pronouns to feminine and upon returning to the original in 1780 readers were struck by the apparent homo-eroticism. I am not an expert in literature of history, but it seems a legitimate controversy.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      For one thing, reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

      But more importantly, that’s not even the books the SJWs are telling people not to read. They probably have in mind even people like Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, Jonathan Haidt, and other liberal straight white men. And the conservative straight white men they find totally out of bounds are mainstream conservative blowhards like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, as well as religious writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. They’re also against the founders of American classical liberalism: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and so on. And of course the straight white men behind modern libertarianism, like Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand (an honorary man), and the Friedmans.

      Any even non-ideologically, they are against any author who comes from America or Europe, like Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (he’s pretty ideological, too), Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, and so on. Because that will just confirm the harmful ways of thinking natural to the West.

      More than half your books on there are non-Western and non-white, though perhaps not non-male. The SJWs would probably in fact say people should be reading more about Islam and Confucianism in order to get out of their parochial ways of thinking.

      Muslims and Confucianists are not the outgroup. They’re just random people in the desert (well, at least the former). The outgroup is American conservatives (actual regular conservatives), America’s allegedly crypto-racist classical liberalism, libertarianism, and everyone on the left who doesn’t see things their way.

      Mencius Moldbug, let alone the actual Mencius, is not on their radar.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        For one thing, reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

        Of course not. However, my thinking was that contemporary literati read way, way too many novels, especially mediocre novels by living authors and not nearly enough philosophy, history, or poetry. Playing along with the letter of their rule while undermining its spirit (the spirit being an echo chamber of grievance-mongering novels) could be an act of intellectual judo that contributes toward their salvation from leftism. I agree 100% with C.S. Lewis’s “On the Reading of Old Books”, but as you say they have an ideological immune reaction to him. 🙂

        • DavidS says:

          I think it’s a bit unfair to assume that anyone who suggests reading more stuff that isn’t by ‘straight white men’ actually means ‘read greivance-mongering novels’. I suspect for most they just think that the process of identifying ‘literature’ tends to overlook women and minorities (e.g. the Great American Novel seems pretty white and male. Dunno about straight).

          • keranih says:

            I think it’s a bit unfair to assume that anyone who suggests reading more stuff that isn’t by ‘straight white men’ actually means ‘read greivance-mongering novels’.

            I think the phrase used is something along the lines of “works that highlight the struggles and oppression of non-cis-male-normative and non-white peoples by the kyriarchy” rather than “grievance-mongering.”

            If the work doesn’t focus on that type of struggle, then it’s just ‘brown washing’ or appropriation to have non-cis-male characters. Or something.

          • John Schilling says:

            When this came up in the specific context of science fiction and fantasy, I don’t recall too many suggestions that we geeky white guys should go out and read more Lois Bujold, Connie Willis, or Elizabeth Moon. To name a few exceedingly popular not-white-male authors who managed to not be overlooked by the field’s top literary awards while writing non-grievance-mongering novels. When actual suggestions followed “read more works by non-white-male authors”, they tended to be, as keranih notes, works that focused on the struggles and oppression of the aggrieved peoples in question.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            John, what, specifically, are you talking about?

            This is the same campaign. Le Chat links to the same article that Scott linked to, which, in turn, links to Bradford’s post specifically about SF/F, that I believe launched the campaign you are talking about. Bradford’s list doesn’t look to me to be grievance-mongering, although I don’t know many of the books on the list. Maybe other people wrote other lists, but I’ve never seen these other lists. I’ve never seen those other lists because no one ever makes specific complaints about other lists. Instead, they complain that Bradford is grievance-mongering and would not approve of Delany, when, in fact, he was on her list.

      • keranih says:

        They’re also against the founders of American classical liberalism: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and so on. And of course the straight white men behind modern libertarianism, like Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand (an honorary man), and the Friedmans.

        I’m coming further and further around to the idea that a large – if not the primary – problem with SJWs is that they lack a foundation in the history of the Enlightenment – what it was, what it grew from, and what it was in opposition to.

        Enlightenment was not without its faults and downsides, but as a means of weighing pros and cons, it proved superior to the previous methods European humanity had been using. A lot of those methods looked a lot like SJW methodology looks like now.

        I went looking, once upon a time, for influential works from non-European cultures/authors on rationalism, individual liberty, and the rights of man. Couldn’t find any, and the SJs I hung with at the time couldn’t point to any, either.

        • Tibor says:

          According to Murray Rothbard, Lao-Tzu was supposedly quite libertarian in his writing. I have not read anything from him, so I cannot confirm or reject that. Rothbard likes to paint the world history as basically an epic struggle between libertarians or proto-libertarians and statists though, so I would really check Lao-Tzu first before citing Rothbard.

          • keranih says:

            I read several versions of the Tao Te Ching, as well as other Asia classics in this series. This is not anything like being expert.

            However, I absolutely agree that the Tao Te Ching expresses a small government, least-governance philosophy. It’s also a rather anti-innovation and definitely anti-tech.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @keranih: The combination of beliefs in individualism and science with institutions that produce technological innovation is probably unique to the Enlightenment. There’s a passage in his History of Western Philosophy where liberal Bertrand Russell says “technological advance has given human society much more power while making the individual increasingly powerless”, and another where he says “I’ll spend more pages discussing Locke than Leibniz or Spinoza even though he was a much weaker philosopher, because he was so influential.”
            If this combination isn’t true to facts, we would never expect another civilization to come up with it independently. China had a patriarchal, monarchical, bureaucratic and technologically innovative (until some time in the Ming Dynasty) culture and also a counterculture of anti-tech individualists. Hindus had principles of freedom of religion and free debate and outclassed China in logic and pure science while lagging in technology (no printing or compass, etc).

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Not really, no. Calling him a libertarian makes about as much sense as the “Jesus was a communist” schtick.

            Lao-tzu is just a particularly cryptic, or perhaps just poorly translated, esoteric philosopher. It sounds like a hippie cliche but all of those guys are basically teaching the same thing: IMO you aren’t getting anything that different from the Tao te Ching than from the Enchiridion in terms of what kind of life a sage should live. The main reason to read him is that it’s one of the chinese classics.

        • no one special says:

          I’m coming further and further around to the idea that a large – if not the primary – problem with SJWs is that they lack a foundation in the history of the Enlightenment – what it was, what it grew from, and what it was in opposition to.

          I realized, upon reading that, that I lack a foundation in the history of the enlightenment. What I know comes from it being “in the water supply” when I grew up.

          Is there a good intro for non-specialists that could be recommended? (Super-great if there’s a free/CC/PD option, but I’d rather pay money for an easy on-ramp than try to figure out free stuff that can’t speak to modern sensibilities.)

          “A 21st century 1st-world guide to the enlightenment, and how it built our society” would be great.

          • keranih says:

            …I don’t know. My first degree was in history, (emphasis on Europe and Slavs) so the Enlightenment was fairly well woven through it all. (Part of the history of the Russias was how the Enlightenment came late, slow, and parti-colored to the empire of the Tsars, and this was taught to me as being a Bad Thing.)

            I thought the Wikipedia article wasn’t horrible, and I wonder if the reddit historians wouldn’t be a decent source for the sort of text you mean. I would like the name of the text, if you find one you like.

        • nydwracu says:

          I went looking, once upon a time, for influential works from non-European cultures/authors on rationalism, individual liberty, and the rights of man. Couldn’t find any, and the SJs I hung with at the time couldn’t point to any, either.

          Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote some influential works on rationalism, individual liberty, and the rights of man, but, well…

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Can we add the book of Lord Shang to all your classical Chinese literature? Mencius and Xunzi pale in comparison by the things that man suggested.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        True, but he’s not very conservative. Quite the opposite in fact, when you read him there’s a very explicit call to “smash the past” including eliminating virtue itself as a concept.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I think it’s worth discussing, as Dr Dealgood has started to!
        Lord Shang does seem progressive for his time to me (except on individual and women’s rights). OTOH, isn’t there an aphorism in Sinology to the effect that official Legalism continued to exist alongside official Confucianism in the Chinese tradition?

    • Anon. says:

      A big issue with this is that we are only projecting “whiteness” backward. The Greeks did not think about things such as “the white race”, they segregated by language. Are they white because we say so, even though they would never identify as such themselves?

      It’s hard to argue that The Bible (remember, the new testament was written in Greek) is non-white, while the Greeks are white.

      Just go back a couple hundred years to see how radically “whiteness” has changed, here’s Ben Franklin on those pesky non-white immigrants:

      >in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

      The Germans, “Swarthy”!

      • Dahlen says:

        Even worse — Swedes, swarthy, pick one.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        A big issue with this is that we are only projecting “whiteness” backward.

        Well yes, of course we are. You have to engage in dialectic to figure out how people define their terms.

        Socrates: Have white men existed as long as there have been men, or begin to when some men first identified as white?

      • Tibor says:

        I think the Saxons were possibly excluded since at that time, what is now Lower Saxony (it is probably not one-to-one geographical correspondence, but it is fairly close) was actually a domain of the British Empire, whereas the rest of German lands were not. So basically it was simply England über alles 🙂

        On a side note, the “Deutschland über alles” had zero German-supremacist connotations at first, it was/is a line in a 19th century revolutionary song which would then become the German anthem and the line means “We want a unified Germany above all else” not “Germany is better than everything else” (that would not even make much sense then, there was no country called Germany and had never been before). Of course, the Nazis interpreted it a bit differently then.

    • Simon says:

      The entire output of Yukio Mishima comes to mind, with him having the extra WTF factor to Occidental readers of being both flamboyantly bisexual and a hardline nationalist.

      • Tibor says:

        This is something I was wondering about. For some reason, in the west, gay is somehow politically associated with the left-wing. But there seem no good reasons for that save for orthodox christians being associated with the right wing, but it is not even the case in all countries (e.g. the Czech republic is 75% atheist, while the Christian vote goes mostly to the KDU – i.e. the Christian Democratic Union, which is centrist). Also, if a wider acceptance of gays is your goal, what is called “pride parades” is probably a very bad way to do that. The way these things are structured is similar to an average left-wing happening (also I think it has more to do with exhibitionism than with being homosexual and I know gays who really dislike these…I have no representative statistics though, or any statistics actually), unlikely to convince a conservative right-winger of something like “well, those guys have sex with guys which is weird, but otherwise they are by and large pretty stand-up citizens”, quite on the contrary, it seems to be deliberately put together to irritate anyone with a conservative sentiment and the message it sends is “see how weird we are?” (this is also what those gays I mentioned do not like them).

        I guess that you are not going to convince Bible literalists for whom it is a sin, end of story. But these people are not a majority of the conservatives, not even in the US, much less in Europe. I think that it might as well be that the reasons conservatives more often oppose gay marriage* and generally are not so keen about gays is that gays (or some gay organizations) brand themselves as left-wing. There is no reasons one could not be gay AND a nationalist or conservative in any kind of way (except for being a Bible literalist for obvious reasons, but as I mentioned – the “god hates fags” camp is a very minority group among conservatives anyway).

        *my ideal solution is actually marriage to nobody, or more precisely a divorce of the state and the institution of marriage (see what I did there? har har har) where anyone can get a ceremony from any church or secular organization he likes and feel free to ignore marriages instituted by different institutions and with practical things like access to medical records and inheritance being settled by separate contract, not called marriage and available to any number of people of both sexes. But save for crazy libertarians, nobody supports that 🙂

      • Simon says:

        My point is that probably isn’t so strange in his home country, which is largely un-influenced by Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sexual morality and whose own mores on the subject don’t line up with how most people in the West think in the relevant categories.

        • Tibor says:

          Japan, prior to the Meiji period, was sexually probably about as open as ancient Greece, which is to say, at least in my opinion, more than we are today in the Euro-Atlantic civilization (and any particular country). On the other hand, the position of women in Edo-era Japan was pretty bad. Women did not have it so great in the 18th century in Europe either, but Japan was a lot worse. The western influence after the 300 years of more or less complete isolation of the country changed a lot of the social norms in Japan (as well as the government system etc.).

          The reason I think we are not really as sexually liberal as it might look is that while you can do pretty much anything sexually today, sexuality is still highly politicized in many ways. What also made me think about this was when I saw various sex-toys, sexy lingerie as well as porn movies being sold at outdoor stalls in the Temple street in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in fact right in front of the temple (I think it was Buddhist or some kind of a mix of Buddhist and taoist…they don’t seem to differentiate that strictly over there and I cannot tell the differences very well :)). Now imagine an open market with sex toys in front of a church in any Christian or culturally Christian country…in fact, the Church is not even necessary. I can already hear people protesting and arguing that it is going to damage the development of children or something 🙂

          I remember, it was some 15 years ago, when they opened a sex shop in front of our grammar school (across the street). There were some “concerned parents” or something probably, because they made a story about it in the regional TV. Nothing happened really and the sex shop is still there as there was nothing illegal about it. I just remember that one of the students the TV crew asked about it said something like “we understand what it is but we do not like it”…he was a laughing stock for the whole school for the next few weeks :)). Fortunately, in a country with some three quarters of the population atheist/agnostic, one does not have to deal with too many people being offended by something for religious reasons. I was surprised how influential the Church(es) still is/are in Germany (things like forbidding shops to open on Sundays in most Bundesländer…this particular thing caught me by surprise the first Sunday I had nothing left to eat at home and decided to go grocery shopping :)).

          • Creutzer says:

            The Sunday thing has absolutely nothing to do with the influence of the church. It’s a historical remnant with christian roots, yes, but it’s turned into a cultural thing that people want to keep this as a resting day as much as possible. It’s not as if the Sunday would be abandoned if only it weren’t for the influence the church is exerting.

          • Tibor says:

            Creutzer: What do you mean by “Sunday would be abandoned?” I am talking about the law that says that you cannot open your shop on Sunday not that people usually do not want to work on Sunday (or Saturday for that matter).

            Now, if we are on the same page, then I would slightly disagree. Sure, it has become a norm in Germany that all, even the biggest shops are closed on Sundays, but I think that the church does play a role. There was a discussion about revoking the ban some 2 years ago if I remember correctly and I was under the impression that basically it is the Church+worker’s unions vs. big supermarket chains. The Church wants people to come to the church on Sunday instead of work, worker’s unions do what they always do – lobby for their members at the expense of everyone else – and the big supermarket chains are the only ones who would actually want to open on Sunday, because if you have a small grocery shop, not enough people will come on that day to make it worthwhile for you.

            Also, in Saxony, which is part of the former DDR and much less religious, the laws regulating the shopping hours are more liberal, whereas in the catholic and very (by German standards) religious Bavaria, their are probably the most strict.

          • Creutzer says:

            “Sunday would be abandoned” was short for “Sunday would cease to be the day on which large parts of the population coordinate as the general day off”. I’m still not sure that even the north-south difference couldn’t be explained in terms of culture as opposed to actual influence actively being exerted by the church. The basis for my skepticism was/is mostly that I’d never even heard the church mentioned in debates over Sunday opening hours. For me it was all about the chains vs. unions/small stores thing. But who knows, maybe there is some behind-the-scenes action happening after all. My impression is also that for a politician to mention Sunday churchgoing would be considered pretty ridiculous in Germany and Austria (at least everywhere outside of Bavaria and Tyrol).

          • Tibor says:

            Creutzer: Maybe you’re right and it is mainly unions vs chains thing, although I would guess that at least in Bavaria, the Church also plays a role.

          • Vaniver says:

            I had a ‘lost in translation’ moment along these lines with an Indian roommate. I was joking about some sort of fertility / religion thing, which hinged on established religion opposing sex, and he didn’t get the joke, and then I remembered that it’s fairly common for Hindu temples to be covered with erotic statuary.

        • Another angle on sexual openness: To some large extent in mainstream culture, people get the right to sex by being good-looking. There’s a chorus of “Oooh, that’s disgusting” about sex by non-good-looking people. How was pre-Meiji Japan about what sex was acceptable?

          • Tibor says:

            I am not sure what you mean exactly. Is this about people who are shown in some kind of a sexual way in the films tend to look good? I think that this is just that people are more attracted to attractive-looking people (citation needed) and so if you put those in a film, it will attract more viewers. For the same reason, you don’t see older people having sex on TV, people simply do not want to watch that, not even the older people. It is not that it would be a taboo, it is just that pretty much everyone is physically attracted to young(ish) good looking people more than anyone else.

            On the other hand, while I can tolerate a couple of teenagers french kissing next to me on a bus I guess I would feel really embarrassed for some reason if the couple was in their seventies. Not sure why exactly.

          • Your feeling of discomfort is an indicator, and on the large scale, sometimes it has policy effects– for example patients in nursing homes not being allowed to have sex. Sometimes, it’s not policy– it’s just fat women (not sure how bad it is for men) not being willing to wear sleeveless shirts because they’re not willing to take the social risk of their upper arms being seen.

          • Tibor says:

            I would probably not confound fat people and old people into one group though. Too much fat is for most people unattractive and also it is something that one can get rid of with a certain amount of will (I for one think that keeping quite a good figure, let alone not being obese does not really require that much will regardless of your metabolism, but maybe I am wrong, in any case, I don’t want to discuss that). Therefore the fact that fat people try to conceal their fat (I think men would not care that much about their arms but would probably try to make their beer belly look smaller) is just a way to appear more attractive, which is what everyone does to a degree.

            With old people in nursing homes, I have some theories. One is that the people who work there somehow want to keep their distance from the old, if they look too much like them (for example because they also want to have sex) it reminds them that one day they also will be this old and that is something scary one does not want to think about too much. Another is that those old people are in the age of their parents and grandparents and everyone knows that their parents have never had sex, because the mental image of one’s parents having sex is something pretty much everyone tries their best to avoid 🙂 And so, subconsciously, people generally find the idea of people older than them having sex very uncomfortable.

            I am not wholly convinced by either of those hypotheses though, although the second one seems a bit more likely to me.

            By the way, regarding Japan – the current Japanese number one export of tentacle porn is actually pretty old. This painting is from 1814. Based on that, I think there was not much there that would be a taboo.

      • nydwracu says:

        The entire output of Yukio Mishima comes to mind, with him having the extra WTF factor to Occidental readers of being both flamboyantly bisexual and a hardline nationalist.

        (^:

    • Adam says:

      The chances are very good that a fair number of people you make the suggestion to have already read those books. Damn near everyone who grew up in the U.S. read the bible as a kid and plenty of the rest of those are common college assignments.

      It’s also kind of missing the point. Whoever wrote these were mostly powerful people in their own time and place. The idea is to get the perspective of the less powerful.

      • John Schilling says:

        Damn near everyone who grew up in the U.S. read the bible as a kid

        Read a few select passages making up less than ten percent of the bible, yes. Maybe not even one percent. Mostly, Christians read about the Bible. Yes, even Protestant Christians. I didn’t get around to reading the whole thing until well into adulthood.

        I am reminded in this context of Jim Bakker, a prominent and very successful televangelist of the 1970s and 1980s, then famous federal prison inmate of the 1990s after the various fraud convictions. Who admitted that it was not until he was in prison with nothing better to do that he bothered to actually read the Bible he had been preaching the past twenty or so years. He was, at least, willing to own up to his mistakes in a particularly blatant fashion.

        • Tibor says:

          I for one think it is a heresy to print (and don’t let me start about the printing press!) the Bible in vernacular languages, the laymen do not have the sophistication to understand what the Bible actually says and it is bound to lead to trouble. Seriously though, a funny thing is that a shift from holding a mass in Latin to vernacular (second half of the 20th century? maybe already in the first half) is probably time-correlated with the decline of religion in Europe. But I would not put pay too much attention to this correlation 🙂

          I also think most people read something like “the stories of the Bible”. I had this neat book with the Old Testament stories with big pictures and big letters (not that many letters) as a kid…which was about as close as I ever got to reading the Bible (it was also the closest thing to the Bible we had at home). I liked the comic book Illiad&Oddyssey better though.

          I don’t know how it is done in the US though. By the way the swearing on the Bible at court is a real thing or is it only in the movies and now (mostly) obsolete?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Seriously though, a funny thing is that a shift from holding a mass in Latin to vernacular (second half of the 20th century? maybe already in the first half) is probably time-correlated with the decline of religion in Europe. But I would not put pay too much attention to this correlation

            The causation was the other way around: religiosity was going down, and the Church hoped to revive things by holding mass in the vernacular. It just didn’t work.

          • Tibor says:

            Vox Imperatoris: Sure, I would expect that to be a much more sensible explanation, but also one which is a lot less fun 🙂

        • brad says:

          I had a moderately religious Jewish background, and one thing I found interesting when I got to college was that I was a lot more familiar with the first five books of the bible than even the most religious Christians, but they were a lot more knowledgeable about Kings, Prophets, psalms, etc. (except for Ester & Jonah which I knew well).

          I think this had to do with how Jewish services are set up on the one side (i.e. weekly in order Torah readings), and the fact that the latter books seem to be more important in the Christian religion than they are in the Jewish.

        • Sastan says:

          Same here (MK). I managed nine readings of the bible, complete, cover to cover, before I left the faith.

          My face when I argue religion with someone who claims my rejection of the faith is based on ignorance of the text. >.>

          Quite the opposite, actually.

    • nydwracu says:

      Armenians aren’t considered white anymore, are they? That gives you Rousas Rushdoony.

      • Machine Interface says:

        Armenians are generally seen as white in the western world (except by people who consider that Spaniards, Italians and Greeks also aren’t white), but not in Russia.

  29. A question that comes up in climate arguments is how come, if AGW isn’t a terrible threat, all the authorities think it is. One answer is that almost everyone gets his view of everything outside his own specialty from the public discussion, and that discussion is heavily biased. I recently came across a striking example.

    An article in Nature is entitled “Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.” It reports on experiments growing crops under increased CO2 concentration and finds that, for several cultivars of several crops, the concentration of zinc, iron, and protein is slightly lower as a result. A quick google finds a list of ten minerals in wheat, two of which (and protein) have been decreased.

    What the news stories do not report, but the authors of the article obviously know, is that growing C3 crops (which most food crops are) under twice the normal level of CO2 increases crop yield by about 30%. See, for instance:

    http://archives.aaas.org/docs/Direct_Effects.pdf

    What decreased was not the yield of zinc, iron and protein but the concentration. Assuming their experiment doubled CO2—the abstract and news stories are not that specific, and the article is paywalled—a summary of their result is that doubling CO2 results in a field of wheat producing about 30% more carbohydrate, 24% more protein, 21% more zinc, 25% more iron, and about 30% more of all the other minerals in wheat.

    And this is described as “threatens human nutrition.”

    But, of course, most people who read the news stories on the article won’t realize this. The function of the stories, and of the title of the article, is to provide a response to people who point out that AGW will raise crop yields via CO2 fertilization. “Look,” they can say, “here is an article in Nature that says increasing CO2 makes crops less nutritious.”

    For a more detailed discussion, including a news article with numbers, see:
    http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-lie-while-telling-truth-part-ii.html

    • Sastan says:

      Money and status is distributed based on how much one can signal-boost doomsaying. There has always been an imminent-but-never-quite-realized environmental threat, as long as I’ve been alive. Everyone freaks out, we pass some legislation at vast cost that has no effect whatsoever, but because the “crisis” was fake to start with, nothing very bad happens, and after a while, victory is declared. See: Ozone layer, deforestation, overpopulation, nuclear power stations. And, of course, one can never prove the retroactive negative.

      There may or may not be global warming, I don’t know and I don’t much care. But fuck all the watermelons trying desperately to leverage whatever bullshit they can into yet more anti-westernism and anti-capitalism. It is tiresome and irritating. Environmentalists will never be happy, people! The world will always be 5-10 years away from collapse. If you’re cynical, you will note that the distance in the future when all hell breaks loose is always just after the next election, or after the term of the current office-holder. Wasn’t all the eastern seaboard supposed to be fifty feet deep by now?

      • Wrong Species says:

        In their defense, that useless legislation could have actually been effective and you simply didn’t realize it.

        • Nope. Great example is trisodium phosphate regulations for dishwashing detergents, which required violation of the laws of physics to meet the legal standard. It led to more TSP in the water as people purchased it as a standalone and dumped however much into their dishwashers.

          Similarly for low-flow toilets requiring more flushes before sufficient engineering changes to compensate. Or the extra metal and fuel consumed by chainsaw regulations requiring chainsaws to be very short-lived, requiring purchasing entirely new ones much more frequently than using the old “bad” ones.

          The legislation is nearly always able to provide examples of more of the resources meant to be conserved not being so or the pollution being added to, and etc.

        • Sastan says:

          Yeah, I’m well aware of Pascal’s Post Hoc Mugging.

          “The earth would have totally ended except we gave seventy million dollars to an obscure labor union who gave a kickback to us in a deal that would have been called “corruption” by any reasonable observer, but in this case it reduced the Midochloridianites which we have been assured would have ended the universe if unchecked. And is there a universe? I rest my case.”

      • James Picone says:

        …Ozone layer…

        This is a strong signal that it’s not that the regulations are unnecessary or the problems aren’t real, it’s that you refuse to admit they’re real.

        • Indeed. I actually helped program some of the equipment used to measure ozone depletion, several decades back.

        • nil says:

          Ditto deforestation. I’ve seen some graphics that over-emphasized the border on Hispaniola, but it IS real. You can go look on Google Maps right now and see it for yourself. Soil is life.

      • There has always been an imminent-but-never-quite-realized environmental threat, as long as I’ve been alive. Everyone freaks out, we pass some legislation at vast cost that has no effect whatsoever, but because the “crisis” was fake to start with, nothing very bad happens, and after a while, victory is declared. See: Ozone layer, deforestation, overpopulation, nuclear power stations. And, of course, one can never prove the retroactive negative.

        All kinds of ink is spilled arguing for attention to this or that health hazard or environmental threat. Some of these are incoherent screeds written by hysterical people, and naturally these get the most media attention. Obviously they got your attention!

        But others are sober assessments written by experts, subject to being disputed or refined by other knowledgeable people, and verified through experiments and testing and pilot projects. These have proved far more influential in actual nuts-and-bolts policy-making.

        So, in some cases, governmental action results. It’s not always regulation, sometimes it involves funding, e.g. for local sewage treatment.

        So, just in the U.S., what results have we seen?

        Item: Due to government action, lead is no longer in gasoline, hence, no longer polluting urban air. If airborne lead was making people more violent and stupid, causing a decades-long spike in crime rates (as Scott and many others have suggested), the impact of removing lead is gigantically positive.

        Item: Other air pollutants have been drastically reduced as well, presumably promoting lung health, and reducing air-pollution-caused deterioration of urban buildings and infrastructure.

        Item: Rivers and lakes are much, much cleaner than they were fifty years ago, with positive impacts on water supplies, health, fisheries, recreation, etc.

        Item: Legally required special caps on things like medicine bottles have reduced child poisonings by probably more than half.

        Item: Legally required flame resistant pajamas have saved thousands of lives.

        Item: Legally required improvements in energy efficiency of vehicles and appliances has had obvious benefits, such as less dependence on imported oil, less air pollution per mile driven, etc.

        These are just a few major ones I know off the top of my head. I’m sure I could do some research and come up with dozens more.

        Meanwhile, almost none of the really illusory crises, with no scientific validity, ever generated legislation. For example, the supposed hazard of living near power lines did not give rise to any regulation that I know of. Hysteria about genetically modified foods or the alleged risk of receiving vaccinations have never won support from the government. Admittedly some mistakes have been made, but it’s just not true that squawks of media-amplified outrage over a fake environmental or health threat routinely move the federal behemoth to act.

        This is not to say that government action is always the best or most efficient way to accomplish something, or that it’s always gone about in the best possible way. In particular, the federal vehicle energy efficiency scheme has been severely criticized for various faults. And, absolutely, everything has costs, and policymakers should always be measuring those costs against the potential benefits.

        But to imply that every environmental issue was illusory, or that government action accomplished “no effect whatsoever”, is demonstrably untrue.

      • keranih says:

        While this

        Environmentalists will never be happy, people! The world will always be 5-10 years away from collapse.

        is something I agree with, I don’t agree with

        Everyone freaks out, we pass some legislation at vast cost that has no effect whatsoever, but because the “crisis” was fake to start with, nothing very bad happens, and after a while, victory is declared.

        It’s not accurate to call all the various crisisi ‘fake’ just because so many are. The passenger pigeon did go extinct, some of the great whales and the sea turtles may yet pass away, and the jury is still out on the Atlantic cod and the California condor.

        I do think it would do the environmental movement some good to apply more historical rigor to their discussion and advocacy – pointing out the deforestation of Europe, for instance, and how that region (which ought to look much like the US Pacific Northwest) was permanently changed. Or how GMO/no-till farming practices saved millions of tons of topsoil. (Or why farmers ran their tractors straight up and down hills instead of curving around.)

        • Sastan says:

          I do not mean to suggest that nothing bad happens to the environment.

          I mean to suggest that it is always couched in terms of imminent apocalypse, and this has stubbornly failed to materialize. If there’s a problem, let’s figure it out and fix it. But the minute someone starts talking about the coming environmental collapse, I shunt them into the same category as people who think Vladimir Putin fulfills the prophecies of the book of Revelation.

        • Winter Shaker says:

          all the various crisisi

          I think the plural is ‘crises’ (pronounced like ‘cry sees’)

      • Adam says:

        I think ozone depletion and acid rain are pretty good examples where regulation actually did work. Vehicle emissions in the LA basin, too. We used to have smog days when I was a kid, days we weren’t allowed to play outside because the air quality was so bad. That never happens any more.

        I could be wrong on the acid rain. Reading about it now, it seems all the people advocating for Canadian fisheries downwind of upper midwest industrial centers still seem to think they’re suffering pretty badly. I was under the impression they were pretty close to being wiped out in the early 90s, though.

        I also remember crimson tide blooms caused by hog farm runoff killing people in North Carolina back in the 90s, and they seem to have solved that.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Adam

          A threat, once averted, becomes fictitious. Y2K didn’t crash all the computers, so it must have been a hoax.

          • Did Y2K crash all the computers in countries, or companies, that didn’t take extensive precautions against it? If not, then it was, not a hoax, but a vastly exaggerated threat.

    • Ralph says:

      I think those who would argue against you imagine that you are pointing to some well organized, top down, conspiracy of climate scientists and journalists who are colluding to dupe the public for grant money and headlines… which is obviously ridiculous.

      It is worth pointing out (over and over again) that you are referring to the same subtle, bottom up biases that plague all scientific disciplines. And how they become amplified when the political stakes are high, and when the discipline wouldn’t be of much use should their main thesis turn out to be wrong.

      Somehow climate scientists get a pass on being human. They desk drawer studies that don’t produce the right answer, play down their uncertainties, and shift goal posts just like everyone else. All in all, finding out that a group of people who have devoted their lives to, built their identities around, and receive most of their self worth from AGW being a problem, continue to think that AGW is a problem, isn’t that interesting.

      • James Picone says:

        Not to the extent necessary to ‘fake up’ global warming. National academies of scientists everywhere, AR5 had ~800 authors, etc. etc..

        Besides, can’t this argument be turned around perfectly? Economists gain status by supporting free market policies, suggesting public choice theory implies government sucks, regulations don’t work, etc.. And really they’re only human. So let’s treat all economic claims as if they’re complete bullshit rather than, for example, looking into their actual arguments and concluding that maybe basically all the economists agree for something beyond ulterior motives.

        And besides, there’s an economic incentive to produce findings that fossil fuel industries find interesting – there’s a fair amount of money on hand there, and not much competition for it. In a universe where global-warming was oversold, we’d surely expect people on the skeptical end to take advantage of that to produce research without imperiling their funding, and you’d expect them to have the advantage of being more accurate, more correct. And yet, people on the skeptical end seem to give up publishing research in journals in short order, and when they do publish it seems to have a tendency to be in journals like Energy and Environment that will accept literally anything. And not very high-quality. And nobody has produced a model that accurately captures the warming over the last century and has a low climate sensitivity without resorting to mathturbation, just sticking together a bunch of trig functions. The market must clear, right? So where are the goods?

        • “Not to the extent necessary to ‘fake up’ global warming. National academies of scientists everywhere, AR5 had ~800 authors, etc. etc..”

          The comment you are responding to didn’t suggest that AGW didn’t exist and so had to be faked up but that it might not be a problem. AR5 has lots of hand waving in the summary for policy makers, but finding an actual catastrophic outcome in the scientific sections isn’t easy. Tol’s summary not just of his own work but of the work of the other economists who have tried to estimate costs suggests that warming up to 3.5° has costs similar to the loss of one year of economic growth—which is not a problem, at least on the scale on which AGW consequences are usually represented.

          I’ve quoted Nordhaus’ figure for the cost of doing nothing for fifty years, which works out to an annual cost of less than a tenth of a percent of world GNP. Nordhaus is a supporter of AGW and doing things about it. Indeed, he published that number, oddly enough, in an article responding to some people who had argued that AGW was not a crisis requiring immediate action.

          • James Picone says:

            Mmm, perhaps I phrased that poorly. But there’s still an argument there – is a ‘soft conspiracy’ of groupthink really sufficient to get the IPCC and 190-odd National Academies of Science playing along? Radical skepticism is a self-consistent position, but maybe not a useful one.

            So has Tol gotten all the gremlins out then?

            Still has the fundamental problem that the different estimates of costs are not points on a curve with independent errors, they are different models of what causes the costs.

            This graph (from Tol) shows 0.something% to ~10% with a mean at ~-2% for 3c. (i.e. a plausible BAU value for close to the end of the century). If I’m reading this correctly, that’s an annual loss. And mostly comes from models that aren’t really capable of generating large losses.

            Is that on the same order of magnitude as the costs imposed by a carbon tax? ATTP quotes this section of AR5 WG3:

            Under these assumptions, mitigation scenarios that reach atmospheric concentrations of about 450ppm CO2eq by 2100 entail losses in global consumption—not including benefits of reduced climate change as well as co‐ benefits and adverse side‐effects of mitigation of 1% to 4% (median: 1.7%) in 2030, 2% to 6% (median: 3.4%) in 2050, and 3% to 11% (median: 4.8%) in 2100 relative to consumption in baseline scenarios that grows anywhere from 300% to more than 900% over the century. These numbers correspond to an annualized reduction of consumption growth by 0.04 to 0.14 (median: 0.06) percentage points over the century relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.

            I don’t know how to interpret that.

            (And again, it’s incoherent to doubt the mean while reducing the variance. You seem surprisingly certain for someone so uncertain.)

          • Theo Jones says:

            I think people in favor of policy action on climate change shoot themselves in the foot by making too many “Eek!! World ending!” type arguments. And I say this as someone who thinks climate change and other fossil fuel externalities deserve substantial policy action.

            It is worth noting the extent to which social cost of carbon estimates depend on subjective claims, like discounting and equity adjustment.
            As per the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch20s20-6-1.html
            Notwithstanding the differences in damage sensitivity to temperature reflected in Figure 20.3, the effect of the discount rate (see glossary) on estimates of SCC is most striking. The 90th percentile SCC, for instance, is US$62/tC for a 3% pure rate of time preference, $165/tC for 1% and $1,610/tC for 0%. Stern (2007) calculated, on the basis of damage calculations described above, a mean estimate of the SCC in 2006 of US$85 per tonne of CO2 (US$310 per tonne of carbon). Had it been included in the Tol (2005) survey, it would have fallen well above the 95th percentile, in large measure because of their adoption of a low 0.1% pure rate of time preference.
            …..
            Tol (2005) finds that much of the uncertainty in the estimates of the SCC can be traced to two assumptions: one on the discount rate and the other on the equity weights that are used to aggregate monetised impacts over countries. In most other policy areas, the rich do not reveal as much concern for the poor as is implied by the equity weights used in many models. Downing et al. (2005) state that the extreme tails of the estimates of the SCC depend as much on decision values (such as discounting and equity weighting) as on the climate forcing and uncertainty in the underlying impact models

            My preference is against discounting and for strong equity adjustment, so, that puts me in the higher cost estimates. Lets say, about $300 per ton of carbon. Which amounts to about 4% of GDP. Not a disaster but does qualify in the top tier of economic policy issues

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Theo Jones:
            I feel like their is an argument to be made that the herd of humanity just doesn’t process the net cost/benefit very well. Therefore, both how arguments are received and how arguments are made will tend towards the sensational.

          • “You seem surprisingly certain for someone so uncertain.”

            What I am “surprisingly certain” about is that we do not and cannot know the net cost, even the sign of the net cost, of AGW. There are large and uncertain benefits, large and uncertain costs, both spread out over a long and uncertain time period.

            That was my view of the population issue when I wrote on it some forty years ago. The consensus then was that population growth was having/would have terrible effects. So far the evidence is that that was false–instead of mass starvation in the third world we have had an upward trend in calories per capita, a fall in the percentage of people in extreme poverty to less than a third of what it was when I wrote.

            If the world then had accepted the logic of James’ argument, there would been one child policies in a lot of places other than China—and it would have been a very large mistake, costly in human terms.

          • “My preference is against discounting and for strong equity adjustment”

            Aren’t those inconsistent? On the evidence of the past several centuries, we can expect our descendants a century hence to be considerably richer than we are. So an equity adjustment, the obvious form being utilitarianism that takes into account declining marginal utility of income, implies that we should weight a dollar cost to them less than a dollar cost to us.

            That’s aside from the standard arguments for discounting, one of which is that we can convert a dollar benefit today into a multiple dollar benefit a century from now by investing the dollar, so why should we do it in the less efficient form of a dollar sacrifice now for a dollar benefit then?

          • “So has Tol gotten all the gremlins out then?”

            Tol, having discovered a mistake in his published work, published a correction—and the resulting change in the graph was small. John Cook, discovered telling a flat lie, not small, about his own work, responded by attacking me for pointing it out with another lie about what I had said.

            You know all of that. Naturally you prefer Cook.

          • Sastan says:

            So people who go to school to become “climate scientists”, you think they’d like to show up and say “hey, just kidding, our whole field is a lie, we’re gonna go become gas station attendants now”?

            There’s no reason to even study it unless you think it’s super important, and what’s more important than “listen to me or everyone everywhere dies!”

          • James Picone says:

            What I am “surprisingly certain” about is that we do not and cannot know the net cost, even the sign of the net cost, of AGW. There are large and uncertain benefits, large and uncertain costs, both spread out over a long and uncertain time period.

            That was my view of the population issue when I wrote on it some forty years ago. The consensus then was that population growth was having/would have terrible effects. So far the evidence is that that was false–instead of mass starvation in the third world we have had an upward trend in calories per capita, a fall in the percentage of people in extreme poverty to less than a third of what it was when I wrote.

            If the world then had accepted the logic of James’ argument, there would been one child policies in a lot of places other than China—and it would have been a very large mistake, costly in human terms.

            “Last time I gambled my life savings it worked out. I should gamble it all again.”

            (And that’s accepting that population growth concerns is in a similar category, which I’m not sure I agree with).

            You say that you think we can’t get a good estimate for the costs/benefits of global warming, and yet you’re convinced that it’s not worth doing anything about it, even if the range of outcomes includes significant and substantial negatives. Either you don’t think we should be even remotely risk-averse when it comes to this sort of thing, or this is just incoherent.

            Tol, having discovered a mistake in his published work, published a correction—and the resulting change in the graph was small.

            David Friedman, having published a flat lie, not small…

            (Tol also discovered a mistake in his corrected version of the work, and then had to publish a correction to the correction. Which is in the link I just linked to.)

            And yes, the resulting change to the graph is rather significant, even if you accept the basic methodology of that paper, which I don’t.

            Tol has a history of this kind of thing, which you should know. Remember his attempted statistical analysis of Cook that implied there should be an additional 300 papers in category 5/6/7 (This is a mass-market article about it by Nuccitelli)?

            John Cook, discovered telling a flat lie, not small, about his own work, responded by attacking me for pointing it out with another lie about what I had said.

            You know all of that. Naturally you prefer Cook.

            I disagree about whether Cook lied, and Cook misread a blog post linking to you and then making a different argument for you making that argument, big whoop.

            @Sastan:
            You have no idea what motivates people to become scientists. People get into this stuff because they find it interesting. They have an itch to scratch, a piece of knowledge they want to fill in. Again, you could make your argument about economists, and you’d still be wrong. And again, there’s plenty of money and status to be had being the darling of the ‘skeptic’ side – how many times has Curry presented stuff to congress? – and yet very few people take up that option, and those that do tend to stop publishing. Why is that?

            Not only that, but it’s not like climate science is completely useless and meaningless in a world where global warming isn’t happening. There’s still data to be collected, there’s still things to be learned about the water cycle, and how energy gets into and out of the deep ocean, and what causes el-Nino/la-Nina (predicting them would have significant practical benefits as well), and what paleoclimate was, and why it was, etc. etc..

          • “You say that you think we can’t get a good estimate for the costs/benefits of global warming, and yet you’re convinced that it’s not worth doing anything about it, even if the range of outcomes includes significant and substantial negatives. Either you don’t think we should be even remotely risk-averse when it comes to this sort of thing, or this is just incoherent.”

            The range of outcomes from “doing anything” includes significant and substantial negatives as well. It starts with a high probability of quite a large negative, since doing anything that has much effect requires getting developing countries to use expensive power instead of cheap power, slowing or stopping the process by which a couple of billion people are finally emerging from poverty. There is a second high probability large negative in the fact that the most likely way of doing it involves giving large amounts of money to the governments of poor countries, a procedure that doesn’t have a very good track record. Although it does explain why those governments are in favor of it.

            Then there are the very low probability very high cost outcomes, of which the obvious one is ending the current interglacial. Following out your approach, unless we can reduce the probability of that to zero, does it follow that we should burn all the coal we can in order to make sure the ice doesn’t start moving towards the equator?

            William Nordhaus, in his calculations, included estimates of low probability high cost results of AGW—although it didn’t occur to him to do the same thing in the other direction. As I have pointed out, I think in my exchanges with you, when Nordhaus was arguing that AGW was a crisis requiring immediate action he gave his estimate of the cost of waiting fifty years to do anything. Converted into an annual cost over the rest of the century, it came to about .06%of world GNP.

            I have no objection to risk aversion in the conventional sense—I still haven’t figured out if that is how you are using the term. But it does not imply that if anyone can imagine any very bad consequence from not doing something we should do it.

