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What was the result of the IARPA prediction contest (2010-2015)?
Below I present what seem to me very basic questions about the contest. I have read vague statements about the results that sound like people are willing to answer these questions, but the details seem oddly elusive. Is there is some write-up I am missing?
How many teams were there? 5 academic teams? Who?
What was the “control group”? Were there two, an open benchmark and another group consisting of intelligence analysts with access to classified information? More?
What were the Brier scores of the various teams in various years?
When Tetlock says that A did 10% better than B, does he mean that the Brier score of A was 90% of the Brier score of B?
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I can identify a few teams:
GJP (Berkeley/Penn: Tetlock, Mellers, Moore)
DAGGRE/SciCast (GMU: Twardy, Hanson)
Michigan: Page
MIT – another team, or joint with Michigan?
crossposted to LW
Anyone notice the recent spate of space 4x’s? If you could design one, what would you change to the formula? Most of them seem to adhere to tradition so closely I’m curious if the problem is innate conservativism, programming hurdles or myopia in taste.
I haven’t really played any spaced based 4x or tie fighter/wing-commander style games since Freelancer and Sins of a Solar Empire, but my impression has been that Eve Online is unique enough, big enough, deep enough, and we’ll executed enough to just suck the oxygen out of both genres.
I mean it essentially did what every MMO, 4x and space pilot game dreamed they could do but gave up immediately after.
Eve doesn’t play in the same space at all. It’s not a game about building empires, it’s a genuine world of cutthroat space pilots in which, as in all worlds, humans have built empires. You can’t fire it up and go build a galaxy-spanning empire. (You can fire it up and be cannon fodder in a genuine, if nonlethal, war, though.)
Perhaps this explains why alien von neumann machines never colonised this galaxy – they are all busy playing EVE…
Yeah. The space that used to be occupied by things like the X series has been split between EVE and things like Elite: Dangerous, which focuses on giving you the things X can’t. Note should also be given to the space survival sandbox genre (titles like Empyrion or Starmade), which also grabs a piece of the same pie.
I don’t think EVE is eating any 4x players. I think EVE takes its bite from MMO players.
I’d want one that’s more like Aurora 4x, except with an interface meant for a human and optimized for performance.
I’m very gradually building a game engine that interfaces with a SQLite database specifically for this purpose. It’s a second- or third-line project, however, so expect virtually no progress ever.
That’s exactly what Aurora is. It literally uses a database as its backend.
I’d love to see a decent automation AI added to Aurora, but that’s not going to happen unless some game studio decides to pick it up. Making the game is the easy part there.
I know that’s what Aurora is, hence adding a SQLite database backend to my existing game engine. The difference is that I have a game engine, rather than some rather scrappily designed VB. In particular, being able to access the database from both Lua and C++ seems rather promising.
(Also I’m doing some experiments with driving my engine’s GUI from SQLite tables. But that’s a weird afterthought of a thing.)
And you expect to be able to reverse-engineer Aurora well enough to be able to make it work? Also, are you aware that it’s being rewritten in C#?
No. I expect to be able to build an interesting space empires game out of the same kind of general premise. I have no particular desire to specifically clone Aurora, that seems eminently pointless.
(Actually I expect to get a framework built, create a test case, post excitedly on social media about it then lose interest and move on to something else. But you get my point.)
As for the C# version… I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’ve been playing Stellaris recently. They seem to have the bones of some kind of robust internal political system in the game’s mechanics, but there’s not any flesh on them right now. I think that if and when Paradox does make those gameplay elements meaningful, they’ll provide a more distinctive and engaging 4x experience.
Indeed, because it’s a Paradox game, I’m holding off on buying it until it’s been patched a couple of times.
Wise move. Paradox games are basically built to be bought in their “Game plus all DLC to date” forms.
“Game plus all DLC on Steam Sale” is my SOP for most games
“It’s The Current Year god damn it, how are you people still incapable of making city/planet governor automation any better than Alpha Centauri?!!”
I think a big part of the problem is that the recent boom is mostly nostalgia-fueled, so any changes to the traditional model are going to be met with suspicion.
It sounds like Stellaris got a lot of things right, but nobody’s discovered a way to get rid of the micromanagement that bogs down galaxy-spanning-4x play in the late game, without oversimplifying to the point that the early game is boring and content-free.
Definitely. I think that “the Sector governors who you turn things over to so that you don’t have to micromanage might rebel against you to overthrow you or seek indepdence” would be an amazing improvement in this department.
(Basically, bring in something like the internal politics from Crusader Kings II. They did a nice job reducing the late game power/boredom factor there.)
I’d be happy if governors just didn’t make all-robot populations try to grow food they don’t need on barren tomb-worlds you can’t grow food on. >_<
I think the food issues got fixed with the recent patch? (at least they claimed so, I haven’t bothered looking at the sector planets in that much detail)
I don’t know why they decided that Stellaris wouldn’t have direct interaction between different leader characters; but I think that was a big mistake.
It sounds like Stellaris got a lot of things right, but nobody’s discovered a way to get rid of the micromanagement that bogs down galaxy-spanning-4x play in the late game, without oversimplifying to the point that the early game is boring and content-free.
Stellaris actually has the opposite problem. The early game is interesting and full of things to do, but then you grow to the point where the micromanagement-limiting mechanics kick in, making the mid-game boring and content-free. (I’m told the late game is somewhat better due to the catastrophes. Honestly, I never got that far.)
Honestly, I’d just add a lot more content and depth to Stellaris. It looks like it has the potential to do it right.
The biggest change I’d do is give each scientist three traits at level 1; one of which would always be a field of study (like the Rocketry Expert trait). Then I’d make anomalies more involved, with you getting multiple options based on your scientist’s traits and your ethos – a bit like FTL’s text encounters.
The results of an anomaly would have long term impacts. For example, if you find an ancient mining drone, you might unlock an entire new section of the tech tree for your empire. Or you might get the opportunity to design and add a new species to your empire.
My other ideas are smaller (I’ve just been replaying the early game). For example, I’d really like the ability to add stars to my empire just by clicking on them – imagine drawing a circle on a map in your throne room and saying “mine”. Then when you encounter another empire you compare maps, and if you’ve both claimed the same stars you have to either negotiate a deal (with happiness penalties for giving up territory, bigger ones if you got a bad deal) or have a small war to sort it out. After you’ve met empires it costs influence to claim stars; but the claim is automatically known to other empires so no more overlap.
Regarding the conservatism angle…
The 4X genre underwent a slow death/evolution process in the 00s which more-or-less reduced the field to real-time 4X experiences like Sins of a Solar Empire and, of course, the perennial iterations of Civ. The Space Empires series has fallen on its backside and with it, the old-school approach more or less died.
The recent resurgence has been an attempt to reclaim the original form, in the case of Stellaris while also basically still being a PDX grand strategy. The only reason that’s possible is because a lot of other genres have been gradually absorbing 4X elements for decades, which in turn has fed the death of the original concept; to a degree, “4X” isn’t a coherent concept any more.
Of course, another way of looking at it is that Aurora has already claimed the position of “Platonic form of the 4X genre”…
I’ve played a bunch of them–Distant Worlds, Endless Space, Stardrive, Sid Meier’s Starships (it kind of counts), Stellaris, and more that aren’t coming to mind. I’m not actually sure that there are disproportionately many of them, rather than just the indie gaming scene / digital distribution making lesser known titles more salient.
I think the fundamental problem with Space 4Xs is that they’re not operating at the right level of abstraction. The future and past are fundamentally different in a way that makes it painfully obvious when someone is taking a pre-modern way of dealing with things and applying it to the future. (It’s easier to complain about individual things than paint a holistic picture, and I probably shouldn’t go on a rant.)
To talk about Stellaris specifically, there are a lot of things that are just bad about it as a game, but which I expect them to patch. (For example, I discovered yesterday that the research agreement–which makes you researching a tech that they have 25% cheaper–is 25% of the base tech price. You know, the one that increases by 10% for every planet and 1% for every pop, so it basically means 2 less planets and 5 less people. Thanks, that was totally worth it. 😐 )
But one of the weirdest things about Stellaris is energy coming from… mostly power plants and gas giants, and sometimes stars. Why, exactly, am I not able to capture solar output directly? You’d think building Dyson clouds to capture energy would be the obvious way to do things, not building mining stations around a gas giant.
So I think most of my game design effort is focused on pre-modern 4X games. It’s getting to the point where I really need to just throw together a prototype and see if the sorts of systems I think would make a good underpinning can just work at all.
Back when Master of Orion III was in development, we were promised an “imperial focus” dynamic in which the player would be allowed only a limited ability to manage game events. Every command issued, screen or window opened, would cost “focus points”, and when you were all out of those there was nothing for it but to hit the “end turn” button and trust the AI to handle everything else as best it could.
This, of course, was never implemented, and MoO III sank into oblivion. Almost certainly the AI of the time wasn’t up to the task. Probably the AI of today isn’t up to it. Even CKII still gives me fits of “Aargh why would you do something so boneheadedly stupid!”, and that’s apparently after being told not to waste 75% of its clock cycles deciding who to castrate.
But I’d like to see it done right. Done right, such a mechanic would almost force the game to be equally engaging throughout, and it would change gameplay for the better.
It sure would be nice in, for example, the Hearts of Iron games, which quickly descend into micromanagement hell.
The biggest issue with achieving this goal is that a surprising proportion of players actively want micromanagement and wallow in it to the furthest possible extent. I am relatively certain this is the case, as I am exactly such a player; I actively miss the wildly overcomplicated tech tree of HOI1, for example.
Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a golden medium somewhere. I think this might lie in providing high-detail-tolerant players with unintrusive mechanics which keep the player from effective hyperengagement. I don’t think that “focus points” were the right approach, though – maybe something like the “orders delay” in Aurora but with a broader context?
If micromanagement is possible and advantageous, I want it. How can I be playing a game and not want to win? Even if I set a personal victory condition of “win without micromanagement because that’s more fun and rewarding”, and I’m all about personal victory conditions, at the margin one more bit of detailed management is always going to be a personal win at the time. And if there are times when the micromanagement is going to be an unfun slog, then still better than watching the AI bollix up everything I’ve been working on.
It doesn’t follow that I “actively want micromanagement”. I want, crudely speaking, for micromanagement to not be possible, not be advantageous, and not be necessary.
More elegantly, I want the AI to be both good and responsive enough to trust with most things, for micromanagement to be possible when something looks particularly interesting or critical, but for it to come with costs that make excessive micromanagement to be suboptimal. “Focus points” plus a good AI, is as good a proposal for that as I have yet seen. Orders delay seems like it would prevent the bits of carefully targeted micromanagement that are going to be necessary with any plausible near-term AI.
Orders getting delayed could be an interesting mechanic depending on how it’s handled – I’d think the most plausible method would be increasing delay with distance from the “capital”, possibly with different capitals for different purposes (military, expansion, and policy, for instance). You also could have Interesting Tradeoffs if you combined this with the focus points you mention.
Hmm…
I’m reminded of Blood Magic in Dominions (last one I played much was D2, I hate the wizard aging mechanic). Very powerful, but required absurd levels of micromanagement to the point where it was a sort of balance factor.
I had another idea for limiting micromanagement, somewhat similar to the idea of “focus points.” Rather than having a limited amount of interaction in general, limit the times when interaction is allowed. My idea is to only allow control of your empire occasionally, and the rest of the time it is controlled by a an AI in observer mode. The player would be able to choose when to take control, and their control would last for some period of time, perhaps a leader’s term in office (anywhere from a few years to life). There would be limitations on how often you could take control, so the player has to plan strategically when you can make the most impact, whether by taking advantage of an opportunity or by staving off some crisis.
I feel like most 4X games suffer from a lack of dynamism, whereby civilizations rise and fall. Paradox games in observer mode are the only example I can think of where there is a real risk of empire collapse, resulting in a huge power void. If a player is involved, then the nation under human control tends to enjoy a mostly monotonic rise to prominence. By injecting AI control into your game, you can add some fear. I recognize that I could try this today using console commands, but I haven’t yet.
There was a Civ 4 mod that tried to inject this dynamism, “Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization” or something like that. I played it, and it turns out it’s really aggravating for the player when there is a real risk of their empire collapsing despite their best efforts.
I feel like smashing what the player has built so that they can have fun picking up the pieces is not the way to keep 4X games interesting. Rather, I think what you really want is to keep challenges scaling so that as your empire gets bigger it faces bigger threats. There are attempts at this in some Paradox games, like the endgame event chains in Stellaris, the coalition mechanic in EU4, and the Mongol Invasions in CK2, but I don’t think they’ve quite figured out the magic formula.
I’d always interpreted Rhyse as more addressing a complaint about simulation: There are a lot of things that affect the long term health of an empire that the State Policy God of that empire wouldn’t actually be able to control. Rhyse tried to simulate some of those issues.
CK2 has the best approach for this, or at least it tries: not so much the Mongol invasions, but rather the fact that the larger your empire gets, the more easily it’s going to fragment due to internal conflict.
Of course, experienced players still find large realms relatively easily to control even in CK2, but it’s a nice concept. You don’t break big empires by introducing even bigger enemies, but rather by introducing internal turmoil that gets harder and harder to manage.
I’ve always had a notion of tying tech trees to various types of unobtanium. That is, there’d be uu1, which was good for making armor and kinetic weapons, uu2 was good for shields and energy weapons, and so on. You’d follow down tech paths for the resources you had a lot of, each with differing strengths, weaknesses, and combinations with other unobtainiums.
This would make tech and empires more varied, you couldn’t just rush straight to the whatever-cannon if you don’t have whatever-cannon juice. It would also create more interesting interactions and decisions. You’ve won the war, do you want to take the nice developed planet, or the toxic hellhole that just happens to be full of the right sort of space rock?
Noted. I really rather like this idea.
Civilization 6 looks like they are planning on operating that way; meet a criteria and the associated tech is 50% cheaper.
Endless Space did this somewhat, and I liked it for that. You also couldn’t see which planets had X resource until you’d researched a certain technology.
I have not played the recent ones, but I’ve noticed a really big but quite subtle regression between Master of Orion and MOO2 in terms of diplomacy, and everything I have played since then followed the MOO2 mistake.
Basically, MOO2 forced the AIs to roleplay. So the best strategy was to befriend everyone and tech/develop like crazy. Then someone frames someone and the shit is going down as various alliances force everyone to attack everyone and use scorched earth approach at that because there’s not enough actual spaceships, only the threat that one can switch one’s economy to military track with disastrous consequences for the attacker.
MOO1 didn’t have that, it was a pure game, entirely”Realpolitik” if you will, nobody would sign a nonaggression pact with you to roleplay, so it was actually way way more interesting as far as strategic gameplay goes. It’s not one big showdown, it was action all along.
Try it in dosbox, it was really a total mindfuck the first few times I’ve played it, “they do that? And I actually have to use all of the early combat tech?”
I’m going to lay the blame on justified conservatism. 4X tends to produce long games with subtle feedback systems (early weakness screws you later, low novelty cripples the satisfaction of good gameplay). A single design error will send a good game into meltdown; see the fights over whether Stellaris is excellent or too unreliable to be worth playing.
So innovation in 4X is genuinely dangerous and difficult compared to other genres. If you can clean up someone else’s mistakes and upgrade their graphics, you’ll get steady sales. If you take a bold new direction, you have a high chance of a massive downside.
I’d add costs to maintaining everything. Research a project? You have the knowledge now, but it’s institutional – you have to invest in schooling to keep it in your population, you have to invest in engineering to keep being able to work with it, invest in fabrication to be able to build it. Then there’d be “commitments”, things like pacifism or standard of living, that you can lock yourself into for bonuses but that limit your options and impose further costs. The goal is to have a situation where empires can actually collapse from size and where a new player can in theory come in halfway through and not be automatically dogfood, where specialization gives you advantages but isn’t free, and where Race to Exponential Growth is not automatically the dominant strategy. A game where if you find ruins, they’re not there because the game placed the “ruins” entity, but because there was an actual civilization there that hit its end state in the actual history of the game you’re playing.
Ooh, yeah, that would be great. Costs increase so long as there’s possibility to pay them, then some event smacks the costs greater than possible income, just a bit, and it steamrolls downward from there, since the vast majority of that income is *also* predicated on that which the costs were paying for. The empire goes into meltdown, unable to generate revenue to pay for generating revenue…
It’s up to you, of course, and I’ll enjoy your posts either way, but I prefer shorter, more frequent posts.
I tend to disagree. Most of Scott’s greatest hits are pretty long.
Seconded.
How about we compromise on long, frequent, and of course high quality posts?
You can get this all for the low low price of whatever-itll-take-to-rent-a-scott.
By its own admission, Scott’s writing is a sort of inverse giffen good, wherein the higher the demand/price people try to pay for it, the less of it gets produced.
“By its own admission, Scott’s writing is a sort of inverse giffen good, ”
I thought that was with the idea of having to write specific content though. Like Handel chafing at having to write some water music for the King while he had an Oratorio buzzing in his head.
Rent Scott — but without rules! : -)
+1.
(Irony!)
Er,comment didn’t go through?
But,you don’t want what happened to Moldbug to happen to this place. The guy was once recommended to by someone, but checking out the blog…you wonder if he leads anywhere.
“For an example, Moldbug responded … by writing a seven-part sequence of posts in September 2007, totalling 37,941 words, in which he conclusively proved, step by step, thread by thread, detail by detail, that Dawkins was, for all his protestations of atheism, in fact … a cultural Christian![29] Dawkins, of course, stated the same thing in December 2007 in four and a half words: “I’m a cultural Christian”.[30] ”
Vs…
“Moldbug’s early “The magic of symmetric sovereignty” (19 May 2007)[31] is short, comprehensible and gets its point across in 1,666 words, rather than barely getting started in that much space.”
I think the phenomenon you’re observing is actually not one of writing long posts, though correlated with it. Namely, presumably Moldbug’s blog got into the rabbit hole of self-referential internet discussions and doctrinal arguments within an insular community.
I tend to prefer (with exceptions, of course) slatestarcodex posts which are prompted by random things Scott thinks or reads about rather than rebuttals or explainers prompted from within the rationalist (or around-rationalist) community. I’d say that the majority of Scott’s posts are of the “fresh” sort, and so wouldn’t be worried about this.
True, though I think Scott understands the value of concision better than Moldbug, for whom waxing eloquent seems to be something of an end value, or at least, became so.
All things equal, of course, shorter is better than longer if you can make the same point in fewer words; I just have noticed a correlation between quality and length in Scott’s case, which in no way holds generally.
Arguments like this make me wonder whether people any longer have patience for books. An argument sometimes requires an entire book-chapter to be deployed to its full strength, even though sometimes the length of an average newspaper article works as well. Not that there’s no such thing as a meandering writing style, but to look at word count only can be deceptive.
There is a structural difference between how The Reader approaches a book and a blog post. War and Peace is a good book, by all accounts, but would not have worked as a piece of serial fiction. Great Expectations, by all accounts, was a great serial fiction, but it doesn’t work very well as a book in my opinion.
Also in favor of the shift to fewer and longer.
So I know we’ve kinda moved away from the whole rationality will turn us into God Emperors thing, but assuming in 20 years time a single individual has gone from complete obscurity and Is now, by miles, the most powerful person on earth: what books do you think that person read cover to cover? And why would that book have contributed to their dominance?
I would think “Leviathan” by Hobbes
(lays out a comprehensive and still relevant theory of the origins and nature of political power, while at the same time showing why the most prosperous, secure and long lived nations will be liberal and “pass unwounded between the rocks of too much liberty and too much authority”)
“On War” by Clauswitz
(Both for its relevance to politics and war, but also for laying out the first comprehensive description of large complex organizations and becoming the model for modern corporations)
“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
(A clichéd entry but in any strategic scenario there’s an aphorism from Sum Tzu that matches it perfectly)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
(Self explanatory)
Nice discussion starter– thanks! I’ll throw in my two cents:
“Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky
Our future God Emperor or Empress reads this book, thinks “What is this guy Raskolnikov’s problem? Why is he having a breakdown?”, hates the ending, realizes that he or she actually *is* a “Napoleon”, and then proceeds to emulate Napoleon: rise to power from obscurity, conquer a large swath of the developed world, and rule it with an iron fist.
Once one’s ambitions, character, and willpower are recognized, acquiring the relevant technical knowledge is secondary. (And for the record, I’m a big fan of Crime and Punishment’s ending.)
The only thing is this seems to imply that ambitions, character and willpower are the missing ingredients and I just don’t see that. Law schools and med schools are full to the brim with people drowning in ambition, character and willpower. And yet almost all of them are dooming themselves to at best upper-middle class/ lower-upper class obscurity.
The technical knowledge and more importantly the ideas about how one organizes their life/ achieves greatness seems infinitely more important. (As compared to our cultures credentialist , heirarchical, salary+status= station, conception of the successful life)
I would suspect our future God Emperor will have read a significant number of personal finance books at some point, the earlier the better, and as such knows better than to get him/herself trapped in zero sum status Careers/competitions.
I’ve heard horror stories of tier one lawyers and MBAs doing the math and realizing that, once they divide their salary by the number of hours they work, they actually make less than minimum wage. I remember doing the math for the army and realizing that you have to make Colonel before the often 24 hour work you do adds up to minimum wage.
So basic personal finance books which our God emperor started with and is building off of:
“Rich Dad Poor Dad”
“The wealthy Barber”
“The Millionaire Next Door”
Any other suggestions?
— for the record, Rich Dad likely didn’t exist and his advice boiled down to buy property and commit tax fraud.
What’s wrong with buying property?
Nothing is particularly wrong about it, its just not overly profound advice. I was emphasizing was that the book spent a lot of time discussing how profound he was, while the actual advice was a little slim.
I’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and some of its sequels, and I agree that it’s mainly flim-flam, not useful information.
Really?
I haven’t read in like a decade. Was probably 12 the last time i touched but i do remember reading it at an early age that it seemed like a revelation.
I included it on this list not because i think its an amazing personal finance book but because it was the first book i really read that pretty much completely rejected the script of “your life outcomes are entirely determined by how well you shutup, listen to your teacher, and do your homework. Now shutup and do your homework”.
Compare that with other PF books a kid might read which don’t want to challenge the script but instead want to say, “oh be a good kid and do well in school and get a good job, but also be extra good and save x% of your income in a diversified mutual fund”. I think it would be important for a God Emperor to have that script challenged early (i can imagine the class prankster becoming God Emperor, i can imagine the teachers pet). If our God Emperor did not have someone to challenge those cultural models of success he might sleepwalk into law school, or med school or worse
Also property ownership is a massive winning proposition for people with little other skills.
Here is a PF blog I follow, where the guy shows how, with some clever work, rental property ownership adds up to a $72.50 an hour job.
So irrelevant to our god emperor then.
You MMM guys just can’t help talking about trains, can you?
anonymous
The trains thing is a reference i don’t get.
Although ya i kinda assumed a God Emperor would read a little deeper.
Does any one have a suggestion for a really comprehensive personal finance book? A”master this and you’ll be able to play your pocketbook like Jimi Hendrix plays his stratocaster?”
I’ve been looking for a personal finance book that talks about margin investing forever. I mean there are public sector employees out their with perfect credit, who will never get fired and who have a generous pension waiting for them. It would seem anything less than remortgaging your house and leveraging to the hilt to invest in index funds would be leaving money on the table in that situation no? I mean borrow at 4% invest at 9% (avg. market rate before inflation) and you have 5% on your entire allowable credit with your secure job and lifestyle evening out the volatility.
I’m a fan of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” and anything by John Bogle.
I haven’t read the barber book, shun everything in Rich Dad Poor Dad, and had this to say (spoilers: not great things) about Millionare Next Door.
Note: This will be for preserving and growing your millions acquired elsewhere, because getting rich by beating the market consistently is really, really hard.
Personal finance books are great for dentists that don’t want to be tricked into investment scams. Also for people with mediocre salaries that want help being frugal. I have no idea why awould be god emperor would want to read one. No need to be especially frugal and if he’s the type to get scammed he ain’t going to be GE.
I would suspect PF would be a useful entry point and set of skills for working your way up to wealth, no?
If not what books do you think would give better time invested to God Emperorhood gained?
No. Neither knowing the ins and outs of 401ks vs Roth IRAs nor knowing that you can totally cut off the bottom of soda bottles and save money on tupperware is going to be particularly useful in becoming a god emperor through wealth.
Your best bet is probably a subject matter book in an area that you are going to be an entrepreneur in, but if you insist on something finance focused, you probably want to read up on the venture capital industry so you don’t lose control of your company after it starts to take off.
Agreed.
Most PF books are books on what to do with a lot of money, not how to make a lot of money.
Yet they are marketed to people with no money who think they will be receiving advice on the latter.
You described a wannabe politician, maybe even a wannabe dictator.
I am not necessarily disagreeing; maybe that is the fastest way for an individual to gain a lot of power. I just think there are already many people trying to do this; what exactly would be your relative advantage? Also, how important is here the role of rationality? I mean, assuming you do everything more or less correctly, how much does the result depend on random events, such as who and when exactly decides to betray you, and whether their first bullet will hit?
More generally, I think that in some fields the role of rationality is greater, while in other fields the more important thing could be e.g. luck, or how much resources you own at the beginning, or whether your family is a part of existing power structures, etc. A rational person deciding whether to do X should include this in their calculations, just to make sure they are not doing an equivalent of buying a very expensive lottery ticket.
That’s funny because I was assuming from the start it would be an Elon musk style startup god, the reason all the books are political is that I assumed a strong non-faddy philosophical foundation would be what really separates his/her multimillion-billion dollar career from all the others. (And Leviathan + On War do both genuinely combine solid theory (leviathan remains perhaps the only comprehensive morality free conception of political order) (On War pretty much invented the modern strategic language we use in war games/ other strategic scenarios) with massively in depth tooth and comb discussion of the issues (leviathan lays out a conception of law that would make a dictator want consistent, just and dependable courts)
Bother of these are massively applicable if you just live in a society, or if you intend to build or interact with any large institution of people.
But given I’m assuming it’s a startup founder, let’s add:
“The Lean Startup” by Eric Riese
The Personal MBA” by John Kaufmann
And
The works of Ayn Rand maybe “anthem” to start,, because it’s short.
I know the works of Rand piss people off but if you look at her, not as laying out a political philosophy, but an aesthetic philosophy or a philosophy of virtue, then you can see she’s really the master in her field. She provokes action in the kinds of people she thinks are the heroes of history. Compare that to Neitszche who want to provoke action but is so obscured by his own inability to know what that hero would look like, and anyone who reads Neitszche to be inspired will just leave confused.
Yes I just said Rand did it better than Neitszche.
Actually I think that you can make a case that, insofar as Nietzsche had a call to action, it was to inspire more pragmatic authors such as Rand to develop object level agendas in line with the meta-level principles he laid out. And considering Rand said in more than one interview that her meta-level principles were largely cribbed from Nietzsche you could thus conclude that Rand is herself a check mark in Big N’s win column.
However, on the object level Rand’s aesthetic theory was actually pretty unsatisfying and her virtue ethics appear to have failed the basic test of virtue philosophy. Most people who follow the recommendations of Objectivism see no improvement in their life, and many see losses that are only regained after they abandon the theory. Hell, the biggest success story for a while was Alan Greenspan, and his career ended in the single biggest act of corporate looting in the fifty years since the philosophy was committed.
I think your really short selling Rand here. I mean, yes, she’s best understood in the context of US bravery debates. But any writer who has an influence on:
-Mark Cuban
-Malcolm Frazer (former Prime Minister of Australia)
-Alan Greenspan
-Paul Ryan (speaker of the house)
-Gene Roddenberry (creator of star trek)
-Clarrence Thomas (supreme Court)
-Hunter S. Thompson
-Peter Theil
-Mark Emery (Canadian Cannabis Celebrity)
and Anton Levey (founder of the Church of Satan)
Is doing something right.
Hell this list includes 2 potential God Emperors and one potential POTUS. Their aren’t many other authors alive who can claim that influence. Neitszche doesn’t have this much influence on modern life, nor do any other would be successors.
This doesn’t mean she’s right (if there’s any meaning to saying someones moral/virtue framework is right or wrong) but it does mean a hypothetical God Emperor is very likely to have read her.
Check out the full list
If there will be such an individual then it’s propably some multinational’s CEO that got there by a combination of various kinds of blind luck. The only two books he or she will have read from front to cover are going to be Some Cheap Airport Novel and “MS Excel 2020 For Dummies”, both having had a profound influence on them.
Could be a politician, but otherwise, cosigned. The desire for power is fundamental and pretty much exogenous.
The problem is power is fragmenting and even the really powerful positions that you could get to by the right amount of luck combined with basic competence: elected office, top of the corporate ladder (via office politics) are largely disappearing. The silicon valley types are pretty much undeniably involved in a meritocracy (everyone of them was the self taught top off their field when they made it rich google:search, mark Zuckerburg: social networking, Theil Musk et AL. : online transactions.
So ya a person might be able to get to a high position through a combination of Luck, Basic Competence in their field and a few impressive attributes, but all of those positions are losing power and influence every day.
If a person were to get to where we’re talking about (real life Lex Luthor/Ozymandiaz) then they’d need something more than Luck. They’d need a set of ideas, knowledge and habits that make them expanding their influence as one-sided as a kid taking an M1 Abrams to a king of the hill shoving match.
For most things, it seems necessary to have the kind of luck that gives individual merit, i.e. being born with a high IQ in the right kind of culture, pursuing the right kind of childhood interests, or having the exact right life experiences. The kind of luck that involves bags of money falling from the sky and the kind of luck that means your mother doesn’t die three days before product launch are pretty damned helpful, but on their own they don’t seem to be sufficient to produce the future God-Emperor.
Cosigned. Nerds overestimate the importance of books and underestimate the importance of firsthand experience. How many books do you think Donald Trump reads?
Are you assuming that the single most powerful person is going to be in a political role, rather than (say) technology, sports, entertainment, banking/finance etc?
I can see the argument that “President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world” but that’s a result of the office, not the individual. You can work your way to becoming president, certainly, but once out of office, all that power and influence disappears (this is something that often strikes me about ex-prime ministers and premiers and the rest of it – yesterday you were the guy setting the terms of trade agreements and influencing the money in people’s pockets, today you can’t even sign off on a dog licence).
I think that’s why ex-politicians go on the after dinner speeches and lectures circuits and wangle their way into foundations, because they miss the buzz of having power. Ex-civil servants and the like tend to end up via the revolving door working for the companies that lobbied them when they were in government.
If we’re talking “made it myself on pure charisma and producing something people want, be that fancy mobile phones or a new game or being the highest-scoring sports person”, then I think there’s more room there for individual achievement – and possibly genuine influence. You might not know or care who the Minister for Counting Sheep is, even though as part of the government they have a direct influence on your life and well-being, but you’ll be very aware of your favourite sports star, pop star, movie star, comics/movies content producers, brand of computer, etc.
For instance, right now with the whole Peter Thiel versus Gawker thing – Nick Denton is obviously very powerful and influential in a certain sphere where his websites can make or break reputations (and he may have had more of an influence than we think via his investment and involvement in various companies – looking him up on Wikipedia, I see one of his early ventures was co-founding Moreover Technologies, which was involved in developing RSS – hands up everyone who uses RSS feeds?)
Is Nick Denton The Single Most Powerful Person In The World? For a small slice of society, he probably is, because get on his bad side and you may find yourself (or your product or your business) being profiled in one of his online media enterprises and getting the “stupid, evil, or stupid and evil?” treatment.
“Are you assuming that the single most powerful person is going to be in a political role, rather than (say) technology, sports, entertainment, banking/finance etc?”
Consider Keynes. His influence on the world surely ended up being greater than that of most kings or presidents.
“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”
There’s a similarly punchy quote that I forget, to the effect that every hard-headed pragmatist who claims to care only about the Object Level is in fact mindlessly echoing the high-handed Meta-Level beliefs of some long-dead and obscure philosopher without realizing where they picked it up from. Reading philosophy backwards and all that.
“Den veldig sulten Grave Maskin” written by a former Putnam Fellow.
A book on the desperate cravings of the animal kingdom and its inhabitants.
“The Kings Stilts” by Dr. Geisel
An engrossing read into the delecate balancing acts of people in power.
read the few books by other outliers and cargo cult off of them even if you don’t understand the causal mechanisms by which the actions outlined lead to success.
Searching for invariants between:
Principles by Ray Dalio
Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charlie Munger
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Bloomberg by Bloomberg
etc.
Also, several billionaires publish their own reading lists, so you an get an idea of what their information diet is like.
and reading between the lines for the mental models the successful have that differ.
I’ll criticize your selections at a meta-level. I don’t think reading the canon will set allow you to stand head and shoulders above your peers. To do that, you need to take a unique or contrarian approach.
One example that comes to mind where [knowledge -> power] principle holds is Geoffrey Hinton who pursued neural networks while they were in the trough of disillusionment with the greater CS community, and emerged with his name associated with one of the more important discoveries of the 21st century so far.
So my theory predicts that 2030’s ‘God Emperor’ is currently pursuing something that “we know is unfruitful/impossible”. A guess to what something that might look like today is Theranos-like technology, which goes on to “cure” cancer.
I wouldn’t discount the classics. They’re ridiculously effective knowledge to have in a world where absolutely everyone is influenced by them, but a ridiculously small percentage of even successful people have actually read them.
Understanding the arguments and logic of some classic piece of wisdom verses just having it as an assumption strikes me as something that would be ridiculously useful once you start going toe to toe with other people who maybe know the subject matter and share all those assumptions but don’t actually understand the internal logic of that received wisdom.
You can see this all the time with politicians (because their on TV, not because politics is unique) where there are a bunch of people who got to where they are by spouting this or that received wisdom, then they get pushed ever so slightly, or this complexity arises, or that complexity arises, and they’re completely fucked. So they wind up saying something incredibly stupid because they do not have any of the basics down.
Just from a first principles perspective i cannot see how the classics can’t have a positive impact on someones thinking. You get to outsource lifetimes worth of difficult thinking and research to the very best people in history as judged by multiple generations with very different tastes and affects.
I can’t see where the cannon can’t set you head and shoulders above your peers. Given in any individual field you can assume most of your peers have read a good chunk of that specific cannon, but having read the cannon across multiple fields so that odd things your peers are just forced to assume you know inside and out and can play around with and, yes, be contrarian without going completely stupid for having let go the shackles of recieved wisdom.
Almost anything as arduous as reading and comprehending “the classics” has benefits. The question is always: how much benefit vs how much cost.
Nick Szabo blogged the the trouble with books is that they are too long for the amount of insight gained. Costs > Benefits (if your opportunity costs are high enough, which if you’re being groomed for god emperor, they are astronomical).
Szabo has also blogged that he denies being the creator of bitcoin. But from what I understand he still under suspicion. How does a lecturer at a law school come to be a likely suspect in one of the most interesting technologies in decades?
He probably has read his Cicero and decline and fall of the roman empire. I’m sure there are relevant ideas in these texts to developing a new currency. But what concrete insight from the classics actually made its way into the technology?
I’d argue, the body of skills and innovations was gathered working on the *frontiers* of intellectual discourse; not the classic but the modern curriculum: Mathematical proofs, auction theory, pragmatic programming, etc. It was these un-genteel side areas of research that his peers lacked, and which also enabled the putative-Satoshi to leave his mark.
He has, but I can’t see any justification for that assumption, either in his post or anywhere else. Sure some books are long-winded, but a lot of them aren’t.
“Taltos” by Steven Brust, Because I just read it, and it’s going to be me.
More seriously, if someone is going to be god emperor I think they’re going to have to be smart enough to invent and figure out things for themselves. There isn’t a book on how to become god emperor (or any comprehensive argument for why a person of extreme abilities ought to). If there is one, I imagine they’ll write it, -or they’ll take the trick(s)(!) to their graves.
I also think being a master of all trades would be very helpful in terms of how a person who wants to be god emperor is perceived. If there’s few or no field in which a person can’t say, “trust me, it works out that way. I can’t explain it to you, it’s too complex and subtle and fraught, but look at my track record, -I get these questions right”, that might be one of the only ways someone could convince the whole world they ought to be king for a lifetime. If someone can do that they probably don’t need the ancient wisdom, though they might of course investigate it anyway, out of prudence, and the question of why not?
So our god emperor might e.g. be not just a successful inventor/businessperson combo (inventing something new and useful would be a good way to make a lot of money), you probably want to be making new emperical discoverys in theoretical physics and theoretical discoveries in archeology, -to be doing such things, and such a variety of things, and to have contributed such an amount that you can just say, “trust me”. (though such discoveries would involve little or no personal sacrifice, relatively, and so would not imo be a very good basis for personal trust)
I think it would also help to be personally dangerous in combat, and perhaps possessing a particularly fine or otherwise “impressive” vessel to walk the earth in, because I’m sure that still makes a difference, (especially to would be assassins).
Along these same lines, I think “conquering the world” would not be a likely motivation, (unless the person happens to be totally cracked/insane), as- why would you take the risk.
There’s no glory in it nowadays, and much less exposure to the vicious struggles for survival at early ages (relative to statistical likelyhood of later capacity for world-conquest) that cracked a few unfortunately-exceptional people’s terminal goals. And/or enough unexceptional people’s that it worked out for one or two of them.
There’s a chance that anyone capable of it wouldn’t be interested in it.
I also think the existence of nuclear weapons reduces the appeal of the “I wanna be the very best like no one ever was” side of things, -where “best refers in large part to being ruthless, cunning, dangerous, etc, because no matter how good of a vicious empire builder you are, any incompetent NOOB with a nuke can (-omg designers pls-) wipe you out if they can locate you.
I mean, I don’t think a game where no matter how good you are any idiot can take you out if they get lucky, is very appealing to someone who might want to prove themselves in that way. Even for an insane solipsist.
The problem is that with nukes there’s simply no recourse. Poison can be avoided with food testers, assassination while sleeping can be avoided with carefully selected guards, and a locked and sleeping door. Assassination in the street can be avoided by eternal readiness, and perhaps vigilance, blade or gun, and the ability to throw things to the wall seventy times seven harder than any attackers.
Even snipers can be played around to some extent with surveilance, angles, “armor”, and of course actual body armor (I’m pretty sure you could afford to not follow the convention of leaving your precious mortal shell unprotected and ready for assassins).
-but nukes are just bullshit! And I imagine anyone megalomaniacal enough to go for an elimination victory might not feel like playing the game on this particular patch, where the best player in the whole game, even the best player ever, could be taken out by the worst, -without any recourse!
Arguably if you were secretive enough you could avoid your location being known, but I think 90%+ of the time you’re back to diplomacy victories in that case, because there’s no way you can hide your army. Unless maybe the warfare involved is all about computer hacking to gain access to the nanobot net or something and can hence be done from anywhere. And nukes allow angry players to crash the whole server anyway.
As for actual books that might be helpful. Well, again, I don’t think anyone who isn’t reading sun tzu and thinking something more like “not bad for an uninformed ancient”, rather than “teach me senpai”,
-or just not bothering reading it in the first place,
is going to be up for the goal, let alone the task. Or of course if someone is extremely good at extracting valuable wisdom from other perspectives, and at avoiding associated pitfalls, the answer could also be “anything and everything”.
Anyway, here are some book ideas:
Prince of thorns by Mark Larence. Could be a place someone otherwise not inclined picked up the aesthetic or the idea, as well as the idea of ignoring the wall of corpses and worse that mount up in their wake.
Berserk. SPOILERS FOR THE START. SKIP THIS IF DON’T WANT. (ALSO DON’T READ THE COMIC IF YOU DON’T LIKE NEEDLESSLY HORRIFIC SHIT) The anti “anything for the dream” message is so heavy handed, and so potentially effective, that I could imagine someone being almost “overawed” by it (letting it cause them to balk at the idea without them meaning too), that they might bounce back the other way in contempt. Same goes for other impressive (as conceptually distinct from good) works with similar messages.
Chronicles of amber. -Another example of a compelling amoral(ish) high stakes game with a protagonist who might be considered justified by the romanticism of it all (oh yeah, and of course the small subtlety that it’s a book). Anyway the point there is again that I think what might be more significant than knowledge, is if someone smart enough to normally not want to do anything so obvious and blase as to be god emperor were imbued with a great aesthetic appreciation for that idea. On this same point, I might have said this above, but, if there is a god emperor I expect them to have been poor, and blessed with no more than not-much-better-than-mediocre- parents, because while an argument can be made for “you ought to be god emperor” (and moreover, that you ought to go well out of your way to make it happen, too) I think in most possible worlds where that happens, the original impulse/impetus wouldn’t have been a rational and detatched evaluation.
Though again contempt for heavy handed “Don’t think you’re good enough to judge things”, especially if they are almost successfully imposed/were narrowly avoided, could potentially change that, but I still think some form of fundamental crackedness in values, epistomology, in a vital heuristic, in a particular engaging with the world, or something important, would be a likely precipitate
Or it could maybe be someone initially not very intelligent/capable, or whatever the exact right word is, that of course doesn’t exist, but who at some point grasps “the nature of victory” or some such “ideal”-that-isn’t-very-idealistic, and is motivated by this and/or megalomania (-I kind of repeat myself) onto the heights necessarry to successfully take on such an unnapealing, difficult, and dangerous task.
Anyway, I’m mostly reassured by the understanding that to actually do this you’d probably have to be extremely “sane” in a lot of ways, or I guess I mean something more like “hyperpurposeful”, -to a level where you’re figuring out the nature of things and acting on that.
As well as probably quite elevated and dignified I think, or something like it, that is, I suppose, posessing an aesthetic which is greatly motivating but does not make you look like a dangerous lunatic.
So I imagine it doesn’t even occur to the majority of candidates that might genuinely have a shot.
The genghis khans and alexanders and mohammads of the past lived in more brutal times, times where the aesthetic of conquest, or subjectivism, would have have a greater illusion of legitimacy. And times where information travelled more slowly, too.
Take someone like Ted Kaczynski. A genius by usual definitions, Cracked (imo) (possibly by an evil and abusive psychological experiment he was fraudulently tricked into participating in in college).
But, despite these risk factors, was caught even in his relatively unambitious scheme (-relative to “becoming god emperor”) thanks to a number of slip ups.
Imo it’s quite likely that someone strong (strong as in “elo”, not as any kind of reference to “worthiness” or such nonsense, but I don’t have a word with better connotations than strong offhand here) -enough to start an antitechnological revolution, would probably have been strong enough not to lose track of their goals, and was also brought down by the informational connectedness of the time he lived in.
I am of course assuming that Ted Kaczynski’s actions were not very sane. I think his statement that people who want to effect antitechnological revolution should want to undermine society so as to increase agitation, rather than try to convince people, should be sufficient proof of that, both tactically and in terms of sanity.
(this isn’t a very good procedure for all the difference people who want to mould society to better fit their image, and/or even just be better in an absolute sense, -to follow. It might be a technically correct tactical direction in very particular kinds of situations, but if you’re wrong it’s a disaster, and even if you’re right, and it’s, -seperately, also worth the risk of betting that you are, it’s still never right to broadcast this to every two bit revolutionary of every different cause in the country. That will make people suspicious of revolutionaries in general, and people associated with you or your ideas in particular.)
-It’s advice from someone who has no viable plan to implement their ideal, but is still going for the smallest most infinitessimal outside chance of it at the expense of others. Though maybe that is a mistake a would be god-emperor might be particularly prone to making. And like I said it’s tactically awful and makes anyone associated with you or your ideas an object of suspicion.
There’s also the fact that I think a dedication to vengeance would be quite helpful for gaining the reputation of such, and/or the appearance of it, and so at enabling someone to survive such a scheme, so I also think the Ted Kaczynski that has the good fortune to be vengeful enough to put themselves into the far riskier and more vulnerable positions needed to personally effect antitechnologial revolution, is at very high risk of strangling the “researcher”, if it was that that did it. -Or whoever it was, whenever it was, that so badly cracked their mind as to end up in that direction, and hence end up in prison, or self imposed exile and in hiding, rather than as god emperor.
One other thing, it’s possible that the would-be god emperor would go well out of their way to avoid visibly reading such books where possible, to avoid your friends at the CIA, and so on (and so we’d never find out unless they told us), and if guaranteeing that no one would know was impossible, they might just choose not to, either because they don’t need them, or because the smartness and ruthlessness/capacity for deferment, etc that mgiht lead them to be capable of being god emperor, might lead them to be capable of giving it up for a life of a much higher eV, (which as usual, they might have to be capable of, -that is capable of generating their own values, if they were to have a shot) if present circumstances don’t lend themselves well to approaching life as that particular kind of game.
A couple of typos I missed:
if there is a god emperor I expect them to *be more likely* to have been poor…*
“, and was also brought down by the informational connectedness of the time he lived in.”
in regard to Ted Kaczynski
Should be ” *.* And *he* was also…”
“in a particular *way of* engaging with the world
and probably one or two others but that’s enough combing for now
Thank you for pointing to Trollumination’s post on dualization. I missed it the first go round, but it seems a very accurate description of the market for academic labor. As the demand for academic labor decreased, it wasn’t like everyone’s job got 20% crappier across the board. Rather, the best jobs stayed good, but the number of new good jobs dropped off dramatically, with the slack being picked up by much worse jobs.
And because it’s academia, the indirect effect on the quality of our public discourse have been bad. Megan McArdle has argued that academics only understand one labor market – their own, where the employer (universities & tenured professors) have near-unlimited market power over the powerless adjunct masses. Of course this doesn’t describe low-skilled labor generally, but because it matters in academia, it pervades public discourse about bargaining power and inequality in a big way.
Eh, adjuncts can always give up on academia and enter the low-skilled labor market. An adjunct can compete for fast food jobs, but a fast food worker without a degree can’t compete for college teaching jobs.
How exactly does this result in adjuncts having less bargaining power?
Adjuncts can enter the high-skill labor market, too. They’ve got a college degree, which gives them a huge leg up on fast food workers.
I don’t know about the US, but in Europe, there are plenty of jobs that you can’t get anymore once you have a PhD.
Also, the fast-food job is actually less valuable to a former adjunct than it is to the (other) people who actually apply – not in monetary terms, but because it represents an additional status hit.
Yeah, there is definitely such a thing as being “overqualified” in the US as well.
Even within academia the problem exists: if you have a PhD from Harvard, say, then that gives you a leg up on getting a job at Yale, Princeton, MIT, UChicago, Stanford, etc.
It can actually be a hindrance to getting an academic job at low-ranking local university or community college. Because they’ll assume you’re “too good for them” and will leave as soon as you can find a better post (which you probably will).
You can always leave the PhD off your resume if you feel that’s an issue.
Well then what I was I doing for the past 7 years? Big gaps in employment history are probably worse than superfluous PhDs.
True. I thought about addressing that in my last comment.
If the job you’re applying for is low-skilled enough they MIGHT not care. You MIGHT consider lying or embellishing something hard to prove – “I was working on starting a business” or something.
Maybe tell them you were in school but didn’t finish?
I was just throwing it out there as a thought, not as a “this is 100% guaranteed to solve all your problems” type of solution.
@onyomi
If it’s a fast-food job, just imply that you were in prison but the conviction was overturned.
If it’s a lesser academic jobs, traveling Europe while writing a novel?
For the lesser academic position, you still need a PhD – it just ought to be from a less prestigious university. You can’t fake that.
I guess the deans and deanlets in the university system are kind of like the CEOs that get wildly overpaid, although deans don’t get paid as much as CEOs. But they are the ones, comparatively speaking, with the money and the power, in the so-called free market.
That’s the thing about believing in laissez faire capitalism. It seems that if one believes in it, you don’t expect to be the person stuck in a less powerful position, being competent but without the power to get rewarded for your competence and hard work, while someone else skates on by.
That’s why it’s a problem that Libertarianism ignores these power issues in the free market that is far freer for some people than for others. The situation is such that some CEO or dean can be totally incompetent and still do fine, while those with less power can be tremendously competent and hard working perhaps still not get tenure.
Everyone who believes in laissez faire capitalism thinks that they are going to come out on top because the market is supposedly free, and fair in some way. But that’s what the whole inequality idea is about, about the top 1%. In fact, it’s really the top .01%. The bottom 99.99% can be very vulnerable to getting screwed over, due to lack of power.
It’s like what Scott talks about when he talks about Moloch– how individual incentives lead everyone to do what is destructive for the group as a whole. But it’s not the same incentives for everyone. The behaviors caused by the incentives for a small group of people– those who find a way to concentrate massive power and money in their own hands– can be perversely, quickly and extremely destructive for the whole group, in ways that the average person’s behaviors can not be.
Laissez faire capitalism seems wonderful when you think you are the bourgeosie or are going to be the bourgeoisie. But once you realize you are really the disempowered proletariat, laissez faire capitalism doesn’t seem so hot any more. And the idea of unions, or political action groups to press government to make laws for public protection, or other ways of organizing so as to have a bit of power– suddenly those don’t seem like such bad ideas.
@Jill
I’ll grant that capital-L Libertarianism ignores the problem you describe in one sense: it has no prescription for solving it.
It simply points out that similar mismatches of competence to compensation occur in every other system tried so far, including the ones that have created their rules precisely in response to those perceived mismatches.
Well, okay, it does go further than that. It also says that using government as a tool to disrupt concentrations of power is itself creating another concentration of power, namely, the government. And assuming that the government is any more competent or friendly than the concentration of power you want it to disrupt is… biased at best, deadly at worst.
CEO pay is incredibly messed up. There is some research evidence of pay aligning with performance, but it’s weak.
The people who are being ripped off are the shareholders, and they seem to say “given that billions of dollars are at stake, I’d rather take the 1% chance that CEO pay matters a little bit, so let’s spend an extra few million on a ‘good’ CEO.” And the CEOs are happy to exploit that.
It requires a much much higher level of evidence to show that high CEO pay is somehow harmful, either to the company or to outsiders.
I guess the deans and deanlets in the university system are kind of like the CEOs that get wildly overpaid…
That’s the thing about believing in laissez faire capitalism.
Except that the deans and deanlets aren’t a part of anything that could be described as “laissez-faire capitalism”. Colleges and universities, the tenure-granting ones at least, are nonprofit institutions. The most prestigious of them, and the ones which set the culture for the rest (e.g. Oxbridge and the Ivies) are among the oldest surviving human institutions, predating both the United States of America and Adam Smith. The younger universities, in addition to inheriting a pre-capitalist culture, are mostly created and operated by state governments. There is no private ownership of capital involved, no capitalism in any normal sense of the word.
So if you are seeing some aspect of human behavior that you believe is objectionable, e.g. high pay at the top of a hierarchy, and you find it noteworthy that this behavior is shared by corporate CEOs and university Deans, that’s a pretty good bet that the root cause is something that isn’t laissez-faire capitalism.
We live in a capitalist system and that infiltrates everything within the system. A non-profit is just a technical category. It’s often even worse in its power politics than for profit corporations. In fact, universities have a reputation of being all about power politics.
Yes, a university makes sure that the tons of money it takes in are all spent on deans and deanlets and big gyms or whatever, so that there is, technically speaking, no profit. But that does not necessarily make their corporation very different from a for profit corporation. It’s a simple bookkeeping maneuver, done for the purpose of keeping the highly beneficial non-profit status going.
Some of the richest most powerful corporations in the world are technically non-profit, like large churches, for example. But they are chock full of power politics. And many people have wanted to start some kind of school or business, and then realized the tons of benefits that would come with making it technically a “non-profit”, so they did. But the organization was just as they had originally conceived it– except that it received tons more benefits, like not having to pay taxes.
That strikes me as the political-science version of Spinozan pantheism. By defining capitalism so broadly, you’ve robbed yourself of the ability to say anything interesting about it.
Spinozian acausal pantheism, given the timing. But if laissez-fair capitalism can bend the laws of time and space like that, sign me up! Whatever harm it does “now”, we can retroactively fix sometime in the next trillion years.
@Jill:
What’s your definition of “capitalist?” I assume it’s not just “full of power politics,” since one can easily imagine a socialist economy (economist’s definition–government ownership and control of the means of production) with lots of power politics.
@David Friedman
Communists playing power politics amongst themselves was a major factor in the USSR losing the race to land a man on the moon.
I am curious about the extent to which this happened in other, more private industries. Because to my mind, part of the reason this can happen in academia is because professor pay and profitability of the college are very decoupled (in both positive and negative senses).
Like, it’s kind of hard to imagine the shareholders putting up with a private company giving half the workers pay cuts while upper management all got raises in response to a downturn (well, not TOO hard to imagine, but it seems like the unprofitability of such a decision would tend to mitigate against it, though increased automation potential does make it easier to replace some of the rank and file… though maybe the universities who have protected all the senior professor positions at the expense of new professors are in fact failing in slo-mo, since, as institutions, they tend to function on a longer timescale).
Between 2006 and 2014 this occurred so frequently there are actually country-western songs with the plot “You are being fired so there will be space in the budget for my raise.” When it happened in reality is was always defended on the basis that the company was hemorrhaging money, and thus someone had to be downsized, but only by attracting highly skilled leaders with generous pay and benefits packages could the hemorrhaging be stopped, and thus the CEO needed a raise. Politically these decisions were roundly criticized, but to my knowledge there was no great shareholder reaction.
This is a version of nominal wage rigidity, no?
“As the demand for academic labor decreased”
What are you classifying as “academic labor” here? Research?
I mean research and teaching jobs. There are few pure research jobs, at least in my field, though there are quite a few where continued research beyond the terminal degree is not required if you don’t mind having no prospect for advancement.
@onyomi:
Do you disagree with this graph that shows college enrollment rising at a steady rate from 1970 through now (roughly).
If not, how can demand for academics, including teachers, being going (absolutely) down?
It’s possible for the demand for academics could go up while the demand for teachers goes down. Larger class sizes or online education would be two ways this could be possible.
(I don’t know if this is indeed the case, but I could see it being this way.)
@JayT:
Sure, but there would have to be a really large jump in both to overcome the rise in overall students. Let’s just say I want to see the numbers on that.
Well, honestly, the drop in demand for academics is something of a mystery to me! Maybe it’s just a drop in the demand for the type of academic I am, i. e. someone with aspirations of tenure and pretensions of being, first and foremost, a researcher and writer, and only secondarily a teacher (and within that role, aspirationally, a trainer of grad students and would-be scholars primarily, and a general purpose introducer of Asian language and culture for undergrads secondarily).
What is clear, both to me and people I know who have been in the profession much longer, is that the market for the tenure-aspiring, research and writing-focused academic, and even, to a lesser extent, the market for the tenure-aspiring teaching-focused academic, has been getting steadily worse since the 70s (ironic, considering enrollment), and also got notably worse yet again after the most recent financial crisis.
As to why that is, again, it’s probably complicated and I don’t have good answers. The increase in undergrad enrollment could ironically have resulted in a shift in focus: the professors are there as teachers/camp counselors for all the young adults in need of gentry and elite finishing school, and the research is thus less valued for its own sake.
Academic publishing is certainly WAY down since the 70s, when it seems like there was a greater likelihood of the general public actually picking up and reading an academic book now and again. Would make some comment about dumbing down of the culture, but honestly not sure why this is.
With regard to why the opportunities for tenure-type job security even for teaching-focused academics is down, my best guess is that the overall job market has an effect, even as demand for teaching has gone up: the general job market having been bad since 2008, humanities PhDs have even fewer other options than they had previously; hence, schools found they could still attract qualified candidates even if they stopped offering one of the major historical perks, i. e. strong job security.
The overall demand for teaching labor may actually be up, but the demand for the type of work most people getting a humanities PhD are hoping to do is way down.
@onyomi:
My googling isn’t giving me what I want, but I don’t think demand for faculty in general is falling. Generally it appears to have been rising over the long term. although the composition has changed a great deal in the last 40 years.
I think what you are seeing is likely more competition for tenure track research jobs. These jobs aren’t growing at the same pace as people who want to fill them. Maybe I am wrong here, but that feels more likely than an absolute fall.
This Atlantic article seems to back me up:
Demand for academics, and willingness to provide good pay & tenure, goes down because academics don’t have the power to stop it from happening. I know that many here believe it’s the invisible hand of the free market. But it’s really just power politics.
Just like CEOs get on each other’s boards and finagle super high pay for each other, for no reason other than that they can. Academics don’t have unions or any other form of power, so they are easily screwed over. Maybe it has partly to do with how disempowering an experience graduate school often is. Academics don’t expect to be treated well, until and unless they have tenure.
“up 26% since 1975…”
Well the US population is up 32% since 1975, so , if it’s accurate that the total number increased by 26%, then the number of professor jobs is actually down, per capita (unless they mean up 26% per capita, which they didn’t specify). And the same article states the percentage of professor jobs which are tenurable is down from 45% to less than 25%.
So the total number of professor jobs is up, but the number per capita is down and the number of tenurable jobs per capita is down even more. What’s more college enrollment has roughly doubled in absolute numbers since 1975, further implying a shrinking number of faculty, especially tenurable faculty, relative to students.
What is more, there are a lot more foreign professors qualified, willing, and able to move to the US today, especially in a field like mine (Asian Studies), so that further adds to the competition (ironically, I’m more likely than your average blue collar worker to be unemployed or underemployed due to competition from immigrants).
I also wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of Americans aspiring to be a tenured professor is also up, though I’m not sure about that. I definitely sensed a spike in grad school enrollment after 2008. I think the thinking was “well, the economy sucks now, may as well go to grad school… hopefully it will be better by the time I get my degree.”
That is, the job of tenured professor has started to seem more attractive compared to other career options at the same time as foreign competition has increased, the number of positions has shrunk per capita, and the percentage of tenurable positions shrunk even more.
@onyomi:
You are double counting the “down” side.
The 26% rise is for tenure and tenure track positions, not all positions.
You seem right that this is a drop per capita, and definitely it’s a drop per college student (as college entry is climbing faster than population).
Part of this issue here is that I imagine the distribution feels very different. In 1970, most professors at most colleges were surrounded by mostly tenured and tenure track professors. Now it is probably the opposite, which makes the title “professor”, on average, much less valuable (in many senses). In the old days, “you” probably would just be on the outside looking in, wishing “you” could be a professor. Now the barbarians (so to speak) are inside the gates.
“In 1970, most professors at most colleges were surrounded by mostly tenured and tenure track professors. Now it is probably the opposite, which makes the title “professor”, on average, much less valuable (in many senses). In the old days, “you” probably would just be on the outside looking in, wishing “you” could be a professor. Now the barbarians (so to speak) are inside the gates.”
I don’t really get what you mean here. Doesn’t being surrounded by tenured professors make being tenured seem less valuable than if only one in a great many of college-level educators you know is tenurable? Right now there is the greater sense of “haves” and “have-nots” within the group of people doing roughly similar work, and landing the tenure-track job feels like more of a “coup” and less of a given.
I’m also not sure what you mean about “barbarians inside the gates.” It seems to me that, had I got a PhD in 1970 with the aim of becoming a tenured professor, my chances of achieving that goal were greater, not lower.
If you mean it would have been just as hard or harder to turn the PhD into a tenured position but I would have been less likely to be working alongside tenured professors as an adjunct and therefore feeling like a second-class citizen, then I’m not sure why that would be the case. Yes, the number of adjuncts were fewer, but the number of tenurable jobs per seeker was also greater.
If, in some other industry, the number of “good” jobs per seeker had dropped, but the number of “bad” jobs per seeker had increased, then I wouldn’t blame the growing “dualization” so much on the growth of “bad” jobs, as on the loss of “good” jobs (though the two are related, of course).
@onyomi:
The title “professor” used to imply that one was on the track to tenure (the vast majority of professors were on the track to tenure). Now it only implies “contract teacher”, so the title of professor feels less valuable.
“Tenure track” might feel more valuable now, but then again, tenure used to mean lifetime employment, and it doesn’t really mean that anymore. Still, “tenure track” probably feels like a rare jewel now, even if it is only a topaz among cut-glass, instead of the ruby, emerald or diamond it used to be.
As to the “barbarians”, it was only supposed to be slightly humorous. What I mean is that, broadly speaking, if college enrollment is going up as percentage of population, then I expect that so are PhDs. Which means, statistically speaking, if you have a PhD now there is an increased chance that you would not have been in the cohort that would have been accepted to grad school in 1975.
It would not surprise me if PhDs per capita have more than doubled since 1975. If that is so, then it seems reasonable to say that the average “you” should not expect that they would have had a tenure track job in 1975, and they also should not expect that they would have been working on a college campus at all.
“but then again, tenure used to mean lifetime employment, and it doesn’t really mean that anymore.”
It used to mean employment to age 65. It now means lifetime employment–until you decide to retire.
@David Friedman:
Publish or perish is absolutely a thing.
“Publish or perish is absolutely a thing.”
From what I can tell, that still mostly applies only to the untenured. I’ve never heard of a tenured professor losing his job due to failure to publish. Though there are those who remain at the rank of associate professor for decades.
At least at the fancier institutions, tenure is still pretty iron-clad, at least for the time being. A tenured professor at Yale was not too long ago discovered to have been sleeping with an undergrad student, which student he then helped get into a graduate program and then a tenured job at Yale. In other words, besides sleeping with a student and cheating on his wife, he corrupted the whole grading, recruitment, hiring, and approval process.
Neither of them were fired, though I think he was required to accept some unpaid leave time.
Yale is private with a huge endowment.
My father started feeling the pressure of publish or perish at a state university maybe 15 years ago? Not that he was ever in danger of not publishing, but he was getting the clear message that you could be “shuffled off to Buffalo” if you weren’t publishing. Trust me, that stuck in his craw.
ETA: At that point he had been at the University for 20+ years and tenured for 15, I want to say.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of expected value, and the idea that in utilitarianism one should attempt to do the action with the highest expected value every time. The issue is that you get into situation’s like Pascal’s Mugging.
Is there some sort of formalism of the idea that taking the highest expected value choice each time only works because actions are repeated over and over? For example, if there’s an extremely small chance (one in a googelplex, say) of there being a super-high payoff in a wager, we’re unlikely to repeat the wager enough times in the next few billion years such that we even get a single positive outcome, so we may as well take the lower expected value… which, uh, is the higher ‘expected’ value.
I guess it might be a more formal version of risk aversion I’m wondering about, which makes me think this idea is awful.
This idea may not be well-formed – just curious if there’s anything out there on this.
Sounds vaguely like the frequentist interpitation of probability applied to ethics. In frequentist probability an event’s probability is equal to the limit of its relative frequency. In some variants this means that probabilities are only well-defined for repeatable events.
“we’re unlikely to repeat the wager enough times in the next few billion years such that we even get a single positive outcome”
You’ve accidentally introduced time to your model without factoring it into the expected value. In the simplified model without time, all iterations happen “at once”, and there’s no such thing as billions of years. If you add time to the model, you have to add it everywhere.
The present value of a future return is reduced by time discounting. If I offer you 1 penny today or a coupon for $100 in 500 years, the penny is much more valuable. This reduces the expected net present value of any long-term wager that will take billions of years to pay off in exactly the way you’re suggesting.
Nobody adds this to the babby EV model because it confuses the basic concept, and you’ll painfully grind out the NPV of future cash flows in intro to finance anyway
TL;DR it’s dangerous to ask reasonable questions about simplified models, because they’re too simple to reason about.
You’ve accidentally introduced time to your model without factoring it into the expected value.
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”
So – should you buy Wimpy a hamburger? 🙂
Not if you’ve known him longer than a week.
More seriously, I’m pretty sure elements like “odds this bum will ACTUALLY pay up” are supposed to factor into your EV calculation to begin with.
I think you’re taking what I said a little too literally, which is my fault for being unclear.
As I understand the (somewhat simplified, as you note) rationalist argument for doing things in terms of EV,
1. Assume we’re consequentialists, so we want to maximize our utility function.
2. Actions have uncertain outcomes, but due to the law of large numbers, if we perform these actions a lot of times we can expect the average EV to be a very useful measure.
3. If we perform high-EV actions all our lives, we’re likely to maximize utility. So in any given instance, we should perform the highest-EV action available.
If it helps, I’d prefer to get rid of time dimension. I don’t see it as relevant, here. Pretend we do a hundred thousand wagers (note: pure utility wagers, not wagers in terms of money, utility curves aren’t relevant) instantly, all with a ridiculously low chance of success but a good EV. We’re still unlikely to get a good outcome if this is the only time in our lives we’re going to be doing a wager like this (say we’re a really weird alien race which goes into stasis).
I’m wondering if there’s some way to model in an extremely heavy discount for such low-probability things in order to defeat Pascal’s Mugging. Jacob brought in the idea of variance, etc. which is along the lines of what I was asking for, but no mathematical equations.
