This is the bi?-weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Comment of the week is this discussion on the calendar and the solstices, although everyone eventually agreed it was on the wrong track.
2. A while back, everyone donated some money for Multiheaded to be able to get a Canadian visa and escape Russia. Canada refused to grant such a visa and this plan has fallen through. If anybody else has any ideas for how a transgender person might get to a country that tolerates transgender people, please mention them in the comments so Multi can find them.
3. The first chapter of my book Unsong is now online here. New chapters every Sunday, new interludes some Wednesday, subscribe on right hand column of that site if you’re interested.
I’m a Brazilian being accused of a crime I didn’t comit and although court proceedings haven’t started yet I’m reasonably sure I’ll be convicted. There are many things going against me and I can see why they’d think I did it. The severity of the crime is such that even if I am somehow absolved, my name and face will probably make their way to the press and I’ll be shunned.
I’ve never felt this bad in my whole life, I am desperate and have no idea what to do. I have started considering some drastic options lately, things which I don’t want to do but I see no other way around it. If anyone is reading this I have urgent need of guidance. Please, help.
(First version seems to have been caught in the spam trap, so, trying again.)
I don’t have any info about the Brazilian legal system, but for the psychological aspects, check out /Mobbed/ by Janice Harper. It’s a memoir and analysis–she’s a cultural anthropologist–of when she was driven out of her job by a false accusation. Her accusers sent the USA’s FBI after her.
Here is an article and excerpts and the article has a link to the book.
This book has some great tips for staying balanced. For example: Whenever you see that friend who didn’t support you or that false accuser, imagine them as a funny fictional character or object. Not a powerful character like a wicked witch; a funny character like Baby Huey or a potted plant. 😉
Also consider the English proverb: “Act in haste, repent at leisure.” Both the above authors say the same thing: This kind of stressful situation encourages hasty actions that only make things worse. I can’t advise you on what your legal system is likely to do, but don’t do something desperate just because of the stress you’re under.
I originally mentioned another author too, but I think that’s what got this caught in the spam trap, so had to edit out the reference to him. I’ll just repeat what he and Harper both say: Find a private method of stress relief so your emotions don’t overwhelm you (Harper suggests expanding on one of your current hobbies).
Remind yourself who you really are. Your own conscience knows the truth even if no one else does. (Read Harper’s book. I was only mobbed, so I can’t claim to have been under as much stress as you are–but I wish I’d had it then. It would have been extremely helpful.)
Take care of yourself.
In the wake of the impressive success of SpaceX’s reuasable stage on a Falcon 9, Elon Musk claimed that in the long term, this tech could see costs of access to space decrease by a ‘factor over a hundred’. Even a factor of 5 would be something to get insanely excited about, but one hundred seems like it might be wildly out to me, and I was wondering what others who follow this stuff more closely might think. The things that make me a little doubtful are:
* The articles I find mention $200,000 for fuel as if it’s the only cost aside from building the rocket. I’d imagine there would be large amounts of money sunk into logisitcal labour, transportation, safety etc etc.
* The reusable component is just the first stage. This is obviously awesome because its a large part of the vehicle, but my uninformed impression is that other stages wouldn’t be easy to reuse in the same way.
* Refurbishment after a launch still would cost something… I’m guessing the cost wouldn’t be trivial
* Even reusable rockets wont last forever – if you got 50 launches this would push up the ‘factor of a hundred’ reduction quite a bit.
I don’t want to take away anything from Elon or the crew at SpaceX for the great job they’re doing. And I’d imagine even a factor of two or three would be enough to do great things for space exploration efforts, including massively changing the economics of the whole affair. But this number seemed odd to me. I’m curious to know what people who follow this topic closely think?
(Also on reddit.)
@citizensearth:
See here for a long discussion thread.
Thanks that’s really helpful!
This is actually the exact kind of discussion I was looking for, thanks so much!
I believe that a mature, optimized reusable space transportation system could achieve cost-to-LEO reductions of two orders of magnitude from the current state of the art, with costs roughly evenly divided between fuel, hardware, and labor. Note for comparative purposes that carrying a kilogram of payload to LEO requires about as much energy as carrying a kilogram of payload from London to Sydney nonstop, and in my professional opinion there is nothing fundamental to the space-launch version that makes it intrinsically more expensive than the air-transport version. But note also that it took several generations of airliner development before we could offer London-to-Sydney nonstop at reasonable prices.
I do not believe that the SpaceX Falcon series of rockets will ever see more than one order of magnitude cost reductions from the state of the art, and even that will require upper-stage recovery that SpaceX has put on the indefinite back burner. SpaceX, to make their business case close before Musk’s fortune and his co-investors’ patience ran out, had to optimize for a minimum-cost expendable launch vehicle to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (roughly, London to Los Angeles the long way around), and you can’t optimize for two different things simultaneously. They are stuck with trying to add reusability to a suboptimal RLV architecture.
Blue Origin may be on the right track here, but they are secretive enough that it is hard to be sure. It helps that Jeff Bezos has about ten times Elon Musk’s fortune to play with, and so doesn’t need immediate profitability.
Thanks for the post. It’s exciting to think we might be headed in this direction.
How/where are you getting the London-to-Sydney thing? It seems to me this could be a shakey comparison, because we don’t have to accelerate an airliner to 28,000km/h, nor provide thrust outside the atmosphere. I think difference is evidenced by the fact that >95% (?) of airliner mass/volume is not taken up by its propulsion and fuel. This strikes me as being more fundamental than just an innefficient design.
The geosynch vs LEO thing is interesting. I actually briefly tried to find information regarding cost and energy for travel to Mars (is it the more/less than geosynch or LEO * 2), but failed to turn up anything useful. I figure the time you’re willing to spend travelling would have a big influence on the energy requirements, but I haven’t done the physics/math to check.
LEO-Mars is somewhat less than Earth-LEO (which is similar to Earth-Saturn). Better figures will be given in terms of either delta-V or C3 (an odd unit, but one that does show up for some reason). Delta-V will be somewhat more useful, as you can get delta-V numbers for earth-LEO (~9 km/s) and a lot of various interplanetary transfers. Atomic Rockets is a good place to start.
About London-Sydney, it’s just barely doable with modern aircraft, and it isn’t actually done. The 777-200LR can theoretically make the flight, but the longest flight anybody has made in scheduled service was Singapore 21, about 10% shorter. The ‘Kangaroo route’ is quite popular, but there’s always a stop somewhere. It used to be Singapore or Bangkok. These days it’s often Dubai or Abu Dhabi. But nobody flies it non-stop.
Also, the airliner does not have to carry its own oxidizer. The effective specific energy of jet fuel is approximately six times that of liquid rocket fuel. That makes a huge difference. For a London-Sydney run, you’d need nearly 50% of the airliner’s takeoff weight to be fuel. But that’s a lot better than the 95% of launch vehicles.
, because we don’t have to accelerate an airliner to 28,000km/h, nor provide thrust outside the atmosphere.
We also don’t need to deal with drag outside the atmosphere. Almost all of the energy cost of an airline flight is overcoming drag. For a fully-loaded, fully-fueled 747-800 flying London to Sydney, assuming a mission-averaged lift-to-drag ratio of 15:1, I get roughly four trillion Newton-meters of work, or four trillion joules of energy, on drag alone. Maximum payload is 50,000 kg, so that’s eighty megajoules of energy per kilogram of payload delivered.
With space launch, drag is almost insignificant and acceleration is everything. An Ariane 5G can lift 16,000 kg of payload to the ISS orbit, along with 2,700 kg of upper-stage hardware. At 7,665 m/s orbital velocity, that’s 550 billion joules of kinetic energy, plus another 70 billion joules of gravitational potential energy. Doing the math, forty megajoules of energy per kilogram of payload delivered.
But the airliner is about 50% efficient in converting the chemical energy of its fuel to work, and the rocket only 25% (rocket engines are better than 90% efficient, but much of that is spent carrying fuel partway to the destination before burning it). So, in terms of raw energy input, it’s 160 megajoules per kilogram of payload delivered, to ISS or Sydney, your choice.
As for rockets being 95% “propulsion and fuel”, most of that isn’t actually fuel but oxygen. Liquid oxygen is cheap, about fifty cents per gallon if you buy in bulk. Sheet metal, even aerospace-grade sheet metal, isn’t terribly expensive either.
Engines are another matter. But if you look at a jet engine, about 90% of the mass is in the elaborate machinery necessary to grab “free” oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere (along with the nitrogen you don’t need but can’t avoid) and compress it to a useful density. Which is why the engines make up 5% of the takeoff weight of a 747 but only 2% of the takeoff weight of a rocket, even though the rocket has to ascend vertically with a >1G raw acceleration and the airliner can make do with a quarter that figure.
It takes about 0.5 kg of expensive engine to deliver 1 kg of payload to Sydney and/or LEO.
Beyond LEO, things get even more complicated and I’m not going to get into that in this post. Except for rule #1: You really want to stop in LEO and transfer to a different, deep-space-optimized ship for that. Insisting on blasting off from Cape Canaveral on a great pillar of fire and going directly to GEO, the Moon, or Mars, is rather like trying to take a Mississippi riverboat from St. Louis to London because New Orleans is a smelly, boring swamp and besides you’re in a hurry.
Thanks that’s a great post lots for me to think about there! It’s an awesome field almost makes me wish I went into physics/engineering or something instead of what I do now.
@John Schilling
I decided to check your airplane numbers, and running them (using numbers on the actual fuel burn) for a 777-200LR, I got 150 MJ/kg of payload. So we’re in agreement within the margin of error, except that you used a plane which doesn’t exist. I hate to nitpick (OK, not really), but the 747-8 (not 800) has a maximum range of 8000 nm (which is why it’s -8, not -500), not the 9000+ you’d need to fly that route. I suppose you could take off with full fuel at less than MTOW to get the extra range, but that’s a bit wasteful.
@Citizensearth
It’s an awesome field almost makes me wish I went into physics/engineering or something instead of what I do now.
I wouldn’t recommend aerospace engineering to anyone who doesn’t really enjoy it. There’s a big difference between popular books and what you end up doing in class.
Mea culpa on the 747-8 vs -800, I keep using the old Boeing numbering scheme. But 8000 nm is the maximum range of a -8 at max payload; I used full fuel and reduced payload.
If you load a 747-8 with full fuel and full payload, you wind up roughly 50 tonnes over maximum gross weight. And that’s true of just about every passenger aircraft ever built; if there’s an FAA-standard 85 kg passenger in every seat and proportionate luggage in the baggage area, you can’t fill the tanks and (legally) fly – manufacturers always oversize the tanks to allow operational flexibility.
If you load a 747-8 with full fuel and full payload, you wind up roughly 50 tonnes over maximum gross weight.
Are you sure that the 8000 nm range is done with max payload (airplane at max zero-fuel weight)? I don’t think it is, although I haven’t been able to find hard figures for the payload used for the design range of the passenger version. The freighter version, with a payload of 390 klb, has a design range of 4,475 nm at 970 klb MTOW. If we assume that it is pretty much up against ZFW (actually, MLW), it’s doing that on 213 klb of fuel. Scaling this through the range equation would suggest that this means a passenger version taking off at 970 klb and doing a flight of 8000 nm would be landing at 623 klb, well under the maximum zero-fuel weight of 651 klb. Obviously, I’m ignoring some factors, but I doubt it’s enough to add the 65 klb I’d need to get to max landing weight. (Max fuel capacity is 422 klb. I estimated using 347 klb. Units are pounds because it’s easier to use the values in the book.)
In conclusion, I suspect that ‘full payload’ for the 8000 nm flight is ‘full typical revenue service load’, not ‘as much weight as we can stuff into the thing’. I’m no longer certain you’d have to reduce the weight below MTOW to make 9000 nm, but I’m also not certain you wouldn’t be on very low payload indeed. If nothing else, the fact that they made the tank in the horizontal stabilizer standard (and it gets used first) makes me suspect it’s part of the 8000 nm profile.
Since “cigarettes” were mentioned earlier, do people have advice on a long-lasting, drop-resistant e-cigarette that I could buy for someone? Preferably something that’s not too expensive and easy for a person of average IQ to use.
I’ve had success with the Kanger Evod Starter Kit, available here for $30 (for some reason, it’s $50 from the manufacturer). It comes with two tanks and two batteries, which will help with dropping, and is generally pretty idiot-proof.
I’m honestly not sure how “average IQ” my brother is – on occasion he notices how brilliant *I* am, and other days a box of rocks on a good slope would give him a run for his money.
He recommends the $50 Teslia starter kit – it survived falling off a car roof at 40 mph.
Do be aware that finding a good tasting fluid brand/model can be a bit of a trial.
(The most significant issue seems to be the problem with going off and leaving the dang thing in random places. A person truly trying to quit smoking tobacco should have two. I suspect that losing the ecig more than twice in one day could be an field-expedient method of diagnosing ADHD, but Not My Field.)
@Leit
Don’t put words in my mouth. I mean what I said, I doubt a study at the scale necessary with confounders controlled properly will emerge anytime soon saying how these factors do or do not influence attraction, regardless of the outcome. Maybe I’m wrong and there will be such a study – if so, I will accept the data. I may want certain results but that doesn’t mean I ignore evidence.
According to a recent study involving 10 universities around the world, men generally find the figure of women with a BMI about 17-20 the most attractive. This corresponds to skinny 19 year olds or average 13 year olds.
http://egomoral.com/thinner-females-are-more-attractive/
Here’s an example:
http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/8353532/1118full-jordyn-jones.jpg
Was anyone else troubled the first time they saw a “Nerd Rope” on sale in the candy aisle?
In the annals of nominative determinism, Billabong CEO David Le
iasure quits to surf more.Anyone have any thoughts on recent economics research purporting to show that scarcity impedes cognitive functioning, the implication being that part of the correlation between poverty and bad decisions is from the former causing the latter? See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much-ebook/dp/B00BMKOO6S and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract.
My gut reaction to this is that it’s too politically convenient, and so is probably dubious. But I haven’t looked into the studies much, and when I’ve heard them summarized in presentations etc. the researchers sound like they’re avoiding the most obvious potential problems with their studies.
I’m still doing this book discussion group to anyone interested. I just was a little confused because the change from weekly open threads to biweekly. Anyways the book is still “The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter” by Joseph Henrich. It’s really good and I think it provides a welcome addition to the nature/nurture debate.
Paul Graham writes essay on income inequality. The blue response boils down to (sorry, “is literally”) “SHUT UP, SHITLORD”.
Surprised this hasn’t been discussed here yet.
Probably in part because if you want to exhaustively discuss a Paul Graham essay there’s a good place for that. Likewise from time to time I see an SSC post over there but never comment because I’d rather do so here.
Where’s “over there”, btw? Good forum I’m missing out on?
Hacker News.
I’m sorry, but all my american news consumption is centered around Trump’s chances of becoming president.
For those who haven’t read it yet: the essay in question. Echo’s description of the response to it is pretty accurate, which is disappointing since it makes some interesting arguments. People should read the entire eassy, but here’s one quote from near the center which will probably be of interest to some local political tribes which I’ll leave unnamed:
Here’s an avenue that I *haven’t* seen anyone mention (or that, even if useless itself, might give someone else an idea that would turn out to be useful): if you can’t get asylum for being transgendered, perhaps you could for being gay?
I know they’re completely different things, but if you have proof of being persecuted for something that could also be construed as ‘gay’, that might be enough to get you through somewhere (and out of Russia)–gay people are more accepted than transgendered people, at least at this present time in the USA. I wouldn’t feel too guilty–you need to get out of there.
The issue isn’t winning an asylum claim–I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s doable. The issue is that you can only make an asylum claim when you are in the country you are seeking asylum from and she apparently is having trouble getting to Canada or the US.
There’s a refugee process that allows you to apply aboard but at least for the US program is mostly limited to people living in UN recognized refugee camps.
Is it that hard to get a tourist visa to Canada or the US from Russia? Or to Schengen?
@multihead: By the way, maybe another country suggestion (but probably not a good one because of economic reasons…or rather it depends on how much money you currently have – see below):
During a trip to East Asia, we also visited the Philippines and we booked a hotel at this one beach which then turned out to be the local gay and transvestite beach. It was not the season so there was not much to do there in the evening except for that one travesti show so we went there to see it. It was my impression in that country in general that the Filipino men really often do look much more feminine than men from other countries for some reason, but some of the performers must have been transsexuals as well (or women, most of the time you can tell but some of those performers either were women, which would not make sense at a travesti/transsexual show or were transsexuals with either great plastic surgeons which is unlikely in the Philippines, or already looked so feminine as men that one could not tell they ever were men). In any case, the Philippines seemed like a place where transsexuals are almost an everyday thing (funny, given that the country is also strongly Catholic), and getting a visa there should be really easy since hardly anybody wants to immigrate. The downside is that the country is dirt poor…Russia is no Switzerland but this would still be quite a big difference. I guess that parts of Manila are passable, but the rest of the country is really poor. I have not been to India or sub-Saharan Africa but I have not seen any place poorer than the Philippines with my own eyes. On the other hand, I’ve met Europeans there who live there and make a good living. The thing is that most things are very cheap in the Philippines for Europeans (even for Russians I think). A house costs next to nothing, food costs maybe a quarter of what you’d pay in Germany (as long as you are willing to eat where locals do, tourist places are much more expensive), you don’t need to pay for the heating because it is warm there all the time. Depending on which part of Russia you’re from it might even be quite close to home (when you go back to visit the family or something). The people make next to nothing but if you already come there with money and maybe find a job in the tourist industry it may work out pretty well. The official language is English, so no extra language to learn either.
I have to say I would not want to live there because of the sleazy European and Chinese sex tourists (I don’t have anything against prostitution per se and understand that both those guys and the girls are better off by it but I don’t have to see it myself), widespread poverty (this is worse in some parts of Manila than in the countryside actually) and most importantly everyone seeing you as a walking wallet and trying to rip you off (although this probably changes if you are not a tourist anymore…also some other friends who visited the place had a different experience, so maybe we were just unlucky). Then again, it is quite a pretty tropical country and as far as tolerance to transsexuals I guess you can hardly get more of it than there. Maybe go there for a holiday first to see it for yourself if you think my suggestion is not complete rubbish…
Did you notice the part at the very beginning of this post where Multiheaded tried to get a tourist visa to Canada and failed?
Yes, it is “that hard” if your actual purpose in asking for a tourist visa is to move in and settle down. Because getting a tourist visa from a country whose standard of living / level of oppression is significantly worse than e.g. Canada, requires getting past an official who is a trained professional expert at figuring out who is lying about just wanting to tour around for a bit, and the would-be immigrant is most likely an amateur at selling that lie. Now, especially for Canada, I’d expect there is a fair chance that one would succeed on the basis of the relevant official knowing what you are trying to do and thinking it would be a good thing for all if you got away with it, but that’s not a sure thing and it didn’t work out in this case.
Someone suggested Argentina (not so rich), or perhaps Uruguay, its more-liberal neighbor? Doesn’t Uruguay have gay marriage and legal pot? Didn’t the famously-liberal president offer to take the Guantanamo prisoners in? Multiheaded might have a window of opportunity here.
Travel from Russia to Argentina requires no visa for stays shorter than 91 days.
John: Actually, I did not read the whole thread… but I dunno, I see Russian tourists everywhere all the time (in the EU), so I assumed getting a tourist visa cannot be that hard for Russians. Maybe you need to prove you have a job in Russia or something?
Actually, I have no idea about how the visas are granted, the only time in needed one was in Shenzhen (southern China, a special economic zone, north of Hong Kong) where one just has to stand in a line, fill in some papers and pay a fee and it all takes about an hour…and this is totalitarian China (although outside of the special economic zones it is more difficult) so I thought that getting a tourist visa should be easy for anybody anywhere (maybe save for North Korea and perhaps a few more totalitarian regimes somewhere). I suppose I was wrong 🙂
@Whatever Happened to Anonymous: Looks like Argentina is a better option than the Philippines then. Except for having to learn Spanish but Spanish is really easy if you speak English, even with the weird Argentinian accent :))
The higher the immigrant demand, the more scrutiny and hostility, duh. It’s also relatively easy to get a Russian visa. But travelling from a poor country to a first-world one is the worst.
Anyways yes, Argentina is currently looking like my top long-term option.
@multiheaded: I guess. But I would not have guessed that a citizen of Russia, which is economically (at least measured by GDP purchasing power parity per capita) about on the level of Greece or Poland would have so much trouble getting a tourist visa. Maybe it has more to do with not so warm relationships between Russia and NATO+EU countries nowadays?
At least with respect to the US: politics and animus might have some impact on the margin, but by far the main issue is likelihood of overstaying the visa. Statistics are collected and pressure comes from the top on embassies and consulates that do a bad job. Some middle income countries probably have it tougher than some of the poorest countries.
FWIW, Poland is not a visa waiver country and I’ve heard anecdotally that it can be very difficult to get a tourist visa to the US for young Poles.
@anonymous: Really? I thought that no Schengen countries were required to get tourist visas to the US any more. I remember that it was a big deal in the news some 6-8 years back when Czechs were no longer required to have tourist visas when visiting the US and I’ve always thought that this was extended to all of Schengen.
I am surprised that illegal Polish immigration to the US is still a major thing. All their Schengen neighbours are richer than them and they can work there legally without any visas or anything. Germany and Sweden are almost as rich as the US. Both Germany and Sweden are at 80% of the US in terms of GDP PPP per capita and you can get anywhere in Poland from there in a few hours by train or a car. Since you will not likely get a good job if you go to the US illegally, it only makes sense if someone really really wants to live in the United States, despite all the trouble.
EDIT: I consulted it with the Internets and they say that it was extended to most of what was then Schengen (Romania and Bulgaria were not in Schengen back then) with exactly one exception – Poland. Strange.
Don’t Indonesia and Thailand have more-or-less indigenous MTF traditions?
What is MTF?
Male-to-feamle.
@Zyrkom: You mean like some kind of crossdressing or something?
@ Tibor:
You know multiheaded is transgender, right? “Male-to-female” is a used to indicate someone who is sexually male but identifies as female in terms of gender. As opposed to “female-to-male”, someone who is sexually female but identifies as male.
@Vox: Right, but what does that mean when you are talking about indigenous traditions? Prior to hormone treatments and plastic surgery there are not many ways for someone who is biologically a man to be more like a woman.
@ Tibor:
Oh, I see. I didn’t know what you were confused about.
Anyway, you’re not totally correct. There’s always been castration and emasculation. Indeed, eunuchs have often been regarded as a kind of “third sex”.
The hijras in India and Pakistan are a traditional part of society, albeit a traditional part of the underclass of society. People choose to become hijras, and according to Wikipedia they traditionally and usually still do undergo nirwaan or emasculation (the removal of the penis, scrotum, and testicles). They dress and act like women, using feminine language. However, they are regarded as a “third sex”.
There’s also the kathoeys or “ladyboys” of Thailand, who are also traditional. I’m really not aware if castration is typical for them, but I wouldn’t be surprised. They are usually considered female, sometimes referred to by a term that means “female of the second kind”.
There’s also atypical people like the famous Chevalier d’Eon (who is commonly known to this day in France), 1728-1810. D’Eon was born and raised as a man but had an androgynous appearance and became a secret agent for France, dressing up as a woman to spy on Empress Elizabeth of Russia as her maid of honor. Then d’Eon left Russia and became a (male) captain of dragoons for France, leading to the awarding of the title Chevalier (knight).
D’Eon was appointed as intermin ambassador to England but fell out of favor when the new ambassador was appointed and after claiming that the new ambassador tried to drug him, d’Eon went rogue and blackmailed the king of France into giving him a large pension by threatening to reveal French plans to invade England.
Eventually, d’Eon was able to return to France. But in London there had been rumors and an actual betting pool that he was really a woman. A few years later, d’Eon claimed to have been born as a woman but raised as a man by his/her father so that he/she could inherit. D’Eon therefore asked for the right to be known as and live as a woman.
The king granted this request if d’Eon would dress “properly” as a woman, and she lived out the rest of her life as the Chevalière (female knight) d’Eon. But when she died, they examined her body (everyone wanted to know) and found “that the Chevalier had “‘male organs in every respect perfectly formed’, while at the same time displaying feminine characteristics such as rounded limbs and ‘breast remarkably full’.”
Long digression, but I always thought the Chevalier d’Eon was an interesting person. I guess I had been vaguely familiar with the name somehow, but I first looked up the reference and the story due to the Chevalier’s mention in the song “Sans Contrefaçon”. The singer, Mylène Farmer, is not actually transgender, but the song contains such themes. Excerpts:
@Vox: Thanks, both the story and the Hijras are interesting and surprising, especially their existence and government recognition in the muslim Pakistan.
I suspect that much of the disagreement surrounding Intelligence Explosion is because of its Löbean nature: Yudkowsky assumes that AGI is easy to create via cleverness. If that it true, it means that the so-created AGI, which is supposedly clever, can also create a (more powerful) AGI up to a maximal level of cleverness.
It is typical software development experience that developing a buggy/limited first version of a product takes much less effort than developing the project to “completion” – and if it does not have significant computational bottlenecks (for example, if the AI can run on a botnet computer with about-human-level intelligence), a buggy/limited AGI might be able to take the effort to bug-fix itself.
On the other hand, if creating an AGI requires lots of slow intellectual effort, then we may have an Hansonian slow takeoff with a shared AI-human effort for a significant amount of time.
I am quite sure that if an AGI can get intelligent enough it can probably be a huge risk to humanity – at that level, it may be less a lone eccentric genius and more a hyper-competent perfectly-motivated million-person conspiracy – that does sound very likely to be able to easily take over the world, right?
Another issue that tends to get overlooked is the physical substrate of AI. There seems to be an uncritical perception that the necessary computing power to instantiate at least a weakly-superhuman AI either is already found in the sort of computers you’d find in a typical university AI lab or soon will be, that the only thing missing is some clever bit of software engineering that we have somehow missed in the past fifty years of AI research. That once the necessary “spark” or “seed” is belatedly created the AI will be able to finish optimizing and upgrading itself at the speed of software.
And then, with its presumed uber-hacking skills, suborn all the world’s other computers if it is so inclined.
In reality, we seem to be a long way to having the hardware necessary to instantiate even a single human-level AI in real time, and I’m pretty sure we will run out of excuses to pretend that Moore’s Law still holds long before we have enough computronium anywhere to support your hypothetical perfect-million-man-conspiracy AI. And if the emergent AI’s path to superintelligence requires ordering a hundred billion dollars of highly customized silicon from not-yet-fully-AI foundries, that’s going to both slow things down and provide a big hint as to what is going on.
The problem, of course, is that no one really knows how much computational power is required to run “human-level intelligence”. Probably, the human brain is not very efficiently laid out because evolution doesn’t work that way. There is a lot of path dependency.
We can make one motorcycle, smaller than a horse, with the power of hundreds of horses. Or course, horses do a lot of other things, but those are superfluous. In the same way the human brain is useful for many other things besides intelligence, but the AI won’t need that.
But given that we’re not that far away from being able to reach the lower end of the wild guesses of the computational power of the human brain, computational power doesn’t seem like the limiting factor.
And really, I don’t see why computational speed is so important at all. Maybe the AI thinks ten times more slowly than humans. It could still be as or more intelligent.
“the level of cleverness which has eluded us for the past fifty years”
How many of the lesser advances — in e.g. face recognition or autonomous navigation — can, in the wisdom of hindsight, be expected to run on wimpy old computers?
It seems to me that most of the progress in learning and in planning-ish computations has followed fairly closely upon increases in computer power, not with a fifty year lag but more like 5-10 years. What proportion of algorithmic breakthroughs would have been practically interesting on 20-year-old hardware? To pick on one described by a book on my shelf, the kernel machine approaches (SVM, etc.) to handwriting recognition were not developed at a single simple precise date, but “early 1990s” seems like a fair summary. Would there have been practical interest in using those algorithms on 1975 computer hardware?
(This pattern holds to some extent with other algorithms and architectures, too. E.g., even at DOD procurement budgets, public key crypto and packet switching probably weren’t very practically interesting in 1950.)
And the timescale of evolution sorta suggests that learning probably isn’t all that architecturally complicated, likely no more architecturally complicated than stuff we’ve already gotten computers to do. General learning seems to be very computationally expensive to *do* in a brain, but not absurdly difficult to *specify* in a genome. It is hard to be sure from the spotty fossil record, but it seems plausible that it took more generations in a much larger population to go from brains which could control wriggling up onto land to brains that could do bipedal locomotion than it did to go from brains that could do facial recognition to brains that could figure out _Principia Mathematica_.
And really, I don’t see why computational speed is so important at all. Maybe the AI thinks ten times more slowly than humans. It could still be as or more intelligent.
Per the original poster, we are discussing “Intelligence Explosion”. Speed is important to most traditional definitions of “explosion”, and the sloth-AI that will get around to conquering the world, destroying the world, and/or creating the post-scarcity world, a few thousand years after we’ve managed to do it our own meaty selves, isn’t terribly interesting in this context.
Sure – most of the recent progress in AI (and computing in general) was due to increased computational power and available datasets – many times, even running slightly-modified versions of old algorithms! A possible explanation is that the current set of AI algorithms are not that hard to discover, but consider that this is how a problem that is not properly solved looks like – before algebra was discovered people were coming with many variants of geometrical techniques to solve each algebraic problem, but algebra made solving them all equally trivial.
Also, we don’t really know how much computational power brains have, and this is made worse because they are very architecturally different from computers – and there is no real reason one of these should be more suited to AGI than the other.
That’s a very reasonable proposition, that an AI can be created out of cleverness, and after a moderate amount of experience in CS and an interest in mathematics and physics I consider that the obvious conclusion. More or less the entire point of theoretical computer science, and point of sub-fields of computer engineering is to think of clever ways to reduce the time of algorithms, or solve the same problem by different means. And there are plenty of examples of that. Quantum computing is a bit of a popular meme, I guess due to the word quantum, but there’s plenty of commonly used algorithms with reduced running time based on clever already existing hardware manipulations. Or aka, I’m not sure that we even *need* a computing paradigm shift…but that starts involving wordplay.
With that, the Hard Takeoff (after a given level of intelligence) is the obvious solution.
And nobody in the past fifty years of very clever people very deliberately trying to create an AI, has been clever enough?
What’s your confidence that the level of cleverness which has eluded us for the past fifty years will somehow emerge in the next fifty, or hundred, or five hundred, and what is the basis for that confidence?
Cleverness has the annoying tendency of striking only when it wants to. In addition, it is possible that it requires a few more ideas that are not known (or just not widespread) yet, but might be simple to understand once known.
Of course, AI could also be like airplanes or CPUs, and require a huge amount of distributed knowledge to work with – that would seem to lead to a slow Hansonian takeoff, but prototype software development does not seem to behave very much in that way. Or AI could require huge supercomputers, which is basically the same.
Well, this is the age of assortative mating, the dawn of the super-babies, and those refined “algorithmic learning techniques”
Assortative mating (which is now even global with international grad-school acceptance!) implies that its very possible, and in fact probable, that the smartest person of all time is a youth today, or born not far from now. Add in algorithmic learning that instantly recommends weakpoints, and does so intelligently, and the person can reach a very effective crystilized knowledge base at an early age. A return of mathematical progress to the young, is one way to put it.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4gi/age_fluid_intelligence_and_intelligent_posts/ ***
A token suggestion for this is noticing how young new grandmasters are in chess, which has corresponded with computer programs that are hard to beat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy#List_of_youngest_grandmasters
***
That figure by the way, explains just *why* so many CS/Engineering fields have age discrimination, in light of experience. At a bit above age 50, the IQ 150 rarity (aka around A average at MIT) are now competing with recent college grads 15x in number who are willing to work for half the pay, after standard deviation calculations. And the 160 tier, or very high intellect tier, is now outnumbered 40 to 1 for top-positions.
Wait. That chart has been verified elsewhere for cognitive traits that are difficult to train.
By age 80, the median person has close to a 70 IQ raw fluid intelligence (That is the threshold for a diagnosis of severe mental deficits) Individuals once around the 90 level(which a quarter of the population is naturally below) are now at 60, which is a score considered profoundly mentally retarded.That, with greatly diminished reaction times. Don’t both of those in conjunction *strongly* imply that there really, really should be more regular driver competency tests for the elderly?
It seems very likely a serious AI effort will be aligned with the interests and aspirations of a particular institution or group of people, unless it is some kind of open source project like that OpenAI thing recently discussed (better/worse… unsure). In which case it will have a large institutional support, and the organisational would be subsumed to its own goals slowly over time, possibly without a formal decision to do so. This seems to be particularly likely if there was competition between multiple such instituitions. They must make their version stronger at all costs or lose the fight to be “ahead”. Sounds quite Molochian :-/
Somewhat related:
If we knew about all the ways an Intelligence Explosion could go wrong, would we be able to avoid it?
I should say as a caveat I’m not especially convinced that an intelligence explosion is a plausble scenario, but it seems reasonable to at least consider it, because it probably helps thought about softer AI scenarios anyway.
I don’t think current Yudkowsky thinks AI will be “easy”. But it sounds like you’re talking about amount of time, and if AI works like a lot of other computer programs – eg thousands of times faster than humans – even an AI without super-high raw intelligence will still be able to create new AIs in a very little objective time just through the power of hard work and high clock speed.
The Labour party is falling apart!
After espousing a “new kind of politics”, Supreme Leader Corbyn has sacked Shadow Minister for Europe Pat McFadden for this microaggression:
“Can I ask the prime minister to reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the West do? Does he agree with me that such an approach risks infantilising the terrorists and treating them as children when the truth is they are adults entirely responsible for what they do. No one forces them to kill innocent people in Paris or Beirut and unless we are clear about that we will fail even to be able to understand the threat we face let alone confront it and ultimately overcome it.”
(See here for more of his horrendous comments, including saying “he did not agree with Corbyn on everything”)
This has sparked the resignation of 3 more shadow ministers (from their positions, not the party). Luckily, Corbyn chose not to call the bluff of the 14 further who threatened to resign if Hilary Benn was removed – instead, he has merely been muzzled.
Corbyn has only been in power four months, and already appears to be doing a good job at destroying the party from the inside.
The next general election will certainly be interesting – I’m hoping for a mass exodus from Labour to the Lib Dems.
I agree this is a fascinating development.
McFadden wasn’t sacked for the precise words he said, though. It was because he opposes what the Stop The War Coalition stand for. Stop The War, on the other hand, consider themselves to be the true Labour Party, and have the (internal) election results they think prove it. It’s existential – see the tweets of Corbyn supporting MPs e.g. Paul Flynn this morning – and so the “deniers” have to be purged. The only thing that saved Benn was his surname.
In truth, of course, there is no true heart of the Labour Party. Like every political party, it’s always been a coalition, and it has to be a coalition to attract enough support to win elections. What makes this so weird to me is the Maoists’ outright denial of this obvious reality. Pat McFadden, who’s been a loyal Labour member for over three decades, has at least as much right to consider himself “truly” Labour as the most disloyal MP of any party over that same period.
Like you, I wish Corbyn and McDonnell well in their attempts to turn the Labour Party into the Tooting Popular Front.
Did you mean to link the Wikiquote article on Jeane Kirkpatrick? I don’t see what she has to do with the Stop the War Coalition.
She’s obviously not a supporter, and she’s famous for not always supporting democratization. She basically said authoritarianism is bad but better than totalitarianism, therefore the U.S. should ally with authoritarian regimes and not try to spread democracy to them when that risks their collapse into communism.
Whereas recent neoconservatism is famous for wanting the U.S. to spread democracy far and wide.
The Kirkpatrick-style line that Saddam was better than what Iraq has now is the main line of criticism by the left of the War in Iraq.
Yes, I meant to link to Mrs Kirkpatrick’s wikiquote, which contains several excerpts from her most famous speech, in which she so perfectly described the politics of the Stop The War Coalition:
And indeed, hours after the Paris attacks, the Stop The War Coalition blamed the attack, not on the terrorists who carried it out, but US foreign policy. (The article has since been deleted but you can still read it here).
Naturally, McFadden condemned this, and pointed out that “terrorists are entirely responsible for their action, that no-one forces anyone to kill innocent people in Paris, to blow up the London Underground, to behead innocent aid workers.” This is the mainstream Labour position, but it’s anathema to Stop The War, and the long-time head of Stop The War is now running the show. So McFadden got fired for “disloyalty.”
Okay, you just meant the “blame America (or Britain) first” part. I see.
So, how do you guys like this Cameron guy? Because it seems you’ll be stuck with him for a while.
Cameron has said that he will not contest the next election. If we are going to be stuck (or blessed!) with anyone for a long while, it will be Osborne or The Boris.
Do you think anyone would vote for a Tory Party with Osborne as the leader? At least with Boris, there would be a guaranteed series of sex scandals for the public amusement and I know he’s a lot, lot cleverer than his “dumb blond” public performance but I have no idea how he would tackle the problems facing the country.
(I have no idea how any of our own parties for the next election are going to tackle the problems facing Ireland, in fact, never mind next door).
You’re right that Boris is no buffoon – he got elected, and re-elected, and has maintained his popularity, in a London that is far more hostile to the Conservatives than the rest of the country, and has done a very good job as mayor. But Osborne has a tight grip on the Cabinet and the party mechanisms, and I would make him favourite to be the next leader. He will probably try and make sure May gets #2 selection among the MPs, so Boris’ rank-and-file popularity can’t come to bear. But a lot will depend on the EU referendum.
As for whether people would vote Tory with Osborne as leader? I agree with your implicit suggestion that Boris is a more likely vote-winner. But Osborne has worked hard to change his image (and physique!) these past couple of years, in a way that might not be apparent to foreigners. If the choice is Osborne or Corbyn, it will be a Tory landslide, but it’s far from certain that either will be leader.
Osborne isn’t very popular personally, but if it’s a choice between him and a far-left ideologue who openly expresses sympathy for terrorists, I reckon a lot of people would hold their noses and vote Tory.
What might hurt Osborne is being Chancellor of the Exchequer. Do people feel like they’ve been hit in their paypackets? If they do, they’re likely to blame the man who sets the national budget. If they don’t, they may be happy to vote for him as next Prime Minister.
If, as has been pointed out, he gets to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. I think there will be a lot of internal backstabbing, horse trading, and the general ructions you get when power is being handed over. Does Cameron support Osborne as successor, or is he going to stand aloof from the fray? I’m going on impressions picked up from the papers, and I haven’t been following this at all closely: is it true that Cameron doesn’t much like Boris, and so he’d back Osborne rather than see Boris get the leadership?
There’s a good chance it’ll be someone else after the next election; Labour lost two general elections in a row before Corbyn was elected party leader, so Cameron will have been in power for ten years at the next election. It’s generally expected that he’ll turn things over to a successor at some point shortly beforehand, although by no means certain.
The main thing people are missing about these events is that the moderate wing of the Labour party speaks a good line about the importance of pragmatism, but they’ve been horribly bad at executing it for a good while now.
(Substance of your point is right, though; next election it seems pretty likely that it’ll be Conservatives who win. The bet exchanges have poor liquidity, only about £10k matched so soon on the biggest, but https://www.betfair.com/exchange/politics/event?id=27456523 gives maybe 70% chance of being biggest party, slightly over 50% chance of an outright majority again.)
He is a PR man.
Probably a nice chap, but an absolute disaster as a prime minister – Libya, immigration, stagnant growth, worsening public services, increased taxes, lost the vote to bomb Syria, EU renegotiation (lol) – I don’t think he has had *any* successes. Even by his own (probably moronic) lights he has failed – did the old switcheroo when austerity was caving the economy, and, now, this time magicking up some (imaginary) billions to avoid additional unpopular tax rises/ spending cuts. Falling public debt? Hmmmm… we’ll see. Even winning a majority has put him in the doo-doo in that he now has to try and fulfill the mad promises he made during the campaign.
Also, the election campaign was absolutely dire – essentially he won because someone took a picture of the other guy eating a bacon sandwich.
The good point is that the country seems sufficiently robust that it doesn’t seem to really matter how idiotic the government is (as long as you aren’t sick, poor, or married to a foreigner) it kind of keeps ticking along, and you can just turn off the TV and try to forget that politics exists.
I don’t know… perhaps there is something to be said for having a vaguely incompetent government.
It seems to work for the Belgians, too; they were locked in negotiations over just what coalition ought to be formed for a period of time lasting more than a year, and I don’t see it being a smoking ruin just yet. It’s almost as if the head of any given state isn’t nearly as important to its prosperity as his many thousands of subordinates in the civil service, law enforcement and general governing process are.
Yeah… maybe… I hate to come over all patriotic, but I think its probably to do with the culture, the people, the way people conduct themselves – to the extent that the government functions well, I think it is because it exists as part of that broader culture. British people are basically honest and considerate, and it takes quite a lot to mess that up.
(I wonder if I am alone in feeling that the general social mood/condition has improved immensely over the past twenty years? It might just be due to the gentrification of the area that I live in.)
Point of not-quite-idle curiosity:
For those of you (including our illustrious hegemon) who have dabbled in the occult, what did you try? And what experiences did you have as a result?
Had a girlfriend that was a practicing Wiccan some years ago, and sat in on some of her ceremonies. (Not sure if that counts as dabbling, or occult.)
Most of the time, I was completely unmoved. Some times, I was…I need one of those long, complicated German compound words, I think. There needs to be a word to describe “The experience of being aware exactly of how a given set of artificial factors is inducing an emotional state in you, while also experiencing that emotional state, and the follow-up annoyance.”
Extending from that, and from other events that have triggered this feeling in me (mass events, the two Catholic services I’ve been to), and noting that these or close analogues seem to be a thing that many rationalists are into, I do wonder if the occult is something that rationalists might want to check out.
“The experience of being aware exactly of how a given set of artificial factors is inducing an emotional state in you, while also experiencing that emotional state, and the follow-up annoyance.”
Liminality?
I don’t think so. The ritual stuff was, at its best, affecting of my emotional state to some degree, but I never felt changed by it.
Again, to draw the comparison to the the Catholic masses I’d been to, I was concurrently thinking “This is pretty nice.” along with “The architecture, acoustics, and communal movements and vocalizations have been carefully selected to produce that feeling of niceness.”, and not really approving.
I dunno. I enjoy caroling, but didn’t enjoy choir or group singing. I think that I might have interest in group bonding rituals that are explicit and honest about what they are trying to do, but not in ones which are trying to underhandedly hack my mental state. So, for me, the occult is not helpful.
Also, I should note: my assumption here is that you are looking at the occult as a way to socialize with people and…make use of your own internal placebo effect, again for the lack of an appropriate word. I did not find the occult useful in this case for me, but I did see how it could be helpful for others.
I did not find anything, in by experiences, to suggest that, at least in the domain of modern Wicca, there are any serious truths to be learned outside of what you already know, nor effects produced outside of the aforementioned placebo.
And I don’t want to knock that, but I don’t want to oversell it, either. Also, I’m not an expert, since I did just sit in, only read a few books, and (hah, got the exact phrasing this time!) never really put my soul into it the way she did.
Well, examples of things I’ve been looking into:
– Are there plausible points of overlap between IFS therapy and Goetia?
– to what extent do trance states *actually* provide higher affordances for cognitive-behavioral changes?
– what components of ritual are most crucial for inducing trance states, and what components are most fudgeable?
Oh dear. I saw an infographic on Tumblr about the Fermi Paradox, quoting Nick Bostrom, and I thought of one particular phrase “Well, that can’t be correct, this must be a sloppy paraphrase of what he originally said”. Googled it and no, he really did say (emphasis mine):
Kindly indicate to me how the above can be an “empirical fact”, given that “empirical” as I understand it means “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic”.
I mean, if Professor Bostrom is in contact with an actual technologically mature, post-human civilisation with enormous computing power, and so he can say from direct observation and experience that it is an “empirical fact” about what such a civilisation would possess, I think everyone would be interested to meet them so can he provide us with an introduction to them? Or is he himself from such a civilisation and is conducting field research amongst the primitives, in which case he should be more careful about letting his cover slip.
“Empirical” here just means “concerning a state of the world”, as opposed to being a piece of a priori reasoning like the other premises in the argument. This is a little loose, but fairly common.
Yes, in this context he means that extrapolation from currently observed trends supports the idea that a more advanced society will have more computing power.
Then why not say “extrapolation from current trends”? I’m sorry, I think this is trying to have your cake and eat it. It slips past very easily; from a proposition about what this theoretical “technologically mature post-human civilisation” would be like or what it would possess to a pronouncement that not alone is the supposition a fact, it is an empirical fact.
That means that ordinary idiots like myself find ourselves subliminally convinced “it must be true if it’s empirical fact, not mere theorising or speculation” because of the effect of words and their meanings (and words do have an effect, why else the demand for “treating other people with respect” when it comes to preferred terms?).
Honestly, if a religious apologist tried the same thing, they would be hauled over the coals for it by the same rational logicians who are asked to swallow what is being said here by Bostrom. I’m not saying he’s wrong and I’m certainly not trying to use the kind of “reasoning” that says “The Theory of Evolution is only a theory, it’s not proven fact”, but I am saying that this is a three-card trick kind of argument, where the reputation of SCIENCE! as being empirical, based on observation and testing of concrete phenomena of the apprehensible physical world, is then used to bolster an argument that presumes what it sets out to prove, and where “empirical” no longer means “by direct observation and/or experience” but “a conjecture where, in order to get the conclusion I wish to use, I assume a chain of events to happen in such a way that the outcome is the one I desire (to warn against), and then maintain that those events and that conclusion is proven, concrete, tangible, palpable fact”.
I’m quite happy to accept that a technologically etc. civilisation would be very likely to possess immense computational power. But until we either develop to that level ourselves or encounter such a civilisation, we cannot say that that is a fact instead of a supposition, conjecture, or most likely scenario.
As to what such a civilisation would do with that computing power, again we have no idea. They might invent or create self-improving God AI, they might choose to sit around in sunny glades making daisy chains while the orangutan-level intellect robots do all the work, we don’t know either way.
We certainly cannot claim it to be empirical fact, unless you want to use “empirical” to mean “I had a dream about it, and a dream is a state, and I am a physical being, so a dream is a physical state, so it’s real”.
Deiseach, in my opinion you misunderstand why he uses the word “empirical” there.
He doesn’t mean “this is empirical so it couldn’t be wrong”.
He means just the opposite: “this is empirical so it might be wrong, therefore this argument is not a priori and absolute; it depends on certain projections which might be misguided.”
This is in contrast to something like the doomsday argument, which is supposed to be an a priori argument that the human race is soon going to be destroyed.
Note that I don’t really agree with his argument. I also think the variables are far too uncertain.
@Vox:
That just makes the word “empirical” fairly superfluous in the sentence.
@Deiseach:
I think what he is saying is not much more or less than “post-human societies by definition have enormous computing power”. If you take that as his meaning, and assume something about what he means by “enormous”, points 1, 2 and 3 follow.
I think the problems with Bostrom’s argument are most in the definition he is using. In other words, I think his argument fails at point 1. But I don’t think he and I share the same estimates of probabilities for what might cause failure at point 1.
I think he tends to lean on “we snuff ourselves out before post-human”, whereas I think that the most likely reason for failure at point-1 is that the post-human society he envisions isn’t possible within the realm of physics. As a small example, the speed of light is a limitation on information transfer, and that means that harnessing the power of a solar system or galaxy into one coordinated entity is not really possible in the way he seems to talk about it (as far as I understand. I am no expert on Bostrom’s arguments).
@ HeelBearCub:
He uses it to mean “not a priori”. I don’t see how that’s redundant.
@Vox:
Do you think the meaning of the words he wrote is materially different from the following:
“Given that a technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:”
@ HeelBearCub:
Yes, there is a difference. “Given” implies it’s just a random assumption, perhaps for the sake of argument alone.
“Empirical” means he thinks it’s true and could in principle be (perhaps weakly) argued for on the basis of evidence we have now.
@Vox:
If some future society did not have vast computing power, would it be post-human, in Bostrom’s formulation? If so, then his points 1, 2, and 3 aren’t sufficient. For all practical purposes his argument just assumes this as a fact. He doesn’t try and prove it in any way.
As an example, if all humans die off due to some cataclysm, that isn’t a “post-human society” even if we leave behind similarly sentient robots.
Vox Imperatoris, I understand the distinction you’re making, but I’d very much like Professor Bostrom to explain how we can know for a definite, observable, experiential fact something that may take five hundred years to happen (or fifty, if you’re very optimistic about rates of progress) – either we become the post-human civilisation or we run into one – and how that is not an assumption, an extrapolation or a guess.
If he wants to argue “Given such a civilisation, these propositions follow” that’s fine, but playing around with the sense in which “fact” is understood, and qualifying it with “empirical”, is playing fast and loose.
And if he wants to make a distinction between “a priori” arguments and the arguments he is making, what the dickens is wrong with “a posteriori”? He can say that empirical evidence of increasing computational power in the real world we inhabit over the past whatsit years leads him to believe a posteriori that this rate of progress will continue and will be the (or one of the) hallmark(s) of a mature, post-human civilisation.
It’s an empirical fact that this minute I am sitting in a chair typing this. It is not an empirical fact that in five years’ time our new God AI will have rejuvenation technology so I will be restored to the form of a twenty-five year old.
I’d be happy enough if he dropped the “empirical” and left it at “based on this fact”. But given that the “empirical fact” quoted leads to “there’s a damn good chance we are all probably living in a computer simulation”, then by his own argument my dreams are just as real as anything that happens in the “real world” (given that it’s all a simulation) and so seaweed monsters are an empirical fact because I dreamt about a seaweed monster once.
I’d also be willing to spit on my fist and argue that he is actually arguing a priori (from pure reason) rather than on empirical grounds, given that we are not yet a mature etc. civilisation as he describes and we have not encountered one as yet. It’s speculation on his part up till the moment somebody does indeed create an AI that everyone agrees is an AI. As I said, we don’t know that it necessarily follows such a civilisation would be the gleaming chrome future of AIs, simulated-worlds running on computers, and brain uploads; they could equally turn their world(s) into rural paradises where everyone looks like they’re walking around wearing primitive clothing and living in country cottages and in actual fact it’s highly advanced (there’s been at least one Star Trek episode and one Stargate episode on this very theme and I’m sure plenty of short stories also).
@ Deiseach:
In my opinion, a priori / a posteriori is pretty much a false distinction. If a priori reasoning is reasoning about concepts, well, concepts are abstractions from experience. There is no such thing as “pure reason”. Some reasoning is just more directly connected to experience than other instances.
I’m just trying to interpret things the best I can as far as what Bostrom is getting at.
Fundamentally, I’m not sure why you think he is saying “this argument is stronger because it’s empirical”. I think he is saying the opposite: “this argument is weaker because it’s empirical”. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s how it reads to me.
If he could show that people were living in an simulation based on an analysis of ordinary concepts alone, that would be quite something and iron-clad. But he can’t do that. He has to throw in an empirical projection that could easily be false.
Moreover, “empirical” partly means “it’s not my job as a philosophy professor to know if this is wrong”. He does present some arguments for the proposition, which are extrapolations from scientific data he has acquired from some non-philosophers. That’s section three of his paper.
What makes this empirical vs. a priori is that, if that data is wrong, the argument fails.
Also, it’s interesting to note that Bostom relies on functionalism, substrate-independence, and the idea that a simulation of a brain would itself be conscious.
But these aren’t really necessary to the argument. If you are a non-functionalist or even a dualist who would say a computer program could not be conscious, it still ought to be possible for a future civilization to build zillions of artificial brains (if it’s possible for an artificial brain to be associated with a mind) or even biological brains in vats (which ought to satisfy even religious dualists). How do you know you’re not one?
The same type of reasons they would do this: observe primitive behavior to advance science, etc. still apply.
Moreover, the brain-in-the-vat argument, as Chalmers argues, is not a skeptical argument. If you are in the Matrix, it is not the case that everything you think you know is wrong. You’re just missing a little context: that there is a “substratum” that underlies and explains our world.
I think this is more interesting than Bostrom’s version, since I don’t find functionalism/simulationism plausible at all.
Edit: now that I think about it, the main problem with the simulation argument in any form is that if we’re in a simulation, we would have no basis whatsoever to speculate about what form the reality underlying it would take (at least at this time). So no empirical facts about this reality could apply to the substratum-reality.
It’s like Kant’s noumenal world.
@Vox:
“now that I think about it, the main problem with the simulation argument in any form is that if we’re in a simulation, we would have no basis whatsoever to speculate about what form the reality underlying it would take (at least at this time).”
Indeed, and Bostrom’s argument actually presents an even bigger problem. Remember, his argument is that these hypothetical consciences should be the result of ancestor simulation. So, the assumption he makes about the computing power of “post-humanity” is that it is so exceedingly powerful that it can model us so exactly that the simulation experiences consciousness as we do, and interacts with a “real” seeming world and other virtual minds…
and that there are so many of these minds that they dwarf actually living minds such that we must certainly be in a simulation.
So, it isn’t just lots of artificial minds. It’s artificial minds that are having experiences so similar to the ones we are having right now that we should go ahead and assume we are the simulation. The experience has to be almost identical to a real one, because it is being used for ancestor simulation.
There are a great deal of assumptions in that statement about computing power.
@ HeelBearCub:
No, that’s not the bigger problem.
The problem is: if the simulation argument is true, you’ve never had a “real” experience. So how do you know what a “real” experience would be like to compare it? Obviously, you couldn’t.
So the problem isn’t that it’s implausible the “real world” has enough computing power to do all this. The problem is that you don’t have the faintest clue what the “real world” is like. We could be in the 10,000th level down of simulations running simulations.
@Vox:
But the purpose of the real world in creating the simulations was to model themselves and their experiences.
Presume that we are the real world for a moment. Suppose we want to create actual conscious simulations that will let us recreate Einstein’s work. Do you see the issue?
@ HeelBearCub:
Yes, if we were the real world, that’s (possibly) what we would want to do.
But if we were not the real world, their motives for simulating us would be unknowable and inscrutable. Beings like us might want to simulate beings like themselves. But it doesn’t follow that beings completely unlike ourselves would want to simulate beings like themselves.
Either we are the real world or we aren’t. If we are, well, we’re not a simulation. If we aren’t, who knows what the purposes of our being simulated are?
@Vox:
It’s Bostrom’s argument. He is proposing the motive.
@ HeelBearCub:
I’m confused. Obviously, I know it’s his argument. I thought you were explicating his argument by saying why we ought to expect a simulation to be like the real world: since if we were the real world, we would make a simulation like the real world. And I’m responding that this is a bad argument.
If that was not your point, what was it?
@Vox:
That Bostrom’s argument (for why we should think we are in a simulation) requires not just simulated brains, but also fidelity of experience to the real world. This puts additional assumptions into the definition of “post-human”.
You need enough “power” to simulate the real world with fidelity, far quicker than realtime, and do it for millions of copies of all 7 billion of us (plus everything we interact with and observe).
This creates some real problems for his argument, I think.
What makes this empirical vs. a priori is that, if that data is wrong, the argument fails.
And that’s the core of my unhappiness with this use of “empirical fact” – he has no data to base any of this upon, so it’s a bit much to say that “Based on this empirical fact, X Y and Z follow”.
Sure, he can use the increase in computational power and complexity to date to construct grounds for an argument. But going beyond what we have so far achieved means he has no real-time, physical data to work on or with; he’s making assumptions and extrapolations about (a) rate of increase in both power and complexity will continue (b) to levels that enable AI or something like it (c) which will be the hallmark of a post-human civilisation (d) which naturally will be technologically mature (and that isn’t even defined; what constitutes maturity for a technology? AI alone? What about FTL or something else that civilisation has not yet achieved – is that not further maturation of the technology?)
And if we have all that, then it’s very likely that such a civilisation would create simulations of consciousnesses in a virtual world in order to do research or recreate historical events (ancestor simulation) to see why things turned out as they did or for amusement or whatever.
Which may be so (I think there is a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek about “we should consider we’re all NPC characters in a computer simulation”, and I don’t mind that), but the part that gets my goat is saying that what remains to be demonstrated as something that is really actual in the current universe (some civilisation or civilisations out there who are at that stage) or to be achieved by us (that is, if we’re not just game characters) is “an empirical fact” which, in common language, would be taken to mean “real thing apprehensible to test and experience in a material form”.
And that is where the confusion happens between what you claim Bostrom is saying (being empirical, it is more likely to be wrong) and what people in general (such as my Tumblr infographic maker) would understand him to be saying (being empirical makes it more likely to be right).
It’s like someone saying “Belief in miracles is irrational. Suppose you have an infection and you pray for it to be cured. That’s not likely to happen. But I can demonstrate, as an empirical fact, that antibiotics kill bacteria and by prescribing you this medicine you will be cured.” That is how people generally understand claims of empiricism to be phrased: that they can be backed up by evidence and proof in concrete, material terms and not merely as ideas or abstract logical reasoning.
@ Deiseach:
I’ve already said why I think his argument fails even if the facts he claims are granted. So I won’t get into that.
But you seem, to slightly alter one of Scott’s expressions, to be engaged in “selective demands for logical positivism” here. “Empirical”, at least as it’s used in philosophy, is not limited to that which is directly in front of your eyes. An argument is empirical when it is based on facts, facts that require investigation of the natural world. An argument which extrapolates from facts is still based on facts if the facts have to hold for the argument to hold.
Personally, I think that all concepts are based on facts, so I think everything is empirical. But an a priori argument is supposed to be one merely based on an analysis of concepts.
Nevertheless, I think a certain distinction can be salvaged, if a priori vs. empirical is interpreted as a matter of degree. That which is relatively “armchair” and based on an analysis of basic concepts obvious with only a little experience is relatively “a priori”. That which is based on sensory evidence less and less obvious to everyone (such as the findings of experimental science) is relatively “empirical”.
For instance, “All bachelors are unmarried. This man is a bachelor. Therefore, this man is unmarried.” This is relatively a priori. You don’t even have to know what “bachelor” and “unmarried” means to endorse this. You only have to know the law of identity, which I believe is an empirical fact—but it’s an empirical fact implicit in everything, so it’s very obvious.
On the other hand, if you want to conclude that this man is a bachelor, therefore he is probably under fifty, you have to know something about our society. It’s relatively empirical.
Yes, this attitude is real. It’s basically logical positivism, which says that a priori reasoning says nothing about reality, and only sensory evidence (not even reasoning which abstracts from sensory evidence) is a means of knowledge.
It’s no longer a popular idea in philosophy, but it does remain prevalent in popular atheism. I apologize.
The kernel of truth in it, however, is that long and complex deductive arguments—while a perfectly good means to knowledge if valid—are very difficult to verify. It’s hard to say if someone has made a mistake in a fifty-step deductive argument for the existence of God based on the analysis of the concept of “existence”.
Even though that concept (“existence”) is obvious, it’s quite likely that in the fifty steps, the guy has accidentally smuggled something in there. And this is not limited to religious people. Michael Huemer accuses Ayn Rand of smuggling in some implicit premises in her essay “The Objectivist Ethics”; and depending on how you interpret her, this seems to be correct.
So if you have a fifty-step deductive argument that God exists but don’t seem to find any miracles, you might want to check your argument more carefully.
The evidence or lack thereof for miracles is empirical, and that means the evidence limited to those who have gone out and looked for them (and those who rationally trust their authority). Yet this still may be a sounder method of investigation than the fifty-step deductive argument which analyzes evidence available to everyone. As strange as it seems, people are really bad at those but relatively good at gathering lots of empirical data.
In any case, Bostrom is not a logical positivist and is not claiming “You stupid theists: the truth of simulationism is right in front of your eyes but you refuse to see!” So it’s not really fair to selectively demand he be a logical positivist. Even though his argument is actually not that good.
What “empirical” does in his argument is give people an “out” by accepting his logic and denying the premise. An a priori argument doesn’t let people do this, since it moves from concepts that are (allegedly) innate or at least really obvious.
If you use the concept of “existence” to prove God (in fifty steps otherwise), the other guy can’t deny existence. He has to accept God or find a problem with the argument.
That being said, it is a mite amusing when the “empirical premise” in an argument is something like “everything that exists is part of a single wave moving about in n-dimensional configuration space.” You saw that, did you? Unaided, or through a microscope?
Well, if we’re changing the primary meaning of “empirical”, then please let’s make that clear. Because it’s very confusing when party A is using a word which means what they want it to mean, and party B is interpreting that word in its former sense.
And nobody ever again gets to laugh at religion on empirical grounds of non-factualism, right? Since empirical no longer means “direct observation or experience”, simply “extrapolation” or “a state, which includes mental and emotional states as well as physical material states”.
Seems to me that he’s doing to “empirical” what everybody else does to “literally.”
This made my day.
Normally, I find the lefties over at Crooked Timber to be tedious, though I used to read them a lot (maybe it just takes a couple of years before they start repeating themselves?). However, this post should be interesting to anyone teaching at college level, and many at high school level: Get your students to know each other and make them write for each other
That would have been all the circles of Hell for me. I would have needed the “everybody introduce yourself” every week because I am useless at names (faces I remember but can’t attach names to them and no, the common mnemonics tricks don’t work for me).
But having to say something personal about yourself? (I wouldn’t have had the confidence at eighteen to say “No, I would rather not, because it’s none of anybody’s business” to The Authority Figure so I would have ending up lying and inventing something to satisfy the ‘tell us about yourself’ bit, which defeats the purpose of the exercise, e.g. “Oooh I love fluffy kitties and puppies!” “Yes, thank you, next please!”) Being shoved into making friends with others in the class, whether I wished to or not? It’s all very well to “draw the reticent into discussion” but there’s a reason some of us are reticent and it’s that we don’t want to discuss things in groups (if we have something to say, we’ll say it), and forcing people together so they’ll talk about things outside the class doesn’t sound appealing. People with poor social skills will still not “make friends” and as an added bonus they’ll fall behind in the work since if progress is made by discussing the material with your ‘study group’ and they’re not invited to join such a clump, especially if it’s structured as “these are friends you made in class” rather than a formal study group, then they’re at a disadvantage.
All of which is to say that perhaps introverts should not consider third-level education, at least at traditional institutions 🙂
Fellow introvert bad at remembering people and making friends here. Although I can only speak for myself, I find that while I’ll flounder and burn if you throw me at a friendly stranger (or group of them) and expect me to socialize, I do completely fine with discussing things and being open if there’s a clearly defined topic to discuss, as would be the case if the class is limited to the course content.
In any case, it doesn’t sound like the professor is trying to force everyone into friendship or study groups, just into class discussion (facilitated by the memos), and the article didn’t make it sound as though socializing in-person outside of class was an outright requirement. If students are socially awkward to the point that they can’t handle a class discussion, then they a) shouldn’t be in this class to begin with, and b) probably need to learn to be comfortable discussing things as a group anyway, I’m having trouble thinking of a career where group discussion can be avoided.
I had a class that tried something somewhat similar, and I found it helpful, as did everyone I talked to who was with me in the class. I don’t think the professor is expecting too much of the more reticent students.
But why do people think “Now we’ll go round the circle and everyone introduce themselves and tell us a bit about yourself” is any good? Has it ever broken down barriers and made everyone feel like they’re all pulling together to make Morgensen’s Sprockets the Number One leader in the field of global sprocketeering? It’s this kind of fake intimacy, instant relationships, forced bonhomie HR nonsense I hate, because it’s all about harnessing human instincts of herd behaviour and gregariousness in the service of raising productivity and making the business more profitable. It’s got nothing to do with “let’s all be friends” and everything to do with “we need social lubrication to prevent costly inter-personal friction the same way we need to oil our machinery, and for the same reason: keep churning out product”.
I’m fine with “Hello, my name is Bob Bobson” and leave it at that. I don’t want to know about your ceramic unicorn collection or how many states of the union you visited.
As for what the professor is trying to achieve, he says:
So he does want discussion groups outside of formal class, whether you call them “study groups” or not, and for the reason that this will help ensure they do the reading, discuss the course content, and work out positions and arguments.
If you’re one of the unlucky ones who don’t easily make friends, or who can contribute in a classroom setting where there’s a formal structure but have trouble in informal groups (such as the gang of pals all heading off to the coffee shop to discuss what went on in class and have arguments and debates), and you’re trailing along like a lost puppy after them, or find yourself on the fringe of such groups trying to get included, you will lose out because you’ll fall behind on the work being done in these discussions.
You won’t have any provocative insights, you’ll be raising questions that “Oh but Dan and Laura and Steve dealt with that already on Wednesday, oh yeah, you weren’t with us when we all met up in Laura’s room” and you will feel isolated in the very place you thought you would be able to participate.
He obviously thinks that having friends who (a) decided to take the class with you (b) you met them in the class and became friends is so good a thing, he’s encouraging students to do so and setting up means of getting small groups to know one another.
And that’s great for the extroverts, but some few introverts probably slip through the meshes of the selection nets and manage to get into university, and this kind of “Now class, I want you all to be instant friends who sit around and have deep meaningful discussions about the course work!” is not going to be easy for everyone.
The example he gives of the little group that inspired him is pretty much one of people living in one another’s ears, to be frank:
And MA is getting roped in to attend his class. This is all very cosy, but pity the person who doesn’t have a little clique of classmates-cum-friends to do the work with!
Here is a blog entry about the blacklivesmatter hashtag movement thingy and its implications for racial integration. I think this is an important and unique insight:
https://welldotdotdot.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/racial-integration/
I love slatestarcodex open threads, but I’m also really busy at the moment, and have no self control. What should I say to get banned for a period of exactly four months?
Insult Bryan Caplan twice.
I really dislike the blog of Noah Smith. I dislike Noah Smith. The blog is called noahpinion and that is slightly irritating. I dislike his ideas, I dislike his attitude, and I dislike his face.
Bryan Caplan is a man who favors open borders. I don’t favor open borders. I’m a liberal economic optimizing man. I don’t want to go to Somalia. It’s easier to exploit workers when you don’t have to look at them and they can’t smash your windows. I therefore fail to see the advantage to allowing immigration. Bryan Caplan must either be very, very foolish, or evil.
And he is both.
You get the bancandy.
That’s the beauty of the reign of terror, you never know whose head our Glorious Leader Scott, hallowed be his name, will call for next.
Scott Alexander (PBUH) is G-d.
I dread the day that I open SSC to find an article titled “Confusion Instead of Comments” denouncing me for formalism, and everyone starts wondering out loud how long it will be until I disappear.
こちのサイトの皆さん
議論する時、余り分からない言語で話したほうがいいと思う。
その理由：
１。外国語で話すのが ムズッ（！）ので 話している内容が大切じゃないとすぐ「ギブアップ」。 どうでもいい話は無くなる。
２．私は英語で話す時、自分が何を言っているとちゃんと考えていない。まあまあ綺麗な英語が使えるけど、意味に余り関心がない。いわゆる「style over substance]
３．もう ギブアップ
This is cultural appropriation of the worst kind!
And you, sir, are also guilty of cultural appropriation.
Appropriating the culture of humans, when you are, in fact, a decaying turd upon a stick.
I suspect something akin to the previously mentioned rejection of fraudulent visa application is in play – the powers that be may have detected ulterior motives below the overt appearance of (im)propriety, and have thus declined to take the requested actions.
As with multihead, my sympathies – sucks to be you. Consider researching alternative means to your ultimate ends.
BANNED!!!!!!!!!!!
4. 殺殺殺殺殺殺殺
Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic eloquently points out how tribal biases stop left and right from finding common ground in Oregon and beyond. (He cites I can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, providing further evidence that in the near future we are all going to be complaining that we read Scott before it was cool.)
Yet I can’t help but wonder if the argument that we should put aside Red-Blue tribal biases and find common ground is insufficiently pessimistic. What if the tribal divides are all there ever were, with the ideological issues being peripheral to very old, very much ethno-regional divides ?
The problem with cynicism is that we can look at the scoreboard; things really are better now than they were for most of our ancestors, and they are better in precisely the ways that liberalism (broadly, but still ideologically, defined) expected and wanted them to be better. This fact is hard to reconcile with the most pessimistic takes on human nature, particularly the ever-popular “identity is everything” take.
I think wanting things to change, rather than expecting them to do so, is what made the most difference.
Sitting back, saying “Well, people are naturally nice at bottom, things are better now than they used to be, so just let nature take its course and things will keep on getting better” isn’t much help; saying “This is not right or not good enough, things need to change, we need to explain why it’s not right and why it needs to change, and we need to do something about it” is what works.
Why was slavery legally abolished in Great Britain before the USA? Was the USA not as ‘advanced’ or ‘nice’ as Britain? I think the work of anti-slavery activists is what made the difference; there were certainly those who argued that let time take its course, slavery would naturally wither away, people would stop owning slaves and relying on slave labour as human nature improved and progress meant you didn’t need slave labour – and that just didn’t happen.
I’m not saying you always need a civil war to change things, but merely relying on time because people just naturally get nicer isn’t enough.
@Deiseach:
Aren’t you sort of ignoring the disparate economic interests in the slave trade between the US and the UK?
Edit: I do agree that activism matters and is necessary. But I don’t think activism is sufficient and, for any given scenario, differences in activism aren’t actually likely to be the main driver in different outcomes.
I also think that activism is dependent on the basic “niceness of people at the bottom” so I’m not sure that the necessity of activism really invalidates that argument either.
You’re making the point for me, HeelBearCub.
It wasn’t simply natural niceness, it was external economic forces. There’s no reason to think Americans were not as nice or progressive or civilised as their British counterparts of the time, but if slavery meant money, then slavery would be permitted as long as it made economic sense.
The reluctance to interfere with the rights of private property was possibly as much behind “let it die out naturally rather than impose laws banning it” as anything else, and I think that regardless of whether or not people would eventually come to abhor slavery as not befitting a civilised nation, you would need some imposition of laws rather than waiting for everyone to voluntarily liberate their slaves or not purchase new ones when their old ones died.
@Deiseach:
Well, I agree with your central point, I think.
But I was disagreeing with this: ” I think the work of anti-slavery activists is what made the difference;”
I don’t think more or better work by abolitionists in the US would have caused slavery in the U.S. to end before the UK.
“Why was slavery legally abolished in Great Britain before the USA?”
Because the slavery on which the UK was economically dependent was in the US. Hence our war led to your Cotton Famine.
The odd shortage of cotton notwithstanding, Britain was not in any sense economically dependent on US slavery, during the 1860s or any other decade. Hence why neither any of the Anglo-American wars nor the defeat of the Confederacy caused a British economic collapse.
Imagine “Thing” from the Addams Family, (modified with a Senor Wences lipstick mouth and a contentious personality), periodically emerging from its box to blurt out a resentment-charged inaccuracy before quickly retreating back into its gloom.
I move that before “true, kind, necessary” we insert “comprehensible”.
Because they had the luck to abolish it just before the cotton boom launched by the adoption of the cotton gin in the 1830s.
The cotton famine was widely feared at the time, but in reality Britain quickly found new sources of cotton to replace Confederate imports (and instituted some public works programs to support laid-off textile workers).
“The cotton gin” can’t be the answer, because when it came in Britain had already abolished slavery and America hadn’t, i.e., Britain had already got there first.
It does not by itself answer why Britain abolished slavery in the early 19th century, but it was the direct cause of the reinvigorated antebellum slave economy in the US South.
Slavery in Great Britain was never formally abolished. It was subject to conflicting judicial decisions, none of which claimed to be changing anything; and they didn’t matter much because there wasn’t much slavery. Slavery in the Empire was abolished in the 1834 (and the slave trade in 1807). This step was much easier than in America because, as Mary says, it wasn’t that big a portion of the Empire. Also, the owners didn’t generally have a vote. Third, the British emancipation compensated the owners. I don’t think compensation was ever seriously proposed in America, although it would have been a lot cheaper than the War. (Not that the South would have agreed to compensated empancipation, anyhow.) In fact, the post-war abolition of slavery in Kentucky didn’t include compensation.
I’m not sure what Multiheaded is saying. If American abolitionists could have created a viable anti-slavery party in 1830, they would have. Maybe the point is that the idea that slavery would wither away was more plausible in 1830 than in 1860?
In 1830, there was generally still slavery in the North. The children of slaves were emancipated, but the institution did not end until the older generation died off. Maybe this is a model for “withering,” but it is about house slaves, not agricultural slaves. It is easy to imagine agricultural slavery withering away if (if!) it were outcompeted, but house slaves were a status symbol. It is hard to imagine southerners ceasing to care about this status symbol, just because people in Britain and the North had done so. But maybe it was tied to agricultural slavery and would have gone away in turn.
(Sorry if this is a double-post.)
No, this is good. I don’t think there would have been a natural withering-away simply by letting time go by because people were getting nicer.
I think there were external impetuses, some from changing economic and political conditions, some from developing humanitarian impulses and religious motives (the Non-Conformist conscience).
I also think that developing humanitarianism needed a conscious and willed effort of change, not merely going with the tide of progress working gradually on human nature to soften and raise it.
Yes, this was my point here.
“This fact is hard to reconcile with the most pessimistic takes on human nature, particularly the ever-popular “identity is everything” take.”
Could you elaborate on this a little more? I don’t see how it militates against a picture like JayMan’s where social pathologies and political conflicts are fundamentally genetic.
I take the “strong” identity claim to be “there’s no ‘there’ there”, IOW politics is only about tribal differentiation, and political arguments are fundamentally empty signaling, like an accent. That can’t be the case if politics has actually changed the world.
Huh. I guess that still doesn’t seem like a reasonable inference to me. Something can be a local custom while still having a concrete impact on the world; think of ritual cannibalism in New Guinea and the spread of kuru, for instance. Politics changing the world is compatible with, for instance, people mostly inheriting their political opinions.
I think that the claim, “things really are better now than they were for most of our ancestors” is entirely compatible with the claim, “political divides are driven largely by identity.” What am I missing?
Though I would add that although in a place like America tribalism indeed does not get that bad (for any number of reasons), in other places tribalism can be quite destructive.
Is that Scott’s most linked-to post?
So, Vox Day apparently got banned from Goodreads after 36 hours’ membership, on grounds of being Vox Day (no reason given).
I do wonder how he’ll fuck up GR for this insult.
Goodreads is owned by Amazon. They aren’t a few hundred SFF fans or a twiter subculture. Vox Day is a schoolyard bully, not someone to be taken seriously in the real world.
So it’s okay to ban someone merely because you don’t like them, even if they haven’t done anything (yet).
Fine, that’s the same logic as Donald Trump and ban all Muslims, you do realise?
The point isn’t that it’s right, the point is that there’s probably not a lot VD can do about it.
I didn’t comment on whether or not it was okay that goodreads banned VD, just that I wasn’t worried about his “retribution”.
That said: 1) I doubt that they banned him just because they don’t like him. 2) In any event, I have no problem with a private website banning someone they don’t like without waiting for them to do something specific. Freedom of association and all that. If I had a website I would certainly ban Vox Day, Jim, et. al. Just as I would never sit down to have a meal with such loathsome characters so to I wouldn’t want to do so virtually.
Wait a second, you’re not the same anon!
Typo in the email address maybe? I donno.
Most likely cause is a difference in the initial capitalization of the email address. If you are on a smart phone or tablet, this is frequently done for you, whereas it is not on a standard desktop or laptop.
As pointed out above, Goodreads is owned by Amazon. That means that whatever it is, it is not a private site. Flip’s sake, the idea that “You like this book as recommended by six other readers? Head on over to purchase it at Amazon!” is behind why they bought it.
I don’t know much about Vox Day and don’t like what I do hear, but I also think you have to let a dog have one bite. If he started trouble, then sure, kick him off. But if he’s entitled to be on the site, and didn’t do anything yet to be a bannable offence, then throwing him off for “we don’t like him” means anyone can be kicked off, and the next time it might be someone whose politics/opinions you do like.
So unless you’re going to argue “Only the people whose opinions we don’t like should be banned”, you leave yourself with no defence against anyone being banned or kicked off for no reason.
Defence of free speech means defending the people you don’t like as much as those you do like.
Though this is probably a storm in a teacup, and Amazon’s rating system is much too easy to rig anyway (there’s nothing stopping Author of Book or E-book from getting friends and relatives to spam a ton of five-star reviews, not to mention getting a fan campaign to do the same, and then it can turn into warring campaigns between those who like Author and those who despise Author. I… may or may not have been involved in one of those.)
@Deiseach:
There most certainly is: Amazon’s monitoring systems, which are getting better all the time. They are more and more active in dealing with self-review and instigated reviews.
They apparently still don’t care about reviews that aren’t reviews but personal attacks on the author’s politics, but as for the stuff in the first paragraph, they are working tirelessly to reduce it.
@Deiseach:
By public I meant not government. Maybe that’s an Americanism?
By public I meant not government. Maybe that’s an Americanism?
I’m not following. I think there’s a confusion of terms.
While GR is not a government-owned space, and hence not subject to US constitutionally-mandated support for free expression (*) it does have both its own internal codes of conduct, which include some degree of support for the right of everyone to express their own points of view (**) as well as some degree of operating as a “public open space” which (IANAL) has, in some cases, resulted in legal responsibilities for freedom of speech. (***)
In any way, “public” in the USA tends to be used to mean “government owned” and private to mean “citizen owned”. I know that the UK uses those words differently and it always confuses me.
(*) Please to note that this doesn’t mean a right to free speech exists on US government virtual spaces, such as those operated by the DOD.
(**) a cultural value, not a legal one
(***) a very tenuous responsibility, because the right of a private property owner to do as they want trumps free speech, generally
Ah, right. I was taking it as “public” (anyone can join in and it’s run by an organisation) versus “private” (as here, which is Scott’s blog and he makes the rules and brings down the guillotine blade on the necks of whom he will).
I wasn’t thinking of it as “government” versus “non-government”.
It’s not like GoodReads sells wedding cakes, after all!
I can’t resist sharing my favourite quip about that:
Donald Trump wants to ban Muslims. But if we have learned anything from Prohibition, people will just make Muslims in their bathtubs.
I don’t think that’s possible. But you can make a Catholic in your kitchen sink, if you’re Catholic and have an unbaptized baby handy.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/560412.Vox_Day
It’s still there as of the time of the this comment.
That’s an author page, not a user page.
That’s his author page. To delete it is to assert that he does not write books. Where it says that he “isn’t a Goodreads Author (yet)” I think it means that he does not control it, but that, in theory, he could. Presumably he is banned from taking that control, but it isn’t worth much since they syndicate his blog; the real ban is from the ordinary use of the site as a reader – reviewing other people’s books.
Interesting, I agree it would have been shocking if they removed his books or banned that page.
A couple of clicks off that site you get to an article where VD defends Amazon’s decision back in 2011 not to allow authors to review books in their own generes. Maybe this is somehow related?
Maybe? But if so, why wasn’t that reason stated? Or any reason? I mean, Reigns of Tyranny are fine and all, but they’re usually announced beforehand.
Maybe there was. Where are you getting your facts on this?
http://voxday.blogspot.no/2016/01/social-justice-convergence-at-goodreads.html
Kind of hard to figure out who’s who in that comment section, but it appears the Rabid Puppy group was banned for vote manipulation (surprise, surprise).
If you are going to ban a group it makes sense to ban its leader. Maybe the email could have been more explicit, but meh. Tempest in a teapot.
So when Luke Skywalker pulled off his hood in the new Star Wars, did anyone else think the Resistance had found Slavoj Zizek?
Yes! It was uncanny.
I’d like to take a minute and thank the Immigration Services of Canada, my home and native land, for not allowing MultiHeaded entry into the country. Not just because MultiHeaded is one of the most irritating people on this board, an avowed communist, and in no significant danger anyway.
I’m impressed that they managed to tell that MultiHeaded was attempting immigration fraud. I’m not saying it was Mission:Impossible, the “heist” was pretty half-baked (buying a ticket to a random hockey game. Really?), but I’m impressed nevertheless. On top of that, to actually prevent him/her from entering the country after diagnosing the immigration fraud indicates a healthy attitude towards illegal immigration, which isn’t a huge problem in Canada anyway.
Lots of people would love to emigrate to Canada, including many who don’t publicly plan on breaking our immigration laws to get here.
Neither true, kind nor necessary. Reported.
Which part isn’t true?
It is true. Multi was always trouble with his appalling comments here and was pretty much banned for quite a period of time. A very unpleasant person.
He doesn’t seem to think beyond himself at all in regard to his emigration. What does he have to offer to Canada or any other country? Mental illness and communist agitating? Why would we want that?
If you dislike Multiheaded and/or think they are a net drain on the host country, attempting to send them towards a country you also dislike and/or want destroyed may be a consistent solution.
I have experience as a gardener. Which means, among other things, that a workers’ collective could hire me to look after the flowers on the grave of Capitalism. After we bury it.
I could also… make the Russkie Communist villains in your fiction more authentic, translate lesser-known items of vintage Soviet propaganda, and so on.
And now I have an opinion.
As a joke, that seems pretty ambiguous. Are you joking that people think of you as a Communist or are you claiming to actually be a Communist and joking about that?
P.S.: I hope you folks become less awful people at some point, so that you could look back on this moment and feel intensely ashamed at your response.
Oh, and rest assured, if any of you haters need help escaping something like a viciously hostile environment, I would cease this banter at once and do what little I can to assist you. I’m serious, I do think your life and sanity and human dignity have worth – even considering that you are vicious heartless fuckheads.
I’m really sorry about your situation, and I think several commenters here have been inexcusably awful to you.
I don’t agree with your political views, but I do hope you find a way to make it to a reasonably tolerant country. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know. If you can make your way to the U.S. at all, I even have a spare bedroom you could stay in.
If you were serious about it and I knew you better, I’d even consider the “fake marriage” option. Unfortunately, from my experience, the INS are pretty draconian in making sure every marriage is a “real marriage for love” in order to qualify for immigration. I’ve scanned Spanish Hallmark cards and filed reams of phone logs to help one couple prove it at a job I had once.
Can it really be that difficult to get a tourist visa to Finland or Sweden? I studied abroad in Russia just recently, and I went on a three-day trip to Finland and Sweden with a Russian tour agency. It was very inexpensive (less than $100 for the whole thing, meals excluded), and though I didn’t have to get a visa, everyone else on the tour bus with me did, and they were a diverse group of people who seemed to be of moderate means. Like I said, I didn’t need a visa, but I bought a ticket on a Wednesday for a trip starting on a Friday.
I don’t know the law of those countries and don’t know if you stand a realistic chance of being granted asylum, but you might consider it. And if you think living there illegally would be preferable to living legally in Russia, I certainly won’t hold it against you.
Based on what I hear from my friends who still visit that benighted land, Swedish prison might actually be nicer to live in than anywhere in Russia, so maybe Vox Imperatoris has a point…
A visa for a legit tour with a tour agency does sound somewhat realistic… but if I do need to make a reasonably hasty escape, it will most likely be to Argentina, as has been proposed above?? Looks like that would be legally more clear/less risk of deportation, easier to learn the language, and easier to subsist on donations if absolutely needed?
(Learning Finnish… brrr.)
@ multiheaded
Is the GoFundMe or whatever still going? Url?
You can role-model sanity, we need it.
It’s technically still up. I should probably update it.
https://www.gofundme.com/klsiw0
(Moving funds is, however, non-trivial and requires the cooperation of a person in the US, so that should be done in one go and when absolutely neeeded.)
and thanks for the entirely unearned compliment, friend! : D
Forget true. It clearly was neither kind nor necessary to kick somebody when they’re down. Mocking someone who has just been denied refugee status after trying to leave a regime that is trying to imprison you clearly qualifies. Wanting people to suffer because they have bad politics is pretty much the antithesis of what this blog stands for. Timothy and Ghan banned indefinitely
You’re a fundamentally bad human being.
False. Unnecessary. Unkind.
But gr8 b8 m8.
Nu-uh
It’s true, in the sense that Scott is indeed a terrible person within a whole bunch of moral frameworks (most notably, religious fundamentalism and veganism). It’s kind in that, despite calling Scott a bad human being, it contains no slurs and doesn’t call for bad things to happen to him. And it’s necessary because reasons.
So there.
You know it
I see someone’s not a fan of this whole “reign of terror” concept.
Being smugly self-aware about your bad choices doesn’t make them not bad choices.
You don’t think it’s a slur to call someone a fundamentally bad person? I’d consider it a slur if someone said it about me; at the least, I wouldn’t take it as a compliment and it’s rather hard to read it as a neutral statement of fact (unless you provide evidence that said person is fundamentally bad).
Anyway, reign of terror is my favourite part! 🙂
Thank you, Scott! I was not really emotionally hurt due to my utter lack of respect for people who would act like that… but I appreciate the gesture.
A transwoman in Russia is certainly in significant danger.
Can we wirehead AI?
https://youtu.be/kHseZYsrYYg
Most likely, some AI can be wireheaded and some can’t. The immune AI will tend to outcompete the susceptible AI, so the overall effect is to make it harder to write AI that does what we want while not helping much at stopping AI that does things we don’t want.
AI wireheads *itself*.
How soon until we pass the point where even the most strident head-in-the-sand normie liberal is able to deny what’s going on? Try as they might, the internet makes it impossible for the western governments and media to completely suppress this information, and yes, if you are unaware, they are in fact trying.
https://archive.is/fP1bo
Any thoughts from the rationalist community? Michael Vassar once said that a true bayesian could have prevented the holocaust. I posit to all you effective altruists out there that preventing a global religious war is the absolute best use of your time, resources, money, and thought right now.
Michael Vassar said that? Did he specify how?
What does Michael Vassar know?
https://www.reddit.com/r/thingsjonsnowknows
Please explain to me how, exactly, this incident is related to a coming “global religious war.” I mean, it isn’t crazy to worry about that nowadays, what with the recent Saudi-Iran tensions and the continuing crises in Syria and Yemen, but I fail to see any possible connection between a riot involving what seem to be common criminals and any sort of global war.
How about this:
In your opinion, how likely is it that violent radical Islamists in the Middle East are knowlngly/deliberately using the “refugee crisis” as a Trojan horse in which to send significant numbers of agents into the West either to 1) commit murderous acts against Westerners directly; 2) soft-colonize the West, starting with “no-go zones” where Sharia law is dominant and potentially building up to Muslim movements to take over Western governments; and/or 3) have kids who will employ their Western resources, educations, and social connections in the fight against the West?
0 = this is impossible
1 = this is already happening
My guess is somewhere between .55 and .85, and I believe the West as it is now would be totally impotent to combat such a plot.
The question is not properly framed.
I find it quite probable that they have at least one agent / fellow traveler among the refugees.
But I find it completely implausible that the effect of this will be significant, let alone bring about the Downfall of the West.
I think the cowardice of the “conservatives” who want to draw up the lifelines and hunker down in “fortress America” is despicable. As is the blindness of the “liberals” who aren’t prepared actually to prosecute the war against Islamism.
Timothy Sandefur says it best:
Except it’s not about a handful of “spies” or terrorists here. Read the article: this is a case of hundreds, possibly thousands, of so-called refugees behaving like conquerors sacking a city. We saw this play out in Britain, most notably in Rotherham, and before that in France and before that in Sweden.
The problem is not that a few of the refugees will be bad apples. It is that they, as a group, represent an invading hostile force.
@ My Alt:
First of all, it’s a sensationalized article by a source with an obvious agenda. I would appreciate a better source. This is just based on my experience with Steve-Sailer-type accounts of completely fictitious “illegal immigrant crime wave” stories in the U.S.
But even taking it at face value, we are talking about a small minority of the immigrants. And it mainly reflects a failure of policing. If they catch any bastards raping and stealing, I say deport them back to ISIS. That ought to be sufficient discouragement.
Moreover, much more severe and extensive riots occurred as a result of Catholic immigration to the U.S., out of fear that Catholics wanted to impose religious law and the rule of the Pope. Some of them no doubt did want to. Catholicism, especially before the Second Vatican Council, was completely opposed to the values America is founded on. But it would have been very wrong to ban Catholic immigration on those grounds.
Chinese immigration actually was banned for similar reasons. There was a faction of rabid racists and restrictionists, and they caused enough trouble that the moderates (like Grover Cleveland, who reluctantly signed the Chinese Exclusion Act) gave in for the sake of a “peace” achieved by appeasing the initiators of the violence. I think that was an act of cowardice.
Another major part of the problem with Germany, Britain, and France is multiculturalism and postmodernism, which finds no firm basis upon which to criticize Islamist savagery and provides no vision for people to assimilate to. But that’s a failure of the West itself to live up to the Enlightenment values it created. And excluding foreigners is not the way to bring them back. The problem is, if you criticize multiculturalism, you get accused of being a racist restrictionist—because unfortunately being “against multiculturalism” is the motte to the bailey of “keep Britain white and Christian”.
If 20 million Muslims wanted to move to Estonia, they’d have a problem. But if the great countries of Europe can’t deal with a few refugees—if it can’t offer them a compelling vision of a better, happier, more civilized, more rational life—they are too weak and decayed to be worth protecting.
@Vox: We are never too weak and decayed to be worth protecting. Weak, decadent hipsters like the ones the Islamic State brutally murdered in France are our brothers and sisters. They deserve a paternalistic government to protect them, as they have a Father who forgives them (they know not what they do).
The problem is that, by identifying as the tribe that votes for the Party that rams multiculturalism down their country’s throat for ulterior movies, they have the illusion of political power. They want to stick it to their parents’s “racist” generation. But it’s all an illusion, and the illusion should be taken away from them so they can live their day to day lives in a safe and fun way while the culture stays safe and traditional around them.
By “war”, do you mean culture war or literal war?
As far as the former goes, I support whatever is effective at abolishing belief in Islam (though it may not necessarily look like a culture war), as long as it doesn’t replace it with something similarly bad. But non-defensive military war against Islamism is unjustified on libertarian grounds.
@ blacktrance:
I mean, in general, the struggle against Islamism both through military means and otherwise. And I think that ought to include war against the dictatorial regimes that spread and back it around the world, most notably Iran and Saudi Arabia (and the Islamic State, if you count it as a real state).
On the other hand, I am very sympathetic to the argument that given the way any such war is likely to be waged in the current political climate, we’re better off doing nothing at this time than getting into a half-assed and half-baked war like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But—if it is a real threat we need to do something about, and I think it is—we really ought to be confronting the Islamism abroad, not surrendering to it at home by restricting the liberties of Americans. Including the liberty to hire, sell homes to, and associate with foreigners.
Vox Imperatoris:
If merely supporting violent organizations is a sufficient justification for war, that would also imply that it would be justified to attack the United States.
Also, there is a great deal of injustice in war, most notably collateral damage, and a war against countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran would likely induce them to conscript innocent people and send them to fight the US military, in effect putting us in a position where we have to kill innocent slaves. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should never go to war, but that it takes a lot to justify it. If we have to kill innocent people to literally defend ourselves, then we grit our teeth and do it, while seeking to minimize the loss of life. But we’re not in that position in relation to Saudi Arabia or Iran, so we shouldn’t do it even if we were politically more competent.
I’ve become skeptical of the idea that getting rid of religion would fix anything ever since I read about the officially atheist Chinese government’s push for abstinence-only sex education.
You might respond, “maybe getting Muslims to apostatize wouldn’t fix every cultural problem, but surely we’d at least get rid of any possible support for groups like ISIS,” except…
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/23/10653840/poll-arab-world
When it comes to terrorism in general, at least in America non-religious people actually display much greater support than Muslims. And Timothy McVeigh was a self-described agnostic so yes, non-religious terrorists have killed people in America.
@NN:
I agree that religion is mostly bent to culture and not vice-versa. Getting rid of religion by waving a wand wouldn’t get rid of the culture from which it springs, but going through a real world process that succeeds in substantial deconversion probably does result in cultural change, in my opinion.
You want to explain how they can achieve 2 or 3 but have barely achieved any significant degree of success at murdering people so far?
Well, it’s already effectively banned to draw Mohammed in any Western nation: no, technically you won’t be arrested, but when the vigilantes come for you the government will shrug and most of the intelligentsia will be openly stating that you deserved what you got. So there’s that.
The first version strikes me as very unlikely, given how easy it is to get people into developed countries at least for a while if only in the guise of tourists. I believe the current cost for a stolen western passport is around a thousand dollars.
I suppose the second and third are possible, but I expect the islamists are putting most of their energies into projects with more immediate payoff.
As I have repeatedly told you before, a stolen western passport does not suffice to actually get people into developed countries any more, unless you are willing to settle for the prisons of developed countries. The stolen western passports you can buy for a few thousand dollars are for getting into “developing” countries(*), or for moving about within developed countries where you still need some sort of ID to do so much as rent a hotel room. If you try to use one to get into a first-world country, you generally get as far as the customs station at the border where a discrete warning tells the inspector that you have a passport on the Interpol “stolen passport” list and probably another that your fingerprints don’t match the biometric data associated with the passport.
Which is not to say that stolen passports are entirely useless to terrorists. They can be used to e.g. get into Mexico and maybe hire a coyote to sneak one over the US border. But stolen passports are not so useful as to render parallel channels like “pretend to be a refugee” entirely useless. Particularly in Europe, where there’s a large population of weakly-screened refugees to blend into. I doubt it is a major problem in the United States.
*Or those otherwise-developed nations which still have 20th-century border security infrastructure, if you have the expertise to keep track of such things and if you’re willing to settle for one of those nations while there still are a few left. The United States isn’t one of them, and I don’t know if there are any on the periphery of the Schengen area.
Good to know, and probably part of the reason there’s talk of a reduced Schengen core in north-central Europe. And Greece is geographically isolated from the rest of Schengen-land, but for someone who can afford airline tickets (and hundred-euro bribes and who doesn’t otherwise seem undesirable), it’s a way in to Western Europe.
Unfortunately Greece doesn’t border Russia, or it would be an obvious thing for Multiheaded to try. Russia to Greece by air would be somewhat harder and riskier.
1.I doubt that, but I can’t quite articulate just why. Perhaps the ease of entering the nation other ways. What I find more worrisome is the idea of taking in hundreds of thousands of possibly uneducated refugees with questionable capabilities to contribute to the country after an attempted integration, which may or may not succeed.
2.I flat out don’t believe anything like that in this nation could happen to a significant level, though maybe the news could spin something. The closest, and its not very close, thing I know of in this country are indian reservations. Also, in this day of education, most of the most intellectually capable people tend to not be so dogmatic, regardless of their birth country/philosophy. Its not a fear.
3. I expect moderate secularization to largely take hold over by generation three. But on that note, most ISIS sympathizers born in the US, tend to be somewhat socially unconnected, “mis-fits”, without large resources bases.
I think there’s reason for the nation to be more selective about what immigrants the nation wants. There’s a great deal of inherent unknowns when accepting refugees. But I don’t think you want to make a blanket statement of “Keep the Muslims out”.
I think the best solution is to let anyone come in, give them zero welfare. That can be achieved either by eliminating state welfare altogether or by limiting it to people who have lived in the country for X years and had an income. This is actually the current Czech law (the latter, EDIT: Except that you still need to get a Schengen visa, so it is not “let anyone come in”) but it does not include people designated as refugees.
There one would have to make clear rules granting a very limited refuge in specific and well-researched cases, maximum absolute number of refugees for a limited amount of time, giving them shelter and means of survival and some basic medicare but nothing else. Also, it would be necessary to make sure people in the third world know that those are the conditions and that they cannot hope for anything better if they come as refugees. A lot of the current problems in Germany are caused by the government doing the exact opposite, there was even an advert by the government with a smiling lady in an empty immigration office and a guy who comes there, gets promptly processed and everything is fine. People have smartphones in Africa today, they see this and then they see the photos from their friends who already went to Europe who pose in front of a BMW and tell them that it is their car because their are too ashamed to tell them that not all is paved in gold and that they did not get their own house upon arrival. Then you constantly hear these “refugees” complaining about living in a peaceful country in clean houses with electricity, running hot water, food prepared for them every day and free language courses…”I expected Europe to be better” is what they often say. But the fault of the government which does not clearly send out the message that nothing better can be expected (and that it takes people who clearly are not war refugees because war refugees do not complain about such things).
I don’t think there is a problem with immigration per se and I think it is a big mistake that most people nowadays (both the proponents and opponents) put immigration and asylum together. Welfare immigration has a simple solution which I mentioned above. Asylum is more complicated. Of course, a simple solution is to say “our country does not provide asylum to anyone, if you want to come, do it as everyone else”. Most people would not like that solution though, so it is necessary to talk about what the asylum right should entail exactly and how many people in total can be granted an asylum in the country (and also financially supporting refugee camps in countries closer to the one(s) refugees come from should be considered as an alternative). And most importantly, this should be treated separately from immigration, because if anyone wants to actually immigrate to a country, he should do it under the same rules as anyone else. And of course, there is always space for private charity helping whomever.
…limiting it to people who have lived in the country for X years and had an income.
This is not possible in America unless Federal law is changed, and depending on what limits you try to impose it may not be possible without amending the Constitution, which means that it is for all intents and purposes impossible.
Not that it’s not a rational suggestion and possibly of great use elsewhere, but it is one we could not implement here.
…war refugees do not complain about such things.
[Citation needed.]
Marc:
Well, I don’t know US laws very well, but would it be unconstitutional to grant welfare to US citizens only and only grant citizenship after X years of living in the country self-sustained?
War refugees – it is natural that when you have to leave your country you want to go somewhere where the conditions are the best. But when someone is disappointed by these conditions it suggests that he would have rather stayed at home had he known how things really were and I cannot imagine someone preferring a warzone over a place like I described.
By the way what do you (all of you) think about this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IcoHMACke0
It is a German satire programme, this time about the Syrian war an stuff. I think it is only moderately funny but actually quite spot on.
@Tibor:
The answer to both your initial questions is “No.” However, that change would need to be made at the Federal level. States can’t do it. Also, our birthright citizenship provision makes it possible to get around at least part of the block.
WRT war refugees: I agree in principle, but I have read many anecdotal accounts of Syrian refugees complaining about conditions they find. “Go back to Syria, if you don’t like it here” is viewed as not a very rational thing to say to them. Not to mention racist.
I actually was a refugee (from a natural disaster instead of a war, but I think it was close enough) for 5 months when I was a teenager, staying first in an actual refugee camp for 3 days, then at a relative’s house in another state for the rest of the time. During that time, I heard a number of similar complaints from family members and other refugees. It turns out that people have wants and needs beyond just those necessary for their basic survival, and this doesn’t change if they are forced to flee their homes.
@Marc: How is “Go back home if you don’t like it here” racist? If someone offers something for free (housing, food, medicare, even education and an amount of pocket money which is on par with the average wage of some Balkan countries…which is also why about 40% of the asylum seekers in Germany come from the Balkans) and I complain, how is it racist to tell me to go back if I don’t like it?
@Tibor:
Rejecting or even criticizing someone of a protected class, even if done for non-discriminatory reasons, is seen as inherently evil by a certain mindset.
If someone offers something for free [ . . . ] and I complain, how is it racist to tell me to go back if I don’t like it?
Because “you’re a racist” is the content-free all-purpose insult du jour.1
Which, of course, does a disservice to both sides, because one is needlessly slurred and the other devalues a term that has legitimate use labeling actual racists.
1 As far as immanentizing that eschaton, refer back to the discussion of the Oberlin “cafeteria food is racist!” goat rodeo.
@Marc: And capitalism is considered as inherently evil by people of a certain mindset. I am not sure how relevant it is to the discussion. What I said is that I doubt that someone is an actual war refugee if he complains about pretty nice conditions he is given in Germany, says that he “imagined Europe otherwise” and suggest that if we send a clear message to the countries of origin that this is the best they can hope for in Europe (or rather in Germany…and it is also not clear for how long) that would significantly reduce the influx of asylum seekers, reducing the problem by a lot (not entirely though, the Albanians know exactly what they get and that they don’t even have a chance to be granted asylum but they still get the benefits while their request is being processed and that is way better than being unemployed in Albania from which it is actually quite easy to travel to Germany).
Thinking about it a bit, I guess one could imagine someone fleeing the war in Syria to a refugee camp in Lebanon, being dissatisfied with the conditions there and scraping up money for the smugglers (and risking life) to get to Germany which, as far as he is informed, is paved by gold and everyone gets a car and a house for free only to realize when he comes that while the conditions indeed are better than in Lebanon, it is just a nicer version of the refugee camp over there, so not really something worth the money and the dangerous trip. I also don’t really blame such a guy or even someone who only comes for benefits and is at no particular danger at home, it is the fault of European governments, German in particular and especially that of Angela Merkel. But it is an insane policy from any possible angle, making basically everyone worse off (except for the Albanians and other people from the Balkans, I guess). What I am saying is that unless there will be a political will to clearly state what asylum entails and what are the boundaries of it, these sorts of problems will only get worse. I am not really afraid of “islamisation of Europe” in any meaningful sense (although ghettos and “no-go” zones are a real problem). But I am quite afraid that this might eventually lead to strict restrictions to the free movement of labour and immigration in general in Europe, just because people are unwilling or unable to differentiate between immigration and asylum. What is frustrating is that almost nobody makes that distinction and while they don’t it is impossible to reach a meaningful consensus.
@Tibor:
I don’t think we have any significant disagreement on the points you raise. I was not referring to what *I* believe, only what I have observed in others. You’re right, they’re not being very rational. At least, not in my opinion.
Bringing it up looks like some combination of concern trolling and deploying a weak man.