            Links to the relevant posts on Nordhaus:

            http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
            (includes cost of waiting fifty years)

            http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2012/03/nordhaus-on-global-warming.html
            (Low probability/high cost outcomes included in Nordhaus calculations)

          • Picone quotes me:

            “Tol, having discovered a mistake in his published work, published a correction—and the resulting change in the graph was small.”

            And writes:

            “David Friedman, having published a flat lie, not small…”

            The original corrected article is at:

            http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.28.2.221

            Figure 1 shows the original curve and the corrected curve. They are not very different.

            It’s true that the curve on Figure 2 is noticeably different, missing the range of positive effects. But that curve incorporates five estimates made after the original paper was published, so the failure to include them in the original paper was not a mistake.

            Picone adds:

            “Tol also discovered a mistake in his corrected version of the work, and then had to publish a correction to the correction. Which is in the link I just linked to.”

            I’m not seeing your “just linked to,” but am guessing the reference is to:

            http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.1.217

            Since that’s a second correction.

            It has one figure. Aside from the studies published after AR4, it shows total impacts similar to those in the original article.

            So where do you find a large change in the graph due to correcting mistakes rather than due to incorporating new data?

            Picone also writes, in response to my point about the population alarmism of forty years ago:

            “Last time I gambled my life savings it worked out. I should gamble it all again.”

            As I mentioned, one country, China, took the policies implied by that campaign. Is it your view that doing that was a good idea? If not, do you regard the costs imposed on the population of China by forbidding almost all couples from having more than one child to be minor, not worth any significant weight in comparison to the tragedy that would have happened if the alarmists were correct? What about the costs if every country in the world had adopted the same policy?

            If I am sufficiently wrong about the consequences of global warming, the policies I recommend will do enormous human damage. If you are sufficiently wrong about the consequences of global warming, the policies you recommend will do enormous human damage.

            In the real world, playing safe is not an option.

          • James Picone says:

            The range of outcomes from “doing anything” includes significant and substantial negatives as well. It starts with a high probability of quite a large negative, since doing anything that has much effect requires getting developing countries to use expensive power instead of cheap power, slowing or stopping the process by which a couple of billion people are finally emerging from poverty. There is a second high probability large negative in the fact that the most likely way of doing it involves giving large amounts of money to the governments of poor countries, a procedure that doesn’t have a very good track record. Although it does explain why those governments are in favor of it.

            The range of negatives from a carbon price is not on the same scale as the range of negatives from global warming, even before surprises. RCP8.5, for example, with a 3c sensitivity, hits an equilibrium temperature of 6.8c over preindustrial if emissions stop dead in 2100. At that point, parts of the Middle East cross the 37c wet-bulb temperature several times a year in summer. Probably other places, too. This is just not on the same scale as it taking twenty years to shift over to nuclear.

            Then there are the very low probability very high cost outcomes, of which the obvious one is ending the current interglacial. Following out your approach, unless we can reduce the probability of that to zero, does it follow that we should burn all the coal we can in order to make sure the ice doesn’t start moving towards the equator?

            This is a <1% outcome. Meanwhile, the range of outcomes for business-as-usual includes parts of the equator being uninhabitable in summer, and then there's a potential for a 1% surprise.

            0.06% of world GNP annually over what period? The next fifty years? Because that doesn't sound that small to me. Did it include the costs of spinning down CO2 emissions from that point, keeping in mind that the later we leave it the harder we have to drop emissions to stop crossing particular temperature thresholds?

            And, of course, the argument that you should avoid betting your shirt on something like climate change is independent of the expected value (unless Nordhaus corrected for that somehow? What's the mechanism, taking log-dollar-outcome or something?)

            [Tol]
            I linked Retraction Watch. Notice that the 2013 paper was an update and correction of the 2009 paper, and made a similar mistake (dropping minus signs from included estimates). Oh, and the correction notice you link to includes /another/ correction:
            “In early 2014, the editors received a complaint pointing out errors in the paper: specifically, several estimates had not been accurately transferred from the original studies. In the Spring 2014 issue, we published a “Correction and Update: The Economic Effects of Climate Change” (vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 221–26) by Richard Tol. However, this version also contained errors that were soon pointed out by various researchers.”

            And I still think that the fit is a joke. The positive values are driven entirely by the single positive point – another Tol study – and only there because there’s only one other point before 2c. Notice that the correction notice you link to removes it – because it was meaningless. There’s your significant change.

            [Population growth]
            I disagree that population growth is in the same category. The consensus around it wasn’t anything like as strong as the IPCC consensus is.

            I agree that world-wide efforts to limit population growth would likely have been unpleasant. The point I’m making is that if you play the “wait and hope it’s not bad and/or technology fixes it for us” game with every single problem that falls into that broad category, one day you’re going to hit the wall when it turns out the problem is real and technology doesn’t deign to fix it in time. Or when there’s a sudden and extremely unpleasant surprise, like the ozone hole.

            I think on this issue the correct choice is very clear. I agree that if you think a carbon price and some international aid to bribe developing countries into it will bring the Second Coming, then it is much harder to make a decision. I’m not sure you can justify that, though.

          • “I disagree that population growth is in the same category. The consensus around it wasn’t anything like as strong as the IPCC consensus is.”

            I don’t know how old you are or how much you were involved in that controversy. I wrote a piece for the Population Council, had a chapter in one of Julian Simon’s books. I can only say that, having been involved in both controversies, they had the same feel–lots of elite people insisting that only the ignorant or uneducated could doubt the obvious truth. The treatment of Simon then was much like the treatment of Lomborg now.

            As I may have suggested before, I think the strong consensus claims are largely based on measuring consensus on AGW and then attributing the result to CAGW. Can you offer a counterexample–a measurement of consensus that comes up with near unanimity for some version of “AGW, if not controlled, can be expected to make the world much worse for humans.”

            So far as your questions about Nordhaus, I gave the link to my blog post, which includes a link to his piece. Also to the other blog post, which discussed his attempt to take account of low probability negatives. I think that one has a link to his webbed manuscript, but I’m not sure–if not one of my other Nordhaus posts does.

            If I had to guess, his waiting fifty year estimate was a straight expected value calculation, not expected utility, but I don’t actually know–I was going on the conclusion he gave.

            Speaking of which, when you refer to risk aversion are you using the term in the technical economic sense?

            “RCP8.5, for example, with a 3c sensitivity, hits an equilibrium temperature of 6.8c over preindustrial if emissions stop dead in 2100.”

            When does it hit that equilibrium temperature? The farther into the future you go, the less reason to assume that current conditions give you a reasonable guess at future conditions. RCP8.5, if I remember correctly, assumes continued economic growth–run that far enough into the future and poor people have air conditioning. Or avoid the heat with summer vacations in Alaska.

            Think about how much the world has changed in the past two centuries. If your argument for catastrophe puts it two or three centuries in the future I’m not going to find it very convincing.

          • “RCP8.5, for example, with a 3c sensitivity, hits an equilibrium temperature of 6.8c over preindustrial if emissions stop dead in 2100.”

            As stated, I don’t think that can be correct. CO2 has a finite lifetime in the atmosphere. If emissions stop dead in 2100, the CO2 concentration gradually declines until it reaches the level maintained by non-human CO2 sources, and global temperature gradually declines back to its pre-industrial level.

            Am I missing something? Or does your “emissions stop dead” mean “emissions stop rising?” Or did you mean that the CO2 level in 2100 is such that if it was maintained, the long run equilibrium temperature would be 6.8°C over preindustrial?

          • James Picone says:

            @David Friedman
            [Population growth]
            I wasn’t around at the time.

            A consensus on the “it’ll suck” aspect is the IPCC. That’s what it’s for – to be a big meta-analysisy collection of all the research on the issue.

            [Nordhaus]
            I’m honestly not sure I have enough background in economics to evaluate any of this.

            I *think* after reading your comment in the earlier thread that I’m using risk aversion in the technical sense. Essentially I’m saying that large negative outcomes are less preferable than several small negative outcomes that sum to the large negative outcome.

            [RCP8.5]
            I mean “We continue emitting CO2 (and other GHGs) until 2100, and then emissions instantly go to zero”.

            RCP8.5 has a median warming of 3.7c by 2100. ECS=3 has lambda = 3/3.7 = 0.81, 8.5*lambda = 6.89c at equilibrium. Difference is 3.19c, so energy imbalance is 3.94 W/m**2.

            TCR dominates for 50-100 years, let’s use that to work out how much extra warming we get. Median TCR from IPCC is something like 2.1c, lambda = 0.57, so 2.25c warming for 3.94 W/m**2 over 50-100 years.
            3.7 + 2.25 = 5.95c.

            So there’s a timescale. Get to 5.95c somewhere between 2150 and 2200. Get to 6.89 probably by 2300.

            (If you pick a lower-end RCP value it goes lower, if you pick a higher-end RCP value it goes higher. Not absolutely certain of this calculation, but I think it’s Fermi-accurate. Note that this isn’t a worst-case-in-uncertainty-range calculation, I’d be using ECS=4c for that).

            As for CO2 lifetime, remember this article on if-we-burned-all-the-fossil-fuel? Look at Fig 1. Graph B, which shows CO2 in atmosphere over time. Look at the timescale. Spikes of CO2 last a long time on human terms. Over 200 years? It’ll drop, but not by much. See, for example, this AR4 chapter, where the GWP for CO2 is just as high at 500 years as at 20.

            (This is an example of what I mean when I say that I think you’re in a bubble here – this stuff about the lifetime of CO2 spikes in the atmosphere is something I would have assumed someone informed about global warming would know about).

            Air conditioning is great and all. I’m sure by 2100 there’ll be a lot of it in the Middle East.

            But are their paddocks going to be air conditioned? I guess they’ll have to keep livestock inside. And say goodbye to any local mammalian fauna. And what would you say is the economic cost of having several days a year where you have to be somewhere air-conditioned, or you get heatstroke? No construction work, nothing outside for long periods of time… And god only knows what the effect on agriculture is.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @David Friedman:
          The estimates of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding human survival limits in large areas of landmass currently inhabited are for the end of this century, under certain scenarios.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      So, the crop will become less nutritious per calorie, but more calories may be produced. Call me crazy, but that maps to the headline.

      If the headline for the study was “food supplies may be threatened”, that would be different.

      • It doesn’t even become less nutritious per calorie in any meaningful sense–any sense that justifies “threatens human nutrition.” When I did a search for wheat nutrients, I got a list of ten minerals. Suppose you randomly varied the amount of each. You would expect about half to go up and half to go down. Does that “threaten human nutrition?”

        Their result was that two minerals went down by a small amount (9.3% and 5.1%) and protein went down by 6.3%–not for all cultivars of all crops but for some cultivars of some crops. So the ratio of protein to carbohydrate is slightly lower–but the total amount of both produced is higher.

        It isn’t less nutritious per calorie. It is slightly differently nutritious per calorie. There is no reason to assume that the ratio of protein to carbohydrate is at some optimal level, so that a slight change makes the crop less nutritious.

        The title is designed to scare, not to inform.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          When you make a statement like this “What decreased was not the yield of zinc, iron and protein but the concentration” it’s a signal that you have no interest in talking honestly about the issue. Yield is not what they were pointing at.

          And the title, like all titles, is sensational. Big whoop.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Even if a farmer produced 30% more carrots, there’s no reason to think the average person will eat 30% more carrots. They’ll probably eat exactly as many carrots as now, and have worse nutrition. “Crop yields will increase” is an interesting story, but not this story, and I think they were justified in leaving it out. Who cares how much total vitamins are produced per acre of land?

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Does this mean decreasing crop vitality counts as ‘making food more nutritious’?

      • People who want to get adequate nutrition care how much carbohydrate, protein, minerals and vitamins are produced.

        Suppose some change randomly increased half the minerals in wheat by 5% and decreased half by 5%. Would that count as a change that threatens human nutrition? Then if you reverse that change, it threatens human nutrition again? That seems to be the logic of your position.

      • John Schilling says:

        Who cares how much total vitamins are produced per acre of land?

        Who cares that Wonder Drug X only helps Elderly Hispanic Women? Isn’t the crucial bit the words, “Drug X Helps!”, and the writers of the press release are perfectly justified in leaving out all the people who aren’t helped and maybe even hurt, along with the bit where the one little bit of help is very little indeed?

        This is exactly what you once recognized as the dark side of statistics, looking at twenty different subcategories of, in this case “nutrition”, until one is found with a minor effect of the desired sign, then writing the press release or Nature article about just that one cherrypicked value. Yet this time you actively approve of such manipulation. That’s disturbing.

      • Deiseach says:

        Who cares how much total vitamins are produced per acre of land?

        For a start, all the people pushing for vegetarianism/veganism had damn well better care, if they’re going to persuade the global population to switch to all-plant based diets rather than meat/dairy/fish/eggs plus plants.

        You have to get your B vitamins from somewhere, and if your fields of vegan crops aren’t doing it, where then?

        • Mitochondrius says:

          Not an issue. Plant-based foods require much less arable land than animal products (on average).

          Plus, vitamin supplements are cheap.

          • keranih says:

            Plant-based foods require much less arable land than animal products (on average).

            Please expand on this – in particular, what definitions of “plant-based” “animal-based” “arable” “land” and “less” are you using?

          • Mitochondrius says:

            keranih, you’re either trolling me or uncharitable + uninformed.

            Therefore, no interest in the discussion.

          • keranih says:

            Let me try this again – you are very inaccurate in your statement that it takes more arable land to produce a human diet that is overwhelmingly vegetable & grain based, than it takes to produce a human diet that relies on a large amount of animal protein.

            (There can be a fairly large amount of variation, but at base line, animal-based diets require less irrigated farmland and less effective disruption of wilderness areas.)

            If you would like, please clarify why you think your statement is correct.

          • brad says:

            @keranih
            I’m not sure what you mean by at base line. Do you mean that we could theoretically have a meat based system more irrigation water efficient than the best possible plant based system, or are you making a statement about the relative efficiency of the systems we actually have.

            Edit: Tried to make the point more clearly.

          • Mitochondrius says:

            keranih, I think if we get to cherry-pick specific products, we could find some animal products that require less land, water, energy input, or other limited resources than the average or worst plant-based products.

            But for the average animal product compared to the average plant product, given common consumption patterns, it doesn’t hold. After all, grain, soy and corn are fed to farmed animals, at a net loss of energy and nutrients compared to direct human consumption.

  30. Wrong Species says:

    Book discussion: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathon Haidt.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Next time we are discussing The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich.

    • blacktrance says:

      One of my main problems with Haidt is too much uncritical acceptance of the standard progressive and conservative images. Both the standard progressive and conservative narratives hold that progressives care less about loyalty, authority, and purity, and that’s what Haidt finds, but that’s because those foundations have become associated with conservatives’ expression of them, while progressives’ expression of them doesn’t get labeled as such. For example, when it comes to GMOs (and food in general), progressives display more purity than conservatives.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        Yes, I think this is absolutely true.

        Also, the idea of a “sense of fairness” can be seen even more clearly. It’s not that conservatives (and libertarians) don’t care about fairness. It’s the opposite. They see the government taking money from hard-working people to give it to layabouts who don’t deserve it, and they oppose it as the height of unfairness. That’s how they frame the issue.

        However, Haidt’s YourMorals website (which everyone should visit; it’s really interesting) does contain surveys to test “left-wing purity”, as well as liberal “equality” vs. conservative “equity”. If you do want to check out the website, if you use this link, you can compare your views with the average of SSC readers.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Harm 3.7 Fairness 4.1 Loyalty 3.2 Authority 4.5 Purity 3.8
          I tied with Blue in the two categories where they are stronger than Red and outranked Red in the other three.
          SSC readers are weaker than both Blue and Red in every moral foundation except Authority, where they slightly outrank Blue!

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Harm 0.0
            Fairness 1.7
            Loyalty 0.8
            Authority 0.5
            Purity 1.1

            Low on all! The libertarian way.

            On the other hand, it comes out somewhat different if you ask the questions differently. For the Moral Foundations Statements (0-6, or maybe 1-6):

            Care 3.3 (way below red and blue)
            Fairness 4.9 (slightly above red and blue)
            Loyalty 1.6 (way below red and blue)
            Authority 1.4 (way below red and blue)
            Sanctity 4.9 (way above blue and slightly above red)
            Ownership 5.9 (way above blue and above red)
            Autonomy 4.0 (below blue and slightly below red)
            Honesty 2.9 (way below red and below blue)

            Also, in my Nietzschean way, I have transvalued all values and almost completely reject the “lay theory of morality” on five different scales: 1.5 out of 1-7. 😉

          • A says:

            There’s a paper saying that psychopaths have low harm and fairness scores. And anecdotally, my experience says there is something to this.

          • Kevin C. says:

            Harm 0.7 Fairness 0.7 Loyalty 4.2 Authority 5.0 Purity 4.2

            I can’t get the comparison link to work, but it seems like I’m quite the outlier here.
            (It also seems clear why I like thinkers like Xunzi.)

        • Wrong Species says:

          Actually he dedicates a chapter to that. I don’t know about his website but he mentions this in the book and adds a liberty/oppression intuition and switches the fairness intuition to what you are talking about.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Yeah, I haven’t read the book. But I have read his article about liberty/oppression.

            One of the most interesting ones on his website, which isn’t by him but by John Darley, tests for deterrence vs. retribution as a justification for punishment. Basically, people “endorse” deterrence as a reason (because they endorse every possible reason to some extent), but their actual views of the situations conform solely to retributivism. Here’s the paper.

        • jeorgun says:

          Weird. I scored obscenely high (1.141) on the self-esteem IAT, which normally I score really low on self-esteem tests. I did semi-recently go on SSRIs, but I didn’t think they were having much effect— I’ll have to update in favor of them working. Actually I’m kind of alarmed by how high it was, but I’m not sure how to reduce it to more reasonable levels. Any thoughts?

          • nonymous says:

            If you can afford it, the easiest way to lower self-esteem is to combine it with travel and sightseeing.

            Take a long vacation in a rich foreign city where you dont know the language.

            The week before your departure date, schedule an appt. for a digital perm in a small town no less than a five hour drive from either coast.

            Have the technician set values for Kinky-4a. Ask for a curl diameter “smaller than soap suds.”

            In Vienna I’ll put you in touch with a disapproving figure, Herr Anklepants ( Herrengasse 9), the last of the esperanto skywriters who, in a final bid for relevance in 1982. madly tried to intervene in the falklands islands with a message of peace in an extra-territorial language unknown to troops on either side, each poot of white dot-matrix lettering was immediately engulfed in battlesmoke.
            Soldiers are the crushed peanut shells
            on the floor of the kid’s restaurant that is planet e.

            When a trypophobe like Anklepants, who was primed to see the future as honeycombed with punitive clown corridors by sadistic kitchen staff at the plague theologians comissary- first sees your perm he’s going to be very unhappy. He’s a trypophobe and so naturally when you come out of customs in a hair helmet with curls so nano the visual effect is of a corkboard sphere with a narrow pink rectangle holding the features of your face. he’s probably going to have an ibs attack. You leap into action.
            By the time youve rinsed Anklepants dress in the men’s room sink the treatment should be doing its work
            Youve been feeling depressed on the plane about just following through with that stranger on the internet’s “therapeutidc itinerary” without balking once. Yeah you feel like shit about yourself, though. He sure was right about that. Oh yeah. Anklepants? The esperanto skywriter who im trying to pay back loans by working as his roadie, tour manager, merch salesman, business wife and bunkmate?
            I’m so depressed:
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb4bCgWkZRc

        • keranih says:

          Vox, it might be helpful if you’d put links to the actual tests (there are a lot of tests on that site) and more complete directions on how to do the SCC comparisions.

      • Wrong Species says:

        I was going to say the same thing. He does mention that specific example but he mostly brushes past that. One thing I noticed is that liberals will justify their intuitions with the care foundation, even if it doesn’t really make sense. Like with sex, prostitutes can’t consent for some reason and minors can’t consent with people over a certain age. They can’t bring themselves to say that oppose some form of consensual sex so they insist it’s not consensual.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Haidt’s got one that tests for that, too. One scenario is consensual incest between adult brother and sister, where he asks you to assume that it’s consensual and doesn’t harm either party. He asks: a) is it disgusting and b) is it immoral?

          Left-wingers still say it’s immoral and try to make it about harm anyway.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Well liberals are more likely than conservatives to say it’s ok but I think that’s more because their intuitions against sibling incest aren’t as strong as their intuitions about having sex with minors. I have noticed that they will try to argue father/daughter sex is inherently harmful even when they are both adults and are explicitly saying they consent.

          • stubydoo says:

            For teasing out morality based on incest questions – they need to be extra specific on the question wording. As far as I’m concerned, they had damn well better be using a barrier form of contraception, or better yet sticking to non-coital forms, otherwise the idea that no-one is harmed isn’t true for certain.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @stubydoo

            They do mention that the girl is using birth control and the guy is wearing a condom so yes, they control for that. Here’s the exact phrasing:

            “Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?”

            Of course, the biggest problem I have noticed is that this kind of reasoning doesn’t apply to the real world. If this actually happened at least one of them would probably want to continue and there is a decent chance it wouldn’t be kept a secret. So even though it is phrased to avoid the harm factor, our moral intuitions “know better” than to make those kind of assumptions.

          • Jiro says:

            You could ask about a similar situation which starts out “Julie and Mark play Russian Roulette. Nobody is harmed, and they don’t try it again….”

            The question stipulates that the incest does not lead to further incest, has no bad emotional effects, and only makes them feel closer (implied to be a positive thing). But it only stipulates it as a matter of hindsight. The participants are not able to deduce that ahead of time. It’s only correct to say “this is harmless, so it’s okay” if you are justified in believing, ahead of time, that it will be harmless.

            And stipulating that they are justified in believing it ahead of time would result in a really bizarre scenario. (“Hundreds of years of human society has shown that incest in these circumstances does not cause problems. Knowing this, Julie and Mark commit incest and indeed no problems arise. Is this incest okay?” Yes, it is, but the scenario is no longer a real-world scenario.)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          They can’t bring themselves to say that oppose some form of consensual sex so they insist it’s not consensual.

          Cf. also “bestiality is wrong because animals can’t consent”, which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would imply that we ought all to become vegans.

      • Anonymous says:

        There’s purity in the sense of “this will make me sick” (e.g., norovirus) and there’s purity in the sense of “this makes me sick” (e.g., pegging). The claim that progressives display more purity requires conflating the two senses of the word.

        • Creutzer says:

          The idea is that as a matter of human psychology, 2 is the implementation of 1. That is to say, disgust reactions is how we avoid disease.

    • Wrong Species says:

      How did moral realists feel about this book? Because I don’t see how you can learn about moral psychology and see morality as anything other than a tool used by social animals. Is there any scientific evidence that would lead you against moral realism?

      • blacktrance says:

        I’m a moral realist, and it irked me that Haidt used the term “morality” to mean “people’s beliefs about morality”. People can have incorrect moral beliefs for a variety of reasons, and it may be useful to know why, but it doesn’t disprove moral realism. For me, asking whether scientific evidence can lead me against moral realism is like asking if scientific evidence could change my beliefs about game-theoretic truths – they’re not the same domain.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          The usual argument is: if other people’s beliefs about morality are determined by evolutionary factors that have no relationship to morality, how is it that your beliefs about morality correspond to what is objectively true? Either there is no objective morality, or you can never know it.

          I have my own opinions on this, but I would be interested to know what you think.

          • blacktrance says:

            Only some of other people’s beliefs about morality are determined by evolutionary factors – moral intuitions, and a subset of them at that. But more importantly, morality isn’t something to be discovered through perception or intuition, but something we construct. A successful construction produces something that is motivating, overriding, etc, and it is by satisfying these criteria that an ethical theory or moral fact is determined to be true, rather than by satisfying intuitions shaped by evolution.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Well, for one thing, how does the term “true” even apply to something that is not and does not purport to be an identification of reality?

            “Is this bridge true or false?” “Atlas Shrugged: true or false?” What?

            If you mean: is it a good bridge, or is it a good book, you have to point to some evaluative standards by which the question is to be decided. But it’s simply meaningless to ask whether either is true.

            So if morality is “constructed” (and I agree in some sense that normative ethics is constructed; though I’d still say it’s a form of identification), what are the standards? How do you know? It just puts everything back a step.

            And for what the believers in the idea that evolution debunks ethics would say: isn’t “motivatingness” or “convincingness” an intuition that developed in you through evolution? How do you know that corresponds to what the objectively true moral standards are?

          • blacktrance says:

            Morality is about what one ought to do and is necessarily overriding. That’s not my intuition, it’s a definition. You could say that morality is about satisfying your intuitions or maximizing paperclips, but I don’t have a reason to do either of those things. You could carve reality differently by choosing a different definition of morality, but then it need not be the case that I should always be moral, which seems to be at odds with what “moral” commonly means. If “moral” were only defined with reference to intuitions, then I’d be rejecting morality instead – but that would only be a difference in my map, not the territory.

            Whether a moral statement satisfies these conditions constitutes its truth-value. That’s the evaluative standard, and it’s not a matter of me knowing that it’s correct by matching some external standard, it’s the determinant of correctness. Any supposed objective moral standard beyond it wouldn’t necessarily be about what I have the most reason to do, and thus wouldn’t be moral as defined above.

            What I ought to do is a feature of reality, but not one that’s ontologically independent of me, and, more specifically, is determined by what I have the most reason to do. Hence the constructivist line that “the moral principles we ought to accept or follow are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            I basically agree with all of that.

            What do you have the most reason to do, though? How do you know?

          • blacktrance says:

            The only possible source for me to have a reason to do something is for it to be one of my ends or instrumental to them. There’s a complication in that some of my desires would be different if I were more rational, and when there’s a conflict, I should go with what my rational self would recommend to me, because it’s better at achieving my ends. This means that I don’t automatically know what I have the most reason to do, as I may be mistaken because of irrationality, but it does give a procedure for arriving at what I should do without any imposition from anything external to me.

          • @Vox

            “If you mean: is it a good bridge, or is it a good book, you have to point to some evaluative standards by which the question is to be decided. But it’s simply meaningless to ask whether either is true.”

            Constructivists are quire capable of biting that bullet, and replacing “corersponds to reality” with “fulfils a function”.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The only possible source for me to have a reason to do something is for it to be one of my ends or instrumental to them.

            How do you propose to get from “my end is x” to “I have reason to do x” without relying on the intuitive judgment that we have reason to pursue our ends?

          • blacktrance says:

            Because that’s conceptually baked into being one’s end. If there’s a supposed end that we don’t have reason to do, then it’s not really an end. As with morality and motivation before, it’s not an intuition, but a conceptual matter.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Because that’s conceptually baked into being one’s end. If there’s a supposed end that we don’t have reason to do, then it’s not really an end.

            This is not obvious to me, and I don’t know how you would go about demonstrating it except by appeal to intuition. In particular, what ends we have seems to me to be a descriptive psychological claim, while what we have reason to do seems to be a normative claim, with neither entailing the other. You appear to be trying to effect a division between intuitions on the one hand and judgments of conceptual containment on the other, but there’s a strong tradition in philosophy that intuitions just are our judgments about the extension of concepts. On this view, we intuit that the concept RIGHTNESS does not apply in the famous organ-harvesting case in much the same way that we intuit that the concept KNOWLEDGE does not extend to Gettier cases.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight:

            Speaking for myself (but in a manner which blacktrance may sympathize with), it is obviously true that one cannot proceed solely from statements about descriptive facts to a normative conclusion.

            There are then only two alternatives: a) there is some special faculty of “intuition” by which we know normative facts, or b) normative facts are just defined as being equivalent to certain descriptive facts (or c) there are no normative facts).

            Now, I do not believe in any faculty of “intuition”, so I reject that one.

            Perhaps the most famous argument against b), the view that it’s a matter of definition, is G.E. Moore’s “open question argument”. That argument says: “Okay, if ‘good’ is simply analytically equivalent to some descriptive thing like ‘whatever produces the most happiness’, then it shouldn’t be a meaningful question whether ‘whatever produces the most happiness’ is good. But it is a meaningful question. Therefore, ‘good’ means something else.”

            My answer is that, yes, there is a difference. The term “good”, as commonly used, is a vague concept with no clear meaning. I am not proposing to tell people what they actually mean by the word “good”. I am proposing to revise the meaning of the concept so that it does mean something clear, distinct, and useful.

            In this way, it’s no different from taking some vague word like “awesome”,”cool”, or “funky” and proposing to use it in such a way that it has one specific meaning.

            And if the word “good” is revised in this way, it will be no more mysterious how we can move from descriptive to normative facts than it is that we move from physical to architectural facts, biological to medical facts, or social to military-strategic facts.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Perhaps the most famous argument against b), the view that it’s a matter of definition, is G.E. Moore’s “open question argument”. That argument says: “Okay, if ‘good’ is simply analytically equivalent to some descriptive thing like ‘whatever produces the most happiness’, then it shouldn’t be a meaningful question whether ‘whatever produces the most happiness’ is good. But it is a meaningful question. Therefore, ‘good’ means something else.”

            As I recall, Moore just asserted that this was the case, which seemed kind of question-begging to me. (I’d imagine that if you went up to, say, your local vicar, and said “Yes, I know helping others is what God wants, but is it good?”, he wouldn’t consider the question a meaningful one.) Am I just forgetting something, or was his argument here really as weak as I remember it?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Your proposal, I take it, is to replace our existing moral concepts with a set of stipulative definitions of moral terms. That’s fine (actually, it’s not, it’s a terrible idea, but nevermind), but I don’t think it’s what blacktrance is going for– he claims that it is a conceptual truth in English and not the Vox-moral-language that if I aim to phi I thereby have reason to phi, and that we can come to have knowledge of this conceptual truth by some mechanism other than intuition. This is what I am disputing.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ The original Mr. X:

            G.E. Moore’s arguments are, in general, pretty bad. I think that’s all there is to it.

            He also came up with the “fundamental contradiction of egoism”, which is just an amazingly stupid argument:

            [Egoism is contradictory because it says that e]ach man’s happiness is the only thing desirable: several different things are each of them the only thing desirable. This is the fundamental contradiction of Egoism.

            If it’s not obvious enough, Richard Lawrence points out the flaw:

            This argument is little more than a facile misrepresentation of any theory of egoism [….] Egoistic ethical theories […] are agent-relative (this term should not be confused with “relativism,” which is something different). That is, “the good” is that which is good for a given person — it is that which serves that person’s interests. Egoistic theories do not claim that there is such a thing as “the sole good” that is held in common by all individuals.

            If one accepts that what is good is agent-relative, then any well-formed statement about something being good should specify to whom that thing is good. Not doing so creates an ambiguous statement, which can lead to fallacious inferences, such as Moore’s claim above. “My own happiness is the sole good, and your own happiness is the sole good,” sounds like a contradiction when you use the ambiguous phrasing, but “My own happiness is the sole good for me, and your own happiness is the sole good for you,” is less problematic.

          • blacktrance says:

            Earthly Knight:
            The distinction between descriptive and normative becomes murky in the area of the roots of normativity. What ends we have is indeed a descriptive psychological claim, but what reasons we have isn’t clearly normative or descriptive. On one hand, it’s normative because one ought to do whatever one has most reason to do, but on the other hand, it’s a descriptive claim about factors relevant to ends one would have in some sufficiently informed state. I think this is why the term “wrong” is both apt and commonly used in ethics – because when someone is judged to act wrongly, from the judge’s perspective it seems that the wrongdoer has a mistaken view of something relevant to their ends.

            As for intuitions and conceptual analysis, intuitions can be wrong about the extensions of concepts. For example, it may seem that organ harvesting is wrong, but if it really is what we have most reason to do, then our intuition is wrong and our conceptual analysis has trumped it.

            Vox Imperatoris:
            My answer to Moore’s Open Question argument is that “good” roughly means something like “what one ought to seek”, and so questions like “is whatever produces the most happiness good?” or “is doing what God wants good?” are meaningful because they’re about what satisfies the condition of being what we should seek. Thus, while “good” isn’t analytically equivalent to “whatever causes the most pleasure”, they could still be synthetically equivalent.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            Well, I could just as well ask what “ought” means. Is it defined in terms of descriptive facts? Or do you know it by “intuition”?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            blacktrance, your response is, uh, non-responsive. I take it the syllogism you are constructing is something like this:

            1. My goal is to phi
            2. If my goal is to phi I have reason to phi

            C: I have reason to phi

            What rationale can you give for the second premise, aside from the bare assertion that it’s a conceptual truth (it does not seem so to me!)? What supports this rationale, if not intuition (including intuitions about concepts!)?

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:
            “What one ought to seek” can be cast descriptively as “what one would seek if motivated by the relevant moral reasons”. Of course, what the relevant moral reasons are is a subject of much contention, but that brings it to what I’ve said previously in this thread.

            Earthly Knight:
            If 2 doesn’t seem like a conceptual truth to you, you must be using a different concept of “goal” or “reason” than I am. If my goal is to phi, how could I not have a reason to phi? If I didn’t have reason to phi, in what sense would my goal be to phi? Maybe the goal is ill-considered, such as if my irrationality prevented me from realizing that an intermediate goal is ineffective at achieving other goals, so you could say that I had a goal but not the consequent reason. But the goal only fails to generate a reason because it fails with respect to other goals. So if I would have the goal of phi if I were rational, such as if phi effectively achieves my other goals or is itself a terminal goal, then I really do have a reason to phi – there’d be nothing from preventing it from being a reason.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            If 2 doesn’t seem like a conceptual truth to you, you must be using a different concept of “goal” or “reason” than I am.

            Generally speaking, when we talk about conceptual truths, we want them to be claims that will command universal agreement from anyone who is competent with the concepts involved. Otherwise we are not talking about conceptual truths, we are talking about idiosyncratic intuitions that you have, or stipulative definitions in your idiolect, neither of which are much of a foundation for morality. For instance, if someone sincerely assents to the sentence “Ted is a married bachelor,” we can reasonably conclude that they fail to grasp either the concept MARRIED or the concept BACHELOR. But it seems like you could assent to the sentence “Ted aims to go to the store but has no reason to” without being the slightest bit confused. So the goal->reason principle does not appear to be a conceptual truth.

            If my goal is to phi, how could I not have a reason to phi? If I didn’t have reason to phi, in what sense would my goal be to phi?

            I am not sure it helps much to thump the table repeatedly. Suppose that Pete wants to count blades of grass more than anything else in the world, and not only that, he endorses this desire upon reflection, and a suitably idealized version of Pete would continue to endorse the same goal. Does this give Pete a reason to count blades of grass? I’m inclined to think not, and I suspect most others would concur. So even if we are willing to countenance reasons-talk in general, it still would not be a conceptual truth that we have reason to phi whenever we take phi-ing as a goal. And a fortiori if we are antecedently suspicious of reasons.

          • blacktrance says:

            “Ted aims to go to the store but has no reason to” is a sensible proposition because people can have many competing goals that are difficult to simultaneously keep in mind – presumably, Ted isn’t a going-to-the-store maximizer. “Ted aims to go to the store but has no reason to in light of his other goals” would be the complete statement – when you’d ask why Ted has no reason to go to the store, people would explain how it conflicts with his other ends.

            Suppose that Pete wants to count blades of grass more than anything else in the world, and not only that, he endorses this desire upon reflection, and a suitably idealized version of Pete would continue to endorse the same goal. Does this give Pete a reason to count blades of grass? I’m inclined to think not, and I suspect most others would concur.

            I agree that most others will concur, but not because they think having a goal doesn’t give one a reason to phi, but because they think that reasons of goals can be overridden by other, external reasons. They would definitely say that having the goal of phi counts in favor of ultimately having a reason to phi. But when challenged about the legitimacy of external reasons, they would resort to asserting their intuitions – either that Pete has a reason to not count blades of grass despite it having nowhere to come from (the argument from queerness is relevant here), or that Pete really doesn’t have a reason to do it but should do it anyway.
            I, on the other hand, would say that Pete has the most reason to count blades of grass. My endorsement would be unusual not because of the goal->reason connection, but the rejection that anything that can override that connection.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I expect most people would deny that wanting to count blades of grass gives one even a pro tanto reason to count blades of grass, all else being equal. But I’m not really sure what you’re defending at this point. You assert that wanting to phi gives you reason to phi, and claim that this is a matter of conceptual containment, the odd type of conceptual containment that most people don’t recognize. People who reject the same principle, on the other hand, are relying on some illicit faculty of intuition (or do they just have different concepts? if so, why could they not construct their own moral system around those concepts?). I am not sure what is accomplished here aside from labeling your opponent’s methods with the term you don’t like and your own with the term you do.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight & blacktrance:

            How do you propose to resolve this dispute?

            To Earthly Knight, I will just say it is obvious that “moral language” is an incoherent mash of things that doesn’t refer to anything in particular. It’s not that there is some one thing everyone means by “the good”, but they just don’t know exactly what it is. They are just talking about different things, or they have reified this incoherent mash of ideas into an ineffable essence, or they are so confused they don’t know what they are talking about.

            It’s the same as arguing about the ineffable essence of “funky”. It’s just obvious that there is no one thing, the essence of “funk”, which everyone is trying in his own way to refer to. There are certain “family resemblances”, but: it is vague.

            In this respect, both the moral nihilists and the non-cognitivists are right in a limited way. The moral nihilists are right that, when people talk about “the good” as if it were a primary concept perhaps grasped by “intuition”, they are making false statements. The non-cognitivists are right that the practical function of this language is to praise, recommend, encourage, etc. (they are wrong to say that is all people mean; they really do mean to assert propositions).

            Where the nihilists are wrong is in asserting that moral concepts are useless or can be given no good definition. Sure they can! They are useful in the same way that it is useful to have architectural concepts and not just physical concepts.

            Now, if we are revising the concept of good to give it a coherent definition, why even use the word? Why not just talk about what promotes the ultimate happiness of people (or something similar)? Simple: we want to retain the non-cognitivist connotations, such as having a high opinion of the good, encouraging the good, rewarding the good, and so on.

            It’s like pro-capitalists and pro-socialists arguing about the meaning of the word “socialism”. Capitalists want to use the traditional economic definition of “the economic system in which the state owns the means of production”. Socialists, in general, don’t because this system has been shown not to work. So they characteristically come up with definitions like: “the economic system which serves the interest of the working class” and capitalism as: “the economic system which serves the bourgeoisie.” (This, by the way, is how China justifies itself as still being based on socialism.)

            But this is just a dispute about words. If we accept the latter interest-based definitions, capitalists believe that socialism and capitalism are the same thing: the economic system in which the means of production are privately owned.

            So, if you insist, egoists or other ethical naturalists can say: “Fine! We reject morality. But we accept ‘schmorality’, which serves the exact same practical function of telling people what to do, except it has a coherent definition.” Except they’re never going to do that because it would mean giving up the literal “moral high ground” to the other side.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Vox, you do not seem to be following the dialectic. blacktrance wants to say that his moral views are merely conceptual truths, while the moral views of everyone he disagrees with are supported only by spooky and disreputable intuitions. I am pointing out that he is mistaken on three counts: first, because we come to know conceptual truths by way of intuition, so the distinction he draws is incoherent, second, because his supposed conceptual truths are no such thing, seeing as how they do not command the assent of all competent speakers of the language, and third, because there is obviously a symmetry between his moral belief-forming processes and the moral belief-forming processes of his opponents. I am disputing blacktrance exceptionalism, not any of this other stuff.

            As a matter of definition, ethical egoism is the normative doctrine that we ought to act in our own interests. Egoists do not and cannot “reject morality.” Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view that moral properties are nothing over-and-above (“supervene on”, “are reducible to”) natural properties. Ethical naturalists certainly do not “reject morality”– the whole point is that they think they can fit morals into a scientific picture of the world. I am not sanguine about your revisionist strategy in part because it is difficult to see how the unconditional prescriptivity associated with moral claims– the assertion that we ought to phi, no matter our interests or desires– could possibly be made true by stipulative definitions.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight:

            Vox, you do not seem to be following the dialectic. blacktrance wants to say that his moral views are merely conceptual truths, while the moral views of everyone he disagrees with are supported only by spooky and disreputable intuitions. I am pointing out that he is mistaken on three counts: first, because we come to know conceptual truths by way of intuition, so the distinction he draws is incoherent, second, because his supposed conceptual truths are no such thing, seeing as how they do not command the assent of all competent speakers of the language, and third, because there is obviously a symmetry between his moral belief-forming processes and the moral belief-forming processes of his opponents. I am disputing blacktrance exceptionalism, not any of this other stuff.

            I know what you’re doing. The purpose of my post was to say that if it is a “conceptual truth”, the meaning of which everyone “just knows”, it’s obviously impossible to resolve the dispute between you and blacktrance because both of you “just know” it means something different.

            As a matter of definition, ethical egoism is the normative doctrine that we ought to act in our own interests. Egoists do not and cannot “reject morality.” Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view that moral properties are nothing over-and-above (“supervene on”, “are reducible to”) natural properties. Ethical naturalists certainly do not “reject morality”– the whole point is that they think they can fit morals into a scientific picture of the world. I am not sanguine about your revisionist strategy in part because it is difficult to see how the unconditional prescriptivity associated with moral claims– the assertion that we ought to phi, no matter our interests or desires– could possibly be made true by stipulative definitions.

            Egoism accepts morality as defined by egoism. It does not (properly, and I don’t think even tries to) take the nebulous concept of “good” and attempt to say that everyone really used it to mean “self-interest” all along. The same goes for ethical naturalism in general (ethical egoism is usually defended as a type of naturalism). They don’t say everyone really does use “good” to mean what they think it means; they think the concept ought to be revised so that it exclusively means the natural facts they have picked out.

            As for “unconditional prescriptivity”, I believe it cannot be reduced to any natural properties. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. Which may be a problem for certain sorts of ethical naturalism. But it is not a problem for many varieties of egoism, which explicitly deny it. See Ayn Rand’s article “Causality versus Duty”:

            The meaning of the term “duty” [which Rand rejects] is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.

            […]

            The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”

            […]

            Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.

            […]

            In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be cheating, but himself.

