This is the bi-weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. I’m going to be running a psychiatry journal club at my clinic in a few weeks. Any suggestions for interesting or surprising recent (in the last year or two) psychiatry-related journal articles I might present?
2. Comments of the week are Anonymous on Ubers and taxis, and Zaxlebaxes and Telmid on sealioning. This was originally brought up in the subreddit as similar to my Against Interminable Arguments post, but I agree with both commenters that they’re very different. I am saying “people should be careful about saying controversial things in inflammatory ways”, but the sealioning essay seems more like “Given that I have said a controversial thing in an inflammatory way, people should not respond and set the record straight”. I feel the same way about the “randos in my Twitter mentions” complaint – too often it seems to take the form of A saying “Hey world, you should know that all Bulgarians are stupid and unemployed”, B coming in and saying “I’m a Bulgarian and find that offensive, here are statistics showing that Bulgarian test scores and employment rates are above average”, and A saying “Gross! Randos in my mentions!”
3. A few years ago I reviewed A Future For Socialism and mentioned that the book’s suggestion of redistributing corporate profits as a basic income wasn’t enough – it would only provide about $6000 per person. This was true of the book’s method, which only redistributed the profits of publicly-traded companies. But Tumblr user fadingphilosophymiracle points out that private companies have lots of profits too, and that redistributing those as well could produce a basic income of $12,000/person, which sounds a lot more impressive. I’ve edited the post to include the recalculation. (maybe not? see here)
4. I’m going to be in the Bay in mid-April. David Friedman usually offers to host a meetup at his house, and I’ll probably take advantage of that, but still looking for a good location in the East Bay/Berkeley area. A good location would be one that could fit 50+ people and have room for everybody to talk. Last time we tried an Indian restaurant and it was a little awkward. Any better ideas?
Just for fun, I kinda want to look at an aspect of the whole Sealioning thing. Is there a good use for Twitter specifically as a communication medium? I’ve taken my five minutes, not sure I can think of any.
Edit: I am a moron, the obvious answer is humor.
And, perhaps, providing references to longer pieces?
It works pretty well for mostly-useless publicity announcements – think events at a public library, new book or album releases, etc. They’re forced to be brief (with a link to more info) and they don’t clog up your inbox/facebook feed or require you to check their sites.
Of course, you still need a website and calendar for the people who are more invested, but it’s good for the spur-of-the-moment crowd.
Humor and ego boosts/low-content emotional support, I think.
I like the influence of the brevity constraint on Weird Sun.
It’s bad for arguing, because you have to compress your ideas down small and that means more charity than usual is necessary when unpacking them. But for you to compress an idea down small enough to fit and have it still be recoverable you have to really understand the key point, and this can help clarify your thinking. Also the mental work required to unpack the idea ensures that your reader really engages with it rather than just blowing by a cloud of words. And the small low-investment nature of tweets lets you engage in rapid prototyping.
I agree on both points: that it is generally not optimal for arguing charitably, but that it is helpful in forcing one to be concise.
I often fail at the latter, and had a tendency in my younger, stupider years to get into Facebook arguments where I posted essays in comments. I would self-flatteringly describe those comment-essays as inspired by Scott’s way of arguing–breaking down points into shorter paragraphs (see this comment), building the argument up by spelling assumptions out, providing examples of a meta-level concepts using less controversial or even humorous object-level examples (In the reddit comment Scott mentions, I used mixology as the first example because 1. I was in my kitchen looking at a bottle of whisky and 2. I figured it would be an uncontroversial topic in this particular community that probably includes a higher-than-average number of teetotalers, for example (though the higher-than-average interest in nootropics here might have made the LSD example controversial; I don’t know)). I liked the way Scott helps people get comfortable with the form of an argument, and I don’t find the length of his posts prohibitive, since they’re pleasant to read. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling sad when they’re over and even wishing they would go on for a little while longer, like a scenic and relaxing train ride.
Anyway, it’s an understatement to say that format is not suitable for Facebook. What’s more, for a lot of my interlocutors, taking my time with a post just proved my point was invalid, since I was spending time arguing on the internet so obviously my time and therefore my life and beliefs were worthless. TL; DR was an affirmative argument; somehow it made my point less valid than if I hadn’t articulated it with evidence. Incidentally, this is why the concept of sealioning bothers me so much. I think it’s almost elementary to say that by creating a one-word bingo-card instant-shutdown term for asking for evidence, and by penalizing length, it dramatically shifts the discourse online toward a preference for inflammatory, unkind, and often untrue (or less well justified) at the expense of the charitable, nuanced, qualified, and better justified arguments.
That said, a medium has better and worse uses. By limiting tweets to 140 characters, Twitter exacerbates the above problem, but it at the same time discourages verbose people like me from picking fights on it. And it forces us to cut down our responses to the sorts of messages that people on the medium generally prefer. Facebook allows blog-post-length responses, but no one is going to read them on there anyway, and it promotes a culture of stigmatizing long post-writers as kooks and losers. Twitter might prevent people like me from going overboard and looking kooky by telling me every 140 characters, “Hey, this is long and you’re giving people too much to digest, as evidenced… (1/2)” “(2/2) by the fact you have to throw another message at this person.” It also forces me to cut down on unnecessary words. In general, people probably don’t qualify enough, but I feel like sometimes people like me might have a little bit of a tendency to sort of overqualify a bit kind of at times in certain contexts maybe or not. People should be less unkind, but I know that in academic writing, people need to speak more plainly and directly. Perhaps people with a problem with excess verbosity, or those whose virtues in charitable discussion unfortunately face difficulty arousing others’ interest in their thoughts and maintaining their attention and comprehension, could be served by a light course, via Twitter, in the agressive, loud and disagreeable way neurotypical people communicate with each other. You know, rather than us bleep-bloop logic bots.
Yeah, IMHO part of the issue of sealioning is that it can be used to create a test where it’s your job to convince me that you are correct, and if you fail to meet this burden, then, well, you fail.
(This used to come up on The American Scene’s comment board all the time, for some reason. Commenter A would announce that B had the “burden of proof” on some issue and that because A was not convinced, B had failed.)
Presumably, the way around it is just to respond to your own satisfaction, and leave it at that.
This is a valid argument if the other side is claiming something to be obvious.
“I disagree with X” is a counterpoint to “X is obvious”.
@ton – that’s a good point.
If B’s proposition is at least implicitly “no reasonable person could disagree with X”, then “I am a reasonable person and disagree” is valid.
But these weren’t those cases. 🙂
>create a test where it’s your job to convince me that you are correct, and if you fail to meet this burden, then, well, you fail.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this.
> I don’t see what’s wrong with this.
Well, changing someone’s mind on the internet is almost impossible. I’m personally curious to understand competing arguments or to hear some of the best arguments for something I don’t believe, but I don’t expect other people to convince me very often, even if they’re right and I’m wrong.
@ J Mann: I suspect that in most such arguments, the response would be “no, you’re a lamer who likes to pretend he’s reasonable; that you disagree with X is proof that you are not.”
Short-form stories: https://twitter.com/quietpinetrees
I love this feed so much. It reminded me of how much unexplored territory there is out there, when it comes to writing. If two-sentence microfiction can be this rich, there must be some truly amazing novels out there waiting to be written.
Novels and short works are immensely different beasts.
I prefer https://twitter.com/hardscifimovies, myself.
https://twitter.com/HardSciFiMovies/status/398497136091725824
That was great!
Already existed, much better, before Twitter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novel
Harder to publish.
of course, that may mean a higher bar.
Not sure. It’s something I think that’s particularly Japanese. Cell phone culture there is much different than ours. It’s like cell phone charms, huge over there but outside of anime fans nonexistent here.
Shortest sf story:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
Shortest sf story minus one letter:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door.
(neither by me)
I thought it was ‘Hey, Adam, let’s call this planet we have crash landed on “Earth”!’
Hmph.
The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a loc on the door.
“Loc” is Old Fannish for letter of comment.
The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. “Showtime”, the alien said.
The last man on Earth sat alone in his room,
shaking and crying.
There was a knock on the door.
He grabbed his weapon and took cover behind the couch.
“It’s Bryan Caplan and I’m here to help…”
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a sock on the door.
Shorter:
1. The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. (Orson Scott Card, source)
2. Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth. (Vernor Vinge, ibid.)
3. Time traveler dies tragically; 1964 – 1514. (thesuzerain, source)
There is a lot more on the subreddit for the genre, though it’s not all science fiction. Six word stories are fun to read and write.
If you want surrealism, go here: https://twitter.com/allgebrah
Tech advice that takes long to figure out but is easy to express, like Bash one-liners.
The only reason I’m on Twitter is to follow a few data science/stat software developers and they tend to blast some useful links as well as updates on projects they work on that I follow. I would never use it to actually talk to people.
Twitter’s OK if you want a general sense of how people are responding to an event. It’s often a good companion for a sports game – basically like sitting in the stadium hearing people yell their opinions about the last play.
As a Feedly-type app it’s great. Follow some people with interesting internet tastes, and bam, you’ve got a curated link-feed.
It’s useful for casual discussion of technical topics. Almost all of the VR devs and engineers are on Twitter, and routinely compare notes and link to resources. Probably works a lot less well for actively controversial topics, though.
I thought Slack was picking up the slack for this, but I’m not a tech person.
Journalists live-tweeting press conferences.
It’s kinda useful as a glorified RSS feed.
Another minor tragedy in the death of Google Reader?
There was a recent subthread which I would like to revive here so as to get more people commenting on it.
What are differences between red tribe and blue tribe culture other than political ones?
My initial list:
What red parents do wrong is claim that you shouldn’t contradict your elders–that hierarchy trumps truth.
What blue parents do wrong is to wrap their kids in cotton wool–be unreasonably protective, thus greatly limiting their kids’ opportunity to do things and learn things.
What bad blue parents do is to impose no discipline on their kids, letting them run around other people’s houses endangering the furniture.
What bad red parents due is to impose discipline with orders to be obeyed but no need for justification.
If cooking a meal for a bunch of blues, you are expected to pay attention to a wide range of food constraints–not just avoiding lethal allergens but catering to vegetarians, and vegans, and people who have decided that maybe they should try a gluten free diet.
If cooking for a bunch of reds, you avoid lethal allergens if you know about them but for anything else people are expected to eat those parts of what you provide that fit their requirements, not to make a fuss or expect to be catered to.
Blue parents are proud of how few children they have, red parents of how many.
Criticizing the behavior of someone else’s children is permissable in red culture, criticizing the existence of other people’s children, being in general anti-child, is permissable only in blue culture.
Finally, consider a guaranteed minimum income not from the standpoint of whether it does or doesn’t work but whether the world it creates is attractive. From the red tribe point of view, there is something fundamentally wrong with someone living entirely on other people, doing nothing productive himself.
Doing something productive doesn’t have to mean earning money–volunteering to teach Sunday school, making jam, bringing cookies to a PTA meeting count. But a life that consists simply of generating utility for yourself at the expense of others, even if those others can easily afford it, feels wrong.
Not true, I think, for blue tribe.
Can others confirm, disagree, or add?
Marrying and having children young is accepted and even encouraged by the Red Tribe, usually discouraged by the Blue Tribe.
An interesting point of view/alternative explanation for why those red-tribers who’d benefit from basic income don’t want one. <>
https://medium.com/@emmalindsay/trump-supporters-aren-t-stupid-3d38f70f2a2f#.42s33jeuh
Thanks for this, I found it really interesting and quite plausible.
It fits with the point I made a little higher up in the comment thread about red tribe people seeing a world where people produce nothing and live on the basic income as wrong. Ugly.
Not bad, but I think the author misses the critical fact that poor whites are already in “last place”. They get all the downsides of being poor without the excuses, or the ideological super weapon of “playing the race card” to fall back on. Pride is all that’s left and that’s what Trump is tapping into.
Democrats tell poor whites that they are racist scum who don’t understand what it’s like to be poor.
Trump offers them love.
Exactly this. Keep kicking someone, and then act surprised that they don’t love you. (Also, keep kicking poor people and then congratulate yourself for how enlightened and left-wing you are.)
These comments need more angry rightists imo. Until every mention of terrorism or somesuch is accompanied with a comment along the lines of ‘Daesh just proves what we all know already, that rightism is completely evil’, shit like this is just going to feel like slinging insults at people who probably aren’t even there.
Do you mean “more angry leftists“? If you don’t, I find your comment impossible to extract meaning from.
I am ambivalent on the question of having more Multiheadeds.
“kicking poor people then congratulate yourself for how enlightened and left wing you are”
You see that too, huh?
I am pretty much on my last ounce of patience for middle-class lefties at this point.
Mai La Dreapta is right about my comment, but it’s too late to edit it now unfortunately. I’ve been a mess all day.
I don’t feel like commenting much atm, but I will always remark how weird/amusing it feels to be locally notorious.
Are there any poor white people really? Poverty rate after government transfers is around 5%, right? Considering the disparity in income between whites and NAM the % must be super low right? I’m sure there are a few in Appalachia
I’d guess that there are more poor whites than poor NAMs (have never heard of this term before but I’ll roll with it). Remember that there are a lot of white people in this country.
http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#_ftnref3
About 5 million white children under 18 in poverty in the USA. (likewise for blacks and hispanics – the disparities in poverty rate and the disparities in population size cancel out pretty closely)
If anyone else can find post-taxes-and-transfers rates for children in poverty, I’d appreciate it. Quick searches suggest that T&T benefits reduce the total US poverty rate by only around a quarter, but they are typically aimed disproportionately at households with children so I’d expect to see a larger effect there.
I can tell you that I’m white, and I grew up in an area with almost exclusively white people where poverty was as complete and widespread as it’s possible to be.
No one I knew had ever taken a vacation out of the immediate region. I’ve taken one vacation my entire life, just over the nearby border into the next state.
A neighbor kid once came over and was amazed that we were able to have so much food in the house. This is the kind of thing that really impresses very poor people.
We didn’t have running water for my entire childhood. I could count the number of showers I had taken in my life on one hand before I turned 18. We washed our clothes by hand and collected the rainwater for bathing and flushing toilets.
I’m no longer as poor as I once was, but many still are. This is in spite of the fact that they work jobs.
I remember a few years ago when there was a story about black people in the Detroit area having their water cut off for not paying their bills. The media cast this as a problem unique to black people and evidence of systemic national racism, or at least callousness. The white people I know (which is almost everyone I know) are constantly upset about being apparently invisible while poor minorities seem to be a top concern for the left.
I don’t mean to sound defensive, but comments which question the existence of poor white people seem to question whether almost everyone I’ve ever known even exist.
>Are there any poor white people really?
Let me ask the three homeless white guys that hang around my supermarket.
I think people are being too aggressive in response to Cliff. I grew up in essentially 3rd world conditions too (though in Australia rather than USA), and I definitely get that it’s easy to take that sort of ignorance personally. But maybe try not to anyway. He didn’t mean badly.
Yes Cliff, poor white people exist, in large numbers. I’m (genuinely) happy for you that your life has been such that this is not immediately obvious to you.
The white people I know (which is almost everyone I know) are constantly upset about being apparently invisible while poor minorities seem to be a top concern for the left.
That’s exactly the point I was trying to make about those articles about “why do people vote Republican when it’s not in their economic interest? are they really that stupid?” and get the patronisingly well-meaning “they’re not dumb as such but they’re voting on pride and dignity”.
No, you twerps, it’s because of these attitudes from a lot of the more left-ward or progressive side as if they have never personally met an actual poor person in their lives and regard them as an anthropological field observation. It’s because they perceive that, whatever about a Republican candidate, it definitely will not be in their interest as a poor white to vote for a Democratic candidate, as a minority cause (whether non-Asian or whatever) will always trump their needs. Poor Joe and poor Bob may be in the same economic class, but if poor Joe is white and poor Bob is black, Bob will be seen as “more in need” even if all else is equal.
We didn’t have running water for my entire childhood. I could count the number of showers I had taken in my life on one hand before I turned 18. We washed our clothes by hand and collected the rainwater for bathing and flushing toilets.
Bringing me back to my childhood, Z. We only got running water when the local farmers put in a group water scheme to get water for their cattle and we were lucky enough to live in the neighbourhood and be on the line 🙂
As for toilets – toilets? In my early childhood we had chamber pots (and no, I’m not joking). Aged nine, I helped my father dig out the hole for the septic tank by hand with pickaxe and shovel when he converted an old shed into an outside lavatory. We collected rainwater in a barrel for flushing it, too. All this is why I like to say I had a perfectly ordinary 19th century upbringing 🙂
“Do poor white people still exist” – duh! And in the cities and towns as well as Back Of The Mountains, too!
Deiseach,
You seem upset that the cliche of the sneering pince-nez sporting u.s. liberal isn’t exactly scoring points on the versimilitude scale with actual americans. Maybe ask yourself why youre getting so much emotional satisfaction from right-wing propaganda designed to shame anyone who yearns for a less selfish society. Yeah, you’re a real friend of the people.
“The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.” – cs lewis
I’d assumed that the “vote against their interest” was an inexpensive way to buy virtue points. It’s similar to why I think a hard-line freedom-of-speech stance is so emotionally appealing to me.
People are disavowing a policy that would benefit them. The Republican voter would benefit from basic income. I’d be able to use hate speech laws to shut down bigots like the Westboro Baptist Church.
This make the stance feel satisfyingly altruistic.
At the same time, the Republican knows that min-income is a far off policy, unlikely to be impacted by their vote. And I don’t really believe that speech-restrictions would ever impede anyone with actual influence.
So our support is cheap.
And I think appealing to self-interest is exactly the wrong response. It just makes their (low-cost) vote seem that much more self-sacrificing.
Assuming that that is actually voting against their interest is begging the question, in the original sense of that phrase. It assumes that
1) financial interests are the only kind of interests that exist
2) the policy would help them financially if properly implemented
3) the policy actually would be properly implemented
4) the policy would not be accompanied by other policies with worse effects
Most analyses that ask why reds “vote against their interests” don’t even attempt to prove more than 2, and many of them don’t even do that.
Indeed, most analysis is too shallow. There are some issues on which I think the policies Republicans tend to advocate are probably more sensible than those the Democracts tend to advocate. But I expect Republicans to be extremely likely to do a bad job at implementing their policies, so those issues don’t actually do much to make me less of a partisan Democrat.
@Protagoras
What’s your basis for that expectation? Seems to me that the safe assumption is that both parties are equally bad at implementing their policies.
Most people who moan about right wingers voting against their own interest aren’t seeking truth. They are deploying a really really stupid line of attack and/or reassuring each other of their own superiority, depending on context.
Of course the analysis springing from that will be bad.
@Tommy, An unscientific general impression based on recent cases when the Republicans had power.
“the safe assumption is that both parties are equally bad at implementing their policies.”
Some libertarians always want the government divided on the theory that a united legislative and executive always does more damage, regardless of which party. It’s psychologically difficult for me to accept this, since it means the best we can hope for is a very sclerotic government unable to keep pace with the pockets of free market innovation which naturally pop up, though it may be the most realistic.
The funny thing is that I have exactly the same feeling as Protagoras, but in the opposite direction. The Dems seem doomed to have their policies derailed by the often competing special interests in the party – school reform gets neutered by the teachers unions. The stimulus package, a great chance to rebuild much needed infrastructure, gets attacked by women’s groups because “shovel ready jobs” are too masculine (they are also mostly the jobs that were lost, but never mind). Obamacare relied on a medical device tax and a “Cadillac tax” to be solvent, but those got nixed by women’s groups and trade unions, respectively.
Heck, the Dems controlled both houses of congress and the White House from 2008 to 2010 and accomplished what? Essentially nothing but a convoluted health care law so bad that they had to bribe chunks of their own party just to ram it through, and amend the hell out of by executive fiat after the fact to make it palatable. Even then in cost them Congress in the 2010 elections.
Then again the Republican leadership hasn’t been a paragon of competence either. The “gang of 8” stuff was a bad attempt to pander to Hispanics that lost them their base and gave us Trump. Romney was probably the most competent executive either party has had as a major candidate since at least Bill Clinton, but they packaged him as so milquetoast that he was doomed. And just recently they made a huge tactical error by promising not to hold hearings for Obama’s SC nominee, opening the door for Barack to make an “offer they can’t refuse” with a moderate-right candidate that will make them look petty and stupid (which there are now rumblings he might do).
@Gbhub, I assumed that conservatives would be likely to have the mirror image of my view. And perhaps we’re both right; when it comes to the little fiddly details of implementation, people who are like me are more likely to do them the way I would want them done, and people who are unlike me are less likely to do so. So to some extent it is rational to support a candidate who seems to be more like me, even if their stated policy positions don’t exactly line up with my preferences (their stated policy positions are admittedly going to be a part, but only a part, of the evidence for how much like me they are).
That’s a good point. I think Americans tend to vastly overestimate the degree to which the President can be realistically expected to enact their agenda, how much control they really have over the economy, etc. What’s generally more important for a president is how well they react to the unexpected – and in that case you’re going to prefer/trust someone who thinks like you.
Another side of it, and this is a downside of the shrill polarization we’ve been getting, is that we seem to overvalue ideological purity at the expense of effectiveness in our leaders. Bill Clinton was very effective, Obama not so much, because the former built a rapport with his opponents and compromised, and the latter didn’t. Some of that is the personality of the men involved, but I’m worried that Obama’s supporters wouldn’t let him pull Clinton style deals even if he wanted to.
Hell, just yesterday I saw a bunch of Berners in my feed ripping on Hillary because there’s a picture of her hugging a smiling George W Bush at a frakking state funeral. Is that what we’re coming to? Treating political opponents as human beings is being weak and evil?
Basic income can be likened to wireheading. You might opine that you don’t want it, because you can see how it leads to your doom*, but once you’re hooked up, you can’t imagine wanting to make it stop.
* Give a typical working class person an indefinite stipend, and they cease doing anything (other than watching TV/playing games/drinking with friends). Part of this is because current-day stipends *require*, via justification, (the appearance of) incompetence – unemployment benefits require one to be unemployed, disability benefits require one to be disabled, social benefits to aid the ability of people to make ends meet require not being able to make ends meet. Not searching for jobs, not getting out of bed, not planning finances are all easy to do in order to keep the revenue flowing in.
The wire-heading comparison makes for an interesting thought experiment.
An eccentric billionaire offers you a stipend worth $X / year. The pay is guaranteed. But the catch is that you’ve got to drop out of society. No job. No formal charity work. No published novels. Just consumption.
How big of an $X would you need for that to be appealing?
I agree that I have a price. But I don’t think I’d do it for anything like the ~$20k I see in min-income threads.
I think I need more details about the deal.
>The pay is guaranteed.
If you break the agreement later, you’re required to give it back?
>But the catch is that you’ve got to drop out of society.
Does this mean not being allowed to raising a family, etc?
>No job.
Does a hobby count as a job?
>No formal charity work.
Not allowed to play the organ at the local church on Sundays?
>No published novels.
How about unpublished ones? What about commenting on blogs?
This was something that I had an econ professor pose to a class. It was over a decade ago, so I’m going from memory.
>If you break the agreement later, you’re required to give it back?
No, but we shoot you / are asking for a sincere agreement to do this for life.
(Unsure if it matters, but in the original, you were getting guaranteed a bundle of goods worth interest-adjusted $X. So you’d just have had the use of a car or an apartment)
> Does this mean not being allowed to raising a family, etc?
You can have have kids but getting married was “bourgeoisie bullshit”. So were college degrees for some reason.
> Not allowed to play the organ at the local church on Sundays?
> How about unpublished ones? What about commenting on blogs?
Organ yes, blogs yes. But status-granting titles like “Chair of the X Committee” or “Editor of Y”, no.
—
I think the spirit of the question was to look at how we were pricing the status that comes along with formalized participation in society.
If informal status is OK, then I’ll ask for double median salary for wherever I happen to live.
(So long as there is some marriage option that isn’t just on the basis of the current say-so of the spouse. I like my contracts enforced.)
@Tseeteli
I would absolutely take that deal for $20,000 a year if I can also continue to receive virtually free health care (I currently qualify for Medicaid and as such only have to pay very tiny co-pays for my prescriptions and doctor’s visits; if I couldn’t keep getting this benefit and would have to purchase insurance on the open market, the minimum the billionaire would need to offer me would be higher).
I am from the underclass, and like many people from the underclass, I despise working and only engage in paid employment because I absolutely have to. If I could receive enough money to live on and have some disposable income (and $20,000 would be enough for me to live on and have some disposable income) without having to work, I would be more than willing to accept it with the strings attached that you’ve mentioned.
However, I think my position on this is affected by the fact that I prefer to live my life as close to your “drop out of society” stipulation as possible. I don’t want to work, or leave the house much, or do formal charity work, or anything of the sort. I like spending time alone doing things I enjoy doing, and things I enjoy doing are mostly personal consumption-related activities like reading books and blogs and things, watching TV, playing video games, laying around with my cats, etc. I don’t like socialization, or dating, or being around people in general, and I don’t seem to feel the innate need to be productive in some way that many people feel. It is possible that I would eventually regret taking this deal, but I don’t think I would. The deal seems obviously awesome to me, because it’s hard for me to viscerally understand why some people don’t despise working with every fiber of their being (though I do understand it on a detached, intellectual level).
As long as I can still engage in my hobbies if I take the deal, I would take the deal for an amount of money smaller than what it would take for a lot of people to accept the deal.
@Anon
I feel, to a significant degree, the same way. I’m not built to enjoy work – in the meaning of doing things I have to in order to be able to survive and do things I like to do. I’ll do it because I have to, but whenever people ask me if I like my job, I can offer a blank stare and some platitudes about being paid well and the conditions being bearable.
(Not underclass. Family’s mixed labour/gentry.)
@Tseeteli: If I’m allowed to marry and reproduce and keep commenting on SSC, probably something like $15,000-$20,000 or so. My plan would be something like marry a mail-order-bride, move to a cheap rural community, and raise a family while engaging in all my usual hobbies (except writing flash fiction, I guess). Online commenting and informal interaction with family and neighbors would satisfy my need for socialization and status without need for a formal title, I think.
I’m not sure such a sum exists that I would stop working, either on startups or regular paid work. I suspect this is because:
a) Money is only relevant when you don’t have enough and
b) If your job is fun enough that you get up in the morning wanting to go to work, it ceases to be “work” and becomes people paying you for your hobbies.
Getting up in the morning with nothing to do is so alien that I genuinely can’t wrap my head around the concept.
@Richard
That’s really interesting! The fact that the idea of not having something to do feels alien to you, I mean. I think we’re definitely hitting on some kind of fundamental psychological or neurological difference between individuals.
For me, the idea of being okay with having to do something specific (like go to work) when you wake up each day is alien and it’s very hard for me to grasp it.
Even if I was getting paid for something I love doing, the fact that I had to do it whether I wanted to or not would ruin my enjoyment of it, so I don’t think it’s possible for me personally to ever have a job where it’s like I’m getting paid for a hobby (because having to do it makes it not fun anymore).
Drinking with friends is a fine activity endorsed by many thinkers and authors.
It’s also endorsed by mankind’s greatest yet to be born thinker.
Even if I was getting paid for something I love doing, the fact that I had to do it whether I wanted to or not would ruin my enjoyment of it,
But that rules out a whole lot of enjoyable collaborative activities, on the grounds that not having your collaborators show up when they said they would also tends to ruin the enjoyment. If, as a wealthy dilettante or incorrigible bum (your pick) you decide to take a role in an amateur musical, you then “have to” show up for rehearsals and performances in the same way that you “have to” do your job – nobody will make you do it at gunpoint, but if you don’t reliably perform at the expected level you will be excluded from the activity, denied its rewards, and labeled as someone who shouldn’t be trusted to participate in such activities in the future.
Are you actually unable to enjoy structured collaborative activities on that basis?
The “yes” answers to this thought experiment really surprise me. I guess that shows how much of a bubble I’m in. I wouldn’t take anything less than $200,000/year to drop out of society.
These “would you do x for why” sort of proposals seem to end up hinging on definitions.
If “drop out of society” means no job, no formal volunteering, and no published novels? That would not be incredibly onerous to me: I’d just spend my time in the gym, hanging out with friends, and reading. If the money is guaranteed, and indexed to inflation, and so on, $20k US isn’t that bad. More would be nice, but that amount of money for doing nothing puts you ahead of the vast majority of people ever, past or present.
But “drop out of society”, to me at least, suggests becoming some kind of antisocial recluse: if a book jacket “about the author” reads “After writing three bestselling novels, including this one, she dropped out of society”, I’d think she was living off the grid in some shack, shooting at anyone who came too close out of fear they were a literary agent.
@John Schilling
For the most part, yes. I don’t try to participate in activities where I am expected to do something or be somewhere at a specific time very often, but on the few occasions where I have, the expectation has ruined my enjoyment of the activity and made me wish I had never gotten involved with it in the first place.
(An example: I recently got kicked out of a guild in an MMO I play because I wasn’t participating with the guild as often as they were expecting. Prior to getting kicked out, I was aware that I “should” do more collaborative activities with them, but I just didn’t want to spend my video gaming time on it nearly as often as they were expecting, and the feeling that I “should” be spending my gaming time on forms of gaming I didn’t feel like doing at the moment was negatively impacting my overall enjoyment of playing the game in general. I don’t really mind that the guild kicked me out, but I do think it would have been better for me and them if I had never joined in the first place.)
I find social obligations incredibly onerous, far more so than most people it seems. I don’t want to be engaged in any activity (whether its intended to be fun or not) where everyone else will be annoyed or inconvenienced if I don’t show up. I don’t want to disappoint people or be a bother to them, so I rarely sign up for voluntary activities where my participation affects other people’s enjoyment of the activity.
@Anon
I suspect the ting about fundamental psychological differences is correct.
I have been thinking more on the matter and the idea of waking up tomorrow without far too much to do and way too little time fills me with a deep visceral dread.
I don’t believe this is about status, because I’m quite happy to work low-status jobs and it’s definitely not about money because I could live quite comfortably if I retired tomorrow.
The need to have the day packed sits on a more fundamental level than that, it feels more like the need to breathe really.
[I think something I did may be putting this in the wrong thread–hopefully the context is clear]
More generally, the argument about people voting against their interests, like a lot of political arguments, takes it for granted that the person making it is right about what policies are good for the country.
It’s like the cartoon that shows up in climate arguments from time to time: Wouldn’t it be terrible if AGW turned out to be wrong, and we had achieved all sorts of good things in trying to fight it. (paraphrase not quote).
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html
The implicit assumption is that everyone else agrees with the author that the effects of those policies would be good.
@anon:
In a way, I’m in the opposite of your position. As things now stand I could choose to do no work at all and still live a reasonably comfortable life.
But I don’t like the taste of lotus. So I committed myself, some time back, to spend two hours a day seven days a week on my various writing projects–currently mostly a book on legal systems very different from ours. That’s a lot less than eight hours a day five days a week, but it’s enough so I feel as though I’m accomplishing something, not just doing the closest available option to wireheading.
I do other things–I’m teaching two classes today at a high school in Honolulu as a guest lecturer, four classes tomorrow. But that doesn’t count for my two hours, which is why I got more than an hour ahead on my writing commitment in the plane between San Jose and Honolulu yesterday.
How big of an $X would you need for that to be appealing?
There is no such number. Beyond a certain price, mere consumption enters a realm of greatly diminishing returns and the value of money is in the power to change the world. Give me a billion dollars a year, and no way to spend it on anything that anyone else will care about, and what is there for me to care about? Will I be happier living in a mansion than a modest house, driving a fancier car and flying a faster airplane? Yes, but not to the point of compensating for what you are asking me to give up.
Even if you allow me to spend the money in the company of my friends, I mostly make friends through my work and similar activities, and I think the quality of the friends so obtained is greater than I could expect through waving cash around at some tropic island resort.
Give a typical working class person an indefinite stipend, and they cease doing anything (other than watching TV/playing games/drinking with friends).
I disagree. Much of the adamant refusal to work on off-hours comes from spending the majority of our time spent on work. I can spend an entire weekend consuming on the internet, but that’s because I’m catching up on all of the hours I was not consuming on the internet while at work. Given a two-week vacation, depending on how busy I was in the weeks preceding that vacation, (i.e., was I able to consume with full focus in the evenings, unhindered by tiredness) I’ll max out on my ability to only consume in about a week.
That is, if I don’t find a new fandom during that time.
So a person given “nothing” to do (like, say, people who retire!) can live in a state of “only” consuming until they’re consuming faster than the rate of material production. (like running out of blog/episode archive to binge while waiting for new material to come out)
How many retirees wirehead/only consume, if unhampered by health?
As for the thought experiment, a bunch of the money people desire for their current incomes comes with huge buffers for taxes, retirement savings, emergency savings, and general “savings for X.” If I no longer need to worry about taxes or retirement, I could probably go for $30K or so, because I’d still like to have the option to try out the more expensive hobbies and travels. (Even something like the local community orchestra or sports league takes dues)
There are so many non-formal projects/participation I could do. No titles necessary.
My missing work would come from not encountering/receiving problems to solve if I wasn’t working in that industry anymore. There are certain experiences that require formal training/research/equipment/personnel, and that usually requires a job that wants you to do those things in the first place. So I’d miss that, getting to discover problems I never would have without being in the lab.
@arbitrary_greay
I don’t think you’re the kind of person I’m talking about in my statement. Now, my sample may be unrepresentative of all peoples everywhere, but I’ve met these sorts of people multiple times. I know like three from just one apartment building, whose job is apparently simulating being more sick than they are, sitting on their butts, watching TV, drinking and smoking, and complaining that their benefits aren’t quite high enough.
Are you aware that there is a lot of research on the percentage of people who never find a job and get off financial assistance (in both the US and elsewhere, including previous experimental basic income projects), and the number is invariably quite low (less than 20% at worst, usually much lower)?
I know the kind of people you talk about, but be wary of anecdotal evidence.
I’ve been very interested in these two different styles of thinking, as I’ve been trying to transform from the type of person who would take the 20,000 (which is definitely enticing) do-nothinger, to possibly a have-things-to-do type person. I despise responsibility, but ended up with goals where it seems like the only way to actually accomplish them is to have a Richard-do-things mindset. I try to build habits and make it so that I work towards things in a way that is more than “when I feel like it” but I often feel like I can get similar rewards to my goals by just quitting everything.
It seems to be partially about control and responsibility. I hate it whenever I have any obligations set upon me from the outside. Even responsibilities set by me at another time. I feel crushed. I get to feel free and in control when there is nothing I have to do, only things I choose to do because I want to. My impression is that Richard accepts all or many responsibilities, and feels in control by arranging them (or possibly choosing which ones to accept?), but would like to know more. Like what happens if he doesn’t have things to do? Does it feel like there is going to be chaos (what I’ve heard other people say) Why? I don’t understand what situations lead people to have this belief. (I would like to understand!)
My own apathy from my goals was formed sort of like this: I failed a some classes and was terrified of this happening. Then the day after, everything was pretty much fine. All of my friends still liked me, I still had food, my social status hadn’t really changed. I used to wish that failing to meet my goals had larger consequences, though I’ve gotten better at visualizing these on purpose.
There is also this ‘accept responsibility’ maneuver. It seems really useful, because when I do do it, then it’s quite motivating and successful and getting me to work towards my goal. However, every time there is any sort of pain point, I think about how I can just drop the goal and not deal with it. In response to this I’ve worked at making working towards my goals as painless as possible, but I’ve wondered about if there are ways to keep responsibilities more active.
My theory: some people experienced the sweet sweet freedom when they were young (because their parents didn’t make them take the summer job at McDonalds and didn’t send them to a summer camp), and got hooked.
Notice Richard says working is so very awesome, but admits that not working is something he never tried (and finds difficult to imagine!), whereas Anon et al. know very well what working is like (and they loathe it).
It is a story you hear now and then in the Silicon Valley about some hard working overachiever who got a few $M from an IPO, kept on working like nothing happened, and then maybe three years later took a month of vacation (for the first time in a decade), said wow this is awesome, and never came back.
I’m wired like Richard. Getting up with nothing at all to do is not at all alien to me, however (because I’m literally unemployable for completely unknowable reasons). It’s AWFUL GRINDING MENTAL TORTURE. I finally found an out in grueling 24/7 startup work and never looked back.
I share the opinion of the economist George Reisman, who said (paraphrasing):
“I really enjoy my job educating young people about the principles of economics from a pro-capitalist perspective. I find it intrinsically rewarding and would do it for free. However, if I were doing it for free, rather than teaching five classes every semester, I would teach one class every other semester.”
I haven’t quite had a “real job” (being still in the higher-education track), but I’ve had some long-term internships. I don’t hate working, not when it’s for something meaningful like advancing liberty. But if I didn’t have to in order to make money / have a good career, I would work like a quarter of the amount, or less. If I lived longer, too, maybe I’d work for a year and take ten years off.
And if my job were something boring like stocking shelves, I wouldn’t work at all.
@ Nonnamous
My theory: some people experienced the sweet sweet freedom when they were young (because their parents didn’t make them take the summer job at McDonalds […] and got hooked.
This suggests a very odd, and damaging, sort of parent. If the family doesn’t need the McDonalds income, why force the teenager into wasting his time that way?
Left free, he can pursue art or sports or read odd books or travel or many things — all of which will be more productive for him than McDonalds. Even just goofing off is more productive for him than McDonalds.
@BenS
I’m not sure responsibility is much of a factor, but my thoughts here are rather woolly. The thing is that I enjoy doing things for the sake of the things themselves, not for any extrinsic reward or pressure. Also, new things are always fun, from getting a robotics startup running to a month of long-haul trucking. My threshold for enjoying work is low.
@Nonnamous
It is not that I have never been on vacation, but having nothing to do for 2 weeks is very different from having nothing to do forever and it’s the latter that is scary.
I’m with blue-avatar Anon here. I’ve had jobs I liked and even enjoyed, I’ve had jobs that literally made me sick and I had to force myself to go into work because I needed the money to live on.
I’ve never had a job that I was so passionate about that I went “I’d do this even for nothing!”
So I get a guaranteed income that’s enough to live on (pay my current bills and level of expenditure, plus medical care, plus if I needed to pay rent/mortgage) and the only catch is that I can’t –
– what? Go to work? Well, I don’t have a job that makes me go “I’d want to do this for nothing, I love it so much!”
– status? Such as formal charity work (whatever that means) – I already don’t do that. Member of this, Captain of that, Leader of the other? None of those ever in my life. So nothing lost there.
– you can’t go out and socialise? I don’t do that either! There is no party life for me to give up!
– no published novels? Ah shoot, I’ll just have to confine my writing to unpublished even on the Internet kept strictly private on my PC’s hard drive like I already do?
– not married etc? I’m an asexual aromantic, guess how highly love and romance rank in my life or interests 🙂
I don’t really like people. When I’m working, I can get on fine with my colleagues but I don’t socialise with them or interact with them outside of the workplace. Outside of work, I don’t mingle or go out or have any dealings other than unavoidable “talk to the shop assistant/doctor/pharmacist” kind of interactions.
Drop out of society? I’m already dropped out. You’re offering to pay me for what I’m already doing for free? I’d snap your hand off, I’d take the offer so fast! 🙂
What money would I want? Did a quick calculation of my “cover my current expenditure plus a bit over” and it came out to something like $23,000 per annum at current exchange rates. Any eccentric billionaires wanting to pay me $25,000 a year for the next twenty years, I will make my details available 🙂
Can’t answer for them, but I’m currently living abroad due to work, and my life pretty much consists of eating, working, excercise, browsing the internet, sleeping and video games. The latter two could easily take up all the time covered by working. This arrangement wouldn’t be optimal, but it wouldn’t be terrible.
@ Mark Atwood:
Some people spend a lot of time on the internet, but even if there was no internet, there would still be infinite things to do alone – reading books, cooking, playing musical instruments, solitary hiking, carpentry, painting, fishing, running, playing with your dog, doing puzzles, come on, the list would go on and on to infinity – there are as many solitary hobbies as you can think of – I don’t understand how anyone can fail to visualize them. I don’t think it’s even possible to get bored when you have free time and imagination. Possibilities are infinite.
Anyhow, if “dropping out of society” does permit social activities too, with the only rule that you aren’t allowed to receive money or have job descriptions, then this, to me, sounds like too good a deal to be true.
Since I know how to live cheaply, the amount of money I would accept for this is shockingly low.
@houseboatonstyx
If the family doesn’t need the McDonalds income, why force the teenager into wasting his time that way?
I agree with you 100%, but from what I understand it’s pretty common to nudge the kid to work, not necessarily at a fastfood restaurant but similar, to teach them work ethic or something. I’m talking about upper middle class families which probably spend more on a two week vacation than a McDonald’s employee makes in a year.
And like I said, I do think it works, in the sense that after such treatment the kid will be more likely to grow up hard working therefore successful.
The Republican voter would benefit from basic income.
How about if the hypothetical Republican voter thinks it would come with strings attached? That if you want your UBI as raised from the taxes of the wealth-producing creative class (the Silicon Valley technocrats mentioned in another thread) and disbursed by the Democratic party in power, you had better vote “yes” or “no” (depending on what is the desired answer) when the next referendum on gay marriage or trans rights comes up, or else.
You see, I’m fascinated by this notion that seems to be at work, when I read and hear Democrat Party supporters, that all the virtue is on their side. That not alone are the Other Party wrong on policies, they are actively wicked – motivated by racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc.
Things like Bull Connor was a Democrat? (Something I only learned by reading a story) – oh that was different; that was Back Then, that was the South and the South is special, we’re all changed now.
But I rather imagine if you showed Civil Rights Era photos of police batoning protesters in Alabama, the assumption by most young people would be that the authorities were Republicans and they’d use it as an example of those horrible racists this is why we have to vote them out. Tell them it was the party of Bernie Sanders (though he wasn’t in the party at the time) and I do think the cognitive dissonance would be real: we all know the Democrats are pro-minorities and were on the right side back then! We all know the Republicans are the racists!
I’m not, as I keep saying, an American. Were I the Irish immigrant to the USA so many of my countrypeople were and are, I’d probably support and vote for the Democrats as so many of them did and do.
But the idea that the ordinary voter for the other party is either stupid and manipulated or a bigot, and that all the party members in the official party from local officers up to the very top are all racist sexist etc bigots, and that rich people who support the Republicans do so because they are evil (rich people who support the Democrats, on the other hand, and do not want to overthrow capitalism or destroy the government are all selfless philanthropists doing it for the benefit of humanity and with no expectations of tangible business benefits for themselves) – this fascinates me.
How are you going to live in this country so divided? Do you expect to get and keep power forever and impose your policies by fiat, and if they don’t like it they’ll just have to lump it? Do you expect to change everyone on the other side to your way of thinking simply by saying “We have the right and correct answer and attitude to everything” and those who don’t or won’t say “You know, you’re right!” are plain evil and can only be dealt with by dismissing them as “Who cares how Orcs vote?”
I really think much of Trump’s success has been because terms like “fascist” and “racist” have become so watered-down by repeated use and inappropriate use, that they only function now as general insults with no real meaning (in the same way that calling someone a bastard does not mean you are alleging they were born out of wedlock), and they’ve lost any sting they may have had.
“You called me a fascist and a racist and a sexist* when I voted for Romney, why should it be any different when I vote for Trump?” (Ah, remember the Good Old Days when all the progressive panic-mongering was about a Mormon Theocracy through voting for a particular Republican candidate, and not potential nuclear war? Good times, good times!)
*Remember the mockery over the “binders full of women” remark, which I thought was clumsy but well-meaning? Suppose a Democrat candidate had said “I asked for a list of talented women to promote and I got not just a list, I got binders full of CVs! This proves there are women out there who should be in positions of authority who are being overlooked!” Would the same people have made jokes about “He thinks women come in binders, ho ho ho!”?
@Deiseach
I am first to admit that blue tribe has plenty of flaws, most important being inane virtue signaling, but what you wrote about Democrats is completely irrelevant today. There was a massive realignment in the 60’s, then Democrats are today’s Republicans and vice versa.
Present poverty assistance programs don’t come with any caveats about social and cultural beliefs and voting patterns you have to follow (at least in the U.S. – I realize you’re not American). Why would a universal basic income? Especially considering the core feature of the program being that every single person is entitled to get it.
@ Adam
I think the real question is why would you expect them not to?
I just said why, because no current transfer payment comes with such a stipulation. I’d even guess as a strong prior subject to disconfirmation that old people and poor people, who currently receive most of the transfers, are two of the more socially regressive groups.
You don’t any of you remember some of the more fevered remarks during the last couple of presidential campaigns by some about leaving the rubes in “Jesusland”?
That the wealthy areas of the country are Democrat and the areas taking their unfair share of government money are Republican, and so the Blue (not tribe, political party colour) states should separate from the Reds and see how they did with sinking into poverty and backwardness with their religion and flags, while the smart, progressive, liberal Blue states forged ahead with tech innovation and financial success?
There was certainly a lot of enthusiasm about seeing the areas that refused to think and do the right things failing and suffering.
So you really don’t think there would be conditions attached? I don’t mean anything as overt as “Did you vote for the Democrat candidate in the last election at local level” but things like oh wow isn’t it really coincidental that places that are holdouts on trans rights/immigration quotas/progressive cause are the places that are the poorest and how there aren’t as many public programmes there somehow, now why would that be?
If UBI replaces all government schemes, there will be conditions (there are already conditions for receiving payments, nobody gets free money on welfare) and if you don’t think political gerrymandering will take place when one side or another are in power to reward their supporters and do down their opponents, I think that is over-optimistic.
I’ve seen this at work in my own area; the logical* new headquarters for an amalgamated local government service being rejected and instead the headquarters going to a backwater, purely because the backwater was in the constituency of a minister in the then-government.
*It was the geographic centre of the area being serviced; it had staff and plant in place; it was a much larger centre of population and was accustomed to dealing with a high volume of applications and work; it was neutral ground and other reasons of convenience for the public, the staff and the board of directors. No, political string-pulling trumped all that.
The whole point of UBI is that there are no conditions, or at least no conditions more complicated or onerous than “adult and warm”. The moment you start doing means-testing, you lose half of what’s supposed to make the proposal cost-competitive and all of what makes it attractive from an incentives point of view.
Now, that may or may not be politically feasible, and if you think not, then sure, I respect that. (I’m leaning that way myself, but as you may have noticed I tend to be a bit cynical where politics is concerned.) But a program that gives out free money to a means-tested group with favorable demographics is not a UBI program, it’s a subsidy to that group.
@antimule
Well, no. The police were Democrats, but so were the protesters they were beating up. For about a century after the Civil War both major parties were loose non-ideological coalitions of various ethnic and regional groupings that didn’t always see eye to eye, and there were still a few outliers into the ’90s.
For an even more dramatic example, there were fistfights on the floor of the 1924 Democratic National Convention between KKK supporters and Catholics, both major Democratic constituencies at the time. (We often forget, in remembering how viciously racist the Klan was, that they were almost as viciously anti-Catholic too.)
Of course I remember cracks about Jesusland. I actually live in this country. I just happen to more heavily weight the fact that no existing assistance program institutes an ideological purity test and the biggest recipients are in fact not socially progressive people yet they keep getting the assistance more heavily than cracks about Jesusland in predicting what will happen if we institute a different form of assistance program in which the specific feature is supposed to be no means testing at all.
@antimule
That is a widely-held, but inaccurate belief about the realignment.
The southern shift to the Republican Party began in the 50s, in the suburbs of industrializing Southern cities around the periphery (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida) which went for Eisenhower (who supported two civil rights bills and Federalized the National Guard to enforce the Brown vs. Board of Education decision) and Nixon (look at the Electoral College maps for 1960 and 1968). As the suburban middle class grew in the South, it became more Republican.
I grant that 1964 election was strange. Barry Goldwater carried only his home state of Arizona and the “Deep South” (LA, MS, AL, GA, SC). Arguably the archest conservative of the Republican Party, Goldwater was a founding member of the AZ chapter of the NAACP, a proponent of desegregating the AZ national guard, and a supporter of both of Eisenhower’s civil rights bills. However, he had opposed Johnsons civil rights bill (which passed with overwhelming republican support) on constitutional grounds, and the anger of Southern Democrats was such that Johnson wasn’t even allowed to appear on the ballot in AL, and the KKK endorsed Goldwater (despite his being a half-Jewish, non-racist Republican who did not desire their endorsement).
Strom Thurmond was the only signatory of the segregationist “Southern Manifesto” to switch parties, the rest remained Democrats (the one independent continued to caucus with the Democrats).
Can anyone show that there is a substantial amount of anti-conservative moral entrepreneurism out there?
I know my inverted picture of reality, where Republicans are far, far more aggressive than tepid Democrats will seem wondrous strange to anyone who whose never been to the U.S. and gets there impressions of conditions on the ground from this site, but you only have to step into any American Barnes and Noble and look at the contemporary non-fiction literature of our people to see that the truth isn’t even close to what’s being peddled here.
Instead of the evidence-free political impressionism that reigns here…let’s resort to basic science and market analysis to figure out who’s extreme-ing who in America.
Let’s start with simple counting. What does the evidence say?
I’ll go first…
Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, Neal Boortz, Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, Walter E. Williams, John Stossel, George Will, Ross Douhat, Cal Thomas, Michael Barone, Megan McCardle, Erik Erickson, Glenn Reynolds,
Laura Ingrahm, Dinish D’Souza.
Note: all of these people make a living bashing liberals. I left actors/musicians (Clint Eastwood, Ted Nugent) and politicians (Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich) off the list, figuring we should go with people who show true commitment to an internal enemy hating oeuvre.
@anyoneofyou
I have to ask, what do you really expect to accomplish here? and if I gave you a matching list of 25 liberals who show true “commitment to an enemy-hating oeuvre.” would you accept it at face value or would you feel the need to argue that folk like Bill Maher, Piers Morgan, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are different because they’re “legitimate” writers / journalists?
I live in the United States, and as a far left Democrat, I definitely perceive Democrats as just as aggressive as Republicans. Definitely neither side could accurately be described as “tepid” with respect to how they approach and attack each other.
Maybe about 5-10 years ago, I would have agreed that Republicans were more aggressive and Democrats more “tepid” relatively, back in the GWB years or when Tea Party was getting into the thick of things. But today, we Dems have our own Tea Party equivalent that’s just as aggressive, hateful, and influential. And I’d suspect that my perception that the Republicans were the more aggressive party 5-10 years ago less reflects the reality of the situation than my own desire to perceive my side as the virtuous underdogs. Today, the evidence is just too overwhelming to deny that my side behaves just as aggressively and with ill intent as the other side (which probably indicates that my side is probably actually the one behaving worse – but that’s not a rock-solid conclusion).
There exist individuals on SSC who have what I perceive to be inaccurate perceptions about the state of politics in the US. But the perception that Democrats attack Republicans as not just being wrong but WICKED – and do so at least as much as the other way around – is not a perception that I see as inaccurate.
I wont disqualify anyone on your list. If they had even a single bestselling book devoted to bashing conservatives name it.
Most of the folks on my list have multiple books.
Its my contention that you can’t make a corresponing list. The market for anti-liberal propaganda is massive. No one would ever say the same about anti-conservatism.
>Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood is anti-war,pro gun control, pro choice and pro gay marriage… I’m not sure how he figures in this list.
> Democrat Party
‘Democrat’ is a noun, ‘Democratic’ is an adjective. So, Democrats are in the Democratic party.
Meanwhile, ‘Republican’ is both the noun and adjective forms, so Republicans are in the Republican party.
I find it interesting how the only people who make this mistake fall on one side of the political spectrum.
@ Luke Somers:
I’ve seen Scott do the same thing, oddly.
Or maybe this is evidence of his secret loyalties? 😉
Some data on this debate: By the “would you let your child marry a member of the opposite party” measure, which seems like as good a proxy as any, both parties are pretty bad (and have suddenly gotten worse over the last decade), with republicans being slightly worse (though democrats today are worse than the republicans of five years ago).
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/really-would-you-let-your-daughter-marry-a-democrat/262959/
“A pair of surveys asked Americans a more concrete question: in 1960, whether they would be “displeased” if their child married someone outside their political party, and, in 2010, would be “upset” if their child married someone of the other party. In 1960, about 5 percent of Americans expressed a negative reaction to party intermarriage; in 2010, about 40 percent did (Republicans about 50 percent, Democrats about 30 percent).”
“But the perception that Democrats attack Republicans as not just being wrong but WICKED – and do so at least as much as the other way around – is not a perception that I see as inaccurate.”
Enough with the perceptions. Show me the market for literature about wicked republicans.
Well this was faster than I was expected.
From, Daily Kos. Top 10 Reasons to Vote Republican
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/9/25/1020037/-
I mean, Salon, Slate, Gawker, Buzzfeed, and Vox are media outlets that exist and, for the most part, thrive by vilifying the right-wing. They’re not as mainstream as, say, NYTimes or MSNBC which are more moderate, but they’re around, they’re huge, and they notably tend to be generally well respected relative to their right-wing equivalents like Breitbart or The Daily Caller.
Honestly, though, getting meaningful evidence beyond perception in this area is hard and likely out of reach for people who don’t have access to polling. It’s not like we can go out there and count anti-left-media-units and anti-right-media-units and compare how many we find in the wild. Counting the number of publications or authors would be of the most boneheaded ways of comparing, since it doesn’t take into account the influence of individual publications or authors, which is much more important than the count. A single Fox News has more impact than 10 Salons.
If you perceive that there is more or more aggressive anti-left media sentiment than anti-right, I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. But I will tell you that this far-left Democrat’s perception is inconsistent with yours.
” Counting the number of publications or authors would be of the most boneheaded ways of comparing”
So while you can’t deny their is a massive market for anti-liberal books, television and radio
And while you can’t show any examples of the same on the liberal side…….you’re going to cling to the “both sides do it” narrative till you just can’t ignore the truth any longer.
This query is like kryptonite for conservatives.
@anyoneofyou I notice, tellingly, that you brought up books, TV and radio, where right-wing hackery thrives, but strategically left out the internet, where a vast network of liberal chauvinist publications has emerged, not to mention tons of user-created content on social networking sites.
So yeah, “simple counting” of famous print writers is on the spectrum between boneheaded and disingenuous. Do better, anyoneofyou.
He actually tried to stick to books originally; bringing up TV was an own-goal, because there’s the issue of The Daily Show and Colbert Report to consider.
But if you’re stuck on books, there’s always the one that helped propel Al Franken to the Senate.
Even a principled limiting to just books is utterly boneheaded. It wasn’t true 50 years ago, and it’s definitely not true today that books are the best or only means by which to measure the zeitgeist. And I’m not sure that even using such a stupid form of analysis would show anti-liberal attacks as being more common or aggressive in current US society. Ann Coulter is an author, but so are Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert.
It’s amusing being called “conservative” while being to the left of the current US Overton window, just for daring not to claim to be under disproportionate attack based on flimsy evidence. Outgroup homogeneity bias is real.
Before that one, Al Franken wrote a book titled Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, which, I think, tells you just about everything you need to know.
But straight partisan bashing really does seem to be rare in Blue formal media: there’s plenty of it floating around, but it’s mostly relegated to low-status forms like comedy, popular music, blogging, and social media. Michael Moore is an exception, but I get the impression that his schtick is seen as a little declassé. This probably says something about the norms surrounding politics in the two cultures.
“So yeah, “simple counting” of famous print writers is on the spectrum between boneheaded and disingenuous. ”
I can name 100 liberal-bashers and you can’t name ANY conservative bashers that arent bloggers or comedians?
Do anything you can to shut down this line of argument because it conclusively exposes the local
BIG LIE, “both sides do it”, for what it is.
There certainly was a large hack gap back in the 1990s and 2000s, when Rush Limbaugh and Fox News were printing money and liberals struggled to match that success with the likes of Air America. The rise of Salon and Gawker has done a lot to narrow the gap, but note that lefty hacks are almost entirely online. In print/TV/radio the conservative outrage machine is still much bigger than the liberal one. The question becomes, how much has the internet really taken over our lives and how dead is the rest of the media?
Also, polls in the ’90s showed a 40/40/20 split among self-identified conservatives/moderates/liberals, and that gap has also narrowed to close to a 3-way tie. This is just intuition, but I imagine if someone doesn’t call him/herself “liberal” he/she is less likely to be receptive to left-wing outrage garbage, and the same with conservatives.
Aside from the stuff I went into above, I think really ideological leftists also tend to go for specific intellectual frameworks — feminism, anti-racism, socialism, environmentalism — and that those come with their own language for their boogeymen. Conservatism is only a bad thing to, say, a socialist insofar as it implies support for capitalist economics, which is what he really hates.
Incidentally, if you asked me to name twenty authors bashing capitalism, I’d only need to go as far as the syllabus for my freshman political science class.
Conservatives sometimes do this too, and more often in the past — libertarians have statism as their bugbear, for example, and old-school John Birchers had Communists — but mainstream post-Cold War conservatism finds itself less in opposition to a single cultural force than to a hundred disparate movements. The only thing those movements have in common, policy-wise, is that they’re in some sense progressive. Or liberal, in mainstream American parlance.
Question: How much of this gap between media is explained by the age gap between liberals and conservatives?
Doesnt EVERY libertarian make the same argument about poor democrats?
Does every libertarian argue that poor Democrats are voting against their interest in order to signal virtue?
No?
Many libertarians (who I disagree with) think that they vote for the Democrats in order to further their immediate self-interest at the expense of others. They’re lured in by greed for other people’s wealth, which the Democrats promise to deliver.
Other libertarians (such as Bryan Caplan) believe that poor Democrats vote that way because they genuinely but irrationally think it’s for the good of everyone. And they (as well as poor Republicans, etc.) have no incentive to learn about what actually promotes economic growth for everyone because the individual’s vote is too small to matter.
Something that was not mentioned in the article referenced in the linked article (that is, the Matt Breunig piece referenced by Emma Lindsay) is the “white supremacy being in the interests of poor whites” is not merely down to dignity and status, it genuinely is in economic interest.
The commenters talking about “the elites” lying to poor whites and manipulating them politically seemed to have – if I am reading them correctly – the assumption that by voting against their economic interest (since poor whites and poor people of colour are all in the same economic class), they are voting for status and are being manipulated by rich Republicans.
Because if they voted in their economic interest, they’d vote for the Democrats, right? The Democrats are the Nice Party! All for justice and equality and redistribution! But if they voted for the Democrats, and they are now in the same economic and social class as poor people of colour, they will lose out. Because not alone of “affirmative action” but the notion of white privilege. Oppressed minority groups automatically qualify for more aid because they need it more and it is reparative justice to help them up the rungs of the ladder.
Which does nothing now for poor white Joe, if poor white Joe and poor black Bob are going for a job and Bob gets it on a quota system or Bob is eligible for supplementary welfare programmes for African-Americans Below The Poverty Line or any thing else the Democrat elites institute.
Meanwhile, Joe is not eligible for the works of charity the Blue Tribe prefer (helping minorities in race, gender and sexual orientation – as Emily points out, Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuke re: Black Lives Matter costs him absolutely nothing and gets him a lot of kudos; now imagine if he tried setting something up for white people only, even with confining it strictly to low-status poor whites – unless it was for an LGBT group or the like favoured status, he’d be hammered as a racist) and he loses out on any trickle-down of white privilege that sticking with the Red Tribe gives him.
So it may be cynical opportunism, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of status and dignity solely, it may well be (in a small way) to their economic interest to seemingly “vote against their interests” for the horrible rich manipulative elite on The Other Side.
Cautiously endorsed, contingent on what the real state of things is like in America.
This is a large part of what I was getting at when I said that the Author has failed to realize that poor whites are already in “last place”.
Poor black Bob has options, but poor white Joe knows that he’s on his own.
And if Joe manages to rise above his station by getting a scholarship, joining the army, making decent money as a coal miner, etc… He’ll still have to deal with people lecturing him about “the rape of mother earth” and how white people don’t understand “real hardship”.
It’s enough to make even a patient man tempted to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats.
Seriously, are we living in the same reality?
I went to a nationally ranked, left-leaning university and never had anyone lecture me in such a manner. Unless you’re counting signs saying stuff like “be green, turn off the lights when you leave the room”? Hell, I even took a seminar on (something like) “political philosophy and the environment”, and it wasn’t delivered in “guilt-ridden lecture” format.
I even wrote my final paper for that class criticizing “deep ecology” as anti-human. Got an A (highest possible grade). The professor wasn’t a conservative or libertarian.
I’m pretty damn sure Mr. Blue-Collar Coal Miner isn’t getting those lectures. Unless you mean when he chooses to watch a left-wing political commentary show or a left-wing politician’s speech? (And even then…)
Vox Imperatoris akss: Seriously, are we living in the same reality?
I honestly don’t know.
I live in decidedly “Red” enclave (NASCAR, BBQ, Country Music, etc…) of a decidedly “Blue” state (California). However work takes me to LA and San Diego on a regular basis.
City folk complaining about those ignorant hicks in the valley is common enough that has become cliché, likewise valley folk referring to LA as “that wretched hive of scum and villainy”.
I was going to UCSD on the GI bill when OWS was in full swing and yes I caught a fair bit of flak of the “Bush lied people died” and “why do you hate Muslims” variety from the humanities & ethnic studies contingent while I was there. Fortunately I was a math major and could safely avoid or ignore them most of the time.
Of more immediate importance is that the local yuppies hate the Oil and Gas industry but it remains one of the largest employers of blue collar labor in the area. Protests and political clashes over jobs and water rights are bitterly fought, and Mr. Blue-Collar Roughneck and Power-station Tech are well aware of the low regard in which they are held.
Is this representative of the nation as a whole? I don’t know, But there seem to be a lot of people in similar boats who are similarly fed up with the coastal urban gentry’s bullshit.
That still sounds weird, like you’re abnormally sensitive or somehow seeking out or attracting hostile people. I originally went to CSULB on an ROTC scholarship, way before OWS, but after people started hating Bush, and still just universally got ‘thank you for your service’ from everyone that knew, which of course led to embarrassed explanations of how I was a cadet and hadn’t actually done anything yet. Heck, my ex and I even went to an actual Muslim student group meeting just to see what they were about and openly confronted them about how oppressive and backwards their traditions actually are and they weren’t even hostile in response, just kind of stammered and couldn’t come up with any coherent response. I grew up in the LA suburbs and of course made plenty of cracks about the 661 and the 909, but they’re made the way an Alabama fan makes fun of an Auburn fan, fully realizing we’re basically the same in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t think I’m actively seeking out conflict but I do think it’s possible that “crossing the border” on a regular basis has made me more sensitive to the differences.
It’s just a little bit jarring to go from a Saturday afternoon barbeque where the chief political divide is between Trump supporters and Cruz supporters to driving up the 8 on Monday morning and listening to the denizens of 94.9 FM’s morning zoo muse about how weird and scary the whole Trump thing is, and how nobody they know would ever seriously consider voting for him.
It’s like the old Pauline Kiel quote…
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
…or Scott’s own bit about “dark matter people”.
and once you’re aware of it you start noticing it all over.
Edit:
And as an aside I suspect that the ease of identifying GI bill students didn’t help much on the whole “avoid conflict” front sometimes you can’t help but have “fuck with me” tattooed on your forehead.
@ Vox
I have people on my FB feed right now posting a form letter about how they’ve built a search engine to scour their friend list for people who have “liked” pro-Trump stuff so they can unfriend them.
Back at uni, I had quite a few run-ins with faculty over various subjects, and on every single occasion, it was over some lefty doctrine or other. I had a psych professor just lose his shit and lecture the class on how Bush was a classic psychopath and sociopath (as if he hadn’t just taught us that one couldn’t be both) for six whole class periods over three weeks. I had two professors hand out party registration forms for the Democratic Party in class back in ’07. I’ve had a couple profs fail papers of mine because they disliked the ideological content. In both cases I had to take it to the dean of students to ask for a neutral grader.
Now, all this isn’t to complain. It never concerned me in the least. I am energized by conflict and debate. But I know it made a lot of people who might have backed me sit quiet and let me take the heat.
Oh, and one of the democratic candidates for president just told me I don’t know what it’s like to be poor.
So yeah, I think we do live in different realities.
@Vox
Perhaps you had se unusually good fortune. My experience moving between Appalachia and the Megalopolis parallels Hlynkacg’s.
In college, I had a scholarship to study Latin and Ancient Greek, and was taking graduate level language courses my freshman year. One of the reasons I ended up in biology instead of the humanities is how tedious it was to argue with mind-killed Kafka-trapping leftists all day, and occasionally get marked-down for my efforts.
Biology was just more interesting, and arguments in the field could actually be settled by evidence rather than appeals to the current party line.
Of course academics all tilt left and biology is no exception. When George W Bush was reelected I watched a professor devote a whole (biology) lecture to how stupid Bush and anyone who voted for him was. The basic gist was that all those slack-jawed racist/sexist/denialist/warmongers in flyover country couldn’t be smart enough to go to college, let alone sit in his lecture at $elite_university. And yet there they were sitting in front of me, the poor white students from flyover country some of whom transferred in from their state college, others were on ROTC scholarship. I didn’t know their political affiliation — but they were definitely outperforming most of their peers. Nobody was going to build them a safe space or worry about how stereotype threat would affect their performance, because a hostile learning environment can’t possibly hurt white people, or if it does hurt them, they deserve it.
None of my colleagues get the Trump phenomenon. The best only way I’ve found to explain it to them is that he is America’s middle finger, and if you can’t understand why anyone would vote for him, that finger is pointed at you.
@Ptoliporthos, I wonder whether you agree with me that it’s at least a bit disturbing that a sizeable fraction of the US electorate apparently wants to make “America’s middle finger” President of the United States.
I can understand the appeal of a Big Swinging Middle Finger, just as I can understand the appeal of smashing someone’s windows if they say something that makes you angry. But smashing those windows is probably a bad idea, and so is electing the Middle Finger, no matter how it may stir you to see him insolently and magnificently upraised against your enemies.
(That doesn’t necessarily mean that electing Trump is a terrible idea. He might have virtues other than those of the Middle Finger. Or, of course, faults other than those of the Middle Finger. But, taking what you say seriously, I think it’s reasonable to be alarmed at how many people apparently really want a Middle Finger for president.)
@ g
I think it’s reasonable to be alarmed at how many people apparently really want a Middle Finger for president.
(Democrat here, seeing Trump as a lesser evil GOP.)
In our US checks and balances system, POTUS isn’t as powerful as Prime Minister etc is in other systems (though POTUS gets at least four years in office). A Middle Finger may get a lot of votes, but even if he becomes POTUS there is not much a POTUS can do without cooperation from Congress, the media, the courts, etc etc. And of course the more he’s offended those, the less cooperation he’ll get from them.
* especially in the Primary, which may or may not get him the nomination
ETA – A firebrand looks impressive during a campaign, but tends to fizzle out in the Oval Office.
Houseboat, you and I are perfectly I agreed on this. I’ve been trying to reassure my friends, who are universally terrified that Trump today means an American Reich tomorrow, that no, the President just does not have that power. Even in the modern era, there’s only so much you can accomplish via executive order. For the big stuff you’ll need Congress AND the Supreme Court at the very least to go along, leaving aside other institutions like the military (which can and would refuse to obey unlawful orders) and the media.
@g
Sure it’s disturbing. Trump is empirical evidence that both the political establishment and the media have completely squandered their credibility with a large fraction of the electorate.
If one (and increasingly both) parties treat Trump voters as illegitimate, they shouldn’t be surprised when those voters return the favor.
Are these people correct to trust Trump? Probably not, but I can see why they don’t trust anyone else either.
The only silver lining I can see is that both parties might discover a newfound respect for the constitutional limits on executive power and roll back the powers that congress has unwisely delegated to the president during the 20th century. But that would require a supermajority of both houses to be high-minded and take the long view. if they were capable of that, Trump wouldn’t be winning.
The Constitution is not a guarantee against the implementation of fascism, it’s just words on paper. But it’s well enough respected among the elite, and Trump is not well enough respected among the elite, and Trump lacks the paramilitary organization to even keep from being thrown out of his own rally by Black Lives Matter, so I wouldn’t be too worried about him.
I’d be more worried if there were a candidate that had Black Lives Matter on their side, since they seem to be the ones getting things done w.r.t. political violence, but it’s not clear that there is one.
@Ptoliporthos, one other remark about the “America’s middle finger” thing. It looks to me as if a substantial fraction of the US electorate — shall we say 30% at least? — are more or less in the “can’t understand why anyone would vote for him” camp. If a middle finger is pointed at 30% of Americans, can it really be rightly said to be America’s middle finger?
There is a complaint I’ve seen made from blueish Americans about reddish Americans, that the latter allegedly tend to portray themselves — or sometimes the communities they come from — as the only real Americans. There was a famous example from Sarah Palin back when Vice President Palin was what the blue tribe were terrified about — she said something about “real America” meaning small towns in rural areas or something like that. Anyway, calling Trump “America’s middle finger” if in fact what he really is is “(such-and-such a subset of America)’s middle finger” seems like the same sort of phenomenon. As if the treehugging handwringing booklarnin’ urbanized gentrified Blue Tribe aren’t actually part of America.
@ g:
Moreover, those 30% include not only a lot of Democrats but very many Republicans. And not just fringe libertarians or business fatcats, but your regular little-old-lady Republicans. They’re real Americans.
I think the phenomenon of the more rural, blue collar sorts thinking of themselves or even being though of by elites as more “authentic” examples of a culture, nation, or ethnicity exists all over the world to greater or lesser degrees (it’s not common in the US anymore today, perhaps due to political polarization, but it’s not historically uncommon in places like China, Japan, and France for people to idealize the “salt of the earth,” “authentic” lifestyle of their own cultures’ rural populations).
And I don’t think this is just arbitrary; rather, city-dwellers and elites are relatively cosmopolitan and fashion-conscious (both in the sense of clothes and of new trends in thought and culture generally). Rural and labor-class populations tend to be more conservative in thought and consumption habits. They eat barbecue instead of pad thai, to use the same example above.
Of course, it’s not that their ancestors have been eating bbq for thousands of years, but that their grandparents did and they are more like their grandparents who were, more often than is the case with city-dwellers, natives of the area themselves.
Of course, one can turn it on its head and say culture comes from cities and American culture is fundamentally an immigrant culture, etc. etc. but that refers more to an ideal or historical structure as opposed to a particular instance.
So, I’m not saying it’s nice or a particularly good argument for anything, but I do think that rural and labor class populations do have a better claim to being “authentic x people” than elites and city dwellers for the same reasons elites and city dwellers have a better claim to be cosmopolitan, fashionable, cutting-edge, etc.
There is a complaint I’ve seen made from blueish Americans about reddish Americans, that the latter allegedly tend to portray themselves […] as the only real Americans.
As our host has noted, both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe tend to think of Red Tribe as being the “real Americans” and Blue Tribe as being a bunch of WEIRD cosmopolitans who happen to live between Mexico and Canada and would find it troublesome to move.
If Blue Tribe is complaining about that now, they ought to be facing at least a 50%-silvered mirror when they do.
This sort of thing is kind of why I intellectually at least decided to feel better about my country: if you let people you disagree with monopolise patriotism, patriotism itself is going to end up being something reviled within the eyes of many.
@g
Oh I didn’t mean that reds are any more or less American than blues. For that matter, I don’t even believe Trump is red!
By calling him America’s Middle Finger I meant that if you had to pick a single American to demonstrate giving the finger for visiting aliens, I bet most Americans would pick someone from New York City to do it. Vaunting, brash, vulgar, with that Queens accent — you’ve seen this character in dozens of Hollywood movies. It’s the role Trump was born to play.
I agree that probably only 30% of Americans are wagging Trump at an equivalent number who are so estranged from the waggers that they can’t even understand that they’re being wagged at. That blissfully ignorant number includes Rubio, Romney, McCain, and the Bushes, FWIW.
The most (only?) thoughtful media take on the whole Trump phenomenon I’ve seen was a lengthy interview with Pat Buchanan in the Washington Post. He might have been the last pro-labor nativist Republican of national significance, and that was more than 20 years ago. It’s not surprising that people have trouble remembering what that actually looks and sounds like. Trump is certainly more crass and politically successful, but at the same time, far less intimidating. I remember UAW workers smashing Japanese automobiles to bits with sledgehammers at Buchanan rallies.
@ John Schilling
As our host has noted, both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe tend to think of Red Tribe as being the “real Americans” and Blue Tribe as being a bunch of WEIRD cosmopolitans who happen to live between Mexico and Canada and would find it troublesome to move.
Raises hand. I grew up in Palin’s America (and voted for her in 2008) but have spent most of my adult life being Blue expat one place or another outside Real American Society. If we divided Cosmopolitan World Citizenry according to their country of origin, I have no idea what the Blue Real American segment would look like — other than insufficiently assimilated?
Well, I have seen (perhaps in this thread, though I was thinking of late 2000) non-USians describing us as ‘believing Their Constitution can handle anything’. And some non-USians don’t seem to take Enlightenment Values as seriously as we do…. And the French still have ‘guilty till proved innocent’ over there!?!?!?
@suntzuanime
“I’d be more worried if there were a candidate that had Black Lives Matter on their side, since they seem to be the ones getting things done w.r.t. political violence, but it’s not clear that there is one.”
That’s a clever joke. I think you won the thread and the Internet today.
I can give you a concrete example of this. I live in Tacoma, WA but my parents live in Louisville, KY so I see both worlds. One time I was visiting I read in the local newspaper that the county program to prevent poor families from loosing their heating in winter months was being accused of racial discrimination. This was based on the fact that more money was being spent per poor white individual then per poor black individual. What the article went on to explain was the inherent differences and costs in serving white poor, which are largely rural, and black poor which are largely urban.
If you were a white person in this situation what is this signaling to you? To me it seems like what somebody is saying is that not only is it unfair to meet you needs, but that there is something inherently wrong about it because racism is a horrible thing, right? Why would that make me want to vote for the democrats
when theirs is the party that harbors these thought processes in the first place?
I can understand preferring in the abstract welfare dressed up as not-welfare for pride reasons. But by the time you are demanding from your politicians welfare dressed up as not-welfare the gig is clearly up, no? Who exactly do you think you fooling at that point?
Maybe the Marxist / Protestant labor theory of value is just so strongly implanted that it shuts off all other objections — if one is tired at the end of the day and hates his boss he must perforce have been involved in useful activity.
Human capacity for self-delusion is enormous.
I’d add “Blues are proud of taking public transit, Reds consider it a loss of status.”
> What bad blue parents do is to impose no discipline on their kids, letting them run around other people’s houses endangering the furniture.
I don’t think that’s the typical failure mode of blue parents – I’d say the typical failure mode is to overuse trendy parenting techniques, from pushing them into the latest obscure japanese way of learning music and mind developing to forcing specific diets to using time-outs.
(I’d also argue that letting kids run around isn’t bad parenting, unless I guess you’re really fastidious about your furniture. But that’s a different issue).
> Blue parents are proud of how few children they have
I’ve never observed this. Being proud of having lots of children does seem restricted to reds though.
> If cooking a meal for a bunch of blues, you are expected to pay attention to a wide range of food constraints–not just avoiding lethal allergens but catering to vegetarians, and vegans, and people who have decided that maybe they should try a gluten free diet.
I don’t think you’d be expected to pay attention to it upfront, but it’s considered legitimate for guests to ask for that.
(Also, a bunch of these apply only to specific subgroups of the tribes, but I’m assuming this wasn’t meant to be super-precise.)
Not super precise–and the tribes don’t have exact boundaries around them.
Your kids running around your house may not be a problem, depending on the house. Running around someone else’s house which is not kid proofed is a problem.
A bit of running around is one thing, kids are kids. The solution is to let them go run around outside 🙂
If you can’t do that, or if they’re climbing up on things, getting things dirty, breaking things, etc. then you should stop them and not be all “Oh we never tell little Jessamine-Moonglow ‘no’, that stifles her finding her own boundaries and developing a sense of self-discipline!”
I have not observed excessive permissiveness to be tribally affiliated.
Blues live in places where public transit is even doable, to be blunt. You ever try to take public transit in your average small town or rural area? It takes fifteen minutes to drive, and an hour to take the bus.
Blues worship bicycles and ride them as status. Reds notice that the reality is that its mostly poor people who use them, and that bicycling really sucks to do unless you are a kid or a “pro” cyclist who cares about things like cadence and spends more on his bike than he does his PC.
“Blues live in places where public transit is even doable, to be blunt.”
I think this actually gets at what I see as the core of the Red-Blue divide: the rural-urban divide. Though there are many Blues who live in the country and many Reds who live in the city, I think the Blue culture is fundamentally an urbanite culture with most of its values explicable by appeal to that: bigger govmt (seems more necessary when living in close proximity with lots of people), public transit, smaller families, higher need for tolerance of racial-cultural-social differences, more cosmopolitan, more able to make big money (but therefore correspondingly suspicious of it–I know of none so disdainful of the wealthy as my friends who were born into wealthy families), more focus on institutional education and credentials…
Red culture is fundamentally rural culture: oriented to small, relatively homogeneous communities brought together by shared values and cultural assumptions, skeptical of the necessity of a big role for government in daily life (since govmt institutions generally aren’t that important for daily rural life), focus on non-governmental vectors of social cohesion (religion, especially), focus on self-reliance within that frame of community (including self-defense, i. e. guns), preferences for “native” culture products: BBQ, Country music, Nascar, as opposed to Pad Thai and ballet. Bigger families (more space and less focus on institutional education means each child is cheaper and pays off sooner).
There even exist relatively “Red” cities and “Blue” small towns, but I think the “Red” cities tend to be located within vast expanses where rural cultures hold sway (eg Texas), whereas the “Blue” small towns tend to similarly be located on the rural peripheries of densely populated urban areas (eg New England).
People are complaining about how these categories are not useful, and obviously there are big grey areas (yeah, intentional), but I still think this rural-urban divide and the kind of opposition it creates especially at the level of national politics is a huge, if weirdly overlooked (when was the last time you heard a commentator say, “well, you’ve got to understand that what Donald is saying may not make sense to a New Yorker, but let’s interview this guy from rural Pennsylvania”?*) factor in socio-political discourse.
*I wonder if this isn’t the true source of the “liberal media bias” thing: being in media is itself a pretty urbanite thing to do, as is being in the class of academics and professional commentators of the sort who get invited on TV programs. It may be in the nature of major media outlets, which are, after all, almost always physically located in urban areas, to overrepresent the urban perspective relative to the rural.
So maybe my whole issue with this classification boils down to how much of this specifically doesn’t apply to LA Metro, i.e. there is almost no public transit and nobody takes a bicycle anywhere because the place is huge and the distances are too great, plus it’s the only major U.S. city that is majority Hispanic and lot of the descriptions of Blue Tribe read like a parody of Stuff White People Like.
Stuff White People Like is a parody of Blue Tribe.
Yeah, rural culture is something the blues don’t always get. And so much of what is in the news betrays this. Like rural people don’t care about Uber, because you have to own your car just to make the daily commute.
It’s funny you mention Texas in particular, as Texas has to be the most bicycle-crazy place I’ve ever lived. It was huge at Fort Hood where I lived when I first moved here. Not as a means of commuting anywhere, but as a recreational activity and form of exercise. Triathlon, too, but I suppose at least some of that was the need for people in the Army to be fit with that fitness mostly consisting of generalized endurance more than strength or any specific athletic skill. Of course bicycling was a big deal in Austin, too, the bluest city in a red state, but it’s even big here in Dallas where I live now.
Locally, by car I can get to (work)+(home again) in (15)+(20-25), depending on traffic.
By bicycle, it is (15)+(15), making it the superior choice unless it rains.
This is partially because of good bicycling infrastructure – e.g. my bicycle can use a path to cut through a small park that my car has to go around.
This makes my ability to ride a bicycle to work an urban trait, not a blue-tribe trait. The two may correlate, but not anywhere near perfection – I know plenty of urban blue-tribers who take their car to work because they work further away, and one urban red-triber who rides a bicycle to work at her private clinic because it is faster for her than taking her massive expensive status-symbol car.
In my Left Coast experience, Blue towns are either college towns (Santa Cruz, Eugene), or tourist towns (Ashland, Mendocino), or, in a few cases, places where the first-generation hippies happened to congregate when San Francisco got too expensive for them (usually tiny little mountain towns you’ve never heard of). They’re rarely more than a day’s drive from an urban center, but not necessarily in its periphery, and anyway nowhere in the coast states is more than a day’s drive from a major urban center.
thank you for clearing us all up on “the reality” about bicycles.
Where I live, bicycles are used by Chinese immigrants who can’t afford cars. You rarely if ever see any “pro” cyclists, because small towns can’t easily afford or make bike lanes and the roads are not designed to allow cyclists to have the same status as cars. You cannot be treated as a vehicle on a road where the average car goes 40 mph.
There’s a huge difference between red and blue attitudes on this. Most of the reds i know let their kids have bicycles and drive to work, because a twenty mile commute both ways in inclement weather is not worth it. But blues tend to live in dense cities where car ownership is not practical and dedciated bicycling infrastructure exists. that’s where you see the pro cyclist. The bike shop here is ten minutes away from bankruptcy, and most people here if they own bikes get them from Wal-Mart or the local Benny’s
I agree with you on the difference. I was chiding you because in your comment:
“Blues worship bicycles and ride them as status. Reds notice that the reality is that its mostly poor people who use them, and that bicycling really suck…”
You are departing from the productive posture of “blues believe X, reds believe Y” and moving closer to “blues have a nonsensical status-obsession, whereas reds discern the true reality of things”
ie if David Friedman had started the discussion with “reds are obsessed with having kids. blues notice the reality that mostly poor people have kids and that kids are really a pain in the ass…” this whole thread would probably be much less interesting.
As someone in a small town in a country that has rainy weather, and with health promotion campaigns pushing cycling as good for you and good for the environment, and companies being encouraged to set up bike purchase schemes, I can tell you that enthusiasm for cycling to work lasts until the first heavy rain fall and winds blowing it right into you.
If you’re living in a climate where you are either cycling only short distances between work and home in a compact urban area or where the weather is reliably not going to leave you drenched to the skin and dripping water until lunchtime all over the office if you bike to work, then such promotion works great.
If you’re living somewhere where we’ve had five solid months of rain, the bike gets left in the garage while the car is back on the road.
It is possible to bicycle to work only on days with good weather. My mother did that for many years.
I expect that hills are also an issue.
Someone must explain to this European why it apparently never occurs to Americans to save money by riding motor scooters, which beside being very cheap, are often MORE practical than cars (they cut through traffic, you park them easily) (and yes you can ride them in the rain if you just cover yourself properly).
I’m basing this on what I read everywhere on the Internet, including American frugality blogs. Correct me if I’m wrong but it appears that the only options Americans ever consider are car, bus, and bycicle. Are motor scooters illegal or what?
I just rode my bike in to work, in the allegedly un-bikeable LA Metro area (El Segundo, to be precise). On account of this thread, I counted nine bicycles in the parking lot, and probably sixteen more in lockers, out of 728 people who have offices in this building.
The bicyclists I know, skew weakly Blue in our generally Red and Grey workforce, but it’s really more about whether their particular situation favors bicycle commuting. Distance is the big variable, but traffic and as Nancy notes hills are also an issue. There are few good bike paths, but some streets are safe and some not so much. For me, weather permitting, it is faster, safer, healthier, and less stressful than the alternative.
Weather sometimes not permitting, I do actually own an automobile.
Edit for anonymous: Six motorcycles visible on the south side parking lot, probably as many more elsewhere. Motor scooters are legal on American city streets but not on freeways, and large American cities are set up with the assumption that you will be using the freeway if you are going across town.
I tried to convince one of my coworkers to ride her horse to work, just once to prove it could be done. Preferably during the week of our annual commuter survey.
Motorcycles and scooters are popular in some places. The main drawback is they’re dangerous compared to modern sedans and trucks, but people use them.
I understand that American cities are set up differently and that motor scooters have drawbacks such as being risky and unable to use the freeway. However, bycicles have the same disadvantages.
What surprises me of the US is the popularity of bycicles relative to scooters, at least judging (very superficially, I admit) from the Internet. Bicycles have more drawbacks than scooters, and are only slightly cheaper in absolute terms (compared to what the expenses for a car would be). Yet it appears that they are very popular in the US, much more so than scooters, and not just among health enthusiasts, but even among people who are trying to figure out how to save money. On American frugality blogs, everyone talks about cars and bicycles, and nobody talks about scooters.
You would expect a noticeable amount of people to seek a compromise solution, instead of going abruptly from cars to uncomfortable bicycles.
So that’s what I find weird.
Motorcycles are a different matter because they aren’t cheap.
With a scooter, you can’t use bicycle lanes, bicycle paths, or cut through parks, like an above poster says he does. They’re a hell of a lot more expensive than bicycles. You need to get a license, register, and insure scooters, whereas you can just buy a bicycle and you’re good to go.
By the way, I hope I didn’t sound rude with the phrasing “apparently it never occurs to Americans…”. If I sounded rude I certainly didn’t mean it.
Also, relying on public transport or a bicycle is a lot easier without kids.
>> Blue parents are proud of how few children they have
>I’ve never observed this. Being proud of having lots of children does seem restricted to reds though.
I think that’s just a pithy way for David to say it. I think he mentioned in one of the versions of his comment that being childfree–as a conscious and voluntary choice, an indefinite commitment, and an affirmative identity within the context of a long-term romantic and sexual relationship like a marriage or domestic partnership–only really fits within the Blue Tribe. A Red Triber could be incapable of having children by circumstance, or could be putting it off until they’re in a more conducive situation, or saving themselves for marriage, or whatever, but the reasons would generally not be the same as within the childfree community, whose members either dislike children in general (not meant as a sideswipe; my partner, and to a lesser extent I, belong to this group) or just don’t want their own, full stop. Many feel a strong identity with this, and many, like my Bluish partner who comes from a more Red-Tribe milieu, contrast this identity with their Red friends and acquaintances who, fitting the typology outlined above, married and had children early, or got pregnant unexpectedly and nevertheless embraced the role of motherhood. My partner is happy that she did not go down that path and that we have the lifestyle and disposable income of a young, childless couple. For me, this is just a preference. The error comes in, as in most conflicts between these tribes, when people think they ought to be universal.
For the sake of symmetry with “Red Tribers are proud of how many kids they have,” this childfree identity could be phrased as being proud of how few children you have, just for a certain value of few: 0. It may admittedly be a stretch, since we could argue that not having children is semantically distinct from having very few children, but amounts of children tend to be natural numbers, and I really don’t want to think of non-integer amounts.
And being proud of how few is not limited to 0. I’m an only child, and my generally Blue parents have expressed pride in that fact. It’s generally connected to their pride in me, of course, but they’re thankful that they were able to invest the time, energy, and resources into me as an only child. Now, Bryan Caplan would disagree with the assumptions underlying this idea, and I’m inclined to agree with him, since it looks like he has a lot of evidence on his side. My turning out well enough probably had more to do with the generally healthy atmosphere my married and together parents engendered, their combined middle-class income, and that other little factor that so bothers social psychologists. They probably ought to have had more children, and those children would probably have turned out well enough, too. But nevertheless, just as assuming the relative primacy of “nature” should shift parents toward more children less intensively raised, assuming the relative primacy of nurture in outcomes should cause parents to favor fewer children more intensively/carefully raised. My parents, who hold those assumptions, are proud that they followed them to those conclusions. They also, like my partner, tend to dislike typical child behavior and highly value their disposable income. Sometimes they express disdain for couples with a large amount of children.*
There are definitely not enough gradations for this to be a margin on which Blues can directly compete with one another or seek status (again, negative amounts of children are nonsensical, and non-integer amounts are disturbing). However, I associate these attitudes–a preference for fewer or no children, and the cultural traits and identities that emerge from that preference–with the Blue cluster.
*But at least in my parents’ and my partner’s case, they tend to dislike misbehaved children especially and prefer behaved children, even sometimes making exceptions to their general dislike for children. So I think this might be one area David’s typology breaks down. Many of the Blue Tribers I know would be especially incensed about kids running around their house and being poorly disciplined/controlled, and badly behaved children feed into their general dislike for children. So maintaining strict control of one’s children may not be so Red-coded as it once was. I could at least conceive of some Red Tribers (and definitely some Greys like Caplan) as maintaining a more laissez-faire attitude toward their children. It’s possible for super-strict discipline (and especially physical discipline) to be limited to very conservative (still Red) households, and for the set of Blues who already don’t like children a great deal to prefer the ones around them to be seen, not heard (though to heavily disapprove of physical discipline), while in the space between (median Red through median Blue), parents are happier to “let kids be kids,” more or less.
You may well be right that blues who are generally negative on children will also be particularly negative on other people’s children making a nuisance of themselves. Possibly we need further subdivision.
So far as greys are concerned, our attitude, and I suspect Bryan’s, corresponds to the general laissez-faire/libertarian approach–people are free to run their own lives but not to impose costs on others. Our kids were unschooled, free to study or not study whatever they wanted (Bryan has a less laissez-faire approach on that subject, but I gather his kids agree with it). The rule for dinner was that if a kid didn’t like what we were having he was free to feed himself something else, provided that it was nutritionally adequate (so not complete laissez-faire) and required no effort from anyone else.
Which in practice mostly meant fruit yogurt. Currently chicken pot pies.
Hey, stop slandering me! It was fruit yogurt when I was a kid, yes, but it is most definitely not chicken pot pies now – or anything frozen, for that matter.
… actually it doesn’t come up, in my experience laissez-faire rules for dinner work pretty well since tastes expand naturally as one gets older (at least for me they did), especially if one chooses to push them a little, but that’s beside the point.
More seriously, responding to the overall point, I would say I do think there’s a distinction? My experience does support the idea that blues who really don’t like children are more likely to really not like children who are less well-behaved, and may put up with ones who are well-behaved as tolerable exceptions. But I think blues who do like children and are not good parents are still more likely to let them run wild – Deiseach’s comment above pretty much exactly captured how. I freely admit all my evidence is anecdotal, though.
And I expect Red parents who don’t really much like children exist – I suspect the tribal contribution is less in whether you like or don’t like children, as in how it is appropriate to express it. If just plain saying you don’t like children is forbidden but not liking children who are insufficiently well behaved is fine, you may just see most children as insufficiently well behaved.
