The Theory Of Deadly Initials proposed that people whose initials spelled out negative words, like D.I.E. or B.A.D., died earlier because of the associated stress. People believed this for years before someone figured out it was all based on bad statistics.
Jamie Brew has become Internet-famous for his predictive text generator that makes hilarious mishmash out of sources like the political debates (“I am in this campaign for the sake of the four largest people in the history of the world, people who should have a lot of healthcare”). But how come he is able to do this so much better than anybody else armed with a Markov chain and a source text? Some kind of shiny new machine learning algorithm? Rationalist Tumblr user @nostalgebraist investigates and bursts all our dreams by finding that nope, it’s mostly done by good old human judgment.
This seems unbelievable to me, so I challenge readers to tell me how to reconcile my perceptions with the data: of all candidates (including Trump), Hillary Clinton has received the most negative media coverage.
You know those Neuro drinks that are on sale everywhere and promise to lift your mood or help you relax or whatever? They’re now paying $500,000 for misleading advertising. Sounds like a pretty fair decision to this psychiatrist.
BMJ: a large study from 1973 found that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil did not decrease death from coronary disease, but the results sat in a file drawer for forty years. And the New York Times’ popular presentation of same.
Although shared environment has kind of gotten the short end of the stick in recent behavioral genetics studies, it still shows up sometimes in early childhood and in studies done on the most deprived populations. But what percent of that is prenatal versus postnatal environment? Abstract, table of results. Most interesting finding: adopted adults’ IQ is so unrelated to the IQ of their adoptive mother that in some studies the correlation shows up as nonsignificantly negative.
There’s been some past discussion here about Success Academy, a chain of charter schools that has achieved impressive results. Freddie deBoer argues this will never scale because their business model is hiring a tiny number of elite teachers who have just graduated from top colleges for really cheap, luring them with promises of social impact and getting to live in desirable areas. This might work – have the best teachers teach poorer students and those poor students will do well – but it doesn’t scale beyond the tiny number of elite teachers willing to work in those conditions. I find this idea plausible but far from proven – first of all because the schools themselves say it’s their (easily scalable) discipline policies that lead to their success, and because the research on the importance of teacher quality seems mixed.
A while back I posited a utopian online future of automated machine learning filters that prevent you from ever having to see trolls. Now Hugh Hancock makes the case for pessimism by positing a dystopian online future of automated machine learning trolls.
I can’t improve on this title: Reflections On Reasons for Reduced Rates of Replicability.
A while ago I got a bit paranoid about some kind of deliberate conspiracy to prevent working class people from getting jobs painlessly, and how the government used bureaucracy to smite any opportunity that arose outside this system. This probably isn’t going to help my paranoia: San Francisco to require Uber and Lyft drivers to obtain business licenses.
Related: Google, Ford, Uber, Lyft, Volvo, etc, form lobbying group for self-driving cars. I’d forgotten that people could also lobby in favor of things I want!
Classic Programmer Paintings dot tumblr dot com.
Scientific American: Scott Aaronson Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question I Throw At Him. I disagree with John Horgan about a lot, sometimes vehemently, but man can he do a good science interview.
Andrew Gelman dissects a study on airplane inequality. And Asheley Landrum dissects a study on Ted Cruz and bullshit.
Scientist suggests that quantizing inertia would explain flyby anomaly and make the EmDrive not contradict physics. Anyone want to tell me if this is crazy or not? (EDIT: probably crazy)
Marginal Revolution: Regulatory Arbitrage, Rent-Seeking, and the Deal Of The Year. Why did the Real Estate Board of New York give its Ingenious Deal Of The Year Award to somebody who literally destroyed value with a wrecking ball for no economic reason? And what does it say about our society that they were right to do so? An interesting companion piece to some of what I talked about in my review of Art of the Deal.
Correlation of -0.68 between “rule of law” in a country as defined by the World Justice Project, versus road accident deaths per capita in that country. Is this something boring, like better governments making better road systems, or everything about countries always being correlated by development anyway? Or some more fundamental connection between people following the rules while driving and following the rules while governing. I’d say “paging Garett Jones” except that I think I got this link from his Twitter.
Vox: Inequality As Waste. Discusses increasingly costly signaling in terms of houses, weddings, and parties as a multipolar trap in which everybody has to keep up with a small group of increasingly super-rich Joneses.
Study: “About 40% of studies fail to fully report all experimental conditions and about 70% of studies do not report all outcome variables included int he questionnaire. Reported effect sizes are about twice as large as unreported effect sizes and three times more likely to be statistically significant.
Vox’s profile of Mencius Moldbug is a thing that exists. Nick Land praises it as “almost saintly in its attempt to get the phenomenon right”. Ross Douthat responds in the NYT calling reaction potentially “something genuinely new…a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.”
Also in the NYT, this time by Amanda Hess: “Those who try to signal their wokeness by saying ‘woke’ have revealed themselves to be very unwoke indeed.” I am deeply grateful to have a bubble that mostly insulates me from the sort of people for whom this is a problem.
I had a fun time presenting Plomin’s paper Top Ten Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics to a room full of psychoanalysts last month, then fielding their increasingly angry and horrified questions. But this group might be more in need of the (partial) antidote, Turkheimer’s Weak Genetic Explanations 20 Years Later, which I endorse as the most pessimistic about genetic explanations it is possible to be while still being 100% intellectually honest.
In the context of recent papers finding the global warming “hiatus” is real after all, David Friedman notes that he has been predicting this for years, and further predicts (if I understand correctly) that the warming trend should return with a vengeance around 2030.
The percent of Americans who identify as environmentalist has gone down from 78% in 1991 to 42% today! I find this really surprising, and indeed, Gallup notes that how Americans actually feel about environmentalist issues has changed much less or not at all. So what’s going on here? One possibility: global warming has so eclipsed all other environmental concerns that the mainstream environmentalist movement has entirely folded into the anti-global-warming movement, which doesn’t have a catchy name or identitarian label. But I wonder if there’s something deeper going on here – something like environmentalism so permeating the culture that normal people stop identifying with it and the term becomes more relegated to an extremist fringe. How might that relate to other political movements?
Speaking of how people self-identify: did you know the average self-identified vegetarian eats one serving of meat per day? Or that 60% of self-identified vegetarians say they’ve eaten meat in the past 24 hours? Related: Rational Conspiracy on cost-effectiveness of vegetarianism.
Rational Conspiracy: whatever you do, don’t subscribe to the Boston Globe.
New n = 9,000 blinded resume study finds no preference for white over black or Hispanic applicants, contradicting previous research. Before you get too excited, I think there’s a lot of previous research this contradicts, so more studies are needed. Also, they signaled black race by using the last names “Washington” or “Jefferson”, instead of previous studies that had used first names like “Jamal” or “DeShawn”. While people convincingly argued that Jamal and DeShawn might be less popular among employers than the average black person, I worry that “Washington” and “Jefferson”, while indeed disproportionately black names, may not be black enough to effectively signal blackness. On the other hand, the Hispanics were “Hernandez” and “Garcia”, you’d think that would have worked.
Related: “implicit racist attitudes” as measured by Implicit Association Tests do not actually predict whether someone will racially discriminate or not, are of questionable meaningfulness.
r/SubRedditSimulator is a subreddit made entirely of bots; each bot generates posts and comments based off of predictive text from a different subreddit. 8th post is by the r/CrazyIdeas bot: “Open a pizzeria that only serves food made by two different parasites fighting for control in our solar system by detonating calculated explosions near the soda fountain…”
Popehat attorney Marc Randazza files a legal brief about Klingon, partly in Klingon, supporting a very Klingon conception of copyright law.
President Obama makes a Red Wedding joke at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner, threatens to have security bar the doors and take out all the Republicans in the room. Funny in context, but I appreciated Pax Dickinson’s commentary – our history of drone strikes on Pakistan is pretty grim, and jokes about killing everybody at a wedding are less funny when the person making them has actually done that before.
Weasel shuts down Large Hadron Collider in the most blatant act of animal aggression against the particle physics community since a bird dropped a baguette into CERN machinery and a conspiracy of raccoons took down Fermilab.
Aptly-named Impossible Foods says it will have a high-tech vegetarian burger as good as the real thing available at select restaurants this July. No word on when it’ll be available direct to consumers.
Did you know: light bulb manufacturers maintained an honest-to-goodness conspiracy to prevent the introduction of longer-lasting bulbs. I would say this should increase our concern about this sort of thing happening today, except the conspiracy lasted barely ten years before other companies managed to undercut them, so maybe it should decrease our concern.
The price of solar power has decreased 50% in 16 months. Maybe. There’s a lot of complicated stuff about subsidized versus unsubsidized power and I’m not sure it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. But there’s some very impressive claim about solar power that’s true. Sometimes it seems like technologies only have two possible modes – stagnant for decades, or doubling every eighteen months.
David Chapman always has posts that are structurally brilliant and revelatory until I sit back and think about them later and realize I don’t know what half the terms in them mean and I am just assuming they are brilliant and revelatory because they are put together in a way which is a superstimulus for formally correct thought. His latest, A Bridge To Meta-Rationality Vs. Civilizational Collapse, is a typically engaging and impressive example of the genre. I really wish I knew more about post-modernism, or that somebody who does would write an engaging and meaningful introduction.
A scuba diver petting a moray eel, with relevant commentary here.
In 1737, William Penn’s children made a (shady, possibly forged or forced) treaty with the Lenape Indians that granted white settlers all territory within thirty-six hours’ walk from the Lehigh River. Then they hired the fastest power-walkers and best surveyors in the colony to cover as much ground as humanly possible within thirty-six hours. The history of the Walking Purchase.
Scott Aaronson and a student find that the 7918th Busy Beaver number is unknowable. This is a fun read even for someone like me who only understands the tiniest fraction of what’s going on. I think it is about a function which proceeds from being finite, knowable, and known to being Godelian and unknowable in an orderly fashion in a finite number of steps (apparently, less than 7918). If I’m understanding this right, my brain hurts.
The French company behind the TGV supertrain has invested 80 million euros in the Hyperloop.
Tow truck owner refuses to tow Bernie Sanders supporter. This is the world you people have built for us.
Oddly prescient Onion from 2012: Shrieking White Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016. Between this and the Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity article I’m starting to think the Onion employs Nostradamus.
A roundup of everybody who said Trump could never win the nomination so we can laugh at them for being wrong. There’s actually an important rationality lesson here, which is that a person who said Trump had only a 20% chance of winning the nomination (like Nate Silver) may in fact be perfectly virtuous – things with only a twenty percent chance of happening do happen one in every five times. By extension, even a person who said there was only a 0.000001% chance of Trump winning the nomination may be virtuous, although it’s pretty unlikely. I am less contemptuous of anybody who provided a number, and more contemptuous of the sort of people who said “Anyone who thinks Trump might win the nomination is an idiot and shouldn’t be taken seriously”. SSC’s own (rather late) prediction was 60% chance he would be the nominee – an earlier pseudo-prediction was non-numerical and very carefully hedged.
French study shows diversity causes social anomie, but I get kind of suspicious when “social anomie” is treated as a quantified study endpoint. Related: contra usual conventional wisdom, study suggests that ethnic diversity does not decrease support for redistribution, except maybe in special cases involving recent immigrants.
What do actual epigenetics professors and researchers think of the pop epigenetics that always gets cited in the media as the hot new explanation for social phenomena? Jerry Coyne collects some biting responses.
Egypt Independent – “Salah Abdel Sadeq, head of the State Information Service, has blamed the spread of violence and extremism in the Arab world on Tom & Jerry cartoons and video games.” The fun thing about this is that every time another culture blames their problems on the way things are portrayed in the media, it sounds hilarious, but whenever our culture does it people find it totally plausible. Related: Mexican Congresswoman Declares War On Memes
The Open Philanthropy Project has declared that AI risk will be one of their major priorities this year, an important development given both their levels of funding/talent/connections, and their reputation as a gold standard for analysis of what charitable opportunities are important. Especially interesting given that the OPP leader who wrote the report, Holden, was previously one of MIRI’s strongest critics – he notes that “my views on this cause have evolved considerably over time”, though it’s also important to note a lot of his criticisms were MIRI-specific rather than related to the entire field.
Has the more charismatic candidate really won every one of the last thirteen presidential elections?
The theologians say that Hell is the absence of God, marked not by divine abandonment of human souls but by humans who deliberately refuse the salvific power of the Divine. On the one hand, I feel like this is an uncharitable portrayal of nonbelievers, many of whom are not opposed to God but only intellectually unconvinced of His existence. On the other, Haifa Man Seeks Restraining Order Against God
Yet another study showing permanent increase in Openness (and the ominous-sounding “brain entropy”) after LSD use (h/t Emil Kierkegaard)
What does it look like to walk along the ridge of the Matterhorn? (warning: it looks like something that will trigger people who are scared of heights). A less dizzying perspective. Relevant Reddit commentary.
Brad DeLong vs. John Cochrane on the Ease of Doing Business Index.
You know that chart showing how US GDP keeps going up steadily, but after 1973, wages stop going up along with it? Somebody broke it down and figured out why. Some of it is The 1 Percent, but a lot isn’t.
New York bar told it is discriminatory to deny service to pregnant women.
Percent Neanderthal genes in Europeans has been declining over the past 40,000 years in a way consistent with natural selection acting against them.
Ten percent of federal judgeships are currently vacant – study finds that this leads to a thousand fewer incarcerations each year as prosecutors triage which cases they want to bring to trial. Suggested trollish by technically correct spin: Congressional Republicans have done more for the fight against mass incarceration than almost anyone else.
A counterpoint to a recent post on Chinese happiness: Pew asks a very subtly different question and sees vast improvement in all emerging markets including China.
America has 35% fewer police officers per capita than the world average, even though its prison system is much larger. Alex Tabarrok wonders if this suggests a strategy of shifting criminal justice resources from prisons to police, in the hopes that criminals use a rational P(caught)*punishment strategy to determine whether or not to commit a crime and so if we increase catch rate we can shorten sentences.
Artir with a very long and data-intensive argument that there is no technological stagnation. Strongest possible rebuttal I can imagine after this data overflow (unless you can prove the post is cherry-picking indicators, which it doesn’t look like) is that for some reason stagnation is uniquely limited to things that can’t be graphed – progress in how much energy can be stored in a single battery is going as fast as ever, but there are fewer completely new ideas like airplanes. But that might be too close to a god of the gaps argument – people can graph a lot of things.
An argument against denser zoning in San Francisco good enough to get featured on Marginal Revolution???
Why are there billboards across Utah advertising the 9th President of the US, William Henry Harrison?
Is there an evolutionary reason why humans continue to live after they stop being able to reproduce? We still don’t know, but of note, A Simple Offspring-To-Mother Size Ratio Predicts Post-Reproductive Lifespan, suggesting that long life might be a spandrel of the health needed to survive the stress of childbirth.
Is Social Darwinism A Myth? (1, 2). Despite the ubiquitous demands not to be like those nasty social Darwinists who must have dominated 19th century thought or something, there’s very little evidence that people of that era used the term ‘social Darwinism’ or used Darwinian theory to justify their social policies. The whole thing may have been mostly invented by one guy in the 1940s as an attempt to tarnish economists he didn’t like.
Venezuela has come up with a sure-fire solution to its hyperinflation problems which is 100% in keeping with socialist principles.
Can anybody explain whether this image (apparently derived from here?) contradicts or even reverses the narrative that Democrats have stayed pretty normal but Republicans have become much more extreme?
Did iTunes delete all the music on this guy’s hard drive? vs. Apple doesn’t delete all the music on your hard drive unless you do something wrong, which given Apple’s confusing policies and dictatorial business model you inevitably will.
The great thing about ketamine is that it relieves depression near-instantly and much more reliably than ordinary antidepressants. The bad thing about it is that it’s ketamine – a potentially dangerous hallucinogenic drug – and similar but safer compounds don’t seem to have the same effects. Now scientists have found (at least in mice) that it is not ketamine itself but a metabolite of ketamine that treats depression, and the metabolite is relatively safe. Also, the metabolite affects AMPA receptors, not NMDA receptors, which means previous research was looking in the wrong place and now we can look in the right one. Exciting progress!
Thing of Things: Contra Piaget, very young infants probably have object permanence.
The first few paragraphs of this article are standard intra-Christian exhortation boilerplate, but if you can make it through them, the rest is a fascinating and terrifying ethnography of a creepy new charismatic movement.
Explanation of the Scott Aaronson paper, if anyone is curious.
Busy Beaver, BB, is a function defined over the integers. BB(n) represents the largest number of steps that an n-state turing machine (TM) can take before halting (when given the empty string as an input). It grows incredibly quickly. We know that this function is incomputable, meaning there cannot exist an algorithm which explicitly computes the nth Busy Beaver number. This fact can be proven easily by showing that if you could compute the nth BB number, then you could solve the halting problem. Suppose you could compute any BB number. Then give me an n-state TM, and I’ll run it for BB(n) steps. If it doesn’t halt, then I know it never will. So I’ve solved the halting problem! (Which is impossible).
So we already knew that we couldn’t construct an algorithm which is proven to calculate any arbitrary BB number. But we do know some BB numbers (see above link). For example, BB(1) = 1. Now, thanks to this paper, we have the
firstlowest current bound on the highest possible BB number that wecould computecould provably compute (7918). The authors got this bound by constructing a particular TM whose stopping behavior could not bepredictedproven to be predicted, and that TM had 7,918 states. Specifically, the TM would halt if and only if ZFC is inconsistent, and Godel’s second incompleteness theorem tells us that we can never prove that ZFC is consistent (assuming that it actually is, which we do). So anyways, if we knew BB(7918), we could run our TM BB(7918) times, and if it didn’t halt, we’d know that it never would. Since it is impossible toknowprove in ZFC that this TM would halt, we’ve proven that BB(7918)is incomputablecannot be proven to be any particular value.The tl;dr is that we always knew that a bound like this existed. We could write a python program which did the same thing as the TM in their paper, and just knowing that that program could be written as a TM (h/t Alan Turing, as always) would tell us that there was an upper bound on computable BB numbers. But I dunno, it’s kind of cool to have a specific number.
Although as ton pointed out (and which I did not know), we had a specific number earlier, and this one is just much lower. Aaronson tries to motivate the practice of lowering this bound, but I think his motivation is borne from intellectual curiosity and not applicability. Hard to fault him for that, of course.
See this for motivation on Busy Beaver numbers.
It’s not the first bound, he previously showed a bound of 340,943.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100680
My bad, thanks!
No no no. It is impossible to prove in ZF theory that this TM halts. This is very different from knowing whether it halts (by most reasonable definitions of “know”, we *do* know that it halts).
A single number cannot be “incomputable”. Only functions can be computable or uncomputable. The number is well-defined and has a definite, knowable, super-large value; the only problem is this value cannot be *proven* in ZF theory. But it can be proven in other axiomatic systems.
Yes you’re right, I should have been a bit more careful with words like “impossible” and “incomputable”. Really the 7918th BB number cannot be proven in ZFC to be any particular value, because their TM cannot be proven in ZFC to halt. BB(7918) is a perfectly well-described positive integer, we can just never know what it is (using ZFC axioms). Although it’s worth noting that this general technique would work for other axiomatic systems too, we would just need a TM that tested the consistency of those new axioms and not ZFC.
That’s technically correct, but this statement is weaker than it sounds. If you believe ZFC is consistent, you probably also believe ZFC+con(ZFC) is consistent (where con(ZFC) is the statement “ZFC is consistent”). But the latter is a stronger theory, so it might be able to prove the value of BB(7918). And if not, you could always try ZFC+con(ZFC)+con(ZFC+con(ZFC)), which is a still-stronger theory. And so on.
If you push this logic far enough (including infinite chains of consistency statements, and the statement that the entire chain is consistent, and the statement that that’s consistent, etc.), there’s no end to it, but you could conceivably become less and less convinced that the resulting mess really is consistent. So whether you can truly know the value of large busy beaver numbers depends on your definition of “know”.
Why? Don’t we have that, if ZFC is consistent, then all of those are consistent?
@ton:
Sort of. Once you get into infinite chains of consistency statements, it actually starts to matter how you defined the chain – usually you’d define it by a turing machine that generates it, but the choice of machine can matter. And since it’s hard to be prove how Turing machines behave, it may be hard to be sure that the machine really generates the statements you claim it generates. See this old post by Aaronson.
(Note that I’m not an expert on this; people who know more should feel free to correct me)
So I’m confused by the motivation for this debate. Sure, we could throw in the axiom “con(ZFC)”, and we’d need to amend our TM to test ZFC + con(ZFC) in order to still buy our proof. But we could have added any axiom to ZFC and gotten the same result! 7918 was the number for ZFC. We may need a higher number for con(ZFC), and we may need an even higher number for ZFCLGBTQQIA (that’s a very inclusive set of axioms).
By why? Do we think con(ZFC) is a good axiom to have? Why would we want this infinite hierarchy of axioms?
@gabe:
We would want this hierarchy of axioms because if we believe ZFC is sound, then we believe the axioms in this hierarchy are true. So we can know the value of BB(7918) if we know that ZFC is sound, so long as the value of BB(7918) is provable in ZFC+con(ZFC).
@anon85:
But we’re never going to be able to design a set of axioms for which everything we believe to be true is provable, right? It seems at first glance that it’s worth throwing in as many “true” statements as possible into our axioms, even if it won’t cover everything, but eventually we’re going to have to buy the fact that “truth” and “provability” aren’t the same thing. And I feel like once we buy that, we can accept that con(ZFC) is true without making it provable. And once we do that, we have no motivation for adding con(ZFC) to our axioms in the first place.
Put another way: is there a reason that mathematicians haven’t added this hierarchy to our set of axioms? Apologies if my CS background is insufficiently math-y for this discussion.
Okay, you’re basically right, except in your original posts you kept using the phrase “will never know” as if it’s the same as “not provable in ZFC”. But what we “know” is simply what we believe strongly enough; so if we “know” that ZFC is arithmetically sound, we also know that any arithmetic statement provable in ZFC+con(ZFC) is true. Hence we could theoretically know the value of BB(7918).
The reason not to add con(ZFC) to the axioms is the reason you stated: there’s no natural place to stop adding axioms. However, whenever con(ZFC) is necessary, mathematicians do not hesitate to use it as an axiom (with a disclaimer stating that it is being used). In other words, mathematicians accept the consequences of con(ZFC) as true.
@anon85:
Yeah I tried to go back and change “will never know” to “cannot prove in ZFC” per your comments. I wasn’t super careful with my wording in the original post since it was aimed at the larger picture, but I agree that I was making non-trivial errors.
As a tangent, it’s kind of weird to think that most of what we call “mathematically true” is based on some axioms that we all just kind of invented, and the rest of what we call “mathematically true” can’t even be proven by those same axioms that we invented.
I’m basically just marveling at Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Feel free to ignore.
I chuckled.
You have it backwards — the TM halts iff ZFC is not consistent, which means we “know” that the TM doesn’t halt.
This is actually a critical distinction, because a TM that works in the opposite way — halting iff ZFC is consistent — is impossible. Because then the TM does in fact halt after N steps for some N, so ZFC can prove that it halts (for instance by enumerating the N intermediate states), so ZFC can prove its own consistency, which is a contradiction.
All this presumes that ZFC is actually consistent, of course.
Right, good catch. I meant to say it is impossible to prove in ZFC whether the TM halts. Of course, since the TM doesn’t halt, it is also impossible to prove in ZFC that it halts (assuming ZFC is arithmetically sound).
But I guess you could still have a Turning Machine which halts iff ZFC is consistent, as long as this fact is not provable in ZFC. (For example, a turning machine that always takes a single step and then halts.) Conceivably you could give such a machine, and then prove that it has the right property using some stronger axiom (e.g. a large cardinal axiom or whatever)?
If it halts, it halts in a finite number of steps, which you can prove by enumerating those steps.
Ok, I see what you’re saying now.
If anyone is having trouble with the idea of a deterministic machine whose behaviour can’t be predicted, even in principle, it may be worth pointing out that it is an infinitely large machine which may or may not continue to run for an infinite amount of time. This stuff is mathematically important, but there’s a reason why some of it seems implausible. 🙂
I’d say that it’s a finitely large machine which may or may not continue to run for an infinite amount of time. But I agree with your broader point: the BB function seems to have crazy properties, but that’s because it has kind of a crazy definition. It’s defined by the stopping behavior of turing machines, which is a recipe for disaster.
I’m not well-versed in this field, but I’m reasonably sure that the fact that the tape is infinitely long is essential to the paper’s argument.
(A Turing Machine with a finite tape can only go through a finite number of steps before it has to either halt or start repeating itself. Not the sort of thing you could use to evaluate the consistency of ZFC.)
Ah, depends on what you mean by a “infinitely large machine”. I was interpreting that as meaning “a TM with an infinite number of states”, which it wouldn’t have. You are right that it has an infinite long tape.
> I’m reasonably sure that the fact that the tape is infinitely long is essential to the paper’s argument.
Correct. The halting problem for Turing machines with finite tapes is decidable. Here’s how: simulate the Turing machine, and at each step, record the current configuration of the machine and tape, and check to see whether this is a configuration that you have seen previously. There are only finitely many possible configurations, so eventually, either the machine will halt, or it will repeat a previous configuration. In the latter case, the machine has entered an infinite loop, and you will know that it runs forever.
I see the point of confusion: I said “machine” meaning an actual, physical machine, but you interpreted it as shorthand for “Turing Machine”. That’s my bad, I should have realized there was an ambiguity there.
To rephrase: if you wanted to actually run the Turing Machine in Scott’s paper, you’d need to implement it physically, and you would need an infinitely large physical machine to do so.
Well, kind of. Depends on what you mean by “run the Turing Machine”. We can simulate a TM on a computer which is what they did in the paper. Now the simulated TM doesn’t have infinite memory (because it doesn’t have access to an infinitely long tape), but until it runs out of memory, their program is effectively running a TM.
But yeah, we obviously can’t construct a machine with infinite memory.
And I think you’re absolutely right to point out how theoretical (as opposed to applicable) this is. It’s kind of like CS professors invented a crazy function and then proved that it has crazy properties. I find this particular crazy function kind of interesting, but perhaps a bit unmotivated.
Well, I can tell you about the news on sites like reddit, and a bit of Salon.
The fact that Sanders is still in the race seems to mean that on sites that generally lean left, news articles on how Hilary is an evil corrupt demon are pretty constant. Its hilarious on r/politics, leaving me to wonder what’s going to happen when Sanders loses (even without superdelegates or anything approaching shady practices for normal delegates)
And I have not met anyone IRL who is loud and excited for Hilary Clinton. There’s loud Sanders and Trump. I even heard more support for Kasich. Heck, the people who support Hilary that I know tend to qualify it with some variation of “I like Sanders more but he can’t win” Granted, I am considered to be a young adult, so hearing Sanders Sanders Sanders is expected.
As for education, how do strict HS military academies fare for at-risk populations? It seems to fulfill a similar enough function as charter schools.
Related question. What’s the data on adaptive learning for math and science? My few experiences with the better versions of that tell me that its somewhat superior to typical methods of studing. Its simple enough, immediately tailoring problems to ones difficulty level. Of course, as any student of standard deviations will know, there can only be so much gain in subjects like math and physics.
As for enviromentalism, its probably a lot like a few other “isms” that got big in the 60’s to the 80’s. From my readings, certain types of public pollution was much more obvious and horrid then today, sans some areas with bad smog. Acid Rain was big until most chemicals involved with that became banned. I believe it succeeded enough in quite a bit of its goals that people identifying with its causes are less relatable on a day to day basis.
Solar–I am starting to become rather jaded about Solar. I have been hearing its 3 years away from public uptake since I was 8 years old, and im quite a bit older then that now.
Trump— Why did so many people predict Trump had such a poor shot at victory? I remember reading about his poll numbers last August -http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/nbc-wsj-poll-2016-gop-race-n433991,– where he was consistently beating his opponents in multiple states. Not long since after the start he had the best chance nearly since the start of his announcement, according to polls. I don’t feel shocked at all due to that, and I almost feel alone in that.
And perhaps lastly on antidepressants. Is the reason all the current ones allowed are hard to distinguish from placebo is because all the drugs that actually *work* become illegal as people inevitabely become obsessed with them? Plenty of banned drugs temporary effect is *awesome*, and if people could be trusted to use it properly(however that would be) it would probably outsell any SSRI.
“And I have not met anyone IRL who is loud and excited for Hilary Clinton.”
-The Silent Majority?
And Clinton is most popular in rich suburbs, the South (including among White Democrats), and Black-majority areas. I suggest talking with some old Black people. The vast majority of them support Clinton.
Oh, its clearly the silent majority, as the polls show.
But the silence is almost deafeningly loud.
Relevant SMBC:
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3812
My friendslist has a lot of people saying that it’s crucial to vote for whoever the D candidate is because Trump must be stopped, and telling people to not be too nasty about the other Democrat.
Why do they think Trump should be stopped? Do they really want or care about thousands of Muslim immigrants to this country?
I wouldn’t presume to read their minds, but there’s not just concern for (only thousands?) of Muslim immigrants, it’s also Muslims who’d like to visit their families in the old country and then come back to the US.
There’s also an issue of nastiness about Mexicans. And from my point of view, is Trump actually random enough to get the US into a war with Mexico?
I wouldn’t presume to read their minds, but there’s not just concern for (only thousands?) of Muslim immigrants, it’s also Muslims who’d like to visit their families in the old country and then come back to the US.
Oh if only an elected President could stop them rather than the bureaucrats stopping him!
As for Mexico, I dunno? The risk with total outsiders is that they’re unpredictable. I’d feel better if Cruz had won the nomination.
On that note, I’ve seen more than one leftist admit that they were more scared of Cruz than Trump. Since journalists are overwhelmingly leftists, why did they spend the entire election season trying to destroy Trump and giving Cruz a free pass, as reflected in the latter’s much better poll numbers against Hilary and Bernie? Simple lack of strategic thinking? Did Trump’s abrasive personality simply force them to be reactive rather than proactive?
And non-Muslim immigrants too. It’s not a big step to go from anti-Muslim demagoguery to anti-Mexican demagoguery to anti-everyone-else demagoguery.
@Le Maistre Chat: probably at least some journalism is based on considerations besides calculated political strategy. For example, Trump just makes more interesting stories than Cruz. More outrage.
And the point about electing someone who is just really randomly random.
t’s also Muslims who’d like to visit their families in the old country and then come back to the US.
If Trump is so bad, why do people need to deliberately misinterpret the things he says?
@Chalid:
First they came for the Muslims
but I was not a Muslim
so I stayed silent
Then they came for the Mexicans
but I was not Mexican
so I stayed silent
…
Then they came for me…
In the alternative universe:
First they came for the Muslims
but we all knew this poem
so we didn’t let that happen
Then the Muslims came for me
(because I was gay)
and everyone was too scared to help me
I’ll also note that the quote includes “they came for the communists” with an implication that communists are harmless. Sometimes communists are harmless, sometimes very much not.
@ Nancy
No, the implication is not that they’re harmless, but that sending communists to concentration camps was socially acceptable, and each next step in the escalation felt too small to raise enough alarm.
The author was actually in favor of Hitler coming to power at first, so presumably he’s no communist sympathizer. He explained:
Bonus quote:
By the way, “then they came for me” is not just a poignant turn of phrase. He was, in fact, even sent to Dachau, the first camp the Nazis built to hold communists.
If there is no implication that the group is harmless, he could equally well have said “first they came after the murderers and rapists”. But we know very well that nobody would write the poem that way, because even if the poem isn’t mainly about the group being harmless, the poem still depends on the assumption that the group is harmless.
“Being a communist” is not a crime, but that doesn’t mean all communists are 100% harmless.
First they came for the rape apologists, then they came for the pedophile defenders, then they came for the lolicon fans, then they came for the kink activists.
First they came for the neo-nazis, then they came for the racists, then they came for the white nationalists, then they came for the HBD bloggers.
First they came for the antifa skinheads, then they came for the SJWs who signed a certain statement, then they came for the SJWs who did not sign a certain statement, then they came for the defenders of political correctness.
(all hypothetical, of course — but please take note if, God forbid, someone actually starts shipping any of these groups to concentration camps)
@ Jiro:
As Nita explained quite well enough, the poem does not depends on the idea that Communists are harmless. It depends merely on the idea that they aren’t so harmful they need to be sent to concentration camps and exterminated.
But the context that the poem was brought up in was immigration policy, which doesn’t involve extermination camps either.
First they came for the Muslims, and I called them racists.
Then Muslims became 5% of the local population and came for everyone who drew a picture of Mohammed, and I did not speak up because I’d never drawn Mohammed and thought only racists wanted to.
Then they came for the gays, and I did not speak up because I was not gay, just a straight who doxxed every white person who’d opposed gay marriage.
Then they came for…
@ Le Maistre Chat:
This step is the one that strikes most people as implausible…
It’s a bit much when the social conservatives turn around after opposing the “gay agenda” at every step and, “Guys! We’ve got to crack down on these Muslims! Think about what they’ll do to the gays, who we’ve always supported.”
From the Pew Research Center:
@Vox: Please consider why something that already happened in 2002 would strike most people as implausible.
The Overton window has shifted so far left in the Netherlands that the relevant government agency requiring immigrants to watch a video of men kissing was denounced as right-wing racism by the left.
Vox, firstly, there is a difference between wanting a behavior to be taboo, or even just not sanctioned, and wanting participants in that behavior slain. Gay relations join a large swath of other vices, from adultery to cutting in line, where I neither want celebration of the practice, nor the death penalty for it.
Secondly, even if one assumes conservatives secretly have only malice towards gays, that doesn’t mean that they are wrong when pointing out to gays, “hey, as bad as you think conservative westerners are, Muslims are more than just a bit worse.”
In response to your quote, I don’t know of Christian doctrine that because a suffering is from God, or natural consequences of one’s actions, or etc., others should not provide aid and comfort. There is a belief that suffering and sickness is largely a result of sin, but not that it is our duty to spread suffering. Doesn’t mean you can’t find any quotes asserting otherwise, or that the idea doesn’t sound cold, but it does not follow from your poll results that the respondents would add “and therefore we are justified in harming them ourselves.” (This is rather similar to our discussion of social Darwinism elsewhere.)
@Randy M.
There’s a lot of room between approval and death penalty. But I think “think should be punished by the state” falls a lot closer to the latter. And, on that issue, Gallup apparently still finds more than 30% of the American population thinks homosexual relations between consenting adults should be illegal. (Down from over 50% in the 80s.) I can’t say for sure that the 30% is composed mostly of conservative Christians, but I know where I’d put my money.
(Source: Page six here https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/-polls-on-attitudes-on-homosexuality-gay-marriage_151640318614.pdf)
(I should note that while the numbers seem higher than I would have expected, I don’t see any obvious methodological problem with it.)
@ Le Maistre Chat:
I’m not sure how you think the story of Pim Fortuyn supports your view of things. This politician was not killed by Muslims for being gay. He was assassinated (in what I obviously think was an evil and unjustifiable act) because he was perceived as scapegoating Muslims, who don’t present a serious threat to gays, by playing the “victim card” in order to gain political power.
Which is exactly what the social-conservative opponents of Muslim immigration do, except they’re not playing the victim card themselves; they’re playing it on behalf of the gays who they’ve always considered upstanding representatives of the superiority of Western culture.
I have no idea about this story or any of the details behind it.
Such a policy (if it exists) could very well be enacted for racist motives. For instance, I also consider Islam false and harmful, but I would oppose any policy that required immigrants to burn a Koran before being allowed to enter the country, as the Japanese once demanded that Dutch traders stomp on crucifixes to “prove” they weren’t Christian (which they complied with, by the way).
@ Randy M:
If God is punishing our tolerance of homosexuality by sending down AIDS, then not punishing homosexuality is just stupid. Don’t we want to…not have God send plagues down upon us? Plagues that not only effect the sinners themselves.
That’s whole idea behind this sort of religious thinking: that God collectively punishes communities that don’t do enough to root out sin. Even just the sins of the leaders: pharaoh pisses off God, he kills all the firstborn. This is firmly part of the American tradition; for instance, take the common idea of the Civil War as the punishment for slavery.
Anti-gay Muslims are more extreme, but anti-gay Christians are more numerous and powerful in Western countries. It makes complete sense that people in favor of gay equality would consider the latter the objectively greater threat.
Islamic caliphate with sharia law = extremely bad but very low probability.
Gays being disowned by their families = much less bad but much higher probability.
Now conservative opponents of Muslim immigration may think that the probability of Eurabia given current levels of immigration is very high. But this is an empirical point that proponents of gay equality, on average, tend not to agree with.
If Eurabia is not going to happen, then the only way increased Muslim immigration leads to anti-gay laws is if conservative Christians cooperate with them to pass those laws—which makes the argument simply ridiculous: “You should oppose Muslim immigration because we’ll cooperate with them to pass oppressive laws.”
Providing aid and comfort without expecting or encouraging people to repent is a position some people might hold, but it’s not a very sensible position.
If God is causing AIDS to punish us for tolerating gays, why would you extend comfort to AIDS-sufferers unless they renounced homosexuality?
I sure wouldn’t give aid to meth addicts unless they promised to, you know, quit using meth. Otherwise, I’m just blatantly subsidizing the use of meth.
Moreover, if it’s about dealing with the natural consequences, then the appropriate response would seem to be to encourage gays to use condoms or, better yet, be monogamous with each other. There’s probably a reason why closeted gays tend to do dangerous things like have anonymous sex in bathrooms. Maybe…allow them to get married, for a start? But that was not the general tack taken by these proponents of supposedly natural law, for some reason.
It was a large part of Justice Kennedy’s reasoning, as a man who’s not exactly in favor of destroying monogamy and the nuclear family.
@ Frank McPike:
That is very surprising but good to know.
The sakoku laws were not racist, they were a rational and effective method of preventing cultural colonization by a foreign power that had already been substantially undermining the stability of the nation. I hadn’t really been thinking of the islamicization of Europe in those terms, but now that you mention it I can see the parallels.
At a considerable tangent, back when there was a caliphate and the legal system was, at least in theory, based on Sharia, homosexuality was often, although not always, tolerated and largely taken for granted. Among the famous medieval essays there are two that are debates on the relative attractiveness of hetro vs homosexuality.
Titles, if I remember correctly, translate as “The Debate Between the Page Boys and the Dancing Girls” and “The Debate Between the Back and the Belly.”
@David Friedman: My understanding is that sex with page boys or male entertainers is a very old Iranian custom that the strictest jurists wanted to criminalize but many sincere Iranian Muslims were moderate about it.
Many sincere Muslims were historically moderate about alcohol as well, which is why (I assume) it was hilarious to the original audience when a hadji whips out his hidden wine in a 1001 Nights tale whose title escapes me.
How much any of this has to do with immigrant Muslims is debatable.
I also wouldn’t presume to read anyone’s mind, but I think it true that a lot of the rest of the world (except Russia, apparently?) thinks of Trump, well, not pleasantly. Having a President who is widely seen as the right-wing answer to Hugo Chavez sounds like the sort of thing that at least some Democrats could legitimately consider unfortunate.
I thought democrats were fond of Hugo Chavez?
Seems kind of unlikely, but I suppose I wouldn’t know. Perhaps a poorly chosen example.
Was that link in support or opposition to my (admittedly overly broad) generalization?
(It wasn’t exactly showing him dissing a person dearly loved by the archetypal Democrat)
In context, it seemed to me to be an attack on the US as a whole. I don’t know whether an American (or, in particular, a Democrat) would think so.
More importantly, it was just incredibly childish. After that, how could anyone take him, or by extension the country he ruled, at all seriously?
Going back to Trump, I’m just barely self-aware enough to realize that my impressions of him are thoroughly unreliable, being based mostly on TV ads for The Apprentice plus a few (mostly biased and third-hand) reports of his election and/or business antics. So if he does become President I’m going to try very hard to continue to take America seriously as a nation. But it isn’t going to be easy. I’m thinking a lot of people won’t bother.
>More importantly, it was just incredibly childish. After that, how could anyone take him, or by extension the country he ruled, at all seriously?
It’s tough, but we’re slowly recovering from the Bush years.
Oh, you mean Chavez?
Well, here’s one (recent) Democrat calling him a ‘dead communist dictator’. Probably some sort of a right-wing, New Democrat exception, though.
That really isn’t fair. That’s a guy running from president, working from hindsight because Venezuela’s sorry state can’t be defended anymore.
It would seem to be more fair than unsupported assertion “democrats were fond of Hugo Chavez”, at any rate.
Images like this left an impression of something more than mere diplomatic cordiality, though the Sander’s quote is encouraging.
As a Democrat, I was never a Chavez fan. But Chavez pissed off conservatives, and after all it wasn’t us in the U.S. who had to deal with the consequences of his policies, so it is not surprising that some Democrats cheered Chavez as a way of flipping the bird to conservatives. While I certainly wish people were less tribal, and less childish in their choice of tribal signals, things do not seem to be improving on that front. But certainly there was no widespread support among Democrats of Chavez’s actions and policies. As usual, there was in fact no widespread knowledge of his actions and policies among pretty much any large group of Americans, since Americans just don’t pay that much attention to foreign affairs.
@Protagoras well said and I stand corrected.
How could you even support such an assertion to your satisfaction? It seems pretty obvious that no American politician is going to speak highly of a guy whose entire rethoric is based on bashing America, as for what the regular Democrat, unless there is some sort of poll on the subject, you can only go with what you see and hear.
Now I can’t really say much about Democrats, not being American and all, but leftist in my country (and in the internet) have a long history of defending Chaves, despite de mounting evidence of the ever deteriorating living conditions in Venezuela. Many got an easy out when he died, since now one can blame all the bad stuff on Maduro.
@WHTA: “It seems pretty obvious that no American politician is going to speak highly of a guy whose entire rethoric is based on bashing America…”
You’d be surprised! Ever since the end of the Cold War we have had a grand tradition here in America of saying kind things about, and sometimes even lavishly funding, foreign governments and NGOs whose rhetoric is based on bashing America.
I’m not the best person to explain why because I think this behavior is insane, but I believe it’s a sincere desire for global peace and conflict de-escalation that has metastized horribly. We can be the most effective brokers for peace by acting neutrally towards all parties in any dispute, even the ones holding “Death to America” parades in their capitals or speculating in state newspapers about nuking Los Angeles, that sort of thing.
Here:
https://newrepublic.com/article/68892/chavezs-friend-massachusetts
The memory for inconvenient facts is really short sometimes.
According to Pew, 18% of Americans had “a lot” or “some” confidence in Chavez in 2007. There may be a Lizardman’s constant thing going on, though, the same poll found 9% of Americans willing to say the same of Ahmadinejad.
(Source: http://www.pewglobal.org/2007/06/27/chapter-6-views-of-world-leaders-and-institutions/)
I lived in MA for a couple of years and I remember those obnoxious Joe Kennedy/Hugo Chavez ads. Thing is, at that time Kennedy had been out of office for years, and to date he still hasn’t returned to politics. Most MA Democrats would’ve voted for him in a heartbeat if he ever ran again, but solely because of who his father and uncle were and not from any active consideration of his policies. So I don’t know how much he counts for determining what “Democrats” believe.
@Frank McPike – I was deep blue tribe in that era, and had fairly favorable impressions of both Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Both were strongly (and at the time apparently effectively) opposed to Bush, and I *hated* Bush.
I don’t know if it’s accurate to say Democrats were fond of Chavez, but I think the far left definitely was. Celebrities like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte were all ardent supporters.
I don’t remember too many politicians throwing their support behind him publicly, though there was one Democrat representative, Jose Serrano, that was lambasted for tweeting a fairly pro-Chavez comment when Chavez died.
From a personal standpoint, I know in the San Francisco Bay Area I had many friends that were always quick to hold Chavez’s early “successes” over my head. Of course, they are all very quiet nowadays.
I suspect so.
His entire campaign has been an ongoing vilification of left/Blue culture. Cruz gets on stage and advocates for things that are against my opinions and values. Trump gets on stage and attacks me and my values. Imagine if Obama had spent his entire campaign touring the country and talking about how bitter clingers are destroying the country–that’s what it’s like to watch Trump from a left/Blue perspective.
Also, in this scenario, half the Obama supporters you meet online seem to love few things more than using a gross sexual fetish metaphor to call you a class traitor.
“Trump gets on stage and attacks me and my values.”
-Can you give some examples of this? I’ve watched quite a few Trump rallies, but can’t tell what exactly you’re referring to.
The biggest part is the attacks on political correctness.
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”
I’m a blue state liberal professional. I understand that to some people PC is an invasive and unwanted norm, but every invasive species has a home–and that home is also my home. It’s a normal part of how I live my everyday life, and I have a pretty negative reaction to a narrative which casts it as the source of all problems. That’s doubly true when you look at specifically how that’s supposed to work. Political correctness prevents us from erecting categorical bans on members of certain religions; it prevents us from mass deportations–but avoiding those kinds of actions are part and parcel of liberal values that are important to me, and it’s insulting to cast it as some kind of pearlclutching reaction based on nothing more substantial than fear of “offense.”
More nebulously, but probably at least as importantly, are the incessant insults against individuals. I’ve never been one of those individuals, but by and large I have more in common with the journalists and protesters who he attacks as “sad” “disgusting” “pathetic” etc than I do with him–I’m sure if I were ever in a position to interact with him, I’d get those same insults. More, zooming out a little bit, the entire practice of insults, bullying nicknames, the arrogant bragging, etc is something I read as an ostentatious rejection of political norms (which has profited him greatly)–but those political norms are ultimately just more-or-less-Blue professional norms, and they’re ones I feel entirely at home in. Certainly, anyone who acted Trumpy at my workplace or any social gathering I’d be likely to be a part would be made to feel very unwelcome… and I think he knows that and his supporters know that, and that it’s all very purposeful.
For the record, I don’t expect anyone who doesn’t identify with this culture to give a fuck about any of this, and I’m very aware of the fact that it’s essentially the shoe being on the other foot for the first time in a long time. But you asked, and this is the answer, for me at least.
Ah, got it. As Scott Adams puts it, New York v. California style.
“Political correctness prevents us from erecting categorical bans …”
I think most people who talk about political correctness are referring to speech, not action. Part of the point of criticizing it is the idea that PC evaluates statements on a basis other than whether they are true. It’s politically incorrect to say that the distribution of intellectual abilities is different for males and females or for members of different racial groups–whether or not it’s true.
I agree that Trump comes across as a bully. But rejecting political correctness isn’t an attack on you, may or may not be an attack on your beliefs. And attacking beliefs of people you disagree with is normal behavior, across the political spectrum.
@Mark & @David:
That was actually sloppily put by me. The “that’s” in “[t]hat’s doubly true when you look at specifically how that’s supposed to work” isn’t intended to begin a description of how political correctness actually works in my view, but rather a description of the purported mechanism for political correctness being “the source of all problems.” That is, Trumpism posits that we are unduly hampered by political correctness in dealing with Islam and illegal immigration, and I reject that on every level (and instead say that the rejections of the solutions it proposes are based in foundational liberal/progressive norms to which I ascribe… and, I’d add here, a proper recognition of the actual non-seriousness of said problems).
@E. Harding Yep.
And I’ll give Trump one thing–those of us who never understood the degree of vitriolic hatred some parts of America had for Obama are now getting an unpleasantly first-hand example of what that was (probably, mostly) about. Not really about policies or ideology, and not directly about race, but rather just an in-your-face vision of an unpleasantly alien cultural style.
@herbert herbertson – thanks for taking the time to write that.
Herbert, don’t you think that GW Bush was hated in much the same way as Obama? Yes, people hated him for the war, but culture/tribe was a big component of it.
Secondly, you say we are not unduly hampered by political correctness in dealing with Islam or Immigration. Would you say we are duly hampered by it or unaffected by it?
@Randy “Herbert, don’t you think that GW Bush was hated in much the same way as Obama? Yes, people hated him for the war, but culture/tribe was a big component of it.”
Probably, but the war was such a very, very good tangible reason for disliking Bush that it wasn’t as clear as it was with Obama. Or, arguably, is with Trump, although from my view the categorical religious ban is in the ballpark.
“Secondly, you say we are not unduly hampered by political correctness in dealing with Islam or Immigration. Would you say we are duly hampered by it or unaffected by it?”
I would say it’s irrelevant, and that most of what gets identified as political correctness in the context of Islam is actually about diplomacy with Muslim allies, an unwillingness to affirm Wahabbist/Salafist claims to represent Islam based on strategic WoT-related reasons, and disagreements about the actual scope of the threat, while in the context of immigration it’s just an alliance between big business and big softies.
“How does it actually work, in your view?”
This is probably going to disappoint, but I think the norms against racial/gender/sexual/trans insensitivity are equivalent in form to the norms against calling someone’s mother a whore, except more limited to a particular culture and less stable/simple. Basically just a component of Blue/progressive/professional cultural norms, designed to avoid offence and discord in certain types of groups. I have a fair amount of sympathy to those who are in other types of groups and chafe under the hegemony, and am very hostile to attempts to punish violators through their livelihoods–but I’ve spent at least the last six years in environments where PC reigns supreme and it hasn’t bothered me a bit (contra, I’m very anti-war/anti-military and I spend a fair amount of time in a community that values military service highly–that does chafe, because there the values are discordant)
Probably, but the war was such a very, very good tangible reason for disliking Bush that it wasn’t as clear as it was with Obama.
Except that the war seems to have massively increased Bush’s popularity. Not sure how many people here are old enough to really remember the first months of Bush II’s administration, but I was. The man started with barely over 50% approval, steadily declining from there, and the reaction from the segment that didn’t approve of him was almost exactly the same sort of visceral, largely content-free hatred that Obama gets from the Far Right.
@ Herbert herbertson
FWIW, I’m a conservative who thinks George W. Bush was a little too liberal, and the insults against individuals is one of the biggest things making me a “Never Trump” kind of guy. (The fact that most of his core political principals–to the extent he has any–seem to be really liberal is the other half of my problem.) His strikes against PC as a general principal is one I agree with, for the reasons you identify: it’s just the shoe being on the other foot for once, where we’ve been dealing with people acting on closely-held principles being driven out of business by left-wing regulators.
However, you can be against PC without being nasty to individuals. “Conservative” and “asshole” aren’t synonyms, despite what left-wingers like to tell themselves.
Mark – you’d be wise not to dismiss the idea of virtue.
As Scott pointed out, the Puritans didn’t accept their Faustian bargain because they enjoyed throwing things we value away; they got results. That we’re unwilling to accept their methods or beliefs doesn’t mean we’re going to get the same results by vaguely implying anyone who tries to be good must lack innate goodness granted by ROB.
Yes, people do bad, stupid things by default if they aren’t thinking. That’s fairly clear from history.
It may seem like the best of both worlds to accept the parts of political correctness where we don’t tell things offensive to the protected groups, but we also don’t coordinate hate mobs or try to fire from jobs the members of the unprotected groups.
Unfortunately, this solution is not stable. What really happens is that soon whenever there is a conflict between a member of the protected group and a member of the unprotected group, the member of the unprotected group is screwed, because anything they do, even the obvious self-defense, will be interpreted as an attack against the whole protected group, and most people will signal their virtue by condemning the member of the unprotected group.
Generally, when there are too wide rules against speaking about something, someone will abuse them to hurt other people in such manner than the rules prevent them from complaining about their suffering.
Even more generally, you can’t achieve equality by making unequality a social norm.
(This is not a sophisticated argument in favor of Trump. I see both SJWs and Trump-like people as two different groups of predators competing over which one gets the power to hurt me. I am not going to support one of them just to spite the other.)
Sure, but the comfy temperature in our buildings doesn’t maintain itself, either. Many valuable things require constant maintenance.
So, suppose we agree that “we don’t tell things offensive to the protected groups.” (Or something more general, like the rules we have here on SSC.) What exactly should happen if someone does say or do something offensive? It should probably be something between the two extremes of “nothing” and “they should be expelled from society”, but what?
How do we determine a proportionate level of response, and what can we do to keep it proportionate? (The latter is a real challenge when the response consists of many uncoordinated individuals each doing something relatively small, like the shirt-related Twitter storm or the harassment of the women who wanted a cake for their wedding.)
“How do we determine a proportionate level of response, and what can we do to keep it proportionate? (The latter is a real challenge when the response consists of many uncoordinated individuals”
And yet social norms are maintained in just this way.
For what very little it’s worth, I didn’t know about the sexual meaning of teabagger until it became an issue about the Tea Party. I took it as a mild minimizing joke about little paper bags with tea in them.
The joke is “ha ha, those right-wingers are so stupid they don’t even know that ‘teabagging’ is a sexual activity. Let’s make fun of them behind their back”.
(Of course, someone who thinks every smart person knows what teabagging is is probably living in a bubble.)
Remember what they did to Santorum? The left comes up with some pretty cruel and disgusting “jokes”, I’m not sure they’re in a position to be clutching pearls.
Can we attribute both the ‘pearl clutching’ and the anti-Santorum campaign to the same people?
— Dan Savage
Apparently not.
Yeah, there were people on the left who thought it was going too far. I was one of them, once. But it had pretty mainstream acceptance by the edgier leftists. It was on the Daily Show and everything. I think it’s fairly comparable to the edgier rightists calling people cucks.
Sounds a lot like listening to your culture talk about straight white men
My perspective: even without considering policies, he’s way too thin-skinned to be POTUS. Trump holds grudges and will never back down (see: dude grabbing that reporter at a rally, where it would have much better to just let it go than keep doubling down).
As POTUS you will be constantly getting criticism from everywhere; if you can’t deal with that constructively (or at least ignore most of it) you’ll be at best ineffective and at worst dangerous.
(This is also a problem I had with Palin in 2012)
“where it would have much better to just let it go than keep doubling down”
-I certainly don’t think so. Letting it go would have made Trump look weak and unreliable, while doubling down greatly enhanced his perceived loyalty and reliability.
Trump ignores the vast majority of criticism about himself.
Palin was in 2008.
“My perspective: even without considering policies, he’s way too thin-skinned to be POTUS.”
Isn’t it legitimate for the right to see Clinton as being the thin-skinned candidate? She’s been very controlling of interviews to make sure harmful questions aren’t asked of her on camera, and she’s publicly on record as saying she intends to change the first amendment because of attacks against her.
she’s publicly on record as saying she intends to change the first amendment because of attacks against her.
that is a comically uncharitable interpretation of someone criticizing Citizens United.
The question before the court in that case was very literally whether or not a group of people had the right to criticize Hillary Clinton.
I think that most people realize that Citizens United is actually about more than just the right to criticize Hillary Clinton.
I think that to Clinton, there isn’t a bigger issue than it being about an anti-Clinton ad. Or the possibility of more ads in the future.
@keranih
Do you think that a comment similar to that about your favored candidate would contribute to the discussion?
@ keranih
I agree with you but…
@ Chalid
I disagree, whether someone has the right to criticize Hillary Clinton (or any other state official) is exactly what that case was about.
If you want to argue the “corporations aren’t people” angle you need to concede that labor unions and the cable news networks aren’t people either and thus not protected by the First Amendment.
@hlynkacg
whether someone has the right to criticize Hillary Clinton (or any other state official) is exactly what that case was about.
That is an extremely important parenthetical that was not contained in the statement I was criticizing.
Compare the original statement:
she intends to change the first amendment because of attacks against her.
You really think that these are equivalent? Is the original statement intended to convey information in a way that a rationalist ought to respect?
Any Democratic candidate for just about any national office is going to oppose Citizens United. From a purely electoral standpoint, this opposition is a political winner both in the primary and in the general election. And such opposition is consistent with Democratic party principles about reducing the power of money generally. These are sufficient to explain Clinton’s opposition, so her position on Citizens United reveals nothing about her character.
I’m not really a Clintonista (though I prefer her to any other candidate running) but it’s disheartening to see how people here feel free to direct any lazy slur in her direction, and even more disheartening to see such things reflexively defended.
Edit: Citizens United is opposed by about 80 percent of Americans. Clearly Clinton must be thin-skinned.
Fair point, and I apologize for being less charitable than I really should have been considering the venue.
That said, I sympathize with the desire to reduce the influence of money on politics but the (for lack of a better term) popular narrative that the bill of rights applies only to isolated individuals and not larger groups robs it of any real “teeth” and clearly goes against the founders intent.
“…would have made Trump look weak and unreliable”
You mean like promising to fight legal battles for his supporters who beat up protesters, and then immediately backing down and lying about it?
Look at the tiny hands thing. That’s not just a joke; Trump obsessively mailed a reporter images of his hands, for years, over that comment. If you listen to him talking about it in interviews, he’s clearly still angry about it. Nobody would have thought him “weak” for failing to do that; heck, if anything, his inability to let it go looks like weakness, and for good reason.
I am in disgruntled disagreement over whether my comment lowered the tone of the argument at all. However, in the spirit of the venue…
That Citizens United was over an anti-Clinton movie which was suppressed from distribution by a Democratic administration is completely unknown to any anti-CU person I have spoken with. There is also a distressing tendency to conflate the Hobby Lobby decision with CU, and so I am really not comfortable with polling numbers on this subject at all.
When I press people further, they are also extremely fuzzy on how the NYT or NBC or any other media organization is protected from unreasonable searches, has their right to a fair hearing before legal action against the corp, and can print whatever they like, and yet other media are not so protected. (They are also not clear on how a Catholic Diocese can be an incorporated entity without losing its status as a religious organization, nor how 99% of all US charities are corporations of some sort or other.)
I myself feel that Clinton’s repeated failure to note that CU was against her political career is a failure of integrity. I also sympathize with those who want “less money in politics” but am really *really* more interested in how we are going to get our words printed and our speeches broadcast without money. Most people who are against “more money in politics” are, when I ask them, actually about “less money concentrated in the hands of people promoting candidates I don’t like, and opposing candidates I do like.” Very few of them mention the Clinton Foundation as a problem, f’zample.
So IMO Clinton is extremely vulnerable on this topic, and promoting it on the campagin trail may well backfire on her.
It seems misguided to evaluate court cases with wide-reaching ramifications by focusing on the details of the case, rather than the implications. Is it actually important that opponents of Obergefell v. Hodges know who Obergefell is, and why he wanted to get married? Should we understand U.S. v. Lopez as being primarily about a student who brought a gun to school to sell it?
Any decent lawyer trying to challenge a constitutional interpretation is going to attempt to find the most sympathetic plaintiff they can, even if that plaintiff is highly unrepresentative of the changes they’re pushing for. And, conversely, if you want to reduce First Amendment protections, start by prosecuting a Nazi, or the Westboro Baptist Church. In an ideal world, that would have no impact on the result: it’s irrelevant to the point of law at hand, and even if you care only about public policy consequences you’d get a terribly misleading sense of them from the facts of the case. It’s a trick, a rhetorical move. Don’t fall for it, and don’t be proud of falling for it.
I think Citizens United was rightly decided. But it would be silly to allow the fact that it involved criticism of Clinton to influence my opinion at all, in either direction.
The actual quote from Hillary: “And let’s remember, Citizens United, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our country’s history, was actually a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign. A right-wing organization took aim at me and ended up damaging our entire democracy. So, yes, you’re not going to find anybody more committed to aggressive campaign finance reform than me.”
Slate, in an article both critical of the Citizens United decision and of Clinton’s attacks on the decision, phrases the point much better than I: “Clinton seemed to confirm everything Citizens United apologists have been saying for years. She essentially acknowledged that she hated the ruling because it allowed a corporation to disseminate harshly disparaging speech against her.” (http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/10/hillary_clinton_on_citizens_united_was_terrible_and_terrifying.html)
I think it’s fair to say that a reasonable person on the right could believe that Hillary’s objections to Citizens United are because the case was about her, not because of any devotion to principle (which doesn’t rule out other possibilities).
As for popular support for overturning the decision, I’d also say that most of the population doesn’t know what the Citizens United decision was actually about, nor do they understand what the proposed remedies would actually do. I understand the desire to get money out of politics, but to believe such a rule change would not be abused by the party in power even unconsciously is hopelessly naive.
The actual quote from Hillary: “And let’s remember, Citizens United, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our country’s history, was actually a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign. A right-wing organization took aim at me and ended up damaging our entire democracy.
Yeah, it’s all about her. Right.
I also strongly object to characterizing this as “the” actual quote from Hillary, as if this was the only thing she’d ever said on the topic. Heck, keranih objects to Clinton’s “repeated failure to note that CU was against her political career”! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.
I think it’s fair to say that a reasonable person on the right could believe that Hillary’s objections to Citizens United are because the case was about her, not because of any devotion to principle (which doesn’t rule out other possibilities).
What I said was that Clinton’s opposition to Citizens United tells you nothing about her that you didn’t already know from the fact that she was a Democratic politician. It’s not valid to use it as support for the idea that she is thin-skinned.
If you *already* believe that she is thin-skinned, then Citizens United is *consistent with* that belief but it is not *evidence for* that belief. Bayes’ theorem, people!
A lot of politicians get criticized. What about the specific criticism of Hillary in the movie made by Citizens United is so bad as to be “damaging our entire democracy”? (Note that in the quote the movie itself, not the resulting decision, was “damaging our entire democracy”) I don’t know how to parse this ‘criticizing me is so bad as to damage democracy itself’ as anything other than ‘hypersensitivity to criticism’ or ‘incredible self-centered ego’.
I expect Democrats to claim to oppose Citizens United on the principles outlined in the Slate article. The reason Hillary’s specific statement is important is that the recognized damage to her own cause makes it an admission against interest; she’s not saying this because it sounds good, that it sounds bad gives us no other more likely reason for the statement than that it is her actual belief. The fact that a left-leaning publication agrees with me on this suggests that such an interpretation is not just the product of any biases I may have.
If the left wanted to argue that movies critical of politicians were in fact a problem, they could at least come up with another example for Hillary to cite that avoids the appearance of conflict of interest. (Ideally, they could come up with a token example from all the movies that criticized the right.) What is the probability that of all the movies critical of politicians, especially during the Bush era, the only one actually violating principles claimed by those opposing the Citizens United decision is the one by Citizens United against Hillary?
(Note that in the quote the movie itself, not the resulting decision, was “damaging our entire democracy”)
I don’t know what to say to this other than that your reading is wrong – I feel like it is very obviously the decision that is being referred to.
reason Hillary’s specific statement is important is that the recognized damage to her own cause makes it an admission against interest;
Why do you think this was damaging to her interest?
It sounds bad to *you* and maybe to the 20% of the population that supports Citizens United, but not so much to the 80% who oppose it. Clinton is essentially saying “I really understand why this is a problem.”
It sounds bad to *you* and maybe to the 20% of the population that supports Citizens United, but not so much to the 80% who oppose it. Clinton is essentially saying “I really understand why this is a problem.”
It certainly sounds bad to Slate, which supports overturning Citizens United. Again, while I may be biased, the fact that I can find a distinctly left-leaning political magazine that has made the same connection suggests that the idea is pretty obvious and is not limited to one political leaning.
Hillary could have avoided this by finding another example. If it’s really a problem, there should be another example. Heck, if she’d just stuck to the narrative, we wouldn’t be discussing this.
On Slate’s Political Leanings:
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/lets-rank-the-media-from-liberal-to-conservative-based-on-their-audiences/)
At a slight tangent …
Has anyone tried to estimate which party got more money as a result of Citizens United? It basically made it easier for organizations, such as firms and labor unions, to spend money on politics. Unions mostly support Democrats, firms support both parties. Given how much people on the left attack the decision, it would be interesting to know.
One opinion piece does not represent “Slate,” (does a David Brooks op-ed capture the NYT’s official opinion?) Slate, while left-leaning, may or may not be similar to the voters Clinton thinks she needs to target, Clinton did not admit to anything in the quote you are emphasizing, and the whole idea that admissions against interest should be believed is questionable at best.
So the problem you have with trump is that he wins, instead of letting people who you agree with win.
As it happens, people who support him happen to like that about him.
> And I have not met anyone IRL who is loud and excited for Hilary Clinton.
Loud and excited might not be the best indicator. I’m a Clinton supporter, and I have a Clinton sign in my lawn. One of my neighbors told me “we’re Clinton supporters, too, but we’ve been afraid to put up a sign… some of friends are really rabid Sanders fans”.
I like Sanders. He could have won. I just like Clinton more.
I just like Clinton more.
–Why? Status quo bias?
It’s not in good taste to accuse someone of a cognitive bias before you actually know the justification of their position.
It wasn’t an accusation, it was a question.
Harding, do you smother babies and throw sacks of kittens into rivers?
That’s a negative.
I like Clinton more (far more) because I think Sanders would make a very poor president.
He has little to no experience or appetite for building coalitions. He has little tolerance for the everyday art of the possible that is the nature of every executive position of a very large organization.
Clinton has liberal/progressive goals married to very competent executive and political skills.
” Clinton has liberal/progressive goals *married* to very competent executive and political skills ”
Oh dang, shots fired
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-horror-show-that-is-congress-20050825
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html
In April 2015, obviously, he (unconvincingly) endorsed Hillary Clinton before anyone even thought of the possibility of a Trump presidency:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/04/endorsing-hillary-rodham-clinton.html
“Clinton has liberal/progressive goals married to very competent executive and political skills.”
-First gentleman is not a political position.
No, I didn’t mean, Bill.
Seriously, steelman, be charitable, etc.
Hillary made mistakes at the beginning of Bill’s presidency when she was trying to be an politically active first lady. 23 years ago. On the other hand, she managed to lock up almost every single democratic super-delegate this time around. You don’t do that by being politically incompetent and broadly disliked among the party representatives.
The example of a Bernie surrogate calling (most) elected Democrats “corporate Democratic whores” is instructive. Sure he resigned. But it is of a piece with the broad tenor of his campaign. He wants to break everything and re-form it. He does not believe in the power of incremental change and is promising much more than that.
For what it’s worth, I parse the argument over relative competence of Bernie vs Hilary in just the opposite way from those making it. Both of them are mostly in favor of things I’m against, so the less politically competent the better.
I’m coming to the conclusion that the least bad result we can reasonably hope to get from the election is Hillary plus a Republican congress. Trump plus a Republican congress means a centrist President whose party controls both houses–not quite as bad as Hillary plus a Democratic congress, but close, quite aside from issues of Trump’s personality and style.
It’s logically possible for Gary Johnson to take enough electoral votes to throw the election to the house and for the House to then elect him president, but I don’t think it very likely.
I suspect there will be some making up, or rather Deal Making, but at the rate things are going, a Trump presidency might be a president with two opposition parties in congress. A boon for those that see gridlock as a best case scenario.
@David Friedman:
That is a fair hope on your part, but not related to the question at hand (which, as I understood it, was “Is anyone willing to actively back Hillary here at SSC?”)
I mean, in the sense that the rules of the game allow it to happen, sure. But unless you are willing to posit something like “Hillary kills someone in the street while cameras roll”, the current dynamics of the electorate won’t let this happen. If they did, Mitt Romney would definitely be president right now.
You think centrists are going to leave Hillary for Gary Johnson in enough numbers to actually win states when Gary Johnson will be trying to split Republican base votes with Trump? If Gary Johnson could pull this off, he would be the Republican nominee already.
@HeelBearCub Strictly speaking, Johnson only has to win a state (or electoral votes in a non winner-take-all state like Nebraska. Then a (Republican) House to decide they prefer Johnson to Trump or Clinton, which last doesn’t seem beyond possibility if it ever got that far.