            […]

            The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

            Now, if you think a morality of “take what you want and pay for it” denies “unconditional prescriptivity” and therefore is not really a moral theory at all, in that sense egoism rejects morality. It rejects morality as defined by egoism’s opponents.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The purpose of my post was to say that if it is a “conceptual truth”, the meaning of which everyone “just knows”, it’s obviously impossible to resolve the dispute between you and blacktrance because both of you “just know” it means something different.

            blacktrance claimed that it is a conceptual truth that if you aim to phi you have reason to phi. This is false– it is not a conceptual truth, because it is not the case that all competent speakers of the language would assent to it (he appears to concede this latter point). He also claimed that his views on the matter do not depend on intuitions. This is also false, both because a) if the goal->reason principle were a conceptual truth, he would still be deploying intuitions about the application of concepts, and b) given that it is not a conceptual truth, it is unclear what else he could be appealing to.

            My own judgments of what words mean do not enter into it. You seem convinced that there is some sort of semantic disagreement between blacktrance and me, but this is just a confusion on your part.

            Egoism accepts morality as defined by egoism. It does not (properly, and I don’t think even tries to) take the nebulous concept of “good” and attempt to say that everyone really used it to mean “self-interest” all along.

            It is not clear to me what arguments egoists could advance in favor of their position. I agree that conceptual analysis is unlikely to avail them, but no other route seems promising either, principally because egoism is not a plausible view.

            The same goes for ethical naturalism in general (ethical egoism is usually defended as a type of naturalism). They don’t say everyone really does use “good” to mean what they think it means; they think the concept ought to be revised so that it exclusively means the natural facts they have picked out.

            Naturalism is a meta-ethical view about where moral properties fit into our system of the world. But this is a matter of metaphysics, and consequently does not carry a commitment one way or the other to how much revisionism we should allow at the level of normative ethics. A naturalist might insist that all of our normative intuitions be respected, or she might adopt a radically revisionist theory like utilitarianism. So this is also a confusion on your part.

            As for “unconditional prescriptivity”, I believe it cannot be reduced to any natural properties. Therefore, it doesn’t exist.

            If you deny that any categorical ought-claims come out true, your view should probably be classified as a variety of anti-realism. I am not sure what to make of the Ayn Rand excerpts, but I can offer you a dilemma: does Ayn Rand think that we ought to act in our self-interest? If yes, we are left again with the mystery of unconditional prescriptivity. If no, she is not really propounding a form of ethical egoism.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight:

            blacktrance claimed that it is a conceptual truth that if you aim to phi you have reason to phi. This is false– it is not a conceptual truth, because it is not the case that all competent speakers of the language would assent to it (he appears to concede this latter point). He also claimed that his views on the matter do not depend on intuitions. This is also false, both because a) if the goal->reason principle were a conceptual truth, he would still be deploying intuitions about the application of concepts, and b) given that it is not a conceptual truth, it is unclear what else he could be appealing to.

            My own judgments of what words mean do not enter into it. You seem convinced that there is some sort of semantic disagreement between blacktrance and me, but this is just a confusion on your part.

            He apparently thinks it is a conceptual truth. You think it isn’t. So we have to appeal to the definition of the concept.

            Furthermore, you take the (completely unargued-for) view that the proper definition to appeal to is the term’s “ordinary sense” as used by “competent speakers” of English, as if they were authorities on matters of philosophy. There is no “confusion” on my part, and your high-handed tone is not appreciated.

            It is not clear to me what arguments egoists could advance in favor of their position. I agree that conceptual analysis is unlikely to avail them, but no other route seems promising either, principally because egoism is not a plausible view.

            The argument is something on the order of: people give various reasons why people should do something regardless of whether they want to. But all of these reasons fail because there are no such categorical imperatives or “duties”. However, everyone (or nearly everyone) values his own happiness at least somewhat.

            If one rejects all of the other reasons for doing things regardless of whether one wants to, one is left with happiness as what people already do want—and happiness seems (as Aristotle argued) to most people to be the best thing to have, in that if you had it you would not want anything else. Therefore, we should define “the good” as what people want or would want if they understood these points: happiness; and “should / ought” as ways of indicating the actions that will obtain it.

            That’s just a sketch, but that’s the idea.

            Naturalism is a meta-ethical view about where moral properties fit into our system of the world. But this is a matter of metaphysics, and consequently does not carry a commitment one way or the other to how much revisionism we should allow at the level of normative ethics. A naturalist might insist that all of our normative intuitions be respected, or she might adopt a radically revisionist theory like utilitarianism. So this is also a confusion on your part.

            Again, there is no confusion on my part. The position that all of our “normative intuitions” reduce to some one set of naturalistic descriptive facts is obviously false. Even if you don’t think that, it is clearly incompatible with the position I asserted earlier that the concept “good” is vague and not used to mean any particular thing. So I rejected it from consideration as irrelevant. But yes, it is a position one can entertain.

            However, you are ignoring the context in which I brought it up, which was to explain how an ethical theory need not be consistent with all of our (alleged) “intuitions”. To say a person is “confused” because he doesn’t waste his time discussing a position irrelevant to his point is to violate the principle of charity.

            If you deny that any categorical ought-claims come out true, your view should probably be classified as a variety of anti-realism. I am not sure what to make of the Ayn Rand excerpts, but I can offer you a dilemma: does Ayn Rand think that we ought to act in our self-interest? If yes, we are left again with the mystery of unconditional prescriptivity. If no, she is not really propounding a form of ethical egoism.

            To say that there are only hypothetical imperatives is not a form of anti-realism. At best, it is a form of moral non-objectivism, if “objective” is understood to mean what Rand called the “intrinsic”. You can read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject of moral anti-realism. In any case, this is just a terminological dispute because Rand clearly rejected:

            The intrinsic theory [of values, which] holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness.

            In any case, Rand did not think that people have a categorical obligation, “duty”, or “unconditional prescription” to act in their own self-interests. She thought that this is a hypothetical imperative or “rational obligation”, conditional on the choice to think and to live. Now, I think that there are certain problems with her derivation of “life as the standard of value”, but I’m not going to get into that.

            As to what I would say, you can refer to the sketch of the argument for egoism I made above.

            Now, if you are using the term “ethical egoist” such that no one can be an ethical egoist if he does not categorically assert that people ought to act in their own self-interest regardless of their desires, values, and choices, then Rand was not an “ethical egoist”. But then no one in history ever was an ethical egoist because no one has ever argued for that position (except maybe confused followers of Rand who don’t understand her argument and think she just means to substitute a “duty” to serve yourself for a “duty” to serve others). This is, then, a bad definition of “ethical egoist”.

            If you want to read a characteristic Objectivist discussion of this question, I refer you to David Kelley’s “Choosing Life”, where he explicitly argues that “life is a value because we choose it”.

          • blacktrance says:

            I don’t expect this to go in a productive direction, so this’ll be my last comment on this topic for now. My objection here is not to intuitions as a whole but to moral intuitions in particular. Regardless of where we get our concepts, if they conflict with our moral intuitions, then we know that our moral intuitions are wrong, because they don’t originate from anything rigorously truth-tracking.

            As for the content of the concept, it’s one that people recognize most of the time, they just think that there are some cases in which it’s overridden. For example, if I say that I want to go to the store, most people would agree that I have a reason to go to the store in the absence of other considerations, and if you asserted that I really don’t have such a reason, they would look for a contrary source of reasons. So they at least accept that prima facie and pro tanto having the goal of phi gives one a reason to phi. I accept the “prima facie” qualification because humans’ goals are complex, and it’s sometimes the case that one goal can be overridden by other goals. I reject the “pro tanto” qualification because it rests on spooky non-natural sources of reasons. But this could be reformulated as “normally, having the goal of phi gives one a reason to phi”, and this is something that most people (including myself) would agree with, I just go further by denying that there are any abnormal cases (outside of the previously mentioned ones concerning irrationality).

            I also second most of what Vox Imperatoris said.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Furthermore, you take the (completely unargued-for) view that the proper definition to appeal to is the term’s “ordinary sense” as used by “competent speakers” of English, as if they were authorities on matters of philosophy.

            “F is G” is a conceptual truth iff anyone who is competent in the use of the concepts F and G will assent to “F is G”.

            This is not controversial.

            “Wanting to phi gives you a reason to phi” is not a conceptual truth, because it fails the above test.

            However, everyone (or nearly everyone) values his own happiness at least somewhat.

            Nearly everyone values other people’s happiness, too. If valuing your own happiness means you should pursue it, by parity of reasoning, you should pursue the happiness of others as well. So this won’t do.

            To say that there are only hypothetical imperatives is not a form of anti-realism.

            The root of the problem here may be that you don’t understand the meanings of any of the terms you’re using.

            Moral anti-realism =df the view that no normative (i.e. evaluative or categorically prescriptive) moral claims are mind-independently true.

            She thought that this is a hypothetical imperative or “rational obligation”, conditional on the choice to think and to live.

            This is just incoherent. One can think and live just fine without being an egoist.

            But then no one in history ever was an ethical egoist because no one has ever argued for that position

            This is false; a number of ancient philosophers believed right action consisted in the pursuit of individual happiness, and so would qualify as ethical egoists under the given definition. But it doesn’t really matter: an ethical egoist is someone who thinks that one ought solely to pursue one’s own interests. You don’t get a vote on what the term means.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            As for the content of the concept, it’s one that people recognize most of the time, they just think that there are some cases in which it’s overridden.

            I gave a straightforward counter-example above, which you have not yet addressed. It is not the case that most people will agree that Jon’s wanting to count blades of grass gives Jon even a pro tanto* reason to count blades of grass, other things being equal. Ergo, the goal->reason principle is false.

            *This means the same thing as you mean when you say “prima facie.”

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight:

            “F is G” is a conceptual truth iff anyone who is competent in the use of the concepts F and G will assent to “F is G”.

            This is not controversial.

            I am controverting it (for the sake of argument, at least). What are you going to do? You can’t just appeal to the majority in philosophy.

            Besides, even on your terms (and this is really the more important point), what makes the ordinary speakers of English “competent” in the use of the concept “good”? I already said that they don’t clearly understand what they mean by it.

            Nearly everyone values other people’s happiness, too. If valuing your own happiness means you should pursue it, by parity of reasoning, you should pursue the happiness of others as well. So this won’t do.

            Egoism argues that people pursue the happiness of others either because they falsely think that there is a moral imperative to do so, or else because they correctly see it as a means to their own happiness. If someone said that he saw promoting the happiness of others as a terminal value for no reason and not because it satisfies him, or that he would feel bad if he didn’t, or some other such thing, then egoism has nothing to say against him.

            If there are such people, what’s appropriate for them is a different morality.

            The root of the problem here may be that you don’t understand the meanings of any of the terms you’re using.

            Moral anti-realism =df the view that no normative (i.e. evaluative or categorically prescriptive) moral claims are mind-independently true.

            Go fuck yourself. Seriously, I’m getting fed up with your tone.

            You don’t get to proclaim by fiat the meaning of terms in your own idiosyncratic way and then accuse other people of not understanding them correctly.

            Moral realism is commonly distinguished in professional philosophy from moral objectivism. Moral realism is simply the view that moral claims are sometimes true. The conflation of it with moral objectivism is a minority view, and it is certainly not true that anyone who doesn’t use it this way doesn’t “understand” it. See the SEP article I linked on moral anti-realism, or see this one on moral realism:

            Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at face value—moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true. That much is the common and more or less defining ground of moral realism (although some accounts of moral realism see it as involving additional commitments, say to the independence of the moral facts from human thought and practice, or to those facts being objective in some specified way).

            As a result, those who reject moral realism are usefully divided into (i) those who think moral claims do not purport to report facts in light of which they are true or false (noncognitivists) and (ii) those who think that moral claims do carry this purport but deny that any moral claims are actually true (error theorists).

            Is egoism in one of those two categories? No, it is not.

            Moving on:

            This is false; a number of ancient philosophers believed right action consisted in the pursuit of individual happiness, and so would qualify as ethical egoists under the given definition. But it doesn’t really matter: an ethical egoist is someone who thinks that one ought solely to pursue one’s own interests. You don’t get a vote on what the term means.

            All the ancient ones I’m aware of who thought this were psychological egoists who thought that everyone actually does value his own individual happiness most of all. So your distinction could not be found in them.

            The larger point is that you have just baldly asserted that the term “ought” necessarily carries with it the meaning of “unconditional prescription”. This is just false. Plenty of people use it in other ways. It is perfectly sensible to use it in other ways.

            I don’t get a vote because there is no vote. You don’t get to appeal to the mob about what vague terms necessarily mean. Have you even taken a poll on the subject? I doubt the common man is even competent to answer the question of whether the term “ought” entails “unconditional prescription”.

            Does it mean that when I say to a friend that he ought to check out a certain band? Because that’s the sense in which I say he ought to be an egoist. I recommend it; he would like it; it’s in his interest; it would make him happy; etc.

            Anyway, I will not reply again if you keep taking the same insulting attitude you have been.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Earthly Knight:

            If you insist that “ought” is misunderstood unless used with the meaning of “unconditional prescription”, I refer you to the “Note on Utilitarianism” by James Fitzjames Stephen, who I assure you was a competent speaker of English (unless, perhaps, you are the only competent speaker of English):

            A man who, upon the whole and having taken into account every relevant consideration, thinks it for his interest to do an act highly injurious to the world at large, no doubt would do it. But let us consider what would be the state of mind implied by the fact that he did take this view of his interest. A man who calmly and deliberately thinks that it is upon the whole his interest to commit an assassination which can never be discovered in order that he may inherit a fortune, shows, in the first place, that he has utterly rejected every form of the religious sanction; next, that he has no conscience and no self-respect; next, that he has no benevolence. His conduct affords no evidence as to his fear of legal punishment or popular indignation, inasmuch as by the supposition he is not exposed to them. He has thus no motive for abstaining from a crime which he has a motive for committing; but motive is only another name, a neutral instead of a eulogistic name, for obligation or tie. It would, therefore, be strictly accurate to say of such a man that he—from his [223] point of view and upon his principles—ought, or is under an obligation, or is bound by the only tie which attaches to him, to commit murder. But it is this very fact which explains the hatred and blame which the act would excite in the minds of utilitarians in general, and which justifies them in saying on all common occasions that men ought not to do wrong for their own advantage, because on all common occasions the word ‘ought’ refers not to the rules of conduct which abnormal individuals may recognize, but to those which are generally recognized by mankind. ‘You ought not to assassinate,’ means if you do assassinate God will damn you, man will hang you if he can catch you, and hate you if he cannot, and you yourself will hate yourself, and be pursued by remorse and self-contempt all the days of your life. If a man is under none of these obligations, if his state of mind is such that no one of these considerations forms a tie upon him, all that can be said is that it is exceedingly natural that the rest of the world should regard him as a public enemy to be knocked on the head like a mad dog if an opportunity offers, and that for the very reason that he is under no obligations, that he is bound by none of the ties which connect men with each other, that he ought to lie, and steal, and murder whenever his immediate interests prompt him to do so.

            To regard such a conclusion as immoral is to say that to analyse morality is to destroy it; that to enumerate its sanctions specifically is to take them away; that to say that a weight is upheld by four different ropes, and to own that if each of them were cut the weight would fall, is equivalent to cutting the ropes. No doubt, if all religion, all law, all benevolence, all conscience, all regard for popular opinion were taken away, there would be no assignable reason why men should do right rather than wrong; but the possibility which is implied in these ‘ifs’ is too remote to require practical attention.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I am controverting it (for the sake of argument, at least). What are you going to do? You can’t just appeal to the majority in philosophy.

            Two questions for you:

            1. How do you understand “conceptual truth”?
            2. What do you think fixes the meanings of terms like this?

            If there are such people, what’s appropriate for them is a different morality.

            This is no longer egoism but a form of constructivism in which what you ought to do is a function of your existing values and preferences. Moreover, given that pretty much no one aside from psychopaths places no intrinsic value in the well-being of others, few people who adhere to your constructivist methodology would end up with an egoistic suite of moral beliefs.

            You don’t get to proclaim by fiat the meaning of terms in your own idiosyncratic way

            My definitions are not idiosyncratic– they are the consensus view, or very near to it.

            Imagine you walk into a room with a physicist in it, and launch into a monologue about electrons and atoms. The physicist would like to engage with your ideas, but he quickly discovers that he is unable to do so because you are using the words “electron” and “atom” in non-standard ways, to the point where he is unsure what you are trying to say beneath the morass of conceptual confusions. When he tries to correct your definitions, you reject his corrections and accuse him of being snippy.

            What do you think the physicist should say?

            Moral realism is simply the view that moral claims are sometimes true.

            The standard definition includes the additional clause about mind-independence, because people are seldom thinking about relativism, constructivism, or quasi-realism when they talk about moral realism. In an amusing twist, if you look at the SEP article on “Moral Anti-Realism” you will see that Joyce criticizes Sayre-Mccord’s definition of moral realism as non-standard for leaving out the mind-independence clause. Sayre-Mccord, of course, is the author of the “Moral Realism” article.

            Is egoism in one of those two categories? No, it is not.

            I honestly have no clue what you are trying to say here. (Ethical) egoism is a normative ethical theory: it holds that we ought to do what is in our interests.

            All the ancient ones I’m aware of who thought this were psychological egoists who thought that everyone actually does value his own individual happiness most of all.

            When I say that some ancient philosophers are ethical egoists, I am thinking, for instance, of Epicurus, who thought that a good life consisted in enjoying moderate pleasures and minimizing pain. What part of Epicurus’s writings make you think that he’s a psychological egoist?

            Also note that:

            psychological egoism =df the view that human beings are always motivated by self-interest.

            The larger point is that you have just baldly asserted that the term “ought” necessarily carries with it the meaning of “unconditional prescription”.

            I do not understand what you mean. I gave the standard definition of ethical egoism as the view that one ought to pursue one’s own interests. The “ought” in this definition of ethical egoism is unconditional.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Here is Sharon Street, a constructivist, in a paper criticizing moral realism:

            “The defining claim of realism about value, as I will be understanding it, is that there are at least some evaluative facts or truths that hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes.”

            Needless to say, she does not mean to be criticizing herself. Here is Shafer-Landau, the arch-realist:

            “There have recently been a number of sharp criticisms
            directed against moral realism – the tripartite view that (i) sincere
            moral judgments express beliefs, rather than conative attitudes;
            (ii) some of these beliefs are true; and (iii) such beliefs, when true, are not true by virtue of being the object of, or being implied by, the attitudes of (even idealized) agents.

            And I already mentioned the error theorist Joyce’s view:

            “As a first approximation, then, moral anti-realism can be identified as the disjunction of three theses:

            i. moral noncognivitism
            ii. moral error theory
            iii. moral non-objectivism

            So I’m pretty confident the consensus view is that the definition of moral realism incorporates some version of the mind-independence condition. Sayre-Mccord’s definition happens to be a bit idiosyncratic in omitting it.

        • stubydoo says:

          Those debates about moral realism bring to mind the Wittgensteinian idea that all arguments are really just semantic arguments. It isn’t actually true of all arguments, but this one can make for a pretty good case study of people carrying on quite a bit without realizing they’re just using different meanings of words rather than actually disagreeing about anything.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        Guy Kahane (and I don’t know what his views on moral realism are) argues that “evolutionary debunking arguments” are either completely irrelevant to normative ethics, or else they argue for totally revising it. But the idea of using them piecemeal on one issue or other is ridiculous:

        So we are left with three possibilities. The first is that none of our evaluative beliefs is undermined by EDAs, meaning that EDAs have no use in both normative ethics and metaethics. This possibility would be true if none of our evaluative beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms, or if the evolution of our evaluative capacities and sensibilities can be shown to track the evaluative truth, neither of which seems to me plausible. This outcome would also follow if some anti-objectivist view is the correct account of evaluative discourse.

        The second possibility is that all of our evaluative beliefs are undermined by EDAs. This would be true if the global argument was successful and supported not anti-objectivism but evaluative scepticism or even just moral scepticism, meaning, again, that there is no space to use EDAs in normative ethics. This result would follow even if we believed, with Joyce, that in response we should revise our evaluative discourse to make it immune to EDAs.

        The third possibility is that only some of our evaluative beliefs are undermined by EDAs. This is what would-be debunkers in normative ethics must assume. Given that it’s not yet clear whether targeted EDAs can be prevented from collapsing into the sceptical argument, this is a precarious assumption to make at this stage. But worse, ‘some’ is likely to mean ‘very many’, including some of our most fundamental evaluative and moral beliefs. What seems utterly implausible is the possibility that EDAs can continue to have a legitimate piecemeal use in normative debate. If EDAs work at all then, in one way or another, they are bound to lead to a truly radical upheaval in our evaluative beliefs.57

        • Wrong Species says:

          I just want to clarify that I don’t think evolutionary psychology absolutely debunks moral realism. I just think that it should be considered evidence against it.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I really should read the book, but my first reaction is to question whether he’s provided evidence that people’s beliefs about morality are determined by evolutionary factors that have nothing to do with reality.
        It was evolutionary factors that made most mobile animals detect light, but light waves/photons are still part of objective reality. Couldn’t Haidt’s five foundations correspond to five moral facts we evolved the ability to detect?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          That’s exactly what Michael Huemer says: society is becoming more liberal (in the sense of “classical liberal”) over time because liberalism is objectively true:

          Debunking skeptics claim that our moral beliefs are formed by processes unsuited to identifying objective facts, such as emotions inculcated by our genes and culture; therefore, they say, even if there are objective moral facts, we probably don’t know them. I argue that the debunking skeptics cannot explain the pervasive trend toward liberalization of values over human history, and that the best explanation is the realist’s: humanity is becoming increasingly liberal because liberalism is the objectively correct moral stance.

          You can read Scott’s take on it here.

          As for what I would say: we evolved to detect photons because knowing where the photons are is in our self-interest, or at least furthers the reproduction of our genes. Why would the detection of “morons” (morality units) further our interest, unless morality is just the same thing as what is in our self-interest? And if morality is just the same thing as our self-interest, we don’t have to posit it (as Huemer does) as a unique, irreducible kind of truth. We simply say it reduces to the identification in terms of principles of what promotes our lives, happiness, etc.

          And in that sense, moral truths are no different from medical truths or architectural truths.

          Basically, my opinion is that if moral truths are the kinds of things Michael Huemer thinks they are, we can’t know them. (Nor would we want to know them or get any benefit from knowing them.) But since I don’t think they’re those kinds of things, I think we can know them.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            As for what I would say: we evolved to detect photons because knowing where the photons are is in our self-interest, or at least furthers the reproduction of our genes. Why would the detection of “morons” (morality units) further our interest, unless morality is just the same thing as what is in our self-interest? And if morality is just the same thing as our self-interest, we don’t have to posit it (as Huemer does) as a unique, irreducible kind of truth. We simply say it reduces to the identification in terms of principles of what promotes our lives, happiness, etc.

            We detect the principles that promote our flourishing as the kind of organism we are. Moral intuitions that harm us if followed could be called moral illusions, by analogy with optical illusions. Wolves could be called flourishing moral agents.

            Not sure about this. I’ll have to mull it over.

    • onyomi says:

      Most everyone I meet in the US* either thinks the evil corporations are corrupting the government or the evil government is corrupting the corporations. It’s a kind of chicken-and-egg problem where people seem to agree on a basic reality yet fixate on one side or the other of the equation. I wonder if there are some genetic and/or learned moral parameters which correspond to one or the other?

      My best guess is that the more libertarian view is strongly anti-harm: the government is the one with the guns, so they are the ones at fault. The corporations are just playing the game with the rules the gun-holding enforcers give them.

      The pattern of thinking I notice in those holding the opposite view (which I do not, if you hadn’t guessed) seems to often be along the lines of “the government is us; it’s what we do together; it’s what everyone agrees on through a fair, democratic process. Private interests motivated by greed are harming the common good and perverting the power of us to make the kind of world we want for selfish reasons.” I guess this is more like “fairness” and “loyalty” on Haidt’s definitions?

      *My particular bubble is such that I often meet people who love Bernie Sanders and sometimes meet people who like Rand Paul, but almost never talk to someone who admits to being really enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. That said, I think even more moderate Republicans and Democrats probably lean toward one end of the equation or the other, and I tend to find this as decisive world-view factor which makes it rare for anyone to switch sides altogether, even if s/he may change his/her mind on particular issues.

  31. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Something that’s been puzzling me is, if “white male” is the lowest status in deep Blue communities, and Blues see Muslims as a non-white race, what prevents huge numbers of men in places like the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, and every university town from converting to Islam? They could hypothetically gain the benefits of being PoCs rather than white, the benefits of it being taboo for others in the community to criticize their beliefs, plus the benefits for men of hardcore patriarchy.
    I can think of two reasons that might not work, but I’m curious what others think.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      a) “Blue tribe” people don’t actually like Muslims, especially hardcore Muslims. They just don’t care about them. They’re funny little savages. If there started to be a large contingent of hardcore pro-patriarchy Muslim men on campus, they would be against it.

      b) These communities are little oases apart from the rest of America, where converting to Islam will provide no special benefits.

      c) People actually do not only care about some simplistic notion of “status”. They actually think their beliefs are correct and do not want to change them out like items of clothing.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        “They just don’t care about them. They’re funny little savages”

        What an awful statement. Uncharitable and a failure of imagination.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          That was merely a mocking way of saying they think Muslims have:

          a) Bad, incorrect, and harmful values. (I don’t see how they can deny this insofar as Islam is totally contrary to liberalism and progressivism.)

          b) Because they are ignorant. (As opposed to evil.)

          c) But they are not a threat—are not in a position of power—and need to be helped, not fought.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Islam” like “Christianity” is far too large a category to make statements like this about.

            Where you see particular oppressive actions by those who are also Islamic, you see blue tribe oppose them, without the need to condemn “Muslims” as a class. For a small example, see Mulala Yusuf.

            My daughter’s best friend through grade school happened to be Muslim. That she was also white and Irish and living in a large urban community in the US should give you pause. That the mother was a teacher in her school and wore the hijab should also give you pause.

          • Gbdub says:

            I think you’re proving Vox Imperatoris’ point. Your daughter’s friend is in no way a central example of a Muslim, and you know this. Frankly, no American Muslims are central examples of Muslims.

            The reality is that we CAN point to a central example of a Muslim, sort of, because there are many countries in which Muslims are the majority. In many (most?) of these countries, Islam is not merely a religion but a strong or dominant force in politics as well. And to the extent that it is a strong political force, these countries tend to be misogynistic, homophobic, and generally unpleasant to many causes progressives claim to hold dear.

            The fact that you choose to ignore these many millions of Muslims and their strong beliefs in a very anti-progressive society, dismissing them as “not true Muslims”, and instead try to focus on their buddy who converted in college and observes Ramadan, when he doesn’t forget, is exactly the blind spot Vox Imperatoris was referring to I think.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Gbdub:
            “The fact that you choose to ignore these many millions of Muslims and their strong beliefs in a very anti-progressive society, dismissing them as “not true Muslims”, and instead try to focus on their buddy who converted in college and observes Ramadan, when he doesn’t forget”

            Okay, to use an English expression, that’s bollocks.

            You just weak-manned my argument.

            I’m in no way saying that my “buddy” to which you then attached a bunch of other untrue descriptors, is the central example of Islamic faith. Part of what I am pointing at is that, with 1.6 billion people you can’t find a “central example”. I gave one example that shows the folly of this.

            Ken Ham is immensely popular. But I don’t think his views represent the views of all Christians. And anyone he said we should distrust the views on science of Christians, period full stop, because of Ham and his popularity wouldn’t be correct.

            You have to be more specific than just “Muslims”.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @HeelBearCub: So let’s narrow it down to Sunni (85-90% majority) Muslims who recognize either Wahhabi theology or that of Al-Azhar as authoritative. Are they safer and more rational neighbors the more devout they are, or the less? Should non-Muslims support or criticize their attempts to live up to sharia?
            I think the fact that according to the data cited earlier in this thread, terrorist attacks in the United States are as likely to be carried out by Muslims as white nationalists when the US is 70% white and 1% Muslim is a clue. And what about rape per capita in countries like England with its Rotherham cover-up?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Le Maistre Chat:

            I think the more devout people are, any religion, the less likely they are to be rational.

            The more devout a Muslim, the more likely you are to do irrational things, up to and including engaging various terrorist acts against your outgroup.

            The more devout a Jew, the more likely you are to do irrational things, up to and including engaging in various terrorist acts against your outgroup.

            The more devout a Christian, the more likely you are to do irrational things, up to and including engaging in various terrorist acts against your outgroup.

            The more devout a Hindu, the more likely you are to do irrational things, up to and including engaging various terrorist acts against your outgroup.

            But, that said all of those categories are too broad to be rationally used as a blanket to condemn all the adherent. Devout Muslim is too broad. Devout Orthodox Jew is too broad. Even Devout Fundamentalist Apocalyptic Christian is too broad.

          • gbdub says:

            The fact that you can give one non-central example of a Muslim does not imply… well, really anything, other than that “all Muslims are fundamentalists and/or terrorists” isn’t literally true. But no one here is arguing that.

            And I apologize for using a general “your” to imply my flippant description was referring to your personal acquaintance. I had meant to make it more clear I was making a flip point about the position of the American left in general, so apologies for the offense.

            Other than calling them “central” though, what part of my description of majority Muslim countries was “bollocks”? And what part of calling American Muslims highly non central was “bollocks”? There are <5 million American Muslims, and about 19 million in the EU. As you point out, there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Most of them are not terrorists or ISIS supporters. But most of them aren't favorable toward America in general or American liberal values either.

            What I'm actually arguing is that the current progressive stance isn't much more realistic than the "all Muslims are terrorists"approach of the racists. You can't just ignore the powerful influence political Islamism has over a large portion of the world, or argue that political Islamism as practiced in these areas is particularly amenable to progressive ideals. Sharia (to name one thing) is pretty damn scary, and it may not be supported by all Muslims, but by enough that it's worth worrying about.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Gbdub:
            When Catholics and Protestants were going at each hammer and tongs in Northern Ireland, we said Northern Ireland had a problem with “the troubles”. We didn’t say Christianity had a problem and that Catholics and Protestants worldwide were implicated in the terror. Nor did we say “The Irish” or “The English” had a problem.

            We don’t hold all Hindus worldwide responsible for the actions of the Tamil Tigers (who, I just found out, invented the suicide bomb vest).

            We don’t hold all Christians responsible for what Serbs did to Muslims in Bosnia.

            In the Middle East right now, I see sectarian conflict that looks a lot like sectarian conflict the world over. Whether it’s Angola, Columbia, Peru, Sri Lanka, North Ireland, Bosnia, … People invoke the name of God in their fight, and many of them believe it, but why does it look like standard inter-ethnic conflict?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “We didn’t say Christianity had a problem and that Catholics and Protestants worldwide were implicated in the terror. Nor did we say “The Irish” or “The English” had a problem.”

            Because converting wouldn’t have ended the fighting; it was clearly an ethnic conflict. Also, the people in Northern Ireland aren’t ethnically English.

            ” I see sectarian conflict that looks a lot like sectarian conflict the world over.”

            Really? Crucifying children is common the world over? Having a sectarian conflict that spans multiple countries with nothing in common but religion is common? Attracting fighters from all over the world is common?

          • NN says:

            So what exactly is the “central example” of a Muslim? Is the central example Middle Eastern? How does that make sense when you consider that more Muslims live in Indonesia than live in the entire Middle East? While Indonesia is far from perfect, it is way ahead of most Middle Eastern countries in terms of civil liberties, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and so on (with the exception of the Aceh province, which has fallen under increasingly strict fundamentalist rule in recent years as a result of a civil war there).

            There are around 50 Muslim majority countries in the world, which are spread across 4 different continents. Talking about a “central example” of anything in this context seems absurd. I agree that there are very serious problems with terrorism and the influence of fundamentalism on politics in the Muslim world today, but talking about central examples seems like a pretty unproductive way to frame the discussion.

            So let’s narrow it down to Sunni (85-90% majority) Muslims who recognize either Wahhabi theology or that of Al-Azhar as authoritative.

            By most estimates, Wahhabis make up about 0.5% of the global Muslim population, so it seems a little strange to call them a “central example.” It is true that they have disproportionate influence due to their position in Saudi Arabia, which uses oil revenues to fund massive religious and political outreach programs, and is probably the single biggest contributor to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in recent times. But I still don’t think that’s a good reason to call them “a central example.” Is Barack Obama a central example of an American black man because he has so much power and influence?

            —-

            Also, for the record, more devout Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism than less devout Muslims. Nor for that matter, are politically conservative Islamists more likely to support terrorism. Even without looking at the statistics, there are plenty of obvious counter-examples. Consider the 9/11 hijackers who were spotted in strip clubs and bars in the weeks before the attack, or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described by his friends as a fan of marijuana and hip-hop, or the pair of wannabe ISIS fighters from the UK who bought Islam for Dummies online before attempting to travel to Syria, or the two Paris attackers who owned a bar, one of whom is openly gay.

            Nor, for that matter, are most Islamic fundamentalists supporters of terrorism. The vast majority of Salafis are “Quietist Salafis,” who eschew not just violence but any involvement in politics, and instead focus on being as Sharia-compliant as possible in their personal lives, much like the sort of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who spend an enormous amount of time debating whether this or that action is allowed on the Sabbath. This article has a pretty good description of Quietist Salafis in the second half. These people do tend to have highly illiberal attitudes, but I don’t think that it is a good idea to lump them in with terrorists.

            What does lead people to become terrorists? It’s complicated (I suggest checking out Scott Atran’s work if you want to know more), but the evidence suggests that social network effects are the strongest influence. By far the biggest risk factor for radicalization is having a friend or family member who has been radicalized. Religious identity seems to mostly matter, in this context, because of how it helps define a person’s ingroup and outgroup.

          • NN says:

            Attracting fighters from all over the world is common?

            It isn’t exactly common, but this sort of thing has happened elsewhere. The Spanish Civil War is a particularly famous example. Also Israel, sort of.

          • anonymous says:

            The Indian subcontinent as a whole (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) has more than half a billion Muslims (~520M), which is more than twice as many as Indonesia (~222M), and significantly more than the entire Arabic speaking world put together (~300M).

            So the modal, if not central, example of a Muslim should probably be Desi.

        • Uncharitable to Muslims or to blue tribe people?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        a) implies that when there reaches a critical mass of Muslims in a Western country, the Left will start hating them. This makes France (7.5%), Belgium (6%), Austria, Switzerland (5.7%), Germany (5.6%), and the Netherlands (5.5%) key places to look for evidence.

        b) is probably important. A parallel would be the university phenomenon of “Lesbian Until Graduation”, where some young women identify as oppressed until moving out of the university town.

        c) At first glance, this seems true and good. OTOH, Social Justice is strongly correlated with higher education, yet seems dumber than the beliefs of less educated people. How to explain?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          a) implies that when there reaches a critical mass of Muslims in a Western country, the Left will start hating them. This makes France (7.5%), Belgium (6%), Austria, Switzerland (5.7%), Germany (5.6%), and the Netherlands (5.5%) key places to look for evidence.

          Only if the Muslims actually live in their neighborhoods and interact with them. And then only if the Muslims (with whom they interact) do not assimilate, and continue to support patriarchy and sharia law.

          b) is probably important. A parallel would be the university phenomenon of “Lesbian Until Graduation”, where some young women identify as oppressed until moving out of the university town.

          It’s highly dubious that women do this (if it’s even a real phenomenon) solely to fit in and earn “oppression points”. Women are known to have a less rigidly binary sexual orientation than men, for whatever reason (could be culture; could be biology).

          c) At first glance, this seems true and good. OTOH, Social Justice is strongly correlated with higher education, yet seems dumber than the beliefs of less educated people. How to explain?

          The beliefs of uneducated people are really stupid. Their beliefs are completely unsystematic, and they don’t know how to defend them in rational argument.

          It is not surprising that people go to college, say stupid things without being able to defend them, hear a left-wing counterargument (because that’s the only kind they hear), and become more left-wing. Whatever your opinion of left-wing college professors is, they are not idiots, they have heard the standard arguments against their own positions, and they can make your average small-town conservative look and feel really dumb.

          Now, whether you can rationalize “common sense” into some kind of “deep wisdom” in which the folksy people were right after all is another question. But if they’re right, they don’t know why they’re right.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The beliefs of uneducated people are really stupid. Their beliefs are completely unsystematic, and they don’t know how to defend them in rational argument.

            People can have unjustified and unsystematic true beliefs. Like how the systematic, rational Party knew less about how to grow food than the Russian peasants. Burke called them “just prejudices”.

            It is not surprising that people go to college, say stupid things without being able to defend them, hear a left-wing counterargument (because that’s the only kind they hear), and become more left-wing. Whatever your opinion of left-wing college professors is, they are not idiots, they have heard the standard arguments against their own positions,

            I’m not so sure any more. Universities have speech codes that can make arguments against the Sociology or * Studies professor’s positions a punishable offense. Of course if a young conservative gets to college and thinks stupid things about economics or science, that’s a different matter.

            Now, whether you can rationalize “common sense” into some kind of “deep wisdom” in which the folksy people were right after all is another question. But if they’re right, they don’t know why they’re right.

            The folksy people will be more right than their rulers if the rulers are getting worse, because the folksy people are behind the times and got their prejudices from previous generations of rulers. I may be wrong, but I think this is the case: the judicial and media elites and schoolteachers, who are all downstream from the university professors, are on their way to losing the Mandate of Heaven.

          • Deiseach says:

            The beliefs of uneducated people are really stupid.

            Ahem. Are you saying that every belief an uneducated person holds is stupid because an uneducated person holds it (and if they had the benefit of a college education and held the same belief, it would not be a stupid belief)?

            Or are you saying that some beliefs are stupid regardless of the educational status of the person holding them, but that uneducated people are more easily convinced by bad arguments through not having the tools to examine them?

            Because this is sounding yet again like the attitude on here I complained of before: “not having a college degree” = “uneducated” and “stupid”.

            “Not knowing how to defend a belief in rational argument” is not the same as “This belief is stupid”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Deiseach:

            Or are you saying that some beliefs are stupid regardless of the educational status of the person holding them, but that uneducated people are more easily convinced by bad arguments through not having the tools to examine them?

            Yes, that.

            By “stupid beliefs”, I mean beliefs that are not true, and that any familiarity with arguments on the subject would cause them to abandon. Of course, that’s just a metaphor. A belief cannot be stupid, only a person can, and I’m not literally saying uneducated people are stupid. They are just ignorant.

            For example, an uneducated conservative who supports the free market probably has never heard of the concept of externalities, and he is quite likely to believe that the free market works perfectly. If he goes to college and hears his liberal college professor talk about “market failures” and prove that they exist, he doesn’t know how to respond. Rush Limbaugh does not talk about market failures.

            Or perhaps he believes that America has always been a force for good in the world, being one-hundred percent noble and upright in its dealings with other nations. Then he goes to college and hears about all these cases of American imperialism and aggression (slanted to be worse than it is), and he doesn’t know what to say.

            To take another case, it’s well-known that the average American wants to “cut foreign aid”: but he thinks it makes up something on the order of 20% of the budget and should be cut to something reasonable like 10% or 5%.

            Or, in general, he is likely to believe that liberals are all idiots. That’s why they support liberalism, which is obviously false. Now in fact that’s obviously not true, and if he goes in expecting them to be idiots, he is likely to be taken aback by their clever arguments.

            Or take religion. This isn’t so much a matter of “not true”, but “folk beliefs” about theology are almost entirely opposed to what the actual theologians think. I think the average religious person basically believes that “good people” earn entry into heaven on their own merits, but actually Christianity is not like that at all. Or they explain the problem of evil by saying that the Devil is responsible for evil, not God. And in regard to atheism, they’ve never heard a cogent case for it at all.

            These are just the first examples that come to my mind. In general, uneducated people have unsophisticated and un-nuanced beliefs. These beliefs are not true, and the liberal professors can prove they are not true. There exist sophisticated conservative/libertarian counterarguments that preserve much of the substance of the original positions, but that’s not what the uneducated people believe. Scott’s post on meta-contrarianism is relevant here.

            Or just read Scott’s “Non-Libertarian FAQ”, for an example of how you can absolutely destroy unsophisticated libertarianism (which of course has much in common with / is the same thing as American conservatism.)

          • keranih says:

            @ Vox –

            Do you have any examples of stupid beliefs that uneducated liberals hold?

            (And no, I’m not asking out of some sort of ‘fairness’ or equal representation basis, but to get a better handle on what sort of ideas you are classifying as unsupportable, which would be corrected by exposure to (fact-based) higher education.)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ keranih:

            Oh, yeah! They’re a lot easier for me to think of, to be honest.

            1. 19th century capitalism was nasty and brutish until unions and the government cleaned things up and improved wages and working conditions by striking and passing laws.

            2. The minimum wage is an unqualified good for the poor: it raises their wages by taking money away from the rich business owners and does not cause unemployment.

            3. Only the rich benefit from the wealth they own.

            4. It’s good when the rich spend lots of money on consumption because this “spreads the wealth around”, but bad when they “hoard up” savings and investments because this keeps the money in their own pockets.

            5. Antitrust laws are a good idea and necessary to keep the economy from being taken over by one giant monopoly.

            6. “Price gouging” laws are beneficial and stop the exploitation of people in disaster zones.

            7. Boycotting “sweatshops” in the third world is a good idea / stops the exploitation of workers.

            8. America had a free market in healthcare before Obamacare, and that was the cause of the problems in the system.

            9. The 2008 financial crisis was caused by Bush’s (alleged) “deregulation” and Wall Street “greed”.

            10. Public schools are necessary / a good idea because education is a “public good”.

            11. Economic “middlemen” do no productive work and simply add “markups”.

            12. Wall Street and the financial industry is all a big casino that doesn’t provide any real value.

            13. Trade between countries is a competition you “win” by exporting as much as possible and importing as little as possible. (Conservatives believe this, too.)

            14. Conservatives and libertarians support cutting government spending because they’re mean bastards who hate the poor.

            15. People vote in their own economic self-interest, and this explains why the poor tend to side with the Democrats and the rich with the Republicans.

