OT55: Thready For Hillary

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. I think some named users are posting more controversial comments anonymously. I’d like to request people not do this, because I IP ban anonymous accounts on a hair-trigger, and if I IP ban your anonymous account then your real account also suffers. I think this is why a lot of people’s posts haven’t been showing up lately. I try to take people’s past history of posting interesting things into account before I ban them for a single violation, but if you’re anonymous I can’t do that and you’re kind of out of luck.

2. I’m actually considering banning anonymous commenting on here, because getting rid of the crappy anonymouses sometimes feels like trying to fill a leaky bucket. How angry would this make people?

3. It would also help if I knew how to make Akismet (the anti-spam program) realize that someone with a thousand previous good posts probably isn’t going to start being a spambot today just because they cited a few links. This seems like the absolute basics for a Bayesian spam filter, but I can’t seem to get Akismet to figure it out. I’d be willing to buy a premium account if it had this function. Does anybody know anything about this.

4. Can anyone think of any soft “nudge” style ways to steer open thread conversation here away from specific topics without banning them completely. Right now the best I can do is censor some of the most annoying words and force anyone who wants to discuss annoying things to come up with trivially inconvenient workarounds, but that’s a pretty irritating solution.

5. Comment of the week is by Z, who went through that Romanian study a whole lot more thoroughly than I did, though without any clearer result.

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2,121 Responses to OT55: Thready For Hillary

  1. Jill says:

    I wonder if Scott started a Thready for Hillary because he is voting for Hillary? Anyone know? Has he said?

    • Saint Fiasco says:

      I think he is voting for Hillary. At the beginning of each year he makes predictions to calibrate his confidence, and he predicted “Conditional on me voting and Hillary being on the ballot, I will vote for Hillary: 90%”.

  2. AnthonyC says:

    I recently re-read “Fish- now by prescription” and “Sleep – now by prescription” in a somewhat different light. Basically, the opposite market failures also happen. In the past year and a half, I’ve been prescribed vitamin D (which I’m told is actually a different form than the OTC one, but still) and omeprazole (same dose as OTC). I compared with the OTC options to check prices. In both cases, with my insurance (high deductible plan, so my charge for prescriptions is not just a copay), the prescription version cost 10x less than the same-dose OTC version. I’m at a loss for why that should happen.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      By fluke, insurance covers prescription drugs and not non-prescription drugs.

  3. Kyrus says:

    I was thinking about Scotts piece on white redneck culture and how we might preserve it while listening to Thomas Sowells book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbOUTNs66o

    He argues that black culture today has its root in white, southern, redneck culture. Take this together with Scotts article and you get: Because nobody cares about shitty, white culture being eradicated, white people might be doing better than black people today. maybe we just have to be as hostile to shitty black culture, in order to advance blacks.

    • LPSP says:

      It’s a growing body of thought among black people, and entering greater legitimacy among white people. I think I first encountered the idea about 3 years ago, and let me tell you, it was a breath of fresh relief to hear a black person say that “black culture”, as defined by propaganda, is worthless.

      For the sake of interest, as an english person I find american “black culture” much nearer to our local chav culture than to rednecks. There’s a clear lineage between redneck and chav, but chav and black culture have both adapted to the urban environment (travelling in gangs, car scrumping, exploiting benefits) to a greater extent than rednecks.

    • I can’t speak for any knowledge of black culture today, but a while ago, I read “Honor and Violence in the Old South” (which detailed Southern culture around violence and dueling across various social classes in the pre-Civil War era) and “Manchild in the Promised Land” (which discussed both growing up in the ghettos of Harlem in the 1940s, and featured extensive discussion of parental attitudes), and it was uncanny how similar the vices and failure-states of one culture were to the other.

      • Jill says:

        Interesting. I read Manchild in the Promised Land. Very interesting for those of us who might otherwise be clueless about that subculture. People’s beliefs and habits can be incredibly different in different subcultures. And since each is so used to their own, people from different subcultures tend to miscommunicate and misunderstand one another, even more than most humans do.

        It’s good to understand what a subculture is actually like, and maybe to understand why also, before forming any opinion as to whether it sounds worth preserving or if it might be a disaster where everyone might benefit if it were lost.

        Of course there is the Iraq problem. If you lose one destructive system (e.g. rule by Saddam), something is going to replace it. And you can’t guarantee that if you lose a destructive system, that the one that replaces it won’t be even more destructive. Looking only at a subculture’s flaws, you might not realize what positive functions it serves. But you may realize the functions only too late, having gotten rid of it. Cultures and subcultures are likely to keep following some kinds of beliefs and habits, even if some part of what they have is destroyed. And bad can possibly turn to worse, if one goes in and subtracts things without adding enough worthwhile things, not understanding what’s going on, as in Iraq.

        • I think we even got some examples of the Iraq problem in the book itself. Lack of respect for law, lack of care for long-term goals, lack of value for education, and pride in capacity for personal violence came together in a really bad combination, but just pulling out the pride-in-violence lead, according to the author of the book, a lot of people to embrace junkie-dom. The author describes how some people made the conscious decision to become junkies, because there was no soceital expectation that junkies react with violence when disrespected.

          In some cases, you can make things worse by going into a bad-but-stable system and removing what looked like bad elements.

          • Jill says:

            Yes, very much so. One of those cases that before trying to change anything, one should definitely look at why those parts of it work, that do work, in the eyes of the people doing them. Things like becoming a junkie– or even a terrorist– may seem like, or be, a “problem” to us. But to the person who does the behavior, it seems like a “solution.”

  4. Jack V says:

    I would vote for, “ban posting under ‘anonymous’, allow anonymous posting, but choose a consistent nickname for one post”

    That allows people to occasionally say “I know about this but I don’t want to be harassed about it”. But cuts down on “I want to randomly say something banworthy.”

  5. Sick of this says:

    Some months back multiple online accounts of mine, on unrelated sites, were apparently simultaneously hacked and the passwords changed. Sadly this is not the only problem I’ve had recently and I’m at a loss as to an reasonable explanation.

    I keep my letterbox locked with a padlock, and am religiously careful about keeping it locked and closed. I ordered a copy of the census (which for the first time has a unique ID, and there is major punishments if you don’t do and return the census with accurate answers). The census is going on tomorrow, and it was to be delivered to this letterbox, and so was particularly conscious about locking it this week. Today I went to check it and found that the letterbox was wide open with the padlock *still locked*, and the letterbox totally empty (despite the usual copious load of rubbish that gets shoved in there). There is no way the box can be opened without removing the padlock, there is no possibility it was open before, and there is no damage to the mailbox. Either someone has got hold of my key, or they have have opened the padlock using other means. This has not happened before (had it for years, don’t usually get really important stuff delivered there), and I find the timing especially bizarre. This alone is no cause for alarm exactly, but…

    I’ve also recently returned to my car several times to find it has been tampered with, such as windows I never use being down, the radio I hadn’t used being on etc etc. Obviously like everyone I forget stuff, and so I’m not in a hurry to jump to conclusions about this stuff.

    But as I mentioned, this is all on top of some pretty serious hacking not that long ago, as well as multiple other things that offer no real explanation. Thing after thing like this has happened. I don’t think ‘they’re after me’ or anything like that, but as it’s simply not possible that I’ve got it mixed up, I’m struggling to find an explanation for these increasingly blatant things happening again and again.

    YEARS ago I was involved with the environmental movement doing a large number of hours of work. The movement was mostly just normal people, but there’s plenty of people with radical views spread through it too. Some people I met claimed exactly this sort of thing happened to them after they began political/activist campaigning. I thought they were a bit odd at the time, and I guess people will probably be skeptical about my story like I was of theirs. Since then I’ve read a lot that this sort of thing is quite common. I suppose I was much more left wing in those time, and I mixed in a movement that included occasional people that were pretty nuts, but even in those days I never did dangerous stuff or advocated anything extreme or violent (even then I sometimes got accused of being a “neo-liberal” by the lefties in the movement). So while the ideas that environmentalism pisses powerful people off does provide one fairly neatly fitting explanation, it’s really hard for me to picture that happening to someone with views as soft as mine. There’s *large* sections of the community, let alone all the radical nutcases out there, that carry on with what I consider extreme views all the time. I am a bit of a contrarian that likes to adopt weird views (especially when I was at uni), but generally people tell me my views are actually too nice and that I try to please everyone too much. I’m (now) very privacy conscious, quite well read on politics and IT, into unusual futurist topics, I have a blog with very small readership, and I still support protecting the environment. I don’t see anything especially weird in any of that? I’ve also openly criticized the authoritarian-left online multiple times. It just doesn’t make sense to me that significant time would be spent on a centre-left/centrist person. Would they dilute the effectiveness of stuff that’s meant for extremists on somebody like me? Would someone seriously waste time on doing things like this to moderates? Did I just get put on the extremist list for some trolly thing I said at some point and no-one can be bothered to take me off? What am I missing here?

    I’m not panicked or anything about this, and it’s hard for me to really fathom that someone would want to waste so much time doing this, but I’m lost for rational explanations other than the above. As it’s a fairly aggressive thing to do to someone, and I mean I don’t really want to start throwing serious accusations around (I never asked to be in this position), but I’ve got plenty of other challenges in life and don’t need this. It’s getting really frustrating and ridiculous.

    I’m trying to decide on a rational response. I’d like others advice on rational responses.

    • Lumifer says:

      Set up a webcam or two pointed e.g. at your letterbox and at your car. Read a few espionage thrillers and set some traps and tell-tales (leave a hair on a handle kind of thing). Will you be able to tell if your computers and/or smartphones are clean or pwned?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Well, one explanation is that someone’s messing with you. Another explanation is that nobody is. Perhaps the best move is to have someone you trust set up concealed security cameras covering your car, letterbox and any other things which are being messed with.

      Also, if a bunch of unrelated accounts of yours were hacked at the same time, the common element is you, or your computer. This isn’t necessarily personal at all; just spammers and other criminals collecting useful accounts.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Another possibility: Carbon monoxide poisoning. Just throwing that out there, because this reminds me a lot of that.

    • John Schilling says:

      Rationally, it is going to be very hard for you alone to distinguish between “I am paranoid” and “They really are out to get me” on this one. Both ought to have very low priors, but everything that explains the observations you report will have low priors, and you cannot e.g. absolutely trust your own memory of having padlocked the letterbox.

      If there are people you can trust to help you sort this out, preferably more than one and unconnected to each other, that’s your best asset. Barring that, physical evidence. As others have noted, a hardwired camera-based security system, set up to a non-networked computer or dumb recorder that you control.. Tamper-evident seals on things like the letterbox, car doors/windows, etc, and a logsheet where you (always, strictly) record when you place and break the seals – and don’t forget to put seals on the computer or recorder for the cameras.

      With a substantial body of evidence, you ought to be able to go to the local police for further assistance.

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      If I may offer another suspect….

      Distinguish between “They are out to get me” and “Some person is out to get me.” The local mischief suggests a local person. THRUSH is unlikely to spend the money to hire a local person (or send someone in to do the local mischief).

      Here’s a theory that would eliminate, (or shrink) several coincidences.

      1) The local mischief maker also knows enough hacking (means) to do the recent minor hacks ..
      .
      I sometimes got accused of being a “neo-liberal” by the lefties in the movement). [….]

      2)… and holds a grudge (motive) against you for being too moderate in the activism.

      3) Timing might be the key to opportunity. How often have you and he been within mischief distance of each other?

      One coincidence that could be shrunk a lot, is the car mischief happening timed with the other things. Windows down, radio station, etc sound like joy-riding, which is very common.

      Either someone has got hold of my key

      How possible is it to get hold of the key, at least long enough to have it copied?

    • Sick of this says:

      Thanks to everyone that’s provided advice. Others feel free to add thoughts, and in the meantime I’ll think about what I can do. Thanks.

  6. Mr Mind says:

    This is a sci-fi hack of baseball. Comment and correct at will.
    You are a member of the Rebellion, and your squad’s mission is to disrupt the construction of the Imperial Giant Superweapon of the Week before it’s completed.
    The problem is that the construction site is surrounded by a cloud of search-n-destroy space-drones: they are incredibly fast, able to outmanouver any Rebellion ship, and incredibly deadly, armed as they are with lethal Aptly Colored Lasers. As soon as they sense your ship, you are dead. Your only options is to lie on an asteroid or on a planet somewhere, with all your systems switched off, and hoped to be confused with the background noise.
    Their only weakness is that, being so small, their energy reserve is limited.
    Indeed every x cicle, an Imperial Ship of Refilling comes to the yard, connects with a Master Relay and starts pumping plasma and sensors updates, that the Master Relay will then redistributes to the other drones.
    This is your only chance: when the refilling starts, you have your occasion to send a Disruption Signal. If the Disruption Signal’s Harmonics match precisely those of the Refilling Ship, a cascade of malfunctionings will spread over the network, temprarily disabling every drones.
    In this short amount of time, your squad must quickly jump to action and fly to other planets or asteroids on which to rest, before the drones compensate for the errors and reactivate. Who is caught still flying when the drones become operative, is Eliminated from the Game.
    The ships that are able to reach the Superweapon in the center can Score by striking with their missiles, with enough attempts (and some luck) the Empire will be defeated!

    • Montfort says:

      A worthy effort. However, I spot a few places for improvement:

      1) I like the model of batting as disrupting a transfer, but this version runs into difficulties because the fielders don’t have to return the ball home (its original destination) to stop the runners, but instead to the next base. Also presents difficulties with explaining stealing.

      Perhaps the ball could be interpreted as an arms shipment. Regular deliveries of arms are necessary to maintain martial law on rebellious worlds and prevent them from launching unauthorized spacecraft. When such a transfer is disrupted, it has to be recovered by Imperial field agents, giving the plucky pilot a window to take off. If the weapons are ready and waiting when a rebel tries to land at a waystation (or brought to bear by an agent directly on the rebel ship), the rebel becomes another hero on the walls of HQ.

      And in either system, walks are fairly easy to explain – balls are just partially-failed transmissions, if there’s enough (4) then the drones are rendered briefly inoperable / the Imperials run out of supplies. Foul balls and strikeouts are kind of difficult, though.

      2) There’s no explanation for why the bases are run in a set order (and why the final one is where you start), nor why one runner can’t overtake another or share a base.

      This one is tough, but here’s my take. The batter is an ace smuggler, sent to acquire a large quantity of an extremely volatile chemical to deliver to saboteurs at HQ. HQ has charted a path of safe space (relatively free of cosmic rays and energy fields that might set off the chemical) to friendly chemical plants. Each of the chemical plants provides one substrate of the finished product, and each stage of the reaction can be done in flight. Three in total are needed. Smugglers must take care not to get too close to each other, lest one mishap destroy both their ships.

      3) Pop flies and tagging up

      This is major and abstract enough I think explaining it is in scope (as opposed to, say, balks, infield fly rule, or equipment rules), but realistically I don’t think it can fit gracefully. Would like to be proven wrong, though.

  7. Jill says:

    Here are 2 fascinating sounding books about people with Asperger’s and autism, just recommended for my local book club to read:

    “Imagine being trapped inside a Disney movie and having to learn about life mostly from animated characters dancing across a screen of color. A fantasy? A nightmare? This is the real-life story of Owen Suskind, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and his wife, Cornelia. An autistic boy who couldn’t speak for years, Owen memorized dozens of Disney movies, turned them into a language to express love and loss, kinship, brotherhood.The family was forced to become animated characters, communicating with him in Disney dialogue and song”

    Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism (ABC) Paperback – July 12, 2016
    by Ron Suskind
    https://www.amazon.com/Life-Animated-Sidekicks-Heroes-Autism/dp/1484741234/ref=la_B001I9RR1C_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470622549&sr=1-1
    —————————

    And the 2nd book:

    “In 2007 John Elder Robison wrote the international bestseller Look Me in the Eye, a memoir about growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. Amid the blaze of publicity that followed, he received a unique invitation: Would John like to take part in a study led by one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, who would use an experimental new brain therapy known as TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, in an effort to understand and then address the issues at the heart of autism? Switched On is the extraordinary story of what happened next.”

    Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening Hardcover – March 22, 2016
    by John Elder Robison (Author), Alvaro Pascual-Leon (Introduction), & 1 more

    https://www.amazon.com/Switched-Memoir-Change-Emotional-Awakening/dp/0812996895/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470622974&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Seitched+on

  8. Utopn Naxl says:

    Eh. You *can* get rid of anonymouse commenting. What follows is the same thing that follows whenever anonamouse comments are banned.

    Positive:

    1. Less low effort comments.

    2. Less trolling.

    3.Less flame wars

    Negative:

    3. More conformity in opinion.

    4. Less people actually speaking and thinking their minds on issues. I think this one can *sound* like trolling, but the problem is IRL lots of genuine thoughts seem like trolling.

    Really, I would suggest a method of keeping out commentators of low quality. Probably a basic email registration system. Something like only one comment per thread if one does not have an email.

  9. Jill says:

    Here’s an interesting point of view regarding federal deficits and inequality, from a Modern Monetary theory web site. I had not thought of the federal deficit in this way before.

    “It is more than a coincidence that federal deficits and inequality have grown simultaneously. The upward flow within the private sector links them. For the democracy to remain a healthy, ways must be found to limit the upward flow and redirect it toward the vast majority of the country’s population. MMT could become a more powerful tool for bringing this about by expanding analyses of the sectoral financial flows to show the flows between layers within the private sector. It may also show more about the causes of business cycles and how to break what appears to be a trend toward ever larger federal deficits.”

    Full article here:
    http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/08/another-dimension.html#more-10530

  10. jordan says:

    Scott,

    (or someone else with medical knowledge)

    What do you think about Todd Rider’s DRACO anti-virus drug research at MIT?

    Read through it, but my lack of technical know-how limited my comprehension. The biggest red flag I saw was that it seemed to claim to fix EVERYTHING and to have no problems, which is basically not true of any treatments or drug in the history of the world, ever.

    Still, I found it very exciting when this research got popular in 2011, and was glad someone in medicine was trying to “take on viruses” rather than simply accepting them as our permanent parasitic companions. If you get a chance, let me know if you’ve researched this and have any answers for me.

    Thanks,

    Jordan

  11. Jill says:

    A neuroscientist explains what may be wrong with Trump supporters’ brains

    http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/a-neuroscientist-explains-what-may-be-wrong-with-trump-supporters-brains/

    I know, I know. The title article might offend some people, so some folks here are about to exhort me once again to treat people of the Right Wing with kid gloves, even while so many of them are stomping on me with army boots. But I have decided against that policy. What is the point of being one more wimpy liberal who is too nice to ever authentically call things as she sees them? The country is filled with liberals like those. They’re not getting anywhere.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      Jill, you’re part of a tribe whose “wimpy, too nice” members have no problem defending violent rioters, shredding due process rights, and driving people from their jobs for supporting the wrong side of a political campaign. I have no idea what bizarre parallel universe you come from, but it’s clearly not the one that the rest of us inhabit.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      @Jill:

      A neuroscientist explains what may be wrong with Trump supporters’ brains

      Not much there there. The article puts forth these options:
      (1) Dunning-Kruger: Trump supporters are ignorant and don’t know what they don’t know. (Alas, this is an all-purpose accusation – you can apply it to any group in any circumstance.)
      (2) Conservative brains are broken in that they have an outsized fear response. (I’m pretty sure most MRI studies claiming brain differences between liberals and conservatives have been casualties of the replication crisis (eg), so this point should be presumed bogus.)
      (3) “Terror Management Theory” – evolution makes us act stupidly in the face of existential threats. (Wikipedia says many psychologists challenge/question the entire basis of TMT. Which in any case would seem to explain Hillary support similarly well if they perceive Trump as an existential threat.)
      (4) “High attentional engagement” which is to say Trump is much less boring than other candidates. (Well, yeah. But did we need a neuroscientist to tell us that?)

    • SP says:

      It seems to me, Jill, that you are torn between two goals. On the one hand you are genuinely distressed by America’s tribal cultural warfare. Inter tribal communication matters a lot to you. On the other hand, you seem equally if not more distressed by the too nice way your fellow Blue tribe members are acting (not disputing this for the moment).

      Unfortunately I think this means you’re stuck. Inter tribal communication sometimes means being really nice to people who think that you are the devil. It means communicating really nicely with people who just told you that there is something wrong with your brain because of your political beliefs. That’s incompatible, as far as I can tell, with not being nice to people of another tribe because you are concerned about said too-niceness.

      For my part, whether you decide the first goal is your priority over your second goal (or not) I hope you stick around. I disagree with almost everything you say, and I imagine myself to be someone you think is some form of evil or stupidity or both, but you are nonetheless the most interesting thing to have happened to this board in a while. So I’m rooting for you to enjoy yourself here, and excited to see both how you and this board changes as a result of your involvement.

    • Jiro says:

      A neuroscientist explains what may be wrong with Trump supporters’ brains

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

      I wish I’d expected better of you.

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      Jill proclaims [intemperately]  “I have decided against that policy [of discourse that is rational, respectful, and empathic] What is the point of being one more wimpy liberal who is too nice to ever authentically call things as she sees them? The country is filled with liberals like those. They’re not getting anywhere.”

      Among young people especially, rational, respectful, and empathic discourse *is* getting somewhere. See for example, the traditionally conservative aggregator RedState’s latest broadside: “Trump In 4th Place, Behind BOTH 3rd Party Candidates, With Young Voters In New Poll“. 🙂

      Doesn’t neuroscience teach that changing minds is not a matter of deductive ratiocination, but rather is founded upon the physiological and cognitive reparcellation of social cognition? So changing peoples minds is inherently a slow process, isn’t it? A process that requires long-term sustainment of empathic practice, right?

      What does it matter, if the far-right (or the far-left too) responds with their characteristically toxic blend of intemperate anger, juvenile abuse, willful ignorance, and ineffectual repression? “Soft responses” that “turneth away wrath” catalyze the rejection equally of the far-right and the far-left, thereby ensuring the long-term triumph of Enlightened Modernity with young people especially.

      So let’s embrace Jeeves as our role model! More Spinoza, please! And in the meantime, my write-in vote will be going to a pair of Enlightened Modernist Moderates … Jim Webb and Al Franken! 🙂 🙂 🙂

      • Jill says:

        Interesting ideas and links. To be clear, I certainly never said that I have decided against that policy [of discourse that is rational, respectful, and empathic.] Those words inside his parentheses were Uncle Ilya Kuriakin’s, not mine. I simply am talking about authentically calling things as I see them, which does not in any way preclude rationality, respect, or empathy– except in the eyes of those who desire me to treat them with kid gloves.

        With the exception of SJW’s I find most liberals to be pretty wimpy, not even normally assertive, much less aggressive. It’s no wonder at all that the GOP controls both Houses of Congress, most state legislatures, most state governorships, and SCOTUS until very recently.

        It’s still amazing to me that people who want to rebel and say a big Eff You to the establishment, are deciding to do so by voting for the party that controls both Houses of Congress, most state legislatures, most state governorships, and SCOTUS until very recently.

        Although the particular candidate that they are voting for claims to be anti-establishment, he is surrounding himself with lots of economic and political establishment type people.

        Trump’s economic team has a lot of billionaires, very few economic experts
        http://www.vox.com/2016/8/5/12387698/trump-billionaires-economists

        • Jill says:

          In fact, I think the reason why SJW’s have gotten so aggressive is that most liberals are so wimpy that they have laid down and become door mats to the SJWs, just like they have to the GOP.

    • The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t as big a deal as a lot of people think.

      The article leaves out the “let it burn” Trump supporters, but I have no idea how common they are.

      As for how much anger it’s worth showing, I haven’t wanted to do the work of sorting out who’s been offensive about what, but what I’ve seen is Jill being apparently polite in terms of not doing overt insults and right-wingers/red tribe members expressing a lot of anger at her without being specific about what she said that they were angry at. So now Jill is also showing a good bit of anger.

      Being specific about what’s going on is *work*, and it’s hard to do when people are angry and it might not get a friendly reception. I’m reminded of a lot of what goes on with SJWs.

      I’m fresh out of advice. Have a classic video (not related to American culture wars) about people being driven to “incomprehensible” rage.

      • Also, there are people who are planning to vote for Trump because they can’t abide Clinton– they’re not going to be psychologically the same as people who actually like Trump.

    • Sandy says:

      Yes, the side that’s been calling Trump the reincarnated amalgamation of Hitler, Mussolini and Vlad the Impaler is “too nice to call things as they see them”.

      • The Nybbler says:

        They’ve called him a vampire, but I don’t think they ever related him to directly Vlad Dracul. They’ve also called supporter Peter Thiel a vampire, but “they” was Gawker and I think we know why they’re a bit sore.

    • The Nybbler says:

      As Jiro says, this is just Bulverism. It considers all the possibilities but two: That Trump is actually on to something that his supporters like, and that Hillary Clinton is completely unacceptable to his supporters.

      Out of immense frustration, some of us may feel the urge to shake a Trump supporter and say, “Hey! Don’t you realize that he’s an idiot?!

      Here’s the problem: Trump’s not an idiot. A lot of people said W. was an idiot, and that’s almost believable; he did have the entire Republican party backing him. But even ignoring his business career, Trump has just managed to take the Republican nomination against the wishes of that same Republican party apparatus. That doesn’t square with “idiot”.

      This article basically breaks down into “here’s some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to reassure you that Trump supporters are paranoid idiots with a short attention span”. This is what many mean when they talk about the “arrogance of the left”.

      • Aegeus says:

        Trump has proven he is incredibly good at getting Republicans to like him, which requires some sort of talent, but every time he talks about policy, I keep landing on words like “idiotic” or “ignorant” or “blatantly lying.”

        I know that the conventional wisdom around here is that IQ is generally applicable and that smart people tend to be smart in general, but it really seems like Trump only uses his intelligence to find more ways to appeal to his base. If he was skilled at political strategy in general, you would expect him to do strategic things like, say, not interrupting the news about your rival’s latest scandal to attack the parents of a dead soldier.

        Basically, I’m not sure if he was clever enough to identify an unmet need in the Republican party and become its face, or if he just ran on his ideology and was pleasantly surprised to find it filled an unmet need in the Republican party.

        • Jill says:

          He is entertaining, and a bully, and is ignorant about just about everything except real estate dealings. And he knows how to work a crowd entertaininly. So he has great appeal to people who like to be entertained, are ignorant about most things, and who see a bully as being “a strong leader.” That’s about all there is.

    • John Schilling says:

      I know, I know. The title article might offend some people,

      I doubt it would offend anyone here.

      It will annoy us. It will annoy us because it is an insulting waste of our time. It will annoy us because just about everyone here has heard countless variations on “our political opponents have something wrong with their brains, here is a Genuine Scientist giving the Science Reason why our political opponents are literally insane or brain damaged!”. From both sides, though I think it’s more common on the left on account of their otherwise-laudable desire to be the science-friendly ideology. And pretty much every time we’ve bothered to follow up on such claims, we have been left dumber for the experience. The rational choice for all of us is to ignore all such claims unless they are backed by extraordinary evidence, and really to not even bother with the evidence unless it comes from a highly credible source.

      Which you aren’t. A credible source for something like this would be a person with a proven track record for delivering accurate and insightful analysis of contentious issues, and the awareness to open with “Look, I know you’ve heard things like this many times before and it’s always been wrong, but here’s why I think this one is different and doesn’t repeat the mistakes you’ve all seen before”. Someone like Scott could pull that off. As, indeed, he has.

      You can’t. Not yet, maybe not ever. From day one, you’ve been presenting us with arguments we’ve all heard many times before, supported by links to work no better than we’ve all considered and rejected before. I don’t know whether you think these things are new to us, or that one more repetition will be somehow persuasive to us, but what we are mostly persuaded of is that a Jill-link or a long Jill-post is so unlikely to be worth our time that we should probably just skip it.

      And you aren’t alone in being on the usually-not-worth-engaging-with list, but you are here and you seem to be trying to do better. But if you want to build the level of credibility that lets you accomplish anything with posts like the above, it’s going to take time. I’d recommend focusing, for the time being, on subjects that are closer to your areas of personal expertise and experience, and farther from the usual realms of political debate. Perhaps more importantly, I’d recommend a whole lot more time and effort spent trying to understand what other people here actually think, before you set out to change their minds.

    • Jill says:

      To be clear, I certainly never said that I have decided against that policy [of discourse that is rational, respectful, and empathic.] Those words inside his parentheses were Uncle Ilya Kuriakin’s, not mine. I simply am talking about authentically calling things as I see them, which does not in any way preclude rationality, respect, or empathy– except in the eyes of those who desire me to treat them with kid gloves.

  12. Over in the links thread, there’s a long discussion of choosing children’s names so as to avoid the child getting bullied over that, at least.

    It seems to me that if anti-bullying policies work, then it’s a much stronger strategy to put the child in a school where bullying is strongly and effectively discouraged. Does anyone have experience of anti-bullying strategies working?

    • John Schilling says:

      I very much second Nancy’s question and am reluctant to interject in a way that might derail the thread before getting answers. Please, if you have experience one way or another, let’s hear it.

      That said, however strong a strategy it may be, most parents aren’t in a position to decide the range of anti-bullying policies in place at the schools within geographic and financial reach maybe ten years, two jobs, and a move in the future. Deciding on a name that doesn’t invite bullying seems like a decent backup plan, and at least some relevant trends can be predicted with fair reliability a decade or two out (e.g. “A Boy Named Sue” being written fifty years ago and needing no explanation when brought up here).

      • Luke the CIA stooge says:

        It always seemed to me that bullying almost definitionally could not have effective policy to counteract it because bullying isn’t the core phenomenon. Bullying is either A the result of a semi-agressive culture which some just do not have the ability to compete in (think teenage guys ripping on each other and the weird kid can’t cope) and/or B. Confining a sizable population in a status competition they aren’t allowed to leave.
        Creating a peaceful non-predatory school is about as difficult as creating a peaceful non-predatory prison, because from a social perspective their the same institution (right down to confrontations in the cafeteria). The prize of competition (social control over the environment you can’t leave) is simply too great.

        Sure you can restrict the methods of competing (declare stabbings above waste attempted homicide and threaten to add infinity to there sentence, or declare snarling each other over facebook cyber bullying and threaten expulsion and you’ll get more ass stabbings/snarling in person) bit fundamentally the competition will not stop, there might be lulls or temporary equilibriums but the incentive is right there waiting to temp everyone once the situation changes.

        Ask yourself: does work feel that much different from highschool? baring changes in YOUR status. Probably not, because it’s an environment your stuck in with strong penalties for leaving and massive benefits for winning the status game. Bullying is just what happens when one party’s massively outgunned or the natural logic of escalation is played out. If humans still exist as rational individuals in 40000ad then bullying will still exist.

        This is basic Hobbes: human nature isn’t evil or good it’s rational. And God made a world where evil is rational.

        • Jill says:

          What an interesting view, where much of it is new to me, but it mostly makes sense.

          Some schools have far less bullying than others. And some workplaces. Probably the ones that are more cooperative and less competitive and cutthroat and authoritarian, I would think? And/or perhaps the opposite too, very authoritarian and the punishment for bullying is severe. I think the local community outside the school itself makes a huge difference too. How harsh, competitive, cutthroat, authoritarian is that environment vs. cooperative or kind?

          Evil is most rational in the most authoritarian competitive cutthroat environments and least rational in environments where it’s mostly safe to relax and have fun and where mutual cooperation is bringing many benefits to people.

  13. Emily says:

    If you’re currently reading this from a computer lab/apartment office in a big DC apartment building, my husband just saw you reading and did not say “my wife is a big fan as well, want to come over for board games sometime,” but I would have.

    • cassander says:

      I’m in a big DC apartment building….

      • Emily says:

        Cool! Shoot me an email at heterodox.jedi@gmail or find me on Reddit if you want to get together sometime. Or, idk, leave a note in the laundry room?

  14. Slajov says:

    I have a non-political topic:

    Is there anything (books or survey papers especially) worth reading in nutrition science as it stands today? In particularly I’m looking for something that would would appeal to rationalists or members of adjacent subcultures.

    I’ve gotten the impression that everything is hopelessly confounded, and we have no idea what’s causing the rise in obesity, whether changing one’s diet in any way can increase one’s lifespan or health, etc. At the same time, I’ve seen a few rather counterintuitive assertions, like a claim that removing sugar from one’s diet has about the same impact on your dental health as flossing or brushing (so that many hunter-gatherer tribes have perfectly fine dental health with no modern medicine), and I’m not sure how to evaluate them.

    • Jill says:

      Here’s one an M.D. at my chruch recommended for our book group to read.

      Eat fat, get thin : why the fat we eat is the key to sustained weight loss and vibrant health
      by Hyman, Mark

    • Nornagest says:

      like a claim that removing sugar from one’s diet has about the same impact on your dental health as flossing or brushing (so that many hunter-gatherer tribes have perfectly fine dental health with no modern medicine), and I’m not sure how to evaluate them.

      I’d believe that one, with the caveat that sugar doesn’t always mean refined sugar. In the archaeology of the pre-Columbian Americas, we can tell which peoples ate a lot of maize (and when it started to become a staple crop) by looking at skeletons’ teeth: maize is rich in sugars relative to most other staples, and the cultures that ate it have much more tooth decay than those that didn’t.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      Is there anything (books or survey papers especially) worth reading in nutrition science as it stands today?

      It’s not strictly “in nutrition science”, but I can recommend Penn Jillette’s new book (just released this week!): Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales. Over the course of a series of meandering stories, Penn describes what he did to lose a third of his weight and dramatically improve his general health situation. The more science-y book covering this material is still being written – it’ll be a book called _Our Broken Plate_ by Ray Cronise. (Meanwhile, there are some papers, most notably the one on Metabolic Winter.)

      • I haven’t read Jillette’s book, but I’ve listened to an interview where he said he was very consistent about saying “I” and not generalizing to other people.