That “if” is still unlikely enough that I’d expect to ride my flying pig to watch the results, but it doesn’t require Johnson to actually get anywhere near a plurality of the popular vote, just enough electoral votes to play spoiler. If the election managed to go to the House and the House stayed Republican[1], I can see him being seen as the least bad among the top three electoral vote getters assuming he qualified.
[1] And since each state gets one vote, it’s at least possible for the House to be numerically Republican for this purpose even if it’s got a Democratic voting majority post election.
@LHN:
He has to peel off enough votes from Trump and Clinton to win a state, but without peeling off enough votes to prevent Trump from winning enough states that Clinton is denied 270.
Maybe if Gary Johnson gets on the ballot in one sure Republican state only, and then if Trump would have won, except for that one state. Try making that argument to the electorate though “Vote for Trump everywhere but here so that Gary Johnson wins”.
LHN wrote:
I was under the impression that in case no candidate gets >50% of the Electoral College, the outgoing House (controlled by Republicans) elects the president from among the top three.
That’s the way it used to be, till the 20th amendment moved the convening of the new Congress to January 3. Since 3 USC § 15 specifies that the electors present their results to a joint session of Congress on January 6[1], it’s the newly elected Congress that deals with them.
(Except the outgoing Vice President can still preside over the Senate if he chooses, since his term doesn’t expire till January 20.)
Since that’s statutory law rather than Constitutional, it’s not completely impossible for the outgoing Congress to try to accelerate the process. But as things are currently set the electors don’t meet till 12/19. You’d need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, plus either a veto-proof majority in both houses or presidential connivance, to have a chance of making it happen in time.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/15
It belatedly occurs to me that Johnson in principle doesn’t need any popular support to be in contention if the election is thrown to the House. Just one faithless elector.
The same, of course, could also put any of the other contenders– Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Sanders (or even someone who didn’t run at all like Ryan or Biden) into contention. You could even have multiple groups of electors contending to make their guy number three to give them a shot in the new House. But of course it’s been well over a century since more than one presidential elector in an election defected.
Mattis crosses the Potomac. 😉
@LHN:
No, you have to have no candidate get to 270 electoral votes. So the 1 faithless elector would have to coincide with a 270-268 vote split. And would spark a massive constitutional crisis.
Again, unless you posit something like “Trump and Hillary take turns murdering old ladies in cold blood live on camera”, that kind of scenario is not happening.
An effective electoral tie is extremely unlikely, but it doesn’t strike me as requiring either one to commit public atrocities.
I’m not seeing how the Constitution operating according to its rules provokes a constitutional crisis. Handwringing and renewed calls to abolish the electoral college, sure, but we had that in 2000 with no long-term effect on the system.
(Maybe afterward the National Popular Vote compact gets enacted in enough states to be tested in court, maybe it doesn’t. If not, I don’t think an amendment is likely to make it through, but maybe it does. Either way, that’s not a crisis.)
The electors almost certainly won’t be punished, faithless elector laws notwithstanding. And it’ll be two years before the members of Congress face election. It’s hard to see the Supreme Court intervening when there’s no constitutional ambiguity. Where will the crisis come from?
(Assuming that voter anger at being deprived of their preferred candidate, who almost won, outweighs the relief at dodging the near-triumph of the other.)
@LHN:
I agree that an essential electoral tie does not require anything particular of the candidates. But the part where you have a faithless elector who deprives the US of the result of their popular election? And throws it to the house? And the house elects someone who was not even part of the campaign? That is not going to happen unless BOTH candidates are so beyond the pale that they both have become completely unacceptable in a rapid and unusual manner.
Because what you are talking about otherwise is a scenario that basically says to the populace “screw you, we elect who we want”. The very legitimacy of the government would be immediately in grave doubt. We would essentially be in a third world tin-pot dictator scenario.
This is REALLY different than what rolled out in 2000. Imagine if in 2000 you had enough faithless Florida electors that they threw the election to the house and the house elected Bloomberg. That is the scenario you are describing.
It’s hardly a tinpot dictatorial move to operate according to clearly written, two-century-plus established rules, however little they’ve needed to be invoked. It’s weird, but so was Gerald Ford becoming President without ever standing for election to any national office. And I suspect that a Republican congress choosing anyone over Trump would be viewed with substantial relief by Democrats and a sizable fraction of Republicans. (However mad the former might that they didn’t cross party lines and elect Clinton.)
(The Trump voters would, of course, be both hopping mad and betrayed. But I don’t think it would be likely to erupt in armed rebellion, so that’s mostly a problem for 2020. By which point perhaps the horse will have learned to sing.)
Regardless, the odds that this will ever be more than a thought experiment are we can agree, extremely low.
@LHN:
Theoretically, 1/2 the house and 2/3s of the senate can remove a sitting president essentially arbitrarily, but it would still provoke a crisis if they did it arbitrarily.
The Bork nomination fight continues to impact politics today, and that was just a tiny toe over the norms that sit on top of the constitution.
The expectation is that the popular vote in each state is what governs the votes of the electoral college. Mess with that and it starts to look like you can make anybody president. Why should Trump II run a campaign at all when he can just “convince” the electors to vote for him?
If Gore had followed the advice of those who thought he should take his fight to the electoral college, and then won that fight, the damage to the legitimacy of the federal government would have been resounding. As amped up as partisanship has gotten, it would be peanuts compared to what would have happened if he did that.
I think the faithless elector version would create a lot of problems as well as being very unlikely, since it depends on an almost perfect tie. But Gary Johnson picking up at least one state, possibly New Mexico where he was a popular governor, is a little more likely and doesn’t require such a close tie to prevent anyone from getting enough electoral votes to be elected.
I’m not sure what the popular response would be if Congress made him president, and perhaps made the VP candidate of one of the major parties VP. It would seem unfair to give the victory to the candidate with by far the fewest votes. On the other hand, each party would prefer him to the other party’s candidate, and a fair number of Republicans and a few Democrats would prefer him to their party’s candidate.
@David Friedman:
Assuming Gary Johnson gets ballot access via the Libertarian party, he will be on the ballot in all 50 states. In order for him to pull enough votes from Trump to win New Mexico outright, he would be pulling votes from Trump everywhere, and you don’t get the close election you want.
You have to posit some white knight candidate who only has ballot access in just a few states, say Mitt Romney, and beats Trump and Hillary in those states. The problem here is that a) if such a white knight existed, they would have won the primary, and b) it require Trump to be popular enough to keep Hillary from 270. If Trump can win on his own, the party is much less concerned about him, frankly.
Now, if Gary Johnson manages to convince Bernie Sanders to run as his VP pick, maybe you get something? But, assuming that, how do you get the House to throw the result to them? Because if that ticket gets traction enough to cost Hillary 270, the likely result is Trump winning outright, because they would be running as liberal-libertarians. It would be a sort-of nonsense ticket.
Perhaps it is failure of imagination, but I don’t see anyway to get someone who a)wins a state (needed to keep someone from 270), b) pulls voters from both parties in noticeable numbers and c) is more acceptable to a presumably Republican house than Trump, the Republican nominee.
I think it’s fairly common for the term to be used when one of the get-out-of-deadlock clauses in a constitution gets used. They’re kind of rare and extreme, after all.
For example, the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis (brief: one party is in government, other party has control of the other house, refuses to pass budget bills. Resolved when the governor-general dismissed the government and forced a double-dissolution election to be held) ran according to provisions in the constitution, but is still referred to as a ‘constitutional crisis’ (well mostly it’s referred to as ‘The Dismissal’…). Theoretically it could happen again today – our Senate retains the ability to block supply, and Australian elections often lead to different parties controlling the House of Representatives and the Senate, because they have different voting mechanisms (one is districted, one is proportional by state).
In order for him to pull enough votes from Trump to win New Mexico outright, he would be pulling votes from Trump everywhere, and you don’t get the close election you want
How so? If, absent Johnson, the voters would have split 55% Trump / 45% Clinton, but Johnson wins 10% of the vote and that from Republican voters only, then Johnson turns what would have been a Yuge Trump Landslide (just ask him) into a close election.
I think 45% Trump / 55% Clinton is far more likely than the reverse, but how confident can you really be on that right now?
Also, Johnson will draw votes from anti-Trump Republican voters, anti-Clinton Democratic voters, and from people who wouldn’t have voted at all if the only two choices were Trump and Clinton. That’s going to further complicate the analysis.
Gary Johnson almost certainly isn’t going to be President, but the theoretical path to get him there runs through territory that I don’t think you have adequately mapped.
The constitution only has power to the extent that the American people accept it. Every so often people think “hacks” to the system that are technically consistent with the constitution, but would immediately lead to the constitution losing legitimacy if they were enacted.
For example, Republicans could guarantee themselves a presidential victory by changing the electoral college allocation rules away from “winner take all” for every Blue state with a Republican state government. Or Obama could promise to pardon anyone who murdered a Republican senator. etc.
One thing that is a bit scary about these days is that the parties are pushing their legitimate powers beyond their traditional bounds, to the point where it erodes those powers’ legitimacy. If, for example, the Garland nomination doesn’t go through, and president Trump manages to appoint someone similar to Scalia next year (or if Clinton wins, and McConnell refuses to confirm anyone through 2020, as some people suggest) there are going to be a lot of leftists questioning why the hell they should respect the court anyway. (Obligatory disclaimer that examples of Democrats pushing limits can easily be produced too.)
@John Schilling:
Because Gary Johnson won’t be on the ballot in only 1 state, he’ll be on the ballot in all 50 (if he has the libertarian nomination). So if he can pull 45% percent of the vote, all from Trump, in some state that votes 40% Clinton (not New Mexico, BTW), then there are a bunch of closer states where he gives Clinton the victory.
So, again, you have to posit that you can field a candidate in only certain states, just enough to throw it to the house. In my view, the scenario that Republicans are really worried about is a Donald Trump “big loss”. If Donald Trump really looks like he has a shot at winning on his own steam, I don’t think you are going to see much push from Republicans behind making him lose the election. But even assuming this is so, can you pick the candidate and the few states where you can do that right now? Because now is about when you need to be working really, really, really hard to get ballot access.
What you would really need to throw the election to the house is a candidate who can beat Hillary in enough states so SHE doesn’t go over 270, but don’t give those states to Trump. Well, the Republicans aren’t going to be able to field that candidate. Again, maybe a really pissed off Bernie. But he isn’t doing the work to get on those ballots as an independent. But then you are talking about the house making who, Paul Ryan?, president. Again, constitutional crisis, although less so than the faithless elector scenario.
The thing is that money and work and organization (and a lot of it) would have to be going on right now to make that possible, and I’m not seeing it.
Endorse HBC here. The problem with any of these scenarios is that the system is winner-take-all by state.
To make one of these scenarios happen you need a *regional* third-party candidate with strong appeal in his region and very weak or equally divided appeal outside it. Hard to imagine that happening these days.
@Chalid The Constitution survived the elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, and 2000, plus FDR’s repudiation of the century and a half old informal two-term limit and his attempted court-packing, and Gerald Ford’s accession to office by appointment by someone who resigned just ahead of impeachment. (Having been to Ford’s museum and library, I’m actually pretty impressed with him. But the bare bones of the story sound like the machinations of a banana republic, or the Putin-Medvedev two-step.) So I’m pretty sure it would survive Republicans choosing a two-term Republican governor, in the unlikely event that the country was faced with what’s otherwise a statistical tie between two candidates who both had >50% negative ratings.
I think the GWB administration gives a fairly good sense of what it looks like for large parts of the electorate to think the President’s accession is illegitimate and the Court corrupt. That neither prevented Bush from being elected to a second term nor damped Democratic reliance on the courts as a vehicle for political and social change (as one might expect if the institution had lost legitimacy).
@LHN:
There is a difference between saying a constitutional crisis would occur and claiming that the country would not survive. Constitution crises are damaging, not necessarily fatal.
Now, look at 2000 one of your examples. Gore accepted the ruling of the SCOTUS. He did not provoke a constitutional crisis (nor were we in one before that). The normal channels spoke and that was the end of it.
Another example, the court packing plan, the bill ultimately failed. No constitutional crisis.
FDR violated a tradition of only being elected for two terms. It is important to note that Teddy and Grant had already run for a third, non-consecutive terms, which means that the nation had had ample time to codify the tradition. More importantly, FDR was broadly popular, winning 38 of 48 states and 85% of the electoral college. Being elected to a third term or fourth term with those results hardly looks like losing the support of the populace. The popular vote legitimizes the move.
That is nothing like what we are talking about here.
2000 was definitely a constitutional crisis. The SCOTUS is not supposed to decide elections. The fact that Gore accepted their decision just meant that the constitutional crisis didn’t lead to civil war.
Because Gary Johnson won’t be on the ballot in only 1 state, he’ll be on the ballot in all 50 (if he has the libertarian nomination). So if he can pull 45% percent of the vote, all from Trump, in some state that votes 40% Clinton (not New Mexico, BTW), then there are a bunch of closer states where he gives Clinton the victory.
Yes, but so what? Clinton getting the victory in a bunch of states in no way rules out a close election. Clinton getting the victory in a bunch of states – roughly half of them – is necessary for a close election. And it still counts as a close election if the only reason she gets those states is because of Johnson.
You seem to be assuming the proposed model is to start with a close election, add Gary Johnson to claim New Mexico’s five electoral votes while changing nothing else, and wind up with a hung election. You’re right that this doesn’t work, but that’s not what we are talking about.
We are talking about an election that would have been e.g. Trump 370, Clinton 168 if it were just the two of them. Johnson’s entry draws enough marginal voters to swing 100 EV from Trump to Clinton(*), while campaigning intensely to claim New Mexico’s 5 EV from Trump for himself.
In that case, in spite of his entry having siphoned off enough Trump voters to give Hillary a net 100-point gain, the result is Trump 265, Hillary 268, Johnson 5. Enter the House of Representatives.
* Net; there will probably be a few states where Johnson’s entry favors Trump.
@John Schilling:
OK, if (and it is a big hug massive if) that scenario is in play, then yes.
But that scenario is not the concern of people who are talking up the idea of somehow throwing the election to the house so that Trump isn’t elected. Trump is splitting the Republican party along some ideological fault lines that the establishment didn’t even quite realize were there.
Again, if the Republican establishment actually thought that Trump was on pace to destroy Clinton, they would mostly just be getting in line behind him. But the concern being talked up (by Republicans, importantly) is that Trump will a)get destroyed b)suppress down-ballot results and c) may lose Republicans the Senate and, on the outside, the House.
Trump isn’t even very popular among Republicans, let alone the broad electorate. Hillary is broadly popular inside her own party which means that predictions that Trump is going to outperform her in Democratic leaning states aren’t what are being bandied about by anyone but Trump.
@suntzuanime:
The recount in Florida was already in the hands of the courts and had already made it to the Florida State Supreme Court. I didn’t agree with the SCOTUS ruling, but all the SCOTUS ruling did was prevent even more recounting of ballots, which had already been counted and recounted and the result of which counts kept coming out in favor of Bush.
This is entirely different than a few individual electors choosing to simply ignore the results of the popular vote, which is what is being proposed here.
John Schilling’s model seems to rely an awful lot on the idea of Johnson pulling votes from Hillary. While I’ll admit that it’s certainly possible for a Libertarian candidate to draw votes from the Democrats, (classical liberalism, and all that) in today’s political climate I don’t think it’s really fair to assume that will actually happen, at least in significant enough numbers to make a difference. Yes, it’s true that there are some issues where the Libertarian platform matches the Democratic one more closely than the Republican one, but as our host said recently, the ideology is not the movement.
That said, am I alone in thinking that I wouldn’t necessarily mind a Constitutional crisis of the sort that a faithless elector might cause? I’ve long thought that America’s political climate in general would be a lot healthier if we moved away from the winner-take-all first-past the post system, and that the electoral college is an anachronism that doesn’t serve any practical purpose, but the only way to change any of that would be a Constitutional amendment, and I can’t imagine there ever being the political will to do that without some sort of crisis beforehand.
Admittedly, I can’t say for sure that whatever we get from that amendment will be better, but I don’t think it would end up being significantly worse. And even as tense as things are right now politically, I don’t think we’re quite at the point where a Constitutional crisis would spark a civil war, just yet.
“If Trump can win on his own, the party is much less concerned about him, frankly.”
I was commenting on my concerns, not the concerns of the Republican party. I’m not sure if I find Trump with a Republican House and Senate more or less scary than Hillary with a Democratic House and Senate.
So far as the party is concerned, if we assume my unlikely scenario happens, they get to choose between Trump, who is unpopular with the party establishment even if tolerable, and an ex-Republican governor. And even if a majority of Republican representatives prefer Trump, the minority might ally with the Democrats in favor of Johnson.
So far as the legitimate worry that a strong Gary Johnson campaign would throw the election to Trump, that assumes he doesn’t pull a substantial number of voters away from Hillary. It also ignores his special position in the state where he was a popular governor.
John Schilling’s model seems to rely an awful lot on the idea of Johnson pulling votes from Hillary.
The Trump 370 / Clinton 168 baseline model, which I believe is within the error bars of current polling, would allow Gary Johnson to tie up the election while pulling votes only from Donald Trump. So, no.
I expect that, if it comes to that, most of Johnson’s support would come from people who otherwise wouldn’t have voted at all – and there will be a lot of those come November. Of the votes he does actually draw away from the major-party candidates, I agree that most but not all will be Republicans who would otherwise have voted for Trump.
And, as David Friedman notes, in the extremely unlikely event that this does go to the House, a Johnson victory would depend on at least some Democratic delegations holding their noses and saying “If we can’t have Clinton, better Johnson than Trump”.
Wait, what? Where are you seeing that? The Cook Report is showing 304/44/190 for Clinton, toss-up, Trump.
Even if you back out the lean Clinton (Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida = 87) and the likely Clinton (Minnesota, Michigan = 26) she still has 191.
Dropping to 168 would take a miracle.
I admit, I too feel a vague sense of confusion at someone endorsing Clinton.
I’m pretty much a Bernie supporter, but I can comprehend hating him. He’s flawed. I basically hate Trump, but I can comprehend liking him; he’s charismatic.
But Clinton? Why? Does she have policies you support? Do you think she’d be a good leader, or is a particularly ethical person, or has some other presidential quality? Is there some sort of coherent political philosophy buried deep in there that you support?
… or is it, as Harding may have been uncharitably groping toward, a belief in the ramshackle meta-system of political corruption that select who gets to be the “Establishment” candidate? I mean, things had been going pretty well lately. Western democracy is pretty darn nice, as these things go…
From talking to Clinton supporters IRL (who are relieved to hear that I’m supporting Trump and therefore won’t be able to take a position of moral superiority towards them), there are two reasons people endorse Clinton. One is, like you say, things had been going pretty well lately, at least for some folks, and Sanders, Trump, and even Cruz seem more inclined to boat-rocking than Clinton. Shouts that the system is corrupt and broken are less appealing to people who have been well-served by the system. The second reason is a sense of personal identification. Just as I identify with Trump’s presentation as a loathsome troll, some people identify with Clinton’s presentation as a total lame-o. All of her horrible attempts at memes and social media that get her cast as “out of touch” let the out-of-touch see her as in touch with them. (I’m reading between the lines on this one, but I think it’s accurate.)
Clinton projects (or others project for her) an appearance of competence. It seems, based on how she carries herself and how she speaks and so on and so forth, that she will be able to successfully carry out the duties of the President, subject to the usual caveats for a politician. Sanders, while he has interesting ideas, seems likely to be rather ineffective, liable to give up a leadership role on any particular thing to the first (or, really, most recent) person to ask. Trump and Cruz both seem actively dangerous; Trump for reasons outlined by other commentors, Cruz for his debt ceiling shenanigans. Turning briefly to other candidates, I would say Kasich and Rubio presented the same appearance of competence (less so Rubio after Christie finished with him). Christie I would probably see as competent where I not from New Jersey and aware of his style of governing there, which shifts him over to the “danger” category (substantially less so than Cruz or Trump, though). Fiorina strikes me as incompetent, possibly because I’m tech-adjacent. Carson confused me until he quit to do a book tour. Oh and Jeb. I always feel bad for Jeb. It was plain from the beginning he wasn’t going to win. Such a sad story. Why did they ever make him run? It wasn’t necessary. Let the poor boy have his retirement.
Do people who are opposed to Clinton think she would be merely a sub-optimal president (good luck finding an optimal president) or a worse than average president? If the latter, what’s your line of thought?
Worse than average.
She has not shown herself to be able to create amacable agreement between opposing parties, she has a history of severe misjudgement of other nations’ interests and goals, domestically she promotes identity politics and is a poster child for crony capitalism. (In this she represents the worst of both parties.) As both a Democrat and a woman she would be forced to use military intervention when a man or a Republican would not have their bluff called.
I have not been a fan for a long time, and I regard the Bengazi attack itself as the sort of thing which happens from time to time. I do hold her responsible for lying to the American public about the motivation for that attack, and find the attempt to blame free expression of speech – and to actually defend violent reaction to speech – horrific.
The combination of incompetence and willful disregard of the law which led to the home server is just the icing on the cake.
I think Bernie is a crazy old professor whose economic theories would break the world economy. But I’d vote for him over Trump, no problem.
Not Clinton.
Do people who are opposed to Clinton think she would be merely a sub-optimal president (good luck finding an optimal president) or a worse than average president? If the latter, what’s your line of thought?
Almost certainly worse than average.
First, lack of relevant experience. A single Senate term and one more as a Cabinet secretary is near the bottom of what makes for a successful President in the post-ACW era. State, admittedly, is probably the best cabinet posting for a Presidential apprenticeship, but only one term? Benghazi and the followup, which as others have noted is more clusterfuck than malice, but where are the great successes to balance against it? Hillary’s actual experience in government seems to have been treated more as ticket-punching for the resume than an actual career accomplishment or learning experience.
Second, Arrogance, and hostility to anyone not 100% on her team. That’s a particularly bad thing to go with inexperience. Again from the other commenters, treating Citizens United as cause for a vendetta rather than simply a tactical defeat, isn’t good leadership or good politics, and it’s not an outlier for Clinton.
Third, object-level policy issues, both in terms of values and consequences, but we don’t need to rehash all of that here.
Fourth, nobody really likes her. It isn’t necessary for a President to be liked, but it does give them political capital they can use to accomplish things they otherwise couldn’t, and it gives them margin to survive mistakes without going into a full-on wagon-circling defense or worse counterattack. Hillary is going to be playing aggressive defense her entire term.
And finally, she’s a crook, straight up, and always has been. Running classified material through her own email server is just the last example and evidence of that, and should have been enough to disqualify her even before her campaign started.
But she’s an experienced, capable crook, and like anyone in the extortion-racket business will be careful not to actually drive her “customers” out of business. The republic can survive four years of Clinton rule.
And the alternative is Donald Trump
@John, I have no dog in this race, but you’ve made me curious: how do you get “crook” from “running classified material through her own email server” ?
Granted it was a very bad idea and at least technically illegal, did she actually make money out of it somehow?
“how do you get “crook” from “running classified material through her own email server” ?”
Presumably on the theory that she used her own server not in order to expose classified material but in order to conceal unethical or illegal activities reflected in her correspondence.
But the best evidence that she is a crook is the old cattle market case, which looks very much like funneling illegal bribes to her husband, disguised as speculative profits.
@ HBC
all the SCOTUS ruling did was prevent even more recounting of ballots, which had already been counted and recounted and the result of which counts kept coming out in favor of Bush.
You might want to check that before using it as a heavy duty talking point. My memory is that SCOTUS may have stopped recounting of some already recounted votes, and also prevented recounting of some votes that thus never got recounted. Iirc after the deadlines had passed, the news media got ahold of those votes and counted them under several different scenarios, and they came out for Gore under 5 of 8 scenarios (or some such ratio).
“how do you get “crook” from “running classified material through her own email server?”
The Clinton Foundation is a charitable organization. Any suspicion that it acts as a front for selling diplomatic access is unfounded nonsense. Just look at our official email server.
PS: please ignore the unofficial email server that we actually conducted all our business on.
@houseboatonstyx:
I am well aware that I am glossing over the finer points of the Florida recount. I actually did work at a State Board of Elections for many years, said work being at least partially motivated by HAVA which passed after the Florida debacle.
The primary point of dispute in Florida was whether vote counting in some of the counties accurately reflected the intent of the voter, especially where no vote was tallied. Said voting procedures had been used for many decades without (legal) complaint. The judiciary making a decision that essentialy said the voting procedure would need to stand for that election, even though I think the decision was wrong, doesn’t rise to the level of constitutional crisis, in my opinion.
I have no dog in this race, but you’ve made me curious: how do you get “crook” from “running classified material through her own email server”
What David Friedman said, on both counts. If you see someone with an empty gas can standing next to a mound of burning documents, the proper question is not “Gasoline costs money; how can they be making a profit on this?”
Like most crooked politicians and other white-collar criminals, if Hillary ever does go down it will probably be for the coverup rather than any of the original offenses – which I don’t think we need to try and catalog here.
@John, OK, so you were presenting the use of a private server as evidence of other wrongdoing, expecting that your audience would already be aware of the relevant allegations? That makes more sense.
It might have been clearer if you’d said “official material” or “incriminating material” or something like that, the classified material would seem to be a red herring in this context. (On the other hand, it seems that all the US readers understood what you meant!)
(Having now skimmed the relevant Wikipedia articles, I’m unconvinced that the evidence is as strong as you suggest, but I don’t care enough to attempt to argue about it.)
@Harry: Clinton both violated federal law and endangered national security by running highly classified material through a private email server, and rather obviously used that server to avoid the whole pesky transparency-in-government thing and cover up God only knows what. Each of those is individually objectionable. Clinton’s personal corruption is probably rather petty, and harmless except insofar as it reveals her character. She’s a crook. Playing fast and loose with TS/SCI in the process, makes her a dangerous crook, even if her motives are personal and petty.
Making it OK for her to get away with all of this because she is Saint Hillary of the Clintons, Only Hope for Democracy in America, is corrosive to the very concept of rule of law and objectionable as well.
@John: OK, but from my perspective, the fact that she sent potentially classified material via the private system makes the theory that she was using the private system to avoid transparency far less likely. (If it was me, at any rate, I’d be very careful to use the official system for anything that might attract attention or provide an excuse for someone to audit the private server.) So I hope you can see why focusing on that left me a bit confused as to what you were saying.
For what little it’s worth, I can add one relevant observation from my own field of expertise: the stated motivation, wanting to continue to use BlackBerry phones, really is entirely credible. That’s exactly the sort of thing IT departments have to deal with all the time. (And generally speaking, if management won’t enforce the rules – or when it is management that is breaking them – there’s not much IT can do about it.)
How does “wanting to use a Blackberry” translate to “setting up a private email server”? The people I know who use their own Blackberries, mostly use Gmail or Yahoo. Setting up your own basement server, with any degree of security and confidentiality, is definitely the hard way to go about it, and it’s just as illegal as simply using Gmail, so I’m not seeing the motive for that part. People autoforwarding their office mail to Gmail, yes, that’s common and it’s wrong but it’s easy to understand why basically honest people do it.
Setting up a private server in your basement is an uncommonly wrong thing to do, which suggests a different motive.
And, classified vs. unclassified is orthogonal to honest vs. corrupt. Some information will fall into both categories, some into neither, and sometimes people will make mistakes about that. If you’re being corrupt the odds of discovery will increase if you have to spread your corruption across two servers rather than keeping it to one (particularly one that you control).
My understanding is that the private server already existed at the time Clinton became Secretary of State, so since she couldn’t use the official servers without giving up her Blackberries, the path of least resistance would have been sticking with the status quo. (But perhaps there is evidence that the private server was set up at that time? But that seems unlikely, since the Blackberries in question already existed, and must have been running on something.)
(To anticipate your next objection: Gmail only became available to the general public in 2007, and I for one wouldn’t have trusted it for anything important at that time – the concept was too novel.)
Oh, I should perhaps have mentioned that at least one of the academics in the faculty I work for is running his own email server, and I’ve run across a number of students with private servers – I don’t know whether they manage the servers themselves, necessarily, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. So in my experience, it isn’t all that uncommon even nowadays. (Granted we’re talking about the Computer Science department here, so an unusual concentration of techies, but even so.)
Before becoming Secretary, Hillary shared a server with Bill and everyone else at the Clinton Foundation. After, she had her own server, probably run by the same people.
Colin Powell used AOL email, but only from desktop computers. That sounds a lot more secure, but Hillary probably didn’t know that she could get gmail imap on her blackberry. Fewer of his emails have been determined to have contained classified info, but probably a larger proportion (not counting deleted emails). He also used email on the classified system, while Hillary only used the one system, relying on her aides to deal with electronic system for classified materials.
I’m still not seeing how anyone gets from “I want to use a Blackberry” to “I need my own private email server”.
Because, for anyone who isn’t a techie, setting up a private email server is about the least convenient possible way to use a Blackberry. And always have been, even before Gmail in 2007. Anybody who has ever had or wanted their very own Blackberry and asked, “Now how do I make email work on this thing?”, will have got an answer that involves IMAP and a bog-standard commercial email account, not a kludge with a server in their basement.
And anyone with a server in their basement, has it for a reason that isn’t “I needed it to make my Blackberry work”.
I think that would depend who you asked. I can easily imagine the answer being “no problem, I’ll set up a server for you”. Particularly if, as Douglas’s post suggests, the person you asked was the person who was running the server you had been using up until that point. (I could definitely see myself having said that, under the right circumstances. Nowadays I wouldn’t dare, of course.)
I can also see a legitimate privacy motivation … hmmm, I’m concerned that this could be misinterpreted, but I guess I can take it for granted that nobody here is likely to fall victim to the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” fallacy … if you’re dealing with sensitive material, e.g., stuff reporters might like to get their hands on, a server administered by someone you trust personally is likely to be far more appealing than a server administered by a business whose technicians you’ll likely never even meet.
It looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of trying to convince you, though, which isn’t what I’d intended. All I wanted to say is that, speaking with some experience in the area, I don’t find the argument that the private email server demonstrates malice convincing. I’ll try to leave it at that.
but I guess I can take it for granted that nobody here is likely to fall victim to the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” fallacy
Government officials don’t get this. Their records have special handling rules.
The simplest way to make sure you follow the complicated rules is to have someone who doesn’t work for you and whose job title is “carry out the complicated rules” carry out the rules.
When Clinton made the choice to run her own server, she chose to take all that responsibility onto herself. And we know she failed, because initial FOIA requests for Benghazi stuff returned no records from her.
You came up with the right reasons, though: she wanted control. She didn’t want some pissant G-12 deciding which of her emails would be released in regards to an FOIA request. She wanted her direct employee to do it.
I do know several women over the age of 40 who support her on those grounds alone (gender.) The identification is esp strong in a few with broken/no marriages.
Why Clinton?
1. She is the devil we know.
2. I think divided government works best, and I think the past 35 years support this view.
I don’t think this comment is really directed at me, because I voted for Sanders, but I’ll answer anyway:
I support Hillary because, of the available candidates with a snowball’s chance of winning, her policies will be most likely to improve the welfare of the country (and the world), while protecting the rights of its citizens. This is the basis on which I make all of my voting decisions, and I find it incredible that anyone could use any other selection criteria. My only real concern is that she might spend her entire term so mired in scandal that she’s unable to govern effectively.
If all of their relevant character traits had been switched around, if Bernie had been the inveterate sleaze-weasel with decades of skeletons in the closet and Clinton honest and upright, I would still have voted for Bernie. I view our obsession with the character, moral fiber, and private lives of politicians as deeply unhealthy, like children being distracted by a shiny bauble. What really matters is policy, and whether it promotes the common good.
It at least presumes the happy situation that at least one of the candidates fits those positive criteria. I don’t think I’ve ever done better than “hopefully likely to degrade the welfare of the country (and the world) and erode the rights of its citizens measurably less than their rival(s)” in my voting career.
I strongly agree. I’ll take the crook over the idiot any day. There’s a lot to disagree with Moldbug but his basic point about government is important. The best government is one that governs well. Who cares if politicians don’t meet up to our demanding personal standards as long as they are doing well?
But there’s crooks who govern well and crooks who don’t. IOW, there’s crooks, and there’s malignant narcissists.
I’ll vote for a competent crook over an incompetent saint. But I’ll vote for an idiot over a malignant narcissist, and I would classify Trump and Hillary Clinton in the latter category.
Like, the ideal is someone who aligns with your ideology and knows what they are doing.
Second-best is someone who has a sincere viewpoint you disagree with, but at least knows how to perform the job. Their intentional policies may make things worse, but they won’t fuck things up on accident.
Then there’s incompetents. Even if they are trying to do things you want to do, they don’t know how, and they’ll fuck everything up in the process, which always causes more damage than competently-executed plans to do bad things.
But below them, are the people who will constantly fuck things up because they cannot separate their feelings from the world, and will make policies with no regard to whether or not they fuck things up, only if they fit the emotional landscape they wish to fit the world into.
Mitt Romney would lessen people’s ability to live on welfare by lowering its budget. Bernie Sanders would do something badly thought out that was attempting to help people on welfare, but was executed so badly and created such perverse incentives it made their lives even worse than they would be under Romney. Clinton and Trump would institute welfare policy solely designed to flatter Clinton or Trump’s emotions, without competence OR pure motivations, taht would wind up an even more bloated and unnavigable mess because each component was actively fighting with the others.
@ MugaSofer
But Clinton? Why? Does she have policies you support? Do you think she’d be a good leader, or is a particularly ethical person, or has some other presidential quality? Is there some sort of coherent political philosophy buried deep in there that you support?
All of the above. As for Enthusiasm(TM)!, Clintonistas who lived during our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity*, already know what the Clintons can do in a Billary’s third term. But after what happened in November 2000 and in the 2008 primary, we’re busy knocking wood with crossed fingers. On Inauguration Day, we’ll clap.
For younger Hillary supporters’ enthusiasm, see the links I posted for Jill.
* http://www.theonion.com/article/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of-peace-and-pros-464
Bill Clinton flew to Arkansas to execute a convict so incapable of understanding what was happening to him he saved a piece of pecan pie for later. That political philosophy resulted in being more Reganite then Regan: Bill Clinton cut welfare, which Reagan couldn’t even do.
@ wubbles
Bill Clinton had the same kind of problem Obama did: a GOP Congress with a near-veto-proof majority. He kept vetoing their attempts, finally getting the best compromise he could.
> But Clinton? Why? Does she have policies you support? Do you think she’d be a good leader, or is a particularly ethical person, or has some other presidential quality? Is there some sort of coherent political philosophy buried deep in there that you support?
Generally, I trust Clinton to put more thorough thought into policy than any of the other candidates. She seems more likely to listen and compromise. I find that to be “presidential”.
I actually find her ethical system to be more like mine than Sanders’s is – sometimes situations require you to make ethical compromises rather than seeing everything in a moral black and white. I don’t find any of her so-called “scandals” to be even the slightest bit important.
And I don’t think the system is as broken as people make it out to be. I mean, if you compare the US to Canada – vastly different electoral system, but in the end the policies aren’t *that* different. Mostly government lags social changes, but eventually the law converges onto something inside the society’s Overton Window.
Part of this is informed by seeing things I thought would never change actually change very quickly: gay rights, drug legalization.
Not that I don’t have major problems with our society! I hope that we can move to a world with less violence, more support for people who are struggling, more freedom for people with diverse experiences, and generally less us-vs-them thinking.
I guess part of this is informed by sort of a Systemantics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics ) point of view – our society is more like an organism than a computer program, and I don’t want to do a lot of extra surgery on its vital organs.
“I don’t find any of her so-called “scandals” to be even the slightest bit important.”
It’s very old, but have you looked at the cattle futures story from back when her husband was governor? I cannot see any plausible interpretation of that other than as a way in which a firm could pass bribery money to her husband through her.
My basis for that is an old article analyzing the transactions by a libertarian writer who was a Soros protegé and a successful speculator.
Three possibilities:
1. You have never looked at the case.
2. You have looked at it but disagree with my interpretation (in which case I would be interested in your explanation).
3. You don’t see funneling bribes to a state governor as the slightest bit important.
@ David Friedman
2. You have looked at it but disagree with my interpretation (in which case I would be interested in your explanation).
This was discussed here not long ago. Even Wikipedia had enough information to dismiss the bribery theory.
Republicans have been investigating Hillary every time she breathes, since her time as First Lady of Arkansas. They haven’t found anything that held up, yet.
Covering up that many crimes would argue the Clintons capable of faking the moon shot, even while being born in Kenya.
“@ David Friedman
2. You have looked at it but disagree with my interpretation (in which case I would be interested in your explanation).
This was discussed here not long ago. ”
I may have missed it. Can you point me at the explanation of how Hilary made quite a lot of money speculating in a market she had no expertise in while betting, on average, against the direction the market ended up moving? A way of eliminating what seems to me the obvious explanation?
Donald Trump almost certainly worked with the mob. There are no good choices this time around. It’s even worse than Bush v. Gore. Worst of my lifetime I’m pretty sure.
(a) If they’re digging up dodgy pasts, unfortunately Hillary has a lot of skeletons in the cupboard – things like the Vince Wallace suicide which a good few conspiracy theorists seem to like to think was murder, etc. There’s a lot of negative coverage of Bill and Hillary to regurgitate
(b) Swooning over Bernie as the favoured Dem candidate. Nobody seems to want to do any dirt-digging on “Feel The Bern” and come on, he’s a career politician, he must have done something dodgy (or that can be perceived as such) at least once in his career
(c) the Republican candidates – coverage has seemed to be more mockery (“none of these losers should be taken seriously”) rather than establishing them as credibly Evil (the worst I’ve heard about Ted Cruz, apart from the “Zodiac Killer” meme, is that apparently he might be a raving theocrat if he wants to get into power, and since most of that type of coverage boils down to ‘raving theocrat = did not donate to Planned Parenthood’, I remain sceptical on that – show me real proof he wants to establish a Puritan-style Commonwealth of the Elect or shut up).
>(b) Swooning over Bernie as the favoured Dem candidate. Nobody seems to want to do any dirt-digging on “Feel The Bern” and come on, he’s a career politician, he must have done something dodgy (or that can be perceived as such) at least once in his career
Also, since Bernie is way behind and the race is almost over, Hillary’s campaign isn’t going to spend any time and effort digging up dirt. They’re too busy digging up dirt on Trump for the general.
Hillary has also made a pretty obvious, understandable effort to play nice with Bernie in order not to piss off his supporters so much that they vote for Trump, or, more likely, stay home for the general.
@Deiseach – Vince Foster, not Vince Wallace. otherwise much agreed.
There’s a meme on the right that the media has held its fire on Trump, and will now obliterate him in the general with the REAL negative coverage. I don’t see it. I think they’ve taken their best shot already. Likewise, I think that the media has not really engaged with the meat of Hillary’s negatives, and that is largely because the Republican fire has likewise been aimed at Trump.
Yeah, where can you go from “Trump is literally Adolf Hitler”? There are no gears left to switch to.
Well, he is a rapist …
@MugaSofer
-Unfounded accusation.
Not unfounded, but perhaps inadequately founded, since the sole basis seems to have been a claim made during a divorce fight and later in part retracted.
Also, legally speaking, whether the claim counts as rape depends on what state the event happened in, which I don’t think the linked story said. By that time all states recognized the possibility of marital rape, but the standards varied.
To be clear, that was an example of possible escalation past Nazi. The media has never really cared about whether accusations are merely partly founded.
Hypothetically, the Media could simply dismiss Trump as a joke. A joke not worthy of being loudly laughed at, because it’s over. He won, the Republicans showed they were idiots, and now we can expect a Democrat presidency: what will Clinton do in office?
It’s be easy. Clinton is way ahead in the current polls. Without a media presence beyond Internet memes that can’t quite decide if they’re ironic, Trump would crumble. It would be easy.
But it won’t happen, because the Media aren’t actually strategic.
The Huffington Post tried.
Right, just like when the Huffington Post declared that they’d only cover Trump on the entertainment page because he wasn’t a serious candidate.
I’m pretty sure Trump’s campaign petered out and he dropped out a few weeks later.
Moving someone to the Entertainment page for a few months while covering them like crazy isn’t no-platforming them. It’s extra-double not no-platforming them when only one publication does it and they capitulate after a few months.
If the media treated Trump the way they treat people who actually don’t have a chance – i.e. by not covering him – then he wouldn’t win.
I know several left of center baby boomer women that are very excited about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency if not Hillary Clinton per se. When this came up my mother (born 1950) said something like “You have to remember I grew up in a different era. There were five women in my entire law school class.”
Re: solar, you may want to take a look at this wiki. This should help calibrate you on how fast/slow solar is actually growing. Regarding the price curve, subsidy vs. non-subsidy does indeed complicate the picture (although one could argue it also complicates the picture for other non-solar electricity sources). Quick aside: The price in Scott’s link is bid price from solar companies, and “price” and “cost” are not the same thing (price will include a strong subsidy effect; the effect on cost will be less, but not zero). Another complicating factor is that the cost of a solar module is strongly dependent on polysilicon material costs, which were quite volatile in the early aughts. Although, as module prices decrease (through scale and incremental technological improvements), more and more of the cost is bundled up in what industry folks call “balance of system” and “soft costs” which include ancillary hardware (inverters, moutning), permitting costs, labor, etc. See this link for more info.
Full disclosure: I work in solar, but I have not ever edited the wiki page.
There was a really simple and straightforward story most people could use to rationalize away his early lead. To wit:
– This early in the race nobody KNOWS most of the other candidates, whereas Trump being a reality TV star and general newsmaker more people have HEARD OF Trump. But as the campaign goes on we’ll get more exposure to the other candidates and eventually public opinion will settle on whichever one turns out to be electable and seems “presidential”. Maybe Jeb!
– This early in PREVIOUS elections the guy who was leading usually didn’t win – tortoise and the hare. Early leaders tend to flame out, so we shouldn’t read much into it.
– Trump has huge negatives, so as people learn more about him they’ll hate him more – nobody has ever gotten elected with this high disapproval ratings.
– The republican race started out with MANY candidates all dividing the “someone republican-ish and presidential” vote. As the field winnows, even if Trump keeps his ~30% the remaining ~70% will land on whatever non-Trump candidates remain.
– Seriously, TRUMP???? Really???
In retrospect, it sounds like rationalizing but it wasn’t ridiculous. Remember the 2008 election? Remember the 2012 election? And look at what happened to people like Ben Carson and Fiorina in this last election. So we were wrong but had good non-ideological reasons for believing what we did(admittedly, the ideological reasons were a factor).
Trump— Why did so many people predict Trump had such a poor shot at victory? I remember reading about his poll numbers last August , where he was consistently beating his opponents in multiple states.
Trump was consistently scoring about 20-40% in the polls and early primaries in multiple states. Nobody expected him to do better than that except maybe break 50% in his home state of New York and maybe NJ/PN. And for the most part, that expectation was consistently proven correct through the primaries.
What people didn’t predict was that e.g. Kasich would stay in the race much past Super Tuesday, never mind to the very end, such that 40% would be a winning plurality for Trump. And I don’t think anyone even has a good retrospective understanding of why that happened.
Kasich got what he thought to be a mandate from New Hampshire, than another one from Ohio. He only dropped out when all hope was truly lost.
Any hope that was remotely grounded in fact or reason, was gone long before Kasich dropped out. Rationally, his best hope for being inaugurated as POTUS was to drop out early, and try to come back as a dark-horse candidate in a contested primary.
But if someone wants to believe that winning just their home state, and that on a plurality, counts as a “mandate”, that’s not the sort of behavior that other people are going to be able to reliably forecast. Though the possibility should have been sufficient to have everybody carrying large error bars on their electoral predictions.
If the same rules are in effect for this convention as last, Kasich would have needed to win multiple states to be nominated at the convention.
If the party was really united about #NeverTrump, they would have actually started cooperating around it far earlier and more meaningfully that’s the Kasich/Cruz fiasco. The problem is that non-establishment candidates like Cruz and Carson stayed in for so long, making establishment cooperation unable to provide a single establishment candidate who seemed inevitable. That and the establishment candidates all had fatal flaws.
If the same rules are in effect for this convention as last, Kasich would have needed to win multiple states to be nominated at the convention.
There was never a realistic possibility of Kasich winning on the first ballot. And while I’m not sure, I believe that the current rules would allow anyone with any delegates at all to win on a later ballot. I am certain that the rules allow the delegates to vote to change the rules as necessary to avoid infinite deadlock or other clearly undesirable outcomes when there isn’t a first-round winner.
That was Kasich’s only chance, however slim, of winning the GOP nomination in 2016. He needed two things to make it even possible: A contested convention, and status as a Serious Candidate. Winning Ohio gave him the second, or as close as he was ever going to get. Everything he did after Ohio, guaranteed that he’d never have the contested convention where he could even argue the case.
I might lose some Trumpkin friends here, but I actually think that the prediction that Trump had a minimal chance of winning the nomination was the correct forecast to make last summer and fall, on the evidence available then. Trump’s rise was due to a combination of his impressive political skill, the GOP’s dysfunction, and sheer dumb luck.
It’s true that Trump consistently led in the polls starting not long after he announced last summer. What people might have forgotten is that he still didn’t have that much support. From June 16 to August 31, his polling average never crossed 25%, and while it briefly hit 30% in September, it started falling again after that. A 25% vote share is enough to win a 17-candidate race, but Trump would need to pick up more support to hang on after the field started to consolidate. For a period around Halloween, Ben Carson was essentially tied with Trump. We’d seen this pattern before in 2012, with guys like Herman Cain briefly polling really well before falling to Earth.
Trump’s polling didn’t start to approach the high 30s until after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. His proposal to temporarily suspend Muslims from entering the U.S. was treated with shock by mainstream media outlets and politicians, but it was really popular with Republican voters. As terror moved to the forefront of the campaign, Trump gained a lot from his willingness to say things outside of the usual Overton window — he deserves a lot of the credit here for coming up with a policy proposal that really struck a nerve with the electorate. But without the Paris attacks, Trump might have been another Herman Cain, or at best another Pat Buchanan — a factional candidate who routinely managed about 25-30% of the vote, but not more.
This willingness had a downside, too: it made Trump unacceptable to large parts of the Republican party elite. This is why pundits assumed that said elites would close ranks, coordinate around a mainstream alternative, and ultimately defeat Trump. But the Republican party experienced repeated and massive coordination failures here.
Republicans knew what they had to do. When Scott Walker exited the race in late September, he explicitly called for other candidates to drop out to coordinate around a Trump alternative. Here’s a New York Times article from early December about how everyone wanted somebody to go after the Donald, but every individual actor was disincentivized from doing it themselves. Here’s a Vox article from mid-January listing some of the high-profile GOP figures who’d indicated a preference for Trump over Ted Cruz — right as conservative media outlets like the National Review were making the opposite case. Here’s a Times piece from late February describing a meeting of high-profile Republican elected officials and strategists to stop Trump, featuring Paul LePage suggesting an open letter from GOP governors to the people. LePage endorsed Donald Trump later that month.
I don’t know why the party apparatus failed so utterly to stop Donald Trump. If Trump loses badly in November, there’ll probably be books written on the subject for a long time. But, even if they didn’t take them, they clearly had opportunities to at least launch a coordinated assault. And it might not have worked! Trump is a smart guy, a skilled political tactician, and he would have done a pretty good job arguing that the Republican Party was conspiring to stop him (indeed, this is pretty much what he did through much of the spring, when Cruz was collecting delegates at unelected state party conventions and briefly teaming up with Kasich). But the party didn’t even try — something that nobody expected in August or September.
I think that it’s safe to say that by December 2015 or thereabouts, there was a clear possibility that Donald Trump really might win the Republican nomination. He’d broken through his previous polling highs, and there were signs that the party establishment was having serious trouble coordinating a response. But for most of last fall, the idea that he’d fade fast, turn into a Buchananesque gadfly, or be stopped by elite party movement wasn’t so crazy. It was to be expected.
My model has basically been:
* The fundamental goal of the Republican Establishment, rulers of the House, Senate, and most governorships, ever since Trump popped up has been to maintain their positions as party leaders of an influential conservative national party. They might not like getting 47%, but better 47 than 27.
* There are some deep, deep fractures in the Republican Party base, and between the base and the establishment.
* Anything that was perceived as seriously screwing Trump would cause those fractures to become breaks.
Therefore, while they’d love it if someone stopped him, they won’t. Because they can’t.
I have seen many people on the internet say they don’t know anybody excited for Hilary. This surprises me as I probably run in similar IRL circles (work academic-adjacent research in STEM, live with other such people just outside Cambridge, MA), and most of my friends are enthusiastic about Hilary Clinton. Granted, most of my friends are not rationalists.
Is it really so hard to admit you live in Somerville?
Yeah but did you know 8% of atheists believe in God?
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/05/7-facts-about-atheists/
Wait a minute, what about Lizardman’s constant? This casts some doubt onto the vegetarian thing too…
Two thirds of vegetarians having eaten meat in the last day is far larger than the lizardman’s constant.
Not necessarily — maybe it’s ~5% of people who are both meat eaters and “vegetarian” (which actually agrees with the data in the post ~7% of vegetarians in the coutry, 5/7~2/3). You have to be careful with the lizardman’s constant, as with any other kind of conditional probability.
Also, this would make the data sadder for the animals — only 2% of veg*ns. :<
This is actually the error behind the financial crisis
You have a model that says there’s a 10% chance of an investment being wiped out, and you calculate the expected value of the investment based on the model
Now there’s also a 2% chance your model is a pile of horseshit. But that still means there’s no more than a 12% chance of going to zero. Your calculations won’t be too far off.
If you build an instrument that you model as having 0.1% chance of failing, however, you’re in deep shit. That 2% chance of your model being crap is now your major risk, and it’s 20X bigger than you’ve calculated for.
(Obviously there was way more to the crisis than that, but I saw the above happen).
My feeling is that the “way more to it than that” describes most of the financial crisis, and subsequent economic crisis. Market psychology is a big deal.
Bear Stearns wasn’t obligated to bail out its hedge funds, for instance. At least I don’t think it was.
How many of those are “ovolactovegetarians” or “pescatarians” or “I was at my family’s house for a particular occasion and my mother cooked dinner and I ate it rather than make a big fuss”, I wonder?
The latter is me. I never purchase meat for myself but when I’m a guest at somebody else’s place I eat what they serve me, because doing otherwise would just be making a nuisance of myself for no reason. I think this approach is pretty common.
Same for me, Acedia. I don’t buy meat, and I don’t eat it unless someone else bought it and served it to me and it would be rude to refuse. Or it’s going in the garbage, like if my sisters and I are at a restaurant and one of them orders ribs they don’t finish and don’t want to take home. I don’t mind taking them myself then, because that doesn’t add to animal harm; the animal is already dead and everyone involved already got their money. It’s just reducing waste and displacing a different snack from my diet, which arguably does a tiny bit of good for animals even though that snack would have been dairy or plant-based. And it saves a little money.
That said, these situations don’t pop up every week, more like every other month.
I don’t much care for meat and don’t usually eat it unless someone else cooked it… but I wouldn’t describe myself as “vegetarian”! I don’t find it surprising that there are other people eat meat ‘sometimes’, what I find surprising is that so many of them describe themselves as ‘vegetarian’.
Sounds like a good potential blog post.
This please.
What he said. I think it would definitely be worth discussion, both for the findings themselves and for why people were horrified.
“Can anybody explain whether this image (apparently derived from here?) contradicts or even reverses the narrative that Democrats have stayed pretty normal but Republicans have become much more extreme?”
-Majorities in Arkansas, West Virginia, and Louisiana voted for Bill Clinton in 1996.
“This seems unbelievable to me, so I challenge readers to tell me how to reconcile my perceptions with the data: of all candidates (including Trump) , Hillary Clinton has received the most negative media coverage.”
-E-MAILS! LIBYA! Hard to escape from these!
“Or some more fundamental connection between people following the rules while driving and following the rules while governing.”
-Russia has gotten much better at both over the last 20 years.
“I am less contemptuous of anybody who provided a number, and more contemptuous of the sort of people who said “Anyone who thinks Trump might win the nomination is an idiot and shouldn’t be taken seriously””
-Nate Silver provided a number: 2%. Months later, it was soundly critiqued by Yudkowsky. Scott Sumner was more of the “Anyone who thinks Trump might win the nomination is an idiot and shouldn’t be taken seriously” kind.
BTW, this Nate Silver tweet is just…
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/718836449424977920
“An argument against denser zoning in San Francisco good enough to get featured on Marginal Revolution???”
-You are assuming the Marginal Revolution only features good arguments. That is demonstrably wrong.
“A counterpoint to a recent post on Chinese happiness: Pew asks a very subtly different question and sees vast improvement in all emerging markets including China.”
-What’s the big difference between Russia and Poland in 2014?
Considering what we regularly see on YouTube from Russian drivers now, I shudder to imagine how bad it must have been back then…
Boris Yeltsin was more law abiding than Putin. Admittedly not a high bar, but going in the wrong direction.
They had the good judgment to ban you. That’s worth a major update in the reliable direction.
Poland is an imperfect democracy. Russia is a dictatorship.
I’d have thought with the fall in the price oil the FSB wouldn’t be able to afford the web brigades anymore. Are you now working pro bono?
“Boris Yeltsin was more law abiding than Putin.”
-Boris Yeltsin was less capable of executing laws than Putin. And the bureaucracy as a whole was much less willing and able to do its job in the 1990s.
“Poland is an imperfect democracy. Russia is a dictatorship.”
-No, Russia’s not a dictatorship, it’s an open anocracy. Was FDR a dictator? And did you look at the table?
Nate’s call is a failure of imagination, not mathematics. Trump’s still 200 delegates shy. He’s the presumptive nominee now because the other guys dropped out because he’ll probably get there when they thought he would.
Isn’t predicting candidates dropping out part of predicting who will win the nomination?
I, too, was skeptical of Trump, but making predictions about the GOP nomination wasn’t my job.
“Nate’s call is a failure of imagination, not mathematics.”
-Exactly. There is a severe shortage of imagination among the pundit class.
>E-MAILS! LIBYA! Hard to escape from these!
You’d think so, but I’ve heard almost nothing about the emails from mainstream outlets.
The favourite for President of the United States committed a federal crime! An actual, honest-to-God federal crime! Am I just in such a big bubble that the expected furore hasn’t reached me?
I’ve seen a fairly steady trickle of stories, none of them especially positive to Clinton.
Probably because there’s not a lot to go on now that the initial news has broken. Pro-Bernie and Pro-Trump outlets will keep talking about the scandal, because it’s part of the narrative. Every editorial and every internet comment is going to mention that Hillary’s going to be indicted any day now.
But the actual events in the scandal are few and far between. The current status of the investigation is just “The FBI is still investigating. They aren’t saying anything about what they’ve found so far.” If you’re not pushing the “any day now” narrative, all you can do is wait for a verdict, and the wheels of justice grind very, very slowly.
And from what I’ve read (disclaimer: this comes from an internet lawyer), it isn’t going to result in indictment. You need intent to have a crime, and everything we’ve seen so far looks like stupidity, not malice.
It could get you fired, but since Hillary has left the State Department, that ship has already sailed.
Also, Hillary and the DNC have probably already had an army of lawyers look over the situation to make sure, because getting their presidential candidate indicted would be pretty goddamn embarrassing. If they aren’t expecting indictment, I wouldn’t be either.
As a general point, people have to decide not just whether something a politician did was bad, but whether it was bad enough to matter. Oddly enough, bias affects those decisions.
Do we have a new candidate for “worst thing you’ve ever wrote out of context”?
Maybe try Eric Washington Jackson Jones Johnson Jefferson? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoNsFQkdRpU
The surname “Washington” is now 80% or more black, according to one of Weyl’s books of surname analysis. But I don’t think that’s all that widely known. Weyl used people named “Washington” in his analyses as a proxy for blacks, but that’s a pretty obscure bit of social science trivia.
I think during the late 20th Century that “Jackson” was the most famous surname for blacks — I have a vague recollection of the Wayans’ sketch comedy “In Living Color” using Jackson that way. But there are a lot of white Jacksons too.
I can remember an All Pro receiver named John Jefferson who had started his college career at Arizona State as John Washington, but then changed his name to John Jefferson for some family reason for his sophomore year. His coach, Frank Kush, said he could play as John Lincoln as a junior and John Roosevelt as a senior as long as he kept catching touchdown passes.
Okay, Gregory Clark’s surname analysis book “The Son Also Rises” lists four surnames as over 90% black in the U.S.:
Washington, Smalls, Merriweather, and Stepney.
The highest average achieving black surname in the U.S. is probably Appiah from West Africa.
Jackson is a very white first name.
The only Jackson (first name) I’ve known was the valedictorian of my son’s class. He’ll probably wind up a history professor.
“Rational Conspiracy makes the unexpected case that, even if you care about animals, charity toward humans is more effective than charity toward animals. I am very doubtful, perhaps because I don’t really understand the relevance of the “money moved” measure they’re using.”
As the author, it’s my fault this wasn’t clear enough, but I’d still like to make a correction. The thesis in that post is that personally not eating meat is, for most people, a less effective form of charity than GiveWell per life-year, assuming that an animal life-year counts for negative one human QALY. You can compare the two by asking what an average person would otherwise buy with GiveWell money, and comparing the pleasure they get from those purchases to the pleasure they get from meat-eating. I haven’t looked in enough detail to know whether the most effective way of helping-animals-in-general is easier than the most effective way of helping-humans-in-general.
Ah! That makes more sense. Thank you for the correction. Fixed.
As far as how Hilary got the most negative coverage, it is all in how you define and measure negative. It may well be that more pieces about her have used negative words or something than for other candidates, but in the “being compared to Hitler” sweepstakes she loses in a landslide to Trump.
The story also mentions that a lot of negative press coverage includes the email scandal. And since it goes back to Jan 1st 2015, it would also include the Bengazi hearings. The differences in media coverage didn’t seem that large. Clinton had the highest at 41% negative, and Kasich had the lowest at 31% negative. Trump at 36%, and Cruz/Sanders tied at 35%.
After seeing the actual numbers, I’m less curious about why Clinton was the worst, and more curious how the numbers are all so close.
Clinton does have an ongoing FBI investigation. Call it overblown and politicized if you want, but it is news, and technically any factual reporting on the mater is going to read as negative coverage.
Yup. Spinning is powerful, and Hillary’s actions may be below the level of a punishable offense, but it’s hard to not describe them in negative terms.
The Phoebus cartel is brilliantly fictionalized in what might be Pynchon’s best work: the story of Byron the Bulb.
The Aaronson thread links to EY’s post at http://echochamber.me/viewtopic.php?p=3254229#p3254229 re big numbers.
It’s worth mentioning that although the number Eliezer Yudkowsky described in his post is the largest numerically, several other posters (listed here) came up essentially the same methods for producing large numbers, some of which could have been larger than his with only mild reformulations. The earliest of these was itaibn, who in this brief post described a nearly identical number to Yudkowsky’s.
I was twelve years old at the time….
It’s amusing that this is a mystery to you.
The woman who published the study was dishonest, obviously.
I find “dishonesty” too often a black box. It’s almost never outright fabrication of data, and almost always some complicated statistical trick. So don’t say “dishonesty”, explain the statistical trick. Or if you think it’s outright fabrication, make that (very bold) claim.
I’m sure that if you examined her methods in detail you could indeed find the specific way in which she was being dishonest but why bother? How is finding the specific trick she used of any value? The author is going to keep on producing dishonest “science” and academia isn’t going to discipline her in any way. Nor is the author an exceptional fraudster who must specifically be found out. She commits fraud because she comes from a culture where fraud is valued and which selects for people who enjoy committing fraud.
Because this attitude seems like a sure route to confirmation bias where any time you hear something that contradicts your worldview, you assume it’s lies and ignore it.
Except that you and I both know damned well which culture controls academia and which types of lies they like pushing. Hunting down every one of their tribal lies is pointless unless you just want an excuse to accept their narrative – “well, these 20 studies we looked at were all fraudulent but there are thousands of studies (by the same people and people given grants and positions by the same people) that all say the same type of thing!”
They’ve gone over the line of presumption of honesty. Observing that a study has been published gives you no new information.
@Anonymous
This is the kind of gratuitous addition of tribal politics I would like to see less of here.
I don’t think “academia leans heavily leftist and has been untrustworthy in the past about research that produces conclusions convenient for leftists” really counts as tribal signalling.
(Of course people in other comments have already taken apart this study. So the claim actually makes useful predictions….)
Love the irony in a black-and-white anon advocating for ignoring claims based on their source.
@Jiro
He didn’t actually say ‘left,’ so you are putting words in his mouth/pen.
Left/right are pretty useless labels in this context, IMO. There are various tribes on the left and the right. Most of the rationalist community is probably left-wing, yet this is a very distinct group from the identity politics-tribe.
There are also tribes on the ‘right’ that value winning a debate over truth and which would be equally destructive if they would monopolize science.
Anyway, I saw an interesting paper a while back that showed that the beliefs of social scientists had homogenized, which seems like a big problem no matter which set of beliefs the echo chamber settles on. To quote Aaronson:
Okay, change “left” to the appropriate tribe name. The tribe in question is still on the left, and produces shoddy reasoning for political positions associated with vilifying their outgroup. I didn’t think it was particularly controversial that academia is strongly left-wing, even if the name of the tribe isn’t “left”.
Frustratingly, there is very little I could find from the actual source of the study. It was supposedly done by a company that claims to be good at analyzing social media data. Vox just cites them as a source by linking to their homepage http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/
On their website they have a bunch of their old case studies, white papers, etc. But none of them are this social media study. And since this isn’t a peer reviewed paper, and they don’t have their data available, I’m not going to call it a study. Its a Corporate Relations Academicky Paper.
If I had to guess what the culprit is of this data looking weird, it would be that they picked certain news organizations that would give them this result, and they picked . Here is their list:
1) The Huffington Post;
2) The Washington Post;
3) CNN;
4) The Washington Times;
5) Politico;
6) The New York Times;
7) Fox News;
8) MSNBC;
9) CBS News;
10) The New Yorker.
Here is what could be said to be missing:
ABC News
NBC News
Los Angeles Times
USA Today
The Wall Street Journal
So I don’t know much about traditional news organizations. And I don’t have a way of measuring their bias for or against a candidate without seeing the news stories. So I have no way of verifying my hypothesis about them cherry picking the data sources.
Another problem with this CRAP, is that the data goes back to Jan 1st 2015, when most of the candidates, including Hillary, announced in the summer of 2015. And Hillary has been in two major new cycles that are unrelated to the presidential campaign: Benghazi and the email server stuff.
Finally, the numbers for all the candidates look suspicious the range is only 31% negative to 41% negative and only includes the 5 candidates that were in the race until now. So we lost any chance to see whether there was some relationship like ‘more coverage = more negative coverage’.
Of the media outlets you cite, The Washington Times, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal are traditionally regarded as right-leaning. This gives us 20% in both groups, so no obvious cherry picking.
The Wall Street Journal is very different kind of right-leaning than Fox News though.
Your argument is like saying that both Trump and Kasich are Republicans, so it doesn’t matter which one of them you’d do a study on.
They’re just doing automated sentiment analysis, which is notoriously unreliable. I suspect that an article like ‘8 claims that the evil patriarchy makes about Hillary’ would be marked as negative because of the close proximity, in-article, of Hillary’s name and negative words.
Here’s a theory:
News sites are incentivized to sell stories. Negative stories kick up more controversy and therefore views, and are therefore more profitable. Therefore, news sites will run a lot more negative articles for candidates, while activist groups and sites will make up the difference by either running their own positive articles or by providing a market for the same. Hillary has less supporters active on the internet; therefore, there is more advantage to running a pro-Bernie article than a pro-Hillary one.
Another possibility is that the juicy stories around Hillary tend to be scandal-focused and therefore negative.
Additionally, all of the numbers were normalized; so Hillary might have “the most negative media coverage” proportionally, while not actually having the most negative coverage by raw number of stories.
What woman? What study? Scott’s link attributes the claim to a company, not an individual and does not indicate that it was published beyond the Vox article, let alone in an academic journal, as you imply later.
Results of that sort often are produced in a way that’s easy to rig, a point I recently discussed in a comment. But, assuming the description of how this one was done is truthful, it isn’t clear to me how it could be rigged.
On the other hand, they seem to be measuring number of negative and positive stories, not how negative or positive they are. It might be that Clinton got more negative stories than Trump, but that negative stories about Trump were a lot more negative.
What about even-handed stories that note both the arguments in favor and against? What about stating inconvenient facts? Are these counted as negative? There is a lot of potential for fudging especially if one has bias and considers criticism that matches one political beliefs to be neutral and criticism that goes against it to be negative.
It seems weird to me, instinctively. I can’t hit news.google.com without seeing ten negative stories on Trump. Thoughts…
Maybe the study is doing things proportionally? That is, maybe there are more absolute stories critical of Trump, but since there are also a few favorable he falls behind Clinton in percentage?
Much more likely, the author’s “negative” is different for each politician. Trump stories would just be counted as truth telling, not negative, when they slam him. Ergo, he has many truthful stories, but what could count as negative vs. him? By contrast, anything against Hillary is negative.
There’s no author to determine negativity. Crimson Hexagon’s a machine learning/sentiment analysis company (I interviewed there once upon a time) that does automated sentiment analysis. That doesn’t mean it’s free of bias, because things like sarcasm and (maybe) mentioning & debunking negative arguments might be counted as negative.
That just moves it up the ladder a step, right? Program author, or whoever sets its criteria is in the position that I mentioned. I mean, the software isn’t somehow deciding whether an article is negative with no human input, yeah? Someone “told” it what to look for.
I doubt the study’s wrong. Whatever you think about Hillary, it’s a simple and not particularly disputable fact that the mainstream media has been waging a jihad on the Clintons for two decades. Bob Somerby of the daily howler has been documenting it since ’98. As a total coincidence, I was searching something in his archives last evening, and I ran across a series he did on Margaret Carlson, and what she’d written in Anyone Can Grow Up, and how she’d covered the 2000 Presidential race (Gore, of course, was treated as an extension of Clinton). It’s just amazing to read. Part 1 ishere, from there you can navigate onward (recommended).
>There’s actually an important rationality lesson here, which is that a person who said Trump had only a 20% chance of winning the nomination (like Nate Silver) may in fact be perfectly virtuous – things with only a twenty percent chance of happening do happen one in every five times.
Silver said 2%.
Also, ” Suggested trollish by technically correct spin” should be but, not by.
I couldn’t remember whether the 2% was regarding the nomination or the general election so I searched out the source.
“If you want absurd specificity, I recently estimated Trump’s chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/
“In the context of recent papers finding the global warming “hiatus” is real after all, David Friedman notes that he has been predicting this for years, and further predicts (if I understand correctly) that the warming trend should return with a vengeance around 2030.”
I think this is already happening:
https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/721084941405184001/photo/1
To be fair, it’s an El Nino year and those tend to be warm. But last I heard, climate models weren’t predicting any serious cooldown even when La Nina sets in this summer.
If you fit a straight line to the global temperature from 1970-1997 and extrapolate, then 2014 is basically right on that line and 2015 is well above it. Of the data points since 1997, the year 1998 is the farthest from the trend line (0.18C above trend), and 2015 is the second farthest from the trend line (0.12C above trend).
It seems pretty safe to bet that temperatures will keep going up over the next 15 years, based on the agreement between researchers’ climate models and very simple trend fitting.