@anonymous:
If you are referring to my mentioning accusations of racism, it was a response to Tibor’s implication that he didn’t understand why people wouldn’t tell war refugees not to be ungrateful. If you think I’m weak-manning, then you do. I respectfully disagree. I have heard people, unironically, say that pretty much any criticism of the Syrian refugees could only be motivated by xenophobia/racism/etc. Maybe they were weakpersons, but I am not representing their statements weakly.
@Marc: Oh, ok. Now, I can follow the whole thing 🙂 My bad.
So you’re suggesting that ISIS managed to sneak hundreds of agents into Germany, and all these agents could think to do on New Year’s Eve, when every major city in the country was full of vulnerable crowds, was to screw around in a train station, shooting fireworks at people and assaulting random women? Even if none of them could acquire guns or bombs in time, that many people could have easily inflicted massive carnage using knives. Seriously, stop and think about how ridiculous this idea is.
As for 2 and 3, as a general rule, terrorists don’t think that far ahead. This is without bringing up the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda and especially ISIS hate political Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, or the fact that ISIS has gone to great lengths to attempt to prevent Muslims from fleeing its territory.
Finally, do you have any actual evidence that the people involved in the events at the Cologne train station are, in fact, Muslim (you may have noticed that an awful lot of Christians have been fleeing Iraq and Syria lately), or if they are that their religious identification had anything to do with this? The reports we’ve seen so far certainly don’t mention these men ever mentioning religion.
This event certainly raises concerns about managing incoming refugees, but suggesting that it was the planned result of the schemes of “violent radical Islamists” is a Protocol of the Elders of Ziyon level conspiracy theory.
I didn’t say that #1 is what happened in the train station in Germany. I was posing that scenario more generally. It seems plausible to me. Also, if you’re a young Islamic guy with an illegal machine gun, you might not have the nerve to go to a REALLY crowded place like a stadium or Times Square on NYE, but you still want to take out a few kafirs so you can get your 72 virgins or whatever, so a train station with a few unsuspecting travelers might be perfect.
I think some terrorists don’t think ahead, while others do. 9/11 took a lot of thinking ahead to pull off, for example. ISIS’s organization took some planning too.
Protocols of Zion is flawed because it’s looking at a set of facts (Jews tend to rise to the top of political, financial, and media fields) but then completely inventing an underlying explanation despite an obvious one being right there (high Jewish average IQ and a cultural taste for intellectualism and critical thinking).
What I’m positing here about Islamists is based on a pattern that’s already been documented, and statements that have already been made (ISIS has claimed credit for many recent terrorist acts in the West, for example). Note that my confidence in any of this stuff being true STILL isn’t a full 1, I only say that I think it’s more likely true than not (0.55-0.85). That’s actually pretty moderate, considering some of the stuff that’s been going on in recent years.
Oh, I agree that ISIS has been and still is attempting to smuggle agents into the West to commit terrorist attacks (though through what means they are attempting to do so is still an open question). I just don’t see how an incident involving a bunch of hooligans running amok in a train station is at all related to that issue.
And #2 and #3 are still paranoid nonsense that is completely ridiculous in light of what violent radical Islamists are actually like. For example, ISIS would never work to “build up Muslim movements to take over Western governments,” because ISIS believes that running for office in a democracy is an act of apostasy, and thus a beheading worthy offense. They also consider voting a sin, though I don’t think they consider it worthy of excommunication. This position has already made it impossible for ISIS to ally with a number of less extreme Islamist Syrian rebel groups, so it demonstrably is not something that they are willing to compromise for reasons of pragmatism.
Which isn’t to say that European governments aren’t having all sorts of issues with integrating large immigrant populations. Those issues just aren’t the intentional result of any sort of planned conspiracy by anyone.
OK, so how certain are you–on that same scale from 0 to 1–that your assertion
isn’t wishful thinking?
@Cop Party,
The same objection about wishful thinking applies to literally everything anyone might believe ever (i.e. it is pointless except in cases where someone is really likely to be thinking wishfully, which this isn’t). How likely, on a scale from 0 to 1, is it that your belief that ISIS weren’t deliberately created by the US government is wishful thinking?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a religious war exactly. It’s more of a war between “honor” cultures that say it’s proper to kill for an insult, and “gentle” cultures that say it’s better to ignore insults or go to court. Thankfully, right now “gentle” cultures have a tech advantage. Unfortunately, many people in “gentle” cultures are easily seduced by “honor” ideas. Both the left and right wing have factions that support “honor” and factions that oppose it. My vote is always against “honor” cultures, because I’ve seen them up close.
Wow, what an interesting and thought-provoking comment. Seriously, this is the level of political comment I see when passing through thestudentroom forum, where a typical political argument runs “Islamic countries aren’t bad – look at how high the average income of Qatar and UAE is!”.
Do you have any evidence for your assertion that governments are trying to suppress this information? It seems unlikely, considering that it is being reported in the New York Times. Why did you feel the need to archive the Breitbart link, when the original is perfectly accessible (I suspect it wasn’t because you don’t want to support Breitbart through their advertising)?
All I see in this overhyped telling, assuming the basic facts are accurate, is a cluster of recent male immigrants from a culture where opportunistically copping a feel is considered acceptable behavior(*) running into a cluster of party girls from a culture where such is so far beyond the pale that women no longer take care to defend against it, and saying “They’ll let us get away with this? I wonder what else we can get away with, before this rare and pleasant opportunity slips away?”. That’s a problem, and it’s a problem that will recur until European governments and cultures take steps to deal with it. But trying to spin it as the spearhead of an Islamic invasion that will bring down Western civilization and replace it with Eurabia, is just absurd. Basically, why should I care?
(*) And where women consequently take care never to offer the opportunity, thus if one does she “must be a slut”, etc.
I think this summary sounds pretty accurate.
I do think the critique that some stuff is under-discussed is fair; I agree that educating and explaining one version or another of Western European culture to new arrivals who have less good ideas of how to treat women, where to draw the line between loyalty to family and adherence to civic duty, etc, is a useful concern, as is keeping an eye that there aren’t clusters dense enough that incentives to adopt Western European culture fail to penetrate.
On the other hand it is probably better, in policy terms, to be ignoring it than to be basing policy on dramatic exaggeration of the state of the world; a government that does nothing is better than a government which makes policy on the basis of absurd claims that entire cities have become “no go areas”, and is ruled by panic that unless Something Drastic Is Done Now To Those People Who Aren’t Us, and all moral qualms are set aside, civilisation will end. In case of failure of public debate, defaulting to inaction is relatively safe.
What I’d like would be for there to be more kind, thoughtful consideration of it all which comes from a place of genuine humanitarian concern for all people, but this stuff barely exists in public. I do think that there’s some of it which is kept quiet to avoid lending force to the stuff above, but gets a sympathetic ear in private, but that’s just based on my own bubble, which seems to not be as bad as a lot of other people say theirs is.
My suspicion is that it will keep on being dealt with poorly and without public debate, but social incentives will favour a gradual reduction in issues over time and assimilation, simply because having more people in society like you is really useful and humans respond to incentives pretty consistently.
And if that doesn’t happen then I’d expect that it’d get paid attention to when it actually becomes a noticeable problem for more people, but it’d probably happen by more people switching to the “wild overreaction” position rather than a shift to thoughtfulness, and if mainstream political parties trying to retain wide support don’t keep it tamped down it could get quite ugly. I’d hope to be wrong about that.
What would you consider a “noticeable problem” then? Apparently Swedish rape rates and British pedophile gangs don’t count, nor the French having to close their nude beaches or German women being attacked en masse in the streets. What would it actually take?
Besides, if you two are right and the problem is that Muslim immigrants are behaving this way because they feel that they can attack women without consequence then ignoring them is the absolute worst thing that you could do. It proves that they were correct in their estimation and will only further encourage them. The logical response is to have swift sure punishment doled out as soon as such incidents occur, not to wait until it becomes such a severe problem that it can’t be ignored any longer.
He’s not saying the problems should be ignored.
He’s saying that, given the alternatives of “do nothing” and “immigrants raus!”, the former is preferable.
Ideally, things like the British pedophile gangs should be attacked by better, more targeted policing. But as bad as things like that are, the consequences of hysterical overreaction to it will be worse. For one thing, the vast majority of child sexual abuse that gets perpetrated by Muslim men is on Muslim girls, who would have been worse off if they had been excluded and kept in their countries of origin.
The same goes for “no-go zones”. It’s certainly a terrible phenomenon, but the main victims are Muslims themselves. It’s like “the ghetto” in the U.S.: the existence of it is bad for the black people who live in it, but it has little effect on the white people who just don’t go there. Or in Brazil, it doesn’t bother those living in gated communities to have favelas close by.
Most of the “they’s after our white wimminz” stories are exaggerated and the product of hysteria. I’m not saying that Muslims never attack white women, and maybe they even attack white women at a higher rate than white men attack white women. (That’s actually probably not true, though: for example, blacks in the U.S. commit crime in general at a higher rate but victimize whites at a lower rate than other whites). But they are not presenting any kind of existential threat to Western civilization or to the white population.
A noticeable problem, for the purposes of the above, is one such that people feel individually threatened by it, and so are individually incentivised to eliminate that threat. People are selfish like that.
I’m not sure exactly what causes that. I’d expect large shifts in overall rates which were well attributed to the cultural problems to do it, and some things short of that to do it. The attack in the streets is probably a couple of orders of magnitude before it’s the kind of “en masse” that people (who aren’t politically inclined to agree with you already) consider “en masse”, and accomplish that.
I think Rotherham *was* the kind of thing which, if it proved to be as sustained and well spread as some blogs allege, would shift attitudes, and probably did a fair chunk on its own, but the further allegations haven’t been substantiated.
It was mitigated somewhat by sitting on a background of the Jimmy Savile effect and allegations of coverups of epophilia within political circles; the fact that culture has bad clusters elsewhere too makes for less of an implied difference, and the presence of more general efforts against this stuff (mostly getting rid of the people who think 15 year old are ‘basically mature’ and were inclined to treat it as a minor crime at all levels of decision-making) took focus away.
I don’t know much about the Swedish rape rate stuff; I would suspect that if it’s a big gap, then either people don’t believe it, or it hasn’t been clearly tied to culture as opposed to poverty, income, etc. I suspect that it’d need to become obvious enough for people to notice, or the case would need to be made in a manner that was persuasive.
There are lots of things a government can do worse than ignoring a problem, for any problem. Actions by government have effects way beyond what ‘message’ they send/what cause they signal is more important, even if people don’t tend to pay attention to that. I’m not in the “government interventions always go wrong” camp, but I don’t believe they can do no wrong, either.
Note that this is just for a specific, motivated targeted intervention; naturally regular old law enforcement is there, doing its thing, and even operating according to some internal targeting process. Just a culture blind one. In the street attacks, arrests were made, and consequences demonstrated in immediate fashion, so I don’t know that they were proved correct to think they could get away with it just because we didn’t, I unno, start throwing large numbers of different people out of Europe.
But blacks also often live in majority black areas. To correctly compute such figures you’d want to compute whether blacks attack whites disproportionately to the ratio of black and white targets available to them, not disproportionately to the ratio of blacks and whites in the whole country.
@ Jiro:
Am I incorrect in understanding that Muslims in Europe tend to live in mainly-Muslim areas? I thought that was the whole point of the outrage about “third world communities in our country!”
I don’t see why the ratio of “targets available to them” is so important. If black criminals prefer white victims but can’t get them, your chances of being attacked as a white person are still less.
No, no you wouldn’t want to do that. You really wouldn’t.
Too late to edit, but I’ve been reading some more about the situation and I retract the part of my earlier post about arrests being made and consequences demonstrated in response to the assaults in Germany, on the basis that the police response was apparently really shoddy.
That shoddiness seems to have now propelled it into mainstream news (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35241818) and caused some pretty explicit statements in support of more proactive efforts, a few statements about acknowledging background, and groups agitating for Things To Be Better which aren’t calling ethnicities subhuman as they do it, which gives me some hope that I’m wrong about people mostly shifting to the opposite extreme rather than actually moving to be sensible, although I remain pretty concerned.
Apparently Swedish rape rates and British pedophile gangs don’t count
I’m not aware of any relevant British pedophile gangs; if you mean the Rotherham bunch, those weren’t pedophiles. And they were a problem of a different scale and arguably different kind, making them much more threatening. The immigrant community in Rotherham went beyond ” I wonder what else we can get away with, before this rare and pleasant opportunity slips away?” to “OK, we can get away with anything and they’ll let us keep doing it, as long as we stick to the white-trash(*) schoolgirl demographic”. And then began integrating it into their local fusion culture for the long haul.
That did have the potential for creating substantial no-go zones, or worse no-escape zones. But, being a noticeable problem, it was noticed, and stopped, and in a way that makes it unlikely that the next Rotherham would go so far without being noticed.
* “White Trash” would be the American term, not sure about the appropriate Britishism.
Chav?
> How soon until we pass the point where even the most strident head-in-the-sand normie liberal is able to deny what’s going on?
That point will never come, because there’s always another excuse.
It’s like asking “when will science progress to the point that even the most strident head-in-the-sand creationist will admit that earth is not 6000 years old”
You can’t reason a person out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
I think global war is an exaggeration, but I despair (as a centre/centre-left person) that the left won’t harden up on this issue, and the right will use it cynically to shove a rightist agenda down our throat. We need to take a harder stance, but the centre can’t seem to muster a sensible surgical approach. 🙁
Yes, the greatest threat from foreign groups blowing people up, shooting people domestically, burning people alive, raping them, and enslaving them is that it might help the domestic outgroup gain power.
It takes a solid centrist such as yourself to perceive this.
That isn’t remotely what I said, but I’m sure you’ll win political points for your team by saying so.
In a domestic policy discussion, the risk that the extreme right, which has a historical death toll of millions, could come to power is significant even in the face of the sort of horrendous crimes you’re talking about. I’m not saying the right are Nazi’s or anything, but if things totally destabilise often the extremists do the best in the chaos. Your group criticises the left for being blind to the threats of the extreme left – don’t undermine that by doing the exact same on your side of politics.
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/world/europe/german-village-of-102-braces-for-750-asylum-seekers.html
“One of the few people, in fact, who seem enthusiastic about the plan for Sumte is Holger Niemann, 32, an admirer of Hitler and the lone neo-Nazi on the elected district council. He rejoices at the opportunities the migrant crisis has offered.
“It is bad for the people, but politically it is good for me,” Mr. Niemann said of the plan, which would leave the German villagers outnumbered by migrants by more than seven to one.”
—
By the way I’m arguing for sensible action on this issue which I’m acknowledging as important, but because I reject a right-wing agenda, you appear to be unwilling to accept my view as reasonable on this topic. How can there be across-the-floor action if that’s the level of cooperation the West achieves?
I’d say one great threat is for one political side to capture the issue (as has happened with abortion, AGW, and gun rights), leading to it being used only to score political points instead of ever being usefully addressed.
Totally agree.
The hard problem of meritocracy:
As machinery, technology, and systems of organisation improve, the knowledge and experience of the worker becomes less important as a factor of production. There must be a stage where, if the best people are sufficiently rewarded, competition to *be* the best will use more resources than are gained by having the best people in the job.
Isn’t this just another variation on the problem of detecting errors? (Similar to tests with low predictive values.) At some point, looking for faults is more expensive than just dealing with them when they occur.
I don’t think so… If there are sufficient incentives available for being meritorious, and if merit can be gained through work/study/training, aren’t we always going to be locked into a zero sum competition no matter how good our test is?
* DUH* You start improving people! Progress is endless.
In a meritocracy, people would be paid closer to their productivity (by my definition of the word). People would improve their ability until the pay increase isn’t enough to cover education/training costs and time. Presumably that would be efficient. How do people getting better hurt others who aren’t getting better?
Now with some sort of signalling people might end up in a endless toil to *seem* the best without actually becoming better.
If people don’t know who will receive the pay increase ahead of time, they will tend to over-train. We might both train for a position only up to the level at which such training makes sense economically (if we get the job), but if only one of us gets the job, one of us is still over-trained.
If we discount the amount of training we do based upon our probability of getting the job – and if training improves our ability to do the job – the person who discounts the least actually ends up getting employed. The system rewards irrational confidence and provides incentives for over-training.
There isn’t one job. What is more likely if people are overtrained is that one person trains extra hard spending thousands of dollars and then gets paid a hundred dollars more than the person who didn’t train super hard because their productivity didn’t go up by thousands of dollars (net present value).
Yeah… maybe you are right
http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/01/quote-metritocracy-unquote.html
Workers don’t have to be the best. They just have to pass a minimum threshold of competence.
Cf. “You say you’re an experienced accountant. But did you win the Putnam?”
I don’t think that matters as long as there is competition for “jobs” – the right to perform certain roles – and ability to perform jobs determines who gets them.
It isn’t at all certain that a random distribution of jobs would be worse, depending upon how much effort was expended in the competition to gain jobs, and how much increased ability led to increased value.
The issue with this question seems to be that of scale. “The best” is always contextual–there is no universal best. It appears that there’s already a mechanism for addressing the problem you propose: in areas where automation can reduce the importance of knowledge and experience of the employees, once you get to the point where competition to be the best in those fields uses more resources than are gained by having the best people in the job, the job stops existing. Ideally only the best keep the job, and the rest find work elsewhere. More commonly, those with connections kep the jobs (featherbedding) while those without lost their jobs, with merit playing a poor second fiddle to influence. Think John Henry, or the Erie Canal, or the like. For featherbedding practices, I believe stevedores and railroads provide examples, but my memory may be faulty here.
This doesn’t reduce the importance of knowledge and experience overall, however, as in every case so far human input has been necessary to build and maintain the things that replace human labor. I can’t speak to AI (not my area), but at least in the past that seems to be what happened. The culture ends up migrating from an emphasis on grunt labor to an emphasis on skilled labor, then to non-labor tasks. You can see that migration in World of Warcraft servers, within the limits of that game.
Then there are areas where knowledge and experience can’t be automated. It’s hard to automate a geologist. You can automate some of the processes (see the Mars rovers), but in the end someone needs to make evaluations and draw conclusions. Plus, you’ve got to pick where to sample, for which Type 1 logic is the best tool (see the lecture “Straw Vulcan” on YouTube).
Against – as the costs approach parity with the rewards, people will become disinterested and go do other stuff or find non-knowledge ways to make a crust, or just be unemployed. Competition will not be universal because costs are different for people with different learning abilities (already most people can not become brain surgeons for this reason). Also, new job opportunities created by technology etc might not neccessarily always require knowledge as the only human input. Judgement, morals, charisma (eww) might become more important factors. Also, pay for jobs should theoretically go up allowing for higher learning costs.
For – “Knowledge economy”. IT jobs require a LOT more ongoing training/research than blacksmithing – is the curve getting too steep? At some point AI systems are going to get better at least some knowledge-processing tasks (already are in some cases).
IDK. Seems like there is more factors to consider than that, but its not totally wrong either?
@Citizenseaearth:
I don’t know about IT jobs vs. blacksmithing.
As a computer programmer, once you have mastered the fundamentals, everything else is application plus a little Google.
I’m not necessarily challenging your statement, so much as providing a different view on it. In the days where blacksmithing was “every day” and not a form of art, I think blacksmiths were really limited by what they had been taught. If they had Google and YouTube, maybe this would have changed, but I’m not sure we can say that with confidence. Shoeing a horse is still a skill with little penetration. Almost no one who rides shoes their own horses.
Fair point. To counter-balance I think programmers are constantly having to learn new libraries, languages etc., but I think you are right to suggest external tools ease upskilling a lot.
A question that stuck in my head after reading Scott’s review of Red Plenty:
Assume you are running a communist country. In a situation where each agent (or citizen) is trying to maximize their personal gain, how would you run the job distribution process in order to maximize total utility?
In a scenario with free national goods and paid exported good for citizens, my first idea was to divide the means of production to parts where each parts can be likened to today’s monopolistic companies. We could then allow free association for citizens, which would (optimistically) end up in each person doing the best job for themselves. After that, distribute the company’s profits with a suitable weight function and we’re done. The money they earn are to be used for import products, as all of the national goods are free of charge.
Some things I don’t like about my idea: we still have companies (which doesn’t feel very communist), there is no process of decision for potential workplace conflicts, and we rely on the dreaded invisible hand.
Those aren’t called “companies,” they’re called “communes” or “soviets.”
And – I don’t say this to be rude, but simply direct – your answer to “how do you maximize total utility in a communist country” seems to be “make it as un-communist as you can get away with.”
To your credit, this is exactly the answer arrived at by every successful communist country.
I do not know much world history, so I’d really appreciate if you posted the countries. I’d love to read about them.
He is probably referring to China (as well as Vietnam) who have essentially dumped communism.
Yugoslavia was probably the first example of the pattern. They didn’t go all the way to reinventing capitalism under the banner of socialism, but they made a good start.
China is of course the best and largest example, but Vietnam is another good one. Basically, any country that started out in the Warsaw Pact/Soviet Bloc and retained “Communism” whilst dumping the actual mechanisms of communism has improved the quality of life for its citizens, and in more or less direct relation to how much it dumped.
These were also the kind of measures that were proposed in the 60s in Czechoslovakia and shortly implemented in 1968 before the Russian tanks came to reclaim their satellite and the so called “normalization” begun. Basically, those measures consisted of mimicking capitalism with companies using internal prices for which they would buy and sell to each other based on demand and supply and other mechanisms that would have improved the functionality of the system. However, they were deemed reactionary during the normalization and everything went back to the Soviet model introduced 20 years before…with a minor exception of a few “experimental” companies which (surprise surprise) prospered much more than the rest of the economy.
East Germany
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Poland
Yugoslavia
Romania
Bulgaria
Albania
Latvia
Lithuania
Estonia
Mongolia
China
Vietnam
Of course, in many of the above cases, ” as un-communist as you can get away with” was “more capitalist than West Germany”.
I leave off Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus for having botched the job.
I leave off North Korea and Cuba for having not tried.
I leave off Laos and Cambodia because I don’t really know.
Huh? East Germany more capitalist than West Germany? Or what cases did you have in mind exactly? Also, I am not sure how Mongolia was a success, even if I set the low bar of “being relatively well-off compared to other communist countries”. Also note that not all communist countries started at the same level. Czechoslovakia and East Germany were much more developed when they started being communist (although German infrastructure was pretty much destroyed by the war) than all of the other countries you mention. The fact that they continued being more developed than the rest of the Eastern Bloc was due to their past high development not due to better policies. Yugoslavia probably had the best economic policies as far as communist countries went and also the most capitalist ones…which was possible only because they were not a Russian puppet state, unlike all other European communist countries during most of their communist history (Poland in the 1980s is the only other exception I guess). In that light, it makes very little sense to say that Russians botched the communism whereas Germans or Poles did not – both were, for the most part just Russian satellites and while the policies were not exactly the same and non-soviet communist countries in Europe were usually a bit freer than the USSR, all the important things were the same and when a country diverted too much from the soviet model, they were stopped (the only exceptions were the relatively hard to reach by land Yugoslavia and too big to fight China which then had its own sphere of influence).
Generally, when judging different government systems and policies between countries, it is important to compare the difference between the state of things before the policy and after it, not the absolute wealth which is a result of at least several decades of history.
Tibor – my reply was for ulucs’ question to list those countries which were communist, and which have become more economically successful by “mak[ing] it as un-communist as you can get away with.”
East Germany is, of course, not noticeably more capitalist than West Germany, but others on that list are. Mongolia isn’t terribly successful, but it’s doing better now than under communism. Etc.
How (economically) successful each country was under communism isn’t the point, it’s how much more successful they are after having transitioned away from communism.
Anthony: I think that the “as un-communist as you can get away with” means as un-communist while still staying within what can meaningfully be called communist. Otherwise the “as you can get away with” is redundant.
@Tibor:
Very close. I would only change “meaningfully be called” to “be rationalized as.” In China, they have a wonderful phrase: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” That’s the sort of fig leaf they have to maintain. Anything short of it, the less communism the better off everybody is.
I believe that the official historical solution is, “indoctrinate agents so that they value the common good far above their own”. The unofficial Less Wrong solution is, “create a godlike AI that will solve all of our problems by Deus Ex Machina“.
Spend all available R&D on this technology?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140321-orgasms-at-the-push-of-a-button
Singularity Schimgularity.
But I would be hesitant about saying “godlike AI”. Its still not solving an NP hard problem in polynomial time.
Sold !
State-distributed orgasms sound like a great argument for communism
If there’s a shortage, how do you know where to distribute the scarce goods? How do you plan production and avoid a glut in a production chain with hundreds of pieces? How do you prevent selfish parties from taking more goods than they need? Why would anyone choose a job with unpleasant work even if there is a large need for what it supplies? In market economies you elegantly do all this with a price mechanism. Of course, there’s some serious perverse outcomes to contend with, such as negative externalities and monopolistic tendancies, but if you deal with them with sensible, cautious government action and a mixed economy, you can at least start to get the best of both worlds.
You can rely more on good behaviour at a community level, so if you’re really set on equality of outcome (why not go for a compassionate meritocracy instead), I guess you can always go for a left-wing cooperative (which seem to perform reasonably in and contribute effectively to a market economy). On the other hand, most sensible modern left wing positions don’t rely on a centrally planned economy – as others have pointed out even places like China appear to have partly abandoned that path.
Is anyone interested in discussing the utility of and issues surrounding classical/”great books” education? That is, the all-required curriculum of Greco-Roman Classics, logic, math, science, etc. that was replaced by the course catalog model in the early 20th century. As I said to David Friedman in the previous thread just before this one opened:
While I am generally in favor of “great books” education, the specialized curriculum for MDs is already so long and challenging. I’ve read Wealth of Nations and Origin of Species and found the logical arguments persuasive, but when I need to see a doctor I only care about his ability to apply logic and evidence to making me well. If he’s a creationist who thinks international trade just steals surplus value from the poorer country’s laborers, oh well.
Actually I see both of those as potential general tests – people who fail may be either a) stupid or b) good at deluding themselves. While only the former directly impacts how likely they are to do a good job doctoring, the latter is still indirectly probative.
The thing is, I don’t think being a creationist or naive socialist is a medical doctor’s or engineer’s fault if they were never required to study Adam Smith or Darwin, which is what happens in the modern university model. Only biology majors have to study Darwin, and often not in a way where you have to evaluate the logic and evidence in Origin of Species. The fault is with the institution for replacing the all-required liberal arts courses.
In America, MDs pursue an ordinary, aimless BA before medical school. If you want to change the BA, it makes just as much sense to apply it to them as to anyone else. Whether MDs should get a BA, as in America, or not, as everywhere else, is a separate question from what a BA should be. Similarly, the question of whether BA students should have a bunch of general requirements (in America) or specialize (elsewhere) is separate from the question of what should constitute the common requirements.
American MDs are required to devote about a year’s worth of their electives or gen ed courses to a pre-med curriculum. It’s not a great books curriculum, but it’s probably in the direction of what someone who wants to standardize science requirements would choose.
Thank you, those are the issues I’d like to disentangle.
Does anyone on SSC actually support the modern “Chinese menu” general education requirements? If not, do you believe undergrads should be pure specialists, or should everyone study the Western canon in addition to their specialization?
What are the trade-offs for highly educated professions of high social utility like MDs? Do we need them to merely be experts at applying logic and evidence to their important work, or gentle(wo)men who are well-educated in general?
I’d strongly prefer the British model, where a broad education is expected to be provided in secondary education and tertiary education is for specialization. You probably couldn’t shave four years off a ready to practice schedule, as some of the undergraduate courses are foundational, but should at least be able to cut 2-2.5 years off.
Some medical specialties don’t allow people to become fully independent professionals until their mid-thirties. I think something is lost to the profession when there are no genuinely young bloods trying to shake things up. Not to mention the enormous opportunity costs to the people themselves, and the increase in prices to patients from artificial barriers to entry.
If doctors want to be broadly educated beyond the high school level, which to be clear I think should be somewhat different–at least at the high end, that ought to be a choice they peruse as a personal interest.
While the length of time argument isn’t as strong, I think bachelor of laws (i.e. an undergraduate degree) should return as the legal degree.
We have a similar system for the most part here in Australia, but in my experience (myself as central example) as a high schooler we’re generally too lame-brained to really absorb some of the important lessons that the classical or civic style education can provide. Though this is decreasingly the case, in teritiary there is at least some sense of seriousness and actual interest in the topics of study, so it seems like there is more hope of some of the important civic stuff actually sticking.
I work in engineering, not medicine, but I definitely don’t want to see my new coworkers becoming very narrowly trained technical specialists. If nothing else, I have to read the stuff they write, and four years of Nothing But Stem and One Technical Writing Class, doesn’t cut it. The good news is, we get plenty of people who do have a good general education beneath the STEM-specific skills, so the universities must be doing something right and so I suppose I generally agree with what you call the “Chinese Menu” approach.
Ideally, though, I’d like the basics of the Revised Western Canon to be something most people test out of if they’ve had a first-rate high school education or take a few remedial classes in if needed. I appreciate the value of having a wide variety of follow-on general-education courses available instead of just More Western Canon, but I think there should be a bit more rigor and more constraints than the current too-easily-gameable standard. And I’d like a better balance of fairly rigorous intro-level liberal arts/humanities, fine arts, and STEM classes in the “Chinese Menu”.
As a UK citizen, I prefer our model of high specialisation (~10 subjects 14-16, ~4 subjects 16-18, 1 (or rarely 2) subjects at university) in general to what I perceive as the current America method.
Although I think I would have enjoyed and done well with a broader method, I know many people who certainly wouldn’t have. It seems pointless to make someone who is good at maths or chemistry study English if they hate it. As a STEM student, I can always read great books in my own time and get about as much out of them as I would have done in studying them. The opposite isn’t true, but I don’t think there are too many English students who would enjoy studying maths for its own sake. I think I would also have been incredibly bored by the maths in a broader curriculum, if the content was dumbed down enough so everyone could do it.
I do think English in secondary school should be inclined more towards great books, or even just good ones. Mandatory study of the KJV, 3 or so Shakespeare plays etc. gives the understanding needed to appreciate other literature.
I also think that the American method of forcing medics to do another degree before they can study medicine is stupid.
This British model sounds like it’s on to something. How much study of the Western canon do you think could be pushed down to the secondary level?
The Bible (Authorized Version for the Anglosphere), Homer, Virgil, Ovid, the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, Faust, Dante, Don Quixote… (this seems the easy part)
Western history: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon & Arrian (or Diodorus Siculus?), Livy (or Polybius?), Appian, Tacitus, Gibbon…
Logic?
Philosophy primary sources?
As far as science, I can see a lot of value in having to read Darwin (at least Origin) for yourself, as well as Aristotelian physics and the major scientists in the whole heliocentrism controversy that led to modern physics. We have too many creationists and Neil DeGrasse Tysons out there, perhaps because science education doesn’t involve following the logical arguments of great scientists.
In large part it depends on whether or not you want the works to be read in the original. If translations are okay, you can put a dozen classics into the high school curriculum, at least at the advanced track, without *too* much trouble. It’ll still require some serious trade-offs but it can be done without gutting entire existing subjects.
If the proposal is to go back to every well educated person being expect to be able to at a minimum read and write in Latin and Ancient Greek that’s going to take an enormous amount of rearranging and dropping material. Not to mention the problem of finding sufficient numbers of instructors.
As a graduate of the British system, I quite strongly believe that “add more years of it” is a poor response to “general education isn’t working well enough”.
It doesn’t seem to result in people who are noticeably more cultured or better at dealing with life in meaningful ways, it’s obscenely expensive in human life and money, and it relies on more or less forcing people into it, because few would voluntarily opt to pay the extra money and extra year of their life for it. I don’t think much of the breadth of character in your co-workers comes from them having been forced to take more English literature lessons.
Moving compulsory education to end at 18 (rather than 16) has been proposed in the UK, but mostly it seems to be that people like to imagine in their head that the new classes will be nothing like the existing classes, the new ones will be perfect shining examples of practical and detailed and advanced knowledge delivered at a brisk pace now the earlier base is there. And, well, we know that isn’t what happens from running education to 18.
When you’re getting up to university, you also have all the concerns which come from deliberately pushing “common cultural touchstone education” or “common life skills” into the metaphorical tulips; it makes it harder yet for people to avoid buying them, and it emphasises an already existing cultural divide, even if you weaken degrees and subsidise to the point 90% of people are getting them.
I think having to take a wide range of subjects is great, to get people a decent founding in a variety of topics so they don’t get hoodwinked as easily. Sadly even when you have to take a math, science, and English course they’re all math, science, and English for mouth breathers so the effect is lost.
I’m really not too big a fan of this “Western canon” / “Great Books” stuff.
Not because I’m a postmodernist who is Concerned that these are all written by Straight White Men. That’s just a stupid objection.
No, the main problem is that students are not sufficiently exposed to the connections among ideas and the historical progression of ideas. The history of ideas is a dialectic, if you understand that term in a non-Hegelian way, simply to mean that it’s a conversation. Just getting a grab bag of random works by Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Bacon, and whoever else to study in depth is not very useful in this regard.
For one thing, it is completely unnecessary and mostly counterproductive for a student at the middle school, high school, and even lowerclassman college level to study primary sources. The person who had a great idea first is almost never the person who said it best. Moreover, you don’t see the arguments against their position and the counterarguments and refinements, etc. because they didn’t exist at the time of writing.
Primary sources, especially in philosophy, are also very difficult to understand—and not in a good way. Aristotle is the greatest example. It’s not really his fault (all the works he wrote for a popular audience have been lost), but his writing is terrible and nigh-incomprehensible in parts. One theory is that what we have are the equivalent of lecture notes: highly compressed and possibly not even written by the man himself. People study certain passages in Aristotle all their lives and can’t agree on what they mean (cf. “active intellect”).
It’s also (effectively) impossible both to read a large enough number of primary sources to get a full picture of an author’s thoughts, and also study a large enough number of authors to get a full sense of the progression of a field. It really can’t be done in most fields, and even if it could be done, it won’t be done.
Primary sources are certainly appropriate if a student develops a particular interest in a certain author, but the main thing is to have an idea of who said what and why. For example, take philosophy. The start of it was: how do we explain a) change and b) multiplicity? Thales said everything is water because (modern scholars presume) water was the substance which seemed to be able to take on the most forms yet remain the same thing. Heraclitus said the “world-stuff” was change itself: everything changes in every respect, so nothing can said to be anything in particular. Parmenides attacked this as contradictory and formulated the first version of the law of identity: what is, is and what is not, is not; he held change to be impossible and an illusion. Plato’s theory of forms was intended to accommodate both by giving one unchanging world of forms to Parmenides to explain identity and one world of flux to Heraclitus to explain change. And Aristotle refined Plato’s theory and unified reality by moving the forms into objects.
You will not learn any of this (or anything useful, really) if you just read The Republic or something without context. Woo, myth of the cave! Okay, class, let’s move on to some other random book.
With literature, the “Western canon” has even less to recommend it. I’m not denying that Shakespeare’s plays and Victor Hugo’s novels are worth reading. But then so are the Chinese classics, the Indian classics, the Arab classics, the Russian classics, and so on. And honestly, it sucks reading books you don’t want to read. You’ll get much more out of Harry Potter or Foundation than out of the Bible if you don’t want to read the Bible and just go through it mechanically. Literature is primarily a form of entertainment, and when it presents necessary ideas, they can be conveyed much more clearly and briefly in prose.
As for the alleged benefits of being able to understand allusions, you just pick those up naturally by reading anything of substance. At best, students might benefit from a “greatest hits” of quotes and short passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. all with proper context. And if that encourages them to read more deeply, great.
Overall, I think students can learn much more from good secondary sources that condense and link together all the important ideas and thinkers in fields like philosophy, economics, psychology, historiography, and so on. It’s not a bad idea for every field to be taught as “history of”.
More on what students should learn specifically, shortly.
I think the subjects that ought to be taught in school, at least until the time students specialize toward technical knowledge related toward their careers are:
a) Philosophy
b) Economics
c) Psychology
d) History
e) Natural Science
Philosophy is the most important subject. But it is usually not taught at all except maybe in college for one or two courses (and even then only required at a few schools). Philosophy includes: a) metaphysics: what is the nature of reality?, b) epistemology: how does one obtain knowledge?, c) ethics: what should one do?, d) politics: how ought society be organized?
Every single one of these subfields is essential to one’s functioning in the world, and in society as a responsible citizen. But most people don’t think about it and just absorb a philosophy by cultural osmosis. Or, at best, get a very rudimentary philosophy from sermons in church.
If you don’t have a grasp of epistemology, for instance, (which can be gotten implicitly through studying other things), you cannot know anything. You can have opinions, but you won’t know if they are justified. Therefore, it is crucial in regard to actually learning anything else. Yudkowsky’s Sequences (though they could certainly be refined and narrowed down) are a good example of applied epistemology.
And it’s hardly necessary even to mention the importance to every person of understanding the basic nature of the world and his role in it.
Economics is almost as important. You cannot understand modern, division-of-labor, capitalist society without understanding economics. Therefore, you cannot understand your place in society without understanding economics. I think it’s one reason why many people feel “alienated” in their work. And its importance to one’s role as a citizen is obvious.
Psychology is the science of understanding your mind and your self. It is also therefore essential to functioning well and overcoming obstacles in life. As much as I sympathize with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Nathaniel Branden (who, of course, also was an Objectivist despite his split with her) argues persuasively that ignorance of psychology caused major problems for her and her followers. For instance, the belief that emotions will magically and automatically fall in line with one’s values—leading to repression of them when this does not happen.
History is essential not only because it explains how and why our civilization arose from its ancestors (file under: understand your place in the world), but it also shows comprehensively the effects of bad ideas and bad policies in the world. For instance, if you have no idea about the religious wars of Europe, you will not understand why freedom of conscience is so important. If you do not have any idea about the horrors of Communism, you will not understand the importance of economic freedom.
Natural science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology) is also essential to understanding the world and one’s place in it. Just as importantly, it serves as the best illustration of how the progress and increase of knowledge is possible.
Ideally, in every subject, students should understand how the field progressed from the first rudimentary ideas to the current state. Where there is less controversy, they ought to be led right up from first principles to the correct theory.
In a field like philosophy, this will not work in any uniform way. But I think the best way is nevertheless to present each thinker as a response to the previous ones, to tightly connect their ideas as an ongoing debate, and even to present a certain viewpoint as true (provided the others aren’t distorted) in order to critique each one in a more focused way and to make sure the students have the impression that at least someone has a coherent take on philosophy as a whole. I think it’s better for an author to be open about his prejudices than to bias things surreptitiously. Despite my disagreements with him on many issues, I think Leonard Peikoff’s History of Philosophy lectures are a fantastic example of a good philosophy course.
I second almost everything in the higher-level comment, but I have one minor quibble: while rigorous (and even informal) arguments are better presented in non-fiction (I assume that’s what you meant by “prose”), there are certain points that are easier to make in literature, particularly when it comes to virtue ethics. It is one thing to list virtues and describe their applications, but their meaning, application, and consequences of not applying them are often easier to depict in a didactic yet quasi-realistic story. For example, it’s clearer what having the Objectivist virtues of “rationality, integrity, honesty, justice, independence, productiveness, and pride”[1] entails after having read the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged than from just reading that list and some short descriptions, because one often projects one’s own understanding and impressions onto them and thus may not really grok what’s being pointed at.
[1]SEP
Subjects that I don’t think are as valuable:
a) Mathematics
Yes, students need to learn arithmetic, and that does involve brute memorization for things like the multiplication table. But honestly, I don’t think most people really need or get anything actually useful out of even algebra and geometry beyond “can you basically understand what a graph is conveying?”
You need mathematics to do natural science or economics. But you do not actually need it to learn them. Almost no one learns enough mathematics to be able to follow the equations in a technical economics paper, anyway. And if the writer is good, he will explain in plain English what the calculations symbolize. What the man on the street needs to know is whether what he hears someone say is totally contrary to economic principle or not. If it really is an issue of fine-grained quantities, leave it to the experts.
We like to talk about “learning by doing”, but you just can’t “do” real science in school. You need to “learn by learning” first. And you just plain don’t need to know any math whatsoever to understand the progression of ideas in physics, chemistry, or anything like that. You can accept on rationally-grounded authority that calculus is not a massive fraud and still get the basic picture of how and why Newton forumulated the laws of motion as he did.
The really valuable part of mathematics—knowing how to prove things logically and tell the difference between a valid and invalid argument—can be taught in philosophy.
Of course, mathematics shouldn’t be discouraged, but it should be an elective class.
NB: I did take calculus through the equivalent of the basic undergraduate core-requirement level (and got a “5” on the AP Calculus AB exam). I did not really like it, and I have never once used it for anything, including reading scientific papers, because if they have calculus it’s far more advanced or else just superfluous.
b) Literature
Literature is a very valuable thing (it can be very inspirational and can shape one’s worldview), but I don’t think “literature classes” accomplish much at all of any value to students. Just make students read some books on their own and offer it as an elective.
“Critical reading” skills are important, but that should be built into every other subject. Literature isn’t even a good way to develop this, anyway.
c) Foreign Language
Completely useless if it is not taught by serious, intensive immersion. You just don’t learn a foreign language at all in the average school or college foreign language class.
And in America, it doesn’t really benefit you to learn a foreign language. You get to appear slightly more cultured. That’s it. If it’s that important, you could just lie about it and no one will call you on it if you pick a language besides Spanish or French.
I studied Latin, and I did like it, and it did probably give me a little better grasp of grammar and an expanded vocabulary. But I have never read anything on my own in Latin, and I don’t think I am missing out. If I tried to read anything of value in Latin, I would be more likely to misunderstand it than to have a better understanding than what the translator provides.
I also studied Russian, and while I did also enjoy that, it is useless. I listen to some Russian music, and it is nice to be able to understand it, but I liked it beforehand too.
d) “Writing”
This should be taught in connection to every other subject. Writing clearly is mainly a function of understanding clearly. Matters of style can be addressed pretty easily and are picked up naturally through lots of writing.
As an aside, I personally really like improving my penmanship, but it is obviously totally useless.
e) “Art” and “Music”
I actually do think learning how to draw and paint, etc. is valuable for many people. But it should be totally elective, and more importantly students should actually be taught the correct techniques for drawing things. Before they use their “creativity”, they need actually to be taught the fundamentals of perspective, etc. In my experience, this doesn’t really happen.
The same goes for music. The thing I really wish I had gotten was a better understanding of the basic technical structure of music. Even now, I listen to a song and don’t really have the concepts for understanding how it fits together.
@ blacktrance:
This is absolutely true about literature, and I certainly got a lot of value from reading Ayn Rand’s novels. She is right that literature can “concretize” abstract concepts.
What I guess I was trying to say is that if students are not engaged with the literary work in question, they will not really get this benefit. The characters won’t stick with them, and they are likely even to misunderstand them. Reading literature is such a personal experience that assigning everyone the same book and making them discuss it has little value in my experience.
Also, since characterization in a novel is so much more complex and detailed than a philosophical theory, there is the potential for the author unintentionally and subconsciously to introduce messages which he himself may not agree with.
This is what I really like about Nathaniel Branden’s essay I linked above. He shows how, in many respects, Ayn Rand’s novels (despite being great) present contradictory and harmful messages.
For instance, Ayn Rand explicitly held that emotions and reason ought to be in harmony, and that one should not repress emotions. But if, as he says: “you show someone being heroic by ruthlessly setting feelings aside, and if you show someone being rotten and depraved by, in effect, diving headlong into his feelings and emotions, and if that is one of your dominant methods of characterization, repeated again and again, then it doesn’t matter what you profess, in abstract philosophy, about the relationship of reason and emotion. You have taught people: repress, repress, repress.”
In regard to “encouraging moralizing”:
And of course it’s infamous that Ayn Rand explicitly supported the virtue of benevolence, but very rarely showed or emphasized instances of mutual aid and generosity (outside of romantic relationships). As he says:
This paragraph really sums up the pitfalls of induction-from-literature:
This last point is what I meant about expressing ideas more “clearly” in prose. You don’t accidentally say things you don’t mean.
I’m not sure how to do this, but I’d very much like to see some method of applying what’s learned in school to the student’s current decisions.
I’m inclined to think that some fraction of what’s wrong with the world is people spending crucial developmental years in simulationland–not even simulationland, really– it’s more like maybe this will be useful some day, but we’ll not sure how.
@Nancy:
On students applying what they learn … .
My view of how to learn to program is to have a program you want to write. You look at the manual to figure out how to write it, reading additional bits as needed. It’s not elegant, but it means you actually want to learn what you are studying and get immediate feedback.
The children of my present marriage were unschooled, largely home unschooled. One of them liked D&D and similar games, so was curious about how to figure out the probability of getting various dice rolls. We discovered that the author and illustrator of How to Lie With Statistics, which both children had read and enjoyed, had also written How to Take a Chance, an introduction to probability theory. We got a copy, and had a fairly young child who, with no compulsion, had learned how to calculate the probability of rolling less than six with two D-6’s.
In America, MDs pursue an ordinary, aimless BA before medical school. If you want to change the BA, it makes just as much sense to apply it to them as to anyone else.
A number of them get a BS, rather than a BA.
And while I can see the point that MD’s (and society) aren’t particularly served by forcing a pre-med school degree, “MDs get a degree before med school” isn’t what we’re doing.
What we’re doing is selecting our MD candidates from those who have demonstrated enough academic ability to get a lesser degree (generally in a related field.) And we’re not exactly running short of those.
I don’t know about the basis of education, but I do find the cultural literacy approach to the Great Books appealing, as it’s nice to have cultural lodestones and shared cultural knowledge that can be used to communicate.
Of course, even then I doubt the utility. We all know the story of Sisyphus or Pandora without having read Homer, Hesiod, or Ovid. Cultural knowledge can be gained through use rather than reading the source material.
I get what your saying, and you may even be right but I can’t help but suspect that a lot of our current issues with political polarization, social justice, immigration etc… are a result of people failing to “read history backwards”.
I get the feeling that kids today* have jumped straight to post-modernism without ever learning about modernism, or whatthe rest of what the “enlightenment era” was all about. After all who gives a shit about what a bunch of old dead white guys had to say about science, economics, or philosophy. We’re way to young and clever to fall into those sort of traps.
*by kids I mean those who are now graduating college (shakes walking stick, and demands you get off his lawn)
Quite a large fraction of my younger son’s (considerable) cultural knowledge comes from the TV Tropes site.
Leaving him time for his own projects, such as memorizing “The Ballad of the White Horse.”
I think that a common core of “great books” is useful for the same reason that a common language is – it eases communication and reduces error in transmitting and explaining information.
There is the same downside, too, I think – a rigid definition of what the ‘common core’ of books-to-be-read would be as harmful as the French language purists, and would make the common canon increasingly irrelevant. Additionally, innovation in the arts and sciences alike has frequently come from people “outside” the approved core, in part because they had not been trained to see the up-to-then-unsolvable problem in the same way as everyone else who had failed to solve the problem.
(As a note: a great deal of science progress comes not from astonishing leaps but from the level grinding refinement that follows. Approved-core-minded people do better at level grinding than the great-leap people.)
There is a line that must be straddled between retaining common ground and seeking out strange new worlds. Or words.
Yes, there are trade-offs. However, some texts act as keys that unlock lots of others. As sweeneyrod said, “Mandatory study of the KJV, 3 or so Shakespeare plays etc. gives the understanding needed to appreciate other literature.” Ovid is another one in that category.
Not thinking of good examples for science or philosophy right now.
Reading lots of interesting stuff strikes me as a good idea, but I don’t see that particular works such as Ovid are more important than many others, and you can’t read everything.
If I think about books that contributed a good deal to my education, they would include LOTR, Casanova’s Memoirs, Mohammed’s People, several primary sources in economics (Smith, Ricardo, Marshall). Kipling’s complete poetry. Kim. GKC.
I agree. I think there is error in stressing a particularly contemporary literature if only because it has not withstood the test of time; however, a range of literature is probably the best course. Even better would be to bring the focus back to writing in school which is all but forgotten. It is not enough to know good ideas but to be able to recognize them and express them as well.
Oh absolutely.
I don’t agree with the prospect one often seens in literature classes, where there’s a de-facto “Everything made after 1900 can’t count as a classic” , I think there should be an understandable emphasis on more modern influential big books.
As someone who has done engineering, I get the (I believe justified…well, more then justified. More or less the point *of* getting a specific major, but I digress) impression that its very easy to come out of there with a very very good understanding of a small portion of technology(and as most instutitions don’t follow the Hardcore Harvey Mudd approach, perhaps a *very* small portion of the tech world) , while coming out of there knowing very little about the general world.
My own favorite personal style is cutting to the chase and removing as much fluff from the educational process as possible…for fields where that is possible. I think that’s much more possible in engineering then in general sociology/economics/history/psychology, the prior of which I view as inherently amenable to algorithmic learning techniques which assess ones cognitive traits, and recommend fact after fact and then formula after formula, and bump up the difficulty. Or kiindof like a blended gmat/khan academy. Engineering is *so* susceptible to that, that i’m almost amazed the current educational system hasn’t been done away with since the mid 90’s.
For the rest of academia, and modern thought, I don’t think its that simple. For instance, a simple modern fact-based summary of the works of Freud lead to the impression that the guy was an idiot, and every well-educated intellectual at the beginning of the century was also an idiot. “Oral stage of develoment, dream-theory analysis, yada yada” Its one thing to know that A-B-C happened in the French Revolution, and another to read 5 biographys of the time period in conjunction with some knowledge of group psychology. Or, with just engineering, one could walk away with an eventual PHD actually *believing* there is something about the anarchistic youth of today, when that was true long ago. Or, perhaps there’s an educational reason that top specialized engineers tend to be more dogmatic then top graduates in more generalistic fields.
Scott, (or if there are other psychiatrists around here):
What do you think of the use of actuarial decision methods in psychiatry? Some have charged that actuarial methods almost always outperform psychiatrist’s subjective clinical decisions. More extreme commenters charge that the lack of use of them borders on malpractice due to hubris. I’m curious to hear your, or another psychiatrist’s (/in training) view.
For example: http://www.tue-tm.org/snijders/papers_on_prediction/Grove_Meehl_1996.pdf
If each additional binary digit (as written) allows us to represent twice the number of concepts, why is the fundamental unit of information called a bit? I think they should rename the “bit” the “bidi” – binary distinction.
Hmmmm… maybe “bion”?
“why is the fundamental unit of information called a bit”
Programmers were hungry.
Because “bit” is already short for “binary digit” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bit#Etymology
Well… exactly.
If a number is a piece of information, then an additional binary digit enables you to express twice the amount of information (because information provided by the position of the digits means that one more digit allows us to express twice as many numbers).
It doesn’t make sense to call the fundamental unit of information a binary digit, if the addition of binary digits leads to exponential growth in the ability to express information.
It might make sense for the fundamental unit of information to be binary, in the sense that a distinction between two things is the lowest level of meaningful difference (and therefore meaningful information) but it doesn’t make sense to call this a “digit” – that’s just confusing.
I think I see what you’re getting at. The number system where each additional digit allows you to represent one more number is called “unary”, so perhaps “unit”?
But I think there’s an important sense in which a single bit — with both values — is the fundamental unit of information. That is that the absence of signal is signal in itself, and signal doesn’t mean anything unless it’s compared to no signal. If you are always silent or always emitting a low drone I can’t tell if you are not communicating or not; I only get information when you change state. Hence, the basic unit of information needs two states.
(IANAInformationTheorist)
Bion is the way to go.
Edit – maybe we should stick with “shannon”.
“If a message is made of a sequence of bits, with all possible bit strings equally likely, the message’s information content expressed in shannons is equal to the number of bits in the sequence.[2] For this and historical reasons, a shannon is more commonly known as a bit, despite that “bit” is also used as a unit of data”
Seems to me that a *number* written using binary digits isn’t a sequence of separate digits each providing a piece of information – it is one number.
It would be a bit like saying “the word “number” provides 6 “letters” of information” – this is only true if each of those letters is a message in and of itself – and this isn’t how letters are normally used. The word “number” provides one piece of information and six letters (in an alphabet of 26) can provide 300 million distinct words (pieces of information).
In summary, “bits” is a logarithmic measure of information, like “bels” are a logarithmic unit of power. Only there isn’t a standard linear measure of information like there is a linear unit of power (“watts”). Is that what we’re saying here?
From what I gather, the information content of three entirely separate binary digits is 3 bits.
But I don’t think that the information content of a number (for example 100 = 4) expressed using three binary digits is necessarily 3 bits.
[IANA information theorist]
I think you’re conflating the signifier with the signified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
I don’t think Information means “number of possible states”. I think Information means “number of digits in the message”. If you want “number of possible states”, I think that’s Outcomes. The number of states a single digit can represent is the Radix.
E.g. a 3 digit binary number like Binary(100) has 8 outcomes. But the number of digits (AKA units of entropy/information) is 3. Because log2(8) = 3 and 2^3 = 8. The Binary system has a radix of 2.
The word “number” has 6 letters, and therefore 6 units of information. Since the english alphabet has a radix of 26 letters (lets ignore special characters), 6-letters can represent 26^6 particular words (outcomes) such as “canine” or “lawyer”.
Each additional bit allows us to represent twice the outcomes. Each additional bit represents +1 unit of information. Which obeys the logarithmic product identity.
You’re overthinking this. “3 bits of information” means “Enough information to transmit any number that fits into 3 bits.” Which, with a little work, translates to “Any set of messages that can be mapped to a number that fits in 3 bits.”
As for why computer scientists use “bits” rather than “messages”? Because computers work in binary, so you normally add or remove information a bit at a time, rather than a message at a time. It’s rare to be in a situation where you have enough information to transmit exactly 27 different messages, instead of 16 or 32 or 64.
@fullmeta_rationalist
I suppose that 1 and 0 actually convey no information unless you have a means to comprehend a distinction between the two… we always have to assume a capacity to make a distinction – otherwise information has no meaning what-so-ever.
I don’t think that information means the number of possible states. I think that the information provided by any given message depends upon our capacity to use that information (a capacity that is actually fundamental to information ( not just some frivolous addition) ).
There is good reason to think that if we have the capacity to distinguish between only two states (assuming rather than ignoring our capacity for information interpretation) we have hit the lowest possible level at which anything can have any meaning.
OK… I get that.
But if we assume the capacity to distinguish between numbers based upon some positional system, already present in our minds ( and we require such an assumption for any system of messaging) uh… the number of symbols within a binary numerical system are different to like… the *information* we get.
I mean… I’m certainly not trying to say that the geniuses of information theory have got it wrong – I’m just saying that the terminology is highly confusing – because you have a system of writing which has nothing much to do with the fundamentals of information, and you have a theory about the fundamentals of information – *and they are called the same thing!*
@Aegeus
” “3 bits of information” means “Enough information to transmit any number that fits into 3 bits.” Which, with a little work, translates to “Any set of messages that can be mapped to a number that fits in 3 bits.” ”
I’m sorry if I am being dense… but if 8 different messages can be transmitted using 3 binary digits (in a positional system) how can the binary digit be a fundamental unit of information – except where the same word is being used to mean two different things?
I can absolutely understand that the fundamental unit of information in computer science (or anything else) is binary — i just don’t think it is a binary ***digit***…
I don’t think you want Information Theory. I think what you want is Semiotics.
Semiotics (the study of signs) is a branch of philosophy and linguistics. It recognizes a referent, a signifier, and a signified. The referent is the literal object. The signifier is the text/speech/image used to describe an object. The signified is the concept elicited in the mind. In the context of binary code. The data is a property of the referent, the code is the signifier, and the knowledge gained is the signified.
Information is a property of the code, not the knowledge or the data. A bit is a unit of information, like how a foot (or a meter) is a unit of length. Each word (or number) is a signifier, which is composed of several atomic glyphs. Each glyph serves as a unit of information.
If you want a unit of knowledge, it’s called an outcome. If you want a unit of data, that’s what all the other units of measurement are for (like watts and kilograms).
Ok, now I’m confused. How then is “binary distinction” better? A bit is just the amount of information needed to make one more independent binary distinction.
Because I think “binary digit” is strongly associated with a method of writing numbers.
It is a bit like calling a “newton” a “kilogram”.
… that would make sense in 1/9.8 Earth gravity
Binary should be strongly associated with base-2 number systems. Just like how the Imperial System and Metric System use different units of length, binary and ternary use different units of information (the tit? Lel). Ternary is actually more efficient in terms of radix economy. But… you know… computers. Therefore, computer scientists pretend that everything is measured in bits, like how real scientists pretend everything is measured in metric units. E.g “Dog” has roughly 14 bits, because “log2(26^3) = 14.101…”.
@FullMeta_Rationalist:
Trit.
one extra bit doesn’t allow you to represent twice the concepts. It allows you twice the states. You have information about math and about physics each of a certain size. You can’t just add one bit and store all of that. You need to have twice as many bits to store all of that information.
You rarely talk about the number of states.
“one extra bit doesn’t allow you to represent twice the concepts. It allows you twice the states.”
If each state can be used to represent a different number, why wouldn’t an extra digit (with positional notation) allow us to represent twice as many concepts?
00 – red; 01- blue; 10 – green; 11 – orange.
000 – red; 001 – blue; 010 – green; 100 – orange; 011 – red2; 101 – blue2; 110 – green2; 111 – orange2.
I suspect that the interaction between the digits, their position when the combination is viewed as a whole also conveys additional information, meaning that multiple digits can provide more information than the sum of their parts.
I think perhaps, maybe the unclear (for me) part is that while a message consists of information, it also represents it? You can’t really say anything about the information represented by a word by analyzing the information needed to transmit the message.
Decoding involves code and a key. Numbers are the code. Positional Notation is part of the key, which is in our heads.
Yeah… that makes sense.
But I still think that it’s a confusing convention to name the unit of information after something that can represent a number (implicitly involving the already transmitted knowledge) which is (in this capacity) a completely separate concept.
I recommend reading up on the information theoretic definition of self-information and the Shannon entropy.
The fundamental — but not obvious! — idea is that the information content of a set of one string from a set doesn’t depend on how many distinct values you can represent with the set, but instead how confident one can be that the string isn’t just noise. This “surprisal” then depends in some way on the probability of the particular string being selected. If you want the “self-information” of signals to be additive and positive the only natural choice is -log(P(X)) where P(X) is the probability of the particular string.
So the natural units for information are logarithmic.
Thanks to everyone for the responses!
I’ll try to do a bit of reading around the subject!
Science news: four new elements added to periodic table!
New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
The distinguishing characteristic of these new elements is their infinitesimal lifespan. I propose naming them “Carpathoukranium”, “Crimeamium”, “Galicium”, and “Puertoricium”, after four countries which per Wikipedia survived (as sovereign nations) only a single day.
Well, technically, the Periodic Table has not changed yet, since those four elements are already on the table, and they still have their ugly Unun-#-ium names.
But it does mean those will be replaced in due course with actual names.
Ctrl+F elerium: 0 hits
I am disappointed.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/08/petition-terry-pratchett-element-octarine-discworld-colour-of-magic
Can somebody who understands chemistry tell me which, if any, environmental toxins I should or should not care about avoiding? I’m a little OCD, and I periodically get worried that I’m subtly poisoning myself by microwaving plastic, etc. I also do tend to buy the “organic” produce at the supermarket when it’s reasonable, though that’s also about taste. I inconsistently wash my fruit in a vinegar solution to remove pesticides. I switched from nonstick coating to cast iron when I read the nonstick coating could get into your system, but then I read that too much iron from fortified foods and iron cookware also can cause problems… etc. etc.
On the one hand, a lot of this stuff seems like quackery. On the other, it is plausible to me that, for example, people are having puberty earlier now, having lower testosterone and sperm counts, etc. and other things which might indicate a more gradual buildup in our systems of say, endocrine disruptors, or what have you. And, of course, if one goes down this road it never ends: do cell phones increase your risk of brain tumors, etc.?
In most cases, I just don’t have the knowledge to evaluate what is or isn’t worth actually worrying about. Anyway, is there like a credible list of what to care about and what not to care about? Or a method of figuring it out? I find googling studies to be rather ineffective because they usually just say something like “study found [very small quantity] of [chemicals the effects of which I don’t understand] leaked into water at 100 c, which is below established safety limits, but long-term health effects are unknown.” In other words, they tend to boil down to “yeah, you are getting a really, really tiny amount of poison when you do this and we think that may be okay, but we’re not sure.”
Should I care, for example, if part of my electric kettle I use to make tea is made of some sort of supposedly heat-resistant plastic? Note that I drink a lot of tea.
I just assume that any concern about “toxins” that aren’t lead or asbestos are complete nonsense.
Many concerns about asbestos are also complete nonsense, sorry.
I haven’t gotten mesothelioma yet, so I must be doing something right.
I’m studying chemistry, but I have not taken any courses on biochem or toxicology yet so I cannot speak as to specific risks. Personally, I wash my (conventional) produce, don’t worry at all about microwaves/cell phones, am sometimes iffy about warming up plastics, and don’t care about my testosterone or sperm count. Then again, none of this is stuff I have researched in any depth so if someone wants to correct me they are welcome.
However, I think it’s important to keep in mind your base risk of whatever tumor or disease you are worried about, absent of any chemicals that may or may not aggravate it. To take brain tumors, for example: According to the wiki, they account for less than 2% of all cancers and affect globally about 250,000 people a year (in other words 0.003% of the world’s population). Obviously, that is a poor calculation of your actual risk, since a) the world’s population is difficult to track, b) the incidence is probably skewed towards developed countries, where people live to be old enough to get cancer and the technology exists to detect it, and c) your individual risk probably varies a lot based on genetics or whatever other risk factors there are. (I know very little about cancer and am not qualified to talk about it.)
My point is, for many things people worry about they have a very low probability regardless of chemicals in the food supply. Even if we assumed that something has the dramatic effect of making you 5x more susceptible to some cancer (at which point I hope the government would ban it), if your risk is changing from 0.01% to 0.05% then your chances of developing the disease are still incredibly low whether you consume the chemicals or not. So I would not lose too much sleep over this, unless you think that because of family history or something else you’re particularly vulnerable.
Studying something similar to chemistry, took a toxicology class. The baseline is that most poisons you can’t avoid; you should be most wary of accumulating substances with a long-term effect such as lead.
Most “organic” stuff is pretty much okay since it can be degraded, except for mineral oil, benzene, diesel and similar derivatives. Don’t linger around petrol stations, inhale their vapours as little as possible. People tend to underestimate the danger of this, whereas they overestimate dangers from other toxins. Plastic is okay for the most part, don’t breathe the smoke though (really, don’t breathe *anything* other than air, your lungs are not made for that! I had an “everything is connected” moment when I learned about how dangerous smoke from wood fires is a few years ago).
Be careful around heavy metals, make sure to avoid their organic compounds. Lead is the most prevalent and was famously used as an additive to benzene in the form of tetraethyl lead (an organic lead compound). You might also encounter cadmium and mercury.
Most of the other stuff is pretty meh, especially for a chemist. There were organic accumulating poisons from like pesticides and stuff, but they’re rather closely monitored nowadays. You can’t avoid getting exposed to them anyways. Do you commute? Consume items of food? Breathe air inside a city? Near a coal power plant? The list is endless, but each individual effect is negligible.
As a general trend, people overestimate the immediate effects and underestimate long-term issues, as always.
I’m a chemical engineering undergrad, although I haven’t studied biochemistry much.
Arsenic in rice seems like it could be a big problem but is very below the radar for most people. Good example of the principle that just because something is natural does not mean that it is safe or healthy. Rice plants are exceptionally good at absorbing arsenic naturally in soil, regardless of whether or not they’re organic. I think the problem persists to at least a moderate degree regardless of where the rice is grown. Brown rice has more arsenic per serving than white rice.
Good article:
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/oct/13-food-at-risk
Apparently VOCs are bad?
There are people who are violent because they’re mentally ill, and this is being ignored on the left.
In the comments, I brought up a theory I’ve run across that mass/spree killers (those who aren’t part of an organization) have recently gone off their SSRIs or had their SSRI prescription changed. I don’t find the theory extremely plausible, but I thought I’d check here.
I think it’s both undeniable that there is a link between mental illness and violence, and that it’s much less than most people would believe and doesn’t work the way most people expect it to.
I know a lot of schizophrenics whom I trust not to be violent as much as I trust anybody; the link between schizophrenia and violence is complicated and imho in certain people who aren’t predisposed to be violent practically nonexistent. I worry that nobody’s sophisticated enough to talk about a violence-mental-illness link in any terms finer than diagnostic categories, and that’s nowhere near good enough.
On the other hand, a lot of the people who might be predisposed toward violence anyway, mental illness shears away at their buffer and causes them to be much moreso. A lot of men with what I would vaguely call anxiety disorders, or sort of bipolar disorder in remission that still has them keyed up, seem to have violence issues. But this looks a lot more like otherwise violent people being a little bit more prone, not like crazy people attacking you out of the blue. I have a lot of patients with a history of violence toward friends and relatives whom I nevertheless feel 100% safe being alone in a room with.
Note that I’m talking about the normal outpatient population here; there are some institutionalized people with different issues who are institutionalized for good reasons, but they’re a tiny tiny fraction of the psychiatric population.
There is a strong subset on the web that closely correlates the teenage white shooter with a change or removal from SSRIs. Google “SSRI mass killing”. I will leave it to others to verify the evidence if there is any. It seems that anyone who has had a negative thought could be written a prescription for SSRIs and their effects on appear to be magnified for some people over others, including a strongly disassociative effect. I have personally had an absolute nightmare of an experience after trying a half of one after going through some tough times after my brother died unexpectedly. There also appears to be a strong financial motive behind pushing the “cure de’jour”. I have found a curious lack of media exposure regarding this matter, however it could be nonsense, my personal experience aside.
I have years of experience on SSRIs. Neither a doctor switching them around to find the optimal one (Citalopram), nor going off made me a violent person, let alone a murderer. Granted I was prescribed it for anxiety, so maybe sudden disorientation of someone’s chemical mechanism for coping with depression makes him a murderer, but I’m skeptical.
I don’t have a lot of experience with SSRIs, but I was also prescribed them once for anxiety. However, after a difference of opinion with a psychiatrist I had to ramp myself down from Paxil before my script ran out. The first two steps down in dosage, after several hours I went into a state where any passing thought that angered me was immediately followed by me physically lashing out at whatever was nearest. I realised I was probably a danger to my family in that state, so I stayed out, and spent the night both times randomly vandalising nearby objects as I walked around for 4 or 5 hours. Considering that I’m normally non-violent enough that I struggled to defend myself when I used to get bullied as a child, the state I was in terrified me.
(regular poster here, posting anonymously)
I have a similar experience. Three different times in my life, I have been prescribed and taken SSRIs. Two of those times, coming off of I became a cold-blooded slow-burning-rage jaw-clenched… something. Once it wasn’t even the coming off of, it was just being on it.
People just enraged me. In the specific, and in general. I worked out detailed plans to to kill people fast, to kill them slowly, and to kill them by the hundreds and by the tens of thousands.
In HPMOR, how Harry went all “cold, mechanical, you are annoying, you should die” after being exposed to the Dementors…. yeah, that was me.
And no, I did not tell my doctors about it. The most I would say is “I feel kinda irritable and like to be alone” when asked how I felt. I’m not stupid.
I dealt with it by staying physically away from people, lifting heavy and working out hard, beating on a lot of trees with a staff, and bluntly, self medicating with MDMA, until the cold raging hate passed.
I’m terrified of SSRIs, I’m fearful of what they are doing to society, and I’m fearful to what’s going to happen when someone really smart and a bit controlled actually implements one of those “kill people by the tens of thousands” plans.
C. S. Lewis on sexual licence and the “right to happiness”:
Clare, in fact, is doing what the whole western world seems to me to have been doing for the last 40-odd years. When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”
[…]
Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous and unjust.
Now though I see no good reason for giving sex this privilege, I think I see a strong cause. It is this.
It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion—as distinct from a transient fit of appetite—that makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires makes promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity.
Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends’ amours easily enough. We know that such things sometimes last—and sometimes don’t. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.
If we establish a “right to (sexual) happiness” which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it. Hence, while the bad behavior is real and works miseries and degradations, the happiness which was the object of the behavior turns out again and again to be illusory. Everyone (except Mr. A. and Mrs. B.) knows that Mr. A. in a year or so may have the same reason for deserting his new wife as for deserting his old. He will feel again that all is at stake. He will see himself again as the great lover, and his pity for himself will exclude all pity for the woman.
[…]
Secondly, though the “right to happiness” is chiefly claimed for the sexual impulse, it seems to be impossible that the matter should stay there. The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives. We thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will—one dare not even add “unfortunately”—be swept away.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/1985/issue7/733.html
But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”
Is that really true in modern society? Cheating is not looked at as morally neutral or positive. I assume that Lewis is talking about someone leaving their spouse for another; and that well may be an example of “unkindness and breach of faith” according to him, but certainly not *every* unkindness and breach of faith are condoned.
The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous and unjust.
Again, is that true? What would be an analogous situation (to a spouse breaking off marriage in the name of sexual happiness) with “another end in view”? Say someone has been in business with a partner for many years, but decided that their partner is just not ambitious or skillful enough, and so sells their share of the business and founds a new enterprise with a new partner. Would that be considered by the society “merciless, treacherous and unjust”?
If that agreement was made explicitly to be lifetime? Yes. So far as I know, the wedding vows are still “until death do us part” or similar. It’s no excuse that the government doesn’t enforce that agreement. (Would be different if said marriage was explicitly non-lifetime, as business agreements tend to be.)
But marriage is not seen as a lifelong involuntary commitment in the modern West, whatever wedding vows say. The proper analogy would be if business contracts included a traditional clause about eternal partnership, which no one took seriously anymore, and would be laughed out of court if invoked as the basis of a suit.
The Lewis essay is just a long-winded way of saying “Your sexual mores look weird and destructive to me.” It’s like a Trobriand Islander insisting that real marriage has to involve lots of yams, and anything else is a fraud.
Apparently you missed the great controversy when Scott said pretty much the same thing (“that [monogamy stuff] was all legal boilerplate“). A lot of people disagreed that vows are meaningless. Some of them were even blue tribe!
Not really the same situation; infidelity and divorce are different things. Most moderns would agree that married people are obligated not to cheat on their spouses, but wouldn’t agree that married people are obligated to stay married no matter what.
“Marriage is not seen as a lifelong involuntary commitment” means that the marriage can be ended. Scott thinks that monogamy is just boilerplate even before the marriage has ended. There’s a difference from “you are permitted to get a divorce and then have sex with someone else” and “you are permitted to have sex with someone else at any time”.
Lewis’ example was precisely about infidelity. This infidelity then also led to divorce(s), but if you’re attacking the essay for saying “your sexual mores look weird and destructive to me” then you are defending infidelity.
Or perhaps, defending infidelity as long as it leads to divorce, which seems like it would serve to illustrate his point.
Divorcing your spouse out of a stated belief that you’d be happier married to someone else may have been indistinguishable from infidelity in Lewis’ mind, but it is distinguishable in mine. Infidelity is dishonest; divorce may be ungrateful, petty, or selfish, but it is not dishonest, as long as neither party had the honest expectation of an unbreakable lifetime commitment. We can safely assume that anyone who gets married in America or Britain of 2016 has no such expectation.
@Brad: Many people who get married in 2016, possibly most, expect that the marriage will not be broken for reasons of differential unilateral happiness. The most recent of my close friends to marry, neither of them devoutly religious, almost found it a dealbreaker that he considered divorce to be even theoretically acceptable under any circumstances. How many actual recently-married people have you talked to about this, and across how broad a social spectrum?
Huh, I’m confused. I think (A) my wife and I are both obligated to keep our vow to stay together, but (B) neither of us has the right to hold the other to it. Nor does anyone else. I think I need to revise my understanding of the reciprocal relationship between rights and obligations, because neither of the particular judgments (A) or (B) will budge.
But marriage is not seen as a lifelong involuntary commitment in the modern West, whatever wedding vows say.
That is since then, and we’ve done a lot of development of divorce law in the meantime e.g. redefining marriage in popular thought as no longer a life-time commitment and divorce being a necessary evil which only applies in extreme cases and should be rare to marriage being about personal fulfilment, ‘no fault’ divorce, arrangements re: property division and maintenance payments, etc. after divorce.
It’s not so much a business partner model that Lewis would be thinking of, as one involving other personal relationships: someone, for example, who made promises upon which you depended and then never kept them or broke them. You believed that person, you did things in the expectation that promise would be kept, and they let you down.
We’d be disappointed in a friend or family member who caused us inconvenience and even personal hurt (and indeed possibly lost us money, or other trouble because the commitment we thought was sure never was performed). In that case, an apology would be expected from the person who broke the promise, some realisation that they had caused hurt.
But we are expected to accept, and not just accept, to glorify, promise-breaking in the name of “this person appeals to me sexually”; you can be divorced against your will and someone refusing to give or accept a divorce is seen as the ‘bad guy’ – why try to hang on to your ex-spouse, why not let them go to be happy?
Most moderns would agree that married people are obligated not to cheat on their spouses
At the same time, if X and Y have an affair that breaks up the marriage of X and Z, and X and Y go on to marry, it would be seen as in very poor taste (to say the least) to object to the second marriage on the grounds that it was the fruits of adultery. So we don’t accept cheating – unless it’s on the grounds of Twu Wuv leading to marriage.
A man who destroys his marriage by philandering will not be considered a sympathetic figure, even today. OTOH, “We’ve grown apart” and other such claims that Lewis would have regarded as mere rationalizations (at best) are now considered acceptable grounds for ending a marriage.
There’s a definite prescriptive-descriptive gap here. Marriage is a different institution today than when Lewis was writing. Is it a better or a worse one? Depends whom you ask. Certainly the widespread social evils Lewis foresaw have not come to pass, despite our astronomical divorce rate. If our civilization has “died at heart”, there’s precious little evidence of it.
I am afraid that I am less optimistic about those “widespread social evils” not coming to pass than you are.
Just in my own lifetime I’ve seen what seems like a precipitous drop in public respect for classical liberal values like “rule of law” and free inquiry.
Camp of the Saints was supposed to be some poorly written racist clap-trap not something you watch on CNN.
Camp of the Saints was supposed to be some poorly written racist clap-trap not something you watch on CNN.
I’d never heard of Camp of the Saints until it had become something you watch on CNN and I started looking for the conservative take on the story. Something that racist being that prescient creeped me out.
Arguably a major point of The Camp of the Saints is that what the modern Westerner calls racism is more often than not culturalism. It is certainly racist in that it implies that certain races tend to have less successful cultures, but the book is not about a clash of races as much as a clash of cultures. It is not The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf.
@ hlynkacg:
I guess I’d have to know how old you are in order to know whether I agree with you that there has been a “precipitous drop” in respect for “rule of law” and “free inquiry”.
If you’re fairly young, I would have to disagree. What’s going on now with college campuses (I assume that’s what you’re referring to) is nothing compared to when the New Left radicals were literally staging takeovers of universities and holding people hostage. And the same kind of crap as now was going on in the 90s with postmodernism.
But if you look at the big picture, things have definitely improved since the nadir of classical liberalism in the mid-20th century. We’ve effectively abolished the draft, abolished Jim Crow, eliminated widespread price controls and greatly lowered barriers to international trade, eliminated Communism as a major threat to the world (!), significantly lowered immigration barriers, achieved equal rights for women, pretty much abolished legal moralism, are on the way toward stopping the War on Drugs, etc.
If you look at the legal climate, Constitutional protection of individual rights (including economic rights!) is, in my opinion, at its highest level since the Lochner era ended with the nosedive in the 30s. Look at the work of organizations like the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Institute for Justice.
Sure, things are far from perfect or fully consistent in a classical liberal direction. But straight white men have more liberty than they’ve had at least since 1933—and everyone else is doing comparatively better.
And what have we really got to fear? Yes, the government may continue to meddle more in healthcare and education, and maybe we’ll get some harmful “carbon tax”. But overall, things look pretty good for liberty to me.
Compare the 1950s or 1960s when they were talking about nationalizing the steel industry, nationalizing the coal industry, when people were really afraid the Khrushchev would lead state socialism to outproduce and “bury” capitalism, where nuclear war was a daily fear, where homosexuality was the target of vice squads, where you could get sent to die in Korea or Vietnam, where forced sterilization was being proposed to prevent the “population bomb”, where blacks and other minorities were being experimented on without their consent, etc., etc.
@Marc Whipple: Arguably a major point of The Camp of the Saints is that what the modern Westerner calls racism is more often than not culturalism. It is certainly racist in that it implies that certain races tend to have less successful cultures, but the book is not about a clash of races as much as a clash of cultures. It is not The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf.
Yes, that’s arguably true. It’s confusing because it seems like he’s “really” talking about culturalsm, or (in hindsight) Islam in particular, but it’s literally an army of Negroes from India gaming our guilt and secular piety.
If the Adam and Steve thread was any indication, the Overton window may already be shifting in that direction (though, to be fair, Scott’s position did receive some pushback in the comments).
Now reread all of that, considering that Lewis considered homosexuality to be immoral, and figure out which of it is actually true about gays (hint: probably not a lot).
Lewis wasn’t actually that bothered about/by homosexuality and did propose a version of the two-marriage model, though agreed, he did think ‘gay marriage’ wouldn’t be permissable:
Those quotes show that he thinks of homosexuals who want gay sex to be in a similar position to married people who want extramarital sex. They’re not evil just for having impulses, but it would be wrong for them to actually act on those impulses. So it seems that his reasoning that “our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege” would apply to them.
Yes, and just look at what happened with gay marriage. “If you don’t validate our twu wuv by baking a cake for our marriage, you’re an evil hater and I’m going to have you dragged before the courts and sued into oblivion.”
@ The original Mr. X:
Just curious: do you think we should validate the irrational whims of “left-handed” people, or should we make them write with their right hands like everyone else?
I mean, really: left-handed “desks” in classrooms?! What is the world coming to? Everyone knows a “desk” is made for writing with the right hand (no matter what the Supreme Court says).
And don’t get me started on the allegedly “near-sighted” people who insist on being pampered with unnatural artificial lenses. They ought to be happy with the eyes God gave them. If they’re unhappy because they get Cs (because they “can’t read the chalkboard”), well, life’s about more than selfish happiness. There’s also duty, and living in accordance with human nature.
On a more serious note, if all you are objecting to is the right even of bigots to freedom of association, then I agree. If you don’t want to bake a cake for a white bride and a black groom—it’s your bakery. And it’s everyone else’s right to boycott it.
“do you think we should validate the irrational whims of “left-handed” people, or should we make them write with their right hands like everyone else?”
And you regard a private bakery being unwilling to bake a cake for a same sex marriage as the same sort of thing as compelling left handers to write with their right hand? No distinction in your moral intuition between leaving people—left handers and bakers— free to do as they choose and compelling them to do as someone else chooses?
In a free society, I am free to act on my own irrational whims as long as they don’t actively injure people. I am not free to compel other people to act on my irrational whims, or even my rational whims.
Is it just that you are trying to live up to your posting name?
@ Vox
Given that the actual, facts-on-the-ground situation is people being fined over $130,000 for not baking said cakes, the rest of your examples are very strongly missing the point. It doesn’t rescue the tone of your comment to mention at the end that you totally agree in theory when you’ve spend the rest of it furiously signalling how crazy you think that outgroup is. Doubly so when you follow it up with an irrelevant aside about boycotts.
@ David Friedman:
I thought my last paragraph should have made this clear. I apologize if it did not. I entirely agree with you on the point that no one should be forced to bake any cake for any reason.
What I was objecting to was The original Mr. X‘s implication that homosexuality is a baseless emotional prejudice that rationally shouldn’t be catered to. That it is “twu wuv”, i.e. a delusional pretense of true love, that people should man up and disregard. Thus, the bakers who refuse to bake such a cake are the only sane men in a room full of lunatics.
With the right-handed / left-handed thing, I wasn’t trying to make it an issue of government schools forcing students to do things one way. But surely you would agree that, despite the fact that private schools are well within their rights to “force” children to write with their right hands (and indeed, certain religious schools are infamous for doing this in the past), this is irrational? They ought to accommodate left-handed students.
The fact that you have the right to do something does not exempt you from ostracism and condemnation. Indeed, as the power of the state shrinks in this regard, the power of ostracism and moral suasion has to grow. Otherwise, everything would be socially permitted which the state did not forbid—and that would be a fairly intolerable moral rule in any halfway libertarian society.
@ Jaskologist:
I direct you to the response I typed to David Friedman.
I think you are “missing the point” of The original Mr. X‘s post. What was the flow of the conversation, in which I was participating?
Jiro said: “So it seems that [Lewis’s] reasoning that “our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege” would apply to [gays].”
The original Mr. X said: “Yes, and just look at what happened with gay marriage. “If you don’t validate our twu wuv by baking a cake for our marriage, you’re an evil hater and I’m going to have you dragged before the courts and sued into oblivion.”
I was responding to the part in bold, not the part about the courts. The thing about the courts is just a form of motte-and-bailey argument. The motte is that people should have the right to bake or refuse to bake whatever cakes they please. The bailey—which he was definitely occupying— is that religious people are justified in refusing to bake cakes for homosexual couples.
Motte: they have the right.
Bailey: they are right.
I guess it shows that this sort of argument works well to draw in even third parties on your side, even if an opponent makes it clear that he is only attacking the bailey and explicitly excludes the motte. Nevertheless, he attacks the bailey and people ask indignantly how he can dare to attack the motte.
What I was objecting to was The original Mr. X‘s implication that homosexuality is a baseless emotional prejudice that rationally shouldn’t be catered to.
Homosexuality itself? No.
The idea that not getting a cake from your first-choice bakery is going to ruin your life, and that leaving bakers free to turn away customers is going to set us on the slippery slope to “separate but equal” facilities for gays and straights? That’s completely stupid, and most definitely should not be catered to.
Although speaking of “our sexual impulses being put in a position of preposterous privilege”, I don’t think that, say, an optician who only sold glasses to long-sighted people would promote this sort of hysterical over-reaction.
No mottes or baileys here, just pointing out the way large segments of society seem to demand active support for their sex lives in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with anything else.
One could also bring up the HHS mandate. Nobody supposes that if your boss doesn’t give you a free car or pay for your holiday he’s part of some “war on motorists” or “war on holiday-makers”, but apparently workers all have a fundamental human right to subsidised condoms, and any employer who doesn’t pony up is part of some vast misogynistic conspiracy.
@ The original Mr. X:
I do think it is somewhat preposterous to suppose that in the current cultural climate, gays face a real threat of becoming “separate-but-equal”. In the past, that certainly did exist (no hotel would rent to Oscar Wilde during and after his trial), but precisely because the cultural climate has changed enough to consider making discrimination against homosexuals an offense, such discrimination is no longer a very serious problem.
But on the other hand, what are the odds of Armenians suddenly being considered “separate-but-equal” in this country? Yet, if you refuse to bake a cake for an Armenian, that is a crime. In the minds of many people, bigotry is bigotry, and it ought to be against the law for a “public” establishment (i.e. one that serves the general public) to engage in discrimination based on any kind of innate identity. See Heart of Atlanta.
I disagree with this, as I have explained. But on the other hand, I think the majority of people who support the right of bakers to refuse to sell to gays would not support their right to refuse to sell to blacks or Armenians. I think their actual position is not one of “allow discrimination, right or wrong” but “allow discrimination only if it’s right, and of course against gays it is”.
Presumably, the optician does not have a moralized hatred toward near-sighted people. If he did, people would condemn him (or laugh at him, more likely).
And it would be against the law for him to discriminate against a disability without a bona fide reason. (Such reasons can include, e.g. wanting to hire only black actors to portray slaves in a period film.)
No, I believe they feel similarly about the currently “protected categories” of: race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, pregnancy, citizenship, familial status (i.e. unwed motherhood), disability status, veteran status, and even (though this one surprised me) genetic information. It is illegal for any public establishment to discriminate against anyone for any of those reasons.
And just watch Gattaca for how the average person feels about discrimination on the basis of genetics, even when it would be efficient.
The Catholic Church does not oppose socialized medicine or government-mandated employer-sponsored benefits like unemployment benefits or health insurance in general.
They oppose paying for condoms because they adhere to a ludicrous religious dogma. This same religion has long been closely linked to the view that men are superior to women, that wives ought to obey their husbands, that only men are fit for the highest positions of religious leadership, that woman was created from a part of man, etc. Moreover, their opponents (correctly) see that the stamping out of contraceptives—which that religion would like to accomplish if it could get away with it—would be more harmful to women than to men.
What the Catholic Church wants is that in general employers have no right to not to be compelled to provide healthcare, but to have a special exemption for religious convictions.
What the leftists say is that religious and secular objections (such as cost, burden, etc.) to employer provision of healthcare should be treated on the same level. I also say they ought to be treated on the same level. Where we differ is that I say we have a right to liberty which includes both freedom of religion and freedom of trade and contract. The leftists say we don’t really have either. And the Catholic Church says we have freedom of religion but not freedom of trade.
Part of this is the distortion (originating with progressives but now popular with certain conservatives) of the Bill of Rights which ignores the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, in order to support the idea that the Constitution only seriously protects certain defined rights which are named explicitly (e.g. freedom of religion), but not those which are implicit (e.g. privacy, freedom of association, freedom of contract).
What the leftists say is that religious and secular objections (such as cost, burden, etc.) to employer provision of healthcare should be treated on the same level. I also say they ought to be treated on the same level. Where we differ is that I say we have a right to liberty which includes both freedom of religion and freedom of trade and contract. The leftists say we don’t really have either. And the Catholic Church says we have freedom of religion but not freedom of trade.
Wait, what? Employers were perfectly free to subsidise their workers’ contraceptives if they so chose. How does changing the situation to one where they’re forced to do so promote “freedom of trade and contract”?
Also, since when is this a Catholic vs. secular thing? The Hobby Lobby owners weren’t Catholics, after all.
You see, this is part of what I was talking about. Whenever the subject turns to matters involving the pelvis, you get this sloppy, manichaean, everything-not-compulsory-is-forbidden type of thinking.
You have the right to not patronize a business.
Ginning up other people into going out of their way to cause harm to the business and causing the legal system to force the business to accommodate you, because of the lies you told about the business’s refusal to give you something actually being a malicious attack on you… that’s less defensible.
Everything about desks and lenses you wrote was totally irrelevant, and you know it. He is clearly and explicitly referring to a specific event, you go off on a tear about other things that don’t make sense, and then at the end add “well if you are only talking about [The thing you were obviously talking about] then I agree with you”. Come on.
@ The original Mr. X:
…?
I have no idea how you could have read my post and come away with the conclusion that I support employers’ being forced to provide birth control. But in case it isn’t clear, I do not support employers’ being forced to provide birth control.
But what I say is that Obamacare (and the whole rest of the federal regulatory establishment on healthcare) is unconstitutional because it is a violation of employers’ (and employees’, through the individual mandate) rights. But if it is not unconstitutional, you don’t get a special religious exemption to it. Freedom of religion is not, properly, more or less strongly protected than any other right.
You were talking about condoms, which relates to the Catholic Church’s objection to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. I attended Georgetown, and this was a big controversy there, but I believe it made it the national news. There was the whole controversy with Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke.
The Hobby Lobby case was related but separate and about Plan B, which the non-Catholic owners consider an abortifacient.
@ DrBeat:
He was “clearly and explicitly referring to a specific event” in the context of condemning homosexuality as an irrational whim which society ought not cater to.
We happen to agree on one peripheral issue—that bakers should not be sued for refusing to bake a cake—but for completely different reasons. I because I think even bigots should be tolerated. He because he thinks they are right.
But this issue was not the topic of discussion. The topic of discussion was whether the acceptance of homosexuality represents putting “sexual impulses” into a position of “preposterous privilege”. The cake issue was his example of how the acceptance of homosexuality is infantilizing society.
I have no idea how you could have read my post and come away with the conclusion that I support employers’ being forced to provide birth control. But in case it isn’t clear, I do not support employers’ being forced to provide birth control.
Oh, I’m sorry, I thought that when you said “the Catholic Church is opposed to freedom of trade” you were referring to its opposition to the HHS mandate. My bad.
But what I say is that Obamacare (and the whole rest of the federal regulatory establishment on healthcare) is unconstitutional because it is a violation of employers’ (and employees’, through the individual mandate) rights. But if it is not unconstitutional, you don’t get a special religious exemption to it. Freedom of religion is not, properly, more or less strongly protected than any other right.
Actually I think there’s quite a bit of precedent in American law for giving people conscientious exemptions from things. E.g., there’s nothing unconstitutional about conscription during times of war, but if you’re a Quaker you do get a special exemption because of your religious beliefs.
He was “clearly and explicitly referring to a specific event” in the context of condemning homosexuality as an irrational whim which society ought not cater to.
I was in fact referring to the current trend of prosecuting people for not catering (arranging flowers, etc.) for gay wedding ceremonies, as everybody but you seems to have recognised.
Going back to the beginning of this, I don’t think “If you don’t validate our twu wuv by baking a cake for our marriage, you’re an evil hater and I’m going to have you dragged before the courts and sued into oblivion” implies that homosexual love is somehow worse than heterosexual love. The context, after all, was Lewis’ objection to the idea that sexual desire had a special claim to being satisfied.
If the bakery had refused to bake a cake because the owners knew the (heterosexual) couple, thought their marriage would be a disaster and wanted nothing to do with it, nobody could have made a discrimination case–but “if you don’t validate our twu wuv” would have been just as relevant.
What trend? Has even a single person been indicted?
@ David Friedman:
I suppose you’re right there. Marriage and sex aren’t really supposed to be about erotic love, but rather about procreation and duty to God and family.
Which is the reason homosexuality and gay marriage are condemned: they fundamentally separate the “natural unity” of sex and reproduction.
Now, the most consistent Catholics are just as opposed to masturbation and oral sex (which is, of course, a form of sodomy) as to gay sex. But those aren’t winning moves to emphasize in this day and age. And being opposed to homosexual relationships is on the same track to de-emphasis.
If Pope Francis (who chose his namesake very appropriately) gets his way, they’ll go back to being opposed more to “greed” and “acquisitiveness”, “gluttony” and “excess”, man’s pridefulness in exploiting Mother Earth, and the alleged exploitation of workers by employers unwilling to pay a “living wage”. The Catholic Church is, after all, the original source of “social justice” teaching.
But in this case, they are correct in their judgement that this “twu wuv” is not worthy of validation. (Unless they knew each other very well, though, most people would say they’re not in an appropriate position to judge this and should bake the cake anyway. But that’s beside the point)
If it were true that all gay marriages were disastrous, the judgment would be appropriate in that case, too.
@Vox:
It’s weird, you’ve expressed agreement with my actual point, but you still feel the need to keep going on these long screeds about the Catholic Church. What, are you really that worried that somebody will mistake you for a member of the hated outgroup?
>oral sex (which is, of course, a form of sodomy)
Haven’t heard that one before. I suppose it does fit into the “sticking the implement in the wrong hole” box and the “strictly non-reproductive sexual practice” box, though.
>But those aren’t winning moves to emphasize in this day and age.
Which is exactly what is wrong.
>oral sex (which is, of course, a form of sodomy)
Yes. This is true under the legal definition of sodomy. Theoretically you could have been prosecuted under sodomy laws for getting a BJ from your wife or giving one to your husband.
The fact that this was ruled unconstitutional in various ways at various times for heterosexual couples is one reason why its application to homosexuals eventually was declared unconstitutional. Many of the laws invalidated by Lawrence v. Texas applied to heterosexual conduct.
@HeelBearCub
Not just theoretically.
In Virginia
from
http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/sensibilities/virginia.htm
I’m not sure whether C.S.Lewis is an outlier, whether I am, or whether we are just sampling opposite ends of a population distribution, but this is nothing like my experience. My experience is that sexuality is a substantial, but hardly overwhelming, chunk of the pleasures of life – say 10% of the enjoyment of a typical week. The advice that Lewis hears and views as hypocritical, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.”, seems to me both sensible, realistic, and, at least from my end of the distribution, honest.
Now, there are sensible precautions and practicalities needed for enjoying any impulse, but I don’t find those needed for sex to be particularly onerous. To pick one component and one comparison: I’ve found birth control easier than girth control… I also, personally, don’t tend to find the grass greener on the other side of the fence…
Multiheaded, I know it is easier to get a visa for New Zealand than it is for the US (I don’t know how NZ compares to Canada). And according to this article, if you haven’t had gender reassignment surgery, it might be easier than trying European countries?
http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/09/03/watch-trans-refugee-finally-finds-safety-new-zealand
I happen to hail from Finland and can say that this part of the article is factually wrong: “but was consistently rejected because of regulations that required her to have undergone gender-confirming surgery before being legally recognized as a woman.” Finland does not require gender-confirming surgery to legally recognize someone as woman. What is required under current legislation however is being sterile, which is most commonly achieved through hormone therapy at least with male-to-female trans persons.
Noted, thanks. (Seems enormously more difficult and expensive and unlikely than Argentina, tho…)
What about some Scandinavian country, like Sweden ? From what I’ve heard, they’re all uber-progressive; this has obvious downsides, but might be an upside for trans immigrants. On the other hand, they’ve been cracking down on immigration recently, so maybe not…
Note that this is not endorsed by Scott.
Parts of LessWrong London have been feeling like the association with LW no longer really captures what we’re about. Several of us have pretty much stopped reading the site. So we’re doing an experimental rebrand as a diaspora meetup group.
The diaspora includes, but is not limited to: LessWrong, SlateStarCodex, parts of the Effective Altruism movement, the bit of tumblr that brands itself ‘rationalist tumblrsphere’.
If you feel like you want to hang out with the sort of people who are involved with those things: welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited.
This meetup will be social discussion in a pub, with no set topic. If there’s a topic you want to talk about, feel free to bring it.
The pub is the Shakespeare’s Head in Holborn. There will be some way to identify us.
People start showing up around two, and there are almost always people around until after six, but feel free to come and go at whatever time.
Event on facebook. (Should be visible even if you don’t have facebook.)
Just you wait til L. Ron Yudkowsky hears of this sedition! Treason! Apostasy! You’ll end up with an ice pick in your head, just you wait!
http://pastebin.com/WWe7uvtf
Despite obviously being bait, this list has been making the rounds on Rationalist Tumblr™ and causing quite a stir (and now here I am, reposting it).
How high can you score, SSC readers?
I’ve got a meager 4 points, as The Man All About Space-Based Franchises, The “I’m Working On…” Guy, The No-Bed Guy and The Man with An Active Reddit Account
Approximately zero.
(I don’t count my shirts. It is possible that the number is exactly 6, but I doubt it. Regardless, six shirts I could live with – who needs more?)
(On reflection, I am certain I have fewer buttoned shirts than six, and don’t use more than six T-shirts even if I may have more than that. I’m not quite sure what the point of having more shirts than you use.)
People who like to go a long time without doing laundry, probably
That’s a bad idea. The stains set into the cloth if you let them stew.
Yet another reason to own more shirts than you need
So rather than do laundry regularly, so you can retain useful, unstained shirts, you propose to do laundry rarely and buy more shirts whenever they predictably get stains set in them?
Yup
Would get 6 or 7, were I male enough for the author to care about.
(She’s most likely salty as fuck about all the men she did fuck but couldn’t stay with, so… hehe, she comes across as kinda pathetic, oh, and needs her bigotry to feel superior. First time I’ve seen libertarians insulted as “emotional children” rather than “beep boop logic bots”…)
So, I’m a woman, but I can’t resist taking a good test when I see one, so I just changed *guy* to *gal* and answered the questions.
Ted talks… Um, not these specific speakers, but I do love Ted talks. What is this person’s problem?
I find Ayn Rand highly entertaining and describe myself as a libertarian. Check.
Gal with no gal friends. Not exactly accurate. But, but, I do feel that women who write/talk/think like the author is the reason I don’t feel very comfortable around many American women.
No bed. Check.
Active reddit account. Wait, why is that a problem?
What’s wrong with reading Richard Dawkins? I have recently noticed two unrelated posts on my Facebook feed hating on Dawkins, both from people who don’t strike me as very religious. Is this some sort of a trend?
6 shirts. Check in spirit. 6 shirts is enough. American women own too many darn clothes. *Investing in yourself* style-wise is not about quantity but about fit and quality. Again, what is wrong with this person?
Mentioning high school. Yeah, occasionally. Again, nothing wrong with that.
This test is absolutely awful.
>Active reddit account. Wait, why is that a problem?
Presumably – low status signal.
Dawkins was fine when he was anti-Christian, but it turns out he’s consistent and that means he’s anti-Muslim and so now he’s a badthinker.
Although in her defense he’s also kind of a giant tool.
Consistency is the heresy of leftist minds. See also Ayaan Hirsi Ali coming to the Netherlands from a super-poor country that practices FGM, embracing the Enlightenment narrative she learned at university, and being shunned as right-wing for saying “crush the infamy” to Islam.
Why is everyone assuming she’s a leftist? Granted SJWs hate male feminists almost as much as redpillers do so that could go either way, but the part about how the only thing a man should be working on is his car reads like a cartoon caricature of the red tribe.
@ anon:
Let’s see:
a) Talking aggressively about people you will or won’t “fuck” takes you squarely out of the “religious conservative” camp.
b) This could leave you in the “libertarian” camp, but she rules that one out.
c) The “finance guy” section is heavily anti-capitalist, anti-“consumerist”, anti-“suburbia”, and that’s heavily associated with leftism.
d) Most varieties of “reaction” are ruled out by the general tone of “female empowerment” and—more to the point—aggressively offensive “bitchiness” that permeates the piece.
I suppose she could be some kind of Mussolini-like or Peronist fascist. But my best guess is some variety of leftist. (If, indeed, fascism is not a form of leftism.)
But hey, she could be Mussolini’s granddaughter!
I wasn’t aware gold digging was considered a form of opposition to capitalism
Did I miss Marx talking about it in one of his letters to Engels?
I wasn’t aware gold digging was considered a form of opposition to capitalism
Did I miss Marx talking about it in one of his letters to Engels?
It’s “to each according to their neeeeeeeeeeds”.
@Marc Whipple:
I’m an atheist.
I thought Dawkins was pretty much a tool when I read “The God Delusion” shortly after it’s release. Maybe it is that British argumentative style though…
Basically, Dawkins spends the prequel talking about how he is trying to speak to and convince theists, but then precedes to essentially mock anyone who believes as stupid and deluded. I didn’t get it at all.
The Selfish Gene, on the other hand, is my favorite example of the kind of book that teaches the author’s field in a way sufficiently entertaining so that people will read it for fun–and, so far as I could tell, teaches it honestly. It’s a model I’ve tried to follow.
he’s also kind of a giant tool.
Aside from the problems NN highlights below, Dawkins is kind of anti-everything-except-his-own-genius, which gets pretty annoying once he’s done talking about something that you’re against, too.
In addition to being an aggressive atheist, Dawkins criticized Steven Jay Gould, whose specialty was attacking evolutionary biology arguments whose conclusions he didn’t like. Gould was both a prominent popular science author and a left winger, so being a fan of his might be a reason to dislike Dawkins.
One of the few things Krugman wrote that I reacted positively to was his comparison of Gould to Galbraith.
That is a plus point for Dawkins, but even though the only book I’ve read from him is The Selfish Gene, one could see even from that book that his atheist writing is probably not very interesting (there are some 20-odd pages of writing about atheism rather than evolutionary biology in the book and they all struck me as much below the otherwise great level of the book…and I am myself an atheist or agnostic, depending on the exact definition).
Strong agreement. I’m an atheist, but I can’t really reconcile the guy who wrote Selfish Gene and Ancestor’s Tale–well-written books that I enjoyed greatly–with the guy making cheap shots on Twitter
nil: Well, I like to say that if Mao were an amazing novelist or Hitler were a brilliant painter, their other deeds would not have changed the quality of that work. A great novel is not enough to forgive being the worst mass murderer in history but a great book on evolutionary biology is enough to forgive some dull atheist rants.
In regards to Dawkins, I find that he is very good when talking about his field of expertise, and is generally an entertaining writer, but I find that he and most other “aggressive atheists” have the same problem: they praise the power of science and reason to discover how the world works, then go on to present completely unscientific assumptions about how religion works as fact. None of them seem to have realized that, while the truth value of any religion can be debated philosophically, the effects of religion on human behavior and vice versa is an empirical question that can and is studied by sociologists, anthropologists, etc. So you end up with the classic problem of very intelligent scientists making wildly unsupported statements about subjects that are outside their field of expertise.
Take, for example, this passage from the God Delusion: “Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools; that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise. And they were taught that lesson not necessarily by extremist fanatics but by decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors, who lined them up in their madrasahs, sitting in rows, rhythmically nodding their innocent little heads up and down while they learned every word of the holy book like demented parrots.”
First, anyone with any training in psychology would find this to be a laughable explanation of how childhood learning works. Second, and more importantly, actual researchers in this field have found that receiving a formal Islamic religious education (from a school that isn’t run by the Taliban) makes a person less likely to support terrorism. Dawkins just pulled this idea out of his butt and presented it to the reader as if he knew that it was true. That sort of conduct isn’t very becoming for a scientist.
This may not be the reason why people on your Facebook feed dislike Dawkins (most of the recent criticism seems to come from him disagreeing with the consensus of the SJ crowd), but it is my biggest problem with him and his work.
Speaking of scientific conduct, Dawkins has gone on record saying that literally nothing would convince him that God exists:
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/4-dawkins-admits-nothing-can-persuade-him-god-exists/
@ The original Mr. X:
I believe you (and that guy) are misunderstanding Dawkins.