    • Agronomous says:

      I’ve gotten the impression that everything is hopelessly confounded, and we have no idea what’s causing the rise in obesity…

      My theory is that committing crime burns a lot of calories, so as the crime rate goes down, the obesity rate goes up.

      Note that this is probably not actually the least-well-thought-out theory in the world of nutrition.

      • dndnrsn says:

        CrimeFit, the most intense workout you could have, and if it goes wrong, some dudes get absolutely jacked in prison?

  15. Jill says:

    Am just realizing that much of the time, I don’t know precisely what the issue is that some other commenters have with my comments. I don’t remember using the words “malice” or “greed” but have been accused of saying these are characteristic of the GOP. I do find that the characteristics that many people here ascribe to Dems are pretty ugly. But I’m not wanting to play “Both sides do it.” I want to be fair to people, even if they are not fair to me.

    However, I am not going to pretend e.g. that I think the GOP restricts voting rights in order to prevent voter fraud. I don’t believe that. And there is no evidence for it. Such laws always greatly decreases minority voting, and minority opportunities to vote. And that’s why SCOTUS has been striking these laws down.

    Voting Rights on the March
    Lower courts are emboldened by a 4–4 split and the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling to strike down specious voting laws
    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/08/why_courts_are_striking_down_voting_rights_restrictions_right_now.html

    I am trying to be fair, but not treat people with kid gloves or pretend not to notice what the GOP is doing, in order to satisfy Right Wingers here who may believe the GOP can do no wrong.

    Inter-tribal communication is almost impossible. But, for the time being, I am willing to keep trying. However, I’m not willing to swallow other people’s explanations for things when the truth of them looks quite different, and quite obvious, to me.

    I don’t see any point in pretending I see eye to eye with people, when I do not.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      If you want to “stick” around here (by which I mean have a pleasant enough experience that you want to continue posting) allow me to suggest the following.

      State your positions as arguments, rather than facts. If it helps, you might even consider framing each position using the phrase “I assert”. And try and keep your assertions quite specific. Don’t refer to this board as a whole, or even conservatives on this board, or even conservatives in general, if you mean, say, elected GOP officials or other people in positions of influence.

      This will allow people here to engage with you more dispassionately and not throw themselves under a blanket that perhaps should not cover them.

      For example:
      I assert that GOP officials are primarily concerned with suppressing the legitimate votes of those who vote for Democratic candidates, rather than believing that voter fraud is a particularly viable concern.

      • Jill says:

        Thanks for your suggestion. I’ll think it over.

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        Please allow me to agree with Jill, that HeelBearCub’s suggestion is worth trying … and so let’s try it. In reflecting upon two maxims of Alexander Pope,

        Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

        Since it is reasonable to doubt most things, we should most of all doubt that reason of ours, which would demonstrate all things.

        we find two reasons to doubt the capacity of Trump-supporting rationalists, to learn from the ever-increasing class of reasons that convey doubt regarding inherent cognitive and emotional capacities of Mr. Trump to fulfill the grave responsibilities of Presidential office that he seeks

        These grave responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the unrestricted, unilateral, immediate authority to launch nuclear attacks anywhere on the globe.

        In the present as in the 1960s, once nuclear attack orders are given, the attack itself is entirely governed by strictly rational procedures. Hence it is crucially important, to reduce the probability of a dubiously rational initiation order, to the lowest feasible level.

        In a two-kernel nutshell, Mr. Trump is both (1) too irrationally self-confident and (2) too unwittingly ignorant, to be safely entrusted with immediate, unrestricted, unilateral nuclear launch authority.

        In regard to open public discussion of these issues, Army Gen./Dr. H. R. McMasters’ required-reading history (within the US military, anyway) Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (1997) has this to offer:

        “To say that the most momentous issues a nation must face cannot be openly and critically discussed is really tantamount to saying that democratic debate and decision do not apply the the questions of life and death. … Not only is this position at odds with the principles of democracy, but it removes a very important corrective for governmental misjudgement.”

        Yes indeed … this mode of expression is rational, respectful, informative, democratic, and refreshing (and to very many folks, including me, it is entirely convincing).

        Thank you HeelBearCub.

      • Mistake Not ... says:

        It’s not terrible advice, but it’s sad that we need a special set of rules for left leaning posters that non-left leaning posters certainly don’t follow.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          I do pretty much the same thing by double-checking my posts and adding “I think” anywhere I’m not confident I could find an absolutely ironclad source to back it up within five minutes.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          They aren’t rules.

          It’s merely recognizing the terrain and mapping out a path that has you walking on the high-ground and not wading through the mud. Wading through mud is tiring and seems to last forever and you feel like you have made no progress at all.

          Jill has been fighting her battle on two fronts or more and I’m trying to help her close the front that is taking most of her effort (and is a losing battle, especially given Jill’s stated goals.)

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        @ HBC
        State your positions as arguments, rather than facts. If it helps, you might even consider framing each position using the phrase “I assert”. And try and keep your assertions quite specific.
        [:….:]
        For example:
        I assert that GOP officials are primarily concerned with suppressing the legitimate votes of those who vote for Democratic candidates, rather than believing that voter fraud is a particularly viable concern.
        >

        I assert that your idea is good, but ‘assert’ is not a good word for the purpose. I assert that ‘assert’ suggests that the speaker has 100% confidence in the predicate, and replying with “But I assert with 100% confidence that just the opposite is true” is, er, not often seen in polite circles.

        I assert that better phrases for the polite padding are terms like: “I think”…”I wonder if”…”I guess”…”But what about”…”I’m afraid you’re forgetting”…”IMO” — and many others of the same level of generalization as the original claim.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          I don’t disagree with any of this.

          I wa trying to emphasize a thought process that might put one in the mindset of philosophical argument. Here is my position, counter-arguments are welcome and expected. That approach is fairly respected here, in my experience.

          But softening modifiers can also be very useful.

    • Lumifer says:

      Jill says:
      August 5, 2016 at 4:07 pm ~new~

      I’d be lying if I said that I see no signs of greed or malice in any GOPers. I don’t think they’re all that way.

      And merely two hours later:

      Jill says:
      August 5, 2016 at 6:03 pm ~new~

      … I don’t remember using the words “malice” or “greed” but have been accused of saying these are characteristic of the GOP.

      You don’t remember what you posted two hours before?

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        Thank you lumifer, for providing further occasion to appreciate Jill’s gracious comments, and to thank her for them.

      • Jill says:

        Both of those 2 posts were sequential replies by me, to an earlier post by someone who said I saw greed and malice where there was none, in the GOP or the Red Tribe. To be perfectly precise, I should have said that I didn’t remember using those words prior to the post by the person who referred to my “characterizations of greed and malice in the GOP” in posts.

        Every single instance of imperfect precision by me here, seems to be jumped on immediately. This doesn’t seem to happen to anyone else here. Oh the joy.

        • Jiro says:

          Every single instance of imperfect precision by me here, seems to be jumped on immediately.

          Well, the point of discussion is to try to become correct. Of course incorrectness will get noticed. Mistakes are a bad thing.

          I think you’re still confusing this with other forums. Being careless about your information sources or saying fake but accurate things is frowned on here.

      • Dahlen says:

        Hey, please stop quoting “~ new ~” (with no spaces). Ctrl+F-ing those characters is just about the only way to make sense of the SSC comments section.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          It’s 2016, bro, use the sidebar thingy.

          • The sidebar thingy is good if you’re not terribly concerned with reading comment threads as relatively coherent wholes. ~ new is good if you have a lot to catch up on.

          • Dahlen says:

            Just noticed it, and it still doesn’t seem to be a better system than what I’m currently using. I’d rather type two characters in and lazily press Enter, instead of keeping track of who’s who.

    • Outis says:

      Sometimes the view from outside can help put things in perspective. Having grown up in Europe, the lack of voter ID in the US strikes me as one of those weird and exotic American traditions, like carrying weapons everywhere or not having a national health service. In fact, in terms of how obviously reasonable, appropriate and non-contentious it ought to be, I rank voter ID above both gun control and socialized health care.

      Just my €0.02.

      • Mistake Not ... says:

        Keep in mind we don’t have national IDs because it’s some kind of boogiemen. Clearly it wasn’t necessary for pervasive surveillance but try telling that to the black helicopter crowd.

    • Seth says:

      Am just realizing that much of the time, I don’t know precisely what the issue is that some other commenters have with my comments.

      I’m finding the reactions pretty interesting from a sociological point of view. I don’t think there’s a single issue, but multiple minor factors adding up to more significant friction.

      1) The SSC-commentariat-swims-right problem. It’s not that there are no left-leaning posters, but I believe (note qualifier) that the median is significant Libertarian-right.

      2) Communication style. It’s really obvious to me that Jill comes from a different social group than most people here. It’s straight out of all the theory about how different groups use language.

      3) Not quite the same as #2, but the jargon and shorthand has mismatches with what most people expect.

      I don’t suggest that the above is exhaustive. It’s just things which have caught my eye here with someone who has a just a bit more deviation than standard from the local central peak (note example of how I’m using jargon there).

  16. Jill says:

    Newt Gingrich historical quotes, for those of you who question whether he is responsible for our latest wave of bashing politics.
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/newt-gingrich-greatest-rhetorical-hits?page=2

    • The Nybbler says:

      Petition to ban Jill for linking to an article containing language which could evoke mental imagery of Newt Gingrich having sex.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      @Jill:
      Did you catch my response to your Gingrich schtick (aka “Evil Wizard Theory”) in the prior links thread? It’s here.

      Skimming the MJ reference links, I was impressed with a quote from this one – Gingrich said:

      “Oh, this is just the beginning of a 20-or-30-year movement. I’ll get credit for it…As a historian, I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious, sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.”

      I think he got the near-term entirely backwards – it seems like it’s his enemies who are writing histories that glorify him and prove him more important than he was!

      • Luke the CIA stooge says:

        Would that we could all have the honour

      • Jill says:

        He was pretty darned important in the most recent wave of the politics of bashing, partisanship, tribalism, and lying big time.

        Thanks for pointing me back to your comment on the other thread. Threads get so long here, that I sometimes lose track.

        • Jill says:

          Glen, here’s my reply to what you said on the other thread:
          “If Evil Wizard Theory were true, identifying Gingrich as the Evil Wizard might cause his influence to disappear in a puff of smoke whereupon everybody who has read that article you kept linking would wake up in a daze and decide to, I dunno, vote for Hillary?”

          No, it wouldn’t. Propaganda still works even if people are told who is doing it and what they are doing– at least if that propaganda has been going on for decades. If it’s only been going on for a few weeks, there is some chance that exposing it would de-activate it though.

          Goebbbels has been quoted as saying “Say something once and it’s a lie. Say something twice and it’s a lie. Say it a thousand times and it’s an eternal truth.” Right Wing “news sources” have told lies and bashed Dems many thousands of times over past decades. I can’t do much as an individual to counteract that. But I do what little I can manage.

          “But here’s my question for you: what if Evil Wizard Theory isn’t true? Or if it is, what if Gingrich *isn’t* the relevant wizard but is just one more sad sack operating under the influence of a spell cast by a different wizard?”

          In this case, I think it is true. And there may be wizards higher in status than Gingrich. But Gingrich looks like a major wizard to me, and to Ornstein.

          “When you post links to an Evil Wizard Gingrich essay, what outcome are you hoping to achieve? Do you see any evidence that you’re getting that outcome?”

          Just some discussion, for the time being. I know it won’t change anyone’s mind here. Right Wing media has repeated many many lies about the Left Wing, about everything from saying Hillary murdered 100 people to small things like Obama being divisive when dealing with those oh-so-cooperative GOPers.

          I would not see evidence of what I want to see. I have to do it without evidence. What I am doing is exposing Right Wingers, some perhaps for the first time in their lives, to Left Wing points of view, from the point of view of someone who knows certain things to be true and valuable– not from the usual point of view people here are used to hearing– that of Right Wing media deriding these views as stupid, silly, evil etc.

          People here do deride me as being those things, just like their Right Wing media sources have done before them. But at least those who can deal with the fact that I am not a troll, may eventually admit to themselves that some people do believe these things, even thought their own tribe does not.

          • Jill says:

            People in the U.S. have been incredibly easy to Divide and Conquer, because we are such an active nation and so non-reflective. Propagandists seem like Evil Wizards, who couldn’t possibly exist.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            As I said in another thread somewhere, it seems to me you cannot simultaneously accept the claim that running a polity by popular vote is a good idea and the claim that the populace can be manipulated en masse by clever people with money to spend. They just cannot both be true.

          • The observation that humans can be manipulated by advertising seems uncontroversial. But if a polity isn’t to be run by humans, what’s your alternative?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @Jill:

            Propagandists seem like Evil Wizards, who couldn’t possibly exist.

            Calling somebody an Evil Wizard is great propaganda – it lets you shut off your brain and dismiss out of hand a vast array of enemy claims made by a vast array of enemies without having to think them through and come up with any actual counterarguments. You can just say “Oh, they only believe that because they’re in thrall to the Evil Wizard!”

            But consider for a moment the possibility that Gingrich isn’t an Evil Wizard. Maybe he was successful because his arguments were popular. Maybe his arguments were popular because they were actually correct. Or maybe they were popular because he was riding a popular zeitgeist – lots of people were thinking similar things at the same time.

            One argument for one of those latter options is that I myself came to many of the same conclusions at a similar time independently of Gingrich and with essentially no exposure to “right wing media” of the sort you’re thinking of – only from having read a few of the same books he had read.

            Norm Ornstein thinks Gingrich “delegitimized” government, which presumes government was “legitimate” prior to his influence. But the people whose writings most “delegitimized” government for me included Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Lysander Spooner (1808-1887). Are they “wizards” too? Or did Gingrich perhaps go back in time to convince them?

            Or consider other, more recent thinkers Gingrich was riffing on and bringing to his students. Have you read, say, Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom? Has Ornstein? Do you have any arguments against Hayek’s core claims? Does Ornstein? Identifying Gingrich as a middleman who helped popularize the ideas of people like Hayek is no substitute for engaging with the underlying ideas.

            In short: you say he’s an Evil Wizard; I respond “okay, but was he actually wrong about anything in particular?” If he was wrong, we should dismiss those claims whether or not he was an Evil Wizard. If he was right, we should accept his claims regardless of whether or not he was an Evil Wizard. So calling him one is beside the point.

          • John Schilling says:

            it seems to me you cannot simultaneously accept the claim that running a polity by popular vote is a good idea and the claim that the populace can be manipulated en masse by clever people with money to spend

            What if you accept that clever people with money to spend are always going to be running the show no matter what? Popular vote makes people feel better about it, and puts at least some bound on the level of overt villainy and/or incompetence the overlords can get away with.

            There are some assumptions in there that I am neither confident of or comfortable with, but it’s not obviously wrong.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            The observation that humans can be manipulated by advertising seems uncontroversial.

            Okay, with caveats. Advertising can communicate to me things I might not have known about the candidate any other way; does that count as “manipulation”? And advertising can appeal to my feelings in ways that a Vulcan might be immune to; does that count as “manipulation”?

            The argument Jill is making seems stronger than that — that advertising can control the outcome of an election regardless of the thoughts and feelings of the populace. Like Glen I have my doubts about that.

            But if a polity isn’t to be run by humans, what’s your alternative?

            On even days, I deny that my fellow voters are so easy to manipulate.

            On odd days, either anarcho-capitalism or Moldbuggian formalism.

            Popular vote makes people feel better about it, and puts at least some bound on the level of overt villainy and/or incompetence the overlords can get away with.

            Does it? The myth of popular sovereignty, that the vote legitimizes whatever the hell those in power decide to do, strikes me as tending to remove those bounds rather than enhance them.

            Yes, those in power need to fear being voted out of power. But by assumption, that threat is negligible because those in power are Evil Wizards who can control the outcome of the vote.

            If they just exercised their power nakedly, they could still use their Evil Wizardry to convince people of their right to do so, but they would have to do that from first principles.

            There are some assumptions in there that I am neither confident of or comfortable with, but it’s not obviously wrong.

            Heh. I hear you, brother.

  17. Jill says:

    I’ve been doing my best here to role model commenting even if one is Left Wing. I am glad that other Left Wingers are feeling free to comment too.

    I value comments from all tribes, especially inter-tribal and intra-tribal analysis attempts.

    This is difficult and people can get their feelings hurt and/or hurt other people’s feelings. And there are ways to do it in a more civil manner that can be learned. I certainly am not perfect in doing it either. But it’s a worthy endeavor that could yield good results.

    We really can’t analyze the polarization and tribal identity stuff that is perhaps the most significant block to progress in the U.S. currently, unless we have a decent number of representatives of different tribes. If it’s heavily one way, it doesn’t go very far.

  18. Jill says:

    Thinking about red pill brute strength sometimes now. There is so much belief in being “alpha” in American culture right now, that it seems like lots of people think that the best way to be is to beat their chest and brag and insult and bully other people. I can understand why some people are scared right now in the U. S. about the economy and immigration and other issues. But maybe the way some people try to become strong isn’t working that well.

    Anyway, this guy, from WWE, is different. He has a ton of red pill brute strength, but has a kind of self-deprecating humor that I find particularly funny because it’s so rare nowadays.

    http://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2016/8/4/12382506/john-cena-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert-interview-shade-aj-styles

    If you really ARE a strong person, rather than a scared person pretending to be strong, maybe you don’t need to stomp on and destroy everybody who disagrees with you in some minor way. There are times for competition, and this guy’s a competitor in the ring. But he can leave that aside and “come home from work” and relax, once he’s out of the ring. Maybe it’s all an act. But even in things that are all an act, we rarely see humble acts any more.

    Anyway, he seemed fun, entertaining and a nice guy.

    • John Cena is funny and charming, and I recommend the video.

      However, I don’t think we know why (anecdotally) people who weight train might find their politics drifting rightwards.

      Notes from the videos: The world clearly needs a Trump impersonator doing professional wrestling. Or does this exist already?

      There’s a recommendation to not eat anything that’s green *and* breathing because it will be rotten, but there’s always sloth, not to mention mallard heads.

      • smocc says:

        There is already a Donald Trump impersonator in professional wrestling. His name is Donald Trump.

        I have sometimes claimed that if you can’t understand why people enjoy professional wrestling, you won’t be able to understand why some people find Trump’s personality appealing (personality only, not necessarily politics). He’s a perfect heel.

        Personally I enjoy some professional wrestling but can’t stand Trump’s personality because I know the former is an act but the latter seems to be completely sincere.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I can’t tell what’s real any more.

          • I’m having that problem myself. I keep having to check on whether some headline is from a real or fake news source.

            This being said, I would still like to see a bout between a Trump impersonator and practically an anyone else impersonator. Trump impersonator vs. Clinton impersonator might be too surreal or possibly not.

            What I really want is the moment when Trump is defeated and the victor is parading around triumphantly waving Trump’s toupee. We probably don’t want a Hillary impersonator for that. Suggestions?

          • The Nybbler says:

            What I really want is the moment when Trump is defeated and the victor is parading around triumphantly waving Trump’s toupee. We probably don’t want a Hillary impersonator for that. Suggestions?

            Bill? Ted Cruz?

          • hlynkacg says:

            The Onion turned into sober, hard-hitting journalism so slowly that I didn’t even notice.

          • smocc says:

            Kanye West.

    • Nornagest says:

      I think the “bully has low self-esteem” angle is overrated.

      I am a serious martial artist and formerly a competitive one. I’ve known strong fighters who were chest-beating assholes. I’ve known strong fighters who were quiet and soft-spoken. I didn’t notice any particular correlation. It seems to be more a matter of base personality and maybe culture than ability.

      There are certain types of chest-beating that are found only in people who can’t actually back it up — what rap artists call “fronting”, basically. But you can’t assume that anyone who looks “alpha” is doing that.

      • Jill says:

        It seems to me that strong fighters who are chest-beating assholes are less emotionally mature, than strong fighters who are quiet and soft-spoken, or than strong fighters who are assertive but not pugnacious.

        The way I see it, if one is really strong emotionally, one can relax and have fun and enjoy life and other people– and not have to constantly prove one’s toughness by pushing on other people and trying to dominate them 24/7/365.

        Do you see it differently?

        • Nornagest says:

          Okay, that’s a different kind of strength than I thought you were going for. But I still suspect there might be some kind of no-true-Scotsman action going on here.

          Thing is, a lot of people like trash talk and overt pugnacity. The process of it, not the dominance aspect. It’s fun for them; it helps them bond with each other; it psychs them up and gets them into the headspace for whatever they’re doing. But it’s a two-player game. It only works if someone else is playing.

          Emotional maturity is such a subjective thing that I don’t hold out much hope of convincing you, but I’m reluctant to label this a mark of immaturity in itself. In my experience, a better test is not how initially belligerent someone is, but how they react when they lose, and whether they’re capable of adopting other modes when it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want to play.

          • Jill says:

            “a better test is not how initially belligerent someone is, but how they react when they lose, and whether they’re capable of adopting other modes when it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want to play.”

            I see what you mean. That makes sense to me.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          I see what looks like typical mind fallacy. Constantly proving one’s toughness by pushing on other people and trying to dominate them sounds exhausting to you, yes?

          To other people, that’s their natural state of being; it is exhausting to try to not do that thing.

          You should carefully consider what it means that your concept of “emotional maturity” has little to do with maturity, and everything to do with core personality.

          • Jill says:

            Well, I see this only in the sense that, to some other people, it may seem exhausting or stressful not to count all the cracks in the sidewalk, not to be physically violent, or not to give in to taking hard drugs etc.

            To go another way than the way you have learned to habitually go may be stressful or even exhausting. But that doesn’t mean it’s emotionally mature or healthy.

          • jimmy says:

            Yes, engaging in dominance games to “prove” ones toughness can be fun and rewarding. However, if you see people doing it in cases where it doesn’t fit (e.g. their toughness is already proven and it’s just making people dislike them), then they are doing something that is bad for themselves despite it being a bad thing to do.

            Maybe they’re doing it because of an insecurity that blocks them from realizing that they’d be respected for their toughness even if they took a chill pill, or maybe it just literally never occurred to them that they can stop. Either way “emotional immaturity” can be a good label for things like this.

            However *local* emotional maturity is different than *overall* emotional maturity, and there’s always more than one way to do things wrong. So someone beating his chest may still be overall more mature than someone who doesn’t. Or maybe the chest beating is the healthy response in that context and the person who *doesn’t* beat their chest is emotionally held back from the healthy response. And maybe “core personality” is just a way of saying which types of errors you’re likely to make before you just do the *right* thing in every context.

            But that doesn’t mean Jill is typical minding or that “emotional maturity” isn’t a well defined and useful concept here.

          • orkin style says:

            Jill “should carefully consider” how ” typical mind fallacy” biases her against “constantly proving one’s toughness by pushing on other people and trying to dominate them”.

    • Jiro says:

      If you really ARE a strong person, rather than a scared person pretending to be strong, maybe you don’t need to stomp on and destroy everybody who disagrees with you in some minor way.

      That sounds like a version of No True Scotsman. Those guys who stomp on everyone? Well, they’re not really strong.

    • wtvb says:

      Game theoretically, it might make sense to act tough. All battles end with both sides losing a bit with the loser losing much more. If you establish your strength in some intervals you are likely to reduce the number of challenges you get, reducing your loss over time.

      As a real life example I can give Murad IV. His bans for alcohol and smoking were ruthless, however there are some stories about him having a great sense of humor and forgiving people who outplayed him during his undercover inspections.

  19. lesser spotted anonymous says:

    A bot relevant to fans of Unsong (via King James Programming): Markov sentences composed from drug diaries and tech recruitment emails.

  20. Jill says:

    Here’s another Jill here. Jill Stein. Running for president. I thought she stood up for her policy positions quite well on Fox News here. So what do folks think of her policies?

    Jill Stein Appeared on Fox News, Made Their Heads Explode
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECH9xwzN1Mw

    • Sandy says:

      I got 1 minute and 30 seconds in before starting to believe she is some kind of loon. I agree that student debt is a boiling problem that has to be addressed, but why would a $1.3 trillion “bailout” energize the economy? Or put millions to work? I mean, she talks about young people who can’t “pursue their dreams” because of debt, but if you run up $250,000 in debt on an arts degree, I’m inclined to believe taxpayers shouldn’t have to suffer for your idiocy. But personal politics aside, there are some fields that are heavily saturated and enabling more degrees to come rushing in will not help. Law school debt is massive and crippling, but the legal market is also extremely oversaturated and wiping away all that debt at a stroke will just make the problem worse by convincing more young people to pay massive sums and attend law school.

      Now I’m 4 minutes in and this woman is clearly insane. “Young people were hoodwinked because they were told there would be jobs for these worthless degrees”? Do young people not know how to use Google? Also, “Wall Street crashed the economy so they reneged on their end of the deal”? Wall Street made agreements with students? Before 2008, jobs were plentiful and prosperous for these degrees?

      At least Trump theoretically has a governing apparatus at his disposal in the form of the Republican Party. Is Jill Stein a fair representation of the Green Party, generally?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If people were hoodwinked by these degrees, it sounds like the college industry should be destroyed at the very least, and people put in jail. Can we some up with some snide name for them, like “banksters” for “bankers”?

        • Corey says:

          You may have unintentionally said something smart – a lot of recent debt comes via for-profit colleges, which are usually scams that sell hope to the hopeless.
          ETA: that sounds mean – I just mean I know you were snarking.

          • brad says:

            I understand why people like to point to the for profit sector which contains the highest concentration of bad actors, but there are some really terrible supposed charities but really run as employee co-ops out there. Southern New Hampshire University, for example.

            I think maybe it’s a partisan thing. For profit university executive reads Republican while “non-profit” university president, even making seven figures, reads Democrat.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            No offense taken.

            The for-profit schools are merely the most obvious examples, but there’s absolutely no reason why a “non-profit” can’t be just as scummy. And greedy, too. “Non-profits” still have budgets and salaries.

          • Lumifer says:

            Yeah, I don’t think dividing the higher education into for-profit and non-profit sectors is terribly meaningful. They do look very very similar (except that the really bad obviously scammy ones are usually for-profit).

            The thing is, the whole higher ed industry discovered that the price elasticity they are facing is really really low, so why not charge as much as the market (financed by the Federal government) will bear? I think the bottom-tier schools will be in a great deal of trouble soon, but the “highly selective” schools will continue this trend for a while.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’d like to know how much, and how hopeless, before I get out the torches and pitchforks.

          • cassander says:

            There are plenty of excellent for profit education programs. Many will literally guarantee you a job as, say, a jet mechanic if you get through the program. They also tend to have the opposite model of most traditional schools in that they let anyone who wants show up, then fail out people who can’t cut it, rather than being very selective with who they take then working to make sure they don’t fail. It’s hard to make an enough of an apples to apples comparison to really say which sector is worse.

      • She starts off with the very dubious logic of “you spent large amount of money on $thing, therefore you can spend large amount of money on $otherthing”. Maybe, maybe not.

        I have more sympathy for the students than Sandy does– I have a impression that a lot of them signed up for practical degrees, but the jobs weren’t there. Especially for those who got degrees before 2007, it wasn’t obvious that the economy would tank, and it can be hard for people to become cynical enough. As for googling, sometimes the hardest part is realizing that one needs to do it.

        I do think student debt is a disaster, but I’m not sure what a good way out is. How about forgiving the interest?

        Also, in Stein’s plan, who’s left holding the bag? The universities? The federal government? The collection agencies?

        • Corey says:

          I have more sympathy for the students than Sandy does– I have a impression that a lot of them signed up for practical degrees, but the jobs weren’t there. Especially for those who got degrees before 2007, it wasn’t obvious that the economy would tank, and it can be hard for people to become cynical enough.

          Agreed, it’s a pet peeve of mine that people implicitly assume careers can be sorted a priori into valuable and valueless. In this thread we have law as a good example – it was the archetypical practical-mercenary career, then the bottom fell out.

          There is quite literally nothing “safe” – it’s contrary to capitalism (safety breeds inefficiency) and capitalism can’t be displaced. Healthcare? Either price controls will turn it into a crappy job (e.g. Ireland) or they won’t and demand will collapse because nobody can afford anything. Any “knowledge work” is vulnerable to Big Data and/or India (Big Human?)

          • Once it’s obvious to everyone that some credential is an obvious way to make money, people will flood into that occupation.

            As I recall, petroleum engineer was the (joke?) secure and renumerative occupation. Now that the price of oil is way down, how’s that doing?

          • Gil says:

            Some comments

            One theory behind ‘Valuable’ and ‘Useless’ is as follows. Certain degrees teach information and skills which is directly relevant to particular jobs or lines of work. Others have no direct job applicability but due to the academic rigor one can infer the ‘smarts’ of a graduate by the school x level of academic attainment.

            Of course if the number of college graduates increases and the *average* smarts of, say, an English major declines. Combined with secular stagnation and a glut of more mature workers, your modern day English major has a much harder time in the job market.

            My other theory is that STEM is somewhat harder to ‘dumb down’ then liberal arts, and STEM fields are more naturally insulated from labor gluts in non-stem industries, whereas liberal arts and social science degree majors may involve more sloshing around.

            Safety exists in degrees, and certain industries can be protected one way or another from the kinds of break-neck speed automation that displaces work. Analyst jobs can be automated to a certain extent

            Almost everyone I know who went to reputable schools who got STEM are doing reasonably well. Those who are crushed by debt right now seem to be in one of the following categories:

            1. Got a STEM Degree at Degree Mill / Scam institution
            2. Liberal Arts or Social Sciences [There are very rarely jobs for these
            3. Prince or Pauper degrees like ‘Business’ or ‘Law’

            People were told that a bachelors degree was both a necessary and sufficient condition for getting a job.

            I oppose any kind of debt forgiveness by the likes of a stein or a sanders, but only because too many people view funneling tens of thousands of dollars per child per year into the modern furnace of post-secondary is a reasonable expenditure that merely needs to be born to a greater degree by the taxpayer. They never ask what a valuable knowledge and efficient knowledge stream would look [or cost] like in a modern information economy.

            If a movement was set up to build a genuinely affordable college program that could be mass produced, and valid for job applications, I would reconsider.

          • Any “knowledge work” is vulnerable to Big Data and/or India (Big Human?)

            I am really curious if there are any SSC readers that actually have a positive experience outsourcing to India.

            The universal impression, across dozens of close friends, is that outsourcing ANY knowledge work to India is about as intelligent as outsourcing nuclear planning to Skynet.

            This cannot be the universal experience, otherwise so many companies would not outsource so much to India.

            Really interested if anyone at SSC has positive experiences and can shed some light on why they are positive.

          • Matt C says:

            I worked for some guys who outsourced quite a bit of their programming work to India and kept it up for some years. I interacted with the Indian devs some and they were OK. Not much different than I imagine working with a stateside body shop would be. I wasn’t wowed and I wasn’t appalled. This wasn’t precision work and it wasn’t a fussy company, it seemed to be an decent match.

            I worked with another group that hired a solo guy from Pakistan. I didn’t interact with him as much, but he was OK, at least not incompetent, and he seemed to have settled in by the time I left (a few months after he started).

            Another guy I worked for hired some Indian help and got the more stereotypical results of poor communication, work done incorrectly, and a project abandoned half-finished.

            I don’t say it was the single determining factor, but I bet it made a difference: in the first two cases the groups interacted with their offshore devs pretty much daily. In the last case the work was handed off with looser supervision and less frequent communication.

            If I was in a position to hire a software developer, I’d consider hiring a solo dev from offshore. I wouldn’t hire an offshore body shop, but I wouldn’t hire a local body shop either.

        • Lumifer says:

          I have a impression that a lot of them signed up for practical degrees, but the jobs weren’t there.

          I think this impression is false. The unemployment rate for people with bachelor degrees is very low. It’s people who don’t have one that are screwed.

          • How well do the jobs pay?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Nancy Lebovitz

            What they always paid, more or less? Your point was that recent college graduates were blindsided by lack of jobs — that doesn’t look to be so. If you want to argue that these jobs pay much less than what the college grads reasonably should have expected, do you have evidence to support this?

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            How well do the jobs pay?

            About $50k/year, it looks like, though it varies a lot by major.

        • Jill says:

          There indeed may be a problem with universities “preparing” naive students for some fields where there are no jobs. And some colleges that are just overall scams. And a student loan debt problem. And a problem with college affordability, even if students choose fields that have jobs. If Stein is wrong about how to deal with these problems, then what is the real solution?

          • Corey says:

            There might not be one, sadly.

            Path dependence causes major problems with any scheme to “disrupt” the university system – if employers don’t recognize degrees conferred by Uber4BSes then it doesn’t matter if they’re as good and/or cheaper.

            Though I heard a possible counterexample to this once – consider, say, Amazon makes an Amazon U to educate their employees, then opens it to the public once the bugs shake out. (That’s how some Amazon stuff like the AWS “cloud”, which accidentally makes them a lot of money, got its start). It starts out with cred amongst tech employers then filters out to the rest of the noosphere…

          • If you’re willing to consider outside the US box (and ignore the practical problem of getting from “here” to “there”) there’s always our approach: Government regulation. Any prospective new University (whether private or public) has to demonstrate that it will meet a need the existing ones don’t.

            (That is, without approval you can’t call yourself a University and your students won’t get subsidies or student loans. As far as I know you could still teach an undergraduate course if you could find anybody willing to pay. I don’t think you’d be allowed to issue degrees. I think there’s also some special regulation around businesses that teach English to foreigners, but I don’t know the details.)

            We are also discouraged from enrolling too many students. If we exceed our quota, the extra students aren’t subsidized – and that has to come out of our budget, we can’t charge the students more. (In fact, I gather that it’s worse than that, if we exceed our quota by too much the Government doesn’t just stop adding money for each additional student, they actually start taking it away.)