> > Blue parents are proud of how few children they have
> I’ve never observed this. Being proud of having lots of children does seem restricted to reds though.
Blue *couples* are often proud of how few children they have (usually when they have none). But blue couples who already have children, whether 1, 2, or 6, aren’t usually proud of having fewer children than they could if they chose to have another one.
Blues with one child emphasize how much effort they put into that one kid.
Your conclusion seems to be supported by Jonathan Haidt’s research. Check out the “just desserts” and “care” collumns in this study – http://www.vox.com/2016/2/5/10918164/donald-trump-morality
“What red parents do wrong is claim that you shouldn’t contradict your elders–that hierarchy trumps truth.”
My parents emphasized that you shouldn’t do it publically, because it was rude.
“What bad red parents due is to impose discipline with orders to be obeyed but no need for justification.”
Maybe a little personal, but I would focus on this not necessarily being deliberate. They assume you know the justification the first time you hear it, forgetting that people forget, and that training takes time, etc.
“If cooking for a bunch of reds, you avoid lethal allergens if you know about them but for anything else people are expected to eat those parts of what you provide that fit their requirements, not to make a fuss or expect to be catered to.”
Well, you’ll be shamed for being picky in pubic, and it reflects poorly on the parents.
“Criticizing the behavior of someone else’s children is permissable in red culture”
Only in the mildest possible terms, telling people to knock it off, etc. Going into any degree of detail publically is going to trigger justified Defend The Family reflexes in everyone else, and you’ll look real bad, real fast, and this will be spread to all the other parents.
All of this may reflect the class status of my family, the emphasis on politeness and public behavior.
As for guaranteed minimum income, it seems to be to strongly incentivize Being A Bad Person. It sounds very much like one of those social policies that will be perfectly fine for high-IQ types during their lifetimes, because every social policy is fine for high-IQ types during their lifetimes, but will leave the stupid out to dry, and possibly the next generation, too.
Edit: Thinking about it, one of them might be “Red tribe parents can expect too much maturity from their children, Blue tribe can expect too little” might be a rephrasing?
People in the Grey Tribe think that the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are fully distinct groups with ironclad boundaries, when the guy who made up the terms only thought they were loose cluster-structures.
So for instance, everyone here talks about the white working class as a locked-in Republican constituency, whereas I tend to firmly believe that which way they’ll vote depends on whom the Democrats nominate. If Hillary Clinton of the motherfucking liberal class gets the nom, they’ll act like “Red Tribers” and vote Republican. If Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, I predict they’ll vote for him, or at least I predict that I won’t be able to call the election better than a coinflip, whereas if it’s Hillary vs Trump I will vote for Jill Stein and place my betting money on Trump.
Before yelling at me and offering steep odds at which you would lose money, consider that Bernie’s bases in the primaries have been (so far) low-to-mid-income non-black workers, education levels ranging from high-school completion to bachelors degree completion, registered Independents, non-Southern rural-to-suburban voters, and the young. I note this because except for the young, those are telling demographics of the “Red Tribe” white working class, not the archetypical Blue Tribe cluster.
The archetypical Blue Tribe cluster (college-to-postgrad, high-mid to high income, urban professional) have all gone for Hillary, except in the tech sector where people worry about needing a basic income to deal with automation. This is why Hillary’s actually been winning: she’s got all of the Obama coalition minus the young (and maybe now minus LGBT issues), he’s only got labor-issues voters and the young. He has to at least peel off a couple of demographic groups just to fight respectably hard, and should probably be trying to make inroads with professionals making $50k-$80k a year to add to his labor coalition of wage-workers making up to $50k/year.
For all his meager “victories”, he’s been campaigning with insufficient strategies.
This is all the opposite of what the extent SSC theory of “Red-Tribe/Blue-Tribe” says ought to happen. Of course, that theory assumes that labor politics are dead and buried, a memo sent by the ’90s that Sanders has been managing to blithely ignore so far. If labor politics aren’t dead in favor of a purely tribalized politics, then it explains how the fuck not one but two candidates can run insurgencies in the primaries from almost completely outside the party structures.
I agree with the point that Red and Blue tribes are much more loose, varied clusters of behaviors and structures than really specific, tight, iron-cloud things. I think that, if you are trying to limit either Red or Blue to loose stereotypes of people that you know, you’re probably not going to be getting all that much useful information about them out of it – not much above the level of “You might be a redneck if”. However I am…. extremely, extremely skeptical re: your claims about Sanders both in the context of the general election and the primary.
In the context of the general election, I think it’s true that a platform that emphasizes economic issues much more strongly and that emphasizes elite liberalism less could very well appeal to a much broader base of the country including the white working class. But I’m extremely skeptical that, like, all you gotta do is show up to the party with Sanders and the votes are going to be there. I think that strongly understates (1) the continuing importance of social issues to all voters and (2) the importance of narrative as opposed to policy in peoples’ decision making processes. On the one hand, I think that even if you come with a more populist economic message, there are still going to be a lot of voters who also care a lot about things like abortion, evangelical issues, political correctness, affirmative action, and immigration where there’s variance between their views and the Democratic platform. And I think that would still be a huge stumbling block for voters. On the other hand, while I think that economic populism is a really useful angle of attack for approaching lower-middle and working class white voters, I don’t think you can make the change over night, because people make their decisions based in part on narratives and those shift much less easily. In other words, a Bernie Sanders advancing a policy of economic populism would still have to grapple with the narratives about the left that currently make it difficult.
With regards to the primary battle, I would just… really, really want to see some polling data, at least, backing up that demographic breakdown of Bernie and Hillary, because it really does not line up with what I’ve seen and read and heard. My sense is that Bernie is largely relying on just the young and the progressive urban vote, while Hillary is largely relying on older voters, traditional Democrats, and in particular black and Hispanic voters. I would be very interested in hearing evidence to the contrary though.
I don’t interpret their comment as claiming that Red and Blue categories are loose clusters. I interpret their comment as claiming that Red and Blue categories are only loose clusters under certain prerequisite conditions, and if we go outside those conditions we will need to draw lines around entirely different clusters to understand people’s behavior.
Read the demographic breakdowns for Massachusetts and Michigan. What you’ve heard is a regional pattern in the South.
I would strongly caution anyone from drawing large conclusions about the whole country from the Michigan presidential primary.
While I find blue/red/grey tribe does map really nicely onto political culture, and while I find grey tribe as a useful shorthand for certain aspects of nerd culture, I think blue/red is far too simplistic to map onto people’s home lives and parenting styles. For example religion, nationality, class and occupation, while correlated with tribes somewhat, would be closer correlations with home life than political orientation. Blue and red tribes are distinct things in political culture because they feed off eachother, which I don’t think happens as much in home life. I don’t find the observations incorrect per se, I’m just not comfortable with using a unit of analysis that’s so broad in a highly specialized society.
This is a good analysis of why my mother and I disagree so much on how I should be parenting my own kids.
Now I wonder if I can explain the Red/Blue thing in a way that helps her to understand that it’s a cultural variation and not just her being Right and me being Wrong.
If your mother is red and you are blue, won’t your mother just accuse you of “relativism” or something like that? The red tribe is not very fond of “cultural variation” as a justification for perceived misbehavior.
Part of it may be that when you do things differently, particularly when she’s said “Oh you should do X”, that your mother feels you are criticising her.
The way she’s telling you to do it is, after all, the way she raised you. If you do something else, this feels like “My daughter hates how I raised her, she thinks I was a bad mother”.
Maybe gently trying to explain that it’s not that you think she did a bad job or that you resent her parenting style, it’s just that things are different now and attitudes have changed?
Or it may just be your mother is one of the “my way or the highway” moms (my own mother was like that) 🙂
Cultural Variation vs. Being Right is another Blue/Red thing.
On some issues. In other issues, though, both clusters will readily agree with the statement, “The way we do things is Right and the way they do things is Wrong.” They just have a different “we” and a different “they.”
On the other hand, it’s true you don’t often see the Red Tribe, as conceived in the Great Outgroup Post, arguing from a consciously relativistic perspective. Some in the Bizarre Local Sect and people with Burkean perspectives are much more suspicious of moral universalism and sympathetic toward particularism, but this is as good a moment as any to reinforce the difference between giant supergroups of political philosophies (delineated by relative directions) and historically contingent tribes sharing clusters of cultural affinities (delineated by color). And even then, traditionalist arguments tend to value cultural variations between societies and cultural homogeneity within them (cultures and societies should be mostly coterminous); while the Blue cluster is more associated with multiculturalism, which values cultural variations within societies, but can also be associated with a historically liberal belief in certain universal values, like human rights, and with globalism, which could be conceived as a desire to create a more connected global society with those shared values.
I think I’m aggressively agreeing with you.
As a parliamentarian of Irish Catholic descent, Burke had a lot to say about cultural homogeneity and imperialism. He said things like how, as an immigrant to England, he had a duty practice Anglican Christianity and assimilate, and how we Englishmen need to stop imposing our customs in Ireland and in India. He also supported Olaudah Equiano’s position* that blacks who escape slavery to Britain should marry whites and assimilate.
*By subscribing to his book, which in economic context means “helping it get published at all”.
I’m going to posit that the Blue Tribe is more homogenous in views than what we’re calling the Red Tribe. I think it has the advantage that it’s more influenced by the dominant culture, whereas the Red Tribe represents people who haven’t modified their views as rapidly as the dominant culture, for various reasons.
For example, the dominant culture overwhelmingly embraces LGBT, so there’s no dissent within the Blue Tribe on questions in that vein. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I support Bernie/Hillary, but I have some reservations about their acceptance of gay marriage.”
Among people who could be called solidly Red Tribe, however, I’ve heard a much wider range of views. This is tied largely to a combination of how religious and how old they are.
The “Red Tribe” label seems to be stretching to include elements of both the white working class and the suburban upper middle class in the South and Midwest. The latter group includes a lot of Whole Foods shoppers who nonetheless vote Republican. This is certainly the case in my area, which is a “super zip” in terms of median income, but voted ~75% for Romney in 2012. Maybe the point is that this Republican-voting suburban upper middle class is some hybrid of Red Tribe and Blue Tribe?
In any case, I’d correlate David’s food constraints point more closely to Whole Foods shoppers than political affiliation.
There are lots of disagreements within the “Blue tribe”:
“let’s get closer to Mother Nature” (e.g., anti-GMO) vs “yay, technology!” (pro-GMO)
“prostitution is exploitation” vs “prostitution is an unfairly stigmatized line of work”
“religion / spirituality is important” vs “religion is harmful” vs “live and let live”
“we’re all in this together” vs “class struggle”
“economic inequality is more important” vs “prejudice is more important”
“speak softly and carry a big stick” vs pacifism
“the status quo is HORRIBLE” vs “the status quo is mostly OK”
“we can’t judge other cultures” vs “we must shame bad cultures” vs “we should let people harmed by other cultures speak for themselves”
“regulated capitalism is working just fine” vs “big business has too much power”
“I should get my children into a top university” vs “I should unschool my children”
Point taken, though I think the range of opinion is exaggerated here.
E.g., the Blue Tribe consensus on religion, as I understand it, would be be “It can be helpful to find spirituality if you personally find that it enriches your life, but branches of Christianity that teach old-fashioned social views are harmful and/or evil.” A significant minority would go so far as to say “All religion is bad always.”
Is there really a pro-GMO Blue Tribe position? If so, I’d think it’s tiny. Much larger is the apathetic group, I.e., the non-Whole Foods portion of the Blue Tribe.
In any event, while Blue/Red != Democrat/Republican, a lot of the issues that Scott has talked about do map to that. E.g., the politicization of Ebola or ISIS.
But I think other issues that we’re calling Blue/Red map to upper middle class vs. white working class. E.g., Whole Foods, and generally having something, like gluten, that you’re passionate about avoiding at any given moment.
And some issues are multidimensional — based on what I’ve seen, the Republican upper middle class is much more likely to own a firearm than the Democratic upper middle class, though less likely than the Republican working class.
Romney isn’t a hunter, but he seems to be of a common view among the Republican upper middle class: “Using a shotgun to shoot varmints is occasionally kind of fun and/or useful, but hunting is never something I’ll do all that much.” This view may be tolerated among Blues, but I think the median Blue regards personal firearm ownership with revulsion.
All this to say, I think if we’re interested in understanding the Republican upper middle class, we should call it out, since in some cases, its values are closer to the Democratic upper middle class, and in others, closer to the Republican working class, and in others, somewhere in between.
This issue is becoming more salient in the current primary season, in which the Republican working class is pitted against the upper middle.
A majority of actual scientists and probably even just people with undergrad basic science degrees that ended up doing something else are both mostly Blue and pro-GMO, along with the general technocrat wing.
It’s interesting that you bring up GMOs and firearms. On both issues, there is a very vocal minority that has an extreme position on one side, and this skews perceptions. Like, while there are a lot of people who are vaguely pro-GMO, they don’t really make a fuss about it so you don’t hear from them. Firearms are similar. While there are probably more forceful gun control advocates than there are forceful GMO advocates, for Blues/Democrats gun control is maybe number five or six on the list of priorities. Whereas, for maybe 10-20% of the Red/Republican side, this is the NUMBER ONE issue, absolutely dwarfing all others.
Likewise, I think there are large numbers of people who are vaguely anti-GMO, or vaguely pro-firearm, but not all that fanatical about it. But these people get drowned out by the fanatics, along with the people on the other side of the debate.
Is there really a pro-GMO Blue Tribe position?
Yes. My Blue Tribe Architect friend is aggressively pro-GMO. He considers anti-GMO activists the moral and intellectual equivalent of anti-Vaxxers.
His hatred of the anti-GMO crowd is only matched by his hatred of: -incompetent outsourced labor (common among anyone who regularly works heavily with the Indian Service Sector)
-Tiny Houses
-Donald Trump
There’s definitely a pro-technology Blue Tribe element that hates the Mother Earth-y strain of Blue Tribe. Blue Tribe is NOT homogenous.
This is true, to a degree, and maybe Wency’s comment is flavored by the mild and non-malicious form of outgroup homogeneity bias: they say they live in a more Red community, and they’re liable to see more of the variation within it than the variation within communities they spend less time in.
That said, I’m also worried I might have a bias against the Blue Tribe, but I am surrounded by it. That should make me more likely to see the variation within it, but I think one of my main reasons for not identifying with Blues is the fact that when it comes down to it, like Wency, I really don’t think I see much variation. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough? But to take your examples:
> “let’s get closer to Mother Nature” (e.g., anti-GMO) vs “yay, technology!” (pro-GMO)
Here I associate enthusiasm toward technology with the Greys (even Reds in some cases), and ambivalence with the Blues. Some Blues are more hostile toward technology (or Greens, and Purples, too, but I don’t want to cheat and create too many categories.) Let’s just say I don’t really hear conscious cries of “yay, technology!” around here. It’s more like, everybody uses Uber because it’s useful, but not too enthusiastically, and if you ask, people are expected to signal some ambivalence toward it.
> “prostitution is exploitation” vs “prostitution is an unfairly stigmatized line of work”
Again, the latter sounds Grayer to me. I would expect the Blues to agree with both statements, and even to connect the two, but to attribute both issues to patriarchal forces. I only ever hear Grays emphatically disagreeing with the former statement, and while Blues might acknowledge when pressed that talking about how exploitative prostitution is can stigmatize it, I don’t think they’d disown the statement, just acknowledge that it’s problematic to say it without considering the effect it can have. I don’t associate a positive attitude toward prostitution with any major Blue Tribe faction.
>“religion / spirituality is important” vs “religion is harmful” vs “live and let live”
I’d more or less collapse one and three, because “religion is important” without “live and let live” is Red, and as I’ve seen “spirituality” used, it’s usually wide enough to encompass the concept of living and letting live itself. As for “religion is harmful,” it was popular for criticizing the majority religion in the U.S., as practiced by members of the majority race, and particularly in the forms practiced by the other tribe. The statement became general, but usually with that prototype in mind. As another world religion became more relevant for the U.S. conversation, associated with different people who were not the majority race here, “religion is harmful” seemed to cleave: it can still be acceptable in the Blue Tribe if the relevant religion is Christianity as believed by white people. But talking about how All Religions Are Bad, and Yes, Even That One, and maybe Especially That One is pretty Gray to me; criticizing That One can get you excluded from Blue circles and accused of racism and an irrational fear of it, since it seems to them more like attacking a minority than an oppressive structure. This may be the New Atheism/Atheism+ distinction.
> “we’re all in this together” vs “class struggle”
This one seems complicated to me and maybe I might tackle it some other time, but this comment is already too long and I feel like a blowhard already.
>“economic inequality is more important” vs “prejudice is more important”
I think this one is actually a very valid example, and one I see spirited argument about. Very true.
“speak softly and carry a big stick” vs pacifism
I don’t associate a conscious policy of strong defense with the Blue Tribe. Rather, when Blues are in charge of foreign policy as at present, they tend to fall into this, but I think that’s more practical than idealistic, and I think they try to signal the speaking softly part to their base more than the big stick part. The stick is for other countries. Reds, I think, like SS&CBS, but their political leaders tend to interpret that as “Carry a big stick and shake it around all the time and yell.” Maybe SS&CBS is the practical synthesis of Blue “speak softly” policy and Red “big stick” policy. Maybe I misinterpreted you.
> “the status quo is HORRIBLE” vs “the status quo is mostly OK”
Point taken; I don’t think any tribes cleave on optimist-pessimist lines.
>“we can’t judge other cultures” vs “we must shame bad cultures” vs “we should let people harmed by other cultures speak for themselves”
I thought out loud about this in a comment in an above subthread.
>“regulated capitalism is working just fine” vs “big business has too much power”
Don’t really hear the former. The only way it’s Blue is in the sense that regulated capitalism is preferable to unregulated capitalism, but I don’t associate “capitalism is regulated the right amount already” with Blue.
>“I should get my children into a top university” vs “I should unschool my children”
Unschooling sounds Grey. It’s close to homeschooling, and I think homeschooling is associated with Reds. Sure, we Blues would might instill the right values in our kids, but Blues probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with losing their institutional influence over educating the other tribe’s children.
In many of these cases, I’m not sure the juxtaposed statements are actually in conflict with one another, while in others, I think we define tribal boundaries differently and that you might include what I consider the Grey Tribe as a faction of the Blue Tribe.
The latter may just reflect a difference in the way we categorize, but I suspect they are actually useful conflicts for examining areas where Blue Tribe beliefs shift over time–I think certain beliefs eventually leave the space of acceptable Blue opinion and people who still hold them find themselves, often to their chagrin, on the other side of an invisible line. The space they occupy eventually turns Gray.
The former cases–where there aren’t apparent conflicts right now–seem to be where the Blues I encounter hold complex sets of beliefs rather harmoniously. Sometimes people exaggerate the incompatibility of these beliefs–members of the hostile outgroup do so to foment conflict, and members of the ingroup or sympathetic people do so to counter the effects of homogeneity bias targeted against the group in question.
But then sometimes, previously compatible beliefs do appear to come into conflict. Some horrible things happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, and became politicized before the gunpowder smoke dissipated in the night sky. To the naive observer, these events threw certain tribal values into conflict with one another. The outgroup tried to take advantage of this, to point to the conflicts, and to force the ingroup to confront the cracks within its intersectional coalition. But the ingroup resisted this, and its loudest mouthpieces rather quickly articulated a position. It may seem like there’s a screaming match going on right now, but if I look more carefully, I see more people who don’t identify as feminists saying, “As feminists, you should be less open to immigration from these patriarchal societies!” And people who do identify as feminists taking a stand against Islamophobia. Even if those positions turn out to be incompatible on a practical level (I don’t know), a group with strong shared beliefs, media to articulate them, and a structure to control group membership along ideological lines will, I think, behave predictably.
The caveat is that these are my personal opinions, observations, and hunches. And I know the context of the discussion was Blue Tribe culture, and I veered into the politics of social justice, and these are not the exact same things (just correlated). My main point is just that these associated groups seem good at articulating shared beliefs, prioritizing between them in cases of conflict, and avoiding infighting by excluding dissenters from ingroup membership.
If you don’t mind sharing, are you in the Bay Area?
Thanks for the detailed reply. I’ll only touch on some of the points here.
I
I take it you’ve never heard of “feminist sex wars”? Or read any rants about “SWERFs” on Tumblr?
Here’s a short overview from The Prostitution Debate in Feminism: Current Trends, Policy and Clinical Issues Facing an Invisible Population:
And here’s how “SJWiki” sees the ‘anti’ side:
II
41% of “mostly liberal” and 24% of “consistently liberal” Americans would be “unhappy” if a close family member married an atheist. If Blues are supposed to be about half the country, all of those people can’t be Red.
III
Is Hillary Clinton Blue or Red? What about those who voted for her? Many people, including many “Blues”, are practical, not idealistic.
IV
Eh, that’s how Scott defined it, I think:
Building a little on the theme of bubbles we live in:
1. Best I’ve been able to tell, I don’t personally know any solidly Blue STEM types. I have 4-5 friends who went into engineering, all are self-described libertarians, except one who is diehard TradCon. I know one Ph.D. Chemist — he is thoroughly apolitical, and a Ph.D. Engineer — the only Blue/SJW in the lot. They are all male.
2. The Blue/SJW types I know are mostly artistic types, except one who’s an accountant and the STEM guy. They are also mostly single women.
3. From where I sit, politics seems to be extremely sex-segregated. In my metro area, while I was single, I can only recall having met perhaps two single, college-educated women who would self-describe as Republican.
4. Funny story on the topic of “SWERF”. The Blue STEM guy that I know was a mild-mannered fellow who actively encouraged his bright, college student girlfriend to become a stripper as a form of empowerment. It sounded like a bad idea to me, but what do I know? She ended up leaving him for one of her customers. Another mild-mannered Ph.D. student, you ask? Nope, a biker who went by the name of “Ratsnake”.
The STEM guy was devastated, more so because none of his friends could discuss the matter without bursting into laughter.
Ill-defined as “Blue” may be, it’s not equivalent to SJW.
Jaskologist:
Sure, but aren’t SJW’s a sub-tribe of Blues?
In that vein, I would think that being an SJW moves one away from any gray area between Reds and Blues. If you agree with the statement, “Stripping is a form of empowerment to be encouraged because it turns the Patriarchy’s desire to control female bodies against it,” you are undeniably Blue. If you disagree with that statement, you could be anything, including Blue. So if I’m trying to identify the Blues among my acquaintances, the outspoken SJWs are the easiest ones to spot. Just as, say, the guy with an oversized pickup that sports a Confederate flag is an easily-identifiable Red. Even if neither is an archetypal Blue or Red (if we can imagine such a thing existing).
The next Pulitzer: Fifty Shades of Blue.
Most SJWs are Blue, but Blue is a culture and SJ is a set of political goals and tactics. There are definitely culturally Gray SJWs, and also some that don’t fall into Scott’s taxonomy — though not as many as you’d think from their rhetoric about multiculturalism and whiteness.
Similarly, talking about the patriarchy is strong but not conclusive evidence of a Blue background: it says that you’ve had a Women’s Studies course or talked to a lot of people that have. But Blues don’t have a monopoly on college education. They don’t even have a monopoly on the fluffy majors.
The Confederate flag is a stronger signal of Redness (actually a subtribe of Red) because it’s almost always used, contrary to stereotype, as a cultural symbol rather than an ideological one.
Also, don’t forget that Blue != Democrat and Red != Republican.
The old unionized working class was Red, but Democrat. Romney and his breed of “coastal conservatives” are Blue, but Republican. There are certainly plenty of high-income Red areas, but based on your description it seems just as likely that you’re talking about a Blue Republican enclave.
^ exactly.
I think this red/blue “tribe” vocabulary works against intelligent discussion. How is it useful to divide the entire population of the US into two sterotypes and then pretend it’s a useful predictor? It looks like to me like a straightforward example of the reductive fallacy.
The reality of people’s actual views is vastly more rich, interesting, and contradictory. People differ in temperament, ethical preferences, regional culture, social class, and all sorts of ways. Why ignore this nuance in favor of glibness and cliché?
@Samedi
Agreed. It’s more useful to highlight where the stereotypes break down, in order to show how nebulous and perceived this entire “conflict” is. The whole point of the original coining of the terms was to show how red/blue can outgroup each other only because they’re so similar, instead of outgrouping Daesh or something, and thus pointing out that the red/blue conflicts are over more trivial things.
Besides which, most of the “I feel like that’s grey tribe” statements here smack of “grey tribe is the motte, baileys to the red/blue please.” How convenient.
Note, at a slight tangent, that the CEO of Whole Foods is a libertarian and got quite a lot of flack from blue tribe people over some libertarian statement he made that was from their standpoint heretical.
What’s this list based on- your own interaction with red and blue families?
Here’s a related survey:
http://reason.com/poll/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-national-survey
“Democrats and Republicans tend to agree the law should require 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds be supervised at public parks, but Republicans (48%) are slightly more likely than Democrats (41%) to also want the law to apply to 12 year-olds as well.
“Americans who think government should promote traditional values are also more likely to say the law should require supervision of 9 year olds at public parks-74 to 62 percent of those who say government should not promote traditional values.
“As income and education rise, Americans become more likely to say government should allow children to play at public parks unsupervised. For instance, only 21 percent of those with high school degrees or less think government ought to allow 9 year olds play at the park unsupervised, compared to 39 percent of those with college degrees. Income reflects a similar pattern. ”
“Those who prefer a “larger government providing more services” tend to think children should be older before they are given greater autonomy and more responsibility, compared to those who prefer smaller government. For instance, those who prefer larger government think children should wait one more year before then are allowed to babysit younger children (15), have a part-time job (16), or play in the front yard unsupervised (11) compared to those who prefer smaller government.”
This is really interesting. I would have expected the exact opposite outcome. I’m from the underclass, and my mother (along with the parents of all of my underclass friends) allowed me to essentially go wherever I wanted alone starting roughly at age 7 or 8. And even before then, when I was about 6, I was allowed to walk to my friend’s house, which was two blocks away, unsupervised. It made my mom uncomfortable and she worried about me when I went out alone, but she didn’t seem to think it was right to actually prevent me from doing things alone.
I always saw the “children must be supervised at all times” impulse as something wealthier parents would have, mostly because they seem to be more likely to helicopter-parent in general. I guess I was wrong, though, at least about their supervision preferences. Am I wrong about them helicopter-parenting more too? Do they actually helicopter-parent way less often than I thought? I don’t know a lot of middle or upper class parents, so I don’t have any a lot of first hand knowledge of this.
Now I’m wondering why all the poor parents I knew when I was a kid were so unusual in this regard. It doesn’t seem to be a tribal-affiliation thing; some were culturally blue tribe, but others were a tribe that doesn’t seem to have a name (religious and culturally conservative, but very economically liberal).
And it’s not due to the race of the parents I knew, since the article states that African Americans (who were the majority of my friends and friends’ parents even though my mom and I are white) are more likely to support laws preventing kids from being at the park unsupervised. Quote from the article:
So what was it that made the parents of my friends so unusual for their economic class? I have no clue what it could be, other than some strange local anomaly. I did grow up in a city that’s kind of weird in other ways too (Minneapolis, MN), so it might just be due to that general weirdness. Maybe the 21% of people without high school diplomas who think 9 year olds should be able to be at the park alone tend to clump together in certain geographic areas, and I just happened to live in one of those clumps.
Another (less charitable) explanation would be that these parents I knew didn’t think other people’s 9 year olds should be able to go the park alone (because they didn’t want other people’s kids causing trouble), but still thought their own 9 year olds should be able to because it’s convenient to be able to send your kids to go play outside or at the park when you’re busy and don’t want to watch them. So they would have answered “no” to a question about it on a survey, but would still have sent their own kids outside alone.
You didn’t mention fathers. Maybe single mothers just don’t have time for helicopter-surveillance-parenting but wish they did and they feel a little guilty because they can’t.
Then they would be in favor of a law that increases the cost of not being a helicopter parent, so they can say to friends, coworkers and extended family members something like “I’d love to assist you with whatever you are asking, really, but leaving my child unsupervised is literally illegal. Thanks for understanding!”.
Yeah, I think you’re right that single moms don’t have the time to helicopter parent. My mom actually did have the time, because she was unemployed my whole life and lived on disability payments for her schizophrenia, but the mothers of most of my friends worked, so they did not.
I’m not sure if they felt guilty about it or not. I’m sure some do, but I don’t know how widespread the phenomenon is. Underclass single moms mostly associate with other mothers like themselves, who would be unlikely to shame them for letting their kids play outside unsupervised while they themselves clean the house or do something else essential. But the general cultural message that letting your kids be unsupervised is bad is powerful enough that I could conceive of them feeling guilty for having to do it anyway.
But I guess I can’t really see how a law preventing them from leaving their kids unsupervised would help them much. It would give them a good excuse for why they can’t attend PTA meetings or chaperone a field trip, but it would also increase the number of them who get arrested for letting their kids go to the park while they’re doing something essential, because some of their obligations simply can’t be blown off the way PTA meetings can. I’m thinking of cases like this.
I can’t think of any reason for a woman in a situation like the woman in the article was in to support criminalizing leaving kids unattended, and the mothers of my friends were highly likely to be in that situation at least occasionally.
But a lot of women like them apparently told the survey questioner that they did want it criminalized. So I’m wrong about something, but I don’t know what or why.
Seems like it’s a function of living in bad neighborhoods – poor people (and black people disproportionately so) are more likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods, and minneapolis (by reputation) is very safe relative to its poverty level.
I’m wondering how much of that is “kids should be seen and not heard” and how much of that is fear over child abuse and kidnapping etc.
I am surprised about the results, though; I would have thought the lower income/education group would have given more responsibility re: lack of supervision, babysitting, part-time jobs etc.
Things have definitely changed since my day! 🙂
“As income and education rise, Americans become more likely to say government should allow children to play at public parks unsupervised. ”
Perhaps what correlates here is how likely they are to regard their parks as safe.
One possibility is that the survey is wrong–that the questions were put in some form that made responses correlate with education for reasons unrelated to actual opinions on the questions being surveyed. No particular suggestion on how, but I’ve seen enough cases where supposedly scientific results didn’t really imply what they were reported as to make routinely a little skeptical.
There is a fun game where the goal is to apply political categories to non political distinctions.
For example :
Houses are conservative, appartments are liberal
Firefox is liberal, IE is conservative
Contact lenses are liberal, glasses are conservative
Stairs are liberal, elevators are conservative
Ties are liberal, bow ties are conservative
Dogs are conservative, cats are liberal
Even numbers are conservative, odd numbers are liberal
Some more :
God is a conservative, the devil is a liberal
Circles are conservative, squares are liberal
Moutains are conservative, volcanoes are liberal
Additions are liberal, subtractions are conservative
Hands are liberal, feet are conservative
P=NP is liberal, P≠NP is conservative
Gold is conservative, silver is liberal
>Circles are conservative, squares are liberal
I’m with you on most of these but I would say the opposite for this one.
God is a conservative, the devil is a liberal
JOHNSON: The first Whig was the Devil.
BOSWELL: He certainly was, sir. The Devil was impatient of subordination; he was the first who resisted power. “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heavn.”
I wonder what an implicit association test that primes people on conservative/liberal ideas (instead of white/black people) show.
Espresso is liberal, coffee is conservative
Film musicals are liberal, horror films are conservative. (they actually are tremendously so, once you get past the violence. Horror is very much about what happens when you transgress moral, religious, and cultural norms)
Tofu is liberal, hamburger is conservative
I remember watching Deathwish 2 with a friend who described it as the most r*******ary movie he’d ever seen.
Are there actually that many horror movies where people get killed for having sex, or is this one of those things where there is a 10:1 ratio James Bond Parody to James Bond Movie.
You tell me. But since “Scream”, it’s much less common to play that one straight. Which isn’t to say that the sexually active are now safe, but their risk isn’t as high as it used to be and their gruesome deaths are now likely to be also ironic or self-consciously retro.
Most slasher films pre-Scream played the trope straight, but it’s not just sex. A lot of them are about revenge for murder, adultery, etc. Or transgressing local holy/unholy places. Horror films are often modern morality plays. Someone breaks the moral law, and everyone suffers for it. Maybe it’s made right, maybe it isn’t.
Mac is liberal, PC is conservative
Coke is conservative, Pepsi is liberal
Open is liberal, closed is conservative
The sky is liberal, the ground is conservative
Coming is conservative, going is liberal
The Sun is conservative, the Moon is liberal
I think Mac is grey tribe.
Apple’s corporate culture is technocratic, paternalistic, homogeneous, young, self-consciously image-focused — close to what got called “Silicon Valley Democrat” a couple threads ago, although that doesn’t quite capture it.
Apple’s consumers are generally Blue: creatives, the gentry, and the hip. That doesn’t necessarily mean liberal, but it’s a lot more likely to be liberal than it is conservative.
Mac is definitely Blue – see the Hipster In Coffee Shop stereotype, who definitely uses a Mac. But “PC” is too generic, so:
Mac is Blue, Linux is Grey, Still Using Windows XP is Red, and Windows 10 is neutral.
Well gee. TIL.
Also, this little exercise makes me feel like taking a break from the internet for a few weeks to get away from all the liberal/conservative nonsense.
Nah. Grey tribe is Linux.
Edit: Crap, blacktrance beat me to it.
What tribe is netBSD? z/OS?
z/OS is (Big) Blue Tribe. NetBSD is an uncontacted tribe. FreeBSD is Russian and outside the scope of this analysis (once you patch KDE2, anyway).
OpenBSD is, of course, the Go Fuck Yourself Tribe.
Blue parents are proud of how few children they have, red parents of how many.
Criticizing the behavior of someone else’s children is permissable in red culture, criticizing the existence of other people’s children, being in general anti-child, is permissable only in blue culture.
The Blue parts of this ring very false to me. There’s the belief that one should wait to have kids until one is older and has an established career, and that kids should be very high-investment. In practice these beliefs may lead to fewer kids, but that is, I think, seen as a tradeoff not a desired outcome.
Finally, consider a guaranteed minimum income not from the standpoint of whether it does or doesn’t work but whether the world it creates is attractive. From the red tribe point of view, there is something fundamentally wrong with someone living entirely on other people, doing nothing productive himself.
Doing something productive doesn’t have to mean earning money–volunteering to teach Sunday school, making jam, bringing cookies to a PTA meeting count. But a life that consists simply of generating utility for yourself at the expense of others, even if those others can easily afford it, feels wrong.
It seems like the thing to look for would be statistics showing red tribe retirement looks different from blue tribe retirement.
I’ve definitely come across the view that having lots of kids is selfish and indulgent and a drain on the environment, and decent people should restrict themselves to one or two. (I don’t hold that view myself.)
There is a community of people who identify as childfree. There’s a subreddit for it, though I’ve never been. My partner enjoys reading the stories, though. I asked her where she would situate the position you mentioned–the belief that one should wait to have children until one is more established and that one should invest more energy into fewer children–within three contexts.
In American society in general, the above position is skewed Blue.
Within the Blue cluster, the above position is about standard. I can’t imagine a Blue for whom “you should wait until you’re established” is not a given, if one is planning to have children at all.
Within the childfree subcommunity (and you can get an idea of its small but non-negligible size from the subreddit probably), that position is pretty much outside, because it keeps the possibility of kids pretty open, whereas childfree people are identified by their conscious and committed choice not to have children. The variation within the community is basically between a live-and-let-live, you can have kids but I won’t deal, and varying degrees of active distaste, dislike, even hatred for children. Not so much in terms of members favoring legal restrictions on having children, but maybe once a month their are heavily upvoted posts in favor of people needing to pass intelligence tests to be allowed to have children. There is strong support for the creation of more private spaces–restaurants, etc.–closed to children, but we haven’t seen support for restricting children from public spaces. Nevertheless, much of it concerns their dislike for parents and the children they bring to public spaces and public accommodations. They sometimes call parents “breeders” and children “crotch fruit.”
This is obviously not representative of either major tribe, but falls within the Blue and Grey (that is, such beliefs would not draw much disapproval from those groups in general) and is pretty much entirely outside the Red (they would highly disapprove of these beliefs). And that attitude exists, which I think is the original contention.
IIRC for wealthy Manhattanites (who I would consider Blue tribe whichever way they voted), having more children is an elite status signal. It shows that you can afford them, including paying Manhattan prices for their rooms, nannies, top day cares, etc.
“Blue parents are proud of how few children they have, red parents of how many.
Criticizing the behavior of someone else’s children is permissable in red culture, criticizing the existence of other people’s children, being in general anti-child, is permissable only in blue culture.”
Interesting, because I think it is different “over here”.
Red tribe just _has_ childeren but feels little need to talk about or take pride in the fact for various reasons. It is also common knowledge that blue tribe has less childeren and, since it is kommon knowledge already, little need to talk or feel pride about that either.
The battle of status happens not with respect to own childeren but to the state of affairs as a whole.
Blue tribe views it as the “wrong people” having too many childeren. That argument is often made from class, but I think it is more fair to attribute it to tribalism, if we understand “red tribe” as not being a social class. From this reasoning, blue tribers that, contra the trend, do choose to have childeren, are envisioning themselves as doing a service to humanity (offsetting red tribes “insane” fertility advantage).
From this arises a fraction that is certainly blue tribe but thinks that parenthood is instand virtue that should never be criticised in any way.
No objections here. Seems at least vaguely accurate to me!
Methinks we are approaching a point where SSCers need to ask themselves whether it’s wise for them to continue to reify these clusters and stereotypes. The General Theory of Red vs. Blue isn’t even a useful enough conceptual tool to warrant the sort of attention it gets here, the borders of these clusters are even fuzzier than is the usual case for stereotypes. The proper use of this concept of “tribes” entails awareness that you’re doing away with nuance and that these things don’t exist in reality as they do in the toy model, manifested in careful and qualified statements and a general feeling that you’re taking these distinctions with a grain of salt. All these attempts to even further ramify the theory, to find new things to attribute to the Blue/Red model, to treat these categories as more of “a thing” than they actually are, and even to go as far as to self-identify with them, “oh, I’m Red Tribe”, “my social circle is Blue”, “Blue-leaning Grey”, this is not proper use. This is you people dreaming up expansions of the model for the sake of expanding the model, it’s an exercise in creativity, it’s blatant stereotyping, it’s convincing yourselves that this blatant stereotyping amounts to something in the real world if you squint and filter and cherry-pick hard enough. I worry that, if Red and Blue Tribes as imagined here weren’t so clear and cut, they will be brought into existence by all the theorizing. Let’s go back to a more nuanced understanding of reality. Please.
Fair criticism, but I think the core realisation in the red-tribe vs. blue-tribe post is “there is a significant part of the populace to which I have no connection whatsoever; hell we barely speak the same language”. And while the exact bondary, what part that might be, varies individually (speaking of nuance), it does seem fair to say that some clustering is observable.
Can’t say much about the US, but in priciple the same thing happens in many european countries. And two tribes within the same territory does seem to be a recipe for desaster, no?
Yeah, that would be nice. But I don’t think it’s likely.
Nuance takes effort, and simple theories are so satisfying to contemplate — hell, I’m even starting to think that our brains might be biased in favour of overly simple heuristics!
It’s a kind of wireheading. It feels like achieving a better understanding of the world and doesn’t require any real effort or risk.
This place confuses me more and more everyday on what exactly Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are supposed to be. I suspect your experiences are colored by the fact you’re the son of a celebrity and probably spent your entire life being educated at or teaching at elite schools and being surrounded by other elites.
I consider myself Blue Tribe. I was born and raised in a coastal big city full of multicultural idealism, as far as I know the top entry point for immigrants to the US during the 90s. I never even heard a country song until I was in my 20s. I never saw a megachurch, either, unless you count the ridiculous TBN headquarters, but my hometown is home to the largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere. On the other hand, my parents had four kids and they didn’t wait. They married and began as soon as my mom turned 18. Neither of them went to college. One set of next door neighbors was a Lebanese family and the other Mormons. They both had big families, were very religious, and fairly conservative people. My hometown is also Nixon’s hometown. My mom and her entire family loved Reagan. I’m not religious, but all of my sisters are and my mom and dad have both volunteered at churches their entire lives. My mom and sisters are also vegans (my dad and I are not).
Much of what you posted seems ridiculously abstract. For instance, I think my parents tried to impose quite a bit of discipline on me. Justification was usually just ‘it’s my house, so there.’ On the other hand, I think they largely failed, not because of culture, but because they were teenage parents and had no idea what they were doing, plus my dad suffered a lot of baggage from being hit so much as a kid and refusing to do the same to me. I was extremely strong-willed and ran roughshod over them a lot of the time, but maybe they let it go because I was such a smart kid and an outlier for my family so they figured I’d be fine regardless, which turned out to be true.
But being anti-child? I’m not going to say I’ve never seen the sentiment expressed, probably because my two best friends from high school were both gay so I’ve spent a lot of time in gay culture where there is sometimes an air of disdain expressed toward ‘breeders,’ but that seems to be much different from what you’re talking about. I don’t have children and never will but I’m not anti-child. I have plenty of nieces now and they’re all awesome. I do wish my oldest sister had waited because she put off all the responsibility of actually paying for a kid onto my parents, but you know what? I guess they managed and family is family, even if a generation removed.
This thing about basic minimum income is even more abstract. I have absolutely no idea what almost anyone in my family or in the peer groups I grew up in feel about this. I’ve discussed economic policy plans with my family exactly zero times in my life. This isn’t something we thought about at all. My mom mostly voted how the church said to vote and my dad mostly voted how the union said to vote and I don’t think either of them thought much of it. That usually meant they voted for different people, which sowed basically no discord because who cares? Voting is a pretty small and mostly insignificant part of life.
Something fundamentally wrong about living entirely on other people, doing nothing productive? I’m not completely sure how to parse this statement. I’m glad you clarified, because my mom has never had a paying job, but has raised seven kids if you count the fact she basically raised my cousin and two of my sisters’ kids. My dad keeps nearing retirement and then putting it off because I don’t think he knows what else he’d do with his life if he didn’t need to work any more. On the other hand, there is no question there are people in the family who have just fundamentally leached off us for huge periods of time, but they’re family. We’d prefer they not, but we’re a unit, a team. We’re not going to let one fail while we still have the capacity to help. Arguably, that’s a weakness, enabling people to be losers, but we still do it or at least my parents definitely do it.
But again, no country music, I think we’re universally horrified by the idea of a confederate flag, we don’t hunt, the people who own pickup trucks are all tradesmen who need it for work and otherwise eco-friendly sedans. We don’t use public transit, but there isn’t any in the LA suburbs so of course we don’t. Some of us are religious, but it’s Catholicism, which tends to place a lot of focus on caring for the poor and is popular in third-world countries full of brown people. We’re a mixed-ethnicity family. Both of my nieces are the daughters of immigrants, one of them even an illegal immigrant. However, since we actually know illegal immigrants (his mother brought him here when he was 2 and it’s not like he had a say in it), and they even look like us, and don’t just represent some far-off menace in border towns seven states away, we don’t fear them.
This whole Blue/Red thing is looking more and more everyday like some vestige of the Yankee/Rebel divide that never resonated with people from a state that didn’t participate in the Civil War, whose family didn’t even live in this country when it happened, who are neither Anglican nor Black.
From this description I would guess that your family is Hispanic, which is its own tribe.
I think viewing American society through coarse “tribal” labels can be a useful approximation in some contexts. But at a minimum, there are Red and Blue and Grey and Brown and Black tribes. Probably others that I’m not thinking of right now. So the simple game where everyone who isn’t one of us nerdy rationalists gets quickly sorted into “Blue” or “Red” isn’t really going to work. And the one where everybody who votes for Democrats is “Blue” and everybody who votes for Republicans is “Red” but we use special terms rather than the party labels to show how clever we are, that doesn’t work either.
And if we stop playing those games, how much use are we really getting out of the tribal labels any more? Maybe enough to justify trying to pin down the definitions the way David wants, but if we’re trying to fine-tune the definitions without even identifying all the tribes I think the effort is likely to devolve into stereotyping.
Yep. I might be overestimating our own importance because I’ve either lived in California or Texas for most of my life, but damn people, there are a lot of us.
It seems like the stereotypes of “red” and “blue” that people go to are how the stereotypical (middle- or upper-middle class, college educated, white collar, urban) white Democrat supporter supposedly views the stereotypical (lower to lower-middle class, not college educated, blue-collar, suburban/small-town/rural) white Republican supporter, and vice versa. It’s how the stereotype views another stereotype.
I say “how the stereotype views another stereotype” because I don’t know off the top of my head if, for instance, the median white Democrat supporter is actually college-educated, or not – but the stereotype is.
Part of the problem is that, among winner-takes-all electoral systems, the US’s system is especially bad at supporting multiple parties. When you’ve got two big-tent parties with a lot of odd-bedfellows stuff going on, it’s hard to come up with an accurate view of what the “average party supporter” is like. Maybe even impossible.
Yeah, Blue Tribe and Red Tribe are largely labels for white Americans, though some members of ethnic minorities have been inducted into both of them (Bobby Jindal is clearly Red, Obama is obviously Blue, and I would guess that most middle-to-upper-class blacks are Blue as well), and some white populations are distinct tribes (including cajuns and probably some of the people in Appalachia).
To be more specific, they’re generally labels for white and either Jewish, Christian, or non-religious (with some converts to Westernized versions of Buddhism and other “exotic” religions among the Blue Tribe) Americans. Most American Muslims, for example, don’t map to the Red/Blue tribe distinctions at all. In terms of religiosity and positions on social issues, they are much closer to the Red Tribe than the Blue Tribe, but since 2004 they’ve overwhelmingly supported the Democrats due largely to foreign policy and security issues and more recently due to stuff like Peter King’s “radicalization hearings” and Trump’s proposed Muslim immigration ban. American Muslims also tend to be pretty left-wing on economic issues. One could also argue that Mormons are their own distinct tribe. Their political positions match the stereotypical positions of the Red Tribe pretty much across the board, but they have a lot of distinct cultural traits that clearly differentiate them from, for example, my Facebook friends who live in rural Louisiana.
I’m not seeing it. Tim Scott, now, different story.
“Finally, consider a guaranteed minimum income not from the standpoint of whether it does or doesn’t work but whether the world it creates is attractive. From the red tribe point of view, there is something fundamentally wrong with someone living entirely on other people, doing nothing productive himself.”
David, my experience with red tribe thoughts on this is that they think that not working (again, which can include unpaid work) is harmful to the individual in almost all cases, and that it’s also morally suspect. So it’s not unlike, say smoking.
IMHO, blue tribe members are a little bit more likely to assume excusing circumstances – that if someone’s not working, they presumably have a good reason.
My impression, largely from discussion here, is that many people are comfortable with the idea of a sizable fraction of the population living on a basic income without themselves producing anything. The “excusing circumstance” is that if those people try to get a job it won’t pay very much.
To what extent the people comfortable with that fit the blue tribe picture in other ways I don’t know.
I have two lines of approach towards UBI.
The first is that I do not in fact believe that “a sizable fraction” would become pure lotuseaters worth nothing. Freed from the necessities of desperately scrabbling to survive, I would expect some to engage in ridiculous games of status, tearing each other down as they mark each other “heretic” for being unable – or unwilling – to learn and use the latest cultural shibboleths. Others would engage in poetry, in carpentry, in writing, in theater. Some would dedicate their time to becoming the best parents they could, rather than the best parents their remaining evening hours allow.
The second is that even if a sizable fraction become lotus eaters, pure consumers whose existence has no external value, I would consider this an acceptable outcome given the alternative options. That is, I would not be “comfortable” with this state of affairs, but I would be more comfortable than I am with the current state of affairs where people desperately scrabble to survive and yet still suffer – and far more comfortable than with the future state of affairs where they starve to death from lack of economic value, automation having driven their value below that which is needed to trade for enough food.
I still haven’t made it through all of Machinery of Freedom so maybe you address it later ( You may remember I wrote to you recently re: the price disparaty between the ebook and the physical version ) but that is my final objection to anarcho-capitalism and right-libertarianism: I do not believe those systems would work adequately (through charity and improved efficiency of trade ) to feed the poor.
@ Shieldfoss
The first is that I do not in fact believe that “a sizable fraction” would become pure lotuseaters worth nothing.
Are there no studies we could look at, of people who already don’t have to work for a living (or not many hours). Retirees on adequate pensions. Semi-retired business owners or people living on their investments. Even trust fund babies.
David, I thought we were talking about blue and red tribe, not grey tribe. 😉
The red tribers I know honestly believe that even low paying work is good for people, and the blue tribers think that low status work is sufficiently demeaning that it doesn’t do anyone any good.
For a grey tribe view, I recall one of the libertarianish economists (Cowen or maybe somebody on Econlog?) arguing that a UBI isn’t much of a problem economically because most of the people who would drop out don’t produce very much that the economy values.
For Blue Tribe, sex is for having fun with your friends. For Red Tribe, sex is for creating and maintaining families.
It’s true, it’s true! We’re so lame!!
I have sex for fun.
Same here.
That may be the official position of the tribal elders, but having gone to high school in a Red Tribe area, I know it does not hold in practice. Not among the teenagers, and not among the adults.
Any of of you “greys” pretending to give a damn about “poor whites” know what the CMA country song of the year was?
“Girl Crush” by Little Big Town?
You people act like Seinfeld and Thai Food hadn’t made it down here.
As if Willie and Merle and David Allan Coe concerts weren’t packed with young progressives…
Be fair, Anon – the greys are more curious than “pretending to give a damn.” Clueless Red tribe anthropology is IMHO OK, because it indicates an actual desire to understand and is capable of improvement.
“Girl Crush” isn’t actually about homosexuality. It’s about feeling envy over the girl your man is going after instead of you. Just an EVEN MORE INSECURE version of TSwift’s “You Belong to Me. ”
I mean, obviously they learned enough about the general acceptance of homosexuality to leverage queerbaiting for their own purposes, but it’s still not even at “I Kissed a Girl” or “Poker Face” levels of homoeroticism. They really “no homo”d their use of the girl crush phrase as hard as they could. It’s basically akin to “going to go shopping with my girlfriends.”
I didn’t have to prove Girl Crush was a lesbian separatist song to demonstrate what a joke the SSC’s red/blue schema is.
It can’t be a joke if enough rationalists take it seriously.
Even if it isn’t really about the first thing that comes to mind upon reading the title and hearing the lyrics, the fact that the singer was comfortable using those words and imagery without worrying about a backlash does say something. Remember than less than 20 years ago, Jerry Falwell accused Teletubbies of spreading gay propaganda.
Incidentally, through my Facebook friendships with people who live in rural Louisiana, I have witnessed a noticeable increase in the tolerance of same-sex marriage and homosexuality in general among those demographics, or at least among young people in those demographics, over the past few years. When gay marriage was legalized last year, I saw no objections and a few celebratory posts from that crowd. The furor over the Indiana pizza parlor, on the other hand…
Whoever came up with the idea of advocating gay rights through a campaign that constantly sent the message of, “don’t be afraid of us Middle America, all we want to do is get married, move to the suburbs, and raise 2.5 kids just like you!” was a genius.
SWPL stuff white people like – whole book full of ‘blue tribe’ mores and mannerisms
I wonder how the gray tribe fits into this, as far as child-rearing tendencies and views on productivity.
I tend to lean more grayish as far as cultural attitudes, even though my politics are pretty blue. I have no plans to have kids so I can’t speak to the former, but as far as a GMI, to me, the questions “does it work?” and “does it create a more attractive world?” are the same to me. It can only be said to be “working” if it creates a better world.
For both the blue and red tribes, it seems like the question is more about moral attitudes, regardless of how effective it is. The red tribe asks, “is it moral for people to be receiving something they haven’t earned?” and the blue tribe asks, “do people have a fundamental right to be provided for?” and the answers to those questions guide their attitude on the question (and questions in general, it seems to me) regardless of the overall utilitarian benefit.
My attitude toward productivity is that it’s a virtue insofar as it’s necessary and beneficial (which, currently, it is). If we lived in a society where machines did all the work for us and we had infinite leisure time, productivity wouldn’t be a value, which would make the red tribe’s value system rather antiquated…though they’d probably see such a world as inherently problematic even if the overall quality of life was good, because to them work is the source of dignity.
Whereas the blue tribe, at the more extreme end, seems to find work not inherently dignifying but inherently demeaning and associates it with being exploited by capitalist fat cats…or at least, they tend to be scornful toward the concept of meritocracy. To them there’s actually more dignity in receiving a check from the government than working a crappy low-level job, because to them it’s not “charity” but claiming something they’re owed, a concept which the red tribe finds alien and repellent.
I read a study once that said children tend to transition from an egalitarian view (everyone gets an equal number of cookies because that’s fair) to a meritocratic view (people who’ve done more work get more cookies) when they learn how to count. So I’m tempted to be a smart-ass and say that the blue tribe’s values come from being bad at math.
Then again, the meritocratic view only makes sense in a world where you’re trying to motivate people to be as productive as possible. And it’s arguable that it doesn’t apply to modern capitalism because the system is incredibly complicated and the ones who get the most cookies are the ones who learn how to work the system as opposed to providing the most units of productive labor. And in a system like that, you could argue that the attitude of “doing hard work=being exploited by those in power” is not all that illogical.
Though, taken to its end-point and combined with the concept that people are owed a living, it results in a society of people who have no emotional or financial incentive to work, which creates some obvious issues.
The counting thing seems like it could easily be a coincidence – kids learn to count about the same age that adults start having expectations of them, which could lead to them becoming meritocratic because they’re learning “do stuff to win approval/rewards”.
(Aside from that I agree with you).
(Also, that username is either a fairly obscure if underappreciated rabbit or a massive coincidence. I’m hoping it’s the former).
Yeah, I’d agree…I found the study interesting but I’d be kind of surprised if tribal divisions actually had any connection to math ability.
And yep, it’s the former. 🙂
I was thinking on a test for tribal membership, and it hits other tribes as well as red, blue and grey. I think it shows some differences between tribes as well.
Rank the following 10 people in western culture from most to least admirable based on what they are famous for. Use the archetype of what they are famous for, not your personal preferences. For instance, John Lennon is on the list. Even if you don’t like the Beatles, but view being a musician as super admirable rank him highly. Similarly, rank Sean Connery on being an actor not his views on women.
-John Lennon
-George Patton
-Mark Twain
-Thomas Edison
-Steve Jobs
-Al Capone
-Sean Connery
-Steven Hawking
-Neil Armstrong
-Brett Favre
I’m interested in how the ranking matches tribal membership, and I know that my ranking makes me obviously Gray.
This could also make a very interesting non-political political survey. For instance, do people who admire Sean Connery more than Neil Armstrong overwhelmingly support gun control? And what about the tribe that ranks Al Capone highly.
Armstrong, Patton, Twain, Hawking, Connery, Edison, Favre, Lennon, Jobs, Capone.
I’d bump Jobs to left a bit but that’s pretty much my order as well.
I believe there is someone who we would rank significantly differently, but I’m not sure who.
@null: You were supposed to rank both Patton and Favre lower. Unless the latter is at your “indifferent” level, with the last three at varying levels of dislike.
Favre is ‘indifferent’, as you surmised.
Hawking, Edison, Jobs
Twain, Lennon, Armstrong, Connery, Farve
Patton, Capone
The only one that was tough was Armstrong because I’m not sure what archetype he was supposed to represent. I tend to think human spaceflight was and is mostly dumb posturing.
I’m not sure this test is intended to rank archetypes rather than people. At least for me, I considered Patton rather than ‘general’, and Lennon rather than ‘popular musician’. If I had considered archetypes my answers would probably have been a little different.
I think the original post was edited at some point, because I remember seeing GRRM instead of Twain. So maybe when you read it, it didn’t have this part:
I had the same problem with Jobs. Is he there representing tech CEOs, CEOs in general, or glib, messianic hucksters in general?
Just to be perfectly clear, this is my ranking with archetype names:
Scientists, Inventors, Entrepreneurs (creators)
Authors, Musicians, Explorers?, Actors, Athletes (entertainers)
Generals, Organized Crime Bosses (destroyers)
Science2s categories are fine except I am ambivalent about placing authors and musicians among creators or entertainers. Maybe the difference is lasting value? e.g. Mozart > Katrina and the waves?
I would at least occasionally place destroyers above entertainers for net value to society because sometimes you really need destruction.
The two examples given:
No Patton -> World wide nazism
No Al Capone -> prohibition succeeds -> everything else some moralist don’t like gets banned -> totalitarian regime. Come to think of it, not much different than the result of no Patton.
Armstrong
Edison
Twain
Hawking
Patton
Lennon
Connery
Jobs
Favre
Capone
Armstrong because Moon, yay!
Edison for the myriad practical inventions he is directly or indirectly responsible for
Twain because his writing should stand for all time
Hawking because his valuable contributions to physics can’t be denied
I think Patton is overrated somewhat, but still probably the best American or British ground commander of that war.
Lennon for being a content creator, although not one as great as Twain
Then Connery
I never got the Steve Jobs worship
Favre just kind of seems like BRUTE STRENGTH to me, although I admire him as an athlete.
Capone seems pretty brilliant but also is, y’know, evil.
George Patton, Steven Hawking, Edison & Jobs, Neil Armstrong, Mark Twain, Sean Connery, Brett Favre, Al Capone & John Lennon.
(Yeah, I don’t like Maoists. Would have been different if you’d used Paul or George,)
Armstrong, Edison, Patton, Hawking, Twain, Lennon, Jobs, Connery, Favre, Capone.
Twain is close to Hawking — but I would have rated Turing or Gauss or Newton higher. Favre and Jobs and Connery are all close to each other, but you could talk me into rating Connery on par with Lennon if he represents film rather than actors, or Jobs higher if he’s supposed to represent businessmen or entrepreneurs rather than marketeers or celebrity designers.
This list would look very different if I was ranking people rather than archetypes, though.
Edison, Jobs, Hawking, Twain, Patton, Armstrong, Connery, Favre, Lennon, Capone
Greyish Red
1: Steven Hawking
2: Neil Armstrong
3: Thomas Edison
4: John Lennon
5: Mark Twain
6: Steve Jobs
7: Sean Connery
8: George Patton
9: Brett Favre
10: Al Capone
You could have a version of BI that’s dependent on doing something constructive.
But a life that consists simply of generating utility for yourself at the expense of others, even if those others can easily afford it, feels wrong.
Not true, I think, for blue tribe.
Disagree. I think it feels wrong to nearly anybody. (The difference will be in how people model others: Feels wrong to others = Blue, Feels right to others = Red.)
Regarding generating utility for yourself: maybe there are some people who like to do nothing but do that, but I think the picture is more complicated.
For example, typical anti-productive is playing video games or watching TV. But I don’t think all people who do that are doing it are doing it for the self-indulgence. I feel many are escaping real-world problems with that (which they are unwilling to talk about).
It’s so much about habits. I have been in my life very productive and very unproductive (different times). When you build habit of being productive, being productive is not hard actually BUT it’s easy to lose the habit if something bad happens (break-up, unemployment, family responsibilities etc). Also a lot about environment, relationships etc.
I think having strong social circle which protects you is the key here. It’s the people who go outside social circles or become isolated for other reasons (plenty in modern world) who are in danger.
There’s what I take is a fairly familiar argument that the game of Go as played by people is more interesting and subtle than the game of Chess, which is made partly on the basis of the relative sizes of the game trees and the differences in difficulty of designing computer programs to play the games well against humans. But that difference alone is only particularly interesting if people are really (to put it crudely) competing across the whole space of those trees. If, instead, the contemporary human Go game is only in a small subset of the potential space of competition, then it makes total sense that the AlphaGo approach would work: just design a big neural network to recognize and participate in that tiny part of the space humans are competing in and attach that to a Monte Carlo tree search.
If so, the total game space of Go would be a red herring. The problem of computers playing the game would not be the overall size of the space (because perhaps nothing tractable would be competitive there) but simply characterizing the particular relevant subset to play in.
From the coverage of the current match, there does seem to be some evidence that that is the case. There have apparently been drastic changes in overall playing style when new ideas have suddenly succeeded against the then-existing ones. And the common openings have also apparently changed over the past few decades.
When the AlphaGo successor is trained without the human game database (which the company has said is an upcoming step), the result could provide more evidence that the human Go game is like this. One possibility is that it evolves its own style that’s largely incommensurable with the contemporary human style, and games where a person plays the computer just don’t make much sense for a while (above the sub-board level, where lots of properties and effects are well understood).
I think that also means that there’s a specific sense in which Chess might be a better game for people: the game tree is such that absolute space is of a size and nature that humans can approach playing the absolute game specified by the pieces and rules, as opposed to a point in a subset of the space reached by a process of social evolution. So there’s an identified game properly called Chess, and some people can really play it, or approach playing it. On the other, hand, there’s no reason anyone should necessarily care about that.
I really do think the size of the game tree—specifically, the breadth of the tree—is fundamental to what people call the “subtlety” of go.
In chess, it’s common to have positions where there’s only a small number (maybe two to five) of playable moves; anything not on the shortlist will lose the game in a clear and immediate way. With the help of some clever tree-pruning heuristics, this means that precise calculation is a large part of chess skill.
In go, it’s common to have positions where ten or more different moves are, at first glance, equally playable. This means that chess-style calculation is often futile. Instead, people (and now computers!) have come up with heuristics that work for a large fraction of the search space. Calculation is replaced by informed guesswork.
Restricting your play to a small fraction of the tree just doesn’t work. It’s always possible for the opponent to play a “random” move that takes you out of the space that you’ve studied. Their move might be suboptimal, but if you don’t know how to handle the resulting position then you can stlil lose.
Having said this, I agree that there’s potential for a future “unsupervised” AlphaGo to emerge with a different style. I hope we get to see such a thing!
This is very interesting. If I understand your point correctly, it could be boiled down to ‘human go is probably highly idiomatic’. It would be fascinating to see an alien play go, or indeed, train Alphago’s neural networks from nothing, rather than using human databases.
That said, I think that the close fighting part of the game, the ‘tactical’ part, would remain largely the same. The basic moves of the game like ‘hane’, ‘nobi’, ‘keima’, ‘kakari’, etc. etc. exist in human go because they work, and have been shown over thousands of years and millions of games to be effective. It’s less ‘socialisation’ and more a process of selection, in this case. Aliens playing go would still grapple for ‘sente’ (tempo, initiative), they’d still play in the corners first (probably!), they’d still enclose corners and extend from enclosures. I’m prepared to make this argument because human go players – particularly beginners – constantly play bad moves (even moves completely outside of the ‘human part’ of the game-tree), and part of getting stronger is learning to refute those moves. Certain tactical moves have survived not because of socialisation or convention, but because players who played them won their matches, won amateur tournaments as kids, won professional certifications as go players, won their professional matches, got their games studied and memorised by younger players.
This said, as far as the opening of the game goes, it would probably be totally different. These openings (the first 4-10 moves or so) vary so much according to fashion, nationality, the mood of the player. When you ask even top-level pros whether a particular move is better in the opening, they just shrug and say ‘A, B and C are all good moves’. It seems to be way beyond human abilities to make accurate statements about the strength of moves in the opening – we often resort to statistical analysis of pro-game databases.
I’m trying to say that go is a lot like a really practical martial art. A martial art where you don’t protect yourself against sharp strikes to the neck and the sides of your head won’t be around for long. With the exception of say, Aikido, but go is not like Aikido – bad moves of any kind are ruthlessly punished, causing the loss of the game and, if repeated enough, the termination of any futures where that player’s style could influence others. Certain basic tactics exist for a reason, and I expect aliens playing go would converge on the same tactics. That said, overall opening strategy could differ significantly from human convention – we see great variability even in human go in the last few hundred years.
The really exciting thing is that we have basically created an alien go machine, and I’m extremely curious to see how it plays if they train it without the human database of patterns.
“I think that the close fighting part of the game, the ‘tactical’ part, would remain largely the same.”
Yes, this is definitely the case. That’s what I was trying to get at with the caveat about the “sub-board level”.
I’ll add in here that I was surprised by how large the inter-pro variance is. I would’ve expected the gap from computer that can occasionally beat some pro to computer that can always beat every pro would be fairly small, but after months of additional training, alphago still did *worse* against Lee Sedol than against Fan Hui.
As an occasional Go player, there is one particular development that I would expect a “perfect Go algorithm” that “solves” Go to do very differently than humans:
Play move 1 on Tengen.
For those unfamiliar with Go, the board is symmetric and mirrored – that is, every move has a mirror move on the other side of the board. EXCEPT Tengen. Tengen is the center point [10,10] with points 1-9 on one side of it and 11-19 on the other.
This makes it likely that Tengen is either the best or the worst starting position, and it is definitely not the worst (e.g. [6,6] and its three equivalents are worse) so it is likely the best – but nobody who plays competitive Go put their starting stone there, because in practice, doing so leads to losing the game if playing an equal-skill opponent.
I suspect that this is because humans cannot comprehend simultaneously all the things necessary to take advantage of the benefits of owning Tengen. A go algorithm running on sufficient memory and having “solved” Go would. (If I am right about the value of Tengen. I could be wrong, obviously)
Maybe! I bet you have other reasons for suspecting tengen, but I think that the uniqueness of tengen alone is not *that* a good argument for it being best (or worst).
A priori, it’s just as plausible that any other move (after modding out by symmetry) is best. Such as that the 5-5 point is better than than tengen, and in such a case there wouldn’t be a *unique* best move obviously, but logically there’s still no problem with there being 4 best moves.
In fact, I think it’s reasonably likely that there are *many* best moves. Excluding all moves on the first and second lines, there are 36 unique first moves after modding out by symmetry. And I think it’s a pretty good conjecture that nearly all non-first-line-non-second-line opening moves are within say 4-5 points of another in how good they are (komi suggests an opening move is worth ~15 points and it would be quite surprising if a typical opening move somewhere random in the center loses more than 1/3 of the value of a stone compared to some other point). Packing 36 moves into a range of size 4-5 means that you have to have lots of moves with equal values, which makes a decent chance that the optimal value is also achieved by multiple moves even after modding out by symmetry (although obviously very far from guaranteed).
I think that how many “best” moves there are depends on whose playing. If we’re imagining a hypothetical bigger-than-the-universe computer that plays via exhaustive minimax search right to the end of the game vs another such computer, then there’s a fairly coarse granularity of points – the winning margin can only be an-integer-and-a-half moku and probably a low integer at that, so it wouldn’t be surprising if more than one opening move (correcting for symmetry) worked out the best.
Against real players who are subject to things that are random or which can only be modelled with some randomness[1], I think it’s entirely possible for one move to be better than another move by a very fine margin, if you’re calculating by expected number of points or probability of winning. So the possible values can be modelled as reals, and it would seem like a freakish co-incidence for two opening moves to have exactly the same value.
[1] I mean, I play better Go than someone playing legal moves at random, but there are going to be cases where two moves are finely balanced and any old process going on in my brain could tip the balance. Or even cases where there’s a good move and whether I spot it or not will depend on chance influences on the way my eyes and thoughts move.
I think you are making a mistake in classifying “best” and “worst”. In games it is usually more helpful to classify a move has having an impact or not. The best move has an impact as it increases your chances of winning, the worst move has an impact because it increases your chances of losing. Tengen, by your description, sounds functionally neutral. It doesn’t confer an advantage or disadvantage in itself, but by the loss of a move it confers a disadvantage.
Tengen confers an enormous advantage through the entire game by providing influence in every single fight on the board.
It’s just not influence enough compared to the points advantage of starting Hoshi or Komoku.
At least, so it is for human players.
I only know the basics of Go, but it doesn’t sound like you are disagreeing (to my ears).
On a gradient of opening moves where does Tengen lie? 2nd best? In the middle?
Can we envision a future in which AI satisfactorily answers fundamental philosophical questions in a way that is satisfying to most humans? On the one hand, if it’s much smarter than us, it might be able to convince us even of incorrect things, which is scary… but, even given that possibility, might an AI produce say, a philosophical proof or disproof of the existence of god or of a certain type of morality that we would find both intelligible and more satisfying than any yet produced by a human mind? Is it also not possible that answers to such questions do exist but are not explicable to human brains? (We are much smarter than ants, for example, but that doesn’t mean we can explain to them how a steam engine works). That said, the problem of how to explain things to things which are much stupider than you is itself a problem which a sufficiently smart AI might be able to solve?
At least for humans who are willing to listen to some lessons about cognitive psychology and how their philosophical questions got formed, thus giving shape to how they might be satisfactorily answered, then yes, I can imagine such a thing very clearly (in fact, it’s more or less what I kinda want to write as the “Future Work” section for a paper someday when I go back to grad school).
The big problem here is that to a great degree, people treat, “I will not accept answers to Philosophical Question X of kind Y” as a polite way to phrase, “I want reality to work in way Z and will not accept being told otherwise.”
My point being, large schools of current-day philosophy are elaborate attempts to construct some rickety, shaking justification for the belief that naturalism cannot possibly work.
For purposes of this useful thought experiment, let’s assume the AIs are reliably human-friendly and answer all problems put to them truthfully and without nasty side-effects.
No. Given sufficient resources (time, paper) our brains are probabilistic-Turing complete. We’re capable of comprehending any idea that can be formed, even though it might take a long time. Certainly I expect half-decent AI designed to answer philosophical questions to understand enough about humans to make the answers easily digestible.
Many uses of the term “smart” and “stupid” within humanity are attribution errors: attributing good inferences to “that guy has Smart Juice in his brain” rather than “that guy has lots of accurate information on which to base inferences.”
“My point being, large schools of current-day philosophy are elaborate attempts to construct some rickety, shaking justification for the belief that naturalism cannot possibly work.”
And other large schools of current-day philosophy are elaborate attempts to construct some rickety, shaking justification for the belief that naturalism can possibly work.
I say this as a philosophy PhD student who has been a naturalist for most of my adult life but recently, through reading the arguments in the literature and through trying to defend naturalism, became convinced that it has at least as many problems as the alternatives. They are different problems, but problems nonetheless.
Please name one observable phenomenon not explicable via naturalism.
The obvious response would be that the concept that human life / consciousness is somehow valuable has no basis in a naturalistic frame.
As such any naturalist who isn’t also a nihilist lacks the courage to follow their convictions to their natural end. That we are all just meat.
I guess it’s only valuable for humans, more precisely for those who are not psychopaths, and we also have mechanisms for turning that feeling off if those humans belong to a different tribe.
But why exactly is admitting this a problem? Are philosophers trying to justify their values to a hypothetical mind made of perfect emptiness? (What do we expect to receive from that hypothetical mind in return for our rhetorical efforts?)
The value of human life to humans is an observable, naturalistic fact. Read your Peter Railton, people!
Translation: “Boo naturalism! I don’t wanna read ethics and meta-ethics texts by naturalists! I wanna ignore that they exist!”
At least in rigorous philosophy, things are required to be true to be accepted, not emotionally satisfying.
Besides which, I find it much more emotionally satisfying to be meat than Warp-stuff. Meat is an integral part of a causal universe rich with possibilities. Meat has compatibilist free will, the only kind that really works. If you find yourself made of spooky soul-stuff, you might try to claim that makes you Objectively Valuable in a way that being a child of God or being made of meat wouldn’t, but usually it just means that dark gods of the abyss want to eat you. Besides which, “valuable” requires a valuer.
If human life were valued, we wouldn’t have martyrdom, suicide, war, or self-harm. Naturalistic people do a LOT of question begging and just-so stories when pressed.
If money were valued we wouldn’t spend it.
Human lives aren’t things to be spent. Money itself is valueless, what it represents is time or power. Bad analogy.
Viliam asks: But why exactly is admitting this a problem?
It isn’t per se. The problem arises when one tries to make moral or ethical pronouncements on naturalistic grounds. In short, they end up as appeals to what “feels right” rather than what is rigorous/true.
Eli says: At least in rigorous philosophy, things are required to be true to be accepted, not emotionally satisfying.
Exactly! and that is why I think that the vast majority of naturalist ethics texts are bullshit. They reject the logical, but emotionally abhorrent, conclusion suggested by their philosophy in favor of just-so stories.
Edit:
@ Maware, I agree on all counts.
@Hlynkacg, logically, you can’t agree with Maware. I was asking for an observable phenomenon not explicable via naturalism. If you agree with Maware that the value or valuing of human lives is not observed, then you’ve certainly left the naturalist with no puzzles.
Sure I can.
The challenge was to identify a phenomenon that naturalists treat as is real and observable but that is not explicable via naturalism.
I did that.
The fact that the phenomenon in question does not hold up under naturalistic examination is the whole point.
If human life were valued, we wouldn’t have martyrdom, suicide, war, or self-harm.
Those things are generally frowned on, specifically because human life is valued. With the possible exception of martyrdom, but the reason that’s considered noble (by some people anyway) is that the individual is giving up something highly valuable (their life) in order to serve a cause. If human life were considered of no value, no one would have any cause to honor martyrs.
War happens for various reasons but often because people usually value their own lives, the lives of loved ones, and the lives of people in their culture more than they value the lives of strangers in another culture, and they see war (rightly or wrongly) as a way of protecting themselves from hostile enemies. That doesn’t mean human life is worthless to them, just that they consider some lives to be more valuable than others. Which you could say is pretty fucked up, but still, there’s a difference between “some people are willing to kill a stranger in order to save a friend” and “no one considers human life to be valuable in any regard.”
hlynkacg, you are voicing an incomplete thought. Things are not valuable in vacuum.
“X is valuable” is not a complete thought. The complete thought is “X is valuable to Y”
So are humans valuable? They are to me and other humans. Almost every person can potentially help me achieve some end of mine.
What agent is doing the valuing in your criticism?
All phenomena themselves.
Nice post. Putting aside cognitive enhancement for now, given that humans have limited short term working memory that can hold only a finite (<10 ?) "things" for contemplation at a time, could it be possible that certain philosophical concepts require a greater number of components and thus are impossible to really comprehend? Or, perhaps if you feel we can do this by lengthy analysis in longer term memory or external memory, could it be possible that processing in this form could require a period longer than the human lifespan? I have no position on this but, despite being quite into science, my intuition tells me to question the assumption the idea humans can understand everything given enough time.
I’m pretty confident that a superintelligent AI would be able to provide satisfying answers to most philosophical questions. However, it would also be able to provide satisfying incorrect answers to most philosophical questions; it could convince us to believe pretty much whatever it wants, precisely because philosophy is so confusing and difficult to empirically test. This is very scary, for obvious reasons.
But also for a not-so-obvious reason: I think that even a *benevolent* superintelligent AI may make mistakes about fundamental philosophical questions and come to have incorrect and even irrational views about them. So even if we solve the Control Problem, we still have to worry about this. You might think that philosophical errors won’t matter much, and you’re mostly right, but (a) it would be bad if we’re all permanently deceived about philosophical truths due to a glitch in the initial AI program, and (b) sometimes philosophical errors can lead to drastic consequences, like misjudging which systems are conscious and which aren’t.
Honestly, if you don’t have a scientifically-grounded theory of how consciousness works, and have to resort to fucking Chalmers and Mary’s Room, why the hell do you think it’s a good idea to go around knocking people unconscious?
This is the question I pose to hypothetical future robots who don’t check before tampering with other people’s minds.
We can’t have a scientifically-grounded theory of consciousness until we have a good philosophically-grounded theory of consciousness. (Probably the two will develop in tandem of course) My worry is that robots might be mistaken on the level of philosophy, and thus *think* that they have a good scientifically grounded theory of consciousness, and be wrong.
A helpful analogy: You might think that we can have a scientifically-grounded theory of ethics without having to worry about doing philosophy or metaethics. Someone who thinks this will likely end up essentially assuming whatever theory of metaethics finds its way into their head first. For concreteness, let’s suppose they decide that ethics is really just happiness-maximization, and that happiness is a simple reward-circuit type of brain state. So they do some science to figure out what happiness is exactly, and lo! It turns out to be the sort of thing that can be achieved with drugs, and that consequently the way to maximize total happiness is to tile the universe with orgasmium. They then go do that, confident that they have Science on their side.
Obviously one worries about an AI doing this. They call this the “Value Alignment Problem” perhaps, or maybe it’s just a part of the Control Problem. I worry about something similar happening with epistemology.
Why? Where is it Established that:
1) Philosophy illuminates more than it confuses,
2) Science cannot be done or done well without the illumination of Philosophy?
@Eli
Because all scientific investigation has philosophical assumptions behind it. You can pretend they’re not there, not explicitly state them, and thus smuggle a bunch of assumptions in with you, but they are there.
There are at least three things going on here.
First, and mercifully not relevant here except as a contribution to the microwave background hostility, most of the times people have encountered “you can’t have any science if you don’t eat your philosophy” it’s been as part of a “… so stop talking about/worrying about/working on these AIs/quantum computers/theories of the origin of the universe, they’re logically impossible” structure of argument. Yes, we’re all too smart for that, but the scientismists can definitely be forgiven for jumpy defensiveness.
Second, there are assumptions behind science, yes, but what does saying we need to “ground” the science in a solid philosophical basis actually do? What does it mean? It seems like the course is supposed to run:
Sienso: We intend to test out theory of consciousness using this computer model to …
Phillipia: But you have not grounded your theory. You need to air out your basic assumptions or the whole thing is meaningless.
Sienso: Well, we’re using the standard modern-science assumptions of naturalism, Popperian falsification, that kind of thing. You know, the same assumptions geologists and astronomers and organic chemists use, that you never seem to question when they’re using them.
Phillipia: Oh, you poor sad fool! Those are all highly questionable philosophical positions – why, just recently several new flaws in naturalism were revealed, no one takes falsificationism seriously any more, and if you’re not careful I’ll accuse you of logical positivism to boot.
You can see why Sienso is not so keen to run down this path. Phillipia might feel better knowing that Sienso has at least done a little research into their field from the philosophical angle, but Sienso thinks they’re being asked to add a bunch of pointless caveats to their results.
Essentially, the question “what if the assumptions underlying the scientific approach to these philosophical questions turn out to be flawed” seems like it can be answered “what if they’re not?” If so, we might actually learn something about the philosophical issue, but there’s no way to find out if we get caught up in speculating about the relative merits of the assumptions. That is: the best way to test the assumptions is to just make them and see if it goes anywhere. For this to happen, Phillipia needs to either duck out of the conversation if they can’t keep up with the technical aspects, or contribute questions that make it easier rather than harder to move forward. This is what we would like from science and philosophy working on the questions together, but I can’t think of any good examples of how philosophy could directly, definitely contribute to advancement in any of the contested areas. Is such collaboration really possible, or is insisting that we need it just a way to say the same “stop trying to do something that we think only we can do” as the first thing while being a bit more polite about it?
So, even if Phillipia is arguing entirely in good faith, the natural course of the discussion is away from what Sienso is interested in and towards an interminable argument. Which are the third thing – since when has ‘achieving a grounded philosophical view of [field of inquiry]’ ever happened? As far as I know, philosophy has settled exactly nothing over millenia of effort. Some ideas have been struck down – a subset of those by philosophy itself rather than by science – but the majority of philosophical questions have gotten wordier without getting any closer to being resolved. How long should we expect to be waiting for a philosophical grounding for scientific work in consciousness? Is there any reason to expect the scientific investigation to not at least make interesting progress in its own way, even if you’re sure there are watertight reasons to believe that nothing they can possibly find is really, truly, cosmically consciousness?
And if they then come over the fence and start telling you that actually the thing they’ve found is the real deal and no other kind of consciousness need apply, when it’s obvious that it’s just some minor result – well, then it’s their turn to be told off for overstepping. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Indeed! And in this particular case, Phillipia seems to be saying, “Don’t bother with that ‘claustrum’ thing in the brain or with the wake-sleep cycle, let alone the free-energy minimization theory of how the brain models the world. What you really need to bother with is p-zombies. Yes, I know you have a chain of interesting reductions from cognitive science to neuroscience and statistical thermodynamics to cellular and molecular biology to organic chemistry to atomic physics to subatomic physics. But listen to my billiard-ball metaphors for particles: billiard balls can’t be conscious, so p-zombies are a thing. Yes, seriously.”
Eli: You keep asking me to defend irrelevant straw-man positions which I never advocated, and your tone is demeaning to boot, so I’m going to bow out of this conversation.
Dirdle: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Here is my response:
“…most of the times people have encountered “you can’t have any science if you don’t eat your philosophy” it’s been as part of a “… so stop talking about/worrying about/working on these AIs/quantum computers/theories of the origin of the universe, they’re logically impossible” structure of argument. Yes, we’re all too smart for that, but the scientismists can definitely be forgiven for jumpy defensiveness.”
It’s true that various crazies have used philosophy to bash on science, and so perhaps some people can be forgiven for reacting so strongly against philosophy. But I’m not trying to cast blame, just to educate.
“Second, there are assumptions behind science, yes, but what does saying we need to “ground” the science in a solid philosophical basis actually do? What does it mean?”
Good question. This is an issue on which Eli straw-manned me. I’m not trying to say *we can’t do science until we do philosophy.* What I’m saying is that if we don’t do philosophy, we’re opening ourselves up to the possibility of being permanently and dramatically mistaken in our science. For example: If we think that Laws of Nature are literally Laws set down by God, as the original people who came up with the concept seem to have thought, and we don’t ever do any philosophy to question that, then the existence of God will be an unexamined assumption of science, and worse yet, people will eventually get confused and think science has actually proven it. My worry is that something similar might happen with consciousness.
“Sienso: Well, we’re using the standard modern-science assumptions of naturalism, Popperian falsification, that kind of thing. You know, the same assumptions geologists and astronomers and organic chemists use, that you never seem to question when they’re using them.”
You think philosophers only question these assumptions in some contexts but not others? When you question an assumption you are questioning it for everyone.
“Phillipia might feel better knowing that Sienso has at least done a little research into their field from the philosophical angle, but Sienso thinks they’re being asked to add a bunch of pointless caveats to their results.”
Sienso isn’t being asked to do anything different here! All I’m doing is trying to defend the importance of philosophy. Again, I’m not saying that we need to do philosophy *before* we do science (sorry for being unclear about this earlier) I’m just saying that we need to keep track of our philosophical assumptions so we can question them in case they turn out to be wrong. Scientists can continue doing what they are doing; they just have to leave the philosophizing to the philosophers. (unless they are trained in philosophy themselves, which would be awesome I would love to see that)
“Essentially, the question “what if the assumptions underlying the scientific approach to these philosophical questions turn out to be flawed” seems like it can be answered “what if they’re not?” If so, we might actually learn something about the philosophical issue, but there’s no way to find out if we get caught up in speculating about the relative merits of the assumptions.”
See above.
“That is: the best way to test the assumptions is to just make them and see if it goes anywhere.”
Whoa, whoa, hell no. Philosophical questions can’t be tested so easily. Sometimes they are testable, but certainly not by someone who doesn’t understand them. One needs at least a basic level of philosophical background to decide whether or not “it goes anywhere.”
“For this to happen, Phillipia needs to either duck out of the conversation if they can’t keep up with the technical aspects, or contribute questions that make it easier rather than harder to move forward. This is what we would like from science and philosophy working on the questions together, but I can’t think of any good examples of how philosophy could directly, definitely contribute to advancement in any of the contested areas. Is such collaboration really possible, or is insisting that we need it just a way to say the same “stop trying to do something that we think only we can do” as the first thing while being a bit more polite about it?”
See above. (I’m trying to keep my word count down here, but I’d be happy to say more if you ask.)
“Since when has ‘achieving a grounded philosophical view of [field of inquiry]’ ever happened? As far as I know, philosophy has settled exactly nothing over millenia of effort. Some ideas have been struck down – a subset of those by philosophy itself rather than by science – but the majority of philosophical questions have gotten wordier without getting any closer to being resolved. How long should we expect to be waiting for a philosophical grounding for scientific work in consciousness?”
Philosophy gets stuck with a higher standard than other disciplines. When our current best theories of physics make wrong predictions, we say (sensibly) “well, we don’t have the truth yet, but we are getting closer.” I say we ought to say the same thing about philosophy. (That being said, I do agree that philosophy has a pretty uninspiring track record in some ways. I just don’t think it’s enough to make us dismiss the whole discipline. We have to do philosophy better, not stop doing it entirely.)
“Is there any reason to expect the scientific investigation to not at least make interesting progress in its own way, even if you’re sure there are watertight reasons to believe that nothing they can possibly find is really, truly, cosmically consciousness?”
No, of course not. Again, I’m not trying to slow or stop scientific research, I’m just trying to keep room for philosophy. I am objecting to the idea that if we just do enough science, we won’t have to do any philosophy.
“And if they then come over the fence and start telling you that actually the thing they’ve found is the real deal and no other kind of consciousness need apply, when it’s obvious that it’s just some minor result – well, then it’s their turn to be told off for overstepping. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
If I understand you correctly, I think the bridge you speak of is being crossed all the time. Otherwise intelligent people who know next to nothing about philosophical positions like naturalism nevertheless say that science has established their truth *all the time.*
I wish I could respond to these points in more depth, but:
I don’t see the “philosophy police” going around and stopping people from doing work in neuroscience or AI. What I see is resistance to people taking findings in these fields and presenting them as if they were answers to questions in philosophy of mind!
Analogy: maybe you think “can we really know anything, and if so, how do we do it?” is a stupid question to talk about. But handing me some workbook on how to learn Russian is not an answer to it. I don’t mind if you just want to teach people Russian and are fine just assuming that this is knowledge of the real world. Just don’t go waving around your little workbooks saying, “Hah, these dumbasses in philosophy can’t figure out whether knowledge is possible, but here we are learning 50 words a day!”
When people talk about being “philosophically grounded”, they don’t mean that you have to go out and convert all of academic philosophy to your viewpoint before you’re entitled to pick up your empirical clipboard. They mean that if you want to make claims about the philosophic meaning of results in neuroscience or whatever, you should have some idea of what you’re talking about in philosophy.
What people like Eli either don’t get or are deliberately evading is that people like Chalmers don’t deny any of the empirical findings in neuroscience. They disagree on how those findings ought to be interpreted in the philosophic context. Now, I think the “p-zombies” concept leads to a lot of confusion and needless arguments because of its stipulation that the “p-zombie” is exactly the same physically as the regular person (and not just very similar).
But the essential point that dualists make (though I’m not a property dualist like Chalmers but rather an interactionist dualist) is: okay, you’ve got a wonderful theory of X. Great theory of X, really appreciate your theory of X.
But what you don’t have is a theory of Y. You’re acting like you do, but you don’t. You’re not even talking about Y, just about X. And therefore you shouldn’t keep claiming that your theory of X solves the problem of Y.
And if the reductivists want to contest that, want to say they’ve really got a theory of Y after all, they’ve got to fight that battle on the grounds of philosophy. They can’t just keep saying more fascinating and cool things about X.
If they don’t care about whether they’ve got a theory of X or a theory of Y, fine. Then they should shut the hell up about the philosophical issue and leave the interpretations to other people.
@ Vox Imperatoris
Perhaps philosophers need to do some empirical homework as well?
When I first heard of the Twin Earth thought experiment (“their ‘water’ acts just like our water, but has a complicated chemical formula”), I was a bit shocked. Although the choice of example is not essential to the point, it betrays an ignorance of high-school level chemistry.
On the “philosophy has never proven anything” idea:
The problem here is that philosophy is the most general and fundamental science.
The practice of physics depends on answers to such questions as: is there an objective reality, is it possible to learn about it, and is it worth studying? The community of people studying physics consists necessarily of those who answer in the affirmative.
If philosophy hasn’t proven these answers, then neither have the physicists proven that any part of their system is valid.
Now, if instead of philosophy as a whole you look at particular schools of philosophy, you will find widespread agreement about what has been proven and disproven. But to complain that you don’t have agreement between, say, Aristotelians and postmodernists is like complaining that you don’t have agreement between mainstream medicine and “alternative medicine”, or between physicists and witch doctors.
But mainstream medicine has been a lot more productive and successful, you say? Well, so have some schools of philosophy been much more successful.
The idea that the universe is lawful, intelligible, and worthy of being studied by empirical methods didn’t come out of nowhere. That is the influence of certain viewpoints in philosophy. As opposed to: it’s all chaos, reason is impotent, and that your main focus should be escape from physical existence. If you view yourself as trapped in a prison, you don’t study the acoustics of the bars.
@ Nita:
No, it doesn’t. That’s just the kind of confusion I’m talking about.
Putnam damn well knew that if you change the chemical formula for water, you’re going to get different behavior. It’s the most absurd uncharitability to act like he didn’t know that.
The point is, whether it’s chemically possible in reality or not, you can imagine a substance that behaves superficially like water but is chemically very different. They do a similar thing all the time with artificial sweeteners like sucralose: it tastes just like sugar, but it isn’t sugar. Of course it differs from sugar in some ways, most importantly caloric content. But if you give it to someone, mixed with the appropriate amount of filler for volume, he’s not likely to be able to tell the difference.
And as you say, he chose water because it’s relatively simple to talk about, rather than talking about some other, more plausible, hypothetical substances that are superficially identical.
***
Anyway, I agree with you on the point that philosophers shouldn’t try to be armchair physicists or biologists. But they do this far more rarely than they are incorrectly accused of doing.
@Daniel, Vox: Ah, it seems that we don’t actually disagree on very much of substance beyond who we feel is more frequetly stepping on who’s toes. There is some stuff, but it’ll take more time and space to explore, so I’m also stepping out here. Thank-you for your thoughts, regardless.
These arguments always boil down to the legitimacy of methodological naturalism, and the ultimate conclusion is always the same: since empiricism is impossible without MN, you can either like it or lump it.
Philosophers can yell all they want about injurious assumptions, but scientists have to assume *something* that lets them actually do science, and no one’s come up with any better ideas.
@ stillnotking:
The problem is that “methodological naturalism” is really vague.
I mean, I consider myself 100% “naturalistic”, but I often have no idea what a particular person means by calling himself that. Or they’ll include things under “naturalism” that have nothing, as such, to do with it, like materialism.
@ Vox Imperatoris
No, I can’t. If ‘water’ had a different chemical composition, life as we know it could not exist.