That’s only true because the 80’s and 90’s had such significant warming that it made up for the lack of significant warming since then. If the pause continues for another 15 years, then temperatures won’t follow that trend line anymore.
I am willing to bet that the 2000 to 2030 (inclusive) linear trend in global atmospheric surface temperature will be within the 3-sigma error bounds of the 1970 to 2000 (inclusive) linear trend in global atmospheric surface temperature, or it will be larger. But I’m probably not willing to bet enough to make it worth waiting 14 years. On the order $1000 USD? Bet void in the event of >= VEI6 eruption, nuclear war, or fancy futuretech that substantially reduces the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
For reference, that trend is the following in the following datasets:
HADCRUT4 1970-2000: 0.166 +-0.080
NOAA 1970-2000: 0.169 +- 0.051
GISTEMP 1970-2000: 0.172 +- 0.083
HADCRUT4 2000-2015: 0.116 +-0.186
NOAA 2000-2015: 0.157 +- 0.179
GISTEMP 2000-2015: 0.151 +- 0.189
Trends calculated using SkS’ trend calculator. Note that the calculator is endpoint-exclusive, and the trends presented are endpoint-inclusive.
EDIT: I mean that the calculator includes the start year and excludes the end year, and the trends I have in the table above include the start year and the end year (i.e. the date range is 1/1/1970 to 31/12/2000 for the first entry).
Endpoints chosen because they’re nice round numbers; I would make a similar bet with jiggled endpoints I suspect if you feel I’m cherrypicking things. But note that, for example, HADCRUT4 1975-1998 (inclusive) is 0.184+-0.125 and 1998-2016 is 0.139+-0.165, so jiggling things doesn’t get you that much.
In order to satisfy my sense of fairness I should note that even though the payoff is tiny I consider this a sucker bet.
I would be willing to make that bet but I have a couple questions:
Is there a way to make this bet in a way that can preserve my anonymity? Because if it not, then I’m not going to agree.
I’m not exactly sure what 3 sigma means. It seems to mean high probabilities correct? I’m not exactly sure what specifically that would mean within the context of the bet.
And you’re going to have to further clarify “fancy futuretech”. Part of the reason I’m optimistic about global warming is that I think technology will help in this regard. I’m assuming you’re not talking about further advances in solar energy or anything like that. What would you give as an example of “fancy futuretech”?As far as end dates, that doesn’t bother me. 1970-2000 and 2000-2030 work fine.
@Picone:
What would you consider a non-sucker bet on this topic?
IIRC the conventional wisdom in the late 1990s was that the warming rate should be accelerating. Here, you’re not even betting that it stays linear, but rather that it doesn’t end up more than 3-sigma LESS than linear. Which suggests you have such a low confidence in the warming trend that you should perhaps be calling yourself a “denialist”.
Do you really need BOTH such a wide negative swing allowance AND such a large time period?
@Wrong Species:
I have no experience making long-term bets of this sort; I don’t know how possible maintaining anonymity is. Is there somebody with experience doing this sort of thing around who can make some suggestions?
Worst case scenario, this is my real name, and this is my real email: jamesmpicone at gmail.com. I expect to still use that email address in 14 years time, so staying in contact and then transferring monies then would work, and there would likely be a plausible way of transferring $1000 USD anonymously around.
Do you care whether it’s $1000 in 2030 USD or however much $1000 in 2016 USD is in 2030 USD? I would take either.
By 3-sigma means 3 standard deviations – all the +/- numbers are 3 standard deviations around the mean. If the linear model is right, then there should be a 99.7% chance of the real trend for that period being inside the range [(mean – 3 std dev), (mean + 3 std dev)]. So, for example, the HC4 range for 1970-2000 is 0.086 C/decade to 0.246 C/decade, and the HC4 trend for 2000-2016 is 0.116 C/decade, which is inside those bounds, so if the bet were decided today I would win. This is part of the reason I consider it a sucker bet, and I strongly recommend you try to figure out what kind of temperatures we’d have to get for me to lose the bet.
David Friedman is correct; I meant active carbon sequestration sufficient to actually reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. I don’t expect that to happen in the next 14 years. I don’t think emissions pathway really matters over that timeframe.
We should probably agree on a dataset. NOAA, HADCRUT4, GISTEMP, or BEST land/ocean are all acceptable to me; I’m happy to agree that if one of those turns out to be broken or is discontinued in the next 14 years we shift to some other dataset with equivalent properties (i.e. surface temperature, global).
The three-sigma bounds should include autocorrelation; the trend calculator I’ve linked to does that, so it won’t change the numbers from the table above. The short version: surface temperature from one year to another is not strictly independent, this reduces the effective degrees of freedom of a dataset, so you get wider error bounds.
Again, just to be clear, under the conditions I’m specifying if we’d made this bet for the periods 1970-2000 and 2000-2015, I would win in all four surface temperature datasets.
@Glen Raphael:
A similar bet for 15-year periods, say. For 1985-1999 and 2000-2014 HC4 (inclusive, periods chosen so there isn’t one year in both periods) I would lose at the 2-sigma level but win at the 3-sigma level, but mostly because the confidence interval is very wide. Probably still very unlikely to lose
Hard for me to come up with them; I’m not normally a betting person.
I could probably relax the offer to 2sigma and be quite safe, yes.
I am betting that it stays linear – I’m betting that the 2000-2030 trend line will be statistically indistinguishable from the 1970-2000 trend line using only those two periods. Do you have a better way of formulating the position “the best model for warming from now to the immediate future has a second derivative that is in the range [0, infinity)”?
@ James:
“I am betting that it stays linear”
Not really. You are betting that the slope of the fit to a straight line is in the range which would be expected if it were linear, which is a much weaker claim.
Suppose my guess is correct and the actual pattern is the sum of a linear warming due to AGW and a cyclic pattern due to something else, probably air/ocean heat transfer. You still win, provided the time periods for establishing the slope and testing the slope are both long enough for a full cycle. I haven’t looked carefully enough at the relation between the time periods you use, first to establish the slope and then to test it, to say whether you will win the bet if my picture is correct, but you well might.
Anyone thinking of taking up your offer needs to consider not merely how likely it is that the pattern isn’t linear but how likely it is that the pattern is far enough from linear so that it won’t fit the relatively wide range of your prediction.
@David
Hard for any effects that aren’t extremely large to be visible over the time period concerned, but point taken.
I would be interested in a similar style of bet with you, if you have a variant that you think captures our disagreement. I appreciate that it’s not really worthwhile from a monetary point of view; I’m just trying to put my money where my mouth is.
As I understand what you’re claiming, isn’t the period ~2000 to ~2030 supposed to be the down-slope part of your cycle? If so, the residuals from a linear fit from ~1970-2030 should have an obvious cyclic component left in them. Not sure how to make that mechanically decidable in a way that’s immediately obvious and that we’d both accept. Residuals 1910-1970 might not be reliable enough; frankly I don’t see it here (not that that’s the residuals, but looking at it the residuals are not going to have something like a sin in them).
Quick estimate: if we repeat the 2014 temperature until 2030, that ~halves the 2000->2016 trend, so ~0.058 to ~0.078 depending on dataset. That’s outside the 3-sigma range in all three datasets I mentioned above. Continuation of the 2000-2014 trend is outside at 3 sigma for NOAA and HADCRUT, but inside for GISTEMP (mostly because GISTEMP has more uncertainty in trend). It’s outside for all three datasets at 2 sigma.
Update: I’m willing to offer the general bet I’m discussing here at 2-sigma.
James:
I approve of the general idea of offering bets, but it’s hard to get an unambiguous distinction between different models in a reasonable length of time. Also hard to organize such a bet for an unreasonably long period of time.
David and James, I’m sure you’re aware of it, but remember that Long Bets provides a platform for long horizon bets. I think they require the money go to charity, which is a shame, but I do think they have a good chance of being around in 30 years, in some form.
@anon:
It seems unlikely to me longbets will be around in 30 years, and I say that as somebody who made a bet using it. (and lost, by a hair).
Longbets seems to be run as a hobby side project. The main revenue model seems to have been a couple grants from Jeff Bezos way back when. There’s no budget for forum staff or tech support, so when spammers found the site they just ended up shutting down discussion of most bets and predictions. They used to allow people to bet on current predictions and track the resulting odds but that’s disabled too – it’s become a ghost site.
(They still occasionally accept new bets or adjudicate old ones, but the turnaround time is horrendous.)
@David:
Fair enough.
@anon:
I didn’t know about longbets, actually. Thanks.
Actually money to charity would be a way for bets to happen and Wrong Species to maintain pseudonymity. Works for me.
Er, obviously that last comment above was me. Made a joke elsewhere in the thread as anon, forgot to change it out. Ugh. Now it looks like I’m one of the jerk anons. :/.
“fancy futuretech that substantially reduces the CO2 content of the atmosphere.”
(quoting James but responding to Wrong)
Solar power can reduce the rate at which CO2 is added to the atmosphere, but decay time is long enough so that unless it reduce it close to zero the CO2 content keeps going up. And even if the CO2 content stayed constant, temperatures would continue to rise for a fair while as global temperature shifted towards its long run equilibrium.
What James was talking about was a hypothetical tech that actually pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere.
That makes sense. I’m willing to void the bet in that scenario.
There’s serious work going into geoengineering, even if it doesn’t get much press. The two processes that come to mind — don’t know if they’re the most significant or promising — are ocean fertilization to encourage algal blooms (which sequester carbon when they die and sink to the bottom of the ocean), and what’s called “enhanced weathering”, which involves olivine or other silicate rocks reacting with water and atmospheric CO2.
Engineers have developed a prototype of this sort of carbon capture technology, see this article:
This article also says that a single “artificial tree” made with this technology could remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate about 1000 times greater than a real tree. It seems like the main question about the practicality of this is about how much it would actually cost to mass-produce these devices and also create enough of the needed underground storage facilities for all the captured carbon.
@Wrong Species:
One thing that makes Picone’s offer (in his words) “a sucker bet” is that he’s defined it in such a way that even if the temperature stays perfectly flat for the next 15 years he still wins the bet. He is privileging the hypothesis of a linear increasing trend to such a degree that for you to win, the result can’t just be under trend, it has to be SO far under trend that we can be 99.7% certain that’s not the trend. (which is the same game Tamino plays, so not really a surprise)
So if the trend is within 3 sigma of flat, that somehow doesn’t count as “a flat trend”, but if the trend is within 3 sigma of sloped, that does count as “a sloped trend”. If the same temperature fits BOTH criteria at once (which seems likely), you lose.
Another thing that makes it “a sucker bet” is that Picone is betting on a 30-year window of which the first 15 years has already passed and (as of this moment) already reflects a positive warming trend, at least according to his preferred (not-satellite) data sources.
If you want to make a bet, I’d recommend figuring out exactly what your hypothesis is and trying to work out terms such that if you’re right, you’d win. I don’t think the bet on offer does that.
@Glen Raphael:
Quick estimate, 2000 is ~0.5, 2015 ~0.85, 10 * (.35 / 31) = 0.113 c/decade, which is outside for NOAA and inside for the other datasets, point. But as I’ve noted upthread I’m happy to go down to 2 sigma, which it’d obviously be outside of in all datasets (Wrong Species: has to be so far below we’re 95% certain it’s a different trend)
Wrong Species referred to ‘the pause continuing for another 15 years’. I believe that 15 years does not, in fact, contain a pause. Betting that in 15-years time we’ll look back and there will be no discernable pause is what I am trying to do. Also it lets the trend be over a sensibly large period of time so we can actually get a meaningful trend.
Your dismissal of actually trying to get statistical significance as a ‘game’ says far more about you than about Tamino.
Assuming that the uncertainty in 2000-2030 is about the same as 1970-2000, only HADCRUT allows for a range that includes both the 1970-2000 trend and zero. And only barely. I do not think it likely that that will happen.
Say you’re watching a tunnel from a distance and you see a car drive into it. You can’t see the car, which is consistent with it driving at half the speed it was going before it entered the tunnel. Do you consider “The car is going half the speed it was going before it entered the tunnel” as good a hypothesis as “The car is going at the same speed it was going before it entered the tunnel?”
But hey, thanks for admitting that you don’t think you can exclude “absolutely no pause at all” at the 99.7% level. How about the 95% level? Keep in mind that you can’t even exclude “the trend to the present day is different from 1970-2000” at the /1-sigma/ level in GISTEMP or NOAA. In HADCRUT4 it’s 1.8 sigma, so about 7% chance of it being the same trend. The significant differences in the datasets is a clue that you’re comparing far too short trends, incidentally.
Final note, while I’m being all bet-ty – I predict that there will be a large cold bias discovered in the satellite datasets in the next few years. Say 5? Not sure I’m confident enough to bet on that one.
“Final note, while I’m being all bet-ty – I predict that there will be a large cold bias discovered in the satellite datasets in the next few years.”
I think that demonstrates one of the problems with the betting approach–it requires an unambiguous true/false outcome. It’s possible that, in the next few years, people will come up with evidence they interpret as such a bias, much less likely that agreement will be sufficiently widespread so that someone who bet the other way will agree he lost.
David, I think the RSS and UAH maintainers are still likely to be around in 5 years. They periodically update their datasets to correct problems. If they make a change that has an average warming effect greater than some threshold, measured over some specified interval, that would seem to me to be a relatively uncontroversial criterion for “discovery of a cold bias in the satellite data”.
@David:
Which is why I framed that one as a prediction rather than a bet.
Please. You’re smarter than this. Of course there’s nothing wrong with “trying to get statistical significance.” But that’s not what Tamino is doing. And it’s not what you were doing when you chose three sigma for your initial bet offer.
Tamino plays a semantic game, the goal of which is to make sure his side doesn’t have to admit error or lose any points to the other side. He uses a combination of statistical machinations and motte-bailey claims to provide cover fire to his pals.
One of these tricks – one move in the game – is to waffle on the meaning of the word evidence.
The game is to claim in an argument “there is no evidence for X” when what you really mean is “though there is some evidence for X there isn’t strong enough evidence to prove X” where by that you might in the worst case mean little more than that you have found a method of analysis which applied to a data set produces a result which just barely fails to meet your own arbitrarily high standard of proof. (If you can’t reach that result, tweak variables until you can!)
Another move in the game is to be really loud about it (and publish more!) when through random chance the latest data looks especially good for your team and be really quiet about it (and refer inquiries back to an earlier analysis) when it doesn’t.
As for statistical machinations, some key tricks include picking the right amount/type of smoothing and the right amount/type of statistical significance.
If the latest data on a curve is pointing up, use ALL the data. If it’s pointing down or flat, use a 10-year moving average or better yet, do a decadal moving average, plotting one point for each decade. (That way if it’s 2008 you can ignore the entire 2000s and end your plot in the 1990s!)
If the data rejects your hypothesis at, say, the 10% significance level, don’t mention that because obviously 5% is what matters. If you’re worried a value might fall outside a 2-sigma bounds, switch to 3-sigma instead!
I’m never quite sure how conscious Tamino is of doing this stuff, but once you notice it, it’s hard not to see, and it’s sufficiently angry-making that I finally had to stop reading Tamino’s blog. So heck, maybe he’s gotten better lately. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
UPDATE: Oh, hey, I nearly forgot one of Tamino’s best tricks: pretend that your own analysis constitutes independent evidence that your own analysis is correct! As an example, go to this blog post and scroll down a bit to find this quote:
Well heck, if the published research by Foster & Abraham says it’s true, surely that shows “Tamino” is on the right track! 😉
Oh, and speaking of that published research by Foster & Abraham, you can find that here and notice this opening sentence:
So if you think there hasn’t been a slowdown, you might be in agreement with Tamino and his “two” confirming sources, but you are disagreeing with a near consensus of the climate science community. I sure hope that doesn’t make you a “denialist”! 🙂
@Glen Raphael:
Gosh, you’ve convinced me that I should just eyeball a graph and make shit up. That seems far better than applying statistical rigour!
I have yet to see any ‘oh look it’s paused’ analysis with any level of statistical rigour. If you think Tamino is playing games, who do you think is a) not playing games and b) demonstrates that the recent trend is different from the older trend in a way that’s statistically meaningful? The only thing I’ve ever seen is “Look! The 3-sigma window for the trend back to this point includes zero!”, which at best is exactly what you’re accusing me and Tamino of doing.
@James Picone:
Have you looked? Serious question: have you read any published papers that take the hiatus seriously, or have you only read the “takedowns” of a few such by way of Tamino/SkS/RealClimate? Is this – like our earlier discussion of Lomborg – a case where you think you don’t need to read what the other side said because your side seems devastating when discussing it?
Remember, Foster (aka Tamino) says there is a near consensus in the climate science community that some sort of pause/slowdown/hiatus exists so in this instance I’m the one defending the scientific consensus and you’re defending a few oddball cranks trying to deny that consensus.
So to answer your question about who isn’t playing games, my answer is: everyone else. All those scientists – nearly everyone, even Mann and Santer – who have written papers trying to explain why the pause exists. When faced with an obvious and trivially measurable slowdown of the rate of warming compared to both past warming and (especially) our simulations of what we expect the current rate of warming to be, most scientists asked “why is this happening?” and wracked their brain to come up with interesting possible explanations for the divergence- more than 60 have been offered so far – while Tamino continues to stick his statistical fingers in his ear and shout lalala this isn’t happening.
I’m fine with Fyfe et al, the paper Tamino is attacking in the link I gave earlier. But if you don’t like Fyfe, here is a large list of recent papers discussing the hiatus, most of which take it seriously. Are you comfortable claiming these papers are all based on a false premise?
So far as I’m concerned, a measurement that even just goes ONE standard deviation outside an envelope and then stays there for 15 years (when it never had done this before and high-profile scientists had repeatedly assumed it couldn’t) constitutes sufficiently “statistically rigorous” evidence that something interesting might be happening that we might want to stop making additional isolated demands for rigor and move on to trying to figure out what’s actually going on.
Some of Tamino’s arguments on the subject are relevant and correct, some are correct-but-irrelevant, and some are transparently terrible. If you never read the other side you might not notice the difference.
@Glen Raphael:
I’ve seen McKitrick’s efforts, obviously I’ve seen Monckton’s nonsense, and I’ve seen the not-quite-the-same but related “Temperature measurements are a random walk so you can’t prove there’s any significant trend” stuff. I’m reasonably confident I’ve already referred to McKitrick’s thing here – the “find the longest contiguous span that is not statistically significantly different from 0”. The obvious problem being that you’re /always/ going to have a ‘pause’ at the end of a dataset using that mechanism if there’s enough noise.
There’s a difference between “The noise seems to be on the low end for this span of time, I wonder why that’s the case” and “this represents a fundamental shift in the underlying trend”. You are conflating scientists saying the first with the second. Consider, for example, noting that 2015/2016 were particularly warm because of el Nino. That’s an example of the first kind of thing – “This temperature measurement has jumped way high, what’s going on?”. You wouldn’t interpret that as saying that there’s been a shift in what underlying model is appropriate to use, though.
PDF of Fyfe et al.. Personally, I don’t find “The 15 year trend is less than the 30 year trend” to be particularly convincing.
You couldn’t have found a better website for that list than one that disputes the basic mechanisms of EM absorption? Ah well.
I’m not going to go through the full list, for obvious reasons, but the first one is Fyfe et al., the second is Trenberth 2015 and is pretty obviously in the “What’s the noise doing?” genre, not “the underlying greenhouse forcing is lower” genre, which is obvious from even the goddamn quote on the site you linked: “Natural fluctuations are big enough to overwhelm the steady background warming at any point in time.”.
The third the website itself excerpts this section:
(my emphasis)
Trend from 1985 to 1998 inclusive in HC4 is 0.252 +/- 0.170 c/decade (2 sigma). That’s different to the trends either side of it at the 1-sigma level. Does it only count if it’s a slower?
If you’re referring to the model envelope, then yes scientists should work out what’s going on, I agree. Some of it is apples-to-oranges, some of it is natural variation, some of it is that stuff should be outside the 95% envelope 5% of the time. The thing I’m rejecting is that it’s because the models are too sensitive; that this is anything other than noise.
Calling my position an isolated demand for rigour is fucking hilarious. It’s a demand for any rigour. Literally any! The same goddamn rigour you’d apply to a study claiming that guns cause murders, or some other field! My very first post in this thread gave all the relevant trends, with uncertainty and made a testable prediction. Meanwhile all I’m getting from you is selective quoting that would make a creationist proud and accusations of dishonesty.
Maybe I should just start replying to people saying ignorant things about climate change here with a link to the relevant Dr. Inferno blog post. Here’s an argument you might recognise.
@James Picone:
And…this is when I realize the phrase “the pause” shares a characteristic with “global warming” (and also with “God”), that if you’re thinking of arguing over whether X exists it might be a good idea first to ask the other guy what they mean by X.
Near as I can tell, your definition of “the pause” includes a connotation that if you admit it “exists” (or even admit that it did exist) you are disagreeing with all of climate science and agreeing with Monckton. To you, saying there was “a pause” is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary statistical evidence.
My own definition of the “the pause” does NOT include such a connotation. I just think of it as a feature in the data, one most clearly apparent in the satellite data and in earlier iterations of the surface data. My reasoning process is roughly: “Is there a flattish, not rising-much section through most of the 2000s to date? There is? Great, it’s settled then!” I find Fyfe convincing because very little convincing is required to say “hey, that part over there, in context, looks to be unusually not-rising. And what’s it doing so far outside the model envelope?”
Thus by my terminology if somebody – say, Trenberth – comes up with a really good explanation for the pause, it doesn’t definitionally stop being “the pause” or become a “false pause”.
I still think I might be able to convince you Tamino is dishonest or at least an overly-motivated reasoner (and will take another stab at that later), but I no longer think i can convince you that (by your definition) “the pause” exists. So I give up; we’ll have to agree to disagree. Too much inferential distance to bridge.
Yeah, the guy who runs that site has some pretty wacky ideas (which I don’t endorse) but he’s a family friend in real life and there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the list itself. Just part of how Google gives us our own personal viewport to reality! 🙂
@Glen Raphael:
Fair enough. I should probably stop commenting on climate change stuff here anyway; it’s probably not very healthy.
On the plus side the UV light thing is fairly highbrow as far as wacky ideas go; My family has some anti-vaccination, pro-homeopathy friends.
I think I’ve figured out why that definitional gap exists.
Suppose somebody – let’s say Monckton – claims that the rate of global warming has slowed down and this proves global warming is a hoax. And this claim shows up very early in the life of “the pause”. Let’s say…2004.
If you are a confirmed consensus defender, how do you respond? It’s a two-pronged argument. The claims are:
(a) the measured warming rate has slowed
(b) the fact that the rate has slowed is troubling for global warming theory and/or casts doubt on the validity of our current models.
In 2004, prong (a) is dicey so that is where you want to concentrate your fire. In 2004, Tamino can trivially do some actually-valid math to demonstrate that the case for (a) isn’t very strong and therefore nobody needs to spend much effort on (b). He gets status and publishable papers out of doing so; everyone else can rest easy.
But as the pause persists for another decade, eventually there is a shift such that prong (a) stops being the vulnerable part of the argument. Yet Tamino remains committed. Having debunked pause claims so many times before he now just knows there must exist some math which makes the case that it’s still not a real slowdown; all he has to do is find that math and declare victory. This shift happens so gradually he and his followers don’t notice the exact point where his work shifts from valid statistics into apologetics.
A problem with having invested too much effort in debunking prong (a) is that it implicitly grants prong (b) legitimacy. Like, why would you try so hard to prove there’s no pause if it doesn’t matter to the theory? Thus to his fans “the pause” starts to mean “a warming slowdown that poses problems for the theory” rather than simply “a warming slowdown” and his math starts seeming like a last line of defense rather than merely a first line of defense.
There’s a popular propaganda meme that when skeptics shift from one weak argument to another this shows dishonesty; this makes it hard for warmists to do the same thing when they need to. The proper course is to say yes, even though we argued very hard against the warming rate having slowed, eventually the data did show it had slowed, so now we’re going to focus elsewhere. Now we’re gonna look at prong (b). But admitting errors is hard, it grants solace to the enemy.
Yeah, the guy managed to publish a paper on it in an actual scientific journal, which puts him one up on most of us. He’s a bright retired geophysicist who became convinced the key to understanding global warming can largely be found in…geophysics. The world hasn’t yet beat a path to his door but it keeps him busy.
At a slight tangent, I don’t think anyone denies that there was a pause for about thirty years in the mid-20th century. As best I can tell, the IPCC deals with that by a combination of restricting its claim that humans are the main cause of warming to the second half of the century and blaming that pause on aerosols.
This time, lots of climate scientists accept the pause and offer ways of fitting it into their models. I’ve already suggested one way which seems plausible to me.
But some don’t.
@Picone:
Oh, and when I mentioned rigor, I probably should have put what I was trying to say in terms of Type I versus Type II errors, or perhaps “privileging the hypothesis”. That’s one of the bigger issues I have with what Tamino does.
Here’s the problem. We have two competing hypotheses about the recent (pre-2014) temperature trend:
(1) It’s a nice upward slope – plus lots of random noise.
(2) It’s surprisingly flat – plus lots of random noise.
If you decide to test #1, you will find it is very hard to prove (with 95% certainty) that you need to reject the hypothesis.
On the other hand if you decide to test #2, you will find that option is also very hard to prove (with 95% certainty) that you need to reject the hypothesis.
So picking which hypothesis you should be trying to disprove essentially decides which one wins.
The trouble here is that “plus lots of random noise” part combined with the fact that we don’t really want to wait 20 years for a result. Real data is bumpy and uncertain.
So Tamino goes with the first option and that choice largely determines his conclusion. He says in effect: there’s an upward slope in that data unless you can disprove it, applies some degree of statistical rigor to suggest you can’t disprove it, and thereby concludes anyone claiming to see a pause is wrong.
But why did he pick the first option instead of the second? Answer: Because his prior is that by default we ought to go with what the scientific consensus says.
Which might have been a fine choice…in 2004. But as of today according to Tamino himself (writing under his real name) there is now “a near-consensus” behind the other hypothesis. So IMO we now should either treat both hypotheses on an equal playing field and see which comes closer to describing the data or we should privilege the second one – the one that has the near-consensus behind it – and see if we can disprove that.
Does that make sense?
The relevance of this issue to placing bets about warming trends is left as an exercise to the reader. 🙂
I’m curious whether James or anyone else can comment on the peculiar role of climate change in Australian politics. It seems to have been an especially important focal point for the Australian left wing. Australia is a natural resource exporter, but (unless I’m mistaken?) most of this is not fossil fuels. Still, mining and other forms of commodity extraction are energy intensive, so in terms of the pure politics of self-interest, maybe it makes sense that “Capital” in Australia would be aligned against policies that make resource extraction more expensive. But it still seems strange to me that Australian progressives are so fixated on this issue. I wonder if I’m missing some important part of the story.
@Glen:
The differing choice of which hypothesis to test comes down to not expecting the climate to bounce about on that timescale; it was doing X before, the forcings haven’t really changed much, so it should keep doing basically the same thing.
@David:
Also forcings increase faster post-1970s – CFCs in particular have a large spike after they were invented and then a fairly rapid dropoff after the Montreal protocol.
@anon:
I haven’t noticed anything weird about climate in Australian politics, but I guess I wouldn’t, would I?
We have a pretty significant coal-mining industry, and I think a combination of that, a deep-seated distrust of hippies and regulation, and the Nationals having a tetchy relationship with environmentalists has led the Liberals (the right-wing party, for hysterical raisins) to not care about climate change, but the full-blown “It’s not happening” position isn’t quite within our Overton window so instead you get figleafs like the LNPs Direct Action program, designed to hook swinging voters that care a little about climate change.
Labour’s had to drop the issue really hard since Julia Gillard’s coalition government got hammered over the ‘great big new tax’, but I don’t think you need anything special to understand that – people don’t like taxes, the Liberals managed to position the ETS as being basically a tax, bam. Labour’s historically been a union party, not a general-purpose left-wing party, so they’re not super into climate as a thing.
The Greens care, obviously, and have the usual swag of lefty policies, but they only get ~11% of the vote.
Might be some weird demographics out of our lovely combination of heavily exposed to climate change + fair chunk of coal mining.
Also maybe having a preferential system makes it easier for the Greens to shift the Overton window.
AFAIK climate models used for long-term forecasting do not reproduce El Nino or La Nina at all; it’s not well-understood enough to be correctly captured by the models’ dynamics. (Even specially designed “seasonal” models that seek only to forecast the El Nino Southern Oscillation say 6 months to 1 year out only have a small amount of skill — compared to a simple autoregressive baseline — in predicting El Nino indicators.) So of course the models are not predicting any serious cooldown.
Sensible humans, probably including Gavin, certainly should be expecting 2017 to be substantially cooler than 2016, assuming La Nina sets in as expected, since this pattern is fairly robust in the historical data. But do note that this says nothing about trends. For a while there was a theory that some funny business with ocean heat content could be causing AGW to manifest in the form of a “step function” with jumps at large El Nino events. I do not think there is enough historical evidence to support this (just the ’98 EN and subsequent “pause”), and I have seen no reasonable theoretical explanation why it might be the case.
To be fair, it’s an El Nino year and those tend to be warm. But last I heard, climate models weren’t predicting any serious cooldown even when La Nina sets in this summer.
For most of the past decade, we’ve been hearing that the hiatus isn’t real, it’s just a statistical artifact because 1998 was an anomalously warm El Nino year and we shouldn’t include outliers in that in our statistics. And there was some truth to that; local outliers probably shouldn’t be included in the statistics, and the hiatus shouldn’t have been taken seriously until it was statistically significant without the outlier year of 1998. By my math, that occurred in 2009-2010.
But it works both ways. If you argue that 1998 needs to be thrown out, then so does 2015. At present, the global warming hiatus is real, statistically significant, and ongoing, if we include both El Nino years, or if we include neither of them.
As for climate models not predicting a cooldown, the whole point of the discussion is that this is about as relevant and reliable as Vox pundits not predicting a Trump primary win.
Your maths is wrong. See this paper, or approximately every post by professional statistician Tamino ever (with special reference to this one).
If what you’re doing is computing the longest trend going back that can’t statistically exclude zero (the classic Monckton RSS-based approach, for example), you are implicitly assuming that global average surface has a discontinuity at the point where you start your trend. Temperature is probably continuous.
you are implicitly assuming that global average surface has a discontinuity at the point where you start your trend
I don’t pick the start point for the trend, I let an optimizer decide whether, or if, to do that. If I throw out 1998 and 2015, the best fit has a discontinuity in 2003 if I use satellite temperatures, 2004 if I use ground data.
Wait, what are you actually doing? AFAIK if you use AIC and data starting ~1970s linear trend is the best fit easily (and if you use earlier data you get a breakpoint in the 1970s, like the changepoint analysis I just linked). I was assuming you were doing something like finding the longest contiguous period where 0 isn’t excluded as a trend. If you’re fitting a piecewise linear trend from 1970ish to now, then yes, the specific objection that you get a break at your startpoint isn’t true. Then I just would be very surprised if you got a better fit than a linear trend, compensating for the additional parameter; that’s essentially what the Cahill study was doing, and it couldn’t find a statistically significant change in trend.
I am doing – well, telling an optimizer I coded many years ago to do – piecewise log-linear fits, temperature anomaly vs. log(CO2), with the break points being left to the optimizer and the number of segments starting at one and increasing until adding another segment doesn’t result in a significant improvement to the fit.
I’ve done this with a number of data sets and with generally similar results. With NOAA MSU Global Lower Troposphere Temperature vs NOAA Globally Averaged Marine Surface CO2, going back to 1979 but throwing out 1998 and 2015, the best fit has a break in 2003-2004. There’s no significant improvement for adding a third segment
Using the annualized Goddard Surface Temperature Analysis and going back to 1946, tossing out six anomalous El Nino / Nina events, there are significant break points in 1974/75 and 2004/2005.
If I push things back to 1880, there’s another break point in 1944/45, but the numbers that far back are narrow and noisy enough that it’s barely significant.
Interestingly, though, the slopes for the 1880-1944 and 1975-2004 segments are within each others’ error bars, as are the slopes for 1945-1974 and 2005-2015. I had for some time favored the hypothesis that we were seeing a bimodal system with sensitivities of ~2.8C and ~0.9C, but there’s something to be said about David Friedman’s model of a steady linear increase superimposed on a ~60-year cyclic term.
Which says nothing about the causes, except that David’s secular trend and my low-rise mode both look like what you’d expect from straight greenhouse effect without forcing or feedback.
Ah, I thought you were just working on T data. That’s pretty neat.
If your log(CO2)-to-temperature is just straight correlation I don’t think you’re going to pull anything meaningful out of that; there’s a pretty large time constant in that interaction. Are you doing anything about the annual CO2 cycle?
Have you considered trying to include things like aerosols / ENSO / TSI? Foster&Rahmstorf 2011 did a multiple regression of some indicators for aerosols / ENSO / TSI / maybe some other things I forget against surface temperature to try and remove their effects; might be worth looking into.
Isaac Held’s blog does some interesting from-the-start climate modelling stuff you might find interesting as well.
Are you doing anything about the annual CO2 cycle?
I’m mostly using the NOAA annual means and interpolating to match the timestamps of the temperature data. At one point tried to use the monthlies with an offset for the annual cycle, but that was more trouble than it was worth and didn’t look like it was going to be enough of an improvement over the interpolated annual data to bother.
Pre-1958, I use the smoothed DE08/DE08-2/DESS ice core data, but as already noted things get pretty noisy much before 1958. I only have a few cases going back past WWII and I only half-believe them.
Aerosols I haven’t done anything with yet; probably should, but I have too many geeky technical hobbies already.
We’ve been instructed that single years are not relevant for trend analysis, especially ones that are correlated to known warming events (El Nino, etc.). In fact as the hiatus was ongoing it was deemed to need to go on for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years for it to be called significant. One hopes the same standard applies in both directions.
It is also noteworthy this warm spike(?) in the trend is still below the mean of model projections. Many people like to argue that “warming will still continue” and that is what counts, but this is incorrect. It is the rate of warming that is important (a.k.a. climate sensitivity to carbon). Sensitivity estimates based on empirical data are coming in much lower than model estimates (1.5C vs 3.0C). There appears to be a lot pressure to not lower model estimates as far as I can tell.
This sounds amusing and I’d be interested in hearing more about it.
Agreed. Scott has a knack for detail.
A YouTube channel comprised entirely of (admittedly very occasional) videos of psychoanalysts getting trolled with behavioural genetics when they’re not expecting it would be compulsive, if niche, viewing.
But if those teachers would adopt those students the effect would go away.
Ha! Well, the students do spend more time listening to the teachers than the parents, most likely.
“Most interesting finding: adopted adults’ IQ is so unrelated to the IQ of their adoptive mother that in some studies the correlation shows up as nonsignificantly negative.”
It’s not uncommon for higher IQ women to delay childbearing, then run into fertility problems when they do finally want children, for which adopting is one solution.
@Sailer
Both the cost and ‘fitness tests’ required for adoption probably result in adoptive mothers being more intelligent than average as well, as higher income correlates with IQ.
And it’s surely more likely for conservative Christians to give up an unwanted child for adoption and studies have found that IQ negatively correlates with religiosity.
So it’s very likely that mothers who put up their child for adoption are a less smart than average and adoptive mothers are smarter than average.
IQ negatively correlates with religiosity
Dis beez troo, uz god peeples not eevn abel reed or rites propper, me am so iggnerent! 🙂
Dei, consider a model where:
1 – Most people are religious
2 – Most people have the same religious opinions as their parents
3 – More intelligent people are more likely to end up with a different religious opinion than their parents (because they actually think about the issue).
In that model you would expect intelligence to correlate with non-religiosity (which, as it happens, it does) without it being because religious people are dumb.
On the other hand, Dan Kahan found that where beliefs function as a marker of group identity, more knowledgeable people are more likely to hold their group’s belief–whether that’s believing in evolution or not believing in it. Religious belief is very much a marker for group identity.
He is looking at cases where whether your beliefs are true doesn’t affect you, whether they match the beliefs of the people who matter to you does, and although that’s true of evolution or global warming it’s not true of religion. But I’m not sure that the costs to someone of believing in a false religion that the group he is part of, including his parents, believe in instead of no religion are large enough to reverse the conclusion.
Aapje, why do you think it’s more likely for conservative Christians to give up a child for adoption?
@Two McMillion
Probably for the same reason we might imagine it’s more likely for utilitarian to push the fat man off the bridge in the trolly problem.
Not because people always follow through on their claimed ideals, but because that is what the ideal would seem to suggest they might do.
Okay, but I’m a fundamentalist evangelical Christian and I can’t think of any principles I hold to that would make me more likely to give up a child for adoption. In fact, many of my local tribe of Christians see having children as something of a duty.
I think the idea is:
Not a conservative christian -> unwanted pregnancy -> abortion
conservative christian -> unwanted pregnancy -> adoption
Oh, I didn’t think of that. Maybe Aapje’s right, then.
My prior is still 60% that there’s no statistically significant difference between professing Christians and others, though.
If you’ve updated, it’s no longer a prior, it’s now a current.
My current, then. Thank you.
Yeah, the idea that a conservative Christian would be more likely to choose adoption than abortion is intuitive, but I thought the research indicated that whether someone identified as pro-life actually had little or no correlation with whether they actually chose to have an abortion when the situation arose for them.
Yes, my point was based on abortion, as well as a dislike that conservative parents have for sex education, which result in more teenage pregnancies among conservative Christians.
@Protagoras and @Aapje:
Citations needed, or you’re just flinging mud / signaling.
And, on the flip side, it’s not uncommon for adopted children to be low IQ. Think of families putting kids up for adoption because they can’t afford good nutrition, severely disabled children that birth families weren’t prepared to care for, or drug addicted mothers “involuntarily surrendering” babies for adoption.
This result seems pretty unsurprising – median adoptive parents are on the opposite end of a lot of spectrums from median adopted kids.
Back in the 1950s you had more adoptions with children moving from higher status genetic parents to more middling status adoptive parents. Steve Jobs is a famous example: his genetic father’s uncle was Foreign Minister of Syria, while his adoptive parents were upper working class.
Adoptive parents tended, however, not to have many obvious flaws. They’d been checked over carefully by adoption agencies for alcoholism, violence, instability, etc. The one thing Jobs, not an uncritical man, was satisfied with was his upbringing.
I always felt sorry, however, for Jobs adoptive younger sister. She had to grow up competing for scarce parental resources with a sibling rival who was the World’s Greatest Salesman. They did not get along.
The Twitter image on polarization claims to be based on this Pew survey data, but the image does not match Pew’s actual data.
Actual method: people were asked 10 questions, such as whether they agree more with the claim “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” or “Government often does a better job than people give it credit for”. Conservative answers were scored as +1, liberal answers as -1, and other/non-response as 0. Add up the 10 numbers for each person, and that is their ideological consistency rating (ranging from -10 to +10).
A person with a score of +7 or higher they call “consistently conservative”, -7 or lower “consistently liberal”.
In 1994, 7% of people were consistently conservative and 3% were consistently liberal. In 2014, using the same 10 questions, 9% of people were consistently conservative and 12% were consistently liberal. The mean on the scale also moved left, from +0.6 to -0.6, which they say is primarily due to shifts on the questions about homosexuality (“Homosexuality should be accepted by society”) and immigration (“Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents”).
So there is clearly an increase in polarization (from 10% of consistently extreme people to 21%), but it’s hard to say if it’s asymmetric. Maybe conservatives polarized more prior to 1994 and since then liberals have caught up and passed them. Or maybe both sides have always been just as polarized as each other, and have become increasingly polarized, and it appears slightly asymmetric at times because the conservative view started out as more popular on these 10 questions and now the liberal view is more popular.
It matches the interactive graphic on Pew’s site if one selects politically active people.
Another possibility is that the while the left as a whole has become more consistently liberal, the right is much better at coordinating around a single candidate and can actually win elections. Thus the base of the left may be more liberal, while the representatives in Congress at most levels are more conservative. This would also match up with a lot of the complaints about this aspect of politics that I see a lot.
Getting people to actually go out and vote is very difficult on the left. This is especially true because of the many ideological divides within the Democrats.
The easiest example that comes to mind is Workers Party v. Green Party. Many of the things that one group wants the other actively opposes(more fracking and coal jobs v. solar power). Up until recently, this degree of animosity and competition within the party wasn’t as present for the Republicans.
Cochrane (the WSJ op-ed author) wrote a response to DeLong on his blog, which I thought was fairly vindicating. DeLong’s initial post also (not untypically for him) struck me as unnecessarily mean-spirited and weak-manned, so I’m somewhat surprised to see it here
Why didn’t Scott mention Soltas’s infinitely more interesting finding that Doing Business reforms do nothing to encourage growth?
http://evansoltas.com/2016/05/07/pro-business-reform-pro-growth/
The most obvious example of this is Georgia.
I don’t agree that it vindicates him. DeLong obviously understands logarithms, his point (which he doesn’t actually ever state explicitly) seems to be that using a logarithmic graph in this case is misleading. His alternative shows how unreasonable it is to just draw that trend line [on the logarithmic graph] out and claim it’s meaningful, as Cochrane does. He tries to justify it by then citing (inaccurate) numbers for China’s recent growth.
As a semi-amusing aside, his update also includes this line:
Despite his original post (I’m quoting from DeLong’s republication because I don’t have a WSJ subscription) saying this :
While DeLong was obviously (and unacceptably) rude, I do tend to agree with him that it’s a bit baffling to see the WSJ publish an article claiming that if it was 10% easier to do business in the US than the world’s current best country, it could have a GDP per capita of $400,000; and their sole piece of evidence for that figure be an extrapolated exponential trend line. And some erroneous Chinese growth statistics.
If it helps with the Chapman thing at all, Kegan is not talking about system 2 understanding of systems that might be mistaken for stage 5. An S1 understanding of stage 5 shows up automatically in behavior without a need for various debiasing tools or tricks. Part of the reason that “postrationality” can be a useful term here is that the stage 5 person can not give you rules for doing what they are doing in a language you can understand (an algorithm or fairly explicit heuristic). If they could, there wouldn’t be this bridging problem.
All of this is NOT to say that progress can’t be made. Reference class forecasting is an example of someone going off into the woods and returning to the village with something beautiful, comprehensible, and incredibly useful even to people who never could have constructed it.
Chapman wants progress.
You can also ask yourself “What is it that CFAR is trying to do?”
Are they trying to teach specific techniques, so that students when confronted with a problem can whip out the appropriate technique and use it quickly, correctly, and context appropriately? Or are the techniques taught so you can ultimately see through the techniques to the pattern of the techniques? Become the sort of person who can search for, identify, construct, bug fix, and execute whatever technique is needed for a situation, because you see the situation clearly, you see techniques clearly, and you see yourself using them clearly?
I’m sure I’ve run into this 5 stage model somewhere before, and I’m sure I’m still as ambivalent about it now as I was then. Part of it is with its structure – by wrapping up a particular ethical or philosophical viewpoint as a “stage of development”, it implies disagreement with the model and its end stage is in fact evidence of existing at a lower, more primitive level in the model. Sort of like how postmodernism, just by its name alone, implies modernists are basically just archaic and behind-the-times, without ever having to deploy actual arguments. That said, some of the stages do seems to me to reflect authentic development. No doubt I’ll be accuse of being a stage 4er, but I’m not sold on the idea that stage 5 is legitimately and unambiguously “higher”. We certainly should question ideological systems from external viewpoints, but it seems like 5 probably implies an implicit, (meta)viewpoint anyway, one that seems almost aesthetically based, but keeps it deceptively hidden and mysterious (cannot be communicated easily to “lower” levels). Stage 5 especially appears to have very specific and quite controversial views on ethics and metaphysics, and because of that I feel pretty suspicious that the stages of development are being used as a rhetorical device.
Stage 5 can, therefore, conjure with systems, as animated characters in a magical shadow-play drama.
This in particular sets of warning bells to me – deploying systems on a ad hoc basis seems like a recipe for self-deception, motivated reasoning and rationalizations.
Many of the people I care about most, and find most interesting, are STEM-educated refugees from ideological rationalism. They’ve mastered rationality, they’ve seen through it—and many now are stuck. Systems cannot provide them with meaning; but neither, it seems can anything else. Many fall into crippling nihilistic depression—a characteristic of stage 4.5. This is awful.
This also seems a little like an attempt to use the personal feelings of STEM folks to coax them away from their perspective without rational argument. So I’m a little wary.
I’m definitely interested in ideas that correct for the postmodernist anti-rationalism mistake currently weighing down our culture’s thinking, but I don’t know enough about these mysterious stage 5 values to be able to translate and assess it as a non-rhetorical idea. Anybody care to try to change my mind on this?
>one that seems almost aesthetically based
Yes! And this is worthy of further investigation! Unfortunately when authors try they are forced to invent lots of vocab and their stuff winds up being hard to decode.
>This in particular sets of warning bells to me – deploying systems on a ad hoc basis seems like a recipe for self-deception, motivated reasoning and rationalizations.
Yes! This is what Nietzsche was referring to! When you look into the abyss the abyss also looks into you, it is easy to slip and eviscerate yourself when you start inquiring into the nature of meaning. And there are LOTS of ways to cut yourself.
>This also seems a little like an attempt to use the personal feelings of STEM folks to coax them away from their perspective without rational argument. So I’m a little wary.
There is no “away” IMO, the “higher” stage is “higher” in the sense that it subsumes the one below it. You are capable of deploying the tools of the lower stage with wisdom.
It’s interesting because the article specifically says that stage 5 thinking looks irrational to someone who is stage 4, and that is the entire substance of your criticism. It’s a catch-22. I REALLY recommend reading the blog post of the full summary of the stages that Chapman links to at the top of the post.
I’m definitely interested in ideas that correct for the postmodernist anti-rationalism mistake currently weighing down our culture’s thinking
In the article Chapman specifically says that the postmodern critique is correct. You may not have to believe him, but seeing it as an ‘anti-rationalist mistake’ also seems like a stage 4 comment.
And the system the person has learned in stage 4 doesn’t have to be rationalism, it can be any system that works well for them. Like me, it might be social justice theory. It might be monogamy. It can be anything.
Post-modernity does not critique rationalism, it critiques the idea of one system being true for everyone, or even that systems are the total answer, or that there can even be a ‘total’ answer.
Here is my personal example of Stage 5 thinking:
My background made me a massive SJW lefty, but I was introduced to LessWrong about three years ago.
Recently. after reading Scott’s blog posts about Left wing and Right wing thought possibly being explained as a reaction to scarcity / times of plenty, I suddenly realised that both the left wing and right wing have good points, they are not perfect optimisations for everything but they are both useful systems.
This was an unthinkable thought to me before because in stage 4, one has ‘principles and projects’. My principles and projects could not allow right wing thought to be correct. Right wing stuff and evil capitalism offended my principles and I decided they were just wrong.
Now I think you might want to analyse a situation and say, ‘ok we’re going to be prone to right wing thought here because there is perceived scarcity when really we should be sharing,’ or you might even say: ‘this is a scarce resource, let’s apply right wing protocols’. I don’t think observing that something is scarce and deciding to use right wing thought is ‘a rationalisation’ or ‘motivated reasoning’. I don’t think deploying a system in that example is deploying a system on an ad hoc basis, because you haven’t just made something up to fit a situation, it’s a highly informed choice that should give desirable outcomes.
I now feel the same way about many systems I previously could not tolerate: capitalism, dictatorships, homeopathy, but also things I thought were ‘true’: monogamy, identity politics, western medicine (yeah that one is not so useful some of the time as well and has in built beliefs that hinder it). Rationalism is on the list of systems.
Now I know that no one thing is the ‘right’ answer, neither left nor right are ‘evil’ or ‘good’. All systems are necessarily too constricting the more specific they become, but if they are very general they fit no ‘real’ life example. Exactly as described by Chapman/Keegan, I see systems more as tools and the cognitive skill is to match the tool to the situation, perhaps even take some ideas from one system and merge them with some ideas from another because they have compatible patterns – that is the ‘woo’ of system 5.
The whole thing is amorphous, but hopefully the left wing and right wing example helps to explain.
I liked the stages and bridges essay. I think the way I phrased that idea on LW back when I still posted there was “rationality is a style of kung fu.”
Actually rationality is necessary for stage 5.
And you can still call bullshit on homeopathy, as you should. Because it doesn’t work. This is why you need solid rationality before stage 5.
Unless by “homeopathy” you mean a combination of ritual, placebo and white lying.
So reason explains well how it “works” when it works and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. What systems are you applying to homeopathy to get a better picture than this? What experiences have you had that lead you to question the rational view on homeopathy?
I would modify that—stage 5 reasoning requires stage 4 reasoning, and stage 4 reasoning requires a thorough understanding of deriving judgements from systems. This system could be rationality but need not be—social justice, Marxism, and Catholicism have all served for my friends.
Yes, you need rationality for Stage 5 (you need every system you can get your hands on).
I do not question the rational view on homeopathy, it’s just not the ONLY view of homeopathy. Instead of thinking of homeopathy in a loaded way (it doesn’t work! It’s bullshit!) because I’m critiquing it from the view of another system, I just see it as its own system that has features, benefits and disbenefits. If you want to trigger the placebo effect in a certain kind of person then homeopathy is the best system to do so. Who am I to take away a person’s 30% improvement just because my rational system conflicts with their magical-thinking-placebo-generating system?
Have you ever criticised western medicine in the same way? Criticised its binary, fixed-or-broken, body-as-machine worldview? it’s really good for a vast number of things but really bad at taking a view of the whole person and their social context, at dealing with complex biological feedback loops or illness with a mental component. Examples: female reproductive health, all mental health, IBS.
@ssica3003
I do criticize western medicine in the way you describe.
I think we actually agree on everything but one definitional thing, I don’t think its fair to consider one proposed technique (Homeopathy) to be on the same level as a system of knowledge.
To clarify, several magicians, shamans and so on have ranted against homeopathy themselves for a lot of reasons, including that “They do it with machines now and sell it like pills in a store, preventing all flow of positive energy” Those aren’t being exactly rational but still can still clearly see how homeopathy does not work by using their own systems.
I agree its fine to pretend it works when you think it can do good for someone, however, I also think its important to aknowledge this on places like this one and separate that from specific claims like “Water has memory” and “Homeopathy works, it would work in a blind study” for the sake of clarity if nothing else.
My super-stage-4 comment: How do you know you’ve reached stage 5 and aren’t just at stage 4 where your system is ‘not having a system’ or relativism?
EDIT: Presumably, stage 5 does not mean giving equal time to all systems.
As mentioned by others, it’s hard to explain but you’ll know it when you see it. Stage 5 is the ability to move fluidly between systems. It’s not that you think all systems are equally valuable or anything. It’s that you can recognize relationships between ideologies, structure them, and understand meaning through this structure.
Consider this argument on occupational licensing: “Yes, it’s a moral good according to the values of the upper middle class, and it’s contrary to the morals of the working class, and there is ongoing attempted oppression of the working by the upper-middle class. It is the relationships between the two value systems and the system of class struggle that causes me to think that occupational licensing is better repealed.”
The author does not draw support from any of the systems individually, nor are they “averaging” them in any sense. Instead, they are drawing support from a complex relationship of three different systems, perhaps under a principle analogous to, I value more the moral judgements of an oppressed system.
Just like at stage 4 (where we would debate whether occupational licensing incentivizes hard work, resilience, and tradition) or stage 3 (where we would debate whether licensing is something people should do), there are questions to ask and answer at stage 5. It is not clear that one should favor the judgements of oppressed systems. But the principle itself, in defining and drawing from relationships between systems, requires stage 5 mental capabilities to understand, debate, and apply.
You can’t prove reason with reason, this would be circular reasoning etc. So you take on “Faith” at least the base “axioms” that tell you you perceive what you perceive and so on. Unless you think that Reason is some platonic monstrosity with map=territory properties, this is, well, reasonable! So it makes sense that if you encounter a situation where Reason is not sufficient or ideal you could accept other systems, and maybe the whole faith thing is not necessary anymore if you drop the absolutist pretenses for your systems. Which is not to say that you throw them away or anything like “not having a system”.
Values, aesthethics and so on are “axiomatic” and subjective. You can try to be rational utilitarian about the how but you can’t even pretend to be objective about the why. Best to recognize this whenever there is conflict on this level.
Take this with a very big grain of salt…
@Nadie R
Or the person talking could be a sociologist. Of course there is a problem;
The argument is an empty one; if your premise is “x is bad”, then it should be a surprise your conclusion is “x is bad”.
There is a correct answer- you don’t make policy.
If you want to figure out the most rational policy, figure out your goal and find which policy advances it the most.
There are fields where people do switch from different ways of thinking about problems; architecture where cost, ascetics, material constraints, functionality and a whole host of other concerns are all balanced against each other. In fact any thing dealing with design (whether industrial plants or smart phones) is going to have to have multiple different concerns and methods of viewing things being balanced against each other.
None of that appears to resemble Stage 5 thinking. Are there any concrete and testable examples for Stage 5?
Edit-
Curse you anon ninja!
@Samuel
First time I’ve been called a sociologist.
In the example, class oppression is obviously bad but not obviously relevant to occupational licensing.
I don’t think I understand, but thank god I do not. Imagine what Obama and Ryan have to put up with.
Of course putting together a smartphone, a modern state, or a financial system all require fluidly moving between multiple systems. Kegan makes the claim in later books that while managers can survive on stage 4 reasoning, CEOs need stage 5 reasoning to do a competent job. But no one at all puts together a smartphone (in full), nor a state, nor a financial system (except the blind ghost of Adam Smith).
But some people really *do* make policy. None of us is the whole of Congress, but one of us (humans) is President Xi and one President Obama, one of us is Mrs. Yellen, dozens are CEOs deciding some part of the fate of dozens of thousands, and so on. All these tasks will require looking through the same phenomenon through multiple lenses. Not just lenses of cost versus stability, say, which are perfectly compatible, but two or a dozen lenses of morality, of aesthetic value, and so on.
Figuring out your goal is the whole game. We all want to do what is good, and finding a system to support a concrete description of the good is a mostly mechanical process (thank the progress of philosophy) but choosing your goals and not identifying your goals with your systems is also crucial. Stage 5 reasoning is identifying your goals with relationships and structures between systems, which happens to be a step up from identifying goals with systems.
The trouble with advancing your goals is getting other people to go along with it.
Supposing your goals would be served by building a bridge somewhere. If you’re El Presidente Dictator For Life, then you can just build the bridge. If it’s your land and your materials and your actual getting-dirty-and-doing-the-hammering-yourself labour, then it’s like being El Presidente of your own very limited domain.
If you don’t have such resources, well, maybe you could persuade the bank or VCs or the government or a charity to fund you, but they all have goals a bit different from yours and figuring out how to persuade them is not always straightforward. Likewise if you have to hire people to build it, then you’ve got to persuade them that they want to be working on it, and get them to actually do the job properly. Also getting the land, getting planning permission, avoiding getting blocked by protestors (or, failing that, removing them from the site), and other difficulties that come under the general heading of “other people”.
It may be that there’s one design of bridge, a bit complicated and novel maybe, that would be just ideal as a solo effort, but good luck persuading people to fund it or build it or not mess things up when building it, and another design that’s less good from a purely mechanical standpoint but which fits in better with other people’s goals, understandings and systems of justifications.
All of the Stage 5 stuff, AFAICT, is working out how to interact with other people, either to figure out that the second bridge is a better bet in practise because people are annoying like that, or how to put the arguments for the first bridge in terms that they will understand and accept. For some people those terms will include “you’re outvoted” or “I’m paying good money for this you know”; working with those involves working out how to interact with their understandings of democracy and economics.
TLDR – concerns about other people are very different to other sorts of concerns and often can’t usefully be modelled as “just another engineering concern”.
One of the things that makes me skeptical of the whole stage thing is that it seems that being the only Stage 5 reasoner in a situation full of Stage 4 reasoners – or the only Stage 4 reasoner in a situation full of Stage 3 reasoners – seems like being the only person with a fax machine.
@Nadia R.
>class oppression is obviously bad
Class oppression is obviously good.
Consider your own body, systems are in control of each other. The immune system oppresses and keeps everyone in control. People no longer have reproductive rights, the Seeders handling this for everyone. Sometimes the systems in lesser levels revolt, sometimes its even cancer and sometimes they have pretty good reasons for doing this, yet class opression remains necessary.
In the world its the same thing if we want a highly hierarchical and specialized superorganism with no infighting and a sense of divine righteousness (And we obviously do!)
Ideally we want the lower classes to become p-zombies and useful workers.
“In the example, class oppression is obviously bad but not obviously relevant to occupational licensing.”
But you don’t show that. And if you did have evidence to show that, you wouldn’t need to frame of class oppression; screwing over poor people for personal gain doesn’t really need a systematic view in order to attack.
“I don’t think I understand, but thank god I do not.”
I’m saying making political judgments is completely irrelevant for most people and this almost certainly includes people reading Chapman’s post.
“All these tasks will require looking through the same phenomenon through multiple lenses. ”
I’m going to assume you mean ‘do well’; otherwise you would be implying all political decision makers ever have been stage 5.
And I’m not seeing why c/b ratio is not a good way to look at decision making. It isn’t good for coalition building, but coalition building is noticeably bad at making coherent policy.
“Figuring out your goal is the whole game. We all want to do what is good, and finding a system to support a concrete description of the good is a mostly mechanical process ”
People accept that charity helps people not die. People do not give as much as they can to charity. There is zero reason to believe ‘do good’ is what people’s goals are.
@ Peter
“concerns about other people are very different to other sorts of concerns and often can’t usefully be modelled as “just another engineering concern”.”
I hate to be snarky, but it sounds like Chapman just reinvented empathy. We should care what other people are thinking in order to figure out the best way to get them to do what we want is not a novel insight; salesmanship is all about that.
“People accept that charity helps people not die. People do not give as much as they can to charity. There is zero reason to believe ‘do good’ is what people’s goals are.”
I think a lot of people have a goal of doing good. They don’t have a goal of doing as much good as possible.
@Anonymous:
Your choice of metaphor is interesting. By and large my immune system is meant to leave the bits of me that are actually me alone. I mean, it should round up and deal with virus particles and other uninvited guests as the virus particles that they are, but when it starts deciding that some of my tissues are targets, well, that’s an autoimmune disorder you’re talking about.
(I’m not entirely sure how going to the doctor for a packet of immunosuppressant pills fits into the metaphor, but it’s amusing to think about.)
@Samuel Skinner – I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. Stage 3 gets described as running more or less entirely on empathy, but relies on being in fairly closed communities full of people similar enough to you to be easy to empathise with, and a safe distance from those freaky others who are hard to empathise with. The parody-oversimplified version of Stage 4 is “who needs empathy when you’ve got systems?”. Which would make Stage 5 “being able to empathise effectively with people with other systems”.
@Peter, I really like your half-phrase summary. (For those reading uncharitably, I mean, in the space of half-phrases, @Peter has a good summary. There are better, longer summaries.)
I now see my foolishness in bringing class oppression into this. Apparently it is not so cut and dried.
@Samuel is totally correct that most people do not make politics, and should not. An increase in the complexity of one’s mental models is mostly useful in resolving relationship disputes, better understanding oneself, and in living a more fulfilling life. It’s hard to bring up instantly-recognizable examples from these topics, since everyone’s lives are so different. I’d recommend Kegan’s “In Over Our Heads”, though, where he has some compelling vingettes of the Stage 3/Stage 4 distinction.
Re doing good: it was a mistake to bring this up. There is general agreement on which goals are net positive. There is general consensus that personal kindness, charity, and gratitude are good things to cultivate. To a large extent, interpersonal morality is well understood by adolescence, and even traditional societies have mostly the same ones as us. Systematic morality, like how to relate to your boss or that charity does good to people you’ve never met but is still a moral imperative, is more complex, and often requires a systematic mindset (“He’s not being mean to me by assigning me this task, he’s trying to help me grow into a management role.”).
“I think a lot of people have a goal of doing good. They don’t have a goal of doing as much good as possible.”
It doesn’t even have to be ‘as much as possible’. There are people who don’t give any charity.
“An increase in the complexity of one’s mental models is mostly useful in resolving relationship disputes, better understanding oneself, and in living a more fulfilling life. ”
The problem I’m having is stage 5 is described as
-after stage 4
-requiring stage 4
I’m pretty sure a large number of people have managed to pull of stage 5. Modeling how other people work is something people are really good at. People are capable of going to different countries or cultures, figuring out the new rules and working within them.
It is really weird that Chapman is talking about the necessity of having people in stage 5 to keep society running when it appears that what he is describing is something that is pervasive.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and the interesting comments that it provoked. I’m actually at least a little familiar with postmodernist writers, including a little Focault, though I admit it was from a while back. At the time I rejected it because of what I felt was fallacious reasoning in its main themes. I’ll just also mention for others that I’ll ignore the idea “that’s normal thinking for level 4” as rhetorical and fallacious in its implication.
I can definitely relate to your example. I too look at left and right wing thought in a very similar way, though I do believe the left has it mostly correct on value of the environment. I absolutely love turning over left, centre and right wing ideologies over in my head, rejecting bits or combining them. Part of that is basically agreeing with Scott’s main idea that a lot of it is tribal/factional BS. So perhaps I am in some sort of unexpected way using “fluid” thinking without knowing it.
Having read people’s interesting comments here though, I’m still very concerned that the criteria on which the ideologies, which are now supposed to be considered not so much fallible but relative are being deployed either on an aesthetic, emotional, or unspoken (secret? hidden?) basis, because ultimately you still have to choose the context in which each system gets deployed or doesn’t. I cannot accept aesthetics as the criteria, because ultimately systems of reason are unnecessary to aesthetics – I feel it effectively amounts to just doing what you aesthetically feel like and deploying a sophisticated justification from your toolkit after the fact.
Edit> This article I wrote some time ago would best illustrate why I consider truth-seeking superior to the ad-hoc tool approach. It’s also the main trouble I have with the LW approach to rationality.
What are your non aesthetic, emotional, unspoken, secret etc. values?
Please don’t answer with complex “values” which are rationalizations of good ways to execute your base values.
There is simply no way for anybody to justify this.
Well it’s not just values that determines the system you deploy, its epistemology, which absolutely ought not to be just subjective preference. And while I appreciate your reference is-ought problem, I kind of think its solvable in certain ways, and I’d also add some systems of values are more internally consistent than others. So I think there’s much value on that being explicit and logically discussed.
Yes, if I may rephrase that last part:
“What criteria are people using to judge which systems to use / move between”?
Presumably one still has to have a ‘system’ of deciding which system to use! A meta-system. You fear it is a system with certain kinds of criteria that are not acceptable.
I like this question and I don’t know the answer.
But, Chapman’s post was all about not skipping through stage 4. I *want* to say that if a person is coming from rationality, they are less likely to use emotional or ‘gut’ feelings to decide on systems unawares, their rational training is still all there in their head.
I’m tempted to say: experience? Even trial and error? Pattern-matching? These may be seen as less good than chance by rationality. But sometimes old, rejected ways of doing things come back into play as I mature.
Example: I used to be honest, because I didn’t know about lying. Then I realised life is a human game of lies and half truths so I did that. Now I’m all the way back round to unlearning all the ‘games’ and being brutally honest again, but with a much more mature awareness this time round.
So is it plausible to see a series of systems that are more useful than they are true and say: this system worked well in these situations but I was stumped in this one place, so what system do I know matches it? And it’s just a pattern criteria: this problem is emotional, let’s use an emotional system?
Perhaps it’s theoretically trying ALL systems one knows on one scenario to see how different things play out and compare the results. That still leaves you with a decision about which to use, and therefore a hidden agenda / set of criteria needed to make the decision. Argh!
Well, some of the descriptions of system 5 imply that, however you make the decision, you feel kind of chilled about it because you know there is no right answer anyway and we should be all jogging on with making meaning for ourselves despite that knowledge.
I think the question of how to know which system to apply is a challenging one that there is not yet a developed answer to. Humanity has several centuries of experience understanding systematic thought (Stage 4 / modernity / adulthood). We have less than a century critiquing it, and probably a few decades of trying to reach something beyond it. That said, just as at one point you likely realized that some of the norms you were taught as a child were incorrect or no longer applicable, and started to change your norms to fit a logic that made sense to you, you can start learning different systems that can organize aspects of the world and then you will start to notice relationships between them.
As the daughter of Russian parents, for example, it took me a while to realize that being a good Russian woman was not too much like being a good American woman. Changing my mishmash of womanhood norms to fit the logic of American gender norms helped me make sense of my behavior and the behavior of others. Note that both notions of womanhood are sensible and have an internal logic of their own. But moving to a systematic understanding of my gender role improved on my adolescent, confused understanding, and gave me more confidence and control of this part of my life. This is like a Stage 3→4 transition in my understanding of gender norms.
A Stage 4→5 would then be learning about different systems for organizing genders, that different people might be using. (For example, men and women in the US have starkly different understandings of how the genders are organized, as do liberals and conservatives, or the working and upper-middle classes.) By understanding the interrelations of multiple systems of womanhood, I would gain (I hope) a greater understanding of what my womanhood and gender presentation means.
(I can’t imagine gender will be less explosive than morality on this blog—but I’d rather not talk much about my life on a more personal level.)
“I think the question of how to know which system to apply is a challenging one that there is not yet a developed answer to.”
?
If it is “is this true about the external world”, use the stuff we use to figure that out. Evidence, logic, reason, science- the well known stuff.
If it is dealing with people, I’m pretty sure that is anti-inductive. If norms have any function as gatekeeping (er, you need to learn the norms so members now you have an investment in the group), they will be hard for outsiders to easily parse without substantial time investment.
I’m also very skeptical of these stages. But the one thing I’ve experienced that might count as a 4-> 5 transition was a big realization that I was acting like reality ‘had to’ follow my preferred system, and that I should stop doing that. As far as I can tell I haven’t fallen into that trap the same way again.
But if I’m S5 now, I’m an odd one, because all of your objections to S5 seem right on. Nor do I feel any nihilistic 4.5 tendencies.
Unlike Scott’s summary of Chapman’s summary of Kegan, Kegan himself writes that this transition happens neither in “one big step” nor quickly. The “big realization” you describe is one step along a longer journey.
A quick essay I wrote outlining intellectual history in the large, in case you like perspective on what Chapman writes. I tried to keep out jargon:
http://nadiarodinskaya.tumblr.com/post/144183028084/intellectual-history-in-brief
Well, if “level 4” is supposed to be like this, then I would say that LessWrong-style rationality is already “level 5”. However, when I am reading something about “post-rationality”, I usually get the impression that those people consider LessWrong-style rationality “level 4”, and themselves “level 5”; I think they sometimes say it explicitly.
Therefore, my impression is that the main purpose of “post-rationality” is to make a strawman of others, and feel superior to them. (Of course, this is probably something that only a stupid person at level 4 would say.)
I actually think that the LW diaspora is a giant, uncoordinated L4-L5 bridge.
LW used to be pretty L4: Bayesianism was often taken to be a workable meta-system, it was often assumed that rationality would yield answers to most or all of the big questions, EY declared a lot of longstanding philosophical questions solved, and the discourse tended to be pretty New-Atheisty.
But we’ve moved on from that as a community! Bayesianism has largely been deemphasized as a philosophical superstructure to merely a very useful tool. The atheist-liberal-libertarian-simple-truth core has splintered into a panoply of beliefs and political ideologies that are at least listening to each other. I see a lot of postmodern methods being introduced into our discourse alongside Sequences-style rationality. And in all this, my feeling is that we’re as a community generally mastering the skill of being ironic and self-reflectively ideological, which is what Level 5 is all about.