            … whether any of this actually helps is unclear to me. We don’t seem to have the same sort of problem as the US, but that may be for other reasons.

            (Disclaimer: while I do work at a University, I don’t deal with the financial side of things, so this information is secondhand and may not be entirely accurate.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Harry Johnston

            If you didn’t have price controls, that system of restricting university slots would drive the price way up. Since it seems you do, you’re rationing university admission, though by what criteria I don’t know. Seems unlikely to fly in the US.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Harry Johnston,

            What you’re describing sounds like the Certificate of Need system we have for hospitals in the U.S. My impression is it’s a very good system for ensuring hospitals are profitable, and a very poor system for controlling costs. (Scott has a post somewhere about how he thinks hospitals are where the excess amounts Americans are spending on health care/insurance are ending up.)

            (Do you mind saying which country you’re from? I assume from your name it’s one of the English-speaking ones. But then I assume from your spelling that it’s the U.S., so clearly I’ve gone wrong somewhere.)

          • @Agronomous, I’m from New Zealand.

            As for controlling costs, it’s my understanding that we’re strictly limited in how much we’re allowed to increase our fees each year. I’m not sure whether that’s true for private Universities or just the public ones, but I guess the private ones can’t charge too much more than the public ones or nobody will go there.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I guess the private ones can’t charge too much more than the public ones or nobody will go there.

            That’s not really true if demand outstrips the number of public slots. Even if public university was absolutely free and otherwise exactly equivalent to private, that doesn’t matter to someone who can’t get a public slot.

          • @Nybler, that doesn’t seem to happen here, at least as far as universities go. (I don’t think any of them actually are private, though I can’t swear to it.) I presume there simply isn’t enough excess demand, and the quota system means that nobody is motivated to try to drum up demand amongst potential students who wouldn’t really benefit from it.

            (Just looked up some statistics; about 177,000 university students and a birth rate on the order of 61,000 per year; if we suppose the average student studies for 4 years, that’s about 70%. Don’t know how that compares to other nations, but it doesn’t seem unreasonably low.)

            I’m not sure about the more specialized providers, but I expect they’re dealing with a limited demand to begin with.

            As you say, this probably wouldn’t work in the US.

        • Agronomous says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz:

          I do think student debt is a disaster, but I’m not sure what a good way out is. How about forgiving the interest?

          A good way going forward is to have the colleges put some skin into the game. Right now, student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy (!). What if, when someone with student loans goes bankrupt, we made them 50% dischargeable, with the other 50% being assigned to the college(s) that they paid for?

          For that matter, what if we just made colleges back all loans that go to pay their tuition? The interest rates would stay low, because colleges don’t go out of business anywhere near as frequently as they should often, but the administration may find innovative ways to, um, steer students away from some majors and toward more-useful ones. I’m sure they’d spend at least as much time and effort on presentations and programs to prepare the students for the workforce as they now do on politically-favored topics.

      • Jill says:

        I don’t know if she’s a fair representation of the Green Party, generally. Do we have any Green partiers here? A friend just sent me this who knew I supported Bernie until he stopped running, because there is some overlap in their policies.

      • For those who haven’t been around long enough, or who couldn’t remember the title, Scott posted on this subject on June 6, 2015 under the title “Against Tulip Subsidies”.

  21. Tom says:

    I just noticed the link to Scott Adams weird blathering has been removed from the left side links. Any special recent reason, or just finally getting around to it?

  22. Agronomous says:

    I just had to share this, in case you read it:

    Basically, a Joel Osteen tweet — and a Joel Osteen sermon, which is just a collection of Joel Osteen tweets — is exactly what you’d get if L. Ron Hubbard wrote fortune cookies. Or if Yoda and Dr. Phil had a baby, and then the baby attended too many Tony Robbins seminars.

    (And if you do, you’ll know I’m thinking of you, and all the miles in-between.)

  23. Andrew says:

    Can we go full SA? $5 fee to sign up for an account, registered accounts only to comment, fees go to Scott’s EA charity of choice, ban at the drop of a hat?

  24. Matt C says:

    I don’t think banning anon* is going to help much. I don’t object to giving it a shot, but I think the guys who are deliberately trying to be assholes will barely consider it a speed bump.

    I would support restricting posting to permanently registered commenters only. I acknowledge there are downsides to this, but the sprawling mess of a comment section we’ve got now has a lot of downsides too.

    Also, and I know this is a pipe dream, but does WordPress support a comment limit per user? I think this would be a better board if most people were limited to, say, 2 comments a day. (Don’t waste them on bickering or snarky little quips.) Favorites of Scott could get more.

    • Just as a data point, if I were restricted to 2 comments a day, I wouldn’t comment at all. And probably wouldn’t read the comments either, and would be inclined to stop reading the blog altogether, though Scott’s writing is probably compelling enough to keep me here.

      • Matt C says:

        I don’t think most people would like the idea, and I don’t expect it to be taken up. But IMO the signal to noise ratio has dropped a lot since I started reading (which wasn’t all that long ago–maybe a year?). Mostly because there is so much more noise these days.

        (And yes, I would say that bitching about how the comments aren’t as good as they used to be counts as noise. I don’t exempt myself.)

        I’m in favor of trying out experiments, at any rate. Make a change, run with it for a month, see how it works out. It’s too bad Scott is so busy, he might find it fun to use us as lab rats under other circumstances.

      • Jiro says:

        Restricting people to X comments a day, where X can be easily reached, is easy to game. Once someone posts their last comment, you can say anything you want in reply, secure that they can never refute it.

        It also makes it much easier to gang up on someone,

        • Matt C says:

          You can always get the last word in if you are willing to wait a day to do it.

          If getting the last word in doesn’t seem as important when you have limited comments to spend, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.

          I doubt a limited comments policy would get people get ganged up on any worse than we’ve seen so far.

          • Jiro says:

            If getting the last word in doesn’t seem as important when you have limited comments to spend, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.

            Sometimes getting the last word means defending yourself against an attack, or correcting a factual error. It’s not a feature that you have to wait a day to do this.

            I doubt a limited comments policy would get people get ganged up on any worse than we’ve seen so far.

            The more gameable the system is, the more benefits accrue to people willing to game the system rather than have an honest discussion.

            In other words, having a gameable system facilitates ganging up.

          • Matt C says:

            Everybody feels like their comment is worth adding to the pool. But many people (most?) think the pool is getting overcrowded with uninteresting comments.

            > Sometimes getting the last word means defending yourself against an attack, or correcting a factual error.

            And when the other guy feels the same way, you get a death-grip bickering match that goes on for 10 or 20 posts that nobody else cares about.

          • Jiro says:

            I think the answer to “your system makes it hard to correct misrepresentations and mistakes” should probably not be “allowing people to correct misrepresentations and mistakes is a bad idea anyway”.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            The likeliest result of limiting comments is that people post monster omnibus comments addressing ten subthreads at once, and conversations become even harder to follow.

    • If it was enforceable, the comment limit thing would be ok by me if it was say 3 comments. I rarely post more than that, and I think it would reduce pointless low-effort contrarianism that plagues discussions in all quasi-intellectual forums. I don’t mind high effort contrarianism, because there is often something to be learned from reading it, but low-effort contrarianism is just annoying. Not sure about its overall effect exactly, same with registration. Perhaps it would be good to try it out for specific posts of Scott’s, but I’m not sure how that could be implemented.

      • Matt C says:

        Sure, 3 might be a good number also.

        Mostly I’d like to see experiments done. The problem of a discussion forum getting good, attracting a lot of people, and then sliding downhill isn’t unique to SSC. I’d like to see new ideas tried out for pushing back against this. Of course fostering good discussion to the point of snowballing growth isn’t that common, either, so I’m expecting only slow progress.

    • Lumifer says:

      Limiting people to a small numbers of comments per day would make it impossible to have conversations on SSC. And I find conversations to be more interesting than just shouting out your views to the world.

      • Matt C says:

        You can still have conversations, just more slowly, and (the hope is) more thoughtfully.

        • You’re reminding me of apas (Amateur Press Associations). They were paper collections of fanzines (a fanzine is whatever writing and/or drawing a person wanted to do that they weren’t getting paid for) that were put together by a central person and mailed out as a (usually stapled together) packet.

          They typically came out once a month or less frequently, though APA-L was weekly.

          Conversation happened.

          Alarums and Excursions (mostly about gaming) still comes out on paper.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_press_association

  25. Orphan Wilde says:

    So, I think the primary issue with socialism today is that “socialists”, as far as I can tell, read Marx to get ideas on how to create a more powerful bourgeoisie.

    Quick, go read you some Marx. I’ll wait. Or read the cliff’s notes. Or don’t. Whatever.

    I can sum up the issue with one word: Lumpenproletariat. If you don’t know what this word means, it’s a very nasty way to refer to the welfare class. Marx was against them (or perhaps it would be fairer to say he had a very complicated opinion of them), and regarded them as the natural allies of the upper classes, who acted as the upper class’s enforcers and allies to keep the working classes down.

    Really, do I need to say more? Trump is probably the closest thing running to a Marxist right now.

    • Lumifer says:

      Lumpenproletariat

      Let’s find the actual description by Marx, there is so much flavour in this quote : -)

      Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Marx was the original alt-right.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Whoa.

          Yeah, there was more than a little whiff of Moldbuggery in that paragraph, wasn’t there?

        • Nornagest says:

          Anytime you start analyzing society in terms of class interests, you’re gonna end up with some of the same tropes. And I don’t know about the broader alt-right, but Moldbug is definitely making a class-interest argument at heart; his Cthulhu theory even bears a certain resemblance to Marx’s future history, just with the emotional valence swapped around.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Moldbug’s history is Whig history with the valence reversed: the Whigs caused everything. “Cthulhu always swims left” sounds more like an empirical claim than something with theoretical support. Other N℞ people make claims more along the lines of historical materialism, eg, “Leftism is just an easy excuse [to seize power].”

          • Seth says:

            Basically, nowadays, liberals (not leftists) are absolutely terrified of analysis based on class interests. But right-wingers embrace it, they just favor a different class than Marxists. This is famously demonstrated by Mitt Romney’s “takers” and “makers” analysys.

            http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/09/18/makers-vs-takers-romneys-47-percent-rhetoric-ec/189987

            That’s a liberal site denouncing the rhetoric. But if you read it for the material itself (rather than whether it’s moral or immoral), it’s a straight-up catalogue of class interest based analysis.

            Though Trump isn’t close to Marxist, unless you think class interest analysis itself is Marxist.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Seth –

            The proletariat are the base Trump is appealing to.

          • Seth says:

            Populist argument aren’t the exclusive preserve of Marxists. Trump is very explicitly nationalist in his statements. This is so foreign (pun intended) to our current political framework that it frequently gets slotted into some vague identification of anything that isn’t about kicking labor when its down must be Communism (which is kind of revealing if you think about it).

          • Jill says:

            Seth, interesting comment there. Food for thought. Perhaps we American capitalists are so rabidly anti-Communist that we compulsively beat on labor when it’s down. People can go from one extreme to the other.

            Ayn Rand certainly did– growing up in a Communist country, being traumatized by it, and then going to the opposite extreme of thinking that anything that was the total opposite of Communism must be flawless in every way. And many modern day Libertarians seem like they take after her in that.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill –

            Ayn Rand didn’t hate the working classes. She hated the people who pretend to represent the working classes.

            They’re the same people who have convinced you that she, and libertarians generally, hate the working classes.

            It’s critical not to confuse the people who claim to represent X, with X itself.

          • Jill says:

            Orphan Wilde, I never said any of that. But I understand how you could have thought I did, because inter-tribal communication seems to be almost impossible.

            I simply said that Rand went from one extreme of growing up in Communism, to the other extreme of thinking that the exact opposite of Communism must be perfect.

            Where do you get “hatred” of anybody out of that statement by me?

            There are many possibilities in the world that are neither extreme Rand type Libertarianism nor Communism.

            One doesn’t have to jump from one extreme to the other extreme. But perhaps that is the common way to do that. One can keep everything in simple black/white terms that way, without having to bother with nuance or complexity. You just switch who wears the black hat and who wears the white hat. And you’re all set up again, good to go, simple as that.

            Very few American capitalists are Randians. But many Americans and American politicians do tend to beat on labor when it’s down. Hence the huge suicide and drug addiction problem among working class whites.

            That’s par of how we got Trump, because he uses the strategy of claiming to be labor’s benefactor– much like the previous false promises of other Republicans– but more intensely and colorfully and emotionally and entertainingly. He uses it so vividly, that many people are convinced that this time the promises are genuine. They’re wrong.

            Anyone can check politifact.com and see how frequently the man lies.

          • Jill says:

            What do I think of Ayn Rand’s attitude, actually toward Labor? I find myself asking. I think she totally ignores them. Not a hatred so much, as just not noticing their experiences, needs etc. Oh, she makes up laborers to put in her books sometimes. But her books aren’t about them and they’re just throwaway characters. Mostly they are there by implication only– since you know that the corporate bigwig she idolizes must have laborers working for him, or else he couldn’t have a corporation to rule over.

            So I don’t think she considers laborers at all. Current day GOP Americans are kind of like that– pursuing the goal of leaving the working classes without health care, without protection from pollution or poisoning, without consumer protection etc. But that’s not hatred either, at least not of workers. It’s simple hatred of paying taxes and of taking any tiny amount of responsibility for one’s community or for anyone else in it.

            It’s not intentional kicking around of labor. It’s mindlessly unintentionally kicking them out of the way, on the way to the goal of not having to pay any taxes.

            People go more and more nowadays into their electronic devices, and less and less into their community. And more and more into being an island, grabbing any money and other benefits one can get, unable to relate to the concept of “giving back”, except as an investment where you expect to get more back than you give, and to get it very quickly.

            There are, of course, exceptions, but that is the general rule.

          • cassander says:

            @Jill

            >So I don’t think she considers laborers at all. Current day GOP Americans are kind of like that– pursuing the goal of leaving the working classes without health care, without protection from pollution or poisoning, without consumer protection etc. But that’s not hatred either, at least not of workers. It’s simple hatred of paying taxes and of taking any tiny amount of responsibility for one’s community or for anyone else in it.

            As has been explained to you elsewhere, this absurd caricature you have of the GOP is not accurate. Please stop repeating it. It’s fine to be wrong, it’s not fine insist that you’re right in the face of mounting evidence. The last GOP president expanded medicare, increased environmental regulation and “slashed” taxes to…their historical average.

          • Skivverus says:

            While we’re all engaging in retroactive/necromantic telepathy –
            I took Rand’s message more as “the moral principle (of receiving money only for things you actually did to help other people) also applies to laborers, they just don’t have as much power to be dramatic about sticking to it (or avoiding it).”
            That is, the reasons for focusing on the “executive” sorts of people rather than the people who work for them are mostly narrative. A slice-of-life story with the same moral message probably wouldn’t get quite the same kind of attention.

            @Jill
            The “not having to pay any taxes” part I suspect has very different emotional connotations to different people, depending on how (cost-)effective the people in question find their government to be – which one presumes at least correlates to how cost-effective the local government actually is. Though on the other hand I don’t think the GAO gets all that much attention.
            I think a reasonably-charitable approach to the perspective against taxes-for-services is to say that, in contrast to job perks, insurance, or one’s neighbors, there’s no honest way to “opt out”, nor any attempts on the part of the taxers to create one.
            This is not (necessarily) to say that we shouldn’t have any services without a way of opting out – certainly I’m not going that far! – but that it’s deceptively easy to take “there ought to be a law!” too far.

          • Jill says:

            I wasn’t talking about presidents. I was talking about everyday Americans. If my characterization is incorrect, then how is it incorrect?

            What do you see differently? I don’t understand what you are asking me to stop doing, because I don’t know what you are seeing differently– other than your talking about GOP presidents and me talking about everyday American capitalists.

            Inter-tribal communication is almost impossible. But let’s give it a try.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill –

            Your understanding of Ayn Rand’s positions is subject to the same inter-tribal communication issues.

            http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Objectivism <- This is the clearest description of Ayn Rand's actual philosophy I've encountered. I'm not sure if it's clear enough to survive, however.

            But you'll notice elsewhere here I've hinted that Marx's views aren't well-represented by what we call communism. Marx's conceptualization of communism looks a hell of a lot like libertarianism, in fact, and for good reason; both were reacting to and attempting to resolve the same core set of problems.

            Ayn Rand's reactions came to some of Marx's solutions not actually solving the problem, however; progressive income taxes, one of the solutions he proposed to help gradually eliminate the rentiers, didn't solve the problem of the rentier class, they exaggerated it, by giving the rentier classes a tool to suppress up-and-coming competitors with. The progressive income tax is class warfare by the richest segment of society against everyone else – which is why it's an income tax instead of a wealth tax.

            Ayn Rand's attitude towards actual communists was one of admiration of people fighting for their principles; that was a major component of We The Living. She didn't make a big deal of advertising this, however, because she was more interested in fighting the communism-in-name-only that was what actually existed. And if you look at her "communist" characters, she doesn't attack them on the basis of their communism, but rather on the basis that they are merely power-brokers who wear communist clothing.

          • Nornagest says:

            Inter-tribal communication is almost impossible.

            It’s a lot easier if you don’t believe — or, barring that, at least don’t loudly profess your belief — that the other side is defined exclusively by greed, malice, callousness, or something equivalently simple and easy to use as a bludgeon.

          • Jill says:

            I’d be lying if I said that I see no signs of greed or malice in any GOPers. I don’t think they’re all that way.

            I see sort of what you mean. I don’t want to be unfair. But I don’t want to commit the chief sin of liberals in being too nice and glossing over what I see.

            Many people on this board are reasonable and/or nice people. But some are so insulting that I don’t think I could even be capable of matching their incivility. I’ve gotten piled on and beaten up a lot on this board. So even here I see some malice.

            If I am assuming more greed or malice than is there, I am sure tons of people will point that out, since I am far far outnumbered by Right Wingers here. I certainly sometimes see greed or malice in some Left Wingers also.

          • Nornagest says:

            The main problem with talking about greed and malice is not that they don’t exist (they do, though I think about as much in the Dems as in the GOP), but that as soon as you mention them, the conversation becomes exclusively about greed and malice and not about any of the underlying facts that might actually make a policy a good or a bad idea.

            This is boring. It’s pointless. And once you start an argument over it, it never goes away until the participants get bored or frustrated and leave; no one is ever going to say “yeah, I’m greedy as shit” or “yeah, my party did this to screw over $DEMOGRAPHIC”, and there’s always an endless supply of anecdotes and character witnesses to support either view. And to make matters worse you’re liable to get a bunch of new people jumping in all the time, because hey, you did just kinda diss half of America, and people tend not to like that.

            Don’t want to get dogpiled? Don’t do this. The most right-leaning people on this board would get dogpiled if they did this — and they do, though the dogpile mostly takes the form of complaining about representation.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill –

            Part of the issue here is that the norms of communication in my tribe look like hostility to your tribe.

            If you throw three libertarians together on a board of a thousand left-leaning people, there’s going to be an obvious fight with many epithets flying: Over what libertarianism actually is.

            And we’ll all still be on relatively good terms when the fight is over.

            Me treating you like I’d treat a member of my own tribe would actually feel far more hostile to you than me treating you like I normally treat opposing tribe members.

          • cassander says:

            @jill

            >I wasn’t talking about presidents. I was talking about everyday Americans. If my characterization is incorrect, then how is it incorrect?

            Everyday Americans voted for bush, twice.

            >What do you see differently? I don’t understand what you are asking me to stop doing, because I don’t know what you are seeing differently– other than your talking about GOP presidents and me talking about everyday American capitalists.

            You can start by not calling the facts people point out that contradict your opinions “talking points” and actually engage with them. If you want to dispute the facts, fine, do that, show how they’re wrong, don’t just ignore them and skate blithely by. For my money, the behavior of republican presidents who get re-elected seems like reasonably good barometer of what the republicans who voted for him want. If you disagree, articulate reasons why. And I would address your accusations of greed, et. al, but Nornagest already did a perfect job there as well. Stop assuming the other tribe is evil.

          • Jill says:

            Nornagest, I’ll have to go back and look in my comments to see if I can figure out what you are referring to in them as comments about “greed” and “malice.” I didn’t use those words. If you already know, please tell me.

            I am still dealing with the quandary still of not wanting to treat other people with kid gloves here. But I don’t want to be unfair either.

            There are a lot of situations like this in inter-tribal communication, where we are not exactly sure precisely what each other are talking about or referring to.

          • Jill says:

            Orphan W

            “Me treating you like I’d treat a member of my own tribe would actually feel far more hostile to you than me treating you like I normally treat opposing tribe members.”

            That must mean in person? Because, here, on line, on this mostly Right Wing board, I don’t notice other people getting piled on the way I have been here.

          • Jill says:

            Cassander “For my money, the behavior of republican presidents who get re-elected seems like reasonably good barometer of what the republicans who voted for him want. ”

            It does not, to me. Candidates of both parties sometimes promise voters things to get elected, and then do the opposite once in office– either because of what their donors want, or for some other reason. I see plenty of people who say they want to pay no taxes, or far less taxes, and say they want smaller government, voting GOP. But the candidates they vote for don’t seem to ever do that.

            Both parties spend tons of money. And I guess they can get away with that, because there is no popular party that seems to spend less in government, once elected– unless it’s the Democrats, since Obama has curtailed spending in various areas and hasn’t put any major wars on the U.S. credit card.

            What do you see as me talking about “greed and malice/” Saying people don’t want to pay taxes?

          • cassander says:

            Jill,

            >It does not, to me. Candidates of both parties sometimes promise voters things to get elected, and then do the opposite once in office– either because of what their donors want, or for some other reason.

            A fair point.

            >I see plenty of people who say they want to pay no taxes, or far less taxes, and say they want smaller government, voting GOP. But the candidates they vote for don’t seem to ever do that.

            I doubt you see many of people who want to pay no taxes. I daresay almost everyone you meet would prefer to pay fewer taxes. “Republicans don’t want to pay taxes” is a standard, and incorrect, caricature.

            > unless it’s the Democrats, since Obama has curtailed spending

            And here you fall back on more caricature. Obama did not cut spending. Obama dramatically expanded spending, and then when the republican congress reigned him in, he spent years complaining about the fact. Now takes credit for a budget deal he was forced into much against his will.

            >hasn’t put any major wars on the U.S. credit card.

            Except the war in Afghanistan, you mean? The one where he spent almost as much as bush did in Iraq? And that’s before we even start thinking about what the catastrophes of libya and syria are going to cost. Still want to claim that you get “all the relevant facts” from your daily sources?

            >What do you see as me talking about “greed and malice/” Saying people don’t want to pay taxes?

            No, the part where you say “American capitalists are so rabidly anti-Communist that we compulsively beat on labor when it’s down.” or “I’d be lying if I said that I see no signs of greed or malice in any GOPers. I don’t think they’re all that way. ” If I said to you,”American leftists are so rabidly anti-capitalist that we compulsively beat on small business people when they’re down” or “I’d be lying if I said that I see no signs of Stalinism in the left, but they’re not all that way” you’d be offended, and I would be guilty of gross generalization.

          • Jill says:

            Cassander, the GOP did break unions. I do consider that, efforts to keep poor people from getting health care, and various other measures and intentions to slash the social safety net, to be kicking workers. You of course disagree, but that’s the way I see it.

            Many many people here are far far from treating me with kid gloves, and far far from characterizing the Blue Tribe or the Dems in non-insulting ways. And I’m not about to coddle the GOP or the Red Tribe either.

            I will do my best to be fair and not to be insulting. But I call things as I see them. As others do also– and there are tons of comments here that are fairly insulting to Dems and to the Blue Tribe.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ll have to go back and look in my comments to see if I can figure out what you are referring to in them as comments about “greed” and “malice.” I didn’t use those words. If you already know, please tell me.

            Ctrl-Fing for your comments in recent threads, I would have been better off putting that in terms of “fear and anger” than “greed and malice” — I’m seeing some of the latter in the context of race and taxation, especially re: rich GOP donors, but you mention the former almost every time the GOP comes up.

            But the overall point should still hold, I think. Don’t accuse one side of being driven entirely by emotion (especially negative emotions), because that’ll be interpreted as an insult and because it’s impossible to determine rigorously until we have some way of polling people’s brains. Even personal perceptions of emotion are incredibly susceptible to bias, and that’s before we get into sampling issues (which would be enough to render them useless on its own).

            If you think a policy was a bad idea, attack the policy, don’t litigate the mental state of the people that supported it. This is not the kind of board where that will go well — well, unless you’re talking about SJWs, but we’ve all got our folk devils.

          • cassander says:

            @jill

            >Cassander, the GOP did break unions. I do consider that, efforts to keep poor people from getting health care, and various other measures and intentions to slash the social safety net, to be kicking workers. You of course disagree, but that’s the way I see it.

            You might think that, they do not, and when talking about their motives, what they think matters more than what you think. Again, if I said “democrats support unions because they hope to stage a worker’s uprising and set up a bloody reign of terror.” you would not take me seriously, nor should you. What you are saying is just as absurd, just from your tribe’s point of view. If you want to know what their motives are, just ask them! there are plenty of people around here who will happily tell you what they are if you ask, and none of them will say “kicking poors for funzies.”

            >I will do my best to be fair and not to be insulting. But I call things as I see them. As others do also– and there are tons of comments here that are fairly insulting to Dems and to the Blue Tribe.

            YOu can start by not assuming that tribes other than yours are motivated any more by greed, stupidity, or malice than your own is.

          • LPSP says:

            “Part of the issue here is that the norms of communication in my tribe look like hostility to your tribe.

            If you throw three libertarians together on a board of a thousand left-leaning people, there’s going to be an obvious fight with many epithets flying: Over what libertarianism actually is.

            And we’ll all still be on relatively good terms when the fight is over.

            Me treating you like I’d treat a member of my own tribe would actually feel far more hostile to you than me treating you like I normally treat opposing tribe members.”

            Wisdom right here from Orphan Wilde. A lesson I learnt for dealing with certain people during my teens, and to a lesser extent one episode in my early twenties, involved realising that the set of behaviour I had developed for dealing with people I didn’t particular respect at arm’s length was genuinely liked – endearing-tier liked – compared to the deliberate behaviour I instead had as a way of saying “let’s be friends”, tail-wagging having a laugh. At key points I would be impressed enough with someone that I’d slip into the latter behaviour, and it would end up aggravating the other partner and, whether immediately causing a fight or leading to an awkward wind down and optional later argument, would sour things up. It definitely happened the other way, and in instances where I explicitly asked people to keep acting X way for my sake, using metaphors like cooking a steak rare – “it’s just my preference, it’s not undercooked, I’m fine with it” – I got a response more like I was asking them to freeze my steak and chunk it down on the plate with unwashed taters.

            Relaxing can be pretty intensive sometimes!

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill –

            I’m not piling on you.

            I’m one of many people having a conversation with you.

            And if getting the shotgun approach from a dozen different opposing perspectives isn’t what you desire, quit posting so many things that inspire exactly that response? I mean, it’s not like you don’t know what you’re getting into when you continually post political stuff.

    • Cord Shirt says:

      Trump is probably the closest thing running to a Marxist right now.

      Well, that’s sure what Sarah Hoyt et al. have been saying.

      I think the primary issue with socialism today is that “socialists”, as far as I can tell, read Marx to get ideas on how to create a more powerful bourgeoisie.

      You seem to be implying that “a more powerful bourgeoisie” is a bad thing. *Is* that what you think? If so, why do you think so? (My jury’s out on this one, always curious to hear others’ arguments.)

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        You seem to be implying that “a more powerful bourgeoisie” is a bad thing. *Is* that what you think? If so, why do you think so? (My jury’s out on this one, always curious to hear others’ arguments.)

        My goal is to stir a congealing pot, to shake up belief systems.

        I write for my audience, not myself. There’s an element of truth in everything I write – I wouldn’t write falsehoods, because I’m not here to troll – but pretty much nothing I write is written to represent my true beliefs.

        Marx is precisely the alt-right, for a different era. A lot of the same rhetoric comes up; the coming collapse, which would unleash social forces which would reconstruct society in a more stable and prosperous configuration after sweeping away the capitalists/cathedral (they’re the same thing, if you pay attention to what Marx was actually saying, as opposed to what the modern Cathedral tells you Marx was saying – look very closely at Marx’s description of the rentier class, for instance), is a theme I find vaguely amusing to see repeated in the alt-right.

        I don’t find either ideology to be particularly dangerous. The danger is how the establishment uses the ideology to establish new narratives for the same old behaviors; Soviet Russia hung communist signs on mercantile feudalism. As far as Marx went, the rentier class was the problem; the bourgeoisie were merely -comfortable-, and didn’t want the system to change. Communism has always had the same pattern; the rentier classes publicly punishing the bourgeoisie for their comfort in order to accumulate greater power and privilege for themselves.

    • hlynkacg says:

      I made a very similar argument in one of the subreddit’s “culture war round-ups” a few months back and our resident Marxist troll was quite offended. I don’t know what bothered him more, the argument itself or the fact that I had apparently read more Marx than he had.

    • Outis says:

      I can sum up the issue with one word: Lumpenproletariat. If you don’t know what this word means, it’s a very nasty way to refer to the welfare class. Marx was against them (or perhaps it would be fairer to say he had a very complicated opinion of them), and regarded them as the natural allies of the upper classes, who acted as the upper class’s enforcers and allies to keep the working classes down.

      That’s what makes you think of Trump? Doesn’t it describe the Democratic party to a T?

  26. Has anyone come across any interesting non-political/partisan list of social theory concepts? I’m interested in things similar to stuff like the Peter Principle, Chesterton’s Fence (well this is a bit political), Goodhart’s law etc etc. I don’t care if the principles are sometimes used by left or right wing as long as the writing itself is not mainly politically motivated/biased. I’ve read bits of all the usual political camps (ew boring), just looking for mostly standalone principles (eg Peter Principle) that aren’t part of the partisan political/social/intellectual gridlock, and therefore might be both interesting and unknown to me. Any thoughts? Any particular principles worth a mention?

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong is basically a (mostly humorous) recollection of this type of concepts, but it’s just the concepts, with no deep theorizing behind them.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      All social theory is political. If it doesn’t look political, that’s just because it pattern-matches pretty well with your own politics.

      • I don’t subscribe to that sort of epistemological relativism. Some theories are motivated by a desire to push a political agenda, some are a result of a search to accurately describe society and how it works. I’m interested in the second.

        Obviously most theorists claims to be in the first group, so it’s not trivial, but with good judgment and a bit of knowledge you can quite often spot the difference. That’s why I’m asking in a forum where there is a higher than usual % of people who claim to put truth-seeking before their politics.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          First, assume ALL theories are of the second sort. This is called “charity”.

          Second, assume all theories are created by people with limited perspectives of society, limited perspectives which give rise to political biases and social theories which unintentionally promote those same political biases. There’s a name for this, too, but it’s not useful to give it because it implies I’m right without actually making a case.

          That is, you’re assuming Marxists sit down and try to think up Marxist social theories. No, the same information that causes them to think Marxist is the right way forward also causes them to create Marxist-oriented social theory.

          It’s more true that all social theories are true, than it is true that any one social theory is true. But both are false. Social theories are merely helpful abstractions for thinking about issues.

    • cassander says:

      I suppose you could categorize pretty much all of management and org theory in that category. It’s never expressly political, but it also tends to have hefty political implications if you think about it .

      • Yeah I’ve read some of it, probably to go into much more depth and look for stuff I’ve missed, which is likely a lot. Thanks.

      • Jill says:

        Well, yes, there are tons of parallels between theory of management of a business, and theory of management of a nation.

        Some say that the personal is always political, that almost everything has some political implications. E.g. we had that long discussion on Hamiliton. Even– probably especially– if you didn’t think about it when seeing it, it’s political in that it has implications/suggestions for what kind of government and economy we ought to have today.

        It really can open your eyes to read a good text on propaganda. For example, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (History of Communication )Dec 1, 1996 by Alex Carey,an Australian author.

        It makes some good points relevant to our discussion of when and whether violence/nonviolence works to cause social change. Apparently, violence often causes the perpetrator to win the battle but lose the war, as the English did in India, for example. Public opinion is against violence. Therefore, groups and corporations lose in the court of public opinion when they are violent. Because of this, one big manipulation that was done to decrease unionism was for corporations to hire people to pretend to be on the side of union members and to have them act violently, thus turning public opinion against unions.

        https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Risk-Out-Democracy-Communication/dp/0252066162/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470416120&sr=8-1&keywords=taking+the+risk+out+of+democracy+corporate+propaganda+versus+freedom+and+liberty

        The U.S. is a highly active, and not very reflective, culture. Which is why most good books on propaganda were not written in the U.S. But I am reading Psychological Warfare, which was written in the U.S., due to someone’s recommendation here, and it is very good. Thanks for that reco.

  27. Anonymous says:

    I am officially sick and tired of the incessant Red Tribe vs. Blue Tribe debates.

    Anyone else?

    • Montfort says:

      Yes. But mind-killing subjects how they are, I’m sure I’ve probably been keeping them alive despite my stated preferences.

    • Zombielicious says:

      Imo, the whole thing would go over a lot better if people focused on policies instead of tribes and ideologies. Something like e.g. debating the consequences of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal can be productive discussion. Explaining why Paul Ryan’s budget is representative of everything wrong with some ill-defined mass of people like the 1%/the nanny state/red-or-blue staters/etc absolutely never is. Once you remove the budget proposal entirely and the conversation becomes an attempt to psychoanalyze the warped psychology of your ill-defined group of opponents and why they’re stupid and evil, you’re basically shitting where you eat.