@ Nita:
Conceivably (but not likely, that’s not the point) life could exist superficially as we know it but with a very different chemical structure. So “water” made of some complex chemicals, and “proteins” made largely of those same components, etc.
Or think about a full virtual-reality simulation of water, that appears just like water to all the senses. It’s superficially just like water but not made of the same stuff at all.
Anyway, it’s a pointless debate because, as you recognize, the plausibility or Twin Earth is not relevant to the example.
Water is a poor example because several key properties that are found in almost nothing else rely upon the specific molecular structure (notably, being less dense as a solid). The point is the form of the argument, though, not the example. Versions of the same argument have been made using qualitative spectrum inversion as the example.
@VoxImperatoris
I’m evading nothing. What’s going on is that I deny there’s a separate domain of uniquely philosophical enquiry, disjoint from science and yet as real as science.
This is standard metaphilosophical naturalism, but again, everyone who’s not a naturalist finds it a bitter pill to swallow and tries to evade the charge that they cannot produce for me one non-natural thing.
Oh, we can make stronger statements than that! If we use hierarchical statistical modeling to do our empiricism, then each observation consistent with methodological naturalism strengthens our belief in methodological naturalism.
@Nita
When you made that comment, were you aware that the inventor of twin earth died yesterday?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-nussbaum/hilary-putnam-1926-2016_b_9457774.html
This made me more put off than I would normally be by the claim that a man who solved a fucking Hilbert problem couldn’t understand high school chemistry.
@ FrogOfWar
No, I was not.
You’re reacting as if I called Putnam stupid. Obviously, he was a very intelligent, hard-working and helpful person. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the chemical structure of a substance and its properties are connected (unless, like in Vox’s simulation proposal, the ‘substance’ is imaginary — in other words, not really a substance at all).
And this kind of thing is not unique to Putnam, but almost ubiquitous in philosophy. E.g., Searle’s Chinese room argument against “strong AI” assumes that the key question is whether we would say that the computer (that is, the hardware and the OS) understands Chinese the way a person does. But that’s not the right question. No part of my brain understands English in that sense — and yet here I am, typing.
Like I said, I’m a bit on edge on this subject. I understand that it is unfair to imply you think Putnam is stupid. But he wasn’t even temporarily acting stupid in the construction of twin earth.
And I don’t think that because I think physical constraints are never relevant to thought experiments. The Chinese room is bad partially because what would have to be going on for the claims of the thought experiment to be true differs sharply and distortingly from the picture people have in their heads when they evaluate it.
But our picture of the chemical structure of twater is irrelevant. All that matters for the point about language is that given the stipulation that the watery stuff on twin earth is XYZ their word ‘water’ refers to all and only XYZ. The question of whether that stipulation is physically possible is neither here nor there, since we can answer the hypothetical prior to knowing anything about such matters.
@ FrogOfWar
[warning: long rant]
If I said, “imagine that, on another planet in our universe, there are people just like us, only they usually carry their shadows draped over one shoulder instead of attached to their feet,” would you not think this was an extremely weird and distracting way to set up a thought experiment?
OK, let’s assume that chemistry-related facts don’t matter. Let’s take a look at language-related facts now. Those should be relevant to the study of meaning, right?
Empirical facts: If you are a modern biologist studying feline phylogeny, the definition of “tiger” you use on the job must involve genes. If you are an Indian farmer trying to protect livestock from predators, “superficial” properties like big claws and striped fur matter much more than genes.
Conclusions: Language is an ad-hoc, pragmatic tool. Questions like “are perfectly tiger-like animals with reptile genes really tigers or not?” are fundamentally confused. There is no “true definition” of “tiger”.
Example: Are birds really reptiles or not?
The fact that Putnam (or Vox Imp) can imagine something, while Kripke (or I) can’t, says more about our personal histories than about the true meaning of “water”.
And all of this is so frustrating because many philosophers are so smart.
Is this a reference to something, because it sounds too compelling for something that was just made up for a forum post.
@ God Damn John Jay
Thank you very much 🙂 I guess I was influenced by various imaginative treatments of shadows in fiction and visual media.
@Eli
“I’m evading nothing. What’s going on is that I deny there’s a separate domain of uniquely philosophical enquiry, disjoint from science and yet as real as science.
This is standard metaphilosophical naturalism,”
If there is something that qualifies as the domain of uniquely philosophical enquiry, it is reflexive enquiry into the nature of concepts we usually just employ….thinking about thinking.
How could you conclude that that is excluded by naturalism?
Presumably, you are taking ‘domain’ to literally mean a realm….and because science studies the only real realm, philosophy must study a fictitious one?
@Nita
“Conclusions: Language is an ad-hoc, pragmatic tool”
He were you proposing to get from that to the conclusion that philosophy is somehow globally wrong?
@ Eli:
I am a naturalist! I don’t believe in any non-natural things. So any particular dispute we’re having can’t be over the validity of methodological naturalism.
Anyway, I don’t think that philosophy is “disjoint from science.” Philosophy is a type of science. It is the most general science; all the other types are subordinate to it. It studies the broadest and most fundamental questions of concern to human beings, such as: what is the nature of the universe as a whole (metaphysics); what is the nature of knowledge, and how it is possible (epistemology); how should one live (ethics); and how should society be organized (politics).
The distinction is between philosophy, which studies these broad questions in the context of the background knowledge available to everyone, versus the special sciences, which study particular topics on the basis of expert knowledge of the subdomain, often empirical in nature. (Of course, there is expert knowledge in philosophy, but it’s not knowledge of data but of what other people have said in the past, so that you don’t duplicate their efforts or their mistakes.)
Whether “methodological naturalism” is appropriate or not is a question for epistemology, not physics. Not because physics is talking about one reality and epistemology about a different one. But just because, by definition, it’s an epistemological question that needs to be studied by philosophical methods. Whether anything in physics is true depends on whether certain propositions in epistemology are true; to attempt to use the existence of physical knowledge to prove the existence of knowledge in general would be absurdly circular.
There’s no fundamental difference between philosophy and other domains. You can say that physics or biology are just sub-fields of “natural philosophy”. But they become sub-fields because in order to do physics, you have to actually go out and do experiments, and since no one can do experiments in every field, people outside the field just have to accept the validity of those experiments on (rationally grounded) authority. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the field where nothing is taken on authority or restricted to those who have specialized knowledge—but which, consequently, is restricted merely to what one can say on the basis of “armchair” reasoning.
That’s basically the difference between, say, philosophy of mind and psychology. Philosophy of mind consists of everything you can say about the mind without getting out of your armchair. Psychology consists of everything else.
> These arguments always boil down to the legitimacy of methodological naturalism, and the ultimate conclusion is always the same: since empiricism is impossible without MN, you can either like it or lump it.
Its more a question of whether MN is all you need. Can you use it to answer questions like, what is knowledge, what is the good?
@Nita
I’m not interested in debating the general quality of Putnam’s philosophy of language, in part because I’m not even a partisan of it. My point was simply that what is in fact chemically possible has no bearing on the quality of the twin earth thought experiment. If your claims about laypeople and scientists differing in their referents was supposed to support your position on that issue–as opposed to more generally just being an argument against Putnam’s philosophy of language–then I don’t see how.
(As a side note, I do find it odd that you make no mention of the fact that a huge portion of “The Meaning of ‘Meaning'” is devoted explicitly to explaining how the words of laypeople and scientists manage to have the same referents despite them caring and knowing about different features of the relevant objects. Though again, Putnam’s overall view is not my dog here.)
The shadow example is more directly on the relevant point. But I never defended the claim that the quality of thought experiments is never affected by whether the relevant scenario is physically possible. I only defended the claim that it isn’t relevant concerning twin earth.
Anecdata; I am now inclined to think that semantic externalism is broadly correct, at least in some form. But I resisted it for a long time, and part of the reason I long found it unconvincing is because its partisans provided arguments that seemed very weak to me. And, specifically, the physical impossibility of twater was indeed one of the reasons I found the water/twater thought experiment less than fully convincing.
It also may be noteworthy that Putnam himself tried to modify the scenario in later years so as to be less scientifically implausible (with limited success).
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2340
@Eli
How about the number 11? I am not altogether sure what you mean by “non-natural”, but if you mean something like “not located in any particular place in space and time”, or “not entering into causal interactions with other objects”, the number 11 certainly qualifies. Now, maybe you would not call the number 11 a thing. But then I suggest that your belief that there are no non-natural things is true only insofar as you define “thing” so as to exclude the most respectable category of non-natural things.
@Nita
Your objection here seems to be that thought experiments which involve situations we know to be nomologically impossible (that is, situations which could not occur under the natural laws which govern the actual world) are in some way incoherent. This is a bad objection. Here’s one reason why: we need sometimes to consider what would occur if a scientific theory we know to be false were true, if for no other reason than to show that it makes the wrong predictions. Suppose I am trying to prove to an interlocutor that gravity does not everywhere attract inversely as the square of the distance. How can I do this if it is incoherent even to contemplate a world where gravity attracts everywhere inversely as the square of the distance?
This is false– species membership goes by descent, not genotype. Roughly, anything descended from a member of species M is also an M unless and until a speciation event occurs. (A badly mutated tiger is still a tiger, for the same reason a human being with Down’s syndrome is still a human being.)
@Earthly Knight, It is not obvious that an adequately nominalistic set theory is impossible; David Lewis was working on that in some of his later writings, and came up with some very promising results (his paper “Mathematics is Megethology” contains a summary of the view he was working on). If a nominalistic approach to set theory works, and we define numbers in terms of sets (as is standard), there won’t be anything non-natural about 11.
Oh, okay, he wants to have sets as plural quantification over parts and wholes. That’s weird.
@Earthly Knight, I thought it should have been clear just from what I said that I wasn’t talking about the first possibility you mention. Or the second, for that matter, but the second also shares a problem with the third, namely that I have no idea why you think possible worlds would have anything to do with anything (unless you just saw the name David Lewis and assumed it must be about that). There’s nothing about possibilities in the account Lewis proposes.
If numbers come straight out of Plato’s world of forms, why would that make them non-natural? This question doesn’t even involve naturalism.
@Protagoras
One problem that jumps out at me is that Lewis has the null set being the fusion of all individuals. This is pretty kooky. The null set is to the left of me, it is to the right of me, and it weighs more than an elephant. Huh?
@Vox
I’m not sure what you’re asking, in part because I have no idea what anyone here has at any time meant by “natural”. If “natural” means “located in space and time”, “capable of entering into causal relations”, “subject to the laws of physics”, or “investigable a posteriori”– I don’t know what else it could mean– numbers will come out as non-natural.
@ TheAncientGeek
I do not think that philosophy is globally wrong. I like philosophy. But are scientists really at risk of being “permanently and dramatically mistaken” unless they listen to professional philosophers?
Biologists used to be more “realist” about species, but then they got out of their armchairs and made some observations. Now biologists are less realist about species. Their underlying philosophical assumptions got adjusted in light of empirical evidence. More broadly, all natural sciences seem to have gone from naive to more sophisticated assumptions without constructing a coherent, philosopher-approved ontological framework at each turn.
Meanwhile, most people have been holding even less justified assumptions than “Laws of Nature are literally Laws set down by God” for centuries, despite the existence of philosophers’ alternative proposals. “Tide goes in, tide goes out — you can’t explain that” remains persuasive until you actually explain how tides work without God.
Of course, without philosophers, we wouldn’t have the words to talk about various epistemological stances and their development. But I think the development would still occur.
@ Vox Imperatoris
So, philosophers only use knowledge that everyone can have. But if we don’t even know what knowledge really is, how can we know what those things are?
Or, to make some tentative progress, let’s take “knowledge” as “justified true belief”. Under this well-respected definition, we can’t know whether we’re truly doing philosophy until we learn 1) what beliefs are available to “everyone”, 2) which of those beliefs are true, and 3) which of the true beliefs are justified.
And yet, you seem confident that at least some philosophers actually exist. Clearly, you must be naive about your own assumptions and in need of external guidance.
@ Earthly Knight
The history of descent is what the biologist is trying to find out, genotypes are the input data. “Tigers” are the group of animals represented by the strings of letters in the folder /P_tigris/. (If one string is very unlike the others, it might be excluded from the sample as unrepresentative of the group as a whole.)
This approach allows the biologist to conclude things like “tigers are polyphyletic” and communicate them to colleagues without confusion. Everyone would understand what she meant, and no one would go, “That’s impossible! P. tigris is a species, and species membership goes by descent!”
In other words, language users spontaneously develop weird de-facto “definitions”, and they serve them quite well, despite not fitting into any of the elegant, universal frameworks philosophers seem to be working on.
@Earthly Knight, Well, obviously, if it seems intuitive to you that the empty set should be non-natural, it’s going to be unintuitive that Lewis has an empty set with natural properties. But, as he points out, the fusion of all individuals satisfies the one and only condition that the empty set is absolutely required to satisfy (being guaranteed to contain no elements). And mathematics has become increasingly pragmatic over the years, more willing to accept whatever works than to impose additional intuitive constraints beyond what can be proven to satisfy the axioms.
@ Nita:
Biology can’t say anything one way or the other about whether we should be realists about species. Not because there’s anything wrong with biology or because they’re benighted, ignorant fools—but because it’s not a biological question!
Biology, as such, just goes out and collects empirical data about living things, formulating theories to systematize it.
Questions about whether species are really real or whatever are philosophical questions. Now, there’s nothing that says one can’t do “philosophy of biology” or that one can’t be a philosopher and a biologist at the same time.
I’m not trying to say that philosophy is some kind of arcane priesthood into which only those with the Secret Knowledge can enter. Anyone can say whatever he wants about philosophy; he has the perfect right. Indeed, everyone implicitly must have some opinions on philosophical matters. It’s just that if he doesn’t know anything about philosophy—which is to say, the history of philosophy, or what has been said before in philosophy—he is more likely to be wrong, or at the very least vague and confused.
But that’s not to say outside opinions aren’t useful! I don’t have much respect at all for contemporary academic philosophy. I’m not trying to defend it and say they’ve got the last word on everything. That’s the difference between philosophy and other fields of study: it’s less about advancing toward consensus over time (though that would be ideal) and more about enumerating and fleshing out all the possible positions.
Philosophy is a subject where you have to think for yourself and judge everyone’s writings for yourself. (In contrast to “special sciences” where you don’t have blind faith but you do necessarily have a certain level of trust that other people are not lying to you about the data.) I’m not saying that scientists ought to blindly accept the “received opinion” of professional philosophers.
As to the question of species: there is nothing about the study of biology in general or evolution in particular that casts any more doubt on immanent realism than what you can get looking at the most general facts. You can just look at the color spectrum and try to tell me where the dividing line is between red and orange, or at countless other examples. Now, I think the immanent realists can’t produce a decent answer here, and I of course think the same about species. But it’s not in any way a new problem.
The influence of biology here is not as a form of rational argument but as a type of intellectual fad or fashion. This kind of thing happens all the time. When they were formulating the laws of mechanics, everyone was interested in billiard-ball mechanism. In the 19th century under the influence of Darwin, everyone was talking about how the universe/morality/whatever is constantly evolving. If lots of people are studying species, which is a phenomenon that seems really hard to square with immanent realism, maybe that will draw people away from that view. But what if people are making all kinds of advances in, say, geometry? That could draw them in the opposite direction for just as little real reason.
Now, philosophy as a general subject is not concerned with whether immanent realism is true of species in particular but rather of everything in general. If you want to look at species in particular, you are doing philosophy of biology, which of course requires a greater degree of familiarity with the actual content of biology. (And of course it presupposes answers to such questions as: do living things exist? Can the laws governing their behavior be studied scientifically?) There’s no hard line or some law that says a person who has a PhD in biology can’t have a philosophical outlook on the subject.
Nevertheless, the point is: okay, take your biologist who says absolutely proves nominalism in regard to species. Fine, but what about all the arguments against nominalism? They’re good arguments! They’re very tricky to refute, if indeed they can be refuted. If the philosophical biologist and all his friends build up some nominalist theory of species without ever engaging with the history of philosophy, they are very likely to have formulated it in a bad way that is vulnerable to the first serious criticism that comes along.
You can’t just say: “but the empirical data prove nominalism right!” If someone can produce arguments against nominalism using the same or other data, the data also appear to prove nominalism wrong! The data on their own, without philosophical interpretation, can’t settle the dispute. As Steven Kaas says:
Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
This is absurdly uncharitable.
Obviously, by purporting to say what philosophy consists of, I am claiming knowledge and thereby implicitly taking positions on a whole host of philosophic questions. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with that, or that there is a definition of philosophy somehow independent of any particular position in philosophy.
A universal skeptic would say he doesn’t know what the definition of philosophy is because he doesn’t know anything. Obviously, I think that’s a pretty dumb position because somehow this universal skeptic remembers where he left his keys in the morning to drive to work and write that. He knows how to find the philosophy department and not the physics department. Nevertheless, he’s at least a useful foil and in philosophy you can’t just say “ur dum”.
And again, my position is not: “defer to your betters”; “don’t think for yourself”. It is simply that, while thinking for yourself, it is often helpful to consider the opinions of those who have thought before you. That is what it means to study philosophy.
I am not a professor. I am not trying to defend my academic “turf” and say nobody else can walk on it without approval in triplicate from me.
I suggest Googling up “Gettier problem” before claiming this is a well-respected definition.
@Nita
But then it would be entirely natural to follow this up with “so I guess tigers aren’t a species after all”, and to either reclassify the tigers as the best candidate monophyletic taxon or abolish them. After a while, biologists will accept this usage and begin to correct any colleagues who use “tiger” to refer to the old, invalid taxon. After a while longer, the change will trickle into public consciousness, and people who erroneously talk about tigers in the old way will share the fate of people who erroneously speak of Pluto as a planet. Natural language is full of constraints on reference. We do not allow people to talk just any way they like.
@Protagoras
The problem isn’t that I have intuitions that sets are non-natural (I have no issue with the set of green things having the combined mass of all of the green things, or being located wherever the green things are). The problem is that making the null set be the fusion of individuals is intuitively crazy. Upon reflection, I suspect it also creates serious problems elsewhere for Lewis:
–Propositions are sets of possible worlds, propositions which report contradictions are the null set, but if the null set is a fusion of all of the individuals, worlds being individuals, we have contradictions identified with all of the possible worlds, equivalent in intension to logical truths. This is unacceptable.
–Abundant properties are sets of actual and possible individuals, metaphysically impossible properties are the null set, but if the null set is a fusion of all of the individuals, we have metaphysically impossible properties being identified with all of the individuals, equivalent in intension to the property of being an individual, or the property of existing in space and time. This is equally unacceptable.
On the ill-definedness of ‘naturalism’: the PhilPapers survey (http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl) found that 50% of philosophers self-identified as naturalists, but they do not all appear to have the same idea of what naturalism commits one to. For example, according to the Correlations page (http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most_with.pl?A=main:Metaphilosophy:naturalism), 14% are non-physicalists about mind, 40% are Platonists about abstract objects, 64% think we can have a priori knowledge, and 38%(!) are objectivists about aesthetic value, despite these all being positions many other naturalists would consider non-naturalistic.
@Earthly Knight, I’m not sure why those are unacceptable. A contradiction would be true in any world which was a member of the empty set; a world in which the empty set exists still isn’t a world where the empty set has members, so it still isn’t a world where the contradiction is true (which would be the unacceptable result). And similarly for the other case.
@ Troy:
Yes, “naturalism” is really vague.
I mean, I know what I mean by it: I don’t believe that there are any supernatural things, things which are outside the natural order. But whatever real thing I saw, I would call it “inside the natural order”. If it’s real, it’s necessarily inside the natural order in my opinion.
There’s only one perspective from which a natural/supernatural distinction makes sense to me: the religious perspective from which one says that God created a universe with a certain natural order, which nothing in the universe can violate. Yet nevertheless, he can violate it if he wants, and these are supernatural phenomena.
When I say “don’t believe in the supernatural”, I mean don’t believe in ghosts or ESP or stuff like that. Because they’re not real. If they were real, I would say that we have proved ghosts and ESP are natural phenomena, not that we have demonstrated the existence of the supernatural.
@Protagoras
Sorry, I think I was confused about the empty set being the fusion of possible worlds while logical truths are the fusion of the singletons of possible worlds (which also doesn’t make a lot of sense). Still, it is profoundly strange to think that you and I are part of 2+2=5 and part of the property of being at once red all over and black all over. We also must dispense with the idea that sets are located where their members are; the empty set is located everywhere but has members nowhere. Unless these problems with the empty set can be fixed, I think they spell doom for the proposal.
I think we already have a superintelligent AI that has provided satisfying answers to most philosophical questions. It’s called the Christian God.
Hint, you’re unaware that you are giving technology religious power and reframing religious beliefs and desires in a worse form. Transhumanism is the province of people who think technology has near magical power to shape things, and is even more unrealistic than heaven or hell.
This is not an argument. It’s just a bald assertion. And this is a place where you shouldn’t expect it to go unchallenged.
Just because Daedalus didn’t exist, doesn’t mean it’s impossible for man to fly.
It is impossible for man to fly. It is not impossible for man to build things that can fly, that are capable of conveying him places.
You can challenge it all you like, most transhumanists have no real conception of what technology can or cannot do, and give it powers that are essentially fantasy. It’s exactly the same as all the SF authors who thought we’d be inhabiting the moon or Venus right now, until science caught up and actually showed us the insane effort it took just to get off our planet, and how vast the universe is. Or how corrosive Venus’s atmosphere is.
The more i study technology, the more realistic i become about what it can accomplish and the more I distrust people who make grandiose claims about what it can do to make us superhuman in the future. The more i understand about the brain, the less likely I find it to be able to be prolonged or scanned into a computer or whatever quackery Kurzweil is ranting about in his latest book. We can change and help the human condition, but within hard limits it seems.
Maware, saying that it’s impossible for humans to fly and only possible to build things that help them fly is a really obnoxious form of semantic nitpicking that’s borderline trolling. Obviously, everybody who talks about people flying, knows that and even the referenced myth of Daedalus involved the guy actually building a device for flying rather than growing wings.
Most philosophical questions are actually easy. It’s just that many people feel that the obviously right answers are not satisfying.
I feel like a lot of people on opposite sides of philosophical debates can and do say things like this, though. Taking the outside view, there’s no reason to think what you see as the easy and obvious answers are actually the correct ones.
Yup. “Intuitiveness” is used as an objection to an enormous range of correct philosophical answers.
Another large source of disagreement comes from unmotivated assumptions about things that are not subject to empirical investigation. The AI can’t do anything to help there.
There’s also the class of questions, where nobody has any idea and all arguments are pretty much unfounded.
For example questions about the nature of consciousness. I feel like its clear that animals are conscious to a degree, say I expect a cat to be like a human without articulated thoughts. Apparently the Eliezer-Clique have different opinions here.
I think neither of us has a very well-founded opinion here, since we just don’t have any sufficient idea about consciousness.
@ The Smoke
Ayn Rand said* “To be conscious, means to be conscious OF something.”
The cat is conscious of the smell of a mouse, the temperature of her cushion, how full her stomach is already; real things. The human is conscious of his own thoughts and fantasies: unreal things.
* QFM, ie Quoting From Memory
Wait, people think cats aren’t conscious?
At least that’s what I read into this:
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/
DING DING DING!
Agreed.
Examples?
Because I do not at all agree with you.
God, Morality, Free Will.
On further thought I also disagree with my statement. It’s just that the kind of question it applies to tend to dominate the public discourse.
Not sure if you meant to apply this statement to the three topics you listed.
God? I don’t think God exists, but it’s not obvious. I’m tempted to say that it’s obvious that the Christian God does not exist, but…obviously…a large number of people don’t find it so obvious.
Morality? I’m not even sure what position here is supposed to be “obvious” to you. So much for that one.
Free will? You mean, of course, that the libertarian position on free will is obviously correct? 😉 But seriously, also not obvious.
Back up here. I can understand the easy answers to God, Free Will or Consciousness(I happen to agree to some extent) but morality? What exactly do you think is the obviously correct ethical theory? Because whatever answer you give there is going to be a problem with it.
Trigger Warning: Reductionism
God: More generally you could ask: “Is there something beyond our physical reality?”. Answer: There’s so far no reason to assume this and any unmotivated specific guess is certainly false. The notion of a God is pretty specific, and hence not worth of consideration. (Simulation arguments are a more justified take on the question.)
Morality: There is no distinguished ethical system. Philosophy can help you work out some criteria which you can use to compare different moral systems, but in the end it is still arbitrary which of those you deem important.
Free will: It kind of depends what you are asking here. Are the actions of an individual more than a product of physical processes? No.
Some people then weaken this to: Can humans make decisions that are not perfectly predictable and not directly determined by what some other entity wants? Here the answer is in general positive, but that basically only means that you don’t understand the physical system well enough.
Edit: I consider those obvious, in the same sense in which other people consider it obvious that the universe is older than 5000 years:
The alternative conflicts with your general conception of reality and the only reason to consider it (the alternative) is that people keep telling you that’s how it is.
It seems somewhat disingenuous to suggest that these answers are obvious, especially when significant portions of the population disagree with all of these.
EDIT: I agree with all of these answers.
Obvious to people who think in x fashion (most people don’t think like that).
@The Smoke
You say you know the right answers to various philosophical questions. But I think your questions are too defective to have right answers, and at any rate they are not questions anyone cares about.
I have no idea what it would mean for an ethical system to be distinguished. Here are some more serious questions: are ethical claims to be interpreted literally, that is, as expressing propositions which may be true or false? Are any ethical claims true? Are they true independent of what anyone believes or feels, for instance, in a world where there are no people? And if there are true ethical claims, which ones are they?
This, again, does not strike me as a sensible question or having much to do with free will. Here are two which do: if the universe is deterministic– if the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe jointly necessitate all past and future human actions– do humans have the ability to act otherwise than they actually do? And, if the universe is not deterministic– if, for instance, one of the indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics turns out to be correct– do humans have the ability to act otherwise than they actually do?
@Earthly Knight
I actually think the more standard way in which you phrase the questions is not really sensible, which is why I tried to do it differently (apparently I did a bad job, too). Nevertheless, if you would answer all of your questions with ‘no’, then we’re basically at the same point.
I guess this is surprisingly against the grain here, but no, I don’t envision a future in which AI can satisfactorily answer hard philosophical questions. I don’t think the barrier to answering them is imagination or intellectual capacity or whatever it is computationally that we think AI will have more of than the collected body of billions of humans over thousands of years. At least some metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical questions are fundamentally unanswerable. In fact, the very question of what a person finds satisfying as an answer is itself a matter of aesthetics. Maybe I’m harder than most to satisfy.
Explaining why a question is improperly framed and has no answer, is a form of “answering” it.
For instance: “When did you stop beating your wife?” “I never started beating my wife.”
Humans have already done that, to the satisfaction of almost no one.
People have asserted that some questions are unanswerable. Explaining, which would require proof, is somewhat harder.
The AI could never answer them, because it never ponders them. What the AI will do is have a huge library of philosophy texts and words, and will repeatedly string them over and over according to whatever criteria the programmer things makes a “good” answer. It will have no understanding of any philosophical ideas whatsover, in the same way Searle’s Chinese room experiment had the person doing it not know the Chinese language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
His example is really what AI is, even deep learning AI.
Which electrical impulse or chemical in your brain “understands” English?
Searle’s Chinese Room reveals more about how we identify discrete entities than it does about the nature of consciousness or understanding.
Unlike probably 95% of the people on this site, I actually agree with you on the Chinese room question.
But it’s irrelevant.
The AI doesn’t have to have any kind of subjective consciousness in order to be able to tell humans the answers to philosophic questions. No more than a calculator has to be conscious to tell you what 503 * 789 is.
All objective logical reasoning can be implemented in the form of a computer program. There is nothing in the actual work of deriving philosophical answers that requires subjective consciousness. If, for instance, there are certain axioms that underlie all knowledge, if you feed the computer many items of knowledge, it can tell you what those axioms are.
AlphaGo is not conscious and doesn’t understand Go. That doesn’t mean it can’t beat people at Go.
In the same way, an AI doesn’t have to be conscious to compose the (as rated by humans) most beautiful song or painting ever made, or the funniest joke, or the most inspiring political speech. You can do all that with the “deep learning” stuff.
“Is it conscious or not?” is a complete red herring as relates to the question of what AI can do.
I agree that the question is a red herring. But I don’t really see why the Chinese room thought experiment is considered refuting the idea that machines could think. We could have an AI that does everything that humans do and then some, and despite all that you still wouldn’t believe that it could have consciousness? What would the AI have to do to convince you otherwise?
@ Wrong Species:
An AI could do everything externally observable that human beings can do, and it wouldn’t convince me that it had subjective consciousness, because there is no particular reason you’d have to be conscious to do any of those things.
Of course, in this case, there would be plenty of things humans could do that AIs couldn’t: have thoughts, beliefs, feelings, desires, etc. But you don’t need to understand mathematics to add up numbers; you don’t need to feel anger in order to howl and stamp your feet; you don’t need desires in order to systematically achieve a goal.
I know that other human beings are conscious by inference to the best explanation, given that I am a human being and have subjective, first-person conscious experience. It’s preposterous that everyone else is talking about it, but I’m the only one who’s really got it. So I presume that other people are conscious, too. That’s not the strongest possible evidence, but it’s the evidence I’ve got.
It is, theoretically, a rebuttable presumption: if Daniel Dennett or whoever keeps going on about how he has no idea what anyone means by “qualia”, maybe it’s because he really is a soulless automaton that doesn’t have any subjective consciousness. But there are also many reasons that argue against that explanation.
If the AI had a mind and wanted to convince me that it had one, it would have to explain the nature of consciousness and the interaction of mind and body, and on that basis prove to me (or the relevant neuroscientists, computer scientists etc.) that its mind was influencing its electronic “brain”.
Or else it would have to convince me that I’m wrong about dualism. But if I knew how it could do that, I wouldn’t be a dualist. I can say in general what it would look like: it would have to show me that subjective experience is not merely caused by, but identical to (that’s what “reducible to” means) non-subjective, external facts. And I can’t see how that is possible.
***
Also, I just want to note that I do not share Searle’s position on the mind-body relation. He is, at best an epiphenomenalist. My position is almost exactly that laid out by Bryan Caplan in this essay.
@Vox
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that an AI passing the Turing Test can automatically be considered a conscious being. The Chinese Room argument is a good refutation of that. The problem for me comes from the next part where it’s asserted that AI could never have consciousness. I can easily conceive of an AI that acts like a conscious being but isn’t but I believe it would be built differently, lacking some physical features that the conscious AI does have. Now what would that look like? I don’t know, but I do think this is much closer to the truth than the idea that consciousness comes from some non-physical aspect, which, as far as I can tell, can never be proven or disproven and seems to be based solely on our own intuitions(which is crazy to me because our intuitions are obviously flawed.)
You state that the AI would have to be able to explain the nature of its consciousness to convince you. But that is an unreasonably high standard! You don’t ask that of other humans. You admit that it’s not the best evidence but say that the similarities between yourself and other humans seems like some evidence. Fair enough. What about a human level AI? It wouldn’t be able to answer your question but it conceivably exist. Would you assign it no rights until it could solve one of the hardest problems in philosophy? What about aliens? If ET came to Earth and demanded to be treated as a sentient being would you dismiss this until it could prove it’s consciousness?
Of course, this presumes that being able to explain consciousness is a trivial task. There could be a intelligent AI that fully understands the nature of consciousness but it’s too complex for you to understand. Or conversely, the AI could be a really good debater and convince you that it is really conscious but it simply isn’t. While convincing you that it does have a mind seems an important aspect in understanding consciousness, I don’t think it’s necessary. Of course, I’m not certain what is necessary, but you’re missing something.
@ Wrong Species:
I don’t know about Searle, but I’m not saying that an AI could never be conscious, that somehow it is not possible to create an artificial being that is conscious. I’m saying I don’t think current AIs are conscious, and that there’s no particular reason to suppose that a given AI is conscious, even if it can do all the externally observable things human beings can do.
And as for your last point, the evidence for the mind is “based solely on our own intuitions” only to the same extent that the evidence for the physical world is “based solely on our own intuitions”.
In any case, the proof that consciousness “comes from some non-physical aspect”—which is not how I would phrase it because I’m not talking about what it “comes from” or is caused by but what it is—comes by listing aspects of consciousness that are not shared with physical things. Disproof of that would consist of an argument against that, combined ideally with showing that the brain is a closed physical system that can be understood without reference to anything mental.
I am asking it to prove a lot more than I would expect another human being to prove. The universe isn’t fair. The fact is that other human beings not only have similar behavior to me, but they are built in fundamentally the same way and have a common origin. The human-level AI only has the first one.
As for rights, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Whether other people are conscious is immaterial to whether or not they have rights. Respecting other people’s rights is not a sacrifice I make for their sake: rather, it’s the most best way, in the long run, for me.
Trying to enslave a race of robots that were functionally identical to human beings in every respect except not being conscious would be just as impractical as trying to enslave human beings. They wouldn’t be able to use their full potential; they would resent it (or display all the outward signs of resenting it) and try to rebel against it at the first opportunity; along with all the other factors that make slavery against the interest of the masters as well as the slaves.
On the other hand, if they’re, like, willing and obedient slaves who want nothing more than to serve humanity (which is what “Friendly AI” is), then what’s the problem?
Really, I suppose it doesn’t have to fully explain the nature of consciousness. It just has to show where the non-physical influence comes in.
@Vox
So we agree then that an AI could conceivably have consciousness but it would be very difficult to tell, correct?
As far as intuition goes, that’s such a big question that could be talked about endlessly so I’ll ignore that for now. And I also spoke loosely when using the word “rights”, which goes beyond the current discussion.
But as far as my question about aliens go, how would you respond? If they insisted that they were conscious, would you automatically assume that they simply weren’t until they could prove otherwise? I guess what I’m wondering is if you’re skepticism about AI consciousness is an issue of humans vs other beings or is it biological beings vs non-biological beings. Do you think animals are conscious to some extent?
@ Wrong Species:
Yes.
With aliens: I just don’t know. I am agnostic on the question. If Vulcans landed on the planet tomorrow, I wouldn’t know whether they were conscious. If they talked about having conscious experience, I would be inclined to believe them. After all, there must be some cause as to why they talk about it. On the other hand, it could easily be a mistranslation or an attempt to deceive us. Maybe the kinds of things Dennett says about “qualia” are true for them: that it’s just a way of speaking, that thinking of it as some kind of special thing is a category error.
As for animals, you have the same factors of similar behavior, similar construction, and similar origin. A ape’s brain is so apparently similar to a human brain, and its reaction to being kicked is so similar to a human’s reaction, that I am very inclined to say that apes are conscious and really feel pain when you kick them. With other mammals, like cats, dogs, and cows, I’m inclined to say the same thing.
But as you get less similar, my confidence drops way down. Are chickens conscious? Plausibly. Lizards? Frogs? Octopuses? Fish? Earthworms? Clams? Protists? Bacteria? I don’t feel very inclined to say that bacteria are conscious.
On the other hand, it’s conceivable that even apes aren’t conscious and the dividing line was somewhere between us and australopithicus. That seems unlikely to me, but I don’t claim certainty one way or the other.
And with AI: if you gave me one out of a black box, I would treat it just like the Vulcans and wouldn’t claim to know one way or the other whether it were conscious. But if you give me one that works on basically the same principles as a calculator and has been iteratively developed from it, I’m going to say it’s unlikely. I guess it’s conceivable that some kind of panpsychism is true and that even calculators have a “calculating soul”—but I don’t see any evidence for that.
> But if you give me one that works on basically the same principles as a calculator and has been iteratively developed from it, I’m going to say it’s unlikely.
Don’t you think it’s conceivable that an AI researcher could invent a conscious being based off those “same principles”(whatever that means)? After all, humans are built off the “same principles” as bacteria, right? And we agree that bacteria are probably not conscious and humans probably are. If you say that they aren’t built off same principles as humans, then I would say that a Superintelligent AI will probably be as far removed from a calculator as humans are from bacteria. In both instances, the former have the same basic building blocks as the latter but with more complexity.
@ Wrong Species:
Sure, it’s conceivable.
And if AIs are invented through some kind of black-box, “make random alterations until you get something that writes opera” approach, maybe it’s somewhat more likely. Otherwise, if you’re just beelining toward intelligence, it seems like consciousness would naturally be selected against as extraneous (unless, for some reason, they simply have to go together).
Anyway, saying that artificial consciousness is inherently impossible is not my intention or my point. My point is just that artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness are not the same thing, and that it’s possible to have one without the other.
Therefore, as connects to the Chinese room thing, it is wrong to say (as many people do say) that the Chinese room “understands Chinese”. And it’s just as wrong to predict (as Maware was saying) that you could never build a machine that can speak perfect Chinese.
You seem to agree with me on that. So: good. 🙂
This seems like a good place to end this discussion. I can definitely see what you’re saying. Consciousness will surely be more difficult to implement than intelligence so we should be skeptical about the ability of intelligent machines to be conscious beings. Good talk.
The vision would heavily depend on what the answers were.
I don’t think so.
The reason is that I think many philosophical questions simply do not have an answer. For example, I don’t think “what is the correct interpretation of morality?” is a meaningful question. The most likely scenario, I think, is that human brains have a concept that you could call ‘morality’: that you could identify some brain signal as an internal representation of what we generally understand as morality, such that if you were to monitor people’s brain activity while showing them images or telling them stories which contain events you expect people will have a moral view on, and then asking them if they would describe what they saw or heard as moral or immoral, you would see a correlation between people’s brains having sent the signal you identified as ‘moral’ and them going on to pick the option ‘moral’, and vice versa for immoral.
But I don’t think you’ll get any further than that, to identify what really is and is not moral according to some provably correct argument. I think the question “what is the correct interpretation of morality?” is analogous to the question “how tall is a human?”. That is, you can identify how tall any particular human is, and you can state the range within which human heights typically fall, and you can state how tall the tallest person ever and the shortest person ever were. But there is no one answer to the question. It’s similar for all humans but not identical, changes as they age, varies based on both genetic and environmental factors, even the average distribution has changed over time. You cannot collate this information and find the value at which all human heights converge, the true height that was really how tall everyone was all along, if you could only have measured them properly. That’s just a non-concept.
The difference between morality and height is that we can easily measure each person’s height, whereas measuring a person’s moral beliefs is much more difficult. For another example: do you think there is one true taste? That a sufficiently intelligent AI could answer, once and for all, what tastes good and what tastes bad? I think it is much more tempting to say ‘yes’ to this than it is to the height question. But I don’t think it’s any more likely. When everyone has a characteristic, and you can’t precisely measure it but everyone’s seems sort of similar, it almost seems like if you could get a precise enough instrument you would find that everyone really agrees even if they don’t realize it. But I think that’s an illusion.
Your original $6000/year calculation already counted all corporations, not just public ones.
Huh! Maybe I’m a moron.
Someone on Tumblr said that Piketty’s calculations also suggested a higher figure, but they didn’t do the math themselves.
I haven’t read Piketty, but I think I remember people discussing him saying that he counts land wealth (including that not held by businesses) as capital.
Couldn’t we just go on national taxation revenue currently assigned to all social services that UBI is designed to replace, as this is a guide to what is politically feasible to actually gather? In which it seems trivially nowhere near enough?
Sure, but that’s besides the point. This is a discussion about whether a book’s suggestion to convert corporate profits into basic income makes sense.
It depends what you mean by makes sense. World peace is a good goal too. I’m just suggesting a different measure that would provide a more realistic starting point for thinking about UBI.
This is not a discussion about UBI in general. It is a discussion about a particular UBI plan.
This is like two engineers arguing about whether a house made by wood would hold. And you come along and say, why not use cement? Sure, cement might make more sense, but we are arguing about wood here.
Fair enough, I butted in. But I think cardboard would be a better analogy than wood.
There’s a lot of work being done there by “is designed to replace”. If you take most of federal social spending, including tax expenditures, you aren’t all that far off.
But once you start saying things like ‘social security is different’ or ‘tax expenditures are just letting you keep more of your own money’ then it looks a lot more difficult.
Fair comment, I think I agree. Clearly we’d need to identify the public programs that would be cut in order to fund a UBI. Unless the red tape overhead is much greater than the services themselves, I just do see how its possible to fund a UBI without convincing high income earners / companies to pay a lot more tax, which is not a new debate, and has been moving in the opposite direction in in at least some OECD countries. It seems necessary to consider the political environment, which I’ve found to be something UBI proponents don’t often discuss.
The starting point is to say that anyone earning more than the UBI pays UBI-equivalent in more tax- making it neutral to them- which leaves you only needing to cover the unemployed and very low earning.
Generally, since one way or another most systems are paying enough for those people to live anyway, a UBI at equivalent “livable” level doesn’t cost much more than you can get by scrapping whatever you were paying for those people to live.
The main potential needs for tax rises would be providing people who were previously eligible for but not using welfare money, any hit to employment that results (which, as under the current system, means higher taxes on the remaining to remain liquid if it’s a long term effect), and making the marginal tax rate at low levels of earning less steep.
@ JBeshir:
In other words, the highest welfare cliff imaginable.
Why the hell would anyone without huge earning potential work in that environment, if the basic income were enough to actually live decently on (which is supposed to be the point)?
If the government is pay you $20,000 a year for doing nothing, nobody is going to work for $20,500 a year. That’s 40 hours a week for $500 a year. You’d have to really not like leisure much even to work for $30,000 or $40,000 a year.
Any sensible welfare system has to be formulated where the benefits are a smooth curve that gradually decreases as you earn more. If the benefits went to zero at the point equal to the value of the benefits, either it’s a sharp cutoff or the gradual curve consists of making $10,000 a year and paying $10,000 a year in taxes, $15,000 a year and paying $15,000 in taxes: leaving you no better off with the basic income.
“The starting point is to say that anyone earning more than the UBI pays UBI-equivalent in more tax- making it neutral to them”
You are ignoring incentives, assuming that people’s incomes are frozen.
Consider a simplified case:
Before the $20,000 UBI, I was earning $40,000/year, paying a 20% flat tax of $8,000, keeping $.80 out of each dollar of additional income. With the UBI, by your approach, I pay a 70% flat tax, “making the UBI neutral” to me.
But now I keep only $.30 of each additional dollar, so the tradeoff between work and leisure shifts in favor of leisure and I earn less than $40,000—how much depending on my particular tastes and opportunities. So you have to raise the tax rate farther to raise the amount of money for the UBI. Which increases the incentive to earn less.
True to an extent, but you’re stacking the deck by assuming a $20K UBI and paying for the whole thing with new taxes – both of which go well beyond what anyone is suggesting here or what would be politically feasible in the real world any time soon.
For a $6K truly universal base income, two-thirds of which is paid for by cancelling existing safety-net programs (including EITC and Social Security) and the rest by a flat tax, and assuming half the population are taxpayers, I get a baseline 20% tax rate increasing to 30% in the UBI scenario, rather than your 70%. I believe the available evidence suggests that most people’s earning and investment behavior is relatively insensitive to tax rates in the 20-30% range, whereas you are correct that a 70% marginal tax rate would highly disincentivize productive activities.
The incentive problem is why I said “starting point”. In the basic tax neutral form I outlined, where UBI is replacing an effective floor provided by welfare systems, you would have a welfare cliff, same as the welfare system being replaced*. It would be no worse or better than that system was.
The point I wanted to make was that UBI isn’t any more impractically expensive than a welfare system. And it isn’t any more broken incentive-wise, either- it just entails merging the existing behaviour into the tax rate, which will then concisely represent the extent to which incentives already sucked.
What costs you is doing *better* than the existing system used to do, financial incentive wise. You need to increase taxes at the high end insofar as you want to lower them at the low end to do that. This is expensive, but the expense of improving incentives is no reason not to switch to a UBI and at least represent the crappy incentives you already have in a single tax rate rather than in lots of complicated rules all over the place.
What probably cripples the system incentive wise is not so much financial changes as that the welfare system used to have a mandate to seek work to remain in receipt of benefits, whereas the typical version of UBI does not. This might be fatal to any version of UBI which lacks this constraint.
* As Vox points out, more sensible welfare systems incorporate phase out of existing benefits as income rises already- this results in a high effective marginal tax rate, but not an absolute cliff. The UK’s new Universal Credit system, for example, has a taper of 65% (after an allowance below which it is 0%, just to complicate things).
When converting this to UBI, this is equivalent to the welfare floor scenario, but with you already having done the tax rises necessary in order to lower the 100% tax rate down to the taper, and move the switch back to normal taxation to the point where you’re sending back more than you’re getting. You would need further tax rises at the higher end to lower taxes at the low end further.
If you take most of federal social spending, including tax expenditures, you aren’t all that far off.
And you should be able make up the difference by increasing taxes on the rich and the middle class by approximately the UBI, because “We are going to raise your taxes by $6K/year, but we are also going to give you $6K/year in guaranteed free money” is economically neutral.
You should be able to do this, but in anything like the current political climate, the middle class is going to be very suspicious that you are trying to pull a fast one.
Although narrowing the base and increasing marginal rates is pretty much the opposite of good tax policy.
“You should be able to do this, but in anything like the current political climate, the middle class is going to be very suspicious that you are trying to pull a fast one.”
Because you are. As my previous comment pointed out, changing the tax structure to make it substantially more progressive affects incentives.
I’m curious about the wages = 50% of GDP then. What is the other 50% if not return on capital?
Wikipedia has a pretty easy table right upfront on its page about National Income and Product Accounts, breaking down the components of GDP.
May I point out that corporations are just 1 form of private company? I’m not 100% sure how much various personal enterprises and LLCs take up in the GDP, but it can’t be completely insignificant.
Reminder for everyone that wants to be (mostly) Anonymous: the Email anon@gmail.com is already being used by several people.
And so the Anonymous collective grows! (Posted such a PA downthread before reading the comments, now deleted.)
Jokes on you, you are all the same entity.
Yes. I am *happy* that you know this. *Light reflections* is not Anonymous, just *fingers*.
A marvelous reference, but one I wouldn’t expect many people to get. The above comment is written as the Orz speak in Star Control II; putting words or phrases in asterisks is how your translation software communicates “this sounds funny, but it’s the best translation I can come up with”.
(It’s strongly hinted that the Orz are 3D projections of a 4D, interdimensional cosmic horror.)
I hate this. I liked being able to tell the different “Anonymous” posters apart.
Now it’s like 4chan or something.
>Implying this wasn’t always 4chan
We’re being a bit more honest about it, that’s all.
It really isn’t 4chan.
It’s a lot like /tg/ or the other highbrow parts of the chans.
@Anon
Having spent quite some time on /sci/ and /tg/, it really isn’t like those parts of 4chan either.
There’s less porn spam, and shit doesn’t get done, but there is a lot of articulate debate about things that normal high-brow people find irrelevant/uninteresting/low-status.
R:32 / I: 1
Hello. I’m Chad and I’m writing a nov͋͗el about the highly unlikely possibility of an extraterrestrial attack on planet Earth. So what are your weaknesses, also in an event of invasion what would be your initial action ? I’m only asking because I’m writiͪ͌ng a novel. I’m Chad.
R:24
Is it pronounced oiler or you-ler?
R: 37
A friend and I had a discussion: who is better overall, Lagrange (her opinion) or Euler (my opinion) ?? Take everything they’ve ever done into account.
R: 38 / I: 3
Aspiring geologist here Is geology a meme science? Do you guys consider it a hard science like physics?
Is geology a meme science?
meme science?
EDIT: And these weren’t the dumbest threads, these were just the dumbest threads among the ten first threads.
>Geology
>Not a meme science
I bet you think data science isn’t a meme either.
Seriously, though, all communities have jargon, when I started reading this blog, all the talk abou fnords and castles and fields seemed pretty silly as well.
Always seems this way, doesn’t it? When you are an outsider, the insider jargon is silly. When you are an insider, the jargon is perfectly fine.
I’ve been on /tg/ and /sci/ for years and I still cannot stand half the jargon of those boards.
And it’s not “the jargon” that makes this place better than 4chan, it is 100% the fact that I am free from bad threads.
I am also not a fan of this development. What, really, is the upside to not only being anonymous in terms of people figuring out who you are irl, but in further preventing people from connecting one of your anonymous comments to any other?
It seems only to enable bad behavior (drive by snark), but I can’t think of much positive it enables to counterbalance it (I will admit, myself, to having, once or twice, posted anonymously something I was embarrassed to post even under my pseudonym, but I certainly don’t do it as regular practice and already can’t remember what it was or why I thought it was such a big deal; probably me taking myself and the value of my online persona too seriously).
Also, yeah, my brain kind of wants to collapse everyone with the same gravatar into one person.
I’m sorry that it’s so difficult for you to evaluate posts based on their content instead of the reputation of the person posting them
That’s not the point. The fact is that having different people with the same Gravatar in the current system makes it harder to follow conversation threads, especially since people insist on using variations of the name ‘Anonymous’.
Sorry, but it does actually matter when the comment does not contain a complete description of what kind of person the poster is and what he thinks about every subject.
If some random guy on 4chan says I should read a certain book and doesn’t explain why, I think, “Why do I care what you think I should read?”
If e.g. David Friedman says it, I care.
Or if someone has a whole spiel about how Israel is an apartheid state, and they explain why, and we have a whole back-and-forth, I probably don’t want to get into that again from square one the next time they say Israel is an apartheid state without realizing it’s the same person. If I want to talk about it again, I’d like to continue where we left off.
Edit: but null is correct that this isn’t even the point most of the time. Not having labels on who’s speaking is annoying. You have to figure out whether it’s really the same guy or not.
It’s like reading a book without enough “he said / she said” tags. You get halfway through the exchange and have to go back to the top counting the lines one at a time to figure out who said what.
And based on my experience just in this thread, it encourages rudeness.
Onyomi, as long as we’re judging manners, note that some might find the fifty (!) individual comments you made in the last thread (Rulink Class) to be indicative of another form of rudeness.
So posting a lot is inherently rude?
It’s undoubtedly narcissistic. Fifty out 1000 posts were yours at one point. Nearly all of them personal musings on the silly red-blue schemata.
Most of them were a debate on racism vs xenophobia in the context of the “birther” controversy, which by the way, was brought up by others. You make it sound like I’m using the SSC comment section as my own personal navel-gazing blog, but I don’t see how an extended back-and-forth with a few other commentors on a topic I didn’t even introduce constitute that. (Yes, I created the comment thread with a topical comment on the linked issue of “Trump anxiety,” but the “birther” controversy which ended up going on so long was introduced by others.)
But if other, non-anonymous users feel I’m abusing the SSC comment section in such a way, feel free to say so and I’ll try to cut back.
You are not abusing the SSC comment section.
Yeah, black and white anonymous is spamming way worse than you are.
Agreed,
Black and white square anonymous is currently sitting on 56 posts* out of 1,002 compared to Onyomi’s 35 so they’re really in no position to be accusing anyone else of spamming or narcissism here.
Edit:
That’s ignoring “Anonymous”s that have different gravatars and “Anon”s who have the same.
Man, that anonymous email really did escalate to full-on asshole rather quickly. This is one ban I won’t mourn.
@ Onyomi
No such thing! Your posts are short, neat, non-repetitive, non-hominem, non-bickering.
If there were to be a quota on posting, it should be on total wordcount per thread, with long posts costing more than short ones.
My suggestion was just an alternative to someone’s wish for pruning by random rejection of new posters. Whether any pruning is needed, except by the Ban Hammer, IDK.
Hey, I like my eulogies for the white working class written by sheltered libertarian academics!
What happened to “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism”? It seems to have been edited to remove all references to conworlding.
Yeah, I was using that post in Important Discourse enough that I removed the weird parts about my personal life.
FTR, I don’t think an interest on conworlding is a negative thing. Although it seems reasonable to assume I’m probably in a minority.
Are you still happy with everything else there, e.g. the statement that conservative Christians are icky?
Is it possible you could include/share/whatever a link to the original? I’m sure I could wayback it, but you probably have it somewhere already.
And no, there’s no particular reason. It’s just to indulge my memory-hole insecurities.
I’m curious as to how the utilitarians here feel about total vs average vs prior-existence utilitarianism, and how much of a problem it is that finding a satisfactory method of aggregating utility is difficult.
Ok, ok, hold on, there are enough people who don’t believe in the prior-existence restriction that a term for it, and the term “replacability”, had to be developed, so that these guys could actually expound a theory….
This is why utilitarianism has such a bad fucking name, guys.
Uh… most people would find “I know! We’ll just enslave every child born after today and put them to work for the benefit of people who are alive at this moment!” to be a morally objectionable stance. Prior existence is not obviously a good test.
As a rule, if you find yourself thinking “how could anyone be dumb enough to believe [novel-to-you philosophical stance]”, you should consider the possibility that you have missed or misunderstood some argument, not jump straight to mocking.
It’s a morally objectionable stance because their parents are alive right now and would care about their children.
So let’s enslave all children as soon as they are orphaned.
Or pay women lots of money to carry unwanted children to term and enslave them.
Or better yet, invent a drug that numbs people’s parental feelings. That would not only allow us to enslave the children, it would eliminate all the pain and suffering that existing conditions cause parents to suffer.
Once they’re orphaned it’s too late, they already exist. And you can’t precommit to enslaving them because before they’re orphaned they have parents.
There are numerous problems with the second plan, the most obvious being that slaves just aren’t worth all that much if you have to raise them yourself. You wouldn’t end up ahead after paying out lots of money to the mother.
Once they are born, they exist. But your argument on enslaving them turned on the concerns of their already existing parents, not on their having acquired existence. If not enslaving children not born yet turns on the existence of people currently in existence, so to must the argument against children not yet born or orphaned.
As for the payment, if the only problem is economic, you are stating there is no moral objection to it.
Someone must be born before they can be orphaned, so there is no point at which they have no parents but have not been born. If they are orphaned before being born they will never be born at at all.
There may be a need for some sort of reflective consistency criterion, as it does seem a little weird to precommit to the creation of slaves who, when they are born, you will predictably cry out to free. I’m not sure what that would look like. Maybe it’s not necessary? People have children for selfish reasons all the time.
For now, but there’s no reason to think we won’t ever figure out how to clone some deceased unknown soldier and grow the clones in artificial wombs.
Say you encounter the following choice. Option 1: everyone born from this moment on experiences excruciating torture for their entire life. Option 2: everyone born from this moment on experiences wondrous bliss for their entire life, and one person currently alive stubs their toe.
If you are going to protest that people currently alive would suffer from knowing about the pain of those who have to experience lifelong torture, grandfather it so that it only applies after the last person currently alive dies.
I think preferring option 1 over option 2 is indefensible.
People currently alive have preferences over the happiness of their children even if they won’t live to see that happiness fulfilled.
If people currently alive had preferences over the misery of their children even if they won’t live to see that misery fulfilled, would that make enslaving the children mandatory?
Like I say, I’m not a utilitarian so I don’t find anything particularly “mandatory”. But in that weird counterfactual where parents hate their children I think it would be pretty hard to convince them there was anything wrong with it. It seems wrong to you because you’re in the ordinary actual factual where parents love their children.
so you think that enslaving children is not actually wrong, I just think it’s wrong — then how can anything be a morally objectionable stance?
Of course nothing is actually wrong, come on! That’s like a fundamental tenet of utilitarianism, that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Give me a break.
@suntzuanime
All right then. In my Option 2, let’s say the people currently alive experience the same suffering as you expect the people in Option 1 would experience from knowing about the fate of their children. Everything else stays the same: all future people in Option 1 experience a lifetime of torture, all future people in Option 2 experience a lifetime of bliss plus one current person stubs their toe.
“That’s like a fundamental tenet of utilitarianism, that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Nonsense. The fundamental tenet of utilitarianism is the greatest good of the greatest number, which is obviously incompatible.
It is you who is nonsense, there’s nothing obviously incompatible about a definition of a word and the use of the word.
I suppose it’s technically possible to have a utilitarianism that counts conch shells collected as utility instead of any sort of measure of satisfaction of people’s wants, but that’s not utilitarianism as it actually exists as an intellectual movement.
This seems to be what we in the business call a “hack”. You basically got the right answer in this particular case by using the wrong set of general principles.
Or, rather, you got that it was immoral, but, because you are preceding from the wrong set of general principles, your estimation of the proposition’s magnitude of immorality would probably be low. This matters in real life (as much as any of it matters in real life) because often Bad Things must be traded against each other.
I’m not really qualified or interested enough to support this challenge on your moral reasoning, though. Sorry.
Side note: you’ve accidentally mistaken utilitarianism with moral anti-realism.
And I just realized I accidentally replicated the plot of Attack of the Clones.
You have not fixed your claim. “any sort of measure of satisfaction of people’s wants, ” does not thereby entail that all good and evil can be altered by your thinking differently. That would require to be able to change it from “satisfaction of people’s wants” to frustrating them if you changed how you thought.
Doesn’t prior existence mean that you’re supposed to care about all people who already exist at the moment of making any decision, but aren’t obligated to create more people with net-positive lives? What you described sounds like a complete straw man.
Your second paragraph. Practice what you preach.
It’s not just that you aren’t obligated to create new positive lives, but also that you are not forbidden from creating new net-negative lives. I believe mine is roughly the standard objection to prior existence (apart from time inconsistency); if you think it’s a strawman, I’m curious why.
On your second point, “prior existence is obviously correct” is not a novel-to-me philosophical stance, nor was I mocking it.
I guess I lean slightly toward total. Most of the decisions I make on primarily moral grounds are not of the sort where the problems with total apply, but I do recognize that total has problems. I lean toward utilitarianism because I tend to think the problems with other approaches are more severe and less likely to be solveable, not because I think utilitarianism has no unsolved problems.
I’m not a utilitarian, but I have published on that question.
“What Does Optimum Population Mean?” Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert.
I think maximizing average utility is indefensible for pretty straightforward reasons. Maximizing total utility leads to some counterintuitive results. I tried to construct a pareto-like criterion that would let you compare some alternative futures with different numbers of people in them, but not all.
Just read your paper. It’s a pretty neat solution to the issue.
For those who don’t have access to a library with it, here is my summary (hopefully not too far from your intended meaning) of the rule.
Lets say there are two worlds A, and B. World A has a population that is 1/2 that of world B. A genie goes to a typical (in terms of well-being) resident of world B, and offers the resident a game of Russian roulette. There is a 1/2 chance of losing, but if the resident wins he will become a resident of world A with typical utility. World A is better if the resident would be expected to accept the genie’s offer, if the resident would refuse the offer, then world B is better.
Isn’t this basically the revolutionary’s choice? Risk death for the chance to live in a preferable world?
In a practical sense, I suppose you could call war a crude form of electing futures by counting how many people are willing to die for their preferred future. Of course other factors apply, but if you consider proficiency at killing for your preferred future as a proxy for how well you’ve made decisions so far… well, that’s a dark line of thought.
“Right makes might.”
— Abraham Lincoln
Not quite right. If the resident would refuse the offer, we don’t yet know which is better.
The next step depends on the fact that people in each world vary. We ask is there is some mapping of people in world A onto specific people on world B, presumably the happiest ones, such that everyone in A is being mapped onto someone in B he would rather be. That leaves half the population of B with nobody mapped onto them. If those people all have non-negative utility, meaning that, given the opportunity for painless suicide, they would reject it, B is superior to A.
It’s only a partial ordering. And this is a simplified account, since my argument doesn’t depend on typical residents. The first step is mapping each person in B onto a lottery among roles in A which he prefers, where half the roles in A consist of nonexistence.
It isn’t equivalent to total utility. If total (V-N) utility in A is greater than in B, A is preferred, but if total utility in B is greater, B may or may not be preferred.
If we normalize “non-existence” to utility zero, and assume that the people in world B are risk-neutral, this seems the same as total utilitarianism (except that it is much harder to adapt this phrasing if world A is larger). But I should probably read the paper.
I’m not a utilitarian, but from an outsider’s perspective, the ones who aren’t prior-existence are totally deranged.
-Partly responding to a different comment, but it goes better here
I argue for the total-view. In people, not too dissociated from real life it leads to justified conclusions such as eliminating factory farming, leading to vaccine development, and countering climate change.
Including the examples that don’t involve people,I think a lot of these counter-intuitive results are due to biases resulting from typical evolutionary processes. A good example is the Grahams number of sand specks in the eye vs a lifetime of severe pain. The bias evolution gives is arguing for the former, but I believe a disassociated view argues for the latter. We are very pre-disposed to accept the former, since in most examples in life, that would be the “correct” cognitive view.
I think its a mistake to not consider that utility may be totally independent from human, or even *conscious* existence. Or even non-sentient beings. Or even worms! I believe that’s what usually alters precise thought on the subject. Utility may ultimately be as fundamental a force as the electric.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-lede-t.html
For all we know, the emotions we receive are simply unlocking that what happens when an electron splits, or a photon is displaced. And that appears to be a basic conclusion.
It gives…strange results. What if an extremely high energy gamma-ray burst contains more emotion then the entire human race, and the human fulfillment is to create an LHC devise.
The Sheogorath-“madness” idea is that just like the electric force, its perfectly balanced with positive and negative forces. I don’t believe that one is true, but its interesting.
We had a good discussion of aggregating utilities last year, in threads in which I advanced Bostrom’s infinitarian challenge to consequentialism. The relevant threads are here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/20/ot15-open-relationship/#comment-185623
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/12/ot16-avada-threadavra/#comment-189409
re: Prior Existence.
I strongly suspect that Prior-Existence is just a way to encode path-dependence. E.g. replacing Alice with Bob is a lot messier in meatspace than in Sim City. Meatspace entails all sorts of macabre ramifications (both physically and game-theoretically). I consider this question dissolved.
re: Total vs Average.
Both paradoxes sound undesireable. There must be a third option.
The Repungent Conclusion sounds less ridiculous when the model allows for negative utility. As Sister Y might argue, merely adding people to the world doesn’t necessarily raise total utility (this is why I lean pro-choice). On the other hand, [channels Hanson] if each soul gets to choose whether to enter the world, the future will reach an equilibrium where each additional person’s utility (as well as everyone else’s utility) is a mere epsilon above 0. This is undesirable.
I find Average Utilitarianism (though imperfect) more appealing. Because my intuition says quality trumps quantity. Still, I dunno how to reconcile this with the commensurately undesirable Utility Monster paradox. The objection clearly stems from a sense of egalitarianism.
In keeping with my Ethics is really just Economics theory, I’ve recently been wondering if we’ve been framing it wrong. “Egalitarianism” in the economic context is usually used to discuss the distribution of wealth. At the highest level, the debate mostly consists of Communism (planned economy) vs Capitalism (free market). If Communism represents “equal wealth” and Capitalism represents “equal opportunity”, then Utilitarianism-as-we-know-it is the equivalent to Communism in the sense that whether we pick Average or Total, the distribution of utility is predetermined by a Central Ethics Agency rather than determined by each individual’s will and resources to realize their goals.
(my comment is poorly formed and this reflects my ongoing confusion.)
Maybe so, but that isn’t total utilitarianism, as it doesn’t take into account the effect on the people who have to have an extra person put into their world. In maximizing total utility you would stop adding people when the marginal person takes away more utility than they add. I don’t see a reason to expect that point to lie when everyone’s utility is at zero or near-zero.
If there are a million people on some utility level, and adding one extra person reduces everyone’s utility, including that of the added person, to 99.999% of the previous level, that person has imposed a net utility cost approximately nine times greater than their own utility.
A major criticism of Total Utilitarianism is that of the Repungent Conclusion:
Barely worth living == near-zero utility per capita. My comment was contrasting the Least Convenient World of Total Utilitarianism with the Least Convenient World of Average Utilitarianism.
Which seems like a cute bit of propaganda, to rephrase your opposition’s position and get it referred to as “repugnant”. Even Searle only went so far as to call his room Chinese.
Derek Parfit is extremely sympathetic to utilitarianism. His “repugnant conclusion” (and the “absurd conclusion” is I think what he calls the companion issue) are problems he wants to find answers to, not slurs directed at his foes.
I’m not seeing the repugnancy. To me, the idea of a large enough number of barely happy people being more important than a single very happy person sounds entirely reasonable.
I would expect that the number of barely happy people that a population would have to contain, to be equally valuable as ten billion very happy people, would be many many times greater than ten billion. I also expect – and this is the point I tried to make above – that in such a scenario, the population size is well above the level which would maximize total utility. That is, you could remove some people and total utility would increase, as the marginal person is imposing a utility cost greater than their own utility.
If imagining that other people are happy is what makes me happy, and if other people are like me, then noteworthy unhappiness has a massive negative utility cost.
Even the possibility of noteworthy unhappiness has a massive cost. Non-deontological utilitarianism also has a massive cost.
If anything, I was expecting replies to the prior existence claim.
@protagoras
I too am sympathetic to utilitarianism and want to find solutions to it. I don’t think we disagree on anything. (I think there’s an aphorism about how the closest allies are often the harshest critics.)
@anon
So given a plot of Population vs Total Utility, you propose an n-shaped curve. This is also what I would expect. But the least convenient world I’m proposing doesn’t have an n-shaped curve, it has a monotonically- (and perhaps asymptotically-) increasing curve.
I find this less absurd than a universe containing a single, infinitely-happy denizen (though ideally I prefer a universe with a few infinitely-happy denizens over a universe with an infinite number of barely-happy denizens). But I still wouldn’t want to live in either universe. This leads me to believe that neither Average Utilitarianism nor Total Utilitarianism are perfect frameworks (even if we were to polish them with caveats).
But if you were to feel perfectly content in a universe full of a near-infinite number of barely-happy denizens, then maybe that’s just a difference in terminal values or preferences.
If find all this talk about “patching utilitarianism” weird.
If your reason for rejecting a certain form of utilitarianism is “I don’t like that kind of world; it doesn’t appeal to me”, then you’ve already got your guiding ethical theory: subjectivism, the good is whatever I think it is, or whatever appeals to me at a given time.
So now you’re just trying to figure out what exactly appeals to you. But maybe there’s no way to make all your vague feelings cohere into a single ethical theory. Maybe what appeals to you today won’t appeal to you tomorrow.
To frame this as a discussion about which form of utilitarianism is true seems kind of silly.
Teach me how to consequentialism.
p.s. in case I was unclear, my objection is “I don’t like what this form of utilitarianism suggests I should optimize for in hypothetical edge-case x”.
This applies to ethics in general. So idk why you say this as if it were relevant to utilitarianism specifically.
I don’t frame it this way. I think of it more as an episode of Dexter’s Lab. Half of ethics consists of playing scientist, in attempting to suss out patterns in our intuitions. The other half of ethics consists of playing engineer, in trying to build a coherent ethical framework which generalizes to societies larger than Dunbar’s Number.
My Metaethics says Normative Ethics is analogous to Civil Engineering. Does this indict me such that my utilitarian license will be revoked?
@ FullMeta_Rationalist:
It’s relevant to ethics in general, of course. I bring in utilitarianism because that’s what you happen to be talking about.
It seems to me like your metaethics says normative ethics is more analogous to what color you’re going to paint the bridge, not to civil-engineering questions of whether it’s going to stay up or not. Whether the bridge is going to stay up or not has an objective answer, independently of what anyone thinks about whether it’s going to stay up.
But the argument you’re having is: “What kind of bridge appeals to me more, a red one or a yellow one?”
The test of an ethical theory is “whether everyone likes it” (think TDT and archipelagos) and “whether society implodes” when we implement the algorithm irl. I predict that choosing whether to optimize for Total vs Average utility has a real impact on how society might operate (even before we evaluate the algorithm in the limit) and therefore has a real impact on the theory’s robustness in the field. So naturally, I feel this question is of a higher order than determining the color of the bikeshed.
Re: my comment “then maybe that’s just a difference in terminal values or preferences” and your comment “But maybe there’s no way to make all your vague feelings cohere into a single ethical theory”.
And furthermore, maybe there’s no way to make everyone’s vague feelings cohere into a single ethical theory. And maybe a single bridge can’t simultaneously satisfy everyone’s preferences anymore than a democracy can.
Suppose we build a bridge and it’s sturdy enough for most usecases, but it’s too small to support tractor-trailers over a certain weight. FMR Shipping Co is very unhappy about this. Does the bridge represent a failed construction project? Is the answer to the question objective? Is the question analogous to deciding whether to color the bridge yellow or blue?
@ FullMeta_Rationalist:
It’s a failure from their perspective. And it’s certainly not a question of civil engineering. Under your premises, it’s like the question of yellow vs. blue in that some people want it one way, others want it another way. There may be more of one than other, but that’s hardly relevant to the question of who’s right.
Let me put things in a simpler and better way. Utilitaranism says that the good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Subjectivism says the good is whatever a given person thinks it is. If some people don’t think the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the good, then these two positions conflict.
In that case, fine; it’s bikeshedding. But I was never trying to answer the question of “who’s objectively right” so much as “what’s optimal given a set of x mathematical-constraints and set of y business-tradeoffs”. I think assuming that “there exists a treasuremap which leads to THE GOOD and we just have to search Platonic Heaven to find the map” is the wrong way to go about ethics.
I’m pretty sure THE GOOD is just a variable for whatever we optimize for or whatever aligns with our terminal values. The Greeks got it backwards in thinking THE GOOD was static and objective. I hear the Greeks also thought that vision radiated outward from our eyeballs.
On the meta level, I’m a subjectivist in that I descriptively model others as having arbitrary terminal values. I take this as self-evident. On the
object levelnormative level, I’m a preference utilitarian because I predict that preference utilitarianism will lead to lots of people being able to satisfy their terminal values. I acknowledge that this up for debate.But I’m hesitant to say “morality is subjective” for the same reason a civil engineer might hesitate to say “engineering is subjective” to a shaman. Because my model of ethics is more nuanced than “morality is subjective, yay or nay”. Answering “yay” would very likely give the wrong impression.
Preferences are subjective, but that doesn’t make the legalization of murder a good idea to implement. I see no inconsistency in this model.
@ FullMeta_Rationalist:
Fair enough for most of what you say, but I take issue with this:
No. Preference utilitarianism doesn’t, of itself, “lead to” people being able to satisfy their terminal values. Preference utilitarianism isn’t a policy position. It’s a position about the proper evaluative standard.
Preference utilitarianism says “whether the greatest number of people can satisfy their terminal values ought to be our standard of right and wrong”. Saying you think it ought to be the standard of right and wrong because it will lead to the greatest number of people being able to satisfy their terminal values is just circular.
It’s like saying: “I support paperclipism because it will lead to maximum paperclips.” I’m sure it will, but questioning whether paperclipism is good is just another way of questioning whether maximum paperclips is really good.
It’s a bad idea from your perspective. It’s a good idea from the perspective of the guy who wants the maximum quantity of murders.
***
Maybe a better way of expressing my point in that second part:
a) Paperclipism: the moral theory that goodness is whatever promotes maximum paperclips.
b) I desire maximum paperclips.
These are two separate things. Maybe paperclips are good, but you don’t desire them. Maybe you don’t desire them, but they’re good.
And, strictly speaking, the theory of paperclipism doesn’t “lead to” more paperclips. Maybe you spread the Good News of Paperclips, and it leads to people resenting your preaching and moving to staples altogether.
Idk man. “proper evaluative standard” sounds an awful lot like policy to me. Implementing a policy necessarily involves the evaluation of a decision tree in order steer one’s decisions towards the ideals of said policy. Are you sure you’re not bifurcating?
What I’m trying to say is more analogous to “I support democracy because I predict we can build a successful society around democracy”. Where “successful” is defined as “compatible with my preferences” and “preferences” are defined as a subjective, spooky, psychological thing that science doesn’t fully understand yet. My particular preferences include a term for other people satisfying their preferences as well as my own, which is why I like democracy and not dictatorships (though if dictatorships were shown to more closely align with my preferences and not collapse into anarchy, I might choose that instead). No turtles, I promise.
Voltaire may disagree with what you say, but he’ll fight for your right to say it. Ron Paul dislikes the idea of smoking pot, but he would prefer to live in a world where pot is legalized. I don’t like murder, and I think it’s a bad idea policy wise. Do you see the difference between a personal preference and a group policy?
The reason I say murder is a bad idea policy-wise is because the value of the policy is not only contingent whether people prefer it, but also contingent on whether one can build a successful society around it. If you were playing the Sims, could you build a successful society around legal murder? Similarly, could a civil engineer build castle out of sand? Is a castle made of steel not objectively superior along nearly every architectural metric, ceteris paribus? (By the way, let me know how building a society around the tiling of paperclips goes. There must be some kind of Civ mod for that. Rule 34.)
I honestly don’t think murder is “objectively wrong” in any cosmic sense. The cosmos don’t give a shit about us. Morality was made for man, not man for morality. Similarly, a bridge isn’t “objectively wrong” in any cosmic sense. That’s very different from saying “this bridge component will buckle under minimal load, and therefore the design is weak in comparison to other possible designs”.
I’m not a utilitarian, but total utilitarianism seems the least correct of those. Utility is supposed to be a quantification of well-being, and in total utilitarianism there’s a decoupling between the two, so it loses sight of the motivation behind utilitarianism of making people as well-off as possible. But average utilitarianism has problems too, such as ranking a world consisting of one person suffering greatly as worse than a world of a million people suffering mild discomfort, and also it allows for the killing of people with (sufficiently) below-average utility. Some kind of hybrid of average and prior-existence utilitarianism seems most plausible.
Average Utilitarianism does not necessarily imply killing people who have low utility, as long as we include past people in the population – you will not increase the average utility by killing them unless by killing them you prevent their utility from being even lower that it would otherwise be (and even total utilitarianism recommends killing people in that case; this is still problematic, but it’s a general problem for utilitarianism). Unfortunately, this is not much help for average utilitarianism, because it has even worse implications: it implies that if the world contains one person suffering a billion units of torture before dying, we ought, if we have the option, create another person suffering a billion-minus-one units of torture before dying.
I think prior-existence utilitiarianism is closest to the True Path, but it’s not there yet. (And I’m pleased to see there’s a name for it.)
Total utilitarianism could lead to creating people until they’re all miserable; average utilitarianism could lead to killing off the least happy people until there’s nobody left. As people downthread have observed, prior-existence utilitarianism could lead to precommitting all future offspring to be slaves. So clearly we need to keep working on utility-aggregation functions until we find something that doesn’t have these problems.
(There’s a counterargument in the Consequentialism FAQ, part 7.3: “Do you want to live in a society where these problems happen? No? Probably other people don’t either. So utilitarianism will aggregate your preferences and avoid doing that.” That’s a nice theory but I’m not sure how far I trust it.)
I think part of the problem is that we don’t have good baselines for the utility of not existing. Total utilitarianism assumes that people who don’t exist yet have a utility of zero (and then calibrates the rest of its scale so that most people’s utility is positive). Average utilitarianism assumes that people who get killed have a utility we don’t need to care about because it’s unmeasureable.
I wonder if we could “patch” utilitarianism by assigning some artificial values to those events. For example, for purposes of average utilitarianism, we could assume that people who get killed have negative utility (equal to whatever utility they would have experienced throughout their potential lifespan, had they not been killed).
I’m pretty sure that if you combine total utilitarianism with the procreation asymmetry (or, rather, the principles that create the the procreational asymmetry), you get the right answer.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe this unambiguously. Probably someone already has, but I don’t really enjoy reading philosophy papers.
Also this introduces a lot of complexity into your equations because you have to acknowledge things like Time and Causation. A shame, really; you’d like to just integrate over the curve of happiness in the universe (as if that were easy!).
To my knowledge, nobody has given a satisfactory account of the principles underlying the procreation asymmetry, and I see no reason in advance to think that there’s a natural way to ‘combine’ those principles with total utilitarianism (or utilitarianism of any form, for that matter).
The objections to all three views strike me as pretty devastating, and the problem seems to me like a serious one, both in raising doubts about utilitarianism as the right approach to morality and because those views substantially differ in their prescriptions.
For what it’s worth (I’m not a utilitarian), some version of the prior existence view seems the best candidate to me, but only because the (very serious) problems it faces are shared by most plausible non-utilitarian views as well.
I identify as a consequentialist, hard leaning toward utilitarianism.
I find prior existence utilitarianism unsatisfactory because it insufficiently addresses negative outcomes of future persons and actively encourages behavior such as “borrowing against the future”. Examples include climate change and natural resource depletion/ruination.
As for average and total, it gets dicier. Of course I’d like to have choices that are between only increasing both average and total, or not. The implications of maximizing average against total or maximizing total against average are certainly repugnant conclusions.
I really honestly don’t know. It seems that every combination, modification, or augmentation I imagine leads to possible unsatisfactory outcomes. It seems that having an individual utility floor (guaranteed basic utility) would *help*, but the range of possible outcomes is still unsatisfactory.
Hm. This thinking smells of consumer surplus, GDP, average income, and guaranteed basic income. There may be some interesting econ models for me to investigate…
About sea-lioning: I follow a certain war correspondent on Twitter, and yesterday he mentioned he was annoyed and would quit his account for a while. I checked his mentions, and apparently some woman had asked him something along the lines of ‘don’t you ever feel bad making money from war?’, to which he responded ‘Sorry, that’s not a conversation I’m interested in.’ And the Very Moral floodgates opened.
Now, to some people it is perfectly legitimate to keep asking him questions. He didn’t answer after all, and he’s a public person, and it’s an important subject.
But, on the other hand, those people are assholes and they need to shut up.
That’s why I disagree with the two linked comments. Yes, it’s fine to ask for more information, but if the other person says ‘I don’t want to engage’, then leave them alone. And especially don’t go on your anti-war-correspondent-forum and ask them to join in.
that isn’t sealioning though
sealioning, as conceived, is someone saying “I hate __________s “, and _________s saying “we think we are okay people and don’t deserve to be hated”.
what you are talking about is a different thing, which is not sealioning, but which certainly does suck and is stupid
The original definition (in the form of a comic) involved the sea lion following someone around (in their home as well as in public places) and demanding an explanation.
And was dumb strawman bullshit written by an idiot and broadcast by more idiots.
(Um, not intended as an attack on you, Nita.)
How can the original source be a strawman? And anyway, it seems to completely apply in this case.
What? The original comic is talking about a situation which is a clear strawman.
Sometimes people use exaggeration for the sake of humor, especially in comics. For a better explanation of sealioning: http://simplikation.com/why-sealioning-is-bad
An exaggeration without which the point being put forward would be almost entirely diminished.
Or, to put it another way, a massive strawman.
I don’t mind most naces. But riggers? I could do without riggers.
I’m getting a fascinating picture of someone burdened by rowing boats that are just too … sexy.
“Nace” has a variable and regional definition, but that’s definitely the most amusing.
In the original comic, I didn’t think the sealion was being unreasonable. Following them home was extreme, but since the person didn’t want to explain or justify why they had a prejudice against sealions, what could it do?
(a) Give up and allow nasty remarks about sealions to pass unchallenged – not great
(b) Make a nuisance of themselves by continuing to harp on about it – not great either
I don’t think the person being “sealionned” was any more in the right than the sealion who moved from “reasonable query” to “stalker nuisance”, and the way the comic was written made it seem like the “excuse me, what do you have against sealions?” was being a nuisance and unreasonable and persecuting, even before it got to the popping up everywhere and following them home.
> (a) Give up and allow nasty remarks about sealions to pass unchallenged – not great
It’s the only sensible response. Other people are free to dislike you (or anyone else), and to state that dislike to their friends in casual conversation out-of-doors.
“In the original comic, I didn’t think the sealion was being unreasonable.”
Ah, a sealion etiquette question! Now, that, I can discuss!
I think it’s out of line to enter someone’s home and ask questions while they are trying to sleep. (Alternately, if the sealion is an invited guest, it’s somewhat rude).
More generally, after a few evasions, I think the sealioning is basically harassment. Maybe the anti-sealion person has it coming for being such a bigot, but at a certain point, it’s not an investagory technique.
Which is where the analogy breaks, because the people complaining about sealioning were stating their dislike in a public square. And complaining about responses in that same space (i.e. no one followed them home). Basically they want the wide audience Twitter gives them, but they don’t want the audience to be able to respond. Which is fundamentally, not the way Twitter works.
@ Deiseach
In the original comic, I didn’t think the sealion was being unreasonable.
I was on the comic-sealion’s side. First the comic-woman was thoughtlessly rude; then she was deliberately and repeatedly rude.
The comic-woman made a thoughtless remark in a public place, and the Sealion ‘called her out’ on it in a very polite, reasonable way. Instead of replying “I apologize, I shouldn’t have said that here; I’ll withdraw the remark” (or even, “Er, sorry!”) — she deliberately did something rude: ignored him.
If she had ever said anywhere in the sequence, “I’m sorry, but please let’s not go deeper into it” and the Sealion had ignored HER request, then he would be out of line, imo. Except that since it’s all really online, he could say, “Well, here are links to some evidence if you or any lurkers ever get interested” — as he walked away.
@houseboatonstyx
When in public, ignoring a stranger who is trying to engage in conversation with you is generally an effective way of communicating to them that you aren’t interested in having a conversation with them. I’m not sure that a verbal refusal to have a conversation needs to be used when a nonverbal one conveys the same meaning.
But all of this seems beside the point, given that the character in the comic actually does say “Go away.” So I don’t see a case to be made that she wasn’t clear about what she wanted.
Now, she didn’t apologize, but even if we agree that an apology was owed, I don’t think that being owed an apology by someone grants a right to follow that person around asking for it. If I’m in public, and I overhear someone insulting me, I might be within the bounds of social etiquette if I inject myself into their conversation and ask for an apology. But I would have far exceeded those bounds, and then some, if I followed them from place to place insisting upon one. I think this is true regardless of how grave the insult was and how polite and well-founded my admonitions are.
The point of the comic is not that the woman is not rude, but that even granting her rudeness the sea lion is in the wrong. It takes a position in favor of the social norm that no matter how wrong someone is, and how angry that makes you, sometimes the only appropriate recourse is to leave them be because they want to be let be.
There are certainly at least some people in the world who dislike me, and probably an even greater number who have said something negative about me (much less something negative about a group I belong to). But even so, I think that social norm is a good thing. I don’t think that others’ dislike of me is an impossible thing to live with, even if I occasionally encounter evidence of that dislike. I’d much rather be denied the opportunity to correct some false beliefs about me (or receive some apologies) than have to worry about being relentlessly pursued every time I hold a belief about someone else that they think is false.
(How this norm should be applied to situations that differ from the comic in important respects is a more difficult question. But insofar as we are discussing the situation in the comic itself, I feel confident saying that the sea lion is well out of line.)
@ Deiseach
Considering how rude she has been all along, I’d consider this justified.
They’re both out of line, perhaps different lines. ‘Calling someone out’ is rude per se; I just give him a lot of points for formal polite manner, and for allowing the comic-woman a chance to speak for her side (seldom seen with real SJW ‘call-outs’).
Another thing that’s uncool and (unjustly imo) annoying, is shifting a conversation from high gear superficial to grinding low gear ‘have to really think about it’ or maybe — horrors! — have to look something up! That’s regardless of content, and applies even if the shifter is part of the party and someone has asked his opinion.
Trouble with the original “definition” – for a definition, it was very vague. The author may indeed have issued some clarifications later but by then “sealioning” was already a thing – also, I think people more often refer to the cartoon than to the clarifications.
The trouble, I think, with that sort of thing is that the clarifications can contain a quite narrow concept, which isn’t too hard to defend, and the people using the term “sealioning” to criticise people can use a broad concept which is widely applicable, and hard to defend against (are we still allowed to mention early medieval castles here?[1]). The vagueness means that people can do this without feeling they’re doing something dishonest and indeed may end up feeling agrieved when being accused of such dishonesty.
[1] Similar complaints could of course be aimed at the medieval castle metaphor too, and I think have been.
The author meant for sealions to refer to Gamergaters. The idea is that if Gamergate is accused of harassment, you are acting like the sealion if you then insist on asking for proof of the harassment (and that asking for proof of harassment publicly is the equivalent of barging into someone’s living room.)
Saying “if you’re accused of harassment, suck it up” is a flawed idea; any comic strip trying to depict it is going to have readers who notice how flawed it is and realize that maybe if you don’t want sealions asking you questions you should stop accusing sealions of things.
Notice how vague the author’s “clarification” is about what sealions are actually supposed to stand for. People with behaviors, yeah. Which people with which behaviors? This is not an author depicting a reasonable concept vaguely and having people use it in unreasonable ways contrary to what he meant. This is an author depicting an unreasonable concept vaguely, and the people who use it in unreasonable ways are doing exactly what he meant.
The author clarified the meaning of the sealion comic: he meant the sealion to be a stand in for people displaying behaviors, rather than demographic groups:
Is this guy always this wordy?
Sometimes you have to talk like a lawyer to make sure no one misunderstands you.
In my experience, talking like a lawyer usually means more people misunderstand you.
And remarkably, all those words just obfuscate. What are “certain behaviors?”
If nothing else, it’s a clear demonstration that the left is just as good at “dog whistles” as the right.
OK, I think I get it now.
1) The Wondermark author is saying that the sealion is an, um, ethics in online recreation advocate, and that the sealion bothering people in their houses is offensive, just like it is when one of these fellows engages with an opponent on twitter. Is that right?
1.1) @Scott – sorry if I got that wrong – I’ve seen some references to a term being barred, but I can’t find it in the commenting guidelines, and since it’s barred, I’m not sure exactly what’s barred or what the limits are.
2) The Wondermark guy’s note is hilariously obtuse. I particularly like his patronizing lecture that people who read his comic “as written” are mistaken, because frequently “in satire such as this, elements are employed to stand in for other, different objects or concepts.”
Yes, dude, the people who are mistaking your intent believe that people prejudiced against sea lions are stand ins for other, different objects or concepts, such as people prejudiced against other people.
(And frankly, I wouldn’t think much better of the couple if they had said “vegetarians are the worst” or “people with tattoos are the worst,” even though those are “certain behaviors” that the subjects chose to engage in.)
I think reproductively viable worker ants is the in-group term, although I haven’t seen it written for a while.
Here’s why
I not sure, but I think the comic was written to describe a Twitter behaviour in general, and got popular off the back of the ethics in online recreation. As far as I know the author wasn’t involved with that at all.
I think what happened was that the author wrote the comic knowing that his regular audience would read it to mean what he intended to describe (i.e., that a certain kind of repeated insistence that you defend a political point is annoying). Then the comic became widely known because of the ethics thing and was read by a large group of people who couldn’t reliably judge its intended meaning. Furthermore, a good proportion of those new readers had a good incentive to read it uncharitably, since it was being used as a weapon against them by their ideological opponents. Although one plausible reading of the comic is “calling out bigoted people’s opinions is wrong, and people that call people out are the worst”, that’s clearly not the reading intended by the author.
Probably a lot of the problem stems from this overexposure of the comic and its use as a weapon. Instead of being a joke for a known audience that loosely describes a common undefined but identifiable phenomenon, now people demand that its meaning is made precise and misinterpret it as a prescriptive rule for online behaviour.
I don’t agree. The couple’s opinion doesn’t have to be a ‘good’ one for the sealion’s subsequent behaviour to still be annoying. Both parties can be in the wrong.
The ant term is not banned, but usually voluntarily censored in various ways. I believe the reason is to avoid drawing in people tracking the term by search engine.
Discussion of the term which is actually banned can be found by searching for “traction fairies” (no quotes) in these comments.
@tkmh – thanks, that’s very well explained and would explain a lot.
(And if I may say so, you have a gift for writing clearly notwithstanding the various levels of obfuscation in this discussion – your post was really fun to read).
And I agree – IMHO, the sea lion’s first question is reasonable, and after that, he’s progressively more in the wrong. (I’d adjust the slope based on how offensive the couple’s comments were by a broad community standard. IMHO, “I could do without vegetarians deserves a little more call out than “I could do without child molesters”, but after the first question, the sea lion is basically calling out rather than engaging in discourse.
The couple is probably in the wrong with the first comment (depending on whether sea lions are actually reprehensible), and I would say courtesy normally suggests some kind of response to the first question, but at a certain point, I agree they’re reasonable in requesting that the sea lion lay off.
The things done by the sealion in the comic get objectionable, and the people in the comic are in the right to ask the sealion to lay off, but the comic is a metaphor for something that actually happened, and what actually happened doesn’t compare very well to what the sealion did in the story.
The original sea-lioning: https://youtu.be/Uwk6r8TJD2U
(probably NSFW)
I think the difference is as far as I know he’s not starting any debates himself by attacking people.
I feel like if you go up to random people and demand to know what they’re doing about prejudice against Bulgarians, you’re being annoying. But if I say “I hate Bulgarians”, and then people try to argue with you about how prejudice against Bulgarians is wrong, well, you kind of walked into that one.
Starting to think nobody has the slightest idea what sea-lioning is. This is as bad as when people talk about “Mary Sue”
Their belief that they have the right to say something abhorrent about Bulgarians in public without recourse from Bulgarians should tell you everything you need to know.
“Sea-lioning” is therefore best described as “the process by which awful people pretend they have the right to restrict other people’s right of reply in public places”.
THAT definition does not appear to have an obvious counter, at least to me… but then I am hardly unbiased in this particular horse race.
I’m using the term in the sense the blog post used it, not the implication from the comic of being against certain groups (which was not intended according to http://wondermark.com/2014-errata/
Good Lord. That may be the most smug thing I’ve ever read. How can that guy read his own writing without wanting to punch himself?
It’s arguably less smug than his douchebag hipster comic, so there’s that.
Well, he needs one hand to type it, and the other hand is…occupied.
The author may not have intended for the term to be used against certain groups, but if someone claims that people with [immutable characteristic] are disproportionately likely to “display certain behaviors,” then what’s to prevent the unintended usage?
Okay. So the woman in the strip says “God I hate smokers”.
Person who is standing outside the pub smoking says “Hey, why say that?”
Instead of “I don’t mean you” or “I think smoking is unhealthy” or “My ex was a smoker and spending time with him meant my clothes smelled like an ashtray”, she just says “ZOMG, so unreasonable!”