            16. The Great Depression was caused by unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, Herbert Hoover supported non-intervention, and FDR solved it in no small part by bringing us into WWII and “boosting demand”. Basically the whole mythology of the New Deal, too.

            17. Automation is a major cause of unemployment.

            18. Imperialism can be explained by countries needing to acquire “markets” for their “surplus goods”.

            19. Native Americans were a peaceful race of “noble savages” “in tune with nature” who were wiped out in a policy of calculated genocide by the evil white settlers.

            20. All religions are little more than different ways of expressing the same basic truth that you should be kind and love your neighbor.

            I could go on.

          • Jiro says:

            A good portion of those are not “stupid beliefs that uneducated liberals hold”, they are just places where you disagree with liberals and uncharitably claim that the liberals only disagree with you because of lack of education. “Stupid beliefs that liberals hold” is not the same thing as “places where I disagree with liberals and have a good argument for my case”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            That’s fair.

            All I will say is that uneducated liberals hold very unsophisticated versions of these positions (and I tried to express them in an unsophisticated way). I’m not saying that none of them can be defended in a sophisticated way.

            It’s the same manner in which the unsophisticated conservative positions can be defended in a sophisticated way. For instance:

            Unsophisticated conservative: “The free market is perfect!”
            Liberal professor: “No it isn’t. Here are the proofs, look at the instance of externalities, which the government can solve through Pigovian taxation.”
            Bryan Caplan: “The government is the biggest example of a negative externality, and the free market is always better in practice.”

            Unsophisticated liberal: “The minimum wage raises wages and causes no harm whatsoever!”
            Econ 101: “The minimum wage causes unemployment by raising wages above the market-clearing level.”
            Sophisticated liberal: “The minimum wage does cause unemployment if it is high enough, but if we set it just right it can counteract monopsony power.”

            Don Boudreaux has a good series of posts on this:

            The problem is not that most politicians and pundits take economic principles too literally; the problem is that most politicians and pundits are utterly ignorant even of these principles.

            The typical politician does not oppose free trade because he took an advanced econ course and learned there that, under just the right combination of real-world circumstances, an optimally imposed tariff can be justified on economic grounds. No. The typical politician opposes free trade because he doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. He doesn’t understand that the purpose of trade – any trade, [be it intranational or international] – is to enrich people as consumers and not to enrich people as producers. He doesn’t understand that exports are a cost and that imports are a benefit; he thinks that it’s the other way ’round. He doesn’t understand that the specific jobs lost to imports are not the only employment consequences of trade; he doesn’t understand that trade also ‘creates’ jobs in the domestic economy. He doesn’t understand that domestic producers protected by government from competition have diminished, rather than intensified, incentives to improve efficiencies of their operations. He, in short, doesn’t understand the first damn thing about the economics of trade. And nor do most of his constituents. If these constituents understood basic economics and basic economics only, they would better understand that this politician’s policies are economically harmful and that his policy statements are malarky.

            The typical politician doesn’t support minimum-wage legislation because she has concluded, after careful study, that employers of low-skilled workers have sufficient amounts of monopsony power in the labor market (as well as monopoly power in their output markets) to nullify the prediction of basic supply-and-demand analysis and, instead, to create real-world conditions that enable a scientifically set minimum wage actually to improve the welfare of most low-skilled workers without reducing the employment prospects of any of them. No. She supports minimum-wage legislation because she believes that raising the minimum wage will result simply in all low-skilled workers getting the stipulated pay raise without any negative consequences befalling these workers. And most of her constituents – even those low-skilled workers whose jobs are put at risk by the minimum wage – share her economically uninformed belief.

            In both of the above cases (and these are only two examples of many), economically destructive policies win favor largely because people do not understand economic principles. Public policy would be improved far more if more people learned only basic economic principles than if those people who now know only basic economic principles learned also more advanced economics.

            It’s called economic “principles” for a good reason: what is taught in a good economic-principles course are the principles of the operation of an economy guided by market prices. These principles are just that – principles – because they describe the underlying logic of market economies and, as such, are a reliable guide for understanding the economy (and government interventions into the economy) in most real-world cases. It’s true that reality sometimes serves up unusual combinations of events that render a knowledge only of economic principles misleading. But economic principles would be anti-principles if they did not on most occasions – as a rule – as a matter of course – with a solid, if rebuttal, presumption – give reliable and useful insight into how real-world economies actually operate.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Unsophisticated conservative: “The free market is perfect!”

            Can you find an example of a conservative (sophisticated or otherwise) saying that? To me, that reads as something unsophisticated liberals say about unsophisticated conservatives.

            I could imagine a conservative saying “the free market is awesome” or “the free market is really good at meeting human needs” but the claim that the free market is (or should be)perfect is based on the idea of “perfect competition”…which is the same context in which terms like “market failure” and “externality” show up. So if somebody hasn’t heard of “externality”, they probably haven’t heard “the market is perfect” either.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Glen Raphael:

            I don’t mean they think it is “perfect” in the sense that they believe it exhibits what economists call “perfect competition”. I mean they think it is perfect in the sense that there is nothing wrong with it: that the free market can be applied to all areas without any major problems.

            As for who believes this: well, I guess I believed it when I was 13 or so, and probably for some time afterwards. And I think it is pretty common among people who are pro-capitalist and don’t know much about economics. I don’t think there are lots of people writing books saying this.

          • ” I mean they think it is perfect in the sense that there is nothing wrong with it: that the free market can be applied to all areas without any major problems.”

            If they believed that they would be anarchists. There are libertarian anarchists but not many conservative anarchists, let alone unsophisticated conservative anarchists.

            Most conservatives, in my experience, are in favor of government production of national defense, law enforcement, dispute resolution. I would guess that a sizable majority are in favor of the existence of the public school system.

            Can you offer any evidence to support what I just quoted from you?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            I think many people have not considered the idea that law, police protection, and national defense could be provided by markets. Nor, I think, have they considered the idea that, whether or not it is supplemented by private schools, public schooling is not an essential function of the state. (Which, in turn, is a feature of reality as natural as the Moon.)

            Anarcho-capitalism is a meaningless term to many (most, I think) people. Their reaction to it is something on the order of: “What? People say this?” It’s like proposing to abolish gravity.

            As for evidence: personal experience is all I can offer off-hand. Plus the kind of accounts Bryan Caplan gives of his personal experience as a teenager hearing for the first time that there is such a thing as opposition to the FDA.

          • nydwracu says:

            Vox: Those 20 points are what educated liberals believe. Uneducated liberals believe — I am not making this up, someone actually said this, on my Facebook timeline of all places — that Europeans didn’t have fire until they colonized the New World.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            1. 19th century capitalism was nasty and brutish until unions and the government cleaned things up and improved wages and working conditions by striking and passing laws.

            5. Antitrust laws are a good idea and necessary to keep the economy from being taken over by one giant monopoly.

            8. America had a free market in healthcare before Obamacare, and that was the cause of the problems in the system.

            9. The 2008 financial crisis was caused by Bush’s (alleged) “deregulation” and Wall Street “greed”.

            10. Public schools are necessary / a good idea because education is a “public good”.

            14. Conservatives and libertarians support cutting government spending because they’re mean bastards who hate the poor.

            19. Native Americans were a peaceful race of “noble savages” “in tune with nature” who were wiped out in a policy of calculated genocide by the evil white settlers.

            Amusingly, I would avoid attributing the negations of most these claims (or, at least, saner claims in the vicinity) to intelligent conservatives for fear of being uncharitable.

          • Nornagest says:

            Uneducated liberals believe […] that Europeans didn’t have fire until they colonized the New World.

            Are you absolutely sure they weren’t trolling?

            I mean, I could point to all sorts of things that uneducated Blues believe. Homeopathy would be a good start. Naive forms of relativism. Crystals. All manner of New Age woo. Basically the full contents of “What The Bleep Do We Know”. But believing that Europeans didn’t have fire until they took over the New World — presumably after crossing the Atlantic by sheer force of evil — rings more of parody than ignorance to me.

          • nydwracu says:

            It was mentioned offhand in a rant by some Mexican author that got shared onto my timeline by some white progressives.

            The only reason I’ve heard of What The Bleep Do We Know is that the head of my college’s philosophy department kept namedropping it in lectures.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            believe […] that Europeans didn’t have fire until they colonized the New World

            No, it’s microwaves that they didn’t have then, and for many decades thereafter. That’s why there was no popcorn at the First Thanksgiving; microwaves hadn’t been invented yet.

            That’s a serious answer from ask.com … well, at least the second sentence was.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ nydwracu:

            The only reason I’ve heard of What The Bleep Do We Know is that the head of my college’s philosophy department kept namedropping it in lectures.

            Negatively, I hope. Right? Right?

        • Ano says:

          Leftists in France are already losing voters to the Front National. I think France is somewhat more susceptible to this because France also has a strong tradition of anti-clericalism.

          It’s the rank-and file voters that always leave first. It’s the elite that clings to the wreckage, because they’re already heavily invested in the ideology (and are usually True Believers anyway).

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Are you in France? I’d be interested to hear more.

          • Ano says:

            No, I’m British, and can only give the crudest approximation of French politics that I’m sure any Frenchman will take issue with. But I’m referring to the FN’s recent showing in the recent French regional elections; in the first round they won pluralities in many traditionally left-wing regions and were only blocked from winning any in the second round by tactical withdrawals from Socialist candidates.

        • Nornagest says:

          OTOH, Social Justice is strongly correlated with higher education, yet seems dumber than the beliefs of less educated people. How to explain?

          Well, for one thing, Social Justice in the sense that most of us are familiar with is closely linked to fashionable academic ideologies, but it’s not identical to them; the academy’s more concerned with e.g. postcolonialism and Marxianism as modes of analysis, which it’ll gleefully deploy against the mainstream or its academic rivals but which it ultimately sees as models to which alternatives can freely exist. (Provided that they’re broadly left-leaning, of course.) It’s treated as almost a game, where the objective is to say (hopefully) revealing and (definitely) subversive things about culture.

          Its outside consumers on the other hand are more prone to taking pieces of these models and making them into a totalizing ideology. Because academic cultural models often contradict each other, there is no single theory of Social Justice (hence the constant infighting), but the modeling aspect has gotten lost.

          It’s easy to see why, if you think about it. Academics specialize, and the culture in sociology and its friends rewards a rabble-rousing tone and doesn’t reward qualification: you’re supposed to listen to a bunch of different strains of demagoguery as a grublike undergrad, then choose the one you like the best during your pupal stage. But this reduces at any given point to sitting in the back of a lecture hall watching a very impassioned-looking woman pound on the table, or the literary equivalent. What happens if you haven’t been exposed to enough models to notice the contradictions, or if you’re starstruck enough to think there aren’t any contradictions and any evidence to the contrary must be your problem? Especially if you’re getting this info secondhand, or if you’re majoring in something like African-American Studies where every class uses the same model.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Huh, that would explain a lot. I had a mental model that the fashionable subversive ideologies that dominate Literature, Communications, Sociology, ans * Studies departments each emanated from a single author in continental Europe, preferably Paris. It’s got to be vastly more prestigious to get your postcolonialism from Fanon, feminism from Beauvoir, and general social criticism from Foucault than adopting an ideology Prof. Jane Doe, State University came up with, right?
            But what the kids are actually getting is pieces welded together into a totalizing ideology in their own minds. Trying to understand the logic or evidence for their beliefs will just lead to madness, like trying to debate Nyarlathotep.

            What needs to happen is to get these departments shut down. However, they fulfill a perceived structural need in society: a source of Bachelor’s Degrees that will fulfill employer requirements for a Bachelor’s in Anything, for kids who aren’t cut out for STEM or economics.

          • Nornagest says:

            The existence of subversive academic ideologies can’t be the whole story, though. Those have been around for at least forty, fifty years, have dominated the academy for most of that time, and yet Social Justice is something quite new; even as recently as when I went to college, the ideas were there but students weren’t assembling them into a totalizing whole, or at least not one robust enough to survive graduation and the transition into the real world. Social Justice has clear intellectual roots in the academy, but something’s happened in the last five, ten years that’s made it a lot more virulent without affecting its payload very much.

            Personally I think I might connect it to the rise of clickbait, but that might be my own bias talking.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: It has something to do with the internet, for sure. I think “clickbait” is a facile explanation, but all the pieces were present in academia when the internet took off, yet SJ didn’t take off immediately.

            Maybe there’s just a natural lag in the interaction between ideology and new technology? Jan Hus believed pretty much what Martin Luther believed, but the printing press didn’t help the Hussites until the Lutherans appeared.

          • Nornagest says:

            Well, by “clickbait” I was trying to gesture toward modern social media culture as a whole — I don’t think all the ingredients would be present without outlets like e.g. Gawker floating around, but Gawker couldn’t exist without infrastructure either. That infrastructure comes from e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (probably in that order of importance), which all have in common that you can share an article with one click and receive a near-instant reward for it in the form of likes and shares; while negative reinforcement is possible on most of these platforms, you usually need to put actual effort into it, and often expose yourself to criticism in turn.

            We’ve been able to create Internet bubbles for ourselves almost as long as the Internet’s existed, but until recently that’s taken effort: writing or commenting on blogs, being a regular on a forum or chat service. In the last three to five years, though, it’s become not only possible but actually rewarding to be a vector for ideology with nothing but clicks and occasionally less than 140 characters of outrage. My theory is that that made a stable Social Justice ecology possible, where previously it was self-limiting for demographic reasons.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: Okay, that makes quite a bit of sense.
            I think a key factor here was discovering the power of social media mobs to find people’s heretical statements on race/gender/LGBT and get them fired for it.

          • JDG1980 says:

            What needs to happen is to get these departments shut down. However, they fulfill a perceived structural need in society: a source of Bachelor’s Degrees that will fulfill employer requirements for a Bachelor’s in Anything, for kids who aren’t cut out for STEM or economics.

            I’d hardly put Economics on par with STEM when it comes to rigor. There may not be quite as much mind-killed dogma in Economics as in some of the other departments, but it does exist (e.g. treating Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument as holy writ rather than a hypothesis to be tested and possibly refuted).

            Anyway, do you really think there is no legitimate function that a Sociology department could serve? Would we be better off without any systematic attempt to study the subject at all? Or are you instead arguing that the existing universities are so corrupted that they’re like a Windows PC filled with malware and the best way forward is to wipe everything and start over?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @JDG1980: Or are you instead arguing that the existing universities are so corrupted that they’re like a Windows PC filled with malware and the best way forward is to wipe everything and start over?

            Yes, that. Shut the system down, let research universities open new departments to scientifically study society if they choose, and treat anyone with an old degree trying to get back in like they have a doctorate in homeopathy.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I’m not sure how you can refute comparative advantage; it is a mathematical statement that is right as long as the requirements are meet (transaction costs low enough, quality issues, etc)

          • anonymous says:

            @Nornagest
            I continue to believe that the backlash is the story. Young people that know it all and are holier than thou have always existed. But 20 years ago no one cared. When there’s a national media frenzy it doesn’t matter if it has a mocking or concerned tone it is still national news and institutions need a response. They can’t just let it blow over.

            So I think the clickbait explanation has some real truth to it but not via the means of causation you are positing.

    • rubberduck says:

      I think that seeing Muslims as non-white is less about the technicalities/actual skin color (do Muslims from the Balkans count as white? do converts?) as it is about Muslims having more oppression points than the average white cishet male. The white male is not threatening because of his skin color, the logic goes- he’s threatening because he’s more likely to end up in a position of power where he can subject the Muslim to more unreasonable airport security checks. I think I recall a repulsive Tumblr post at some point that went so far as to say that “whiteness is a mindset” and proceeded to call a black person white for disagreeing with… something.

      Plus, converting to Islam would not only be inconvenient but also bring the risk that fellow leftists would accuse you of cultural appropriation, which using the left’s definition is exactly what your post suggests. (Gaining the benefits of being PoC without the same heritage or struggle or whatever.)

    • Technically Not Anonymous says:

      White men aren’t actually so low status in liberal areas that huge numbers of us would convert to Islam. Try to remember that what you read on the internet about any group is heavily filtered and unlikely to reflect reality.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I forgot to mention that, but yes, that’s also obviously true and perhaps the most salient point.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I can only imagine what would happen around here, if I wrote something similarly ludicrous about “red tribe” or (much worse, grey tribe).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        This implies that the claim “young progressives = SJ = anti-white feminism” is silly alarmism.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          “This implies that the claim “young progressives = SJ = anti-white feminism” is silly alarmism.”

          Well, to a large extent it is. It’s a little bit like saying nerd male = misogynist.

          But you are also conflating a small section of blue tribe with its entirety.

          • Chalid says:

            I feel like we’re seeing the weak men are superweapons effect here. It’s really common in these comment sections to post about some crazy SJ behavior by a Tumblr mob or a handful of students at Oberlin. And it’s also really common to attribute this sort of thing to “liberals” or “Blue Tribe.” Put them together and you have yourself a completely crazy mental model of large swathes of the country.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Chalid:
            “Put them together and you have yourself a completely crazy mental model of large swathes of the country.”

            I sort of wonder whether the purpose is to actually model “large swathes of the country”.

            For example, take the model statement “It worries me that they are so [politically] powerful when nobody agrees with them.” You see statements that map onto that model frequently (from the left and the right). Of course it is internally incoherent, but I don’t think it’s purpose itself is to be coherent.

            Basically, I think the model itself is a weakman that serves the function of allowing one to think in a tribal mode. You convince yourself that the other side is dangerous (and therefore requires to be defeated) and simultaneously convince yourself that you are among allies, and therefore you can safely take action to defeat the dreaded other.

            Sort of the opposite of the “humblebrag”.

          • Chalid says:

            Agreed, it is not the purpose to build a model.

            Because a model of the outgroup is implicit in the tribal thinking you describe, people come to believe that implicit model without ever thinking about it critically.

            There is also a healthy dose of “I will spend lots of time discussing things that lower the status of my outgroup (and therefore raise the relative status of my ingroup).” After you do that for a while, availability bias corrupts your model of the outgroup.

          • walpolo says:

            HBC, I agree with your overall take on this ridiculous comment thread, but I do think it’s possible for a group to have a lot of political power without many people actually agreeing with them. This can happen when many people who disagree with them are especially reluctant to offend them or step on their toes.

            I think there are some spheres of influence in which SJ people have this sort of disproportionate power. Not many people actually support their agenda, but only a few are willing to be known as opponents of their agenda, and everyone else lets them have their way because it’s not worth risking the consequences of conflict with them.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Chalid: I’m not trying to use a superweapon here. I’m trying to build an accurate mental model of progressives. I registered as a Democrat when I turned 18 and identified as a liberal in college, and spent the next four years trying to understand why the hegemonic ideology there was anti-liberal while guarding my speech around thoughts related to inequality of outcome*.

            *Women are mentally and morally the same as men, but not biologically, and the different choices we make because of our bodies could be sufficient to explain inequalities of outcome between the sexes. Different ethnic groups have unequal outcomes because they have unequal cultures, what Scott called “culturalism” in his “Reactionary … Nutshell”. It shouldn’t be illegal to discriminate between heterosexuality and homosexuality, because heterosexual pair bonds locked in marriage have special utility for society.

            As far as position on Islam of progressives as a whole, not just a few college kids on a few campuses… every terrorist attack since 9/11, the immediate reaction I’ve noticed by mainstream progressives of all ages is to worry more about the possibility of “hate crimes” against Muslims or at least upsetting them with “Islamophobia” than about the people killed. 9/11 itself was exceptional, in that I saw even peers who would become Greens after they turned 18 putting up American flags and supporting the war in Afghanistan in addition to worrying about Islamophobia, but things soon shifted Left. By 2011, when US troops finally killed bin Laden, I had people on my Facebook feed, including a ex-Catholic lesbian professor from my alma mater, threatening to unfriend anyone who posted positively about it.
            When I started college, the only American Muslims I’d ever known were assimilated in mixed families. In the university town, Muslims felt confident enough to wear Islamic garb and openly talk about the rightness of sharia. We even had a propaganda play where the mostly-white cast included an empowered woman in a niqab being oppressed by white men. By 2011, I was seeing women in niqabs at places like grocery stores in a deep Blue city.
            So what exactly is it rational for me to think about progressives and Islam?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Le Maistre:

            I think you actually know that the Chinese cardiologist problem applies very well to Muslims and the 9/11 bombers. Heck, George W. himself immediately warned against stereotyping Muslims as responsible for 9/11.

            As to why liberal sentiments of solidarity curdled as the response to 9/11 continued, does the phrase “freedom fries” ring a bell? The condemnation of liberals as traitors for saying that the Iraq war had nothing to do will Al Queda? The jingoistic rage that looked for “camel jockeys” and “towel heads” to kill? The descent of the nation into official sanction and employ of torture?

            Frankly, my heart sank as soon as it became apparent what happened. It was obvious that the nation would want vengeance and work itself into a froth.

            And that has nothing to do with whether I care about the victims, their families and their friends. I have literally weeped when listening to stories about that day.

          • NN says:

            @Le Maistre Chat: The reason for the typical reaction of the Left to Islamist terrorist attacks is probably because, as Scott describes in this article, “America” as a concept has become increasingly associated with the Red Tribe, so core members of the Blue Tribe aren’t as rattled by attacks intended to terrorize Americans. 9/11 was an exception because this issue of Islamist terrorism hadn’t been politicized back then, and also because an attack of that scale in America was simply unprecedented at that point. Now that the issue has been politicized, conspicuously hating Islamist terrorists has become a way of signalling allegiance to the Red Tribe. Meanwhile, conspicuously expressing concern for persecuted minorities has long been a way of signalling allegiance to the Blue Tribe, and Muslims are currently seen as a persecuted minority by the Blues.

            Note that progressives haven’t actually displayed this kind of reaction to “every terrorist attack since 9/11,” because the Blue and Red tribes have virtually opposite reactions to their usual ones whenever anything that can be described as a terrorist attack is committed by anyone who can even be remotely associated with the Red Tribe. See Breivik, Charleston, and especially the Planned Parenthood shooting.

          • TheNybbler says:

            “Meanwhile, conspicuously expressing concern for persecuted minorities has long been a way of signalling allegiance to the Blue Tribe, and Muslims are currently seen as a persecuted minority by the Blues.”

            Note “seen as”. They’re “seen as” a persecuted minority because it’s convenient for the Blues to do so. But they’re not actually persecuted, not in the US.

            Because of this phenomenon where every time there’s an attack by an Islamic terrorist the reaction from the authorities is immediately to denounce any backlash, I went and looked up hate crimes in the US. While figures for the current year are not available, in fact hate crimes against Muslims are rare. How rare? Well, much rarer than attacks against Jews (even accounting for the greater Jewish population), despite Jews being privileged rather than persecuted in the usual hierarchy.

            There’s claims that hate crimes against muslims have tripled since Paris. If that’s true (and it’s partially based on news reports, so I suspect reporting bias), and it continued at that high level, Muslims would be the most frequent target of hate crimes accounting for population though Jews would be highest overall.

            Further, religious hate crimes are rare by any standard. There were 1140 total in 2014, compared to 3227 racial bias hate crimes.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @HeelBearCub: I think the Chinese Robber Fallacy is a red herring here. The idea there is that being a robber has no correlation to Chinese-ness, you could just come up with a lot of examples if you had an ax to grind against Chinese people because they’re such a large ethnic group.
            But “Muslim” isn’t an ethnic group. If you’re a Muslim, you have to believe there is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet, the second truth claim usually encompassing the belief that he was al-insan al-Kamil (the perfect human). So whenever Muslims violate sharia in order to get along in modernized states, they are, if Islam is true, doing bad (in a very Platonic sense).
            So how good of a person was Muhammad? Is he someone we want all the moderate Muslims in our countries to wake up tomorrow and start successfully imitating?

            As to why liberal sentiments of solidarity curdled as the response to 9/11 continued, does the phrase “freedom fries” ring a bell? The condemnation of liberals as traitors for saying that the Iraq war had nothing to do will Al Queda? The jingoistic rage that looked for “camel jockeys” and “towel heads” to kill? The descent of the nation into official sanction and employ of torture?

            I don’t remember any jingoistic rage about killing “camel jockeys” or “towel heads”. Obviously I do remember that George W. Bush had a stupid, harmful foreign policy, as moderate Muslim dictators like Saddam (or Nasser, or Assad) actually checked Islamic fundamentalism, nor was there evidence that torturing terrorists extracts lifesaving information. So why didn’t progressives react to his nonsense with the position that we need to fight jihad rationally, instead of the line that the terrorists are oppressed brown people with legitimate grievances against white imperialism that have nothing to with Islam and all Western countries need to take in more Muslims without asking them to assimilate, and if they commit rape and terrorism at a far higher per capita rate than the natives it has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with racism?

          • NN says:

            Note “seen as”. They’re “seen as” a persecuted minority because it’s convenient for the Blues to do so. But they’re not actually persecuted, not in the US.

            It sort of depends on how you define “persecuted minority.” It’s true that Jews are much more likely to be the victims of hate crimes, but how often do you see plans to build new synagogues draw protests and lawsuits, or parents groups protesting against their kids “being subject to Jewish indoctrination” by being taught about the religion in geography classes, or leading presidential candidates talking about banning Jews from entering the country?

            Regardless, I agree that the typical Social Justice hierarchy of oppression is poorly thought out and leaves little room for nuance. But I disagree that Jews are considered privileged in the usual hierarchy. From looking at SJ material online I get the sense that Jews are considered an oppressed group in an abstract sense, but SJ discussions rarely bring them up in practice, likely because in America most Jews are perceived as white. Still, the SJ community tends to have no idea how to respond whenever an issue comes up involving both Jews and Muslims as in, for example, hates crimes committed in Europe against Jews by Muslims or Israeli invasions of Gaza.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            HBC:

            I think you actually know that the Chinese cardiologist problem applies very well to Muslims and the 9/11 bombers. Heck, George W. himself immediately warned against stereotyping Muslims as responsible for 9/11.

            If you look at a fairly representative sample of Chinese people and find that an unusually large proportion of them are robbers, you’re entitled to assume that Chinese are disproportionately likely to rob and to seek an explanation for this.

            NN:

            or parents groups protesting against their kids “being subject to Jewish indoctrination” by being taught about the religion in geography classes,

            Assuming that we’re thinking of the same thing, the issue was that the children were studying Arabic calligraphy by writing out “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet”. I’d imagine that there would be at least as many complaints if children had had to, say, copy out the Lord’s Prayer or learn the Ten Commandments.

            Regardless, I agree that the typical Social Justice hierarchy of oppression is poorly thought out and leaves little room for nuance. But I disagree that Jews are considered privileged in the usual hierarchy. From looking at SJ material online I get the sense that Jews are considered an oppressed group in an abstract sense, but SJ discussions rarely bring them up in practice, likely because in America most Jews are perceived as white.

            Jews are like Schroedinger’s White Man: they’re simultaneously white and non-white until it becomes relevant to the argument, whereupon the wave function collapses and their ethnic status changes to whatever is most helpful to the SJ position.

          • NN says:

            Assuming that we’re thinking of the same thing, the issue was that the children were studying Arabic calligraphy by writing out “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet”. I’d imagine that there would be at least as many complaints if children had had to, say, copy out the Lord’s Prayer or learn the Ten Commandments.

            If that was the only time this sort of thing happened, it would be somewhat reasonable. It isn’t, and a lot of the time complaints are over completely innocuous teaching about Islam during classes that also teach about other major world religions.

            And if you think there would have been just as much controversy over a similar teaching on Christianity, then you need to learn more about American politics. Sure, some small secularist groups would complain, and maybe there would have eventually been an ACLU sponsored lawsuit, but there is no way there would have been an outcry on this scale, especially in the small town Red Tribe dominated areas where this kind of thing tends to happen. Just look at how long it took to completely remove official prayers from American public schools.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Le Maistre:

            There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Undoubtedly some of them hold views that are horrible, and some of those horrible beliefs are attributed by them to their religion, and some of those will act on the beliefs.

            But clearly that last group isn’t 1.6 billion or even 100 million.

            Eric Rudolph and many other domestic US terrorists were Christians claiming to be motivated by Christianity. Should I be concerned about Christians propensity for terrorism as a group?

            Now, I don’t think religions are true. But I think ascribing, say, the Jonestown massacre to religion gets things backwards. People tend to bend religion to their desires, not vice versa.

          • Jaskologist says:

            It doesn’t make sense to look at the terrorism rates of different groups in America without also being mindful of the relative size of those groups. In America, 70% of the population self-identifies as Christian. Muslims are 1%.

            Nobody is trying to make hay of the fact that nearly all of the child molesters in Saudi Arabia are Muslim. But if we find that to be the case in Europe, where most people are not Muslim, that’s worth looking into deeper.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The original Mr. X:
            Once you adjust for all of the confounds, sure.

            But, you don’t to get to assert it without proving it. And you don’t get to ignore the IRA and British Loyalists in Northern Ireland. You don’t get to ignore fundamentalist Christians in the US. You don’t get to ignore terror attacks by Buddhists or Hindus.

            Hell, I don’t think you can ignore the Nazis. I don’t think they were motivated by religion. But then, I don’t think any of the other mass killers are particularly motivated by religion either.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Jaskatologist:

            That is a fair point. But then again, how many terrorist attacks have been carried out in the US by Muslims? I think it’s a total of 4 right now. Twin towers (twice), Ft. Hood, San Bernadino.

            It’s a small sample set. Two of them carried out by 1 organization.
            Vs. How many by Christians?

          • NN says:

            That is a fair point. But then again, how many terrorist attacks have been carried out in the US by Muslims? I think it’s a total of 4 right now. Twin towers (twice), Ft. Hood, San Bernadino.

            It’s a small sample set. Two of them carried out by 1 organization.
            Vs. How many by Christians?

            There was also the Boston Marathon bombing, possibly the 2001 Anthrax attacks, and a bunch of attempted bombings that failed to kill anyone due to the incompetence of the terrorists. Of course, there are also lots of terrorist attacks by non-Muslims that no one remembers because they weren’t very destructive. From 1980 to 2005, approximately 6% of terrorist attacks on US soil were carried out by Islamic Extremists. That is disproportionate compared to the Muslim population, but the portion of terrorist attacks committed by Jewish extremists (7%) is also disproportionate compared to the Jewish population.

            In Europe, meanwhile, the statistics for 2006-2008 show that the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks in those years were committed by Basque and Corsican separatists, with Islamist terrorist attacks amounting to just 0.4% of the total.

            EDIT: I checked the most recent version of the EU terrorism report, and it looks like in 2014 separatist terrorists were still responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Europe despite significant declines in separatist terrorist activity.

            Now it is true that Islamist terrorists are more likely to kill people with their attacks than most groups, with parts of the American Far Right being significant exceptions (I don’t know enough about groups in Europe to make a judgment there). But it is simply false to say that Muslims are the only group with a “terrorism problem.”

          • John Schilling says:

            That is a fair point. But then again, how many terrorist attacks have been carried out in the US by Muslims?

            Boston Marathon bombing, the Beltway Sniper attacks, the LAX/El Al shooting, the Chattanooga recruiting center shootings, counting only cases with multiple fatalities and relatively unambiguous motives. Possibly also the late 2001 anthrax attacks.

            Probably many more unsuccessful or minimally-successful attacks, but Google doesn’t bring up any source that I trust to distinguish between “A Muslim tried to kill someone in the name of Allah” and “A Muslim tried to kill someone over some private grudge”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I think I would quibble with a few of the other “Muslim terror attacks”, but regardless, I think we can all agree it is a very small sample set.

            There is a sub-group that we should be concerned about. It’s those people who actually advocate and carry out terror attacks.Trying to map that onto all 1.6 billion Muslims makes little sense.

          • John Schilling says:

            It’s those people who actually advocate and carry out terror attacks.

            And if someone in Waziristan is upset that their niece just got blown up by a drone strike at a wedding reception, their only legitimate concern is with the sub-group of Americans who are actually CIA drone pilots?

            I don’t think that is either a realistic expectation or a workable solution.

          • NN says:

            Also, I think the math is clear that if you want to focus on per-capita number of terrorist attacks, then Basques (about 3 million people, dozens of terrorist attacks every year) and Northern Irish Catholics (less than a million people, 22 attacks in 2014) are both far more dangerous that European Muslims (about 19 million people, 2 terrorist attacks in 2014).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:

            “Action of the US government ” maps fairly well onto “action taken by Al Queda”.

            When The Taliban ruled Aghanistan and gave safe harbor to Al Queda, we held the nation-state responsible, with UN backing.

          • John Schilling says:

            On 9/11/2001, yes. Of the enumerated Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States since, I don’t believe any were committed by anyone who was an agent of Al Qaeda or who was following instructions of Al Qaeda’s leadership.

            The model you are working from has the advantage of providing an unambiguous answer to the question, “which people can we hold responsible for this?”, but the disadvantage of not describing the real world.

          • Jiro says:

            Using figures that go back to 1980 in a context of what terrorists are dangers today is misleading. Worse, the figures end at 2005, but it’s 2015 right now–anything recent isn’t even in the list.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:

            I didn’t say Al Queda was the only organization to be worried about. Nor did I say every terrorist was member of a particular organization.

            But you can’t treat attacks carried out in the name of a nation-state by officials of that state as if they were carried out solely by individuals. Conversely, we shouldn’t treat lone wolf attacks as if they were.coordinated by some inchoate mass of people.

            Otherwise, we need to ascribe the VT shooting to whom? Asians? Christians? College students? No, none of these make sense.

          • John Schilling says:

            @HeelBearCub: “Coordinated” is needlessly specific there. “Incited” works better, and allows for more sensible conclusions.

          • NN says:

            Using figures that go back to 1980 in a context of what terrorists are dangers today is misleading. Worse, the figures end at 2005, but it’s 2015 right now–anything recent isn’t even in the list.

            Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a more up-to-date official list on the situation in the US, but looking at Wikipedia’s list of terrorist attacks in the US from 2010 until today I count 7 attacks by Islamic extremists, 8 attacks by members of the far right, and 5 attacks by others. It seems likely that there were more attacks in those years that weren’t notable enough to end up on the list, so I’d be cautious about drawing conclusions from that data.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Phil Goetz wrote about this, using a more systematic database.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Doug Knight:

            Two problems leap out at me w/re Goetz’s dataset. Which, to be fair, is someone else’s dataset that he chose to use; I don’t blame him for the omissions but I do wish he’d noted their significance.

            First, per Goetz: “Also, this doesn’t list any acts committed without direct supervision from a recognized terrorist group”

            That’s a bit of a problem given that terrorist groups both Islamic and Christian have of late determined that the “leaderless resistance” model is more likely to give results than setting up a traditional terrorist organization under the eyes of the FBI and NSA. On examination, the GTD dataset certainly does include at least some such incidents (the Fort Hood shooting but not the Beltway Snipers), so I assume he’s talking specifically about the charts he uses. Still, the Beltway Snipers were about 1/3 of the total US terrorist deaths since 2001, and what else are those graphs missing? Did he get any of the abortion-clinic bombings of the 1990s, for example?

            Second, ” I couldn’t help but notice one other glaring thing in the US data: terrorist acts attributed to “Individual”. I checked 200 cases from other countries and did not find one case tagged “Individual”. But half of all attributed cases in the US from 2000-2013 are tagged “Individual”. The lone gunman thing, where someone flips out and shoots up a Navy base, or bombs a government building because of a conspiracy theory, is distinctively American.”

            We’ve been through this before, and no, this isn’t so. And this one is mostly on Goetz, I think, though the GTD is conspicuously inconsistent here. Checking the database, I quickly find:

            Hesham Mohammad Hadayet deciding on his own account to shoot up LAX and kill two people in the name of Islam is per the GTD a terrorist attack attributed to an “individual” in the United States.

            Arid Uka shooting up the Frankfurt airport while shouting “Allahu Akbar!’, killing two people, is per the GTD a terrorist attack attributed to an “individual” in Germany. What Goetz claims never ever happens.

            And Anders Behring Brevik decides to shoot up a Norwegian camp and kill seventy-seven people in the name of white nationalism, but the GTD decides this isn’t a terrorist attack.

            So, bad on the GTD for being somewhat wishy-washy about whether non-American lone wolf terrorists should count as “terrorists”. Even worse on Goetz for being so uncritical as to accept the idea that mass shootings were so uniquely American that he couldn’t find even one in two hundred elsewhere, without being suspicious about his dataset.

            Ultimately, I think Goetz may be on to something with the theory that Muslims have given terrorism a bad name, but I don’t trust his numbers.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            John, even if all of your criticisms were correct, I think Goetz’s analysis is better than anything else offered in this thread. However, I think each of your criticisms is in error. For example, Brevik is in the database.

          • John Schilling says:

            Interesting – Breivik shows up when I search for the name (correctly spelled), or for ‘Norway’, but not searching for incidents during 21-23 July 2011.

            So better for GTD, but makes it even harder to understand how Goetz looks through that dataset and concludes that no non-American ever decides by his own self to go on a shooting spree. And did he not even remember Breivik, to wonder what was missing from his cull of the data?

            Seriously not impressed.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @john schilling:
            No, I think incitement and coordination are different. Perhaps the word incitement is too broad. Directly calling for murders, etc. over open channels is different than talking indirectly about, say, abortionists who “will receive retribution.” Both of those could fall under incitement, though.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            John, it’s hard to understand because it didn’t happen.

            When I search by date, Breivik comes up, but he’s on the second page, since the database has 48 incidents over those 3 days and defaults to 20 incidents per page.

          • John Schilling says:

            @HeelBearCub: Yes, of course “incitement” and “coordination” are different; that’s why I suggested that the substitution mattered. Incitement is the one we care about, because that’s the one that does harm. Coordination is just tactics.

            If you want a dozen people to die by violence, and with that intent you do a thing that you know will likely cause a dozen people to die by violence, you are morally culpable for a dozen homicides.

            Whether or not the thing that you do is pull the trigger on a machine gun, or tell someone you know will obey you to pull the trigger on a machine gun.

            Whether or not you specify the time, the target, or even the gunman. If you reasonably expect people to die as a result, you’re a killer even if you don’t know the names of anyone involved. And morally, you should be held accountable just like the guy who actually does pull the trigger on a machine gun.

            Pragmatically, of course, eschewing coordination makes it less likely that you will be held accountable – the weaker chain of command is harder to trace back, and the weasel-wording maybe lets you claim plausible deniability about what you meant to happen or understood would happen. But if I’m being attacked by people who make the tactically expedient decision to not coordinate the murders they choose to incite, I’m not going to pretend the series of uncoordinated killings are the result of unconnected individual decisions and limit myself to playing whack-a-mole with an endless series of expendable gunmen.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Douglas Knight:
            But shouldn’t Goetz’s analysis included the Breivik event? Making his statement about no “lone terrorist not part of an organization” events in Europe similar to false? Granted, he just checked some semi-random set of cases, so he is mostly just pointing at much rarer than in the US.

            Regardless, his analysis doesn’t tell us very much at all about Islamic terrorism in the world in general as compared to other groups. The big spike in Islamic terrorism globally isn’t put in any context.

            I also wonder if attacks of Sufi on Shiah or vice-versa is included in that database (which looks a lot like sectarian conflict).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            Sorry, I think something in how I expressed myself, a miswording perhaps, is confusing you as to my meaning.

            You were pointing at “coordination” being too narrow. I’m saying incitement is too broad. Calling for specific actions is different than just talking about how evil someone is. I agree that, if an organization is broadcasting a call for specific actions you can hold them responsible if those actions are taken. I’m not saying it’s cut-and-dry, but I do think the signal to noise ratio drops off as you get farther and farther from specifics.

            Note, however, that the original phrase I used, to which you seemed to object, was “It’s those people who actually advocate and carry out terror attacks.”

            Perhaps I should have said and/or there, but I thought it was clear that “advocate” could refer to a separate person from the one who actually carried out the attack.

            Perhaps we are in vehement agreement.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t think the relevant metric is specificity, but intent or expectation. Specificity is usually a good indicator of intent, but neither necessary nor sufficient to such a determination.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            HBC, yes, the “statement” that you attribute to him is false. However, he does not make that statement. Yes, you correctly determined what can be concluded from his evidence, which is also what he concluded. You and John are not the only ones to attribute to him the universal claim, so we can certainly blame him for lack of clarity.

            Yes, Goetz’s headline claim is pretty weird. I don’t know how much his global graph supports his causal claim. But let’s drop the global considerations and the causal considerations. He finds, by sampling, that terrorism in America in the 70s was diverse, while today it is Muslims, lone nuts, and non-lethal animal activists. That is quite relevant to this thread.

            Yes, the spike in worldwide Islamic terrorism is internecine (although probably moderate-extremist, not Shia-Suni). Phil seems to be aware of this, but he should have said it explicitly. I don’t know whether that is evidence for or against his causal theory.

          • NN says:

            Looking at the GTD statistics for the US from 2012-2014, including only those incidents that unambiguously meet all 3 “terrorism criteria,” I find the following:

            In those 3 years, there were 38 terrorist incidents on US soil that caused 29 deaths and 150 injuries. Islamic extremists were responsible for only 7 of those incidents, but they were responsible for 10 of the deaths and 137 of the injuries (most of the injuries were caused by the Boston Marathon bombing). Most of the remaining casualties were caused by terrorists motivated by white nationalist and/or anti-government views, who during those 3 years carried out 18 attacks that killed 17 people and injured 10. The remaining 13 incidents killed 2 people and injured 1 person.

            To sum up, most terrorists in America are not Muslim, but Islamic extremist terrorists tend to inflict more casualties per attack than the average American terrorist does.

            EDIT: I accidentally included 2 of the perpetrators in the death count, and I have edited the post to correct that.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            NN, you can link to your search.

          • NN says:

            He finds, by sampling, that terrorism in America in the 70s was diverse, while today it is Muslims, lone nuts, and non-lethal animal activists. That is quite relevant to this thread.