      I wouldn’t mind an informal rule along the lines of, “You’re only allowed argue for/against the policy, not for/against the group that supports or opposes it.” With possible exceptions, e.g. certain threads where the rule was suspended and anything was fair game again.

      • cassander says:

        the problem is that you can’t really discuss the efficacy of policy without talking about the goals you’re trying to achieve, and goals inevitably are based on tribal morays. On the ryan budget, for example, it would be awkward at best to really talk about whether or not it’s the best way to cut entitlements without ever mentioning the desirability of cutting entitlements.

        • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

          Would a “tribal moray” be the way that tribe eels about things?

          Anyway, it’s certainly possible to talk about the desirability of cutting entitlements without making sweeping generalizations about the sort of person who wants to cut|not cut entitlements.

          • cassander says:

            Sweeping generalizations can be avoided, but not discussion of what you’re trying to accomplish by cutting entitlements, or why you prefer cutting them to other methods.

        • Zombielicious says:

          @cassander:
          See my reply to Tekhno. The thread got kind of screwed up, but I tried to address this there.

        • Agronomous says:

          tribal morays

          That’s goin’ in the list.

    • Tekhno says:

      @Zombielicious

      Imo, the whole thing would go over a lot better if people focused on policies instead of tribes and ideologies

      The (specific)tribes thing is a product of a representative democracy system where people have to form into large coalitions or “wings” of the people they hate the least in order to stop all the people they hate the most.

      The only way you could change the political culture so drastically as to make people detach policies from “left and right” would be to transcend representative democracy to a system where people are voting on policies instead of parties, which I’d imagine would be a very very direct democracy (this might require some new technology) rather than a representative one. The whole of the populace would have to be able to act as the legislature somehow.

      As someone who doesn’t fit easily on the political spectrum, and can’t find a party, a direct democracy would suit me personally just fine, as I’d be able to vote on the specific things I want passed into law or repealed that are either “left” or “right” conventionally and hard to find together in a single party.

      Unfortunately, I think such a system would be too chaotic to work effectively and would decay back into a representative system (iron law of oligarchy). I think tribal thinking is going to be with us for a while yet, at least until we can all turn into space faring randian cyborgs.

      • Anonymous says:

        The only way you could change the political culture so drastically as to make people detach policies from “left and right” would be to transcend representative democracy to a system where people are voting on policies instead of parties, which I’d imagine would be a very very direct democracy (this might require some new technology) rather than a representative one. The whole of the populace would have to be able to act as the legislature somehow.

        You could also get rid of voting.

      • Tekhno says:

        @Anonymous

        Only if you have enough automated drones. Democracy is a product of the gun.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        But that only shows that the tribes need to exist– not that we need to talk about them here.

      • Zombielicious says:

        I’m not sure that this is necessarily required for representation, especially not on the range of issues that we see discord on. People’s short-term goals may differ a lot (e.g. does my portfolio go up or down if this tax is increased?), but long-term people’s desires tend to converge. People don’t disagree on stuff like regulation or taxes or a stimulus plan because some people want the economy to grow and others want it to stagnate – they disagree because they can’t reach consensus about the best solution to problems they all agree should be solved.

        I’m not actually sure there are issues with goals that people would disagree on in the longest term. Everyone pretty much wants a long, happy, wealthy life in a stable and prosperous society. Even with something like religious motivations, you could argue those people really want the same things, just have multiple disagreements about the best way to achieve them.

        Anyway, regardless of whether that last paragraph is true or not, even on the issues people should be able to find consensus on, people shift from finding the best policy to picking which policy they support based on which group they hate the most. People who don’t know anything about the healthcare debate still hate Obamacare just because liberals support it; people who don’t know anything about gun control legislation still support it just because it’ll piss off conservatives. To reach consensus on the best policy options, ones where you do agree on the broader goals, you have to be able to discuss stuff, and focusing on policy over tribes and ideologies is the only way I can think of to force people out of the “support what my outgroup hates!” thought process into actual discussion about the efficacy of the policies themselves.

      • cassander says:

        @Tekhno

        >Only if you have enough automated drones. Democracy is a product of the gun.

        Democracy is the product of capitalism, not guns. Guns were around for hundreds of years before we started getting anything like democracy coming out of them. Capitalism, however, has had a strong tendency to produce at least republican government going back millennia, and pretty much as soon as we started getting mass capitalism (countries were large numbers of people relied on markets for food instead of growing their own) we started getting mass democracies.

        @zombielicious

        >they disagree because they can’t reach consensus about the best solution to problems they all agree should be solved.

        This is true for a relatively small list of economic concerns, but that is hardly all of politics.

        >I’m not actually sure there are issues with goals that people would disagree on in the longest term.

        Abortion would seem the simplest and most obvious. There’s not a lot of middle ground between murder or medical procedure.

        >To reach consensus on the best policy options, ones where you do agree on the broader goals, you have to be able to discuss stuff, and focusing on policy over tribes and ideologies is the only way I can think of to force people out of the “support what my outgroup hates!” thought process into actual discussion about the efficacy of the policies themselves.

        What makes you think that’s possible?

        • Zombielicious says:

          This is true for a relatively small list of economic concerns, but that is hardly all of politics.

          Abortion would seem the simplest and most obvious. There’s not a lot of middle ground between murder or medical procedure.

          I don’t think abortion is actually an exception for most people. Once you cut out the tribal outgroup hatred, the main disagreement over abortion isn’t whether murder is great or medical procedures are evil – it’s when a fetus counts as a living human whose interests should be protected, which is largely a medical question. You do get people who think that even a single-celled zygote or embryonic stem cell counts as a human life and it’s murder to destroy it, or people who argue for “after-birth abortions” up to some given age, but those are still just people interpreting evidence in a way that I’d think is kind of nutty (putting it mildly), not people who disagree on the general goal of (loosely stated) “save human lives.”

          What makes you think that’s possible?

          To paraphrase Michael Huemer, irrationality in politics is one of the world’s great problems, because it prevents us from solving most of the other ones. So even if it’s a difficult project, it is an important one.

          • Lumifer says:

            it’s when a fetus counts as a living human whose interests should be protected, which is largely a medical question

            How in the world defining a human is a “medical question”? It certainly should be informed by biology, but it’s no more a medical question than, say, deciding that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”.

          • Zombielicious says:

            All relevant facts to when something qualifies as human (or other creature with qualities such that it has moral interests) are biological, whether the answers to those questions are currently known or not.

            The map is not the territory etc.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Zombielicious

            Huh? Whether some{thing|body} is a human is a question of definition. It’s not a fact (“currently known or not”) and is entirely a function of the definition.

            The map is indeed not the territory. Notably, the territory does not contain the answer to the question of what is a human.

          • Zombielicious says:

            This actually seems to make my point, though. Definitions are one thing that it should be possible to build consensus on, at least when there is enough relevant information about the subject matter to do so. If you don’t think that’s possible, then you have bigger problems than just agreeing on politics, since most of science, math, and philosophy go out the window too. A word may be widely used despite being currently ill-defined, but it doesn’t mean definitions themselves have no real meaning.

            So no, I don’t think it’s that it’s fundamentally impossible to reach consensus on such questions, so much as that those questions are currently poorly stated, based on inconsistent or nonsensical definitions, or the information to do so currently isn’t available, or that people debating the questions are engaged in some kind of emotionally charged motivated reasoning (e.g. “hate what the outgroup supports”) which prevents further progress. Not that some people just want to kill babies or force rape victims to endure unwanted pregnancies as their terminal values. You’re either defending some kind of anti-realist view that truth does not exist, or else that people have such fundamentally different terminal values that they can never agree on a majority of policy issues.

          • Lumifer says:

            You can certainly build a consensus around definitions (that’s how languages work, after all). What I was objecting to is the idea the the definition of a human is a “medical question” and that the answer can be found in the territory.

          • Agronomous says:

            You do get people who think that even a single-celled zygote or embryonic stem cell counts as a human life and it’s murder to destroy it,

            No, nobody claims an embryonic stem cell counts as a human life. We claim that the (human) embryo that is destroyed (killed) to “harvest” that embryonic stem cell counts as a human life, and killing innocent humans counts as murder.

            (You may not have any idea how hard I’m trying to be nice, here.)

          • Zombielicious says:

            Thanks for edifying me on your position. Feel free not to bother next time either if that kind of snide parenthetical aside is the best you can do as far as being “nice.”

          • A merciless and silent disaster says:

            I wish to formally accuse your entire school of thought of inconsistency.

            First, embryonic stem cell research uses embryos made for in vitro fertilisation (IVF). These embryos would die either way. Yet many countries ban embryonic stem cell research but do not have laws limiting embryos produced per IVF cycle or mandating donation of embryos to couples, or restrictions on IVF similar to those on abortion. This saves no embryos at all.

            More importantly, embryonic stem cells are derived from blastocysts, which are a pre-implantation stage. Roughly 30%, maybe more of embryos fail to implant. (Kennedy, 1997; Wilcox et al., 1988)

            Of those that do implant, again roughly 30% miscarry (McNair & Altman, The Johns Hopkins Manual of Gynecology and Obstetrics, p. 438 in the 4th ed). If you think moral relevance begins at the blastula stage or earlier, then you think at least half of human beings die of these natural processes, usually even before their mother knows they exist.

            Efforts to reduce abortion, IVF, or embryonic stem cell research, are opposed by people who want those things. Nobody is opposed to research on preventing early miscarriage and making implantation more likely.

            Where is the charity that funds this research, and why haven’t I heard of it?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Roughly 100% of people die sooner or later. That doesn’t make murder OK. ETA: Nor does it make someone a hypocrite if they campaign to reduce the murder level but not to increase funding for cancer treatment — or to pass more car safety regulations, or to spend more effort searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s, or any one of the other myriad causes of human deaths. The above post is a classic case of whataboutery, and almost certainly made in bad faith.

          • A merciless and now noisier disaster says:

            When I ask anti-murder activists “How come I never hear of an anti-malaria or anti-cancer charity?”, they answer “Do you live under a rock? Here are hundreds.” I can (and do) argue about the relative effort spent on each cause, but the reaction isn’t “How dare you bring that up?”.

            Wait a minute, that’s what’s going on, isn’t it? Nobody can say “What about spontaneous miscarriage? Let’s start a charity” because “What about spontaneous miscarriage?” is a slogan of the enemy side. Hundreds of millions of babies dying because of partisan politics. Shit shit shit shit shit

          • The original Mr. X says:

            You could try Tommy’s. They’ve even recently opened a National Miscarriage Research Centre.

            And, since we’re playing this game, I’d like to formally accuse every pro-choicer who isn’t also a libertarian of inconsistency. Why is it that “choice” is sacrosanct when it comes to terminating your unborn child, but not when it comes to spending your money as you see fit, or educating your child (assuming it’s survived pregnancy, of course) as you see fit, or buying a gun, or drinking a large can of fizzy drink, or working for less than the minimum wage, or only hiring people who look like you, or…?

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            It’s not that pro-choicers believe choice to be sacrosanct. They see it as a nice thing that counts as a benefit in a cost-benefit calculation.

            They are willing to sacrifice choice to reduce things like drug abuse, if they think an increase in drug abuse costs more than the benefit of being able to choose to use any drug.

            Problem is, they don’t see death of unborn as much of a cost.

          • A slightly more merciful disaster says:

            Thanks, threw £30 their way.

            Yeah, what Saint Fiasco said. I think abortion should be permitted because I don’t think embryos are people yet; I’d place the limit at maybe 14 weeks. I also think we should develop artificial wombs as soon as possible, to avoid the whole issue.

            In the violinist thought experiment, where it’s definitely a person… I might be willing to concede that there’s some abstract philosophical way that you have a right to kill the violinist, but if you actually do it you’re despicable and I will use my right to ostracise you.

            I don’t think the violinist-killing philosophy is libertarianism. They both permit underpaid racist soda guns, but libertarianism would not murder a baby (I guess you’d demand payment when it’s grown up) or educate a child in a way it doesn’t want.

          • Agronomous says:

            Feel free not to bother next time either if that kind of snide parenthetical aside is the best you can do as far as being “nice.”

            When I’m being snide, you’ll know it.

            It was an honest report. Go back and read what I wrote. What failed the niceness test? Is there any nicer way to say what I said without changing the meaning?

            What would your reaction be if I misstated your side’s position on something to that degree?

          • LHN says:

            I also think we should develop artificial wombs as soon as possible, to avoid the whole issue.

            While the tech would be great to have for any number of reasons, I think this is extremely optimistic.

  28. Kevin C. says:

    I’m not sure if I’m reading these biology papers/abstracts correctly, involving “sex role reversal” and adult sex ratios in various species. First, we have ones like this about birds from order Charadriiformes: The evolution of sex roles in birds is related to adult sex ratio. To quote from the abstract,

    Classic theories suggested ecological or life-history predictors of role reversal, but most studies failed to support these hypotheses. Recent theory however predicts that sex-role reversal should be driven by male-biased adult sex ratio (ASR). Here we test this prediction for the first time using phylogenetic comparative analyses. Consistent with theory, both mating system and parental care are strongly related to ASR in shorebirds: conventional sex roles are exhibited by species with female-biased ASR, whereas sex-role reversal is associated with male-biased ASR. These results suggest that social environment has a strong influence on breeding systems and therefore revealing the causes of ASR variation in wild populations is essential for understanding sex role evolution.

    But in contrast, we have this one about pipefishes: The operational sex ratio influences choosiness in a pipefish.

    In the pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) females compete for males, who are choosy. In nature OSRs are typically female biased, but may occasionally be male biased. In a series of experiments, males were allowed to choose between a large and a small female under a perceived excess of either males or females. Under female bias, males preferred the large female: they spent more time close to her than to the small female; they courted the large female sooner than the small; and they tended to copulate sooner and more often with the large female. Under male bias all these differences vanished and males mated at random with respect to female size. Males reproduced at a faster rate under male than under female bias because they received more eggs in their brood pouches. Thus, males switched from maximizing mate quality (i.e., being choosy) to minimizing the risk of not reproducing (i.e., being quick) as the OSR became male biased.

    So one argues that sex role reversal is (in birds at least) associated with the breeding population skewing male, and gives an evolutionary theoretical model predicting this. Yet the other gives, for pipefishes, the reverse correlation. Am I understanding this correctly?

  29. Jill says:

    Here are some points to add to the discussion we were having about why Obama failed to keep some of his promises. I don’t believe that voting doesn’t matter, as this article subtitle states. But there are some other people calling the shots– making some decisions that most voters thought were up to the pres and Congress.

    Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
    The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon
    https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html

    • Walter says:

      It’s super weird to see you write this, Jill. I mean, I totally agree with it, but I’m a very right-of-center guy, and I sort of thought that this was a thing we believed. Like, whining about unelected mandarins regulating all the things is kind of our song, right?

      • meyerkev248 says:

        My mental model has that as alt-right.

        In fact, the bits where they start talking about the mechanisms by which that happens are the interesting bits that make me not completely drop them at all.

        Actually, let me correct myself.

        Everyone thinks that to some degree, whether they be left, right, center, or lizard people.

        The alt-right is the ones with the most developed vocabulary to talk about the means and ways by which that happens in large part because they’ve been talking about how Democracy is terrible, so OK, what do we replace it with and how, which in turn means doing a lot of thinking about the very nature of people and systems and…

        /And it’s always super-entertaining to read a Vox piece and go “Wait, is this a 10-page article groping towards the concept of anarcho-tyranny? Because we already have a word for this.”

        • Sandy says:

          It seems fairly mainstream right. The Supreme Court Justices are the typical model for “unelected mandarins”, especially when they point at the Constitution and say, “Look, it clearly says abortion is a fundamental right”.

          • gbdub says:

            Don’t forget the entrenched bureaucracy, and public “servants” lean heavily left outside the DoD.

          • Nornagest says:

            DoD and police departments. The latter are big enough — there’s about a million police employees in the US, most of whom are officers — that they shouldn’t be glossed over in an analysis like this.

            Wasn’t it Rudy Giuliani who pointed out that he has an army about the size of Belgium’s (i.e. the NYPD)?

          • cassander says:

            The DoD isn’t exactly right wing, except by the standard of the rest of the civil service.

          • gbdub says:

            Police departments are a bit weird, because on the one hand they are (obviously) pro-law-and-order, probably socially conservative, but also almost all strongly unionized with a lot of the sympathies that go along with that. They seem more like your traditional blue-collar working class Democrat than the sort of people we talk about as “leftist” here.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ gbdub

            I don’t know about weird. LEOs are strongly authoritarian (no surprise) with all the consequences. As to unions, it’s just naked self-interest.

          • Jiro says:

            LEOs are strongly authoritarian (no surprise) with all the consequences.

            The rank and file police also strongly support the right to bear arms and oppose gun control.

            Considering that police get to carry weapons regardless of whether there is gun control, this support is squarely anti-authoritarian.

        • Jill says:

          I hadn’t known there were more than a couple of people who thought that democracy is terrible, until I came to this site. There are some truly unusual people here. For those 3 or 4 of you in the U.S. who do think this, you certainly have your work cut out for you in finding very many other people to join you in your distaste for democracy and plans for alternatives.

          I’d like to see Congress and the pres really be in charge of the things they are supposed to. And I’d like to see Citizens United reversed and have public funding of elections.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Jill – “For those 3 or 4 of you in the U.S. who do think this, you certainly have your work cut out for you in finding very many other people to join you in your distaste for democracy and plans for alternatives.”

            I’m a pretty big fan of democracy, but in my more pessimistic moments I find their analysis interesting. The big question comes back to the two points of view from In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization. It is certainly possible that cruelty and tribalism out-compete everything else, and if so, Democracy is probably just a transitory stage on the road to something much nastier. I rather hope not, though.

          • Nornagest says:

            Democracy is probably just a transitory stage on the road to something much nastier

            Plato thought that democracy would inevitably give rise to tyranny (a word with less pejorative connotations in his day than ours, though; “autocracy” might be a better fit). On the other hand, democracy in Plato’s time was so different from ours that you could argue it was functionally a different system.

          • roystgnr says:

            “Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others” is a pretty famous paraphrase of Winston Churchill; “two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner” is Ben Franklin. I wouldn’t be surprised if “distaste for democracy” (without “plans for alternatives”) was a more common sentiment than not.

          • Seth says:

            I hadn’t known there were more than a couple of people who thought that democracy is terrible, until I came to this site.

            Sadly, that says more about the filter-bubble theory than this site. The view that democracy is terrible is fairly common among several types of people – e.g. techs, the wealthy, the conservative (hardly exclusive categories, and not meaning to be an exhaustive list either). Allow me to introduce you to the political thinking of Peter Thiel, who is not a obscure blogger, but recently spoke at the Republican convention.

            http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian
            “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. “

          • hlynkacg says:

            The question is which form of the word “democracy” do you have in mind? Are we talking about majority rule/will of the people and all that? or are we talking about democracy as a political institution?

            “Pure democracy” is simply “mob rule” with more syllables. A lynch mob is democratic. It might just be the purest expression of democracy there is. The “will of the people” stripped of all pretense or restraint.

            That is exactly why institutions, and “rule of law” are so important. They are the buffer that allows “freedom” and “democracy” to coexist and they are what most people really have in mind when they talk about democracy as a institution.

      • Jill says:

        I identify as Left overall. But I honestly try to read a lot of things and figure out the truth. What is proposed in the article sounds probable to me.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Jill – Yeah, this is a huge concern for people on the right, and it extends beyond just the security branches as well; my understanding is much of the executive branch is like this, and it’s growing in power the further into the era of the “imperial presidency” we move. If you read into the background of the Bundy standoff awhile back, the red-tribe version was that it was over these sorts of issues: an unaccountable, ham-fisted federal agency using its power to grind under foot anyone who got in its way.

          You also mentioned in the links thread that people should worry less about the president and more about congress, since it’s congress who writes the laws. The problem is that it’s the executive branch that chooses whether and how to enforce them, and the record over the last several presidents, democrat and republican, is not encouraging.

          You’ve linked Ornstein’s analysis of the origins of distrust of government; this is a big part of the picture I feel Ornstein misses. A lot of the fury against government on the right comes from red-tribe people realizing over the last forty years or so that the government is not their friend, and executive-branch abuses have had a huge role in that. Gingrich lassoed that bull, rode it for a while and undoubtedly spurred it on, but he didn’t create it out of whole cloth, and it doesn’t go away without him. For an awful lot of Americans, the government is seen as one of the most obvious threats to their way of life; the main split between Blues and Reds is which parts of it are the threats and which parts are the vital, necessary tools of good governance.

          • Randy M says:

            The problem is that it’s the executive branch that chooses whether and how to enforce them, and the record over the last several presidents, democrat and republican, is not encouraging.

            That’s part of it, but another is congress delegating a lot of the decision making to executive agencies, such as have EPA set various standards and so forth.

          • cassander says:

            It’s important not to conflate the presidency with the executive branch as a whole. Outside of the realm of foreign policy, the president has very little control over the executive. He’s a CEO who can’t fire or promote the vast majority of his employees, can’t move money around, can re-organize his departments, and can’t even make department heads on his own.

            The power of the executive is vast and imperial, the power of the presidency is not.

      • cassander says:

        Tue or not, The right/alt-right position is at least logically coherent. At the most basic level, it’s the claim that there’s a permanent bureaucracy, an overton window, and that the former does a lot of work in shaping the latter. If you’re on the right and have spent a couple decades electing republicans who campaigned against gay rights, immigrants, entitlements, environmental regulation, only to see the those things all increase, I can see why such a theory would be compelling.

        What I don’t understand is how someone on the left can read that article, then immediately turn around and advocate giving more money and power to a system they think is controlled by their ideological enemies. It’s just almost as bad the underpants gnome theory on the far left that evil corporations/republicans control the government, so we need to make the government more powerful to stop them

        • Tekhno says:

          It’s just almost as bad the underpants gnome theory on the far left that evil corporations/republicans control the government, so we need to make the government more powerful to stop them

          It’s more like the idea that the government can help everyone, and the way the corporations control government is by making it too small to help everyone else, but enough to enforce their interests. The corporations are paying for the government even if they control it, so the idea is that giving the government more power requires taxing them more, reducing their power and increasing income equality.

          • cassander says:

            >reducing their power and increasing income equality.

            You aren’t reducing their power if you give an entity they control more money and power.

          • Nornagest says:

            That seems to presuppose that the Secret Masters can control the magnitude of government but not its direction, which seems questionable to me.

            I suppose I could steelman it by saying that there’s no cartel here, only individual industry lobbyists, and they have no shared interest in redirecting money to any particular industry but do have a shared interest in keeping the general level of regulation low… but then that shared interest gets correspondingly weaker. What does a software company in California care about clean water in Kentucky?

          • Tekhno says:

            @Nornagest

            That seems to presuppose that the Secret Masters can control the magnitude of government but not its direction, which seems questionable to me.

            I think a lot of equation between the government and The People is going on in a lot of far-left analysis, so the corporations could be said more to be holding down “the government” rather than controlling it pe se. I do think this is very questionable.

            I think some leftists realize this, and their response is to go farther left and become communists, because they understand that just giving the government money is useless if its a bourgeois government. The radical solution is removal of the bourgeoisie so then there can be no corporations to control the government, and the government can only be The People, leading the way to the dissolution of the idea of government all together (pure communism = anarchism) in favor of the free association of communes in a confederation which is totally not a government honest led by instantly recallable delegates who are servants and totally not leaders.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Nornagest –

            What makes you think corporations want to keep regulatory levels low?

            Regulations increase corporate profits, they don’t decrease them.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Orphan Wilde

            “Corporations” are a very diverse set of entities, but let’s assume we’re talking about large ones.

            I would say that they are mostly interested in skewed (in their favour) regulation. As to absolute levels, I suspect it depends on how effective their regulatory capture is : -/

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            Insofar as people talk about corporations, they’re generally not talking about LLCs protecting a mom-and-pop shop from lawsuits.

            But I think the case holds in general; even entirely neutral regulations impose legal burdens which disproportionately affect smaller companies.

            Mind, I’m a near-religious capitalist. I just don’t think corporations are capitalism; they’re deliberate government interventions into the market that violate rule of law by exempting certain political structures from common law liability rules. From a pragmatic perspective, they may be an improvement, but the solution should have been to correct the general issues with liability laws, not to exempt classes of fictitious entities from those rules.

            So I’m a pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist, and I think other free marketeers should take up this perspective. Corporations sure as fuck aren’t our allies, and we spend way too much time defending their bullshit.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Orphan Wilde

            even entirely neutral regulations impose legal burdens which disproportionately affect smaller companies

            I agree, though I think it’s just a special case of the smaller companies being more fragile in general.

            I just don’t think corporations are capitalism; they’re deliberate government interventions into the market that violate rule of law by exempting certain political structures from common law liability rules.

            That doesn’t look right to me. First, do you have any real-life large-scale examples of successful capitalism without limited liability? Corporations are basically a structure that is remarkably successful at mobilizing capital from risk-averse people who don’t want to run a business. That is a very important function for capitalism and I’m not sure how do you think it will work without it. A semiconductor fab costs a few billions of dollars to build — how will you achieve the necessary concentration of money? Pure debt financing has its own problems.

            Second, why do you set common law and government intervention as opposites? Common law is not distilled ancient wisdom guaranteed to be pure and true — it is, basically, just judicial tradition. By now limited liability is part of it.

            And, by the way, you speak of “exempt[ing] classes of fictitious entities from those rules” but limited liability exempts investors from liability and those investors are not fictitious entities most of the time.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            I think we agree on the regulation aspect.

            I don’t have claim to demand this, but I’d like you to think about what corporations are, and their role in capitalism.

            I spent far too much time in the early part of my political debate career defending corporations. It was frankly quite liberating to realize corporations didn’t really belong to capitalism; their history is pure mercantilism, after all – early corporations were literally government-created independent financial entities.

            Their later history (which IIRC was the US version of corporations, which only later started to be adopted elsewhere) was a patch on a flawed patchwork of legal liability issues which made investment incredibly risky.

            I understand the problem that is being solved there – risk profiles of investment are completely different between “You could lose the money you’ve invested” and “You could be sued for money you never intended to invest”.

            The issue is that that risk profile isn’t limited to business – the liability laws which provoke this issue in business are part of the common law, and the problem could just as easily have been solved there. Why do we treat the owners of a business entity which owns an ice skating rink differently than we treat the owners of an ice skating rink?

            Corporations are a century-and-a-half solution to a problem that originated in jurisprudence that originated in a British empire that no longer exists. Maybe there’s a better solution to that particular problem.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Orphan Wilde

            early corporations were literally government-created independent financial entities

            Sure, the British East India Company and such. But it’s hardly relevant for the current situation.

            are part of the common law, and the problem could just as easily have been solved there

            But if you want to solve the problem there (if I understand you correctly, make limited liability apply to all forms of business), then you would effectively make “corporations” out of single proprietorships and partnerships. And then the question becomes what is it that is wrong about corporations that you want to abolish? If you change the liability laws, aren’t you just creating more of them?

            Maybe there’s a better solution to that particular problem.

            So don’t be shy, propose one.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            Well, one solution would be to change common law to limit liability for everyone; the “make everyone a corporation” strategy.

            What makes this different from existing corporate law?

            Everything else about corporate law. Fiduciary duty, for one example. Double-accounting requirements. Requirements (varying by state) to have a CEO and CFO (among other positions).

            Corporate law basically means the technology of doing business is, to a significant extent, stuck in a century-old rut. I’m not going to say “X would definitely be better”, because X is probably worse; but the whole point of capitalism is, like science, to test ideas out and see what works.

            Instead, we’ve made it substantively illegal to test out new ideas. It’s insane, and it’s also insane that we as capitalists have somehow been shoved into the position of defending this statist monstrosity.

          • Nornagest says:

            What makes you think corporations want to keep regulatory levels low?

            Regulations increase corporate profits, they don’t decrease them.

            Within an industry, sure, provided the regulations are structured such that fixed costs dominate marginal ones (very common) and the industry’s structured such that small players cut into big ones’ profits more than compliance costs do (not rare, but not universal).

            But if you’re the kind of company that can afford lobbyists, you want your vendors and customers to be unregulated (so that you can buy their stuff cheap and sell to them easily; note that this is a marginal cost), even if you want your own industry to be regulated (so you don’t need to worry as much about being disrupted by a startup with a better business model). And that goes for all companies, hence “common interest”.

            This predicts individual lobbyists pushing for (or “grudgingly” suggesting) regulation in many but not all cases, and Chamber of Commerce-type entities weakly supporting deregulation. That seems to fit empirical reality pretty well, from what I’ve seen.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Nornagest –

            Suppose, for a moment, you make steel I-beams; that’s what you do. You don’t make the steel, you make the beams. Suppose also that futures don’t exist; they don’t substantively change any of this on the whole, but they make analysis a hell of a lot more complicated.

            Suppose your profit margin is, like most industries, somewhere between 5-20% of expenses. Let’s say 10%.

            If the price of steel rises by $10, such that all your competitors’ prices must rise as well, what happens to your long-term profits?

            Well, that’s complicated, and it mostly depends on whether there are viable alternatives to steel I-beams – that is, how elastic demand for steel I-beams is.

            Which means you don’t want regulations that harm steel production, specifically. But a regulation that makes all competing products slightly more expensive?

            Well, everybody’s profits get a little bit higher, because 10% of $110 is a little bit more than 10% of $100.

            Again, stuff like futures make all of this insanely complex, and substitutions exist for many products – but regulations that harm everybody about equally are generally in the large corporations’ best interests.

          • Nornagest says:

            That’s not how that sort of broad-based regulation translates into economics, though. You are not decreeing that everything will now cost 10% more; you’re imposing some cost on everybody, probably a fixed one. How they deal with that cost is up to them. Most of them will raise prices to cover it, with the magnitude of that increase depending on the ratio of the new cost to their earnings; for some, that’ll either destroy their profit margin or push their prices up enough that they’re no longer competitive, and they’ll go out of business.

            So what does this mean to a single large company? Demand goes down a bit because you have to charge more, but you don’t have as much competition anymore either, so that’s compensated by bigger market share — the same dynamic you’d see in an industry-specific regulation. But unlike that scenario, your marginal costs have gone up too, and there’s no structural reason for that cost to be covered.

          • Jiro says:

            Everything else about corporate law.

            Most people who complain about special corporate privileges complain mainly about limited liability. If you are fine with limited liability and object to something else about corporations, you’re at odds with the movement. It is no longer “why the people on my side oppose corporations”, it’s “why I and pretty much nobody else oppose corporations”.

            Of course, this is your prerogative. Just be aware of it.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jiro –

            Among those I argue with, most complain about fiduciary duty, although in my experience most of them aren’t aware that’s what they’re complaining about. (They tend to get very quiet when you explain that the government does in fact require corporations to put profits first.)

            I’ve never encountered anybody who complained about limited liability. I can think of a few who probably thought that’s what they were complaining about, but dealing with corporate negligent homicide isn’t actually what limited liability is about.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Orphan Wilde

            Everything else about corporate law.

            Well, then you aren’t complaining about corporations, really. You are complaining about business regulations. A very valid complaint and I would probably agree with much of it, but that was an unexpected turn of events. As Jiro said, when you say “I’m against corporations”, pretty much everyone will assume you have a problem with limited liability.

            Fiduciary duty exists in other contexts as well, e.g. in partnerships. And, by the way, it also is a pretty important factor in the collect-the-capital-from-passive-investors process. Those investors want not only the assurances that they won’t be sued for everything they own, they would also like some legal protection from being marks in a shell game.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            In a sense, yes, I’m complaining about business regulation.

            But in a very critical sense, corporations ARE business regulation, and the worst kind: Exceptions carved out of normal law.

            If you asked me whether I’m for privatization, I’d say yes, immediately. But if you pointed to any actual case of privatization that has happened, I’m almost certainly against it, because privatization, like everything in government, is pretty much always done in an anti-capitalist way. Soviet privatization, in which state assets were sold for peanuts to politically-connected individuals while leaving much of the anti-competition law in place for everyone else, is the perfect example. Us free-market people have a bad tendency of completely ignoring our principles when the right buzzwords are used to describe the shit we normally decry.

            I’m less familiar with partnership law, so am incompetent to comment on it.

          • Anonymous says:

            (They tend to get very quiet when you explain that the government does in fact require corporations to put profits first.)

            Perhaps because they are embarrassed for you. You are parroting an overly-simplified version of the holding of a court case from Michigan in 1919. It’s relevance to modern corporate law approaches nil.

          • John Schilling says:

            They tend to get very quiet when you explain that the government does in fact require corporations to put profits first

            The government is very explicit about the fact that the corporation I presently work for is not allowed to make any profit at all. Back when I used to own half of a corporation, the government didn’t care whether my partner and I even tried to make a profit. Your understanding of “fiduciary responsibility” is I think critically flawed.

            The government enforces contracts. If, and only if, a company makes a contract with its investors saying “we will make as much profit as legally possible”, the government will recognize that a fiduciary duty exists to put profit first. If a company makes some other contract with its investors, maybe “we will make as much profit as possible while Not Being Evil (in some legally definable way)”, or “We will perform this service while making no profit whatsoever”, then the government will enforce those contracts instead.

            And this has nothing to do with corporations as such. If you set up an ice cream shop as a sole proprietorship, but ask your brother-in-law to invest some start-up funding, whatever contract you sign with him has about the same status under the law. So even if you imagine some sort of non-corporate capitalism, you’re still going to have fiduciary duties. Which may or may not be “profit uber alles”, depending on the priorities of the capitalists in question.

            The bit where almost all real investors chose to put their money with the companies that make legal promises to maximize profits and warm fuzzy non-binding press releases about Not Being Evil, that’s not something you can pin on governments either.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Orphan Wilde

            If you asked me whether I’m for privatization, I’d say yes, immediately. But if you pointed to any actual case of privatization that has happened, I’m almost certainly against it, because privatization, like everything in government, is pretty much always done in an anti-capitalist way.