Now, following her home etc. is unreasonable, nobody disagrees with that. But she does not explain her reasons and still have the smoker/sealion badgering her for “Excuse me, why why why”, she just gives a flat refusal to even consider what she said.
I think if you give a reason for what you said, and the other person still willfully continues “why why why” then you are entitled to say “this is going nowhere, I’m not responding”.
But refusing any kind of an answer is sulking. If you really think the question is stupid, then say so straight off. “I don’t have to talk to you and I’m shutting this down!” is saying you recognise you made a dumb remark with nothing to back it up and you are too bull-headed to apologise (and I’m prone to that myself, so I can’t throw stones).
Well, even refusing to give an answer is fine – IMHO, what makes her wrong is that she resents the sea lion for even asking.
If I’m at Starbucks (or on twitter) and I say “joggers are the worst,” and someone politely engages me, I don’t think it’s reasonable to resent them.
Okay, for the benefit of those of us (just me?) who never heard of sea-lioning before this thread, is this an accurate-ish description:
Criticize or insult person or group in a public forum. Then act annoyed when person or group member has the audacity to come on your [blog, twitter, youtube channel] to defend themselves?
That’s one perspective. Another definition would be “constantly hounding, beyond what’s reasonable and proportionate, a person for an offhand remark”.
There is some truth to this second definition, sometimes it is much saner to live and let live. However, the problem is that the people who actually use the term “sealioning” unironically cannot accept this second one, because it’s been a trademark SJ tactic (although frequently not as polite) for as long as forever. So you have to make some sort of mental contortion to say “OK, this that you’re doing right now is super obnoxious, but it was totally OK when we were doing it”.
No, but you see, when they do it it’s activism.
[/sarcasm]
The thing is that, hypocritical as it might be, the point still stands. It’s important to be able to let go, and just not mind people saying dumb things.
“Who, whom?” has been a guiding principle of (certain) Leftists for a long time.
“Criticize or insult person or group in a public forum”
Not as described in the blog post, nor intended by the comic.
The definition I’m working from is more like
“make claim, others ask questions that show a lack of basic research, you refuse to engage”.
Claim doesn’t need to be attacking anyone.
Also, the sealioner isn’t “defending themself”, they’re only asking questions and nitpicking. Someone bringing actual arguments is different.
“other’s ask questions that show a lack of basic research…”
I don’t see how it’s possible to read this from the comic. The sealion is responding to someone saying they don’t like sealions, not someone making an argument. How are you supposed to do basic research into that?
@pete: I’ve been using the meaning in the blog post, not the comic, which isn’t as clear. They tried to clarify in http://wondermark.com/2014-errata/
OK that’s somewhat more understandable. On the other hand, it means that the original comic sucks. Comics and cartoons are a great way to convey an idea in a very small amount of space, but I didn’t get that idea at all from the comic.
In fact, the first time I read the comic I was confused because the sea-lion appeared to be calling out a racist, yet the people linking it approvingly and using the term sea-lioning tend be be vehemently anti-racist and be strongly in favor of calling them out.
Well, bearing in mind that their “calling out” behaviour is exactly the same as that exhibited by the sealion the comic, one can assume that their approval is not actually based on the depicted scenario but is instead based upon their (correct) assumption that the comic’s author is On Their Side.
Fairly accurate, for anyone who has the same lack of respect for social boundaries and poor emotional self-regulation as a sealion.
I had never heard of it before today, and don’t use Twitter, so you’re not the only one. That description sounds basically accurate, from my limited understanding of the issue.
Though I would say that responding to a negative comment about you/your group on Twitter (when Twitter was the platform a person used to make the original negative comment) is different than following them from Twitter (or whatever public original platform they made the comment on) to their personal blog elsewhere on the internet. Blogs are more personal and private than Twitter (at least IMO), and blog runners usually have the latitude to decide who gets to post comments on their blog.
I think it’s more reasonable to negatively react to someone following you* around to various sites on the internet (especially if it’s to your personal blog) than for you to react negatively to someone responding to a public tweet you made on a public website that you do not own or run in any way. The blog scenario seems kiiiind of defensible to me, while the whole “getting mad that someone tweeted a response to my tweet insulting their group” thing doesn’t.
*Generic you
If I understand correctly, the meme originated, or at least become popular, in the context of GamerGate.
Something like:
SJW: “Gobblegabbers are all white creepy racist virgin neckberd misogynerds who harass women.”
GGer: “Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about #notyourshield?”
SJW: “Go away from my Twitter, sea lion! This is my safe space! Somebody call the UN, I am being cyber-raped!”
This is the reason why GGers use the sea lion in their imagery as a form of reappropriation.
Of course, the comic is vague enough that it could be used to justify the KKK talking shit about black people without being called out.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Not only did it trigger every single failure mode of internet discourse, it revealed a few new ones we didn’t know existed.
I think it’s the other way round – follow someone around for saying something you don’t like to a greater extent than is reasonable. Challenging the original statement is reasonable, commenting on every blog post they ever make with “Why do you hate [x]?” is not.
A Mary Sue is a character that shows a set of character traits that normally implies concern with using the character for wish-fulfillment over other concerns such as plot and characterization.
Note that much of the difficulty in defining it is because it’s hard to define anything. The classic example is how to define “chair” while including everything from beanbag chairs to chairs used in art projects yet excluding other things. If you want to cover everything with an explicit definition you’ll need clauses to handle weird subcases (“is intended for sitting on, or is used in a context where objects similar to it are implied to be intended for sitting on”, to handle the chair used in the art project).
If you don’t count something as hard to define just because the definition allows nitpicking of noncentral cases, “Mary Sue” isn’t hard to define.
“A Mary Sue is a character that shows a set of character traits that normally implies concern with using the character for wish-fulfillment over other concerns such as plot and characterization.”
the author’s wish-fulfillment at that.
At witness that the classic originals (in Star Trek fanfic) often had the same name as their authors.
The problem being that if the reader can get into the character as a wish-fulfillment for them, it’s arguably not a Mary Sue — but different readers appreciate different characters.
That’s why I said “over other concerns such as plot and characterization”.
Nah, some wish-fulfillment stories manage to triumph over putting wish-fulfillment over other concerns such as plot and characterization.
The comic artist’s mistake in illustrating their point through that comment was to pick a contention in which the sea lion had skin in the game — its identity group was directly targeted by the comment, which, in a certain reading, awards it sympathy points from the audience. Very often that’s not the case in real contexts. It’s more usually a case of “someone wrong on the internet”.
The tactic is in fact very easy to define, it’s certainly not the case that nobody knows what it is. What the authors call “sea-lioning” is the disingenuous demand for more involvement in the debate, in a rhetorically disadvantageous defensive position, as punishment for disagreement (because it’s frustrating and a time sink, and the sea lion isn’t looking to get convinced no matter how patiently you treat this). In the OP, you presented it as the Bulgarian in the example volunteering facts and evidence. It’s a big distinction. Taking the time to come to the debate with your homework done is evidence against engaging in sealioning.
“Starting to think nobody has the slightest idea what sea-lioning is.”
But the particular reason for that is interesting — that comic seems to be like an ethical variant on the striped dress photo: people divide about evenly on the impression of whether the human or the sea lion is at fault.
I get the impression that most people agree that the sea lion is intended to be at fault, but many people think it is actually being more reasonable than the author gives it credit for.
I thought it meant something like “the online behavior where people keep trying to get answers from/make points to a person that (indirectly) started a conversation they are no longer interested in”. It can be one question or, more commonly, a Gish gallop.
But would the reporter take “no” for an answer if he asked a subject a question and they went “Sorry not a conversation I’m interested in” and then took their ball and went home?
Someone who makes a living asking awkward questions and ferreting out answers should be prepared for the shoe being on the other foot. Even “No, I don’t make money off war” is better than “Not talking about this, la la la la”.
It seems to me that many public figures don’t understand how Twitter works. They tend to use it as some sort of top-down press release system, and then they act shocked when people interact with them in a way they didn’t foresee: “OMG why are these lowly peasants responding to me? Make them go away!!11!”
I am reminded of “Ask Me Anythings” on Reddit and how many people arrive ignorant of how the process works and how badly it winds up going. The end result is that AMAs done by famous people or people with a PR flack machine go hilariously badly. Most notably people go in expecting to answer a list of scripted softball questions.
That experience you talk about sounds horrible. The war correspondent’s actions seem totally justified. But I don’t think what the woman was doing fully maps to what people accused of sealioning are doing. There’s an argument going on below about this, so I’m going to try to explain what I meant when I made one of the comments Scott linked to.
I chose this username for reddit (and now here) a little while back, and I was inspired by an idea Roderick Long, a libertarian philosopher at Auburn, expressed in a talk about contentious terms like capitalism, socialism, right, left, etc. He used the example of a made-up word: zaxlebax, defined as “a metallic sphere like the Washington Monument.” His point in creating a definition that absurd and self-contradictory was to explain that many contentious terms contain assumptions within their very definitions (here, he’s talking about terms being defined by standard usage, as in a dictionary). He chose an assumption that was plainly false as a way of illustrating not only words whose definitions include false assumptions but those whose definitions included debatable or unproven assumptions.
I think that’s what goes on with sealioning. The sealioning comic emerged from the context of a particular controversy, and has to be understood in that context. In that context, at least from the sealions’ perspective and from my perspective as an observer, this was going on: people we’ll call dugongs were accusing the sealions of hating and harming seals. When the sealions asked the dugongs to demonstrate that what the dugongs were saying about the sealions being dangerous and worthy of condemnation was true, the dugongs refused to do so while continuing the accusations. When the sealions continued to press, the dugongs accused them of sealioning. I think, in that circumstance, the dugongs had some sort of ethical obligation to substantiate the serious accusations they were making against the sealions or to cease making them, and that the sealions had a right to be part of the public conversation occurring about them.
From the perspective of the dugongs, what happened was essentially the sort of thing you described above, but where the dugongs were the war correspondent and the sealions were the woman who hounded him. But the comic, made by a dugong, appears to split the difference. It acknowledges that the original claim was about sealions being bad, though it neglects to mention that it was in actuality a collection of repeated public accusations made about the sealions being dangerous and harmful in a potentially actionable way.
The way it looked to me, the situation was more like the woman in the example accusing the war correspondent of making money from war, and then the correspondent saying, “If you’re going to accuse me of war profiteering or the like, you better substantiate it or stop.” And then the woman accuses him of sealioning. In the example, in fact, the woman doesn’t appear to be doing anything remotely similar to what the historic sealions were doing: she’s not asking him for evidence of anything, she’s not maintaining an ostensibly polite and level-headed tone (as the sealion does in the comic while behaving rudely), and she’s not responding to anything about her at all. From the way you portray it, she just came out of nowhere; she started it, and made an unsubstantiated accusation herself. The bad part wasn’t just that the war correspondent had randos in his mentions. It was precisely what that rando was unjustafiably saying and doing in a context that had nothing to do with her.
Which brings me back to the zaxlebax. I think that the comic, which coined the term “sealioning,” wanted to define it as roughly “to enter, unwelcome, into a private conversation, badgering the interlocutors repeatedly and rudely, demanding that they meet a certain unreasonable standard of facts and evidence for the claims they made in the conversation, such as the people we are calling sealions are doing in this case.” That definition includes the assumption that this is what the historic sealions are doing in the context in which the comic was created: they are entering into a private conversation, they are rudely badgering the dugongs (too many animals), and the demands they are making are unreasonable. In other words, the term “sealioning” implies that behaving in the way the people originally accused of it behaved was essentially the same as behaving like the woman in your example. Then, one basically has to say, “And I think what the sealions did was bad because you shouldn’t do what the woman did to the war correspondent,” inverting the situation. Using the term is like taking a “package deal.” It’s inventing a category, like “famous zaxlebaxes,” which is inherently problematic. Someone adds the Washington Monument to the list, another person lists the Avogadro Project kilogram, a third lists their copy of The Orb’s tenth studio album. None of them fit the definition, because the definition is unfittable.
This is sort of like a motte and bailey. The motte for sealioning is what that lady did: being horrible and harassing someone online by asking rude questions. The bailey is the behavior it was actually being used to describe: asking someone who publicly accused you of something to justify their accusation with evidence when they don’t want to.
Using the medium of a comic only furthers these dark arts, because the author can chalk any of the baked-in-but-false assumptions up to humorous exaggeration when called out on it, while still taking advantage of those assumptions where useful. The people accused of sealioning did not, of course, literally stalk a dugong, following them home. Of course, the comic artist isn’t saying that happened. When pressed, stalking is only a metaphor for the sealions’ behavior, a humorous exaggeration. But on the other hand, the artist wants our attitude toward that behavior to be closer to our attitude toward stalking, rather than our attitude toward someone having the gall to respond in public to a public accusation made against them. Below, some commenters are in fact saying that the sealion behaved badly for following the person home. Of course, the imaginary sealion behaved very badly! But that doesn’t tell us anything about the world outside the comic. Another commenter said the comic couldn’t be a straw man, because it was about itself; it was about the behavior it depicted. But it wasn’t; it was about a thing that happened, and it was claiming that what happened in reality was like what happened in the comic on some essential level. When the artist was criticized for depicting a situation where the sealion was depicted negatively for responding to prejudiced statements against sealions, the artist responded by pedantically explaining that he was not literally prejudiced against sealions and that the comic was actually metaphorical. It was really about people; the sealions were representative. Somehow I doubt the artist actually thought his critics didn’t realize the sealions represented people. But by conflating all these things together, using humorous exaggerations to confuse people’s attitudes toward the behavior in the comic and the behavior in real life, using the animal metaphor as a shield to deflect criticism of the comic’s underlying message, and by wrapping it all up into a catchy package-deal term, the artist does real harm to real people, and to our ability to understand and judge the situation.
Underlining your point, at least one person referred to the above comment as “sealioning”, implying it now refers to any attempt by the Hated Enemy to defend themselves, anywhere. https://twitter.com/mathew/status/714107536463503360
As per the top comment about sealioning, and Scott’s response.
I think this represents a big issue in the structure of Twitter and other social media content silos. There are five roles that a communication service can fulfill, 1) 1 to 1 communication between two individuals (ie. personal email), one to many communication (ie. a newspaper), 3) a group of like-minded individuals coming together to discuss a matter of common interest (ie. an Internet forum for conservatives),4) a community of people with, disparate views to come together and discuss those differences (ie. a broader focus Internet forum), and 5) core infrastructure that serves a bunch of unrelated users with different interests and goals (ie. a webhost).
Twitter tries to be all five, and this creates a lot of problems, and tensions.
And it creates people with different expectations of what type of community they are dealing with. There are a lot of different communities and users with different goals. And sometimes these communities don’t get along. The structure of social media systems forces them into the same silo. This creates perverse outcomes.
This is where the sealioning stuff comes from. Remember the original cartoon. The sealion followed the tweeter home. And that’s what the people who complain about sealioning think is happening. Their vision of the purpose of Twitter is one in which they are dealing with like-minded people, or broadcasting their ideas to people who agree with them. Their conception of what Twitter is marks off 1,2,and three on my roles of a communication service, but they aren’t using Twitter for roles 4 and five. They look at their notifications and, like the sealioned person in the cartoon, see someone intruding on their home. Meanwhile, the person who is responding to the Tweet, thinks of Twitter as a way for people with disagreeing viewpoints to interact, and therefore thinks it is perfectly fine to rebut the person talking about how evil Bulgarians are. Considering the structure of Twitter, both have a point.
This also creates some of the controversies over censorship. Twitter is in large part acting as core infrastructure. And its important infrastructure. Social media sites contain so much of Internet discourse that if your opinion is blocked from them, then you are at a severe disadvantage in getting it out. They are so powerful that by taking sides on political issues they could alter the discourse on those issues quite a bit. Its safe to say that both Sanders and Trump are social media candidates– if social media wasn’t available to them, then they couldn’t sustain their campaign solely on traditional media. FiveThirtyEight.com has a post up showing the social media mentions of each candidate for president if you want a visualization of this. But Twitter isn’t purely infrastructure. The different communities can affect each other. If my webhost also hosted a neo-NAZI blog, it wouldn’t affect my site very much. The neo-nazis could read their site, and my readers could read mine. But if a bunch of neo-nazis started using Twitter, then there would be clear leakage on the other users. And this could damage the reputation of Twitter. One FB friend of mine put it thusly: If a bunch of bikers start attending your bar, then you become a biker bar unless you kick them out. Again an impasse created by the dual roles of Twitter.
I think its an inherent problem in the design of such services, one that will eventually lead to their decline, and replacement with services that handle each type of Internet communication more individually. The reason Twitter type services gained popularity is more their ease of use, then their structure.
You are so right about Twitter.
I think the way Twitter is set up makes it an unintentionally brutal front in the culture war. I usually don’t participate in the culture war, but I saw a post that combined two of my pet peeves (punching down and entitlement as fully general insult) so I responded. Rather than giving a counterargument or simply ignoring me, the culture warrior I was responding to quoted my tweet and let hundreds of her followers hurl insults at me for a few days.
Anywhere else on the internet I would avoid that kind of thing. I don’t go to Facebook groups or blog comments sections I know to be filled with people who despise me. But on Twitter, where I have much less control over who sees my tweets, I unintentionally stumbled into a flame war. It was disconcerting and gave me serious doubts about trying to use Twitter as a productive medium.
I recently read an article which argued that Twitter’s invective was due to a clash of protocols [0]. People tweet conversationally. They assume their tweets are ephemeral and that their followers will understand the intended context. But often, followers (especially journalists) interpret the tweets as if they were on the record. They often quote the archive as if it were Ex Cathedra and often don’t understand the context in which a comment was made.
I think Twitter the company is aware of this problem and is struggling to fix it.
[0] can’t find source.
I think the problem is that Twitter started off as quick status posts to be shared by you and your friends (the equivalent of the “I’m on the train” phone call).
But when celebs and corporations and every hog, dog and divil started using them to garner followers as customers and advertising traffic, or to pontificate on various world topics to the audience at large, then it broke down because it was no longer a private system, it was a public one, but still running on the ‘quick private message’ model.
I’m not sure this is a problem from Twitters perspective. All they care about is that people use their service. Flame-wars generate lots of activity, so it may be a feature, not a bug.
Then again, they could solve a lot of these problems by upping the character limit. That way people could provide context. There are rumors they may do this, we’ll see.
IIRC Twitter Inc’s base of active users has been steadily shrinking over several quarters. Perhaps the hypothesized protocol clash isn’t the root of the problem. But Jack Dorsey knows there exists a problem, so he’s been pulling his hair out trying to fix it.
He’s currently going exactly the wrong way about it, too. “Trust And Safety Council” indeed.
Garret, can you paraphrase a post that you responded to?
You forgot 2b, many to one communication (twitter hatemob attempting to ruin someone’s life).
Many-to-one does have legitimate usages, for example people e-mailing a radio show questions or a Reddit AMA. However, it can be used for harassment.
Yep, this is a large part of why I stopped disagreeing with anyone on Facebook. I realized we were interpreting the purpose of posting on the platform entirely differently. People post opinions on Facebook to vent, find agreement, and share common opinions – not to seek debate, even friendly debate.
My experience of Facebook is very different. I have cultivated a friend list almost entirely composed of libertarian-leaning academics and grad students and found that the level of discussion is very high. There are many disagreements, but they are always respectful.
Hmm, my Facebook list consists almost entirely of people who want to show me pictures of their baby (or dog), and that and party invites are pretty much the only reason I have an account. Not sure which norm is more common.
Same here. My actual Facebook friends are overwhelmingly people I actually knew once, either because we lived in the same neighborhood, went to school together, worked together, whatever, which has little to do with common ideology. On the other hand, the only serious discussions I ever have on Facebook are in curated secret groups that don’t consist of my friends.
My Facebook friends are almost all people I’ve met in person at least once. The median number of meetings is probably one or two because I meet a lot of people at conferences. The number of times I’ve met someone is probably inversely correlated to the amount of Facebook interaction, since the people I met with every day for all of high school have much less in common with me than people I met once at an academic conference. The Facebook algorithm has appropriately curated my feed, which means lots of economics and not many puppy videos.
I’m pretty sure I’m an outlier.
I’d say the median number of in person meetings I’ve had with my facebook friends is in the high hundreds or low thousands, because there are very few that aren’t family or friends that I’ve known for years, and only 3 or 4 that I’ve never actually met.
But I do sometimes get into lengthy political discussions with a couple of others that I half hope everyone else scrolls past; having my thoughts on display for your mother, wife, pastor, etc. to see does tend to help me error on the side of polite and moderate.
I have both experiences of FaceBook.
Most of my postings are in one of two contexts. Exchanges in the climate debate on FB are mostly a waste of time, except for the information they provide about how unreasonable many people are.
Exchanges in the SCA (medieval historical recreation) groups, on the other hand, are usually civil, sometimes informative. People are asking for information, providing for information, showing off the neat things they have done.
So the platform has the potential for both.
I really enjoyed Status 451’s Splain it to Me article, because it points out how much certain communities and areas of the internet don’t actually want an information-based discussion. (which is very frustrating)
Your second-to-last paragraph on Twitter leakage is a problem that also applies to Tumblr. It’s a complete nonsense platform for discussion purposes. The ease of proliferation of posts which makes it the ideal platform for some types of posts makes it a non-starter for anything other than “number of likes” feedback. I wonder if Facebook’s emoji reactions would work there, as well?
One thing I find really annoying about Tumblr’s format is that when you “like” a post that has a reply on it, Tumblr gives you no way to distinguish whether you’re liking it because you enjoyed the parent post, or whether you’re liking it because you enjoyed the response and thought the parent poster was incorrect.
All of those likes simply get registered in the original poster’s number of likes, even if most of the people liking that post are doing so because of a response another poster added to it.
I use Tumblr for fandom posting and it works really well for that, but it’s probably one of the worst websites on the internet to actually have a discussion on.
Those threads where the posters’ names are up at the top and earlier posts are nested within later ones are awful for anything longer than the height of a screen.
N
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d
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All the same, I loathe the comment/forum format Tumblr retools reblogs into for the dashboard. Some uses of the “endless embedded quotes” format are very clever, and worthy content in their own right.
I disagree that Twitter is acting as core infrastructure or is terribly important. If twitter banned Donald Trump it wouldn’t do much to hurt him and if it banned all mention of Donald Trump it would hurt them more than it would hurt him. On the other extreme it wouldn’t hurt my ability to get my message out at all if they banned me because no one looks at my tweets anyway.
The people that twitter has the most power over are those that exist because of twitter in the first place. Like these people: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-teens-are-making-money-off-novelty-twitter-accounts
Precisely; you really hit on something there. Add in function 6) as a platform for coordinating political and social activism and 7) as a theater in which activism itself takes place–a mirror for society, in which people with universalizing visions for society endeavor to enact them virtually. These two functions are actually probably just extensions of the ones you outlined above, or dimensions in which all five functions occur: conversations between individual activists, signal boosting, conversations within and between activist groups, as well as call-outs and actions which reward desirable behaviors with status and punish undesirable behaviors with adverse social consequences. So many things could happen. One person could be privately disparaging Bulgarians to another, and Bulgarians could call them out just because they think it’s the right thing to do. One could also be disparaging Bulgarians to another person with the intention of provoking large-scale, coordinated and/or decentralized action against Bulgarians. One could be disparaging Bulgarians without any real purpose in mind, and others could take up the anti- or pro-Bulgarian mantle. Maybe you were just exasperated when you said, “will no one rid me of this meddlesome rando in my mentions?”, but now the knights are already on the boat across the Channel to Bulgaria to dox the Archrando of Twitterbury wearing a sea lion hair shirt, or something.
I am watching this really interesting course on Chinese philosophy of human nature on EdX (https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1%3AUBCx%2BChina300.2x%2B1T2016/). The particularly interesting feature of it is relating various ideas of theirs (about human nature) to modern psychology. Probably the readers of this blog would find this particular video interesting (hot-linked to YouTube, so you can watch without registering for the course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KRpp7v8K9I). It is an interesting summary of what he argues is the current state of psychological research in relation to how human ethics work. According to this, neither deontology nor consequentialism are used by normal people, and most importantly can’t function in the absence of basic emotion, which argues for virtue ethics as being the most psychologically plausible (he doesn’t argue about which one should be followed, or anything of that sort). I’d love to hear what you think of his summary.
Maybe one way to express what bothers me about this, is that it implies that teaching people to be rational is not the right approach instrumentally (because it doesn’t work and is contrary to human nature), and even if we believe that at least some people can be rational (naturally that’s got to be us, the paragons of virtue), we should go more toward Plato’s ideal republic where we just tell the worker bees some superstitious nonsense because that would cause much better moral behavior. Maybe the reactionaries in the audience would be on board with this, but I personally find this repugnant.
One obvious problem is that if we start telling everyone superstitious nonsense (or any other kind of lie) to achieve some goal, how sure can we be that we are actually optimizing for that goal? I mean, the whole strategy for achieving that goal would be proposed and verified by people who believe the same false information, so how reliable would be their conclusion?
(And when you use the typical “fix” that there could be a small subgroup of leaders who are allowed to know the truth, but still punished if they tell it to the muggles, that has its own known set of problems. Most obviously, in realistic situations that try to do this, the leaders are far from being actually rational, and they usually spend most of their energy for infighting. If they are separated from the muggles, they stop giving a fuck about what happens with the muggles. If they are selected from the muggles that show the most potential, then you can’t expect them to unlearn the lifetime of being taught bullshit.)
I suspect that for everyday life, virtue ethics works best (because it’s computationally cheap and less vulnerable to short-term changes of mood), but once in a while we should take a step back and think strategically, and that is when we should use consequentialism (with some caveats because our computational resources are still limited). Because if we would embrace virtue ethics as the ultimate goal, not merely a practical tool, then for example we would stop worrying about “lost purposes”. (Are you doing something that once seemed good, but now it obviously makes no sense and only causes harm? No problem, you are still virtuous for working hard on it!)
Long-standing real-life groups often use a version of this where the closer you are to making policy, the more complicated and abstract a version of the dogma you’re given. The previous versions are explained away as not being exactly false, but oversimplified in a lies-to-children kind of way. In practical terms I think this might hash out to the dogma playing an increasingly minor role in decision-making.
(There’s an old joke playing on this. Q: What do you call an atheist Catholic? A: A Jesuit.)
Of course, this has its own failure modes.
(There’s an old joke playing on this. Q: What do you call an atheist Catholic? A: A Jesuit.)
Ouch, that hurts.
This is pretty much what my priest told me during this year’s visitation. The folks who come to church on Sunday are mostly not theologians, and may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, and are likely to have many large gaps in their catechization – therefore, making complex theological statements in the sermon is a bad idea. It would just confuse them and cause strife, even if the rare smart and well-educated listener would find the content nuanced and correct.
I’ve never once seen this happen when a priest explained complex theology in a homily – it’s all projection. The Church could really stand to be rid of clergy who don’t really believe their own religion.
Not sure I’d disagree with you, but that’s his claim to how things work, not mine. I got the impression that he is trying to run damage control on the general defection from religion trend. I don’t think loosening discipline and requirements will work, though, quite the opposite.
If I understand his summary correctly, he claims the consensus in psychology is that a consequentialist point of view is not ultimately grounded. He gives an example of someone with damaged pre-frontal cortex who gives very reasonable moral judgements in the abstract, but unable to make it work in real life, because he doesn’t experience emotion properly. In order to actually step out and use higher-level abstract thinking requires a judgement that it’s time to do it, but that leads to either infinite regress or backing up to some much less sophisticated algorithm.
I’ve been aping Antonio Damasio for over a decade now when this topic comes up, so I’m glad to see his research being mentioned in an ethics lecture. I’d go further than this guy goes, though, and say it doesn’t really mean much for the question of whether virtue ethics or consequentialism is more grounded in psychological realism. It’s been proven at this point that people cannot act for purely rational, abstract reasons, but I don’t think consequentialism is a fully rational ethics anyway. To be a consequentialist, you still have to value on the same somatic marker level whatever world state your reasoning tells you will be brought about by your optimal actions. Consequentalism gives you instrumental rationality, but preferring one set of consequences over another is not rational. That was the problem faced by Elliot and Phineas Gage. They didn’t prefer any one future over another and that crippled their ability to ever do anything.
I sort of have the same opinion, but then the issue is this: we pretend to apply this rationality, but do we really? It relates to my comment above. Maybe we only use this tool when our gut says we should (kind of like a drug addict switching on his rationality to play chess well, but switching it off afterwards) and the whole thing is really under the control of our emotions the entire time. On some level this is obviously true: if someone is hurting me right now, the entire philosophy goes out of the window and I respond like an animal. But maybe I am writing this post is also because it feels good, and not because I would like to understand human nature better (which is what I think my reason is). In particular, this is all kind of like taking a free walk in the prison courtyard. Maybe the right thing is to simply accept it and try to do the best you can within those constraints.
More-rational behavior can be a habit- it’s not simply a matter of deciding to use it, but of making a habit of using it, so that you don’t “fall back” to some other instinctual less-useful behavior patterns when you’re not actively deciding to be rational.
One obvious problem is that if we start telling everyone superstitious nonsense (or any other kind of lie) to achieve some goal, how sure can we be that we are actually optimizing for that goal?
I think someone like Venkash (of ribbonfarm) may have said that humans are bad at accurately justifying their beliefs, but excellent at distinguishing between situations where they’re profiting vs being taken advantage of. The thesis was that this is why religion is full of bs, yet somehow Just Works ™.
——
The problem with telling a Noble Lie is the method’s susceptibility to corruption. Plato’s Republic relies on the Philosopher King being an immaculate saint. EY once remarked that susceptibility to corruption is evolutionary advantageous. So I doubt the Republic would be very successful.
You may find this course actually interesting. In particular, it seems Mozi was this kind of an early (earliest?) consequentialist. And his solution was to teach the doctrine of common good to everyone, make sure the top officials are all on board, and simply make the peasants conform by force if they are too dumb to understand rationalism. So no noble lies. And then you get his opponents basically saying, yes, you could optimize rice production this way, but people would be unhappy because your doctrines are against the human nature. So it’s much better to use doctrines that align with human nature, even if suboptimal (although they don’t grant that). People like venerating ancestors, so don’t prohibit it, but use it to instill morality, etc. And all the officials should do it too, and genuinely, so it’s not a lie.
I do have a passing familiarity with Mohism. Sounds fun. I’ll look into the lecture and radio back.
It only now occurs to me that I contradicted myself when I said religion works, and then immediately said Noble Lies will never work.
#compartmentalization ftw
English-language Mozi scholarship has been experiencing a boom since that new translation came out in 2010 and academics have had time to read it. It’s a good time to read about him. It’s filled with military engineering and stuff, not just moral philosophy.
As a side note, last year Jo Walton came out with two books (The Just City and The Philosopher Kings) of a planned trilogy, with the premise that Athena and Apollo grab a bunch of people from across time who all thought the Republic sounded like a good idea, give them an island, and let them have at it.
I doubt it’s a spoiler to say that the results are more complicated than the experiment’s founders foresee.
So, use consequentialism to determine which set of deontological ethics to use? Interesting. I’m assuming that this idea has already been explored by some philosopher somewhere, but not being familiar with the field I wouldn’t know where to look for it.
Hey, it’s Ted Slingerland. I like him. He is one of the more practical Sinologists out there, I think (as in, he is willing to try to make Sinology practically relevant despite the kind of nitpicking this inevitably elicits from professional academics).
It’s a very interesting take on ancient philosophy, and I really like it.
Aren’t all (sensible) ethical systems extensions/elaborations of virtue ethics, in the sense that you first have to decide that being a certain kind of person is a good thing?
I’m very late to the party on the https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ Archipelago post (and possibly making a point that has been made better by others already), but I wonder if it would just turn out much worse than one would like to imagine simply because we’re all so damn complicated and clueless. We don’t know what makes us happy. Even when we do know what will make us happy, we don’t know what will lead to making us happy. Even when we do know those two things, we’re often unwilling or unable to actually follow through.
Maybe the SJWs and Trump supporters would be less happy if they each didn’t have the other group to complain about. Maybe all of the blogging psychiatrists fail on their diets and move to Donutopia. Maybe all of the anxious computer science PhD students get too freaked out by the weight of the decision and move to Purgatopia.
I’m not saying that Archipelago would be a worse world than our current one. Obviously it would have the awesome effect of removing people from incredibly awful situations, which would probably totally dwarf the misery caused by the above examples. I’m more interested in pointing out that the failures of our current world are largely caused by our own incredible stupidity (particularly our inability to understand ourselves), and that our incredible stupidity is a very important thing to consider when making policy decisions (and also when imagining fictional wizard worlds…).
(I do think that the Archipelago argument does more-or-less completely fall apart when it comes to children. One of the things people care about most is how they get to raise their children, and that’s something that necessarily affects someone who is neither consenting nor an adult. I very much do not believe that people should have the right to raise their children however they want, and I don’t think that giving children the option to leave would be sufficient protection. But, that seems like it might be out of the scope of the hypothetical.)
I wonder how “the wizard prevents memetic contamination” (that is, in the example given, woman-objectifying media cannot be broadcast to an island that doesn’t want woman-objectifying media) can be reconcilled with “there is a mandatory UniGov class in every school in every community telling children about the other communities out there if they ever want to leave”.
So you have a child living in Equalityisland and as part of the mandatory class they learn about Stripperville, (the woman-objectifying community that has the Archipelago’s largest porn export industry). How is this not introducing foreign concepts and thus memetic contamination? The kid was raised to date on grounds of “no objectifying other beings as products to be consumed”, and now they’re introduced to “this community exists where women are packaged into an image of femininity and their labour used to produce items for commercial consumption according to various fetishes”?
The happy happy story there is that, because of the classes, Lesbian Atheist knows there is an alternative out there and she has the right to leave and so she gets removed from abusive Christianotopia, but how about the flip side: now some of the inhabitants of happy Equalityisland get the idea of women on leashes as rape fantasy objects? Maybe they don’t decide to leave and go live in Stripperville, maybe they like Equalityisland, but now they have discovered they like the idea of treating women as things and they start gradually changing how they behave to women and over time – Equalityisland isn’t so Equalityisland anymore?
The wizard would have to make forced evacuations of the Objectivists (pun not intentional) to other communities where their fetish is acceptable? Or evacuate the women who don’t want to be objectified? Declare Equalityisland a failed community? What happens?
I’m tempted to say that if your ideology can be threatened by a dry, academic description of a competing ideology, it isn’t a very good one.
But of course, no one died and made me the arbiter of that kind of thing. You’re right; Archipelago only works if at some level, every polity involved values exit rights and freedom of (some) information more than they value complete ideological purity. I used to think that was a pretty low bar, but I’m starting to think it’ll be a hard one to clear nonetheless.
For a start, a “dry academic description” isn’t going to be good enough if a child wants to know “what’s a stripper? what do they do there? what’s porn?” If we’re talking someone 18 years old and a legal adult who has the right to information about where they want to live, then they’ll need to get more than “And over here is Stripperville and over there is Donutopia”.
The very idea of a competing ideology may be destabilising; if nobody in Equalityisland ever talks about objectification (because everyone knows it is bad and wrong) then the first time the children find out “Wait a minute, there’s other ways of thinking about this?” is going to be some kind of earthquake (“our parents have been lying to us all this time!” or “I’m not a freak, other people think like this too!”)
Scott presented any attempts by the Christianotopians to persuade Lesbian Atheist not to leave as abuse and brain-washing, so if any argument about “don’t go” is treated as abusive brainwashing attempting to infringe on your right of exit – then that applies just as much to people trying to persuade their kids not to start treating women as blow-up dolls as it does Bible-bashers telling their daughters not to have sex with women.
You might be surprised how dry and academic an answer to that sort of question can be — though I don’t know if sex-ed classes in Ireland are anything like they are in rural American schools.
Either way, though, I have a hard time imagining a culture with so much ideological uniformity that questions like that would be unanswerable. The most hardline Christian fundamentalist cultures there have ever been still knew what homosexuality, for example, is. Or at least what homosexual acts are, and that some people might want them.
On the other hand, I agree that you can’t realistically treat any version of “don’t go” as haram without also assuming that you’re never going to be dealing with anything other than variations on the theme of a liberal Enlightenment culture — and an uncommonly liberal one by present-day standards, at that.
Nornagest, you’re underestimating the degree of blind spots that a sufficiently unified culture can impose.
I’ve read enough accounts by gay people from the bad old days who literally didn’t know that other homosexuals existed, or who could only find a mere mention of homoseuality in a medical book as an aberration.
I don’t have a cite, but I remember something about Mark Twain writing that he was worried that he was insane because he didn’t believe in God.
Equality Island no longer being the island of equality suggests that the majority opinion has changed. So I don’t exactly see the problem. Are you suggesting that Equality Island was preordained by the wizard to outlaw BDSM? Because I assumed that each island was something similar to a democracy. (It’s been a while since I read the archipelago post.)
In any case, I can see how a swing in majority opinion would adversely affect the Old Guard who probably don’t want to move due to the transaction costs, but are no longer welcomed by the community. Robin Hanson recently posted about private law. I didn’t fully understand it, but he was suggesting that each citizen have the option to draft their own personal laws by which to interpret their legal contracts with. It sounded like a more granular version of the archipelago, which would solve the problem of how to deal with subcultures (which are inherently fractal) when they fracture too much.
What I was trying to get at was that the idea of preventing memetic contamination (the wizard will not allow foreign ideas to be imported into the community) and the idea of telling children about their options to leave are going to come into conflict and I don’t see how that can work.
Sure, if a substantial majority of the rising generation decides “But why can’t we import porn from Stripperville?” once they become aware of the existence of Stripperville, then Equalityisland is going to change from what it was – but that’s the very memetic contamination the wizard is trying to prevent. Do the new people who want porn all have to leave? What if they say “We like living here and don’t want to set up a new community, we voted on this and we want to change the existing laws banning the import of porn” – what then?
The Old Guard leave? They stay? Who gets the final say?
I’m saying that the problem of “preventing memetic contamination” and “right of exit based on full information of your options” are going to need some fine-tuning to coexist; the same idea as “when conservatively religious parents send their kids to university and they become atheists” at work here 🙂
The point of Equality Island was not to let the majority rule. If they had wanted that, they would have gone to Majority Rules Island instead. the point of the exit rights was that you could leave a society to be accommodated but the society could continue for those who liked it.
That’s the rationale behind the ban on memetic contamination, but again – how do you realistically prevent it?
If Lesbian Atheist (to take Scott’s example) is living in Christianotopia and everyone else she knows is Straight Believer, how can she tell she’s not suffering from mental problems?
Okay, mandatory UniGov class tells her “You don’t have to stay here, you can leave”. But where does she pick to go, if she has no idea what the other societies are like?
So there has to be a couple of lines of description e.g. “In Hernation, all the women love and live with other women”, “in Materialismdom, nobody believes in fairies, ghosts or deities”, “in Metropolis, you can think what you like, you can sleep with whom you like, and the only rule is that there are no rules”, etc.
Which then introduces to our Lesbian Atheist the notion of “Wait – there are places where people don’t live by the same rules? There are other ways of thinking? I’m not the only one who feels like this?”
And bingo, there’s your memetic contamination, because maybe she tells her friends about this, talks with them. Maybe they don’t all want to leave like she does; some of them may be Lesbian (or Gay) Believers, some of them may be Straight Atheists.
Maybe they think “But this is my country just as much as my parents, why should I have to leave? Why can’t I stay here and have the life I like here and just change one or two things?”
I mean, the right of exit sounds great and it is great. But absolute control over memetic contamination ain’t gonna work, or at least I don’t see how it works. “You can leave but we won’t tell you anything to enable you to decide where to go because telling you about other belief/political/social systems would be memetic contamination”? How do you make that work?
“In Hernation, all the women love and live with other women”,
That won’t work, since it’s euphemistic.
As far as I know, all feminism-related opposition to sex work is predicated on the belief that the workers’/victims’ participation in these activities is, in some relevant way, coerced. If the wizard did ensure both mental and physical freedom of exit, the usual objections seen in our world would not apply.
But I agree that complete memetic isolation is not compatible with the freedom to leave.
Of course some seem to believe on the nicely circular grounds that no woman would voluntarily do such thing, so the evidence of freedom they would require was absence of the condition.
Actually, some of the SWERFs make arguments about how sex work harms other women by contributing to the climate of objectification, or some such thing. But it is true that they more often try to argue that sex workers all must have been coerced in some way (presumably because they expect that to be more persuasive).
The classic reason why women objected to prostitution was that they were breaking the cartel: hard to demand that a man help raise and support any children you have together when a woman is willing to forgo it (and worse, raises the specter that they are not his children).
Feminism has not quite given it up. . . .
@Mary, I agree that some feminists have probably not quite given that up (though I dislike saying that about “feminism” rather than “some feminists” when it’s an issue where there’s obviously considerable disagreement among feminists). But they very rarely make that argument openly, and would probably deny it. Similarly, I am quite certain that some feminists are prudes (including some of the SWERFs) and that this is part of the reason for some of their views, but most of those would certainly deny it. But arguing against people on the basis of what one suspects are their hidden motivations is rarely very productive, so I try to focus on the arguments they actually present.
I think that women who fear prostitution because they want to keep families together are misguided. Prostitution actually helps to keep families together, because it offers men the opportunity to satisfy their sexual desire discreetly without the threat of social shame upon the wife or worse romantic entanglements with a rival lover who might break a family apart.
Prostitutes don’t seriously seduce and steal married men, but they do distract married men with a midlife crisis who might otherwise romance young gold diggers.
I think the idea is that if the husband sleeps with a prostitute, he’s already breaking up the family. The fact that he can hire a prostitute discreetly just means that he can break up the family in a way that is hard to notice; it doesn’t mean the breakup did not happen.
@ anonymouse at 5.16 pm
Prostitution actually helps to keep families together, because it offers men the opportunity to satisfy their sexual desire discreetly without the threat of social shame upon the wife or worse romantic entanglements with a rival lover who might break a family apart.
Right. If sex can be got without drama, that removes a lot of possible conflict from the marriage.
Well, being a prostitute does harm a woman, in reducing her SMV when (if) she wants to marry.
That’s a possible cost. Her decision to be a prostitute implies that she believes it is outweighed by the benefits.
Mencken, observing the situation c. 1900, concluded that prostitutes did at least as well on the marriage market as other women of their class. And, of course, some women don’t plan to get married.
This is where I feel like I’m from somewhere orbiting Tau Ceti. Why would sex be the only thing where skill and experience is a negative?
Virginity preference is like evaluating your future spouse for cooking ability and ceteris paribus choosing someone who has never even boiled an egg over a Michelin chef.
And yes, I have heard all the evo-psych arguments, but I still think it’s damn stupid.
@ Richard
Aside from the nefarious influence of selfish genes and memes, another factor seems to be that many people are very insecure about their ability to “keep” their chosen partner.
Example quote:
In other words, if a woman so much as imagines being with someone “more alpha” than him, her motivation to commit will be diminished.
And memories of past lovers are even more threatening than daydreams about fictional characters.
@Richard:
It might be sort of like that if:
1) “cooking jealousy” were a well-attested phenomenon that is often strong enough to lead to physical violence or murder.
2) spouses were chosen for sexual ability. In general, people claim to select for personal compatibility, attraction, etc. Those who prefer virginity are likely not even to fully test sexual ability before marriage.
3) skill and experience were, in themselves, negatives. It is usually not a problem if the potential spouse has trained themselves, so to speak, nor is it a problem if they permit consummation of their marriage.
I started that comment with feeling alien, so I get that I’m a rather wild outlier and won’t debate this at length, but:
@Nita
Fair point, but it means we should work on less neurotic men rather than less promiscuous women, no?
@Montfort:
1: same conclusion as to Nita
2: If sex doesn’t matter, then why should it matter either way? If it matters a little, more experience should be a bonus. Like the toy in the cornflakes box, you don’t buy cornflakes for the toy, but it’s better than not a toy. That’s why I included ‘all else being equal’.
3: I’m probably unpacking this wrongly, but are you saying experience is not a problem? If so, why would it lower a spouses SMV? (I’m hopefully unpacking SMV correctly as Sexual Market Value, or else this discussion has gone so far off track we should just stop) 🙂
Aside from the nefarious influence of selfish genes and memes, another factor seems to be that many people are very insecure about their ability to “keep” their chosen partner.
This, and in context legitimately so. The context being cultures where there is a generally accepted rule of lifetime monogamy.
In that context, a non-virgin who wants to marry you is a proven defector from the social order that is meant to guarantee the marriage will endure. You might as well enter into a criminal conspiracy with someone who ratted out their last partner.
Note that there has never been a rule, nor I think much in the way of stigma, against young widows or widowers remarrying. And literal premarital sex, i.e. between two people who actually are going to marry in the future, often got swept behind a veil of social camouflage when it was discovered.
@ Richard
Well, obviously 😉
Oh, and there are at least two more sub-groups:
– those who want to personally introduce their spouse to the wonderful world of cooking,
– those who are beginners themselves and want to discover this world with an equal partner.
And finally, I’m not sure about sex workers, but I would stay away from actual Michelin chefs. Have you seen how these people react to not-quite-ideal cooking? 😀
@Richard:
My earlier response is unfair because, in the context of this thread, I forgot there were people who do prefer virgins for short term interactions, too. I think that situation is closer to your analogy, and there I would regard that preference as just another common and somewhat odd kink (not that there’s anything wrong with those).
The rest of these answers are dealing with the long-term / marriage-seeking context.
With respect to (2), I’m saying sexual skill is largely irrelevant. The skill itself is like a toy in the cereal, but sexual history with other partners is a (bad) part of the cornflakes. You’re not buying it for the toy, so it doesn’t make up for the fact that you think the cereal tastes bad. As for the mechanism by which it ruins the cornflakes, I’d point to Nita and Schilling’s answers.
My point about experience is probably splitting hairs, and not necessarily in a productive way. To the marriage-seeker, it’s probably okay if their partner has had a lot of sex with them (usually after marriage or engagement, though), or if their partner somehow acted like someone with a lot of experience (e.g. very comfortable with sex). The problem arises only when their partner has had sex with other people.
Children are probably the biggest, most severe breakdown between present US social conservatives and the LGBT rights movement.
The social conservatives want to be able to continue go on teaching that homosexuality is a sin, and that if you have same-sex attraction (or poly tendencies, or are trans, or other things) the moral thing to do is to try to smush those thoughts down really hard and be a Good Christian anyway. They want to be able to separate their children from peers they feel are corrupting them (especially same-sex partners, naturally), and to make support for higher education conditional on them attending religious universities or similar. Passing on their values and guiding their children back to them when they deviate is probably what is most important to them.
The LGBT rights movement, on the other hand includes a lot of people who have experienced this, and known people who have experienced this, and have obliterating it as their primary goal. A lot of the effort at changing culture, and preventing spots of culture from remaining unchanged, is being done because the only real way to succeed is to have no one *want* to pressure their children to suppress same-sex attraction, because direct policing is unrealistic, doubly so in Red Tribe-dominated areas.
There’s no “they get their institutions, we get our institutions” solution here.
Children are absolutely in scope, seeing as they live in society, and- as well as the memetic thing- are probably enough to completely render the system non-functional.
I also think it’s pretty likely that societies would have parallel evolution, that entry to societies would be heavily controlled, that moving would be prohibitively difficult for anyone who wasn’t a middle to upper middle class white collar worker in an in-demand field, and that any society which actually enforced memetic isolation would end up needing North Korea levels of isolation and suppression to make it work. And basically that we already have archipelago, we call the societies ‘countries’, and it doesn’t solve anything.
It’s an interesting fantasy setting, but I don’t think it has any solutions for us.
I don’t think it solves everything, but I do think it solves quite a lot.
Half the point of Archipelago is the open borders; make the transaction costs of a move too high, and you end up destroying most of the incentive to go somewhere with laws more amenable to you. There are regions where moves between nearby societies are easy — the Schengen Area is one, and the United States is arguably another given the cultural and legal differences between the states — but those tend to be societies that are culturally and structurally fairly similar to each other, which defeats much of the purpose.
Ideally, we’d also want it to be easier to set up an independent society.
Free exit is part of archipelago, but it also incorporated a right for societies to decide who moves into them if they want to, so they can defend themselves against entryism if they want. If you add a requirement for open borders it fails for that reason.
It *was* part of archipelago to assume that most societies would choose not to do this in any particularly onerous way, but that’s one of those things we’ve actually tested and seen doesn’t in fact work out that way.
I mostly want to know whether Scott tried using Beeminder to resist the donuts.
A common recent complaint has been that comment threads are too big, and we have too many new commenters who don’t know the norms and keep getting on my lawn. *shakes fist angrily*
Scott recently capitulated and set up a Patreon account, after being repeatedly asked. However, what if we attempted to solve the too-many-commenters and money-for-Scott problem simultaneously? I’m thinking of something like a $1/month subscription required to comment, or a $5 lifetime subscription. I know that some sites (esp. Metafilter) use a trivial fee as a barrier to entry to ensure that comment quality remains high. Yes, I know that MF has a negative echo-chamber reputation ’round these parts, but the fact remains that its commentariat is a lot more coherent and respectful than the usual alternatives.
How easy is this to set up? Is it a terrible idea?
One way to solve the “too many commentors” problem, just require everyone to register, but upon registering, Scott rolls a random number and you are only permitted to register if the random number is over the threshhold. If randomly removing commentors causes further people to leave, just tweak the random number threshhold so that the number of commentors is what you want after taking that into effect.
(Note that many of the flaws in that apply to your suggestion as well.)
but his idea makes money, and this is america, where making money validates anything
I feel it would be better to limit based on quality of comments rather than willingness to pay.
Perhaps a third alternative is to split OTs by topic areas, such as political/non-political or something like that?
@ Citizensearth
“I feel it would be better to limit based on quality of comments rather than willingness to pay.”
Up and down-voting has been discussed a lot.
An idea I haven’t seen discussed is, in the spirit of ‘know when to walk away’, limiting how many comments a person can make on each thread. Long sub-threads often deteriorate into repetition and bickering. Such a quota would encourage the poster to walk away from bickering subs into more productive ones.
It’s not hard to see how to game such a rule.
That also seems like a reasonable suggestion in some cases, though I agree with Jiro that it could be gamed. How often is tit-for-tat the main issue do you think?
There is already a cruel punishment for engaging in long subthreads: The lowest level of replies does not have a reply button, you must navigate to the penultimate level to post, and go back and forth if you want to quote, particularly if quoting multiple participants.
It’s annoying, but the up-arrow button makes it a lot less annoying than it could be.
I love HN’s fix. HN doesn’t allow replies to a subthread until a time-limit has passed. The time-limit starts at {idk ~5 seconds} but grows polynomially with each additional comment. The end result is that subthreads of exceptional depth take ~20 minutes to respond to, which limits the bickering inherent of extended subthreads.
There’s already a subreddit for up/downvotes, and I feel that those are what killed LW so..
Splitting by topic would at least make it easier to scroll though however.
Against.
I would like to keep posting anonymously, and I can’t do that if I need an account tied to IRL payment information. Not that I think it’s likely that Scott is a doxxer, but I’d rather not put more personal information on the webs than I am already.
Even worse, it’s the lawn in your back yard. This neighborhood used to be just filled with charming artists and asexuals and AI researchers, but now everyone just wants to talk about [redacted]!
More neutrally, a fee seems more likely to a) not wind up functioning very well to maintain a veteran/newbie line and b) make people who pay feel entitled to comment regardless of what they have to say.
Make it like SomethingAwful where you can get banned for trivial reasons and have to re-register, making the whole site a revolving door of tenbux
I’m not sure the proprietor of this blog wants to turn this into Something Awful.
It stopped being about what the proprietor wanted several comments up
Is money-for-Scott a problem? He had to be cajoled into setting up a Patreon because he thinks he doesn’t need money, and now that he has a Patreon you can just give him money through that anyway.
It seems hard to make commenting on a blog worth even the transaction costs necessary to pay for it, much less any actual money. I feel like you’d drive the fun people away and end up with just the ones who have a psychological need to share their economically optimal taxation scheme with the world and consider your fee a small price to pay.
Well, I’d … stop commenting. I guess that would help build up users for the Reddit community Scott seems to like promoting?
I would suggest this if you want people to not take you seriously. You guys are an echo chamber as it is, that would make it hilariously so.
Usually when people accuse a space of being an echo chamber, it’s because they have an ideological axe to grind
Which views are the ones you think are echoing?
This place is perhaps least like an echo chamber, of the places I know of. There’s rightists, leftists, literal commies, real old-timey monarchists, actual fascists, Blue Americans, Red Americans, foreigners, trolls, all kinds of people.
Something Awful was famous for charging for its forum accounts, and it seemed to work pretty well as a filtering mechanism. (The site did eventually become a cesspool, but for other reasons.)
I don’t think the main problem with SA’s model — arbitrary hyena moderation as fundraising measure — would be an issue here.
What is “arbitrary hyena moderation”?
Mainly, handing out bans like it’s cool. SA’s approach to banning accounts is unusual: you can get banned for stuff that wouldn’t rate a slap on the wrist in most forums, or ask for it in one way or another, but it’s usually not meant to keep you out permanently, only to get you to pay [$5 emoji] to have your account reinstated.
The SA mod culture is very aggressive in other ways, too (it locks threads quickly and often, for example). Or it was when I posted there. But the bans are the part that matter from a fundraising standpoint.
I think occasional commenters with interesting knowledge pertaining to a specific post (e.g. the superforecasters) would be put off by this (which would be a great shame).
This is basically guaranteed to happen on any blog, subreddit, messageboard, you name it. Everyone experiences their own subjective ‘golden age’ of the forum, before *the rabble* arrive and change the conversation enough to generate a sense of loss that can be quite cutting. This process repeats itself for each new wave of arrivals – I’m quite new here and I don’t mind the comments at all, but I’m sure in a year I’ll be feeling the same frustration. It’s misery and aching loss all the way down. The fundamental particle of the internet is the hipster.
Look at Reddit. The old guard hated what Reddit was becoming, with the memes and the shitposting, so they started ‘/r/truereddit’ to recapture their golden age of online discourse. Now that’s full of hot takes from the Guardian and Fox News and posts about Jon Stewart and from Slate.com and seemingly every article ever published in The Atlantic. Enter /r/truetruereddit. I’m not joking. Or if that’s a bit mainstream for you, you could try /r/truetruetruereddit, though that seems to be foundering.
I, for one, take some comfort in the fact that there’ll always be a niche somewhere to fit me, and that in over a decade (tremble at my age), I’ve repeatedly found such places online. It’s going to be ok.
That’s a really interesting notion. The closest thing I can think of that already exists is SomethingAwful, where my understanding is that an account costs $5 and if you get banned you can recreate your account for another $5.
I think I might learn towards supporting this, but I worry that some key commenters are not flush with cash, and wouldn’t necessarily be able to justify the expenditure. For the key commenters themselves this wouldn’t likely be a problem because Scott would probably just whitelist them, but it would be a shame to shut out cash-poor commenters who don’t already have a reputation for high-quality comments to fall back on. Some system by people people could sponsor other commenters might help, but I suspect this will always end up having drawbacks of a sort that Scott won’t care for.
The usual solution is for the board owner to instate a moderator, isn’t it?
I recently got an unsolicited “out of the blue” private message on reddit inviting me to an unusual sub called /r/capitalismvsocialism . On the face of it it’s an invite-only pluralist space for discussing economic systems across one of the most vast political divides. It seems to have a dizzying variety of (sometimes fringe) political schools of thought involved. Some of the exchanges have seemed to be unusually polite considering this, which is a positive thing, and could be related to the invite-only status and good rules. Of the many participants there is only a couple of centre-ish people like myself, which makes me a little uncomfortable and hesitant to become involved. Plus one or two invitees have been making comments as if its a trick or trap lol. But on the surface it certainly seems to be in the spirit of rational conversation of difficult topics that we have a little of over here at SSC.
I just wanted to point it out as potentially interesting experiment to the SSC crew, ask what people’s thoughts on it were, and broadly ask for advice whether you guys think I should engage from a centre/centre-left kind of perspective, or steer clear. Also, has anyone else received an invite?
I did! Forgot about it until now, gonna go take a peek.
Edit: nope, looks like it’s filled with mostly morons who have no idea what they’re talking about. All the arguments are horrendously lazy. Nobody exhibits any willingness to learn from others.
Yeah post/comment quality is not especially high I must admit. The idea is interesting given the recent discussions on rational debate in the links post.
Oh btw for others its invite only for contributions, but should be publicly visible without invite.
Found the sub’s origin story in the comments.
Apparently, some ancaps disagreed with a mod’s decision on r/SocialismVCapitalism, so they started their own subreddit, r/CapitalismVSocialism. (Whether games of chance and sex services will be provided remains unknown.)
That would explain their active promotion efforts. As for your question, feel free to give it a go, but expect a lot of “that’s not capitalism, that’s corporatism!” and “that’s not socialism, that’s state capitalism!”. Maybe you could be the sole defender of the liberal democratic state in a sea of anarchists 🙂
Not a bad idea. Although it seems most likely I’d just get attacked from both sides, considering the percentage of people that seem to be fringee. Might follow for a while and see how the quality is.
I bet you anything it’ll suck in two months, if it doesn’t now.
Ambitious pluralist debate spaces get set up all the time. Almost always, what happens is either that one side starts out with a founder-effect advantage or that it ends up getting brigaded at some point, and evaporative cooling effects slowly convert it into a discussion forum for the winning side, sometimes with a few harmless cranks kept on as court eunuchs.
Does that apply to SSC, too? If not, how did it manage to avoid it?
It’s happening here, but slower. It helps that a lot of the commentariat isn’t here for the politics, or has idiosyncratic opinions that don’t map well to any party line. Also helps that Scott wants to keep the political stuff to a dull roar, and also also that Scott’s got a big crossover fanbase coming from a place where there’s strong norms against partisanship. But none of that is going to help a sub calling itself “Capitalism v. Socialism”, or most anywhere else that’s set up specifically as a place for two sides to meet.
Comparing now to the archives, the general sense I get is an average movement right, but also a narrowing of the Overton Window – on average it’s more right wing (expressed mostly in an “of course capitalism is the best” attitude and a somewhat overblown objection to “SJWs” but not full “haha fuck your trigger warning” anti) but there are fewer active Death Eaters and other far-right types, and fewer far leftists.
Well unless its run by a neutral rationalist head-kicker, which is not the case here. The mods at least claim to be from all across the spectrum though, so you never know I guess.
Contributions are invite-only, so that should make brigading at least less of a problem.
Looks like a honeypot to me.
Have you reached out to the CFAR folks? They’ve, like, got an office in Berkeley that you could probably borrow for a meetup.
There’s also several rationalist houses in Berkeley. Terabithia, Liminal, Event Horizon, Godric’s Hollow, and UltraViolet all might work out well. AFAIK Terabithia, Liminal, and UV host the most events and would work well. Event Horizon would as well if the weather is nice, since you’d be able to overflow to the cafe next door. I’ve never been to Godric’s but I’ve heard it mentioned.
Less conventional option: if it’s a nice day, you can probably get people to meet up on Berkeley campus, outside, where the HPMoR wrap party was held.
The CFAR office, IIRC, can comfortably hold about a dozen people meeting at once.
Wait, they’ve moved since I was last there. Not sure if it’s larger or smaller now, but I doubt it will stretch to 50+ like the attendance at the last one.
UV can handle 50, but probably couldn’t take 70. Liminal would be even less. (I’ve never been into Terabithia but it seemed even smaller the one time I saw it from the street.) And it would require basically giving an open invitation to presumed-friendly unknowns, which is a big ask.
Ultraviolet would definitely have room for 50 people. It’ll be a little cozy indoors, but perfect both indoors and outdoors. Please contact me via e-mail about the details!
PS. What a lovely opal! You have excellent taste in gemstones.
The concept of rationalist houses makes me shudder. Purely instinctively – I’m glad you guys help each other out and all that, it’s just that your social norms are so horrifying.
How about you, are you revolted at the concept of a traditionalist Catholic boarding house?
Anyone know anything about the psychologist Oliver James (directly or related to his main claims). Saw him speak, found him fairly convincing, and seeming to be genuinely evidence-focused. But also a bit of the ‘therapist to the stars’ feeling, and a tendency to armchair therapise people he hasn’t met that throw up red flags (on the latter he did give disclaimers that he didn’t have direct evidence etc. so no actual unfounded claims – the tendency just worries me a bit)
As far as I can make out, he’s known for
– I believe inventing the concept of ‘lovebombing’
– Arguing that high achievers in most fields are essentially mentally unhealthy and that this relates to a lot of problems we face in politics/finance etc
– Some thing he wrote called ‘contented dementia’ about living with dementia/alzheimers, which the alzheimers society HATE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_James_(psychologist)
My personal interest is that he writes about child raising/nurture (books including ‘how not to f*ck them up’, which outside the UK might not be so clearly a reference to Philip Larkin), and I’m going to have a child soon! On the child thing he emphasises home/parental role and I think is opposed to the ‘both parents work’ model. At the event I went to I asked him about the idea that peer groups are more influenced than parents and he attributed it to coming from a single well-sold but badly-evidenced book. Apparently same agents as Pinker and equally good at selling something without credibility in the field as being a clear and accepted breakthrough…
I don’t know anything about Oliver James personally but I’ve seen a couple of people linking to this counter-argument to his apparent blank-slatism: https://health.spectator.co.uk/on-genetics-oliver-james-is-wrong-about-everything/
Thanks. Interestingly, for the first 10 minutes of the talk I thought he was saying ‘nurture is all’. But actually wasn’t. He was specifically saying that twin studies show hereditary is a big deal, so he’s not a blank-slatist, but that explanations in terms of ‘the gene for X’ are far weaker in terms of explaining characteristics than things like twin studies. He thinks that there’s something hereditary going on beyond genes, but doesn’t know what. And also that nurture is important, but was clear he didn’t know how important compared to inheritance.
“Apparently same agents as Pinker and equally good at selling something without credibility in the field as being a clear and accepted breakthrough”
Presumably a reference to _The Nurture Assumption_. It originated as an article in an academic journal and I believe got their “best article of the year” (or similar category) award.
The book certainly doesn’t claim its views are accepted–very much the opposite. It does offer evidence although, as an outsider to the field, I can’t easily evaluate its quality. I found it convincing.
That’s the bunny. And ‘accepted’ was probably the wrong word – he didn’t say it presented it as the view of the field so much as overstated the evidence a lot, ignored contradictory stuff etc.
Specifically, I think he also argued that it didn’t convincingly control for whether the crowd you moved in was a cause or a symptom of your personality. (e.g. everyone thinks their kid is disruptive because of the ‘bad crowd’ they’re in, but maybe they join that crowd because they’re disruptive)
My ignorance in psychology is near-total, and I couldn’t find satisfactory answers to the following questions by googling them. An open-discussion thread in a blog written by a rationalist psychiatrist seems like the a good place to ask:
Scientifically speaking, and from historical perspective, how does the “big-picture” of the progress in clinical psychology looks like? (say, in the last 100 years).
Theoretically – is there a distinctive body of knowledge that can be shown to be increasingly refined? A competition between evolving models of the human mind, guided by controlled experiments and empirical data? Are there mainstream reductionist projects trying to explain those models in neurological terms?
Clinically, how much focus is there on reliable evaluations of different methods for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment? Are there explicit methodologies and mete-frameworks (which are not purely heuristic) for systematic development of new procedures? To what extent different approaches (Psychiatry, Talk Theray, CBT…) are integrated within one unified discipline?
This is probably the wrong question to ask. There’s been tremendous progress, but the bulk of that progress consisted in the discipline extricating itself from the self-imposed shackles of Freud and behaviorism.
Setting aside pharmacology, the evidence-based therapy movement has been around for about a generation now. Its success has been less than resounding, principally because: (1) all types of psychotherapy turn out to be roughly on par so far as effectiveness goes, suggesting that there is no connection between having a correct theory of psychopathology/psychotherapy and effective treatment, as one might hope, and (2) it is exceedingly difficult to break the practice of psychotherapy down into its components and manipulate those components in controlled experiments.
So pretty much the only achievement of clinical psychology since Freud, is the realization that Freud was wrong? And isn’t saying that all treatments have the same power, is like saying that all treatments are no better than placebo?
As I understand it, your answer implies that clinical psychology is a scientific as astrology. I was under the impression there were more to it than that.
Not really. (Bias note, I’m an experimental psychologist, and we hate the clinicals with the fire of a thousand suns!)
I generally refer to clinical psychologists as “shamans”. Clinical psychology is basically just philosophy with some anecdotes written in a restrictive format and called “Case Studies”.
There are many areas of psychology with massive knowledge formation, but there seems to be a funny disconnect. Everything relatively easy to describe and investigate is uninteresting, and interesting stuff is super complicated. So there are some people toiling away in obscurity, uncovering crazy stuff about the brain, but no one cares, because there’s no headline in it. And there’s people running terrible studies on race, sex and politics, shouting about it on every NPR show from here to Davos, but it’s mostly bollocks.
Psychology is a very young science. Physics we’ve had for thousands of years, this one is only about a hundred years old as a systematic study. In a thousand years, I’ll bet we have some real progress.
TL:DR – If you’ve heard of a study, it’s probably shit. Science Hipster awaaaaay!
I’m a bit puzzled. Does a typical research in the modern field of clinical psychology is really just a prosing of a tale that some therapist heard from some patient? Is it basically a nonfiction literature, rather than science?
This is undoubtedly an exaggeration. There’s certainly been real progress in some areas of clinical psychology. Nosology is one– 100 years ago there was no such thing as autism or post-traumatic stress disorder. Methodology is another. Most of the clinical psychology community now at least pays lip service to the idea that their methods should be tested in controlled experiments and abandoned if disconfirmed.
Think for a minute on what a placebo for talk therapy would look like. A wait list for therapy? Sugar pills? Sitting in a room with the client but only talking about the weather? Not so obvious, is it? From what I can remember, therapy is substantially more effective than wait-list controls and at least somewhat more effective than sugar pills. But the point I was making here was a slightly different one. In medicine, there is a strong connection between the truth of our theories about a disease’s etiology and the effectiveness of treatments for that disease. The efficacy of amoxicillin in treating strep throat attests to the truth of the germ theory of strep throat, and vice versa. This sort of connection between treatment and cause doesn’t seem to exist when it comes to pathopsychology: psychotherapy based around wacky Freudian principles which we know independently to be false is just as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy. This blocks off a key route to understanding the causes of mental illness, one that was crucial in getting scientific medicine off the ground.
Nosology is one– 100 years ago there was no such thing as autism or post-traumatic stress disorder.
There are two radically different ways to parse that sentence. 🙂
Ms Fnd N A Lbry— a classic sf short story.
The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions Is it possible that a lot of disease is actually hypothyroidism based in resistance to the hormones rather than a shortage of the hormones?
Ms Fnd N A Lbry
What kind of data manager doesn’t have at least one backup?
Someone who’s trapped in a satirical short story? Someone from before when there were data managers?
I’m not sure I’m just defending a story I liked back before computers were in common use, but we might be making mistakes now which will be obvious in retrospect, and I suspect there could still be computer problems because adequate backups were assumed to be someone else’s responsibility, though probably not civilization-destroying disasters.
Nah, I liked the story, a little ridiculous but still fun.
There’s enough real world stories of people “saving time” by backing up to /dev/null
Small divisor problems with the inverse pizzicator transform, plus a really *basic* conceptual paradox with identical quantum particles, that any child could formulate, but not solve (leading to catastrophic loss of capacity in high-energy redundancy modes, when damp).
Has anyone had experience with trying to get a parent to live healthier after a medical emergency?
My mother is an obese 62 year old who has been smoking for the past 49 years. I’m reasonably sure she has moderately advanced COPD. She cannot go more than 45 minutes without a serious coughing fit. She was recently admitted to the emergency room by our family doctor for a rapid heartbeat and some other form of arrhythmia. (I am not too clear on the details, I haven’t been able to talk to the doctors caring for her yet.)
We have a family history of strokes, heart disease, diabetes and dying young. Her Mother died in her 50s her father in his early 60s and her brother at 52.
I’ve been trying to get her to quit smoking and lose weight my entire life, but I have never been able to get through to her. I was born a month premature because she couldn’t quit her smoking habit during pregnancy. I was diagnosed with asthma at age 4 and still couldn’t get my family to stop smoking around me.
I’ve tried everything I could think of growing up to get her to take care of herself, but nothing had the slightest impact. Now I’m stuck here with her death looming and I want to exhaust all options, for both her sake and my own conscience.
Any anecdotes from your own lives, or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Your mom’s health conditions sound really similar to my mom’s! My mom is younger (45), but is otherwise very similar. She’s also morbidly obese, smokes, has horrible coughing fits all the time, and has diabetes. Both of my mother’s parents died of cancer; her mom died of lung cancer probably acquired from her own status as a lifetime smoker. I’m not sure what kind of cancer her dad had, but he might have had lung cancer too, as he was also a smoker (and had diabetes, like his daughter).
I wish I had some good suggestions for you, but nothing I’ve tried to do to get my mom to stop smoking or try to lose weight has worked, and I’ve mostly given up. The frustrating thing is that I know my mom is capable of quitting smoking; she did so after I was born (but smoked throughout her pregnancy) and remained a non-smoker for the next 12 years before she picked it back up again and has been re-addicted ever since (and that was 10 years ago).
But because her original reason for quitting was a very inherently compelling one (having a newborn in the house and wanting to keep smoke away from the baby), I don’t see her stopping again unless she were to gain an equally compelling reason to do so. Judging from her age, she won’t be having any more kids (which is a good thing, since she’s not really capable of being a decent mother due largely but not exclusively to her schizophrenia), and I can’t think of anything else that could get her to stop. Even her horrible hacking cough, which must be a miserable experience, hasn’t done it. Maybe actually getting lung cancer would, but by then it would kind of be too late for quitting to make a huge difference.
She’s never successfully lost any significant amount of weight, so I’m even more hopeless about the prospect of getting her to do that. She was thin before she had me, but she’s been overweight ever since, and has been morbidly obese for probably at least a decade or more. With this I can sympathize; I’m not nearly as overweight as her, but I am overweight, so I know how hard it is to lose it and how unpleasant exercise is. And it’s even harder to lose it and keep it off. I think the only way she’d ever manage to lose it in the first place, barring something extraordinary happening, would be for her to get a gastric bypass, and even then she might just end up gaining it back.
In all likelihood, my mom will die in her 50s or 60s of something related to obesity or smoking. It really, really sucks, but I haven’t been able to figure out any way to convince her to change her behavior enough to make this outcome unlikely.
Sorry I don’t have any good advice! But I thought you might still like to hear about my experience, since it’s so similar to your own.
Anecdotally, vaping is considerably more effective than other smoking replacements. Start with a very high dose (18 or 24 mg/ml nicotine) and don’t insist on fully quitting the cigarettes – tapering off works too, if they’re a heavy smoker.
Flavors can also be important – some people find it much easier to quit when using non-tobacco flavors to disassociate, some find it easier using tobacco flavors for the exact opposite reason. Try both.
SSC SF Story of the Week #11
This week we are discussing “A Militant Peace” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell.
Next time we will discuss “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
You’re late!
Even Jaime nods.
I feel like I’m missing something with Militant Peace.
The characters are going into the conflict with an overwhelming economic, military and logistic advantage. They obviously have a ton of support.
But then the story implies that the mission is just barely accepted. Allowing some guy to hurt himself with a grenade will swing public opinion! Also, the public is indifferent to the North Koreans killing a bunch of unarmed civilians trying to get to the camp.
In the third part of the story, we’re suddenly back to not caring about polls. Mai’s actions will be seen as heroic. Punishing her would be unpopular. Only, now, the problem wasn’t actually polls. It was some kind of bizarro-Hague that’s angry about soldiers defending themselves while being attacked?
It seems inconsistent. Is this the army of dentological philosophers? If so, drop the whole polling bit. Is this a PR campaign? If so, congratulate Mai for her PR coup. Are they consequentialists? Then take actions.
I think the idea is that it wasn’t legally a war or police action etc, rather something akin to a bunch of bulletproof civilians setting up shop.
Though how they’d be legally allowed to attack military hardware even if they can’t attack solders it’s not clear.
I think the absurd part is the pretty much invincible armour.
Whenever armour tech improves someone comes up with better armour piercing rounds and they’re normally cheaper than the armour. In a world with these suits paranoid north korea would have bought or built whatever guns are needed to blast through them.
But wait, apparently NK does in fact have some future-guns as well but only use them in a very limited way to cut power.
They’re also not ready to actually fire their big guns the second the power goes out.
Also the system needed to stop incoming shells and to keep everyone not-dead apparently runs off the same power grid as the civilians electric shavers with no good backup and single points of failure which aren’t defended.
Also there’s only one of these anti-shell laser systems with no backup despite it being the single most important piece of hardware in the entire city.
Also this thing zaps shells in the air, why wouldn’t NK just switch to the shells filled with mustard gas. The city apparently doesn’t have any other defenses.
Yes, I couldn’t help but put my North Korea hat on and figure out all the ways the UN peacekeepers were going to die, or if the peacekeepers were truly invincible how their cities full of protected refugees were going to die on their watch, and if somehow even that was going to be denied “me” the UN was going to have to outright slaughter ten thousand mostly-innocent people to make it so. The story really does depend on idiot plotting in that regard.
As you note, it also requires idiot plotting on the good-guy side; I had mostly missed that. Though I did wonder at their inability to detect and neutralize an approaching self-propelled gun before it came within ten miles of the site, without requiring local power.
The power supply for defence was remarkably dumb (and I’m not a military expert by any means). They start off mentioning “thorium nuclear power plant airdrops in and gets buried into the ground, then shielded with an artillery-proof cap” and that’s sensible enough; they have a power generation system in place on the ground and it’s protected.
Then for Plot Reasons they’ve become so spectacularly successful that they’ve grown faster than anticipated, so they need back-up power. Which is supplied via laser from a dirigible. Which is simply asking for trouble:
Nobody in the pre-invasion (let’s drop all the peacekeeping crap, it’s an invasion) planning tried thinking “suppose we get twice as many as we’re anticipating? five times? ten times? how would we cope? what are our redundant systems?”
They can’t airlift in some more thorium reactors or other means of not putting their entire defence system running on a remote system which could get struck by lightning or act of God, even if the North Koreans don’t try some crazy suicide scheme of flying their jets into it?
The only reason for that set-up is to provide the rationale for Mai’s “oh noes do I spatter these guys’ brains all over the place or do I stick to peace?” dilemma, which is no dilemma really; she’s been itchy trigger-finger all the story and wanting to blow some punks away.
Again, acknowledging that she’s old-style conflict military and wants to fight the enemy the proper way which means blowing brains out, goddamn it! would have helped the story along; as it is, we’re meant to be convinced they’re all devoted to total peace but at the same time Mai is right but at the same time it was a hard choice for her but at the same time she’d do it again.
Really wanting to eat their cake and have it.
OK, this is a bit longer than I intended, but I don’t have time to make it shorter. Sorry…
For nerdish readers like myself, one of the advantages of science fiction is the pleasure of discovering a story that deals with an area of our personal or professional expertise and gets it right. The question of arranging a less than apocalyptic outcome of the North Korea problem has been a professional interest of mine for the past couple of years, and I am not pleased. Well, OK, I’ve never been terribly pleased on that front; it’s an intractable problem. But Klecha and Buckell seem to offer only base wish-fulfilment fantasy on this front. I found “A Militant Peace” to fit the mold of the worst sort of early ST:TNG episodes, wherein the Enterprise stumbles across a Strange New World whose inhabitants face a potentially interesting problem – for which there is a merely technological solution that is simple, obvious, and right, which the Federation’s emissaries can offer at negligible cost, and if the natives don’t like it, none of their weapons can hinder the deflector-shielded, transporter-equipped Enterprise and her crew anyway. The only question is whether Picard will forcefully impose the Right Solution, allowing us to feel like morally superior do-gooders by proxy, or quote the prime directive and leave them to their own devices for a different sort of moral superiority on our end.
Star Trek, at least, has a setting that allows for the sort of disparity in technology and power needed to make this sort of thing at all plausible. With North Korea, we know better. The DPRK is outnumbered, outgunned, and outclassed by its enemies to the point where it will lose any serious conflict – but only at a vast cost, paid in blood on both sides, shed at the hands of both sides. If there is any path around this reality in any of our natural lives, I haven’t seen any sign of it. Nor have Klecha and Buckell given me anything plausible to work with. They certainly don’t help their case by showing the North Korean regime with exactly the capabilities it has now – name-checking specific weapons systems to show that they’ve done their homework – while giving the Certified Good Guys nearly singularity-level technology and infrastructure. Suspension of disbelief is one thing; this is hanging disbelief by the neck until dead.
Beyond being literally unbelievable, the story is boring. What am I supposed to care about? What is the point? Is it:
1. It’s really cool to be omnipotent, because you can go around stopping all the Bad Guys and setting things right? Duh.
2. If you are omnipotent, you should stop the Bad Guys and set things right without killing anyone, because omnipotence means not having to compromise on core values? Also duh.
3. If you are omnipotent but you screw up and kill someone anyhow, you should feel bad about it, but don’t worry, you won’t be punished because everybody knows you meant well? Err…
4. It’s really cool to be omnipotent because you can go around stopping all the Bad Guys and setting things right, but the world will still be dark and gritty enough that you won’t be denied the visceral pleasure of killing a few bad guys and being quietly acknowledged as a Heroic Good Guy even if the Secretary has to officially disavow all knowledge of your actions and you have to feel a little bad about it to keep your Good Guy self-image? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The ticket to a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy. I’d rather have a story about less-than-omnipotent people struggling with real problems that don’t have trivial solutions. And if you’re going to take your problems out of the real world, show some level of understanding beyond just looking up the names of North Korean weapons in Wikipedia.
@ John Schilling
the worst sort of early ST:TNG episodes, wherein the Enterprise stumbles across a Strange New World whose inhabitants face a potentially interesting problem – for which there is a merely technological solution that is simple, obvious, and right, which the Federation’s emissaries can offer at negligible cost, and if the natives don’t like it, none of their weapons can hinder the deflector-shielded, transporter-equipped Enterprise and her crew anyway. The only question is whether Picard will forcefully impose the Right Solution, allowing us to feel like morally superior do-gooders by proxy, or quote the prime directive and leave them to their own devices for a different sort of moral superiority on our end.
Whereas in Original Star Trek, while some guest star is weighing that binary question, Kirk and the crew are finding a clever techy and/or sneaky sort of solution that makes the binary irrelevant, and implementing it before anyone catches them.
Ah, the “Militant Peace” story!
My main problem was it was a bit too fairy-tale. So our side (the Good Guys) have super-duper tech rather farther in advance than our current levels of tech, while North Korea pretty much has the same level of tech as our modern world? Okay, want to show the backwardness of the Bad Guys, fair enough.
But really – just parachute in and set up your bases in minutes? And you only get anything like a convincing fight at the end, when for plot purposes the Heroine has to make Gritty, Morally Grey-Area, But Necessary decision which will involve her getting bounced from the peacekeeping force?
And the cutesy ending with the scrap jewellery – ah, how heart-warming, the grateful natives with their charming quaint poverty showing how they love and appreciate their new masters! Yes, they’re ready now to start working in factories making cheap consumer goods for the West and the refugee camp can be easily turned into a factory town type environment where they live, eat, and sleep in the same place they do their work for the companies which sponsored the expedition and now are getting the quid pro quo in even cheaper than the Chinese labour.
I’d have preferred a slightly more cynical version: we get the mention of the expedition being sponsored by private companies as well as national governments/the UN, and the logos splashed all over everything (to provide good optics for the media coverage) as well as some mention of the sponsors back home want the Heroine bounced, given what she did.
We should have had more of that – more of the fight not being a walk in the park, more interference from the private companies, and more as to what the ultimate fate of the refugees would be. So when the regime is toppled, what happens next? The displaced people go back to where they came from?
An infrastructure that is already on the verge of collapse (the famines mentioned) even before an invasion and overthrow of what central control there was?
The people are going to need a lot of support to put the country back together. What resistance or political party do you back? Who is going to be the official “Hi, this is your new government (as declared by the U.N., Apple, Coca-Cola and Netflix)”? Who pays for this?
Yes, people of North Korea, you are all now free – free to work in sweat-shops to pay off the debt accrued by your nation for the sponsorship by private companies to liberate you. (Think the much-disliked austerity budgets here in Ireland to pay off the bondholders, as imposed on us by the troika, for a mild example. Or what happened in Greece, when Syriza’s bluff was called and they had to accept both bailouts and the conditions attached).
That, sad to say, is how I think such an intervention would go in anything like real life, if they didn’t collapse into an oligarchy of criminal gangs and corrupt officials like post-Berlin Wall collapse Eastern European countries we won’t mention by name 🙂
I was alright with the fighting being a walk in the park. If the soldiers were legitimately in serious danger from the North Korean attack, then they would have to be allowed to shoot back in order to stay alive, and from there we have Just Another Normal War. Iraq War 2: Korean Boogaloo.
The interesting question (and the interesting structure of this future military) arises because the military is 99.9% immune to enemy attacks, but they still need to do something about that last .01% before they can declare victory, because you can’t just live in a suit of armor all your life. Handling that is an interesting moral question, and if they had actually convinced me that the invading army actually had to care about their PR (rather than showing us that the entire freaking world supported it, a UN army backed up by Chinese labor and African soldiers and American megacorporations), I would have cheerfully read about the soldiers working against those restrictions.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes to mind here, now that I think about it. Iron Dome and good shelters have made Israel 99.9% immune to Hamas’s rocket attacks. But they don’t have a way to get that last .01% needed to live a normal life, not without killing unacceptable numbers of Palestinians in the process.
Bonus parallel: Israel is currently working on a laser-based rocket defense system called “Iron Beam.” I wonder how the regional picture would change if Israel could prevent rocket attacks purely through technology, rather than diplomacy?
A large percentage of the rocket attacks are already prevented from hurting anyone through technology. The reaction? Israel is using disproportionate force because it’s attacking Palestinians for attacks that aren’t all that deadly.
The West Bank wall is also technology that successfully prevents attacks (although not rocket ones). I hope I don’t have to remind you that the reaction to that was “Israel is evil for putting up a wall”.
Well, they’re prevented from killing people, but they’re still causing economic and psychological harm because people need to constantly take cover in shelters. The point-defense system in this story is so reliable you can have an entire city living normal lives under its protection.
(Thinking about it, how does that make any sense? Even if you blow up the shells, the fragments still have to land somewhere)
I was underwhelmed by “Militant Peace”. Have we all forgotten that North Korea has nukes? Even if we leave out nukes (and why should we?), I was worried that the that the military building would be massively mined. Body armor which can handle ordinary attacks might not be able to handle a huge explosion.
I don’t believe that the death or injury of one NK soldier would cause a huge publicity backlash, though I suppose the world could have become *that* anti-violence. It would be a big change.
There was IIRC an offhand mention to the super duper laser defense system shooting down North Korean missiles, which I took to mean that their nukes had been 100.00% neutralized.
I didn’t buy it, because, first, no missile defense system is going to be that good. You might actually get every nuclear missile fired out of the DPRK, but you won’t be so sure of it as to embark on an intervention so sensitive to violence that a single fatality would be intolerable. And second, because there are other ways to use nuclear weapons. I’ve played the commander of the North Korean Strategic Rocket Forces in professional wargames; we usually had manned bombers as a backup to the missiles, and we usually considered prepositioning nuclear land mines under critical bits of North Korean terrain. North Korea is riddled with tunnels and quite good at making more.
And since the story allows for the NKPA to drive military vehicles almost to the gates of the sanctuary city, they can just put a nuke inside of a tank and deliver it that way. With a kamikaze crew, or with no crew and under remote/automated control, or with no crew and human shields chained to the hull…
We should never, ever leave North Korea’s nuclear weapons out of the equation when trying to figure out how to deal with North Korea.
I find it utterly impossible to interpret the concept of “sealioning” as anything other than playground status bullshit.
“EEEWWW THE STINKY PEOPLE TRIED TO TALK TO ME!”
It’s probably a function of my own experiences, of course. But it doesn’t escape me that the people using it are ALWAYS in possession of significant social capital of one form or another. not to mention the routine hypocrisy. “How dare this icky subhuman try to point out where I’ve been wildly generalising? Now I’m going to go and give another subhuman a piece of my mind!”
I think the condemnation of “sealioning” is mostly misguided, but…
(from the author’s comments)
That doesn’t sound like “eww, icky people!” to me.
The blogpost in question bears zero resemblance to the concept of “sealioning” as it is used either in practice or in the original comic. I consider it a total and complete irrelevance.
Also, to be clear – I don’t think that this is a rational or even necessarily a fair response on my part. I suspect I’m not actually capable of responding to this any other way.
motte/bailey
“Setting out to publicly humiliate somebody should never be the aim of a conversation or debate.”
Not really the world we live in, though, right?
It’s a normative claim. To refute claims of the form “you should never do X because doing X is wrong”, you need to show that either a) there’s no moral reason not to do X, or b) there is a moral reason to do X.
I mean that the other side is may do that to you anyway. Unilateral vs multilateral disarmament.
I’m confused. Other people have said the typical example of sealioning is “I don’t like Bulgarians”, and then a random Bulgarian coming in and saying: “Why not?”
How does that relate to trying to publicly humiliate someone and destroy their image?
So, let’s say a rationalist mentions their dislike of “SJWs” on Tumblr, either in a sort of “personal musings” post or in a friendly dialogue with a fellow rationalist. That happens sometimes, right?
Obviously, if pro-SJ Tumblr users unleashed an avalanche of abuse upon this person, that would be wrong. But what about an avalanche of polite questions and demands to justify this dislike? What about finding the rationalist’s Twitter account and tweeting more questions at them, and posting the same questions as comments on the rationalist’s WordPress blog, and inviting all their Tumblr followers to do the same?
That kind of thing might be what they’re getting at. Anyway, you’re probably better off reading the discussion in the comments of the post.
I think there’s definitely a subtle clash-of-cultures thing here. I personally pride myself on holding Correct, Defensible Positions, and the idea of the Other Side coming to talk to me about them sounds great! On an instinctive level, the idea of stopping them just sounds like people are afraid they’ll end up being proven wrong.
But … c’mon, we all know people who would definitely seize on this to follow people around, repeating the same arguments, and wouldn’t learn a damn thing because they’d either misinterpret or immediately dismiss everything the Other Side has to say. People I agree with! People who hold positions which are, in my opinion, objectively correct! That doesn’t make them smart, or charitable, or necessarily polite!
It’s not about avalanches of abuse, exactly – it’s about avalanches of *questions*. Stupid, unasked-for questions posed to a person who never asked for the discussion, and who will now be trumpeted by our metaphorical sea-lion as not even having any arguments to back them up.
I can see how that would be annoying, even if you do in fact have evidence to back your position up.
Muga Sofer,
Would you ever say “the questions you’re asking are far too dumb to be worth engaging with. I have good answers to all of them, but explaining them to you while you’re being both disrespectful and intentionally dense would be a waste of my time. Perhaps if you came off differently, I’d do you the favor of answering”?
I think there’s a difference between saying you don’t like someone, which is how anti-sealions like to characterize the sorts of comments they were making, and accusing someone of harming people, endangering them, and of committing crimes, which was a large part of what anti-sealions were saying about sealions.
Your example doesn’t quite match up, because in your example, a rationalist says they don’t like SJWs. Not liking someone does not require the same level of justification as accusing them of harming others in a way that merits legal action or a strong community response against them. Your comment has a rationalist say “I don’t like SJWs” and respondents saying, “Why not?” This is tricky because the type of justification, “Why not” demands is also different from the type of justification “Demonstrate your statement is true” demands. The rationalist is not, strictly, making a statement about SJWs; she’s making a statement about herself, namely, that she dislikes them. Your respondent is not asking her to prove that she dislikes SJWs, because when someone makes a statement about their own feelings, we typically don’t expect proof. Instead, you have the respondents asking for a reason for why the rationalist feels the way they do; but no one needs a reason to dislike someone. Even she is allowed to be irrational. Now, if she wants to provide a reason, that’s great. If she doesn’t that’s fine, and people are allowed to then think she’s not as great a rationalist as she claims, if she can’t articulate a reason for disliking someone. Or to not think that. This is all fine.
What the rationalist cannot do is say, “All SJWs murdered a girl in 1990” and then ask for that statement to be treated the same as “I just don’t like them.” That statement is a different type. First of all, it is a positive claim about the world, not just about her own feelings. Sure, she can say it’s just a way of saying that she feels like all SJWs murdered someone in 1990, but it isn’t. She is, in this case, making a claim about something having happened, and these sorts of claims are the ones we evaluate on the strength of the evidence, and ones for which the person making the assertion conventionally bears the burden of proof. Don’t couples therapists still encourage patients to make “I” statements rather than “You” statements for essentially this reason?
Secondly, “SJWs all murdered a girl in 1990” is a serious accusation, distinct from a non-value-laden factual claim like “SJWs live in Texas” and worlds apart from “I” statements about one’s own feelings about people. These statements require evidence-based justifications, because they are potentially actionable. Your example is different. Some rationalist on Tumblr saying she dislikes SJWs does not justify she or I or anyone else take action against SJWs. It does not imply that everyone else ought to shun them (they can if they want, but that’s on them). It does not mean that anti-people-disliked-by-rationalists activists should themselves mob SJWs, send people identifying as SJWs death threats, get them SWATted, etc. And it does not justify investigating SJWs for the crime of being disliked by a rationalist. And since no one should reasonably believe any of those things are justified by the rationalist’s dislike; that rationalist cannot be held responsible for people doing those things on account of her expressing her dislike. We all share this belief, I think.