I think he means is that no empirical observation, such as of a booming voice from the heavens, would convince him. Given that he holds all the philosophical arguments for God’s existence to be incredibly flimsy, and given all the massive self-contradictions and insoluble dilemmas posed by God’s existence. If he’s right on those philosophical points, it would be more likely that aliens were playing tricks or that he was insane than that God actually did exist as the cause of the booming voice in the heavens,
But if he woke up one day and suddenly thought: “Wow, this ontological argument is really good stuff!” then he would surely change his opinion. However, he just can’t think of anything that would possibly convince him that the ontological argument proves the existence of God. And that’s no anti-empirical bias: what could possibly convince you that 2 + 2 = 5? It seems clear that, unless you change the meaning of some of the terms, it just can’t. If the ontological argument is invalid, it is invalid no matter what empirical conditions obtain.
If you’re right and Dawkins really wouldn’t believe in God even if he were rationally convinced of (alleged) proofs of his existence, I agree that this would be an irrational and wrong view. But basic application of the principle of charity leads me to think this is not really what he’s saying.
Dawkins is a big proponent of Science (TM) as the be-all and end-all of human knowledge, has criticised philosophy and theology for not being empirical enough, and says that the existence of God is a scientific question. I don’t think you get to say all that, and then go “No, actually, empirical evidence against my position isn’t relevant, because philosophy.”
There is no inconsistency between saying that 1) we generally need to be more empiric, and 2) not everything can be handled empirically.
There is an inconsistency between, on the one hand, saying that empiricism is the only way we can know things, and that the existence of God is an empirical question; and, on the other, saying that empirical evidence against your position doesn’t count because you’ve got it all philosophically worked out.
@ The original Mr. X:
Things like philosophy and mathematics are not (properly) anti-empirical.
2 + 2 = 4 because of the law of identity and the meanings of the concepts “two”, “four”, “addition”, and “equality” which are arrived at by abstraction from sense experience. Nevertheless, it is a necessary truth.
What you are doing is assuming “empirical” = “contingent”, and therefore if you can establish something on the basis of empirical observation, you must be able to conceive of an opposite empirical observation which disproves it. But this is not true. Some things are just necessarily true.
In order to know 2 + 2 = 4, you have to engage in observation. But once you know it, it is clear that no additional observation could disprove it.
If the ontological or cosmological arguments are valid, they are necessarily true. That is, if they are true, God just has to exist. But if they are invalid (as Dawkins surely believes), they are false whether or not God exists and therefore do not serve as reasons to believe in him. It is conceivable that God exists, but there is still no rational basis for believing in him. Except that would run against the idea that God is benevolent.
The same goes for arguments that God does not exist. For instance, the problem of evil, the problem of combining free will with God’s foreknowledge, etc. If these arguments are valid, God necessarily does not exist. The truth of these arguments would have to be determined empirically. But if they are necessary truths, there is no way the universe could be such that they were not true—and therefore no additional empirical observation could disprove them.
Now, it is true that some “New Atheists” disparage philosophy and interpret empiricism in a crudely positivistic way. To the extent they do that, they are misguided. But I sympathize because 95% of the time, it’s because they’ve heard one line of bullshit too many from philosophy.
Dawkins has said that the existence or otherwise of God is a scientific matter, and that the good thing about scientists is that their theories are always provisional and open to correction based on new evidence. Now he’s saying that there’s no new evidence that could make him change his mind. So either Richard Dawkins is a really bad scientist, or the existence of God isn’t actually a scientific matter, and new atheist claims to the contrary are naught but false advertising.
@ The original Mr. X:
Scientists surely rely on mathematics to formulate their theories. Does that mean they are being unscientific and dogmatic when they say that they can’t think of any observation which would convince them 2 + 2 = 5?
I regard 2 + 2 = 4 as “provisional” in the sense that if I did see something that convinced me I was mistaken in holding it, I would change my mind. But I just can’t think of anything that would, since to me it seems an absolutely necessary truth confirmed all the time by experience. 3159 + 4896 = 8055 is also an absolutely necessary truth, but I regard it as very provisional, since it is quite possible I just typed in a digit wrong on my calculator.
There is a difference between not thinking you could be wrong and holding that if your previous conclusions were justified, no new information could disprove them. That is how arguments for the existence of God are supposed to work: you go up to Dawkins and tell him that he did the equivalent of typing in a digit wrong in his calculator. Now in real life, you’ll never convince someone that old and that committed that he was completely wrong about everything (people aren’t that rational, and actual science doesn’t advance that way either), but you can hope to convince third parties.
As for whether the existence of God is a “scientific” matter, that depends on how narrowly you interpret science. In the broadest sense, the existence of God certainly is a scientific matter. But is it a matter of the “special sciences” like physics or biology? Obviously not, though of course they can explain many things that God was thought to explain. And of course sciences like psychology and sociology can explain why people believe in God.
IIRC, Dawkins’ examples of what would count as evidence for God included prayer studies showing that people always get what they pray for and video footage showing the resurrection of Jesus — in other words, empirical evidence. Why do you think he’d say that empirical evidence would count as evidence for God’s existence, if he actually thinks it’s irrelevant? And, if he’s got these knock-down philosophical proofs that render empirical evidence a non-issue, why doesn’t he base his case on those, instead of the God-of-the-gaps reasoning he normally employs?
@ The original Mr. X:
For one thing, Richard Dawkins is not a philosopher, and he does not discuss the existence of God in an academic context. He is a biologist who has observed that religious belief has had bad effects on his field, and he’s an ordinary guy who has observed religious belief having bad effects in the broader world. And he speaks his mind about it to the public.
I don’t know about Dawkins, but in my experience many atheists are motivated by concerns like the problem or evil or the related problem of how a benevolent God could make the truth of his existence so hard to establish. As I have said mockingly before, “God is like the CIA: he doesn’t do anything that is not plausibly deniable”.
(In an opposite way, I think many religious believers are motivated by moral concerns (including myself in the past, although I was a deist and never a Christian). The argument is something like: if God did not exist, morality would have no objective validity. But morality clearly does have objective validity. Therefore, God exists. That’s a perfectly valid argument: if the premises are true, the conclusion follows.)
If people always got what they prayed for, or if he had video evidence of the Resurrection, this couldn’t prove that God exists given the truth of arguments that he does not, but it would certainly cause us to question those arguments more carefully. (In the same way, if you add up numbers and your rocket explodes, you’ll want to double-check your figures.) For one, it would take away the problem of God’s existence being so obscure to so many people. If the Archangel Gabriel took over as Pope and started smiting unbelievers, well, we’d certainly know something special was going on with the Catholic Church.
Now, we still might say the prayers and the video evidence and the archangel are more plausibly explained by meddling aliens. For one, we have every reason to believe that aliens really do exist, so we wouldn’t alter our previous conclusions as radically. Though we would have to explain how and why they have hidden from humans for so long.
Why wouldn’t one want to say it was God behind these things? Again, one can simply look at all the evil things in the world which could easily be fixed by a benevolent God, and come to the conclusion that there isn’t one. But there’s no reason to expect meddling aliens to be benevolent, so it fits better.
In the real world, not only do we have all those types of problems, but it’s just so obvious that Judaism is the exact kind of thing you would expect a bunch of desert savages to invent. And Christianity is a natural adaptation of it, an offshoot designed to de-emphasize its more repugnant aspects and make it amenable to Roman culture. That is, even if God didn’t exist, even an honest Christian should still expect Christianity—or something very like it—to exist.
It doesn’t seem any more special than Islam or Greco-Roman paganism or Zoroastrianism or Buddhism. For instance, Zoroastrianism explains the existence of evil in the world much better than Christianity: there is good and evil in the world because it is at war between a good god and an evil god. Not to mention that they’re all worse than deism, which has all the benefit of the “beautiful logical arguments” and none of the drawbacks of “savage primitivism which he have to accept or rationalize away”.
Video evidence of the Resurrection would evidentially favor Christianity because it would mean we could throw out all the other religions and consider any argument in favor of the truth of God or religion in general as favoring Christianity in particular.
In one of the runs of the Supergirl comic (quite some time ago) the overall story arc was about a conflict between different aspects of a Deity. At one point, a character who claimed to be God (who inhabited the body of a 12-year-old-boy) was talking to Supergirl and didn’t seem to care whether she believed his claim or not. When questioned, he pointed out that in a universe with powerful superbeings, there was nothing he could do which would prove he was God as opposed to the New Uberhero of the Week. (He did say that he didn’t care if she believed he was God as long as she listened to what he was trying to tell her.)
ETA: At one point, he did prove to her that he wasn’t just a crazy kid by smacking her with his bat. She flew several miles: he was waiting for her when she landed. She wasn’t mad (she sorta had it coming) and observed, “I can take a lot, but I felt that.”
He responded, “You felt what I wanted you to feel. If I’d really hit you, you wouldn’t be feeling anything at all.”
For one thing, Richard Dawkins is not a philosopher, and he does not discuss the existence of God in an academic context. He is a biologist who has observed that religious belief has had bad effects on his field, and he’s an ordinary guy who has observed religious belief having bad effects in the broader world. And he speaks his mind about it to the public.
Dawkins has spent far more time and effort in recent years criticising religion than doing actual science. “He’s just a biologist who happens to say a few things about religion” isn’t really a plausible characterisation any more.
Plus, so what? If Dawkins thinks that empirical evidence is moot because of some knock-down philosophical argument against the existence of God, he should give us this argument, not rely on (allegedly) irrelevant empirical arguments. I’ve still got no idea what motive he’d have for not giving the strongest arguments for his position.
Why wouldn’t one want to say it was God behind these things? Again, one can simply look at all the evil things in the world which could easily be fixed by a benevolent God, and come to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
So what sort of evil things could “easily” be fixed, without either (a) resulting in an even worse evil, or (b) giving up some outweighing compensatory good?
In the real world, not only do we have all those types of problems, but it’s just so obvious that Judaism is the exact kind of thing you would expect a bunch of desert savages to invent.
So why is it that there are so few religions like Judaism — monotheistic, exclusive, holy books, and the like? History suggests that “exact kind of thing you would expect a bunch of desert savages to invent” is in fact a kind of vague polytheism.
And Christianity is a natural adaptation of it, an offshoot designed to de-emphasize its more repugnant aspects and make it amenable to Roman culture.
Lol yeah, they made it so amenable that most of the early apostles ended up getting murdered.
For instance, Zoroastrianism explains the existence of evil in the world much better than Christianity: there is good and evil in the world because it is at war between a good god and an evil god.
The idea of two coequal Gods is incoherent, so no.
Not to mention that they’re all worse than deism, which has all the benefit of the “beautiful logical arguments” and none of the drawbacks of “savage primitivism which he have to accept or rationalize away”.
I’ve yet to see a deist give a good argument for rejecting the idea of revelations a priori. Mostly it seems to rest on some sort of unexamined intuition that “Of course God wouldn’t do that because [mumble, mumble].”
So what sort of evil things could “easily” be fixed, without either (a) resulting in an even worse evil, or (b) giving up some outweighing compensatory good?
Chronic sinusitus. Or, for that matter, kidney stones. At least, the fact that they are painful. It serves no useful purpose for them to be painful: in fact, it’s actively detrimental that they are painful because the best way to treat them, absent modern medicine, is to drink more water, and when you’re in so much pain you’re nauseous, the last thing you’re going to do of your own accord is drink a lot of water.
Or did you mean “willful acts of evil?” Want a good one? Provide human females with some powerful natural defense against rape. I’m talking “If you penetrate her without consent, her genitals produce a powerful contact neurotoxin,” sort of thing.
The idea of two coequal Gods is incoherent, so no.
No, it is not. The idea of two equally omnipotent gods is irrational, but if you say two gods are coequal, then by definition they cannot be omnipotent. (They could be omnipotent against everything else in the universe, just not completely omnipotent.) If you want a fictional example. consider Kwll and Rhynn. 🙂
Well, actually, that isn’t even true. If God can’t make a rock so heavy He can’t lift it, there’s no reason He couldn’t make a God so powerful it could affect Him. Omnipotence leads to paradox even singularly: I’m not sure why it gets any worse if more than one entity has it.
@The original Mr. X:
You don’t appear to be talking about the triple-omni God that a) the problem of evil applies to, and b) Christians claim to worship.
Edit: I think someone just deleted their post.
Edit: I think someone just deleted their post.
Well, it certainly wasn’t me. I’ll try and put it up again.
(Incidentally, has anybody else had their posts mysteriously vanish?)
@Marc Whipple:
Chronic sinusitus. Or, for that matter, kidney stones. At least, the fact that they are painful. It serves no useful purpose for them to be painful: in fact, it’s actively detrimental that they are painful because the best way to treat them, absent modern medicine, is to drink more water, and when you’re in so much pain you’re nauseous, the last thing you’re going to do of your own accord is drink a lot of water.
So what are you saying God should do, miraculously intervene every time somebody gets a kidney stone? Set up the laws of nature such that getting kidney stones is impossible?
Or did you mean “willful acts of evil?” Want a good one? Provide human females with some powerful natural defense against rape. I’m talking “If you penetrate her without consent, her genitals produce a powerful contact neurotoxin,” sort of thing.
So how would that work? In particular, how would the genitals know whether or not the brain is consenting?
No, it is not. The idea of two equally omnipotent gods is irrational, but if you say two gods are coequal, then by definition they cannot be omnipotent.
No, because God is of necessity pure act, and anything that could differentiate two or more Gods would have to be some kind of potency. Hence there can only be one.
You don’t appear to be talking about the triple-omni God that a) the problem of evil applies to, and b) Christian’s claim to worship.
I don’t think I’ve said anything that hasn’t been standard in Christian theology for the past two thousand years.
So what are you saying God should do, miraculously intervene every time somebody gets a kidney stone? Set up the laws of nature such that getting kidney stones is impossible?
That second one would be relatively easy, but he doesn’t even have to do that. Instead of a pain response – which is counterproductive – wire the brain for an enhanced thirst response.
So how would that work? In particular, how would the genitals know whether or not the brain is consenting?
I dunno. I’m not a neurobiologist. Nor do I think that’s necessarily The Answer. However, I don’t think for a moment that some kind of reasonably potent natural defense to that specific act is something a God which can invent a poisonous egg-laying beaver-duck couldn’t come up with.
…God is of necessity pure act, and anything that could differentiate two or more Gods would have to be some kind of potency. Hence there can only be one.
Saying it doesn’t make it so. I respectfully decline to stipulate that your definition is correct or that the logic it produces is irrefutable.
@The original Mr. X:
“Set up the laws of nature such that getting kidney stones is impossible?”
The Omnipotent god can do this, but chooses not to, for some reason. Apologetics try to explicate why this is so, but they don’t claim God can’t do it, which seems to be thrust of your comment.
HBC:
The Omnipotent god can do this, but chooses not to, for some reason.
The omnipotent God can set up the laws of nature such that nobody gets kidney stones, but neither you nor I nor anybody else on this thread knows if doing so would require accepting a greater evil or sacrificing a greater good. Hence why the strong problem of evil is generally considered a non-starter among philosophers of religion.
Saying it doesn’t make it so. I respectfully decline to stipulate that your definition is correct or that the logic it produces is irrefutable.
Then maybe you’d like to disprove it.
The burden of proof lies upon the person making the claim. You claim that it is required that God be a singular entity. I simply claim that I see no reason why this is required – in other words, my only claim is that I do not believe your claim is justified. My burden of proof lies, and is met, in saying, “I do not believe your claim is justified.” 🙂
Over to you.
(Incidentally, I do not dispute that if I accept your definition of God, which includes the concept of actus purus, God is required to be a singular entity. If you like. consider my specific objection to be that I see no reason why your definition of God is required or even preferred.)
Well, that’s easy: God is the first cause of the universe, if he had any potency there’d have to be something else actualising that, so God wouldn’t be the first cause.
@ The original Mr. X:
I am no expert on Richard Dawkins. I haven’t even read any of his books. I am familiar with his ideas through some articles by him, and through secondary sources.
But Dawkins built his career on being an evolutionary biologist. That was how he got famous. In the process, he spent a whole lot of time arguing against bullshit spread by creationists, and he came to see religion as a very negative force in science and in the world at large. That made him angry, and he wanted to write a book about it.
For a long time, though, publishers had told him that it wasn’t a good idea to write a book openly attacking religion: too much negative reaction. Of course, since the 1700s it’s been acceptable (in the right circles) to be an atheist, so long as you didn’t say it too explicitly or too loudly. People used euphemisms like having “French principles” (an amusing term I read last week in a story from the 1870s written by J. Sheridan Le Fanu). But coming right out and saying God doesn’t exist was Not Done and Not a Good Career Move.
I don’t know where you live, but it’s still like this is many parts of the U.S. and the rest of the world. I’m from Alabama, and my father (who is not religious) urged me to simply remove the “Religious Beliefs” section of my Facebook profile instead of saying “Atheist”. And I think it was good advice: there are employers out there who will just not hire you if you are an atheist. This is not even to mention that, for most of the 20th century, atheism was the creed of The Enemy: the Godless Communist. To use Leonard Peikoff’s joking example of the fallacy of affirming the consequent: “All communists are atheists. You are an atheist. Therefore, you are a communist.”
But finally Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, which made him an “atheist superstar”. The argument for God which (as I understand) Dawkins mainly argues against there is the argument from design. This is definitely not the best argument for God, but it seems to be the most popular among the public. In essence: “Wow, the universe is so orderly and complex! How could you explain it, if not by the fact that it was made by a perfect being? Therefore, God exists.”
Dawkins pretty much says: “Ah, but you can explain how the universe works purely by natural laws. Therefore, God is a superfluous and unnecessary hypothesis.”
This does not satisfy the theologians, who have better arguments. Dawkins is not really arguing against the theologians, though. He is arguing against the kind of nonsense that leads people to support creationism. Remember that he is an evolutionary biologist!
However, that is not even the most important part of the book or what Dawkins is most known for. He is really more of a missionary for atheism, or rather someone who seeks to make it more socially acceptable. And I have never heard of any missionaries who go around giving complex theological arguments for God. They talk about how bad paganism and irreligion is, and about all the benefits you get by trusting in Jesus as your savior.
As Wikipedia says:
It’s at best “weak-manning” to go after Dawkins for not having full knowledge of every technicality of every argument for God, complete with a full response to each. That’s not what he’s trained in or interested in. That’s not what he does. The main point of his message is: atheism is good and something to be proud of, not ashamed of! Be open about your atheism! Don’t hide it! Don’t raise your children in religion if you yourself don’t believe just so that they will “fit in”!
As to what you could read, the idea that one can prove the existence of God has been discredited in philosophy since around the late 18th century, by religious and non-religious philosophers alike. It’s pretty much a dead issue now because they all agree on this. Even Platinga says you can’t prove it. Now, the fact that this is a dominant opinion in philosophy doesn’t prove anything, but there are plenty of authors to investigate, starting with Immanuel Kant.
Well, the free will argument is the usual one given to justify all the evil in the world. In general, I find it totally unconvincing in every respect.
Most obviously, it doesn’t apply at all to “natural evil”, i.e. bad things which are not consciously chosen. So: volcanoes destroying innocent Italian villagers, or little children being striken with brain cancer. People used to say those things were deserved punishments from God. But hardly anyone believes that anymore because it’s too savage.
But even voluntary evil seems completely unjustifiable for God to allow. At the very least, he ought not to let evil people harm others. Why does the unlimited goodness of free will mean that it’s a “greater good” for God to let rapists rape? Does the existence of the police violate free will? Obviously not. Free will is a metaphysical issue, not a political issue. If you put a man in prison, you take away his political freedom—his freedom of action—but not his freedom of will.
If it’s okay for the police to stop rapists in the act, then it ought to be okay for God to send angels down to stop every rapist as he’s grabbing his victim. It makes no sense whatsoever to say this would contradict free will. Moreover, God has the unique advantage of being able to “watch the watchers” and stop corruption in government. Imagine how good it would be if all governments were perfectly just, and every evil politician or dictator was sent to jail.
But most importantly, why is free will even a good thing in the first place, even in regard to being able to harm yourself and merit hell by sinning? Free will is a fact about how people are; it’s neither good nor bad. It would be very bad if, as in Calvinism, people were determined to sin and could not do otherwise. But it would be very good if people could not do otherwise than to act perfectly virtuously all the time.
And it’s simply completely monstrous to expect finite, limited beings in only forty, fifty, or ninety years to determine their eternal fate. People can fuck up and do great evil with the free will that they do have as a natural fact. But not even Stalin levels of evil can possibly merit an infinite punishment. The idea of hell is simply childish: a child (or a savage) can’t think of what comes after ten thousand and just says “infinity!” without comprehending its true extent.
In fact, early Judaism was vaguely polytheistic! This is simply a historical fact. They believed other gods existed, but that theirs was better.
Judaism is also not the only example of monotheism independently developing in history.
Moreover, maybe polytheism was more common because polytheism is a much more plausible and reasonable view than monotheism. The universe seems very clearly not to be ruled by a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who orders everything according to his own Plan.
The Greco-Roman view of many warring gods, each of which embody a limited, natural element of the world, is much more in line with the facts. Why does Athens sometimes win and sometimes lose? Because sometimes Athena gets the upper hand, sometimes she loses, and sometimes she just gets pissed off. Why do bad things happen to good people? Because Zeus is kind of an asshole, and he isn’t the absolute ruler of the cosmos anyway.
Finally, Islam is much more consistently monotheistic in rejecting this “Trinity” bullshit and saying quite firmly that God is One and only One. During the Crusades, the Muslim word for Christian was “polytheist”.
Because they obviously posed a great threat to the status quo and in fact had enormous success in converting Greeks and Romans, starting with Saul of Tarsus—who was a Jew but a Roman citizen, and who converted Christianity from a Jewish sect to a universal religion.
Christianity, of course, had competition in the form of several very similar mystery cults like Mithraism. But it won out due to a combination of luck and certain advantages, such as allowing women into the Church, forbidding people from following Christianity and other religions at the same time, and engaging in a lot of social service toward the poor.
Their success was not entirely dissimilar to how communism beat traditionalism in Russia and China (complete with banning and persecuting everyone else once they got in charge). Which success certainly doesn’t prove that communism was true or beneficial: only that it had a well-crafted message.
It’s not at all coherent. Two equal infinite and unlimited gods is incoherent, but that’s not what it holds. It holds that the gods are in a struggle because neither has the power to destroy the other (right now, at least), but that eventually the good god will win the struggle.
But even one infinite and unlimited god is incoherent, at least as Christianity conceives it. First of all, as Aristotle demonstrated, the existence of an actual infinite is a contradiction of the law of identity (because it’s a quantity without any definite nature). Moreover, Spinoza validly argued for pantheism on the grounds that if God has infinite and not limited in every way, then you can never say of anything that it is “not God”. To say that God is not something is to limit God. God is good, but God is also evil, and he is you and me and this keyboard and everything else. God is everything that is, and he has an infinite number of attributes and an infinite amount of every attribute.
Of course, that concept of God had Spinoza excommunicated from the Jewish community (and of course, would have been excommunicated also if he had been born a Christian). And though Leibniz largely followed Spinoza, he never answered this argument—because he was not the kind of guy to go up against the Church.
Even if I grant that – which I do not, but for the sake of the argument – I do not see any reason why after the moment of initial creation God could not have split himself into any arbitrary number of parts.
Under your definition, the “sum” of those parts is actually God, since they would presumably retain the potentiality of rejoining and becoming a singular God again and if I am correct in my understanding of your particular approach nothing with potentiality can be God. However, again, that means I have to accept your definition and I see no reason why I have to do so. If I do, then it’s tautological that God is singular, but that doesn’t really tell us anything other than that your definition of God includes a singularity requirement. If I were to tell you that my definition of God includes a “cannot abide black licorice and only created it to give an example of absolute evil,” I suspect you’d be unimpressed with my assertion of a required attribute of God.
@ The original Mr. X
[My original post was too large. This is Part 2.]
Deists don’t reject revelations “a priori”. They just think the people who get the revelations are justified in believing them, but for everyone else, there’s Mastercard. If you get a revelation, all I have is your hearsay.
Now, if you’ve got some miracles to show me, that’s another story. But it’s very curious how the magnitude of miracles has decreased in exact proportion to the quality of the historical record. In Old Testament times, God was flooding the whole world (in a way that 19th century archaeology completely disproved). In New Testament times, he restricted himself to bringing back a couple of dead guys and turning water into wine (not much above David Copperfield). These days, he allegedly cures cancer in ways that aren’t even possible to detect by the most detailed statistical analysis.
Also, Christianity completely dismisses the alleged miracles of every other religion. The recent “Hindu milk miracle”—where statues all over India started drinking milk—is much better confirmed than anything in the Bible. There’s even supposed to be some tapes of it. But they don’t believe that one.
Nor have I met a Christian who agreed with Muslims that the Koran itself is a miracle: so beautiful and well-written that it could not possibly have been produced by a being other than God.
As Thomas Paine said in his The Age of Reason (which is a great and hilarious book attacking the stupidity of Christianity—and for which Paine suffered greatly in his time):
[This is the end of the quote from Paine, the third and final part of my post.]
@The original Mr. X:
Your omnipotent God isn’t very potent.
The idea that painful kidney stones or fly larvae whose life cycle depends on eating the eyeball rendering people blind is required to prevent even greater evil makes sense for a god who is somehow constrained. For one who has no constraints? This is a logical impossibility.
And the problem of evil is taken seriously? First time I’ve heard that. Theological scholars certainly take it seriously.
Vox:
This does not satisfy the theologians, who have better arguments. Dawkins is not really arguing against the theologians, though. He is arguing against the kind of nonsense that leads people to support creationism. Remember that he is an evolutionary biologist!
Dawkins disagrees with you:
“This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, on that would otherwise – as sure as night follows day – turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is designed to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.”
Also, your interpretation doesn’t help your defence of Dawkins. For him to be justified in rejecting any evidence for God’s existence out of hand, he’d have to have shown that God’s existence is logically impossible. “The appearance of design in the universe doesn’t actually point to God existing” doesn’t do this, and hence doesn’t justify his pre-emptive rejection of counter-evidence.
As to what you could read, the idea that one can prove the existence of God has been discredited in philosophy since around the late 18th century, by religious and non-religious philosophers alike. It’s pretty much a dead issue now because they all agree on this. Even Platinga says you can’t prove it. Now, the fact that this is a dominant opinion in philosophy doesn’t prove anything, but there are plenty of authors to investigate, starting with Immanuel Kant.
Oh, I guess I must have imagined reading all those modern philosophy books and articles saying that one can in fact prove the existence of God. Perhaps it was just an alien trickster culture playing a practical joke on me.
But most importantly, why is free will even a good thing in the first place, even in regard to being able to harm yourself and merit hell by sinning? Free will is a fact about how people are; it’s neither good nor bad. It would be very bad if, as in Calvinism, people were determined to sin and could not do otherwise. But it would be very good if people could not do otherwise than to act perfectly virtuously all the time.
What would it even mean to talk of virtue absent free will? We don’t say that a medicine is acting virtuously in curing disease.
And it’s simply completely monstrous to expect finite, limited beings in only forty, fifty, or ninety years to determine their eternal fate. People can fuck up and do great evil with the free will that they do have as a natural fact. But not even Stalin levels of evil can possibly merit aninfinite punishment. The idea of hell is simply childish: a child (or a savage) can’t think of what comes after ten thousand and just says “infinity!” without comprehending its true extent.
It seems childish to you because you have a childish understanding of it. Eternity isn’t just “a really, really long period of time”, and Hell isn’t a big naughty step where you get sent for breaking an arbitrary set of rules. Hell is the natural consequence of rejecting God’s love; or do you think that God should force his love on others, like a kind of spiritual rapist?
In fact, early Judaism was vaguely polytheistic! This is simply a historical fact. They believed other gods existed, but that theirs was better.
And then they didn’t. What’s your point?
Judaism is also not the only example of monotheism independently developing in history.
Again, so? To disprove the thesis that “it’s just so obvious that Judaism is the exact kind of thing you would expect a bunch of desert savages to invent,” one doesn’t have to prove that Judaism is unique, just that Judaism-type religions are rare. Which, as a matter of fact, they are.
Moreover, maybe polytheism was more common because polytheism is a much more plausible and reasonable view than monotheism. The universe seems very clearly not to be ruled by a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who orders everything according to his own Plan.
So I guess that’s why all the ancient philosophers tended to converge on some sort of monotheism, then?
Finally, Islam is much more consistently monotheistic in rejecting this “Trinity” bullshit and saying quite firmly that God is One and only One. During the Crusades, the Muslim word for Christian was “polytheist”.”
I’d be interested to hear what qualifications you have to make such a sweeping dismissal.
Because they obviously posed a great threat to the status quo and in fact had enormous success in converting Greeks and Romans, starting with Saul of Tarsus—who was a Jew but a Roman citizen, and who converted Christianity from a Jewish sect to a universal religion.
So on the one hand, Christianity is obviously an adaptation of Judaism to make it fit in with Roman society; on the other hand, Christianity is such a threat to Roman society that Roman society apparently feels the need to make several concerted efforts to stamp it out.
But even one infinite and unlimited god is incoherent, at least as Christianity conceives it. First of all, as Aristotle demonstrated, the existence of an actual infinite is a contradiction of the law of identity (because it’s a quantity without any definite nature). Moreover, Spinoza validly argued for pantheism on the grounds that if God has infinite and not limited in every way, then you can never say of anything that it is “not God”. To say that God is not something is to limit God. God is good, but God is also evil, and he is you and me and this keyboard and everything else. God is everything that is, and he has an infinite number of attributes and an infinite amount of every attribute.
Both your examples seem to rest on a confusion between the way in which God is said to be infinite and the way in which some physical thing might be infinite.
Deists don’t reject revelations “a priori”. They just think the people whoget the revelations are justified in believing them, but for everyone else, there’s Mastercard. If you get a revelation, all I have is your hearsay.
Yes, and reports of revelations can be investigated with the usual historical methods.
Though, let us not mistakenly suppose that all God has to do is pull a few miracles and suddenly everybody will be converted. People can always come up with ways to explain away the evidence.
Zola attached himself to an 18-year-old girl named Marie Lemarchand who was afflicted with three seemingly incurable diseases: an advanced stage of lupus, pulmonary tuberculosis, and leg ulcerations the size of an adult’s hand. Zola describes the girl’s face on the way to Lourdes as being eaten away by the lupus: “The whole was a frightful distorted mass of matter and oozing blood.” The girl went into the baths and emerged completely cured. One of the doctors present wrote, “On her return from the baths I at once followed her to the hospital. I recognized her well although her face was entirely changed.” The doctors who examined her could also find nothing wrong with her lungs, both of which had been infected with tuberculosis, causing the patient to cough and spit blood. Sixteen years later, she was still in perfect health and the cure was designated as official.
Zola was there when she came out of the baths. He had said, “I only want to see a cut finger dipped in water and come out healed.” The President of the Medical Bureau, Dr. Boissarie, was standing beside him. “Ah, Monsieur Zola, behold the case of your dreams!” “I don’t want to look at her,” replied Zola. “To me she is still ugly.” And he walked away.
Zola subsequently witnessed a second cure at Lourdes, that of a Mlle. Lebranchu, who was suffering from the final stages of tuberculosis. He told Dr. Boissarie, “Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle.” He put the second cure in his novel Lourdes (1894), but depicted the woman as relapsing into her former condition on her way home, the implication being that the cure was neither permanent nor supernatural, but rather a case of autosuggestion in an hysterical religious atmosphere.
But Zola, who remained in communication with the woman long after her recovery, was perfectly aware that there had been no relapse. When Dr. Boissarie questioned him as to the honesty of his account, pointing out that Zola had said that he had come to Lourdes to make an impartial investigation, Zola replied that he was an artist and could do whatever he liked with his material.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/1989/belief-and-unbelief-i-emile-zola-at-lourdes
Marc:
Even if I grant that – which I do not, but for the sake of the argument – I do not see any reason why after the moment of initial creation God could not have split himself into any arbitrary number of parts.
That would require God to change, and hence to be in potency.
However, again, that means I have to accept your definition and I see no reason why I have to do so. If I do, then it’s tautological that God is singular, but that doesn’t really tell us anything other than that your definition of God includes a singularity requirement. If I were to tell you that my definition of God includes a “cannot abide black licorice and only created it to give an example of absolute evil,” I suspect you’d be unimpressed with my assertion of a required attribute of God.
God is commonly defined, inter alia, as the creator of the universe, and from this it follows that he must be pure act.
HBC:
And the problem of evil is taken seriously? First time I’ve heard that. Theological scholars certainly take it seriously.
(Some) theological scholars take the weak problem of evil (“The level of evil we see makes it unlikely that God exists”) seriously. The strong problem of evil (“The existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God”) generally isn’t taken seriously anymore.
@Mr. X:
Does God experience time? I can tell how to respond to you better if I know what your answer to that question is.
To put my question in more context: Can future-God communicate with past-God? (This is not necessarily a yes-or-no question, I understand that, and if your answer is neither yes or no it will still provide me with useful understanding of your position.)
@ The original Mr. X:
He is not an expert on “anti-apologetics”. He does not speak as an expert on “anti-apologetics”.
As I said repeatedly, he mainly speaks as an advocate for atheism being a reasonable view that shouldn’t be shunned by society. In doing so, he refutes some common arguments which are the basis for most people’s belief in God. That suffices to show that atheism is at least more reasonable than the kind of Christianity the majority of people believe in.
He has probably not deeply investigated the scholastic arguments for the existence of God. He sees no reason to. One doesn’t have time to examine all the bullshit out there in the world. How deeply have you examined Buddhism or Taoism? Even if you have examined them, I’m sure I can point to numerous religions that you haven’t.
Fringe philosophers like Edward Feser (or whoever) do not count as representatives of the modern philosophical consensus. You can find someone to argue for any view in any field.
Now, I myself often disagree with the modern philosophical consensus. I’m not saying you ought to take it on authority. I’m saying there’s plenty of people out there to read who will more thoroughly overturn every element of Catholic Scholasticism than Richard Dawkins. The cosmological argument, etc. is based on bad philosophical premises and wild assumptions like the matter/potentiality/individuality vs. form/actuality/universality split. Go to Descartes and continue from there.
I don’t know. For one thing, free will is completely incompatible with Christianity on multiple grounds. That it conflicts with God’s omniscience and Plan is the most obvious one.
The doctrine of original sin also contradicts free will, at least if one does not accept the heresy of Pelagianism. Original sin says people can’t avoid sinning yet deserve hell for sinning.
The idea that heaven is a “supererogatory” benefit that humanity doesn’t “really deserve”—so God can take it away without doing an injustice—is clever but stupid. In the real world with limitations, yes, a rich man has no obligation to help out random poor people who haven’t done anything to deserve it. But if he could—at no cost to himself—completely alleviate poverty forever but refused, he would be evil and actively malicious.
Moreover, the Greeks did not connect virtue to free will at all. That is a modern development (one which I think is good). To the Greeks, virtue meant “excellence of function”. They would speak of a virtuous tree or a virtuous horse. I’m less certain about inanimate objects (they may have differed on this), but even there I don’t see why effective medicine is not virtuous medicine in that sense.
“Hell is the natural consequence of rejecting God’s love” is the motte. “Hell is the pit of fire” is the bailey. Go read the Church Fathers and see if you find anyone giving a C.S. Lewis type line about how hell is just separation from God. They are very clear that hell is a place where God actively tortures sinners.
But that’s less important. The main point is “Yes, absolutely!” God should force his love upon others. With a rapist a) love has nothing to do with it, he’s forcing sex upon others, b) he is not a perfect being, and c) he can’t make the other person love him.
God could just make everyone love God, automatically. If God really existed, you’d be a fucking idiot to want to go to hell. No one could rationally choose that if he really understood the consequences. It’s only the incomprehension of or disbelief in hell that leads people to reject God. Deliberately choosing hell would be insane, and you ought to be kept out of it for your own good. After all, we don’t let children (or even adults) choose to shoot themselves with a gun; and if God existed, we would all be children compared to him.
And the badness of hell is really irrelevant to whether God is good. If Joseph Stalin were the omnipotent cosmic dictator of the universe and could inflict a eternal punishment on me, I would do what he says. I would rather die than slavishly serve Stalin all my life. But I would rather serve Stalin all my life than go to hell, no matter what he wanted me to do.
If the Christian God actually existed and perpetrated the atrocities of the Bible, I would regard him as a much more evil dictator than Stalin. But I would still do what he says. And since he can read my thoughts, I would even try to love him. Luckily, he doesn’t exist.
This is beside my point. I didn’t mean that “monotheism” is what you’d expect desert savages to invent. Maybe the Jews were clever on that one. Who cares?
My actual point was that the morality of Judaism is barbaric and primitive, and the God it worships is indistinguishable from a Bronze Age despot. Which makes sense because he’s “just like a king, but king of the whole universe!”
Suspiciously, one that is nothing like the Christian God. In the case of Aristotle, the Prime Mover is completely impotent and oblivious of the world. He “causes” motion essentially by inspiration but not through action or personal creativity and did not create the universe. Arguably, Aristotle also believed that there were really 47 to 55 Prime Movers (to account for all the planetary motions).
Why did Greek philosophy tend to converge on monotheism? Because the basis of philosophy and science is trying to find a smaller number of things that explain the world, rather than giving in to irreducible complexity. The problem is that the Christian God (unlike the Aristotlelian God) is a a bad explanation because it imbues him with superfluous elements like having a personality and loving humanity, which are inconsistent with the facts we observe in the world.
Of course, polytheism is primitive because it doesn’t get the unified principles behind things. But it’s not contradictory to the facts they understood at the time. And the polytheistic gods of Greece moreover have a limited, definite nature and obey causal laws—which they understood in a primitive way as Fate being more powerful than the gods.
Dismissal of what? The Trinity? I was merely arguing that the Muslims are more consistently monotheistic; I certainly don’t endorse their position.
But sure, I reject the Trinity because it’s a logical absurdity. This was one of the crucial debates in early Christianity. You basically had a split between the more pro-reason and the more pro-faith sides (on many other issues as well), and on the matter of the Trinity they consistently rejected every natural and rational interpretation of how three could be one. They proclaimed the official view that it is a Mystery incomprehensible to man.
These do not conflict with each other. I don’t know why you think they do.
Judaism did not endanger Roman society (outside of Palestine rebelling) because it did not appeal to and did not seek to convert Romans. Christianity was dangerous to the Roman status quo because it was a movement designed to and very successful at converting Romans.
It’s quite like how Marxism is a secularized version of Christianity, which made it more appealing to the Chinese, which made it more dangerous to China than Christianity.
Only because no one ever explains just how God is supposed to be infinite.
Anyway, for Spinoza it’s not physical at all. You say that you are not God. But you are therefore limiting God. To define something and to explain the nature of it is to limit it; to say what it is is to say what it is not. To say A is A is to say A is not non-A.
Yes, and the result of any reasonable and unprejudiced sort of analysis of all the things like the world flooding or the Jews being liberated from Egypt en masse is that they didn’t happen.
I’m not saying the Bible has no elements of truth. I believe that someone resembling the Biblical Jesus existed. I also believe that something resembling the Trojan War happened. But I believe he was the son of God about as much as I believe that the Trojan War was instigated by the Judgment of Paris.
That a man existed or that a war happened is an ordinary claim requiring ordinary evidence.
That the man was the son of God (and also God at the same time, naturally) or that the war was caused by the intervention of gods is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
Yes, because the miracles are very low-quality. These days it’s always something like curing a disease we don’t really understand. In other words, it’s always something plausibly deniable. Like when the CIA kills somebody and makes it look like an accident.
How come God doesn’t turn people into pillars of salt anymore? Again, that wouldn’t automatically make me believe in the Christian God over aliens or something. But it would definitely convince me that some unnatural shit was going on.
@Vox:
You’re flip-flopping all over the place now.
Does Dawkins have some airtight logical disproof of God, or is he just saying that we don’t need to assume God to explain the universe? If the former, why has he never given this disproof, instead of relying on much weaker balance-of-probabilities arguments? If the latter, how could his dogmatic refusal to consider any new evidence possibly be justified?
Plus, you keep claiming that Dawkins was only taking aim at the unsophisticated layman’s conception of God, but Dawkins himself specifically said that that isn’t the case. Let’s look at the quote again:
“This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, on that would otherwise – as sure as night follows day – turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is designed to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.”
I’m not sure why you keep trying to mount this defence, when it’s quite clearly contradicted by Dawkins’ own explicit words.
How deeply have you examined Buddhism or Taoism? Even if you have examined them, I’m sure I can point to numerous religions that you haven’t.
I’ve never written any books on “The Buddhism Delusion”, nor gone on record saying that nothing could possibly count as evidence for Taoism. If I did, I’d make darn sure to read up on these religions before I started spouting off about them.
Now, I myself often disagree with the modern philosophical consensus. I’m not saying you ought to take it on authority. I’m saying there’s plenty of people out there to read who will more thoroughly overturn every element of Catholic Scholasticism than Richard Dawkins. The cosmological argument, etc. is based on bad philosophical premises and wild assumptions like the matter/potentiality/individuality vs. form/actuality/universality split. Go to Descartes and continue from there.
I know enough about philosophy (Catholic scholastic and otherwise) to know that mater vs. form and act vs. potency aren’t “wild assumptions”, so you’ll forgive me if I take the rest of your characterisation with a grain of salt.
I don’t know. For one thing, free will is completely incompatible with Christianity on multiple grounds. That it conflicts with God’s omniscience and Plan is the most obvious one.
It’s only “incompatible” if you assume that God is inside of time, which plenty of theologians don’t.
Honestly, this isn’t some recondite and abstruse matter. C. S. pigging Lewis deals with your objection.
God could just make everyone love God, automatically.
In what meaningful sense would that be “love”?
Suspiciously, one that is nothing like the Christian God. In the case of Aristotle, the Prime Mover is completely impotent and oblivious of the world. He “causes” motion essentially by inspiration but not through action or personal creativity and did not create the universe. Arguably, Aristotle also believed that there were really 47 to 55 Prime Movers (to account for all the planetary motions).
You’re moving the goalposts. You said that polytheism is better than monotheism, not that one brand of monotheism is better than another brand of monotheism.
Plus, if you want a God of the Philosophers that looks a lot like the Christian God, check out the Neo-Platonists. Their God was even triune and everything.
These do not conflict with each other. I don’t know why you think they do.
Well, for one thing, if they were willing to change their religion to make it acceptable to the Romans, you’d think that they’d, y’know, change their religion to make it acceptable to the Romans. Not change it a bit, then suddenly get really dogmatic and choose death over tossing a bit of incense in a fire.
That the man was the son of God (and also God at the same time, naturally) or that the war was caused by the intervention of gods is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
What do you mean by “an extraordinary claim” and “extraordinary evidence”?
Yes, because the miracles are very low-quality. These days it’s always something like curing a disease we don’t really understand. In other words, it’s always something plausibly deniable. Like when the CIA kills somebody and makes it look like an accident.
Suddenly curing a woman with suppurating sores all over her face hardly sounds like “low-quality” to me. Plus, even if God did turn somebody into salt, you can bet people would demand more. Heck even the Second Coming wouldn’t be enough for Dawkins.
Re: Hell. It’s ironic to be quoting “trite anti-Christian propaganda” in favor of the religious side, but I do think Neil’s attitude in Hell is the Absence of God is a very realistic one:
@ The original Mr. X:
I never said Dawkins claims to have an airtight logical disproof of God. You are reading that into my comment. (I said only that there exist some atheist arguments against God.)
As far as I know, Dawkins doesn’t claim this because it’s unnecessary. He claims only to disbelieve the alleged “airtight logical proofs” of God. And the existence of God is such an extraordinary claim that the only evidence that would convince him is such a proof—seeing as how even if every event depicted in the Bible were true, aliens would be a better explanation. But Dawkins can’t think of anything which would convince him that such an “airtight logical proof” was true.
That’s my understanding of what he would say, in any case. On the other hand, maybe he really is (as you suggest) a dogmatic idiot who rejects God for no reason. But then it’s just “weak-manning” to attack him because you’re attacking the stupid argument instead of much stronger argument another atheist could take.
Moreover, you’re equivocating between “won’t consider the evidence in front of him” and “won’t continually seek out more bullshit to wade through”. If you refuse to believe something even when it’s proved to you rationally, that’s dogmatism. If you refuse to look deeper into a field from which you’ve heard nothing but nonsense and obscurantism, that’s quite understandable.
You keep going back to this quote where he says he’s not only attacking the “bearded old man”. Sure, he rejects religion in all forms. He’s seen nothing but bad from it and doesn’t care to look further into it in the faint hope that under all the shit there will be a diamond.
But he does not claim to be an expert on “anti-apologetics”, as I said. He just doesn’t. He is much more intent on promoting atheism as acceptable in society.
If he did claim to be such an expert, that would be stupid. I don’t think he does. But if he does, then you can validly say, “Ah, Dawkins, you are correct to reject the religious beliefs of 99% of Christians. But 1% of them really have good arguments for their beliefs. Until you look at the experts’ arguments more deeply, you can’t claim to have conclusively refuted every single argument for God.” And Dawkins would have to respond to that and retract his claim of being an expert.
The assertion that Christianity is true is equivalent to the assertion that Buddhism and Taoism are false. In fact, that they are widespread delusions. You are asserting that Christianity is true. But you haven’t looked into all the arguments for the positions that contradict it.
Of course, it would be impossible to do so. I think there’s not much reason for you to read centuries of Buddhist scholarship. And no one who ever wrote a book arguing for Christianity ever looked into the full writings of every other religion—it can’t be done.
Neither do I think that Dawkins is under any obligation to read centuries of Christian apologetics in order to write a book attacking one more religion than any Christian author attacks when he defends Christianity. He would only have to do that if he claimed to be an expert on every religion, but only an idiot would do that. He doesn’t have to study Christianity in depth to assert that God is a delusion any more than he has to study Sikhism, which he rejects just as equally.
The matter/potentiality/individuality – form/actuality/universality split is at best very controversial in philosophy. The belief that it is some obvious fact is completely discredited.
Scholasticism and that sort of naive Aristotelianism is a fringe position in philosophy. Objectivism is also a fringe position in philosophy, despite the fact that I agree with most of it. The fact that there are tenured Objectivist philosophers at reputable universities does not change this.
I therefore do not expect people to agree—without argument—with idiosyncratic metaphysical presumptions made by Objectivism.
My main point, though, was that if you want to attack atheism, you’d do better to attack e.g. the modern rejection of universal teleology, than to attack Dawkins. Dawkins is not an academic, and he is not an expert on philosophy. Atheism seems obvious to Dawkins because of the philosophic premises he implicitly holds, which he has picked up by cultural osmosis.
I’ve read C.S. Lewis. He deals with it poorly.
It is irrelevant to the argument whether God is within time. You’re screwed either way. If God is in time, it’s obvious that his foreknowledge rules out free will.
If God is not in time, the situation is actually even worse. The only way God can exist outside of time is if eternalism (AKA four-dimensionalism) is true. That is, time (as Augustine argued) is not a real process of change but a subjective aspect of experience. Not only the present exists, but the past and future also exist. That’s why God can see them all at once. God can see the future you because the future you is just as real as the present you.
But if this is true, it is completely “set in stone” what you will do in the future. There is a fact of the matter about what you will do in the future, and therefore you cannot do otherwise.
Aristotle knew about this problem. It’s called the “sea battle” problem, or the problem of future contingents. The problem is: tomorrow, either there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, is it not true now and eternally that there will be a sea battle tomorrow? But if that’s the case, we don’t have free will.
Aristotle’s conclusion was that propositions about future contingents were neither true nor false. But if he’s right, God could not know future contingents.
This was very big in scholastic philosophy. It’s why people like Aquinas (not even to mention Augustine) did not really believe in free will. They were compatibilists, i.e. those who simply redefine “free will” to be compatible with complete determinism and predestination. There were those who disagreed: Pelagius (not a scholastic, of course) did, as well as the excellent but obscure Peter John Olivi. But they did not have a solution to the problem of how God knows future contingents because there isn’t one.
Who cares? It would be love in the sense that dogs “love” their masters.
Besides, what’s so good about freely choosing to love someone, anyway? It’s not “inherently good” that as humans we love people who freely choose to love us; it’s just that we do have free will and therefore love to see it in others.
Why does God want people to love him, anyway? Aristotle argued much more consistently that a perfect being wouldn’t want or need anything.
I’m not moving any goalposts. You attack irrelevant parts of my argument and try to make it about trivial minutiae, then I redirect to my main point.
But I very clearly was attacking the kind of monotheism that believes the universe is “ruled by a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who orders everything according to his own Plan.” This is not at all Aristotelian monotheism.
As for neo-Platonism, sure: neo-Platonism was the final decay and collapse of Greek philosophy, and it was just as awful and mystical (but more pseudo-intellectual) as Christianity. Besides, that’s where the Church Fathers stole most of Christian metaphysics from, anyway. It wasn’t until Aquinas that they started ripping off Aristotle (which was a very beneficial development, by the way).
I don’t hold it against Aquinas for being Catholic (or inheriting some bad ideas from Aristotle). He was a great thinker for his time and made much progress against the rampant mysticism of Platonist Christianity. I hold it against the people today who still are followers of Aquinas!
As I said, refusal to worship other gods was one of the main reasons for Christianity’s success. Not only is it good marketing: “Wow, look how dedicated these people are that they are willing to die for their faith! They must be really certain of it!”
But also, you don’t drive out the competition by being interchangeable. Business does this all the time. That’s why when Columbia released 45 RPM records, they made the hole in the middle bigger than on 33s: so you cannot play them on the same jukebox. That encourages people to make the jump to going full-45 and locks them into the system.
If you convert to Christianity and have to forsake your pagan friends and their gods, you’re now locked in to Christianity and its social support network, and you can’t leave.
That some rabble-rousing street preacher existed is a very plausible claim. I have many examples of such people at hand. That he was the son of God is not: every other person (of thousands) who claimed to be the son of a god was not.
I believe Jesus existed because I think he was basically in the same category as David Koresh.
The problem is that sudden cures of mysterious medical conditions happen all the time to Christians and non-Christians alike. Moreover, millions more Christians pray to God to cure their diseases, but he doesn’t. (“God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy”)
Francis Bacon (back in the days when to criticize Christianity, you had to pretend to be criticizing paganism) famously told the story of a man who went to the temple of Poseidon. The priest told him: “Look at all the icons here! Every single one was commissioned by a sailor who was saved from drowning because he prayed to Poseidon.” But the man replied: “Yes, but where are the icons of them that drowned displayed?”
@ jeorgun:
Yes, and such a view would be literally the most short-sighted and irrational view you could have. If there’s ever a case for paternalism, it’s here.
@Vox:
That’s my understanding of what he would say, in any case. On the other hand, maybe he really is (as you suggest) a dogmatic idiot who rejects God for no reason. But then it’s just “weak-manning” to attack him because you’re attacking the stupid argument instead of much stronger argument another atheist could take.
The discussion was about Richard Dawkins, not atheism in general. How on earth is it “weak-manning” to attack an argument Richard Dawkins made in a thread about Richard Dawkins and his arguments?
Plus, let’s look at what you said upthread:
I think he means is that no empirical observation, such as of a booming voice from the heavens, would convince him. Given that he holds all the philosophical arguments for God’s existence to be incredibly flimsy, and given all the massive self-contradictions and insoluble dilemmas posed by God’s existence. If he’s right on those philosophical points, it would be more likely that aliens were playing tricks or that he was insane than that God actually did exist as the cause of the booming voice in the heavens,
So, “massive self-contradictions and insoluble dilemmas posed by God’s existence”. A tad stronger than just “there’s no positive evidence”. And, since you used it as a justification for Richard Dawkins rejecting empirical evidence – not some generic atheist, Richard Dawkins specifically – it again puts you in a dilemma: either Richard Dawkins knows some argument proving that the notion of God is self-contradictory, in which case it’s hard to see why he’s never used it; or he doesn’t, in which case his a priori rejection of contradictory evidence is unjustified.
You keep going back to this quote where he says he’s not only attacking the “bearded old man”.
I keep going back to it because it completely contradicts your assertion that Dawkins is only aiming at the fundie creationist-type God. I’m not sure why you’re so set on defending Dawkins, a man whose works you’ve apparently never read, but if the only way you can defend him is by ignoring his clear and explicit statements of intent, maybe he’s not worth defending.
The matter/potentiality/individuality – form/actuality/universality split is at best very controversial in philosophy. The belief that it is some obvious fact is completely discredited.
“Not some obvious fact” =/= “a wild assumption”. Most scientific theories aren’t obvious, but it doesn’t follow that evolution or gravity are just wild assumptions and we shouldn’t base any arguments off them.
That some rabble-rousing street preacher existed is a very plausible claim. I have many examples of such people at hand. That he was the son of God is not: every other person (of thousands) who claimed to be the son of a god was not.
I asked about extraordinariness, not plausibility.
The problem is that sudden cures of mysterious medical conditions happen all the time to Christians and non-Christians alike. Moreover, millions more Christians pray to God to cure their diseases, but he doesn’t. (“God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy”)
Francis Bacon (back in the days when to criticize Christianity, you had to pretend to be criticizing paganism) famously told the story of a man who went to the temple of Poseidon. The priest told him: “Look at all the icons here! Every single one was commissioned by a sailor who was saved from drowning because he prayed to Poseidon.” But the man replied: “Yes, but where are the icons of them that drowned displayed?”
Why should I expect you to recognise a miracle if/when you see one? You said above that “even if every event depicted in the Bible were true, aliens would be a better explanation”, so why should I trust you not to just come up with a load of false negatives?
@ The original Mr. X:
I’m quite sure Dawkins has heard of arguments like the problem of evil, and I think he very likely agrees with them, even if he’s not an expert.
He does not (or did not) feel qualified to present such an argument in his book, but apparently he does believe some such argument. You are not attacking his book; you are attacking statements he made off-the-cuff in an interview, where people are entitled to say things they aren’t prepared to defend in print.
In his book, he felt satisfied with saying it’s a matter of evidence and God’s existence is extraordinarily unlikely.
Do you understand the difference between “he’s aiming only at the fundie God” and “he’s mainly concerned with attacking the fundie God”?
He dislikes and rejects all religion. But he thinks the unsophisticated version is more prevalent and more dangerous, and that’s mainly what he argues against. It’s on the basis of the unsophisticated kind that atheists were made for centuries to hide their beliefs or face social ostracism. He takes umbrage at that.
I’m defending him because I sympathize with where he’s coming from and don’t think he should be demonized as some kind of hack. That is the mentality that gets “open advocacy of atheism” characterized as the province of “fedora-wearing edgelords”. I don’t appreciate that.
I haven’t read his stuff because I don’t need to be told that atheism is a reasonable view you oughtn’t be ashamed to hold. But many people do, and Dawkins et al. are very valuable for them.
In my opinion—and in the opinion of the majority of philosophers—it is a wild assumption. But you in this thread have expected people to be familiar with it and accept it—presenting no arguments for it—which suggests you think it is an obvious fact.
If it’s not an obvious fact, you have to argue for it. You can’t just say clearly God is all actuality and expect people just to buy it.
It’s implausible because it’s extraordinary.
What do I mean by “extraordinary”? Well, as a miracle it violates natural law, human biology, etc. There are no other confirmed cases. It would cause me to have rethink a very large number of settled conclusions which I believe are valid and which were based on evidence. That kind of thing.
What are you looking for here? Do you really not understand that there is a tougher burden of proof to show someone was the son of a god than to show he existed but was conceived in the natural way?
Do you really not understand how “magically curing cancer” is not a convincing miracle—given that it happens to many people who do not pray to saints—or you just being obstinate?
If everyone in ISIS turned to salt, and a message appeared in the sky saying “I am the LORD thy God”, and an angelic being with wings became Pope, I would definitely turn all my attention to investigating Christianity. Trust me.
(On the other hand, someone 50,000 years from now would have no cause to believe it. You can’t just reveal everything once.)
But if the arguments about the incompatibility of free will and Christianity, about the problem of evil, and so on still seemed convincing to me—and none of these miracles would change that fact—I would still be more inclined to go with “aliens”. Given the fact that a really loving God wouldn’t create a world like this and do the kind of thing he supposedly did in the Bible (for instance), aliens would be a better explanation.
If you wanted to change my mind on that, you would have to respond to the philosophical arguments—like the problem of future contingents which you ignored.
On the other hand, obliterating ISIS would be a good start toward making this the best of all possible worlds, so in such a world I would have a little more confidence in God’s benevolence. Not much, though.
Your type of attitude is contradicted by the Bible itself. Plenty of people in the Bible (e.g. Doubting Thomas) doubt God until he comes down and does some really amazing miracle to change their minds. He even did a freaking controlled experiment against the priests of Ba’al. If it was good enough for Thomas, who didn’t believe in the Resurrection after ten of his friends told him it happened, it’s good enough for me, too. Let Jesus come and visit me; we’ll have a little philosophical chat.
The idea that Hell is just absence from God doesn’t make sense considering the things that get you sent to Hell. People such as gays, atheists, Muslims (if Hell is Christian) and people who use contraception (if Hell is Catholic) get sent to Hell because they “don’t want to be in the presence of God”. But they haven’t actually said that–rather, the religious believer says “anyone who does one of those things obviously doesn’t want to be in the presence of God. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t say it–they don’t. See? It’s their own fault, they rejected God, not the other way around!” The believer makes no room for honest disagreement–if you’re an atheist, you “don’t want to be in the presence of God”–it isn’t possible for someone to be an atheist who doesn’t believe God exists, but doesn’t mind being in his presence if he does.
Does it *really* make any sense to say that someone “doesn’t want to be in the presence of God” if they examined the ontological argument and found it logically invalid? Or if they were unfortunate enough to be raised as the wrong religion and didn’t convert before they died?
I don’t think most Christian denominations outside cartoon land actually think people go to hell for using contraception or something really minor like that. At the very least, you can get out if you repent.
I’m defending him because I sympathize with where he’s coming from and don’t think he should be demonized as some kind of hack. That is the mentality that gets “open advocacy of atheism” characterized as the province of “fedora-wearing edgelords”. I don’t appreciate that.
I haven’t read his stuff because I don’t need to be told that atheism is a reasonable view you oughtn’t be ashamed to hold. But many people do, and Dawkins et al. are very valuable for them.
The reason he gets “demonised as a hack” is that he is a hack, and a dishonest one to boot; see, for example, NN’s post above: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/03/ot39-appian-thread/#comment-297153
Now, if you want to defend this hack because he’s on your side and you think his truthiness leads to good outcomes, that’s your prerogative. Personally I come to SSC to get away from that sort of arguments-as-soldiers thinking, but each to their own, I suppose.
Does it *really* make any sense to say that someone “doesn’t want to be in the presence of God” if they examined the ontological argument and found it logically invalid? Or if they were unfortunate enough to be raised as the wrong religion and didn’t convert before they died?
No, which is why Christians don’t in general say that.
Well, I don’t appreciate this kind of bullshit nitpicking where people take one line out of a non-academic book and call someone a dishonest hack for it being wrong on some minor point.
Especially when the clear intent of his statement was “terrorists blow people up in no small part because they’re Muslim”—no doubt true—but the author chose to express it more poetically. Meaning that he’s not even wrong at all, even “technically”.
Look at this paragraph again:
Does any reasonable person take this this to be a literal description of how he thinks madrasahs work? They nod their little heads up and down at every word? But Dawkins is a big dumb idiot because that’s a “laughable explanation of how childhood learning works?
I guess someone ought to call Scott Alexander a hack because coordination problems are not caused by a Carthaginian god.
Muslim children are taught that duty to God exceeds all other priorities. They are taught that martyrdom will be rewarded. They are expected to memorize the Koran. And this is all mainstream.
Whether this makes them “demented parrots” is a question of poetic license.
Moreover, the finding that a formal, non-extremist Islamic education is associated with a lesser propensity toward terrorism is not incompatible with anything Dawkins asserts there. Maybe it’s a demographic confounder. Maybe formal Islamic education leads people to see how Islam is too stupid to take completely seriously. If religion is false, it’s not too crazy to expect that the more you know about, the more of its bad elements you will rationalize away.
And the fact that suicide bombers kill people because they believe in Islam is not incompatible with the possibility that others who believe in Islam will not kill people.
If you don’t support arguments-as-soldiers, perhaps you shouldn’t call people “hacks” because they disagree with you, even if they don’t express every opinion in the linguistic format of the driest legal review article.
@Zykrom:
How familiar are you with the various sects of conservative protestant religion in the US and what they teach?
For instance, abortion is believed to be murder, and many consider certain forms of contraception to be abortion (notwithstanding medical evidence to the contrary). Are you familiar with the concept of a “hell house”, which some Christian churches put on before Halloween? These show all manner of things that merit going to hell.
Plus, in most Protestant Christian sects, you go to hell for merely existing. Only “by the grace of God” do you gain entry into heaven. So, to some extent, there is no action that doesn’t merit us going to hell.
Unlike you, I have actually read TGD, and the rest of the book is exactly like the portion NN quoted.
Nevertheless, I’m sure that you, a person who’s never actually read Dawkins’ work, have a better grasp on what he’s actually saying than all the other posters here who have read him and find his anti-theistic screeds tedious and sloppy.
What they do say entails it.
Yes, they pay lip service to the idea that there are honest people outside the Church who have never heard of or been exposed to the Gospel. But this clearly doesn’t apply to most atheists in the Western world.
And since they say “no salvation outside the Church”, it’s really hard to see how this happens even for the virtuous heathens. Bailey: “no one gets to heaven except by being a visible part of the Church”. Motte: “well, I mean being somehow metaphorically part of the Church even though you don’t believe in God or anything”.
Most seriously, it also sets up another paradox: the problem of evangelism. Either your odds of being saved are a) better if you hear about the Gospel than if you don’t, b) better if you are ignorant of the Gospel, or c) the same either way.
In the case of a), God is unjust because he’s more likely to send people to hell just because of something that is no fault of their own. With b), evangelism is actively harmful and should be opposed at all costs. And with c), evangelism is just irrelevant.
Thus the famous line about the eskimo and the priest:
@HeelBearCub
I was raised as a conservative protestant. The idea is that you don’t get condemned for any particular sin, you get condemned for failing to repent. So a lot of things are bad, but it doesn’t really make sense to say you “go to hell for” them, because anyone who will repent and embrace Jesus will be forgiven anyway, and anyone who doesn’t will not no matter what else they do.
@ Vox Imperatoris
The troll answer the the evangelism thing would be that even if evangelism isn’t good for the recipient, you still have to do it. Kind of like those chain letters that curse you if you don’t forward them to your friends.
@Vox Imperatoris: Unlike Mr. X, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mr. Dawkins a “dishonest hack,” because I find that his writing is quite good when he writes about his areas of expertise. But there is simply no defending the quoted statement. No matter how much you appeal to “he was only expressing things poetically,” Dawkins claimed that madrasahs, even moderate ones, at the very least make people more likely to become suicide bombers. And this is plainly, factually incorrect.
It isn’t incompatible with the fact that he explicitly and specifically states that “suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools?” If he just wanted to claim that there was a general association between Islam and terrorism, then why even bring up madrasahs at all? Why specifically mention “decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors?”
Ask yourself honestly: would you be coming up with ad-hoc hypotheses to explain away the data if studies had found that madrasah attendance had a positive association with support for terrorism?
When you say “suicide bombers,” do you include the Hindu suicide bombers employed by the Tamil Tigers, the Orthodox Christian suicide bombers employed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots, the Chinese soldiers who joined “Dare to Die Corps” during various wars in the first half of the 20th century, and the anarchist suicide bomber who assassinated Alexander II of Russia? How about Joseph Stack and Samuel Byck?
I have heard that Dawkins and other “angry atheists” have helped a number of atheists, particularly those from religious backgrounds, come to terms with their identities. That’s certainly a good thing. But I think those people would be better served if Dawkins spent more time expressing why atheism is a reasonable view that you oughtn’t be ashamed to hold and spent less time on armchair speculations about the real-world sociological effects of religion, a subject where he is clearly out of his depth.
@Zykrom:
“So a lot of things are bad, but it doesn’t really make sense to say you “go to hell for” them, because anyone who will repent and embrace Jesus will be forgiven anyway, and anyone who doesn’t will not no matter what else they do.”
I don’t think is actually helping the case that you don’t go to hell for minor offenses, whatever they are.
In other words, protesting that no one holds the view that you go to hell for using contraception (while maintaining that it is a sin akin to murder) and that you are going to hell anyway unless you repent of that sin and all others … well that is sort of a distinction without a difference, isn’t it?
If you get sent to hell for literally anything up to and including existing, it doesn’t make sense to say people are getting sent to hell for any particular sin. “salvation through grace, not works” ect.
@Zykrom:
Here is your original quote.
“I don’t think most Christian denominations outside cartoon land actually think people go to hell for using contraception or something really minor like that. At the very least, you can get out if you repent.”
It’s not cartoon land where some evangelical Christians regard contraception as abortion as, therefore, murder.
And you go to hell for literally everything, no matter how minor.
I mean, I understand what you are saying. If the only way to go to heaven is through Christ, then how can we really condemn any particular sin? It’s a non-starter. God will judge, not man.
But I think your original statement really downplays how strict some faiths are. Why do you think that Jehovah’s Witnesses will let their children die rather than receive a blood transfusion? Repenting of sin isn’t a get out of jail free card. It doesn’t change the gravity of sin. Some adherents take their faith extremely seriously and really do think that specific actions, even one’s we would consider “minor” put their eternal soul at risk.
Fair enough.
@ NN:
To me it sounds like he said consistent belief in Islam, a religion taught in madrasahs, makes people more likely to become suicide bombers.
If madrasahs do what they are supposed to do: make people take Islam really seriously, they’re bad. If they don’t: they’re contrary to their own purpose.
Presumably because the moderates enable the extremists. If the moderates did not sufficiently prepare the culture—directly or indirectly—there would be no audience for the extremists. The moderates say that the Koran is the word of God, but “ignore the parts about killing unbelievers”. The extremists tell people to take it all seriously.
Though it’s certainly possible that if you get indoctrinated by the moderates long enough, they’ll teach you how to rationalize away all the arguments for fundamentalism. It seems to be a recurring theme in religion that the more educated and sophisticated people get, the less their beliefs resemble the book they’re allegedly based on.
No, probably not.
I believe that Islam is false. Therefore, I believe it’s got to be harmful in some way. That’s because I think operating on the basis of the truth, as a general rule, is valuable.
There are many insane ideologies that lead to suicide bombing. Islam is one of them. (Nor is suicide bombing inherently wrong, for that matter. I’m much more sympathetic to Joseph Stack than to ISIS, even though I don’t think his action was effective in combating the IRS.)
I’m not saying you have to be a Muslim to be a suicide bomber. I’m saying it’s the most dangerous such cause in the world today. If Islam magically vanished, there would be fewer suicide bombings. Yes, to a large extent people would find other reasons to kill each other—but I don’t think the substitution rate on destructive ideologies is 100%.
Fair enough. And your objections are reasonable, overall.
But there’s different kinds of books out there, at different levels of “epistemic status” (as Scott says).
For instance, take Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism, a defense of classical liberalism mainly from the perspective of economics. There are parts of the book that are more rigorously argued. But then there are parts where he does things like suggest (with lots of reliance on Freud) psychological reasons leading people to oppose capitalism. A tamer excerpt:
Now, he doesn’t prove any of this. He’s sort of talking out his ass. But it’s fun to read and not completely implausible. The book is more interesting for having things like that in it, even if some of his hypotheses are not true. And that’s what you have to regard them as: suggestions he thinks are likely, not proven facts.
Of course, this kind of thing, or the paragraph from Dawkins you quoted, would certainly not be acceptable in a modern academic journal article. There, you’ve got to cite everything controversial, and you can’t overstate anything.
But a little overstatement and punditry aren’t so bad in a book written for a popular audience. Sometimes you want to hear an author speak his mind freely and not have to cower before he says anything controversial, loading everything with “perhaps” and “it may be”. That’s part of what Dawkins et al. stand for: being able to say bad things about religion—even if it’s overstated—without having ten thousand angry letters come in demanding you retract your statements or be taken off the air.
@ HeelBearCub:
Exactly. It doesn’t necessarily make sense why you should be so terrified of sinning under Christianity—especially in the popular versions that make belief in Christ practically a get-out-of-jail-free card. But people still are anyway, and it makes them quite stressed much of the time.
One of my great aunts was terrified that her husband had gone to hell because he sometimes “took the lord’s name in vain”. I mean, really worried about this in the manner you would expect if you took hell seriously.
Another wouldn’t eat any of my grandmother’s fruitcake cookies because they were baked with a small amount of rum. She really thought that this could lead to hell.
The best case I can make for it is: you should be terrified of sinning, even if you trust in God, because sin leads you away from God. Therefore, you can’t just eat one little fruitcake cookie or say “Jesus Christ!” when you stub your toe, because that leads you on the path to becoming a Confirmed Infidel.
Yes, you could always commit all the sins you want and repent on your deathbed, but if you try that, you will become so callous that by the time you’re dying you won’t even care to repent. And maybe you’ll die in a car accident and not get the chance to repent. (Though why exactly God is more merciful to people who die slowly, I don’t know.)
@ Zykrom:
That is the troll answer to the paradox of evangelism.
Evangelical religion, in my opinion, has much in common with the chain letter. The only question in my mind is why it took so long for one to really take off. Judaism, for instance, doesn’t really have the concept of heaven and hell, and there is no mission to convert everybody.
@Vox:
I am probably more on your side in arguments about God than not. When it comes Dawkins, however, and his arguments about God, I really think you need to actually read what he has written.
The reason I say this is that he states unequivocally in “The God Delusion” that he is trying to talk to theists and convince them that they should not be. And then he precedes to call theists idiots and infants and heap other insults on those who believe. As an atheist myself, he made me less sympathetic to atheism, not more.
Now, that’s all a conversation about tone more than substance. And certainly there are those who will be persuaded that if Dawkins can openly mock theists that it is safe to come out of the atheist closet. Perhaps his approach is necessary for some, but I chose not to praise him for it.
If one wants to approach the Christian tradition with a critical eye, far better to read Bart Ehrman who calmly takes apart the bible piece by piece, with the knowledge of one who is a Biblical scholar and once was a biblical literalist.
@ HeelBearCub:
It’s not that I haven’t read anything by Dawkins. I just haven’t read a whole book. And in writing this thread, I did look at several reviews and summaries of The God Delusion—the way I usually investigate books, since I do not have time to read the majority of books I hear about.
But because of this, I’ll put The God Delusion on my list and let you know if I was terribly mistaken about him. The Selfish Gene is already on my list.
Sure, though, I agree that Richard Dawkins is far from the most sophisticated presenter of atheism. For one, I have read some of his arguments for why atheism doesn’t undermine objective morality, and they’re pretty bad. As I recall, he tends to conflate the issue of explaining why in general people would have to be be moral in any functioning society, with why people should be moral on an individual level.
And there are many areas of philosophy where I disagree with him.
I just think there is some merit in the approach (pioneered by Thomas Paine two centuries earlier) of metaphorically slapping people in the face and saying: “Your religion is stupid!”
A lot of the time, you get bogged down in tiny details and lose sight of the fact that we’re talking about just an absurdly primitive mythology that was grafted onto a Greco-Roman philosophical tradition that gives it a much greater sense of grandeur than it deserves. That’s what’s fun about reading deists: they point out, as atheists often fail to do, that none of the grand philosophical arguments provide one iota of support to Christianity in particular.
“During the Crusades, the Muslim word for Christian was “polytheist”.””
I believe the term is usually translated “splitter.” And they also referred to them as “Nazarenes.”
@ David Friedman:
I really can’t remember the original source I heard that from (it wasn’t some kind of anti-Islamic screed; it was some kind of reputable book on the history of the Crusades from the Muslim point of view). What is the term you’re thinking of that is translated as “splitter”?
A brief search turns up something related to what I’m thinking of on Wikipedia:
I know I read somewhere that this—or something related to it—was a common term of abuse among Muslims for the Christians during the Crusades. (I was a little unclear earlier: I’m sure they also had a more diplomatic and official term.) I don’t know where I read it, though, and maybe it’s not true.
Also, I finally tracked down the Francis Bacon passage I summarized. It’s in the Novum Organum and is the first (or one of the first) discussions of confirmation bias:
Bacon got the story from Cicero, who told it of Diagoras the Atheist:
But repentance also implies sincerely admitting that you were wrong. I suspect most users of contraception don’t actually believe it’s wrong, and therefore would be unable to repent of it.
As for the idea that it doesn’t actually send you to Hell, I’d point out
1) Contraception, according to religions that ban it, kills a person. That seems like an awfully severe crime to *not* send you to Hell.
2) If it doesn’t send you to Hell, what does it do? Is there some level of effect intermediate between “nothing” and “sends you to Hell” that can apply? (I would suspect that the intermediate effect is “is a sign of moral turpitude so increases by some small percentage your chance of going to Hell”; increasing your chance by a small percentage is as objectionable as increasing it a large percentage).
3) The whole idea I’m questioning is that it’s people’s own fault that they are in Hell because they “chose to avoid God” so they “voluntarily went to Hell themselves” rather than God sending them there against their will. If, in fact, people using contraception are refusing to listen to God (who is telling them not to do that), it would seem to fall squarely under this conception of Hell.
“Hell is the absence of God” is typically used to say that it is wrong to blame God for sending people to Hell, because if you go to Hell, that is because you voluntarily chose to be separated from God. But “voluntarily” choosing to be separated from God doesn’t work like informed consent; you don’t have to knowingly recognize that God exists and is good and specifically decide to avoid him anyway in order for it to be “voluntary”. Rather, all you have to do to be considered as “voluntarily” avoiding God is to be an unrepentant sinner; sinning is *inherently* avoiding God, and so all sin is a form of “voluntarily” choosing to avoid God and go to Hell.
Logically, that means if you’re gay or use contraception, and God doesn’t like it, then that is a form of voluntarily sending yourself to Hell. It is true, of course, that most Christians don’t think about the logical consequences of their beliefs.
But a little overstatement and punditry aren’t so bad in a book written for a popular audience.
A little bit of rhetorical overstatement is one thing. But with TGD, the entire book is like that. Not to mention the way it keeps skipping around from topic to topic in a way not entirely suggestive of serious thought. “Anselm came up with this thing called the ontological argument, but that’s silly. Here’s what it would sound like if a kid came up with it. Douglas Adams once said something witty on the topic. I once came up with a joke about the ontological argument, but I forget the details now. Here are some parody arguments I found on an atheist website.” The work reads more like a transcription of some psychological free association test than the final draft of a book.
Though it’s certainly possible that if you get indoctrinated by the moderates long enough, they’ll teach you how to rationalize away all the arguments for fundamentalism.
So, when the Koran (Bible, etc.) seems to say something silly, we should all interpret this completely literally and anybody who does otherwise is just rationalising, whereas when Dawkins seems to say something silly, he’s obviously being “poetic”, and any claims otherwise are just “bullshit nitpicking” and taking things out of context.
Seems like a bit of a double-standard is in play here.
Exactly. It doesn’t necessarily make sense why you should be so terrified of sinning under Christianity—especially in the popular versions that make belief in Christ practically a get-out-of-jail-free card. But people still are anyway, and it makes them quite stressed much of the time.
Given that religiosity is positively correlated with good mental health, the evidence is against you on this one, personal anecdotes about your great-aunts notwithstanding.
@Jiro:
1) Contraception, according to religions that ban it, kills a person. That seems like an awfully severe crime to *not* send you to Hell.
No one thinks that contraception in general kills a person. Some Catholics have concerns that various forms of hormonal contraceptives like the Pill very occasionally act as an abortifacient. But no one thinks that, say, condoms kill people. Catholic teaching is that marriage and intercourse have two meanings/purposes/dimensions: unitive and procreative. Contraceptives are wrong (on this thinking) because they impede the procreative purpose of intercourse.
Also, on the whole hell debate: you can be a Christian, and I think an orthodox one, and hold that hell is not necessarily final. On this view, God never closes off the possibility of redemption, and so people can get out of hell. Most of the moral objections to hell go away if this conception of it is correct.
In this case, my objection is that “Hell is just the absence of God” is an excuse to say “it’s your own choice to go to Hell”, using definitions of “your own choice” that are not limited to what we would consider choices in any other context.
Instead of “God punishes you for sinning, by sending you to Hell”, it’s “sinning means you have voluntarily chosen to be separated from God because you find his orders repugnant. Hell is separation from God, so you go to Hell and it’s by your own choice.” Replace “sinning” with any specific type of sin you care to name, including contraception and practicing homosexuality.
Exactly. And really, the more fundamental point is that if hell is this place of enormous suffering (or even enormous comparative deprivation vis-a-vis heaven) it is completely irrational to choose it. If people can choose to deform their characters so much that heaven would be a torture for them, why does God allow them to do that?
“Respect for free choices” is a good trait in humans because we are not omniscient, perfect beings. I don’t know why God should respect my free choices, any more than my mother should have when I was three.
If hell is limited and finite, most of the problems with it go away. But even if it lasts one second, it still doesn’t make sense why God didn’t make people such that they didn’t go to it at all.
Moreover, the idea that hell is not an eternal punishment is not completely unbiblical. But that just goes to show another point: that the Bible is vague, self-contradictory, has no objective meaning, and is completely unsuitable as a source of revealed knowledge even if you knew otherwise that Christianity were true. At least the Catholic Church recognizes this and says God granted them the power to interpret it with final authority; the problem is how you know they’re right about having the authority.
Indeed, one of the trickiest parts of Pascal’s Wager is selecting the right bookie.
@ The original Mr. X:
Richard Dawkins may sometimes be a little arrogant, but I don’t think he claims to be infallible and to speak with the voice of God.
There is this straw man that always comes up with Biblical “literalism”. No educated person believes the Bible is “literally” true in every word. There are obvious metaphors and poetic lines. I regard the sun “standing still” in the sky as a perfectly reasonable turn of phrase, for instance. But I agree that atheists often misguidedly attack Biblical metaphors.
But there are plenty of people who claim the Bible is inerrant. That’s not a fundamentalist position. Yet the Bible obviously does contain many self-contradictions and factual errors which are not metaphors. For instance, in some of the Gospels, Jesus visits one person first and then another, while in another Gospel, it’s the other way around. Is that “metaphorical”? Is it metaphorical that grasshoppers have four legs?
Those are excusable errors that I wouldn’t nitpick coming from a human. But when the words are inspired by God…
On the other hand, if you don’t believe the Bible is inerrant, you can’t know what’s true and what’s false. (Or what is a fable: is Noah’s Ark just supposed to be a cool story, or are we supposed to believe it was real? The text suggests it was real.) Unless you have a direct line to God like the Pope allegedly does when he puts on his special ex cathedra hat.
Correlation doesn’t prove causation.
Church is a very fun social club for many people, where you can make friends and even find spouses. I don’t find it implausible that atheists feel alienated from society in many less cosmopolitan places and are unhappy because of that. And if everyone else tells you you’re likely to go to hell, you’re going to doubt yourself, even you don’t believe it.
Not to mention, if there’s one thing I can agree with Karl Marx on, it’s that religion is the opiate of the masses. If you have nothing to look forward to but more drudgery—let alone that your situation will decline—you would be miserable. Religion holds out the false hope of supernatural bliss.
This is not all bad, and I wouldn’t hold it against plantation slaves for being religious. However, it also had very bad social effects: namely, it keeps the slaves complacent. I mean, this was a good effect from the perspective of the conservatives of the time, but if the slaves had known that there was no heaven, they may have been more likely to die on their feet than live on their knees.
Of course, religion can also inspire courage. But it’s like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get it to fight for.
Vox:
Richard Dawkins may sometimes be a little arrogant, but I don’t think he claims to be infallible and to speak with the voice of God.
Your claim was that Dawkins *wasn’t* wrong in the passage under discussion, because he was just speaking “poetically”. Are you now saying that he was in fact wrong? If not, what does the fact that he might theoretically be wrong elsewhere have to do with anything?
For instance, in some of the Gospels, Jesus visits one person first and then another, while in another Gospel, it’s the other way around. Is that “metaphorical”?
No, it’s because ancient biographies were generally arranged thematically, rather than chronologically. Which, incidentally, is why none of the earliest anti-Christian writers brought this “error” up: unlike modern sceptics, they were familiar with ancient generic conventions, and didn’t presuppose literalism as the default reading.
Is it metaphorical that grasshoppers have four legs?
At a guess, I’d say that the phrase translated “on all fours” doesn’t literally mean “walking on four legs”. I couldn’t say for sure, though, because I don’t speak Biblical Hebrew, and neither do you.
Correlation doesn’t prove causation.
So I guess we can’t say that your great-aunts’ over-scrupulosity was caused by their being religious, then.
@Jiro:
In this case, my objection is that “Hell is just the absence of God” is an excuse to say “it’s your own choice to go to Hell”, using definitions of “your own choice” that are not limited to what we would consider choices in any other context.
Instead of “God punishes you for sinning, by sending you to Hell”, it’s “sinning means you have voluntarily chosen to be separated from God because you find his orders repugnant. Hell is separation from God, so you go to Hell and it’s by your own choice.” Replace “sinning” with any specific type of sin you care to name, including contraception and practicing homosexuality.
It seems to me that there are two possible objections in the neighborhood here. One is that God shouldn’t be sending people to hell for these particular actions — e.g., contraception and homosexuality — because they are not really wrong. I’m going to set that aside.
Another objection is that God should not send people to hell for actions that really are wrong (what Christians call sins). In response, I would say that the “hell is the absence of God” idea doesn’t just express the idea that sinning is a voluntary choice, or that one is choosing to be separate from God. It also expresses the idea that God cannot be united to a still sinful person, and that that lack of union with God is precisely what the “punishment” of hell is. It’s not like heaven is extrinsic fun stuff and hell is extrinsic bad stuff and God is sending you to one place depending on what you do. Rather, it’s part of the very nature of sin to separate us from God.
@Vox:
And really, the more fundamental point is that if hell is this place of enormous suffering (or even enormous comparative deprivation vis-a-vis heaven) it is completely irrational to choose it. If people can choose to deform their characters so much that heaven would be a torture for them, why does God allow them to do that?
This can be seen as an objection to my above response: perhaps given that someone is sinful, they can’t be reconciled with God, but why doesn’t God make them virtuous by snapping his fingers, or if he can’t do that why did he create beings like us in the first place?
The standard answer to both these questions is that making free moral choices is valuable. I share the concern that if some people never get out of hell, there’s little value in respecting their choices. John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love, suggests that freely formed virtue is more valuable than virtue imparted by fiat. If that’s right it explains why God doesn’t just snap his fingers and perfect us, but it doesn’t explain why he would create people who never get out of hell, since they never acquire freely formed virtue. Hick was, accordingly, a universalist — he thought no one spent eternity in hell. (After writing that book he gave up on orthodox Christianity altogether and became a pluralist. But I think one can be a universalist and an orthodox Christian, and I think Hick was one when he wrote Evil and the God of Love.)
Moreover, the idea that hell is not an eternal punishment is notcompletely unbiblical. But that just goes to show another point: that the Bible is vague, self-contradictory, has no objective meaning, and is completely unsuitable as a source of revealed knowledge even if you knew otherwise that Christianity were true.
That the Bible is sometimes difficult to interpret simply makes it like any other text ever. It says nothing, or very little, about how reliable it is.
It is true that if you accept that we need to use judgment, careful scholarship, etc. in interpreting the Bible, then we cannot achieve the kind of certainty fundamentalists seek that we’ve got it right. But that we cannot achieve certainty that God is telling us X does not mean we cannot achieve a high degree of probability that God is telling us X.
On the other hand, if you don’t believe the Bible is inerrant, you can’t know what’s true and what’s false.
I don’t believe the Bible is inerrant, and I don’t think I do know with certainty what in the Bible is true. But I think I can have reasonable beliefs with varying degrees of probability about what is true, just like I do in every other area of life.
I don’t think “it’s part of the very nature of sin to separate us from God” is a very meaningful statement. I can’t even understand that except as a statement about what things happen under what circumstances; “it’s part of the nature of X for it to result in Y” communicates nothing to me beyond “if X happens, then Y happens”.
You appear to have described an arbitrary set of things (sins) and stated that an arbitrary thing happens when you do them. Why couldn’t I equally say that doing calculus on Tuesday separates me from God? Perhaps God has the “non-Tuesday-calculus-users” nature.
I don’t think “it’s part of the very nature of sin to separate us from God” is a very meaningful statement. I can’t even understand that except as a statement about what things happen under what circumstances; “it’s part of the nature of X for it to result in Y” communicates nothing to me beyond “if X happens, then Y happens”.
Talk of ‘natures’ can be cached out in terms of a number of different metaphysics. It is incompatible with a very austere empiricism, but most metaphysicians today recognize distinctions that can capture the basic idea — for example, the distinction between necessary and contingent properties of an object. Suppose you’re in a society that gives you voting rights if you have at least 4 apples. Then it’s true that, if you have 4 apples, you have voting rights. It’s also true that, if you have 4 apples, you have more than 3 apples. The latter claim, however, is necessarily true, whereas the former is contingently true, depending as it does on societal norms. Having the apples only contingently gives you voting rights.
The claim that God and sin are by their nature separate is (very roughly) the claim that their being separate is more like the latter case than the former.
One suggestion … . People in this subthread who have not read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis should probably do so. It’s an attempt to dramatize his view of the nature of heaven, hell, damnation and salvation.
Two: libertarian (although not of the Ayn Rand stripe) and six-shirts guy (actually, just several shirts of the exact same shirt: a heather-gray t-shirt; for work, I just rotate the same five polo shirts). I’m thankful I’m already happily married, but I would doubt that the emotionally stunted people that take this list seriously are large in number.
Also, I don’t understand why this list is framed in terms of “don’t fuck X” vs. “don’t date X”. Framing it in terms of the former makes the author seem even more shallow (if that’s possible).
“Don’t date” and “don’t fuck” are different standards. “Don’t fuck” is harder, and is to be read as “do not date, and do not have casual sex with”. There are plenty of women for whom “don’t date” is too trivially easy to bother making into a resolution, but who would benefit from changing their casual sex habits so that they experience less regret.
The list is supposed to be funny; the intended audience is not supposed to take it seriously.
It is harder to not have sex with people than to not have dinner with them.
It is easier for me to not go to dinner with unappealing men than to not have sex with them *and* not go to dinner with them.
OK then…
Though I do agree that it is completely idiotic that anyone is actually considering this piece of writing, which is really, really stupid.
Is that supposed to be an easy question? Both seem super inconvenient, for different reasons (unless you mean exclusively going out for dinner).
I’m the Man with An Active Reddit Account, but about half the comments I make on that site are making fun of sexually reproducing worker ants so I’m not sure I fit her mental stereotype of a redditor. (Then again, people like her tend to lump together anyone who isn’t 100% pro-SJ, so who knows.) But I probably fit her profile of the Man Who Reads Richard Dawkins because I think trying to understand reality is a good thing.
Making fun of gators gets you mentally close enough to “male feminist” for people like her that that’s at least another box checked
Zero.
I am married, but presumably that’s not a disqualifier, since it is not mentioned.
I was very disappointed that I’m evidently still fuckable according to this.
More seriously, these sorts of comic lists are always great but this one felt a bit short and incomplete. This genre works best when it’s over-the-top silly, with contradictory clauses or Seinfeldian nitpicking. You get the feeling that this is an actual list of guys she’s been with rather than a humorous rant.
The author was the person writing “In Lists” and “Out Lists” for the middle school newspaper.
I’ve got 5.
Manly literature guy. TED talk guy, “I’m Working on…” guy, active Reddit account, and only 8 shirts (not counting work clothes) .
Are “bro-lit” like DFW and Franzen your favorite (let’s ignore the fact that both authors are huge and popular among those besides literary-inclined men; Franzen was an Oprah’s book club pick, after all)?
I’d probably think a person who said their favorite authors were Hemingway, DFW, and Franzen was a poseur that doesn’t read much (and certainly didn’t read all of Infinite Jest) rather than some sort of slavish reader of man-literature (whatever that is). Not that they couldn’t legitimately be someone’s favorite; just that their popularity is greater than their actual readership.
I haven’t read anything by Franzen (to my knowledge) but I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest along with much of DFW’s non-fiction. I habor soft spots for Hemingway and Fitzgerald but prefer Graham Greene.
If pressed to choose a singular “favorite author” it would probably be Kipling or Orwell though it would be a “near thing” with quite a bit of competition, and caveats depending on the specific Genre and type of work being discussed.
Additional contenders (in no particular order) might be…
Anthony Burgess, WB Yeats, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cormack McCarthy, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury.
…and that’s assuming that we’re restricting ourselves to the last century or so of stuff written in English.
That all sounds quite manly to me. I hope you weren’t hoping to have a chance with the author of the list.
Six or seven points. On one hand, the list shows its author to be a highly unpleasant person. On the other hand, at least she’s open about it, so people would know to stay away.
Can’t help but sneer at how entry-level some of the dealbreakers on her list are. Libertarian? Bitch I’m a n-e-o-r-e-a-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y
Reminds me of the party game: “I’m So Right-Wing That…” 🙂
I only gave myself a 2.5 (Manly White Books, SPACE, half a point because while I don’t care about TED/Gladwell/Lesser Hitchens I would definitely be condescending about her worldview, beginning with the idea that I should spend money at Olive Garden) but I emitted a sinister chuckle while counting a zero for several of the other categories.
I’d say you have no chance, but given that the the dashes movement, like the daesh movment, encourage its adherents to rape people, the poor woman may not have a choice.
True? Kind? Necessary? Does this fit any of those? Comment reported.
That’s just a meme version of libertarianism
What?
Two lousy points. (Libertarian and Reddit account). And I’m the feminist bogeyman (cishet white male… certified nerd and working in tech, no less), you’d think I could do better.
And if the writer thinks the hoverboard is a high-cost fad, she hasn’t seen the bills for actual expensive hobbies.
Accounting for the crowdfunding I got and my finances:
~$2500 received in February 2015 after transfer fees,
– ~$650 wasted on plane tickets,
– ~$300 on other travel-plans-related expenses (fees, etc)
+ ~$200 personal savings added after all expenses
– ~$50 misc. expenses
= ~$1700 currently available
I’ll try and add to that emergency fund, should I have the need/opportunity to leave on short notice.
Also, I am starting low-dosage DIY HRT – for now, mainly to see how it makes me feel, I’ll decide what next before it becomes visible/undeniable. I can currently afford that with personal earnings.
Thank you, all!
Did you ever consider just hopping over the border to Finland? Lots and lots of Russians live and work here, and while we’re perhaps not the most advanced society re: LGTBI*Q…. etc. rights I bet we’re lightyears ahead of the old soviet states.
Did you ever consider how slim my chances to get a goddamn Schengen visa would be?
(see above, everything about me screams “immigrant”)
Considering we have about 30.000 people who have Russian citizenship and we also get loads and loads of tourists every year, getting a visa to at least visit Finland cannot be that hard, and even moving here should’t be out of the question – if you can provide for yourself (ie. get a job here). Some eastern cities have quite large Russian speaking minorities and they can even get elected to city council etc. even if they’re not citizens. I doubt any country is eager to welcome new social welfare ‘customers’ though.
That’s some awfully backhanded encouragement right there… (or at least that’s the way it feels to me)
Until quite recently there were several European countries which gave every indication they were eager to accept new “social welfare customers.” And many of them (as well as the US) have large and vocal minorities who still are.
Incidentally, is there anyone else here who a) has read Tom Kratman’s book Caliphate and b) is willing to admit it? Just curious.
Marc Whipple and Multihead: Well, first, this is for people who ask for asylum only and currently basically shrinked down to Germany (Sweden had a similar approach but gave it up about a month ago simply because the state simply could not accommodate more asylum seekers any more) and it is not clear how long that will last. Secondly, this policy is not very well defined (Germany does not even have an immigration law although there is a big debate about it) and I suspect that getting an asylum from Russia (even with something that could be maybe put into the category “politically oppressed”) is going to be much harder than if you come from north Africa or the middle east without any documents on you. Given that this whole thing is entirely based on current politics, it might also change in a month (it more or less depends entirely on Merkel and on how strong her bargaining position in German politics is).
If you discard the asylum as an option, I guess that getting a visa is more difficult, it might even be more difficult today due to all the asylum mess (the officials in Schengen countries might be more likely not to grant visas because of that). At the end of the day, it largely depends on what your qualifications are. With good qualifications (i.e. if you know something that is in demand), you will have an open door anywhere, even Switzerland (where even EU nationals need visas). If not, it will be harder. Very good knowledge of English and Russian might be enough to get you a teaching job at a language school in many European countries though, I guess. If you find someone willing to give you a job, I imagine that getting a working visa should not be a big problem.
Alternatively, you can get a student’s visa with which you can also work a bit and go on from there. Obviously, it means studying something too. But obtaining a student’s visa should be quite easy.
“just hopping over the border”… I know you mean well, but pfffft.
What do you seek outside of your homeland, exactly?
A society where she can be safely living as a woman, presumably with a decent general standard of living and job prospects.
Even if I didn’t remember multi’s story from previous mentions here and elsewhere, that much is easily garnered from the OP and elsewhere in this thread.
Why do you need to question people just because they are immigrants or want to be that? Are you that sheltered in the people you have dealt with that you can’t understand, or even give the benefit of the doubt??
@xls:
I was born in a house made of sand in the middle east. I’ve lived on 3 different continents, and all over the United States (my current home). I grew up hungry and poor, with lots of family issues, and I’ve lived in nasty ghettos. I’ve lived in tiny flyover towns and in New York City and LA. I’ve changed careers as an adult and I’m in an interracial marriage.
I tell you this so you understand, I’ve met a LOT of different types of people, and I am by any reasonable definition NOT sheltered.
I think Anonymous’s question is completely legitimate; I was wondering the same thing: What is multiheaded seeking outside his or her homeland?
(Russia’s standard of living is about average, maybe higher, and Russia is world-class in many niche areas like the arts and academics, not to mention chess, sports, and computer programming.)
xls, I also think you ought to check your own assumptions when reading people’s questions.
Walking outside, interacting with people, working without having to obsessively conceal things in a way that’s very hurtful to perform? Not biting my tongue all the time lest I speak of myself in the wrong gender? Being legally recognized as my gender without painful and invasive treatment, including nonconsensual surgery? Occasionally meeting other people like me who are socially integrated and not merely surviving in tiny, fairly toxic, beseiged camps where you have to fit in because there’s no alternative? Generally less fear and anxiety?
@Multiheaded
Are you sure that USA is the right place for you, then? It sounds more like you want Scandinavia. Particularly Sweden.
@Anonymous: are you sure you understand just how immensely favourably what I read of queer people living in the US compares with the situation here?
tl;dr imagine everywhere in the US is Alabama (and the federal government also acts in an Alabama way)
I thought it was pretty clear that what Multiheaded wanted was Canada. But there are many parts of the United States that I think are sufficiently Canada-like for her tastes, certainly parts where he/she can walk outside without being assaulted if his/her masquerade slips, and I think pretty much everywhere in the United States would be free from nonconsensual gender-assignment surgery.
And for the people who really care about such things, there are many parts of the United States where one more unrepentant communist would do no harm.
Is the hypothesis, then, that there are NO parts of Russia that are sufficiently Canada-like and that ALL parts of Russia are Alabama-like?
I find that hypothesis implausible, though I admit I’ve never been to Russia. A DuckDuckGo search for “transgender life in Russia” showed a bunch of articles with headlines about trans people not being allowed to drive but then one from Reuters reporting that this wasn’t true. A gay adoption website says that life is hard for LGBT people in Russia but getting better. A trans person went to Russia and wrote an article saying things for LGBT people there are bad, but essentially not much worse than anywhere else, and also mentioned the existence of LGBT communities. (This doesn’t surprise me; Russia’s a HUGE place; of course there are LGBT communities.)
My impression of Russia’s LGBT attitude was that you could do what you want behind closed doors but in public you’re expected to “act normal”. I don’t really see a problem with that personally, I think we all have to contort ourselves in public to make a large society work smoothly. I certainly have, but I think it’s a noble goal.
The US is probably far more Canada-like overall than Russia is, but if a Canada-like life can be had somewhere in Russia, even to a lesser degree, wouldn’t that be way easier than moving across the world, and worth the trade-off of staying in one’s home country? (Look up the effects of social isolation, like the kind you get by moving to a new country by yourself; might be worse than the effects of being trans in Russia, but I don’t know for sure.)
Anyway, just my 2 cents based on this particular avenue of the discussion. I hope multiheaded is able to live a safe and happy life wherever he/she ends up.
@CP
You sure are making a lot of assumptions based on absolutely zero information.
here’s a couple articles, anyway
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/10/moscow-transgender-community-russia
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/12/the-transgender-woman-who-may-never-see-her-son-again
re: “not being allowed to drive” – it’s essentially yet another selectively enforced sodomy law type deal; sure, one isn’t likely to get hit with it just trying to get a driver’s license, unless a local official had a bad day, is especially bigoted, or under orders to hinder people who are Making A Fuss and being a Disturbance. In which case you’re fucked.
“This doesn’t surprise me; Russia’s a HUGE place; of course there are LGBT communities.”… Nothing about your comment is very helpful at all.
@multiheaded:
Which assumptions??
Didn’t I just do an internet search and wade through pages of results and thoughtfully judge which results were relevant and then open those and read them and then summarize them and link to them so you could judge whether my summaries were accurate?
Didn’t I then go on to offer another trade-off to think about, with YOUR psychological well-being in the foreground? Didn’t I send you well wishes? All just to be told
So let me get this straight: you solicit help from a whole enormously active online forum. When I, a person on that forum, take time out of my day to learn more about your situation and offer advice centered around maximizing your well-being (remember, I’m a TOTAL STRANGER thinking about the well-being of someone I will never meet, whose politics I apparently disagree with to an incredible degree, in exchange for absolutely nothing), you basically tell me that my efforts are shit. Doesn’t exactly build empathy.
So let’s get down to my frank advice, based on what I now know, because I don’t want to interact with you after this:
1st choice: Either Russia has LGBT communities or it doesn’t. If it does, then go find those and be happy there, where you’re likely to fit in. If it doesn’t, then find the next best thing. (Does Russia have any hippie college towns? Artsy districts of major cities? Etc. Go down the list.)
2nd choice: Think realistically about what up and moving to another country all by yourself, during the years when you’re most in need of deep social connections, means in terms of your mental health and physical safety. Maybe do that BEFORE investing a lot of time, money, effort, and legal risk.
I once again sincerely wish you well.
I have a trans friend in the UK who may be able to help you out a bit or get in touch with people with similar experiences. I live in Germany myself and have no first-hand knowledge on how it is here with asylum, but I read it’s possible, but you may have to have a convincing story. It’s easy to get by though without German language skills in bigger cities. Send me a mail to justin (at) hugme.info if you’re interested.
Are you still seeking donations?
Oh, not for now, not until I have a definite goal to work towards or I have to tap into my emergency money. But you’re very welcome!
Keep us updated!
Really appreciate the checkboxes to subscribe to replies and/or entire comment threads on Unsong. Could we get that on SSC too?
Edit: The irony being that I probably won’t notice if you reply to this.
That wasn’t intentional and I’m going to have to figure out how Unsong did it.
It’s a wp plugin. You used to have it on SSC.
You must anticipate unexpected effects when you’re messing around with the Names of God, Scott 🙂
I have since come to realize that those checkboxes don’t do what I thought they did. I had misread one of them as allowing me to subscribe specifically to replies to the comment I had just written, but my only two options are actually “Subscribe to blog posts” and “Subscribe to all comments on this post,” neither of which is as useful since there were already ways to approximate those things.
Multiheaded, you should come to Argentina. We have very liberal immigration law and we are relatively liberal on trans issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Russian_citizens says Russians can go to 102 countries or territories without applying for a visa first. Argentina is one of them. We are a fairly well developed country with universal health care and near universal literacy, although neither is up to Russian standards; but we are well ahead of the US or Canada in LGBTQ issues. The current (2012) Gender Identity Law provides for the right of every person to choose their gender and change their name to fit it, and both public and private health care systems are legally obliged to cover gender reassignment surgery. We’ve had same-sex marriage statutorily legal nationwide since 2010, and it’s supported by the majority of the population, following a 2009 Supreme Court ruling in 2009 holding that the previous limitation on the genders of partners was unconstitutional. We’ve had same-sex civil unions in the capital since 2002.
The situation is far from perfect: there is rampant discrimination against trans women in the workplace and in society, and many trans women work as prostitutes, a situation in which they are at risk of violence.
With regard to our development level, our life expectancy at birth is 76 years, better than Russia’s 71 but worse than Canada’s 81; our under-5 mortality rate is 12.5 per 100,000 per year, worse than Russia’s 9.6 and much worse than Canada’s 4.9; and our homicide rate is 5.5 per 100,000 per year, half Russia’s 9.2 but more than three times Canada’s 1.6.