            So you’re for privatization except for how it always actually happens in real life? That’s a pretty big mismatch between your ideas and reality, and I don’t think reality cares about it.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            John Schilling –

            I’m simplifying a lot of what I’m talking about here, because it’s a complex subject. There are many different ways to incorporate, and in addition to federal laws, there are also state laws; I’d hazard a very rough guess that there are around four hundred “types” of corporation, if we treat a “type” as an intersection of applicable state and federal laws that shape how a business does business. It wouldn’t surprise me if that number is greater than one thousand, though.

            Simplifying to the point of damn-near lying, however, there are three types of corporation: Private, public, and nonprofit.

            Some subtypes of private corporations can convert to public corporations later; some can’t. In general, private corporations are subject to the least number of rules, and largely exist as a stopgap so that “ordinary” people can get the advantages of incorporation. Some of them are businesses, some aren’t. Sensible mom-and-pop stores are incorporated, at the very least as an LLC.

            Public corporations are governed more stringently, and have fiduciary duty – there are kind-of, sort-of ways around this, but they’re generally not retroactively available. (Companies which utilize these techniques usually self-describe as not-for-profit, and, while IANAL, I believe they have to be part of the corporate charter. I don’t -think- they can be voted in by shareholders later.) Public corporations are subject to a levy of different regulations, commonly including a requirement to have a CEO, CFO, and board of directors. (This part varies slightly by state law). All of the common elements we recognize as being part of a “corporation” are, in fact, “Legal obligations of publicly-held corporations”. The fiduciary duty rules don’t say “Maximize profit”, but rather say that the interests of the shareholders should come first; since the primary interest of shareholders in a common public corporation is financial, that becomes the responsibility. The standard, like most of law, is what a reasonable person would do. Unfortunately, it’s a tort, meaning in the US it can be very expensive to defend yourself, and worse it’s a personal tort – you as CEO can personally be sued under the law in most states – and it’s considerably safer to err on the side of caution.

            Non-profit corporations are handled somewhat differently; they can be public or private, but enjoy certain tax benefits, and the relief of [ETA: profit-based] fiduciary duty, in exchange for a requirement that they do not accrue profit on a corporate basis. Non-profit doesn’t imply, however, the corporation doesn’t exist to make money; it just doesn’t exist to make money for its shareholders. Non-profit corporations have been used by very wealthy people to effectively avoid paying estate taxes; they establish a non-profit to provide jobs for their descendants.

            That’s the much-simplified version, which I’m mostly writing to say “Yes, I understand this is more complex than I’m representing, but the core of the issue I’m bringing up is still an issue.” I can’t address all the complexity and still address the issue – there’s too much complexity going on.

            Which is itself an issue.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            I’m against paperclip maximizers in the general case.

            I’m for privatization for reasons other than maximizing-privatization-of-the-economy. It’s a means to an end – a more-free market.

            If the actual result is reduced market freedom – say, because a state monopoly with democratic controls became a private monopoly with no controls – I’m not for what happened.

            To be for what happened would be to ignore the principles I actually have in favor of the principles my ideological enemies accuse me of having. I prefer not to let my enemies define my position.

          • Jiro says:

            Among those I argue with, most complain about fiduciary duty

            I don’t think that counts as complaining about special corporate privileges. The fact that a corporation might have a fiduciary duty isn’t a privilege of being a corporation, it’s a restriction on being a corporation.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anonymous –

            I’m disinclined to write fifty pages just so that you can’t find anything I didn’t mention as “proof” of my ignorance. Particularly when you reference a law which doesn’t even exist in most states; indeed, its explicit inclusion in Delaware is one of the reasons Delaware is so popular for incorporation.

            Mind, there is a weaker version of the same principle at play in Federal law, but the weaker version isn’t actually unique to corporate law, and is just the application of the “reasonable person” common law standard, which applies in any case where a tort evaluates somebody’s performance of duties and responsibilities (read: tortuous negligence).

            It’s not a great standard, and can force people to make suboptimal decisions because it requires people to do what a reasonable person in their position would do – which if you happen to be an exceptional person, means you’re limited by the average person in your profession; Scott Alexander has referenced a lot of situations in his field where he’s not allowed to make improvements, such as offering Russian drugs, because that would open him up to tortuous liability because that’s not what a “reasonable” person would do in his position. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better legal standard than that, so, eh.

          • Lumifer says:

            make improvements, such as offering Russian drugs

            I just like this expression : -D

          • The Nybbler says:

            An anonymous relying on an argument based on reputation. How cute.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anonymous –

            You’ve yet to demonstrate any actual knowledge, and as far as I can tell you’re trolling. The only reason I’m even bothering to respond to you is that I need somebody to respond to in order to finish up the point I was making, and you provide a useful foil to continue to elaborate, since nobody apparently noticed that I left a giant bloody hole in my logic where public corporations can put things other than profit motive in their corporate charter.

            I left the hole there deliberately, and if you knew what you were talking about, you’d know both to look for it, and what trap I laid there (the trap is set by the body of the rest of the text). You’d also know how to disarm the trap, and then we could have a nice little discussion on how complex the whole bloody edifice is, which was the next point in the series.

            Instead you’re engaging in low-effort trolling, so I have to make do with making the point about the retarded degree of complexity in US corporate law implicitly. But meh.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Orphan Wilde
            You handled, that much better than I would have. You’re doing good work.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:
          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anonymous –

            I’m glad the things I have written elsewhere here have provided entertainment for you, and that you’re kind enough to point other people towards them.

            ETA:
            Whatever Happened to Anonymous –

            403 Forbidden from my side, unfortunately, because a quick search on the title of the JPEG suggests I’d find it entertaining.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anonymous –

            ETA: Hm. The reply this is replying to vanished. I suspect it has been deleted. Oh well, time to go eat lunch.

            You’re not even pretending not to troll at this point.

            Look, I get it. Cynicism is way easier than intelligence, and most people can’t tell the difference. Plus cynicism never makes you feel stupid; the solution to being proven wrong is just to become even more cynical, to never say anything of meaning.

            But the people who can’t tell the difference tend to play the same substitution game, and the whole enterprise leads to you stagnating as a person. Cynicism never requires you to grow, and indeed, leaves you unwilling to grow, to change; if you never depart, you go from a cynical teenager to a cynical adult, to a cynical old person, and then you die.

            And that’s kind of tragic, because everything between the teenager years and death never really mattered. You might as well have died young. Nothing you do here matters; it’s the dull life of a dull person whose creative spark is directed towards annoying people.

            If you’re going to troll, troll with something more original than “Your ideas suck.” My ideas do suck, but they tend to suck in novel and interesting ways, which is what I’m all about. It’s just stale and disappointing. Oh, you’ve insulted me – I’ve never been insulted on the Internet before!

            But I bet nobody has ever told you that your cynicism is a trap for the intellectually lazy before; see, that requires considering you as a human being, and dismissing that human being’s merits as a person, which your anonymity is supposed to protect you from. I’m not supposed to be able to criticize you as a person when you provide no personhood for me to criticize, right?

            The idea might be wrong. You can claim that it’s wrong. The thing is, I don’t care. And among the observers, no few are going to believe I just burned you in a significant way, with some cause. The extent of the damage, of course, will be unknown to anyone but you – at least you hope.

            Because you can pretend to be another person tomorrow, so what other people think doesn’t matter. But if what other people think doesn’t matter, why be anonymous in the first place? Why hide your face as you insult?

            Because you actually care a lot about what other people think. You’re upset; I can tell you’re upset, because you’re now attacking people bluntly and blatantly, without even the hint of finesse you used before. Nobody even knows who you are, and it bothers you that they think you’re wrong.

            You’re not cut out for trolling. Find a better hobby.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            I’m pretty sure it was just someone trying to get anons banned. That would explain the surge in particularly bad anoning on this post.

            Edit: yup, 99% certain now.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Eh. About normal, for an internet comment thread populated with a high percentage of cranks, I’d guess. You’re the idiot arguing with the crazy person, I must point out. What are you trying to convince a crazy person of? Or are you also performing for an audience you insist doesn’t matter or exist?

            You’re mistaken if you think I’m trying to convince anyone of anything; you just said I sound crazy, so why are you looking for “sane” motives for my behavior?

            “Stirring the pot” is a metaphor whose meaning is apparently lost on you: It means my goal isn’t to shift people to my side, but to disrupt their normal way of thinking about things. To shift metaphors in the hopes of conveying something to you, I violate the conversational scripts constantly; frequently I start talking about the script as I perform it.

            I’m not trying to convince anyone corporations are evil; I’m violating part of the libertarian script. Why am I violating the script? To make people aware the script exists. To illustrate, a common prompt: “Corporation X killed people in country Z!” The response? To look into it and argue that such a thing never happened, or that the situation was more complicated than that, or – well, to disagree.

            That script doesn’t serve libertarian interests. It’s just tribalism. The whole thing about Marx being alt-right? There’s truth, there – it wouldn’t be an effective violation of the script if there weren’t truth there – but the primary purpose is to break a script, the right-versus-left thing. They’re the same goddamn thing, separated by people performing their roles. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans basically agree on abortion – it should be legal up to a certain point, then illegal after that – but the Republicans focus on the part that they think should be illegal, and the Democrats focus on the part that they think should be legal. The moral outrage is mostly a performance.

            You’re playing a script, too. The implication that I don’t have a life outside this in a vain attempt to try to regain some sort of trolling high ground? I’ve only heard that one a few hundred times before. Again, I’m the crazy one – you’re the one arguing with crazy. Who needs to get a life, again?

            (That was me violating another script – that I pretend to care what you think of me.)

            ETA:
            Homo Iracundus –

            Possibly. I see opportunities to express certain concepts, though, and avail myself of them.

          • Tekhno says:

            It’s pretty clear from just this thread alone that anonymous commenting should be purged. It’s primarily used for sniping without having a reputation that requires backing up your claims.

            Anonymous is a “tragedy” of the commons, which actually works great on places like [x]chan for the sheer chaotic fun factor, but the problem is that anonymous commenting makes every form of discussion that doesn’t sound like [x]chan impossible. The general tone is lowered and hoity toity kind of discussions are drowned out. Over time, all anonymous discussion converges on chan culture and trolling.

            If we want to preserve our unique posting culture, anonymous posting must be purged! All glory to Scott!

    • Jordan D. says:

      I don’t agree with the article’s vague outline of this being a dire situation that nobody noticed. I mean, it’s clearly discussing a real thing which happens, but I don’t think we’re yet at risk of the FCC laughing off a sitting President’s agenda- most agency heads are appointed by the President at some point during his term, after all.

      (Also, plenty of people have noticed the rise of administrative agencies, although they then mostly rail against them in scholarly legal texts that only 0.001% of the population ever reads.)

      But a word in defense of Congress. Consider the following model of Congress:

      As a Congressperson, you’ve got a pretty simple set of jobs: keep your constituents happy and keep the country from going to pot. It’s not an easy task to juggle, but you’re honest, and willing to hear out the other side, and fairly bright. You keep things moving.

      Now one day it comes to light that MegaOil Company wants to build a pipeline from Delaware to California for some reason. Immediately there’s a huge split in Congress between people who have constituents who love the idea and people who think it will destroy the earth. You review the proposals and think that it’s a good idea but needs some changes and oversight to work out.

      Problems:
      1) You’re not a pipe-engineer or whatever. The company has engineers who inform you very credibly that this pipe needs no changes, but the environmental groups also have renowned engineers who tell you that this will be ruinous. You’d like to hire some engineers to give you an unbiased take, but that’ll just be reported as ‘Congressperson gives self $300,000 extra for crony staff while people starve on streets’, and you’ll be left with a report that anybody can dismiss as political, partisan hack-work.
      2) Even if your constituents agree with this project as a whole, it’ll be a wedge issue that your opponent can attack you on in March.
      3) Seriously, this thing is probably going to require eminent domain at some point, and then young Challenger Chad will have ads consisting entirely of widows grieving about you callously taking their homes.
      4) The benefits of the pipeline are kind of nebulous, but if there’s even a single spill, your name will be dirt.
      5) The majority of your constituents favor modest regulation of projects like this; but the company has the money to seriously threaten you if you try to write into law anything they dislike.

      No matter what you do, you’re looking at a lot of ways things could go badly for you. So what’s the solution? Establish the Federal Intercontinental Pipeline Commission! FIPC can do the studies, hire the engineers, make the unpopular regulations and authorize the eminent domain… and it’s all at least a step removed from you! Sure, people can say ‘Well, Congressperson voted for FIPC, and then the-‘ – OOPS! Too complicated! None of the voters care! And the best part is that since you’re writing the organic statute for FIPC, you can basically ensure that they do or do not authorize the pipeline to whatever degree of regulation you’d like.

      So Congresspeople do that. They do it a lot, and it works really well for them. If a job is too small to call for its own agency, that’s no problem- ‘There is established within the EPA a Commission on This One Valley I Care About’. Or just write a law ordering the EPA to look into this issue and figure it out.

      I think this is why agencies continue to expand- because they’re a way for the legislature to duck gridlock, evade blame and ensure that something like their policy preferences get enacted without the base being able to call them compromisers.

      • Salem says:

        This is an excellent and perceptive comment.

        The driving force behind the growth of the US executive is that Congress, quite rationally, does not want to take responsibility.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Yeah, the Founders were betting on our branches of government being motivated primarily to amass power. They didn’t consider that they might instead be motivated primarily to avoid blame.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I guess it comes down to the difference between the branch as a whole and individual members of it. If you’re an incumbent congressman, given the incumbent advantages the best way to secure re-election is probably to avoid attracting too much controversy. Setting up a regulatory agency to handle some potentially controversial thing might result in a diminution of Congress’ power, but by making re-election more likely it helps to maintain/increase your own personal power.

      • Schmendrick says:

        It occurs to me that a lot of this is the consequence of purely local projects being kicked upstairs to the federal government simply because locality itself can’t muster the capital.

    • benwave says:

      Is what the article described a big problem though? I would expect that experts within their given fields have a better ability to make decisions regarding that field than does a president, and there are always going to be limitations of the real world, things outside a president’s control.

      I dunno, maybe I would find the general case more troubling than the specific example given in the article, but I can imagine the scenario. A president campaigned on a particular goal. Shortly after having taken office he had to choose between the plans available, made by the military experts before he was president. He chooses one of them, and going forwards sets new goals for the military experts. The military experts make options in the future which more closely align to those goals. None of that seems particularly objectionable to me?

      • hlynkacg says:

        The problem comes when the “power” of the federal government is no-longer vested in the electorate.

        IE Where do I vote to fire the head of the IRS for using thier office to harass anti-tax advocates. Where do I vote against the ATF smuggling guns into Mexico, or vote to fire the head of the VA for being fantastically bad at their job?

      • Agronomous says:

        I would expect that experts within their given fields have a better ability to make decisions regarding that field than does a president

        Provide information about that field? Yes. But decision-making?

        You say “make decisions regarding that field,” but really the decisions that need to be made are policy decisions on which that field impinges. Presidents have to balance different interests: coal miners’ jobs vs. mine runoff, say. Experts don’t, and they tend to think the things they know about are more important and should win. I’m betting it’s hard to find environmental scientists who say things like, “Yes, cleaner stream water is a good thing, but we have to balance it against the short-term economic interests of these people I’ve never met.” Whereas if you find someone saying, “The situation that leaves everyone best-off is to reduce runoff, but only by half,” I’m going to say he’s an economist.

  30. Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

    How does one deal with sudden political-tribal alienation? Specifically, finding that you had fundamentally misunderstood your tribes ground level principles, built a series of beliefs from the midunderstood principles, and only then learned that all your allies are semi-secrerly aliens who drink baby blood?

    Gething involved with obscure movents and random 3rd parties that are functionally irrelevant to politics as a whole but actually do map to what I believe is working out OK, but if there’s some other solution I’m missing out on just because I haven’t asked, that would be unfortunate.

    • Two McMillion says:

      You’ve got three choices: conform, flee, or become stronger.

      Conform is the easiest. Stop talking. Adopt the opinions of the herd. Keep your head down. Don’t make waves or cause trouble for the group.

      Flee is the second easiest. Ignore politics. Say you don’t want to talk about them. Hang out with people who ignore them. Move, in the most extreme case. Stop following the issues and do what you want to do.

      Becoming stronger is the hardest. It means you have to work to ground your beliefs in the most stable way you can. You have to learn how your tribe works and learn to love it, to love it so much you want it changed for the better. Study. Learn how they think and why. Learn how they think and why. Learn how to talk to them. Learn how to change minds. Stand and be proud of what you believe. Stand for what you think is right. Don’t be ashamed of it. Play the long game, and take satisfaction that you didn’t betray your principles.

      I don’t know of any other options.

      • Lumifer says:

        Another option: become a cynic.

      • Bugmaster says:

        If “becoming stronger” and proudly standing up for your beliefs ends up with you unemployed, homeless, or dead, then my advice would be to become stronger in some other way.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Bugmaster – it doesn’t. “Learn how they think and why. Learn how they think and why. Learn how to talk to them. Learn how to change minds.” is the reason why.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Well, I for one would rather die on my feet than live on me knees. There are some things that are genuinely more important than food, clothes, and life. Fortunately, I don’t believe that any of my principles are really incompatible with those things, only perhaps with getting them as comfortably as I would like.

    • Urstoff says:

      My preferred solution is to care about politics less.

    • wtvb says:

      Talk less, smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against and what you’re for.

    • Jill says:

      Some Troll’s Legitimate Discussion Alt , I looked back at your question and realized that I wasn’t sure exactly what you were asking about. What to do about leaving or staying or getting along with the tribe you have gotten alienated from? Or finding new tribes? Or dealing with the emotional shock of what you realized about the tribe you were in? Or what?

      Did whatever you were asking about, get covered here by those who posted answers to your question(s)?

      Both the Red and the Blue tribes are said to be semi-secretly aliens who drink baby blood– or something equally as bad– if you view either tribe through the other’s eyes. So it is easy to get into the position you describe, if you are one of the rare people who doesn’t live constantly in your own tribal bubble, and hears the other side’s view occasionally.

  31. Fossil says:

    What’s the risk of getting into trouble by buying prescription nootropics online under one’s real name? Isn’t one’s real personal (financial, etc.) data required for an online purchase?

    I’m asking for a friend. Please redact/delete if this question was a very stupid move on my part, I’ll get the message.

    • Anonymous says:

      If you are worried about getting arrested, you shouldn’t be. The odds are very low for that. The answer might be different if you are worried about something else, e.g. getting a security clearance. (I don’t know either way as to that.)

    • Anonymous says:

      The danger of ordering modafinil with a credit card is negligible in most places SSC readers live. There is a chance, varying highly between countries, that the package will be stopped by customs and you will receive a note asking you to bring a prescription to pick it up. Just abandon the package. If this happens repeatedly, you might have trouble. But if you live in a place where this happens a lot, the supplier will reject your order.

      Most drugs are of even less concern than modafinil. Don’t order amphetamine by credit card, but you won’t have much opportunity to do so, anyhow.

  32. Jill says:

    Pertinent to some of what we’ve been discussing about BLM and SJW and crime and race, here’s another Vox article. If you hate Vox because you think it’s liberal biased, then suggest an article for me to read at Breitbart or somewhere and I’ll read it, even though I consider the site to be biased, and even though I may disagree with the article as much as you may disagree with Vox. I like Vox because they quote studies and statistics.

    Thanks to the people who read the previous Vox articles I have cited in the past, even if you didn’t agree. We have a problem in our society if almost everyone reads/views/listens to only those news sources that reflect only the facts and opinions that are consistent with their OWN tribe’s narrative– and if those sites exclude all facts and opinions that might sound consistent with the OTHER tribe’s narrative. We have gotten to where we have no consensus reality– even on the basic facts– not attitudes, facts– about our society, culture and government.

    We can’t fix policing without talking about race. This cartoon explains why.
    http://www.vox.com/2016/8/2/12316922/police-legitimacy-cartoon

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Jill –

      If you’re not a right-wing troll subtly making fun of left-wing positions, you’re bloody hard to tell apart from one at times.

      ETA: My apologies. Apparently that’s the absurdly poorly-chosen title of the Vox article.

      • Anonymous says:

        Come on man, that comment amounts to just an insult. I don’t think hounding Jill’s every post with low-effort stuff like this is the right strategy here.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Jill is posting political post after political post after political post, half of which in this particular thread are laments about how tribal everything is, and the other half are “Look my tribe is clearly correct”. This is both at the same bloody time.

          Toss “This comic will convince you of my worldview” on top of that, and for me, I just can’t suspend my disbelief anymore. That’s over-the-top bad.

          ETA: More than that, I think there are alt-right people who visit here who understand tribal dynamics well enough to know that a sockpuppet leftist who makes convincingly bad arguments would shift opinions away from the left, and I think at least one of them works in sufficiently bad faith to engage in exactly that strategy.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          I legitimately don’t understand what they’re reacting to. That’s a damn charitable post. From what I’ve read of the article so far, it seems like a reasonable starting point for a discussion, and Jill has precommitted to look at opposing sources.

          Gentlemen, take a step back, take a couple deep breaths, and try again. You are going off half-cocked. Scott links Vox articles too, and we engage with them. Why is this one different?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Because it contains the word “comic” as a self-descriptor?

            If I had to guess, that is what Orphan was reacting to, and maybe without clicking on the link.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Accusing somebody of being the sort of person who posts comics to prove political points is not a charitable thing to do, is the problem.

            And it doesn’t fit with the rest of the post. The first paragraph is perfect. The second paragraph is perfect. And then it closes with “Your worldview is so simple and unfounded on information that this comic will change it.”

            The person who writes the first two paragraphs does not write the last thing; there’s an incompatibility in world-model there. Which suggests the first two paragraphs were written with a different world-model than the last couple of sentences; the first two are genuine, the last is a right-wing model of what a left-wing person would say.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            HBC is correct. I reacted too quickly. My apologies.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            well, in your defense, it’s a pretty bad title. Clickbait, too, is the mindkiller.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            I agree it’s a bad title.

            But I wish everyone would realize that every single title is a bad title these days, or, hell, ever. “You can’t judge a book by its cover”, as an idiom, dates back to at least 1860.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Orphan Wilde:
            I just want to acknowledge a retraction done in a gracious way.

    • Nornagest says:

      I’m not totally sure this is directed at me, but I did say some stuff to you about Vox links, so: if you rounded my previous comments off to “I hate Vox because it’s liberally biased”, you’re badly missing their point. But I’m not going to try a fourth time in this thread.

    • Two McMillion says:

      As a conservative, I read Vox articles as part of my daily internet routine. That one was interesting, but I’m a bit burned out on race stuff atm.

      • Dahlen says:

        I’m now envisioning a sort of dystopian Smart Media of the near future that has algorithms for determining which genre of outrage you’re currently burned out on, so it can assign the outrage machine to give you a different kind of story to get up in arms about!

    • TomFL says:

      Unfortunately since SJW’s have completely taken over the social sciences the studies used by a sympathetic media are almost totally worthless, but not completely worthless. How to tell the good ones apart from the bad ones is pretty difficult and I can’t do it very well.

      Invariably the problems are sins of omission, especially by the media, and by what is chosen to study, followed by what the media chooses to highlight.

      For example, this story from the NYT which apparently uses the same data(?) as the Vox article has an important different take.

      Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings
      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html

      Why one would feel the need to report this as “surprising” is a debate for different day. There was an urgent rush to “debunk” this finding as one would expect.

      The sins of omission fall into data either not reported or chosen not to study. Things such as normalizing the data for racial disparities in violent crime rates (obvious) or reporting on whether black and white officers show these disparities differently is important.

      Things chosen to not study/report are things such as rates of resisting arrest, disrespectful behavior, etc., or the reverse statistics of how many officers are shot by black people proportionally.

      It is well known that the media uses a “flood the zone” approach to push an agenda. It is what they leave out, what they choose to shut their eyes toward (black dysfunctional culture, white shootings, black on black crime) where the bias mainly exists.

      Every comment thread on these articles has people repeatedly quoting FBI violent crime statistics and yet this “detail” is usually left out.

      Another example is that many SJW’s assert that violent crime statistics are really just a reflection of poverty, not race. However they don’t seem very interested to see if police enforcement disparities are also just a reflection of “poverty”.

      I’d like to trust this science, or know how to, but I don’t.

      • Anonymous says:

        SJW’s have completely taken over the social sciences

        Citation needed.

        disrespectful behavior

        You think disrespectful behavior justifies violence?

        It is well known that the media uses a “flood the zone” approach to push an agenda.

        Citation needed.

        many SJW’s assert that violent crime statistics are really just a reflection of poverty, not race.

        Citation needed.

        • Two McMillion says:

          disrespectful behavior

          You think disrespectful behavior justifies violence?

          Yes. *kills Anon*

          • Two McMillion says:

            I intended the above as a joke. If anyone was offended, I will glad take whatever steps are necessary to rectify that.

            If you were asking if jokes about death as un-Christlike generally, no, I do not believe that they are, but your comment has made me consider that perhaps this is not the best audience for them.

          • Anonymous says:

            Not so fast, kid.
            *Teleports behind you*

          • Two McMillion says:

            Not so fast, kid.
            *Teleports behind you*

            OH NO THE ANONYMICE CAN TELEPORT NOW *runs*

          • DrBeat says:

            That’s not how you respond! You’re supposed to teleport behind him!

            This is BASIC Zwee Fighting, people!

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            You have to unseathe your katana first.

        • Dahlen says:

          This style of arguing is all the more annoying considering it’s replying to a comment about possible bias in science.

          • brad says:

            I agree that it’s a very annoying style of response. But I also think it was responding to an annoying type of post.

            There’s a thing on here where people write up long posts that are written to sound as if they are incisive, neutral analysis. But when you actually read them closely you find that they have very little content. They boil down to stating the author’s prejudices as if they were facts. It’s worse in many ways than just repeating anecdotes because they are camouflaged.

            Something like “social sciences have completely been taken over by SJW” is painting with a giant brush and dismissing out of hand the life’s work of thousands of people. It deserves push-back, if not necessarily in quite such a passive aggressive manner.

          • TomFL says:

            Maybe we should debate it on a forum or something, ha ha.

            I gave a very specific example of a sin of omission and discussion of other areas which I feel are neglected and included evidence of a political bias in this field of study as the possible cause.

            Flood the zone:

            NYT search results:
            Unarmed black = 1227
            Unarmed white = 28
            Unarmed hispanic = 7
            Unarmed asian = 0

          • TomFL says:

            That’s useful, thank you. I’m still reading it.

            I looked him up and found this:
            http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/toward-a-unified-theory-of-black-america.html

            I think he is asking the right questions. Pardon my confirmation bias, but it also included this (circa 2005):

            “Fryer well appreciates that he can raise questions that most white scholars wouldn’t dare. His collaborators, most of whom are white, appreciate this, too. “Absolutely, there’s an insulation effect,” says the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser. “There’s no question that working with Roland is somewhat liberating.”

          • Dahlen says:

            @brad:

            I agree that it’s a very annoying style of response. But I also think it was responding to an annoying type of post.

            There’s a thing on here where people write up long posts that are written to sound as if they are incisive, neutral analysis. But when you actually read them closely you find that they have very little content. They boil down to stating the author’s prejudices as if they were facts. It’s worse in many ways than just repeating anecdotes because they are camouflaged.

            Something like “social sciences have completely been taken over by SJW” is painting with a giant brush and dismissing out of hand the life’s work of thousands of people. It deserves push-back, if not necessarily in quite such a passive aggressive manner.

            I didn’t say Tom’s post was anything worth writing home about, either, but I didn’t bring it up because 1) didn’t want my criticism to come from a “you both suck” high horse, 2) people with a chip on their shoulder about SJW meddling in the social sciences are standard fare for this board, and I absolutely can’t be bothered to get involved in those discussions and face the consequent dogpiling, and 3) as someone who doesn’t know shit about scholarship and references, and cannot access basically any study without paying through my nose, I have a deep and personal dislike for lazy “[citation needed]” challenges and would like to see less of it.

          • TomFL says:

            Here is where Vox drops the ball:

            The paper:
            Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings.” (actually whites are 26% more likely to be shot per capita in this data set).

            So Vox reports the disparities on use of force from this paper, but then ignores the shooting data in this paper ENTIRELY, instead using a different report. The NYT reports it correctly.

            The use of force disparities look real, and there are controls for things such as low and high crime areas. The raw numbers show that blacks have force used 50% more often which is then reduced to about 20% after controls.

            He is silent on any cause-effect relationship with violent crime rates which wasn’t examined I think. Perhaps this explains some of the disparity (police paranoia due to experience)

            I’m no expert at academic paper analysis, but I can tell when Vox decides to not report things (…that don’t fit their agenda…). Anyone reading this forum regularly will know this isn’t the first time Vox has done this.

          • Nornagest says:

            cannot access basically any study without paying through my nose

            Old(ish), famous, or well-cited studies can usually be found un-paywalled through Google Scholar: the first result often isn’t, but click “All versions” on the results page and/or search for PDFs. You’re likely to have less luck finding anything obscure, or which came out this year and isn’t all over the news, or which is more than twenty years old.

            You may also have luck searching DOAJ or OAIster, which archive open-access (i.e. non-paywalled) journals.

            There used to be some SSC regulars with institutional accounts who were willing to pirate them, too, but I don’t remember who and don’t know if they still do.

        • TomFL says:

          I think I support a ban on anonymous comments after all, ha ha.

          Social science bias against Republicans.
          http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans

          Political diversity in social sciences > 10:1 Liberal.
          http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/

          • Anonymous says:

            Neither article says anything about so-called social justice warriors. Do you wish to restate your claim?

          • Nornagest says:

            Liberal, sure, even radical in a lot of places (humanities and social science departments are about the only place you can call yourself a Marxian in the States without anyone batting an eye), but that doesn’t establish SJW.

            It’s hard to describe, and I definitely can’t support it by citation, but I always got the impression that SJ ideology is kind of a crystallization of academic leftism. In academia, you get people applying many different modes of analysis — feminist, Marxian, postcolonial, and so forth — but there’s an underlying appreciation that these are approaches to the subject, still subject to examination or reinterpretation (from another left-leaning perspective, if you want to get published, but still), not definitive proofs. When it filters out onto Tumblr or Twitter, though, that fluidity is lost and the results become part of an unquestioned muddle of Problematic.

          • TomFL says:

            I don’t think SJW has any formal definition I’m aware of. For the purposes of this debate it is something like “supporting an ideology that racial disparities are uniquely and almost entirely a byproduct of external forces, namely white systemic racism”.

            Fill in one’s own definition as appropriate. The point being that only one side of this argument is typically presented academically and through the media. The field that most depends on non-causal inferences through statistics fail to see it in their own profession.

          • Alejandro says:

            I think defining “SJW” by a theoretical belief like the one you propose is unwise. If the W in SJW is supposed to have any objectively usable meaning, other than “my ideological opponents are Bad People”, it is supposed to reflerct an attitude, not just a theoretical belief.

            My own definition would be something like “someone who defends left-wing ideas, especially on race, gender and related topics, in a way that is strident, devoid of nuance, and very uncharitable to ideological opponents”.

        • Evan Þ says:

          Disrespectful behavior doesn’t justify violence, but “police overreact to disrespect” is very different from “police are racist,” and demands a different response.

          • TomFL says:

            Disrespectful behavior is probably a poor choice of words, but the intent is to study why police officers feel disrespectful to the community and whether the disrespect is justified due to the bad behavior of the community (and is not race related, but behavior related). I have not seen data on this but it seems like an obvious question. So either I missed it, they didn’t study it, or it wasn’t reported in the media sources I use.

    • cassander says:

      You still haven’t answered my question about black white murder rates vs. black and white killings by police Jill, figures that don’t seem to be brought up in the article you just quoted. Why not do that before starting new threads on the same subject?

      >We have a problem in our society if almost everyone reads/views/listens to only those news sources that reflect only the facts and opinions that are consistent with their OWN tribe’s narrative

      Yes, we most certainly do. But I haven’t given up hope for you yet.

  33. Two McMillion says:

    Regarding banning anonymous posters:

    I used to be an internet troll. It was a period of my life that lasted about three years, from age 13 and fading out around age 16. I did some hurtful and stupid things, and I deeply regret them now. And these days, I have to be super careful not to do anything that would reveal me as that troll. That’s more true in some corners of the internet than in others, of course, but really you never know. Usernames change and people migrate to new places. My point is that when I was trolling I never thought it might come back to bite me one day- that I might one day regret having done those things and not want to be associated with them. If I’d been more careful to maintain complete anonymity, I probably would still have done those things, but I also wouldn’t have to look over my shoulder the way I sometimes do.

    I don’t know if that’s a point in favor of banning anons or not, but there it is.

    • What was the process that led to you to not troll?

      • Two McMillion says:

        My parents audited my internet use and confronted me about it.

        • Thank you. I’m curious about why people give up trolling because that seems to be very rare, while trolling is a real plague.

          • Lumifer says:

            why people give up trolling

            It gets boring. Shooting fish in a barrel is only fun for the first hundred times or so and eventually you want to go find dolphins and play with them rather than shoot them as usual.

          • Anonymous says:

            Perhaps it is rare for people to talk about giving up trolling, but that tells you very little about whether they do. In fact, the base rate of people talking about their history of trolling is rare. Most such essays I have read are by ex-trolls and do explicitly talk about giving it up.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Lumifer –

            On that note, I once knew a guy who would play GTA for hours on end, just finding a spot that the police couldn’t shoot back, and sniping pedestrians and police and military endlessly.

            Some people some incapable of boredom.