If your expected value is already stated in terms of utility, the answer is already included in the premise.
In the outcome of an EV-maximizing decision, you would not be saying “boy, I wish I’d had an extremely heavy discount for that low-probability thing that didn’t happen and left me with 0 utils”. You’d be saying “yup, it was still worth the risk”.
Any discounting of low-probability events is factored in through risk aversion.
Also, this demonstrates why actually using “utils” outside a thought experiment or a joke is fucking retarded, and rationalists look silly for doing it.
I often have the same question so I’ll pose a concrete example. A genie wants to play a game with you and offers to flip a coin. Heads you win, tails you lose, with equal and opposite payoffs. P(heads) = 0.75, that is, odds are 3:1 in favor of heads. Xe gives you the following two options:
a) Bet $1 million on a single flip
b) Bet $1 per flip, on a million flips
Anybody can verify that the expected return in either case is $500k. Which bet do you take? My answer below. I’m assuming most people here aren’t millionaires, would your answer change if your net worth were $50 million or more?
——————-
In this case we can draw out the probability distribution of events. In case a) it’s a bimodal distribution, with 75% chance of a $1 million win and 25% chance of a $1 million loss. With case b) you have a nice clean bell curve centered around $500k. You might win $450k, or $550k, but it’s going to be in that neighborhood. Chances of losing money are essentially zero. I might take case a) if my net worth were greater than $50 million or so and I could afford the loss, but failing that loss aversion would win out and I’d do case b).
For more complicated situations we can’t necessarily get the full probability distribution, but we often at least have some idea of the variance. Maximizing expected value is all well and good, but if the variance is large then any specific realization isn’t going to be anywhere near the expected value. This has been born out in psychology experiments [citation needed], people are often willing to pay for additional certainty. Consider modifying case b) so that the genie gives you $400k, guaranteed. Lower expected value, but much much lower variance. Would you take it? How about $300k?
I think almost everyone would take bet B. In practical terms you want both low variance and high expected value in your bets/investments*. Many rationalists claim you should always maximize expected value. At least when payoffs are measured in “utility.” Most criticisms of “always maximize utility” say that it might be useful to sacrifice EV to reduce variance. In your example EV is constant. So most people will just reduce the variance.
Here is a more interesting answer:
Option A: One bet. +1 million with p=.75, lose 1 million with p=.25
Option B: 100 bets of +1 dollar with p=.72, -1 dollar with p=.28.
I would take option B.
*See Tetlock for example of people being risk-seeking. Most of the example involve “avoiding losses.” For gains almost everyone, rational or not, wants lower variance under most conditions (some amount of gambling might be fun but not with 500K-ish on the line).
I’m more interested in the tradeoff between expectation value and variance here, rather than loss aversion, so let’s modify it to be a fair coin, where:
a) You win you get $1 million, you lose you don’t pay or lose anything.
b) Genie just gives you $X
What’s the minimum value of $X where you choose b)? At $500k they have the same expected value. I might even take b) if it were as low as $100k, that guarantee is pretty tempting.
The gameshow Deal or No Deal was essentially all about this, albeit dressed up in tinsel. I found it kind of neat.
@ suntzuanime
Ditto.
Xogself am just risk averse. You add that to the model by sticking a Bernoulli utility function in your EV calculation, turning it into “expected utility”.
For anyone interested, this is a good demo of applying that to “how much insurance should I buy?”
That seems to be more about the marginal utility of money, than it is about anything else. I mean the person taking the 400 or 300K over the expected value of 500K makes rational sense once you take into account that the risk of losing a million places a way higher negative utility than the possibility of gaining the extra 600 or 700K creates positive utility for the average person.
I would absolutely take 300K over a 50:50 shot at a million. Just as long as I can keep it secret from my wife.
The Kelly Criterion describes an optimal amount to wager on a bet given a logarithmic utility curve. As a rule of thumb, at it’s upper bounds, it can basically be boiled down to say even on a bet where you would receive infinite utility, you should only bet a fraction of your bankroll equal to the odds. You can kind of use this to escape Pascal’s Mugging by saying that if my net worth is $100k, and I value my time at $1/hour, even if you are promising me infinite utility, I should only even consider listening to you for a minute if I think the odds of you being correct are better than 6,000,000:1.
This probably isn’t the best worded example, but using that approach does seem to help get around a lot of the problems with just straight up calculating expected values. (Though it probably opens a whole new can of worms I haven’t looked at yet)
So that’s fine for money-based bets, but what about other areas of decision theory? e.g. the flashy rare side effects. Should we treat the entire population as our “bankroll”? I wouldn’t think so, health policy is clearly not designed to maximize QALY total (or else we would want to get rid of abortion and birth control just to inflate the population) but rather minimize QALYs lost. It’s not clear to me it generalizes.
This isn’t quite what I was asking. You’re assuming a logarithmic utility curve; I’m talking about wagers which are already in terms of pure utility.
I’m going to answer several questions you didn’t ask instead of the one you did, because they are, I suspect, what actually needs answering here. Apologies if you know much of this already and this comes off as condescending, but I’m getting a distinct whiff of fundamentally-confused-about-what-utility-functions-are from your comment, and it’s sufficiently common that I’d like to head off the possibility and address this all at once.
First: Why is it that an ideal consequentialist — not just a utilitarian, which is rather more specific! See note at end of comment — would act according to a utility function (in the decision-theory sesne)? (That is to say, have a function they are maximizing the expected value of?) This is answered by Savage’s theorem. (If you already believe in probability, it’s answered by the VNM theorem. But I find Savage’s theorem much more satisfactory, as it grounds probability and utility both at once.)
Second, let me address this bit:
Why do you need a “more formal” version of risk aversion, when risk aversion is already perfectly formalizable? Risk aversion in some quantity is just having an convex-downward utility function in it.
Now for the note at the end, which I have written so many times here but let’s do this once more:
Someone who acts according to a utility function, in the decision theoretic sense, need not be in any way a utilitarian. They could be perfectly selfish, for instance. Having a utility function in that sense basically just means you’re a consequentialist (if we accept Savage’s hypotheses, any ideal consequentialist acts according to a utility function).
A (ideal) utilitarian is someone who assigns to people “utility functions” in an entirely different sense, which may be related to those people’s decision-theoretic utility functions (if, y’know, they possessed them) but aren’t necessarily, and then somehow aggregates them into a decision-theoretic utility function that they act according towards. It’s a much more specific type of consequentialist, and also one that’s not really well-defined at all. It’s easy to say what a decision-theoretic utility function is, but nobody knows how to define these utilitarian utility functions, or how to aggregate them into a decision-theoretic utility function.
Yes, the terminology is terrible, but we seem to be stuck with it for now.
(As for your actual question, uh, probably something like what Theo Jones said.)
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I appreciate the note on terminology; I’ll strive to be more clear on that in the future.
For the purposes of the question, though, I was hoping to assume everything in terms of pure utility. Utility functions are misleading for the thing I’m asking. To rephrase with an example question,
You are faced with a choice. Either you take a guaranteed gain of 1 utilon, or you can take a wager. The wager is a nearly-guaranteed loss of 1 utilon, or an extremely unlikely chance of an extreme number of utilons such that the EV for the wager is very high. But you can only perform this wager a limited number of times, far below the number where you could expect to have at least one successful outcome from the wager.
Basically, Pascal’s Mugging. The Sequences bring up the very simple model of just taking the highest EV action each time, and I was curious if there was a mathematical model which takes into account variance, etc. of this kind of situation to determine what one ‘should’ do as a consequentialist. As I mentioned in the other comment, I think the strategy of always taking the highest EV works under an assumption that the law of large numbers is in your favor; I’m curious as to how things would be handled by a consequentialist when that assumption breaks down.
(Put another way: why or why not would EY take that bet?)
What do you mean by “utility” here? If you mean that in the decision-theoretic sense, then your question essentially seems to be a contradiction in terms. By definition, if you have a decision-theoretic utility function, you are maximizing its expected value. You want to talk about a function for which you do not want to maximize the expected value; thus, the function you are talking about is not a utility function.
This is like that old example on LW — “What if nobody was willing to pay me the going rate for a hammer?” Then it’s not the going rate for a hammer; the question’s premises are contradictory.
If you mean utility in some other sense, such as the utilitarian sense, then of course I have no idea how to answer your question; but it seems to me that then the question also loses its force, so I’m not sure why you’d be asking it in that case.
I mean, that doesn’t mean there is nothing to the approach you are exploring. For instance, obviously the various explicit utility functions that people discuss or use for making decisions (e.g. log(money)) are not actual decision-theoretic utility functions. And so when they fail to be, this is one thing it might look like. But one should not confuse actual utility functions (which we don’t actually have) with useful “approximate” utility functions, and attribute the failures of the latter to the former.
Oops, I forgot to also mention: This is also really not Pascal’s Mugging. Pascal’s Mugging, properly, involves (among other things) the possibility that the utility of situations could grow much faster than exponentially in the length required to describe them.
…which, really, goes away if you assume utility functions are bounded — and one of the conclusions of Savage’s Theorem (maybe not the theorem proper, but whatever) is that utility functions not only exist but are bounded. So, as far as I’m concerned, all utility functions should be bounded, because if not for Savage’s Theorem, what other reason do you have for using utility functions in the first place?
EY insists that utility functions should not be bounded, hence why he considers Pascal’s Mugging a probem, but I’ve never seen him put forth even a half-decent argument for this position, or reply to the above.
I suppose having bounded utility functions does potentially answer your question as well, though.
Really? I found his argument rather convincing. There is no ‘x’ such that I would prefer [a 100% chance of living x years] above [an 80% chance of living forever and a 20% chance of living to 100]. That means my utility function must be unbounded. What is your criticism of this argument?
Expected value has the nice property that it’s consistent over aggregation and disaggregation. If you 100 opportunities to roll a D6, and get a pound if it rolls a 6, then a decision on those 100 opportunities “as a batch” is the same as deciding on each opportunity individually and then aggregating at the end.
“Median value” doesn’t have that nice property. The median value of your D6 roll is £0, the median value of 100 rolls is £17, so it matters whether you aggregate or not.
I can think of two other rules that have the property – maximin and maximax – choose the option with maximum possible worst/best outcome. Possibly minimax regret (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regret_%28decision_theory%29#Minimax_regret) has the property as well.
Various bits of decision theory etc. runs on “pick rules that make sense, i.e. that don’t work at cross purposes with themselves”.
That said, all this gets rendered moot if your events aren’t independent – for example, if you’re looking at utility rather than cash value. Supposing I have two opportunities to win a million pounds. How much the second opportunity is worth to me depends a lot on, if I take the first opportunity, whether it comes off or not.
A thought – possibly ill-formed. Suppose you have an ultimate meta-rule that says: “decide according to those decision rules/procedures/parameters/whatever that have given the best results in the past”, a sort-of “optimal learner” criterion if you will – maybe the result of taking the outcome of evolution or learning or culture change or whatever and imagining a more ideal version of that. Possibly you get something highest-expected-utility for most cases, with a “don’t get mugged by Pascal” clause in there. I’m a bit worried about the work that “ideal” is doing there, but it’s an idea.
Reposting my question from previous open thread in hopes of getting a response:
How does one even get started with a therapist? There’s all these people that say “get help, talk to someone” like a mantra but it’s unclear to me what that even means. Is there a thing like a “general mental checkup” work, or do I need to come to the therapist with some attempt at self-analysis? I haven’t gone to a doctor in a while, partially because it’s unclear to me if/how I should raise any issues with him. With a doctor, nothing feels particularly acutely wrong, so I don’t know if things are normal or not and it’s hard to just dump a list of “probably nothing” items onto someone. As you can tell, even just setting up a doctor’s appointment seems to have the same difficulty as a therapist. With mental things I can tell something is up (noticing some periods of depression, lack of strong enjoyment in things, and a trend of mood swings and distractedness that has been increasing recently) — but how much do I need to organize my thoughts to be able to give them to someone for him/her to do something helpful with them? And how important is continuity with a particular therapist? I’m currently away at a summer internship and am wondering if I should pursue all this now and have to find someone new when I go back to my college town, or if it’s better to have a longer-term person back home. Sorry for the textdump, but the whole process seems alien and unapproachable to me and hearing everyone say ~~do something, just talk to a licensed professional~~ isn’t giving me clear actionable steps. I hope you can help me. Thanks!
Replying to increase volume.
As another person who has heard this advice, and thinks some sort of counselling is worthwhile, I too am not sure where to start the process. How do you know that a therapist is right for you? Is it advisable to switch for reasons other than “this person is a complete asshole”?
I think that waiting to find somebody when you go back to your college town would probably be easier (since therapist appointments often have to be arranged a while in advance.) Your college probably has some kind of counseling center where you could get some sort of meeting for free.
As for the issues about introspection– you should probably think some about what aspects of your life you’re unhappy with, but you don’t really need to know more than that. Part of a good therapist’s job is to ask you questions which will help the two of you figure out what the actual cause and extent of your problems are.
I’d like to know this myself, as my initial attempt at going to a therapist foundered on this very thing – what is the use of talking about things that happened in the past, can’t be changed, and just have to be put up with? Is it any good telling them all about the things that are making you feel bad, when there’s nothing that can be done about them (i.e. there is no easy fix of the “talk to your loved ones about the things that concern you” kind of solution which appears to be one of the happy smiley fixes for depression – at least when I’ve looked up websites supporting depression sufferers, it’s what they all say).
I mean, I can see myself tying myself up in knots about what to say and to tell, such that I’ll give the conventional expected answers simply to move things along (“yes, you’re right, I should talk to my friends when I’m feeling upset by something they’ve done”), and I can do that at home by myself so what’s the point of going to a therapist? Especially if they’re going to tell me “So there is this great new technique called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” since I’ve done the mandatory ten sessions of that and it did nothing for me.
Organizing your thoughts and discovering exactly what bothers you and why is a very hard task that talk therapy is well suited for.
If you feel like you aren’t allowed to go to therapy without a clear reason and a lack of clarity is actually part of the problem you’d like help with, then you are de facto barring yourself from getting any help at all. That is what the “just do something, talk to someone” advice is getting at.
It sounds to me that if you go to a therapist with the exact question you’re posing us right now, the two of you will have your hands full for quite a while.
Have you read https://gruntledandhinged.com/how-to-get-therapy/ ? Is it what you’re looking for?
I hadn’t read that before, but it looks like exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks!
“The teacher learns more than the student” and hence in therapy “the listener learns more than the talker”.
The practices of unprogrammed worship build upon this principle to provide an effective, accessible way to practice (what might be called) therapeutic listening.
The key aspect is “unprogrammed”.
Just attend. Just listen. Just reflect on what you hear and what you feel.
It is customary in unprogrammed worship for no-one to speak twice, until everyone has spoken once. Good practice for new attendees is to not speak at all, until everyone has spoken once. Just sit and listen.
So this isn’t “talk therapy” so much as “listen therapy.”
Anxiety is natural (especially at first) in that listeners voluntarily cede control of topics discussed. It can happen, and not uncommonly does happen to new attendees, that expectant silence initiates a panic attack (which is made worse by feelings of shame for having a panic attack in such a psychologically supportive environment). In this respect therapeutic listening can be substantially more challenging than conventional therapy.
With practice, anxiety subsides and listening skills improve, and many people concomitantly experience improvements in their capacity to speak for themselves and to themselves.
These improvements are what David Foster Wallace sought in attending unprogrammed services (Mennonite in his case), alas with only partial success.
Mennonites, Anabaptists, and Quakers are among the communities that practice unprogrammed worship via therapeutic listening.
It is commonly the case, in these communities, that a strikingly high proportion of attendees are themselves healthcare providers. Hopefully this comment has helped SSC readers to appreciate why this is.
———–
PS: humor is present but kindly and nuanced.
Example:
The celebrated joke whose punchline is “You’re absolutely right!” is well-regarded too.
Its interesting how the joke after that about sex standing up has a completely different meaning when told about Protestants.With the orthodox rabbi, dancing being forbidden is portrayed as totally reasonable, while in the one about (insert protestant denomination here) the joke is that they have such an irrational hatred of dancing that they wouldn’t otherwise mind premarital sex
Although apparently the joke-teller doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) that in Orthodox Judaism it would be perfectly fine for a married couple to dance together in private. The restriction only applies outside of marriage.
I’m leaning towards “doesn’t know,” since the very first page of the book has this egregious error: “…during the Passover Seder… the youngest child is asked a question and, in turn, asks four questions.” Actually, one question (“Why is this night different…?”) is followed by four statements (“On all other nights we do X, but on this night we do Y”), and all five lines are said by the child. (Possibly this was how his childhood Seders went, and he didn’t bother to do any further research.)
Julie’s comment matches my own experiences. I have heard “the dancing joke” told by straight-faced Methodists, to straight-faced Methodists; the joke is heard as particularly hilarious in a rural community that strictly forbids dancing, gambling, smoking, and alcohol.
Whereas at Lubavitcher services, I have heard nothing like this particular variety of humor; indeed the prevalence of dancing and alcohol at Lubavitcher services would be regarded as highly scandalous among Methodists.
So who knows where the “dancing” joke originated? More plausibly among Methodists than Lubavitchers?
Perhaps the two most striking facts are that every religious culture is possessed of jokes (hundreds of them), and there is a remarkably high degree of cross-cultural overlap among these jokes. And perhaps the lesson here is that a really good joke is too precious to remain the property of just one religion! 🙂
Your reading differs from mine so much I’m wondering if we’re reading the same thing. It definitely seems to me that the joke is that the rabbi is so much more concerned about dancing than sex when one would expect the opposite. If you think the rabbi’s concerns are more reasonable than when the same joke is told with Protestants I think that says more about you than about the joke.
The joke about Protestant’s is a different joke, playing on different stereotypes.
Well, they aren’t exactly the same jokes, just the same basic setup and punchline.
In the versions I’ve heard (usually about Baptists or Methodists), it’s either premarital sex being wrong because it leads to dancing, or an adulterous couple where one suggests sex standing up and the other is worried someone might see them and think they were dancing.
The version in the book starts by pointing out the man’s getting married, and being told he can’t dance with his wife. All the sex involved is between a married couple. And “They don’t allow dancing” is part of the set-up, rather than being the punchline, so it feels less like that’s what you’re laughing at. To me, it feels more like the joke is in the Rabbi realizing that the young man is trying to find a way around the rule, rather than the rule itself.
Maybe it’s not so much that it’s the jewish version of the joke, but that it’s a fairly tame version, and possibly badly told.
@Broggly:
Here is my interpretation.
First, I think it’s important to understand that humans like to talk about sex, and lots of comedy includes sex for that reason. Just having sex in the joke doesn’t make the joke about sex.
I think that the Jewish version of the joke is about how the Jews have lots of “weird” customs that don’t make “sense”, even to those who are actually members of the chosen tribe. It exploits the very legalistic way that Jewish religion is used to control every day life. The automatic telelphone answers and light switch flickers that exist in some Orthodox communities so that they may “Do no work on the Sabbath” or, I’m sure, also mined for comedic effect. In this joke, it’s “Do any freaky thing you like, except this freaky thing because it against an “arbitrary” seaming rule. The couple is already married, there is no hint that sex is wrong or out of bounds anywhere in the joke.
The Baptist version of the joke is all about how wrong, so very wrong, Baptists think sex, especially pre-marital sex is. So wrong that they can’t even talk about sex at all, it has to be the subtext, rather than the text. Everyone knows that Baptists don’t like young people dancing because it is dangerously close to do something sexual. The joke inverts this known quantity and makes it about the opposite. “The real reason they don’t like sex is that it might lead to pre-marital dancing, which is what they really object to.”
Can someone explain why in the book Rilla of Ingleside (the final sequel to Anne of Green Gables) the minister’s daughters attend a ball but are not allowed to dance, while Anne’s daughters are allowed?
I think it’s better to maintain a long-term relationship with a therapist, but just having a professional to talk to is good by itself.
If you’re looking for a particular type of therapist, I’d recommend one with a cognitive-behavioral orientation. As to what you do when you’re there? I don’t think most therapists expect you to have an organized set of explanations. It’s THEIR job to organize it all. You talk to them, they take notes, they ask questions, you answer, they make suggestions or recommendations for what to do, you do them. It’s harder than it sounds, but that is the process.
Imo what it means is “this particular saying frees from all responsibility and concern for your problems, and I’m not strong enough to do the latter for myself, so I better repeat this mantra”
My point being, why not give it a try if it might help, and you’re not in dire financial straits, -or you might be able to use it as a springing board, schelling point etc, -but I wouldn’t bet your hopes on it any more than I’d bet them on a hypnotist. Which isn’t said to disparage hypnotists, I’m sure there’s some great hypnotists, and I’m also sure that talking things over with someone who is serious about helping a person can help someone, but they’re just people. There’s no magic there, other than that of a willing ear and a person (hopefully) dedicated to helping you.
(and perhaps of the authority any order of priests or shamans can invoke. -at least in part legitimate imo: the orders of psychologists have particular but often highly relevant rules and standards they follow, and their members tend to be dedicated to their chosen profession for example.)
So to be more specific I suppose I should have said I wouldn’t bet your hopes on it unless you find someone who seems on their own merits to make that worth doing so.
But that’s just my perspective. Best of luck with that head of yours.
Does anyone else run into the “tiny internet” problem where they keep running into the same people even though they are in (presumably) vastly different areas of the internet?
I have been online 20+ years and despite bouncing around what I think of as very different groups, I keep running into the same users and posters.
I think one factor is what The Tipping Point calls Connectors.
(I first encountered David Friedman as the author of medieval re-creation articles. Some years later, on Megan McArdle’s blog (this was before she was at Bloomberg), one commenter said something like ‘Milton Friedman may have had a Nobel in economics, but what did he know about parenting?’ and another commenter said that Milton must have been a good parent, since his son is Cariadoc (David’s medieval name).)
That’s amazing—it’s something I’ve never encountered before. Although in most of my communities people switch usernames frequently. Do most of yours work on an IRL names basis?
I started out being open to the WHOLE WORLD MAAAANNN, having correspondences with people all over the globe. But over time I ended up mostly in Ami-specific spaces, but very politically variable.
I’ve basically moved from left to right over the decades I’ve been online, and yet I am not in a wildly different group of people. I still run into the same folks, which I don’t understand given the general high polarization in right/left in America (where I reside.)
There’s one person that used to comment on SSC that I also saw in the Bleeding Heart Libertarians comment section, but those aren’t vastly different. Another person who used to post on the GameFAQs Politics board was mentioned by username in a comment here.
Yeah, I noticed that too. My guess is that there are actually not so many places on the internet supporting the kind of discussion I like (I prefer to call it “rational discussion” but of course many people would disagree with that label), and that I keep meeting people who have a similar preference.
Also, selection bias.
Oh, hey, you’re that guy I talked in Berlin, and also on /r/FeMRADebates, rigth? 😀
To me, that is the opposite of a problem. I get a very satisfying sense of closure every time my interests or social circles intersect. (Perhaps there’s some sort of drive to explore the environment, which only calms down when you seem to have come full circle.)
It doesn’t happen very often, though.
I might feel closure if they all got along together, but that is a classic geek fallacy for a reason.
I’ve had the effect of seeing lots of familiar faces in strange places years later, but they’ve pretty much all been from SomethingAwful and it seems to already have been acknowledged that SA has had a strangely disproportionate influence on internet discourse.
I’ve seen a number of times too.
I left Less Wrong sometime in 2010 and ended up back in the rat-sphere due to Tumblr mostly by accident.
I know at least three people here from usenet days, twenty years ago and in different contexts, apparently having independently gravitated to this space. So I’ve run into the effect you describe, yes.
I am unclear on why you describe it as a “problem”.
I remember John Schilling from Usenet. I used to hang out in the sci.space.* groups and alt.fan.pratchett . A good SSC comment thread is like being in a 90s newsgroup with a high SNR.
Now you’ve got me wondering which of my reports is circulating in your neighborhood.
I’d seen SSC mentioned in a number of contexts, and I can’t recall whether you were one of the sources, but the one that finally stuck was a comment thread at Marginal Revolution that went out of its way to insult Scott in a way that made me think this was an interesting guy I ought to pay attention to. Sure enough, he was. As is much of the rest of the commentariat here, obviously.
This has only happened to me once, where I discovered a member of a Magic: the Gathering messageboard I frequented was also adjacent to postrationalist Twitter. The internet feels very large to me, in general.
I don’t know if this is weird but I remember seeing you/ your avatar comment both here and under a Wildbow story and noticed you as a regular commenter (amongst like loads of others). It took me ages before I realised you were at both places.
as someone who is more peripherally involved here… postrationalist? what does that mean? when and how did rationalism become postrationalism? It sounds like a fascinating tale.
It’s like beginning of FF6, when the Imperial soldiers march into Narshe shouting “That which can be destroyed by Magitek Armor should be!”
Which doesn’t really answer your question. Which answers your question. Which doesn’t really answer your question. And it goes on like this.
Darcey Riley wrote a thing about postrationality. (This was going to be the beginning of a series but unfortunately I’m pretty sure she never wrote the rest.)
Yeah, I don’t think she’s writing anymore. There’s also Immanence. I have a post (well, an outline dashed off at 2am on my daily blog) here that’s also relevant.
I had a similar reaction when I learned that a fairly well-known pro Magic: The Gathering player was the CEO of MetaMed.
No matter how different the internet groups that are interesting to you may be, they do all sare the property of being interesting to you.
Since there are 3 billion plus people on the internet now, at least a few of them are going to have interest profiles similar to your own. Humans aren’t all *that* unique.
So those TPC-like people keep popping up.
How are you finding these new corners?
Some of this is that I’m introduced to X through “Person who was at Y”.
If persons A-J were also introduced to X through Y, then A-J will also be in both of my corners.
I’ve definitely encountered some of this. I’ve run into people in professional settings who go “Oh, are you that guy from HackerNews?” And I’m firmly convinced that there are only like 30 rationalists (and perhaps twice that many -adjacents), just judging by how many places I run into the same individuals.
As an example, I read Gwern regularly for some time, then encountered him again through LessWrong, then encountered him a third time, totally independently, through some academic content.
90-9-1 again, I guess. If there’s 30 you’re aware of, there’s probably 270 who just lurk.
have you asked any of those people if they ever comment?
Almost certainly – there are plenty of spaces I read but don’t post in myself. I guess I didn’t mean to imply that there are only 30 people, just suggest that I’m stunned at how often the same pool of names shows up in new spots.
I suspect if this is a thing, it’s a combination of (a) high IQ people being uncommon and congregating with one another (b) most people, including high IQ people, don’t use the internet seriously or even if they do they mostly lurk. (I think I remember reading that typical lurker to poster ratio is 10:1 or greater? I wonder if lurkerhood in one forum predicts lurkerhood in general?)
In particular, I imagine that a good fraction of SSC posters who are old enough to have been around for Usenet were on Usenet at the time it was active. And you wouldn’t be surprised that you’d keep seeing the same people on Usenet because Usenet was a niche thing right?
For what it’s worth, I was active on Usenet for a very long time. I think of Facebook as a not very good Usenet replacement, from the standpoint of finding interesting people to argue with, SSC as a considerably better one.
Are you interested in having a FAQ for SSC? We could help write it.
Can anyone recommend a good introduction to Color Theory? I can’t pick colors for websites and such.
Websites like http://paletton.com/ are great for picking out triads and such, but to get a good grounding in the theory in a practical sense the resource I found the most useful was Color and Light.
Thanks!
When picking individual colors, I often find the HUSL color picker helpful. It’s a color picker that lets you modify colors by three independent properties: hue, saturation, and lightness. Play with it to learn how each property affects the color.
Unlike “HSL” pickers which are built into many applications, and have the same three property names, HUSL makes these three properties truly independent of each other. So once you set your desired lightness, changing the hue and saturation won’t mess with how bright the color appears to be, unlike with HSL.
The image to the left of the picker demonstrates how different colors have different maximum saturations at different lightnesses. So there is no such color as “dark highly-saturated yellow” – a yellow like that just can’t exist.
The graphs farther down the page can also help you understand the difference between “saturation” and “chroma”, though you will need to find other sources for details. Basically, “saturation” is a relative measure of how saturated a color looks compared to how saturated it could be at that lightness, expressed as a percentage. “Chroma” is an absolute measure of how saturated a color looks, expressed as a number. The maximum chroma for various hues at a given lightness level can be different. For example, for light colors, a fully-saturated yellow has much more chroma than a fully-saturated red.
There is a old, multi-media CD-ROM called DesignSense (https://www.amazon.com/DesignSense-Presentations-Margo-Halverson/dp/0967873606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465557492&sr=1-1&keywords=designsense) that I think is the best ever made on the topic. It is aimed at PowerPoint users but its color and layout theory training is amazing. Sadly, it is now very hard to find but well worth it if you can find a copy somewhere.
If you are old enough you might remember all the hype and promise of interactive learning via CD-ROM. This is one of the few that actually lived up to it.
Idea (not wholly original to me, but I made some tweaks from the version I saw): lawsuit investment. You go to an investor, and say “I have a strong claim against a company that can afford a huge settlement, but I can’t afford lawyers as good as they can.” The investor evaluates your claim and its chance of winning, and if he likes it he he helps pay your legal costs in exchange for a share of the settlement should you win. Is this legal/practical/profitable?
I am not sure, but this reminds me of one of the cleverer laws:
That divorce lawyers are not allowed to work on commission.
Is that a Federal law, or a legal ethics rule, or a state law, or what?
Apparently this is mainly a thing in Ontario (Canada).
I should have looked into it more, but the cleverness of the idea was just very appealing to me.
It is true in many US States.
In the U.S. it is part of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and is a state bar rule in every state I’m familiar with.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_1_5_fees.html
This reminds me of Saga Iceland’s legal system. You could literally sell your claim to justice to a third party, who would extract it from the offender.
I like to argue that, in this respect, we are a mere thousand years behind the cutting edge of legal technology. Making tort claims marketable solves multiple problems:
1. The tort victim who can’t afford a lawyer. He may be able to get a law firm to take the case for a share of the award, but …
2. How does he know which law firm will do a good job, which do a bad job, which sell him out for some covert payment? If he can sell his claim, all he needs to know is which firm offers him the highest price.
3. Ditto for the victim who can afford a lawyer but doesn’t know which to hire.
4. It replaces the class action as a way of dealing with torts that have many victims, each of which has not suffered enough to make it worth suing. An entrepreneurial lawyer buys up many claims, then sues.
Trade in patents is one way in which this is effectively possible in the current legal system. The public perception of non-practicing entities is reflected in the fact that no one calls them that in any context where “patent troll” is permissible.
That said, there are institutions that are unpopular at parties but nonetheless make the world more economically efficient. Are companies that buy patents specifically to sue infringers improving total welfare?
What are patents for, though? The U.S. Constitution fairly explicitly describes the purpose of patent and copyright protection as “to promote the progress of science and useful arts” by protecting the ability of authors and inventors to profit off their work, presumably by selling what they’ve made. The “patent troll” is by definition not trying to sell the new and improved mousetrap or what-have-you, merely waiting for someone else to have the same idea and try to actually make use of it, then demand money.
If you’re going to invent something useful, but not actually produce it yourself or license it to someone else who will actually produce it, what benefit is there to society in giving you rights over it?
No, but it isn’t inherent in the idea of a non-practicing entity. The problem is that the patents are crap. Companies that actually make things don’t want to get into a war over crap patents; instead, they build up their own portfolio of crap patents to use to threaten back.
But a non-practicing entity offers a way to make money off bad patents, because there’s no way for the defendent to countersue using its own portfolio. So either a speculator picks up the bad patents when a company goes bankrupt, or someone simply sells the bad patent to the NPE. Then the NPE can sue and make money that way.
Someone could be non-practicing because it is a field which huge start-up costs.
If I design a novel CPU, I can’t build it myself. I need to license it to others.
In the real life American legal system, some law firms solicit clients and take a high proportion of the lawsuit’s proceeds rather than flat legal fees. American law firms operate on a partnership structure rather than a corporate one, though, which makes getting outside investment to bring in more capital to fund suits like this more complicated than it might be otherwise.
To elaborate, it is illegal for outside investment to come from other than lawyers. Thiel is, in fact, a lawyer, but he probably just donated funds, which anyone could do.
This is exactly how the current system handles ‘X has a strong case for a lawsuit with high damages but no money for attorneys’, and it works in some cases. That’s part of the reason you see a lot of personal injury ads on television featuring serious-looking men in suits telling you that calling their number will cause your opponent to laugh nervously and open up their checkbook. A personal injury firm has seen enough cases that they can make a pretty educated guess whether your claim is likely to succeed (or settle) and what it’ll be worth, and if taking a 30% cut of that will be worth their time.
Where this could create a market is in risky-proposition cases. A law firm (especially a smaller firm) is a risk-averse entity if it’s getting a percentage fee because lawsuits are really expensive. An investment firm with strong enough metrics could probably pinpoint the precise margins for cases better than a law firm. I actually sort of wonder if Scott’s old idea of a slightly negative-sum betting market fueling some litigation could work, although there are enough potential problems with that idea that I don’t care to seriously suggest it right now.
Not exactly on-point, but I highly suggest the book ‘A Civil Action’ to anybody who’d like to see a realistic account about the costs and risks of litigation while still having an exciting, character-driven story.
Historically this was illegal, under the name “champerty”.
In current English law, as I understand it it’s no longer a crime, but the funder of the suit may become liable for costs if they lose.
(What Thiel did would historically also have been illegal, called “maintenance” – the crime or tort of funding another party’s lawsuit without just cause. Champerty is maintenance in exchange for a proportion of the proceeds of the suit.)
British legal doctrines have the funniest names. This is something I’ve noticed before.
Nonsense! Go check out the Tipsy Coachman Doctrine, which I believe originated from some combination of Georgia or Florida.
I like “hell or high water” clauses.
Which reminds me of a little lake in central FL, off the east side of the swamp that drains into the St Johns River.
The name on the maps is “Lake Helen Blazes” which leads some people to ask who Mz Blazes was, and why she lived so far out in the boonies.
Here you can buy the litigation rights of someone and take their place in a lawsuit. Sometimes lawyers buy these rights because it’s cheaper for them.
It’s a good thing because it means that people who can’t afford the cost of lawsuits can still get something and people with power are less likely to bully them.
“Here” meaning Mordor?
I assume you are not in saga period Iceland.
Isn’t that the same kind of thing as “no foal, no fee“?
I can see the appeal where someone has a genuine claim but the other side can afford the big guns, but on the other hand that’s also an invitation to ambulance chasing and fraudulent claims.
I’ll have to be careful to name no names here, but there is one lawyer in my town who is notorious for taking cases about the local government authority where I work(ed); one guy who took a case got a nice settlement but once the lawyer had taken his chunk there was not so much left for the plaintiff.
There was also a particular family who had terrible misfortune; they were always tripping over uneven paving on the streets and having to go to court and get damages. It was a plague for them, it went from one member to another, all falling over in the street and getting injured and having to go to court. Such unlucky people!
*sarcasm off*
I thought this was a typo for “foul”, but that’s how it appears (three times) in the linked article, which seems to have nothing to do with horses. I still think it must be a typo, or a mechanical translation error, but I’m fascinated to know if this is some idiom I have missed.
It’s from animal husbandry, where you’d pay someone to bring his stallion to impregnate your mare, with the stipulation that if no foal was begotten, no fee would be paid.
It appears to come from horse breeding:
John Smith has a mare that he wants to breed. Sally Jones has a stallion. John and Sally agree that Sally’s stallion will mount John’s mare, and if she gets pregnant, John will pay Sally a fee. But he doesn’t pay anything until there is an actual success.
The analogy to legal cases seems clear. You win, you have a foal. You lose, you don’t pay anything.
Wow, learn something new every day, if I pay attention. I should have googled the phrase straightaway.
Thanks!
The is legal in the US and the UK, and is growing in significance.
Suggested Google search terms that will pull up references:
litigation finance
litigation funding
legal financing
Was this inspired by the Peter Thiel/Gawker situation?
That was somewhat similar. It was basically someone going to a rich person and saying “I have a strong claim against a company you hate, but I can’t afford lawyers as good as they can – will you agree to compensate me for my legal expenses if I lose in exchange for the personal satisfaction of having destroyed them if I win?”
I mean it’s not exactly the same but…
It was inspired by a guy I saw on Twitter commenting on the Thiel/Gawker thing, yes. His idea seemed to be public-spirited rich guys funding lawsuits out of the goodness of their hearts, but I thought a self-interested version would be more interesting.
Frankly I see the “public-spirited rich guy” case as being far more dangerous. One of the criticisms of Thiel—rightly or wrongly, I haven’t investigated—is that his involvement changed the case from one that Gawker could have settled into one that put Gawker’s continued existence at stake, without actually getting more benefit for the plaintiff-of-record. One could hope that a for-profit funder would have better incentives in this respect.
(How to allow for-profit funding without letting in the malicious rich guy funder is another question.)
In UK law, where the loser as a rule pays the winner’s costs, as I understand it a third party who funds the losing side can find themselves ordered to pay a share of costs reflecting the extent to which their involvement extended the proceedings without cause.
Wait, how is there not more benefit for the plaintiff? He gets a judgment big enough to put Gawker’s continued existence at stake. And he may even have some emotional interest in getting justice instead of a spare-change settlement, too, Gawker has been at least as unkind to Hulk Hogan as it has to Peter Thiel.
If the plaintiff has been harmed then he’s entitled to damages in respect of the harm, and perhaps an injunction to prevent further harm; he’s not in general entitled to dictate some specific outcome for the defendant.
Refusing a settlement in order to run up the other side’s costs, or adjusting the claim to avoid the possibility that the other side’s insurance might cover it, is exactly the kind of conduct that would distinguish the malicious maintainer from a profit-oriented funder.
The solution to that, it seems to me, is the same one which is practiced in certain fields of insurance: have the interested third party pay into a fund but forbid disclosure of the third party to the attorney. That way the attorney’s interests can only come from the plaintiff directly.
(Granted, that still leaves open the situation where the third party gives the first party instructions on how they want the case handled. Such is life.)
Didn’t the plaintiff sue for damages in respect of the harm? I guess there were some punitive damages too, but surely you don’t think punitive damages are evil and should be abolished. I don’t know why you think the plaintiff has an obligation to settle for an amount that Gawker’s insurance might cover; he was wronged, and deserves his day in court.
he’s not in general entitled to dictate some specific outcome for the defendant
He is specifically entitled to dictate, “You will pay me the sum of money that the jury determines is fair”. He is also specifically entitled to dictate, “Yes, we are going to put this to the jury and see what they think is fair rather than you giving me some smaller sum in exchange for going home early”.
If this happens to result in the defendant’s bankruptcy, then yes, the plaintiff is entitled to demand the defendant’s bankruptcy.
I can’t speak to legal, but it’s profitable. From a financial perspective it’s effectively the same as getting a lawyer who’s working for a cut of the settlement, but with a freer market. There’s no particular reason that the person ‘investing’ in your court case should be the lawyer prosecuting it; they might have an uncommon sense of how likely you are to win, but it should be productive to sell that claim to anyone who’s interested in buying it.
If anything, your system should increase the odds of successful prosecution. As is, semi-shady lawyers who are willing to work on spec usually take these cases. In your model, a strong-and-valuable claim can be sold to an investor rich enough to front money for the best lawyers around.
This also creates solves the problem of spec-work lawyers taking the entire settlement. Right now they’re fighting your broke ass over fees (What’re you gonna do, sue them? You couldn’t afford a lawyer in the first place!) As proposed, they’d be dealing with a wealthy-and-experienced lawsuit-investor, hopefully leading to better negotiated settlement structures.
Odd question, but would anyone here be interested in a brief, illustrated post on the history of beekeeping?
Some conversations in the last few threads about mead-making, medieval food and drink, and economic history got me looking at some recent archeology papers on the subject, and they’ve discovered some fascinating things.
(To… well, someone who’s a little too obsessed with all of those subjects.)
It’s a strange feeling to look at dung & straw hives from 1100-900 BC right next to identical ones from 2012 AD.
And it’s even stranger to realize that iron age peasants 3000 years ago—who could only spell “bee” by drawing little pictures of them—knew the ideal dimensions for hive volume and opening size down to the centimeter. Dimensions that were only confirmed experimentally in the 1980s!
Beekeeping history is only interesting to weird nerds, but the discovery and cultural transmission of knowledge over millennia could be a useful thing for a rationalist group to talk about in general. And this seems like a perfect case study, if I can dig up more info.
Am interested in apiculture a bit, yes. Would like a post.
Yes, I would like this post, and this is illustrating my post-point up above in a slightly different way. Here it’s someone physically local to me, which also happens a ton. I’ve scaled back on mentioning my location because in the recent areas I am online they seem dominated by people from my physical location (well, within 500 miles).
I’ve been keeping bees for a decade (after taking over from several generations of beekeepers) and still know practically zero about the history attached to the whole thing. Would love such a post and can possibly pitch in with a few comments about the current state of the art if desirable.
Yes. Not sure why you’re hating on pictograms, though. They’re very user-friendly in relatively small, relatively static domains.
Why not? Knowledge is no burden, as the saying goes! And it’s nice to see something that helps drive out the modern attitude that “people Back Then were so dumb, they believed all this crap, unlike us Smart Moderns who know so much and all our beliefs are perfectly reasonable”.
Rule of thumb, trial-and-error, and observation over time means that though they may not have had sophisticated measuring instruments or been able to devise the perfect theory, they could – as in your example about opening size – find the best way to do something by using the evidence of their eyes and experience. I think we tend to over-emphasise “if this doesn’t have seven decimal places it’s no good” when ‘close enough’ is good enough for practical purposes.
I can’t remember where I was reading it (maybe a Jared Diamond book?) but I remember it being observed that the construction of Polynesian canoes was based on copying the ones that came back to shore.
Evolution, in other words.
The same method was used during WWII to figure out what were the vulnerable points on bombers. Have a model of the bomber. Every time one comes back, put a black patch on the model where each bullet hole is. Look for the areas that end up with no black patches. Those are where the bullet holes were in the ones that didn’t come back.
Putting the armor where the bullet holes weren’t was actually a hard-won insight on the part of Abraham Wald; I’d known the story, but not about the man, until I read about him in a book by a mathematician, Jordan Ellenberg, who I knew briefly when we were young, called How Not to Be Wrong, which should have some appeal to this readership.
Then this past week the put-the-armor-where-there-are-no-holes idea made the rounds on Twitter, where people had to point out that it wasn’t apocryphal (progress!).
So it’s a small world, both in terms of people and in terms of ideas.
I’m pretty sure I had the story from my father, who was part of the statistical research group during the war, which I think is where the idea came from. Wald was part of the same group.
I strongly suspect that preliterate people had far better skills of observation and recall, at least for concrete events, than we do today. Partly this is due to a sense that there must be some similar overall use of brain capacity, and therefore all of the memory we now devote to modern factoids and media creations must at one time have been much more allocated towards remembering the small details of everyday life and/or the local social gossip. I remember reading an account of a farmer from the 1870s who commented that it had rained on some particular date for five years running. Who now would be able to call to mind the weather on a particular day, for years in to the past, without recourse to a computer?
So far as bees go, this is relevant because I expect that one way to figure out how big the hive opening size needs to be is just to watch your bees for an hour every day, understand what they’re trying to do and whether they’re getting bottlenecked, and enlarge the opening as needed. Once you realize it always ends up essentially the same size you have the information you need…
I remember reading an account of a farmer from the 1870s who commented that it had rained on some particular date for five years running. Who now would be able to call to mind the weather on a particular day, for years in to the past, without recourse to a computer?
If it was an important day, like my birthday, I’d probably remember it.
And if it was an important day for farming, and the rain impacted it, the farmer would remember it, too.
Yeah, rain during your very short window for haying is pretty memorable.
I think it’s very likely that preliterate people had better skills for observation and recall. Methods of conserving necessary knowledge seem likely to have a huge impact on group survival.
On the other hand, it’s likely they also had comparable tendencies towards confirmation bias and overestimating the accuracy of their memories, eyewitness testimony, etc., to what we find in our own experiments. One difference between the farmer saying it rained on date X for five years running now is that instead of assuming he must know or he wouldn’t be saying it, and being suitably impressed, we can google and check.
(Though most people still might not– the “[citation needed]” tendency is stronger in the geekosphere than in mainstream society as far as I can tell. [citation needed])
In fact there were entire suites of pedagogic technologies, fully developed courses of training to cultivate this skill, that became completely outmoded by widespread book printing. Once you had widespread literacy anyway, putting more paper into people’s hands was easier than giving them a minor-degrees worth of training in memory control.
Definitely.
I am really interested in bee-keeping generally, and have actually done some unpublished research on honey collection among African foragers that will likely remain unpublished. There are tons of interesting angles to the topic: The clever search strategies (like triangulating ‘bee tracks’ to find hives), the strategic nature of the symbiotic relationship with the honey guide, and the unique property rights problems that honey collection poses for foragers.
Dear gods, yes. BEES!
Concerning bees:
Poetry.
Economics.
Absolutely. Especially if it goes into detail on pre-modern developments — most of the time when I see an article on the history of some technology, it jumps straight from Egypt or Rome to the early modern period.
Yes, yes I would. That sounds fantastically interesting. Every time I stumble onto anything apicultural, I get swallowed up by a mini-wiki-sinkhole for some number of hours. I suppose I should try it some day when I actually have a yard, but until then, I must live vicariously!
Yes. If you could find information on Yemen and the practice of carrying log hives at night by camel, that would be extra awesome.
“You are not smarter than the entire past.”
Your answer there was exactly why that info made such an impression on me, rather than “huh, that’s a funny coincidence”.
So, inspired by a whole bunch of posters talking about how acceptance of Muslims gelled with Blue and Red values, I’m going to offer some interesting observations based on some travels in the Middle East:
The Shi’a Muslims of South Lebanon (ie: Hizbullah country) are more like Red Tribe Americans than any group of non-Americans I’ve ever encountered (after years of travel in Europe and a lot of contact with immigrants from East and South Asia.) [In the sentences that follow, I’m going to be speaking in statistical generalities– a lot of people in the region do diverge from the pattern in some way, just as many Red Tribe Americans don’t fit aspects of that pattern.] They’re deeply patriotic in a way that links up with regional and sectarian identity, they valorize military service and honor their war dead with great ceremony, they love guns and old cars, they have an intensely entrepreneurial small business culture, they smoke Winstons and eat at KFC, they prefer not to move too far away from their hometowns, they try to maintain and expand family farms, they put a high priority on their relationships with their families, they’re patriarchal but not to the point of banning women from the workforce, they’re baffled and somewhat disgusted by trans people, and they’re extremely friendly and hospitable to visitors, and show their hospitality by serving huge, high-fat meals which you have to eat all of to avoid being perceived as rude.
Making my own position more clear: I’m a very Blue Blue-triber, but I don’t have the usual tribal antipathy towards Reds, probably because my mother’s from a Red midwestern family, and because I went to college in Texas, so I got a lot of opportunities to build emotional connections with Red people. My historical research incorporates material relating to the Middle East, so, like most people in Middle Eastern studies, I’m more inclined to be sympathetic to Arabs than most Americans are.
Hmm, what about Israeli Reds? Are they very different from that?
Israeli Jewish society doesn’t really fit into the sociology of the United States. The big cleavages there are: fundamentalist (Haradi) vs national religious vs secular, Russian speaking vs non-Russian speaking, and Ashkenazi vs Sephardi vs other.
Within a particular subgroup (i.e. secular, Ashkenazi, non-Russian) you do see the kind of economic and cultural animosities that split the U.S. red and blue tribes but with the physical geography being so much smaller and the overarching cleavages playing such a prominent role, the kind of sharp tribal separation we see in the US is not really possible.
Israeli here (don’t idenitify as either left or right wing even though I voted for a left wing party – Meretz – on previous elections). I partially agree with Ben David but the division between people supporting dovish policy vs. people supporting hawkish policy is also significant (and correlates with other standard positionos of left vs. right politics but not perfectly). That said, it doesn’t seem to have most of the cultural attributes of the American Red Tribe. If I interpret “Israeli Reds” as “Israelis who support hawkish policy” and compare with Lemminkainen list:
* Deeply patriotic, valorize military service: yes
* Love guns and old cars: Not really. Notice that gun ownership by civilians is very restricted in Israel.
* Small business culture: Hmm, don’t think so.
* Winstons and KFC: no.
* Moving far away: Israel is a small country so moving away doesn’t seem to be a big issue. OTOH, Lebanon is even smaller. Maybe the transport infrastructure there is worse though, I dunno.
* Family farms: not really. To the extend agriculture is idealized it seems a left-wing thing as much as a right-wing thing, at least used to be (see Kibbutz).
* Sexism and other bigotry: I’m sure there is substantial positive correlation but there also seem to be substantial groups of hawkish people who are not especially bigotted (except bigotry towards Arabs; this is somewhat difficult to separate from hawkishness, at least from extreme hawkishness).
* Hospitality: Hmm, dunno, don’t think there is strong correlation there.
These Shia Muslims sound like my kind of people. Actually, they also sound a lot like Romanians.
My first reaction here was “Sounds like Eastern Europe!” (Also Scotland in a lot of ways.) That cluster of ideas (sexual traditionalism, machinery traditionalism/affection, dietary habits, etc) seems to have found expression in at least half a dozen wildly distinct places.
To me, it sounds like the complete opposite of (present-day) Scotland. And I live in Scotland. And I was born in Yugoslavia.
I think the citizens of almost every other country in the world have more in common with Red Tribe Americans than Blue Tribe Americans, except the upper-left quadrant of Europe.
Source: lots of travel
Outbreeding versus inbreeding.
I sort of noticed this too. While I found very little in common with American media figures, the expat Americans I met were actually overwhelmingly people I most liked and could easily get along with. All of them were Red Tribe.
Anecdote, but as someone who almost went the expat route, but came home in the end, I’ve often felt that that I had more in common with the dirty rednecks, be they from Sumatra or Missouri than I did with the folk from Paris or New York.
Yeah. It has always been easier for me to talk to Chinese, Iranians, or Venezuelans than to talk to New Yorkers.
Likewise, I’m much more likely to get along with an educated Parisian or Hong Konger than some meth head from flyover.
Oh look, you’re back.
@Lemminkainen,
You’re not the only one. Making my own position more clear; I’m probably far more “Red” than the average commenter here and the similarities were striking to me as well. As far as why things have played out the way they have, I feel like there is a two-fold problem.
(Note that this is based entirely my own experience/perception rather than any sort of scientifically rigorous analysis.)
I think the first part of the issue is that I think a large portion of people’s opinions that are influenced by activists and the media rather than direct experience. The second and in my mind the more critical problem is that the activists and the media seem to be actively trying to muddy the waters, making any sort of distinction between distinction between Sunni, Shia, Wahhabists, etc… politically untenable. As such they all get rolled into the blanket group “Muslims” or “Middle Easterners”.
This vox article was linked in the subreddit, and I feel like something similar is happening in regards to immigration, specifically immigration from the Middle East.
By the same token when we are prevented from discriminating between say Shia and Sunni, or Chaldeans and Wahhabi there is a (IMO reasonable) impulse to just throw up one’s hands and say “Fuck it, none of you get to come in”.
Yeah, of these distinctions, I think that the Wahabbis vs. Everyone Else one is the most important. Having more knowledge about the Middle East has made me feel much more comfortable hating on the Wahabbis, because most Muslims (Sunni and Shi’a, actually) in places like Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt also hate them. (I think that this dislike also ties in to a general sense of resentment towards the citizens and governments of the Gulf countries and especially towards the Saudis, who people in the poorer parts of the Arab world perceive as bastards who stir up trouble in their countries and then don’t lift a finger to help, all while claiming to be good Muslims.)
Haven’t traveled the region as much as you have but this part is definitely something I noticed right away.
Don’t want to suggest that I’ve traveled more than I have. I do my research in Beirut, but I’ve run into and talked to a bunch of Palestinians, Syrians, and Egyptians there.
Oh, also, I think that your theory about the representation of American Muslims discounts what I think is a simpler explanation– most Americans actually just don’t know much about the distinctions between different groups of Muslims, at least not beyond the Sunni/Shi’a split, so their discourse doesn’t take those divisions into account. (This isn’t a knock on Americans– I doubt that most Middle Eastern Muslims keep track of the differences between the eighty bajillion Protestant denominations.)
Understand that I’m not disagreeing. I think you are correct in observing that most Americans do not understand the distinctions.
I actually find this incredibly frustrating, because I think these distinction are important and as I said above, it seems to me that there is a subset of activists and the media (the folks at CAIR spring to mind) who are actively try to keep these distinctions from being made.
There are probably still many Americans who think of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and the Nation of Islam when you mention Muslims. The NoI was either a deeply heterodox form of Islam or a separate religion entirely, not unlike the relationship of Mormonism to Christianity, but for many years it was the most visible sect calling itself “Islamic” in America. (I use the past tense because the organization fragmented after the death of Elijah Muhammad. The current incarnation of the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan is, of all things, a Scientology affiliate.)
I think you are correct and I suspect that those I mentioned above may be trying to cash in on this sort of equivocation.
“I doubt that most Middle Eastern Muslims keep track of the differences between the eighty bajillion Protestant denominations”
Hell, most non-Protestant Americans don’t even do this. I’m an agnostic and I know more about the difference between Sunni and Shia than I do about the difference between Baptist and Methodist (because it seems less relevant to global events).
Sunni/Shia is in any event more closely comparable to Catholic/Protestant. How many outsiders know more about that than “The Catholics all obey the Pope, the Protestants don’t because of something they protested once upon a time”?
I know more about the difference between Twelver Shia and Sevener Shia than the difference between Baptist and Methodist.
It’s not that hard. Baptists are Puritan descendants who split off in the early 1600s and share a common focus on baptism of believers rather than infant baptism. Methodists are Anglican descendants which began as a reformist movement and later split into a separate church, thanks mostly to independent ordination not approved by the institutional Anglican church. The historical context is interesting – after the Revolutionary War, there were no longer any validly ordained Anglican bishops in America. So John Wesley (an ordained Anglican) ordained his own priests to go and minister to Methodists in America rather than wait for the institutional church to send their own bishop.
This nails something I’ve been thinking a lot about. The failure to welcome groups like the Chaldeans as refugees seems to be almost exclusively a product of political point-scoring.
The Democrats go “let in the Middle Eastern refugees, they need help!” The Republicans go “no, they’re scary Islamic terrorist types! But we’ll take the Christians!” And the Democrats go “no, that’s religious discrimination, so don’t let them in either!” So suddenly we’re not letting in a bunch of white-looking, culturally-uncontroversial refugees who are in desperate danger, because no one will budge on their proposals. Everyone involved thinks they should come in, but no one can draft a policy making it happen.
None of that was meant to be a moral assessment, just an observation that we have this utterly-idiotic system where we have a near-universally accepted opportunity to do good and still achieve nothing.
Agreed. The partisanship and “culture war” stuff ranges from entertaining to annoying, but this is the sort of thing that tempts me to spit upon my hands and hoist the black flag…
I’d also like to point out that for as up in arms as everyone gets about how “unfair” it is to discriminate on the basis of religion, our current system discriminates based on how much we like the guy who rules the chunk of land you happened to be born on. And that’s apparently not controversial at all…
I don’t know. If it was late 1939 and there was a proposed bill to allow 50,000 refugees from Poland into the country, but the southern democrats insisted on adding a requirement that they be Christian, because they didn’t want any more Jesus killers in the country, I probably wouldn’t be supporting the bill.
I don’t see why.
Not a perfect analogy: after 1939, Polish Jews were in far greater danger than Polish Gentiles: over 90% of Jews who were in Poland before the war started were dead by its end.
In contrast, Christians in the places refugees have recently been fleeing are probably more at risk than the average.
@dndnrsn
This seems crucial.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that half measures prevent whole measures. I was intensely skeptical of ‘civil partnerships’ in the gay marriage debate because they seemed less like a stepping stone than a derailing tactic, and I think the same logic applies in a lot of other places.
In this case, though… The edge case in question (Christians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, whoever other non-Muslims) is even more extreme (per capita) than the standard case. What’s more, we could easily settle as many immigrants from those groups as Americans are likely to take anyway – it’s a half measure, but the full measure would help the same number of people.
If anything, I would analogize to Israel’s immigration rules instead of pre-war conflict; they didn’t help everyone getting persecuted in Russia, but Russian Jews were pretty clearly a group in uncommon need of help!
I can’t find the source on this – but I swear when this whole refugee thing started happening, I was seeing a ton of articles on social media from blue-tribe folks about how back in the 30s, a majority of Americans opposed allowing Jewish refugees from Europe to come settle in America (the point of which, presumably was: see, we haven’t changed, we’re as racist and terrible as ever).
If there was a proposal to settle 50,000 Polish refugees and some politically-powerful group said “OK, we’ll take 50,000 Jews, but we don’t want any of the Gypsies”, would you really have vetoed the resulting bill?
My historical understanding is as follows:
In the 1930s, the debate was largely over accepting as refugees Jews in German-controlled areas, who faced increasing discrimination (mass killings didn’t start until 1939 with shootings in Poland, and only really took off in massive numbers in 1941 with shootings in the USSR; death camps followed that).
Not only did the various countries that could have taken in the German Jews not want to (being, by the standards of today, very anti-Semitic) they feared that if they took in German Jews, they would be followed by Jews from east of Germany – who were much more numerous, generally less assimilated, and victims of discrimination as well.
It’s not a great analogy, for 2 different reasons:
1. The situation is not Person A saying “we should let Middle Eastern Christian refugees in” and someone else saying “ew we don’t like Middle Eastern Christians, plus if we let them in all the other groups facing persecution will have a precedent”. It’s Person A saying “we should let Middle Eastern refugees in” and person B saying “well, but let’s limit it to Christians”, with person A replying by saying “all or none!”
2. Jews in Germany, and in Europe in general, in the 1930s faced discrimination. The mass killing hadn’t started yet: very few people were predicting that by 1945 2/3 of European Jews would be dead (and that’s when Jews in places the Germans never reached are counted – if you only include German territory, German-allied territory, and occupied territory, it’s higher). In contrast, mass killings are already happening in the Middle East.
our current system discriminates based on how much we like the guy who rules the chunk of land you happened to be born on
This is the second time you’ve said that, and I don’t think it is true. Our current system distinguishes immigrants by nationality. Nationality is more than “the guy who rules the chunk of land”. Of all the potentially relevant factors that constitute nationality, I do not think that the identity or likeability of the present head of state or head of government is anywhere near the top of the list in US immigration policy.
If it were, I’d expect US immigration policy to undergo frequent changes when nations change administration or government, and I don’t see much evidence of that.
If you understand that US immigration policy cares about other relevant aspects of nationality and are trying to trivialize it as a sort of personal popularity issue, please stop.
I’m not 100% familiar with our country by country policy, but is it your assertion that in terms of immigration, our government treats people from Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all the exact same?
My guess is that no – they aren’t treated the same, and that favorable treatment probably follows favorable relations with the government from which they claim citizenship. What “other aspects of nationality” does it care about that are things we wouldn’t find it abhorrent to discriminate based on?
Are there other things that might separate an Iranian from a Jordanian? Sure – religion immediately comes to mind – but wait, using that as a criteria is evil and wrong.
Edit: And I mean to refer to “immigration” in the broadest possible sense – encompassing visits for tourism, work visas, permanent residence, refugee/asylum claiming, citizenship, all that. I’m assuming that in all of these areas, the difficulty of accomplishing your desired task depends a great deal on which passport you have – which is almost always a direct result of where you happened to be born.
I’d guess that US immigration (etc) policy treats Jordanians and Saudis in a sufficiently similar manner as to make no meaningful difference. But it’s your claim, so I’ll let you look it up.
I’d also guess that US immigration policy w/re Syria has changed dramatically over the past five years, even though it is the same guy running the country (or at least the parts that are still issuing Syrian passports). I would expect that US policy on Syrian immigrants today is substantially similar to US policy on immigrants from other countries with messy, bloody civil wars in progress and is driven by that fact more than any other.
And with regards to Iran, the incredibly obvious characteristic that distinguishes it from Jordan as a source of immigrants to the United States of America is that Iran’s messy bloody civil war not too long ago was explicitly anti-American in character and still results in annual anti-American mass celebrations promising Death to the Great Satan.
Is it really your contention that the only meaningful differences between those nations are the extent to which Salman bin Abdulaziz, Abdulla bib Al-Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Ali Khameni are “liked” by the United States Government?
“And with regards to Iran, the incredibly obvious characteristic that distinguishes it from Jordan as a source of immigrants to the United States of America is that Iran’s messy bloody civil war not too long ago was explicitly anti-American in character and still results in annual anti-American mass celebrations promising Death to the Great Satan.”
And what does the average Iranian poor laborer have to do with any of that? He is almost certainly not involved in this. It’s a dispute between the rulers of Iran and the rulers of the U.S. And yet, the fact that he was born on one side of a particular river means that we hold him somehow responsible, and yet someone born on the other side of the river would not be held responsible.
Is your point “It’s reasonable to restrict immigration for Iranians because a lot of them have professed anti-American viewpoints?”
Because that applies to Muslims as well. People object to that with “It’s unfair to discriminate against the whole group because of the actions of a few!” So why does that STOP being unfair if you do it based on “nationality” (whatever that means) rather than religion?
Is your point “It’s reasonable to restrict immigration for Iranians because a lot of them have professed anti-American viewpoints?”
Is your point, “It’s reasonable to restrict immigration for Iranians because we don’t like their present head of state”?
Make up your mind what you want to talk about, because this is getting really annoying. Are we talking about what US immigration policy reasonably should be, or about what US immigration policy actually is?
I have said nothing in this thread about the reasonableness of any US immigration policy, real or hypothetical, and at this point I do not intend to. You made an explicit but unsupported assertion about what US immigration policy actually is, and it is one which I do not believe is true. I do not even believe that you believe it is literally true. As part of my response, I offered an alternate (and oversimplified) explanation as to what I think US immigration policy actually is. I make no claim that this is “reasonable” as a policy, only that it is more likely to be the actual policy than is your strawman.
I propose that U.S. immigration policy currently discriminates on the basis of nationality (and the only thing they check is your passport, not any of the non-geographic factors you propose make up nationality). I offer you no particular evidence, just a hunch I have. Feel free to believe that’s wrong if you’d like.
My feeling on the matter is that discriminating based on nationality is certainly no better than discriminating based on religion (which we are frequently told is just plain evil). I would actually lean towards the idea that discriminating based on nationality is worse than discriminating based on religion, because you can generally pick your religion (yes yes, I know in the middle east it’s not quite that simple sometimes) but you can’t pick your nationality – it is a pure fluke of birth.
I also propose to you that if you asked most Americans, “Should we have different immigration policies for Canadians and Iranians” they would say yes – obviously – that’s just common sense. But if you asked them “Should we have different immigration policies for Christians and Muslims” they would say no – that’s discrimination, it’s un-American! I believe these positions are contradictory. In either case, you are judging an individual based on your perception of the group they belong to.
Your lack of patience isn’t my problem.
The obvious point here is that “nationality” is primarily determined by one thing – where you happened to be born (and occasionally, where your parents happened to be born).
Your rant about how there are “other things” that comprise nationality is technically accurate, but irrelevant to the issue. When we decide whether to let in Abdul or Muhammad, we look at one thing, the country that issued their passport. We don’t quiz them on whether they are moderate Shia or 12er Sunni – we don’t take note of whether they speak Arabic or Farsi – we look at “country you are a citizen of” only – and as discussed above, this is almost always a product of circumstances of birth entirely outside one’s control.
But how do we decide which countries citizens to grant easy access to and which ones to grant strict scrutiny? I suppose if you have an optimistic view of government you might say “Our elected leaders survey various research conducted by our intelligence agencies to make educated estimates of the threat level presented by nationals of each individual nation and apply policy accordingly.”
I, taking a slightly more pessimistic view, characterize the same process as, “Our leaders decide how much they like the policies instituted by the leaders of other countries.”
This is largely a semantic debate, and once again, which side is “correct” here is probably irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that a poor Jordanian has zero influence on how much the Obama administration likes the King of Jordan (or, if you prefer, how much of a threat the CIA thinks the average Jordanian is). The average Iranian has no influence on those things in regard to Iran. I have no influence on these things in regard to the U.S. (this isn’t a one way street by the way, I suspect that I would have a tougher time immigrating to Iran than a Jordanian would, but I might be wrong about that).