The immigration situation, while also not perfect, is far better than in countries like the US and Canada. The Argentine Constitution explains that the Argentine Republic is established for “us, our posterity, and all the men of the world who wish to inhabit the soil of Argentina”, and guarantees the right to citizenship to anyone who has lived here for three years. However, in practice there is a lot of red tape: you basically need to get a job in order to get a residency visa, which is kind of rough right now because we’re in the middle of a recession. (This is why I’m an illegal alien here.) Also we just elected a new president, so political turmoil is beginning. But you could worry about that after you get here; it’s not like the US where you have to go back to your own country to apply for a work visa or where they imprison you if you request asylum. Deportations from Argentina do happen, but they are rare, and they usually happen after the deported person has been arrested for a crime that they appear to be guilty of.
I have several trans friends here, and none of them have told me about being subject to violence in the few years I’ve known them, but some have had conflicts with their birth families. None are working in prostitution. But that’s probably because they’re mostly from middle-class families.
You would have to learn Spanish, because speaking only English and Russian will strand you with the US, British, Australian, and Russian expat communities, and the first three of those are composed entirely of insane people. Except for the spies. I don’t know about the fourth.
Cost of living is medium. I’m paying US$3000 per year for my one-bedroom downtown apartment and US$40 a month for home ADSL, and much cheaper plans are available. I just got a largish dinner of takeout baked chicken and salad for US$3.50.
Interesting, thanks!
Fuck off, we’re full.
But really, if you’re actually considering coming to Argentina (we’ve housed nazis, we surely can handle a few dirty commies), replace every mention in the previous post from “Argentina” to “Buenos Aires”. It’s a pretty centralized country, and there’s a huge cultural and lifestyle difference between the capital and the rest of the country (Less so in a few big-ish cities).
I was fairly careful in my post to distinguish the things that pertained to Buenos Aires from the things that pertain to Argentina as a whole. Many of them are averages including both Buenos Aires and the rest of the country. The things from my personal experience are mostly from Buenos Aires.
“us, our posterity, and all the men of the world who wish to inhabit the soil of Argentina”
That’s lovely. It reminds me of my favorite line on immigration:
“Welcome, welcome, immigrante. To my country welcome home.”
>This is why I’m an illegal alien here.
From where?
You realize that the literal implication of this is that you have to be crazy to move to Argentina from the US, Britain, or Australia, right?
Aside from getting more sleep and lowering the temperature, does anyone know a good way to prevent yawning? I have to listen to people’s problems at work and it’s really really embarrassing when I need to yawn in the middle of them.
Oh man, that must be a challenge. I remember numerous afternoon training sessions and meetings where, despite some genuine interest and relevance, I was on the verge of falling asleep. Maybe change your lunch schedule, or try for a light nap at some point?
Otherwise try to respond verbally often to both focus your attention and demonstrate your engagement in case the yawns are noticed.
Check if you don’t have anemia or a similar health problem. My experience is that in meetings there are often too many people in an insufficiently ventilated room. If your red blood cells are deficient for some reasons, you may perceive the lack of oxygen in your body sooner than others.
Well, it’s well known that yawning is very contagious. Watching nonhuman animals yawn can trigger a yawn, talking about yawning can trigger a yawn, reading the word yawn (or typing it a bunch, as I’m finding) can trigger a yawn, even thinking about yawning can trigger a yawn.
So clearly the solution is to focus very hard on not thinking about yawns. Good luck!
More seriously, there might be something with air pressure, though I don’t know how much control you’d have over that. I know that my sinuses can affect how I yawn, and the way those feel is often regulated by barometric pressure. Decongestants might also do something, though I wouldn’t bet on it.
I had the same problem in my Army days. I eventually taught myself to yawn with my mouth closed, breathing in very deeply through my nose and relaxing my jaw. It’s an easy enough “skill” to learn — and it got me out of a hell of a lot of trouble in training! — just force your lips closed as soon as you notice you begin yawning, and you’ll then automatically/reflexively breathe deeply through your nose to compensate. (Don’t try and force your jaw shut. Won’t work.)
…With a bit of practice, other folks won’t even know that you’re yawning at all.
Hope this helps.
I do something like that, tho I usually catch the start sooner. Arch the bottom of my ribcage out, which makes a suction just below that which sucks in new air through the bottom of the nostrils. This provides the deep and much more volumnious refill that the yawn would provide, plus some of the associated muscle stretches and relaxations.
Socially I think the body language, if noticeable at all, might be made to pass for ‘sitting up and taking notice’. My eyes feel like they’re opening wider, sort of bugging out, though I’ve never watched in a mirror.
This works for me as well.
This won’t sound very fun, but I’ve found that pinching myself hard helps with that and other behaviour control issues. It can also help with focusing.
Put a tack in your shoe and stab your toe at appropriate moments?
What if you need to run for some reason? Or go up or down stairs?
From “The Hagakure”, an instruction manual for samurai:
“Yawning in others’ presence is not a proper thing to do. For an unexpected yawn, rub your forehead with an upward stroke of your hand, which is usually enough to stifle a yawn. When that does not work, keep the yawn from being noticed by others by licking tight-shut lips with your tongue tip, hiding the yawn with your sleeve, your hand, etc. … Yawns and sneezes, more often than not, make you look foolish.”
google books link
Scott,
Viliam mentioned better ventilation, which is probably the most practical approach you can take. The nature of your practice may make it hard to open a window, but you may be able to drive air through a sound baffle with a fan (which itself will generate some white noise).
Since you’re an MD, though, maybe you can get supplemental oxygen. You can’t wear the nose thing unobtrusively, but maybe you can have the hose stick up just in front of the seat of your chair.
Vaguely on-topic: not enough sleep + small conference room + lights off because the projector’s on + the warm projector exhaust blowing directly at me = me falling asleep. On more than one occasion. And I snore.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1707464.1393708030!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/selfie2n-1-web.jpg
Someone recently posted this on Facebook with a caption to the effect of “share this to piss off your Republican friends.” And it did kind of piss me off, but more because it’s supposed to piss me off to see the president with TV scientists.
But if it’s possible for me to get meta-meta-pissed off for a moment: does anyone else find the popularity of “science popularizers” like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye as well as the posthumous popularity of certain figures like Tesla really annoying? Related are the pages “I Fucking Love Science,” and the fact that George Takei is now respected as some kind of advocate for science due to his extensive experience…playing a science officer on a TV show.
Also kind of summarized here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2524
And believe me, I’m not some kind of “science snob.” I don’t have any science expertise at all. I’m not at all trying to say “these fools don’t understand real science, whereas I do.” I’m saying that I don’t like what strikes me as a very superficial fetishizing of “science” as some kind of social signalling/”cool” thing. Some might argue that making science seem “cool” might be good for attracting kids to do it. Okay, maybe, but I also kind of feel like the people who would have been good at science were probably going to be interested in it anyway?
Part of it is probably my general discomfort with the blue tribe, but it also relates, maybe, to my discomfort with the recent “it’s cool to be nerdy, but not in the sense of actually lacking social skills” thing? Also, I get the sense sometimes that it’s not science these people fucking love but the feeling of superiority they get by thinking of themselves as people who love science?
A lot of this comment resonates with me as well. I don’t like seeing Republicans stereotyped as anti-science by people who say stereotyping is bad. And, more importantly IMO, I don’t like FB pages like IFLS precisely because they’re both superficial and sported by people who think they’re not.
Or, in saltier terms: people use “Science!” as a beard, when in reality they wouldn’t know a confirmation bias if it swam up and high-fived them.
In the spirit of being constructive: I suppose the thing to do here would be to “trick” people into fetishizing the scientific process. I do see a fair bit of interest, even outside rationalist circles, in recognizing logical fallacies. The next step might be memes that get people to think about how a real experiment would work. Or, how to tell a good experiment from a bad one, perhaps with memes that mock the bad ones. This sounds like one of the driest, distasteful things I can imagine, which indicates to me that I’m either the wrong guy to do this, or I’m the right guy and I just haven’t muscled past the gag reflex yet.
Thinking a bit more about IFLS, the title of which always struck me as needlessly vulgar, I think the “fucking” may actually be the most important word of the title. First of all, a page titled simply “I Love Science!” is perilously close to sounding actually dorky, as opposed to “cool” dorky. Second, it signals to its intended audience that this page is not for the sort of red tribe squares who might be offended by the casual use of such a word. Of course, the people who would actually be offended by the title are, for the most part, not on Facebook, but actually offending or weeding them out is not the point. Making the readers feel good about themselves for being enlightened enough not to be offended is.
It’s layers of irony. It’s “I love science so much that I have to blow away your frivolous taboos to express it, or, use this picture of a cat holding a laser pointer.”
There is apparently a TV series called “The Big Bang Theory,” about fake, pop-culture versions of scientists.
According to people I talk to, TBBT is about “my people.”
I question this. Strongly.
Yes, I just thought of The Big Bang Theory… my mom loves it. She says it reminds her of me and my friends…
People tell me Sheldon reminds them of my mom.
🙁
My mom tells me Sheldon reminds her of me.
I have mixed feelings about TBBT. I find it funny even though I know I’m the butt of the joke. I’m not sure how or if that would change if I saw it more often.
I found it occasionally hilarious and occasionally offensive, in roughly equal measure. At this point I no longer care enough about the characters to tolerate the offensive bits, and so no longer watch. But someone here coined the phrase, “nerd blackface”, and that about captures my feelings towards the offensive bits when I was watching.
Well, OK, Mayim Bialik seems to be an actual nerd, so maybe nerd Uncle Tomfoolery in her case? She was for a while at least one of the funnier ones.
My father tells me that all the time, he also likes the show :))
My view of it is ambivalent. On one hand, at least the first two series were fun (then it turned out into “Friends, faux-Caltech version” with all the romance and everything…I also noticed that most scences are about them eating something, I don’t know what’s up with that 🙂 ), humour is almost always about exaggeration and there really are some almost-Sheldon-type people in maths or physics (then again, from what I can tell I think there are even more of these types in philosophy departments, but that is not a meme for some reason, maybe cause nobody actually cares about philosophers :D). However, I am not sure if most people really recognize this as an exaggeration or whether Sheldon is their mental image of an average physics PhD which could turn people away from actually being interested in science. Also, there are some stereotype nerd bits of popular culture which are not just exaggerations but which are IMO simply wrong. I don’t think mathematicians or physicists are on average less physically fit or have more weird neurosis (neurosae? how do you pluralize neurosis?) than other people. I am not sure where that comes from exactly.
What is interesting though, is that other people seem to recognize something in TBBT that they see in their “nerdy friends”. So that my dad can see something in Sheldon or the other main guy (I forgot his name and I forgot which one he pointed out to) in me and other people who are not in maths, physics, computer science or something like that can do the same. So there has to be something actually spot on there…I guess that, at the end of the day, it boils down to not taking comedy too seriously and I would like to believe and more or less do believe that most people do not actually believe that all physicists are like Sheldon.
I believe two films had a large hand in shaping these ideas. The first is Disney’s “The Absent Minded Professor” (1961) and “Rain Man.”
The first movie is probably the most picture perfect stereotype of the involved scientist made. Absent-minded, brilliant, exploited by evil business and yet triumphing in his own ingenuity. I think that’s probably one of the earliest films that put out the idea of the cloud-cuckoolander scientist.
The second fixed the idea that brilliance/raw computational power is linked to autism. Lot of people think mathematicians/scientists are brilliant due to raw brain computational power I think, similar to the public idea of chess players. So they tend to assign neuroses to them in the same way chess players or other computational types may have them. The idea that someone could like science and be good at it and be as normal as anyone else doesn’t seem to compute i guess.
You mix these two tropes and you have the BBT.
“neuroses”.
Maware: I am a bit skeptical about a few films having such a big influence. Also, the idea of a mad professor is very old and kind of-ish similar. That one is pretty old and I think that it basically is a modern version of an “evil powerful alchemist/wizard”.
@Tibor
Indeed you could trace these stories to at least “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” or to the Golem of Prague legend.
I’m not sure about “Frankenstein”, or at least about the original version. The title character is obsessed, certainly, but aside from the sacrifices he makes for his obsession he’s basically functional: he has friends, a lover, a moral sense, and you never get the impression that any of these are outside the normal scope of his life. He’s not a Sheldon, and the plot wouldn’t work if he was.
He starts hewing closer to the vaguely autistic mad scientist archetype in some adaptations, though.
I hate-watch BBT. (There was also an episode with Summer Glau in it, which was kind of cool, except she wasn’t playing River Tam or beating up everyone or even moving, which was what she does best, with the ballet training and all.) It’s occasionally funny, but I can confirm that anyone who enjoys it on its merits has no business claiming to be a nerd* nor understanding them.
*By nerd, I refer to the type of person grew up unpopular, not because they didn’t want to, but because math/science/programming/whatever was more interesting.
The gag where Sheldon is a fan of Wesley Crusher is either brilliant or a coincidence.
I dunno, a lot of the people form my undergrad (faculty of maths, physics and computers science) really enjoyed the show a lot as do at least some of my current colleagues (I am doing a PhD in maths, or probability theory to be exact). As I have written above, I found it quite funny at first and then gradually less over time (but that is how it usually goes with series). But those were also the kind of people who liked the jokes such as the following funny:
‘A function meets a derivative and the derivative tells her “Give me all your money or I will differentiate you” and the function says “I don’t care, I’m a e^x” ‘
I always found those kind of jokes really lame, so maybe it has to do something with that.
In fact, of the “dorks sitcom” genre, I prefer IT Crowd (a great English show by the way, look it up), where the dorkishness is even more exaggerated perhaps, but to the point where it is so silly that it really funny. But I know people, people who do maths as a dayjob, who prefer TBBT.
A bit of IT Crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0gH_omVWIg
That was wonderful. Thanks so much!
Well, there goes my productivity for a day.
My biggest gripe with BBT isn’t so much their portrayal of nerds—I’ve come to terms that there’s no way to get anything remotely accurate with anything with a larger viewership than The Guild—but that they make perfectly good, subtle jokes and then go ruin them by explaining them for the stupid people watching. And I get why they do that, but it doesn’t make it better.
I’m enjoying IT crowd much more. Might be I just have a preference for British humor, but I just don’t get the same feeling of “here’s a joke, now let me explain it to everyone who missed it.”
0118 999 881 999 199 7253
Have you tried Futurama?
@switchnode: In my bachelor, I think it was the second year, at the last lecture of mathematical analysis before Christmas, the last 30 minutes were about Futurama and the hidden maths/physics jokes there 🙂 Some of them, like the Aleph_0-plex (instead of a multiplex) cinema, I have not even noticed myself before that (there are a lot of freeze frame jokes there). But above all, it was really funny to have the professor suddenly talk about a cartoon and have slides with screenshots from Futurama :))
@zz: It is funny that English humour usually gets labeled “intellectual”. I think it is in a way often even more low-brow than American comedy, or maybe not but the whole point is to have something utterly ridiculous, on a level of absurdity American comedy rarely approaches. US sitcoms usually end up being romantic comedies – the main reason for that is that it is hard to have 8 seasons, 25 episodes per season and still have fresh ideas…love stories are a constant and can entertain for long if you have writers good enough to make you care about the characters (I liked Friends for example). British comedy is different, you usually have a series with 4 seasons, 6 episodes a season and maybe a 1 hour long special at the and but that’s that. That is one season of a typical US show. The only American sitcom I know which did not have a lovestory arc is My Name is Earl. I really liked that show and it was also very different in the way it was shot mostly outside and not in a studio like most sitcoms, it did not even have canned laughter (although I only find that annoying when I notice it and that is when the jokes stop being funny…I started noticing it a lot in TBBT after the second season) it was probably too expensive because of that and not popular enough so they canceled it.
Yeah, I don’t like that show either.
“Daniel, you’re just like Sheldon!” Shut up.
As someone with a physics degree who lived in a house with several other physics/math/CS geeks most of whom went on to have careers in STEM, I find TBBT to be in the Uncanny Valley of representing such people. They are usually pretty close, but then they will do something that indicates that either they just fundamentally Don’t Get It, or that they are really more interested in making a killer punchline than in keeping true to characters of that sort. When that happens, I have to stop watching it for a while.
Isn’t that pretty much all comedies? Shows about normal, realistic people wouldn’t be that funny.
It is not the exaggeration that I object to, it is the sudden sharp discontinuity in the character that I object to.
A good example of this for me was the “Penny being addicted to a MMO” episode. The idea was pretty smart, and it does happen in real life that the non-geek girlfriend becomes a lot more hardcore than the geek. But for some bizarre reason they chose Age of Conan Hypoborean Adventures as the one she got hooked on.
I don’t think any MMO could have been a less-likely fit. The little I played of it revealed a hardcore, sword-and sorcery focused, lore heavy PvP game. The nudity alone might have made her pause. It was little tone-deaf moments like that that made me dislike it.
You have to live with the realities of modern TV. They made it AoC because product placement.
Besides product placement, IIRC the other part of the joke was that Conan is a big beefy muscle dude and would appeal to Penny. (For another example, the “girls” weren’t interested in comic books, but they went to the comic store to try to find out more and were enthralled by a cover featuring Thor.)
Are you kidding me? I’m a Caltech graduate, with a large network of other friends from Caltech (where the show is set). We all think the show is hilarious and pretty true-to-life. Literally every single weird behavior from Sheldon et al. I have seen from someone at Caltech. The only personality exaggeration is that I never met someone who had *all* of Sheldon’s weird traits. I love it. It’s like being back at Caltech (which I also loved).
*shrug* I’m also a Caltech graduate with a social group reflecting that, and everything I’ve heard about TBBT from friends who’ve watched it is negative. Unrealistic characters, “nerd blackface”, etc. I watched a little (the laugh track alone is enough to make this hard) and found the characters unrelatable. An assembly of realistic weird traits isn’t enough to make a convincing weird character.
If I want Caltech nostalgia, I’ll watch Real Genius.
“Also, I get the sense sometimes that it’s not science these people fucking love but the feeling of superiority they get by thinking of themselves as people who love science?”
Yes. Beautifully stated.
I strongly relate to what you’re saying (science major here). I feel like many deep blue folks, especially in non-science fields, are guilty of using “what science says” as a tool only so far as it helps them bash the creationist/etc. reds, while rejecting scientific thinking in other areas. To take an extreme example: I met a STEM type who I heard mock somebody for believing in homeopathy, then not five minutes later she was talking about how deeply she believed in astrology. I also recently recall on Tumblr a post going around about “Biological sex is a CONFIRMED LIE, says SCIENCE” (naturally the actual journal article in question made no such claims.)
I’m probably stating the obvious, but I think it’s because because the cartoonish, simplified science, as related by The Oatmeal comics and Bill Nye, requires less effort to parse and share than the frequently messy, multifaceted, intricate process of real science. To delve into the meat of the arguments and appreciate science as more than a tool to make your car go faster or one-up your conservative buddies requires you to actually be a nerd, and who wants that? Especially if (as many blue tribers I know seem to be) you want to be unique and artistic and study music or gender studies, rather than the engineering that your parents wanted.
Also, as far as getting kids into science: If the kid is bright and you explain it well enough, you can get kids enthusiastic about just about anything. I’ve been teaching my seven-year-old brother some basic organic chemistry reactions using my model kit and he really enjoys it. But he might be exceptional in that regard.
“I also recently recall on Tumblr a post going around about “Biological sex is a CONFIRMED LIE, says SCIENCE” (naturally the actual journal article in question made no such claims.)”
Owwwww. Let me guess, someone jumped from “Rare intersex conditions exist” to “therefore biological sex is a social construct” to “therefore biological sex doesn’t exist”?
No, it was even dumber. http://www.theplaidzebra.com/science-finally-supports-that-we-are-all-born-as-blank-slates-and-gender-is-merely-a-construct/
If you go to the actual journal article, it was basically saying that hippocampus volume does not differ between men and women. The link above (from a self-proclaimed alternative website) simplified this to the Tumblr version, despite the journal article stating many important physical differences between men and women right in the introduction. I don’t know enough about the research in question to criticize the research itself but I have serious problems with how the link above summarized it.
Saw this one, also obviously intended to make fun of ignorant red tribers:
https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience/photos/a.456449604376056.98921.367116489976035/781498815204465/?type=3&theater
The irony to me: isn’t the idea of science as a “package deal” actually antithetical to ummm science?
The antibiotics roughly belong to the same package as evolution. I mean, in an alternative reality where organisms don’t evolve, once you find an antibiotic it works forever, because no resistance can develop in the microorganisms.
I can imagine internet and airplanes working in the same way in such alternative reality though.
(It would be funny if the first version of this joke actually contained only evolution and antibiotics, and was later expanded by people who didn’t get the science behind the joke.)
> I met a STEM type who I heard mock somebody for believing in homeopathy, then not five minutes later she was talking about how deeply she believed in astrology.
I don’t believe you. Outside of dating sites* nobody today *actually* believes in astrology; that’s just the traditional irrational belief from back when the founding heroes of the skeptic tribe (Robert Heinlein, James Randi, Frank Zappa, Carl Sagan, etc.) were writing. Right? Please?
*you know, the one place where people actually specify whether they believe in astrology or not… *sob*
You’ll have to help me: why should this piss off Republicans?
Because Republicans hate the fact that we have a black president who hangs out with scientists who believe in global warming, etc.? (is what I imagine they think–in reality, they sort of Republican who might be pissed off by this probably doesn’t even know who Nye and Tyson are).
Ah, here we go. Enjoy: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
Bill Nye and deGrasse Tyson yes, Tesla no (I have a very soft spot for Nikola).
But yes, the way those two names are plastered over the predominantly American online content I consume annoys me, not so much because of “Bill who?” (not having seen American kids’ TV shows, I don’t know the man or the sky over him) as that it’s very often a few catchy phrases slapped up over a photo of either bloke with a triumphant addition by poster of something along the lines of “Take that, fundies!” Because a slick comment by deGrasse Tyson will cause the foundations of religious belief to utterly crumble, for sure.
I probably was equally annoying when I was sixteen as well, but I didn’t have the Internet to allow me to cast my nets so wide 🙂
@onyomi:
Do you really think “blue tribe” is responsible for politicizing science?
I mean, hell, you are complaining about if BBT as if it is aimed at blue tribe. It’s not, or not anymore (first season, maybe). BBT, like Two and a Half Men, Three’s Company, and a whole slew of other sitcoms, are aimed at the something like the Lowest Common Denominator.
So, in a thread where you complain about “blue tribe” politicizing science, you are politicizing BBT. That should tell you something.
The perceived divide between “book learning” and “common sense” is very, very old. The fact that this lines up along political lines now is more happenstance than anything else.
Intent wasn’t to politicize BBT, nor primarily to complain about politicizing science. My complaint was about fetishizing science for social signaling purposes, which I associate primarily, though not exclusively, with a certain subsegment of blue tribe.
Also, I think you are reading way too much into my posts on this in general. Below I will reproduce all my commentary on BBT on SSC:
“Yes, I just thought of The Big Bang Theory… my mom loves it. She says it reminds her of me and my friends…”
@onyomi:
It strikes me that, in complaining about how people who love science are really just signaling their superiority, you yourself are doing the same.
“I’m not one of those rubes who thinks they actually understand science. I understand that science is actually hard to understand, etc.”
Why does it annoy you that your mom thinks BBT reminds her of you? Is it because they don’t portray science, scientists and high-IQ people “correctly”? Is it because you don’t like being reduced to a stereotype?
And again, I don’t understand what any of this has to do with “blue tribe” other than the very obvious point that educated = urbane in many people’s minds, basically forever. Go watch “Breaking Away” and see if it explains my point more successfully.
*Sigh* why did I know it would come to this?
Count on SSC to have someone who will get meta-meta-meta-annoyed at you for being meta-meta-annoyed about the meta-annoyance of people who think they will annoy Republicans by signalling their love of science.
Did it occur to you that you are signalling your superiority by pointing out that I am signalling my superiority by implying that I’m superior to people who think loving science makes them superior?
@onyomi:
I think you may be missing my main point.
Urbane = educated != uneducated = rural
That basic formulation can be traced back to at least Greek and Roman times, I believe. Both rural and urbane subcultures have propagated this idea. It’s something as constant as “young people have no respect” and “things were better in my day”. It is both truthy, in a shallow sense, and a convenient trope for exploitation by whatever author or political hack wants to make hay with it.
Do you dispute that analysis?
I agree that people associate education with cities and lack of education with the country (to some degree fairly, though not entirely, of course), but I’m not sure what that has to do with what we’re talking about.
Because Red Tribe = Rural.
The fact that Red Tribe = Republican is only a recent phenomena.
I’m saving the text in this comment chain to help explain to my friend what I meant when I said “meta-contrarianisim”
@ HeelBearCub
“I’m not one of those rubes who thinks they actually understand science. I understand that science is actually hard to understand, etc.”
Someone saying that might find themselves in pretty good classical company.
I can’t speak for onyomi, but I think that both tribes are about equal in politicizing science, in that they will pound on science that supports their political agenda, and disregard or explain away science that does not.
I expect both tribes are equally willing to do it. But blue tribe dominance of academia makes it easier for them to get away with it.
And red-tribe then refuses to accept any scientific finding that isn’t “applied”.
It’s a double-does of stupid on both sides.
@HeelBearClub
*dose
I’m not sure why we should accept any finding that isn’t applied. It strikes me that real-life application is the surest way to find the truth. The reason nobody questions electro-magnetism is because we’ve made use of it in so many obviously beneficial ways. String theory on the other hand…
My second point is that science that cannot be applied has no more value to us than a movie, comic book, or concert does. It is simply entertainment. If you can’t do something useful with a particular theory of science, then I sure hope it’s a “beautiful” theory, since it’s not making anybodies life any easier. Which is the second reason why String Theory is so much worse (for lack of a better descriptor) than EM theory.
But I’m not sure what any of this has to do with political tribal affiliation.
@Timothy Coish:
Yeah, I hate that I typo and/or misspell. I do it constantly and try and be assiduous about proofreading my posts. Sometimes I fail. As an aside, I swear I misspell all homonyms at greater than random frequency.
As to your broader point, (generally) basic science has to come before application. The denigrating of basic science in favor of applied does great harm to both.
It doesn’t have much to do with political tribe. As I point out elsewhere, I beleive this is not a Liberal/Conservative divide so much as it is an urbane-rural divide (and I am repeatedly using the word urbane and not urban on purpose). That this divide is now mostly synonymous with the political divide is more accident of the current coalitions (although I think that all of the various instantaneous national media, including the internet, does have something to do with why the political coalitions are uniting around certain cultural differences).
Is this divide really among political lines though? My impression is that the more “hard-science” you go, the more right-wing you get and the more “soft-science”, the more left-wing (and I think this is not solely an effect of a sex ration difference between those fields and women being a bit more likely to be left-wingish) At the same time, the “soft-science” people are those more likely to say something like “some people are book smart and some have common sense”. Maybe this is different in the US.
More generally, probably an actual stereotypical “bible belt fundie” is more likely to go with “book smarts vs common sense” and he will likely vote right-wing but so is a stereotypical “new age hippie” who believes in astrology and is likely going to vote left-wing. At the same time a bank manager is likely to be a right-winger and reject this dichotomy and a university professor (without specification) is more likely to be a left-winger and also reject it. I think you might see it as divide along the political lines because you see the fundie but not the hippie and you see the professor but not the banker.
A few open threads back there was a discussion of whether lower class blue tribe exists and if so what it looks like. I don’t know about money-wise necessarily but in the low brow sense, I associate reddit and their obsessions like Neil DeGrasse Tyson as that. I find it rather annoying. I like my culture solidly upper-middle brow. (I know that in turn makes me a tiresome cliche to other groups of people. Such is life.)
I think this is key and explains why I do, in fact, feel superior to the people who like “I Fucking Love Science,” as Heelbearcub above imputes, and to which I’ll freely admit.
I definitely associate this fetishization of science with a kind of “low class blue tribe” which doesn’t know enough to actually understand the science or data their side claims to value so highly, but tries to imitate the trappings of being the sort of wonkish blue tribe elite they respect by getting excited about Nye, Tyson, et al.
As I said above, I’m not a scientist, but at least I don’t pretend to “fucking love science” when I have no interest in doing the gruntwork of actual science. If this is signalling on my part, it’s just a way of saying, in effect, “I may not be as smart as the people who know something, but at least I know I’m ignorant, which makes me superior to the people who think they know something but clearly don’t.”
My intent wasn’t really to make this about “red vs. blue,” but since some seem to want to make it that anyway, I’ll say that I do see an asymmetry here: obviously both sides are guilty of politicizing science, but the blue tribe fetishizes “expertise” in a way the red tribe does not (or to which they are even actively hostile).
This puts the rank and file of the blue tribe in a weird position: they think that part of what makes their tribe the good tribe is that their tribe values hard science and data and experts while the other side values superstition, blind adherence to tradition, or whatever. But the rank and file of tribe blue has not the time, inclination, intelligence, and/or training to actually evaluate all the information which its experts produce. Therefore, they fetishize expertise and its trappings, i. e. “nerdiness” as a way of showing solidarity.
I generally agree with this, but I’m not sure “low class blue tribe” is the right description. Most of the IFLS / Tyson-fanboy crowd that I see, seem to be white-collar professionals with non-STEM BA or MA degrees. Usually young enough to have only modest current incomes and little current wealth, but that’s not “low class”. And actual STEM workers or students are a minority in both tribes, even among the middle to upper middle classes, so that’s not really a useful distinction.
When I say “low class blue tribe,” I don’t actually mean “low class,” either in the sense of “bottom income bracket” or “didn’t graduate high school.” I was using anonymous’ term, which seemed appropriate, to refer more to what I think of as a kind of “vulgar” or “popular” blue tribe-ism which is, in fact very popular even with many middle and upper class people, including a not insignificant number of movie stars.
I guess the problem is that American English doesn’t really have a word for class in the old sense.
But vulgar is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to get at, and not just because of “fucking” but in the broader sense of “lacking sophistication or good taste; unrefined.”
You can just say “dumb”.
At a very slight tangent to this … . One of my conclusions from arguing climate issues on Facebook is that most people in the argument, on either side, do not understand how the greenhouse effect works. The only reasonably clear exception I have encountered recently was a German poster who said he had studied physics in high school. Even he started out explaining it with a metaphor that only works if you don’t understand it (like a fur coat), but under further questioning appeared to know the actual mechanism.
Outside of Facebook, what first got my attention was seeing various webbed videos of an experiment that was supposed to demonstrate CO2 to be a greenhouse gas–and only worked if you didn’t understand the greenhouse effect. The sponsors of one version were the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Clean Air Conservancy.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-nice-example-of-scientific-ignorance.html
I find your comment re: Blue tribe and scientific expertise to be correct and it follows my observation that they are also more smug about being “objectively” right. Whatever that means. I will also add that the Red tribe uses the same schtick to a similar effect regarding the need for a greater military-industrial complex. Kind of like, let the nerds have their science, we will keep America safe for their freedoms.
@onyomi:
“I think this is key and explains why I do, in fact, feel superior to the people who like “I Fucking Love Science,” as Heelbearcub above imputes, and to which I’ll freely admit.”
Then why wouldn’t you admit it upthread?
Look, to a large extent everyone does this. I’m certainly no different. I recognize it as one of the “seven deadly sins” and try and work against the impulse, but I’m certainly not always successful.
People pick some area, like knowledge of bands from Seattle in the early 90s, and then they feel superior because either:
They know more than “everyone” else about those bands, not like those poser fans.
or
They don’t claim to know much about those bands other than that Kurt Cobain was in Nirvana and they don’t get why people would think that knowing what kind of guitar Cobain used when he composed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” means they understand anything about how to make music or what makes music good.
Well, almost everyone is going to be in the mushy middle. The just like grunge because, well, they do. Or they don’t. Whatever.
Insert some relevant xkcd here.
I explicitly said it wasn’t about feeling superior because I know more about science than these people. If I wanted to feel good about myself in comparison to less educated people I would pick an area in which I actually have some expertise. Do you see me making fun of people with a dilettantish interest in Asian culture?
You’re making it sound like I’m saying “haha, look at these rubes who don’t understand real science.” That is not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying “look at these jerks who are using science and nerdiness as a way to signal their own superiority to people whom in reality they are no better than, because they don’t actually understand the thing they’re making fun of other people for not understanding.”
Put another way, it’s not dilettantes I have a problem with, though I can understand a certain annoyance at the sort of thing zz linked; it’s dilettantes using fake expertise to make fun of their outgroup. Like, as I said, I could make fun of dilettantes who have a vague interest in Asian cultures and languages if I wanted to, but I don’t. If those dilettantes, acting as if they had some expertise, started making fun of other people, however, I’d have no compunctions saying they suck. That, however, is not very common in my experience. In the area of science, or, perhaps more appropriately, “Science!” however, it seems to be a lot more common of late.
@onyomi:
“They don’t claim to know much about those bands other than that Kurt Cobain was in Nirvana and they don’t get why people would think that knowing what kind of guitar Cobain used when he composed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” means they understand anything about how to make music or what makes music good.”
Do you see the pattern match?
You’re saying these people don’t understand science well enough to be fans of it and claim it’s awesome and that anyone who doesn’t think Kurt Cobain, errrrrr, Bill Nye, is a god is an idiot. Well, every fandom has some of that.
But most of the people who like “I fucking love science” just like science the same way I treasured my “Great Big Book of Spiders” when I was a kid. They mostly like watching “Smarter Everyday” videos too. And when people try and say that Ozzy Osbourne, errr, Bill Nye is doing satan’s work, they take umbrage. Because Bill Nye is their guy. But not in a “he’s the best scientist ever” kind of way. Just in a “he’s nice and knows a great deal” kind of way. Plus, the argument about him doing satan’s work is pretty … well … unconvincing.
Look, I’m in the Mr. Rogers camp. Be kind to everyone you meet. I don’t hit it as much as I should. And I can be an fountain of rage at times. But it’s what I think we should be striving for.
Oh, c’mon, spare me the lecture about niceness. I’m plenty nice. If it weren’t “I Fucking Love Science,” but “Science is Awesome!” and if it were just cute pictures of Pluto with a heart on it and stuff like that I’d have no problem with it. Am I saying everyone who likes that particular page or pages like it is a jerk? No, of course not. Is everyone who thinks Bill Nye is cool a lametard who deserves to be made fun of? No, of course not. But then, that’s not at all what I’m saying.
I started the thread out not with a picture of Bill Nye saying “wow! Bill Nye is cool!” It was a picture of Bill Nye with Obama and Tyson, which, I noted, had been captioned to say, “share this to piss off your Republican friends.” There is a huge difference between that and “Bill Nye is nice and knows a great deal!”
@onyomi:
And then you went on to say that it is annoying that Bill Nye, Tyson and Tesla are popular at all. As if trying to make people think science is awesome is somehow a bad thing. Or being successful at it is bad. Or that being good at it is fine, but that most of the people who are fans don’t really understand and are fans for the wrong reasons and don’t deserve to say they are fans.
It smacks of a certain, I don’t know, nihilism, or jaded ennui, or something.
Heeeee’s the one
Who likes all the pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Knows not what it means
We can have some more – nature is a whore
I will just note that Nye and Tyson have very much waded into partisan polemics. They are not Mr. Rogers.
I did not follow that discussion, but what could be broadly described as hippies and new agers sound to me likely largely lower class blue tribers as well as those “revolutionary” types who come from the working class and vote for the communists (the richer similarly thinking people tend to vote the Green Party, I think). I mean specifically the kind of people you meet in electronic music or reggae oriented bars.
Hippies were notoriously from well-off families. Many communes fell apart merely because Mom and Dad finally revolted at footing the bill.
I’m in the same boat. Not so much with Tesla, that’s more of a “hipster nerd” thing. But Bill Nye and NDGT? Definitely. I loved Nye as a kid. But that’s just it – he’s a kids’ show host with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering. Treating him as a high priest of science is absurd. He’s better read than the average celebrity or pundit spouting off – but ultimately that’s what he is and a I wish people who ought to know better wouldn’t fetishize him.
At least NDGT can claim to be an actual Scientist, but then again he’s basically retired from that (hasn’t published in a decade). He’s an astrophysicist – he should only be cited as an expert on astrophysics. And yet you’ve got IFLS posting his pontifications on gun control. WTF? That’s not how science works! You don’t become a god-king of all knowledge just because you have a PhD! Rabble rabble rabble!
Speaking as someone who likes Nye and Tyson for what they do, I find the kind of blind hero-worship they attract utterly repulsive. But then I find it repulsive everywhere, including here when people treat Scott that way.
The issue for me is that both Nye and Tyson actively encourage / bask in the hero worship, or at least do very little to stop it. Continually editorializing on Twitter with the guise of “this is what Science says!” when the content is nothing of the sort exacerbates the problem.
Two recent examples: Nye posted something to the effect of “Skin color is just an evolutionary adaptation of melanin levels to sunlight, therefore science says race doesn’t exist!” Tyson had a post that was, paraphrasing slightly, “You are 22 times more likely to be killed by your gun than use it to kill an intruder. That’s how statistics work” (I don’t recall the exact phrasing of the statistics part, but the implication that anyone who owned a gun for self-defense was math-illiterate was pretty clear).
I don’t want to argue the merit of either of these positions, but merely note that they were editorializing on controversial-even-among-experts topics well outside their actual expertise. And of course thousands of likes and retweets later, only someone anti-science would agree that race is totally made up and gun control is great, right?
It’s one thing to be an effective and popular “science communicator and advocate”. That definitely has value. But good scientists don’t outreach their data or their knowledge, and a responsible “science communicator” would make that clear, not muddy it. Otherwise you’re just trading one set of priests for another.
“Otherwise you’re just trading one set of priests for another.”
You speak as if it could ever be otherwise. Tear down one set of priests, and another will emerge to fill the void. There are always warriors and priests, and society is always ruled by one or the other.
The third way is supposed to be Reason, and while its dominance seems a pipe dream, it’s still disappointing when champions of the one field where Reason holds a beachhead succumb to the dark arts.
It helps that Scott doesn’t encourage it. Indeed, his greatest fault seems to be pathological modesty.
I can’t speak for others, but I don’t assume that the fact Scott believes something is strong evidence it is true, only that he can counted on to be honest and reasonable in his beliefs, has a very wide range of interests and a lot of intellectual energy.
To me, learning that Scott finds a topic/book interesting is a strong evidence that I might find it interesting as well. Ditto for you and to a lesser degree some other people here (because I have not as much stuff written by them). In fact, at least as far as books people find interesting go, I find it almost unpleasant how much overlap there is between you, Scott, most other and often unrelated people I find intellectually interesting and me. I guess it makes sense that there is a strong correlation between the people I find interesting and books they like but it sometimes makes me think whether I don’t live in too small a bubble.
I agree that idolizing is weird, in fact sometimes when reading something from Scott or some other rationalists I felt like they put Eliezer Yudkowsky on a pedestal much like some people do the same with the TV “scientists”. I guess it is natural to do that with people you respect a lot but one should keep that in check (it is a good idea to specifically look for things where one disagrees with the would-be idol).
>I find it repulsive everywhere, including here when people treat Scott that way.
This is heresy! Kill the infidel!
(charitable) BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD
(ethically obtained) SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE
If I kill a heretic, do I need to buy an ethics offset for it, or is it such a meritorious act that I can use it to offset an actual murder?
Just pledge to buy an ethic offset when your income reaches an arbitrarily high number.
It depends on if we can reuse to organs. You did freeze the body? And if the are potentially redeemable, keep the head cryogenically frozen- you can use the money you get from selling the organs to pay for the process (note- do not actually do this. The police tend to look down on this kind of funny business).
I don’t know the two guys next to Obama (am not American) but share the same feeling. I think that popularization of science is generally a good thing. Dawkins’ Selfish Gene is a great book about evolutionary biology (and some atheist rants I did not particularly care about, despite being atheist myself, but they make less than 5% of the book), it is by no means a professional book, but it, as far as I can tell, provides the information in an easy to follow way while not omitting anything too important. Lots of “TV science” does not even remotely meet that standard. However, there is a lot more actual science going on in Myth Busters than in most TV “science programmes”. The general problem is people trusting those who pose as authorities instead of trusting good arguments. Some time ago, somebody sent a link here to a TED talk by a neurobiologist who talked about her experience with a hematoma in her bain. The first half of the talk was interesting, because it was just a retelling of her personal story (although one did not get any insights one could not get from a layman with the same story), the second turned out to be a lot of new-age nonsense plus some disinformation about her particular field of study – the idea that the brain is divided to a left and a right hemisphere in a functional way which cannot be breached which, as far as I can say from some googling, has been abandoned in the field for some time and there is a strong evidence against it. Still, when I posted a comment there pointing these things out there, people would basically tell me I don’t know what I am talking about because that woman is a neurobiologist and therefore can be trusted on these issues. I am afraid that a lot of people have this naive approach to sorting information – they told me at the (authority place) which has the name (subject) in its title, so it has to be true. This breaks when people distrust the (authority place) for political reasons, but then they usually just replace automatic trust with automatic distrust and ignore the arguments anyway. I am not sure how I feel about the “I fucking love science” thing. It is basically a collection of Big Bang Theory-style jokes and memes. Those are usually quite lame, sometimes pretty funny and by themselves would be fine…but the title is entirely misleading and I am afraid that for many people “I like vaguely sciency jokes” means “I love science”. And if some are in doubt, they post a few visualizations of fractals…Wow, science is amazing! :))
What I find annoying about many on the left is that they make a good deal of trumpeting to the world how enlightened and science-based they are whereas in fact, they are (those particular people that do this) no better than those conservatives that trust their pet authority figures. But as far as I can tell, the conservatives are at least not being smug about it (I don’t come into contact with many religious right kind of people though, so maybe I am wrong on that).
> If anybody else has any ideas for how a transgender person might get to a country that tolerates transgender people, please mention them in the comments so Multi can find them.
I don’t know anything about Multiheaded, but what about faking enough interest in finance and computing to get a job and more important a visa in a big westernized city?
My immediate answer is in Future Imperfect. I think the future is sufficiently uncertain, mainly due to technological change, to make projections as far ahead as a century highly dubious, still more dubious further than that. That’s why, for almost all of the book, I limited myself to about thirty or forty years. Given that I can see several plausible ways that we could wipe out the human race within the next century, worrying about sea levels three hundred years from now strikes me as a low priority.
Most reasoning is motivated–obviously I have reasons to want to reach one conclusion or another on many issues, this one among them. So do others. The question is whether the arguments we offer are good.
So far as my exchange with Picone, I don’t know if you went to the trouble of looking over my old blog post on Cook et. al. 2013. I concluded that Picone was (unfortunately) not a trustworthy advocate of his position because he was unwilling to accept the clearest possible evidence for bad behavior by someone on his side–even though accepting it would not force him to abandon his position on the substantive issue.
For a more important example of the same point, you will note that Pachauri retained his position as head of the IPCC after it turned out that he had attacked in very strong terms leading Indian glaciologists for questioning an IPCC claim about Indian glaciers that, as he eventually conceded, had never had any basis. He later lost the position on accusations of sexual misbehavior, rather less relevant. There are clearly lots of honest scientists in the IPCC, but that incident is good evidence that the institution as an institution cannot be trusted.
I assume this reply ended up in the wrong thread? It might be easier to parse the conversation if you repost it in context — not everyone follows my general SSC comment reading strategy (CTRL-F Friedman).
I don’t know how that happened. It was a response to someone, I think HeelBearCub, asking me why I ignored effects of AGW beyond the end of the century.
It used to be possible to get into the U.S. by marrying a U.S. citizen–I don’t know if they have tightened up on that or not. So perhaps a “marriage of convenience?”
Also had a stab at that, with a tentatively interested US citizen; however, they felt it would be impossible/legally troublesome for them to go through with it, given that it would be difficult (objectively and subjectively) for the two of us to cohabitate.
I don’t know if that would be more possible with a person who would be willing to actually cohabitate with me and generally satisfy all the legal requirements. I would be very interested, but I realize this is a very tall order and requires legal knowledge!
Far from an expert on this, but I did have a friend who was paid to ‘marry’ a Russian woman in order to get her into the country (her fiance was the one paying for the service). He did not need to actually cohabitate with his pseudo-bride, in fact he was living with me at the time. Instead, they took several measures to evidence cohabitation. Basically… we received a lot of women’s magazines in our mailbox.
Hi, how exactly do you imagine this could possibly look like? “Faking an interest”??
Learn enough to pass an interview. (The fake bit mostly comes in the interest for the job, if there’s no natural interest.)
Is Mulitheaded bilingual Russian/English? Would some form of teaching be an option? I know ESL is in demand, but I’d assume Russian would be even more rare. Translation work or teaching might not be all that great, but may be an avenue to look into.
I’m definitely looking into studying for an English tutoring certificate, in fact – if I decide to move to a non-Anglophone country. Russian is fairly rare, true, but there seems to be little demand for it in most places that’s not covered by highly credentialed specialists.
On climate issues, I am what Matt Ridley describes as a lukewarmer. I believe global temperatures have trended up over about the past century and the most likely explanation is human production of greenhouse gases. But I see no good reason to expect the effect of warming to be large and negative. People interested in my reasons can find them with a search of my blog:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=warming
The purpose of this post is to point out that the IPCC agrees with me. The latest report contains a good deal of negative rhetoric in the summary for policy makers. It also contains a figure, 10-1, showing estimates of the effect on humans of various degrees of warming put in terms of the equivalent change in income. For 5.5°C the figure is -6%. For 3-3.5°C, still far above the much discussed two degree limit, there is one outlier at -12%, a bunch of estimates between 0 and -3%.
Possible responses:
1. I’m lying.
The report is webbed at https://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap10_FINAL.pdf. Search for Figure 10-1.
2. I am misunderstanding the figure. Possible–explain.
3. The IPCC is unreasonably optimistic.
4. A reduction in human welfare equivalent to a reduction in income of 3% over the rest of the century is a huge cost, justifying strong efforts to prevent it.
5. The problem isn’t the effect on us but the effect on other species.
6. The effect on human welfare of doing nothing to slow warming may not be that large, but the things we could do for that purpose are things that ought to be done anyway.
Other alternatives?
I should probably add that I see the politicization of science, of which the current status of the warming dispute is the most recent example, as a more serious threat at the moment than AGW. For an entertaining and (I think) persuasive discussion of that problem, see:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122603134258207975
I basically agree with you, but I believe you’ve elided the strongest counterargument: the point estimate for the income-equivalent utility loss associated with X degrees of warming is an almost completely meaningless statistic, because everything hinges upon tail risk considerations.
This is basically my current position as well, but sometimes I worry I’m being Pascal Mugged by scientists who decided to retreat to less falsifiable claims once it became clearer that warming would not cause doomsday.
I think it’s clear that some amount of such mugging is going on. But that doesn’t mean the tail risk is also a genuine concern. In the very long run, if the Himalayan ice sheets were to disappear, water wars between China and India seem like a serious problem. In the slightly shorter run, mass migration of refugees from low-lying areas of Bangladesh could trigger religious war in India, which could easily spiral out of control into a nuclear confrontation involving Pakistan. These types of scenarios loom largest in my mind as the most realistic tail risks, at least before 2100. (But I personally have a somewhat lower estimate for the likely amount of warming in the next 85 years, compared to some CAGW alarmists.)
I’m mostly in the same boat as you (although I hadn’t encountered the term) but – one, I think there’s some value to be assigned to non-human environmental concerns, and there are some things that we should probably do for environmental reasons anyway; two, I think there’s at least some small value in taking some limited action simply as a hedge against our estimates catastrophically understating the degree of warming.
But I have not thought very much very recently about global warming, so grain of salt here.
I am intrigued by Figure 10-1 of the report. I don’t have a good answer to you (leaning towards (3)), but I’m looking forward to what other SCC readers have to say.
I found the WSJ article shockingly terrible – I’m quite surprised you found it persuasive. You yourself said you believe in anthropic global warming. So it’s fair to say the last paragraph applies to you: “Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? … Have [you] lost [your] mind?”
Also, since apparently “consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough,” I guess we can conclude that the science behind evolution is weak. Do you support that conclusion?
The link was to a WSJ copy, but the text was actually a lecture given at Caltech. The point is not his opinion on any of the particular controversies but his opinion on the way the controversies are increasingly conducted, as PR campaigns in the name of science.
For an argument for (4), see Nate Silver’s “How To Destroy (Almost) Half the Planet for the Low, Low Price of Just 5% of Global GDP”. Sadly, the images got lost in various site moves.
here and here are the two images.
So dealing with global warming is going to cost 5% of global GDP,
and that 5% is going to be born exclusively by the poorest countries in the world because .
If the world starts implementing the measures tat GW campaigners want, that means they
will have won politically, which means that the liberal/progressives will have won…
but a new breed of liberal, who don’t care about foreign aid or redistributive justice,
since Silver’s assumption is that the poorest countries will simply be left out to dry.
And why are they going to be hit disproportionately again? The poorest countries tend to run
on subsistence agriculture, and tend not to be industrialised. The measures GW campaigners want
tend to be things like carbon taxes, and one would expect those to disproportionately affect
more industrialised countries, not less industrialised ones.
There could be legitimate concerns about putting burdens on developing countries that are in the process of industrialising,
but they can be worked around by making exceptions. You generally don’t make a definitive case against something by making
objections that can easily be routed around.
that 5% is going to be born exclusively by the poorest countries in the world because
… they are the ones which generate the most pollution per capita.
Is There Any Reasonable Climate Denial claims there’s no clear success criteria for the interventions we might take. And related to that, you may believe in anthropogenic climate change but not believe that government is competent or honest enough to effectively do anything about it.
@David Friedman:
Having read your back and forth arguments with James Picone and others, I don’t find you to be credible. All of your arguments seem like motivated reasoning to me.
I haven’t seen haven’t you acknowledge or wrestle with the fact that the “worst case” projections don’t magically flatten out past the 100 year mark, but keep getting worse after that. This is only one of the areas were you seem basically blind to even your own arguments.
Response 1: Because if they’re right we’ll find out within 10-20 years and we can do something about it, and if they’re wrong about the next few decades then who cares what they said would happen 150-200 years later?
Response 2: If there are no sharp discontinuities, then the problems of the first hundred years of warming are basically the same as those of the next, ie the solutions and coping mechanisms we develop will be just as effective, and the costs will be just as minor/major. New Orleans can only sink under the ocean once.
We are talking about the same arguments? The one where Friedman has to constantly restate a point and Picone never returns to it? Or the one where Picone posted a source as a reason for why he completely ignored a certain individual… that turned out to be total garbage?
Neither is ‘credible’ and both use motivated reasoning.
David Friedman hammers on about one thing, the statement about 97% of scientists. This is the point he wants people to admit discredits that particular scientist as a lying liar, and by implication throws all climate science into doubt.
Friedman has never answered the corollary question about Econ either.
Yes, because it lets him see if the people are capable of seeing if someone on ‘their side’ is capable of error. He is using pattern matching- people who are capable of spotting issues with their side are much more likely to have reliable arguments than people who don’t.
I’m not sure what you mean by Econ.
@Samuel Skinner:
I believe the formulation by James was, roughly, asking Friedman what percentage of Economic papers would fall in “Category 1” for the proposition “Do markets set prices” or something similar.
I never saw Friedman answer that question.
The “corollary question about Econ” was dumb and I’m pretty sure Friedman did answer it.
Here’s my answer: Whatever proposition you want to make about economics it would be silly to assume a priori that you could verify it had a consensus based on skimming the abstracts of published Econ papers. If somebody tried to do that anyway – set up a scoring system and had volunteers subjectively rate a bunch of papers – I’m sure the number they’d come up with would be low. If I, personally, had done such a study and it found that, say, 5% of papers were in Category 1 with regard to “markets set prices”, I would damn well report among the findings of my paper that 5% were in category 1. An honest author doesn’t hide inconvenient results, rather you present them and explain what they mean.
Cook seems to have wanted to achieve a particular number and fudged how he treated the data to obtain a rhetorically useful result. I would not expect an honest economist to do the same.
Cook wants to believe his project is possible – that skimming paper abstracts will achieve the sort of answer he wants and get a firm numerical estimate that reflects the existence of a clear consensus. But reality is not obliged to make his experiment come out the way he wants it to. Nor would it be for an economist trying to do the same thing.
Does that answer the question?
(Me, if I wanted to know what economists think, I’d ask economists directly. Or read ENTIRE papers.)
@Glen Raphael:
They also asked the scientists.
From the paper:
“3.2. Endorsement percentages from self-ratings
We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate).”
That generated roughly the same 97%.
Friedman takes issue with combining (3) implicit acceptance of AGW , (2) explicit acceptance without quantification, and (1) explicit acceptance with quantification.
The hypothesis that the percentages of type 1, 2, and 3 positions on a foundational property of economics would be similar to the those on AGW seems very relevant to me. The overwhelming consensus in economics is that markets do set prices. Most papers aren’t setting out to prove this, and therefore only implicitly agree with it, but the papers still reflect the consensus.
The evidence isn’t a proof of AGW, merely proof that there is consensus on it within climate science.
Self reporting (with only a 14% response rate!) is utterly worthless. People with strong opinions are the individuals most likely to respond.
“The evidence isn’t a proof of AGW, merely proof that there is consensus on it within climate science.”
No, it could also be proof that the scientists don’t know the answer to that particular question. You can’t use the results to show anything because you would get those results with vastly different amounts of agreement.
“Friedman takes issue with combining (3) implicit acceptance of AGW , (2) explicit acceptance without quantification, and (1) explicit acceptance with quantification.”
I take issue in two senses:
1. When your research produces numbers for three categories representing different levels of support for your position and the strongest category has only a tiny number, not reporting that number and instead reporting only the sum of the three is suspicious behavior. It isn’t a lie, but it strongly suggests that you are trying to make the evidence look stronger than it is.
2. When, in another paper, you present the figure for the sum of the three categories as representing the figure for the first category, you are lying. In this case, the first three summed to 97%, the first was 1.6%. As I keep pointing out, the sample passage for category two referred to greenhouse gases contributing to warming, which doesn’t imply they are the main cause, which is what Cook (in the second paper) claimed to have found 97% support for. If the category two abstracts had said that humans were the main cause, they would have been in category 1.
Given part 2, I think it pretty obvious that part 1 was deliberate–that the information was presented in a way designed (successfully) to be misrepresented.
Finally, when the author responds to a critic pointing out the problem by attributing to him an argument he did not make, accusing him of being dishonest for making it, and entirely ignoring the argument he did make, I think it stretches generosity to interpret that as mere carelessness.
As I keep pointing out, what’s nice about this case unlike most such arguments is that all of the evidence is up there for any sufficiently curious person to look at, including the first Cook paper, its webbed data, the second Cook paper, my blog post criticizing Cook, and Cook’s response. No part of the argument requires you to believe me, since the evidence was webbed by Cook and his coauthors.
When, despite that, people say there’s nothing there, I conclude that they are either dishonest or capable of a high degree of self deception.
And, for anyone still curious, here is the relevant link:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html
@ HeelBearCub
“David Friedman hammers on about one thing, the statement about 97% of scientists. This is the point he wants people to admit discredits that particular scientist as a lying liar, and by implication throws all climate science into doubt.”
I don’t think it in any way throws doubt on all climate science, and I’m fairly sure I agree with Friedman 100% on this point. It does throw doubt on skepticalscience.com, and on the intellectual curiosity/honesty of people who uncritically repeat the 97% figure, but that’s about as far as you could stretch it.
Which is why it really surprises me that no one appears willing to concede that Cook fudged his figures. It’s not as if this is a way to discredit Trenberth or someone whose work is actually relevant to the question of global warming. Cook isn’t even a climate scientist, he’s a PhD student in psychology for crying out loud!
At a slight tangent …
I have an old blog post whose point is that different people in a movement are different–some are sensible and honest, some are not:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/04/mann-v-hansen-they-arent-all-same.html
@HeelBearCub
What makes this relevant? It’s a hypothesis. Barely better than a guess. It’s not data. To get data you’d have to run the study. And then report the breakdown honestly.
I think in economics If you tried the experiment what you’d actually find is the same phenomenon you see in climate: you can state a claim in extremely general terms and get high agreement, or state it in extremely specific terms and get low agreement.
If you want to define the climate consensus so broadly as to get an honest 97% agreement, you need your statement to be as vague as “human activity has somewhat warmed the planet” – but then all the skeptics agree with it too. Or you can define the consensus so narrowly as to exclude most skeptics, but then you also exclude a large chunk of conventional climate scientists.
What you can’t do is take the large agreement numbers for the broad definition and pretend they apply to the narrow definition – that would be a lie.
“consensus” is a slippery thing. If you need to prove it, you probably don’t have it.
@Glen Raphael:
“but then all the skeptics agree with it too. ”
Say what?
That is decidedly not the case.
@David Friedman:
Do you think the numbers in category 1, 2 and 3 would be similar for a similar economic claim?
Do you think that there is consensus among climate scientists that human activity is causing warming? Do you think their papers reflect this belief?
Does Cook lying in the second paper somehow change whether there is consensus among climate scientists?
@HeelBearCub:
The claim “human activity is causing warming” is so vague that a substantial majority of skeptics would agree with it. Me, Lomborg, Curry, McIntyre, the vast majority of commenters at ClimateAudit and even Watts and his fans can all generally agree that “human activity is causing warming”.
Why can I say this? The statement is trivially true because it doesn’t say WHICH human activity or HOW MUCH warming or even if it’s NET warming when summed over all human activities.
Cutting down trees to build a parking lot is a “human activity” that (nearly everyone agrees) causes warming. Humans are still building parking lots and roads, thus without even talking about CO2 we can say there exist human activities that cause warming, thus it is literally true that “human activity is causing warming”.
So yes, I think there is a consensus that “human activity is causing warming”, but it’s a consensus among alarmists AND skeptics. That’s simply not the locus of disagreement between the two groups. Hence, finding that papers are consistent with THAT consensus tells us nothing about whether skeptics might be correct to doubt whatever more specific claims that they do take issue with.
Would you care to point to any particular point Friedman has to constantly restate and I never answer? I’m willing to bet it’s one that I’ve got a perfectly good answer for he just doesn’t want to accept.
I don’t think the Lomborg thing came out as badly as that. What Lomborg did is the rough equivalent of this hypothetical exchange:
A: This study of the opinions of engineering students on gender says [etc.]
B: But wait a minute! The gender ratio of that particular survey is X%, and I’m going to assume that’s the gender ratio of engineering students as a group.
The population numbers weren’t trustworthy and Lomborg’s use of them is classic cherry-picking bullshit.
(And then there’s the other stuff I referred to, like his habit of comparing the cost/benefit of climate change stuff to other projects using a different discount rate).
@HeelBearCub: He did respond to the econ example, basically said he didn’t know how it would turn out and it’s not relevant because Reasons.
@Cook13
FFS, no the ‘skeptics’ do not fall into that consensus, because category 5 was ‘implicitly minimises anthropogenic contributions’ and 6/7 go on from there and the denialists just can’t help but do that – see Friedman, in this /very thread/ making an argument that implies an impossibly low ECS. That’s why the hypothetical paper that implicitly confirms anthro warming but only at <50% doesn't exist in practice; because the maths and physics just isn't there. Any paper that implied that would put it in the abstract and would end up in 5/6/7.
By analogy, consider a study that tried to assess whether physicists think gravity is real. A paper that uses gravity to calculate the orbit of Mars goes in category 3, of course, implicit endorsement without an explicit statement. "But wait!" says hypothetical gravity-denialist Friedman, "Just because the paper endorses the use of the theory of gravity for the specific purpose of calculating the orbit of Mars doesn't mean it actually endorses the overall theory of gravity! You can't say this paper found X% endorsement of the theory of gravity!".
Fun consensus research: This (not peer-reviewed) report finds that 77% of US climate-expert economists (asked 1103 people, got 365 responses) think that the US should make unilateral emission reduction commitments.
@Picone
Regarding Lomborg, you are simply taking on faith any claims made by his nastiest, most careless critics. The sequence of events was:
(1) You claimed Lomborg gives references that don’t back up his statements. You provided a LINK to such an alleged reference, but didn’t yourself read it.
(2) I pointed out the reference DID back up his statement.
(3) after realizing this was true, you shifted to claiming that the reference was “classic cherrypicking bullshit” because Lomborg referenced study X when you think he should have instead referenced a different study – with the same coauthor – that was a couple years older than the study Lomborg did reference.
(4) you also called it “man of one study” while not realizing that more than one source was referenced for that data point.
In short, you are doing a Gish Gallop. You have no reason to think the new claims you’re making now will survive scrutiny any better than the claims you made before but you’re sure there must be SOMETHING wrong with Lomborg so you’ll keep tossing out these garbage claims in the hopes that nobody checks them. Is that about right?
That study does not back up Lomborg’s claim in any reasonable way. It is not a study of population. It doesn’t apply the relevant statistical models to actually estimate population. You can’t have any confidence in the population numbers. This is the equivalent of citing the gender balance of a study on university students as if it were the gender balance of the university. If you cited that study for the conclusion Lomborg used it for in the peer-reviewed literature review would pick it up and tell you to knock it off. I am very surprised you do not understand this.
If I’m reading the criticisms I’m seeing around the wob correctly (remembering, of course, that I don’t have access to the actual text of Lomborg’s book and don’t intend to go out of my way to pick it up), then the other references are to a blog post (by Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute. Pat Michaels is, of course, also associated with Heartland and has been a ‘member scientist’ of a tobaco lobby group (the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition). Funny how it all links back together…) and an IUCN report that also doesn’t say polar bear populations doubled in size over the early period Lomborg cites.
If this is the ‘nastiest, most careless’ Lomborg’s critics get he’s doing pretty well for himself. This is the climate debate, mate, where conservation of energy is optional and millionaire political scientists (who, nonetheless, haven’t really published since their thesis) with a several-million-dollar think tank with opaque funding (but the little we have seen appears to be – surprise surprise – Donors Trust and Koch money passed through a different trust for some reason that’s definitely not about making it hard to trace) can claim that they’re an environmentalist, really, but we can’t do anything about global warming because it’s much more cost effective to help the poor by spending lots on coal.
Dude’s a propagandist.
(I actually pointed out the discount rate thing at around the same time I linked to the criticism that contained the polar bear thing).
@Picone:
You’re not. The “criticisms you’re seeing around the web” are inaccurate and misleading; when you try to tie them together like this it makes us all a little dumber. Please stop. Either read Lomborg’s book or stop making confident assertions that you know what it says.
Nope, no Pat Michaels. One of the other references given was:
Rosing-Asvid, A. 2006. The influence of climate variability on polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and ringed seal (
Pusa hispida) population dynamics. Canadian Journal of Zoology 84:357 – 364
(alas, I don’t have access to the fulltext.)
Ironically, the fact that you feel the need to bring Pat Michaels into something to which he was irrelevant kind of proves Lomborg’s overarching point – the issue of climate has been overly politicized to the point that people aren’t listening to each other.
But, let us imagine for the sake of argument that one of the other references had been to something Pat Michaels had written. Wouldn’t it still have made sense to SEE WHAT PAT MICHAELS SAID in that reference? Otherwise you’d be making the same error with Michaels as you did with Lomborg – you’d be saying “I don’t need to read this to know what it says” despite having been proven wrong on that score MANY times.
You’re a smart guy and I can’t figure out what your model is here. Are you afraid that if you directly READ stuff written by people you disagree with – even the tiniest amount of it – it’ll corrupt your thinking? When you focus on guilt-by-association arguments and attack a person rather than that person’s ideas, um, why do you do that? If it’s alleged that somebody “has been a ‘member scientist’” of a group you don’t like, does that render them forever after incapable of saying anything useful or true?
@Glen Raphael:
[guilt by association]
It was an aside, because it’s rather interesting how much this group clusters and how much the cluster links with and/or are the same people who were active in working against environmental smoking stuff and CFC bans. The argument is broken and politicised, and I think there’s a lot of evidence out there that it’s to a significant extent due to a smallish group of think tanks that are paid to muddy the waters.
If there are people being paid to produce propaganda in this topic, that should significantly alter your priors on whether someone is being deliberately deceptive. Especially when they run an opaquely-funded think-tank, have questionable qualifications for the role they’re filling, etc. etc. all the red flags on Lomborg.
[references]
The blog post I was referring to is this one, which is close to content-free, and which I had actually read. It’s hard to figure out which things are which without the text; I don’t want to go to the effort of digging it out of a library just for an internet argument, that’s all.
Found the relevant part though, this paper should be the third reference (good: it’s actually a population estimate. bad: it goes back to 2002 at the latest, the early values that I imagine Lomborg is using may not be very meaningful, large uncertainties. Relevant quote:
Here‘s the graph.
I similarly couldn’t find fulltext for the Rosing paper, just the first page, which has nothing of interest on it. My suspicion is that the paper refers to somebody else’s population estimates, just given the way it’s written and the subject of study. Possibly one of the estimates in one of the other papers Lomborg’s referenced; how many for this one area can there be?
@Picone:
It’s not. Cool it was published in 2007 and you’ve just pointed me at a paper written in 2014 saying “this paper should be the third reference”. You’re still guessing what Lomborg wrote (including how he referenced what he wrote) and your guesses are still wrong.
I can’t spoon-feed you the entire book; I give up.
It’s really not. Those sort of insinuations are part of the propaganda war and don’t belong in arguments about what is actually true.
[paper]
My mistake, looking for Amstrup et al. 2006 I somehow fell down a blog post hole into an Amstrup et al. 2015.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2006/1337/ is “Polar Bear Population Status in the Southern Beaufort Sea”, Amstrup et al, 2006, which I think is the relevant one.
Agreed that spoon-feeding me chunks of the book is probably a waste of your time.
[other stuff]
Friedman brought up politicisation; not me.
@Picone:
So having read a bit more of Cool It, I can see that Lomborg actually did refer to that blog post in his book, only he did so elsewhere in support of a different claim related to polar bears, not the one we had been discussing.
Background: At any given time we can tell that some polar bear populations are growing and others are shrinking. A popular alarmist claim has been that the polar bear groups which are shrinking are doing so due to global warming. The postulated mechanism for this is that global warming produces local warming produces reduced sea ice; polar bear behavior is optimized for a particular level of sea ice and/or local temperature so when there’s less ice and/or less cold they are put at a disadvantage.
Once when this claim was being made, Pat Michaels thought to check where the polar bear groups were relative to where the warming had been manifesting. He discovered the most declining polar bear populations were in places where it had locally gotten colder and the most increasing ones were in places where it had gotten warmer which is the exact opposite of what you’d expect if the warming seen so far is bad for polar bears.
So if you think this reference reflects badly on Lomborg…why do you think that? Specifically, do you claim any of the following:
(1) Pat Michael’s observation of this pattern wasn’t factually correct?
(2) Pat Michael’s observation doesn’t imply what he (and I) think it does – that polar bears might benefit from a little more warming, or at least haven’t yet been shown to be harmed by warming according to the data which had purported to show it?
(3) Lomborg didn’t properly quote and/or credit Michaels?
Do you have some other explanation for the data presented? And isn’t it a purely factual claim? Seems to me changes in polar bear populations either do or don’t correlate with warming patterns in the direction portrayed by Michaels and people who disagree might do best to focus on that instead of shooting the messenger because we don’t like the story he’s telling.
@Glen Raphael:
Mm, I got to that blog post by reading a criticism of the wrong part of Cool It.
Patrick Michaels has history.
If he tells you the sky is blue, check it yourself.
You may as well cite Answers in Genesis.
(I think you’re still missing that the study Lomborg cited wasn’t a study of population and likely didn’t apply an appropriate population model).
The question of whether Scenario A or Scenario B was presented as the most likely (and when) is a bit more complex than Cook portrayed. (Here’s ClimateAudit and Michaels adding some context).
Yet again, you’re treating what Cook wrote ABOUT someone else as definitive reason to dismiss everything else that person says. You seem to have ruled out the possibility that what Cook wrote might be misleading or inaccurate. But if Cook is a propagandist, you can’t trust Cook’s account of why other people should be considered propagandists – that would be like, in your words, citing Answers in Genesis.
I’m not missing it, I just don’t think it matters at all. You’re not a polar bear expert nor is Fog, your source; the study in question was written by a polar bear expert and those were the best numbers he had available at the time. This is a book, not a journal article, so even if a journal wouldn’t like that reference, it’s not relevant. Cool It has a many hundreds of references in support of many hundreds of assertions; the only reason you think this one particular number is especially important to the case Lomborg is making is because Fog came up with a bizarre reason to reject it. I think Fog fundamentally doesn’t understand how book references work and I’m baffled that you haven’t yet given up on this point, especially since you still haven’t read the book.
It is certainly possible that the earliest number was spurious and Lomborg was mistaken to trust it and therefore believe the bear population had grown so fast. But even if he was: so what? The small early number had been mustered as one leg in support of a claim that actually matters to people, the claim that polar bear populations weren’t rapidly declining.
And Lomborg was right about that.
We can say this because we now have an extra decade of well-sourced polar bear numbers to look at. The environmentalists were using LOOK AT THIS IMMINENT POLAR BEAR POPULATION CRASH as an example of a current negative effect of global warming. There was no such crash. Lomborg was generally skeptical of that call to alarm and it turns out his skepticism was justified; the polar bears are fine.
Spot the weaselling – the question isn’t “Which one is more likely?”, it’s “Which one better matches forcing since 1988?”. The question with Hansen’s 1988 paper isn’t whether he accurately predicted how CO2/other GHG emissions would increase, that’s ridiculous. The question is whether his climate sensitivity is a good match.
As it happens, scenario B is ~10% above the forcings we’ve actually seen, partially because back in 1988 the accepted figure for CO2 forcing was 4 W/m**2 for a doubling of CO2, not the current 3.7 W/m**2. And scenario B isn’t that far off of what actually happened temperature-wise – the trend is about 50% too high. It seems likely that Hansen’s sensitivity was too high, but not way too high. That’s scary, because his model had an ECS of 4.2C. It definitely outperformed any reasonable naive prediction dating to 1988.
Wiping the other two scenarios off the graph is just plain dishonest.
Actually I was aware of the various things cited in that SkS article from other sources; that was just a good summary. And I can follow the maths on the Hansen thing.
If someone did a study on, let’s say, the attitudes towards gender of some subpopulation of university students, would you consider citing the gender balance of the students surveyed to indicate the gender balance of that entire subpopulation of university students to be legitimate? The survey, of course, doesn’t discuss how or whether they attempted to get the gender balance to be representative?
Keep in mind, of course, that Amstrup, the guy Lomborg cited, is currently a member of Polar Bears International, and certainly doesn’t seem to think the bears are fine. Neither do Derocher or Stirling, I imagine, given that they’re both there as well.
@Picone:
Wrong. That might be the question you would have asked, but you’re essentially criticizing Michaels for using his framing instead of yours.
Hansen had testified we should be worried about how much the world might warm in the future. His charts showing various future warming projections presented results that combine TWO different relevant “models”. These are:
(1) A model of how much warming we should expect given a certain amount of CO2 increase,
(2) A model of how much CO2 increase we should expect to see in the world given a certain amount of global effort to address CO2.
In at least one presentation, Hansen referred to Scenario A as involving continued exponential growth, suggesting he thought that was the track we were on if we collectively did nothing. Since we did, in fact, do nothing, it seems kind of important to note that BOTH models seem to have been overestimates. Scenario A simultaneously overestimated both the amount of CO2 increase the world economy would generate AND the amount of warming we’d get per amount of CO2.
If all you care about is evaluating model #1, then yes, how much forcing was there is the most important question to address. But Michaels was interested in evaluating model #2 as well. If CO2 isn’t increasing nearly as fast as we expected, that’s important information. Getting that right might actually even be MORE important to figuring out how much warming we should expect and how worried we ought to be about it, than getting the sensitivity right.
So it absolutely could make sense to focus on Scenario A and compare it to what really happened, if the underlying goal is to figure out (a) how much future warming is likely, (b) how accurate the predictions of people like Hansen have been about that.
All that said, Michaels probably should have shown all three. Or been more clear about specifically why he thought A was the important one to focus on. I’m not convinced it was inherently a bad idea to focus on A but my impression is that the way he did it should have been more transparent.
(The climateaudit analysis points out that in one of the source papers Scenario A was the only one of the three shown carried forward 50 years, which might be a contributor too…)
@Picone:
The primary claim Lomborg was addressing in the paragraph we’ve been arguing about was that polar bears IN WEST HUDSON BAY were becoming less fertile, less likely to survive, and by now would be well on their way to having been wiped out due to global warming.
THOSE bears are currently fine.
Even Polar Bears International – which is indeed a pretty doom-and-gloomy group – considers THAT group of bears “stable”. (Before Lomborg wrote his book the West Hudson Bay bears were considered “declining” but that has since changed). You can see current estimated status of various regions on this chart, West Hudson Bay is labeled “WH”.
The bears are “fine” today by any objective metric. It’s still conceivable they might stop being “fine” in the future – and PBI’s role includes worrying about that – but they’re fine right now.
There’s no shortage of motivated reasoning on both sides of this debate.
As for the distant future, I think the expectation is that by the 22nd century we will all have cheap abundant fusion power, or something comparable to it, at which point, yes, everything does flatten out and even start to revert. A finite increase in atmospheric CO2 causes a finite increase in the equilibrium temperature, not a constant rate of temperature increase even if there’s no further CO2 increase.
If you insist on modeling the problem >100 years into the future assuming only today’s energy technologies, then yes, the worst-case projections keep getting worse. But the best-case projections don’t keep getting better, or even stay the same, because it isn’t credible to project austerity measures being maintained in perpetuity.
You don’t have the answer for how to prevent global climate change for centuries to come, and you don’t have the standing to demand such an answer from others. Stick to what you can reasonably hope to accomplish in this lifetime, and leave others to do the same please.
I’m a layman, but isn’t part of the issue the fact that if global temperatures increase permanently by (say) 2C, the oceans will warm up (and expand) only very slowly? If this is indeed the issue, then despite no new CO2 after 2100, sea level will keep rising steadily (since we won’t reach a new equilibrium for a long time).
Wikipedia says: “If greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilized today, sea level would nonetheless continue to rise for hundreds of years.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level
As best I recall, it takes about ten thousand years to reach full equilibrium, but you are most of the way there in a mere thousand. I believe that, for six degrees C of warming, the eventual equilibrium is about a hundred feet of SLR.
But I expect that things will have changed a good deal more than that in a thousand years for other and unrelated reasons.
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56649/thermal-expansion-coefficient-of-water
(edit: I realized after posting that seawater could be significantly different. Better link is: http://www-pord.ucsd.edu/~ltalley/sio210/readings/gill_appendix3_ppsw.pdf – see table A3.1 at the bottom, thermal coefficent is labeled α – this means that the resulting sea level rise should be, while still a fraction of a meter per degree of warming, at least not almost zero as it would be if it was pure water. Rest of comment not edited)
http://www.livescience.com/6470-ocean-depth-volume-revealed.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/LilyLi.shtml
It doesn’t look like you can get scary amounts of sea level rise from ocean warming due to moderate global warming, unless the ocean warms much more than the average global temperature increases.
Ice cap melting could be a different issue of course – that would continue a while after the temperature rise too.
@Simon:
Ice cap melting is the most significant source of SLR, easily. There’s about 60-70 metres of SLR locked up in all the world’s ice caps. See, for example, here.
There’s some limited evidence that +2c might be ultimately incompatible with ice caps, but David’s 10,000 year figure is a good estimate for the timescale.
Let’s be honest here. You can’t pretend that you’re a neutral observer in all of this. Of course you would see the “lukewarmer” as having motivated reasoning. In all fairness, people on the right are usually more biased when it comes to global warming(libertarians especially so) but you can’t pretend that progressives aren’t biased as well. I just want someone on the left to admit that the science of global warming isn’t as clear cut as they usually makes it out to be. Just because someone deviates from the IPCC doesn’t mean they are a “denier”.
I’ll admit that, but it goes both ways- global warming may not be as bad as we think, but it could also turn out to be much worse.
On the other hand, if we are considering “probably won’t happen but we can’t be sure” outcomes, preventing global warming probably won’t do enormous harm, but could. We are in an interglacial, we do not know what determines when an interglacial ends, and half a mile of ice over the present locations of London and Chicago would be quite a large catastrophe.
However that tends to be a bit more obvious and easier to counter- just burn more fossil fuels (sadly puts away Davy Crocket). By contrast removing CO2 is a bit more difficult.
Don’t have time for a full argument here; I will come back to this later (probably tomorrow). Quick notes:
– That there’s not much daylight between the facts IPCC and what luckwarmers will attest to has been commented on before; my take is more “luckwarmer is what you get when you don’t want to admit the hippies are right but you are too intellectually honest to [insert figure here]”.
– What is your estimate of the cost of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme? Is it more or less than the IPCC’s impact-of-warming estimates?
– IPCC has a table on the next page of social-cost-of-carbon estimates via different studies varying on the ‘pure rate of time preference’, which I think is roughly equivalent to a discount rate (please correct me if I’m wrong there). The lowest figure on that table is $33/tonne (+-$29/tonne, so it’s just a bit uncertain). I would be quite happy to see a government institute a $33/tonne carbon tax. I don’t think anybody remotely credible is arguing for coal or fossil fuels to be outright banned right now no questions asked.
– What is that % figure relative to? I don’t have the economics here, I think. Is that saying “If we warm to n, then that future will have (100-x)% of the utils of a world where we didn’t warm”? 1% of 2050’s total human welfare doesn’t sound that small to me…
– If those studies are the studies I think they are, they’re based on an economic model that is not very good at generating large negative outcomes. It’s got a point at 5.5c with -6% welfare change; that seems questionable.
– Risks, tail events, what if the IPCC is wrong, ozone hole, incoherency of doubting the mean and reducing the variance, etc.. We’ve been there before.
– How dare those scientists politicise the science by being attacked by industry pressure groups!
– Jesus fucking christ Crichton, weather is not climate, predicting whether it will rain tomorrow is not the same as predicting whether precipitation increases with more CO2. This is arguing that because we can’t predict exactly where every molecule in a pot of water is going, we can’t predict that it will boil if you turn on the gas.
– Seriously, I’ll believe that the hippies are besmirching the good name of science something something power when they get their content-free shitposts published in Serious People Media.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this, as I don’t have enough domain knowledge to have one. However, I’m going to note that a smug-that-thinks-it’s-clever renaming of your opponents (“luckwarmers”) leads me to believe that you’re the one who’s unsure that your arguments will carry on their own merits.
I think that was just a typo.
Nah, he uses it over and over again. Even if it were actually clever rather than wannabe-clever to start with, it would have worn out its welcome about five times over by now.
Sorry I’ve been so long about this; work started back up again and my sleep schedule has been fucked, which has drastically limited the time I’ve had available to be a jerk on the internet.
Economics
So, I think my response is a combination of things, but mostly 4 – I think the response being asked for is entirely proportionate to losing 3% of 2050’s welfare (which is what that graph means right?).
As I pointed out earlier, the same chapter of AR5 includes SCC estimates, with $33+/-$29/tonne of carbon (Careful, /not/ a tonne of CO2!) as the lowest value (with a 3% ‘pure rate of time preference’, which I think is a discount rate; help me out here someone who actually knows something about economics).
I’m pretty sure most climate scientists would be over the moon at a $33/tC carbon tax. For reference, here is the estimate of CO2 emissions on Wikipedia, 35,669,000 kilotonnes of CO2 per year for the world. Grab the molecular weights of carbon and oxygen, CO2 is 27% carbon, multiply it all out and you get 317 billion USD / year of carbon tax monies. If my understanding of the economics is correct, that’s not a good estimate of the loss due to the carbon tax – if it’s well-implemented and revenue-neutral, that money gets returned to people via an income tax cut or something, and the economic loss is the difference between the productivity of fossil fuels and the productivity of whatever replaces them, which is presumably smaller than that number (that is, renewable $/kwh is < fossil fuel $/kwh + 33 * fossil fuel CO2 emissions/kwh). Also there's some loss due to the bureaucracy required to administrate and collect the tax. Let's assume that renewables aren't that close to fossil fuel productivity so it's all loss. I don't know what a reasonable way to account for bureaucrats is. The IRS has an annual budget of $11 billion according to wikipedia, and the US emits ~a seventh of world CO2; lets assume the IRS has to double in size to administer the tax and the extra bureaucracy required is proportional to CO2 emissions. That gives us $77 billion more monies. So $394 billion/year in costs.
You quote Nordhaus extensively as giving a cost of $4.1 trillion for waiting 50 years (discount rate?); we're getting a value that's ~10% of that for the yearly cost of Doing Something About It with assumptions that I think are extremely generous to your position. Keep in mind that in the wait-fifty-years scenario there are likely far more substantial costs when we do actually need to do something about it; the harms are likely to accumulate fast as the temperature goes up, so waiting for it to suck is just going to mean we have to come down faster. Obviously the costs will go down as we emit less CO2 and so have to pay less carbon tax and hire less carbon tax bureaucrats. Basically, these are values on roughly the same order of magnitude, which makes sense given how the SCC has been estimated.
And then we have the risks. I know you're aware of this argument, because I've made it to you before, and I don't think I've seen a very good reply. There's maybe a 1% chance that the genuinely alarmed people, the actual catastrophists that you're lumping in with the boring majority opinion – people like Hansen, or maybe Shakhova – are right. If Hansen is right and sea level can jump ~60 metres in a couple of hundred years, we are going to see a lot of harms. If Shakhova is right and clathrates are a bomb just waiting to put us on an unstoppable course towards 6c warming, then we're going to see a lot of harms. And hopefully this won't end up being life CFCs, where all the scientists are massively underestimating things because of unknown unknowns. We don't really know what caused most mass extinctions in the historical record; how much are you willing to bet on the question of whether stupidly rapid climate change is one of them? Compare, for example, the PETM. Wanna run the 1% risk that methane clathrate release causes localised ocean anoxia and mass extinctions of marine life? The best I’ve heard in response to this from you is talking about similar risks from mitigation, but I don’t think you can seriously argue that the risk we’re actually about to fall into another ice age and CO2 emissions are preventing it is remotely comparable (and it’s frankly weird to argue that we can adapt fine to massive temperature increases, but temperature decreases of similar scale are right out)
I don’t know much about the economics of energy grids; I’ve had some fun fermi-ing around with this wikipedia page and this wikipedia page. tl;dr add 27% carbon tax to coal LCOE; add 12.42% carbon tax to gas LCOE (unless it’s CCS, in which case it depends). Broadly it looks like even with that carbon tax coal and gas outcompete wind and solar (and this is before additional infrastructure requirements to ensure baseload), although it does look like wind is coming into cost effectiveness (and there’s a lot of variability). It’s a pity nuclear is politically nonviable where I live; I’m not exactly a fan but it’s better than the alternative and pretty cheap.
I do think that it’s worth getting rid of coal even minus CO2-related externalities. Smog, mercury emissions, acid rain, etc., it’s pretty awful from a public health perspective. Less pressing minus CO2 of course. Similarly, the Montreal protocol was a good idea even without CFCs being greenhouse gases.
“I think the response being asked for is entirely proportionate to losing 3% of 2050’s welfare (which is what that graph means right?).”
Only if you expect temperatures to be up at least 3°C by 2050. And even then, all but one of the values are between zero and 3%.
“Of welfare” is a bit ambiguous, since reducing income by 3% presumably reduces utility by less than that.
That’s correct, sorry, I was braino-ing on the Nordhaus figure for 2050 (or is it for 2060-something? It’s for waiting fifty years, but from what baseline?).
I do think it’s likely a significant amount. GWP appears to be ~$78 trillion; 1% of it is more than Nordhaus’ number, presumably it’ll be much larger by 2050. I think these IPCC numbers are worse than Nordhaus’, assuming the discount rate roughly matches the rate of growth of the world economy (Does that assumption make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense).
Politicisation
This makes me furious.
If anyone is politicising science, it’s the deniers. You know, Inhofe’s repeated calls for scientists doing work on global warming to be prosecuted, Kuccinelli’s /actual/ legal witchhunt of Mann, the approximately infinity US Senate talks where Judith Curry, two other denialists and someone else are invited to talk about how much they’re persecuted for the umpteenth time, because the republicans have the relevant committees. The most recent one was Christy, Curry, Happer, /Mark Steyn of all people/ and… David Titley, an oceanographer who used to work for the navy and was the only person approaching the consensus position on that panel (although at least Christy and Curry have /published/ in climate). Lamar Smith is another notable politician in the field; this is the guy who’s subpoenaing NOAA for everything ever because they had the temerity to publish a paper slightly altering the temperature record! Also trying to cut the NASA Earth Science’s budget because we can’t pay people to end up saying things we don’t like. There are examples of this shit everywhere you turn – Canada’s Harper government attempting to destroy old scientific records, the Abbott government in Australia defunding the Climate Council and then offering a $4 million grant to a university if they’ll give millionaire propaganda spout Bjorn Lomborg a home…
Meanwhile, approximately 100% of the notable denialists are part of a well-funded network of think-tanks and trusts; very few of them are scientists; almost none of them actually publish any more. Here’s an exercise for you – take any well-known denialist, search their name and ‘heartland’, ‘gwpf’ and ‘sppi’ and see what pops out. Almost all of them are /directly/ connected to one of those organisations. Matt Ridley, for example, is on the GWPF’s academic advisory council, along with Happer (remember him from earlier?). Curry has previously been invited to speak in the House of Lords by the GWPF, and has significant contact with Heartland. Christy is more on the Heartland side of things. Don’t you find it remotely suspicious that this stuff all seems to come from a few small sources? And that they litigate their arguments in public, rather than in the literature?
The tactics involved resemble rather strongly the tactics employed against CFC controls, second hand smoking, and originally smoking itself. This isn’t that strange, of course, because in a fair few cases it’s the same organisation and even the same /people/ involved – Fred Singer was a major figure in ozone depletion denial and secondhand smoking denial, Joseph Bast has a history here, Heartland has a history here. Doesn’t that give you pause? Doesn’t that suggest to you that you’re being exploited by people with a well-honed tactic for getting around the world before the truth has got its boots on?
Serious People media, of course, is their friend. The Wall Street Journal has a history here, for example, being dismissive of acid rain and ozone depletion.
For fuck’s sake, you’re publicly subscribing to Matt Ridley’s viewpoint, and Matt Ridley is /literally a politician/, an ‘elected hereditary peer’ in the UK’s House of Lords! This is either perfectly normal scientific argument or some kind of perfectly understandable response to problems turned up by actual scientists, I guess.
I’m just going to pick out one point of the several dozen you just listed there and explain how it’s actually an example of the opposite of what you’re claiming: The Abbott government defunding the Climate Council.
You’re claiming this is an example of climate sceptics politicising the issue. It’s actually the clearest example I can think of of the opposite: that is, sceptics undoing politicisation of alarmists.
The Climate Council was a blatant political project. Its only function was to try to influence public opinion. It was established by the previous government to try to build support for their carbon tax. It was headed by one of those non-climate-scientist-popular-media-advocates you complain about so much when they’re on the other side, and one with a shocking record of exaggerated predictions to boot. The material it produced was consistently misleading.
I agree with you that the now-thankfully-defunct plan to fund a position for Lomborg was a bad idea, but the Climate Council was no better. Its perverse for a government to use your own money to tell you what to think.
(And at least Lomborg would have only been $4 million. Much better than the $28 million Turnbull is burning on ad campaigns for his stupid “innovation” catchphrase)
I’m sure antivaxxers would say that getting rid of government-funded campaigns to vaccinate your children is similarly ‘depoliticising’ the issue.
And, uh, most of the ‘popularisers’ on the other side are not, in fact, scientists. Very few of them are. Curry, Pat Michaels, Soon, Spencer, Happer, Lindzen, Singer, I’ve probably forgotten a handful more.
Please do tell me about all the ways Tim Flannery has predicted poorly. Let me guess: He said the dams would never fill again? Here’s the full quote:
(link)
This is in the context of projections to 2050. I don’t think you can honestly describe this as a failed prediction.
Any thoughts on any of the other examples? You know, like the legal harassment of climate scientists by politicians? I’ve got some others. I’m sure there as unto nothing compared to paying a few scientists to try and summarise the IPCC’s results in a regional context.
(Wasn’t aware of any particular advertising spend from Turnbull, but I don’t watch much TV so I tend to miss this stuff. Could be worse – the ads over Abbott/Pyne’s tertiary policies were pretty ridiculous. “Just thought you’d like to know that we’re not completely dismantling HECS!”).
If anyone is politicising science, it’s the deniers.
If you want to claim the mantle of Apolitical Voice of Science and Reason, and be infuriated when anyone suggests otherwise, do not use the term “deniers” to describe your opponents. Not ever.
The term “denier” is only appropriate when preceded by the word “holocaust”. Its use in any other context is calculated to promote an association with neo-Nazi holocaust deniers, and calling people Nazis is the ultimate political dick move.
That you insist on repeatedly using this term, is probably the biggest reason why I do not consider you a credible source of information or analysis on this subject and no longer waste my time reading your lengthy writings on the subject.
Thank you, John.
I have no dog in this fight, but I do not have the same reaction to the word “denier” that you do. I found Picone’s posts to be informative.
@ anon85
The terms ‘denier’ and ‘alarmist’ have both got problems, but ‘alarmist’ carries a worse ad hominem. What would be better terms?
They both strike me as rude, but “denial” actually sounds a lot stronger to me. Maybe not in denotational terms, but it’s a usage that was coined for Holocaust denial, which is, er, kind of a big deal.
I suspect this was deliberate — I’ve never heard anyone called an “evolution denier”, though that science is even better established and the political fight’s even older. But no one (okay, almost no one) thinks creationism’s going to lead to megadeaths.
@Nornagest:
I think Occam says that is because we can call them “creationists”, partly because they so name themselves.
Whereas as there isn’t any one single, salient position for those who say that there is no call to take action on climate change. There are multiple positions, sometimes held by the same person in a single conversation. The only thing that connects the various positions is that they all reject the idea that there is scientific consensus that global warming is real, caused by humans and requires action.
Can you accurately sum that up in a word or two? I mean we don’t even really have a good word for the proponents of the argument, let alone the detractors.
@ HeelBearCub:
“Global-warming skeptics”.
But “skeptic” has a positive valence. It suggests that global warming is some UFO bullshit they’re going to “debunk”.
@Vox:
But some of them aren’t skeptical, anymore than creationists are skeptical of evolution. In fact, one frequent argument against climate change is a biblical argument based on Noah’s flood story.
@ HeelBearCub:
I’m not sure what you mean. “Skepticism” in this sense doesn’t mean global skepticism or atheism or something. It just means you doubt it. And it’s a perfectly broad term because it has no specific connotation about how much you doubt it.
And global warming skeptics doubt the existence, extent, and/or consequences of global warming which are put forward by the “establishment”. If you doubt it because it runs up against the Flood, you’re still a global warming skeptic. Just not skeptical of the Bible.
(Some) creationists say that “evolution is a lie from the pit of hell”. That isn’t skepticism. Similarly, some say that “global warming is a fraud and a conspiracy which has been proven to be false”.
You seem to want to apply a more broad definition to “skeptic” here than is in common usage.
“Sceptic” is the generally accepted value neutral term, “doubter” is also sometimes used. Personally I don’t much think it matters. The world is full of too much whining about offensive modes of expression as it is, if you want to call me a denier go right ahead.
(That said, taking a charitable view of those you disagree with IS important if we are to have good discussions about these issues, and to the extent that the complaint is about Picone’s attitude in general, fair enough)
@ HeelBearCub:
There is a difference between saying someone is “skeptical of X” or an “X skeptic” and saying that he is a “skeptic” in the unqualified sense. The latter implies something like the Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
The former absolutely does not. “Bob thinks we’ll make a profit this quarter, but personally I’m skeptical.” That’s common usage to me.
To me, “global warming skeptic” denotes the “I’m skeptical” sense. Though there is perhaps a connotation of Michael Shermer or something, which may be seen variously as good or bad.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t make sense to me to say “You’re not a global warming skeptic; you’re a fundamentalist!” That’s just a complete non sequitur. (A better type of argument would be something like: “If you’re so skeptical of global warming, why aren’t you more skeptical of the Bible? You’re inconsistent.” But that’s not an argument that the person “isn’t really” a global warming skeptic.)
As for the “lie from the pit of hell”, sure that’s the invective. But they set up little institutes that “question” evolution and want to tell “both sides”. They think scientists are suppressing the evidence for creation.
“Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” both have positive valence, and we’ve mostly come to a cease-fire where if you aren’t trying to pick a fight those are the terms you use when you talk about abortion even if there are more technically accurate alternatives. Because pointing out that this nasty little insult you’ve found has the virtues of conciseness and accuracy, well, there’s lots of concise, accurate colloquialisms for people who do that sort of thing, but it isn’t good for discussion.
@John Schilling:
Note that both of those terms are self selected by each group. That is why I noted that creationist is self selected.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I think some people who object to AGW belief would bristle at being labeled a skeptic. That’s why I don’t think it’s a term that can be settled on. It’s the lack of self selected preferred terms that results in so many labels being thrown around.
@ HeelBearCub:
“Skeptic” is by far the most common term I’ve heard such people call themselves. Indeed, it’s what I would say of myself.
For example, Bjorn Lomborg: The Skeptical Envionmentalist.
Who actually resists being called a “global warming skeptic”? Maybe people who completely accept the existence and magnitude of global warming but propose other means of dealing with it than massive taxes and government programs, but that’s all I’ve seen.
Have you ever heard of anyone saying: “Please don’t call me a ‘global warming skeptic.’ I’m actually a ‘global warming is an atheist lie -ist’.”?
@Vox:
I’ve certainly seen many people say that global warming is absolutely not true.
@ HeelBearCub:
Saying something is absolutely not true is not incompatible with being “skeptical” of it. Again, it’s “skeptical of” vs. philosophical skeptic.
If you say, “I’m skeptical of your claim”, that’s often just a more polite way of saying you think it’s false.
Or even in philosophy, “moral error theory”—the view that all moral claims are false—is typically classed as a type of moral skepticism. To say you’re “skeptical” is wonderfully vague term that can mean anything from “I’m not completely certain of this” to “I am completely certain this is false.”
I’ve heard some object to sceptic and insist that they should be called “climate realists”. I generally regard these sorts of objections as silly, and usually describe myself as a climate sceptic.
@ Nathan
I’ve heard some object to sceptic and insist that they should be called “climate realists”.
‘Denier’, ‘realist’, and ‘alarmist’ all beg the question. ‘Climate skeptic’ may be stretching ‘skeptic’, one way or another. How about something, yanno, Bayesian?
‘denialist’ in the climate context has never been a Holocaust denier association. It comes from, y’know, /denial/, the state of not believing something because you would prefer not to believe it.
There are non-climate, non-holocaust uses. See, for example, HIV/AIDs denialism.
I prefer not to use ‘skeptic’ because I read the term as related to skepticism, evaluating ideas on their merits, etc., and I don’t think people on that end of the climate argument do that.
I think that’s the principle reason ‘denialist’ ended up being the principle term in use – people on my end rejecting the ‘skeptic’ framing and looking for a pithy phrase. ‘rejectionist’ has had some use as well.
In the example creationism, that framing isn’t rejected by the evolution end, so it’s just ‘creationism’ not ‘evolution denial’.
(Similarly ‘lukewarmer’, where it’s pretty clearly a branding distinction attempting to squeeze into the Overton window through the large gap left by the ‘skeptics’ on the other end, complete with a term attempting to suggest ‘middle-of-the-road’ and ‘moderation’. Meanwhile, Friedman suggests a TCR ~60% of the bottom of the IPCC range. Middle of the road indeed…).
I have seen the phrase ‘evolution denial’, but I’m not sure there are old attestations; I think it’s a back-formation from the climate version.
The “You’re calling us holocaust deniers!” move strikes me as ClimateBall.
@HeelBearCub:
I have literally never seen this argument, and I /have/ interacted with people who think that having an atmosphere makes planets colder. But to be fair I stopped engaging in arguments with creationists a while ago.
@Vox:
I’m not saying I particularly object to the term, just giving reasons why it hasn’t become the term used most frequently. Regardless of what skeptic can mean, it’s usually not used to describe someone who has examined all the evidence they are going to and come down on one side of the issue.
@James Picone:
Here is one example.
Now, in this case he is currently saying global warming is occurring. But I’ve seen it in the raw form of “God promised the world would not be destroyed by flood, so global warming isn’t true.”
@HeelBearCub et al
“Skeptic” by definition encompasses almost everybody on the anti-“consensus” side of the debate, and I am fairly certain is politely accepted as a label by almost all of them – even the ones who are certain AGW is not happening. The exceptions, while they do exist, are not the majority and are not going to be contributing to a polite and constructive debate no matter what nomenclature we use, so IMO ought to be ignored.
We still need a polite term for the other side of the debate, though, and there seems to be relative a lack of consensus there.
My favorite negative term invented by the other side for us skeptics is “inactivist”. It’s not THAT negative, it does get to the heart of the matter, and it has an obvious reverse term. Thus, here is my suggested pairing:
“Climate Change Activist”: somebody who strongly believes humanity needs to get organized to DO SOMETHING NOW to address global climate change.
“Climate Change Inactivist”: somebody who thinks trying to organize humanity to DO SOMETHING NOW about global climate change is probably a bad idea.
(Between the two, there’s probably also room for “Climate Change Agnostic”, somebody who is merely not yet convinced one way or the other.)
Does “orthodox” work? To my ear it has both positive and negative connotations, and I think it does convey the feel of how that side sees the situation.
I find it interesting that people who are generally pro-property rights are taking a utilitarian attitude about people in low-lying areas who are presumably going to be flooded out.
Considering the proposed fix is usually some form of tax scheme and government intervention, I suspect someone’s property rights are going to be affected either way.
The utilitarian argument is that it may be cheaper to buy out the affected individuals than to cut off all/most CO2 emissions, so that would mean less total violation of property rights.
It’s not The End of the World As We Know It?
Well, am I not surprised (no, I’m not). As ever, yet another one of the flaps where initial hysteria was whipped up in order to mobilise public opinion, get political movement on the topic because it was considered to be so vitally important, and scientists played along because The Cause was more important than being too cautious and precise. You know, like the one where we would all be in a new Ice Age by the far-flung year of 1980. Or global starvation due to famine. Or run out of oil (seeing as how electricity prices are being reduced in Ireland due to price of oil going down, not seeing this one yet). Or any of the other This Time For Sure! end of the world scenarios I’ve heard during my lifetime.
Will there be any apologies for flinging around charges of “climate denialism” and saying people only denied the Horrible Future Coming because they were Republicans (insert right-wing party of choice of your nation) who were all rich old white men who didn’t care about the poor or foreigners, or will we see people changing tactics so as to say forget they ever used terms like climate denial and called for heads on pikes, they were right all along and those on the other side are all rich white old men who don’t care about the poor or foreigners anyhow?
A lovely example of this was the Y2K bug. Short tl;dr for those too young, there was a problem where many computers stored date formats with two digits, and with the turn of the new millennium they’d possibly crash if not fixed into four formats. Somehow this became a mild apocalypse scenario leading to some survivalism, goods stockpiling, etc.
It’s been forgotten now, but it was a good example in why you should never, never place too much weight in dire media predictions.
The millennium bug has been forgotten?
How depressing.
The thing with “scares” like the Y2K problem and the ozone layer and whatnot is that the actual sequence of events were:
1: There was a genuine problem
2: We spent a hell of a lot of effort fixing said problem
3: People now interpret that as “the problem never existed”
4. People now believe that people who worried about the problem were a bunch of idiot cranks.
5. People now believe that people who worry about cascading failures and social-scale punctuated equilibria are also a bunch of idiot cranks.
You lived through CFCs and the ozone hole. Surprised you ended up this cynical. Surprised you didn’t mention it.
Generally surprised more people don’t know who Rowland and Molina are. If the CFC->ozone thing was figured out a decade and a half later, it would’ve been real bad. As it stands, us poor yokels down south get ~15% more UV than in the early 1970s.
The idea that we were entering a new ice age was not a common scientific opinion and you know it. Just because the media is terrible doesn’t mean you have to be. Famine was averted because of Norman Borlaug; good thing we got lucky. Sure hope there’s another one next time. Peak oil: we’ve probably already hit it, which is why there’s so much interest in fracking, shale oil, tar sands, and other alternate fossil fuel sources.
” Famine was averted because of Norman Borlaug; good thing we got lucky. Sure hope there’s another one next time.”
Yes, we had a lucky streak 200 years long. Odd that. Of course Borlaug was working when there was only 2.3 billion people to draw scientists from and we are going to have a lot more and they can all communicate with each other. Worrying about a long genius is silly; if there is a way to do something, someone will find it.
If your claim is that there isn’t going to be a way, that is pretty silly. We are perfectly capable of using hydroponics to grow food. There are alternate ways for many things that don’t get used because they simply aren’t economic.
“Peak oil: we’ve probably already hit it, which is why there’s so much interest in fracking, shale oil, tar sands, and other alternate fossil fuel sources.”
That doesn’t follow. Once you tap out the easy oil, you move over to easy alternate sources. That doesn’t mean we have hit the peak, it means we have drilled the easiest sources of oil. If oil gets a lot more common the harder it is to extract, we are no where near the peak.
I hate to assume you don’t know this, but I took the mention of “peak oil” to mean a (worldwide) Hubbert Peak, and basically a Hubbert Peak is exactly that – you have drilled all the easiest sources of oil.
Well actually that’s when it happens, that’s not what it is. Anyway, if you know what a Hubbert Peak is and you disagree that we have reached it – and new extraction technologies are certainly relevant to when we reach it – then I apologize for my assumption. However, if you’re not familiar with it, the statement about peak oil might make more sense if you look into it a bit.