          • sabril says:

            I think a lot of people grow out of it. When I was in that age range (13-16) the equivalent was making prank phone calls.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Maaaaaybe. I think “growing out of” something is largely a function of either changing social expectations and/or increased requirements on your time pushing an activity to the fringes. The latter probably reduces rates of both prank calls and trolling, but I’d be willing to guess that the former is much less effective at stopping trolling than prank calls. The reason is that it seems to me that trolling is much easier to hide from others- short of someone examining your internet usage in detail, it’s really hard to know if someone is trolling. Changing social expectations can’t really touch a part of your life that nobody you know in meatspace knows about. For that reason, I’d expect the forces that stop trolling as someone ages to be weaker than those that stop prank calling.

          • Cadie says:

            Same here, sabril, though it was more in the latter half of my teens. (Didn’t have much Internet access before that.) Most of what I did online was benign, but I spent some time trolling and getting into flame wars for fun, too. Then I grew up a little more and decided that trolling and flaming were a waste of time.

            I do still enjoy dishing out small doses of sarcasm when it’s a reasonably appropriate place to do so, like when I’m on my own blog writing a critique of a book or article. I’m not quite a saint. I just don’t go around trying to stir up drama or piss people off, and I try to restrict the meanness to occasional mild snark instead of hostility.

  34. Fishchisel says:

    Hi,

    Can anyone suggest to me some good criticisms of ‘the 10,000 year explosion’? I’m reading it at the moment and while it is interesting, there are certain areas I am wordlessly sceptical of or uneasy about. Rather than thinking through and developing those points myself I am hoping that someone else has done it for me!

  35. Jill says:

    This pair of articles is interesting, in view of the SJW discussions here. The 2nd article is a critique of the 1st one. The 1st one was later revised, perhaps in response to the 2nd one, although the claim is that it was updated to reflect news developments. Anyway, the 1st article no longer says all of the things that the 2nd article refers to. But apparently, it did originally.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

    http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/08/dallas-exposed-blood-libels-police-whites-new-york-times.html

    I think that the SJW stuff is interesting. It’s a kind of extreme of political correctness. And it seems to come from white privilege sort of guilt of liberals, often in universities. Liberals are generally nice, and passive, people. They bend over backwards to be nice to minorities. They go too far sometimes, putting up with the extreme SJW type stuff.

    To think that the average liberal is as rageful and mean as some of the more extreme SJWs is a big misconception. What you have with liberals on the whole is a whole lot of people trying to be nice, and their niceness aspirations cause them to put up with some few extremists who are wreaking havoc.

    Everyone thinks groups should rein in their extreme members. But few people do this. Sometimes they can’t. Muslims can’t know about and stop every suicide bomber, although sometimes they do report suspicious activity to police. Christians can’t always stop every abortion clinic bomber. Right Wingers can’t stop every violent Tea Partier, and don’t usually try to. Most Liberals don’t try usually to rein in extreme SJWs because they are afraid of being seen as not nice– as being politically incorrect or biased themselves.

    How do we get out of this state of groups giving up and letting extremists wreak havoc?

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      How do we get out of this state of groups giving up and letting extremists wreak havoc?

      “Extremist” usually just means “somebody who takes what the group is saying seriously”, as opposed to everybody else, who just nods along and doesn’t do anything about the supposed atrocities the world is full of.

      In the case of social justice warriors, fundamentally the issue is this: The weapons they’re utilizing are rhetorical weapons. A social justice warrior is somebody who actually believes in the rhetoric of the social justice superweapons. And once you believe in the rhetoric of the superweapon, it’s immoral not to use it.

      • Two McMillion says:

        “Extremist” usually just means “somebody who takes what the group is saying seriously”, as opposed to everybody else, who just nods along and doesn’t do anything about the supposed atrocities the world is full of.

        Here’s where that breaks down, though: Eric Rudolph thinks abortion is bad, and he’s placed bombs at several abortion clinics. That’s why he’s in jail now. What belief of Eric Rudolph’s made him think that placing those bombs was a good idea? I contend that whatever that belief was, it clear wasn’t his belief that abortion is bad. Lots of people think that, and very few of them blow up abortion clinics. In fact, lots of people are very dedicated to being against abortion: they go on protests, try to talk to people outside abortion clinics to stop them from going in, and give money to pro-life causes. Saying that these people don’t take being against abortion seriously seems like it’s missing something. It really looks like they do take it seriously; that’s why they devote time and money to the cause. Do you think that every person who offers free ultrasounds in a van outside an abortion clinic wishes they could be Eric Rudolph, and is only prevented from blowing up that abortion clinic by cowardice or a lack of knowledge or opportunity?

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Do you think that every person who offers free ultrasounds in a van outside an abortion clinic wishes they could be Eric Rudolph, and is only prevented from blowing up that abortion clinic by cowardice or a lack of knowledge or opportunity?

          Do you think people who park vans outside abortion clinics and offer ultrasounds aren’t extremists?

          Keep in mind who gets called an “extremist” as far as the social justice movement goes.

          • Two McMillion says:

            No, I don’t think they’re extremists. I think Eric Rudolph differs from them not just in degree but in kind. One reason I know this is because I was once in a pro-life group where someone kind of obliquely suggested that maybe Eric Rudolph had the right idea, and they were immediately shot down with about the same level of vehemence as you’d expect someone who suggested that maybe racism isn’t so bad in a social justice friendly circle would be.

            (By the way, this seems like a difference between left-wing and right-wing extremists. I have a hard time imagining a person who suggested sterilizing white males being as strongly corrected in a social justice friendly group. See what Jill said above; a lot of left wing people are afraid of being labeled racist.)

            Part of your point seems to be that “extremist” is flexible and can be applied to anyone you want to tar and feather as a bad person. Fair enough, but I understood you to be making a more general point than that.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Part of your point seems to be that “extremist” is flexible and can be applied to anyone you want to tar and feather as a bad person. Fair enough, but I understood you to be making a more general point than that.

            The two points are compatible.

            From a leftist perspective, the people who heckle women going into abortion clinics, or who try to shame women out of getting an abortion with creepy van shenanigans? They’re extremists. This is what my response to you was indicating.

            The existence of Eric Rudolph doesn’t eclipse them into normality; they’re still outside the pale of what is considered acceptable behavior in our society. They’re still regarded as extremists.

            My broader point, however, is that Eric Rudolph makes perfect sense for a person who thinks we’ve institutionalized murder. From that moral perspective, every abortion clinic is morally no better than a concentration camp; the people who picket abortion clinics are also taking their beliefs seriously, and they’re also regarded as extremists. Given that you believe abortion is murder, however, the appropriate moral reaction isn’t to stand by and do nothing.

            But most people don’t take their moral beliefs too seriously. This is a good thing, because most people’s moral beliefs are paperclip morality.

          • Anonymous says:

            You can take your moral beliefs seriously and still choose not to do the socially unacceptable things they naively lead to. A line of argument against christians is that if they believed in hell, they should be trying to convert and save as many souls as possible, but as they usually don’t try that nowadays they’re not real believers. This fails in that if they did that they’d maybe get a few more converts short-term but longterm they’d all be seen as obnoxious assholes, hurting the movement. Bombing clinics fails in the same way, ultrasound is kinda borderline but on the defensible side.

          • Two McMillion says:

            My broader point, however, is that Eric Rudolph makes perfect sense for a person who thinks we’ve institutionalized murder.

            Not necessarily. Regarding concentration camps, I recently put a poll in a pro-Life Facebook group asking if bombing concentration camps during WWII would be morally wrong; a strong majority of respondents (~66%) answered that it would be. Given the way WWII is viewed in Red Tribe heavy groups, it would not surprise me if a lot of people who said it would be right are just carving our a moral exception for the concentration camps. But more generally: Not everyone is a utilitarian. Most people, I think, agree with the proposition that just because something is wrong emphatically does not justify you doing absolutely anything to stop it. This is in addition to the strategy point anon raised above.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            I recently put a poll in a pro-Life Facebook group asking if bombing concentration camps during WWII would be morally wrong

            Can you explain what the question was meant to indicate? Because I can’t figure it out.

          • Fahundo says:

            From one of Orphan Wilde’s comments upthread:

            My broader point, however, is that Eric Rudolph makes perfect sense for a person who thinks we’ve institutionalized murder. From that moral perspective, every abortion clinic is morally no better than a concentration camp;

            I think the question was meant to indicate whether people who believe abortion is murder but bombing abortion clinics is still morally indefensible are being consistent with how they view acceptable responses to other forms of institutionalized murder.

        • TomFL says:

          He obviously thought he was saving lives. From his view if he prevented one abortion then it was a win. This is the hardline view that abortion is murder and murder is wrong. I may disagree with this, but there is understandable logic here. He is preventing murder. I’m sure he considers himself a hero and warrior for the unborn, etc.

          I’m all pro-choice, but I definitely understand the other side’s point of view. The fundamental question of when do humans become humans is not something settled by science or experts. That’s why it is legitimately controversial.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            This is what makes utilitarianism a terrifying morality to me.

            If you’re a utilitarian who takes your beliefs seriously, you should be vegetarian; even a slim chance that your utility function would generate negative utility for eating meat should outweigh your preference for meat. More, you should be spreading vegetarianism as rapidly as possible, for the same reasons. And on factory scales, maybe meat eating should be banned (except for special cases of disability which require it, maybe).

            But the small chance a fetus morally matters has some implications, too.

          • Jiro says:

            If you’re a utilitarian who takes your beliefs seriously, you should be vegetarian; even a slim chance that your utility function would generate negative utility for eating meat should outweigh your preference for meat.

            That would be falling victim to Pascal’s Mugging.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jiro –

            No. It shares superficial similarities to Pascal’s Mugging – the existence of large utility values multiplied by small probabilities to produce an incentive to action – but Pascal’s Mugging has distinct faults. First, the invocation of infinite, or at least uncountable, utility. Second, the [edit: improper] promotion of a hypothesis to salient attention causing us to be unable to properly consider its probability.

            Neither of these faults apply in this case, and immunity to the fully-generalized problem of low-probability high-utility-impact choices renders one sub-optimally rational; it would lead one to ignore existential risks without regard to their danger, and also to fail to partake in lotteries with positive rates of return.

          • Tekhno says:

            @TomFL

            The fundamental question of when do humans become humans is not something settled by science or experts. That’s why it is legitimately controversial.

            I think far more moral questions than people are willing to admit cannot be settled by science or experts.

            @Orphan Wilde

            You have to edge carefully carefully on those things though. Even if utilitarians should be spreading vegetarianism as fast as possible, trying to spread it too fast and forcefully might cause backlash and lead to vegetarianism becoming associated with authoritarianism and thereby becoming less popular. You could perhaps argue that utilitarians should be vegetarians that spread their belief in vegetarianism at the optimum speed between not fast enough and too fast that it backfires leading to slower adoption though. Given they can’t measure what this would be, there’s a need for a principle of general caution.

            There’s still consequentialist grounds for pragmatism in order to achieve utilitarian outcomes effectively. A group that tried to propose banning meat now would be laughed at, and a group that tried to engage in terrorism for vegetarianism would most likely make it more unpopular. Vegetarianism hasn’t reached some sort of critical threshold where enough people take it seriously for terrorism to be effective. This sort of “yet” probably isn’t very comforting, admittedly.

            Thankfully, most utilitarians are completely inconsistent moderate their utilitarianism with deontological thresholds!

            (As an aside: meat from a living animal almost certainly will be banned in the future. When artificial meat replacements taste and feel good enough, there will be little argument to kill animals for meat.

            Eventually, they’ll look back on the meat companies of our times as moral monstrosities a few steps less bad than slavers. Once everyone’s comfortable with fabricated steaks, that is!)

          • Jiro says:

            As an aside: meat from a living animal almost certainly will be banned in the future. When artificial meat replacements taste and feel good enough, there will be little argument to kill animals for meat.

            Also, homosexuality will be banned in the future once we manage to be able to rewire people’s brains so they can get satisfaction without being homosexuals. (Not.)

            “Oh, by the way, my tribe is going to win out because (insert argument for my tribe)” is an obvious case of motivated reasoning.

          • The Nybbler says:

            When artificial meat replacements taste and feel good enough, there will be little argument to kill animals for meat.

            Unlikely. When artificial meat replacements are CHEAP enough, perhaps. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Farm animals are really great machines for turning vegetable matter into tasty meat, and beating them at all (let alone at lower cost) will be quite difficult.

            Anyway, to a lot of us meat-eaters, there’s zero ethical problem in killing animals for meat, so even the presence of a good and cheap substitute wouldn’t support an argument for a ban.

          • Zombielicious says:

            Unlikely. When artificial meat replacements are CHEAP enough, perhaps. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Farm animals are really great machines for turning vegetable matter into tasty meat, and beating them at all (let alone at lower cost) will be quite difficult.

            I’m expecting Tekhno’s prediction to come true, not because of lab-grown meat, but because of imitation meat products made from plants. The quality gets better all the time, and the long-term economics favor plant-based “meats” due to the expense of animal agriculture. Especially once the global population hits ~10 billion.

            Anyway, to a lot of us meat-eaters, there’s zero ethical problem in killing animals for meat, so even the presence of a good and cheap substitute wouldn’t support an argument for a ban.

            I know this will probably sound cliche, but people thought literally the exact same thing about slavery once. Not talking 200 years ago in the South, when it was already dead or dying in most of the rest of the world, but back in pre-Middle Ages times. Slavery was intrinsic to most every civilization in history, fundamental to the economy, and only a few outliers like the Stoics opposed it. It still died out eventually, once slaves were replaced by cheaper sources of labor (e.g. automation, primarily).

            I’m guessing a similar moral trajectory for livestock.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m guessing a similar moral trajectory for livestock

            You’re free to guess such a trajectory, but until it actually happens, assuming it is equivalent to saying “I’m right because I’ll eventually be proven right”.

          • Tekhno says:

            @Jiro

            Also, homosexuality will be banned in the future once we manage to be able to rewire people’s brains so they can get satisfaction without being homosexuals. (Not.)

            That could totally happen, but the difference is that there’s no reason to expect it from where we are sitting.

            Most people already pay some respect to vegetarianism by bothering to ethically justify why eating meat is okay. Very few people today think that animals should be hurt for trivial reasons, whereas that wasn’t necessarily true in the medieval ages.

            If a good meat substitute comes along that is identical to regular meat for the consumer, the opposition to vegetarianism should be expected to fold, because the only argument left will be; “I like to have more suffering occur to get an identical product”.

            I think even I’d have to give in, and I fully value tasty meat more than the lives and comfort of millions of animals. If my pleasure is rated 1000, and the animal suffering issue only rates -10 on the scale running against it, then as soon as an identical product that produces no suffering can be produced in a commercially viable way for an at least equivalent cost with distribution as widespread as existing meat, then I’d be buying the fake meat instead of seeking out real meat just because… reasons.

            At that point, animal suffering would have to rate as having positive value in order for someone to choose that option over the alternative.

            “Oh, by the way, my tribe is going to win out because (insert argument for my tribe)” is an obvious case of motivated reasoning.

            Animal rights people and environmentalists aren’t my tribe. The only thing that stops me proposing to bulldoze 7/8ths of the Amazon and turn it into theme parks and shopping malls is the issue of removing such a big Oxygen farm, and the very faint possibility that reducing jungle biodiversity is going to doom us in some catastrophic non-recoverable way.

            I’m basically a Humanazi, dude.

            @The Nybbler

            Unlikely. When artificial meat replacements are CHEAP enough, perhaps. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Farm animals are really great machines for turning vegetable matter into tasty meat, and beating them at all (let alone at lower cost) will be quite difficult.

            Yes, I should have said “when artificial meat tastes and feels as good, and costs as little to produce, and has just as widespread distribution” because that’s the idea I was getting at.

            Anyway, to a lot of us meat-eaters, there’s zero ethical problem in killing animals for meat, so even the presence of a good and cheap substitute wouldn’t support an argument for a ban.

            There’s a difference in saying there’s no net ethical problem with killing animals for meat, and saying there’s no ethical problem with killing animals for no reason at all – and not just killing but confining in the conditions rendered necessary by industrial scale production.

            Even if you or I wouldn’t support a ban (I wouldn’t because I’m biased against encouraging banning things), I still predict a ban.

            Vegetarianism isn’t a generally progressive cause yet, because most people are meat eaters and it has little political weight. I just expect that to change once meat alternatives are viable in all of the ways current meat is viable. There’s going to be increasing support for legislation as meat alternatives stop being jokes, and increasing opposition while meat alternatives are still distinguishable from real meat, but once the threshold where this is no longer so has been reached, those who are for banning natural meat will start to win.

            It’ll go down like gay rights and the rest did.

          • Zombielicious says:

            @Nornagest:
            Geez, you must absolutely hate the idea of prediction markets.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Zombielicious

            imitation meat products made from plants. The quality gets better all the time

            So, show me a fake steak made out of plants which “got better”.

          • Jiro says:

            Most people already pay some respect to vegetarianism by bothering to ethically justify why eating meat is okay.

            I’m pretty sure that most people, when faced with people who think of homosexuality like vegetarians think of meat eating, would try to ethically justify why homosexuality is okay.

            For that matter, most people when faced with creationists would try to justify evolution.

            (Of course “most people” must be qualified, but those qualifiers apply in all the cases. Most people, who aren’t vegetarians/homophobes/creationists themselves, and who are willing to engage in rational discussions at all, and don’t think the other guy is impervious to reason, etc.)

            If a good meat substitute comes along that is identical to regular meat for the consumer, the opposition to vegetarianism should be expected to fold, because the only argument left will be; “I like to have more suffering occur to get an identical product”.

            Either that, or “the amount of suffering is pretty small, and I don’t like to be Pascal mugged.”

            Furthermore, your argument requires that it be exactly the same price as real meat, neither more nor less, which I find vanishingly unlikely.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I for one view homosexuality exactly like I view vegetarianism. Personally I think you missing out, and frankly find the whole concept kind of weird and unnatural. That said, whatever floats your boat, floats your boat.

            It’s the crusaders that worry me, the folks who are ready who pick fights with anyone who isn’t 100% on board with their particular kink that make me want to go home and clean my guns.

          • Zombielicious says:

            @Lumifer:

            So, show me a fake steak made out of plants which “got better”.

            Steaks aren’t exactly the low-hanging fruit of plant-based meats, due to difficulty of imitating the texture, vasculature, fat distribution, etc (among other problems I’m probably missing). The closest current products I know of are beefless strips and tips (for reference) – not sure when they were first introduced, but it couldn’t have been before 2009. There are companies working on plant-based steak, separate from in vitro meat. The only prototype I’ve heard of so far is from Vegetarian Butcher in Holland, and they haven’t taken it to market yet. I’m sure the other bigger companies like Gardein, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, etc, are similarly working on it, so I’d expect them to show up within ten years at most.

            In any case, it is a definite step up from the “steak” recipes you see online (such as), made from anything from seitan, to mushrooms, tofu, cauliflower, etc.

            Chicken and burgers are a better example of “quality getting better.” A few years ago, the only vegetarian burger options were Boca burgers made from soy. Now there are dozens of significantly better products, also made from stuff like quinoa, beans, rice, millet, etc. Those aren’t even the top of the line options – see for instance this article for something state of the art.

            Plus the number of items offered is continuing to grow (e.g. seafoods – crab, shrimp, tuna, calamari… didn’t exist commercially a few years ago, afaik), more companies and startups working on it, larger market share, etc. Not sure how I’d want to bet, in the long run, between in vitro meat and plant-based products, but plant-based seems to have a decent head start as of now. The first in vitro burger produced a few years ago cost $300,000+. Even halving in price every year since then, it would be another ~12 years from now before it breaks the $10/burger mark.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Zombielicious:
            “People thought the same about slavery” isn’t an argument. The fact that some things once nearly-universally thought normal were later nearly-universally thought abhorrent doesn’t mean another thing now thought normal will undergo the same transformation. (c.f. “They also laughed at Bozo the Clown”).

            @Tekhno:
            I don’t think most meat-eaters bother to justify why meat-eating is OK. Not unless some vegetarian confronts them, and often enough not even then. And I think banning meat would be more akin to requiring homosexuality than legalizing gay marriage.

            I’ve heard about the next great plant-based meat substitute for years. It’s always not quite, but almost, entirely unlike meat. Those who feel they ought to be vegetarians can often convince themselves it’s more like meat than it is. (I mean seriously, coconut oil as a replacement for beef fat? Not fooling anyone)

          • Zombielicious says:

            @Nybbler:
            You asserted:

            Anyway, to a lot of us meat-eaters, there’s zero ethical problem in killing animals for meat, so even the presence of a good and cheap substitute wouldn’t support an argument for a ban.

            To which I posted a counterexample. At least once in the past, a widespread practice foundational to the economy, which almost no one in history had any ethical problem with, was outlawed after “good and cheap substitute[s]” became available.

            No one just said “but slavery, therefore vegetarianism” with no supporting evidence. Two arguments were already given for a general trend culminating in an eventual outcome, whether you found them convincing or not. (Though I could really have elaborated mine more. It was meant to be a quick comment, not a dissertation.)

          • Anon. says:

            If you’re a utilitarian who takes your beliefs seriously, you should be a meat eater; even a slim chance that your utility function would fail to generate positive utility for farm animals existing should outweigh your preference for plants. More, you should be spreading meat eating as rapidly as possible, for the same reasons. And on factory scales, maybe plant eating should be banned (except for special cases of disability which require it, maybe).

            After all, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Why can’t Sisyphus be a cow?

            Utilitarianism is fun!

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Zombielicious

            My point is that for meat that I like to eat — steaks, ribs, etc. — the plant-based alternatives are nowhere near the real thing. Not in the the same ballpark, not in the same city, not in the same country. I really don’t expect plant-based fake steaks to arrive in the near future, especially at the same price and without fancy chemicals with unknown long-term effects. In-vitro, we’ll see, but replacing soy with quinoa isn’t getting you anywhere.

          • Jiro says:

            To which I posted a counterexample. At least once in the past, a widespread practice foundational to the economy, which almost no one in history had any ethical problem with, was outlawed after “good and cheap substitute[s]” became available.

            He said that the existence of a cheap substitute wouldn’t support an argument for a ban. If slavery was meant to be a counterexample to that, it fails, because slavery is a case where a cheap substitute is followed by a ban.

            In order for cheap substitutes for slavery to support an argument for a ban, someone would have had to have said “slavery used to be okay because the benefit to the slaveowner is very important and outweighs the harm to the slave, but now that we have cheap workers, slavery causes harm and no benefits so we should ban it”. Nobody said that; opposition to slavery was based on the idea that slavery is bad, period. There is no slavery equivalent to balancing animal suffering against benefit to humans.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Slavery was intrinsic to most every civilization in history, fundamental to the economy, and only a few outliers like the Stoics opposed it.

            The Stoics didn’t oppose slavery. They said masters should treat their slaves nicely, but I’m not aware of any who opposed the institution itself.

          • Zombielicious says:

            Nobody said that; opposition to slavery was based on the idea that slavery is bad, period.

            No, since slavery wasn’t considered particularly bad until sometime around the start of the Middle Ages. And re: substitutes, while slavery was sort-of-technically dying out during the medieval period, serfs weren’t viewed substantially differently, just with a few extra rights following the Roman trend of eliminating the worst abuses, while the actual abolitionist movement didn’t get started until their labor was made largely obsolete by the Industrial Revolution, and even then mainly just in places where that condition was met (i.e. not around the cotton industry of the Southern U.S.). The presence of cheap substitutes was not coincidental to the shifting moral opinions on slavery and serfdom.

            There is no slavery equivalent to balancing animal suffering against benefit to humans.

            Most people (in this thread at least) have made arguments about how their preference for meat outweighs any cruelty to the animals. People aren’t okay with torturing animals in general, except when it’s done for farming, apparently. Just as, again, how ancient peoples didn’t think slaves were some kind of philosophical zombies that couldn’t feel pain, or that their lives weren’t generally terrible – they just considered it the natural order that slaves should exist and they should benefit from them. See the shift from “slaves are part of the natural order” to “slaves deserve some basic rights” to “we need to justify slavery with pseudoscientific arguments about their inferiority and need for control” to abolitionism. There is a parallel with views on the treatment of animals.

          • Jiro says:

            Abolitionists never said “slavery used to be okay, but now that slaveowners don’t benefit from it you can no longer argue that it’s okay”.

            That’s what you’d need in order for slavery to be a counterexample to that statement.

            What you’re describing is “we shifted to opposing slavery once slavery became uneconomical.” That’s not the same thing, and isn’t a counterexample. You are failing to distinguish between “would support an argument for” and “would lead to more people making an argument for”.

          • Wency says:

            Prediction:
            In a world where people pay heavy markups for sea salt or Himalayan salt or some other salt because of purported differences that are undetectable by the human tongue, people will cease to prefer meat that comes from animals (as opposed to inscrutable biochemical purposes) approximately never.

          • Wency says:

            Prediction:
            In a world where people pay heavy markups for sea salt or Himalayan salt or some other salt because of purported differences that are undetectable by the human tongue, people will cease to prefer meat that comes from animals (as opposed to inscrutable biochemical processes) approximately never.

          • Fahundo says:

            Sea salt does taste different to the human tongue though.

          • Andrew says:

            And I bought Himalayan salt once to impress visually- not orally.

      • Peter says:

        There’s a key point in the second article.

        I think there’s a big difference between “Too many black people get killed by the police and it’s time to do something about it” and “The white race is conducting a “war on blackness.”” – the latter one was a point that the second article was complaining about.

        Somewhere between statements that there are wrongs to be righted, and outright physical violence against persons, there’s the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that includes the things that the article calls “blood libels”.

        I think there’s the sort of person for whom that sort of rhetoric is… an expression of anger. If you call them on it you’re unlikely to get very far, if you point out that the things they’re saying are untrue you’ll be told to stop being such a literal-minded pedant, or “it’s symbolic, innit, are you so stupid you don’t get that?” (see for example the discussion over “hands up don’t shoot”); also, a lot of the rhetoric is too vague to be shot down easily. These sorts of people won’t spontaneously admit to exaggerating, but if you manage to catch them in a clear exaggeration then they’ll point out some exaggeration that you or someone like you has made.

        Where this sort of stuff is allowed to slosh around, then it’s not surprising if some people take it to be actually literally true, and take the obvious course of action based on that.

      • Viliam says:

        A social justice warrior is somebody who actually believes in the rhetoric of the social justice superweapons. And once you believe in the rhetoric of the superweapon, it’s immoral not to use it.

        I believe there are at least two kinds of SJWs.

        The majority are young inexperienced people (the usual cult recruitment material) who simply want to make the world a better place. They swallow the Big Happy Idea hook, line, and sinker; and they try to contribute to making the world a better place. Their mistakes are overconfidence, and throwing the ethical injuctions out of the window. Because the Big Happy Idea and its proponents told them this was the morally right thing to do.

        The minority are abusive people who realized that as long as they use the proper rhetorics, they can get incredible power over the former ones. Any nasty behavior can be excused, any criticism deflected, as long as they remain part of the orthodox core. They also get their personal army against outsiders.

        This happens over and over again, on scales both large and small.

        • Daniel says:

          I used to be the first kind, the true believer, in high school. I was only exposed to it online, not in real life, and I consider the online exposure to be much like a vaccination.

        • BBA says:

          Then there are those of us who didn’t totally agree with every detail, but felt it wasn’t nearly as bad as the alternative. Even now, after the Aaronson incident convinced me that Social Justice is emphatically Not On My Side, I’d still go full SJW in a second if the choice was between that and going alt-right.

          And oftentimes it feels like it is.

          • cassander says:

            >And oftentimes it feels like it is.

            How is that? The alt right is a tiny fringe movement completely without power and utterly marginal, dismissed by all right thinking people.

          • There is an applicable quote by (I think) Cliff Pervocracy about this sort of thing, which I will paraphrase below.

            They: “Are you a feminist?”
            Me: “Well, that’s a complicated question. The word covers a multitude of waves, interpretations, and behaviors, and quite a lot of actual negativity and unfairness gets swept under the rug by the-”
            They: “Because I don’t think women should be allowed to work outside the home. Or vote.”
            Me: “…I’m a feminist, and also fuck you.”

        • cassander says:

          You’re definitely not wrong, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous. The people you speak of in group one are same sort that gave Stalin nuclear weapons.

        • Bugmaster says:

          I think there’s at least one more kind: someone who experienced some genuinely horrific trauma, and now instinctually hates everyone who looks like the perpetrator. The Social Justice framework legitimizes such hatred when its target belongs to the oppressor class.

    • Two McMillion says:

      Well, I think we have to start by acknowledging that some people are always going to slip through the cracks, and at least extremists are always going to be out there. I tend to think that in these cases, the actual ideology adopted is more or less irrelevant. Anyone who believes in right and wrong can eventually come to believe that violence is necessary to promote right. So when these things happen, we’ve got to stop using them to take cheap shots at our political opponents. Every time it happens, we see people say, “[group] may not officially approve of [crazy person’s] actions, but their ideologies led to it.”

      And herein lies the problem. Most of us genuinely believe that the other side’s beliefs do lead to the world becoming a worse place. Most of us really do think that if the other side’s beliefs were acted out to their fullest possible extent, then these kind of horrible things would be lauded. Be honest- when the Orlando shooting happened, did you think to yourself, “Man, that’s awful. I wish that wouldn’t happen. I wish there weren’t people out there saying that being gay is awful and a sin and makes you go to hell. Maybe if there weren’t, this wouldn’t have happened”?

      And you know what? I bet that’s even true. I bet that if there didn’t exist any anti-gay rhetoric in our society that the nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened. I bet if there weren’t any Muslims calling the west the Great Satan then there wouldn’t be Muslim terrorists either. I bet that if nobody was saying that not being racist was really important than we wouldn’t have an angry social justice movement. The first problem is that most of us genuinely believe that some level of force is justified in backing up our beliefs. And the second problem is that this belief is in fact correct. If something is true, then there do in fact exist circumstances in which that truth will compel you to live it out through force. Ultimately, the urge to use violence to proclaim a particular belief is an extension of the urge to use it in self-defense, and it is justified for the same reasons.

      The world is violent and ugly and always has been and probably always will be. We have to recognize that the choice to meet violence with peace is inherently an act of faith. I do not mean that organized religion is required to do so; I mean that you must, on some level, believe that violence has qualities that make it undesirable even in cases where it is effective (extreme and provocative claim #1: you cannot be a consistent consequentialist and also tell people they are wrong for using violence to advance their goals). You have to believe that things will somehow “work out” if our problems aren’t instantly solved. Some people do this because they believe God guides history, but you might also do it because you believe that history has a flow and progress always eventually wins, or something of the sort (extreme and provocative claim #2: You cannot be an consistent effective altruist without at least being open to killing people who criticize effective altruism in public). You might, of course, try to say that violence is never effective, or some such, but I think the evidence is against that- the Civil War seems to have effectively ended slavery and WWII seems to have ended the Holocaust.

      So I think the solution is to saturate your society with the message that good has to win in the end. Except, of course, that good doesn’t, and doing this is going to slow work on fixing real problems in your society. So you’ll have to make society perfect, first, and then you can do this. Good luck doing that without violence.

      • Jill says:

        Thanks for your thoughts here. Ghandi was nonviolent and won. The Civil Rights movement was nonviolent and won. The peace movement to get out of Vietnam was nonviolent and won. Nonviolence can work.

        One big challenge is to express oneself forcefully enough to be heard but not to incite violence.

        • Jiro says:

          It is availability bias to point to people who were nonviolent and won. If they were nonviolent and lost, what’s the chance you’d have heard of them?

          • Two McMillion says:

            We know of a few people who nonviolently resisted Hitler. I mean, they tended to die horrible deaths, but they did resist him nonviolently.

          • Peter says:

            It’s a mistake to think that if nonviolence can sometimes win then it can always win. It is also a mistake to think that if nonviolence sometimes can’t win, it can never win. It is yet another mistake to think that if nonviolence can’t win, then violence can, and another mistake still to think that if violence won then it’s a sign that nonviolence couldn’t have won.

            Possibly also some nonviolence comes with a faint implicit threat: “make a deal with us now, or you may have to deal with our violent counterparts later”.

            I’m not sure whether Jill was saying “nonviolence can always win” or “nonviolence can sometimes win, and violence can often lose, or ‘win’ in a way that makes the win pointless (‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’), or come at too high a price, so let’s commit to nonviolence”. If the former, I think a point to you, if the latter, a point to Jill.

          • Two McMillion says:

            I’m excluding the empirical fact about whether or not violence, in a given situation, would actually work or not or if it would have undesirable consequences. For me, the more important question is, “If violence could in fact work, why shouldn’t we use it?”

            And for me the answer is that you can’t separate the path to a goal from the goal itself. How you do things matters at least as much as what you’re trying to do. Even if your goal is completely just, and even if the amount of harm caused by violence to solve a problem is less than that caused by the problem itself, it still doesn’t follow that violence is justified as a solution. There is a right way to do right in addition to there being right to do. The wrong path taken to the right goal will not lead you to the right goal at all. Both your hands and your heart have to be kept clean, or you’re dirty all over.

          • Jiro says:

            We know of a few people who nonviolently resisted Hitler. I mean, they tended to die horrible deaths, but they did resist him nonviolently.

            I’m not saying the chance of you having heard of them is zero, but clearly most of them are not household names the way someone like Gandhi is.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Ghandi and the Civil Rights movement, to the extent that they were nonviolent, worked because of a shared culture that was kind of skeptical about violence to begin with. Part of my point is that nonviolence can’t really succeed unless that kind of culture exists. (see: non-violent resistance to Hitler.)

          I do not believe that this shared culture that frowns on nonviolence currently exists in the United States and I do not know of any way to restore it.