For the 50th time, the point here is that this is “policy as usual” and nobody cares. Nobody considers it a moral outrage to discriminate against Muhammad the Iranian, who has done no harm to anyone, because some Iranians are bad and don’t like us. And yet, proposing discriminating against Abdul the Muslim, who has done no harm to anyone, because some Muslims are bad and don’t like us – is considered a disgusting and un-American practice. This makes no sense to me, and I have yet to hear anyone attempt to justify the apparent contradiction.
Chargability for US immigration quotas is a separate issue from nationality. For example, you can be charged to the country that is the current sovereign of the place where you were born even if you aren’t a national of that country, indeed even if that country didn’t have sovereignty over that location when you were born. That wrinkle saved my grandfather from the holocaust.
Anon,
I’m not quite understanding you. Is your point that your grandfather was born somewhere the U.S. liked, then a hostile regime took over, but immigration officials still treated him as if he were “from” a regime we liked?
That’s fortunate for him and seems to be good judgement for sure – but what help is it to people who are born in a hostile regime and would prefer to leave? The idea of allowing Jews to come over to escape the Nazis is noble and proper… but what about an ethnic German born in Munich who just plain dislikes Hitler? Should he not be allowed in?
The ethnic German born in Munich who dislikes Hitler is not in as much danger as the Jew, even though, Hitler being Hitler, his danger is still non-zero.
“The ethnic German born in Munich who dislikes Hitler is not in as much danger as the Jew”
Is the Lebanese Christian as much danger as the Lebanese Muslim?
@Matt M
In this particular case it didn’t have anything to do with “liking” a particular regime. The US at that time didn’t like Hitler’s Germany any better than it liked Schuschnigg’s Austria. On the contrary, probably. Instead at that time U.S. immigration policy favored Western Europeans over Eastern Europeans for reasons that would probably sound very familiar today if you changed Eastern European to say Mexican. But since it was based on where you were born rather than nationality my grandfather was under the Western European German quota, rather than the Eastern European Austrian quota and was able to escape to the United States. His parents were considered Austrian for the purposes of US immigration law, could not immigrate, and died at Dachau.
In any event, I agree with you that we should eliminate per country quotas, I just thought the little factoid about the distinction between nationality and changeability might be interesting.
“If it were, I’d expect US immigration policy to undergo frequent changes when nations change administration or government, and I don’t see much evidence of that.”
I know more about UK than about US immigration policy; but the UK is quite good at gathering expert witnesses about conditions in other nations, and has fairly nuanced policy which does change with time – most Tamils from Sri Lanka could get asylum in the UK in 2008; nowadays you would have to have been an obvious member of the LTTE to get it.
[The UK] has fairly nuanced policy which does change with time – most Tamils from Sri Lanka could get asylum in the UK in 2008; nowadays you would have to have been an obvious member of the LTTE to get it.
Yes, but does “nowadays” mean since about 2009, when the civil war ended, or since 2015, when Sri Lanka got a new president and prime minister?
If the policy change occurred in the 2009-2015 timeframe, that’s an argument against the “…based on how much we like the guy who rules the chunk of land” theory of immigration discrimination.
I propose that U.S. immigration policy currently discriminates on the basis of nationality
I agree. That is why the second sentence I wrote in my original response was, “Our current system distinguishes immigrants by nationality”.
But this is the first time you have made that statement. What really pisses me off is that it has taken you this long to make such a simple and unobjectionable statement, which might have served as the foundation for a discussion. Instead, you have persistently and perversely said “how much we like the guy who rules the chunk of land you happened to be born on”, apparently imagining that it is a synonym for “nationality” or that we will all admire your wit in asserting so.
That’s false, it’s stupid, and it’s silly. In the unlikely even that there is some deep truth to it that I have previously missed, you probably should have tried to offer a serious explanation at some point. Because I was from the outset quite explicit that this supposed equivalence was the source of my disagreement with you, and I have now at the conclusion lost patience with you.
In general I’m glad U.S. refugee policy tends towards long standing programmatic rules rather than ad hoc chasing after the latest group of photogenic disaster victims.
That said, vis-à-vis Iraqis in particular there is an element of “you broke it, you bought it”. Yet another brick in the Iraq was Vietnam 2.0 wall I guess.
That’s accurate, and also manages to succinctly describe what I dislike about much of the Arab culture I’ve encountered. Not the loudness or the liking for guns and cars, so much as the incredible racial chauvinism and nationalism, and of course the antisemitism, which they share in common with American-brand racial chauvinists.
I hope you realize that it’s not fucking cute in the Middle East, and actually causes wars. People die because many Arabs cannot feel ok about living alongside non-Arabs.
I’d agree with you that the chauvinism and nationalism (and more pertinently in Lebanon, sectarianism) are negative traits, but I don’t agree with you that they indicate that Arabs’ culture is uniquely pathological or a sufficient explanation for warfare. Indeed, as some other commenters have pointed out, this is a package of cultural traits which appears in a lot of different world regions, many of which don’t share the Middle East’s recent history of intense warfare.
I also think that your implicit attribution of the Arab-Israeli conflict to Arab anti-Semitism (which, to be clear, is common in the region) is inaccurate. Arab hostility to European Jewish settlers in the Middle East really picked up after the Balfour Declaration. Wouldn’t you be hostile to a group of immigrants whose political leaders had persuaded the world’s leading imperial power to carve out part of the land where you had lived for centuries to create a state for them where you would be second-class citizens, reneging on earlier promises of independence? And later, wouldn’t it make sense to continue to oppose their plans and even seek to drive them out as they formed increasingly powerful armed militias to pursue those goals?
A few months ago, the links post included “The High IQ Homo Economicus” which was (correctly) described as getting at an important, under-discussed conservative idea in an offensive, hard-to-follow way. I recently ran across a First Things piece called “Homeless” which I take to be making a similar point from a much different (though still basically conservative) angle. At any rate it’s not nearly as offensive or hard to follow (though I can’t guarantee a total lack of those qualities) and I found it to be really thought-provoking. Unfortunately
this margin is too small to contain itit’s behind a paywall.LambdaConf appears to have gone very well:
http://degoes.net/articles/post-lambdaconf-2016
“All this happened amid the hailstorm that has become known as The LambdaConf Controversy. AKA, the conference’s decision not to ban a [knee oh we actuary] from the conference.”
“Some thought the controversial speaker would break our code of conduct or delve into politics, but he upheld his promise and his talk never strayed (many thought it was quite interesting!).”
“In just three days and against all odds, LambdaConf 2016 proved all the naysayers wrong — on every single count.”
The post is a very charitable and gracious reflection on the issues. On the other, I can’t escape the feeling that in context it’s the “good” part of what was a good-cop/bad-cop opposition.
I like this nice, politically correct, fully general argument against censorship:
Normally I’m not much for fully-general arguments, but this is actually a decent moral basis for anti-censorship. It basically takes the main argument (people should have the right to individually determine their preferences and beliefs via open communication) and says “which also applies to all the marginalized people you’re so focused on helping, god damn it!”
File this under “literally no-one is in any way surprised”.
In case you were being literal, I think that the cynical among the no-platformers are probably outnumbered by the useful idiots who actually expect people with “wrong” views to be evil in every way, including the ability to talk about functional programming for an hour without assaulting a minority.
I’m pretty sure such people will learn nothing from this. They’ll claim “he only behaved because we raised such a stink and he knew he was under the microscope – so we better continue to raise a stink about similar things that may happen in the future”
You assume a level of awareness they often don’t show. They don’t bother to even justify keeping up with the bilge.
Degoes is a hero in my book… best demonstration of nonviolent communication in the face of heated internet opposition I’ve seen in a while, maybe ever. It’s on the backs of such people that cooperative and well-functioning societies rest.
Any news about how the alternative “mooncon” went?
I wonder if there is some sort of opposite to autism. I just read this article
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/israeli-army-autism/422850/
and it said that autistic people have superior 3D visualization and attention to detail. However they also tend to have poorer social skills and tend to want to be introverted and alone. They also tend to have a hard time with hyperstimulation and do not have as much of a strong desire for social status as neurotypical people ( this one is more based on anecdote). I am the polar opposite. I have no visualization skills (only part of math i cant handle), the poorest attention to detail, strong social skills, and extreme extraversion. I seem to constantly crave human contact and visual/auditory simulation ( cant do hw without music ) and I have a strong desire for social status.I am a complete people person, and I am gray/red tribe. Can there be an other side to the autism spectrum?
A politician?
Williams syndrome (allegedly).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome
Low IQ and impaired visuo-spatial skills, unusually high sociability, empathy and verbal development.
Interesting, however i definitely do not have that. My IQ is well above average compared to the regular population, ( although significantly below the mean of SSC ), and I do not share the facial structure associated with Williams Syndrome. My facial structure is more just a classically highly masculinized one ( strong jawline, high cheeks , strong brow ect). I also have well above average genetics for muscle tone and am above the mean for height and weight( especially for my race), so none of the physical characteristics pan out. Plus i have the musical talent of a deaf duck. Interesting but i think the ADHD plus extraversion is more apt diagnosis.
Sounds like some subtype of ADHD + extraversion, to be honest.
Sounds highly likely.
The standard “opposite of autism” thing that gets quoted is Williams syndrome. Except all the cases I hear about tend to be pretty “low functioning” (especially in terms of IQ) and I don’t hear much about higher-functioning cases.
Except that it’s not all opposite; for example, both Williams and autism are associated with having anxiety disorders, having musical talent, and a few other things. Also autism seems to be highly polygenic, whereas Williams seems to be associated with a specific genetic condition.
(I’ve also heard a few “schizophrenia as opposite of autism” things but that seems rather more tenuous, especially as there are cases of one being misdiagnosed as the other, and it’s more common to talk about similarities between the two. Also also schizophrenia (unlike Williams) really isn’t associated with being hypersocial so is unlikely to apply in your case)).
Re: schizophrenia. Under the assumption that autism is the “extreme male brain”(because it affects more men than women) they think that the “extreme female brain” would be its opposite. E.g., things that induce paranoia like schizophrenia or BPD. Which seem to affect more women than men.
That said, schizophrenia is usually quoted as affecting more men than women; the things that tend to affect more women than men tend to be things like anxiety disorders and depression. Borderline is an interesting one, again it looks like one that’s the “opposite” in some ways and yet there (has a google) seem to be stories of misdiagnosis of one as the other there too.
I agree with this, but I think “male vs. female prevalence” may be an axis we should ignore when looking for our ‘opposite’. As a general rule those aren’t two sides of the same coin, since the Y chromosome simply carries less data than the X. So men have high expression of recessive things like color-blindness (only one shot at the dominant gene), but women have high expression of dominant things (two shots at the dominant gene). Even for epigenetic things, hormone mediation is awfully far from a mirror-image effect.
In general, I would expect that for continuum effects, both ends of the spectrum would be extra-prevalent in the same gender.
There is some evidence for the “autism and schizophrenia as opposites” hypothesis from copy number variants, where for certain genes where having more copies is associated with autism, having fewer is associated with schizophrenia, and vice versa (or all four ways, I guess).
There is also this “imprinted brain theory”, which vaguely resembles what Tyrant Overlord Killidia is saying, except it’s not “more male vs. more female” but rather “imprinted so as to benefit the child’s father vs. imprinted so as to beneift the child’s mother”. That said, the hypothesis of them as opposites seems quite separable from this broader theory.
(Note: This is not actually a subject I know anything about.)
I don’t think you’re going to find a term for the opposite of autism, because those people, pretty much by definition, are going to fit in very well with society and accordingly aren’t going to be diagnosed with anything or otherwise systematized. You’ll probably find them in sales and other forms of business; I’m tempted to say Trump would qualify.
Williams Syndrome survives as a diagnosis – partly because it has other parts to it (typically low IQ, but with some social abilities atypically good for that IQ, characteristic facial features, odd speech patterns) and partly because the whole “hypersocial” thing doesn’t actually work out too well for people with the condition. Apparently they can be inappropriately friendly, which can put a lot of people off, and can make it easy for people to take advantage of them.
I’d also beware of thinking that the definition of autism is solely about social factors; there are a lot of traits mentioned in the DSM-V that aren’t anything to do with that.
Apparently they can be inappropriately friendly, which can put a lot of people off, and can make it easy for people to take advantage of them.
I know some autistic people who are hyper-friendly, and this is the exact problem they face, too.
I don’t think you’re going to find a term for the opposite of autism
“Allistic” is the term I’ve usually seen used.
Nah, “Allistic” is the psycho-autist community’s term for “not autistic”.
It was coined as an alternative to “neurotypical” when some of them managed to overcome typical mind fallacy for long enough to realise that referring to a population with an ever-increasing mentally-ill population was probably not the best idea.
Ok then. How about “very allistic”?
>and it said that autistic people have superior 3D visualization and attention to detail.
Autism is so vague of a diagnosis with not too great diagnostic validity in practice(there are very interesting studies on giving the same behaviors and getting different diagnosis by switching gender and in different regions of the US reflecting trends)
If something is defined as a major absense of verbal abilities and aspects of sociability, then its likely some subset will be talented at some traits while lacking the ones requisite to the diagnosis(if valid) in the first place. And it will be a higher percentage then the general population that has that cognitive profile as a direct consquence.
This article has a very detailed argument for psychosis being the opposite of autism:
http://www.sfu.ca/biology/faculty/crespi/pdfs/115-Crespi&Badcock2008.pdf
Probably the most interesting aspect of the theory is that it reconciles the idea that autism is the “extreme male brain” with the fact that most of the most severely impaired schizophrenic people are male.
Here’s an extended quote:
One other remarkable feature of this theory is that it can be used to predict that psychotic savants should exist. They exist for much the same reason autistic savants exist. In discussing this matter, the theorists hint at a reason why so far everyone has missed the relationship between autism and psychosis. Basically, a “high-functioning psychotic” or even a “psychotic savant” will tend to do well in life and won’t be recognized as having a mental problem. Because of the sheer importance of social skills in life, they won’t be obviously impaired the way someone with Aspergers is obviously impaired.
And the best part of all this is the nominative determinism. One of the authors is Christopher Badcock. He started his career as a Freudian and later became an evolutionary psychologist. “Badcock” is the perfect name for him.
I would clarify that description of autism is a generalization. As someone on the spectrum, I have shitty 3-D visualization and an attention to detail wavering between meticulous and downright negligent depending on my mood. Autism generally involves superior abilities in one or two areas, but it’s not necessarily visual. For me, it’s verbal. I had college-level reading ability at 6th grade, and consistently place somewhere in the 90th to 99th percentile in verbal and reading comprehension tests. So, I mean, don’t generalize.
Also, I’m not sure what you’re saying here. There’s no “opposite of autism”.
For what it’s worth, I’m very much in favour of the ‘fewer but longer posts’ approach. Your best work is in the review and analysis posts, by far.
Chesterton’s fence came up in the last thread, which apparently goes something like this:
I was wondering if anyone has any historical examples of a failure to apply this principle? I can’t think of any instance of reformers wanting to remove some institution without thinking about its purpose, rather they disagree with what conservatives think it is. If anything, I would have thought reformer’s tend to theorise much more about ideas like property and civil rights, particularly about how these ideas come to be (rather than Chesterton’s implication that because it exists, it exists for good reason). Is this ‘principle’ just a lame strawman of progressives?
Most people run into examples in smaller scales: some consultant comes in, decides that a bunch of things the company is doing have no reason then 6 months later it turns out one of the people he fired was in charge of sorting out the tape backups for their computer system.
The soviets attempting to do away with markets, even internal markets might be a larger scale example. They did away with them for ideological reasons without first considering that they might be serving a valuable function.
The mechanisms — equally mathematical and empathic — of how and why the soviets came to make their mistakes are surveyed in Francis Spufford’s highly regarded and warmly compassionate historiography Red Plenty (2010).
In accord with J Quenff/Chesterton’s principle, SSC readers are well-advised to acquaint themselves with Spufford’s account. Plus, Spufford is fun.
Those are examples where the usefulness of the useful thing can be discovered, and therefore doesn’t need to be assumed. The problems mentioned are presumably caused by not asking questions, or believing answers .
And how is a business consultant to apply the Fence? They would never be able to sack anybody, including the useless people.
And everyone has plenty of examples of fenes that have been pulled down without the sky falling in. Although some are good at not noticing them.
I suppose the biggest example would probably be the push to make divorce easier, and to destigmatise out-of-wedlock births and pre-marital sex. Fifty years later, I think we’re in a position to say that a bit more thought about the possible consequences of this might have been in order.
Another example would be the sort of people who look at military parades like Trooping the Colour and dismiss them as a load of silly antiquated nonsense, without considering the effects they have on things like regimental pride and morale.
I’m not so sure the marriage one is a good example. You need a mighty heavy set of rose-tinted glasses to believe that the historical situation was better.
2 people who hate each other being forced to remain financially tied to each other does not a good anything make.
Even the teen pregnancy rate is at historic lows:
(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/factsheets/factsheet_teenage_pregnancy_fig2.png)
Probably because even in the rose-tinted past teenagers had sex with each other every chance they got. Now they’re a hell of a lot safer about it and mostly having sex later.
It has had a devastating effect on the price that prostitutes can get since people can hook up in bars which has had the knock on effect of putting lots of women off the profession. It’s also done away with the situation where most young men had their first sexual experience with a prostitute. Nowdays very few do.
s/historic/since 1976
Glib answer: Being molested by your stepdad and suffering major depression because your parents divorced doesn’t make a particularly good anything either.
Less glib answer: Tearing down a system because in edge cases it doesn’t work very well, without considering the effects this will have on the far more numerous cases where the system works OK, is generally not a very good idea. Indeed, it sounds like exactly the sort of thing Chesterton was getting at in his fence argument.
I note that that chart doesn’t begin until well after the sexual revolution got going. Regardless, though, the negative effects of early sexual activity aren’t confined to unwanted pregnancies — sexually-active teenagers are more likely to suffer from depression or low self-esteem, and less likely to be able to hold down long-term relationships when they grow up. This isn’t the sort of thing that can be solved by “Oh well, we’ll just teach them how to use contraception, then they won’t need to worry.”
How is that an edge case? It’s the central case — couples divorce to avoid that outcome. Sometimes they start too late, and then the divorce turns ugly because they hate each other and want to harm each other. I don’t think people dissolve perfectly fine, functional marriages just because divorce exists.
@Nita,
Unfortunately, that’s not true. See my comment below.
Picking any random child there’s just as likely to end up stuck with a (non step) dad molesting them who their mom then can’t divorce.
That was the furthest back I could find a chart, since the timeframe was set at 50 years 40 wasn’t too bad.
Though before then it gets a bit messed up because it was so normal to pair a young teenager off with some 40 year old guy and you’re no longer comparing like with like.
No, they’re not, because that would require that a biological father and a stepfather are equally likely to molest the child.
Even if a biological father and a step-father are equally likely to be molesters, simply by cycling through more step fathers, you’re more likely to land on a molester.
A 10% chance, if you roll the dice 5 times, becomes a 40% chance.
@Jaskologist
Then we have to move into the negative utility of being stuck with a molester for some length of time X where X is the average length of marriages with a molester and being stuck with a molester for up to 18 years.
10% chance of 18 years of abuse vs 40% chance of a shorter term.
Then somehow take into account the odds of the mother intervening, ignoring or participating in the abuse and their effects on the numbers. Hard to say whether an abusive partner is more or less likely to be turned into the police over consecutive marriages or during a single one. specially since abusive people are more likely to pair up with other abusive or permissive partners in the first place.
@Jiro
http://childmyths.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/whos-abusive-comparing-step-parents.html
61% lived with their biological mother and father, 8% with at least one step-parent (I can’t explain what this means, sorry!), and 2 % with at least one adoptive parent. The difference between this total and 100% is because I’ve omitted less frequent situations like living with grandparents or being emancipated.
Wait, 29% of children live in “less frequent situations” than the 2% who live with at least one adoptive parent? That seems a bit off.
And then children of single parents don’t fit into any of the enumerated categories; presumably that category was omitted but I’m not buying it as “less frequent” than 2%. I’m not even buying it as less frequent than the 8% with at least one step-parent.
I’m pretty sure that “spouse is abusive to our children” was one of the grounds for divorce before no-fault came in (or if it wasn’t, it would certainly be possible to make it one).
If you’re actually going to try to write out a utilitarian calculation for this, I think you need to weight the disutility of the initial molestation much higher.
#ActualRationalistSentences
I’m pretty sure that “spouse is abusive to our children” was one of the grounds for divorce before no-fault came in
Less confident here. Coarsely speaking, sexual abuse of children by biological parents was I think rare enough to be socially invisible, nonsexual abuse was “discipline”, and since children were supposed to be seen and not heard, any child whining about how his parents beat him hasn’t been disciplined enough.
Pragmatically, if the kid is being beaten, either both parents are in on it so nobody is talking divorce, or it’s just the one who is most likely beating their spouse as well and that (if beyond socially tolerable limits) gets you a divorce for spousal abuse regardless.
(or if it wasn’t, it would certainly be possible to make it one)
Yes, if there were to be a return to divorce-only-for-cause, this would be an obvious addition to the classical list of causes.
Without taking a side, a site calling itself “childmyths” does not inspire confidence in me.
Unless it’s discussing Boojums and monsters with iron teeth I would say your suspicion is entirely justified.
This is a statistic I like to drop everywhere, so if you don’t mind me using this opportunity:
Only about 20% of divorces are in what are called high-conflict marriages. The sort which would have been permitted under the old divorce with cause system, where you could accurately describe the husband and wife as hating one another (often with very good reason!).
The remaining 80% are in what people who study marriages call low-conflict marriages. Where the problems which drive the couple apart are simply the ordinary stresses any successful marriage goes though. Cases which can only happen in the current no-fault divorce system.
Given that four in five divorces are plainly unnecessary, and the rather large negative effect divorces have on suicide rates and more importantly the prospects of children caught up in the divorce, it seems like the current system causes quite a lot more misery than the old one ever did.
Still though. 20% of marriages being high conflict sounds pretty awful. Surely there could be some compromise between “simple no-fault divorce” and “til death do us part”.
Right.
I’m from a country that had no mechanism for divorce (because the church is literally evil) a few decades back so when people attack divorce I’m not transparently inserting “except in the really bad cases” I’m actually looking at how history was without divorce being allowed at all.
20% of divorces, not marriages.
Well, I’m not sure how things worked in your country Murphy but in most places throughout human history and virtually the whole history of the US we have had legal divorce… provided that the party seeking a divorce could prove that the other was at fault.
The distinction between that and the current system is a rather large one. A high-conflict marriage, the sort we want to be able to break up, is exactly the kind which will generate evidence sufficient to convince a court. Removing that requirement means opening up the floodgates where many low-conflict marriages end, breaking up families without any good reason.
I’m not trying to defend Catholicism or say that divorce is never justified. But there needs to be some justification provided beyond simple whim.
A marriage can survive a lot of stress, but only if both people are committed to making it work. If one or both of them want to get out, the problems won’t be fixed, and eventually resentment will consume everything that was still good in the relationship.
You can look at the research yourself. Your conjecture is not supported by the facts here.
The evidence I’ve seen suggests that, in the majority of cases where unhappy low-conflict couples decide to stick together, they report feeling more satisfied with their relationship during follow-ups a few years later.
And of course, there’s the effect that law and societal attitudes have on struggling couples. If society in general holds up no-fault divorce as the normal thing to do when you’re feeling dissatisfied with your current spouse, people are much more likely to want to leave a marriage although, had they but known it, they were just going through a rough patch and their relationship was perfectly fixable with a little kindness and perseverance.
I’m not arguing (here) against the central point about divorce you’re making, but: what are the criteria that we’re using to decide when a marriage “should” end in a divorce? What are we defining as a successful marriage? I’m kind of dubious about treating all low-conflict marriages as ordinary/successful/”should not end in divorce”.
what are the criteria that we’re using to decide when a marriage “should” end in a divorce? What are we defining as a successful marriage? I’m kind of dubious about treating all low-conflict marriages as ordinary/successful/”should not end in divorce”.
That is a good question. My thoughts:
“Staying married” should be assumed to be the default desired state.
“Staying married” should ABSOLUTELY be the default desired state for all marriages involving children. We-as-society have a vested interest in children being raised by two biological parents. It reduces the rate of so many other problems.
Marriages where one person is physically abusing the other should not be treated as though the assault was happening between two strangers in a bar. While a temporary separation for protection may be called for, we need to remember that the desired end state is not a divorce, but that two partners cherish each other. This situation requires particular skill and attention in solving, and may find that divorce is the eventual outcome. Changing the behavior of the spouses so that they do not immediately reenter the same situation with different partners would be important.
Emotional abuse is more difficult to define, easier to conceal, and women are more likely to do this, making it harder to get social backing to stop it, but emotional abuse can be as toxic as physical. The same ideas as above apply.
For people who are unhappy with each other – whose goals are at odds – we need grandmothers and uncles and priests and counselors, to help these two people find joy and support in each other. The role of general society here should be, I think, to emphasize that the marriage is a real thing that deserves work and attention, and to give more status to married people than to singles, so that the married people feel that their effort in maintaining the marriage is justified.
To this end, we should, I think, avoid promoting love stories of adulterers, emphasize the role of the supportive spouse, and as a society see more in a successful marriage than in a high flying career.
I don’t think we can come to an end of abusive marriages, or unhappy marriages, or marriages where one person is pretty okay but the other is always looking out the door wishing for other things. I do think we can reduce the percentage of them, and in particular I think that reducing the number of children who are born handicapped by not having a stable two parent family raise them is something we should strive for.
>the push to make divorce easier
Isn’t it reasonably accepted at this point that no-fault divorce was a result of rising divorce rates, not the cause of it?
http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/home/cassandr/public_html/vcblog/archives/divorce%20rate1.jpg
Sure, but as Mr X said, it was the push, not the laws that did the damage.
Mr X got there before me on things like Free Love.
The original push for legalising and making contraception more available was all “It will only be used by married couples who already have children who wish to space out the births of their children. No, of course it won’t be used by people who don’t want children. No, of course it won’t be used by people who aren’t married. No, it won’t lead to abortion.”
See the 1930 Lambeth Conference (this is Anglicanism) where limited contraception was accepted as permissible:
Move forward in time, and what do you know, sometimes contraception fails so you need abortion as a back-up – after all, you’ve already given in on the principle of “this is an unwanted child”, you’ve said the parents can try to prevent its conception, why not permit them to prevent its birth?
Can anyone imagine nowadays a Church of England or an Episopalian clergyperson giving a sermon on how sex outside of marriage is sinful, abortion is sinful, if you cannot have children you should not have sex, contraception should only be used in limited cases by married people, and certainly not for those who want to engage in pre-marital sex without the risk of pregnancy?
The reformers thought this was just a small, necessary concession, a recognition of the hard facts of life, and that giving in on this would not have greater effects on society in general and attitudes within the church in particular. They were wrong.
In fact, jump forward from 1930 to 2007 and you get this: a female Dean of an Episcopalian seminary, which is one of the member churches of the Anglican Communion (the entity which holds the Lambeth Conferences) giving a speech praising abortion providers and their work, and moreover abortion not alone the hard cases where most abortion rights activists campaign about but for “motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience” are A-Okay:
Which would be great if people had actually been choosing to not have sex rather than simply having sex without protection dumping the mother in a catholic-church run slave camp and burying the childs body in a well.
http://childabuserecovery.com/catholic-mass-grave-sites-of-350800-missing-children-found-in-ireland-spain-canada/
And there was also the option of rounding the children up and selling them for slave labor. Seriously, these times that people look back on so fondly had a hell of a lot more excess children born out of wedlock and disposed of in various ways by respectable social institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Children
We can go one step further back. The catholic hierarchy had a very serious meeting where they thought long and hard about young girls inserting tampons and decided that it could give them the wrong sort of ideas and had tampons banned in ireland.
They eventually gave in on the idea of women putting things inside themselves and look where it led!
It’s the one thing I found frustrating trying to talk intelligently to the youth-defence nutters back in uni. They loved to talk about a hypothetical universe where everyone actually perfectly follows all catholic rules and thus all the problems go away and any effort to deal with the real physical world we have including real human beings was just “promoting a culture” of not following catholic rules. It was like his brain switched off.
If someone proposed putting railings on the edges of cliffs I’d swear he’d have turned around and screamed that it promoted a culture of cliff-diving.
It’s kind of like trying to talk to a hard-core communist who’s sure that if everyone just followed karl marx perfectly then there would be no problems and anyone trying to do things like prevent fammines by setting up markets is the problem because they’re promoting a culture of not following marx properly.
You might want to dial back on the hysteria a bit, it’s not very good for making people take you seriously.
Factually describing history isn’t hysteria. Sorry to crack your rose-tinted glasses. Ye-Oldie-Time society was largely horrible to lots and lots of people.
No; ranting about Church-run slave camps dumping children’s bodies in septic tanks is.
@Mr. X
As opposed to say claiming that children of divorced parents are all being molested by their stepdads. You might want to check out that beam before doing anything else.
No, Anon, I never made such a ridiculous claim. I was simply mirroring Murphy’s statement that no-fault divorce is good because some couples hate each other. Perhaps you ought to read my post again, paying particular attention to the label “Glib answer” and what it applied to.
Warning to the original Mr. X that this kind of comment is the sort of thing that gets people banned
Obviously not everyone is going to stop having sex but how many people did choose to be abstinent for that very reason? Incentives matter, even when it’s politically inconvenient.
I think Murphy is saying that those incentives had serious costs, and maybe Deiseach should have acknowledged that in her argument.
That’s a good steelman but that is certainly not what Murphy said.
In regards to your point, every incentive has a cost. The question is whether the existence of a few unwanted orphans who do worse under the old system(assuming it’s as bad as Murphy made it out to be) is worse than the high number of impoverished single mothers we see today. Of course , we have to factor in the fact that we are richer today so the worst excesses of history can probably be mitigated today.
Good question.
shall we see what we can find for hard numbers since, say, 1950?
I’ll pre-commit to what I’m searching for and see if I can find it. If I can’t I’ll post the closest I can find and if anyone finds better data let me know.
Is the average age of first-sex higher or lower now than 50 years ago?
Is the teenage pregnancy rate higher or lower?
Has the number of children in orphanages gone up or down?
Has the rate of STD’s gone up or down?
Orphanages is the wrong metric, because we have foster families now.
But otherwise, that seems like a solid list to me.
“Is the teenage pregnancy rate higher or lower?”
Googling around for U.S. data, the best I could find only went back to 1940. Teenage pregnancy rose until about 1960, has been trending down since, is currently lower than it was in 1940.
But that’s a bit misleading, because it includes desired births to married women, and birth rates in general are considerably lower now. The current fertility rate is about two thirds what it was in 1940, half what it was at the peak around 1955.
What was seen as a problem that contraception and abortion were supposed to solve was births to unmarried women, especially but not exclusively teenagers. The implicit assumption was that they were almost all unwanted–”Accidents cause people.” The percentage of births that are to unmarried mothers has gone up enormously–almost eight times as high as it was in 1960.
Which suggests to me that most are not, perhaps were not in the past, unwanted.
@David Friedman, indeed, the rate of births to unmarried women rose because those women remained unmarried after finding out they were pregnant.
(Also relevant?)
Re: wanted vs. unwanted teenage pregnancies, I think direct comparisons are made tricker by, e.g., changes in rate of/attitude toward premarital sex. That said, if all that contraception and abortion accomplish is a reduction in unwanted pregnancies, many would consider that sufficient.
That said, if all that contraception and abortion accomplish is a reduction in unwanted pregnancies, many would consider that sufficient
Right, but from a statistical or evidentiary perspective, “unwanted” is a tricky thing to measure.
Children conceived by unmarried teenagers and carried to live birth would be a good proxy in most cultures, and ought to be at least in principle the sort of thing you could pull out of government vital-record statistics, but I don’ know that anyone does that. Children born to unmarried teenagers is a common statistic that might be an acceptable proxy but suffers from differing attitudes towards “…and now we Have To get married”
Right, but from a statistical or evidentiary perspective, “unwanted” is a tricky thing to measure.
Yes, I think “unplanned” would have worked better in that statement.
@Anonymous:
I think that’s just giving the Akerlof and Yellin explanation. On that theory, it isn’t that women who got pregnant didn’t want to be married, it’s that they couldn’t get the father to marry them–unlike the old pattern.
One possibility is that the babies were wanted–that the mothers would rather have been married, but preferred single motherhood to not having a child. Another is that they were unwanted, the result of contraceptive failure in an environment where the father was not obliged to marry a woman if he got her pregnant.
An additional confounder to factoring in marriage: there’s a very non trivial number of perfectly happy long term couples who put off getting married even if they’re in a stable long term relationship.
Reasons can be as simple as the bride wanting a really fancy wedding but priorities like buying a first house get in the way.
in the 1940’s there would have been massive pressure to get married, now nobody cares and the couple might just start wearing rings and acting married, making each other their beneficiaries in their wills/insurance etc long before they actually go have a party and sign paperwork.
After I moved a few years ago people we met just assumed me and my fiancé were already married. (not changing names is also common enough to not make it an inconsistency)
That pattern isn’t even unusual in my peer group. Lots are getting married 8-10 years into a relationship with or without children.
In my parents generation being married within 18 months of meeting wasn’t unusual where now it’s downright bizarre behavior most common in people with very impulsive personalities.
Additional schooling for girls is also going to throw it off. My mother couldn’t earn the same wage as my father working the same job at the same place starting before him. Young women without cash reserves had a much tougher lot if they didn’t have a man who could earn a mans wage.
FWIW this changes once you get into your thirties. If a couple meets when they are both in their early 30s engagements after a year or so are not at all uncommon. At least IME.
I don’t really see how that makes a difference, Murphy. In the old model those people would have just gotten married soon after meeting, and would most likely have been just as happy or unhappy as they are now.
Also, I also don’t see marriage within 18 months of meeting as something that is unusual, especially for people in their 30s. By that age most people have a fairly strong idea of who they are, and what they are looking for in a mate. it doesn’t take very long to figure out if someone will fit that role. For what it’s worth, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it isn’t like I’ve only experienced backwoods red tribe areas.
Also, if you’re female, and want kids (in a marriage with a husband) and you’re thirty, you have to get on the fucking ball right now or it’s not happening.
Being on the short side of thirty gives a lot of women the impression that guys will go on hitting on them for forever, and that they have a lot of time to make up their minds about who exactly they want to settle down with. This is not actually correct.
Assuming that the up thread article about the dumping of 351,000 children’s corpses into a mass grave isn’t just making shit up, the incentives seem to have short-circuited in a fairly large number of cases to “We will have unprotected sex, and if a baby is conceived we will just kill it after it is born.” I know that historically, other cultures have considered abortion into the eleventh trimester a perfectly acceptable option.
Murphy, this was the Church of England, not the Roman Catholic Church. They had certain attitudes about sex and marriage which they thought were the baked-in hard-wired version of how things were, and a tiny little tweak like letting married couples with children use contraception sparingly wouldn’t make any huge, major changes.
They were wrong.
No, Nita, Murphy was ranting about the Catholic Church and particularly the Irish version – “slave camp” and “burying child’s body in well”.
Plainly Murphy has not read the report, or is not aware of the history, and is going by the dramatically coloured movies that were made about the Magdalene Laundries. Movies where the makers have admitted to inventing scenes (because the facts were not abusive enough for their purposes) but that’s okay, right? The spirit of the thing is right – so English film makers could make movies about backwards priest-ridden sexually repressive Ireland but not have to think about the similar mother and child homes in their own countries, or things like wholesale exporting of orphans to Commonwealth nations in order to get rid of a drain on the English taxpayer and provide cheap labour to build up the Empire.
Murphy also did not bother to read that this was from the Lambeth Conference, which is the Anglican Communion and not the Roman Catholic Church. But hey, why bother with the facts when any stick will do to beat the dog? Murphy appears to be very sensitive to any perceptions of controlling the free expression of their sexuality and frequently fizzes over when discussing such matters. I don’t care who they bang or how they do it or what their reasons are, and I’m certainly not trying to regulate their bedroom habits. That is not why I used that particular example.
You said that the Church of England shouldn’t have demolished the fence, because it lead to bad outcomes.
The Irish Catholic Church did not demolish the fence on its own turf, so presumably that should have produced better outcomes. But, as Murphy pointed out, there were still unwanted pregnancies to deal with, and they were dealt with in rather unsavory ways.
So, are you saying that it wasn’t so bad? Are these women making things up, or is that kind of treatment acceptable?
You can’t prove a case like this with individual examples. You need to show that the quantity of such examples is larger with the wrong policy. Anyone can quote examples of people hurt by pretty much any policy if they ignore the quantity.
Why are you linking the report? it “does not make findings” on the issue of abuse in the Magdalene Laundries. It’s about the extent of the states involvement in the scandal with them such as judges sending women there or industrial school children and mental patients being sent there by the state. It has some personal accounts but their job was not to search for cases of abuse.
It seems like little more than throwing 1200 sheets of irrelevant text at someone and shouting that they didn’t even read it.
It is interesting to note that while women forced to go there by judges had to be informed how long they had to stay and when they could leave girls dropped into them by their families or from industrial schools had no such right and generally weren’t informed.
Never mind that it supports my claim of them being used as forced labor.
This sounds more like a defence of “slippery slope arguments are sometimes valid” than of Chesterton’s fence.
This sounds more like a defence of “slippery slope arguments are sometimes valid” than of Chesterton’s fence.
No, the reformers there did not have a developed argument against contraception; they relied on the traditional understanding of “sex is for procreation within marriage” and did not see why a ban on contraception was anything more than a ban on contraception qua contraception. They may have developed their arguments elsewhere, but in that digest form at least, their only reasons for asking the Anglican Church to permit limited contraceptive use was in a vague social good model: “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood”.
What would be such an obligation? Most would argue the health and life of the mother but there is no definition stated there of what reasons for using contraception should be or would be likely to be. Remove the stigma, and why expect people to refrain within cloudy limits? If I have a “clearly felt moral obligation” not to have a baby because I don’t think I can afford it or I want to complete my education first, for what reason should I refrain from using contraception? Since the reformers propose no good reason for the ban on contraception, they have nothing to offer as guidance on the proper use of contraception except “if you really feel you need to use it”.
How, then, did they expect people who wanted to limit family size or not have children at all to refrain from using contraception for “selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience” – if the people involved feel they really do need to use contraception? In response to “the widespread and increasing use of contraceptives among the unmarried and the extension of irregular unions owing to the diminution of any fear of consequences”, all it can call for is “legislation “, rather than stating clear teaching from the Christian tradition.
They had a vague grasp of the reason for the ban, they decided to do away with it, and they thought they could rely on social attitudes to keep things as they had been. People are using contraception, so let’s yield on this since we probably can’t stop them, but we’ll tell them they should only use it in limited circumstances. Once you remove the fence, you can tell people “don’t walk on the grass” but you certainly can’t stop it happening.
Do Church of Ireland count?
It would, but even there attitudes are changing. Some bishops are more liberal in their notions than others and it really depends if you’re talking about north or south of the border.
The General Synod in 2012 passed a motion reaffirming the traditional understanding of marriage and that sex should be within marriage not outside it, but that did stir up a lot of discussion and they are still working out a position on LGBT, particularly now that same-sex marriage is legal in the Republic and Great Britain but not in Northern Ireland.
@ Deiseach
“It will only be used by married couples who already have children who wish to space out the births of their children. No, of course it won’t be used by people who don’t want children. [….]”
If this gives an accurate reflection of the then-Anglican doctrine … well, before a new thread goes up, I must say it sounds awfully barbaric to me.
Some academic examples, so that this doesn’t immediately descend to obvious culture war: in loco parentis, institutionalized peer review, the extension of copyright, demonization of rote learning, the cult of STEM.
It’s not a strawman. The idea that traditions can arise for unintelligible reasons and still be useful is super important! By analogy, you don’t need to know the exact mechanism by which a drug works to know that it works.
Does it really apply to gradual creep? most of those sound like simple gradual creep of existing structures. Like someone who just can’t stop themselves building fences, started with a Chesterton’s fence that was keeping a bull in and just kept adding branches to it, blocking roads and screwing things up.
They sound like gradual creep, but there are clearly points that describe discontinuous jumps in the system, usually court cases or the creation of institutions.
There are two issues: gradual vs sudden and intent. I don’t think gradual vs sudden is relevant to whether Chesterton’s fence applies. A gradual change is just the removal of a lot of fences. Chesterton’s argument applies at each stage. Intent is the key: Chesterton’s argument is an argument about consequences aimed at someone consciously making an argument about consequences.
But many gradual changes happen without people noticing, so it may be a good proxy for intent. If no one notices, no argument is applicable. Bureaucrats may be aware that they are grabbing more power, but they might not care much about the consequences. And everyone else is unaware. If they were aware, they would probably reject the bureaucrat’s move as selfish, without even recourse to Chesterton’s argument.
For another example of different kinds of intent, I believe that in loco parentis was slowly and consciously eroded. But it was not eroded for beliefs about its consequences, so Chesterton’s appeal to humility about consequences is not very relevant. Instead it was eroded for belief about a moral or legal imperative.
I agree, but I also think that Dixon v. Alabama was a big deal.
Most of those aren’t examples of Chesterton’s fence.
They are just things that changed, and then (at least in your estimation) had bad side effects. That is a bad consequence after an action, but it’s only an example of Chesterton if a) the change occurred in something designed to stop said consequence, and b) the consequence wasn’t known about in advance (known trade-offs are a thing).
Well in that case, there is no example of Chesterson’s fence ever happening. Human beings are rationalizing actors and hindsight is 20/20. Reformers are necessarily going to think they’ve thought of everything and always they will be wrong, hopefully, they will be wrong in a not-terribly-costly way.
Well, isn’t the point of the OP?
Ref.) I want to tear down this fence?
Chest.) Why is it there?
Ref.) It was put up to stop the sheep from wandering away.
Chest.) How do you intend to stop the sheep from wandering away?
Ref.) We are buying a sheep dog.
Chest.) Proceed to tear down the fence.
Old Codger) I don’t think that sheep dog is going to actually work, plus I don’t like dogs.
If the sheep then still wander away, it’s not an example of Chesteron’s fence. It is something else. Calling it Chesterton’s fence doesn’t make it so.
No, I don’t think so. Chesterton’s fences may be allegorical; I think the argument can apply to fences that organic forces conspired to keep in place. Likewise, someone may know about the consequences, just not the poeple wanting to tear it down.
The key insight is that a restriction probably has a purpose, or at least a reason for persevering, and reformers who don’t well understand or even consider it are making trade-offs that may well not be net positive.
The OP was asking for examples of this. Almost all policy debates are much more nuanced than this. Hence Chesterton’s fence is a strawman (or allegorical, as you say).
Put it this way, if I phrased Chesterton’s fence as “Let’s consider the trade-offs in having and not having the fence” the device would have far less rhetorical weight. Implicit in the employment of the device is the accusation that the other side is naive, incompetent, or uninformed.
Well, it also assumes that the reason why the fence is there is understandable at the current level of knowledge, that the trade-offs are legible. The Cromwell’s Rule: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken” approach, which also has a rigorous probabilistic formulation.
For example, nearly all surviving religions include fasting as a major component (for various definitions of fasting, I would say all involve calorie and protein restriction). But obvious you ask the ancients why fasting is beneficial they probably won’t answer with “the metabolic benefits of periodic calorie and protein restriction”. They just know it’s good for you.
Sure. Epistemic humility is always warranted. Saying, “Fasting is an antiquated custom that was not and is not of any use and all who practice it are doddering dolts” would certainly run up against Chesterton.
But again, going back to my up-thread example, if I say that the fence was erected to keep the sheep from wandering off, have I satisfied Chesterton or not? Your view now seems to be that I have not. And that twists the fence argument into a universal helplessness before the status quo.
Your taking a gamble, in which case, I’d expect you to have some sort of investment so that you too would be hurt if you were wrong. Skin in the game, just to be sure.
Edit: Ideally, you will have also secured the investment of everyone else affected by the fence. It does rather strongly resist universalization, or even on the large scale.
“Put it this way, if I phrased Chesterton’s fence as “Let’s consider the trade-offs in having and not having the fence” the device would have far less rhetorical weight. Implicit in the employment of the device is the accusation that the other side is naive, incompetent, or uninformed.”
Well then, this device is a good fit in today’s political atmosphere, where a person is lucky if their opponent only considers them to be simply naive, incompetent, or uninformed– rather than considering them someone who is evil and is intentionally trying to destroy our country or to harm other people.
Yes, but that very same impulse in today’s politics drives everyone to pretend their provincial cultural fashions are human universals, so it’s also not a good fit in that sense. Though I imagine self-conscious traditionalism is the wave of the future, left and right.
It is likely that the pro-fence people have long forgotten what the purpose of the fence was and simply maintain it out of habit. It could be that the fence embodies some useful community knowledge, or it could be that it was built to solve a problem at the time but has ceased to be relevant (but still maintained out of habit).
The burden of proof is just as much on the pro-fence side as it is on the anti-fence side. On the other hand, I think there is a lot to be said for gradual change. We are so bad at understanding cause and effect in complex systems that it warrants a good deal of modesty on our part.
The burden of proof may be equal, but you need a lot less information to determine if something is bad than if something is good, so there is an asymmetry in favor of fences.
I am an ignorant child who doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Care to expand on those examples?
I was very vague, so as to sound smart and hopefully let other people fill in the details so I wouldn’t have to. I will attempt to do so to the best of my ability / understanding, but I’ve only been in academia for so long (and not in any position of power, at that).
In loco parentis was the university taking on a parental role for the students. For example, in my grandmother’s time, university dorms were gender segregated with curfews and chaperones to prevent … hanky-panky. These were removed in 1961, but the idea of bad things happening to the parent’s precious children is still kind of a highly motivating consequence. It turn out college students don’t always make fantastic decisions, but now universities are prevents from being directly paternal to, say, undergrads. So now the paternalism has to be universal and requires a much larger bureaucratic apparatus to keep going, which then metastasized as these things do, leading to outrage as the regulations parents want are simultaneous overenforced and underenforced and they are also hitting literally everyone involved in the university.
Institutionalized peer review was mostly set up in the post-War era, in my understanding, which replaced the previous, more informal system of papers concerned to be must-reads with a professional, blind bureaucratic system that is extremely vulnerable to institutional capture in the form of dogmatism, p-hacking, and in general the requirement that professors publish an increasing number of essentially junk papers to keep their jobs. The is one of those weird cases where formalizing the system actually was terrible, because of perverse incentives.
The extension of copyright seemed like it was a good idea at the time. Originally, IIRC, copyright in America was barely over a decade, and things went out of copyright all the time. There was still a vibrant popular culture even if being a professional branded-content-producer maybe wasn’t a lucrative as it is now. Nowadays, copyright protection is whatever Disney wants it to be, instead of the original sensible term limitations, the law is more or less completely made by pop-culture corporations.
Demonization of rote learning particularly annoys me, but this one is also ore cyclical. So I teach math, and one of the broad things people like to say is understand the concept, not just memorize a formula. In general, this is good advice, but practically speaking, you don’t understand the background of math until much after you are able to use it as a tool. People can write good things without a perfect knowledge of etymology, grammar, style, etc. This basically always pops up because the continuous Red Queen race that is education reform has no memory at all, so any useful tools built up tend to get wiped out every couple decades or so. It’s gotten to the point that I explicitly tell my students that it’s okay to memorize things sometimes because the good ones won’t and it cripples them.
The cult of STEM is much vaguer and probably a bad example, the more general case I think is the watering down of a general education in a common culture, allowing people to specialize way too early and their not really “fully educated”, as far as I’m concerned. This is one of those things I’ve noticed teaching really smart STEM track highschool students, the sort that are taking college level organic chemistry and mathematical modelling as high school seniors (while they’re fourteen years old). I talk to these kids, and they literally haven’t read a work of fiction since they were about 12. They only ever take classes in STEM subjects, usually just one to specialize even harder, and this is kind of extreme specialization is just getting younger and younger. So yeah, this is a bad example cause I probably take this too personally, but I think this is way too specialized way too early in their lives, all because we’ve destroyed the idea of a general education.
I agree with you about “peer review,” but (1) I don’t like it that people use peer review as metonymy for bureaucracy. I can point to a lot of problems that were caused or exacerbated by peer review, but mainly it served to promote bureaucracy for the sake of scale and that is the heart of the problem.
And (2) I don’t think a new institution (whether peer review or government funding of research) is a good example of Chesterton’s Fence. It’s just an unintended consequence, whereas Chesterton’s Fence is an argument that there is a reason to think that other consequences might be capable of being understood; and a benchmark of how much thought might be enough, rather than an open-ended prediction of doom.
FWIW, when I read your original comment, I thought “Cult of STEM” referred to encouraging more people to go into STEM, not acceleration.
Yeah, that’s why I tried to emphasize “institutional peer review” instead of just “peer review”. Maybe “peer review bureaucracy” would be better. And in my opinion the destruction of the (often informal) pre-War academic culture was a fence that was destroyed, it just wasn’t as legible as other examples. One of the cases where formalization is harmful.
I also think encouraging more people to go into STEM fields is incorrect, for a variety of reasons, mostly related to shrinking total academia overall.
Whaaaaaa?
STEM is far more practically applicable to the non-academic market.
Which is exactly why is shouldn’t be pushed in the academic market as much!
Frog Do:
Here is what that maps to in my mind:
The most lucrative and plentifully available jobs when you graduate will be in STEM. That’s why you shouldn’t study it.
More charitably, you seem to be saying that you would rather that private market STEM jobs grow at the expense of academic ones, but a) encouraging people to study STEM doesn’t say where they will ultimately be employed, and b) you always need to save some seed corn for both next years planting as well as experiments with varietals, etc.
If growth is in STEM, we need people to study, teach and research in STEM. Perhaps they are being over sold, but that is a different argument.
I’m fine with research in fundamentals, I’m really strongly in favor of that, it why I switched my dissertation from an applied topic to a more pure research area. I kept seeing a lot of junk papers (and to be fair also producing them), especially in engineering, the definition of mathematical make work in model building. Not even art for art’s sake, more like publications for the publication god. I think the field has a huge quality control problem.
Lots of scientific fields have a publication problem. It’s one of those Moloch things.
Need to assess academics somehow and citations/publications looks like a decent proxy at first but once it’s used to assess them you get lots of shoddy publications that people try to make as sexy as possible.
I have mixed feelings about early specialization. For the individual it pays dividends. There are individuals I’ve worked with who seem like kids but then turn out to be extremely capable because they leapfrogged over their peers and got into the industry 5 years early. Forcing them to sit in a classroom memorizing Latin poetry or trying to learn spanish would only make them miserable and make their lives significantly worse than they ended up this way.
As long as the kid themselves is the driver rather than someone else forcing them to specialize early I’m in favor of it. After all, some people don’t like scifi.
I broadly agree with this, but kids are never going to be in the driver seats, it’s always going to be the parents. Even kids who seem to be in the driver seat are there because their parents allow it.
That said, if we are going to have a Prussian-style factory system for education, you could do a lot worse then to force people to learn languages.
I’m not so sure, I had friends who were pressured into professions and didn’t get much choice but my own experience was very much self-driven goals.
I was lucky enough to have parents who literally went with “We don’t care what you do but try to make sure you’re happy with yourself later”.
At about age 4 when asked what I wanted to grow up to be I’d say “I don’t know but something to do with math or computers”, a few years later that was broadened to “math or computers or science” and now I’m a bioinformatician (intersection point of math and computers and biology)
About the only thing my parents ever pressured me to do was music lessons.
If anything I’d have loved to specialized more than I was allowed to.
Though I accept I’m not the norm. I’ve known some people to get highly distressed at the prospect of having to choose even a vague field of study in college by the age of 18.
Learning about the things I was interested in was a pleasure, effort yielded results easily.
On the other hand >50% of my school hours in my life ended up dedicated to things which were utterly useless to me like dead languages, made me utterly miserable, yielded nothing and contributed not at all to my future career.
Thanks for the clarification. I guess I don’t agree with you.
> The idea that traditions can arise for unintelligible reasons and still be useful is super important
How does one apply it? Exceptionlessly? In combination with othe considerations?
Exceptionlessly, if I understand you correctly.
Tradition getRandomTradition() nothrow;
It clearly gives a lot of wrong results if applied exceptionessly. Three of Maos Four Evils were evil.
Trying to think of it as some sort of abstract deontological rule is probably bad, in the same way applying anything as an abstract deontological rule is bad.
One problem with Chesterton’s Fence is that traditions which arise for no intelligible reason or for bad or forgotten reasons are harder to pull down than those which arose for good reasons. If we know a fence once divided the sheep from the goats, and we know we keep sheep on both sides of the fence now, we can pull it down. But if the fence was put up because “it seemed like a good idea at the time”, a later reformer will never discover the reason it was put up, and so never find support for pulling it down. Or if it divided sheep from goats but no one remembers there once were goats, same thing. And so we get a proliferation of useless fences.
Chesterton’s Fence always reminds me of the brisket pan story:
http://www.snopes.com/weddings/newlywed/secret.asp
There was a good reason for chopping off the ends of the brisket, but it’s gone now. If Grandma had passed away and her pans long since been scrapped, the newlyweds would never discover why the ends were chopped off — and hence would keep doing it, by Chesterton’s fence.
Sure, you sometimes end up cutting off the ends of the brisket unnecessarily. Often, though, it turns out that cutting off the ends is actually important, and in real life, the consequences are usually more severe than simply “You’ll have one dinner where the meat isn’t as nice as it could be.”
There are consequences to a proliferation of useless and counterproductive traditions kept only because no one knows their original reason for existing and so is afraid to abolish them, too.
Can you think of any examples of traditions being kept around more than a generation or two after they’ve stopped being useful?
Jews not eating pork maybe?
> Can you think of any examples of traditions being kept around more than a generation or two after they’ve stopped being useful?
Not by the rules of Chesterton’s fence, because any example I give, the conservative view is I just haven’t discovered the reason.
Did Jews not eating pork stop being useful? If they were intended to mark Jews as separate and prevent assimilation, Jewish food rules were useful for a long time, and among the more observant Jews still are.
That’s useful for separating Jews from non-Jews.
Does it really work to separate Jews from non-Jews though? Muslims don’t eat pork either.
Can you think of any examples of traditions being kept around more than a generation or two after they’ve stopped being useful?
There was holding the horses but alas, snopes (of course) sez it ain’t so.
Jews and pork is a different case, because it differentiated the Chosen People from the settled village people of the valleys who had strange (and false) gods.
You really need to distinguish between the cases where
A) the Fence isn’t producing many bad results even when applied blindly, because it s a reliable rule
B) the Fence isn’t producing many bad results because even its proponents apply it very selectivly.
@JayT: Jewish food rules had existed for quite some time when Islam arose. Plus, there are plenty of Jewish food laws beyond “no pork”, ditto Muslim food laws.
Sure, the Jews were avoiding pork for a long time before the Muslims did the same, and for that time that “fence” made sense as a way to differentiate Jews from others, but for the last 1,500 years not eating pork doesn’t differentiate Jews from Muslims. Perhaps the other food rules do, but that is irrelevant to whether or not avoiding pork has any purpose.
It would, however, continue to work as a marker of difference just fine for all the Jews outside of the Muslim world, who generally aren’t confused for Muslims.
The other relatively convincing theory I’ve seen for a lot of Jewish food laws is that they’re against things that mix categories: pigs have hooves but don’t chew cud, rabbits (look like they) chew cud but don’t have hooves, bats are weird rodent-birds, animals that swim in the sea but aren’t fish are prohibited, etc.
So from a Chesterton’s Fence perspective once we’ve identified that as the reason we can remove it if we are no longer interested in separating Jews from non-Jews, right?
Depends on who “we” is. Jews who don’t put much value on being a separate, distinct, chosen-by-God community generally don’t observe much (if any) of the rules that Jews are supposed to follow that don’t apply to Gentiles.
Of course, if you are a really traditionalist Jew, you might not care about what the mundane purpose of the rules was. I remember an article in the NYT Magazine about young, left-leaning but still observant Jews, who argued for humane practices on the basis that ritual slaughter rules were intended to show respect for animals, be more humane than other means of slaughter, and by extension we should today be following the most humane methods possible. Either quoted after this in the article, or in a letter the next week, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi basically said “no, that’s not why we do it, we do it because G-d told us to, which is what we do”.
dndnrsn:
Yeah, that’s one I’ve heard too. Ancients tended to think of God’s (or gods’, for the pagans) creation as consisting of, or at least involving, bringing order out of chaos. By avoiding category-mixing (not eating the foods mentioned above, not wearing clothes of more than one type of fibre, etc.) we can reflect that orderliness in our own lives, and so become closer to God.
“traditions which arise for no intelligible reason” aren’t necessarily unimportant. If you read that beekeeping thread, there are 3000 year old traditions nobody understands (or ever understood in the sense of knowing the fundamental mechanics!) that still give perfect dimensions for hive boxes.
Also, if some smartass tears down all the fences because he doesn’t think there’s a good reason to keep sheep away from other sheep, he’s going to have a great time when he finds out about breeding season.
If people did honest analysis and made honest arguments about why they want to change things, we wouldn’t need the rule. But instead we get “that fence was only built by an ancient conspiracy to oppress sheep, and we need to smash it!”
Even if people did honest analysis and made honest arguments, we would still need the rule, because people aren’t the Promethian rational gods of the Englightenment, we are grubby little hairless murder-apes that barely understand the reasons for our own behavior, much less anything else.
The person in your example can pull down the fence separating the sheep from the goats whenever he wants! It’s his fence, after all. If there’s no problem, people will probably tear down their fences if they don’t want it or keep it there if they do. What the man tearing down his fence can’t do, is tear down everyone’s fence just because he thinks his is worthless. He only tears down his fence, and faces the consequences.
The fence has to be in the commons, otherwise how can Chesterton prevent it from being torn down? Chesterton doesn’t come into it at all if it is simply private.
In fact, in the marriage example which is being bandied about, Chesterton can be seen as preventing people from tearing down fences on their own land (the fence preventing various activities between people who are not married to each other).
Then you have to get community agreement, and communities should be small enough that this is not an impossible task. I assume Chesterson would also object to the idea that a national level government sets marriage policy in general.
@Frog Do:
I can’t tell exactly, but it seems you are equivocating, switching back and forth between various definitions as your arguments are rebutted.
I treat Chesterton’s fence as a metaphor for a rule that guides behavior, not treating it like an abstract mathematical theorem, because I’m not a Kantian, and I’m pretty sure Chesterton wasn’t either. This is probably the root of our disagreement, to you it looks like I’m equivocating while I think you’re following arguments off of cliffs.
The Sexual Revolution wasn’t just about people having sex, it was about people trying to change the entire societal attitude towards sex. I’m not sure that “trying to change the attitudes of an entire society” can plausibly be analogised to “removing a fence on your own private property”.
Even if it could, though, people don’t have the right to just do whatever they want with their property. If your fence is helping to prop up an unstable cliff and removing it would increase the risk of avalanches onto your neighbours’ houses below, you don’t have the (moral, and probably legal as well) right to just tear it down, even if it is built entirely on your property, and even if you really really want to get rid of it.
@Frog Do:
If Chesterton is merely giving advice to the eager young college educated city man who has determined that the gate on the path from his house to his new DHS appointed doctor position is unnecessary, then I have no problem with Chesterton or his fence.
“Look before you leap”, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, “Loose lips sinks ships”, “Nevermind the bollocks”, all useful aphorisms to keep in mind as heuristics. Especially that last one. 😉
So, a weak form of Chesterton’s Fence is almost certainly true, but perhaps trivially so. The question is, how valid are strong(er) form(s)? If you are only defending it as an aphorism, I think you misinterpreted the OP.
I mean, Burns said it 100 years before Chesterton:
Well in that case, I’d agree that it’s strawman, but then given smart people (and all of us here are probably smart) have an internal bias to think that everyone else is also smart, I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in it.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html
IIUC journals introduced modern-style peer review because the old system could no longer cope with the greatly increased numbers of submissions.
This is a feature, not a bug.
This blog post claims three examples in income tax, state welfare, and divorce laws. Then it applies the idea to take issue with a certain class of argument in favor of legalizing gay marriage.
It’s a nice essay because it mostly avoids moral judgment on the outcomes; the point is simply that consequences that people imagined couldn’t happen did happen.
… whoever’s been making the “throughout human history” claim needs to read a little more widely. There’s a lot of variations.
Even if you restrict your source list to the bible alone you still get a lot more variations on marriage than the 1 man/1 woman. If you bother with the rest of human history there’s plenty of variations that aren’t 1 man+1 woman for life with no divorce.
The foundation there seems to not just be flawed but entirely missing.
I agree with you, but that’s rather like saying we had several cold days so Global Warming is false. Exceptions don’t mean a rule hasn’t been present in most societies for most of human history.
… but maybe it would have been a good idea to actually look at the exceptions and see what the results were, instead of waving vaguely toward “possible unknown repercussions”.
The last paragraph of the blog post in question seems to specifically address and rebut your criticism.
The claim is that in virtually all historical societies, one marriage consisted of one man and one woman with divorce (or annulment) as an extraordinary deviation from the expected until-death-do-you-part bit. Some societies allowed a man, or less commonly a woman, to engage in more than one marriage simultaneously, but each marriage was still a separate arrangement of the one-man-one-woman sort.
The only counterexample I know of offhand is Nika Mut’ah, which is controversial even within the Islamic sects that technically allow it. Possibly there are others, but they don’t seem to be common.
1 man- 1 woman is the common case, sure, with 95%+ of the population heterosexual and most of them having an interest in keeping relationships simple.
But the “divorce as an extraordinary deviation” claim I’m going to dispute.
In Abriamhic religions and Hinduism it’s sort of a thing and isn’t accepted in some but in a large fraction of the other’s it’s perfectly acceptable and more similar to breaking off a relationship with a long term boyfriend/girlfriend. Unpleasant for those involved but perfectly acceptable.
In plenty of cultures breakups are reasonably easily accommodated. Apparently in celtic tradition it was roughly equivalent to breaking off a business contract.
I would take claims about the (pre-Christian, I assume) Celtic tradition with a grain of salt. Pretty much all the accounts we have of it are highly biased — first by Roman observers who wanted to paint it as exotic and barbarous, then by early Christian observers who wanted to paint it as licentious, and finally by revisionist historians and anthropologists of the Margaret Mead school, who generally took the licentious angle and ran with it.
That said, the Christian tradition is historically on the strict side regarding divorce. It was easier in historical Islam, for example, especially if initiated by the husband.
I don’t think the article disagrees with you. That “throughout human history line” is a summary of an argument that social conservatives make. It is not the thesis of the article. You’ll note that it doesn’t ever claim to have a solid argument against (or for) gay marriage. It’s an argument against one argument in favor of gay marriage. The point is summarized well at the end:
In support of this point it gives three examples of institutional changes that let to societal consequences that were dismissed as possibilities at the time.
One of my favorite pieces of history is this 1926 Atlantic article on The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage
For a simpler example, consider the French Revolutionary Calendar, which switched to 10 day weeks, among other things.
But communists thought quite a lot about the family. They wouldn’t have said “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away,” they would have said that it was a keystone of bourgeois capitalism. It’s not that they didn’t think they understood it, it’s that they misjudged the consequences of doing away with it.
It’s not that they didn’t think they understood it, it’s that they actually did not understand it.
Almost everyone, ever, literally ever, who screws up something because they don’t understand it, thinks they understand it.
If by your standard “we abolished this because we thought we understood the consequences of it but we didn’t because we were too drunk on the mad dog 20/20 of ideology” does not count as an example of tearing down Chesterson’s fence, then it is impossible to find an example of tearing down Chesterson’s fence.
I agree whole heartedly. It is perhaps the platonic example of Chesterson’s “Less intelligent sort of reformer”
But then Chesterton’s Fence seems to boil down to “reformers who disagree with me about the importance of certain things shouldn’t be listened to”, which is a less insightful maxim. I think The original Mr. X’s comment further down gives good examples of what I took the Fence idea to be saying.
It can be misused in that way, but I think the actual point is about people who only give superficial or inadequate thought to the potential ramifications of their proposed reforms. I’d say there’s also an element of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” there — if you can’t see the point of something, but as far as you can tell it doesn’t seem to have a real effect one way or the other, it’s probably best to leave it alone.
In its original construction, it’s always seemed an admonition to avoid the kind of mentality which leads people to charge cheerily into tearing down the fence without considering the reason why it was there in the first place.
This, to me, seems eminently reasonable and admirably apolitical in nature. Obviously everyone thinks that The Enemy are the only people who do this, but that’s why the admonition is directed at the reader.