To be honest, I didn’t remember the exact definition; I was working off ‘this is where the output starts declining’. If that isn’t actually involved in peak oil at all, than I have no idea why he brought it up since ‘oil will be slightly more expensive’ isn’t the end of the world.
I was assuming that the peak-oil thing was what Deiseach was getting at with “Or run out of oil (seeing as how electricity prices are being reduced in Ireland due to price of oil going down, not seeing this one yet)”. I wasn’t intending to imply it was an end-of-civilisation scenario, merely that the actual people talking about it actually had some idea what they were talking about.
Presumably output starts declining once you have to start investing significantly more capital and energy extracting reserves? I don’t really have any significant expertise here, but that was my understanding of the thing, with fracking, shale oil and tar sands being potential sources of fossil fuel that have only recently become economic. If that’s wrong then I’m wrong.
“Presumably output starts declining once you have to start investing significantly more capital and energy extracting reserves? I don’t really have any significant expertise here, but that was my understanding of the thing, with fracking, shale oil and tar sands being potential sources of fossil fuel that have only recently become economic.”
Yep; mea culpa.
7. Impact on income (or its equivalent) is not the only, or even the most important, measure of the effects of climate change.
The estimates are not of impact on income. They are estimates of impact on human welfare, measured by the reduction in income that produces the same impact on welfare.
“On climate issues, I am what Matt Ridley describes as a lukewarmer. I believe global temperatures have trended up over about the past century and the most likely explanation is human production of greenhouse gases.”
Not exactly an alternative, but I would point this out:
1. The evidence seems to indicate that global temperatures trended up in the first half of the 20th century as well.
2. It’s not known very well what caused this temperature increase. Some people say it’s because we were coming out of the Little Ice Age, but that only leads to another question: What caused the Little Ice Age? This is not well understood either.
3. If you believe that late 20th century warming was caused by mankind’s activities, then you have to assume that whatever force was causing warming before 1950 or so clicked off in the middle of the 20th century and mankind’s activities took over after that.
4. This explanation goes somewhat against Occam’s razor and in any event, without knowing what caused early 20th century warming, it’s difficult to assess how big of a role mankind’s activities played in warming over the last 50 years.
I believe the IPCC explanation for the mid-century pause is particulates in the air. An alternative explanation, which I prefer, is that there is some sort of cyclic effect, possibly involving heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere, with a period of sixty to seventy years. That’s combined with a gradual warming due to AGW.
When the two push in opposite directions you get a pause, when they push in the same direction you get rapid warming.
But I may be out of date on the IPCC, since I believe they are now making a confident claim about human responsibility only for warming after the mid-century pause.
For more on my preferred explanation, see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/09/an-explanation-for-pattern-of-warming.html
Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much warming we would expect to today from the greenhouse gases emitted since the preindustrial.
Spoiler: if you assume the lowest TCR value in the IPCC’s likely range, it’s 0.7c. We have /observed/ 0.8c of warming since records began. If 50% of the warming is some kind of cycle (as is implied by it ‘cancelling out’ greenhouse warming), then the back-calculation gives you a TCR of ~0.57. The bottom of the IPCC’s likely range for TCR is 1c. Calculating ECS from TCR is not really possible, but a TCR that low definitely implies an ECS <1c, i.e. net negative feedback. Good luck explaining ice ages.
Maybe you shouldn't make sweeping conclusions based on motivated curve-fitting.
TL;DR either you're not a lukewarmer or you haven't seriously considered the implications of your opinion here.
Sweeping conclusions based on motivated curve fitting?
@Nathan:
Thinking it’s reasonable to think <50% of warming is anthropogenic and therefore Cook13 is blowing smoke (sweeping conclusion). Eyeballing a sin curve or similar based on two points (curve fitting). Ending up with a wildly nonphysical result and not noticing because he never bothered to check (motivated).
“If 50% of the warming is some kind of cycle (as is implied by it ‘cancelling out’ greenhouse warming)”
Perhaps you should read more carefully. The conjecture I discuss–one supported with evidence by a published article I link to–is a cyclic effect with a period of sixty or seventy years. Over one full cycle it would have no effect on total warming.
“Thinking it’s reasonable to think <50% of warming is anthropogenic and therefore Cook13 is blowing smoke"
Cook claimed, not that it was unreasonable to think that less than 50% of warming was anthropogenic, but that a particular article of which he was lead author found that 97% of article abstracts that expressed an opinion on the cause of warming held that more than 50% of it was anthropogenic.
The actual finding was that 1.6% of the abstracts held that, and about 95% held or implied that humans were a cause of warming. For all I know all of the 95% believed humans were primarily responsible, but they did not say so in their abstracts–according to the report of Cook and his coworkers—so claiming that they did was a lie.
Over a month ago, you wrote:
“The takeaway here is that David Friedman is quite happy to commit the same ‘dishonesty’ he’s accusing Cook of, by conflating the category “Does not think climate change is principally human caused” and “Does not specifically indicate climate change is principally human caused in the abstract of their paper”.
I asked you to either support or retract that claim. When I pressed you on the subject on a comment thread on my blog, you wrote the following:
(quoting DF):
“”Would you like to support that claim? Where in what I have written, here or on my blog, did I make any assertion about how many people think climate change is principally human caused?”
(JP writes)
Then I quote you as saying:
“97% of articles expressing an opinion on the cause of warming hold that humans are at least part of the cause, but only 1.6% hold that humans are the principal cause.”
Then I add:
“Only 1.6% included explicit quantification /in their abstract/. That’s a different claim to “only 1.6% hold that humans are the principal cause”. Pedantic? Yep. Meaningless? Yep. Roughly the same scale as the complaint you have about Cook? By my lights, yes.”
I should have said “abstract” rather than “article.” But the claim I asked you to support was that I conflated what was in the abstract with what the author thought, not that I conflated what was in the abstract with what was in the article. None of your responses provided any support for that claim. You made a false statement about what I said, and despite repeated requests you have neither supported nor retracted it.
At some point I will stop wasting my time responding to you.
@David Friedman:
Of course, I should perform the calculation from ~1975 to ~2010 to catch half a cycle.
It’s gotten 0.6c warmer over 1975/2010, roughly.
Over that time period, CO2 has gone from 330 ppm to 385 ppm (graph).
CO2 forcing change over that period is 5.35 * ln(385/330) = 0.8 W/m**2.
There are other greenhouse gases that have changed over that period, but they’re harder to get good tabular data on and I’m lazy. Here is a relevant AR5 graph. Let’s add an extra 0.5 W/m**2 from the rest of them, eyeballing from that graph. Adding additional forcing favours your viewpoint by reducing the TCR required to get a given temperature increase.
delta-T = TCR * delta-forcing / 2*CO2-forcing. 0.6 = TCR * 1.3 / 3.7. TCR = 1.7.
Halve the delta-T, TCR = 0.85, still less than the IPCC’s lower confidence bound, although less so. Some of that is the extra forcing to account for non-CO2 sources, of course.
The paper is Tung & Zhou, a classic. They take the AMO, which is North Atlantic sea surface temperatures that have been linearly detrended, and subtract it from the temperature record. North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are not linearly increasing. Result: subtracting global warming from itself and noting that it reduces the trend. Here‘s a Tamino post on it.
(Also CET isn’t a global temperature dataset, but you knew that?)
Cook kerfluffle:
here is the comment thread on Friedman’s blog where he’s quoting. There’s more there, of course, including me making a bad argument about carbon cycle feedbacks that turned out to be very incorrect, me pointing out Friedman making a mistake accusing me of not responding to a challenge of his in a hilarious reflection of Cook mistakenly attributing an argument made by the author of a post linking to Friedman to Friedman, a reflection that could not have been better timed, and like seventy billion additional comments after the one he’s quoted here, a few of which are direct responses. Oh, and and me retracting the specific interpretation Friedman is complaining about (although admittedly being a dick in the process):
tl;dr the scare quotes around ‘dishonesty’ are very meaningful. I am not actually accusing you of dishonesty.
If any of those papers were arguments that GW was <50% of the trend, they would have indicated it in their abstract, because it's an /extremely surprising and very strong claim/. Notice, for example, that the Tung&Zhou paper says "…and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century" in their abstract. Notice the TCR calculation above that indicates exactly how small TCR has to be for the warming to not be mostly CO2. Notice how hard it is to get the two-box model applet I linked here today to produce a TCR <1c (I could get it to somewhere in the 0.9 range by turning off ~half the forcings, I'm sure with creating timescale fiddling you could get it there).
And then they end up in categories 5/6/7. So not in the 97% figure.
This is roughly equivalent to someone performing a literature survey to determine the consensus on gravity, lumping papers that use gravitational equations to calculate the orbit of Mars in with the consensus, and getting criticised because "Just because they think that the gravitational model is accurate for the orbit of Mars doesn't mean they think it applies down here on Earth!".
“If any of those papers were arguments that GW was <50% of the trend, they would have indicated it in their abstract, because it's an /extremely surprising and very strong claim/."
Maybe. But if they argued in their abstracts that it was more than 50% they would have been in category 1. Cook's claim wasn't about what people believed, it was about what Cook et. al. 2013 found in their abstracts, and what it found was 1.6% in Category 1.
I feel as though I am wasting my time. I can see no explanation of your responses on the Cook issue that suggests that going over a perfectly straightforward argument one more time will serve any useful purpose.
"Fine, if it’ll assuage your honour, I retract that specific reading of what I claimed."
The claim was made here, not on my blog, and I repeatedly asked you, here, to either support it or retract it. Are you now agreeing that you have no support for that claim and are therefor retracting it?
[For anyone who has understandably lost track, the claim was that I was "conflating the category 'Does not think climate change is principally human caused' and 'Does not specifically indicate climate change is principally human caused in the abstract of their paper.'"]
Looking back over the comment thread on my blog, something I didn't notice at the time. I mention it here because if I put it there you probably won't see it. In defending Cook accusing me of dishonesty for an argument I did not make, you write:
"The blog post he was posting on made the argument he attributes to you, just after quoting your blog post. This is not a difficult slip of the brain to understand."
For any interested, the relevant blog post is:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/david_friedman_14.html
It quotes three whole paragraphs of my argument. It then continues:
"I did notice, though, another part of the Cook et al paper that further undercuts the 97% claim "
So you are saying that John Cook is so intellectually incompetent that he skips over three paragraphs of my argument to get to something specifically by the blogger not by me, assumes that was my argument, and then charges me with dishonesty for making it. And it's just a lucky accident that that lets him entirely ignore an argument to which he has no response–has never offered any response anywhere that I have seen.
Cook's "response" to me was posted almost two years ago. David Henderson, whose blog it was, promptly pointed out that it ignored my point. From then to now I have routinely repeated, on many places online, both my original argument and the fact that Cook accused me of dishonesty for an argument I didn't make.
Cook, unlike me, is a professional climate warrior–having made a spectacular propaganda success with his first venture in the field, he appears to be devoting full time to it. He pays enough attention to arguments online to have noticed the reference in Henderson's blog and responded to it.
How likely is that over the course of the past twenty-two months he has never noticed David Henderson's response or my response? That nobody who talks to him has noticed it? I made the point some time back to one of his active co-authors online–who promptly vanished from the discussion. But never mentioned it to Cook?
Suppose he is an honest man and discovers that someone he accused of dishonesty denies making the argument the accusation was based on. Checking that claim is easy–all he has to do is look at Henderson's blog, which he has already commented on. Having discovered that he made, by your account, a careless mistake, he is surely obliged to retract the accusation and apologize–at least on Henderson's blog where it was made. If he actually has an answer to the argument he ignored, one would expect him to give it.
Any sign of his doing any of those things? Does that help you understand why I think you are capable of persuading yourself of whatever you find necessary in defense of your side?
Here's a simple suggestion. Write or email John Cook. Describe the situation. Ask him if he can support his claim about what argument I made, and suggest that if not he owes me an apology. See what happens. For extra credit ask if he has webbed a response to my argument somewhere.
I mentioned here a second example of dishonesty on the alarmist side that one can check by a little careful reading:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-lie-while-telling-truth-part-ii.html
The result they report, combined with the familiar facts on the effect of CO2 on the yield of C3 plants which they don't seem to mention, imply that doubling atmospheric CO2 will increase the yield of wheat by 30% for carbohydrates, 21% for zinc, intermediate amounts for other things. They describe this as "increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition."
How do they do it? They assume everyone eats the same number of calories of the same food as before. Since the ratio of zinc to calories is now lower, they get less zinc.
See if you can persuade yourself that the two articles in question (the link to the second one is in the comment thread) were written by honest men.
If I cannot persuade you with the occasional case where, in my view, no reasonable person could fail to detect deliberate dishonesty, I don't think arguing with you about more complicated and difficult questions—which most climate arguments are—is a useful activity.
I have sent an email to contact@skepticalscience.com (Cook’s email address doesn’t appear in any of the official sources I just quickly checked, so this seems the best way to get a question in). Subject: “Question about consensus study”, and the following content:
I will post here if and when I get a reply.
The situation is not symmetric; the paper is not written assuming an observer behind a veil of ignorance. They’re assuming some basic climate knowledge (because these are climate papers), and with basic knowledge statements like “[greenhouse gas emissions] contribute to global climate change” imply humans are the cause of global warming (that is, the warming in the instrumental record was caused by us). This is the argument you have consistently failed to engage with; if you accept the physics, there’s only one positive forcing over the last several decades, and it’s anthropogenic.
You have mis-parsed the categories. Category 2 is not “explicitly says we’re causing some warming but doesn’t say how much”, it’s “explictly says we’re causing the warming but doesn’t say how much”. Similarly, category 3 is “implies we’re causing the warming without saying how much”. The papers that seem to say “We’re causing some warming” get put into category 2&3 because of that background knowledge making it possible to follow the inference.
That inference is important. Consider this paper. Unless you know what “Lindzen’s iris hypothesis” is, it’d be difficult to rate. Knowing what it is, it’s pretty easy to put in category 5, as indeed it is (the only one of Roy Spencer’s papers in the database not in category 4).
Keep in mind that when Cook’s paper refers to ‘the consensus’, it’s referring to the IPCC’s statement, which is that it’s ‘very likely’ that more than half the warming is anthropogenic. The median of their distribution is, of course, larger than 100%, but the IPCC is a very conservative organisation.
[honesty, competence, etc.]
I guess you’ve never skim read, made a mistake, had less than perfect knowledge of what people are saying about you in some venue you frequent, etc. etc.. It did take you a couple of tries to find a response you’d been told about, even after replying to the comment that specifically linked you to it, but that’s obviously no indication that perfectly honest people occasionally fuck up.
Maybe Cook has limited time and energy and didn’t feel the need to check back. Maybe Dana and Cook don’t keep each other informed as to every single little dispute about each other they get up to on the internet. Maybe Cook’s google alert for his name (my best guess as to how he found the blog post) doesn’t generate multiple links to the same domain in a short period of time. Maybe some remote application of charity, rather than finding the most hostile way to read his actions, paper, and methodology.
[nutrition]
Let’s say the paper’s values are completely correct. Now, if I want to get as much zinc as before, I must eat more calories than previously. That is what you’re saying, yes? I’m not missing something?
I’m being careful because, uh, that sounds like the wheat is less nutritious to me. If food A contains more X than food B by unit intake, than food A is a better source of X, even if you could hypothetically get just as much X by eating more B. Calories are the unit of intake. If I eat enough chocolate or hamburgers or something I’ll still get enough of whatever things are present in those foods, but they’re less nutritious – I have to eat more of them by unit calorie – to get those vitamins.
Is there something I’m missing here?
EDIT: Knew I missed a bit.
Interestingly, that could be read as implying that I didn’t respond here, when you, of course, know that I did, but you disagree with the response.
But fine, I’m happy to retract that interpretation. I maintain that you have engaged in category slippage of similar magnitude to the slippage you accuse Cook of engaging in (i.e. not very big).
@Picone:
It’s weird how much charity you’re willing to give Cook compared to how little you’re willing to give Lomborg. I was just about to express almost the exact same sentiment in the other context.
Suppose you find a number in Lomborg that doesn’t seem to be in line with the current consensus view. With charity you might ask yourself why that number would have seemed reasonable at the time he wrote his book. For instance, perhaps that paper was one of the most recent to include such numbers at the time Lomborg was looking into the matter, in which case it would by necessity override earlier estimates and fail to anticipate later ones.
Or upon concluding a number he gave is wrong, you might ask yourself how much does changing this number matter to the case Lomborg was making?
When it comes to Cook, you apply cleverness and effort to figure out why might this seemingly-odd claim be correct? or why might this odd claim have seemed right at the time? or why might this odd claim not really matter to the larger picture? or what does he say in his own defense? but when it comes to Lomborg, you apply cleverness and effort to figure out why might this odd claim prove he’s a dishonest propagandist?
Perhaps a bit more balance is in order?
“Now, if I want to get as much zinc as before, I must eat more calories than previously. That is what you’re saying, yes? I’m not missing something?”
Several things:
1. People who are facing poor nutrition are likely to eat more calories when more food becomes available.
2. If total crop yield increases sharply due to CO2 fertilization, you don’t have to keep eating the same amount of the same things as before. You have access to more resources, so can change your diet to improve nutrition. This isn’t a trivial point–we are talking about a 30% increase in total yield, a 9% decrease in ratio of zinc to calories (for some cultivars of some crops). A 5% decrease in iron. No significant decrease in eight other minerals.
3. Your position is that it is an honest description of a change in yield that increases yield of every nutrient substantially, but increases calories more than some others, as “threatens human nutrition”? To do so by reporting the ratio of nutrient to calories while ignoring the effect on total amount of nutrient available?
In case it isn’t clear, what I am trying to do is to persuade you that some people on your side are deliberately dishonest. My reason to think that worth doing is, first, your response on the Cook case. Second, your response on Lomborg.
You asserted he was dishonest–on the basis of a book you had not read. You offered some examples you got from critics. Someone who had read the book demonstrated, time after time, that the particular attacks on Lomborg were bogus, dishonest. Your response was not to read Lomborg and check out further charges for yourself. It was not to conclude that you didn’t actually know if he was dishonest. It was not to conclude that, whether or not he was dishonest, some of the critics you were relying on were. It was to post a new charge or two, still without having read the book–and in one case, if I remember correctly (I haven’t gone up the thread to check), charging Lomborg with failure to cite an article that had not been written when his book was published.
That only makes sense if you have a very strong prior for the belief that people on your side of the argument can be trusted, so any evidence they are being dishonest should be very heavily discounted, whereas people on the other side are usually dishonest (you pretty much said that about scientists on that side in the post that brought Lomborg into the discussion), hence charges against them are to be assumed true until disproven.
All I can do is to offer examples where I think it requires considerable contortions to interpret the argument on your side as honest. Claiming that a change that increases the yield of all nutrients by a lot, while increasing calories a little more than two out of ten minerals, is properly described as a change that “threatens human nutrition” seems to me to qualify.
The second of the two papers is webbed in full, with a link in the comment thread to my blog post. Take a look at how it justifies the assumption that everyone continues to eat the same number of calories of the same foods as before.
Sorry I took so long to get back to this thread; I’ve been very busy.
I’ve got an email back from John Cook. It’s somewhat disappointing, doesn’t really seem to get the criticism. Reproduced in full:
So basically the standard response to “why are there so few papers in cat1?”, not “why do cat2&3 match >50% anthropogenic?”. The “consensus view that humans are causing *most* of global warming” bit at the end is a strong indicator that that’s what they mean by ‘consensus’ in the actual paper, if you’re in a parsing mood.
That said, I think I’ve already expressed a fairly strong reason why they should be considered to match – because <50% of the recent warming being anthropogenic is ludicrous on just-calculate-the-implied-sensitivity grounds (and I did the calculation above; it implies zero-to-negative feedbacks and a TCR well below the IPCC's lowerbound).
There's a reason AR4 says:
‘very likely’ is ‘90%-94%’ confidence.
[Charity]
Cook has a degree in science (i.e., very basic scientific qualifications), led a volunteer effort to make this paper to test a hypothesis, got it published, crowdsourced the funding to make the paper open access, released all the data, and made a website to let you search the data and try rating abstracts yourself.
Lomborg, meanwhile, has a political science degree (he has published in the literature, on game theory IIRC), has written a couple of books that match the delay/uncertainty/no-regulation-at-any-cost model you should all be very familiar with, from what little we know of his funding some of it is definitely from the standard entrenched interests, and his fundamental argument is nonsense (poor countries are the ones that are going to suffer the most from warming; trying to rush them forwards into a glorious technocratic future where solving all problems is possible is a terrible gamble).
This is a field where you must admit there are a horde of propagandists paid by vested interests to bullshit any excuse they can come up with; as I keep pointing out some of them did the same thing for the tobacco industry over secondhand smoke. When I see people matching that profile, I’m going to be very suspicious of their arguments and motives.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to do that if the science wasn’t politicised. It’s a nice dream. I would love a world where scientists could do their work without being harassed by politicians and vested interests.
[Nutrition]
So basically no, I’m not missing anything, you’re arguing that a hamburger isn’t less nutritious than a more balanced diet because you can eat more hamburgers to get the same amount of nutrients. You can’t let calories float like that; if you eat more than you use you gain weight.
@Picone:
Lomborg completed his PhD in political science and then taught statistics at the University of Aarhus for the next decade. His titles have included assistant professor, associate professor and (now at a business school) adjunct professor; he is an academic.
Whereas Cook completed an undergraduate degree in physics, couldn’t complete a PhD, quit school and became a self-employed cartoonist and blogger for the next decade.
Between the two, I know which one seems more likely to be publishing studies that meet academic standards.
I don’t actually have to admit that. I admit that people claim that to be the case, but I think they largely have cause and effect reversed.
You have indeed kept “pointing that out”. Out of charity, I’ve done my best to ignore it. But since you insist: Please name two currently-living such people. While you’re at it, it’d be nice if you could provide some evidence that what the people you’ve identified said about secondhand smoke was actually incorrect and was in some way supported by the tobacco lobby – if what they said was provably correct at the time they said it that doesn’t count, nor does merely insinuating ties to Big Tobacco based on the views alone.
You’re still trusting Cook and his allies too much. (in this case, Oreskes and Merchants of Doubt).
What’s he published? Answer: SFA, he’s got a h of 4. Cook, meanwhile, has a h of 6 if you don’t count the textbook, 7 if you do. Which also isn’t much, but Cook also doesn’t have a PhD or several million dollars in mystery funding.
I’m not sure “This is a field where vested interests are paying to make a horde of idiots and liars far more notable than they otherwise would be” is much better.
My bold, cute way of avoiding Frederick Seitz.
So, first off, Fred Singer (Yes, he’s still alive). Part of the SEPP, coauthor of “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years”, which was promoted by Heartland. According to his wiki article, “He was involved in 1994 as writer and reviewer of a report on the issue by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, where he was a senior fellow.”, with this reference. Note that Singer was also a fellow of the AdTI at the time.
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution received funding from various tobacco companies at similar times. Here, for example, is a Phillip Morris budget sheet showing a $75,000 payment (Or $50,000? ‘Corp. Alloc’ and ‘USA Alloc’ are the column names) to the AdTI in 1996 (page 2, it’s hard to read, between “Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty” and “American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research”). (On an incidental note, Cato got money too – either $125,000 or $25,000, depending on what the columns mean).
Doesn’t show money changed hands directly, but if you wanna claim that the AdTI didn’t pay Singer for writing the report and that the AdTI wasn’t paid by tobacco companies to write the report then I think you’re being unreasonable.
Jospeh Bast has published a collection of essays named Please Don’t Poop in My Salad that is all about “defending smokers against laws abridging their right to free association and taxes that punish them for a personal lifestyle choice.”, i.e. it is to secondhand smoking what Lomborg is to climate change. Here‘s the old version of Heartland’s page on smoking, here‘s the newer one (without the section on the health risks of primary smoking for some reason).
Heartland and Bast are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, and the money (page 5 and onwards) was just gravy.
EDIT: Oh, and I haven’t actually read Merchants of Doubt.
As for secondhand smoke (which is what most of this is about, obvs.) I don’t know a great deal on the matter. If you want to argue that they’re right, be my guest. I’m going to be over here, looking askance at people who claim to be experts in several unrelated fields and always seem to come down in favour of whoever is paying them.
@Picone:
Here’s Fred Singer providing context – he says:
And what DID Fred Singer say about SHS that was so danged objectionable? Just that the EPA had exaggerated the case against it. Which…they had. That’s pretty much indisputable. Effectively saying “we can’t show this effect is significant at the 95% level so we’ll just use the 90% level instead because it gets us the result we want” – you shouldn’t need someone like Tamino to spot a problem there.
The propaganda claim is that “the same guys” who are being skeptical now on climate were gullible or wrong in the past on tobacco, but it turns out if you try to find specific people who match that description there’s essentially no correlation – most current climate skeptics weren’t tobacco skeptics; the most prominent tobacco skeptics aren’t alive today and weren’t notable climate skeptics. Other than the aforementioned Fred Singer, the “they” seems not to be referring to any specific people but to some sort of tribal affiliation. If you see your enemies as an undifferentiated mass of evil corrupt organizations, then “they” are always on the other side from “us”, the good guys. Guilt-by-association. We should be smart enough not to fall for that.
@Picone:
The claim you’re defending was that there’s “a horde of propagandists paid by vested interests to bullshit any excuse they can come up with” and that “they” had done the same on secondhand smoke.
In claiming Singer as an example of this “they”, you point to: he reviewed for aDT a report about the EPA and secondhand smoke.
A report which you haven’t read.
Since you admit you don’t know anything about the issue and haven’t read the report you are essentially taking it on faith that this report is an example of bullshit excuses rather than, say, an example of a guy who does some policy work on climate also did policy work on a variety of other subjects in the past.
But this is how the Gish Gallop works – rather than making a single convincing rebuttable claim on any subject, we have hundreds of vague, dubious claims, all interconnected. Each individual claim is disposable. There’s nothing I can say to convince you (or Cook) to be charitable to Lomborg OR Michaels OR Singer enough to evaluate what they are saying RIGHT NOW on THIS issue because…people on your side think they once said something wrong on some other issue in the past.
Why was it important to assert that “they” are connected to Big Tobacco? Because Big Tobacco – like the Koch Brothers – is for your tribe a well-established bogeyman. Having established such a connection means you can shut off your brain and stop listening to what “they” say.
But how can you claim people made “bullshit excuses” on some issue when you personally don’t know anything about the issue and haven’t investigated it? Are you just repeating cached arguments again?
Seems like it’s bingo squares all the way down… 🙁
One last @Picone:
Okay…Is it BAD to defend smokers against laws abridging their right to free association and punitive taxes? Do you think nobody should do that? If so, why not?
(Me, I’m kind of glad SOMEBODY is willing to step up to defend undefendables. “First they came for the smokers…” and all that.)
By which you mean Bast’s essays are a scientifically sound, welcome corrective to prior activist overreach? (grin)
Or do you just mean they’re both writing you haven’t read that people on your side don’t like?
(The Bast essay collection is not particularly well-argued or well-referenced – he’s no Lomborg. And Bast is not particularly prominent on tobacco, but I grant that he kind of meets your remit. I had been thinking you meant scientists, of which he’s not. But you didn’t say scientists, so that’s on me.)
Little Ice Age -one hypothesis is the destruction of American agriculture due to the depopulation following introduction of European diseases in 1492, and the regrowth of forests sequestering CO2, leading to the lowest historical levels of CO2 in 1610.
Response #4 for the win. Combined with the fact that large reductions in CO2 are available for a cheap price. (#6 has some truth, but I see it as irrelevant; other reasons for doing things should be addressed in their own right.)
I’m curious about your large reductions for a cheap price. One of the things I find odd is that the same people argue that renewable sources of power are or shortly will be less expensive than fossil fuel and that we need carbon taxes, or subsides to renewables, or something similar to make people switch. Which only makes sense if renewables are more expensive.
To put the point a little differently, if you believe that renewable costs will continue to fall and are or soon will be below fossil fuels, you should base your AGW projections on a very low emissions scenario.
But you may have some entirely different justification for your cheap price claim.
Renewable costs can be below current energy costs without being below what technological development of fossil fuel costs could bring; fracking is basically this.
Plus in any non-apocalyptic future, people will be richer and so able to pay even higher fossil fuel costs as a status symbol; SUVs can get bigger, private helicopters come into widespread use, etc.
Technological change is almost certainly easy to steer in a given direction than any other kind of change., given much research is paid for centrally by taxes. Nevertheless, by definition, if you refuse to steer, you go in a random direction.
I wasn’t aware that fracking technology was discovered by a taxpayer-funded government research program, and it certainly wasn’t necessary that it be so. There’s plenty of private money for new and improved oil-extraction technologies.
And on the consumption side, improvements in automotive powertrains both combustion and electric usually come from the auto companies. I was one of the investors in an earlier generation of EV technology and paid fairly close attention at the time. Now the big action is in closely-held private companies, but the pattern is the same. And better internal-combustion engines, those come out of Detroit with or without government funding.
So, yes, you can push government tax dollars into clean energy and electric-vehicle programs. But those are really hard technical problems. And you cannot, by purely positive means, prevent e.g. General Motors and Exxon from figuring out how to put a V-8 SUV or sports car in everyone’s driveway, and keep it in fuel, for substantially less than the price (neglecting pesky externalities) of a Tesla connected to a solar grid.
You have to ban them from doing so, or tax them for doing so, or some similarly negative intervention. And when, as a result, someone who could have had a Corvette for $60K now has to pony up $80K for a Tesla or make do with a Chevy Volt, you have made someone poorer in the name of your preferred environmental intervention.
That may be the right thing to do. But don’t delude yourself that it is what you are doing, and be prepared for a most skeptical inquiry into your plans and your motives.
Fossil fuel cars are going to be killed by batteries, because an electric car with a not-puny battery pack is a better driving experience by any objective criteria – quiet, vastly superior torque curve, taking up less space, ect, and batteries are getting better a heck of a lot faster than the combustion engine is. ICE’s dont see 20 % improvements / year!
The core problem with electric cars has always been that it takes far more time to charge up a battery, even at “fast-charging stations,” than it does to fill up a gas tank. That seems unlikely to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
@ NN:
That’s sort of irrelevant if the charging is fast enough that people can plug them in overnight. Most people don’t use a whole tank of gas every day.
Fossil-fueled cars likely will remain useful for cross-country trips. But even then, Tesla’s got that fairly well covered with the superchargers. Sure, they’re slower than filling up a gas tank, but you can stop to eat at the same time, and combined with the convenience of never having to fill up while at home, it’s more convenient.
If that doesn’t work for you, and you still want to drive across the country, you could certainly rent a fossil-fueled car. It’s often a good idea to use rental cars for such trips, anyway. And especially if you’re moving stuff, you often have to.
No, the main drawback of electric cars is that they are currently too expensive. But I do expect that to change shortly. I would like to have a Tesla car; it is an exciting technology.
batteries are getting better a heck of a lot faster than the combustion engine is. ICE’s dont see 20 % improvements / year!
Better batteries will unleash (sorry) a LOT of things. Solar, wind, tide, etc etc. That’s one area for research with a lot of payoff. Focus on that, fix that, and we might go back to the moon. Where’s JFK when we need him?
(Well, my first draft said ‘lack of storage is a bottleneck that can unleash’.)
ICE’s don’t see 20 % improvements / year!
They used to. Then they slowed down. Then they did again when people saw different dimensions of performance they wanted to optimize, then they slow down again.
Batteries will slow down too, by whatever metric you care about. It is almost certain that they will stop well short of the power and energy densities achievable through chemical combustion. It is not clear whether they will stop short of being able to power a vehicle that meets traditional consumer demands for automobile performance at a reasonable price.
And the naive assumption that current trends can just be exponentially extrapolated into a utopian future, is annoying to those of us who actually study the engineering. Exceedingly annoying when people insist on using it as the basis for substantive policy proposals.
Batteries will slow down too, by whatever metric you care about. It is almost certain that they will stop well short of the power and energy densities achievable through chemical combustion.
/loses patience/
After you breathe the fumes at the gas station, after waiting for the big truck to fill the underground tank, after breathing its exhaust as it brings the gas to the station [*], etc etc, oil spills in the ocean/pipeline etc etc, wars etc etc.
Vs switching in a new battery every time you stop for a sandwich or a restroom, recharged by a clean power source on the roof.
* Some externalities are closer than others.
You’re losing patience already? We’re just beginning.
Here’s another close-to-home externality for you. You spend a hundred thousand dollars on your shiny new Tesla. Take it on the road south from San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, you swap battery packs while enjoying the view at a beachfront cafe. Pull into a service station in Los Angeles a few hours later to a buzzer and a red light. We’re sorry; the battery pack in your car reads below specified limits and can no longer be accepted for trade-in. We can recharge it for you if you’d like to wait overnight, but it probably won’t hold much more than a hundred miles of charge; really it was just about done for when the last user swapped it out. The local Tesla dealership can sell you a replacement for $30,000. No, sorry, the battery pack in your car right now is five years old and no longer under warranty.
Automotive-grade battery packs do in fact degrade from Really Fucking Expensive to Absolutely Worthless in a disturbingly short time. And it is difficult to predict or even measure this degradation until it’s too late. I have no doubt you can come up with some scheme where the financial risk of being stuck with a worthless but expensive battery pack is borne by someone who is Not You, but that sort of insurance is itself going to be expensive.
The guy next to you at the pump, who is nursing a $5000 beater along for another year because that’s the only way he can hold down his job, he’s going to hear you waxing rhapsodic about how your shiny new Tesla and it’s $10K/year Guaranteed Instant Battery Swap Plan is the only way to drive and the one true solution to Global Warming, and he’s going to vote for President Trump or whoever it is who will make sure he can still buy good old-fashioned made-in-the-fracking-USA gasoline.
As long as we’re sputtering, what is the, er, core reason why electric power storage needs big heavy pesky difficult to predict or even measure degradation style batteries? Who is working on a breakthrough there, and why not? (JFK, pls pick up.)
Well, in colloquial usage, anything that stores electric power is going to be called a “battery”, so there 🙂
There is a bit of work going on in flywheels and regenerative fuel cells, both of which are credible alternatives to electrochemical batteries but not likely to overtake them in the next few I can’t think of anything else offhand that would even be worth focused research in this area, though of course basic research into a wide range of clever technologies might come up with something surprising.
@ John Schilling
Well, in colloquial usage, anything that stores electric power is going to be called a “battery”, so there 🙂
As I was using it. 😉
is a bit of work going on in flywheels and regenerative fuel cells, both of which are credible alternatives to electrochemical batteries but not likely to overtake them in the next few
What could speed that up?
I can’t think of anything else offhand that would even be worth focused research in this area, though of course basic research into a wide range of clever technologies might come up with something surprising.
( ring, ring )
For example, coal and natural gas are competitive options for power plants; gas has half the carbon per unit thermal energy and (bonus) converts more efficiently into electricity. So if coal gets more expensive, a lot of new power plants will produce much less CO2 per kWh than they otherwise would have, without much increase in the price per kWh. More generally, not only do energy forms substitute for each other, but efficiency improvements can substitute for some energy use. Many of these are already cheaper than business as usual, so if governments can exhort/bribe us to bring those into use, that part of the CO2 reduction can come for better-than-free (admittedly a small, one time thing).
AGW predictions for a pollute-for-free scenario should probably assume lower emissions, yes, but replacement of energy forms is a gradual process. Meanwhile, some physical mechanisms of global warming damage are probably underestimated, because scientists are conservative in the sense of reluctant to predict an event without a really big pile of evidence. We should update both estimates, early and often.
Relevant and cool applet: here. Code for it and underlying data files here.
It fits parameters for a simple two-box model to observations and then shows some pretty graphs. ATTP discusses building a two-box model here, the Cowtan one is probably similar but not the same. Conceptually, it models heat transport between two reservoirs with different heat capacities and time constants; in practical use one is the atmosphere and one is the well-mixed ocean layer (by extension there are one-box models where the box is just ‘earth’ and three-box models where the third box is the deep ocean). You fit for ~2 parameters I think; there are some other pre-chosen parameters for heat capacities and time constants and so on; definitely enough for elephantine behaviour so caution etc. etc.. Still interesting.
Some notes on that page:
– The ENSO option presumably sticks ENSO in by including some function of the multivariate ENSO index, given how it’s named. The MEI includes detrended sea surface temperatures; you might want to not have it on for that reason. If you leave it off don’t be surprised if la Nina and el Nino years stick out well away from the line.
– AFAICT the forcing weights just make that forcing that many times stronger. I’m not sure if there’s a meaningful use for it other than turning forcings ‘off’ by setting them to zero.
– I think the RCP graph is driven by the calculated model TCR, not by the model itself. If you have ludicrous TCR values (perhaps because you’ve done something silly with the forcing weights), it will not behave very sensibly.
A question for the Christian 12%:
I have idea for a future adult bible study class I’d like to put together. The goal would be a to take a single chapter and attack it from the perspective of a different church father every week, for a total of around 10 sessions. The trick is finding one that will yield a wide variety of interpretations to play with.
I’m hoping for something from the OT, because I assume I can find somebody going off the rails with typologies, and could probably scrape together a good batch of Jewish commentators as well. I’m leaning towards Psalm 118 at the moment, mostly because Martin Luther listed it as his favorite one, but I’d prefer something a little meatier.
Obvious candidates for commentators: Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Aquinas (did he do commentaries?), Origen if I can find a translated commentary. Bonus points if it’s a chapter that is referenced a lot in the NT, which would probably be enough for its own session.
Well, as you know Bob, Catholics don’t read the Bible 🙂
So cheating here: what Fathers are you thinking of selecting? Wikipedia has a comprehensive list
As for sample chapters and commentaries, all I can recommend as a starting point is this list of selected works in translation by the Fathers – you might find some New Testament suggestions there.
My selection of Fathers would be driven more by who said something interesting about the passage than a desire to include them all. Getting the big names in would be ideal, but a lot of them mostly synthesized a whole lot of scripture rather than expounding on individual verses, which is harder to find. Luther and Calvin are gimmes, because they wrote giant commentaries on everything.
Basically, putting this together requires a lot more breadth of knowledge than I have, and my google-fu doesn’t seem to be up to the task either. I was hoping somebody else here might already know enough to point me in the right direction.
We have and enjoy the three books in this collection of Church Father commentaries: http://www.amazon.com/Journey-With-Fathers-Commentaries-Throughout/dp/1565480139
This probably won’t be too helpful to you, though, because these commentaries are only on Gospel passages. But you might see if the publisher has done anything similar with, e.g., the Psalms (which, as I’m sure you know, are a part of most regular liturgical services).
Aquinas did do commentaries. As for other commentators, I don’t have any early figures to add to Deiseach’s list, but since you seem to be including reformation-era figures too, I would recommend Menno Simons as likely to add variety to your readings. You can search through his complete works here: http://www.mennosimons.net/completewritings.html
This seems really neat, but also alot of work given you don’t have a particular topic or passage in mind.
Nearly all of the Fathers are available online in English translation at http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html (admittedly a 19th-century English translation, but you take what you can get.) I might recommend checking the tables of contents there to see what they wrote about. IIRC there are also (often) indexes of Scriptural references in those volumes, which would help you. Augustine and Chrysostom were both great preachers, so look at their sermons as well as their commentaries. Calvin is more systematic than Luther and browsing his sermons/commentaries might be very helpful.
Intervarsity Press publishes a series called Ancient Christian commentary on Scripture that reprints selections from dozens of the Fathers (and other figures) on each of the books of the Bible. An Amazon search for that phrase will turn up a lot of the individual volumes. That would give you a quick starting point if you had a particular passage in mind (you probably won’t find the full set outside a major theological library).
Thanks, I didn’t know about the indexes. Probably what I need to do is download those and then write a script to parse the index and report back to me which verses seem to have the broadest coverage. That should point me in the right direction.
I love the SLC community hahah
I’m at least generally interested in this, but pretty new (again) to Christianity, so not a great source of what would yield a reasonable study.
This sounds like a great idea, though 10 sounds ambitious. I bet you could find 6 thorough commentaries in English translation for Genesis or Pslams.
tumblr – i dont get it. could someone clue me in?
here’s what happens to me every time….
1/ click link to some post on tumblr
2/ read and enjoy post
3/ click on notes button to see what people have to say
4/ see X liked this, Y liked this, Z reblogged this etc
5/ dont see any discussion.
what am i missing?
Nothing. The majority of tumblr interaction does not take place in the form of discussion. Notes are an undifferentiated mass of likes, reblogs, and actual commentary.
ok, thanks. so then how does the interaction take place?
Most people are not interacting with most other people: They use them as sources for neat images/jokes/videos. You get notified if someone reblogs a post of yours with commentary, but most people don’t bother responding or anything like that to strangers. Back and forth interaction usually takes place between people who mutually follow one another (mutuals), such that they see what the other person reblogs and vice versa. People also interact by sending in questions to people’s inboxes.
ok, got it, thanks.
i had completely misunderstood the point of it then.
One thing I’ve always wondered, as a very casual Tumblr user, was whether it was possible to suppress reblog duplicates. As it is, I occasionally have multiple accounts I follow, who may also follow each other, and so I’ll see posts get reblogged as many as five times each.
I think the main benefit of Tumblr is it’s where the people are: Because it’s a very convenient and low effort way to browse the output of lots of people and to output stuff yourself, lots of cool and smart people use it. So if you follow the right people, you can get a lot of value out of it. But in terms of being crafted for discussion, it’s almost the opposite.
You’re not missing anything. Tumblr’s UI is horrible.
yeah that too!
but then people like our awesome host use it so i thought maybe i was missing something.
Some of those things that are “Z reblogged this” are actually “Z rebloged this and added their own commentary or discussion”. Some posts, you can see they added something, and some posts, you can’t, and I can’t tell why or why not.
At least at one point, it was to do with quoting in their commentary. If they ended their commentary with a quote, it would render the note as if there was no commentary. That might have changed.
For interaction, Tumblr has been messed about with since Yahoo! took it over. Yahoo are pushing very hard to make it a profitable acquisition (naturally) so they’re trying to re-model it as a mobile app, as something akin to Facebook, they’re putting up a ton of ads etc.
The latest change that is enraging everyone is that they took away the “reply” button, which is how people interacted, and instead put up a messaging system which (speaking for the part of Tumblr I haunt) hardly anyone uses.
So mainly interaction is through either private messaging or by reblogging posts, which gets unwieldy when you’re reblogging the same post six times in a row simply to carry on a discussion. But as has been pointed out, it wasn’t really created as a way to have interaction, but to post and like and share things.
I only got onto Tumblr because I was following my nephew and I never thought I’d get active in fandoms there, but I am enjoying it. It’s no replacement for LiveJournal though (and I never really got into DreamWidth after shaking the dust of LiveJournal off my feet and departing).
I saw The Big Short last weekend, and still can’t stop thinking about it.
One of the big “Bingo!” moments for me was when they found out that the big bond ratings firms were effectively trading good ratings for patronage. My immediate thought there was: well, there’s clearly an incentive for them to do that, and no law is going to make it go away. My almost immediate next though: well, why isn’t anyone offering them money to give *bad* ratings to certain bonds? Namely, people who stand to gain from said bad ratings? That might fix the problem on that front.
I was seeing lots of little points of interesting game theory like this throughout the film. Overall, the underlying problem seems to be the problem of acquiring accurate assessments of financial vehicles such as CDOs or credit swaps. Aside from that, the less fundamental problem is use of government force to bail out economic actors who promote such vehicles. (The solution there is easy, IMO: stop letting your government do that, so that the former problem will get more focus.)
Thoughts? On this, or on the film or book in general?
“My almost immediate next though: well, why isn’t anyone offering them money to give *bad* ratings to certain bonds?”
Well, that would be illegal, I’m fairly sure. And more importantly, it’s a great way to make sure no one ever approaches you to rate their bond offerings ever again. And if no one does that, than you can’t even get paid for giving them bad ratings.
If it’s illegal, then my point here would be that it ought to be legal. At the least, it ought to be as legal as being able to choose a different rating agency.
To your more important point: if it were legal, then an agency that sells bad ratings would likely just be different from the one that sells good ratings. I.e. Moody’s gives this bond an AAA, but S&P gives it a B. Why? Oh, I see; they were paid by two different companies.
On the gripping hand: either one of these sounds like a flawed business model. The current model indicates that ratings agencies aren’t really ratings agencies, but rather, advertising agencies: bond sellers pay them to tell everyone that their bonds are awesome. A real ratings agency ought to have bond buyers as customers, not sellers.
@PaulBrinkley:
I think what you are asking for is different, and already exists. It seems like you want independent analysis of the bonds (independent from the bond rating agency), paid for by the investor in the bond, which I believe firms like Morningstar already provide. That’s different than “paying people to say a bond is bad” which sounds like something I, as someone offering bonds, would do to make my bond look better by comparison.
But didn’t big scale investors know that rating agencies were being paid by the makers of products being rated? My opinion is that banks wanted to invest in risky products to get bigger profits and were required by law to only hold AAA assets so were willing to buy things falsely rated AAA. There were 3 ratings agencies, so why didn’t any of them compete by offering more accurate ratings and win over others? Maybe buyers didn’t want accurate ratings.
Because it would not provide any competitive advantage to do that, since they get paid by the issuers, not the buyers. Institutional buyers, meanwhile, don’t have much incentive to care since as long as the bonds were rated if things to south they were covered.
“Aside from that, the less fundamental problem is use of government force to bail out economic actors who promote such vehicles. (The solution there is easy, IMO: stop letting your government do that, so that the former problem will get more focus.)”
Alternatively, do it properly. Nationalise bad actors who need bailouts, retain public ownership until the earnings have paid off the bail out, gradually dismantle them and sell them off.
This is, quibbles around details aside, approximately what the UK government has done, quite effectively.
I recently put up a blog post on the subject of SWAT raids authorized by search warrants based on false information. The occasion was litigation arising from a raid where the evidence for the search warrant consisted of used tea misidentified as marijuana leaves and stems. The victims sued. The court dismissed their suit on the grounds that the police officers were not responsible for knowing that the test they used routinely identified as marijuana things that were not or for failing to use a more reliable test.
I argue that the proper response to such incidents, in our legal system, would be to hold a police officer who submits an affidavit with information that he knew or should have known was false guilty of perjury. The problem is that criminal prosecution is by the state, hence people who commit crimes that the authorities approve of are unlikely to be prosecuted.
A related issue, which I don’t go into in the blog post, is that if courts are not willing to hold law enforcement agencies liable for using unreliable tests, the Fourth Amendment becomes effectively void. All law enforcement has to do is to find a test for drugs that gives a positive result more or less whenever they want it to. That can be a field test for marijuana with a false positive rate of seventy percent (this case) or a drug sniffing dog that has learned to alert when his handler wants him to.
My post, with some relevant links, is at: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2016/01/swat-raids-search-warrants-perjury-and.html
Suggestions for approaches to deal with these problems invited.
(define (marijuana-test sample) true)
Is it indeed the case that police are generally able to obtain a warrant with such a test, and that warrant will stand up if anyone challenges it legally?
No, judges are too steeped in procedure to allow your test. It is far too functional.
Can we break in to a circuit that’s so high that they don’t trip on procedure, though? Maybe the ACLU could undertake such a scheme. Indeed, they may be the only ones who aren’t too puny.
The standard way to enforce the criminal law against influential executive agents is to have an independent prosecutor. For example, this is, of course, how Bill Clinton, chief executive of the United States, was investigated for crimes by the government of which he was the head. Maybe you could require that the prosecutor be from a different jurisdiction or put other safeguards in place to reduce the risk of a conflict of interest, and you could also have a similarly independent investigative agency to avoid the obvious problems in having the local police investigating their own professional colleagues.
I note also that, while this may vary between jurisdictions, at least in my state, perjury is a specific intent offense. So I’m not sure if it would be enough for the independent prosecutor to prove that the officer swearing the affidavit should have known the information was false in the exercise of reasonable care. They have to prove that he specifically intended to deceive; would this not require actual rather than constructive knowledge of the falseness of the sworn statement? Is negligent perjury a real thing?
Negligent perjury is not a thing exactly (perjury always requires mens rea) but saying something is true when you have no reasonable grounds to believe that it is is still perjury, in something of the same way that asserting a fact with reckless disregard for the truth is still defamatory even if you didn’t know it was false.
My problem with this whole line of inquiry is that perjury, especially but not limited to perjury by law enforcement officers or prosecutors, is simply not viewed as a serious crime at all anymore, and so any attempt to broaden the definition and/or increase awareness will not produce any benefits since even if you can show that there was perjury under some new standard, nobody will care.
Well, there’s the major problem, then. What can we do about THAT?
Nothing.
Well, not nothing, but nobody’s interested, so “nothing” is the answer to “What will we do about that?”
Frankly, there’s more support for jury nullification than for making perjury a major crime again.
On the related point, doesn’t the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment (as opposed to the way it has been construed by modern courts) go some way toward addressing these concerns? I’m just paraphrasing (and probably butchering) points I remember from Akhil Amar or someone years ago, but my understanding is that the function of the warrant at the time of the founding was not to cabin law enforcement but rather to immunize the officer from civil lawsuit. So the officer can lawfully choose to implement a search with or without a warrant, but if the officer takes the optional step of obtaining a judicial warrant then that immunized him from a suit if the search turns out to be unfounded. That doesn’t really advance the ball on the problem if the problem is excessively liberal conferral of warrants by judges, but maybe it at least indicates (if it is right) that the framers envisioned civil tort liability rather than the sort of reliance on inbred prosecutorial decisions (or, heaven forbid, exclusionary rules) to be the primary means of restraining search and seizure improprieties. I’m quite confident I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know (to the extent it is right) but I figured it may be helpful to make it explicit in case it is right since it seems like it could at least be relevant.
CThomas:
I gather from a colleague that in the 19th century, police officers worried about civil suits for illegal searches. Arguably the current rules under which evidence from an illegal search can’t be used grew up as a result of increasing level of immunity to such suits.
The problem is that the police as we know them did not really exist until the latter part of the 19th century.
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were not designed with the modern, professionalized police in mind. Police interrogation is especially problematic, as the protection against self-incrimination evolved out of the English tradition in order to stop the infamous “Star Chamber” style inquisitorial interrogations of suspects by judges. The Framers never dreamed that a mini-inquisitorial system would be set up in every police precinct in the country.
The excellent Illustrated Guide to Law gets into this at great length. It’s well-researched and written by a practicing criminal defense lawyer.
Right.
The most famous warrant case of all time, and crucial background to the 4th Amendment, was Entick v Carrington. What’s often forgotten is that it was a case in tort where the King’s Messenger was sued (successfully) for executing an unlawful warrant. There was no nonsense about exclusionary rules.
Would this be a situation where standardization could help?
It looks to me as though the evidence in the original case was ‘police suspected that this gardening store was mostly used for illegal gardens’ plus ‘two false positives on a test that was crap’. The plaintiffs probably can’t prove that those two officers knew that the test was crap, so you suggest that we find that they were reckless and hold them liable.
But if we approach it from the back end and have a standardized list of which tests are reliable enough to produce warrants and which aren’t, we could achieve the same result while avoiding the costs of litigation. This would also prevent any chilling effects on officers and warrant authorities, since it would be black-and-white whether they have the evidence to proceed.
I grant that this system would be vulnerable to, say, the Federal Testing Czar turning corrupt and approving crap tests from companies he’s in bed with, so perhaps it actually wouldn’t work.
I think that’s a good line of thought, but it should be supplemented by allowing counties, states etc. to experiment. The courts could hold the county or state government (the authority governing this police unit) financially liable for allowing a bogus test to be used. This allows a lower burden of proof than proving police negligence.
I think you’re simply mistaken on what “probable cause” means. It’s just something that would make a person of reasonable caution suspect that evidence of a crime might be found in the place to be searched. To quote the opinion in the tea-leaves case, “As courts have recognized, a reasonably trustworthy field test that returns a positive result for the presence of drugs is a sufficient basis, in and of itself, for probable cause.” (p.13) You can come up with a list of “reasonably trustworthy field tests” if you want — but it’s not obvious to me that the actual KN reagent field test wouldn’t be on that list. The test doesn’t yield false positives 70% of the time, after all; it yields false positives under certain circumstances, including when used on certain types of tea. That’s not necessarily damning. By analogy, my tongue can’t tell the difference between antifreeze and sugar water, but that doesn’t mean I have a 70% false positive rate on sugar water.
I am reminded of the story where police departments bought dowsing rods, not because they expected them to work, but because they provided a convenient excuse for probable cause.
(Many police departments have bought variations on dowsing rods, but how aware they’ve been of the reality seems to be varied.)
1983 needs to be amended to eliminate or sharply rein in qualified immunity. The cops will still have the juries on their side by default, that’s enough of a thumb on the scale. Not too mention it’s the taxpayers that end up paying because indemnification is universal, but at least then the anti-tax lobby will have a reason to join with the civil liberties lobby to want to do something about it.
“the Fourth Amendment becomes effectively void”
The Fourth Amendment is a mere parchment barrier, like the rest of the capital-C Constitution; and like much of that document, is effectively a dead letter. Common law requires common culture; we haven’t had the conditions under which the written Constitution functioned for a long time. So there are no “approaches to deal with these problems”; it’s simply the way things are, there’s nothing you can do about it, so stop sniveling, man up and learn to live with it.
“I argue that the proper response to such incidents, in our legal system, would be to hold a police officer who submits an affidavit with information that he knew or should have known was false guilty of perjury.”
That’s certainly *a* possible response under our legal system. A few points:
1. In the specific case you cite, the court specifically found that the officers had no reason to know the information they were submitting was false.
2. In the specific case you cite, the officers didn’t submit false information: they said their field tests returned positive results for marijuana, which by all accounts was a true statement. The test itself gave a false positive, but unless you want to incarcerate a used field test kit, it’s not perjury.
3. Charging decisions are, constitutionally, reserved for the executive branch. A judge is not entitled to order a police officer (or anyone else) charged for perjury.
I’m not aware of any constitutional rulings that all charging decisions have to be made by the executive branch. There is some precedent that they must be so at the federal level (Morrison v. Olson, though it upheld the independent counsel statute by holding that the IC was a member of the executive branch even though she wasn’t appointed by the president.) But nothing I know of that would apply as against the states.
Personally, I’d like to see private prosecutions revived for cases of official misconduct.
Given that this was a federal suit, I assumed that we were discussing the constitutional division of power between the federal branches of government. I don’t know of a specific case holding that a federal judge lacks authority to order a state executive to charge a particular individual with a state crime. I would enjoy seeing an argument for why a federal judge would be entitled to do that.
I didn’t understand David to be suggesting that the judge in question order the police officers in question charged with purjury, but rather a more generalized suggestion that Things Be Changed ™ so that such charges be brought more often than they currently are (i.e. almost never).
But maybe I misunderstood.
@Brad:
You are correct, save that part of my point was that things were not likely to be changed, because of a fundamental problem with the criminal law.
One of the talks I sometimes give is entitled “should we abolish the criminal law?” One point I make is the weakness of criminal law for punishing crimes that the authorities approve of.
Here’s a video of one such talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mMKEKAydeEo#!
The officers certainly did state false information. The affidavit submitted to obtain the warrant referred not only to the results of the test, but also repeatedly described the plant material they found as marijuana and stated that the officer’s own judgment, based on extensive experience, led him to believe that’s what it was. Perhaps he came to the wrong conclusion completely innocently and using his best judgment, in which case it wouldn’t be perjury. Still, David Friedman’s argument is that an officer with extensive experience with marijuana (and presumably at least a passing acquaintance with tea leaves) probably wouldn’t have made that mistake completely innocently.
I think what’s actually going on here (the Volokh Conspiracy post that Friedman links to gets into this in more detail) is a sort of calculated sloppiness. Once an officer knows he wants a warrant to search a particular location, then his goal becomes to gather facts that can be written up so as to convince a judge to give him a warrant. For this purpose, a test with a high false-positive rate actually is a pretty effective tool. And once you get a positive result, there’s no incentive (in fact, a rather strong disincentive) to second-guess it. Similarly, if he sees something that at least plausibly looks like marijuana, there’s an incentive to overstate his confidence.
This seems a little irrational at first blush. Why wouldn’t cops want the most accurate information so that they don’t waste time on searches like this one? But for the cop, it’s generally a lot faster to just search a house he’s suspicious of (which will either turn up a grow up, and lead to an arrest, or turn up nothing so he can stop wasting his time) rather than methodically gather the most accurate information he can without searching the house and make a careful determination based on the totality of the information (obviously there’s a massive cost to the individuals whose homes are searched, even if the police are more efficient). A test for marijuana that will almost always yield a positive result is therefore a pretty useful tool for a cop who’s willing to use it cynically. I agree with Friedman that it strongly seems like this was the case here. If the officer was genuinely interested in knowing whether there was marijuana in the trash, he would have used a different test.
Maybe this isn’t quite perjury. But I suspect it’s very intentionally not quite perjury; the affidavit seems exactly as misleading as you can be without making any statement that is demonstrably perjurious. However, given this, I’m not certain what the best structure for holding police forces accountable would be.
One thing that hasn’t really been discussed yet is the judge who approved the warrant. He pretty clearly failed to do his duty as well; his whole purpose here is to prevent innocent people from having their homes searched based on flimsy evidence. A general effort to educate judges on the high false positive rate of this field test might lead more judges to deny applications for warrants based on this test. It’s also worth noting that most state judges, including the one who approved this warrant, face elections. A series of public campaign to unseat local judges who approve warrants based on lousy evidence might succeed in changing judicial behavior overall (or, at the very least, lead to more responsible judges in those districts).
“One thing that hasn’t really been discussed yet is the judge who approved the warrant. He pretty clearly failed to do his duty as well; his whole purpose here is to prevent innocent people from having their homes searched based on flimsy evidence.”
Actually, as the federal judge explained (and I quoted above), the state judge did precisely what he was supposed to do. The affidavit of probable cause described facts that, as a matter of law, constitute probable cause. Even the plaintiffs agreed that the affidavit was sufficient basis to issue the warrant. Should the state judge be authorized to say, “Oh, sure, this affidavit is probable cause. But in MY courtroom, you need to meet a higher standard”?
A finding of probable cause is already a matter of judicial discretion. A judge is certainly authorized to say “The test you used has a high rate of false positives, and is therefore insufficient to convince me that the material you found is probably marijuana.” A judge is also authorized to say “I’m not familiar with the test you’re using, before I grant the warrant, why don’t you tell me what the false positive rate is.” Obviously, in this case, things would have gone a lot better if the judge had asked those questions. Personally, I think any judge who approves a warrant on the basis of a test whose false positive rate they don’t know is seriously derelict in their duty. Perhaps you disagree. But you at least must concede that if the judge had asked that question in this case, and insisted upon an answer, an innocent family would have been spared a lot of anguish.
I also think you misinterpret the federal case you keep citing. The federal judge agrees with me that the state judge would have wanted to know about the false positive rate. He agrees that this is a crucial question, and he implies that the warrant would have been improperly granted if the high false positive rate was known. Why does he rule against the plaintiffs? Because “There is no basis to conclude, then, that Deputy Burns or Deputy Blake should have known that the field test kits they were using tended to yield false positive results or that the particular test results they obtained in connection with this case were not reliable.” Thus, even if the judge had asked the question, the officers would have stated, in good faith, that they did not know the test had a high rate of false positives. But the federal judge is certainly not saying that state judges shouldn’t know and try to find out the false positive rates of tests they consider when granting search warrants, he says the precise opposite. Nor does he say that it would have been improper for the state judge to hold off on granting the warrant until he was informed of the false positive rate. All he says is that the state judge’s decision was reasonable based on the facts he had (which did not include the false positive rate), not that it would have been unreasonable to decide otherwise.
Now, I think this is a bad ruling. So, I assume, does David Friedman. Federal judges, believe it or not, sometimes get things wrong. Anyone who thought this was a fair and just resolution to a pair of honest, responsible officers making a terrible error would never have brought this case up. So you shouldn’t really be surprised that people you’re arguing against disagree with the federal judge.
Why is it a bad ruling? Well, perhaps the officers genuinely didn’t know about the high false positive rate (I have my doubts). But should they have known? Absolutely. Do you really believe that law enforcement officers have no duty to be aware of the error rates of the investigative methods they use? In this case, a federal judge has relieved officers of that obligation. Definitions of probable cause vary, but at their heart they all contain some language stating that the question must be considered from the perspective of a “reasonably intelligent,” “prudent,” or “cautious” person. I submit that a reasonably intelligent person who draws conclusions on the basis of a test they don’t understand is neither prudent nor cautious.
@Frank McPike: I totally understand that people might disagree with a federal judge about, well, virtually anything. And one might think that federal law is itself immoral. I take no issue with David Friedman saying that criminal law should be abolished, because (while I don’t agree) that’s simply a question of values.
But I do take issue with people simply not understanding this body of law. For example, you claim that a”finding of probable cause is already a matter of judicial discretion.” Whether a given set of allegations would, if true, give rise to probable cause is a pure question of law, and appellate review is de novo. Judges don’t really have discretion to declare, “Your factual averments are clearly sufficient for probable cause under existing caselaw, but I remain unpersuaded.” (I’m eliding a lot of stuff about the final judgment rule, appealability, and what precisely we mean when we talk about “law.”) To the extent that you believe probable cause is a matter of discretion, SCOTUS disagrees with you.
I’m not saying you ought to care about SCOTUS’s opinion. But I wish you would be clear in your critique of the issuing judge. The issuing judge lacked authority to refuse the warrant based upon the affidavit as submitted. The issuing judge also lacked authority to demand a supplemental affidavit answering whatever questions he might have. You are suggesting that the issuing judge ought to have violated his remit and refused to comply with his lawful duty, based upon a personal interpretation of a Constitutional provision that is, at best, not clearly supported by controlling precedent.
“But you at least must concede that if the judge had asked that question in this case, and insisted upon an answer, an innocent family would have been spared a lot of anguish.”
You’re assuming that one judge refusing to issue the warrant would have prevented the warrant from being issued or the search from being conducted; as I alluded earlier, that’s not how it works. I agree that it would have been better if this search had not happened. Ironically, the harshest (for police) review of probable cause occurs, not when innocent people are injured, but when police actually catch criminals. It’s rather perverse; one positive reform might be to switch the standards of review, so that criminals seeking suppression must overcome a highly deferential standard while innocent people suing for damages can place the burden of proof on the government to prove the lawfulness of its actions by clear and convincing evidence.
Your summary of the law is simply wrong. You cite to Ornelas v. U.S. as evidence that de novo review of a judge’s decision to issue a warrant. But Ornelas isn’t about warrants at all, it’s about probable cause in warrantless searches, and is quite clear, if you read it, that different standards of review apply to each: “the scrutiny applied to a magistrate’s probable cause determination to issue a warrant is less than that for warrantless searches.”
The standard under which a judge’s decision to issue a warrant is reviewed was decided (well, revised) in Illinois v. Gates, not Ornelas. What does Gates say? “[W]e have repeatedly said that after-the-fact scrutiny by courts of the sufficiency of an affidavit should not take the form of de novo review. A magistrate’s determination of probable cause should be paid great deference by reviewing courts.” (Internal quotations removed.) You don’t get much clearer than that.
Why is this deference appropriate? Again, the Court in Gates: “But when we move beyond the “bare bones” affidavits present in cases such as Nathanson and Aguilar, this area simply does not lend itself to a prescribed set of rules.” Similarly, in Ornelas the Court notes that “Articulating precisely what “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” mean is not possible. They are commonsense, nontechnical conceptions that deal with the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men, not legal technicians, act.” (Internal quotations removed) In other words, whether a particular set of facts constitutes probable cause is not reducible to a question of existing, rigid legal rules, but is always subject to the common sense judgment of the issuing judge.
Are judges, in issuing a warrant, permitted to require that the affidavit contain contain assurances that the information they’re basing their judgment on is actually accurate? Verbatim from the majority in Gates: “[U]nder our opinion magistrates remain perfectly free to exact such assurances as they deem necessary, as well as those required by this opinion, in making probable cause determinations.” A judge who insisted on being told the accuracy of the tests mentioned in an affidavit before issuing a warrant would be acting well within the scope of his duty. No court would hold otherwise.
Though, actually, that’s somewhat beside the point here. No one, including the federal judge in this case, is arguing that a positive result on a test with a high false positive rate mandates a finding of probable cause. Actually, the judge implies that if the false positive rate was known, issuing the warrant would be improper. The holding in this case was based on the fact that no one, neither the police nor the issuing judge, knew or should have known that the test had high false positive rates (which, as I have already argued, holds the police to an extremely low standard of responsibility). No one, not the Supreme Court, not the federal judge in this case, disputes that if the state judge had insisted on knowing the accuracy of the test, learned that it had major accuracy problems, and then declined to issue the warrant, he would have been enforcing the normal standard of probable cause.
“I take no issue with David Friedman saying that criminal law should be abolished, because (while I don’t agree) that’s simply a question of values.”
No. My argument may be right or wrong, but my arguments for it don’t depend on my having different values than people who disagree.
The affidavit described what they had found as marijuana stems and leaves, not as “plant material that the field test reported to be marijuana.” That statement was false. The question is whether the police officers should have known it was false. I think it is at least arguable that to make that statement they needed some familiarity with what marijuana looked like, and according to the lab that later tested the material, it did not look at all like marijuana.
More generally, my point is not that those particular officers ought to have been convicted of perjury but that there ought to have been a real possibility of their being charged with and tried for perjury. There have been a lot of cases of this general sort, where a SWAT raid was based on a search warrant obtained by false information. I have not seen a single story about an officer being charged with perjury for such an affidavit.
Fourth link after typing “perjury affidavit warrant” into Google. Your essay is the third link, congrats!
If you’re willing to expand your criteria to include charges that are not technically “perjury” but that stem from accusations of fraudulent search warrant applications, you could also look here and here. How hard did you look?
“How hard did you look?”
Not hard enough. That’s an encouraging story. Thanks.
Since it’s an open thread …
A while back, there were claims that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal organs, denials by Planned Parenthood, lots of talk and controversy. More recently, there has been a different accusation, one that this time appears to be real—that the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the parent organization, claims in print that HIV positive people should not be required to warn their sexual partners, and should feel free to do so or not.
While I can imagine arguments for that position, I expect most people would strongly disapprove of it. But so far I have seen no references to the controversy outside conservative sources, of which the most prominent is the publication of the Federalist Society.
I have a blog post with links to the Federalist story and the IPPF site.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2016/01/another-planned-parenthood-controversy.html
Relevant quotes from their publication:
Young people living with HIV have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose their HIV status.
and
Some countries have laws that violate the right of young people living with HIV to decide whether to disclose. Young people living with HIV can take steps to protect themselves.
(http://www.ippf.org/sites/default/files/healthy_happy_hot.pdf)
This raises two questions. One, obviously, is whether their position is correct. The other, which I actually find more interesting, is why the issue is getting so little attention.
Same reason Gosnell got so little attention.
If you’re thinking of the reason I think you are, then I would have to ask how much attention Gosnell got from conservative sources. (Most of my news comes from specialized blogs, so I honestly have no idea how much it got, if any.)
Heaps and heaps. Is that not what you were expecting?
Wow, that is really awful. My position on the first question is that they are absolutely wrong. If you have a serious, communicable, incurable sexually transmitted disease you have a responsibility to tell your sexual partners. End of story.
As to the second question, it’s kind of baffling, but my only guess would be that having HIV is strongly associated in the public imagination with being gay. Journalists are blue tribe and pro-gay. Of course, there’s nothing inherently “anti-gay” about my position, but HIV-positive gay people are sort of “double victims” and therefore get more consideration in our culture.
Being morally and/or legally required to disclose one’s HIV status is slightly reminiscent of disclosing one’s criminal record on a job application: it imposes a big disadvantage in a way that intuitively feels unfair. I don’t actually think it’s unfair since I’d rather jobs go to equally qualified non-ex-cons than to ex-cons in a tough job market, but it seems kind of unfair.
Mostly, I don’t think it feels like a “winning” issue to blue tribe journalists–they run the risk of seeming anti-gay, or worse, red tribe by reporting on it, most likely.
There is very little connection between whether a thing is morally required and whether it should be legally required. The moral obligation is obvious. End of story there. Whether a legal obligation is a good idea, OTOH, depends on its consequences, and there are plausible arguments that the disincentive to getting tested would cause such a law to do more harm than good. I’d need actual data to have any meaningful opinion on that.
I probably wouldn’t want it made illegal, as that would be something of a slippery slope to all kinds of crazy requirements (are you required to volunteer potentially embarrassing information about yourself to would-be employers even if they don’t ask, for example?) but my understanding of David’s interpretation of the position was that the organization was arguing that it should not even be viewed as immoral.
“very little connection between whether a thing is morally required and whether it should be legally required.”
Nice assertion there. Got anything to back it up?
It’s pretty obvious, unless you have a very restrictive idea of what morality covers, or you’re a totalitarian.
For instance, it is immoral to cling to false beliefs about religion in a manner that willfully evades the evidence available to you. (Whether you conceive this as religion-is-a-delusion or atheism-is-man’s-sin-of-pride.) But it seems like a bad idea—with a very bad track record—to have the government enforce this.
I don’t see why anyone would regard false belief in religion as immoral. Would belief in astrology be immoral?
In any case, I don’t think the lack of connection between legality and morality is at all obvious. Although you could argue that the law prohibits e.g. murder not because it is immoral, but because widespread occurrence of it leads to a dysfunctional society, most people campaigning to change the law seem to be doing so because they believe that the law should reflect their morality.
@ sweeneyrod:
Yes? I mean, it’s one thing if it’s just an insignificant source of mild entertainment they don’t take seriously (as religion seems to be for many people). But imagine someone actually basing important decisions on astrology. Say you loan a friend $1000 because he’s had some emergency and can’t pay the rent. Then the stars tell him to invest the money in a penny stock and he loses it all. Wouldn’t you regard that as immoral and irresponsible?
Rights are a species of moral principles.
It’s not that morality and law are two separate spheres with nothing in common. Everything illegal is (or ought to be) immoral, or the law is unjust or at best unnecessary. But not everything immoral is (or ought to be) illegal.
Now some people adopt a strange separation where they say “morality” only involves how you treat others, whereas whatever you do to harm yourself is merely “imprudence” (instead of treating imprudence as a type of immorality). But even there, under that restricted view, plenty of things are immoral but not illegal.
Pretty much everyone would say it’s immoral to join the KKK and chant about how you hate black people. But it’s not illegal—and there is a principled reason why it is not illegal.
In your astrology example, the immoral thing isn’t the belief in astrology, but the spending of money on something other than the rent. Astrology and religion are just beliefs about the state of the world – precisely what moral (or immoral) beliefs are not (they are of the form “you should” or “I can”).
“Everything illegal is (or ought to be) immoral, or the law is unjust or at best unnecessary.” That isn’t true – take the classic question of whether there would be need for laws in heaven, where everyone is perfectly moral. Although there wouldn’t be a need for laws against murder, there might still be need for laws against parking incorrectly. Many laws exist merely to ensure society functions smoothly, not to make a moral point.
The reason why it isn’t illegal to join the KKK despite it being immoral isn’t because of the separation between legality and morality, but because having a government that bans association in organisations as relatively harmless as the KKK is a greater moral evil than the KKK are.
If astrology was correct, they would have been doing the correct action; if it isn’t, there were doing something stupid. Hence there is a moral obligation to have correct beliefs about reality, otherwise your actions will be based on false premises and often get harmful results. Religion is the same.
@ Samuel Skinner:
My thoughts exactly.
@ sweeneyrod:
I wouldn’t say heaven would have a need for laws. Laws imply a penalty for breaking them. Perhaps heaven would need standards, but these could be adopted completely by consensus. And once everyone decides to drive on the right side of the road, it certainly is immoral to drive on the left (i.e. into traffic).
If there were no bad consequences to the government’s legislating morality in every aspect of life, I would be for it. I’m against because it doesn’t work.
I think most people would agree that it is your moral obligation to rescue someone in a danger of death (most likely drowning) as long as it would not be an overt risk to you as well. Make it a law and let the family of the victim sue you if you don’t and you are likely to see fewer people actually saving someone. Why? Saving someone now comes at an additional cost – if you think it would be dangerous for you but the victim’s family thinks otherwise, you might end up in prison or paying a huge fine…so you do your best to avoid any situation that looks like someone in trouble. If it is left being your moral obligation only, some people may come and decide that saving you would be too much trouble but those people and then some would not come in the first place if it were a legal obligation to help you.
This actually reminds me of an old Czech comedy film, where in one scene a family goes to the forest at the weekend to have a picnic and then when they hear a cry for help from somewhere within the forest, they pack their stuff and run back to their car as fast as they can in order to avoid getting involved.
Being morally and/or legally required to disclose one’s HIV status is slightly reminiscent of disclosing one’s criminal record on a job application
I don’t think you need to go that far afield. Being morally and/or legally required to disclose one’s HIV status is (in this context) almost synonymous with being required to out one’s self as gay or at least bisexual. Blue tribe has spent the past forty-plus years fighting for a gay-rights package whose contents have varied from time to time but has almost always included “No Pink Triangles“. So when presented with a concept that pattern-matches to making all the gays wear pink triangles, the leaders of a blue-tribe institution focused on sexual freedom don’t have to think very long or hard before saying “No, we’re against that”.
Maybe, but there are strong practical reasons as well. HIV is, these days, very treatable, and does not spread much at all if treated. Therefore there is a need to get people informed and treated, and the risk from unknowingly having sex with an HIV-positive person is worth the benefit from encouraging people to know their status.
These days, if you’re rich and/or have good insurance and/or live someplace that is willing to provide therapy for HIV, it’s very treatable.
However, there is no reason in the world why we should expect that to remain the case forever, and quite a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t. Especially if it continues to spread and mutate/exchange genetic information in the wild.
Case in point: gonorrhea was easy to treat 40 years ago.
Now… well, there’s at least one strain that’s adapted to every single thing we had to throw at it.
And we can thank the people who kept spreading it for that.
To a great degree, properly treated HIV is no longer communicable. (It’s something like 0.1% transmission rate, if memory serves.) This changes the the moral calculus significantly.
In what other context is it legal, moral, or ethical to subject a person to a 0.1% chance of death without their informed consent? And what is the great benefit that is being secured by this sacrifice that you propose to impose on the unknowing? Because in my line of work, the standard is 0.0001% integrated over all possible victims, and we’re just trying to open the high frontier to humanity, so this must be something really, really important you all have got going on.
It’s not a 0.1% chance of “death”, it’s a 0.1% chance of getting HIV, which is very treatable, etc.
Subjecting others to such risks without their informed consent happens frequently, e.g. when driving a car, or going to work sick with the flu.
A 0.1% chance of getting a disease that requires treatment for the rest of your life is still a pretty big deal.
I tried to get a general picture of what was implied by a 0.1% chance of HIV. What follows is some back of the envelope math using whatever the first link of a google search told me, so don’t use this to make important decisions.
The median Amercian is 36.8 years old, and is expected to live until they are 78.7. The average american with HIV lives until they are 63… unless they are a gay male, in which case it is 77, the same as an uninfected male. (???)
So! A 0.1% transmission rate is equivalent to shortening your partner’s life by (78.7-63)*0.001 =0.0156 years, or 5.7 days. They also have to live with the disease, so (63-36.8)*0.001 = 9.5 days of taking pills and living with any social disadvantages that come with it.
If someone takes five days from me, and makes another ten slightly harder, I want them to ask, by telling me they are HIV positive before I give consent for sex. I can see saying yes; maybe I love them, maybe they are great at sex. Not asking me would be bad, but not unforgiveable.
On the flip side… a few people trying to steel man mentioned the possibility of violence when disclosing that you have HIV. I have no idea what the incident rate of that would be. If the odds of being killed for disclosure are above 0.0156/(63-36.8) = 0.063%, then go right ahead and dismantle mandatory disclosure. If the odds of being attacked, regardless of lethality are ~10x that, go ahead and dismantle mandatory disclosure.
EDIT: since all of these numbers are from the US, I am assuming that the rates for attack upon disclosure are significantly lower than either of these thresholds. I’m too lazy to find stats that confirm this, but I am willing to update my model if someone digs up an actual source.
None of these numbers work if the uninfected partner is a gay male. They don’t seem to lose any life expectancy, and I don’t think they would be likely to attack after HIV disclosure.
HIV is very treatable right up to the point where you die from the complications anyway. That you have the opportunity to spend a few decades between now and then on a constant regimen of powerful and expensive drugs righting a holding action across an embattled immune system is better than the alternative, but still nothing you can rightfully impose on others without their consent.
And no, we don’t do that when we drive a car or go to work with the flu. Not at the 0.1% level, not within orders of magnitude of the 0.1% level, not for the sort of consequences we are talking about with an HIV infection.
Do you live in some sort of a bubble where almost everyone has HIV, being HIV-positive is no big deal, where only the terminally unhip would express concern about contracting HIV? Fine, but understand that it is a bubble, and the very best you can hope for is to be left alone there. Which means not giving the rest of the world cause to believe that you are going to spread your “treatable” disease among their general population. If it’s truly no big deal within your bubble, then no reason not to tell all your friends – and the rest of us are going to insist you give us fair warning.
I realize this was just a quick google, but no way is that correct.
According to the CDC, 15-60 million Americans contract influenza each year, 200,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000-50,000 die.* So it’s not out of the question that going to work with the flu and infecting a couple of people increases the chance of someone dying by 0.1%.
*Note that almost all deaths caused by influenza occur among the elderly.
If I take the geometric mean of those ranges, assume 50% of (mostly mild) influenza cases are among working-age adults who then go to work while infectious for five days, but that only 5% of the fatal cases are among working-age adults who contract it at work (as you note, the fatal cases are almost all elderly), I get 0.0008% probability of killing someone by waking up with the flu one day and going in to work.
So, eight in a million. I don’t think you can plausibly juggle those numbers to get one in a thousand.
Your calculations aren’t unreasonable for people whose coworkers are exclusively able-bodied adults, but using similar assumptions a health care worker or nursing-home employee who goes in sick with the flu could be increasing the chances of someone dying by as much as 0.3%. Do we think there should be severe moral censure or legal liabilities for nursing-home employees or health care workers who go in to work sick with the flu? How about those who merely fail to get vaccinated?
That is probably why nursing homes have much stricter rules regarding the flu. Signs instructing visitors not to enter if they have a runny nose and requirements for workers to get vaccinated are pretty standard from what I’ve seen. We tend to take 1/1000 risks pretty seriously, because over a lifetime, that amounts to “you will kill somebody.”
That’s what I was thinking about. It’s certainly sort of an asshole move to not tell your partner you have HIV, even if it’s being treated and you’re using protection. It’s a different story to propose you should be legally required to tell them. That’s quite problematic, if you ask me.
@ Mark Atwood
Your relatives’ experience here is misleading. Flu shots are not everywhere compulsory for health care workers, and even where they are, compliance is not guaranteed. Overall, 65% end up getting vaccinated, including only 55% of those employed by long-term care facilities.
There does seem to be an inconsistency here– failing to disclose HIV status is met with condemnation and calls for legal sanction, while health care workers failing to get flu shots or showing up to work with upper respiratory symptoms is met with increased signage and gentle nagging.
“Several of my very close friends and family members work in health care.
There is, in fact, a very strong cultural and employee-handbook-rules stricture against presenteeism-while-sick, even on the managerial, back office, recordskeeping, and IT sides of the industry.”
I wasn’t aware that nursing home aides had paid sick leave in the U.S.
If I had to come up with an argument against mandatory HIV-disclosure…
It is of course preferable not to infect people with an incurable disease. But it doesn’t follow that the best way to do that is to legally require people who know that they are infected with HIV to disclose this to all partners. Most obviously, if someone thinks they might be infected with HIV, mandatory disclosure might actively discourage them from getting tested. While it’s true that the people most likely to avoid testing might also be inclined to not report when reporting is optional, it’s plausible that having an actual positive test result would have a bigger effect on their behavior than just a suspicion.
Secondly, there’s cases where disclosing that one has HIV would be more dangerous than the HIV itself! In very anti-gay environments where having HIV is strongly associated with being gay, disclosing one’s infection might put one at substantial risk of attack. In cases where someone cannot safely become not sexually active, disclosure may also pose substantial risks. In times past, when HIV was a death sentence, it still probably wouldn’t be justifiable to doom many others to save oneself (particularly if one was going to die of AIDS soon anyhow), but these days, properly treated, it doesn’t significantly reduce lifespan, and has manageable effects on quality of life. The counterargument to this is that in cases where disclosing poses substantial risk to the discloser, it’s also less likely that anyone infected will receive adequate treatment.
It’s also worth considering whether a requirement would really be the right way to go. People’s situations can be very complex, in ways not apparent to outsiders. Requirements are one-size-fits-all solutions to problems that, particularly in the case of sexual history, tend to be intensely personal. On the other hand, disclosure is right in most cases, but without a standard, people would probably be very good at motivated-reasoning their way to believing themselves an exception. There’s also issues of how good HIV tests are, but that’s something technical I don’t know enough to really consider.
The problem of people having to properly treat a disease for their rest of their life is a factor here. I’m glad it is no longer fatal, but the sheer cost of having it and needing to treat it isn’t inconsequential.
I respectfully decline to stipulate that the ratio of “people who won’t get tested for HIV primarily because if they’re positive they’ll have to tell their partners” to “people who wouldn’t tell their partners they were HIV positive if they knew” is all that divergent. If you have a reasonable suspicion that you’re positive, won’t get tested, and continue to start new sexual relationships, I don’t see your moral calculus as being all that different from a person who knows they’re positive and acts similarly.
I mean, I’m not really convinced by that argument either. I think it’s plausible that there’s some difference because the people no longer have plausible deniability. Although I didn’t say it there, it also seems more likely that someone who knows they’re infected and is having sex anyhow is also receiving treatment that reduces infection rates than someone who isn’t willing to get tested.
“In cases where someone cannot safely become not sexually active, ”
Cases where one is being raped? You obviously lack the mens rea there.
In cases where someone cannot safely become not sexually active
Possibly could be “married woman who had affair, got infected, is too afraid to tell her husband because she fears what he might do when learning she had an affair and so is too afraid to refuse him sex because she can’t tell him the real reason why”. Same presumably applies for a man who got infected by having sex outside of marriage and is afraid to tell his wife, though I don’t know if the same threat of physical violence, injury or death at the same rates applies (could do).
More likely to apply to sex workers, though: pimps not being very sympathetic to prostitutes telling clients they’re infected, or prostitutes themselves not wanting to lose trade by scaring off clients.
Exactly how will the wife hide the medical treatment from him? She’s going to have to face the consequences either way.
I don’t think the argument that mandatory disclosure would cause people to avoid being tested works very well.
If you are positive and get tested in a regime of mandatory disclosure, your opportunities for unprotected sex decline.
If you are positive and don’t get tested you don’t get treated and die of AIDS.
The latter seems the larger cost. Am I missing something?
Have you read the pamphlet? What do you think its goal is? Would that goal be better or worse accomplished by including such an admonition? Is your ostensible goal of getting people to follow such an admonition better or worse achieved by your comment or the pamphlet?
Have you even read the quotes you provided? The first quote is obviously not about sex partners.
On page 6, the following quote appears:
“Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.”
In other words, IPPF’s official position is that an HIV-positive person has every right to have sex without telling their sexual partners they have HIV. Also on that page, it suggests that the HIV-positive reader “Get involved in advocacy to change laws that violate your rights.”
Now, it’s true that the pamphlet overall does seem to be in favor of HIV-positive people disclosing their status to their sexual partners in a reasonably prompt fashion and engaging in types of sex with low risk of transmission, but as far as that pamphlet says, the IPPF thinks it shouldn’t be illegal to go around exposing others to a currently-incurable disease without their consent.
ETA: and since people are discussing the difference between legal and moral requirements above, I’ll add that nothing I’ve found in the pamphlet indicates the IPPF would call it immoral, either.
The second question is indeed puzzling.
For the first one, though, there is a clear reason. If people are legally required to disclose their HIV status, and there is a stigma against HIV that will result in them losing potential partners (which there is, even for asymptomatic, under-control cases), they now have an incentive not to get tested. And while people with AIDS are contagious and dangerous, people with non-AIDS treated HIV are, IIRC, overwhelmingly not. So even though there is mild risk from people who will potentially catch HIV unknowingly, it is dwarfed by the risk of spreading it unknowingly.
See above comment: “I’ll have to tell people I’m positive” is only a disincentive for testing to people who have so little concern for their own or others’ health that I don’t know that it would be much of a disincentive anyway, since they could always just lie.
“that will result in them losing potential partners ”
People do not have property rights in “potential partners”. Losing something you have no right to is not an injury.
This is false– if I steal someone’s kidney, carving it out of my body and restoring it to its original owner injures me, even though I never had any right to the organ.
It is true that people do not have property rights in potential sexual partners, because human beings are not property. But I am not sure what this has to do with PDV’s comment, which concerned incentives, not property rights or injuries.
The injury is not the restoration. It’s the carving out of you.
You have, indeed, forfeited your rights by having it put in, just as a thief’s rights are forfeited in a way that lets us enter his home to remove stolen goods, but there’s a right involved.
There is no such balancing act in “potential partners.” People’s right to not be treated to (moral if not legal) rape does not need to compared to the loss of potential partners.
I am injured by someone taking a kidney from me, no matter how it was obtained, no matter how little tissue is damaged in the removal. It is just false that harms or injuries are connected to rights in the way you suggest.
Don’t be melodramatic, there’s no “rape” of any kind being considered here. And no one’s making the kind of moral comparison you’re talking about, either: PDV claimed only that compulsory disclosure will give people at risk for HIV an incentive not to get tested.
No, you are not injured if the kidney is taken back without causing you bodily injury.
Also, there is nothing melodramatic when talking about rape when “consent” is obtained by fraud.
Except, of course, the injury caused by my body’s inability to filter out toxins! But we can make the example clearer, if you like. Suppose that I am missing a right arm, steal someone else’s, and suture it to my torso. The original owner hunts me down and takes it back. Do you really think that having an arm forcibly amputated, whatever its provenance, causes me no injury?
Generally speaking, the concepts INJURY and HARM do not seem to be sensitive to historical information. Being caused pain or deprived of goods qualifies as an injury/harm even if the pain is deserved or the goods unjustly procured.
Failure to disclose is not obviously fraud, and not all forms of fraud negate consent, or virtually everyone would be a rapist, because deception is universally a part of courtship. These matters demand more careful thought.
the injury caused by my body’s inability to filter out toxins!
That is not an injury. That’s an illness. Calling a fact of life for which, presumably, no one is responsible an injury pushes the term beyond the bounds of its meaning.
But we can make the example clearer, if you like. Suppose that I am missing a right arm, steal someone else’s, and suture it to my torso. The original owner hunts me down and takes it back. Do you really think that having an arm forcibly amputated, whatever its provenance, causes me no injury?
It’s the chopping off, again. As witness that you explicitly stated that it was sutured on to make it injury.
Failure to disclose is not obviously fraud,
When a reasonably prudent person would be expected to refuse consent if the information was disclosed, it obviously is.
Okay? It’s still a counter-example to the claim that “losing something you have no right to is not an injury.” I have lost an arm. Even though I never had any right to the arm, I am nevertheless injured by the loss.
I’m not so sure about that. I have bachelor friends who would enjoy a lot less success in picking up women if those women were acquainted from the get-go with their unusual standards of hygiene, their emotional baggage, their romantic histories… In general, I doubt that failing the counterfactual test– if s/he knew that you were x, would s/he still consent?– suffices for a showing of fraud. And obtaining consent by “fraud” or (more prosaically) deception will still only rise to the level of rape in extreme cases.
It is wrong to recklessly risk infecting someone with a chronic and potentially fatal disease without their consent. No overblown rhetorical flourishes are needed to make that point.
@Earthly Knight
I might agree with you if you chose a better analogy to fit the context. Losing potential partners is more like losing potential sales due to media piracy, than it is like losing organs due to enacting justice.
Everyone is aware jerks will be jerks and do jerk-like things. Mary was basically saying that the incentives of jerks don’t matter, and the standards to be enforced shouldn’t be set to benefit or sidestep jerks based on their incentives. Some people would rather choose to attack jerks than they would tactically reduce the jerks’ effect on the world.
At least that’s how I chose to process it.
That’s irrelevant. This isn’t about rights, this is about incentives, and by requiring disclosure we create an incentive to avoid testing and treatment. Now, we could easily just ignore that incentive and force every adult in the country to submit to mandatory government testing and then create laws requiring disclosure of HIV status, but somehow I don’t think you’d like that either.
“and by requiring disclosure we create an incentive to avoid testing and treatment.”
Because not being able to engage in unprotected sex is worse than dying of AIDS–that being the expected result of avoiding testing and treatment if you are actually HIV positive?
If you aren’t, the testing comes up negative, so no problem.
For people who are not sure if they are HIV positive, legal liability would give them incentive to convince themselves that they are sure they are not, therefore testing is unnecessary.
My dad refuses to go to the doctor because he suspects he eats too much salt and the doctor will prohibit him from eating salt, and he really enjoys salt. So he convinced himself that he doesn’t need to go to the doctor. I imagine that if people who eat too much sodium were (in practice) forbidden from ever having sex again, it would be much worse.
@David Friedman:
If you were to make the argument you just made in an economics class, you would bring yourself up short. I believe, the proper way to state it would be that they prefer not to know and are willing to pay for that preference. Therefore, their behavior is rational.
People do these sort of things all the time.
Proper marketing strategies take these known facets of human behavior into account. They want people to buy.
If you are providing healthcare to a community that has a high risk of HIV, you want people to agree to be tested, because that is the best way to stop the spread of the disease. That is what you need to sell.
My suspicion is that “murdering babies and selling their organs” is a more controversial soundbite than “think it’s okay to not disclose HIV status to partner.” The latter might be regarded as a worse sin around here, but the former is probably considered a worse sin among the general conservative public.
Here’s the strongest arguments I can think of for not requiring disclosure of HIV+ status:
– Disclosing HIV status to potential partners can be dangerous, especially in areas where gay sex is illegal or highly stigmatized and HIV is perceived to mostly affect MSM (men who have sex with men).
– Even when disclosure isn’t dangerous per se, most HIV- people are not willing to have sex with someone who discloses their HIV+ status.
– As such, mandating disclosure discourages people at risk of contracting HIV from getting tested: no need to disclose something you don’t know you have!
– Someone who knows their HIV+ status will most likely be getting treatment (and thus have a low viral load, reducing risk of transmission) and stick to safer sex.
– Someone with undetected HIV may have a very high viral load and not know what precautions they ought to take.
– And, obviously, risks for the infected person increase the longer they delay treatment.
– As such, creating any disincentives or barriers to testing is a terrible idea.
I think it makes sense that Planned Parenthood would tend to oppose measures that increase barriers to HIV testing and treatment. I am opposed to legal requirements to disclose. I’m undecided as to whether there is always an obligation to disclose; regardless, I support moving cultures in a direction where disclosure is less stigmatized.
Speaking personally? If I had sex involving minimal risk of transmission with an HIV+ person on treatment, and only learned their status after the fact, I do not expect I would be upset. When I have sex with a new person, I only take risks I’ve decided I can tolerate, and I expect my partners to be responsible about the risks they expose me to.
EDIT: whoops, got super-ninja’d. Oh well!
By some definitions, then, not telling them is tantamount to rape, or at least fraud.
An employer who didn’t get dangerous equipment inspected regularly is still liable for employee safety should an accident occur. “We just never bothered to inspect” does not save them from legal culpability. No reason why it should here either.
This is precisely the case in housing disclosures. If you test for lead and it comes back positive, you need to disclose that when you try to sell the house. Realtors thus advise that you not test it, but *wink wikn nudge nudge*, if your house was built before the 70s it totally has lead paint.
Now, this is probably heavily influenced by the fact that people don’t regard lead paint as all that terrible (also, it is easily mediated by painting over it). Realtors don’t advise that you ignore structural issues if you have reason to suspect them. So the same effect may not apply to HIV.
I guess the real question is “must you disclose if directly questioned by a partner who would have said ‘no’ had they been fully informed?” I see a heavily competing interest in bodily autonomy here. If the worst that we can reasonably expect to happen to person A (infected) is that they don’t get to have sex with person B (uninfected) then that’s not a high-stakes moral interest.
This is separate from assuming instead that the worst that can happen to person A is that disclosure leads to violence against them, then that’s a much higher stake.
I don’t think it is reasonable to insist that the recipient specifically ask if you are going to expose them to some unusual danger before exposing them to that danger. That’s sort of inherent in the concept of “unusual danger”. And if there’s a community where sex with HIV-positive people is one of the usual dangers like driving a car, then that’s A: tragic but BL difficult to reconcile with the fear that disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to an intimate partner within that community is at all likely to get one beaten up.
A always has the fall-back option where the worst that happens to them is that they don’t get to have sex with B or risk getting beaten up by B because they don’t proposition B in the first place. And it would seem to me that if you don’t trust a potential partner not to beat you to death over your HIV status then not having sex with that partner shouldn’t be your fall-back option but your first, second, and third choice. But if you do insist on giving it a try, “I’m sorry I exposed you to a deadly disease without your consent for fun, but I was afraid you’d beat me up if I told you I wanted to expose you to a deadly disease for fun with your consent, and really, the fun was mutual wasn’t it?”, is IMO morally indefensible.
Also, in the long run, I think that version is more likely to get you beaten up or worse.
As such, mandating disclosure discourages people at risk of contracting HIV from getting tested: no need to disclose something you don’t know you have!
And what about other STIs apart from HIV? If you infect a partner and they know nothing about it until the symptoms show up, they’re going to say to anyone who asks “But why didn’t you get tested?” that “I had no reason to do so, they never said they had anything, I assumed we were safe!” and is probably very likely to end up with some kind of civil case at the least about endangering health and life.
The irony of Planned Parenthood being all about supporting abortion because of the risk to the life and emotional as well as the physical health of the woman during pregnancy and bodily autonomy, and then turning around and saying it’s your right to have sex even if you have a communicable disease and to hell with other people’s rights to health and life and bodily autonomy – oh, well.
“Disclosing HIV status to potential partners can be dangerous, especially in areas where gay sex is illegal or highly stigmatized and HIV is perceived to mostly affect MSM”
If you regard a person as a physical danger to you, why on earth do you consider that person to be a potential partner?
Gossip.
Propositioning a fellow male reveals the fact that you are homosexual (or bisexual), whether or not you reveal your HIV status. So if the worry is being beaten up for being gay, the argument only applies to a bisexual propositioning an opposite sex potential partner. Or a heterosexual who is HIV positive and worried about being misinterpreted as gay.
Yes, I don’t understand this at all. How is it possible to navigate the “I would like to have sex with you” stage without the exact same result?
I have had sex with men I didn’t know were gay beforehand, but it gets pretty clear at a certain point.
And let’s just put aside the “trying to have sex with people who want to kill you” thing…
Bisexual or less-than-exclusively-homosexual males are far more common than Kinsey-6 homosexuals, and are almost always included in the “gay culture” that Blue Tribe is sworn to defend. Hence “LGBT” rather than “gay culture” in more recent usage.
So as long as homophobia exists, there’s going to be a fairly high rate of: Kinsey 2-5 “gay” male propositions homophobic woman, he doesn’t tell her he also sometimes has sex with men, they may or may not have sex but she doesn’t know he’s gay so she has no reason to be particularly offended or otherwise have her equally-homophobic boyfriend beat him up. And a legitimate threat that, if the proposition includes a mandatory “…and BTW I’m HIV-positive”, she will (usually but not always correctly) infer that he is gay and she almost had sex with one of THEM, eww, and so call her homophobic boyfriend to administer the beating.
Credible threat, but the proper response is not “Go ahead and expose her to HIV without telling; if he’s hip she won’t mind and if she’s square she deserves it anyway”. The proper response is, if you’re a gay-ish and/or HIV-positive male, don’t proposition women unless you are reasonably certain they aren’t homophobes with violent boyfriends. If for no other reason than that there are too many ways for that to blow up on you even if you do keep your HIV status hidden at the start.
More generally, don’t have sex with people you don’t trust with your life.
If bisexual men were regularly propositioning women with boyfriends, I think that would probably be the main source of risk. It really doesn’t make a difference how straight or how gay a guy is, he’s going to get his ass kicked by the boyfriend either way.
It seems more likely that the stakes of admitting that you’re gay to a woman are more along the lines of being less likely to have sex with her than risking violent reprisal. Which is certainly a reason to lie, but not a terribly sympathetic one even if you’re 100% disease free.
I don’t think there’s any “if” about it; bisexual men pretty much have to proposition both men and women to be more than theoretically bisexual, propositioning multiple people of any gender mix pretty much rules out being a member of a subculture that highly values monogamy, therefore bisexual men will frequently proposition women who have boyfriends. Not all of them, but enough for a strong generalization to hold – and even now, moreso in the recent past, a nontrivial fraction of those boyfriends will be violently homophobic (as will some of the women themselves).
This is an unavoidable risk factor for being actively bisexual in a culture which still possesses homophobia. It can be somewhat reduced by secrecy, as can the lesser risk of sexual frustration due to nobody wanting to get it on with one’s HIV-positive gay self, but I think we’re all agreed that this is A: unethical and B: most likely only going to postpone the inevitable.
I don’t think there’s any “if” about it; bisexual men pretty much have to proposition both men and women to be more than theoretically bisexual, propositioning multiple people of any gender mix pretty much rules out being a member of a subculture that highly values monogamy, therefore bisexual men will frequently proposition women who have boyfriends.
IDK, most heterosexuals seem to proposition/get propositioned by multiple people over the course of their lives. Why would bisexuals have to be less pro-monogamy than the average heterosexual?
Most heterosexuals in the contemporary western world are only weakly committed to monogamy, e.g. only within marriage. In the traditionally monogamous western societies of the past, the ideal was for a bare majority of the population (females) to proposition nobody ever, and the large minority (males) to proposition the minimum number of people necessary to get one “yes” answer and then never again. This allows rather limited scope for active bisexuality even if such a thing were tolerated. Among modern monogamists, the propositions can come from either gender but are still relatively small in number and usually targeted at known singles.
“bisexual men pretty much have to proposition both men and women to be more than theoretically bisexual, ”
Being merely theoretically bisexual does not, in the face of it, seem to be so horrible a fate that it justifies exposing unconsenting people to incurable disease.
If there is no legal obligation to disclose HIV status, then there is also no legal distinction between infecting partners negligently and deliberately, meaning that depraved people like Simon Mol will be free to infect unsuspecting partners.
Somewhat related, there was a horrible article a while ago attempting to shame gay men who did not want to get involved with HIV-infected men.
I just threw up a little. Thanks for that.
which stale catchphrase caused my heart to cringe in turn..
I aim to please.
All (or at least most) of the arguments against requiring HIV disclosure so far seem to me to be flawed for one or both of the following reasons:
1) they presuppose a dangerously strong stigma against HIV mostly because of its association with being gay and an associated stigma against homosexuality. But neither of these stigmas is universally true (certainly the stigmas aren’t worse than the disease everywhere), and if the stigmas are not there then I don’t see how fear of stigma outweighs the risk to your partner. Also, the worse the stigma, the greater the potential harm to your partner from contracting HIV – so this should increase, not decrease, your obligation to inform!
2) the arguments against mandatory disclosure so far might make sense as far as general disclosure, but I’ve seen little that speaks against disclosing to your partner specifically. Sure, your boss doesn’t have any business knowing about HIV in most jobs. I can see the stigma threat outweighing the boss’s interest there. I’m totally fine with making HIV status a protected disability.
But your sex partner? First, don’t get into sexual relations with people you think will gossip to destroy you. Sorry if HIV cuts into your ability for guilt free casual sex, but, well, that’s not a human right. Maybe some people are more afraid of HIV than they need to be, but it sure as hell seems inconvenient enough that “informed consent” should rule. I mean, you can probably steal $20 from your sex partner’s wallet without them knowing or even particularly caring, but you’re still kind of an asshole if you do, and I don’t think you have much of a leg to stand on if your partner tries to get you charged with petty theft. I think we can agree that knowingly exposing someone to HIV is at least as bad?
Related thought: the places where HIV stigma is worst seem like the places where HIV is least treatable / deadliest. So while announcing yourself as HIV positive in those places is particularly bad, HAVING HIV in those places is also particularly bad. So the “it’s low risk and pretty treatable anyway” card doesn’t play well.
Eh. This is one where I think the logistics of successfully prosecuting someone for the crime of being a disease vector are such that making it illegal “to fail to disclose a positive HIV status” would be a very bad law.
As a moral issue, though, I have no problem stating that someone who has a communicable disease and deliberately or through negligence fails to communicate that with their sex partners is wrong and is doing harm to their partners and the wider community. Also? A disease that is (generally, but not always) controllable with the constant and consistent use of expensive drugs – and which will become fatal without those drugs – is not a trivial matter. That people are starting to think of HIV in this way is a problem.
It would be a good and proper law if explicitly coupled to a high burden of proof. We may need such a tool to deal with e.g. serial offenders who infect dozens of people and can’t otherwise be stopped, or those who brag about their “AIDS Mary” status on Tumbler and Facebook – not just because of the number of infections they might spread, but because of the fear and the potential for a very ugly backlash.