        • houseboatonstyxb says:

          @ Jill
          Ghandi was nonviolent and won. The Civil Rights movement was nonviolent and won. The peace movement to get out of Vietnam was nonviolent and won. Nonviolence can work.

          It can work in some circumstances but not in others. Ghandi was working against the British, with massive support from his own culture. MLK and the Vietnam protesters were working against the US establishment (off-spring of the British) and in a period where the establishment was not prepared for the whole world watching on television.

          So I don’t think that those successes of physical non-violence are much support for verbal non-violence working against verbal violence now.

          Hm, maybe we’re meaning different things by ‘verbal violence’. You said in a different comment: What do I mean by inciting others to verbal violence? I mean things like inciting one’s Twitter followers to pile onto someone for not being quite politically correct enough about race or gender. Or inciting one’s Twitter followers to pile onto someone, or for writing a non-flattering article about Melania.

          What I’m calling ‘verbal violence’ is the tactics that some SJW use in debate [examples needed] which amount to undeclared attacks on Enlightenment Values. These are shocking and silence opponents the first time we hear them, but when someone calls them out as being attacks on Enlightment Values, that turns on the light of sanity again.

        • Anonymous says:

          Ghandi was nonviolent and won. The Civil Rights movement was nonviolent and won. The peace movement to get out of Vietnam was nonviolent and won. Nonviolence can work.

          The first two of these are taking the opposition’s stated values and weaponizing them, to be used against them. Gandhi took the will of the Indian peoples, and waved it in front of the democratic British – “are you going to let my people go, or are you in fact a bunch of hypocrites who only *say* they act in accordance with democracy?” Same with the Civil Rights movement, on egalitarian grounds this time, rather than democratic.

          The third seems more like the USG deciding to accept that they’ve lost that war (which they did), peace movement or no peace movement.

    • Jill says:

      A lot of our political culture is based on bashing the Other tribe. If we each spent even 10% of that time that we spend doing that– and instead focused it on holding our own tribe to high standards of nonviolence, including verbal nonviolence– so that we are not inciting physical or verbal violence in others– then our country would be a far better place. After we do that, we could even say to the Other tribe– Look, I have role modeled this behavior here, the behavior that I am asking you to do. I’m holding my tribe to high standards. Would you please hold your tribe to high standards too?

      What do I mean by inciting others to verbal violence? I mean things like inciting one’s Twitter followers to pile onto someone for not being quite politically correct enough about race or gender. Or inciting one’s Twitter followers to pile onto someone, or for writing a non-flattering article about Melania.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        I don’t think you and I have a common definition for “violence” here.

        • Lyyce says:

          She is talking about “verbal violence”, and it doesn’t change the argument which is interesting (it’s mostly the same idea as Scott’s In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization)

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Niceness and civility are luxuries that victors permit themselves until those who don’t replace them.

      • The Nybbler says:

        After we do that, we could even say to the Other tribe– Look, I have role modeled this behavior here, the behavior that I am asking you to do. I’m holding my tribe to high standards. Would you please hold your tribe to high standards too?

        I’ve tried that. I’ve seen others do it better than I can. The Other Tribe says (to a close approximation) “fuck you, due to your inherent characteristics and heretical beliefs, you deserve whatever abuse we give you. And your mere existence is more violence (and to better people) than we could possibly hand to you”.

        At that point, uncompromising enmity is all that’s left.

        • Anonymous says:

          The other guys are evil mutants. It’s not just that I watch and read too much bad fiction and want to escape into a Manichean universe with good guys and bad guys. Not that at all!

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – or, possibly, tit-for-tat with forgiveness is actually a good strategy.

          • Nornagest says:

            The frustrating thing about polarization is that the more extreme it is on a population level, the more justifiable it is on an individual level. There aren’t that many actual DefectBots out there, but an opponent who’s convinced you’re a DefectBot may as well be one as far as strategy is concerned.

          • Jiro says:

            Some people are evil mutants. The fact that you can refer to an essay saying “evil mutants do not exist” doesn’t change this.

        • Two McMillion says:

          And now you know why Christians believe in Hell.

      • Loquat says:

        …holding our own tribe to high standards of nonviolence, including verbal nonviolence…

        Doesn’t that usually get dismissed as concern trolling and/or tone policing, though?

    • Peter says:

      The trouble – one of the current troubles, in some areas – is that there’s been a lot of anti-anti-extremist rhetoric in some circles at the moment. People who don’t spontaneously come up with extremist rhetoric themselves, but if you criticise extremist rhetoric, they’ll react very angrily – and they’ll broadcast generic anti-anti-extremist stuff on Facebook or whatever saying how absolutely terrible the people who disagree with the angriest voices are. The term “concern troll” is one of the milder reprimands dished out to vocal moderates.

      This doesn’t seem to be universal – for example, every now and again someone posts a thing to Facebook saying, “All these Muslims went and marched against ISIS and the press didn’t cover it”.

    • TomFL says:

      I don’t think you can hold any group responsible for herding their own cats. A simple denunciation is good enough, generally you just get silence (passive resistance) which is also OK. There is no reason to expect or desire consistent messaging from a group of people. People screaming past each other that the opposing side has extremists (and thus everyone is an extremist) is very tedious.

      The left has kind of allowed an SJW virus to take hold. This virus exploits the tribal rulebook to bully its members into submission by effectively playing the race card intra-tribally in order to acquire power. I think a problem is there are no lines for when minority support turns into majority intolerance. For example, arguing that “white privilege” is counterproductive to winning elections is a no-go area. Majority intolerance cannot exist by definition in this twisted view.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        This virus exploits the tribal rulebook to bully its members into submission by effectively playing the race card intra-tribally in order to acquire power.

        Yep.

        I’m terribly amused watching the whole thing, because the dominant narrative from the SJW movement is that their opponents are right-wing. Well, they weren’t.

        • ChetC3 says:

          Well, from the SJW perspective, they were. In other words, even those who did move farther right had a starting point that was already right of center. Not to mention, it’s easy enough to find people telling the opposite story: anti-SJW rhetoric is what caused them to be sympathetic to SJWs in the first place. To me, it looks like this boils down to an inferential distance problem.

    • onyomi says:

      I think a key point Bill Maher makes with respect to radical Islamic terrorism is this: sure 99% of Muslims aren’t terrorists and will never kill anyone for their faith; nevertheless, surveys of majority Muslim countries like Egypt apparently show shockingly high moral support for the actions of Muslim terrorists. In other words, if only 1% of Muslims will actually commit an act of violence for their faith, but 50% of surveyed Muslims think violence is an appropriate response to insults to the faith, or express sympathy with groups which use terrorism to advance Islam, then that means that there is a bigger problem. Not just with 1% of Muslims, but with 50% of Muslims.

      Now arguably large percentages of many or most groups could be accused of supporting something evil. As many Muslims probably think US foreign policy is evil, and that violence is the appropriate response, there are many Americans who say things like “why don’t we just nuke them all” or “make the sand glow,” which is clearly also not a just response.

      Overall, I think the solution, to the extent one is possible, is for everyone to take to heart the lessons of “In Favor of Niceness and Community,” part of which includes denouncing members of your ingroup who use evil or violent tactics to try to achieve even goals you agree with. Being a radically anti-government libertarian, for example, it would be difficult for me to loudly condemn someone who blew up an IRS building, because there’s a part of me which, while I would never personally try to blow up a government building, nevertheless thinks the IRS is evil and that extreme measures to fight government tyranny are understandable. But I should condemn that act. As radically pro-life Christians should condemn abortion clinic bombings.

      If you really believe abortion is murder, then, even if you wouldn’t bomb an abortion clinic yourself, you might be strongly tempted to quietly or even loudly express your support for those who might. But that way lies the breakdown of society, because as soon as you make an exception: “me and my group are justified in using violence to achieve our most important ends,” you open the floodgates to every other group using violence to achieve their priorities.

      So the radical pro-life Christians should condemn attacks on abortion clinics (not hard to do on Christian grounds–two rights don’t make a wrong, turn the other cheek, etc.), the Muslims should condemn the Muslim terrorists, the people who are against gay marriage should condemn violent attacks on gay people, etc. etc.

      So long as we agree on the underlying “niceness” principle, we can tolerate almost any other peaceful disagreement; as soon as we make an exception, we are in trouble (which is not to say I think only total pacifism is permissible, ethically, but trying to toe that line in all but the most extreme cases seems a good general principle).

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I’m with you right up until you got to complete intolerance of any deviation. That just sounds like guaranteed failure of the approach.

        • onyomi says:

          Well, like I said, there may be extreme circumstances in which violence is justified, but the problem is, if you start making exceptions like “well, this particular issue is important enough to justify violence and deception and abusive behavior,” then how do you draw the line? How do you justify to everyone else with different priorities that your top priority is important enough to justify violence and abuse, but theirs aren’t?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I’m with you on the violence part. Violence is not acceptable.

            But I read you as saying that failure to condemn violence by me was grounds for defection by you, and that is what I was objecting to. If that is not what you meant, then I think I agree with you.

      • Maware says:

        Except that the point of many of those groups is breaking down society. Christianity is an outlier in this, because its doctrines distrust political power as a solution and tend to talk about giving secular governments secular obedience and God spiritual obedience. The “niceness” you want in many ways is a reflection of that Christian duality of needing to save the unbeliever.

        A group that doesn’t have that in its doctrine wants to change the world and has no real desire to play nice like that. They want society to fall and be refashioned, no matter what the pain.

    • Agronomous says:

      Right Wingers can’t stop every violent Tea Partier, and don’t usually try to.

      What violent Tea Partiers?

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        I think one of the guys cleaning up the park after their rally threw some trash, like, violently once. Like he was pretending it was Obama and they were having a symbolic lynching. At least that was the MSNBC analysis.

      • hlynkacg says:

        McViegh and Roof are probably the most recent examples of “Right wing” violence, but neither were “tea partiers” in any realistic sense.

        There was also that guy who shot that abortion doctor a few years back but got shot in turn because seriously who the hell is dumb enough to shoot up a church in redneck country?

        • Winfried says:

          In a different reality, McVeigh is less competent and doesn’t get more than a handful of people killed. A few decades later, he ends up a professor and is the mentor of a future presidential candidate.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Reminds me of another meme.

            It’s a good thing righties aren’t nearly as violent as lefties seem to think because when righties get violent they tend to be really good at it.

    • LPSP says:

      A “kind of extreme political correctness” is literally and explicitly SJWism in a nutshell. There’s a direct etymological line. The entire angle of framing everything in terms of some arbitrary and authoritation “acceptable social justice” is just a step up from the polite-company angle of PC.

  36. Two McMillion says:

    Regarding replication studies of psychological studies: consider the candle problem.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem

    Now, my father was one of the subjects of one iteration of this (I’m not sure of exactly the year). The wikipedia article says, “The test presents the participant with the following task: how to fix and light a candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below”, and later, “Many of the people who attempted the test explored other creative, but less efficient, methods to achieve the goal. For example, some tried to tack the candle to the wall without using the thumbtack box, and others attempted to melt some of the candle’s wax and use it as an adhesive to stick the candle to the wall. Neither method works.”

    I first heard about this test when my Dad told me a story about it. “When I was in college,” he said, “I participated in some psychological experiments for money. One of them was they gave you a box of tacks, some matches, and a candle, and they told me to stick the candle to the wall. I heated one of the tacks in the candle, stuck it into the bottom of the candle, and stuck it to the wall. The guy doing the experiment came in and said, ‘That’s not correct’. All I could think of was that it was some test of if you changed something that was right when somebody told you to, so I didn’t do anything.” I became interested and googled the experiment and showed him the wikipedia article. When I read the line from the above wikipedia article to him, “to fix and light a candle on a wall in a way so the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below”, he exclaimed, “What?! That isn’t what they said at all!” Apparently the original experimenter hadn’t said the part about not dripping wax onto the table. Once he heard that part, he was able to describe the solution in seconds.

    It makes me wonder how many other experiments of this sort were plagued by unintentional experimenter error that we know nothing about. Probably the people conducting the experiment on my dad were grad students who didn’t really understand what the problem was about themselves. If they really didn’t present the problem correctly, that seems pretty significant.

    • Elias says:

      I don’t remember any details of this, but at some point I took a survey in response to some questions I was asked. Midway through the survey I suggested some methodological improvements, and the grad student took them onboard and implemented them immediately without asking me to retake the survey. The methodology affected the way I responded to the survey, and I’m just wondering if he ended up controlling for the change, discarded the first half of my survey along with everyone else who took it using the old methodology, or if he willy nilly just changed it and left it at that.

  37. Dahlen says:

    4. Can anyone think of any soft “nudge” style ways to steer open thread conversation here away from specific topics without banning them completely. Right now the best I can do is censor some of the most annoying words and force anyone who wants to discuss annoying things to come up with trivially inconvenient workarounds, but that’s a pretty irritating solution.

    Roll your eyes at people when they bring it up and imply more-or-less politely that they’re stupid and they suck for wasting their own and everybody else’s time on such silly topics. This requires that 1) you don’t bring them up yourself and 2) you manage to select for the right kind of hivemind who has an allergy to them.

    Where direct, forceful interventions might seem ham-fisted and ineffective, culture/soft power/social power/the coolness factor can do the job better and more smoothly.

    What I’m getting at here, is that you can’t blog about politics and tribalism a lot (since I suspect the topics you find undesirable come from that direction) and then politely request that commenters find other things to focus on in the open threads. And the suggestion above only works when it’s not applied hypocritically or dishonestly, and at the cost of having a bit of a hivemind. Otherwise, without being actively dismissive of said topics — start being politically boring, and maybe in three years or so the kind of people for whom the Kulturkampf is catnip will stop reading this blog and migrate elsewhere. Although I wouldn’t hold my breath.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Roll your eyes at people when they bring it up and imply more-or-less politely that they’re stupid and they suck for wasting their own and everybody else’s time on such silly topics.

      Probably won’t work all that well here, because such tactics are characteristic of the outgroup.

      • ChetC3 says:

        You just have to dress it up a bit. For example, instead of saying “my political enemies are needle-dicks”, say “I am exploring a hypothesis that being my political enemy correlates with lower levels of prenatal virilization.” Same meaning, same connotations, but no one can object to the second without running the risk of being labeled an enemy of science and rational inquiry.

      • Dahlen says:

        You know, on one level, I totally get what you’re saying. In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization. People being dicks to each other is a bad thing, and one that Scott has condemned since the dawn of time. Once a community stumbles upon good discussion norms, it should work to conserve them. Etc. etc.

        On another level, I have to wonder if you hear yourself talking. People getting all gung-ho about ingroups and outgroups is exactly what got the SSC commentariat into this mess in the first place! That’s not the lesson you’re supposed to draw from learning about tribalism, people! Designating some collection of people or another as an outgroup is exactly what makes them fair game in your mind for mean tactics, and if you try to be clever and tell me that your ingroup is defined as precisely the kind of people who are IFoNCaC and don’t pull that shit, and that this is totally consistent with calling everyone else an outgroup, well, you know what? I’m not going to believe you. Nobody can hack human social behaviour that well.

        And I’ll be damned if this comments section isn’t proof of that. For all the mutual back-patting and fist-bumping about how successful SSCers have been in transcending exchanges of interpersonal hostilities between each other and how this forum is one-of-a-kind on the otherwise mean internet, the actual norms of discussion fall quite short of that ideal. Sure, SSC is not homogeneous enough to have much in the way of self-aware hivemind-y hostile-tone enforcement of norms (which you associate with the SJ left), except in the case of the SJ left, and it’s technically only Scott that enforces norms of his making. But don’t come and tell me that the social unpleasantness of a mode of interaction (within reasonable limits) is grounds for convincing people here not to engage in it.

        Also, something that might have not been clear: my advice was not meant to be taken at face value. The “roll your eyes and call people stupid” was just the most evoking depiction of social pressure at work that I could think of, and I brought up social pressure to contrast it with the less effective method of employing admin powers and setting rules for people/banning words, which Scott has used so far. I know it goes against the spirit of SSC and Scott’s ethos and was not saying it with the expectation of it being followed. Heck, it doesn’t make for the kind of atmosphere I’d like to participate in either. But there are few tools as magically effective as social pressure, if you’re able to build it.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Almost everybody thinks the corner of the internet they’re invested in is exceptionally nice and all the rest is mean.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I think you’re reading a lot more into my comment than I intended. I was pointing out that the tactics you suggest for soft-enforcing norms are likely to be pattern-matched (by their targets) to tactics used by the SJ Left, and therefore not work well.

          Knowing about tribalism doesn’t make it go away. And probably shouldn’t.

          • Dahlen says:

            Yes, I probably am reading quite a lot into it. I’ve realised that about into my third paragraph, when your own comment was only a line long. I still chose to dedicate so much jabber to it because the inferential distance there was not resolvable in just a few words.

            Namely, the idea that “knowing about tribalism does not make it go away, and probably shouldn’t” (!). I mean, it takes a truly contrarian reading to reach that conclusion. Normally, people read about the e.g. Robbers’ Cave experiment and then think of instances in their own lives when they’ve succumbed to something similar, and feel a little ashamed and try to avoid that pitfall, at least for a couple of days. Just like with most other biases. But here, folks are smarter than that, and think up elaborate justifications for tribalism involving kin selection and social cohesion and the need for an unconditionally dependable community. And so, when Scott proposes some loosely-defined archetypes of political constituencies with cultural features attached, people just eat it up. Red Tribe Blue Tribe, My Tribe Best Tribe.

            I don’t think you (and other people who play right into these constructs) realise just how much unnecessary toxicity this injects into an online community. Out of all the bullets to bite, the biases to embrace, it had to be this one. Again I have to extend another invitation to this crowd to tone it down with the whole “tribe” thing. There’s a whole lot to be criticised about things that vaguely look like shaming tactics and callouts (which, btw, have been with us for the whole history of H. sapiens sapiens and have in no way been invented by SJWs) without the complimentary side dish of inter-subcultural animosity.

            If I were to have a tl;dr of the grandparent comment, it would be, basically: it’s incoherent to be both willingly prejudiced (to the extent of explicitly using the term outgroup) and against people being mean to each other, and you can’t even use the loophole whereby you claim to be prejudiced against people being mean to each other. That’s what an outgroup is, people who are fair game for bad treatment.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It is probably true that tribalism is a bad thing. And one who is using a super-rational (in the game theory sense) strategy would not act tribally.

            But tribalism works; one who avoids tribalism will be at a disadvantage compared with one who acts as a member of a tribe. Non-tribalism is not stable, because when a tribe forms, it has an advantage. Which is why merely knowing about tribalism doesn’t and shouldn’t make it go away; it’s often rational to act tribally.

            There’s a whole lot to be criticised about things that vaguely look like shaming tactics and callouts […] without the complimentary side dish of inter-subcultural animosity.

            There are, but inter-subcultural animosity isn’t a side dish; it’s the main dish. It’s the #1 reason “nudging” people away from topics using content-free signals of social disapproval is unlikely to work here. That analysis doesn’t require you to believe that this is a good thing.

            That’s what an outgroup is, people who are fair game for bad treatment.

            No. If you take the narrow definition of “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”, it’s a group with proximity and small differences to your in-group. That essay indicates the usual attitude towards such an outgroup is hatred. But whether that means they are “fair game for bad treatment” is a separate question, one which depends on your own ethics (or perhaps that of your in-group). That means it is not incoherent to both have an outgroup and to be against being mean to people; it just means you have to be against being mean to people you hate.

  38. Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

    Ross Douthat on Twitter:

    https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/760120529592266753

    “I’m saying: Imagine a race where the choices were an unfit, paranoid, unstable Democratic nominee and Rick Santorum.”

    • erenold says:

      The entire tweetstorm is well worth reading.

      There was a fun parlour game in his mentions afterwards about who a 2020 “Trump of the left”might be. I thought the guy who suggested Kanye West ought to have won, but in seriousness everything I’ve read about Alan Grayson worries me as well.

      • HircumSaeculorum says:

        >everything I’ve read about Alan Grayson worries me as well.

        Why, in particular? His Wikipedia article makes him sound pretty good.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Alan Grayson specializes in throwing “red tofu” to the liberal masses. His salient feature as a politician is bombast.

          I honestly don’t know how substantive or even how numerous his policy proposals are, but what I have seen of his style strikes me as far less than ideal. I’m not sure I would say worrying, but I see red-flags.

        • erenold says:

          Because both Trump and Grayson are equidistant from my ingroup.

          Wait, shit, no, I don’t think I was supposed to say that out loud. Let me try that again.

          In seriousness – because both men strike me as literally amoral in the truest sense of the word. Utterly bereft of any true principle, and yet – or perhaps thusly – remarkably adroit at whipping up passions at the opponent of the day. They remind me of Lord Birkenhead, who was supposed to have joined the Tory Party on a coin toss. It’s not difficult to imagine a parallel universe in which the Trump of the left was… Donald Trump himself. Similarly, it’s not difficult to imagine Grayson, freedom fighter extraordinaire, turning on a dime.

          That’s what I disagreed with the people putting forward Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn etc as 2020 left-Trumps. These people are true believers. They’re obnoxious, perhaps – but they believe. (God only knows what Yeezy believes, though.)

          (Oh, and also because Trump is an arse to his wives, and so is Grayson. My priors are that this is not coincidental. Character counts.)

          • cassander says:

            >In seriousness – because both men strike me as literally amoral in the truest sense of the word. Utterly bereft of any true principle,

            But Hillary Clinton doesn’t strike you this way? I don’t mean this as partisan snark, I’m genuinely curious. Granted, no one would accuse her of being good at whipping up the masses.

          • erenold says:

            I wouldn’t have taken offence even without your disclaimer. I think it’s a fair comment, and I anticipated a response in that vein, truth be told.

            Before I begin I want to just show deference to the fact that you guys, right or left, who actually are her constituents are going to be the better judge of everything than me. It winds me up no end when Westerners talk complete rubbish about my country without ever having stepped foot into it. So I suppose it says something about me that, even knowing how annoying distance long-distance armchair commentary can be, I can’t stop myself from partaking in it!

            Substantively – I *think* Hillary is not like that. At her core, she is not a demagogue. That is not merely a stylistic thing. Nor is it just her inability to do it well. I think she really does care about stuff.

            I like watching her come alive when she’s discussing, e.g., bringing down the number of deaths from respiratory ailments from dirty woodstoves in the Third World. That’s the kind of governmenting that I most believe in, and I think she’s genuinely interested in that.

            Maybe she lacks integrity. You’d be the better judge of that than I. But I think it’s a stretch to extrapolate from that that she truly cares about nothing and no one. I *think* she’s fundamentally akin to Obama, which is both why a fight between them had to become so bitter and why they became such close allies afterwards. That is, she’s a liberal technocrat to her core.

          • cassander says:

            Hillary’s definitely not a demagogue, but what gives you the impression that she cares about anything besides Hillary? I see her as someone absolutely desperate for the presidency, and, with one very minor exception, willing to say practically anything to get it, as witness by the fact that she’s spent the last year or so running against both her husband’s administration and big chunks of her tenure at sec state. Again, definitely not a demagogue of any sort, but there are many ways to be unprincipled that don’t involve demagoguery. Hillary does have a fair bit of wonk in her (though, sitting at immense distance, she strikes me as an excessive micromanager), but she’s never let it get in the way of getting elected.

            As for obama, he’s just about the opposite of a technocrat, someone who’s always preferred soaring rhetoric to the gritty compromise of actual policy. Hillary, I get the impression, loathes campaigning (and, having done it, I understand why, it’s terrible) Obama definitely seems to prefer it to governing.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      [11-12] But it was only a few months ago smart liberals were arguing Trump would be better than Cruz or Rubio, for same reasons liberals would be horrified at Santorum.

      Really? I don’t remember that. I remember liberals being horrified by Trump continually for the past year. Maybe they’re equally horrified by Cruz, but Rubio?

      • Jordan D. says:

        Yeah- I’ve heard that about Cruz, but never Rubio. I thought Rubio was basically one step removed from a Romney or a Bush.

        Consistently throughout the primary, the ‘oh my god are you serious’ comments from the Left seemed to be primarily about Trump and Cruz, with a few flyover states like Carson and Fiorina showing themselves for only a few political minutes.

        • E. Harding says:

          Yglesias, who occasionally, though by no means always, looks at actual policy, wrote pieces on why Rubio worried him more than Trump.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Here. Thanks!

            In contrast to Rubio, Trump is more prone to offering simply ignorant remarks but also has considerably more restrained instincts.

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        @ Douglas Knight
        >> [11-12] But it was only a few months ago smart liberals were arguing Trump would be better than Cruz or Rubio, for same reasons liberals would be horrified at Santorum.

        > Really? I don’t remember that.

        I do. I was one of them. Of course it was theoretical, as I’m Clintonista. But his stated policies on Social Security etc were more liberal than the other GOPs’, and his rhetoric seemed more rhetorical then.

  39. JustAnotherShitlordAnon says:

    For those who propose using a burner email account for comments registration, please note that this is harder than it once was.

    (1) Someone above mentioned hotmail, but (as I recall) they now require a phone number or alternate email account before you can open a new account. Gmail has similar requirements.

    Thus, for these accounts, one either needs a burner phone or you must already have an email account that you don’t mind associating with this new burner account (which defeats the purpose).

    (2) Yes, one option is mail.com. However, in my experience, they arbitrarily close accounts, so they’re not reliable.

    (3) Additionally, for all email accounts I know of (including mail.com), one cannot register via Tor. This is due to the various CAPTCHA/Turing tests that you need to pass, but do not function in the Tor browser.

    ——–

    Finally, at Scott: IMHO I’d be okay with a requiring people to avoid using the anonymous handle, but I would urge you to avoid comments registration.

    Even if it stops a (relative) handful of hurtful comments, the solutions comes at the steep price of potentially killing some of the most interesting and useful conversations.

    If multiple postings are the issue, then anonymous users who do that should just be ignored until they learn to use a unique (but still anonymous) handle.

    • Jiro says:

      Can you use mail.com and then use that to get a hotmail.com/gmail.com address?

      • brad says:

        Google, at least, now uses opaque heuristics to determine whether or not to insist on a mobile number before allowing you to create a gmail account. Coming in from tor is almost certainly a trigger. These tactics are all part of the war against email spam.

        Personally, I think the concern is overblown. With registration it would still be easy to be psedoanonymous to Scott and to readers of the site. The only thing that would be tougher would be staying anonymous to someone armed with a subpoena. As to that: first, I doubt very many posters here use sufficient op-sec every time to be anonymous to them anyway. Second, I don’t see much value in making this a friendly place to people worried about subpoenas.

        I don’t see what intersting or useful conversations this is going to end. The closest I can come up with is some of the discussion of drugs (modafinil, anabolic steroids). I can’t think of any time I’ve seen a discussion on here where someone leaked government secrets or anything like that. It’s not that type of place.

        • Corey says:

          I think the major worry is about socially-conservative views that are considered anodyne or maybe a little edge-lord-y today. I’m assured that we’re not far from people who hold those views getting rounded up into camps for orderly disposal. The fact that about half the country holds them is no comfort.

          • Jiro says:

            Don’t assume that just because half the country holds those views and therefore we can’t prosecute all of them, there is no danger. Selective prosecution is a thing, and it becomes really easy for the government to retaliate against anyone if it knows that everyone is guilty of some crime.

            Just imagine, you piss off some politician 15 years form now and he subpoenas Scott for information which proves that you’ve made anti-black remarks, thus supporting a discrimination claim made against you….

          • Cord Shirt says:

            @Jiro: So, like Paula Deen?

            (And as sick as some people are of hearing about Brendan Eich, he certainly is an example of someone who received years-later retaliation for something that, at the time he did it, over half the state agreed with him on.) (I disagreed with him. But I don’t support him being run out of his job over it.)

          • brad says:

            The politician would have to have reason to believe that Scott had responsive information in the first place. Also, Scott or wordpress would still have to have the logs in 2031. And even then the politician would still have to subpoena google and the phone company to connect the comment back you. And they’d have to have kept the records.

            It just doesn’t seem very likely. For anyone that is worried about this: do you currently only ever comment on SSC while logged on through a scrubbed VPN or tor?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cord Shirt:
            The only relevant population to Eich is (roughly) the user base of Mozilla, which is very different than the population of the state of CA.

            I imagine people here would feel different if they found out Eich had donated to a 501c3 dedicated to lobbying for the Patriot act, even if Mozilla actually had great privacy protections built in.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ HeelBearCub

            I imagine people here would feel different if they found out Eich had donated to a 501c3 dedicated to lobbying for the Patriot act

            I imagine not.

            The issue isn’t Eich’s personal beliefs, the issue is whether the particulars of his beliefs (which are well within the Overton window) justify firing him from his job.

          • Mistake Not ... says:

            Said job being the CEO, and so face of, a large charitable organization that depends in no small part on the efforts of hundreds of volunteers. Not being fry boy down at the local McDonalds. There was exactly nothing wrong with what went down there.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @HeelbearCub

            I imagine people here would feel different if they found out Eich had donated to a 501c3 dedicated to lobbying for the Patriot act, even if Mozilla actually had great privacy protections built in.

            Nope! Not even the tiniest bit. I personally wouldn’t have endorsed this series of events if he was an actual Stalinist. (Though it is darkly amusing that, for someone in tech, being an actual Stalinist is a much safer political position these days than opposing gay marriage.)

            @Mistake Not…

            Said job being the CEO, and so face of, a large charitable organization that depends in no small part on the efforts of hundreds of volunteers. Not being fry boy down at the local McDonalds. There was exactly nothing wrong with what went down there.

            Let’s unpack that. The claimed reason why Eich had to go was that his holding this opinion made some of these volunteers unwilling to work with him. Isn’t the fact that these volunteers can’t tolerate the presence of a dissenting political opinion — one, let’s not forget, a political opinion held by a near-majority of the American population and almost certainly a solid majority of the world population — a problem with the volunteers, not of Eich? Even if cold utilitarian calculation says that the intolerant volunteers are more important than Eich and therefore Eich must go, there’s nothing “right” or “moral” about it.

            Also this is the bit where we ask, if Eich was black and the volunteers had a problem with a black CEO, would there still be exactly nothing wrong with what happened.

          • You seem to be eliding the distinction between holding an opinion and attempting to give that opinion the force of law. I’m not saying that necessarily invalidates your conclusion, but I think your argument should address it. At a minimum, I think it would be preferable if you didn’t actively misrepresent the situation, whether or not you personally think the distinction is important.

          • On second thoughts, cancel that. I suppose by definition a “political opinion” is an opinion that you want to give the force of law, so perhaps I just wasn’t reading carefully enough. Sorry.

            There is I think still a distinction between someone who simply holds a political opinion and someone who has actually taken action to promote it. But I’m conflicted on the question of what an acceptable level of response is, so I should probably have kept quiet.

          • Mistake Not ... says:

            @M
            Not the mere presence, the overall leadership of, the organization. That is not just another job.

            I think it’s somewhat admirable that you are consistent and would extend the same attitude to a Stalinist. However I don’t share your radical views on tolerance. I think at the end of the day they sacrifice too much at the object level for not enough at the meta level. I don’t find unlimited tolerance in the social and economic sense to be a virtue. Nor do I think this sort of unlimited tolerance is a long standing liberal or leftist principle so attempts to frame it as hypocracy do not convince me.

            To my mind the criticism of McCarthyism were not that communists should have been allowed to stay in the state department but rather over tactics that were 1) indifferent to false positives 2) incentivized or compelled people to betray others and 3) did not take into account that people could change their minds.

            The Eich situation doesn’t include any of these elements.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Mistake Not …

            I don’t find unlimited tolerance in the social and economic sense to be a virtue.

            Unlimited tolerance? Let me remind you what the post you’re replying to said and what you didn’t contest: “a political opinion held by a near-majority of the American population and almost certainly a solid majority of the world population”.

            Let me suggest an alternate interpretation: the people who pushed Eich out are highly intolerant and demand ideological purity from everyone around them.

          • Mistake Not ... says:

            I think you are conflating two different axes. One is what range of opinions you tolerate and two is the strength of the response. One can be intolerant of a very big group of people but limit his response to dirty looks. Another can be intolerant of only a tiny minority group but be actively trying to kill them.

            What I am rejecting as a virtue is taking social and economic consequences are off the table completely as consequences for expressed ideological views.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @Mistake Not …

            With regards to McCarthyism, I agree with your assessment of it in pretty much every detail, but the question has to be, to what extent is the view we wish to be intolerant of relevant to the mission of the organization. If the mission of the government is to oppose Communism, it’s reasonable (at least on a basic level! Maybe there’s some other reason why it would be counterproductive) to demand that its functionaries not be Communists. It’s reasonable for Planned Parenthood to demand that its functionaries support abortion rights, it’s reasonable for the Republican Party to demand that its functionaries not be Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.

            The stated mission of Mozilla is not to legalize gay marriage; it’s to keep the Internet “open and accessible to all.”. The arguments that somehow that extends to ensuring that gay marriage is legalized everywhere, to the extent that a leader cannot hold a dissenting political opinion while off the clock, were a) rarely even made and b) when they were, they were tenuous and penumbra-y to an extent that would embarrass the Warren Court.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            “I imagine people here would feel different if they found out Eich had donated to a 501c3 dedicated to lobbying for the Patriot act”

            …no?

            …I’m a time-traveler from the past when we all agreed someone’s job didn’t control the rest of their life. When we all agreed that being “the face of an organization” didn’t come with a responsibility to alter your politics, or even your personal life, according to the organization’s values.

            (Remember all the criticisms and boycotts of the Salvation Army’s anti-LGBT hiring discrimination? Even though it’s a church that just hires people to help out with its charitable operations, and “marriage is heterosexual by definition and homosexuals should be celibate” is one of its religious tenets?)