As an addendum to Chesterton’s fence, can we add signs saying what exactly the fence is for? The first ten thousand people asking to take it down are fine, but after a while it does get old.
In other words, “no” is less useful than “no, and there are reasons, go find out what they are”, which is in turn less useful than “no, and here are the reasons”.
On the other hand, justifications can get arbitrarily long with respect to the human attention span; hence why the first option shows up so often, I suppose. (Now can we please take that fence down and start writing reasons for laws?)
@ Mr X & Zorgon,
Pretty much.
Saying we should add signs misunderstands the whole concept. It’s a justification for conservatism by appeal to folksy wisdom.
The “fences” in question are customs, habits, and prejudices passed down in a community, not anything codified.
> This, to me, seems eminently reasonable and admirably apolitical in nature
Once you realise how selectively it is applied, it s very poltcal indeed. Who is complaining that Christian countries have abandoned their age old ban on usury? It could be about a thousand things, but itis always sex.
That’s a question of the poltiics of those who use it most often, not the term itself.
My personal favourite example of the fencr is the UK establishment position against the death penalty, which has nothing to do with sex at all.
I’m not following you at all. In what way us opposition to the death penalty an exampe of the fence?
@Anonymous
I’m pretty sure the concept’s intended as “the presence of X should be interpreted as evidence of X being good for (something)”; the addendum I propose is “the presence of people asking to get rid of X should be interpreted as evidence that whatever (something) X is good for, it isn’t obvious enough. Therefore effort should be made to either get rid of X, or make (something) more obvious.”
(Whoops, replied a bit distanced)
This is certainly a large part of the confusion. Few people are foolish enough to go around tearing down unknown fences, but a great many see a fence in the road and say “this must be here to slow down excessive amounts of traffic – let us remove it for the sake of progress!”
As I’ve learned it, a better heuristic than “say why it exists” is “say why it exists, in terms the builders would agree with.” If you cannot justify something in the terms that justified it, there’s a good chance that you’re being dangerously reckless. If you can, and you can also invalidate the reason (either the ideology, or the rule within the ideology) then you might go ahead.
” they would have said that it was a keystone of bourgeois capitalism.”
They were, in fact, assuming that their ancestors were fools. Let us read on in the Chesterton passage:
“There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. ”
That is, Chesterton precisely pointed out that this is not a solution.
The French revolution was very good at what you’re describing, they found institutions they didn’t like and got rid. But they also deliberately got rid of old things simply because they didn’t fit the rational models they wanted. So a whole lot of lower-level institutions like the parlement were removed. I’ll leave it to others to say if it worked.
####
The Gracci in Rome are my go-to example of people who broke something by not respecting tradition which then couldn’t be un-broken. They did this by breaking customs around the powers of certain offices, and then threatening to enforce their unconstitutional actions by violence. It wasn’t clear to them why the same person couldn’t be tribune multiple times, why the senate couldn’t be overruled in cases of land reform etc.
They changed the effective source of political power in Rome from popular elections (mobs granting power by their voice), to violence (mobs granting power by force of arms). Beforehand mobs were constrained in the constitutional channels which had served well. Afterwards mobs were aware that they could change the constitution when it didn’t suit them by use of force. The end result after 3 generations of revolution and counter-revolution was Ceaser and the end of the republic.
I’m not sure the Gracci brothers are a case of not *knowing* why the traditions around the Tribune of the Plebs and other positions existed, but rather a case of them not *caring* about those traditions. They seem to have played on the desires of the mob in order to secure wealth and power for themselves, rather than out of any principle. Maybe the sources I’ve read are just unkind to the Gracci and I’m being unfair, though.
The greater point stands, of course. There’s a definite line between the Gracci’s political changes, plus the part where the Senate has them beaten to death and begins the process of normalizing violence in Roman politics, and the fall of the Republic. I doubt bringing an army into Rome like Caesar did, or even like Marius and Sulla did, would have become acceptable without someone like the Gracci brothers weakening those prohibitions against violence and attacking the institutions and traditions that allowed Rome to have political change *without* violence.
Related: Sulla marched on Rome when his eastern command was taken away and given to Marius instead, something accomplished thanks to rioting by Marius’ partisans. The justification Sulla gave was that the Republic was too much in the grip of violent demagogues to function properly, and that it was his patriotic duty to march in and restore order.
The death throes of the Roman Republic are so fascinating. It’s one of those periods of history, like the French Revolution, where things just get worse and worse, like a movie franchise where each sequel has to top the last movie in how epic it is.
@Xeno; Here is something I wrote in my old blog attempting to explain this fascination, which share:
A little while back there was (sort-of) a discussion of the book _After Virtue_ (here) and there was mention of Polynesians giving up their taboos with a shrug – see Kamehameha II’s wikipedia page for more. That, at first, looked like a good example of Chesterton’s fence being roundly ignored.
On further reading it seems that abolishing the system of taboos was a bit of power politics; they entrenched the power of the class of rulers beneath the King – so abolishing the taboos allowed him to centralise his power. So perhaps he precisely saw the use of the fence, and that very use was what motivated him to get rid of it.
In general, I think the “we know exactly what the function is, it’s there to boost the power, prestige, privilege and other desirable things beginning with ‘p’ of some particular social group at the expense of other people; that’s why we want to get rid of it – we are, or are acting on behalf of, the other people” argument is pretty common. There’s also the implicit “No-one’s quite sure how this superstition got started, some people have theories about how it was priests or someone like that looking to boost their status, whatever way, it’s past time to clear out the cruft”. I’m not so sure how common that one is.
Another few examples I’ve just thought of: wanting to do away with restrictions on governmental power so that the government can do more to help poor people; wanting to reduce the protections given to defendants to make it easier to convict rapists (or other criminals, I suppose, but mostly this sort of logic gets applied in rape cases); wanting to restrict freedom of speech where it negatively impacts minority groups.
These ones I like. They also remind me of a recent situation in Ireland that seems to fit the bill. There’s a law that says the state broadcaster has to devote equal time to both sides of a political issue when there’s a referendum coming up that concerns it. During the gay marriage referendum it had the unfortunate effect of banning LGB people from speaking about their same-sex relationships without someone on air to chime in to say that we still shouldn’t have gay marriage. It led to a lot of left-wing people calling for the rule to be abolished, without concern for the obvious downsides that might follow in the future.
> Is this ‘principle’ just a lame strawman of progressives?
Libertarians and small government conservatives are at least as likely to violate this principle as progressives.
One of the contemporary places you see this effect quite strongly is in software development and what could be called “version 2.0 syndrome”. The common criticism of second-version software is feature bloat, but that’s often not the primary issue. When the initial version is developed iteratively in response to problems and feature requests, the result is often “ugly” and developers want to wipe the slate clean. But much of that ugliness encodes solutions to real problems, and when those problems are not understood some portion of them tend to reappear. That can make getting the overall system to “converge” very difficult, leading to a drawn-out process of bug fixing that can compromise or even destroy the project. So it’s best to throw out code only after you understand why it’s ugly.
This is totally a genuinely valuable principle.
My best example isn’t something erected by humans, but it conforms anyway. Mao began a campaign against the Four Pests (sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitos) which disrupted health and agriculture in China. Eurasian tree sparrows (which were targeted for eating grain from farms) were driven to near extinction, after which it was discovered that they primarily ate bugs. The main predator of crop pests had been eradicated, crop yields plummeted, and 20 million people died. If you don’t see the use of sparrows, I certainly won’t let you drive them away.
Two political examples, both from Rome:
The Marian Reforms of the second century BC revoked the former requirements that soldiers be raised from the land-owning class and supply their own equipment, in favor of raising and equipping a professional army. This may have been a net good (it massively improved Roman military prowess), but it created a standing army drawn from the peasant classes, who had little loyalty to the Senate and government. As a result, they favored their generals (who made them wealthy) over their Senators (who had left them peasants), directly driving the move towards civil war and undemocratic leadership. If you don’t see the use of civic duty, I won’t let you abridge it.
Similarly, Diocletian attempted to address third-century inflation with the Edict on Maximum Prices. This increased the currency supply, fixed the maximum prices for most goods, and banned profiteering under a definition which included raising prices due to risk or travel costs. As a result, inflation became overwhelming and an illegal barter economy emerged almost immediately. If you don’t see the use of market pricing, I won’t let you overturn it.
These are simply my most familiar examples. The Cane Toad entering Australia and a great many other examples also qualify.
I admit, these are examples where the fence-builders had not consciously addressed the issue created. But in every case, a functional and complicated system was catastrophically altered by people who couldn’t explain its functioning.
Under other names, this is a long-standing principle in ecology, software design, business management, and I assume a variety of other fields. Any time you face a highly interconnected system, it should be considered dangerous to alter it without a clear statement of what you are changing and why it took on the form it currently has.
If the fence had been applied to sparrows, I would have had to be applied to flies mosquitoes and rats….indeed, every apparent pest ever. What do I keep saying about selectivity? To show that something as a rule, you have to show it works in all or most cases.
One out of four s not good enougl
And people a keep missing that there is a third way. You can kill the sparrows in one area , and see what happens. Further Research is Needed s a much better rule than Never Change Anything.
Isn’t your third way the one advocated by Chesterton?
Experimentation is superior to just thinking, of course, but the gist of it is still the same as “Further Research is Needed”.
I disagree with that “one out of four” assessment pretty vigorously. As I read it, Mao picked four pests without deliberation, and 25% of his choices were genocidally bad! That doesn’t mean the other three were well considered, just that not every fence will literally kill tens of millions when you take it down.
I’m not calling for Never Changing Anything; your third way seems completely compatible with Chesterton. Don’t tear down the fence, but perhaps leave it open for a few hours, during which you sit and watch. If you cannot explain its existence through thought alone, that is a reason for research, not surrender.
I’d argue this post is merely examples of “selective rigor”. It seems like a good example of what OP is talking about.
I disagree.
Of the four pests chosen, one was a nation-crippling disaster. That isn’t selective rigor, it’s just an observation that not all fences are devastatingly bad to remove. In this case, one was a catastrophe, two were questionable (flies and rats have ecological value, but we still try to limit their populations), and one still looks plausible (ideas about driving mosquitos to extinction are still floated with total sincerity).
To me, that looks like evidence that tearing down fences is not universally problematic, but that the consequences can be enormous. Similarly, Diocletian and Marius both fiddled with complex systems they didn’t understand; other Romans did this without disaster, but those two are reminders of just how severe the results can be.
I feel like we’re crying ‘selective rigor’ when what we mean is ‘bad decisions with unreliable consequences’. If I had my way, I would change out Chesterton’s summary with “don’t touch complex systems unless you understand them well”, but I don’t think the principle is useless.
At the risk of causing some heat, I’d like to point out that one of the main things Chesterton is likely to have meant when he wrote that is women’s emancipation and enfranchisement. Whether you like the outcome of those reforms or no, the suffragettes themselves were pretty clear that their motivation wasn’t improvement of society in general at all, or careful consequence analysis. They were just fucked off and thought it was unfair that they couldn’t have everything they wanted, even though they were middle class. (And if that seems like a snide and unfair snipe to you, O reader, you should take a look at Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s interactions with Sylvia Pankhurst, after she became a socialist.)
The actual fence quotation is from a chapter of The Thing entitled The Drift from Domesticity, so I feel pretty comfortable with calling the women’s lib movement a central example of the principle being violated, even though The Thing‘s from the interwar period. He wrote a number of very similar things in his prewar essays. Oh, and by the way, besides being probably the best even written in the English language generally, those essays are very useful for providing examples of the kind of kook social reformer abroad in those days, which might be hard to get from conventional history writing — for instance, Chesterton feels the need at one point to engage with people who want to abolish private kitchens in favor of large communal ones in order to prevent…? Who even knows, some sort of bourgeois abuse of spices, maybe.
The kitchen thing is about the change in how you made, prepared, and then resold food in the “pre-grocery store” era, and people not knowing how kitchens would work when they didn’t need to accommodate four-man teams of food preservers or feed 9 to 19 people on a nightly basis.
The Swiss voted no to a Universal Basic Income.
What I found interesting in the article was this – on the one hand, the opponents are arguing that Switzerland already has a labour and skills shortage, so paying people to do nothing means that would be even worse.
On the other hand, they say this:
So I thought the basic economic fact was if labour is in short supply, wages go up. If wages aren’t enough to compete against a payment of €2,250 per month, how bad can the labour shortage be? Or alternately, how low are the wages for low-paid workers that the UBI would be worth more on its own?
See, “We haven’t got enough labour but we also need to keep wages down” doesn’t make sense to me. Either the Swiss start relaxing immigration laws so they get cheap foreign workers taking those low-paid jobs, or they start paying their native workers more. I don’t see how “we don’t want foreign workers but we haven’t enough workers of our own” is going to help the Swiss economy; even if they mean “We are badly short of skilled workers”, surely letting high-skills workers legally immigrate is a better solution?
Anyone know the nitty-gritty of the Swiss economy and can explain to me this conundrum – not enough workers (so wages should be high) but if we don’t force the low-paid to work (by not giving them a basic income) they won’t take the jobs on offer?
If someone can get paid 2250 per month to play video games, or get say 4500 per month (say min wage + basic income, with no taxes at this level) to serve burgers at McDonald’s, some will choose to stay home, when previously they would have needed to work for rent and food. However, this means that there will be one less (marginal) person’s productive work being generated in the economy, while that person still consumes resources. Basically if you subsidize leisure, you’ll get more of it on the margin. Whether this is ultimately a good or a bad thing depends on a number of factors and will probably require testing as much as theory.
Also it seems possible that if wages are driven high enough by this, you may end up with similar employment levels but higher wages (PLUS the basic income) for the lower-end workers, effectively a form of redistribution. If the basic income is so high that people won’t work for a wage where they can actually produce profits for their employer (because they aren’t very skilled etc), then you’ll end up effectively paying people to do nothing when they could have otherwise worked.
Would a large proportion of the population really be okay with sitting at home all day playing video games and jerking off if you gave them a BI? The only people I’ve known who could do that for more than a month or two without getting antsy and wanting to do something more productive were really badly depressed.
I’ve been unemployed for a few months now and only really thinking about getting a job because I have to. I’ve done the same once in the past too. If I was on BI forever (and it was enough to live a comfortable life) I might do the occasional productive project but I’d probably do like 5% of the work I’d do at a job.
I’d never work again if I had BI. At least, not in a job. I’d do something more interesting like work for CFAR for free, or become a politician, or start another company.
There are lots of work-like things that are fun and rewarding, but which aren’t actually (reliable) sources of income.
You must know a lot of productive people then. Avoiding any kind of strenuous activity is the default state for many people. Maybe most. And there’s probably a cultural component too. If you grew up never working and never expecting too, you would probably be less likely to start.
The people you know are probably disproportionately overachievers.
We had a decently long subthread about this a little while back. It might be one of those fundamental human experiences things.
For what it’s worth, there are productive things I’d do if I didn’t need money, “productive” in the sense that they involve progressive improvement at some goal-directed activity. But they’re things like music and athletics. Nothing that anyone would pay me to do.
You are in a bubble. I went to an overachiever college, and we still had people drop out because they realized they liked to just play video games all day. (And this was a while ago, before video games became something everyone played.)
I was going to say, I spent a good five years of my late teens/early twenties doing little more than sitting around and playing video games with all my friends. It was called college 😉
Are you kidding? That’s my #1 aspiration in life. On some lazy weekends or periods of leave from work, I’ve occasionally reached the point where even “playing video games” sounded like too much hassle to bother with.
I don’t doubt it, but I was talking about what people feel like doing when they’re well-rested and energized, not when they’re exhausted and still recovering from work.
The other responses are all telling me that wanting to do basically nothing for years and years on end even when you’re not tired or depressed is perfectly common and normal though, so I guess I’m wrong about this.
You’re giving me way too much credit
Because it helps ensure the health of the commons in which you graze your sheep.
Unless I think it’s actively harmful for the sheep in the commons.
@Edward Scizorhands
It is significantly contentious that a UBI would harm the sheep.
@Mark Atwood
People sitting on their ass playing video games all day still pay rents to landlords, buy electricity from power companies, purchase video games from game studios, buy food from supermarkets, etc… Consumers are a necessary part of a healthy economy. Decreasing labor supply without reducing demand for consumer goods is a benefit to the people who still labor because they get increased leverage in negotiating salary without a reduction in the overall economy.
Furthermore, the assertion that UBI will result in a more than trivial shift of the population towards free-loading assumes a UBI of a magnitude far larger than is feasible. The kind of shelter, with the kind of food, with the kind of luxuries available on only a UBI will not be palatable to the majority of people, in much the same way that the kind of lifestyle available entirely on modern welfare isn’t attractive to any but a minority. UBI allows people to survive on their savings longer while hunting for jobs, and mitigates worst-case scenarios in times of misfortune.
Finally, the assertion that charity to free-loaders is such a moral failing that the continued suffering of the poor but hard-working is necessary is not persuasive. We live in an unfair world where people are disadvantaged through no moral failing of their own; a UBI mitigates the consequences of bad luck far more more than taxes decrease incentive to produce value.
It is significantly contentious that a UBI would harm the sheep.
Yes, it’s contentious. The people proposing a big social upheaval are the ones who need to justify their big social upheaval, not the ones who are nervous about it.
assumes a UBI of a magnitude far larger than is feasible
I’ve been told by the BI advocates here on SSC that people not working is an unalloyed good, so I can only assume that they are trying to create a BI of that magnitude.
I said on the last comment thread that I would like to try smaller experiments. Like “universal food stamps.” Give everyone $100/month on a card, usable the way EBT is. Try that, let’s see how it works. (This particular example comes because my family has been trying to help two other families get on them and it’s a big PITA.)
Sure, but the problem with this line of thinking is that they only have the money because it was taken away via the tax system from other consumers, so any increase in the video-games-players’ consumption ability can only be brought about by a corresponding decrease in other people’s.
“People sitting on their ass playing video games all day still pay rents to landlords, buy electricity from power companies, purchase video games from produces, buy food from supermarkets, etc”
That is to say, they still consume goods and services that have to be produced by someone else. That’s a cost, not a benefit.
Follow out the line of argument you are starting and we can make the world richer by producing stuff and dumping it in the ocean.
@Edward Scizorhands
UBI is not as big a social upheaval as you’re making it out to be, since both taxes and social welfare already exist.
Reduction in suffering is, ceteris paribus, an unalloyed good. Most jobs require compensation because they include some component that is sufficiently odious to dissuade people from doing it themselves. A society where no one has to undergo such odios tasks is strictly better than one where people do.
We live with scarcity, so material wealth has to come from somewhere. We are not yet efficient enough that purely volunteer labor is sufficient to sate demand, so we have to be careful not to undermine incentives to produce so much as to cause more suffering than we eliminate. Anyone arguing for such a large UBI in current societies, as opposed to post-singularity utopias, is unfortunately naive.
@The original Mr. X
The marginal value of that money spread out among a larger number of poorer people is higher than concentrated into a single person’s hands. I’d also say that the economies that the larger number of poorer people pay into employ more people because of locality, and therefor have larger positive externalities.
@David Friedman
Only if the government is paying you for dumping said stuff in the ocean. And in some cases that can make the world richer, in terms of human well being, if it means lower unemployment and fewer people suffering as a result .
Mark, paying zero marginal product people to sit around doing nothing might just be enough to stop them from trying to start a revolution, so from that perspective it could be looked at as a form of self preservation for all the higher income people.
I don’t think people who think the world owes them a living are really the type to start a revolution, or be very effective in accomplishing that goal. And if they are… bullets are cheaper than UBI, and you only need a to use a few pour encourager les autres
The Czar will be so happy to hear that!
I wasn’t saying anyone should pay for me to play video games (though if enough people are interested maybe I’ll set up a Patreon)
My point was more the opposite. I hate working, derive no satisfaction or fulfillment from it, and right now the only incentive I have to go to work is that it’s necessary for me to survive and live comfortably. I know I’m not the only one. A basic income would enable people like me to do what we want, and what we want isn’t productive at all.
I expect many single mothers would be happy to quit unfulfilling jobs and stay home with their kids.
If I had UBI, I’d still work – self-employment almost certainly, and certainly not full-time – but only because I don’t trust the government not to remove UBI after a while.
Something often missed is that there’s *already* a large population of people who have a regular income and don’t work. They’re called retirees, and they’re often quite happy to not work. Some of them do in fact watch TV all day (and IIRC tend to not be particularly satisfied with life), but a lot of them do all sorts of more interesting things that no one would pay them for – fish, golf, garden, write memoirs, provide care for their grandchildren, volunteer, spend time with their family, and so on.
Wolfram Alpha says the median Swiss household income is about €46k. Two people with BI of €2250 a month is more than that. That’s enough money to live on comfortably. If you had BI to that level, I think you’d see a *massive* number of people drop out of the labor market. I might. I’d probably use that safety net to do something that *might* be productive, like write fiction or code my own projects, but is too risky to rely on as a main income source, but maybe I’d just play video games all day.
Retirees are also unlikely to engage in blue-collar time if they have a bunch of free time.
They also know how hard it is to work.
>all sorts of more interesting things that no one would pay them for – fish, golf, garden, write memoirs, provide care for their grandchildren, volunteer, spend time with their family, and so on.
Of those, society only cares about the volunteering and caring for the grandchildren. Fishing and golfing are about as useful as video games, maybe even less. Memoirs could be good if you’re particularly notable but probably not.
The hope with BI is that people behave more like workers with savings or like contractors, using it to negotiate jobs that better fit their skills instead of going for the first thing available. Retirees understandably can’t provide data about how well that would work. Another hope is that those who do check out of working will do other useful things, and looking at retirees sounds like a great idea for that. The hope is for things like civil service, making art that people appreciate (fanfiction with 100 readers qualifies, memoirs that nobody will read do not), open source software, low-cost research, startups.. Playing golf may seem morally more acceptable or whatever but it’s just as big a failure for BI as playing games would be.
@Anonymous:
No, the part that society cares the most about is that we don’t see every 75 year old needing to wait proverbial tables at Denny’s so that they can eat there after their shift is done.
Their are a bunch of other ancillary benefits, but the A1 reason is not forcing granny to be in the labor market just so that she can satisfy the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.
For retirement programs yes, but for BI we need a bit more than that to have a chance of implementing it.
Your point is well taken and is quite worthy of consideration.
I think when people say “I’d still work – I mean I’d go crazy just sitting around and playing video games – I feel the need to do something productive!” we must keep in mind that everyone has a different idea of what “productive” actually means.
What would actually happen in my best guess is that we’d see a hugely dramatic increase in the types of things you just mentioned. Tons of amateur golfers. An exponential growth in “starving artist” types. More bloggers and “independent journalists” then we can shake a stick at.
But take away the incentive and how much effort would they put in? How much would they practice? Would the world really be better off with a bunch more paintings that nobody values enough to actually buy? A tenfold increase in the amount of wordpress hobby blogs? Does something really count as “productive” if you can only do it because the government is subsidizing your requirements of living?
People act like it’s completely unresearched what unemployed people do.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/06/upshot/how-nonemployed-americans-spend-their-weekdays-men-vs-women.html
Unemployed men spend most of their time watching TV.
@Edward Scizorhands: Interested study, had no idea that something like that existed. I’d definitely expect people to spend way more time passively consuming stuff like television, or sleeping more (and by “more” I mean “not being chronically sleep deprived like the average American worker.”) Not certain how much the study would apply to a world where everyone had the option to not work. If you’re unemployed and looking for work, you’re (probably – this is conjecture, not from the study) going to avoid anything that requires an ongoing time commitment if you won’t be able to keep it up once you’re working 8 hours a day again. If not having to work is your life (and you’re young and healthy and not exhausted from a life of work for wages, unlike retirees), it might be different.
Also, keep in mind that unemployed people are not a representative cross-section of the working age population – there are more people who are disabled, physically or mentally, more people whose work just isn’t very valuable (and aren’t attractive to employers and so can’t get jobs), etc., and all of these point towards people who won’t use their leisure writing the Next Great American Novel or inventing things or whatever socially beneficial thing you want. Again, conjecture, not data – no idea how’d you study if this is important other than actually implement UBI. IIRC, GiveWell is trying this in a low-income country, so we should have actual results one day.
@Everyone: There seems to be two camps in regard to what UBI is for in this thread, and I think they’re talking past each other. One sees UBI as just being enough so people literally don’t starve, possibly replacing most other entitlement programs. The other is thinking of a form of UBI where society generates so much wealth that even without work people can live comfortably, say in the middle class, with their UBI. These are going to lead to very different outcomes. The second one is probably impossible in the current world and we’re going to have to wait for much more work to be automated before there’s enough wealth to go around.
There seems to be two camps in regard to what UBI is for in this thread, and I think they’re talking past each other
This is probably true. There is one kind I would really like.
The stress of being unemployed and knowing that both benefits and COBRA would run out have a non-zero impact on the activities. It’s probably useful to look at what the unemployed do, but remember that the population is inordinately like to be suffering from depression and anxiety*, both of which may keep them from more productive activities.
* Both from their status and because those conditions may cause unemployment.
Even people who sit around all day playing video games buy food and clothes and of course video games, pay utility bills, engage in the economy. The money the Swiss government would pay them would not stay in their bank accounts, it would be spent.
Indeed, the only way it would stay in bank accounts is if it is paid to people with other sources of income – the already working in good jobs who use it as savings or the rich who can treat this as free money.
If there aren’t enough people to do the work, as the Swiss are claiming, then why is the UBI such a threat? If they’re saying “We have plenty of low-income workers, we need high-skills workers” then the simple answer is not to pay the UBI to everyone, or to pay it on a sliding scale – you are a skilled worker making more than the UBI every month, you get paid a percentage of the UBI. You are a low-income worker making the same or less than the UBI every month, you get paid the UBI.
It does sound, on a very shallow reading of it, that they are saying “If people don’t have to take shitty jobs for bad pay because they will be able to pay for food and shelter otherwise, what will the employers do?” The short answer there seems to be “pay better wages or make your shitty jobs less shitty”. If the long answer is “but we can’t afford it!” then either open up your job market to foreign labour or work out some way of affording it.
Low-income people primarily consume the labor of other low-income people. How in the world are they going to eat at $LOCAL_FASTFOOD_RESTAURANT if $LOCAL_FASTFOOD_RESTAURANT can’t hire anyone?
One social revolution at a time, please.
The largest parts of the consumption basket for low (and moderate) income Americans are rent, food, energy, and medical care in that rough order.
Energy and rent have large non-labor components and what labor they do include have tends to be at least moderate income. The labor components of medical care tends to skew towards moderate to very highly compensated labor. That leaves food, which does indeed embody relatively high proportions of low income labor — but overall I think the claim is overstated.
Well, the alternative to the current wages (for a potential worker) is starvation or begging. If the alternative was merely (relative) poverty, employers might have to offer higher wages, and nobody knows how much higher.
They want more labor, and they want it as cheap as possible — I don’t see what’s paradoxical about that 🙂
The funny thing is, this argument is exactly why I am so strongly in favor of UBI. Remove coercion (the threat of starvation etc) and wages will adjust upwards to their true level, because now both sides have bargaining power. If someone can’t afford a worker at the new price, that job probably wasn’t worth doing anyway. Tough luck.
I guess what would happen next is that the price of bigmacs would drastically increase (noone willing to flip those burgers), which will in turn make people wonder if they really want to live off just the UBI. I hear they started offering quite nice wages at McD’s, I’ll go to work after all, etc.
Extrapolating this process, I think that in the end market forces would make the UBI trend towards 0 in purchasing power of luxuries, e.g. widen the price gap between a home-cooked meal and a restaurant meal even further than it already is here. I’m fine with that.
If someone can’t afford a worker at the new price, that job probably wasn’t worth doing anyway.
This attitude is what makes me really hate UBI.
“I do not see the use of this low-wage job; let us clear it away.”
It’s the exact opposite of marginal thinking. I see this attitude come up in MW debates, too, and it drives me bananas.
You’re using an emotive argument in the face of reality. If the low-paid job cannot be paid more, it clearly is not actually important and is only being done because the marginal benefit of having it done is worth slightly more the low cost of employing someone to do it.
However, unimportant low-paid jobs are actually quite rare. Most low-paid jobs are really quite important to the enterprise, but low-status; cleaning work, stacking shelves, and so on. These are low-wage not because the work is unimportant, but because they are unskilled and thus used as an entry point to the workplace hierarchy. Is that a good enough reason not to pay someone a wage commensurate to the importance of the job?
Put simply – do you think low-wage workers are virtuous? If so, why do you not wish to pay them more?
You’re using an emotive argument in the face of reality
No, it’s me realizing that my opponents want something much bigger than I do, and having to stop it.
If the low-paid job cannot be paid more,
That’s merely reservation wages.
If we had a super-low unemployment rate everywhere, then I wouldn’t worry about “jobs being undone.” But there are places in the US with serious unemployment. Modesto, California has 15% unemployment. It’s not because there “are no jobs that are actually important.” Just look around Modesto and you will see jobs that need done.
I do wish to pay them more. I advocate for something that will actually accomplish this: increasing my taxes to pay for a wage subsidy. I eschew policies that say “well, as a third-order effect we think wages might go up. Maybe.”
Do you believe that unemployment is implicitly and inherently a bad thing?
If you do, then we are not arguing from the same basic principles and I’m not sure how to proceed.
“Unemployment” as defined by labor statistics generally means “looking for, but unable to find work.” Retirees, house husbands, cloistered nuns, and the idle rich are not “unemployed.”
Since unemployed as commonly used in these contexts implies people failing to find what they want, I don’t see how it could but be negative, other than, perhaps, in the transitional sense, where it’s better for someone to look a little longer with the result of finding a good job than to take whichever is the first job offered.
If the low-paid job cannot be paid more, it clearly is not actually important and is only being done because the marginal benefit of having it done is worth slightly more the low cost of employing someone to do it.
Using “importance” as a metric is strange and seems totally arbitrary. What does it mean to be “important”? And why should pay correlate with “importance”?
“Important” in this context carrying an implicit “to the enterprise”.
Which is to say, carries a direct benefit to the enterprise’s operations. It may be marginal; cleaners are a good example of marginal yet important jobs. If you can’t pay your cleaners more (which in a UBI context translates to “paying them enough of a premium over their UBI to get them to do the irritating and backbreaking job of cleaning up after the public”, which is a currently unknown market position) then it is clear that “clean facilities” is not actually important to your enterprise, as if it was, you would pay them more.
The current reasons for not doing so are not actually based on the importance of the work, but on the position those labourers have in the workplace hierarchy. The only reason this is possible is because low-skilled workers are effectively forced to take the job even at a cost vastly below what it is worth. UBI removes that coercion and in turn forces the enterprise to pay low-status workers commensurate to their labour. I cannot help but feel that this is a significant element in the opposition to the idea.
One interesting observation I feel like I should make at this point is that I have had two personal interactions with cleaning workers’ salaries. The first was when one of my sisters had a cleaning job in a large supermarket, and the second was employing a professional cleaning company to clean my offices. The latter was a very small company with three employees and apparently paid very well, while the latter paid buttons and recruited primarily by getting the local jobcentre to force people to work there at jeopardy of losing their unemployment benefits.
Both companies clearly considered having regularly cleaned premises important (I know I did, I’m an untidy git at the best of times). Only one of these, however, would be able to continue to function in a UBI context. I personally find it hard to have much sympathy for the other.
I feel like you’re using the term “importance” to wield emotional effect in order to wave away the concept of efficiency. Some things are worth doing at $x, but not at $(x+10).
An unstated problem, which the janitor example highlights, is that “pay janitors better” or “live with a dirty workplace” is a false dichotomy.
I don’t have statistics on hand, but from personal experience I’m confident in asserting that right now at least three quarters of janitorial staff are illegal immigrants. Often hired through subcontractors for plausible deniability (“hey, we had no idea these guys were illegal. Go talk to the people that hired them…”).
Every Basic Income scheme that has a chance in hell of working pays out only to citizens. So rather than eliminating “worthless” jobs and increasing compensation to the “important” jobs, your plan would just replace poorly paid citizens with even more poorly paid illegal immigrants.
Even in Trumptopia, with a chicken in every pot and a Wall on every border, you’d still see this problem in a different form. In fact, one which you highlight. Poorly paid low-skill labor will not be replaced with well paid low-skill labor: it will be replaced by a much smaller number of high-skilled laborers operating expensive labor-saving devices. The people who would have been janitors originally are no less unemployed, it’s just that a few other people (who likely had other employment options before) are employed in their place.
If it’s not worth doing at (x+10) currency units, then it’s clearly not very important to the enterprise. We don’t have good language for this, however – “marginal worth” is probably the closest and even that doesn’t really cover the intracorporate social mechanics of the situation.
The reason I bring this up is precisely because people are using emotive arguments in favour of maintaining low-importance low-paid jobs. My argument is that either they are worth it at (x+10) or they are not – and if they are not, why on earth should someone want to do it given the opportunity to not do so?
I would rather 500 people working in charities and 500 people playing videogames to 1000 people doing cleaning work that isn’t important enough to warrant (x+10). And that, at its heart, is the core argument for UBI.
@Dr D – I don’t disagree at all. Immigrant labour and inflationary problems are the two major unanswered questions as regards UBI from my perspective. But they get ignored in favour of “oh woe is me, having to pay for all these awful lazy people swept from low-paying jobs”.
If you can’t pay your cleaners more (which in a UBI context translates to “paying them enough of a premium over their UBI to get them to do the irritating and backbreaking job of cleaning up after the public”, which is a currently unknown market position) then it is clear that “clean facilities” is not actually important to your enterprise, as if it was, you would pay them more.
Again, this is just some arbitrary standard of importance you’ve cooked up. Companies value clean facilities, which is why they pay people to clean them (versus saving the money from not hiring janitors at all). I don’t see any reason to use your arbitrary standards of importance as a basis from which to make policy or judge other companies.
I would rather 500 people working in charities and 500 people playing videogames to 1000 people doing cleaning work that isn’t important enough to warrant (x+10)
If you want to re-order society to your wishes, you have to do a lot more hard work to justify the new society you are imagining.
There’s nothing arbitrary about it, given it’s wholly contextual to the employment situation under consideration.
However, you’re now just repeating the same objection over and over and I feel like I’ve gone out of my way (indeed, somewhat beyond the call of duty) to explain my position. I have no intention of repeating myself further at this point.
@Edward Scizorhands
UBI reduces unemployment because it reduces the number of people who want to find jobs. UBI does not take jobs away from people who want to work them, it takes labor away from people who want to employ it. The only jobs that get eliminated from the market are those that the unemployed aren’t willing to take.
@Urstoff
No, you are the one invoking an arbitrary standard. Zorgon is invoking the standard capitalist method of determining importance by Market Rates. If the reduction in supply of janitors would not result in an increases in janitor wages, that implies that janitors are already paid the maximum of their profitability (i.e. their employers make no profits from their labor that they can cut into to pay higher wages). That this wage is so low means that it isn’t important to the markets. That paying more for the labor is less profitable than not having the job done at all.
The idea that janitor jobs are so “important” that we have to coerce poor people with threats of homelessness and starvation so that they’ll accept lower wages is your position, and you have not demonstrated the metric by which you measure such importance.
“There’s nothing arbitrary about it”
it is entirely arbitrary. There is nothing magical about the UBI you will pay; you say that “importance” is defined as something that someone will pay enough that the job gets done even when UBI is $N.
Well, UBI is $N now. N is zero. Indeed, that’s the only non-arbitrary level, since it’s the level that occurs without interference. Therefore, by your definition, everything that gets done now is important. Or your objection is arbitrary.
In economics a shortage is when supply is higher than demand and for some reason the market can’t clear. Like either there is just no way to make more of whatever is in short supply (marginal cost is infinite) or there is something keeping the price from rising to the market clearing level (price controls). When people talk about labor market shortages they aren’t typically talking about that. What they really mean is that the market is clearing but the price is too high for whoever is complaining about it. So there is no contradiction between talking about a “labor market shortage” and a need to keep wages down. Those are really the same idea.
Yeah, but the argument goes “We need to hire the best CEO, we have to pay top wages, even better than our competitor” and I understand that. Nobody argues “Well we don’t have enough CEOs to go round but we certainly are not going to pay top dollar”.
“We need more people to do this low-paid work and we can’t get enough of them” – then shouldn’t the wages rise to attract people to do the work? If there are people who are physical bodies in the country who are not taking on jobs in (I don’t know) restaurants and as hospital porters because they can make money elsewhere, then surely the wages need to rise to attract workers? If there are not enough bodies present – everyone who can work is working – then again, you either need to raise your wages/conditions so just finished high school Georg thinks “Yes, I’d like to work for Frau Suzanne’s Kitchen rather than Liver Baked On The Lake because they pay more” or you need to import more labour.
I don’t see how they can say they haven’t enough workers but wages can’t rise. Either they do have enough workers and they want to force them to work for lower wages, or they don’t have enough workers but they’re not willing to pay the going rate to attract them. If the CEO won’t work for them because they’re not willing to pay the same rate as a competitor, why should Georg the factory worker? If Georg can get a job elsewhere, good luck to him!
EDIT: Actually it’s worse than that, because they’re complaining of a lack of skilled workers. So they’re not prepared to pay even skilled workers more attractive rates than the proposed UBI, which means I have little sympathy for them.
If it’s a closed system, yes.
But if the companies in your country are competing with companies outside then it makes it that much harder to compete and hits many kinds of exports.
But the Swiss seem to be trying to make it a closed system – they only have so large of a population, after all. They also seemingly have stringent limits on immigration.
Therefore there will come a point when all the people who can work are working, or near to it. If they can’t find enough labour, they will have to let more people into the country to do that low-income labour and high-skills not enough graduates work.
As my grandpappy always said, a shortage of $7.99 golden watchchains isn’t a shortage of golden watchchains.
The market for CEO labor is stupid and broken, but the people who have to pay for it (the shareholders) don’t care because it’s a pittance to them.
We should not be trying to make the rest of the labor market into the CEO market.
Is it the shareholders who pay, though? It’s rather hard to see reports of “Company X made losses this year so staff are facing redundancy, meanwhile the CEO gets his guaranteed by contract bonus” which makes a laugh of the idea of a bonus and doesn’t really make it seem like there is any punishment for failure among the higher-ups.
The rationale is that the calibre of CEO has a great effect on the success of the business so they should be rewarded commensurately which is fine – but there seem to be no ill-effects for failure; even if they want to kick the CEO out for totally screwing up, they still have to pay them to leave quietly, which is not the case for any other worker at any other level who gets fired if they screw up and does not receive preferential treatment.
Yes, it’s the shareholders who pay. I wish they would give more a damn, but they don’t.
(Well, and a lot of CEOs sit on each other’s “compensation committees.”)
If you want to argue exactly how CEO compensation is screwed up, okay, but it does nothing against my point that trying to use CEO pay to model the rest of the labor market is game no one should want to play.
‘Labour shortage’ factoid not actually true. Just finished high school Georg who lives in Switzerland and rejects over 10,000 job offers per day is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.
The issue with UBI is that the person isnt doing another job. They are just living of the taxpayers. They would be contributing more to the economy working the job, than they would be living of UBI. They pay for CEOs is not raised by an artificial price floor created at the taxpayers expense. It is created by the natural competition for the handful of people who are CEO-material. And to top it all off we are using government coercion to reduce our economic productivity. I understand that a moral imperative to the old, to the sick, to children, and to those who disabled and cannot find work, and I can understand how we can argue taking care of them could be worth the government coercion. In fact i do support welfare for those who are in that list out of purely moral reasons. However they young, able-bodied, but lazy, should not have a subsidy to just sit at home and play video games. That is a loss of economic productivity by both using money that could have been better spent on this leisure and also by losing the possible productivity of these workers.
how about able minded?
I just read this (scroll down to “hiding unemployment the nordic way” for the pertinent bits) which reminded me of a consulting gig I did some years back on aluminium plants in countries like Brazil, Spain, USA and Norway.
Per 100 tonnes of daily production, the number of employees were:
– 3000 in Brazil
– 1500 in Spain
– 1000 in USA
– 150 in Norway.
The degree of automation and skill level of the employees followed the exact opposite curve, while the production cost of aluminium were just about exactly the same.
What I am (badly) trying to articulate here is that I suspect that what Norway is doing with granting disability pay to anyone who are not in high demand in the workplace is silently and slowly sneaking UBI in the back door without anyone noticing.
The issue with UBI is that the person isnt doing another job
Which person is that? The ‘U’ in UBI means that even the people who are doing other jobs are on UBI; unless and until we get to true mass technological unemployment it will probably be the case that most adults on UBI are “doing another job”. Possibly including the unpaid but vitally productive jobs of “housewife” and “mother”.
The people who refuse to do any job at all, will under a UBI system be collecting UBI and doing no other job, and under any other system will be collecting SSDI or whatnot and doing no other job. There is approximately no place in western civilization where “you’re a lazy bum so we’re going to let you starve unless you get a job” is actually going to happen; the only question is how we hide that fact.
Most of the systems for hiding that fact, have the perverse feature that they actually punish people for getting part-time jobs or minimum-wage jobs that don’t come with immediate prospects for improvement.
In between the people who will be working other jobs with or without the UBI and the people who will be watching TV and collecting the dole with or without the UBI, are a bunch of people who can do some weakly-productive work and will do some weakly-productive work if and only if it profits them. Under UBI, those people will be collecting UBI and doing another job part time. Under any other system, those people are probably sitting around watching TV and collecting the dole, slowly learning the lesson that working is for suckers.
@John — That’s actually a really good point. I’m concerned, though, that there may be some population of people who would rather passively consume whatever we’re willing to give them, aren’t capable of convincingly faking whatever will qualify them for means-tested welfare, and are capable of being productive in low-skill jobs.
How large this population is, I have no idea.
@Nornagest: If convincing the bureaucrats that you are unable to work is hard enough that the reasonably smart and able-bodied people who ought to be working, can’t do it, then it is almost certainly hard enough that actually disabled people can’t do it and so will be left to starve on the streets. We may hope the process is biased in favor of the truth, but it really can’t be biased so far in favor of the truth as to overcome the gross difference in ability between fully capable and substantially disabled people.
The current system, per The Last Psychiatrist and what little I’ve seen of it in action, seems to both pose real hardships to actually-disabled people while still being accessible to anyone who just really really doesn’t want to work, so I am particularly skeptical of promises to fix both of those problems at the same time.
John Schilling,
That’s a fair point. In my anecdotal experience, the one person I’ve known that was on full-time disability was absolutely defrauding the government. The one person I knew who deserved to be on it kept getting denied again and again and again because they thought he was faking.
Reading that The Last Psychiatrist post, it feels like going to UBI is just giving up on those people who currently won’t work.
Which, okay, maybe the right thing is to give up. I’ve certainly encountered lots of situations where giving up was the best course of action. Maybe it is the right thing to do.
But if we’re giving up on that segment of the population, then
1. how are we containing the size of that problem population? 5% of the population refusing to work and not bothering to vote is probably manageable. 20% refusing to work and politically organized isn’t.
2. are we going to create that same problem in other subpopulations?
Wow. That’s gonna leave a mark.
In which direction do you mean? FWIW, 23.1% voting in favor is about twice what I expected, we are talking about a huge, untested overhaul of our economic foundations, after all.
As a reference point, back in 1989 there was a vote about getting rid of our army entirely, which also had a sizable minority (35%) voting for it. It had serious impact on politics in this area despite being rejected.
The other line items in the same referendum:
* A proposal to speed up the country’s asylum process was backed by nearly 67%
* The Pro Service Public initiative proposing that bosses of big public sector companies should not earn more than government ministers – a reflection of dissatisfaction with railways and telecoms provider Swisscom. It was rejected by 68% of the voters
* A proposal to allow genetic testing of embryos before they are inserted in the uterus in cases of in-vitro fertilisation, where either parent carries a serious hereditary disease. It was passed, with 62% backing it
* Transport financing: An initiative from the car lobby which wants more investment in roads. The government had urged a “No” vote, and it was rejected by 71%.
Which says I think something quite good about the Swiss
To “allow” generic testing of embryos? They couldn’t before?
Switzerland has one of the most nonsensical sets of laws governing biological research I’ve ever seen, even by European standards.
Evidently it’s because their constitution has a poorly-worded line about respecting the dignity of all creatures, which has formed the basis for (among other things) attempting to bar or limit research which would disrespect the “dignity of plants.”
Dr Dealgood, I wonder if that’s a reaction to the reputation of Swiss clinics in the late 19th/early 20th century?
Basically that if you wanted any crackpot treatment, a discreet private Swiss clinic would provide it – see the “monkey glands” story about Yeats (which was not a tissue transplantation but a partial vasectomy).
Though I see that the actual “monkey glands” man was a Russian Jewish surgeon working in France, not Switzerland.
Before you heap high praise on us, keep in mind that in our previous batch of votes, 40% were in favor of throwing out the window such pesky and bothersome notions as “separation of powers”, “universal human rights”, etc.
Eh, not a majority, but still better than you’d get in a lot of countries.
There seem to be two schools of thought at the places on the internet I tend to visit.
The first is that foreign competition is too strong and we have to pay lower wages, because otherwise we just can’t make any money and all our businesses will fail.
The second is that employers are greedy and selfish and will stop at nothing to pay their employees less, damn the consequences.
As for myself, I can only hope one of these two is right. If they both are, it is a much more tragic situation.
I can see how foreign competition is strong for Switzerland, but they are going to be hampered by natural limits of population. There won’t be enough surplus people to do the low-wage (or even moderate-wage high skills) jobs. If Georg and Heidi can make more money simply by crossing the border into Italy or France or Germany to do a similar job for better wages, how do you stop them?
The objection seems to boil down to “Yes, conditions and wages are so crap that if people had any other choice they wouldn’t work in our jobs” which is not a great admission for a First World rich developed liberal nation to make.
Yes, you are perfectly correct. I don’t see how we are in disagreement here..?
Almost all talk about being unable to compete with foreign firms is based on a view of economics that has been out of date for about two hundred years. It’s the same view that gives us terms such as “unfavorable balance of trade.”
U.S. costs are in dollars. Japanese costs are in yen. If, at the current exchange rate, everything is cheaper to make in Japan, there will be lots of Americans trying to exchange dollars for yen in order to buy stuff from Japan, no Japanese offering to exchange yen for dollars, since there is nothing in America worth buying.
Since demand for yen is higher than supply of yen, the price of yen in dollars goes up. It keeps going up until quantity demanded equals quantity supplied, at which point Americans are buying as many yen worth of Japanese goods as Japanese are buying of American goods.
Capital flows and such complicate the story a bit, but the simple argument is enough to show why arguments of the form “if you do that, we can’t compete” are nonsense. The correct form is “if you do that, we will be poorer,” which for some “thats” is true.
With the caveat that Japan or China can totally cheat by buying treasuries.
If they’re buying half a trillion in investments, then either we need to match that with half a trillion in investments BACK (not unreasonable for Japan, not so much for China), or we need to buy half a trillion in cheap Chinese crap and expensive Japanese TV’s to make up for it.
“Giving us free stuff” is not a horrible failure state.
I contend that there is no such thing as “free stuff”.
Every other major state on the face of the planet resists that failure state.
The problem is that it’s not free stuff.
It’s reducing productive investment opportunities for Americans, while making American policymakers choose between either increased debt or increased unemployment.
“We haven’t got enough labour but we also need to keep wages down” doesn’t make sense to me.
Makes perfect sense if you look at it from an employer’s perspective, and I see variations on it quite frequently. Particularly whenever someone is talking about how we don’t have nearly enough (cheap) STEM workers and need more, more, more…
And from the middle-class perspective, the €2,250/month wage level is probably perceived as “what we need to pay people to mop the floors, serve the burgers, and otherwise do the jobs that middle-class folk like me want to have done for us”. So, thinking economically as an “employer” even though they aren’t the ones directly making payroll.
It breaks down to something over €500 a week which is decent money. I don’t know if taxes or social insurance payments would be taken out of it, but it certainly is more than you’d make working mopping floors and the like, so I do see the fear about “not enough workers to do the low wage jobs”.
Okay, then bring the UBI down to a smaller amount – €300 a week, or €250 a week. Then people can choose to do part-time/full-time low-wage jobs on top of that to earn extra money.
As it stands, it sounds like (a) too ambitious by the proposers (b) wanting a level of forced inequality and coercion to make the system work under capitalism by those opposed.
People who are doing a job they hate under bad conditions only because they won’t have any money to live on otherwise are not going to do a good job. You the employer may or may not care about that, but it doesn’t make for productivity and good quality in the goods/services produced.
Mopping the floors pays more than the UBI, actually. We have insanely high wages. Also consider that one proposal is to remove the UBI gradually as you make more money, so maybe you make CHF 3000 mopping the floor and get maybe a quarter of the UBI on top of that. If you mop the floor part time, maybe you get 80% of UBI + a wage of 1000. The idea would be to create a smooth, shallow ramp where more work = more money.
We already have a bunch of ramps that phase out when you earn more money, creating significant marginal taxes on the poor. The Basic Income is supposed to solve that problem.
Variants with and without phasing out at higher incomes have been proposed. But that’s a side issue for me, I was just assuming the worst possible world for my argument. If UBI doesn’t phase out at higher income, the incentive to work in order to increase disposable income is even stronger.
I would have voted aganist that bill. The ammount was way to high, a more resonable ammount would of been around 1/2 of that. 30k per year is over 50% of the percapita GDP.
I believe the actual bill didn’t have a set number for what the UBI would be. The 30K was just a suggestion by the authors of the bill.
That’s correct. There was also a 50 year time window in which to implement the changes. There would have been plenty of discussion and secondary votes to hammer out what exactly UBI means.
I have a friend who worked in Switzerland for a variety of NGO’s over the course of about fifteen years. One of his comments about the Swiss system was that such firms often hired a lot of foreign labor on a contract basis, but that the work visas expired quite quickly if you were laid off (and most were quite short, typically six-to-twelve-month contracts).
The permanent positions tended to be reserved for Swiss citizens, and so when the economy weakened and layoffs occurred, their jobs were safe, while all the contractors had to leave the country.
A certain demographic of salary-class consumer wants products to be cheaper. The labor shortage is driving up prices, a UBI would drive up prices, the Swiss are very conservative about immigrants. That’s what they want: to have to pay less for products without deflating their own paychecks.
One plausible explanation: response to wages is intensely non-linear.
This general principle solves a lot of real world and theoretical questions (like the Lottery Paradox). The first few notches of income are absolutely crucial: they keep you from starving or enduing up homeless. After that, value drops off rapidly – there are lots of people working on $10/hour who could be doubling that, but are choosing not to work on an oil rig or join the military (at the cost of risk, exhausting labor, long-term travel, and moving away from friends and family).
Beyond those points, things get complicated. $100,000/year is much, much better than $40,000/year (it enables all kinds of luxuries, and also removes the sting of many minor shocks like an unexpected bill). But $40,000 versus $50,000 (the sort of variance available to unskilled workers)? I think most people would give up that raise for lots more time off work.
Video games, books, and Netflix aren’t just patronizing examples – I could imagine being pretty happy with rent, basic food, and enough free time to consume reams of high-quality media. As is that’s not on the table: if I choose against work, I choose against food and a home. But I think a surprising number of young people might be well-satisfied by affording nothing but staples and media access.
Donald Trump is low-level example of Roko’s Basilisk, right?
If you’re not on board with fascists before they come to power, they may purge you when they win, you mean?
Some Jews voted for the Nazi party based on this logic.
I don’t think anyone knows Donald Trump well enough to guess at his intentions with enough accuracy to be sure he won’t turn on them, given his obsessive lying. Why shouldn’t he purge “his own” supporters if they become inconvenient?
Why are we assuming he’s going to “purge” anyone?
The whole ‘Trump is Literally Hitler’ thing is so hysterical and absurd, it’s actually making me more favorably disposed to him every time I hear it.
There’s a solid argument that this is in fact the main source of his popularity.
Which has nothing to do with Dr. Dealgood’s comment. I’m no Trump fan, but all the hysterics over a guy who would most likely end up being a pretty Democratic-leaning president is just amazing to me.
It’s kinda frustrating to hear Godwin’s law evoked so aggressively by liberals after years of them complaining (with good reason) about conservatives invoking it on Obama. People just can’t get enough of those goddamn Hitler/Nazi comparisons.
Trump should be compared to George Wallace, or the leaders of the Know Nothing party of the 19th century, not any historical dictator.
Berlusconi. As I suggested elsewhere.
I completely agree, but your phrasing troubles me a little.
As I understand it, to “invoke Godwin’s Law” would be to say, “Aha, you brought up Hitler or Nazis irrelevantly, therefore, I have won the argument!”
What you are saying instead is that comparing a politician to Hitler “evokes” or “invokes” Godwin’s Law. Referring back to Mike Godwin’s original conception, perhaps one might say that it demonstrates Godwin’s Law.
What? No. Just… I don’t even see the connection between the two.
Donald Trump does not become more dangerous because you know about him. Donald Trump does not make acausal bargains. Donald Trump is not a superintelligence. Donald Trump is not capable of making simulations of his electorate. Donald Trump has not threatened retaliation against people who failed to get him elected.
Probably disagree with your last point. I was thinking more along the lines of “once I’m in power I will punish all of those who didn’t work hard to put me into power.” He hasn’t threatened it explicitly, but does he really need to? He’s obviously thin-skinned and vindictive, just the sort of person to get back at you for not backing him when you could have been useful.
He’s thin-skinned and vindictive, but not in the way that the Basilisk is vindictive. I wouldn’t expect him to seek retribution against everyone who failed to support him – that’s 50% of the country! And if he did try, he’d find that the Constitution has some very strong words about using state power to suppress your political opponents.
(Yes, the US has done it to Communists before, but if Communists were 50% of the country I imagine that McCarthy’s job would have been a little harder.)
I can imagine he’d seek retribution against a few prominent opponents (I’d certainly be pissed off at the NeverTrump Republicans if I was him), but at that point it starts becoming hard to distinguish from “normal human politics.” I don’t think it’s really helpful to use “Basilisk” as a synonym for “Spiteful politician.”
I wouldn’t, but I do think he’s orders of magnitude different. There’s a certain sense of “no one wants this but we have to help him because otherwise he’ll turn on us” with Trump that I just don’t get with other folks.
Really? I get that impression from Hillary Clinton even more strongly than I do Trump. Trump is fickle; Clinton knows how to carry a grudge.
In her case, I’d expect that anyone outside the higher echelons of the Democratic Party would be safe, but then I don’t envision Trump going out of his way to target average members of the electorate either.
@John Schilling:
You think Clinton is sending pictures of her hands to (essentially) random reporters years after they said something symbolic and crude about her?
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty sure Clinton can carry a grudge. I just think she saves them for things which are more consequential.
Maybe not, but then HH was worrying about Trump punishing people who didn’t help him to power. If that punishment consists of getting a photo of his hands every so often, I don’t think there’s any need to worry.
@The original Mr. X:
Trump has already threatened to do things like pulling CNNs FCC license or investigating Amazon because Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post and Trump doesn’t like their coverage.
I not sure he’d actually be really capable of making that happen, bureaucracies do have survival instincts and defense mechanisms, but it does speak to what he might intend. And certainly speaks to the things he is willing to threaten.
If we’re going to be stuck with a vindictive President, which it looks like we are, it might be better to have one who goes after imaginary targets such as CNN’s “FCC license”.
@Cerebral Paul Z:
Touché.
But, do you really want to follow that line of reasoning through?
What I said was probably too much of a throwaway joke to be worth following through, but as a #NeverTrumper I’m not too concerned about where it might lead.
vs the candidate who wants to introduce actual licensing for media companies… especially ones that criticise her.
@costareports
Spoke w/ a Trump friend this afternoon. Says Trump paying close attn to who in GOP is with him now, who is not. “Will remember,” friend says
@ Eggoeggo
the candidate who wants to introduce actual licensing for media companies… especially ones that criticise her.
First time I’ve heard that one. Cite?
This is missing key features of Roko’s Basilisk — in particular, the whole basilisk part. Do you think Donald Trump, should he be so vindictive, will restrict his vindictiveness to those who considered this idea, and chose not to support him anyway?
I really don’t think it’s a good idea to dilute the term this way.
Trump has a record of being vindictive against people who have specifically offended him, like the journalist who started the “short-fingered vulgarian” meme. I can see Trump holding a grudge against someone for refusing to help the campaign after Trump had personally asked them to, but not against the general category of people who voted for, or even actively worked for, another candidate.
Well he did say he would pick Supreme Court justices who “would look very seriously at her email disaster.” That sounds awfully like a purge of political opponents to me.
If those that are in power are so corrupt that people are above the law, replacing them all is warranted.
Strategy: Always register as a member of the party more likely to use opposing party’s rosters harmfully. Then, in the actual election vote however you like.
(Yes, there are states that don’t allow this, but others do.)
Can you be registered as both a Republican and a Democrat?
Depends on the state, but as a general rule you can only be registered with one party at a time.
Possibly in a “merely knowing about him is likely to break your brain” sense. Unfortunately it’s a bit too late for “we have to censor all mentions of Trump lest people go insaaaaaaaane!” these days.
Can the sidebar be updated to have clearer descriptions of what the different blog groupings are?
I think that working it out is left as an exercise to the reader – and would be a bit like explaining the joke. Some are based on puns on the name, some appear to be partly based on puns on the name, some are based on content… The catergories are mostly cribbed from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge which pokes fun at the idea of classification systems in general. (Well, supposedly it’s taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia but this seems highly doubtful).
Maybe there should be a link to the explanation right above or below the categories. People keep asking.
It’s a way for us to feel superior to the illiterate masses, yo.
You like that sort of thing?
Nah, multi prefers to post comments here to her tumblr to ridicule them and rile up her Holodomor-denialist friends.
Does Multiheaded Multiheadedself deny the Holodomor? Or is it just Multiheaded’s friends?
Well, let me channel multiheaded to see if I get this right…
“You’re a fascist I and want you to die. Why did SSC commenters get so libertarian-Nazi-racist, when I’m constantly shrieking death threats at them and trying to start internet lynch mobs! And no, a sincere appreciation for Stalin and all his policies plus the desire that a wave of purifying violence with
refresh the Volkish spiritbring justice to the deserving proletariat doesn’t necessarily mean I support the Holodomor, just that I politically affiliate with those people!”Opacity has value in establishing community boundaries, I like the inside joke nature of the whole thing.
I agree in principle, but in this case why is the explanation given to people who ask? It’s not like those people are then branded as outsiders just for asking.
Possibly it’s a “soft boundary” sort of thing. A sort of “here’s this thing you’re not a part of yet but can totally get initiated into if you’re willing to make a tiny effort and not run off at the first sign of something unusual”.
^ What he said
OK, so in that case see my earlier comment about just providing an explanation in a link permanently located above or below the categories. Still takes a small amount of effort to discover, etc. but cuts down on (probably some of) the continuous “What’s up with those category names?” threads.
Anybody around learning Japanese? It seems fairly common in geek circles …
Anyway, as an evening/weekend project, I’ve been working on automatically building Japanese review sheets for anime, so that you have a list of recommended words to learn. An example for Naruto can be tested here. Feedback most welcome!
Seems an efficient/fun way to learn. How do you build these sheets automatically? Did you have access to a digital script of the episodes?
Yep, in the form of subtitle files.
Are you doing this for more series? I might try this but I don’t have much interest in rewatching Naruto.
Yes, I’m planning to, what series do you have in mind? (it mostly depends of what subtitle files I have, I have thousands of them but with pretty spotty coverage.)
I wasn’t thinking anything of any alternatives in particular at the time I made that comment, but Digimon Adventure is my favorite series and never gets tiring.
Will, if you can dig up the subtitle files for the series (.srt or .ass), I can build a learning helper from them. I don’t have Digimon Adventures (I have a few of the later seasons tho).
I have the series (and it is softsubbed) but I don’t know how to get the subtitle file out of the .mkv.
Well there are some explanations here : http://mytechieself.blogspot.fr/2011/01/extracting-subtitles-from-mkv.html but you might also be able to find them on the internet.
The thread about people’s conversion stories vaguely amused me. It feels as if 70% of it goes along the lines of this:
‘My parents were X, so I grew up to be X as well. Then I became older and found out some people LIED to me, so I did everything I could to not be X as much as possible. Then some people I thought to be on my side were mean to me, so I became Y.’
Politics-as-tribes, indeed.
This is my story but then I returned to X after I noticed *all* of my friends were Y because I am a huge contrarian.
It sounds a bit like religious conversion (or deconversion) stories as well when it’s put that way: “Up until age nine I was vaguely Church of England as were my parents and everyone else, then at school they taught us about Jonah and the Whale and, thanks to my interest in science, I knew whales were mammals not fish. So I realised they were LYING about religion and that’s why I am now a famous snail geneticist” 🙂
“Up until age eight I was taught vaguely mainstream public education just like my parents and everyone else, then one day at school they taught us about the tree of life but they put whales under mammals, and thanks to my recent trip to SeaWorld I knew whales swim so they are fish. So I realized they were LYING about science and that’s why I’m now a minister.”
I went to Seaworld once and they tell you that whales are mammals there.
But you can see that they are obviously fish. Don’t believe everything the shills tell you.
“But you can see that they are obviously fish.”
Not true. I remember watching a small whale in Seaworld or something similar–a glass sided tank. I was struck by the degree to which it seemed to move like a person in a fish suit rather than a fish.
The funny thing is that the original text doesn’t even mention whales.
My (political) conversion story is different:
My mom was X and my dad was Y. My parents divorced when I was very young, and then my mom was too busy to worry about raising me in X. The culture around me was sorta in between X and Y, though more like Y, but I was inclined towards contrarianism anyway. So when I was a teenager I made a close and lasting friendship with someone who was Z, which of course I liked. Though dismissive at first, I gradually became more and more Z until I was in my mid-20s, by which time I was as hardcore Z as you can get. By then my friend had become totally hardcore X. Always intellectually curious, I asked him to recommend some good arguments against Z because all I’d heard were the retarded ones from X and Y. Gradually, I realized that the arguments from hardcore X against Z were mostly valid, and I started becoming hardcore X too. I sometimes got into (good-natured) debates with my mom and now she’s more hardcore X than she ever was when I was little.
My twin brother, on the other hand, was Y most of his life, and only after a lot of (good-natured) debates with me has tempered his Y-ness with the slightest tad of X, though he’s still averse to it and is basically solidly Y.
(I’m now what a journalist would probably call “alternative X” for her schlocky thinkpiece in the NYT, but I recognize it as just “normal”, having rejected most of the Y that’s floating around and in the drinking water. I don’t actively try and be more X than that. Sometimes I feel the tribal kinship with other Xs bubbling up but I tend to just let it pass, like when you pull your butt cheeks apart to silence a fart.)
In light of the recent Swiss vote, I’d like to get thoughts on basic income using a smart contract with voluntary funding. My idea is that a variety of basic income plans would be proposed and people would voluntarily commit to a proposed basic income plan if they found it appealing. Perhaps these plans would in part be implemented using a blockchain that allowed some of the features I’ll discuss. A variety of ideas would be written up and submitted as plans. For example:
* take 5% of everyone’s pay and equally distribute that amount to everyone in the same basic income plan,or
* take 5% of income up to $100,000 and 10% above that, and distribute 70% of that total evenly to the bottom income half of income levels and 30% of the total to the top half, or
* take 30% of income up to $5,000 and 0% of income above that, and distribute evenly to all
There could be a variety of different trigger mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms, such as:
*1,000 people join, or
*total income of $20,000,000 is committed based on prior year’s salary, or
*Judge Sotomayor or mediator Ken Feinberg gives approval
Basic income plans might require that everyone stays anonymous, though I think this could be less appealing and harder to enforce than a system that incorporated some form of reputation, such as Uber score, AirBnB rating, MeowMeowBeenz rating, or some new rating agency (of credibility, accountability, moral uprightness, etc.) of the future. If costs are required to maintain the system that would be built-in and specified up front. A system for making changes would be specified. Different exit criteria would also be specified, if people were worried they might become unhappy with the agreement under certain conditions. Overall, there would be experimentation with a range of ideas for tax and dispensation arrangements, trigger mechanisms, and exit criteria to see which package could get the most voluntary buy-in.
I find this idea morally and economically appealing over a potential involuntary monopoly system imposed at a federal level. I see the blockchain as a technological improvement that should make it easier to implement what I think of as a modern Mutual Aid Society that can allow cooperation and charity at a distance. I’m interested in what other people think about my proposed system.