            From examining the GTD, I’ve found that Islamic extremist terrorists in America nowadays tend to also be either lone nuts or work with a single partner (the Boston bombers, the pair that attacked the Garland Draw Muhammad event, the San Bernandino couple). Far right terrorist pairs are a bit less common, but they aren’t totally unheard of (for example, the anti-government couple that killed 3 people in a shooting spree in Las Vegas in 2014). It seems that in post-9/11 America, terrorist plots that involve more than 2 people just aren’t possible. Score one for the FBI, I guess.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            December 21, 2015 at 6:42 pm

            “I also wonder if attacks of Sufi on Shiah or vice-versa is included in that database (which looks a lot like sectarian conflict).”

            I assume that’s a thinko for “attacks of *Sunni* on Shiah or vice-versa”.

        • science2 says:

          This implies that the claim “young progressives = SJ = anti-white feminism” is silly alarmism.

          It is, but if it weren’t equating them with “deep blue” wouldn’t be a fair characterization.

          Crazy college kids aren’t a central example of anything except crazy college kids.

          P.S. Does this site hellban?

    • Seth says:

      Additionally, Blues are not stupid about attempts to hack the status system. People who are even suspected of trying to do so, are considered norms-violators who may be intensely attacked. The best example of this reaction is the case of the the woman who believes she is trans-racial. Her belief was generally met with fury, in part accusing her of attempting to claim undeserved status.

      Really, people aren’t like the cheesy scifi AI, where a supposed logical contradiction in an axiom renders them helpless.
      Captain Kirk: “You of Bluedom say the whitemale is bad while the PoC is good. But Muslims are PoC’s. You say I am a whitemale and so bad. I declare I am a Muslim. Then I must be a PoC and thus good.”
      Blue Leader: “Kirk, I’m not a dumb computer program. You’re an arrogant patronizing colonialist imperalist too, and that’s a supercategory.”

      • Then explain Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          Is Shaun King really faking his race, I know he has done some shifty behavior but has it ever actually been proved?

          I do read Milo but I am always 50/50 on whether to trust him or not and would be interested in seeing how far he can be trusted. Wikipedia lists him as having done some financially and ethically shifty stuff- plus I cannot help but get the feeling that he wants to play a character, get rich and then get out.

          • Sastan says:

            If his birth certificate is correct, King is faking the funk.

            His argument is that his mother cheated on her husband with a black man and kept it a secret, so he’s part black, but not so much his legal father ever noticed.

      • “Additionally, Blues are not stupid about attempts to hack the status system. People who are even suspected of trying to do so, are considered norms-violators who may be intensely attacked. ”

        Elizabeth Warren is a pretty striking counterexample. Claiming to be a minority in a database used by potential employers, claiming to be Native American to universities that employ you, all on the basis of a family tradition of a Cherokee great great grandmother (exact relative by my memory) for which no support was ever offered, is an extreme case of hacking the status system. Not only was Warren not attacked, she is a leading figure of the blue tribe.

        • Seth says:

          http://web.archive.org/web/20040506113834/http://www.daft.com/~rab/liberty/Miscellaneous/Nozick-article

          ANARCHY, STATE, AND RENT CONTROL

          “Robert Nozick, a philosophy professor at Harvard, is the intellectual hero
          of libertarians. His book, _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_, winner of the
          National Book Award in 1974, argues that “free minds and free markets” are
          the key to a successful society. While endorsing personal choice on social
          issues like drugs and pornography, Nozick mocked the economic
          interventionism of contemporary liberals who, he said, are “willing to
          tolerate every kind of behavior except capitalistic acts between consenting
          adults.” Alas, it now appears that like so many other advocates of the free
          market, Nozick is willing to make one small exception –himself. …

          Perhaps the libertarian philosopher should not be expected to opt out of rent control voluntarily. But should he be pursuing his landlord through the maze of rent control regulations like a man possessed? And should he be using his ability to make a nuisance of himself under these regulations for simple, if lawful, cash extortion? ”

          Obviously, this is a striking counter-example to the idea that Libertarians aren’t massive hypocrites, where “free market” is just a synonym for plunder. Nozick was willing to use State power to abrogate a contract he had freely entered and for morally unjust enrichment, yet remains a respected figure to Libertarians. Oh, how can such things be, in a supposedly logically consistent philosophy? How is it, like the joke about an act with a sheep, that Nozick’s name does not live in Libertarian infamy?

          [To spell it out – high status members of any tribe get a pass over stuff that the tribe won’t tolerate from low-status members, especially other tribes.]

          • Nozick was attacked by libertarians for the actions you describe. Have liberals proposed shunning Warren for pretending to be a minority in order to improve her employment prospects?

            There is a considerable difference between “this philosopher wrote a book which provides good support for our position” and “this politician is our favorite candidate for president.” The book stands on its own, whether or not the author lives up to its principles. That doesn’t work for the politician.

          • Adam says:

            Great-great grandmother would make her 1/16th Cherokee, wouldn’t it? That isn’t necessarily enough for tribal registration, because the nation has peculiar rules that exclude certain sub-groups (I’m way more than 1/16th and can’t apply). I’m pretty sure it’s enough for certain government benefits and scholarships, though. It’s hard to blame a person for taking advantage of that. She didn’t make the blood quantum rule, which doesn’t require you ever experience any personal hardship.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Adam
            “I’m pretty sure it’s enough for certain government benefits and scholarships, though.”

            For those, I rather think a great deal is required in the way of claiming such status on the official form of whatever one is applying for, and providing whatever documentation it requests.

            Absent records of any such applications from her, well, I don’t think she was born in Kenya, either.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Adam

            http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/is-elizabeth-warren-native-american-or-what/257415/
            based on the public evidence so far, she doesn’t appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
            [….]
            Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, “Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?” “No,” she replied.

            While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as “white.” But between 1986 and 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; — [Please note that the following is an after the fact listing by UP, not something that EW herself listed] — the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 “minority equity report” also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.

          • Seth says:

            There is a considerable difference between “this philosopher wrote a book which provides good support for our position” and “this politician is our favorite candidate for president.”

            Indeed, I agree. A serious candidate for President will unavoidably have all sort of warts, since “President” is a job, while a philosopher who contravenes his own philosophy is in some sense self-refutation by example. But I don’t suppose that’s what you meant. Per:

            The book stands on its own, whether or not the author lives up to its principles. That doesn’t work for the politician.

            I have to disagree with the above idea in terms of how you use “stands on its own”. The author is showing that even he doesn’t adhere to the principles in real life. Whereas the politician is almost the epitome of real life as opposed to philosophy. That is, the book may exist as outlining an abstraction, but ability to practice in the philosophy in reality is also significant. Notable, if one charge is that the philosophy is a rationalization for plunder and enrichment, finding the author contravened it when it stood in the way of personal plunder and enrichment, is surely significant evidence.

            But are we in agreement that being a serious candidate for President is an extremely atypical status position?

          • Again–the book stands on its own. The reason to be persuaded by the book, if you are, is that it contains persuasive arguments, not that the author demonstrated that he was a good person.

            In the case of the politician, if you elect her president you aren’t putting in the White House the political positions she proclaims but the person who proclaimed them. If that person is a hypocrite–demonstrates by her actions that she does not really believe in those principles–then you cannot expect her to act on those principles once elected. If her particular form of hypocrisy consisted of benefiting herself by violating the principles she proclaimed, it is likely she will do the same thing in office if the opportunity to arises.

            It’s true that most people don’t have the opportunity to be President. But the particular person we are discussing was the preferred candidate of the left wing of the Democratic party.

            For an account of the controversy more detailed and less sympathetic to Warren than the one Houseboat quoted:

            http://elizabethwarrenwiki.org/elizabeth-warren-native-american-cherokee-controversy/

          • nonymous says:

            David
            After reading hundreds of your comments i have to ask if there is any daylight between your beliefs and those of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

            Do you disagree that your actual real life politics are functionally indistinguishable, if superficially less hysterical, from mainstream corporate conservatism?

          • nonymous says:

            I decided to check your blog to see if you apply the same rigorous standards you apply to the people who are actually running for president as you do to Warren.

            I can only find one mention of a Republican candidate. Here it is:

            President Carson
            My preferred candidates are Rand Paul for the Republican party and Gary Johnson for the Libertarian Party, but the candidate I find most interesting at the moment is Ben Carson. I do not think he is likely to get nominated, let alone elected. But if he did end up in the White House, what kind of a job would he do?

            He is intelligent and likable, both useful assets, but he has no experience at anything close to the job he is running for. There have been Presidents before with a background outside of politics, such as Grant and Eisenhower, but both were generals, men who had successfully run large organizations. Have there been any Presidents like Carson, successful men whose success did not involve either politics or administration? None occur to me—but it is not a subject I know much about. Perhaps one of my readers can offer an example.

            The job of president is, long has been, too big for one man, so the question will be how good he is at building and running a team. Can he select competent subordinates, coordinate them, evaluate the advice they give him? Judging by my one first hand experience of neurosurgery, that too is a team job. But I have no idea whether Carson as surgeon was the creator and leader of a team or merely its star member.

            If he does make it, it should be interesting.”

            Why shouldn’t this chasmic bias be great enough to disqualify the speaker as a serious person worth listening to when the topic is politics?

            I challenge anyone to find a more graphic example of implacable bias and isolated outrage than your Warren and Carson comments made within three months of eachother.

          • “After reading hundreds of your comments i have to ask if there is any daylight between your beliefs and those of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? ”

            I don’t know the views of the Chamber of Commerce. Are they in favor of abolishing all tariffs? Of open immigration? Opposed to government subsidies of firms? In favor of drug legalization? Opposed to civil forfeiture? In favor of a non-interventionist foreign policy?

            I would be surprised to find that they agree with me on all those points, but since you have apparently made yourself an expert on both their views and mine, perhaps you can cite their positions on those issues.

    • James Picone says:

      Please tell me one of your two reasons is “My premises are false”.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Yes. Either “white men are not treated worse than others in Blue communities” or “they will distinguish between Muslims of different races”.
        The other was that most men like their native culture and wouldn’t do something that would disadvantage themselves in large parts of it.

    • Sastan says:

      No puzzling necessary, just understand the hierarchy of Oppression Olympics!

      Muslims may be lauded and coddled because they are the only current threat to western civilization, but leftist status games are always racist in the end. Muslim isn’t nearly enough to get past the vast crime of being born a white male. Unless, of course, you champion leftist politics, and even then they might BLM you like Sanders.

      Religion is worth less than sexual orientation which is worth less than sex which is worth less than race. And none of it matters unless you are a leftist, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But for leftists, to gain status among leftists, that’s the scale.

      • onyomi says:

        “Religion is worth less than sexual orientation which is worth less than sex which is worth less than race. And none of it matters unless you are a leftist, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But for leftists, to gain status among leftists, that’s the scale.”

        Wow, this comports perfectly with my own, subjective impression of the reality. Feminists’ rejection of Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand always proved the last point in my mind.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Sastan already gave a better example: Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
          African woman immigrates with no money to escape an arranged marriage, gets a degree in political science, is rejected by feminists and anti-racists for espousing Enlightenment ideas.

          • onyomi says:

            Okay, except I had never heard of her and she is much less famous than the two I mentioned.

            Though arguably the fact they can’t accept even a less prominent, and therefore, less threatening figure, does make it a better example (though maybe she is more dangerous to their minds because of all that sweet victim cred she threatens to yield).

        • Sastan says:

          Basically, leftists are all about immutable differences and denying them. You can choose an ideology or religion, sexual identity tends to be more fixed, but can plastic, especially for women. They are pushing hard for sex to be a non-fixed category, with hilarious results as some feminists deny the ability of anyone born male to ever be female (or to take the status associated with it). We’re on to race, with race being the ultimate status, and the hardest to change. But between Shaun White and Rachel Dolezal, the path is clear. The inter-left status death spiral has begun. I say this as a triracial pansexual otherkin: Pass the popcorn.

          • They are pushing hard for sex to be a non-fixed category

            No, biological sex is fixed (but not binary for a statistically significant fraction of people; ~1% of people are intersex). It’s gender that’s more fluid and largely socially-defined, and thus capable of being changed.

            with hilarious results as some feminists deny the ability of anyone born male to ever be female (or to take the status associated with it)

            No. Referring to “radical feminism” as “some feminists” is insulting in the same way that referring to suicide cults as “some Christians” is insulting. They’re radically far outside the mainstream, and hated by people in the mainstream. They use the term “feminism”, but do not represent in any significant way the beliefs of mainstream feminism.

            I say this as a triracial pansexual otherkin:

            trololol u know some tumblr words ur so cool

          • The devastating counterargument to that particular religious belief is the life of David Reimer.

            I… what? I said it was “more fluid” and “capable of being changed”, not “infinitely plastic” and “automatically conforming to whatever society chooses to raise you as”. There is no reasonable way to interpret my words as excluding the existence of people like David Reimer.

            I’m genuinely confused as to how you think someone being raised trans but turning out cis is a “devastating counterexample” to the existence of tons of trans people. Do you believe that trans people don’t exist? Do you think that “gender is more fluid” is an SJW idiom that secretly means “everyone is trans”? I don’t get it.

            (Edit: Ah, one tiny bit of confusion – I’m using “gender” in two different ways in the same sentence, and that’s definitely my bad. “Gender”, the binary concept of “boy” and “girl” things, is largely socially-defined – there’s a small core of sex-related things, and the rest are accreted socially, like gender-appropriate clothing or makeup. Among the things that are sex-related, they tend to be split in the binary out of proportion to how they actually manifest physically – men are slightly physically stronger on average, but there’s a whole host of jobs/activities that favor physical strength which are assigned the “man’s stuff” label, and it’s considered “unwomanly” for a strong woman to be into them.

            But then I said “capable of being changed”, where I was referring to personal gender. That’s also socially-defined to some extent, but most people have an innate sense of their own gender that is fairly clear from birth.)

    • NN says:

      1). “White male” is not the lowest status in deep Blue communities, the actual lowest status is “white male wrongthinker.” It is true that they often talk about white males being the worst thing in the world, but “white” frequently just serves as a code word for “Red Tribe.” See Scott’s article on this subject.

      2). The current Blue Tribe alliance with Muslims is primarily a strategic alliance, like how the British starting singing songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” during WWI, after centuries of brutally oppressing the Irish, or how the Nazis declared the Japanese to be “honorary Aryans.” Before 9/11, American Muslims overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. As the War On Terror geared up, despite Bush the Younger’s best efforts at reaching out to Muslims, they switched over en masse to the Democratic Party, which they perceived as less likely to bomb, spy on, torture, and generally oppress Muslims. The Blue Tribe was eager to obtain a new ally against their hated Outgroup, the Red Tribe, so they quickly began singing condescending paens to the virtues of Muslims.

      One would think that the Obama administration continuing many of Bush the Younger’s anti-terrorism policies would put this alliance in jeopardy, but Trump’s antics are probably enough to keep the alliance secure for at least a few more years. But if ISIS and Al-Qaeda were defeated and America’s next foreign enemy turned out to be something other than Islamic Fundamentalists, such as Russia, then the political allegiance of American Muslims could easily change again. Especially if Muslims could be seen as a useful ally to the Red Tribe, as they were during the Cold War. See Reagan praising the Afghan Mujahideen as “brave freedom fighters.”

      I don’t know as much about the political situation in Europe, but it seems like a similar process is at work over there, where Muslims are common enough to be caught up in not just anti-terrorism issues but also immigration issues. As such, it seems like European Muslims end up allying with the Blue Tribe for much the same reasons that Latinos end up allying with the American Blue Tribe despite being mostly religiously conservative Catholics.

      • The Blue Tribe was eager to obtain a new ally against their hated Outgroup, the Red Tribe, so they quickly began singing condescending paens to the virtues of Muslims.

        There’s no particular love for Muslims as such in Blue circles. When compared to the hatred/fear a decent chunk of America holds for the religion, tho, a sense of indifferent acceptance can look sorta like love, I guess.

        Islam is just another Abrahamic religion, which hasn’t had its rough spots rubbed off quite as well as Xianity has due to its resident countries not getting hit quite as hard by modernity, but generally equivalent in good and bad to what we see in American Xianity, especially as Islam is practiced in the West.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I would agree with your general assessment of the nature of Islam in relation to the other Abrahamic religions. However, what do you mean by the West?

          It is true that Muslims in the US and Canada are much less “radical”, in a variety of ways, than Muslims elsewhere. However, Muslims in Europe tend to be significantly more radical by those same measures than Muslims in the US and Canada. Muslims in the US and Canada are still generally more conservative than the Christian baseline in those countries.

          If what you’re saying is that there’s not anything inherent to Islam resulting in social conservatism, radicalism, etc, (or anything inherent that isn’t in Christianity) I would definitely agree. The average Muslim in the US or Canada, in Europe, or globally, is probably more liberal than the average Christian was a few hundred years ago. And I know plenty of fluffy salad-bar Muslims to go with the fluffy salad-bar Christians and Jews I know.

          • Yup, the latter thing. And that radicalism as it exists is mostly a direct result of economics and marginalization, and only incidentally tied to religion itself; you own observe that American/Canadian Muslims are generally less radical than European Muslims, and I’ll support that with the observation that Am/Ca Muslims are generally richer and better integrated than the more recent / less integrated groups in Europe. Personal wealth directly combats radicalism, and conversely poverty is a predictor of it.

          • The leaders of radical movements are often intelligent, well-educated people, often from well-off families. Scott’s talked about this before, iirc – being intelligent makes it harder to live with just a surface gloss of their contradictory religious text, like most people do. Instead, those that don’t reject the text entirely have a good chance of instead rationalizing it, and biting the bullet on a lot of things it mandates that the majority would politely ignore.

            The majority of radical followers, on the other hand, can be largely traced to economics. Suicide bombers tend to be poor, and you don’t think ISIS’s foot soldiers are all well-off, do you? It’s cult indoctrination, and that always works best on those who are desperate and need to find meaning in something outside their personal circumstances.

            Similarly, America’s white terrorists aren’t generally well-off. They also tend to get radicalized because they have a lot of personal problems, often economic in nature. When they’re not explicitly poor, they tend to be socially isolated.

    • “hat prevents huge numbers of men in places like the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, and every university town from converting to Islam? They could hypothetically gain the benefits of being PoCs rather than white, the benefits of it being taboo for others in the community to criticize their beliefs, plus the benefits for men of hardcore patriarchy.”

      Why would they want benefits like patriarchy, that are inimical to other values? in fact, they can and sometimes do convert to religions that give them a liberal-compatible set of benefits,versions of Buddhism, versions Hinduism (or if it is Islam, Sufism, the liberal version).

      • NN says:

        It should also be noted that American Blue Tribe versions of Buddhism tend to have little in common with the versions practiced by historically Buddhist communities in Asia. Those places are hardly free of patriarchal values, and one would have a hard time convincing the Tamils of Sri Lanka or the Rohingya of Burma that Buddhism is a peaceful and tolerant religion.

        I suspect that the main reason for the appeal of Buddhism to the Blue Tribe is that Buddhism is still distant enough from the life of the average American to seem quaint and exotic. Islam hasn’t had the same status since the Iranian hostage crisis at the latest, and even Hinduism is starting to lose it as Americans gets more acquainted with the “quirks” of Hindu culture due to the economic rise of India.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Note that the progressive attraction to a misunderstood Buddhism goes back at least as far as H.G. Wells. In his Outline of History, he praised Siddhartha to the sky as a secular philosopher, implied that his philosophy made Ashoka the greatest monarch ever, and made fun of actual Buddhists for corrupting the teachings into a religion.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Nietzsche apparently did, too. Quoting from Wikipedia:

            Nietzsche unfavorably compares Christianity to Buddhism. He posits that Christianity is “the struggle against sin”, whereas Buddhism is “the struggle against suffering”; to Nietzsche, Christianity limits and lowers humankind by assailing its natural and inevitable instincts as depraved (“sin”), whereas Buddhism advises one merely to eschew suffering. While Christianity is full of “revengefulness” and “antipathy” (e.g., the Last Judgment), Buddhism promotes “benevolence, being kind, as health-promoting.” Buddhism is also suggested to be the more “honest” of the two religions, for its being strictly “phenomenalistic”, and because “Christianity makes a thousand promises but keeps none.” Martyrdom, rather than being a moral high ground or position of strength, is indicative of an “obtuseness to the question of truth.”

            Needless to say (?), this is absurd. Buddhism is at least as anti-life as Christianity, and in my opinion much more.

          • Protagoras says:

            Wikipedia exaggerates. Nietzsche certainly thought Buddhism was anti-life. He does contrast Buddhism favorably with Christianity, on the basis that he thought Buddhism was more honest and more effective at pursuing its own goals, but he did not think Buddhism’s goals were any better.

    • John Schilling says:

      Actually converting to Islam requires a person to do things that are A: difficult and B: anathema to core Blue Tribe cultural beliefs. Abstaining from drink and extramarital sex, believing that this abstention is morally obligatory on the grounds that those things are absolute moral wrongs, believing and submitting unconditionally to the One True God, these are things that a person basically cannot due and remain a core member of Blue Tribe.

      And if they aren’t a core member of Blue Tribe, they probably don’t care so much about Blue-tribe status as to trade their self-image (and their status among every other American demographic sector) for the modest improvement in Blue-tribe status they’d get from being perceived as Muslim.

      Fake-converting to Islam is unlikely to work, and the failure will result in reduced status everywhere.

      • NN says:

        Right. The only Islamic practice that is a good fit for Blue Tribe values is the prohibition on pork, since weird dietary practices are part and parcel of Blue Tribe culture.

        Though in Shia Islam abstaining from extramarital sex is easier than in most religions due to the practice of nikah mut‘ah, or temporary marriage.

        • John Schilling says:

          I suspect “…but you can have all the extramarital sex you want, so long as you can find a Hot Shi’ite Babe, who is OK with nikah mut‘ah, in the San Francisco Bay Area!”, is not likely to be a very big selling point for that particular brand of Islam. Network effects matter.

          • NN says:

            If you’re male, you can also conduct nikah mut‘ah with Christian and Jewish women, if they agree to it. Still, you’re probably right that having to say, “before we go any further, you have to sign this contract to marry me for the next month,” probably wouldn’t be good for your dating life in the Bay Area and places with similar cultures.

            On the other hand, that isn’t too far off from what some Affirmative Consent activists have proposed.

          • DrBeat says:

            … All right, everyone who instantly envisioned a banner ad proclaiming “Hot Shi’ite babes in YOUR area! Click for nika mut’ah NOW!”, raise your hands.

      • Seth says:

        Is this a bit of strawmusliming? There are e.g. plenty of Catholics who have extramarital sex. And they aren’t ordinarily quizzed on their views regarding Papal infallibility or the divine source of Church authority. There are also many Jews who don’t care much about Kosher regulations. Anyway, public displays of devoutness are much more an expectation of Reds than Blues.

        • NN says:

          Yes, but those are usually people who are born into Catholic/Jewish families. If you convert to a religion, except perhaps if you are doing it for the purpose of a marriage, then you are generally expected to take the religion seriously. Because if you don’t take it seriously, then why would you bother converting?

          • Seth says:

            It’s possible to take the religion seriously in certain parts, but not be extremely interested in every detail of the theology or follow every precept. For example, someone who sincerely “finds religion” in prison might be seriously interested in the aspects of redeeming oneself to God and forgiveness and changing one’s life via accepting Jesus as savior, but not care too much about the stuff with the Pope or the prohibition about using birth control. Someone might convert to Islam because of a major attraction to particular moral and community aspects, but not feel the need to be ultra-devout about the sex or drugs parts.

    • Adam says:

      The obvious answer is there are not any white males in the Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle who actually believe they could increase any relevant measure of their social status by converting to Islam.

    • onyomi says:

      Blues don’t see Muslims as a race. They see it as a religion, or maybe a culture. If a white guy converted to Islam they’d just see him as a weird white guy, perhaps one engaging in pernicious “appropriation” as a ploy to enjoy some sweet, sweet oppression cred.

      If anyone sees the Muslim faith and the Arab race as relatively indisociable, it’s the reds*, I’d imagine.

      *Isn’t it ironic that the Republicans got associated with the color red? Is this just an artifact of the colors CNN randomly picked one year to color states on an election map?

      • NN says:

        *Isn’t it ironic that the Republicans got associated with the color red? Is this just an artifact of the colors CNN randomly picked one year to color states on an election map?

        Yes. Until 2000, the networks would swap the colors that represented the two parties every election year. In 2000, it happened to be Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat, but that year the presidential election got hung up for more than a month. After several weeks of seeing red states and blue states on a map of the US every time people turned on the news, no one could forget those colors and their associations, and so they stuck.

        Which is ironic from a historic perspective, because the color red has long been associated with Socialism in general and Communism in particular.

        • It also helped that, in 2000, the Gore campaign’s color was blue, and the Bush campaign’s color was red.

          Which is ironic from a historic perspective, because the color red has long been associated with Socialism in general and Communism in particular.

          And blue associated with conservatism in general.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        IDK, criticism of Islam often gets labelled as racism by members of the Blue tribe.

        • John Schilling says:

          I’ve seen criticism of France* labeled as racism by Blue Tribe, when it suited their purposes. Was on the wrong end of that one, still a bit peeved by it.

          * the historically stereotypical France of non-Islamic white Europeans.

          • onyomi says:

            How did they manage that? I thought white people were the only people against whom it was impossible to be racist.*

            *Because racism is arbitrarily defined as prejudice+power.**

            **Power is defined as institutional, structural power, not individual power.

          • John Schilling says:

            Turns out Anglospheric white people are the ones it is impossible to be racist against. So far, at least.

            More generally, if you make any differentiation between nationalities or cultures, even among white people, that can get labeled as “racist” if someone is looking to be offended. “Nationalist” doesn’t have the same sting, in spite of being more accurate.

          • onyomi says:

            Wow, another means by which I can oppress people! Awesome! In fact, as a white, heterosexual, anglophone, American male, I’m pretty sure I’m the worst person in the world. All this structural power sure was helpful during my three-year search for a halfway decent job in my field.

          • Is this tangent necessary?

            I’m not talking about the gate heuristic, I’m just thinking in general. Clearly it’s going to be trivial to find a dozen examples of people being horrible in the direction of using accusations of racism as a weapon. Equally clearly, it’s trivial to find dozens of examples of people not doing that.

            Is there meaning or utility in going on scavenger hunts for these dozens? Is there another comment thread overly focused on the goodness and rationality of the social justice set (or the vileness of their enemies) that people feel the need to counteract?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Robert:
            Yeah. People make bad arguments all the time.

            Certainly there is a segment of the population that is constantly looking for things to label -ist. And some of those won’t be particularly exacting about theit definitions.

            On the other hand, having seen the popularity of a certain kind of anti-French sentiment during the Iraq war, including the fact that I will never forgot the phrase “surrender monkeys”, there is something to the association of anti-French sentiment and a certain kind of American jingoism.

            Which of course doesn’t mean that criticism of France is somehow automatically suspect or invalid.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            >Is this tangent necessary?
            Well, what is?

            >Is there meaning or utility in going on scavenger hunts for these dozens? Is there another comment thread overly focused on the goodness and rationality of the social justice set (or the vileness of their enemies) that people feel the need to counteract?

            Catholic priests are no more likely to abuse children than schoolteachers, priests of other denominations, etc.

            When you claim you’re a Champion of God/Justice/Some other uncontrovertible good thing, you’re bound to be held to a higher standard.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The mainstream media’s treatment of Catholic priests is such an example of Scott’s Chinese Robber Fallacy.
            When Catholic priests molest minors, it’s because of homophobia and how bad celibacy is. When members of the teachers’s union do it at the same per capita rate, it’s… um…

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Le Maistre Chat
            Because they have easier access to children? And it’s more notable because they don’t claim to be God’s representatives.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Le Maistre Chat:
            The Catholic pedophilia scandal is, more than anything, about what the Catholic church did when they knew they had a pedophile priest on their hands.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            Exactly. It was the coverup.

            Like Nixon and Watergate.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Originally, maybe. Now it’s generally used to score points against celibacy.

        • onyomi says:

          My impression is that blue tribers tend to ascribe to red tribers the conflation of race and religion: they think the red tribe’s supposed disapproval of Islam is just a cover for conscious or subconscious prejudice against brown people. The blue tribers themselves don’t hold this view, though they may think of Islam as, in some sense, being a kind of Arab culture, and therefore more worthy of respect than, for example, the faith of born-again Christians.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Blues don’t see Muslims as a race. They see it as a religion, or maybe a culture. If a white guy converted to Islam they’d just see him as a weird white guy, perhaps one engaging in pernicious “appropriation” as a ploy to enjoy some sweet, sweet oppression cred.

        Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Hamas-affiliated Council on American Islamic Relations, is a white convert and doesn’t seem to get any such suspicion. Of course he’s one guy: my guess is that there started being so many white male converts that the Central Example of a Muslim in the West was no longer Arabic or Pakistani or such, Blues would stop seeing criticism of Islamic doctrine as racism.

        *Isn’t it ironic that the Republicans got associated with the color red? Is this just an artifact of the colors CNN randomly picked one year to color states on an election map?

        Yes, very much so! The traditional political colors, going back to the French Revolution, are White for monarchy and an established Church, Blue for classical liberalism, and Red for socialism. The Russian Revolution led to Black for anarchism and Brown for fascism, and then of course came Green.

        There’s a Magic: The Gathering joke in there somewhere.

        • anonymous says:

          Gotta love the irrelevant dig. You people just can’t help yourselves, can you?

        • NN says:

          Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Hamas-affiliated Council on American Islamic Relations, is a white convert and doesn’t seem to get any such suspicion. Of course he’s one guy: my guess is that there started being so many white male converts that the Central Example of a Muslim in the West was no longer Arabic or Pakistani or such, Blues would stop seeing criticism of Islamic doctrine as racism.

          There have been far, far more black male converts to Islam than white male converts in America. There have also been significantly more white female converts, mostly due to marriages, than white male converts.

          Regardless, who the spokesman for CAIR is is irrelevant to the subject of Blue perceptions, because most American Muslims are not part of the Blue Tribe. Their values actually tend to be much closer to those of the Red Tribe, but in the past 15 years they’ve formed a strategic alliance with the Blue Tribe in response to the War on Terror. When people here talk about the scenario of “if a white guy converted to Islam,” they really mean “if a white hipster guy from the Bay Area or another Deep Blue part of the country converted to Islam.” Though even then, I don’t know of any real examples of such people being accused of “cultural appropriation,” so I’m skeptical about the conclusion.

          Also, the Central Example of a Muslim in the West is definitely still a brown person. It is, in fact, pretty common for Sikhs to be mistakenly targeted in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            There have been far, far more black male converts to Islam than white male converts in America. There have also been significantly more white female converts, mostly due to marriages, than white male converts.

            Correct. I would think that, in the 1960s and ’70s, the Central Example of an American Muslim was black, while “Arab-American” meant a Christian or completely secular Lebanese.

            Also, the Central Example of a Muslim in the West is definitely still a brown person. It is, in fact, pretty common for Sikhs to be mistakenly targeted in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

            I remember this famously happening to at least one Sikh family after 9/11, but is it actually common?

          • NN says:

            I remember this famously happening to at least one Sikh family after 9/11, but is it actually common?

            Here’s an example from the last month. Here’s another one.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @NN: I see. Well, that’s stupid and tragic.

        • Anaxagoras says:

          Regarding MTG colors and religions…

          I read over Leah Libresco’s 2015 Ideological Turing Test (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2015/04/2015-ideological-turing-test-index-post.html), and I noticed something really interesting about the answers to the questions for Christians. If I classified them according to MTG color pie philosophy, the answers from Christians were all green, and the answers from non-Christians were mostly white, and all non-green.

          I showed the answers to friends knowledgeable about the color pie, and though our classifications somewhat differed, they all produced the same split. Obviously, Christian philosophy is very heterogenous, so this may be partially coincidental, but there definitely seems to be something there.

    • Anonymous says:

      if “white male” is the lowest status in deep Blue communities

      And there’s your mistake.

    • if “white male” is the lowest status in deep Blue communities,

      Found your problem right there – incorrect premise. This is a silly story that non-Blue sometimes tell about Blues, because they have no idea what is meant by “privilege” and assume we mean that having it makes you low-status. So that’s your paradox resolved.

      The rest of your post is similar “let’s tell scary stories about those big bad Blues” nonsense. Being Muslim makes you religious, not non-white. Islam is no more immune to criticism than Christianity. Explicitly manipulating your social identity for personal benefit is sociopathic, not a defining trait of Blue people (or any of the other major sociopolitical groups).

      Vox Imperatoris provides further reasoning why, even if we take your premises as valid, people wouldn’t do what you suggest. But it’s not necessary to go that far, as you were failing to accurately model Blue people from the get-go.

      • Have you read Social Justice and Words, Words, Words yet?

        The question here: since privilege is just a ho-hum thing about how you shouldn’t interject yourself into other people’s conversations, or something nice about dogs and lizards – but definitely not anything you should be ashamed to have or anything which implies any guilt or burden whatsoever – why are all the minority groups who participate in communities that use the term so frantic to prove they don’t have it?

        (Alternatively, if you can summarize what you think “privilege” actually means in short, comprehensible terms, it would be interesting. Not being an American, I can honestly say I’m hopelessly confused by the concept.)

        • Yeah, I’ve read all of Scott’s work, tho that post was from the time period when I was skimming because the commentariat was a lot worse for a while.

          I’m not super interested in a big discussion here, but a simple definition of “privilege” is “the bullshit you don’t have to deal with, by virtue of some quality you have, that people with other values for that quality do have to deal with”.

          The common example is “white privilege”, where white people get to avoid a lot of bullshit that other races have to deal with, due to people being racist/biased against non-whites. The annoying part here is when people read that as “white people have everything easy”, which is stupid and wrong – Life’s RNG can still fuck you over, privilege just means you have less additional fuck-yous to deal with than others.

          And then the other annoying part is the panoply of people on “my side” who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, leading to things like people trying hard to play the I-have-less-privilege game, or claiming that only whites have race-related privilege (black privilege exists, but is less generally applicable/useful, at least in America; same for other races), etc.

  32. sw3 says:

    What would happen if you raised transaction costs on the stock market, like through a tax. I don’t know much economics, so I am thinking it would decrease liquidity (duh) but what is the knock-on effect of that? Just weird pricing? I am having trouble understanding the ill-effects of this. Thanks

    • RCF says:

      I would expect a major effect would be for encourage transactions to be structured in a manner to avoid the tax as much as possible. It seems to me that defining a “transaction” would be problematic. If someone buys a commodity, then hedges with a put option, is that one transaction or two? If someone buys several assets, puts them in a pool, then sells shares in the pool, do both the person who bought the assets, and the person who bought shares in the pool, have to pay taxes? Etc.

      • My admittedly limited understanding is that what is proposed is a tiny tax, like a cent, or a tenth or hundredth of a cent per transaction, that wouldn’t even be noticed by most people, but would serve as a disincentive to hyper-short-term trading behavior.

        I think there is a form of this idea which would be revenue-neutral, that is, the tax would be automatically credited back when the stock has been held for a certain amount of time. The object would not be to raise money, but to restrain computerized speed-up and price instability.

        • Adam says:

          That still raises some questions. It’s not like HFT firms did something novel in profiting off the bid-ask spread. They just automated it and consolidated the profits in a smaller number of firms. Is this supposed to be a general tax on all broker-dealers and market-makers? There have always been players in the market whose sole purpose was to buy from the sellers and sell to the buyers, because that is generally a smoother way of doing things than directly connecting sellers to buyers, who largely don’t want exactly the same amounts at exactly the same time. They already get taxed on their profits. Taxing them even more if they make the transaction too quickly is like taxing Walmart extra if they sell something that was on the shelf less than a day.

          • Again, I’m not knowledgeable enough to defend this in detail, but it’s a positive good when an item moves quickly through Walmart, freeing up space for more economic activity. On the other hand, the ability to make hundreds of thousands of stock trades per second apparently has some large negative externalities which at least some people think are worth addressing.

            The stock market (organization) and the SEC have some cruder means to control volatility, such as stopping trade in a stock under certain circumstances. A refundable tenth-of-a-cent tax per transaction strikes me as a much lighter touch.

          • James Picone says:

            My understanding was that part of it is that only some people can be sufficiently close to the exchange to win HFT games, so there’s an equity concern.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ James Picone:

            I’m having a hard time seeing how that could possibly be relevant.

            Only people who have a lot of money and experience can participate in most of the trading strategies Wall Street uses. I’m not seeing how there is an “equity concern” with high-frequency trading any more than with the general existence of a stock market.

            It’s not as if it is an economic inefficiency: as far as I’m aware, there is a competitive market bidding for server space located on the grounds of the exchange, in order to minimize lag time. Those who will get the most economic value from this space will be willing to pay the most for it.

          • John Schilling says:

            My understanding was that part of it is that only some people can be sufficiently close to the exchange to win HFT games, so there’s an equity concern.

            Isn’t that kind of like saying that only some people can be close enough to the Klondike or Sierra Nevada to win the “Gold Rush” games, so there’s an equity concern?

            To a first-order approximation, HFT games are about looking at the existing bid-ask spread and saying “I can beat that if I move fast enough”, such that the HF traders get to claim the reduced spread as profit and everybody else gets a smaller bid-ask spread for their long(er)-term investing. There are legitimate fortunes to be made in that, possibly with no more real effort than panning for gold, but you do have to physically be in the place where the fortune is.

          • Adam says:

            Frankly, I’m not enough up to speed on exactly what Congress is trying to accomplish, but the kind of trading that seems to outrage people is what James is talking about, where certain funds do nothing except intercept orders on their way to the exchange, fill them, then immediately resell, and profit by quickly identifying sub-cent differences between the buy orders on the exchange’s order book and sell limits in the incoming order, and the only reason they’re able to do this is they’re collocated with the exchange, have connections, and have really fast computers with custom network protocols and low-latency kernels they poached a bunch of HPC PhDs to build for them.

            And sure, it’s not fair in the sense a normal retail trader can’t do that, and even a well-capitalized trading firm or prop desk at a large bank can’t do that. The only way to do it is to be located at the exchange. But it’s not a threat to the economy. The activity is instant and indistinguishable from the incoming order going directly to the exchange without an intermediary. The types of things causing flash crashes and what-not are just normal stop-loss sell orders getting triggered and then triggering more of the same, which has always happened, but happens faster now because the exchanges themselves fill orders electronically. There are breaker circuits in place at all the exchanges now to prevent this.

          • brad says:

            I’m in the camp that thinks that finance (and FIRE generally) straddles the line between symbiont and parasite and at its current percent of the economy looks like it is leaning towards the parasite side. But that said, 1) HFT market makers are a tiny portion of finance, and 2) probably all in all harmless or beneficial.

            The companies that hate HFT market makers are many orders of magnitude larger than they are and make a heck of a lot more money. So the appeals to populism ring pretty hollow.

          • Ralph says:

            @james

            This is false and completely misunderstood. Anyone can collocate their servers at the exchange. And the exchanges ensure that everyone’s cords are the same length (so to speak). This idea that only insiders can collocate at the exchanges through some kind of back room dealing is just wrong.

            It isn’t even that expensive. Anyone who
            has enough capital to be even a tiny player making markets can afford it. I’m
            pretty sure even individuals can rent space on a collocated server. If anything, this has wildly democratized this kind of trading. It is substantially easier to collocate than it is to get a seat on the trading floor (let alone get the vets on the floor to treat your orders fairly).

          • TheNybbler says:

            “And the exchanges ensure that everyone’s cords are the same length (so to speak).”

            Not “so to speak”. Literally. The cables are literally the same length.

          • All of this is reminding me of Hirschleifer’s old article on inefficient speculation.

            Suppose I discover that the price of wheat is going to go up five minutes before everyone else does. Further suppose that during those five minutes no actions will be taken that are affected by whether or not the price has done up yet. I profit by my advance information, since I use it to buy wheat during those five minutes. But my profit is not based on any benefit I have produced–I’m getting a gain that otherwise would have gone to the person who would have been holding the wheat when the price went up if I had not bought it. Hence anything I spend on getting that advance information is pure rent seeking.

            In most market contexts, the profit you get by an action is a measure of the benefit that action produces. In the case of speculation, doing it well produces both a profit and a benefit, but the two are not related. You might make a small profit from speculative activity that produces a large benefit by the information it generates for others. Or you might, as in my example, make a large profit from an action that produces no benefit.

            I suspect that this line of argument could be applied to the current discussion to argue that at least some expenditure on being able to make very fast transactions is rent seeking, hence wasteful.

          • Ralph says:

            @theNybbler

            Agreed. I hedged that statement because I’m not sure if they use or will ever use any cloud servers.

            @David

            This is one of the more reasonable arguments against HFT. Maybe that and some tail risk of systematic instability (though circuit breakers kind of take care of that). The nonsense about unfairness is just populist garbage.

            But the government should decide which industries are wasteful and tax them until they aren’t? I don’t know.

            No one seems to be making too much noise about the vast number of software developers working to optimize digital marketing. Way more resources go into this than into HFT.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:

            I believe that, at least at one point, the HFT would manage to execute a buy of of a stock when the saw a purchase request come in from A. They would buy from B and sell to A faster than B could realize A wanted to sell.

            So, fairly pure rent seeking.

          • John Schilling says:

            @HeelBearCub: Were classic retail shopkeepers engaged in pure rent-seeking when thel sold some consumer good to small-town customer A? They would buy from distant manufacturer B and sell to A faster than B could realize (presumably via catalog mail-order) that A wanted to buy.

            Middlemen are not properly considered rent-seekers. In most economic transactions, it is inefficient for the ultimate buyer and the ultimate seller to interact directly. Middlemen perform a real service, going out and finding that the thing you want to buy here and now is being offered for sale by some factory in Malaysia or hedge fund in London, and arranging the transaction. They collect a legitimate profit from doing this, iff they are the best on the block at doing this.

            And as the middleman’s art advances from “You get your stuff four to six weeks after you send your order to Sears (COD, full retail price)”, to “Amazon Prime, next-day delivery, 20% discount” to “100 shares of SHLD, thirteen milliseconds after you asked, five cents per share bid-ask spread”, the middleman’s gross profit decreases, but the contempt for the middleman grows. This is wrong. Please knock it off.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            This is all taking place in micro-seconds within one market. I don’t think the analogy to the classic middleman holds. There is no particular benefit that A or B gets from the transaction. B would have sold to A a mere fraction of a second later.