A law that encourages or even allows for prosecution of isolated “he said, she said” cases, I agree, would cause more harm than good. As would anything that leads participants in recreational or commercial sexplay to imagine that the law is covering their backs when at best the law might be able to avenge their deaths. Caveat fucking emptor.
@John Schilling:
“It would be a good and proper law if explicitly coupled to a high burden of proof.”
I don’t think that is possible in American jurisprudence. The law and the standards of proof are de-coupled. Law and intent of law are, for the most part, de-coupled as well. When a child can be prosecuted for trafficking in child porn for sending an image of themselves to their boy/girl friend …
Law and intent are not decoupled if the law explicitly states that malicious intent is required. The writers of most child-porn statutes didn’t think to include such a clause; writers of any HIV-notification law might be advised to consider otherwise.
And if you require proof of malicious intent, that’s usually a very high bar to clear unless you specify certain circumstances (e.g. serial behavior or bragging about the crime) to constitute presumptive evidence of malice. I’m fairly confident that this could be done reasonably well for an HIV-notification law, less so that it would be done well.
@John Schilling:
I see where you are going with what you said, I’m not sure I would qualify that as raising the burden of proof, but I accept the basic formulation.
“And if you require proof of malicious intent”
So, this would be intent to expose and spread the disease, yes? That doesn’t seem to be what is really being discussed. I also think that it’s probably already prosecutable.
The flip side question is, should Greg Louganis have been prosecutable?
“Malicious Intent” I believe encompasses recklessness, e.g. “I don’t want my partner to get infected, I just don’t care as much about that as I do about getting laid tonight”. And that’s the sort of thing we want to stop wherever we can. But, and this is tailorable by explicit statutory presumptions, the “malicious intent” formulation errs on the side of caution in imputing such intent.
If the legislative intent is to stop malicious or reckless transmission of HIV, and the legislative result is that most malicious/reckless transmission of HIV goes unpunished but the clear societal standard plus fear of prosecution, reduce that transmission to tolerably low levels and provide visibles punishment for the egregiously visible violations that would otherwise incite great fear of malicious/reckless HIV transmission, that’s as good an outcome as I think we can hope for.
@John Schilling:
If simply being reckless qualifies as “malicious intent” that doesn’t sound like you actually have to prove anything about there state of mind, which is what would seem to be what prevents abuse by prosecutors. Your higher burden of proof formulation seems to depend on it.
Merely establishing that a defendant knew, or should have known, their behavior was “risky” would be enough to establish a standard of “reckless”. That could be applied, I believe, to even one-off behavior.
In legalese, “recklessness” refers to a state of mind and not a circumstance of objective fact. Specifically, per Black’s Law Dictionary, “A state of mind in which a person does not care about the consequences of their actions”.
It isn’t sufficient, where this is the standard, to prove that someone “should have known” that their action was risky, you have to prove that they actually did know and didn’t care. This can be done, but it isn’t easy – and deliberately so.
The legal concept of recklessness includes both a subjective test (was the defendant actually aware they were creating an unreasonable risk to others?) and an objective test (would the existence of an unreasonable risk be obvious to a reasonable person in the defendant’s position?). In criminal law typically the subjective test is used (though not without exceptions; I believe drunk driving typically uses an objective recklessness standard). Using the word malicious should be enough to indicate to courts that a subjective test should be used.
But in this case, the subjective test does not seem like a high bar to clear. The proposed law seems like one that would apply in nearly every case. As far as I can tell, anyone could be convicted who (1) has HIV, (2) knows they have HIV, (3) knows HIV can be sexually transmitted with non-negligible likelihood, and (4) has unprotected sex with (5) a partner who was unaware that they had HIV (certainly anyone who met all five criteria would be reckless under the conventional legal meaning). Which of these are difficult to show? 1 and 2 are easily established. 4 and 5 can be testified to by the victim. 3 is more difficult, though all the difficulties come down to evidence admissibility. Leaving aside those concerns (which are probably not fatal), it can easily be shown by tracking down the doctor who diagnosed (or treated) the defendant and having them testify that they informed the defendant of the risks of transmission (which I assume is common practice).
(Of course, there are two groups of individuals who would be exempted under this law. First, those who avoid getting a diagnosis. This creates the incentive, discussed above, not to get diagnosed. Also exempted are those who sincerely believe that, for some reason, their HIV isn’t transmissible. I’m not sure that’s an advantage, as presumably such individuals are especially likely to infect others.)
In practice, extremely few of these cases will be prosecuted, and the pattern of cases that are prosecuted will probably look pretty arbitrary (only when a victim comes forward, and even then subject to general budgetary limitations). Perhaps the law would reduce the incidence of infection, but I’m unsure how substantial that effect would be (I’m skeptical about how much laws that are virtually never enforced actually influence behavior). Balanced against that are (1) the created incentive not to get a diagnosis, (2) the costs to society of punishing perpetrators (including the inevitable punishment of innocents), and (for utilitarians, at least) (3) the costs to perpetrators of punishing perpetrators. I’m not sure whether the law is a net positive (it probably depends on whether you think 3 should enter into the moral calculus).
@ David Friedman
A while back, there were claims that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal organs, denials by Planned Parenthood, lots of talk and controversy. More recently, there has been a different accusation, one that this time appears to be real—that the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the parent organization, claims in print that HIV positive people should not be required to warn their [next] sexual partners, and should feel free to do so or not.
As to why the fetus parts story got more interest, among many reasons…. ‘Selling fetus parts’ might affect any fetus anywhere; while ‘inform your next partner’ affects only the kind of people who have, or are, next partners.
For my mental model of a pro-lifer, a child born to the kind of person who would have an abortion and a child born to the kind of person who would not have an abortion are not as interchangeable as “any fetus anywhere” implies. The difference is a lot like that between those who are or have next partners, and the ones who aren’t and don’t.
@ dust bunny
For my mental model of a pro-lifer, a child born to the kind of person who would have an abortion and a child born to the kind of person who would not have an abortion [….]
A worthwhile point in a larger topic of contraception/abortion/adoption etc. But even a woman who would prefer to keep the baby might consider abortion for medical reasons, which the hospital might promote because they could sell the parts.
I wouldn’t have pegged you as in favour of mandatory health warnings on cigarettes.
In my case, only on cigarettes that have some uncommon and serious risk that the consumer cannot know they have.
To take a more extreme case, I do not believe a grocery store has the right to sell, unlabelled, bottles of soda to which they have added a lethal dose of cyanide.
Like greatly increasing the risk of lung cancer?
Is that an uncommon risk? No, it isn’t.
Is that something the customer can’t find out about? No, it isn’t. They are labeled as “cigarettes” and the customer can easily find out about the health hazards of cigarettes.
The need for a warning depends on the actual, real-world context. If you wanted to take cigarettes and sell them to uncontacted Amazon tribesmen who’ve never heard of them while not saying anything about them being unsafe, I would say you should be stopped. But in our world, people who buy cigarettes know or reasonably ought to know what they’re getting into.
Do people selling hammers need to put a warning label on them saying there’s a potential hazard of hitting yourself in the thumb? No. It’s expected that the customer will know how to use a hammer and will therefore know that there is a risk of hitting himself in the thumb—which could lead to something as serious as loss of his thumb or hand in freak cases of infection.
Besides, it’s sort of a myth that nobody had any idea cigarettes were bad for you until the 1960s. There was a lot of genuine uncertainty about lung cancer, but many of the health drawbacks are pretty obvious.
And do I think a cigarette company has to run 10 medical trials before they do something like put filters on cigarettes and claim they might be better for you than unfiltered? Maybe it’s not true that filtered cigarettes are better (though from what I understand, they are, except that people just end up dragging harder), but it’s easy to see how someone reasonably could think that.
Now, that being said, I do think that cigarette-selling is a sleazy and somewhat immoral business, like any business that caters to vice. But I don’t think the big bad tobacco executives are much worse than the guy who happily sells them to poor people at the corner store.
Is it an uncommon risk for a consumer product to increase the cancer risk that much?
Yes it is.
Was it hard for consumers to get a good sense of the risk when the warning labels were instituted?
Yes it was.
“But in our world, people who buy cigarettes know or reasonably ought to know what they’re getting into.”
And why is this? Why should the consumer have a solid sense of what the risk is?
“Do people selling hammers need to put a warning label on them saying there’s a potential hazard of hitting yourself in the thumb?”
How many customers have an experience with hitting themselves by accident with something hard and heavy? How many customers have an experience of getting cancer 40 years down the line?
“but many of the health drawbacks are pretty obvious.”
Why were they marketed as health inducing? And why did the CEOs of the tobacco companies testify before congress that they did not believe in any health danger from cigarettes into the 1990s?
I think disclosing that you are HIV positive before engaging in sex is a moral imperative. My sense is that making it a legal imperative is counter productive, but if data showed otherwise I’d be happy to reverse course.
I also think that clearly stating the known dangers of a product is a moral imperative. I support making that a legal imperative where it is effective in accomplishing the goals of both making the risk known and reducing the risky behavior.
@ HeelBearCub:
Because it’s extremely well-known that cigarettes are (or are very likely to be) harmful to your health, and what the law calls a “reasonable person” would know this?
Even if you say this is all due to the government warnings in the first place, first of all they only said “may be harmful to your health”, but more importantly, hurrah! The government program worked. Now we can stop it because it’s not necessary anymore. Funny how that never happens.
How many people know somebody or have seen somebody get lung cancer or other health problems (lung cancer is hardly the only one) from smoking? Like, everybody?
It’s probably more obvious than the danger from hammers.
I don’t believe anyone ever said cigarettes are good for you (since like the 1700s when George Berkeley thought tobacco was a cure-all). Maybe I’m wrong, but please show me something since the 1940s saying cigarettes are a health benefit.
What some companies advertised is that their cigarettes were better for you than others.
You are completely mischaracterizing what those executives said, by the way. The main claim was that cigarettes were not addictive. And to this day, addiction is not well-understood. How much is physical? How much is psychological? There have been very successful books (which have worked for many people) which say the trick to quitting smoking is just to very firmly decide not to smoke anymore.
Here’s a contemporary news article on the CEO testimony:
Yes, obviously “conclusive” is a weasel word. In an absolute sense, it is not “conclusively” determined that cigarettes are harmful, but for practical purposes it is.
But come on, what do you expect tobacco executives to say? There were (and indeed continue to be) real studies, conducted according to proper procedures, showing that some of the harms were nonexistent or exaggerated. Gwern has an article on this, I think. Congress didn’t ask the tobacco executives for their p-values. You can’t reasonably expect them not to express their beliefs in the way that puts their product in the most favorable light consistent with the vagueness of the terms.
The purpose of health warnings on cigarettes is not to impart any new information to people. The purpose is to nag them. It is to make it harder for them to deliberately evade the fact that they are acting contrary to their long-run self-interest.
They already know cigarettes are bad. They just don’t want to think about it. The huge warnings activists want to put on the boxes make it impossible not to think about it.
You can make the argument that this type of nagging is a valid purpose of government. But please don’t try to say this is the same as not telling a sexual partner you have HIV. Which in my opinion ought to be something you can sue the person (or press criminal charges against them) for if you come down with HIV.
For some reason, my comment keeps disappearing. I hope it stays this time.
I’ve never known personally anyone with complications from smoking, and have had a bunch of friends and family who smoked.
I still agree that nowadays, in a developed country, at least today *after* all the warnings, pretty much everyone has the broad idea that smoking is “bad” for health.
Continued warnings probably nudge them towards increasing the extent to which they believe it’s bad, as they’re evidence of other people thinking such, but even without the vast majority would probably be at least aware of the reports, and anyone not engaging in really bad rationalisation think they’re at least somewhat true.
@ JBeshir:
Even if you don’t know them personally, surely you’ve seen people on TV, in the news and in documentaries, who can’t breathe because they have emphysema, or who have one of those holes in their throats they speak through. Or you read the obituaries and see “famous actor dies of lung cancer”.
Oh, sure. I’ve certainly seen it in the media all over the place. The NHS runs a wide range of “stop smoking” ads, which is what sticks in my mind most (a person who doesn’t get sick is a person they don’t have to pay to treat), but there’s a lot of others.
@Vox:
How many 13 year olds do you estimate know that liver damage and type-II diabetes can be caused by drinking?
How many 13 year olds do you estimate know that lung cancer is caused by smoking?
Given that you admit there is a substantial difference between those two pieces of knowledge, what do you think the source of the difference is?
Information has to be taught. It doesn’t travel down the umbilical chord.
As to suing someone for giving you HIV via reckless action, I’m inclined to think that you could do so right now. That fact that it is not legally mandated to disclose does not prevent a civil suit. If someone’s toddler runs into your backyard and you don’t disclose there is a pool there, there isn’t a specific criminal sanction for the non-disclosure, but civil action is certainly possible.
@HeelBearCub:
Under what theory of recovery would you sue such a person? Absent the law in controversy, what duty would they have breached? The person with the pool may have provided an attractive nuisance. Are you claiming that a potential sexual partner with HIV should be similarly described?
(Note that here I speak only of civil recovery. In many states, including my own, such a person has committed a serious crime. But that is because the act is specifically criminalized. If the act is not specifically defined as a recoverable civil tort, what theory would allow the plaintiff to recover?)
@Marc Whipple:
I am not a lawyer, but it seems that it would be similar to the requirements of people with pools to put fences around them, or for stores to tell people that an aisle is currently wet and slippery, or for stores to indicate that their coffee is abnormally hot, etc.
Perhaps there are specific exceptions, through precedent or statute, for diseases. That is certainly a possibility. If so, it wouldn’t surprise me if HIPPA brought them in via statute.
Negligence is still largely common law. It’d be up to a judge and/or jury decide if there is a duty of care to disclose special dangers to sexual partners. Doesn’t seem like a big stretch to me.
It looks like some state courts have already done so. From Carsanaro v. Colvin, , 716 S.E.2d 40 (NC 2011):
Brad:
Thank you. But that is merely the tort version of the criminal law I mentioned – a specific imposed duty to disclose status. Absent the specific imposed duty, under what theory would the plaintiff recover? Battery? Fraud?
Incidentally, this doesn’t help the larger argument, because if the possibility of being criminally prosecuted is a disincentive to testing so significant as to justify risking the health of uninformed partners, so in my opinion is the possibility of being sued to within an inch of your life.
Under a negligence theory. Which is exactly what the case law I quoted is describing–a specific, judicial, application of the general principles of the common law of negligence. I don’t know what distinction you are trying to make with “a specific imposed duty” vs ???.
As to the larger argument regarding incentives to avoid testing, you can see the rule includes not only “knows” but also “should know”.
You really think there is a difference? I don’t think there is.
Maybe they’re not sure on the details, but I think about the same number of 13-year-olds know drinking is bad for you as know smoking is bad for you.
Besides, that’s why you’re not allowed to sell cigarettes or alcohol to 13-year-olds. Or maybe you shouldn’t restrict store-owners and let kids go in like they used to and buy cigarettes and beer for their parents. But then it’s the parents’ responsibility and fault if the kids smoke and drink.
As for suing for catching HIV, I thought that you could do this already, but I wasn’t sure. If it is the case, good. If not, it should be the case.
Possibly relevant … . “Coffin nails” as slang for cigarettes appears to go back to before WWI.
@ David Friedman:
Not to mention King James I’s famous “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”. Much of it is four-humors nonsense (though maybe there’s something to it I don’t properly understand), and a good deal of the rest concerns more the moral degeneracy of tobacco (as a needless luxury), but it closes on:
SSC SF Story of the Week #5
This week we are discussing “Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell.
Next week we will discuss “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov.
It always amuses me when science fiction depicts space militaries are based on navies. In the real world, military space programs are the domain of air forces, but of course Russell couldn’t have known that at the time. Some people argue that it would make sense for navies to be in charge of the kind of military space missions depicted in fiction, which involve packing together large groups of people in close quarters away from home bases for long periods of time time, but even if that was correct there is no way in hell interservice rivalry would let that happen.
Project Rho has a great discussion in the Organization section of its “Astromilitary” page.
I think the theory is that once spaceships are bigger, navy-style organization and command structure will make more sense, and may even be inevitable.
Also, interservice rivalry will not necessarily favor the air force. Once space is weaponized (but before we have the technology [or need] for large crewed military spacecraft) — think satellite-based lasers and possibly kinetic weapons — there is a nontrivial chance that a separate branch of the military will be organized to manage it.
Agreed, but those organizations will almost certainly be split off from national Air Forces, or possibly from Armies (some nations place long-range missiles and/or missile defense under Army control). So the rank structure will almost certainly be some variation of the Generic Western Army Rank System. This, on reflection, has one clear advantage. Manned spacecraft, whether we call them “ships” or not, will need to have commanders. Commanders of ships are often referred to as “captains”. There really isn’t a third option other than the informal “skipper” or abbreviated “CO”.
The traditional Navy rank structure has a rank called “Captain” (O6), and a rank called “Commander” (O5). Most navy officers who hold these ranks don’t command ships. Many ships are not commanded by an officer holding one of these ranks. And even if you have a ship whose skipper-Captain is also an O6-Captain, it’s possible for there to be a second O6-Captain on board. The Navy makes due, of course, but it’s still a kludge inherited from simpler times that opens the door to ambiguity about just what “Captain” means. The Air Force has a “Captain” rank down at O3, but no “Commander”. When the USAF takes over Starfleet, there will be absolutely no ambiguity who is in command, because Colonel James Kirk only gets called “Commander Kirk” when he’s commanding a ship.
Likewise, the naval vessel classification scheme that was in force from roughly 1910-1970, with frigates and destroyers and light and heavy cruisers and battlecruisers and battleships and maybe dreadnaughts, in roughly that order, isn’t going to make it into space. It hasn’t even made it into the 21st century on the high seas, and the mission requirements and operational capabilities of spaceships aren’t going match anything in the 1910-1970 scheme.
None of which counts against Russell and Allamagoosa, which is a delightful tale grandfathered in under the old rules. But it grates a bit when I see someone like Weber using it today.
Why do you think “those organizations will almost certainly be split off from national Air Forces, or possibly from Armies”? It seems conceivable — maybe even likely — that Starfleets will be organized around large capital ships capable of competing for “command of the void”. Certainly most science fictions conceives of them in this manner.
This should just be a matter of economics and physics: a spacecraft capable of carrying (i.e. repositioning in orbit in an efficient and timely manner) and powering weaponry up to the task of destroying land targets as well as other manned and unmanned spacecraft, will be sufficiently massive that it is staggeringly expensive to build and fuel. So there will be very few of them. This paradigm of using a few large but very powerful (and hard to kill) ships (“Star Destroyers”) to control large expanses of territory is something only navies have experience with.
It’s likely to be a pretty long way off, though, so maybe path dependence will mean you’re right. In the next 50 years we are probably more likely to see heavy space weaponry installed in “fixed” orbital battlestations with little or no ability to change their orbits , maybe something like the ISS. In that scenario, the stations themselves become important military targets (as well as exercising control of them during the crucial windows when their targets are visible, i.e. not beyond the horizon). So light, maneuverable spacecraft (“X-wings” [or “Vipers” ;)]) for assaulting and/or defending these stations would be the focus of an effective Starfleet. And managing pilots and maintenance for large fleets of warplanes is squarely within the domain of Air Force expertise (although the Navy is also pretty good at it, I think?).
Why do you think “those organizations will almost certainly be split off from national Air Forces, or possibly from Armies”? It seems conceivable — maybe even likely — that Starfleets will be organized around large capital ships capable of competing for “command of the void”
“Capital ship” is needlessly specific, and carries implications that aren’t likely to apply in space warfare. Large ships, maybe. But capital or otherwise, large military spaceships will evolve from less-large military spaceships which will evolve from small military spacecraft, and we know where that chain starts. They will not evolve, outside a particular manga/anime series, from lofting large seafaring vessels into space.
There is a hundred-kilometer wall between the navies of the earth and the void of space. In military terms, that wall (and everything beyond it) is owned by various Air Forces. It will be their majors and colonels, not the commanders and captains of the navy, who will be running any large military spacecraft of the future. Them, or something completely unpredictable after some complete break in military continuity.
Hmm, did Niven or his collaborators ever describe the organization of the space fleets humanity had to put together to face the Kzin after a couple centuries of absolute pacifism among humans?
“There is a hundred-kilometer wall between the navies of the earth and the void of space. In military terms, that wall (and everything beyond it) is owned by various Air Forces. ”
How is this true? The concept of “No-Fly Zone”, according to the Book of Knowledge, dates only to the 1990s. During large scale 20th century conflicts, no major power attempted to completely ground a formidable adversary, and I doubt they could have realistically expected to do so. Do you think that — in a hypothetical war between Russia, China, and the US in 2048, in which all three parties have satellite-based weapon systems — any one of the belligerents could expect to use air power to prevent its adversaries from launching missions to repair or replace their space weapons?
I think that is extremely far-fetched, and the wall you speak of is a phantasm. Sure, the Air Force will need to defend the national airspace to ensure that Starfleet’s launch operations can proceed. But that doesn’t mean the Air Force “owns” Low Earth Orbit any more than it “owns” the high seas (the dominance of which depends upon the integrity of airspace above Naval bases and carrier fleets).
The relevant phrase is not “No-Fly Zone” but “Key West Agreement“. And its counterparts of varying legal status in other countries. Navies are only allowed to have things that fly if they directly support maritime operations on Earth. If, in the future, some nation’s Navy decides to launch a vast Argosy or Galleon or Cruiser into the void, what stops them will not be the nefarious Air Force of some other nation shooting down their great ship, but their own nation’s Air Force saying “That’s our turf! Keep Out, and hand over the nifty spaceship, er, craft!”
Navies, like Armies, tend to be military forces, and military forces can occasionally prevail against their counterparts in battle. Air Forces tend to be civil service bureaucracies first and military forces second, and nobody beats a civil-service bureaucracy on its own turf.
Nor is there, in this case, any reason why they should. You may argue that Russel’s “Bustler”, or Roddenberry’s “Enterprise”, is far more like a modern Navy ship than anything the contemporary USAF operates, but no such vessel will be built by the contemporary USAF. By the time anyone launches anything comparable to even a maritime frigate, the descendants of the USAF will already be operating spacecraft a decent fraction of the size and crew of a frigate, called “Space Supremacy Platforms” or some such and commanded by Majors rather than Lieutenant Commanders but nonetheless far closer in overall concept and operation to a sky-frigate than is any water-frigate (if such things still exist).
There will be no point at which it would make sense to fight the bureaucratic battle that would be needed to take the N+1th generation of military spacecraft away from the Air Forces or AF-descended Space Forces that have successfully operated the 1…Nth generation spacecraft so far, no reason to suggest that a maritime service that has never flown anything bigger or higher than a communications satellite should take over, and no reason to insist that changing the CO’s rank from “O5 – Lieutenant Colonel” to “O5 – Commander” is going to be any help.
In the real world, NCC-1701 will be a Large Space Supremacy Platform commanded by Colonel James Kirk, with “Enterprise” being probably a semiformal nickname. Not to worry, of course, because the real world already has a Captain James Kirk, who commands one of the most powerful and sophisticated warships in the fleet. Due to an unfortunate conflict in namespace, “USS Enterprise” was unavailable for use at this time 🙁
I can think of one scenario that would lead to ‘navalization’ of the space forces, directly related to the bureaucratic infighting you describe. If the split between the Air Force and the Space Force is vitriolic enough, then it’s possible that the new USSF (or its equivalent elsewhere) will go hunting for ways to distinguish itself from the USAF. Stealing some naval traditions will be an obvious way to do so, particularly as the Navy itself isn’t really a threat to them, and the Air Force is.
Even without that, I expect that there will be some ‘navalization’ as time goes on, simply because a deep-space warcraft is much more like a ship in operational environment. This doesn’t mean we’ll see the BSG ‘USN IN SPACE’ approach, but official ship names are very likely. If nothing else, they’re a good way to suck up to whoever is giving you funding.
“Not to worry, of course, because the real world already has a Captain James Kirk, who commands one of the most powerful and sophisticated warships in the fleet.”
Only so long as it’s upright.
If the split between the Air Force and the Space Force is vitriolic enough, then it’s possible that the new USSF (or its equivalent elsewhere) will go hunting for ways to distinguish itself from the USAF
That’s a very good point. Of course, the USAF wanted to distinguish itself from the Army right from the start but didn’t go about inventing AF-specific ranks or the like even though their buddies in the RAF had some perfectly good ones they could borrow (complete with recent glory and status). But I could see some movement along those lines.
Of course, the USAF wanted to distinguish itself from the Army right from the start but didn’t go about inventing AF-specific ranks or the like even though their buddies in the RAF had some perfectly good ones they could borrow (complete with recent glory and status). But I could see some movement along those lines.
I can think of several reasons why they didn’t do so, which may or may not apply in the future. (I should acknowledge that I don’t know much about the RAF, so some of these may be wrong.) First, the USAF had a much longer history than the RAF (at creation), and was significantly larger, leading to a reluctance to change ranks.
Second, they had the political upper hand immediately after the split, unlike the RAF. They didn’t need to vigorously distinguish themselves, because Congress already knew the difference. To a large extent, the USAAF was already working as an independent air force during the war, and the split only formally recognized this.
Third, the RAF was made of both the RFC and the RNAS. Someone was going to have to change ranks anyway, and the RNAS was a sizable component of the new RAF.
Take away some of these, and it would be pretty easy for a new Space Force to decide it’s a Navy, not an Air Force.
@John Schilling
It’s hard to say what a notional Space Force will look like, because it will depend on the situation when it is created.
The logical place for a space force is the Navy, because if space operations are conducted by large vessels with large crews, the Navy will have the most “turn-key” culture. However, as you pointed out, supplies do have to move through the atmosphere.
The Key West Agreement won’t be quite the slam-dunk you say it is, though. It concerns the distribution of aircraft, and the Navy will have a colorable argument that large spacecraft are *ships*; they can then conduct in-atmospheric operations IAW the Key West Agreement to supply them. If there’s political hay to be made calling spaceships “spaceships”, then contra your post below, there will be a constituency to use that name.
Finally, not all members of the Air Force brass will want to grab space “ships” with both hands; smarter generals (though as Truman pointed out, there are an awful lot of dumb ones) will realize that a space force with large ships and large crews will be a poor cultural fit, and won’t be eager to incompetently recreate another Service’s institutions.
None of this is to say that it won’t end up under the Air Force. After all, the Treasury Department had primary responsibility for protecting the president for 90 years, and the Army has regulatory responsibility for navigable waterways to this day, both for complex historical reasons. But the Air Force vs. Navy thing for space forces will depend entirely on the personalities in charge when (if) it happens.
(As an aside, who decided that in SF, female officers are addressed as “Sir”? If I called a female superior officer “Sir,” I’d expect her to flip out.)
@CatCube
The logical place for a space force is the Navy, because if space operations are conducted by large vessels with large crews, the Navy will have the most “turn-key” culture. However, as you pointed out, supplies do have to move through the atmosphere.
It goes beyond that. Do you expect the space force to spontaneously spring into existence with large, long-range ships? I certainly don’t.
Given that we have to start from Earth, I expect the first thing which resembles a military force will be a customs/safety force, akin to the Coast Guard. Goodness knows what ranks they’ll use, but their spacecraft will be much more akin to aircraft than to warships. A central space station, and smaller vessels for inspection and rescue missions. Eventually, they’d probably grow into a proper Space Force as operations in space continue and we discover that we need to patrol space around Mars, too.
But even if this scenario is a little off, it’s difficult to see why we’d expect military space operations to start with large craft, which is what would be required for the Navy to be given control. The first ones will be aircraft-like in size and mission duration, and as John previously pointed out, even if generation N resembles a frigate more than a fighter, generation 1 was definitely a fighter, and it’s really hard for the Navy to make a case that just because what the Space Force does now looks more like what it does than what the atmospheric Air Force does, it should be given control.
There are ways that a space force with naval traditions could come about. The Free Lunar Navy is set up on naval lines because the USAF was a prime instrument in the attempted suppression of the rebellion. The USAF’s fighter-based force was beaten so badly in its improvised attempts to put down the fighting between Ganymede and Callisto that the USN managed to snatch the deep-space mission. But we shouldn’t expect these to be the norm, and they’re more the sort of things you’d do as an author because you want a space navy than things I actually expect to happen.
The logical place for a space force is the Navy, because if space operations are conducted by large vessels with large crews, the Navy will have the most “turn-key” culture.
Disagree. First, Air Force culture (and the Army culture it is derived from) is not exactly unfamiliar with the issues of large crews operated in isolation and adversity for long periods. Consider e.g. the DEW line arctic radar stations, or any cavalry outpost on the Western frontier. There’s no magic to the Navy Way there, and certainly not to words like “Commander” or “Frigate”.
But more importantly, I think you are confusing present and future. In the future, on the day the United States or whomever launches their first “large” space craft with a “large” crew, it will almost certainly have a Air and/or Space Force with extensive recent experience operating “medium-sized” space craft with “medium-sized” crews. That organization, not the maritime navy of today, will be the best fit across all dimensions for operating the larger space craft with the bigger crews.
The Key West Agreement won’t be quite the slam-dunk you say it is, though. It concerns the distribution of aircraft, and the Navy will have a colorable argument that large spacecraft are *ships*;
So what? The word “ships” does not appear in the text of Key West Agreement. The word “sea” and phrase “at sea” is pervasive in the agreement’s delineation of the Navy’s responsibility. Large spacecraft do not generally operate “at sea” even if you do get the owners to call them “ships”.
And again, on the day that this is actually an issue, an Air Force-derived space service will be operating medium-sized space-almost-ships; they aren’t going to look at the bigger better version that someone just decided is a proper space ship and say “Ugh, too big, and you called it a ‘ship’, go call the navy because we’re not interested”.
There’s no plausible evolutionary process that gives you a Navy-derived space force, and it would be difficult to contrive a revolutionary process that would cause some wholly new space military to copy the particular institutions of a maritime navy of a specific past era. There is a very obvious process by which writers of space opera would copy those traditions, and that is about it.
@John Schilling
I’m not disagreeing with you outright, but I question whether anybody can say looking forward that it’s a slam dunk that a future Space force will definitely come from any particular organization. It would strain plausibility for an author to construct an evolutionary path where the US Army is the nation’s largest hydropower producer, yet here we are. The Air Force came from the US Army Air Forces, which came from the Signal Corps. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I think it’d be less so if you were trying to predict the future.
Organizations pick up missions based on (sometimes esoteric) conditions existing at the time. A notional US Space Force could come from NASA, the Treasury Department, or the Justice Department, depending on exactly what the government thought the most important thing for the Space Force to be doing at the moment of creation, as well as which organization was forward-looking enough to be doing that thing in space. The Signal Corps was the most interested in planes in the early 1900s (I think in part because they had a few officers who had a personal interest in aviation), so it birthed the USAF.
Personally, I like @bean’s proposal of the Coast Guard the best.
@CatCube
I’m not disagreeing with you outright, but I question whether anybody can say looking forward that it’s a slam dunk that a future Space force will definitely come from any particular organization. It would strain plausibility for an author to construct an evolutionary path where the US Army is the nation’s largest hydropower producer, yet here we are. The Air Force came from the US Army Air Forces, which came from the Signal Corps. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I think it’d be less so if you were trying to predict the future.
This is very true, but you seem to be equivocating between “we can’t be sure where the Space Forces will come from” and “the arguement that the Navy is a lot less likely to be the origin of space forces than the Air Force is wrong”. (I think that this blog has a term for this type of argument.) For instance, Air Forces tend to come out of the technical branches of the parent Armies. While if I’d been asked ‘which branch did the Army Air X start from?’, I wouldn’t have just said ‘Signal Corps’, I would have placed the Signal Corps and Engineers (where the RFC started from) above the Infantry in probability.
Organizations pick up missions based on (sometimes esoteric) conditions existing at the time. A notional US Space Force could come from NASA, the Treasury Department, or the Justice Department, depending on exactly what the government thought the most important thing for the Space Force to be doing at the moment of creation, as well as which organization was forward-looking enough to be doing that thing in space. The Signal Corps was the most interested in planes in the early 1900s (I think in part because they had a few officers who had a personal interest in aviation), so it birthed the USAF.
All true, but it breaks down into three basic options, which I rank in my order of probability:
1. Space Force comes out of some orbital police force, run by NASA, the DoT, the DoJ, the Treasury, or whoever. Over time, the ‘cutters’ get bigger and nastier, and eventually, they get uniformed and militarized. Exactly what traditions they follow is pretty much up to the author. I mean a grab bag. Could be naval. Could be air force. Could be police.
2. Space Force comes out of Air Force and follows Air Force traditions. This would require a need for an early military presence in space as opposed to a law-enforcement one. Try as I might, I can’t figure out why this would be needed. Sure, you could put fighters on a space station, but why would you?
3. The Space Force comes from the Navy and follows Navy traditions. This only makes sense if they go straight from ‘basically nothing’ to ‘long-range vessels’.
I do have to sort of disagree with John that there isn’t a sharp distinction between ‘Ship’ and ‘Not-ship’. Something for work in Earth space is not a ship. Something for going to Mars is a ship, and there’s a big enough gap between the two that you can’t just totally assume evolution will cover it.
That said, there isn’t that big of a chance the two roles will separate. Even if the Space Guard doesn’t have interplanetary cutters, it’s still a better fit to operate them than the Navy is.
Personally, I like @bean’s proposal of the Coast Guard the best.
It wasn’t so much ‘Space Force comes from Coast Guard’ as ‘Space Force comes from Space Guard’. But thanks anyway.
@bean on ranks:
The RAF didn’t go as far as they might have with inventing a rank structure- Wing Commander, Group Captain and Air Commodore make the RNAS influence clear. There was one proposal for these to instead be Reeve, Banneret and Fourth Ardian (with the Air Ranks* of Air Vice-Marshal, Air Marshal, Air Chief Marshal and Marshal of the Royal Air Force instead being Third Ardian, Second Ardian, Ardian and Air Marshal). I think the original plan was to have Air Admirals, but the Navy objected.
Ardian, incidentally, is a neologism based on Gaelic words for “bird” and “chief”.
As for the change of ranks in the USAF, the enlisted ranks did change, from Privates to Airmen, but only a few years after the creation of the air force. And of course one officer’s rank changed- Hap Arnold went from being General of the Army to General of the Air Force, though he had retired by then.
*”air officer” is the RAF equivalent of a naval flag officer or an army general officer.
Well, they are called spaceships, not space planes.
By whom, other than fiction writers and other romantics?
Myself included, but reality check. I have never seen anyone who actually owns a space vehicle or has funding to build one, officially refer to such a vehicle as a “spaceship”. It is not obvious to me that real-world usage will in the future change to match romantic or fictional usage of the past.
SpaceShipOne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
SpaceShipTwo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipTwo
I had forgotten SpaceShip One, thank you. An exceedingly marginal case, but it counts.
SpaceShip Two, unfortunately, isn’t actually a space vehicle by the generally recognized definition. So it’s the romantics who aren’t funded to build actual spacecraft, that call their lesser vehicles “Space Ships”.
We can hope for SpaceShip Three, I suppose. But I really want something orbital for that title.
Given the trouble that Virgin Galactic has had, I’d say that their use of the term is making it less likely for the term spaceship to enter common usage.
Add in that they’re not orbital, and that they bear about as much resemblance to a future space warcraft as a canoe does to the battleship Iowa, and I don’t see spaceship entering common parlance.
While not in English:
-At least some translations of Shenzhou give a sense of “ship” but I don’t speak Chinese so I don’t know how accurate this is.
-I do, however, speak some Russian. The Soviet Union built a craft called TKS, which was flown four times (though never crewed or for its intended purpose of supplying the armed Almaz space stations). TKS stands for Транспортный корабль снабжения. The word корабль means “ship”. I can also find the phrase “космический корабль” (“Space ship”) on the website of Roscosmos, used to refer to both Progress and Soyuz craft.
In the Weberverse, most space navies are the indigenous creations of various star nations, with different styles of organization, training, and equipment depending upon whatever the native culture is.
For example, the protagonist Star Kingdom of Manticore, originally a colony of various Western Europeans and North Americans, bases theirs on the Royal Navy, with appropriate nomenclature and traditions. Meanwhile, the planet Grayson, founded by Idahoan religious fundamentalists, bases theirs on the US Air Force, like you propose. And on the gripping hand you have the Andermani Empire, founded by a Chinese-descended colony led by a conquerer convinced he was Frederick the Great reborn, with appropriate Prussian customs.
As for other sci-fi series, I haven’t delved too greatly into many. The Star Wars EU, for example, has the Imperial/New Republic navies organized basically according to the whim of the author, so there’s no clear parallels at all.
Regarding the story itself, I really appreciated a story based around the dull routines of day-to-day shipboard life, rather than alien invasions and laser battles and whatnot (although those are good, too) – I thought the humor was good, and made a nice satire of the bureaucracy of military life.
“For example, the protagonist Star Kingdom of Manticore, originally a colony of various Western Europeans and North Americans, bases theirs on the Royal Navy”
Because the Royal Air Force is the sort of disreputable organization whose traditions nobody would want to emulate, no doubt 🙂
But seriously, if we’re talking about what’s plausible rather than channeling the traditions of Space Opera, the proto-Manticorans will have had at least an orbital police force and emergency-response service, which will itself have been based on the military or paramilitary space forces of Earth at the time of their departure. I haven’t been reading the sequels, because another Weber series is the last thing I need in my to-read pile, but I highly doubt Weber has really put together a plausible explanation of why Manticore would decide to ignore fifteen hundred years of military and astronautical practice to resurrect the particular traditions and customary nomenclature of a military force as distant to them as the navy of the Late Roman Empire is to us.
Hmm: “Space Triremes, Attack! Centurion, take the Liburnians into hyperdrive and harry the enemy flanks!”. Would make a refreshing change.
Well, he’s collaborating with Timothy Zahn about the origins of the RMN, but I haven’t looked into that yet. There MAY be an explanation there, but I rather doubt it, because we all know the reason the Royal Manticoran Navy looks a lot like the Royal Navy is because it’s Hornblower IN SPACE!
Any thoughts about the possibility of a space military with a structure which isn’t that much like any planetary military branch? Is there any science fiction which explores this?
To the extent we know anything about the Culture’s military, which isn’t much, it sure doesn’t seem to run along traditional military lines.
“Allamagoosa” is very typical of a lot of short humorous SF of its time. It’s funny, but it’s not particularly SF; it’s the kind of story every armed force in the world could produce as part of barracks lore.
So I’m not going to break a butterfly on a wheel this time 🙂
“Nightfall”, now, is a very good story and I’m looking forward to that discussion.
“Allamagoosa” is on my short-list of Perfect SF Stories, even if (as Deiseach says) it’s mostly barracks-lore pastiche. (That said, I’d argue against any fib—and accompanying response—working quite as well for a grounded substitute.) I love it dearly, and I laughed out loud several times while re-reading, so thank you for bringing it up. It’s the AM/FM of the human element.
I will agree with this and lament the fact that most of the discussion has been nitpickery about the use of nautical convention in discussing spaceflight. The story is just plain good fun, and there’s not much more to say than that. Technical nitpickery is also fun, for some of us, and there’s always more to say about that 🙂
As fun and lighthearted as “Allamagoosa” is, I was afraid that it would fail to provide enough material for discussion, so I almost didn’t include it. In the end, I decided to compromise by posting the comment about nautical conventions in space as a hedge, since I figured there was a good chance we could have a discussion about that if nothing else.
I was shaking my head and marveling. It’s such a /human/ thing to furiously debate whether or not fictional space navies in fictional star nations actually would properly have naval etiquette versus air force traditions.
And only in SSC would it be conducted with much reference to relevant historical examples, plausible future scenarios, and a vaguely disappointing lack of personal insults and questions of parentage.
Nom d’un chien! is an especially nice touch.
Sixty gallons of gray paint sounds like rather little, but perhaps they’re only repainting a small part of the ship.
Note the lack of modern information-handling– presumably a computerized system would have made it easier to track down what an offog is.
Yes, it’s definitely just a touch-up.
The captain actually calls for one hundred gallons. Milspec paints are, by the data sheets, about 60% solids by volume, and applied in two or three coats totaling about 6 mils—call it 150 microns—dry thickness. This comes out to about 1500 square meters of paint.
So what’s the surface area of a spaceship? The Bustler has 400 men on shore leave (plus half a dozen on duty); a Ticonderoga-class cruiser has just about the same complement. Wikipedia gives the length, beam, and draft (173×16.8×10.2 m); modeling it as a closed box will overestimate the SA below the waterline, which should about make up for ignoring most everything above it. Such a ship would require almost 10000 square meters of paint—six or seven times what the captain ordered.
But wait! Are we being too slavish? It is a spaceship, after all. Well, the paint specifications explicitly apply to all agencies of the DoD, so that’s all right. But why should the spaceship be ship-shaped? Better perhaps if it were spherical.
The volume of the Ticonderoga box is about 30000 cubic meters; fitting all the same space and equipment into a sphere would require 4500 square meters of surface area. Still three times the order. If the crew didn’t strip and re-prime, instead applying a single coat over the top, they could maybe cover about half to three-fourths of the ship (assuming it’s somewhat short of being a perfect spherical shell)… but I’d be very surprised if that were permitted by regulations.
It’s moments like this that I’m reminded that we’re all huge nerds here.
I decided to approach this from the other side. Instead of trying to estimate the surface area of a ship, I decided to look at how much paint was actually used aboard ships. This proved slightly harder than expected, but I did find out that the USS Iowa received 20,000 gallons of paint before being towed to Los Angeles. I believe that the entire exterior of the ship was painted. The number I found for construction (during WWII) was 400,000 lbs, which apparently equates to 7,200,000 square feet. Not sure what that comes to in gallons. A Burke (similar in size to the Tico) apparently requires about 70,000 gallons during construction, but I’m sure most of that is interior.
So we’ll use the first number, and scale by the square of the ratio of lengths. (567/888)^2 = 0.408, or about 8000 gallons for the topside of the ship. I’d guess that several coats were used during Iowa’s painting, but on the other hand, much of the deck is wood, and wasn’t painted. No matter what, we’re only seeing a few percent of the ship painted.
I’m such an indoors/on land sort of a person that I assumed the interior of the ship was being repainted.
Would you use gray paint on the outside of a spaceship rather than white or reflective?
It depends. For a warship you would probably want matte black—cheap stealth. (Sea ships are painted gray for the same reason.) We’re not told what shade “Navy gray” is; it could be quite dark.
That’s not going to work. In space, the man means of detection is going to be picking up the IR output of the heat radiators from the reactor. Those will be black and hot/bright enough that you have no chance of stealth. I’m not particularly sure about the rest of the hull.
There’s no reason to paint for low visibility, although I’m sure this won’t stop some people. Others might do big murals or paint their ships bright orange.
Obviously true wrt conventional propulsion. But IMHO interstellar (and by implication superluminal) drives afford an awful lot of freedom for energetic handwaving.
Project Rho’s article on stealth in space claims that a spaceship the size of a submarine would be detectable with modern tech a quarter AU away with no engine activity at all, just from the heat from the life support systems. (And that’s assuming that the ship’s interior is cooled down to near-freezing to minimize detection range.)
For SF, we could posit magic tech that could shunt IR radiation from heat to hyperspace or something. But in that case why not do the same thing with light so that hull color becomes irrelevant? Ditto if the attacker can just appear via ftl before any detectable radiation– might as well just paint a giant bird of prey on the hull, then.
I don’t think it takes anything that exotic. You could, for example, posit a system that can temporarily “store” heat so that you don’t have to radiate it (for a limited amount of time — eventually your heat reservoir fills up).
Or you could posit some sort of directed IR radiation system, so that you radiate all your heat out the back of the ship, making the ship stealthy but only from one direction.
All that said, hyperspace exhaust vents sound pretty cool.
The Project Rho site does talk about most of the possible objections, including “refrigerat[ing] the ship and radiate the heat from the side facing away from the enemy?” (That section includes a quote from a familiar name here.)
It’s true I’m not seeing a specific discussion of the Mass Effect-style system of temporarily storing the heat in insulated heat sinks, then dumping it later. Whether it’s actually practical to keep a ship’s surface space-cold for any length of time in that manner is something I don’t know enough to answer, though others may. But it seems very likely that it would involve some serious energy, mass, and internal space tradeoffs that wouldn’t make sense for most ships. Especially since it also requires a magic space drive (which, happily, Mass Effect’s Normandy has) to be able to maneuver at all while you’re doing it without sending up a flare.
Whether it’s actually practical to keep a ship’s surface space-cold for any length of time in that manner is something I don’t know enough to answer, though others may.
I happen to have the answer to this on-hand. (I’ve been interested in space warfare for quite a while. This is from the paper I’ve written on the subject. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a link to the whole thing.)
“Heat sinks are impractical over any long duration due to the immense size required. For example, an ice-based heat sink that warms the ice from 200K to 273K, and then melts it to water, would be able to absorb 467.6 kJ/kg of heat, although 333.7 kJ of that would be from melting the ice. If used as the cold end of a heat engine, the engine would be very efficient, due to the low temperature of the sink, but this would only delay the inevitable. For example, every kW that must be placed in the heat sink (which would include both the primary power and the waste heat from the reactor, as well as heat generated by the crew) would need 1 kg of ice every 7.8 minutes, or 184.8 kg per day. Nor can this be vented, as that would substantially increase the visual signature of the spacecraft. Ammonia is a slightly better choice for a stealthy heat sink, although it will have to be kept under pressure to keep it liquid at the upper end of the temperature range. From melting at 196K to 273K (where it will be near boiling under 430 kPa or about 4 atmospheres), ammonia will absorb 662 kJ/kg, a 40% improvement over ice. The efficiency of any heat engines using it as a sink will also be slightly improved because more of that absorption is at the lower end of the temperature range. However, even the most basic housekeeping load will demand massive heat sinks. A ship with a housekeeping load of 10 kW, a generation efficiency of 50%, and a 30-day mission will need 78.32 tons of ammonia heat sinks, with a volume of 122.567 m3. All of these are rather optimistic assumptions, and it should be kept in mind that the added mass and volume of the heat sink fluid and the associated equipment will make the ship easier to detect when under thrust or by visual or active sensors. Also, it should be noted that the above calculation neglects solar energy input, under the assumption that the ship’s exterior will be at equilibrium temperature. Solar irradiance at Earth’s orbit is 1.361 kW/m2, although it would not be necessary to sink this entire amount. If we assume that the ship is to be kept at 273K, then each square meter of ship surface would radiate 315 W/m2. If we assume that 25% of the ship is exposed to sunlight, and that the heat from that is instantly conducted across its surface, then only 101 watts of heat sink per m2 exposed is necessary. However, this translates into 13.18 kg of ammonia per m2 exposed per day, which rapidly adds up over longer missions. Making the ship reflective would of course reduce this requirement, but it would also increase the visual signature of the vessel significantly. On the other hand, making the ship reflective would also reduce the efficiency of the surface in radiating away heat, unless the covering were somehow tailored so that only the parts exposed to the sun were shiny. In that case, it is vaguely possible that the ship could get away with no heat sink at all.”
Eh, the technical objection they have to directional radiation is basically “the requisite radiators would be big and flimsy and heavy”, which is easily addressed by saying that the radiators are built out of some sort of magical sci-fi material such that they aren’t actually big or flimsy or heavy. Schilling’s tactical objections are harder to answer without hammering down all sorts of details like the range of the battle (are we fighting in earth orbit or are we flying all over the solar system?), how fast ships can travel, whether or not we have FTL comms, etc. I suspect, however, we could imagine SF worlds and scenarios in which being stealthy from only one direction would be useful.
In the 1940s, giving a warship a limited ability to travel underwater (for short distances, at low speeds) required a ton of tradeoffs, but the Third Reich still built a lot of U-Boats (and there’s a strong case to be made that they shouldn’t have built anything else). Whether or not it makes sense to equip ships with heat-sink stealth systems is going to be heavily dependent on what the rest of your SF-universe looks like.
My point here isn’t to argue stealth spaceships would be feasible in a very-hard-SF story, it’s that if you want to handwave away the problems that IR radiation poses to your stealth ships, you don’t have to wave your hands especially hard.
My point here isn’t to argue stealth spaceships would be feasible in a very-hard-SF story, it’s that if you want to handwave away the problems that IR radiation poses to your stealth ships, you don’t have to wave your hands especially hard.
I would disagree, in the sense that lack of stealth is as fundamental a feature of spaceflight as is the tyranny of the rocket equation. Saying “I’m going to ignore that” (to either one) is easy, but you instantly lose all claim to being on the harder levels of SF. Most of the problems are from fairly fundamental physics. For instance, radiators run pretty close to an emissivity of 1, and are sized to be as small as possible for the conditions of the system. The only thing that can really solve this is to increase emissivity above 1, which is pure magic. The difference between ‘small handwaiving’ and ‘large handwaiving’ is how much the typical audience-member knows, not the actual physics involved.
@bean, I think our only disagreement is how much handwaving counts as “a lot”.
@bean
Count at least one vote for a link to the whole paper– thanks!
@ReluctantEngineer
Probably. I’m a big enough geek about this (see below) that I have really strict standards on this stuff.
@LHN
Here it is.
Fair warning, it is 150 pages (yes, I’m that big of a geek). Also, I owe a thanks to John Schilling for a quote I used (with acknowledgement). Not the same one Atomic Rockets used.
Well, the color does not matter, because you can’t hide that way, so I would expect the choice to be dominated by aesthetics – Space warships will be whatever color their owners think look most impressive, cool, or intimidating.
If the crew has sufficient downtime – War being long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief intervals of terror and all that – it might actually be covered in murals stem to stern, because a gunnery mate remote piloting a drone with a paint brush at least isn’t actually sleeping on her post.
Thanks, @bean. I look forward to reading it!
@Bean:
I salute your geekery, and look forward to reading this myself. I have something very like it half-written, but working on the professional side of the business means that it would now require tedious effort to sanitize it for publication. The stuff at Project Rho was about the last I could do without having to worry about that.
One minor nit, you seem to have misspelled my name in the “stealth” section. Not your fault, of course – when English pursues other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary, it doesn’t always preserve the spelling. Us proper Germanic Schillings just have to put up with it 🙂
@Thomas Jørgensen
That’s probably true, because any surface coating will probably go away rather quickly when lasers get involved. That said, I did find a method to potentially reduce this, which would result in ships being shiny. (Page 57, at least in my editing copy.)
@LHN
You’re welcome.
@John Schilling
I salute your geekery, and look forward to reading this myself.
Much appreciated, coming from one who’s written a fair bit on the subject himself. Any comments you may have would be helpful. It’s creeping closer to completion, at least so far as ‘complete’ means ‘I haven’t found any new alleys to run down in a while’.
I have something very like it half-written, but working on the professional side of the business means that it would now require tedious effort to sanitize it for publication. The stuff at Project Rho was about the last I could do without having to worry about that.
That’s a problem I would like to have, but don’t.
One minor nit, you seem to have misspelled my name in the “stealth” section.
I’ll get that fixed, although it won’t show up in the posted copy for a while.
I’d read the story long ago. But I’d never reread it knowing the ending. I was struck by how many clues were laid in the text: not just the chef’s interjection, but the items immediately following the offog in the inventory.
Supposing we wanted to discuss rationality, what general advice could be able to be given to the crew and captain to enable them to do better? I think the crucial insight is that the inventory list groups related items together– if the captain and crew had thought about that, it might have occurred to them that their dog should have been in that part of the list, but doesn’t appear.
Aside from that people sometimes just fail to think of things, the other problem is a highly punitive environment– they apparently didn’t feel safe asking anyone off the ship about what an offog might be.
Any thoughts about identifying the right level of punishment? Regaining trust if there’s been too much punishment?
Realizing that the dog should have been on the list at all would probably have been enough. But their thinking of Peaslake as more a crew member than equipment is both key to the story and highly plausible.
And of course we see the Captain replicating the reason to fear asking questions, as he tries to cover his own ignorance by abusing his subordinates for the same lack of knowledge.
After rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy this weekend (in VHS no less) this weekend I am dreadfully disappointed in TFA. Contrary opinions?
I did the same thing over the weekend. Star Wars is a masterpiece. It has no sequels. I am still dreadfully disappointed in TFA.
It has at least one sequel, unless you actually think The Empire Strikes Back is somehow worse than the original?
SW had an incredible attention to detail both plotwise (e.g. the grappling hook micro-plot) and artwise (e.g. Falcon gunport gravity, but basically everything except for that horrible cell block matte), decently subverted melodrama and genius pacing. On the meta-level, it has a series of homages/improvements on classic movie scenes (e.g. Death Star attack is basically The Dam Busters done right).
I think ESB is a strong regression w.r.t. all these: it’s a decent Hollywood blockbuster, but it lacks the artistic merit of the original. And then there’s the silly parts (“Tauntaun freezing to death”, “2-day Jedi Academy”, “Falcon hiding in plain sight”).
“SW had an incredible attention to detail both plotwise”
Huh?
The thing about Star Wars as a whole is that it doesn’t pay to think about it too much. You can Swiss Cheese the whole thing. I mean, the tractor beam alone should have made the Death Star invulnerable. Leia had no business traveling to the rebel base in the Falcon. There isn’t any reason to fly down the trench. Etc.
And the grappling hook is not a coherent plot point. It’s an excuse for a Tarzan and Jane moment.
I mean, I was seven when it came out. I loved it. I just made my kids watch the de-specialized edition. It’s a great movie. But a clockwork plot it ain’t.
A Point of Order:
The tractor beam required significant amounts of power, and we don’t know how many ships it could be applied to at once nor at what level. The fact that the Falcon, taken unawares, couldn’t escape it doesn’t mean that it would be of any use against a group of prepared attackers. Using it as a weapon could be interesting but we just don’t know enough about it to know if it would be feasible.
This reminds me of one of the Heinlein Juveniles, Between Planets, in which a major plot point is the development of force fields to use in space warfare. When I first read it I had already seen things like Star Trek and Star Wars and assumed they would be like the deflector shields present in those and similar modern science fiction.
However, when the force fields are actually deployed (spoiler alert, though the book is many decades old) what they do is put the fields around the enemy ships. The enemy ships are prevented from maneuvering or firing, and must surrender or face destruction by resource starvation. One rarely sees the offensive use of force fields in such a manner (though the modern superhero Invisible Woman has taken to doing similar things in the relatively recent past.)
@HeelBearCub: “You can Swiss Cheese the whole thing.”
Sure, but
a.) You’re talking about consistency, which is not what I mean by attention to detail. SW has a hidden micro-story about Luke Skywalker acquiring a grappling hook. It does not add anything to the main plot. Nonetheless, it’s a cute little detail that the careful viewer can discover. Attention to detail.
b.) Your statement is true of every single plot since Homer. The fact that you can Swiss Cheese it does not mean that it’s not more consistent than most other films,
“a.) You’re talking about consistency, which is not what I mean by attention to detail. SW has a hidden micro-story about Luke Skywalker acquiring a grappling hook. It does not add anything to the main plot. Nonetheless, it’s a cute little detail that the careful viewer can discover. Attention to detail.”
Can you elaborate on this?
I keep hearing people mentioning the grappling hook thing. But as far as I remember it was just something he pulled off his storm trooper utility belt thingy, wasn’t it?
@Marc Whipple:
When it was convenient for the plot, the tractor beam is employed within seconds and at some great range from the death star. Far enough away that the protagonist have just realized that the death star isn’t a moon.
The tractor beam is then conveniently forgotten and ignored when the plot requires it. No one mentions it. It is not a consideration.
Now, there are lots of probably plausible reasons why the tractor beam might possibly not have worked on the fighters, but none of them are presented. From a “this movie is a masterwork of of plot” perspective it’s a perfectly valid example of how the movie is not.
@HeelBearCub:
Not to get too far afield, but official canon seems to be that the tractor beam is difficult to target on groups of highly maneuverable ships, and technology exists that can counter its being used in such a manner. It seems reasonable that it is not usually considered a tactical asset in active combat.
Note that this does point to what is arguably a pretty bad plot issue in the SWU – that their targeting systems are laughably incompetent. (This is not unique to the SWU – it’s also true in the STU.) But that’s a universal canon plot point, not a particular-story-sequence plot point.
As far as its deployment “in seconds,” since Aldebaran was a known Rebel-sympathizer planet, it’s entirely possible the Death Star was loitering in Aldebaran space looking for lucky catches, or just to control information flow in and out of the system while they analyzed the results of the first test.
In the Death Star Hangar scene you can see many stormtroopers going about their business, each one wearing a utility belt with a unique piece of equipment. One of them carries a grappling hook. There’s some visual foreshadowing/pinpointing: his belt is the only one that lacks the white cylinder that would otherwise be the most memorable visual feature.
This same stormtrooper is seen guarding the Falcon. When he’s disarmed inside the ship, Luke ends up wearing his armor.
After the trash compactor scene, the heroes are forced to remove their “trashed” stormtrooper armor. Luke wisely keeps the stormtrooper’s utility belt.
By the way, did you know that every X-Wing in the Death Star Assault has distinct, unique wing markings? You can even use them to keep track of the pilots.
@Publius Varinius:
I think I am confused about what you mean about plots, then. Especially when you add:
“And then there’s the silly parts (“Tauntaun freezing to death”, “2-day Jedi Academy”, “Falcon hiding in plain sight”).”
I mean, there are plenty of “silly parts” in Star Wars. Like an entire squad of storm-troopers running away from two guys.
Again, I love the original movie. It’s great. But what makes it great is how it made you feel the first time you saw it. You both had no idea what was going to happen, but everything felt exactly right. That is impossible to re-capture, so all of the sequels and prequels are necessarily doomed to fall short.
Empire works extremely well as a sequel, even though things feel “wrong”. It’s the “wait, the empire wasn’t defeated when the death star was blown up?” moment for a whole movie.
Then Return of the Jedi screws up what was supposed to be a moon full of wookies tearing storm-troopers limbs off. A moon full of wookies. Tearing people’s arms off. And Lando was supposed to die.
@ HeelBearCub
In all genres, travel moves at the speed of plot.
Same for the functioning of any other technology indistinguishable from magic.
@houseboatonstyx:
As the 20 year old “castaway” who has been living with us for the last year said (when I was aghast he had never seen any of the Star Wars movie and made him watch the “despecialized” version):
“The force is made of plot-ium.”
@HeelBearCub:
Words seem to fail me, so let me try with a visual metaphor.
This building is consistent: all the pieces fit together without contradictions or unmotivated parts.
However, it is not detailed: there’s no point in taking a closer look, or looking at the building from a different vantage point. You won’t discover any new nuances by visiting this building multiple times.
Now this monstrosity is definitely not consistent: most of the pieces are completely random. However, much thought went into creating it, and discovering all the details takes multiple visits. I was told that talking about this building is used as an aptitude test for local architecture students.
Finally, an example of a consistent and detailed building. One could write an essay about each door ornament. And that’s before you notice the perspective trick with the stairs.
@Marc
“However, when the force fields are actually deployed (spoiler alert, though the book is many decades old) what they do is put the fields around the enemy ships. The enemy ships are prevented from maneuvering or firing, and must surrender or face destruction by resource starvation. One rarely sees the offensive use of force fields in such a manner”
You may be interested in Vernor Vinge’s Realtime/Bobble series, which features the prominent use of “bobbles,” or forcefields which do exactly what you describe.
Random question: where did you get the de-specialized edition? Do you just have it left over on VHS from the Olden Days?
@ ReluctantEngineer:
The place I know to get the de-specialized edition is on the Pirate Bay. It’s an unofficial fan creation.
@Reluctant Engineer:
Google “Harmy’s despecialized edition”. You will find, among other things, a nice youtube documentary on how it was made.
I asked my daughter to bit-torrent it for me onto her laptop and we used the HDMI output to show it on the TV.
@Publius Varinius:
I understand what you are saying now. Incidentally, I think a couple of our comments passed each other in the night, so to speak. The explication on the grappling hook made it relatively clear. The T-16 in the background when he is cleaning the droids (and that C3PO is hiding behind when Luke comes back) is, I think, another example of what you are talking about.
I’m not sure I would call that plot, though. Minor story elements, perhaps. They are largely irrelevant to the plot and are essentially unnoticeable unless you go looking for them.
@ HeelBearCub
“The force is made of plot-ium.”
Have you read John Myers Myers SILVERLOCK?
@houseboatonstyx:
I have not. Should I?
I read an anecdote about the filming of Star Wars:
Mark Hammill said about the scenes in the Death Star after they escaped from the trash compactor:
“Wait, aren’t we supposed to be wet and covered in garbage?”
and Harrison Ford replies, “Relax, it’s not that kind of a movie.”
Heelbearcub, I don’t know whether you should read Sliverlock. What is “should” in these matters?
However, I’ve had a good bit of fun reading it. It’s set on an island where all the interesting characters from fiction live (up till 1949– I don’t know whether there’s been good fanfiction set later). It’s a fast and cheerful.
@ HeelBearCub
“The force is made of plot-ium.”
Have you read John Myers Myers SILVERLOCK?
“I have not. Should I?”
Probably. Your castaway should, certainly. 😉
The problem with The Empire Strikes Back is that it does not work as an ending. By including it, you are implicitly committing to Return of the Jedi as well, which is usually considered the weakest movie in the original trilogy. By contrast, A New Hope works perfectly well as a standalone movie.
Not only does ANH work as a stand-alone movie, it’s an exceptionally well-constructed one. Its beats are damn near perfect, its characters are drawn with skill and economy, its exposition and setup are textbook how-to examples (that opening shot!). While ESB is a good, perhaps even a great, film, its greatness is in moments and ideas rather than story structure. It has quite a bit of “waste”, e.g. the Falcon asteroid-field sequence, which exists only to show off ILM and give Han and Leia some screen time. It wants to tell the story of Luke confronting Vader (and his own inner demons), but a bunch of other stuff keeps getting in the way. Even the Hoth scenes in the beginning could’ve been trimmed significantly. Heresy, I know, but bear in mind I’m talking story, not spectacle.
Saw TFA for second time two days ago. It’s a good movie and better the second time. We’ve been discussing this at length in the latest link thread and earlier.
We’ve been discussing this at length in the latest link thread and earlier.
Ah, had missed that – my bad. Will go check.
It’s a good movie and better the second time.
…Um. Not my experience. (I so, so wish it was.) I actually wish I hadn’t seen it the second time, because an element that had made me go o_0 the first time now has me actively seething. /grumpy mcgrumpypants
What element was that, out of interest?
Fin’s characterization, motivation, and actions. (+/- the casting – I can think of half a dozen people I’d rather have played that character, including Oscar Issac, but the writing & plotting of that element was so bad I’m not sure even Idris Elba could have saved that role.)
Considering that they already had Aeryn Sun’s arc to draw upon as a reference, the way TFA handled that character was, imo, inexcusable.
I liked it. Good dialogue, good characters (Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren were all great), callbacks generally worked (in contrast with Star Trek Into Darkness); major weakness was the central conflict, but that bothered me less the second time I saw it. Obviously much better than the prequels. Wish there were other fighters besides the X-wing in it, though.
No B-wings? /me loses interest
(not entirely, but some. I have really wanted to see what one of those things could do since RotJ)
You’ll want to check out the recent Star Wars Rebels episode “Wings of the Master”, if you haven’t already.
I wasn’t disappointed by TFA. It just seems to me that it’s not for SW fans anymore. My parent’s are old-school SW fans, they’ve seen the movies, but never any of the books. They liked it fine and I suppose that’s who the movie is for. The casual fans.
That being said, I don’t like Rey.
Is this why you don’t like Rey? Just curious. (Warning: Spoilers.)
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-29/-the-force-awakens-has-a-perfection-problem
It’s part of why I didn’t like her. Also, she just had less personality than Finn and Kylo and even Poe, who wasn’t even a main character. Finn (contrary to what taht article claimed) had loads of personality, and showed off relatable emotions and fears and vulnerability. I cheered for him because I cared about him because there was enough of a “him” to care about, and he opened up enough for me to see it. Rey… had no “there” there. There’s no narrative thread with any of her flaws; she’s afraid of the vision she gets from Skywalker’s lightsaber, but that’s one scene and that’s it. She mentions going back home to wait for her parents, but none of her other actions seem focused on or influenced by that goal. It doesn’t get her into trouble and she never has cause to regret it.
Finn, on the other hand, has consistent characterization informed by his flaws, the things he does because of or to escape them follow from scene to scene, and they get him into bad situations we can identify with. We can point at things Finn does and say “Man, I’ve been there!”, but can’t say the same of Rey.
Also, Rey Jedi Mind Controls a stormtrooper, exhibiting way more power with it than anyone previously had, while having no training whatsoever or even familiarity with the concept. But to me that was less “Mary Sue” and more “J.J. Abrams doesn’t realize he’s handed out an ability so powerful it breaks everything in the universe.” See also: ST2009 making starships obsolete, and Into Darkness curing death.
J.J. Abrams doesn’t realize he’s handed out an ability so powerful it breaks everything in the universe.
He tends to do that, as you’ve pointed out. I think he’s not so much interested in “Does this make sense when you stop to think about it for five minutes?” as he is in “Will it look amazing cool on the big screen with the pow! and the pew! pew! pew! and the kaboom! swoosh! zzzzzzing!!!! ?”
she just had less personality than Finn and Kylo and even Poe
The character I related to best was Kylo Ren. IMO, this is a sign of a seriously flawed film. I should not be hoping for Darth Emo to win.
What you have to understand is that Abrams doesn’t do science fiction. By his own admission, he doesn’t even like science fiction. He does slick action tales chock full of hot-blooded young protagonists and shiny special effects, ‘cuz that’s where the money is. In our particular cultural moment, it’s popular for those tales to be set in Outer Space rather than, say, the Wild West or World War II, but that’s mere backdrop.
Rey will be revealed to have had previous Jedi training from her father, Luke. Her memory was suppressed or altered when Ren went rogue. Touching her father’s lightsaber and/or having her mind invaded helped reawaken her latent abilities.
Is there an open source project for rewriting the prequels from scratch to make actual sense when prepended to the original trilogy?
I once took a whack at an outline for Revenge of the Sith that gave Anakin a semi-plausible reason for turning to the dark side; it was more or less a retelling of Othello, with Palpatine as a Brabantio/Iago hybrid and Obi-Wan as Cassio. Never actually wrote the thing, though.
The first two prequels don’t fall under the category “should be rewritten” so much as “should never have existed”.
>The first two prequels don’t fall under the category “should be rewritten” so much as “should never have existed”.
I don’t disagree, but what do you do with Episode IV being IV?
Hmm, well, it was “Episode IV” without a “I-III” for twenty years, so I guess just kick the can down the road? Maybe someone could come up with a story worth telling, one that didn’t revolve around tax codes, or whatever the fuck that movie I drank assiduously to forget was about.
I don’t see any problem with a movie being labeled “episode IV” and no prequels ever being made. There are many books that use similar literary devices to set the present story within a larger imagined framework.
Accept “Episode IV” as a nod to old serials. That’s what it was, after all, until 1999.
My take on redoing the prequels would be to leave the Clone wars in pretty much the same shape but have them start earlier. Have Anakin be recruited during them, as the Jedi Order very patiently and slowly managing a war that persistently killed billions of people over and over again, yet they were under strain from losses that were not so easy to replace. Anakin had been passed over for training at a younger age due to psychological issues, but when they needed numbers, they took him on. And he was very effective.
Have Palpatine take notice of him. Have him tell him how this is because of their rules of engagement. Too restrained to be effective. (partially true, but largely Palpatine is sabotaging them) Send him on a secret assassination mission under the codename, Darth Vader. As Darth Vader he wears the mask and armor from the beginning. He takes out a few enemy generals, and Palapatine makes sure (because he controls both sides) that this makes a lasting difference.
A while passes. Things stagnate again, and Anakin gets frustrated. He comes to Palpatine asking if there’s anything he can do to help. So Palpatine sends Anakin as Darth Vader to kill a Republic official who betrayed the Republic for money or something like that, but evaded justice on a technicality. Again, he made sure it appeared to do good.
Then he sends him to take out a merely incompetent officer. And then a corrupt Jedi.
And then, he’s ripe. The Darth Vader persona has killed Anakin Skywalker.
As for the kids, the mother is a clone of the queen of Alderaan who works as her bodyguard. When the queen got pregnant, she opted to as well, and chose Anakin as the father (btw, Jedi are knights, not monks. Not required to be celibate and they sure don’t wear desert robes). Sends Luke to live with her ‘sister’ – the daughter of the parents who raised her while she was being trained as a bodyguard on Tatooine, while she stays on the bodyguard job with her daughter Leia (matching the actual princess Leia). She tells Obi-Wan about this, but not Anakin. Anakin’s from Coruscant or something, and never hears about Tatooine.
At some point, the real Leia dies and alt-Leia is substituted.
It’s just a skeleton, but I think it would make more sense. Fits everything, has a good reason for Anakin falling and moreover having the motivations he has later on (protracted chaos BAD, mmkay?), dramatic, lots of fight scenes – light-saber, blaster (mommy plays the badass normal scrapper role of Han Solo), and star-fighter.
There’s enough material in there for three movies, I think.
Not open source, but What if Episode I were good? takes a good whack at it.
I am considering nominating the cactus person piece (and by extension the rest of Scott’s work) for the Sad Puppy basket 2016 for best fan author. Opinions are solicited but are not to be considered definitive for this action.
Scott isn’t a fan and this isn’t a fanzine. Go for the short story category instead.
If you think his work is good, you should nominate it for the Hugo Award in the appropriate category.
Thank you, but I’m worried that if I get nominated for Sad Puppy something once, that will classify me as “on the Sad Puppies’ side”, that it will be hard for me to credibly distance myself from them given that I’ve argued against some social justice things before, that then it will be impossible for me to deal with the non-Sad-Puppy part of SFF without being viewed as an enemy, and that will come back to bite me later.
I acknowledge that the opposite problem exists if I don’t deal with the Sad Puppies, but I’d rather spend some time figuring out how this all actually works and make my own decision rather than have it made for me.
Does anyone who knows more about SFF know if this is a reasonable worry?
This is a totally reasonable fear. I’m personally acquainted with two people who were on the original SP 2015 slate, and who received truly mind-boggling amounts of hate from the anti-Puppies, despite the fact that they, individually, were perfectly progressive and had no interest in the political elements of the SP platform at all. They both requested to be taken off of the slate in order to have their lives back. (Brad Torgerson, who I don’t know but who is by all reports a stand-up guy, agreed to take them off.)
(This is your regular reminder that Vox thinks you should make your browser auto-change “political correctness” to “treating people with respect”.)
My understanding is that last year the anti-Puppies deliberately buried the Puppy slate, which makes it sound like given what you’re saying the best bet is to just try to do things the old fashioned way without a slate. Is that true? Are there any resources for people trying to figure this out?
Assuming that you want a Hugo (a dubious honor at this stage), I think the best move is just to campaign among your own. The biggest lesson that I took from the controversy is that it’s possible to get a nomination with a surprisingly small number of nominations, and it only costs $40 to get to vote. You probably have enough pull among rationalists and SFF fans that you have a decent chance just by running a traditional campaign, without any slate.
The whole Puppy affair has been an eye-opener for me. I used to think that the Hugos were sort of like the Pulitzers, or maybe the ACM Turing Awards, only for SF. But it turns out that the Hugos are given out by a small community of WorldCon fans, who all know each other — and this community is so small that it’s very easy to essentially DDoS it. Since I’ve never been to WorldCon, and I have zero interest in going there, I’m no longer interested in the Hugos.
There have been efforts to publicize voting for the Hugos– I expect more people will be voting in coming years.
There are people who’d not just been reading sf, but who’d been going to worldcons for years who had no idea that the Hugos were voted on by worldcon members (and also that it wasn’t necessary to attend the worldcon to nominate and vote).
I don’t know how or whether this will affect how the awards turn out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes some difference.
There were people who declined the awards after being nominated by this group. There were others who were nominated by them, at least in part, who neither claimed allegiance nor declined the nomination (such as Jim Butcher) and I do not think there will be any lasting association among the broader readership.
In all honesty, I think if you were nominated by them it would be proof of your being a closet reactionary by those seeking it, but to most, it’d be simply proof of a wide appeal.
It’s hard to say– I’m not expecting the upcoming Hugo situation to look exactly like last year’s, and I’m hoping that a campaign for HPMOR will add a third force which is neither puppy nor anti-puppy.
As for the rest, the more I thought about it, the less certain I am.
Ahh, that will be wonderful. I wonder what slurs they’ll come up with for people who like HPMOR?
Just kidding–they always use the same ones.
Is there a slur for people who like author-mouthpiece fiction?
To be clear, my question was whether to suggest your work for inclusion in the Sad Puppy bin, so as to have it be in the stack of SP “for your consideration” works. If you would prefer to not be considered for that, I shan’t. (It will be a shame, esp for the heckler’s veto explanation you give, but I don’t have to live in your shoes, and will abide by your choice.)
I can and will make my own nomination, for what it’s worth, and you don’t get a say in that. Sorry-not-sorry.
More about SP4 here: http://sadpuppies4.org/about-sp4/
(Lower down, Scott, you asked about 2017…there have been nominating counting changes proposed which can not take effect until they’ve been re-approved in 2016. Some of the suggestions are more intuitive than others – the “everyone can suggest up to 4, the top 6 make the final list” recommendation has wide approval, while some of the others are…well.)
Sad Puppies slate was ineffective; Rabid Puppies slate got the nominations where the two disagreed, and Rabid Puppies nominations got largely buried in the final voting, including by No Award.
If you want Scott to get a nomination, run a GOTV campaign around nomination time getting people to vote. He might have a worse chance of getting nominated, but he’ll have a much better shot at the actual award. Hugos voters were not impressed with Puppy antics, and are unlikely to be any more impressed next year.
>Hugos voters were not impressed with Puppy antics
You mean the anti-Puppy slate-voters, as opposed to the pro-Puppy slate-voters.
The Puppy slates managed to get ~10% of the Hugo votes for their nominations.
This is not a 50:50 pro-anti issue. There are the ~10% Puppies, the ~5% semi-organised anti-Puppies, and the whole-of-the-rest-of-Hugo-voting mass of fans.
Yeah, the anti-Puppies would be out to vote down the Puppies regardless, due to things like Vox Day being a raving theofascist *and* a crap writer, but the mass of Hugo voters wouldn’t give a stuff about the Puppies if they’d kept to nominating 1-2 works per category. Puppies only got voted down so hard because they tried to take over the whole nomination process*.
I expect the Puppies to get a bunch of nominations in 2016, but if they lock up any categories they’ll get a spanking at the hands of No Award and people will wait for 2017 when – guess what – the rules change to make slates a lot harder to run.
*And because a lot of their stuff is crap, to be fair, but they did manage to co-opt some decent works onto the slate.
According to Chaos Horizon:
5653 total votes (assuming I have the right number here), so that makes it:
~10% rabid puppies,
~8% sad puppies,
~7-15% sad puppy-leaning neutrals,
~10-18% true neutrals,
~18% mostly no awarders,
~44% absolute no awarders.
The last two groups are the anti-puppies, so you were off by an order of magnitude.
Any link to what’s going to happen in 2017?
@Scott the proposed amendment to the voting is here: http://sasquan.org/business-meeting/agenda/
under the name E Pluribus Hugo.
Assuming it passes at the next WorldCon in Helsinki, that’ll be the voting system for 2017.
>You mean the anti-Puppy slate-voters, as opposed to the pro-Puppy slate-voters.
You mean the anti-Puppy-slate voters not the anti-Puppy slate-voters.
Voting against a slate, even to the point of placing no-award above any entry from the slate, is not slate voting. Many of those who did so were opposed to the existence of slates.
The impression I got was that anti-puppies were all about the puppy slates being endorsed by the wrong tribe, and the “slates in general are evil” being the motte to that bailey.
Yes, the problem is that mottes usually work because there are actual people who are in them.
I concede that there are, there must be, those who consider slate voting a greater evil than the wrong tribe winning. This is not the impression I got from the anti-puppy crowd in general.
For what it’s worth, the anti-puppy side could have put it’s own slate or slates together, but didn’t. And put a lot of work into changing the rules to weaken the influence of slates.
I believe there was strong anti-slate sentiment as well as tribal issues.
I suggest that if the anti-puppies’ main problem was with “the the puppy slates being endorsed by the wrong tribe”, they would have lobbied their own slate rather than urge people to vote against slates. Even if only a sizable proportion of anti-puppies felt this way, there would still have been visible *attempts*, even if unsuccessful, to promote a competing slate. But in fact I remember no such visible attempt.
Certainly there were anti-puppies who felt very strong ideological aversion to the puppy side. But substantial conversations on the anti-puppy side, from what I’ve seen, tended to be dominated by very strong rejection of slate voting as an idea. In that respect, it seemed to me, there was striking asymmetry between the anti-puppy and the puppy sides.
Notably, the most authoritative arguments coming from the anti-puppy side – e.g. GRRM’s series of posts – displayed good understanding of the puppy side’s claims and attitudes (while disagreeing with them); while the most authoritative arguments coming from the puppy side – e.g. Brad Torgerson’s and Larry Correia’s missives – accused the anti-puppies of being ideologically driven SJWs, and didn’t seem to understand, or to take seriously, the aforementioned rejection of slate voting of any kind. This is another kind of asymmetry between the sides I found important; I’ll be happy to consider corrections to this claim of asymmetry, but that’s how it appeared to me when I was spending much time reading arguments from both sides.
I find it notable that even those like Sandifer who hate the Rabid Puppies with the fire of a thousand suns were not advising a counter slate *or* (that I recall) telling others to vote No Award.
I suggest that if the anti-puppies’ main problem was with “the the puppy slates being endorsed by the wrong tribe”, they would have lobbied their own slate rather than urge people to vote against slates.
The anti-puppies main problem, tactically, was that they did not realize that the sad/rabid puppies were a force that needed to be effectively opposed (rather than just mocked) until after the 2015 nominations were in and the Puppy slate had swept most of the fiction categories. At that point it was too late to propose a counter-slate for 2015. It is also, obviously, tactically ineffective to counter with “Slates are Bad, we should all no-award the Puppy Slate in 2015 because they are Evil Slate Voters, meanwhile here’s the slate we are going to support in 2016”
Given a choice between ceding the 2015 Hugos to the Puppies to focus on their own 2016 Slate, and opposing the Puppies in 2015 by way of a “slate nominees should be no-awarded on principle” campaign, the anti-Puppies chose the latter. This was tactically effective, but it is consistent with both opposition to slates and opposition to non-SJ science fiction and so gives us little insight into the motives of the anti-Puppies. Which, as noted, was probably a mix of the two.
What’s the name of the bias where you think of your own side as composed by individuals making their own choices, while the enemy side is assumed (usually tacitly, without fully understanding it) to act in concert under a single will? There’s got to be a name, but I can’t find it. It’s a very very very common bias.
Anyway, John Schilling, you’re doing *that*, all over the place. Please don’t, it makes for a depressingly low level of discourse. The anti-puppies were and are many people acting independently and choosing different strategies all over the place. While the Puppygate awareness got a huge boost after the nominations were in, there were quite a few anti-puppies criticizing them before that, too, and those *did not* propose their counter-slate even though it wasn’t too late. Moreover, if a substantial number of anti-puppies were pro-“slates of the right kind”, they were completely free to go with the “here’s the slate we’ll win with in 2016” message, while *other* anti-puppies could stress the “slates are bad, period” message. There was no cabal enforcing the correct opinion (in fact, the most popular anti-puppy activists continually stressed that while they propose e.g. noawarding, others should feel free voting individually for whatever they prefer; there was no pressure to converge on the single correct response to puppies; there was anti-pressure!).
But that didn’t happen. The reason the anti-puppies activists did not propose their own slate, this year or in 2016, is not that they made some kind of uniformly enforced tactical decision that would mask, for the PR purposes, their terrible ideological dogmatism. The reason was that they overwhelmingly truly were and are against slate voting, and the loudest and most authoritative voices in that camp were even *more* against slate voting than the average.
@Anatoly:
What part of “… gives us little insight into the motives of the anti-Puppies. Which, as noted, was probably a mix of the two” did you not understand? Or did you not bother to read to the end of my post, but decide to pen your screed as soon as the beginning of my post disagreed with yours?
My point was, and I emphasis was, that the anti-puppy coalition represented a diversity of views that we cannot fully understand, including both people who oppose slates on principle and straight-up SJWs. But it is possible to persuade me that one, particularly hateful, viewpoint dominates the whole, and people like you go a long way towards convincing me of that.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
I agree that there was a lot of anti-slate feeling in general, but I disagree that the anti-Puppy side, at least the core SJW elements, could have put together a counter-slate. It would immediately have fallen into squabbling chaos. Everything is Problematic.
>What’s the name of the bias where you think of your own side as composed by individuals making their own choices, while the enemy side is assumed (usually tacitly, without fully understanding it) to act in concert under a single will? There’s got to be a name, but I can’t find it. It’s a very very very common bias.
Seems like a variety of Fundamental Attribution Error, but maybe you’re thinking about something else.
I don’t know a lot about the whole puppies controversy, but I would think the simplest test of whether the objection was to slates or a particular slate would be behavior prior to this controversy. Did people ever propose slates? Was there the sort of widespread opposition to slates that the Puppies experienced?
If the answer is “yes and no,” that suggests that what is really going on is not opposition to slates.
Is it?
@Anatoly
Sounds like the outgroup homogeneity bias.
@David Friedman:
There was the occasional hint at it, and the occasional discussion that gosh, it would be easy to subvert the Hugos via slate voting so it’s a good thing we fans are Above All That, but the Puppies were really, AFAICT, the first serious slate or slate-like-thing that was implemented with a large fan base. The closest that had come before was a large group of arguable non-fans would get behind a specific single work because of the author. The most notorious example of this was a work by L. Ron Hubbard that Scientologists tried to get picked. It failed rather spectacularly, IIRC.
The Puppy argument is that basically the last twenty years or so was slate voting, the slates just weren’t formally announced. *shrug*
@David Friedman
This in itself is controversial. The puppy supporters believe that there has been a secret slate for a few years. The anti-puppies either say there have never been slates before or point to the defeat of Black Genesis (which the Scientologists where probably responsible for getting on the ballot.)
“For what it’s worth, the anti-puppy side could have put it’s own slate or slates together, but didn’t. ”
When?
If they didn’t believe it was a serious threat before the nominations were announced, no, they couldn’t have — all slates had to be before then.
“I suggest that if the anti-puppies’ main problem was with “the the puppy slates being endorsed by the wrong tribe”, they would have lobbied their own slate rather than urge people to vote against slates.”
I repeat, when would they have done this? Remember they could not have done it after nominations were announced.
I note that the anti-Puppy forces were discussing the strong Puppy representation on the ballot BEFORE the ballot was announced. Either they had gotten the ballot — against the rules — before the announcement, or they knew who the real candidates were (the secret slate NL mentioned), and that the only conceivable competition came from the puppies.
Furthermore, after the nominations were announced, several prominent fans/authors released anti-Puppy slates of suggested winning votes, including both “utilize No Award to stop Puppy wins” and “here’s how to vote for non-Puppy candidates.” Those slates were enormously successful.
To the anti-Puppy side, that is merely a coincidence, and True Fandom would have won the day regardless of such actions. And that may in fact be the case. But it cannot be denied that they were created and published widely.
As Mary notes, there is nearly indisputable circumstantial evidence that the results of the nominations were made available to anti-Puppy activists before the nominations were announced. The only possible way in which this could not be true is that the anti-Puppy side was already so heavily invested in coordinated anti-Puppy maneuvers that they knew who had been nominated because every single non-Puppy potential nominee was reporting whether or not they had been nominated (which is, by the way, considered very bad form) to some central information holder.
I think a major confounding factor is that it’s surely way easier to build a coalition around “people we don’t like are making a slate, let’s block all slates” than “people we don’t like are making a slate, let’s make our own” if you’re at all internally fractious about what that slate should be. It also makes a moral high ground easier.
It’d be nice to believe that the politically motivated were a fringe group, but I don’t think the lack of a counter slate was good evidence for it.
@Earthly Knight, “outgroup homogeneity bias” it is, or at least close enough, thanks!
@John Schilling, you describe the anti-puppies as a mix of two motives at the end of your post, but you also describe them as acting as one body throughout. Anti-puppies “did not realize” something. Then it was “tactically ineffective” for them “to counter” with something else. Then they “chose” another thing. I’m sorry that you don’t even realize how silly it all sounds. There was no opportunity for anti-puppies to “choose” any strategy collectively at any given point. As I already wrote, if different anti-puppies had different motives, nothing prevented them from executing different strategies. There was no push towards deciding on a single strategy, in fact there was an anti-push.
My point was, and I emphasis was, that the anti-puppy coalition represented a diversity of views that we cannot fully understand, including both people who oppose slates on principle and straight-up SJWs.
Now this is just bizarre. FFS just read the blog posts and the discussions on the anti-puppy side and you’ll understand the “diversity of views” just fine. I don’t know what’s supposed to be so difficult about that. Both sides have been pretty open about what they want and what they believe.
Certainly there were “straight-up SJWs” on the anti-puppy side, but my impression was that they were a minority. And even they did not, anywhere that I saw, endorse straight-up slate voting. SJWs would talk a lot about how it’s important to nominate works by women, POC, etc. They often suggested some works they thought deserved to be nominated on the basis of their ideological/racial/gender conformity. But even they did not make up slates and call for slate-voting. Rejection of slates was well-nigh universal on the anti-puppy side.
@Mary, it’s weird to talk in terms of “If they didn’t believe it was a serious threat before the nominations were announced”. “they” didn’t have one belief about that. As I tried to explain to John Schilling already, there was no single opinion about that. Some anti-puppies raved and warned about puppy slates way before the nominations were in. *They* could have tried to organize an anti-puppy slate, if they were actually really pro slates, just their own kind. There was no serious attempt to do that.
I note that the anti-Puppy forces were discussing the strong Puppy representation on the ballot BEFORE the ballot was announced. Either they had gotten the ballot — against the rules — before the announcement, or they knew who the real candidates were (the secret slate NL mentioned), and that the only conceivable competition came from the puppies.
I don’t know why this is supposed to be such a huge thing. If I remember correctly, Nilsen Haydens hinted that a storm was coming a few days before the announcement. It seems likely that someone from the organizing committee leaked to them the fact that the puppies are taking the nominations by storm, or even the entire list. If so, that was very wrong, but there seems to be little actual (or potential) harm, and it’s not like such a leak tarnishes the entire anti-puppy side.
The secret slate thing is straight-up conspiracy theory nuttery.
“Secret slates” are fairly ridiculous.
Decentralized distribution of socially accepted voting patterns within an in-group bubble is not. There doesn’t need to be any conspiracy of the strict sort for it to work, just a bunch of people interconnected on social networks (both meatspace and cyberspace), liking each others’ posts and indicating which options are socially acceptable to pick, and which are heinous travesties against right-thought.
“f I remember correctly, Nilsen Haydens hinted that a storm was coming a few days before the announcement. ”
One explicitly and openly said that Puppies had taken as many slots as they did.
” If so, that was very wrong, but there seems to be little actual (or potential) harm,”
It would be explicitly and openly against the rules.
(Unlikely the puppies, who scrupulously obeyed every rules and were abused as if they had violated them.)
So you are saying those who followed the rules are the bad guys, and those who broke them* are the good guys.
*In your scenario. It is worth noting that they, unlike you, deny it. Unfortunately for you, the only alternative is their knowing the only possible other candidates.
The puppy slates were repugnant, and even though Scott would not of course be responsible for someone else nominating his work, it’ll still be an association best avoided. My opinion is that you really shouldn’t.
>The puppy slates were repugnant
What? No, they weren’t.
I don’t know what Anatoly had in mind when they said “repugnant”, but I what I read of puppy nominiees struck my as boring or worse, and I don’t get the impression that there’s much being written now which is both good and is what the puppies say they want.
Unfortunately, one that that was good, plotty, and heroic was Marko Kloos trilogy (I don’t remember which one was up for a Hugo), but he withdrew it, and I’m entirely willing to believe he didn’t like *either* side or being in the middle of the quarrel between them.
The main thing I learned from the recent Hugo difficulties is how much people are apt to underestimate the effect of the hostility from their own side.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
Just curious: Did you read Big Boys Don’t Cry?
No. Why?
If I were asked what the best example of a nominee which was both good and what the Puppies want was, that would be my answer. I thought it was eminently Hugo-worthy. Its category got no-awarded.
Because Krautman can write, and you may like what he writes. Give it a try.
(Not all of the puppy-nominated stuff was of a quality I would have voted for…but neither was much that had made it onto the final ballot in the past few years.)
(There has been some really good stuff – both that which was nominated and that which was ignored.)
If the whole puppy kerfluffle has only the result of getting more people to read and vote for what they like, I think it will be worth all the electrons that have died for it.
I thought that the villainy of all the people in Big Boys Don’t Cry was just a bit too mustache twirling for me. There were certainly some Puppy entries that I voted for over No Award. Skin Games, In the Stone House, Totaled, The Parliament of Beasts and Birds (I do love Wright’s wordsmithing), The Hot Equations. But I thought there was also a lot of very low quality stuff. I mostly get involved with the Hugos as a chance to read good short fiction for cheap but this year it was mostly just a slog to give everything a fair shake.
I meant of course that the idea of the slates, and the execution, were repugnant, not the actual works. I read few of the nominees, slate or no slate.
But since we’re talking about it, I remembered last year opening Vox Day’s blog and reading a post – I found it now – about how there’s this great military SF story that “SJW critics” are panning because they hate the actual science fiction we love. We have no interest in or regard for their SJW, non-SF, “science fiction”. We appreciate a genuine sense of wonder. They refer in snarky contempt to “sensawunda”… etc.
I got curious. Here was a short story Vox Day was actually holding up as a worthy representative of the Puppy side. The story was “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa. I read it. It was very, very bad. It was awful. The cloyingly preachy descriptions. The characters weren’t even cardboard, they were cigarette paper thin. And the main plot switch, nevermind that it was predictable (not really a flaw) was just such a painfully unconvincing cliche. If this is what Rabid Puppies held up as the best they had to offer, they were safe to ignore as far as quality goes, I thought.
(I do know of at least one exception: I think John C. Wright is very talented. “Guest Law” is a little gem of a story I would recommend to anyone. Haven’t read his latest. I suspect though that it isn’t the quality of his prose that makes him a Puppy favorite).
I think John Wright is a Sad Puppy, not a Rabid Puppy, isn’t he? Admittedly though I haven’t been following the affair all that closely.
Both puppy lists featured Wright, but the Rabid Puppies one was positively saturated with him.
Wright is most definitely a Rabid Puppy, although he is not the I-Just-Want-To-Watch-The-World-Burn kind exemplified by Vox Day.
Wright is mostly Rabid Puppy, getting two nods (one for non-fiction) on the 2015 Sad Puppy slate and six with the Rabid Puppies. Sad Puppies was sincerely trying to nominate what they thought were good works, constrained by their narrow taste and their rejection of their opponents’ tastes. Rabid Puppies was about nominating the works most likely to cause the Hugos to go down in flames.
I would distinguish between being a $PUPPY and having one’s works nominated by/being seen as good by a $PUPPY. Wright is definitely a Rabid Puppy in both categories. Many people are Sad Puppies (or not Puppies at all) by personal inclination but have produced work which appeals to Rabid Puppies.
“Wright is most definitely a Rabid Puppy”
This is exactly the guilt by association that the Puppies complained of. The Puppies were the voters and proposers of nominees, not the nominees.
“Many people are Sad Puppies (or not Puppies at all) by personal inclination but have produced work which appeals to Rabid Puppies.”
How true.
There is a review on Amazon of Jim Butcher’s latest that gives it one-star and says it’s because the Puppies liked his other work.
@Mary:
I don’t know how active, if at all, Wright was in the leadup to the actual SP/RP nomination process, but there is no question, out of his own mouth, that he agrees with the Rabid Puppy position on pretty much every point. Technically, he may not have been a Rabid Puppy during the nomination process, but he most definitely is one in spirit. This is not guilt by association, which many other authors who were “merely” Sad Puppies, or not Puppies at all, suffered. This is guilt by enthusiastic agreement.
” but there is no question, out of his own mouth, that he agrees with the Rabid Puppy ”
quote him, then.
@Mary:
http://www.scifiwright.com/
Just click the puppy topic flag, or search for the terms.
Quote him. Do not throw his extremely extensive blog — which I follow — at me and claim it’s in there somewhere.
Mary, the directions were pretty explicit. After roughly 5 seconds of link-following I found this:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2016/01/the-stormbunnies-and-crybullies/
http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/12/peace-on-mars-good-will-toward-puppies/
When people criticize puppies or make overtures to them, he responds as one of them.
“the directions were pretty explicit.”
They were so vague as to be unusable, because you provided not the slightest hint about what you meant to qualify.
“he responds as one of them.”
What is that supposed to mean?
You’re saying to be qualify as a Sad Puppy a person can’t object to being lied about?
@Mary:
I think “we Sad Puppies” is pretty clear.
But the claim was that Wright was a Rabid Puppy.
@Mary: Who are you talking to? I followed those directions; I didn’t write them.
@Jon: Oh right. Hmm. Would need to poke around a bit more to figure out where he falls on that distinction. Meh.
@Mary
He is unavoidably a rabid puppy. A cursory examination of any of his blog posts, essays, or forum debates railing against social justice warriors and atheists will demonstrate that without a doubt. The reason Marc’s instructions were not vague is that it did not matter what you clicked on, because his entire website is a dedication to rabid puppy values.
I was tremendously heartbroken when I found out; I adore the Golden Age trilogy and am eagerly awaiting the conclusion of his Count to a Trillion series.
The Hugo’s have been a joke for over ten years. If you’re not trying to make it as a full-time SFF author (and thus just want the exposure), I don’t see why you’d want to have anything to do with them.
The Hugo’s have been a joke for over ten years
What does it mean to say that? What are you actually saying?
That getting a Hugo doesn’t translate to celebrity status or financial success? But that has been the case forever, the last 10 years aren’t different.
That particular awards given in the last 10 years are much worse in judgement quality than before? If so, what’s the evidence – where are the utterly brilliant SF novels ignored by the Best Novel Hugo (for instance), and even more importantly, where’s the evidence that the last 10+ years are worse in that respect than before? There are many forgotten novels from the 60s and 70s that got Hugo’s in their time.
That the Hugo’s lately have been much more about status than than quality. The only other book award that sees so much hand-wringing is the Man Booker Prize, and for much the same reasons as the Hugo. Maybe the Hugo’s have always been like this; after all, middling novels from Asimov won it over much more deserving books in the 70’s and 80’s. But if a truly awful book like Redshirts can win, then I see no reason to ever pay attention to the Hugo’s. As a somewhat experienced reader of SFF, I have much better ways to find books/stories that are likely to be good than looking at who wins or is nominated for a Hugo.
Awful? I thought it was entertaining enough, in a fairly light way. It was good bus reading. Not “this is good enough for an award”, definitely.
Agree with dndnrsn- it didn’t seem like award-quality, but was definitely a fun, enjoyable read for Trek-fans (of which there are gigantic quantities in SF-fandom).
It was the nadir of Scalzi sarcasm-humor, dialed to 11 and completely awful. The characters were paper thin (which, given the main conceit of the book [redshirts are people, too], you’d think they wouldn’t be). The codas were by far the best part of the book, and shows that Scalzi can actually write something decent if he’s not trying for wall-to-wall yuks.
I guess you don’t like Scalzi’s other stuff, then?
I’ve found everything I’ve read by him to be entertaining, if lightweight. None of it came even close to passing my test for “this is especially good, or even great”, namely, whether I would read it again knowing the plot twists and such.
I enjoyed Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades for what they were. Redshirts just took the worst parts of those books and amplified them.
Being John Scalzi with his blog is what won him the award, just like being Isaac Asimov is what won Foundation’s Edge the Hugo, so I guess this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. It just seems that Hugo’s from the 50’s through the 80’s more reliably tracked quality than in more recent decades; that perception could be due to me simply being much more familiar with the wide range of contemporary releases, though.
That the Hugo’s lately have been much more about status than than quality.
I think that’s always been the case. You want a focus on quality, look to the Nebula. Gene Wolfe has never gotten a Hugo, talk about quality.
But if a truly awful book like Redshirts can win, then I see no reason to ever pay attention to the Hugo’s. As a somewhat experienced reader of SFF, I have much better ways to find books/stories that are likely to be good than looking at who wins or is nominated for a Hugo.
I agree with this, mostly. Personally I’ve got little to no use for the Hugo’s. The average quality of Best Novel nominees is below my expectations. But I still think the Puppygate is a fascinating story: a crowd of stupid people armed with conspiracy theories and chanting “SJWs! SJWs!” destroying the reputation of an award, just because they could. It didn’t hurt me, but I kinda feel for those it did hurt.
That… That isn’t just not what happened, it’s almost the opposite of what happened.
@DrBeat:
Seconded. We’re definitely in “Not Even Wrong” territory here.
@DrBeat, you want to elaborate? My description may be somewhat flippant, but I’m not seeing how it could be “almost the opposite of what happened”. By “conspiracy theories” I meant things like “the secret slate” already mentioned above.
(Among the descriptions of how Hugos functioned before the puppies, how political/factional/SJWy/etc. they were, I found GRRM’s long posts in his back-and-forth with Larry Correia to be the most convincing. Having carefully read both sides, my conclusion was that Correia had nothing substantial to offer against GRRM’s claims).
@ Anatoly
If you read the GRRM/LC exchange, and came away with the impression that the Hugos were wrecked, this year by a group of people whose primary effect was to shout “You’re an SJW!” at their opponents, then I am not sure that anyone here could convince you otherwise.
However, in my impression, this is what happened:
1) Starting back in the early oughts, $study majors – who had grown up in a world where consuming SFF wasn’t just something nerds did – became a larger and more visible contingent in both professional and fannish SFF.
2) These progressive writer-advocates attempted – as most humans do – to create a place in SFF-dom more to their liking. This group was more tech-savy than the older generation of fan/writers, and had the support of literary academia and mainstream publishers, as previous generations had not.
(It is a mistake to think of these influences as either absolute or completely one thing. I speak of tendencies and comparative advantages.)
3) While publishing space in either the big houses nor the various magazines were not and have not been a zero sum game, the rising influence of progressive writer-advocates meant far less space for conservative/technical/old-style-space-yarn/religiously observant writer-advocates.
4) While it is arguably true that older SFF failed a segment of the potential readership in being too conservative/technical/old-style-space-yarny/religiously observant, the newer progressive writer-advocates have, imo, over-estimated the appeal of their identity-oriented works.
5) Worldcon participants (both writers and fans) became increasingly distinct from the main run of SFF fans – being fans with enough money and free time to attend a con that moved all over the country – and the Sorts of Things that appealed to WC participants increasingly did not match the Sorts of Things that appealed to the larger run of SFF fans. The increasing influence of progressive writer-advocates in WC and similar circles only expanded this disconnect.
6) Fans of a conservative bent became increasingly aware of a distinct anti-conservative leaning in Fandom, and among the more vocal writer-advocates. Note: GRRM says he wasn’t aware of this sort of thing, which imo undercuts GRRM’s ability to speak with authority on this.
7) An increasingly nasty set of disagreements occurred in the SFF writers organization, SFWA. To call it a purge of conservative writers would be a monumental overstatement, but there were hard feelings and people flouncing off into the night, and other people saying they didn’t want to be part of that mess, and SFWA became distinctly more progressive and more anti-conservative than it had been.
So, three years back – long before Gamergate – Larry Corriea started a campaign to get the Sort of Things he liked on the Hugo ballot. (A reminder for those just tuning in – there are two sets of SFF awards. The Nebulas are voted on by the SFWA, and are the equivalent of the Oscars. The Hugos, which we are talking about here, are the People’s Choice Awards.) His goals were two fold – to investigate the possibility of overt vote tampering, and to investigate the possibility of social manipulation. The first year, there were only a few categories that had a SP entry, and none did exceptionally well – but it did infuriate the right sorts of people. (LC was able to discredit the idea of overt vote tampering to his satisfaction, and the charge has not been seriously raised since.)
Year Two, the SP list had 1 to 3 (iirc) entries for each category (well, for most of them) and a few got on the final ballot. This lead to even more infuriation on the part of the right sorts of people, and active campaigns to “no award” anything listed by the SPs. Having watched various heads explode, LC declared himself satisfied and turned SP3 over to Brad Torgensun (sp?) who is by all accounts a decent guy. (Except when he’s a secret racist who is so dedicated to the White Supremacist cause that he actually married a black woman in order to oppress her in person 24/7.)
(No, not kidding. People actually said that about Brad.)
In order to expand the SP entries beyond “the Sort of Thing LC likes”, BT solicited opinions, constructed a list of five (ish) entries for each category, and set it out for the consideration of the SP peps. This list included a variety of works by people of various gender and political orientations.
…and here is where it gets complicated.
Remember the SFWA “purge”? One of the most colorful participants of that mess was a writer/editor by the name of Vox Day, about whom nearly everyone has an opinion. VD is Not Nice. He does not tolerate fools, suffer suffragettes, or agree to respectably disagree, nor does he let bygones be bygones, and he specializes in the sort of internet debates that most closely resembles the conduct of your eight year old brother in the back seat of your parent’s car on a five hour trip to your grandparents. He makes the progressive writer-advocates insane, and has ongoing feuds with several of the most SJW of the SJWs.