An additional thought: Over 100,000 Swiss signed a petition for their basic income proposal that was voted on. Since they all thought their proposed system was a good idea, what if the signers entered into a pact among themselves to implement their basic income vision? I see that as preferable to a system where the unwilling are forced to participate.
Commit when, and for how long?
If you allow people to change plans over the course of their life, they will quite reasonably change at various transition points to the plan that is most favorable to people at their stage in life, whether that means “…and extra subsidies for college education” or “…and extra health care for geezers”, with the result that each plan will at all times be running at a net loss. Good luck designing a meaningfully diverse set plans that don’t at least implicitly favor one demographic, generational or otherwise, over others.
Make them commit at the age of majority, and they’ll chose the plan that is front-loaded with benefits for the young, on the grounds that if they are free to do what they chose at someone else’s expense in their twenties they will certainly land that law-firm partnership or achieve dot-com success or whatnot by thirty and thus not really need anyone’s help after that. When that doesn’t happen and they are stuck with the minimum allowed level of support as an unemployed forty-something, they are going to whine about it all the way to the voting booth.
If we are talking about the sort of people who can make sound economic decisions at 18, most of those are going to be able to make a pretty accurate assessment of e.g. whether they are going to be making more or less than $100K for the bulk of their lives. So the plan that counts on the six-figure earners to fund it, isn’t going to have any of the six-figure earners in it. Really, every plan will be preferentially filled with people who will take from it rather than contribute to it.
And if the plan is for people to commit for their entire (working) lives, who is going to enforce that? People usually live for the better part of a century. Governments usually don’t, and the ones that do usually have major political realignments at no more than half-century intervals.
The length of commitment would vary by basic income proposal. If shorter periods get more voluntary buy-in then they’d become more popular.
If you’re right that allowing plan changes at various points in your life would lead to net losses (which seems reasonable), then basic income plans might need to add age requirements to their proposals to account for this. I can imagine a proposed plan that allows only 20 somethings to join, for example.
Do basic income supporters have any issue with this? Perhaps some basic income supporters don’t mind this as they see it as a form of charity.
Also, I pointed out that one requirement to join a proposed basic income plan might be to have a minimum reputation score, which could be a credit score, Uber rating, or some other yet to exist rating that measures the likeliness of contributing versus taking.
If lifelong enforcement is an insurmountable problem, then lifelong basic income plans won’t exist. Enforcement mechanisms and costs would need to be accounted for in the proposed basic income plan.
Note that Mutual Aid Societies did in fact exist, so there exists some combination of factors that allows voluntary organization to exist as some form of an income support program. Charity does exist today as well, so many people have a propensity to be willing to commit income without expected monetary returns.
Perhaps no basic income plans would get voluntary buy-in or be sustainable. It’d be good to know that, and perhaps other types of smart contract voluntary orgs would be more prevalent, like say a group that commits to unemployment benefits, or life insurance, or health insurance, or disability insurance. I’m interested in what the marketplace of ideas can produce.
Ethnic and religious homogeneity, just the right amount of clannishness, and a high-trust society.
If those factors are the only way people would voluntarily agree to a basic income plan, then the only basic income plans that would exist under my proposal would have ethnicity, religion, and degree of clannishness requirements. No other basic income plans would get voluntary buy-in. That’d be a good hypothesis to test.
Edit: Do you think the 100,000+ Swiss basic income petitioners would agree to form their own basic income program amongst themselves?
Probably not. Talk is cheap. I’m told that the Mormons have de facto basic income, so there’s an upper bound for the minimal level of cohesion and buy-in you need.
No because UBI is worthless if unenforceable. Incomes are hidden. People can move out of the country even if they signed a contract forbidding them to. The idea is kind of similar to voluntary slavery, which is forbidden for good reasons.
(Also, being one of the 100’000 petitioners is not a large hurdle to pass. It means that some person on the street stopped you and asked you to put your name on a piece of paper. I sign every sensible initiative I stumble across out of principle, even when I disagree with it)
I sign every sensible initiative I stumble across out of principle, even when I disagree with it
Be careful, some people who get mad when legislation passes find those people and dox them.
There’s also the issue that I would guess that the people that are most likely to support a UBI are also the people that would have the greatest need for it, so there is probably little chance that those 100,000 people could actually do anything of the sort if they pooled their money.
I’ll take my chances, thanks.
The trouble is, a smart contract can’t work out what someone’s “income” is, all it can do is see how much money you put into an account that you give it access to. That makes it easy to work “under the table” – keep my own income somewhere else, while raking in the income from honest contributors. Or worse, you could create an extra account or fifty and collect extra income for all of them. Welfare fraud becomes a lot easier when everything is digital and anonymous.
You’d probably need some sort of reputation or web-of-trust thing to make it work, but I don’t know how you’d implement it, and half the point of basic income programs is to get rid of complicated means-testing requirements in the first place.
Perhaps a requirement would be to post a picture of your W-2 each year, with some % of people getting audited to measure compliance.
Right, and as I said above:
“Basic income plans might require that everyone stays anonymous, though I think this could be less appealing and harder to enforce than a system that incorporated some form of reputation, such as Uber score, AirBnB rating, MeowMeowBeenz rating, or some new rating agency (of credibility, accountability, moral uprightness, etc.) of the future.”
I knew of a woman who got into subsidized housing by showing her W2 and carefully neglecting to mention that it was not her only job.
Presumably people would only go into plans with people from roughly the same economic situations as themselves, as not doing so would amount to voluntary wealth redistribution, and people generally only support wealth redistribution if it doesn’t require them to make unusual sacrifices themselves while others do nothing. If UBI is a solution to technological unemployment, would this run into a problem when people from similar backgrounds, all clustered together in the same plan, all become unemployed at roughly the same time and the plan fails even though no-one defected?
Hey everyone, Theodidactus here, long time reader first time poster.
I’m a social sciences librarian in Omaha. In my spare time I write fiction (see site).
How’s everybody feel about libraries these days?
I avoid them. I used to run into someone rather frequently in the local library, and everything that happened with/around that person triggers my PTSD.
Tho’ that’s probably not the response you were looking for.
I wish all those organizations which publish academic journals online would be nationalized and forced to give away everything for free, thereby freeing up library budgets to buy actual books (only sort of joking–the libertarian way of possibly producing this result is being very anti-intellectual property).
Well, the intellectual property angle is interesting simply because the copyright arrangement between a journal publisher and an author is very different than in other trades. If I ever get any fiction sold, I’ll want strong IP in some fashion to get me money, so I can get food, shelter, nice clothes, etc. X has some relationship to Y
If I ever get an academic journal article published, I won’t care about about the copyright much, because I don’t get cut Y when they sell X issues. In fact, I may want piracy to occur because it boosts my citation count.
I find good libraries very useful and enjoy spending time in them. I would prefer that they focus on their core mission of housing lots of books in well-organized collections. I expect that libraries as an institution will diminish in number, size, and importance over this century as much of their role is taken up by the internet, which is in some senses regrettable – but trying to turn the library into a place for people to access the internet isn’t really playing to its strengths. That’s what coffee shops are for.
Ditto, especially, “I would prefer that they focus on their core mission of housing lots of books in well-organized collections.”
I love them. Reading something you hadn’t planned to is one of the great joys of life, and browsing in a library is crucial for that. Plus the books are free, so there’s that, too. Also, my city has a library system that’s better than you would expect for its size and culture.
And as a parent of a young child, I appreciate our libraries for the many programs they hold for children, as well as the spaces they have dedicated for play and reading for children.
While I can use digital readers no problem, I have a really hard time browsing digitally. It’s very odd and I know I’m not alone here.
Most library catalogs now have a feature like “nearby on shelf” or “ebrowse” or something that presents images of books as they would appear in order on the shelf, but this is not the same. I have had at least a dozen major discoveries from physical browsing.
I’m currently reading Healy’s “Great Dissent”, an item I found while looking for a completely different book on the same subject.
Love them. I spend a lot of time on public transit, which I use for reading, and the public library is a great money-saver.
Love the concept. Have serious problems with the implementation almost everywhere I go, and I have 7 library cards. Some libraries have bad hours. Some put everything interesting on the reference shelf. Some don’t understand how sorting systems are supposed to work. And some decide to charge non-residents, unlike everyone else in the area. (Those are the worst. I left my books on the desk and walked out.)
There are still things which cannot be found on the internet, and libraries usually are the best alternative. Also, the internet can’t match the pleasure of browsing at a good library (which are unfortunately not that common close to me). In college I went to the library for fun on a regular basis. I don’t now that I’m out, because of transportation and the fact that I have money to buy books.
But the second-worst is libraries that forget that they are ultimately places that have books, and should focus on that above all.
Annoyed Librarian writes for Library Journal: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2016/06/02/the-evolution-of-traditional-libraries/
and frequently pushes back on this trend where libraries are trying to be all things to all people.
Thinking this over more, I have a much greater fondness for library systems than I do for specific libraries. I live in LA, and thus have access to two of the largest public library systems in the US. WorldCat searchs and a paid card at UCLA mean that I can usually find all but the most obscure books. But besides UCLA, it’s been quite a while since I went to a library with any intent of browsing.
Libraries’ audiovisual media collections fascinate me.
In one region, libraries only bought DVDs of really old movies, obscure TV shows.
At another, they only bought very recent and popular movies and TV shows.
At another, their focus was on nonfiction.
Now, for most people, the 2nd model was the desired one. I still take advantage of it myself, to where I’ve been in the movie theaters maybe twice in the last 3 years. On the other hand, it’s harder to find or even discover the older and more obscure stuff, even streaming/bootleg so I also really appreciated libraries that followed models 1 and 3.
And it’s always amusing to see which libraries have foreign-language collections, for what languages. (Curse you Japan for refusing to license Jdramas! You’re leaving money on the ground here!)
Ditto for sheet music.
It’s been probably five or ten years since I was in a library, and I haven’t had a library card since I first got the internet. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I see little value in how many libraries are spread across the country.
I have great feelings about libraries but little actual use for them. I wonder how common this is.
The traditional community library seems partly obsolete now. The sort of thing where you have a broad collection of non-fiction books averaging 15 years old and aimed at around the high school level of comprehension on a wide range of topics seems to not very valuable in a world with the web.
The part that isn’t obsolete is as a book lending club mostly for fiction books and movies, heavily weighted towards the new and popular. I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing as such but I’m not sure it needs to be publicly supported. Similarly I don’t see much public value in the trend of turning community libraries into ad hoc community gathering and programming spaces, much less day shelters for homeless.
Research libraries, generally associated with universities, but also sometimes associated with major cities, seem to still have a reason to exist, at least for now.
I went to get a library card, I had recently moved but not yet updated my drivers’ license, the address I put on the form did not match my ID, the lady at the desk wouldn’t give me a library card. Basically this was my fault, but I have had a grudge against my local library since then.
My university had a library that was great because nobody went there and you could hide away among the books on your laptop and get some peace and quiet. But then they closed it because nobody went there. Life is sour.
My wife’s a librarian with an MLIS but she keeps getting hired by vocational schools which seem to be uniformly poorly run and awful to work for. What tips would you give for how can she get a better library job (e.g. law library, 4-year college library, corporate library)?
PS. I use public libraries all the time. To borrow books. Which I read. And then return on time so I can borrow more books. I also borrow CDs and movies but only occasionally. If paying a $120 yearly membership fee kept the bums and riff raff out of libraries that would be cool. I’d totally pay it.
Jame, I’m happy to help!
Write me an email at Theodidactus@gmail.com and I can provide some advice, maybe.
As a parent of a two-year-old, I love public libraries. Reading four to eight children’s books every day gets old really fast if you can’t cycle them out regularly, and we don’t have that much money to spend on books. Our nearest library does singing / reading time, which is cool as a place to meet the other kids / parents in the neighborhood (though we don’t go because it’s at a bad time for us).
My wife reads lots of young adult fiction and so she loves the library for being, as someone else put it, “a lending club for fiction books and movies.”
I don’t read as much fiction, and the non-fiction I want to read tends to be very specialized, e.g. undergraduate level mathematics or 18th century Japanese poetry. Thankfully I still have access to a university library, though I only learned in hindsight that my undergraduate library was in the nationwide top 30, and I still miss it.
My main usage is to think of some subject I want to learn, look up the best books on Amazon, and then ask my wife to see if she can find a copy at the library when she goes next.
I used to hang around in libraries all the time, but now I get just about all the books I want online (often pirated), so I visit a library only a few times a year these days. If so many libraries weren’t public, lots of them would go the way of video rental stores.
Well said. The last time I went to a public library, it looked more like a homeless shelter than a depository of knowledge and wisdom.
Ah, libraries. In my youth, public libraries were a treasure trove – I checked out Andre Norton paperbacks by the fistful. Read my way through all the dog and horse adventures. And the encyclopedias! With articles on EVERYTHING. And HUGE books about space and stars and engines. Books of maps – lovely lovely maps. Battles and trade routes and ship ports and shifting towns and roads that had never been paved.
Now there is the internet, and the libraries have chosen to provide internet access to those who can’t get it on their own. Their other offerings have declined, and I now think of the public library as my favorite place to go where I get mumbled at by homeless people and called a white bitch by nine year olds.
Seriously. I don’t like any other place where that happens near as much as the library.
Libraries are wonderful, and everyone should support them more.
I remember this bizarre comic strip, I think it was the zombie strip Hi and Lois, where there’s a panel with the kids in a cute old bookstore enjoying it, then another with a library opening, and then the last panel is the mother and kids walking past the bookstore, now closed. The mother says “Everything has a cost”. This is, and probably will be for long into the future, the most baffling thing I’ve ever seen.
Why is it baffling? If you give away something, it’s a lot harder for people to make money selling it.
Still, cute old bookstores survived Andrew Carnagie for quite a few decades, and survived the Internet for a while too. Didn’t the serious damage time with Amazon, and/or Barnes and Noble etc?
I wanna say Borders and Barnes and Noble did most of the damage, in the 2000-2006 period. Amazon was a thing at the time, but it wasn’t doing a huge amount of business.
All but one of the small bookstores in my hometown survived in any case, and the one that didn’t was in a strip mall. But n=1 and all that.
@Jiro:
Diane Duane: Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries.
On the other hand, the fact that you can borrow a book from the library makes it less necessary to buy it yourself, and one copy in the library may substitute for multiple copies in private hands. So I don’t think we know whether, if all the libraries vanished, your sales would go down or up.
I love my library.
I’m against public libraries, though, especially large institutional libraries, because they keep rare books out of the hands of people who would actually appreciate them and in climate-controlled cupboards.
I’d like to signal-boost this excellent post by TD.
He (she?) argues that we should classify “right wing” and “left wing” by ideology, not policies, since there are conceivable left-wing and right-wing justifications for the same policy, such as welfare programs.
This seems important because it makes sense, for me, of the weird way in which Republicans can now “defend” social security and medicare from evil government encroachment. The traditional value “take care of old people” has now been deployed to justify the ostensibly liberal welfare programs (though if we called them “welfare for old people” instead of “getting back what you earned,” one imagines the right would like these programs less).
This seems both discouraging and encouraging in different ways: discouraging because it seems like even if you have a good ideology, it doesn’t provide a very strong bulwark against bad policies, because ideologies can be flexibly reinterpreted to accommodate bad policies. The plus side is, if you somehow manage to pass good policies, you maybe don’t need to worry that much about the culture accepting them, because the culture will adapt to where they seem totally normal in a few decades.
You can also try to justify your preferred idea by arguing that some terminal value is compatible with a seemingly incompatible belief. See the number of people who go from Christian Creationist to Atheist who believes in evolution through the intermediate stage of theistic evolution.
I find it more useful to think of them not in terms of policies or ideologies, but rather in terms of the “kinds of people” – on the left you find teachers, intellectuals, students, civil servants, artists, and on the right you find parents, business owners, the military, old people.
At least, that kind of break down looks mostly the same in Europe vs. in the US, whereas if you start looking at policies, the parties in various countries look very different (hence Europeans saying that the US only has “right-wing and far-right”)
The odd thing from my point of view (Britsh, centre-left, card-carrying Lib Dem, I’d have a picture of J S Mill on that card if I had my way) is that the American left/right isn’t just the British left/right shifted along a stop or two – I think partly because of the “kinds of people” thing.
I mean, from the point of view of a social democrat – caring a fair bit about economic inequality – the Democrats look pretty right wing. From a point of view of social issues – not so much – it’s notable that same-sex marriage went through at about the same time in both places. It’s very easy to call the whole intersectionalism/SJ/whatever thing (that alternately irritates and terrifies a slightly-old-fashioned-centre-left-liberal like myself) an American import – whether this is true or my prejudices showing is another matter, and how typical this is of the average Democrat voter/politician/etc., likewise. Like your stereotypical raving fundie isn’t the whole of the American right. So maybe economic issues are more a matter of national culture or something, and social issues depend more on the “kinds of people” thing.
That said, on social issues, we don’t have nearly such a problem with the religious right, so that’s something. We do have UKIP and the like which looks a lot like Trumpism, but many’s the time that me or my friends have said something like, “oh gods, the American right, thank the gods we don’t have them over here.”
While I think there’s something to the differentiation between economic / national culture issues and social / kinds of people issues that you see, I can see at least one obvious counter example: the American gun rights culture. It’s a social issue that is a product of a unique facet of American culture.
Part of the explanation may be in that some “kinds of people” are more internationally focused in nature. University-affiliated people (including a mix of intellectuals, teachers, and students) and artists tend to be groups on the left with regular exchange of ideas with peers outside their own countries (at least with regard to the US and Western Europe), which may be why their chosen issues tend to be consistent whenever encountered. The only group stereotypically on the right, at least in Emile’s classification, with what I perceive as an international focus is business owners, and that mostly only in matters relating to trade.
The reason that the intersectionalism / SJ movement has gotten as big as it has is that American and European university activists are effectively working together, while American and European farmers (for example) aren’t and may be actively opposing each other.
Good point, especially about the guns.
I saw this article on Cambridge (where I am) vs Peterborough (a place I’ve been through, on the train, plenty of times, but never _to_, as such) on the forthcoming EU referendum, which should be of interest to SSC types.
Cambridge is very much “Remain” and Peterborough is big on “Leave”. Cambridge has a Labour MP, Peterborough has a Conservative. Nationally, Labour voters tend to be less well off than Conservative voters – yet average salaries are much higher in Cambridge than in Peterborough. The article explains that there’s a big difference in education, and Cambridge has the sort of internationalist attitudes that a university-dominated city with a big tech sector could be expected to have.
Potato-pickers are near-enough farmers for your analysis, aren’t they?
It doesn’t require any coordination for low-skilled laborers feeling threatened in two different countries to both decide to oppose expanded immigration.
I think this supports the ‘economic issues are determined by local culture / circumstances’ observation you made. American consumers are fine with genetically modified crops, while European ones generally aren’t, so the farmers are going to not agree over which works best. Likewise, while French vinters may benefit from insisting true champagne has to come from Champagne, this didn’t go over too well with everyone else.
Absolutely. I live in a very “Red” area (Imperial Valley) of a very “Blue” state (California). And I see a similar dichotomy going on. The State’s politics are very much dominated by the cities of San Francisco and LA because that’s where the population majority of the population and by extension the most of money and the media lives. There is a definite disconnect between the way the cities view things like water and power, and the way the valley does. Likewise replace “potato pickers” with “fruit packers”, “road crews” or “ditch diggers” and you’d see much the same effect.
Of course, if we’re talking politics at local levels – Cambridgeshire is mostly Conservative, so we have a Conservative County Council, but a Labour/Lib Dem City Council – UK political colours being the other way around, we’re an island of red/orange in a sea of blue. But the County Council gets responsibility for transport policy, and I’m always hearing things from my friends complaining about how the County Council doesn’t understand Cambridge and doesn’t understand cycling. OTOH local government in England doesn’t have a whole lot of power (much less than the States in the USA), so it doesn’t matter so much.
Agreed, I’m just offering corroboration in that I have observed a similar phenomena.
So your friends are pagans who don’t want the religious right to come over and expose their rampant heresy
In general it’s only me: I’m not a pagan, I’m an atheist, but at some point I switched from “oh god” to “oh gods”. Zero takes plural agreement, doesn’t it? Two bananas, one banana, zero bananas? An atheist is a person who doesn’t believe that there are any gods.
Also, I don’t think the religious right could come over and expose _heresy_, as such. I’m not an heretic, I’m an infidel. There was a time when David Hume was charged with heresy – he (or his friends) refuted the charge by saying he was an atheist.
(That said quite a few of my friends are Christian (but still can’t stand the American right), and it’s just me who has the whole “gods” thing going on.)
Same here, for much the same reason. Also helps when LARPing.
I see what you mean, but “thank the god or gods, if any” gets to be a bit of a mouthful 🙂
The thing with social security and Medicare is they were sold as a kind-of saving account (their actually an insurance scheme) with the amount you get back being related to the amount you put in. The “get your government hands off my medicare!!!” Crowd make perfect sense within this framework and as such the only way to restructure entitlement is to make the promise that everyone will get paid what they’re owed.
Alternatively you could let what I want happen and just wait for the programs to fail, burning everyone involved, and let it be the consensus from then till the end of time that the welfare state was a failed experiment, FDR was the worst president, and the 1890s had the proper extent of government intervention.
Actually forget I said anything
Ideologies, especially the more pure ones that never actually get fully implemented, tend to have a ‘how do we get there from here’ problem. We acknowledge that the current state is bad and there exists an alternate state which is much better, but the necessary steps to change states involve intermediate steps which are much worse than the current state and/or transitions with a high chance of failure.
Getting rid of Social Security and/or Medicare is one such complex problem, and I don’t blame politicians for not touching it with an 11 foot pole. I think drug legalization and immigration are other issues with the same problem.
I’m not sure that drug legalisation is such a sticky one. You already have in the USA a range of policies for cannabis that range from full commercial legalisation, through more or less restricted medical use, to draconian prohibition for possession for any purpose. After a long enough period of the sky not falling in Colorado and Washington (and particularly California if it votes to legalise come next election) there will be more weight behind reformist efforts in other states, and there will also be more weight behind efforts to cautiously decriminalise* and then legalise other drugs (again, possibly through the half-way stage of having them at least legal for medical use, eg. MDMA and some psychedelics) based on a rational assessment of their risks. Given that there will presumably be a range of degrees of restrictiveness within the legal cannabis states, the idea of calibrating the degree of regulation for other drugs to try to find the least harmful set of policies should start to look more reasonable to more people.
It may be more likely the Haidtian purity/sanctity response, where for lots of people, ingesting certain chemicals to experience altered states of consciousness is morally wrong regardless of the health risks, that stands in the way of a rational drug policy, rather than any practical barriers against gradually bringing drug users and producers into the legal economy and reversing on changes that measurably increase harms.
*using the standard jargon whereby ‘decriminalise’ simply means having no penalties for personal use, whereas ‘legalise’ also means having legal production, distribution and sale.
I thought I’d share my opinions on US Presidential hopefuls with you. I have done no research whatsoever and have absorbed the essence of the candidates through osmosis.
TRUMP
Pros:
-Against Iraq war, at first glance seems to vaguely understand that intervention in Libya and Syria helped destabilize the region, leading to the rise of ISIS (support supplied to “moderate” rebels), and the migrant crisis (loss of southern border control in Libya, chaos in Syria, and ISIS rampaging around the rest of the middle east). Seems to not want to start WW3 with Russia.
-Supports retaining national sovereignty and the ability of nation states to be selective about who they let in and who is allowed to stay. As a non-US citizen, I find the worry over the fairly civilized Mexicans to be a bit overblown (Latinas are sexy), but he’s helping push an Overton Window here that is useful to us Europeans in solving our more severe problems… *shark like grin*
-Struggles to name a Bible verse, and doesn’t seem to care much about social conservatism (with one notable exception) beyond what is necessary to get elected in the GOP.
-Will defend the second amendment.
-At first glance, appears to be the freeze peach anti-PC candidate defending the first.
-Annoys people I don’t like (the salt from the peanut gallery is delicious).
-Memes.
Meh:
-His healthcare plan. Okay.
-Lower corporate tax rates. Neat. Whatever.
-The Wall itself. It makes for great memes, but as a plan, I do wonder if there aren’t more high tech means we could use (to do that bad Hitlery stuff) that would actually cheaper. If we have drones and semi-humane automated active denial systems (heat rays and noise rays), we could probably make do with a very heavy duty fence or wall. Or maybe I’m not thinking YUUUUUUGE enough. Maybe the psychological impact will be worth the price. Eh. Just get a room of smarty pants working on the best way to do it, and then do it.
Cons:
-Flip flops constantly, beginning to look like Romney.
-Seems to oppose the neoconservative line, but then veers straight into it, going on about how we need to stop Iran, and how great torture is. Flip flopped TWICE on Libya, going from being in favour of kicking out Gaddafi, to his more familiar anti-neocon position, and then now finally he’s back to saying he would have had him shot straight away. To think I defended you! Then again, he’s remained positive towards Russia, so Putin might bring him around again on Syria and Iran.
-Here’s that notable exception… He tells us that women who get abortions have to be punished. This is clearly not something he actually believes because he’s so clumsily misinterpreting the conservative position on abortion that Pat Robertson is wincing, but the fact that he’d suggest such a thing makes him look like a dangerous politically illiterate buffoon.
-Protectionism and trying to bully other countries into “deals”. Look, I understand why people are considering protectionism, but most of the evidence is in favour of free trade being better (the best exceptions apply to weak third world industry not superpowers). Making foreign goods more expensive just so the unemployed can have the “dignity” of low paid jobs doesn’t impress me, especially since we’re busy finding ways to automate them out of existence anyway. The future for the useless is permanent welfare, and the conservative masses are just going to have to check their pride, keep their chin up, and stop acting like children. As the 21st Century progresses, the IQ floor for employment is going to keep rising and we’re all just going to have to accept that software engineers will be our overlords. But hey, maybe you don’t believe in that science fiction crap? Well, take it all aside and his trade and foreign policies are still awful and will probably result in a trade war. This happened before during the Great Depression with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which led to retaliatory tariffs making everyone worse off by lowering global production. Only this time, add WWE style showboating to the proceedings to make antagonizing other countries into shutting down trade even easier.
-In that vein, getting Mexico to pay for the wall, sorry, The Wall. I’m no engineer (or anything really), but Israel built a pretty damn effective wall relatively recently that drastically cut rates of suicide bombings (or so they say). Compare Israel’s wall length to the American border and you can get a rough first hand of cost, and it honestly doesn’t look that expensive. You wouldn’t need to cut much other stuff to afford it, and yet he wants to bully Mexico into paying for it. What happens when Mexico refuses? What then? War? It’s interesting that getting another country to pay for something you are erecting on your soil was the first place he went to.
-I seriously think he might be a dumb dumb, which yes, helps yokels like me relate to him, but probably means he shouldn’t be the leader of any country, let alone the most powerful empire in the world. People keep saying he’s a genius and he’s running rings around everybody else, but that doesn’t mean he’s smart. It just means that popularity doesn’t depend on intelligence, but on style. Maybe you can say he’s smart at style, but he can’t keep his policies straight for five minutes, so I can’t believe he knows what he’s doing. On the other hand, maybe he’s smart enough to know that he doesn’t know everything, and will actually just hire rooms full of smarty pants to hash out the details like a real businessman would.
-Let’s take our second glance at the free speech issue. Trump wants to open up US libel laws to crush the lugenpresse. That makes me sigh a lot. People can say that lies are different than opinions all they want, but I find that way too slippery and abusable which is why I’m a free speech extremist (possibly even a free speech terrorist). We all hate the media (that disagrees with us), but I think that social media trolling is doing a good job of cutting it down to size. We’re all the media now, so strong libel laws would mean pushing the government’s interpretation of the truth onto the populace in general. Or at least, as the distinction between media and the individual breaks down that would be the case. Don’t like it.
-Annoys people I don’t like (this might actually be a really bad thing, stirring up the hornet’s nest and making SJWs ten times worse).
-Pleases people I hate. The alt-right, neo-nazis, and other racial nationalist types seem to think Trump’s cultural nationalism is a ruse, and that he’s on their side.
HILLARY
Pros:
-The illusion of stability might meme magic itself into real stability.
Meh:
-Benghazi. The non-scandal.
-The email scandal feels like a non-scandal that partisans are hyping up. That being said, some of the non-classified information revealed in those emails is terrifying.
-Beige suits.
Cons:
-She’s a (dis)honorary neocon, and that worldview has a lot to answer for.
-At least neocons don’t invite the world after they invade it.
-One of the released emails from the scandal shows that she wants Bashar Al Assad, an Iranian ally to go so that Israel’s trigger finger will get less itchy, and then Israel and the US can agree on a redline for Iran.
-Might start WW3 with Russia.
-“Free trade” deals. Funny this one, considering I complained about Trump’s protectionism. The thing is, these deals might get rid of tariffs and barriers to trade but they also help integrate shitty copyright laws and other regulations globally. So yes, I’m in the crazy old Ron Paul camp on this one.
-Muh guns (Well, actually not my guns, since I’m interned in Britain, but I admire the yank freedoms from afar, and feel they stand as a symbol for the rest of the world. Almost like some kind of anchor actually, some fixed point to orient yourself around).
-Freeze peach again. She hasn’t said anything specific, but I know which way the wind is blowing. A recent study that I won’t cite because I’m lazy and stupid reported that 40% of US millennials support cracking down on hate speech. Seriously, it’s not hard to find.
-Hillary is pretty much a corporate centrist with warmongering tendencies, but she’s also an opportunist and may pander to Black Lives Matter as well as other intersectionalist causes. I seem to remember some evidence that she was behind getting BLM to pester Bernie rallies, but I won’t hold it against her, because I can’t confirm that or anything.
-Hillary will absolutely shill for feminism, and since feminism is intersectionalism these days, I feel like it comes with the territory. She, of course, interprets the wage gap as being down to misogyny. This may distort her economic policy.
-I hate her unfairly on a visceral level. At least I had the honour to ignore the conservative conspiracy sites.
BERNIE (He’s done, but hey!)
Pros:
-Best candidate on war and the surveillance state (I think).
-WEED LMAO
Meh:
-Memes. Bernie memes are just cringeworthy.
Cons:
-A national minimum wage of $15 would be just about the highest in the world, so no, this isn’t even Euro style. This would certainly be above the median wage in some places, leading to job losses. Maybe it acts as a nice automation accelerator?
-He wants to reduce Wall St speculation with taxes on high speed trading, and then use the revenue from the taxes to pay for free tuition at Universities, but if the taxes reduce the financial activities in question, then there’ll be no revenue for the free tuition… that can’t be right. I must have not researched this plan enough, because that just sounds silly!
-Same protectionist crap that Trump wants.
-Gets pushed around by BLM, making him a [insert alt-right buzzword].
Agree? Disagree?
Your politics differ from mine, which is fine, so I’m going to limit myself to where we disagree on fact issues.
* Trump is smart. This isn’t enough to be President, and his ego might overwhelm that. (He definitely flip-flops a lot, depending on whatever is advantageous to him right now. Only Trump knows what Trump’s policies will be, and I’m not even sure of that one.)
* You don’t have to be partisan right-winger to be annoyed by Hillary’s handling of her server. I voted for Bill twice. Perhaps the most annoying thing has been the deep insistence from Hillary’s camp that I must be a partisan to be take issue with this. (I remember Hillary talking about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” the day before her husband lied to my face about never having sexual relations with Monica. Hey, Clintons, while I like your politics, stop telling me I have no reason to be suspicious.)
Trump is (almost certainly) smart, but he’s not very politically sophisticated, which might end up being more important. He does have an enormous ego, but I don’t know if it’s bigger than Hillary’s — they express it differently, though.
After having looked into the Benghazi thing pretty extensively, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no there there. It’s literally outrage over nothing, at least when it comes to Hillary Clinton. Anyone that brings up Benghazi loses a ton of credibility in my eyes.
The email thing is different. At its core is a real thing. Hillary Clinton did something she wasn’t supposed to do. And she either knew or should have known she wasn’t supposed to do it. Just how big a wrong it is, that’s something people can disagree with. My inclination is to think the national security state is full of blowhards that have cried wolf far too many times for me to take anything they say about the importance of things like this seriously. That said, look at where Hillary Clinton is on Edward Snowden. She thinks he belongs in prison. Maybe this is one of those live by the sword, die by the sword things.
Unfortunately as far as I’m concerned, it is a moot point. I’d vote for Blagojevich over Trump.
Can you elaborate on the Benghazi thing a bit? Because I take it somewhat seriously, at least in this sense:
a) Evidence seems pretty strong that the State Department lied about the proximate cause of the attacks (i.e. made it seem like a spontaneous protest about a video when in fact it was a planned and organized assault). This bothers me from the lying perspective and also because I’d prefer American politicians to stand up a bit more strongly in favor of free speech instead of excusing religious violence.
b) State Department employees, who should not normally get murdered in the course of their duties, got murdered. It looks like the security precautions taken to prevent this were inadequate. Now, hindsight is 20/20, and personally I don’t think Hillary is directly responsible for much or any of this, but she was the head honcho at the State Dept. and in that sense bears some institutional responsibility (like a ship captain might not be directly responsible if a sailor falls overboard, but could still be reprimanded for not overseeing a culture of safety or whatever).
c) Hillary was apparently strongly in favor of the Libya intervention. The general disarray of the post-Gadhaffi Libyan state, of which Benghazi is just the most prominent example, speaks poorly to Hillary’s skill and judgement in managing foreign policy (honestly that’s my biggest knock against her, SecState was her most important actual job, and in my opinion she did badly).
So does that bringing up of Benghazi make you take me unseriously, or are you talking about something else?
@gbdub:
I don’t think (a) is true. It basically relies on misinterpreting somewhat vague statements made about a situation that was still in “the fog of war”.
Points (b) and (c) don’t get discussed very much by those who are particularly concerned about Benghazi. The problem with (b) is you need to show that Hillary wasn’t effective as SoS to make that stick. In other words, you need to show a pattern of behavior. If it’s just a one off, well outliers happen.
Hillary gets criticism from those to her left about (c), but they aren’t particularly concerned about Benghazi. The Republican coalition leading the charge on Benghazi has been more strongly in favor of intervention in general. Trump is obviously an outlier on this, but he wasn’t running all of those hearings on Benghazi.
C is totally legitimate and something I hold against her as well. I don’t think “Benghazi” is a reasonable shorthand for it.
B I think is somewhat unreasonable. It seems to hold Clinton to a standard that no other cabinet official is held to. Certainly I’ve never heard Gates and Panetta held personally responsible for every serviceman that died during their tenures.
A is the least reasonable. It takes a fog of war confusion, short lived mistake and blows it up into some kind of sinister coverup. And in any event most of the misinformation originated with the intellegence community or White House yet somehow Hillary Clinton is painted as the mastermind of the story.
On a), Clinton flat out stated in an email to Egypt’s prime minister, “we know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest” on the evening after the attack. And later Susan Rice, Hillary’s direct subordinate, is flat out calling it a “spontaneous reaction” to the video. And Obama makes a point to criticize those who “denigrate” Islam. The video maker got perp-walked (yes I am aware he violated parole, but the timing is awful convenient…)
You and I must have differing definitions of “misinterpreting” and “somewhat vague”, or are at least stretching the principle of charity awful far – sure, I’ll allow for some fog of war, but not days after the fact. And it’s not like we heard “this may have been a protest, it may have been a planned assault” – we only got the one narrative.
The administration keeping the “it was all the video’s fault” line going because an unpredictable protest was easier to swallow than us missing a premeditated attack seems at least as likely. I don’t think Hillary was the “mastermind” of this, but she didn’t do any credit to herself either.
Anyway in general I do think a) is the weakest critique but still not absurd.
I feel like, at a minimum, b) gets discussed a lot by the Benghazi hearing people. I mean, the major argument is “people died while those who could help were told to stand down”. Whether that’s true or not, it seems to fit generally into my point b). I don’t think we’re necessarily holding Clinton to an unusually high standard here – Rumsfeld got criticized for body armor issues, why shouldn’t Clinton get criticized for lack of security in her department? One of the key arguments is that the ambassadors requests for additional security were denied. I think that’s a fair decision to critique, and certainly one issue that Clinton could have pushed that may have helped. Sure, hindsight’s 20/20 and that weakens the argument, but again I don’t think that makes the whole line of argument unreasonable.
As for c), while the GOPers are tending to support intervention, I think they generally believe Obama (and Hillary, who was implementing Obama’s policies) to have badly mismanaged the interventions. It’s certainly possible, and I think reasonably common on the right, to believe that intervention in Libya was on the whole a good idea, but the adminisitration royally screwed the pooch on the follow-through. Certainly they feel that way about Syria.
Is there a quote on this? The nearest thing I’m aware of is “If abortions are made illegal, then women who get them should be punished for breaking the law.”
I mean obviously the usual suspects reacted in the usual way, but I’m not actually aware of him saying he wants abortion to be punishable, only that he’s “pro-The Law”.
That question was one of the “gotcha!” questions routinely lobbed at pro-life groups. “Oh yeah, if you think abortion is murder, why don’t you want women to be arrested for murder then? ‘Cos if you don’t, then you don’t really think it’s murder!”
Personally I think Trump doesn’t care a straw either way, but he was mistakenly trying to signal to the Evangelical vote he was courting*, and so he had the guts to say “Okay, sure, if it’s wrong, then yeah charge them with murder”.
Cue predictable shrieks of outrage, but to be honest, if he’d said “No they shouldn’t be”, then the shrieking would have been “See? He’s not really pro-life, he’s only trying to appeal to the religious rubes! Hypocrite!”
You’re a hypocrite who doesn’t really care about the foetus (because you don’t really consider it murder) but only want to punish women for having sex if you say “No, women should not be put in prison for having abortions” and you’re a monster who hates women and wants to punish them for having sex if you say “Yes, they should be imprisoned”.
*Again, he has a large chunk of support from ‘cultural’ Evangelicals, i.e. the kind of person brought up in that milieu but who doesn’t attend church regularly, but the churches are very much anti-Trump:
I’m going to agree with a version of that sentiment which is vastly generalized out of context. I don’t think Trump actually cares a straw about any issue.
Sanders has supported every military action he’s had a chance to, with the sole exception of Iraq. He favored bombing Kosovo in 99, and after Bush left, he favorted Libyan regime change, and bombing the crap out of Syria.
Unless anti-war means “opposes war 50% of the time if a Republican is president,” he is not anti-war.
Either you made a mistake, or I do not know why you potholed the same article three times.
Uh, I’m not sure this is the most mature analysis of the candidates I’ve ever seen. (The most obvious example of it is that internet memes somehow factor in for every candidate you mention.) Exactly what is the point of this, and what reaction where you expecting out of your audience?
Maybe it was meant for fun.
I say, this is a rationalist space, boy!
I call dibs on Rationalist Space Boy for a sci-fi short story title.
would be a waste. It’s a great name for a rock band.
Fortunately, that would be non-competing.
Though, of course, you can repeat story titles.
It definitely does for us non-americans. If you, like me, believe that a hypothetical Trump presidency wouldn’t have a lot of impact (and a negilgible impact on my country in particular), then memes are definitely a part of the equation, what’s the point of living a joyless life?
I definitely do have a horse in this race, I’m afraid. At some point Putin has threatened sending Russian tanks on the streets of my city. (Now, there’s a good chance he was just talking shit and being his usual threatening strongman self, as evidenced by the lack of sightings of Russian tanks around, but still.) My personal well-being depends on the continued US involvement in NATO, which Trump apparently wants to discontinue. (It’s debatable whether he’ll have the power to do so single-handedly, though, but it does increase the chance of it happening.) So yeah, for some people US elections are more than an occasion to fetch your popcorn.
I don’t care much for Trump in particular and don’t regard him as a fascist as others do, as far as I’m concerned he’s just a clown who got luckier than he should have, but that particular policy is worrisome.
It strikes me that if you are going to compare Trump to a European politician, Berlusconi makes a better fit than Hitler.
Come to think of it, indeed.
@TD
I agree with you on the broad strokes but the Clintons have always been somewhat shady and I am pretty confident that Hillary just plain corrupt as all hell.
I will concede that I am likely too close to the Bengahzi case render an impartial view. But in regards to the emails I am convinced that the only reason she hasn’t been exiled from public life (a la Patreus) or doing 20 years in Ft Leavenworth (a la Manning) is that she’s cut some sort of deal with the President and/or AG who haven’t exactly been pillars of honesty or transparency themselves.
The requirements for criminal charges in this case are either criminal intent (i.e., Clinton was literally handing secrets to Russia) or gross negligence (I’m not a lawyer, but from what I’ve gathered it has to be a lot larger than “told an underling to get email on her phone”). The first one definitely didn’t happen, the second one is almost impossible to prove.
Now, the State Department has said that the email server violated their policy, but policy isn’t law. It could get her fired, but seeing as she’s already left, that ship has sailed.
A lot of people think she should be in jail for what she did, but legally, she’s almost certainly in the clear. No secret deals necessary.
Manning, by contrast, intentionally leaked secrets. And was in the military, which has much tighter rules about that sort of thing. That case was a slam-dunk.
I thought the “smoking gun” bit was Hillary basically instructing someone to destroy the markings so that a classified document would look unclassified? That’s pretty gross misbehavior. Also at some point the sheer volume has to mean something. Maybe not quite “throw you in jail” level, but at least as bad as what got Petraeus unpersoned.
Link? My prior is that there is no evidence of this. (My prior is also that it’s not true, but that would be a stronger claim.)
I vaguely recall that this accusation was based on a misunderstanding of some state department jargon (something about a clean copy).
Interesting discussion about the charges against Hillary here. I am for Bernie, not Hillary. But I have observed that Hillary has been bashed constantly for decades now. And many of those bashing her don’t need any evidence. Bashing her seems to be their job, defined as:
–Hillary did or said something today
–How was that thing she said today proof of her incompetence/untustworthiness/desire to destroy America?
The only thing that I see really wrong with Hillary is that she’s bought and paid for by a number of Special Interest Groups. Just like every president we have ever had.
And I see no reason why she would make a worse president than Trump. According to politifact.com fact checker site, she’s a whole lot more honest, despite Trump calling her Crooked Hillary.
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/01/10/hillary-clinton-says-nonpaper-email-a-nonissue/
Has a pdf of the email in question attached.
A charitable and plausible interpretation would be that Clinton wanted Sullivan to remove the classified information from the document and send just that over an unsecure email. But… that’s a weird way to say “Just send me the unclassified portions for now”.
“w no identifying heading” sounds particularly bad, since on most documents the identifying heading is there to explain what’s in the contents and why it is classified. Also, “turn into nonpaper” is basically saying “make it unattributable as a gov’t document”, which, if it IS an attributable gov’t document, is a bit shady.
Anyway that plausible part is why I put “smoking gun” in scare quotes. Still, we know there was a high volume of unmarked classified on Hillary’s server, so I think at best we’re arguing over when “negligence” turns into “gross negligence” and then into “deliberate law breaking”. I’m not particularly comfortable with any of those three in my SecState.
The way I see it there are two possible scenarios that explain the facts currently at hand. Option A) Clinton was selling favors / access through the Clinton Foundation and wanted to keep any evidence of such exchanges on a private server where it would be less vulnerable to FOIA requests and/or congressional scrutiny. Option B) Clinton genuinely believed that the server in her basement was secure (afterall, how are the Chinese/Russians/whomever going to get a Spy into Clinton’s basement), in which case we must assume that neither Clinton nor anyone on her staff have even a 101 level understanding of how the internet works.
I’m not sure if option B rises to the level of “gross negligence” but it’s got to be getting pretty damn close seeing as how all DoS and DoD personnel are required to take a annual Information Security training, and SOMEONE on her staff ought to have realized that transmitting TSC information “in the clear” over a public ISP represented a serious breach of protocol.
Likewise, If one of her aides did indeed remove the classification tags from secret documents to avoid having to go through the “official” state department channels (unconfirmed at this point) the only question is whether the Aide did it on their own initiative or because Secretary Clinton asked them to. In either case, someone is guilty of a felony and ought to be doing 10 – 20′ in Ft. Leavenworth.
This was not a server that was designed to handle information that was classified. Even if she used servers at state for these emails, they still would be not have been designed to handle classified info, and it still would not have been policy to send classified info on those servers.
The secure servers for sending classified info are a separate system.
Edit:
And remember, everything that is going through the non-classified system is public record, so saying those systems need to be secure is roughly an oxymoron. Not to mention there is nothing wrong with communicating, using those emails addresses, with people have email addresses anywhere else, which means you will be transmitting in the clear.
Well yes, that’s the whole point, the classified system is kept separate for a reason and intentionally circumventing that separation is a serious charge, which is what the FBI is investigating. Likewise, we want our official’s communications to be public record for a reason and intentionally subverting those requirements ought to make you suspicious at the very least. See the Post article I linked above.
The way I see it, the charitable explanation is that Clinton and her staff were all playing fast an loose with the rules, and in doing so displayed a level of negligence and/or incompetence that would have gotten anyone else fired and barred from ever holding a government job again (See Patreus). The less charitable explanation is that Clinton and her staff knew that they were breaking the law and went ahead anyway, in which case someone really ought to be in jail.
@hlynkcg:
I think the most charitable interpretation is that Clinton wanted to keep using a mobile communication device, and that State and the NSA weren’t ready to handle that, and that Clinton had no intent to send classified information on that device, which means its all subject to FOIA.
That’s basically the kick off to the whole thing, State gets told by the NSA to “shut up and color” (i.e. go back to the kiddie room) when asking about a secure Blackberry and what the solution for the POTUS was.
The idea that mobile communication needs would be in flux around that time is not surprising given how new that tech is, relatively speaking. Blackberries are roughly 2000. The firs iPhone is 2007.
@HBC
But, that just leads us back to the conclusion that Clinton and her staff are incompetent. Even in the dark ages of 2004 (when I was still handling classified material on a semi-regular basis) arranging to have your unclassified work emails automatically forwarded to a private account was a pretty straight forward procedure. Certainly much easier than setting up your own parallel server.
If she already had the option to have unclassified material forwarded to her blackberry why did she need to set up a independent server? Especially if she had no intent to send classified information on that device?
The fact that this server was also conveniently inaccessible to oversight and FOIA requests is just icing on the cake.
Well, if that’s the case, why are we concerned about the security of the Clinton’s server? You think it’s better to have her stuff forwarded to a Yahoo account? If I can just forward all non-classified stuff by default to some online ESP, security concerns are pretty much out of the window.
Also, are you sure this was the case at State?
Look, no SoS before Clinton officially made very much use of email at all. Powell sent some unknown amount of emails from and to his AOL account, including receiving at least some classified material. We don’t know how much because he never turned any of it over and claims it is gone. (Which very well may be true!)
Rice claims to have never used email at all. (Never? Really?)
What I see is a turf fight over whether and how people at State use email. I don’t think State was willing to have Clinton’s Blackberry connecting to their servers at all. At least that is the way I read it.
Less charitably, Clinton started out using a very standard “I don’t have a government email account. All of the emails I send are only personal” tactic. That doesn’t require believing Clinton wanted to hide criminal activities though, merely that she was paranoid about witch-hunts (which she demonstrably is, whether or not she is a witch.)
A hugely contentious public controversy boils down to a turf war between a liberal state department and conservative members of Congress over acceptable security practices with hints of a possible cover-up?
I guess there really is nothing new under the sun.
Because I don’t actually believe that “she had no intent to send classified information on that device”. and what little we have seen seems to indicate that information and security discipline amongst her staff was disturbingly lax.
Absolutely. Officially forwarded messages leave a paper trail. We, or rather someone from the NSA or Inspector General’s office, would be able to look at what was forwarded and when. Instead we are stuck having to take Clinton at her word that there’s nothing to be seen.
I find it hard to believe that the SecState (and her staff) would be denied an option available to overseas military personnel and embassy staff for years.
…and I see it as a turf fight over who gets to oversee cabinet members. Congress or the President.
Edit: @Matt
I chuckled at that.
There’s definitely an underlying element of all this that DNI and CIA and the like think they should “own” everything to do with classification even though the legal structure in place has authority flow from the President to the cabinet secretaries.
It’s not the main issue but it’s there lurking underneath.
@Hlynkacg:
That is certainly a fair point, but it has nothing to do with whether Clinton’s email server needed to be secure. Which was the entirety of your second point.
Whatever email was being sent to Clinton on her private server came off of non-classified servers, wherever they were. Therefore, the issue isn’t that they went to Clinton’s private server. The issue is only whether that material should have been sent from a non-classified server at all.
Even if she had used only State email servers, any classified material that came or went to those servers would be the same level of bad, from a legal perspective. Concentrating on the private email server is a red-herring. You’ve already said it would have been completely OK for her to have set up an automatic forward from a State server to Yahoo. By implication, that means it was also perfectly fine for her to forward it to any private server. And perfectly fine for anyone to have emailed that server directly. There is nothing special about a third party ESP here. Non Classified serves talk to non government servers all the time.
You can make an argument that the security violations are bad. But you can’t bring her private server into a security argument. Any violation occurred before then.
think the most charitable interpretation is that Clinton wanted to keep using a mobile communication device
Using a “mobile communication device” doesn’t require a private email server, just a Blackberry and a commercial email account. Not in this century has setting up a private email server been anything but needlessly complicated and expensive if your actual goal is to have a working Blackberry.
The advantages of a commercial email account are that it is easier, cheaper, and probably more secure. The disadvantage of a commercial email account is that if the FBI subpoenas Yahoo or whatever, they’ll turn over everything without letting you delete the “private” stuff first. And if Hillary somehow didn’t know all of this, and know how sketchy and illicit a private server would be in that context, whoever set up the server for her certainly did.
Also, so what? The information I work with isn’t nearly as sensitive as what Hillary dealt with on a daily basis, not nearly so damaging to national security if it falls into the wrong hands. But my smartphone spends a good chunk of its time powered down and locked in my desk because it’s not allowed in the SCIF, the ops room, or whatnot. It’s part of the job, so shut up and do the job.
That doesn’t require believing Clinton wanted to hide criminal activities though, merely that she was paranoid about witch-hunts (which she demonstrably is, whether or not she is a witch.)
Sure, people are out to get Clinton. Absolutely.
This really is the simplest explanation. When someone comes around with an FOIA request, she doesn’t want some peon State Department lifer deciding what’s private and what’s not. She wants her own spokesperson. So she can control the message.
Unfortunately, there is no exception that says “you are exempt from public accountability laws if some of people trying to hold you accountable are dumb poopyheads.”
@John Schilling:
Her Blackberry didn’t come onto Mahogany row, as near as I can tell, and that isn’t the issue being debated. She wanted some Blackberry there, but someone was rebuffed very early on in a request for a secure device. So she kept her device locked away as well. Are you claiming different?
The “wants to hide from FOIA” holds far more water than the other accusations. The fact that this is not the main thing people are accusing her of is one of the reasons why it seems like motivated reasoning.
Do you dispute that her email server being private has no bearing on how bad sending classified info to/through a non-classified server is?
I don’t feel like taking a side here, but: anytime you get into politics, there’s going to be a lot of motivated reasoning floating around. Reliably enough that you can pretty much treat it as a fact of nature.
But when a process is that reliable, knowing about it doesn’t give you much information on anything else about the issue. Like, for example, the actual substance of the accusations here.
So she kept her device locked away as well. Are you claiming different?
Not at all, and her keeping it locked away strengthens the claim I am making – which is that her desire for or use of a Blackberry is a total red herring when it comes to her private email server. The only connection between the two is that if you happen to have both of those for their own reasons, you’ll probably route the one through the other for convenience.
Do you dispute that her email server being private has no bearing on how bad sending classified info to/through a non-classified server is?
I do indeed. The damage to national security is likely the same in either case, but the extra deliberate effort involved in routing everything through a private server shifts the moral culpability from negligence at least as far as recklessness and arguably some way into malice.
Hillary Clinton probably committed two offenses here. First, maliciously routing her work email through a private email for the purpose of evading FOIA requests and other legal accountability requirements in her job as SecState. Second, in carrying out the former, recklessly passing classified information through an unclassified network. These crimes are not unrelated, insofar as the former was almost certainly the motive for the latter. And either should at minimum disqualify her from government employment, as they have so many others.
She is properly attacked on both of those grounds. Depending on what sort of defense she offers, or is offered on her behalf, the focus of the attack may be on one or the other, or may shift between the two as different defenses are offered. There is no requirement that anyone limit themselves to pointing out one of her offenses, or even prefer one to the other.
How did the classified information end up in Hillary Clinton’s email? Aren’t the classified systems a-irgapped?
Did she hear / read classified things and then type out emails that referenced them? Did other people send her emails that included classified information they had typed in? Did Hillary or someone that emailed her put a flash drive into a secure network, copy documents, put them on the insecure network and then attach them to emails?
They’re supposed to be, and how exactly that separation ended up being broken is what the FBI is obstensibly investigating. See my comment and the linked Washington Post article at the top of this thread.
Edit:
As for the rest, it seems that John Schilling and I are pretty much of the same mind on this topic.
How did the classified information end up in Hillary Clinton’s email? Aren’t the classified systems a-irgapped
Aide: “…they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it”
Clinton: “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure”
That implies classified hardcopy (the secure systems I’ve worked with still aren’t up to soft-faxing), but it isn’t clear whether the hardcopy was emailed as an image, OCRed and emailed, or retyped and emailed. “No identifying heading” implies some degree of editing, so probably more than just emailed as an image.
@John Schilling:
Two thoughts –
1) If there is something prosecutable vis-a-vis FOIA, it should be pretty plain. There isn’t really any disagreement that Clinton set up and used a private server in lieu of using an official State email address. Clinton isn’t denying it. Since I’m not seeing anyone even making this case, Occam says that (legally) there is no “there” there, despite what might look like it on the surface.
Frankly, I’m not sure exactly sure we want email subject to FOIA, as email is replacing phone conversations that weren’t subject to it. But that is a whole different conversation.
2) I’m aware of two examples that look like Clinton asking for nomatively classified information on the separate system sent via email. In neither of those case was she sent that classified info via email, correct? In other words, that isn’t a good explanation for the things in her email which are being referred to as classified.
Living outside Washington, I know a lot of people with security clearances, and just about every one has a second or third hand story of someone hit with felony charges for something a lot less than what’s been proven about Clinton (willingly taking TS level information outside a SCIF). In most cases it’s plea bargained down to ‘suspended punishment + never work for the government again’, true, but there’s always some prosecution. Also, the military rules are the same as the rules for the rest of the government regarding this stuff.
For me, though, the willful avoidance of federal records retention laws and just plain non-compliance with FOIA laws is worse than the security classification violations. It’s as if a criminal suspect, when presented with a search warrant for cocaine, proceeded to dump a bag of white powder down the toilet right in view of the cop, and then claimed she was just disposing of some expired sugar, and of course there are no drugs in the apartment. Yes, of course we’re having difficulty getting proof, she’s admitted disposing of stuff that rightly belonged to the government, but we’re supposed to just take her word it was all innocent.
And that’s before you get into the previous cases (yes, multiple) where records of hers that were legally supposed to be kept that would serve as evidence one way or the other regarding criminal allegations against her managed to disappear. This isn’t a one-time occurrence, it’s a consistent pattern.
9 years Navy enlisted, part of which was spent as a personnel security specialist.
Can vouch for this. Even the most minor and benign incidents of mishandling classified information was always vigorously prosecuted. Even when there is absolutely no question that no actual harm was done.
Where at? (if you don’t mind my asking) I was Navy for 8 years myself, plus a couple more years as a reservist and doing contract work.
I was an FTS so I am well familiar with the reserves. Spent a couple years in Dahlgren, VA, a few in Point Mugua, CA, and finished up at a reserve center in Oregon.
I was enlisted aircrew, spent most of my active duty time rotating between through North Island and various SAR/MEDEVAC detachments in the far east. (Singapore, Bahrain, Aum Qasr, etc…)
Except in this case, the policy was designed to ensure compliance with the FOIA law. It’s a difference without a distinction. Not complying with State Department policy means the server runs afoul of the law.
She mishandled classified information.
Military personnel and former military personnel have told me that people are in jail for less egregious mishandling.
In my opinion a somewhat corrupt person with a cool temperament is preferable to a somewhat corrupt person with a volatile temperament.
Though I think Clinton’s corruption has been exaggerated by her political opponents, but there’s no point in arguing about that because it’s an article of faith for too many people.
I concluded that the Clintons were corrupt a very long time ago, after reading a detailed analysis of the cattle futures case written by a libertarian speculator who was a Soros protogé. I don’t remember being terribly upset about it. Given all the legal ways of bribing a politician, the fact that they were being bribed in an illegal way was more interesting than disturbing.
I think Sanders has a few more cons.
Education:
His push for free colleges and universities across the country is not possible. The main country I know of that does something similar is Germany…which only does so for say, the top 15% of HS students. And from the reports I hear from some friends there the campuses fund less on-campus activities and goodies like well-stocked gyms and concerts.
“Reduce the amount of Americans who go to a 4-year by 60% and make college boring to make it affordable!”. Try saying that as a populist.
And anyways, there already *is* a good cap. No more then 10% of ones total income(regardless of what it is) for at most 20 years. If the nation wants to ability for every citizen to make a name for themselves regardless of High School performance, theres a cost to it.
His specific rebuttal to No Child Left Behind.
“By placing so much emphasis on standardized testing”
There’s no other way not full of bull to measure how much someone learned besides standardized tests. Sure, some of the tests suck, but that dosen’t mean standardizes tests are not very useful when done well.
Free Trade:
The best way to start funding some of his proposals is for the nation to benefit from all the economic benefits of what goes along with free trade. I’m a good deal more sympathetic to the green party critiques of some trade deals, where companies mostly go to avoid regulations. But I have not yet found notable quotes where he dosen’t take the fake trade deficit issue seriously. That was debunked over 200 years ago. It also screws over developing nations who really benefit from the wages.
My major pro for him is basic healthcare. This is something that’s clearly used the totally inelastic demand of not dying of a broken arm or an infection or living in misery to make everyone who works in it filthy rich, with a bunch of bunk being sold by the pharm companies to the desperate(Some pills offered for sleep/depression/PTSD are barely away from placebo, with good evidence its mostly a statistical trick)
Nuclear Power is another con, from my limited knowledge. NASA seems to be a trustworthy enough source on the dangers of various types of energy, and nuclear is another way for energy independence.
I suppose another pro is greater income inequality in the age of robotics. Sanders platforms are good prep for when theres no more jobs.
And from the reports I hear from some friends there the campuses fund less on-campus activities and goodies like well-stocked gyms and concerts.
*Gasps* The horror.
More seriously, though:
“Reduce the amount of Americans who go to a 4-year by 60% and make college boring to make it affordable!”
As someone who never used the rock-climbing wall, etc., of my university, I fail to see why this is a bad idea. Presumably, having free tuition but having to pay for extras like gyms and concerts is still much more affordable than what we have now.
As for reducing the number whose tuition is fully funded at 4-year colleges, there remain other options: two-year colleges (and an end to degree inflation!), trade schools, private colleges that charge full tuition.
I would be astonished if climbing walls and concerts were more than a rounding error in your average college’s budget. Extracurriculars generally, not a rounding error, but they’d never get you into affordable territory, and killing college sports will be a very hard sell.
Ending degree inflation is exactly what we need — if we significantly reduced the demand for four-year degrees, tuition would be almost an afterthought — but you’re not going to do that by making tuition free, unless you do a whole lot of politically difficult other stuff at the same time.
Climbing walls are not a rounding error if used as a synecdoche for all the myriad ways colleges improve the dorms and facilities largely for the purpose of making the campus look more attractive, comfortable, and impressive to prospective students and donors.
Well yes, but the free tuition would make the politically difficult other stuff more likely.
@onyomi — When I was in college, the dorm facilities were like what you’d see in a moderately well-appointed apartment complex, except a bit less well-maintained and with four to six times the population per square foot. Given that I was paying three hundred dollars a month more for that than I would a year later for my own room off campus, I have a hard time believing that this has much to do with tuition inflation.
(I suppose the gym was better, but suburban YMCAs have similar facilities and they manage to stay afloat on thirty bucks a month from their members.)
@Anon — Show me.
@Nornagest Show you?
Honest question: Is the notion that pairing a politically unpopular idea with a popular one makes the former more palatable, really something that warrants a request for supporting evidence?
Sure, that’s plausible. What I haven’t seen, and what I was asking for, is any indication that Bernie Sanders et al. have a workable plan to implement any of the hard stuff, or even a workable idea of what would be required.
Could probably have been less vague.
@Nornagest,
Don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve been in college, but things have changed a lot pretty rapidly. That said, the nice facilities aren’t the proximal cause of the tuition inflation. The cause of the tuition inflation is subsidized student loans, which act to eliminate ability to pay as a limiting factor. The facilities, along with administrative salaries and sports, are just one area where a lot of the money flows.
Also, keep in mind that it’s very much analogous to medical care in that you can’t always see or fathom where all the money is going. $300 hammer and all that. I recall, for example, that my school bought $500 computer chairs for all the computers in one of our labs.
I still want to know why people think free college tuition is even something worth doing. State universities are already extremely affordable (the most expensive, Penn State, is ~$16K per year), and I see little reason to think getting the marginal student into college adds anything of value.
@JayT, more like $14,000. That’s $56,000 over four years and does not include boarding or meals (which are an additional $12k-$15k). Are you assuming that the students’ family pays the $104,000+ or that the student takes out this amount in loans?
One of the reasons *I* support free tuition is that it would allow newly-adult students to attend college with or without the blessing/support of their parents.
For starters, you have to pay for food and housing no matter what you are doing, so I don’t see why that should be included. Also, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to earn enough to pay for food and rent with a part time job and full time work in the summer.
So you are looking at $56K for the most expensive possible college degree from a state university. If the degree isn’t worth that amount plus the interest on the student loan, why exactly are you getting that degree? If it’s purely because it is a subject that interests you, why should that be subsidized?
@JayT, You seem to not consider student debt something to be avoided. I do. Your comment has also gone off in a whole other direction.
This brings me to a good question.
Is there a well organized online budget of various american universities, vs total tuition?
I really, really want to see where that money is going.
Everything other than salaries is minor. And the fastest growing category of salaries by far are non-faculty professional staff, especially deanlets and deanlings.
It’s a little astonishing to me that anyone thinks it is a good idea for the government to pay four years worth of living expenses of people that will soon be members of at least the middle class. Tuition is one thing, but room and board is crazy.
Conservatives shouldn’t like it because they don’t like any taxes and liberals shouldn’t like it because it is regressive, at least from a post hoc view rather than the usual pre hoc one.
The fact that someone is willing to loan you four years worth of living expenses at age 18 is itself astonishing and something you should be grateful for. If you have some sort of phobia about debt, I don’t see how that is or ought to be anyone else’s problem.
The free college tuition thing would not happen, even if Bernie did win the election. Congress would never make that into law. The only effect of Bernie’s winning would be to push the nation very very slightly to the Left, which I think would be good, which is why I am for him. The nation is so Right Wing that such a slight nudge would still not bring it to the Center.
Jill, the nation is by definition in the Center. I understand what you mean, but calling yourself the ideal default and observing that the nation is to the right of you and therefore should move towards you does not mean that you actually are “the Center”.
Anonymous, that’s a strange idea to me. Clinton is where Nixon was years ago, on policy. So the Dem nominee is Right Wing.
The nation is by definition in the Center? Was Nazii Germany by defininition in the Center? What about the former Soviet Union? Policies matter. Where the typical person is in a nation, is not necessarily even close to the Center politically.
The Center is what centrist voters prefer, correct? The Soviet Union didn’t have voters, and the government of Nazi Germany couldn’t have been elected democratically by a 1% extremist group, could it? It may have then behaved against the preferences of those centrist voters but those things are very quickly fixed when the next election comes around.
The Center isn’t some cosmically chosen position of perfect balance that is independent of time or space. What’s in the center is defined by the voters in the specific country and era. Which is why I pointed out that your appeal to the center as something to strive for because it’s the center is wrong; the center doesn’t necessarily contain all the good policies, and we already are there unless all the lefties are forbidden from voting or something.
You’d be correct to say that Nazi Germany was extreme rightist compared to the center of now, but a nazi scholar writing in 1940 that the centrist view demands universal income or [some other 21st century idea] would be objectively wrong.
This is the standard “the country is so full of extremists of the other party” that we all know and love.
If you only look at one little issue, you can always tell this story, but each party has consolidated several wins on their win, such that the other party doesn’t even bother trying to fight them.