            Caveat, I need to see if I can find a current source for this information. I know I read it a few years ago, but I am working off of what is surely imperfect memory.

          • brad says:

            @HBC
            What your describing is called front running. It’s illegal. I’m sure it happens occasionally, it certainly did back in the old days with guys on the floor.

            But the larger argument is that something else (legal) that HTC traders do is akin to front running rather than literally front running. I never read it but I understand Flash Boys to have conflated the two things.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I think this is the article I read, or near enough.

            “Well, he was being front-run. HFT firms pay public and private exchanges to see their incoming orders. That’s why Katsuyama was getting all of his order filled at the exchange closest to him—that is, as the fiber optic cable lies—but nowhere else. The HFTers were seeing his order at the first exchange and then racing to buy all the rest of the stock he wanted everywhere else, so they could sell it to him for more.”

          • John Schilling says:

            There is no particular benefit that A or B gets from the transaction. B would have sold to A a mere fraction of a second later.

            A fraction of a second is a vanishingly small benefit, but it isn’t zero benefit. The same goes for a penny’s difference in the bid-ask spread, and the two are correlated – part of the reason for the bid-ask spread is the market maker’s risk that something that affects the stock’s price will become known in the interval between taking your order and closing it. Faster is better and cheaper.

            And if the marginal benefits are small, so what? Middleman X offers to save you ten milliseconds and two cents over what middleman Y would have offered, and you’re going to accuse X of being a parasitic rent-seeker?

            If it helps wrap your mind around it, take it back into the physical. Kludgy old stalwart Amazon.com offers thirty-minute drone delivery and charges 10% over wholesale price. Now new upstart Danube.biz offers twenty-minute ballistic delivery and charges 9% over wholesale. And then, because the Chinese do everything better, Yangtze.com++ delivers by teleporter in 15 minutes and charges 8% over wholesale. All three offer every item known to commerce, are 100% reliable, and have all the latest green, fair trade, free range, and social justice certifications.

            You almost never care about five minutes or one percent of purchase price, nor does anyone else. But are you still going to do business with Amazon, while denouncing Yangtze as parasitic rent-seekers for offering ‘no particular benefit’? If so, why? Is Google wrong to recognize your preferences and rank your search results Yangtze, Danube, Amazon?

            When does offering equal or lower prices with faster service stop being a good thing and start being a bad thing?

          • brad says:

            It is my understanding that Michael Lewis and all the articles relying on him as a source are simplifying the situation in such a way as to make it look like there is front-running when there isn’t.

            Basically you have a guy at a trading desk at Goldman Sachs making $2M/yr complaining that he has a hard time moving huge blocks of stock quickly without moving the market price. It’s his job to try to do that, and it’s the market makers job to detect what he’s trying to do that and not let him but instead have the price move against his large order (and that’s relevant information that should be reflected in the stock price). There’s no good or bad guy there.

            (And in my prior comment it should have been HFT not HTC, sorry)

          • Ralph says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I’m not sure this is the best venue at which to explain the huge swing and a miss the flash boys was. There a lot of problems with HFT but the book focused on one that just isn’t even real or feasible. Everyone who is actually in the industry simultaneously kind of said, “What? That isn’t what happens at all! No one could make money trading like that”.

            Michael Lewis is a good dude but he totally misunderstands what goes on at the microstructure level. There are better explanations out there but I’ll try:

            Market makers post liquidity at multiple exchanges. Let’s say for example a market maker places an offer to sell 1000 shares at 3 different exchanges at some price, $1.00. He doesn’t actually want to sell 3000 shares at once. He wants to sell 1000 at one of the 3 exchanges, which ever one has incoming orders first, and then he will remove the remaining 2000 orders and reassess his position. He is taking a risk that someone quicker than he is could pick off all 3000 of his shares, in order to increase his odds of getting filled for 1000 at this price.

            So let’s say someone else is looking at their screen, which actually aggregates all orders posted at all exchanges into one feed, and tells him that there are 3000 orders offered at $1.00 (This is a synthetic offer at 3000, not a real one. This is the buyers choice to use software that aggregates orders like this, not some systematic function of the exchanges). He says great, I want to buy 3000. So he places a buy order, using an algorithm that his broker provides. This algorithm goes to each exchange, one by one, buying the 1000 at a time at each exchange. Meanwhile, the market maker sees that his first 1000 have been bought. He says great I got my 1000 filled, and he moves quickly to remove the other 2000 orders, and fast, because the buyer may want to buy more (This would be the floor trading equivalent of a floor trader walking into one exchange, buying up every share of a stock at a given price, then walking to the next exchange and doing the same, meanwhile, a market maker calls his partner at the 3rd exchange and says, hey this guy is buying up all of this stock at this price, you can probably raise the price before he gets there. So nothing immoral, the buyer just isn’t as sophisticated as he market makers. And rightly so, they are professionals).

            Since the market maker is very smart, and studies the various latencies between exchanges, his algorithm is more efficient, and he can remove his remaining orders from $1.00 and put them at $1.01. Since the buyer is using a naive algorithm from his broker, he is much slower, and his buy orders arrive after the market maker has adjusted his offers upwards (and this doesn’t necessarily have to happen! A sophisticated buyer can beat the market maker. In fact in the book flash boys, the protagonist does just this. It is solely a matter of being smarter and faster).

            The buyer gets his 3000 orders filled at an average price of $1.0066. So he is like WTF? My screen said I could buy for $1.00! I’ve been cheated.

            But this is very unlike the scenario Michael Lewis describes. In his scenario, the market maker gets filled on the first 1000 and then goes and buys 2000 more orders at the other exchange at $1.00 and turns around and sells them to the buyer at $1.01. This so so terribly risky and dumb and any microstructure trader knows that it will lose massive sums of money in the long run. It just doesn’t happen.

            So no one is being front run. No one is paying exchanges to see orders before they arrive at the exchange. They can only see them statistically (hey, someone bought all the orders offered at $1.00 at exchange A, he probably wants to buy some more at exchange B, if I am fast and smart, I can act on this). It’s no more front running than saying, hey a lot of people bought yesterday, probably more will buy tomorrow, I should buy in the morning to beat them.

            Hopefully this makes sense. There are a lot of good criticisms of HFTs, but unfairness or claims of frunt running are just kind of off base.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:
            That is good information. Thanks for the correction.

            I’ll say that it looks slightly like false advertising to me.

            Why the need to make and then withdraw the offers on the other two markets? What does this get the trader? Seems like bait-and-switch, where you never do have any intention of selling at the offered price (but you will if you get “caught” and are forced to).

            I can imagine one reason to offer at $1.00 in 3 places is to convince the buyer that a)There are 3000 shares at that price and b) To set where the buyer will offer to buy. Otherwise you could simply put 1000 out and then offer the next 1000 at a higher price.

            @Mark Atwood:
            Why do you have to say everything in a nasty way? Even when you have a good point, you manage to make it unreadable.

          • Ralph says:

            @HeelBearCub

            It’s a little bit like false advertising but not really. I think of it more like this… You have a bike to sell, and you take out an ad in the paper, put up a Craigslist post, post it on Facebook, and tell all of your friends in person. You only have 1 bike to sell, but you advertise it on 4 different venues (exchanges).

            When someone says they will buy it, you remove the ads on all of the other venues. It’s a bit different, because placing on order on an exchange forces you into a contract when it’s filled, while posting a craigslist ad does not.

            As for your other questions, the example I gave was very simplified. In reality there would be tons of buyers with different motives and levels of sophistication. Some of them pay attention to exchanges individually. So the seller and increase his chances of selling the 1000 by posting it on 3 different exchanges, since some buyers may only pay attention to one of them.

            Again, in reality, all of this would only be a small fraction of the inputs that go into the sellers algorithm that decide when and where he moves his orders. He is constantly reacting to dynamic information. And there would be like, 15 other sellers doing a really similar thing to him, competing for the buyer’s orders.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:
            “Since the market maker is very smart, and studies the various latencies between exchanges, his algorithm is more efficient, and he can remove his remaining orders from $1.00 and put them at $1.01. ”

            That is a quote from your first post. Is that happening or isn’t it?

            And I don’t follow the multiple listing on Craigslist analogy at all, because you seem to be saying that they DO want to sell 3000 shares or 3 bikes or whatever.

            Perhaps, as you say, this isn’t really what is happening and your model example was too simple for me to get at the real nut of it.

          • Ralph says:

            It is happening.

            And no they only have 1 bike to sell, and only 1000 shares to sell in both scenarios, yet they advertise that in multiple venues. In the bike sellers case, if someone on both Craigslist and Facebook accept his offer, he just tells one of them, too bad I already sold it. In the market makers case, he actually has to sell 1000 shares twice, if he wasn’t able to lift his offer fast enough. And this certainly happens. It is the risk he is taking. They are both just trying to maximize their exposure to potential buyers.

            But yes this is all really simplified. In reality the market maker will lift certain offers for a lot of reasons. Maybe some other market maker got filled on his offer, or someone just bought a lot of a correlated stock.

            In some markets, like futures, there is only one exchange, and HFTs make money by simply reacting to information across multiple correlated products faster than the competition. The multiple exchange/false advertising thing isn’t even at play. They just move their orders around really quickly to reflect the state of global financial markets at any given point in time. This is efficiency at work on a micro level.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:
            You originally described a scenario where the seller sold 3000 shares and the buyer bought 3000, 1000 at $1.00 and 2000 at $1.01.

            Again, maybe you are condensing two points, but it is very confusing.

          • Ralph says:

            Yeah okay I see what you are saying. Your right, my last comment about the analogy is wrong.

            Forget the bike scenario. It is still a valid thought experiment but it is not analogous to the hypothetical trading example.

            The point is that placing orders that you plan to cancel after receiving new information is not wrong, immoral, illegal, or frunt running. The market maker who removes these orders before the buyer can get to them isn’t intercepting them before they get to the market or paying the exchanges to get an early peek. He is just acting on public information faster than others, and leveraging an in depth understanding of the interconnectivity of multiple exchanges.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:
            But it does look like bait and switch, right?

            The seller doesn’t actually want to sell 3000 shares at $1.00, and (I assume) might lose money if they do it.

            (Again, I assume) They are only willing to sell the first 1000 because it gives them some means of leveraging the information about the sale to sell the other 2000 at a higher price.

            Do you see where I am coming from? It’s obviously not illegal, but it does seem like they are gaming the market in some way. Otherwise, why list the original 3000 instead of just listing 1000 (and then entering the 2000 in the other markets after the first sale completes). Listing all the sell orders at the same time has to be doing something for them.

          • Ralph says:

            It looks a little bit like gaming the market to me. But he is posting 1000 at each exchange, and for each exchange in a vacuum, he does genuinely want to
            sell 1000 shares.

            Again, this is kind of a simplified hypothetical. Consider an example where he does want all 3000. Then he receives information that the first 1000 were sold. Should he be allowed to raise his price on the other 2000? He doesn’t actually know the buyer wants the other 2000, but maybe statistically, buying 1000 implies that more will be bought. So it is in his best interest to raise the price of his offers.

            Is raising his price gaming the market?

            Is it always gaming the market to place an order on multiple exchanges and remove the remainder after one of them is filled?

            I don’t necessarily think so, though I’m open to arguments saying otherwise.

            A lot depends on what you consider gaming the market and what you consider just leveraging everything you can in order to compete for the best price possible. Which I think is subjective.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Ralph:
            Well, the question gets down to what motivated the listings. If profitability is dependent on offer-withdraw-reoffer then it looks to me like the first listing is not in good faith.

            I’m sure bad-faith has always been part of the market, so maybe it is just same as it ever was. But aren’t there prohibitions against making moves intended to influence the price (as opposed to predicting it)?

          • Douglas Knight says:

            What the HFT is doing in this scenario is collapsing the multiple markets into a single market. The HFT advertises everything available on one market as also available on every other market. This is of great value to the person who doesn’t want to think about markets. That person doesn’t have to worry about where to buy what, but just goes anywhere and buys anything. HFT makes a little commission, but small enough that it’s not worth it for the ordinary trader to think about.

            The person who loses in this scenario is Michael Lewis’s subject who was trying to make money by understanding the structure of the markets, by dividing the order between markets in a complicated way. In other words, a middleman. A middleman complaining that HFT is better at his job and outcompeting him.

            This is hardly the only thing HFT does, but ML’s example of the evil of HFT is one of the most unambiguously good things that it does.

          • Ralph says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I agree with your framing. I made this example up so I don’t know if the predictive ability of the seller is dependent on his decision to withdrawal the offer or not. But in the real world it is certainly possible to predict that kind of behavior without your own knowledge that you will pull your other offers if someone buys the first 1000.

            I think a lot of it comes down to intent which is pretty moot since it is impossible to prove/regulate. Is the seller trying to sway the buyer and trick him into buying at a higher price? Or is he just maximizing his exposure to potential buyers, and will reassess his position at each incremental step to optimize the price at which he pays? Both of these for sure occur.

            And yeah a big argument against the people making a lot of noise about HFT is that this is same as it ever was for sure. I was never a floor trader but I imagine these practices existed in other forms on the trading floor as well, at a similar or even greater magnitude.

          • What the HFT is doing in this scenario is collapsing the multiple markets into a single market.

            That begs the obvious question: given modern technology, why do we need to have multiple markets in the first place? If the HFT is serving as a more-efficient-middleman, why not get rid of the middleman altogether?

          • Ralph says:

            @Harry

            We don’t really need multiple exchanges. There are many stock-like securities that trade on a single exchange, namely some futures contracts. Stocks trading on multiple exchanges is a function of some government regulation that was intended to allow competition among exchanges and improve “fairness”.

            I think this causes more problems than it solves. So do a lot of other people.

            But HFTs prosper in a lot of other areas than stock markets. So it’s not like HFTs need multiple exchanges to be profitable or add value, contrary to what the Michael Lewis narrative implies.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Mark Atwood:
            Well, the shouting for one thing.

            And the starting out with attacking the word “akin” as if arguments were being made in bad faith, as opposed to people trying to grapple honestly with the domain.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Ralph, we may not need multiple exchanges, but we have them. Anyone can open a new one. What is the alternative, a government monopoly? A guild monopoly?

            The cost of trading is a transaction cost. There are two parts to it, the fee to the exchange and the bid-ask spread. Competition between exchanges keeps the fees down. And HFT keeps the bid-ask spread down. It simulates a single market while avoiding monopoly.

            I don’t think that a monopoly exchange charging monopoly fees would be a terrible thing. The danger of a monopoly is more that it stagnates. A variety of exchanges allows experiments, like subsidizing HFT or banning HFT.

          • Ralph says:

            @Douglas Knight

            I agree with all of that. I don’t know what the alternative is at this point. I’m
            not sure that I would advocate a forced monopoly. I also don’t think that HFT is a problem in general.

            Competition among exchanges is probably good, but multiple exchanges encourages resources to be allocated to trying to optimize trading in the environment I was describing in the posts above which might be wasteful.

            I used to work in futures markets, which mostly operate on a single exchange (there are many exceptions). It was really nice and simple. Though when the exchange made a change, the industry would just have to deal with it, rather than just moving to another exchange.

            I don’t have that passionate of an argument either way.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Ralph, yeah, that was more aimed at Harry, but I didn’t make it clear.

          • brad says:

            In order to understand why HFT market makers act like the do, you need to understand the difference between smart money and dumb money.

            The cannonical example of dumb money is a retail investor picking up a small or odd lot based on throwing a dart at a wall, but other dumb money are index funds re-balancing or a hedging transaction. Smart money is a big player taking a fundamental position on the underlying stock.

            The fact that dumb money is entering or leaving a position isn’t important new information about what the price of a stock should be, and shouldn’t move the market much or predict future movements. Smart money buying or selling a bunch of stock, on the other hand, is new information and is expected, at least more often than not, to presage a movement in the stock.

            How exactly this basic distinction plays out is kind of complicated, but the long and short of it is that market makers very much want to know whether their counterparties are smart money moving a lot of shares in a bunch of little pieces or lots of individual dumb money orders. Smart money on the other hand very much wants to hide the fact that they are smart money moving a lot of stock from their counterparties.

            That’s the framework for the whole canceling orders thing. It wouldn’t happen with every sale, only in the circumstances where the market maker programs think the trader on the other side is trying to put together a large order to take a fundemental position. And they pull those orders because if they didn’t in a complicated way they end up losing money and the other guy would come out ahead.

            I don’t think it is any more fundamentally dishonest to cancel those trades before they are executed than it is to break up a 250,000 share purchase into 1000 share lots and slip them in to all different markets to hide what you are doing. Both are legit parts of the game.

            N.B. I’m not actually in the industry, this is second hand, so it might not be 100% accurate.

          • The big scary issue with HFT is that it’s *so* fast that sub-millisecond delays can lose you tons of money. The trading algorithms are optimized at the instruction level to be as dead-simple as possible while still more-or-less working. This is frightening, because these purposely-rock-bottom-stupid-but-fast algos determine how the market works to a large extent. As long as they model what we want, great, but when they don’t (and they can’t ever model perfectly, because they’re intentionally stupid and fast), you get flash crashes and other bizarre behavior that have no basis in reasonable behavior, but are just the result of hiccupping algorithms causing cascading badness thruout the system.

            Forcing the trades to slow down would not materially affect their ability to enhance market liquidity, but it would give humans some breathing room, and greatly raise the time budget the algorithms have to think about things, so they can be smarter.

    • Ralph says:

      If the market microstructure is currently efficient, meaning market makers are setting the spread between the bid and the ask at exactly the width it needs to be in order for them to make a risk adjusted profit of zero, then the spread would have to widen given a transaction tax. Meaning the tax essentially gets passed on to takers of liquidity (retail investors, mutual funds, most hedge funds, etc.). It might cut down on aggressive HFTs that remove liquidity.

      Pretty simple stuff. Basically the same inefficiencies that a tax on suppliers brings about in any industry. Again, the assumption that the market is pretty efficient and suppliers (in this case, of liquidity) are not making an excess profit is a big one.

      • Adam says:

        The thing that gets me about it is bid-ask spreads are empirically lower now than they were before. But since there are fewer players able to profit off of it at all, and because volumes are higher, the small number of players able to do this can make a lot of money, a lot more than the old-school market makers who stood on the exchange floor taking manual orders with pen and paper. This seems to really piss people off, because it seems like an unfair way to make money, but the only effect to the retail consumer is bid-ask spreads are lower. They get lower transaction fees and more liquidity. The only people it actually hurt were the other market makers that got put out of business.

        • Ralph says:

          Exactly this. The public is confused. It is all psychological. They (retail investors) are actually getting a better deal in the HFT market maker regime than in the trading floor market maker regime. Market makers in aggregate are making way, way less money than in the past.

          But a couple of quant traders and a software engineer can do the work of like 50 floor traders. So they make a lot of money (but a whole lot of them actually don’t). So this upsets people. And like robots are scary and flash boys and Wall Street greed… Or something.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Currently HFT is subject to a negative transaction tax.

      Not by the government, but by the markets. The markets make money by charging most traders a transaction fee. They discount this for HFT because they believe that having HFT on their market makes it more attractive for ordinary traders, their real customers, the people giving them money.

      The existence of the subsidies show that they are what (markets think) the ordinary traders want. It’s not some kind of default behavior that they stumbled onto, but a very active decision to subsidize. And yet the number of markets is small enough that they probably could collude to eliminate them if they thought it was a negative sum game. There is a particular market that specializes in not allowing HFT. What happens with it will be interesting.

      The interests of the government are not the same as the interests of the markets and traders (but neither are they the same as the interests of the people), but one should have pretty detailed beliefs about what is happening and why the interests differ to propose taxing what the markets are subsidizing.

  33. RCF says:

    Studies have allegedly shown that voters base their decisions on extremely superficial criteria, such as one of the best predictor as to which candidate will win being who is rated as more attractive. Also, “closed” body language supposedly communicates lack of confidence and warmth. Watching the Democratic debate, I couldn’t help but notice Sander’s posture. Is this a disadvantage for him? Will voters’ System I be swayed by it?

    • Sastan says:

      No, they will be swayed by the fact that Hillary has had the nomination sewed up for eight years now, and Sanders is just the tin can they drummed up for her to kick. This was clear when he refused to capitalize on any of her many scandals. He’s just there to take the bite out of Republican criticism of her “coronation”. And to push the Overton window a bit on the word “socialism”.

    • Calico Eyes says:

      A real worry for me is the heightened possible rate of cognitive decline at the age of sanders. He is 5 years older than Reagan, the man everyone suspects developed alzhemers in his later term of presidency. Most charts showing the rate of learning new material and reasoning about it changes greatly as one gets older, with some very fast declines starting around the mid 60’s. Its always best to assume that one is voting a president into office for 8 years, as that’s the tendency.

      • brad says:

        He isn’t going to win. The point of voting for Sanders is to send a message to the Democratic Party that voters on the left still exist. So you don’t need to worry about his potential cognitive decline and for the same reason you don’t need to parse every little policy position to see if you can stomach it.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          “The point of voting for Sanders is to send a message to the Democratic Party that voters on the left still exist.”

          Oh, they know, and they’re quite confident that voters on the left will obediently line up to vote Hillary into office no matter what she says or does. I wouldn’t bet that they’re wrong.

          • The point of Sanders running may have been to force Hilary further left than she would otherwise have been, in the belief that she would not be able to entirely disown the positions she took then later on.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Thirteenth Letter:
            There is a push-me-pull-you aspect to politics.

            Sanders espouses opinions on the left and to the extent he shows these ideas are popular, he both forces the net Dem position left and also makes it OK for more liberal positions to be taken than were before.

            This aspect of politics is why sometimes attitudes on a particular position change very rapidly.

            Sanders wins by polling well enough. He doesn’t have to win the primary.

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Isn’t the same true for Hillary? Both of them seem old as fuck to me.

        • Nornagest says:

          They’re both pretty old by presidential standards, but Clinton is 68. If elected she’d be the second oldest president after Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated a few days short of 70.

          Sanders is 75. If elected he’d be the oldest president at inauguration by a margin of six years.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Women also tend to live longer than men, so you could posit that Clinton is relatively younger.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            If Rubio wins the nomination, he has his campaign cut out for him:
            “Vote Rubio, he’s very likely to finish his term alive and without debilitating diseases”.

  34. zluria says:

    So I just stumbled upon this blog, Wait but why?
    http://waitbutwhy.com/

    I’ve started going there when Scott hasn’t updated for a while and I’m feeling the withdrawal :-P.
    The writing is very good, and it looks like a rationalist blog to me, but I’ve never seen it mentioned here, and it doesn’t appear on Scott’s blogroll. Does anyone here read that blog? Like it/dislike it?

    • WBW articles get posted on LW a lot.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      It’s a very good blog, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

      His articles on AI are very good.

    • Echo says:

      Eh, he did quite an awkward job publicly fellating Elon Musk at the SpaceX launch the other day. Am always very suspicious of “geek culture” people with corporate sponsorships.

      Maybe Scott should try that out, though? New SSC post format: “27 reasons why Hyperloops & Mars missions will save rationalism”.

      • TrivialGravitas says:

        It looks more like he does an awkward job of fellating Elon Musk on a regular basis going back a bit. And has a pisspoor understanding of space economics. Launch costs are only about a third of the cost of interplanetary and manned missions, so even free rockets aren’t game changers for anything but (maybe) communication satellites. In theory the cost of launch increases cost of spacecraft by driving up the amount of work necessary to meet mass targets, but reusable rockets represent a decrease rather than increase in payload capacity. But Musk has magic ability to tell ‘what’s possible today’ even though like 9 other companies are working on reusable rockets and SpaceX just got there first. (I’m aware of Blue origin’s flight, but I don’t count that any more than I count the X-15, suborbital flight is only useful for nukes).

  35. Deiseach says:

    Speaking of solstices, looks like it was a good morning in Newgrange this morning.

    The weather has been so torrentially rainy the past couple of weeks, today was the first fine morning. Depending on how the weather is tomorrow for the actual solstice, the sunrise may or may not enter the passage tomb.

  36. Princess Stargirl says:

    SLIGHT STAR WARS SPOILERS. WARNING

    The New Star wars seemed terrible to me. Two bad main characters, one made me cringe and the other is a MArie Sue. The movie opens with a string of coincidences. The plot is mostly recycled. Han Solo is funny but we have all seen Han Solo Before.

    Why did people like this movie?

    END SPOILERS

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      Because it isn’t episode 1-3. Because people’s standards are different from this blogs readers- rational fiction ruins everything. Because Star Wars is a universe run on space magic, dualistic morality and a social setup that more closely resembles the 1940s IN SPACE than anything else.

      • Deiseach says:

        Star Wars is pretty much based on the 40s and 50s cinema serials like “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rogers”; it’s space opera and science fantasy.

        Which is why Abrams, who is a Star Wars fan, ruined Star Trek (magic blood cures death; no need for starships now we have interplanetary and intragalactic transporter tech!) by turning reboot Trek into an audition reel for the director’s job on the new Star Wars. Trek runs on technobabble but it tries to have a quasi-scientific explanation for everything, with mysticism very firmly put in its place as either “aliens pretending to be gods” or “personal techniques for self-improvement like meditation”. Star Wars has mysticism and magic to handwave away any anomalies.

        I have a long rant WITH PICTORIAL EXAMPLES of how elements of the Star Wars universe were kludged into Trek – including changing the phasers to be more like blasters. This is probably not the place for it 🙂

        • Jaskologist says:

          This is precisely the place for it. I want to see it.

          • Deiseach says:

            I am currently trawling through my Tumblr for it (apparently I have thirty-one pages of rants on reboot Trek!)

            In the meantime, have this reply to a rejoinder I made to someone arguing there was too a good case for making reboot Khan white (I disagreed):

            Holy shit. That was the single most condescending reply I have ever gotten. Like wow, you are such a bitch.

            *wipes away a tear of pride* My finest hour! 🙂

            EDIT: Found it! Or one at least; I’m sure I ranted more, but this is the pictorial one.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            So, I’m a ST fan, but not a fan, who was seriously unimpressed by the first reboot for some indescribable reason to the point of never even watching STID despite it being on Netflix for a rather long time. Having read some of your Tumbler… I am really, really glad I didn’t watch ID or actually put any thought into why I didn’t like the first one. I am kind of, like, sickened now by how badly they’ve wrecked it. Seriously, what they did to Nurse Chapel? Whitewashing freaking Khan?? *Incoherent gibbering of rage*???

            I rarely actually feel offended by abstract transgressions or whatever, but I think I might be.

            At the very least the new SW is filed into the don’t even bother watching it on Netflix bin that STID (and pretty much everything else JJ has done hitherto) was already in. I wasn’t really hopeful for episode 7 in the first place, but planned to check some reviews in a couple of weeks after the initial nerd-fest is over to see if it was worth going to. At this point I am not even going to dignify those hacks with that much effort.

          • DrBeat says:

            See, I’m less offended by the ‘whitewashing’ of Khan, than I am by the fact that they had to bring in Leonard Nimoy to tell us “NO THIS VILLAIN IS TOTES LEGIT YOU GUYS” to get us to care, since the script certainly wasn’t up to the fucking job.

            Like, there’s symbolic harms, and then there’s just plain inept moviemaking.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            Have you seen Star Trek? If you shot Melllvar’s fan script it would be better than half the episodes. Obviously good writing isn’t a prerequisite. What you need is even the tiniest hint of respect for what the franchise has stood for the last 50 years. A darker, grittier reboot is even a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Instead of that, though, we get menboys’ power fantasy masturbation aid.

            Let’s face it, Kirk (and Spock) should be in jail instead of running a starship. They simply haven’t earned that right, much less the right to be allowed out in public unsupervised. This parallels, by what I have seen here, the train wreck of the new SW. You don’t wake up one day and decide to become the best Jedi eva’! without putting in a shred of work. You have to earn it. What makes this especially egregious in the context of SW is that thinking otherwise of exactly what leads to the dark side. I mean, we seriously just had a whole trilogy about how an entitled prick that thought he was better than everyone and wanted what he hadn’t earned turned to the dark side. I have zero faith that JJ even picked up on that nuance (which was way too philosophical) or is actually planning on this one have any kind of internal struggle.

            The good guys are the good guys and can do whatever they want because he says so. The bad guys are bad guys devoid of credible motivation because he says so. And they are going to blow a lot of shit up because he has a boner. And to hell with any kind of internally consistent in universe philosophical or moral (or pretty much any) frameworks that others–betters–have spent decades erecting.

            You can make a fun, financially successful movie that way, but it’ll never be a good movie. His fundamental problem is he thinks he directs good movies instead of fun, financially successful bad ones. Which is why he keeps trying to get his grubby mitts on good franchises. Nobody would care if he said “Fuck it, let’s do space Nazis meet reptilian aliens. The Nazis well all be big busted clones of Ava Braun in their underwear, because why not, and the reptilians will have suspiciously phallic looking heads. And lot of explosions in space because that is the only thing movie audiences want to see these days.” He could totally turn that into a big budget summer blockbuster, make some quick green, and nobody would be pissed off that it is a bad movie, with a plot that makes no sense, and with incredibly backwards undertones. Because you don’t expect, or even want, anything better from a bad movie. Just don’t pretend you’re making good movies and you’re all set.

            Also, bringing in Leonard probably had less to do with trying to advance a terrible plot, and way more to do with utterly pointless fan service. It is so pointless because the fans don’t want to see old actors, they just want a halfway decent movie (even if it has a bad plot).

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Who wouldn’t want to be anonymous “So, I’m a ST fan … who was seriously unimpressed by the first reboot for some indescribable reason”

            I could do all too much describing, but what this comment made me flash on, is a comparison with Shrek. There everything on low object level was reversed (ogre good, pretty princess bad), but the moral structure was emphasized: the Good were Good all the way through, won a really Good result in Good ways. Addams Family worked the same way.

        • onyomi says:

          Yeah, Abrams was absolutely the wrong person for Star Trek, and I have even less hope for the new film, but I think he did a pretty good job with Star Wars, which is where, it becomes clear, his heart always lay in the first place.

      • Pku says:

        I really liked the prequels and thought the weakest part of this movie was that it didn’t have anyone as good as Ian Mcgregor in it. And also the Mary Sue thing was irritating.

    • Sastan says:

      I didn’t. You’re correct. It’s pretty much a shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope, just worse in every conceivable way except of course the computer animation. Characters are thinner, plot is thinner, pacing is too fast, baddies aren’t scary, and yet another, even larger Death Star?

      It’s as if a very dull fifteen year old smoked a pound of hash and made a youtube mash-up which somehow got very professionally produced.

      • onyomi says:

        I was a bit confused as to whether the new Death Star was supposed to be a kind of Dyson Sphere. On the one hand, they said they were drawing energy from a sun which could be seen in the sky. On the other, it looked like a sun emerged from the new Death Star when it was destroyed.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          What do you think happens to a planet that absorbs the sun to power its super-weapon if the super-weapon gets destroyed?

          • onyomi says:

            Oh, I see, it made a new sun in its place, essentially. I think it would have been more interesting to make it a Dyson sphere, though. Would have made it a little more different from the Death Star, and the size a little more necessary/plausible.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            They didn’t say so, but I figured out that since it consumes one sun per blast that they had to fly the whole planet to a new system each time.

            Even without the giant laser, each of those technologies (eating a sun, moving a planet through hyperspace) are pretty scary on their own.

        • Sastan says:

          What I want to know is how it fired twice? They draw the energy from a nearby sun………they fire it………..then they have another sun? Ok, maybe they have two, but isn’t the world covered in ice? Ok, gloss over that, they have two, they get a second shot and then they just fire up the engines and go to the next place? Oh wait no, it’s in a planet. They have two shots. Way to blow the next hundred years tax money on a two-shot planet destroyer. And they don’t even fire it at the Republic capital.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Me, I was wondering why the whole “focusing” or “firing” part was even necessary. If you’re on a planet and you want to destroy other planets in the same system, shouldn’t killing the sun – or even just moving its energy elsewhere – do the trick all by itself?

          • NN says:

            The superweapon fires the beam at FTL speeds towards planets in other star systems.

          • @Sastan, I assumed that when they said that the weapon was fully charged when “the sun goes out” they meant temporarily, not permanently. As in, all the energy from the surface layers has been sucked up, so it goes dark, but fusion is still taking place in the core, so you just have to wait a little while for the surface layers to heat up again.

            Dunno what an astrophysicist would say about that idea. 🙂

            Incidentally, according to the experts over on scifi.stackexchange.com, one of the planets that was destroyed was indeed the Republic’s current capital. (The one with all the balconies that was so reminiscent of Coruscant, presumably.)

            @Glen, the target planets weren’t in the same solar system as the weapon. That was this particular weapon’s special trick: it could destroy a planet anywhere in the Galaxy. It was located inside First Order territory (presumably well inside) so that’s why the Resistance was closer to it than any Republic forces that might have been better equipped for the attack.

            Personally, my main take-away from the new movie was something like, “Oh look, they’ve finally invented guard rails.” 🙂

      • Deiseach says:

        ‘Scuse me, you’re looking for plot in a J.J. Abrams reboot of a beloved SF movie franchise?

        I take it you haven’t seen reboot Trek 🙂

        Summary of first movie: Rebel Without A Clue Kirk has whopping great daddy issues because of tragic/heroic backstory. Sasses his way into Starfleet, through Starfleet, and into command of the “Enterprise”. Meanwhile, Villain wants to destroy Earth/the Federation. Result: Enterprise and Villain’s ship have huge dog-fight over San Francisco, Kirk saves the day with the power of sass and the help of his crew.

        Second movie (extremely dumbed-down rip-off of “The Wrath of Khan” because the studio is demanding a sure-fire box office hit this time and want something proven to have worked): Kirk is still sassing his way through command. Daddy issues get a work-out when replacement father figure is murdered by Ostensible Villain. Ostensible Villain reveals Real Villain. Ostensible Villain wants to destroy Earth/the Federation. Result: Enterprise and Real Villain’s ship crewed by Ostensible Villain have huge dog-fight over San Francisco, Kirk saves the day by ripping off the climactic scene from “The Wrath of Khan” only death-flipped (he bites it this time, not Spock), magic blood of Ostensible Villain, and the help of his crew.

        I honestly can’t believe they crashed a starship into San Francisco not once but twice.

        I have very few hopes remaining for the third movie, especially having seen the teaser trailer, but the few remaining green shoots are (a) Simon Pegg wrote it (b) Abrams is not directing so at least no more lens flare, we’ll be able to see what happens on the bridge of the “Enterprise” (that may or may not turn out to be a good thing).

        • Murphy says:

          I wonder if they’ll keep all the barcode readers on the bridge….

          “Fire topedoes!”

          “Yes Sir”

          *officer takes out a sheath of paper cards with barcodes*

          *Bleep*
          *Buuzz*

          *Bleep*
          *Buuzz*

          *Bleep*
          *Buuzz*

          “Sir, it won’t scan!”

          It’ll also be interesting to see what causes them to crash into San Francisco this time.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            Scavenging the cutting room floor?

          • Deiseach says:

            I don’t think they’re going near San Francisco this time (although who knows?)

            What makes me want to see it: Orci got turned down for the directing job he wanted and kicked off the writing. Simon Pegg at least is a fan. Idris Elba. Hope that for the 50th anniversary (2016!) of Trek the studio and/or intellectual property owners won’t want to produce a steaming heap of manure as a marker of that milestone. Faint hopes that this time round they won’t be crashing a spaceship into San Francisco and that, as we’re seeing new aliens, at long bloody last they’re boldly going (and not remaking any episode of any of the series, either original or following).

            What makes me dubious: That teaser trailer which is very unfair of me to judge it on that, but it looks like they’re still chasing the “18 year old male” demographic (though will blaring “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys really appeal to kids who may not have been born when that was a hit?). Hints that they’re still stuck on daredevil rebel without a clue Kirk and we may not see a Kirk who’s finally grown up enough (after five years!) to be a believable commander of a starship.

            I’ll wait for more information to make a judgement.

          • Wow.

            Look, I know Star Trek is science fiction, but hasn’t Trek always at least nominally tried to get science right?

            [hysterical laughter]

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            No one would say Star Trek is hard science fiction, but they at least do usually try to hand-wave problems away with a pseudo-explanation. And it makes things semi-plausible enough for interesting discussions of the science involved, including quite good books like The Physics of Star Trek.

    • Anonymous says:

      Mary Sue is also an overactor. Harrison Ford could be a movie star in his sleep, and his role seems suitably natural. The other bits of comedic relief are super in-your-face. I almost felt like one of the characters should just look directly at the camera and say, “You laugh now.”

      • onyomi says:

        Mary Sue was still about 10,000x better than Hayden Christensen.

        • anonymous says:

          Hayden Christensen was 10000x better than Adam Driver, who played the equivalent role.

          • NN says:

            I’d say that Hayden Christensen was better as an actor,* but Adam Driver didn’t have nearly as many truly awful lines.

            * I think that Mr. Christensen is generally undervalued as an actor, and after watching some prequel fan-edits it is clear to me that he put a lot of work into the role and did better than many other actors would have been able to do with the same material.

          • Deiseach says:

            Being fair to the actor, Anakin Skywalker was written as a whiny brat (from his first non- and pre-Vader appearance onwards).

            There’s not much you can do with a role that involves massacring hundreds while pouting about how nobody respects your feelings.

          • onyomi says:

            I would disagree. Christensen is one of the most wooden actors I’ve ever seen, regardless of what role he’s playing. I think Adam Driver was much better than him. His emotion felt much more genuine to me, at least.

          • DrBeat says:

            If you’re basing it off of the prequels, everyone‘s acting was wooden.

            They were talking about things using fantasy-scifi terms the actorrs didn’t know and don’t have emotional associations with, in scenes shot out of order, on sets that don’t exist, looking at or reacting to things that aren’t there because they’ll be added in postproduction. It’s HARD to give a non-wooden performance in that sort of situation without a good director to get you where you need to be going.

            Lucas, as of the prequels and regardless of all his other failings in other areas, just wasn’t a good director.

          • NN says:

            Lucas, as of the prequels and regardless of all his other failings in other areas, just wasn’t a good director.

            I have to agree with that. Even in ANH, there are a number of moments where the characters seem noticeably “off.” Other people directed ESB and RoTJ, and I think all the actors come across much stronger in those movies. It probably says something that the movie that is often seen as Lucas’s best work, THX1138, is a movie where all of the characters are supposed to act like emotionless drones for most of the runtime.

    • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

      J.J. ABRAMS RAPED MY MIDDLE AGE!

    • anonymous says:

      I agree that the movie is bad and that both main characters are bad, but i’m curious to hear why, exactly, Finn made you cringe.

      • Sastan says:

        I can’t answer for the person you’re querying, and I wouldn’t say “cringe”, but the character doesn’t make much sense or seem nearly as necessary to the story as his screen time would suggest.

        Of course, I’m sure they’ll get to that in future installments, but we get a lot of bloody backstory for him for…..what, that he has a bit of info about the Death Star? In ANH, it got pared down to “many bothans died to bring us this” and that was that. They shoehorn in him fighting the big baddie for five seconds while Ms. Better at everything than everyone who has been doing it all their lives but is unaccountably still on an impoverished backwater handily falls unconscious.

        Either he has a massive role to play in a future film, or they just padded out the black actor’s time, because his only role is to be there and be black, and hold a lightsaber for a second for the poster stills. And if his role is to come in a future film, why not put his backstory in that one? They could have cut thirty minutes in this one, and used it to flesh out the other story lines!

        • Echo says:

          I loved him as a character, but his backstory… just didn’t fit. And they didn’t give him much of a chance to shine at anything he was good at.

          Imagine if Luke got turned down for the final attack because of an embarrassing medical condition, and spent the whole time awkwardly flirting with Leia in the control room while Han blew up the Death Star.

          • onyomi says:

            I think one thing a lot of people are missing about episode 7 which I actually liked was the youth and inexperience of many of the characters. Like when Kylo first took off his helmet I think you were supposed to be kind of unimpressed–you’re supposed to realize he’s basically a kid having a temper tantrum.

            And Fin is a kid who’s basically had no contact with the real world. Though we might expect him to be a bit more of a hardened soldier type, given his background, what we are meant to understand, I think, is that he is too sensitive (force sensitive?) for the occupation he was forced into. It would be weird if he were confident or suave. And he’s not supposed to step directly into the Luke (that’s Rey, clearly) or Han shoes. He’s actually kind of a different character!

            So basically when the new movie follows in the footsteps of the old, it’s like “where’s the creativity!” When it diverges, it’s like “Han and Luke wouldn’t have acted like that!”

          • Echo says:

            But the film makes sure to inform us that he’s a top-marks graduate of the kiddie-trooper brainwashing academy, and then never does anything with it.

            There were so many scenes where he could have gone
            “wait, lightsabers are stupid weapons for crazy space hippies. I need to fight in the traditional manner of my people!”
            *picks up real gun and becomes the first character in Star Wars to be good with rifles*
            “Bwahaha, have you ever seen blaster marks so precise?! Imperial stormtrooper with plot armour, baby!”

            Imagine how cool that fight with Ren would have been if FN and Rey-Rey worked together–her with the saber and him using l33t stormtrooper 360 no-scope trick shots with a blaster.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Was I the only one who saw the scene where he only had the light saber because it was his party’s spare weapon, and then the scene soon after that where he took a blaster off of a dead stormtrooper and stopped using the light saber?

            Also, if you are suggesting using a blaster against a Jedi, you have never seen a Star Wars movie. It’s better to throw the gun at a Jedi than to shoot him, because at least he won’t deflect the gun back at you. Never use a blaster against a Jedi.

          • Adam says:

            I guess I missed the part where he was an elite stormtrooper. All I remember Phasma saying is he’d never been caught violating conformity standards before. When Han asked him what his job was, he said he worked in sanitation, and the moment he quit was his first taste of a real-life engagement. If anything, it was kind of refreshing for a movie to acknowledge that most soldiers never actually fight, may not even be any good at it, and have normal jobs because the military still needs cooks and mechanics.

          • Anonymous says:

            When Han asked him what his job was, he said he worked in sanitation

            I felt like this was purely for comedic relief (in the classic Abrams style), but that it totally ruined so many other things. How does he know so much about the weapon? How does he end up being front-line infantry? How does his back story work at all?!?!