When someone makes a serious accusation against an SJW, then while it may not be the norm in our own community to respond, in a place like Tumblr and definitely Twitter, people are almost expected to shun the accused-and-therefore-guilty group, and it is way too common that activists form mobs, make threats, dox, even SWAT people accused of certain transgressions and try to push them out of the website’s community. These are some of their crude but nevertheless customary forms of justice. Someone involved in communities in which this happens (Tumblr to some extent, but especially Twitter) can be reasonably expected to know that their accusation has consequences. And again, regardless of the subcommunity, when the accusation rises to one of potentially criminal or at least tortious behavior, there are legal consequences. [I think your analogy also has some problems in that you picked as your “disliker” a member of a community where vigilantism is right out, while in the original case the accuser was from a community where these responses to crimes and anathema behaviors are very much on the table and well-known; and a rationalist seems likewise much more amenable to evidencing their feelings or accusations anyway, but I’m trying to roll with this]. In the original case, the accuser could be expected to know that their accusation potentially subjected the accused sealions to retaliation, per the norms of the community.
When the original sealions asked their original accusers to back up their accusations of potentially actionable wrongdoing (again, not just personal feelings), the accusers could not do so. And may have felt embarrassed. But they continued to make the accusations. They certainly did not retract them. This continued to subject the sealions to being popularly perceived as harmful, dangerous, even criminal–having committed acts that justified retaliation against them.
The sealion comic tries to turn that situation–one in which people were accused of serious wrongdoing which, under community norms, justified retaliating against them–into a situation like the one you describe. It transforms an accusation into a statement of personal feelings. A term and a framework is useless for understanding an event like this if it cannot make that distinction.
There are absolutely grey areas, and we need to try to negotiate these boundaries. Part of the difficulty is that in a place like Twitter and in communities like those of anti-sealion activists, different norms prevail than in meatspace. When people are accused of crimes in those communities, the communities respond in a different ways, often harsher, less organized ways with fewer checks and balances or protections for the accused. And different things qualify as crimes in those communities. Members of communities that say “all X should be called out and shunned, and Twitter should not allow them a platform to speak” need to recognize, then, that saying “sealions are X” means saying to your followers, “get the sealions out of here.” So sealions have every right to demand their accuser prove the accusation.
Yes, getting mobbed off Twitter following an accusation is not the same as getting thrown in jail in real life. It’s just online. But then, so is the sealion’s response. You can’t say your accusation against the sealion has no real-world consequences, and then when he doggedly responds in the same virtual space as you accused him in, say he’s essentially stalking you and invading your house. You can get offline. If “you can get offline” is an unsatisfying response, so is “you can get offline to escape the Twitter mob that came after you after I accused you of hurting people.”
There are grey areas, but the concept of sealioning actively prevents us from understanding them. Because whereas in a place like this, we’re good at drawing relevant distinctions between concepts and determining how to judge individual cases, the sealion comic and the term it created functions in the complete opposite way: by confusing relevant distinctions, conflating ethically distinct behaviors, and severing the concept of “sealioning” from the context it mischaracterized in order to coin it.
@ Zaxlebaxes
I chose the example groups to make the idea more psychologically accessible for Scott, not to express an opinion on the worker ant debate. Also, as far as I could see, people on both sides of that interminable flamewar sincerely considered themselves the besieged underdogs, so your model of the anti-ants might be inaccurate.
tl;dr: You’re trying to persuade Nita Translate that the source text is wrong (it’s like Google Translate, but for online subcultures). This does not seem like a good use of your time.
If you’re asking “Why not?” because you think they might have valid reasoning and are genuinely interested in what it might be, that’d be one thing.
But more plausibly, you’re asking “Why not?” because you are very sure they don’t have a good reason, and you want to highlight this to third parties, by showing how they’re unable to give you a good reply.
And if you repeat it, and say things about how you’re owed an answer, and how you’re “just asking them to engage with you”, and so on, you’re repeating that effect each time, until you get sick of it or they admit their error or they react angrily and you proclaim victory or whatever.
Now, the original person who said “I don’t like Bulgarians” was being a jerk. But I don’t think the second person gets to pretend they were engaging in a honest process of intellectual inquiry- they were already pretty damned sure of the answer, they just wanted to demonstrate it to everyone else, and socially punish the original person for making statements they couldn’t support.
Presuming it did repeat more than once, I don’t think I’d regard anyone in that exchange as coming off as a nice person. I think it’s probably an unreasonable expectation of virtue to expect the random person to be nice, though, and personally feel that if people sealioning you is a major problem for you you might be way too prone to sweeping statements about other people in public social media.
Keep in mind that almost any generalization can probably be interpreted as an over-generalization. OTOH if you just assume that by “white cis men are the worst” they mean “white cis men are statistically over-represented in the group of people I consider the worst” it’s a lot less galling (not necessarily true but it should induce a lot less anger). Note that the poor writing required for the more precise version.
Regarding communist redistribution, you need to subtract private investment as it would not happen and state would have to compensate.
But the investment is already subtracted by the time you get to redistributing “profits,” right?
Is it? I am no expert on accounting or goverment statistics, but I do not think it would be.
It is, but it’s amortized. In many cases, depreciation for tax purposes is so accelerated that you can damn near expense all of your capital expenditures in the year they’re made, though. I think it’s a little ridiculous to say private investment would not happen. Companies aren’t going to stop buying equipment and labor because you take their accounting profits. Plenty of companies don’t make any accounting profit anyway, with Amazon being the most obvious example of a really large and successful company that does that. If you go beyond this and take capital gains from equity-holders as well, then you’re going to push everyone to a regime of pure debt-financing, which is a very bad idea because debt holders have much less of a stake in a company’s success than equity holders. I actually think the proximate response from companies with the ability to a regime of taking all their profits would be more investment so they don’t have any profits. If there are no feasible operating assets to purchase, they’ll just buy Leer jets and spas for their VPs.
There are reinvested profits, but there also is investment in starting a new company or issuing additional stock, which I think is separate from profit altogether.
Probably the clearest way to put it is that investment is in the past by the time you get to redistributing profits; by doing that, you’re essentially confiscating the original investment, which was made solely for the purpose of buying a claim to the stream of profits which the state is now collecting instead. It’s the sort of thing that only works once: going forward, no one is going to be willing to invest on those terms, and the state is going to have to provide any capital that’s needed.
There’s a fanfic called Princess Luna’s Suicide Solutions in which Princess Luna goes around rescuing ponies who attempt suicide and making them her slaves. Her rationale is that they obviously cannot function and run their lives themselves, and that they threw their lives away when they tried to kill themselves anyway, so she is going to own them from now on and make sure their abilities are put to good use.
I’m not sure this would work in the real world (for one thing, our economy is now efficient and complex enough that even healthy and functional people are having trouble creating enough value to earn a living, let alone suicidally depressed people), but I still found the idea incredibly charming, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if we took people with nothing to lose and drafted them into the military, the peace corps, the red cross, teach for america, or whatever over such organization was best suited for their talents, that they may receive structure and purpose while contributing to the world.
While we are on the subject of ponies, Ted Cruz has endorsed Applejack for best pony. Ever ready for some hard-hitting journalism, Brietbart asks the question in everyone’s mind: “Having successfully chosen the most conservative pony, he has placed Donald Trump in a difficult position. What pony can the GOP frontrunner possibly endorse as a response? Rarity? Fluttershy? Pinkie Pie?” I’m going with Filthy Rich.
And speaking of The Donald, Trump has apparently grown so powerful that even the Effective Altruists are considering breaking their vow not to interfere in the politics of man in order to stop him. Eliezer Yudkowsky chimes in with an ominous warning: “You will not like the allies this brings you 2 years later.”
As far as I can tell, the military is already filled to the brim with people who hate having no purpose in life and want to find one in that way. I find it a little sad that it seems to be one of its draws, but then I’m also bad at thinking of some better way to draw people in; organisations such as it or the charities you mentioned have more corruption scandals than I am comfortable with, and I doubt adding an influx of morose people is going to help much in that regard.
Highly amused by how many people in that comment thread I know from other contexts despite not being particularly into EA.
Great idea! Give me a gun and enslave me. I promise I will shoot only the enemy and totally not the people who enslaved me and everyone who defended the system.
How did the historical record of slave armies turn out?
If by ‘slave armies’ you mean ‘conscription’, then in terms of loyalty to their slavemasters, they’re almost impeccable.
Is the record of conscripts better or worse than the record of mameluks and janissaries?
@Douglas Knight: It’s hard to compare, because for a couple hundred years plus the world’s premier militaries have either had peacetime conscription or have brought conscription in during major wars.
The closest thing to slave soldiers were conscripts from minority ethnic/national groups – while, say, German troops performed well in WWI, Austro-Hungarian troops performed significantly less well, due in large part to a gap in performance between Austrian and Hungarian units, and units made up of the other national groups in the Austro-Hungarian empire. They didn’t feel connected to the leadership, often officers came from a different national group and spoke a different language than the enlisted men, etc.
Pretty good, actually. The usual failure mode seems not to be rebellion but rather the army growing into an independent political force and getting involved in palace coups, slave status notwithstanding.
Although everywhere I can think of a slave army per se being built, it’s been in a place and time where non-slave standing armies are rare or unknown, which provides a ready-made reason for the force to punch above its political weight. There are more modern forces whose freedoms are partial or dubious, like Russian convict battalions or press-ganged British sailors or third-world militias of many stripes, but they’re usually built around a hard core of careerists or ideologues or both.
Isn’t becoming an independent political force and getting involved in palace coups, what rebellion is?
Rebellion is denying the power of the state, coup is seizing it for yourself.
Rebellion generally implies some sort of attempt to overthrow or exclude the existing power structure from outside; a coup implies subverting it from the inside. A palace coup is specifically one where you’re kicking out the old guy in favor of someone that’s already pretty important: in a monarchy, as most of these were, that’d be a close relative of the king. (And not, for example, an officer of the slave army we’re talking about.)
In Game of Thrones terms, Cersei’s plan at the end of season 1 was a coup; Renly was planning a coup and changed plans to rebellion when he couldn’t get the support he needed; and all the other players went straight to rebellion.
The outside view predicts that you would in fact do exactly that, since, empirically, draftees are not exactly known for going postal after being handed loaded rifles.
And for the more traditional definition of “slave”, it was not unheard of for black slaves in the antebellum South to be told that their owners weren’t going to be giving them free meat this week but they were welcome to use his spare rifle on Sunday afternoon. Using the rifle for any purpose other than hunting, pretty much was unheard of.
This is what slavery is, in its purest form. Something I find almost unspeakably disconcerting.
Empirically, draftees are not drawn from suicidal “they don’t know what to do with their lives anyway” demographics.
(As a side note, I find the infantile pony shit unspeakably creepy)
The phrasing of your side note is unwelcome on this blog.
I say this as someone who never misses the opportunity to take a shot at that fandom on 4chan.
‘The phrasing of your side note is unwelcome on this blog.’
I find it amusing that you fret about phrasing, but not about the rationalization of slavery that began the conversation.
It’s a good thing I don’t care about the opinion of people with that mindset.
Which means you’re missing the two basic points of this blog: charity over ridicule, and meta- over object-level issues.
‘Which means you’re missing the two basic points of this blog’
Perhaps. Yet, strangely, I don’t feel motivated to cater to the tastes and preferences of slavery rationalizers.
@ Hedonic Treader
The preference for kindness is Scott’s. The preference for slavery is Jaime’s. Two different people.
You realize that this is literally how the USMC (and many other ‘elite’ military branches) work do you not? Consider the following video and the sort of person who would find it’s message appealing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inSzBLaTiNI
The obvious choice is Rainbow Dash. Rainbow Dash is a winner.
This is tough, because as an orange pony with a cowlick of blonde hair, Applejack is definitely closest to the Donald in appearance. But Rainbow Dash in personality, for sure.
Hmmm… which gets me thinking:
Twilight=Jeb!
Fluttershy=Ben Carson
Rarity=Rubio
Pinkie=??
But for studiousness outside of politics, Carson is Twilight.
Pinkie is the fan favorite wildcard character, which makes her the Donald.
Applejack has the family farm, which makes her Jeb! And as the Sword of Chiang’s successor, Rubio is Apple Bloom.
Rainbow Dash is thusly Cruz.
Fluttershy is Kasich???
Rarity: class focused, but more of a self-made blue blood than a legacy one. No idea.
I’d go with Spike for Jeb.
1. Could you explain how this can be “incredibly charming”? Since you mentioned real-world implementation, I’m specifically curious about real-world (i.e., not kink-based) reasons.
2. I’m not sure why Luna bothers with the speech, anyway. According to the author, all ponies are already
slavesproperty:This finding might upset some British people, I’m afraid 🙁
Uhm… I don’t know how to put it into words? I dunno, I feel like I’m being asked to explain how puppies can be cute or how french fries can be tasty.
Follow-up questions: Were you raised in a Christian family? How do you feel about Christianity?
I was raised as a Catholic in a Catholic family in a Catholic country.
Policywise, I feel that certain forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Mormonism, are a net positive for civilization. Personally, I think that I would be much better off if I believed in one of these forms of Christianity, but I just can’t get over the part where they are simply not true.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks 🙂
Personally, I find 24/7 “slavery” arrangements sketchy in terms of psychological safety even when they are completely consensual, so actual, non-consensual enslavement seems horrifying (even if it’s motivated by “love” or something along those lines).
I know I’m likely to get banned yet again for this comment, and I really am throwing rocks from a glass house by shaming weird creepy people[1] like myself…
…but have you considered: jesus fucking christ ughhhhh. What the FUCK.
[1] like… I would totally be okay with this as d/s *roleplay*, even when used for support by an actually suicidal/depressed person – something still considered weird by the mainstream, and actually with a lot of ethics stuff to hash out, and needing a big investment of responsibility and good communication…
…but that’s worlds apart, dude.
In conclusion: okay-ish as a weird kink thing on a personal basis, not okay to actually apply this whole mode of thinking to unconsenting individuals. Like, you really ought to unfuck your premises.
Seriously. “Charming”? WTF?
You probably know this, but your CURRENT YEAR reaction is pretty much the kind of response jaime hopes to elicit.
I can’t believe I’m agreeing with multiheaded over jaime but you’re exactly right. I’m all for calm, rational discussion but sometimes you have to say “seriously, what the fuck!?”. Slavery is not charming, even if dressed up in the aesthetics of princesses and ponies. That’s probably worse actually.
This is the guy that likes to repost James Donald screeds in here so no one will be bereft of his wisdom even though he’s banned. Nothing at all should surprise you.
I’m sorry if this is moving into personal territory, but we can explain both of those; they are superstimuli that hack ancient, ancestral directives, around babies and food.
And just as some people over-collect cats or give themselves hypertension with too-salty food, finding the use of mind-control magic to enslave suicidal people charming feels like an adaptation around tribal leaders being Strong and In Charge for the Good of All taken to a bad place.
Or, OK, different example. I like garlic. When I cook recipes with garlic, I generally do a simple substitution of “head” for “clove”. But while I do consider garlic tasty, I also am aware that the level of garlic I consider pleasant, perhaps verging on too strong is well into the territory of causing actual physical pain for people without my palette. Furthermore, I can enjoy my own cooking and still recognize that most other people wouldn’t.
Is it clear to you that your preference for…well, whatever is being satisfied with Luna in these stories, is well into the chewing-the-raw-cloves territory for other people?
@Nita:
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/on-consensual-power-dynamics/
I also have the last comment on that page, which explains some of the appeal I find in the concept. There’s a serenity in security, knowing that someone has your best interests at heart, and will direct you towards that ideal outcome. It’s the security that there is no unknown. (Or that the unknown is Not My Problem)
After all, the drive towards truth is partially motivated by the promise that once truth is divined, we can devise solutions to things with known beneficial results. So here we have the fantasy that someone has the answers, and so we don’t need to know those answers ourselves. It’s the certainty that we are doing good.
No, I understand where the appeal comes from in the consensual case. I also understand the appeal of sex, food and shelter — but that doesn’t make me like rape, force-feeding and imprisonment any better.
Unfortunately, there’s no evidence (in what I’ve read of the story) that Luna has this guy’s best interests at heart — only that she considers his “potential” a valuable resource.
Fair enough, since I haven’t read the story in question. And I would definitely be side-eyeing someone for whom the “charm” is being on the enslaving end.
Obviously, the tension in whether or not any hypothetical omniscient benevolent being is actually so is what drives those who reject religion, even when they have the temperament where it’s their lotus. It’s just too good to be true.
Thankfully, that’s one of the things fiction is for.
Ponyslaves idea seems bad given that a major reason for suicide is to escape suffering – presumably this will only allow it to continue or even make it worse.
The idea is that there are alternative ways to escape suffering that don’t involve your death, and if you weren’t suicidally depressed, you would choose those instead.
The ponyslaves method is a very direct approach – “This will reduce your suffering, so I’ll make you do it whether you like it or not” – but every way of preventing suicides, even a simple hotline, could be described as “finding a non-fatal way for them to deal with their suffering.”
Especially given that Filthy Rich is actually a positive character. But Milo, confirmed Trump supporter, also has Applejack as a favorite.
…dude.
“You are not capable of managing your own life, therefore I will manage it for you. My ideas of what your life should be used for are better, and you will under compulsion fulfill them from now on, because I feel that you gave up the right to manage your own life when you considered/attempted suicide.”
Am I getting the position right? This is charming?
Sounds nice to me.
/sarcasm tag missing there?
a lot of things missing
The reasoning “you can’t manage your own life, so we can manage it for you” is one of those clever wordplay pithy sayings that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. You don’t know the suicide isn’t for a rational reason or that it shows a difference in priorities rather than mismanagement. Even if it does show mismanagement, all you know is that it shows mismanagement at one point in their life–why should that mean they can’t manage their entire remaining lifespan?
Not to mention the conflict of interest when you decide that someone mismanaged their own life–an inherently subjective decision–and also benefit from one side of that decision.
I haven’t read the Pony stuff, but what I can imagine sounding nice in certain situations is the idealized trope of someone (usually a lady in a bodice-ripper), giving up her complicated problems in the world and joining a nunnery. *
Nobody can bug her for help because the nunnery now has all her money, and her worldly power (well, anyway she doesn’t have it any more). She’s inside walls, protected from outside contacts.
But I’d want a contract saying the only work I have to do is flower gardening in a big big garden of always perfect weather, and embroidery, if and when I felt like it. (And I could go free anytime too, incognito, with the outside world thinking I’m still safely cloistered.)
* And the nunnery actually solves those outside problems with money and/or family counseling; Sister Flora Poste.
Leaving aside the Altruism part of campaigning for Hillary Clinton, is it really Effective? If you wanted to influence US government policy, is that really the most rational use of your time and money? It really seems like the “buying videogames for sick kids” of political action.
To the movement’s credit, most of the people in the comments seem to be opposed to this plan, so it’s less “the Effective Altruists are considering” and more “one fool on a public Facebook page is considering”.
It was, technically, a question about whether they should go ahead and research the answer to the question of whether it was effective, in their role at 80000 Hours. Rather than just polling the group about whether it was effective and thinking it was.
I think it was good that they decided otherwise, though.
I’m glad that for now, the Effective Altruists have agreed that the situation is not yet dire enough for them to break their vows.
(That is my favourite summary of that EA Facebook group conversation. Although I would think that, since I was in it.)
I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if we took people with nothing to lose and drafted them into the military, the peace corps, the red cross, teach for america, or whatever over such organization was best suited for their talents
As a sometimes suicidally-depressed person, I can only say that it would be a very bad idea. “You are indeed valued and loved, and to prove that, we are going to make you do compulsory volunteer work! Yes, just like the guys in prisons on the road crews picking up litter! We care about you that much, we won’t even put you in a paying job, we’re going to run voluntary organisations on indentured labour!”
You can imagine the levels of enthusiasm and commitment that would engage. Coercion, even sugar-coated coercion, will not make a depressed person feel better; indeed, it will only reinforce feelings that they’re worth nothing – if work such as the military and the red cross and volunteering becomes identified as “the scut work the wackos do when the government makes them do it or else lose their welfare payments”, how much social status will it retain? How would you feel, when asked “So what do you do?” if the answer was “Oh, I work for the Red Cross” and everyone knows that means “tried and failed to kill yourself loser”?
Giving very depressed people, who may even have tried to commit suicide, mandatory ‘work’ that is seen as low-status, which will not help their self-esteem, and that then involves access to guns (as in the volunteer military which would probably be something more like a reserve force or national guard) does not sound like the best idea.
If it really was something that was seen as beneficial to society and not as “get the lazy bums off welfare”, that might be different. But would it be?
Ignoring that I find the proposed scheme incredibly morally awful….
A non-trivial fraction of people do really really well when placed into a regimented environment where they just have to do what they’re told as long as the people giving orders aren’t totally nuts.
This is sounding more and more like the discussion about mental institutions from the Reverse Voxsplaining post
Don’t get me wrong, for the majority it would be awful but some people thrive when they can sit back, stop stressing and rest assured that someone else is sorting things out.
Also, I stress again that I consider the proposed scheme morally awful. It simply being morally awful doesn’t mean I should pretend it has no upsides.
Well, I’m still for the general idea of making my charity dollars do the most work they can, but the apparent seriousness of all those posters has prompted me to rethink my general pro-EA stance. I’ll rethink it for a few days.
Why is all the pony fanfic I hear about weird and twisted and incompatible with cute cartoon ponies?
The show is made for little girls. The fanfic is made for adults.
Specifically, the kind of adults that are very invested on a show about cute cartoon ponies made for little girls.
Yeah, okay, this anon is getting really annoying.
Come on, it was an open shot with the keeper on the floor! (replace with your favourite sport or videogame analogy)
To make the point more defensible, though:
Is it not true that the bulk of the adult MLP fandom is quite atypical?
Is it not true that MLP fanfiction, by adults or otherwise, is more frequently “pretty out there” than that of other fandoms? I mean, you start with Fallout Equestria and shit just keeps getting weirder.
There is non creepy stuff;
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/20685/Sunny-Skies-All-Day-Long
It reads like an episode of the show that was never broadcast.
Also “adult but noncreepy”
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/3270/sparkles-law
—
It is the day of the Summer Sun Celebration, and Princess Celestia is coming to Ponyville. Twilight Sparkle is overseeing preparations yet again, and has meticulously planned every last detail to ensure that everything is perfect for her mentor’s arrival. Nothing is going to go wrong.
Except when the big day comes, Twilight has gotten four hours of sleep and Fluttershy is nowhere to be found. Pinkie Pie sets off after her with nothing but a dark coat and the voice of a chain-smoking stallion, and the Apples and the Carrots are at each other’s throats while Rainbow Dash is attempting to fill in for Fluttershy.
As her plans collapse around her and Ponyville descends into chaos, Twilight Sparkle must focus on obtaining the one thing that can set everything right: the all-powerful, awe-inspiring magic of caffeine.
—
All fandoms have their creepy side. There’s nothing special about bronies in this regard.
As the one who posted the sealion thing to the sub, let me clarify that I only said it was “relevant” to the SSC post, not similar. It’s relevant in the sense of “when can/should we shut down discussion”.
The disagreement doesn’t seem to be that sealioning is actually good, but over the standard of evidence needed to conclude that someone’s sealioning.
The sealioner described is not informed and presenting conflicting information, they’re uninformed and asking questions maliciously.
The author tried to explain how to tell, but doesn’t seem to have done such a good job.
I view this as a subset of your post. You’re talking about times when outsiders with little knowledge ask questions that have already been answered. They’re talking about the subset of those that are malicious.
(They also seem to be an example of the ” not a 101 space” you referenced.)
Regarding the Bulgarian example: it’s the difference between
“Here are statistics showing that Bulgarian test scores and employment rates are above average” and “why do you think that”, when in the second case, a simple search will turn up all the literature showing that indeed Bulgarians perform worse.
Conversely, Scott’s suggested norms also seem like they can shut down the Bulgarian case. ” you don’t have to debate on anyone’s schedule”.
What about, “Bulgarians collectively murdered an American girl in 1990; the ones who didn’t do the act covered for the ones who did by failing to turn them in.” And “If you Bulgarians do a simple Google search, you can indeed find evidence in the form of my earlier accusation and accusations by my friends that you murdered an American girl in 1990, so the fact you are asking for evidence proves that you did not take the time to look up my previous accusation, and this is not a 101 space for learning about my accusations against you”? Also you’re yelling this loudly while walking in Times Square with your friend.
Every time one says or thinks of the concept of sealioning, one needs to remember that the original context was not an academic debate about sealions or Bulgarians, but a set of serious accusations made against sealions/Bulgarians on a public medium, which dugongs/anti-Bulgars continued making publicly while complaining about being asked repeatedly to justify them.
I think we may have our first documented case of leftist dogwhistle apologism.
You need to chill, man.
The GGs are so tiresome. No one knows WTF they want exactly, just that they are super pissed off. And if you ask you get pointed to a dozen different websites with poorly written screeds intermixed with weird screenshots. They are almost as bad as OWS.
Hey millennials, if you want you movements to actually change things learn the goddamn basics of public relations.
>The GGs are so tiresome. No one knows WTF they want exactly
They’re an anti-entryism movement. “Ethics in Games Journalism” and “Harrassing women and drive the out of gaming” are just propaganda from different sides of the aisle.
>No one knows WTF they want exactly, just that they are super pissed off.
Among the identifiable goals of that crowd:
1. To play games they enjoy, and to see such games produced, rather than what some ideologues would like produced and played.
2. To read game reviews that bear resemblance to objective assessment, rather than ideological poppycock or crony back-scratching.
3. To belong to the “gamer” identity without being decried as very probably the absolute worst.
My, that’s a lot of sealions horking in my house.
HELP! HELP! I’M BEING HARASSED ON THE INTERNETS!
Madoka Magica: Rebellion is now on Netflix.
(It’s the third of the Madoka movies. The first two are movie adaptations of the TV series. Rebellion is the actual sequel. So you can watch the TV series, and then skip to Rebellion)
Anyone want to discuss the movie’s take on: (rot13’d for expectation spoilers in the bullet points, and then full spoilers in the paragraph below)
–tnfyvtugvat
–gur ebyr bs zrzbel va vqragvgl/ntrapl (naq gur zbenyvgl/rguvpf gurerbs)
–jverurnqvat
–gur cbegenlny bs engvbanyvgl naq hgvyvgnevnavfz va Xlhorl
Gur guvat gung vagrerfgrq zr vf ubj Ubzhen, jura yrsg jvgu whfg gur zrzbel bs Znqbxn, sbhaq gur ynolevaguny jverurnqvat gb or qvfgnfgrshy, senzvat guvatf va grezf bs gurve qhgl nf zntvpny tveyf, naq Znqbxn’f fnpevsvpr nf gur hygvzngr hcubyqvat bs gung qhgl.
Ohg bapr pbasebagrq jvgu Znqbxn, fur znxrf ab nggrzcgf gb vairfgvtngr jurgure Znqbxn vf n pbafgehpgvba be abg, naq yrncf sbe gur punapr gb fjvgpu sebz ure “ubabe ure fnpevsvpr guebhtu bhe qhgvrf” fgnapr gb “lnl jverurnqvat,” xabjvat shyy jryy gung guvf vf pbagvatrag ba Znqbxn’f bja fgnapr orvat pbagvatrag ba zrzbel. Naq guvf orsber Ubzhen pbasvezf ure bja jvgpu fgngr, fb vg’f abg na “rzoenpr gur pbaabgngvbaf bs rivy bs zl jvgpu/qrzba fgngr” guvat. Fb gung vaqvpngrf gung vg jnfa’g ure npghnyyl hcqngvat ure cevbef, ohg ybbxvat sbe na rkphfr gb erghea gb ure byq “erterffvba nf cebgrpgvba” fgengrtl?
Ok, I want to do a serious linguistic analysis on ROT 13 now.
Does it comply with typical grammatical rules, perhaps with a decent transformation? Are the pronunciations simple enough when it comes to languages?
Could you create a plausible movie alien language simply by reading ROT 13 and putting a voice filter on it, with it taking awhile for people to catch on?
Could a language successfully be extended after ROT 13’ing a book of moderate size?
>Does it comply with typical grammatical rules, perhaps with a decent transformation?
Given that it is a substitution cipher for English, it should comply exactly with English’s grammatical rules. Whether said rules can be considered typical is admittedly a separate question
Ok, not “linguistic-grammatical” analysis. But pronouncing it the way it reads, at least while using normal English pronunciation rules, can natural man extend this into a spoken language decently consistently?
How malleable is the young mind with its natural language learning capabilities to pick up a language designed to be horrible to pronounce, but still conveys valid information?
At the point at which the grammar and words are the exact same as English, there’s less incentive to not just use English. Some of the motivations to learn something like Klingon or Elvish comes from the fun of puzzle-solving their unique grammars, in conjunction with vocabulary whose etymology can serve their own grammatical functions, and words aren’t one-to-one translatable. The gap from other languages justifies their existence.
“designed to be horrible to pronounce” is relative
Most rot13’d words won’t have vowels in normal places, because AEIOU becomes NRVBH. So it’s a little difficult to “pronounce it the way it reads.” Most words will be lumps of consonants held together with schwas and glottal stops.
Also, because of this, there’s going to be a lot of homophones and other words that are hard to understand when heard (not to mention the ones that are just hard to pronounce). If I say “funk,” did I mean “fnq” (sad)? Or “fnk” (sax)? “phq” (cud)? Hard to tell.
These aren’t insurmountable problems, any more than homophones are in English, but I would expect your language to be much harder to learn and speak than a normal one.
Rot13 looks too unpronounceable to be used as a fictional language. Maybe if you rotated vowels and consonants separately.
In the anime Hataraku Maō-sama the fictional language is a substitution cipher on English, with vowels kept identical and consonants mostly reversed: B = Z, C = Y, etc. The odd thing is it’s an English cipher in the original Japanese version, so the makers had to translate, substitute, and then transliterate back for the voice actors to read the lines.
Also, in the video game Final Fantasy X there’s a language that’s a cipher on whatever language you’re playing the game in. As your character learns the language more and more letters get translated for you in the captions.
Apparently Babylon 5 includes a substitution cipher language, as well.
The FFX language is called Al Bhed.
A snobby linguist will tell you that when laypeople discuss “language”, what they probably mean is “lexicon”. I.e. substituting different words into an English dictionary doesn’t create a new language, it just creates a new encoding of English. What “creating a new language” really entails is creating a new grammar; ROT13 doesn’t change any grammar rules.
Though experiment. If your web browser were to encode your comment in ASCII instead of UTF-8, did you create a new language? What about if you changed the font from Verdana to Wingdings?
*Thought experiment.
Depending on the characters contained in a comment, encoding it in ASCII instead of UTF-8 may be impossible.
ROT13 looks sort of like Zdetl.
I love how everyone is discussing rot13 instead of discussing Madoka.
Which is kind of disappointing, since the normal places to discuss anime all honed in on the fandom and storytelling aspects, which I found tedious.
Given that some of the issues of the movie are relevant to this community, (wireheading especially) I though it could be interesting to use as a springboard.
Alright, I’ll actually talk about Madoka. This is a little late in this thread, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but…
Madoka’s stance is contingent on her memories, yes, but isn’t Homura’s as well? She had no memory of what was going on in the Labyrinth, but once she broke out of it, she remembered why she had set up that whole scheme in the first place. So while, yes, Madoka didn’t have the information she needed to make that sort of decision, I’m not sure Homura cared once she got out. (Plus, how would you ask the right question? “I know you don’t remember this, but if you did remember it…”?)
And I’m not getting what you mean by “investigate whether Madoka is a construction or not”? She seems to understand Madokami’s nature pretty well, given what she does in the finale.
The utilitarian question is interesting, but for Homura more than Kyubey, I think (The main series already raised all the interesting questions about Kyubey). In theory, Homura’s action is a net positive for everyone – she takes the “personality” bit from Madokami, leaving the good parts of the Law of Cycles for everyone and keeping Madoka for herself. But to pull it off, she had to mindhack everyone involved. So we’re back to the age-old question of whether it’s better to live happily in the Matrix or live unhappily knowing the truth.
Of course, there’s one huge wrinkle in all of this, and it’s that magic can change the laws of physics. Homura acknowledges that Madoka could one day regain her powers, despite the changes she made. Trying to make long-term plans in this world is a mug’s game.
And yes, Homura is definitely lacking in self-reflection, given that the whole thing started with Homura breaking out of a happy illusory world. But nobody ever said she was perfect.
I just want to note that in light of the Flint water crisis, Scott’s comment from Words Words Words (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ ) looks especially prescient. I apologize if someone has brought this up before:
“Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply, saying it makes people kinder and more aware of other people’s problems and has no detrimental effects whatsoever. A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous, it’s just about being more sensitive to other people’s problems which of course no one can object to. However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug and become kinder, they freak out and call you a terrorist and a shitlord and say they hope you die. If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”
For those not up on the news (http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/01/28/amid-denials-state-workers-flint-got-clean-water/79470650/ ):
“In January of 2015, when state officials were telling worried Flint residents their water was safe to drink, they also were arranging for coolers of purified water in Flint’s State Office Building so employees wouldn’t have to drink from the taps, according to state government e-mails released Thursday by the liberal group Progress Michigan.”
Botox injections into facial muscles apparently pretty good for treating some cases of MDD.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24910934
Re: nostalgebraist, Scott, etc. on tumblr about Nietzsche: why would anyone feel such the need to dismiss a prominent, immensely influential, incredibly intelligent philosopher based on “20 pages” of a mediocre secondary source? “boring”, “predictable”, “edgelord”, “With Nietzsche even the finer details are unsurprising”… What the fuck do you know about the finer details of Nietzsche after 20 pages of Mencken?
Why do seemingly intelligent people respond to disagreement with butthurt and character assassination instead of attempted understanding, or at least a counterargument? (A counterargument to WHAT, though? He hasn’t even read the person he’s flinging shit at) Clearly nostalgebraist’s understanding of Mencken’s Nietzsche (which, really, has very little to do with Nietzsche himself) struck a memetic nerve. But at least try to defend your memes in a decent manner instead of this nonsense.
I’m sure there is at least one incredibly influential philosopher you dismiss based on very little.
Wow, if he does this thing, it must not be bad!
Well, yes. No-one has time to critically read everyone who has every been considered a prominent, incredibly intelligent philosopher. We all use secondary sources to decide that e.g. Heidegger, Plotinus, Mozi, Zera Yacob are worth reading (or not).
Why do seemingly intelligent people respond to disagreement with butthurt and character assassination instead of attempted understanding, or at least a counterargument?
Said the person making an emotional response to the poster who found Mencken’s treatment of Nietzsche convincing.
“Mediocre assessment”, “what the fuck do you know”, “flinging shit”, “hasn’t even read”, “this nonsense” – yes, I see the fine levels of reasoned argument laying out why Nietzsche is worth reading laid out there clearly!
Nietzsche is worth reading for the sheer joy of reading, whether you take his philosophy seriously or not. I don’t know why one would deprive oneself of the experience of sharing a laugh with Nietzsche and then take pride in that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/
Shared this in the last open thread, but it was too late to get much action. Does this look like a real effect to you guys?
This is very interesting if true. It also changes the “White people vote for Trump because they’re afraid of losing their privilege.” narrative to “White people are voting for Trump because they’re afraid of losing they’re privilege because it is literally killing them.”. Which seems a lot more sympathetic.
Since I was the only one who responded earlier, I’ll take the liberty of reposting what I wrote.
I detest the headline, which coyly implies that dead people are flocking to the polls.
The notion that Trump does better in counties where less educated middle-aged white people are in greater socio-economic distress? I haven’t looked at the numbers, but it certainly makes intuitive sense.
The effect is flat in Massachusetts, perhaps, because Massachusetts counties are so vast that local differences are all subsumed. Moreover, with restrictive party registration laws and few Republican officials, the number of Republican primary votes is probably quite small.
The increase in death rates due to “poisoning” (drug overdoses) and suicide is real and troubling. It is probably related to other social ills, such as the falling labor force participation rate among men.
All that being said, statistically, there may be something else going on. I wonder if the rising death rates among non-college educated whites is partly an artifact of rising educational attainment across the board. The non-college-degree part of the population is both shrinking and aging.
For example, the Wonkblog analysis uses the population from 40 to 64. Death rates (based on the U.S. Life Table) increase by a factor of six across those years, in other words, a 64-year-old has six times the chance of dying in a year than a 40-year-old does.
Meanwhile, the 40-year-old is significantly more likely to have a college degree than the 64-year-old. That means the college-educated folks in the 40-64 age group have a younger average age, and a lower death rate, than the non-college folks.
I know this might explode into its own subthread of 500 replies, but I was really curious:
There are unusually many religious people on SSC compared to the typical rationalist space. How do you square this general rationalist tendency with a) supernaturalism (especially the epistemological impossibility of establishing supernatural causes of events, given imperfect knowledge of laws of nature and imperfect observation) and b) religious anthropocentrism (e.g. God created humans in His image, God can be said to be a He, God cares about your sex life, God likes and demands worship just like a human being with a need for status, the Objectively Correct way to live has a suspicious lot in common with what Levantine societies of Antiquity thought, etc.)?
Because these are the two biggest (perhaps only) reasons I’m an atheist, and religion seems like something that’s pretty important to get right.
I’ll just be sitting here reading the replies. Sorry if this sounds like a strawman, it’s the best I could do to illustrate some real features of religion that I have a problem with.
Without getting too into the weeds, the historical evidence around Jesus particularly, and the early Christians in general, has always been more persuasive to me than the broader metaphysical route.
On a tangentially related note, I wonder if the association might be traffic driven from Leah at Unequally Yoked? Then again, I started reading *her* while she was an atheist, so that may just drive the problem back a step.
Could you clarify what historical evidence you find convincing? My understanding of the historical evidence leads me to believe that there is probably some truth to the idea that the Gospels were loosely based on historical events (although I don’t think the evidence is as conclusive as theologians seem to) but that there is no more evidence that anything supernatural happened than any other ancient (or modern) stories about supposed supernatural events.
Pete: apologies for responding with a link, but I find the Reliability of the Gospels YouTube video lecture series here to make a strong, accessible case for the historicity of the Gospels: http://www.apologetics315.com/2012/11/audio-resources-by-tim-mcgrew.html
In (very brief) sum: we have about six independent sources within the first 200 years of Christianity attributing the Gospels to their traditional authors (Matthew the disciple of Jesus, Mark the disciple of Peter, Luke the companion of Paul, and John the disciple of Jesus). We have no rival traditions of authorship. These authors were either eyewitnesses or spoke to eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life, and were thus well-placed to tell us what he did.
On matters of historical fact on which we can independently check up, the Gospel writers show themselves to be very accurate.
The relationships between the Gospels (and the other New Testament books) are such as are unlikely to result by either chance, collusion, or gradual development of myth, but are likely to result by different sources reporting historical events.
I looked at the notes there, but didn’t and won’t listen or watch anything.
I didn’t see anything dealing with the question of the unlikelihood of the putative authors to able to write in Koine Greek or if we accept the Aramaic hypothesis, the lack of any hint of a surviving text in that language. Can you point me to anything in text on those issues?
I do not know of any texts focused on those questions in particular, although I would wager that they are discussed by some New Testament scholars.
Neither of the objections strike me as particularly forceful. The inference from “there is no surviving text of Matthew in Aramaic” to “Matthew was not written in Aramaic” is an argument from silence, which are not usually very strong in history. It’s in general not too surprising that we don’t have copies of various manuscripts; most ancient writings are lost to time. For example, Cicero tells us that Aristotle wrote dialogues, but none of them have survived to the present day. Nevertheless, few historians of philosophy doubt Cicero’s assertion.
In fairness, we do have many more copies of New Testament manuscripts than most other ancient documents, but even so it’s not too hard to imagine the Gospel getting translated into Greek and then the original being lost, with the Greek version being the main one circulated.
As for the Gospel writers not being able to write in Koine Greek, Matthew was a tax collector and Luke a physician, both educated positions. Perhaps the antecedent probability that Mark and John would be able to write in Koine Greek is lower. But it’s possible that they dictated to someone who wrote down their Gospels.
“On matters of historical fact on which we can independently check up, the Gospel writers show themselves to be very accurate.”
That isn’t helpful. If you list things that happened and things that didn’t happen, we will be able to see the things that happened occurred. Using that to claim the things that didn’t happen also happened (because there is no source contradicting it) doesn’t work since we expect no one else to contradict it.
Most modern biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as one of its sources. (See two-source hypothesis for more details.) Assuming this consensus is correct, what we know as the Gospel of Matthew can’t have been written by Matthew in Hebrew, since there are too many overlaps with the Gospel of Mark which was written in Greek.
There is quite a bit of material common to Matthew and Luke that isn’t found in Mark. Scholars generally assume this material came from a lost document (or perhaps oral tradition), which they refer to as “Q”. That leaves open the possibility that this “Q” source could have been Matthew’s original gospel in Hebrew, now lost.
Most modern biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as one of its sources. (See two-source hypothesis for more details.) Assuming this consensus is correct, what we know as the Gospel of Matthew can’t have been written by Matthew in Hebrew, since there are too many overlaps with the Gospel of Mark which was written in Greek.
There is quite a bit of material common to Matthew and Luke that isn’t found in Mark. Scholars generally assume this material came from a lost document (or perhaps oral tradition), which they refer to as “Q”. That leaves open the possibility that this “Q” source could have been Matthew’s original gospel in Hebrew, now lost.
I’m aware that most Biblical scholars think Matthew used Mark as a source, and that Matthew and Luke used Q. I think the arguments for these conclusions are generally poor. On the ordering of the Gospels: we don’t have as many ancient sources discussing the order of the Gospels as we do their authorship, but those we do all agree with the traditional order, except for Clement of Alexandria, who places Luke before Mark.
I take this testimonial record as strong though defeasible evidence that the Gospels were written in their traditional order. And most of the modern arguments for Markan priority of which I’m aware are either weak (e.g., Mark is shorter) or question-begging against the historical reliability of the Gospels (e.g., Matthew must have been written after 70 AD because otherwise it would have contained a before-the-fact prophecy of the destruction of the Temple). So I think the evidence for the traditional view is stronger, at the end of the day.
I am persuaded that the Synoptic Gospels used each other as sources: here I agree with modern scholars that the textual coincidences between the Synoptics would be too unlikely otherwise. I don’t think this contradicts traditional views of the Gospels; Luke explicitly tells us in the introduction to his Gospel that he used sources. But all this is compatible with Matthean priority: Matthew could have been written first, Mark could have relied on it, and Luke could have relied on Matthew and Mark. This also eliminates the need to hypothesize an ad hoc Q document to explain similarities between Matthew and Luke.
Anyway, since Troy doesn’t seem to care, I’ll elaborate for our other user.
We have records from the Black Death. We are pretty sure the writers are who they say they were and are trying to accurately record things. However, when they provide numbers of deaths, historians don’t treat them as reliable. It seems odd since we have accounts of looking at the mass graves and presumably people could figure out the death toll by counting the total number of mass graves and multiply by the amount in them, but the numbers we have for several cities are larger than the estimated total population of the city (and people tended to flee cities during the Plague).
You cannot use the fact that the individual in question lived in the time period as evidence that what they say is reliable. Evidence that points to “living in time period” does not change their level of reliability.
And really, it goes downhill from there. Calibrating your acceptance level so only one example meets it (when there are multiple different criteria to judge by) is essentially p hacking. If your supernatural detector accepts the Gospels, but not the Miracle of the Sun, something is wrong with it.
@ Samuel Skinner:
Don’t forget the Hindu milk miracle, far better attested than anything in the Bible.
Is it really that hard to accept the implications of the idea that miracles get a loss less impressive the closer they get to any sort of outside verification?
@Samuel Skinner:
You cannot use the fact that the individual in question lived in the time period as evidence that what they say is reliable.
That a historian is trying to record history, lived close enough to that history to have knowledge of it, and is reliable on matters which we can independently check up on is obviously evidence that what they say about matters we can’t check up on is reliable. Assuming that what you say about the black death is right (I am not familiar with the scholarship in this area and so not qualified to comment), that example just shows that this evidence is not conclusive. I grant that point, but I never said otherwise.
@Vox:
Don’t forget the Hindu milk miracle, far better attested than anything in the Bible.
And much easier to explain naturalistically than a person rising from the dead. You can recreate that kind of capillary motion in your kitchen.
@ Troy:
It’s just as easy to explain the resurrection, even if the accounts aren’t completely mythological: somebody took the body out of the tomb.
Hmm, on the one hand we have:
a) Somebody took the body out of the tomb, even if it perhaps seems unlikely that they could get away with it.
On the other hand, we have:
b) No rational choice but to believe this was really the Son of God and also God in some weird way.
The only way you’re going to think b) is if you’re already really strongly inclined to believe it.
Thomas Paine said it best:
It’s just as easy to explain the resurrection, even if the accounts aren’t completely mythological: somebody took the body out of the tomb.
This is somewhat pedantic point, but you’re talking about explaining various evidences for the resurrection, not the resurrection itself. In this case the actual claimed miracle, I think we agree, is not naturalistically explicable. This contrasts with the Hindu milk miracle, in which there’s a perfectly good naturalistic explanation for the exact events described.
Hmm, on the one hand we have:
a) Somebody took the body out of the tomb, even if it perhaps seems unlikely that they could get away with it.
On the other hand, we have:
b) No rational choice but to believe this was really the Son of God and also God in some weird way.
The only way you’re going to think b) is if you’re already really strongly inclined to believe it.
It all depends on the data. Unless the prior you assign to the resurrection is 0, there should be some amount of evidence sufficient to convince you that it probably occurred. People can reasonably disagree both about the prior probability and the strength of the evidence, but there’s no a priori argument against a miracle ever being more probable than not on our evidence. We have to look at the data.
I’m happy to grant that the prior probability of the resurrection is quite low, but I think that when we look at the cumulative evidence, including both the background evidence for the reliability of the Gospels above and particular evidences for the resurrection, which includes reports of not only the empty tomb but of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, the conversion of Paul, the events of Acts, and the martyrdom of several of Jesus’ disciples, the evidence for the resurrection is quite strong, strong enough to outweigh the low prior probability.
Paine’s remarks don’t quite rise to the level of an a priori dismissal of any evidence we might bring forward, but they come close. He complains that our evidence for the virgin birth is “hearsay upon hearsay” because Mary and Joseph didn’t write about it themselves. The same could be said for almost all historical testimony, since most history is not autobiography. Historical evidence can be extremely strong for all that.
As for the explanation of the story of Jesus being the Son of God, what Paine says might be plausible if he were right that the only people who believed the story were Gentiles and if the bare story of the virgin birth was all the evidence about the life of Jesus we had. But neither of these are the case. While most Jews did not become Christian, there were probably many Jewish Christians in the very early church especially. For instance, Acts 2 records 3000 Jews being baptized at Pentecost. And the testimonial evidence for the virgin birth is not the strongest evidence for Christianity; if the only record of Jesus’s life we had was the fragments of Matthew and Luke recording the virgin birth, then I would agree that it probably didn’t happen.
@ Troy:
There’s so naturalistic explanation of the fact that the statue drank the milk, either. What you’re arguing is that the statue didn’t really drink the milk, but that people were fooled into thinking so.
And there’s other potential naturalistic explanations of the resurrection. Maybe Jesus wasn’t really dead. Maybe he switched himself with some lookalike who got crucified in his place.
Hell, maybe he rose from the dead but it wasn’t God or anything, just some kind of freak biological event we don’t know enough about science to explain.
Besides, when you combine it with all the other evidence of Hindu miracles and the long history of the caste system and the transcendent wisdom of the Upanishads, the evidence is clear.
The probability of something happening which is against natural laws, and in particular something acting in a manner contrary to the kind of thing it is, i.e. a miracle, is 0.
Now you may say, well, maybe I’m wrong about what the natural laws are. Maybe I’m wrong about the law of identity. But how am I supposed to formulate the probability of my being wrong about everything? If I’m wrong about everything, I’m wrong about what the probability is that I’m wrong. If the law of identity is not true, then anything could happen.
But I’ll leave that aside on the presumption that you’re not asserting this to be a violation of natural laws.
Give me a break. I’m sorry, but this is a joke.
If you can say all this about Christianity but not admit that the beauty of the Quran proves its miraculous creation, or that its continued oral history of complete memorization proves its authenticity, or that the superior consistency of Islam and its rapid conquests—to say nothing of the superior willingness to fight and die for it by millions of people to this day—are not at least equally strong evidence of the truth of Islam, you are engaged in the most blatant case of motivated reasoning. And that’s just me off the top of my head, setting aside the legions of more detailed and convincing bullshit arguments an actual Muslim could give you.
Here’s a little taste:
This is of exactly the same caliber as the stuff about Paul (or whatever other author, really). It’s just absurd that you say it isn’t.
The conversion of Paul, the events of Acts, the martyrdom of disciples? This is supposed to be shocking? We have better evidence in the case of David freaking Koresh. Not to mention Jesus’s little brother who started the Taiping Rebellion.
It’s nothing more than the old standby of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
If some ancient historian relates some fact that sounds like a normal thing that actually happens, I’ll tentatively believe it. But if Herodotus relates some kind of bullshit story about the Amazons or people with goats’ feet, I don’t believe it.
And while the claims made about, for instance, Aristotle are perfectly normal sorts of claims, I could easily believe that he wasn’t really from Stagira, or that he didn’t write all of his works, or even that he didn’t write any of them and was a historical myth. It would not take that much. Indeed, you might say it’s incredible that a single man was such a genius on so many subjects.
If, 2000 years from now, we had no evidence at all for the fact that Hitler killed 6 million Jews except some anecdotal accounts from survivors of camps, the natural reaction would be “Lie! Exaggeration! History written by the victors, so typical of 20th-century primitives.” And rightly so, because it’s not a normal thing; it was rather a very extraordinarily terrible event.
The bare story of the virgin birth is all the evidence we have for the virgin birth. Even if Jesus were actually the Son of God, maybe that part was a distortion. Maybe God sent down his Godly Member to have Godly Sex with her. Maybe Joseph had sex with her, but God waved his magic wand over the sperm and changed the DNA. Proving one part doesn’t prove everything else; adding more complications to the story makes it less likely.
In any case, the point Paine is making—which is not the strongest point but more of a side note—does not rely on the assertion that no Jews converted to Christianity. Just that, as a group, they did not, while the pagans did.
A question for Vox Imperatoris:
Vox, I have long wondered, what is the meaning of your name? You don’t sound like a monarchist, and it looks like you aren’t a Christian either.
@ The guy asking me about me username:
If I’m perfectly honest, I’ve used this name for years and years before my political opinions were fully formed. So you’re sort of asking me about my inner psychological affinities.
I guess it’s got something to with the fact that, while I am not a monarchist in real life, I’m sort of a monarchist “in spirit”. I see the appeal, you could say. I have some kind of positive affect toward the idea of a single person being the final authority, or of some kind of Peter the Great building a city by his own will.
And while I don’t really believe in monarchy. I don’t really believe in democracy, either, in this idea that somehow the government embodies or ought to embody the “will of the people”. On forums with signatures, I had: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit. (And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.)” It’s a quote from the monk Alcuin to Charlemagne.
I suppose I could point to this comment for how I feel about ideal monarchy.
And in broader terms, you could say it has something to do with the idea of the will, which I am attached to. I think this is reflected in a good quote from the medieval thinker Peter John Olivi, who I linked something about last thread:
Also, you can’t ignore the simple fact that I really like the sound of the word “vox”, but it’s a pretty common username, so I have to pick something more specific. 😉
Sorry if that was more detail than you wanted, but that’s my answer for the future as well.
Thank you Vox.
There’s so naturalistic explanation of the fact that the statue drank the milk, either. What you’re arguing is that the statue didn’t really drinkthe milk, but that people were fooled into thinking so.
My thought was that we can separate out what was directly observed from a particular causal explanation of that observation (as implied by the verb ‘drank’), and that when we do so, what was directly observed in the Hindu milk miracle is naturalistically explicable. By contrast, what the disciples claim to have directly observed (their teacher being crucified, and then being alive a few days later) is not naturalistically explicable. Of course, we did not ourselves directly observe those things, and so our immediate evidence is testimonial, and then we’re back to the question of what best explains that.
And there’s other potential naturalistic explanations of the resurrection. Maybe Jesus wasn’t really dead. Maybe he switched himself with some lookalike who got crucified in his place.
We can always come up with skeptical possibilities that are consistent with the observations. This is the problem of underdetermination. I don’t claim that these aren’t epistemically possible, but I do claim that their posterior probabilities are negligibly small. No skeptical naturalistic hypothesis explains all the data nearly as well as the hypothesis that Jesus really was raised from the dead. The lookalike hypothesis, in addition to having no independent evidence for it, does not explain the empty tomb or the conversion of Paul. Then we have the resurrection appearances and the disciples’ willingness to go to their deaths in attestation to the resurrection: if the disciples are in on the trick the latter becomes less likely, if they’re not in on it it becomes less initially probable that Jesus could pull this trick off.
The ‘not really dead’ theory looks even worse. Roman execution was not a slipshod affair. Condemned criminals were not taken down while still alive, and even if Jesus were somehow to survive, a broken, bloodied nearly-dead Jesus would not have made the impression on his followers that the resurrected Jesus did.
Hell, maybe he rose from the dead but it wasn’t God or anything, just some kind of freak biological event we don’t know enough about science to explain.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s not the way to bet. This wasn’t some random dude coming up from the grave, this was someone who claimed to be a messenger from God and who had predicted his death and resurrection. There’s a clear theological framework within which Jesus’s resurrection can be explained.
The probability of something happening which is against natural laws, and in particular something acting in a manner contrary to the kind of thing it is, i.e. a miracle, is 0.
Well, it depends on what you mean by something happening against natural laws. I think there’s a perfectly good sense of ‘natural laws’ in which the laws governing a system tell us what happens to a system when it is left to itself. To say that a miracle occurred at a particular point is to say that the system was not left to itself at that point. This isn’t a violation of the natural laws because the laws just don’t tell us what happens in such a case. But it’s also not something that could have been predicted by those laws.
Maybe if the universe is not all there is you want to say that there’s some set of super-natural laws governing the interaction between God and the universe. I don’t think the epistemic questions here are much affected by how we describe that case, so long as we’re agreed that it’s epistemically possible that God could interact with the universe.
Now you may say, well, maybe I’m wrong about what the natural laws are. Maybe I’m wrong about the law of identity. But how am I supposed to formulate the probability of my being wrong about everything?
I’m not asking you to consider the probability that you’re wrong about simple a priori truths. I’m happy to give those a probability of 1. But our evidence for the natural laws is empirical. We could be mistaken about them. But I’m not even asking you to consider that those laws are mistaken in my first sense above, i.e., as describing the operation of the universe when left to itself. I’m just asking you to consider the possibility that sometimes, they are not left to themselves. Surely the prior probability of this is not 0.
If you can say all this about Christianity but not admit that the beauty of the Quran proves its miraculous creation, or that its continued oral history of complete memorization proves its authenticity, or that the superior consistency of Islam and its rapid conquests—to say nothing of the superior willingness to fight and die for it by millions of people to this day—are not at least equally strong evidence of the truth of Islam,you are engaged in the most blatant case of motivated reasoning.
There are superficial similarities between Islam and Christianity: both religions spread quickly and were founded within recorded history by people who claimed to be sent from God. And, as you note, Muslims also offer arguments for their religion. But I think when you actually look at the evidences, they are not at all on a par.
Islam did indeed spread widely over the Arab world — after Muhammad turned to the sword. There’s nothing remarkable about that. Before gaining political power in Medina, Muhammad probably had around 100 followers. This is impressive, but hardly inexplicable naturalistically. Muhammad was no doubt a skilled politician, and he came from an important family. Many of his early followers were in his extended family.
As for Muslims being willing to fight and die for Islam, there is a difference between being willing to die for an ideology in which one was raised, which obviously many people are willing to do, and being willing to die in attestation to an empirically observable event which one claims to have witnessed, when this claim goes against the religious community in which one was raised. The former is about equally likely given the truth or falsehood of the ideology, the latter is much more likely given that one witnessed the event than otherwise.
Again, that many people have memorized the Quran is completely unremarkable conditional on Islam’s being false: some Muslims are very invested in their religion and great feats of memory are possible through long training.
As for the beauty of the Quran, this is a popular apologetic argument, but it is similarly wanting. That Muslims raised to believe in Islam would find the Quran beautiful is unremarkable. The claim that it the most beautiful work of art in history or some such might be impressive if it were true, but it’s clearly not true. I think it was Mike Licona who recounts a Christian in Indonesia challenging Muslims (ones who had not memorized the Quran, presumably) to tell him which passages he quoted were from the Bible and which were from the Quran. They couldn’t do it. There’s nothing that remarkable about religionists not knowing the details of their Scriptures, but if the Quran really were unparalleled in beauty you would think that it would be identifiable by that standard.
The kind of evidence we have in the case of Christianity — testimony to miraculous events and to effects of miraculous events (e.g., the empty tomb) — are completely lacking in the case of Islam. The Quran itself says that Muhammad performed no “signs,” i.e., publicly observable miracles: the Quran itself is supposed to be miracle enough.
I hope I don’t need to respond to all of the quoted passage in addition to the above, but the author is mistaken on several points, for example, the claim that the Quran has never been changed. Non-canonical versions of the Quran were destroyed by the caliph Uthman, and we don’t really know what changes there might have been before that point.
It’s nothing more than the old standby of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
I’m happy to grant this standby. But this is very different from claiming that we can never get sufficient evidence for an extraordinary claim. Miracles have a lower prior probability than most other claimed historical events, and thus the evidence required for us to conclude that they probably happened must be greater. But this does not imply that we can never get such evidence.
The bare story of the virgin birth is all the evidence we have for the virgin birth. Even if Jesus were actually the Son of God, maybe that part was a distortion.
You’re moving from evidence to proof here. I never claimed that Jesus being the Son of God entails that he was born of a virgin. Obviously it doesn’t. But just as obviously, the probability of the virgin birth is higher conditional on Jesus being the Son of God than conditional on Jesus not being the son of God. If Jesus really was the Son of God, then the claim that his birth and life were miraculous is not nearly as surprising as it would be otherwise.
@ Troy:
Adding complications to the resurrection story make it less likely, not more. “Burdensome Details”, etc. Probability of feminist banker vs. feminist banker who hates her job.
***
All I can say is, I completely disagree with you on the supposed strength of the evidence supplied by the Gospels and also on the prior probability of these miracles occurring.
It’s really not strong evidence. This kind of shit (“unexplainable miraculous observation!”) happens all the time. You just know more details about this one because you have dedicated yourself to finding reasons to believe in it.
But even if you had really, really strong evidence, I wouldn’t believe you. If you had the caliber of evidence that convinces me that WWII was a real event, I wouldn’t believe that some street preacher was the Son of God and rose from the dead. That’s really, really unbelievable.
If you want to say that you don’t care about the evidence but this story just speaks to you on a spiritual/emotional level that you feel driven to believe it, fine. But don’t try to tell me that you’ve got rational cause to believe in this. I’m sorry to be rude, but you don’t.
All I’m asking for is the same level of proof demanded by Doubting Thomas: if the stories are true, he knew the other damn apostles personally and didn’t believe them saying that Jesus had risen. So Jesus did what a reasonable divine being would do in this situation: he appeared in front of Thomas and let him feel the wounds. That is the appropriate level of proof one needs to credit the story of the Resurrection. I applaud the epistemic virtue of Thomas.
I don’t even demand a personal intervention. I just want to see the clouds part and hear the voice of God booming from the heavens. I want to see Richard Dawkins struck down by a pillar of flame, with the word “blasphemer” burned into his forehead. I want to see angels come down and put a crown on the head of the Pope.
These are not unreasonable demands of an omnipotent being who actually exists. The Biblical Israelites demanded a hell of a lot more on a regular basis in order to keep believing in God.
Even then, I would have philosophic reservations against the existence of God, but I promise that I would go to Sunday School and read my Bible and Pocket Aquinas every day.
“Maybe he switched himself with some lookalike who got crucified in his place.”
That is, I believe, the standard Islamic account.
“Islam did indeed spread widely over the Arab world”
A considerable understatement.
The Arabs were bit players in the international politics of the day—the great powers were the Sassanids and the Byzantines. Within a century the Muslims annexed all of the Sassanid Empire and about half the Byzantine. It’s as if there was a new religion in Mexico c. 1960, and it conquered all of the US and half of the USSR.
Ibn Khaldun offers a theory of political change in which there is a lot of inertia. He concedes that the early history of Islam appears to be a counterexample. His defense is that that was obviously a miracle, and scientific theories don’t have to account for miracles.
A lovely way of explaining away contrary evidence.
I don’t buy that this is more applicable to his explanation than yours.
He is saying that the probability of a near death experience + a prophecy of resurrection is less likely than just a near death experience (or the one “natural” resurrection). Right.
But, you counter argue that the probability of someone being a prophet and correctly predicting a true event is less than that event happening, which may be true, but not to the same extent as above, since they are not at all independent events, in fact they are nearly completely dependent (conceptually there could be a subset of gods that can’t predict the future, but can raise from the dead, and by happenstance predicted that event, but that’s a very small amount of possibility space.).
You may not believe that he in fact predicted it, that any of it happened, but either one actually occurring should raise your prior about the other one out of the straight out impossible realm, whereas something being a “freak biological event” happening to someone who predicted it would happen is a lot more independent and thus a bigger hit to the credibility.
@ Randy M:
Sure, they’re not independent events.
Anyway, there’s plenty of other naturalistic interpretations of these events if we grant that they happened. For instance, there’s the “aliens messing with us” explanation, with holograms and laser beams.
This not only fits well with things like the Fermi Paradox but also works much better than the Christian theory to explain all the evil in the world, and why we don’t see very impressive miracles these days.
@Vox:
Adding complications to the resurrection story make it less likely, not more. “Burdensome Details”, etc. Probability of feminist banker vs. feminist banker who hates her job.
Suppose it’s part of our background knowledge K that Jesus claimed to be a messenger from God and said that he would be killed and raised from the dead. And let Messenger stand for the proposition that Jesus really was a messenger from God.
Your point is that P(Resurrection&Messenger | K) < P(Resurrection | K). Sure. It's also the case that P(Resurrection&~Messenger | K) > P(Resurrection | Naturalism&K) because P(Resurrection | Messenger&Theism) is very high, and P(Messenger | Theism) is not too low.* Multiplying these terms together gives us a lower bound on P(Resurrection | Theism), which, by the Theorem of Total Probability, is equal to P(Messenger | Theism)P(Resurrection | Messenger) + P(~Messenger | Theism)P(Resurrection | ~Messenger).
* Obviously we can’t give exact values here. But I don’t mean to suggest that this probability is, say, above .5. Maybe it’s on the order of, say, 1/1000. I take it that’s still many, many times higher than P(Resurrection | Naturalism&K), which is sufficient for it to be the case that P(Resurrection | Theism&K) >> P(Resurrection | Naturalism&K).
This contrasts with a case in which there’s no plausible theological rationale or framework to explain a supposedly miraculous event, e.g., someone with no public ministry, no pretensions to a divine calling, and an unremarkable life being raised from the dead at some unremarkable time. The probability of this event E given Theism is much lower, and so even if it’s still more likely given Theism than Naturalism, the Bayes’ factor P(E | Theism&K) / P(E | Naturalism&K) will be much less top-heavy than in the Resurrection case.
It’s really not strong evidence. This kind of shit (“unexplainable miraculous observation!”) happens all the time. You just know more details about this one because you have dedicated yourself to finding reasons to believe in it.
…
If you want to say that you don’t care about the evidence but this story just speaks to you on a spiritual/emotional level that you feel driven to believe it, fine. But don’t try to tell me that you’ve got rational cause to believe in this. I’m sorry to be rude, but you don’t.
I believe in Christianity because I take myself to have good evidence that it’s true. If I did not take myself to have such evidence, then I would not believe it. I have no desire to believe a lie. I have done my best to examine the historical evidences impartially just as I do my best to examine arguments for and against any views impartially. I have also read about many, although of course not all, miracle reports outside of the Bible and in my judgment most (including both most made by later Christians, and ones in other religions) do not have anything like the same evidences for them.
But it’s pretty pointless for us to argue over whether one of us is engaging in motivated reasoning. I’d rather focus on the first-order evidences.
I don’t even demand a personal intervention. I just want to see the clouds part and hear the voice of God booming from the heavens. I want to see Richard Dawkins struck down by a pillar of flame, with the word “blasphemer” burned into his forehead. I want to see angels come down and put a crown on the head of the Pope.
It’s always possible to demand more evidence. Of course if we had such evidences the probability of Christian theism would be even higher. I think that the probability of Christian theism is already quite high without them.
Perhaps you mean to suggest that the absence of such evidences is strong evidence against Christianity. (This is also suggested by your more recent comment about the lack of miracles today.) Then I disagree. In general, the probability of some miraculous intervention is very low, even given the truth of Christianity. According to Bayes’ Theorem, the posterior odds of Christianity given some evidence E, that is, the posterior probability of Christianity given E over the posterior probability of its negation given E, are equal to:
P(Christianity | E&K) / P(~Christianity | E&K)
= [P(Christianity | K) / P(~Christianity | K)] * [P(E | Christianity&K) / P(E | ~Christianity&K)]
(K again stands for our background knowledge.) The last term is the Bayes’ factor, and is a good measure of the strength of the evidence E.
Now let M-i be the proposition that miracle i occurs. In general, P(M-i | Christianity&K) is very low. M-i would still be strong evidence for Christianity, because P(M-i | ~Christianity&K) is many many times lower. However, ~M-i will not be strong evidence against Christianity, because P(~M-i | Christianity&K) will already be near 1. Hence the Bayes’ factor will be only very slightly bottom-heavy. For example, if M-1 has a probability of 1/1000 given Christianity and a probability of 1/10,000 given ~Christianity, then we have the following Bayes’ factors:
P(M-1 | Christianity&K) / P(M-1 | ~Christianity&K)] = 1/1000 / 1/10,000 = 10/1
P(M-1 | Christianity&K) / P(M-1 | ~Christianity&K)] = 999/1000 / 9999/10,000 = 9990 / 9999 =~ .999 / 1
The former is such that M-1 would be moderate evidence for Christianity. Nevertheless, the latter, as you can see, is so close to 1 as to hardly impact the prior odds of Christianity at all.
In a (perhaps not very pithy) phrase: absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but absence of strong evidence is usually not strong evidence of absence. Arguments from absence generally don’t give us strong evidence against a theory, and this case is no different.
But even if you had really, really strong evidence, I wouldn’t believe you. If you had the caliber of evidence that convinces me that WWII was a real event, I wouldn’t believe that some street preacher was the Son of God and rose from the dead. That’s really, really unbelievable.
I’m under no illusion that we’ll settle these disagreements here, but I am curious as to why you assign such a low prior to the resurrection. By the Theorem of Total Probability, the prior P(Resurrection | K) is at least as great as P(Theism | K)P(Resurrection | Theism&K). (Let Theism here stand for the classical conception of God — all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, etc.) Do you assign such a low prior to the resurrection because you think Theism is really, really unbelievable, or because you think that, conditional on Theism, the resurrection is still staggeringly unlikely?
@David Friedman:
“Maybe he switched himself with some lookalike who got crucified in his place.”
That is, I believe, the standard Islamic account.
Although this differs from a naturalistic explanation in that Muslims believe that it was God who deceived people into thinking that the man on the cross was Jesus.
@ Troy:
First of all, writing everything out in pseudo-mathematical form doesn’t, in my view, really help anything. It just makes it more complicated to talk about. I’m not going to dissect your tedious formulations; none of them are particularly significant to the main point, anyway.
Anyway, in answer to your question, I think it’s incredibly unlikely that theism is true. Or rather, let’s say deism: the argument that there’s some kind of omnipotent being who’s the first cause and all that. Separately, I think that, even granting deism, it’s even more incredibly unlikely that any random revealed religion is true.
I see very little reason to believe in the Thomas Paine type of God. I see even less to believe in the Christian God. Proving that God exists does almost none of the work toward establishing the truth of Christianity.
The lack of miracles today is strong evidence against Christianity, given the content of Christianity, which posits the existence of an omnipotent being who wants the best for mankind and desires to save them from eternal damnation.
Given that the evidence for Christianity is extremely weak (as it is), a few grand miracles of this sort would do a great deal to enhance its credibility and lead more people to salvation. The fact that there are no such miracles is strong evidence that the being proposed by Christianity does not exist.
It’s just a variation of the problem of evil.
There is no way for me to systematize mathematically how ridiculously paltry the “first-order evidence” is here.
I’m not saying that no one could potentially do it. I’m saying that that person isn’t me, and I think it would be an enormously pointless endeavor. There’s near-infinite room to play with the numbers to determine what you’re going to include as a similar false account.
All I can do is talk about the outside view, about Muslims and Jews, and how this appears to me to be the most transparent form of motivated arguing imaginable.
This is just not nearly the kind of evidence required for claims this extravagant! I’m not going to throw some kind of pseudo-mathematical incantation at you. But psychology wouldn’t be having a replication crisis if they were using your standards for p-values.
@ Troy:
Look, let me step back a minute and tell you what I really find offensive about these types of religious arguments.
Let me grant for the sake of argument that you have studied the evidence in an honest, even-handed manner and come to the conclusion that Christianity is highly probable. Fine, then you are justified in believing it.
But I am also an intellectually honest person, and the evidence I have been exposed to appears for all the world to point to the idea that Christianity is so patently ridiculous that it’s not even worth looking at closely. Whatever the status of your arguments, you can’t deny that this is true concerning me—unless you just want to insist that, no, I am secretly being completely dishonest with myself. So I am not justified in believing in Christianity.
However, in advocating the truth of Christianity, you are committed to the idea that God has revealed its truth to the people of the world and that they are morally obliged to believe it. That if they don’t, they can rightfully be punished by being cast into the lake of fire or whatever.
I don’t care whether you want to downplay this or not say it too loudly, but your religion teaches it all the same. And it’s the most insulting kind of dogmatism there is, on the same level as the Spanish going on some hilltop in the New World, reading from the Bible, and expecting everyone to immediately bow down and worship it.
For instance, just look at this statement by William Lane Craig:
Now, what kind of fundamental duplicitousness do we have when someone who presents himself as an debater in favor of Christianity says that no one could possibly disagree with him for an honest reason? Why debate it at all?
The logical corollary of saying that you’re right is that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. The corollary of saying that belief in Christianity is rationally justified is that disbelief is rationally unjustified. The corollary of saying that something has been made manifest is that anyone who disbelieves is willfully blind.
***
You can say this only counts for people who have been “exposed to the Gospel”. But I’ve been “exposed to the Gospel”; I’ve picked it up and read a few chapters. It seemed like really boring nonsense, so I put it down. I don’t think I was acting dishonestly or in some manner that deserves condemnation.
It’s like Scott’s essay “Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person“. Maybe if you study Buddhism for 30 years and meditate every day, you will achieve enlightenment and a mystic vision that makes it all worth it. But to an outsider, it seems like they’re deluded fools.
They’ve got to throw me a bone, here. The Buddhist mystics have got to demonstrate to me, as a person who has not done the meditation, that the meditation is worth doing. Otherwise, I may be making a bad choice, but it’s not a rationally unjustified choice.
***
Or look, if I want to say people should consider checking out Objectivism, I can’t tell them to go read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and all of Ayn Rand’s nonfiction works, then decide. Not good enough. I have to pitch it to people who have not read those books and find what they have heard of Rand absolutely repulsive. Otherwise, they are perfectly justified from a rational perspective in ignoring it.
If not, I’m like Leonard Peikoff saying that, since Objectivism is obvious, anyone who disagrees with it (he’ll charitably concede: anyone over the age of 25 or so) must be a dishonest, irrational person who evades reality—so why waste time arguing with them?
But at least Peikoff has the grace to refrain from arguing that their souls will be damned to hell.
***
To bring this back around, the fact is that regardless of how obvious the existence of God and the truth of Christianity is to you, it is so obscure and ridiculous to so many honest, well-meaning people, that this itself is evidence against Christianity.
If a halfway benevolent God existed, he would make his existence obvious. It is not obvious. Modus tollens.
You cannot refute this because even if you’re right that the Christian God does exist, the very fact that we’ve had to have such a laborious discussion proves that it is not obvious. If you have to argue that it’s obvious, it’s not obvious.
Again, unless you want to hold—consistently with the repugnant view of the Bible—that: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.”
And that’s just the atheists, not to mention all the followers of all the other religions that deny the divinity of Jesus.
@Vox Imperatoris: I agree with most of what you said, but I feel the need to comment on your mentions of Buddhism.
I assume that this is describing Western New-Age influenced versions of Buddhism? Because it is worth pointing out that traditional forms of Buddhism had a very different perspective on meditation. Specifically, in traditional Buddhism meditation is pretty much only done by monks and never done by the laity, and its primary purpose is to eliminate all of the cravings that remain after someone has given up all sense-pleasures by adopting a monastic lifestyle.
For example:
https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/renunciation-in-buddhism/
Which is not to say that traditional Buddhism is necessarily more correct than Western New-Age Buddhism (though from what I’ve read it seems significantly more logically coherent), but there is more to it than just “meditate a lot and eventually you’ll reach enlightenment!”
@ NN:
Yes, I’ve read many of Chapman’s essays, and while I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on Buddhism, I’m familiar with the distinction between monks and laity and the idea that meditation is only a small part of the renunciation.
Anyway, this doesn’t improve the situation but rather makes it worse. At least the Westernized type of Buddhism seems somewhat pleasant, if silly. The real deal is just horrible: I sure don’t want to get involved in that!
You’re saying in order to achieve enlightenment—which is kinda sorta the same thing as self-annihilation, which according to my belief system is achievable with a revolver—I have to not only do all this meditation but renounce everything?! No thanks.
Maybe I’m the fool and they’re having all the fun—or at least all the ineffable wisdom—but the point is it doesn’t seem that way to me, as a person who has not renounced everything.
Vox mostly covered it but
“and is reliable on matters which we can independently check up on is obviously evidence that what they say about matters we can’t check up on is reliable”
That only works if the things we can check are randomly distributed. If they aren’t and the person writing that is aware or constrained by that, it breaks down.
“Assuming that what you say about the black death is right”
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mortality-Intimate-History-Devastating/dp/0060006935/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1455681977&sr=1-1&keywords=the+great+mortality
Decent book, but may be too popsciency.
@Vox:
First of all, writing everything out in pseudo-mathematical form doesn’t, in my view, really help anything.
I take probability theory to simply be a formalization of good uncertain reasoning. We can often do good uncertain reasoning without explicitly employing probability theory. But probability theory helps focus disagreement and show us what we’re committed to in our plausibility judgments, just like deductive logic shows us what we’re committed to in our full beliefs. I employ it in this context because arguments about the evidence for Christianity tend to get bogged down in disagreements about the nature of good empirical inference, and it’s hard to address those disagreements without making the probabilistic form of reasoning we’re using explicit.
Probability theory also helps make clear certain methodological upshots about uncertain reasoning, such as that arguments from absence tend to be very weak. Those upshots are worth heeding even when we don’t walk around explicitly updating probabilities in our head.
The lack of miracles today is strong evidence against Christianity, given the content of Christianity, which posits the existence of an omnipotent being who wants the best for mankind and desires to save them from eternal damnation.
Given that the evidence for Christianity is extremely weak (as it is), a few grand miracles of this sort would do a great deal to enhance its credibility and lead more people to salvation. The fact that there are no such miracles is strong evidence that the being proposed by Christianity does not exist.
If it’s a premise of your argument that the evidence for Christianity is weak, then of course I don’t grant that premise. But anyway, I still maintain that if Christianity is true, the probability of God performing any particular miracle is very small. It follows (from my tedious formulations) that the lack of that miracle cannot be strong evidence against Christianity.
I think this probability is small even in the absence of substantial background knowledge, but it’s certainly true after we observe several times where we thought God would intervene and he didn’t. These aren’t independent events.
To bring this back around, the fact is that regardless of how obvious the existence of God and the truth of Christianity is to you, it is so obscure and ridiculous to so many honest, well-meaning people, that this itself is evidence against Christianity.
If a halfway benevolent God existed, he would make his existence obvious. It is not obvious. Modus tollens.
You cannot refute this because even if you’re right that the Christian God does exist, the very fact that we’ve had to have such a laborious discussion proves that it is not obvious. If you have to argue that it’s obvious, it’s not obvious.
I should think that, as a philosopher, you would know better than to make that last claim. The existence of consciousness is obvious, but some philosophers still deny it.
I think there is strong, publicly available evidence for Christianity. This doesn’t mean that I think that all non-Christians are self-deceived or morally wicked or some such (see below), but it does mean that there’s a clear sense in which I don’t grant that God is hidden. I do grant that he is psychologically hidden, and perhaps this psychological hiddenness is some evidence against Christianity. But, like the lack of constant miracles today, I think this is fairly weak evidence, because, while it’s more likely on ~Christianity than on Christianity, I don’t think it’s very unlikely on Christianity to begin with.
But I am also an intellectually honest person, and the evidence I have been exposed to appears for all the world to point to the idea that Christianity is so patently ridiculous that it’s not even worth looking at closely. Whatever the status of your arguments, you can’t deny that this is true concerning me—unless you just want to insist that, no, I am secretly being completely dishonest with myself. So I am not justified in believing in Christianity.
However, in advocating the truth of Christianity, you are committed to the idea that God has revealed its truth to the people of the world and that they are morally obliged to believe it. That if they don’t, they can rightfully be punished by being cast into the lake of fire or whatever.
I don’t care whether you want to downplay this or not say it too loudly, but your religion teaches it all the same. And it’s the most insulting kind of dogmatism there is, on the same level as the Spanish going on some hilltop in the New World, reading from the Bible, and expecting everyone to immediately bow down and worship it.
I think that you are imputing to me beliefs and attitudes which I have not put forward and do not hold. I haven’t been arguing that you or anyone else is irrational or that you’ll burn in hell for all eternity. I don’t deny that reasonable people can be atheists. I think they’re wrong, and I think that there is publicly available evidence that tells strongly against their position, but that doesn’t mean I think everyone who disagrees with me on this question is irrational, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I think they’re wicked.
I don’t deny that many Christians, including William Lane Craig, impute sinister motives to anyone who disagrees with them, and I do not defend their doing so. I do disagree, though, that I’m somehow committed to doing these things myself.
I certainly don’t think that you have a moral obligation to believe something that you don’t see the evidence for. I agree with Descartes, who wrote that “an infidel who, destitute of all supernatural grace, and plainly ignoring all that we Christians believe to have been revealed by God, embraces the faith to him obscure, impelled thereto by certain fallacious reasonings, will not be a true believer, but will the rather commit a sin in not using his reason properly.”
I also don’t think you’ll spend an eternity in hell if you disbelieve Christianity. I’m a universalist: I think that everyone gets out of hell eventually. I don’t think a good and loving God would have it otherwise. I think this position is fully consistent with orthodox Christianity, and it’s certainly consistent with anything I’ve said in this thread.
***
This conversation may have largely run its course, since you’ve said that you’re not interested in systematizing why you think the first-order evidence for Christianity is weak. But I’m happy to continue on particular topics if you are interested (though professional obligations will probably keep me from responding for the next day or two).
@Troy
Do you read Koine Greek? If I were to present an argument for the age of say John based on certain words or grammatical constructs used in it versus other texts in the Greco-Roman world with better dating, could we actually have a conversation, or would we just be trading appeals to experts?
Or to put it another way: given that I’ve studied biblical criticism at the undergraduate level why should I disbelieve the standard academic account? The fact the you have links that claim they are wrong isn’t nearly enough to do it. Short of learning Aramaic, Koine Greek, and Latin for good measure and then applying for and attending grad school I don’t see how I could be convinced the experts are all wrong.
Compare for example climate change. Every time it comes up in here someone starts talking about how this or that model failed to take into account the critical issue of the molecular structure of unobtainium. As someone who is not a climate scientist and has no interest in becoming a climate scientist, armchair or otherwise, this argument is completely lost on me. I have no choice but to use second order heuristics. I believe that Scott calls this learned epistemological helplessness.
So if you want to convince me that the apostle Matthew actually wrote Matthew you are going to need to either convince the academy that it is a strong possibility or be very convincing on the claim that this particular part of the academy is totally broken with respect to honestly seeking truth.
@ Troy:
It is possible for something to be self-evident in the sense that it is properly axiomatic, without being “obvious”: in a context of knowledge where there are an array of seemingly-good arguments against it, for instance. Therefore, even if it should be accepted without proof, they are not being willfully blind (as you are when you deny the obvious) in rejecting it.
I don’t think you disagree with me on that.
Even granting for the sake of argument that there is strong, publicly-available evidence for Christianity, my point is merely that it is not strong and publicly-available enough. Obviously so, given that so many people reject it.
Is Christianity as obvious as the existence of the sun? I don’t think so. But why shouldn’t it be?
I’m glad to hear that you agree with Descartes on this and that you are a universalist. I’m sorry for assuming otherwise, but it’s a minority view that has little support in the Christian tradition up until the Enlightenment. It’s hard to escape the suggestion that it has been adopted by many because it makes the religion more compatible with the modern worldview.
Unfortunately, accepting universalism takes away most of the force of the need to proselytize for Christianity, as well as most of the fear and Pascalian arguments that have historically led people to accept it. I mean, this was a major factor in the early spread of Christianity: if you want to be a Christian, you’ve got to deny all other gods and cults. And if you follow other gods and cults, your soul is in grave danger.
I don’t feel like I need salvation. I don’t feel like I need a divine helping hand. I certainly don’t think the arguments are persuasive. So I’m glad to hear from you that will will not make a difference to my eternal destiny, even though I may spend some time in Purgatory.
You should probably announce universalism more loudly, though. It makes you seem a lot more reasonable. The default assumption people have is non-universalism.
It’s not so much that I’m not interested in quantifying how weak the evidence is for Christianity. It’s that I don’t know how it can be done.
If I knew how to quantify the evidence for fundamental disagreements like the probability of theism, I’d be publishing a book on it and becoming a world-class intellectual.
“I take probability theory to simply be a formalization of good uncertain reasoning. ”
And all the other religions? Because the probability that Buddhism is true but Christian miracles are better supported is higher than the probability Christianity is true, but Buddhist miracles are better supported. This is ignoring religions like Zoroastrianism where the strong evidence for miracles in other religions have zero effect on its probability.
” But anyway, I still maintain that if Christianity is true, the probability of God performing any particular miracle is very small.”
The probabilities are flawed. Think of it this way. Dr Evil wants me dead. I am dumped naked down a chute which goes into one of two rooms. Room one is filled with nerve gas. Room two is filled with normal air. If in a few minutes I am still alive, it is because I fell into room two.
There is not a spectrum of intervention by the Christian God. Either God wants us to know God exists (in which case we know since God can simply tell everyone), God doesn’t care (in which case Christianity is false, but theism is true so Christianity can’t be used as evidence) or God doesn’t exist.
That is what happens when you are all powerful or all knowing. You can’t simultaneously hold “God wants people to know God exists” and “the existence of Donald Trump is universally accepted”.
Apologies for the late replies; been busy with work.
@Anonymous:
Do you read Koine Greek? If I were to present an argument for the age of say John based on certain words or grammatical constructs used in it versus other texts in the Greco-Roman world with better dating, could we actually have a conversation, or would we just be trading appeals to experts?
I would be interested in arguments of the form you suggest, but I do lack the expertise to evaluate the textual premises. I do not read Koine Greek. I took it in college but I haven’t kept up with it. About the best I can do now is laboriously go through a short passage on a website like http://www.greekbible.com/.
Or to put it another way: given that I’ve studied biblical criticism at the undergraduate level why should I disbelieve the standard academic account? The fact the you have links that claim they are wrong isn’t nearly enough to do it. Short of learning Aramaic, Koine Greek, and Latin for good measure and then applying for and attending grad school I don’t see how I could be convinced the experts are all wrong.
Compare for example climate change. Every time it comes up in here someone starts talking about how this or that model failed to take into account the critical issue of the molecular structure of unobtainium. As someone who is not a climate scientist and has no interest in becoming a climate scientist, armchair or otherwise, this argument is completely lost on me. I have no choice but to use second order heuristics. I believe that Scott calls this learned epistemological helplessness.
So if you want to convince me that the apostle Matthew actually wrote Matthew you are going to need to either convince the academy that it is a strong possibility or be very convincing on the claim that this particular part of the academy is totally broken with respect to honestly seeking truth.
I think the latter is pretty probable, at least in certain respects. I don’t think New Testament studies is unique in this; the medical and social sciences are also broken, as Scott has illustrated on this blog many times.
I am in a similar situation as you vis-a-vis climate science: I rely mostly on second-order heuristics. I think that with respect to New Testament scholarship (I have not studied the Old Testament as much) I am somewhere inbetween this state and that I am in with respect to my own field of study. I have read enough of the secondary literature that I think I am familiar with much, if not all, of the first-order evidence (including some that mainstream New Testament scholarship is apparently not aware of today, such as so-called “undesigned coincidences,” discussed in an earlier generation by William Paley among others and laid out in one of the linked to lectures earlier). Moreover, much of the first-order evidence in this case is not as esoteric as that in climate science, and so I think can be pretty readily appreciated by a non-expert (I grant that some linguistically based arguments are exceptions). I also am an expert (by training) at the evaluation of arguments, especially probabilistic arguments, and the more skeptical secondary literature which I have read on the New Testament seems to me to rely liberally on arguments which can be shown to be quite weak, such as arguments from silence.
@Vox:
It is possible for something to be self-evident in the sense that it is properly axiomatic, without being “obvious”: in a context of knowledge where there are an array of seemingly-good arguments against it, for instance. Therefore, even if it should be accepted without proof, they are not being willfully blind (as you are when you deny the obvious) in rejecting it.
I don’t think you disagree with me on that.
Well, I’m not sure that having seemingly-good arguments against a proposition necessarily make it non-obvious. But I do agree that there are distinct notions in the neighborhood here. Anyway, I don’t claim that Christianity is obvious in the sense that anyone who rejects it is willfully blind, as I said in my last post.
Even granting for the sake of argument that there is strong, publicly-available evidence for Christianity, my point is merely that it is not strong and publicly-available enough. Obviously so, given that so many people reject it.
Is Christianity as obvious as the existence of the sun? I don’t think so. But why shouldn’t it be?
No, it is not. (Nor is it as obvious as the existence of consciousness, for that matter.)
Why it isn’t, I don’t claim to know. I suspect that the answer will be related to the reasons God allows evil. (You rightly note that the problems of evil and hiddenness are related.) I have some thoughts on that (I’m broadly sympathetic to John Hick’s soul-making theodicy), but do agree that the existence of evil is some evidence against theism. I’m not sure that the little bit of epistemic hiddenness that there is adds extra evidence. Either way, I don’t think this evidence is nearly as strong as the evidence we have for Christianity (this includes not only the historical evidence but also natural theological evidences for theism more generally, especially fine-tuning). Like any other theory, Christianity should be evaluated in light of the total evidence, and so it’s compatible with there being some evidences against it that it’s nevertheless all-things-considered quite probable.
I will say that, for any probability short of 1 we could wonder why the probability of Christianity on that evidence isn’t higher. Short of that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and my judgment of how strong the evidence is is such that it seems to me that God has drawn the line pretty high. You could respond that God should have made the probability 1. I’m not sure that’s even possible, but assuming that it is then that God should have made the probability that high is a pretty strong claim. If there are any goals of God for us that cannot be obtained without at least some epistemic distance, then he’ll have reason to not make the probability that high.
I’m glad to hear that you agree with Descartes on this and that you are a universalist. I’m sorry for assuming otherwise, but it’s a minority view that has little support in the Christian tradition up until the Enlightenment. It’s hard to escape the suggestion that it has been adopted by many because it makes the religion more compatible with the modern worldview.
Apology accepted; no harm done. I’m sure you’re right that its becoming more widely accepted is partly due to it making Christianity more palatable to moderns. But I think some aspects of modernity themselves have Christian roots, and I think the best arguments for universalism don’t rely on those aspects of modernity that Christians should reject. And while you’re certainly right that it was a minority view, there are a few important historical figures who endorsed it, including Gregory of Nyssa and Origen. My sense is also that it is the plurality view about the afterlife among Christian analytic philosophers of religion. Alvin Plantinga, for example, is a universalist, although as far as I know he’s never defended it in print.
Unfortunately, accepting universalism takes away most of the force of the need to proselytize for Christianity, as well as most of the fear and Pascalian arguments that have historically led people to accept it.
I can’t speak to the psychological effects, but I disagree that it takes away the need for proselytization. I don’t think Christians should be selling people fire insurance; I think we should be sharing the good news of Christianity with others because we want them to know the truth and to experience the joy and liberation that a relationship with Christ can bring. I think the truth of Christianity is one of the most important truths there is, not just for the afterlife but for your fulfilling your telos right here on Earth. I doubt I can persuade someone of that by rational argument; if someone disagrees with that I can only ask them to try living the Christian life.
Another thought on divine hiddenness: I think epistemic hiddenness would be a serious problem if universalism were false (or, at least, if post-mortem salvation were impossible). If even a little bit of hiddenness were to damn someone eternally to hell, that would raise serious questions about the goodness of God. But once we eliminate the specter of eternal damnation (or eternal damnation based definitively on this life), it doesn’t seem to me especially probable a priori that God would make his existence more obvious than it is.
“I’m not sure that the little bit of epistemic hiddenness that there is adds extra evidence.”
It does. The problem of evil simply means that a all powerful, all good, all knowing God is incompatible with the universe we observe. The problem of hiddenness means a powerful God who wants to be known is less likely. The former applies only to Abrahamic faiths, but the latter applies to most forms of theism.
” Either way, I don’t think this evidence is nearly as strong as the evidence we have for Christianity (this includes not only the historical evidence but also natural theological evidences for theism more generally, especially fine-tuning). Like any other theory, Christianity should be evaluated in light of the total evidence, and so it’s compatible with there being some evidences against it that it’s nevertheless all-things-considered quite probable.”
Logically impossible trumps evidence. And that is what those two dilemmas are- when you have an individual with infinite power there is nothing that prevents them from achieving their goals so if we don’t see the expect results, we are wrong about their goals or they don’t exist.