(I like to think the seeds of this were in the Sequences themselves, or at least what we chose to emphasize in them. If I ever have time, I’ll try to dig into that history and trace some coherent intellectual line between then and now.)
And I’m actually kind of excited about where all this is headed, because I feel like this is a pretty productive place to be in as a community.
Agreed. Old-style LW was very focused on (specific formal) rationality as the ultimate truth—Bayesianism, utilitarianism, many worlds (‽). More recently members of LW have been moving to understanding some of the flaws of this view.
“The atheist-liberal-libertarian-simple-truth core has splintered into a panoply of beliefs and political ideologies that are at least listening to each other.”
Wait, people have started accepting supernaturalism? That sounds pretty bad.
Dude, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism like six years ago. Get with the program.
“Dude, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism like six years ago. Get with the program.”
I was never a member of Less Wrong. I do not know about your crazy little dramas.
“But we’ve moved on from that as a community! ”
That implies an improvement. What you described… isn’t.
Loved this essay, thank you Nadia. I’d like to be in touch on this topic, if interested, I’m @ssica3003 on Twitter.
I don’t do Twitter (I never got with the program!) but I sent you an email, @ssica3003.
>This seems unbelievable to me, so I challenge readers to tell me how to reconcile my perceptions with the data: of all candidates (including Trump) , Hillary Clinton has received the most negative media coverage.
Complicated statistical analysis on Vox proving things the writers want to believe? Should be presumed false or misleading until very strong evidence is provided to the contrary.
>Can anybody explain whether this image (apparently derived from here?) contradicts or even reverses the narrative that Democrats have stayed pretty normal but Republicans have become much more extreme?
Looking at the issues in question tells you a lot more than statistical models. 4 years ago, Obama and Hillary were against gay marriage. Today, that position is routinely derided as extreme right wing. Hillarycare was rejected by a democratic senate in 92 for being too left wing, the entire democratic party supported the largely similar ACA in 2009. With the exception of gun control, there’s not a single issue on which the republican party is to the right of where it was in, say, 1994. There are many issues where democrats are far to the left.
Obama flipped 4 years ago http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-robin-roberts-abc-news-interview-president-obama/story?id=16316043, you’re implying otherwise.
It all depends on which issues you use to measure left-wing and right-wing.
The right has become outright hostile to racism among its own during my lifetime. The left has decided that taxes on middle-class people are bad.
The ACA is not particularly like what Hillary Clinton proposed in ’92. Arguably the ACA is far more like what the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) proposed in ’92 (source). It’s also more like what Mitt Romney passed in Massachusettes in the ’06 (source: Mitt Romney himself admitted that without Romneycare we probably never would have had Obamacare. Sorry for the ironic Boston Globe link, but I prefer to provide the original source for things).
As for whether the Republican party has gotten more conservative about anything, I would refer you to the actual actions of Ronald Reagan. He sometimes raised taxes. He granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. After US troops were attacked abroad, he withdrew from the country. Could you see Republicans supporting those actions today, much less revering the author of them the way they do Reagan? Of course, this was before the ’94 cutoff in your post, but it’s not like these are from a different generation or something like that.
>Arguably the ACA is far more like what the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) proposed in ’92
No, it isn’t. The heritage plan involved zero new spending. the ACA spends 100 billion a year. the heritage plan did not require illusory cuts to medicare to make the books come out, the ACA does. the heritage plan did not have an employer mandate, it actually blew up the group market entirely, the ACA has an employer mandate. Read up on Hillary’s plan. The language is somewhat different, but the plan is essentially the same, heavily subsidized and mandated insurance, organized regionally, with a maximum focus on expanding access. The only thing it lacked was the medicare expansion, and the ACA only had that because it made the numbers look better.
>It’s also more like what Mitt Romney passed in Massachusettes in the ’06
that was passed over romney’s veto by the most left wing legislature in the country. calling it romney’s plan, even though romney himself did, is inaccurate.
> He sometimes raised taxes.
Reagan passed 5 major tax bills in his first 6 years in office, the net effect of which was either revenue neutral or a slight lowering of tax rates. it makes no sense to take one of those bills in isolation, unless one is trying to cherry pick evidence.
>He granted amnesty to illegal immigrants
Yep, he teamed up with democrats to pass a bill doing that over the objections of a wing of the republican party. And that’s exactly what Bush tried, what mccain and the gang of 8 tried, and what romney promised. The difference is that there are fewer democrats around today, not that republicans have moved right.
> After US troops were attacked abroad, he withdrew from the country. Could you see Republicans supporting those actions today, much less revering the author of them the way they do Reagan?
When you’d described them more neutrally, yes, absolutely.
It looks to me like first the Democrats moved to the left, and afterwards the Republicans moved to the right. Perhaps the latter shift is more recognized because it is more recent.
“An argument against denser zoning in San Francisco good enough to get featured on Marginal Revolution???”
Tim Redmond is very intellectually dishonest, and any numbers from his blog should be treated as guilty until proven innocent. (I suspect Tyler Cowen posts so many links that he doesn’t have time to fact-check everything.) Eg., a few years back, there were a bunch of headlines that half of San Francisco’s new condos were being used as “second homes” by the wealthy, ie. no one was living in them. This came from an analysis by Redmond where he explicitly didn’t account for condos owned by one person, and rented out to another. Two thirds of San Francisco households rent rather than own, so this is almost certainly a large fraction. He then tries to sweep this under the rug by using cherry-picked examples to scapegoat AirBnB. Credible estimates of the number of San Francisco housing units taken off the market by AirBnB are in the hundreds to low thousands, ie. on the order of tenths of a percent of the city’s housing stock (cite).
A number of commenters on MR pointed out the most obvious dishonesty – saying that San Francisco was “dense” by only comparing to cities in the US (which is unusually sprawly) and especially the western US (which is even more sprawly), and also ignoring that only ~10% of the Bay Area lives in San Francisco proper, which artificially raises the density when you compare SF to cities whose city limits include all the surrounding suburbs. But I’d bet at very good odds that the other numbers are wildly misrepresented too.
There is a ton of “credible evidence” that building more and loosening development restrictions will lower prices. For a brief overview, I recommend this report by Jason Furman, chief economic adviser to President Obama. I’m sure Redmond has seen this evidence, he just doesn’t want to believe it, like creationists or anti-vaxxers. Just as creationists believe that all evidence for evolution was planted by the nefarious Big Science conspiracy, and anti-vaxxers believe that all the evidence was planted by the nefarious Big Pharma conspiracy, any evidence against zoning is planted by the Big Real Estate and Big Tech conspiracies.
It just seems strange to me that “We’ll have 3 jobs for every housing unit on the Peninsula with a grand total of 2 3-lane bridges leading to the place with more houses” + “Wow, not even rich people can afford to live here anymore” doesn’t immediately make everyone go “For the love of…, build more housing on this side of the bridge, DUH!”
I totally get the “We don’t want our neighborhood to change” argument, but then you either need to get rid of jobs or add some serious infrastructure to move people to the jobs from the place where you’re making them live 40 miles out.
/in practice, the traffic is causing the Bay Area to split into many chunks, because you can’t get there from here on a Thursday evening.
//My particular rage at this may be caused by my office moving to Palo Alto, and the resulting 70 minute commute when I’m on the Peninsula.
This is yet another reason our system of land ownership is bullshit. People regard land as they do a house or a car or any other item: it’s theirs to do with as they will. But land simply isn’t that way. The land parcels, taken together, make up San Francisco, which is a portion of California, which is a portion of the United States. Unlike houses or cars or other property, that land was not created by anyone, but simply claimed by the US. Ultimately, all of the land of the US is held by force by the population of the US, and is subject to the rules of that population. Land ownership is an expedience; it’s a means to make fixed improvements possible. But the land should ultimately be regarded as something that is to benefit all citizens. This idea that the land is “their” land, and that their preferences should trump the well-being of their fellow citizens is simply ridiculous.
By thios reasoning, nobody should have the right to own raw materials either. Or charge money for electrical power.
Of course you could say that electrons in their natural form aren’t much use and people must work to get them into a form that is useful, but the same is true for land.
Theory: Change in annual societal investment in a field is directly proportional to the amount of recent success in that field, minus a baseline corresponding to the average rate of return over all fields. And also, suppose the amount of recent success in a field is proportional to the (total) amount of annual investment.
This corresponds to the standard exponential-growth ẋ = ax formula.
Under that model, there are fields of study (perhaps a lot of them!) which produce about the mean return, and grow or shrink slowly for a long time. There are fields which underperform, and shrink very fast. And there are fields which outperform, receive an amount of investment which saturates their ability to grow, and double as fast as you can hire/train new people and ship things around the world.
Possible explanations for the Vox article from a quick skim
1. The article seems to be looking at what percentage of media coverage is positive or negative rather than absolute numbers. It’s possible that the absolute amount of negative coverage trump gets is larger than clintons.
2. The data gather starts in January 2015, long after it was clear that Clinton planned to run but significantly before it was clear that Trump running for president was anything other than a joke (back when the most likely republican nominee was considered to be JEB, who isn’t even on this list). Clinton likely had a significant period in early 2015 in which near-100% of republican media’s political energy was spent on attacking her.
3. The article is only talking about internet media, an area that, at least according to the common wisdom, is dominated by Sanders supporters who have likely focused their ire on Clinton more than Trump. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump supporters were also disproportionately powerful on the internet relative to other right-wingers.
4. The controversy with Clinton’s emails and some of the Benghazi stuff would be caught within the timeframe of the study, almost all articles on that would probably count as negative press coverage of clinton.
Benghazi and the email thing have been covered incessantly by Right Wing radio, TV, and Internet sites– and by Right Wing pundits and writers on whatever Center or Left Wing news shows or publications would allow them to appear or write an article. And always with a very strong presumption of guilt and strong anti-Hillary bias.
Negative political ads work. And being far more goal oriented than Dems, the GOP uses anything that works to attain their goals. The only reason Hillary is doing well in polls and primaries still is because a lot of people do not believe the heavily biased Right Wing media or heavily biased Right Wing pundits or writers.
They successfully Swift Boated Kerry, and they are trying to do the same sort of thing to Hillary.
The “presumption of guilt” for Clinton’s e-mail server comes from the observation that any peon who did what she did would be sitting in jail right now, based on just the information that’s been made public.
I knew a captain in our brigade who inadvertently sent out an e-mail on an unclassified system with a PowerPoint slideshow that had a classified map in one of the images. The (US Government-owned) BlackBerries and hard drives off all the recipients were gathered up and destroyed and the captain got his career wrecked. BTW, that was with information from a SECRET system. Compare that to building a goddamn privately owned server shot through with TOP SECRET//SCI information.
Seriously. Anyone who’s ever worked a DoD job, even as a contractor, knows how seriously that stuff is taken.
Unless your name is Hillary Clinton, in which case it appears they’re going to sandbag the investigation until she can become President and pardon herself.
Probably has less to do with her name than with the title “Secretary of State” that preceded her name.
The people at the top will always find a way to increasingly force compliance below while finding new ways to get around those new rules themselves.
This sort of thing happened with the heads of basically every government agency since the Bush years so no, you’re totally wrong on this one
No one that ever worked for a DoD job, even as a contractor, was going to vote for Hillary Clinton anyway. They are still bitter her husband cut the gravy train in the 90s.
@Held in Escrow
What on earth are you talking about?
CatCube and Josh are 100% correct, and I can throw another data point in their favor. Anyone who has ever worked with classified material knows that anyone without the sort of political clout Hillary has can, and would, go to jail for this.
Do you just mean that, like j r said, it’s not because it’s Hillary, but that anyone in as high a position as Secretary of State would get special treatment? Fine, I’ll grant you that, but the fact remains that even if there have been a couple minor, accidental infractions here and there which have been covered up well enough that I’ve never heard of them, NO ONE not named “Snowden” or “Manning” has mishandled classified information on this scale in recent memory. The amount of hedging you would need to do to say “this sort of thing” happened all the time is mind-boggling.
You can argue that people are making a bigger deal out of it than it really deserves. I might even be with you on that; overclassification is a real problem, and I know people like the captain in CatCube’s example who have gotten slammed for similar things, who deserved better. But to say that those things don’t happen is willfully ignorant, at best.
I hope I’m misunderstanding you.
That the current rules were implemented after Powell left, and the fact that Petreaus lost his job for what was a comparatively innocuous violation seems like strong evidence against this being the case.
As Vorkon says; no one not named “Snowden” or “Manning” has mishandled classified information on this scale in recent memory. Spinning it as “not a big deal” or “something that happens all the time” is a pretty big pill to swallow.
@anon,
They may be bitter, but that’s not what they’re bitter about.
As in “I have personally talked with people in the SES who yell at their political appointee heads of agency not to do this yet they do it anyways.” Private email servers where you keep all your shit, classified or not were really common and the fact that Congress kept pulling Hillary up for it is what finally got these people to stop.
Having your own email server to handle this sort of thing has been considered to be no big deal; it’s hugely different from purposefully leaking documents or otherwise being loose lipped with them.
You can say that the heads of agencies shouldn’t do dumb shit like this and I agree. But it’s a totally different ballgame from Manning or Petraus. You get busted for actively giving away secrets, not for failing to uphold best practices.
@Held in Escrow
Okay, I guess that makes a bit more sense. So, to ensure clarity, you are basically agreeing with j r that it’s not so much the fact that it’s Hillary, as the fact that anyone in such a high position could get away with it?
Still, even if that’s true, it definitely does not follow that CatCube and Josh are “totally wrong.” Sure, maybe it’s possible that heads of entire government agencies can get away with it. But anybody who is not the head of an agency knows damn well that they’d end up in jail if they were caught doing the same thing. Even the people you’re talking about seem to understand, now that Hillary has been caught, that they can’t get away with it anymore, and by your own admission, have stopped.
I’m also uncertain, just based on the information you’ve provided, just how widespread it was. Sorry to sound accusatory, or anything; I’m sure people in high positions have told you things to that effect. But I’m not sure there isn’t a bit of a telephone effect going on here: they may be talking about yelling at people for something similar, but not as extreme, as what Hillary did, such as storing backups of old emails on their personal computer, or having emails automatically forwarded to a civilian email account as soon as they arrive (which, admittedly, is probably an even bigger security concern than what Hillary did, but easier to pass off as just not knowing any better. Plus it definitely was pretty widespread, and they started clamping down on that long before the thing with Hillary ever came to light.) It would also be important to note just which agencies you’re talking about, here: This would be a much bigger deal in a law enforcement, military, or diplomatic position, for example, than in a lot of others. More importantly, it’s hard for me to imagine how even someone in an SES position would be in a position to know that multiple people were doing this. They might have known about their own head of agency’s private email server, and may have extrapolated that other people are doing it, but how would they know for certain about any others? If it was really as widespread as you are saying, it’s hard for me to imagine how no one was ever caught doing it.
That might be naïve of me to say; after all, in order for them to be caught doing it, there needs to be someone who is actually interested in catching them, and at those levels of power that pretty much means “your political enemies,” from whom it is pretty easy to hide such things. Maybe it was really was as widespread as you say. But such a situation doesn’t seem to jive with my own experiences. (Experiences which, I’ll admit, have mostly involved lower ranked individuals, but that doesn’t invalidate my central point: That what CatCube and Josh said is true, and should not be dismissed.)
Either way, I take issue with you framing it as “failing to uphold best practices,” rather than “getting away with a crime because people can’t or won’t enforce it.” But even if that is how you want to describe it, people can, and do, get busted for failing to uphold best practices. Just not people like Hillary.
Is there yet good evidence that Clinton sent emails which were classified at the time at which she sent them? As of September 10, 2015, there was not.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/01/08/boom-in-newlyreleased-email-hillary-orders-aide-to-strip-classified-marking-n2101680
Still no indication that the contents of the email were classified.
If I mailed a bomb through the USPS, it would be nuts to scream “well, it wasn’t labelled as a mail bomb until someone else did that!”
The State Department has said that many emails on the system, some authored by Clinton, should have been marked classified based on knowledge at the time.
This isn’t Fox News saying it. This is the State Department saying it.
Sending a bomb through the mail is itself a crime. Sending emails which contain material that is later marked classified is not (if it were, it would mean that actions could be criminalized ex post facto, which the constitution forbids).
Do you have a source for this?
Look, it may be that, even if Hillary never sent emails containing material which was classified when she sent them, she is still guilty of some lesser offense. Maybe she was criminally negligent in unsecurely transmitting information which should have been marked classified and which she ought to have known should have been marked classified. This is something for the investigation to turn up, though.
Isn’t the SoS the original classifying authority for the State Department?
Sending emails which contain material that is later marked classified is not
The State Department said it should have been classified. Not “on retrospect, we should have classified this.” But rather “this should have been classified at the time.”
The best reporting of this has consistently been the Washington Post. Here is their long-form story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-clintons-email-scandal-took-root/2016/03/27/ee301168-e162-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
You can ^F for “These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department”. It’s a pretty direct reputation of this frankly insulting dodge.
Sending a bomb through the mail is itself a crime. Sending emails which contain material that is later marked classified is not
Sending emails which contain material that is later marked classified may or may not be a crime, depending on factors like whether or not the material is classified at the time (and at what level), and whether or not the sender knows that.
Material doesn’t need to be marked classified, to actually be for-real, throw-your-sorry-ass-in-jail-if-you-leak-it classified. And when somebody is being this carefully strategic with their denials or defenses, well, if the question is “did you have sex with that woman?” and the answer is “I did not have vaginal intercourse with that woman”, somebody was getting a blow job.
@Edward Scizorhands
This is discussed in the Politifact article:
“As for emails turned over and reviewed so far, there’s some interagency squabbling that makes it confusing to sort out what is classified and what is not. Independent inspectors general have said her emails contain some classified intelligence community information, but Clinton’s campaign and the State Department dispute those findings — saying the information was not classified.
Government agencies regularly disagree over what should be classified or not, and transparency advocates say the government overclassifies. (We talked about this at length in a previous article.) It means, though, that the inspectors general’s findings are not definitive proof that Clinton’s server contained classified information.”
but Clinton’s campaign and the State Department dispute those findings — saying the information was not classified.
I was quoting the Inspector General for the State Department. He says they were classified. He signed his name to it.
https://oig.state.gov/system/files/statement_of_the_icig_and_oig_regarding_review_of_clintons_emails_july_24_2015.pdf
But, I guess, if the Clinton campaign disagrees, that’s reasonable doubt, right?
You said:
Politifact says:
“Independent inspectors general have said her emails contain some classified intelligence community information, but Clinton’s campaign and the State Department dispute those findings — saying the information was not classified.”
I’m quoting a primary source. You are quoting a secondary source.
The problem is not that our sources conflict. The problem is that you’re attributing to the State Department the opinion of the State Department’s inspector general. The State Department itself, in fact, backs Clinton, maintaining that the contents of her emails should not have been classified at the time. The inspector general disagrees. But if there is ongoing inter- or intra-agency debate about whether the contents of her emails should have been classified, it will be very hard to prove that (1) Clinton transmitted material which should have been classified and (2) Clinton ought to have known that it should have been classified. That’s why an investigation is needed.
Even worse, there was also SAP. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/us/politics/hillary-clinton-email-said-to-include-material-exceeding-top-secret.html
I’ve witnessed people’s clearances revoked, escorted out of the building, and blacklisted from ever coming near intel again for way less.
And yet the IC mouthpeice lawfareblog considers Trump a disaster. They have an open invitation for anyone to make the national security case for him, that no one has seen fit to take up.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/will-anyone-make-national-security-case-donald-trump
This must be a tough year for the spooks.
“I knew a captain…”
Well, there’s your problem right there. I know lieutenant colonels who drove drunk and rolled their cars and only got a slap on the wrist.
Driving drunk and rolling your car doesn’t threaten national security.
hehe always strange to find a straight up conservative or liberal on SSC. SSC has a rep for deatheaters, socialists, and libertarians that i welcome some good ole non-ironic partyism.
Do you mean to imply that the media on net is heavily biased right, or that just the portion that is heavily biased is unbelieved?
As a republican myself, I swear to you that describing us as “far more goal oriented” is hilarious. Like, I wish.
The article makes no assessment of the intensity of the sentiment.
Negative articles about Trump can be very very negative; negative articles about Clinton can be pretty mild.
Thanks. I thought your 1 was most likely the explanation (the linked article claims Clinton got more unfavorable articles, but then shows data with just percentages, which suggests that the writer of the article was confused). But the other items you mention sound like plausible contributors as well.
RE: Moldbug
It is extremely interesting that when it comes to its piece on reaction, Vox focuses so much on some obscure technocrat like Curtis Yarvin. In the real world, people tend to rally around things like ancestry, language and religion, not technical rejiggering of the political machinery. If we ever get a serious reaction against the current liberal order, its not likely to look to the likes of Yarvin for its inspiration.
My guess is that Vox technocrats can sort of understand a fellow technocrat. Plus, Yarvin does have some followers in Silocon Valley. Still, this is a mistake similar to judging the popularity of libertarianism by the number of libertarians you find on the web.
You don’t think it’s significant that he basically founded the movement? Intellectuals matter. The famous Keynes quote about economics comes to mind but can applied to other academics:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
He hasn’t founded anything, and his importance in the broader alt right is negligible.
Are you serious? He didn’t found the alt-right but he founded techno-commercialism and the movement which shall not be named. People like Nick Land talk about him all the time.
Any “movements” that Moldbug has founded consist of a few guys on the interwebs, a couple of Silicon Valley entrepeneurs and maybe and eccentric academic or two. Compare that with traditional religious or nationalist reaction and it’s nothing.
Regardless of how influential he is or might be, your original statement(“He hasn’t founded anything”) is straight up wrong.
Now you’re just quibbling about the meaning of the word “anything.” Given the extremely negligible impact of Moldbug, I’m comfortable with my usage.
It is significant that Moldbug founded the movement, but movements take on lives of their own. Just look at Moldbug’s and Carlyle’s bête noire, the French Revolution.
If the alt-right becomes a significant political force, its leaders will be a lot more like Trump than like Moldbug, whatever intellectual debt they owe the latter.
People exaggerate Moldbug because he’s the one figure that a few Silicon Valley types have glommed onto, but he’s really nothing. Traditional reactionary thinking, based around religion and ancestry, has been around forever, is far more influential, and will continue to be far more influential. Do you think the LePenistes or the Sweden Democrats or the AfD have taken any inspiration from Moldbug? Do they need it? I doubt any American version of the same will take notice of him either.
Can SD or FN really be said to be reactionary in any way? Their platform is essentially “social democracy status quo, but with slightly fewer immigrants”.
Just take a look at SD’s website..
Social equity!
Clicking around you can read about their support for animal welfare, environmentalist energy policies, etc.
If this is “reaction”, “reaction” is meaningless.
You’ve been confused by the heavy libertarian influence on the Anglosphere right. Ideas like the ingroup taking care of its own, the sacredness of the land etc. are all perfectly compatible with reactionary politics.
What are they reacting against, exactly, if all the progressive values (except immigration) are “perfectly compatible”?
In any case, any political categorization that groups Moldbug and social democrats under the same label is simply not very good.
They’re also more conservative on abortion, gay rights etc. Cultural issues generally.
Have you never heard of Karl Marx?
Human beings tend to have a pretty strong leveling instinct (see Christopher Boehm), so you can often build a pretty strong political movement around class resentments, justified or not. That, and his call for immediate revolution, was Marx’s appeal.
Marx was very smart and good at diagnosis.
Of course, Hillary Clinton has much more negative press coverage than Trump. We are immersed in Right Wing propaganda in the U.S. And Right Wing news sources, and Right Wing writers in any Center or Left publication that will publish them, and on any TV station that will have them, and on Right Wing radio, pretty much constantly bash Clinton and Obama.
Is this satire?
Of course not. Even Sanders complained about hearing about Hillary’s emails incessantly. And he is running against her. And Benghazi was also covered incessantly and with a very strong anti-Hillary bias.
Go to the most popular Right Wing web sites and see if they are not incessantly bashing Hillary and Obama, as we write this. Here are what are said to be the 50 most popular Right Wing web sites.
http://rightwingnews.com/top-news/the-50-most-popular-conservative-websites/
If you don’t believe we are immersed in Right Wing propaganda, ask someone who recently moved here who knows English well enough to tell. I forget that almost no one here in the U.S. notices this. It’s like you’re a fish. You don’t think about being in water, because it’s just normal.
“If you don’t believe we are immersed in Right Wing propaganda, ask someone who recently moved here who knows English well enough to tell. I forget that almost no one here in the U.S. notices this. It’s like you’re a fish. You don’t think about being in water, because it’s just normal.”
Just because Europe is left of the US doesn’t mean we’re “immersed in Right Wing propaganda.” What if Europeans are “immersed in Left Wing propaganda” and any non-left wing views sound to them like “Right Wing propaganda”? Of course it’s all relative.
Also, Europe is not the world. Ask a Chinese person who recently moved to the United States. They find our propaganda very tame.
As for the idea that our media is dominated by “Right Wing” perspectives… well if talk radio and Fox News are our only media: http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy/559-1.gif
http://www.journalism.org/files/legacy/u29/14-Tone_of_Coverage_on_Cable_News.png
Yeah, that’s just called an Overton window. Europe isn’t a windowless fortress of Truth.
Of course China has more propaganda than the U.S. They set the bar pretty low.
The people who watch, listen to, or read Right Wing propaganda here still believe that Obama is a Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the U.S. and other ridiculous lies. If you believe those things are true, well, what can I say?
“The people who watch, listen to, or read Right Wing propaganda here still believe that Obama is a Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the U.S. and other ridiculous lies. If you believe those things are true, well, what can I say?”
Wow, I expect a lot better than this from SSC.
So, Onyomi, so you expect no one here to discuss what sorts of statements are passed off as truth by Right Wing media here? Or are you saying you believe those statements, and how could anyone doubt them? Or what? I’m new here, so if this is a Right Wing site, I didn’t know that.
@Jill
While not an explicitly conservative website, people here are probably more right wing than you expect so if you start making statements about how conservatives obviously dominate propaganda and no evidence to back that up then you’re going to be laughed at.
Even this conservative American Enterprise Institute political scientist states that, beginning with Gingrich in the 1990’s, the GOP has specifically targeted Democrats in government, to bash them and to bash Democratic administrations. And he says that their doing so prepared the way for someone like Trump to arrive and win big with the GOP voters.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
When I put together “We are immersed in Right Wing propaganda in the U.S.” and “The people who watch, listen to, or read Right Wing propaganda here still believe that Obama is a Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the U.S. and other ridiculous lies”, I arrive at the conclusion that nearly everyone in the US believes Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born here. Is this true?
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/09/12/iranpoll.pdf
Pg. 32
% of Republicans who identify Obama as a:
Muslim– 43%
Christian– 30%
Not religious– 15%
Pg 34
% of Republicans who believe Obama was born in:
USA/Hawaii: 68%
Africa/Kenya: 16%
No opinion: 12%
Other country: 3%
@Jill
So Earthly Knight just showed that your blanket statement isn’t even true for Republicans (43% and 19% are less than 100%). Do you want to take back your statement?
You might also want to apologize for your passive aggressive ad hominem attack (“If you believe those things are true, well, what can I say”).
It’s not just Europe. Latin America is also to the left of the US. So is the rest of North America. Asia is also kinda left-wing-ish because China has that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” going on and Russia is Russia.
It may be the case that the US are the only sane people and it is the rest of the world that is crazy for even considering socialism, but it is a fact that the US is more right-wing than the rest of the world.
At least 60% by volume, higher if we count hysteria over so-called SJW as right wing.
I’m definitely right wing (I’d consider myself centre-right) but according to that political leanings quiz linked here a while back, I’m Solidly Liberal.
So European centre-right is American liberal? Perhaps 🙂
I don’t think the Democrats are Communists or even Socialists (not by European standards; Bernie Sanders may be old-style 70s Socialist but really more of an Old Labour type) but they do, to my eyes anyway, seem to be locked into a position on a handful of “culture wars” issues that they will purge their own moderates and centrists from the party on and that they will use with all the conviction of the zealot to decry any deviation from as racism/sexism/homophobia/evil evil evil, rather than “you have a different opinion on this, please explain reasons why?”
I should note that the CNN/ORC results are on the low end; others put the numbers much higher:
Q28 (Republicans) Do you think Barack Obama
was born in the United States?
Yes 29%
No 44%
Not sure 26%
Q30 (Republicans) Do you think Barack Obama is a
Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?
Christian 14%
Muslim 54%
Not sure 32%
(To be fair, the left has its own problems with conspiracy theories– around half of democrats are truthers)
This hasn’t turned out great for us.
Besides, I wouldn’t say Chile is any less right wing than the US. As for Argentina, Brazil and Mexico… well, it depends on how exactly you define left and right, and what values you consider more essential to each side.
No, it’s just that Jill has decided to step into the niche that multiheaded’s absence has mostly left vacant.
I actually kind of like it. It’s annoying when the low-information trolls are all on one (my) side.
Aw, I prefer multiheaded, she’s a proper Commie! Jill is a nice ordinary liberal who thinks that the natural laws of the universe and what is true, right and just line up with the positions she holds on everything, and the opposition is all foam-flecked, swivel-eyed loons who are dangerous in power 🙂
perhaps i spoke too soon. this has got to be a fellow deatheater doing a bad satire
Perhaps 2016 is hugely different from 2013 but back then, there was a general sense of agreement that in the main, the media does lean left, not even so much in politics as that most newsrooms are filled with people from a particular type of background who share particular values.
From a 2008 column by the Washington Post ombudsman:
Everybody thinks The Other Lot are in positions of power and spreading their horrible propaganda, while Our Side simply reports the factual truth in an unbiased manner.
This is true, but there are a lot of non-mainstream right wing aligned news outlets, especially talk radio. And a lot of them spend a lot of time with negative stories about Clinton.
If the Vox articles counts those, then it’s conceivable, just by sheer volume, that anti-Hillary news outweighs anti-Trump news.
But maybe I just see more “Her husband rejected her, you should reject her too” memes on my facebook wall.
On another forum, I found some criticisms of Scott’s pieces on ancient religion and Albion’s Seed. Part of it is the normal trained-historians-turning-their-noses-up-at-pop-history stuff but some of it was insightful.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/a-theory-about-religion.28767/
“There are lots of interesting ways you can relate culture and iconography of america to the use of house hold gods in the ancient worlds. Unfortunately this has none of that and rambles on about Judaism for some reason. Also it seems to some how think that Judaism of 1000 bc even had much to do with it in 0 ad much less in the modern worlds. Judaism is not some weird crystal entity that just sits around unchanging. It is a living, breathing culture and religion that constantly is evolving. ”
” ‘The act of writing it down in a book, declaring this book the sort of thing that people might doubt but shouldn’t, and then passing that book to their children – that made it a modern religion, in the sense of something potentially separable from culture that required justification. I think that emphasizing the role of God and the gods provided that justification.’
Is most peculiar, because not only did no one doubt the texts of the bible for a very long time (and doubt about the Greek gods or some legends of them was quite popular in antiquity), but to claim that Jewish religion is seperate from culture and required justification is glaringly wrong. Jewish religion is Jewish culture, it is the basis of the Jewish belief in their separateness as a people. Even the most secular jew participates to some extent in Jewish festivities; this contradicts everything else that Alexander has to say. How does this work, if Judaism is a “modern religion” that detaches culture from religion, when Jews are the most ethnoreligious group in existence “
The idea is apparently based on the idea of treating information horizons seriously – that anything on the far side of such a horizon really can’t have any information gathered about it, regardless of whatever clever tricks can be imagined. One such trick that is thus limited is using partial waves of the vacuum energy, similar to the Casimir effect; thus, large-sized waves are limited to fitting inside the Hubble horizon, and are effectively quantized, which leads to a minimum possible acceleration.
Some further math notices that objects which accelerate have horizons much closer than the Hubble horizon, leading to unequal pressures by the vacuum energy – which seems to result in a counter-force which has the properties we usually associate with inertial mass. Light doesn’t have rest mass, but it does have inertial mass, so when it’s reflected, it has a high acceleration, and thus a close horizon, leading to more forces; which, possibly, through some clever physical arrangements, can be calculated to result in accelerations similar to those of EmDrives.
The theory’s authour lists further predictions at http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2016/04/predictions-of-mihsc.html , and more details elsewhere in that blog.
Physics PhD student reporting: here is the McCulloch paper on the emDrive.
I can’t give much more than vague impressions, but to my (not quite expert) eyes the is a mess. It reads like someone who got good at the trickery and formal manipulation that we feed to freshman and then stopped learning.
As the main example, at one point he has an equation that includes a multiplicative factor of mc^2 (where m is never defined and c is the speed of light). He then says “E = mc^2” and “E = ∫P dt” and so replaces mc^2 with P times some characteristic time.
This is very nearly nonsense. It certainly needs more justification to be convincing to anyone. E does not equal mc^2. In special relativity E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2 c^2 where m is mass and p is momentum. For objects near rest you could say E ~ mc^2 approximately, but the photons must have momentum or the proposed mechanism wouldn’t work, and m is earlier assumed to be small!
What’s more, the mechanism depends on the photons’ inertial mass being modified because they are accelerating. But light accelerating is exactly opposite the assumption of special relativity, so how do we justify bringing in a relativistic energy relation in the first place? I can accept that solving strange problems requires sometimes sloppy thinking, but I’d at least expect a brief note on the applicability (or lack thereof) of relativity.
Here’s the worse part. The paper makes four predictions: The thrust can be increased by increasing 1) the input power, 2) the Q factor of the resonator. 3) The thrust can be increased by introducing a dielectric, slowing the effective speed of light. 4) The thrust can be reversed by making the length of the resonator equal to the width of the narrow end.
1) and 2) are just what you’d expect intuitively. 3) is kind of an interesting prediction and is probably worth trying, though it being true definitely wouldn’t make me believe McCulloch right away. But unless I’m nuts, 4) is completely unjustified in the paper! He references two equations relating the thrust F and the length L and in both there is no physical choice for L that reverses the sign of F (which would reverse the thrust). I just have no idea what he’s talking about.
Long story short: any news report of the form “[new physics theory] may explain [phenomenon]” is wrong. Even more wrong than most science reporting. Basically, don’t trust anything you read about physics theory until the reporter can find multiple physicists that all agree that the theory is correct.
Another physics student here, just confirming that nothing in the paper makes sense. It’s a vague mishmash of unrelated equations dressed up with fancy words. The few times he makes a concrete statement using the fancy words, they’re wrong. The papers are only published in predatory or ‘alternative’ journals, and his only citations are from himself. And I can’t find the part where he actually ‘quantized’ anything. Quantization is not just a fancy word you can drape around equations, it’s an actual procedure that requires a lot of work!
I’m ashamed that the MIT technology review fell for this. SSC and some of my non-physics friends, too, but that’s more excusable.
I wonder if someone is pulling a Sokal.
I doubt it. I’m not sure it’s even full on crankery, just bad physics. MOND is a real thing and not an intrinsically terrible idea, despite it being heavily disfavored now. The idea of MOND arising from a dynamical mechanism that has boundary conditions at the edge of the observable universe also isn’t a intrinsically terrible idea, and is kind of creative. As others here have pointed out, it’s an idea that does not do what he wants it to do, and he should have realized that by now, but you can kind of understand why he might think it works.
As for the “quantization”, it doesn’t play a role in this paper, but it does seem to have meaning in the anomaly paper. (Though it’s quantization in the “modes on a string” sense, not in the deep Quantum Mechanics “second quantization” sense.)
More physicist here 🙂
There are also a bunch of experiments involving the interaction of small accelerations with quantum mechanics, the most direct probably being the wonderful bouncing neutrons (which you can use to measure magnetic field!), and none of these experiments have seen anything to contradict our current understanding of inertia (other experiments include cavity optomechanics experiments and time-of-flight measurements of trapped atoms).
So not only is it nonsense, it’s nonsense that we should already have noticed if it were true.
Math post-doc who has studied GR, EM, QM and argued about McCulloch with cosmologists here. tl;dr McCulloch is almost surely wrong.
The paper is a mess, and has enough flexibility in the failure to actually calculate typical length scales in a frustrum that the fit to existing thrusts is… arbitrary. McCulloch’s papers in general are a mess like this.
From a theory point of view, what is proposed is very strange, because the information horizons only appear in the large time limit, and for small accelerations are close to the Hubble boundary anyway. But on his hypothesis the inertial modification occurs immediately. Put another way, when the small accelerations occur, how does one know which modes of Unruh radiation will be suppressed in the very far field? How does one couple acceleration now to the distant metric expansion? He treats the radiation modes as spatially extended and instantly excited, which is just… wrong.
In the new and updated hypothesis, the suppression can be modified by distant conductors to boot… so this gives you superluminal signalling. The flyby anomalies would be different if you suddenly encased (or partially encased) the solar system in a conductive shell a light year in radius, thereby increasing the quantisation by a factor of some billions. But the flybys take only a few hours. Sure, this isn’t impossible per se, but it makes the EmDrive look like the smallest of possible fry.
Curious if military-minded folks have read this 1999 Chinese treatise on unrestricted warfare (link in English translation) that I have seen making the rounds on internet today.
Thanks for posting it. Very interesting read.
I haven’t, but I will now.
The “Charlie Stross” link is actually by Hugh Hancock, guest-posting on Stross’s blog.
Also, with the moray thing: If you want to link to a linear series of comments on Reddit, a better way to do it is to link to the bottom one and then [use the context option](https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/4ho3xs/petting_an_eel_underwater/d2ravsr?context=1) to show the ones above. That way you get a cannonical link to that particular series of comments, rather than relying on the reader’s sort order. (And on the vote totals not changing!)
Oops, tried to use Reddit formatting there… I meant to say, use the context option. (Note that the number supplied determines how many comments above are shown.)
This seems quite obvious, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of people self-identifying as feminists parallels the number of people self-identifying as environmentalists, though 1991 was a real high-water mark for the more feel-good “save the whales,” “save the rainforest,” “save the ozone layer”-type environmentalism. Like environmentalism, feminism used to have a more innocuous reputation: equal rights for women, poaching rhinos to make their horns into aphrodisiacs is bad.
For better or for worse, and fairly or unfairly, the causes have now come to mean something closer to “everything is rape” and “it’s worth crippling the fossil fuel-based industrial economy to respond to some seemingly ‘chicken little’-esque weather predictions.”
In both cases, I think the explanation for this change is the same: almost all of the blatant and obvious problems were fixed, so the moderates “declared victory and went home”. Those who remained were those who wanted not just incremental reform but a thorough-going restructuring of Western society, so they became recognized as extremists, and the mainstream was increasingly reluctant to associate with them.
I was going to suggest something like that. No fewer people want smog cleared up and forests preserved, but a lot fewer probably feel the need for activism about it.
See, I don’t know anything about the plight of forests and endangered species anymore (though I know air pollution is still a huge problem in China). I don’t know if this is because the former problems are not as severe (or never were as severe as made out to be), or if now climate change is just drowning everything else out?
I feel like it was a big strategic error to focus on apocalyptic climate changes. People can’t relate to it. If you say “look at this cute endangered rabbit whose habitat is being destroyed by rising sea levels” or “look at all these coral reefs being destroyed by acidification,” people have something to try to “rescue,” as opposed to just reducing the amount of certain types of gases in the atmosphere as a whole, a project which seems vague, vast, and impossible.
The former problems are less severe. Air pollution in southern california is greatly reduced from twenty years ago. Overall coverage of forests is up in the nation, acid rain doesn’t seem to be a concern anymore, the Ozone hole is gone (right?).
Some endangered species that aren’t cute and cuddly are protected to the point of shutting off water for irrigation or closing down development, etc.
Things may be entirely different in other countries, but I do think the near-mode environmental issues are greatly reduced in severity over the last half century or so.
” the Ozone hole is gone (right?)”
Not really, but it is a bit smaller than before and isn’t getting as much media attention.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011781/Predict-Future-Ozone-Hole2.gif
You’d make your argument stronger if you compared it to, say, anti-GMO sentiment.
My impression is that anti-GMO sentiment is stronger, or, at least, no weaker now than it was several years ago. It’s also a much less prominent issue in general than feminism.
I may have my time frames wrong (this likely happened before 1991), but the environmentalist movement nowadays is heavily left wing/anti-capitalist. See almost any green party anywhere in the world. This wasn’t always the case. It’s possible that more conservative environmentalists, in the Tolkien ‘evil industry destroying ancient Albion’ mould, have therefore stopped identifying as such.
I think I’d put the inflection point in the Sixties: no nukes, Silent Spring, and so forth. That’s about when leftism started picking up its modern Romantic slant.
My own model, which I think I have discussed here in the past, divides “Environmentalists” in to three camps, the Gaians, the Pastoralists, and the Conservationists. The embrace of Global Warming as the One True Cause of environmentalism, and the associated tribal politics, have I think put the Gaians in ascendance and convinced the Conservationists that they aren’t welcome in the tent any more. And the Pastoralists aren’t all comfortable with the current state of affairs either.
I would identify as Green if it were about protecting ancient Albion from pollution. Alas, reading any actual Green Party platform shows a long list of left-wing shibboleths with no logical connection to environmentalism, like homosexual “marriage” and letting the Palestinians conquer Israel.
The (American) Green Party of today is less a single-issue environmentalist party and more Ralph Nader’s brainchild, even if Ralph Nader himself isn’t running anymore. So, environmentalism plus left-wing populism.
I understand that similar situations prevail in many other countries, though the actors are different.
@Nornagest: If so, the story of how individual national Green Parties got taken over by specific actors must be interesting.
Nader is the only one I know about. WRT other nations, I was talking more about the policy mix.
The Australian Greens spun out of a variety of environmentalist groups, mostly Tasmanians with issues with the logging industry and dams and things, but also out of some leftist radicals – wasn’t so much taken over as left to begin with. Don’t know about any other countries.
There are a handful of right-ish wing green parties around. Probably the most explicit are Germany’s EDP, who have a seat in the EU parliament due to absurdly low vote thresholds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Democratic_Party
The nordic agrarian parties also have a bit more of an old fashioned less overtly leftist bent, though I don’t know much about them individually, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_agrarian_parties and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Greens_and_Farmers
Regarding the Clinton news coverage not matching your perceptions – it looks like the analysis is on articles in:
1)The Huffington Post; 2) The Washington Post; 3) CNN; 4) The Washington Times; 5) Politico; 6) The New York Times; 7) Fox News; 8) MSNBC; 9) CBS News; 10) The New Yorker.
Do you spend much time reading the politics sections of any of these? If not, the discrepancy is explained.
What terms and ideas are you having trouble with in “A bridge to meta-rationality”?
I haven’t looked at the stats, but the fact that Hillary has gotten more negative press doesn’t surprise me at all, though I think it would depend a lot on what counts as “negative.” For example, virtually any mention of Benghazi or private servers could be taken as “negative” coverage of Hillary. But what about a story to the effect “Donald Trump insults John McCain but poll numbers don’t take a hit! Can nothing stop this rude maniac?!” That story might be a net positive for Trump.
Also, does more negative press mean more intensity of negativeness in the stories, more numerous negative stories, or wider circulation of negative stories? Possibly some combination (balanced how?) of all three?
Scanning the vox article, it means “a greater proportion of stories that mention Hillary are determined by our sentiment analysis tool to be negative about her”.
Non-negative Trump articles would include:
Every article that’s a straight report of polls.
Every “why is Trump doing so well” article.
etc…
The study scanned a bunch of major outlets for candidate names, and automatically tagged them for tone (positive, neutral, negative).
So circulation wasn’t included (they skipped duplicates and republishing) but the sources were large outlets. Intensity was totally ignored – “Hillary’s boring debate performance” gets the same -1 as “Hillary eats baby on stage”.
The result is that there’s not much news here: fifty analyses of Hillary’s awkwardness in one speech produce -50, but three unrelated “Carson is batshit crazy” stories produce -3. They clumsily applied a business analysis to political news and called it science.
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon writer, does think that nothing can stop Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-will-win-in-a-landslide-the-mind-behind-dilbert-explains-why/
Actually, Scott Adams thinks that he can stop Trump and has offered to do so for $1 billion.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/134861704021/my-offer-to-stop-donald-trump
I’ll do it for a tenth that, and I’ll throw in this tiger-repelling rock absolutely free.
(Offer of tiger-repelling rock not valid in India, Southeast Asia, Sumatra, or southeastern Siberia.)
…or anywhere near a zoo.
I’m seconding this as a major cause.
It also explains the failure to match our perceptions in two ways.
First, I can round off 100 articles about Benghazi to “lots of news about Benghazi”, which is a smaller perceived unit than 20 unrelated articles about Trump lunacy. Redundancy is ignored by this study, but not by actual news readers.
Second, this is only a raw-count result. Hillary has lots of low grade pseudo-news I don’t care about, from “Benghazi still happened, remember?!” to “Hillary’s debate performance unimpressive”. Those may be more numerous than “Sanders: SECRET RACIST” and “Trump says ‘I eat babies'”, but they’re way less potent. Hillary’s news coverage, like the rest of her campaign, is simply less emotional than many of the candidates.
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Thoughts?
[EDIT] – Perhaps my own thoughts first. I am not really interested in the “conservatives are discriminated against” angle, so much as I am in the question of how much of the social consensus in the last decade or so has been actually real. For me, this flows into the question of why so few saw Trump coming (and whether he can win in november), Sad puppies and the hugos, ants, and into the Something Awful discussion from a few threads ago. How much of the current political landscape is downstream of a handful of technical chokepoints?
I read all the Gawker pieces about the former news curators, and this is what emerges:
–Facebook didn’t want trending news pieces that linked to sites (“like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax”) that have a reputation for ignoring standards of journalism, and would instead link to reputable outlets covering the stories
–consistent with the above, news topics that were trending among Facebook users, but sourced only from crap sites, were left off the trending page
–the Facebook algorithm for ranking trending stories had a slower response time to breaking news than Twitter did, and didn’t always pick up news items that were front-page stories at major media outlets, so curators “injected” these stories onto the trending page
–Facebook didn’t want the contract curators to post trending stories referring to Twitter by name, and required clearance for stories about Facebook.
That’s it.
The Gawker cites a single ex-curator who’s information about suppression of conservative topics is entirely consistent with Facebook trying not to link to crappy sites. Another curator who confirms that Facebook didn’t want to link to those sites put it this way: “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”
———————————————————
Right Wing “news sources” that lack journalistic integrity have gotten very spoiled in the past decade and now expect their lies to be treated as truth by Facebook and others.
“News” is supposed to be factual. E.g. Facebook should have no obligation to classify stories as news, that are from National Inquirer, and are about space aliens, complete with photo shopped photos of the aliens. Neither should they have to classify as news, stories about Obama being a Muslim and not being born in the U.S. as “news.”
I guess this is going according to the old fashioned standards that news is supposed to be facts rather than entertainment though. And I know that most people don’t use that standard any more. Young as he is, I guess Zuckerberg has old fashioned standards in that way.
“I guess this is going according to the old fashioned standards that news is supposed to be facts rather than entertainment though.”
-All news is entertainment.
Well, there are still people who do go by the old standards that news should be true rather than lies. And Zuck seems to be one of them.
And as we all know, reality has a liberal bias so a conservative website is going to lack journalistic integrity by default!
“Journalistic integrity” lol.
It’s fair for Facebook to decide they don’t want to associate their brand with those nasty right-wingers. But it’s also fair to tell the nasty right-wingers what they’re doing, so they can decide whether to associate with their brand.
Yeah, I have this gut reaction that “Journalistic integrity” is totally code for “people I agree with.”
And the cure for “wrong” speech is “right” speech in opposition, not suppression of the wing speech.
While of course FB is free to do what they want, I think the approach is wrong on philosophical grounds. And the explaination just feels totally disingenuous.
That’s essentially my reaction as well.
So, for future calibration of my response to your comments- can I interpret your words as “I, suntzuanime, believe that Breitbart is a credible news source.”?
Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is Breitbart a credible news source, or not?”
But Moldbug, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Click that link. Observe the atrocious graphic design. (Have you noticed how far above the rest Obama’s graphic design is? Some font designers have.) Observe the general horribleness, so reminiscent of Fox News. Then hit “back.” Or, I don’t know, read an Ann Coulter column, or something. Dear Lord. I am not a progressive, but I’m not a conservative either. (If you must know, I’m a Jacobite.) Over time, I have acquired the ability to process American conservative thought – if generally somewhat upmarket from Fox News or townhall.com. This is an extremely acquired taste, if “taste” is even the word. It is probably very similar to the way Barack Obama handled the Rev. Wright’s more colorful sermons. When David Mamet points his readers in the general direction of townhall.com, it’s sort of like explaining to your uncle who’s a little bit phobic that he can understand the value of gay rights by watching this great movie – it’s called “120 Days of Sodom.” It’s not actual communication. It’s a fuck-you. It’s Mamet.
But many people will think exactly this: if you stop being a progressive, you have to become a conservative. I suspect that the primary emotional motivation for most progressives is that they’re progressives because they think something needs to be done about conservatives. Game over. Gutterball. Right back to the insidious grip.
Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any consistent relationship to reality.
Let’s think about this for a second. As a progressive, you believe – you must believe – that conservatism is a mass delusion. What an extraordinary thing! A hundred-plus million people, many quite dull but some remarkably intelligent, all acting under a kind of mass hypnosis. We take this for granted. We are used to it. But we have to admit that it’s really, really weird.
What you have to believe is that conservatives have been systematically misinformed. They are not stupid – at least not all of them. Nor are they evil. You can spend all the time you want on townhall.com, and you will not find anyone cackling like Gollum over their evil plan to enslave and destroy the world. They all think, just like you, that by being conservatives they are standing up for what’s sweet and good and true.
Conservatism is a theory of government held by a large number of people who have no personal experience of government. They hold this theory because their chosen information sources, such as Fox News, townhall.com, and their local megachurch, feed them a steady diet of facts (and possibly a few non-facts) which tend to support, reinforce, and confirm the theory.
And why does this strange pattern exist? Because conservatism is not just an ordinary opinion. Suppose instead of a theory of government, conservatism was a theory of basketball. “Conservatism” would be a system of views about the pick-and-roll, the outside game, the triangle defense and other issues of great importance to basketball players and coaches.
The obvious difference is that, unless you are a basketball coach, your opinions on basketball matter not at all – because basketball is not a democracy. The players don’t even get a vote, let alone the fans. But conservatism can maintain a systematic pattern of delusion, because its fans are not just fans: they are supporters of a political machine. This machine will disappear if it cannot keep its believers, so it has an incentive to keep them. And it does. Funny how that works.
So, as a progressive, here is how you see American democracy: as a contest in which truth and reason are pitted against a quasicriminal political machine built on propaganda, ignorance and misinformation. Perhaps a cynical view of the world, but if you believe that progressivism is right, you must believe that conservatism is wrong, and you have no other option.
But there is an even more pessimistic view. Suppose American democracy is not a contest between truth and reason and a quasicriminal political machine, but a contest between two quasicriminal political machines? Suppose progressivism is just like conservatism? If it was, who would tell you?
Think of conservatism as a sort of mental disease. Virus X, transmitted by Fox News much as mosquitoes transmit malaria, has infected the brains of half the American population – causing them to believe that George W. Bush is a “regular guy,” global warming isn’t happening, and the US Army can bring democracy to Sadr City. Fortunately, the other half of America is protected by its progressive antibodies, which it imbibes every day in the healthy mother’s milk of the Times and NPR, allowing to bask securely in the sweet light of truth.
Or is it? Note that we’ve just postulated two classes of entity: viruses and antibodies, mosquitoes and mother’s milk. William of Ockham wouldn’t be happy. Isn’t it simpler to imagine that we’re dealing with a virus Y? Rather than one set of people being infected and the other being immune, everyone is infected – just with different strains.
What makes virus X a virus is that, like the shark in Jaws, its only goals in life are to eat, swim around, and make baby viruses. In other words, its features are best explained adaptively. If it can succeed by accurately representing reality, it will do so. For example, you and I and virus X agree on the subject of the international Jewish conspiracy: there is no such thing. We disagree with the evil virus N, which fortunately is scarce these days. This can be explained in many ways, but one of the simplest is that if Fox News stuck a swastika in its logo and told Bill O’Reilly to start raving about the Elders of Zion, its ratings would probably go down.
This is what I mean by “no consistent relationship to reality.” If, for whatever reason, an error is better at replicating within the conservative mind than the truth, conservatives will come to believe the error. If the truth is more adaptive, they will come to believe the truth. It’s fairly easy to see how an error could make a better story than the truth on Fox News, which is why one would be ill-advised to get one’s truth from that source.
So our first small step toward doubt is easy: we simply allow ourselves to suspect that the institutions which progressives trust are fallible in the same way. If NPR can replicate errors just as Fox News does, we are indeed looking at a virus Y. Virus Y may be right when virus X is wrong, wrong when virus X is right, right when virus X is wrong, or wrong when virus X is wrong. Since the two have no consistent relationship to reality, they have no consistent relationship to each other.
There’s a seductive symmetry to this theory: it solves the problem of how one half of a society, which (by global and historical standards) doesn’t seem that different from the other, can be systematically deluded while the other half is quite sane. The answer: it isn’t.”
That was a lot clearer than most Moldbug. It might even be a reasonable statement about the world.
However, I’m distracted by “you will not find anyone cackling like Gollum over their evil plan to enslave and destroy the world”.
Did Gollum ever actually do that? Does Moldbug tend to get popular culture wrong?
Have I mentioned that if you look at LOTR from the point of view of the Ring, it’s a very sad story? The Ring tries so hard for so long and against such odds, and is destroyed just before its moment of victory.
I’m not sure that even Sauron did that sort of gloating, though Morgoth might have.
I believe the “like Gollum” was intended only to apply to the “cackling” and not to the further “over their evil plan to enslave and destroy the world”. Gollum certainly cackles.
That was really good. That wasn’t actual Moldbug? I felt my respect for him shoot up, but I assume that was actually you imitating his style.
You should do that more often, you’re much better at it than he is.
No, that was actual Moldbug – possibly his most famous work. It’s from “Open Letter to an Open-Minded Progressive” (you’ll have to google; Scott’s system doesn’t like the link).
If I say “Moldbug said” followed by something in quotation marks, I feel like I have in fact attributed that quote to Moldbug. I apologize for any confusion.
I parsed that as “(cackling like Gollum) over (their evil plan to destroy the world)”. Gollum certainly did a lot of cackling, at least in the movies, but his ambitions were a lot smaller than the world.
I guess the confusion is over whether a group of first-century Jewish religious authorities conspired to attack poor innocent Moldbug 😉
EDIT: woah! this site has smileys?
I did quote the Bible without attribution, I suppose. I’m not going to apologize for that, that’s been a legal move in Western intellectual discourse for centuries.
Indeed, Gollum’s Ring-induced power fantasies were remarkably modest considering how long the Ring had control of him. (‘Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths. Lord Smeagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum! Eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea. Most Precious Gollum!’) Sam only had it a few minutes before he started imagining himself as Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age.
>Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is Breitbart a credible news source, or not?”
Never has the phrase “Come down off the cross, we can use the wood” been more appropriate.
The obvious question is if Facebook did the same for equally bad left wing sources.
Assuming there are equally bad Left Wing sources. Not necessarily so. A false equivalence here perhaps.
You could examine that. Let’s take a few examples of lack of journalistic standards:
1) Jackie Coakley’s rape hoax – zero evidence for her story to the extent that her friends didn’t even corroborate details and the reporter didn’t do any other follow ups; reported as truth. Was that filtered from facebook feeds?
2) Michael Brown was a criminal who attacked a cop and was shot. Obama’s Justice Department ordered multiple autopsies of him and still couldn’t come up with any pretext to recommend indicting the cop who killed him. Were stories implying or stating that he was murdered filtered out?
etc.
Give it up Jill. You are not particularly good at it.
It’s called Salon.
Nah. I’m starting to be amused. It could be that grit and leaning in could overcome her disadvantaged upbringing and poor early education. Why deny her the chance to fulfill her dreams, just for a lack of any indication of talent?
Anons being rude is one thing, but non-anon old-timers like you represent the community, keranih. You should know better than that.
Would they accept trending links from, to pick an example totally and utterly at random, Gawker?
I really appreciate the context of what they were thinking when they did this – and, honestly, I’m not all that appalled at a private website not being perfect saints of free-speech and balance, because we already knew that about every major social media site; Facebook is already infamous for selectively banning things for violating “community standards”. Learning that their “trending news” thingy is actually a curated list, not an algorithm, is interesting but not really shocking.
On the other hand, uncritically accepting the idea that conservative news sources were suppressed because they have no standards passes all the way through charity and steelmanning and approaches the point of parody. C’mon. Be serious.
I wonder if someone will test how much editing is allowed before a common platform loses their Good Samaritan protections under the CDA, (to avail themselves of the protections the site isn’t supposed to be a content provider).
I really don’t see a single “trending” topic my Newsfeed that looks like “news.”
The closest is a story about the next X-Men movie, which will be set in the 1990s. Apparently.
I’m mostly just surprised that this is coming from Gawker.
Certainly; that the social consensus is indeed false has been adequately demonstrated by at least two things: The rise of Trump, whose supporters have in common only that they do not share the consensus. And the ants, who are clearly more numerous than their consensus-claiming opponents.
Note we also had a false consensus in climate change… that was completely blown apart by Climategate; I think this ties into the fall of self-identifying environmentalists. My sense is that while the whole climate thing has used many of the same tactics as the culture war, that it’s a separate thing.
I don’t think it’s technical chokepoints, though. It’s _true_ consensus (both on social issues and on climate change) among what the right calls the “MSM”, and the lefty blogs. The other perspectives are all still available if you are willing to look at despised sources such as Fox or Breitbart. Facebook cutting them off from “trending” is a pretty minor thing in itself; if Twitter and Google and Yahoo all did the same, THEN it might be technical chokepoints causing the issue.
This would be a stronger post without Climategate. I’m probably more skeptical than average on climate, but I never found any of the various allegations there at all convincing.
As far as I can tell, there is a true consensus on climate change among the people studying it, now and in 2009. And no significant deception, though this doesn’t rule out groupthink issues or simplifications of a lies-to-children type. Insofar as skepticism is justified, it has to take that into account.
Scott, do you actually perceive that Trump has gotten more negative media coverage than Hillary? I guess you must not read, listen to, or watch many Right Wing news sources then? There are tons of them, and they bash Hillary constantly. Look at, listen to, or read a few and you will see what I mean.
Although the GOP establishment doesn’t like Trump, they certainly dislike Hillary more, and it shows. And there have been long periods of time that Right Wing media didn’t say a lot about Trump, because they were trying to figure out what to do. They’d try to hurt him. It wouldn’t work. His poll numbers would go up. And they would stop for a while and be stunned.
Also, with Trump, a lot of the coverage of him was him speaking on TV– just him being there talking, which maybe would be positive or neutral, rather than negative. Or else just articles reporting what he said or did, which would be usually neutral.
They wanted to have a different nominee than Trump, but I guess they knew that it was possible that he would turn out to be the only man left standing in the GOP race. And they knew in that case that they wanted to bash Hillary more, so that the pres would have an R behind their name, not a D.
Have you seen any positive media coverage about Trump from the MSM? And if you haven’t noticed, the MSM is hardly right-wing. That Vox piece rates Trump as the second-most-positively covered candidate. Ridiculous.
Most media coverage of Trump is neutral, because it’s just him talking, or a writer reporting what he said. A lot of media people don’t know what to make of him or what to say to or about him, so they hand their show or article over to him to say whatever he says. They want ratings, viewers, listeners, readers. Because of that, many of them are not willing to criticize the entertainer that people clicked on their article to hear about, or turned to their channel to see or listen to.
The vast majority of media outlets I’ve seen (HuffPo, NYT, Vox, WaPo, NRO, TIME, Der Spiegel, the New Yorker, FiveThirtyEight) have done nothing but criticize Trump ever since he started running. He’s not getting much favorable media coverage. Politico provides some neutral coverage.
I think Jill might be a troll but it’s really hard to tell.
Liberal web sites criticize Trump a fair amount. Right Wing web sites criticize Hillary a lot more than liberal ones criticize Trump.
If a troll means the only non-Right Winger on this board, then I guess that is me.
I try to find a forum with more Left Wingers or Center folks than Right Wingers, but they are very hard to find.
Yes, there are a few Left Wing news sources. But most news sources are just entertainment and trivia, no news to speak of.
Jill, it’s not you’re left wing beliefs that make you sound like a troll. It’s your “reality has a liberal bias” attitude that makes you sound like a conservative caricaturing a progressive.
Jill, You might like Amptoons and/or Making Light.
Deleted my comment to be more charitable.
>Right Wing web sites criticize Hillary a lot more than liberal ones criticize Trump.
But not nearly as much as those same right-wing websites criticze Trump.
Nancy, I’m no fan of Making Light anymore, but I don’t think they deserved that.
Making Light introduced me to John M. Ford, so I can’t say it’s totally bankrupt. However shrill and tribal it’s gotten.
Thanks, Nancy for the links. I will check them out.
@ Jill
Us Lefties, especially Clintonistas, mostly keep our heads down.
reddit.com/r/hillaryclinton
Nice and polite and logical.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/
Logical articles, applauded sweetly by a large choir.
Both are Hillary sites, well moderated.
(I don’t like Making Light either.)
Maureen Dowd columns in the NYT about Trump are so affectionate that I sometimes wonder if they might have been an item at one time.
OK, but the Editorial Board is about as anti-Trump as could possibly be. Remember all those Trump’s a Fashist articles in December?
And while Dowd’s columns do count as positive coverage of Trump, they are hardly pro-Trump.
I think you’ve nailed the problem. Run an automated sentiment analysis tool and tell it to score -1, 0, +1 and you’ll get these sorts of results. There’s lots of mildly positive coverage of Trump: primary results; grudging acceptance that he’s won (the nomination); noting how many people attend his rallies; MoDo; polling stories; “why is Trump doing so well?”. Negative coverage tends to be super-negative, on the other hand: “Trump is a fascist”. “Is Trump a fascist, a neo-fascist, a post-fascist or a crypto-fascist?”.
Run it again with -5 to +5 and you’ll see that there’s lots of Hillary -1 and -2 stories, but virtually all the -5 stories on the MSM are Trump.
Mark Leibovich’s columns in the NYT Magazine also tend to be crypto pro-Trump. But journalists have to keep this under covers.
1. What makes you think that the sentiment analysis software would classify these stories as positive, rather than neutral?
2. It’s hard to see how primary results, polling stories, and stories about how Trump is the de facto nominee could explain how he has a greater proportion of positive coverage than Hillary, given that she has won basically the same number of primaries, has led in the polls for even longer, and is also the de facto nominee.
I’ve noticed elsewhere (eg, the NYT magazine did a sort of journalist-follows-candidate-around piece on Trump sometime earlier, when his candidacy was still kind of a novelty) that some journalists who are generally left-wing seem like they’re charmed by Trump in spite of themselves.
Trump has survived as a New York celebrity for 30 years in part because New York media types who know him tend to like him.
This reminds me of Talleyrand. Everyone who didn’t know him thought he was a terrible person. People who knew him liked him.
Another man who was surprisingly successful, although probably for different reasons.
We should hope that the EmDrive doesn’t work for great filter reasons. An EmDrive being possible would shorten the time a civilization would need before being able to colonize other star systems and so, conditional on the Fermi paradox being caused in part by civilizations destroying themselves, would reduce the expected lifespan of our high tech civilization.
Great Filter arguments never really convinced me. “If interstellar colonization is possible, and there aren’t any known interstellar civilizations, there must be something stopping civilizations from reaching that point.” is one valid explanation, but it seems like it’s equally valid to say “Nothing stops civilizations from reaching that point–humans are just the first.”. After all, someone has to be first. No reason it can’t be us.
Yep, plus given how little we know about the distribution of planets capable of supporting life throughout the galaxy, things like the Drake equation are basically guesses.
It’s better than that, actually: Alex Tabarrok is assuming that criminals aren’t using that rational strategy, and are instead discounting larger punishments heavily. That is, they’d be more deterred by a 50% chance of a year in jail than by a 2% chance of 25 years, even though both have an expected-jail-time of six months. If that’s the case — and we have strong evidence that it is — then shifting resources from prisons to police could be a big win, both by reducing crime and by reducing punishment.
I think this is the conventional view of the subject, usually put as criminals being risk preferring, but there’s a problem. The analysis, as I understand it, assumes that a two year jail sentence is twice the amount of punishment of a one year sentence–which sounds right but isn’t.
The cost to the criminal of being arrested, tried, and convicted isn’t just the amount of time he spends in jail. It includes the cost of posting bond, the cost of a lawyer if he has one, the reputational cost of being known as a convicted criminal. That’s about the same whether he is sentenced to one years or two, so two years is less than twice the punishment of one year, so the deterrent effect of a .1 chance of two years is less than that of a .2 chance of one year even if the criminal is risk neutral.
The classic historical version of this is the (British) Victorian-era replacement of the “bloody code” (220 capital crimes and transportation also common) with imprisonment for many crimes (by 1861, the only capital offences were murder, treason, espionage, piracy and arson of the – then still wooden – Royal Navy) and the simultaneous introduction of modern policing – the Metropolitian Police in 1829, progressively extended across the country, completed in 1857.
Crime levels dropped dramatically at that time.
“Crime levels dropped dramatically at that time.”
Evidence? We don’t have very good data on crime rates in the 18th century, but such evidence as I have seen doesn’t support that.
The rate of homicides known to police in England from 1906-1910 was 0.8 per 100,000. (Ted Robert Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crimes: A Critical Review of the Evidence,” in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research v. 3, Michael Tonry and Norval Morris eds.)
Homicide indictment rates reported by Beattie fell from 8.1 per 100,000 (1660-1679) to 0.9 (1780-1802) in the urban parishes of Surrey, from 4.3 to 0.9 in the rural parishes of Surrey, and from 2.6 to 0.6 in (rural) Sussex.
It’s possible that homicide indictments in the 18th century were a smaller fraction of homicides than homicides known to police in the early 20th century, of course. But those were the best figures I was able to find when I wrote an article on 18th c. English criminal law enforcement.
It’s worth noting that, although almost all serious offenses were capital in the bloody code, only a small fraction of those tried for such offenses were hanged, and probably only a minority of those convicted. For more details see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Legal_Systems_Draft/Systems/England_18thc.htm
“the deterrent effect of a .1 chance of two years is less than that of a .2 chance of one year even if the criminal is risk neutral”
I’m a bit confused as to why this would be a problem. Doesn’t this mean we get even more bang for our buck by reducing sentence length and increasing policing?
I’m not saying it is or isn’t a problem. I’m saying that what appears to be evidence that criminals are risk preferring isn’t.
Doesn’t that just scream WEIRDO to you? It does to me.
Your standards of “intellectual honesty” are pretty damned low. Turkheimer is cursed by not being able to deal with the implications of his own discovery. Hence, he makes every effort to undermine it. Most of which of course is nonsense, as much of this ultimately is.
“Correlation of -0.68 between “rule of law” in a country as defined by the World Justice Project, versus road accident deaths per capita in that country.”
According to WHO, the highest road death rate in the world, by a factor of two is in … Libya.