You won’t notice this if you read the excitable media trying to get you to panic that is prevalent in your bubble.
@Jill, Anon
I suspect the two of you are operating on different meanings of the word center.
From the outside perspective, when most other countries in the OECD think of the Democratic party as being to the right of the Overton window, a change to the left will still not put the nation in the center.
From the inside perspective, the center is obviously in the center, duh.
Right, my objections to Jill are that her definition of Center seems to be chosen as “Jill’s policy preferences define what the Center is”, and that there’s no reason to assume moving toward the center is desirable. If the center is defined by the preferences of the electorate majority then at least we want to be there for the love of democracy, otherwise what do we care about it?
@anon
One reason to care about it is that the outside view provides a sanity check for your stance:
If your left wing extremist is to the right of the rest of the world and the rest of the world is doing OK then:
a) you might actually be nazi Germany and/or
b) moving slightly to the left may not be an undiluted disaster.
which is always worth a second or two of thought.
Good point.
Whether we should locate the political “center” according to national or world standards is itself a politically charged question.
The US is somewhat right-wing by current world standards and somewhat left-wing by US historical standards. You can guess which side prefers to use which standard.
“The US is somewhat right-wing by current world standards”
Without pulling the “lol citation needed” card, I’m curious as to your justification for this statement. The more I actually look into various policies that are in place in various countries around the world (including northern europe), the less convinced I am that this is actually true.
It seems like something we were all told in grade school and just accepted as self-evident. I feel like it’s rarely challenged because both sides like to believe it’s true.
I’m not challenging you to deliver all of your evidence right now, just curious as to whether you’ve researched it or not. Not trying to be combative or accusatory or single you our or anything like that – just making a general point.
“It’s a little astonishing to me that anyone thinks it is a good idea for the government to pay four years worth of living expenses of people that will soon be members of at least the middle class.”
The point is that if you don’t do that, only people who are already middle class will study.
Re centrism
If you define the center by long term trends, it is perfectly coherent to say that a given country has gone off centre.
That’s not true. Many don’t have a phobia about debt.
Oh I don’t believe its a bad thing at all, and I would very much prefer the atmosphere of european universitites where there are professional and local intramural and regional sports events rather then “Football colleges” too. I can’t believe I read nonsense of colleges paying for the best student athletes like I read in some papers, as if cheap tuition and social status benefits was not enough.
My *main* point was that no populist politician in America is going to run on the platform “Free College…..for 10 percent of America!” and/Or, “Take away the aspects of college life that greatly differ from europe which has become an american distinction to make it cheaper!”
You are not correct on Germany’s education system. It’s actually 49%(as of 2010), the number not being vey high because the German apprenticeship system encompases many professions which other developed countries teach in colleges (like nursing).
One third of those students (which actually works out to around 15%, so maybe that’s where you got the number from) receive a small stipend from the government based on financial need. I understand that housing is included in American tuition, but obviously still needs to be somehow paid for by the student in Germany, so the usual juxtaposition of costs in Germany vs. the US fails to show that.
You are right about the goodies provided not matching US level, though. Still, there are enough sports activities (usually offered at a small fee like 10 bucks per semester) to make it slightly less boring than what internet stereotype suggests German life to be.
Source:https://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf (page 332, the chart is not really detailed, it was the best English language source I found.
This is a little complicated. Housing is not part of tuition in the States; even if you’re living on campus (common for first- and often second-year students, increasingly uncommon thereafter, though it varies by school), it’s usually accounted as a separate expense. On the other hand, a housing allowance is included in some higher-end scholarships, and it’s often one of the things that student loans are designed to cover.
Depending on the numbers you’re looking at, it may or may not be rolled into the comparison. Most estimates of the cost of college in the States will include it, because it makes the numbers go up and that’s what sells papers.
Trump claims to have been against the Iraq War, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe him.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/no-donald-trump-didnt-oppose-iraq-war
(Absence of evidence is evidence of absence)
(If you’re reluctant to believe evidence from the hard left partisan site Mother Jones, that’s ok but Kevin Drum is definitely one of the more clear headed mainstream political pundits out there. )
Regardless of the extent to which his opposition was a matter of public record at the time (and let’s remember that businesspeople are a little less likely than politicians to make their political positions a matter of public record, and let’s remember that on the other side presence of evidence is evidence of presence), he took a strong position on it in the Republican primary when the standard Republican position on the war was much more apologist. (e.g. Bush’s “he kept us safe”) Trump deserves credit for being against the Iraq war.
Huh?
Trump managed to read the tea leaves on the electorate and wasn’t hamstrung about being consistent with prior positions.
Plus, his whole pitch is that “all these other guys are idiots”. Taking the position that Iraq was a success doesn’t help him there. Whatever his actual position at the time, taking the “Iraq was a fucking disaster” position doesn’t hurt his positioning.
I mean look at his statements about McCain. “I like heroes who don’t get captured.” You think that was a statement of principle? No, he just aims for whatever feels like a chink in the armor.
All those other guys are idiots. He gets credit for saying so. Yes, you can say that every position a politician takes is actually cynically crafted to earn them the most votes, and so we shouldn’t judge politicians on their positions but rather on their race and/or gender, and that’s not unreasonable. But to the extent that we are going to judge politicians on their positions, taking correct minority positions when the conventional wisdom is wrong has to be worth points if anything is.
Something towards a measure of “actually how well off/badly off are you,” considering recent discussions of how income numbers aren’t useful because of cost-of-living changes across locations, and which “keeping up with the Joneses” behaviors is contributing to well-off people being one paycheck away from broke:
Housing square footage * percent of income that goes to housing
Variations might include some form of unavoidable regular costs, as well, such as healthcare?
Education costs:
Calculate some form of ground floor income for the area: the minimum housing square footage in the area / maximum acceptable percent of income that goes into housing. Then something something percentage of housing in area at that minimum level, multiply by inverse of percentage of jobs that offer that level of income or greater requiring X level of education, education cost divided by the result?
And a similar calculation for transportation costs.
The goal here is to figure out which consumptive patterns are actually survival-based, and which costs aren’t. Someone breaking the bank on housing for more space than they need to isn’t badly off, unless transportation costs for local job minimum income gets prohibitive. Someone with lower income, but gets greater housing space and lower monthly-costs due to location, is well off.
So the goal is to divide out actual income numbers, and try to parse out quality of life. (Of course, there will be some factors hard to account for, like location quality via quality of restaurants, noise/light pollution levels, availability/quality of the arts, or availability of nature.)
Check this out: http://www.fixr.com/tx/
Only available for Texas right now, but it doesn’t seem like a terribly complex piece of work.
Reposting since it was too late in the last open thread:
Here’s a question that pits a average justice metric against an equality metric. Is it it better to have one uniformly terrible (overly harsh, capricious) justice system or one system for most people, that is as terrible as the first option, and a second justice system that is exquisitely fair and humane but only open to a privileged few — mostly the wealthy, but also the famous, members of certain professions, and the odd lucky random cause célèbre defendant?
Utility-wise you want the latter for obvious reasons. Incentives-wise you want the former because then people with power are motivated to change it. But my honest first impression is “where are you going with this?” — it looks more like an intuition pump for something than a practical dilemma.
I saw an article which described a young woman who was unjustly kicked out of college on account of an overbroad sexual assault policy with too low a standard of evidence, which is usually only used to boot male students. In the simplified version, this is good for equality and bad for utility. IRL, it might be a good thing if, depending on to what degree it catalyzes reforming overbroad policies and due process.
Near as I can tell, OP was talking about a general case of this. Maybe they saw the same article (Julia Galef posted it on her Facebook, so it’s somewhere vaguely in the rationalsphere) and that’s where they were going with it?
The immediate inspiration was Brock the swimming rapist, but this kind of thing comes up all the time. They’ll be someone rich or famous or a cop that is accused of a crime and they’ll get treated very differently by the justice system from how my clients were when I worked at legal aid. If there’s some outrage over the disparate treatment, other people will appeal to justice norms, e.g.
“Shouldn’t it be proof beyond a reasonable doubt?”
“Isn’t the prosecutor supposed to above all seek justice, not convict?”
“Why do we need these terribly long sentences? A few years in prison isn’t trivial.”
Those are all good points, but they are bitter pills to swallow when they are only brought out for the privileged few.
I think in the swimming rapist’s case, justice was not served by his sentence. Seriously, penetrating an unconscious person with a bottle? Same goes for Officer finger-on-the-trigger Liang in New York, who got justice from a jury, but the judge knocked down his conviction and gave him no jail time because cop.
I think that if the system gives justice to some (not uncalled-for leniency, but justice) and injustice to most, it’s probably better than giving injustice to all. Just because the incentive argument seems purely theoretical for one thing (even most people able to afford a private lawyer to get some modicum of justice aren’t in a position to do anything about the system as a whole), and smacks of hostage-taking for another.
What amazes me here is that Teal thinks this is an example of an “exquisitely fair and humane [justice system] … only open to a privileged few”.
I think maybe you are reading “fair” differently than I intended. What I meant was looking at a case in complete isolation are the procedures and outcome closer or further away from the Platonic ideal justice system.
I wouldn’t say that six months, which is actually three months with good behavior, is the platonic ideal sentence for Brock the Rapist’s actions. But I think it is closer than the absurdly long sentences we have authorized in this country after 30 years of tough on crime posturing.
@Teal:
I think we must have different takes on the facts in the case.
The number one fact being that he clearly knew that what he was doing wrong, which dispense with most of the “well they were just both drunk” argumentation.
Do you disagree with the following summary?
Students come upon what the believe is a male assaulting an unconscious female behind a dumpster. Students yell, male flees and has to be tackled in order to be stopped.
I don’t think we have different takes on the facts. I agree it was a rape in the full, undiluted sense of the word.
Do you think he should have gotten 14 years in priso.n? And if so, what do you think the sentence should be for full, undiluted voluntary manslaughter? Murder?
I’ve been curious about this. What is the most common sentence for this type of crime? Was the rapist let off with a slap on the wrist, or was this a fairly normal outcome for a first-time offender? I haven’t had much luck finding decent stats.
This article https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/06/07/what-sentence-should-the-stanford-swimmer-have-gotten/
suggests that the federal guidelines in a similar case that took place in a federal jurisdiction would have been 97-121 months. It also links to this article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/06/what-makes-the-stanford-sex-offenders-six-month-jail-sentence-so-unusual/
which among other things says that the average person convicted in state court of rape is sentenced to 11 years in prison, and that 84% were sentenced to prison (which implies a sentence of at least a year), 5% were sentenced to jail (< 1 year) and 11% received probation or other.
Those are all good points, but they are bitter pills to swallow when they are only brought out for the privileged few.
Yes, that’s the worst of it: when you get the pleas in court about how A is from a respectable family, is going to college, has his (it generally is “his” for some reason) life all ahead of them, should a temporary moment of madness ruin their future, prison is so harsh, etc.
When it’s Joe from the inner city, there’s nothing about prison is so harsh or it will ruin his future. The attitude there is that he has no future to ruin and besides, the lower classes are more used to hardship, prison won’t be that big a deal.
What if those privileged were actually less likely to be repeat offenders? Couldn’t there be a case made that it would make more sense to treat them less harshly, if that were the case?
(it generally is “his” for some reason)
I think if you take a look at investigation, prosecution, and conviction rates for violent offenders broken down by sex, you will find your generalization contradicted.
I’m tempted to say we already have the second version: rich enough or influential enough, it’s very unlikely you’ll do jail time (unless public outrage is such it’s considered a good thing to give the rabble a scapegoat).
But a two-tier system will eventually cause enough resentment and outrage that the rabble will rise up and drag it all down in fire and revolution.
Of course, post-revolution it all builds up the same again (“one law for the rich and another for the poor”) but most people would prefer a “harsh and unjust but everyone gets treated the same” to “harsh for you, fair for me” system (unless they can be sure of being one of the small group who gets fair treatment).
The system we have now is biased in favor of those who have resources and against those who do not have resources. Said bias being an “on average” measure and not necessarily dispositive in any particular case. I’m don’t think it makes sense to call the bias in favor of those who have resources as making the system “fair”.
Isn’t this perfectly applicable to the Clinton email scandal? Every time it gets brought up you have people saying what she did wasn’t that bad, she doesn’t truly deserve to have her career ruined over it, and people who keep harping on it are being way too harsh. Then you have people saying “well I worked for the DoD and I’ve seen clearances revoked and careers ruined for much less.” These two positions are not entirely contradictory.
As one of those “I worked for the DoD and…” people, I’d just like to clarify that in this case, my own position is NOT that the system is generally unfair to the common folks. Procedures about handling classified material are made VERY clear. Training (required, not just available) is abundant. And while the “maximum” penalties are quite severe, it has been mentioned that they are very rarely enforced unless it’s obvious that harm was intended. Someone who merely puts secret documents in a briefcase and takes them home to work on them will probably lose their clearance and government employment, but is not likely to spend time in prison. I find this to be a fair punishment – therefore I would find it to be a reasonably fair punishment for Hillary as well (although I also think there is clear intent to evade the law and cover it up on her part, but let’s put that aside for the moment).
The “radar detector detector detector detector” might not exist but the ad blocker blocker blocker does. An ad blocker blocker doesn’t let you view a website unless you have disabled your ad blocker. An ad blocker blocker blocker prevents the ad blocker blocker from realizing that you are blocking the site’s ads. Since this ad blocker blocker blocker doesn’t seem to work anymore I suspect the existence of ad blocker blocker blocker blockers. Expect this recursion to continue!
Oh yeah, I totally need an adblocker blocker blocker blocker.
Are you sure you didn’t instead mean to say you need an adblocker blocker blocker blocker blocker?
Maybe he’s an online advertising tycoon.
Nah, there’s a hard limit where people realize that Forbes was terrible anyway, and give up trying to go there.
I remember Forbes as being relatively good, like a notch above Vox. Not good enough to get me to sell my soul to the demons, though.
So, vaguely related… I’m coming across more and more sites that, when viewed on an iPhone, auto-load an ad that either bounces you to the App Store, or has one of those irritating unkillable popups that take you to their website even if you hit the “close” button (and if you try to go back to the original website, reloads).
a) Why do websites put up with these sort of ads? It must kill their traffic, since I make a point of not going to those sites (and basically can’t event if I wanted to – the site is effectively unusable).
b) Any good way to kill these on iPhone?
Maybe the’re gaining more in bandwidth costs than they’re losing in traffic. Apps are cheaper server-side; you only have to push state data. Or maybe it’s not making them money and they just want an app because apps are cool. Not every corporate decision is a rational one.
Imgur’s the one that really confuses me; all the gingerbread’s gotta be cached for most users, so most of the bandwidth must be coming from content, and that’d be the same either way.
It’s probably keying off your browser’s user agent string. It might be possible to change that in some cases; I doubt Safari can do it, though.
I’m not talking about sites like e.g. Pinterest that try to force you to open their own app. I find that annoying but understandable.
I’m talking about the pop-up ads for Candy Crush knockoffs or whatever that bounce you to the app store. Like I try to go to .com and end up at the app store page for instead. would seem to be losing in that deal since I can’t view their actual content (or their traditional ads).
Ah. Dunno, then, I haven’t had that problem. It’s still very likely keying off the user-agent string, though; that’s the straightforward way to tell what system you’re talking to over HTTP.
After a little digging, it appears that the major browsers on iOS (Chrome, Safari) don’t allow you to set that string, but it’s possible to obtain third-party browsers that do. Give that a try, see if it works and isn’t too much of a handicap.
Disable Javascript.
If your iPhone is the 5S or newer, you could check out content blockers in the App Store. I use 1Blocker, which is free if you only want to block one kind of content (ads or tracking, for example). My brother swears by BlockBear, and there are certainly a number of other possible options out there.
Thanks, I will look into those.
In EA circles, people often talk about how voluntourism is awful, because it is much less effective than doing regular work and giving some of your earned money to good charities. However, I believe that in many cases, if the people weren’t doing voluntourism, they’d just be doing regular tourism instead. So what I’d like to know is, is voluntourism still bad in that case? Is it actually worse than nothing?
(this question originally asked, with different phrasing, on Thing of Things)
The last thing a third world country needs is manual labor from out of shape westerners. The only good you are doing is spending money locally. If you are spending less of it locally because you are paying some western voluntourism company for your trip than you are doing less good than if you had hired a local tour operator for a traditional vacation.
Realistically if all the church groups that spend money to go down and build schools (which don’t get used) instead went down to hire hooked and drink they’d be doing more for the country and it’s economy.
This is why I love EA and the rationalist movement!!! all the worst most cynical things I ever said growing up in a small town get proven here
I’m usually really cynical about the whole “raising awareness” thing – but I actually take a brighter view on this issue. I believe there’s something to be said for the idea that observing poverty first hand motivates you to become more charitable, or at least understanding, of the issues involved.
Even if the labor they perform on the trip is negligible, I think it’s possible that the experience will motivate them to become more charitable later in life (when they’re earning real money). Even barring that, if the experience moves them to learn more about the country and return and tell their friends about it – that might be a net plus in and of itself.
Yes these are long-shots with no guarantee – but certainly it’s more of a net positive than if they had just gone to Paris or whatever, right?
I’d agree that I have had personally mildly-life-altering reactions as a consequence of observing poverty first-hand in the third world. I’ve been there on organised trips, so the kind of thing where they won’t drop you in the middle of somewhere dangerous, but not up at the thousand-dollar-a-night level where there are gates and all the locals you see are either serving you directly or standing with a gun at the gate to ensure you never see a local.
That the level of inequality, down to a bottom which is well below anything you ever see at home, is completely ubiquitous *is* the big observation.
It’s not clear that voluntourism gets me anything more than tourism does; but I strongly don’t believe in the virtue of labour, so ineptly doing manual labour that I’m not used to isn’t going to uplift me.
I had a similar experience when I was 16 years old. I took a trip with a group of similarly-church-attending teens to an orphanage in Guatemala.
The group leaders educated us on a few basics–don’t drink the local water, watch out for pickpockets, and always be with another member of the group when traveling in public. They also told us about the orphanage for girls, and how we would have chances to play with the girls, practice Spanish with them, and help them improve the orphanage property.
About half of the teens on the trip had some experience with construction already.
The type of work on-site was mindlessly manual (helping dig out the location for some sort of water-tank…or septic-tank) or low-skill and doggedly manual (laying another couple courses of cinder-blocks on a wall).
A few team members got the chance to help finish the roof work on a building. Even this was barely a medium-skill task.
We didn’t get a first-hand view of the street people and the local poverty, but we learned a lot about poverty outside the U.S.
And we got a chance to spend a day in one of the tourist markets, where we were encouraged to haggle…which was also odd.
It was definitely educational.
I earned most of the money for my part of the trip myself…which was educational, in a different way. Though there was a large fund-raising push at the involved church.
Some parents could have paid outright for their teen children to go, but I gather that they didn’t. Those children fund-raised with the rest of us.
Tourist markets, particularly ones where the conceit that you are looking at products lovingly manufactured by locals has worn thin and you can see the ‘made in China’ at the bottom of the printed fabrics, are very peculiar things. I had a surreal afternoon spent showing half a dozen interested storekeepers the pictures of wildlife I’d taken two hundred miles away a few days earlier – more interesting to them than failing to sell wooden trinkets, but rather distressing to realise that I’d seen more of the Okavango Delta in two days than they had in thirty years while living next to it.
What’s everyone’s favorite candy? Don’t dodge this one, Scott.
I really enjoy the HFCS bolus of Mike and Ike’s (original–the berry blast and “Red” boxes aren’t diverse enough), spice drops (except wintergreen), Swedish Fish (multicolor), and jellybeans, particularly the Starburst variety. Boy, the Starburst jellybeans just have something in them which defy the realities of dental health, stomach capacity, and tastebud saturation. The best way to describe the flavors is “rush of fruitiness.” Skittles and Good and Plenty’s are really great too.
I have less of an interest in the chocolate (savory?) end, but there’s much to be explored. Goetze’s caramel creams are quite good, as are M&M’s and Junior Mints. Take 5 is a great example of modern American candy done well.
Things I dislike are Necco wafers, peach rings, and Haribo gummi bears.
My favorites are hard candies and gummies. With hard candies, flavor doesn’t really matter. I’m just as happy with menthol as I am with butterscotch. It’s more about the texture. For gummies cola flavored are my favorite.
I’m a big fan of Heath bars. Used to like jelly beans and gummi candies but after an infected tooth sent me to the hospital I’ve been leery of the negative dental effects of the sticky stuff.
Maoam Pinballs.
I keep stealing my daughter’s supply and given my teeth are decades older than hers this is probably a good idea in the long-term yet still, these cursed moral instincts!
Are these a US thing? With the advent of Amazon, I could see myself getting into foreign candy. For instance, Turkish Delight was an eye-opener for me. I had never tasted anything like it!
No, Maoam is German, I think; a brand Haribo uses for some candies (presumably those which were the most popular products of the Maoam company when Haribo bought them out). You can get pinballs in the UK, but I have yet to find the bags of only cola pinballs here, which frustrates me.
Some candy is OK (and Mounds bars are better still), but I find it hard to get excited about anything other than SUPER dark chocolate. I’m talking >90%.
Cacao percentage is kinda like a drug in that you get introduced to it at the low levels (e.g. 55%) thanks to Hersheys basically marketing it to kids, then you experiment with stuff a little higher (70%), then you’re on that 86% stuff from Aldi on a weekly basis, until finally you’re pawning your mom’s appliances so you can afford another hit of that sweet 90% Lindt’s that only goes on sale once in a blue moon.
The only place you can go from there is the 100% baking cocoa bars. I’m puzzled why nobody makes a 95-99%. I feel like I could probably be pretty happy staying at a 98 or 99% dark chocolate.
They do exist! I eat Lindt 99% bars regularly.
NINE BUCKS?!
I’m pawning my mom’s appliances here, not her priceless diamond-encrusted heirlooms! I have a sense of decency after all! We’re trying to have a CIVILIZATION here, people!
Wait, there are people who like 99% cocoa dark chocolate? I tried some of that stuff once and it was bitter as hell, won’t touch again. And I say that even though I prefer the 85% version to sweeter chocolate.
What’s better? Is it a flavor difference? Or something subtler? It seems like over 90% would be “standard pure bitter cocoa taste”
I very occasionally buy high quality 100% chocolate (that’s how it’s labeled anyway, it was probably 99.x%), but I have to eat it one tiny little piece at a time, and while the flavor is so intense that it sort of leaves me in an altered state of consciousness, I end up being in the mood for that type of experience only rarely.
Very dark chocolate is to food as Morton Feldmann is to music.
I do not like 99% cocoa dark chocolate (I actually don’t like most dark chocolate), but I do love whole cocoa beans. I’m not sure how that happened.
Ugh. I really like dark chocolate, but can’t stand anything over 80%. It’s just a pure bitter blast with zero subtlety, like chewing on coffee grinds.
Honestly to me it seems like a novelty, like the insanely hot peppers that taste of nothing but pain, or some of the hop monster beers. Or even those who swear off adding any water to their whiskey, or any seasoning to their steak, out of a mistaken insistence on purity.
There’s such a thing as balance. To me the flavors of good chocolate aren’t fully realized without some (not too much) balancing sweetness. Sure, it’s interesting to sometimes taste the raw unmitigated essence of a thing, but that doesn’t make it its “best” form. Just like some coffee is best with a little milk, some whiskey is best with a bit of water, bread with a bit of butter, etc.
Taste does not contain objective truth for actually edible things.
I don’t dilute my whisky, enjoy chewing newly roasted coffee beans, love hop-monster beers, 99% chocolate and the rich and complex taste of Dave’s Insanity Sauce. Each to his own 🙂
I actually do all of those things to, but more as a novelty. I enjoy sampling hop monsters etc. or tasting very hot sauces, but as an isolated entertainment rather than a foodstuff. I guess it’s less taste, and more of a “season for everything”. “I ONLY drink high alcohol Imperial Stouts!” often seems like macho posturing from someone who hasn’t quite learned to appreciate subtlety / balance (there’s a place for a good hot-weather session beer!).
For me at least it’s part of growing into a taste for something: dislike -> acquire taste -> seek out most extreme version of taste -> recognize why most things aren’t like that and find a happy medium / appreciate the spectrum. Not judging you specifically here, there are certainly those who honestly enjoy the extreme version most of all and that’s obviously fine as long as there’s no looking down on those with different tastes. As you say, no objective truth.
(side note, unless you exclusively drink actual barrel proof, you drink “diluted” whiskey, and some whiskey is designed to be “diluted” to taste by the end drinker. Most tasters try it neat, with a little water, etc to see how it fares in each.)
@Richard:
I’m with you 100% except on Dave’s Insanity Sauce.* It’s not THAT hot to me (uh, piquant, if we’re being real snobs), but I don’t think its flavor is very sophisticated or even very good. There are equally or near-equally hot sauces I’ve had that taste way better. (I haven’t tried any of the other varieties of Dave’s, only the popular one with the mostly black label.)
*Also, while I enjoy craft beer if it’s around at a party or something**, I tend to like maltier ones (e.g. bourbon-barrel stouts) over hoppier ones (e.g. session IPAs).
**People think of beer as something you need to acquire a taste for, which is true, but the notion is that you then have to acquire a taste for craft beer in particular. My experience has been one in which, after acquiring the whole taste for craft beer thing, I acquired a taste for big-name domestic Lite beers after that! I’m at a point now where I’d much rather have a Bud Lite than some locally brewed 10.3% porter (with some rare exceptions of course). It’s not that there’s more flavor or subtlety in Bud Lite, but it’s a different experience (maybe a different beverage entirely, really) and that experience is what I’ve actually finally acquired a taste for. I seem to be alone on that one though–craft beer seems to be the end of the line for most people who get there.
@Jame
The label “Craft beer” contains practically an infinite variety, from fruity things containing the bare minimum of malt to make it not cider (one brewery here makes one out of crab apples) to the dark hop-monsters. This is possibly why it’s the end of the line for most people because just about everybody can find their own favourite.
Bud lite is essentially a rice beer with a minimum of malted barley to get the enzymes and a minimum of hops. This is excellent for quenching thirst in warm weather, but I’m sure you can find a rice-based craft beer that will fit the bill just as well.
Variety is the best thing about craft beer! (and hence my frustration when I hear drinkers say “I can’t stand craft beer, it’s too hoppy!” or something similar).
Nothing wrong with liking American style pale lager. But there’s some variety within that category as well. If you’re curious it might be worth sampling craft beers in similar styles like Pilsner, Helles, and Kolsh, or Blonde or Cream ales (the latter two are very common at American craft breweries and are often recommended to folks used to pale lagers, since they are a very similar style, just with ale yeast instead of lager).
I like plain coffee, but steak without any seasonings? Not even salt? Can’t imagine it.
To me sugar plays the same role with cacao as salt does with beef – it enhances the flavor, but shouldn’t mask it. Without it though, the base flavor can be flat / one-note.
Chocolate. Not fussy about brands, just gimme (though I have to say, since Cadburys was taken over by Mondelez/Krafts, it seems to have changed in taste or quality – they keep introducing new flavours, particularly Oreos, but they are just not as good as the old reliables). Speaking of which, the absolute nethermost abomination from the pit of damnation I’ve ever tasted was Philadelphia cream cheese with Cadburys chocolate – it was disgusting and, thankfully, has been discontinued.
I used to love toffees, but one too many “argh this is getting stuck in my fillings” means I don’t eat them anymore.
Things like Skittles and Starbursts tend to be too much pure sugar for me. Licorice allsorts though – oh yeah. Even though I have now learned that licorice drives up your blood pressure so I try to keep that in check (actually, anything licorice/anise/fennel will get my attention because I love those flavours). I used to love things like fruit jellies and wine gums, but again, have to be careful of sugar intake so don’t indulge in these anymore.
Peanut butter and chocolate – since we got Reese’s peanut butter cups and bars on this side of the Atlantic, even though they are (relatively) expensive (due to import) I love them and have to make a conscious effort not to over-indulge. Turkish delight – either the Cadburys/Fry’s version or the original version (again, too much sugar if it’s the Real Thing so only at Christmas!)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tbpJ_kAhQy4
Those little dinner mints. You want the soft ones that are slightly crunchy. By far my favorite now is Scotch tablet, now that I’ve figured out how to make it myself. http://notsohumblepie.blogspot.com/2010/06/scottish-tablet.html
Tablet is a terrible thing, second only to Kendal Mint Cake in terms of destroying my self-control. Curse these sugary minxes.
Payday bars are probably my favorite simply because they hold up well in heat and if I leave one in my bag for months it still tastes good.
Lemon drops are probably my favorite. I like the plain Twix and most plain chocolate, as well.
I avoid buying peanut butter m&m’s because they’re like crack for me.
Snickers bars and Chime’s ginger chews, peanut butter flavor.
I prefer a combination of fat, protein, and a little sweetness over anything only/very sweet. I also will not eat anything gummy.
Multicolor Swedish fish are definitely among my top candies, though as far as gummy candies, the Sunkist Fruit Gems are better, if harder to find. I also think the Starburst jelly beans are the best jelly bean assortments on the store shelves. I like some of the individual Jelly Belly flavors better (the buttered popcorn ones, especially), but the store assortments of Jelly Belly jelly beans have too many completely horrible flavors, and it’s frequently impossible to tell the difference between the good ones and the horrible ones until it’s too late.
As far as chocolate goes, mixing it with peanut butter (any of the Reese’s candies) or pretzels is generally better than just straight chocolate, though my family will brand me as heretics if this is revealed.
Candied fruit slices, like these.
Anyone here feel pain in their teeth when eating sweet stuff, particularly chocolate? I get it really inconsistently and it’s not really enough to stop me from eating, but I also regularly visit the dentist so I know it’s not related to actual cavities in my case.
As for the question, I just buy chocolate bars. And snickers.
If chocolate counts, then chocolate, of various kinds. My favourite one was a lemongrass flavored dark chocolate from an ecuatorian brand. What about ice-cream?
If it’s just candy, then gummy bears, I usually get sick from eating too many when I’m able to buy them in large amounts.
Unusual flavors of gummies are my biggest thing right now. Lifesavers has some interesting ones – a berry pack and an ” exotic fruits of the world” pack that can reliably be found in my local stores. There’s also a candy store in Pittsburgh that sells a whole long list of fruit-flavored gummi bears, including black cherry, which I highly recommend.
They also sell weird things like clove-flavored hard candy, for anyone who’s into that and is near Pittsburgh.
Clove drops are not weird! 🙂
I bought some last time I was out there. My taste buds are going to have to disagree with you. 😛
If you have a Cracker Barrel near you, they have lots of different kinds of local candy from not very local places that you pretty much can’t find anywhere else.
My favorites are probably English Toffee (of which Heath Bars are a mass market version) and chocolate and peanut butter candies.
Chocolate covered raisins. It’s fruit, so of course it’s good for you!
I have on occasion had turkish delight, which is quite nice.
Tim Tams, and I feel sorry for you unfortunate souls that they only sell them here.
If “here” is Australia, you’re right about Tim Tams being awesome (although they are properly a cookie not a candy), but wrong about only selling in Australia.
I can reliably get my fix from Cost Plus World Market in the States, although they aren’t always labeled “Tim Tams” they are the same manufacturer and product.
A good Tim Tam Slam with Aussie style iced coffee (a vaguely coffee flavored sweet milk product) is a thing of beauty.
I had no idea. Consider it our gift to the world. 😛
Farmer’s Union will probably be the death of me. Not the healthiest of beverages.
I was in Australia for a few months on a World Solar Challenge team. “Tim Tam Time”, when we’d pass around a couple packages at the end of lunch, was a daily highlight.
Farmer’s Union was a life-sustaining beverage on the Stuart Highway.
We were ecstatic when we discovered Tim Tams and Bundaberg ginger beer (but no Bundy rum, sadly) available in the States.
I will say that the Aussie predilection for (or at least wide availability of) pre-mixed bourbon and cola in cans was a bit odd. Then again maybe it’s weird that those are rare in the US where the bourbon is made in the first place.
Only plain dark chocolate is austere enough for me.
Do chocolate covered things count? Almonds, cherries, whatever. I once had some chocolate-covered blueberries that were really nice.
Watermelon flavored Nerds
Good dark chocolate is so good that I can’t eat anything but the highest quality milk chocolate, because it doesn’t compare. Trader Joe’s dark chocolate in the big several pound packages is amazing. In general Trader Joe’s has an awesome selection of candies.
I also love Payday bars, Almond Joy, and Raisinettes. and orange slices, and quality black licorice. Otherwise I avoid candy. I had gummi worms today, and they were not just terrible, but left a weird smell on my hands (WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN WITH GUMMIES?).
ATOMIC FIREBALLS
It’s a new Open Thread, and the usual head of the scifi discussion thread is still suspended.
Ray Bradbury died 4 years ago yesterday. Who wants to discuss The Martian Chronicles?
I’d like to discuss how much poorer it makes a community to lose interesting people.
But also wow, I had no idea “There Will Come Soft Rains” was a part of The Martian Chronicles. Will have to read the rest of them now.
Hopefully it’s just a temporary loss, and he returns we’re all the happier. (I like him as a poster, but I wouldn’t want someone to escape justice because they are a special kind of contributor here. I’m not taking a side in how just his punishment was, just that it followed Scott’s rules, which are “Scott makes the rules.”)
If anyone wants to talk about “The Martian Chronicles”, I’m up for it.
Ray Bradbury was such a large part of my SF fandomness (he got me at an early age). Still sad over his passing.
I greatly enjoyed some of the stories in the MC, but I also felt that the whole collection didn’t entirely hang together. Some of the stories (it’s been a while, so I can’t name specific stories) seemed to be juxtiposition to others – not in a way to make a point, but because Bradberry wanted to tell stories where Frodo won and where Gollum won, both at the same time.
And part of the social (race & gender) commentary seemed to be trying just a hair too hard.
A question for average utilitarians:
One common challenge to average utilitarianism is, “If everyone with below-average utility died, would that be a good thing?”. One common response is, “No, because what counts is average utility per life, not per amount of time. Everyone with below-average utility dying would result in them collecting no more utility in their life but still living the same number of lives (i.e. one), lowering the average per-life utility.
My question is the following: have you considered the Temporal Repugnant Conclusion? Imagine someone who lives for 100 years, collecting 100 utiles per year. Would it be just as good if they lived 200 years on 50 utiles per year? How about 10,000 years on one utile per year? 1,000,000 years on 0.01 utiles per year? If your reason for preferring average utilitarianism is opposition to the ordinary Repugnant Conclusion (which seems to be the case for many average utilitarians), how do you feel about this alternative – that any world could be made better by the above described average utilitarian standards, if the lives it contains are made simultaneously less enjoyable and longer?
People make that tradeoff all the time, e.g. excercising.
Also note that when you compare 100 years * 100 utiles and 1’000’000 years * 0.01 utiles, in the latter case the picture of a long, unexciting life barely above the point of wanting to kill yourself is what comes to mind, and we (or I at least) intuitively feel that this is a horrible fate and a life not worth living. But if utiles are correctly computed in both scenarios, then this existential dread is already factored into the latter number and the utility is still positive overall, so the two cases are per definition equally worth living.
NB: I’m not a utilitarian.
Utilities (in the technical sense of VNM utilities) are a function from world-histories to the real number line. (like, let’s say you love drinking beer after eating fish and chips, and hate the reverse, then your preference ordering can’t be decomposed as a sum of “utility of beer” + “utility of fish and chips”)
Now, sometimes, ordering and duration and stuff like that doesn’t matter, so you can treat it as adding up utilities over time in those specific cases.
But in general, utilities are over a whole history of events, so each life-quality of life tradeoff thing would have to be judged individually.
It’s still possible to salvage your thought-experiment though. Imagine one really fantastic year. And one moderately postive year that you are glad you stuck around for, though it definitely wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is likely that there is some number of moderately good years you would trade a fantastic year for. Now imagine a dial slowly ramping down the quality of the moderately good year while ramping up the number of years. There’s probably some point where you’d go “stop, that’s good enough”, and you would have traded off a short excellent lump of time for a very long, faintly positive lump of time, but it ultimately comes down to your own preferences. If you don’t like where the dial is set, you can always dial it back to wherever you want.
I’m sort-of-vaguely utilitarian leaning, but lean more towards the total side (I tend to think that the two are doing different things, total seems to correspond to something that’s worth paying attention to but I’m not sure what, average seems to be more of an ugly hack that doesn’t quite work.) Also I tend not to be a fan of strange hypotheticals, especially not ones that require people to have intuitive ideas of what various combinations of utils are worth. On the other hand if we’re talking about the Repugnant Conclusion, that’s Derek Parfit’s thought experiment, which reminds me of other Parfitisms.
His “Reasons and Persons” is a book that looks like it’s going to be about personal identity, but ends up finding lots of things that aren’t personal identity that might matter. One thing is people-at-moments-in-time, which we seem to care about. Certainly people often seem to care about themselves-right-now over and above what might be expected from them caring about their own whole lifetimes. So if you care about that, then the Temporal Repugnant Conclusion does indeed look repugnant.
Let’s take another way of looking at utilitarianism. Imagine someone (let’s call him Bob) who has a social-temporal discounted utility function – the further away something is, in time and/or social distance, from Bob, the less it matters to Bob. There’s a discount rate, and utilitarianism is sort-of the limiting case where the discount rate goes to zero – where all people and all times matter equally. So, for Bob, some hypothetical grey life stretching far into the future might matter less to him that having a good normal-length life now, or for that matter having good normal-length lives go on around him now. If Bob is a maximally-saintly utilitarian saint, then his discount rates are zero, and he’d prefer the long austere life, which… feels like the sort of thing a saint might do. Those of us who are less than maximally saintly wouldn’t want that for ourselves or anyone we care about.
The thing about the zero-discount case is if everyone has a zero discount rate, everyone has the same utility function, which simplifies a lot of the game theory, and leaves no room for Moloch to rear his ugly head. In this world where practically everyone is less than maximally saintly (in a utilitarian sense) we need other ways of keeping Moloch at bay, and I think that’s where things with a more deontological character start to come in.
(I have some thoughts about the oddities of _hyperbolic_ discounting, but that’s going even deeper into speculative theory land, so I’ll save that for another comment if there’s interest.)
Has anyone here with Asperger’s (or another autism spectrum disorder) had any success with learning social skills? As a child, I never received any social skills training and I only had a handful of friends in school (in general, I tried to keep social interaction to a minimum). Now that I’m in university (age 18), this is coming back to bite me. Could you share any tips or suggestions?
Sometimes community colleges or community centers have social skills types of classes. You would think regular universities would have plenty of them, but they do not seem to. Going to a therapist is another option, and it is sometimes free at a university counseling center. It also would have the advantage of being individualized, so that you could learn those social skills that you personally need to learn, rather than learning some generalized curriculum.
Another possible option is to join some kind of church or social organization and to get to know people a bit over time, and to seek out a friendly kind mentor for yourself. You would want someone caring, who would be willing to give you information and feedback on how you impact other people, and to make suggestions as to how you might become more skilled.
Number one tip: everyone likes to talk about themselves.
This is really true. You can get very far by basically cueing other people to talk about themselves/their interests. Bonus points if you have shallow knowledge of enough things to sort of nod along and occasionally mutter “oh I read something about that one time”.
OP is in university. In undergrad “what are you studying” is a bit of a cliche, less so in grad school where most people are relatively deep into more interesting things. Although if having someone whose mind has been blown by PSY100 talk at you is the cost of a social life, so be it.
A useful tip, not just for people who have trouble with social skills in general: in university, there’s generally going to be a fair bit of drinking. If you are a drinker, strive to be neither the lightweight who gets wasted off of 4 drinks and does something embarrassing, nor the tank who gets wasted off of 24 drinks and does something embarrassing. It is far better to be the person who has no more than their tolerance would indicate, doesn’t do anything embarrassing, and drinks a couple litres of water before going to bed.
If in university you are a person who is good at letting others unload their life story/special interests/whatever instead of being the one to do that, and doesn’t make an ass of themselves while drunk, you’re already way ahead of the game.
Go to places where strangers are, and practice.
Also, medication.
One simple thing that helped me a bit was simply observing people with “good” social skills. Find a big extrovert that you have a couple minor things in common with and try and befriend them (it won’t be as hard as you think – most extroverts like having more friends and are often very willing to accept you).
Go to a party with them and watch them work a room. Go to a bar with them and watch them approach and talk to strangers. Look for patterns in their behavior that you can analyze. What do they talk about with strangers? How do they greet acquaintances?
I like to think I’ve got some fairly nifty social skills hidden away somewhere. I grew up thinking I’d been diagnosed as Officially Not Autistic, but kind of similar and had Lots Of Issues To Work On. Much later I got an Asperger’s diagnosis – I was seeing a therapist for an anxiety disorder, we dug up the old notes, and it turns out that the Officially Not Autistic thing was a lot less official than I thought it was, so we thought I should get it checked out.
I suppose I had something like a mental list of Things I Ought To Be Able To Do Like All Those Other Neurotypicals Can Do, and kept throwing myself at various of those things until my sanity gave out. Going full-on like this is not advised, but I think picking things that are challenging but do-able, do them, review in your mind what went well and what went badly afterwards, keep at it, and have the idea that maybe with some things, it’s not so much about you permanently lacking some abilities as being a late starter or slow learner.
Back at university I had something called the “1am rule”, which said that if I was at a party but feeling “alone in a crowd” and not getting into any interesting conversations or anything like that, then I should give it until 1am, and then if things hadn’t got good by then, I could write the party off as a loss and go home. Now at the age of 37 I’m slightly alarmed by how much stamina I had back then, but also by how I saw parties almost as a task that I had to get good at.
So in the end I’ve wound up with a decent selection of friends, a reasonable job (and the social skills to get jobs via contacts), no romantic partner (ever), and a prescription for SSRIs. I’ll leave it up to you to work out whether this counts as a desirable goal or a terrible warning.
Usual disclaimer: everyone is different, when you’ve met one person with an ASD you’ve met one person with an ASD, things that work for one person may not work for another and may be unnecessary for a third, etc.
“no romantic partner (ever),”
I have Aspergers and this is making me sad
Everyone is different. For some people, to have no romantic partner is ideal. For others, it’s sad. Everyone has their own desires and goals, including different people with Aspergers.
Certainly there are a lot of marriages where one or both of the people in them would be better off single. And some single people who are looking for a partner and will be glad when they find a partner.
And those neurotypical sorts will at least generally have the option to go through with this, find out it’s not for them, and so on. Wanting something and attaining it and even wanting something only to find out it’s not all that great both sound better than wanting something and never being able to get there because autism.
Note: have asperger’s, am biased.
Stefan,
Do you mind if I ask how old you are?
I was once in the “desperately want but can’t attain” camp. I still haven’t attained, but a lot of introspection and discussion with friends is leading me more and more towards the idea that I never really wanted it that much. I’ve certainly never behaved as if I did.
I think there is such a societal pressure, on young men especially, that often we feel our worth is judged by the amount of romantic partners we’ve had – and that itself is motivation to find one.
I know this will sound patronizing (in my 20s, I would have loudly scoffed and rebuffed anyone who told me “maybe you don’t really want it”), but it’s just something to consider.
Oh, no, no. I’m not the desperate sorts we’re talking of; through a one-in-a-million fluke usually reserved for cheesy romance movies and whatnot I did at one point get myself that fabled romantic partner, and it was quite nice. Hardly the greatest thing in the world, mind, but certainly not something I’d tell someone not to give a damn about.
More to the point, it’s just a really, really bad thing to tell someone. I know much of this is cultural expectations not dealing well with a segment of the population, and I agree not caring so much is the optimal solution to this issue, but telling people things are okay and they should get over themselves is equivalent to telling a man dying of thirst the water you’re drinking tastes kinda bland. I have seen the face of resentment, and its visage is twisted.
EDIT: my age is also not some big secret, I am twenty-two.
@MattM
I’m in… not quite the same camp, but things are a lot better than they used to be.
I think there’s what I call the “primary hurt” and the “secondary hurt”. The primary hurt is from missing out on the thing you’re keen on. The secondary hurt is from a variety of sources. The sense of rejection. The social pressure to pair up. The pressures Matt M mentions. The problem of finding that lots of your friends have less time for you when they start pairing up, moving in together, having families etc. and you get left out. The pressure to prove yourself straight (you can live in one of the most queer-friendly places out there, and still feel the pressure left over from school or media stereotypes or whatever). The pressure to prove that you’re a real person with all the real person skills and aren’t some incomplete half-made thing. These days a fair part of it is not having the primary hurt validated and acknowledged – getting empty platitudes or even being told you’re a bad person for being hurt really doesn’t help.
It was helpful to talk through this with a couple of therapists, and that helped to take a lot of the edge off the secondary hurt, and looking at it, the secondary hurt seems to be the bulk of it. The primary hurt seems to be harder to shift, but when you’re not adding secondary hurt to it, it’s not too terrible on average. Every now and again, I get an “attack of the singles” and have to resign myself to feeling pretty crappy for an evening or two, and the feeling passes.
One thing I find useful to remember, is that when I’m feeling sad it’s hard for me to remember what it’s like to be happy, when I’m feeling happy it’s hard for me to remember what it’s like to be sad. So sometimes I find it’s useful to take the outside view, to say to myself, “yeah, you feel pretty down, you’re going to feel down for a little while, but before too long you’ll cheer up again.” … At least that works these days. I suspect that there have been times in my life when I’d been depressed, and that might not have applied so much, but these days a) I’ve sorted my head out quite a bit, and b) I’m on SSRIs for anxiety, so that helps clobber any depression that might be lurking around.
@Stefan
telling people things are okay and they should get over themselves is equivalent to telling a man dying of thirst the water you’re drinking tastes kinda bland.
Totally. Having sour grapes on someone else’s behalf really doesn’t help, it does the opposite.
I think some of the woe is me, I can’t find a girlfriend people underestimate how much effort at least some “normal” people put into it and the compromises they make.
One guy I know that’s married and expecting his second kid, for about year in his mid to late 20s treated dating like a second job. He was seriously putting 20+ hours a week in and striking out more often than not. And when he eventually did meet his now wife, she was fairly pretty and well off, but also abrasive and bossy. Not some dream perfect pixie chick.
Of course they underestimate it, just as the reverse case of socially apt people underestimating the effort it’d take for our frustrated people to do the same also happens.
Most recent Anonymous:
That “at least” is doing a lot of work there. It’s far more common for me to see the pairing-up sort pair up very quickly – to have a very short gap between finishing one relationship and beginning the next. A lot of the time, it sort-of just happens.
Putting 20+ hours a week into dating… wow, to have the abundance of opportunities to be able to put 20+ hours a week into that.
You really have no idea what other people are going through or what difficulties they have. I’m sure getting into relationships is really easy for at least some people out there, but so what? Some people are born rich too.
As for “abundance of opportunities” they didn’t just fall into his lap. How many hours did you spend on your okcupid, match, and eharmony profiles last week? How much time and money have you put into building your wardrobe? How many minutes a day do you spend on grooming? How many pictures of yourself have you taken or asked others to take in order to find a few that flatter you? How many dealbreakers do you have — Do you have no interest in women that like to watch reality TV? That aren’t into N_R_X/libertarianism/rationalism? That don’t like anime? That are bad at math? That don’t think truth is the most important thing in the universe?
Revealed preferences are a thing.
@Peter,
It’s kind of the opposite actually. When you have abundant opportunities it actually dulls your drive to head out and meet new girls. One of the reason spinning plates is difficult that they don’t tell you: you actually lose most of your motivation to maintain relationships once you hit your “magic number” IME. Part of why monogamous dating is more stable, it forces you to stay focused on keeping things going with that one girl.
Humblebragging aside, 20 hours a week isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s like any other skill, you need to spend a lot of time sowing before you can reap.
Red Anonymous (are you the same as the pale Anonymous further up?):
You really have no idea what other people are going through or what difficulties they have.
Hahaha hahahahaha. Oh the irony! All those wrong guesses about me.
I’ve spent my time cranking the big rusty online dating handles. You know those mental health woes I was talking about above, those therapists – a big chunk of that was me cracking under the strain of chasing all that. It’s painful to remember what it was like back then, and I’m not making that effort for the likes of you.
I’m sure some people have managed to crank the rusty handle lots to success. Doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Doesn’t even mean it will work for most people.
When I was younger I had a devil of a time finding romantic partners. I put in a lot of work, and never got any results until I was in my late 20s.
In retrospect, there were things I could have done differently, like noticing the few times a girl was paying attention to me and reacting properly to them. (These were pretty rare, but they did happen.)
Maintaining a relationship is much less work than starting one.
Peter, yes the same person. If you were putting in serious effort, open to broad variety of women, and got nowhere, you have my deepest sympathies.
What annoys me is when people dismiss others’ successes as luck, when often it is the fruit of really considerable effort.
Totally agree with anon here. An understanding of revealed preferences combined with asking some of my more successful friends exactly how much effort they were putting into the things he discussed is what led me to believe that maybe I don’t “actually want” a romantic partner at all.
Everyone who says “I put a lot of time into this,” should seriously consider that we all have different definitions of “a lot.” Unless you are actively comparing yourself to other people on this metric, it’s useless. In my 20s, I thought I was putting in “a lot” of time and effort. Turns out I wasn’t. Not even close.
Early 20s were a devil-ish time for me as well. I did not invest as much time and energy as I could have, but that’s not an unintelligent decision: bashing my head against a brick wall is a pointless endeavor.
Success came in mid and late 20s after having more disposable income and a deeper social network.
Such is life.
I might have been more willing to put in the effort when I was twenty if someone had told me what I was supposed to be doing. Or pointed me towards where that information was hidden, or even just told me that the effort was required and that I’d have to figure it out for myself like everyone else.
Anything but what actually happened, which is pretty much every aspect of popular culture relentlessly spreading the message that if you just be yourself and have patience “true love” will come and that making a concerted or deliberate effort is only for Lotharios trying to rack up an obscene score of notched bedposts, and pretty much every authority figure at least implicitly going along with that message. Meanwhile, a parallel network made certain that various demographics of which I was not a part, got the proper instructions and a nearly insurmountable head start.
I feel like I was denied critical, need-to-know information…
I feel like this is the Western version of the cultural forces that, in another context, make harem anime protagonists into boring, indecisive schlubs whose only identifiable personality traits are vague kindness and an inhuman ability to put up with abuse.
As someone in the same boat as Peter (and seriously, thanks, I feel like I’m the only person on earth like this sometimes) I figured out a while ago that I wasn’t enjoying myself at parties and bars so why bother subjecting myself to it? I can have a perfectly fine time spending the evening at home, thank you very much. The problem with being 90% asocial and 90% asexual is that those 10%s happen and I’m utterly unprepared and bewildered. I end up going out alone and feeling empty at the end of the evening.
Most of the time I think I’m not cut out for a relationship, and I can live a perfectly fulfilling life on my own, but sometimes…sometimes…
John Schilling,
That’s pretty much my story as well. To this day I hold a massive grudge against anything that even resembles a “be yourself and everything will magically work out” theme. It’s terrible advice that will rob a certain percentage of young men of the most promising years of their youth.
Having fallen for it and believed in it as a teenager is one of my life’s greatest shames. I’m incredibly embarrassed that I was dumb enough to take it seriously while many others, apparently, realized it was a crock from the beginning.
And that is why men turn towards the manosphere; there simply is no one else who will honestly tell them what they need to know. Scales drop from your eyes, and you’ll never after shake the feeling that everyone was lying to me, what else are they lying about?
I muddled through in my youth, probably through at least as much luck as savvy. Looking back, I can see a lot of missed opportunities, but perhaps it is just as well that I didn’t know then what I know now; I’m not sure I would have had the wisdom and restraint to handle it.
I’m surprised so many of you were so naive. I don’t think I was in any favored demographic that was given secret knowledge but I can’t remember a time when I thought romantic success would just fall out of the sky.
John Schilling “Meanwhile, a parallel network made certain that various demographics of which I was not a part, got the proper instructions and a nearly insurmountable head start.” what parallel network are you thinking of?
My feeling is closer to other demographics just doing it unconsciously and winning — those who guessed or just picked up from context that college is meant to be the elite’s dating service, not an education. But maybe I’m missing something.
Things seem to vary from person to person. I know several people with autistic spectrum conditions, some paired up, some not. It seems to be a risk factor for long-term persistent failure to pair up, but not the whole deal. You can sort-of say how “high functioning” someone is, but people often have areas of strength and weakness that don’t fit the pattern.
I’m told that there are three main routes to getting an autism spectrum diagnosis in adulthood – one is doing therapy for a mental illness (usually anxiety or depression) and ASD coming up as a possible route cause, one is in relationship counselling, one is where a child gets diagnosed with ASD and one (or both) of the parents gets a diagnosis too. So evidently lots of people with ASD do pair up.
Thing is, you can’t rely on it, and that’s not a great position to be in. I’ll put more in a comment downthread.
I probably have Asperger’s and would love to find/date people like the guy up-thread
All I am gathering here is that it is now time to turn SSC open threads into a dating site for the unfortunate.
Lots of things (newspapers) have their own personal ads thing. So why shouldn’t we go further and go from newspapers to blogs? SSC Personal Ads! What could possibly go wrong?
Sadly or not, the gender balance alone will probably make sure the idea never gets off the ground.
For straight girls and gay dudes, though, it’d probably be nice while it lasted.
I have “hmmm … it’s not autism … I don’t know what it is, but labels don’t matter too much anyways”.
This is mostly my boat as well. Except that I had/have social anxiety so I didn’t pursue dating in college. And I have almost never been able to stay up much past midnight without being stupid, so I would leave early.
I’ve also never had a romantic partner. At 34 now, this leaves me very sad. The rest of my life is very awesome!
No. 2 tip: evolution has given many men, myself included, a horrific fear of romantic rejection. My best guess is that either we all grow up sexually stifled nowadays, or else, back in the day, if you hit on the chief’s daughter and it didn’t work out, you might be dead or permanently branded as not romantic material for the other 30 healthy young women in your tribe.
Thus, it feels subjectively like maybe if you ask a girl out and she says “no,” or you put your arm around her and she awkwardly shifts away, then quite possibly you should put red hot coals in your eyes to avoid ever having to face the eternal shame you will feel upon looking in the mirror.
But all that really happens is you feel awkward for a bit and move on.
Knowing that the actual cost of failed attempts at romance is much lower than it feels can somewhat free one up to make more attempts. And like everything, you get better at it, and it gets easier with practice.
Yep. This is another thing that you find out when you ask very detailed and specific questions of people you know who are “really good at this sort of thing.”
As was mentioned somewhere above, the guy who you think it “comes easy to” probably got turned down 12 times last week. He just stopped letting it bother him.
One of my proudest accomplishments in my life so far is asking out a girl who I was pretty sure had a boyfriend and getting rejected. I asked, she declined politely on the grounds that she had a boyfriend, there were no hard feelings and everyone moved on. She probably doesn’t remember me at all.
It may sound strange, but the whole thing was incredibly liberating. I then felt free to ask girls out without obsessing over them from a distance for two months. This lead to a period of fun and varied dating (that ended, in the best way, with me meeting my wife.)
man, I dunno, I’ve managed to avoid most social skill training since elementary school. Some critical things though: learn how to make eye contact, and say hello to people. This at least makes people think you’re not a complete goober. Also, ask people questions about themselves to demonstrate that you are interested in them (even if you’re not).
Has anyone been following this story about John Oliver purchasing and forgiving “$15 million worth of medical debt”?
http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-john-oliver-buys-and-forgives-15-million-in-debt-2016-6
I use the quotes for a very specific reason… This story is getting shared with that particular headline completely uncritically.
But if you dig into the details, the debt in question was SO distressed and unlikely to be repaid, the actual purchase price was about $60,000 (0.4% of the face value). It seems more than a *tad* dishonest to me for everyone to act as if Oliver made a charitable donation of $15 million here. Media outlets are parroting reports that this is the “biggest charitable giveaway in television history” eclipsing when Oprah gave away $8 million worth of cars…
The econ geek in me knows that value is subjective, but how on Earth it is reasonable to claim the debt in question is “worth” $15 million when the most recently observed market price for it was $60k?
Well, given how little scrutiny the IRS pays to people in John Oliver’s social position, he’s probably going to be able to write it off for much more than $60k. So that’s one way of stating the value.
Not social position, income bracket. In no small measure because Republicans explicitly cut the budget of the high income audit unit.
It seems that taxation is theft or something.
No, taxation is a weapon to be used against ones political opponents. /s
You remember why that funding was cut right?
Different set of cuts, but keeping on hoisting that chip.
“keep on hoisting that chip.”
Yeah, can you imagine? Holding a grudge just because the IRS was deliberately and explicitly weaponized against people who share your political views, and no one has ever been meaningfully punished for it. Sheesh, some folks need to learn how to let go.
Well, it’s also not clear to me based on the articles I’ve read whether Oliver personally even paid the $60k or not. Perhaps HBO did as an expense for his show?
In any case, I don’t care about the taxable value – nor would most people.
It’s worth $15 million to the people who are now debt-free. The people who are in debt aren’t able to convince their creditors to accept pennies on the dollar. So in theory, if you went around to all those people one by one and offered to pay off their debts, you’d need $15 million to do it. So in that sense, he bought $15 million worth of impact for $60,000.
Maybe it’s a little shady, but at the same time, I feel like he’s definitely added value somewhere. If he had simply given the $60,000 away as cash, it wouldn’t have accomplished the same goal.
No, it’s not worth $15 million to the people who are now debt-free, because they weren’t going to pay those debts anyway. That’s what distressed debt is.
“It’s worth $15 million to the people who are now debt-free.”
I don’t think that’s true.
The fact that the debt sells for less than 1% of its face value suggests that they expect less than 1% of it to be recovered. Had John Oliver done nothing and had this debt been purchased by a (real) collection agency, how much of this debt would *actually* have been repaid? Assuming VERY generous amounts of overhead and profit margins for the debt collectors, probably less than 200k.
I discussed this with a friend who said something like “He probably saved them some annoying phone calls and maybe an additional hit to their credit score.” Which I’ll admit, isn’t nothing, but it’s not the same as donating $15 million to charity.
Is them failing to take a hit to their credit scores even an overall good? This is making credit scores worse at reflecting how likely a person is to pay off a loan, which seems like it’s bad for the economy overall.
Debt bought at 4 mils on the dollar is probably well past the statute of limitations; it’s had all the hit on the credit score it’s going to, unless a debt collector gets lucky and gets the debtor to acknowledge the debt.
I was wondering this also. Many people have said that it isn’t actually a big deal, but then it seems strange to have an entire charity devoted to helping people with something that apparently isn’t a big deal. The charity certainly thinks that they have a worthy cause: https://www.ripmedicaldebt.org/about-rip/
I feel like I’m missing something
I’m not the biggest fan of the Effective Altruism people, but: lol.
LOL, a Left Wing person did something good. Let’s get to work right away to obliterate that. Let’s see what we can find wrong with what he did– or if not with what he did, with the story. Oh, here it is. The head line may have been accurate but it didn’t tell the whole story and may have been misleading to those who didn’t read the article. Horror of horrors.
I dunno, running misleading stories to make people ideologically aligned with you look more generous than they are smacks of, what’s the word I’m looking for, propaganda?
Just wait until John Oliver weighs in on an issue you know a lot about, but on the other side from you, and all your friends won’t listen to your arguments because John Oliver.
Did I say it was the horror of horrors? No, I described it as a tad dishonest. Is there a partisan angle to this? Possibly. Consider the following:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/04/11/donald_trump_gives_free_golf_rounds_not_cash_to_charity.html
About two months ago, the usual suspects were all up in arms about how Trump was a huge liar because he talked a lot about making “donations” that didn’t actually come from his own personal checkbook. Instead, they came from his foundation, or they were gifts-in-kind (such as free rounds of golf on his courses). This was considered to be an outrage.
I also thought this story was worth discussing for its larger implications – that a lot of medical debt is SO incredibly distressed. Perhaps this will cause us to think a little differently the next time we read a story about some poor couple stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bills – stories that are typically designed to outrage us at the injustice of our current system. Would we feel as outraged if we were told “There is less than a 1% chance they end up having to pay this balance in full”?
If we assume that delinquency rates roughly track with wealth/income, that would suggest that we have a system where the very poor end up paying nothing a lot of the time, subsidized by those with more wealth who are paying (presumably inflated) full prices to make up the difference. Does that system sound familiar to anyone? It’s almost like we already have socialized medicine, and we don’t even realize it!
>It’s almost like we already have socialized medicine, and we don’t even realize it!
So how could you not have socialized medicine, if that’s what it is? Is the only way not to have it, by having debtor’s prison for medical debts?
Before ObamaCare, and maybe now too, I’m not sure, the most common cause of bankruptcy was medical debts. So a lot of people apparently try to pay these debts and end up bankrupt, with ruined credit ratings, great difficulty being able to get loans or rent an apartment etc.
I guess with our society’s current political tribalism, if bad rumors come up about a candidate, then if the candidate is from your tribe they are seen as innocent until proven guilty. And if the candidate is from the other tribe, they are seen as guilty until proven innocent.
Did I say “Trump is innocent and Oliver is guilty?”
No. You’re projecting that onto me. I merely pointed out two similar stories that were handled completely and totally differently, based (I believe) on the political orientation of the individuals.
I conceded that Oliver’s donation is, on net, a good thing – and is almost certainly providing some degree of help/relief to the parties effected. But I maintain that his acting as if he personally wrote a check for $15 million is incredibly dishonest. It’s also dishonest if Trump does that (although it would appear that Trump’s gift-in-kind donations actually were valued at the amounts he claimed, unlike Oliver’s debt which was valued at 60k). Can we not agree on this?
>his acting as if he personally wrote a check for $15 million
I’ll have to go look up news articles and see if he did act that way. One can’t ever accept the word of someone of the opposite political persuasion. Our politics are far too tribal for that.
I would expect that Oliver probably just said that he paid off $15 million of medical debt, leaving it to others to look and see what that means exactly. But if so, this is correct, and uses the terms that are generally used for such situations, even though it may be misleading e.g. to someone who read a headline but didn’t read the news story under it.
It does seem like nit picking to me.
No, you didn’t say “Trump is innocent and Oliver is guilty.” I was just referring to our general political tribalism. Someone posted this comic
about tribalism further down. I’ll repost it here. This is indeed what our society and our Internet are like 24/7/365.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4133
Yes, it is somewhat nitpicking. I’ll concede that – but I think it raises some interesting issues that are worthy of discussion.
I read a few articles about it, and my impression is that Oliver, HBO, and his supporters in the mainstream media have all been VERY careful to avoid saying anything that is technically false, but are making every effort to imply that Oliver has done $15 million worth of good, which is not even close to true.
If I was Oprah, I’d certainly be demanding my record back for sure. Of course, Oprah probably has better things to worry about…
Before ObamaCare, and maybe now too, I’m not sure, the most common cause of bankruptcy was medical debts.
No. It. Was. Not.
We’ve been through this before, Jill. If a person owes a total of $112K to various people and $12K of that is medical bills, they are not in bankruptcy because of medical bills. They are in bankruptcy because they have debts which they can not pay. Elizabeth Warren’s calculations were full of ill chosen metrics at best and are outright fraud at the most likely point.
The most common cause of bankruptcy is loss of income due to job loss. In good times, this is often related to illness. In bad times, loss of a job could result from any sort of things, including butterflies in Peking and the moon in Mercury. But the ACA was not – in the mind of any sane voter or policy maker – going to keep people from getting ill, and hence losing their jobs.
@ keranih
The most common cause of bankruptcy is loss of income due to job loss.
Retirees who did not have a job can be pushed into bankruptcy by medical bills. So can people who still have their jobs. Medical bills can be too high for anyone to absorb , even those who were and still are solvent by normal standards.
“Can be” vs. “the most common”. People can be eaten by sharks, it happens.
This claim is (and was) false. Though you can find claims to similar effect in some terrible studies Elizabeth Warren cooked up when trying to help ObamaCare get passed.
Medical issues are a factor in bankruptcy, but not the largest. We know this because when you just ask people who went bankrupt (or are about to do so) what the cause is/was, “medical debt” is not what they are most likely to give as the reason. Let’s see if I can find some actual numbers to make this less handwavy…here you go…
Politifact says:
The poor aren’t paying nothing under this system. They’re paying an amount which is much less than the full amount, but which is still large enough to drive them into bankruptcy and have other negative effects on them.