You are also ignoring the other problems. An all powerful God doesn’t need to incarnate as Jesus. God can forgive mankind’s sins because God is all powerful. The Gospels are not evidence for an all powerful God because an all powerful God would not have needed to do any of it. An all knowing God would not have needed to become a person to know how it feels to be a person because they are all knowing. The Gospels can’t be used as evidence of an entity that wouldn’t need to carry them out- they are evidence that polytheism is true or magic exists (especially the massacre of the innocents and Wiseman), not that Christianity is true.
“I will say that, for any probability short of 1 we could wonder why the probability of Christianity on that evidence isn’t higher.”
Given God can simply make everyone believe he exists, I’m not sure why this is unreasonable. In fact given people claim this is what religious experiences are, I’m not seeing how this impinges on free will that people like to claim.
” I’m not sure that’s even possible, but assuming that it is then that God should have made the probability that high is a pretty strong claim.”
Yes, if only God was ALL POWERFUL. Then doing that would be exactly as hard as every other possible option!
” I doubt I can persuade someone of that by rational argument; if someone disagrees with that I can only ask them to try living the Christian life.”
Some of us work with Hindus; I can assure you there are plenty who seem to achieve that affect just fine by living the Hindu life. Exactly what is the point of the Good News if other religions can pull off the same thing? Is the claim that Christianity is marginally more effective? Because then that means that people who couldn’t get access to Christianity got the short end of the stick because…
” I think epistemic hiddenness would be a serious problem if universalism were false ”
Or if people believed universalism were false. Because then they would be willing to kill other people in order to prevent them from going to hell. Setting up such a situation is not compatible with benevolence.
” it doesn’t seem to me especially probable a priori that God would make his existence more obvious than it is.”
It costs God nothing to tell people God exists. Therefore we should expect God to pick the level of obviousness that most aligns with God’s goals. If atheists don’t believe in God, that means God doesn’t want atheists to believe in God. That is… sort of weird.
On the climate analogy …
Analyzing all the evidence for yourself would be hard, probably impossible, since it requires a lot of different sorts of expertise. But there are short cuts that can give you some idea what to believe.
One is testing predictions. You can read the first IPCC report, see what it implied would happen to temperature thereafter, compare that to what did happen, repeat for the second report. That won’t tell you what the right model is, but if the predictions don’t fit what happened it does suggest that the IPCC is not a very reliable source.
You can also sample the literature, read something that you do have the expertise to make sense of. If you conclude that it’s wrong, still worse dishonest, and it is taken seriously and cited by the people you would otherwise rely on, that’s a reason not to. Again, it doesn’t tell you what’s true–that is a much harder problem–but it tells you that you have only weak reasons to believe the existing authorities.
I’ve paid more attention to climate issues than to biblical criticism, so don’t know what the equivalent tests are there, but I expect they exist.
One example in a related field … . Boswell argued that the early Christian church was not strongly against homsexuality–no more than against other forms of non-marital sex. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate his argument. But I read an attack on his book by someone who did have the expertise and the attack was clearly dishonest–misrepresented what the book said. That’s at least some evidence that the book is right, since if there were good arguments against it the critic would presumably have offered them instead of bad ones.
@ Samuel Skinner:
It’s not strictly true that all the evil in the world and the hiddenness of God is logically incompatible with God’s existence and benevolence.
It’s just extremely strong evidence, since no one has ever given a plausible benevolent motive for these things. But you can’t refute categorically the idea that “God works in mysterious ways”, i.e. that the benevolent motive is somehow beyond human comprehension. Once you say “mysterious ways”, though, you’ve left the sphere of rational arguments based on the evidence and are just asserting things on faith. Possibly, you’re arguing based on evidence in other areas, but not in that area.
You’ve got to emphasize the enormity of the “mysterious ways” view, though: it says that everything from the Holocaust to little Italian children being incinerated by volcanoes is somehow for the greater good and therefore not really evil at all. After all, if there were any phenomena in the world which were evil on net, God would have to eliminate them.
Precisely. This is a major part of it.
If Christianity has…actual benefits, then it’s unjust/unbenevolent of God not to reveal it to everyone. If Christianity has neither natural nor supernatural benefits over paganism, it’s not unjust, but what the hell’s the point? That’s when you convert from universalism to Unitarian Universalism, I guess.
Of course, this is only a small part of the general injustice and unfairness that God ordains and allows.
This is a really good point, as well.
@David Friedman
What you are suggesting still sounds like quite a bit of investment. Perhaps not as much as my mooted going to grad school, but still many hours a year (100+?). If that’s what you got in the lottery of fascinations, well that’s great but otherwise you are back to LEH.
Bringing it back to the theological question–
IF
the world we live (which according the Christian view was deliberately created down to every last detail by God) is one where: 1) the expert consensus is that the books of the new testament were not written by their traditional authors, and 2) it is generally a decent idea to trust the expert consensus if you don’t have much else to go on, and 3) that the books were written by their traditional authors is an important piece of the puzzle we are supposed to use to come to be convinced of the truth of Christianity, and 4) in order to legitimately convince yourself that the experts are wrong you need to have biblical criticism as one of your top two or three picks in the lottery of fascinations as well as a fair amount of intellectual horsepower
THEN
it doesn’t seem like God particularly wants many people to find out the truth.
“But you can’t refute categorically the idea that “God works in mysterious ways”, i.e. that the benevolent motive is somehow beyond human comprehension. ”
That falls down because God is supposed to have made man in God’s image. It requires God to deliberately make humans unable to fully understand morality. Technically you can toss the superstructure of Christianity and Judaism and it wouldn’t contradict, but at that point you are left with deism.
“Once you say “mysterious ways”, though, you’ve left the sphere of rational arguments based on the evidence and are just asserting things on faith.”
It is worse than that. It means morality comes in tiers; actions are praised and judged differently based on their actor. Now, consequentialism can handle that, but virtue ethics and deontology can’t because once you do “omnibenevolence” becomes equivalent to “God’s morality is to act in God’s fashion”. It becomes without meaning which is a problem because it is normally used to explain why God created the universe.
@ Samuel Skinner:
Maybe he had a good reason to make humans unable to fully understand his morality. It doesn’t contradict the idea that people are “made in God’s image” (a very vague idea, by the way) that they can’t necessarily understand every single thing he does.
It’s just evidence against. And certainly does refute many interpretations and common practices of Christianity.
I agree that there is a huge problem here with saying that God is “good”. You are smuggling in an implicit theory of the good which says that to be good is to promote the happiness of others or something.
But why should God want anything? Why would anything in particular be good for God? Aristotle argued much more consistently that, since God is completely self-sufficient and lacks nothing, he does absolutely nothing and simply contemplates himself. There is not anything good for him, that he needs or wants to have.
As for morality coming in “tiers”, though, it doesn’t really imply that. Maybe there’s a good, perfectly normal “tier” of reason to allow the Holocaust but you just didn’t think of it. Is it logically possible that you didn’t consider one of the possibilities, didn’t have all the information, or were simply too stupid to comprehend how all the parts fit together such that God allowed it? Yes, it is logically possible.
Is it more likely that the theory has no explanation because it is false? Also yes.
@ Anonymous:
(re what it takes to form an opinion in a controversy other than by accepting the current orthodoxy)
I may well spend more than a hundred hours a year arguing with people about climate issues, but most of that isn’t aimed at my reaching a conclusion about those issues but at some combination of entertainment (I like arguing), understanding what other people are like, and trying to spread what I believe to be more correct ideas.
I have, however, done the project I described on IPCC predictions and I have identified two much quoted articles that I think I can demonstrate are deliberately dishonest, as well as one more that I believe is honest but demonstrably mistaken. None of the three hinges on expertise in climate science. For two, all it takes is careful reading, for the third, some understanding of statistics and probability theory.
And I don’t think all of that took as much as hundred hours even once, let alone annually.
There are other areas where I reject the dominant consensus, most obviously political, but those come much closer to areas within my own field of expertise.
I agree that if you are not prepared to spend significant time and energy trying to make sense of a controversy, accepting the current orthodoxy is usually a sensible strategy, providing you can figure out what it is, which isn’t always easy.
@Vox:
If Christianity has…actual benefits, then it’s unjust/unbenevolent of God not to reveal it to everyone. If Christianity has neither natural nor supernatural benefits over paganism, it’s not unjust, but what the hell’s the point? That’s when you convert from universalism to Unitarian Universalism, I guess.
There are different ways in which one might take Christianity to have or not have benefits. It’s a central part of orthodox Christianity that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection atone for our sins and reconcile us to God, but it’s an open question what the means through which that happens are. One view, sometimes called exclusivism, says that these effects come only through Christian faith, or through participation in the church, perhaps — through in some way being a Christian. (Excluvism is compatible with universalism: just say that, eventually — in the afterlife — everyone will convert.) Another view, sometimes called inclusivism, says that these effects can come about through other means as well, for example through participation in other religions. On this view, a Hindu has false beliefs about who and what the divine is, but God may nevertheless work his grace through Hindu faith/practice.
I think the most plausible view is somewhere inbetween these two positions. It is possible to have a relationship with God outside of the church, but, other things equal, this relationship will be inferior to the one one could have inside the church.
On the objection that it’s then unjust of God to not reveal Christianity to everyone, I think there’s a clear sense in which he has — he has given publicly visible signs through Jesus’s miraculous life and resurrection, which were recorded and passed on. That, as a psychological matter, many people don’t believe, or that the probability of Christianity on publicly available evidence is not 100% do not seem to me to tell nearly as strongly against God’s justice. Again, this is given that universalism is true, so that no one will be forever excluded from reconciliation with God.
@Anonymous:
IF
the world we live (which according the Christian view was deliberately created down to every last detail by God) is one where: 1) the expert consensus is that the books of the new testament were not written by their traditional authors, and 2) it is generally a decent idea to trust the expert consensus if you don’t have much else to go on, and 3) that the books were written by their traditional authors is an important piece of the puzzle we are supposed to use to come to be convinced of the truth of Christianity, and 4) in order to legitimately convince yourself that the experts are wrong you need to have biblical criticism as one of your top two or three picks in the lottery of fascinations as well as a fair amount of intellectual horsepower
THEN
it doesn’t seem like God particularly wants many people to find out the truth.
There are different views among Christians about the degree to which God micromanages things in the world. Some people think he micromanages things quite a lot (“thank you God for helping me find my car keys”). This objection presupposes a similar conception of divine providence.
I doubt this view of divine providence is correct. The large majority of the time, the universe behaves as an autonomous self-developing system. It seems that God is content to let people do things for themselves most of the time, even if that means that they are intellectually irresponsible with how they develop certain fields of study.
Also, (3) is not obviously true. I think the historical case for Christianity is still strong if we deny traditional authorship, just not as strong. It’s still hard to explain the various evidences for the resurrection naturalistically, for example.
***
Really, on the hiddenness objection, it seems to me that if you grant that, conditional on the publicly available non-hiddenness evidence, the probability of Christianity is very high — say >.99 — then “but why isn’t the probability even higher?” or “why isn’t the probability that high on so-and-so’s private evidence?” look like pretty weak objections. I presume neither of you grant the premise, but if the evidence is that strong, it seems to me like the non-Christian has a lot more ‘splaining to do of that evidence than the Christian does of any remaining divine hiddenness.
@ Troy:
If the publicly available evidence—and by that I mean the evidence available to people who hadn’t even studied the question—were such that the probability rationally seemed like >.99, then anyone who didn’t believe in Christianity would be immoral, evading reality and denying the obvious.
Since you have said you don’t believe that, you can’t say that.
But sure, what the hell, if the probability is >.99, why not >.999? What’s the probability that man needs food to live? This is imparted to (almost) everybody by the natural sense of hunger and the obvious evidence of the results of not eating. Why can’t God just make people believe in him, like he (in the Christian theory) made them with the sense of hunger?
Yes, God is less bad in a world where the probability of Christianity is >.99 and not <.001. But he's still bad, to whatever extent the deprivation of Christian knowledge is harming people. If universalism is true, he becomes infinitely better because he's no longer infinitely evil. But he's still a finite amount of evil.
If not believing in God is no big deal, this argument doesn't play a major role, I agree. The role is then taken up by the usual suspects of why does God allow dictators, rapists, little kids dying of brain cancer, and so on.
The free will argument is a bad argument (and obviously doesn't even address natural evil). Punishing criminals doesn't take away their metaphysical free will. The existence of just laws doesn't restrict your freedom; it enhances it by removing the threat of criminals.
I can’t help but imagine each of these conversions like so:
If the publicly available evidence—and by that I mean the evidence available to people who hadn’t even studied the question—were such that the probability rationally seemed like >.99, then anyone who didn’t believe in Christianity would be immoral, evading reality and denying the obvious.
Since you have said you don’t believe that, you can’t say that.
We mean different things by “publicly available evidence.” I don’t mean evidence possessed by people who haven’t looked into the question. By that standard the publicly available evidence for evolution might not be high. I mean evidence available from physics, history, and other fields of study with public records.
Conditional on that evidence, I do think the probability is above .99. (The probability that the sun exists is and that consciousness exists are still much higher.)
I don’t think that means that even someone with that evidence is necessarily immoral in not believing in Christianity. They may be “evading reality,” but even that is not necessary. Perhaps they’re just bad at evaluating evidence. Evaluating evidence can be quite difficult (a point I believe David Friedman has made in the past with respect to intractable disagreements). For instance, most people do quite badly on the following problem. Suppose the urn in front of us has either 1 white ball and 3 black balls or 3 black balls and 1 white ball, and that either possibility is equally probable to start. We make the following series of draws from the urn: W, B, B, B, W, B, W, W, B, B. Most people think this evidence is pretty much a wash, and that the probability that the urn has 3 black and 1 white is only slightly above 50% now. In fact the probability is 90%.
But sure, what the hell, if the probability is >.99, why not >.999? What’s the probability that man needs food to live? This is imparted to (almost) everybody by the natural sense of hunger and the obvious evidence of the results of not eating. Why can’t God just make people believe in him, like he (in the Christian theory) made them with the sense of hunger?
Yes, God is less bad in a world where the probability of Christianity is >.99 and not <.001. But he's still bad, to whatever extent the deprivation of Christian knowledge is harming people. If universalism is true, he becomes infinitely better because he's no longer infinitely evil. But he's still a finite amount of evil.
If not believing in God is no big deal, this argument doesn't play a major role, I agree. The role is then taken up by the usual suspects of why does God allow dictators, rapists, little kids dying of brain cancer, and so on.
The free will argument is a bad argument (and obviously doesn't even address natural evil). Punishing criminals doesn't take away their metaphysical free will. The existence of just laws doesn't restrict your freedom; it enhances it by removing the threat of criminals.
I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘free will argument’; a couple of different positions can go under that name. I think that John Hick’s soul-making theodicy, which is sometimes called a free will theodicy, goes some way towards explaining the existence of evil. On this view free will is not a good in itself; rather, it is a means towards another good, namely the development of virtue.
I also think it’s plausible that the existence of stable natural laws is necessary for science and probably for rational planning in general, and that it’s difficult to have stable natural laws without natural evil (once creatures capable of suffering come on the scene).
I think considerations like these make the existence of evil somewhat less surprising. But I agree that evil is still some evidence against theism. This is where I think formulating the arguments probabilistically really does help. Conditional on God creating embodied conscious agents in the first place, I don’t think that the proposition that those agents suffer natural evil and commit moral evil is terribly unlikely given theism. Maybe it’s moderately low — .05? But we are ignorant enough of God’s purposes and means, and we can come up with enough possible reasons for evil (such as those above) that we should not be super-confident that God would make the world free of evil.
In general, E can only be strong evidence against H to the extent that E is improbable given H. If E is not too improbable given H, then E cannot be very strong evidence against H. When we look at the evidences for Christian theism, they are facts which are extremely unlikely given naturalism. To return to an earlier example, even if it’s possible that Jesus could rise from the dead given naturalism (via aliens or whatever), the probability of this is incredibly, incredibly low — many, many, many orders of magnitude below the probability of evil given theism. There is thus no barrier to Jesus’ resurrection being extremely strong evidence against naturalism and for theism.
@Troy
I don’t think the micromanaging objection works particularly well when you are positing an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent creator-God. The question isn’t why didn’t God intervene and suspend the natural order to help me find my keys, but why select the universe where I can’t find my keys when there’s was an identical one available to him where I did find my keys? And we aren’t talking about keys, but rather the difficulty of finding out the Truth about God and Salvation.
Even if I were to grant your >99%, which I certainly do not, it doesn’t answer the objection. If a reasonable person give it a 2% probability after investing a few hundred hours into the question using a reasonable approach, and only once thousands or tens of thousands of hours were invested did it become clear that 99% is a better estimate, there is a lot tougher hidden knowledge problem than you are suggesting.
@ Troy:
Then we’re back to hidden evidence. This doesn’t solve the moral problem you said it solved.
I am not talking about evidence that people theoretically could know. I am talking about evidence that people do know or reasonably should know.
If you believe the probability of Christianity is greater than .99, I can’t take anything you say seriously. That is insane.
If people don’t know the laws of probability, they don’t have part of the evidence they need to evaluate probabilities correctly. It may be perfectly reasonable for a naive person to believe that the distribution is 50-50 in the situation you described.
I’m not saying that, from the standpoint of an ideal rational agent, it is rational to believe it. I’m saying that, from their perspective, it is rational to believe it. The question with evaluating the extent to which people are “evading” facts is the extent to which they sincerely want and try to believe the truth—or not. Not how good they are at it, or what epistemological theories or methods they have been exposed to.
Then our situation becomes: God should have made it easier for people to understand the laws of probability. He could’ve put them in the Bible for good measure.
The soul-making argument is bad. God doesn’t need to work through intermediate causes. He can just put the virtue in people directly. And the magnitude of the evils perpetrated on innocent parties far exceeds whatever level would be necessary to “promote virtue”.
For that matter, we’d be better off without many “virtues” if the problems necessitating them were eliminated. If we didn’t have murderous dictatorships, we wouldn’t need the fine art of machine-gun manufacturing. So?
The stable natural laws argument is really bad. Think about what you are saying! It’s all for the best for innocent Italian villagers to be incinerated so that other people can study geology. This is nowhere near dust specks vs. torture!
There is no reason why the natural laws can’t operate in basically the same way, but with a lot more miracles to save innocent people from harm. You can have lava not burn the righteous, bullets bounce off the innocent, and tyrants drop dead upon assuming power. That sort of thing happened all the time in the Bible, too, so it’s hardly unprecedented.
For that matter, there’s no reason the world couldn’t just be set up a lot better. Living standards today are much better than 500 years ago. There is no reason they couldn’t have been that way from the beginning of human existence.
The argument is:
Christianity -> ~Evil.
Evil
~Christianity
Now, as I indicated, this is probabilistic, not absolute. But the evidence against Christianity by way of the problem of evil is far stronger than the evidence for Christianity by way of the Gospels.
Naturalism is a better explanation of the Gospels than the theory of Christianity. If Christianity were actually true, the world would look very different, and God would have revealed himself much more obviously. The fact that Christianity appears practically indistinguishable from a Roman mystery cult informed by Greek neo-Platonism—for that matter, one which on a face-value reading proclaims the imminence of the Apocalypse—is better explained by the fact that it is not true, than by the suggestion that it really is true but God wanted to make it seem like it was false.
I have no idea what makes you say this.
I don’t believe aliens resurrected Jesus because I don’t think there’s any big mystery to solve. It just didn’t happen; in the same way there was not a worldwide flood that drowned everybody except one guy and his family.
But if I were somehow convinced that the historicity of the Gospels were unimpeachable, aliens would be a perfectly reasonable explanation. We already have reason to believe that there are aliens somewhere out there in the universe. Evidence of alien involvement with humanity would wrap up the Fermi Paradox, a difficult problem to address.
The idea that Christianity was planted by aliens to fuck with us, or as a scientific experiment, is much more plausible than that this was the best an omnipotent, omnibenevolent divine being could do. And maybe the aliens got bored and left. That would explain better than Christianity why there are no miracles anymore, when they were happening left and right in the Old Testament times. Though, indeed, I don’t know how to pin down how much of the Bible you think is actually accurate and how much you think is mythology.
@Anonymous:
I don’t think the micromanaging objection works particularly well when you are positing an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent creator-God. The question isn’t why didn’t God intervene and suspend the natural order to help me find my keys, but why select the universe where I can’t find my keys when there’s was an identical one available to him where I did find my keys? And we aren’t talking about keys, but rather the difficulty of finding out the Truth about God and Salvation.
I don’t think God “selects universes” in this way. One possibility which would make it impossible for him to do so is open theism, according to which the outcome of libertarian free actions (and perhaps other indeterministic events) are not knowable by God, at least not when he is making his decision about how to create. In this case he can still know probabilities for how things will turn out, but
But even if open theism is false, it doesn’t follow that God “selects universes” on the whole, rather than creates a universe with certain initial conditions and lets things run their course. Perhaps he foreknows what will happen if he creates things one way rather than another, but it does not follow that he intends those outcomes (and hence, it does not follow that he is “selecting” a universe).
You can still run an argument from evil or hiddenness on either of these conceptions of divine providence, but you won’t be able to use as a premise that God does not want people to know about him (or that he wants people to suffer, etc.).
@Vox:
Then we’re back to hidden evidence. This doesn’t solve the moral problem you said it solved.
Here we just disagree: I think that a universe in which God has given publicly visible signs through Jesus’s miraculous life and resurrection, which were recorded and passed on, is one in which he has revealed himself in a fairly obvious sense. I grant that he could have revealed himself more, but I deny that we have very strong grounds to think that he was unjust for not doing so.
If you believe the probability of Christianity is greater than .99, I can’t take anything you say seriously. That is insane.
I naturally don’t expect you to agree with me on that. I’m just telling you where I’m coming from with respect to the hiddenness objection.
If people don’t know the laws of probability, they don’t have part of the evidence they need to evaluate probabilities correctly. It may be perfectly reasonable for a naive person to believe that the distribution is 50-50 in the situation you described.
I’m not saying that, from the standpoint of an ideal rational agent, it is rational to believe it. I’m saying that, from their perspective, it is rational to believe it.
I’m a bit skeptical that this weaker sense of rationality that allows for violating the laws of probability can be spelled out coherently. But I’m not sure the existence of such a sense of rationality is necessary for your argument.
Then our situation becomes: God should have made it easier for people to understand the laws of probability. He could’ve put them in the Bible for good measure.
But now it seems the problem is not hiddenness per se but intellectual inabilities, which seem to fall under the class of evils, broadly construed.
The soul-making argument is bad. God doesn’t need to work through intermediate causes. He can just put the virtue in people directly.
Hick argues that freely developed virtue is more valuable than virtue given by fiat.
And the magnitude of the evils perpetrated on innocent parties far exceeds whatever level would be necessary to “promote virtue”.
It may be that the soul-making theodicy can explain some evils but not others. However, I think Hick already has some good responses to the objection that his theodicy can’t explain horrendous evils. He points out that if we recognized that suffering only occurred to the extent necessary for the soul-making of the sufferer, then we would not be moved to compassion and charity for them. Only in a world in which suffering occurs haphazardly and unequally, even temporarily working against the soul-making of the sufferer, can people develop these virtues.
Some Christian theodicists, such as Marilyn Adams, adopt as a constraint on theodicies that any suffering must redound to the ultimate good of the sufferer. Hick does not have that requirement. In some cases my suffering may contribute to my own soul-making, but in other cases it may contribute to others.
The stable natural laws argument is really bad. Think about what you are saying! It’s all for the best for innocent Italian villagers to be incinerated so that other people can study geology. This is nowhere near dust specks vs. torture!
Well, I think that “other people can study geology” is understating it; humans would be unlikely, for instance, to discover how to make fire if they did not have repeatable experiences of how sticks behave when rubbed together. But setting that aside, I take stable natural laws to be one goal which it is difficult to get without evil. It is presumably not God’s only reason for allowing evil, and so may not be morally sufficient on its own, but may be sufficient together with other considerations.
There is no reason why the natural laws can’t operate in basically the same way, but with a lot more miracles to save innocent people from harm. You can have lava not burn the righteous, bullets bounce off the innocent, and tyrants drop dead upon assuming power.
This is probably possible to a limited extent, although the laws would have to be a good deal more complicated. But the variety of ways in which humans can hurt themselves and others is pretty unlimited, so it seems difficult to set up such a system in which there is no natural or moral evil, unless people’s free will is completely curtailed. For example, if bullets bounce off the innocent, evil soldiers could shield themselves from their enemies with virtuous people.
The argument is:
Christianity -> ~Evil.
Evil
~Christianity
I understand the deductive form of the argument. But when we have multiple arguments for or against a conclusion, the way to determine their cumulative force is to apply probability theory. Here, instead of taking Christianity –> ~Evil as a premise, we ask what the conditional probability P(Evil | Christianity) is. This tells us how strongly Evil can disconfirm Christianity. My claim is that this value is not too low, and so that the Bayes’ factor P(Evil | Christianity&K) / P(Evil | ~Christianity&K) is not nearly as bottom-heavy as the Bayes’ factors for the positive evidences for Christianity are top-heavy — e.g., P(Testimony to the Resurrection | Christianity&K) / P(Testimony to the Resurrection | ~Christianity&K). So when we multiply these together, the latter Bayes’ factor “wins.” (This is oversimplifying, because it assumes these evidences are independent, which they almost certainly are not. But I’m just trying to give the general form of my claim here.)
for that matter, one which on a face-value reading proclaims the imminence of the Apocalypse
For what it is worth, I think this is probably the strongest historical argument against the truth of Christianity. I think it’s outweighed by the positive evidences, but I agree that the most natural reading of the New Testament is one on which it predicts something which did not come to pass. (However, in light of the fact that they did not come to pass, the version of Christianity with the highest posterior probability is one on which we are misinterpreting those passages. Or, perhaps, one on which Paul was misinterpreting Jesus.)
I have no idea what makes you say this.
I don’t believe aliens resurrected Jesus because I don’t think there’s any big mystery to solve. It just didn’t happen; in the same way there was not a worldwide flood that drowned everybody except one guy and his family.
I realize you don’t grant the resurrection.
I was just comparing the evidential force of evil with the evidential force of the resurrection for illustration’s sake, since we had talked about the latter earlier and you had said that even if you were convinced that the resurrection had taken place you would not take this as sufficient evidence for Christian theism.
The idea that Christianity was planted by aliens to fuck with us, or as a scientific experiment, is much more plausible than that this was the best an omnipotent, omnibenevolent divine being could do.
Do you think this because you think the prior probability of God is low, or because you deny that P(Resurrection | Theism) >> P(Resurrection | Aliens)?
I’m happy to grant that P(Resurrection | Theism) is low, but it seems crazy to me to say that it’s as low as P(Resurrection | Aliens). I think the Resurrection is obviously strong evidence for Theism, even if that strong evidence is not enough to outweigh the initial improbability of Theism.
To say that the prior probability of God (by which I mean, its probability independently of the historical evidences for Christianity) is low is not crazy, although I disagree with it because I think there are independent evidences from natural theology.
“I think that a universe in which God has given publicly visible signs through Jesus’s miraculous life and resurrection, which were recorded and passed on, is one in which he has revealed himself in a fairly obvious sense. ”
Except to all the people living before Jesus was born. Or on the wrong continent. Or in Albania.
” I grant that he could have revealed himself more, but I deny that we have very strong grounds to think that he was unjust for not doing so.”
People being treated differently for no reason is the definition of unjust. You need to explain how different treatment is just.
“Hick argues that freely developed virtue is more valuable than virtue given by fiat.”
And he is wrong. If you can give pedophiles a way not to be attracted to children, a lot of them would take it. It certainly is fiat, but individuals who refused would be considered bad people. Parents who refused to fix their genes to prevent their offspring from having such a trait would be considered bad.
“He points out that if we recognized that suffering only occurred to the extent necessary for the soul-making of the sufferer, then we would not be moved to compassion and charity for them.”
That implies that it is good for people to commit atrocities because it increases the amount of compassion and charity in the world. In fact since there is an optimal amount, it means that after we pass that point we need people to be committing horrible deeds in order to drive up the soul making rate.
Given the state people lived in for the majority of human history, now is the abnormality. We should celebrate the contributions Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others who selfless endeavored to insure that people were placed into situations where they could display moral virtues.
“But setting that aside, I take stable natural laws to be one goal which it is difficult to get without evil.”
God is all powerful. He can in fact pull that off, if only by highlighting when exceptions are being made. I’m pretty sure “this is the rule except when God intervenes” is already the default position of religion. People already think prayers being answered is reflected differently in the world.
“For example, if bullets bounce off the innocent, evil soldiers could shield themselves from their enemies with virtuous people.”
That wouldn’t work since the forces of evil’s bullets wouldn’t hurt anyone. Hard to threaten the innocent or shoot righteous soldiers.
“I’m happy to grant that P(Resurrection | Theism) is low, but it seems crazy to me to say that it’s as low as P(Resurrection | Aliens). I think the Resurrection is obviously strong evidence for Theism, even if that strong evidence is not enough to outweigh the initial improbability of Theism.”
Why do you think aliens are so improbable?
@ Nita
I can’t help but imagine each of these conversions like so:
LOL, ouch.
Conversions in Narnia and Lewis’s other fiction weren’t so groveling (a pity, really). More like ants climbing a costumed elephant, then somehow growing and backing off so they could see the whole thing. Or at least see more of it, becoming (sorry) less wrong. There was a mural in _Perelandra_ that worked like my ants and elephant, and Lewis talked about such a view in correspondence with Dom Bede Griffith.
This is exactly what you’re supposed to find persuasive and what “faith” actually means to classical Christians is trusting that the chain of transmission from the Twelve Apostles to you are not liars. All metaphysical arguments can get you are the existence of God, not any knowledge about what God is like.
If there were 25 hours in a day, I’d sleep through them all.
I’m not sure how to interpret your reply to my self deprecating joke.
The most parsimonious explanation is that Mark Atwood is an asshole.
Different strokes for different folks, as I’d say if I were some kind of folksy type who didn’t work 26 hours a day.
>supernaturalism
If you have a systematic model of the world where it’s created and sustained by God, then God’s intervention isn’t supernatural, it’s natural.
When it comes to “imperfect observation” … yes, hallucinations and so on are important to consider (I’d argue most people don’t consider them enough.) But there’s nothing supernatural about imperfect observation – plenty of hallucinations etc are of things that are perfectly plausible, and even known to exist, like CIA spies. It’s all about the priors.
The only reason for assuming evidence for God “must” be fake, in the face of evidence, is a low prior. And the philosophical arguments for assigning a low prior to God’s existence … are suspect at best.
> religious anthropocentrism
People used to anthropomorphize lightning. Does that mean lightning isn’t real?
But maybe that’s unfair.
God is like us in certain ways. Morality. Something one could call intelligence, if an omniscient and omnipotent being is “intelligent” as we would understand it. Conscious, in some sense. That’s why we’re important. If we weren’t like-God, we couldn’t have this conversation.
Almost every religious believer who believes in a God would agree that they’re not gendered, not humanoid, and completely apart from our societies. Every society that produced a religion, that religion has criticized.
Not every religion is equally correct, and not every religious organization has been free from the influence of their society (to put it mildly). But that’s true of every discipline – science, engineering, even math (statistics.)
Any attempt to find out True Things will discover some truths, make some mistakes, and be misled – wilfully or otherwise – by some of their own biases.
But they still discovered those truths.
>demographics
Are there really more religious people here? There are a good number on /r/rational, even authors. There are definitely some on tumblr, I’ve run into a few.
I think this blog’s demographics benefit from the simple passage of time, to an extent.
There’s a well-known religion that believes in a God who was a man and lived 33 years as part of human society.
Jesus having divine origins != Jesus being The Divinity
That’s heresy.
Only if you’re a Baptist.
Though it would be more accurate to say that Jesus being a divine instrument, or embodying the divine nature in human form is a separate question from whether Jesus was the Logos described in Genesis.
No, only if you’re a Christian.
What do you mean exactly? I think most Christian denominations hold to Christ predating the creation of the world and being divine even while incarnate. Is there some other meaning to “being” that you have in mind or do you disagree?
edit: I think you edited while I was posting.
@ Randy M
I don’t know if you’re responding to me but it should be noted that this is a specific point of denominational contention.
Orthodox and Roman Catholics both hold that Jesus was god’s instrument/avatar on the mortal plane but not God himself any more than internet persona you’re currently viewing is “me”. My hands are not me but I am an entity that has hands and through these hands I can affect the world. That is how “The Father” and “The Son” can be both separate and consubstantial.
Baptists on the other hand reject this and hold that Jesus was the one true God ™ made flesh.
Catholics and Orthodox Churches do NOT say that Jesus was just an ‘avatar’ or an instrument. That’s definitely heresy (if I was less tired I’d remember which one – it’s not new!). Both say he was fully divine as well as fully human.
Orthodox and Roman Catholics hold opinions about whether God was Jesus, that seem to be incoherent to outsiders. Presumably, the question “does anyone think God has gender” is being asked from the perspective of an outsider looking at the beliefs of an insider. From the perspective of an outsider looking at an insider, it appears either that Orthodox and Catholics think God has gender, or at best, that they have inconsistent beliefs on that subject.
If someone says “I believe the world is round” but then defined round as “six square sides that meet at right angles”, with some philosophical explanation about how such a thing has “spherical essence” and so is actually a sphere, saying they believe in a cubical Earth is going to give a more accurate impression with respect to what an outsider cares about.
@DavidS
You’re probably thinking of Arianism, which holds that Jesus was an entirely distinct entity from the Logos.
The mortal avatar/”perfect complimentary natures” of Christ are how Orthodox and Roman Catholics squared the circle of the trinity with monotheism.
Course neither could agree on how the “The Holy Spirit” fit in, which when combined with spats over leavened vs unleavened bread and Greek vs Latin gave us the first proper schism.
@ Jiro
I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. The closest analogy I can think of as an insider is that asking for God’s is kind of like asking the Sky’s gender. Even if you got a definitive answer one way or the other, what makes you think it would be relevant?
“Orthodox and Roman Catholics both hold that Jesus was god’s instrument/avatar on the mortal plane but not God himself any more than internet persona you’re currently viewing is “me”. ”
Wrong. Completely wrong. The orthodox view for both is that Jesus Christ was and is wholly God, and wholly man,
“The mortal avatar/”perfect complimentary natures” of Christ are how Orthodox and Roman Catholics squared the circle of the trinity with monotheism.”
Wrong.
Not only is your “mortal avatar” a view that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns, the Incarnation is not a part of the doctrine of the Trinity, which, the Church teaches, preceded Creation, let alone the Incarnation. Different kettle of fish.
“So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.”
What I see is this (using “Christians” to refer to these specific Christians):
— Christians say that God is Jesus and Jesus has a gender
— Christians have a special type of “is” called the Trinity which denies that just because God is Jesus, and Jesus has gender, God has gender.
— Outsiders find this special “is” to be incoherent.
As far as I can tell, Christians believe something that implies that God has gender, even if they also have doctrine which says that this implication does not exist. I would describe this as “according to Christians, God has gender”.
If you say “according to X, Y”, and X says, “no, not Y”, you have failed to accurately report X’s position on Y. Even if you think X’s position on Y is stupid and you’re much smarter than X.
@ Mary
I’ll grant that it has been close to 30 years since I’ve sat through Sunday school (and in a different language to boot) but I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong, at least as far as Orthodox Catholics are concerned.
Though I’m pretty sure those idolaters who service of the whore of Rome would agree 😉
@ Jiro
My reply would be that while the historical figure of Jesus was male, the gender of Mary’s child has little or nothing to do with their divinity. Likewise the concept of God/Logos as “The Father” has more to do with ancient Greek concepts of biological essence and 2000 year old translation conventions than anyone’s dangly bits. As such, trying to ascribe modern social/sexual mores to the eternal is comparable to ascribing malice to a hurricane.
If it’s next to impossible to even describe the doctrine of the Trinity without inadvertently committing heresy (which appears to be the case – see not only the thread above, but parallel arguments lasting centuries in late antiquity), perhaps the problem is with the doctrine and not with the people trying to understand it. Why not just say it’s a mystery and be done with it?
Only if X’s position is consistent.
According to Jiro I’m 100% correct about everything.
Orthodox and Roman Catholics both hold that Jesus was god’s instrument/avatar on the mortal plane but not God himself any more than internet persona you’re currently viewing is “me”.
WHAT? Hlynkacg, we have a Creed* which we recite every Sunday at Mass which goes in part:
He is True God and True Man, in the Hypostatic Union of the Divine and human natures.
There are various Christological heresies but the one I’d most identify there in what you’ve said is Adoptionism (unless you’re going for one of the weirder new philosophies like Anthroposophism with the idea of the two Christs and the Cosmic Christ and I can’t really get my head round what they think).
Or I suppose you could just be stating the Unitarian position. Or maybe you were talking to a Jesuit? 🙂
*Indeed, two versions: the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed.
@ Deiseach:
I know that my view is not Adoptionism as I hold that Jesus was the “son of God” from the outset.
In any case I will grant that you are way more knowledgeable when it comes to Catholic doctrine than I am. However, I can’t help but feel that something’s being lost in translation.
The recitation of faith (in Ukrainian) That I grew up with was the Apostle’s Creed or something close enough to it that any errors are probably mine.
Wikipedia says that is mainly a Roman thing but I’m not sure how clued in they were/are to the practices of the communist Bloc Christian diaspora, or even how clued in I am seeing as it’s been a few years since I attended orthodox services regularly. (the closest thing I’ve got in my neck of the woods are Lutherans, unless I want to head into the city 😛 )
Anyway, I’m probably going to butcher this but here goes
nothingsomething…I believe in God the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and all things known and unknown.
I believe in our Lord Christ, his only son, conceived by the Spirit and born of Mary, who suffered under Pilate, was crucified, killed, and buried in hell only to rise again on the 3rd day.
He ascended into heaven, and sits at the side of the God the Almighty where he judges the living and the dead.
I believe in the Spirit; the one true Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection; and life everlasting.
Amen.
However, I can’t help but feel that something’s being lost in translation.
By some accounts, language differences were a significant cause of the various early church splits over Christology.
t I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong, at least as far as Orthodox Catholics are concerned.
Though I’m pretty sure those idolaters who service of the whore of Rome would agree ?
What produced this change of tune? You were explicitly claiming to speak on what the Catholics taught. Why, if you are now SURE that they teach something else, should we take your claim about the Orthodox any more seriously?
Especially given that you’re smirking while doing it.
@ Troy,
That sounds plausible to be me, even likely.
Mary asks: What produced this change of tune?
What change of tune? My position hasn’t changed.
My position hasn’t changed. The wink was just to indicate that while I might talk a little smack about those “splitters” in the Vatican, there’s no malice in it.
I was honestly kind of expecting Deisach to chime in with a crack about “dirt worshipping crypto-Arians” or some such.
The Ukrainian you’ve translated, Hlynkacg, corresponds to the Apostles’ Creed, which is admittedly silent on the point of Christology being discussed. The longer form Nicene Creed is a lot less ambiguous though. The English and Ukrainian can be found here, apparently. And yeah, that’s a Catholic site, but it notes this:
Which is true (although proper interpretation of the Filioque (again, not the point under the discussion though) is disputed between Catholics and Orthodox). Here’s some independent confirmation from various Orthodox churches. I would be pretty surprised if Ukrainian Orthodox had rejected or were forbidden from reciting the Nicene Creed, since it’s the gold standard of orthodox Christianity. It’s possible you were never taught it at all, but if so that’s a matter of bad catechesis (which, let’s be real here, is not an unknown phenomenon among mainline Christians).
Yes, but that was because He became man — it was not inherent to the Godhood.
I actually hadn’t noticed that this was an especially religious space, but I also don’t hang out in places like LW, /r/rational, or wherever else the cool kids are.
I would think off the top of my head the number of religious people here could be counted on one hand, or perhaps in the low double-digits at best.
Deiseach, Irenist, Mary, Jaskologist, Mai La Dreapta, Troy, randy m, yourself… keranih? John Schilling?
Those are all the ones I can remember off the top of my head. So definitely more than one hand, but perhaps not much more.
Still more religious than LessWrong, though.
You forgot me.
Who are the center leftists?
Deiseach, Irenist, Mary, Jaskologist, Mai La Dreapta, Troy, randy m, yourself… keranih? John Schilling?
Are you assuming that anyone who understands and at need defends the religious, must be one of them? If so, I’m curious as to how you view the civil rights movement…
“Who are the center leftists?”
Only one i know of is HeelBearCub.
I’m far left on some things and center left on others.
I understand and defend some right wing people on some things.
I’m an orthodox Catholic in the vein of Deiseach and Irenist and others, but I haven’t posted in forever. (Still reading though!)
No? I was just trying to remember as best as I could people who have owned up to being religious. If I mistook you for a theist, I apologize; I wasn’t too sure, which is why I added a question mark.
*raises hand*
Put another Catholic on the scoreboard.
>Who are the center leftists?
Center(?) Left Commenters (I can name):
houseboatonstyx
Heel Bear Cub
stillnotking (I think)
Larry Kestenbaum (sorry for probably misspelling your last name)
Null
Citizenearth
The Ancient Geek
EarthlyKnight
Protagoras
Far Left:
Eli
nil
birdboy2000
Nita(?)
Multiheaded
Yep, I could fairly be described as center-left.
Oh, fantastic. Apparently, I’m a (potential) commie 😀
Would you care to explain why?
You’re eastern european, into SJ, and frequently comment on the nice things people remember from the Soviet Union. Now I’m not saying you are a commie, but if someone told me you were a commie, I’d probably believe them.
More seriously, though, I have no idea, you don’t comment much on those issues, which is why there is a (?) included.
I won’t quibble with being called center-left. That’s probably where my views average out, though few of my views are particularly moderate (they’re a mix of far left and libertarian). But then there seems to be evidence that this is true of a lot of people who get classified as “moderates” (not that they have exactly my mix, but that they are likely to actually have a variety of extreme views with some in each direction rather than just not having extreme views).
Are we talking about centre-left religious people or centre-left in general? I’d say I’m centre-left. It’s how I vote, at the very least.
@jaimeastorga2000, Good question. I thought somebody was comparing the frequency of center-leftists to the frequency of religious people, but looking back through the thread I have no idea where I got that impression. I now have to admit that I don’t know why the number of center-leftists was brought up. If the question was instead intended to explore the overlap between the two groups, I am of course not at all religious.
Another center lefty here
@Protagoras
Thats how I feel about my views. I self-identify as a centrist, but my decision-making process isn’t to take a poll and pick the option halfway in the middle of everyone’s viewpoints.
On the issues I have a mix of views that are a mix of leftish ones and and libertarianish ones.
Left-wing views:
* Basic income/ more social spending
* Strongly in favor of action on climate change — conducted through a carbon tax
*Support the use of expansionary fiscal and monetary policy to offset recessions
* In favor of the ACA, with caveats and asterisks (but not single payer)
* More spending on international aid
Libertarianish
* Open borders
* Free trade
* A belief that standard economics is pretty much right about the impact of price controls, and a belief in general market efficiency.
* Strong support for the standard civil liberties — freedom of speech, privacy, due process.
* Support for full utilization of modern technology like nuclear energy and genetic modification
* Opposition to agricultural, and energy subsidies (all attempts to alter the path of the energy economy to ie. deal with climate change should be done through negative intensives like taxation)
* A belief that the government has no particular special role on the culture war issues, and strong opposition to government coercion either way.
You spelled my name correctly. And, yeah, my generally-center-left politics are pretty obvious.
As to religion, I am Jewish and member of a synagogue, but I am not very theistic. I do often find myself defending the good faith and positive impact of religious people and religious organizations.
A) I don’t find “supernatural” a useful noun outside of a Scholastic context, and I am not a Thomist.
B) We are images of God primarily in having rational minds. We call God “He” because religious truths were discovered in patriarchal societies and changing to “It” or some sci-fi pronoun would sound dumb, but Mind and the One obviously transcend sex. God wants you to have good sex because He is Goodness itself. God doesn’t demand worship,: if an omnipotent being demanded worship, we would be unable to resist. Rather, He merits worship.
The Levantine Antiquity thing is a bizarre strawman. It doesn’t apply to all religions. It doesn’t even apply to most Christians: what the Catholic Church teaches about law and morals scarcely resembles Levitcus and Deutoronomy, and before you scoff at that change, read The City of God.
As to the “Lol, why would a god care about what you do with your dangling bits,” attitude, from the religious Christian point of view sex is literally a ritual used to summon an immortal being into creation. The idea that God would care about it’s use does not seem that far fetched to me.
I find this a very insightful summary; previously as a second-generation irreligious person it’s seemed very arbitrary, and the only way I’ve been able to make any sense of it at all has been through ideas about practising restraint and conservative following of what used to work, which still seemed incomplete.
The “lol why would god care about your dangling bits” also comes unstuck pretty rapidly if you then consider “So God/god would be perfectly okay with rape or paedophilia because hey, what does it care what you do with your dangling bits?”
That gets a reaction which boils down to no, what they really mean is they don’t want god to make rules about I can’t have sex with all the hotties I want without marriage or commitment or taking children into account.
After all, why should god care if we steal or lie or kill in addition to having sex? Why is that any different as a commandment on human behaviour?
@ Deiseach
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/08/a-tale-of-two-boxes-contrastin-sexual-ethics.html
@Deiseach: That’s so very true.
If you read the Classics, you’ll notice that myths about Zeus Pater/Jupiter send the message that the supreme god doesn’t care what men do with their dangling bits, and the Platonists and Stoics had to argue that those myths should be suppressed or were allegories in order to square remaining traditionally religious with having sexual ethics.
Well, presumably they’d care about rape or paedophilia because those things hurt people and hurting people is bad. Even if they had no particular care for how the ritual was used otherwise.
Which is what I’d say is my true position here; I mean I don’t want to have to follow rules about what I do that aren’t proportionate in their restrictions to harm they prevent.
This is why those “but then why not rape and murder and kill” things aren’t really persuasive to the irreligious; when a restriction is called ‘arbitrary’ it means ‘decoupled from preventing harm’, not… arbitrary in the sense that any value system is orthogonal to claims of fact.
Restrictions on rape and murder and killing aren’t arbitrary, in that sense, because they’re pretty clearly justified by harm prevented.
This then opens the door to the counterargument about how family disruption is harmful. Roughly this isn’t found compelling either because barring all outside-the-right-way sex to prevent family disruption is perceived to be like barring all assemblages of more than three people to prevent riots; massively disproportionate and oppressive compared to just dealing with the bad cases directly. This is probably a difference in opinion of fact.
What do you mean?
Something I should clarify — I was raised Eastern Orthodox. I think I remember pretty well the various sources that claimed you go straight to hell if you don’t worship God, no questions asked, and the standards for what proper worship consisted of (the failures to pray you had to confess to your priest) were rather high and probably in conflict with a modern 9-to-5 job. (On your knees. Facing an icon and the East. Say the words slowly, don’t rush through the prayer. Don’t half-ass your genuflexions and prostrations. In the morning, in the evening, and before and after the meals at least.)
What do you mean?
I mean it’s a late medieval Roman Catholic term, rooted in the distinction between nature and grace. The Modern Catholic Dictionary defines it as “the sum total of heavenly destiny and all the divinely established means of reaching that destiny, which surpass the mere powers and capacities of human nature.” If you want to understand theism qua theism rather than RCC theology, it’s a pretty useless term.
I was raised Eastern Orthodox. I think I remember pretty well the various sources that claimed you go straight to hell if you don’t worship God, no questions asked, and the standards for what proper worship consisted of (the failures to pray you had to confess to your priest) were rather high and probably in conflict with a modern 9-to-5 job.
Huh, I would have thought Eastern Orthodox priests explain worship better than that. Attending the liturgy on Sundays and saying daily prayers, using symbolic aids (icon, facing east, etc.) and actually thinking rather than rushing through by rote are about literally turning your mind to God. You want to undergo theosis when your mind leaves space-time for eternity. The alternative (hell) is sometimes understood as voluntary eternal separation from God in something like the ancient Greek underworld, but more commonly as the mental anguish of being welcomed into the Kingdom of God when you dislike Him.
I meant “supernatural” as in miracles, divine intervention, life after death, and generally all the stuff that conflicts with the way physics models the world. In other contexts it’s also referred to as magic. Why is it useless as a term in this context?
If that meant I failed to understand them, please take into account that the last time I was very religious was at about the age of 11. But I don’t think that’s what happened, knowing this religion. The theological explanation you put forward is very high falutin’ compared to what the average believer hears. (The average believer here is the lower-class elderly woman, very likely from a rural background.) Religious books are overwhelmingly about ascetics (their lives, their miracles, their hardships, their prosecution where it applies), about Orthodox morality and life advice (and it’s more conservative than any Westerner would imagine), about how the end times are coming, and finally about theology. This religious literature is meant to awaken awe, teach rules, and inspire readers to forsake “the world” and turn to God, not to prove religious truths rationally.
Re:hell. Sometimes understood, yes. I’ve only seen hell-as-separation-from-God a few times, and hell-as-antitheist-cognitive-dissonance basically never. More often it’s been accounts of near-death experiences with incursions into heaven and hell, that weren’t at all light on physical descriptions of the tortures of the damned. (They were described as screaming for mercy and repenting, with nobody to hear them. Eastern Orthodoxy rejects the purgatory doctrine.) Occasionally, speculation that hell was physically found beneath the crust of the Earth; there was a sound recording of screams and wails in a Siberian pit apparently proving that. The Church is very much encouraging this.
Hell-as-voluntary-separation-from-God is something completely made up in later centuries. It has no source in the Bible or in the Church Fathers. Early Christian thinkers are very clear that hell is a place where God sends people against their will to punish them, and that there’s nothing wrong with this because they deserve it.
The separation-from-God thing comes in when people don’t think that sounds very fair and/or loving of God, to torture people eternally, so they reframe it as God giving them what they really want after all.
I remember some piece really getting into this a while ago, looking through the sources, but I don’t recall the title or source.
While as far as I can tell this is true in the general sense, I’ve heard that annihilationism, the doctrine that unsaved people simply cease to exist after death, did have support among some sects of early Christianity. It also isn’t totally without Biblical support: note that Paul’s letters refer to sinners being punished with eternal destruction, not eternal torment or torture.
Also, heaven and hell pretty much don’t exist in the Old Testament. The only mentions of the afterlife before the New Testament are a few references to “Sheol,” which seems to indicate either a poetic term for the grave or, if it is talking about a literal afterlife, something akin to the Underworld in Greek Mythology: a bland and unexciting place where everyone good or bad goes after they die. From what I’ve read, concepts of judgement in the afterlife didn’t become part of Jewish thought until around the 1st and 2nd century BC at the earliest.
@ NN:
Annihilationism is totally separate, you’re right, and it has a lot of Biblical support.
Also, you’re right about Judaism. Everyone goes to the same place; serving God isn’t about getting some kind of eternal reward but about duty / not getting hit in this life by the Almighty Smiter.
@Dahlen: I meant “supernatural” as in miracles, divine intervention, life after death, and generally all the stuff that conflicts with the way physics models the world. In other contexts it’s also referred to as magic. Why is it useless as a term in this context?
Well, there was another subthread in this OT about how if ESP or magic existed, it would be part of the natural order, not supernatural. If you mean miracles, divine intervention and life after death contradict materialism, then I think it’s more productive to tackle the issue of whether materialism, idealism or dualism is true than to argue about the supernatural.
I don’t think physics is the first and last word in describing reality. I think it’s dependent on mathematics, and mathematical entities are immaterial things.
Anyway, are you Russian? I’ve heard some pretty odd things about the Russian Orthodox Church, though the End Times stuff is new to me.
b) religious anthropocentrism (e.g. God created humans in His image, God can be said to be a He, God cares about your sex life, God likes and demands worship just like a human being with a need for status, the Objectively Correct way to live has a suspicious lot in common with what Levantine societies of Antiquity thought, etc.)?
I don’t think most rationally-aligned religious people actually believe these things, and I don’t think most religions actually require members to believe these things. Even if we limit it specifically to Judaism and Christianity, it is fairly common to e.g. read “in his own image” as “first-person consciousness with a basic moral instinct and immortal soul”, not “bipedal mammalian body”. More generally, any God that is compatible with observed reality is a minimally interventionist deity. If his last overt revelation was to a bunch of Levantine shepherds or whatnot, a clever rationalist ought to be able to unravel the inherent simplifications, misperceptions, and mistranslations rather than demanding that God provide a separate revelation in the language of modern academia.
Islam, and the Biblical Literalists subset of Protestant Christianity, really want you to not do this. Everyone else is pretty cool with it, and most of the religious people I know do it to at least some extent.
Islam, and the Biblical Literalists subset of Protestant Christianity, really want you to not do this. Everyone else is pretty cool with it, and most of the religious people I know do it to at least some extent.
There’s Biblical Literalism and then there’s Biblical Literalism. John Calvin was a YEC, and he taught that God’s revelation to Moses was simplified for acceptance by primitive shepherds and only infallible in the original autographs, not in translation or even Erasmus’s Textus Receptus.
I think this is a bit of an anachronism. What else could he have been? In Calvin’s era, we didn’t know the scientific facts that make a literalist reading of Genesis clearly at odds with reality (i.e. that the earth is billions of years old and that animals and plants evolved over very long periods of geological time through a process of natural selection). The term “Young-Earth Creationist” only makes sense to describe someone who is aware of the scientific consensus listed above and willingly chooses to deny it. We can only guess how John Calvin would have reacted to the scientific facts of geological age and biological evolution, had they been available to him.
Right. My point was that no serious Christian has been a literalist about everything in the Bible. It’s a matter of context. Your 20th-21st century fundamentalists will tell you that “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars” is a metaphor for government in general. To Martin Luther, it made sense that Jesus was literally talking about the Kaiser.
@ Le Maistre Chat:
No true Scotsman ever committed a murder like that.
@Vox: I think you’re committing the Fallacy Fallacy. Unless you have evidence that there are any Christians out there who non-jokingly believe in geocentrism, obeying the Roman Emperor in particular rather than government in general, that King Solomon fell in love with a woman who had baby deer where her teats should have been…
@ Le Maistre Chat:
Maybe it’s true that no one has ever thought that there are no metaphors in the Bible. “Literalism” in that sense is a strawman position.
But plenty of “serious Christians” have been literalists in the normal meaning of literalism, AKA inerrantism. From the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, made by over 200 serious Christians:
Wikipedia elaborates:
God can be said to be a He
No, God is spirit and is neither male nor female.
Why do we call God “Father” and “He”, then? Because that is how we have been taught to address Him (e.g. in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in Heaven”).
From the catechism:
God created humans in His image
Which does not mean “has a body with two arms and two legs, etc.”. A six-tentacled jelly beast from Antares could be described as created in the image of God if it were established to have a rational soul 🙂
From the relevant section of the “Summa Theologica”:
God cares about your sex life
God does not care about your sex life; God cares about your entire life and right relationship and your eternal fate. However, people are very concerned about sex, whether it’s for pleasure alone or not. Thus the hair-pulling. Most of the laws in Leviticus and Numbers are about living in community (if we’re going to argue about “God cares/doesn’t care about your sex life”, then we should say “yes/no” to incest, because there’s a whole lot of “don’t sleep with your sister/daughter/niece/step-mother/half-sister no really we mean it” for the one or two lines about “no sleeping with the same gender as yourself”).
Well, the Church is the Bride of Christ, right? Clearly, this cannot refer to Christ as a man, because a human being can’t marry a church. Therefore, it must refer to Christ as God. And since only two persons of opposite genders can be united in marriage, and the Church is the bride, which implies the feminine gender, then Christ must be of the opposite — masculine — gender.
Thanks for the answer, but I was sort of looking forward to your answer (as one of the prominent religious people on SSC who can also write/explain pretty well), and hoped people didn’t get this hung up on those particular bits. They were added in more to contrast our biological nature, which is often seen as belonging to the realm of the profane, with the sacred, to show what I meant about anthropocentrism. I could have mentioned any other various lifestyle & cultural factors generally covered by religion (what is halal/kosher, which language to use in church, whether to cremate or to bury the dead), as these do genuinely seem small potatoes on the cosmic scale (and beyond-cosmic) of God’s existence.
An even stronger assertion of this is the question of why would a god care about anything happening on this pale blue dot, I mean, we’re freakishly tiny, our planet could be wiped by Random Celestial Body/ high-energy cosmic thingamajig tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a dint in the universe, physically. Literally, “why should god care if we steal or lie or kill in addition to having sex?”. Who knows how such a being might think? Morality or disapproval is still a uniquely human concept as far as we know, which exists in humans for very good reasons, but there’s no good reason to assume it exists in transcendent beings. Admittedly, there’s a weaker case to be made for this position, than for the one described in the first paragraph, for unspecified but intuitive reasons.
(please don’t mock me for this reply, I’m genuinely not trying to get you outraged with my heathenry)
Nitpick “Earth is small in the grand scheme” only applies if time is a constraint. If you aren’t constrained, you can mess around with everything, even things that are marginally important.
I’ve never understood this complaint. The Biblical narrative about God creating the universe makes clear why he would care about this one small part–he made it as a home for the creatures he made in his image with whom he could relate. It doesn’t say how much he cares about everything else, maybe lots, maybe little.
But I don’t see why we should have such a small view of God as to think he only concerns himself with physical grandeur, compared with the social, emotional, intellectual universe which, as far as we know, is limited to this planet.
So why did He create all the rest of it?
So Angra Mainyu couldn’t find us so quickly.
It’s not difficult to come up with rationalizations here. For instance: he created all the rest of the universe so the Carl Sagans of the world would have fun investigating it. But he made us apparently small and insignificant within it to keep us from getting too arrogant before him.
The magnitude of the universe is not really an argument against God in itself. It’s just evidence that writers of the Bible weren’t inspired by any kind of higher intelligence and that, like every other religion, Judaism and Christianity are historical products of their times.
There are unusually many religious people on SSC compared to the typical rationalist space. How do you square this general rationalist tendency with a) supernaturalism (especially the epistemological impossibility of establishing supernatural causes of events, given imperfect knowledge of laws of nature and imperfect observation) and b) religious anthropocentrism (e.g. God created humans in His image, God can be said to be a He, God cares about your sex life, God likes and demands worship just like a human being with a need for status, the Objectively Correct way to live has a suspicious lot in common with what Levantine societies of Antiquity thought, etc.)?
I think people have adequately addressed the anthropocentrism objection above: the respects in which we are created in God’s image don’t have to do with peculiar physical or biological features of humanity, but with things like our rational nature; God is not literally male or female*; sex is an important part of life, and is an imperfect reflection of our relationship with the divine; God merits worship, and worshipping God is good because God is our end, not because God needs status**; etc.
** The Christian God in particular doesn’t look like a God who needs status, inasmuch as he became incarnate, lived a humble life serving others, suffered a humiliating death, and so on.
* The male language used to refer to God the Father may reflect the Greek biological idea (which you can find, e.g., in Aristotle) that a mother provides the matter for her offspring, whereas the father provides the form, or nature. Calling the first person of the Trinity “Father” then reflects the fact that the Son shares the Father’s nature. Of course, this Greek biological idea was wrong, and given what we now know abut biology God is not biologically more like a father than a mother to either Christ or to humankind.
On supernaturalism: the claim that it’s epistemically impossible to establish supernatural causes of events is either false or trivial. It’s trivial if it means that we can never conclusively establish, with probability 1, that the cause of some event is supernatural. This is because we can never conclusively establish any causal claim with probability 1. Most of our interesting beliefs about the world are not entailed by the data we directly observe. So theism is no different from the vast majority of scientific theories here.
It’s false if it means that we can never get evidence for supernatural claims. That God exists, has certain intentions, and has interacted causally with the world in history are empirical claims that make particular observations more or less likely. We can get evidence for and against these claims just like we can get evidence for and against the claims that Caesar crossed the Rubicon or that birds are descended from dinosaurs.
What the evidence for theism in general, and Christian theism in particular, is is a long topic. I agree with Rob above that the historical evidence for Christianity is strong. The main other evidence I would point to is the fine-tuning of the universe for life, the probability of which is vanishly small given atheism. (Given atheism, and given that this universe is the only universe, it’s nearly certain that the universe would not be life-permitting. Given atheism, and given some versions of the multiverse theory, according to which there are many universes, it’s likely that some universe or other would be life-permitting. But the vast majority of universes with life on such theories are ones in which most of the universe is chaos, and life pops into existence for a few seconds and then pops back out of existence. Ones like ours, with incredibly low initial entropy in which life evolves over millennia, are much rarer. Hence, if the multiverse theory were true, we should expect to find ourselves in one of the chaotic universes and not in a stable one like this.)
I’ll just be sitting here reading the replies. Sorry if this sounds like a strawman, it’s the best I could do to illustrate some real features of religion that I have a problem with.
Don’t worry, if you are self-conscious about setting up a strawman of religion, you’re already doing better than the annoying Internet atheists[TM]. 🙂
I’m not sure about the other religious commenters, but I’m only here on SSC and have little to no interest in the rest of rationalist-space.
So, at least for me, I don’t feel a pressing need to square my religion with typical rationalist tendencies because I don’t accept many of the typical rationalist tenets. Rationalism seems to have produced or influenced some interesting people thinking in interesting ways, and I really enjoy reading what some of them have to write (well, mainly just Scott), but I don’t view it as the One True Way of thinking, or even far-and-away-the-best way of thinking.
What’s far more important is that Scott has created a really interesting and welcoming space on the internet. Especially as a religious person it is incredibly refreshing the find a place that 1) is respectful of religious perspectives and 2) has a variety of really interesting opinions and well-reasoned arguments. Most communities on the internet manage one of those at best.
In summary, I’m not here for the rationality so much as the “niceness, charity, and civilization.” Those may be correlated but they’re not inextricable.
My reasons are largely the same.
Why? We have empirical results that rationalism works great for predicting the future compared to every other method. What other standard is there for seeing if a method of thinking about the world works?
Is rationalism better than prediction markets? 😉
Like I said, I’m not really that interested in the rest of the rationalist-sphere. I’ve never read LW, the sequences, or anything else, so I only have a notion of what is meant by “rationalism.” What I mean is the philosophy that the correct way to determine truth in all areas is to hold confidence values for various statements of fact in your head and then do updates according to Bayes’ rule as you encounter new evidence.
For one thing, I don’t really know what empirical results you’re talking about. Do you mean the whole body of current natural science, or is there something more specific to the current rationalist community?
If you are talking about the results of natural science (and probably even if you’re not), those results are great, and I agree that Bayesian-style reasoning works well,but you will always run into the epistemological limitations that science has. It only works well on phenomena that are repeatable, testable, etc., and still has the problem of induction.
A more fundamental issue is that in rationalism is only useful when you couple it with a rule for determining action. If I find that my confidence level that a tsunami will hit my house tomorrow, what should I do? Why? There seem to be various rules people use but how are those rules justified? I guess this is the a form is-ought problem.
Which isn’t to say that rationalism isn’t useful as a way of determining statements of fact. It just can’t be the only way of obtaining knowledge. (Unless you bite the bullet and claim that the only real knowledge is that which is justified in a rationalist framework.)
I have definitely enjoyed the things about statistics I have learned here. As a professional physicist I expect it will be helpful in my career. I just haven’t seen anything to convince me that rationalism is the one true way that I should order my life around.
“What I mean is the philosophy that the correct way to determine truth in all areas is to hold confidence values for various statements of fact in your head and then do updates according to Bayes’ rule as you encounter new evidence.”
That is Baysianism, not rationalism.
“For one thing, I don’t really know what empirical results you’re talking about. ”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/04/book-review-superforecasting/
“It only works well on phenomena that are repeatable, testable, etc., and still has the problem of induction.”
History? Macroeconomics? Are these not science?
“A more fundamental issue is that in rationalism is only useful when you couple it with a rule for determining action.”
That is a bit like complaining the problem with communism is it doesn’t provide the unified theory. “what is reality like” and “what should we do” are completely separate questions. Rationalism does not claim to answer that- the field devoted to that is ethics.
“It just can’t be the only way of obtaining knowledge. ”
I’m not seeing where you get the idea rationalists reject empiricism. Unless you are saying rationalists believe that beliefs need to be logically supported and calibrated and that if they aren’t they are likely to not be logically supported and calibrated… which is sort of a priori true.
Like I said, I’m not sure what you mean by rationalism.
The point I was trying to make originally was that the apparent excess of religious commenters on SSC may be less surprising if you consider that they are here for reasons other than its connection to the “rationalist community.” (These quotes are not sarcastic, I’m just not sure exactly what the phrase means.) And hence it might be less surprising that their views don’t square with others in the rationalist community.
I can’t debate the merits of rationalism very seriously because I am not well-versed in it. If you would like to ask my views on specific claims I’d be happy to take a stab at it, but keep in mind that I don’t know a lot of the jargon.
“Like I said, I’m not sure what you mean by rationalism.”
—points at host—
—points at EY and Less Wrong—
That is generally what people are referring to by rationalism here (not the philosophical term).
“I can’t debate the merits of rationalism very seriously because I am not well-versed in it”
///The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.///
///First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems. No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.
This is why we have a whole site called “Less Wrong”, rather than simply stating the formal axioms and being done. There’s a whole further art to finding the truth and accomplishing value from inside a human mind: we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on.///
Do you agree with that?
Looking at your quote/definition, I’m not sure I see anything that I can agree or disagree with. It appears to mostly be definitional. If I try to pick out non-trivial truth claims I get:
— “the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems.”
— Agree; I have no reason to doubt this. Most really interesting problems are intractable.
— “There’s a whole further art to finding the truth and accomplishing value from inside a human mind:”
— Yeah, probably. I certainly agree that figuring out truth is difficult and probably cannot be solved by a single algorithm.
— “we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing…”
— Yes, though this sounds like any serious philosophy that still believes in truth.
— And, if I may, I read an implicit claim that “the method on Less Wrong are the best known methods for determining truth in light of the claims made above.”
— Now I am skeptical, though not much more than when this claim is made by any community of philosophers. If you add caveats like “determining the truth of certain kinds of claims, such as etc.” I become much less skeptical. If you explicitly remove caveats and say “determining all truth in all domains” I become much more skeptical. But NB I have not read any of LW; anything I know about it I picked up here secondhand.
“if you consider that they are here for reasons other than its connection to the “rationalist community.” ”
That describes me, although I’m not religious.
I am here, first, because Scott is an interesting writer, and second because he has managed to create an environment of generally civil conversation among people, many of them intelligent, with a wide range of views. That’s hard to find online.
If you’re using “Rationalism” to mean less-wrongism, then I don’t think you can claim much int he way of empirical proof that it works way better than everything else. You certainly can’t put science under your umbrella, which predates this philosophy by centuries.
” And, if I may, I read an implicit claim that “the method on Less Wrong are the best known methods for determining truth in light of the claims made above”
Does anyone ever look at the links I post? No?
“If you explicitly remove caveats and say “determining all truth in all domains” I become much more skeptical. ”
Why? Attempting to eliminate the mental biases that cause you to have beliefs not reflect reality is exactly the sort of thing we should expect to result in beliefs that more closely approximate reality. You can question the implementation, but I have no idea how the methodology itself is disputable.
Jask
” then I don’t think you can claim much int he way of empirical proof that it works way better than everything else. ”
People don’t read links on the internet. Much sadness.
Psh, what am I, some kind of newb? I read that link back when it was first posted. It’s a promising indicator, but that’s all. This is not iron-clad proof that LW Rationality is the best way of doing things, and it does not justify giving them credit for science.
Plus, that’s basically a social sciences study, so my prior for it not replicating is 60%. As the prophet says, beware the man of one study.
Hey Giant Squid, this is monolith94, you know, from the old times.
I reached out to you on twitter but this is probably a better bet? In any case I was hoping you’d take some time to check out the book Valis. I would love to hear your thoughts on it, as it deals with therapy and psychology from a patient’s perspective. It’s very interesting and I can only imagine your reaction to certain passages of it.
Another thing I’d love to hear about from you on your blog is more about ADD/ADHD. What is it? Given it’s nature as a spectrum condition, what is the best way to address it?
For my money, the most surprising and interesting behavioral genetics of the past two years are the phenome papers showing pervasive genetic correlations of good traits:
Krapohl et al 2015 http://www.hungrymindlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Krapohl-et-al-2015.pdf “Phenome-wide analysis of genome-wide polygenic scores”
Hagenaars et al 2016 http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2015225a.html “Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive functions and physical and mental health in UK Biobank (N=112 151) and 24 GWAS consortia”
Hill et al 2016 http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/09/043000 “Molecular genetic contributions to social deprivation and household income in UK Biobank (n=112,151)”
I should mention that one reason Scott may find them interesting is that this sort of pervasive intercorrelation, like the genetic correlations of schizophrenia with depression, bipolar, and other psychiatric disorders, may well be part of the phenomenon he puzzles over in his past post https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/ . Part of why you see such pits of suffering, where a lot of people are poor and sexually abused and depressed and schizophrenic etc, is because many of these causally lead to each other as outcomes but also because getting depressed is evidence for having genetic risk for depression which also predicts/causes additional schizophrenia risk and this also overlaps with intelligence genes so that’s also going to predict other problems, and so on.
As far as I know a lot of people are backing away from the idea of mutational load; how else do we interpret:
1. There being just straight out “bad genes” that make everything worse
2. The same people having lots and lots of them, as opposed to all of them averaging out over the population?
2. The same people having lots and lots of them, as opposed to all of them averaging out over the population?
Lots and lots of the alleles, or lots and lots of the everything worse?
If the latter: pleiotropy.
If we assume Jonathan Haidt and Scott Adams are basically right and nearly everyone starts out with gut emotional decisions and then uses logic to justify them, what does this imply about the strategy or advisability of debate and/or persuading others to one’s cause? Also, what does this imply about our ability to trust our own intuitions, other than that we should probably read the Sequences again? Is it a “dark art” to try to appeal to people on a gut level instead of a logical level? Is logical discussion useful within the narrow confines of discussion among SSC types who value logic a lot more than most and try to subordinate their gut reactions to it? Or not even there, since even in such contexts instances of people changing their minds on fundamental assumptions are pretty rare? Also, are there any ways to reshape one’s own or someone else’s “gut” (as in, intuitions) without genetic engineering and/or time machines that allow you to change their early childhood?
For example, I can think of cases where someone is strongly inclined to socialism, but who briefly flirts with an alternative–say, libertarianism–only to eventually find a way back to some new, more defensible version of socialism, which was what his heart told him was right all along. And I myself, am this way with respect to libertarianism–it seemed instantly and obviously right to me the first time I encountered it but I have since had periods of flirtation with or trying on of other philosophies, yet I always come back to libertarianism.
Is libertarianism just in my DNA/early childhood and should I operate on the assumption that others have a similar relationship to socialism, nationalism, and other philosophies? And if so, is logical persuasion useless since, even in the rare case when I can convince them, for a time, of the logical superiority of libertariansim, their guts will eventually lead them home to socialism or whatever else?
Well, one of the implications is that influencing peoples gut feelings before they notice they’re being influenced and before the people are asked to commit, in words, to one side or the other is probably insanely overpowered.
Fnords are real and many in the media are already using them to full effect. It’s just that instead of a secret word it’s carried by the “tone” of articles and TV shows.
The libertarianism thing I think is a different issue. With that there’s discord between my preference for outcomes and my preference for methods. Ends vs means.
Libertarianism does amazingly well when it comes to principled principles that lead from a small set of coherent starting positions.
If it was a computer program it would be written in Haskell and would be a few beautifully elegant statements.
Unfortunately the end game implies child brothels and no entity of social responsibility of last resort so anyone who can’t care for themselves is basically fucked unless they can beg effectively.
Socialism is a mess in terms of core principles and starting positions. Instead it’s what you get when people look at the outcomes they want and cludge something together to get the answers they want.
It it was a computer program it would be written in assembly by 200 different people and every time a tough edge case or bug came up someone adds a messy little patch.
@ Murphy,
I genuinely enjoyed that analogy.
I don’t really agree. I think the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is a pretty neat and elegant principle. And my understanding of libertarianism is fairly hacky – there are lots of questions, such as what things people should be able to own, what you should be able to do when someone violates your rights, what externalities should be acknowledged and what to do about them, that need to be answered, but whose answers are not obvious and can’t really be determined from first principles.
Yes, one of the most common critiques of libertarianism is that it is simplistic, utopian, overly concerned with consistency at the expense of practicality, etc. etc.
On the libertarian view, this is not just wrong, it’s the exact opposite of the truth. From our perspective, trying to manage society and the economy from a few central offices in the state house is the utopian, oversimplified, blunt instrument.
Letting all the individuals with the relevant knowledge work out all the messy details on a case-by-case-ish basis is actually much more practical and is, in fact, the source of all large-scale, complex social systems which function: not just economies, but even law (which is always based to some degree on common law and precedent) and natural languages (which are codified in dictionaries and grammar books but created, sustained, and evolved through the billions of communicative acts which occur each day).
“From our perspective, trying to manage society and the economy from a few central offices in the state house is the utopian, oversimplified, blunt instrument. ”
Isn’t that an empirical question? Aren’t there plenty of cases were oversimplified blunt instruments work?
But this contrasts libertarianism with old-style, command-economy socialism, and that isn’t what most non-libertarians advocate. Rather, the real-world choice in the modern West is between greater and lesser degrees of government intervention within the context of a mostly-capitalist economy.
What we have now is more or less what happens if you take capitalism and then implement special-case hacks and workarounds every time the big-picture results are ethically abhorrent to a majority of people. I think this is what Murphy was getting at.
What we have now is more or less what happens if you take capitalism and then implement special-case hacks and workarounds every time the big-picture results are ethically abhorrent to a majority of people.
And is the driver for Molochian local minimums.
“What we have now is more or less what happens if you take capitalism and then implement special-case hacks and workarounds every time the big-picture results are ethically abhorrent to a majority of people. I think this is what Murphy was getting at.”
Put another way, almost everyone has now grudgingly recognized that free market capitalism works best; therefore, instead of letting their atavistic socialist gut reactions lead them to try to overturn it wholesale, utopian planners content themselves with tinkering with it up to a level where most people don’t notice how much worse off they’re being made (unless all or even most government laws exist only in cases when their nonexistence would clearly lead to morally abhorrent outcomes. This seems highly improbable to me; then again, imagine the horror if people were allowed to braid hair without a license).
@JDG1980
Plus a great many cases where the general principle of the thing is the argument-soldier but the motivated activists and beneficiaries are special interest groups. /snark
The most salient examples I can point to of a special-case hack for a perceived flaw in capitalism are Social Security or Medicare. These are built to care for the poor and elderly excluded by the capitalist system, so long as you ignore the state-imposed reasons for the problems of the poor and elderly. Social security is needed in part* to fix the savings-destroying bubble markets created by government’s low interest rate policies and constant 2% inflation target. Medicare is needed to cover gaps in poor person health care due to massively inflating medical costs** in part thanks to credentialism of what doctors/nurses are allowed to do + wasting tons of doctor time in filling out mandatory paperwork.
That said, in the interest of changing my mind on things too: What sort of policies do you see as ways to fix edge-cases in capitalism? What does a non-anarchist consider worthy trade-offs and moral hazards of government as a fine-tuner?
*No one wants to live with or support their grandparents like they used to all while being terrible at saving for retirement in general. Culture is to blame here too.
**Of course, part of the ballooning cost is people living longer and having access to treatments that are as effective as they are expensive, so blame all around for that one, I guess =D.
“utopian planners content themselves with tinkering with it up to a level where most people don’t notice how much worse off they’re being made ”
I’m currently leaving Saving Gotham and I’m not sure how banning restaurants from selling sodas over a certain size counts as “making people worse off”
“What sort of policies do you see as ways to fix edge-cases in capitalism? ”
You are familiar with the existence of tobacco companies?
@Samuel Skinner
Just to make sure I understand your intent, you mean tobacco companies as an edge case in that the product they freely make and people freely buy is dangerous to those people’s health but is addictive so they cannot or find it much harder to stop using.
As much as my instinctual impulse is to frantically search for a reason why it is government’s fault or exacerbated by government, I think you’ve got me in check on this one. The policy of taxing cigarette is generally effective in getting people to value less the nicotine stimulant in the form of cigarettes.
On the other hand, don’t smokers have free will (or something functionally similar to human appearances) to be able to choose self-destructive things in the long run for pleasure in the short run? It is and was BS that cigarette giants colluded with the medical establishment to keep evidence of cigarette harms out of public view for so long, that sort of fraud is also condemned in ancap circles.
That is true, but wasn’t the issue I was thinking of. Smoking companies have a strong incentive to tell people their product is safe. Unless you have an authority people listen to, complaints about smoking by scientists are going to run up against other scientists saying smoking is safe. In our world it took decades to get the companies to admit that cigarettes are bad for people.
And yes, having the government be the tie breaker is sucky; regulatory capture is a major problem for dealing with health issue caused by obesity, salt… basically anything with money in it (the food pyramid being the most infamous). Unfortunately, there isn’t a way around it; any authority that people will listen to is going to be one interest parties will fight to control. Having it be the government appears to be marginally better than the alternatives, if only because the government attracts “people interested in the subject and helping others” and concentrates them in the place they can do the most damage (surrounded by a protective layer of punch-clock employees because the government also attracts those sort of individuals).
As for free will, you can drive down the smoking rate and amount by individual smokers just by moving where tobacco is displayed in a store. Heck, advertisements informing people they can die from smoking are less effective than ones informing them they might be crippled, even though the latter is better (since crippled people can kill themselves but the dead don’t have the option to cripple themselves).
When you start talking about libertarian paternalistic programs, it gets hard to talk about free will of individuals. Banning large size soda cups will result in people gaining less weight… despite the fact they can use refills or buy multiple sodas.
Punch-clock bureaucrats as the protective fat layer insulating the well-meaning government employees. If things actually work that way, that is fantastic (especially if intentional) org design! That way it takes significantly more bribing and capture for a single entity or coordinated group to seize the regulator by ‘bulking up’ the organization with people who want a stable job and are unlikely to take risks like accepting a bribe unless it is huge.
That’s the problem with getting to libertopia isn’t it? We’ve got ideas for a stable society with multiple competing regulators and safety-certifies once we are already there, but we’ve got a chicken and egg situation of how do safety certifiers get started without a rep? I mean we’ve got UL, but they’ve got regulatory capture at this point with municipal codes requiring UL certified stuff.
Thanks for the conversation, and I appreciate the points you’ve brought up here. I’ve got to keep working on exactly how this fence works and what its doing before I suggest newer and better fences to replace it.
“If we assume Jonathan Haidt and Scott Adams are basically right and nearly everyone starts out with gut emotional decisions and then uses logic to justify them, what does this imply about the strategy or advisability of debate and/or persuading others to one’s cause?”
It means these people are part of a small subset of people that enjoys discussing ideas in the abstract at an emotional level. Probably means these people can also be convinced of anything, which is from Scott’s epistemic learned helplessness essay.
“Also, are there any ways to reshape one’s own or someone else’s “gut” (as in, intuitions) without genetic engineering and/or time machines that allow you to change their early childhood?”
Practice, practice, practice. Fake it till you make it, etc. This was I think was supposed to be the original point of Overcoming Bias, Yudkowsky’s idea of a rationality dojo where people actually meet and talk IRL and stuff.
In the Yudkowsky Dojo, is the goal to reason without being influenced by gut feelings or to put the gut feelings somehow more in their proper place (not sure what that is), or…?
Because if the first, doesn’t this run into the problem described by Ted Slingerland re. Chinese philosophy and the case of Phineas Gage: people with the ability to rationally analyze moral problems but no gut level instincts on such questions seem not to actually function well in society nor as moral reasoners?
That is, if we consider Haidt’s comparison of gut reactions to the dog and rationality to its tail, are we trying to make a dog with a really strong tail? Or to get the tail and the dog to trade places? Or to render the dog as quiescent as possible? Or…?
I think part of the intent of the dog-tail metaphor is that the tail, however strong, cannot truly lead the dog, nor, maybe, would we want it to?
The goal is to make the right decisions. The implication of those half-million words on heuristics and biases is that the right decisions are best made with less gut involved, but we could reasonably disagree on what the proper balance is — one of the main take-aways from Kahneman is that decision-making isn’t free, and that fast and frugal heuristics can be optimal under time or energy constraints even when they’re less accurate.
My own thirty-second pitch would be that gut feelings are reliable in proportion to how well we’re adapted — both personally and ancestrally — to the situation we find ourselves in. And that many aspects of modern life hew surprisingly close to caveman politics.
I could be horribly misunderstanding Yudkowsky and the greater rationalist movement, of course, but I thought the point was getting better gut reactions, some of which involve interrupting your previous gut reactions in situations where you do have time to think about it.
Eliezer does write about that in places (not to be Sequences Guy, but a good search term would be “five-second level”). I have my doubts about whether it can be effectively done in a domain-independent way — there are some concepts that pop up in a lot of places, like basic statistical literacy (this is half of what Eliezer’s talking about when his Bayes fetish comes up), but that is of course domain-dependent, it’s just a particularly common domain.
Well, at the limit, domain independence is just domain specificity to the general domain.
(True hardcore domain independence is probably precluded by no-free-lunch stuff as usual anyway.)
Sure, and I’m not saying that low-hanging fruit doesn’t exist for most people. I’m saying that it’s not as exciting or as generally applicable as you’d think from reading the Sequences or HPMOR. To rephrase:
Q: Are there subjects or habits of thought that would make most people better off if they knew about them?
A: Yes.
Q: Will they give you superpowers?
A: No.
Q: Can you reliably lead people, by teaching them these things, to [voting Blue/donating to MIRI/going atheist/going theist/sacrificing a goat to Our Father Below/whatever weird things you’re convinced are rational]?
A: Hell no.
No, rationalists already value one future over another, which is the trait Phineas Gage was missing. The goal of the movement is to learn how to make decisions more likely to bring about the future they most value. Typically, this involves paying attention to evidence and using probabilistic reasoning when predicting the future, but it doesn’t involve suppressing your feelings about what the future should be.
In reference to your own libertarianism, why are you a libertarian? Is it because you place terminal value on social structures that are provably in harmony with minimally defensible first principles? Or do you just think a world without nation-states would be a better world for most people by whatever standard they individually judge their lives to be good or bad? If it’s the former, attention to evidence and probabilistic reasoning will mean nothing to do and completely miss the point. If it’s the latter, then you should stay libertarian as long as the best available evidence and arguments actually suggest your prediction is correct.
The trap, of course, is that historical evidence of policy outcomes is fraught with so many confounders that true believers can dismiss endless historical examples and cherry pick whatever favors what they already believe. At least if you’re being a good rationalist, though, you should try to identify the relative frequency of ‘place tried X and descended into chaos’ versus ‘place tried X and were basically fine,’ then if you come to some conclusion that is only plausible in the face of strong priors one way or the other, you at least know you’re reasoning from strong priors and can call upon yourself to justify them.
Related: As I remember it, Haidt (I really hope this is Haidt and not another author I read around the same time) explains people’s gut intuitions as being established largely based on what lets them feel good about themselves, and what brings them social status.
Now, these aren’t always the same thing: imagine a religious community where it’s maintained that material prosperity is a reward for faithfulness and moral rectitude. A poorer person in that community who holds those views probably has some level of self-loathing because of them, but on the other hand, they hold the right views, which brings status. But imagine a majority of people in this community are poor – what led to them holding views that don’t fulfill both criteria?
Also – and this is something I am definitely guilty of – it’s possible to look at people’s beliefs and go meta and think (or say) “ha ha, according to Jonathan Haidt their views are just what makes them feel good and gives social status and they only think they’re being rational, it sure is nice to be more enlightened than they are, look at them status signalling like mere beasts” … isn’t this just another view that allows feeling good about one’s self and (at least in some communities, such as this one) brings prestige? But this realization is just the same thing: is it signalling (or whatever you want to call it) all the way down?
I hope this makes sense.
I have a somewhat similar background to Scott Adams, and I’ll give you my opaque-one-liner answers to your questions in the order you asked then try a brief response to the overall sentiment. If you want me to expand on something, just ask.
*be emotionally relevant, meaningful, and salient
*trust, but always *verify*
*”dark arts”, as usually used, is by and large bullshit (which substantial caveats – the arts get very *very* dark). Complaining that your ideological opponent is “using dark arts” is just being a sore loser. If you want your win, *earn it*. Trying to use “dark arts” will hinder your progress, not help you “cheat the system”.
*logic is important in changing minds to the extent which it connects emotionally, no more, no less. If your interlocutor feels bad about letting themselves be dumb enough to miss your point, it helps painful things connect. SSC is better than average at this, but by no means perfect.
*no, you should not view your relationship with libertarianism as fixed in the past, and yes, you should operate on the assumption that others have a similar relationship to their political philosophies
*logical persuasion *done right* is not useless and can change such things, but if you only manage to talk someone into a place they don’t know how to argue out of while missing the internal logic, don’t be surprised if they find a way to reject your conclusion.
The way I prefer to relate to my own gut/emotions/system 1/whatever you call it is to treat it like an unintelligent yet perceptive and wise friend who has my best interests at heart and will listen when I’ve actually addressed his concerns. This means I very rarely have experiences like “I have an irrational fear of X” because that’s dismissive as fuck. Instead, that kind of thing tends to resolve in one way or another (“is that actually dangerous? huh, I guess not. i’m no longer afraid”/”I have a bad feeling about X and I don’t know where exactly it comes from, but I don’t trust X”/”X brings up a fear which I don’t know how to dismiss, but I’m pretty sure it’s safe so I’m going to proceed even with the fear and pay attention if it gets worse”/”oh shit, X actually *is* dangerous!”/etc).
The point is that information is supposed to flow *both* ways. Yes, my verbal beliefs follow from my gut level intuitions. Yet my gut level intuitions also follow from my abstract reasoning – that’s the whole damn point of becoming a (post)hypnotist.
I don’t use Reddit anymore, but I own the /r/fallfromheaven subreddit. It has only 27 subscribers, but Derek Paxton aka Kael just posted there recently. Are there any regular Reddit users/FFH fans who would want to take ownership of the sub?
“3. A few years ago I reviewed A Future For Socialism and mentioned that the book’s suggestion of redistributing corporate profits as a basic income wasn’t enough – it would only provide about $6000 per person.”
Is 6k not enough to live on?
I’m not American, but I heard that you can rent a room with utilities for 4000 yearly in many American cities (a room not a house). Surely you can eat on 1000 yearly, plus another 1000 for luxuries, while riding a bycicle.
I know from reading frugality blogs that frugal people in the US eat on less than 3$ daily. It’s easy to do by buying dry grains and legumes.
Maybe there’s no money for health care here, or for raising kids.
Seems to me that for most people having kids is non-negotiable. I don’t have the urge so it’s a big fear of mine that one day I’ll wake up and Gnon will have taken control of my brain.
I just realized that the figure of 6k per person probably doesn’t apply to those with children, because the children represent more heads in the headcount. So, if you are a parent with 2 kids, you’ll probably get 18k.
Also note that it’s only $6K per year if you are a complete wastrel and/or completely disabled, and in either case a loner to boot. Otherwise it is $6K per year plus whatever you can earn with whatever work you can get and feel motivated to do. That’s one of the huge advantages of a UBI over traditional welfare; it preserves the incentive to do productive work where any sort of means-tested program is likely to destroy it.
You may want, for the sake of fairness, to supplement the UBI for people who genuinely can’t work to supplement it themselves, and you’ll probably need to do so for people who not only can’t work but come with expensive support requirements (e.g. most quadriplegics). So the UBI doesn’t completely replace the rest of the social safety net. And as I’ve noted elsewhere, it isn’t clear whether you include children in the UBI or cover them separately – I’d prefer the former, but some people disagree.
So on top of a completely unlikely expenditure on UBI, we have to maintain the safety net, with the attendant political pressure to increase it over time? Wasn’t this my criticism of UBI originally? That modern westerners aren’t hardcore enough to institute it strongly enough for the norms and incentives to work? We wind up with exactly what we have now, and welfare for everyone on top. The worst of all worlds.
I believe Scott’s point was that $6K, especially in comparison with the money that workers usually earn yearly, seems like too small of a sum to create a “workers’ paradise”.
If a basic income replaced all other welfare programs and provided each adult with a fixed amount, would anything be done to help people who had children they couldn’t provide for?
How little money are we talking about before we reach “they couldn’t provide for”? SFAICT $1000/month will allow a mother and few kids to eke out an existence in many places in the country without anyone starving or freezing to death. Even without access to food stamps, section 8, and the like — say illegal immigrants families for example.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is healthcare. If it keeps eating ever larger portions of the economy nothing else much will be possible or matter.
It eats a lot of the economy in many developed countries, not just America because people care a lot about the things which come under the heading of healthcare and when it gets more effective at keeping people alive it doesn’t cut long term costs because they still get sick enough to die eventually.
It’s not just moloch. Even in a well managed eutopia people would probably still want to spend a big chunk of the economy of making peoples lives healthier and longer.
The current size of the healthcare sector is probably sustainable, though saying it’s not just America sweeps under the rug a huge amount of money in the gap between the US and everyone else. My real concern is the trend line. It can’t last forever, therefore it won’t last forever but I don’t see what is going to slow it down either.
Anyway, my main point was that if UBI is going to be expected to be expected to replace medicare, medcaid, obamacare subsides, etc then not only will it need to be higher to start with, but growth will be a major issue. But on the other hand, if not, that it doesn’t really fulfill the promise of replacing the rest of the welfare state that is supposed to secure the cross ideological coalition for it.
I think right now the eventual solution in some welfare states is probably that you’re deemed unable to care for them and they’re taken away from you, after inadequate living conditions are reported (so after a while of poor living), repeatedly if necessary. The government won’t either starve your children or sterilise you, so it relies on very few people wanting to maximise their number of children. Which seems to be a valid assumption.
You could plausibly retain this approach, if you really had no better ideas, under a UBI.
But that is a public expenditure in excess of the UBI, thus defeating its purpose (assuming its purpose was to replace other forms of welfare, as Julie K said).