One of his works was nominated by LC in SP2 (because he liked the story, and in order to make people’s heads explode. In retrospect, this might not have been the wisest long term strategy choice on LC’s part.) In SP3, one of the stipulations that several SP nominated authors had was that VD not be involved. BT shrugged and agreed, LC shrugged and agreed, VD shrugged and agreed.
A few days after the SP list was suggested, VD produced a similar but not identical list, which he dubbed the “Rabid Puppy” List.
Both lists were largely ignored – and when not ignored, mocked – by the progressive writer-advocates and their fans. Until the nominations were tallied, and the authors whose works had been on the short lists of various progressive writer-advocates did NOT get contacted with news of their (all-but-assured) nominations. Instead, people on the SP/RP lists got contacted.
When the final short lists came out, on Easter weekend, the SP/RP lists had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In more than one category, there had been a complete lock out.
And then All Fandom Went To War.
IMO, all the ink spilled in the months there after was just clean up after this EW article (archived versions here: https://archive.is/http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/06/hugo-award-nominations-fall-victim-misogynistic-and-racist-voting) went live the Monday after the awards were announced. The progressive writer-advocates (to include snubbed authors who penned anti-puppy opinion pieces in which they failed to note their own conflicts of interest) seized the media spotlight, conflated SP with GamerGate, and proposed countless “revisions” to the nomination process to ensure that this sort of grassroots revolt “never happened again”. (Again, seriously, this happened, although GRRM did note that this attempted rules-gamemanship was both 1) happening and 2) not helpful.)
So.
If there were armies marching in the night with pitchforks, it wasn’t just SP. There was and continues to be a lot of personal bad blood on all parts, and many people have staked out ground that they may come to regret dying upon. But imo one side is (still) advocating for a free market in sff fiction/media, where the reader gets to pick the stuff they like, and another side, which would like to act as a gatekeeper of the Properly Approved Sorts of Thing Which Are Consumed By Our Kind of People.
For all their faults and excesses, I am still on the SP side – if only because I get to read works by anti-puppy writers without being cast out.
The best anti-Puppy argument I saw is that most of the “SJW” books sold dramatically better than most of the books on either Puppy slate, to the extent that it’s completely implausible to blame some vast conspiracy of entryists, Hugo voters and publishers for “warping the fandom.” This is the fandom, like it or not.
From my admittedly limited SF reading I think the nominees are mostly crap on both sides… Ted Sturgeon said something about that some years ago.
Thank you, keranih. For those of us not involved in the ruckus, that was a far more helpful explanation than “a crowd of stupid people armed with conspiracy theories and chanting “SJWs! SJWs!” destroying the reputation of an award, just because they could.”
Redshirts was pretty bad because it was Peak Scalzi. Interesting concept, solid start, completely and utter flub akin to running down mainstreet naked during rush hour halfways through the book. Old Man’s War had the decently to be a trilogy so the flub didn’t happen until the second/third book at least
@ BBA:
The best anti-Puppy argument I saw is that most of the “SJW” books sold dramatically better than most of the books on either Puppy slate,
What do you mean by “most of the SJW books”, when by my count there were only two “SJW” books on the final ballot? Specifically, Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and Leckie’s Ancillary Sword. There were two “Puppy” books as well, Butcher’s Skin Game and Anderson’s The Dark Between the Stars. Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem was a dark-horse entry when a third “Puppy” book declined the nomination, and was endorsed as a book worthy of nomination by Puppy and non-Puppy alike.
Everything else was a short work that doesn’t sell in standalone book form, and in many cases are published in magazines or digests whose subscribers don’t know what they will get until after they pay. I don’t think meaningful sales figures are to be found there.
And among the books, I’m pretty sure that Skin Game sold more than all the others combined, as it was (successfully) marketed as a straight-up mainstream bestseller as well as a genre work.
If you’ve got sales figures that say otherwise, and in particular if you can find something to serve as a useful sales figure for the short fiction, I’d be genuinely interested.
@ John Schilling
Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem was a dark-horse entry when a third “Puppy” book declined the nomination, and was endorsed as a book worthy of nomination by Puppy and non-Puppy alike.
Yep. First the SJ side was talking it up as being “by a Chinese! translated by a Chinese!” then “Well, it’s dull but it has some cultural stuff in it”. Then someone noticed that the dull stuff was math and science and aliens, and some of the Puppies read it and said, “Hey, we should have nominated that.”
After it won the Hugo, the author came out and denounced the Puppies. Ho hum.
@keranih:
Thanks for writing up a pretty detailed and reasonably balanced backstory to the Puppygate. It’s evident throughout that the recap is both Puppy-friendly and tries very hard to give a fair hearing to the other side, which you did very well. I’ve no factual disagreements with anything you wrote, but I do disagree with some interpretations and descriptions of people/motives. Let me try to explain how this backstory is still in pretty good agreement, as far as I’m concerned, with my
a crowd of stupid people armed with conspiracy theories and chanting “SJWs! SJWs!” destroying the reputation of an award, just because they could.
1) Everything you write in your 1)-7) about the progressive or anti-conservative tendencies of SF in the last ~10 years is well said. I would also add that SF fandom was actually the first battleground of the modern-style Internet SJ movement, with the Racefail’09 scandal that resembled nothing before it, but so many SJ-related scandals since. Notably, Racefail’09 fizzled out after many prominent blue-tribe authors/editors realized just how toxic things were getting, and either went silent or took mildly anti-SJ positions. The Requires Hate scandal more recently also had a moderating effect on SJ tendencies in fandom, especially among writers.
2) As you say, the left-leaning tendencies of fandom in general, of Worldcon fans, and of Hugo picks have been both real, and, after all, tendencies rather than any sort of conspiracies/blacklists/etc. Following GRRM, I interpret this as “business as usual”. The Hugos have *always* been political. Camps of people despising each other and trying to boost their votes have always been there. The Hugos survived the cultural revolution of the late 60ies and the Vietnam war. Following the well-known tendencies in today’s colleges and Internet activism, the Fandom has been lurching left. It’s entirely possible that it’ll lurch back (or apolitical) in another few years, as happened before. GRRM was downplaying this anti-conservative bias not because he was clueless about it, but because he’s seen it all before, and more than once. He was not impressed. It wasn’t something out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing worth trashing the Hugos over.
3) As long as LC was trying to get one or two works of “our kind” onto ballots – that was one thing. I think LC is full of unsubstantiated conspiracy-type beliefs, but, you know, whatever. Some liberal activists opposed him bitterly, but it was all a storm in a teacup. What changed this year? First, Brad Torgerson switched to large slates that had a potential to completely fill categories. Second, Vox Day happened. But staying on the first thing for a second: it’s one thing when sustained lobbying pushes a novel or a story or two into a category. It’s very different when a slate of five works pushes everything else off the list, and it’s fair and reasonable to call it “trashing of the award”. You have a list of ideologically chosen works (adding insult to injury, they’re also really bad as quality goes) not leaving any chance to any other works, whatever their merits, that are not pushed by ideologues. This isn’t business as usual anymore, and it was unprecedented in the history of Hugos. The liberal-SJ-whatever side has never done anything so sleazy. And LC with BT are very blameworthy for this, as instigators and propagandists, even if the actual votes were mostly fielded by the Rabid camp. I imagine BT, who’s to all appearances a fine upstanding guy, just sick with ressentiment and deluded by this conspiracy thinking, was shocked and dismayed when he saw the nominations; I think he tried to downplay them and walk some of his rhetoric back, but it was way too late.
4) Vox Day. I wish you didn’t repeat the usual wink-wink-nudge-nudge “He’s not a Nice Guy, he fights dirty, SJWs hate him” sort of narrative that decent people in the Puppy camp often write about VD. It lies by omission. Vox Day is not “not a nice guy”. He’s scum, a genuine article. He’s a bona fide turd of a human being. To say that he’s “Not Nice” is to unfairly give him a pass. And it’s not like any of this is hidden. It’s easy to evaluate VD, just read his blog for a month. He’s compulsively dishonest; he WILL lie to his readers about his “enemies” and misprepresent them. He WILL go for the most sickening personal attacks possible, with nothing even remotely comparable coming from the other side. And the tone in his comments is worse yet, both in mendacity and stupidity. VD as a demagogue is big on rhetoric, but not so much on subtlety. To be a loyal reader, to actually buy into the narrative he’s peddling, a degree of stupidity is required. And as it’s well-established the the nominations fell mostly to the Rabids and not the Sads – there you go, an army of stupid people chanting “SJWs! SJWs!”. To be a loyal follower of LC or BT, you don’t need to be stupid. With VD it’s different; again, a month or two reading the blog and the comments section are instructive.
The Sad Puppy leaders made two huge mistakes this year. First, establishing large slates which can break the Hugos – and guess what, the Hugos got broken. Second, not distancing themselves the hell away from VD when he showed up to the party – and consequently sharing the blame and the rep hit with him, deservedly. It isn’t enough to say half-heartedly “We’ve got our own thing and VD has his own thing, don’t confuse us”. When a vile asshole with this degree of toxicity shows up, you fight AGAINST him, not ALONGSIDE him, if you want decent people to think well of you. Compare with the unmasking of Requires Hate, performed by impeccably liberal SF authors.
If you want “decent people” to “think well of you”, you submit to the Blight. That’s how it works, that’s their power. If you want to survive, you have to roll your eyes at the “decent people” and what they think.
>[Vox Day is] compulsively dishonest; he WILL lie to his readers about his “enemies” and misprepresent them.
Examples? Because following his various misadventures, I got the impression that dishonesty in particular is not among his flaws.
>He WILL go for the most sickening personal attacks possible, with nothing even remotely comparable coming from the other side.
So far as I know, none of those were unprovoked.
>To be a loyal reader, to actually buy into the narrative he’s peddling, a degree of stupidity is required.
I beg to differ.
If you want an honest write-up on VD, go here: http://therev3.blogspot.no/2015/08/killing-vox-day-part-one.html
@ keranih, anatoly
Keranih’s account is about right, per my observation of how it all went (starting from Racefail). My sympathies are with the SPs, both in SF taste and in how they were treated in this controversy.
Among the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day is a live-action troll (see his history re SFWA). He publishes John C. Wright, who probably did deserve a Hugo for one or another of his many RP nominations; Wright’s fiction that I’ve seen on the web is fascinating, literate, brilliant narrative pace (on small scale; I haven’t followed up on his stories, expecting no one could keep that up on a larger scale).
Conflating the Sads with the Rabids is understandable, but very unfair on a closer look.
Disclaimers: my info is from my mostly SJ populated Friends List on Livejournal; politically I vote Far Left but despise SJ tactics, and ad hominem on any side.
>a crowd of stupid people armed with conspiracy theories and chanting “SJWs! SJWs!” destroying the reputation of an award, just because they could.
That doesn’t seem like a super terrible outcome if the reputation was underserved in the first place.
“As long as LC was trying to get one or two works of “our kind” onto ballots – that was one thing.”
At that one, one opponent publicly tweeted that she hoped that LC and all his supporters would die in a fire.
No, the hatred doesn’t stem from “breaking” the Hugos. It stems from the very existence of such unpeople as the Puppies
@houseboat:
Wright does not always deliver on the promises his talent makes, but he often does. His stories set in the world of The Night Land are amazing. (One of them was the first Christian Apologia I’ve read since I finished the Narnia stories that didn’t make me want to hurl the book across the room.) The only fully original novel of his I’ve read, Count to a Trillion, was uneven in spots but I greatly enjoyed it overall.
Say what you will about Vox Day (and I could say plenty bad), it’s worth noticing that he’s the only real winner in the Puppies War. He never cared about making the Hugos more “inclusive” to anyone; he wanted to burn them to the ground, destroy their prestige, and that’s exactly what happened.
Well, yes, “dumb” or “stupid” is not the kind of insults people direct at him.
Or maybe you are just an asshole.
So it sounds like maybe the best move is to pull a Cixin Liu and enter as a non-puppy but with a book that Puppies can nevertheless appreciate? And if it’s good enough both sides will unite around it? Does that sound right to people who know more about this area?
Scott, are you saying that the way to win is to appeal to as many people as possible? Of course that’s the way to win.
But that’s only once you’ve been nominated. The big problem is how to get nominated. This is a coordination problem, not just to get people have heard of and like your work, but to believe that everyone else does, so that it is worth spending a nomination on. Without a slate that would piss people off. Even choosing which of your short stories to nominate is a coordination problem.
@urstoff: what do you think were the weakest parts of those books?
I thought them to be entertaining, if a bit bland, military sci fi with some cool little ideas but nothing really earthshaking.
@dndnrsn
The worst parts being the comic dialogue. In contrast, some of the situations were nicely absurd in a tragicomic way; for example, the main character getting deeply upset at being able to kill lots of the tiny Corvandu.
@Urstoff:
Yeah, thinking of it, he definitely writes better comic situations than comic dialogue. Honestly, the dialogue in general was often the weakest point.
Wait, can you cite this? I’m always up for some Night Land fic, but it’s quite hard to find.
@ houseboatonstyx –
In my memory, Racefail was the “breakout” SJW viciousness, but there had been a number of “trial runs” before that.
@ anatoly –
I appreciate your even handed engagement here. Some quibbles/counter-interpretations/pushback to your push back, more or less in ascending order of what I actually care about:
– Vox Day – I stand by my assessment. He is not Good People, and if I could wave a magic wand and instill in the man a measure of humility and charity towards his fellow human, I think I would, personal sovereignty be damned. But I can’t, and I’m not him, and if you have issues with what he thinks or what he has done, take it up with him. The world is full of more loathsome humans and my days are already packed.
– Secret conspiracies – you know, I used to be pretty firmly on the “echo chamber of right-thinking people who refuse to sully their high minds by contacting the little people and their little people thoughts.” Because I’ve been there, done that – both as the solitary Little People among the High Minds, and as one of the deaf-and-blind High Minds who didn’t recognize her own biases.
All that changed the week after last Easter, when dozens of opinion pieces and press-releases-masquerading-as-factual-accounts hit mainstream press around the world, calling Sad Puppies sexist, fascist, homophobic and racist trash. All at once. This was deliberate, this was coordinated, and this was hateful.
Now-a-days, I’m pretty solidly in the “conspiracy of Puppy Blenders sitting in the middle of a self-confirming echo chamber of like-minded people” camp.
– “It’s not what SP did, it’s how they did it, with slates that broke the Hugos” – NO. Stop right there. The first year, people wanted LC to die in a fire. The second year, people refused to read ANY SP nominations, even though there were 1 or 2 per category max. The third year, they handed out “ASSterisk” tokens to SP nominees. This year? When the goal is to have ten quality potential nominees per category? People are still saying that SP are nasty wrecking kulacks and we should shut up and go away and make our own “conservative” awards if we want to play in SFF. At this point, I think people have to either be actual angels or fucking morons to think that anything the SP do will ever be seen as acceptable. Fuck that noise.
– Left shift in fandom – boyhowdy. Firstly, yes, Fandom has always been political. Being people of letters, we have always had a leftist contingent. The hard left, progressive, SJW bent is new, excessive, and bad. It’s not the politics that are a problem, it’s the unbalanced nature that is a problem. And, more to the point, people are valuing politics and identity more than story, which is bad for Fandom. Assume your $identity quality to your hero, or your hero’s struggle, and tell me a story that will keep me up all night, reading.
– Denouncing VD. This is serious, because there are evidently cultural factors at play here. Red tribe – which is most of what SP is – we don’t do denunciations and purity tests. We try to hold to a value of judging people by what they do, not what they say, and we allow for disagreement. This sort of value is particularly evident amongst the “Western” (ie, American West – plains and rockies) sorts. Being all up in someone’s bizniz is a personal fault. (The South is different. The South is always different.)
Blue tribe puts a lot more emphasis on visibly shunning the heretic and the non-repentant sinner, and demanding public shaming. This is deep SJW & Puritan attitude.
I don’t know how to fix this discordant clash of povs. I know that it causes trouble again and again, as one side insists that the other is being a bunch of control freaks and that side says the first side won’t police their own.
Me, though – I’ve seen this at work before, and I’ve listened to the SJWs who want VD’s head on a pike so they can piss on his hair. They won’t stop there. They are already calling for both VD and John Wright to be burned at the stake. If the SPs cast out those two, the next thing would be another name on their list. And then another.
And it won’t ever stop.
I am not VD. He does not speak for me. I don’t speak for him. If you want more than that from me, sir, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.
I do hope people can keep on talking through this. This problem isn’t likely to go away on its own, and left to fester will only develop a nasty stink.
@Nornagest:
Just go on Amazon and search for “Awake in the Night” and “Awake in the Night Land” by Wright. The first is a novella. The second is a collection of stories (including “Awake in the Night”) which are set in the Night Land universe but range greatly through time. If you have KU you can read AITN for free.
Thanks!
By many standards, “The Night Land” was not a very good book. It plot was nothing special, its characters were flat, and its clanking pseudo-Elizabethan prose was excruciating. But I haven’t read much that can match it for pure exoticism, and I think that might be why I keep coming back to it.
Every now and then I come across someone that’s written fiction in its setting, and that’s almost always a treat. Partly, I imagine, because it’s a pretty obscure book and most of its fans are people who’re into spec-fic history and the weird fiction genre.
” Red tribe – which is most of what SP is – we don’t do denunciations and purity tests. ”
If you say so…
In my observation, it’s half true. They do do purity tests, but not denunciations.
Red Tribers will not abandon someone until it’s been screamingly obvious for years to all outside observers that that someone is a total disasterpiece, whether that person is openly malicious and evil or not. Blue Tribers will abandon, then actively destroy, anyone within their tribe who shows signs of Wrongthink, and be faster to turn on someone the more loyal they are and the more respect they have. Related phenomenon: during the term of each Democratic President since FDR, he was regarded by leftist and center-leftist thinkers as a traitor to liberalism, a Republican in disguise. But even after everything Bush fucked up, most Red Tribers will defend him.
Basically, Red Tribers are way too loyal, and Blue Tribers are way too disloyal.
They certainly do a lot of insisting that other people do denouncing or be suspect themselves. Recently Muslims, but plenty of others before that.
@ Marc Whipple
If you enjoyed Count to a Trillion, you should read the sequels, of which 3 of a planned 5 have been published. Each one has been an improvement on the last so far IMO.
@DrBeat:
Do you know what a RINO is? Do you know how popular a term it is inside of conservative circles?
Seriously, these “conservatives rule, liberals drool” posts are annoying.
Hold on, which tribe was McCarthy again?
Isn’t it painfully obvious to anyone else that it’s always the tribe with local power that’s doing this? Tiny, quiet minorities need to make peace with their local neighbors, lest the loud majority turn on them and denounce them for their otherness and lack of purity. And people with absolute power can enforce artificial distinctions of purity, but don’t have to.
Where you get purity tests are groups who are not powerful in a general sphere, but do have control over a local space, and care more about signaling “Yay, my group!” in that space rather than accomplishing any actual goals with that space.
@ alexp, brad
They [red tribe] certainly do a lot of insisting that other people do denouncing or be suspect themselves. Recently Muslims, but plenty of others before that.
Not saying that this hasn’t happened, but we’re talking about actions against in-group vs out-group. (and tendencies, not absolutes.) Blue tribe will turn on in-group people far faster than red. (As indicated, this can be bad in both directions.)
In the context of Puppygate, this means, first, that the Sad Puppies saw themselves (and the TruFans) as fans, first, and political/other culture identity primarily, and were dismayed to realize that the Puppyblenders see themselves as Progressive Rightthinkers primarily, and SFF fans secondarily. I can recall more than one SJW/anti-puppy type writing in dismay about the number of conservatives in old school “hard” SFF. As if the presence of conservatives made the whole subfield unappealing.
It also means (point 2) that the comparisons between VD and Requires Hate are not the clear-cut ying/yang that many Puppyblenders see them as. First, Puppyblenders want VD excommunicated and burnt for the same reason they wanted RH excommunicated – for the sin of causing pain and harm to Puppyblenders. (There was no outcry against RH so long as she kept her targets limited to the proper sorts of people.)
Secondly re: shunning VD, the non-Rabids have done what they feel is appropriate – decline to participate in those actions of VD which the individual person doesn’t agree with. SP have not felt a need to reject VD’s goals when those goals are shared. The Stalin/Churchill/FDR analogy has been made before, and is apt, imo.
As with any social/economic/cultural groupy-sort-of-thing of many decades standing, there is a lot going on here.
>Seriously, these “conservatives rule, liberals drool” posts are annoying.
Exaclty what I’d expect a drooler to say. Why are liberals so predictable?
It doesn’t seem to me that enforcing against the outgroup in broad strokes while not enforcing against individuals in your ingroup is very good behaviour. It’s hard to see how that could end in anything but indefinite group conflict.
I’m also pretty dubious that it accomplishes much. To get an individual to change behaviour, they need to be significantly incentivised, and generally the only people with the kind of social leverage to say “You’re being an asshole, dial it back” and have it mean anything are the people close to that person and respected in the circles they run in.
If you let the people near you off and criticise only the distant, you’re ignoring the people you could actually affect. If everyone does that, everything is awful.
Undirected attacks on an entire group probably do incentivise self-policing a little, but it seems like you should be willing to engage in self-policing yourself if you’re willing to use rhetorical tactics to pressure other people to do it more.
For what it’s worth, I do not think this is a Red Tribe thing. I think failure to enforce norm violations on one’s own while attempting enforcement on the enemy is a very nasty all tribes thing. But I don’t think “my tribe behaves this way all the time” would be a reasonable justification for continuing to behave that way even if it were something exceptional about a particular tribe rather than a common failing.
It might be nice (if troubling, in terms of strategy) if a tendency towards ideological purity did come with better pressure to adhere to communal norms, but I think if there’s a correlation it probably goes the other way. The two are different things.
This is one of the things, I think, we should be trying to use our recognition of ingroup/outgroup effects to be better than.
Isn’t the “cuckservative” meme basically a purity signal?
@ Urstoff:
Yes, but “cuckservative” is completely beyond the regular conservative pale, and I’ve never even heard it except on this website.
Libertarianism, though, is infamous for conflicts over ideological purity. You’re not a real libertarian if you’re an anarchist / support the state / are against open borders / are for open borders / are an Objectivist / are a utilitarian / support the War in Iraq / support Israel / oppose Israel / support the Federal Reserve / oppose the gold standard / support any state-backed currency etc.
And as HeelBearCub said, “RINO” is definitely a common term of abuse among conservatives. The Tea Party movement itself—which I supported, especially in its early phase—was an attempt to throw out “fake conservatives” in the establishment wing of the party and replace them with people more consistently in favor of limited government. There was a lot of vitriol on both sides, with the Tea Party accusing the Republican leadership of betraying conservative principles and the establishment accusing the Tea Party of betraying the conservative movement by “going after their own”.
Republicans in general are much more likely to challenge incumbents in primary elections than are Democrats.
William F. Buckley was arguably the intellectual founder of the modern postwar conservative movement, and he deliberately carried out a systematic process of denouncing and excluding people who didn’t fit the program. That included John Birch Society types who seemed too hysterically focused on Communist infiltration, anyone who held openly racist beliefs, as well as people like Ayn Rand who were opposed to linking support for capitalism to “Judeo-Christian values”.
The idea that the “red tribe” doesn’t engage in purity tests is absurd. Maybe they don’t on “social justice” issues, but that’s just because they don’t care about “social justice” issues.
@Urstoff
I would say it’s more a loyalty signal than a purity signal, if “loyalty signal” is a thing.
The general message seems to be “these people say they are the ingroup, but they are playing by the rules of the outgroup and are easily cowed by the outgroup”.
Isn’t the “cuckservative” meme basically a purity signal?
Sort of. In a straightforward sense, “cuckservative” can (and is) used in any place where “RINO” used to be. You aren’t pure enough to The Cause, as it were; the two terms denote the same thing.
They connote different things, though. Here, RINO is similar to blue-dog democrat. A middle-of-the-roader low on party loyalty. Cuckservative, however, reeks of self-conscious edgelordism on the part of the speaker, a willingness to amp-to-11 your insults. The “cuckold” part of the slur–properly understood–has little to do with the traditional use of the term, the “Hie thee to the courts of equity, Goodman John, your wife hast cuckolded you!” sense. It has everything to do with a reference to a particularly unpleasant form of internet pornography where a guy gets off on the idea of being subservient to a woman who allows herself to be gleefully ravaged by a bigger, more masculine, more virile man than her husband, the wife then metaphorically (and literally) rubbing it in her husband’s face.
tl;dr: It’s a gross internet porn thing.
@ The Anonymous:
I think the term also has heavy connotations of a wimpy white man allowing his wife to be taken by a big scary black man.
“By many standards, “The Night Land” was not a very good book. It plot was nothing special, its characters were flat, and its clanking pseudo-Elizabethan prose was excruciating. But I haven’t read much that can match it for pure exoticism, and I think that might be why I keep coming back to it. ”
James Stoddard retold it in more modern language.
Given that VD has co-written a book entitled “Cuckservative”, I’d think the RP side (though maybe not the SP) have their own purity/loyalty signals.
Seems like a pretty stupid and gross term to me; to empathize with the SJW types, I just imagine my visceral reaction to someone using that term and multiply it by ten. I can see how such a powerful emotion can be hard to restrain.
“Cuckservative” is an etymologically interesting slur, for two reasons. First, it’s explicitly sexual, something conservatives have long eschewed — either from religious sentiment, or respect for those who have it. Second, as Anonymouse pointed out above, it doesn’t refer to being cuckolded in the traditional sense, but to the enjoyment of being cuckolded. A “cuckservative” is someone who emasculates himself willingly and gleefully.
It definitely has a distinct connotation from “RINO”, or even “traitor”. It’s much more personal, specific, and profane.
DrBeat says:
It’s strange to me that someone cosmopolitan enough to, well be here, can be so ignorant about huge swaths of his fellow countrymen. It’s one thing if you are what-his-name the Eastern European guy who apparently gets all his information about US culture for PUA websites, but if you are living here you shouldn’t be this far off.
The “Blue Tribe” even narrowly defined is tens of millions of people. It’s not a few tens of thousands of teens and young twenty somethings and a few hundred internet personalities that cater to them.
Bill Clinton can go to Manhattan, or Beverly Hills, or any other Blue Tribe stronghold and get a million dollars for a 30 minute speech and a few hours of schmoozing. Does that sound like someone who has been “destroyed” because of “wrongthink” and treated as a “traitor”?
@ science:
Well said.
Also, “what-his-name the Eastern European guy” is TheDividualist, who I think is Scandinavian.
@Whatever happened to anonymous:
“Exaclty what I’d expect a drooler to say. Why are liberals so predictable?”
I think I understand your intent when I say that this made me chuckle.
First off, when did I say “conservatives rule, liberals drool”? I made a perfectly and explicitly symmetrical complaint, that one side was way too X and the other side was way too not X. So how is that cheerleading for one of those sides?
And yeah, Clinton can get speaking engagements now that he isn’t President, and can represent a lost bygone age where our leaders weren’t betraying our liberal values. Barack Obama will go through exactly the same transformation for exactly the same reason, and the next time we have a Democratic president, thought leaders on the left will lament how they aren’t really a liberal at all, why couldn’t we have a real liberal like Barack — the same people who have been, all through the Obama administration, saying that Obama is nothing but an extension of Bush’s policies.
The point there was that each Democratic president is regarded as not actually a liberal during that President’s administration. The more perceptible he is, the more they turn on him. The more perceptible a Republican is, the more they line up behind him, and it takes much more to mark them a traitor to their ideals, and much more than “actually being a traitor to their ideals”.
I mean, I cannot be the only one who notices how every single Presidential election cycle, Blue Tribers will — completely independently and not referring to or influenced by any previous tradition because it’s a newly politically-aware generation each time — decide that we should throw this election on purpose, because the Democratic candidate isn’t actually a liberal at all, and won’t be able to do anything, and allowing the Republicans to fuck up the country with their vile conservatism for a term will get Americans to realize how terrible conservatism is, and then maybe we’ll be able to get an actual liberal candidate instead of these liars and traitors.
@DrBeat:
You seemed to have ignored the meat of my objection. Nowhere are you addressing my point about RINOs.
My flippant aside is merely another in my long standing objections to posts that conflate the normal human biases and tendencies that tend to manifest in any group (especially any group of large size) with uniquely conservative or liberal behaviors.
Usually, around here, these are couched as “liberals are bad” and the “conservatives are good” is more by implication, but not always. In more liberal spaces it’s “conservatives are bad”.
So when Barack Obama — now while still President — gives a speech in NYC or Berkley or so on, he gets booed off the stage like Lyndon Johnson in 1967?
You need to calibrate better.
@ DrBeat:
That’s just the thing: every single Democratic president has been a traitor to the values of those to the left of him who expected better!
And every Republican president has betrayed conservative / small-government values! I get really pissed off about this at every election. Everyone in the Tea Party got pissed off about it, too.
If anything, I think the Republican politicians are worse on this. “Progressives” never get all of what they want, but they get more and more of what they want over time. The Republican base, in contrast, gets continually disappointed by politicians compromising away one value at a time.
When’s the last time the Republicans repealed what they said they were going to repeal? In the 50s, they were going to repeal the New Deal. In the 80s, they were going to repeal the Great Society and put us back on the gold standard after Nixon went off it. What are the odds they’re going to repeal Obamacare? (Hint: not good.)
Yeah, I read “A Story Retold” sometime after I read Hodgson. It’s decent, but after I did slog through the original it didn’t have the same lightning-in-a-bottle quality.
Dunno what a new reader would think.
@Mark Atwood, is that exchange still in Google Groups by any chance?
Granted, the Graydon one doesn’t strike me as entirely implausible, since he was often off in a weird direction. I remember in the runup to the first GWB Inaugural, when those in opposition were planning protests, he opined that he “would not take a bet against the use of grapeshot” by the incoming administration.
PNH’s politics and his waspish mode of responding to disagreement with them were a major factor in my deciding rec.arts.sf.fandom wasn’t the group for me. But to his credit, the idea that even the hated, “selected not elected” Bush administration would actually fire on unarmed demonstrators was a bridge too far even for him, and he called bullshit on it in so many words. (Along with other rasffers of the same general persuasion) https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.sf.fandom/x0flt1jlhww/JEZ8fAx57vYJ
(I’m also not sure I’d call him Graydon an influential fan– he was a frequent Usenet poster but I didn’t get the impression that he was a big name in fannish circles the way, e.g., the Nielsen Haydens are. That said, I’m on the fringes of fandom at best and may just be insufficiently informed.)
Also, it needs to be pointed out that after seven years in office, Obama has approval ratings in the mid-to-high 80s among Democrats.
I really think we’d be better off tabooing “Blue Tribe” here. There’s a constant equivocation between whether it means “the culture of the cities and coasts” or “fifteen students at Oberlin.”
“You’re not a real libertarian if you’re an anarchist / support the state / are against open borders / are for open borders / are an Objectivist ”
That last is a special case. It’s the Objectivists who claim that Objectivists are not libertarians. The rest of us, at least in my experience, think Objectivists are libertarians, even if some of them have odd views in a few areas, and are amused at the attempt of hard core Objectivists to redefine “libertarian” in order to exclude themselves.
@ David Friedman:
Yes, exactly, but I didn’t want to get into that. Objectivism is not really “red tribe” (though Larry Sechrest once said that “I have often been struck by the fact that, aside from their atheism, [many] Objectivists are virtually indistinguishable from conservative Republicans.”), and I thought discussing it in addition to libertarianism would be unnecessary and too much of a deviation into grey. Objectivists have certainly been good at denouncing “traitors”, though. 🙁
I have heard people say that Objectivists are not really libertarians, however. Mainly because of certain foreign policy stances by e.g. people at ARI. Or for instance, John Bolton was interviewed by Stossel at the International Students for Liberty Conference, and the folks from The Atlas Society (who do “self-identify” as libertarians) tended to agree with what he had to say. Some fellow attendees expressed the opinion that one could not support drone strikes (which I think Bolton was endorsing, even though by Obama) and call oneself a libertarian.
It’s not that the Red Tribe doesn’t do denunciations. They seem less prone to doing it within their own group than the Blue Tribe, but that’s not why the Sad Puppy group wouldn’t denounce Vox.
Put simply, they’re not going to denounce Vox Day just because their opponents demand they do so. In fact, if they had any idea of denouncing Vox Day on their own, they’d probably give it up if their opponents insisted on it. This is probably good tactics on their part; denouncing Vox would not gain them one iota with the File 770 bunch, and it would make Vox their enemy. Why engage in a two-front war unnecessarily?
@keranih:
Pausing to reaffirm that I appreciate your balanced approach and awareness of the other side’s self-perception, I’ll focus on where I sharply disagree:
It’s not what SP did, it’s how they did it, with slates that broke the Hugos” – NO. Stop right there. The first year, people wanted LC to die in a fire. The second year, people refused to read ANY SP nominations, even though there were 1 or 2 per category max. The third year, they handed out “ASSterisk” tokens to SP nominees. This year? When the goal is to have ten quality potential nominees per category? People are still saying that SP are nasty wrecking kulacks and we should shut up and go away and make our own “conservative” awards if we want to play in SFF. At this point, I think people have to either be actual angels or fucking morons to think that anything the SP do will ever be seen as acceptable. Fuck that noise.
Now let me tell you how it looks from a perspective of someone who’s neither P nor anti-P. First year, you have a petty squabble between SP and AP which >90% of fandom doesn’t care about. Second year, you have a petty squable between SP and AP which >90% of fandom doesn’t care about. Third year, joining ranks with RP, YOU BREAK THE FUCKING HUGOS. Because of your petty squabbles and deluded conspiracy theories. Just like that. Your sordid lists of ideological puff-pieces pushed almost everything in any way connected to merit out of the award. And now the fourth year is here, and you’re STILL going at it, and your excuse is… “AP are continuing to say nasty things about us, so no matter what we do, we’ll never be seen as acceptable”.
Wake up and smell the confirmation bias! SJWs will always dislike the SP, that is a given. That doesn’t mean you get to justify whatever you do with “SJWs continue to say nasty things about us”. That’s an incredibly intellectually dishonest thing to do, I’m sorry to say. It’s a way of giving yourself a carte blanche to do whatever. The SJW activists are a very small part of fandom, and they’re a tiny proportion of people who are mad at you this year for BREAKING THE FUCKING HUGOS. The vast majority of people who’re now mad at you are mad at you not because you’re red tribe, or that you dislike identity politics, or that you have a petty squabble with SJWs, but because you BROKE THE FUCKING HUGOS.
So while it’s true that SJWs will always hate you, that’s also irrelevant. It is NOT true that a large part of fandom will automatically hate you; they didn’t care either way before 2015, and they hate you now because of the very specific thing that you did, viz. BREAKING THE FUCKING HUGOS. The attitude is well-deserved, because you actually did something sleazy and repugnant; please don’t do that anymore, and go back to, you know, petty squabbles with SJWs that >90% of fandom doesn’t care about. Unfortunately, it looks like you’re in full denial mode. There is ZERO soul-searching I’ve seen on the Puppy side – zero instances of someone saying “oh shit, we really shouldn’t have done that”. Again, compare with a healthy number of mea culpas on the liberal SF side following the RH report. Seems like empirically you’re so much worse than SJWs at being able to admit you were wrong. Count me very, very surprised (no sarcasm).
If someone tries to rob you and you fight back, nobody’s going to say that you’re “both responsible for causing trouble by getting into a conflict”. That’s why we have concepts such as “heckler’s veto”–the party who is to blame is the party that initiates the conflict, not the party who tries to defend himself, even if failure to defend himself would lead to less trouble for others than being willing to defend himself.
So you can’t blame one side for “breaking the Hugos” unless you’ve taken a position on which side is at fault. If you’re really trying to remain neutral, you can’t do that.
@Jiro:
True, and furthermore, the SP position is that the Hugos were already broken, and they are trying to unbreak them. You may agree, you may not. You may agree that what they are doing is the best/a good/a rational way to approach the problem, or you may not. But you don’t get to accuse them of “breaking the Hugos” unless you are an AP, because “breaking the Hugos” means you entirely reject their argument that there was anything of significance wrong in the first place.
RP and SP did not “join ranks”.
RP did what they did specifically and explicitly because the SP were trying not to break the Hugos, and the RP wanted to do that.
Stop blaming groups for the actions of people that openly hate and oppose them, just because neither of those groups is part of the Social Justice movement.
My understanding of the relationship between Sad Puppies III and Rabid Puppies is that Vox Day wanted to break the Hugos by sending in his supporters to vote No Award in all categories. The Sad Puppies leaders talked him out of it; Vox made Rabid Puppies instead, which was a slate consisting mostly of self-promotion and promotion of his publishing house.
And then the Puppy Kickers took up the cry of No Award, smashed the Hugos themselves, and left Vox Day laughing like Donald Sutherland in Mockingjay II. Larry Correia, who came up with Sad Puppies and ran SPI and SPII, simply responded with a blog entry which said “I told you so”
I’m not sure if I’d call this critique drift, but good god are people using Blue Tribe wrong.
The whole purity politics dog eat dog is not an aspect of Blue Tribers as a whole. It’s an key value of identitarian politics which are found within the Blue Tribe. They’re located within the Moralist Cluster on Auerbach’s grid (http://theamericanreader.com/jenesuispasliberal-entering-the-quagmire-of-online-leftism/) and don’t make up a plurality much less a majority of the Blue Tribe.
Rather they’re just located within areas that nerdy web surfers such as those that browse SSC will often come up against so it seems like there’s a lot more than are actually around.
@ Anatoly –
I think I need to apologizing for the profanities in my most recent post in this thread. While I don’t think it seems that you took offense, you might well have, and it would have poorly served our mutual attempt at communication.
Having said that, I profoundly disagree with your support for the feeling of justification which is felt by people who blame the SP for the whole mess.
The people who are focusing their vindictive on the $puppies for “Breaking the Hugos” are badly mistaken, imo. This assignment of blame rests on the idea that the Hugos were just fine, thank you prior to ‘Puppygate’, and that it was through deliberate bad action on the part of $puppies that they are in the mess they are in.
To the first point – no. Absolutely not. The Hugos completely failed in their mission to represent a fannish-oriented (rather than creator-oriented) selection of worthy works, and had so failed for most of a decade. The Hugos were broken before the Puppies got there.
They were just broken in a direction that GRRM – along with other people – were just fine with. A similar concept is seen here at SCC, when Scott looks at the political demographics that show 9% conservative and 50+% liberal, (*) and voices the opinion that there are more conservatives now, to the point where it might be “off balance.” This is not *whole* or *right* – it’s just corrupt in a specific direction.
Secondly, wrt the actions of the SP – dude, this was not VD’s idea, this was not his party, and there is no one in either the SP or the RP who imagines them to be one and the same the way that the Pupplyblenders do. VD & the Rabids are a different matter.
The capture of the whole ballot (+/-) took everyone by surprise. It wasn’t planned, and the SP sure as shooting didnt think they had a shot at doing so. It wasn’t their goal. And that they were able to do so, accidentally, also refutes the idea that the Hugos were in a great place before hand. Far, far too many people were voting.
Thirdly – the Hugos in their present form weren’t “broken” by the SPs voting. They were broken by whoever wrote up and sent in that press release to EW. They were broken by Aurthur Chu, who called Brad T a racist. They were broken by Kameron Hurley, who has laid down piece after piece of vindictive – in the Atlantic and across the media spread. They were broken by David Gerald and whoever else on the committee thought that “ASSkerets” was a good idea. The Hugos were broken by the very people who claimed to have owned them.
The place were we might agree most is that it’s not going back to where it was before. What I’d like to see is more discussion of where to go with it from here.
(*) numbers by memory, probably wrong
@ keranih
demographics that show 9% conservative and 50+% liberal, (*) and voices the opinion that there are more conservatives now, to the point where it might be “off balance.”
Try toting up not commentors but comments. And sideswipes and stuff within comments.
On the question of whether the Hugos were broken …
At some point, reading some of the arguments, I saw the claim that Baen publications had for some time gotten very few Hugos, Tor a lot. Baen is the publisher SJW’s are most likely to hate. Tor is run by the Hayden’s who I gather are SJW’s and heavily involved in fandom.
It that’s true–it might not be–it’s at least some evidence that the Hugo was already being gamed by one faction for their own personal and ideological advantage. I don’t read all that much current SF, but my impression is that a fair number of the things I like came out of Baen.
Is the claim true? If so, are people who disagree with the “the Hugos were already broken” argument willing to claim that Baen has published almost no very good books in recent years?
@ houseboatonstyx
I take your point, and esp in an online forum, where physical presence and body language are largely invisible, I agree that who is posting and what they can say without pushback matters. (I think that identitarians overstate the effect of “hostile environments” but I don’t disagree that this is an actual thing.)
But Scott gave no indications of talking about that. He was talking about percentages of response on the survey, and how *now* might be unbalanced, in contrast to *then* which (in his view) was not.
@ David Friedman –
I don’t have the link, but Chaos Horizon – which has been the closest thing we have got to a dispassionate numbers cruncher in the conversation – has noted that the Locus Magazine list has failed to include Baen books for multiple years. As the Locus list is one of the leading indicators for “what gets on the final ballot”, this is noteworthy. CH is worth looking at – among other things, he is capable of teasing apart causation and correlation at least on a discussion level.
a crowd of stupid people armed with conspiracy theories and chanting “SJWs! SJWs!” destroying the reputation of an award, just because they could
I don’t like what went on with the Hugos, but I think their reputation was dwindling before ever a puppy, either sad or rabid, appeared on the scene.
Have you read some of the short story award winners? I know I’ve stomped over it on here before, but honestly – “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”, a 2014 winner for best short story, isn’t SFF (its Wikipedia stub covers all bases by calling it “science fiction/magic realism” and it’s very heavily tilted towards the second part of the description).
The magic water in the story is a McGuffin, which never gets an iota of explanation and is only there to serve the main thread of the plot, which is “Chinese guy comes out to his traditional parents, finds it goes better than expected”. Now, I don’t have any particular objection to stories involving gay Chinese guys bringing their boyfriends home to meet the parents*, but by Klono’s own gadolinium guts, if I’m reading a SFF award-winning story that won a SFF award for being a SFF story, I want some SF and/or F in there in rather greater amounts than “The ‘New Yorker’ could happily publish this if I scraped off the light dusting of skiffy talk”.
Imagine a crime-award winning story that had “Oh yeah, I guess there was a murder in there somewhere, but what I really want to talk about is how I never got on with my sister and my boyfriend is so cute and cool but by the way I’m way smarter and richer than him” and we never hear anything more about the murder, whodunnit, why they did it, or an arrest/trial/nothing.
*I also think it would have been vastly improved by an editor going “Okay, we have the bones of a decent story here, but let’s stop turning White Boyfriend into a Marty Stu, give the sister some motivation other than being Jealous Bitch, and for crying out loud, you’re talking so much about the parents, can we at least get a word from them personally speaking to their son and/or boyfriend, rather than narrator telling us about what he assumes they’re thinking?” But then again, not alone was this gay SFF but POC gay SFF so no cis het white heteronormative impositions on it by way of telling an inclusive author what they should be saying, right?
Let’s not be unfair to the New Yorker; the fiction they publish is generally much better than that story.
I agree that “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere” wasn’t sf and had some failures in non-sf ways, but was it a typical Hugo winner or an outlier?
It was an outlier which is part of a general movement making such things less outlier-y. The awards are definitely moving in that direction.
nornagest, if you’re looking for Night Lands stories, I don’t know if you are aware of this website?
I think the quality of the Night Land is partly because of the awkward prose, the pseudo-archaism suits the imagery and descriptions when it moves into the Night Land, because it puts a distance between the reader and what they’re reading, and it helps to make it sound like reading a true account of something so far from ordinary experience, it can’t be described in ordinary language.
Am I the only science-fiction lowercase-f fan who feels like he’s looking into an alternate universe when he reads these descriptions of the puppies fiasco–not in terms of the dynamics (which are obviously very familiar) but in terms of the players? Outside of Scalzi and the Three Body Problem, I hadn’t heard of ANY of these people or works (or, in the case of the people who are apparently still writing and reading pulpy military-based space operas in 2015, entire subgenres)–and, more importantly/interestingly, the people I do read, and who I assumed everyone was reading, aren’t involved or so much as mentioned. Where are Daniel Abraham/Ty Franck? Kim Stanley Robinson? Stephen Baxter? Neil Stephenson? Peter Watts? Paolo Bacigalupi? Is this what it’s like to be part of the Silent Majority? Was 2015 just a publishing interregnum?
@nil:
No. If you are not active in fandom, specifically online fandom, you will not have heard of a lot of these people. Many of the authors you mention are not particularly involved in the online/fan scene, so there is a lot of disconnect. I had not heard of a lot of them either before I became interested in independent publishing, which has a lot of overlap (both pro and con) with this sort of thing.
I’m not sure how you’d get “2015 as a publishing interregnum” out of that, because the authors you cite all had new works published in 2015. But you’re right that part of the problem is a perceived disconnect between the works most fans are reading and talking and thinking about, and the works that Worldcon Fandom is honoring with the Hugo. So maybe “fannish interregnum” would be a better term, or just “Worldcon interregnum”
But Bacigalupi was able to win as recently as 2010, and that’s post-Racefail, so maybe it’s not hopeless or irreversible.
The “publishing interregnum” thing was just me covering my ass because I didn’t want to take the time to make sure the answer wasn’t just “outside of the fun but very lightweight Long Earth books which are published every nine months, none of those authors happened to publish in that period.”
Anyway, if the critique were just “these aren’t representative,” I’d get it. But what makes the whole thing feel Twilight-zoney to me is that the works they claim are being ignored are even more obscure.
Really, the whole debate just seems like an extended non-sequitur. Pinkos vs. manly men, books about gay rain vs. books about space honor? Seems out of date, at best. The best book I read this year was an immaculately researched hard-SF book that convincingly argues that a longstanding SF trope constitutes a moral atrocity and ends on a practical but fatalistic pro-green message; where does that fit into in this dichotomy? Indeed, practically everything I enjoy lately runs around those lines–the Expanse books are basically space operas with tight and driven plots, but have a multicultural cast and take progressive ideas on family, militancy, race and gender as given; Seveneyes is a reasonably hard-SF space-survival drama where almost all of the important characters are women and which stresses again and again the benefits of cooperation and the harms of aggression and competition; Echopraxia is… well, Echopraxia is so orthogonal to that debate I think you’d need to break out an extra dimension to do it justice, but it definitely doesn’t strike me as anything Vox Day would read nor as something that could be credibly cast as lightweight magical realism masquerading as the real thing.
It’d be one thing if the popular works that were being ignored by the food-fighters were just doing their own thing, but much of the best work being put out right now is a synthesis of hard-SF and social-SF. Makes it strange to see people putting so much effort into keeping the dialectic relevant.
“Am I the only science-fiction lowercase-f fan who feels like he’s looking into an alternate universe”
No. That was the Puppies’ root complaint: it bills itself as the fan award, it does not go to the stuff fans like except in the No True Scotsman definition of fan as Worldcon goer. (Whenever anyone complained about the small pool, he was condescendingly told to increase it then. Which the Puppies did. Behold the reaction.)
George R.R. Martin condescendingly offered that Puppies could go off and create their own “conservative” award — without making the additional offer to relabel the Hugos the liberal or even the Worldcon award.
Of course, you can get a supporting membership and nominate and vote yourself, if you so please.
@Mary But the Puppy slates are even more obscure, to me at least.
Is the attitude “this is what we like, so this is what we’re promoting, and if you like other stuff, you should promote it”? That’s reasonable enough, if perhaps a tad hypocritical. Or is it “this is what the real fans really like, and this is the silent majority taking back democracy?” Because I would very much question that–I’ve never heard of any of their alternatives either, and they sound less similar to what me and my friends are reading than the original offerings.
Of course, if you look at the Amazon lists it suggest that we’re all wrong and that movie tie-ins and Michael Crichton books should take the prize!
I remember reading one post, I believe from LC, where he said one of the SP complaints was that movie tie books (i.e. star wars or star trek universe) don’t get enough respect at the Hugos. Come on.
The ‘sff as high art’ people may well be off in their own world but so too are the ‘you people are snobs for looking down at wish fulfillment pulp’ people.
Yes, fun should matter, but so should basic literary quality issues. Money is the reward for having the most sales, it makes no sense to use the same exact criteria for a literature award.
“Money is the reward for having the most sales, it makes no sense to use the same exact criteria for a literature award.”
Then there should be no fan award. Let the fans vote with their wallets.
I came across this Skepchick post a while back, and I’m really impressed with someone in with the whole Atheism+, anti-fatphobia movement calling out, for lack of a better word, fatlogic, which is very consonant with her politics. It’s not just the post, either; the comments are an amazing mass of people being calm and reasonable with each other, even when they disagree.
I’m impressed with the author’s authentic commitment to skepticism in the face of politics.
This kind of thing is a big part of why I don’t call myself an atheist anymore. Atheism+ is a perfect counter-argument to the idea that we’re any more rational or enlightened than the average fundamentalist. A lack of belief should be just that, a negative factual claim, not a capital-I Identity which obliges you to become part of some grand political alliance.
As for the article, I was impressed by her patience but much less so with her need to insert constant disclaimers that fat activism is still justified despite her takedown. The people those disclaimers are meant to placate will just see them as a sign of weakness; to anyone else they seem like either pointless redundancies or suspicious ass-covering.
I believe it is necessary to “cover your ass” in such debates, because when you point out an error in an argument used for some political side, someone will immediately accuse you of belonging to an opposing side. That’s the cheapest way to deal with criticism, and in a sufficiently mindkilled group it will immediately get a lot of support.
So if someone uses a lot of disclaimers (and you agree that they have to; that there is a real need, not just their personal paranoia), it is an evidence that the group they belong to is in a bad epistemic situation. It is a bad news about the group, but not necessarily about the individual who uses the disclaimers.
I think that “Atheism+” people in general are doing skepticism wrong. Their definition of “skepticism” is more or less “laughing at all claims made by my opponents (because they seem unlikely if you have already accepted my beliefs)”. Using the same definition, a religious person could claim to be “skeptical” about the reasoning of sinful people, or a homeopath could claim to be “skeptical” about the research done by official medicine. It simply means that you disagree with the people you disagree with, but with the connotation that you are smarter and more scientific for some unspecified reason. Real skepticism is more about looking at the specific claims, and looking at the specific methodology used to support those claims; and doing it for all claims regardless of which side uses them.
I suppose that fat activism is a fringe movement within the SJWs. Feminist women still sexually compete with each other in terms of looks.
Fat activists are useful allies when it’s time to rally against the perfect digital bodies of female video game characters and shame the creepy male nerds who drool over them, but otherwise they are ugly weirdos to keep at arm length.
Does this comment meet the standard of at least two of true, kind, and necessary?
To my mind, the stigma against fat people is, at best, wildly disproportionate.
I took the comment as being not about fat people, pro or con, but about feminists.
As did I, specifically their “true” perception of the fat people amongst their number.
Yeah, me as well. I think vV_Vv is saying that these people are using fat activists for political purposes. I assume s/he has a good-faith believe that this statement is true and necessary.
I think “ugly weirdos” refers to fat activists as seen by feminists. How do you parse the sentence?
Also, vV-_Vv isn’t engaging with fat activism on its merits– all he’s saying is that it isn’t respected by people he doesn’t respect– as though that matters.
It’s like a religious person saying that efforts to create an FAI are ridiculous– even other atheists think MIRI is a bunch of crazy weirdos. That kind of statement is just an effort at status-lowering.
My comment got lost somehow, but I think he’s factually wrong about that anyway. Feminists are not hypocrites about body shaming women.
Of course, when it comes to body shaming of men, that’s a whole battle that has barely even started.
I took it that it applied to very fat people in general–that “activist” only came in because those were the fat people feminists purported to approve of when convenient. I thought it was a put down of feminists as hypocrites with no implications positive or negative for fat activists.
“Ugly” referred to fat people in general as perceived by virtually anyone. This is unkind but true.
“Weirdos” referred to fat activists as perceived by feminists, in particular the kind of fat activists that promote unhealthy lifestyles and question medical science for self-serving reasons, that is, the kind of fat activists that Rebecca Watson was criticizing in the linked post.
My comment was directed at SJW/Atheism+ feminists, not at fat activism, though of course I have little respect for the kind of fat activists who deny the health risks of obesity or insist that obese people should be seen as beautiful.
Keep your personal beauty standards out of this sort of conversation! There are plenty of people who find overweight/obese people attractive and/or conventionally attractive people repulsive or just uninteresting sexually and aesthetically. Personally I find most “supermodels” about as attractive as a rock or a tree with few exceptions. That doesn’t mean I call them ugly, though, so cut that shit out when you talk about what others may like – it’s insulting/offensive (and it is worse for the actual members of the group you deride).
The health risks are another matter (I don’t deny that there are some, for the record), but they don’t dictate what others should see as beauty.
Beauty and attraction is all opinion, preference, and social/cultural norms.
@Yushatak:
While it is possible to use social norming to override biological preference to a large degree – or at least make people agree that you have – there are definitely traits that human beings are hardwired to find attractive. It is not completely arbitrary and it’s definitely not something that’s entirely externally imposed on some sort of “attractiveness parameters go here” tabula rasa.
@Marc Whipple:
You really think we are hardwired to find “fat” unattractive?
Desmond Morris wants to have a word with you.
It would probably be more defensible to say we are hard-wired to find “health” attractive. In ancient times, a fat, healthy person would have seemed much more attractive to most than someone dying of malnutrition and/or disease. But in developed countries today we rarely encounter the latter sort of unhealth, but frequently encounter a level of fat which is obviously compromising to health. This also affects aesthetic standards, of course: fashion tends to favor that which is not easy to achieve: in olden days fatness was not easy to achieve. Today being in shape while still having a job is not easy to achieve.
But, of course, fashion is more fickle than attraction, I’d say, and we are probably hard-wired to find “health” attractive. But the signals of health can change with the time and place.
“Fat” in this context is subjective. “Morbidly obese” is one end of the spectrum, “a little too hippy to walk the runway at Fashion Week” is the other. The latter is well within the hardwired preferences of most heterosexual human males. “Morbidly obese” is not.
Incidentally, this is one of those “statistically speaking” things. Any random individual will have tastes which are, well, random. But statistically, they will prefer certain body types to other body types, and those preferences cluster around a particular set of body types across most cultures.
ETA – onyomi’s observation on what is really being selected for is reasonable and consistent with my understanding of the topic.
@Marc
There is some biological component, but this obviously still varies from person to person depending on whatever factors shaped their tastes. Either way, it doesn’t justify insults.
“Beauty and attraction is all opinion, preference, and social/cultural norms.”
The general things that men find attractive about women are correlated with fertility. E.g., obesity lowers fertility in women and is linked to earlier menopause. Though I think this is in the realm of “morbidly obese”.
On the flip side, what women find attractive (the nebulous “status”) is socially constructed sort of by definition. Therefore, I find that when people say that beauty/attraction is all opinion etc. they are flirting with the typical mind fallacy of the average woman.
Case in prediction: If attraction were overwhelmingly socially constructed, then hetero/homosexuality would be fluid. As it stands, it seems this mostly holds true more for women and not men.
@Nero: I dunno if there is something wrong on my side or if your link is broken, but I get redirected to an empty website which offers me to buy the domain.
It does in our society. In Ancient Greece or Modern Afghanistan, things were/are a little different.
@Yushatak
Yes, fat fetishism exists. It doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of people find obese people unattractive.
That’s not unusual, as most supermodels are relatively androgynous. After all, their job is to sell women clothes designed by gay men. Male heterosexual attraction hardly enters the picture of that business.
Typical “female lead” actresses such as Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Lawrence are more representative of the modern Western beauty standard, which may be actually quite universal in many important aspects (e.g. the waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7 which seems to be preferred across different cultures and it’s also observed in ancient artistic depictions of female beauty).
I did not mean “ugly” as an insult, but as a statement of fact.
In support of it being a heavily socially/culturally-influencable thing, take the case of Mauritania (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritania).
In this nation obese women are the beauty ideal for most of the population and women strive to
meet it. I’ve seen documentaries about it on Youtube, but the mention of this part
of
their culture on Wikipedia is brief.
If we are so hardwired against finding fat attractive, how do you explain this if there is no strong external societal component?
Also, the word “ugly” has very negative connotations, which is why I interpreted it as insult – I felt insulted. :p
One of the poorest countries in the world, where lots of people were probably literally starving until recently.
Also, probably the most regressive country in the world, where Islamic fundamentalism is nearly ubiquitous and it was legal to own slaves until 2007 (and still unofficially allowed). I bet that all marriages there are arranged between families and clans, with women being considered chattel and sexual attraction being hardly relevant. The weight of a bride is probably just a signal for the wealth of her family.
Obvious questions: What sort of women are depicted in Mauritanian pornography? Are successful Mauritanian prostitutes generally obese or heavyset?
Granted both of these things are almost certainly illegal in Mauritania, but the also almost certainly occur regardless. And they would go a long way towards revealing what Mauritanian men, at least, privately prefer when they aren’t trying to signal wealth or fashionable status.
Valid counterpoints – I don’t think we’ll get our hands on that data any time soon though (if ever).
I’d suspect that baseline attractiveness derives from biology, but epigenetics, environment, and culture all play some part in the puzzle on a per-individual basis. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the scale of research needed to determine that evidentially, though.
By which you mean you don’t think actual research is ever going to get the result you want, but you’re going to keep making the same assertions and pointing to edge cases. Got it.
There’s an interesting theme in fat-acceptance where memes will show that being fat isn’t bad by showing fat women being loved on by fitness-model-looking dudes. See here.
The charitable version is that the memes are speaking the mainstream language of attractiveness while trying to change the standards, but that feels like a stretch. (Outlined here; I am unconvinced.)
Also, let’s not confuse attractiveness with desirability. You can desire something for reasons other than your personal aesthetic preferences. “This woman is from a high status clan/has a large dowry/has huge tracts of land/will make me look prosperous” are all great reasons to desire a woman’s hand in marriage, but have zero to do with “she makes me feel funny in my pants.”
The gray zone is to be found in Heinlein’s observation that a man will not insist on beauty in a woman who builds up his morale: after a while, he’ll realize she is beautiful, he just hadn’t noticed it at first.
@grendelkhan:
I used to dislike this music video for similar reasons.
Then I came around to the “speaking the mainstream language of attractiveness while trying to change the standards” interpretation.
Well…sort of. Because yeah, I do think the “mainstream language” use is not entirely a conscious and deliberate choice.
But for me it’s enough to just point it out, without going out of my way to overly embarrass or shame those doing so, since we’re, you know, already on the same side and stuff. 😉 “Yeah, they’re still using the mainstream language in some areas, and of course really we eventually want to change it in all areas. Now, moving on…”
This doesn’t sound right to me. As far as I know, fat activism and feminism have a huge overlap. While the “there is absolutely nothing unhealthy about being 400lbs” types are definitely a small minority, the “stop saying people are less attractive for being 40lbs overweight” seem to be pretty common.
Additionally, fat activism seems mostly to be a feminist-focused, female-focused thing – there’s far more about unrealistic depictions of bodies when it’s airbrushed women who work out and diet for a living than when it’s airbrushed guys who work out and diet for a living. Beyond this, guys complaining of how they are treated (especially by those they hope to be potential partners) for how they look tend to both dislike and be disliked by feminists.
So, if what vV_Vv is saying is that feminists are using fat activists as a catspaw, I don’t think that’s correct.
I was referring to the first kind of fat activists, the one that Rebecca Watson was criticizing in the linked post.
Anyway, I think that modern mainstream feminism in general mostly cares about the interests of average-looking, middle-class/upper-middle-class white women. People like Jessica Valenti, Anita Sarkeesian, or indeed Rebecca Watson.
Everybody else on the “intersectionality” bandwagon: blacks, fat people, trans, disabled, etc., are second-class allies. Cannon fodder to be used for political battles but not really respected.
I still think that you are incorrect in separating fat activism and feminism, and in stating that feminism treats fat activists as cannon fodder.
First, what is a “fat person”? By most standards, people have gotten fatter in a lot of countries (and not just developed countries) over the past several decades. I would go so far as to say that the average person now is kind of fat by the standards of the fairly recent past. Statistically or anecdotally speaking, people are fatter, and more people are really fat.
The extreme fat activists are a fringe. However, mainstream fat activism is a part of mainstream feminism: “mainstream” being “we should stop judging [people, often specifically or implicitly women] for being 20lbs overweight”. 20 pounds, though, will bump the average 5’5″ woman from ideal to overweight and another 20 to obese.
Body positivity is a big part of modern popular feminism, and fat positivity a big part of that – articles vociferously proclaiming the author to be completely happy, no need to doubt that, 100% happy, OK about her weight are a dime a dozen.
In this context, it clearly means “person about whom discrimination based on being too fat is claimed.”
@Jiro:
As I understand it, body positivity types, of whom fat activists are a subset, claim increasing discrimination based on how far someone moves away from a supposed ideal – which would include anyone overweight.
My point is that a group of which a majority of members are fat (which, these days, in North America at least, probably includes every group other than fitness junkies and the underweight) can’t be said to be using fat people as cannon fodder, unless that group is itself a catspaw of a sub-group of normal-weight people.
Alternatively, fat activism is just activites by some amount of the 31% of Americans over 20 who are obese. And that’s only counting americans ( ie; lots of people have reason to want fat acceptance )
As for the hypothesis that feminists are rallying against perfect digital breasts by deceiving some large subset of people whoose support they somehow need to fight this onslaught of virtual women… Somehow ( high body fat causes electronic failures? Proximity puts on digital weight? ) I find your theory severely lacking in explanatory power.
Actually what did you even mean by that?
>> I suppose that fat activism is a fringe movement within the SJWs.
So a small part of a small group of people. Thank god there are people out there making sure people understand how terrible they are.
Is there an consensus in the EA community of when it is rational to spend a dollar to help today vs. invest that dollar and save for tomorrow? Would one be considered to be an Effective Altruist if they committed substantial portions of future wealth to evidence-driven altruism (e.g. something like The Giving Pledge), but gave little money today?
To your second question, I know of several prominent EAs doing exactly that, so I’m pretty confident the answer is yes.
I don’t think there’s a consensus about which is better. I think it’s a tough question that EAs debate a lot, and nobody is all that sure. Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of Givewell, has a write-up from 2011 grappling with the question.
Paul Christiano’s written about it.
Related: 80k hours on saving a 6—24-month runway
I spent a moderate amount of time reading a lot more about this last year and, while I remember all the precise arguments in detail, I do remember concluding the balance somewhat favored donating now, although could change drastically depending on your values or how you see giving opportunities changing in the future. Maybe, since you’ve been reading the GiveWell blog, you know they been investing heavily in building capacity these past few years, so maybe wait until said capacity has had a good chance to root out the best giving opportunities. Or maybe you think that EA is going to catch on, so all the most effective opportunities are going to be saturated really soon, so donations now are worth more. Or maybe you’re doing the tech startup thing, and therefore should spend as little as possible, because you’re going to grow significantly faster than the world economic growth rate, but only if you don’t die, so wait until you’re Dustin Moskovitz to donate. Or maybe you think you can grow EA significantly better if you’re actually, you know, donating, so donate now to show you really actually are invested, since getting each time you get a marginal person, who you presumably know and so should on average have around your level of income, you get into EA for life, you’ve essentially added the amount of good you’re going to do over the course of your life yet again. Or maybe you’re young and don’t have many useful skills you, and maintaining any sort of runway requires you spend basically nothing, but it’s definitely better in the long-term to get skills with financially imperiling yourself now. Plus there’s small, but positive, value to pumping GiveWell’s “Money Moved” figure, since that should get them more cooperation from charities, experts, press, etc.
This is off the top of my head. I’ve probably missed a bunch.
Anyway, coming back to your question, there’s certainly no sort of “giving now is better than giving later” consensus. Indeed, many (most?) EAs are students who aren’t really able to give (How many Giving What We Can members does it take to change a lightbulb? Fifteen have pledged to change it later, but we’ll have to wait until they finish grad school.). This doesn’t imply that there’s not people for whom waiting to give is tremendously irrational.
I am a new and avid reader of the blog and I’ve been reading the archives. There was one argument back in March that I felt a strong need to respond to, in “List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of ‘Machinery Of Freedom'”. Scott cited Friedman’s idea for urban “jitney” system as an example of a brilliant libertarian idea destroyed by government regulation. I see it more as an example of why urban mass transit is really hard. I’m aware that bringing this up now is a little ridiculous, but I figure it’s appropriate for an open thread. I promise not to do this too often. Anyway, from Friedman:
“I have solved the problem of urban mass transit. To apply my solution to a major city requires a private company willing to invest a million dollars or so in hardware and a few million more in advertising and organization. The cost is low because my transit system is already over 99 percent built; its essence is the more efficient use of our present multibillion dollar investment in roads and automobiles. I call it jitney transit; it can most easily be thought of as something between taxicabs and hitch-hiking. Jitney stops, like present-day bus stops, would be arranged conveniently about the city. A commuter heading into town with an empty car would stop at the first jitney stop he came to and pick up any passengers going his way. He would proceed along his normal route, dropping off passengers when he passed their stops. Each passenger would pay a fee, according to an existing schedule listing the price between any pair of stops.”
Consider the following four cases:
1. Cambridge MA.
You want to get from one part of Cambridge to another. Fortunately Cambridge is a very dense city built along a single big street (Massachusetts Avenue). You hop on a jitney going farther along Mass Ave than you plan to go, the system works very nicely. Hooray.
2. Greater Boston, morning commute.
Boston is a dense urban core surrounded by sprawling suburbs. You want to get from say, the town of Woburn to your office in Copley Square downtown. It takes a couple tries to find a car going to the same part of downtown you are, but soon enough you find someone going close to your office. Works well enough.
3. Greater Boston, evening commute.
You stand at the Copley Square jitney stop. The first car is going toward Newton. No use. The second is heading south toward Quincy. A third guy is going to Wakefield which is a least closer to where you live, but it’s still not walking distance and catching a jitney out of Wakefield at night is not easy. After a lot of shouted conversations at the station, you get a ride to Winchester and accept that you’ll have to take a long walk home tonight. At least it’s better than the times that rides dry up at night and you have to find some other way home. You wonder why you don’t just drive to work like everyone else.
4. Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a huge decentralized city, with pockets of high density surrounded by low density. People are going every which way. You are one of the huge number of people who live in the Valley but work in the West side, one of the more common commuting routes, but unfortunately only a small percentage of morning commuters are going anywhere within walking distance of your office and on the homeward ride the fraction who can drop you near home is even smaller. You must put up with lots of interactions and multiple transfers to get anywhere. You give up after a week.
In other words, outside of a few cities (like Cambridge), a jitney rider would have to be prepared to accept unpredictability, transfers, long delays, and the potential for a lot of walking. There’s a cheap alternative for the sort of person willing to accept this . . . the bus. Furthermore, the cities where jitneys work well are the ones like Cambridge that are highly amenable to train or bus transit. And trains have the advantage of taking cars off the road and often going faster than traffic. Jitneys would be of limited use in the places like Los Angeles (or really most cities) where mass transit is also hard to implement.
These problems may not be unsolvable. In the Boston evening commute scenario you could have different stations for people going to different suburbs, but this means potentially walking across downtown to get to your station, lengthening your commute. You could raise the fee for jitneys and hope that it makes the drivers more pliant. The driver going to Wakefield might be more willing to detour if he is getting $15 rather than $5 for example. But demand drops a lot in that case, since most people aren’t willing to spend anything approaching taxi fare just to get to and from work. They just drive themselves. There might be some market for cheaper but less easily commanded taxis, but jitneys feel like a niche market to me rather than a solution to all urban transit.
Finally, it’s worth considering why hitchhiking become unpopular in the first place. It wasn’t the taxi cab lobby. It’s because hundreds and hundreds of men and women were horribly murdered while hitchhiking. And sometimes hitchhikers would kill their rides, often in conjunction with robbery. I do not recommend googling “hitchhiker murders” or whatnot, but if you must you will find that I am not talking about one or two or five or twenty isolated serial killers. Services like Uber provide an electronic trail that protect people from crime (by guaranteeing that a criminal driver gets caught), but just getting into cars with strangers was actually pretty dangerous.
The broader point that Friedman is making (I believe, I have only read what was in Scott’s post), is that, as you say, urban mass transit is extremely difficult to get perfect. What works for me is very unlikely to work for you. So the best system is one with lots of choice. Systems created from above (such as those by a government) do not have lots of choice because its very difficult for anyone or any group to anticipate what every is going to want to do now or in the future.
So Friedman’s solution of the jitney is not just “jitney”, its “any system that can be tried.” If you have only buses, you need enough demand to open a bus line. If you have trains, same thing with higher barrier. Taxis appear to solve this but taxis companies and taxi drivers and taxi regulators aren’t going to be able to anticipate the demand for all times of day on all days of the year (and they suffer from bias as we all do).
Friedman’s “jitney” is a stand in for an open source solution. If you want to drive me to Detroit for $400 then you can. Thats the choice you and I both made and agreed on. If you don’t want to do that then I’ll find someone else (or I’ll offer you more). But current cities limit the options by highly regulating transportation services in cities and between cities.
Jitney’s may be niche (may not), but that niche does represent demand that is being unmet without jitneys. So by ignoring jitneys some people go unserved.
The success of Uber et al. seems to show there is high demand for a jitney type service however. Addition there are major cities where private ass transport has succeeded. Santiago Chile used to have an extensive, efficient (for passengers), and profitable private bus industry (hundreds of different companies with many different types of buses and lines). In South Africa there are a number of informal private bus lines run in poor areas not serviced by the government.
You mean like a sweet ass-car? :-p
From the angle of criticizing libertarianism from the right: libertarians tend to be too optimistic about security. Being a cab driver is a high-risk profession in many parts of the world, often killed / mugged. Since everywhere but in the snobbiest Euro cities middle-class people tend to drive, the people who use public transport are disproportionately of the dangerous population.
Security problems are often solved by scaling. Buses can have cameras, discouraging attacks, and enough passengers so that hopefully some will help the driver.
Taxi drivers put up with the risk because they have to. Often they are immigrants with poor language skills and not much in the way of job prospects.
The chance that the average commute will pick up someone who may be a knife wielding maniac for chump change… is not very high. And if you consider that by putting 100 strangers into your car, at least 1 is not very good at wiping their butts, eww. It was for reasons like this that hitch-hiking has declined.
Violence and the various security methods protecting people from violence don’t follow the normal market rules, they have their own, if I may say, kind of military logic. Libertarian logic generally works within a high-trust, minimal-violence community. It can internalize fraud, via lawsuits, but it cannot really internalize much violence.
I think the fear factor is overstated in the demise of hitchhiking. Other theories include the rise of car ownership and licensing, which left only the most desparate people as hitchhikers, and the spread of the Interstate system, which essentially prohibits hitchhiking.
http://freakonomics.com/2011/10/10/where-have-all-the-hitchhikers-gone-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/blog/2009/may/29/hitchhiking-uk-road-trip
As the second link points out, hitching is still common in countries with similar crime rates but much lower rates of automobile ownership.
Julian and spandrel you both have good points. I used to live in a third world city with private buses, they were very cheap and convenient. But as in the US, they were popular only with people who didn’t have their own cars or motorcycles. I think the general problem is that driving yourself to work just isn’t that awful, and so if you have a car and can use it you will not tolerate the slowness of the bus, the uncertainty and cost of jitneys or cabs, or even a minimal risk of being murdered in a stranger’s car while hitching. The internet has made it possible for people to easily set up carpooling networks, but they mostly aren’t, because they can’t put up with even the minimal inconveniences associated. I think we can agree that jitneys could be a niche, maybe they would slightly improve the world, but the benefits associated should not be exaggerated. That’s what I took issue with.
What you’re ignoring is people’s ability to respond to market pressures. If there are enough people going from point A to point B who need rides, the Jitney system creates a profitable opportunity for freelance drivers to stop at known stops! It’s not entirely reliant on happenstance and volunteer drivers, but in fact allows for an ecosystem of transit solutions to problems. And it can happily supplement and interact with existing transit systems! While I was staying in New York recently, I would regularly take an uber a reasonable distance to get to a subway stop, and then go the rest of the way via train, because that was a good balance between footsoreness and convenience. This is especially the case with busses, because given enough traffic that’s not being handled by existing busses and stops, the jitney system enables an arbitrarily smooth scaleup using freelance busses.
And then these freelance drivers have a profitable opportunity to associate in order to avoid competing all on the most transited routes and instead offer a network service, with predictable routes and schedules => van drivers guild.
Then the van drivers guild attracts external investments and uses them to buy larger vehicles and schedule its services better => bus company.
Professional specialization and economies of scale will cause the van drivers guild to put out of business the occasional jitners, and then the bus company to put out of business the van drivers guild.
Friedman’s jitney model essentially describes mass transit in many developing-world cities, with competing private operators and loosely coordinated pickup spots. See this description of Lusaka, for example.
It’s not a good system for cities that can afford better, for a few reasons. First, private operators chase after the biggest markets, which are usually radial lines directly to downtown, and neglect the circumferential connections between outer areas necessary for good network design. (This why Manhattan’s subways, built by three competing private companies, are good for traveling from residential areas in the north to the commercial centers in Midtown and the southern tip, but require long detours to travel east-west – something New York is only now somewhat rectifying, at thrice the cost of any similar project outside the US.) Second, cooperation is imperfect; the article I linked above discusses, among other things, that jitney operators do not offer free transfers; a ride on two companies’ vans involves paying twice. The more competitors there are, the worse this gets, because for N operators to coordinate requires O(N^2) agreements. (Note the interaction between this and the difficulty of running circumferential lines.) Third, there’s a fundamental capacity limit: cities have finite space for vehicles, and a 500-person train or 60-person bus can transport a lot more people per square meter of right-of-way than a 10-person van or five-person car. (This is also why driverless cars won’t end public transit either.) The 4/5/6 line in Manhattan carries 1.3 million daily riders. Even if they were evenly distributed into 27,000 per direction per hour, which they’re not, that’s still well over a jitney in each direction every two seconds, in Manhattan traffic, trying to use the same set of informally determined curbside stops. You would have to ban private car traffic and have jitney passengers board by taking running leaps from moving sidewalks to make this work.
Nitpick: TWO competing private companies (IRT, BMT), and the city government (IND).
That being said, the era in which all three existed independently was brief: 1932-40.
See, e.g., Wikipedia’s history of the NYC subway system.
Given the massive, massive differences in startup cost between subways and jitneys, I don’t think you can compare the two.
It’s just my impression or many of these innovative libertarian proposals are just things that have always existed in ancient or third world societies?
Actually, this is not that surprising. While over-regulation is a thing, for the most part if a regulation exists is because somebody noticed that something was not working well and sought to solve the problem (usually a coordination issue) by imposing some rules.
Yes, that’s typically the point.
It’s quite often (more often) a bootleggers-and-baptists coalition between the special interests who stand to benefit from the regulation and the useful idiots who think it serves the general interest.
If you propose a law with the explicit purpose of enriching yourself at the expense of the public, you’ll never get anywhere. But if what’s good for General Motors is good for the country…
So for instance you have taxi medallion caps, which allegedly exist to solve “coordination problems” like traffic congestion, and even (I have actually seen this argued in a newspaper editorial) to keep the taxi drivers from competing against one another until they earn less than a “living wage”. But in fact, they curiously end up benefiting the politically connected owners of the medallions, who rent them to the drivers. There may be useful idiots who believe that the medallions really exist to keep traffic under control (or some such thing), but that is simply the first excuse the real beneficiaries thought of.
A similar story could be told of labor unions’ support for immigration restrictions, child labor restrictions, and the minimum wage (especially in the early 20th century).
I might be missing something, but I thought that Labour unions positions on all those issues were clearly stated in terms of protecting wages, which they explicitly said was a good thing. In which case it’s unlike the more concealed basis you’re suggesting for taxis?
Labor unions tend to be pretty open about their intent.
Anyway, regulatory capture, cronyism and corruption certainly exist, but according to the “stationary bandit model”, even self-interested rulers have an incentive to keep society productive.
“It’s just my impression or many of these innovative libertarian proposals are just things that have always existed in ancient or third world societies?”
Warlord Urbanism.
I’ve been wondering if most CFAR attendees wouldn’t benefit more by using their money to hire a personal trainer (assuming they don’t already have a regular fitness routine). Since a few CFAR alumni are active here, I’d like to ask some questions:
1. Did you attend CFAR as part of a drive towards self optimization?
2. Do you exercise regularly?
3a. (if no) Why not?
3b. (if yes) How do you feel the benefits of regular exercise compares to the benefits of the skills you learned at CFAR?
Side note: I am not a very fit person. I recently signed up for two months of one on one training sessions at a local gym. It’s helped tremendously. I hope these questions come across in the spirit of honest inquiry in which they were intended, and not as some kind of “DO YOU EVEN LIFT BRO” type putdown.
I think CFAR is pretty important, but I also agree this is a pretty legitimate hypothesis to entertain. (Although it depends a lot on whether you’re paying the full rate for CFAR, and not getting a scholarship).
I have just recently joined a gym. They tried to sell me on a personal trainer, which would have been over $1000. I did not do it, because I didn’t have the money, but I _clearly_ would be making much more progress if I did. My next major goal is to solidify my financial situation, and after that I am strongly considering doing some manner of Personal Trainer dealie.
The value of CFAR, IMO comes from a few key things:
– If you haven’t been tapped into the rationality network, that’s a major life improvement, and CFAR will plug you in. (There are other ways to do so, but there are also other ways to get the equivalent of a personal trainer, it’s just a lot easier for some people)
– Some people report the CFAR techniques (and accompanying “mental soup”) to be valuable in their own right. This varies from person to person (I didn’t feel like I got that much in that regard)
But the most important thing, in my mind, is the more altruistic notion that CFAR is *research*. I expect them to both improve at teaching, to improve at understanding underlying principles of rationality-teaching, and to improve at applying those ideas to high-leverage people over time.
My current take is that most of the value of a CFAR workshop lies in the future, and not necessarily for you in particular.
> I have just recently joined a gym. They tried to sell me on a personal trainer, which would have been over $1000. I did not do it, because I didn’t have the money, but I _clearly_ would be making much more progress if I did. My next major goal is to solidify my financial situation, and after that I am strongly considering doing some manner of Personal Trainer dealie.
What’s more effective than hiring a personal trainer is finding a workout buddy. That’s easier said than done; with a friend, you need to coordinate your schedules and find exercise you’re both interested in, but it’s also free and you also have the advantage of exercising with someone you like and have interests in common with. It may be worth putting out feelers among your social group to see if anyone is interested.
Depending on what your fitness goals are, simple bodyweight exercises in the outdoors may be enough. I exercise with two of my friends outside, meaning that I effectively exercise for nothing give or take the occasional visit to the swimming pool.
1. No, but I plan to.
2. Yes
3b. If CFAR does their job right, you don’t need to hire a personal trainer. Maybe you goal factor or find a buddy to spot each other on sets or something who keeps you showing up, or you overcome your shyness and start playing pickup ultimate.
So, I have not explicitly goal factored here, but the thing I’m looking for with a personal trainer is someone who’ll force me to stay accountable, and to work out longer and harder than I want to.
To do this, I need someone willing to work out, regularly (at least once a week, possibly more), for a full hour. This is… well… work. All of the accountability-buddies I’ve had have never worked out, because the very sort of person who needs an accountability buddy also tends to flake, and what happens in practice is someone flakes, the other person (a friend, who LIKES the other person) isn’t able to the right level of “tough” on them, and then a few days later the OTHER person flakes, and then we get in the habit of cutting each other slack.
(I can imagine systems wherein this works better, but it requires effort to find and get that system setup. Whereas you can just start paying a personal trainer and they’ll more or less do the thing you want. I assume they vary in quality and you should still shop around, but its a different class of problem)
1)Yes
2)Yes
3b)Probably think that exercise is more important, but a lot of that is because I feel compelled to exercise and get jittery if I don’t. I’m not sure if exercise would as important to the sort of person who needs a trainer to exercise.
1. No. (Attended CFAR, self-optimization wasn’t my motivation for it)
2. No.
3a. Getting other parts of my life in order has been higher priority, so I’ve been irregularly exercising.
Multiheaded, I’m not an expert on immigration law, but what if you came to the United States on a tourist visa and then tried to claim that you would be persecuted if you went back to Russia? My understanding is that even if you lose it will take the government a long, long time to actually kick you out. Your major problem might be getting employment if you don’t have the legal right to live here, but millions of illegal non-English speaking immigrants manage this somehow so it can’t be that hard.
Please don’t encourage illegal immigration.
Why not?
They’re criminals, just like that Martin Luther King, Jr.!
Using King as an example is a cheat, because of the taboo against criticizing him. If I were to argue that it is correct to oppose criminals as a class (at least under Western legal systems) including King, I would be opposed by tons of people who defend King for unprincipled reasons.
@ Jiro:
Are you saying you do oppose King? Or you support him? For unprincipled reasons? It’s hard to interpret your comment.
But let me just respond to the hypothetical you who opposes King’s civil disobedience because it’s breaking the law, and the law is the social contract and the foundation of all social order, and if anyone feels free to break it whenever he disagrees, there will be chaos. Besides, the law is the will of the people and of society, and since society made you, it can tell you what to do. Basically the Crito argument.
It’s a terrible argument, especially for the situation of illegal immigration. For one thing, if illegal immigrants “obey the law”, they don’t get to live in our society, so it ought not to matter to them whether they allegedly undermine the social order to some extent by breaking it. And of course they’re not part of society and it didn’t make them, so that part of the argument has no force.
But more importantly (and this applies to all forms of lawbreaking), people justifiably break the law all the time when they judge strict adherence to it to be immoral or unnecessarily burdensome. For example, almost everyone drives a little above the speed limit—and this is not thought immoral where it does not endanger others. No business (such as a restaurant) could possibly comply with all government regulations on it. People give homecooked food to the homeless even though it violates health codes in many places. And if you catch your child with marijuana, you don’t turn him in to the police.
Strict adherence to the law would cause the collapse of society far quicker than widespread breaking of it. Maybe in a sense this would be good, as we would have no other choice but to change the laws. But it’s a very destructive way to go about it. (Not to mention completely contrary to human nature.) For instance, Murray Rothbard once argued that black marketeers were the biggest drivers of the success of communism: without them, the whole thing really would have collapsed in short order. However, it seems absurd to me to blame the black marketeers from doing their best to survive under that system.
The only way a strong presumption in favor of obeying the law (even when you think it is wrong) could be justified, as I see it, would be if a) individuals were typically much worse judges of a law’s wrongness than society as a whole and consequently b) when people break a law they judge to be immoral or unnecessary, they almost always act against their own best interest and/or the good of society. Neither of those things are true, in my judgment.
For one thing, almost all morally contemptible lawbreaking is done by people who do not reject the law in question as a general rule. The typical murderer does not think murder is a “victimless crime” that ought generally to go unpunished. They don’t even, in the vast majority of cases (and I would argue, all cases) make a rational judgement of the selfish benefits of murder. They act out of blind emotion or short-sighted greed, not misguided moral principle.
So I find it hard to see how widespread acceptance of the idea that one’s own conscience comes before the law will lead to chaos. The vast majority of all dangerous lawbreakers don’t act out of any sense of conscience. Now, you might say “What about Muslim terrorists?” But, provided someone truly believes that he is a slave of Allah and that sharia is the will of Allah, how could “respect for the law” possibly convince him that man’s law takes precedence over God’s law?
Besides, the whole thing is circular anyway. What faculty but individual judgment could lead someone to determine that he has a duty to obey the law, whatever it says? If it’s tradition, he has to accept the tradition as worth following. Yet if individual judgment is valid in this case, why is it not valid in any other? All you can do is make the (dubious) case for the good consequences of following the law no matter what, which the individual weighs against the reasons for breaking the law. Only the individual can decide. Thought and action are capacities of the individual.
Martin Luther King Jr was also an unrepentant and consistent plagiarist. Would you defend a plagiarist out of hand by comparing him to MLK? If not, please do not detract from the issue at hand by making a weird hybrid appeal to emotion combined with appeal to authority.
@ Timothy Coish:
I was linking to Scott’s article on the non-central fallacy by using the example he used. If you don’t like it, take it up with him.
Besides, the point of the example is that King is liked precisely because he was a “criminal”. That is, he had the courage to lead protests against Jim Crow even when they were in violation of the law (which operated under the color of neutral purposes like “not obstructing traffic” to deny them permission to protest). His “criminality” is an essential part of what he is praised for: see “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.
On the other hand, plagiarism (and adultery) are not what is praised for. At worst, these transgressions completely undermine his accomplishments. At best, he was a great man in spite of these failures. But in either case they detract from his greatness. But no one says “King was a great man, despite his criminal behavior that tarnished his image.” The “criminality” is to his credit.
No one would say: “Plagiarism isn’t wrong! After all, King did it!” At most, some might say: “A plagiarist is not necessarily a completely evil person. After all, King was a plagiarist.” That a great man had a vice does not prove (or even semi-persuasively argue for the view) that it was not a vice at all. It merely shows that one can be great despite being flawed.
The same kind of analysis applies to a figure like George Washington and the fact that he owned slaves. You can argue either that he was a great man despite having owned slaves, or that his owning of slaves is sufficient to undermine his greatness. But for both sides, the owning of slaves serves as a defect. No one (except Confederates hiding under a rock somewhere) says that he was great because of his connection to slavery. So he can hardly serve to put slavery in a better light. (Again, except by refuting the naive position that slaveowners were all demons with no redeeming qualities.)
Making an asylum claim isn’t illegal. It would only become illegal if he stayed after his claim was denied.
Her.
Apologies, my mistake.
Am young, legally male, unmarried, employed but poor + in a poor country, no travel history, no college degree as of yet (I’m working on it…)
I don’t think I have a better shot at an American tourist visa than I had at a Canadian one.
So you couldn’t legally travel to, say, Disney World?
Hell if I know. For the Canada attempt, I bought a ticket to a major hockey game in Toronto for the relevant weekend, and submitted proof of that with my visa application. Still didn’t work.
(I’m reselling the ticket.)
(also, am not *that* young; turned 25 in October)
If you aren’t from a visa waiver country (basically the first world) in order to get a tourist visa you need to go into a U.S. Embassy or Consulate and convince an immigration official that you have a permanent home that you have no intention of abandoning.
Even if you apply for a student visa you still need to go to an interview and prove non-immgrant intent. H1Bs allow dual intent but a) they are oversubscribed and b) no degree makes it unlikely to qualify for a specialty occupation.
I don’t know if you’ve looked at the UK? I know that gender identity is recognised as one of the things that can cause someone to need asylum here. I am led to believe that entering the UK on a tourist visa is reasonably achievable for Russian citizens, at which point an application could be made.
I know some Russians who moved to various EU countries as college students and then got a job and stayed there.
I doubt you can pull the asylum thing anywhere, as it’s reserved to people coming from war zones or subject to ethnic cleansing or personal political persecution. You would have a hard time arguing with an immigration officer who is motivated to keep you out that you would face legal persecution in Russia for being trans (and this assuming that you actually manage to convince the officer that you are really trans and not just pretending in order to claim refugee status).
Therefore, if you want to live in a country other than Russia, you need to go through the regular immigration process.
That’s not so; queer people from hostile countries are granted asylum both by UN convention and in practice, although of course some host nations are very unfriendly/reluctant.
I’ve seen stats for Canada from ~5 years back: the rate of approval for asylum requests from Russian citizens (filed from within Canada) was around 40 pecent. (no info as to how many of those were LGBT-related + in good faith)
But Russia is not Saudi Arabia where people can be arrested, lashed or executed for homosexuality or “cross-dressing”. If I understand correctly, in Russia transgenderism is not illegal per se. Arguing that you would face persecution would be probably difficult.
There is omnipresent hostility (some of it by government-sponsored groups), massively damaged employment prospects, government censorship in the guise of preventing “the promotion of LGBT lifestyles to minors”, oh and the legal system specifically forbids LGBT individuals from being recognized under anti-hate-crimes law. I would be very, very fucking afraid of going out or interacting with an official as a non-passing trans woman.
Speaking of which, for anything bureaucracy-related you either have to pass as your ASAB (or have trouble with the “mismatch”) or submit to institutionalization, be at the mercy of uncooperative doctors who’d try to dissuade you, and not infrequently be ordered by the court to have SRS before your legal gender marker is changed (due to no legal procedure for legal transition ever having been formalized).
You are honestly so asinine and ignorant.
I took, “Arguing that you would face persecution would be probably difficult”, in context, to be a very specific phrasing indicating not that the persecution wasn’t happening but that the argument would not convince an unsympathetic civil servant. And I think he may be right about that – most of the countries you’d want to emigrate to, do not I think offer asylum to people who “only” risk being beaten up by ordinary apolitical thugs. I could certainly be convinced that the thugs in question are not apolitical and are tacitly encouraged by state policy e.g. the explicit exclusion from hate-crime protections, but I already sympathize with you and I’m not a customs official.
At minimum, I think the principle of charity calls for assuming vV_Vv was trying to offer useful advice.
“You are honestly so asinine and ignorant.”
Not exactly making a great case for strangers to help you emigrate to their countries here.
While I think vV_Vv and others are giving sincere advice, this seems to be a case of people on the internet using what’s “logical” in place of what’s factual.
Russia recently passed a law that would bar trans people from getting driver’s licenses (though they don’t seem to have acted on that). Trans people are widely diagnosed as mentally ill (often as schizophrenic, with no evidence other than their gender identity and perhaps some understandable depression). At that point, some are involuntarily committed and medicated, which certainly counts as “harm or mistreatment” and conceivably as “torture” on an asylum application.
I totally grant that a US bureaucrat might not grant this application, but it’s absurd to say that there’s no persecution to base a claim on.
I was trying to offer useful advice but I see that it’s not appreciated.
While I’m not an expert I think it’s probably easier to get a work visa for an EU country rather than the US or Canada, therefore it seems to me that this is the most viable option.
You may seek asylum if you want, but you may not be likely to succeed.
I would strongly advise against illegal immigration: if you are caught and expelled it will significantly harm your legal migration prospects, if you are not caught you may end up homeless or in some other shitty condition.
Alright, thank you for your goodwill then, vV_Vv, but as you said, you most certainly don’t seem to be an expert; you don’t know any refugees personally, your claims don’t appear to be founded on known stats, etc. So yeah, this advice feels a bit too generic and removed, sorry.
Also, you seem to assume that I have not already spent some time and effort researching the basics here. (Like what constitutes the basis for an asylum claim.)
For the US, one option to consider is EB3 — other worker. For a long time the quota in this category was way way back, but now it is almost current for all chargeabilities except China, India and the Philippines. If you do manage to get in under that program you’ll have a green card and won’t need to worry about asylum. The whole process would probably take 18-24 months.
The bad news is they’ve really cracked down on the labor certs. Realistically you’d probably need to find someone willing to sponsor you for a job with a business necessity to speak Russian in a part of the country where there aren’t a lot of Russian speakers looking for jobs.
Hopefully someone else can chime in on the likelihood/cost/possibility of this idea. If the donations to help are large enough could they be funneled to an employer to support a work visa in the US?
But then you would be an illegal worker, and one removed from their family and social support network. Seems like a pretty harsh life. Makes sense if you are starving, but I’m not sure it would be worth in this case.
Hello? Lack of family and friends’ support is a big part of why my situation is so troublesome in the first place. (I am closeted to everyone, but I’m reasonably certain I would not be accepted.)
Do you have any damn idea what it’s like to fear forced institutionalization, harrassment, nonconsensual abusive “therapy”, etc?
>Do you have any damn idea what it’s like to fear forced institutionalization, harrassment, nonconsensual abusive “therapy”, etc?
I’m still wondering why I should sympathize with your predicament given your other beliefs. How else are communists supposed to deal with bourgeois degenerates?
@Yakimi
This is one of those peculiar situations where you feel like you might be coming across as condescending because what you’re saying is obvious to anyone with a shred of a humanity, but well, here we are.
Even if you believe that treatment like that is justified based on someone’s political views[1], a thread in which someone is asking for help to avoid ‘forced institutionalization, harrassment, nonconsensual abusive “therapy” ‘ is quite obviously not the time and place to open this discussion.
[1] It’s worth pointing out that I’m trying to keep the focus of my comment as narrow as possible to avoid getting into the broader discussion but this is one of the first times in my life that implicitly “condoning” a view so that it doesn’t distract from my point has actually made me feel ashamed of myself just a little bit.
@Virbie:
I have no idea what multiheaded’s political views are. I can easily imagine someone who was both in dire need of acceptance of their own non-typical traits and was endangered by them, and yet had stated political preferences condoning analogous things being done to people they themselves disagreed with. (The first example that springs to mind is Rosie O’Donnell.)
In such a case, then actually yes, it would be a reasonable thing to say, “I’m not all that concerned about your persecution, since the only difference between you and your persecutors is want of opportunity on your part. I choose to invest my time in solving other problems and urge others to do likewise.”
But, as I said, I don’t know if this applies to this particular situation.
“Other people seldom want to harass, institutionalize and abuse people in general” seems like a pretty low charity bar to clear.
But, err, sure. I guess the “some people have used things like the things you believe to do things I disagree with so i’m using your predicamebt to get in sly digs at my ideological opponents” works too?
@Marc Whipple
Tldr: while I may disagree, I don’t think your point is unreasonable. However, I don’t think it’s applicable either, given that we’re talking about a case in which the political views are entirely unrelated to the topic of conversation. To me this seems nothing more than “I disagree with you on something unrelated and I’m going to shoehorn it in the most disgusting way possible into a discussion where you’re desperately asking for help”.
It seemed clear to me from Yakimi’s comment that the perception is that multiheaded is a supporter of Communism (otherwise, why would they be referring to Putin’s Russia as Communists?). It’s of course possible that I’m assuming too much, but I did a cursory search of some past multiheaded comments out of curiosity and it supported that hypothesis.
I’m not sure I’d ever personally be okay with kicking someone in the middle of a conversation where they’re asking desperately for help. I can see where you’re coming from, and how you might reasonably feel differently in the situation you’re describing (ie, when you condone treating others the same way).
I know the term “political views” is extremely broad, but I was trying to convey that the views were unrelated without having to go through a few logical contortions. This situation seems a lot less like someone asking for help about being fired for being Christian while they’ve supported firing all Muslims in the past.
It’s a lot more like someone asking for help escaping racial harassment and being told to go to hell (in that very thread!) because they support capitalism (since the institutions that capitalism support entrench racism)[1].
My example seems further applicable from the fact that AFAIK anti LGBT sentiment in Russia isn’t stemming from some sort of proto Communism, but rather traditionalist attitudes buttressed strongly by the influence of the Russian orthodox church.
[1] this is my poor paraphrasing of things I’ve heard people say, not a view I personally hold.
@Virbie:
Thank you for your thoughtful and civil response.
I’ll add to the factors I might consider from my side of the argument not only some sort of (admittedly) ambiguous, “I won’t aid you against bad people because you’re just as bad,” point, but as a further consideration “You want to come to my country because you’ll be safe from prosecution for being a member of $CLASS, but you are also an outspoken advocate of $POLICY which I believe is very detrimental to my country.” Supposing multiheaded were an unrepentant Stalinist-Communist, while I would still oppose people trying to persecute her for being trans because nobody should be persecuted for being trans, to be dreadfully honest if it were up to me I wouldn’t let her into the US either even if there were a high risk of her being persecuted for being trans. Please note that I have no reason to believe this is true, and have no opinion on whether the real, non-hypothetical multiheaded should be allowed into the US.
In the book I mentioned elsewhere (Caliphate, by Tom Kratman, which is among other things a fictionalized version of what people who are opposed to Muslim immigration think will happen if it is allowed without sufficient restriction) a social activist from Germany wishes to emigrate to the US after Germany is essentially taken over by Muslims. Her application is rejected, and her history is the reason. “The attitudes and actions of people like you are what made what happened to your country possible,” she is told, “and we do not want them contaminating our country or we will end up the same way.” You may believe this, you may not. But it is not an irrational factor to consider.
:popcorn:
(I don’t know if this post was deleted or just didn’t go through or if my browser is acting up, so preemptive apologies for doubleposting)
>I’m still wondering why I should sympathize with your predicament given your other beliefs. How else are communists supposed to deal with bourgeois degenerates?
For the same reason we sypathized with moldbug back when that tech conference happened. Because people shouldn’t be punished for their fringe views, particularly when they are (by now) mostly harmless.
Excluding someone from the country based on their fringe views isn’t punishment unless they have a right to be in that country, and only open borders advocates believe that.
>Excluding someone from the country based on their fringe views isn’t punishment unless they have a right to be in that country, and only open borders advocates believe that.
Neither is excluding someone from a tech conference, but it didn’t sit right because the talk had nothing to do with their politics. Similarly, the cause of immigration here is not to try to spread communism throughout the US, so “I hope you can never come here because your views are awful” (and they are), doesn’t seem like the kind of behaviour we so often praise here.
Excluding Moldbug from talking about his weird OS thing because of his political views is quite different from excluding a person from a country because of her political views. Moldbug’s political views are irrelevant to his weird OS thing and are not a danger to the purposes and goals of weird OS thing development. Being a radical Communist, a philosophy which is antithetical to the purposes and goals of the United States, is quite relevant to the question of whether you should get to live in the United States.
@Marc Whipple
Do you think that the US should start deporting Communists?
I think that such a person has a *moral* right to not be excluded from the conference on these grounds, even if this would not extend to a legal right. I don’t believe a non-citizen has a moral right to be in a particular country.
@ sweeneyrod:
I am not trying to argue against multiheaded, but in order to become a citizen of the United States, you have to swear that you have never been a member of the Communist or Nazi parties, or any other totalitarian or terrorist organization. You also have to swear that you have never advocated the overthrow of any government by force or violence (!), as well as swear that you would take up arms to defend the United States.
In practice, you can get an exemption if (like billions of people), your membership in the Communist party was involuntary or effectively required for ordinary life in your country. And even if you were a diehard communist (but not a Nazi or terrorist), if you haven’t been in ten years, you can still be naturalized.
I don’t know if similar requirements apply to permanent residency.
The questions themselves:
@sweenyrod:
1) Citizens who are communists: No.
2) Non-citizens who are communists: In a perfect world, yes, but that’s so far down on my “people the US could do without” list that the light now leaving “Known violent criminals illegally present here” will not reach it for several seconds.
@ Mark Whipple
“Being a radical Communist, a philosophy which is antithetical to the purposes and goals of the United States, is quite relevant to the question of whether you should get to live in the United States.”
I would say there is a far stronger case to be made that blocking entry over political views is antithetical to the “purposes and goals” of the US.
@baconbacon:
Entry, perhaps. The privileges of citizenship and/or long-term residence, I respectfully disagree. At some point, the melting pot overflows before it can render a good alloy. When the slag going in is resistant to molding, that point comes sooner. “We welcome those who would destroy us” sounds very noble, but at some point it becomes suicidally foolish as well as a very long moral stretch.
I’m rather late to this conversation, but subjectively, Caliphate is honestly one of the stupidest speculative fiction books I’ve read in my teenage years, and that includes Battlefield Earth and Terry Goodkind.
I do not think it would be possible to try and reason you into feeling sympathy in the first place, thank you very much.
Support, good luck : ). It seems like once the college thing is done it might be easier. Sorry if suggestions are not welcome, but maybe getting accepted to a masters program after that somewhere might be an option (with crowdfund for tuition). I think even without many academic credentials, it should be possible to find something, if that’s a worry. And yeah, people who have never dealt with immigrating will mostly never understand.
There is something I don’t understand. Let me ask, because I am really curious. Many people are “gender gray”. This is perhaps less common in the West where there is a strong social pressure to be sexy, but pretty common in Russia, due to it fitting the generic mood of light depression that tends to permeates the place. People whom I call gender gray people are generally lazy (or light depressed) who simply don’t put any effort in their gender expression. They wear loose, comfortable unisex clothes (jeans, basic tees, sweaters), no make-up, low-maintenance hair, and so on. They are just taking it really easy.
The question is, if both men and women can live like that, why is it that difficult for you?
This is something always confused me. Gender expression takes effort, especially a female one (guys get away better with just being lazy), and there are plenty of 40 years old women with a tough job like cleaning maid who are like to hell with that effort, they drop the make-up, cut their hair low-maintenance short and wear comfortable unisex clothes. So if it takes effort, and it gets discriminated against, it should not be that hard to give it up, all it takes is basically the path of lesser resistance, just giving up and being lazy?
Question: are you of the elites? Because that is the only reason I can see how it could not work. Gender gray people typically stand in a bus stop that goes to a factory job, or drive the bus, or are postmen or cleaning maids, so they are almost always lower-class, reeking of cigarettes and halfway alcoholic. An elite, like a lawyer, is expected to have more gender expression. Is this your case? (Of course, speaking perfect English at 25 is already a highly elite marker, so it is almost unnecessary to ask.)
“(Of course, speaking perfect English at 25 is already a highly elite marker, so it is almost unnecessary to ask.)” A even stronger indication might be posting/commenting on SSC.