Well we obviously don’t know the breakdown here. My guess is that some are paying nothing, some are paying ridiculously reduced amounts (such that the reduced amount does NOT destroy their life), some are paying reduced but still life-ruining amounts, and others are paying the full price (or close to it) out of fear. How the equation balances out is hard to say for sure – but let me emphasize – the market price of this debt was 0.4% of its face value. That’s not just “distressed,” that’s like, super-mega-ultra distressed.
Thing is, I’m not sure if this was entirely thought out. Debt forgiveness is counted as income by the IRS, and one generally has to pay taxes on it. Granted, tax on $45k is cheaper than $45k, but between a private company and the IRS, I know who I’d rather have hounding me for money – especially if I was never going to pay it anyway.
On edit – IANAL nor an accountant. I just listen to Dave Ramsey a lot.
Oh wow. That’s dark.
If the IRS actually starts going after people imagine how grim that would be. Exchanging annoying phone calls over unenforceable debt for a big bill from the IRS. ouch.
This is an interesting point, but I guess the taxable income is the actual cost of buying out the debt and not the original debt?
The reason I’m for doing things like this is that being saddled with debt that you have zero chance of repaying is severely limiting your options and the possibility of going bankrupt and defaulting on debt is rather essential to a functioning economy. From my very limited understanding of the US system, Student loans and medical debt are exempted from personal bankruptcy and therefore represents a problem?
the taxable income is the actual cost of buying out the debt and not the original debt?
IANAL, but no. You still legally owe that money. You’re judgment proof, because SoL have run out, but you still owe that whole amount unless you get into some agreement with the lender to cancel the debt.
Oh, I agree, bankruptcy is a good tool for a society to have, but like most tools, misuse of it can do more harm than good. (And not just “if you use a skill saw to cut off your fingers it is a problem” but also “if you use a skill saw to cut a bunch of expensive boards way too short that is also a problem.”)
Medical debt is dischargeable in Chpt 7 bankruptcy. This is how you get the infamous Elizabeth Warren study that defined a medical bankruptcy as practically any bankruptcy where they listed medical bills of $1,000 or more – never mind that they could have had $200,000 of other debts, that $1k of medical bills – even if they had been paid off made it a “medical bankruptcy.”
Ahem. Sorry, yes, medical debts are dischargeable.
Student loans are not. This is the only thing that makes student loans affordable, and available to people regardless of what they want to study. Because they can not be discharged, the bank is pretty sure it will get its money back. Otherwise, the bank would do a lot more digging into your grades and your field of study, and would be very unwilling to loan money if, say, people got into a habit of graduating, not finding a job for three months, and then said, OMG, I can’t pay these bills! I need to file bankruptcy.
IOW – this is why we can’t have nice things.
On this note: Even the claim that these people “had their debts paid off” might be somewhat misleading itself.
I think the average person hearing this would assume it means “the hospital received full payment for services rendered,” but this is clearly not the case. The hospital receives the 60k when it sells the distressed debt, and then gets nothing more as the debt is recovered.
From the hospital’s perspective, these are certainly not people who “paid their debt in full,” contrary to the illusion that this is what John Oliver has kindly done for them on their behalf.
This is a neat, self consistent story, but isn’t true. The non-dischargability rule was put in place based on a panic about a wave of recent medical school graduates strategically defaulting, but it turns out to have been made up. There was never any epidemic of strategic defaults. And prior to the rule being put in place there were private student loans, they didn’t have outrageously high interest rates, and there was no extensive underwriting as to grades or field of study.
Federally guaranteed student loans were affordable because they were Federally guaranteed. (I believe this category of loans was abolished in favor of direct government loans, but I’m not 100% sure). The nondischargability is simply the government using force to reduce the chances it would lose on the deal, much as the mafia employs legbreakers for the same purpose. The Feds even have programs where you can sell yourself into servitude (couched as “public service loan forgiveness”) in exchange for having your debt paid off, something a private lender would find impractical for political reasons if nothing else.
You can also do it ahead of time. Give the government four years of military service, leave with a voucher for free college.
@ blue snowflake anon –
The non-dischargability rule was put in place based on a panic about a wave of recent medical school graduates strategically defaulting, but it turns out to have been made up. There was never any epidemic of strategic defaults.
Hmmm. This seems to suggest that there continues to be no risk of stragic defaulting, and that there is tons of money on the ground, ready to be picked up from advancing loans to medical students. I shall notify my accountant to take advantage of this.
And prior to the rule being put in place there were private student loans, they didn’t have outrageously high interest rates, and there was no extensive underwriting as to grades or field of study.
As I understand this, it was not the student but the parents who took out the loans in the bad old days, and those loans were secured, not on word. Anyone have data to confirm or prove me incorrect?
You cannot get in on the student loan market. It is run by the government who undercuts you.
Bankruptcy always goes before a judge. If you accumulated a bunch of debt after medical school and wanted to declare bankruptcy at around the time in your life when you would be expected to start your medical career, he would shoot you down.
No unsecured loans to medical students is already a competitive market. Also refinancing non-discharable student loans with dischargable loans at lower rates (see e.g. SoFi). Unfortunately people got there before us.
I am neither a lawyer or accountant so this is from some googling
Reading up on this a little more you appear correct.
It could be considered either income from the company or a gift(for the full value of the forgiven debt) but if it’s a gift then it’s likely similar to gifts given out to audience members on TV shows like how oprah audience members given cars get a tax bill.
If it’s being given out by a company and the company can reasonably expect to be using it as publicity (they are) it can get treated like income for any individual gaining more than $600 from it and they’d owe tax. Things like houses etc are assessed at the market rate but with debts it seems clearly phrased that the full amount of the debt forgiven is counted as income and it has no exception for old unenforceable debts since they still legally exist but just aren’t enforceable.
If the show had gifted them the title to their own debts then that might have counted as a gift worth only the market value of the debts but since they forgave them as part of a publicity stunt it could very well count as income for the full amount forgiven which the individuals would have to pay.
I have no idea if you can legally refuse the gift of a forgiven debt but in the shoes of someone being forgiven a large amount I would so be doing so (only after consulting a tax lawyer), it’s not like the show is going to enforce those debts even if the individuals refuse the gift of the debt forgiveness.
This is a lot more weird than I expected and could make the lives of some of the people much much worse.
I imagine the people are free to refuse the “gift”. Otherwise it would allow buyers of cheap debt to tax-blackmail people by threatening to forgive their debt in full and report it to the IRS if they don’t pay some non-trivial fraction (but still less than the taxes would be).
“then it’s likely similar to gifts given out to audience members on TV shows like how oprah audience members given cars get a tax bill.”
Note: Articles about this regularly describe Oliver having “broken Oprah’s record” for the largest charitable giveaway on television. By this standard, they should, in fact, have to pay the tax on the full value of the debt, just as Oprah’s guests had to pay tax on the full value of the cars.
From what I gathered, he handed it off to a charity that specializes in forgiving medical debt, so I’m assuming they’ve found a way to deal with the tax consequences of doing this.
Yes, and he also mentioned that there will be no tax disadvantages, so at least they are aware of the issue.
This makes me feel better. I didn’t get the mention of the charity from the linked article.
EXCEPTIONS to Cancellation of Debt Income:
Amounts canceled as gifts, bequests, devises, or inheritances
Refer to Publication 4681 (PDF), Canceled Debts, Foreclosures, Repossessions, and Abandonments (for Individuals)
if you look up gifts and gifts given out by TV shows of companies for promotional purposes you’ll find they can also count as income so while it may count as a gift in that context the gift may then go back to counting as income when considered as a gift.
Gifts are non-taxable to the receiver; this would likely be one of the unusual cases where a debt was cancelled as a gift. The question, then, is whether it would be taxable to Oliver, and in what amount? If any individual whose debts were cancelled had debt over $14,000 forgiven, and Oliver has reached his gift tax exemption for the year, Oliver may owe the IRS 40% of the amount over $14,000 for each individual. That could be considerably more than he paid for the debt.
To confuse things further, Oliver set up a corporation to buy the debt and do the giving. Gift tax passes through to the stockholders in the corporation. I don’t know the ownership of “Last Week Tonight”, but divvying up the gift tax could be arbitrarily complicated and they may pay more for the tax accountant than they did the debt.
When Oprah gave away cars to the audience it was somehow the receivers who had to sort out paying the tax.
And apparently gifts vs income varies if the company doing it is doing it for promotional purposes which can lead to it being considered simple income.
definitely one for a good tax accountant to look at as it seems less than as simple as I expected.
So, a TV comedian and social commentator engages in a comedy bit that intentionally confuses nomative and market value for comedic effect and … I guessed you missed that this part of it was a joke?
Let’s really dig in and talk about how those cars weren’t worth the sticker price either.
I absolutely did miss the part where this was a joke. Probably because I’m seeing dozens of purported media outlets report on it as if it was not. (Not to mention that Oliver pretty clearly follows the Jon Stewart example of “If you agree with my political argument, then I’m being serious – if you don’t, it was just a joke and I’m just a comedian and why are you taking me so seriously?”)
For the record – my gripe is less with John Oliver than it is with media who are uncritically reporting this as news.
Scott regularly blogs here about how dishonest media scrounge academic studies for clickbait headlines that don’t accurately reflect what the study found. I think a similar thing is happening here.
I think you are correct. The actual episode was all right. Oliver kept pointing out that debt collection agencies buy debts for “pennies on the dollar” so he created his own debt collection agency to take advantage of that. It was very funny.
What part about that is confusing (assuming you have watched the show before)?
I think the real issue you have is this:
You disagree, generally, with the values and ideology Oliver is espousing, so it predisposes you to see positive coverage of him as “incorrect”.
The article you linked is entirely concentrated on the ideas of the selling of bad medical debt in general and the forgiveness of said debt through charities. They aren’t praising Oliver as an amazing humanitarian. Mostly they are giving positive press to the idea of medical debt forgiveness charities. They don’t even get into the meat of Oliver’s criticisms of the industry.
The headline is factually accurate and then described in more detail with even more factually accuracy within the article. It seems to me that you are overreacting.
I dispute that the headline is necessarily factually accurate.
He did not buy $15 million “worth” of debt. He bought $60,000 “worth” of debt. Because that’s the price that the debt was actually exchanged for on a well-functioning and presumably efficient market.
By this same logic, his giveaway does not, in fact, eclipse Oprah’s. The value of what he gave away was $60k, not $15m (regardless of what the IRS has to say about it).
I pretty much guarantee the description of the debt being bought included the number “$14,922,261.76” (with the dollar sign included). So the nomative worth of the debt is about $15M. Assuming that they have not been discharged in bankruptcy, which would make collection illegal and the sale perhaps fraudulent, the owner of the debt is entitled to collect that much money if they are able.
The fact that the people who owe the debt can’t actually pay it doesn’t make the nomative value of the debt less.
You are essentially just quibbling over esoterica at this point.
“He described it as eclipsing the $8 million giveaway by talk-show host Oprah Winfrey”
The “he described it” with the “show-biz flair” I noted earlier, is the queue to the reader that this is being played for effect. None of this is unclear when reading the article unless you want it to be.
Again, Oprah’s giveway wasn’t $8M either. Unless you think people pay full sticker on cars.
The nominative value of distressed debt is almost entirely irrelevant.
I can write a piece of paper that says “$10 trillion” on it, but if all anyone will pay me for it is two cents, then it’s worth two cents, not $10 trillion. The fact that hypothetically you MIGHT be able to convince someone to pay you $10 trillion for it later is irrelevant.
If I sign a contract to buy something on credit for $500, say a tanning club membership, you are not entitled to collect $2000. Nor am I entitled to say that you are only due $100.
I have my years worth of tans, and you are owed $500. The fact that I only have 5¢ to my name doesn’t change that.
I won’t answer on this thread again. You are clearly way too dug in on this.
I actually did watch that Last Week Tonight segment- yesterday!
(And people claim time is linear)
John Oliver actually goes into some detail about the debt, how it works, what its impact is otherwise and so forth before he announces that he bought it. There’s no explicit acknowledgement of the fact that he’s not *really* giving away $15M, but the context for it which he provides is absolutely complete. If a viewer watched that segment and came away with the idea that Oliver had donated $15M to charity, I feel comfortable saying that it’s not Oliver’s fault.
The Oprah stuff is, I think, the kind of ‘hyperbole-in-action-comedy’ he enjoys adding to otherwise-dry segments to spice them up.
There have been some bad LWT segments, and there are parts of this segment which I’m not entirely comfortable with, but if the debt-forgiveness shtick was taken out of context then I really don’t think John Oliver should be blamed this time.
Let’s take the sum of the products of each person on this thread’s IQ and the number of minutes they spent thinking* about it (reading, writing, stewing over).
Is it large enough that Scott should consider banning mention of newsmedians like Oliver and Stewart?
(* Charity, remember?)
1. During the show, he did say that it cost $60k, and he did not say that he paid for it out of his own pocket.
2. The whole point was to say, “Hey, did you know that anyone can buy the right to harass someone for [a huge sum of money] for the rest of their life by paying [a small sum of money]?”
3. As the libertarian-minded commenters here keep reminding us, a voluntary trade transaction is mutually beneficial. Presumably, the debt was worth less than 60k to the hospitals, and more than 60k to any collection agency willing to purchase it — how much more depending on the effectiveness of their collection practices. And the show is certainly trying to get $15m worth of goodwill and publicity out of it, so maybe that will end up being ‘the’ value after all.
There are some pretty strict laws about the extent to which a creditor can harass a debtor about their debt. (Anything that would actually legally constitute harassment is forbidden.)
Except if the government does it! 😉
As it turns out, the overlap of people who owe debts, and people who are ignorant to creditor law is quite high. Many news stories in the last 10 years have made pearl-clutching hay out of the fact that people will buy Halloween costumes of police officers, knock on debtors’ doors, and tell them if they can’t pay by the 15th they’ll be arrested and held for the next 4 months, then arraigned on a ten year felony fraud charge. Many people do not think that calling the police will make a problem with the police better, and thus never find out they are being defrauded.
Right. But the fact that this debt sells for 0.4% of the face value suggests that this is only going to work on a VERY small percentage of the people involved.
Obviously, your local news channel only needs to find one such person to run a sensationalist story about it.
Getting back to Nita above – yes, it may be relevant that you can, for a small price, purchase the right to hassle someone about their debts. But who would do this, other than an actual debt collection agency? If debt collection is so easy – why isn’t everyone doing it? If you think you could even recover 5% of the $15 million face value of the debt you purchased at $60k, that would represent a return on investment of over 1000%.
One of my points here is that, in my view, Oliver is accidentally making a point that works against what I assume is his core thesis. My first reaction when seeing this story was “Holy shit – look at how much medical debt ends up not being repaid at all – I guess the current system isn’t nearly as terrible as I have been led to believe.” Obviously I have certain biases and opinions going into this, but still…
Yeah, crime is a real problem. But it’s a different sort of problem than Nita is worried about. You cannot actually buy the right to harass someone; if you want to harass someone illegally, well, you could anyway.
If the debt was so distressed that it wasn’t going to be paid anyways, did he actually do any good? Were the people who’s debt was forgiven experiencing any stress from the unpaid debt?
That is, I can see a middle-class family experiencing misfortune getting stressed out about the constant phone calls. But a mentally-ill homeless guy who doesn’t have a phone or mailing address might not even be aware that he has outstanding medical debt.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges
What a worthless generation. On one side you get Afro-Latinx girl and other you get edgelord channers reviving white supremacism.
Still better than the generation that had actual literal Stalin on one side and actual literal Hitler on the other.
The Greatest Generation!
I think they are two different generation — missionary and lost, but point taken.
I wonder if there’s something about the economic crisis of 1929 and the crisis of 2008. Except that that doesn’t explain Stalin – Stalin was comfortably in power in 1929 and the Great Depression didn’t really affect the USSR.
Also it’s not clear how much the whole generations thing applies outside of the USA/Anglosphere/whatever. Also also – is the issue the generation that Hitler was from, or the generation that brought him to power?
As I understand it Stalin (Bolshevism in general) can be explained by a similar economic collapse that played out in basically just Russia under the last Czar.
Whereas the great political thinker of the prior generation .. is Moldbug.
Maybe Global Thermonuclear War and starting over with the cockroaches isn’t such a bad idea after all.
One could do a lot worse than Moldbug as far as “political thinkers” are concerned.
If Moldbug had published his writing under his real name in dusty old volumes instead of online as a Chinese philosopher insect, he’d probably seem a lot more comparable to political philosophers of the past.
Also, there’s the issue of “this generation’s greatest x” often being something not determined till 50 years later.
Those gosh darn young people, though. Times were better when the youth decided to set France on fire or keep countries running on coal because nuclear power is evil.
I was reading this the article “typical mind and gender identity” and I was wondering if anyone has thoughts about applying the logic of a body map/body disassociation to body dysmorphic disorder? Would those suffering from this illness feel a sense of peace if they actually did have the defects that they’re obsessed with?
Here’s the article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
How exactly did the intersection between alt-right culture and anime culture come about? It seems like 40-70% of the Twitter Nazis have anime avatars.
Both anime and extremist ideology appeal to hopeless young men. Anime Marxist Twitter is a thing too, although in that case you’d want to expand the category to include hopeless young AMAB transfolx.
Yeah makes sense; maybe there’s some Wilhelm Reich type sexual repression root from which both grow.
Wow, I was not aware of this. Twitter has gotten really weird recently.
I blame shipgirls and takahiro
a sensible position.
I blame Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and their attractive robo-nazis
I blame Legend of the Galactic Heroes, all too many people walk out of it thinking Reinhard was right.
SMBC shows us the bright side of political tribalism: comic.
Thanks. More interesting than funny, actually. I like it.
Scott, insofar as the commentariot here is great, if you do produce fewer but longer original material then keep sending us your linkables as well. Give us a reason to come back daily if you can, even if somedays just for the aggregation.
The science-positive website Skeptical Science has an essay this week “Climate Bet for Charity, 2016 Update” (which search engines find).
The executive summary is simple: prospects for contrarian wagers against continued global warming are looking worse-and-worse, in the face of sustained global heat increases, seen on land, sea, and air.
From a purely empirical perspective — assigning zero Bayesian weight to thermodynamical laws — the ocean steric-rise data and borehole data are strongest, the land data next-strongest, and the satellite troposphere temperature data relatively the noisiest and most artifact-ridden, and hence the weakest.
Guess which data the contrarians focus upon, and which they ignore. Is this cherry-picking rational? Wagering against thermodynamics hasn’t worked well in the past, has it?
Perhaps the moral is, that contrarian wagers against expert consensus make good sense, unless the wager is against thermodynamical laws. Articles like James Hansen’s “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” summarize the reasons.
That’s why contrarian climate-change wagers — yes, even Bryan Caplan’s contrarian climate-change wager — are making less-and-less rational sense.
Fans of STEM history recall, sadly, mathematician Serge Lang’s decades-long hyper-rational rejection of the HIV-AIDS causal relation. Contemporary climate-change contrarians are well-advised to take a lesson from Lang’s tragically contrarian example. Contrarian skepticism can be a Roman virtue, that is, a virtue carried too far.
I’m getting fairly strong John Sidles vibes here.
(although yes Caplan will lose that bet).
That said he does note this:
Expressing a 33% belief in the proposition is still ludicrously overconfident, though.
Good call! I needed the later comments to identify him.
Say I know more about technology than the average person. Intuitively it seems like I might be less likely to fall victim to technological unemployment than most, because I am better aware of the technological changes afoot, and know something of the theory underlying those changes.
But then I look at many non-technical people in a typical workplace and am a little amazed at how little they know about technology, even when it’s a significant input into their productivity. These people sometimes live by on their people skills and “EQ” (…) and so they are currently employed. It suddenly occurred to me the other day that people skills are unlikely to become useless in the near future. On the other hand, even relatively recently acquired tech skills can be out of date very quickly. What’s more, a lot of tech work is constantly (or increasingly?) being centralized or automated – you can do a lot of stuff with google, or some easy web-based tool, and no tech knowledge, that you used to have to get an expert in for. Databases, websites, video production, whatever. There’s an app for that, enough to get something semi-decent together, and the quality (of simple tool+consumer) is increasingly hard for techie individuals or small groups to keep up with.
Despite their total lack of knowledge of tech, non technical professionals often seem less troubled by automation and similar phenomenon than technical ones. When it comes down to it, they can usual downplay the significance of tech skills, demand others make the tech work for them, or just use charm to get technically orientated people to do what they want. Maybe its because in their ignorance actually they are somewhat immune, sitting on the banks of the river while some of us try to swim against an ever increasing current.
While there are obvious exceptions, maybe tech people are automating themselves into eventual poverty, and leaving the socialite personalities to rule over society instead. Should tech-minded people be doing more to assist each-other against this problem? Or maybe this is all just a small eddy and the main current is actually still flowing in the opposite direction, with the technophobes ultimately being left behind. Does anyone have any thoughts or interesting reads on this topic?
What Huckleberry Finn was to the inhumanity of slavery and racism, Annie Proulx’ That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) is to the inhumanity of technocapitalism. Twain’s pilgrim-character Huckleberry Finn supplies some observations regarding John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that parallel Proulx’ observations regarding her pilgrim-character Bob Dollar. As Huck says of Pilgrim’s Progress:
In short, Huckleberry Finn and That Old Ace in the Hole are two fine character studies, that focus upon the tough questions that Citizensearth raised, without however supplying simple answers, to questions that (as far as anyone knows) don’t have simple answers.
There’s a third class of job that uses neither people skills nor intellect. The majority of workers hold such jobs, examples being truck drivers and garment makers.
Knowledge workers had to obtain knowledge in the first place, and can presumably continue to do so, with the added advantage that information-processing skills are transferable. Those with soft skills can continue to do business as usual. However, a man who spent 20 years learning to iron shirts really fast can’t go from one type of skilled manual labour to another, but must start from scratch.
I think this is basically right.
If you have a low-tech job that you obtained and succeed in primarily due to your people skills (say, a sales position), you’re probably going to be fine – you’ll always be able to convince someone to pay you for something.
But if you have a low-tech job that you obtained and succeed in primarily due to being really good at a specific low-tech task, you’re in a lot of trouble. The best darn burger flipper in the universe may be valuable to McDonalds now, but he won’t be for very long…
We have an entire class of office workers essentially in this boat. Their jobs are increasingly automated or outsourced (temporarily cheaper than automation).
Knowledge workers, at least in the accounting/finance field, are expected to have knowledge of the MS Office suite. This might qualify as technically uninclined, but you’d be surprised how many people do not know how to create a simple pivot table.
Right. I would only clarify that my point is, an office worker with really good people skills is probably not at risk here. Even if the office job goes away due to technical obsolescence, their people skills should enable them to get some other job.
Basically – if you’re good at making people like you, you’ll always be able to find someone willing to pay to have you around.
I recently found this blog by the lead data scientist at MailChimp, and it strikes me that “knows excel” can mean a lot of different things: the linked blog uses it for everything from linear programming to cluster analysis to logistic regressions. Most of Gwern’s
magicanalyses could be worked in excel instead of R, in the same way that J. K. Rowling could write a novel on paper, in word, or in google docs.Keep in mind that a large number of older workers are not capable of using “Sum” functions correctly. Pivot tables are right out of the question.
I used to do some regressions in Excel when I was younger, but I am pretty sure my current boss would think I am doing voodoo and fire me.
I ran a macro today, I think I have run one once in my several years here. My coworker has run one macro once. No one else knows any VBA.
Corporate America is technologically incompetent but that’s not where our value-add lies.
You mean, how people with high “soft skills” fare better even in technical positions than those with technical skills?
There’s one simple solution: try to do both. Or at least fake those soft skills. There is indeed an upward trend in demand for corporate socialisation bullshit as opposed to technical know-how, and I suspect it’s at least partly a matter of allegiance to your employer and having the sort of personality that is on board with corporate culture (broadly speaking, not a corporate culture of any given individual company), which being first a techie and then a yes-man does not guarantee. That’s the way of the zeitgeist.
(That’s what I did with my last place of employment, which was a people-oriented position — went carefully through all the standard interview advice, no matter how much I despised that, and tried to play my part well; apparently it worked and I got the job; then it kind of became obvious that my comparative advantage was in the technical department after I learned to use their database about five times more quickly than expected. For some reason, the manager wasn’t pleased.)
Then there’s the other path of getting really, extraordinarily better at your tech specialisation and preferably several others, to be a step ahead of the current technology that exists to, basically, do the job you used to do. Which obviously not everybody can do. Also, this is about the point where I’m talking out of my ass.
In any case, you raise a very good question.
Regarding the manager being less pleased than expected, I’ve found the same with tech skills in many contexts. At an intellectual level, people sort of get that they’re valuable skills and they should appreciate them, but at a deeper more emotional level they get some kind of resentment that sort of feels like the same kind of attitude you’d get from people who thought you were cheating at cards or something. But when they’re good at something, if you’re not impressed as anything, you’re the bad guy. IDK, it’s not always like that and maybe I have it wrong but I have gotten that impression from people more than once.
One problem with soft skills is that I need to keep track of a big list of lies.
People don’t mean what they say. At my current job, I recently found out that there is a thin layer of corporate bullshit on everything, which isn’t unusual or necessarily bad, but I had been led to believe by reasons that it wasn’t there.
Some (most?) of the “corporate socialization bullshit” is a real problem, but some of it is the discovery that having great technical skills doesn’t make up for having the personality equivalent of a pile of burning cat shit. Somebody can be a great engineer or programmer, but they very rarely develop anything on their own. If nobody else can stand working with them long enough to make use of their input (design or code), the highly-technically competent person can actually have negative value.
Sales and marketing is something I am absolutely no use at whatsoever, and those are an example of skills where I think if you have them, tech isn’t going to put you out of a job (yet). Calling people on the phone may become automated and there are a lot of technical and computer packages for the job, but basically you are still trying to persuade someone to hand over money for goods or services, often against their conviction that they don’t need it or can’t afford it.
They may need to be up on social media since that’s the latest buzz in business (“We have to get our company up on Facebook/Twitter/whatever the next platform is!”) but the skills that they are relying on are, as Citizensearth says, ‘soft’ rather than hard.
I think where technical people have the advantage is being slightly ahead of the curve, where they have an idea what the “next big thing” is going to be and can provide that for the organisation or business. Being aware that your boss is likely to come back from a seminar or conference or corporate training day with the idea firmly fixed in their head that “We absolutely need BIG FLASHY THING! Why don’t we already have BIG FLASHY THING? All our competitors have BIG FLASHY THING!” If you can show that you know about BIG FLASHY THING, even a little, then you are okay. The trick is not to know too much, because it’s no good telling the boss (especially if this has come down from On High in head office) that the company doesn’t need BIG FLASHY THING as it’s not suited for what you’re doing, or it will conflict with systems already in place, or it’s a heap of crap 🙂
Despite their total lack of knowledge of tech, non technical professionals often seem less troubled by automation and similar phenomenon than technical ones.
Some of that, I think, is down to ignorance. They can imagine a production line being automated, but not their job. “They’ll never replace accountants with a completely automated system!” Oh yes they will, as soon as they get a reliable one. There are already lots of software accounting packages, if in future you get an all-singing all-dancing one that can produce a set of audited accounts, all you really need is someone to do data entry in a reliable fashion (“just enter the invoices and corresponding bank payments and the software will do all the rest”) rather than pay an accountant a couple of grand to produce a signed-off set of accounts for the year’s end.
Same with a lot of white-collar jobs that right now seem “you can’t replace a human in these”. That day will come sooner rather than later. Ironically, I think it’s the low-level, directly dealing with the public, jobs that will last the longest (until they figure out a system to replace people with the equivalent of those phone menus you get: “For XXXX, press 1, for YYYY press 2” and so on – when was the last time you got through to a Real Human Being on the other end of the line, and if so, didn’t it take you a long time to get one?)
You can’t replace accounting people with software because accountants don’t just crunch numbers.
The majority of my day is spent yelling at insurance companies to pay us or hatching schemes with other departments to force companies to pay us, and then interpret the financial impact of different schemes and settlements.
The majority of Mother Dearest’s day is spent yelling at production line managers for violating their budgets and figuring out ways to make the production line run more efficiently.
The idea of accountants as little cubicle dwellers that only crunch numbers all day is a tad behind the times.
If they could automate this, damn right they would. I am sure they will someday, when the Singularity eats us all.
Right now they are attempting to train offshore workers to do this. It is going about as well as the Dieppe raid.
“Yelling at people over the phone” is people skills 🙂
That’s the point about switching from pure [technical skills] to [technical skills plus people/soft skills]; I’ve just been landed with the job of matching up an accountancy software package with the paper documents, after the former outside accountant recommended the office switch to this system, then retired half-way through.
Need I say I have no accountancy skills, no interest in accountancy, am bad at maths, and have no training in this particular package?* And I’ve already been invoking imprecations on the retired person’s head because for some reason the edited version of the final accounts before the year-end was run didn’t get selected, the unedited version did, so now there are imaginary balances carried over to this financial year and I am currently switching between flipping between piles of papers, the software programme, and tearing out my hair trying to make one correlate with the other, plus worrying about “If I delete this incorrect figure which is not the right balance carried forward, will the external auditors that come every year to monitor the spending of public monies think I am trying to cover up fraud and embezzlement?”** 🙂
*So why me? Because I’m a warm body who was free at the time and my boss doesn’t want to do the job 🙂
**In case you think I’m joking, I have related this anecdote before, but when I did an evening class in an accountancy software package (not the one I’m currently doing an imitation of Laocoön and His Sons with), the guy teaching the class – who came from private business background – told one of the people in the class not to worry that there was a difference of five grand between her balances, that wasn’t big enough to worry about. And the majority of us in the class who, it turns out, were all in local government/public sector work, all piped up about how the outside auditors who come every year to monitor the spending of public monies will haul you over the coals if you can’t account for the fifty cent difference between the initial quote and the final invoice when purchasing goods and equipment 🙂
It only needs to be as reliable as the current system, not perfect. Legal discovery is an area that’s largely been automated. It turns out that after a few days of reading boxes full of emails of sales people negotiating the sales terms for the same products with hundreds of different customers, lawyers will start getting bored, going crosseyed and missing things. Computers can do all the processing much more quickly. They suffer from different types of errors, but the overall error rate is lower.
It’s depressing but true. The “people people” always rule. The best a non-people-person can do is extract as much from them as possible. One can fantasize about the technologists going on strike and leaving the “people people” to sell each other empty promises, but it’ll never happen.
Tech doesn’t look likely to become so good as to put tech-minded people out of business any time soon; that would take a full self-sustaining technological infrastructure, probably involving true AI. But then what does the AI need the “people people” for? That’s a good reason NOT to build in anti-“kill-all-humans” safeguards into AI.
A couple points of disagreement:
1) Tech is already heavily engaged in replacing “people skills” – people visit a website or look at reviews instead of talking to a salesperson (which used to be one of the best ways of getting information), devs market their project through Twitter and Kickstarter rather than having a marketing team, etc.
2) There are plenty of “soft skills” that are very important and don’t fit in this “people skills” vs. “tech skills” dichotomy you’re setting up – for example, being able to explain a complicated concept (it’s both tech and people), or being able to estimate when a project is likely to be delivered/how much time something will take, being able to promise something and deliver it in time, being able to keep focused on the right thing and not be distracted by the shiny, being able to consider uncomfortable ideas (“maybe I fucked up and we’ll never be able to do this”), being able to tell what’s worth doing, being able to think in the long term, etc.
I basically agree. Perhaps the dichotomy is still useful to illustrate the point, that tech is putting pressure on technical employment as much as or more than other professional jobs, particularly those where people skills may shield against the demands of being productive.
Technical skills become rapidly obsolete, but I think a lot of technical people have some sort of general “Understand the rules of a computer system” skill that stays relevant even when technology changes.
Hence why so many techies describe the process of tech support as “Look for a button that seems relevant and click it,” or “Google the error message and see what comes up,” but for some reason people still ask us for tech support instead of doing that themselves. It’s not clear what the skill is, but it seems like there is a skill.
That said, as programs become increasingly user-friendly, this is likely to become less relevant, while people skills will probably never go away.
I think this is less of a skill and more of an attitude. I came a long way towards helping my elderly father understand tech issues by making it clear to him every time that I didn’t “just know” the answer to his questions – but rather I knew where to look, or I knew how to experiment. Always tried to emphasize to him “You can do this too.”
It may sound like hokey nonsense, but I’ve always felt like 90% of solving a tech problem is believing that you can solve it. The rest is just research and experimentation.
…and then your grandfather has executed “format c:”.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but there is value in the kind of hard won epistemic humility that comes from having lost too many documents when trying to edit, save, copy or move them, etc.
It’s basically https://xkcd.com/627/
He’s probably a “people person”. You can’t handle people problems that way; if you don’t get it right or at least close the first time, you piss off the people involved and they actively work against you. Possibly you’ve created an enemy for life. This is why people skills can only be learned in a fairly narrow window (during childhood and adolescence) where it’s expected you make mistakes and most of the other people are as inexperienced as you.
I realized recently that part of the reason I know so much about computers is that when I was a kid I had nearly infinite patience for messing with our computer. For example, I know that F11 puts programs in fullscreen mode because it happened to me by accident once and I then spent several minutes pressing every button on the keyboard until I found the one that did it. What sane adult would do that? (I wonder if always-on internet connections will prevent this to some extent. Why spend an hour opening program in the “Accessories” folder when you can just get on the internet?)
On the flip side, my mother has become much more computer-competent lately. She attributes it to getting a Mac, but really she just figured out that she could Google problems and follow instructions to fix them. It’s actually kind of annoying to me to hear her rave above the Mac, but I don’t want to say anything and ruin the magic.
I have some questions about dopaminergic drugs, more specifically selegiline, and their role in increasing motivation (in the context of motivation to work / to exert effort, to sustain a high level of activity, to try new things and break out of routines, to endure in the face of boredom and other aversive stimuli, and to a lesser extent sexual motivation; I mention all this stuff because most studies I’ve seen have been on rats and, well, as we all know, rats don’t labour in the sense that humans do). We know that dopamine plays a large role in motivation; specifically, the reward system of the brain employs dopaminergic pathways which connect the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens; the release of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens is the neurological manifestation of motivation. (Am I getting this right?)
I’m asking this because I suspect that something is not functioning as it should in my brain regarding the motivation system, after having tried all the “software” / therapeutic advice for improving motivation. It manifests across the board, the majority of my behaviours wherein motivation plays a large role indicate low motivation (with three exceptions: I’m not impulsive, don’t get addicted easily, and have better than average control over my diet and exercise regime). Most doctors I’ve been to have more or less dismissed my case, saying either that my level of laziness is normal, that it’s pointless to try and get tested and see whether my hypothesis is true because testing is expensive and inconvenient, that I should forget about everything I’ve read so far about it because the internet sucks as a medium of research, that I should try psychological interventions some more (as if I hadn’t already exhausted them), or that maybe it’s not my calling in life to be to be a very productive person. (I’ve also messaged Scott about this, but since then it hasn’t been an option to try to take it, so my interest has just resurfaced.) So, I’d like to try some selegiline and see if it works. It can’t kill me, and at least it’s a start in realising WTF my problem is.
There are a bunch of non-scientific sources out there that confirm my hypothesis, so I tried to see what Real Science has to say about this.
I’ve encountered studies that observed the impact of selegiline on improving apathy following traumatic brain injury [1], [2]; these patients showed improvement. I’m more interested in cases showing reduced motivation from genetic or congenital causes, but in any case, those results were encouraging.
In this study, it seems they also tried injecting (?) deprenyl (selegiline) directly into the nucleus accumbens of rats, after which they showed increased exertion of effort:
But it also says “systemic administration”, so I’m assuming that works as well?… Sorry, full study unavailable for now.
This study (or news report thereof) indicated “higher release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in areas of the brain known to play an important role in reward and motivation, the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex” for subjects who were more willing to work hard for rewards, but… surprise, surprise, “slackers” also showed increased dopamine in another brain area, the anterior insula.
AFAIK, if you take a dopaminergic medication p.o., it goes everywhere in the brain, you don’t get to choose which brain area it affects. (And I’m not sure to which extent a human patient could receive injections into their brain on a regular basis, if at all.) These results are rather contradictory. What if I take some dopaminergic medication and it goes right into the area associated with decreased exertion of effort?
This study (warning, direct download link) indicates that selegiline improves decreased volition associated with Parkinson’s disease:
This is all I could find that didn’t have the relevant content paywalled. I have some very basic notions of pharmacology (and none at all of how to get access to a full scientific article), but could really appreciate someone who knows about this stuff telling me whether this is a promising line of research for patients with apathy/decreased volition.
As for getting articles behind paywalls, emailing the first author or the corresponding author for a reprint is almost always successful.
Is there a university library near where you live? Most of them are open to the public and you could get access to the journals there.
I am a university student and have an .edu email address, it’s just that most websites which host scientific articles don’t seem affiliated with my uni…
When I was in college, I couldn’t get journal access from my dorm but could from library computers. Either they had a per-machine license or they were whitelisting specifically those IP addresses.
That was several years ago, but it’s still worth a try.
For a student, it’s worth trying to go through your library’s website rather than directly to the hosting site. Subscription databases are often routed through a proxy server– if you go to the library’s site and log in with an active student/faculty/staff account, links from there will be seen as being from on campus.
So, for example, if I go to JSTOR from home, it’ll tell me I don’t have a subscription. If I go through the link on the university library’s web page, it’ll ask me for a campus login and then give access to anything the university subscribes to.
University libraries often also have a finding tool that allows for searching journal titles to see if any of the various overlapping services cover the journal you’re looking for in the date range you need.
If you’re not affiliated with the university, off-campus access is out, but it will often be possible to get access from an on campus computer.
(Some universities, especially public ones, will allow members of the public to do on-campus online research even if they’re not affiliated. Private institutions tend to be more restrictive. Also some online database licenses require restriction to active students/faculty/staff, and can’t be offered to non-affiliates even on campus.)
There are two ways I handle things like that 1) print journals, I’ve encountered a number of times where my university doesn’t have the online copy of the journal, but does have it in print,2) interlibrary loan, my university has a program with other schools where if they have the journal a librarian can request a scan of it within a few days.
Just pirate the articles. https://sci-hub.cc
More about this:
This article states the following:
It might be that if one dopaminergic ameliorates these symptoms, another can have a similar action?…
… I don’t know, is anyone else interested in this stuff and/or has the relevant expertise?
I found the following quote from a Hacker News comment by kragen about tabloid vs. regular journalism interesting. Before we proceed I should say that I do not want to single out this particular comment or its author as good or bad; I am only using the quote to illustrate a general concept. I’ll describe the concept after the quote:
So, how was that? The concept that I am thinking of is that there is a form to rationalist and affiliated insight that exists separately from its content. The thing about this quote for me is that its truth value is not really obvious but it clearly follows the form. I was alarmed to realize I was almost swayed by the form alone when I first read it.
Have you experienced something similar yourself?
This quote sort of takes the form of “counterintuitive statement plus support based on reason” – there’s no hard evidence provided that, say, tabloids are more likely to be correct than ordinary newspapers. Not exclusive to rationalist/adjacent type stuff, but I think you are right that it’s common.
I had to look this up:
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
― George Orwell
Probably not actually by Orwell: http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/people-are-using-fake-george-orwell-quotes-to-lecture-the-bbc-on-journalism–ZkEiZqtC7Z
So I guess I should be more careful when looking things up instead of just taking the first Google hit. 😉
Two world-class mathematicians got radical this week.
— — — — — —
Terry Tao’s What’s New weblog is hosting “It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America“. Tao’s title is self-explanatory and Tao’s reasoning is characteristically refined, hinging crucially upon the distinction between “common knowledge” and “mutual knowledge”.
Certainly the mind that rationally laid out the foundational reasoning of “The Blue-Eyed Islanders Puzzle” (of 7 April 2007) deserves to be taken seriously.
— — — — — —
Michael Harris’ weblog Mathematics without Apologies is hosting “French expert committee resigns in protest“, which concerns mass resignations by pretty much all the top-level French mathematicians and computer scientists. The resignees object to a changing research culture that “shift[s] priorities from long-term funding of laboratories and research teams to short-term funding of specific projects”, the net result being “”the confiscation of scientific choices by a purely administrative [ie, bureaucracy] management” (and in so evolving, French research culture increasingly resembles the existing US research culture).
Not for the first time, the French are launching a revolution without much certainty about how it will end up. Is the prevalent US attitude (“passive resignation to a worsening research climate”) any better?
Am I missing sarcasm? The Blue-Eyed Islanders Puzzle, including the inductive solution, is much older than the blog post. Anyway, it’s certainly NOT mutual knowledge that Donald Trump is not qualified to be President, and if it were, it would be common knowledge, seeing as many of those who believe that Trump is not qualified to be President are willing to say so loud and clear.
Tao’s reasoning is entirely dependent on the premise that the millions of people who clearly and explicitly disagree with Tao on the matter of Trump’s fitness, all secretly agree with Tao’s position and are lying for political reasons. This is an argument even lower than “the lurkers support me in email”, and the only evidence he offers is statements by high-level GOP insiders that call out Trump on specific errors or weaknesses, somewhere between damning with faint praise and praising with faint damns.
High-level GOP insiders being Trump’s main foes from day one, this would be like questioning a group of British generals in 1781 and, on account of their pointing out all of George Washington’s defeats on the path to victory, that it is “common knowledge” that Washington is unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.
I agree with Tao that Trump is almost certainly not fit to serve as commander-in-chief. But I understand that, in spite of my epic smartness, not everybody agrees with me on that. And Tao has no foundation for his subsequent “reasoning”.
This claim is too strong across all voters, but I think you can support a weaker claim like “GOP insiders all think Trump shouldn’t be the nominee but they’re uniting behind Trump because everyone else is.”
There’s a good number of GOP insiders who endorsed Trump at this point, including some who said they’d never support him. The conventional wisdom that I’ve been hearing is that the GOP is unifying for the general, so all aboard the Trump Train whether you like it or not.
But even that’s hard to support, because in the past few days alone we’ve had prominent Republicans calling him out for his “Mexican judge” remarks. There’s still room for Republicans to oppose him openly instead of secretly.
Further muddying the waters, even if you’re a NeverTrump Republican and you’re willing to be loud and proud about that fact, what can you actually do by now? You probably don’t like Hillary much better. Even if this was “common knowledge,” how do you act on that knowledge?
The best you can say is “Don’t vote for Trump, but you should still vote for down-ticket Republicans,” which IIRC some NeverTrumpers have been doing. So I guess I don’t buy the weaker claim either.
It seems that a lot of the GOP insiders are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They endorse Trump on the record, but as quietly as they possibly can and usually “with reservations.”
Then whenever there’s a Trump-related media scandal, they loudly denounce him and threaten to withdraw their endorsement and so on and so forth.
They’ve learned nothing from the past six months. They still fail to understand that Trump’s “controversial” statements are taken as a positive to a large segment of the country. They are still playing the game as if the worst thing that can possibly happen to them is for MSNBC to call them a racist. They are going to get crushed in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of Trump voters specifically avoid voting for down-ticket Republicans.
You are equivocating between “large segment” and “majority of voters in a particular district”.
I’m sure it is a heady feeling to know that there’s a lot of other crass immoral people out there, but a lot isn’t the same as enough.
@Anon – “I’m sure it is a heady feeling to know that there’s a lot of other crass immoral people out there, but a lot isn’t the same as enough.”
Eh, give it awhile. We can wait if we have to.
In today’s Shtetl Optimized column “Daddy, why didn’t you blog about Trump?”, Scott Aaronson cogently (and wittily) supplies the specificity that John Schilling seeks.
The Nybbler is not “missing sarcasm” as he fears, but rather is advised to reflect on the crucial logical distinction — which is a crucial socio-empathic distinction too — between “common knowledge” and “mutual knowledge”; this distinction is at the heart of Tao’s analyses of both the Blue-Eyed Islanders Puzzle (2007) and the Puzzle of Trump’s Electoral Support (2016).
I see Aaronsen supply great specificity about what he believes makes Trump unsuitable as a president. I must have missed the part where he provides any evidence or “specificity” about Trump’s supporters secretly believing Trump to be unsuitable as president.
Smart, college-educated upper-middle-class people agreeing that Trump is unfit to be President and writing for one another about why Trump is unfit to be President, yawn, been there, done that. And yes, some of them keep this to themselves and support Trump for tactical reasons. But knowledge that is limited to smart, college-educated upper-middle-class people is in no meaningful sense “common knowledge”. Get back to me when someone has evidence that the other quarter-billion or so Americans all secretly partake of this universal anti-Trumpian consensus.
” and writing for one another about why Trump is unfit to be President”
Don’t forget harping on how stupid all those racist, xenophobic redneck scumbag not-liberal dum-dums are for the billionth time. That’ll convince ’em!
Aaronson’s post is exactly the opposite of this.
@Eggo,
Uncalled for dude.
@hlynkacg
Literally a quote, broski.
Not the first part, the second.
The second part is pretty close to a straight quote. What Aaronson wrote:
“my friends and colleagues constantly describe the rise of Trump as “incomprehensible”—or at best, as comprehensible only in terms of the US being full of racist, xenophobic redneck scumbags who were driven to shrieking rage by a black guy being elected president. Which—OK, that’s one aspect of it, …”
He’s arguing that one has to go deeper, but he is describing that as “one aspect” of the reason for the rise of Trump.
To be fair, I’d have totally cut him a break for that… except for the following “and hopefully we’ll have gotten rid of enough white people to make Texas blue” part.
Do these people not get how much condescension and hatred drips from everything they say? Is it just expressed so casually in that society that nobody even notices they’re doing it?
My point is that this analysis is not original to Tao; it’s the standard analysis of that puzzle, which I heard in the 1980s.
And also that, as John Schilling and I have said, it simply is neither common nor mutual knowledge that Trump is not qualified to be President. Many assert it, loudly. There is no evidence that there are many people out there thinking Trump is unqualified but not realizing that other people think so. The fact that Scott Aaronson didn’t openly assert it until today doesn’t change that. Aaronson even makes this point:
The notion that someone could be following this election cycle and avidly consuming media and coming to the conclusion that the problem here is not enough people are denouncing Trump strikes me as incredible – in the most literal sense of the term (not at all credible)
“Damn Donald Trump! Damn everyone who won’t damn Donald Trump!! Damn everyone that won’t put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning Donald Trump!!!”
Drat him. Double drat him. CONFOUND HIM!
The problem is, the people saying Trump should not be president are not saying “He would be terrible in the job because he has no experience of government; running a business is not at all the same thing, and he hasn’t held office even on the level of public dogcatcher”, they’re screaming he’s a racist he’s a sexist he’s a fascist HE’S THE NEXT HITLER!!!!
So most people will tune that out as “yeah, well, you would say that” and ignore it, which means that sensible criticism about “He can’t do the job” gets lumped in with the “If Trump becomes president we’ll all be living in a YA novel come true!” vapourings.
Tao is a mathematician, not a political scientist or historian or anything like that, so I don’t see why his opinion on politics is automatically more valid here than the average Joe’s. Being a scientific supergenius says nothing about whether your policy choices are right or even moral — Stephen Hawking fell for BDS propaganda, after all.
Are the political opinions of historians and political scientists any more valid than anyone else? I don’t see it.
No no one’s opinions are any more valid than anyone else’s. A recovering meth head with an IQ of 90 that’s now found Jesus is as fully equipped as anyone else to predict what the consequences of electing Trump president might be. Any other conclusion is rank elitism which is the worst thing ever.
A historian or a political scientist — at least, the Platonic ideal of one — would be better able to understand how Politician X’s behavior and positions map onto experiences of the past thanks to their years of study. So, yes.
This doesn’t mean automatic deferment or anything like that, just that their statements deserve a little more consideration than the average mathematician ranting in a bar somewhere.
ThirteenthLetter asserts (and other SSC commenters agree):
Objectively speaking, mathematicians are far more likely than most citizens to be aware of the historical context supplied by works like Sanford L. Segal’s scrupulously documented history Mathematicians Under the ***** (2014).
A crucial lesson of that history is “Speak up early, speak up plainly, and speak up loudly.” There’s no rational reason to study this history, if we don’t take lessons from it, is there?
Shall we criticize Tao and Aaronson (and increasingly many of their STEM colleagues), for speaking up earlier and more plainly and more loudly, than the too-shy too-quiet STEM professionals of the 1930s?
In view of history, Tao’s and Aaronson’s concerns and criticisms are rationally justified, in full-to-overflowing measure, aren’t they?
You can say the word Nazi, it’s not on the banlist or anything. Censoring it is kind of a baffling choice actually.
> In view of history, Tao’s and Aaronson’s concerns and criticisms are rationally justified, in full-to-overflowing measure, aren’t they?
No. Tao’s concern is erroneous. Even if he is right about Trump being unqualified to be President, he is wrong about this being a matter of mutual knowledge which “merely” needs to be made common knowledge. It is required instead that Trump’s opponents actually convince people that Trump is unqualified and (despite Tao’s objections to this) that Hillary is qualified, or at least less unqualified.
Aaronson’s objections I think are also erroneous, not because they’re not bad things about Trump but because they aren’t bad things that demonstrate he’s unusually unqualified
1) Libel laws — Trump’s proposals here are far weaker than previous laws, such as the Smith Act and the 1918 Sedition Act
2) FDR’s court packing scheme.
3) Trump’s “temporary ban” on Muslims is not so radical as to be disqualifying, nor is it clear that the Constitution forbids discrimination against immigrants based on religion. (note that Trump later qualified his proposed ban as not applying to US citizens)
4) Killing the families of terrorists is a terrible idea, but again, it doesn’t make Trump particularly “unqualified”.
5) Not ruling out the use of nukes against ISIS is just good sense. Why rule anything out? Let them wonder.
6) Another terrible idea, but again, an isolationist foreign policy would disqualify a lot of Presidents.
7) This is probably the strongest one, actually.
8) Trump called Kim Jong Un a “maniac” in the same sentence where he was saying “you have to give him credit” for ruthlessly destroying his rivals. Same with Tiananmen square; he said they were horrible while being impressed with their competence in being horrible. Not disqualifying, though it certainly makes one nervous; is he only saying they’re horrible because it’s expected and does he really admire them without qualifications? Or is it just the awe one might have for any competent villain?
9) I take this one as just running his mouth; it’s the protesters doing most of the roughing-up at his rallies.
10) I agree with him on global warming, except the Chinese part.
While I sympathize with Aaronson, and admire his candor. I think he’s wrong about Trump’s suitability being common knowledge. I think that he may even be wrong about Trump being less suitable than Clinton. Even if he’s correct, I’m not entirely sure it would matter. Trump’s appeal has little if anything to do with his “suitability”. Trump’s appeal is that he fights.
Furthermore I would suggest the possibility that Trump may be substantially less dangerous than Clinton because he wears his hostility on his sleeve. We can trust the media and the bureaucracy to be suitably on guard against him or his supporters doing anything truly heinous rather than covering for him.
Indeed — there’s a segment of Trump’s support that is banking on his total unsuitability causing the government to collapse. People who just want to burn it all down. I’m not particularly sanguine that whatever gets built out of the rubble will be more to their liking, but on the other hand, they’ve been stockpiling canned food and ammunition for over a decade, so maybe they have an edge there.
Anyone who calls Trump unqualified and then throws their weight behind Hillary immediately reinforces what support I have for Trump.
At worst, you have two corrupt politicians; I vastly prefer one that is nationalist instead of globalist.
There is a credible argument that Trump is unqualified but honest while Clinton is qualified but corrupt. Trying to collapse everything onto a single axis will I think greatly interfere with your understanding of other peoples’ views, because other people care about different things than you do.
Corrupt is different than unqualified.
I think Clinton is corrupt, but the country could easily handle 4 years. Lots of our Presidents have probably been corrupt. And the Clintons are often very careful and deliberate bout their corruption. She isn’t going to start nuclear war.
I don’t like Hillary and am really annoyed by her attempt to Goldwater Trump (both because I don’t believe Trump would start a nuclear war and because I will never forgive LBJ for that even though I wasn’t born at the time… the Dems rightly berate the GOP for fearmongering in recent years, but what is bigger fearmongering than saying your opponent will start a nuclear war?)
That said, generally speaking, I would prefer a corrupt but competent leader to the reverse. Corruption may result in millions of dollars of waste as the corrupt line their own pockets; incompetence can result in billions of dollars of waste, thousands of lost lives, and decades-long ramifications if bad programs are passed.
The problem with the ‘corrupt but competent’ formulation is that the presidential election isn’t just about the position of president, but also about the relationship between the executive branch (the Executive Office of the President), the federal agencies and the press.
The problem is that the corruption currently in Washington is tied to the incompetence of the federal agencies. A corrupt but competent president that owes favors to the agencies (or their patrons, like the American Federation of Government Employees) may not be willing to fix the incompetence of the agencies.
Trump might end up making more competent decisions, not because he would be a more competent president than Hillary, but because he would have no relationship with the patrons of the incompetent agencies, and he would not have a compliant press to shield him from the political fallout generated by that incompetence. The actions of the incompetent VA and TSA should make any president look bad, and even an incompetent one should need no encouragement to fix the issues to make themselves look good.
Likewise, Bernie Sanders may be the least likely major presidential candidate to start a nuclear war, but what we should be worrying about is the likelihood of a nuclear war started by anyone on the his watch if he were to win. It’s easy to imagine that a weak president might cause a paranoid Iranian or Israeli regime to be much more likely to launch a first strike.
Competent corruption means not driving the targets of your extortion scheme or protection racket all the way to bankruptcy or suicide. We’ve survived eight years of Clintonian corruption; we can endure another four. The guy for whom repeatedly declaring bankruptcy and walking away is a “winning” strategy, maybe not.
At the level of U.S. president, I don’t think “corruption” is really about “lining their pockets” anymore.
Most of the current HRC scandals (emails, Benghazi, whatever) aren’t about her trying to use the system to get rich, they’re about her using the system to gain more power – for power’s sake. People with the intelligence and abilities of her and Bill could have made a LOT more money in the private sector than they have spending their lives on politics.
When you look at it this way, I think the difference between “corrupt” and “incompetent” starts to minimize. Hillary’s corruption will be such that she will favor policies that advance her own power, and those of her friends/party/whatever. This would include things like unnecessary wars, lives-lost, decades-long ramifications, etc.
We’ve survived eight years of Clintonian corruption; we can endure another four.
It’s just as easy to say “we survived somewhere between seven and fifteen years of incompetent president(s), we can endure another four.” At this point, I seriously doubt either Trump or Clinton, or, for that matter, any of the other presidential candidates this election cycle, is competent enough to fix the massive issues with the federal government. We’ve seen major incompetence from the VA, the IRS, the EPA, the TSA, HUD, the department of Education, the BATFE, HHS, and I’m sure I’m missing a few. The federal government is nowhere near as competent as it was when Bill Clinton was president, and that’s what’s going to determine whether we ‘survive’.
It’s just as easy to say “we survived somewhere between seven and fifteen years of incompetent president(s), we can endure another four.”
Very easy to say, but uselessly vague in that it offers no standard for incompetence.
The United States has never endured more than four years under a President without prior experience at the highest non-presidential levels of government.
Taylor/Fillmore (1849-1853) saw the destruction of the Whig party, the Compromise of 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Act, leading to
Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865), during whose administration nothing bad happened, followed by
Garfield/Arthur (1881-1885), whose competence was never put to the test due to their infirmity, and finally
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), who showed the world what putting a self-made millionaire in office could do for the economy.
I suppose one can excuse Lincoln on the grounds that his predecessors had made a civil war in the early 1860s inevitable regardless of the level of executive competence in the White House, but that just doubles down on Taylor/Fillmore. Either way, it’s not looking good for the Republic under an incompetent and inexperienced President. The merely corrupt have historically done far less harm, particularly the ones named “Clinton”.
Some additional thoughts on beating Trump…
Of the options presented by Arronson I think the Johnson Gambit (Option 4) is the one with the most with the highest likelihood of success. Unfortunatley It’s not really an option because at the end of the day I think that Trump has a lot more in common with Clinton than Johnson does and that as such I suspect that the vast majority of Democratic donors and voters want Trump to be the nominee. Heck, a disasterous Trump presidency might be the best thing to happen to the Democratic party since FDR.
Realistically I think the opportunity to defeat him, and a what he represents is rapidly diminishing in the rear view mirror. The time to beat him was when he was still one candidate among many. He thrives on the attention and would wither without it. I think other Scott is dreaming if he thinks that testimonials from young urban professionals about how “unsuitable” Trump, are going do anything but make Trump stronger. Elizabeth Warren and the recent violence against Trump supporters are really the best spokesmen he has. He will say that his opponents are either petty thugs, or a bunch of “out of touch elites” and the Democrat’s response will prove him correct.
At this point, I think that the only way to legitimately stop Trump is for people to start ignoring Trump while giving positive attention to Clinton, or for a Third Party to present themselves.
“He can’t lose, everyone I know is voting for him!”
IIRC, (and I am very fuzzy on who posted it and what the exact words were, so take this with a salt lick) hlynkacg at one point posted that Trump will do very well among Hispanics in the general election because they have a culture that admires strength or machismo.
Regardless of whether hlynka posted it, I think any general view of Trump as an unstoppable juggernaut is based on assumptions along that vein, in the mode of Scott Adam’s “master manipulator” argument.
This is a good point and generally seems to be true.
There are a lot of explanations for Trump’s success that basically rely on the idea that what people like about him is his refusal to apologize, his tendency to double down, etc.
Less mainstream explanations generally link this to Redpill-style thinking (basically positing that Trump is treating the electorate like a PUA treats women, in contrast to the other Republican candidates).
@HeelBearCub
As I recall it was in the context of someone saying something about how “no Latino will ever vote Trump” and I suggested that they were seriously underestimating the level of friction between legal immigrants and illegals and the appeal of machismo.
And to be clear. I don’t think that Trump is an unstoppable juggernaut, I actually place his odds at just under 50% atm.
That said, I think that he has been, and continues to be, seriously underestimated by all involved. And not only that, the Democrats’ response to him has made him stronger. Like I said above…
Elizabeth Warren’s comments and the recent violence against Trump’s supporters in California are the best advertising he could have possibly gotten. He will say that his opponents are a bunch of petty thugs lead by “out of touch elites” and people will believe him because that’s exactly what they look like.
@dndnrsn
I think the two go hand in hand.
I agree with hlynkacg.
I’m not predicting that Trump will win a majority of Hispanic votes – but given his machismo appeal to blue-collar values, I have a very hard time believing he won’t do significantly better than Mitt Romney did.
Hispanics may care more about immigration than whites, but they don’t care more about immigration than they care about “will I still have a job in six months,” which, rightly or wrongly, seems to be an area where Trump is perceived by many to be superior to Hillary.
@hlynkacg:
They’re definitely related. Are the more far-right interpretations (in which Trump is some kind of Getting Elected Artist) an add-on to the mainstream right interpretation (in which Trump is a backlash to the PC left), or is the mainstream right interpretation a (consciously or unconsciously) watered-down version of the far-right interpretation?
It’s hard to say. But I’m leaning towards the PC backlash end of the spectrum if only because that’s what I’m seeing in my own circle.
Can’t it be both?
One of the qualities of a “getting elected artist” probably needs to be “ability to identify and exploit a promising niche” – which, in this case, is the anti-PC stuff.
I was more wondering whether the mainstream right wingers are aware the extent to which they are presenting a milder version of what people who are unquestionably part of the far right are saying.
It is bizarre seeing respectable, suit-and-tie-wearing columnists writing milder, less profane versions of stuff that people with Pepe-as-Pinochet avatars were writing a few months earlier.
@dndnrsn – “I was more wondering whether the mainstream right wingers are aware the extent to which they are presenting a milder version of what people who are unquestionably part of the far right are saying.”
it seems like the left has largely and increasingly controlled the overton window for quite some time. At this point, it seems obvious that the right either has to fight back to something like parity, or else simply abandon the field. The left is never going to stop calling us nazi racist misogynerd shitlords anyway, so what does it matter?
@Faceless Craven:
It’s seductive to look at the issues that aren’t going the way you want them to and claim the opposition is all powerful. But the Overton window is on a case by case basis, and there really isn’t any sort of meta-narrative that is really coherent around this.
Some things move right and some move left. The policy window on abortion has moved right, not left, over the past 16 years. Funding for many government functions has been moving right since at least Reagan (per capita, inflation adjusted). Hell, Bill Clinton block granted welfare for cripes sake, and the block has been frozen ever since.
Using the “past 16 years” to assense changes in policy and thinkability is like looking at last winter and declaring that global warming ain’t happening. These changes might be significant, but unless you look at a much longer timeframe, they may as well be noise.
@HeelBearCub – “It’s seductive to look at the issues that aren’t going the way you want them to and claim the opposition is all powerful. But the Overton window is on a case by case basis, and there really isn’t any sort of meta-narrative that is really coherent around this.”
What would you call the one that endlessly maps current culture-war conflicts one-for-one onto a hindsight projection of the 1960s civil rights movement?
“Some things move right and some move left.”
I’m not really talking about policy. I’m talking about how we talk to each other. The Sad Puppies were treated as poorly as they were because their opponents didn’t just see them as evil, they saw them as too weak to need to be negotiated with. There’s a part of the human brain that likes crushing things too weak to put up a defense, especially when the things being crushed are evil and totally deserve it. Think MsScribe’s “cockroaches”.
When your opponents are in that frame of mind, trying to appear reasonable is pointless. Do what you need to do, and to hell with what they say about it. If they’re right and you’re doomed, at least you go down with your head held high. If they’re wrong, maybe you start winning, and they realize that negotiation and mutual respect are a nice idea after all.
Hence the situation dndnrsn is pointing out; a number of people on the right aren’t interested in “moderate” any more, which means all the stuff pushed to the fringes in an effort to seem reasonable comes flooding back in.
@Faceless Craven:
You referenced the Overton Window, which I understand mostly in terms of politics, which is why I gave a policy example.
I still think the phenomena you are talking about is mostly a case of a combination of selection and confirmation bias.
The position of the U.S. on people who happen to be black has moved “left” a “considerate” amount since our founding. I’m thinking that you probably have no issue with 95%-99% of that movement (depending on how you want to measure it). So, if you object to the general “leftward” movement of speech on this issue, it’s only because you a) were primed to see that it was bad, b) selected a period that was entirely bad (in your mind), and c) only remember the bad things that occurred in that period, and not the good ones.
Sorry, for using race an example, but it’s easy to see the concept there. I think it applies similarly to other areas, like women’s rights.
@FacelessCraven: You said
Well, sort of.
If you’re talking about the new far right we’re seeing, I don’t get the sense they’re moderate right-wingers deciding that being moderate is a losing strategy, and going from there. A lot of them seem to either be people from “culturally left-wing” backgrounds, “liberals” not “leftists”, who have reacted in a big way to what they see as the excesses of those to the left of them or ex-libertarians who came to agree with Thiel regarding freedom vs democracy. They went straight from liberal or libertarian to reactionary without stopping at conservative.
If, on the other hand, we’re talking about mainstream right-wing pundits who are, knowingly or unknowingly, scrubbing the parentheses and cuckold-related references from stuff the former produce … they probably still think of themselves as moderates.
And I guess my point is that you could on the one hand see the former as a more extreme, gussied-up version of the latter, or you could see the latter as a watered-down, incomplete version of the former.
I think you are right that taboos are breaking down, in part because of the “if you outlaw something, only outlaws will have it” situation you are referencing, but also because of a sort of inflation: consider Trump and Sanders. Conventional wisdom was that Trump would crash and burn for saying the stuff he did and proposing what he has – but he didn’t. Conventional wisdom was also that Americans were so allergic to socialism that even a whiff of it would scare everyone away except that one tom-tom player with the white-guy dreads sitting in the quad. Neither piece of conventional wisdom was vindicated. It would probably have been five or ten years ago – but there’s been a boy who cried wolf situation with both.
@HeelBearCub – “So, if you object to the general “leftward” movement of speech on this issue, it’s only because you a) were primed to see that it was bad, b) selected a period that was entirely bad (in your mind), and c) only remember the bad things that occurred in that period, and not the good ones.”
Race seems like an excellent example. In the 90s, the Overton Window on race I remember was that we should aim to be colorblind, that racism was a serious problem that should be fought through government sanction and social pressure, and that everyone could get along if we abandoned prejudice and pitched in together. I would describe that picture as primarily leftist.