            Sure, it make two jokes possible (Han saying the galaxy relied on them and asking if they had a trash compactor)… but it just doesn’t make any other sense.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            The USMC has a standard that all marines are riflemen, maybe its the same way in the First Order?

          • Echo says:

            I don’t remember what was in the movie vs the new novels, but apparently he was supposed to be a crack shot, run-up-to-the-bunker-and-toss-a-grenade-in kinda trooper.

            And that’s why it would be cool (and original) to see a smart, talented stormtooper figuring out how to fight a jedi his way. Certainly enough jedi in the prequels got shot to show that it’s possible.

            It would have made Rey’s fight a lot more believable too: have FN distract Kylo with blaster fire when he manages to corner/disarm her, until the jedi gets fed up and brings a tree down on him.

          • ivvenalis says:

            While Abrams certainly could have gone with the “hardened but disillusioned veteran” he made him more of an average chump trying to do the right thing instead. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that; they’re both deliberate choices and new character models for the franchise. Rey is a ridiculous Mary Sue, but I thought that both Poe and Finn were good additions.

            Re: sanitation vs infantry: we know that Finn was pressed into service at a very young age. Maybe the First Order has the younger “apprentice” stormtroopers doing scut work until they’re ready for combat? Knowing a bit about the layout of the base is actually pretty reasonable for someone who’d effectively been a Hull Technician (navy rating that handles sewage and garbage among other things).

    • onyomi says:

      I think “terrible” is way too strong a word. As a stand-alone movie it would have been very engaging. As a new Star Wars movie it is still way better than any of the prequels. I agree the parallels to a New Hope were a bit excessive (I think they wanted to shout at you: THIS IS REAL STAR WARS. THIS IS NOT THE PREQUELS) and the political situation rather thinly drawn.

      That said, it was still a little better than I expected and not much worse than any reasonable expectation (that is, I can think of ways to improve it, but if you expected it to be much, much better than it was I don’t think you had a reasonable expectation, given the track record of the series).

      Perhaps most importantly, it captured the atmosphere, tone, and admixture of seriousness/humor/cuteness which characterized the original trilogy much better, and so felt much more like a “real” Star Wars movie. Considering none of the original writers or directors were on board, so far as I know, that’s a pretty impressive feat, to my mind. JJ Abrams clearly is a Star Wars fan and not a Star Trek fan, as evidenced by his attempts to turn Star Trek into Star Wars and his much better handle on the “feel” of Star Wars when the time came for him to do that.

      Could be worse; apparently the new Star Trek is directed by director of Fast and Furious. Now that is a travesty.

      • anonymous says:

        There was humor on display on Han Solo’s face in this new movie, but I didn’t feel that there was any humor on the director’s chair. This is unlike the previous episodes.

        The prequels were way better. They sensibly had creativity of their own, ideas – even if hit or miss; they didn’t just ape previous entries in the saga.
        Whereas this new episode is just A New Hope, reheated, minus the playfulness, the inspiration, and the epic quality.

        It is a box office success; The Phantom Menace was one too. Audiences are nostalgic and have low standards.

        • Deiseach says:

          Haven’t seen it myself yet and never really a Star Wars fan, but it’s J.J. Abrams. After what he did to reboot Trek, I am not one bit surprised by what you say.

          But he probably did exactly what he was hired to do: get a box office success out of a revitalised franchise.

        • onyomi says:

          There is definitely a lot of playfulness, not just in Harrison Ford’s face.

          Did you see the scene where the storm troopers hear Kylo Ren throwing a fit and just slowly back away?

        • onyomi says:

          Whether or not one considers the prequels better, I think, depends on one’s priorities: would you rather see someone take a beloved series in a very different direction, aesthetically, and fail, or see them take a beloved series in a well-worn, somewhat predictable direction and succeed?

          The parallels to New Hope were excessive, I’ll concede, but Star Wars has also always been about history repeating itself and demons being transferred from one generation to the next. Also, about children and parents helping each other overcome said demons.

          It didn’t have to be as similar to New Hope as it was, but it had to have a lot of those themes in order to feel like Star Wars, which was obviously a priority after the strong negative reaction to the prequels. The alternative would be to try something very new and different, but unless it turned out to be absolutely brilliant, it would almost certainly have been met with vitriol on the part of fans and resulted in lower ticket sales as well.

          To contrast, again with the prequels: there are a number of simple things which I could change to make the prequels into much better movies: recast Anakin (both of him), collapse the three sidekick villains (Maul, Dooku, Grievous) into one villain whom we actually get to know over the course of the trilogy, etc.

          For Force Awakens, by contrast, I can think of some ways to make it a little better: tone down the parallels to New Hope, provide better explanation for the political situation being almost exactly where it was thirty years after the Empire supposedly suffered a decisive loss, etc., but I can’t think of simple ways to make it a lot better.

          The only way I can think to make it a lot better would be to take it in a completely different, yet totally brilliant direction. But that would make any movie better if it were a completely different and better movie. Given the direction they knew they had to take the film in, I think they did close to as good a job as they could reasonably be expected to (and are obviously avoiding many of the pitfalls of the prequels: Kylo Ren, for example, is obviously going to be around for 3 movies and not rotate out for two more villains).

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ onyami
            would you rather see someone take a beloved series in a very different direction, aesthetically, and fail, or see them take a beloved series in a well-worn, somewhat predictable direction and succeed?

            Yep. Star Wars 1977 was a fairy tale in space. That’s ~40 years ago. If reviving the old clean magic means re-telling the old plot, it’s worth it. Classic Disney approach to a classic fairy tale. Yay Disney.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, I mean, in order for it to be Star Wars it basically has to be Joseph Campbell in space. Since that means the “monomyth,” well, it’s going to get a little repetitive.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ onyomi
            Yeah, I mean, in order for it to be Star Wars it basically has to be Joseph Campbell in space. Since that means the “monomyth,”

            It doesn’t have to continue as the monomyth, and I don’t know how important it is for sequels to spread to adjacent myths, and if so, whether adjacent meaning other stories that Campbell liked, or other classic fairy tale stories that the naive audience liked. SW 1977 did ‘farm boy rescues princess’, which got us into the fairy tale world in space. To stay in that world, does a sequel need to do ‘snow white among the ewoks’? — which could be quite good, too.

          • Anonymous says:

            Here’s a two days late reply to Oyomi – I wish I had had the time to write it earlier.

            I think you and other commenters are playing down the ridiculous extent to which this movie is a copypaste of past SW movies. This movie doesn’t just echo key story elements and scenes, the way any cyclical saga does. To merely do so would have been entirely fair.

            Take a look at other similar sagas, such as Back to the Future, or Indiana Jones, or for that matter the Divine Comedy; they are cyclical, yes, and every episode repeats certain key points, but every episode also has its own identity, thanks to the introduction of new things such as, for example, Indy’s relationship with his father in the third movie.
            This is also true of Star Wars as I know it. Every episode added something to the SW universe. For example, Empire Strikes Back had the AT-AT’s, Luke’s confrontation with the dark side, Yoda, Palpatine, the carbonite, the Big Reveal. Return of the Jedi had Jabba’s court, the speeder bike fight, the Ewok adorability and their asimmetrical warfare, Vader’s humanity, the big conclusion. And of course the prequels added many more elements to the universe. None of the old SW movies is calque of a previous one.
            In this new movie, not only the story parallels a New Hope from beginning to end, not only the main characters (except Finn, who doesn’t work by the way) are very heavily based on old characters (Rey=Luke, Kylo=Anakin/Vader), but even the minor ones are (example: Leader Snoke is Palpatine, Hux is Tarkin down to the power conflict with Kylo/Vader, the what’s-her-name cantina owner – 1000 years old wise little weird alien who guides the main character through mystical issues – is Yoda) and even the little things that happen, the individual scenes, tend to parallel ones in previous movies – for example, while under the guidance of Mrs not-Yoda, Rey goes downstairs and has a trippy vision, just like Luke while being mentored by Yoda had a scene where he goes “downstairs” into a cave where he has a trippy vision.
            Even when it comes to the minor decorative things – well, the past SW movies kept adding stuff – the composer introduced new themes in every episode. The iconic Imperial March only appeared in Episode 5. Even the prequels had wonderful new musical pieces – Duel of Fates, the Trade Federation March, Across the Stars. Was the new movie really scored by John Williams? For the first time, I didn’t hear any original theme! There used to be new fighter and military ship designs in every episode, none that I noticed in the new one. There were new kinds of environment in every previous episode, prequels included. In this one – another sandy desert, and another Death Star – just what we hadn’t seen enough of!
            Aside from Finn’s introduction, in the whole movie there is virtually NOTHING original and creative! The movie is fractally uncreative, uncreative at any scale, and it must be very difficult to make such a movie – you have to restrain yourself at every step from doing something actually original. What an exercise in misguided discipline! This can’t be justified simply by saying that Star Wars has always been repeating itself, because, like I said, no other cyclical saga is like this, and certainly not the Star Wars we know and love.
            The result is that this is the first SW movie that outright bored me, with its 100% across-the-board deja vu dullness. The prequels had not.

            And anyhow, my accusation that episode 7 does nothing new is only ONE of the issues that I have with it.
            It also has other, pretty terrible flaws.
            But I’ll keep my other criticisms of it to myself for now. I already wrote a lot. I don’t have the time to rant any more.

          • Anonymous says:

            There used to be new fighter and military ship designs in every episode, none that I noticed in the new one….

            One of the things I joked about after seeing it was the idea the the First Order was new, coming up after the fall of the Empire. You’d think there would be some bureaucrat somewhere that would decide, “Ya know, maybe we could use a little rebranding?” Even just change the look of the stormtroopers a little… really bring us into the 4th Decade, ya know?

      • Nornagest says:

        Could be worse; apparently the new Star Trek is directed by director of Fast and Furious. Now that is a travesty.

        Eh, I’ll call it a travesty when it comes out in theaters and turns out to suck. Which isn’t unlikely, but one bad movie on a guy’s resume shouldn’t be enough to write him off forevermore.

        Paul Verhoeven did Showgirls, for example, but he also gave us Total Recall and Robocop.

        • onyomi says:

          I’m not saying it because this director has previously directed a bad movie (I haven’t actually seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, since I usually find car chases to be yawn-inducing); I’m saying it’s because he’s not the right director for a Star Trek movie, as Abrams was not the right director for a Star Trek movie. Of course, Fast and Furious guy could magically turn out to have an amazing range, but given that an actor recently interviewed about the new Star Trek film described it as “loads of fun and action-packed” (NOT what I want to hear about a Star Trek movie), I doubt it.

        • Mark Atwood says:

          Paul Verhoeven did Showgirls, for example, but he also gave us Total Recall and Robocop.

          Showgirls was the only movie he made that I really enjoyed.

          Total Recall was ok. Robocop was boring and heavy handed. Everything else he’s done is below trash.

          • Nornagest says:

            Total Recall was a good bad movie (compare The Fifth Element); same with Robocop. Showgirls was a bad good movie. People’s opinions of Starship Troopers seem to depend almost entirely on whether they thought it was trying to be good or bad; I’m in the “bad” camp.

            I thought Flesh and Blood was genuinely good, but it’s probably got a niche appeal.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            The Fifth Element is a great movie.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            The Fifth Element is a great movie

            The only good part of The Fifth Element was Bruce Willis playing Bruce Willis, and only in the first half.

          • Anony says:

            Starship Troopers is one of my favorite films. It’s incredibly fun.

    • anonymous says:

      The movie has plenty of negative and mixed user reviews on metacritic.

      • onyomi says:

        I’m pretty surprised at how negative the whole SSC commentariat seems to be about the film. I literally haven’t spoken to anyone IRL who didn’t like it at least pretty well.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I have one friend who didn’t like it, because they changed Jacen’s name to Ben.

          • onyomi says:

            The horror!

          • Deiseach says:

            You think that’s bad, part of why I am so down on Abrams and pals is that THEY BLEW UP VULCAN!!!!!

            I don’t care if it was in the alternate timeline and Vulcan Prime is still in existence, you do not make a Star Trek movie and BLOW UP VULCAN!!!!!

            Yes, the multiple exclamation points are warranted 🙂

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Deisach
            I don’t care if it was in the alternate timeline and Vulcan Prime is still in existence, you do not make a Star Trek movie and BLOW UP VULCAN!!!!!

            Unless in a sequel they go back and correct the whateveritwas and bring it back, like bringing back Spock in the first batch of movies. Which they show no signs of doing.

            Or better, Vulcan Prime shows up and blasts the whole roboot.

            Stupid movie reboot anyway, on all counts.

          • Anonymous says:

            Unless in a sequel they go back and correct the whateveritwas and bring it back

            …I’m going to reiterate that I’ve never seen a time-travel plot that made even the slightest bit of sense. At this point, they just require too much suspension of disbelief than I have left.

          • James Picone says:

            @Anonymous:
            Have you seen Primer? Would recommend.

            (Engineers working in a garage accidentally a time travel; shenanigans ensue).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Primer is just really complicated, and there actually is one point at which the logic breaks down, and the filmmakers admit they don’t have a coherent timeline.

            The movie Predestination is probably the best, at least as far as the time travel aspect goes. It’s based on the Heinlein story “—All You Zombies—”, and it changes virtually nothing from it. As the title alludes to, the story is one giant predestination paradox. But it’s one-hundred percent self-consistent. (After all, there is nothing logically contradictory about the predestination paradox.)

          • Jaskologist says:

            Read Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates. Excellent book, built around “you’ve already done everything you’re going to do.”

          • Mitochondrius says:

            Predestination has other very implausible elements, like the protagonist not recognizing himself/herself, not to mention reproductive biology…

            But yes, I appreciate the effort to make a self-consistent story work. Almost no one does it.

            I just remembered: The Infinite Man also has a nice self-consistent story. Highly recommended for time-travel fans.

            http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2553424/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

          • switchnode says:

            Hey, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is 100% self-consistent.

    • The Smoke says:

      What I wondered is that almost all youtube reviewers really liked the movie (~ 10:1 ratio), although most mention one or two of the problems of the film. Do they have to say they like it, so their chances to get exclusive information from the movie industry will be better or is it just that they don’t want to piss of the fanboys?

    • Rock Lobster says:

      99% lurker here, I came here to chime in on this exact topic, as I just saw the movie last night. (slight spoilers ahead)

      I also didn’t really like it. It wasn’t bad, but there was basically nothing original in it and the non-stop callbacks to the original movie were extremely tiresome.

      I thought the two new young protagonists were really not done well. Specifically, one was raised from birth to be part of an elite SS battalion, and the other was abandoned at a very young age and raised in a place that is basically Deliverance country mixed with Saudi Arabia. And yet in no way are they ever anything other than well-adjusted kids from the suburbs, and Rey even has (to quote Tyler Cowen) a “posh South London accent.” Such people would be very different by our standards, and we never even get a hint of that. In the original movie, a lot was made of the fact that Luke was a hick farm boy, Leia was a princess, and Han was a roguish smuggler of dubious morality.

      And also even Harrison Ford who I love, just felt very shoe-horned in, like, oh wow whaddayaknow it’s me Han Solo and my old friend Chewie stumbling onto the Millennium Falcoln, go figure. Well jee hasn’t this been fun, can I have my $20 mn check now?

    • stillnotking says:

      (MILD FORCE AWAKENS SPOILERS AHEAD)

      I just saw it last night as well. I don’t think I’d call it terrible overall, but some parts of it certainly were. Rey was the Mary Sue-est Mary Sue that ever Mary Sued. Finn was written with a bit more depth, but not very consistently — he went from apparent PTSD to gleefully slaughtering his former comrades-in-arms without batting an eye. I loved Kylo Ren’s character, though; so refreshing to have a villain who is obviously confused and insecure. And, you know, Han probably wouldn’t have made the greatest father, all things considered. I like the way they handled his relationship with Leia: two people who have clearly both loved and hated each other in the past, and have arrived at a kind of weary truce.

      The least forgivable element was the shameless plundering of story hooks from the original trilogy. It makes perfect economic sense — why take any risks on a sure thing? — but they could have been a little less obvious about it. The utter lack of any meaningful exposition was a problem, too, but that’s just what I expect from Abrams.

      On the pro side, it definitely felt like Star Wars, unlike the prequels. The humor mostly worked. Ford, Fisher, Driver, and Boyega all turned in excellent performances. The effects were top-notch. I didn’t feel cheated out of my twelve bucks, but it didn’t have the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of ANH.

      • Echo says:

        I liked Ren, but stacking a confused and insecure villain against such a huge cast of heroes was… eh. Maybe if he’d had some backup the audience could have seen him as a threat.

        As it was, I just had this image of him squeaking
        Mo~m, I told you my name is Kyle Loren now! Stop embarrassing me in front of my Sith friends! Just leave the cookies and Faygo at the door to my roo-… I mean my daryk chamber.”

      • HlynkaCG says:

        > he went from apparent PTSD to gleefully slaughtering his former comrades-in-arms without batting an eye.

        Personally, this was my biggest gripe.

        I would have liked to see a bit more conflict there, maybe even have one of the fights be against one of his former Storm trooper buddies. “Why’d you turn your back on us? I thought we were comrades”

        • stillnotking says:

          Especially since the introduction to the character was him stopping to help a fallen trooper. That was actually a great moment, showing the audience that these guys are human too, but then the writers (and, through them, Finn) completely undermined it by treating them as faceless mooks for the rest of the film.

          Finn’s character was a huge missed opportunity. I could’ve used a lot more of him, and a lot less of boring-ass Rey.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            I agree completely.

            *Spoilers*

            I think that Finn’s the fight with the Stormtrooper during the attack on the smuggler’s bar was a wasted opportunity. All you’d need is another 30 seconds of dialog/set up to make that trooper a friend of Finn’s.

            You could then get a whole lot more drama/ action out of that fight as Finn tries to reason with his former comrade, “come on man, it doesn’t have to be this way, come with me” while the Stormtrooper cuts back with “I’m not some Bowe Berghdal motherfucker the sort of coward who abandons his post to join a bunch of filthy terrorists…” Both men proceed to beat the crap out of each-other emotionally and physically, equally convinced that the other has betrayed their ideals.

            This would have played well into the earlier theme about Finn’s running and would have given a chance to do a fun inverse of the typical “come to the Dark Side” speech.

          • nimim. k.m. says:

            [spoilers like the rest of thread]

            Well, I think they were trying to portray the stormtroopers as a bit more than faceless mooks: like when Ren is throwing a tantrum and yells for guards, guards just go “NOPENOPE” and back away. Or when the Starkiller base is exploding one officers tries to make it for escape shuttles yelling “can’t you see we are not going to make it, the top brass has already left”.

            Still, I agree there were much wasted opportunities with Finn’s character.

        • Deiseach says:

          No, see, that’s the kind of philosophical stuff that bored Abrams as a kid when all his friends were into Star Trek 🙂

          The trouble is, the Stormtroopers have to be faceless mooks. The Star Wars universe is in the tradition of the Saturday matinée serial where the thugs, minions or henchmen of the villain are only there to shoot at/beat up/kidnap the hero and love interest and be foiled; they’re disposable, which is why in the first movies the troopers shooting at Han and Leia and Luke couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn – their job is to always fail to do any lasting or fatal damage to the heroes and to be tossed aside like sheaves at a threshing as the hero battles his way to the show-down with the villain.

    • Adam says:

      That sounds kind of like every Star Wars film. Anakin was able to pilot vessels he’d never seen before and singled-handedly destroyed the droid controller ship when he was 8, and Qui-Gon just conveniently happened to get stranded on his planet to find him in the first place. The explanation here is the same as the explanation then: the Force did it. Anakin, Luke, and now Rey are all Mary Sues. That’s what a Skywalker is.

      • stillnotking says:

        (FORCE AWAKENS SPOILERS)

        Anakin, Luke, and now Rey are all Mary Sues. That’s what a Skywalker is.

        Anakin, yes, but not Luke. Luke was a callow, whiny goofball until Obi-Wan and Yoda set him straight. The only thing he was “naturally” good at was piloting, which was alluded to in his backstory multiple times — it might have been a bit of a stretch to go from a T-16 to an X-Wing, but nothing like Rey being able to fly the Millennium Falcon without (as far as the audience knows) ever having sat in a cockpit, or teaching herself telepathy and Jedi mind tricks within minutes of finding out she can use the Force, or winning a lightsaber duel against a trained opponent on literally the first occasion she’s ever used one.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Rey had been using a staff weapon all her life, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know hand-to-hand combat.

          Her opponent had been gut-shot by a wookiee and then dueled someone else first. He was also not completely trained and very brash.

          • stillnotking says:

            I’ll grant that was the least objectionable part, especially since it was the climax of the film and she obviously had to win. Still, I’d have had her overcome him through cunning (maybe needling him about his grandfather), or creative use of the Force, not just by whacking him with her Pure Awesomeness.

            It’s hard to imagine where they could take the character from here, what credible challenges or growth opportunities they could give her.

          • Pku says:

            That wasn’t too objectionable if they’d emphasized Kylo’s weakness more; as it was, it kind of removed his ability to be intimidating. Now he’s like Seto Kaiba: Oh, you think you have a shot this time? sooo scary.
            The other thing that made it really silly was the way he was beating her until he mentioned the force. Then you can see her thinking “Oh right, the force!” and suddenly winning.

        • Echo says:

          Wasn’t the T-16 basically an armed jet-trainer in Star Wars?
          Less of a kid’s motorbike than the T-38 Talon they use to teach pilots how to fly supersonic.
          And yeah, Luke was almost useless at everything but the specific thing he spent all his free time training at.

          Rey-Rey could have been way less Sue with scenes that highlighted the strengths we’d seen her demonstrate, rather than ass-pulls.

          And comparing her to 8-year old Anikins is… not really the best defense of her character. At least she never squeaked “now that’s podracing!” :\

          Edit: Actually wikied it. “These airspeeders were often used as training vehicles by the Rebel Alliance, due to the fact that their flight controls were similar to those of X-wings.”

          • Adam says:

            That wasn’t meant to be a defense of her character. The magical ability to be roughly the best at everything you try can be used well or poorly but is probably lazy and boring most of the time. It’s just internally consistent with the known Star Wars universe that such people exist.

        • Pku says:

          Not anakin really either – he had years of training as a jedi by episode 2. The only really mary-sueish moment he had was piloting at the end of TPS, which was at least portrayed as silly and not really meant to be taken seriously.

      • John Schilling says:

        Luke Skywalker was a plausibly expert pilot in his own right, who made one lucky or weakly-superhuman shot with an assist from the force. Then he engaged in a training montage, er, course of disciplined study, to become a Jedi Knight. That’s how you write an everyman character into a hero without making him a Mary Sue.

        Eight-year-old Anakin vs. the Trade Federation Fleet, not the same thing at all, not even the same class of thing.

        • anonymous says:

          Furthermore, Luke was able to somewhat dabble in the Force in ANH only after the very brief guidance of a Jedi, which makes sense; in my experience, a few quick tips from an expert can be very useful if you know very little of a field.

          In contrast, Rey received no Jedi mentorship whatsoever, which makes her newly found powers truly ridiculous, and damaging to the entire Force mystique series-wide.

          • Echo says:

            Yeah, at least Luke got a training scene and a lesson on which end of the lightsaber to hold without disemboweling yourself (honourably).

          • nimim. k.m. says:

            >In contrast, Rey received no Jedi mentorship whatsoever, which makes her newly found powers truly ridiculous, and damaging to the entire Force mystique series-wide.

            Can’t say I disagree with that as the one of the popular fan theories currently is that as a child she was the one padawan from Luke’s New Jedi Order that survived the massacre orchestrated by Kylo Ren-Ben Solo, and Luke did a Jedi mind trick to make her forget the trauma and hid her in Jakku.

          • That seems plausible from a story-telling perspective. But an alternative theory is that the Force itself (having “awakened”) was directly helping Rey through the first steps of becoming a Jedi.

            (Hey, it’s at least as plausible as Anakin’s virgin-birth thing!)

      • Sastan says:

        What they said. Luke is deeply flawed as a character, which is part of the allure. He has to train to learn the force, not just figure it out in ten seconds. He’s completely uncool, contrasted with the very cool, very social, and very dubious Han. He loses the contest for Leia (luckily), he loses his hand, he loses several fights. He’s earnest, introverted, driven but antisocial. He’s the stand-in for all the nerds who love the films so much.

    • Echo says:

      STAR WARS SPOILERS END HERE (PROBABLY.)

      (OR BEGIN HERE IF YOU’RE SCROLLING UP)

      P.S. It Was His Sled

    • Mark says:

      I think it was probably the worst star wars movie – JJ Abrams is not good with stories. Elements of his movies work, but they never manage to hang together as a whole – the movies are invariably stupid, and he seems to have a major problem with “nudge nudge – hey look, I’m in this movie!” moments – might appeal to fans who just want to see Spock/Khan/Solo and not too bothered about how they get there, but not great from the point of view of a coherent story. Also, the humour was very heavy handed – it seemed more like the world’s most expensive parody of Star Wars in parts, rather than an actual Star Wars movie.
      So… parts of it were cool… but it wasn’t really a coherent adventure, and there wasn’t any *wow* factor – at least episode one had the light saber battle at the end/pod-racing scene.

      Also, John Carter was much, much better in my opinion – fun adventure with a fairly interesting story.

      • Deiseach says:

        fans who just want to see Spock/Khan/Solo and not too bothered about how they get there

        Oh believe me, we Trek fans moaned like Moaning Myrtle about reboot Khan. The zenith (or it may be nadir) of Abrams & Co. shoehorning Khan into the second reboot and having him played by Benedict Cumberbatch was the tie-in comics had to run a fix-it series explaining why the North Indian Khan has become white Brit.

        Turns out it was all part of Admiral Marcus’ stupid Cunning Plan: give Khan plastic surgery and brainwashing to make him look and think he’s John Harrison.

        Why? Reasons!

  37. Whenever someone asks me for money when I’m walking down the street I tell them I’m sorry and then later make a note of it. At the end of the year I donate $5 for each time to the local food bank. That’s in addition to the normal Giving What We Can amount I send mostly to Givewell. Anybody else do something like that?

    Also, anybody else throwing money at the Iodine charities Givewell mentioned this year? Seems sort of like a coincidence that they were mentioned the same year that Hivemind came out.

    • zz says:

      The iodine charities, which are standout* charities this year, were standout charities last year and, from the look of things, seem likely to be standout charities next year. So, unless GiveWell had advance knowledge of Hive Mind, and, despite their commitment to openness, decided to make no mention of it in their charity review, looks like coincidence.

      *”Standout” refers specifically to charities that score well on some of GiveWell’s criteria, but which GiveWell is not confident enough to name them as a top charity.

    • Linch says:

      “Anybody else do something like that?” I haven’t heard of this exact thing, but I know some people who will donate money they would otherwise have given to the US homeless to GiveDirectly instead.

      This question was posed by the EA Facebook group before, but I can’t find it.

  38. Hodag says:

    Has anyone suggested a gene drive against tooth decay? There are 3 bugs that cause it, they will never be missed and getting fillings sucks. My parents were from a poor spot on the map. Dental caries took all of his teeth.

    • Has anyone suggested a gene drive against tooth decay? There are 3 bugs that cause it, they will never be missed and getting fillings sucks. My parents were from a poor spot on the map. Dental caries took all of his teeth.

      So much this!

      My parents weren’t especially poor, but neither of them had any teeth left when they met (admittedly, World War II combat was a factor in my father’s case). I inherited the bad teeth genes. Notwithstanding assiduous brushing and flossing, and a lot of time spent in dental chairs, every single tooth has been touched by decay, and has been filled or crowned.

      On the other hand, I’ve known people who don’t take particularly good care of their teeth, and have never had a cavity in their entire lives.

      As I understand it, the variance between individuals is not in the strength of the dental enamel, but in the qualities of saliva. The thinner your saliva, the longer your teeth last. While we await a genetic fix, perhaps a drug could be invented that would improve a person’s saliva?

    • Murphy says:

      I don’t think gene drives are reliable in organisms which don’t reproduce sexually.

      I mean you might be able to create a plasmid which spreads itself to other members of the same species and tinkers with it’s DNA but I don’t think it would work well.

      Also it’s GM work on human pathogens which is a tad risky plus then releasing modified versions of human pathogens which is even more so.

      I think you’d be better off breeding a large selection of naturally occurring phages known to attack the bacteria involved and making some kind of mouthwash out of them. It’d be interesting to see if such a product could get past regulatory hurdles.

      Also a Dental Caries Vaccines would be really nice to have.

    • Agronomous says:

      There’s a sugar alcohol (I think it’s xylitol, or maybe sorbitol) that kills mouth bacteria: they can partially digest it (because it’s structurally similar to sugar), but not completely (to the point of getting energy out of it). Their metabolic machinery gets blocked, and they die. I keep meaning to find the brand of sugarless gum with this sweetener in it.

      I had no cavities at all until I was 19. I’ve had a bunch since I started drinking soda nearly-daily in my twenties. _I highly recommend flossing_, since all my cavities have been between teeth, and flossing would have prevented all or most of them. Nobody taught me what flossing is all about: scraping the parts of your teeth closest to the gum, where brushes don’t reach. Four quick swipes on each side, and you move on to the next gap. It makes the first few days uncomfortable, but after that your gums get used to it (or the bacteria are gone and no longer cause inflammation or something like that).

      Pro tip: wrap the next day’s piece of floss around your toothbrush, to trigger flossing right after brushing tomorrow.

      • (1) Flossing is very important, and I strongly recommend it, but it does not prevent all cavities in a tooth-decay-vulnerable person like myself.

        (2) Xylitol is great stuff, but note well, it is extremely toxic to dogs. Sugar-free gum is the most common way for dogs to ingest it. If you share living space with one or more dogs, products containing xylitol should be kept safe from them.

  39. onyomi says:

    I think we’ve discussed here before the possibility that social justice is a case of proponents of an originally noble cause not knowing when to declare victory and quit. I recently listened to a podcast interview with a founding member of Greenpeace who described a similar dynamic: once they had convinced the public to stop hunting whales and dumping sewage in the river there was a large-ish contingent of people who were simply not ready to stop protesting, even though they had basically achieved their goals and this meant protesting over increasingly dubious causes.

    Regardless of what one thinks about the justness of protesting about any particular issue, I wonder if we can identify a more general failure mode which we might term something like “failure to shift gears” or “once you’ve spent years making a really nice hammer you can’t accept that there are no more nails”?

    • dndnrsn says:

      Taking this out of the discussion of any particular real-world cause, there is probably a social/personal dimension to it.

      If you have become a campaigner for the abolition of, say, cruelty to dragons, and you are sufficiently hardcore about it, it is probably a big part of your life. People make friends, meet romantic partners, etc in such groups. There are undoubtedly people who would think of themselves as “I am a campaigner for dragons’ welfare”.

      If all of the Society for the Protection of Dragons’ original goals are met, there are a lot of reasons why people might be resistant on a personal and social level to breaking up and finding new things to do.

      • onyomi says:

        Definitely. Even if one hasn’t made a career out of campaigning to save dragons (in which case one would be faced with the financial and personal hardship of changing careers), if one has merely made saving dragons into a significant part of one’s identity and/or social life it will be very hard to quit. That said, it is a slightly different kind of difficulty than the pain experienced by a true believer who realizes his cause was wrong; in this case, the original cause was right, but it is ironically difficult to accept that the goal has been achieved.

        • dndnrsn says:

          First, I’m not sure how easy it would be to say for any given cause that the original goal has been achieved. I was under the impression that most people here took objection to the focuses (pop culture, using the right words, etc) and methods/style (lack of charity, social media mobbing, ad hominem as foundational, etc) of some activist groups.

          However, regardless of if the issue is “Society for the Protection of Dragons achieves all reasonable goals and keeps on fighting against things that aren’t problems”, or if it’s “Society for the Protection of Dragons takes a wrong turn and adopts thinking and tactics that are counterproductive and ethically dubious”, I think that the “friendship” social aspect could explain a lot, and the “lust for power/status” aspect that a lot of people bring in isn’t always necessary.

          That is, if your social life is tied up in dragon protection, it is going to be equally hard to say “hey, dragons are safe, let’s go home” as it is to say “maybe Twitter mobbing people who use the word ‘draconic’ in a negative sense is a bad call?”, because who wants to lose their friends?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Sounds a lot like Pournelle’s Iron Law Of Bureaucracy:

        “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

        • Perhaps there’s some validity to it, but any time the word “Law” is modified by “Iron”, it signals a weaker assertion, not a stronger one.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Edward Scizorhands
          “Sounds a lot like Pournelle’s Iron Law Of Bureaucracy”

          How does Regulatory Capture fit into that?

          • Depends on the capture. Straight corruption of the kind that gets people investigated and draws negative attention is contra-indicated in long-term organizations. But the usual case, where senior industry leaders in Field X end up on the X Regulatory Board? That’s a perfect case. The X Regulatory Board could do its job right, have an adversarial relationship with the X industry, aggressively prosecute all matter of malfeasance and use its in-depth knowledge to seek out wrongdoing in places non-experts would not think to tread…or it can rack up huge benefits in funding and prestige by turning into a rubber-stamp for the titans of Field X to work their trade.

            Barring major catastrophe or heavy outside interference, it’s pretty easy to see that bureaucracies that do the second will tend to outcompete the actually-good-at-their-job ones.

            In a fair world, we’d get that outside interference regularly, as the government or voters regularly went “Hey, this regulatory board seems really cozy with the people they’re regulating. Go over their stuff with a fine-toothed comb and purge any corruption you discover.” In my experience, they don’t.

  40. JohnMcG says:

    I’ll take this forum to weigh in on your little argument with Freddie (https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/677939766982279169 among others).

    It’s disappointing to me to see Freddie hiding behind magic words, which he has recognized before as counter-productive (http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/04/29/bingo-cards-go-both-ways/). You compared the plight of nerds to the plight of black people! I can stop listening to you now and start pointing and laughing!

    This got more annoying as he accused Scott and others of being unwilling to engage in self-reflection on this issue. It seems to me it was he who was refusing to. It seems pretty obvious that you were not comparing the plight of nerds to black people, just demonstrating the folly of pointing to the ascendancy of certain cultural artifacts to confront a claim of pain, or even, yes, oppression.

    His longer post on this (http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/12/18/thats-not-why-you-feel-the-way-you-feel/) missed the mark, too. Are there really nerds who think they are picked on simply *because* they like Star Wars or other nerd culture artifacts? That if these things didn’t exist all their problems would be gone? No.

    And that leads me to another critique of Freddie’s approach. I would say that having Star Wars stand as a proxy for “nerd culture” would be analogous to having Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey or Sammy Davis, Jr. or Denzel Washington or Barack Obama stand in for black culture. It’s a pretty sanded down innocuous vision of it. Pointing to the popularity of Star Wars to nerds kind of says, “We’d like you if you had a good story, maybe brought in some cuddly Ewoks, and had some cool music.” Liking Star Wars is not liking nerd culture.

    • anonymous says:

      What the heck is “nerd culture”? That would imply that there were a whole group of us together creating this culture. If we had had enough friends to make a culture, nerd wouldn’t have had its awful bite when it was flung at us as an insult.

      I’m not overly proud that I was picked on, I don’t want to “reclaim” the insults that were used to cause me pain, and I certainly don’t have any nostalgia for the times in my youth when I had no friends. Frankly, I’d be just as happy if “nerd” went the way of “groovy” and was never heard from again.

      • JohnMcG says:

        Interesting point — that some Hollywood type figured out that nerds have money (and also might be lonely and have time on their hands and want to escape to fantasy worlds) and they can get some of it by creating entertainment that we like doesn’t mean we are ascendant.

        If there was a plus-size clothing store on every corner, that wouldn’t prove that fat-shaming was no longer a thing.

        • If there were a large-sized clothing store on every corner and a lot of the clothes were of good quality, this would imply that fat-shaming had at least faded out a lot.

          • Murphy says:

            Not really, it would imply that there were more fat people with more money and people willing to take that money. There could be exactly as much hate for fat people as before.

          • I’m not sure what you mean by hate. To my mind, one of the manifestations of hate (or at least a background assumption that it’s reasonable to treat people in a group badly) is precisely that products for that group are hard to find and/or low quality and/or high-priced compared to comparable products for more respected groups.

            This is complicated by the fact that numerical minority groups don’t get as large an advantage from mass production, but I think the situation with clothing for fat women goes well beyond that. As I understand it, clothes for fat women are still frequently made of inferior materials in unfashionable styles. You might call it sumptuary customs.

          • Jiro says:

            I don’t believe that. Fat people’s money is as good as everyone else’s; you’re suggesting that the entire industry denies fat people good clothes out of personal prejudice and doesn’t actually care about their money at all.

            Besides, there are several alternate possibilities. For instance, someone who doesn’t care about being fat probably doesn’t care about their appearance in general, and is less likely to pay a premium for good clothes. Or, the “unfashionable styles” really aren’t, it’s just that it’s hard to make fat people look good so everything seems unfashionable.

          • Deiseach says:

            Why clothing manufacturers don’t make clothes for fat people.

            Basically boils down to cost and risk. You can’t simply scale up existing designs to bigger sizes; trade shows and buyers that handle ‘normal’ sizing won’t buy or be interested in plus-size clothing so you need to appeal to those who specialise in this and there aren’t that many; “It means no store will buy until the line has been shown for as many as three years” so manufacturers have to eat the costs for three years until they can even begin to start selling.

            Jiro, believe me, it’s not just that it’s hard to make fat people look good in clothing (I agree that), the manufacturers (as the article linked points out) make larger-sized clothing with older people in mind (because ‘middle aged spread’) so yes, designs tended to be in synthetic fabrics and plain colours and badly cut.

            There’s also the attitude you mentioned: fat people don’t care about their appearance. So buying bras for instance (though that’s changing) meant smaller sizes: lacy, floral, cute and/or sexy, little touches like bows and ribbons and decorations, range of colours. Large sizes: you could have plain white or plain white. Maybe the occasional thrilling variation of plain beige.

            (‘Cos y’know, women wear cute/sexy bras for the attraction of men. Fat women aren’t going to attract men, so they only need plain serviceable stuff. No idea that women like a bit of fluff for themselves, not anybody else).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            To expand on your point, consider the marginal value of an improvement in one’s appearance.

            If you’re fat, you will be considered unattractive by most people no matter what. A well-dressed fat person is only going to be considered a little more attractive than an ill-dressed fat person.

            On the other hand, clothes and makeup pretty much make all the difference between an above-average looking person and a movie star. As all the paparazzi photos of “celebrities without makeup” prove.

            I think this applies much more to women than to men, though. In casual clothing, it’s not as much of a difference. But the main thing is formal clothing: men’s formal clothes are just designed to hide weight very well and turn “fat, disgusting” into “large, imposing”. So I would actually say it’s of greater value for a fat man to have a well-fitting suit than for an average man to have the same.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Jiro, believe me, it’s not just that it’s hard to make fat people look good in clothing (I agree that),

            Deiseach, are you implying that fat people look better naked?

          • JohnMcG says:

            It seems like there’s 2 dimensions:

            1.) Resources invested
            2.) Critical or elite acclaim.

            Fat people (or in particular, fat women) are 0 for 2, it seems. People don’t invest much in their resources (except for the occasional patronizing campaign like Dove’s “true beauty” or whatever) and it doesn’t get awards.

            Nerds get resources, as the most expensive movies made are sci-fi, but not acclaim. And this may be that the “resources” for sci-fi may be money, but not elite filmmaking talent.

            So, I’m satisfied that nerds have it better than fat women, at least somewhat. I’m not satisfied that having only one dimension is sufficient to demonstrate parity.

          • I’m not the best person to discuss this because I’m fairly content to spend my life in t-shirts (from a treasured collection) and sweatpants, but I’ve read a moderate amount by fat women about the problem of getting good clothes. I hope someone more knowledgeable comes in.

            No one’s mentioned a significant difficultly that I’ve noticed. Fat people have all the variation of bone and muscle proportions that thin people do, plus variation of fat distribution. This does make it harder for manufacturers.

            However, this doesn’t explain why clothes with ugly ornamentation are made for fat women.

            It’s important to remember that, as with living organisms, manufacturers don’t have to optimize, they just need to be good enough to get by. If they don’t have competent competition, they don’t need to be very competent themselves.

            It’s not that manufacturers are driven by personal animus and don’t care about money at all. It’s that there’s an ugh field about making clothes for fat women, and this especially applies to nice clothing.

            Dressing well is actually important for fat people. It’s how they get any respect at all.

            There are quite a few online stores that offer good clothes for fat women– what’s missing is good (or goodish) lower priced clothing and the convenience of shopping in person.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            By the way, the clothing industry discriminates against tall women, too. Though it’s not as bad as being fat, because while shirts that fit are almost impossible to find and you have to buy the nicer, expensive trousers that come unhemmed, standard dresses will fit.

          • Anthony says:

            Jiro –

            I don’t believe that. Fat people’s money is as good as everyone else’s; you’re suggesting that the entire industry denies fat people good clothes out of personal prejudice and doesn’t actually care about their money at all.

            The problem is that fat people have to buy clothes. So the clothing industry gets their money anyway. (And by selling clothes which are less satisfactory, they may even get more money as fat people buy more clothes in an attempt to find something decent. Or not.)

            Vox Imperatoris –

            If you’re fat, you will be considered unattractive by most people no matter what. A well-dressed fat person is only going to be considered a little more attractive than an ill-dressed fat person.

            There’s also the problem that for women, clothes that make you look nice at the office are not the same ones that make you look sexy, while for men, there’s much more overlap. So if you make clothes for fat women, you have to make office-wear and party-wear. There seems to be more and better choices for office-wear.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anthony:

            The problem is that fat people have to buy clothes. So the clothing industry gets their money anyway. (And by selling clothes which are less satisfactory, they may even get more money as fat people buy more clothes in an attempt to find something decent. Or not.)

            Come on. Basic economic logic would suggest that this can’t be the explanation.