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A997
There’s a General Factor to good citizenship, which includes driving well, paying taxes, and not littering. It’s probably something that the Obama Administration should have thought about it before getting involved in Libya.
If only the General Factor of good citizenship extended to not starting wars in other people’s countries!
This seems to me to be a big misreading of the linked piece. If you read the earlier post he links to, What Was Gary Becker’s Greatest Mistake, he explicitly says that the P(caught)*punishment model does not predict criminal behavior, and that P(caught) matters much more than punishment does — and that therefore such large punishments don’t gain us anything, and we’d do much better to focus on P(caught).
So the post you linked to isn’t saying “If we increase P(caught), we can decrease punishment”; rather, it’s just pointing out way in which you can see that we haven’t put enough resources into increasing P(caught). (And that increasing P(caught) and decreasing punishment are things we should do anyway, because this would increase deterrence, not keep it constant.)
Surely the subjective disutility of punishment doesn’t scale linearly with the length of the sentence given that people have discount rates and criminals are likely to have particularly steep ones.
For the p(caught)*punishment to work, it requires that criminals have a realistic estimate of both.
I don’t know if criminals in the US are different, but this side of the pond it has been shown that criminals have epsilon knowledge of punishment and only a vague idea of p(caught).
What they do have a good grasp on is how often they see a cop on the street, so that having lots of cops walking around and never arresting anyone lowers crime.
I believe most criminals socially interact with other criminals and criminal-adjacent types without keeping their criminality strictly secret. Indeed, I believe most criminals brag about their criminality, within their social circle, for status.
This suggests that most potential future criminals will have a pretty good feel for the ratio, Crimes Bragged About : Criminals Arrested, calibrated for the particular type of crimes they’d likely commit and the quality of the accomplices they would bring to the job. There is still room for systematic error when it comes to the ratio, Crimes Bragged About : Crimes Actually Committed.
It looks to me as though the link about the implicit association test just says that racist behavior is so ill-defined that no one has figured out whether the test predicts anything. Have I missed something?
They ought to have made some definitions and looked for correlations before touting it as “This one trick will show your hidden racism!”
I’ve been rather incredulous that anyone took that seriously since first hearing about it. Not terribly surprising that no one has bothered to match it’s findings to anything of consequence.
Definitely this. I remember the first time I took the test. I guessed what they were doing less than halfway through, and then tried to game the rest of the test. Also, since it’s taking a time differential on quick reactions, it’s incredibly susceptible to noise. We need a really strong link to something else for it to mean anything.
Why on earth would you game the test? Were you taking it in some context where you would gain a benefit from doing so?
For a bit, it was A Thing in some stridently progressive agitprop circles to boast of how well one did on the association test.
I was taking it purely for my own curiosity. I’m also a nerd, so I quickly became curious about whether I could game the test. I figured that if I consciously had a model of what the test was doing, the idea that it could capture subconscious effects was broken, anyway. If the results are going to be garbage, I might as well satisfy my curiosity!
Good article that I linked to on a previous thread too. It relates to the planned bashing of Democrats who are, or have been, in government, which has been going on since Gingrich’s time. Which will tell you why a Democratic Secretary of State and Dem presidential candidate gets bashed more than anyone running as a Republican gets bashed, at least by Right Wing media.
The political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
Norm Ornstein on why the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover, what the media missed, and whether Trump could win the presidency
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
The right-wing media (Breitbart) bashes left-wingers. The left-wing media (New York Times) bashes right-wingers. Nothing new here.
The interesting thing for me is that the left spent a huge amount of time talking about how awful the conservatives are…. and then when Trump came along, they didn’t want to believe Republicans would be awful enough to support him.
Well, he’s quite different from what one would call a “Republican”. Much of his support has come from working class whites who have been abandon by the Democrats.
Yes, working class whites who’ve been catered to by Republicans since Nixon, using approval of racism as bait. He is very Republican in that way.
Can we get some solid figures on this, other than hand-wringing articles about how the only reason people are supporting Trump must be because they’re all racists?
I’m fed-up of seeing this. Show me good polling data on “Yeah, I hate black, brown, and yellow people and that’s why I’m voting for Trump” as distinct from “The major employer in town shut up and moved to China and I haven’t worked in the last three years, I don’t think we should be sending our jobs to China”. The second is treated as racism (“how dare you not be delighted that a poor person in China is marginally less poor now they have your job at a fraction of the wages you used to be paid?”) but need not be based on thinking Chinese people are inferior or hatred of Chinese people.
People often call Trump a racist, but what’s the evidence? Yes he has said mean things about Muslim and Mexican immigrants, but neither are a race.
@Deiseach
If someone says that political correctness is the number one problem facing the United States, what exactly do you take from that?
All those racists in Massachusetts…
That they think social justice and most of the concepts derived from it are a scam.
That they’re concerned about the excessive political correctness in the USA… what do you take from it?
Even if you think social justice is a scam, that still doesn’t get you to number one problem in America.
Does it need to?
If someone says that political correctness is the number one problem facing the United States, what exactly do you take from that?
That they have a particular political slant and unless I see more of what they mean by “political correctness” (which can range from “don’t use ‘tran*s’ instead of ‘trans’, that’s hurtful and offensive!” to “Quentin Tarantino should really stop using ‘nigga’ in his movie scripts”) and how it’s such a big problem, I can’t say if they’re making a reasonable point or not.
>working class whites who’ve been catered to by Republicans since Nixon, using approval of racism as bait.
This is demonstrably false. The southern strategy is almost entirely a myth. Nixon, in particular, lost the south in 68 because he wouldn’t pander to the racists. And in 72, he won 49 states
@Teal
Perhaps he thinks that there are taboos that prevent recognizing and thus solving certain problems. For example, in my EU country, integration of some groups of immigrants (mostly Muslim) was/is going very badly, but there was political consensus that pointing this out was racism. Non-racist ideas like ‘let’s limit migration of groups from a culture that integrates badly, so we don’t keep adding to the problems’ were outside the Overton Window.
To give a US example, I think that the US political system is one of the main problems in America, not because of the political system itself, but because it makes solving many other problems is near impossible now.
@ Aapje
Perhaps you could suggest some ethnically neutral criteria for rejection? For example, reject everyone who believes in “traditional family values” or authoritarian parenting?
@Nita
I assume that by ‘rejecting,’ you mean placing something outside of the Overton Window.
If so, I believe that it shouldn’t be the business of mainstream politics or media to enforce a certain morality by refusing to engage & socially shaming certain (semi)popular opinions, especially not with smears (people who advocate X are fascists/Nazis), weak manning or straw manning. After all, we shouldn’t forget that in the past certain ideas were outside the Overton Window that we now consider to be right (for example: black people deserve equal rights). It would be pretty arrogant to think that right now we are 100% correct in our ethics. I also find it very worrisome when people have no confidence in the strength of their arguments and instead seek to coerce people. If people have a poor message, they should understand why and fix it.
Another big reason is that the Overton Window polarizes. It tends to create an echo chamber of ‘politically correct thought’ and echo chambers of ‘politically incorrect thought.’
To take Trump (and similar movements that are growing throughout the West) as an example, I think that most of the people who vilify him would be better served to examine what legitimate issues there are that makes him popular (like reduced social mobility or to phrase it in American: the end of the American Dream). Then the second step would be to examine how their own politics has contributed to this and how it can address this.
I think that Sanders and Trump actually address the same issue in this regard, although from a different side of the culture war (where each side has their own dog whistles and other rhetoric that is emotionally pleasant to their own side, but off-putting to the other).
@ Aapje
Well, you were talking about limiting immigration, so that’s what I meant by “rejecting”.
@Nita
I’ll also address your first example:
“Traditional family values” is in essence the fear that abolishing certain rules will result in societal problems/chaos. Children experiencing bad parenting, due to both their parents working too much, policies making it easier to be a single parent, easy divorces, etc.
Instead of looking for ‘ethnically neutral criteria’ to reject traditional family values, why not flip it around and look for commonality first. Do you believe that divorce harms children (as studies tend to show)? Do you believe that single parenting is harmful (as studies tend to show)? Do you believe that some children are neglected because their parents both focus on their careers? Do you think that it’s good for children to have role models of both genders? But of course the advantages that ‘traditional families values’ do have are offset by disadvantages. For example, without divorce, people can’t escape their abusive spouse. So the situation is not black/white, but there is a balance you need to seek.
So now we no longer are at ‘I reject everything my opponent says,’ but at ‘I share some of your concerns, but think that my standpoint is the proper balance between various interests.’ Such a point of view enables you to convince your opponent from a position of empathy: ‘I understand that you are afraid that gay couples will make bad parents, but research shows….’ Of course, if you are fair, this also means that you have to allow your position to be challenged in the same way. My experience is that people on all sides of the spectrum have a tendency to idealize their ideologically preferred solution, downplaying certain issues. In an open debate, you can point these out for others, but there is a good chance that others will point out your blind spots.
TL;DR version: don’t categorically reject people with certain ideas, reject their solutions based on a position of empathy/good faith.
Right, that’s how some Muslims feel, too. That’s why they’re not assimilating. Why drink poison, why adopt those evil liberal values?
Another issue is that many religious people believe that (their) religion is the only basis for morality. As a local Catholic big-shot told me once, “in a lifeboat, atheists would start fighting each other, because you people care only about yourselves.” To someone who truly believes that, a secular country is populated by selfish, amoral aliens who can’t be trusted.
Perhaps some of them might change their minds if they see people around them being kind and fair, or if they befriend someone and connect to them on a basic human level.
@Nita
Xpost. Also, I just noticed you wrote, ethnically, not ethically. Hence my confusion.
If you actually listen to the anti-immigration people, most argue against people from certain cultures (although they tend to conflate religion with culture, which is a bit simplistic), not certain ethnicities. Of course, these do tend to strongly correlate, which is why it’s easy for people on both sides of the argument to conflate the two.
I think that there is a very good non-racist argument to make that (sub)cultures have various levels of compatibility. I’m not just talking about Muslim vs Christian or Mexican vs White American, but also upper class vs lower class and regressive left vs progressive left, etc, etc. Historically, the way people deal with these mismatches is segregation and/or integration and/or tolerance. In fact, this first solution goes back to the Pilgrim Fathers who left Leiden because they didn’t want to integrate with progressive Dutch society.
However, these solutions have their limitations. Segregation requires resources, space and such. It used to be very viable in the past, but much less so today (as people have fairly big expectations of life and are unwilling to build from scratch). Integration takes generations and depending on how the cultures interact can cause major disruptions (even permanent ones, like the American Mafia). Muslim cultures seem to mostly be very alien to modern Western culture which makes integration of these groups rather slow and accompanied by serious issues (like terrorism). Tolerance only works up to a point, of course. I’m sure that you won’t accept attacks on gay people, which is part of some cultures.
Based on this schema, I think that non-racist arguments can be made like:
– there are limits to the absorption capacity of countries, which differs based on how much the cultures (mis)match. When going over this capacity, more people are harmed than helped.
– some cultures mismatch so much that the process of integration is too painful to be acceptable and/or cause permanent issues that are unacceptable.
– the cost of the integration process puts too large a burden on the existing citizens (which is sooner the case in countries with a big government)
However, you can also make a completely different argument:
Migrants are self-selected to be the brightest and more entrepreneurial people. If we keep accepting these people, poor countries suffer from permanent brain drain which means that they will never fully develop (and may even end up as ISIS areas that threaten us in the West anyway). So people who seek a better life should do so through their own government (with civil war/uprisings if necessary). This may be less pleasant for people in this region in the short term, but it may be in the best interest of humanity in the long term to require people to improve their own country, rather than escape.
Unfortunately, rejecting everything your opponent says may be the way to go if you want to get elected.
@Nita
I think that this is the main reason for the improvement in support for human rights of various groups that happened in history. Unfortunately, I see increased segregation both in real life and the internet, so I fear that this trend will reverse.
@Julie K
Yes, especially since we are in a culture war, where there is a lot of virtue signalling and dog whistling on both sides, which separates people, even when though there is far less disagreement if you look at the problems people want solved.
Do you think “progressives” don’t already believe there are plenty of racists in Massachusetts?
Less than many have been led to think: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
As I noted in the other thread, primary voters tend to skew older and more educated compared to the general electorate. Saying that “there’s no sign of a particularly heavy turnout among lower-income Republicans.” doesn’t change the fact that the ones who did show up voted for Trump. (at least in states east of the Mississippi)
Likewise, his “Make America Great Again” rhetoric is aimed squarely at the sort of people who lost their jobs when the local mine or steel-mill closed down and the election map reflects this.
Jill, you seem to be astounded by the commonplace fact that Side Opposed To Political Opponents will, in fact, try to run candidates that will win such offices in elections and so try to defeat the candidates from the opposite party, and that coverage of opponents will largely be negative and critical in reporting on them.
I am surprised by the tone of one of your comments which more or less seemed to say “Republicans wanted to beat their Democratic opponents in an election, the rotters!” You make it sound as if, when in power, Democrats don’t ever attempt to win and don’t mind losing to their opponents (no, why ever would someone want to win the next presidential election and replace the opposing party currently in power with their own candidate? I just can’t figure that one out!) and that left-wing media throw roses and uncritical, neutral language at their ideological opponents (I’ve posted a comment before about the language of pro- and anti- as applied to abortion, and how the phrase “abortion rights” has slipped into common usage as though this was settled and agreed matter).
Yes, I am right-wing (though ironically, on a political quiz posted on here, I came out as Solidly Liberal) and I don’t expect left-wing media to say nice things about conservatives, or left-leaning parties to be “after you, Algernon” when contesting elections.
This is how the world goes.
There is the matter of the degree of bashing of the opposite party’s candidates. Even this Right Wing American Enterprise Institute political scientist states that the GOP has gotten so destructive, since Newt Gingrich’s time, that they have lowered the level of political discourse to the degree that ending up with a nominee like Trump was inevitable.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
I’ve seen that url before in this thread. Two or three times? And twice more last thread.
Enough that anyone who is interested has probably already checked it out.
The link contained evidence related to my response to what Deiseich was saying, so I put it in. It’s not going to kill you to see a link, and ignore it, more than once– when it’s relevant to points people that different people make at different points throughout the thread.
It could be worse. It could be a full blown block quote, complete with bolding, about how the tea party was so polite and people were mean to them and so we got Trump seven or eight times.
If you use the same link more often than Princess Zelda… you might be a spambot.
OR, even worse than that, it could be the same black and white avatar we see dozens of times every thread, making the same rude, content-free shitposts we see almost every time that avatar pops up.
…complete with “witty” banter about how those who disagree should kill themselves.
I don’t read that to say people should (ought to) kill themselves, but rather that they should feel free to do so if life under the social contract seems unbearable. It’s a very libertarian statement. I’m sure Ayn Rand would approve.
It’s time we dealt with the issues that matter: that avatar is purple and white.
I’ve even confirmed this by checking the RGB (40, 13, 65). How am I the only who sees this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
It’s purple, but it’s a purple dark enough that I tend to mistake it for black unless I’m looking closely.
Thanks, I never noticed that it was purple. here is the avatar and here it is at high resolution making it visible to me.
Oh man, my entire world is blown! o_o
I feel like a Nazi who just found out my mother is Jewish. And purple.
@ Randy M
I’ve seen that url before in this thread.
Your comment is neither necessary nor kind. It is more of a distraction to productive discussion, than the (if truly) redundant link might be.
Interestingly, I clearly see that avatar as purple while it is moving when I’m scrolling the page, but as black when stationary.
Now that you bring it up, I also see it as purple when scrolling. Before Jask pointed it out I thought that it’s actually black and the moving color is the illusion.
And they say that nobody ever changes their mind around here.
Disagree. It was a very mild call out for repetitively spamming multiple threads with the same links.
The GOP was heading in the direction of Ted Cruz, not Donald Trump. Trump is sui generis and is more reminiscent of Nixon than Cruz.
This seems understated in most discussions. So I am glad you make the point concisely.
We’ve had Republican candidates make immigration their focal point before. 2008 had Tom Tancredo, for instance.
The insurgent in 08 and 12 candidates like Huckabee and Santorum do not look like Trump. Santorum took Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Iowa. Those states all went to Cruz.
Trump also took a whole bunch of Eastern states that had gone to Romney or McCain.
Trump is orthogonal to a lot of the trends in Republican Presidential politics.
+1 to what Beta Guy says. Trump is his own thing. He doesn’t arise from the same tradition as Romney/McCain/Bush.
Huckabee and Santorum were, like Trump, vaguely protectionist economic nationalist moderates. However, like Ted Cruz and unlike Donald Trump, they were strong on social issues. Ted Cruz had strongly free-market, small-government positions on domestic economic policy, which is where Congressional Republicans (and the GOP establishment as a whole) have been tending since the Reagan Revolution. However, I suspect the GOP base has, if anything, been tending in the opposite direction, with a lot of recent Republicans having voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and having no real small-government instincts, but being attracted to nationalism and social conservatism. I was surprised that most counties in Wisconsin that voted for Huckabee voted for Trump, while the counties that went most strongly for Cruz went strongly for McCain. Economic/nationalist issues in Wisconsin outweighed social ones, unlike in, say, Iowa.
Trump’s defining issue was nationalism. The GOP (but not necessarily its base) was trending towards economic and social conservatism.
My friend likened Ted Cruz to a Terminator hybrid of Santorum and Ron Paul. He played both to the social base and the flirting-with-libertarian base.
they’ve delegitimized President Obama
Someone explain that to me. So two-term Democrat president is powerless and ignored because the mean ol’ Republicans have delegitimized him – what, the presidency now is on a par with who empties the cat litter, is that it?
So why is Trump possibly winning so horrible, if the presidency has been delegitimised?
I mean, I see a ton of stuff about how “hopey changey” never happened but that’s nothing to do with Obama (who is, as I’ve banged on here and elsewhere before, a typical career politician and not the Messiah), it’s the fault of the mean ol’ bad guys who are all racists and evil zillionaire libertarians running secret cabals.
Can we get a bit more concrete examples of what exactly “delegitimisation” is and how it’s happened, rather than “those mean ol’ bad guys did bad stuff”?
You really should stop commenting on American politics until you spend maybe, say, a year reading a major American newspaper or some combination of ideologically variegated bloggers. I cringe every time I see one of your posts on anything to do with American culture at large.
@anon
It’s a fair question though. If we accept the premise that the president has little real power and it’s really Congress and the career bureaucrats who run the show, there will be very little that Trump can accomplish as president and thus little to worry about.
On the other hand, this advice is coming from anon@gmail.com.
@anon — Perhaps you should find a more presumptuous Deiseach post? This one seems like an honest question that could use answering.
@Deiseach — “Delegitimized the presidency” is more rhetorical than anything; in this context it roughly means “doesn’t fall in line with it”. In terms of formal powers this is dumb — the POTUS has few positive domestic powers, and a Congress in opposition is free to ignore its proposals and/or make its own (though they probably won’t get far without a veto-proof majority, which is very rare). On the other hand, the Presidency has traditionally set the tone for policy, though no administration ever gets everything it wants, and the degree of deadlock we now see is historically rare. The complaint is basically that the administration is not being given its traditional respect. Which is kinda ironic given how angry (rightly, IMO) the American left was about Bush’s “imperial presidency”, but you’re not gonna get far if you expect consistency in national politics.
I personally think a Trump presidency is likely to give us more deadlock, unless he turns out to be a lot better at political deal-making (vs. self-promotion) than I’ve seen so far. But a lot of American leftists think that most GOP politicians are basically closet Trumps, under which worldview Trump plus a GOP Congress really is a scary thought.
Also be aware that when a writer writes negatively about Trump, he may sick his followers on the writer, through Twitter. So some people are just plain scared to do negative reporting on him.
Journalist who profiled Melania Trump hit with barrage of antisemitic abuse
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/28/julia-ioffe-journalist-melania-trump-antisemitic-abuse
And most people are familiar with what Megyn Kelly went through.
https://www.facebook.com/MelaniaTrump/posts/10154069359512808
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/727372398333325312
Criticism of Ioffe’s integrity is strongly warranted. Also, I have not seen a single pro-Trump piece in either the NYT or WaPo.
Liberal news sources do criticize Trump. But Right Wing “news sources” criticize Hillary a lot more than liberal news sources criticize Trump.
Straight reporting of a Trump win in a primary would count as a positive piece for Trump. I bet both NYT and WaPo have done that.
The methodology was pretty clearly stated, and it wasn’t just comment pieces.
I think this is a problem – you only need to read “Trump won New York 60-25-15” once, but you might want to read ten comment pieces explaining why… but if you do ten news sources, then each source will have one straight-reporting piece, all of which will be counted as positive. You or I would only read one of those pieces, but we might read all of the comment articles.
Given that Trump’s campaign has been so successful, a majority of straight reporting of his results will hit the positive on the sentiment calculator. So it overstates straight reporting (which is redundant against each other) and understates comment.
Makes sense.
Megyn Kelly? The woman who has been a meme since “It’s a food product, essentially?” Trump made some nasty remarks about her. Politicians and reporters sometimes don’t get along. Now they’ve made up, and she did an interview with him and said he couldn’t have been nicer.
She’s probably going to be his press secretary.
A group of raccoons is called a gaze or a nursery. It’s ravens that form a conspiracy.
There’s at least one obvious way in which a caregivers IQ could negatively impact the children: they’re more likely to be working, and perhaps more likely to be working in fields that tend to take up pretty much all of your focus even when you’re supposedly off-the-clock.
It would be a pretty big coincidence if this sort of thing just happened to perfectly balance out positive factors, though.
As best I can tell, one of the following is true:
* Vox is an extremely biased news source, filled with sociopaths who assume everyone else thinks the same way as them
* I am an abnormally ethical human being.
Sorry, the idea that people are being systemically impoverished by trying-and-failing to one-up a handful of super-wealthy elites is insanity. Do people across the country really have so much money to spend that they can waste it all like this? Are the poor really so poor because they spend money on bigger houses and shinier cars, instead of food? That’s crazy.
What’s more likely to me is that the nouveau-riche upper-middle class urbanites who read Vox, a very small percentage of the total US population, believe this. Why, I don’t think I could opine on without violating the tribalism rules here. The naieve millennials who write for Vox, who do not make an upper-middle class salary but think they can upgrade their station through aping culture, frantically take part in this signalling spiral. For them, status means everything, and they typical-mind others until they can seriously believe this article.
And then, to go on and assert that we need to change the tax code to protect them from themselves? It sure takes some gumption to say that. Writing off the millions of good, hard-working people in this country who are kind and generous like that. People who just want to support a stable family and have a good life. Who have no patience for these kinds of bullshit status and mind games.
Mr. Frank should swallow his pride, get over his elitism, and spend some time getting to know people in the Midwest. Or talking to some of the poor people in Appalachia. The professional technologist class in SF could teach him a bit about passion over arrogance. He could try actually speaking to the driver the next time he hops into an Uber. He might learn a thing or two, become a better person
We know that median house values are actually LARGER than mean house values in the big cities full of rich people like SF and NYC, etc. Which if you think about rich people owning mansions makes zero sense. Link
So at least part of the “People are keeping up with the 1%ers” line has minimal basis in reality. The 1% aren’t getting enormous mansions, they’re getting tiny cubicles and spending the spare cash on fun vacations Because when you can fly to Jiro’s for a month’s rent… I’ve at least thought about it once or twice.
/Which in fairness, might be leading to the weddings and parties bit.
I have no intention of renting a house to meyerkev248.
That’s fine. It’s $5,000/month for a 3/2 within an hour of work these days, which is about the monthly take-home income on base Tier 1 Software engineer salaries to begin with.
So I couldn’t afford it.
Robert Frank is a bright guy and I like his old work incorporating status into the utility function, but he definitely has an axe to grind. For some evidence of how unwilling he is to follow his own logic when it leads to conclusions he doesn’t like, see my extended exchange with him on my blog.
Frank took some bizarre stands–his stance on medicine quality was flunk-freshman-econ level confused–but I think he was getting at something you didn’t address. I think his thesis, which he never managed to state clearly, is that higher local disparity causes higher expenditures on relative status. Global inequality is bad only insofar as it indicates high average local disparity.
Right. The idea that most people are competing for status with billionaires through conspicuous consumption is ridiculous, since a) It’s obviously impossible, and b) they have basically no social interaction, so they’re in completely different leagues. People compete with members of their own socioeconomic stratum, like their neighbors and peers, not with the out-of-sight rich.
A corollary of this is that it can and does happen at all levels of income inequality. This was a common theme in fifties and sixties sitcoms, when income inequality was at its modern-day nadir.
To what extent does this get confounded by television and mass media? If people can pick up beauty standards which vanishingly few people they’ve met in person meet, why can’t they pick up social status cues similarly?
Some no one else seems able, let me steel-man Frank/Vox on inequality.
The thesis is roughly that high income disparity around a given income pressures people with that income to signal wealth. Overall income disparity is only relevant as a measure of average local income disparity.
A corollary of this is that a bimodal society of equally poor serfs and equally rich nobles would not have Frankian signalling problems, though it might have other problems.
The thesis is fine, but the resulting suggestions are insane.
So let’s say that people are, in fact, putting themselves in financial distress, in part, out of a desire to outcompete their neighbors for positional goods like what car they drive and what college sticker they get to put on the back window. OK, now what?
Frank’s suggestion is to impose consumption taxes to save people from themselves. But how is that a solution? You’ve just taken some money away from people, you haven’t made them want to compete less. It’s not “inequality” causing these people to do this, it’s the deep dark pit of existential despair inhabiting their inner beings. What tax policy is going to change that?
This is exactly the sort of thing on which The Last Psychiatrist spent five years blogging. There’s nothing natural about it. Status competition is to some extent natural, but most people manage not to bring themselves to financial ruin because of it. Human beings are, mostly, made of sterner stuff.
You don’t impose consumption taxes to save people from themselves, you impose consumption taxes because there is a gigantic flow of water and you may as well stick in a turbine and get some useful work out of it. If you tax positional goods, people can afford less positional goods, and everybody shifts one seat downward, but since they’re positional goods, no one is worse off, and you’ve extracted free money to spend on the presumably useful programs of your government.
suntzuanime,
I get the revenue-raising part of it, but that’s not where my comment is directed. In fact, this is how Frank himself pitches it:
“5) A simple change in the tax system would eliminate many wasteful spending patterns
Elk lack the cognitive and communication skills to do anything about their particular positional arms race… The tax system offers a simple, unintrusive way to change our incentives…. There’s another important dimension to the argument: a progressive consumption tax would generate additional revenue…”
Personally, I would much rather move towards a system that taxes consumption more and labor less and one that incentivizes saving and investment. But that’s no magic bullet for the problem that Frank posits. People committed to this sort of positional competition will always find a way within whatever rules that you set up to try to stop them. In fact, I would argue that by normalizing this sort of behavior an labeling it “natural,” you’re actually going to get more of it, which would only increase the amount of people making ruinous financial decisions in the name of status competition.
What do we do about costly status-signalling between governments?
Frank believes it *is* inequality causing people to do this (or at least, to do it more). Your disagreement is factual.
On the issue of burden-free taxation, which is in effect what Frank is claiming, see.
People are spending crazy money on big weddings, though. I don’t think it’s keeping up with the super-elite Joneses, I think it’s a combination of the huge “biggest day in your life” expectations and the industry that has grown up around marketing services to weddings. The idea of the perfect fairytale experience.
I really don’t see why people can’t have small weddings (why not go to a registry office if you’re not planning on having a religious ceremony) and then having a party for their friends and family? The amount of money that can be spent on huge receptions for hundreds of people is silly, but there seems to be no slow-down in the dream industry.
A bit of it, I think, is that it’s both difficult and odd in the modern world to hold a big party for your friends which *isn’t* a wedding. For a wedding, there is an entire industry that arranges the venue and the catering and adds ninety-three kinds of frills of its own invention to it; I’m not at all sure how I’d go about booking a party for a hundred people for my 40th birthday, and I think I’d be considered quite peculiar for doing it. Because it’s quite an imposition on the people who don’t live locally, and society is atomised so not all of the hundred people I’d want to invite live locally.
At least in part because it’s What Old People Do – I _have_ been to parties-for-a-hundred-people for relatives’ 90th birthdays, though they tend to have family trees on the walls and everyone has a common great^4-grandparent.
Reserve space in a park, or rent a dedicated event space (in the American West, Veterans’ Buildings are usually the right size for this kind of thing; churches often have event spaces too, but they might be harder to talk into this), or buy out a bar or restaurant for the evening. Going with the restaurant has the advantage of solving the food and drink problem; otherwise you’ll also have to hire a catering company. Or, if you have a large house, just host it there. 100 people is a little large for your average home but not totally ridiculous.
Or you could just talk to a company that does event planning. Most of their business is corporate, but they’ll probably be happy to do private events.
Apparently, some people have big families and a lot of friends. That humble party isn’t going to be cheap.
Also, aren’t huge, barely-affordable weddings an ancient tradition in many cultures? The rural Catholic folks in my country brag that in the good old times, a proper wedding would last three days, and everyone in the village would be invited.
We managed to have a nice wedding cheaply about 15 years ago. Held at the church my MiL attended so that didn’t cost much; invitations, cake, & decorations provided as gifts, food done cheaply by friends of my wife’s family in the town.
I don’t fault families who wish to splurge if they’ve got it; ours didn’t and we didn’t care to take out debt for it either, and I honestly don’t think anyone was disappointed.
We had the typical Mormon wedding, which was very cheap. A couple of thousand.
My parents was even cheaper: total cost was the modern day equivalent of around $500 or so.
My grandparents’ was even cheaper. They put on their Sunday best and drove to the courthouse, the end.
What we usually say is that y’all have huge weddings because the ceremony itself doesn’t actually mean much when the couple has already been living together and so on. Which means that the ceremony has to be hooplahed to compensate. But this is probably just self-justifying mythology. Dunno.
1. How cheap is cheap? A lot of people claim they had a cheap wedding, so you go to them for advice, and turns out they meant a couple thousand.
2. Did any of your family or close friends live far away? Did they stay home? Did you pay for them to come? Did they pay their own way even though they didn’t get a lavish party out of it?
3. How many people came to the wedding? Did anyone mind being left out?
4. Did you get wedding presents and the like? Did people give large gifts despite you not spending much on them? Did they give no/small gifts and feel awkward doing so?
I didn’t give a cost because I don’t trust my memory on the matter. I asked my wife, she said $2,000, not counting the aforementioned services-as-gifts. It looks like you put this in the “not cheap” category? It is an order of magnitude less than “average.” Sorry if you feel misled.
Most people lived within an hour or two.
There were about 300 there. I don’t think anyone was omitted for cost reasons, but someone may have felt left out. No one said anything since.
The only social awkwardness was matching up bridesmaids and groomsmen.
There were a few nice gifts. Many people were college students or recent graduates. Not everyone brought a gift.
I don’t recall what everyone brought, but, for example, one of our favorite gifts was a somewhat simple comforter/blanket from our friends which I don’t think was very expensive. I don’t know how they felt about it.
I don’t mind the questions, but I infer a bit that you think we were not considerate of people time and expenses. This is not so, outside of maybe the bridesmaids and groomsmen needing to rent their outfits, which we tried to keep as low cost as possible.
I am asking because I would like to get married, but on a much smaller budget. The average cost is not relevant to me, so I have to ask about the absolute cost, not about whether it was relatively cheap.
I apologize for the implications. The questions are about problems I run into trying to plan.
It’s good to learn that people don’t feel obligated to bring gifts. Thank you for the answers.
Are you saying people spend on average $20,000 on their wedding? This sounds unbelievable.
Okay! No harm done, I agree that the assertion I made originally is meaningless without numbers. Here’s some thoughts:
Consider venues that limit the number of guests. A couple of weddings I’ve attended have been at beaches, which had very low limits for attendance (30 in one case). You can tell people who feel left out “We really wanted a wedding at place X, they only allowed X people, but we’d like to see you guys at an informal get together later!”
You can put something on the invitation like “Your presence and emotional support are all the gifts we are looking for.”
I’ve never heard of paying for someone else’s travel expense. My brother who moved several states away had a wedding last year. Most of our immediate family attended and bore the costs ourselves. My wife and youngest children couldn’t come. I think that’s an acknowledged part of modern life. Other friends from college who grew up across the country had a wedding back home, then some smaller gatherings in our state to celebrate with friends.
Invite an alcoholic, so you can’t have an open bar. Okay, joking, but that is a big expense which some guests might expect and a valid excuse for not providing it. We didn’t have alcohol; I don’t recall if that was because the church wouldn’t have allowed it, or family members have had alcoholism problems, or just because we aren’t big drinkers and didn’t realize how ubiquitous it is at social gatherings.
You could hold the event at, say, 1:00 until 5:00 or so, and keep refreshments to some drinks and appetizers. Some kind of food is obligatory if you have people captive for hours, but some fruit, cheese, punch, and cold cuts or such can go a long way if you aren’t overlapping a mealtime. I might be called out for having no taste for this, but…
Any cost saving measure can be hand-waved away by saying something like “This is just how she always pictured her wedding.”
I certainly see reasons why theknot.com and costofwedding.com might have reasons to inflate the number–and lazy journalists might just be quoting those inflated numbers offered by arms of the matrimony-industrial complex–but every site I saw from a quick search posted average figures > $20k.
I agree with @ Randy M – $20k is about what I heard discussed about six years ago.
I myself feel that a great deal of that cost was on frivolous things, that even the non-frivolous things were over priced, and that the whole matrimony-industrial complex (totally stealing that) puts more emphasis on the day than the life. But, still. $20k.
Anyway. If you’re going to push back against the “traditional” wedding, do so. A flattering dress for the bride that she is comfortable in, but not a wedding dress. An outdoor venue or church that doesn’t charge a huge rental fee. Ditto for the reception/after party, and consider a pot luck dinner. Do preview the band – but there has to be a cousin willing to sort youtube vids or spotify for $100. Above all else, prevent the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride (the second one esp) from building her dream celebration.
Keep it simple, keep it short, don’t let people drive drunk. And live long happily together.
A couple of thousand is cheap. That’s how much ours was.
We did not pay for guests to attend. We were also quite clear (and our cultural expectation for our community supports this) that we would not be offended if out-of-staters did not come. Family who did come from out of state mostly drove and were put up in the homes of local family. Gifts were mostly pretty small: useful household setting up stuff, since we were both young and had just been living in furnished apartments with roommates to that point.
One advantage is that for Mormons the actual wedding is free and their is a hardcap on attendees imposed by the church. Mostly you are looking at a max of 50, maybe 100, attendees. So most “wedding” invitations are actually invites to the reception.
Note that the distribution of wedding costs is skewed, with a *very* long tail. It doesn’t take that many million dollar weddings to drag up the whole average.
Argh. “Vox” did not write the article. *Robert Frank* wrote the article. He is a 70-year-old professor at Cornell. Please spare the millennial-bashing. “Vox,” like many online media outfits, sometimes publishes provocative opinion pieces that do not represent the staff’s official opinion.
Anyway, it is absolutely not just upper class people who get into signalling spirals. Don’t you ever encounter non-rich people with expensive clothes?
Careful not to confuse acres for people. All of Appalachia is 25 million people and 7.5 million of that are in a large metro area or adjacent to one. Rural Appalachia is only 2.5 million people, which is about the same as Brooklyn.
1 in 4 Americans live in the BOS-WAS corridor, Southern California, or the Bay Area.
The vox authors would be better served by learning about the middle class and poor people that live near where they live than going to Appalachia or Toledo.
Tumblr Rationalists were mocking people who dislike the FDA the other day, because Stupid Libertarians Want People To Die Eating Lead Paint As Patent Medicine.
Turns out people mostly just want to be able to buy artificial pancreases (pancreatae?) for their diabetic children, instead of making them in the garage while the FDA sits on developer applications forever..
Amazing how much a mechanically-minded person can do from home these days, isn’t it? Imagine what kind of products we’d see if people were allowed to collaborate more.
As someone who would happily see the FDA burned to the ground I’d like to file a complaint as to your portrayal of who was mocking whom and for what.
pancreases (pancreatae?)
Pancrea.
It’s greek.
And a neuter t-stem, so the Greek plural would be pancreata. Except it was probably not countable in Ancient Greek.
Actually it’s κρέας, κρέως. If it were a neuter t, it would be κρέα, κρέατος.
And if you read the article, the Amazing Do-It-Yourself Artificial Pancreas is actually an old insulin pump (so, technology that was created, tested and licenced through the Bad Old System) rejigged with some computerisation.
For mealtimes (the most important time when trying to calculate insulin dosages) it still has to be done manually, i.e. they have to work out the bolus and carry out the injection.
And sometimes the pump breaks down. For an individual DIY project, that’s not so bad. For a mass-market device that consistently has a failure rate, you’re looking at a load of customers who will complain, return the product and claim refunds, and badmouth your machine (would you buy a car where the chances are that once a month it won’t start?) Maybe you’ll even end up sued if a customer (or customers) has a health problem arising out of “your device didn’t inject the insulin when it should have/gave me too high or too low a dose”.
Things like that are why developers need to do large-scale testing to work out the bugs before bringing a product to market. I don’t see any evidence that the “FDA are sitting on developer applications forever”, rather that some people are jumping ahead with DIY devices based on already-existing technology (they’re not inventing those insulin pumps themselves).
I … may have bashed the Lead Paint Libertarians a little, but the impression I got was that I was very much in a minority – everything I wrote on the topic was a direct response to someone else, which seems like it would limit the volume. (Although maybe not, if we all ganged up on someone …)
Stuff like Scott saying “people aren’t dumb enough to feed their kids drain cleaner, so why worry about applying less obviously-lethal medical-seeming substances wrongly?”
Reading that. I think Scott is distinguishing two different things: whether it should be legal to sell an unapproved drug (FDA) and whether it should be legal to get a drug without a doctor’s prescription (medical monopoly). Scott is phrasing it using the word “you”, which makes this not very clear, but he’s actually only objecting to the first one–he wants doctors to be permitted to prescribe unapproved drugs, he doesn’t want people to be able to buy drugs on their own.
If the medical guilds are preventing people from selling lead paint as a cancer cure, then they’re serving as a makeshift FDA, and all Scott wants is to make the FDA slightly more easygoing. If they aren’t, then somebody needs to.
people aren’t dumb enough to feed their kids drain cleaner
People don’t do it deliberately, but kids still manage to poison themselves. From 2010: “An estimated 267 269 children ≤5 years of age were treated in US emergency departments for household cleaning product-related injuries. ”
And there was a very recent news story here about detergent capsules will be given bitter flavours to stop young children eating them. Now, I don’t know about you, but I find it tough enough to open the containers of such capsules, yet apparently enough children three years of age and younger can manage it to make it worth the manufacturers’ while to take extra precautions.
So even with being careful and taking precautions, shit can happen. Getting rid of red tape is good; junking the FDA or other bodies is not so good, unless we’re all going to agree “If you buy this alleged medicine over the Internet and it turns out to explode your liver, you can’t sue anybody because you made the decision to buy and try it of your own free will and you decided you were grown-up enough and smart enough to figure it out yourself”.
And that’s part of the problem. The lids are such a bloody nuisance and can be so finicky that it’s easier to just leave the damn container open.
Trivial inconveniences.
The Philippines had a national election yesterday. They elected a populist who says stupid things and may be implicated with the Davao Death Squads, a very prolific vigilante group. John Oliver calls him the Trump of the East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tebans1dOYo
On the other hand, as mayor of Davao, things got a lot safer, so there’s that.
Killing criminals does have an effect of lowering crime.
You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s actually a super contentious point. Dalrymple rails endlessly about how Britain has stopped believing that criminals cause crime.
I don’t really think so.
Well, actually doing that may reduce crime, but nobody who claims to be doing that is actually doing that — they are killing people they dislike, and a regime that kills people it dislikes is generally not all that great about actual policing stuff.
Are they actually killing “people they dislike” and not “criminals”? (Yes, yes, they might dislike criminals, but that’s not the point.)
Unless it produces cops/vigilantes that are so used to transgressive behavior that they become criminals themselves.
And unless these killings are not done based on convictions, but based on ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ resulting in many innocent deaths, whose family then retaliates.
Well, whatever they are doing in Davao, it’s working.
This is reminding me– with a little luck I’ll find author and title– of a theory of levels of behavior in a book about psychology/dysfunctional families/addiction– that authoritarianism, even fairly harsh authoritarianism– is simply better than letting everyone be destructively impulsive.
>On the other hand, as mayor of Davao, things got a lot safer, so there’s that.
I’ve heard people dispute this in a number of filipino-centric forums, actually. (this came up, for example: http://www.philstar.com/nation/2016/04/01/1568337/pnp-data-shows-davao-had-most-number-murder-incidents).
>According to the PNP’s [Philippine National Police] Crime Situation for calendar year 2010 to 2015, of the recorded index crimes for the top 15 chartered cities nationwide, Davao City posted the most number of recorded murders at 1,032. It was followed by Quezon City (961) and Cebu City (806). Naga City meanwhile posted the least number of murders at 45 while Makati had 113 incidents.
>The PNP recorded a total of 6,010 murders for the top 15 chartered cities nationwide for 2010 to 2015. Included in the top 15 chartered cities nationwide are Quezon City, Manila, Cebu, Davao, Cagayan de Oro, Baguio, Zamboanga, Ilolilo, General Santos City, Bacolod, Angeles, Makati, Iligan, Naga and Mandaue.
>Meanwhile, Davao also ranked second among the 15 chartered cities in terms of recorded rape incidents. From 2010 to 2015, Quezon City recorded the most number of rape cases at 1,122 followed by Davao at 843.
I’m not sure if they’re including the extrajudicial killings of criminals in these stats or not, however, nor how this compares to previous years – and that’s without remarking on the famously corrupt reputation of Filipino government.
Would be more meaningful if it was per capita. Davao City is about 1.4 million people; Quezon City is about 2.8, and Cebu is about 0.9. (Naga has 200,000 people, and Makati half a million.) Of course, that doesn’t make Davao look better.
“San Francisco to require Uber and Lyft drivers to obtain business licenses” – well, there’s clearly some kind of business taking place. Uber and Lyft adamantly deny that their drivers are employees or that they operate car services. If you take them at their word, then the drivers are independent contractors, each operating an independent car service and thus each requiring a separate business license. Makes sense to me.
Unless of course, you’re making the libertarian argument that all business licensing requirements are an infringement of freedom of contract and inherently oppressive, which is a fair enough position to take. In which case you should disregard the first paragraph because it operates under assumptions you reject.
How onerous is the task of getting a business licence, assuming that Lyft’s legal department and process-automation team have devoted a moderate amount of effort to the problem; is it a task that cannot be reduced to ‘fill in _this_ web form at lyft.com; sign the pack of papers that we will send you in the nine places indicated with post-it notes and return it in the DHL bag provided’, plus one intern to stick post-it notes on packs of papers and one to walk a bag of packs of papers round City Hall weekly?
How onerous is the task of getting a business license
That right there is the question. In my own experience it varies wildly even within the state. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Bay Area has some particularly onerous requirements compared to the central valley for instance.
It’s an orthogonal issue though. If there’s a longstanding rule that’s onerous, it is not some fresh outrage every time it is applied. In fact, I’d say inconsistency would be even worse than either keeping the rule in place *or* repealing it altogether.
It’s amazing to me that uber has managed to somehow build a fanboy base that is willing to argue for ad hoc exceptions on its behalf. It’s one thing to be a fanboy for a game console or a cell phone brand, but a taxi service?!?
It’s a taxi service mixed with an ap. That’s kind of like a game console.
I’d support the ad hoc exception on the theory that once their competitors can’t use it to slow down Uber/Lyft competition, they’ll switch to lobbying against the requirements themselves on fairness grounds. (Where they’re willing to support the status quo while it serves as a barrier to entry.)
While I don’t use any ride service enough to be a fanboy, on the rare occasions I need a ride I’ll use Uber, where cabs are a strictly desperation move. (I’ll take an hour on the L over a twenty minute cab ride.) Too many experiences with cabs tailgating and otherwise driving in a way that strikes me as dangerous (and is certainly stressful to me) especially with the often inaccessible seatbelts. For the most part Uber drivers in my experience simply don’t drive like that.
I assume that’s the difference in incentives. For cabs, it’s all about getting there and then getting the next fare (and presumably a lot of passengers tip for speed rather than safety), while Uber drivers are additionally critically dependent on customer ratings.
(I once gave a driver four stars out of five, which struck me as still a good rating and certainly not a major criticism. I immediately received an email asking what had gone wrong (it had taken enough longer for the car to arrive for pickup than the time estimate that it didn’t strike me as quite five-star perfect), with a human (or apparently so) agent asking how they could resolve my “problem”. That’s… so far outside the realm of my experience with cabs that they hardly seem as if they’re operating in the same realm.)
@LHN
That has been my experience as well.
Why wouldn’t people feel stronger about a taxi service than they do about game consoles?
Taxi services are useful, sometimes vital. Not having those gets people killed or mugged.
Here in New York City, Uber is a registered livery service, the cars all have taxi plates and the drivers have to get T&LC driver’s licenses. And it’s still often cheaper than a yellow cab.
(This may not be a useful comparison. Surprisingly given all the red tape in the city government, NYC doesn’t actually have a general “business license,” just licenses for specific types of businesses.)
I’d argue that Uber and Lyft are properly conceptualized (and structured, if this is not the case; I don’t know their structure) as what they advertise to be: a ride sharing service, not a ride acquiring service. The ideal model would be: a would-be passenger downloads the (free) app, and uses it to request rides as normal. A would be driver downloads or subscribes to a paid version of the app that provides mapping software and allows them to receive requests from potential fares. The driver can set their own price (per mile), and a maximum distance driven. The passenger gives a destination and some maximum price range, and the app includes features for an implicit negotiation, rather than an explicit one. Uber/Lyft have nothing to do with the actual pricing. The driver can, at any time, stop listing themselves as “driving”, and will no longer appear to passengers, with no penalty (except potential lost revenue, of course).
If you still think the drivers are operating independent businesses in that scenario, ok. But I don’t think that’s a business that should need a license, any more than someone who holds a garage sale needs a license to open a store. As it stands, Given mechanisms like surge pricing, Uber drivers do seem to be employees of Uber at this time, and Uber should therefore be subject to appropriate regulations.
Well, Uber does say things like:
So, according to them, every Uber driver is an entrepreneur running their own taxi business.
Yeah, that’s … not what I think people want them to be. I mean, modern taxi service, great, but a non-taxi ride coordination service would probably be better. I think. Maybe. Anyway, it’s clearly not the case, because Uber makes at all decisions about ride pricing.
a ride sharing service, not a ride acquiring service
“Ride sharing”, to me, implies two or more different people making the same trip for reasons that do not include “this guy is paying me to drive him there”. I have never been under the impression that any Uber driver I have “shared” a ride with, had any motive other than my payment. And I’ve never felt that Uber was trying to advertise anything different.
If Uber is advertising, “Hey, we’ll hook you up with someone who was going your way anyhow, and you can split the gas money with them”, I strongly believe Uber is lying.
I agree with you on the Uber business model. However, I would strongly support the business model where, for ten minutes preplanning, I can pick up someone going the same way and get paid a bit of gas money. I would make use of this as a passenger, you betcha.
I suspect that the probability of finding someone who is genuinely going the same way at the same time is sufficiently low that it wouldn’t be worth my time checking the app. And this is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if it’s not worth my time checking the app, it’s not worth the would-be driver’s time updating it from their end.
It is possible that such a model could achieve criticality in e.g. Manhattan or San Francisco; I’m not sufficiently familiar with driving patterns there to say.
https://www.blablacar.com
I have no idea if this is used widely enough to regularly be of practical use. I think my girlfriend used it (or an equivalent) in France once though, for a trip to Paris from another city. Which is the kind of trip it’s most likely to be useful for.
If we were, e.g., evacuating a state and just wanted to get people west as fast as possible, ride shares would be great.
But I don’t want to hop in three different cars to get to work. If I’m going to be inconvenienced by having to share a ride, then I absolutely need to get dropped right near the door.
On tech stagnation, someone asked “Is there stagnation in technologies related to the service sector?” That’s an interesting question and makes me wonder if service productivity is just inherently harder to do than manufacturing productivity. An interesting post here:
“For Gordon’s critics, they can be right that individual technologies are still growing quickly, but what they do not account for is that labor may be moving out of those sectors and hence aggregrate growth could still be low. If we could get finer and finer levels of industry data, it is quite possible that what looks like a decline in within-sector growth in 2009/2010 is really just negative across-industry growth at those finer levels of industry. Gordon being wrong about whether specific technologies are improving does not make him wrong about aggregate growth declining.”
It’d be interesting to see if the long term decline in Western productivity growth (Source) is strongly correlated with a decrease in manufacturing’s share of the economy and an increase in services’.
It certainly makes intuitive sense that it’s hard to make services more productive, at least without also making them worse. i.e. if your hairdresser has 5 times as many appointments per hour then they’re 5 times more productive… but your haircut probably isn’t as good as you might have been expecting.
The “charismatic movement” article is from 1997. Anyone know what’s happened since then?
Heh. At first I thought you were talking about the article about charismatic presidents. I was THIS CLOSE to hitting “post” on a snarky comment about how incredibly charismatic presidents Gore, Kerry, McCain, And Romney were, before I realized which article you actually meant. :op
Nixon is the counter-example on charisma for Presidents.
Conventional wisdom is that charisma got a lot more important in the TV era. Nixon is really no exception to that; he famously got his ass kicked on TV by JFK. But the 1968 elections were a weird race in a weird time, and Nixon faced a divided and indecisive DNC. (Humphrey was no prize, either, and while Wallace had charisma he also had, er, polarizing views.)
Lincoln had the charisma of a sack of ball bearings. But he was a hell of a writer.
Hi Sniffnoy,
It has morphed into becoming part of the “mainstream” Charismatic/Pentecostal church movement – the phenomena has become less common / dramatic. Members of charismatic churches would generally look at the events of the mid-90s as a time of ‘revival’/’spiritual refreshing’ when God visited them.
Paul
In the 1990’s I was at a charismatic church which was heavily involved in everything described in that article. AMA.
I’m very curious. I’ve had my own experiences which have ranged from outrageous & embarrassing to outright creepy. The first church I started visiting semi-regularly on my own initiative in high school was a small congregation similar to the article, but nowhere nearly as a exaggerated. Just glossolalia from the pastor/worship leaders and occasionally someone lying down in an aisle.
For the latter, I once visited a small house congregation where the female worship leader would kept demanding members of her small house church give “prophecy” or speaking tongues – at which point someone would spontaneously just start talking as though they were God in the first person and/or engaging in glossolalia. This same group would, during their sermon, almost casual remark that they denied the divinity of Christ which probably doesn’t mean much to most readers here but was huge red flag for me.
What about you?
Your experience with the house church sounds slightly more fringe. My church was pretty mainstream for a charismatic church, but what “mainstream” means in charismatic Christianity is not what passes for mainstream everywhere else.
Rodney Howard Browne, the main character in the linked article, visited my home church. I also attended a youth group which visited the church where the “Toronto Blessing” originated, and my parents visited the church in Brownsville which was the focus of another major revival in the late 90’s. So I had direct participation in all of those things, and some amount of all of these antics were present on a regular basis on my church’s sunday services and my youth group meetings.
Here’s a quick resume. I have:
* Spoken in tongues (regularly, frequently, and as a matter of habit)
* Been “slain in the spirit” (rendered unconscious/immobile by the touch of a charismatic leader)
* Experience uncontrollable shaking
* Cried. A lot. Crying during services was so ordinary as to barely merit a mention.
* Danced under the influence of the Holy Spirit
* Prayed for other people and had them be “slain in the spirit” at my touch
* Laughed in the Holy Spirit
Additionally, I’ve been at meetings where people were drunk in the Spirit, “glued” in the Spirit, claimed miraculous healings, saw visions of angels, were rendered dumb, etc. Basically, any weird Charismatic thing that you can think of, I was there and either saw it or did it.
So you may be asking yourself what I’m doing here at SSC, and why I’m kissing icons in church every Sunday. Basically, all of this was going on while I was in my late teens, and I was heavily involved with it. I had not a lick of skepticism about the whole thing throughout my teens. However, this had a really distorting influence on my spirituality and psychology. To begin with, my spiritual life was overwhelmingly devoted to the pursuit of extreme experiences. A church meeting in which none of the manifestations mentioned above occurred was regarded as a failure, at least by me, and I gauged my spiritual health by how often and how intensely I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in this manner. I was, in turn, extremely proud of how “spiritual” I was, and I took myself as an example of what a true Christian should be.
The culmination of all of these trends was a youth conference that I attended when I was 17, which involved three days of communal fasting and three long, intense meetings per day along the lines described above. At the time, I considered it the greatest experience of my life, and I experience an intense, nearly dissociative euphoria that lasted for weeks afterwards.
But, unfortunately, once the euphoria wore off my psychology seemed to have been damaged by too much Holy Spirit. To avoid making the story any longer than it already is, I fell into a period of intense depression, including one serious suicidal episode (it wasn’t quite an “attempt”, since my girlfriend talked me out of it when I called her to say goodbye), and months of total alienation. What’s worse is that, given the kind of spirituality that I enjoyed beforehand, I experienced this not just as depression (which is pretty bad), but as a total loss and failure of everything that I understood about myself, God, and religion. My pre-depression self believed that it was not possible for a true Christian to experience what I was experiencing. This crisis nearly ruined me.
(I even tried being an atheist for a while, but I just couldn’t alieve that there was no God.)
Eventually it wore off, and I regained the ability to function as a human being. But I left the charismatic world and have never looked back.
Looking back, what do you believe about what you experienced in your teens? Do you still think it was the Holy Spirit, or was it your own psychology, or even demonic influence?
(I attended an Assemblies of God church for about a month in my late teens, while my parents were looking for a new church. It was about as mainstream as it’s possible to be; I didn’t see anything there that couldn’t have happened at the Southern Baptist church we used to go to. However, my mother used to attend a charismatic church back in the 80’s where they would all would speak in tongues regularly – so I’m not denying it happens.)
I wish I had more interesting questions to ask. But here is one:
The physiological – or rather, subjective experience of charismatic fervor – the stuff you list in bullet points – how could you describe that state?
edit: one more thing, may or may not be relevant: but did you hear a “buzzing” during any of these experiences?
@Brad
That’s a difficult question. It depends a lot on what the specific experience was: being slain in the spirit and becoming immobile was different, obviously, from shaking uncontrollably or going into fits of uncontrollable sobbing.
There was always a significant amount of physiological excitement (not that I thought about it in those terms): elevated heart rate, the feeling of adrenaline in the blood, rapid breathing. Combined with those physical symptoms, there was usually a subjective, emotional quality to the experience which I’d compare to infatuation. I assume that at some point you’ve experienced that really intense infatuation which makes you nearly sick to your stomach and unable to think about anything else; it was a lot like that, but without any specific object to the obsession. Sometimes it felt like being intensely in love with God, but at other times it was just that feeling of intense emotional agitation, unattached to anything.
For more overt physical symptoms, such as shaking, moaning, or being “drunk in the Spirit”, the comparison to drunkenness was actually quite good, in that it felt like the normal connection between your conscious mind and your body had been disrupted. Your body either wouldn’t react to your mind’s commands, or it would act without your will, as if possessed (*cough*) by an outside force.
The other memorable aspect was what it felt like after you went home. I was typically tired, but very very happy, like the physiological state right after an orgasm or a strenuous workout.
@Evan:
Depends on the specifics. Some things had surprisingly mundane explanations. Why did people laugh in the Spirit at Rodney Howard Browne? Because he would literally make faces at the audience to make them laugh. Then, given the atmosphere and expectations, the laugher would cascade into uncontrollable hysteria, and Brown would chalk it up to the Holy Ghost and go on from there.
I think that speaking in tongues is mostly psychological. Paying attention to how charismatics actually go about speaking in tongues, it seems to me to be a way of engaging the brain’s linguistic centers, but disconnected from the lexicon and semantic layers. I basically never heard people using phonemes or syllables structures that would have been illicit in English (other than me — I was a linguistics nerd even then), and that people often had to be explicitly coached in how to start speaking in tongues. This is consistent with a learned, psychological trick. The purpose and effect of speaking in tongues was to induce a “prayerful” meditative state, and it is indeed pretty effective along those lines.
The weirder and more extreme stuff, though? I know of two possible explanations:
1) Demons
2) Something something crowd psychology, an explanation which is functionally equivalent to “demons”.
@Mai La Dreapta
I’ll just throw in something else, not really a direct response nor a query:
I once recall seeing, in the context of watching Christian youtube videos warning of ‘new age’ spirituality/deceptions, a clip of film that seemed rather old, maybe from the 80s or older, as many of the men and women had hairstyles that seemed dated. (And can’t find the specific clip I’m thinking of, which might be alright as it was borderline-nsfw). It seemed to ostensibly be demonstrating a large group of western people engaged in some form of kundalini yoga; almost everyone was dressed similarly in t-shirts and shorts, and the people were filmed as they went through various ‘states’, which involved, variously, jumping up and down rhythmically, screaming at the top of their lungs, a blissful state of recovery, among other things.
The reports of the charismatic church’s antics remind me of this video quite a bit.
@Mai La Dreapta
demons
…yeah.
I mean, God works in mysterious ways and who sets a seal on the stars and all that…but when I look back at the overt references to the Holy Spirit, I get stuff like small still voice, and when I look for stuff like the most extreme charismatics do, I see my name is legion and herds of pigs running into the sea.
I am willing to accept that there are things beyond my understanding, but this makes me very uncomfortable.
@Mai La Dreapta:
I recommend reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which provides an interesting alternative explanation for your experience.
The short version is that this is the way brains worked for our ancestors, and it is caused by left and right brain hemispheres working somewhat independently. What you perceive as “you” is simply your dominant hemisphere, and what you perceive as “Holy Spirit” (or maybe “demons”) is your non-dominant hemisphere when it acts independently.
During the recent millenia there was an evolutionary pressure against this kind of brain functionality; the integration between the hemispheres has increased. The old behavior now mostly manifests in extreme situations (and for schizophrenics also in normal situation), but to some degree it can be learned.
The author suggests that the Old Testament actually provides a record of how this brain functionality gradually diminished. Deep in the past you had people who literally walked and talked with God (or gods, as in the Illiad). Then the ability was limited to prophets who were respected and obeyed; but gradually people noticed that sometimes different prophets contradict each other in ways that were difficult to rationalize away, so they started testing their predictions and killing the false prophets (and also killing all prophets of the competing religions) which created an evolutionary pressure against them; and then the prophets more or less disappeared and almost no one treats them seriously.
A somewhat similar situation can be caused by hypnosis, which probably means that the individual hemispheres pay more attention to the hypnotist than to each other.
The descriptions of being able to induce drunkenness, paralysis, visions or hallucinations, and being “‘glued’ in the Holy Spirit” all remind me intensely of descriptions of hypnosis.
Those all sound eerily like standard stage hypnotist tricks – although they would focus more on the dancing and especially the visions (of things rather different than angels,) and I imagine the atmosphere and experience would be intensely different. (Speaking in tongues, as you note, seems more like something people learn to do on command through practice.)
Then again, hypnosis is itself a near-liminal experience at times, beloved of frauds and magicians.
During your time at charismatic churches did you ever hear anyone (critic or supporter) bring up scripture relevant to spiritual gifts such as Corinthians 14?
It’s been commonly quoted at every Charismatic Church I’ve attended (and my folks church shopped a lot).
Did any of them actually follow that passage’s instructions (e.g. 1 Corinthians 14:28, “If there be no interpreter, let [someone who’s speaking in tongues] keep silence in the church”?)
I grew up in an AG church, and when tongues were taught on, that was the instruction, and generally it was followed. Everyone babbles incoherently at once was not seen as a positive sign, either as misusing your gifts or as not a real instance of God’s spirit.
In my experience, all of them did (and there were usually a few older men who would call violations out). Afterward a pastor or worship leader (depending on the timing) would usually read/quote that text.
Evan,
Thank you for bringing that up. It led me to learn some stuff.
Mahalo!
“there’s very little evidence that people of that era used the term ‘social Darwinism’ or used Darwinian theory to justify their social policies.”
There wasn’t a lot of difference between Darwinism and British classical economics (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo) in apparent social policy implications. So people had lots of highbrow handwaving arguments against, say, Shaftesbury’s proposed act banning employment of chimney sweeps before age 12, both before and after 1859.
My area is statistical mechanics, not general relativity, but I’ve taken courses in GR and quantum field theory, and I can tell you that this particular EmDrive theory is trash. It is a fairly straightforward exercise in QFT to compute the radiation pressure associated with Unuh radiation at some acceleration, and this is by many orders of magnitude not sufficient to explain “inertia.”
Amusingly, since mass is quantized, “inertia” is of course also quantized, but this is not sufficient to explain any magical space propulsion systems.
It’s worth pointing out here that the business model of the arXiv reporter at the Tech Review seems to be to find some very bad crackpot papers and then report them as thought they were respectable science. Often the articles are exaggerated beyond even the wild claims of their dubious sources, and frequently contain outright lying. There are many examples. I strongly recommend against putting any credence in any of these reports, and frankly Tech Review should be ashamed for publishing them.
Could you confirm a suspicion I’ve had?
You point out that inertia is quantized because mass is quantized, which is what I suspected when I read the summary. Given that mass, time, and distance are quantized, does that imply that all of their higher-order constructs (momentum, acceleration, etc) are also quantized?
More broadly, are all properties expressed only in kg, s, and m quantized?
Think about it this way: assume that mass, time, and distance could only take integer values. Then any derived unit that involved multiplying, adding or subtracting mass, time, and distance could also only take on integer values and any derived unit that involved those plus division could only take on rational values. There’s no way to add, subtract, multiply, and divide integers and come up with an irrational number.
Would a value that can take on rational values be considered quantized? You can have distinct values arbitrarily close together.
I thought that continuous = reals, but now that you mention it that sounds like a reasonable argument. Guess we’ll have to see if a physicist answers.
There are serious epistemological issues in proposing a theory where something only takes on rational values.
“There are serious epistemological issues in proposing a theory where something only takes on rational values.”
Such as? As far as I know you could never measure a value to infinite precision, and therefore couldn’t tell if a physical value was irrational.
If angular momentum is quantized, doesn’t that mean it effectively can only take on rational values (or only integer values given the right base unit)?
Alex, yes, I guess that’s all I mean, that it’s not possible to distinguish between the hypothesis that something takes on rational values. Of course, it depends on the actual hypothesis. Most dynamics for reals don’t make sense for rationals. But what should be our prior on the fine structure constant? Was it right to put an atom of measure at 1/137?
Anon, angular momentum takes on integral values, which is a quite different situation.
“Most dynamics for reals don’t make sense for rationals.”
We already use continuous objects to approximate discrete systems all the time. For example, calculus with smooth functions helps study fluids that are actually made of particles. I would expect a physical quantity that can take rational values to be well-approximated by a real-valued one; for example, if you have a function that’s continuous on rationals, that defines precisely one continuous function on reals.
You are starting from bad assumptions. Time isn’t quantized. Distance isn’t quantized. In most cases, momentum isn’t quantized. Acceleration isn’t quantized.
Many laypeople seem to thing “quantum mechanics means everything is discrete.” It’s not true. Basically the only thing that is quantized is the energy levels of certain systems. For example, the energy levels of electrons in atoms are quantized. (The energies of free electrons outside atoms are not quantized.)
In particular, there is no indication that time or space are discrete.
“Basically the only thing that is quantized is the energy levels of certain systems.”
I agree with your general point that most observables don’t have discreteness that matters experimentally. But besides energy, I think angular momentum deserves to be on the short list of properties for which quantization commonly becomes important.
Yes, thanks.
If time or space isn’t quantized, doesn’t that mean that the universe is keeping track of an infinite amount of information?
Yes, in quantum mechanics the universe seems to be keeping track of an infinite amount of information. (Even more information than in classical mechanics, which is why I groan whenever someone suggests that quantum mechanics is a sign that the universe is being simulated using a computationally cheap numerical approximation scheme).
Actually, QM requires the universe to keep track of an infinite amount of information even if time and space are quantized. QM is formulated in terms of “probability amplitudes.” Probability amplitudes are complex numbers which can vary continuously. So each amplitude requires an infinite amount of information to store exactly.
Most QM involves infinite dimensional vector spaces. I think most people believe that reality is a finite dimensional vector space approximating such an infinite dimensional model, at least locally.* It is true that even in a finite dimensional vector space the amplitudes still contain infinitely much information, but there are senses in which they contain only finitely much information.
* I think that this finiteness is implied by the cosmological constant plus quantum gravity, but I think it is also expected without a cosmological constant, though maybe that only implies some kind of local finiteness.
I don’t believe so. There are physical limits on the amount of information stored in a location. This applies to classical bits and quantum bits. From the Scott Aaronson interview:
Regarding the Social Darwinism link, Roderick Long and George H. Smith have both written extensively defending Herber Spencer, probably the most smeared “Social Darwinist” thinker. This is a nice essay if anyone is interested: http://archive.lewrockwell.com/long/long10.html
On second thought, it’s a nice essay even if no one is interested.
I am!
Seconded, I find it interesting how Spencer got picked as the prototypical social darwinist. His views are pretty standard libertarian but only he gets labelled a social darwinist.
As a libertarian, I guarantee you that Spencer isn’t the only person on the receiving end of that slur.
And even though this article appears on Lewrockwell.com, the author is not in the least “paleo”. He’s actually one of the leading exponents of a certain brand of left-libertarianism.
Am I the only one who was disappointed to find out that the link about the New York Bar being told they couldn’t deny service to pregnant women had nothing to do with lawyers?
Does “horrified” count as disappointed?
It seems to say that a pregnant woman was prevented from entering a bar, which does seem rather excessive.
Until we know further details, we can’t really comment. It could turn out to be the likes of the below:
Ms A claims she was prevented from entering Bar X because she was pregnant. Ms A neglects to mention she was accompanied by her aggressive boyfriend and the pair of them were engaged in a loud public screaming match and boyfriend threatened to tear the face off the barman, who then refused them admittance.
I’m probably jaundiced from my dealings with the public as a minor local government bureaucratic minion, but people who go running to their lawyers and the local media generally only give one side of the story and it’s the one most favourable to them, especially when there’s the possibility of a pay-out involved.
It’s very frustrating when you’re bound by confidentiality, etc. and can’t ring up the local radio station which has just broadcast the heart-rending case of Ms C and the heartless bureaucrats mistreating her to say “Look, the lying baggage is lying and this is the evidence to prove she’s lying” 🙂
I’ll delete this if Scott thinks it’s spam, but I wrote a post on ~tumblr~ talking about What Terrible Security Practices in COMPUTERS can tell you about AI risk.
The basic gist is that when people designed stuff for the internet age, they basically treated everything they touched as “automatically safe”, instead of taking safety seriously as a priority and this has predictably resulted in large swathes of technology being extremely insecure and prone to exploitation.
https://lostpuntinentofalantis.tumblr.com/post/143652373285/lets-wait-until-we-know-about-the-ai-situation
Mostly would like people who know more about crypto/history of the web to correct me or to point me to some more resources to see if my point is sound or just honkin’ crazy.
Please don’t delete it, it’s a good point you’re making.