The problem seems to be that wasn’t a stable position either for the left or the right. Government and social sanction against racism became well-nigh universal, everyone pitched in together… and we still can’t get along. The consensus doesn’t get either side what they want, so it can’t last. A good chunk of the left has concluded that colorblindness is itself racism, that prejudice is necessary rather than being part of the problem, and that government and social sanction need to be redoubled. In response to that, a good chunk of the right has concluded that racism is a distraction from the actual problems or possibly even accurate to a limited degree (HBD, say), that the other side has no intention of abandoning its own prejudices, and that pitching in together is a mug’s game under the current conditions. Paying lip service to the old consensus appears to serve no useful purpose, so people are abandoning it and looking for something new.
I think a similar pattern holds for feminism, immigration, gun control, and so on. In all of them, I see a left-leaning consensus in the 90s that failed to secure a stable peace in the culture war, and so collapsed. I think Gay Rights still has a shot at a stable position, but is well into the process of being dragged off it by intersectionality. I haven’t really followed abortion closely enough to comment, though the impression I have is less of a broad cultural backswing than slow and limited erosion via cultural insurgency; the broad position seems pretty stable to me. Could be wrong, though.
@dndnrsn – “I think you are right that taboos are breaking down, in part because of the “if you outlaw something, only outlaws will have it” situation you are referencing, but also because of a sort of inflation: consider Trump and Sanders… ”
Exactly, and I think this inflation/decay thing applies at all levels of political discourse. Political narratives have to eventually output a stable equilibrium, or they eventually collapse. We can only have the 80s war on drugs or the 90s war on racism so long before the next generation loses patience and decides it’s time to try something else.
[EDIT] – “They went straight from liberal or libertarian to reactionary without stopping at conservative.”
Well, in my own case, I started as strongly conservative, drifted to strongly liberal over a decade or so, and have bounced back to reactionary in about a year and a half due to the causes you describe. I think what I see as liberal control of the overton window in the 90s-00s has a lot to do with that. A lot of people either drifted to or grew up as liberal by default. they now see liberalism as having failed them, but have no conservative antibodies for reactionary thought.
@FacelessCraven:
I think your time line is just too short. The fact that you call it the “90s war on racism” is indicative of this.
There are plenty of people alive today who were born when Southern governments still took fire hoses to blacks who protested Jim Crow laws. You can’t start your time line in the 90s and have any hope of getting a realistic sense of what is going on.
Otherwise, you allow people to seamlessly shift from Jim Crow to dog-whistle and when you call them out on it the accuse you of not being “color blind”. Many of the same people who supported Jim Crow will try and game the system when it is color blind in name only.
At some point we will probably have enough admixture where a plurality of black people are as black as I am Italian, then one might begin to be able to see what it means to be truly color blind. My nominally Irish cousin, who gets her kinky black hair from her Czech grandmother on her half-Italian mother’s side married a black man whose mother is white. Their kids are beautiful and smart and funny and I hope they see themselves mostly as American, but also black and Irish and Czech and Italian. I hope they learn how to make the family red sauce that my great-grandmother made when she came over on the boat. And I hope they never think that is anything but awesome.
But if you implicitly say my cousins are two SD stupider than I am because they are black, I will kick your fuckin’ ass from here to Sunday. Just the same way that if you presumed that my wife’s father was prone to violence and stupid because he grew up a poor white dirt farmer my wife would kick your ass.
And I say that in that way because I think you will understand it and not hold it against me. It’s about respect, and too many people, for too long, got none of it because of the color of their skin. It’s not ancient history, it’s right there in the rear view mirror “closer than it appears”.
@FacelessCraven:
You said
Regarding terms, I tend to differentiate “liberal” from “leftist” and “conservative” from “reactionary”. I still see “liberal” used to mean “left of mainstream” sometimes – but only really from people on the right; the actual left of mainstream types tend to sneer at those they call liberals in a way that bears more than a passing similarity to the way the new far right sneers at conservatives they liken to cuckolds: naive dupes who don’t realize they’re helping the other team at best, secret members of the other team at worst. I’d call myself a liberal – I’m a left-winger but I reject the means of making moral judgments, the epistemology, the norms of discourse, etc that tend to characterize a lot of people who call themselves “leftists” today. Probably a lot of the commentariat falls into the same boat as me.
I think your “conservative antibodies” comment is hitting on something. A lot of the new far right – who are certainly reactionaries – seem to view conservatives in the way someone on the left might, but they reach different conclusions. An example would be the essays and such you see promoting religiosity as a means of building communities, creating interpersonal bonds, and having various other positive but mundane effects. They are basically taking a secular view of religion – religion as explained by and of use for entirely secular reasons – which is something associated with the left more than the right. However, someone who actually was brought up in a religious community, who is actually an earnest religious believer, etc is unlikely to say that they go to church every week because it’s necessary for social cohesion and social trust, etc. They actually believe in the religion itself.
@HeelBearCub – “I think your time line is just too short. The fact that you call it the “90s war on racism” is indicative of this. There are plenty of people alive today who were born when Southern governments still took fire hoses to blacks who protested Jim Crow laws. You can’t start your time line in the 90s and have any hope of getting a realistic sense of what is going on.”
This may be a fundamental point of disagreement for us; I do not see social movements as seamless. We recognize that the suffragettes were in many ways different from the later feminists. We recognize that the later feminists can be broken down into a second or third wave of the movement, and that those movements are probably different from feminism as it currently exists. In gay rights, the stonewall riots era was different from the 80s gay rights movement, which was different from the Gay Marriage-focused movement of the 90s-00s. I believe those discontinuities matter deeply.
For race, I think the civil rights movement won fairly decisively in the 70s and 80s. I was raised in a very conservative family in a very conservative state. I was home-schooled, and listened to the complete Rush Limbaugh program every day, and the liberal 90s consensus described above is what I grew up seeing as the norm. To the extent that the right was simply trying to conceal their racism, they did it successfully enough to fool their own children.
“Otherwise, you allow people to seamlessly shift from Jim Crow to dog-whistle and when you call them out on it the accuse you of not being “color blind”. Many of the same people who supported Jim Crow will try and game the system when it is color blind in name only.”
…Or possibly they actually abandon their Jim Crow positions completely, and take up new ones that are considerably to the left of where they started, but not actually far enough to catch up with where leftism is now. Certainly their children did. The society that produced Bull Conner was dead and gone before I was born, but the left has been claiming to be fighting it my entire life. Maybe most opposition to Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws started out as a longing for the good old days of open white supremacy, but remain today because Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws are legitimately a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with racism.
remember that study from “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup” that found political bigotry significantly stronger than racism?
“And I say that in that way because I think you will understand it and not hold it against me. It’s about respect, and too many people, for too long, got none of it because of the color of their skin. It’s not ancient history, it’s right there in the rear view mirror “closer than it appears”.”
I take no offense, but neither do I agree. Racism is not “right there”. America in the last 25 years is the least racist society that I’ve ever heard of, possibly the least racist that has *ever existed in human history*, and it doesn’t seem to have been enough to fix our problems. That shouldn’t be an excuse to dive back into the cesspool, but it does call into question whether the crusade has hit diminishing returns and it’s time to switch tactics. On this point, again, radicals on the left and right both agree; the left argues for doubling down, the right argues for trying something else.
HBD is a profoundly ugly idea, but punching people isn’t going to make it less or more true. For what it’s worth, I have nothing to brag about in the IQ department and would be very happy to see it proven conclusively false in any case.
The often unacknowledged flip-side is that there are a lot people who weren’t. For anyone under the age of 50 “racism” isn’t about Jim Crow or the summer of 68. It’s about coming up, and staying on top. while screaming, “187” on a motherfuckin’ cop.
Well, this isn’t the first place I would have expected to find Sublime lyrics.
“HBD is a profoundly ugly idea”
Why?
Almost everyone recognizes a lot of biological diversity across individuals. Most adult men in my society are substantially taller than I am and substantially worse at learning mathematics. That’s an obvious fact, and I don’t see anything ugly about it. If anything, the fact that humans vary a lot makes for a more interesting and attractive world.
Does that change when we discover that some of the differences correlate with the environment in which your ancestors grew up, as one would expect on straightforward Darwinian lines? I don’t see why.
@David Friedman – Because we’ve spent two generations pounding in the idea that it doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s who you are on the inside that counts. Your brain is as Inside as it gets, and the idea that brain quality correlates to skin color is a bitter, bitter pill. No amount of equivocation about how IQ isn’t the sole measure of man is going to make that pill sweeter; no one wants to see themselves as congenitally stupider than others, or worse yet other groups.
[EDIT] – To be clear, IQ *ISN”T* the sole measure of man. The problem is that way too much of society reflexively believes it is, and fixing that is going to be a very painful process.
@Dndnrsn – “Regarding terms, I tend to differentiate “liberal” from “leftist” and “conservative” from “reactionary”.”
Good point, and I should probably have used “leftist with liberal leanings” instead. Likewise, I think I grew up conservative, but am now much more of a reactionary. If I shift again (and rather expect I will, as the situation changes), I expect to lean back toward the liberal.
Thanks to everyone in this thread, by the way. I’ve greatly enjoyed the discussion.
@FacelessCraven, You seem to be saying that racism in the form of outright bigotry is a thing of the past. Is this a correct reading? If so, I’ve seen plenty of examples, up close, that show it is still alive and kicking.
@Faceless
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx
Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between colored people/blacks and whites?
opinion whites (black)
1969- 17 (56)
1979- 33 (66)
1991- 44 (71)
2003- 60 (78)
Group opinion isn’t available prior to that, but the 1959 survey had only 4% of people in favor.
So yeah, Americans were incredibly racist until 1995-97 (approval went up by 16% among whites). Remember, this isn’t asking if you personally want to marry someone of a different race, but if you are okay with the idea in general.
The sheer volume should make it clear this isn’t conservatives hiding something from their children. A good portion of people who identified as liberal were also pretty racist.
@Anonymous – “You seem to be saying that racism in the form of outright bigotry is a thing of the past. Is this a correct reading?”
Within the mainstream culture, yes, and it’s been so for a generation or so. I just got back from discussing this over dinner with a friend, and he mentioned how the first time he saw Blazing Saddles, he was so horrified by the blatant racism that he shut it off halfway through. His upbringing left him with zero context for that sort of humor.
“If so, I’ve seen plenty of examples, up close, that show it is still alive and kicking.”
I’m sure you have. I haven’t, as it happens, but I’m aware they exist. Some level of bigotry is pretty clearly intrinsic to human psychology, and there will always be outliers who run with it. We fixed it to the extent that it can be fixes, and that still didn’t solve our race problems. From this, I conclude that fixing those problems is going to require something more than driving racism further underground. Less racism alone doesn’t result in sunshine and rainbows; maybe the lack of sunshine and rainbows is actively creating the racism.
@Samuel Skinner – “So yeah, Americans were incredibly racist until 1995-97 (approval went up by 16% among whites). ”
If white Americans are “incredibly racist” for majority disapproval of sharing wedding vows in the 80s, what were they for disapproving of sharing water fountains and bus seats and restaurant tables in the 50s? Were blacks in the 60s “incredibly racist” for having a lower approval of interracial marriage than whites in the mid-90s?
I don’t see an appreciable contradiction between what I’ve said above and the data you linked. Under the Connor Bull culture, interracial marriage was utterly unthinkable. That culture was destroyed in the 70s, and its lingering effects faded rapidly in the following decades.
And again, a large chunk of the left and right both agree that it didn’t work, and the 90s “colorblind” ideology is dying or dead on both sides of the political spectrum; possibly even more so on the left than on the right.
Racism Plus?
Motivated reasoning alarm sounding. The answer is obviously yes. You shouldn’t have to ask this.
30% of over 65 and 16% 50-64 (born 1952-1966 so grew up in the 60s and 70s) still disapprove of inter-racial marriage. The culture wasn’t destroyed; people just died and were replaced by others who didn’t share their views.
Given the majority of whites didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1996, I’m curious how you are sure today it is a large chunk.
@Samuel Skinner – “Racism Plus?”
Calibrate your scale. I am fine to concede that our society at its best was “incredibly racist”, as long as it’s clear that “incredibly racist” is equivalent to about an 10 out of 100, and that number is unusually, perhaps uniquely low among the societies we can observe. Personally disapproving of interracial marriage (not even claiming it should be illegal!) seems way, way less racist than seeing an interracial bus seat as a justification for violence, which is in turn way less racist than actively exterminating other races.
Again, some level of racism is probably irreducible given a scarcity society and human nature; my claim is we probably got as close to that level as “fighting racism” could get us, that at some point trying harder appears to increase racism rather than reducing it, and that if we want to reduce it further we are probably going to have to try something else.
“Motivated reasoning alarm sounding. The answer is obviously yes. You shouldn’t have to ask this.”
No, I rather think I should. Among other things, this measure would imply that white people in 2013 were less racist than black people in 2003, and that Whites got dramatically LESS racist in the aftermath of 9/11. Those claims seem to be obviously false, and I do not think you would support them in any other context. Combined with the lack of scale calibration, I don’t think the Gallup stats work as a simple proxy for total racism in a society.
“30% of over 65 and 16% 50-64 (born 1952-1966 so grew up in the 60s and 70s) still disapprove of inter-racial marriage.”
The culture in question re-elected a man to public office after he facilitated mob violence against racial minorities for sharing bus seats. The fact that two thirds of that culture’s last cohort approve of interracial marriage is strong proof that it WAS destroyed. Calibrate your scale.
“The culture wasn’t destroyed; people just died and were replaced by others who didn’t share their views.”
Since the standard narrative is that they simply learned to hide their bigotry better and passed it on to their children more or less intact (dog whistles, southern strategy, etc etc), this alone seems like it would be a significant concession.
“Given the majority of whites didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1996, I’m curious how you are sure today it is a large chunk.”
…I’m not sure I can parse this properly. Restate?
You are comparing racist beliefs to racist actions; they really aren’t on the same scale. For starters Southerners have historically been really racist, but the idea of exterminating black people or not interacting with them (aka nannies) would appear crazy to them. The fact they believed “blacks were inferior” meant “whites should be in control”, not “blacks should be eliminated”.
I’m also not sure how you can say the US is ‘uniquely low’; while tribalism is certainly rampant throughout the world the American attitude towards interracial marriage makes it pretty clear the US departed from the position of much of the rest of the world. Wiki gives the US, Nazi Germany, South Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the British Raj as the only places prohibiting interracial marriage in modern times.
Given the 12 point gap between black and white rates the last time the poll was taken, it is pretty clear it can keep dropping.
They don’t seem obviously false to me. The former is supported by the data and the latter is supported by people action (note how the reaction to Syrian refugees is targeted towards religion; the furthest right in America are fine with Christian Arabs).
Of course not. Racism against blacks due to ‘blacks are criminals’ isn’t covered, racism against whites and racism by other ethnic groups isn’t really resolved. However given the centrality of anti-black prejudice by whites in talking about racism, it is fine since it is directly tied to ‘are blacks inferior’.
My scale is calibrated to this
http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-semitism-usa/adl-poll-anti-semitic-attitudes-america-decline-3-percent.html
If the prejudice is higher than the prejudice towards Jews, it is high for the country.
That could be true you know. Until 1996 the trend certainly implied that. It looks like there was a tipping point where what was socially acceptable shifted.
The proportion of people who reject the colorblind ideology now needs to be greater than the proportion who rejected it during the 1990s. Given less than 50% of whites approved of interracial marriage until 96, I don’t see how that is possible; I’m not aware of any of the people today rejecting the colorblind who also reject interracial marriage. It wasn’t until 1996 that affirmative action (which is pretty blatantly not color blind) got pushed back in Hopwood v. Texas.
Calibrate your scale. I am fine to concede that our society at its best was “incredibly racist”, as long as it’s clear that “incredibly racist” is equivalent to about an 10 out of 100, and that number is unusually, perhaps uniquely low among the societies we can observe.
Turn that around. If the United States is “incredibly racist”, what are the societies that are “credibly racist”, or weakly racist or not at all racist?
There are certainly societies that don’t have our particular heritage of institutionalized discrimination against black people, but that’s mostly because they don’t have enough black people to be worth more than informally discriminating against – or because they are mostly black people finding someone else to discriminate against, e.g. Zimbabwe.
But where are the societies that don’t exhibit at least as much animus or discrimination against the locally-disfavored ethnicities as mainstream American society presently does against blacks? Because I haven’t found any.
If your racism gauge is calibrated so that “incredibly racist” is at the bottom, it’s useless except as a joke.
I’ll note that this conversation is now occurring in a context that assumes, at least tacitly, that it is impossible to see “blacks” as no different from “whites” as “Italians” or “the Irish” are.
So, the idea that you are currently, or were ever, actually color blind is pretty much out the window.
Does it? Go to Japan, you’ll find people being fantastically racist against Koreans (among other groups…). That particular species of racism basically doesn’t exist among white Americans (who may hold prejudices towards Asians in general, but very rarely towards Koreans in particular), but that proves neither that Japanese are unusually racist nor that white Americans are unusually less so; just that the two societies draw their lines differently.
@Nornagest:
I’m not sure I’m parsing your comment correctly, but I think you aren’t understanding that I implied “in the U.S.” in that comment.
In other words, various immigrant waves (the Germans, the Polish, the Irish, the Italians, etc.) were seen at some point as lazy, unintelligent, exotic, etc. They weren’t included in “white.” Eventually they all assimilated.
This conversation is now tacitly assuming that blacks can’t do this in the U.S. That its simply not possible in the U.S. to view “black” as no different than “Italian”.
Bullshit.
As far as I can tell, it’s assuming only that “black” currently doesn’t have the status of e.g. Italian or Polish ancestry, which strikes me as pretty reasonable. John Schilling came the closest to saying otherwise, and even he just extended the same argument to the rest of the world.
If someone here has said or implied that assimilation isn’t on the table, you’ll have to point them out to me.
@HeelBearCub,
Well the demonyms “black” and “white” should pretty much answer your question. It’s hard to see someone as a coethnic when they’re visibly, obviously different from you.
Anyway, responding to something you mentioned elsewhere about admixture and racism:
The most plausible path we’ll tread, in my view, is approaching something close to Latin America or the modern Black American community. Even with the social sanctions against interracial marriage largely dismantled, people mostly keep to their own ethnic groups out of simple familiarity (pun intended). So while the physical distinctions between races will narrow and blur over the generations, I don’t doubt that we’ll see the same sort of vague ‘colorism’ / Casta* remain behind.
*I’m not familiar with what contemporary Latinos call their intra-group form of racism.
18-29 year olds in the US approve inter-racial marriage at 96%. I think that definitely counts as weakly/not at all racist.
@DrDealgood:
Once you have enough admixture that there is a continuum, and people living side by side, this becomes less of an issue. Jews, Poles, Irish, Italians, etc. were all instantly recognizable at one time. Now, someone who is 100% Italian just blends in, instead of sticking out as Italian.
But I get that it’s always going to be apparent that, say, Idris Elba doesn’t come from the same parents as Daniel Craig. But when Jessica Beals could be the sister or mother of either one, and it’s not seen as uncommon, then maybe we see “Black” become just like “Italian” and “white” disappear altogether. Or maybe some other nomenclature.
@HeelBearCub,
Well that was my point about Latin America.
Even with a continuum you still see people organizing themselves by their dominant ethnicity (mestizo, criollo, indio, etc.) rather than accepting a unitary Hispanic identity. Obviously they have the legacy of the colonial caste system… but then again, we have the legacy of slavery.
It’s possible things will go the way you predict but I highly doubt it. The physical differences will be striking even after generations of intermarriage, as you can see again in Latin America.
Jews (of various types), Poles, Italians, and Irish are still quite recognizable. It’s just not particularly important, any more, for most things.
The claim that someone who disapproves of interracial marriage is a racist strikes me as an example of how the term has been deprived of almost all content. Also reminds me of a true story.
We have some friends who we will be visiting in a few days. Her ancestry is Chinese, his I think Croatian. Their families knew each other professionally. They jointly (and unsuccessfully) tried to keep the kids apart.
According to their account, her father didn’t want her to marry an American because he didn’t think American men treated their wives properly. His parents thought the children of a mixed marriage would have problems (does not seem to have happened). So both disapproved of interracial marriage. In neither case for reasons it makes any sense to describe as racist.
I think the intersection of the groupS
“didn’t believe Mitt Romney when Mitt said Trump was unsuitable”
and
“believes Hillary Clinton when Hillary says Trump is unsuitable”
is zero.
Pointing out how off-the-kettle Trump was didn’t work when done by the most likely groups leveling that charge. It won’t work. Find something else.
Pointing out how “how off-the-kettle” Trump is doesn’t mean a thing. The same people would be saying the same thing regardless of who the GOP nominated. Democrats calling Republicans stupid/racist/fascist/etc… is like dogs barking at strangers. It’s more notable when it doesn’t happen.
Notable this time that a large amount of Republicans are agreeing though: No, THIS TIME the guy really IS racist.
(Whether that actually helps Trump or hurts him depends on the amount of credibility the politically correct Republicans have with the general public.)
I don’t think PC has anything to do with it in that case; breaking into Latino communities has been a goal of the Republican establishment since at least George W’s first term. And purely in culture terms it’s not a bad fit; your average American Latino is much closer to your average white Red Triber in a lot of ways than to the Democratic core. The big obstacle (outside the Cuban expatriate community, which has been Republican forever) is the GOP’s reputation for nativism, or at least that’s what the GOP thinks is the big obstacle.
Trump may or may not be racist, but he’s very overtly nativist, and he doesn’t even bother to couch it in dog-whistle terms. GOP leadership sees that as an existential threat in the long run.
I’ve been thinking of doing a “the boy who cried wolf” blog post, pointing out that one risk of accusing everyone who disagree with you of being next thing to a Nazi is that if someone shows up who is and you say so, nobody will believe you.
@David Friedman also applies to misuse of “Godwin’s Law” imo.
Over the holiday weekend of Memorial Day (née Decoration Day), I was reminded of an earlier post on the civic religion of America.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/
Alongside Superman, Honest Abe, Luke Skywalker, and George Washington, American culture has holidays like Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Alongside superhero movies and sci-fi extravaganzas, we have film classics like The Longest Day, modern films likeSaving Private Ryan, comedies like Kelly’s Heroes, films like The Dirty Dozen and Ruthless Basterds, and quasi-historical dramas like The Patriot.
There is a large level respect in the United States for the military and the culture of the military. Combined with a mythos of the United States Military as protectors of the cause of Freedom.
Accurate or not, this was part of the civic religion of the United States.
How many other cultures of the world have a similar attitude towards their nation’s military forces?
Gwynne Dyer in War wrote that military service started to (paradoxically) get more popular around the Napoleonic wars with the start of conscription and mass levies.
There is a similar culture in Canada, however it is far less overt in most people. It is only really a thing among people who are connected to the armed forces.
The concept of one nation’s military being protectors of anything for the whole world has shown up in the past, but more in the sense of “we are standing against the barbarians/infidels” rather than “we are protecting freedom” – a distinction that might be lost on some, depending on which side of the free/notfree or civilized/barbarian line they were standing upon.
Certainly one could have seen elements of this in the Roman legions, the British empire, Russian intervention in the Crimea (no, no, not this last year, the one before that. No, the one before *that*) and even in the Reich itself. Japan certainly was a highly militaristic culture.
So. Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Russia. I’m beginning to see a pattern here…
American military praise by the common masses is…well, at 15 years on, one can’t really call it new, but there was a chunk of time in the 1960’s through the 1980’s where military was not cool. (I think that Top Gun makes a decent line for when it became cool again.)
I wonder if any people more familiar with the IDF could speak up.
The concept of one nation’s military being protectors of anything for the whole world has shown up in the past […] Japan certainly was a highly militaristic culture
Interestingly, there even now seems to be a substantial fraction of the Japanese population that sees the Japanese military of 1868-1945 as having been the protectors of all East Asia against the Evils of Western Colonialism. With “all East Asia” being mostly a bunch of ungrateful bastards who didn’t know what was good for them and “Western Colonialism” ultimately being too powerful to overcome, but the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who died fighting the good fight being honored heroes all.
I think there are interesting parallels and differences between the Japanese with regards to World War 2 and Americans ‘of Southern Heritage’ with regards to the American Civil War. Both tend to emphasize the proud military tradition of their ancestors while overlooking the serious ethical issues (to put it mildly) with the causes their ancestors fought for. The biggest difference is the Japanese went, or were forced, into pacifism, while Americans with Confederate family backgrounds seem to have a disproportionate presence in the very army that defeated their ancestors. One classic example is George S. Patton, who had at least one ancestor that died fighting for the Confederacy, and whose family had J.S. Mosby as a friend during Patton’s childhood.
Taking up arms for your tribe in time of war is a bedrock part of civilization, and contains an irreducible nobility even if your tribe is in the wrong. Soldiers can commit crimes that make them reprehensible, but fighting on the wrong side of a war is not in and of itself evil. This principle seems obviously applicable Confederates, Germans, Japanese, Mongols, Persians, whoever.
Perhaps in a defensive war, but there’s nothing noble about being part of an army of conquest.
@Anonymous – There is honor in serving your tribe, whatever the war. Wars of conquest are often grotesque; blame the leaders who convince the tribe to engage in them.
I agree with the anonymous. Allowing yourself to be used as a tool means putting your honor in someone else’s hands. If they use you for dishonorable purposes you are dishonored.
Also, FWIW, the word ‘tribe’ in there sticks in my craw a bit. It seems like an affectation, unless there’s some deeper meaning I’m missing.
Perhaps in a defensive war, but there’s nothing noble about being part of an army of conquest.
The problem with that is in the formulation. One could certainly say we conquered Japan and installed a puppet government, or rely on the rather tired description of the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression”.
World War 2 gets a pass because the Nazi regime (and to a lesser extent Mussolini and the Japanese Militarists) were so evil that even other odious regimes just as bent on conquest (but conquest on our side), like the Soviet Union, get the hero treatment.
Also, as society has progressed into a ‘war is evil’ stage, it’s come with a recognition that the guy at the lowest level, the Poor Bloody Infantryman, is likely a conscript and not able to meaningfully object, and therefore almost as noble as the PBI on your own side. Snide sneering SS Officer? Evil. Poor Wehrmacht infantry grunt? Noble, but wrong.
A far more libertarian, and very definitely of European ethnicity, acquaintance of mine is a historical reenactor. For the Vietnam war, as a VC. There’s no disrespect involved, nor does he see any cognitive dissonance between the political beliefs he has and those of the cause he emulates. (Though part of it is that he’s a fan of the AK-47).
The Wehrmacht conscript may well be a tragic figure, but not a noble one. The Wehrmacht volunteer is neither.
It’s hard to make comparisons here; the situations in all those countries were very different, and institutionalized evil happens at such a scale (and, usually, a remove) that our intuitions can’t deal with it.
You can certainly say one regime was worse than another by some criteria (body count, culture of war crime, inventing industrialized genocide), but which criterion you pick is more of an aesthetic choice, I think. It’s hopeless trying to get a solid utilitarian analysis out of this.
The Wehrmacht conscript may well be a tragic figure, but not a noble one. The Wehrmacht volunteer is neither.
This will always be an area of disagreement. As one generations removed from the battlefield, it’s very hard to understand what the people that were there knew about the big picture or what was going through their minds. Also, keep in mind that given the scale of the war, there was a lot of room for very unusual circumstances.
which criterion you pick is more of an aesthetic choice, I think.
As always, the most important criteria seems to be from a rhetorical standpoint, “were they on our side”. Side, in this case, can be political philosophy as well as the actual alliances of the war.
One of the reasons the Nazis (and the Italian Fascist party) get the ‘irredeemably evil’ treatment is that both the political left and right have reasonable claim to treat them as being politically on the other side. The communists and socialists both have cause to minimize the atrocities of communist regimes, and the anti-communists have cause to minimize the atrocities of anti-communist regimes such as Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and the Nationalist Chinese. Neither side has cause to minimize Fascist / Nazi atrocities.
Conscripts may be pitiable but I don’t see how they are particularly “noble.” At best, you can say that they are excused from the dishonor of war due to the fact that they have little say in the matter (although technically speaking they could refuse and accept the penalty of imprisonment or possibly death in the worst case).
But that just gets you back to morally neutral. There is no moral good being done by the conscript. To me “noble” implies a net positive moral force.
I suppose the question is how you categorize bravery, loyalty, etc. Are they morally positive qualities? Or are they morally neutral capabilities – is someone who is capable of facing dangerous and trying situations with courage, morally, in the same boat as someone who is really strong? Nobody would say “well, he fought for an evil and criminal regime – but we must also take into account his impressive bench press”.
Is someone who is loyal and brave for a bad cause morally a good person (let’s assume for the sake of argument that they commit no individual crimes personally)? Are their loyalty and courage positive, but in a bad cause, rendering them a tragic figure? Are their loyalty and courage neutral, rendering them at best a morally ambivalent character?
For me, while evil people can be brave, loyal, and honorable and can sacrifice themselves for a higher cause, those qualities are themselves noble.
A good example, considering the discussion, is during the last days of Nazi Germany, there was a minor battle over a castle where a lot of high-ranking French prisoners were being kept. The German forces in the area were in disarray. Several of the SS units decided to basically either kill everyone in the castle or use them as hostages. Defending the castle from the SS were the small Wehrmacht garrison, the French prisoners, a small American relief force, and a Waffen SS officer that had determined the war was over and was in the process of heading home when he stumbled on the whole thing. I believe the only defender killed was the SS officer. Here’s a guy that could have headed home, yet decided his duty was with the laws of war; however evil he was, he showed courage, honor, and duty, all noble martial virtues, and died for it.
Likewise, during the fall of Berlin, elements of the Berlin garrison basically sacrificed themselves to get as many people of possible including a lot of refugees out of the encirclement, not on some quixotic quest to preserve the Reich, but so they could surrender to the Western allies who were a lot less likely to work prisoners to death or rape the women. By that point, the original cause they fought for was completely irrelevant.
World War 2 is full of hideous moral choices. How do you judge the Finnish? They definitely have a good claim to be in the right when siding against the Soviets, even if it meant teaming with the Germans. How do you judge cases where you get Russian prisoners of the Germans volunteering to fight the Soviets running up against German prisoners of the Soviets volunteering to fight the Nazis? Both sides had good reasons to think of their former colleagues as being the morally bad side.
I don’t think the castle defenders are a very good example because at least at that point you can argue they were fighting for some positive end. There’s no real contradiction there, though there might be with their actions earlier in the war.
What about the courage and bravery of one of the SS soldiers that was attacking the castle? Suppose one of them single-handedly stormed an enemy (defender) position at great personal risk like you read in a MoH citation. Was that guy acting nobly?
Conscripts may be pitiable but I don’t see how they are particularly “noble.”
Eh. To me, this is a lot like “miners and roughnecks and fishermen and farmers are inherently evil because they rape the earth/contribute to global warming/crash fishstocks/raise sentient animals for slaughter.”
To me, it is possible to do even a bad job well – and most jobs, including that of conscript soldier are not that bad, in terms of total utility/moral outcome.
And for the moral person, refusing to have anything to do with morally grey occupations means that only immoral people are going to do it. There is nothing about prisons, for example, which will be made better by having more corrupt and abusive people as the guards.
I don’t even know what it means to do a bad (i.e. net utility destroying) job well. Does it mean efficiently destroying the most utility (e.g. killing the most people) or being inefficient and incompetent and so destroying the least utility?
(FWIW I think it is terribly unfair to compare farmers to soldiers in armies of conquest.)
“To me, it is possible to do even a bad job well – and most jobs, including that of conscript soldier are not that bad, in terms of total utility/moral outcome.”
Not sure I agree with this either. Almost all people will fight, voluntarily, to defend their homeland if it is truly necessary.
Any war that requires conscription is almost certainly a war that isn’t worth fighting in the first place.
I don’t even know what it means to do a bad (i.e. net utility destroying) job well.
Okay, lets back this up a hair. Can you imagine a complex task with multiple subtasks which might appear to be in conflict?
Such as the infamous diggers vs fillers on construction projects, or QC vs programers?
@ Matt –
Any war that requires conscription is almost certainly a war that isn’t worth fighting in the first place.
You know that you’re including most wars of the modern age, right? And esp the American Civil War and WWII?
Sure. The programmer / QC works. Not sure I see the connection.
Yes – I am aware.
If you can’t get someone to fight for your cause without threatening them with violence, maybe your cause isn’t as just as you think it is.
In the context of the Allied powers in WWII, the question is more about whether you can get enough people to fight for you without coercion to beat off those other guys, looking across the border with covetous eyes, who already grappled with the question of coercion and decided “yes”.
And sure, those guys’ cause wasn’t remotely just. But good luck ensuring that you’re always dealing with moral paragons in international politics.
@brad – “I agree with the anonymous. Allowing yourself to be used as a tool means putting your honor in someone else’s hands. If they use you for dishonorable purposes you are dishonored.”
Do you want soldiers to obey orders, or not? You can’t have it both ways. If you demand they be obedient tools, you cannot turn around and blame them for not rebelling. Note that I am specifically referring to normal military service, not participation in extreme atrocity. There are orders we should expect all humans to refuse, and punish them if they do not. Wearing a uniform, carrying a rifle, marching and fighting are not among them.
“Also, FWIW, the word ‘tribe’ in there sticks in my craw a bit. It seems like an affectation, unless there’s some deeper meaning I’m missing.”
Tribe, as in state/nation/ideology/society/ethny/homeland/whatever. The big cooperation circle you’re part of that has decided that it needs some portion of itself to take up arms and fight. Couldn’t think of a better word for it. Good soldiers in time of war are choosing a fairly serious form of cooperation in the Civilization-scale prisoner’s dilemma, and that act deserves a respect and honor that ideological assessments can’t touch.
“The Wehrmacht conscript may well be a tragic figure, but not a noble one. The Wehrmacht volunteer is neither.”
I respectfully disagree. People fight for their countries, and on the balance it is probably a good thing they do. The fact that sometimes their countries are wrong and very occasionally incredibly evil doesn’t change this.
Civilis – “Also, as society has progressed into a ‘war is evil’ stage, it’s come with a recognition that the guy at the lowest level, the Poor Bloody Infantryman, is likely a conscript and not able to meaningfully object, and therefore almost as noble as the PBI on your own side. Snide sneering SS Officer? Evil. Poor Wehrmacht infantry grunt? Noble, but wrong.”
This.
@Matt M – “But that just gets you back to morally neutral. There is no moral good being done by the conscript. To me “noble” implies a net positive moral force.”
Do you think armies should exist? If so, why?
I don’t think standing armies should exist – no.
I think that in the event of a legitimate threat to one’s homeland (“nation” is probably tricky given how many current “nations” are entirely too large and diverse to inspire people to sacrifice their life for it), it will not be difficult to raise an army to fight in exchange for pay.
@FC
I hear what you are saying and there is certainly something there. We don’t want every soldier serving under a democratically elected government to submit every order to a full ethical analysis but … that said I still see volunteering as essentially moral gambling. You hope that you are deployed for moral ends, and if you aren’t you good intentions don’t really save you. If you kill innocents you are still damned no matter how pure your desire to do only good.
Look up the fall of the Commonwealth of Both Nations. Randoms called up for war on short notice don’t stand up to professional soldiery. Any state that wishes to preserve itself will have a standing army, because unless everyone else has no standing army, they are going to rather inevitably lose in any war that occurs.
I will also note that there still are homogenous nations, and that mass education has made them more homogenous than they were before that era – check what languages the French spoke before modern French, for example.
@Brad – “that said I still see volunteering as essentially moral gambling.”
I definately see the moral gambling angle. I guess you feel that the bad cause dishonor outweighs the honor of nobility of service somewhat, and I think the nobility of service outweighs the dishonor of a bad cause somewhat. I think part of what tilts the scales for me is worry about the aftermath of war; I think defaulting to respect for a defeated enemy is a much safer stance than defaulting to scorn for them. I note that it’s much easier to feel sympathy for Confederates, Wermacht or Imperial Japanese than it is for, say, Nigerian Federal forces in the Biafran war, where the “bad guys” came out on top. Thinking about it, I guess I’d say that fighting on the losing side of a war is a hell of a penance. The Japanese in WWII were terrible, and they paid terribly. No one is claiming they were in the right, so what does scorn for their soldiers achieve?
“If you kill innocents you are still damned no matter how pure your desire to do only good.”
If you mean judging whether the individual soldier in question committed intentional atrocities, I’d agree, but atrocity and killing innocents are an inevitable part of warfare. To the extent that it creates communal guilt, there are none without sin.
I thought about it some more, and I think you’re right about my “still damned” line. It doesn’t really get at what I was trying say.
I think we probably understand each other, just don’t fully agree, but to restate it one time:
When you commit an intentional homicide that’s murder unless there’s a valid justification. For example, self defense or duress provides a justification. Legally speaking war also justifies intentional homicide. By when we switch frameworks from law to morality I think it makes sense to switch that from war to just war. The issue isn’t atrocities, normal “regular” war activities are in themselves evil unless justified. And when the enterprise as a whole is unjustified then there is nothing to fall back on. It’s like a guy who dresses up as a policeman and “arrests” people — it doesn’t really matter how well he follows the use of force continuum because he shouldn’t be using force to begin with.
As for how we treat defeated enemies I think that’s a somewhat separate issue. I don’t think we need to think that the rank and file foot soldiers of the Mongolian Hordes were honorable in order to have a policy where we don’t necessarily spend a lot of time talking about the fact that we think that volunteering for the Imperial Navy was a dishonorable thing to do while those guys are still alive.
@Brad – “When you commit an intentional homicide that’s murder unless there’s a valid justification. For example, self defense or duress provides a justification.”
It’s entirely possible for two people to both mistake the other for an attacker, and get into a lethal fight where both sincerely believe they’re engaging in legitimate self-defense. What would be a rare tragedy at the interpersonal level seems to be the norm at the nation-state level, owing to the several orders of magnitude in additional complexity in their interactions. I think it’s pretty hard to find a war where this is not the case. Whether you’re from Bavaria or Alabama, you probably go to war believing you’re kicking ass to vanquish the villainous and vouchsafe virtue.
“The issue isn’t atrocities, normal “regular” war activities are in themselves evil unless justified.”
We agree on this; I guess our disagreement is that I think for the soldiers, “our country decided we should” is sufficient justification for the ordinary evils of their profession. The guy dressing up as a policeman is acting on his own initiative, but soldiers, even and especially volunteer soldiers, are fundamentally acting according to the wishes and ideals of their society. If we assign blame for that evil, it should be to the leadership and the society as a whole, which is one of the reasons I’m less squeamish about, say, the firebombing of axis cities in WWII.
And again, from a consequentialist angle, scorning those who fight for a cause you think is unjust may well cause people to question the justice of their own causes less, not more. After all, unjust war is something inhuman monsters like the Nazis do, and we’re not inhuman monsters, so our wars must be just, right?
“As for how we treat defeated enemies I think that’s a somewhat separate issue.”
For me, part of it comes down to the ongoing debate about war monuments. We have one in a town near me for soldiers of a bad cause, and last time I visited there were a gaggle of protesters out decrying it due to the memorialized people being racists and so on. I find their views revolting; despite their obvious flaws, those soldiers fought and died when their society asked them to, and it is entirely proper to honor them for that. The human right to disagree and to fight for your beliefs and your people is one of the best parts of us, and the urge to deface the monuments of those we defeated is one of the worst.
“Down with evil Western colonialism! Up with evil Japanese colonialism!”
Several observations:
First, even with the movies you listed, there’s a difference between respect for the common soldiers, especially those of the Greatest Generation, and respect for the military and military culture as a whole, and it’s a difference that’s widened over time. The Longest Day was produced with the aid and assistance of a number of high-level American and British veterans of the battle while memories of the war were fresh and before the cynicism brought on by Vietnam kicked in, and so it’s a relatively positive portrayal of the D-Day operations. Saving Private Ryan, covering the same battle at a different level, is deliberately designed to play up the horrors of the battle, although balanced with respect for the troops that actually fought.
I’m also not sure that most countries, at least those that didn’t lose major wars in the twentieth century, don’t have some national holiday associated with the military. Armistice day, which corresponds to our Veterans Day, is much more of a holiday in Europe, if more somberly celebrated. As an American, it took me a while to figure out why Anzac Day was celebrated. Other countries often celebrate with more of a military focus than in the US. For example, the US doesn’t generally do annual military parades, which are major features of some other countries celebrations, such as Victory Day in Russia and Bastille Day in France.
China is probably close enough.
(France certainly isn’t, and I think the same holds for the rest of the European Union)
I was always under the impression that the UK held its military in fairly high regard. Is that not the case?
Oh its Tommy this an Tommy that, an Chuck ‘im out, the brute! / But its thin red line o heroes when the guns begin to shoot.
Beat me to it
It’s a piker whose only Kipling quotes come from The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
Things vary from era to era; these days, there’s very much a “support the troops” ethos which says “think what you like about the politicians and their policies, but don’t take it out on the squaddies” – I don’t often hear bad things about the top brass, either, apart from the occasional complaint about troops not being given enough armour. Lots of people thing the government isn’t doing enough for wounded soldiers. There’s also the perception that the armed forces are decent chaps who are always ready to help out if the fire brigade goes on strike or if there’s flooding or some other emergency that requires a bunch of strong well-disciplined well-organised people in a hurry.
That said, there’s always a few who do like to take it out on the squaddies and call them babykillers or whatever, and apparently you get the odd well ‘ard person who picks fights with Marines to prove how tough he is, but it’s rare. There were a couple of Muslim youths who murdered a soldier (Lee Rigby), and practically everyone was queueing up to condemn them.
The SAS are recognised as being completely awesome and the best of the best and there’s a lot of interest in them.
In general, it’s more of an attitude of quiet respect, much less extroverted than the American reaction.
There’s a report at: http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/THE-ARMED-FORCES-SOCIETY.pdf
The understanding that I have is that until the Boer War or the Great War, the navy was traditionally held in higher esteem than the army in Britain. Supposedly, this had to do with the use of the army in doing stuff like suppressing demonstrations.
The Senior Service. Island nation. Britannia rules the waves.
We used to be a big sea power, we’ve had a standing navy for longer than a standing army, the English channel has long been our main line of defence. Our navy is now in the embarrassing position of having more admirals than warships.
The Navy, the Marines, and the Air Force all get the be Royal, but the Army is just the British Army. Apparently this may well have something to do with the Civil War.
From about the time of Charles I until the 19th century there was a tendency to fear that a large standing army could be used as an instrument of tyranny by the government. Since it’s much harder to use a navy in such a way, there was less resistance to the concept of having a large standing navy.
The same basic attitude went with English colonists to North America too, which is why the Founding Fathers’ ideal was to have a small standing army and rely on militia for most defensive purposes.
I’m not sure, the impression I get is that Americans and Chinese and Russians have more public “Woo soldiers and guns and planes and tanks!” stuff than the UK (who hold it in high esteem but don’t talk about it *that* much). But I could be wrong, I’m not very knowledgeable about current UK culture & media. France and Germany certainly have less “woo our soldiers! Tank magazine!” stuff than China, but in addition I think that (unlike the UK), they don’t even hold the military in high regard.
Finland is probably another pretty pro-military European country.
This question can be rationally and objectively addressed by examining the attitude of the US Military toward themselves. The USMC Commandant’s Professional Reading List (presently ALMARS:009/16, which search engines find) constitutes an objective survey.
Historically, economically, and morally, both present and past USMC Reading Lists stand to the “Enlightened Left” of the SSC’s predominantly right-wing/rationalist commentariat. See for example Col. (now Gen.) H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (1997).
There is a considerable psychological/psychiatric component too; see for example: Karl Marlantes’ What It Is Like To Go To War; Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society; two books by Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming; Edward Tick’s War and the Soul
As background, Grossman is a psychologist, Shay and Tick are practicing psychotherapists, and Marlantes is a Corps legend for his novel Matterhorn — an autobiographical novel so harrowingly realistic and professionally challenging that the USMC Reading List website provides two Discussion Guides that are specially devoted to it.
Does the USMC Reading List contain contradictions? Absolutely, and perhaps uniquely in all the world US military culture embraces these contradictions. Given that the USMC was founded by a “Fighting Quaker” (Samuel Nicholas), and the US military’s highest-ranking and most-victorious officer won a Nobel Peace Prize (George C. Marshall), the embrace of contradiction is self-evidently a professional requirement. 🙂
In striking constrast, the Internet sustains plenty of insular “bubble communities”, whose members seldom or never read any of the challenging works from the USMC Commandant’s Reading List.
Does the SSC’s rationalist commentariat constitute one such “bubble community”; a community so culturally insular, and so intolerant of contradiction, as to become (in effect) willfully ignorant?
The world wonders.
Are the US military’s “Enlightened Left” worldview becoming more prevalent in the United States, and around the world?
Arguably “yes” … and does rationalist insularity explain why so many SSC readers remain stubbornly unconscious of this military-led, structurally progressive, internally contradictory, and yet ultimately transformative, societal evolution?
Not remotely. It’s more a PR move than anything else, and even insofar as it’s representative, it’s representative of the self-image of the officer corps of one branch — and a famously, ah, “motivated” one at that.
I would bet that the Commandant doesn’t even pick the books – one of his aides is probably assigned this task and then he rubber stamps it, maybe demands one or two be included every once in awhile.
But even if he did, the notion that the views of the single highest ranking person in the Marine Corps are somehow representative of the Marines as a whole (much less the entire armed forces) is ludicrous.
It’s like responding to someone saying “The U.S. is slightly right of center” by saying “Actually if you look at Barack Obama’s favorite books the authors tend to lean to the left.”
The principles of the Reading List are reduced to military practice via the doctrines of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency (2006, available free-as-in-freedom). The bulk of FM 3-24 was written under the direct, close, and personal supervision of Army General David Petraeus and USMC General James Mattis.
Enlisted Marines of my acquaintance served on Gen. Mattis’ staff during this writing, and subsequently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan where they were personally responsible for implementing its practices; the phrase “direct, close, and personal” is carefully chosen and accurately descriptive.
Appreciation of this principled integrity is widespread within the Corps, however politically inconvenient and ideologically discomfiting the distilled recommendations of FM 3024 may have subsequently proven to some civilian politicians and some ideological cohorts.
“Each Marine shall read a minimum of three books from the Commandant’s Choice or Grade Level sections each year.”
There is absolutely zero chance this is happening. I’d bet anything that less than 5% of Marines do this. I’d bet less than 50% of Marines read three books each year, period (not counting job-related training manuals).
Matt M, aren’t you concerned that, among folks who are personally well-acquainted with individual Marines, and their service, and the traditions of their Corps, comments like the above will act to sharply reduce the relative respect that reasonably can be accorded to rationalism and libertarianism, as these disciplines are presently practiced?
Not that USMC humor or the sense of history required to appreciate it are in short supply! 🙂
I am personally acquainted with individual marines, their service, and the traditions of their corps. That’s why I’m confident my assessment is correct.
I also think the average marine is secure enough to happily admit the truth in matters like this.
Thank you for clarifying so distinctly, if not the traditions and practices of the US armed services, at least the opinions of one rationalist/libertarian in regard to those traditions and practices.
It really is him, isn’t it?
The >Username communicates quoting style would have been a giveaway, even if nothing else was.
On it’s own? Meh.
But when taken in conjunction with the whole “empathy” fixation, the “citations” that aren’t really citations, and generally esoteric reasoning…
Yah, that’s him all right.
Quit teasing us. Who is “him”?
John Sidles. Last seen here; note the presence of Matterhorn, among other things.
Also here; linking many of the same links and employing similarly esoteric reasoning.
Did you mistake parallel universes? Because this sure isn’t the case in this one! Perhaps in the next one over, the Parallel Scott is a Red Triber struggling with the occasional deeply-felt Blue Tribe opinion he holds on grounds of it being true, and his commenters are predominantly cultural conservatives and a small minority of radical anarcho-communists. It isn’t the case here.
It’s relieving to learn that SSC’s commentariat does not commonly espouse rationalist and/or libertarian principles, on the grounds that recent comments have so weakly defended these principles, that it would be discouraging to conclude that there was not much substance to them.
A libertarian is not a conservative. They’re – at best – adjacent.
A rationalist is not a conservative. They might *also* be a conservative, but one does not imply the other; otherwise you would have the thought leaders of rationalism be largely coterminous with the thought leaders of conservatism, which is not the case. You will find, if you look, that the rationalist leadership is quite non-conservative.
So what is SSC all about, if it is not the principles — including clinical principles — that the Commandant’s Professional Reading List surveys?
USMC Gen. Victor Krulak famously distilled these principles as follows (with the rest of the Reading List amounting to “commentary”, as the sages put it):
If these aren’t reasons for the world to embrace rationalism and/or libertariansm (or any other ethos), then what are reasons? If SSC is unconcerned with these principles, is it about anything of enduring value at all?
It’s about a Jewish-American psychiatrist blogging about stuff he finds interesting. He has acquired a following because he is a talented writer, and also because his ethos is one of truth, which goes against the grain of typical tribal adherence. That he strives to be both truthful and loyal to the tribe grants him a lot of sympathy. This draws people similarly inclined, some of which are right-wing, or libertarian, or rationalist, but mostly they are like him – culturally Blue but without an unbending commitment to Blue dogma.
Anonymous, that is an outstandingly excellent comment (as it seems to me and no doubt will seem to many).
Melatonin update: I want to thank Douglas Knight (I think it was) who advised to try a lower dose. I’ve gone from 10mg time-release to 1mg time release with no change to my sleep.
FWIW, I was skimming my pharma textbook and found the section on melatonin:
(translated)
So yeah, a lower dose seems preferable.
Here’s good sense on WSJ on the FBI and the emails:
https://np.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/4ndwpd/fbi_probe_was_centered_on_emails_regarding_drone/
Reminds me of Salinger’s Buddy Glass. “Where there’s smoke, there’s usually strawberry jello.”
PS. There was a saying in the US that the Boomer generation (born 1945+) was ‘the pig that swallowed the python’. IE that at every stage of life, they transformed that stage of the system. Looks like Hillary’s email practice is going to swallow the CIA/State Dept security system, and she wasn’t even trying.
Whatever was there at that reddit post got wiped out.
An archive is here. But it wasn’t entirely wiped out – the title was still there, which is enough to find the WSJ.
If this is accurate the private server is a red herring. For the purposes of classified information there’s no difference between the state department’s insecure network and a commercial network — either way the bad act was completed the moment top secret material was communicated outside the classified network.
@ Anonymous June 10, 2016 at 12:26 pm
Your archive link showed the complete WSJ report as it appeared in my Reddit link. Your WSJ link got to a different WSJ article.
No, it’s the same WSJ article.
(When I posted it, the body of the reddit post was gone, as Edward said (pun not intended), but now it’s back. I guess it was copied into a comment, as well.)
If this is accurate the private server is a red herring.
No, it just wasn’t the focus of the FBI’s attention. It has always been clear that Clinton committed two separate offenses here. Setting up the private server was a regulatory violation per se and a crime if done for the obvious reason, even if no classified information ever touched it. Sending classified information outside the secure networks, likewise a big no-no even if it had been done on a commercial network or State’s own unclassified network.
This explains why the FBI was focused on the security violation and not the transparency violation. For all the talk of overclassification and harmless violations, people at State were apparently sending messages like “The CIA is going to blow up Terrorist Leader X at his home in Y this afternoon; are we good with that?” over unsecured channels. That’s pretty much the core example of a secret that really legitimately needs to be kept from the Bad Guys for the sake of national security, and that nobody can mistake as anything else.
And an aside on the lesser-evils front: If anyone ever does have to send true Secrets over an unsecure link to avoid some greater calamity (a mistargeted drone strike might qualify), pick up a phone and make a voice call to whomever you need to talk to. Preferably a landline. That is technically, legally, and practically more secure than email, text, etc, and more deniable if you care, and it gives you direct feedback that the person you critically need to receive this message has actually got it.
The third time this happens, go set up a more secure network by fair means or foul.
The part about IC wanting State to use the top secret network instead of just the secret one even though it didn’t connect to foggy bottom seemed interesting.
Reminded me a little bit of the story that state people asked the NSA early on how Obama was able to use a blackberry and whether Hillary could do the same, and were basically told to fuck off.
Yeah, there was definitely a bit of a turf war going on there, and those can get ugly.
Since we’re liable to be stuck with a Clinton presidency, I’m hoping she uses at least some of her political capital to insist on the NSA developing a secure smartphone and wireless voice/network for all branches of government to use. The crypto is there; there’s no reason to balk at wireless. It’s just the crappy implementations we’re stuck with because almost nobody in the commercial or open-source world really cares about security.
The site I posted –https://np.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/4ndwpd/fbi_probe_was_centered_on_emails_regarding_drone/
— came up for me just now, and survived several reloads. Searching for [ Continued: ] Ctl-F found one segment of the WSJ article. Its first paragraph began:
With the compromise, State Department-CIA tensions began to subside. Only once or twice during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State did U.S. diplomats object to a planned CIA strike, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials familiar with the emails.
Apparently this search only works if I open a new CTL-F box from within a comment within the discussion. Using the “search” box that Reddit supplies at the top of the screen goes somewhere else.
ETA: details
The problem with this theory is that if it is true why did they do a mass dump of Clinton’s emails, many of which were embarrassing for her. Alternatively, why, if they were just looking for info in a CIA vs State Department pissing match couldn’t she have given them some kind of agreement were they didn’t have to dump them all.
It really looks like the FBI wanted to score points against Clinton. Its the difference between an arrest and a perp walk at noon after you tipped off the press.
>>3. I may or may not switch to writing fewer but longer posts sometime soon. I feel like I get the most out of really comprehensive review posts, or complicated theory posts like this, and I don’t have the time to write them if I’m writing a couple of posts a week. So don’t be surprised if quantity starts to drop off.<<
Personally, I get more out of reading the long posts to, so I just wanted to take the time to encourage you to go ahead and do just that.
Long posts with the OTs between them is very nice. The Links posts don’t need to have so many links, so Scott might save some of his time there.
Interesting church and state (or, as the post has it, synagogue and state) story in New York. So – religious accommodations: part of the fabric of society when you have people of all beliefs and none, or theocratic interference in the secular sphere?
I’m finding it interesting because if you approached it from a feminist angle (at least, the older school of feminism I grew up hearing – I’m not up on Third Wave and later), then having women-only groups were considered important for purposes of solidarity, consciousness-raising and what would nowadays be called ‘safe spaces’ (even though that concept was not named as such back then). I was always struck by the irony of calling for men-only spaces to be opened to women while at the same time being busy creating women-only spaces, but this was a perfectly legitimate (and probably remains perfectly legitimate) secular reason.
So do you think the New York Times would be fine with the Women*-Identifying-As-Such Empowerment and Liberation Collective hiring swimming pools for women-identifying-as-such only sessions? What about the Goddess Lilith Female Feminine Femme Non-Binary and Gender Queer Circle? Is it okay if it’s for a non-religious reason, or if your reason is “spiritual but not religious we’re so minority it’s basically the sixteen of us in the whole USA” religion?
My own opinion? If the real problem is “they’re hiring the pool on Sunday afternoons when that’s the prime time most people have free, and this is why that anonymous complaint by a face-ache was made”, then that should be sorted out. Otherwise, I don’t see what the problem is with any group hiring the pool for specific times, and indeed if anyone can do it and it’s legal, what’s the beef? If they are not hiring the pool but the local council running it gave them this time as an accommodation, I don’t see that that is a problem in itself, simply find a better time when they can have it if anonymous sourpusses** are going to complain “I wanna use the pool and that’s the only time I have free, it’s not fair that religious nutcases get special treatment!”
*Or as it may be Wimmin, Womyn, Wom*n or Womxn, whatever the newest shibboleth is
**Though the sourpuss may indeed be operating on “I am An Atheist And Proud Of It and I stand up to defy all shackles of priestcraft that would be imposed upon proud free-thinking secular society” principles; it’s just unusual to see them complaining about Jews rather than Christians for once
I don’t think they are hiring (that’s renting, right?) the pool at all. Or even have an organized group that is asking for use of the pool — like a swim team or a swimming club with a defined membership. Rather they’ve lobbied successfully for open-to-the-female-public hours. Although I don’t have a huge problem with it, it is more government entangled than if they were a closed private group that happened to have reserved time at the pool.
Green anon is right. There’s no hiring-out of the pool. These are “open-to-the-female-public” hours, which are violations of NYC equal rights laws, as well as being highly suspect on Establishment Clause grounds.
@ Deiseach
I was always struck by the irony of calling for men-only spaces to be opened to women while at the same time being busy creating women-only spaces,
Creating is the point. We met in each others’ storefronts or homes.
@Deiseach:
I think it’s fair to say that you are a cynic. There certainly is a value in the cynical view, so I can’t necessarily fault you for it.
But when you get in the mode of assuming that essentially no one involved in an issue is acting in good faith, that such a thing is unimaginable, I think you jump the rails. Perhaps in this case you aren’t familiar with government owned pools and what a fixture of the municipal scene they are in the U.S. and that has led you astray. I don’t know.
In any case, debates about the intersection of individual liberties, civil rights and accommodation of both minority groups and the larger public at municipally owned pools aren’t exactly new, and it’s not surprising that NYC has to do interesting things to “ensure domestic tranquility” when they have so many starkly differentiated cultures living side by side.
While I’m at the religion thing – want to cook like the Swiss Guard? Now you can! 🙂
I saw this reviewed elsewhere, decided to have a look, and though I’m still not sure how a planned “let’s do a booklet on the history of the Swiss Guard” turned into “let’s write a cookbook” (okay, so a former chef joined the Swiss Guard – but why?), it looks very nice as a coffee-table book.
I’ve had a quick look at the Amazon preview and I note the recipes have been translated into American (“arugula” for “rocket”) so that should work all right. I haven’t tried any of the recipes (look, shepherd’s pie is about as adventurous as I get) but if anyone wants to try the ones previewed, let us know how they turn out? Also, if you do try them, let us know if they inspired in you a sudden desire to go to Rome to guard the Pope 🙂
A step sideways from religion – but still cooking.
Serve it Forth is a recipe/cookbook collection edited by Anne McCaffery back in mumblemumble. The recipes draw from a variety of sources, and are of fair-to-middling appeal – the sort of thing the Ladies’ Guild will do every year or so for the church mortgage fundraiser. Good, solid, feed the family or the writer so others things can get done.
But as plain-food as they are, the recipes are submitted by SFF writers, many of whom included a bit of story about the how and whyfor that the food came from. There is a poem about watching UFOs while canning tomatoes (a Rsyling winner), another story about a mincemeat pie that went to SEA in the 1970’s, and “The Parable of the Cow and the Sofa”, a re-telling of the Next-To-Last-Supper which is well worth the cover price alone. (And so the circle comes back to religion anyway.)
(@ Deiseach – I never wanted to be a Swiss Guard, but have never minded looking at them.)
If you really want to be adventurous in your cooking, my wife and I have a cookbook for you–both free pdf and printed.
And for even more adventure, you can find some of our sources here and work from them yourself.
I have a bit of a problem that requires critical thinking and maybe some specialist knowledge. I couldn’t think of anywhere to ask other than here since this issue touches on a number of concerns and I know the commenters here to be very thoughtful and helpful.
I have an acquaintance who I believe perhaps suffers from some sort of mental condition. I don’t know much about these things, but I have recently spent far more time than I would like with him and I noticed that his habit of interrupting people to insert unrelated tangents seems like a compulsion. And the desperation with which he will keep talking seems like he’s afraid that if he stops talking the people he’s with will go back to ignoring him. I don’t know what any of that means about his mind, but it doesn’t seem healthy. I don’t want to just list off mental health buzzwords either, but at the very least he has some kind of debilitating attention deficit.
Here’s the thing. He is very young, about 19 I believe. He was recently disowned by his fuck-off parents for coming out as not straight. He is homeless right now, secretly living in a music room on our college campus.
The reason why I’m so concerned for this is actually not at all altruistic. In fact, it’s downright ignoble, but whatever. Now that he’s homeless, he spends a lot of time at the same coffee shop where I get most of my work done and he’s also starting coming to and derailing the meetings of a reading group I’m in. When I first found out he was homeless, I considered inviting him to stay with me since we have many mutual friends and I was so upset by his story. But then I had my first ten minute “conversation” with him and realized that I do not possess the fortitude to suffer his presence in my home.
My question is, what kind of services are available for someone in his position? He’s lost the only support system he had since his parents care more about sexual propriety than their own fucking child’s well-being. How do you get support for someone else? If it helps, we are in Houston, TX.
Is he enrolled on campus? If so, he probably has access to campus health services.
(Is he employed?)
I’m of two minds on this – firstly, I spent some time as a young adult desperate for anyone to talk to who seemed like they might be interested in listening to me speak, (and I still occasionally struggle with shutting the hell up and letting others talk) and I never got throw out of my family home. This could be “just” loneliness and a desire to fit in with other people.
Secondly, there are a lot of co-morbidities with homosexuality
(which is what I think you’re hinting at, if I am wrong please correct me)and young men of 19 or so are at a risk period of various mental illnesses. Don’t discount the possibility that it wasn’t just “caring about sexual propriety” which led him to be shut out of his family. As with all stories – there is more than just one side. In any case, it might be that getting him to see a counseler of some sort is key.However – as a 19 year old, he’s an adult, can vote and sign contracts. Unless he’s actually a danger to others, he’s allowed to be annoying and difficult. The options for other people to force him to do otherwise are (rightfully) somewhat limited.
Edit – just re-read the OP and realized homosexuality was expressly described.
He’s no longer enrolled since he can’t afford it anymore, though he also says he wouldn’t want reenroll anyway. So, there’s really no convenient counselling available.
I was talking it over with some people yesterday, and it seems like the only reasonable option is we’re just going to have to be more direct with him. Like you said, we can’t make him do anything which is a good thing, for sure.
There are a lot of consequentialists among those influenced by SSC. What we ask in that moral theory is how to deliver the goods. Those of us who were also influenced by LW and EY’s fears of Unfriendly AI are hesitant to affirm any specific theory of what precisely the goods are. On the one hand that’s appropriate skepticism. On the other hand it’s not much fun, and it doesn’t advance the discussion much either.
This is a thread for consequentialists to propose what you think the goods are. It’s OK if it’s a provisional belief, or even if you don’t particularly believe it but merely assign it the plurality of your current credence. It’s also a thread to discuss people’s proposals.
For organization purposes, I’ll do so also in a comment.
My best-effort proposal changes often, and here’s my most recent: the moral good that should be maximized is the well-distributed total information of the true pleasurable memories of living agents.
Here’s what I was trying to pack into that phrase.
“agents”: Entities with the capacity to act to achieve arbitrary goals. Human adults and children count. Fetuses don’t count. Animals count. Present-day AIs and robots don’t count. Star Trek style aliens would count. A General Artificial Intelligence would count.
“living”: i.e. Actively living. The dead don’t count. Minds uploaded or copied to computers but then put on pause don’t count. Cryogenically paused people don’t count – so restoring them to vitality would get calculated as a big moral win.
“memories”: Physical records of the past coupled to a system that can interpret them. Scenes in current working memory count. Recallable memories of scenes count. Unconscious memories such as long-term potentiation in the brain also count. Off-brain storage such as diaries and home videos count. Forgotten events do not count. Memories made inaccessible by disease or damage don’t count. A human mind is more valuable than an animal mind in part because we have more storage capacity for memories. Every death gets calculated as an evil due to the loss of living memory.
“pleasurable”: In the traditional utilitarian sense, it includes all types of positive affect. Pains, or all types of negative affect, are counted as negative pleasure. More neuroscientifically, it’s positive reinforcement in a recursive neural net.
“true”: The only memories that count for a given agent are memories about that agent’s own past, caused by that past. Implanted false memories do not count. Memories about the real experience of enjoying fictional works do count.
“information”: The Kolmogorov complexity of the memories. An exact copy of a mind adds almost nothing to the total. A billion locusts add almost nothing past the first few locusts. A human mind is more valuable than an animal mind in part because we have more capacity for diverse memories.
“total”: Not average. I bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion, although its repugnance is moderated by the “information” and “well-distributed” criteria. A future superhuman AI might be capable of greater pleasures than all humanity, but loss of humans and their memories would still be calculated as an enormous evil.
“well-distributed”: I say that some agents are more deserving of their pleasures and some are less deserving. Consider the distribution across living agents of the pleasures they’ve actually received. Now consider the distribution of moral desert across the same agents. Normalize the two distributions and compare. The degree of overlap of these two distributions ranges between 1 (perfect match) and 0 (e.g. all the pleasures going to undeserving people). The well-distributed total is the original total multiplied by that degree of overlap. I define the degree of moral desert, for each agent, as equal to the total moral good they have contributed to the world by their actions so far.