If Multiheaded can get here, they have a year after arrival to file for asylum in the United States. It’s free to apply, and Multi is then eligible to work as soon as asylum is granted, or after 150 days if the case is still pending.
The asylum application is pretty detailed, and Multi could justifiably claim a fear of persecution if they go home. Forced therapy might even qualify as ‘torture’ for the relevant section, though it certainly doesn’t meet the standards the US applies to itself. Awkwardly, the first question (“Why are you applying for asylum?”) has no option for gender or sexuality – the closest box is “membership in a particular social group”.
Typo thread!
“new interludes some Wednesdays”
Maybe Scott actually meant that there will be one Wednesday some time in the future on which all interludes will be posted :=)
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. Any thoughts on this?
You are going to have to define MTG color pie; it sounds like divine law versus utilitarian is the split you are highlighting.
This question was more aimed at people who already have a decent feel for the color pie.
But for a quick rundown… The MTG color pie is an alignment system of sorts created by the Magic: the Gathering designers. It’s split into five colors, white (approximately striving towards peace), blue (towards perfection), black (power), red (freedom), and green (acceptance), though it’s gotten a fair bit more complex over the years. For more detailed breakdowns, see these five recent articles from Magic’s chief designer (no knowledge of MTG gameplay is required):
White: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/great-white-way-revisited-2015-07-13
Blue: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/true-blue-revisited-2015-07-20
Black: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/black-revisited-2015-07-27
Red: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/seeing-red-revisited-2015-08-03
Green: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/its-not-easy-being-green-revisited-2015-08-10
I have a newfound appreciation for this blog’s color scheme, which turns out to be very fitting.
SSC=Esper? Can totally see that.
Or it’s just slate colours. Bluey-grey.
Lucky coincidence? I think not
Also matches Scott’s tribal affiliation!
You’re on to something there! Green is the color of a *lot* of traditional philosophies. “Moderns” (not my favorite word, but you know what I mean, even if it’s a pejorative people don’t ever call themselves) have trouble comprehending them because we have difficulty with the idea of a natural order, which is a very green idea in Magic terms. It’s widely considered (in MTG circles) the hardest color for most people to really identify with philosophically. I’m a philosophical Confucian, which is a pretty Bant ideology, and a Catholic, which is *also* pretty Bant (even if pop culture thinks we’re Orzhov…)
After typing the above (except the last two sentences which I typed later), I looked at the first Ideological Turing Test page to see what you mean, and two out of the three Christian answers literally used the words “natural order”. I swear I typed that before looking at it.
(For those who aren’t Magic nerds, color combinations have shorthand names based on the lore. Bant is White/Blue/Green, Orzhov is White/Black, and see http://humpheh.com/magic/c/ for a handy interactive guide to all of them.)
You never go full Bant.
Also, I feel all these color pie discussions are hampered by the fact we never got rundowns of what the wedges actually believe, unlike every other color combination. I might be Abzan, except what the hell is Abzan? Nobody knows. It is a mystery.
I think the pairs, shards, and wedges don’t necessarily have one defined philosophy. The Simic are blue/green, and they’re all about improving nature through science. But Kruphix is also blue/green, and he’s about using all the knowledge of Theros to preserve the natural order against catastrophe.
There’s a lot of ways to fall into one color; there’s even more ways to fall into several. If you’re WBG, it’s not necessarily because, like the Abzan, you venerate the spirits of your ancestors preserved in ancient trees. It’s because the dominant elements of your philosophy align with parts of white, green, and black.
I used to mock the people who got overly attached to their color choices, until I read some MaRo article (I forget which one) that enumerated the philosophies associated with each color. And then I realized that my preferred colors to play with are White and Green… and those were exactly the philosophies that I most strongly identified with. (And I despise the philosophies of Red and Blue. Black I am neutral on.)
Not Selesnya though: too hippie. I like Bant, Simic, Orzhov, and Golgari to varying degrees.
Huh, I personally identify the most with Esper, but my favorite decks are token decks, which is more of a White/Green thing. I think this makes sense: a token deck can be quite powerful, but you wouldn’t want to live inside one…
There’s a troublesome ambiguity between the shorthand names for color combinations, which is what most people use things like “Selesnya” as, and the actual organizations in the Magic lore, which are just one particular ideological expression of those colors. You can be GW without being a hippie – you could be a GW New Phyrexian that believes in killing and eating anything weaker than yourself so that the world may be joined in one flesh.
Yeah, I find it kind of interesting how New Phyrexia seems mostly dominated by WUG. Would be funny for them to meet what’s left of Bant itself.
I’m not sure how much personal color pie fit matches with favorite colors to play. I’m pretty blue, but my favorite decks have been RW. Admittedly, they’re control decks (yay Skred!), but still. The colors are mechanically broad enough to support most play styles.
I played Magic: The Gathering a little (I mean, a very little) when I was in middle school and maybe a little bit in high school, but I never got into the color wheel stuff. I just spent some time reading through all the little articles on it, and it is an interesting, insightful, and original way of laying things out.
I didn’t understand or play the game at any complex level, but I remember (from looking up the list of decks just now) having the “Mind Swarm” deck from “Darksteel” and the “Little Bashers” deck from “Mirrodin”. Those were both set on some kind of metallic world.
I either used only the black deck or combined it with some white cards. (I liked the idea of combining black and white.)
Philosophically, I fall at the exact meeting point between black and blue. Interestingly, according to the wheel, that places me diametrically opposed to green, which is correct.
Blue represents enlightenment and black represents self interest, so the combination represents enlightened self-interest. People have the ability and need to shape their own lives and their own destinies through the use of reason; in this way they can perfect themselves and achieve their own ends. Black and blue fundamentally share the idea of free will and individual mastery.
At the same time, knowledge isn’t valuable for its own sake or for the good of the collective; it is valuable for the personal benefits it brings. And the course of action that promotes one’s actual interest isn’t a matter of whim; it is determined by reason. Therefore, I reject the white side of blue and the red side of black.
Of course, white and red aren’t completely opposed to blue and black. Social order is valuable insofar as it serves the needs of the individual (and society is especially for aggregating knowledge), but individuals do not exist to serve society. And emotions are not to be ignored, but they ought to be subordinated to reason and long-term goals.
Green is the one I’m completely opposed to: nature, tradition, determinism, “acceptance” of one’s place in the status quo. This is not only on a philosophical but also an emotional level: I always disliked “rugged” nature and never thought much of the “natural beauty” of the world in contrast the artificial achievements of the human mind. Of course one ought to understand the way things are, but the point is not to “accept” the natural world. Rather, the point is to conquer nature, to master it, and to direct it toward the service of oneself. Green completely reverses the order of things.
Someone said Francis Bacon was the combination of blue and white, but his most famous aphorism reflects perfectly the combination of blue and black: “knowledge is power.”
I also quite like this little passage from the article on black:
Okay, in real life I do not think that “fear, pain, threat of death” are the best ways to motivate people. But it reminds me very much of arguments from Ayn Rand / Leonard Peikoff that dictatorship and totalitarianism could never result merely from amoral and short-sighted self-interest, but in fact rely upon a large group of people willing to put “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz”. Unenlightened selfishness is bad but not really dangerous—it’s petty criminality. It’s selflessness and blind devotion to duty that’s the real danger.
And this one speaks for itself:
Other thoughts:
—M:TG predictably sets up the familiar dichotomy between white’s “sacrifice self to others” and black’s “sacrifice others to self”. But hey, it’s a game, and black’s “parasitism” is fun thematically.
—Magic is obviously…not real, but necromancy has strong parallels to things like vivisection of animals and dissection of the dead. Black-and-blue is definitely the philosophy of “body-snatching” anatomists.
—Like virtually all works in this regard, in M:TG black is presented as being solely concerned with the self but the depicted characters don’t seem very good at actually achieving long-run success. People want to say that self-interest is not only evil but not in your self-interest, which is an…interesting…position.
—They say black is not concerned with sadism for its own sake, then consistently depict it as being just like that.
—The flavor behind Dimir—the guild representing Blue and Black—is really lame: “secretive guild of plotters”, how original!
—”Reaction” is definitely a green philosophy which takes on either white or white/black flavors. That’s why I hate it so much! It is the ideology of “blood and soil”.
—”Identity politics” is also green, as is “deep ecology”. Regular environmentalism falls somewhere between blue, white, and green. The blue side wants to control and mitigate the harmful effects of nature, the green side wants to worship nature, and the white side says the government should be in charge of coordinating it all.
—Belief that coordination problems are the main source of evil in the world is white. Belief that it is irrationality and lack of independent thought is blue. Belief that it is laziness, lack of ambition, and servility is black. Belief that it is lack of respect for the natural order and discontent with one’s station is green. Belief that it is not being in touch with your feelings is
stupidred.—”Selling your soul to the devil” (a common theme for black) seems to me the epitome of red-type short-term thinking.
—The article on black portrays it as highly motivated by a belief in psychological egoism: that everyone is completely selfish anyway and they simply recognize it. But all black really has to say is that self-interest is a firmer and more dependable motive than selflessness; not that people are always completely selfish, but that they are rarely as selfless as they say they are (because they have no reason to be, when push comes to shove).
—Liliana, Defiant Necromancer is pretty cool. Edit: compare the facial expression to my avatar.
Things didn’t turn out too great for the metal world:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/24/87/1f/24871fc05efb47dc6ce4b40020072786.jpg
http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/daily/arcana/709_mortisdogs.jpg
http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/som/factionwars/hotspots/lg/131604d.jpg
http://www.artofmtg.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Lifes-Finale-Art.jpg
Yeah, the Dimir aren’t the most original take on UB. Wizards does seem to struggle to do much with that color combination. Racism and other identitarian things are definitely in green, and a WGB group in a recent set was explicitly said to get a lot of its good elements from the black mana in it, such as not excluding capable outsiders, and supporting merit over species.
The color pie really is surprisingly good for a trading card game alignment system.
—Like virtually all works in this regard, in M:TG black is presented as being solely concerned with the self but the depicted characters don’t seem very good at actually achieving long-run success.
They’ve gotten more comfortable with letting black actually succeed at stuff in recent years (Liliana Vess in particular is doing pretty well for herself). That said, going mono-black has some serious failure modes. One is that in the course of running around looking for stuff to throw out of the plane to make it go faster, you can throw out the engine by mistake. Another is that nobody trusts you.
—The flavor behind Dimir—the guild representing Blue and Black—is really lame: “secretive guild of plotters”, how original!
They did a much better job in the Innistrad sets, which were based on Gothic/monster-movie horror, and blue and black were indeed the colors of body-snatching anatomists.
—”Selling your soul to the devil” (a common theme for black) seems to me the epitome of red-type short-term thinking.
Except red NEVER sells its soul. Red’s soul bows to nobody. Its mind is not for rent to any god or government.
For black it’s not simple shortsightedness, but a calculated risk. You gotta John Constantine that shit. Like, make the kind of contract where the devil gets your soul when you die, and then make sure the devil dies before you do. (Again, Liliana Vess.) You have a plan going in but you have to assume the devil also has a plan, and if it’s faster or sneakier than yours, you lose. Which is a pretty good description of the game in general.
Well, that’s just the sort of short-run vs. long-run thinking. If you stab everyone in the back the first chance you get, you may do well at first, but then you’re worse off precisely because no one trusts you.
It’s like playing Diplomacy. If you’re the kind of guy who always stabs his allies, allies will be harder to find in future games than if you keep your agreements no matter what. Of course, that kind of metagaming is no fun where the whole point is the joy of backstabbing people…
M:TG is a game, of course, and “paranoia” is the flavor of black. But if the idea is “victory at all costs” and your typical strategy works very poorly…maybe you ought to consider “effective egoism”.
I was referring to how a “deal with the devil” is presented in the broader culture. It does make more sense in M:TG, where one can realistically hope to kill devils.
Also, I like that Lilliana Vess is an anagram of “a villainess”. Very Scott Alexandrian.
Maybe this means that drafting a lot is the equivalent of learning to keep your identity small. I can enjoy playing all colors almost equally at this point, after a concerted effort to learn the strategies of the ones I used to play less often.
This is going to be the geekiest thing I’ve ever said on SSC…
Christianity was originally Selesnya. If Roman Catholicism is Bant, it’s because of philosophical changes since the Great Schism (Scholasticism, the Jesuits, Descartes). When the philosophes turned against Christianity, Blue was the only color they consistently kept.
Islam and Hinduism both see themselves as Selesnya, I’d say.
When you look at Magic cards, the archetypes each color is typically evoking is religion and chivalry for White, evil for Black, New Age environmental woo for Green, anarchy and violence for Red. Blue iconography is harder to pin down, but has affinities with the Enlightenment/magic-as-science. If he’d found magic to be real, Francis Bacon would have been Azorius
That’s something of an unkind stereotype. Christianity has deep roots in blue. Augustine is very much Azorius, for example. Many of the Church Fathers think very blue. Christ himself ordered his followers to “be perfect”.
But the green part is what’s hard for enlightenment-types to get. They end up thinking things like “they can’t value blue, they have all these incomrehensible GREEN values!”.
While I’m definitely assuming some things about LMC here, when I contrast “original” Christianity with Catholicism, I’m talking about the pre-Council cult of ~1BC to ~100AD. How blue do you think the Apostolic Fathers were on their own?
I think part of this is that the M:TG color wheel (shockingly!) is not a universally valid typology.
Christianity has always said that you should strive to be perfect (blue) and hope for the salvation of your individual soul and the attainment of perfect happiness (black) by loving the creator and ruler of nature who made you and inherently deserves your obedience (green) and following strict moral rules (white).
But (especially) early Christianity stressed that you should achieve this mainly by faith and trust in God (which is not even really a color; it’s closest to green but is not the same as instinct). The Catholic Church gradually emphasized the necessity of strict hierarchy (white) and developed a higher view of the competence of natural reason (blue).
The Protestant Reformation said that every man ought to investigate the Bible for himself (blue, black insofar as not-white), but totally rejected natural reason—for the first century at least—and embraced complete determinism and the rejection of free will (green).
It is true that the Enlightenment totally rejected the green part of Christianity and focused hard on blue. This is seen not only in science but in politics. Previously, everyone just thought that kings were natural rulers, that having a government with a king was just “the natural order” and part of the “Great Chain of Being”. But with people like Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founders, government was something you had to justify and explain the creation of by man. “Natural rights” is arguably an element of green, but can more easily be seen as blue insofar as it’s an individualistic concept based on reason.
With people like Hobbes and Machiavelli, there’s also a strong black element of “we didn’t make people selfish; that’s just how things are.” Machiavelli is the stereotype of blackness. As such, he’s as friendly to red as he is to blue, having said such things as that fortune is a woman and therefore has to be held down and beaten (!) by young men who take the initiative rather than old men who plan.
“Unsong” is excellent (to date) and warms the cockles of my esoteric tradition dilettante heart 🙂
Not even Epiphany yet and I’ve already managed to break my new year’s resolution “I will be nicer online and not such a thundering bitch”. Apologies to all at whom I’ve snarled! I am trying but you know, circumstances.
Third time trying to put this snippet up, maybe better luck here than elsewhere.
I’ve never known why “Bronze Age” is considered such a crushing put-down; I’m perfectly happy with the Bronze Age, that’s where I get my eye colour from!
Because the bronze age was a long time ago and everybody knows that things from long ago are uniformly filthy, primitive, and useless.
/sarcasm
😛
Other things from the Bronze Age we should therefore also discard:
– Bronze (obviously)
– Writing
🙂
The wheel.
Cities.
I think we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees.
😉
@ hlynkacg
I think we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees.
I quite agree. Now, why was that, anyway?
I think we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees.
I quite agree. Now, why was that, anyway?
Because it’s in the trees, it’s coming!
@ Deiseach
I thought it was going to be that in the savannah we were the sneaker, but in the trees we were the sneakee.
Something I mentioned on LW a while back, but reposting here to get comments from SSC readers:
For every controversial subject I’ve heard of, there are always numerous very smart experts on either side. I’m curious how it is that rational non-experts come to believe one side or the other. What are your meta-arguments for going with one side or the other for any given controversial subject on which you have an opinion?
– Have you researched both sides so thoroughly that you consider yourself equal to or better than the opposing experts? If so, to what do you attribute the mistakes of your counterparts? Have you carefully considered the possibility that you are the one who’s mistaken?
– Do you think that one side is more biased the other? Why?
– Do you think that one side is more expert than the other? Why?
– Do you rely on the majority of experts? (I haven’t worked out for myself if going with a majority makes sense, so if you have arguments for / against this meta-argument then please elaborate.)
– Do you think that there are powerful arguments that simply haven’t been addressed by the other side? To what do you attribute the fact that these arguments haven’t been addressed?
– Do you have other heuristics or meta-arguments for going with one side or the other?
– Do you just remain more or less an agnostic on every controversial subject?
– Or do you perhaps admit that ultimately your beliefs are at least partially founded on non-rational reasons?
– Do you think that this whole discussion is misguided? If so, why?
I know I don’t have to list controversial subjects, but here are some to perhaps stimulate some thinking: Politics, religion, dangers from AI / x-risks, Bayesianism vs. alternatives, ethics & metaethics, pretty much everything in philosophy (at least that’s what it often seems like!), social justice issues, policy proposals of all types.
Let me give this a shot.
“Politics”
I have a degree in economics so I have a reasonable level of confidence for that field. Aside from that politics also concerns foreign policy (which I am not competent in and so don’t have too strong opinions on) and ‘moral issues’ (which are pretty blatantly not expert opinion ones).
‘religion’
Basic evidentiary requirements.
“dangers from AI / x-risks”
I’m not important enough that my opinions on those subjects matter. I do believe strong AI is possible and can be a threat, but I don’t have any opinion on when or how easy it is to control.
“Bayesianism vs. alternatives”
You mean frequentism? That requires you have enough trials to establish the probability and there aren’t rare events that you haven’t covered in said trials. As long as all coins are fair…
“ethics & metaethics”
The goals are not rationally derived, although the optimal method for achieving them is.
“pretty much everything in philosophy”
If people have been arguing about it for millennia, it tends to be a trivial issue. If it is something new, that is when I can’t provide an answer.
“social justice issues”
That covers so much that I can’t really answer it.
“policy proposals of all types.”
That is the interesting one. I assume you mean “should the state spend the additional money on x or y” and you don’t have anything else to go on. The simplest way to deal with that is to go for the one that benefits you more; if everyone else does the same thing, the course of action that benefits the most will pass. This obviously breaks down for certain cases, but I’m not aware of a better heuristic.
>I have a degree in economics so I have a reasonable level of confidence for that field. Aside from that politics also concerns foreign policy (which I am not competent in and so don’t have too strong opinions on) and ‘moral issues’ (which are pretty blatantly not expert opinion ones).
This is a very narrow view of politics. The average white middle class guy in US or EU is generally not worried about these three, these are not his biggest concerns. The major issue seems to be he is feeling more and more unsafe because of immigration and changing ethnic/racial composition of countries. Econ is not really useful in figuring it out: Bryan Caplan, famously, doesn’t even understand the problem at all, his open borders advocacy demonstrates it, the idea that a monoethnic neighborhood could have demonstrable utilitarian value (more helping each other, more trust etc.) escapes him. The elites staunch refusal to relate to this “racism” of the white peasants via anything but pure scorn is driving the Trumpening, the Lepenning, the uncuck-the-right movements etc. I would nominate this as the No. 1 issue for our times, the elites have to figure out some more nuanced answer to race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and the felt need for communities of one’s own than the usual “raycism be evil”. So this is something that would require a lot of studying and currently there is no discipline that could tackle this well. Most social science currently tackles it from precisely the opposite angle i.e. how white peasants are being oppressive, not how and why they feel distressed. While social capital is something economics could theoretically understand, see Bowling Alone, in practice it is not done.
So this is one example of a huge political issue of our time – swept under the rug of course, as all really important ones usually are – and your econ will not really help you that much there. And it is arguably far more important than moralizing about gaymarriage for example and other non-econ issues you have in mind.
“Bryan Caplan, famously, doesn’t even understand the problem at all, his open borders advocacy demonstrates it, the idea that a monoethnic neighborhood could have demonstrable utilitarian value (more helping each other, more trust etc.) escapes him.”
You just failed Caplan’s ideological Turing test. Caplan has specifically (and repeatedly) endorsed the idea of a “beautiful bubble” and the benefits of only associating with those you agree with.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html
“Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble”
Caplan’s bubble isn’t monoethnic and I doubt he could be convinced that a preference for same was anything other than misguided. Not sure you’re completely on target.
@ Marc Whipple:
He certainly would think it is misguided. But he would support their right to do it, provided they didn’t violate the rights of those who choose to associate with foreigners to do so.
@ Marc Whipple
Caplan’s bubble isn’t monoethnic, but it is highly selective in other traits, and he specifically advises that people form their own bubbles based on their own preferences to make their lives better. Quotes from the same link
“Instead, I pursue the strategy that actually works: Making my small corner of the world beautiful in my eyes.”
“If you’re not happy with your world, don’t try to pop my beautiful Bubble. Either fix your world, or get to work and make a beautiful Bubble of your own.”
The historical reality of immigration is not of foreigners moving into monoethnic neighborhoods and mingling, but of forming their own communities. The township I live in has maybe 5,000 people, and it had for decades an Italian portion, a Slavic portion and a Polish portion (each with their own church) with little overlap between them. This dynamic can be seen virtually everywhere with even “melting pots” like NYC having specific ethnic neighborhoods that for many decades were near monoethnic.
Everything you’ve posted to SSC suggests that you badly misunderstand US culture. You aren’t in any position to be correcting anyone about what the average anyone in the US is worried about.
There’s no shame in not knowing, but there is shame in insisting you do when you don’t.
Some of the time, experts are mistaken about basic facts due to politics: either those internal to the field or external national politics. If you were a geneticist before 1956 you probably would have believed that humans had 48 chromosomes because you had never bothered to count them yourself. If you were a geneticist in the USSR at that time you probably would have loudly stated your belief in Lysenko’s theories to avoid the gulgag.
In a controversial field, it can be a good rule of thumb to pick the political underdog for this reason. A bad theory needs political support to survive at all, whereas good theories will necessarily re-emerge even if initially ignored or suppressed. Of course this isn’t a perfect heuristic: going by it without humility and common sense will leave you with plenty of crackpot ideas for every correct belief that you gain.
Or do you perhaps admit that ultimately your beliefs are at least partially founded on non-rational reasons?
For a lot of the most controversial subjects (ethics, religion, social justice issues, etc) your position is going to be heavily determined by your moral views, not so much by logic. What’s the “rational” position on abortion, for example? You can’t possibly answer that question without first deciding what moral weight you place on the developing fetus, what moral weight you place on the pregnant woman’s freedom, and how/whether either of those weights is varies by the age of the pregnancy. If I discuss abortion with someone on the opposite side, it’s almost certain they disagree with me on the above moral questions – a fundamental conflict no amount of “rational argument” can solve.
True. At your level of understanding. Most people aren’t there, though. I think a lot of people would change their minds about abortion (both ways) if they actually got their facts straight.
No offense, but that doesn’t make any sense. Why would getting facts straight change their minds both ways? Are you saying that the distribution of current positions is essentially random, and the response to getting the facts straight is equally likely to flip a person one way as the other?
> Are you saying that the distribution of current positions is essentially random, and the response to getting the facts straight is equally likely to flip a person one way as the other?
The comment you’re referring to here said nothing about _equally_ likely. It simply said that there are a lot of people on both sides who are misinformed and would switch sides. Depending on the number of flippers, that could easily be consistent with (say) 10% of the flippers being on one side and 90% on the other.
This may sound unnecessarily pedantic, but I think the point of her saying “lots” was to point out that (in her opinion) it’s not a particularly rare phenomenon.
I find your logic reasonable but I still think that absent more specific statements, my reading of the original post was more reasonable. 🙂 The OP is invited, not that they need my permission, to tell us which, if either, interpretation is more in line with their intent.
I certainly agree that clarification from op would be more meaningful. That being said, it seems like an interpretation that you claim “makes no sense” would by definition be the less reasonable one.
None taken. =) I meant the comment exactly as Virbie interpreted it.
Which facts do you think most people are unaware of?
It seems to me like that abortion is one of those rare issues where there isn’t much disagreement on facts. Anyone disagree? Because I can’t think of any.?
@Wrong Species:
That depends on your definition of fact. If you limit it to “things which can be experimentally and observationally verified,” then I would agree with you. Not many people disagree on the observational parameters of gestation.
If you include things like “has a ‘functioning brain'” or ‘feels pain’ or ‘is a human being’ in that status, then I would argue that the whole argument is about the fact that people disagree about the facts.
“Is a human being” isn’t a matter of fact, it’s a matter of definition. There are minor disagreements over facts like when a fetal brain is capable of sensing pain, but the big disagreements are over which factual distinctions are to be included in the morally relevant definition of “Human Being”.
@ John Schilling:
That presupposes that definitions are not matters of fact, or (if they are not) that it is at all morally relevant whether someone fits into the apparently arbitrary definition of “human being”.
Moreover, this whole discussion presupposes that there is some deep dichotomy between matters of fact (on which reason has something to say), and matters of value (on which reason apparently has not). Now, there is a distinction between descriptive facts and evaluative facts, but they’re still both facts (or else false). It’s like the distinction between physical facts and architectural facts.
Some facts I can think of on which people disagree:
1) Does God exist?
2) Is the Christian Bible the word of God, and do the various religious authorities which condemn abortion correctly interpret it?
3) Is there an immortal, immaterial soul which is generated and joins with the body at conception?
4) Is there, in fact, a moral duty never to kill any (or any innocent?) being with such a soul? If so, what is the basis of it?
5) Is there any basis for attributing rights to children and adults, and if so what is it?
@Vox
For “Does God exist?” to be a coherent question you first have to define God, and that itself is pretty tricky, especially considering that the word seems to mean very different things to different people.
It gets extra tricky because a key component of the definition of God seems to be “transcends human reason (at least partially).”
Defining “soul” or “person” seems equally difficult. You could come up with a list of criteria for personhood and I’m sure many people have done so, but there’s inevitably going to be a lot of disagreement on that too.
I think the most general definition of God would be “some form of consciousness with meta-natural powers”.
Wrong Species, I’d think that too, but lately, I’ve been seeing a posting running around facebook (probably tumblr, too) which attacks a pro-life posting about fetal heartbeats by pointing out the difference between defining “alive” by heartbeat and by brain activity.
Then it says that there’s no fetal brain activity until 25 weeks.
Thanks for the question, Julie.
This is based on my own lack of knowledge not so long ago and on my conversations with fellow pro-choice family and friends. A lot of folks aren’t aware that you can hear the fetus’s heart beating 4 weeks after conception. Or that roughly a quarter of babies born at 23 weeks can survive. They aren’t aware of what those babies look like. Or that it’s legal to abort them in most states. Now, I’m sure people commenting here know all of those things. And even if they don’t know some of the specifics, these facts won’t change their minds, because their positions are based on a deeper understanding of the issue, as per Marc’s original comment.
When Carly Fiorina made a false statement during one of the GOP debates about the Planned Parenthood tapes showing a fetus, its legs still kicking, its heart still beating, waiting to have its organs harvested, the media was abuzz about what a liar she is. Yes, Fiorina lied. In fact, the fetus whose legs were still kicking was not the same fetus whose heart was beating, and who had its brain harvested. She got her fetuses confused. “Liar the likes of which we have never seen.” Sigh. For the longest time I couldn’t understand why people were giving her such a hard time about it. So she got the fetuses wrong. She exaggerated to sound more persuasive. (Which, interestingly, ended up backfiring very badly according to Scott Adams.) Big deal. I couldn’t understand the fury. But after talking about it to my friends, I now think I get it. Turns out many people aren’t exactly comfortable with those very human, very viable looking fetuses being aborted. So it was much easier for folks to focus on calling Fiorina a liar (thankfully, her statement wasn’t true, phew) and just forget the whole thing. Moving on. It was much easier than saying, like most of the pro-choice people commenting on this blog would, I’m sure, that “hey, yeah, we’re aware this is what fetuses look like at 20-odd weeks. We know many of them would be viable if they were born prematurely to mothers who want them. But we’re still pro-choice, because A, B and C.”
Further, many people aren’t aware that in some doctors’ offices, if a woman says she’s pregnant but not sure if she wants the baby, she’ll be given all the info about how easy the abortion procedure is, and about how the friendly doctor X she’s just met in the hallway performs it. And so that before going home to think about it she’ll be given all the reassuring information but none of the not-so-reassuring stuff. (I’m not saying this is wrong. Just saying this happens. Some people I spoke to believe this sort of thing is pure right-wing propaganda.) So then when the woman goes home and talks to her partner about it, she thinks he’s crazy for bringing up how traumatic abortions end up being for some women, and how difficult they can be for families, and that, yes, it is a big deal. That’s all right-wing propaganda made up by religious freaks who just want to control women, right?
Many pro-choicers don’t know how (psychologically) difficult it is to have an abortion or how likely a woman is to regret it because I don’t know if anyone knows these things. And we don’t know because the abortion conversation is so polarized. It’s either all good or all bad. Most of the info you get about regret is from pro-life websites and, well, they are motivated, so how trustworthy can they be. If you are pro-choice but call an abortion a tragedy, you get attacked by (some) feminists. “It’s not a tragedy. In fact, it’s not a big deal. Let’s have a coming out campaign to destigmatize abortion.” So polarized. So little room for people who think an abortion is (often) a tragedy and that a human being is in fact killed in the process, but abortion should still be legal.
Now, on the other hand, I’m sure pro-lifers don’t know many things either. To begin with, most probably don’t know God doesn’t exist, and neither does hell, so, no, you aren’t going to go to hell for having an abortion. 😉 More seriously, many probably aren’t aware of the Levitt hypothesis about how legalization of abortion may have contributed to reduction in crime. Many probably don’t know what hyperemesis gravidarum is, and what it feels like, and that a woman can be so sick she can’t keep down anything, for months, not even water, and that she’d die if it weren’t for IVs. And that when someone has hyperemesis, it’s not the constant vomiting that’s the worst, it’s that there’s never respite from the nausea. The nausea, which doesn’t go away even after she throws up. Which doesn’t go away even if she’s on anti-emetic drugs (if she’s lucky enough for them to be working.) The nausea that is so bad that it makes her depressed and suicidal. So bad that rather than suffer another week of it, she’d go through the pains of labor and a difficult birth med-free. In fact, she’d do it many, many times over if it could save her from hyperemesis. I don’t assume all pro-lifers are right-wing morons, I and understand there are valid reasons one might be pro-life. But I wish they all knew, really knew how truly soul crushing hyperemesis can be, even though no, with modern medicine available, it doesn’t put the mother’s life at risk. I wish they could all spend a day by the bed of a woman who is suffering from it. Hold her hand, talk to her, help her with the IV. I’m not saying these folks would then change their minds. But I do hope most of them would henceforth speak their views a tad more softly, and with a bit less vitriol.
Anyway, these are just a couple of examples, and, again, I’m sure they don’t apply to most of the readers of this blog.
I actually have a slight bias against a majority view of experts, which gets stronger the more ridiculed those who go against it become. I tend to think people, including experts, are pretty susceptible to social pressure. So if there is strong social pressure to adopt a particular point of view, I tend to assume that the social pressure is in significant part the cause of the popularity of that view. Conversely, what is the cause of the support for a less supported position? Maybe pig headed contrariness, but maybe the facts just support it better.
That’s not to say I think the mainstream view is always wrong – I’m confident the holocaust happened for example – but the kind of scorn that gets heaped on holocaust deniers would incline me to disbelieve it if I knew nothing else about the subject.
I was really happy to see this comment, because the exact same is true for me, and because I’m always surprised more people don’t think this way.
Nathan: I actually have a slight bias against a majority view of experts, which gets stronger the more ridiculed those who go against it become. I tend to think people, including experts, are pretty susceptible to social pressure.
Nadja: I’m always surprised more people don’t think this way.
Although in this case there’s nothing strictly contradictory, this exchange reminds me of the following quote from Bertrand Russell:
“I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others.”
(For what it’s worth, I am sympathetic to Nathan’s reasoning myself.)
(This is not a rhetorical post about the other parts of this conversation. I am solely interested in the quote. Moreover, my post below sounds snappier and more arguing-for-a-position than is intended–it’s actually just exploratory, and not just exploring “what the *other* person believes” either. Now that the unwarrantedly large preamble is done…)
When you dream and dream characters share basic characteristics with yourself, do you find that surprising?
@Nathan:
“Conversely, what is the cause of the support for a less supported position? Maybe pig headed contrariness, but maybe the facts just support it better.”
Aren’t you refuting yourself here? Your reason for supporting the idea is, essentially, pig-headed contrariness.
It isn’t just pigheaded contrariness, though. Nathan makes it clear with his social pressure argument. He’s basically noticing something about how certain people in our society behave when their views are challenged. If the reaction is to try to shame/burn at the stake/attack personally/lie, then there’s a reason to believe that perhaps that majority view is, well, somewhat “religious”/irrational in nature? Or maybe he’s not even noticing that. Maybe that’s just me. What he is saying, though, is that social pressure is often a reason people believe stuff. So that’s why we have to discount the majority of experts argument a bit. Also, “social pressure” doesn’t even begin to describe other forces at play, such as significant personal and financial rewards for those who subscribe to the “majority of experts” view.
I don’t think so. I’m just somewhat discounting opinions where I can see a bad-but-persuasive reason for people to adopt them.
Even if you apply a penalty to the expert side when certain conditions are met (e.g. opponents are ridiculed) no discount should ever get you back to zero, much less to the entire other side.
There needs to be something affirmative pushing you there.
Yes. This.
If the only reason you have to accept that a theory is correct is that lots of other people argue it is not correct, and do so vociferously, that is not evidence in favor of the theory actually being correct.
I can see a lot of potential reasons for a proposition becoming popular among experts in the first place. One of those is that the proposition is correct (or at least, the best reasonable guess), but there are plenty of other possibilities. So to me, this does discount the penalty I give to majority opinion, but in net terms I still tend to lean against the majority.
There’s a subtle difference between an expert who has done all of the work, and an expert who has learned all of the correct memes.
Most of the doctors I’ve been to, it seems, try to quickly cross reference my condition with whatever’s been in the book. Only one actually tried to understand what I was communicating to them. (He then sold me on a rather unpleasant flu shot which I was surprised to learn my insurance didn’t cover, but oh well)
It is at this point where I should be asking if there are qualifications for expertdom, or is it just a label applied liberally to whatever the important academics are speaking on the subject. or somewhere in between.
Incidentally I scrutinize the hell out of anything which is written in such a way to assume what I should be thinking. Most news is written that way, so I end up in a situation where everything is made up, and the points don’t matter. Which is perfect for me since I don’t like getting into dumb fights.
Could you clarify a bit on your strategy? As expert opinion on the truth of a proposition increases from 50-100%, does your confidence decrease from 50-0%? That seems absurd so I don’t think that’s what you mean. So do you just apply a larger penalty as the expert opinion increases? So for a 99% proposition, you would have something like a 80% confidence in a field in which you are a nonexpert? This seems like a fair strategy, but would still lead you to live your life pretty much the same as someone who did not apply any penalty. You’d just be less vehement about your beliefs. Which I guess is a good thing.
If I know nothing at all about a subject I’m never going to take a strong position one way or another. So I might go from being 50/50 on a proposition to 60/40, but never all the way to 100/0.
But if I’ve understood your two proposed models right, then the first is closer to being true. That is, additional agreement in favour of a proposition decreases my confidence in that position.
Note that I apply this only to areas where there is actual disagreement. As far as I know, for example, literally no one disagrees that the Roman Empire existed, so I’m happy assuming that to be the case.
I have heard second-hand accounts of people claiming that the Roman ruins are forgeries.
Fomenko’s New Chronology should count as denying the existence of the Roman Empire.
So since most scientists reject these ideas, you are more inclined to believe them?
Okay, I suppose I should refine my caveat. Basically my standard is among the set of opinions held on a subject by intelligent, reasonable people knowledgeable about the subject, I will tend to support the less popular ones.
Now it is possible that all dissent to a view is from people who are not intelligent or reasonable. Even among nominal experts, such people will exist. But if the level of dissent is sufficient that it seems likely to include intelligent and reasonable people, or I can be convinced that a singular example of such exists, then I will weight in favour of it.
A complication is that I don’t actually know what the level of dissent is on many subjects.
Obviously this isn’t my only heuristic for judging what to believe. For example, I trust evidentiary claims in general more than I do theoretical constructs. E.g. Someone who says “I survived the holocaust” over someone who says “the holocaust makes no sense” or someone who says “I went to the moon” over someone who says “the moon landings make no sense”.
Someone who says “I went to Mars” over someone who says “Alien abductions make no sense”?
Someone who says he faked the moon landings? Someone who says he shot JFK? (S Kubrick and EH Hunt, respectively)
Absent any other information? Absolutely. Most people who confess to crimes are in fact guilty of those crimes.
Most people who confess to dramatic crimes are not guilty of them.
What convinced me to oppose gun control is that the side in favor of gun control had some really terrible arguments, the side opposed to it was able to tear them down, and there wasn’t anything similar in the other direction.
This happens to me a lot.
Somewhat relatedly, I used to resist filtering the comments of people of opposing political beliefs out of my Facebook feed. I was trying to keep myself exposed to the other side’s arguments because, well, open-mindedness. But recently I realized that most of these arguments were so flawed that reading them had the opposite effect on me. All these bad arguments, often drenched in vitriol, made me think that if that’s the best these people can do, my side is probably right after all. So instead of keeping me open-minded, the feed was doing the opposite. After realizing this, I started filtering the stuff out. Now I get the opposing view from places like this blog. Good arguments, very few sideswipes. Works much better to keep me open minded.
Seconded. It makes it far too easy to think the other side’s arguments are stupid when you only (mostly) listen to the stupid people on the other side making them.
On the other hand, you might notice that a lot of your side’s arguments are stupid too.
One result of participating in climate arguments on Facebook is to temper my unrealistic view of how reasonable other people are.
I had to do this recently myself. The only down side is realizing how thoroughly certain friends, and they are truly that, had all but disappeared from my feed. More than compensated for by the improvement in the quality of the remaining dialogue.
Yeah, I have a number of friends I’d really like to read a #nopolitics filter of, since I’m in danger of missing actual developments I care about in their lives. But there’s a limit to how much snark and ragebait and self-congratulation I can (or should) wade through.
(My wife and I sometimes have to remind each other that they’re not at all like that in person, and that we should really make plans with [X] to remind ourselves of that fact. Social media are an odd and highly uneven magnifier.)
Though I admit I’m sort of jealous of having a bubble in which it’s possible to post weak or bad arguments to much support and minimal, easily shouted-down criticism. As someone who always feels as if he needs cites and disclaimers when presenting anything remotely controversial, it looks like a relaxing way to live.
I have the mirror image of this problem; I keep running into people presenting positions I agree with, but backed by arguments or invective so terrible that I can’t rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that give rise to them.
I find there are increasing swaths of human interaction where there’s so little sense involved that I just want to check out of the conversation.
It’s never a bad time to quote Hudson Hawk on this topic:
“Stop. Helping. Me.”
I think the world actually needs a lot more of this kind of open elitism.
I wonder if there is a generalized tendency for the internets to increase polarization by means of the following mechanism (in addition to the generally enhanced ability to keep yourself in a content bubble):
The smarter arguments for any position are usually found in more esoteric, intellectual places devoted to their discussion, rather than on Facebook, Twitter, etc., though the latter may occasionally link to the former.
The average netizen reads something like Facebook and/or Twitter and/or Youtube for purposes of socialization, and, if they are at all interested in political science and other intellectual stuff, more specialized blogs, forums, etc. aimed at people who think like them.
Hence, you get exposed to smart, sophisticated arguments for your own side and dumb, simplistic arguments for the other side–unless, of course, you seek out smart, sophisticated blogs dedicated to expounding the opposing view, but this is very uncomfortable. I, for example, have difficulty reading Jacobin for more than five minutes without wanting to break something.
Of course, it was always true that one was more likely to seek out evidence to support a view he already had, but this wasn’t necessarily further reinforced by constant bombardment of bad arguments for the opposite.
> Hence, you get exposed to smart, sophisticated arguments for your own side and dumb, simplistic arguments for the other side–unless, of course, you seek out smart, sophisticated blogs dedicated to expounding the opposing view, but this is very uncomfortable. I, for example, have difficulty reading Jacobin for more than five minutes without wanting to break something.
Does this mean that you find Jacobin smart and sophisticated but it has other flaws that make you want to break something? Do you mind if I ask what these are (I’ve had fairly little exposure to Jacobin beyond an article or two)? I definitely can relate to feeling discomfort when reading smart, sophisticated writing I disagree with, but for me wanting-to-break-something is rarely caused by sources that I think highly enough of to call smart and sophisticated.
It just inflames his passion for the revolution, comrade. Is sad time for Jacobin with no guillotine to purge the enemies of the people.
I’ve encountered the same feeling. It’s generally someone laying out a sophisticated argument that completely misses the point or dismisses values I find important (or the reverse). And if coupled with the feeling that there’s no way they’d take a response seriously, it’s especially frustrating. One way you can get there is when an objection similar but not identical to yours is made, and then successfully counterargued.
For a non-political example, I remember when Scott Aaronson had this thing about consciousness requiring radiating entropy, therefore nothing in an anti-deSitter space could be conscious because the radiation would come back eventually. Someone made a poor argument against this, which Scott answered. My more sophisticated (and, I believe, correct) counterargument pattern-matched to it, he referred to his previous counterargument, not noticing that it didn’t apply, and moved on. I’m left with nothing new to add but just telling this grand expert he didn’t pay ME ATTENTION LOOK AT ME I KNOW BETTER Blah blah or maybe instead of that I’ll just leave.
Now, substitute out this thing that doesn’t really matter with someone advocating a policy which I think hurts people I care about (possibly including me). Kiiinda awkward.
See, I think we just get better at ignoring bad arguments for our side. We’ve heard them before, and we can easily dismiss them as “those idiots who don’t represent me.”
We see our own side as varied and complex. But the other side is more nebulous. It is easy to see the other side as the extremes of all their opinions, because you don’t have that constant voice saying “don’t link this idiot to me.”
Obligatory LW warning against reversed stupidity here. Actually thinking about it, I haven’t seen any *really terrible* arguments against gun control on par with some I’ve seen in favor of it, but that might be related to living in a Blue Tribe echo chamber and seeing way more pro-gun control arguments than the reverse.
(actually, correction, it seems to me that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a really terrible argument, because a person with a gun can kill far *more* people than a person without, so I have seen at least one. On the other hand, “if guns are made criminal, only criminals will have guns” is an entirely decent argument which I mostly accept, so this makes a good example of why reversed stupidity doesn’t work.)
Also as a general thing on literally any “gun control” discussion, I feel the need to point out there’s a strong risk of getting into an affect debate, and that among other complications there’s a big space between “ban all guns altogether” and “legalize all firearms”. Unfortunately in affect debates this space just tends to get used as a weapon to hit the other side and make ones’ own side seem more reasonable. (see “at least we should ban uzis” vs. “of course no-one opposes banning uzis”)
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a terrible argument if taken to mean “because people can kill without guns, guns are harmless”. But it’s not so terrible when used to mean “because people can kill without guns, you need to reduce your estimate of gun-caused deaths by the amount that would still exist without guns”. It is common for gun control advocates to imply that the deaths caused by guns would all be nonexistent without guns; that’s a bad argument, and this is a reasonable reply.
Be warned that in my experience, basically any blue tribe person will read that argument as a claim that the substitution rate for guns is 100%; that all of the crimes that happened with guns would have still happened to the same people had a gun not been available.
If you’re talking with other people who will read it the way you mean it, that’d not be a problem, but otherwise it’s worth bewaring the potential communications issue, because these matters are bad enough without it.
JBeshir: this is why you don’t bother discussing politics with people unless you already know they are statistically literate.
However, you will find the number of incidents where a gun killed a person of its own accord to be so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Would you like “Guns don’t kill people, killers kill people?” better?
I think the strongest way you can frame that argument is that a stupid person with a gun can usually kill more people than a stupid person without a gun. (If I wanted to kill a lot of people, guns would not be involved, even though I have several including a battle rifle.) Since there are a lot of stupid people running around, some of whom can’t be trusted with string let alone guns, I am actually a bit sympathetic to that line of thought. However, I am not a big fan of group punishment nor pre-emptive punishment and I am definitely not a fan of pre-emptive group punishment at all, so the Argument To Stupid People does not carry much weight with me, whether it be applied to guns, cars, drugs, or blogs.
On another note, one thing that helps me determine which side of an “expert” debate, or even a smart-person debate, to listen to is the extent to which the debaters have bothered to learn about the details of the topic. Gun-control advocates invariably come out on the losing side of this. If you were advocating gun control (I don’t think you were, and I am not castigating you) in your post above, I’d already have no interest in what you said because you made a fundamental error in what should have been a simple example. Popehat has a very good essay on this in regard to guns: https://popehat.com/2015/12/07/talking-productively-about-guns/
For another example, someone wrote an article in the NYT the other day about why the statute of limitations should not apply to rape. Very early in the article, they demonstrated that they don’t know what it means to toll a statute of limitations, which is a fundamental concept regarding the topic. I stopped caring what their opinion of the question was at that point, because if you write a whole long op-ed about some social topic and can’t be bothered to learn basic terminology*, you are not interested in debating, or even advocating: you are signalling.
*The person was a licensed attorney, which adds a whole new level of why-should-I-take-you-seriously to the question. But even if they weren’t, the objection stands.
“I think the strongest way you can frame that argument is that a stupid person with a gun can usually kill more people than a stupid person without a gun.”
Actually the death toll for mass murderers by means is first explosives, second arson, and only third guns.
” It is common for gun control advocates to imply that the deaths caused by guns would all be nonexistent without guns; that’s a bad argument, and this is a reasonable reply.”
Alternatively, one can offer to beat them to death with a baseball bat, which will preserve them forever from any form of “gun violence.”
Statistically speaking, using a machete would be a better formal refutation.
Even couching the problem, as gun-control advocates and NPR do, as “gun violence” obscures the reality of what’s happening in unhelpful ways. At the risk of being banned for shameless self-promotion, here’s my take in a comment from a previous post.
Even couching the problem, as gun-control advocates and NPR do, as “gun violence”
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed that. And that’s in their straight news coverage, not just “The Diane ‘I don’t even pretend to be objective’ Rehm Show.”
I happen to see it the other way. I’m a natural born libertarian but kept hearing so many bad arguments against gun control that I started leaning away from that view. I’m still split between the two but I feel like the anti gun control faction has an arrogance that’s unearned.
I’ve heard plenty of dumb arguments on both sides… the biggest thing that swayed me was which side understood violence, violent encounters, and the use of guns.
The people in favor of gun control, broadly, have little experience with guns. The experts I consider most reliable in terms of gun rights tend to be firearms trainers — people who have studied violence, who know how to use guns, and who know how people respond to training with guns.
Now, these people are *incredibly* biased. But when all of the people you can find with that direct personal knowledge are biased the same direction… that reads as a clue to me, at least from *that* aspect of the issue.
Do I trust them to analyze an academic study of country or county-level trends of gun use? No, not at all. But I do trust them on the “what are the possible personal benefits of having a gun in a bad situation” which is a part of the analysis that most gun control advocates seem to have spent zero time researching.
@ Jiro
What convinced me to oppose gun control is that the side in favor of gun control had some really terrible arguments, the side opposed to it was able to tear them down, and there wasn’t anything similar in the other direction.
In some other venue it might be the opposite. Anyway, in the world there are an infinite number of stupid arguments, and of stupid people, on both sides — so the obvious win on that point is to have more gun control. The fewer guns in the hands of stupid people, the better, and the stupid pro-GC people already don’t have guns.
I am greatly saddened by how convincing I am beginning to find that argument, despite my earlier disavowal of the Argument to Stupid People. (Maybe it should be called The Argument to Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.)
Meh. Stupid people with votes cause far more damage than stupid people with guns, and we’ve officially decided we’re not even going to try and stop them. If I have to deal with the slightest possibility of President Donald Trump, you all can deal with the possibility of being shot by a drunken redneck. At least the rednecks tend to be concentrated in known danger areas.
The United States of America: An experiment in whether firmly believing that any idiot can exercise the traditional rights and responsibilities of a free man, will eventually make it so. It has outlasted all but a handful of the sovereign nations of this world, and alone sent its emissaries to another. Pretty cool, all that.
@Marc Whipple:
I think this essentially reduces to an externalities argument.
If I could trust [entity] not to produce a negative externality using [right], then said right could be unconstrained. The extent to which this is not true is the extent to which the right must be constrained in some manner.
@John Schilling:
Very little can be done with a single vote.
Quite a bit can be done with a single gun.
If very little can be done with a single vote, then very little harm is done by disenfranchising a single person. Say, the single stupidest person in the United States. By induction, we can then harmlessly disenfranchise everyone but the intellectual elite.
And at the other end, very little of national interest can be done with a single gun. For that, you need a gun and a television camera – and the gun is optional.
@John Schilling:
“If very little can be done with a single vote, then very little harm is done by disenfranchising a single person.”
Which is why the actual punishments for disenfranchising a single person are small.
“By induction, we can then harmlessly disenfranchise everyone but the intellectual elite.”
That doesn’t follow at all, for all of the reasons you know very well.
Are you really making that argument? Or are you just sort-of trolling.
You seemed to be arguing for broad and substantial gun control on the basis of one shooting that nobody had ever heard of, or on the basis of proof-by-induction, or to be simply trolling. I’m not sure which, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have to be any more specific in my response.
Also, per 18 USC 421, conspiring to deprive one single United States Citizen of the right or ability to vote is a federal felony worth a ten-year prison sentence.
@John Schilling:
I’m not arguing for gun control. All I did was point out a massive flaw in trying to use suffrage as a reference.
And you seem to have ignored the word “actual”. The number of cases where people go to prison for a single case of disenfranchisement is very low compared to the number of cases where people go to prison for a single case of misusing a gun.
“Stupid argument” doesn’t imply “stupid people”, though.
Someone in this very thread mentioned Neil Degrasse Tyson quoting the bogus statistic about being 22 times more likely to be killed by your gun than to use it on an intruder. I don’t believe Tyson is stupid. He’s just biased and latching onto whatever argument his side has.
A difference without a difference is no difference.
What’s amazing is that we have two arguments that should be similar being opposite.
By this I mean many believe somehow believe that:
1. Prohibition and incarceration for a particular item is harmful and created a huge prison industrial complex despite the majority of use being harmless or recreational (drugs) and despite having no effect on use.
2. Prohibition and incarceration for another item is needed and will not create a huge prison industrial complex, despite the majority of use being harmless or recreational (guns) and will have a strong effect on use.
It’s doubly telling when you realize that the death rates are far worse by illegal drugs than guns. Something like 13k for heroin and cocaine alone, and 11k for gun violence in 2013.
By the same measure, if I believe in gun control I feel like I should believe in drug prohibition due to the same level of harm. Yet people do not on either side.
I’m not sure if I’m seeing “the opposite” you’re referring to. In my experience most of those who oppose gun-control also oppose (or at least display ambivalence towards) the “war on drugs”. The staunchly Pro-War-On-some-Drugs but Anti-Gun-control voter or politician strikes me as an extreme outlier.
Of course that could just be a product of Libertarians being overrepresented among anti-GC advocates.
That said, I agree with you that the contradiction here is worth noting and it is largely why I oppose prohibition in general despite harboring strong Socially Conservative tendancies.
@HlynkaCG:
“In my experience most of those who oppose gun-control also oppose (or at least display ambivalence towards) the “war on drugs”.”
I think the “in my experience” is doing a great deal of work there. I would be very surprised if this were the case for the broad Republican coalition. At least since Reagan, the coalition has been largely pro-war-on-drugs and anti-GC. I think this tendency has been ramped up even further as the Republican coalition has added the “Blue Dog Democrats” and shed the Rockefeller Republicans.
What HBC said. Come home with me next Christmas and I will broaden your experience. 😉
Rural people (and the significant fraction of their suburban descendants who still like their cultural heritage) are used to having and enjoying guns. Drugs are for those crazy outgroup urban people.
Drugs are for those crazy outgroup urban people.
Says someone who’s never lived in a rural community, or does so but can’t pry themselves away from their “Andy Griffith” reruns. There’s plenty of drug use in contemporary rural America, just (mostly) different drugs than in the cities.
I assume you know this, but I think it needs to be made clear.
@ John Schilling:
Of course drugs like meth are “popular” in rural areas, but does anyone have a positive view of them, in the way some people in the cities / on the West Coast practically worship marijuana? Or even how cocaine was for a long time seen as “cool”?
My impression is that this is not the case. The prevalence of drugs like meth only makes people there have a worse view of drugs.
Indeed, a similar point could be made about guns and cities: where do most instances of gun violence occur? City people perceive guns as more of a threat.
I grew up in a rural, red (but not exclusively Red) part of a blue state. Weed was quite common. Being a stoner carried some stigma, but I got the impression that that had more to do with the culture (and the lack of moderation) than the drug per se. Meth was just becoming popular, but the stigma there was serious; “tweeker” bordered on fighting words. Hallucinogens were rare, cocaine and derivatives were rare, opiates were rare.
Marijuana, certainly, is just as popular in rural areas as it is in urban. It’s a drug which crosses tribal lines. Alcohol in the form of cheap American beer is as red as you can get.
I went to high school in an area which was red at the time (but is probably now blue). Pot was ubiquitous, cocaine was available. Meth hadn’t really gotten started yet.
1 seems right. I’m not sure how ‘we should institute a somewhat higher level of control’ qualifies as #2, though.
What is the basis for saying there is no effect on use? Prohibition led to a large reduction in alcohol consumption, and there’s a lot of evidence that cigarette taxes reduce smoking. And guns per capita does seem to relate to stringency of gun control laws. The idea that states have no power to influence ownership rates of guns, or usage rates of drugs, by affecting the cost of these activities, seems implausible.
You may be interested in this: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html
@ maware
By the same measure, if I believe in gun control I feel like I should believe in drug prohibition due to the same level of harm
The direct harm from drugs is to the user. The direct harm from guns is to others.
Taking it up a level, there’s no contradiction in “Keep the most dangerous [nouns] away from the most dangerous/at risk users.” ‘Stop the War on Drugs’ does not mean selling heroin freely to children. Making it harder for NECAR* profile under-30s to get NECAR-capable armament does not mean mass incarceration of all users etc.
* NECAR = Newtown/EliotRodger/Columbine/Aurora/Roseburg
That’s an interesting and important question. Figuring out what is true in such a context is harder than most people assume.
One approach is to look for some overlap between the arguments for either side and things where you have enough expertise to rely on your own judgement. If one side includes in its arguments bad economics or a misunderstanding of physics, that does not prove that the rest of their argument is wrong, but it’s at least grounds for suspicion.
Another is to look at how the argument is put. Real world controversies almost always have arguments on both sides. Someone who presents his side as if it’s perfectly obvious that it is right and only a fool or a villain could disagree either does not understand the issue or is lying. That is not certain, but it’s the way to bet. Someone who offers a persuasive case while acknowledging its weaknesses deserves to be taken more seriously. In practice, of course, there may be people of both sorts on both sides.
A related approach is to see how honest each side is about its own members. If it becomes clear that someone was dishonest, do those on his side acknowledge the fact, try to obscure it, or avoid the subject? There’s obviously a problem here, since each side will accuse the other of dishonesty, but sometimes you can find a clear case. I think we saw one here when a commenter accused Lomborg of dishonesty on the basis of a book attacking him and another poster provided a detailed analysis of what each side said that was strikingly inconsistent with the first commenter’s initial view of the subject. That did not prove that Lomborg is correct or even honest, but it was pretty clear evidence that his critics were not.
Another approach is to look at predictions. See what each side was saying as far back as the controversy reaches. See how their claims then fit what has happened since. If they confidently said X would happen in five years, it didn’t, and they then revised either the date or X, that’s a reason for skepticism.
I have discussions of some this, in the context of climate and nanotech, at:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/06/judging-outside-your-expertise.html
and
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-warming-nanotech-and-who-to.html
My own response, absent expert consensus that I have no reason to suspect, is to decrease my confidence, usually to levels bordering complete agnosticism, about pretty much everything that I don’t know much about. So:
Politics: complete and total apathy; no real beliefs one way or another. This might change once Open Philanthropy Project starts publishing writeups about political causes, at which point, I predict my political beliefs in the areas they write about will closely reflect said writeups and I will continue my policy of total apathy elsewhere.
Religion: I’m an apatheist (don’t care enough about God to bother with an opinion about existence). In practice, this turns into secularism unless I want to consort with religious types, at which point I fit in disturbingly well.
Dangers from AI x-risks: no strong beliefs. Again, this should change once OpenPhil starts publishing relevant writeups. I plan to check MIRI to see whether the math I understand they’re not publishing in academic journals is really good, and whether I think they’ve gained a reasonable degree of organizational competence since Holden thought about them, but that requires some amount of math and CS that I don’t already know and learning takes time.
Bayes: I’m currently learning calculus (turns out one can score a 5 on BC calc exam and A’s in multivariable calculus and differential equations without ever actually having learning calculus); once I get through chapter 7 of Apostol volume 1 (dealing with Taylor series), I intend to have at Jaynes’s book. (Is this the right prerequisite? Jaynes himself is unclear, but my understanding of this lw post’s comments is that Taylor series were a necessary and sufficient prerequisite, but I’d be happy to learn I’m wrong.) After finishing, I’ve bookmarked/toomanytabsed two criticisms of Bayesianism that should be of the highest quality, and will read them and then decide what to believe. Internally, I expect the result to come out Bayes-side up, but we’ll see.
Social justice issues: deep, deep, deep apathy. I generally trust things Scott writes, but find I have to apply a much higher degree of skepticism to his social justice posts (congratulations on going a year without a ten-thousand word rant on feminism, btw, Scott; also, after reading SSC on feminism, I have come to believe that you’re getting better at writing about it, so grats again), which is exhausting and needing to check every single fact against a third party really ruins the reading experience. I have taken this as a cautionary tale and systematically refuse to take anything approaching a position on social justice. (I am, however, happy to take positions on things that sometimes get brought up, like freedom of speech (which I tend to favor); or admissions (merit, based on a test, and if the test sucks, build a better test; if test-prep resources suck, not only am I going to look at elite school that are overflowing with really poor Asians and call bullshit, but you have a computer, you can download LaTeX, it’s free (libre and gratis), and it only takes one person to write a decent test-prep but and slap a Creative Commons license on it; or protesting during classtime (students skip class to protest is stupid; students who prevent other students’ learning, either by having classes cancelled for their protest or interrupting their study, may be expelled).)
I’m not sure the degree to which other rationalists tend towards not being political, but I think it’s the trend. As I understand it, Eliezer (who I only bring up because he’s a data point I know about) has progressively become less political over time. We have all these posts about not having strong opinions and not quite being radically skeptical and noting the tendency of looking at the other side’s evidence to create a more nuanced picture which gives their arguments some validity, resulting in a sort of policy-effect regression to the mean. We’ve been certainly been deemed postpolitical, and while some of that’s certainly preselection, I like to think that some of it’s also the result of learning useful heuristics that go something like “if they outside view suggests that, without doing hours upon hours of homework—and you have to be maximally epistemically virtuous the whole time or it doesn’t count, no matter how hard it is to constantly challenge your cherished beliefs and sometimes change them in response to evidence (Litany of Tarski is very helpful here)—you don’t won’t have opinions based on reality much better than randomly choosing them, then don’t have opinions.”
This is probably the right answer.
I don’t feel like every controversial issue has equally smart people on either side. Obviously, if we’re talking about “thing that is currently in dispute among two different factions of trained biologists,” then there are probably very smart, very competent people on either side, and I’m probably not in a position to judge so I’m going to stay agnostic.” But matters like that tend not be “controversial” because most people don’t read about intra-biology disputes.
But if we’re talking about something like evolution, which a lot of Americans still don’t believe in, then I think the pro-evolution side actually has a much better set of arguments because it’s being argued by people who know what they’re talking about. In this case, the arguments are simple enough–and there is enough normal-people level material out there, explaining both sides, for me to just read a book on each side and then decide.
“Who caused 9-11” is another controversial question (at least in certain quarters), but one where I don’t have the lay knowledge to really evaluate the relevant arguments; eg, I can’t tell a bogus claim about the melting habits of steel from a legit one. In this case, I’ve stuck so far with reputation–people whom I know to be basically trustworthy and have a good track-record of avoiding bullshit get their opinions ranked more highly than people who have a track record of being gullible or believing things that turned out to be incorrect.
So I guess for most controversies, I’d go with a combination of “Do I trust these people’s judgment?” and/or “Does this argument make sense to me after reading a respected argument from both sides?” But if it takes detailed knowledge of a field I haven’t studied, I go with “I don’t know.”
As it happens I agree that the case for evolution is much stronger than the case against, but I’m not sure how easy it is for the random lay person to tell. You read a book on each side and, if they are well written, each is convincing.
In my view, most people believe or disbelieve in evolution for the same reason–because that is what they are told by the people they trust. Very few, even in that case, could provide an adequate argument for their position.
I get very little disagreement with evolution from my conservative friends and family. The few that disagree, seem to get the most emotional about it when it’s used to talk about human evolution in particular; they appear perfectly receptive to, say, the concern over over-use of antibiotics.
As a result, I have a weak hypothesis here that support for creationism is mainly just support for the notion that humans are special and unique among lifeforms, and irritation at arguments suggesting they aren’t.
There’s History involved in the creationism issue.
Back in the late 19th and even more the early 20th Centuries, Scientific Opinion was all for eugenics. Not in the Nazi sense of killing “undesirables”, but at least in preventing them from breeding, and encouraging the Superior People to have more children.
The only real organized opposition to eugenics came from the more devout (and retrograde) sorts of Protestants. Since they weren’t generally smart enough to convincingly say “Look – Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection doesn’t require us to speed things along, (partly because all the True Scientists said that it did), they attacked Darwin’s theory instead. The Catholic Church was awfully slow to accept Darwinian evolution, but they had (and have) intellectuals of sufficient firepower to make that argument.
Anyway, both sides have mostly forgotten what that was all about. Though creationism also presents an argument against some of the “naturalist” justifications for sexual libertinism which started coming up in the 1960s (and which continue to this day. For example, almost any article with the word “Bonobo”). Since the poltical valences of the arguments were the same – the pro-eugenics side had become the pro-libertinism side, creationism persisted as a mass movement. Albeit a mass movement which requires a certain amount of crankishness, as the argument from the Literal Truth of The Bible is quite brittle, and can be defeated by astronomy or geology.
“The only real organized opposition to eugenics came from the more devout (and retrograde) sorts of Protestants.”
???
And the Catholic church.
The only real organized opposition to eugenics came from the more devout (and retrograde) sorts of Protestants. Since they weren’t generally smart enough to convincingly say “Look – Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection doesn’t require us to speed things along, (partly because all the True Scientists said that it did), they attacked Darwin’s theory instead.
Belloc’s take on why the Catholic Church was not twisted into knots about Darwin was (discounting the usual pugnacious way in which he phrased such things) that Protestantism had based itself on sola Scriptura which led to a tendency to a literalist reading, and when freethinkers leapt on Darwin’s theory as “See? The Bible is wrong in its reading!”, they had no recourse other than to attack the science and the scientist.
Whereas Catholics were quite comfortable going “Yeah, we know, it’s not meant to be taken literally as scientific description” so that attack glanced off.
If you think modern anti-theists have spoken harshly about Biblical literalists, you should read what Belloc says from Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):
Nobody* believes in evolution, at least not from the neck up. Everybody*, left and right, wants to exempt humans.
The extreme HBDers are what comes of telling people that Belief In Evolution is super-important; a few of them are going to end up believing you.
I feel weird being the first to point this out in this thread, because I thought that was pretty much the consensus view here, but maybe the purges have worked their magic.
*to a first approximation
@Jaskologist:
Evolution simply says that, over a long enough period, fitness in reproduction will become dominant.
I’m not sure why that means I don’t believe in evolution “from the neck up”. But evolution doesn’t mean that “we” get “better” at anything other than reproduction. This isn’t Heroes or some other sci-fi fantasy where “evolution” means “we are just about to become uber-beings”.
Basically, I don’t know what the heck you mean. I am happy to be corrected if I am misinterpreting what you are saying, as I suspect I am.
@HeelBearCub:
It does not require “better” to incur the wrath of the Tabula Raza. It only requires “different.” Because different will inevitably work out to different outcomes, and if those different outcomes are the result of natural selection, it means that they’re not the result of human activity, and that conclusion is unacceptable to them.
They are perfectly okay with those differing outcomes “from the neck down.” One rarely hears complaints about the lack of diversity in the NBA, marathon running, or strongman competition. Let them occur in a field which is not a “neck down” field, and all bets are off.
As noted, the anti-evolution side really only cares about human evolution; there’s no way to prove that evolution itself doesn’t happen, because we can observe simple cases of it happening with our own eyes.
Anyone who has the ability to basically understand what the theory of evolution is does not reject it on those grounds. They only reject it in the specific case of human evolution, and the arguments I have seen there are along the lines of, “Here are some bones that got miscategorized/misdated” or “here are some stone tools that are in rock layers that are way too old for stone tools.”
Since I’m probably not going to go dig up the original papers about Piltdown Man or how they figured out Lucy’s age, this is where trust kicks in; do I really think the majority of people in paleoanthropology (and science in general) are either completely misinformed about crucial facts related to their fields and/or lying to us? Or do I think that people who haven’t devoted their lives to studying paleoanthropology might have missed something?
It may help, though, that I know a lot of people in science and know they’re trustworthy. I suspect that a lot of people don’t have any concrete grasp of how science works. I don’t know if this is a problem that can be rectified by simply learning about how science works, or if it’s a fundamental personality issue that some people just don’t think in sciency ways.
(Okay, i lied, i would totally dig up those papers. But I didn’t dig them up back when reading about the subject for the first time back in highschool.)
What evidence do you have that MOST people think in “science-y” ways? Given the Scientific Method was not formalized and did not receive wide acceptance until relatively recently, I would strongly believe that MOST people do NOT think in a way that is “science-y.”
I think this might be the more relevant part:
The Enlightenment, for lack of a better descriptor, is a social force and slowly works its way through more of the global culture.
HOWEVER:
This still doesn’t help resolve knowledge claims for those interested in delving deeper into fields, and doesn’t help much at all with certain political questions.
Why should I trust Elizabeth Warren more than Dick Fuld on the proper regulation of investment banks?
> the anti-evolution side really only cares about human evolution
Alternatively, perhaps some of them agree that, given a population with diverse traits, the ones that are fittest will be most likely to survive and reproduce, but disagree that random events produced the diverse traits in the first place.
That’s really the crux of the issue. I accept the validity of evolution but could not defend it at anything beyond a freshman high school class.
My “knowledge,” to whatever extent it actually exists, consists of received wisdom from elites who may very well lie to me on an hourly basis.
Can’t really operate a society of hundreds of millions of people in any other fashion, I suspect.
This is an important point that is broadly true of even fairly uncontroversial topics. Very few people (including me!) could write out a valid mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem. But I’m not aware of any Pythagorean truthers out there. We are told as little children that a^2 + b^2 = c^2, and we accept it. Perhaps the very inquisitive once glanced at a proof, but they almost certainly don’t remember the details. You are far more credulous than you should be. I think.
What would Timecube guy say about the Pythagorean theorem?
You might not be able to write it out now, but a proof of it is usually provided not later than high-school geometry. You are not taking anybody’s word for it.
(Heck, *I* would have to think hard to work out the proof, and I have a degree in math. The only Big Proof I have permanently memorized is the proof of the infinitude of primes, because one of my math professors swore he would jump up at our graduation and ask us to prove it, and if we couldn’t he would rescind our grades. I memorized it just in case I saw him that day so I could recite it.)
On the Pythagorean theorem:
My guess is that most high school students who have been exposed to the classical proof did not follow it closely enough to have a justified belief that it’s true.
There is, however, a much simpler proof (square within a square) that I could readily reproduce and that a reasonably intelligent high school student paying attention should be able to follow adequately.
I found this wonderful page with dozens of proofs: http://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/
The first few will make anyone’s eyes glaze over, but some of them are intuitive and involve remembering just one thing (followed by some simple derivation from there).
>But I’m not aware of any Pythagorean truthers out there.
Probably because:
– it is a math equation, which is boring,
– it is not politically charged, which makes it even more boring,
– you can easily show that it is true for arbitrary inputs with just a pencil and paper, unlike many controversial issues.
I disagree. It’s not that hard to get a decently smart kid to understand what’s wrong with the “evidence” for creationism. It has basically no explanatory power and so many holes that any layman can see. A simple Wikipedia read through is all that’s needed. Just look up “human evolution” and look at all the bones of the various homo species. It takes a great deal of ideological contortionism to see that as anything but strong evidence for human evolution.
A simple read-through of the Wikipedia article would prepare one wonderfully to defend the fact that there’s a Wikipedia article which makes evolution seem pretty open and shut. However, I’m not sure that answers Dr. Friedman’s assertion adequately. IMO it sort of supports it. 🙂
Why should I trust Wikipedia?
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2012/01/18/145338804/why-do-so-many-have-trouble-with-evolution
Almost half of college graduates do not accept evolution!
Even a quarter of post-grads do not accept evolution!
Are these people not decently smart?
This is in part an issue of identity politics, which is why the blog author has no problem stating:
Wonderful causal explanation.
Wait, what was that evidence?
Yeah, okay, I renounce my beliefs in evolution and proclaim my belief in FSM, because I just don’t like this author.
@beta guy
My point wasn’t that smart people can’t be creationist. It was that basic evolutionary concepts are pretty easy to understand. You don’t really need any technical information to understand the debate. Compare that to climate science where there are all these complicated models and reports that are hundreds of pages in length.
Based on my high school experience with genetics 101, the average person cannot understand how evolution works without extreme efforts made to pound it into their heads. At best, you can make them understand it as “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, but all that stuff about random mutation (popularly perceived as getting superpowers from radiation, rather than cancer), adaptation (popularly something like mutated Lamarckism) and speciation (which is fairly mystifying even to me) is going to get lost along the way.
My mistake, Wrong Species. I absolutely agree with you. Most people above a certain IQ threshold can intuitively understand evolution, same as economics, although some concepts need to be rehearsed and pounded repeatedly for the concept to REALLY stew.
My point is that most people do not embrace this “pounding,” so no one really embraces the theory either. For me and economics, this means most of my business classmates thought rent control was a great idea by senior year, far more than you’d expect for people who all took Econ 101 and are business majors.
What’s happening is that people don’t really hold this idea, IMO, and are just evaluating the credibility of different sources with only a superficial review of the ideas.
IE: If I said “rent control” is a public good because XYZ, most of my senior year business students do not actually remember enough of their economics to evaluate this claim at any real level.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have a suggestion for a place where I can find potentially compelling (or at least well written) arguments against evolution?
Evolution (and homeopathy) are the examples I always give when someone claims that people need to be able to understand their opponents’ good arguments.
Not everything has a good argument.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have a suggestion for a place where I can find potentially compelling (or at least well written) arguments against evolution?
The book Debating Design, ed. Dembski and Ruse, contains essays defending a variety of perspectives on creation and evolution. The Intelligent Design essayists in the book — William Dembski, Walter Bradley, Michael Behe, and Stephen Meyer — reject the consensus view of evolution to varying degrees.
I haven’t read it, but you might also try Three Views on Creation and Evolution. I’ve read some other stuff by one of the Young Earth Creationist co-authors, John Mark Reynolds, and enjoyed it, although it was on culture and had nothing to do with biology.
(I accept theistic evolution and do not find the creationist or Intelligent Design arguments in biology I’ve encountered persuasive, although I do endorse what some would call Intelligent Design arguments about the fine-tuning of physics.)
@David Friedman:
You really think the case against evolution is convincing? Is that what you just said?
Or, are you making the argument that most people are too uneducated/unsophisticated/illogical/something to realize the case against evolution is not convincing?
I am arguing that most people have not followed either the arguments for or the arguments against carefully enough to justify their view.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of the population didn’t clearly understand what the substance of the theory was. GKC, a very bright man, apparently thought that the essential idea was gradual change–I could see no evidence in The Everlasting Man (a fun read, attacking both evolution and comparative religion) that he understood the Darwinian mechanism.
I expect many, perhaps most, people could persuade themselves that the case against evolution was weak if they paid sufficient attention to the argument–but why should they? It’s much less trouble to simply believe whatever the authorities they trust tell them and congratulate themselves for their adherence to scientific (or religious) truth. It isn’t as if an incorrect belief on the subject is likely to affect any important decisions they make.
@David Friedman:
This –
“You read a book on each side and, if they are well written, each is convincing.”
and this –
“I am arguing that most people have not followed either the arguments for or the arguments against carefully enough to justify their view.”
seem to be very different statements.
They’re not. Reading a well-written book that proposes Lysenkoism, and accepting it as fact because it “seems legit” is not the same thing as investigating the various propositions, comparing them with data and seeing which is a best fit.
@anonymous:
The second statement says, roughly, that they aren’t reading both books. Or perhaps either book.
But even for the layman, reading any current book on evolution will show the great big holes in the current arguments against it.
Sure, most people aren’t reading the books. But in a thread that is about “how do you decide between opposite sides of the debate” it seems weird to say that the argument against evolution is a convincing one. That’s not a statement about most people’s source of knowledge.
This is a hard one.
I suppose that I am more likely to be willing to go against experts the more “soft” a subject is. This is due to the fact that my educational background is in the humanities (not really the “arts” humanities, though)and to a lesser extent the social sciences: I am better able to pick holes in something in the field of, say, history or sociology, than I am in physics or biology. Additionally, the softer something is, generally the more influenced by outside society something is. There are, of course, exceptions. Here I may of course be wrong, and am just less aware of institutional dogmas in the hard sciences.
There are some fields, primarily in the social sciences, where the experts often seem to be doing something that is very much like theology: they have constructed systems that are internally coherent and consistent, but that do not line up with the outside world very well. At this point, it becomes reasonable to disagree with the experts without being an expert, just as it is reasonable to disagree with theologians without becoming a theologian.
Additionally, I’m more willing to have an opinion contrary to the experts on things where day-to-day experience is more reliable. For instance, I’d be more willing to contradict nutritionists about how to lose weight than climate scientists about the causes of climate change.
However, this is all ideal. My personal biases, emotions, self-interest, etc all presumably come into play.
An interesting excersie can be to argue a position from facts given by the opposite side. This doesn’t work too well in some cases (religion, etc.), but can give some interesting results in more factual/outcome based debates.
I tend to scale things down, and think of a meeting of intelligent people where everyone is asked to determine and then put forward their perspective and position on a matter which requires a judgement or response of some sort. The ultimate goal being to come to a consensus about what that judgement should be.
If you’re in such a meeting, you want to try to get information, think on your own, and then report back with an argument for a certain judgement, and you’ll often want to do this on the basis of your particular best areas of expertise. And this holds even if you think other people’s opinions are likely to be more accurate than yours, or your area of expertise is not the most important one.
And then you want to attend the meeting, and present your arguments to the pool, even if you expect them to be worse than other people’s, I think. Everyone putting forward their inside views enables everyone else to react to those inside views and change their own, and this I think works better than everyone just deferring to whoever, from an outside view, would be expected to be best.
I think society works a lot like this, on a much larger and messier scale. Where questions of fact are controversial I’d expect confidence to usually be wrong, and am willing to bite the bullet on the idea that policy should be made accordingly.
I think it is nevertheless valuable to put out your inside view- your own little effort to filter for truth before adjusting for others’ opinions- so that it can inform other people, though. Just advisable to act on the outside view. It would be better if people could conduct this process more respectfully.
An important proviso: I think it is necessary to use prediction markets/bet exchanges as the measure of controversy to determine your outside view, or failing that what you’d *expect* a prediction market/bet exchange to do if one were possible. Polls of popular opinion have all kinds of complicated social/tribal crap going on and are very dubious as a measure of belief-that-actually-anticipates-experience. This means in some cases of disputes over fact, where I’d expect one side to be willing to bet almost arbitrarily huge amounts, confident they’re ripping off the other, and the other side to be averse to actually betting, I feel justified in having my “outside view” opinion align very solidly with the side I think would actually expect to make money betting on their position.
I think public policy is more complicated, because the questions of fact it is over are only a little the ones actually talked about and are much more questions over what broad concerns would be best to give attention to, belief which isn’t actually belief-as-anticipation abounds, and that’s before you even start to consider coalition building for both benign and malign purposes, revealed preferences for silly discounting rates, and probably a lot of other complicating factors.
“I think public policy is more complicated, because the questions of fact it is over are only a little the ones actually talked about and are much more questions over what broad concerns would be best to give attention to”
That’s how it is often presented, but I don’t think it’s usually true. The big disagreements are usually over what policies have what consequences.
Consider the minimum wage question. Supporters of a large increase like to see it as “are you for or against poor people getting a decent wage.” But the fundamental argument against the increase is that it hurts poor people. That may or may not be correct, but it has nothing to do with “what broad concerns would be best to give attention to.”
Similarly for health care, where each side believes its preferred policies produce more health for less money, drug laws, and lots of other issues.
Or consider the invasion of Iraq. If the opponents had agreed with the supporters’ view that a little violence now would produce democracy and freedom in the Middle East, most would have been for it. If the supporters had correctly anticipated what actually happened, I doubt very many of them would have been.
There certainly are big disagreements over consequences, but I think it mostly goes “concern -> support for thing affiliated with concern -> arguments that thing probably works” rather than “believes thing probably works -> support for thing -> hey I notice this broad concern is neglected” for the majority of people- at least once they’ve already arrived at a favourite concern and they have their hammer and are only looking for nails.
Said hammer might be insufficient empathy for the needy, or insufficient pressure to stand for yourself, or insufficient respect for traditional ways of doing things and thinking, or insufficient attention to systemic effects of things, or excessive involvement in other people’s lives, or some such thing. Minimum wage got affiliated, and then the affiliation chose belief.
I do think belief-that-anticipates is still involved, and tends to determine actual long-term retention of a policy, but it is a lot messier and I’d be very wary of trying to trust an outside view when social and tribal crap is dominating.
That was a very useful reframing of the problem/question.
If I remember correctly, the following article by Helen De Cruz makes similar points to some of what you’re saying: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~some3056/docs/DeCruz_DeSmedt_2013_SHPS.pdf
You’re basically asking for a general procedure for epistemic rationality. That’s hard to produce; Eliezer wrote half a million words on it and I’m not sure he entirely succeeded. I’m pretty sure “least astonishment” is at the root of the solution, but it’s quite hard to figure out what to be astonished by, or to apply the heuristics you come up with consistently.
That said, there are some heuristics I use:
– Are both bodies of theory taking into account basic economic, social, or (sometimes) physical rules of thumb? For example: thermodynamics, or supply and demand. Special cases do exist, but they’re special: I’m much less skeptical of a theory that says a well-known heuristic doesn’t apply in certain cases for such-and-such a reason than of one that ignores it or glosses it over.
– As a special case, does one theory have people frequently making irrational choices (in an extended economic sense), in contexts where e.g. temporal discounting doesn’t apply and where they should be aware of the irrationality? In particular, does it require something like a conspiracy? Group selectionism and its relatives are the usual culprits here, but note that conspiracy can be hard to distinguish from Molochian incentives.
– Does one camp of experts seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time on policy implications? Be careful here, though: the press loves jumping to conclusions, and pretty often the coverage of a theory says things the theory itself doesn’t.
– In the case of ethics and related fields, how malicious, prejudicical, or hateful does the theory require people to be? Does it have a “Those Fuckers” without offering proportional, well-rooted explanations?
– Is there an obvious generation gap between experts? It doesn’t necessarily make either side right if there is, but it does make at least one side more likely to be driven by intellectual fashion rather than anything more rigorous.
– Is one theory unique to a relatively small demographic group? Size and isolation are important here; Europe, America, and China are big places with relatively isolated academic traditions, so theories unique to them might be right. A theory unique to Mormons is probably wrong.
– If the theory derives almost all its conclusions by extrapolating from reasonable-sounding but highly abstract axioms, what’s the ratio of empirical confirmations to special pleading? Doesn’t apply to mathematics, does apply to most things.
One way you can try to form an opinion is by finding arguments you can evaluate for yourself that you are reasonably confident are bogus and seeing how other people on that side of the debate treat them. I have discussed before the case of Cook et. al. 2013, which involves actual dishonesty. Possibly more interesting is a case where, so far as I know, the authors of two articles said nothing that was not true, but a careful read makes it clear that the articles were intended to persuade readers of something almost the precise opposite of the truth, and to do so for ideological reasons—to counter a true argument by the other side.
The issue is the effect of increased CO2 on the yield of agricultural crops. It’s been known for a long time that high CO2 increases yield by quite a lot for C3 plants, which most crops are, by less for C4—the difference being in the mechanism for photosynthesis used by different plants.
This presents a problem for people who want to argue that AGW will lead to food shortages. The solution to that problem appeared in two articles claiming that increased CO2 made some crops, in particular grain, less nutritious. I had a blog post on one of them, with links, and a comment on that post pointed out the other. The list of authors of the two is not identical but has a close overlap.
The articles ignore the effect of CO2 on total yield and focus on the effect on the concentration of nutrients–the amount of the nutrient in a fixed amount of the crop. They found that for two nutrients, zinc and iron, the concentration is lower in grain grown under a high CO2 concentration. The title of one article is “Increasing CO2 Threatens Human Nutrition.”
Combining their results with the results of published articles on the effect of CO2 on crop yield, the net effect of doubling CO2 is, roughly speaking, to increase the carbohydrate yield from a given acreage of grain by 30%, increase the zinc yield by 21%, increase the iron yield by 25%, increase eight other minerals in wheat by about 30%, increase protein by 24%. They report this as “threatens human nutrition” because they do their calculations assuming that people eat the same number of calories of the same crops as before, hence get less zinc and iron.
As in my previous case, anyone who wants can check my claims. The first comment on my blog post has links to lots of articles giving the overall effect on yield, or you can find those for yourself with a little googling–the subject has been studied for decades, since increased CO2 is routinely used in greenhouses to increase yield. Another comment gives the link to the second paper. I quote a bit from it making it explicit that they are holding constant the number of calories of each crop people consume, thus eliminating the entire effect of the increase in total yield. My post is at:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-lie-while-telling-truth-part-ii.html
What is the relevance of this case to the overall climate argument? Obviously it does not demonstrate that AGW is false–and I don’t think it is. But the fact that people find it necessary to make a deliberately dishonest argument in order to obscure one of the positive effects of AGW is evidence that the argument for net negative effects is weaker than they pretend. The fact that the dishonest argument is picked up and echoed in the popular literature on the dangers of AGW is evidence that that popular literature is either dishonest or incompetent, hence ought not to be trusted. The views of most people who regard AGW as a terrible threat are based on that popular literature. That does not prove that AGW is not a terrible threat, but it is a good reason to reduce one’s confidence that it is.
For another example of the same pattern, consider my blog post examining a piece in the New York Review of Books by William Nordhaus, an economist who has done a lot of work on the effects of warming. It was written to respond to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that argued that AGW was not a crisis requiring immediate action. In it Nordhaus gives his estimate of the net cost of waiting fifty years to do anything about AGW, relative to the alternative of taking the optimal action immediately. He gives it as $4.1 trillion dollars, and comments that “wars have been started over smaller sums.”
The cost would, of course, be spread out over the world and a long period of time. Assuming he is including costs only for the rest of the century, $4.1 trillion dollars corresponds to a reduction of annual world GNP by about .06%. And this figure is given in order to argue that AGW is a crisis that requires immediate action.
That does not prove that AGW is not such a crisis—Nordhaus’ estimate might be wrong. But the fact that, writing in a high profile publication, he presents his results in the way he does is a good reason to distrust the literature arguing for crisis. It is also a good reason distrust Nordhaus’ claim that there is no incentive for academics to bias their work on the subject, since he has quite obviously biased the presentation of his own work.
The relevant blog post is:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
All of these are reasons to distrust the literature on one side of the argument. There may, for all I know, be equally good reasons to distrust the literature on the other side. They should, like my two, be cases where you can convince yourself with reasonable confidence, on the basis of publicly available information that you can check, that work is bogus—it isn’t enough to find work that people on your side say is bogus, as was illustrated in the exchange over Lomborg here a week or so ago. Tthey should be cases where the work is being done by reasonably high profile sources, treated with respect by other people on that side of the argument.
Suppose you find examples that meet that criterion. Your conclusion should then be to lower your confidence in both sides of the argument, to conclude that we do not know whether AGW poses a serious threat or not.
One further comment … . Looking for arguments that you can evaluate for yourself and doing your best to make sense of them is a lot more fun than the debate by dueling authorities/peer reviewed articles that largely dominates the climate argument and, I suspect, many others. Also more educational.
Speaking as a fairly strong climate sceptic, allow me to offer an example from my own side of the debate. Lord Christopher Monckton, a populariser of sceptical science though not a scientist himself, likes to describe himself as a member of the House of Lords. The clerk of the House of Lords wrote an open letter saying he wasn’t and could he please stop saying he was.
When confronted on this point by the media, I saw him produce his passport as proof, demonstrating that it described him as a Lord.
“The clerk says I’m not, my passport says I am,” he declared, obviously and deliberately conflating the concepts of “Lord” and “member of the House of Lords”.
I spoke to him privately following this, and he explained that he actually thinks that legally he is entitled to sit in the House of Lords and explained why he thought it was so. I’m no lawyer so I’m not going to attempt to repeat his argument here but it centered on the letters patent received by his family never being revoked. He thought he could win a case in court on the subject but was unwilling to commit to that expense.
I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, but either way he demonstrated that he was willing to make a misleading and dishonest argument in support of a position he believed to be true. So accordingly I recommend that people apply a decent helping of scepticism to things he says.
I have been thinking about why my response to the controversy over evolution is different from my response to the climate controversy. In each case, one side claims that all of the informed opinion supports it. In the climate case, I view that as in part based on the deliberate confusion of two different claims—that AGW is real and that it is a serious threat. Reports of how many people “support the consensus” test belief in the former claim but get used to imply similar agreement on the latter. And in part, I see it as reflecting blue tribe dominance of the institutions whose views get reported and the media that report them.
My view of that controversy is the result of having spent a good deal of time looking into the climate debate. I have made no such effort in the case of evolution. If an intelligent and persuasive creationist told me that a similar pattern explained the appearance of scientific consensus over that controversy, I would have no adequate rebuttal. So why do I accept the orthodox view on evolution but not on climate?
The answer is not the evidence—I have only a casual layman’s knowledge of that. The answer is the internal logic of Darwinian evolution, which I can check inside my own head. It provides an elegant and internally consistent explanation for the appearance of design in living organisms.
That does not prove it is the correct explanation. If I was confident that the world was the creation of a benevolent and omnipotent God, that would provide a reasonably plausible alternative. To reject it I would have to look at the evidence for evolution more carefully than I in fact have.
But the best argument I know for the existence of a creator god is the watchmaker argument, that the existence of intricately designed organisms implies the existence of an extraordinarily able designer. Evolution provides an alternative explanation, so eliminates that argument. In its absence I see no good reason to believe in a creator god. Absent that belief, I have no argument for creationism, a plausible argument although not a proof for evolution. Hence I prefer the latter theory.
If I ever encounter a sufficiently persuasive creationist I might want to put more time and energy into checking my impression that the evidence supports evolution, not only the fossil evidence, which can probably be explained away by a sufficiently well designed version of creationism, but the evidence from actual design. There seem to be a lot of features of organisms that fit the evolution story reasonably well, the creation story poorly. But I have not in fact looked into the evidence with any care or subjected it to criticism by someone on the other side.
There is one further element which I am tempted to describe as aesthetic. Darwinian evolution is an elegant theory, a pretty theory. I like seeing the world in terms of elegant theories. That’s probably one of the reasons why economics, which shares a good deal of the logical structure of evolutionary biology, also appeals to me.
Because you were skeptical of AGW, you looked closely into the claims in favor of it.
You compare this to your belief in evolution, which you were not (or, were less) skeptical of because it made logical sense to you, and so you didn’t look as closely into claims in favor of evolution as you made into claims in favor of AGW.
But for this to be a symmetrical comparison, wouldn’t there have had to be a preexisting alternative to AGW that struck you as logical, causing you to dismiss the more seemingly far-fetched AGW claims? Instead it seems like you investigated AGW claims and then came to your own conclusions, and only THEN discovered who already agreed with you.
To make the comparison more symmetrical, you’d have to look as closely into creationist claims (from a Jewish perspective, perhaps?) as you did into AGW.
(That’s exactly what I did, by the way, and my conclusion was that the creationism vs. evolution debate has been misframed, and that creationism–defined as “the portion of Genesis describing the creation of the world”–is perfectly compatible with evolution or any other well-regarded scientific theory, because they don’t actually compete on the same plane.)
In the climate case, you need to distinguish AGW from CAGW. AGW struck me as a priori plausible, given the mechanism of the greenhouse effect and the quite substantial increase in CO2 concentration with an obvious cause in human use of fossil fuels. So I never looked very carefully at the various claims that the temperature data were fake or the AGW claim for some other reason false. I regard AGW is a probably but not certainly true theory.
But CAGW, the claim that warming on the scale suggested by AGW would have large net negative effects, did not strike me as plausible, although not as impossible. As I usually put it, the current climate was not designed for us nor we for it and humans currently prosper across a range of climates much larger than the projected change. Insofar as I had an opinion based on the logic of the theory, CAGW struck me as probably wrong. Hence I had an incentive to look critically at arguments for it. Some of the results I’ve described already.
On your second point … . A possible theory, and one that would be attractive if I believed in a creator god, is that he created the world with Darwinian evolution as the mechanism for developing organisms. That would be consistent with both theism and all the evidence for evolution. But that isn’t what “creationism” is usually taken to mean.
In the climate case, you need to distinguish AGW from CAGW. AGW struck me as a priori plausible, given the mechanism of the greenhouse effect and the quite substantial increase in CO2 concentration with an obvious cause in human use of fossil fuels. So I never looked very carefully at the various claims that the temperature data were fake or the AGW claim for some other reason false. I regard AGW is a probably but not certainly true theory.
But CAGW, the claim that warming on the scale suggested by AGW would have large net negative effects, did not strike me as plausible, although not as impossible.
Your CAGW depends on how far in the future you set your net and whether you count the dis-utiities of AWG in the meantime (and assume that the obvious negative effects will ever be outweighed and unknown unknowns wlll not turn up).
“Your CAGW depends on how far in the future you set your net”
True.
When I wrote Future Imperfect, which is about possible technological revolutions and the issues they raise, I mostly limited myself to about thirty years in the future, on the grounds that things got too uncertain thereafter, largely due to technological change. I think basing decisions now on guesses about what will be happening a century from now almost never makes sense. The one possible exception that occurs to me is the threat of asteroid strikes, since we can actually calculate orbits out for centuries, and I’m not confident that we will have the ability to deflect an asteroid a century from now, although we might.
So most of my analysis of CAGW is limited to the rest of this century and I think even the far end of that is pretty iffy. Nordhaus, who is one of the main people who has worked on the net consequences, comments somewhere that none of his estimates after (I think) 2050 are worth much.
If I believed that our current civilization was static, that things in most non-climate respects would be about the same a century from now, I would be more willing to take very long run effects seriously. I think a lot of people implicitly make that assumption–and shouldn’t.
@ David Friedman
So most of my analysis of CAGW is limited to the rest of this century and I think even the far end of that is pretty iffy.
Hm? But your large positive of Siberia growing warmer climate crops would take much longer than that (assuming it ever worked, with the difference in soil, rainfall, etc). The dis-utilities are beginning already. Eighty years (or even 100) would not heal the social disruptions (even if the warmer Siberia could in theory physically support the refugees from the becoming-too-warm, and/or flooded out, areas).
Oops, you’re right, I meant CAGW.
Re. my second point, you’re still treating them as being on the same plane, though it’s true that I’m probably defining “creationism” differently than those who are caught up in the “creationism vs. evolution” debate. But that’s my point: the whole debate is misframed, and I see it therefore as a non-issue.
@houseboatonstyx:
I would expect the cultivable area to expand gradually towards the pole, and the increase in usable area from that, as best I can estimate it, is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the (also gradual) decrease due to sea level rise.
For one piece on the usability of land currently at the northern edge, see:
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/livestock/beef/news/info_vbn0713a4.htm
“The dis-utilities are beginning already. ”
The IPCC seems to have a hard time finding them. Their latest report retracted the claim of a link between AGW and drought. Hurricanes don’t seem to have been more common than in the past. They do more damage because there is more coastal property for them to damage. The extinction claim has been watered down to a few species (out of millions) plus the warning that climate change in the past has sometimes led to extinctions.
And the increase in CO2 so far should have pushed up the yield of C3 crops by ten or twenty percent, as well contributing to a general greening of the globe.
What substantial, measurable, disutility were you thinking of? There have been some increases in heat waves–but also decreases in very cold winters.
@ David Friedman
Their latest report retracted the claim of a link between AGW and drought.
All drought worldwide, over the last how many years?
@Houseboat:
“An assessment of the observational evidence indicates that the AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in hydrological droughts since the 1970s are no longer supported. … we conclude there is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land since the mid-20th century to human influence.”
AR5 Chapter 10 second draft. I haven’t actually checked to make sure it’s in the final draft.
[current costs of warming]
I remember seeing graphs of losses from natural disasters normalised to some year dollars as estimated by a reinsurance company floating around, but I haven’t been able to dig it up. I have found this report, which appears to be from a banking organisation (“Established on 17 May 1930, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the world’s oldest international financial organisation. The BIS has 60 member central banks, representing countries from around the world that together make up about 95% of world GDP.”).
Contains this text:
Any trend in losses is somewhat unclear in the graphs (which are normalised to 2011 dollars, I think that mitigates the ‘we’re losing more because we’re richer’ argument), they’re very noisy (hurricane katrina is very visible, as is what I assume is this earthquake) and presented as bar graphs. Trend in frequency of meterological disasters is pretty clearly significant. Speculate, conclude, and/or find better data as you will.
Picone:
Adjusting for inflation is not nearly sufficient. The trouble is that as humanity gets richer, more populous, and more clever at building stuff, there is more stuff for storms to destroy. New housing developments are regularly built near beaches, in low-lying flood-prone areas or up on cliffs that can slide down the hill. When some area goes from NO houses to a dozen or a hundred houses, the growth in how much damage a really bad storm there can do grows by quite a lot more than the rate of inflation.
@Glen Raphael:
Ah, right, yes. I was about to post something about how I thought that’s what inflation was, and then something clicked and I realised that that would imply that we had as much wealth in 5000 BC as we do today, corrected for inflation, which is obvious nonsense. I guess to the first order normalising against gross world product would do the trick? I don’t know, I don’t really have any knowledge of economics. (‘Clearly’, you think to yourself), I was mostly pointing towards useful data rather than making an argument here.
Also we’d need data on spend on adaptation measures, I imagine. If losses from weather events are stable (suitably normalised) but spend on, iunno, dikes (suitably normalised) is trending upwards than the economic burden of weather stuff is increasing.
“I remember seeing graphs of losses from natural disasters normalised to some year dollars as estimated by a reinsurance company floating around, but I haven’t been able to dig it up.”
MunichRe, perhaps?
There is a graph of theirs of number of weather catastrophes sometimes posted as evidence of the effect of AGW. Taken that way, it’s clearly unbelievable, since it shows total number of disasters more than doubling over a period when global temperature rose by about half a degree.
If you check back to the source, it turns out it is only showing catastrophes for which there was an insurance payout, so is largely reflecting the increase in insurance coverage over the period.
I don’t remember if they also have the graph you describe but it wouldn’t surprise me. You would again have to check on whether it is limited to insured losses.
It’s pretty hard to avoid going with the majority of experts, that’s more or less what’ happening when you get medical treatment, and so on.
For most fields there’s a level of understanding that allows for evaluating some claims while still being weaker than the level of expertise actual experts have. Getting to that point takes effort, of course, but for some fields it’s worth it. Examples: Only very minor understanding of physics is required to sport blatant violations of the second law of thermodynamics, and if you spot one it’s a definite ‘bang you’re dead’ moment. Similarly you don’t need much expertise to know that conservation of momentum is probably not going to be overturned very soon. You can be rationally skeptical of the Cannae drive despite all the excitement and people who’ve studied more physics than me looking at it, because reactionless drives break a lot of the rules. I haven’t studied formal logic in anything like the detail Alvin Plantinga has, but his modal form of the ontological argument is very obviously a semantic game if you develop any understanding of modal logic.
Another strategy is to look for crank magnetism. Some false beliefs have a weird habit of clustering. People who think the moon landings were faked, for example, are much more likely to have some JFK conspiracy theory as well. There’s a whole cluster of mystical/woo stuff that tends to occur together; if you know nothing about Reiki but discover it’s closely associated with homeopathy and antivax stuff that’s a strong signal that there’s nothing there.
Is anyone an open source developer? Any projects you’d like to share?
I guess since I added support for fish (the Friendly Interactive SHell) to ROS. ROS is a pretty cool project if you’re looking for something to get involved with and robots are your cup of tea. Really lots of projects have a “things you can do to get involved” section and it’s more about finding what sort of thing you’re excited about.
Ah. I used ROS in my Masters. Very impressive codebase in terms of features. Found the docs and versioning challenging, but that was back in 2012.
I’m one of the founders of LBRY, an open-source (but for-profit), decentralized information marketplace. The Simple English description it is a single box that let’s you find anything, powered by a network of computers and phones just like yours.
You can try it out here, but it is only out for OS X and Linux atm.
We’re also advised by some names likely familiar to this community: Alex Tabarrok, Michael Huemer, and Stephan Kinsella.
Code is on Github here. Grandiose business plan is here.
If anyone has questions, I will come back to answer, but probably not until tomorrow afternoon EST sometime. If you like the sound of LBRY but don’t want to jump in right away, you can join our list or follow/like us here.
Am I roughly correct in saying that LBRY is an altcoin where the blockchain holds metadata for an equivalent to BitTorrent? (Interestingly, that sentence would not be remotely understandable thirty years ago)
If so, other than a decentralized method of storing metadata, what advantages does LBRY have over BitTorrent for any patrons? I suppose it is useful because it is more legal than BitTorrent is, since publishers will be able to sell on it.
Is it intended that the publisher will give away for free to all patrons of LBRY once a certain amount has been paid (Assurance Contracts in the design document), or is this simply an alternative to the patron paying per view?
LBRY wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago.
LBRY is what you describe, but there is a bit more too:
1) Resolution of names in LBRY is controlled by highest committed credits. Names are not owned. If someone comes along and commits more, resolution will change unless the existing holder or other parties up the bid on the existing claim. We are betting that this is best structure for right’s holders. If the community backs a name resolving a certain way (as determined by committed credits), that’s the way it resolves.
2) It’s not just for BitTorrent; it’s for anything. At the blockchain level LBRY is really just a key value store where key resolution is controlled by largest number of committed credits. We are suggesting a bunch of conventions to follow to make the system useful (like assurance contracts), but basically none of this is blockchain level. Similarly, you could have a contract where after the price is met the price is zero, or you could continue to set a price. We think free is a great price but we want to support all kinds.
3) Another big thing LBRY vs. BitTorrent offers is that it brings power of marketplace and prices to data provision. BitTorrent is great, but a cost of zero reduces incentive to host rarely desired content. We’re big believes in the power of prices as signals, and think they could do a lot of good in an information marketplace context.
I’m not an open source developer, but I did put up a bunch of ideas for computer programs to teach economics quite a long time ago in the hope that someone would be inspired pick the project up:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Living_Paper/living_paper.htm
The best framework for living papers for teaching purposes is IMHO IPython Notebooks, demo: http://www.nature.com/news/ipython-interactive-demo-7.21492
The basic idea being that by embedding code in papers, the calculations are directly reproducible by a click. Instead of putting a graph into a paper, putting the code there that calculates it and readers press a button and they get the graph.
Have you seen MathCad (or its free substitute, SMath)?
It’s primarily for mathematical calculation, but it sounds like at least some of what you want for economics would work in it.
I’ve been told that some engineering offices use it extensively, as it allows one to do engineering calculations and update them, and provide a printable copy of the calculations which show the formulas (important when engineering work is being reviewed).
Heeyyyy, those look super interesting.
I’m a game designer / programmer that has been thinking about ways to make little applets that teach interesting concepts of economics or statistics … your Hansa thing might be worth implementing.
(more specifically, my recent weekend project has been making a map generator with a bunch of cities and random-but-plausible characteristics, in the form of a webpage, so I would totally be able to cannibalize most of that and turn it into Hansa)
(I haven’t put this online anywhere yet but I will when I have a clean enough version, even with few features)
I’m an SSC lurker and work on open-source CAD software: Antimony is a design tool from a parallel universe where CAD evolved from Lisp machines rather than drafting tables (http://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/antimony).
Would possibly be wonderful to see cointegration of things like this with things like procworld (and maybe noflo).
I develop open source bioinformatics software supporting genome-wide association analyses; main Github project is at https://github.com/chrchang/plink-ng .
I have an open source NLP start-up: http://spacy.io
Making a quantified federated queryable web of trust would be nice (hoverhell.github.io/wot/doc.html).