Computing generally has always been basically a cluster**** of duct tape and temporary fixes. My friend says this goes down even to the hardware level, where registers and other rubbish is strapped onto CPU architectures in a idiotic way to add capacity while retaining backwards compatibility, because basically its impossible to get everyone to rewrite all the software, and because a compatibility layer is too costly to coordinate in a competitive market. Not sure if it could work any different, but the fact that early UNIX stuff was so advanced for its time suggests it might be if you give the best CS academics a bit of time and funding to go nuts.
I know Linux isn’t BSD, but in what way do you think it’s security model is as bad as Windows?
For the AI point, I agree that this is correct. I think opposition to this sort of forward thinking is usually because its seen as an annoying distraction to more immediate objectives, The arguments are usually just a smokescreen. Perhaps I’m unfairly attacking motive here, but I think that’s usually how things work.
Just because I find it so hard to get honest feedback for my blog, I’ll try to provide some – I like your humourous theme, and I found your writing style good, but maybe a bit chaotic. I also found it difficult to get a sense of what your blog theme was (maybe too hidden behind humour?), so didn’t really explore further, even though I liked the article theme quite a bit. That’s pretty normal though, as far as I’ve read in web statistics articles etc, most people come for one article on a blog and leave.
It’s only the Intel architecture which is notably messy,
My friend was using that as an example, so you may be right!
Newer ARMs aren’t great either.
Hey, thanks. I guess my blog is mostly “stuff I decide to blog about”. I guess a better way to do this is to have a mostly fun blog and a serious business blog, where things like get posted too.
Hm, I don’t think it’s as bad as Windows per say, probably should edit the post to make this clear, but I do think that stuff like Permissions and Groups in Unix/Linux seem like a fairly leaky abstraction when it comes to security. I had to set up server on AWS once with Apache and it basically felt like “type in all of these arcane incantations or else the spirit of bruce schneier himself will possess your /usr/bin/ with great vengeance and post your gmail password to 4chan”, which felt fairly brittle; if I didn’t take this seriously beforehand I could easily be making a bunch of mistakes.
A more succinct summary is that Linux/Unix does not feel Secure By Default, whereas an OS which treated permissions and sandboxing as a primitive, at least I imagine, would be Secure By Default.
I’m told that basically “secure by default” = “does nothing useful until you’ve compiled a bunch of stuff from source, entered a 1k decryption key manually, and performed a rain dance to get config files setup”. Or, user-friendly/economic VS secure. Which I guess is your point, we’ve erred too much away from security. Whether it’s a fundamental problem with Linux system architecture, I’m not sure, because I had the impression Linux was kinda BSD with a bunch of stuff preinstalled for ease of use.
Thanks for reply and article in any case, and keep writing!
Why would a compatibility layer be required? That’s what the assembler is for.
I thought CPU architecture is very decoupled from the programs that run on it.
Well I guess its a question of how much fancy stuff you want your assembly code to support with duplication of similar functions for slightly different platforms? Anyway my friend isn’t within earshot so I won’t try defend his view any further.
A program compiled for one architecture won’t usually run on another CPU architecture unless there’s specific support for backwards compatibility (e.g. 64-bit x86 running 32-bit x86).
Source code can be written so it can’t be ported to an architecture with different endianness or size of datatypes without someone doing potentially a lot of work. Badly-written networking code can have this problem, for example.
You have to be writing in C++ or something with similar low-level access that compiles to machine code, but if you’re writing in C# or Java you already have the compatibility layer Citizensearth is talking about – it’s the .net/java runtime.
Right, I just find it very surprising that Intel came up with an architecture that they can’t implement because it’s impossible to write a compiler for that architecture that also implements all functions of their old interface. Unless in the CPU world backward compatibility also requires keeping the good performance of older versions.
So I think the problem was not exactly “the compatibility layer was too costly to write”, and was hoping someone knows what it actually was since it’s a curious case if true.
@Anonymous
If you’re referring to Itanium, badly written code that assumes integers and pointers are the same size and can be freely converted between each other was one problem, other people actually producing stuff for it was the other. Even if you can compile driver X for Itanium, unless the manufacturer of X actually compiles an Itanium version of your driver, you’re screwed. You get nasty network effects because there’s no point in manufacturers putting out Itanium versions of their drivers unless people want to use their stuff on Itanium processors and people don’t want to buy Itanium processors unless there’s driver support. This problem becomes extra vicious because the kind of code most likely to do stupid bit-level pointer hacks is driver code.
In the case x86 vs x86_64, x86_64 CPUs are specifically backwards compatible with x86 to mostly fix that problem (although as it happens a lot of very old instructions – 8086 era – are /extremely/ slow on modern x86).
tl;dr: if stuff has to be recompiled, nobody will bother recompiling. If stuff isn’t recompiled, you need explicit backwards compatibility.
Minor erata:
Modern Linux has far more relationship with the old unix mainframe systems and multiple users is pretty much an assumption. The average linux box will happily act very much like a mainframe/server.
For that matter modern windows systems while pretty dire for security again have far more in common with microsofts server software than with windows 95 or 98.
selinux in particular is an attempt by an NSA team to create a highly secure system. (I assume they have a few subtle back doors though)
Complexity is the bugger, no matter your initial assumptions.
Look at qmail vs sendmail.
Both were written for the internet in an age when people knew there were threats.
Qmail was written to be simple and secure. Sendmail…. has a config file so complex that there are other programs purely for trying to manage it. The former has very few security holes. The latter has weekly serious security problems.
The problem with browsers is similar. Complexity. Disable addons, flash, java and javascript and most browsers are pretty solid and fairly resistant to attack but the more features (particularly complex features like turing complete languages in sandboxes) you try to add the more security holes.
If security is a high priority I can’t remember the last time I heard of an exploit in LYNX with javascript disabled.
I think this example may be better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o59mQhBiUo4
FTP was written very very early in the days of the internet by a grad student in a few hours. It was written for one server connecting to another in a university. At the time data could only go one way on a socket and so it was designed a certain way.
Then the internet got big and TCP/IP took off and we could talk 2 directions on a socket. But FTP still existed and had a weird stilted protocol from the pre-TCP-IP days. Without FTP and it’s protocol you wouldn’t need a firewall, you’d just need to configure a router right and you’d be secure. So people had to build expensive firewalls. Now because FTP worked that way other more recent crappy protocols had the freedom to work badly too.
Now everything has firewalls and the global firewall industry is worth billions.
because the firewalls exist nobody has to fix the bad protocols.
it would have taken a good programmer about 2 hours to fix FTP in 1975.
But the problem is that before TCP/IP existed someone would have needed to guess about the knockon effects of coding ftp to user multiple connections that eventually lead to firewalls in your IP enabled fridge.
it’s really hard to solve those problems without also spending 10000 hours on problems that never will actually exist.
Over engineering solutions is a thing: you spend years working on elegant solutions to every problem you can think of but then you’re standing next to your competitor and the customer says “can it sing and dance”and you say “no”(because the complexity was pointless) and your competitor says “absolutely”and they get the sale.
That’s a great link, thanks.
Yeah, agreed about how informative the link was.
I don’t remember where I read this, possibly in the Arrakis OS press release, possibly by some crypto dude like Colin Wright or Thomas Ptarek (sic), but from what I understand the permission system in and of itself is a far cry from an ideal sandboxed OS. The backdoor thing is a part of it, but aside from that the memory used in the OS isn’t as isolated as a more secure OS would be.
I’m not sure how much of what I’m saying is true, and also it’s possible it’s the standard paranoid security researcher response to always advocate for more certainty in their stack (because their threat model tends to include Nation States)
The Qmail/sendmail example is very interesting. Gwern has stated that single people have produced relatively secure protocols/implementations alone (Bittorrent, Tor and Bitcoin were the cited examples). …and I see here that Qmail was also written by a single developer. There really is a point about having programs be simple. Thanks!
I always wondered why FTP was like that. Thanks!
Hillary has the most negative press coverage in the study because the study cherry picked the starting date – January 2015. Trump, Cruz, and Sanders wouldn’t be on anybody’s radar for several months after that.
The study is about ratio of negative to positive coverage, so fewer news stories about other candidates is not sufficient explanation.
Only 16 years until the publication of the main result. The new publication does various extra analyses that were never published, despite being prespecified, listed here.
Though I’d hardly rank on a list of notable pundits, I’ll confess a mea culpa about believing Trump could not get the nomination. This was based not on smug liberalism, but nonpartisan cynicism. In the simplest form, the Republican establishment hates Trump, don’t bet against the Republic establishment. Early polls mean nothing. Ben Carson was the Republican frontrunner for a while, where is he now?
What seems to have happened is like a real-life version of a contrived fictional arena melee group fight. The establishment support fragmented over a large field of candidates, who mostly took each other out. Because they were all vying to be the establishment winner, they all focused on weakening their similar rivals. Trump, as the one non-establishment contender with staying power due to his wealth and name recognition, ended up like the Last Man Standing after the results of the melee, and it was too late to consolidate support against him. Now the establishment has nowhere to go, and they’re stuck with Trump.
It’s not possible to predict that sort of result from historical polling data. It’s more like a complicated iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with many players. The Trump opposition is collectively stronger than him at first, but all members want to be the beneficiary of that collective strength, so wind up dissipating it via internal strife.
The rationality lesson is being overconfident in one’s model when the assumptions underlying it, while usually true, are proving too narrow in a specific context.
Trump really is popular with Republicans in New York and other northeastern states. Winning 60% in the New York primary was the event that validated him. (He even got 42% in a 3-way race among Manhattan Republicans.)
The mistake Nate Silver made was not using international election trends in his model. All around the world, immigration policy has been a huge election issue for the last couple of years. There have been all sorts of new developments due to this (mostly on the right, although sometimes on the left, as in Canada).
I posted something to this effect on your blog, but you may not have seen it: as far as I know, political scientists are quite skeptical about whether there are valid cross-national electoral inferences to be drawn. I don’t know of any empirical literature on forecasting (say) the conservative party vote share in country X from recent electoral results in countries Y, Z, W; and the political scientists I asked about this didn’t either. It seems like a plausible hypothesis to me, but this might be a genuinely new phenomenon (a social media era phenomenon) in which we can hardly have great confidence with respect to generalizability.
Perhaps this is all hindsight, but reading the newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, there were massive global trends, first toward the left in the mid-1970s, then toward the right from, perhaps, the late 1970s leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
I can remember standing in the rain in March 1983 peering into a newspaper box to read the headline on the critical West German election reject the Soviets’ proposed Nuclear Freeze and thinking: “We’re not going to lose the Cold War.”
@anon
I think that there are clear global trends, but they manifest themselves at different times in different countries, so they aren’t that useful in making predictions.
I also confess to be a Trump dismisser but I wasn’t wrong because he happened to have the good fortune to run in a crowded field.The Trump ceiling theory was disproved when he managed to get over 50% of the vote in some states. I was wrong because nearly everyone underestimated how important stopping illegal immigration was to the typical primary voter and how anti-establishment the people had become. I can’t imagine Trump will win because of his problem with minority voters but I’m not going to make the mistake again of dismissing the possibility as ridiculous.
“I can’t imagine Trump will win because of his problem with minority voters”
-As though Romney had no problems with minority voters and Pennsylvania and Ohio are great bastions of minority voters.
And Romney lost. What’s your point?
And he can’t rely on rust belt states. He’s going to need to win states like Florida, Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina. And it’s not exactly like him winning those states can be taken for granted. Trump might win but he can’t rely on white people to help him.
Florida is a bastion of minority voters -but…
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/01/1205878/-The-Palm-Beach-Puzzle-How-did-a-diversifying-urban-county-trend-Republican
Trump doesn’t need Colorado. He does need either Virginia or North Carolina, and, as you know, Southern Whites born in the South have been trending Republican over the last few decades. Boosting Hillary-hatred among them is probably more productive than trying to win over liberal well-off carpetbaggers or southern Blacks.
“And he can’t rely on rust belt states.”
-Yes, he can. Ohio and Pennsylvania are rust belt states. He can’t rely on small, disproportionately Mexican states. Romney could have won New Mexico, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado -and he’d still have lost. Are you suggesting Romney seriously go for California? The Mexican vote is far, far less important than the native-born White vote in Presidential races.
“Trump might win but he can’t rely on white people to help him.”
-What do you mean by that? Trump isn’t gonna win without appealing to rust belt Whites in Ohio.
The whole GOP-needs-Mexican-votes-to-win-the-Presidency meme is just a lie. It deserves to die.
You can quote me on this:
If Trump gets less minority voters than Romney(percentage wise), he’s going to lose. We’ll see who’s right in November.
And I say that if Trump loses Luzerne County (90+% Non-Hispanic White), Pennsylvania, he’s going to lose. If he wins it, he will win.
The GOP does not need a single more non-White vote to win the Presidency.
I expect Trump will do no worse than other GOP candidates among minority voters. Probably a little better. I expect him to actually get a bit of the black working class vote in the northeast.
Scott Adams– the Dilbert cartoon creator– there’s a Wa Po article about him– he has the best explanation by far of why Trump is so popular. Basically he knows to sell himself to people via their emotions. He’s aware that facts, rationality, knowledge etc. do not matter at all. Emotion and identification are the sales tools that work in a presidential election.
I don’t buy Adams’ “Trump is just that good” theory, for the obvious reason everyone is forgetting in this thread: Trump has run before, and failed miserably.
That’s a big reason no-one took him seriously at first; it looked like a repeat of his previous attempts, in which he ducked out early but got his name in the papers and maybe enhanced his brand a little.
Regarding the trollbots story: Unless a breakthrough in AI is posited, this would only work in a large and corporately unregulated space, where the management has neither the ability nor the inclination to look carefully at everyone who joins. A mob of chatbots would be quite noticeable on your average PhPBB board, or even in the comments of a site like this one: they might have a hard time fending off the assault, but everyone is going to know that they are under the equivalent of a denial of service attack.
Now, that Twitter and the social circles on it could be brought down by unlimited numbers of trollbots, I agree. However, the elimination of one of the world’s largest channels for political propaganda, clickbait journalism, virtue signaling, and angry, uninformed mobs would be a massive boon to humanity, so I say bring on the trollbots and the sooner the better.
No, definitely not. Graham cites absolutely no evidence that the winners of those elections were more charismatic; his assertions about how obviously one candidate or another was obviously more charismatic are non-statistical retrodictions. If Bush had lost in 2000 or 2004, Graham would have written about how Bush’s struggles communicating (e.g. his ‘Bushisms’) showed he was uncharismatic; if Obama had lost in 2008 or 2012, Graham would have written about how the law school professor had failed to connect with the average American.
We have some fairly strong evidence that the opposite is true. The American National Election Studies has polling data on both candidate ideology and personal qualities; it finds that Graham’s assumptions about which candidate was perceived as better personally than the voters are simply wrong. e.g. Carter, Dole, and Dukakis were higher rated than Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. (see here, pg20) This makes sense, as polling tends to find that personal likeability is not a priority for voters- e.g. even if we restrict ourselves to personal qualities, in 2000 only 2% of people cared the most about the candidates’ likeability.
It’s of course possible that personal qualities and charisma are different things, and that charisma is a major influence persuading people of your ideology. But at this point this is not just an unsupported retrodiction, it’s one that seems countered by the data we have available.
I think in most cases it was obvious, on election day, which of the two candidates was the more charismatic. Bush v. Gore is the only ambiguous example I can think of in my lifetime.* Gore was a bit nerdy but still energetic, and, as you say, one could fault W. for some Bushisms, though he certainly wasn’t dull in the way e. g. Dukakis, Dole, Kerry, and Romney were.
I don’t think if McCain or Romney had beaten Obama we would have interpreted it as someone exciting and dynamic beating someone boring. There would have been other explanations about experience, repudiating Obamacare, or what have you. Personal example: I wanted Obama to lose to Romney and, indeed, thought he might, but I never had any illusions that Romney was a more exciting candidate.
*And is it a coincidence that the closest election in recent memory also happens to be the one where I have trouble picking an obviously more charismatic candidate?
By the standard DW-NOMINATE measurement, the average Republican member of Congress has gotten more than three times as much more right-wing since 1960 than the average Democratic member of Congress has gotten more left-wing.
In 1916, the median Congressional Democrat and Republican scored about -0.4 and +0.4, where negative means more consistently left-wing and positive more consistently right-wing votes. By 1966, the median members in both parties had moderated, to about -0.25 and +0.25 respectively. Here in 2016, the median Congressional Democrat has gotten more liberal to about -0.4 again, while the median Congressional Republican has gotten more conservative all the way to about +0.8.
The famous asymmetrical extremism is Republican Congressmen versus Democratic ones. Not Republican voters versus Democratic ones. It’s about the people serving in the House of Representatives, not the people who voted for them. Confusing the two is as bad as confusing “income taxes” for “all taxes.”
(How do people measure this? Pretty charts and methodology details at voteview.com. Basically you ask the computer to line up everyone in congress in the way that maximally predicts which people vote the same. The best single-number representation of this turns out to match “left-wing to right-wing” pretty well. If you add a second dimension, that used to match “civil rights versus racist” nicely in the days of the 1960s’ pro-segregation Southern Democrats. I don’t believe it still does, though.)
I personally haven’t seen research saying ordinary voters have gotten asymmetrically more extreme. Honestly it would surprise me if they had, unless you looked at an intense group like “regular campaign donors” or “reliable primary voters”. But the finding that the United States Congressional delegations have gotten much more extreme on the right than on the left is pretty robust.
Why have the Republicans in Congress moved more right than the Democrats in Congress have left? I don’t think there’s a settled answer on that. I like the suggestion I’ve seen that the Republicans developed an “ideological infrastructure” of think tanks, talk radio, et al in the 1970s-1980s that punished ideological deviations (e.g. with primary challenges) in a way that the Democrats haven’t yet replicated. A complementary suggestion is that the Democrats are inherently more fractious, because as the party of “change” they have different contending groups to attend to, making ideological purity more difficult. (Which can be a feature when it prevents groupthink, or a bug when it makes you susceptible to near-corruption on behalf of one interest group or another.)
DW nominate does not prove what it claims to prove. Imagine the only political issue was the number of buttons on military uniforms. Hardcore republicans want 8, moderates of boh parties 6, and left wing democrats 4. Then there’s an election and a bunch of new super extreme 2 button democrats get elected, while all the 8 button republicans lose. DW nominate would show the republican and democratic parties moving RIGHT, because all the republicans would be clustered around the new furthest right position, 6, while the democrats were spread out over the whole spectrum.
DW nominate tries some tricks to account for this, but they don’t do it in a way that is sufficient. their method is based on congressional votes and it cannot, by definition, account for movement in the overton window over time.
I like the button analogy, but are you sure that’s how it works? And aren’t the politicians in DW-Nominate only allowed to move ideologically at a constant rate? So wouldn’t it take a while for the six-button people to move to the far right?
Yes, thanks for the analogy. I could sense that something wasn’t right, but didn’t have the mental fortitude to go through the full math.
So is it fair to think of the dw nominate procedure’s output for Ds and Rs as kind of like skewness (3rd moment) in statistics?
It’s important, as you note, not to read DW-NOMINATE as a measure of the larger Overton Window of society.
When incumbent representatives shift views, DW-NOMINATE largely factors it out. The algorithm only sees moves where new representatives differ in their typical left-right ordering from the representatives they replaced.
Your button example is close, but not correct as given. It all depends on whether the change in button votes comes from reelected officers changing their minds, or from new representatives replacing those officers.
In the particular case you gave above, since the returning 4-buttoners and 6-buttoners haven’t changed stance, the comparative chart would still show a big move left. 8-buttoners have gone; 2-buttoners have arrived; existing representatives who used to be in the middle of the vote cuts (6-buttoners) are now on the right of the vote cuts. This shows up in DW-NOMINATE as Congress having moved left around them.
But we could have an alternate example, where nobody got thrown out of office. Let’s say New Scientific Evidence On Button Constriction has made all representatives shift their own views two buttons fewer. That is, the same representatives who had been voting for 4 buttons are now voting for 2 buttons, etc. That would show up as no movement on the chart.
So you should never use DW-NOMINATE for estimating broad societal moves, like increasing acceptance of gay rights or declining average racism. But it’s quite useful for tracking moves in Congressional representation relative to the larger society.
(As E. Harding notes, DW-NOMINATE assumes any individual legislator moves at a constant rate through left-right space. This accommodates things like legislators becoming more conservative or more liberal over time.
The algorithm tries to assign each legislator a starting point and trajectory in left-right (and a second axis) space so as to maximize the likelihood of the model yielding the actually observed data of who votes together or in opposition. If you worked hard at it, you could construct a voting pattern where it was easier to assume the 6-buttoners had moved right than that the Congress had moved left. But in the pattern you presented, the maximum likelihood model is just going to be to correctly identify the 2-buttoners as leftists.)
Well, my first instinct was that it should be the last explanation. On reflection, I'm not so sure.
If you believe the stereotype of Asian behavior, Chinese people are an obedient, docile bunch. They do not drive that way in China; they drive like total terrifying maniacs. Foreigners new in Shanghai need help to cross the street. To me this looks like support for your middle hypothesis, that road deaths are determined by level of development (as people get used to the roads, they drive more safely).
Since you wrote a long piece defending the meaningfulness of implicit association tests, I’d really like to hear more than this drive-by comment. Any chance?
“Foreigners new in Shanghai need help to cross the street. ”
Not my experience in two visits over the past two years.
I heard that road rules cooperation is a proxy for rule of law and in general cooperation in PD situations. One could imagine a population docile due to oppression, but with a defecting norm (leaving China aside as I never lived there, Soviet Union might be a good example).
I’m a bit torn on the drinking-while-pregnant thing. On the one hand, avoiding pollutants for developing children is a promising societal intervention. On the other hand, mentioning it even in passing is an excuse for lots of people to just massively and continually dump on people who are pregnant.
Like, in lots of countries, drinking a small amount while pregnant is perfectly normal, and even if not doing that is *better* “it’s for their own good” is NOT usually a legal or moral defence to “I illegally discriminated against someone”. Bartenders are not doctors, and even doctors should not impose preventative treatment on people against their will except in extreme cases.
I’m also torn, I think it’s good that other people in your community care about you. But going up to complete strangers and making medical decisions for them is really shitty.
I’m also curious, did the people enforcing this, ask for doctors notes? Or do they just decide if someone “looks pregnant”, and are they sure that’s not going to discriminate against fat people, or people with ectopic pregnancies, or people who’ve recently given birth or miscarried?
You frame it as if it were about the mother. But the other side would probably argue that you’re missing the point and that giving a drink to the mother is to be an accomplice to child abuse.
are they sure that’s not going to discriminate against fat people, or people with ectopic pregnancies
An ectopic pregnancy is fatal to the woman and must be surgically removed. I can’t make sense of the worry that someone might be discriminating against people with ectopic pregnancies by not serving them drinks. In all likelihood, a woman who is visibly pregnant with an ectopic pregnancy is about to die. She should be in a hospital, not a bar.
(Some exceptions discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectopic_pregnancy )
I’m not torn at all. I can’t look around for five minutes without seeing an anti-smoking advertisement indicating second-hand smoke can harm people and even pets around you; We get get reasonably upset when pollutants in water or air are shown to be linked to birth defects and/or increased cancer rates; I even recall hearing about studies indicating strong links between lead exposure and crime rates 20 years down the road – but we cannot act to prevent exposure to a dangerous substance for the sake of a child because of fear of intruding on a pregnant’s woman’s rights?
Rights are good, but they end at harm or possible harm to others.
But what’s your threshold of proof?
There is no good data that minor amounts of alcohol consumption is damaging to a fetus. We have no idea what the safe level is, so our culture has settled on zero tolerance. Many others have settled on a single drink in a sitting.
How much proof do we need to ignore someone’s rights for their own child’s good? I’d think it’s more than we have.
I think it is fair for the law to allow both the mother and the bartender freedom of conscious on the matter.
>We have no idea what the safe level is, so our culture has settled on zero tolerance.
The reasoning behind the medical recommendation not to drink at all was that we looked for a threshold below which symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome didn’t occur, and couldn’t find one. This reality coexists with the reality that drinking before you realize you’re pregnant is not considered a moral failure, and that whatever harm you might do to your child thereby will be (a) slight, and (b) impossible to attribute to the alcohol. FAS isn’t a discrete thing.
As far as I know, Yrro is correct. Do you have a citation for people looking? for FAS being continuous?
For people looking, I’m speaking based on what my mother told me. She is an obstetrician.
For FAS being continuous, look no farther than the title of the wikipedia page, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
Following citations from wikipedia, I find the following in a report from 2015, here: “Mills et al prospectively studied approximately 31 000 pregnancies to determine how much alcohol pregnant women could safely consume and found increased risk of infant growth retardation even when consumption was limited to 1 standard drink daily. [30]”, cited to a paper called “Maternal alcohol consumption and birth weight. How much drinking during pregnancy is safe?” and published in 1984. It goes on:
It’s a little hard for me to believe that “do you have a citation for people looking” was asked in good faith, since it beggars belief that, once it’s established that alcohol consumption during pregnancy (not a rare circumstance!) causes developmental retardation, people wouldn’t go looking for how much alcohol is necessary to cause the effect. But there you go.
Thanks for the links! I concede that Yrro was incorrect. They have found a threshold: 1 drink/week has better outcomes than abstaining.
No one has a moral right to force others to do business with them.
>Like, in lots of countries, drinking a small amount while pregnant is perfectly normal, and even if not doing that is *better* “it’s for their own good” is NOT usually a legal or moral defence to “I illegally discriminated against someone”.
It should not be illegal. That’s the point. This is preposterous.
At the same time, you have people demanding that bars be held accountable for serving people who get into accidents as drunk drivers.
So there’s pressure for bars to cut off customers and refuse service if they seem like getting drunk from one side, and pressure about it’s our right to get blotto if we want no matter if it might possibly be harmful from the other side.
Whatever you do, someone is going to be offended and demand There Should Be A Law.
Is there also any chance that someone might bring a suit against a bar for serving them when they were visibly pregnant if they then go on to have a child with foetal alcohol syndrome? I know it sounds absurd but where lawsuits are concerned, I tend to think somebody will eventually try it.
there was a very relevant comment on reddit:
Yes, that is very relevant to Jack: making it illegal to not serve pregnant women doesn’t stop anyone from making it illegal to serve pregnant women.
But the redditor’s claim that there’s no story is exactly backwards. The (putative) fact that two departments are giving conflicting advice is a very interesting story. The reporter’s claim that NYC has a coherent plan is almost certainly wrong. But that is downplaying the interesting part, not exaggerating it. That they are merely guesses and not settled case law is not reassuring.
I’ve often thought that if “fetal personhood amendments” ever got off the ground then a straightforward combination of that with “illegal to serve alcohol to minors” meant that bars would be unable to serve anyone who appeared to be a woman of childbearing age. Unless maybe they were menstruating, or signed a waiver or something.
Ireland has explicit fetal personhood and “protection of the unborn” in it’s constitution yet didn’t run into that.
keep in mind, it’s mostly while something is a political football that you get crap like that.
Interesting, thanks.
It shouldn’t be illegal for a privately owned business to discriminate against anyone for any reason. No one should have a gun to their head telling them who they have to associate or do business with. Least of all bartenders being forced to serve alcohol to pregnant women. That absurdly overzealous interpretation of the 14th amendment tramples all over the 13th amendment.
The laws you’re referring to are not an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, overzealous or otherwise.
Not to mention the 18th amendment…
Antidiscrimination law: upholding the proud institution of slavery since 1954.
I’d be careful with that for essential services and natural monopolies.
It’s all well and good if your local coffee shop doesn’t want to serve you but less fun if your hospital declares that they won’t stop the bleeding of “your kind”.
I thought hospitals are licensed by the government.
Normally though many people here are in favor of the hospitals-as-private-business model.
I’m wondering what other Christians here think of the counterfeit revival article.
Contrary to every depiction of the work of the Holy Spirit in scripture. Mass hysteria at best, demonic at worst.
Essentially, yes. The practices described bear no resemblance to the work of the Holy Spirit as described in scripture. It’s likely a messy combination of mass hysteria, suggestibility, peer pressure, and outright fraud. There might be some demonic influence involved (the description of Rodney Howard-Browne asking for power sounds like it could have been an invitation to possession), but that’s just speculation.
FWIW, I attended a Vineyard church for 3 years several years ago, and it didn’t resemble that even slightly.
It’s certainly a long-running strain within Christianity. The article seems to conflate a few things at the start (the mention of Anglicanism naturally reminds me of the Nine O’Clock Service which was initially spectacularly successful but eventually imploded in the usual kind of scandals).
The main thrust, though, is the kind of “signs and wonders” strain which is very easily warped into something sinister, and if that report is anyway accurate (allowing for the axe-grinding which is going on), then the thing involved is best called a cult. It’s like messing around with ouija boards – you don’t have to believe that there are spirits out there but when you’re stirring up the depths of the psyche, you never know what is going to come to the surface. Things like the woman ‘stuck to the floor’ sound like hysterical paralysis: a potent mix of heightened expectations, desire for something to happen, seeking after diversions and ‘proof’, fear of standing out by not ‘getting the spirit’, self-hypnosis, bullying and intimidation by the ‘preacher’ involved – and it may be significant he originated in South Africa, as these kinds of “name it and claim it”/Pentecostal-type churches are very prominent in Global South Christianity – and the feverish atmosphere of a crowd of people hyped up and egged on to have extravagant reactions are all you need.
The local experience of this kind of thing was about thirty years ago when apparitions of the Blessed Virgin (and Christ and Padre Pio) were supposedly happening at a grotto in the locality; people were having all kinds of visions and there were busloads coming down to attend. This was during the hey-day of the moving statues. I don’t believe there were real apparitions going on (and my late father, who had great Marian devotion, wasn’t too convinced either) but at least it was a natural out-welling of folk religion rather than something whipped-up by unscrupulous clerics (sorry, people, no sinister monks or prince-bishops trying to delude the credulous masses involved!)
It’s nothing new, this kind of event goes back to the kind of alternate Christianities (to use the term beloved of the modern neo-Gnostic scholars) when the great heresies were being fought in the early centuries of Christianity. It breaks out every now and then ever since, from the Reformation onwards (and in the movements preceding the Reformation).
Some of the people are charlatans and con men, the same kind as would otherwise be spiritualist mediums, channellers, and running psychic hotlines. Some are quasi-sincere. Some are deadly sincere and possibly do the most harm; the charlatans will duck out when the money runs out, but the really sincere ones will wreck lives and minds convinced they are the chosen prophet of God in this time.
The “signs and wonders”/Pentecostalist strain is also prominent in the history of Christianity, often in tension with the orthodoxy of the day. It’s telling that the guy in the article uses “Pharisaical” as the condemnatory code-word; that’s the “law-bound, rule-bound, in opposition to set free by grace” quarrel all over again 🙂
In short: the guy is probably a snake oil merchant (though he may have convinced himself he has genuine spiritual powers), can be very destructive psychologically, and should be avoided at all costs.
The “Prosperity Gospel”/”Power Word: Stun” movement is a heresy. Mass hysteria is pretty succinct: it preys on cognitive biases. Glossalia has nothing to do with the miracle of Pentecost, so the fact that its worship leaders rely on this equivocation, using suggestibility, peer pressure, etc. should be a huge red flag.
Now that’s a word I haven’t heard in a while. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone straight-out call this sort of moment heresy before, but I think I see the point.
I’m not and I’ve never been a Christian – could you go more into what being a heresy actually means? Does it just mean that it’s a practice counter to the orthodox teachings of the church (and therefore Christians shouldn’t do it), or does it have a deeper theological meaning, like people who participate in it are damned? My knowledge of heresies in the Church mostly centers around the first millennium, and the Church is a lot less fractious and violent these days.
In general, heresy consists of being persistently intellectually wrong on key doctrines of the faith. (Obviously there is room for definitional arguments on whether or not these terms apply in any particular case.)
Persistently (so a brief flirtation with the idea isn’t enough to define some as a heretic), intellectually (so it’s not a matter of feelings or emphasis, but of settled definition), and on key doctrines (so it’s not just a minor agreement).
It’s not just being wrong; it’s been stubbornly wrong about something important. Now I don’t think just being wrong about something is enough for damnation, but I think that being persistently and stubbornly wrong about God can ultimately send one in a direction other than God-wards.
But aren’t even the major Christian denominations technically heretical from each other’s point of view?
In many cases they are, yes. But (say) the Catholics, the Orthodox, and most Protestants can all agree on the Apostles’ Creed. It’s when you get outside that zone that I start worrying about heresy. I find that many groups spend amazing amounts of energy worrying about their local fences with their neighbors, and not so much on all the things they have in common. (Consider different rationalist groups arguing about who is most-rational…)
(In some cases they’re just schismatic: in agreement on doctrine but not on leadership/organization issues — of course, those can lead over time to changes in doctrine, too.)
You might be interested in my comment above, describing my experiences there.
It doesn’t strike me as some horrible evil, but I see it as probably mostly a psychological/physiological phenomenon. With potential for evil, I guess.
I could probably also be brought to believe something condescending, like “well, that is how God is forced to interact with low class people.”
Basically, it is so far removed from my experience that I should and mostly do reserve judgment.
I’ve seen churches that act like that. Go for “The Experience”. Encourage the emotional impact of the big meeting.
And I’ve seen churches that are open to, and engage in, similar interactions with the Holy Spirit…but also build a firm foundation of teaching and fellowship. Teaching that the important part isn’t the experience, but the Fruit of the Spirit that grows out of communion with God.
Is the article focusing on the negatives of chasing the spiritual experience, or the negatives of any kind of interaction which is labeled “experience with the Holy Spirit” ?
See also Cutting through Spiritual Materialsim, which describes such distractions as wanting unusual experiences, or wanting to have spiritual experiences to talk about them. As I recall, it uses a context of meditation, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t apply to other paths.
I think the title is unclear, and “spiritual greed” would be better.
Better a little wildfire than no fire at all.
A while back I posited a utopian online future of automated machine learning filters that prevent you from ever having to see trolls.
Am I the only one that read the filters article as a dystopian article? I thought Scott’s point was to warn people that it may be tempting but it will ultimately a dangerous level of echo chambers. Or maybe that’s just what I thought :-/
Scott is firmly in favour of bubbles, and believes that strong enough bubbles will eventually usher in Utopia (“Archipelago”) and we should do everything we can to hasten them.
Everything he writes on the topic looks dystopian to me, but he believes it.
One of the main issues with Archipelago is that moving is never free, even if you’re not moving geographically. The whole system relies on easy transfer between bubbles.
More to the point, it relies on there being easy transfer between bubbles AND on it being prohibitively difficult for one bubble to conquer another by force and/or subterfuge. If you could find some way to crack that particular egg, I think it would be a workable theory, but it’s difficult to have one without the other.
I find it bizarre that people on the left have trended so zealously towards social justice causes, while going a little luke-warm on environmentalism, which to me is the one cause where I think the left is unambiguously on the better side of history (in other areas both sides have points). It’s also a cause with a much sounder philosophical and scientific basis in my opinion. It did occur to me though, that different social groups giving each-other a hard time doesn’t cost elites any money, whereas environmental reforms might do in the short term. Thankfully at least some elites appear to care deeply about the environment too, otherwise I’m fairly certain the media campaigns and weak man arguments against it (given the fringe comes across as sufficiently loony) would crush it completely. On the other hand, without some temperance at some point the social justice thing may backfire horribly in economic ways, so it will be interesting to see if that changes direction at all.
I’m not sure why you think the left is lukewarm toward global warming. Bernie Sanders declared it the number one national security threat. Obama spends plenty of time talking about it. I don’t see any on the left talking about how global warming doesn’t really matter.
They give the impression of considering it an important issue, but not as much as really pressing issues like transgenderism.
Global warming doesn’t fit into the oppressor-oppressed narrative nearly as easily as identity politics.
On the other hand, global warming fits the “we’re always right and you’re always rubes, because Science” narrative to a one-tailed T.
You haven’t heard of the global north vs. the global south?
That is, whiter (more privileged) countries get the advantage of technological advances while browner countries bear the environmental cost.
@Nancy: I’ve definitely heard the term “environmental racism.” Which makes me imagine leftists saying “We’re all going to die, and that’s bad because PoC will be disproportionately impacted!”
Le Maistre Chat, I’m not going to say you’re entirely wrong.
There’s a faction of the left which I think feels so secure that they aren’t comfortable advocating for their own interests.
Well, you have my feelings on a totally different topic pegged right there. (I won’t go into it now because it’s extremely controversial and we’re already up against the right edge of the page.)
I’m sorry but you are all crazy. The left considers it an incredibly important issue. Look at the way they talk about it. People on the left, feel free to chime in.
Completely agreed.
Yeah, I’ve never heard of this idea that the left doesn’t consider global warming important. They’re obsessed with it.
They had rallies when I was in college (a couple of years ago) to get the university to divest from it. They consider opposition to carbon taxes, etc. one of the main markers of “market fundamentalist” denial of reality—nicely lumping together skepticism of the dangers of climate change with denial of evolution.
It doesn’t fit the narrative that the great scourge of our age is the social justice warrior colossus which heroes need to go online and vanquish in rhetorical combat.
I was more leftist when I was a wee lad and back then, in middle school, I was convinced that we’d all be extinct in 100 years from global warming.
Now that’s I’ve matured, I think global warming will ‘merely’ contribute to (further) disease, malnutrition and poverty for the world’s poorest while also aggravating weather patterns that will contribute to the same.
Leftist here, global warming is the most important single issue the world has to deal with period. Getting full civil rights for everyone seems like a way easier problem, though – at least the arc of history is on our side. I feel that we might have to hope science can mitigate the damage of global warming rather than expecting politics to prevent most of it – that’s clearly not happening.
EDIT: I feel it’s the most important issue because it’s 1) Pressing – it’s going to happen within a generation and we’re already feeling the effects, 2) likely irreversible – if we screw this up, we won’t be able to fix it. If the left loses a battle over civil rights, we can try again in a generation. If we destroy the global climate, it’s done. If I thought we’d have a technological means to fix the climate I’d worry a lot less about it.
There are certainly some social justice aspects to global warming, as in the rest of the thread, but that’s not why I care. It’s essentially selfish – I have to live on this Earth for the rest of my life, I really don’t want us to ruin it.
I think you are overstating the magnitude of the problem. Global warming won’t ruin the earth. Worst case, some really hot areas can’t be occupied without air conditioning and the sea rises a bit.
” I feel that we might have to hope science can mitigate the damage of global warming rather than expecting politics to prevent most of it”
Two reasons to prefer mitigation to prevention:
1. It’s much closer to a private good for those who do it, so much more likely to happen. If Louisiana dikes against sea level rise, most of the benefit goes to people in Louisiana. If it switches from cheap fossil fuel to expensive solar, any benefit from reduced CO2 is shared with the rest of the world.
2. Warming has good effects as well as bad. Mitigation lets you minimize the bad effects, keep the good.
“it’s going to happen within a generation and we’re already feeling the effects”
Dubious, if you mean net bad effects. The latest IPCC report has a table showing estimates of the effects of various degrees of warming. For about three degrees, it’s equivalent to a reduction of world GNP of between zero and three percent. For the change in a generation, even if you accept the estimates they are using (which I think pessimistic for reasons I won’t go into at the moment), the net effect could easily be positive.
So far the only negative effect both predicted and observed is more very hot summers, and it isn’t clear that the resulting increased mortality outweighs decreased mortality from milder winters. All the rest amounts to “something bad happened which could be due to AGW, so attribute it to AGW,” which ignores the fact that, with or without AGW, bad things happen.
As the IPCC itself says, normal weather variation is still larger than the effect so far of AGW, making it difficult to attribute any particular event to the latter.
I didn’t specifically mention global warming, though I guess with that I feel like ratio of attention/effort to the size of the stated problem is much smaller when compared to effort placed into SJ issues. But other (related) issues, like the fact we could lose some of our closest relative primate species this century (!!!!!), seems to very get little attention, while SJ is fairly embedded in the way even the mainstream media talks now. I still think it’s fair to say luke-warm, even if there is general lip-service or agreement.
If you switched your statement to “non-global warming environmentalism” then I would completely agree. Of course, I’m not sure to what extent that is because global warming has sort of connected with other environmental issues. So before someone might mention animal extinction as a bad thing by itself but now is considered another effect of global warming.
Can anyone explain the “wages vs income” part of the median income article to me? I didn’t understand one bit of that. If wages and salary are dropping as a percentage, what is replacing it and what conclusions can be drawn from it?
>If wages and salary are dropping as a percentage, what is replacing it and what conclusions can be drawn from it?
Welfare? Dividends? Self-employment income?
I admit to not knowing how the median white male income is calculated in this study, but I would expect welfare, dividends and self employment income (unless it is under the table income) to be included in that number.
So am I – I’m suggesting replacements for salaries/wages. These were what sprang to mind. If a lot of people are on welfare, for example, then I figure average income would fall, since welfare isn’t especially lucrative. Same thing if a lot of people are trying to unsuccessfully engage in their own business, as opposed to earning a stable wage.
Fringe benefit income, specifically healthcare benefits. In the US, most people are covered by employer-sponsored healthcare. Over the last several decades, the value of this has grown dramatically, as the price of health-care has grown dramatically.
Healthcare benefit income is untaxed. So if an employer can give me a $7,000 contribution to my health insurance policy, they’ll do it, because it’s a better deal than giving me $5,000 and Uncle Sam $2,000.
Fringe benefit taxes are within the Overton Windows of at least some nations. Australia, for instance, has a Fringe Benefit Tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_benefits_tax_(Australia)
I see, so then the conclusion would be that part of workers’ total compensation does not contribute to the median income, and thus part of the divergence between median income and per capita GDP can be explained by that factor?
Yes, that’s the explanation the author used. The author also mentioned that household income has changed over time, and I am not sure exactly what this is specific to:
Maybe that’s related to food stamp income, etc. Not sure.
I don’t know why the Red Wedding joke was reported as a murder joke. Or, maybe, yeah, I understand that the Red Wedding was a thing where people got murdered, but it was also a thing where people were physically lured to a space controlled by a political enemy and that political enemy used their presence to further his plans.
That is, in context, the joke was that he was going to lock those GOP senators in the room until they confirmed his SCOTUS appointment, not that he was going to murder them.
[The Red Wedding] was also a thing where people were physically lured to a space controlled by a political enemy and that political enemy used their presence to further his plans
In roughly the same sense that the Holocaust was a thing where people were forced to take a shower by a political enemy to further that enemy’s plans.
If you don’t understand that the murdery part of the Red Wedding is the only part that really matters, might you at least spare a second thought for the name? Did the wedding in question take place in a red room? Was the bride wearing a red dress? What part of that wedding had anything to do with the color “red”?
“Of course, in fact, for months now congressional Republicans have been saying there are things I cannot do in my final year. Unfortunately, this dinner was not one of them. (Laughter.) But on everything else, it’s another story. And you know who you are, Republicans. In fact, I think we’ve got Republican Senators Tim Scott and Cory Gardner, they’re in the house, which reminds me, security, bar the doors! (Laughter.) Judge Merrick Garland, come on out, we’re going to do this right here, right now. (Applause.) It’s like “The Red Wedding.” (Laughter.)”
Yes, of course the main point of the Red Wedding as written in ASOIF is that people got murdered. But I don’t think “Obama wants to murder two low-profile GOP senators” is the more natural reading of that joke.
That’s interesting, thank you. I hadn’t read the actual text of his remarks.
The Red Wedding was memorable because major characters were ambushed and slaughtered. That seems the relevant part.
that political enemy used their presence to further his plans
Which he did by murdering his rivals, or such is my understanding.
I’m not greatly impressed by the Obama dinner thing, mainly I suppose because I see excerpts posed approvingly all over the place about how he absolutely killed with his wittiness and all I’m seeing is rather sour-faced “you won’t have me to kick around anymore!” score-settling.
Yes, the Red Wedding was about murder. Confirming a SCOTUS pick isn’t.
Sure, one can use a less prominent feature of a situation to make a joking analogy, but nobody should be surprised when the more prominent feature is then pointed out in a counter-jab.
Freddie deBoer argues this will never scale because their business model is hiring a tiny number of elite teachers who have just graduated from top colleges for really cheap, luring them with promises of social impact and getting to live in desirable areas.
Good! Because reading Freddie’s post, what would these cocktail-party strivers be doing instead? They’d get a job at a prep school for the posh kids, do a few years’ teaching there, then go on to the more lucrative, less stressful jobs he mentions. If they’re going to abandon teaching anyway, why not make use of them to give “poor brown children” (and the unconscious condescension and classism dripping from that throwaway phrase makes me want to shake him) a leg-up on the educational ladder with the type of elite, high-achieving teacher they would otherwise have not a snowball in hell’s chance of encountering in ordinary schools?
Also the “fragile young children” bit had me rolling my eyes: Will Nobody Think Of The Children, Freddie? Honestly? You’re a college teacher, how many hours at the coalface with lower-class kids in primary and secondary school did you put in? I fully agree that the emotional and social health of children should be protected and that they shouldn’t be treated as raw materials for the sausage machine, but I also am willing to guess that I’ve had more contact with exactly the type of “fragile young children” from lower socio-economic classes that he plains about in his post than he has had, and I can assure him that if he walked in the door of a classroom in the school where I worked (where we had a lot of kids who came under the Special Educational Needs Act), those fragile blossoms would eat him alive, not to mention the ones on the Early Schooleavers’ Programme who did get “emotional and social health” support and would still make mincemeat of him trying to teach a class.
I think you’re being unfair to deBoer both on a personal and logical level.
In the linked post, the motivations of the elite graduates becoming schoolteachers are brought up not to attack those teachers personally, or to impugn their characters. The motivations are brought up because with those motivations come a major problem: high turnover. And deBoer’s argument is that these educational reform movements are inapplicable to the country at large because they will not be able to build up a sustainable cadre of teachers.
Furthermore, he uses the phrase “poor brown children” ironically, referencing the media trope wherein non-white poor children are taught the values of education, industry, etc… by an old-fashioned disciplinarian with a big heart (“How can I reach these keeeeds?”). He only brings this up because he thinks that many of the new “elite graduate” teachers buy into it, and he thinks they will drop out when confronted with reality. He is mocking the trope, not endorsing it.
Your eye-rolling over the phrase “fragile young children” is confusing. Yes, it’s true that he teaches college. So what? Are young children less fragile because Frederick deBoer teaches college? I have many friends who teach in inner city schools, and every one of them has told me how demoralizing it is to watch, passive, as their (fragile young) students are subjected to emotional and physical attack by the conditions of poverty. Do you think that’s not a cause of high turnover? I can’t tell because your argument focuses mainly on how badly you imagine Freddy deBoer would do in a classroom. What does Freddy deBoer’s profession have to do with this argument?
I don’t get the sense that he’s using “poor brown children” ironically, but rather that he’s using it in exactly the same sense (if not for the same purposes) as those inspirational Hollywood “tough teacher turns failing ghetto school around” movies.
And the “fragile young children” is condescending twaddle. Don’t start clutching your pearls over Will Nobody Think Of The Children, Freddie, when you’re doing the liberal “these poor folks need a White Saviour to stand up for them” schtick in your post. I eye-rolled over it because the phrase struck me as very damn Broken Blossoms (which I will admit is probably more an artefact of how my brain makes weird connections rather than de Boer’s intentional prose stylings).
Ordinarily I like de Boer’s writing, but here he misses (and messes up) his point with a tipper truck load of White Liberal Guilt that does feck-all for the disadvantaged kids he champions. As I said- where are these elite young teachers going to teach if not in these schools? They’re not going to go work in Public School InnerCity Hellhole, they’re going to get a cushy gig at a private school teaching the spawn of the wealthy. At least the “poor brown kids/fragile young children” would get the couple of years’ benefit from their expensive qualifications!
And I’m not necessarily supporting charter schools or private academies – there are a lot of problems with the model. But Freddie really did have a good old-fashioned swooning onto the chaise longue, dab my temples with eau de cologne fit of the vapours in that post which was ultimately unconvincing: don’t let the kinds of ambitious kids I’m teaching go out to teach the poor kids in charter schools, let them stick to – well, what instead? Who are the good replacement teachers for the ordinary non-charter schools and where will they come from? If the best teachers are all planning to drop their career after five or six years to attend cocktail parties and embark on a lucrative career, then the other teachers must be second- or third-rate by comparison and they are the ones going to end up teaching the “fragile young children”.
I’d have been a lot more convinced if he’d argued the teachers in these academies actually were not all that and a side of chips, but he seems not to be able to do so, which means that they probably are the best qualified (or the ones with the best qualifications, whether or not they are in actuality good teachers) so instead of teaching at HopeChange Charter School for Achieving Minorities, they’ll go work at Mount Pleasantville Academy for Young Gentlepersons instead, and the second-rate and third-rate will go work in Public School Not Enough Funding.
People: This is PERCENTAGE of negative stories on Trump, not absolute number. The fact that Vox decided the absolute numbers weren’t worth showing is……regrettable.
Clinton has definitely gotten her fair share of negative stories, she has plenty of baggage, and the email thing is a complete embarrassment. When you are being investigated for a felony, it’s all negative. Anyone who monitors the NYT, WSJ, WP (especially), knows that it is mostly wall to wall Trump coverage.
Simple Google count over the past 30 days. Trump = 90M, Clinton = 53M (invariably most stories mention both)
It’s instructive that the media covers almost everyone negatively by the standards used. If you were to count the number with “very negative” such as explicit name calling, Trump would win here easily.
Hey, speaking of implicit association tests, there’s a working paper out that claims to find no relationship whatsoever between IAT scores and giving behavior in a dictator game.
Caveats: there’s no worked-out power analysis in the paper, although the author implies he did one. Also the study participants were mostly black, and it’s plausible you’d see a different result if they were mostly white.
Aaronson:
“In social sciences, there’s an absolutely massive bias in favor of publishing results that confirm current educated opinion, or that deviate from the consensus in ways that will be seen as quirky or interesting rather than cold or cruel or politically tone-deaf.”
That’s about as politically correct a way to state the problem as possible. As with many criticisms of “science”, one needs to also examine how the media selection filters work. You need both unbiased science and unbiased reporting to get useful results to the common man. Sometimes both are biased and it becomes a disastrous self-reinforcing feedback effect.
What we need is more activism in science against biased media reporting?
“What we need is more activism…”
*wince*
The trollbot scenario reminds me of how Russia currently uses poorly-paid people to troll on websites in various countries. The employees receive a list of web forums, and a list of targets and things they are supposed to associate with them. Then they register on the websites and start commenting, all day long. Humans are less efficient than a bot, but more flexible.
My God, I could have a career in Russia! Fighting with strangers on the Internet and getting paid for it (as opposed to doing it for free as I currently do?) 🙂
the only downside would be getting paid in rubles 😉
or vodka
Mmm – the roubles to euro exchange rate is terrible (100 ₽ is the equivalent of €1.35 at today’s rates) and I don’t like vodka.
Ah well, there goes my dream career! 🙂
What if what is currently happening to Uber is exactly what has happened to every other industry, only now we’re social media-ed and desperate enough to notice it?
That seems likely to me, yeah.
I’m sort of interested in the whole thing about them leaving Austin, though, but I haven’t really researched that story enough to have a cogent opinion about it yet. This story about them needing business licenses in SF seems pretty much par for the course for an emerging industry, though.
The first few paragraphs of this article are standard “We Christians must resist the rot of secularism” boilerplate
Where do you get that? The article starts off with:
and then moves into the whole circus of the “signs and wonders” movements. It mentions nothing about secularism and is concerned with the kind of battle that has been going on for a long while between the Charismatic and Pentecostalist movements, the “Properity Gospel” and “Word of Faith/Word of Power” ‘churches’ which mushroomed up, and the more traditional expressions of Christianity.
From the terminology used, I imagine that particular site is more in the Reformed tradition, so it will naturally be very heavily text-based (the Bible, particularly the Pauline Epistles) and ‘head over heart’ influenced, but this is more an outgrowth of the kind of criticism of things like megachurches, where ‘religion as entertainment’ and copying trends in secular culture (the internal criticism that Christianity copies pop culture but ten years out of date) were used to grow attendance which was seen as the metric of success, plus the ongoing “signs and wonders” strain which has been around for a very long time.
That article has little to nothing to do with the secular world and is mainly an internal critique.
Thank you, you summarize my thoughts nicely.
I wouldn’t say to never listen to anyone again who was wrong about Trump. Trump tapped into some things that U.S. culture is blind and deaf about. All cultures have their limitations. And now some talented people have explained why everyone else was wrong about Trump. So perhaps others will listen and learn. Here are a couple. Scott Adams has great explanations that make sense, although I don’t agree with him the Trump will win the general election.
Donald Trump will win in a landslide. The mind behind ‘Dilbert’ explains why.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-will-win-in-a-landslide-the-mind-behind-dilbert-explains-why/
The political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
Norm Ornstein on why the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover, what the media missed, and whether Trump could win the presidency
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
As far as I can tell, what Trump has done that has helped him the most (vs what others, especially the media, have done) is take a stance against illegal immigration and immigration by Muslims. His comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico, that at the time some observers described as a campaign-ruining gaffe, appears to be what spurred his candidacy.
Was it really that hard to spot that there was a market for that? The average Republican voter is probably more restrictionist on immigration, especially illegal immigration, than the Republican leadership, at least on a national level. For some time now, there have been voices at the national level in the Republican party pushing some form of amnesty in the hope of peeling Hispanic voters off from the Democrats.
The Republican rank and file has different priorities from the Republican leadership. They are to the left of the leadership when it comes to economic matters, and to the right when it comes to immigration. There was an Atlantic article about this. Key quote:
The GOP was railing about immigrants to get their voters riled up, long before the Donald entered the scene. Trump just got more colorful and intense about it, and promised to do something concrete (a wall) about it.
But I think Scott Adams explanations of Trump’s strategy, in the article I mentioned above, are the best ones. It’s not about facts or issues at all.
Using it to rile people up, while not actually doing anything about it, and having support for some sort of amnesty among the top echelons… Is it surprising that sooner or later a big chunk of the Republican base turned on the national leadership?
I have no doubt that some of what Adams is saying is correct. Part of Trump’s appeal is definitely tied up in irrational personality factors: he projects strength, he doesn’t back down, etc.
But by some accounts – usually left-wing ones (eg, What’s the Matter with Kansas? – the Republican leadership has for quite some time gotten votes by making appeals that it could not or would not fulfill. They’ve caught on – but instead of transferring their votes to the Democrats, have chosen to support a right-wing populist.
Correction: “They’ve … their” being the Republican base, or a large chunk of it, not the Republican leadership.
“It’s not about facts or issues at all.”
Which raises the interesting question of what Trump will do if he gets elected. He can, and presumably will, continue demagoguing, but what actual policies will he support? What he says doesn’t tell us.
And the whole “make a deal” approach gives him quite a lot of wiggle room.
The average Republican voter wants to restrict lots of illegal things. They’re kind of adorable that way.
For those who want “evidence” that we are immersed in Right Wing propaganda, I feel like I’m documenting that the sky is blue and the grass is green, but here goes.
How could we NOT be immersed in Right Wing propaganda and views, with this much money spent, this year only, by this one Right Wing faction, not including the others? How do people think Big Money in politics functions? What does Big Money buy with their money, if not propaganda to get their preferred candidates elected? And it’s not going to be the truth. It’s not going to be “Vote for this one so that the Kochs can control Congress and screw over everyone else.” The truth wouldn’t garner many votes.
Koch brothers set $889 million budget for 2016
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/26/koch-brothers-network-announces-889-million-budget-for-next-two-years/22363809/
This ignores the possibility of left-wing money being funneled into politics. If you can only see right-wing money buying influence, of course you will believe only the right wing is influential.
It also assumed that money buys political power. It actually doesn’t, no matter how “obvious” it seems. There had been research in the past on it, and the 2012 election proved it, with all of that unprecedented superPAC money going to candidates who crashed and burned. ‘Big Money’ does not decide who gets elected (and isn’t an ideological bloc anyway) — the candidate who is better at getting elected is also better at getting donors to give them money. In 2012, people actually started really trying to buy election in earnest, and found themselves unable to.
Trump really put a nail in the coffin for that idea. All the republican donor money went against him and he still won because he was popular.
Yes, and if Trump gets elected, we will see how he plans to fulfill the promises he’s made, while getting zero help from Congress. Congress makes the laws.
Americans focus far too much on the presidency. Both Houses of Congress, most state legislatures, and most governorships are GOP dominated. That’s where most of the power to get things done is.
“Corporations are buying the presidency, we have to keep democracy alive!”
Theory gets disproven.
“The presidency doesn’t matter. It’s Congress that matters. That hasn’t been disproven yet.”
By the way, have you seen the dragon in my garage.
People think that is so because they focus on the presidency. Both Houses of Congress, most state governorships, and most state legislatures are GOP dominated, because that’s the way the Kochs and other Big Money folks want it.
Yes, Dems have the presidency. But Congress makes the laws. There are big limits on what can be done via Executive Order.
And of course there was the huge well publicized political science study showing that the average American has very little effect on public policy, due to the influence of the very wealthy and their political donations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/opinion/america-the-unfair.html?_r=0
Yes, and then there were the many, many criticisms of that study.
I think the truth is that money matters in politics and policy, but so do a ton of other things, and they offset as often as not. Indeed, the study you cited seems to suggest real but pretty small effects on policy from having a bunch of money; you don’t always get what you want, but you can get what you want like 55% of the time instead of 45%. That’s not nothing, but it’s far from Koch-brother domination of our political life.
In terms of local elections — I’m not sure exactly how much money they poured into his campaign, but a lot of Silicon Valley billionaires were behind DeRay Mckesson’s bid for the Baltimore mayoralty. He ended up with 2% of the vote. And it arguably says something that smart, rich folks like Michael Bloomberg often consider running for president themselves, rather than using their resources to fund candidates for Congress or state and local offices. (Although I think Bloomberg does have a PAC to give money to pro-gun-control candidates.)
Both Houses of Congress, most state governorships, and most state legislatures are GOP dominated, because that’s the way the Kochs and other Big Money folks want it.
So an African-American Democratic two-term President doesn’t matter a hill of beans.
On the other hand, were he a white Republican two-term President it would be the sign of Armageddon.
I see.
I’ve seen some research which actually suggested that exogenous money (from independent wealth) gives you a 1% advantage in the polls for every factor of 2 by which you outspend your opponent. So it does have an influence, it’s just pretty small compared to most other things.
I’m pretty sure this comment was addressed to you
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/09/links-516-linko-de-mayo/#comment-355418
@Jill:
…is a claim Politifact plausibly rated false.
The total amount being spent is less than that and is the combined total of multiple “Right Wing factions” rather than just one. Most of that smaller total is NOT being spent by the Koch brothers themselves, and only a third of it is aimed at the 2016 election. Also, it’s not for “this year only” your own link said in the link title itself that their overestimate was a spending estimate over two years – it was for 2015 and 2016.
Re. growing polarization:
Beyond my point in the OT about how we have to take into account absolute positions rather than just relative movements, my subjective impression is that, recently, the number of people getting more left-wing due to outrage at the stupid, radical Republicans is probably equal to, if not greater than the number of people getting more right-wing.
That is, the response to constant reports that the other side is getting more radical may be to get more radical yourself, which seems like it leads to some kind of radicalization death spiral.
Something like that may be so. However, it does seem that the Right is getting more extreme than the Left is getting. If both were equally radical, the general election would be Bernie vs. Trump. And we all know that won’t happen.
The Left going a little more to the Left here won’t even bring them back to Center– from the Right, where the Left actually is now. Hillary in her policies is close to Nixon. And she’s going to be the nominee. So we really have 2 Right Wing candidates now.
Trump is not nearly as right-wing as Bernie is left-wing. Trump is more anti-establishment than Hillary, which to me says the left is happier with the status quo than the right, because the left picked the “safe” candidate and the right picked the “wild card.”
And this, in some sense, is the root of it: those who are relatively happy with the status quo can easily accuse those who are not of being “radical.” But if you’re happy with the status quo that tends to indicate you’ve been getting your way.
I can’t speak for people who prefer Hillary. I prefer Bernie.
It’s possible that the difference between Bernie’s popularity and Trump’s is an effect of the primary system and delegate choosing systems of the Democratic party vs. the system the GOP uses. The systems for choosing the party nominee need to be overhauled in both parties. They are different, but both are dysfunctional.
I think it’s hard to define establishment conservative vs. radical, and establishment liberal vs. radical.
Radical should be a depart from the establishment. However, the establishment is not one thing. Each major party is– and has been for a long time– a coalition of various groups that may be fairly different from one another.
E.g. Libertarians seem to more often vote GOP than Dem, but do they really have a lot in common with military industrial complex people who desire everlasting unnecessary wars, so they can keep feeding at the public trough? And do people who are in the GOP because they want low or no taxes, really similar to people who are in there because they want their religious beliefs about abortion, gay people etc. made into federal law?
“… do they really have a lot in common with …”
Exactly.
Do radical feminists really have anything in common with the pro-immigration movement? Do LGBTQ+ activists really have anything in common with communists? Does BLM have anything in particular to do with Sex Positivity Means Women’s Health(tm)?
EDIT: but I don’t think this proves much. Politics is about coalitions; you can be far or near from the center of a coalition, by supporting larger or smaller fractions of it.
Other than gun control, can you name a single position on which the republican party today is left of where it was in, say, 1994? Because I can name many on which it, and the democrats, are to the left.
Assuming you mean positions where Republicans have moved “right” not “left.” Taxes? Financial regulation? Military adventurism? Campaign finance? Immigration?
Caveat: I wasn’t paying much attention to politics in the 1990s.
I think there’s some conservation of tribalism going on. For instance, I recently read that 1/3 to 1/2 of people would be upset if a family member married someone from the other political party, whereas in 1960 only 5% of people would care about that.
On the other hand, care to estimate how many people in 1960 would be upset about a family member marrying someone of a different race/religion?
Thanks for linking to my post. I’m glad you at least liked the title.
I can see other problems with the air rage paper, above and beyond their poor statistics. First, they divide all aircraft into ‘economy’ and ‘first’, which gives no information as to what the ‘first’ actually looked like. First Class on domestic flights is usually what would be called business class on international (transoceanic) flights, and a big step down from the first class on international flights, which can be really impressive. For that matter, some airlines have three classes on domestic routes, usually first, economy, and economy with more legroom. The paper says that they were using one large international airline’s database, which is why the data is proprietary. However, the data includes flights without a first class section, and all four major North American airlines (United, Delta, American, and Air Canada) don’t operate single-class planes that in their own name. They do have subsidiaries which do regional flights with single-class planes, however. But those planes are smaller and generally fly shorter routes than planes with two classes, and they don’t seem to control at all for the number of passengers when doing their math to prove that first class causes air rage.
(As an aside, I suspect Air Canada is the airline in question, based on some of the numbers they give.)
Also, flight duration. If the single-class seating is only or mostly on subcontracted commuter runs, then the passengers are only putting up with crappy airline service for an hour or so, maybe an hour and a half with boarding and deplaning. Traditional two- or three-class seating is on long-haul flights, which are going to average, what, three or four hours? Maybe more for Air Canada.
One class of flights averaging 200 pax for 4 hrs, another with 50 pax /1.5 hrs, gee, are we surprised that the former has an order of magnitude more incidents of severe passenger discontent per flight?
A good point as well, although they did suggest the incidence of air rage was lower on international flights than on domestic ones. In fairness, if we’re dealing with Air Canada, a lot of those ‘international’ flights are only distinguishable from domestic flights in that you have to get out your passport. That said, I suspect that passenger expectations and profile have a lot to do with the incidence of air rage as well. Long international flights will see different people from domestic/US ones, and that could easily lower the incidence of air rage. It’s also the only other way to explain the difference mid-loading makes. If it’s Air Canada, I think that only happens on their 777-300ERs, which are going to be used exclusively for long-haul routes.
On the Vox inequality article, check this out:
“We could abandon the current progressive income tax in favor of a much more steeply progressive consumption tax.”
I’m used to hearing progressives dismiss consumption taxes as regressive so this a step in the right direction.
I never quite understand how the support of progressive taxation fits in with the support for the wide range of sin taxes (alcohol, cigarettes, soda [lol]) and support for state lotteries, as they are clearly very regressive. Is this a case of cognitive dissonance, or is the nanny impulse just much stronger than the concern for fairness?
I am in favour of sin taxes, state lotteries, and progressive taxation.
My viewpoint is that the benefits of people drinking less/smoking less outweigh the negatives of them being significantly regressive.
The case of state lotteries is more that the alternative seems to be non-state lotteries run by the mafia or local equivalent; the state lottery does at least give you the odds it says on the tin, even if it’s a tax on people who can’t do maths.
The mafia had a fairly ingenious system of picking daily winners using a series of publicly-known, unpredictable, and unriggable numbers: they used the last three digits of the published daily balance of the U.S. Treasury.
Then the Treasury (because of this) started rounding off the balance. So the mafia switched to using the “mutuel numbers”, drawn from the last digit of the win, place, and show betting totals at racetracks. As Wikipedia explains it:
So they had a system that gave you the “odds it says on the tin”.
Of course, the really relevant alternative to state-run lotteries is not lotteries run by the mafia but legal for-profit lotteries. And while betting on the lottery may be irrational, bettors aren’t so irrational that they prefer worse odds to better ones. If the state lottery spends a certain percentage of the money on education, without a legal monopoly they would be undercut by people who offer the players a better chance of winning and/or a larger jackpot. So there’s good reason to think that the state-run lotteries are actually harming poor people, as compared to the legal alternative.
I think even if the lottery paid out exactly as much money as it took in, it would still be a large net harm because of the diminishing marginal utility of money. Reducing the payouts and spending the money on education might actually reduce the net harm, because of that diminishing marginal utility.
Where I live, the state spends money on aggressively advertising its lottery, which seems like an unalloyed evil.
“the state lottery does at least give you the odds it says on the tin, even if it’s a tax on people who can’t do maths.”
I can’t speak to the current state lotteries, not having looked at them, but my favorite example of dishonest advertising was an ad for a state lottery, I think in New York, that I saw many years ago.
“Our odds are better than the numbers’ odds. Our numbers are better than their numbers too.”
The second sentence didn’t mean anything. The first was a flat lie. The small print gave the payoffs, and the house cut was greater than fifty percent which, if I remember correctly, was the house cut on the numbers game at the time.
Lying about your competition works better when if anyone admits he is the competition in order to sue or rebut you can arrest him.
In what sense does the numbers game not give you “the odds it says on the tin”?
I’m not familiar with what the literal mafia actually ran prior to state lotteries; I had the impression that there were a significant number of very rigged games run by a variety of enterprises. Maybe that’s wrong. *shrug*.
Agreed that that ad is dishonest and terrible.
The numbers games use numbers the mob can not easily control (e.g. less significant digits of stock market indexes); even people willing to place bets with the mob are generally aware enough to realize the mob cheats.
There’s also my usual “You guys realize that progressive income taxes are really, really progressive, and that this probably overcomes the regressiveness of 6% sales taxes?” response.
You know why sales taxes are regressive? It’s because last year, my father paid 15% of his income to income and payroll taxes and I paid 35%. So my father paid sales taxes on 85% of his income (minus rent and services), and I paid sales taxes on 65% (also minus rent and services).
So we tax people a dollar a pack on cigarettes, and I dropped an extra 20% of my income that they didn’t.
So a whole heck of a lot of individual taxes are regressive, and the overall system is deeply, deeply progressive.
/And then in practice, because the rich areas have higher sales taxes, it all balances out. I pay 9, he pays 6.