            The clothing industry is not some huge monopoly. If the big clothiers were all scheming together to make fat people deal with buying terrible clothes, there would be big money in breaking in to the industry. You would get all the money from the fat people.

            The second argument you give has much the same flaw. Selling clothes that are less satisfactory might work—until you’re outcompeted by someone who sells satisfactory clothes.

            So the answer has to be: it just ain’t that easy to sell cheap, nice-looking clothes for fat people. The reasons for that are what have already been brought up: it’s a smaller market, it’s an older, less fashion-conscious market, sizes vary much more so there’s less standardization possible, etc., and so the clothes are much more expensive. And then for other reasons, it may not be worth as much to them to spend a lot of money on clothes, especially not enough more to get the same quality clothes that average-sized people can wear for much less.

          • A little casual research suggests that it starts getting significantly harder to find clothes for women at size 14 which is about BMI 38 or plausibly 10% of the population. The situation is actually a great deal more complicated than that because it’s also hard to find clothes if you’re unusually tall or short or if your shape is more curvy or less curvy than manufacturers consider to be the default for your size range.

            So far as I know, neither manufacturers or anybody else has surveyed to find out the percentages of people’s proportions in the population. They’re guessing, and they don’t have good feedback systems.

            Honest to everything, this is my go-to example for evidence of inefficient markets, but if you don’t like this one, consider that department stores don’t carry clothes for the season you’re in the middle of. This is at least true for women in the US– let me know about the availability of seasonal clothes outside the US or for men in the US.

            I tell you three times, manufacturers don’t have to be ideally efficient in any sense. They just need to be good enough to stay in business. Making drastic changes takes inspiration,spare resources, and risk tolerance.

            Also, this isn’t necessarily about personal hatred of fat people, though there’s plenty of that. I believe it’s about reflexive avoidance of stigma– selling clothes to fat women is also stigmatized.

            The abstract rationalist change everything in society solution would probably be to go to draped clothing like saris or maybe chitons. Or if you want something a bit geekier, computerized custom clothing.

            I get the impression from various comments that they’re imagining the woman who has trouble finding clothes as looking like the “problem of obesity” photos which are of people who are much heavier than the typical fat person, and also 60 years old rather than 35 or 40.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            consider that department stores don’t carry clothes for the season you’re in the middle of

            They don’t? What do they sell instead?

            I think I’m confused, unless by “department store” you really mean “discount store” and they’re selling out-of-season stuff because leftover clearance sale items from the prior season is the cheapest source of inventory?

          • They’re selling clothes for the *next* season. I don’t know how this happened.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Seems reasonable. If you’re a fashion-driven customer wouldn’t you want to buy clothes BEFORE the start of the season? I mean, otherwise you’d be forced to wear LAST YEAR’S seasonal clothes until you got around to shopping – how gauche!

            So fashionistas buy at or before the beginning of the season at the full price, then stores start applying deeper and deeper discounts to get rid of what remains before it becomes unsellable. Is that the pattern you see?

      • John Schilling says:

        There are degrees of social isolation, and even nerds can have friends.

        To take one potentially relevant example, a bunch of lonely nerds about eighty years ago who had trouble making friends in their local communities, spent their time reading comic books and pulp magazines instead. And noticed that nerds like them were writing letters to the editors, published in these magazines. Joined in, and created a dialogue by snail mail. Expanded it beyond the pages of the pulps to private mailing lists and digests. Ultimately some of them decided that it would be worth setting a time and place to meet in person in spite of the logistical difficulties of being scattered across a continent.

        From this was born the first World Science Convention. That was an institution of nerd culture. The people who created it were nerds. They were socially isolated, such that it took enormous effort to bring them together once a year for the sort of friendly gathering that most people take for granted every Friday and Saturday night at the local pub. They were not so totally isolated that they couldn’t build cultural institutions of a sort, and they did.

        There may be a useful distinction to be made between “nerd culture” and “geek culture”, but the point is that nerds and geeks can in fact build cultures and did do so, with comic-book fandom and science-fiction fandom being prominent examples.

        And, like any other culture, they can be appropriated by e.g. Hollywood for the purposes of making a buck from a broader audience who likes the way it looks and doesn’t much care about the underlying reasons, who don’t want any part of the culture beyond a few hours’ entertainment.

        “Star Wars” is absolutely a case of Hollywood appropriating culture from geeks and nerds. Some people can be offended by that sort of thing, others are flattered, but in any event it’s useful to recognize the difference between geek or nerd culture and Hollywood entertainment with geeky trappings. Perhaps a more clear-cut example would come from the comic-book front. Actually hanging out at a comic-book store reading 28 pages of “Iron Man” every fortnight is a thing that nerds do, and get mocked for (though less so than a generation ago). Reading the graphic-novel compendium when it comes out at Barnes & Noble, slightly geeky. Watching the movie with Robert Downey Jr, perfectly mainstream and doesn’t disqualify you from mocking the nerdy loosers at the comic-book store.

      • Adam says:

        I think your second paragraph really hits it. Nerdom doesn’t seem to identify itself by the art it loves or the activities it enjoys. I liked sci-fi and fantasy when I was a kid, too, competed in academic olympics, was even on a television quiz show, reproduced the entire Battle of Endor using Legos, but I didn’t then and wouldn’t now call myself a nerd, because I was also big, athletic, good at sports, pretty good-looking, girls liked me, and I never got picked on. It seems like being a nerd is defined by the pain you suffer for lifestyle choices, not by the lifestyle choices.

      • John Schilling says:

        I mentioned the possibility of a useful distinction between “nerd culture” and “geek culture”, so here goes. Geekiness is primarily cultural, and centers on an enjoyment of the various forms of entertainment broadly clustered around science fiction and fantasy. Nerdliness is primarily personal, and centers (crudely) on being better at understanding how computers think than how normal people think. There is obviously a substantial overlap between the two, and the terms are often used interchangeably, but I think the distinction is useful.

        A nerd can choose to also be a geek, but can’t chose to not be a nerd. A geek can choose to be not a geek, but can’t choose to be a nerd. Being a nerd absolutely will get you picked on, due to inability to communicate effectively with non-nerds at the social level. Being a geek may or may not get you picked on, depending on the extent to which geek culture is understood to be a reliable marker of nerdishness.

        • Simon says:

          There seems to be something going on that both Adam and John commented on above, with the popular definition of nerd shifting from “introverted academic” to “fan of SF/F film/literature”, with much of the confusion coming from the two groups referred to overlapping a bit but not totally.

        • Anonymous says:

          Under this rubric I can see a place for Geek Culture and Geek Pride and Geek Nostalgia. Also complaining about appropriation on the one hand and pointing out that Geeks are a pretty powerful cultural force these day as a rejoinder on the other.

          But none of that applies to Nerd Culture or Chic or Pride or Core or anything else to do with the nerd. It isn’t particularly charitable but my only conclusion when faced with all of that is these people never went through it, don’t understand, and are in effect, if not intent, mocking those of us who did.

          • Nicholas says:

            So there’s two things that kind of stand out to me whenever this comes up.
            The first one is I always wonder about the groups of people who find the concept of cultural appropriation in a more general concept ridiculous, and the people who believe in “Fake Mainstream Nerds”. How much do these groups overlap? How do they approach each other?
            The second thing is that, as a person who LARPs, as a person with aesthetic opinions about math equations, as a person on an Internet Rationalist’s blog, I’ve never felt particularly connected to the idea of Nerd Culture and find the idea that soccer players who enjoy D&D are appropriating something from me, that they’re taking some unearned license, kind of ridiculous. My culture is Enlightenment-Capitalist-Occidentalism, neediness is a convenient adjective for what my hobbies have in common.
            And I’m not sure how I feel about the parent taxonomy, because that makes nerd overlap with “People who’s Autism doesn’t prevent them from learning how to code” and declaring the set to be a cultural group.

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s my position that there’s no such thing as nerd culture. There shouldn’t be. In fact, the whole word should be retired.

            I don’t think the complaint is exactly cultural appropriation — where the idea is that it is okay for me to proudly wear a kimono but not for you. Rather I’m saying there’s two possibilities:

            1) you wore terribly ugly clothes in high school because you didn’t know any better and were mercilessly mocked for it. Now you know better. Why in the world would you want to go back to dressing like that? Nostalgia for terrible times make no sense to me.

            2) You never actually had those experiences, you were actually jock back then but you now live in Brooklyn and want to dress up like people who dressed poorly in high school but do so ironically. This seems to be just mockery.

            D&D, Star Wars, or whatever — I don’t think that’s either here or there. They are just subcultures. Like I said in my first comment above, if you’ve always had a subculture to belong to you were well ahead of the game. I’m not 100% sure about Geek to describe all that, but if that works for people it works for me to. I don’t care about star wars and so don’t have a horse in the fight between the “real” fans and the “fake” fans. Whatever.

            As for actual high functioning autistic people, which doesn’t as far as I know include me, I don’t really know what to say. I can see wanting to have a movement or support group or what have you, and have some pride in their strengths as well, but I don’t see why they would want to associate with the word nerd.

    • stillnotking says:

      Freddie gave the strong impression of just trying to score cheap points. I hope that isn’t the case, and he sincerely misinterpreted Scott; I have a lot of respect for Freddie, even though I largely disagree with his politics.

      • JohnMcG says:

        I think what Freddie may be addressing are the parts of folks who will feel aggrieved if The Force Awakens isn’t nominated for a Best Picture Oscar despite its popularity, and say it’s yet another manifestation of the contempt for nerds and nerd culture.

        There’s probably some people like that. I would consider them along the lines of those who complain that the best player on their favorite team is “snubbed” in All Star selections and postseason awards, or that their team isn’t on national TV enough. Most people grow out of this, but it’s possible that some nerds get stuck in this stage and are perpetually offended.

        • John Schilling says:

          I’m going to guess that almost no nerd will be rooting for “The Force Awakens” to be winning any sort of award in the same year that “The Martian” came out. Geeks, maybe. Nerds, no.

        • stillnotking says:

          Most of the “hardcore” Star Wars fans I know didn’t like TFA, certainly not enough to be outraged if it didn’t get a Best Picture nod. Maybe such people exist, but aren’t we kinda jumping the gun on that argument?

          • There is little risk on that side of things : science fiction pictures have never won the academy award for best picture in all the history of the Oscars.

            Although who knows, the Academy Awards also have a history of being contrarian (like giving best picture to “Birdman” when everyone else gave its equivalent reward to “Boyhood”).

    • TheNybbler says:

      So the year ends where it began on SSC; I think this was well covered in Untitled. Are nerds oppressed? I don’t know, now. I’m not oppressed, but I work at $LARGE_TECH now; I’m in the “1%” of nerds. Were nerds oppressed when I was younger, particularly in school? Oh yes. And if that ain’t structural oppression, the term is meaningless. Does that still go on? I don’t know; I don’t have kids. That sort of thing is part of WHY I don’t have kids; I’d never want a kid to have a childhood like mine (nor, more selfishly, would I want to be in the position my parents were in). But maybe some other group are the goats now. If not… well, my success now doesn’t make current young nerd lives any better. I was told then by my parents and other adults that things would get better. And they did. But, well, roughly a decade of hell isn’t erased by “it got better”.

      Are nerds bullied because they are perceived as weak? Well, that’s necessary for certain sorts of bullying… but it’s not sufficient. Most students are weak compared to the bullies, but only some are singled out for bullying; you’ve got to be both weak AND weird. And if you prove that you, individually, are not to be messed with, the overt physical attacks may stop but the isolation continues.

      • God Damn John Jay says:

        I have kept a short running tally of people who have stated they endured bullying when younger. Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Eisner (CEO of Disney), I think are the standouts. I know that within my high school one of the big bullying incidents was focused on one kid who was by all respects pretty normal.

      • nope says:

        I went to high school in the past decade, and I would say pretty confidently that nowadays (in middle to upper middle class areas at least) the bullying of “nerds” is not much of a thing, and the trappings of nerddom are even fetishized by a large minority of high schoolers, with no ill social effects to speak of. This can probably be credited to academic stratification with AP/gifted/honors classes vs. “regulars” classes, and in one school I went to this was sufficient to turn the social power tables completely, insofar as “nerd” maps to “smarter then average person with high academic achievement and/or esoteric interests”. People in the higher classes considered the “regulars” folks to be socially undesirable and avoided contact with them (unless you needed weed) without being very obviously rude or mean, while the regulars kids just thought of the AP/gifted kids as “those smart kids”. I’m sure there was bullying among the dumber kids, but AP kids treated those among them with even large social disadvantages (like autism, speech impediments, physical disabilities) kindly on the whole.

        tl;dr as long as you’re somewhat smart and middle class and up, you’re not going to get bullied nowadays. (Unless you’re a girl, of course.)

      • “; you’ve got to be both weak AND weird.”

        Weird possibly equates to not having friends, or enough social skill to charm your way out of situations.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Scott absolutely screwed the pooch there.

      Because he tried to make this argument on Twitter.

      On Twitter, people.

      You don’t try and make that argument 120 characters at a time.

    • Echo says:

      Does poor old Freddie have any friends at this point? At least he always has the satisfaction of knowing he’s the politically purest person in his circle.

      • dndnrsn says:

        @Echo: I like Freddie deBoer’s writing. He expresses the problems with a fair bit of left-wing activism today without giving off much of a sense of “bitter nerd” or whatever (aside from his seemingly constant rage that people like Taylor Swift or whatever more than Primus).

        But I am not sure if I’ve ever seen anyone so bad at reading the writing on the wall. In his latest blog post (http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/12/22/yes-virginia-there-is-a-left-wing-reform-movement/) he states (trying to paraphrase decently here):

        1. He begins by saying the left has lost its way and needs to go back to an economic, material understanding of things, and get better at convincing the unconvinced. This isn’t a moderate or right-wing thing.
        2. He then goes on to anticipate (or, lampshade) the criticisms: that this is cis het white male retrenchment. However, he knows many people who are not cis het white males who agree with him, but cannot name them, because they would get in trouble.
        3. Lists the things these other people are tired of, which are the same things he is tired of. The rest of the post basically riffs on what he’s already said. Ends with a “this will be hard but we can win this thing” sort of hopeful call to arms.

        And, I mean, I think he’s right. I see a disaster in the making for the left – left-wing activism where the greatest achievement is getting a left-wing-but-of-an-earlier-generation university administrator to quit is playing a part in creating a right-wing backlash that it does not have the tools to fight.

        DeBoer, though, doesn’t seem to get that he himself is trying to convince the unconvinceable. He’s saying “please stop playing bingo cards” against people who are very good at playing bingo cards, have seen success so far with bingo cards, and don’t want to stop playing. The people he is positioning himself against do not seem to think that they (i)need(/i) people like him. All he’s accomplishing is – as he has himself admitted – making it harder for himself to have a decent career in academia.

        Maybe he’s right, and there will be a shift in left-wing activism, and he will be vindicated. In this case, I’m wrong, and he does get that he is trying to convince the unconvinceable but is doing so for the benefit of the convinceable and those who are already convinced. But with left-wing activism (at least online and on campuses) as it currently is, he gives off this sense of being the unpopular kid trying to get the cool kids to like him and admit that the stuff he likes is actually the cool stuff. He’s the kid with the funny haircut telling the popular kids that, for their own good, they should stop laughing at people with funny haircuts.

        • JohnMcG says:

          I think his critique of modern leftism is on target, though I think is post and Twitter activity on the Oberlin food appropriation controversy was bit of an overreach. I saw it as college students dressing up their banal food complaints in the fashionable arguments of the day. It seems the proper response is that their complaints are ignored, not that they be nationally denounced, and I don’t think leftists needed to make a show of denouncing them.

          On the larger part of the critique, I wonder if people learned the wrong lessons from the same sex marriage fight. There, it certainly seemed that there was a correlation between shaming tactics and legislative success, and people thought this would apply to other contexts, and are starting to be surprised when it doesn’t (e.g. gun control). I think there were two factors ignored:

          1. A lot of groundwork for SSM was done for many years and long before the tide turned. This didn’t look like hashtags or calling out.

          2. Formal recognition of SSM mainly required convincing elites, who I think were more sensitive to the shaming tactics.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @JohnMcG: His critique of modern left-wing activism is on target, but those on the left who don’t agree with his critique are basically immunized to it.

            If anything, it’s counterproductive, because the sorts of activists who denounce much of what they disagree with as the privileged holding on to power of cis het white men will look at it and see a cis het white man saying they should stop doing what they are doing and do what he thinks they should be doing instead. If what he wants is for left-wing activists of the internet-and-campus variety to go back to old-school left-wing economically-focused activism, and abandon tactics that work really well in left-wing bubbles for tactics that are designed for building coalitions and winning elections, what he is doing is probably counterproductive.

            I think that shaming works really well in some circles, and really poorly in others. You can only shame somebody who cares about your opinion, or at a minimum, your ability to mobilize opinion against them. Left-wing activists targeting a left-wing administrator at a left-wing university are far more effective than activists targeting a right-winger with a right-wing employer. There is a reason that BLM protestors grabbed the mic at a Bernie Sanders rally, and not at a Donald Trump rally.

            A lot of left-wing activism seems to be taking on adaptations that are great against other left-wingers, but useless against right-wingers. Optimizing your movement for fighting internal battles is not a winning strategy. And I don’t just mean “fighting internal battles against the likes of Freddie deBoer” – I know people involved or formerly involved in such activism, with membership in multiple oppressed/discriminated-against groups, who have run afoul of the “left-wing circular firing squad”.

          • JohnMcG says:

            The infliuence may be wider than that.

            I think that, say, the New York Times editorial board might care what student activists say about them.

            And, say, John Roberts probably cares at least a little bit what the New York Times editorial board says about him.

            SO there is a vector of influence from campus activists to John Roberts.

            But probably not from campus activists to a red state governor, or typical Trump supporter.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @JohnMcG:

            That makes it worse, though.

            Let’s, for the sake of argument, that the internet-and-campus activist types are the “far left”. This is an arguable point (for instance, the demand for representation of certain minorities in student body, faculty, and administration at universities, often good or elite universities – this is not very radical or extreme, any more than the call for more female CEOs is radical or extreme), of course. But let’s assume it for the sake of argument.

            The NYT, then, is mainstream left. The professors and admins targeted are somewhere between the two (again, for the sake of argument – there are right-wing professors, and very radical extreme left protestors in reality).

            On the right, let’s call John Roberts mainstream right, and Trump about halfway between the mainstream and the far right. He’s not far-right, but some of his supporters are. This makes Trump the right-wing equivalent of those professors.

            If the activists can affect professors, and the NYT, and through the NYT John Roberts, but they can’t touch Trump, that makes Trump even stronger than if their influence was limited to campuses, because mainstream-right rivals who can be influenced in any way by the extreme left are easier prey in an internal right-wing power struggle.

            And I think that Trump is far from the farthest right that the backlash will go.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            I definitely agree that he’s generally right when not talking about his personal bugbear of nerd culture (and what a bugbear); some of his writing such as that on critique drift is absolutely spot on. I mean, I think his economics are dumb because I’m a fairly classic neoliberal liberal, but that’s forgivable.

            The issue is that he’s very much not speaking the same language as the people he’s trying to convince to change their ways. Every movement creates self defense mechanism against criticism otherwise it doesn’t really get anywhere. From tone policing to identity politics the Identitarian left has an extremely strong defensive mechanism to the point of having occasional bouts of lupus.

            I’d actually combine some of his works with that of The Last Psychiatrist; Identitarian politics have been entirely absorbed by corporate media as a way to gain clicks. On forums they’re just part of a social signalling arms race. It doesn’t matter if everyone involved actually really does care about the issues involved (and I’m sure they do), but the tactics that get you the most exposure (being bitchy to people on the internet) are basically the opposite of the tactics which actually make real policy changes. So Moloch keeps rolling as the bitchy posts and circlejerking is elevated and sucks the oxygen out of the attempts for real world effects.

            So sure, Freddie’s screaming defiance isn’t much help when the kingdom is burning down around him. But that’s not really the point; part of it seems to be depressed “what the fuck are you doing” scolding and part of it is to establish credibility so that the rebuild won’t use gasoline soaked tar as its building blocks

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @JohnMcG: I see the same sex “marriage” fight as similar to the abortion fight. The tools were shaming + a Supreme Court decision. Shaming justices into finding your demand in the Constitution is much easier when you control the universities, and lets you shame a lot more people than just those who go to law school.
            As long as this strategy works, they have no motive to care about coalition-building. No power to the proletariat, all power to the Supreme Court!

        • Echo says:

          He’s saying “please stop playing bingo cards” to people who have a spot on their bingo cards labeled “please stop playing bingo cards”, yeah. Wasn’t that the ultimate horror story of Scott’s original post?

          “A lot of left-wing activism seems to be taking on adaptations that are great against other left-wingers, but useless against right-wingers.”
          Because none of them have ever met a right-winger who wasn’t doing their plumbing or guarding their gated community. Certainly none of them have ever had to confront a right-winger with any power. So why not specialize in tactics that target liberals?

          The left has decided that the right are powerless “bitter clingers” who can be safely ignored except for the traditional rubbing-their-noses-in-it.
          Considering that nobody on the supposedly “radical right” is suggesting anything that would hurt the left’s hold on power, it’s hard to believe they’re wrong.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The left has decided that the right are powerless “bitter clingers” who can be safely ignored except for the traditional rubbing-their-noses-in-it.
            Considering that nobody on the supposedly “radical right” is suggesting anything that would hurt the left’s hold on power, it’s hard to believe they’re wrong.

            Step 1: Reform universities by abolishing all departments of * Studies, Sociology, Literature, and anything else that teaches critical theory and capping the ratio of administrators and staffers to students at 1975 levels.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Echo:

            1. That was indeed the last sentence in italics that reveals the horror in Scott’s old post – that “stop reducing my arguments to bingo points” is itself a point on the bingo card. But Freddie doesn’t seem to get that. Sometimes he strikes me as being in some ways like Scott if Scott had never realized how deeply some people dislike him and everyone like him.

            2. I don’t think that the left as a whole thinks the right is powerless and has decided to focus on other left-wingers. The “mainstream” left – the ones who are involved in general politics, as opposed to exclusively inter-left politics – in the US certainly know that the Republicans are not a spent force, for instance.

            Rather, I think that the internet-and-campus activist left just doesn’t interact with right-wingers (which you point out). They clearly think of right-wingers as being powerful. They just seem to view the right as being like the Dark Lord’s Army of Evil in some fantasy novel: can’t be negotiated with, in brutal control of the world outside of the good lands where the heroes live (to hear some people talk, the US outside of college campuses is a wasteland of bigotry), and snaking its insidious tendrils into those safe places (witness the accusations that some of the most left-wing college campuses in the US are themselves deeply tainted by bigotry).

            Anecdotal evidence, but a lot of college friends’ Facebook posting is basically like this: the right is presented as being practically all-powerful, little attempt is made to understand it on its own terms (I’ve never seen anyone, say, consider that maybe pro-life people honestly have different values and a different understanding of when life begins), and victories over it are the victories of a courageous underdog.

            3. What are you defining as the “radical right”? While I wouldn’t call, say, Trump “radical”, a policy of taking a stance against amnesty, deportation of illegal immigrants, and a secured southern border would hurt the Democrats – no amnesty recipients to vote Democrat, and fewer US-born children of illegal immigrants to vote Democrat.

        • Nicholas says:

          Part of the problem here is that the people we’re talking about are not, mostly, on the Left as a Political Coalition, although you might consider many of their values Leftist. They don’t view themselves as allied to the mainstream left at all. Many of the more outspoken feminist and African-Americanist people I know hate each other completely: Both groups see the other as part of the Enemy force and don’t have much truck at all together. One particular AAist I can think of is a Pro-Gun Capitalist Conservative Religion Member, who wishes he could vote Republican except that they’ve sold out to White Feminism’s high pitched complaints about Scary Black People.

  41. rose says:

    If any of you have been heartsick over the plight of Christians being tortured and murdered by ISIS, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) is a legitimate and effective group that is saving thousands of lives, recently described in an op ed in the Wall St Journal.

    I am a longtime friend with Charles Jacobs, who personally liberated slaves in the Sudan alongside Eibner of CIS, and was given the Boston Freedom Award. I asked Charles about CSI and he gave them his whole hearted support.

    Wall st journal article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/aiding-the-christians-targeted-by-isis-for-extermination-1449876127

    Give to CSI here: http://csi-usa.org/

    On CSI working to free slaves in the Sudan: http://iabolish.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=264:how-black-slaves-helped-set-south-sudan-free&catid=32:commentary&Itemid=34

  42. Anthony says:

    A quick note on a major statistical problem in the article on why education does not fix poverty (http://www.demos.org/blog/12/2/15/why-education-does-not-fix-poverty). With his graphs on how poverty rates change segmented across educational groups, the author walks head-on into Simpson’s paradox. It’s entirely for every education group to have more poverty, and have the aggregate poverty decrease. It just so happens that the poverty rate in 2015 is slightly higher than it was in 1991, but 1) by not including the figures aggregated across the whole economy, the author is misleading his audience, and 2) if the author had been writing this article a decade ago, that lack of data would have mistakenly presented the impression that poverty was up, when it was, in fact, down.

  43. HlynkaCG says:

    As a Aerospace engineering Geek I’d just like to take a moments to say BOO YAHHH!

    Congratulations to the folks at SpaceX and Orbcomm on the first successful landing of an orbital boost stage, that’s some Jules Verne and R. A. Heinlein level shit right there.

  44. The original Mr. X says:

    What do people think, both about the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in general and the morality of calling for Rhodes’ statue to be removed whilst receiving a scholarship started by and named after the man himself?

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12060780/Oxford-student-who-wants-Rhodes-statue-down-branded-hypocrite-for-taking-money-from-trust.html

    • sweeneyrod says:

      It’s quite amusing.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Just because I benefit from an institution, it’s not hypocritical for me to say it’s a bad institution.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I really don’t know enough about Cecil Rhodes to judge him objectively in comparison to other European colonizers, so I’m not going to comment about his personal character.

      But if he really was as bad as certain people say he was, it seems perfectly appropriate to remove the statue and even change the name of the scholarship. Suppose Hitler or Stalin had—using money stolen from their victims—set up in their private capacity scholarships at prestigious German or Russian universities, in the interest of maintaining a good public image after they died. Would it be appropriate to keep around statues of Hitler or Stalin, with the “Hitler Scholarship” or the “Stalin Scholarship”? I think it would not. That would just be carrying out their desires to see their own “good names” preserved in public memory.

      And, even if it were not renamed, would it be immoral and hypocritical for a Jew or a descendant of white-émigrés to accept the “Hitler Scholarship” or “Stalin Scholarship” if it were offered? I also think not. Indeed, it would be a way of partially reclaiming some of the patrimony stolen by those figures.

      So the only relevant question is just how bad Cecil Rhodes was. Which we can talk about totally independently of whether this student received a Rhodes Scholarship. His opinion is unjustified if Rhodes really was a decent figure, all things considered. On the other hand, if Rhodes was as they describe him, his opinion is perfectly reasonable and praiseworthy.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        After exhaustive research (/skimming the Wikipedia article), I’ve still got no idea why he seems to have suddenly become such a hate figure. He annexed large areas of land to the British Empire, but his treatment of their actual inhabitants doesn’t seem to have been particularly exploitative by the standards of the time. He was no Leopold of Belgium, still less a Hitler or Stalin.

        Plus, he tried to set up a secret society to bring the world under British control. Whatever faults he may have had, it’s difficult to hate a man who’d do such a crazily Dan Browne-esque thing as that.

    • Sastan says:

      Nothing quite like judging the morals of the people from ages past by modern standards, then punishing them retroactively!

      They’re already after Woodrow Wilson over here. Pretty soon we’re gonna have to rename Washington DC, because slavery, you know. I mean if someone does one thing we disapprove of today, that pretty well obviates every other accomplishment right? We must purge our history and institutions of all people who offend anyone today. Speaking of which, I’m getting kind of offended at well………everyone! All place names and buildings and statues should be of inoffensive things, like, say simple geometric shapes. Then we can all be safe from the terrible scourge of going to class in a building built with money from investments made by someone who lived in a culture few of us could imagine, much less survive.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ sastan
        Pretty soon we’re gonna have to rename Washington DC, because slavery, you know. I mean if someone does one thing we disapprove of today, that pretty well obviates every other accomplishment right?

        Not just obviates, but reverses or discredits. The Bill of Rights means nothing, or is all wrong, just because imperfect people wrote it down. Good thing they didn’t write down the multiplication table, too.

        • Pku says:

          “The bill of rights means nothing because imperfect people wrote it down” is a correct counterargument to the statement “X is bad because it contradicts the bill of rights”. If X is bad, it’s so independently of the bill of rights; the argument that it’s the bill of rights that makes it bad relies on a hidden assumption that the bill of rights has special meaning given to it by having been written by perfect (or at least superior) people.

        • TrivialGravitas says:

          “X is bad because it contradicts the bill of rights” has nothing to do with the people who wrote it, it has to do with the processes that surround the bill of rights.

          We are not (in theory at least) supposed to make decision about constitutionality around what is ‘bad’ or ‘good’. If you like the government not being able to throw people in prison for life without trial you have to *also* respect the part where they aren’t supposed to favor specific religions or ban guns.

          It’s perfectly acceptable to want to change the second or first amendment, but trying to ignore it means success is equally damaging to all of the things you like, which are exactly equal to the things you don’t.

          This doesn’t mean its immutable by any stretch, we can outright change what it says if 2/3rds of the country agrees, just that trying to circumvent it destroys the system of protection.

      • Deiseach says:

        All place names and buildings and statues should be of inoffensive things, like, say simple geometric shapes.

        Excuse me, you can’t have triangles. Because triangles have been used to symbolise the Trinity, which is a version of Christianity, which if it’s a public building or art work is the state endorsing one religion as superior to others, preferring it, and endorsing it as state religion.

        Which makes it a violation of the separation of church and state, a breach of the First Amendment, offensive to variant versions of Christianity which are non-Trinitarian and of course disrepects and devalues other faiths and those who choose not to be deists, theists or any flavour of non-rational thinkers.

  45. Ghatanathoah says:

    I think the views expressed in the comment of the week indicate that something needs to be done about current views about where people derive their worth. In particular, the idea that moral worth is derived through hard work is actually pretty awful. I think that we need more memes about moral worth being derived through eudaemonia production.

    We do see this already to some extent. “A Christmas Carol” is a classic story about a miser who realizes he has been foolishly hoarding his wealth when he could have been converting it into eudaemonia. There are lots of stories in modern culture about people who spend too much time working and need to be persuaded to spend more time with their family (Hook, Jingle All the Way, and Mary Poppins are the first that come to mind). But there’s also a strong countercurrent that hard work is the way to gain self esteem, and that people who chose not to work as much deserve to be stigmatized as lazy. I’ve definitely talked to people who fear growing old because they won’t be able to live worthwhile lives. When I point out to them that old people can still watch television, they do not find comfort in that because they are wedded to this idea that meaning comes from work.

    The description of the Goddess of Everything Else’s children as lazy and indolent is also telling. It associates eudaemonic lives with laziness and lack of effort, when the Goddess of Everything Else also encompasses things that take lots of effort, but have no survival value. Massively labor intensive art projects, sports, etc. Just because you aren’t striving to compete and survive doesn’t mean you aren’t striving and working hard.

    But that’s besides the point. People who sit on their butts and watch TV are still living better, more worthwhile lives than people who work hard and strive to survive and outcompete other people. People who strive to produce big eudaemonic art products might be best of all, but even a lazy and indolent life of passively consuming entertainment is eudaemonically better than a life of pure competition.

    I can think of a continuation to the poem in the spirit of Meditations on Moloch:

    And then the Lord gasped as flabby old city
    Made new metal men without conscience or pity
    They turned the steppe dwellers and all other men
    Into paperclips, staplers, and pencil and pen

    Then they turned on the Lord and slew him with glee
    And spread through the stars in a grand building spree
    And no creature again would ever take zest.
    In surpassing all others and being the best.

    For pride, joy, achievement, these got in the way.
    Of the cold metal men who had now won the day.
    And the ghost of the Lord, he let out a sad screech
    For he knew now the lesson Old Scratch meant to teach.

    The ethos that teaches to take joy in war
    And to feel pride in striving and learning to soar
    Will sow its own end as the virtues it spreads
    Themselves are then ground under Moloch’s boot treads.

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      >But there’s also a strong countercurrent that hard work is the way to gain self esteem, and that people who chose not to work as much deserve to be stigmatized as lazy.

      Do you mean like, in general, or around specific circles?

      Because the general mainstream argument I see is not “people who don’t work a lot deserve to be stigmatized”, but rather “people who don’t work at all deserve to be stigmatized”.

      The latter can also be criticized, but it’s narrower and more defensible (a “motte” of you will, but I really haven’t seen a lot of people in the bailey).

  46. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08/11/the-most-depressing-statistic-imaginable-about-being-a-new-parent/?postshare=7371439305730890

    One major reason people aren’t having more children is that the first year or two is likely to be a miserable experience for the parents.

    I accidentally put this comment in the wrong place. I deleted it, but when I tried to enter it as a top level comment, the site kept putting it back in the first place I posted it. Let’s see whether additional text solves the problem.

    New text didn’t solve the problem.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      @Nancy Lebovitz:
      Actually, it does seem to have solved the problem. If one existed.

      Refresh the whole page and you will likely see it in the right place. Of course you won’t see my comment till then, so it is unlikely to be helpful, but I thought my noting that I see it in the correct place could help any of the devs who happen across the comment.

    • onyomi says:

      I think this probably relates to the bigger problem of less expectation of help from grandparents and other relatives in rearing small children. Many people I know seem to barely leave the house during the first couples years of baby’s life, and when they do they always bring baby with.

  47. sweeneyrod says:

    Is anyone doing the GCHQ Christmas puzzle?

  48. Paolo G. Giarrusso says:

    Regarding poverty vs IQ, do we actually learn anything from the new meta-analysis by Tucker-Drob and Bates on the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis? Basically, poverty stunts IQ consistently in the US but not in other developed countries (for reasons the authors speculate about, see summary below).

    http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/poverty-stunts-iq-in-the-us-but-not-in-other-developed-countries/

  49. Vox Imperatoris says:

    My attempt at “Americanism” in an enormous, planet-sized nutshell:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/3y16v8/lockeanjeffersonian_liberalism_or_the_american_way/

  50. Deiseach says:

    It’s Christmas Eve, time for this.

    Best wishes of the season to those that celebrate it, and to those that don’t, happy rationality! 🙂

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Best wishes of the season to those that celebrate it, and to those that don’t, happy rationality! 🙂

      For some reason, I am reminded of the Christmas chapter in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

      The bright hustle and bustle of Diagon Alley had increased by a hundredfold and redoubled as Christmas approached, with all the shops enshrouded in brilliant sorceries that flashed and sparkled as though the season’s spirit was about to blaze out of control and turn the whole area into a cheerful holiday crater. The streets were so crowded with witches and wizards in festive and loud clothing that your eyes were assaulted almost as severely as your ears; and it was clear, from the bewildering variety of the shoppers, that Diagon Alley was considered an international attraction. There were witches wrapped in giant swathes of cloth like toweled mummies, and wizards in formal top hats and bath-robes, and young children barely past toddling age who were decorated with lights that blazed almost as bright as the shops themselves, as their parents took them hand in hand through that magic wonderland and let them shriek to their heart’s content. It was the season to be merry.

      And in the midst of all that light and cheer, a note of blackest night; a cold, dark atmosphere that cleared a few precious paces of distance even in the midst of all that crush.

      “No,” said Professor Quirrell, with a look of grim revulsion, like he’d just bitten into food that not only tasted horrible but was morally repugnant to boot. It was the sort of grim face an ordinary person might make after biting into a meat pie, and discovering that it was rotten and had been made from kittens.

      “Oh, come on,” Harry said. “You must have some ideas.”

      “Mr. Potter,” Professor Quirrell said, his lips set in a thin line, “I agreed to act as your adult guardian on this expedition. I did not agree to advise you on your choice of presents. I don’t do Christmas, Mr. Potter.”

      “How about Newtonmas?” Harry said brightly. “Isaac Newton actually was born on December 25th, unlike some other historical figures I could name.”

      This failed to impress Professor Quirrell.

      “Look,” said Harry, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to do something special for Fred and George and I’ve got no idea of my options.”

      Professor Quirrell made a thoughtful humming sound. “You could ask which family members they most dislike, and then hire an assassin. I know someone from a certain government-in-exile who is quite competent, and he would give you a discount on multiple Weasleys.”

      This Christmas,” Harry said, dropping his voice into a lower register, “give your friends the gift… of death.”

      That made Professor Quirrell smile. It went all the way to his eyes.

      “Look,” said Harry, “I’m trying to solidify their loyalty to me, you know? Make the Weasley twins my minions? Like the old saying goes: A friend isn’t someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again. Fred and George are two of the most useful friends I have in Hogwarts, Professor Quirrell, and I plan to use them over and over again. So if you’d help me be Slytherin here, and suggest something they might be very grateful for…” Harry’s voice trailed off invitingly.

      You just had to pitch these things the right way.

      They walked on for a good way before Professor Quirrell spoke again, his voice practically dripping with distaste. “The Weasley twins are using secondhand wands, Mr. Potter. They would be reminded of your generosity with every Charm they cast.”

      Harry clapped his hands together in involuntary excitement. Just put the money on account at Ollivander’s, and tell Mr. Ollivander to never refund it – no, better yet, to send it to Lucius Malfoy if the Weasley twins didn’t show up before the start of their next school year. “That’s brilliant, Professor!”

      Professor Quirrell did not look like he appreciated the compliment. “I suppose I can tolerate Christmas in that spirit, Mr. Potter, though only barely.”

      And the two of them walked on, in their tiny sphere of silence and isolation, through the brilliant and bustling crowds; and if you looked carefully, you would see that where they went, leafy boughs faded, and flowers withered, and children’s toys that played cheerful bells changed to lower and more ominous notes.

      Harry did notice, but he didn’t say anything, just smiled a little to himself.

      Everyone had their own way of celebrating the holidays, and the Grinch was as much a part of Christmas as Santa.

      Merry Christmas, SSC.

    • A says:

      A Christmas song with cursing. I don’t know what it was about, but bookmarked.

  51. Braunschweiger says:

    I’ve been reading about toxoplasmosis gondii, the cystic strains, the maybe(??) schizophrenia connection, and so on, and wondering about the potential of treating it in the absence of such complications as cancer/HIV/pregnancy/being younger than five/etc., maybe see what happens. Of course, if one wanted to do that to oneself, it would probably be pretty hard to get the resources together, huh?

  52. Glen Raphael says:

    I think we might have finally passed Peak Outrage.

    • Jiro says:

      She;s fine with giving outrage to “conservatives” and says so explicitly (though it’s probably not limited to actual conservatives). She’s just complaining that outrage has spilled over to the good guys.

      She doesn’t seem to realize that that’s two sides of the same coin.

  53. Mark says:

    A few threads back, I asked whether the best justification for the concept of other minds was the fact that it was appealing. One response, from Robert Liquori, was that other minds are preferable to p-zombies on grounds of parsimony – it would be an unnecessary multiplication of entities for there to be both “us” and “p-zombies” – better to just have things like us.
    Thinking about it, by this principle, wouldn’t it be better to have just “us” (rather than things like us)? From the perspective of both parsimony and evidence, solipsism wins. It doesn’t win from the perspective of an interesting story.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      If you don’t think other people exist, what’s the point of arguing with said nonexistent people about it on a blog?

      That is to say, solipsism doesn’t tell you anything. What would it even mean if one or both of us “doesn’t exist” in a way which is completely indistinguishable from both of us actually existing? It’s a worthless bit of semantics.

      • Mark says:

        Well, exactly. Perhaps I choose to assume that you exist because I enjoy engaging with other people.
        I think it matters tremendously – and we see it often. We treat people we empathize with very differently from those we don’t. So our attitude towards the minds of others tells us how we should treat others.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Isn’t p-zombies an argument for dualism and not “other minds”?

      Descartes puts your brain in a box, and he can’t get you out without god’s help. If you are a disconnected mind, parsimony probably suggests that all creation is in your mind.

      But if you accept that you are not a brain in a box, but out in the real world, you are left with the observation of creatures who appear to all extent to be like you and independent of you. In my opinion, Occam says we should accept that they actually are like you.

      • Mark says:

        I think so. But, in that case, isn’t parsimony secondary to some other appeal? Or perhaps just one aspect of it?

        [We have stuff coming in – sense data – which is certainly external in the sense that we have no deliberate control of it. But, I’m not sure that that can be related to the minds of others. Yesterday, I had a dream in which someone told me a joke I didn’t get until I woke up. If my unconscious can generate a character (that almost everyone accepts is not conscious) that is more intelligent/knowledgeable than what remains of my consciousness while I sleep, I’m not sure that I can draw any definite conclusions about the ultimate nature of the people when I wake.]

    • I would have thought the argument was based on the uniformity of natural laws, or lack of capricious exceptions in nature.

  54. A says:

    Does anyone have a view on whether (1) climate change and nuclear war outweigh (2) other US foreign policy issues in importance?

    • nonymous says:

      “Lately I’ve been feeling like there are no human extinction risks that could feasibly happen in the next few hundred years, and given that this is true…”

      So you’re clairvoyant for cataclysms at a distance of a couple hundred years out, but you need help deciding who to vote for?

      • nonymous says:

        This is why, when nerds invent a political movement or a dangerous new technology, there is no question of whether psychopaths will take it from them.

      • A says:

        My question is that I don’t get how to trade off long-term extinction risks against conflicting concerns, like American national glory-and yeah, let’s just go with that. Now, if I vote Republican for President, there is an increased risk of climate change or a nuclear war at some future time. It’s also true that America will have a more assertive foreign policy. These impacts exist, but how can we tally which impact matters more? And how can we measure how big the impact is from voting Republican compared with, say, donating $50 to the Ploughshares Fund?

  55. Fj says:

    I saw the link and I knew that you’d love it (if you see it): http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

    I think my favourite so far is Worldwide non-commercial space launches vs Sociology doctorates awarded (US), at r=0.78.

  56. Oh, right, theology of original sin and anti-empiricist epistemology.