I don’t think most people count operating a foster care system as a “welfare programme” in the sense of those to be replaced by a basic income for adults.
(Certainly I don’t think most people think all public expenditures are such welfare programmes. Police? Military? You’d get a kind of backwards minarchist state whose sole purpose was redistribution and had no law enforcement capability)
If you did count it, though, then the answer would simply be that it’d be a bad idea to do an all welfare programmes -> basic income replacement, because orphans and children who need taking into care exist and the latter wouldn’t care for them.
I meant public expenditure in the sense of direct individual benefits, currently known as entitlements. Police, military, road maintenance, etc. are a different category.
This is not a trivial problem with the idea of UBI. The class of people who cannot take care of themselves (even with an adequate monthly stipend) is much larger than just photogenic orphans. It’s not a new problem — e.g. food stamps were designed explicitly to address it. I’m not sure how much of current entitlement spending the UBI would replace, and I don’t think anyone really knows.
The term entitlement has more to do with how the legislation is written than the fact that there is a direct individual beneficiary. Rather than there being a fixed dollar amount budgeted Congress passes a law that specifies a benefit which applicants are entitled to regardless of the total amount. Those applicants can be corporations or even state and local governments.
To give a counterexample, Pell Grants are direct individual benefits but are made by annual appropriation and can only be granted while funding is available.
What is and isn’t a welfare program is a matter of perspective. Although the WPA built a lot of buildings and roads and bridges and such, and its employees were paid real wages for doing real work, I’d consider it a welfare program because the point of it was to give money to unemployed people and all the stuff that got built was just a nice bonus.
Foster care isn’t a direct, individual benefit to adults, certainly, so I think expecting it to be replaced by a basic income for adults is probably unrealistic. I think regarding it as a direct individual benefit even to the children is dubious, too, because all the expenses involved aren’t individualised- it is structurally similar to policing or a regulatory agency, where you’re paying to maintain an organisation which then does work for members of the public for free.
I don’t think whether something is classified as an ‘entitlement’ by the US budget or not maps very well to whether something is a direct individual benefit. Maybe it does most of the time, though, I’ll admit to not having a great deal of familiarity with how the US does its classification.
We can know that food stamps are replaceable, because welfare systems outside the US don’t all use them; the UK sticks with the economists’ favoured approach of “just give them money” and it works fine.
There needs to be an emergency fallback for people who have literally no food or money- food banks are the usual- but that’s the case with stamps, too, because they’re about as easy to use stupidly or even lose as money is.
There is a lack of clarity as to what will be replaced elsewhere, though, that’s true- healthcare being the biggest.
Theoretically, this shouldn’t matter- you should be able to just drop the level of the BI for everything not included in it initially, and then argue later over whether to merge a thing in (and increase it correspondingly) or maintain a thing as separate. But in reality politics likely makes that very difficult.
Each of the children has their own UBI.
Some basic income proposals encompass children and the elderly, and in the case of children pay the income to a trustee for the child’s care – which would usually be one or both of the child’s parents. Others grant the basic income only to working-age adults and maintain essentially the existing programs for ensuring children and the elderly are cared for. “Basic income” is not a single, well-defined concept,
even if you precede it with “universal”.
True. But if you pay UBI for kids to the parents, isn’t that a massive incentive for population growth? And isn’t one of the problems we have now that people have kids they can’t raise because they are incentivized to do so? UBI passed first scrutiny, but once I got down to it, I never found a path that worked.
What if you paid UBI for kids, but slightly less than what it actually takes to take care of a kid (like the futurama episode where bender adopts a bunch of kids)?
You think the sort of person who knocks out kids for money gives a damn about raising them correctly? You should ride along on my day job sometime. The projects have to provide free lunch to all the kids, because their parents kick them out of the house in the morning and don’t let them back in until after dark.
Wow, that’s depressing. Like, there are lots of people who are neglectful or abusive towards their kids but are there actually people who have kids for money? Even without the ethical issues it just seems like there are much easier ways to scam welfare.
I actually don’t think it’s quite as mercenary as that, but it’s not far off. For poor, underclass teenage girls, a kid is a status boost, and a meal ticket out of your mom’s house. With a kid, you can get Section 8, WIC, TANF etc. And once they have the kid, or kids, they show little interest in raising them. Most of that is done by grandparents if at all. For many if not most of these mothers, the only interaction with their kids that they have in a normal day is when they wake up at seven or eight at night and put them in bed before heading to the club, and when they kick them out in the morning so they can sleep in peace.
I wish this weren’t the case, but I tell you from what I see with my own eyes on a daily basis. It makes me a lot more sympathetic to the plight of the underclass to realize that they are on their seventh or eighth generation of this shit too. We have families in which no one in living memory has ever been raised or socialized at all. No wonder they’re a problem population.
I agree that finding a workable path to UBI is unlikely, but I don’t think it is so thoroughly impossible as to not be worth discussing.
If I were to make an educated guess, the path most likely to be politically acceptable and to be only tolerably corruptible would be for children to automatically be allocated the same UBI as everyone else (because setting any precedent for changing “everybody gets exactly $X” is the surest route to corruption), with some fraction of the UBI being paid to the legal guardian of the child and the rest held in trust until the child’s 18th birthday. “Some fraction” likely being a sliding scale based on age.
Getting “some fraction” right is of course one of the parts where a nice theory is likely to run aground on the rocky shore of reality. But, like I say, maybe still worth talking about.
Oh, I’m all for discussing it, but as I said, there’s a few problems I just can’t see any polity on earth having the cold-heartedness to implement fully.
1: There’s not enough money. Especially looking at health care costs for the truly jacked-up. Any UBI that could provide care for everyone would be far too expensive. And if the UBI can’t provide care for the most hard-up….
2: The constant push to expand a safety net for really pathetic cases. This makes Problem 1 even worse. Are we really hard enough to say “sorry love, you had your UBI, if you can’t pay for chemo, tough!”?
3: Dysgenic incentivization, which I just mentioned.
4: Immigration. If you’re handing out ten thousand dollar checks (or anything, really), how exactly do you plan on keeping out all the people on earth from coming over to get some? Here again, immigration enforcement would have to be FAR more brutal than even the most hardcore Trump supporter supports today. Marriage fraud would be rampant. You’d have to repeal Law of the Soil.
None of these are technically impossible, but I think in any democracy highly unlikely to happen at all, and impossible to maintain over the long term.
children to automatically be allocated the same UBI as everyone else …with some fraction of the UBI being paid to the legal guardian of the child and the rest held in trust until the child’s 18th birthday.
Does the USA not have anything like Children’s Allowance?
What you’re talking about sounds a bit like using the UBI as a trust/savings fund for the kid so when they turn 18 they can use it to go to college – which would be nice, except:
(a) there’s nothing to prevent them when they turn 18 – unless it’s legislated in – from taking the lump sum and blowing it on hookers and coke
(b) a mass of money sitting in government bank accounts earning interest will be used to dip into to pay for other day-to-day expenses, so we’re back to “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (e.g. today’s UBI will be paid out of the money sitting in trust for the next decade and when we get to having to pay out the lump sum to your little Johnny when he turns 18 we take that out of the money for the next generation ad infinitum) – which will become another social welfare/social security timebomb (to use the not-at-all alarmist phrase about paying out pensions).
@Deiseach re: Children’s Allowance
Not exactly. If you have income you get a lot of money in tax benefits per child, and some of those tax benefits are “refundable” meaning if they reduce your taxes below zero you get a check back.
But if you have no income, we no longer have a unified cash welfare program. Which is not to say we don’t have any cash welfare programs, just nothing so straightforward as that. The main ones are SSI/SSDI and TANF. The latter is administered by the states and they have a fair amount of flexibility in how it works.
Dysgenic incentivisation could be beaten by designer babies. Healthcare should probably be separate from UBI anyways, since that allows for better cold-hearted QALY calculations when deciding what to cover. And about immigration, it seems like most illegal immigrants right now are undocumented, which means they wouldn’t get UBI anyways. So these problems are nontrivial but probably not insurmountable.
@pku,
I don’t think your solutions work all that well. Designer babies are fine (absent the moral argument) for the rich. The poor who will be incentivized to have more kids for the cash (if they get the UBI money) will not have the money nor the inclination to buy designer genes. And if they don’t get UBI for kids, they’re still irresponsible enough to have lots of them, making their poverty even worse.
On healthcare, separating it from UBI, I’m not sure how that helps? Either people buy health care coverage with their UBI, in which case any UBI would have to be enough to cover health care, which is unlikely in the really unfortunate cases. Or you have single-payer health care in addition to UBI, in which case the costs are going to be even worse, siphoning cash from the UBI. Or you have to deny a lot of health care.
On immigration, first off, the immigrants might not get UBI, but their kids do, unless you repeal law of the soil. And if you do that, you have a long term “second class” of noncitizen residents constantly pushing (rightfully so) for full privileges. Unsustainable in a democracy. And when they get citizenship rights and privileges, we’re right back to not being able to afford it, which we never could in the first place, and we’re the richest nation on earth.
” And if you do that, you have a long term “second class” of noncitizen residents constantly pushing (rightfully so) for full privileges. Unsustainable in a democracy. ”
You are, of course, describing the long term situation of history’s most famous democracy.
On dysgenic effects, one point worth mentioning. There is a very low cost way of importing high quality genes into your gene pool. In a world where all the high status people have wonderful genes due to genetic manipulation, some of the high status men will have (probably nonmarital) sex with low status women who want to bear higher quality children.
Yeah. But Athens and the other Greek city-states following its model had political systems so weird that basically the only thing they have in common with the modern US is that both call themselves democracies. There are plenty of non-democratic systems that resemble ours much more in terms of incentives and in terms of practical mechanics.
@ David Friedman,
Yes, I recognize the parallel. I don’t think it would work in the modern world at all. We see it being done in places like the UAE, but these are lightly populated, monoreligious, monoracial oil states. Without massive extractive wealth, and the pure social cohesion to go with it, the plan falls apart. In a fragmented democratic society, there will always be a group looking to import more voters. Things degrade quickly once the tipping point is reached.
As to your dysgenic solution, it is sort of the case now, but two things hinder it.
1: Lower class women tend not to live, work or play anywhere near upper-class men.
2: Lower class women tend to be far less attractive than what an upper-class man could get elsewhere.
There are, of course, as many counterexamples (The Governator springs to mind). But more importantly, perhaps I worded my disagreement poorly. My concern with “dysgenics” is not the genetic nature of any of the individual kids, but in a structure which incentivises those least able to care for children to have the most. For poor kids to have the best chance at climbing out of poverty, they need the best possible upbringing and training. They aren’t going to get that from a single parent on UBI. There is, of course, a simple way to structure it in order to not incentivize this behavior, which would be to not give UBI to kids. If you want kids, it’s on your own dime. But this leads me back to my original criticism. Are we really that hard as a nation? I am. But I know virtually no one else is.
And policy prescriptions built on a fallacious reading of human psychology are doomed to failure.
Re: the other comments regarding SeaLioning.
I suspect the definition of SeaLioning has undergone semantic drift. Like how the definition of Trolling used to strictly signify “deliberately and obliquely provoking invective on a forum” but has expanded to “anything which vaguely resembles jest”.
Anecdote. I was playing a game recently. At one point, there was a guy in my queue lobby complaining about {idk something petty from a prior match} and said “it was literally the definition of trolling”. I said “that sounds more like griefing”. The guy responded “um, no. do you even know what trolling is?”
#Kids these days
#Wake me up when Eternal September ends
> I suspect the definition of SeaLioning has undergone semantic drift. Like how the definition of Trolling used to strictly signify “deliberately and obliquely provoking invective on a forum” but has expanded to “anything which vaguely resembles jest”.
And to some people Trolling simply means “suggesting anything that is outside of that group’s Overton Window”.
I think this is about right.
The term could have been defined as something like, “Disagreeing in a polite but excessively repetitive way. Especially when part of a group of people who are doing the same.”
I can see how that’s a thing. Especially on a platform like twitter where a conversation could go from 2 participants to 2000 participants just by having a single post reshared.
But from there, I agree it seemed to dilute into “one person making arguments that have been addressed in the past,” to just “a person making arguments”
So here’s what tends to be called sealioning
Some person: Group X is full of witches.
Hundreds of replies: What? No we’re not. *some other remark protesting innocence, calling for proof, or insulting back*
That same person: Ugh, Group X is sealioning me. Look how they keep hounding me about this thing I said.
Except that’s not what’s actually happening. What’s actually happening is that that person made a blanket negative statement about a group of hundreds of people. It’s not one person hounding them with hundreds of replies. It’s hundreds of people responding once. And since this statement was made in public, they get a stream of replies as new people discover it. This of course could have been avoided by not making blatant negative statements about large groups in a public forum, but we all know people on the internet don’t have that much self-control.
It’s probably worth noting that this phrase got popularized during the whole ants thing (you know what I mean). Certain people would make extremely hateful statements about a group whose membership was in the thousands, then somehow get “shocked” when they received hundreds of angry replies.
I agree that your example seems pretty prototypical. It’s kind of a conversational DDOS.
I think my objection to the original definition might come down to tense. (The drifted definitions are objectionable for all sorts of other reasons)
The individual who’s protesting their innocence is being reasonable. Someone made a provocative statement in public. They responded once. That seems fair.
At the same time, all of those reasonable protestations could be overwhelming. It could lock down a blog just as quickly as a flood of Reddit traffic.
Phrasing the problem like, “I’m getting DDOSed / sea lioned” seems way more reasonable than, “You personally are DDOSing / sea lioning me!”.
I think that the bolded part above is the crux of the problem. Often, these people don’t realize that they are speaking “in public”. The nature of various social platforms (especially Twitter and Tumblr) encourages the false belief that they are privately speaking to a circle of friends. When someone outside that circle reads the statement and comments, it feels like an intrusion, even though this is in fact the manner in which the social networking site is designed to work.
Note how the original comic dishonestly shifts the ground midway through the conversation – when the couple makes their anti-sealion statement, it happens in the public square, but when the sealion responds, the vista has magically changed to the couple’s private home.
It’s hundreds of people responding once. And since this statement was made in public, they get a stream of replies as new people discover it.
Depending on how the media is set up, each of those responders may not know how many other responders are saying the same thing.
The actual rap on actual Bulgarians, back in the early 1990s, had to do with malware.
Communist Bulgaria tried to become the Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc. Thousands received technical training. In practice, though, Bulgaria’s tech output mostly involved making pirated Cyrillic versions of software published in the West.
After Communism collapsed, Bulgaria had a whole lot of unemployed programmers, discontented with their lot, and experienced in things like getting into other people’s code to defeat security and copy protection.
No wonder little tiny Bulgaria became, for several years, the world’s #1 source of computer viruses.
In that era, Bulgaria and Bulgarians had a terrible reputation, which was awful for the job prospects of legitimate programmers of Bulgarian origin seeking employment in the West.
See, e.g.,
* Bulgarians Linked to Computer Virus
* The Bulgarian Computer Virus Factory
* Heart of Darkness… the hot zone that spawned the infamous Bulgarian computer viruses
* Bulgarian ‘Dark Avenger’ Part of East-Bloc Legacy
* Bulgarian Computer Virus Writer, Scourge in the West, Hero at Home.
In an earlier posting you mentioned you were reading Worm… have you finished yet?
Yes. It was pretty good.
You’re a fast reader… it took me much longer to get through it.
The title of this thread reminds me of how my stepmother’s name is April, but my grandmother kept calling her “Opal” at first. My grandmother was very mentally acute even in her 90s, but that’s such an old-lady name, like she was thinking of her friends from the 1920s.
The thread title also reminded me of a time, more than half a century ago in Chicago, when my parents considered buying an Opel automobile (the ones I saw at the time looked like this).
I don’t know why the Opel was the only thing they considered, but apparently it was an Opel or nothing.
Their ultimate decision was “nothing”: they decided to continue relying on public transit and taxicabs.
Is the user assessing interest in the Harry Potter tabletop still around?
I don’t know, but I’d like to know, too.
The more I think about this comment (which I made a few threads back) the more I think I might be onto something:
“I feel like materialists might actually have a tendency to anthropomorphise the universe, by claiming that our perspectives exist in some way beyond us (which is quite an embarrassing mistake when you claim not to believe in God.)”
It is entirely reasonable to believe that our experiences are entirely determined by *something*, but to claim direct knowledge of that something, or (more egregiously), to claim that the thing that determines our experiences is *equivalent to* our experience, is a dogmatic/religious position.
It kind of sounds like you’re conflating materialism with naive realism.
I say that naive realism is more egregiously dogmatic, but that materialism, by making strong claims about the fundamental causes of our perceptions, is also, basically, a dogmatic position.
(Edit: I think you’re right, actually, since I said “is” a religious position, rather than “are” religious positions.)
You seem to be conflating epistemology with ontology. Materialism is an ontological thesis. Various theories of perception are epistemological. Plenty of representationalists (so, not naive realists) have been materialist as well.
“Various theories of perception are epistemological.”
Are they?
It don’t think that a statement about the properties of things that *cause* perceptions (beyond our perceptions) can possibly be related to knowledge.
Or perhaps all theories are, at root, epistemological claims.
Materialism doesn’t require you to have unquestioning faith in it. A materialist can be willing to drop it as soon as a convincing reason presents itself (though I have trouble imagining how such a reason could look — hopefully, we’ll know it if we see it). Is that a dogmatic belief? Maybe some people treat it like dogma, but some people do X wrongly for any X, so why single out materialism?
The reason why it is hard to imagine an argument or piece of evidence that would flatly contradict materialism is that materialism is not a position that is amenable to contradiction. Is my belief in Russell’s teapot any less dogmatic if I were theoretically willing to change my mind if evidence presented itself (though what form such evidence might take, no-one knows)?
Surely a better measure of whether a belief is dogmatic is whether there is any evidence/reason supporting it in the first place.
@ Mark:
Right.
From an earlier thread:
[T]here is no such thing as matter. There is only subjective mental experience! Where did you get this mad idea of an external physical world? It’s necessary to explain your experience?! Nonsense! Your mind produces the experience. You say you have a “brain” made of matter; well, I grant that but, you see, matter is merely another type of experience. It’s a category error. All your alleged “particles” and “algorithms” can be reduced back to mental sensations. They’re at best just a name for those sensations. We ought to be good reductionists: we don’t need to accept any idea of the “fundamental physical”. There is only one science: introspective psychology, and it studies the laws by which the mind produces regular patterns of sensations. Sometimes, those sensations are “material” in nature and follow “physical” laws, but clearly it all reduces back to introspective psychology—the queen of the sciences.
That is exactly how your argument goes, but in reverse. The answer to it—the only answer to it—is: “But I’m directly aware of non-mental objects as well as mental objects! And the one can’t be reduced to the other!”
But at least the theory of subjective idealism is much less stupid than reductive materialism. It’s not as obviously absurd to talk about how matter is a type of experience as it is to talk about how experience is a type of matter.
Strangely enough, this parody reminds me of reading about matter as quantum fields recently.
If everyone in society already has the basics, how could explicitly guaranteeing those basics reduce the consumption of the rich, unless the policy reduces total production?
The key question with a *basic* income is not how we’ll pay for it (we already pay everyone enough to have the basics), but how the guarantee will affect production (especially the production of luxuries).
If you were so inclined, you could make the claim that it would be earn us more in util terms to have the rich (productive) people work a bit more to make up the slack for the (unproductive) poor working less. (Assuming that both rich and poor value their free time equally.)
About “sealioning”: I feel like the author of that article and many of the commenters here (and in the reddit thread) aren’t talking about the same thing. The author is very explicitly talking about people arguing in bad faith and being willfully ignorant.
Of course having bingo card-ish words like that is a Discourse Hazard, but as Scott points out in his post about interminable arguments, no one is obligated to have a thoughtful debate on your demand. Sealioning, as the article describes it, is just a particularly annoying variation of that behavior. And having catchy names like that for things isn’t that bad. If someone’s going to unfairly dismiss your arguments, they’ll do it whether they have a cute name for it or not.
The author claims he is talking about people arging in bad faith, but the comic is so far from that that he had to give a long correction explaining that he didn’t really say what he said. In the actual comic,
1) The sealion is being personally attacked as a sealion. Being a sealion is a good analogy for being in a racial or social group and a poor analogy for having a bad opinion, even though the author tries to claim it means the latter. Responding to such an attack is self-defense, not arguing in bad faith.
2) It is not claimed that the sealion did anything concretely bad. The guy just doesn’t like sealions. How can you possibly argue in “bad faith” or “willfully ignorant” with someone who just makes generalized negative statements about you? If someone says “ants are sexist” (or worse, ants are sexist and should be ostracized) and you’re in the ants, are you really arguing in bad faith when you demand evidence?
3) Following someone into their house is clearly bad, but the cartoon is using that as an analogy for situations whose similarity to being in someone’s house is dubious. Furthermore, the comic implies that the sealion is out of line even before he enters anyone’s house.
To what extent can Moldbug be said to be the cause of Trumps rise? There is an obvious connection to be made between the two:
Moldbug>”His followers”>the alternative right>Trump
But does Moldbug’s ideas have any influence on the rise of the alternative right, or do they simply happen to be independent reactions to the status quo?
“To what extent can Moldbug be said to be the cause of Trumps rise? ”
Very little. There are ideological overlaps. But outside of a handful of Internet communities where Moldbug types are unusually vocal, his ideas have very little influence. The number of supporters of such ideas, are in the grand scheme of U.S politics very small. The vast majority of people in the country would have no idea who Moldbug is. I’ve never met one of his supporters in off-line life.
Its tempting to take weird Internet ideologies are representing something broader — but thats not how things work. It reminds me of how a lot of feminist bloggers seem to take redpillers and MRAs as their top idealogical opponents — despite the fact that such redpill and such are pretty small peanuts in the big scheme of things.
I’m not saying that Moldbug directly influences the average voter. I’m saying that there might be a connection between the two. Name recognition doesn’t equal influence.
1) Is there any indication that anyone particularly influential, powerful, or agenda setting pays attention to Moldbug? Not that I can see.
2) Are there particular similarities between Trump and Moldbug in ideology which are strong enough to be a signature of cross influence? Not really. Trump is a fairly garden variety right-populist. There are some similar goals, but also quite a bit of differences.
Are you hypothesizing that there is substantial overlap between the impulses that drive a huge number of people to Trump and the ones that have driven a small number of people to the Local Sect influenced by Moldbug’s ideas? I think that makes more sense than to say there is any substantial influence running from Moldbug and his followers to Trump’s followers.
And how specific are we talking? Analysts are often fond of talking about how a certain huge thing like “economic difficulties” is a contributing factor to many different movements. Definitely, but that doesn’t give us much specific information. On the other hand, I doubt many of Trump’s supporters see it as an error to believe he has real cultural power because he would lose status from a bar fight with Rebecca Black, or have even considered the effects of such a match-up.
I’ve never even heard the dude referenced outside of this specific blog and I’m almost certain nobody I know has ever heard of him. I also have no idea who his followers are, so who knows? Maybe they’re responsible for the rise of Trump. From what I can tell, the parsimonious explanation for Trump is the presidential election is a reality TV show to begin with and we finally got a candidate who is optimized for winning something like that.
Thing I will regret writing:
Is libertarianism one of these “weird Internet ideologies”? For all the detailed, animated discussion it generates online, it’s seen practically no electoral success.
True, and also the arguments that libertarianism works in making a functioning society are abstract and often require functioning knowledge of economics and game theory; there are simple arguments against libertarianism which have embedded themselves in the public consciousness. (Also most of the public only knows about Ron Paul libertarianism.
I don’t think so. Although it depends on what you mean by “libertarian”. If you mean ancaps, or other hard-line variants of the ideology — then yes, libertariansim is rare in the real world. But if you mean “in the top right of the Nolan Chart” (ie. free-market oriented, and socially liberal, compared to the population as a whole), then libertarianism is a pretty common ideology.
I meant harder-line libertarianism. Michael Bloomberg is certainly free-market oriented and socially liberal, and he’s nobody’s libertarian.
It’s just kinda weird that libertarians are well-represented and loud across much of the internet, but here in reality the US Libertarian Party has only hit 1% of the Presidential vote once. True, the US system disfavors small parties more than the rest of the world does, but libertarian parties are even less successful outside the US.
There are influential libertarian thinkers, and well-endowed research institutes like Cato, but they only take on advisory roles and an adviser is only influential as far as anyone will listen to them. Pinochet had lots of libertarian advisers but his regime jailed and executed political dissidents all the same.
I will grant that there are far more libertarians than monarchists or the various other weird groups discussed. Perhaps it represents the limit of how big a weird internet phenomenon can get while having limited impact on the mainstream.
Sort of. Libertarianism covers a big tent and parts of the tent are popular (decreased government intervention) and parts aren’t (anarcho-capitalism). It is honestly about a helpful a label as feminist- libertarian paternalism is a real ideological position.
Even if Milton Friedman was the only influential libertarian, that would be enough to answer your question.
There are politically active libertarian billionaires (most notably the Koch brothers – David Koch was the Libertarian Party VP candidate in 1980).This alone gives libertarian ideology a substantial amount of influence, since these billionaires have been willing to generously fund think tanks and PACs to propagate these ideas and elect candidates who (at least to some extent) share them.
The fact that several prominent libertarians, such as Hayek and Friedman, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (often incorrectly referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Economics”) also helped libertarianism gain mindshare with certain parts of the public.
To the best of my knowledge, there are (thankfully) no Moldbuggite billionaires in the United States. Nor has anyone popularized Moldbuggite ideology in the same way that people like Rand and Friedman did so with libertarianism. Thus, that set of ideas hasn’t been able to move the Overton Window the same way libertarianism has done over the past couple of decades.
Moldbuggite ideology is extremely resistant to popularization, by design.
If an anti-democracy movement ever does become popular in the West, it will no doubt draw inspiration from Moldbug, but it won’t be Moldbuggism, any more than Nazism was truly Nietzschean.
Note that Trump is anything but anti-democratic. He and his followers are fervently pro-democracy. I don’t see a link there at all, other than both of them being on the broad ideological right — and even that’s arguable.
I’m a libertarian, and I have a theory that libertarianism doesn’t get political success because libertarianism is a political philosophy for people who don’t like doing politics.
To none. They (and the proposed intermediate step of ethnonationalists) all simply share the common cause of “the Cathedral” having sufficiently lost contact with reality and consequence that their behavior (particularly with respect to foreign and fiscal policy) appears psychotically delusional.
Moldbug noticed the rot a bit earlier than most because of his civil service background, and dug back deep to find alternative philosophical frameworks for viewing society. EthNats are simply reverting to their instinctual loyalties after the globalist system lost theirs. Trump is an opportunist exploiting the personal unworthiness of his opponents.
I don’t think Trump’s following is “the alternative right”. It’s mostly traditional blue collar Republican groups who feel the GOP has abandoned them. I expect if he gets the nomination, he’ll also pull from traditional blue-collar Democratic groups who feel Hillary has no use for them, and win the presidency. The alt-right isn’t even on the radar for him.
Both, I think, are reactions to the status quo.
None. Trump was a household name long before Moldbug started writing about politics. I don’t know exactly how old Moldbug is, but it is quite possible that Trump was famous before Moldbug was even born. Trump’s recent success in politics is simply a result of him finding a political niche and exploiting it, with his name recognition and previous success (for a certain definition of the word “success”) in business giving him the ability to attempt such a thing without support from either the GOP or Democratic establishment. Given how willing Trump has been to flip flop on issues for whatever reason, and given how nobody has managed to use his record of inconsistency against him, it seems likely that Trump would have found some sort of political niche sooner or later.
Yeah, even if we took Moldbug as a synecdoche for the whole alt-right, I don’t really see it, except insofar as Trump, channeling disillusion with the establishment as he does, attracts a fair number of weirdos in the way all anti-establishment movements do (that is, I’m sure some alt-right people support Trump, but they didn’t create him).
I think Trump is largely a populist revolt at both parties’ continued failure to take the immigration issue, which is a big issue to blue collar workers but not a big issue to elites of either party, seriously.
Trump’s rise is mostly to do with a certain kind of average Joe red triber who has probably never heard of Moldbug or the alt-right, but is pissed off at what he sees as a blue tribe status quo. The alt-right has an outsized internet presence because it engages in much trolling on twitter, and is genuinely the loudest and biggest meme factory in support of Trump. So, most voters for Trump aren’t alt-right, but the alt-right is the loudest and craziest voice in support of Trump.
From that perspective, we can say that the alt-right has had an impact. Richard Wilson didn’t identify Trump supporters as “childless men who masturbate to anime” because he understands Trump support in general, but it does show that he spends too much time on twitter, which is where alt-righters congregate to harass opponents. The anonymous alt-right is fond of posting sarcastic anime girl faces which shows its chan influence.
As for Moldbug and your question: the alt-right owes a lot more to /pol/ than it does him. Rio Knee Action Canary (DON’T SAY IT) ideas certainly had some influence but there are obvious diversion points; a lot of the alt-right is antisemitic and populist, whereas [that which must not be named] is “philosemitic”, elitist, and argues that progressivism is a protestant heresy, rather than da jooz being to blame for whatever it is. Another more moderate section of the alt-right which comprises its e-celebrity face (Ramzy Paul and so on), repudiate or soften antisemitism while espousing populist nationalism (so it’s important to distinguish the anonymous alt-right from public faces). The problem is that the alt-right is a big tent, it’s more a cultural underground than an ideology, and being an underground it cannot represent the average Trump supporter, but being an underground with a populist orientation neither can it truly be related to MoldLandianthatthingism.
The line of the internet alt-right goes more:
/pol/ > TRS > splits off into more moderate less antisemitic or even “philosemitic” forms developing a public face in the form of American Renaissance leading to the coining of the term by Richard Spencer (and tension with more traditional pol neonazis, and TRS which is kind of a middleground) >shilling for Trump on twitter and the comment sections of many sites across the net by /pol/ and TRS
There’s an alternate stream into TRS from Moldbug which I think goes something like this:
Moldbug > nationalists taking RKaC ideas > Land formalizing this as the “trike” > some streams into early TRS, but the /pol/ influence is stronger so the “The Cathedral” is converted into “The Synagogue”.
The real issue with influence is that Nero Key Traction Fairies eschew political activism as demotist, so populists like Trump are anti Knee Low Klaxon Berry, philosophically speaking, so guys like Land see Trump as only being valuable in the sense of a destroyer to stress the system.
The alt-right is more of a brother to “whatever we’re calling the elitist movement based on anti-demotism now” than a son, since both emerged in opposition to a perceived problem they diagnose differently.
Are you saying that the /pol/ alt-right types and through them TRS predate or feed into American Renaissance? Because I’m pretty sure that’s not the case: Jared Taylor founded American Renaissance back in 1990, according to Wikipedia. Is American Renaissance even alt-right? It seems like old fashioned white nationalism, rather than cyberpunk villains/pseudo-ironic Nazis jerking it to anime tiddies and hoarding rare Pepes/evopsych-loving He Man Women Haters (whether of the “get laid a lot” variety, or the “go and live in a log cabin with your bros and fight bears” variety).
This would be a fabulous set of sentences to send back in time with no context.
I sometimes fantasize about sending printouts of SSC Open Threads back a few centuries without any context other than Omega/God/An Angel/Whatever certifying that they are genuine intellectual discussions from the 2010s. I wonder what the luminaries of ages past would make of them.
@dndnrsn
I think I’m confusing AR for whatever conference thing Richard Spencer (guy who coined the term alt-right) and Jack Donovan, and Ramzy Paul go to that gave the movement some media presence.
It could be that it’s just AR (I’ll check) but I only noticed it in the last 3 years because of the rising popularity of nationalism. Whatever the case, those e-celebs are a more moderate crowd than /pol/, though they’ve taken influence from it. Ramzy Paul, for example, argues that the Nazi Pepes on twitter are just shock value fun, and repudiates the “14/88” crowd. Meanwhile, same crowd calls him COINTELPRO JIDF etc.
Very chaotic set of intertwining movements. Quite possibly there are lines of influence that lead to temporal paradoxes.
Wikipedia says that Spencer got the domain name in 2010, and took over the National Policy Institute in 2011.
Is nationalism more popular? It’s very hard to say whether, what with the internet and all, something is more popular or just louder.
Thinking about it briefly, the far right (maybe just the alt-right, but I’m not sure if I’m using a definition that makes sense, or my own weird categorization) is kind of the opposite of the far left: the far left tends to descend from a few thinkers and then fracture more and more (eg, from Marx, to eight different factions of university Trots who all hate each other), while the far right, being reactionary, seems to have all these different strands that pop up and then get weirdly mixed (eg, there’s a link between a gay guy whose whole deal is lifting heavy stuff and being SUPER MANLY on the one hand and guys whose entire purpose is learning Sith mind tricks to pick up women in bars).
“Nero Key Traction Fairies eschew political activism as demotist, so populists like Trump are anti Knee Low Klaxon Berry, philosophically speaking”
And they say social science uses too much jargon!
That is social science, though.
For the same reason.
But is anyone going to tell me what it means?
Say it out loud.
Death Eaters and Gilderoy Lockhart are not friends.
Edit: Because they hate people who are well-versed in the vulgar form of ancient Egyptian hieratic writing, apparently. Be careful, Onyomi. First they came for the egyptologists…
…
It’s a bad phonetic spelling of n-e-o-r-e-a-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y, Jesus.
There!
Yeah, I got it.
“n-e-o-r-e-a-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y Jesus”
I would not want to meet this Jesus, and I’m a Christian monarchist!
@Le Maistre Chat
That sounds amazing. Somebody smart and funny give us that New Testament, please (and we all know the Bible by Moldbug would be much much longer…).
Oh, and are we allowed to write n – e – o r – e – a – c – t – i – o – n – a -r – y without a euphemism now, or are we all going to be banned by Scott?
I propose we come up with an official euphemism so no one is confused. I propose just calling them “modernist monarchists”.
The rule is you can use the word so long as you prove you aren’t one of them by disobeying legitimate authority by using the word.
I like putting the word behind a pastebin link, it really brings into focus the futility of this sort of censorship scheme.
Does it even count as disobeying legitimate authority if Scott isn’t even bothering to enforce the rule?
Don’t ask me, I’m not a http://pastebin.com/Ae57Dbii
Can someone provide a coherent definition of alt-right that isn’t “people who disagree with leftists on the internet”?
Non-mainstream right-wingers.
Like gamergators?
Not really. Gamergate was more what gets called grey tribe here, but that tends to include both left and right wingers. Demographic polls indicated the group skewed left overall, but there was a decent mixture of views.
The definition varies by the speaker. The narrowest use is in reference to the Dark Enlightenment types and Neato Redaction Aeries (aka they who must not be named on this blog). The broadest encompasses any right-wing group that does not fit the standard movement-conservative mold: right-libertarians, neocons, anarcho-capitalists, etc.
Neoconservatives? They’ve been one of the dominant forces in the mainstream Republican party for a while now – hardly “alt-right”.
It’s only been a couple decades. Alt-right at its’ most general probably refers to all the paleo-conservatives that lost that particular power struggle for “coherent ideology the Republican party could use to win elections”, but they used to be pretty establishment themselves, for a while.
Again going by Wikipedia: the first use of “alternative right” appears to be by a paleocon. There’s a couple uses in TakiMag in 2009 that link it to Paulites and Buchananites. Then, in 2010, Richard Spencer (a white nationalist) registers a website by the name. White nationalist tendencies seem pretty strong in the alt-right. And of course the meaning of terms changes.
The question of whether libertarians are “alternative” is an interesting one – to some extent, they’re mainstream, in that there are people within the Republican party who call themselves libertarians and aren’t kicked out of the party or voted out of office, and it’s usually socially acceptable to say you’re a libertarian. In contrast, there’s no Republican congresspersons who call themselves white nationalists.
However, you’ve got libertarians, and then you’ve got libertarians. Someone who wants more school vouchers, no public health care, legalize pot, etc is pretty mainstream. Someone who wants all roads private, all water plants private, private police, private military, and also legalize all drugs, etc – is not mainstream.
Things exist before we have words for them, especially in politics, and double especially in modern democratic-republican politics. I mean, Paulites and Buchananites are classic paleo-cons.
I’d argue the rise in white nationalism is probably related to the rise of identity politics in general as a common language of political expression, probably in response to globalism.
“People who disagree with leftists on the internet” seems like it unpacks into something reasonable.
The Alt-Right is a subset of people who are interested in discussing political philosophy on the internet. In particular, they’re sub-community of people who want to iterate on ideas that are less appealing to liberals.
The first split is “Philosophical” vs “Practical”.
Traditionally, political discussions seemed to crystalize around some practical goal. “Elect Bernie Sanders!” or “Elect Ron Paul!” can lead to discussions about the candidates’ philosophies. But generally with an eye towards some achievable goal.
In contrast, there are communities (like this one) that are more interested in ideas-for-ideas. “What if the government made decisions using prediction markets?” and “Could America benefit from having a king?” are both provocative questions that are appealing to a certain kind of person.
The next split is about the specific topics that people find interesting.
I’m an economist. I’m convinced of the merits of math-based-policy. So I like reading about how, exactly, someone would implement a prediction market.
I’m loving the rationalist community because so many of the authors seem to share my notions of “interesting”. It’s kind of SIG: Techno-Futurist Proposals.
In contrast, I’m not sold on the whole idea that the US should have a king. So, while I’m happy to talk about it at a high-level, I’m not going to be a great discussion partner for debates about how, precisely, America would pick it’s supreme leader.
Community size seems to be a compromise. Too small and discussions die out. Too big and you lose specialization.
Since there aren’t a TON of people on the Right, there seems to be a community that amounts to SIG: Authoritarian Stuff that Makes Liberals Uncomfortable. It might specialize when it grows.
What’s cool is you can see how groups seem willing to reach out across these splits. SSC has it’s “Those Belonging to the Emperor!” link section for blogs that share the interest in philosophy, but differ on special-interest. It will also connect to things like Effective Altruism that share the special-interests but are more explicitly practical.
If there are alt-right sites that are not bogged down in an anti-liberal blamefest, it would help to have a name or a link. Perhaps I’ll check the front pages of the sites Scott links to after supper.
A remark I said I’d steal a few posts back, I’ll steal now, though not verbatim:
The alt-right are like Christians who, having lost their faith in God, have decided to worship the Devil. That is, they are disillusioned leftists who have adopted a leftist parody of right-wing beliefs.
People who think the enlightenment was a mistake. I think that’s the closest I can come.
No, that’s the bad-word group. Plenty on the alt-right utterly loathe Moldbug and his followers, perhaps excepting Clarkhat and the former jokeocracy, who might not actually be one.
Can’t have white nationalists without an idea of whiteness and an idea of nationalism, can’t have right-libertarians without Manchester liberalism, can’t have neofascists without fascists, and you can’t have the PUA’s without the sexual revolution.
White (or ethnic) nationalist 4chan-style nerds.
Right wing believers who are starting to use left wing/revolutionary tactics in an attempt to change society to be more like their beliefs.
So I find myself transported back to Ancient Rome and decide that I’m going to single-handedly kickstart the Industrial Revolution. How do I go about doing that?
Bringing back 1900s-era knowledge of metallurgy seems like the best bet. That’ll let you build steamships, and that’ll accelerate everything else.
Heck give a competent Roman architect/civil engineer from the 1st century AD access to 1700s era math and metallurgy and I’m pretty sure they’d figure out the rest themselves.
Bring a copy of “Lest Darkness Fall”? Actually I don’t think that had enough technical detail to help.
Better iron and steel; a prerequisite to this is coke from coal. Add in some form of welding and riveting, introduce the concept of the assembly line and interchangeable parts to make animal-drawn agricultural machinery, and you’ll be well on your way.
The original Simon & Schuster “How Things Work” would I think be a better bet in that regard, possibly supplemented by a set of the Foxfire books.
If you’re not allowed to bring books, what is it that you actually know well enough to teach that the Romans could practically use?
The decimal number system could be of use to Romans by making calculations quicker.
Also, if you know how to rig up a battery, telegraphs.
I imagine it would be so much harder than it seemed, even assuming you possess and can teach a great volume of technical knowledge. Because so many new technologies are useless or even meaningless outside of a larger technological context. May be apocryphal, but I read somewhere that some Ancient Greeks invented a kind of proto-steam engine. It was quickly forgotten, the story goes, because it had no practical use in that technological context.
Hero’s engine did exist, as far as I know. Partly the problem was lack of a use case, but I’ve also read that the reason they didn’t see a use for it was that the metallurgy of the time wouldn’t let you get useful boiler pressures.
Which I guess supports your point – there’s a whole network of technology that goes into the industrial revolution.
The problem isn’t just technological, you need the right economic and demographic conditions, too. You need strong demand for potentially industrially-produced goods, which requires an astounding surplus population both to supply the labor and the demand (and consumer goods are worse for this than, say, thousands of cannon and kms of railroad). At the same time, you also want to keep entrepreneurs from either getting stomped on by the Senate/Emperor or converted to more traditional gentry.
What you’re looking for is a virtuous cycle of technology and production scale reducing prices which in turn helps expand the market to increase production scale and make new technology viable, etc. Obviously you can cheat a bit and give it a kickstart with metallurgical, mining, and financial/mathematical tech. Maritime stuff like more seaworthy ships, compasses, and sextants is on the list, too, but you’d have a devil of a time getting those made properly at anything resembling a reasonable cost.
The biggest problem is that I don’t know where you’re getting dense energy from. Sardinia has some coal but the big Gaulish fields aren’t economically central enough, much less the stuff in Britannia or Germania. You can’t move enough economic weight there in a single lifetime, either. Romans did a lot with water-wheels, but that isn’t going to scale well enough. It’s like you need steam ships and railroads to get to the resources you need to build steam ships and railroads (in the quantity you need).
China might be a better choice, but you still have to disrupt political control of the economy there (which may well spark massive unrest and rebellion, but military demand does work pretty well for industrialization).
Start by reading _Lest Darkness Fall_ by Sprague de Camp for ideas.
How did they do it the first time round? This series might give you a clue 🙂
Those youtube videos are exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in. Thank you.
Bring a whole wad of technical books written in Latin, or at least archaic Italian. Many copies each. That way, after you die, the process can continue without your help, and hopefully, the Romans might achieve industrial technology in like half the time it took us from their level.
Provided that they don’t collapse under their own degeneracy, like they did historically. Technical progress might actually accelerate their downfall.
(Good literature on the subject of Industrial Revolution is Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms”.)
Only in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, kept going until it got conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
Good point.
It kept going as a political entity, but how was their economy during the nadir of the dark ages?
It bugs me that people conflate political unity with prosperity.
I don’t see why becoming smaller would affect the average wealth; most of the population were still farmers.
Average wealth may not be affected, but civilizations require scale and complexity to produce certain advances. A farming group of 2,000 might have the same living standard as an Empire of 2 million, but the Empire of 2 million will have resources to build fortifications, iron weapons, and develop writing.
1000 politically independent groups of 2000 can do those things.
Northern Italy in 1300 was the most developed part of the world, and look at its fragmented political map.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/images/map-europe-1300.jpg
The great lesson of science in antiquity is that books do not work.
We know what happens when Romans read science books—you get Pliny and Seneca. At best you get Vitruvius and Varro.
Maybe Roman engineering was done by Greek slave-engineers. Maybe they still understood the old Greek books and maybe you should bring Greek books. In the East, Hero seems to have gotten something out of the book of Ctesibius, despite a break of a couple centuries in the scientific culture. But after the Renaissance of the second century, the eastern empire, despite its great libraries steadily decline. Every generation understood less than the previous.
Considering the thesis of “A Farewell to Alms” is that a lot of bright people made small improvements which cumulatively led to the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think that would help much.
Which is why I wrote what I did. I think being handed some technical answers could help them industrialize in 1000 years instead of 2000.
I don’t think importing technology (e.g. the blueprints for a Boeing 747) would by itself help much. My armchair impression of history says the Industrial Revolution was mostly contingent on the Agricultural Revolution and the Renaissance.
Sure, there exist foundational engineering technologies which certainly didn’t hurt. E.g. fossil fuels; electromagnetism; the Haber Process; the Bessemer Process; Mass Production; etc. But (for lack of a better analogy) I think of these more as catalysts than limiting reagents. I suspect the Industrial Revolution was ultimately a result of a shift in the economic and political climate which allowed for innovation in one’s spare time.
If I could share only one technology with the Romans, it would be the Haber Process. Because I’d expect the ability to manufacture fertilizer to be the single easiest way to immediately improve their quality of life. And once their quality of life improves, I’d expect every else to cascade. (I.e. hunger is on the lowest rung on the Maslow Hierarchy. Transportation isn’t part of the Hierarchy period. Inventing automobiles won’t empower the Romans to innovate further.)
This – it starts with agricultural productivity and the way society is organized.
Which is why ages ago I was disagreeing vehemently with someone who was arguing that it would be impossible to have an industrial civilization in a planet without fossil fuels. Industrial revolution didn’t absolutely need fossil fuels. Before there were railways, boats did the job just fine; look at how the Romans managed to transport food for one million citizens of the capital all the way from Egypt thanks to boats. Who needs fossil fuels? You need agricultural productivity and entrepeneurial freedom, and then you invent things. You could go from water wheels all the way to nuclear power. There’s more than one way to go from point A to point B.
The correct response to the fossil fuel argument is
S T E A M P U N K
A professor of mine once mentioned a former student who explained why the black plague caused to atomic bomb. The reasoning was something like (Bubonic -> decimated population -> surplus of cloth rags -> books -> printing press -> Science -> Hiroshima). “We wouldn’t need to worry about a nuclear winter, if only the black plague hadn’t occurred!”. lmao.
#necessary vs sufficient
#do you even causal network
Perhaps you mean something like clockpunk. Steam requires fossil fuels.
Steam engines can burn wood or other biofuels just fine. As can internal-combustion engines, for that matter. An early industrial society limited to renewable energy sources will not be as prosperous as one with cheap, abundant coal, but having even a few steam engines will offer an advantage over having none at all.
In the “bootstrap an industrial revolution in Rome” scenario, I’d consider using my first steam engine to power a trading ship that can deliver out-of-season luxury goods against the wind. If necessary, a blockade runner equipped with shell guns and gatlings. Then make sure to hire every clever spy who wants to see how it all works and report back to his master.
If you are allowed to use things like machine guns, maybe the quickest way to modernize the world is to conquer it. Ethics aside.
David Weber’s written like twelve books on that very subject.
Re: machine guns
Doubtful.
As a case study, consider the Brits. First came the longbow. Next came the navy. They conquered the world. Then afterward they “modernized” their colonies by (for example): redrawing borders; outlawing the caste system; Christian missions; etc. How well do you think that worked out? Before you answer, consider: India; Iraq; Nigeria; Somalia; et al.
Incidentally, the US military’s contemporary plan to modernize Afghanistan is going swimmingly. As is the Glorious Leader’s plan to modernize the decadent US.
In all seriousness, the case studies we actually want to emulate probably include Japan, the Four Tigers, and idk maybe China. The question of the hour is, how does a feudal society like Japan become fully-industrialized within a few decades, especially after getting ham-blasted by the Little Boy and the Fat Man?
That sounds an awful lot like James Burke’s “Connections” TV series from the 70s. Though he did touchstone->atomic bomb and Black Death->computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
I don’t know, fullmeta, you raise good points, but the Romans had already displayed impressive organizational skills, which none of the nations conquered by the Brits possessed.
Many of the European missionaries establishing ties with Japan and China in the 16th century expressed awe towards the sophistication of those cultures and the intelligence of the people. You don’t find any back then who treated any nation in Africa or the Middle East with the same respect. I suspect that countries like Japan and China had always greater potential compared to Africa, the Islamic world, or India.
Russia was industrialized by brute government force.
I’m not saying that it is the moral way to do it, mind you.
And I certainly don’t recommend conquering any nation today with that in mind.
It seems to me that the easiest way for a time-displaced modern person to improve agricultural productivity in the Roman Empire would be to let them know about the existence of a vast “undiscovered” continent across the Western ocean, whose inhabitants have a bunch of very useful “new” crops that they would easily be willing to trade seeds of for iron tools and the like. Considering how far Thor Heyerdahl was able to get using hand-built rafts, I assume that Roman ships would be able to reach the Americas if they knew where to go.
Good point!
Eh, doubtful. Obviously we’re handwaving the problems of getting someone important to pay attention to you, an obvious madman, so let’s just focus on the practicalities.
The main problem is just that shipbuilding technology was not advanced enough to reach the Americas much before Columbus, let alone actual seafaring and navigational skills. Vinland was settled via a very long and tenuous supply chain stretching across the cold islands of the Northern Atlantic – not at all an economically viable route.
As for the Mid-Atlantic routes that were the arteries of the Spanish and Portugese empires, well, there’s no way Roman ships could have handled that crossing. Most ships were designed for the placid Mediterranean or short hops up and down the Atlantic coast (admittedly I am not especially familiar with Roman naval traffic outside the Med). Even in the Mediterranean, the vessels of antiquity were light, flimsily-built craft more often designed for speed instead of sturdiness, and accordingly many were lost even in that calm inland sea.
Note also that the Romans had contact with China by both land and sea, and yet that civilization, despite its relative wealth and prosperity, was considered to be too distant to be a viable trading partner. Beyond a handful of minor embassies exchanged there was basically no intercourse between the two civilizations, and the Americas are an order of magnitude more difficult to reach, and much, much poorer.
After the problem of construction (including building a proper hull and rigging the proper sails for a transoceanic crossing – not a trivial problem) you have to solve navigational difficulties. Being able to take advantage of wind and wave to get you to where you want to go is an immensely difficult task, one that we’ve largely forgotten since the advent of steam engines. But consider: Isn’t it odd that Africa was never fully explored by Europeans until the Age of Discovery? Why did no Roman or medieval expeditions make their way down the African coast and map the continent? The answer lies in the vagaries of the currents and wind patterns off the northwest coast of Africa – Cape Bojador was considered a deathtrap for mariners, beyond which there was no return. It wasn’t until 1434 that the Portuguese explorer Gil Eanes discovered a way to safely navigate the Cape. And that’s just Africa!
So, to get to America, you’ll need charts of trade winds and ocean currents, such that the Romans can use their new-built caravels and carracks to safely cross the Mid-Atlantic and make landfall. You’ll need to know how to rig and handle sails, so you can teach the first crew of your IN Rebus to handle her. Then you’ve got to solve the problems of food storage and healthcare at sea, so the whole crew doesn’t starve to death or die of scurvy halfway there (remember, most ancient voyages rarely went out of sight of land). Then and ONLY then is large-scale commerce with the Western Hemisphere a viable proposition.
In order to get the Romans to America, you need to bring with you at least a 14th-century knowledge of shipbuilding and rigging, navigation, shiphandling, and food preservation – at which point you’re already most of the way to an industrial revolution.
You sound like you know a lot about this sort of stuff, but I have to ask:
If Roman ships were incapable of even theoretically crossing the Atlantic, how is is that Thor Heyerdahl was able to sail from Morocco to Barbados using far more primitive technology?
I also want to clarify that I’m not talking about establishing large scale regular commerce between the hemispheres, just importing enough seeds to start growing corn and other New World crops in the Old World. That still might be a long shot, but again, I’d like to know what Thor Heyerdahl had that a hypothetical person with modern knowledge and the support of some experienced Roman sailors (like you said, I’m handwaving the issue of how to get people to take me seriously) wouldn’t have.
Also, as a displaced modern person, it would be pretty easy to solve the scurvy problem: just tell people that eating limes and other fruit can prevent scurvy. Preserving them for a long sea voyage might be a problem (though how did the British handle that in the 19th century? I assume they didn’t have refrigerators back then?), but it would go a long way towards fixing it.
Food storage and scurvy are not real problems. Like every agrarian society ever, the Romans knew how to dry and preserve food.
It only took Columbus five weeks to cross the Atlantic, which is obviously not enough to develop scurvy.
Scurvy in the age of sail was a problem for military operations that required ships to remain at sea for a long time. You don’t get scurvy crossing the Atlantic.
If the goal is merely to bring to the old world potatoes, maize, and quinine, you don’t need to establish commercial shipping. You just need to find the seeds, and bring them back, once. The Vinland route would have been enough.
@NN You’ll want to make sure you go with knowledge of which citrus fruits are actually high in Vitamin C– or better, a testing protocol, since it seems likely that the specific breeds of citrus would be different. Otherwise, you’ll risk recapitulating the effective loss of the cure for scurvy by the British Navy in the second half of the 19th century.
They started with lemons, which worked. But they later substituted limes that started with a quarter the Vitamin C and then lost a lot of that via storage and pumping through copper tubing, which breaks down the vitamin. (The effect was largely masked for the Navy by faster ships leading to shorter voyages, but the result was disastrous for some polar expeditions.) The issue wasn’t fully resolved till the 1930s.
http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
I repeat that scurvy is not a problem here! You don’t risk scurvy for crossing the Atlantic! The british navy needed citrus because during the napoleonic wars it was a *military* advantage to be able to keep a ship at sea for many months. This is not an issue for transatlantic trading trips.
Regarding shipbuilding, Roman ships were flimsy *because* they were designed for the Mediterranean. But the ancient also built enormous ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula's_Giant_Ship
Apparently that one was 6 decks high!
I can’t believe that they wouldn’t have been able to build ships able to withstand the ocean.
The Romans did not have the compass, which would have been a real handicap. In the late middle ages the compass, knotted rope, trigonometric tables, and portolan charts, taken together formed a dead reckoning technique that allowed ships to determine where they were without having to watch the coast, so they were much more confident leaving the coastline.
However if you can go back in time and talk to the ancient romans, maybe you can just teach them the compass and dead reckoning.
Apparently the Ancient Greeks wrote about lodestones in the 6th century BC, so it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find suitable materials for a compass in the Roman Empire.
“If the goal is merely to bring to the old world potatoes, maize, and quinine, you don’t need to establish commercial shipping. You just need to find the seeds, and bring them back, once. The Vinland route would have been enough.”
The Vinland route gets you fairly far north in North America. Potatoes and Maize don’t get anywhere close to that until well after Roman times. So you have to come across the North Atlantic then make it all the way down the east coast to somewhere in Central or South America, then back.
Right. It would be far more efficient to follow the same route as Columbus to the Caribbean and then from there travel to Central and South America. Maize was the staple of all pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations, and I think that the potato had reached Columbia by that point, so it should be possible to obtain those and other crops without reaching the Andes mountains (which would require sailing around to the West Coast of South America).
Between the historical examples of very large ships built by the Greeks and Romans and the aforementioned Thor Heyerdahl, I’m pretty confident that Roman shipwrights and sailors would be able to mount such an expedition, especially if they were also given compasses and the knowledge of how to prevent scurvy. The latter may not be necessary if things go well, but it still help.
I’ve got to say, I’m not sure I believe the reports on Syracusia (I guess Caligula’s ship was found, and so must have existed, but it’s described as a barge, and I’m guessing that if it ever floated, it probably never moved). Wooden ships for which we have definitely reliable records that were over 80 meters either proved disastrously unseaworthy, were heavily reinforced with iron or steel parts, or both. Of course, Syracusia is only supposed to have made one voyage, so I suppose it’s barely possible that they just got enormously lucky. But my money’s on it not actually having been quite that big after all.
Protagoras, the barge is believed to be an obelisk ship, for journeys to Egypt. Such ships obviously existed! Furthermore, the identification of the wreck with an obelisk ship is based on Pliny’s account of something that happened in his lifetime, albeit his childhood. Though maybe the height was added after it stopped moving.
Columbus also had the mariner’s astrolabe, which the Romans didn’t have.
The argument that you need to know the winds before getting to America seems particularly weak. I’m not a sailor so what do I know, but you don’t know the winds of a place until you discover it. By that logic you could never get anywhere.
I insist for the third time, that scurvy is no issue at all. Columbus didn’t have or need citrus fruit. Scurvy is not a problem for crossing the Atlantic!
All in all I think that critics are exaggerating the difficulties.
Regarding the existance of very large wooden ships:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship
Pedantic self-correction, I don’t know if he happened to have citrus aboard, but, he didn’t need it or know of its qualities.
The Vinland route gets you far north, but I assume you can sail south along the American coast, no?
From that wikipedia link about treasure ships, some (those who pay attention to the engineering issues) think the ships were 61-76 meters. And the only surviving archaeological evidence is a rudder that wouldn’t have been outsized for a ship of 60 meters or less. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that more than 80 meters just doesn’t work for wooden ships (unless they’re wood/iron composite ships, like the 19th century clippers; iron frames can extend the feasible length of wood-hulled ships to somewhat beyond 100 meters, but 140 meters is still a little hard to believe even if the Chinese were using iron frames, and there is no mention of them using iron).
Yes, the treasure ship size estimate is probably the usual Chinese propaganda bullshit, I’m ashamed I used to believe in it.
Why are we talking about ginormous wooden ships anyway? Yes, everybody who was serious about wooden shipbuilding built something in the 80-100 meter range, sailed it a few times without sinking, and said “maybe we shouldn’t do that any more”. I have no trouble believing the Romans did likewise.
The preferred vessel for early oceanic exploration was the twenty-meter caravel. I am fairly certain Roman shipwrights could have built one if someone had given them a decent set of drawings. I am also fairly certain I could reconstruct the basic design of a caravel from memory.
@John:
Yeah, size isn’t the issue – a 20m ship will serve much better than some hulking monster. The main difficulty is in knowing how to design a sail plan, and in building a ship sturdy enough to stand up to the Atlantic for months on end. The 15th century explorers solved the issue by adopting the lanteen sail for oceanic vessels (previously they’d been mostly square-rigged). That let the vessels lie much closer to the winds than before, which permitted much more maneuverability in sailing. The lanteen is what allowed the aforementioned Cape Bojador to be conquered, for example.
@anonymous: You’re right about the scurvy – that wouldn’t actually be an issue, I think. We’re talking (relatively) short one-way voyages, with plenty of opportunity for landfall at either end, not the months-on-end patrolling and blockading of the 16th – 19th century navies I was taking as my model.
The Vinland route just doesn’t seem plausible to me. The length and difficulties are immensely greater, since you need to sail virtually the entire length of North America to Panama. That’s a lot riskier than the direct route. Your vessel of exploration will be subject to accident, disease, or hostile action the whole way. Could you make it without mishap? Certainly. Is the middle passage risk-free? No, of course not. But the risks are a lot greater the longer the voyage is, and you’re proposing a MUCH longer voyage.
Then you still need to find the maize and potatoes and whatnot and cart them back through all the difficulties to Europe, making sure your precious seed crops survive the voyage. It’s doable, but hardly easy. I think the best example of the difficulties is the fact that the Norse expeditions themselves never brought anything back from the New World, or established any sort of lasting connection between Scandinavia and North America. The route was too long, too difficult, and the returns too poor for it to be worthwhile.
So, what would you need to bring the Romans to enable them to effectually exploit the Americas? Are we proposing that simply having the Americans’ crops would be enough to jump-start an industrial revolution? Well, I’m not convinced on that point, but it’s a much easier problem to solve than establishing large-scale commercial traffic between the two hemispheres would be (so, no trans-Atlantic Roman empire on the Portugese or Spanish models).
We’ve still got shipbuilding. Heyerdahl’s first vessel broke up and foundered without reaching Barbados, so you need to carry back at least knowledge of his 2nd attempt (I’d still prefer an American clipper ship, or one of the heavy frigates if I felt like being a pirate king). Otherwise your great vessel of exploration sails out of Gibraltar and never comes back, and good luck convincing another band of lunatics to sign up with you. Then you’ve got to know enough about rigging a sail that your ship can sail BACK across the Atlantic, too – Heyerdahl made use of the Canary current on his second voyage, which you can’t ride back to Europe, so we’ll need to be able to take advantage of the Mid-Atlantic trades to get our vessel back.
That’s where you’ll need navigational knowledge. Sailing a ship isn’t as easy as pointing it generally west and saying go. Ships are constantly at the mercy of wind and wave, and knowing how to take advantage of all that to get where you wanted to go was a science that required years of training. So, when I say you need knowledge of the winds, you need to know the general sea characteristics of the area you’re sailing in. Columbus didn’t know America existed, but he did have the records of decades of explorations through the Mid-Atlantic area that established prevailing winds and currents, knowledge he was able to use to head in generally the direction he wanted to go. Then, you’ll need to know how to manage a sailing vessel, since we’re jumping the Romans up some shipbuilding generations, so you can train your crew of plucky volunteers/conscripted slaves.
Storing enough food for a several-week crossing is one of the lesser problems, but it still needs to be solved – space is limited on a sailing vessel, and so you need compact, preservable calories. Ship’s biscuit shouldn’t be TOO hard to make, and can probably be found via experimentation, but knowing off-hand how to make it would greatly simplify things.
So, let me examine things. You’ve got a ship, the IN Rebus. She’s sturdy and can sail in just about any direction, regardless of wind. You have rough charts and know generally how to get where you’re going, your crew is confident in handling the vessel, and you’ve got enough food for the duration. Scurvy won’t be an issue, since this is a relatively short voyage. I /think/ you can stage a successful expedition to the New World now.
Really, I’d want you to set up a school of navigation. Get your shipbuilding and navigational techniques diffused out into the world, and let the Romans set up large-scale commercial contacts with the New World. (There wouldn’t be a whole lot of trade, to be honest – there were no organized native states that I know of in Augustus’s time – but you can definitely get the food across and that’s all we’re after). The closer connectedness of the world would lead to a global society along the lines of the 16th and 17th century worlds far sooner than otherwise, which I can’t help but think would speed human progress.
Surprised it’s taken this long for someone to answer “convincing arguments for IQ and practical eugenics policies”.
A convincing argument not to drink things from lead and uranium-glazed vessels might help. Or maybe not; if the lead-violence connection is real, it may be the lead which propelled the (strikingly violent) Romans to greatness in the first place.
From what I recall the success of Roman violence was more to their organization than anything else, the northern barbarians were physically more impressive. Social technology is an important force multiplier.
“half remembered”
I think they waited for the pipes to be gunked up before using them (so lead poising that way isn’t an issue), but I heard some people added it as a sweetener to wine.
This guy writes a blog on fraud in the olive oil industry and it’s totally awesome: http://www.truthinoliveoil.com/.
Could someone explain how comparative advantage allows humans to still have jobs even when there are “robots” that can do everything (crucially; building/fixing other “robots”).
I understand how comparative advantage suggests that (generally) free trade between nation-states is beneficial, but I don’t understand how it should prevent technological unemployment in an economy. Someone mentioned this last time as a response, and I’ve been trying to figure it out. Can someone enlighten me?
This is also related to the basic income issue, because if technological unemployment does become a thing, then one will become necessary to avoid a violent revolution/genocide (fortunately a basic income should become easier to pay after automation has brought the cost of everything down).
It doesn’t.
Comparative advantage as it’s usually thought of is between market actors, and robots as they’re usually thought of are capital, not market actors. There could be comparative advantage between robot owners and robot non-owners, which you could think of as “if you’re willing to work for low enough wages it will be cheaper to pay you than to buy an expensive robot to do your job”. But there are a bunch of problems with this that show up when those expensive robots get cheap enough; you can run up against minimum wage laws, transaction costs, and the hard floor on wages due to the survival needs of the worker.
If almost everything is automated, wouldn’t that bring down the costs of the survival needs of the worker?
For a start, it’s unlikely that things like rent will go down (you can argue that utility prices will go down because companies are running on cheap robot labour, food prices go down because now we have huge industrialised farms running on robot labour owned by corporations, etc. but I would not hold my breath on that one).
If you are living in a city (because that is where the work is), you will be stuck for rent. It’s unlikely a landlord will decrease rents because if you can’t pay, someone else will. Or they can sell the property to a developer. Or it can be used as an investment/money-laundering scheme.
If you can’t afford that, you live in the cheapest possible housing. If you can’t even afford to have a shared room with six other people in a one-bedroom flat in an urban centre, you move to the country. But if you have absolutely no income, then you are going to be reliant on social housing (let me take a moment here to laugh hollowly about the social housing problem in Ireland, which would be ten times worse under displaced robot labourconditions) or some other provision.
The assumption seems to be that robot economy will only affect manual and low-skills labour. What happens when it is doctors, lawyers and the like getting replaced? Oh that will never happen, you will always need experienced lawyers to fight court cases? Maybe in court, but drawing up contracts – even tricky ones? As robots (and we’re talking all kinds of computerised systems under that label) get more sophisticated, more and more white-collar and skilled professions will come under their purview.
The economic maxim is we can’t all make a living by taking in one another’s washing, and I also doubt we can make a living by the easy solution of having seven billion programmers.
Re: Rent and population
In the United States, the fastest growing states are North Dakota, Texas, North Carolina, etc. In no small part because these areas offer cheaper real estate than Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City.
Robots can solve rent easily: build more housing. Same as humans now. The relevant problem in these cities is regulation. There are technological hurdles to overcome as well, but robots can overcome most of those (since we’re assuming robots are hyper-intelligent, near-perfect machinery).
But, yeah, you can’t overcome legal burdens, unless you tell the robots to remove the City Council, which results in the City Council deploying their army of hyper-intelligent, near-perfect robots.
If Better Call Saul is at all accurate, pretty much all sectors of law require significant amounts of social labor. Since you brought up them up, drawing up contracts requires you to determine what each party to the contract wants, and negotiate the best way to meet both of their needs while staying within legal requirements. Yes, you could theoretically do some of this through a computer, but considering how many people justifiably hate dealing with customer service teleprompters, I think it’s quite likely that many people would pay a premium to be able to tell a human being about their wants and needs.
Criminal defense in particular seems pretty much completely immune to automation to me, because no criminal in his/her right mind would admit guilt to a computer owned by law enforcement.
There are aspects of the legal profession that are easily automatable, a prominent one being “discovery,” or searching through piles of legal documents for relevant information. However, the data indicates that automatic discovery software has if anything led to an increase in the number of paralegal and lawyer jobs, likely because automating parts of the process has allowed firms to handle more and larger discovery requests, and maybe even take on more cases.
The economic impact of automation and technology in general is complicated. You can’t just assume that everyone will keep doing the same things that they were doing before, except with robots instead of human employees.
I think the story Manna touched on this before it went for a visit to the crappy-eutopia.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
Well, if robots can do literally everything, then everything is free because infinitely abundant and no one needs to work. Much more likely, there will always be some things humans can do better or cheaper than robots (even assuming the robots can fix, maintain, and even improve themselves), especially service industry stuff. So if robots can do 99% of the work necessary to produce all the goods and services we currently enjoy then everything would be 99% cheaper.
It might be very hard to find a 40-hour a week job under such circumstances, but if everything is 99% cheaper you only need to work half an hour a week to afford everything you now enjoy and probably more.
Moreover, human wants are practically infinite, meaning that even if we had robots providing all the goods and services we currently enjoy, there would still be room for creative people to invent new goods and services you didn’t even know you wanted yet.
If we can deal with the transition from 90% of everyone being employed in farming 200 years ago to 1% being employed in farming today, we can deal with robots.
Well, if robots can do literally everything, then everything is free because infinitely abundant and no one needs to work.
This reminds me of the starry-eyed visions of nuclear power plants which would produce “electricity too cheap to meter! practically free power!” I always wondered how it was meant to pay for itself – nobody ever mentioned things like flat fees or how it would be economic to run a power plant that didn’t charge on metered rates and what charges it would run on instead.
Robots produce so much stuff it’s being given away for free – and how do the manufacturers pay for the raw materials they are consuming? The energy to run the production? The costs of the robots themselves? Make a profit?
We’re talking about a major restructuring of the economy in a fashion nobody has contemplated apart from the experiments in Communist nations, which didn’t work out so great in the long run.
In our world as currently constituted, people who get goods for free are not living on the pig’s back, they are recipients of charity from (usually but not always) church ministries (like soup kitchens or the St Vincent de Paul). Does Apple run on a platform of “we can make our goods so cheaply using Chinese sub-contractors we are practically giving them away?” or do they rather charge full-whack? A business is in business to make profit; if they don’t charge for the goods, they have to make the money somewhere along the line.
If we can deal with the transition from 90% of everyone being employed in farming 200 years ago to 1% being employed in farming today, we can deal with robots.
Displaced farm labourers moved into cities and worked in factories.
Displaced urban factory workers move – where? do what?
They’re not all going to turn into artisan café owners, micro-brewers, indie songwriters and teledildonics content creators.
Empirically, displaced urban factory workers move into service industries. Since 1970, the share of US employment provided by the Goods Producing sector of the economy has decreased from 30% to 13%, while the share provided by the Service sector has increased from 64% to 84%. Based on the data that I’ve seen, I think that the decrease in manufacturing jobs in the US in recent decades is far more due to China than to automation, but the principle is the same.
It’s more complicated than that, owing to the fact that specialization has meant a lot of “manufacturing” work is now classified as “services”. Think about a manufacturing plant keeping janitors on-staff, versus outsourcing the job to a services company.
Last I checked was about a decade ago, but I encountered convincing statistics that the decline in manufacturing was greatly overstated.
You’re making analogies to current economic conditions. But, as you said, if robots can actually do all the work, we’ve entered a totally new version of economics.
If robots are cheap enough to do everything, then both labor and capital cease to be limiting factors, and the limiting factors become Earth’s natural bounty. Most likely the raw materials to make the robots.
At that point robots become prohibitively expensive.
But then you can make a living writing AI for the robots or AI for the Internet or whatever.
There is no static economy where robots have all the jobs and there is a large group of displaced people with no access to robots.
“Most likely the raw materials to make the robots.”
Asteroids.
Life support is much simplified when you send robots to mine them, and also many rare elements are rare only because they sunk into the earth’s core when the earth formed. (This is how they figured out it was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; the layer of mud was amazingly rich in lithium.)
I think the idea is that beyond a certain point, if you have machines which make machines which make machines which can make X…. then at some point X becomes more expensive to account for than to simply provide at a flat rate.
The “too cheap to meter” literally meant that putting meters in would be more expensive than just providing it all-you-can-eat style.
Software and some information has already passed that point for some things.
It costs money to run all the servers to provide downloads of linux ISO’s and wikipedia but little enough that donations can handle it.
It still takes inputs like computer hardware but the degree of automation allows the services to just be provided to everyone.
If you’d asked the publishers of Encyclopædia Britannica 50 years ago whether it would be possible to make an Encyclopedia 100 times the size of theirs accessible to everyone for free they’d have called you nuts.
“Robots produce so much stuff it’s being given away for free – and how do the manufacturers pay for the raw materials they are consuming? The energy to run the production? The costs of the robots themselves?”
Part of the assumption of “robots produce literally everything” is that robots are even producing the raw materials for making robots.
I doubt we’ll get to that point any time soon; in the meantime, though there would be a lot fewer jobs in auto manufacture and cab driving, there would be a lot more jobs in making and repairing robots, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a very difficult job. It’s a parody, of course, but recall the “Jetsons” future in which George’s only job is to stand around and push a button periodically.
“turn into artisan café owners, micro-brewers, indie songwriters”
This is hilarious, but I think what you’re suggesting is that eventually the only jobs which need doing by humans will require a level of intelligence and/or artistic creativity which many humans don’t have; therefore, everyone not smart enough to be a robot programmer or indie songwriter will be unemployed.
I don’t think this is so for at least two reasons:
As the average work week was something like 60 hours long in the 19th c., so I predict the average work week will become 30, 20, 10… hours long in the robot future. It will be hard for Joe Sixpack to find a 40-hour a week job, but he won’t need one because most things will be super cheap because they are made by self-repairing robots.
Think no one will make stuff at the price point for Joe “I work five hours a week giving rich people foot rubs” Sixpack? Of course they will. Like Wal Mart is more profitable today than Rols Royce, so using robots to produce stuff at a price the great mass of the population can afford will be the biggest profit opportunity.
I predict in such a future that anything made or provided by people will have a high social signaling value, as, to some extent, it already does. Maybe all the people currently working at McDonalds can’t become micro-brewers, but they can work at a micro-brewery selling “artisanal, hand-crafted, made-with-love” beer to richer people.
As hand-made, tailored clothes used to be the only option but then became a luxury when factory-made clothes became an option (at which time, incidentally, poor people finally became able to afford more than one or two pairs of clothes), so, too, will robot-made become the increasingly default option for most things, even as individualized, hand-made, human-provided goods and services become more valuable.
And as for where people can move: I actually predict urbanization to slow down and even reverse somewhat in the next few centuries. Many of the advantages of city life are increasingly irrelevant with Netflix, Amazon Prime, self-driving cars… Everything comes to you now, so why live in a cramped apartment to be close to all the cool stuff. More robots, it seems to me, would only tend to accelerate this trend.
What’s more, as everybody starts working 10 hours a week because robots are doing everything, they probably will start having more children again, if only because they’re bored. People with more children would also tend to prefer the big house in the country to the cramped apartment in the city, especially when robots deliver much of the cool stuff the city has to offer.
Exactly.
I don’t have the time or patience to fight this fight again right now, but I just wanted to thank you for saying everything that I would say.
I agree with most of what you say but I think you have the urbanization factor backwards. If people are content to binge watch netflix over going outside, that means they need less space in general. They will probably also prefer to live out their fantasies than to take on the hard work of raising a kid. And assuming that Virtual Reality is going to be the entirety of leisure time(a reasonable assumption I believe), the most important aspect will be having a good connection, something that cities will better provide than the country.
(emphasis added)
I said it before and I’ll say it again. If virtually all planes still have pilots* even though we’ve had the technology necessary to create pilotless planes for decades and virtually all trains still have drivers** even though we’ve had the technology to create driverless trains for more than 50 years, then there is no way in hell that people are going to let cars and trucks drive themselves on streets that kids play in anytime soon, if ever. This is leaving aside the fact that so far completely self-driving cars have turned out to be more accident prone, at least when driving on city streets, than human drivers, largely because they have a harder time reacting to the mistakes of other human drivers.
Maybe we’ll eventually get completely autonomous cars and trucks when someone invests the money to create walled off highways that neither human driven cars or human pedestrians are allowed to enter, Until then it’s going to be like what happened in air travel: increasingly advanced “driver assistance” features that cut down on accidents and maybe eventually autopilot that is restricted to highways, but they are going to require a sober and awake human who is capable of hitting the manual override and taking over to be at the wheel at all times. If anything, this might lead to an increase in the number of cab and truck driver jobs due to the lowered skill requirements and diminished risk and by extension lower pay and insurance rates.
The fact that so many people just assume that self-driving cars will eliminate cab and truck driver jobs without ever asking the (to me) extremely obvious questions of, “does automation technology capable of eliminating human operators already exist in similar fields, if so has this actually resulted in the widespread elimination of human operators in that field, and if not why not?” is emblematic of a lot of the problems with the automation debate.
Incidentally, this indicates another potential source of low-skill jobs in a hypothetical post-automation future: monitoring robots that could potentially hurt people or damage something important in the event of a glitch. Simply having someone there with the responsibility to take over in an emergency gives the company someone that they can blame in the event that something goes wrong. Until robots are given citizenship rights, that’s a service that only flesh and blood humans will be able to provide.
* Apart from civilian drones that are too small to do serious damage if they crash into anything and military drones that are already expected to cause large amounts of “collateral damage.”
** Apart from some elevated and subway trains that 1) aren’t fully automated, since they still have manual override brake buttons that staff inside can use in an emergency, and 2) have rules preventing members of the general public from walking on or driving across their tracks, meaning that if someone gets hits by one of these trains it is 100% their own fault.
I have my doubts about this. First, it seems like most though not all of the new jobs that spring up to replace the automated jobs will require the employees to be around a lot of other people. Not everything can be done online. Second, cities offer attractions that Netflix can’t replace. A lot of people do really like physically hanging out with their friends, going to fancy/trendy restaurants, going to see plays and stand-up comics, etc. Also going to see movies in theaters, because it’s going to be a long, long time before the average person can afford to build a home theater system that offers a viewing experience remotely comparable to a commercial movie theater.
I haven’t studied the issue in depth, but it seems like people who already have jobs that are done completely online like camgirls and internet reviewers/celebrities don’t tend to move out to the countryside that often even though they could do so without disrupting their work at all.
@ NN:
I feel like this is a distraction from the main point.
If truck driving jobs could and should be eliminated, but aren’t because of stupid political reasons, well, that’s a contingent fact that could change. It doesn’t do much good to answer the people saying the elimination of these jobs would be a disaster by saying that you think public policy is probably going to be too stupid to allow it.
After all, they can just go find another line of work that really is going to be automated and make the same point.
***
There’s also lots of reasons why the situation of airplanes is different from the situation of cars. Very few people experience the “annoyance” of having to fly a plane, but almost everyone experiences the annoyance of having to drive a car. And most people who fly planes experience it as a money-making job (or as recreation), while most people who drive cars experience it as a money-sucking hassle. While at just the same time, the question for the airline customers is a few dollars off the ticket versus the (perhaps-misplaced) peace-of-mind they get from knowing there’s a human pilot. The only people for whom human-flown planes are a major hassle are people who run airlines.
Bottom line: there’s a whole lot bigger of a lobby for self-driving cars.
everybody starts working 10 hours a week because robots are doing everything
onyomi, I have seen this prediction back in the 70s (one of the advantages of being a bit older than the general run of you young’uns in your 20s/30s: a lot of the new stuff is really a re-tread).
By now, the far-flung future days of the early 21st century, everyone was supposed to be working two-day weeks for the same or even more wages as the old five and six day weeks, have robots in the homes doing the tedious labour, and all of us have expanded into creative ways of using our bounteous leisure time.
Did that happen? As clerical work became automated with typewriters and then word-processors, did clerical workers do their day’s work in four hours in the morning and then head home to enjoy the rest of the day plus the weekend?
Did things like weekend opening hours for shopping increase, so that people in service industries who formerly had weekends off, or if they worked weekends got compensated with double-time, now work these as mandatory parts of their work week at the same rates? Did the demand for weekend opening of shops come about because ordinary workers had no free time to do things like shopping or banking during their work week?
Did factories which automated have the same number of workers on the assembly lines, only now each man works a four hour shift, or did they reduce the number of workers so now you have three guys working eight or twelve hour shifts overseeing the fully automated manufacturing process?
Is the drive to automation shifting a lot more of the routine onto the customer and consumer (online banking where you do the work of looking after your bank account at home; in-branch automated banking where you can only get a teller at certain hours or on certain days to deal with queries; chip-and-pin self-service machines at supermarkets; people pumping their own petrol at service stations, etc.)?
As I said, I have seen and heard the predictions of “future automation and technological progress will make us all rich in both time and goods”, and while we certainly have more goodies now, do we have more time to enjoy them?
Where are all the factory and call-centre workers working three hour days two days a week and earning the equivalent of full-day, full-week wages? Oh right: their jobs went to a call centre in India and a factory in China, because even with automation, labour and other costs are lower so it makes economic sense for the business to move the work there, not pay workers here.
Good point. Although, you can totally attempt a minimalist existence with part-time work. A subsistence wage/salary is something like one-fifth to one-tenth of a median salary in the west.
@ Deiseach:
In addition to everything I said elsewhere, so what?
So they’re moving jobs to China and India and the workers there are making more and working less / in better conditions. Do they not exist? Do they not count?
If you obliterated them with nuclear missiles, the American/Irish worker would be worse off, not better. He would make a higher nominal wage but have a lot less to buy.
Funny how the people who make the “muh shy knees” argument are never the ones whose job was stolen by cheap Chinese labor.
The very notion of stealing a job is incoherent babble. Might as well talk about stealing a wife, but then again you probably don’t see anything wrong with that idea either.
No one owes you shit. Try to be a less of an asshole and maybe people will voluntarily want to hire or sleep with you. You won’t have to force them. A radical idea, I know.
Screw you too, buddy.
While the insult are fun and all, cheap Chinese labor is having the jobs ‘stolen’ by even cheaper labor in the third world. So if you want to stiff the people of Ghana, now is your chance!
Doesn’t follow; see Vladimir_M.
We actually did a pretty bad job of dealing with that; see Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I’m still reading through those links, but Eliezer’s first post seems to be overlooking something obvious:
Farmers ended up just as poor, if not more so, than hunter-gatherers because populations increased until they hit a Malthusian equilibrium. Populations also massively increased during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. I’ve read some pretty convincing arguments that the main reason for increasing human prosperity in the developed world during the 20th century was the demographic transition putting an end to Malthusian cycles, not just technology making people more productive.
This certainly isn’t the only factor at play, but overlooking it seems like a pretty big blind spot to me.
Neolithic humans were dirt poor no matter what they did for a living, but as far as we can tell from skeletal evidence, pre-agricultural foragers were quite a bit healthier than early farmers: taller, less parasite load, greater adult lifespan.
This causes problems for the Malthusian narrative, because its logic didn’t spring fully formed out of Thomas Malthus’ head once farming was invented; it should have applied to foragers just as well. There’s something else going on here.
Firstly, I don’t think working conditions are worse than they were 50 years ago. I think they’re better. And I’d much rather be a poor person now than 50 years ago.
Also, it fails to take into account confounding factors: namely the government, which has a tendency to grow in proportion to the level society can accept (it’s like a really useless but mandatory Windows update that prevents your computer from ever running really fast even though it’s 100 times as powerful).
And if people still aren’t happy it can be because 1. they used to be really unhappy and 2. happiness seems to have a strong tendency to rebound to a baseline level if things aren’t constantly getting better and 3. breakdown of a lot of traditional social institutions could be making us miserable… but we’re not as miserable as we would be if we had broken social institutions and no Angry Birds.
Just as something I’ve observed: consider the relative number of “cushy” office jobs and the amount of time people can afford to spend not actually working hard…which I’m sure no one commenting on this site has taken advantage of.
Eight hours in an office and eight hours busting your ass putting cars together may be the same number on the clock, but it isn’t the same amount of work in any other sense.
Vladimir_M argues that physical conditions (safety, temperature, etc…) are better, but that the status distribution is worse. How many people today consider everyone who hasn’t gone to college contemptible? How many people consider a modern entry-level fast-food worker to be a full adult ready to marry and raise a family? How many young workers today have to live with their parents?
Really? What would you expect your life to be like as poor person in 1966 that makes it worse than the life of a poor person in 2016?
Unless you think the government is going to stop growing, the bad future is the same; you are just shifting the blame around.
Show me where all these cushy office jobs are. In particular, show me the ones which a man can get with the same amount of intelligence, conscientiousness, and credentials it took to get an assembly line job several decades ago.
I don’t think it takes much intelligence, conscientiousness, or credentials to get a job as a customer service representative. True, a lot of those jobs have been outsourced to India, but there are still plenty of companies willing to pay extra for a rep who lives in the same time zone as most of their customers and speaks English well.
I’m sure that there are other examples, but this is the first one that came to mind.
Or office receptionist, security guard who sits at the front desk and watches who comes in, etc.
“Office clerk, general” is the fourth-most-common job in America:
Personal anecdote time: my half-brother is literally mentally retarded as well as somewhat physically disabled (he had a stroke at birth), and he’s never had any trouble finding employment. Sure, he’s had family helping him get through school, but he supports himself.
He’s always wanted to be a police officer, even though that’s unrealistic for him. But he really enjoys being a security guard, and that’s what he gets paid to do: just sort of ride around and look out to make sure places aren’t being broken into. Not exactly very demanding work.
***
Also, a highly relevant fact is that it takes a whole lot less intelligence, conscientiousness, and/or parental wealth to get the same amount of credentials today than it did several decades ago.
@ jamieastorga2000:
Just because you keep saying / quoting people saying that everything in the economy is zero-sum, doesn’t make it true.
Almost everything in the economy is positive-sum. Housing is most definitely positive-sum. Empty space is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. It is the most limitless of all resources. You could more plausibly argue that oxygen is zero-sum.
The limiting factors on housing are the cost of the materials and labor to build it, the cost of transportation, technological limitations like how high you can build a tower without it falling over, and political restrictions on building height. Not quantity of empty space.
As transportation technology and communications technology improve, the need to live in close proximity to your workplace and trading partners decreases, lowering the effective cost of housing. That’s literally the exact reason for the growth of the suburbs. And it’s how someone in India can give me technical support, or how someone in Indonesia can make my clothes.
Maybe some people will be incredibly miserable about the fact that they can’t afford the rent in Hyper-Paris-One, and that they have to live in Neo-Dakota working ten hours a week selling handmade trinkets on the internet. If you want to argue that, argue that. But don’t argue absolute deprivation.
Technological improvements make people more productive and make it easier to support “unproductive” people. Consider care for the elderly now vs. among the eskimos. Or your career prospects as a paraplegic now vs. in ancient Sparta.
Maybe some people will be incredibly miserable about the fact that they can’t afford the rent in Hyper-Paris-One, and that they have to live in Neo-Dakota working ten hours a week selling handmade trinkets on the internet.
Vox Imperatoris, when I was a child in the 70s, I got a potted-history book which coverered various topics.
One of these was futurology and how people expected the future (these would be the dazzling days of the 2000s in the science-fictional 21st century) would be.
One prediction was that since technology was advancing all the time and making work faster, cheaper and less labour-intensive, we’d all be working two days a week, have so much leisure and riches we’d try and find new ways to occupy ourselves, and everyone would be middle-class professionals and living the dream.
Did it work out like that? Or did we get “lean in”, “crunch time”, working on weekends going from double-time overtime pay to being part of your mandatory regular hours, and getting up at six in the morning to be at work at eight where you stay till seven and that’s considered leaving early, and your benevolent corporate overlords will offer to pay for you to freeze your ova so you can have kids, just not now during your peak fertile years when you need to work without distractions to build your career and be the most productive for them that you can (when you’re old and your skills are outdated and the new generation have replaced you, then you can leave the firm and have babies)?
The idea of the typewriter was that the hand-written work that would take a clerk all a working day to do could be done in a half day’s work. Did this mean that clerks only worked a half day every day for the same pay? Or did it rather mean that the work expanded, so that they worked the same hours for the same pay and did more? You tell me which happened, and how many of them worked only ten hours a week making trinkets to sell which was enough to support themselves!
We are not “doing two days work for five/six days pay” by now, and we’ll never be; any employer expects productivity and full value, which is why you’re paid for what hours you put in – if the money for working two days is enough to live on in the robot economy, great, but I imagine we’ll see “if we only need a human for two days, buy a robot instead” to be the rule.
Not everybody is creatively gifted and even a vastly reduced global population of six million hobby craftspeople is no more realistic as a way of making a living than “everyone can switch to being a programmer!” notions today is.
@ Deiseach:
It doesn’t matter what the employers want. I’m sure they’d like to have people work fourteen hour days, six days a week. And if the workers had no other option but starvation, they’d accept it.
But that’s not how things work because wages, hours, and working conditions are determined by competition among employers for the limited supply of labor.
Suppose you are moving to New York City, and you have to sell your car. If you had no other option, you would be willing to give it away for free, or even pay a tow company to haul it to the junkyard, getting basically a negative price. And any particular person looking to buy your car would like to get it for free or a negative price. Yet you do not have to give it away for free or for a negative price because there is competition among the people who would like to have your car. They big against one another and drive up the price.
Exactly the same phenomenon was seen in the labor market as the result of the Industrial Revolution. It used to be that a person could barely purchase his subsistence with fourteen hours of labor, six days a week. That was because his productivity of labor was very low.
But then factories started being created, which could produce great amounts of wealth with just a little bit of labor. Although the owners would have liked to get this labor for free or for the same low price, they faced a problem: they had to attract workers who could potentially be employed in other lines of work. Since this labor was more valuable to them than it was to less productive businesses, they were willing to bid more for the available labor.
As other people built newer and better factories, they were willing and able to bid labor away from the first factories. Soon, even places like restaurants and taverns were having to pay more, even though productivity had not improved there at all, or else all their workers would be gone to other jobs.
So instead of being able barely to purchase their subsistence, workers found themselves able to purchase four or five times their subsistence. At a certain point, workers decided that, rather than working fourteen hours a day, they would rather earn less and work only ten hours a day, since the extra leisure was more valuable to them than the extra money. Although employers would have preferred someone working fourteen hours to someone working ten hours for 70% of the pay (as is proportionate), they found that they could save money by offering to pay workers less than 70% for 70% of the work. Still a good tradeoff for the workers.
And so on, in the same way, for working only eight hours a day, five days a week.
This reduction in working hours certainly wasn’t because of laws forcing employers to cut working hours. If the person at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, barely able to purchase his subsistence at fourteen hours a day, had been forced to work only eight hours a day, he would have starved. It was only the improvement in productivity that allowed him to be able to afford to cut his hours.
This is the same reason people are not cutting their hours and working ten hours a week today: they wouldn’t earn enough money to lead the kind of lifestyle they want to live.
***
So what is the explanation for why the predictions for life in the year 2000 haven’t yet come to pass? Well, I can think of a few possible alternatives:
a) The socialist answer: employers enjoy widespread monopoly and monopsony power, such that they are not paying competitive rates for employees and at the same time are able to keep all the profits to themselves. The solution is clear: pass a law mandating a ten-hour workweek. (After all, that’s the socialist answer to how we got the forty-hour workweek in the first place.) I don’t think that will work because I don’t think the diagnosis is correct: employers are not enjoying widespread monopoly and monopsony power.
b) The traditionalist/environmentalist answer: we could be working ten hours a week, but people are caught up with buying things they don’t need and “keeping up with the Joneses.” Solution: mandate a ten-hour workweek.
c) Government taxes, regulations, and restrictions on business and economic freedom are hampering productivity to such an extent that technology is barely able to keep up. Solution: lower taxes; deregulate.
d) Government taxes, regulations, and restrictions are driving up the costs of certain vital industries like healthcare, education, and housing, so that despite increasing productivity, people’s wealth is being sucked into these gaping holes such that they have no choice but to keep working the same amount or harder to keep up. Solution: lower taxes; deregulate.
I think that the answer is some combination of c) and d). On the other hand, b) is not totally off-base—very many people really could work a lot less and not die, see the “extreme early retirement” people—but I think the proposed “solution” is terrible because most people are actually benefiting from the work they do and not making an irrational choice to work harder than necessary.