>So a whole heck of a lot of individual taxes are regressive, and the overall system is deeply, deeply progressive.
Citation, please. At least in the UK, the impression I got (probably from a uni class that was literally just economic graphs and occasional bullet point summaries) is that the tax system is mildly regressive on balance.
Is a progressive consumption tax just basically a progressive income tax with a credit for savings? How are purchases that mix consumption and investment counted (e.g. housing)?
There’s a very important difference between labour income and investment income. In the standard growth theory models, you *really* don’t want to tax capital, because capital is where your economic growth per capita comes from. (I don’t know of anybody who’s tried to link this stuff to Austrian ideas about malinvestment and to stock markets being in large part giant incestuous scams, but it’s porbably been done. I don’t know whether it says anything strong enough to overturn the prohibition on blocking capital accumulation.)
Housing is probably done via capital gains and maybe imputed rents, but I’m not a tax lawyer and obviously tax systems vary a lot between countries.
Why are you so sure “Big Money” is always or even predominantly right wing?
Why is an article from early 2015, before the election began, the best place to look for how spending has affected the increasingly anomalous 2016 race?
For that matter, why are you so sure the Koch brothers are solidly right wing? They have expressed disappointment with the Republican field, to the point of throwing the possibility of supporting Hillary. I’d certainly suspect they’ve had to change plans for who they intended to donate to. (http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/24/politics/charles-koch-hillary-clinton-2016/)
I’ve always found OpenSecrets.org a good place to go for raw numbers. Their graph for donor stats for the 2016 election is at https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/donor_stats.php. The Republicans have had a lot more donations this election cycle, likely due to the highly contested primary. What disputes your contention is that the Democrats have taken in a higher percentage of the Top 100 / Top 1% donors than they have with the population at large. Further, both Hillary and Sanders have taken more from donations than Trump (http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/index.php).
The top one percent is upper middle class. They are not in the same league as the Koch brothers.
Of course everyone has taken more donations than Trump. Everyone gives Trump infinite TV time for free.
>>Why are you so sure “Big Money” is always or >even predominantly right wing?
Who do you expect big corporate interests to support? Bernie?
The Kochs like the establishment GOP candidates– except when those are not Right Wing enough for them, as was the case of Cantor vs. Brat.
The Donald is an outlier case here– very atypical. The Kochs don’t think they can trust him, because he could be a loose cannon. So they may indeed choose a different Right Wing candidate–Hillary, who is where Nixon was politically.
That’s a nonsense definition pushed by wealthy professional class people looking to hide behind the true middle class in order to avoid tax increases. Shame on Clinton for adopting it. There’s nothing “middle” about earning/owning more than 99 out of 100 of your fellow Americans. No one calls an IQ of 135 an upper middle IQ.
Did Clinton adopt it? I am skeptical.
She said should wouldn’t raise taxes on the “middle class” which she defined as those making less than $250,000 a year. That’s 96 percentile. So not exactly what Jill said, but very close.
Meanwhile, in Australia’s current electoral campaign, the incumbent party’s tax policy is to (slightly) reduce income taxes on people earning over $80,000 AUD a year, which is slightly larger than mean full-time income, and leave the others the same.
(that said they’re also planning on changing the rules for superannuation in a way that will only hit very wealthy people, so I can’t complain too much about their tax policy)
I think we’re confusing income and wealth here. The top 1% individual income earners make >$240k. Top 1% in net worth is $8m. I think many people in the >$240k income bracket are not living much differently than those who made $100k. The reason I believe this is because people who cash out on the stock market to buy a house, for instance, will report all their capital gains in one year. But their net worth will not change. This makes income brackets very variable and taxing people more highly at that level really strikes me as unfair. I know because my parents live in a working class neighborhood and had to make a withdrawal on stock investments pushing them into the top 1%.
I don’t know the stats, but I’d expect that the people in the top 1% in income changes a lot year to year, but those in the top 1% in wealth doesn’t.
>>Who do you expect big corporate interests to support? Bernie?
I expect someone boring, safe. Conservative, not in the sense of policy or beliefs but in the sense of “more of the same”. Someone like Clinton, to be honest.
That would be my answer as well.
“The Kochs like the establishment GOP candidates”
Earlier you were pointing out that libertarians don’t hold the same views as other groups that usually vote Republican. Do you actually know anything about the Kochs? Their foreign policy positions, for example?
That’s the Top 1% and Top 100 of all donors, not all Americans.
I’d suspect that most donors in general are in the top percentage of Americans, but where the median of the Top 1% of donors falls is beyond my ability to guess.
Who do you expect big corporate interests to support? Bernie?
Yes, actually. I’d suspect more Big Money / Big Business donors go for Bernie than Cruz. I admit Trump is a special case. Bernie’s donors heavily represent the Education, Health, and Law sectors.
The Kochs like the establishment GOP candidates– except when those are not Right Wing enough for them, as was the case of Cantor vs. Brat.
The Kochs are libertarian, so I can see a wild card populist with nationalist tendencies and economic policies that are more socialist than libertarian (Trump) and an unabashed social conservative (Cruz) not being among their top choices. Assuming the right is monolithic is a mistake.
I’d suspect more Big Money / Big Business donors go for Bernie than Cruz. I admit Trump is a special case. Bernie’s donors heavily represent the Education, Health, and Law sectors.
Health is definitely big business, but not so much education (mostly not business) and law (not really very big).
The original line was about “Big Money”, which was changed to “big corporate interests”. There’s definitely a matter of different definitions at work here, but I feel reasonably comfortable in considering the NEA as a ‘Big Money’ donor, and likewise lawyers also have a reputation for political contributions.
I haven’t looked in to who donated to Cruz, mostly because it’s a moot point, but I was basing my opinion on his willingness to stand up against agricultural subsidies in Iowa.
“Vegetarian” here who eats seafood about once every other week.
Personally, I have a bunch of reasons for prefering a plant based diet (health, environmental, moral, economical). Not all meat checks all the boxes for me equally, and in fact some meat probably scores better than say milk or eggs. For instance as far as animal cruelty, it is probably better to be a wild caught fish that swims around in its natural environment before being killed and eaten than a factory farmed egg laying hen. And invertebrates definitely score lower when it comes to my personal concerns.
At the end of the day I am probably 80% vegan 95% lacto/ovo vegetarian and 100% pescatarian or what ever you want to call it. But that is really hard to explain to someone, so if asked it is much easier to say “I am a vegetarian” and folks generally know what you prefer to eat (I personally try to go out of my way to not identify as anything unless someone ask and try to not make myself a burden in social situations).
At the end of the day I am optimizing on several fronts, and the goal is to be better not perfect. Its not a religion for me. I imagine this reflects many of the folks who call themselves vegetarians but eat some meat. Similar to say the vegan before 6 approach.
It seems like the study conflates vegetarians who do it for health reason with those who do it for ethical reasons. That makes it a little less interesting than the headline would make it appear:
“Some research on lapsed vegetarians supports this. Faunalytics (formerly the Humane Research Council) conducted a survey on 11,000 American adults, which found that there are five times as many ex-vegans and vegetarians as there are current ones. About 60 percent of them said that the reason they were vegetarian in the first place was for the health benefits. In this frame, lapsed vegetarians are no more extraordinary than lapsed dieters.”
better to be a wild fish in the ocean than a factory farm chicken in a cage
Hmmm. Can you go into more detail about how you decided this? Specifically, how did you decide that consuming the eggs a caged layer provided over the course of her life caused more suffering than consuming an equivalent amount of protein from wild caught fish?
It’d really be good if you could include how you accounted for the bycatch loss and if you specified which fish species you mean, and at what point of depletion of global fish stocks for that species you’d draw the line.
Frankly the analysis is not to detailed as I don’t eat that much fish or eggs and the eggs that I do eat I try to get from “free range” sources.
But here is my thinking. We all have to go some way and it probabiy is going to suck when it happens. To me the question is does the animal in question suffer (at least that is one level of analysis, as I said my choice to limit meat is multifaceted) and how much.
I assume that animals enjoy doing the things they do naturally and dislike unatural conditions. So a fish in the ocean is living a normal fish life doing the things it has evolved to do for most of its life right up til the time of its death. Not to bad given that it was going to die somehow anyway possibly to another predator. The caged chicken not so much, at least it seems that way to me. It spends a long time in what seem to me to be negative conditions.
This argument would also apply to hunted Venison vs feedlot cow/pig.
As far as the math on protien, I really don’t eat animal products for protien. I can get that from plant sources (and I can get B12 from a pill). I eat them for pleasure, taste, covenience, and social reasons. So the question is how much am I willing to trade off the suffering of an animal for my pleasure.
But really I am just making educated guesses and trying to do the best I can within reason.
I agree that our knowledge of animal’s lives is even more imperfect than our knowledge of the lives of other humans, and that there is a degree of subjectivity in our analysis. But I would challenge you to research futher and guess less.
For instance…We all have to go some way and it probabiy is going to suck when it happens.
Actual death in a slaughterhouse for animals sucks much less than death in the wild. Far, far more wild animals die after a linging illness or injury so that they are struggling to breath and move (with pneumonia) and eat, so that they are starving and losing weight, and subject to invasion by parasites. At that point they are caught and eaten by predators. Many times the prey animal is not actually dead before the predator starts to feed on it. Compared to the throat cutting of a chicken or the stunning of cattle, to me a “natural” death involves more suffering.
This is especially true for wild caught ocean fish, who are hauled up out of the life-supporting water and then thrown into a container (with or without ice) where they slowly suffocate (with other fish piled on top of them, it probably goes faster.)
Another error to avoid would be to consider the specific animal you are eating, rather than all the animals in that group. For instance, eating wild hunted deer includes the suffering of the specific deer (whose life, granted, is not too bad, not counting last winter’s cold and starving time) who provided that steak, but all the deer who died of malnutrition illness and predators along the way. While the individual chicken (grouped with several others in a cage) is not scratching for food nor attempting to fly, it does have food and water and shelter from heat, rain, and cold, and is protected from most illnesses. Most of the chickens hatched out and intended for layer cages live out their lives laying eggs. The loss for “cageless” birds is higher, and that for pastured poultry higher than that. Most quail/grouse/etc do not survive their first year.
So to me, a broader and more factual consideration of animal suffering would not be tipped towards the wild/organic/sustainable sources.
“Another error to avoid would be to consider the specific animal you are eating, rather than all the animals in that group. For instance, eating wild hunted deer includes the suffering of the specific deer (whose life, granted, is not too bad, not counting last winter’s cold and starving time) who provided that steak, but all the deer who died of malnutrition illness and predators along the way.”
I am not so sure on this. My decision on whether to eat the deer or not really does not impact the suffering of all the other deer as long as I am not raising deer for slaughter. I am not causing the deer to come into existence, and regardless I assume existence for most deer is positive. In fact given all the nasty ways they may die I might be saving them from some suffering by killing them humanely. (The point is moot to me because I don’t eat venison or other mammals).
“This is especially true for wild caught ocean fish, who are hauled up out of the life-supporting water and then thrown into a container (with or without ice) where they slowly suffocate (with other fish piled on top of them, it probably goes faster.)”
This is a fair point, I am not sure how I should weigh a lifetime swimming doing what they were born to do ending in suffocation vs a lifetime in a cage. I think I know personally how I would make that decision.
Regardless, my original point was not that it is a slam dunk either way, just that it is not clear to me that one is better than the other. They both involve some level of badness so I generally try to limit both.
The other thing is I simply value the lives of fish less than birds and of birds less than mammals. (and invertebrates less than fish).
My decision on whether to eat the deer or not really does not impact the suffering of all the other deer as long as I am not raising deer for slaughter. I am not causing the deer to come into existence, and regardless I assume existence for most deer is positive.
Ah, but by promoting conservation efforts to increase greenspaces and the like, you are using tax dollars to manage the size of deer populations. And wildspaces are in balance against other human demands for land.
(I do agree that most lives are positive, period.)
I am not sure how I should weigh a lifetime swimming doing what they were born to do ending in suffocation vs a lifetime in a cage.
Do remember that what most fish are born to do is die early, eaten by other fish. (Or birds. Or dolphins.) Likewise, most birds are born to die at the teeth and claws of predators.
I think I know personally how I would make that decision.
…but most humans, if given the choice between roaming the wet wild woods in fear of predators and starvation, choose to live in small boxes off the dirt, eating food that has been provided to them and drinking water from a tap. We generally regard failing to provide shelter, food, and water as inhuman and abusive.
Chickens are not that much different.
I am not going to say that there are not downsides to conventional agriculture, but I do hold that the suffering tradeoffs are much more complex than some say.
The other thing is I simply value the lives of fish less than birds and of birds less than mammals. (and invertebrates less than fish)
And the lives of field mice and quail – not to mention cabbages, peaches, and wheat plants – less than shrimps and clams?
We also regard keeping someone in a cage and failing to provide the appropriate level of stimulation as inhuman and abusive, even if you caused this someone to come into existence in the first place (e.g., if it’s your own child). Moreover, killing someone just because you’d like to enjoy a delicious meal is also considered wrong, even if you do it painlessly.
And as long as you’re not keeping someone prisoner, many people regard failing to provide them with anything perfectly fine. “Positive rights are slavery,” after all.
x Moreover, killing someone just because you’d like to enjoy a delicious meal is also considered wrong, even if you do it painlessly.
So we are in general agreement that the treatment of animals is not held to the same moral standards as the treatment of humans, yes?
(If we are going to argue otherwise, I’m going to refuse to start with human/pig equivalences, and go straight to human/tick and human/small pox virus equivalences, and demand a rational reason to work our way up to charismatic mega fauna. Just FYI.)
the appropriate level of stimulation as inhuman and abusive,
And therein lies the rub. What *is* appropriate level of stimulation to a chicken?
And ‘cage’ carries with it a great deal of baggage, which is the other half of the rub. We don’t ‘cage’ dogs, we kennel them in a den substitute which actually makes them happier and easier to live with.
And we confine kids – as well as dogs and other domestic animals – for their own protection in order to keep them from tragic interactions with cars and other modern/ancient hazards. I would argue that keeping food animals confined to better protect them and feed them is not materially different.
I myself would best prefer a diverse system of food production that allowed consumers to make a variety of choices based on accurate, readily available information on risks, benefits, downsides and postives of all sorts of levels – including ones which we now legislate. For instance, while I think drinking raw milk is incredibly risky for no good advantage, I don’t see why we don’t allow people to do so, provided a) they have been deemed mentally competent to judge the dangers for themselves and b) don’t expect anyone else to pay the hospital bills when they get TB or kidney failure. Same-same with picking wild-harvested or organic food over cheaper and better-for-the-animal conventional food. Or red-purple apples over yellow ones.
This is especially true for wild caught ocean fish, who are hauled up out of the life-supporting water and then thrown into a container (with or without ice) where they slowly suffocate (with other fish piled on top of them, it probably goes faster.)
Sincere question: Do we know whether this is painful or uncomfortable for the fish?
The equivalent process for humans is known to be about as comfortable and painless a way to die as possible – may take four or five minutes to become Completely Dead(tm), but you’re quite unconscious after ten seconds or so and the few survivors report little pain during those seconds.
Fish brains could be wired differently, and I don’t know of anybody researching the question. On the other hand, I haven’t looked.
RE: Fish time to die.
When I worked fished on a friend’s fishing boat, as soon as the caught fish were hauled in, we cut their necks just under their gill flaps and hitting the main artery to the brain, which resulted in the fish bleeding out in a seconds. They did this because it was supposed to improve the flavor of the meat, I didn’t ask if it was the lack of blood or that the fish not stressing.
@ John Schilling
Sincere question: Do we know whether this is painful or uncomfortable for the fish?
That is, in general, a great question, and should be asked, imo, every time we decide to mandate something be done (or not done) with livestock. (And imo the question should be is this more painful or uncomfortable than the alternatives? – because all things have downsides.)
However, the people I have spoken with say that 1) being out of water is very distressing for fish (see: continual flipping to get back to the water) and 2) as inadequate as our testing measures are for noting pain/distress in domestic animals are, we have even worse measures for reliably testing pain & discomfort in lower animals. esp wild ones.
Having said that, I would like to see the source for “suffocation and/or drowning being of low distress in humans.”
@ Bluto –
What were you catching? And how many pounds/person/day? (That sounds like a cool experience.)
There’s been some work done on finding out what chickens want by looking at how much trouble they’ll take to get various things. From memory, chickens care more about having an enclosed place for their nests than for a chance to get out of doors.
I would like to see the source for “suffocation and/or drowning being of low distress in humans.”
“Suffocation” is too broad, and drowning can be quite distressing for humans. But it is also pretty much the opposite case of being “hauled up out of the life-supporting water”. Physiologically and psychologically, not being able to breathe because you are surrounded and/or filled with something that blocks the process is quite different from being able to breathe in an environment that doesn’t happen to have any accessible oxygen.
Geoffrey Landis, among others, describes the latter in some detail. TL,DR, the three cosmonauts who were the only literal “hauled up out of the life-supporting atmosphere and thrown in an [airless] container” victims aren’t around to testify, but the condition of their bodies suggested minimal distress. The one guy to have his spacesuit rupture in a test chamber reported the experience as disconcerting but not painful, and in ten seconds he was out cold. There’s more relevant data from high-altitude aviation and the like, same results.
Things are painful because they correspond to natural hazards that our ancestors could plausibly escape from, like being too close to a fire. Or, more relevantly, having a python constrict around your chest. Vacuums and the like don’t exist in the natural habitat of humanity, so we never evolved a general warning for “can’t breathe – no oxygen!”, just a specific one for “can’t breathe – something’s blocking the process”.
With fish, I assume things work differently but I’m not clear on how.
Fish are at occasional risk of being out of water– waves, bears, drought– so it’s plausible that they feel distress and try to get back to water.
My understanding is that what causes distress in humans during suffocation is not lack of oxygen, but buildup of CO2.
People who work with gases have to be acutely aware of this stuff. Getting a couple lungfuls of air without oxygen can knock you out, and if you’re not in a well-ventilated room you’ll be dead in a couple minutes. Rooms where liquid gases are expected to be used must have fans going in them at all times.
Back when I was a grad student, someone a few doors down from me committed suicide by blocking the vents and breathing nitrogen. One thing I remember from the mandatory safety courses was a macabre story of someone at an LN2 production facility who walked too close to an open container of LN2. He got a big lungful, fainted, and fell into the liquid.
It was a great experience, it was very, very low key. The boat & business mostly to allow fishing trips to be tax neutral, though we did sell the fish at the end of the day. We were catching mostly lingcod and a few other small bottom fish (we had a halibut line out but didn’t get a bite).
Commercial lines were allowed multiple hooks per line, and it was an experience to catch multiple fish at once. I believe we caught something like 50-60 pounds per person per day, though it was quite a while ago. We would fill 3 rather large coolers each day.
Fish are at occasional risk of being out of water– waves, bears, drought– so it’s plausible that they feel distress and try to get back to water
Agreed, but the other necessity for an evolutionary advantage is that there be something they can do about it. Lacking e.g. limbs, makes that problematic.
Maybe “thrash about in intense pain” is a sufficiently effective way of escaping bear jaws as to confer a reproductive advantage, but it isn’t obviously so.
Non-water environments are something a fish could encounter, though, and they do indeed have responses to them.
The first, being pulled out of water, results in them thrashing about an in attempt to fall back into the water. As it happens, that they can breathe outside as long as they stay wet, so this probably isn’t equivalent to suffocation, inasmuch as fish experience maps to human.
The one which I believe was referred to originally was being in oxygen-deprived water. Fish detect that, too, and will respond by clinging to the surface of the water and… gasping isn’t quite the right word, but it’s close enough.
Granted, my experience here is with freshwater fish, who are more likely to encounter land than ocean fish, but I bet the same still applies.
I’m pretty sure the thrashing is an effort to locomote with really inadequate tools. Still, it might work if the water is close enough.
>death in a slaughterhouse for animals sucks much less than death in the wild.
A wild fish killed for food funges against it’s life/death in the wild, not the life/death of another animal in a slaughterhouse, as is fairly evident from the fact that that fish populations are declining because of overfishing, not the inverse. The issue here is that animals in factory farms are constantly tortured every hour of every day of their miserable lives, which is emphatically not true of a wild fish – that is, insofar as factory farming is a uniquely bad thing, the issue is their quality of life, not quality of death.
It is true that wild animal suffering is a big deal, but it’s also a lot harder to change – all of human civilization working together might be hard-pressed to eliminate wild animal suffering, whereas a minor change in our diets or laws is sufficient to eliminate factory farming.
Implying that trying to reduce factory farming is “wasted” because we should care more about wild animal suffering is like saying the Against Malaria Foundation is a “waste” because money donated to them isn’t spent on curing death; the return for a marginal dollar spent on those problems is vastly different, because we only know how to do one of them.
@ MugaSofer
>death in a slaughterhouse for animals sucks much less than death in the wild.
The issue here is that animals in factory farms are constantly tortured every hour of every day of their miserable lives,
Not a true statement.
which is emphatically not true of a wild fish
Also not true – not if you’re implying that a wild fish is not also experiencing some suffering as it lives and dies.
whereas a minor change in our diets or laws is sufficient to eliminate factory farming.
A supposition not supported by fact. Veganism is a major dietary change that would be harmful to a majority of the population and disastrous for a non-trivial fraction. Conventional modern farming – because ‘factory farming’ is a pejorative term without any firm meaning(*) – is built upon layers and centuries of increased efficiencies and responses to consumer preferences across the economy, and no it can not be easily changed, much less eliminated.
And your analogy to malaria nets – I don’t understand. Can you rephrase?
(*) “Factory farming” is as useful a term as “pretty” or “ugly” – it means nothing objective about the system’s characteristics. The failure to grasp the spectrum of intensive vs extensive interventions in agriculture (ie, it is not binary) is only one part of this framing error.
“Not a true statement.”
What’s not a true statement? That that’s the topic of discussion? That the way animals are treated in the overwhelming majority of modern farms causes them staggering levels of pain and distress, and would unquestionably be considered multiple simultaneous forms of torture if applied to a human? That animals feel?
“Also not true – not if you’re implying that a wild fish is not also experiencing some suffering as it lives and dies.”
Bwuh? How on Earth does that statement imply that?
I said that most wild fish aren’t being tortured most of the time. Most humans aren’t being tortured most of the time; does that imply that we don’t feel pain?
“Veganism is a major dietary change that would be harmful to a majority of the population and disastrous for a non-trivial fraction. ”
Total veganism isn’t required to eliminate the horrors produced by modern farming.
As for whether it’s a “minor dietary change” – if the entire population adopted any of the many variations on vegetarianism, the market and public support for factory farms would collapse. I think many of these could reasonably be described as “minor”. Total veganism varies in how large a change it is depending on your current diet; for many, it would be a minor change, and others can easily accomplish a reduction in meat consumption in other ways.
It isn’t hard to reduce your consumption of animal products by a lot. And it would be even easier if economies of scale could be applied.
“‘factory farming’ is a pejorative term without any firm meaning”
It’s a perfectly clear term that distinguishes between the more extreme forms of modern farming and literally any other kind. You, yourself, clearly had no trouble understanding what was meant by it.
Yes, it’s moderately perjorative, in the sense that it refers to something that’s actually horrific – and no other sense. Actual factories aren’t horrifying.
“And your analogy to malaria nets – I don’t understand. Can you rephrase?”
Interventions that help alleviate a problem – factory farming, malaria – are not worthless merely because they’re not reshaping the entire universe to suit humanity’s values.
You argue that there’s no point in preferring wild meat to farmed, because wild animals still die, often painfully. But demanding that any given action save every animal on Earth is absurd, and indeed you don’t provide one that does save them all.
It’s as absurd as demanding that any given medical intervention also cure aging. Don’t they realize that curing aging is important?
The point about wild animals is that for every wild chicken you eat, a couple die from lingering disease or starvation or whatever. A factory farmed chicken may find living in feces unpleasant, but it’s not immediately obvious that 1x living in feces with endless food is worse than 5x living in fear of predators and starving over a week because of broken leg that doesn’t heal.
Same about animals farm animals being tortured. You immediately say that those conditions would be considered torture for humans, which ignores that cows and chickens are not in fact humans. Pretty sure even a cow is distressed by sitting in enclosed spaces for long periods of time, but let’s not get hyperbolic by invoking the image of endless rows of immobilized humans.
To me it’s obvious that free range is better than factory, but if I had to naively bet between factory vs wild, I’d bet on factory.
Two points.
First point: what I think a lot of people miss is that, when deciding which animals not to breed and eat, the scale doesn’t run between “breed and eat an animal, giving it a terrible, strongly negative-utility life in the process” as the worst case, and “don’t breed and eat an animal, causing no positive or negative utility change” as the best case. If veganism entails the nonexistence of animals whose lives would have had positive utility, that’s bad, not neutral. Unless you’re going to claim that preventing the existence of a negative-utility life is a good thing, but preventing the existence of a positive-utility life is not a bad thing. In which case you get weird implications, like “given the opportunity, you should prevent the existence of an infinite number of infinitely good lives if doing so also prevents the existence of a single life that is only just barely bad”.
Second, unrelated point: I think determining the impact of hunting a wild animal is considerably harder than it first appears, because you need to take into account the implications of there being one fewer of that animal out there. Obvious example: reduced competition for other members of the same species in the area.
@anon: There’s no causal connection between a hunter shooting a deer and other deer dying in worse ways, so I don’t see how you could possibly object to it on consequentialist grounds.
You can argue that animals don’t have moral standing, so it’s OK to torture them, but it’s still torture. I think it’s probably OK to squish bugs, but tearing the legs off a fly still isn’t being nice to the fly. Let’s call a spade a spade.
@Joe: this is one of those utilitarian edge-cases where things get weird, but yes, most people don’t think we’re obligated to try and create as many somewhat-happy people as we possibly can.
@MugaSofer
One of the big EA causes – existential risk mitigation – is concerned entirely with the existence of future lives. So I think at least some people involved with EA consider the existence or nonexistence of future positive-utility lives to be relevant to their interpretation of utilitarianism.
I would be moderately surprised if most EA folk would honestly say, in the face of my hypothetical – “Should you prevent the existence of an infinite number of infinitely happy lives if doing so will prevent the existence of one only just barely bad life?” – that yes, you should. I am not that good at predicting which bullets they will bite and which they will build around. But I think that, if you are committed to reconciling utilitarianism and ‘what people generally think’, you will never be finished, there are an endless number of situations in which maximizing utility gives an answer that feels icky.
Moreover, as I said in the Open Thread, I think trying to do this largely defeats the point of utilitarianism, which is the bit where you get to say, “Your intuitions are mistaken, to find the correct moral choice you have to calculate max utility and ignore what your feelings tell you”.
@ Mugasofer –
What’s not a true statement?
It is not a true statement that “that animals in factory farms are constantly tortured every hour of every day of their miserable lives”.
This is “not true” on several levels, and not just because it relies on several absolutes. It is also not true because the animals are not tortured (by any commonly used definition of the word) and that their lives are not, in total, miserable for those animals, nor is “every single minute” – or even a majority of their time – “miserable”.
I said that most wild fish aren’t being tortured most of the time. Most humans aren’t being tortured most of the time; does that imply that we don’t feel pain?
You appear to be hung up on torture. I’d suggest stepping away from this as your lynch pin for morality – there are many things south of torture which should be avoided.
Total veganism isn’t required to eliminate the horrors produced by modern farming.
Total veganism is required to prevent meat protein from being restricted to a privileged upper class who can afford to buy food produced by the outdated, inefficient, land-hungry, and animal-neglecting archaic methods used in non-modern farming.
As for whether it’s a “minor dietary change”
It’s a major change. Please quit quibbling about this. If it was minor, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard about it.
It isn’t hard to reduce your consumption of animal products by a lot.
Just because you found it easy to reduce your consumption of animal products by a lot doesn’t mean it can be easily scaled to the rest of humanity.
[ “‘factory farming’ is] a perfectly clear term that distinguishes between the more extreme forms of modern farming and literally any other kind. You, yourself, clearly had no trouble understanding what was meant by it.
Yes, I understand that it means, to you, “that thing I hate” and that you can not provide a more tangible, concrete definition. Moreover, you can’t even define a separation between what is a “factory farm” and what isn’t. “More extreme” means nothing without context, nor does “any other kind” mean anything without specific examples. Extreme in what way? Better suitability for the market? Fewer baby animals dying of disease? More productivity per acre of land not in pristine forest? By all of those measure, hell yes modern ag is “extreme”!
“Modern farming” encompasses a wide range of choices in management and materials. If some of these choices seem excessively horrific – then define those choices, say *exactly* what is horrific about them, and then approve options (which are out there) which reduce the horror involved. Of course, this means that one would have to understand the pros and cons of all the options, and understand that by making one choice, one wasn’t choosing a perfect solution, but the best of the available options.
Anti-ag activists have been repeatedly offered this option – and they turn it down. Because they don’t want to hear that choice X was made because choices Z and Y led to more animal death or animal sickness, or that in “non modern farming” net animal suffering was higher than it is today.
You argue that there’s no point in preferring wild meat to farmed, because wild animals still die, often painfully. But demanding that any given action save every animal on Earth is absurd, and indeed you don’t provide one that does save them all.
Not what I said. I said that preferring wild meat because it represented less animal suffering was absurd, because wild animals suffer quite a lot more compared to domestic animals. It is the ignorance of the different qualities at play here.
@ keranih
most humans, if given the choice between roaming the wet wild woods in fear of predators and starvation, choose to live in small boxes off the dirt, eating food that has been provided to them and drinking water from a tap.
Ah, not often that I get an opening to cry, “Anthropomorphist!” And now I’m too sleepy.
Guilty *g*
My point, I think, stands – animals – including people – like constant supplies of good food and shelter from the elements, and if accustomed to confinement from an early age where they are kept from attack by predators or their own kind, adapt pretty well.
Humans with our thinky brains do create issues for ourselves. But we are not well selected for domestication on the whole, and I think we often don’t recognize the tremendous changes domestication has visited on the genomes of domestic animals.
What does a progressive educational policy at the school-level look like? Charter schools like Success Academy and Uncommon Schools have clear strategies for success. Whether they work is another matter, but there’s a clearly articulated set of policies there. Besides simply being against charter schools in general, what do progressives think needs to be done at the school-level to improve educational outcomes? Do they agree with some of the methods of these well-known charter schools (very detailed discipline policies, a large focus on teacher training and skill development, etc.) and just want to implement them in (all?) public schools? Or do they think there is some other way to improve schools that charter schools simply aren’t doing?
I’m asking because it’s really hard for me not to perceive progressive education pundits as being 100% in the pocket of the Teacher’s Union, so I want to see what the actual proposals are. The only progressive education researcher that I am really familiar with is Diane Ravitch, and her blog isn’t exactly a trove of sparkling insights (50% of the posts seem to be news links that negatively implicate charter schools).
Charter schools hire non-union teachers. This is mostly the start and end of the unions problems with charter schools. A charter school outperforming a “union” school is embarrassing and tends to result in over-reactions that appear tone deaf when other schools in the area are hopelessly failing.
They do seem to be against change in general though, although there are plenty of magnet schools and such that implement some parts of charter school agendas in public schools. The unions seem to believe that less testing and paying teachers more are part of the answer.
Teaching is a very honorable profession, and I think you have to work pretty hard to make teachers look bad, but somehow the unions are accomplishing this. Chicago is a pretty extreme example of this.
Public schools do work in many areas (our public school experience was very good over the last 18 years) and that is largely left out of the discussion. You can’t make a good football team with unskilled players, and that isn’t the coaches fault. It is anathema to “blame the victims” here but this is likely where a lot of the fault lies. In a sane environment this would be the first thing to look at, not the last. So either start working on the home life and valuation of education at home or start shifting the responsibility for parenting to the school system where it is lacking. Not a popular idea.
I’m moderately pro-charter (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/kipp/ ), but Success Academy is just…unreliable. People I know who have worked for her for multiple years and believe in the model still say Eva Moskowitz actively makes the place a living hell and deliberately pushes people out, which as DeBoer points out is much more practical in a place with NYC, with infinity well-educated young people arriving every year, than in almost anywhere else. As I noted in the link above, she told the group of visitors I was with that her teachers, like other teachers, were racists and that prevented them from engaging in rigorous instruction, within a few minutes of meeting us. Aside from the distastefulness of such remarks, it just makes me think that the person who says them can’t be relied to play by the rules in other respects or encourage a culture that prevents cheating, on tests or in day-to-day school life.
There are also arguments about the political role of charters in addition to their individual effectiveness. Often they, like value-added measures, are used as bludgeons to threaten regular schools with, for not closing the full racial or economic gap in achievement. If you are reading this blog you probably are in agreement that schools have relatively little to do with the full gap in achievement (even KIPP, which combines the intensity model of Success Academy with a fair amount more transparency and replication, only closes about 0.3 SD of the 1 SD gap), even if there are ways for schools to improve outcomes or at least *provide better services* even so. So a political culture that treats teachers as a bunch of slackers is inaccurate aside from whether or not it is good for schools.
For what it’s worth, the full force of anti-teacher rhetoric among influential education reformers and allied journalists seems to have abated some in recent years, most likely because the general economy has improved and the disequilibrium of teaching being a relatively attractive job with strong union protections is no longer such a juicy political or economic target.
In answer to what progressive education types think should be done to improve schools, apart from strengthening unions, I think this guy’s Op-Eds are a pretty fair flavor (http://www.nytimes.com/column/david-l-kirp ). Pre-K, more democratic decisionmaking, parent involvement, counseling and support services, reduced teacher turnover, and so on.
Thanks for that article. Good one.
Those seem like a bunch of things non-progressive education reformers also agree on (assuming reduced teacher turnover doesn’t mean teacher tenure, and instead means incentivizing quality teachers to stay at the school).
Unfortunately, it seems like the charter vs. teachers union issue tends to crowd out every other subject when it comes to the public debate over education reform. Plus, it’s also a front for the pro- versus anti-government culture war.
No kidding there. There are plenty of folks who believe that government is always the problem, no matter what. And the article about Norm Ornstein on Vox.com documents that this belief has been sold to the public as propaganda for a long time.
“Those seem like a bunch of things non-progressive education reformers also agree on (assuming reduced teacher turnover doesn’t mean teacher tenure, and instead means incentivizing quality teachers to stay at the school).”
The parenthetical is really the kicker there though, isn’t it? And I’d say a good reason why the battle lines get drawn around the unions.
Should we not study the efficacy of pre-k before spending money we don’t have?
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-26/early-childhood-intervention-is-not-a-sure-bet
Progressive is a highly overloaded term. Do you mean the education specific version (associated with John Dewey)?
No, not progressive in the Dewey sense, progressive in the sense that it is promoted by political progressives. Or liberals, or leftists, or whatever. To my eyes, it seems like the only ideas about what to do in actual schools comes from charter/magnet schools (although this might simply be a definition problem: any public school that tries something different may simply get labeled a magnet school).
This, of course, doesn’t make those ideas coming from the charter schools non-progressive or conservative, or whatever. What I want to know is, that assuming we table the charter school discussion, how should the operation of public schools change according to political progressives?
Keeping in mind this is just one person’s observations, most people I know on the political left don’t have strong opinions about what happens in individual schools. They tend to think that the problem is segregation and the solution is desegregation.
If pressed, they’d espouse a wide range of educational philosophies without much tie-in to their overall left wing ideas.
Some teachers I know, or people married to teachers etc., would probably say more money, but even people pretty far to the left roll their eyes at that these days.
That sounds about right. I think I probably asked a bad question to begin with. Non-progressives don’t have big ideas about that stuff either. It just seems unfortunate that the focus tends to be more on political/culture war issues than the practice of education itself.
I’m not sure that’s fair. If you buy the segregation critique than what you are saying is that advocates should focus on making sure the schools are more equal rather than pressing their point that separate is inherently unequal.
@Urstoff What I want to know is, that assuming we table the charter school discussion, how should the operation of public schools change according to political progressives?
From the Spiders Georg of progressives (me): fund-the-child, national curriculum standards, a divorce from the ed-school establishment, a renewed appreciation for knowledge (vs. skills), teacher-centered instruction, and effective solutions to disruptive classroom misbehavior. And school choice.
[Note: All links are approximate.]
Both the unions and the charter school movement contain a few people who actually care about teaching and a whole lot of profiteers. The basic left-wing position is against corporate profiteering and for union profiteering.
Jerry Coyne linked to this John Oliver episode about p-hacking and other science reporting woes. Which was pretty surprising to me, given that it’s a mainstream TV show.
The segments for Last Week Tonight tend to be fairly well researched (relative to other news shows / comedy news shows). They’re obviously still coming from a left perspective ala The Daily Show, but they’re much more coherent and focused than any Daily Show segment was (part of the benefit of being a weekly show, presumably).
Who could have possibly predicted that “DeShawn” has different signaling characteristics from “Jefferson”?
I think that the article about Social Darwinism is making a map/territory mistake. Sure, the term might not have been used in the period, but people like Herbert Spencer, an incredibly popular late Victorian thinker who used evolutionary concepts to model social relations definitely existed. (His social thinking actually fit into a sort of holistic worldview which explained all kids of phenomena in evolutionary terms, but that aspect of his thinking tends to get forgotten.)
Actually, you can’t even say that Herbert Spencer was a literal Social Darwinist because he used Lamarckian concepts in his ideas. But that’s beside the point. When people say “Social Darwinist” it’s not just the idea that you can use evolutionary concepts to explain society. It’s used in a way that says certain people shouldn’t be having children in order to make our species better. So an “individualist” Social Darwinist would advocate letting the lowest in society die to improve our genetics while a “collectivist” would advocate a more active role by the government. The problem is that Spencer never advocated either.
Herbert Spencer definitely existed.
Herbert Spencer is the ur-Social Darwinist, in that the term was invented as an insult against him.
Herbert Spencer definitely had evolutionary thought in his writings – he came up with the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Darwin cribbed it.
But Herbert Spencer was not a Social Darwinist, in the sense that people use the term. And as far as I can tell, no-one else was either.
>But Herbert Spencer was not a Social Darwinist, in the sense that people use the term. And as far as I can tell, no-one else was either.
Eugenicist policies (forced sterilization and such) surely existed, though, and that’s probably what people think when they hear “Social Darwinism”: When talking about “the survival of the fittest [human population]” in social context, it’s not unreasonable to assume the implied “fittest” were “white race” or equivalent.
The Eugenicist policies were pushed by a wide range of people, including the progressives. They were opposed by the Catholic Church and some people we would now classify as libertarians.
The famous line from Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” was by Oliver Wendell Holmes, not someone likely to be accused of social Darwinism.
@ nm. k.m.
Literal “survival of the fittest” — or rather, “non-survival of the non-fit” — would scarcely need eugenicist policies to help it along.
So I’ve talked about this issue in a previous thread.
The first question is: just what is “Social Darwinism” supposed to be, exactly? In theory, it could be any suggestion that Darwinian principles apply to human beings, in which case everyone should be a “Social Darwinist” of some sort.
But everyone understands Social Darwinism to be something bad; it has a negative connotation. And I think the view that is criticized is something like this: “under laissez-faire, people can, should, and will be left to suffer the consequences of their own bad genes and bad decisions, so that they die and remove themselves from the gene pool, which will improve the quality of the race as the invisible hand selects only the fittest for survival; interference with this natural process would constitute irresponsible dysgenics.” (This would be the classical liberal version of Social Darwinism, as opposed to the fascist/Progressive version where the state takes charge of sterilizing and exterminating undesirables.)
This supposed idea of Social Darwinism stands in opposition to the idea that some form of aid (whether given by the government or private individuals) to the poor, disabled, drug-addicted, etc. is socially beneficial because it’s capable of reforming them, of helping them reform themselves, or at least of giving them higher-quality lives. Instead, the stereotypical Social Darwinist says that such aid is not only perhaps cost-ineffective or bad when done coercively with taxpayer money; it’s a positive evil in itself because it only encourages the propagation of poverty, infirmity, and vice. What’s ultimately kinder is to let them die and weed themselves out.
Now the next question is: did anyone in the 19th century actually hold that view? I am no expert on Herbert Spencer, but as far as I can tell he simply didn’t; it’s a myth. He was simply what we would now call a libertarian who opposed government welfare but supported private charity and indeed thought that as society progressed over time, people would would evolve to become more altruistic and less self-centered.
On the other hand, William Graham Sumner did express certain sentiments that come pretty close to the stereotypical view of Social Darwinism:
Yet he didn’t emphasize—or even mention, really—the idea that bad behavior like this might have a genetic component. So there’s still a question of whether he’s a Social Darwinist. Also, I took this quote out of context, in which he was just arguing against alcohol prohibition; it was the worst I could make him sound.
Then has anyone ever held the kind of view I paraphrased above, or is it purely a malicious left-wing caricature of classical liberalism? Well, honestly, it seems to me like some people actually have—but it’s not something very polite to mention in public, so it’s mostly limited to darkly hinting. That’s not of course a very satisfactory answer, and it would be interesting if anyone else is inclined to look through primary sources (preferably among 19th-century liberals) and find a straightforward statement of what I have laid out as the “prototypical” Social Darwinist view people likely have in mind when they criticize it.
In the sense you describe, social darwinism is basically a more extreme form of what is now called “moral hazard”, or, when parenting, natural consequences. It’s an area where ethics are kind of a muddle of utilitarianism and deontology (so, like most areas of intuitive ethics, I guess) wherein people are trying to balance what will produce the most positive change, versus what can we just not stand by and allow to happen to people–eg, sleep on the streets? starve? have stigma?
I want to say I’ve seen social darwinism as a label applied to the purely economic realm, something like “You want to let a big business fail? And all those people lose jobs? That’s like social darwinism”, nevermind that there are social safety nets for the individuals involved, etc. But I’m not sure of any examples of someone actually using the term like that.
Yes, moral hazard is a closely related concept here. And I’m certainly not trying to deny that it exists.
But the “Darwinist” part of Social Darwinism is supposed to be (at least as far as I can tell in the popular imagination) not just that people will learn from the “school of hard knocks” if they aren’t kept isolated from the consequences of their actions. That’s pretty mainstream, especially among conservatives.
For instance, there’s the quote from economist George Reisman: “In a free market, stupidity of choice is its own punishment, which tends to reduce the amount of it.”
Rather, the specifically “Darwinist” idea is that they will not learn but die and thereby take themselves out of the gene pool. And that interfering with this would be bad because you’re impeding the method implemented by “nature or nature’s God” to “take out the trash” of society.
Like I said, it is difficult to find someone who says exactly that in so many words…but at the same time I feel like it’s not a completely foreign idea that nobody ever held.
I have often seen this idea applied to corporations in the free market. For instance, the first result I found on a Google search for “corporations natural selection”, an article in the Harvard Business Review, applies these biological concepts to corporations, talking about how they die off when they don’t maintain enough fitness to remain competitive.
That’s the precise problem with things like “too big to fail” that people criticize, right? If badly managed corporations aren’t allowed to “go extinct”, then how will the market maintain efficiency?
If a policeman picks him up, we say that society has interfered to save him from perishing.
Oh, bollocks. The job of the police is not to “save [drunkards] from perishing”; when the cops run a guy in for being drunk, it’s often for also being disorderly, and it’s generally to stop the guy getting into fights, breaking windows, etc. and annoying or endangering the “industrious and sober workman” passing by.
This is disingenuous and special pleading.
‘Mulcted’ is a magnificent old-timey word that I would be happy to see come back into common use 🙂
Interesting to compare this to ‘fascism” used as a word. My argument would be that there were fascist writers and philosophers knowingly and self-consciously writing in an attempt to build a fascist tradition. Social Darwinists were not attempting to build any kind of Social Darwinist tradition, so there wasn’t one. Maybe there will be one in the future, and maybe they’ll try to claim the earlier Victorians were a part of that tradition unknowingly, but it will be about as credible as early Christians trying to Christianize especially excellent pagans, or Muslims trying to claim early Christians as merely heterodox Muslims.
From the MR post on SF housing:
“The same goes for Muni. It costs the city far more to serve new housing than the new housing pays. Which means every time the rest of us pay higher fares for Muni, we are in effect subsidizing market-rate housing developers. ”
I hear this sort of claim often. “Welfare subsidizes Walmart/McDonalds by allowing them to pay lower wages” is another one. One thing I haven’t seen, is any empirical evidence that it’s true. It does fit into basic economic theory, but there are all sorts of other distortions of the unskilled/low wage labor market, including minimum wage and welfare cliffs.
It also seems like a fully general argument without a clear conclusion. I think it’s supposed to justify more regulations, taxes, and restrictions on “the rich/CEOs/greedy corporations” without any consideration of the impact social welfare programs on the people they’re supposed to help.
“But as far as I can tell, that evidence doesn’t exist.”
Rent control is one of the most-agreed upon topics by economists. How MR let this just go by without significant comment is mindboggling. See
I’ve debated this several times here, but I don’t agree with this at all. Economic theory would seem to suggest the exact opposite.
The more people get in welfare, the greater is their income and the less is the marginal utility from each additional dollar they get from working. So welfare, if anything, ought to encourage the poor to work less.
And there’s certainly no way in which welfare “allows” Wal-Mart or McDonalds to pay a lower wage, unless of course the welfare were literally conditional upon working at those places and not others—which it isn’t. If the wage Wal-Mart pays is $8 an hour and the welfare bumps up the total by $2 an hour, then if you eliminate the welfare, there’s no reason why Wal-Mart would raise its wages to $10 an hour. The workers previously on welfare will just have lower incomes. Indeed, as I said, they ought to work longer hours if anything to make up for the lower pay.
” The more people get in welfare, the greater is their income and the less is the marginal utility from each additional dollar they get from working. So welfare, if anything, ought to encourage the poor to work less.”
Welfare is a subsidy of both non-work, and lower-wage work, since low-wage employees receive it, so it should encourage both unemployment and low-wage work over mid-wage or high-wage work. But, as you point out, there are several possible effects at work which have to be tested empirically.
edit–also, there’s a difference between changing wages, and changing number of hours worked.
” there’s no reason why Wal-Mart would raise its wages to $10 an hour. The workers previously on welfare will just have lower incomes. Indeed, as I said, they ought to work longer hours if anything to make up for the lower pay.”
On the contrary, there is a reason: the workers need more pay in order to work. Wages are determined by demand of labor (which is unaffected here) and supply, which will change. If, for example, as some claim, you can’t survive on MW, then you won’t bother working at MW, you’ll turn to begging/crime/welfare. So supply goes down and price goes up.
Also, adding hours requires paying benefits and/or overtime, so sometimes companies won’t let certain workers work 40 hours per week. Again, based on what I’ve heard.
If the minimum wage represents minimum subsistence—which is preposterous—then the welfare still isn’t “subsidizing Wal-Mart” or whatever. It’s subsidizing the people who otherwise would be starving or turning to begging or crime.
Who has the capacity to do medium- or high-wage work but chooses low-wage work instead? Maybe for “fun” jobs like elderly people sometimes do just to keep active, but not the kind of jobs that people on the left claim are inherently exploitative and demeaning.
Sure, but this has nothing to do with subsidizing low-wage work.
That was a response to your claim about people working longer hours.
edit–posted too soon.
Note, as my original comment implies, I don’t really believe the argument. But, I think it is more plausible than you are giving you credit for:
“Who has the capacity to do medium- or high-wage work but chooses low-wage work instead?”
They won’t do a different kind of work entirely, but they could be willing to work for 8$/hour instead of 12.
It seems like it should be the other way around: the more total income people have, the lower the wages at which they should be willing to work.
For instance, nobody in America would work for $1 an hour, even if it were legal, since this would only add a small amount to what you can get through food stamps, etc., and nobody wants to trade 40 hours a week for an extra $40 a week on top of what they otherwise have or can get.
But in Haiti or the equivalent, people will work for $1 an hour because they have so little income and $1 an hour is better than nothing.
In other words, it’s we’re talking about the “income effect” on the supply of labor. And it’s pretty standard that the income effect causes the supply of labor to slope downward—and that this is counteracted by the substitution effect. In other words, higher wages give people the incentive to work more, but they also give them the means to afford more leisure, which they like to “purchase”.
But all welfare does is increase workers’ income, not their wages. So it ought to encourage them to work less.
.
8-year old me disagrees. Being able to work 10 hours a week at that rate would have exceeded my allowance. Sure, my labor wasn’t worth much, but I could have swept floors on demand or something in a semi-reliable way.
Minimum wage DOESN’T represent subsistence. The level at which benefits set someone while they’re receiving minimum wage represents a determination of the minimal income a working person needs in our society. This is not at all obscure. Disagree with it if you will, but the argument isn’t baffling or unclear.
@ Patrick:
But…it isn’t the actual minimum income a “working person needs in our society”. That’s the fallacy.
And even if it did represent such a minimum income, it would not follow that welfare is “subsidizing Wal-Mart”.
“If, for example, as some claim, you can’t survive on MW”
If we were literally talking about wages so low that people starved to death, reducing the supply of labor, the argument would work, but we aren’t. Average real wages in the developed world are about twenty to thirty times what they were through most of history. The current minimum wage is something like an order of magnitude above literal subsistence.
One could make Ricardo’s version of the Malthusian argument. Children are expensive, so if people are sufficiently poor they have fewer of them—and “sufficiently poor,” as Ricardo points out, isn’t defined by how many calories you need to stay alive but by what level of consumption you consider low enough to be a strong reason not to lower it further by having kids. That would be a much slower process than the usual argument assumes, and one would want evidence on the actual effect of income on birth rates.
Alternatively, if we’re building several tens of billions of dollars worth of housing that’s worth twice what it costs to build, it seems as though you can solve this via taxes. Split the difference. We’ll STILL end up with more housing.
Also, of course, if it costs more to add a marginal rider to an existing line than that rider (who is the sort of person who can afford a million-dollar SF condo, remember) pays in taxes, this sort of begs the question of how the city ever afforded to build Muni in the first place or how it keeps it running right now. It would strike me as very, very odd if diseconomies of scale were Muni’s problem in a city that’s 2/3rds single-family housing.
Because market rate in San Francisco is expensive. Yes, McDonald’s workers don’t pay for themselves, but they don’t live in San Francisco. If people making a quarter-million a year don’t pay for themselves, we’re completely boned.
At this point, I pretty much assume that arguments against building housing are entirely emotionally motivated, and that any nominal reasoning could be replaced with duck sounds without loss of content. Literally every time I’ve bothered to chase that reasoning down, it’s turned out to be ignorant of 101-level economics or a blatant lie or both.
From Florian Maderspacher’s response to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s New Yorker article on epigenetics:
Why assume that what the press communicates about the arts and politics is not lopsided? Science reporting is usually terrible, I’ve always assumed that it’s reporting of other disciplines are equally terrible.
I’ve always assumed that it’s reporting of other disciplines are equally terrible
Religion reporting, especially since so many papers are dumping dedicated religion newsdesks and either letting reporters go, switching them to other beats, or having any reporter they can lay hands on cover religion stories, are equally bad.
The amount of eye-twitching that I do when they attempt to deal with things like the Eucharist, never mind is “Mass” spelled with a capital or small letter, and how is it done? Also, from the Protestant side of things, confusion over the difference between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, and thinking “fundamentalist” is the same as “Fundamentalist”, and anyone who holds the traditional understanding of their denomination’s doctrines is a “fundamentalist” which is a Bad Thing (e.g. Catholics who think women can’t be ordained are “fundamentalist Catholics” – oh, and while I’m at it, “woman ordained as Catholic priest” stories which are a whole traincrash specialty of their own).
Yeah. Basically about the only thing to trust in the newspapers as unimpeachably factually correct is the date and masthead 🙂
Sports reporting is usually pretty solid.
Generally newspaper articles are unbiased and accurate, except if they are on a subject you know a lot about, in which case they are full of mistakes and lies.
“You once read about something called Gell-Mann Amnesia, where physicists notice that everything the mainstream says about physics is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, doctors notice that everything the mainstream says about medicine is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, et cetera. You do not have Gell-Mann Amnesia. Everyone is terrible at everything all the time, and it pisses you off.”
So a little while ago I was having a discussion of politics and religion with someone in my tribe. I agreed with most of her conclusions but thought her arguments for them were terrible and started pointing out some of the flaws. Long story short, our discussion ended with this exchange:
Her: “So what’s the right answer?”
Me: “Well, you’ll need to think about it and research it and decide for yourself.
Her: *bursting into tears* “I don’t want to think for myself! Just tell me what’s right and I’ll believe it!”
I was completely flabbergasted by the response. I know that many people trade intellectual inquiry for the “right” beliefs in practice, but this was the first time I’d ever met someone who was fully aware they were doing it and was okay with it. Heck, she even welcomed it. It still staggers me a little when I think about it. I can’t imagine being in a place where I’d deliberately make that tradeoff.
Anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
I know it sounds weird when you write it out, but it definitely is often easier to just accept the “right” view in your tribe than to actually do research. I can testify I experience this feeling a lot, and one thing I try to do is notice when I have those thoughts and hold off on forming any sort of strong opinion until I can put in some effort to thinking about it and researching alternative points of view.
It’s extremely common to do this, though not necessarily to admit what you’re doing and be okay with it.
Probably people must have mentioned this before but there are lots of authoritarian followers. And there’s a free pdf book on the subject where the brilliant Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer shares his research on authoritarian followers.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
I love his book.
The reason he focuses on authoritarian followers, rather than authoritarian leaders, is that it’s the followers that determine what will happen. To take the extreme example, if Hitler had no followers, he would have been just another homeless guy wandering around in Germany and would have had no significant impact on history whatsoever.
Most of us have had some kind of dysfunctional “solution” to the stresses of modern life and the difficulty of making decisions. Before we jump to criticize an authoritarian follower, we should realize the problem, and realize that our own solutions at times may have been just as dysfunctional. Many people do compulsive or addictive behaviors to deal with the stress– overeat, over-drink, take drugs, compulsively overuse the Internet or the TV, do the workaholic or rage-aholic thing etc.– in order to run away from the stresses or decisions of life.
Modern life can be overwhelming for many people– some far more than others.
And then some people have been severely punished or criticized a lot for making their own decisions, or they’ve been prevented from doing so, and they don’t want to ever take that risk.
It’s certainly not the most free or mature stance in the world. So if a person is capable of learning to make their own decisions, that’s certainly more healthy.
“the brilliant Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer”
So brilliant that he can rig his research, not notice he is doing it, and continue not noticing it when the rigging is pointed out in detail (by me, in our exchanges on my blog).
That’s basically every brilliant person, though
Doesn’t everyone do that to some extent? Most of us haven’t actually thoroughly researched everything that we have an opinion about. Who has the time?
Yes, most of time learning something, I don’t go into Scott mode and look up every citation etc., but look to see if this is coherent with the rest of my understanding. Of course, another word for this is bias, so I have to do a sanity check now and then and look for contradictions, etc., but I don’t think a person can plausibly evaluate every facet of any fact that they see. Which is okay if one is gracious in accepting and giving corrections, and willing to live and let live as much as possible.
I think one of the best takeaways of Rationalism is the idea that you should be very clear on what the bounds of your knowledge are and what they are not. Thus, for a given issue you should be as clear as possible on what you know of good evidence for and what you don’t. Most controversial issues don’t come up in daily life; I don’t need to exhaustively support abstract philosophical beliefs to get to work and support myself. All the same, in those cases where abstract philosophical beliefs come under discussion, I strive to be aware of where I know, where I think, and where I am merely suspicious.
YASSS! Knowing what you don’t know is so very important. Lots of people that they know things that they don’t. It’s super dangerous. Note as in “they have a false belief that X is the way it works”, as in “They think that they know (without imagining a particular X) the way it works, and this free floating credibility will attach to whatever seems reasonable.”
We do have a dilemma in modern society in that we live in this huge world with so many people and activities. We ALL end up taking someone else’s word for some things.
Say we are going to decide what’s true with our own eyes and ears. How are we going to do that? There’s a political issue about Syria. You want to consider that in your choice of presidential and/or Congressional candidate. Have you ever been to Syria? Probably not. So you’re going to end up taking someone(s) word for that, in the end.
Same thing with analyzing complex factors in the economy. Is more government better or less government better, in some particular sector of the economy? Your different choices of political candidates maybe say different things about this.
You can read accounts of what’s happened in the past in this area. But if you read about it, it’s likely that the descriptive articles you read will have their own ax to grind. So the author may have a hidden agenda to show that more, or less, government in this area would be ideal. And e it’s hidden, so the author won’t come out and tell you that. You’re going to have to try to figure it out for yourself.
Many “news sources” lie. And many of them slant the story quite a lot.
I’m reading a book with a group now called The Evolution of Everything. It’s quite good in many ways– about Bottom Up cultural evolution of morality, language, the economy etc. However, it’s got a very strong Libertarian bias that gets more intense as the book goes on.
In researching the author, I found that he had been the head of a bank that ended up being bailed out by the British government so it wouldn’t go bankrupt. He violated the code of ethics of the House of Lords, of which he is a member, by politicking the pro case for fracking while failing to reveal a significant investment in fracking. And he and his family are profiting from a coal mine on their property. So, of course, he is against regulation of any of these industries that he profits from or has profited from– regardless of how much they may pollute the environment, or bankrupt the English economy or whatever.
It’s a lot of trouble to research all this stuff. And sometimes it’s hard to find. Or else the info is not available publicly.
Of course, propaganda doesn’t work if the author of it divulges their conflicts of interest and bias up front. So they hardly ever do. They just act like their proposed way of doing things is just the very best way for everyone impacted– and describe stacks of evidence for that, while ignoring all evidence that would point the opposite way or evidence that would be inconclusive.
From the other side, as it were: sometimes I have noticed the (almost literal) slamming closed of doors in my mind when I’m faced with something I don’t want to think about or which challenges beliefs I don’t want to investigate.
Sometimes it’s “No. I’ve had this argument fifty-seven times, the fifty-eighth will not change my mind, it’s just going round in circles at this point”. Sometimes it’s “Okay – I really do need to think more about this, don’t I, if I’m having this reaction?”
If the person burst into tears, that sounds like they’re under a lot of strain on this particular thing, for whatever reason. They may well be tired of trying to argue the pros and cons and just want an answer, any kind of an answer, so they can stop the “round and round and round the mulberry bush we go” carousel in their head and have a rule to guide them.
Sometimes I’m talking with people, and I don’t feel very tribally connected to them. But I trust them and really, truly, desperately want to be considered a part of the tribe by them and their peers.
When they tell me there is a tribally-correct answer that they are witholding until I perform actions that I know, from experience, will cost me more than I can afford…it can cause some bad feelings. It sortof feels like they’re mugging me from a position of superior social and intellectual capital.
It’s not my most virtuous moment, I’ll grant you. But I have thought it. Hope your friend is feeling okay.
Do you personally research every claim in, say, physics? No. You find someone who’s authoritative on the subject, and listen to them. And maybe check some of their claims, or compare them to facts you already know, to see they’re honest.
It would take more than a human lifetime to build up a single person’s beliefs from scratch experimentally.
Division of labour, both physical and intellectual, is literally the cornerstone of society – not just ours, but all organized human endeavor. You make this tradeoff constantly.
Bursting into tears in a political discussion is unusual; I imagine there were personal factors and/or details of the conversation we’re not privy to. She probably felt very harassed, like her beliefs and personal worth were being attacked by someone well-positioned and intelligent. That you were deliberately withholding your own position in what probably felt like a mocking fashion – what, you can’t even figure out what’s true? – probably didn’t help matters.
Everybody wants to be included in a group or “tribe” of some sort. It’s a natural human need. It is better to find tribes that respect your right to be an individual, rather than ones that expect extreme conformity. And to realize yourself that you have that right to be an individual.
I agree with your comment, though, I suspect from your other comments, not with your intended implications: that’s actually one of the major reasons I’m wary of left-wing causes in general. They tend to want to put me in a box into which I do not, thank you very much, fit. To my memory, I’ve never gotten that from right-wing sources – then again, my bubble is very left-wing-dominated. In general, I suspect pressure varies more by what philosophy is locally dominant than by the explicit tenants of that philosophy, at least when speaking in broad terms like “left wing” and “right wing”.
That is a valuable observation. I have experienced slight pressure to, e.g., conform to right-wing-friendly gender norms, and no pressure to do anything left-wing-flavored, which reflects my local social surroundings.
I was thinking along similar lines recently. I have a friend who, although he does share a lot of my political opinions (he definitely leans libertarian, even though from the left perhaps…he also is interested a lot in encryption and surveillance but that is probably a work-related disease, given what he does), he finds the left in general as more likable than the right. Most of the people I know are like that too (but then again, most of the people I know are related to the academia in one way or another and a lot of them actually are probably left-wingers, although mostly not very radical).
I have the opposite sentiment and it is not really because I would be particularly conservative. But the feeling I get from the “academic left” is that they do two things I really do not like – they like to tell other people how to live their lives in the sense what they should and should not like and they also like to fit people into categories like race, gender etc. instead of treating everyone as an individual. The very radical conservatives (or socialists who base their socialism on belonging to an ethnicity and who usually get labeled “far right”) seem to do the same, at least to a degree, but they seem to be quite an insignificant minority (particularly where I am from and where religion has basically zero influence on politics), the left seem to be much closer to being the mainstream, so I feel much more threatened by them. The conservatives might have some values I do not share (perhaps even more often than the left-wingers, in social issues), but they usually only demand that they be left alone.
This is not true of all countries, for example in Poland the conservatives (and the Church) are actively trying to make abortions illegal (even more so than they are in Poland today – which is more or less comparable to Latin American countries), gays are actually persecuted in some countries (as opposed to people who do not like to associate with gays being harassed by left-wing extremists in others). I think I would probably be more sympathetic to the left-wing in a country like Russia, but in most of Europe (or Northern America) it seems to be the left-wing which is trying to force people into boxes and tell them how to live their own lives more than the right-wing.
“Correlation of -0.68 between “rule of law” in a country as defined by the World Justice Project, versus road accident deaths per capita in that country. Is this something boring, like better governments making better road systems, or everything about countries always being correlated by development anyway? Or some more fundamental connection between people following the rules while driving and following the rules while governing. I’d say “paging Garett Jones” except that I think I got this link from his Twitter.”
There is an easy test of this. Calculate the partial correlation where the S (general socioeconomic factor) factor is removed. If two things still correlate strongly, then perhaps there is something about them. One can think of this as the nodes being closer in the nomological network.
“Emil Kierkegaard”
I thought we went over this spelling thing once already? 😉
Maybe you need a mnemonic “kirke” is like the Scottish “kirk” and means church (we do pronounce the e). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk (The extra e in “kierke” is not pronounced but is no longer found in the spelling of the word.)
“gaard” means yard and is a cognate of the same word. g’s and y’s look like each other as well, so maybe that will work as a mnemonic.
On Ketamine:
Every single drug that shows effectiveness for treating/affecting the body should have trials run on its metabolites.
Okay, so, a couple of things. Apple’s business model for almost everything is “You give us money, and then you get a thing”. This is, at least, less creepy than a lot of other tech companies, whose business model is “We give you a thing for free, and then we sell your personal information to advertisers”.
Music is a bit different, because the music is owned by the record labels. Apple can’t sell music in any form without the record labels saying “Yes, we are happy for you to sell music this way”. A decade ago, what this meant is that the songs you bought had DRM that would only allow you to play it on five computers. This wasn’t Apple’s idea, it was the labels’. Steve Jobs posted a famous open letter about how he didn’t want to use DRM, he thought DRM was stupid, but Apple was forced to use it by the labels. Eventually, Apple won this argument, and for several years now, music purchased individually on the iTunes Store is DRM-free.
Today, streaming complicates this issue. The record labels eventually said “okay” to single DRM-free tracks for 99 cents, but there’s no way they would say “okay” to the entire iTunes library DRM free. So Apple has two parallel things going on, DRMed streaming music and DRM-free purchased/ripped music.
Which leads to the actual problem here, which is not “Apple’s policies” or them being “dictatorial” in any way, but just simple, innocent, honest poor user-interface design. There’s a dialog box with buttons labeled in a way that if you don’t have a good mental model of exactly what is going on, you’re more likely than usual to click something you don’t want.
None of this is surprising to Apple fans, who, contrary to what probably everyone reading this believes, are some of Apple’s biggest critics when it comes to problems Apple actually has. Apple people have been complaining about the iTunes application being a complete horror show for years and years now, and this criticism has intensified exponentially since the disastrous introduction of Apple Music last year.
TL;DR: Scott, you’re ascribing to malice what is way better explained by incompetence.
What’s baffling to me is that for the longest time, Apple was associated with good user interface design, wasn’t it?
But compared to Spotify – which still has issues – Apple Music is terrible.
Apple still does some of the best UI in tech. But they also do some stinkers, and lots of people think the stinkers are accelerating.
There are a few possible reasons. One is that Apple is doing so many more things these days than they used to that their developers are spread too thin. Their hiring has not kept up with their ambitions. This might change when they open their massive new headquarters; they reportedly have a problem right now finding the office space in Cupertino to put people. That may be a stretch, though.
Another issue is that lately, a whole lot more software design authority has been given to Jony Ive, who is a magnificent hardware designer, but isn’t as experienced in software usability. I’ve also seen people say that some guy (can’t remember his name offhand) whose history is in graphic design has been put in charge of UI stuff. And those two fields are not the same.
Third, a lot of the bad stuff at Apple comes out of Eddy Cue’s Services division. Less of it comes from Craig Federighi’s Software division. iTunes and Apple Music are both under Eddy Cue. BUT, one of the most worrying usability disasters to come out of Apple in the last year is the new Apple TV remote control, and that’s not software at all.
Which leads to the final possible reason Apple design seems like it’s going downhill, which is that Steve Jobs is dead. He was not a designer, but he was the ultimate editor. He was excellent at saying “This sucks for reasons A through K” and he had the authority to say “We’re not shipping this until you fix it.” Jony Ive is the closest thing to that Apple has now, but he may be focused too much on visual appeal and not enough on usability.
Again, Apple still does some of the best work in tech. There’s basically nowhere else to turn for people who like tech and have taste[citation needed]. But we’re kind of nervous with all the “one step forward, one step back” we’re seeing from Apple these days.
It’s interesting how over the past 20 or so years, Apple’s reputation has gone from “minority market share, high-quality but overpriced products, snooty userbase” to “ubiquitous, still overpriced but lower quality, userbase that can’t escape the problems”.
Maybe it’s the death of Jobs, maybe it’s just the nature of such a company getting bigger and more successful?
I mean, the more I think about it, Apple Music was awful. The interface was monstrously counterintuitive, which was supposed to be Apple’s strong point.
This isn’t really the case, though. Sure, they may be responding to industry demands in music DRM… but pretty much their entire business model is build around controlling absolutely every aspect of your device. They control every aspect of rhe hardware; they’re the only ones who can put software on it; they decide what goes into the App Store. When they make dictatorial rulings for their kingdom that reflect a treaty with a neighboring kingdom (music industry), perhaps its not a pure reflection of their own desires… but the king stay the king.
First, the issues you bring up are about their product design philosophy, not their business model. A “business model” is just how a company makes its money, on a high level. Business models are things like “Sell a thing for a profit”; “Sell a thing at a loss and sell its consumables for a profit”; “Give away a thing and make money on advertising”. Apple has different business models in different parts of its business, but the lion’s share of the money comes from selling physical objects for a profit.
Now, their product design philosophy is just that, a philosophy, and different people can feel differently about it. The thing about product decisions is that everything involves compromises and tradeoffs. Point by point:
This has ever been a complaint about Apple. People raised holy hell when the first iPhone came out because you couldn’t replace its battery. Fast forward to today, and the iPhone’s most popular high-end competitors don’t have replaceable batteries, either. The tradeoff is that a built-in battery can be significantly larger than a removable one, which suits the mass market just fine.
There are decisions in this category that make me feel sad; I think in recent years they’ve been sacrificing Mac upgradeability to save on weight and size to a somewhat excessive extent. But for normal people, those tradeoffs either don’t matter or are net positives.
True of iPhones, not Macs. The tradeoff here is that on Android, malware is a recurring problem, and on iOS it’s practically non-existent.
I totally agree that App Review does some really, really stupid things sometimes. Rejections for stupid, capricious reasons. And it accepts a lot of junk that it should reject. But then, again, I can be 99.9% confident that I can install whatever I want from the App Store and it won’t screw up my phone. You can’t say the same for Google Play. And App Review sometimes catches issues that make legitimate developers glad they’re there.
Yes, there are tradeoffs involved in owning Apple products. No, I can’t put arbitrary PCI expansion cards in my Mac or sideload iPhone apps, and yes, sometimes (rarely) that sucks. But there are legitimate reasons to live with those compromises. Developers who care about making software that’s both powerful and usable are almost all on Apple platforms (at least). Apple makes hardware that works. I have never, ever used a trackpad on a PC laptop that did not make me want to throw the computer off a skyscraper; Mac trackpads just work, flawlessly. If I ever have a problem with a new Apple device, I can walk into the nearest Apple Store, say “Hey, my new iPhone has a bad proximity sensor”, and walk out with a brand new iPhone in ten minutes.
They’re far from perfect. And people who value Apple mostly for their logo do exist. But they’re not a majority, and the attitude that Apple people are all brainwashed dupes should not have as much credence as it does.
The fact that dictatorial policies have some nice features does not make them non-dictatorial policies.
Feel free to try to distinguish the App Store from Apple’s business model. I’m fairly certain that Apple would disagree with you.
Anyone has access to the IAT paper? Remember writing an essay for school about it four years ago claiming the opposite, so I’m mostly familiar with sources that do support a link. Would like to read in more detail.
google scholar
thank you!
I research epigenetics, and even I thought the criticism of the New Yorker piece was overly pedantic. Mukherjee’s descriptions of epigenetics are far from the worst offenders I’ve seen, and he did hedge about the lack of evidence regarding inter-generational transmission.
The criticisms of the piece seem to boil down to Mukherjee’s omission of transcription factors. Instead he focused on histones, structural proteins whose modifications correlate with various regulatory states of the genome, in a broad sense. Active vs. poised, regulatory vs. genes vs. “junk”, etc. These modifications can be changed to some extent, which is what Mukherjee focuses on. The actual activation of genes is caused by the binding of proteins called transcription factors, which modify expression at much finer scale. Transcription factor binding is determined by a number of things, including but not limited to histone modifications.
The distinction between two types of proteins (histones vs. transcription factors) is extremely important for a biochemist but not so much for a layperson. When I tell people that I research how genes are turned on and off, they sometimes are confused: “Genes can be turned on and off?” That should be the takeaway for the layperson reading this article.
Vox also has a more measured take: http://www.vox.com/2016/5/7/11606886/scientists-angry-new-yorker-epigenetics
Interesting how tribal politics is and facts really don’t matter not at all, even to people having extremely long winded “logical” or “rational” or “data-oriented” arguments. At least facts don’t matter enough to change anyone’s mind.
Has anyone’s mind on this thread ever changed as a result of facts presented by someone else?
If someone believes something strongly enough, especially if the tribe they identify with does too, there is no limit to the number of ways they can claim that all evidence against it is false, or the number of ways they can nitpick apart every aspect of any studies one cites etc.
You could say that grass is green and the sky is blue and, if their tribe doesn’t believe that, the person has tons of reasons why it can’t possibly be so.
There is always a rational, and often detailed and specific, list of reasons why:
“My tribe good, no matter what they say or do. If what they say or do seems bad, well here is a perfectly logical sounding explanation of why it’s actually good.
“Your tribe bad, even if they say or do exactly the same things my tribe does. If what they say or do seems good, well here is a perfectly logical sounding explanation of why it’s actually bad.”
I see at least two examples of people updating their priors in this thread, and that’s the people talking about it.
So yeah; your crusade against the evil right-wingers (cof) has gone exactly as you expected of the Evil Other, who rejected your shoddy evidence for reasons they’ve clearly enumerated and you’ve failed to counter, have failed to see the obvious sense behind your caricatured partisan screeds, and are now making fun of your pearl-clutching.
You’re just not very convincing. Hell, the only reason that I’m not outright accusing you of being a troll is that charity toward others is pretty ingrained and usually warranted around here.
I usually would agree but I don’t think anyone has ever been this bad before. It would probably be best that we ignore her until she either gives up or learns to make better arguments.
“never been this bad before” is a high bar to clear, and I don’t think she meets it.
That said, I agree with the general sentiment.
Nobody is worse than anon@gmail.
No, I hope Jill stays around and interacts with us. As I’ve said, I don’t think she’s malicious, she’s a nice liberal whose instincts are “See? My trusted sources which represent my point of view prove that the bad guys are bad!” and like many’s another person of any political viewpoint, she thinks her guys provide knock-down arguments, the other guys only indulge in propaganda.
I think the rest of us are a bit more sceptical because we’ve seen how bloody awful most media coverage is of subjects we know about, so when any source throws up dubious figures to prove The Other Guys Are Evil, our instincts are “this is probably baloney because even people who should know better mess up statistics in studies, why would a journalist knocking out an article based on a half-digested press release do any better?”
I agree.
That’s close to my take, too.
And mine. Naive, not malicious.
Let’s be honest here. At least part of the reason Jill is so annoying to us is because of her strong left wing beliefs. I don’t think we’re tribal enough that we would welcome any idiotic statement from the right but we would probably be less hostile.
That said, most of the progressives on here I respect. I would say the vast majority of us(regardless of political orientation) have spent a decent amount of time arguing with people who disagree with us so if we’re going to be ideologues, we’re going to at least know enough not to utterly embarrass ourselves. This might be Jill’s first time having her beliefs confronted by actual people instead of strawmen. So maybe you’re right. If she decides to stick around, we’ll see if she gets better.
I really don’t think it’s a matter of Jill being left-wing, except inasmuch as the argument style of framing any disagreement as stubborn truth denialism is more a sin of the left than the right. It’s just really annoying being at a level 6 in sophisticated meta-level discussion and then someone comes in at level 3 and bitches you out about how close-minded you are for not seeing the obvious truth of this hypothetical person’s basic-ass opinions. Do you really expect we’d react any better to someone coming in with off-the-shelf Fox News talking points?
(In before “Fox News is left-wing”)
@Wrong Species – “Let’s be honest here. At least part of the reason Jill is so annoying to us is because of her strong left wing beliefs.”
Nope. I’m waffling on whether they’re sincere or a right-wing troll. I’m uncertain which is a more charitable interpretation; the former seems more charitable to Jill, the latter to the rest of the left-wing posters here, whose opinion I care rather more about.
There have been (rare) posters who’ve come and gone with a similar posting style with a right wing perspective, and if memory serves I’ve found them equally annoying.
If they are genuine, I concur on hoping they hang around.
At least part of the reason Jill is so annoying to us is because of her strong left wing beliefs. I don’t think we’re tribal enough that we would welcome any idiotic statement from the right but we would probably be less hostile.
Eh. I am deeply annoyed because she’s leftwing/insulting rightwingers.
I am feeling hostile because she barges in here, doesn’t lurk long enough to tell a hawk from a handsaw, and makes generally gross mischaracterizations of the commentariant at large.
I myself think that if SSC has become more rightwing, it’s only so far as to have an equal balance of presented views. (I await, with bated breath, Scott’s survey for this year.) But even if it turns out that 75% plus of the lot is conservative (which would be some doing, considering the single digits that conservatives were in last year) that still leaves a lot of defectors. Any reasonable reading of the comments should have picked up on that, imo.
I am leaning 35% chance troll, 65% really, really encapsulated but honest leftie.
Oh, and young. My god, young. Like, young lady, does your mother know where you are going on the internet young.
A little dishonest to cite stats for conservatives but not include libertarians, who are also generally considered to be right wing. That would be like tallying up the liberals but not including the socialists. IIRC the numbers were something like half left-wing and one third right-wing with a sixth uncommitted. Which doesn’t invalidate your point, but the numbers weren’t as skewed as you’re claiming.
A little dishonest to cite stats for conservatives but not include libertarians, who are also generally considered to be right wing.
Emmm. Not in my experience. Or – not from my end (middle-ish side?) of the spectrum.
The socialist vs liberal analogy breaks down when one looks at relative positions on the scale – socialists are further from the center than liberals, but libertarians are more centralist/overlap more with both true liberals and true conservatives.
At least in the USA, and when we shift further afield, the discussion breaks down because of a lack of common vocabularly.
@ keranih
I myself think that if SSC has become more rightwing, it’s only so far as to have an equal balance of presented views. (I await, with bated breath, Scott’s survey for this year.) But even if it turns out that 75% plus of the lot is conservative (which would be some doing, considering the single digits that conservatives were in last year) that still leaves a lot of defectors. Any reasonable reading of the comments should have picked up on that, imo.
Regardless of what the members call themselves on a survey, the bulk of the wordage that gets posted here is hostile to liberals/liberal ideas. (Often viciously hostile).
@houseboatonstyx:
I think, as someone who finds the commentariat here to be tilted right, that there are two confounding factors.
1) Scott has identified himself at various times as left of center, but is very concerned with maintaining a a walled-garden of (mostly) true free expression. As such, the commentary is naturally going to tilt right. Someone in the KKK who also believed strongly in the rights of black people to express themselves (and created a space dedicated to that) is going to look hostile to the KKK, even if they are a strong believer in separation of the races and white superiority.
2) Scott has explicitly identified “SJW” (as inept a term as that is) as his out-group and spoken in fairly vicious terms about that group. It’s relatively free-reign on that left-aligned group.
Edit:
I forgot/left out 3)Scott has a special interest in targeting academic papers which engage in faulty/poor science. This tends to be attributed to failings of “the left” in the comments.
@houseboatonstyx – “Regardless of what the members call themselves on a survey, the bulk of the wordage that gets posted here is hostile to liberals/liberal ideas. (Often viciously hostile).”
I think you’re probably correct. From your impression, how much of that wordage is aimed at Social Justice in particular, as opposed to general liberals/liberalism?
@Faceless Craven:
I think the root level comments tend to target something specific (SJWs, the Academic left, occasionally communists), but as you go deeper in the comment tree, you are more likely to see “the left” used in a pejorative sense or attacked in general, rather than specific, terms.
If someone can link to a time when a commenter was:
Right wing
Had the same terrible, smug, holier-than-thou, extremely uncharitable attitude that Jill has
Received universal(or nearly universal) condemnation from the rest of the commenters
then I’ll take back my comment.
Also, I haven’t heard feedback from our progressive commenters here. Do you think that Jill would be as universally condemned if she were right wing?
I was seriously considering just replying to one of her comments with “lurk moar”, but I decided that probably wasn’t the best idea…
“It’s just really annoying being at a level 6 in sophisticated meta-level discussion and then someone comes in at level 3 and bitches you out about how close-minded you are for not seeing the obvious truth of this hypothetical person’s basic-ass opinions. Do you really expect we’d react any better to someone coming in with off-the-shelf Fox News talking points?”
That describes it perfectly. And no, I don’t think anyone coming to SSC and offering straight up, un-nuanced Fox News talking points (and that would be the right wing equivalent of what she did) would be treated any more nicely than Jill… which was pretty nicely, by the way! Note Hlynkacg, Nornagest, and David Friedman’s comments.
Look, let’s be nice to the new posters.
Remember what happened to LW when new people stopped coming in? If we don’t want SSC’s comment section to look like Discussion we need new blood, and that means teaching them the local lingo not driving them off with torches and pitchforks.
Besides, we spend so much time jerking ourselves off over capital-N Niceness that it’s a bit jarring to see this kind of reaction.
Right, we’re only rude to people who offend our refined sensibilities by being insufficiently sophisticated. Let’s pat ourselves on the back some more.
On a slight tangent, what I’ve seen of Fox News did seem a little… over the top. Are all American news channels like that? Is it a cultural thing?
I remember what happened to LW when all the fun people left and got replaced by tedious people, sure. I promise I will never pat myself on the back about being capital-N Nice.
Nita, I avoid mainstream news programs (single stories on the web don’t seem to be too bad), but I don’t think it’s like Fox.
Instead, you get a teaser about something that might be interesting and/or useful. They keep repeating the teaser for what is probably almost an hour but seems like several eternities, and then they tell you what it’s about and it’s nothing of any interest.
A lot of them, yes. The ones that aren’t are the exceptions rather than the rule. Think of them as audio-visual “clickbait”.
Likewise.
@HeelBearCub – “I think the root level comments tend to target something specific (SJWs, the Academic left, occasionally communists), but as you go deeper in the comment tree, you are more likely to see “the left” used in a pejorative sense or attacked in general, rather than specific, terms.”
The shorter comments seem to be the worse ones, and they seem more or less random to me. The longer a thread goes, though, the more of a chance one appears, and then you get swarming.
Fox News makes me crazy with its style first, its brevity second, and its slant third. They took the brevity of HLN (the proto CNN) and made it a lot more interesting. If you’re going to be stuck in an airport or a bar or at a lab bench/mechanic bay listening to the same clips over and over, Fox is definately a superior option.
But even NPR has shifted towards a more “show” style – they keep their pieces a *bit* longer – mostly with quotes and interviews – but have also deepened their slant.
Honestly, BBC still sets the standard for depth in their presentations and span of interest (global – at least, global to mean any place that used to be pink) even though they are the least likely to own their biases. What I saw of Al Jazzera was also impressive in depth, but that only made the slant more obvious on account of I would be waiting for them to at least bring up something, and it would never get mentioned.
I’m tempted to say “Jim”, although he was less condescending and more straight-up rude.
@Nornagest:
I don’t know if an analogy can be drawn. His thing seems to be saying stuff that’s outside the Overton Window – even for most Death Eaters, pretty outside – in an extremely blunt fashion that tends to rudeness.
We don’t really seem to have any mainstream Republicans of the “Bush-did-nothing-wrong” variety. Although the internet seems to have fewer in general: arguing with people on the internet in the early 2010s, in less weird places than this, there were a lot more “some-kind-of-libertarian-voting-Republican-for-lack-of-better-alternative” types, and a lot fewer “we’re-gonna-find-those-WMDs-just-give-it-TIME” types, than in the mid 2000s. For obvious reasons.
That guy who occasionally notes that AI is impossible because souls, here’s a link to some unsophisticated Catholic theology? Short, non-handly name, don’t remember it offhand. Joe?
@ Anonymous:
I know what guy you’re talking about.
I think his username starts with an “M”.
Or actually, I think there is a “Joe” with a blue gravatar who has dismissed AI on those grounds.
And then there’s the other guy who’s a Catholic anti-capitalist and likes to cite Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. He doesn’t like AI, either. He’s the one whose name starts with an “M” and has a brown gravatar.
Just for the record, this isn’t me.
@ Faceless Craven
From your impression, how much of that wordage is aimed at Social Justice in particular, as opposed to general liberals/liberalism?
I might be kind of a test case here. I silently cheer for bashing ‘SJW style’ stuff. But I silently growl at most other insults to leftists or liberal ideas.
This is (only partly) a matter of style. The latter insults I notice most are sideswipes and/or Bulverism. — Which, hm, Jill’s comments have been mostly free of.
I’m breaking my habitual silence to chime in here – I would vastly prefer Jill to stay.
Sure, she’s a bit naive with how things work around here, but everyone starts somewhere, and I think having the courage to dive right in is to be admired (especially considering I’ve been around for literally years and still haven’t posted as much as she has in just a few days).
Plus, she’s a fresh voice – I miss the days when left-wingers were going at it hammer and tongs with the libertarians in the comments threads. Now you mostly just get some self-assured statements about SJWs, a few vague condemnations of hte left in general, and apart from anon@gmail drive-bys and the desperate efforts of our outnumbered left-wing remnants there’s not a whole lot of opposition. And I say all this as someone who is perhaps the closest to a stereotypical right-wing Republican here (I don’t think Bush did nothing wrong, but I think he did a damn sight more right than most people give him credit for).
Jill, pray don’t let a few cranky folks make you feel unwelcome. They’re decent enough sorts once you get to know them.
I think one of the issues is that I think a large part of the SSC left is the part that comes here for the complaints about the capital-S capital-J SJ left. People like me.
Thing is that arguing with the SSC right can get tiring, and I permanently need to cut down on my amount of arguing on the internet… and slowly, one-by-one, the left-wing remnants decide that certain sub-threads aren’t worth participating in, and that makes the remaining remnants feel even more outnumbered.
Possibly things like the glory days of SSC can only last a limited amount of time, before the process of self-sorting by ideology takes its toll, and you end up… not exactly with a monoculture, but with something that can superficially resemble one to outsiders.
I don’t know how to fix this, or whether it even can – or should – be fixed. I mean, I really don’t want to say anything like, “waaaaah, I demand affirmative action for liberals, it’s biased against us out here and I demand you fix the bias”, that would go against more-or-less everything I come here for.
Major factual errors that she won’t admit are more than just “a little bit naive with how things work around here”.
Jill, when you post a link in support of one of your assertions and people point out that the link doesn’t substantiate the claim you’re making, does this give you pause? Do you stop to consider perhaps some of your news sources are lying to you? Or consider that maybe – just maybe – the reason your link was easy to argue against with “a list of reasons” might be because the underlying claim you’re making isn’t true?
I used to be a bog-standard liberal but became more libertarian-ish over time because as far as I could tell the libertarian side had better arguments. So far, you haven’t done much to dissuade me of that view. It’s great that you’re willing to come here and argue for liberal policy positions but it would be nice if you would actually, you know, argue for them.
If somebody has a “rational, detailed and specific list of reasons” why they’re more right than you and you have no contrary arguments, shouldn’t we update our priors in the direction of the possibility – however small – that they actually are right?
At some point, when I realize that probably no one on this board has ever changed their mind about anything, in response to facts given by someone else. So I stop responding at that point.
No offense, but if you’re basing that on the reception to your arguments, you might have unreasonably high expectations of their persuasiveness.
This is not a Chick tract. People — here and otherwise — do not throw away foundations of their worldview, opinions they’ve probably been thinking about and refining for years, when they’re shown a few shallow talking points. That doesn’t mean they’re not updating on the information you give them (insofar as you are giving them new information); it just means that actual knockdown arguments are hard to find. Not to be confused with alleged knockdown arguments, which you can’t swing a cat without hitting.
I’ve gotten some interesting back and forth political discussion going on, on other boards. But I can see that won’t happen here. So I will limit the time & energy I’ll spend.
Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
@Jill:
There has been at least one case in the past day where your claim was contradicted by the source you linked to (Koch expenditures). Unless I missed it, you neither admitted making a mistake nor offered an argument to show that you didn’t.
That looks as though you are the one whose views are not subject to revision on the basis of discovering that the facts you claim are not true. A reason for others to discount your claims.
For what it’s worth, keranih, I think your contributions to this whole thread of discussion have been significantly below the usual standard of this site as well. You’ve been singularly rude and, yes, genuinely dismissive to Jill, to the point where I think it drops below the standards that are allowed here, let alone expected.
How is “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” either true, necessary, or kind, for example?
For what it’s worth, keranih, I think your contributions to this whole thread of discussion have been significantly below the usual standard of this site as well.
Oh, really? Please do expand. Do you mean “this thread responding to Jill’s slander of the commentariant” or “this links post”?
How is “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” either true, necessary, or kind, for example?
It is true because it was a response to Jill’s declaration that she wasn’t going to hang out here anymore.
It was kind, in that it was not a demand that she leave, regardless if she was leaving or not.
And it was necessary because it is counterproductive to the health of the commentariant to go running after rude short-sighted, ego-centric and poorly read commentators and beg them to come back and beat up on us-the-commentariant some more.
I see that there are some who are willing to overlook her gross errors. I think that’s probably praise worthy. What is not, is getting upset over the rest of the commentariant rejecting Jill’s bombastic style, factual errors, and refusal to admit mistakes, on the grounds that Jill is at least a leftist, and will bring balance to
to the forcethe board.“Do you mean “this thread responding to Jill’s slander of the commentariant” or “this links post”?”
Jill’s entire multi-thread posting spree about how The Media Are Rigged that’s spread shotgun-style across this entire thread.
Ctrl+Fing, you’ve made several replies on the topic, and all but one of them have been dismissive jokes at her expense.
“It is true because it was a response to Jill’s declaration that she wasn’t going to hang out here anymore.”
This is not what “true” means in the context of SSC’s rules, and would appear to include any possible response to anything.
“It was kind, in that it was not a demand that she leave, regardless if she was leaving or not.”
This is not what “kind” means in the context of SSC’s rules. That you could have been ruder doesn’t change the fact that you were rude; in order to qualify as “kind” you have to be exceptionally nice.
“rude short-sighted, ego-centric and poorly read”
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about!
“I think that’s probably praise worthy. What is not, is getting upset over the rest of the commentariant rejecting…”
Oh no, everyone else has been perfectly reasonable to her, as far as I can see.
Look, I understand being annoyed when a newbie comes in and is naive at you. I’m not sure what your political views are, but I can certainly understand Jill’s views rubbing you the wrong way either way; she’s either treating you as a Faceless Enemy, or defending you inexpertly. Her tone and the quality of her submissions are well below the standard we’ve come to expect here, and I for one hope that she improves; and if she doesn’t, she’ll probably get herself banned fairly quick. Arguing with her is perfectly understandable.
But c’mon, man, would it kill you to be polite to the new kid?
What? She said “I’ll do X”, then he replied “fine, so do X”. That isn’t a possible response to anything.
I can see the argument being made for true and possibly even necessary (since “necessary,” is, frankly, rather subjective) but I think trying to describe it as “kind” is pushing it.
“True” means “this is supported by a bunch of undeniable facts”. If it meant “this is a response to another comment”, then it would apply to literally any insult.
@MugaSofer
Lack of kindness I’ll give you – no, I was not being “exceptionally nice” to the person who stormed in, slandered everyone on the board –
– and this is what is really getting at me – seriously, she fucking erases all the liberal highquality thinkers here, and all the myriad different takes everyone has on everything, just so she can dismiss the rightwingers as lockstep unthinking, unreflective morons, and that is just a complete repudiation of what this board and its true, actual diversity means to me (and what I thought it meant to many others) –
– and repeatedly states things which are not true, and no, I will not be “exceptionally nice” to her. She’s gonna get pushback.
‘Mongst my kin, we’d say she needed pushback with a twobyfour, because nothing less was going to slow her down.
Oh no, everyone else has been perfectly reasonable to her, as far as I can see.
*grits teeth* Please consider reading further, because I’m just a bit peeved at your jumping on me when multiple others have been far worse.
And remember that I’m annoyed because she’s slagging on rightwingers/me, but I’m hostile because she’s rude, doesn’t listen, refuses to acknowledge her errors, and says untrue things about the commentariant at large.
And no, Making Light, despite their insular attitude, doesn’t deserve her.
Seriously, tell it to her to her face, or she’s not going to get the hint, and she’s going to go on doing this for weeks. Or until she’s banned, and if we go running to Scott to ban her, instead of first speaking to her straight up, that’s an error on our part, imo.
It’s an undeniable fact that she implied she was leaving (or at least leaving an uncomfortable conversation). So a comment about her leaving is true.
It would not literally apply to any insult because most insults aren’t based on the factual content of the other comment. Furthermore, by your definition, “true” would be redundant with “kind”.
“It’s an undeniable fact that she implied she was leaving”
I don’t think so. I read her comment as implying that she was limiting how active she would be here.
@Jill – “At some point, when I realize that probably no one on this board has ever changed their mind about anything, in response to facts given by someone else. So I stop responding at that point.”
I’ve gone from being strongly anti-gay-marriage to being fairly strongly pro-gay-marriage. I’ve gone from being strongly anti-abortion to weakly pro-abortion. I’ve gone from supporting isolationism to supporting foreign adventures, back to a stronger isolationist position. In the last two years, I’ve gone from strongly supportive of social justice to strongly opposed, based on a wealth of new evidence that’s recently become available. I voted for Bush, changed my mind and voted for Obama, and the way things are shaping up I’ll probably vote for Trump. Having been a convinced global warming skeptic for more than a decade, I came around to accepting that it was a real thing that was happening thanks to reading discussions and evidence presented on this board, ironically just a month or two before the “Pause” became official.
What in your life have you changed your mind about, and why?
@Jill:
Since you bring it up: have you changed your mind about the Koch Brothers contributions?
You claimed the Koch brothers spent $889 million in a single year to influence this election.
Even your own link did not support this claim, but you didn’t realize this, possibly because you didn’t read it carefully enough to notice it was an early estimate (which turned out to be a 20% overestimate) of what a network of contributors (not just the Kochs) was going to spend over two years (not one). The Politifact article I pointed you to gave the corrected estimate and added in the fact that most of the spending being referred to wasn’t aimed at electioneering.
Summing all those factors together, if we had to estimate the actual amount being spent just by the Koch Brothers just in one year on candidates and influencing the election results – the amount you thought was $889 million – my own guesstimate would be around $25 million.
So:
(1) Do you agree that the number you gave – $889 million – was too high by an order of magnitude to reflect what you said it measured?
(2) Is this difference large enough to matter to your views on this subject?
(3) If it does matter: in response to this new information, have you changed your mind at all about how much the Koch Brothers (and other Right Wing sources) are influencing the election?
Do you disagree with the Politifact analysis? Or with mine?
If you do, please clarify. I would be happy to change my mind in response to new information, but you have to work with me here. If you want to change my mind about something by providing me with facts, they have to actually be facts. Not rhetorical overstatements. Not exaggerated or misleading claims made by people with an axe to grind.
Politifact is a very left-wing-friendly source. If even THEY judge your claim false, I tend to give them some benefit of the doubt. They can be wrong. And I can be wrong. But I can’t know if I’m wrong if you give up and throw up your hands at the first sign of disagreement.
Please consider spending a bit more time on this board before making such a blanket uncharitable assertion. Also please reconsider your use of “no one” and “anything”.
Thanks!
@Jill – here’s my few cents.
1) I think people do change their mind about some of their underlying facts. It’s easier to convince someone that unemployment went down instead of up under President X than it is to convince someone that President X’s economic policies were good.
2) Occasionally, people’s overall viewpoint changes, but that’s a slower process.
3) On the gripping hand, I approach this discussion pretty selfishly. (a) First, when I update my priors to more accurately match the evidence, I get smarter, so I like fora where people will challenge my preconceptions and take the time to explain themselves to me. (b) I’m also interested in what techniques work to engage other people, so I learn something by explaining myself. (c) If other people get smarter as a result of talking to me, that’s a bonus, but if I had to bet money on convincing any one person of anything, I wouldn’t.
So I think you should at least address the question honestly when people say you’re wrong on your underlying facts. See if you agree with them, and if so, clarify it. As a result, we’ll all get smarter. If you remain convinced of your ultimate conclusion, that’s fine – you’re right that most of us do.
Jill, you seem to have missed the fact that quite a lot of people here have decidedly left-wing politics and come from a ‘Blue Tribe’ background. Myself, for instance, and our host. Yes, there are many people here from the Red Tribe, but lots of people responding to you have had to rise above their tribal affiliations to criticize you.
(Not me, though.)
If you look around, you’ll see – for example – an anon getting chewed out for speaking about trans men in vaguely mocking terms; do you think the people saying that these comments prove “the anon@gmail experiment was a failure” are particularly right-wing?
The issue is less that people are knee-jerk rejecting your beliefs out of hand – although I’ll note that I think a lot of it is that your borderline-trollish tone is putting people off considering your points as seriously – but that you seem to regard them as so obvious as to regard little justification. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a particularly tribal way of viewing the world – “a barbarian is one who mistakes the customs of his tribe for the laws of the universe”, and all that.
Also, of course, as someone who lives in the Blue Tribe, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about and everything I see is slanted to the left. I don’t live in the US, I live in Ireland, and in fact my intuitions are correct – our media is dominated by a “liberal” coalition to a degree that is undeniable, and in no small part descended from the historical oppression of the Catholic majority. So when I see someone saying the same things who lives in the US, my instinct is that they probably have a point – although, indeed, there’s certainly a strong right-wing branch of the media in the US that doesn’t exist here, I don’t get the impression looking in that it dominates the country.
You say that this is as obvious as that the sky is blue, but consider – the weather can be very different in different places. I suspect it’s completely obvious to everyone where you are, just as it’s obvious to me, looking outside, that the sky is grey-white and we can expect rain.
“This seems unbelievable to me, so I challenge readers to tell me how to reconcile my perceptions with the data: of all candidates (including Trump) , Hillary Clinton has received the most negative media coverage.”
Anecdotally, most of the US liberals (and libertarians!) I know are voting against Donald Trump not for Hillary, so this doesn’t surprise me. She’s very widely disliked among many people who would vote for her, so it’s not surprising to see this reflected in the media. Even the former PAC slogan “Ready for Hillary” smacks of resignation rather than celebration.
True of many folks. There’s a cause-effect relationship there. Hillary’s been bashed constantly for 2 decades. And propaganda works. The constant bashing has affected many– but not all– people’s opinions of her, so lots of people don’t like her. She will win, but only because more people dislike Trump more– not due to media bashing (which is indeed less than with Hillary)– but due to what Trump himself says and does.
Hillary’s favorability has experienced a nosedive over the past five years. And, assuming Hillary stays a loser like she was in 2008, and Trump remains a winner, there’s no reason to expect Trump to lose.
“assuming […] Trump remains a winner, there’s no reason to expect Trump to lose.”
Wow. Just, wow.
Cites Hilary’s unfavorability as a reason she’ll lose to Trump. recordscratch.txt
I’m not citing Hillary’s unfavorability as a reason she’ll lose to Trump. I’m citing her inability to be a winner when faced with a serious opponent, as in 2008, as a reason she’ll lose to Trump.
Being a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ is only an actual skill in the world of Trumplandia.
Well, Trump won the nomination, so we’re officially in Trumplandia.
Trump hasn’t actually won the nomination yet, though it is nearly certain he will do so on July 21st. It is almost equally certain that Hillary will win her nomination on July 25th.
Trump’s window of Winnerish Supremacy seems a bit narrow to be of much predictive value.
So, John, you think Trump’s ability to cause his opponents’ unfavorability to soar relies on the specific qualities of the GOP base, the weakness of his Republican primary opponents, or what? Cruz’s net favorability among Republicans was pretty high -and it only started falling when Cruz started going after Trump, and visa versa.
RE: Postmodernism & David Chapman
I am now motivated to write a postmodern introduction.
Chapman seems on point to me (although my humanities education in Fine Art did just fine in getting me to what feels like stages 4 & 5, but I’m here and smart so maybe it wasn’t that).
Please do. And send me a link when it’s done.
Hillary Clinton promises aliens if elected.
Come on, that’s not an accurate summary. She “has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject.”
But as someone who is going to vote for Clinton, I’ll admit that if a politician I didn’t like was quoted as saying things like this I would freely make fun of them for it:
Well, I don’t plan to vote for her and I am making fun of her for it.
Fair; my only complaint is that you should make fun of her for what she actually said, and she did not promise aliens.
She subtly implied: “maybe there is some evidence of aliens deep in some government files; elect me and maybe you’ll find out!”
… whereas Trump promises to keep all the aliens out!
Vote Trump! Keep earth safe!
Wall, Schmall. We need a Dome.
Paid for by the Small Fuzzy Green Things from Alpha Centauri.
Didn’t they already release the (negative) results of an Air Force investigation, back in the Seventies?
Whether they’re wearing a red cape or not, they are a threat to this country, our freedom, and our lives.
Monsters are coming for your families!
But if their mother is named “Martha,” then obviously that makes everything okay!
Paul Theodore Hellyer, who was the Minister for National Defense in Canada went from believing that aliens might exist, to stating he saw one, to stating that there are multiple species who disaprove of how humanity are treating the environment.
(Interestingly he is an engineer, which seems to be similar to surgeons in terms of crankdom)
She wouldn’t be the first.
Another good reason to have voted for Goldwater!
I was all ready to barge in here and make a Weekly World News joke, and it turned out the actual article beat me to it… ;_;
Has anyone ever looked at correlations between primary turnout and general turnout?
I’m not sure primary turnout is a good predictor, but it’s tough not to put incrementally more stock in Adams’ predictions when WV shows a 65% increase in turnout from 2008 for the Republican primary (both with only one candidate still running), but a 35% decline for the Democratic turnout, even though by May of 2008, Obama’s lead was quite substantial, while I don’t believe Sanders had been eliminated prior to today’s contests.
You might be correct overall, but WV is one of the worst choices to base your theory on. It has a lot of working class whites, and they probably hate Obama’s guts due to the decline of the coal industry (whether or not Obama’s at fault). Furthermore, you I think the 35% decline in Dem turnout has a lot to do with Dems in the state crossing over to vote for Trump. One of the exit polls showed that a plurality of WV Bernie voters said they will vote for Trump if Clinton is nominated. This is likely because WV Dems were marginal dems to begin with and have been drifting away from the Democratic party on economic reasons.
Marginal Dems? They voted for Carter in 1980 and Dukakis in 1988!
Yes, WV is still one of the worst states to base the enthusiasm argument on.
There’s no relationship.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/primary-turnout-means-nothing-for-the-general-election/
There should be adjustments for only one candidate running.
If immigrants were expected to mostly vote for Repubs, do you think Republicans would be more welcoming of immigrants and the Democrats less welcoming? What about the individual voters who comprise each party? It’s my hypothesis that a lot of Republican animosity toward immigrants is because of the long term political implications. Standard media script these days is to constantly mention that “America is becoming diverse” and that “the demographic trends favor the Dems”. Of course the pundits who usually say this can barely conceal their joy, but I imagine the other side resents this a lot. I wonder if a lot of the desire to deport immigrants and restrict immigration is due to this.
I don’t know what to google to find research on this topic. I think it has surely been studied. If anybody knows of the relevant research, please point me in the right direction.
I take immigration seriously, but I’m also a Libertarian who normally votes Republican (I actually don’t vote, but if I did…). Being a Libertarian immigrant, I realize I’m in a small minority. It occurred to me that inviting more people with my background will probably be devastating to the limited gov’t ideals I hold. If my theory on R and D motivations is correct, a good compromise is to balance immigration from countries with likely Dem voters with immigration from countries with likely Repub voters. Other than Cubans who fled Castro, I can’t think of another immigrant group that votes Republican. Of course, it would be just as bad from my point of view to let in repubs of the Trump variety.
I’ve seen a great many conservatives quote and paraphrase Bertolt Brecht on that exact subject. I think there’s a pretty solid consensus among the anti-immigration right that one of the major goals of immigration policies is “to dissolve the people and elect another”.
Eh, chicken and egg problem. Many immigrants actually seem to be socially conservative (for cultural reasons) and economically liberal (for “American Dream”-ish reasons). But Republicans are loudly anti-welcoming, so they vote for Democrats instead.
This does not seem particularly true for Hispanics, at least. Judging by the economic freedom in Meso- and South America, they seem more in line with democratic socialism than anything else.
I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but that link is insufficient to support your argument. People who voluntarily leave their native country and move to a more right-wing one are not a random sample of the population.
I really doubt the self-selection here is sufficient to override the general attitude of Hispanics in their home countries.
American attitudes:
Latin American attitudes:
This link was posted here before in an attempt show that immigrants’ political positions approach those of average Americans, and it takes that spin, but if you look carefully at it, the one part which is broken down by type of immigrant actually shows that Asian immigrants assimilate politically, while Hispanic immigrants do not assimilate and remain Democrats:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/
Needless to say, it’s the Hispanic subgroup that is a political football nowadays.
(And I would imagine it would be even worse if you specifically got figures for Mexicans–“Hispanic” includes Cubans as a subgroup and they’re more likely to be Republican.)
Something interesting in this regard is the difference between the US and Canada: at least anecdotally, the Conservatives in Canada (who are, of course, closer to the centre than the Republicans) do quite well with ethnic minority immigrants.
Even without looking at the numbers for either country, the difference in the perception is dramatic: in the US, immigration is often presented (with gloom-and-doom on the right and hand-rubbing glee on the left) as something that dooms the Republicans, because immigrants go Democrat. In Canada, much less so.
Immigrants don’t go Democrat. Mexican immigrants go Democrat.
I saw the link above – which is why I’m focusing on perception, rather than reality (also, lazy). I find myself wondering, then, why the message becomes “immigrants go Democrat” in the popular imagination, rather than “Mexican immigrants go Democrat”.
Because the only immigrants that anyone is worried about are the Mexican ones (and perhaps the Muslim ones, but there are far fewer of them).
This is also complicated by the fact that pro-immigration groups like to conflate Mexican immigrants and all immigrants for political reasons.
And the South Asian ones, though that’s a different group that Trump is not pandering to. I don’t know how they tend to vote.
Yep. https://popehat.com/2013/12/16/here-versus-there-public-policy-implications/
White farmers from Zimbabwe and South Africa, although there aren’t that many of them.
Other than Cubans who fled Castro, I can’t think of another immigrant group that votes Republican.
Eastern European immigrants to the United States, at least in my experience, and for the same reason.
Eastern European immigrants from before the fall of Communism.
Vietnamese-Americans, also probably for the same reason.
Well, yeah. Just follow the incentives. Democrats want to import more Democratic votes, and Republicans want to restrict the importation of Democratic votes.
So if we make a simple model out of this, immigration is a positive Democratic feedback loop that will make the Democratic become more and more of the “everyone except white people party” over time. Ross Douthat put it pretty well: “…seen from people who used to be a core Democratic constituency and now aren’t, there is a sense in which modern liberalism looks a little like an ethnic patronage machine in which you have everything from the politics of affirmative action to the politics of immigration reform, which all seem to be designed in certain ways to pursue, woo, and reward minority constituencies, and I don’t think it is necessarily unreasonable for a lot of hard-pressed white working class voters to see that as a trend in which they really are losing out.”
If there’s a better way to push the Republican Party into becoming the party of of white identity politics, I can’t think of one.
It’s a win-win, since white nationalism is very low status indeed, almost to the point of being a boogeyman.
It has been my experience that identity politics is really corrosive to a diverse society as ours. It was pretty jarring, actually, to go to college and see people insert race and gender into approximately 90% of political discussions. Even the university president and faculty were engaging in this. I think most whites who engage in this stuff probably think they’re making life easier for people like me (nonwhite), but I strongly doubt that’s what’s happening. Like you said, you can only exclude the majority from identity politics for a certain period of time before they catch on and want in. Then it’s probably too late, because you’ve lost all credibility among average whites.
Emotional responses to news also plays a role in this. Imagine if you constantly saw on the news the crime and race statistics. Liberals say, and I agree, that this is quite harmful to society because it makes people more discriminatory towards blacks who are decent people. Why? Because most of us don’t like criminals and if we are constantly told that a much larger portion of the black population is criminal, we will inevitably have a negative emotional response against blacks. Similarly, conservatives and libertarians hear repeatedly that minorities are going to vote democrat and vanquish the republican party as it exists (pre trump) today. I believe this is doing more to increase prejudice and racism than whatever they accuse trump of doing.
As an extension, Nationalism should actually reduce racial prejudice. If Trump is a Nationalist (not ethnic nationalist), then he would actually be more uniting than the standard liberals of media/academia/gov’t. Let’s see if Trump makes this point. I think he has a good chance in the general if he does.
Yes, Democrats did oppose anti-communist refugees settling in their state.
This is one of the longest comment sections I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how other people find what they said previously, in all of this. I can’t. Well, I could, but it would take me a very long time.
ctrl+f “Jill says”
Where do I type Jill says and then press the ctrl button and F ? I tried in the Search box.
First press Ctrl+F. Your browser should show a little search box. Type “Jill” into that.
Thanks much.
Open the blog page to the post with comments that you want to search.
Hit crtl and f at the same time. A search window should open. This may or may not have something already there.
type in the phrase you want to search – I use ~n a lot because this lets me track updates to on-going conversations even if I haven’t been a part of them.
hit return
you should get a listing inside the search box of how many instances of that phrase were found. Use the up/down arrows to navigate.
Thanks, much.
You must be new here, this length of thread is pretty routine.
As Anonymous says, ctrl+F is your friend – it’s the way I use to see if I’ve got replies, for example.
The date stamp contains a bookmarkable link.
Thanks.
1200 isn’t too unusual for the open threads. at 2000 it starts to bug out a little.
I think you’re stuck on this thread because you’ve posted a lot of short comments. “Jill says” turns up 41 comments. Sometimes, remembering key words to search on will help.
For the crazed wish list, I’ll note that Making Light (a Movable Type blog) has “show all by” for each commenter, actually each email address.
Yes, I’d like that too.
Nancy, you had posted a link to a lecture on propaganda, and I can’t find it now. Would you mind posting it for me again? Thanks.
https://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/tag/ruud
Added:
http://nancylebov.livejournal.com/tag/ruud
(Dreamwidth doesn’t have the icons from the livejournal comment, so I think the comments in the second link are easier to follow.)
Thanks much.
Scott, would you ever consider making multiple consecutive blog posts each time you post?
E.g. you’ve got around 900 comments here now on this post. If you separated this kind of post into, say 5 posts, with a few subjects per post, then there would only be an average of less than 200 comments on each post, so far. And people who wanted to read comments about e.g. immigration, or post comments about that particular subject, would be able to find what they’re looking for a lot quicker.
Ayy lmao
This is the oddest board I’ve visited in a while. I have no idea why you find that funny.
The amount of comments expand to fill the available space. If you separated the post, not only would you reduce the potential of cross subject discussion, you’d get 5 bloated comments sections instead of 1 (or, more likely, a bunch of bloated ones and one or two with a more manageable amount of comments).
Possibly. But I don’t think so. At least I think the conveniences of doing it would outweigh the drawbacks We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.
Of course, this is an empirical question. If Scott ever decides to try out the method of doing a number of posts, rather than one at a time, for a while, we’ll see what happens.
Interesting attitude. You are so sure you are right that it seems hilarious if someone has a different opinion than you. Of course, that’s a very common attitude on the Internet, so no big deal. I just didn’t know that you had any opinion on that method of posting, until you said so just now.
Scott has experimented with how often he holds open threads (monthly versus biweekly versus weekly). Increasing the frequency did not reduce the amount of comments per thread. Whatever Happened To Anonymous is correct.
Jill suggested breaking a link post into multiple simultaneous posts. I don’t think Scott has ever done that.
Jill, you haven’t been here long enough to be familiar with the culture, which means you aren’t likely to be able to predict how commenters will react to changes.
I wonder how close a parallel we have here to that theory about how building more freeways will just lead to additional traffic.
Very common, indeed. In this very same thread someone actually said “I feel like I’m documenting that the sky is blue and the grass is green” regarding their own perceptions.
However, your internet mind reading powers have failed you, I do not find it hilarious that someone has a different opinion than me, for all I know, I could be wrong, I just find it funny that someone has your specific opinion. For one, as jaime noted, reducing the time between threads has not reduced their traffic; Nita rightly points out that this is not the same as doing it simultaneously (and indeed, one would not expect that successively reducing the time between threads were to lead us to a commenting singularity), however this current Links post and the previous Open Thread were indeed posted nearly simultaneously (1 day of delay), and if we count their comments together, they’re on track for the most in a single SSC post.
Further, pointing at the average number is not very helpful, is having one post with 50 comments and one with 950 any better than having a single 1000 one? Due to different levels of interest in different subjects (usually culture war stuff gets the most comments), the distribution of comments is usually pretty lopsided.
Besides, having so many active threads would be a hassle to manage, and tank the exposure of the links that get randomly assigned to the first one.
I’m not even opposed to trying it (even if I were, it’s not like I can do anything about it, I’ve been complaining about the Reign of Terror for a while and that hasn’t stopped the heads from rolling), I just don’t think the benefits, if any, will outweight the inconveniences.
This is the oddest board I’ve visited in a while.
Consider embracing the diversity it represents, instead of trying to change it to match the rest.
I’m aware I can’t change it.
Diversity? It’s certainly isn’t politically diverse. Is it diverse in other ways?
It’s different from other blogs. It adds to the diversity of the blogosphere.
You hear that, Nancy? You and I represent the same political opinions. And Multiheaded. And Vox. And Dieseach. And Protagorous. And all the rest.
We’re way more politically diverse than we are black, which is what “diversity” usually means absent context. But in context the meaning of “diversity” should have been clear – this comments section adds to the brilliant tapestry of broader internet culture, rather than necessarily itself being a brilliant tapestry.
SSC not politically diverse???
I’ll admit it’s long past it’s glory days; the SSC right seems to be more of a dominant presence here than it used to… and this has been discussed ad nauseam in other threads, so let’s not have that argument again.
I suppose that if you’re a long way out in one direction, and there’s no-one else here from that direction, then outgroup homogeneity bias can make a bunch of people all look the same.
I’d say ssc has moved right quite a bit lately, but it’s a fast change which might mean motion in other directions is reasonably likely.
Proud to be associated with Multiheaded in our homogeneous political views – it’s the commonality of our Europeanness, I suppose 🙂
Well, it certainly has moved a bit towards the mainstream when Scott began the purges, but it’s nowhere near as bad as you imply. Death Eaters still lurk in the dark corners.
I think the removal of some of the death eaters actually made the commentariat appear to move right; the death eaters provided a foil to be countered.
My impression is that there are way fewer Death Eaters around, but there’s been an increase in libertarian types.
As far as I can tell, he most underrepresented views here, relative to their overall prevalence in the general population, are mainstream right-wingers (eg, party-line Republicans), followed by mainstream left-wingers.
Nancy, I’m trying to reply to you, but there’s no Reply button on your comment. So I’m replying to someone above your comment. You’re certainly right that I’m unfamiliar with the culture on this board. Quite a mystery to me so far.
Click the up-arrow button at the bottom of the post you want to reply to, and reply to the comment it takes you to. That will append to the thread you want.
It’s a crappy system, yes.
This blog only allows limited nesting of comments, so you can get a very long tail of unnested comments. If it’s not clear who you’re replying to in one of those long tails, you can mention their name and/or include the timestamp and/or include a quote.
This is a pain, but there is no good solution available. That is, I think trn would be better, but it would be work to adapt it to the web and no one has done that.
@Jill
I tend to use a twitter-esque “@person-I’m-replying-to” unless I’m directly quoting, or I’m just making a joke, or it’s otherwise blindingly obvious who I’m replying to.
(One of the few worthwhile contributions to online discussion ever to come out of twitter, IMHO.)
Possibly we find your response funny because a lot of us see it as being odd in strongly positive ways–a place for intelligent and civil discussion among people with a wide range of views, unlike almost all of the rest of online conversations.
Imagine someone who sits down at a restaurant, takes a few bites, looks up to remark “that’s funny. The food actually tastes good.”
Thanks for that thought, David.
It’s funny because when you say:
It wouldn’t work that way. It really wouldn’t.
We’re not laughing at you particularly; we’re laughing at the notion that reducing one long post into handy bite-sized convenient pieces would stop any of us from commenting twenty times per chunk (which would give 20 x 5 = 100 comments each) rather than, say, forty times or so on the one long post 🙂
I know I keep forgetting to comment on something in the usual long posts that struck me if I get sidetracked by getting into a discussion thread on something else; if the long post were broken down into smaller ones, God alone knows the amount of crap I’d churn out!
There’s always the possibility, Deiseach, that the additional posts you would make might be particularly interesting– perhaps even creative breakthroughs. A lot of writers write for a long while before they think of their best material. It often doesn’t come pouring out immediately. It may take a while to arrive at a novel and useful conclusion.
And it may be the same for others. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to say or write a lot of material. That what famous genius writers do.
It might not be a bad idea for me to make links about half as long – the problem is that I don’t have time to flesh out and explain the links posts that often and they have to wait until I do.
I do think the link posts have been getting kind of long lately. Maybe more frequent link posts with fewer links per post. Would also help with the problem where everybody only comments on the one about Donald Trump and ignores the rest.
@ onyomi
I do think the link posts have been getting kind of long lately. Maybe more frequent link posts with fewer links per post.
Or even simultaneous.
Would also help with the problem where everybody only comments on the one about Donald Trump and ignores the rest.
Exactly. This article quickly got more than 1200 comments. For someone most interested in, say, self-driving cars, that’s a lot of comments to skim (or Ctl-F) through.
The word “troll” has undergone a pretty crazy definitional creep. The word actually means someone who assumes the role of someone with provocative/contradictory beliefs in order to get a reaction out of someone else. These days, though, everyone seems to use it as a stand-in for “asshole.”
The words, with its original meaning, has no synonyms. Why give it a definition that so many other words share?
Not giving “troll” an exact definition can be a big boost for the ego. That way, perhaps anyone who disagrees with you (not you Mariani, can just the general “you”) can be called a troll. Or anyone who disagrees with you but doesn’t want to argue back and forth all day about it, as you may be are eager to do, can be called a troll. Or anyone who is “wrong” because they point out a problem, and that problem did not turn out to be true of everyone or everything in the category 100% of the time (nor did they say it was.) Then you demand that the person apologize and get to feel as right and virtuous and exemplary as Moses holding up the 10 Commandments.
That way the troll has to be wrong and awful. And the person yelling “Troll” gets to be right and smart and virtuous. And you get to speculate about exactly what kind of awful person they are, about beliefs and habits that you make up and ascribe to the. A big one-upsmanship play.
There can be cases where the strategies above can’t be carried out. In that case, you just make up something that a person did not say– maybe an exaggeration of what they did say– and argue against that. There is always some nit you can pick or exaggerate into a disagreement where you are “right” and the “troll” is wrong. Don’t ever give up.
Lots of ego here. What can one expect? It’s the Internet, after all. The surprise is that there are some helpful people also.
No one decided to give the word a certain definition. Assholes called their behavior “trolling” and themselves “trolls”, and eventually it caught on.
A lot of trolls (my definition) are assholes. Assholes in general are a waaaay bigger category
Then there’s always “I was only pretending to be retarded” types that call themselves trolls as a refuge
I suppose it’s part of the general tendency of words to degenerate from signifying fairly precise concepts to being mere synonyms for “good thing” and “bad thing”.
Back in the old days “troll” used to have some bite to it because it gave an idea about in what particular way someone was bad. But people wanted to use that bite even when they weren’t entitled to it, and so more and more people use the word, and by now it’s well on it’s way to being sucked dry.
C. S. Lewis in _Studies in Words_ has some good examples of this phenomenon. “Verbicide”, he calls it. We can’t stop it, he argues, but at least we can avoid participating it it ourselves.
Yeah, I agree. But, I don’t think trolling should just be about a reaction (though there is that) – there has to be some art to it. I like to view it as a way of exposing rubbish. The poison is the cure.
Anyway, here’s the opening gambit of a nice bit of trolling I did on the feminists a few months ago – what I’m looking for is something that will be irritating or stupid-seeming enough to get people to jump on it, but that can actually be worked into something that makes perfect sense (from their perspective).
“Until employees are able to sack their employers, policing ‘problematic’ compliments is pure bagatelle (if female intelligence were attractive, would it be problematic to compliment a woman on her quick wits?)
It’s the power structures that are the problem, not the particular form in which these power imbalances express themselves.”
They did not like that one bit. Though, of course, if people are being entirely intellectually honest, there is no need for trolling, and you can just play devil’s advocate.
My memory of the use of “troll”, going back at least a couple of decades, was that it included being uninterested in actually arguing for the beliefs in question. The prototypical troll made a post likely to provoke responses in a group then left, often to make the same post elsewhere.
Thus it mixed the “troll under a bridge” image with the “trolling as a form of fishing” image.
“The prototypical troll made a post likely to provoke responses in a group then left, often to make the same post elsewhere.”
That’s still 4chan’s definition
Traditionally (well, circa 1995) you were supposed to stick around for a bit. At least long enough to post the traditional sign-off: YHBT. YHL. HAND.
>The words, with its original meaning, has no synonyms.
I’ve seen “false flag” or “agent provocateur” used to mean this, kind of, in a more “culture war”-y way.
(Personally, I still use the standard meaning of troll.)
In case anyone would like some time off from discussing American politics, the Harper administration censored a lot of Canadian science.
Speaking as a Canadian scientist, although this almost certainly will never have personal repercussions (nobody caaaaaaaaaares about my work) it’s still welcome.
What’s more pressing is funding. NSERC grants are still underfunded, with more funds going to the Research Chairs programs. CFI continues to focus on big purchases, with a bare pittance for maintenance. While I’m OK with the changes happening to the Post-Graduate Scholarship program (fewer awards tiers), restricting applications for the Postdoctoral Fellowship to once per lifetime is, frankly, insane.
At this point I barely care about being able to share my research; I’m much more concerned with being able to afford to carry it out!
I realize I’m a couple of days late to the party, but thanks for the link. This should have been a more major news item.
Us Australians are much more civilised – we just fire scientists studying politically inconvenient things, even the leading authorities.
“Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment”, Okbay et al 2016 https://www.dropbox.com/s/my9719yd8s5hplf/2016-okbay-2.pdf
Aside from, obviously, being super important in finding more intelligence hits, check out extended data figure 9 a. More evidence for balancing selection of intelligence because it’s too developmentally fragile/expensive?
And the extensive FAQ for the study: http://ssgac.org/documents/FAQ_74_loci_educational_attainment.pdf
The kicker:
As a group, the 74 SNPs explain 0.43% of the variation in educational attainment across individuals in the sample. Individually, each of the 74 SNPs had an extremely small influence on educational attainment. The variant with the strongest association explained only 0.035% of the variation in educational attainment. Put another way, the difference between people with 0 and 2 copies of this genetic variant predicts (on average) about 9 extra weeks of schooling.
Not sure what you mean by kicker. This is exactly what was predicted early on when candidate-genes failed to replicate, it’s what Rietveld et al 2013 found, and it’s what studies since have found, so it’s no surprise that Okbay et al 2016 also found it (it would be a serious issue if it had instead found large effects). IQ and things IQ affects like schooling are highly polygenic. This has the interesting implication that while it makes selection/editing less profitable in the short run, editing is more profitable in the long run.
The first few paragraphs of this article are standard intra-Christian exhortation boilerplate
Just noticed, and very much appreciate the edit, Scott!
So I looked at Chapman’s “Probability theory does not extend logic” and some things aren’t making sense. He claims that probability theory does extend propositional logic, but not predicate logic.
But if we assume a countable universe, probability will work just as well with universals and existentials as it will with conjunctions and disjunctions. Even without that assumption, well, a universal is essentially an infinite conjunction, and an existential statement is essentially an infinite disjunction. It would be strange that this case should fail.
His more specific example is: Say, for some x, we gain evidence for “There exist distinct y and y’ with R(x,y)”, and update its probability accordingly; how should we update our probability for “For all x, there exists a unique y with R(x,y)”? Probability theory doesn’t say, he says. But OK — let’s take this to a finite universe with known elements. Now all those universals and existentials can be rewritten as finite conjunctions and disjunctions. And probability theory does handle this case?
I mean… I don’t think it does. If you have events A and B and you learn C, well, you update P(A) to P(A|C), and you update P(A∩B) to P(A∩B|C)… but the magnitude of the first update doesn’t determine the magnitude in the second. Why should it when the conjunction becomes infinite? I think that Chapman’s claim about a way in which probability theory does not extend predicate logic, is equally a claim about a way in which it does not extend propositional logic. As best I can tell, it extends both equally well.
“Mathematical logic is the modern, formal version of rationality in the narrow sense, and probability theory is the modern, formal version of empiricism.
It is sometimes said that probability theory extends mathematical logic from dealing with just “true” and “false” to a continuous scale of uncertainty. Some have said that this is proven by Cox’s Theorem. These are both misunderstandings, as I’ll explain below. In short: logic is capable of expressing complex relationships among different objects, and probability theory is not.
A more serious corollary misunderstanding is that probability theory is a complete theory of formal rationality; or even of rationality in general; or even of epistemology.
In fact, logic can do things probability theory can’t. However, despite much hard work, no known formalism completely unifies the two! Even at the mathematical level, the marriage of rationality and empiricism has never been fully consummated.
Furthermore, probability theory plus logic cannot exhaust rationality—much less add up to a complete epistemology.”
This is basically gibberish.
I have no idea why this guy thinks it’s a revelation that probability theory doesn’t dictate how much a universal generalization is confirmed by the observation of one of its instances, This is obviously a job for a confirmation theory.
Chapman writes well, but I would like to add a disclaimer for anyone who goes on to explore more of his site(s): don’t rely on him to interpret Buddhism for you. If anyone’s very interested I could write quite a bit on this, but the gist of it is that he takes an extremely heterodox position, claims it is actually representative, and then argues against it by contrasting his own heterodox interpretation as obviously better.
It’s interesting, to be sure, and not without value — but it’s not informative for someone not already very familiar with more fair and charitable explanations.
As someone with a mild interest in Buddhism I’d like to hear a bit more but don’t want to ask anyone to exert effort out of proportion with my level of interest. With that in mind, could you give a rough idea of what his heterodoxy is about in a paragraph or two?
That sounds more-or-less fair, although I’ll note that I always got the impression Chapman’s version was heterodox. My bet is that I’ll like it better, but I didn’t get the feeling he was passing it off as the actually orthodox position.
A rather amusing collection of Political Compass-style charts, both apparently serious and obvious parodies.
I fucking lost it when I got to the anatomical charts.
From now on I politically identify as “lower caudal fin”.
(The idea behind the Nolan cube is actually kinda interesting, though, even if the chart is crap.)
Jaime! I missed you during the last Open Thread, since this links thread went up so quickly, but I’ve got the Gods of the Copybook Headings nailed down if’n you want to discuss the memorization of such.
(Also, I found the Transmission mildly amusing when I first read it, but rereading it for the sci-fi book discussion made it seem a lot more contrived. Plus, I don’t believe minds can be uploaded and transmitted in the first place, which rather reduced the impact of the story, as all those folks were already dead in my view. I look forward to the Cold Equations next OT, though!).
You are better at this than me. I’ve got most of the poem down, but I still need to memorize the last three stanzas. Memorizing the geological periods was the hardest part; there is nothing logically connecting the Cambrian to the perils of pacifism, for example.
(I didn’t use to believe in mind uploading, either, until I read the Reductionism sequence and “Staring into the Singularity”, which is incidentally my favorite Yudkowsky article ever. Now I am pretty convinced that it is possible in principle. What is the nature of your objections?)
It helps that the poem follows a logical progression:
The first 4 stanzas introduce the Gods of the Copybook Headings and how we came to turn away from them
The next 3 (the geological periods) detail the failed promises of the Gods of the Market, in contrast to the Copybook Headings’ warnings.
The final 3 are on the fall of the Market gods, and the bloody return of the Copybook Headings. I’d advise concentrating on first lines: “then the gods of the market tumbled, their smooth tongued-wizards withdrew,” “as it will be in the future, it was at the dawn of man:”, and “but when all this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins,” as then the rhyme will typically let you get the rest of the stanzas easily.
(My main objection is that if you systematically destroy a brain and replace it with electronic synapses, I think that you just get at best a copy of a person, not the original individual. Similar to some teleportation schemes that depended on rebuilding people out of the molecules available in the destination – I don’t think it’s the same individual.
Basically, I see no reason to expect consciousness to be continuous, and I can see no way to prove that it would be so.
Then again, I am a believing Christian, in contrast to the majority of LWers, so that’s undoubtedly informing my beliefs in this area).
I understand the macrostructure of the poem, but its really easy for me to accidentally, for example, say “When the Cambrian measures were forming, we were promised the Fuller Life” because there is no way to know that this is wrong except by memorizing which geological period goes witch which stanza.
(Ah, the just-a-copy objection. A nondestructive upload ends up with a physical you and a virtual you, while a nondestructive transporter ends up with a you here and a you there, so a lot of people have the intuition that the virtual or distant you is just a copy, and the destructive versions of the above procedures merely happen to kill the original at the same time they create the copy. I think it makes more sense to think of a nondestructive upload or transport as splitting you into two instances which have an equally valid claim to being you, per the relevant Yudkowskyian arguments, and so a destructive upload or transporter merely take a situation in which there is a single local or physical instance of you and create a situation in which there is a single distant or virtual instance of you, which is what we wanted.)
The MSPaint-doodled one with the quotes from strawmen in each of the quadrants was pretty good, too. But then, I tend to be easily amused. At least it was equally unfair to everyone!
But yeah, the anatomical charts definitely took the cake.
I liked that one too.
With regards to the income/productivity gap, the Heritage Foundation has an explanation along similar lines but I think it is a bit better than the one you linked to. The Heritage Foundation keeps its focus on labor compensation specifically, includes the impact of faster depreciation, and I don’t think it makes sense to adjust for the Employment to Population ratio.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/07/productivity-and-compensation-growing-together
Related to the weasel story, a personally amusing crackpot theory: Bizarre accidents at particle accelerators, particularly unlikely ones involving small animals, are the result of the accidental destruction of all more-likely timelines if the particle physics lab had continued operating uninterrupted.
Related crackpot theory: A time machine is theoretically possible, but actually using one destroys the timeline in which it occurs. Thus, the only timeline we can experience will be ones in which increasingly unlikely events occur to prevent the intentional or accidental use of a time machine. In the grim darkness of the far future, this is exploited to create weapons that when activated cause the spontaneous creation of singularities, strangelets, and other exotic particles or events which come into being to destroy the time machine-warhead. Reliability is an issue though, as the weapon can also spontaneously become, say, a vase of petunias.
See “How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
> A time machine is theoretically possible, but actually using one destroys the timeline in which it occurs
My favorite permutation of this, c/o Charles Stross: time machines are possible, but the only stable timeline is one in which they are never invented. Therefore, people will keep using time machines to fuck with the past until, by chance, their interventions change history so much that they are not born in the new timeline. This keeps happening until someone’s changes result in the time machine never being invented, leaving a stable sans-time-machine history littered with the wreckage of the time travelers who stopped time travel from ever being invented. This explains Atlantis, etc.
AKA “Niven’s Law”, from Larry Niven’s “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel” (1971): “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
John Brunner did that one first, in the 1969 version of Times Without Number. It’s one of my personal favourites, worth a look if you can find a copy at the local library.
Some links I’ve been meaning to share:
Why Japanese web design is awful
Gap between foody culture and what American really eat
(Remember next time you’re tempted to say Americans tried “low fat” diets and got fatter that what they actually eat consists largely of butter mixed with mayo)
Are smart people less happy?
Another reason I Fucking Hate Science: Bill Nye is a huckster
Something close to my own heart: What does a Russian literature expert look like? Not me, apparently. (As a white guy trying to teach Asian studies I encounter this problem in the supposedly ultra-tolerant academy where, for example, my Jamaican friend who researches 18th c. French Opera is constantly pushed to go into Caribbean and postcolonial studies).
Even if Allrecipes were representative of America, it’s just a snapshot in time, so it doesn’t tell you about change. Here are some time series. It doesn’t directly address the question of fat (or even calories), but the fall in red meat since 1970 is people following advice. I think it is also true that chicken is leaner than it used to be.
Interesting data. Thanks.
Wild-arse guess: Scaling up offence and defence tends to advantage offence because you only need to get one thing through and defence has to cover everything etc. etc.. So as people get more intelligent, their ability to self-criticise improves faster than their ability to feel like they’re still a good person.
That Allrecipes article reads as if the author is a member of the Brahmin class discovering the Vaisya for the first time.
Audobon’s fakes I have no idea whether I should trust the debunking.
Medieval morningstar may not have been a real weapon
The article is talking about flails.
Morningstars are something different. They are spiked maces (i.e. clubs) with no chain. The spikes may extend from a cylindrical shape on the end, or the end may be more spherical.
As far as I know, morningstars were quite real.
From the Wikipedia article talking about the supposed military flail (which mentions the controversy concerning whether they existed):
Somewhat related, I have heard arguments that flexible Chinese weapons, like the three-section staff, the less traditional two-section staff (i. e. nunchaku Bruce Lee made famous), nine-section whip, and rope dart were never used for anything other than showing off/performance. They certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice in a real battle, though I guess I can see there being some benefit to how concealable the whip and rope dart potentially were, though I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just carry small throwing knives in the latter case.
Related is the flexible sword in Kalaripayattu, called an urumi, I believe.
Not saying one couldn’t seriously hurt someone (or oneself) with any of these things, just not sure whether they were ever seriously used.
I am disappointed that, header image aside, there are no Airplane! jokes in the airplane inequality post or its comments. Shirley that’s a way to make statistics more enticing.
There were, but the jokes didn’t survive translation from the original Jive.
Proposed new terminology for a certain much-maligned political group.
I like it.
Alt-Right, Ctrl-Left… Shift-Up?
Ooh, and it captures their totalitarian bent nicely. I endorse this.
https://twitter.com/drethelin/status/686372470203387905 alas
No one seemed to have edited the Wikipedia page on ketamine, so I gave it a shot. If that’s a terrible summary, or if I should change the surrounding paragraphs, please let me know, but this really isn’t my field. (If you don’t feel like editing it yourself, reply here and I’ll see what I can do.) Someone already expanded the article for HNK, so there’s that… maybe there’s something to be added on the page for AMPA receptors, too?
Our future police force in training.
They’ve issued a challenge to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, no news if the Nordies have taken it up yet.
Discussion of general principles for programming
From the comments:
“Every program is an attempt to capture and automate a decision-making process. If you don’t fully understand the specific process you are working on, nothing else matters.” — dsrtao
“True — although that comes with the flip-side, that you often (almost always, in my experience) learn along the way that you *didn’t* completely understand that process at the beginning, and need to adjust as you go. *Believing* that you fully understand what you’re doing, and being bull-headed about that, is one of the most common failure modes…” –jducoeur
Whenever I see stuff like this where everybody emphasises inline commenting, I remember a bunch of the scientist code I’ve seen with this classic commenting style:
I liked this:
Do you know what I think would be a great feature? If each post had a little button you could press that would make you jump immediately to the post to which it was a response within the nested hierarchy. Obviously this won’t work after the maximum number of nestings has been reached, at which point most people explicitly state what they’re responding to, but it seems it would help in cases when someone responds to something to which there have been many previous responses at different levels. Sometimes it is quite a pain to scroll up long enough and keep your eye on the nesting levels in order to figure out what exactly they are responding to.
Click on the little up arrow right next to ‘Hide’.
Oh, I figured there might be such a feature and I was just stupidly missing it. Thanks!
First, may I say this blog is orders of magnitude better than others that I regard as very good? How you find all this stuff is beyond me.
On the point about negative news stories about Hillary, I think it is simply that the Republicans have bloodied the noses of the MSM repeatedly, but Democrats just take it. In addition, I think a portfolio of critical reports against Democratic politicians is an MSM reporter’s price of admission for access to conservative sources. Of course none of these factors apply to the conservative media, so if conservative outlets are included, the “balance” is perpetually against any successful Democratic politician. Last of course is the fact that Hillary has been around a long time, creating endless opportunities for lazy reporters to Google old stories and recycle them.