There is no need for everyone to be creatively gifted. So long as man’s desire for wealth exceeds his ability to produce it, there is always more potential demand for labor than there is supply. (And if ability does exceed desire, we’re already in the land of Cockaigne, so there’s no problem.)
Maybe you can’t imagine what people would do with their time if 90% of current jobs were eliminated by technology. Well, neither could people imagine the kinds of things we’d get up to if 90% of people were no longer required to be farmers.
@ Vox Imperatoris
Could you add an approximate timeline to your development story?
@ Nita:
Here’s the first three graphs I could find:
– The general “hockey stick” graph of income.
– Decline in working hours in US manufacturing
– Real wages in Britain
The increase in productivity and wages really kicks in during the mid-1800s, creating an incredible rise in living standards. Working hours fall more or less continually until ~1970.
Though see Don Boudreux on why the “stagnation” since the 70s, though to some extent real, is exaggerated.
@ Vox Imperatoris
So, at what point would you say the labor market got so good for the workers that they could freely reject jobs that were likely to result in permanent disability?
You do know that the negotiation for higher wages and shorter working hours has sometimes involved violence on both sides, right? If “the pie” was growing at such an astonishing speed, why would anyone resort to violence?
@ Nita:
It’s a sliding scale. Some people today still choose jobs that are more dangerous than others and which will be less desirable in the future for that reason. But these jobs are less dangerous than they were in the past.
I think there are people today who feel that, in order lead an acceptable lifestyle, they have to take on a job that involves significant extra potential for disability or death. You know, truck drivers, taxi drivers, convenience store clerks, etc.
Ignorance. Misinformation. Communist agitation.
The same kinds of reasons people want to shut down “sweatshops” today.
Confessions of a self-employed iPhone dev who works 3/7 instead of 24/7.
This 21-hour work week may be a rare unicorn. But perhaps the fact that this unicorn exists at all is significant. I don’t think this would have been possible 100 years ago.
Maybe hours-per-week fall asymptotically. I would love to hear David Friedman’s opinion regarding this comment tree.
Generally speaking, I think Vox is correct. Over the past couple of centuries, economic progress has resulted in hours worked trending down and incomes trending up. But it’s worth remembering that a change that is fast in historical terms is still pretty slow from viewpoint of a single life.
To get some perspective on the overall size of the change, a few figures. Dierdre McCloskey estimates that the average real income of the world at present, including the poor parts, is about ten times what it was through most of history. For the developed world, it’s twenty to thirty times.
According to a very interesting book by Coase and Wang, from Mao’s death to 2010, real income per capita in China increased twenty fold. That’s a situation where the change from extreme poverty to something approaching a modern economy got compressed into a much shorter time period.
If many moderns preferred half the number of hours with half the pay, I expect that many employers would offer it–not all, but those employers in areas where output is roughly proportional to hours worked. The fact that not many people are working a twenty hour day strikes me as evidence that most prefer the money to the additional leisure.
Deiseach points to various optimistic accounts of what things would be like by now. I think those accounts assumed a rate of economic growth considerably higher than occurred, and considerably higher than the average over the past century or two.
On the other hand, Deiseach also describes the conditions of life she grew up in, which I am guessing are considerably harder than her current conditions.
@ David Friedman:
It’s reasonable to suppose that, due to fixed costs of employment, you would have to accept somewhat less than half the pay to work half the hours. Maybe not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
After all, we have overtime, which is the same concept.
On the other hand, I myself have delivered sandwiches for 20 hours a week for the same wage as people doing it 40 hours a week. You just sign up for the number of hours you want; it’s flexible, which is a benefit people enjoy and potentially makes it a more attractive workplace.
@ Mark Atwood:
Schilling is exactly right about the nature of these fixed costs. And many of them can’t be eliminated even if all government mandates were totally abolished.
One potential alternative to get around this sort of problem would be to have a schedule of something like: six months on, six months off, where workers alternate working 40 hours a week for those six months. There would still be some productivity loss, but probably less than that of paying them both to work 20 hours a week simultaneously.
Yeah, the diseconomies of overhead sounds about right. Reducing the +40 hour week sounds intractable. I suppose pushing for an earlier retirement is the next best option.
In the short to medium term, technology ought to make it cheaper to support a worker.
In the extremely long term, biological humans have fixed maintenance costs and they won’t necessarily be able to create enough value to pay those costs. (e.g. extreme case – “should we use the solar energy incident on this 100 square meter plot to grow enough food to feed a single biological human, or should we use it to power a computer supporting a complete emulated city with 1e6 emulated humans, all of whom are absolutely more productive than the biological human?” Pretty sure the biological human gets outbid in this scenario.)
It doesn’t.
There is no guarantee that the value you produce in your area of comparative advantage isn’t smaller than the costs of transaction, and even if it is there is still no guarantee that the surplus value is enough to pay for your living expenses.
There is a reason horses aren’t around anymore.
@suntzuanime and jaimeastorga2000: “It doesn’t.”
Yes, that’s what I thought (unless we’re all missing something). It seems a basic income guarantee will become necessary. I want to settle that question.
I think the biggest problem is political. One problem I foresee is that (on first glance) the people who really don’t want a basic income tend to be market liberals, and the people who are really enthusiastic about the basic income tend to be market illiberals. This means that the people who are likely to get it into the books anywhere in the world are the same people who would bring a load of other crap with it and spoil it, whereas the people who don’t want it have the (generally, within some self-detonating limits) correct idea on how the economy should be structured.
I’m also worried about the experiments that are going on to “test” basic income. If it can’t easily be paid for now, but it will become necessary when automation begins to really bite, then the experiments may be complete failures, souring people on the basic income until the only people who take it seriously are people very far on the left. The result being that when there is a colossal unemployment crisis, the only people willing to solve it would be people who bring a load of other unsavory ideas to the fore and generally throw out the baby with the bathwater, kill the goose they want to lay the golden egg etc. It’s a lot like how far-right nationalists have made gains in our time from the status quo rejecting certain necessary concepts of statehood due to their mere association with ethno-nationalism.
Wouldn’t expanding length of unemployment benefits be enough?
I argue at length to fellow libertarians that basic income is the way to go.
I disagree that in the future it will become necessary, but the structural incentives are so much better than what we have now that it’s almost certainly worth doing anyways, given a political environment in which no-welfare isn’t an option, and in which welfare inevitably becomes an incentive nightmare.
But we’re not going to abolish the welfare state and replace it with basic income. If the movement gains enough influence, we’re going to get some kind of shitty distortion of basic income, plus welfare.
Getting rid of welfare entirely may be unlikely, but it has the advantage that incremental progress is good, not bad.
Comparative advantage wouldn’t work even if there were no transaction costs or living expenses. The reason is that there isn’t an unlimited need for things. If robots have comparative advantage in one area and humans in another, all the robots will be put to use in the area where they have comparative advantage until that area is saturated and nobody needs any more robots for it. The remaining robots will be used in the area where the humans have comparative advantage. (unless the humans also have *absolute* advantage)
Whelp, I didn’t expect to see such dank praxxes as ‘humans are horses’ show up on SSC. I thought it was restricted to the less savory parts of reddit that /r/badeconomics makes a living pointing out.
How are humans not horses?
Even supposing humans to be in exactly the same position as horses, how many perfectly healthy horses were sent to the glue factories because of the invention of the automobile?
I actually don’t know the answer to this, but I suspect it’s not a lot. There was no great horse massacre; they just got relegated to the areas where they had the greatest comparative advantage, while at the same time people stopped breeding as many of them.
The expected value of breeding a horse and the expected value of a horse you already have are two different things.
A slow genocide is still a genocide.
Making fewer of something when it stops being useful isn’t genocide.
Isn’t this a pro-genocide comments section anyway? The black and white anonymous has assured me that it is.
“Making fewer of something when it stops being useful isn’t genocide.”
Yeah, better to say obsolete. And, of course, humans are already become obsolete insofar as they are tools for accomplishing such tasks as mental calculation, welding, or whatever.
But whether humans get to be the lazy artist bohemian overlords to the robots or the curious specimen of which the robots keep a few examples around for research purposes probably depends largely on how we design the robots.
@Adam: No offense, but you’ve indicated upthread that you don’t want to have children, which makes you somewhat unusual. Can you imagine how someone who wants to pass on their name and genes feels about knowing that economic forces are going to end his line and drive his entire extended family to extinction?
@onyomi: Are you talking about the intelligence explosion? Because otherwise I don’t think it’s going to matter much.
You don’t get to redefine the English language no matter how much you care about the immortality of your line.
“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
(Prosecute Malala Yousafzai for genocide!)
Of course, within the context of this discussion, intent (or “deliberate…calculation”) is presumably the sticking point. But if someone were to intentionally arrange matters such that people stopped reproducing, yep, that would be genocide.
The United Nations is a bad joke and their definition of genocide is one of the worst extant cases of motte-and-bailey.
@jaimeastorga2000
I don’t think genocide version 2 that’s not violent or painful or even involves killing anyone is that bad though.
I just want to make sure that people have enough to eat, drink, and a place to stay, so I want a basic income in the age of robots. If whatever the case, we get a decline in the population of humans, then I’m entirely okay with that, in fact I would find it to be a very positive thing from my perspective.
As long as the population stops at a number that it is still interestingly high, without being as annoyingly obnoxiously high as today, according to my personal subjective preferences, then I’m 100% okay with that genocide (this sounds wrong).
If the population declines to 1 million by 2300, then the price of property should plummet for one thing, and any robot basic income would result in more resources for each person. Also, as the population declines, the freedom of the remaining will increase as the number of people whose rights clash with yours decreases.
Would be kind of amazing. Excuse me while I daydream about entire cities of the future, in which only a few hundred people live, supported by a public robot army, private robots, and shares in asteroid mining. Hell, a population of 1 million would be lower enough to give each person their own city-state. The beauty of an empty city all to yourself. That’s a glorious future.
A future with an expanding human population is only a good one when we are expanding into space, and then each human can own a planet (“Don’t immanentize the (Mormon) Eschaton!”)
@TD: That does sound pretty amazing, but I don’t expect me or one of my descendants to be among the people who get to enjoy a personal city as opposed to simply disappearing, so I am against it.
@jaimeastorga2000
“That does sound pretty amazing, but I don’t expect me or one of my descendants to be among the people who get to enjoy a personal city as opposed to simply disappearing, so I am against it.”
Against a natural decline in population? It’s already occurring (Japan is already worrying) causing a dangerous rise in the dependency ratio, and various population predictions for the global population even have Africa peak and decline by the end of the Century, so if anything, robot “slaves” should save us from the negative consequences of the human decline process, even if it accelerates that process.
Now, purposeful violent genocide by elites who don’t want to supply a basic income guarantee? Yes, I oppose that, but so does almost everyone, including most elites who are already in favor of welfare programs.
> How are humans not horses?
Short answer.
Longer answer: We have free will to choose between different productive options. Opportunity cost means nothing to a horse. Horses are more like hammers than humans.
On a technical side, machines don’t have a way to set their own terminal goals. Yud’s robo-Satan notwithstanding, that’s up to us to do.
For a purely economic answer, long-run labor equilibrium will always trend towards full employment, technological shocks will manifest with income not employment. Fuhrer Krugman has made this point a number of times, even if there is only a single skill for which labor demand exists in we would still trend towards full employment.
Sure, I can imagine it. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your name and genes from eventually disappearing from this universe. Whatever future we still have goes to the winners. If you don’t think you and yours are among the winners, sorry I guess?
>>Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your name and genes from eventually disappearing from this universe.
And some people don’t share your nihilism/defeatism. Just because victory seems hard to the point of impossibility, doesn’t mean you should give up.
>>Whatever future we still have goes to the winners.
Have you considered that one might prefer a different future, if the future you foresee (the near-extiction of mankind) is disagreeable? Instead of calmly accepting death – to resist? To accept any sacrifice necessary, including reducing ourselves to preindustrial savagery, if that what it takes to stop being obsolete?
>>If you don’t think you and yours are among the winners, sorry I guess?
Those who participate in the contest have at least a chance of winning, however small. So too those who think up ways to cheat, or otherwise take a third option. Not so those who fail to do either, accepting loss by walkover.
The beauty of an empty city all to yourself. That’s a glorious future.
This does not sound appealing to me. I’m introverted, but I’m not a hermit.
Plus, am I the only one here who loves green things? Give me woods over buildings any day.
What does it mean to have ‘considered’ it? I believe you and Jaime when you say you feel that way. The notion of preferring preindustrial savagery to widespread prosperity because the savages will look more like you seems absurd to me, but I can obviously tell that real people really do prefer that.
@ Adam:
Exactly.
It’s like “yeah, okay, I’ve considered reverting to savagery, but no, fuck you, I’m not going to let you bring that about.”
Considered and rejected.
That will guarantee the extinction of your genes when the Sun burns out.
That will guarantee the extinction of your genes when the Sun burns out.
It will likely result in the extinction of their genes long before that. The post-civilized order will be as violent as the preindustrial, which means occasionally genocidal. And the vast majority of humanity will hate no one more than those who brought about the downfall of civilization. If they don’t pursue that hatred to genocidal extremes, they will at least rebuild civilization on principles diametrically opposed to its destroyers, and the e.g. disaffected conservatives-turned-anarchists are not going to do well in the resulting communist dictatorship.
If your plan is to even quietly survive the apocalypse, never mind thriving in the aftermath or rebuilding civilization in the image of your tribe, it is very very very fucking important that you make sure it is your enemies who are seen to destroy civilization.
If the highly unlikely case there is a way to get around the heat death of the universe it is not going to be found by going full luddite. Your position isn’t even internally consistent.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. You and those like you haven’t taken the crucial step accepting your own mortality. You’ve also rejected the traditional comfort of believing in an afterlife. Instead you’ve taken a metaphor, i.e. the selfish gene, and reified it into a life philosophy that offers you immortality. But it isn’t immortality. Everything that makes you, you will still be dead and gone, just as the proto-bacteria that was your ancestors is in no meaningful way, shape, or form still alive.
I guess whatever it takes to get you out of bed in the morning, but if I were susceptible to religious proselytizing somehow I think I’d go for immortality through eternal life in paradise over immortality though misunderstanding a metaphor.
SSC was the first place I read the words of fellow citizens rationalizing genocide.
Because of Scott’s ban, this group of people, is almost seamlessly protected from any critique. No other group enjoys this freedom.
It’s a very clever assist disguised as a proscription.
Can’t you see that genocide pales beside the moral and logical atrocity of making fun of someone?
To be fair, you’re not comparing apples to apples. THe genocide is entirely hypothetical, while the making fun of is mostly for realsies.
If you want to be anonymous, I suggest picking your own fake email. My brain collapses everyone with the same gravatar into the same person and holds that person responsible for the worst things it’s said.
“No other group enjoys this freedom.”
Scott’s ban on a certain political term seems to leave plenty of space to talk about that group using other terms. You can say “Moldbug and his cronies” and get all the same stuff done, right?
Or are you referring to his general comment policy? I suppose if you want to be unkind to that group, you need to be fairly confident that your statements are true and necessary, but literally every other group enjoys that freedom.
Oh no, we won’t get any respect from this site’s top shitposter. The horror!
>If you want to be anonymous, I suggest picking your own fake email. My brain collapses everyone with the same gravatar into the same person and holds that person responsible for the worst things it’s said.
I’m afraid I can’t do that, but if you tell me which are these “worst things” I can tell you whether there’s a single individual you should hate a lot or several people to divide your anger amongst.
I find it fitting that our most frequent and self-enamoured alt-right posters, Onyomi and Suntzuanime, are bucking against a little pushback.
I am confused about some things.
1. What is your definition of alt-right, and how do suntzuanime and onyomi fall into it?
2. Yarvin-Landism and the alt-right are different but related movements, yet you seem to claim that they are the same.
3. Related to 2, what does genocide have to do with Yarvin-Landism?
1. and 2. “Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear – they are merely masks… Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.”
-Schopenhauer
3. Of course, Im not allowed to link
to the Yarvinland site but if you google “the dire problem and the virtual option” you should find the genocide scenario done up with utmost plausible deniability.
@null
“Related to 2, what does genocide have to do with Yarvin-Landism?”
I don’t know, but that’s because Land is inscrutable (but very fun to read). I read Land as essentially saying that we need a GeoTreeFaction economy so that we can accelerate AI development in order that the AI, which will be better than us, and therefore more morally valuable than us, does away with us. So, antihuman genocide, yes? Also, this is going to happen anyway, so all “progressives” can do is hold back the inevitable mwhahahahaaa!
He reads like someone who accepts the Marxist proposition that capitalism is evil, but responds “Yes, and?”
Your answer to 1 seems too broad, i.e. you could justify calling me an SJW under these terms. What specifically suggests that they are alt-right?
@ The anonymous horde:
onyomi is not alt-right. onyomi is a pretty standard libertarian.
suntzuanime is alt-right, if you include “novo-regressivism” under that category.
And what’s wrong with industrialists, businessmen, and speculators?
I’m not an industrialist or a kulak or a http://pastebin.com/eLnjesSi or whatever. I’m just a loathsome troll. I have recently heard the term “Trumpenproletariat” used, and that’s probably a better identification of me than any of those lofty terms.
“onyomi is a pretty standard libertarian.”
If by standard you mean a person who compulsively and histrionically blames contemporary liberals for everything from communism to nazism to eugenics and jim crow. A very big “yes” to that.
What unites libertarians, movement conservatives and monsters of the far right is their singular focus, to the near exclusion of any positive point of view at all, on the demonization of their common enemy for whom no amount of one-sided partisan blame and psychological projection can ever be enough; and their common target marked for destruction, our ailing democratic government.
They find it difficult to endure any kind of criticism and enjoy staying on offense 100% of the time. Love discussing pie-in-the-sky gifts to poor like UBI, while in the present-day doing all they can to enrich the richest of the rich and spread the meme that the lucky ducky poor are already wealthier than Solomon with their color tvs and cell phones; so fuck em.
Quoth the pot.
“You know what I can’t stand about people who disagree with me? They lump together everyone who opposes the agenda they want to ram down everyone’s throat, blame them for all the world’s problems, and attribute sinister motives to them.
These people are driven by nothing but greed, hatred, and lust for influence with the powers that be. Even when they disagree among themselves, they are united by their nihilistic drive to destroy all that’s good in the world. It’s the worst threat to our democracy, nay, our civilization.”
Horses aren’t around anymore, but we have jobs no one would have dreamed of when horses were around. Mark Twain did not have a social media consultant.
Let’s not forget that the economy consists of all the things people are willing to pay for. It’s probably true that our kids won’t be assembling cars, and our grandkids won’t be doing lots of things we regard as white-collar, but they’ll be doing something. Until robots are able to do literally everything anyone wants, by which time I assume they’ll be running the place.
I can report that horses are still around as hobby and a few niche uses like ranching. However, horse are less popular.
The main difference between a horse and a human is that horses could never become humans. But it is conceivable that humans could merge with machines.
When robots are so advanced they can literally do everything we can do, they take over, and either kill us all, or do something like wireheading us or providing for us like pets.
Seriously.
And i bet that happens before a basic income is enacted.
Isn’t avoiding that the whole point of MIRI: to design AI in advance in such a way that even when robots and computers are more powerful than us, they’ll still treat us nicely and provide us with autonomy (assuming that is what we really want…)?
MIRI is specifically concerned with the intelligence explosion scenario. Friendly AI theory isn’t going to help if instead of one AI ascending to godhood overnight we just have a whole economy of computers, robots, uploads, and AIs. See The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate.
As far as I can tell the point of MIRI is to make sure that the AI will be nice to us when it is in charge, in the same way that we are nice to pets. But it is inevitable that the AI gains power.
Basic income enacted where? When do you think robots will become as advanced as you describe?
The robots don’t take over unless they’re programmed to take over.
Maybe they are programmed to take over (that’s “Unfriendly AI”), but maybe they are programmed to serve us (that’s “Friendly AI”). Just because they are much more powerful than us, doesn’t mean that they will regard themselves as having any independent purposes, rather than existing only to serve us.
As far as I can tell, even if they regard themselve as existing only to serve us, it is inevitable that they be one step ahead of us and manipulate us, which is in the end will be hardly distinguishable from them having power over us.
Picture yourself the human caretaker of an animal sanctuary. This person may tell himself that he exists only to serve the animals, but in the end he is the one who has the power over the animals. He may consider the animals free, but the notion of self determination of the animals hardly makes sense when the understanding and power of the human being is so superior, he can’t even explain to the animals anything he does. The human being will decide the fate of the animals.
Okay, sure. What’s the problem?
The whole idea is that they take “power” over us for our own good. The usual problem with giving people power over you for your own good is that they are corruptible and/or ignorant of what is good for you.
Nevertheless, we do this all the time. Anarchists may disagree on the necessity, but as individuals we are theoretically supposed to agree to set the government above ourselves. This is—supposedly, but at least as far as the vast majority of people say—for the good of every one of us, since if we had no coordination, criminals would start robbing and killing people, but nobody would have the means on his own to stop them, and all the vigilantes would trip over one another’s toes, not agreeing on how the law is or how to enforce it.
My voice is completely insignificant in determining the policy of the US government. There is not some kind of collective entity that sets the policy, of which I am only a splintered reflection. They have power over me whether I like it or not.
To the extent that Friendly AI has power over “us”, it is only to the extent that a rational, just government of incorruptible people would rightfully have the same power.
It isn’t necessarily a problem, I’m just saying that at that point the AI will determine how we live, so all the talk concerning the basic income doesn’t apply.
Won’t there be a gap between “able to kill us all” and “able to take control” where we’ll need to be worrying about the human owners of these robots?
I imagine that that group of owners will decide who among us lives and dies. And these moves will be rationalized as cost-saving measures that will also “put people out of their misery”.
Yeah, yeah, the evil robot-owning capitalists will exterminate all the “undesirables”.
Except what this argument ignores is that technological improvements decrease the real cost of supporting people who can’t support themselves and also increase the amount of value people can provide, so that they can support themselves. There’s a much better case for the “ruling class”, I don’t know, killing all the old people now than there is for doing the same thing where wealth is ten times as abundant. In the same way, there’s a much worse case for doing it now than doing a hundred years ago.
Maybe the robot-owning capitalists are just evil to the core and actively desire to kill poor people whenever they get the chance. But I get the feeling they don’t want to do that, especially when the “opportunity cost” of not instituting Nazi death camps becomes lower and lower.
Look at all the money that people give to charity already. As the real cost of supporting people decreases, the amount needed to provide for all needy people becomes smaller and smaller.
Not used to seeing you attack straw, Vox.
“As the real cost of supporting people decreases, the amount needed to provide for all needy people becomes smaller and smaller.”
No problem then. I guess.
@ Anonymous:
I don’t know what you consider the strawman position I’m attacking.
Yes, no problem.
What are you trying to establish? Yes, if evil robot-owning capitalists take over all of society, seize absolute power, and decide to exterminate everyone despite not getting anything of significance out of it (if I grant for the sake of argument that they’d get anything at all), then everyone except them is screwed. I’m not saying that’s metaphysically impossible; I’m saying I think it won’t happen.
And even if it were somehow fated to happen by the Molochian nature of the system, then having the government, I don’t know, ban robots or seize the means of production would not stop it.
I knew it was the horror of regulation that was motivating you to shut down speculation.
For the journal club: proton pump inhibitors might cause dementia. The paper is surprisingly compelling.
That’s a little worrying…..
Dementia is probably only a possible side-effect when you take them for a long time (years), which according to most guidelines is much longer than most people need. At the same time, the effect was only studied in patients above 75 years old, so we don’t really know the effect of the use in childhood and adulthood. Even with these caveats, it is in fact a little worrying, especially because many people are taking proton pum inhibitors without indication.
My SO has been prescribed them for ~10 years due to bad stomach problems. The alternative is crippling pain.
Is it just me, or is popular culture cashing in on existing franchises more?
It’s not just you.
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/t/54f69af6e4b00ed71355a46e/1425447670137/the-decline-of-original-movies-infographic-geektyrant.png
A few decades back the majority of top movies were originals, now the majority are sequels/prequels or reboots.
Is there a better version of this graph?
First of all: the t-axis goes from right to left, a break in convention.
Also, the graph for some reason doesn’t cover every year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/11/forget-what-the-right-says-academia-isnt-so-bad-for-conservative-professors/?postshare=7071457872803631&tid=ss_fb
Summary: academia’s not so bad for conservatives! So long as they’re the right kind of conservative (hint, Silicon Valley-ish Grey Tribe, not Trump supporter), hide their conservative beliefs until they get tenure, and avoid departments and subfields like sociology, literature, and modern American history… imagine replacing the word “conservative” with “feminist” or “Muslim” and see how it sounds.
Does make a good point, however, that eliminating tenure, which seems like something conservative commentators hostile to academia are more apt to argue for, might only make it even worse.
I personally think the case against tenure is pretty strong regardless of what eliminating it would do to the ideological composition of universities
What are the strong arguments in favor of eliminating tenure? Keep in mind that you will have raise professors’ pay or make due with inferior/fewer professors to compensate for taking away one of the major forms of compensation currently offered (high job security).
Strange to hear you sound like a union official. Yet, I know you’re libertarian when it comes to other people’s jobs.
There’s nothing un-libertarian about unions.
Wow, this legion of anonymous is so awful. I hope Scott does something to crack down on this soon, though I also hope that doesn’t mean completely eliminating the ability to post anonymously.
Also, yes, 1, there’s nothing inherently un-libertarian about unions, and 2, what I described was just basic economics. There’s nothing uniquely “union” about it.
It does feel like a couple people decided to abuse the collective the moment it was founded.
If you have an enormous number of applicants per position, then you’d better make sure that a) the position has a very high or non-existence skill ceiling and b) you are very confident in your the efficacy of your selection procedures. If not, you should probably offer less compensation to cut down on the number of applicants.
(Just thinking out loud here, I haven’t worked though to make sure it’s ironclad.)
By its nature, being a professor has an unlimited skill ceiling. You can always be a more effective teacher and/or produce more/better research.
That said, I do think there is a bad mismatch right now between the number of people seeking to become professors and the number of available positions. This is made particularly unconscionable by the same programs which take on a lot of grad students rarely creating any new positions.
As to how exactly the mismatch could be remedied there are a number of ways conceivable, though I don’t know which, if any, are practical.
For my personal benefit and intellectual gratification, I’d just like to see more college money going into hiring new professors and less into hiring administrators and building fancy buildings/turning colleges into spas/summer camps for young adults. (In an extreme example of bad government programs not even providing the perks one might expect, even as government-subsidized student loans have skyrocketed, universities have somehow managed to hire fewer professors than in the past).
In terms of society, I think too many people already go to college due to the signalling function, so we probably need fewer colleges and fewer grad students and fewer professors–unless we can shift the role of professor more toward that of researcher, though that would also require a shifting of societal values (I wish our society put a higher premium on interesting criticism of Asian literature, for example, but I can’t necessarily say it’s wrong not to, either).
I agree that professors have an unlimited skill ceiling, though I’m not sure about pure teachers. That was in there for completeness sake, as there are other jobs with people lining up to apply that don’t have particularly high skill ceilings (e.g. jobs in the public transit agency in my city). On the other hand, I’m far from certain that hiring in academia is a particularly efficient sorting mechanism.
I also agree that we as a society are producing way way too many undergraduate-man-years but that in most fields either about right or not enough researcher-years. If I were king of the world, there would be a high school track that produced a broad liberal arts education, college would be mostly limited to pre-professors, and professional or other vocational training — law, medicine , and so on — programs would start immediately after college. Jobs that didn’t require specific, non-on-the-job training (i.e. most of them) would be applied to right out of high school. Subsidized research would be a completely separate issue with no requirement or expectation that those who are good at teaching are also those good at it or vice-versa.
Finally, in response to the back and forth above with anonymous, I don’t think you post too much.
I just want to say that my initial reaction is totally the opposite: we’ve got way too many people producing useless papers and not enough good teachers.
@Brad, the idea about only teaching the very broad humanities thing to people who are on, esssentially, a pre-professor track seems a reasonable comprimise. Though research and teaching work synergistically (that is, one gets good research ideas teaching and it would also be a waste if would-be researchers had no opportunity of learning from the best researchers, who would, inevitably, be the ones who got the “research only” jobs), there is a big difference between training grad students and teaching undergrads who genuinely expect to use the information in their future and teaching people who are just there to fulfill a requirement, check a box, etc. so they can get back to the networking that is the real purpose of college for them.
The market is saturated with enough PhDs looking for academic jobs that you could eliminate tenure without reducing the quality or quantity of professors
No. Even if only say, the top 20% of tenure-seekers succeed right now, that doesn’t mean you could take 40% of a pool half as large and get the same result. Because the top 20% of a given pool will consist, on average, of stronger applicants (as judged by academia’s own standards, at least) than the top 40% of a pool half as large.
This is evidenced by the (to me) infuriating fact that many senior professors currently making decisions about whom to hire for junior positions never could have gotten hired today with the qualifications they had when they got hired. Because the larger, more qualified applicant pool means you have to be stronger to get an equally good job. But you can’t make the job less desirable and fill the same number of jobs with equally qualified people, ceteris paribus.
” Even if only say, the top 20% of tenure-seekers succeed right now,”
What makes you think that the successful tenure-seekers are in the top 20% of the field?
Academia mostly seems to select for dishonesty and progressivism.
I was under the impression that STEM academia was still part of academia, unless of course we got kicked out and no one told us.
Obviously, math professors are selected for dishonesty and progressivism. /s
Let’s all play motte and bailey – that’s a fun game!
You know damned well that we’re not discussing STEM and math professors.
It’s not clear to me that the discussion re: job supply doesn’t apply to STEM. At least, I’ve heard that STEM academia is oversupplied relative to tenure-track positions.
And for that matter, there isn’t necessarily going to be a tight correlation between career success and quality of work in STEM academia, either. Progressivism wouldn’t matter as much, but talent for bullshit, ability to navigate bureaucracy, sensitivity to academic fashion, and compliance with unspoken standards all would.
Oversupply isn’t as bad in STEM because STEM doctorates are more useful for getting jobs in industry than humanities doctorates.
In the original comment I included the caveat:
“(as judged by academia’s own standards, at least)”
If it is true that the criterion for who gets tenure is the problem then that’s an entirely different problem which wouldn’t be solved by eliminating tenure. The irony is that most of the people advocating eliminating tenure tend to be kind of right-wing, but it isn’t left-wing ideas that currently need the protection of tenure to be expressed.
Personally, being in the humanities myself, and just based on personal observation, the bigger problem is not dishonesty and progressivism being unduly rewarded, but femaleness, non-whiteness, and charisma being unduly rewarded. But those are all unduly rewarded in most fields in the US today.
I wonder if the people in favor of quotas etc. to balance out the number of women and minorities in positions of authority would be as strongly in favor of such measures if they knew this was how it always works out: the old, white men who grew up with the actual privilege and who enjoyed actual advantages when starting up their career keep their jobs. Young white men who never had special advantages are not given a chance because the company needs to show how well-balanced it is.
Of course, I’m sure many who think in terms of group power dynamics would be okay with even this, but I think we need to remember when we try to empower certain groups at the expense of others, we usually aren’t actually disempowering the individuals we think we are, but rather the least powerful members of the group deemed to be too powerful.
the strong argument against tenure is that offering job security means that the job tends to attract those more interested that most in job security. This, in practice, discourages intellectual freedom.
What? I’m not sure what you think the mechanism is there.
Why are the people interested most in job security opposed to intellectual freedom? It seems like the people who are most willing to conform their opinions to whatever is demanded by the authorities ought to be least concerned about job security and simultaneously least likely to care about intellectual freedom.
On the other hand, the conservative argument against tenure is that the university donors are more likely to be conservative than potential professors, so you make sure not to hire any liberal professors—but if one turns out to be a secret liberal promoting it in the classroom, you can fire him.
For instance, there’s Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, which is explicitly founded with a pro-capitalist, pro-market position:
“you make sure not to hire any liberal professors—but if one turns out to be a secret liberal promoting it in the classroom, you can fire him.”
These donors need to up their game, because if that’s their idea, they’re already failing miserably at the level where they could have an effect right now.
@ onyomi:
The idea is that they are doing a bad job of it because tenure is protecting liberal professors. Get rid of tenure, solve the problem.
Even in the case of government universities, the population as a whole is more conservative than the professors. So conservatives say (or at least have often said in the past): get rid of tenure. We’re paying for this education; we shouldn’t have to pay for leftists to indoctrinate our kids and lead them to atheism and communism!
I’m saying that even within the current system, if they wanted more conservative professors, donors could get that by pressuring universities not to hire openly left-wing candidates for tenure-track jobs (this would eliminate a LOT of candidates as it stands right now), or at least ear-marking their donations for the hiring of non-left-wing professors. It’s not as if all these professors come out as secret liberals once they get tenure. They usually make their liberal preferences well known well in advance of getting tenure, even as grad students, when many of them quite publicly advocate for liberal causes.
The people who have to stay “in the closet” till they get tenure are the conservatives/libertarians/right wing/red tribe sympathizers.
Of course, tenured liberal professors are currently making a lot of the initial hiring decisions, so to really overturn the system you’d have to not only get rid of tenure but then fire most of the most senior people, effectively decimating the academy as it currently exists. But that would be a far more radical change than even just eliminating tenure and I don’t think there’s appetite for it (nor would I support it, even disliking the extreme liberal dominance of academia as I do).
In the meantime, these conservative donors who claim to be concerned about the excessively left-wing culture of academia could be endowing departments and professorships for the study of conservative ideas if they really cared about them so much. But, frankly, I don’t see much of that at all. They’re far more interested in having their name on a library or gym.
@ onyomi:
I mean, you’re right. I don’t know how people who want to eliminate tenure think it would really work, apart from founding new universities / getting rid of all the faculty.
But there are a significant number of wealthy conservative/libertarian donors who give money to universities to start/maintain capitalism-friendly departments.
Like, the whole economics department at George Mason. Or you have Objectivist professor Stephen Hicks, who is head of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College in Illinois. Or Tara Smith, who is BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism at UT Austin. That last one I know is funded by John Allison (who used to be CEO of BB&T).
Jason Brennan is a libertarian philosopher at Georgetown who’s not in the philosophy department but rather in the business school, technically in business ethics even though he doesn’t really write anything about business ethics in particular. I don’t know who gives money for that, but I suspect it’s not George Soros.
I think you’re kind of proving my point that there’s a lot conservative donors could and, to some extent (though not a very great extent, in the scheme of things), are already doing without eliminating tenure. Nor is it clear that eliminating tenure would bring about the changes they’d want.
Therefore, I think focusing on tenure is something of a red herring for donors who want to see academia become less liberal-dominated/more conservative-friendly. Donating money designated for hiring conservative professors is much more likely to be effective than campaigning to reduce the job security of old liberal professors or the desirability of the profession.
(Actually, that might have the reverse effect–the more undesirable you make the job, the more you’ll attract only the true believers who feel a sense of belonging in the overwhelmingly liberal academic community and who don’t want to treat it as just one of many possible career choices–an attitude I associate more with the few Red Tribe-ish academics).
@ onyomi:
I do not disagree with you.
“Why are the people interested most in job security opposed to intellectual freedom? ”
It’s that if they are that afraid of losing their job, they aren’t going risk themselves in other ways too, thus making their “intellectual freedom” a nullity.
“It seems like the people who are most willing to conform their opinions to whatever is demanded by the authorities ought to be least concerned about job security”
Why? They obviously would be MOST concerned, because they are afraid of consequences.
@ Mary:
…are you saying it’s irrational to be afraid of losing your job for being a conservative (or whatever)?
I guess I’m not looking at this the same way as you. We’ve got three groups of people:
a) People who have no strong opinions and will go with the flow. They have no reason to be concerned with academic freedom.
b) People who have strong opinions but are indifferent to being fired. They have no reason to be concerned with academic freedom because they don’t care about the consequences of losing it.
c) People who have strong opinions but who do not wish to be fired for them. They have reason to value academic freedom if they have it, it means they can be open about their beliefs and do the kind of research they want. If they don’t have it, maybe they hide their beliefs to fit in, but they are much less satisfied.
You seem to be saying that groups a) and c) are the same. I don’t think so.
This is weird. Academic freedom isn’t about having to risk your career to express your opinions; it’s just the opposite.
What kind of country do you think is going to have more protections for private property rights: a country of people who are afraid of losing their property to government expropriation, or a country of people who are indifferent to the prospect?
“…are you saying it’s irrational to be afraid of losing your job for being a conservative (or whatever)?”
The number of jobs in this country that have protection against losing your job on just those grounds is so small as to be rounding error.
If the fear is so rational, why don’t more people demand the protection?
“If the fear is so rational, why don’t more people demand the protection?”
The academy is a much more ideologically-charged space than most occupations because you’re dealing in ideas. Firstly, professors are much, much more politically conscious than average. On top of that, there is an idea that your coworkers’ heterodox political views could result in actual books on the subject which might influence actual policy (which they really might), to say nothing of poisoning young minds.
What’s more academia can be a small world and functioning within it, especially at the junior level, can depend on the good will of a lot of people. Even if 9 of the 10 professors you need to help you get a job, review your book, review your tenure case, etc. don’t care that you’re an open conservative, it may only take 1 to torpedo you. Plus, judgment of performance in humanities is a lot more subjective, so there is a fear that those judging you may let their opinion of your political views subtly influence them even if they don’t intend it.
Contrast this with a blue tribe person working on a construction site: he might get into some arguments with coworkers if he chooses to broadcast his views, but unless his supervisor happens to be unusually partisan, he’s not going to lose his job over it. For the most part, so long as he just does the job well (a fact which is objectively verifiable), that’s all people care about.
Though with the way everything is getting more and more politically polarized recently (stats about more people caring if their son or daughter married someone of opposite political affiliation), it might be a growing concern.
Do you think your position as a tenured academic is relevant? Job protection for you but no one else?
Wow, this legion of anonymous commentors (or one very prolific commentor?) with all the same gravatar is super annoying.
Job security is just one of many possible ways employers can compensate employees: good health benefits, paid vacation, flexible scheduling, nice working conditions, etc. etc.
In any given field, stronger job security is a perk any given employer could choose to offer to employees who were willing to accept less of some other perk, such as salary. In most fields, people are not willing to work for a lot less than they could otherwise make just for the promise of job security, so this kind of deal doesn’t get struck so often (though historically, a lot of government jobs worked this way). But for academia it makes sense because it has the added benefit of encouraging intellectual freedom, so most institutions have chosen to structure the incentives this way.
One could eliminate tenure, but that would make the job less desirable. Therefore you’d have to be willing to accept fewer professors, lower quality professors, and/or professors who are more highly compensated in some other way, such as salary.
>Wow, this legion of anonymous commentors (or one very prolific commentor?) with all the same gravatar is super annoying.
Why?
Well, at least one anon in the open thread has been doing personal attacks on other posters and general shitposting (see the anon versus onyomi exchange upthread).
Perhaps Scott should appoint a trusted moderator to deal with such breaches of the peace, if he is unwilling to deal with it himself.
Don’t waste your time Theo, they’re obviously a troll.
Yeah. This sudden surge occurring just after someone mentioned the existence of a common anon account suggests someone has been hoping for a way to troll other commenters with relative impunity for a while.
“someone has been hoping for a way to troll other commenters with relative impunity for a while.”
Yeah, it’s a bit surprising and disappointing. Based on the style and tenor, I’d guess Autonomous Rex.
As annoying as I’ve been finding the anon, I think it’s best if we don’t give out accusations for a while.
Throat-slitting fantasy? REFRAME AS SPECULATION
Enslaving the suicidal? REFRAME AS FANTASY
Defending Genocide? REFRAME AS HYPOTHETICAL
Anonymously teasing Onoyoko and Suzieanime?
Group meeting, gang!!!
Or rather, reframing:
>>Hypotheticals, speculation and fantasies
>A-OK
>> Being an asshole to the real people you’re discussing with
>Not Cool
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
1. I did not hide my political views, was (I suppose) the proper kind of “conservative” (libertarian), did get tenure at a university that combines two ideologies both of which I disagree with—Catholicism and soft leftism.
2. It’s worth noting that changing legal rules sharply revised the tenure contract. The old deal was tenure until sixty-five. That then got interpreted as age discrimination, converting it to lifetime tenure.
Great article that I’m surprised to see in the New Republic.
The gist: looking at income inequality is stupid; we should look at spending inequality. Also, net marginal tax rates on the rich are really high, ~68%.
Some interesting comment discussion on the original article posting, including some caveats about the source data: https://theconversation.com/weve-been-measuring-inequality-wrong-heres-the-real-story-56179
Observation about Scott’s banning the word commonly used to refer to monarchists around here: instead of Taboo, we got Whack-a-Mole.
I’ll call it Whack-A-Mole when more than one mole gets whacked.
That said, it clearly didn’t do what Scott wanted it to do. I think this is mostly because Scott wanted something unrealistic: he wanted us to stop talking about Death Eaters and start talking about monarchists or traditionalists or the far right, but by and large the banned words weren’t being used to talk about monarchists or traditionalists or (aside from a few mindkilled or confused people) the far right, they were being used to talk about the weird little online movement that has a lot of membership overlap with SSC. So everyone just moved to euphemisms instead.
He may have had a point about the emotional loading, but people are pretty good at transferring emotional loading between phrases.
As an traditionalist who thinks Yarvin is an obscure godless racist wannabe technocrat, I support Scott’s thinking as you expressed it.
Yarvin is a troll above all things, and must be read in this knowledge.
I think there might be some beneficial effect; before the taboo, people here seemed more keen on ascribing all sorts of views to the malign influence of You Know Who, or suggesting that such-and-such a view is an Original-Red-Pill-Guy-Goes-Whoah-Ary view or whatever; a sort of vague but big dark miasma hanging over the whole of culture maybe, a heresy to be tracked down vigourously and
rooted outpointed out semi-politely because this is SSC after all. This seems to be happening less these days, people seem to be using the euphemisms to talk about the actual group of people that includes Yarvin, Land et al.OK, it’s a very vague impression.
Content quality of threads that mention the movement has certainly improved since the ban. They actually discuss ideas and results and efficacy! (Even when discussing within the context of culture wars!) Much more educational and interesting, as someone who doesn’t have much skin in the game.
Giant tedious definition-war threads have switched to endless red/blue/grey categorization instead.
(And I think the term itself does do it. Leftist articles about the movement are completely useless, because they tend to engage with it in storytelling terms, focused on the people involved as characters, instead of as a shorthand for ideas. It’s the same frustrating dismissal that gets all Rationality dismissed as Cult of Yudkowsky, instead of talking about the various concepts underneath the umbrella of the term. They may have interest value as historical/cultural examinations of the figures discussed, but they’re so, so useless as a means to discuss what parts of the ideology are truth/bunk, and what we can do with those truths/mitigate damages of the bunk. Because those don’t make for a good story, which the Capital Letter Name evokes. Basically, what Peter says above.)
What ideas? Most of what I’ve seen from them has been either standard criticisms of the status-quo or well-worn right-wing tropes about the liberal media and marxist professors. The only part that seems new is the twee jargon.
Even if that is the case, you wouldn’t know it from reading aforementioned articles. Not even the obvious “Feminism solves this!”
Granted, this is mostly because most leftists have never heard of the movement, which means aforementioned articles are written by people who aren’t exactly your standard leftist. And they tend to have more idiosyncratic non-discussion-based writing styles.
The fact that Scott has not rescinded the taboo despite the complete and obvious failure of his policy is making me suspect that something else is going on. My current theory is that Scott’s real purpose is to improve his optics by reducing the association between his blog and Death Eaters. Banning the term affects Google searches and Ctrl+F searches, which impedes third parties from casually looking for out of context quotes but allows regulars to continue discussing novo-regressivism with creative euphemisms.
Maybe he literally just doesn’t want his blog coming up when people google the term.
You’re probably right.
More than people associating his name with that movement, or misbehavior from regular readers, I think his worry is that this issue is magnetic to terrible people.
About a month ago there was a Darkactionment enlightenary type who singled out a offhand comment made in a SSC thread by Scott, and amplified it as wide as possible with an explicitly stated goal of provoking trouble between Scott and others.
And then there are the people on the other side who take any attempt to understand or discuss the Darkactionment enlightenary viewpoint as equivalent to agreement with it. Agreement that deserves personal consequences.
And then there have been incidents where people have deep-trawled comments here to look for juicy culture war stuff to amplify.
Scott rightfully wants to keep clear of those types.
“About a month ago there was a Darkactionment enlightenary type who singled out a offhand comment made in a SSC thread by Scott, and amplified it as wide as possible with an explicitly stated goal of provoking trouble between Scott and others.
…
Scott rightfully wants to keep clear of those types.”
Oh, you mean the comment where Scott basically admits that the worldview that shall not be named is right but then chooses to draw no conclusions from that fact?
Scott wants to keep his communist tumblr friends. He’s much more honest on tumblr than he is here.
What, you mean Spandrell’s “Picking Sides”? I think you’re taking a rhetorical framing device too seriously.
You only think that the failure is obvious because you read the comments. Scott doesn’t.
If it were for the reason you suggest, why wouldn’t he say so? He gave that reason on another occasion.
Well, I personally think it’s a really stupid rule, so I’ve been doing my best to obey the letter while flouting the spirit as obviously as possible
My main suggestion would be adding the taboo to the commenting policy, so that sporadic readers can figure out what is tabooed.
I honestly thought Gamergate was tabooed, not the political theory associated with Mencius Moldbug, so thanks for the link!
Well, you’re not exactly wrong. There was some concern a while back that mentioning l’affaire du reproductively viable worker ants would cause the people prosecuting one side or another of that fight to show up via Google searches and start causing trouble, as had been known to happen. But the controversy seems to have died down to a dull roar, so I doubt that’s worth worrying about anymore.
I still use euphemisms in the rare cases where I have a reason to talk about it, but only because they’re more fun to type.
Gamergate isn’t actually tabooed, but people do often refer to the ants or some other euphemism to prevent it from coming up in web searches.
Oh, I thought it actually was banned because of people talking about ants. Given that Gamergate is pretty much past its acute phase and has fully transitioned to its chronic phase, it seems relatively safe to talk about.
Just to clarify, by “talk about” I mean “refer to by name instead of euphemism”. I’m not suggesting we have an actual conversation about it here.
Rationalist Taboo doesn’t work, but it ESPECIALLY doesn’t work when it’s forced on people. Scott’s not an idiot, he should be able to see this. My suspicion is similar to jaime’s: the purpose of the ban was not to improve discourse but to help keep us from embarrassing him in front of his tumblr commie friends.
Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Scott Alexander doesn’t know what he’s doing; he knows exactly what he’s doing!
Hahaha
I get that impression too, but then, so what? It’s not like he’s actually banning the discussion and he’s gotten a lot better about givin warnings rather than autobanning people recently.
It seems like a lot of people (both left and right) assume Scott is some sort of closet Reactionary/Conservative. But maybe he is, in fact, a liberal that likes liberal things and wants to be friends with other liberals (for whatever reason).
Well, if this theory is accurate, he is being dishonest both towards us and towards his commie tumblr friends. I know you do not care much for intellectual honesty, but many people do.
He’s a liberal, but he tends to accept the conservatives’ framing of reality a lot more than most liberals.
Age 30? Clearly a former liberal who has now decided he wants to strike it rich.
It’s the oldest story in the book. Liberal hits thirty. Decides he wants to strike it rich.
“Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.”
This anon is trying as hard as he can to get the handle banned.
Funny, last year I hit 30 and struck it rich, and I think I’m more liberal now than I was as a naive student living off my parents.
Probably it’s that I was surrounded by liberals then, I’m surrounded by conservatives now, and I’m just naturally contrarian.
Weird that people bring up his ‘tumblr commie friends’ right after he just blocked a bunch of tumblr commies and is currently engaged in multiple arguments about why he thinks communism is awful
People sufficiently far-right think social liberalism = communism (or more charitably; it’s a joke).
No, these were mostly actual communists, or at least LARPing as them.
(Not that LARPing is a useful term at all, since the difference is irrelavent.)
Here in [Left Coast City], I’ve noticed that since some time last year, all the party invitations I’m getting from leftist casual friends specify “no alcohol allowed.” Has anyone else noticed a new wave of dry progressives? It seems a logical consequence of their passion for promiscuity combined with the feminist doctrine that women can’t consent after ingesting alcohol, yet it’s something I’d never seen until recently.
Left Coast, never seen it. Maybe you just have weird friends.
ETA: Wait, no, I have seen it, but only for parties where unaccompanied children are expected to be present — which I don’t think is what you’re talking about?
Nope. I’m talking about parties where everyone is 18+ and it’s understood that casual sex may happen (but never actually does, unless people are being super-discreet).
Yeah, never seen that either. Of course, I live in Texas, but I do still go back and visit LA every now and again. Hollywood may be a hotbed of ridiculous political views, but it sure as shit isn’t full of people I would ever call “dry.”
That sounds awful. I think you need to ostracize these friends to prevent contagion.
I like to think I’m immune to contagious leftism at this point.
Prohibition was originally (sort of) a creature of the left
Leftists specifically? Not rationalists? Because I’d sort of understand why someone who’s big on life optimization and being healthy and making good choices and not killing precious brain cells would want to avoid an alcohol habit, but that’s not the closest descriptor for “leftists”…
Dunno, maybe it loosens their tongue and politically incorrect jokes slip by.
Question, what’s their attitude on smoking, esp. of weed?
No, definitely not rationalists. I have no face-to-face rationalist friends, unless you count a loved one who’s a raging Leibniz fan. 🙂
This is a circle I’ve fallen in with through shared interests that could be apolitical, but it turns out nothing ever is. Think urban nerds in their 20s or early 30s who generally have a bachelors.
I wonder if there’s a recovering alcoholic in your extended social circle, and the parties are going dry out of respect.
May be unconnected, but I’ve noticed that the University-age people I spend time with have become increasingly teetotal over the last 10 years. At the moment most society meetings are dry despite being held in a pub, with a couple of notable and (dis)honourable exceptions.
Kids these days.
I know, right?
As someone who works in the field of mental health I would be very interested in your take on this book https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cargo-cult-psychology/
As a result of a Department of Justice investigation, it’s now mandatory for students at my University to undergo ‘bystander intervention training’ for the purpose of preventing sexual assault. Training to teach safe drinking behaviors, rudiments of self defense, etc was proposed, but ultimately dismissed because it was a form of ‘victim blaming.’
Since the Rationalist community is a crowdsourced search engine, I thought I’d ask here if there are any good studies or papers on the actual effectiveness of either of these types of intervention
Slightly off topic: When I was younger and dumber I found it very difficult to know when to step in in a potential sexual assault situation and when to not. I thought that way because I was against sexual assault/rape*/men taking advantage of women, but I was also beholden to the idea that it was wrong as a man to be so sexist/patriarchal/misogynistic to assume to know what was best for a woman. Maybe she wants to just get drunk and go home with a stranger/acquaintance. Who am I to judge her? I thought, from reading a lot of online feminist works, that I should never stop a woman from doing something she chooses to do. Sure, if she called for help or was actively being raped/violently groped or is passed out completely, then yes I should help her but in any other situation, I shouldn’t involve myself, because I don’t know her state of mind and will. I no longer think that way.
*I still am that part.
A young friend of mine once had a little too much vodka at a party. (Inexperienced drinkers often don’t know how much they can have safely.) They did not pass out, but they did have to be practically carried home. And prior to losing control of their limbs, they gradually lost control of their speech and actions. (Most of it happened when they had already stopped drinking.)
Were we wrong to keep an eye on them and make sure they got home safely? After all, who are we to interfere with a man’s freedom? (None of us were related to him or sleeping with him.)
His being a man meant you were not at risk of being accused of rape when you carted him off to places unknown; that is part of the down side Mark was talking about.
Also, it sounds like you didn’t so much stop him from doing something stupid as watch over him until he stopped doing much of anything and then carry him home. That’s safer, but much more labor-intensive.
Only place I could think to look is the US military if they’ve published anything. They’ve been pushing this basic thing for maybe six years or so, getting soldiers to look for signs that someone is vulnerable to sexual assault and stepping in, though geared to groups of actual friends, not intervening by guessing at what strangers are up to. If assault rates have actually gone down, I’d expect that to be publicized, but of course there are all kinds of confounders that make it nearly impossible to draw a solid conclusion about what actually caused it. It’s been a huge push, though. I believe at one point the Secretary of the Army said it was more important to reduce assault rates than it was to win in Afghanistan (which sounds ridiculous on the surface, but charitably, he means it’s important to maintain long-term public trust in the military as an institution of basic integrity).
Given the high incidence of divorce it would seem wise to have a prenuptial agreement to simply its resolution. Anyone have any ideas for a simple effective prenup or want to comment on their effectiveness. Seems harder that at first glance.
Prenups are not very effective for simplifying the divorce process. For example, prenups are summarily deemed unenforcable if there are any children affected by the divorce proceedings.
Another thing: due to the court’s ability to declare unconscionability, prenups are not effective for protecting assets either. The prenup is likely to be voided as soon as there is any significant disagreement on who should get what.
Things are a lot worse in the UK, and marginally better in civil law countries. Recommended reading:
http://www.theguardian.com/law/radmacher-divorce-case
— If you want legal advice, go ask your lawyer. I am not your lawyer.
Well, they appear to be very effective in causing divorce. I’ve heard of lawyers advocating for them that admit that, every time, the pre-nup was needed.
(I have heard of one where it wasn’t. But then, it was the marriage of an elderly widow and widower who were arranging that after their deaths, their substantial assets would go to their own children.)
Any particular reason for this direction of causality? I would expect that it’s the reverse, that high divorce risk causes prenups. If divorce risk were small, or if divorce law were sane, I expect the prevalence of prenuptial agreements would be low.
Because the rate of divorce is not actually that high. Even the 50% figure you see touted, which is very bad statistics, would expect some success.
Also, it’s easy to see that if you are already considering divorce while still engaged, you have, if not one foot out the door, already have your eye on it.
“Trust, but verify.” Or any one of several aphorisms along those lines.
@ Nornagest:
That saying is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
If you have to verify what someone says, it means you don’t trust him to be telling the truth.
Of course, the actual meaning is something like: trust people to some extent but not completely.
@ Vox Imperatoris
It’s a saying with a purpose, not a logical proposition with a truth value. The purpose is to avoid the tension inherent in talking about trust.
— Don’t you trust me?
— Oh, I do! I totally do. But you know what they say, haha.
Also, the original is far better because it rhymes. It makes you smile, which dissolves the tension 🙂
@ Nita:
Of course. I don’t disagree with anything you said, and I recognize the purpose and humor of the saying. Doverai, no proverai.
I’m just pointing out that the real meaning is: don’t actually trust people 100%.
@Vox
I think you could interepret “trust, but verify” to mean “verify even when you do trust, so that verification isn’t offensive.”
For example, I always cut the cards, even when I do trust the person dealing, so that I don’t have to start cutting when I’m suspicious, and I always put on my seat belt in the rear seat so that I don’t embarrass the driver by suddenly putting on the belt mid-drive if I notice a close call.
Of course, that doesn’t work very well for marriages: “I ask all my fiances to sign a pre-nup so that I don’t embarrass the ones who I don’t trust!” (I guess the lawyer could say that she requires all of her clients to discuss one for that reason, if she typically represented the richer party.)
I think that if one party has sufficient amount of assets that a pre-nup makes sense, should a divorce ever happen it will be in the interest of the second party to try and get that set aside and get a bigger share than the initial agreement.
Nobody is really going to fight over “I demand a bigger share of the five hundred quid in your post office savings account”, but if we’re talking hundred of millions in shares, property, Swiss bank accounts etc? Well worth going to go to court and try to get a bigger slice of the pie!
So I don’t think pre-nups really do you any good, unless there are a roughly equal amount of assets on both sides and it is confined to “if we split up we both take what we brought into the marriage with us”.
Is there any way to use a prenup to decrease divorce risk, you think? As opposed to mitigating the damage.
I doubt it. Any such provisions would doubtlessly be deemed unconscionable.
Prenuptial agreements are not as unenforceable as the popular stereotype suggests. It varies by state, but they can be pretty powerful.
You’re right that there is nevertheless something inescapably fishy about them. I couldn’t see myself personally making one.
We have a lot of armchair experts that don’t know what they are talking about on here. You can tell immediately because nowhere in their posts do you see the phrase “it depends on the state.”
You must be feeling kind of silly right now.
Not really. Though the timing was unfortunate, it still applies to Mary and Publius.
Are there any states in which the divorce court judge would not throw out such clauses as unconscionable?
Remember we are not discussing pre-nups in general but ones written to decrease divorce risk.
For the clause “it depends on the state” to be correct, it would have to, in fact, depend on the state.
Yes. There are plenty of states where a filer penalty would be upheld at least under some circumstances. Ditto for infidelity clauses and a range of other clauses. Unconscionabilty is a high bar in most jurisdictions and tends to require both procedural and substantive unfairness.
s there any way to use a prenup to decrease divorce risk, you think?
As in “if we divorce within five years, you only get X amount of assets”, you mean? I’m too lazy to Google it right now, but I have a hazy notion there were cases like that (or at least one) and it didn’t work.
I could be imagining that, though.
Anti-Semitism being so very much less in the US than in Europe strikes me as a remarkable achievement of reducing both personal and institutional bigotry. Any thoughts about how it happened, and whether there are lessons for getting more decency for other groups? Any other comparable historical improvements?
I was tempted to post about this in an SJ venue, and I want credit for not trolling. Also, I’m very grateful to Scott and the commenting community for there being a place where this can be discussed.
Quick, ignorant, in no way based on anything other than off the top of my head:
(a) The USA is located in a continent of its own. There is a lot more space. Europe/Middle East was older, crowded together, and with a lot more history of bad blood.
(b) The Jews were just one more immigrant group. They certainly could be discriminated against, but the nativist parties were also busy discriminating against Catholics, the Irish, non-“white” immigrants like Italians (dagoes!), Spanish and Portuguese (spics!), Eastern Europeans, former and current slaves, Native Americans, etc. So Jews were not one convenient easy target, they were one more element being assimilated into the melting pot.
(c) A lot of immigrant Jews were from Eastern Europe and looked white (I know there’s been discussion about “Jews are not white” by social justice types; one instance I’ve seen was a Tumblr poster who was as milk bottle white in complexion as I am and has blue eyes and light brown hair. To be fair, they’re very young and going through a lot of identity crisis, so their Jewish Middle-European immigrant heritage was just one more part of the “I am not part of the mainstream, I am one of the oppressed minority groups and just because I can pass for white doesn’t mean I have privilege” ammunition they were using in their arguments). My opinion on that is “Of course Jews are white (the Semitic peoples are in the Caucasian grouping), but if you mean White as in WASP, then no, they were outside what was considered the mainstream of social and political influence. Though so were other groups and, like those, Jews have broken through to attain that (first Catholic president, then first black president, now maybe first Jewish president?)”
So they dressed funny, had a weird accent and didn’t talk the English so good? Just like the Poles, Czechs, Swedes, etc. etc. etc. in the other national ethnic neighbourhoods.
(d) Conscious effort, particularly post-Second World War, to reduce anti-Semitism by various parties both Jewish and non-Jewish.
the Semitic peoples are in the Caucasian grouping
Let me take this opportunity to say: I never cease to be amused that “Caucasian” is used as a synonym for “white”, in the Western world — given the origin of the term:
“Caucasian variety—I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (original members) of mankind.”
“By the early nineteenth century, Circassians were associated with theories of racial hierarchy, which elevated the Caucasus region as the source of the purest examples of the “white race”, which was named the Caucasian race after the area by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach theorised that the Circassians were the closest to God’s original model of humanity, and thus “the purest and most beautiful whites were the Circassians”.”
(The irony is that, in the non-English-speaking world, people from the Caucasus are most emphatically not considered to be “white”.)
One or two centuries ago, “aryan” and “indo-european” were virtually indistinguishable, and “caucasian” seems to have evolved to be the replacement for “aryan.” And it has become standard to think of “caucasian” as being about race and “indo-european” as being about language, while a century or two ago people rarely bothered with such distinctions between language, race and culture (they were generally assumed to go together for the most part). All of them refer to the language, culture, and people descended from the proto-indo-europeans who invaded and took over large parts of Europe and northern India in ancient times, and which were presumed to have therefore originated somewhere in between (and the caucasus region is in between). Almost everyone realized that this very broad group included people who weren’t all that white; I believe the usual racist theory was that the earliest proto-indo-europeans were very white, and their descendants in India (and those who remained in the caucasus) did more mixing with other populations than those who moved to Europe. Which is nonsense, but not exactly the same nonsense that you propose.
Well, it seems that when Blumenbach (who popularized the “Caucasian” term) wrote “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian”, he was referring to the actual Georgians of his time, not the theorized proto-Georgians.
On the other hand, Wikipedia says that he was really non-racist, even anti-racist, for his time.
And yes, some modern Russians see Caucasians, including Georgians, as “dark” and shady.
As the dates given in Said’s link makes clear, Caucasian has been around for just as long as Aryan. It was not a synonym, but a much broader term encompassing not just speakers of Indo-European languages, but speakers of Semitic and Hamitic languages and, I think, all Indians, including Dravidians and the hypothetical pre-Aryan inhabitants of India (although I can’t find an old source that clearly addresses this, one way or another).
And that is what it continued to mean in US government usage up until the 80s, at which point Indians were declared to be Asian.
It is true that people nervous about the word White (not the word Aryan) have adopted Caucasian as an official- and clinical-sounding word. But most whites have never given any thought to the question of whether they should consider Arabs to be White.
“Georgians are almost always depicted as stupid, greedy, hot-blooded, or sexually addicted, and in some cases, all four at the same time. A very loud and theatrical Georgian accent, including grammatical errors considered typical of Georgians, and occasional Georgian words are considered funny to imitate in Russian and often becomes a joke in itself.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes#Georgians
The other part of this is that “christian” used to be virtually synonymous with “white”.
Douglas Knight:
It is true that people nervous about the word White (not the word Aryan) have adopted Caucasian as an official- and clinical-sounding word. But most whites have never given any thought to the question of whether they should consider Arabs to be White.
Quite. Although I have had experiences where some (white) Americans consider me to be white, until they learn my name (I go by a more Western-sounding sort-of-nickname in some social contexts). I’m not sure what to make of that, honestly.
@ChetC3
There were significant Christian populations in Ethiopia and under Muslim rule in the middle east in northern Africa (Disputes in early Christendom led to North African religious leaders having diminished authority, but they were still there). Similarly there was enough Christians in the Mongol Empire that at least two notable Khans (Ghenghis and Hulagu) had Nestorian wives, while Hulagu’s mother was also a Nestorian.
There are also the legends of Saint Thomas spreading Christianity as far as India. I am not sure how far and how deeply it took hold.
Sure, but I was referring to the tendency of Europeans of the time to use the terms as if they were synonyms.
@ChetC3 Not a historian (History Enthusiast), but that sounds unlikely to me. During the Roman period the empires influence was skewed eastward and they would have know the residents of N. Africa and the Levant were Christians. Following the breakup of the empire there were struggles with the pagan Germanic tribes. Additionally Roland the (largely apochryphal) Paladin was stated to have been raised a Muslim and converted. Similarly a large portion of military conflict was in the Baltic crusades against Slavs and Finns. Finally there was knowledge that Ghenghis Khan was at least sympathetic to Christianity and the French attempted an alliance with him. It really did seem as though Religion overwhelmingly dominated ethnic concerns.
http://imperialglobalexeter.com/2016/01/06/conquerors-how-portugal-seized-the-indian-ocean-and-forged-the-first-global-empire/
Mentions how the Portugese originally thought the Indians were Christians (Khrisna!) and brought along clergy to correct their religious errors. So yeah, race was massively trumped by religion which was trumped by “the foreigners are plotting against us!”
Based on the Tumblrs I’ve visited with an axe to grind about the topic, Deiseach’s point c) plays a large role.
They point to the whitewashing/erasure of Jewishness (such as the widespread use of “Judeo-Christian” descriptor) as the US’s form of anti-Semitic microaggression, as well as the sedative used to have Americans not really care about the anti-Semitism happening internationally.
In America, their concerns have a similarity to the distress Asian Americans have over their cultural invisibility, the level to which their stuff is culturally appropriated, etc. The root of which is that those cultures have been deemed “harmless” by the majority. They’re honorary whites, and in the case of many Jews, subsumed into the white identity.
One of the aims of those Tumblrs is to reclaim Jewish identity as a separate thing from being seen as a part of the oppressive white majority. Passing is no longer considered a gift. (How that will impact anti-Semitism in the US, I have no idea. But as it is Tumblr, they’re speaking to an international audience, as well.)
I believe you that this exists on tumblr, but I’m Jewish, live in the most Jewish city in America, know lots and lots of Jews, and I’ve never heard anyone claim not to be white because they were Jewish. Not even Sephardic Jews. Sometimes you’ll hear that Jews didn’t use to be considered white (ditto Irish) but that’s a different thing.
I have seen, and gotten a little annoyed by, a similar phenomenon among those of clearly Spanish (not mestizo) decent going on and on about being a minority.
In terms of people’s attitudes towards “cultural appropriation” it’s a mixed bag, but by and large I think people are amused and a little flattered when they hear yiddish from an unlikely source, for example.
Much like brad, I though the “white passing” thing was a meme made up by /pol/. My experience with jewish people is similar, but I live in a country were people play up their whiteness, rather than the other way around.
@brad, anon
Yes, I made the comment to point out that even SJ Tumblr has noticed how much Jews tend to be subsumed into white America. Anti-semitism in America is down because they’re not sufficiently alienated from the majority anymore. Not a target worth noticing to target.
The other stuff was just leakage of my frustrations with the rhetoric I was reading on those blogs. From the “lack of overt anti-semitism is good” standpoint, passing is good.
From other standpoints, (“erasure is a form of anti-semitism”) the cultural diversity is lost (coopted by the oppressive PTB) by passing, and is thus bad.
For example, some anti-semitism was religiously motivated. But once “Judeo-Christian” defused that by grouping them as allies, that lane of attack substantially decreased. But now there are some frustrated with the way they see “Judeo-Christian” as just another form of Jewish erasure, reinforcing Christian dominance.
Any reason why you dont link to an example?
Why are you using two different names with the same Gravatar? see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/13/ot45-opal-thread/#comment-336688
Example of the Tumblrs, you mean?
Mostly just that I didn’t really feel like trawling through those posts again. Didn’t enjoy it the first time.
https://jedablue.com/2015/07/09/on-judeo-christian/
https://hagar-972.tumblr.com/post/138733026324/thoughts
http://returnofthejudai.tumblr.com/post/132084941308/hey-i-love-ur-blog-and-reading-ur-opinions-i
That’s to start with, I may return later with more. Because the majority of those tumblrs are fine, (that’s how I found them in the first place, some of them write good geeky stuff) and usually don’t have posts that are so on-the-nose.
Evangelicals believe that God loves the Jews. Therefore, they love the Jews, too.
The re-establishment of Israel probably played a role there in reviving this bit of theology, since it was a fulfillment of prophecy and served as a reminder that God is not done with the Jewish nation.
There could be an element involved of the out-groups that get picked on in the United States are often being associated with being poor and regarded as lacking competence (which is then linked to laziness and some sort of associated immorality). I don’t know much about Anti-Semitism, but the generalizations I’ve heard about Jewish people were never attached to being poor or lacking competence. It’s usually the exact opposite. Perhaps America just likes hating different things?
Modern anti-Semitism is often of the “Jews steal our money and run the world” kind, but in early 20th century USA most Jews were poor immigrants and hence were stereotyped as lazy, criminal etc. (and also as being skilled at basketball).
Oh really? Sounds like some pretty effective rebranding then. (Minus the basketball part.)
Basketball? Not baseball?
Yes, I think this was the article I read on it (possibly mentioned on an SSC links thread or comment).
There’s a historic African-American position that Jews consciously stoked racial conflict between white and black to distract from Anglo vs Jew, for a pessimistic take.
In most of the world national identity is tied up with ethnicity, religion, etc., in a way that it really isn’t in the US. After three generations in America, my family is clearly American; my ancestors spent countless generations before then in Russia and Poland, but never became Russian or Polish because they were Jews. Antisemitism fades away if Jews aren’t seen as foreigners but as your countrymen.
More cynically, and I’m not sure how much I believe this: Jews were allowed to become white because we weren’t black. It happened before with Irish and Italian immigrants, it’s happening again with Asians and it’s likely to happen with Hispanics.
My best guess is that it’s about WWII.
During the period of high immigration Deiseach mentions (the early 20th century), there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the US, as evidenced by university quotas, Father Coughlin, name changes, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1939/01/i-married-a-jew/306262/, etc.
My guess is that, after having won the war, and decisively established that Hitler was the Most Evil Person, anti-Semitism was something the US associated with murderous dictators. (Then again, I’m not sure why this wouldn’t equally apply to the UK; it just empirically doesn’t. English people will still call something “Jewish” if it’s a lousy deal. They have Christian school prayer by default. It really *is* different there.)
I also think the decline of US anti-Semitism was gradual.
By the 60’s or so, being anti-Semitic was considered inappropriate among liberals, but you’ll still see anti-Semitic comments e.g. from Southern segregationists against Jewish Freedom Riders.
By 1990, US anti-Semitism was *not a thing* to the point that “In a 2006 editorial, Gideon Rachman (The Economist, the Financial Times) recalled interviewing Duke’s 1990 campaign manager, who said, “The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David, stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”[62]
But we still had soft anti-Jewish admissions discrimination at my alma mater of Princeton, well into the 90’s. (They required photos back then, and the admissions dean personally approved all applications, and was reputed to pick pretty girls and avoid Jews.)
Here is a time series of Jewish representation at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
What happened in 1980 at Princeton?
And why the huge spike in the late 2000s?
I have a notion that part of what happened (possibly related to revulsion at the Holocaust) is that American Protestants decided to distinguish themselves from Catholics by being more pro-Jewish– with Judaism being seen as more like early Christianity instead of having a bunch of Catholic stuff mixed in.
The other route (more common in Europe?) is for Protestants to distinguish themselves from Catholics by being more anti-Semitic.
However, this is guesswork about the motivations of a lot of people from a somewhat different sub-culture, so I’m not sure I’m right.
Was it something I said, Elon? You make one little criticism that you don’t think the guy is the Second Coming of the Technological Saviour, and he refuses to sell to your home country 🙂
So for now we Paddies will just have to keep on going with our polluting old petrol and diesel cars, buses, lorries, vans and trucks!
With Hillary running for POTUS, I’ve been thinking: is the whole spouse thing a huge loophole to term limits?
I mean, first of all, supposedly two people become one when they get married. So when you elect Bill Clinton President, you’re really electing Billary. Obviously, then, electing Hillary gets you Billary as well. I mean, I understand that that’s not the literal truth of the matter, but obviously one’s spouse has a great deal of influence.
I have to think that when the founding fathers came up with term limits, they failed to close the spouse loophole only because they didn’t conceive of female representatives. Shouldn’t this be revisited?
See also: Lurleen Wallace, Miriam Ferguson.
What do you mean by ‘the founding fathers came up with term limits’?
The US founding fathers didn’t incorporate term limits; they were in the Articles of Confederation, but left out of the US Constitution. They had an informal two-term convention, but term limits as a matter of law were only introduced via the 22nd amendment in 1951.
(I should admit that the only part of this I actually remembered offhand was that they were not originally in it, and were added at some point in the 20th century. The rest I looked up.)
I think by this time they were probably able to conceive of female representatives. This loophole also exists without needing them, via dropping to Vice President (legal, AIUI) and making a trusted lieutenant the President part of the ticket. Putin did something similar in Russia, dropping from President to Prime Minister between 2008 and 2012, before returning to the Presidency, to avoid being restricted by Russian term limits.
A two-term president can’t drop down to VP, because the VP needs to be eligible to be President (Twelfth Amendment).
EDIT: Although Wikipedia says “Others contend that the Twelfth Amendment concerns qualification for service, while the Twenty-second Amendment concerns qualifications for election, and thus a former two-term president is still eligible to serve as vice president.”
I wouldn’t bet on that in court, though.
If you read the 22nd amendment it only says that no person may be elected to the office of the President more than twice. Meanwhile the 12th amendment says no person constitutionally ineligble to the office of President shall be eligible to the office of Vice President.
Suppose an ex-President were elected to the House of Representatives and selected as Speaker of the House (I don’t think anyone claims this is unconstitutional) . If the President and Vice President were killed would the 22nd amendment bar him from taking office? If not, than is he really constitutionally ineligible from the standpoint of the 12th amendment?
I didn’t know this- certainly it seems to be at the least legally questionable.
You could probably move into a Chief of Staff role or something, but formally being Vice President on the ticket would probably have enough legal questionability to it to not be a good plan, and it’s plausible that having less formal status than that would be too tenuous to avoid simply losing power to your Medvedev.
Most def. It’s even worse in countries (like my own) in which there’s a limit to successive terms, but not total, since the ruling couple can alternate indefinitely.
It hasn’t happened yet, because one of them usually dies, but it’s not great.
The Founding Fathers did not come up with term limits, they were only implemented after FDR was President for four terms.
There’s some religious stuff about two people becoming one, but legally, members of married couples are their own people with their own rights to property independently, vote independently, etc. I was googling around for cases of married couples in Parliaments, Senates etc. and there was even a case of a married couple in India where the two spouses were members of different parties!
The term limits thing only became official comparatively recently anyway; in 1947 – and even then, the 22nd Amendment was drafted so as not to apply to the sitting president (Truman) at the time the amendment was proposed. According to Wikipedia, Washington himself didn’t intend his decision to retire after two terms to set a precedent; the idea was more Jefferson’s. Also: Jefferson sayeth “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life.” This doesn’t apply in cases of married couples; if you really wanted to stretch things you could call it a four-term limit but that’s still not life. Yes, technicallly someone could marry and divorce a succession of Presidents, but maybe that’s a bridge to cross when people come to it.
Incidentally, apparently Hillary had the considered idea of picking Bill as her VP but was told it would be unconstitutional. Also it would have looked far too much like the Putin And Medvedev Show for my tastes.
Of course, you could say, “go away you interfering Brit, who are you to be offering constitutional advice to Americans?” to the above, and I wouldn’t have a good response to that.
“There’s some religious stuff about two people becoming one”
Also Anglo-American common law, at least in the 18th century and I think for a fair while thereafter:
“In law, husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband.” (Blackstone, possibly not verbatim)
Not entirely a disadvantage for the wife. If husband and wife jointly committed a crime, only the husband was liable, since the wife obviously had had to obey him.
For a fair while after: it seems according to Wikipedia that Married Women’s Property acts sprung up in the US in 1839 and in the UK in 1870 – alas, the UK can’t be ahead of the curve on everything it seems.
There was a case of an echo of the criminal liability thing a few years back in the UK: Chris Huhne (a politician) got caught speeding – presumably by a camera – and he and his wife (Vicky Pryce) conspired to claim that she was the one who was driving at the time, and to take the penalty points. Years later they got divorced, and she mentioned that this had happened – they both got tried for perverting the course of justice. She tried using a defense of “marital coercion” – unsuccessfully.
Apparently said defense had been dormant in practise for a long time, but the Huhne and Pryce case prompted people to actually get around to legislating to get rid of it.
I don’t see the rationale behind Terms Limits to begin with. If We The People want to elect FDR a fifth time, then by-golly let’s put him in office again. Term Limits just enable the POTUS to go apeshit during their last term. If this bug is actually a feature, I’m missing it.
The problem is authoritarianism, cult of personality, dictatorship. It’s not right when a single person has been the leader for 16 or 20 years, with adults having grown up knowing no one other than the Fearless Leader.
Under FDR, the outlook didn’t look so hot to many people. That’s why they decided: we’ll let this one slide, but never again.
Look at the track record of other countries. Look at Russia with Putin circumventing term limits.
Also, presidents don’t really “go apeshit” during their last term.
By “go apeshit”, I’m referring to the phenomenon where presidents do things “they wouldn’t normally do” during their last months in office in order to improve the valence of their historical legacy. Unnecessarily-hyperbolic diction, I’ll admit.
I was aware that you were exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but they don’t really do things in their last months that are particularly out-of-character.
Bill Clinton pardoned a lot of people, I guess? That’s pretty minor.
I think there’s some value in enabling presidents to care less about politics in their second terms. It’s a pretty minor effect overall — they still have to think about their legacy and the fortunes of their party — but it gives some space for controversial pardons and the like, which I see as a net positive.
It also gave us Obama wanting guns to be banned for people on the no-fly list.
Incumbents have a very big advantage most of the time. Term limits are seen as a way to get around this, and also to change up who’s in government to try and decrease corruption or something.
It’s a “protect people from themselves” kind of thing, you may not agree with it, either from a values perspective (“Democracy is Awesome”) or a practical one (“It’s not that big a deal, and really, if you look at what we have now, wouldn’t you prefer Obama again to any of the clowns that are running?”), but the intent is pretty clear: To prevent prospective charismatic leaders from perpetuating themselves indefinitely.
I was going to point out the obvious preference voters (who, by and large, are rationally ignorant of politics and who therefore fail to educate themselves on the issues at stake in an election, especially as offered by a new candidate) show for incumbents as an indication that they are likely to choose consistency over quality, but now I’m thinking that may not necessarily mean they are wrong.
Beyond just preferring incumbents, I think history shows that voters usually prefer a mediocre consistency to trying anything new. Especially if one views the government, as I and many libertarians do, as largely a force which the private sector must work around, the worst government, ironically, may not be one which maintains a consistently, predictably bad policy regime, but one which constantly changes. Arguably the most destructive aspect of even the worst regimes like the USSR, Maoist China and the DPRK is the constant trying out of new schemes each time the old ones fail and black and grey markets start filling in the cracks.
Though I think he’s been better than his predecessor in a few ways (not saying much), I’m not sad about the idea of seeing Obama go; in fact, I’m kind of excited to see something different, if potentially crazy happen, and the idea of Obama being able to run for a third term seems superficially awful to me.
But thinking about it from what I think is the more genuinely libertarian perspective, in which politics really shouldn’t play a big role in daily life and should be boring and predictable, it is not at all clear to me that term limits are, in fact, a good thing, though I do think they may tend to limit executive power in a useful way.
(I guess the test of that is how much disruption FDR, the only 3.5-term president and also, imo, one of the most obvious demagogue-approaching-dictator figures in US history, really caused in his later terms; of course there was WWII, which probably(?) most hypothetical other US presidents would have gotten us involved in anyway, but other than that, he did most of his crazy domestic stuff in his first term… the more contemporary test is, I think, a thought experiment in which the very charismatic and well-liked Bill Clinton never left office. Would the US be better today if Clinton had never left office? Doesn’t seem entirely implausible; in fact, I’d judge it as more likely than not).
@ onyomi
Would the US be better today if Clinton had never left office? Doesn’t seem entirely implausible; in fact, I’d judge it as more likely than not).
Yep. That’s why I’m voting for Billary’s third term.
On AlphaGo: Suppose that in his fifth game, Lee Sedol had played white, and that, in an effort to troll AlphaGo, he tried to get the program to play exactly the same game they played in the fourth game (which he won). Would this work? Would AlphaGo respond the same way to all the same moves? Or do we not know?
The nature of Go makes this unlikely: opening sequences are a lot more open than in Chess so that deliberatedly reproducing the opening of a specific previous game is effectively impossible unless both players are collaborating toward this end.
It’s unclear what AlphaGo would do, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume the program includes possibilities of randomised choice in the event of closely weighed opportunities.
I believe one of the techniques the AI uses is Monte Carlo tree search, so that would naturally inject some non-determinism (unless it was using the same seed every time for no good reason I guess maybe?)
I know that Linux (and I believe the other common OSes are better at this now) include an entropy buffer that collects “randomness” from sources like the fine-timing of network interrupts, and parcels it out (appropriately processed) from /dev/random. Most decent libraries that generate random numbers will make at least some use of that. It almost certainly won’t collect fast enough to make the whole Monte Carlo search truly random, but it will be plenty enough to make it non-deterministic.
If AlphaGo incorporates random numbers at all, even a crappy pseudorandom number generator will prevent this exploit so long as the seed isn’t reset for each run.
It isn’t obvious that AlphaGo uses any random number generator at all, as opposed to being perfectly deterministic. Many powerful search and optimization algorithms are perfectly deterministic.
Monte Carlo isn’t, though.
They’ve been quite explicit that the high-level architecture is a neural network that produces an estimate of the “value” of a given board for a player, a network that suggests moves, and a Monte Carlo tree search that makes use of both in a semi-directed search of possible move chains.
I hadn’t seen the Monte Carlo part spelled out, thanks. Neural networks can be absolutely deterministic, though each retraining would have the effect of introducing something akin to randomness.
I’m reading The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott (the Seeing Like a State guy), and I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in how humans build societies, the limits of government, southeast Asia, and especially to anyone who’s interested in world-building. And to Jack Vance fans.
It’s specifically to a region JCScott calls Zomia– highlands and mountains which run from India to China. It’s a region about the size of Europe, has about 80 to 100 million people, and is the last large more or less ungoverned region on earth.
JCScott says that it’s not a matter of people who never developed centralized government, it’s people by those who don’t want to live under government. It’s a little more complicated than that, since people in what he calls splinter zones will join or leave governments depending on which seems better to them. “Splinter zones” because there are small grouping of many cultures.
Anyway, the reason I’m bringing it up now is that the right of exit might be more a matter of terrain than rules. The right answer might be tech which makes people harder to govern (unfortunately, anything involving techtonics (a typo I’m not correcting) would be both slow and irresponsible), not rules imposed from the top.
It’s tempting for me to post a summary of everything I’ve read so far, but the book is showing its own self-determination by hiding in the house somewhere.
I know the “geography implies size of state” is a strong counterargument to Patchwork state systems, which is why so many of the early Moldbug-descended thought focused on multiethnic European imperial states, which is why some form of Archipelago system is probably necessary, unfortunately.
What surprises me of the US is the popularity of bycicles relative to scooters, at least judging (very superficially, I admit) from the Internet. Bycicles have more drawbacks than scooters, and are only slightly cheaper in absolute terms (compared to what the expenses for a car would be).
Bicycles don’t compare with cars, any more than they compare with airliners. The proper comparison is the relative mobility vs. cost of bicycles and feet.
Outside of a few very dense urban areas, almost everybody in the United States who owns a bicycle also owns(*) a car. Almost nobody uses that car if they are e.g. going to visit neighbors a few houses down the block. A bicycle costs slightly more than a good pair of boots, and increases by an order of magnitude the area you can travel without having to deal with any sort of motor vehicle. A scooter is rather more expensive, and over modest distances it allows your motor-vehicle experience to involve less frustration with traffic and parking but more fear of death or great bodily injury. A scooter but no car would be a net cost savings, but it would limit your convenient travel range to a small fraction of a major American city rather than the whole thing.
*or lives in a household that owns
First world problems. I’d love to be able to get to places by bike, but I can’t park it anywhere and leave it unattended for 5 minutes without it most probably getting stolen. (Yes, I know about security chains. Our thieves know them even better, i.e. how to break one.)
Can confirm. Hell, the existence of widespread bike lanes is a pretty first world thing.
What lock you use matters a lot. This works (at least some models) this doesn’t (a cheap pair of bolt cutters gets through it easily).
Sometimes they let you have the frame and steal the wheels…
There are wheel locks that you can’t open without keys. Not unbreakable, but I haven’t had my wheels stolen since I got them (for comparison, I had my wheels stolen two or three times in the similar time period before I had them).
You could possibly take the front wheel off, and put a lock through both wheels and the frame. Or just get two locks.
Once, when I was in college, the local bike thieves left the frame and the wheels and stole my handlebars. Cost me two hundred dollars to replace, because it turns out they don’t sell just the hand parts of the shifters or the brakes.
A month later the whole bike was stolen.
I live in the country with the world’s highest bicycle ownership rate, and reading this makes me wonder if safety isn’t also an issue for people trying to own bicycles. In here bicycle stalls are common, and stealing from those will not end well for most people; if bicycles are uncommon enough for stalls not to be around, stealing them becomes much easier.
Where I live is pretty bike-friendly by most standards, I gather, and they’re common enough that public bike posts are common. Bike theft is really common, and it seems pretty much expected that it will happen. Buying a really nice bike is far more foolish than buying a really nice car – it will get stolen.
RE:Journal club
Coughlan, Tony, and Leigh-Anne Perryman. “Learning from the innovative open practices of three international health projects: IACAPAP, VCPH and Physiopedia.” Open Praxis 7.2 (2015): 173-189. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.7.2.188 ” … maps quite well with the OPAL matrix”
For the week of April 1, one of the articles from British Medical Journal’s December issue, such as the Fear Factor?
http://www.bmj.com/archive/online/2015/12-14
A question for my fellow anime dorks: has anyone else watched/read WataMote?
I’m curious as to how much it affects your enjoyment of it if you share or used to share Tomoko’s (comically exaggerated) social dysfunctions. For me, it’s usually funny but sometimes it hits a little too close to home.
I read the majority of the manga a while back. The frank depiction of the protagonist’s obsession with sex, anxiety over not losing her virginity etc would have been a little creepy, except I remember feeling exactly the same way when I was that age.
I’ve watched the anime and find it very easy to relate to. I don’t think I’ve ever felt there was anything that hit too close to home, though, in the sense that I felt discomfort. This, despite the fact that I found the way a lot of her issues were expressed was right-on. What I found very interesting was seeing this from the perspective of an adolescent girl, having only experienced them as an adolescent boy (and post-adolescent man, for that matter). Perhaps that extra gap is what’s contributing to my not feeling discomfort from things hitting so close to home. Or perhaps I’m just in denial about the extent to which I suffer from such issues. I’m not sure what to make of it.
In any case, I found it a fun show which presented someone suffering social anxiety in a way that I could understand and empathize with. It reminded me somewhat of Welcome to the NHK in that aspect, though I thought Welcome to the NHK did a better job going deeper into those themes and exploring them further.
I watched the anime, have seen bits from the manga here and there but haven’t read it all the way through.
The author of the manga is a man, so I think he may just be translating his own experiences to a female lead. It has to be a girl because moe sells, right?
NHK takes itself more seriously, and I find it far bleaker, even though Satou comes off as a more competent and sympathetic figure than Tomoko. The ending, especially, with its endorsement of conformism as the only way to avoid endless despair… it just feels sad to me. Maybe it plays differently in Japan where conformism is practically the state religion.
That’s interesting that the author is a man who chose to tell that story on a female character. Perhaps that’s why I find the character’s trials and tribulations so easy to relate to. Then again, I know at least one woman who feels similarly about Tomoko, so perhaps he’s just doing a good job touching on issues of social anxiety in general, regardless of gender.
Tomoko isn’t really the image of a “moe” anime girl, though. She looks almost purposefully designed to look off in some way, if not necessarily unattractive. This sort of faux-unattractiveness, of course, could be considered its own moe factor, and perhaps that really was the intention.
I’m not sure I’d agree that Satou is more sympathetic. He’s more competent, but he’s also an adult at the start of the series, one who’s a NEET leaching off his parents’ money. I can sympathize with his psychological plight, but it’s hard to get behind the way he treats his parents. Tomoko, on the other hand, is a girl who just entered high school. And as misguided as her attempts usually are, she does often take initiative to try to improve her situation even without someone forcing her to. I’m not saying Satou is UNsympathetic, but I do think it’s easier to root for Tomoko than for Satou.
I think that’s part of what I like more about Welcome to the NHK. It’s utterly cynical, the good guy is kind of a jerk in some important ways, and there is no real happy end for him, just incremental progress in the right direction which could be reversed at any moment. Just like in real life.
Garbage collection on carbon?
I know this is way too far down in the weeds for much luck of a response, but does anyone have any recommended psychiatrists in the Oklahoma City/Dallas area? I have a family member that will be going to a someone soon, but I’d like to have a recommend rather than just rely on who they might be referred to by the hospital.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/catferguson/addiction-marketplace
Have you guys seen this stuff? Has Scott written about this outrage? buying/selling addicts in hellhole Florida
I regret that my first comment on SSC is a link to tickld.com, but life is unfair sometimes. Anyway, it seemed to me that Scott and some of the regulars might find this list amusing:
http://www.tickld.com/x/sm/20-phd-students-dumb-down-their-thesis-just-for-us
Pertinent examples:
3. Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.
-M33
5. When I get rid of this gene, it messes the brain up. A lot.
– NeuroscienceNerd
9. Inpatients with schizophrenia are happier and socialize more in the context of a music listening group. It was obvious before we began the project and we learned nothing.
– Wouldyestap
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nfk/lesswrong_2016_survey/
I published the lesswrong survey. On reviewing what I have done and talking to people about why Scott is not involved it occurs to me that it might be my fault for not trying hard enough to reach out and get in touch with you. So this comment is to do a few things:
1. Sorry for not trying harder to contact you (post asking for submissions, offering to help, email and lw pm)
2. If you get this message would you like to collaborate on the results?
3. For anyone here who wants to do the survey, please do.
Hi all, I wonder if any of you have followed the current shitstorm on Moldbug and have insight. Please let me know if I’m violating any ban, even though I’m trying to be careful (I’ve been lurking for a while).
Basically, a programming conference accepted a talk by Moldbug, and decided to keep having it even after he was alleged to be a racist and advocating slavery: http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion
Most boycotted the conference, but some are worrying about the “censorship”, and sharing some of Scott’s fears.
I already (mistakenly?) asked about this on Twitter (and tried to *not* get noticed and catching Scott in the shitstorm by avoiding links and hashtags). https://twitter.com/Blaisorblade/status/713148081185943554
Link posts function as open threads, so now that a links post has appeared more recently than this open thread, you should go there if you want to be heard. Moreover, the topic has already been broached there.
No they don’t. Link posts are supposed to be for discussing the links Scott posts. Some people use them as open threads, but some people use every thread like an open thread.
Yes, some people use every post as an open thread. But more than 10x as many people use link posts that way. Regardless of what Scott wants, which he has never said, they function as open threads, hence my choice of words.
Fuck disclaimers and fuck you.