            In my grandparents’ day, employers often pried into and demanded control over employees’ personal choices. (My grandmother and her brilliant sister were quite affected…story redacted.) People a bit younger than my grandparents and a bit older than my parents…a generational position rather like millennials’, come to think of it…fought *hard* to shift American culture to get people’s jobs *out!* of their political and personal lives.

            (Here’s where I’d really like to link to Alison Bechdel’s old strip illustrating generations of gay activists, with the circa-1960 activists dressed conservatively and carrying a sign saying “Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is IMMORAL”…but I couldn’t find it online.)

            My parents were on the tail end of that fight–they grew up hearing about infractions going “On Your Permanent Record,” a similar issue, and were the same age as some of those circa-1960 activists. And then came the baby boomers and gen-xers, who grew up generally expecting to be free of that kind of employer intrusion.

            Well. All I can say is, I’m very sorry for having taken that aspect of our culture for granted. AFAIC, your job has nothing to say about your political opinions or even personal life.

            (I’ve sure never fired anyone for “making the company look bad through their political choices.” Incompetence, yes. Anything else, no.)

            HBC’s / Mistake Not’s interpretation of the situation isn’t the only possible one, is my point. American culture has shifted on this before, and can again.

            I agree with my (metaphorical and actual) aunts and uncles on this one: You can’t have political freedom when you need to fear losing your job because of your political opinions/contributions/votes.

            (That’s a “positive rights” type argument, so a traditionally liberal position–but w/e, there’s no rule saying all liberals have to hold it or no non-liberal can. Not accusing anyone of “hypocrisy” here.)

            I also agree with Justice Thomas’ Citizens United opinion. (Too bad about his lack of empathy for women. It’s a serious, dangerous character flaw. I still agree with this legal opinion.)

          • Corey says:

            @all re: Eich, yeah, it sucks when someone loses their job over political controversy, but about 1.2% of US employees lose their jobs each month *for no reason at all* related to themselves, so… meh. (BLS seasonally adjusted layoff data, recent)

          • brad says:

            What does any of this have to do with whether or not it is safe to put a throwaway email address that is validated with a mobile number into the email field at SSC?

            Are we going to hear about donglegate next?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Corey
            People do not get outraged when a tornado destroys their house, but they do get outraged when a bulldozer does it. There’s good reasons for this.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            You seem to be eliding the distinction between holding an opinion and attempting to give that opinion the force of law.

            Any time you vote, you are attempting to give your opinion the force of law. Should Eich have been canned if he had merely voted for Proposition 8?

            I swear to God, I do not understand the point of view that spending your own money to express an opinion is coercive, but voting is not.

          • @Doctor Mist, I had already retracted that comment.

            However, I think it depends on how you view democracy. One vote is just one vote. Paying money to experts on manipulating public opinion gets you lots of votes, so depending on your viewpoint it may seem like cheating. (Obviously, however, that’s an emotional reaction, not a rational argument.)

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Harry

            I had already retracted that comment.

            Heh. So you had. Also a ton of other people had other interesting things to say. I should resist replying to a comment that far down the page without reloading first.

            One vote is just one vote. Paying money to experts on manipulating public opinion gets you lots of votes

            Going door-to-door with pamphlets or setting up a soapbox in the park gets you more than just one vote, but these are the paradigms of Concerned Citizenry. (If Eich had done these things he’d still have been in trouble, but I hope you and I can agree that this would have been unfair.)

            Somehow people think that adding money to the mix taints the whole process, which I just don’t get. To come at it from another angle: Suppose for the sake of argument that “experts on manipulating public opinion” really are capable of some kind of Jedi mind-trick that makes people vote against their better judgment. Is that an argument for forbidding political advertising, or an argument for the inherent senselessness of trying to run a society by having all these manipulable saps vote?

          • Well, humans aren’t perfect, but they’re the best option we’ve got for the time being. : – )

        • smocc says:

          One thing about the Eich case is that it’s unusually easy to turn around. Just imagine that public opinion is slightly different and he got fired for donating money to a gay-marriage-legalization advocacy group.

          I view the whole thing as a good illustration of the difference between “should” and “should be allowed.” Should this sort of thing be allowed to happen? Probably, because it would be hard to write a comprehensible law that doesn’t go to far in restricting someone else’s freedom. Should this sort of thing happen? Absolutely not.

          • An interesting and telling point, in that I have to work hard to think objectively enough to consider the two situations at all comparable.

            I think I’m pattern-matching the Eich case to an attempt to have the state enforce a religious law, and I guess I’m triggered by theocracy, even in small amounts. (To be honest, I don’t really understand how it could be anything else, so the best I can do is to blindly apply Principle of Charity.)

            By comparison, your hypothetical just seems like a legitimate attempt to shape public opinion in favour of the interests of a minority group. No religion involved.

          • smocc says:

            It is interesting that it seems incomparable to you, because it seems nearly exactly the same to me. They’re both political opinions right? Opinions on how the government should operate w.r.t. marriage. One group wants to change the law to explicitly include same-sex marriage, one group wants to change the law to explicitly exclude same-sex marriage. Anything about “religious law” or “theocracy” or “minority groups” is extra detail that probably isn’t justified.

            (For example, one does find non-religious people opposed to same sex marriage, and one could imagine people supporting same-sex-legalization for religious reasons.)

          • Well, it seems that most people who oppose gay marriage do so for religious reasons, and while I don’t know for certain that this was the motivation in this particular case, given his religious beliefs it does seem very likely. My judgement of the probabilities here is presumably biased by the fact that I haven’t been able to develop any alternative explanation, not counting sheer prejudice, of course.

            (That is, all of the arguments I’ve seen invoke either religion or prejudice, or just don’t make any sense to me. As I said, all I can do at that point is blindly apply charity.)

            I’m not sure whether I “should” attempt to disregard motivation as a consideration when thinking about the Brendan Eich incident – surely motive matters? – but I am sure that it is difficult to do so.

          • smocc says:

            As far as I can tell, you seem to be saying that the difference between the real situation and the “flipped” situation is that the motivation for the political belief is different? Does that difference make it okay or not okay for him to be fired for his political opinion?

            I’m having a hard time seeing how the argument isn’t essentially “it’s okay for him to be fired because his political opinion is one I disagree with.”

            What if Eich were, say, Episcopalian and his religious beliefs compelled him to contribute to lawsuits attempting to overrule state same-sex marriage bans, and he gets fired for it. Would this be bad or not?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            So wait, why is supporting a law for religious reasons worse than supporting a law for some other reason? If Eich had opposed gay marriage because he was a utilitarian and thought that on balance the negative utils would outweigh the positive ones, why would that be better?

          • So wait, why is supporting a law for religious reasons worse than supporting a law for some other reason?

            I’m not sure that it is, and I certainly wasn’t attempting to argue that is is.

            I mean, if I was trying to make that argument, I suppose I could blither something about the separation of church and state as being essential to a free society, perhaps point at the US constitution, that sort of thing. If I’m not convinced that the argument is valid, I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t, either.

            But that wasn’t my point. I just thought it was interesting that smocc’s hypothetical so clearly established why exactly I find it so difficult to consider the incident in question dispassionately.

            What if Eich were, say, Episcopalian and his religious beliefs compelled him to contribute to lawsuits attempting to overrule state same-sex marriage bans, and he gets fired for it. Would this be bad or not?

            Well, it’s bad either way, really, the only difference is whether I can raise any real sympathy for him or not. But … I don’t know. That hypothetical doesn’t raise any hackles, any more than I object to people contributing to charity because they think it’s their religious duty. That may be because of the other asymmetry here: one case is asking the government to actively interfere in people’s lives, the other is just asking the government to butt out and stop interfering. I’m not a libertarian by any means, but I do think that the burden of proof generally lies with those who want to make something illegal.

            Or perhaps that’s just a rationalization. Hard to say.

          • I could make a case that supporting a law for religious reasons is bad because that means a peroson is less likely to be swayed by considerations of practicality or kindness, but I’m not sure it works out that way in practice.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I mean, if I was trying to make that argument, I suppose I could blither something about the separation of church and state as being essential to a free society, perhaps point at the US constitution, that sort of thing. If I’m not convinced that the argument is valid, I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t, either.

            Well, if “separation of Church and state” is interpreted to mean that nobody doing politics is allowed to have religious motivations, I think that the Founding Fathers would disagree with you: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

            That may be because of the other asymmetry here: one case is asking the government to actively interfere in people’s lives, the other is just asking the government to butt out and stop interfering.

            One of the main arguments given by gay marriage advocates is “We want preferential tax status, societal approval, adoption rights, etc., too.” Whatever you may think of such an argument, it’s not really compatible with “All we’re asking is to be left alone.”

          • I think that the Founding Fathers would disagree with you

            Isn’t that just a figure of speech? I notice it doesn’t say which creator. But in any case not being an American I feel no particular need to defer to their opinions. And as far as the US constitution goes, wasn’t this pretty much exactly the reason Intelligent Design was shot down – because it was motivated by religion?

            One of the main arguments given by gay marriage advocates is “We want preferential tax status, societal approval, adoption rights, etc., too.”

            That seems … disingenuous. Saying “we’ll give people special privileges, but only if they meet our religious criteria” is hardly “being left alone”. (ETA: besides, they’re not particularly special privileges in the first place; most of them should probably apply to all couples, married or not.)

            (Reminder: I’m still in explanatory mode. I’m not attempting to construct a logical argument here.)

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Isn’t that just a figure of speech?

            No, it’s a reference to Locke’s idea that we all have rights because God made us and gave them to us.

            And as far as the US constitution goes, wasn’t this pretty much exactly the reason Intelligent Design was shot down – because it was motivated by religion?

            I’m not sure Supreme Court decisions several centuries later are necessarily a good guide to what the original Framers intended — after all, the SC once declared that growing stuff to use on your own farm counts as “inter-state commerce”, which I suspect would come as a surprise to the people of 1787.

            Saying “we’ll give people special privileges, but only if they meet our religious criteria” is hardly “being left alone”.

            Huh?

            (ETA: besides, they’re not particularly special privileges in the first place; most of them should probably apply to all couples, married or not.)

            Why should they?

          • I’m not sure Supreme Court decisions several centuries later are necessarily a good guide to what the original Framers intended

            But they’re a good guide to how the constitution is interpreted now, which is all that would matter to me if I wanted to invoke it to make an argument.

            Why should they?

            Why shouldn’t they? What’s so special about marriage? (But if you want to discuss specifics, you’ll need to specify which specific “privileges” you’re talking about; it isn’t as though I’ve looked up a list. I might well think some of them are silly or shouldn’t be relevant in the first place. For example, I seem to recall someone mentioning estate taxes as an issue, but my opinion is that they should be outlawed, which would make the question of how they should be applied to non-married or gay marriage couples moot.)

          • The original Mr. X says:

            But they’re a good guide to how the constitution is interpreted now, which is all that would matter to me if I wanted to invoke it to make an argument.

            If the Constitution is nothing but what nine men can twist it into saying, why is disagreeing with it such a big no-go area?

            What’s so special about marriage?

            Bringing the next generation of people into the world, and raising and socialising them to be good citizens.

            (But if you want to discuss specifics, you’ll need to specify which specific “privileges” you’re talking about; it isn’t as though I’ve looked up a list. I might well think some of them are silly or shouldn’t be relevant in the first place. For example, I seem to recall someone mentioning estate taxes as an issue, but my opinion is that they should be outlawed, which would make the question of how they should be applied to non-married or gay marriage couples moot.)

            Tax breaks, freedom from inheritance tax, hospital visiting rights, and so on.

          • If the Constitution is nothing but what nine men can twist it into saying, why is disagreeing with it such a big no-go area?

            “Twist” seems unnecessarily pejorative. But in any case you’d need to ask an American.

            Bringing the next generation of people into the world, and raising and socialising them to be good citizens.

            But you don’t have to be Officially Married (TM) in order to do any of those things, so it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

            Tax breaks:- you’ll need to be still more specific. (Here in New Zealand there are no tax advantages to being married that I’m aware of, certainly not for the typical household. In fact I’m told that getting married originally disadvantaged two-income couples, though that was before my time.)

            There have been proposals that couples should be allowed to split their income for tax purposes rather than each paying taxes based on their own income. Is that the sort of thing you’re thinking of? (If they had been implemented here, they’d almost certainly have applied to de-facto and civil union couples as well as the Officially Married.)

            Freedom from inheritance tax:- I mentioned this one before; IMO, nobody should have to pay inheritance tax as it is manifestly unjust.

            Hospital visiting rights:- IMO, you should absolutely have visitation rights to your SO regardless of marital status, with the only obvious complication being providing evidence of your relationship. But I’m not sure I understand why visitation needs to be restricted at all; are you talking about people in comas or something?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            “Twist” seems unnecessarily pejorative. But in any case you’d need to ask an American.

            It is indeed pejorative, but not, I think, unnecessarily so. When the Supreme Court argues with a straight face that growing crops for consumption on your own farm counts as “inter-state commerce”, “twisting” is quite a reasonable description of what they’re doing.

            But anyway, you originally said:

            I mean, if I was trying to make that argument, I suppose I could blither something about the separation of church and state as being essential to a free society, perhaps point at the US constitution, that sort of thing.

            –as a reason why you might think that supporting a law for religious reasons was bad. But if the constitutional argument just boils down to “Nine individuals don’t like people supporting laws for religious reasons,” then frankly, why should we care what these nine individuals think? What authority do they have to dictate which motivations are and aren’t acceptable?

            But you don’t have to be Officially Married (TM) in order to do any of those things, so it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

            Marriage is uniquely geared towards those things, which is why the government recognised it in the first place.

            I’m afraid I can’t be more specific about tax breaks, because (a) I don’t know anything about the US tax code, and (b) most of the people agitating for gay marriage are pretty vague about the matter, presumably because they realise that talking about the minutiae of tax regulation is a pretty good way to get people’s eyes to glaze over, and they don’t want that for obvious reasons.

          • But if the constitutional argument just boils down to “Nine individuals don’t like people supporting laws for religious reasons,” then frankly, why should we care what these nine individuals think?

            Nine experts, at the very top of their profession, working on the basis of over two hundred years of precedent. If I were arguing with someone who doesn’t like them, I guess I’d have to abandon that line of approach. But it doesn’t seem to me to be an inherently poor argument.

            Marriage is uniquely geared towards those things

            Official Marriage (TM) no more so than the unofficial sort, IMO. YMMV.

    • Lumifer says:

      I have a number of gmail accounts and only one of them is associated with a phone number (or another email). Google tries to trick you into giving them your mobile number on a regular basis, but so far when told to fuck off it fucks off.

      Of course these are pseudonymous accounts, not anonymous.

  40. Elias says:

    What do you think are some attributes that make you an unlikely SSC reader? Any other NCAA athletes out there fanatically pursuing their sports?

    Also, has Scott publicly deliberated over whether supporting Gary Johnson is a good idea or not this election?

    • Two McMillion says:

      To clarify, you’re taking a poll about what attributes people think ought to put them outside the demographic of SSC readers?

      • Elias says:

        It’s not as formal as a poll, but yes. I’m curious what attributes people think are uncommon amongst SSC readers/ LW etc. I’m wondering if them not “fitting in” makes them less inclined to interact with the SSC community, and if so Anonymous commenting might be useful in not thwarting such voices.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Well, I’m a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. I doubt I’m the only one, but I can’t imagine that’s common in LW circles.

        • Trying it out says:

          I have three kids, which I have been assuming isn’t the norm here, but I guess I don’t actually know.

          I’m also experimenting with anonymous posting on this comment.

        • Trying it out says:

          I have three kids, which I have assumed isn’t the norm here, but I don’t really know.

          Apologies if this comes up twice; I’m trying out an anonymous post.

    • I’m female and over 60, which at least makes me demographically unusual.

  41. Cord Shirt says:

    I think some named users are posting more controversial comments anonymously. I’d like to request people not do this, because I IP ban anonymous accounts on a hair-trigger, and if I IP ban your anonymous account then your real account also suffers. I think this is why a lot of people’s posts haven’t been showing up lately. I try to take people’s past history of posting interesting things into account before I ban them for a single violation, but if you’re anonymous I can’t do that and you’re kind of out of luck.

    Welp, I can see the writing on the wall here. 🙁

    Scott, I really think this is a warning sign.

    I think people are doing this because your behavior has convinced them you will ban them for expressing an opinion on a controversial topic.

    People generally make predictions about others’ behavior on an “actions speak louder than words” basis. You can *say* “Oh, well, you’ll actually have more chance of avoiding banning by not posting anonymously,” but your *behavior* has already convinced them otherwise.

    Similarly, your past behavior has made me hesitant to state the fact that :deep breath: if you ban anonymous commenting by requiring registration by e-mail, I won’t be able to post, since I don’t have an e-mail I’m willing to associate with comments here.

    Why am I hesitant? Because you talked about the “little list” you’ve got of people you actively look for the flimsiest possible excuse to ban. You said that. And your banning behavior supports it. I’m afraid I may already be on that list, and if I am, then obviously what I just said won’t discourage you from requiring registration, it’ll only encourage you.

    Yes, I know, you (ISTM) intended to “charmingly admit a human foible” when you said that. But actually…actually, you have power, and when someone with power says something like that, it stops being charming and turns into a threat. (See also, Deborah Tannen on how differently the same remark is received depending on whether it’s seen as coming from a peer vs. from someone with power over the hearer.)

    ISTM the root problem in all this is that you’re more comfortable seeing yourself as “just some guy,” even as your blog posts earn you more and more respect, even as more and more people come to value the community that has grown up here…IOW, even as you gain more and more power over more and more people. You have power, and you’re not using it deftly or tactfully, and ISTM that’s because you’re in denial about even having it at all.

    …whatever, JMO.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Cord Shirt – “Similarly, your past behavior has made me hesitant to state the fact that :deep breath: if you ban anonymous commenting by requiring registration by e-mail, I won’t be able to post, since I don’t have an e-mail I’m willing to associate with comments here.”

      …why not just use a burner hotmail account? There’s no way I’d be willing to attach any of my actual email addresses to this handle, but a burner would be fine for me.

      “I’m afraid I may already be on that list, and if I am, then obviously what I just said won’t discourage you from requiring registration, it’ll only encourage you.”

      I have read every comment in every open thread for the last two years, and I would be willing to bet a hundred dollars that you aren’t on the short list. I don’t really understand why you think you would be; I mean, I believe you that you do, but I’m pretty sure that your belief is not accurate.

      • Cord Shirt says:

        “…why not just use a burner hotmail account?”

        An anon explained.

        I hardly expect the world to end tomorrow, but I *am* a small business owner, and so out of an abundance of caution…

        “I don’t really understand why you think you would be”

        You…want me to lay out a case for Why Scott Should Want To Ban Me? 😉

        Since you’ve read all the open threads, you may remember this.

        IOW, it’s because of how unpredictable I find his banning decisions. And the fact of even having a list, as explained in the previous comment.

        Like. Maybe we want to keep people with diverse opinions and perspectives here instead of banned so that we can talk with and learn from them. But if, in order to keep them here and not banned, we have to chill them to the point that they never *express* the more unusual/eccentric of their opinions and so we can never even *hear* let alone *discuss* them…well then what good does that do?

        I mean, but maybe we *don’t* want to keep people with diverse opinions and perspectives here instead of banned? If so, I mean, it’s Scott’s blog, he can do what he wants…*but* that *is* what I came here for.

        And it really does seem like the diversity of backgrounds has been dropping–as in, mean inferential distance has been reduced, not through everyone learning from each other but instead through banning the people whose backgrounds were too different from the majority’s.

        S4stan the veteran with extended family from the middle east who summarized his upbringing as “home schooled in foreign countries by adherents of a weird cult.” D3iseach the Irish Catholic philosopher of religion. Dividualist the geekily sincere Euro-atheist on a quest to integrate his “secular reasons to respect religion” into his life. The people who’ve been banned are people whose background and resultant worldview was different enough from the majority’s here to make them (IMO) interesting and worth learning from.

        And, I think, different enough to increase the likelihood of the kind of cultural clashes that may have led to their bannings…but…I just…had thought we were trying to prevent that result.

        Guess I agree with the others, it really depends on what Scott decides are his goals for the blog.

        • Montfort says:

          Cord Shirt, when you say the bans are unpredictable, can you elaborate a bit? Because, for instance, one of the people you mention was banned for posting (among other things) “FUCK YOU TOO AND THE HIGH HORSE YOU RODE IN ON”, which to me looks like an easily-predicted ban.

          Anyway, intellectual diversity, in the narrow sense of “many commenters here believe different and unusual things” is not, by itself, what’s valuable here – in my opinion, obviously, but I think maybe you would agree. It’s easy to imagine such a place where just about every post is something like “typical green tribe hubris…” or “people like you should be exiled.” Another key component of the community here is that it’s a place where people can post their opinions and get a reasoned counter-argument back, or something polite, at least, not content-less fury or insults.

          In a perfect world, we would have high diversity and high charitable-engagement, but as you can see, sometimes contributors to the former interfere with the latter, and vice versa.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Montfort
            Because, for instance, one of the people you mention was banned for posting (among other things) “FUCK YOU TOO AND THE HIGH HORSE YOU RODE IN ON”, which to me looks like an easily-predicted ban.

            Iirc, the only reason that Scott gave was that she had attacked a polite opponent along with a harsh opponent whom he banned at the same time.

          • Montfort says:

            houseboat, the only person she attacks in that post (ban announced here) is the same one the “FUCK YOU” is directed at, who was not later banned. She does attack the other banned one (I know who you mean) in the same thread, but not in the post Scott replied to with the ban notification.

            Downthread I’ve seen mentions of Steve Johnson, who would qualify as unpredictable. (I’m tempted to say that Steve Johnson’s eventual ban was probably anticipated by some, but even if that’s true, it wasn’t foreseen by most, and definitely not the timing of it).

          • Cord Shirt says:

            See my reply to onyomi.

            Frex note the “too” in the example you gave–“Fuck you *too*” is very obviously a response to provocation. Why does provocation matter for most other angry comments but not that one?

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Montfort
            houseboat, the only person she attacks in that post (ban announced here) is the same one the “FUCK YOU” is directed at, who was not later banned. She does attack the other banned one (I know who you mean) in the same thread, but not in the post Scott replied to with the ban notification.

            Thank you for the links. Apparently I was conflating two or more of D’s comments. Scott seems to have considered at least two of them to support the same ban; see his later comment at
            https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/14/three-more-articles-on-poverty-and-why-they-disagree-with-each-other/#comment-372693
            Apparently I mis-remembered Scott’s reason for favoring Al…s over Xe…s: on re-reading, it seems to have been about Al…s’s topic rather than tone.

          • Montfort says:

            Cord Shirt, thanks. I disagree on some of the details (“looking for an excuse” could plausibly mean “this commenter has a bad history,” I don’t think provocation really counts for much in his decisions, or else he’s looking for a high level of provocation), but at least that seems more understandable now.

            You could take the “too” as proof of “provocation”, but you have to consider whether the post she was responding to is adequate provocation for that kind of response. A—-‘s opinion was expressed in fairly reasonable terms.

            Houseboat, yeah, that one seems to be what people remember most of the exchange.

        • onyomi says:

          “But if, in order to keep them here and not banned, we have to chill them to the point that they never *express* the more unusual/eccentric of their opinions and so we can never even *hear* let alone *discuss* them…well then what good does that do?”

          I’ve never seen anyone get banned just for expressing a weird opinion politely. Nearly all the bans I’ve ever seen on here have been for simple rudeness. There are a few exceptions with opinions like “all women secretly want to get raped,” but well, if you want to express an opinion like that in a place that values “niceness, community, and civilization,” I think you have to be prepared to walk on eggshells a bit.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            “I’ve been looking for an excuse to ban you for awhile” = the only reason the person was banned was for rudeness?

            Not for getting on the “I’m looking for an excuse to ban you” list and then being the kind of “rude in response to provocation” that Scott usually lets pass?

            I’m not even the first person to say this.

            Scott says he usually takes provocation into account. With the bannings, he suddenly…doesn’t. The result is that these comments are indistinguishable from many others that were let pass. This makes it hard to be sure what is and isn’t acceptable.

            Or…they’re indistinguishable in degree of rudeness. There does seem to be one pattern in who gets banned: They tend to be socially conservative, economically what-the-US-calls-liberal or both. It may be just an issue of “Scott’s less aware of what even is provocation to a social conservative / economic liberal,” or even just, “A post is more likely to get reported to Scott if its author is a social conservative / economic liberal”…

            But it winds up giving the impression that expressing socially conservative and/or economically US-liberal opinions is what gets you on the list.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cord Shirt – I stand corrected, both on the burners and on your worries. : / …good luck, eh?

    • Tedd says:

      … Why do you think this? There is a registry of bans (for named bans, mind, not anons). Does it really give the impression that people are getting banned merely for expressing controversial opinions, as opposed to expressing opinions of any degree of controversial in an exceedingly obnoxious way? (With the sole exception of Steve Johnson.)

      It is also a very short list at 59 total bans, given that there are in excess of a thousand comments a week these days. Let us be generous and suppose that an even dozen of those were for an opinion and not its expression. Given that there are well in excess of 120,000 comments on SSC across all posts, this means that a comment needs to be in the top 0.01% of controversy among the already highly controversial commentariat here to warrant a ban. Frankly, you’re not that special.

      • Anonymous says:

        The list is not exhaustive. And the reasons for the ban are often somewhat vaguely worded (“for a general posting style exemplified by this thread”) or not specified at all. This doesn’t inspire confidence.

        • Tedd says:

          The registry includes almost all named bans and generally links to comments which are quite clearly uncivil or otherwise bad, not merely controversial. If you don’t think this is so, you ought to give some reason or examples of why you think as you do.

          • Nornagest says:

            Given that you’re talking to an anon, I reckon “named” is the sticking point here.

          • Tedd says:

            @Nornagest, OP’s concern was specifically that named posters would face censorial bans, so… .

          • Anonymous says:

            It also lists Steve Johnson being banned for literally no reason:

            Steve Johnson is banned for reasons of total personal caprice. Let it be known that he has not broken any rules and the ban is not his fault. Also, this is the beginning of a Reign of Terror. Govern yourselves accordingly.

            This doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I mean, we’ve been under the reing of terror for like one year now, it probably doesn’t get a lot more terrifying.

          • Tekhno says:

            When does the Thermidorian Reaction start?

          • Cord Shirt says:

            I mean, a Thermidorian Reaction is exactly what I’m worried about. I’ve been online long enough to have seen those before. :shrug:

      • Cord Shirt says:

        What Anonymous said:

        The list is not exhaustive. And the reasons for the ban are often somewhat vaguely worded (“for a general posting style exemplified by this thread”) or not specified at all.

        “You’re not that special.”

        Eh, that’s what people always tell themselves so as to dismiss their worries. Worries that, in my experience, often actually turn out to be founded.

        I agree that it’s often appealing to reassure oneself with that thought, but IMX it’s also usually a mistake. I’m with Gavin de Becker: If you’re worried, there’s a reason.

        • Tedd says:

          “I am worried that you will do a thing I have absolutely no evidence to suggest you will do other than my worry itself” is not a persuasive argument. If you have a reason, what is it?

          In particular, you said several things:

          You can *say* “Oh, well, you’ll actually have more chance of avoiding banning by not posting anonymously,” but your *behavior* has already convinced them otherwise.

          And your banning behavior supports it.

          which suggests you have some reason to believe that named posters are at risk of bans merely for expressing controversial opinions, and I’m wondering what that reason is. The fact that you are worried cannot itself be a reason for you to be worried.

          • Jiro says:

            This was a blatant case of banning by putting arbitrary restrictions on someone that can’t be followed with 100% accuracy by a normal human being, so Scott has an excuse to ban him when he doesn’t follow them.

            And this was Scott admitting he was looking for an excuse to ban someone.

            And the Steve Johnson ban was already brought up.

          • Tedd says:

            John Sidles’ comments practically jumped off the page with their unusual formatting; it’s a little disingenuous to call this “can’t be followed with 100% accuracy by a normal human being”. Moreover, I gather he’s now posting again under a different handle while respecting Scott’s “please format your comments in a reasonable way” restriction, and has not been subsequently banned.

            That comment is not the only place Scott has said he harbors personal dislikes, but given the comment which earned the ban, I don’t think this is any evidence in favor of the proposition that you can be banned merely for expressing controversial opinions.

            I mentioned Steve Johnson in my original post, and accept that his ban is nonzero evidence that you can be banned just for expressing controversial opinions sufficiently often. But, given the sheer volume of comments here, and that it is the only such ban in the multiple-year lifetime of this blog (and how long Steve Johnson posted before getting banned, and his posting behavior in general), I’d expect someone expressing a belief as strong as the OP’s to have at least some other reason.

          • Nornagest says:

            Moreover, I gather he’s now posting again under a different handle while respecting Scott’s “please format your comments in a reasonable way” restriction, and has not been subsequently banned.

            Has, actually — he returned under a filtered handle that starts with “LWN”, and was banned by Scott here on “strong suspicion that he is John Sidles”.

            I’m fairly confident that both Ilyushechka and Uncle Ilya Kuriakin are the same person. He changed names and emails here, but you can see the continuity of style and even of argument. Not sure why; “Ilyushechka” is not a filtered phrase, which points against a third ban, but then again neither is “John Sidles”. Think there was some time as a B&W anon somewhere in there, too.

          • Jiro says:

            John Sidles’ comments practically jumped off the page with their unusual formatting; it’s a little disingenuous to call this “can’t be followed with 100% accuracy by a normal human being”.

            Scott’s description of what John was not permitted to do could be violated either in obvious ways that could reasonably be avoided, or in unobvious ways that could not. It so happened he violated it in an obvious way, but the proscription was broad enough to cover a lot more.

            Analogy: Someone is constantly referring to “the Jews”. Scott tells him “if you post anything containing the word ‘the’, you will be banned.” He posts another rant about “the Jews” and is banned. Was that a fair reason to ban him? The actual behavior that resulted in the ban was a fair reason to ban him, but the broad rule under which it fell is likely to trip people up.

            That comment is not the only place Scott has said he harbors personal dislikes, but given the comment which earned the ban, I don’t think this is any evidence in favor of the proposition that you can be banned merely for expressing controversial opinions.

            It doesn’t mean you can be banned merely for expressing controversial opinions, but it does mean that expressing controversial opinions can lead you to be banned for other things that would be otherwise allowed. Even though the ban isn’t directly for controversial opinions, it still has the same chilling effect as if it were.

        • Anonymous says:

          I don’t understand this comment.

        • another anonobot says:

          I’m with Gavin de Becker: If you’re worried, there’s a reason.

          I think there’s a rather obvious tautology here. If you’re worried then you must have good reason to be, assuming your sense for these things is working properly — i.e., that you’re not just paranoid. But saying that your concern is justified, given that you know you’re not paranoid, is begging the question.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            Gavin de Becker’s argument is that if you’re worried there’s *a* reason, not necessarily a *good* reason. 😉 IOW you’re noticing *something*. Then you do have to look into it, figure out what you’re noticing and whether you’ve done enough to address it etc.

            De Becker’s argument is that you should *do that* investigation rather than immediately reassuring yourself with “Oh I’m not that special” or etc.

            Think of the two opposing adages in medicine: “If you hear hoofbeats, think zebras, not horses,” vs. “Patients can have as many diseases as they please.” De Becker says sure, first think horses…but if you keep getting signs that it’s a zebra…freaking well investigate them. Don’t just keep reassuring yourself that since horses are more common, it’s *got* to be a horse.

            As far as my own needs go, I can handle that investigation just fine. This thread really isn’t about me. Rather, I’m using myself as an example of someone who’s been chilled out of contributing more to the discussions here. I’m an example of a way some people are reacting to Scott’s past modding patterns. I believe the increased frequency of [word on the list]s is a sign that others are also reacting this way. What Scott does with this info is up to him.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            [That author]’s argument is that if you’re worried there’s *a* reason, not necessarily a *good* reason. 😉 IOW you’re noticing *something*. Then you do have to look into it, figure out what you’re noticing and whether you’ve done enough to address it etc.

            [That author]’s argument is that you should *do that* investigation rather than immediately reassuring yourself with “Oh I’m not that special” or etc.

            Think of the two opposing adages in medicine: “If you hear hoofbeats, think zebras, not horses,” vs. “Patients can have as many diseases as they please.” [That author] says sure, first think horses…but if you keep getting signs that it’s a zebra…freaking well investigate them. Don’t just keep reassuring yourself that since horses are more common, it’s *got* to be a horse.

            As far as my own needs go, I can handle that investigation just fine. This thread really isn’t about me. Rather, I’m using myself as an example of someone who’s been chilled out of contributing more to the discussions here. I’m an example of a way some people are reacting to Scott’s past behavior. I believe the increased frequency of anons is a sign that others are also reacting this way. What Scott does with this info is up to him.

        • SP says:

          Maybe Scott should institute a year of Jubilee. After seven years of internet time, all SSC bans are lifted. Of course, if these people misbehave again upon the lifting of the ban they should be banned again, but they get to look forward to reintegration into the community during the next year of Jubilee.

    • Viliam says:

      The paradox of censorship is that the less censorship there is, the more people complain about censorship.

      As a big natural experiment, you can probably take any post-communist country. A few decades ago, people were afraid to speak their minds about almost anything, because it could have cost them their jobs, maybe even their freedom or their lives in the more serious instances. So they were quiet. Today, people complain on facebook about how in the evil capitalism they have no freedom of speech… not realizing that expressing the same kind of criticism about the society the few decades ago would get them (and their families!) into big trouble, while today no one cares unless they start posting e.g. some Nazi stuff, and even then usually no one cares.

      Analogically, the mere fact that the owner of the website bans someone for repeatedly breaking the rules, and then people publicly complain about how that was unfair, how the person contributed to diversity or whatever, and how now they are afraid to talk here anymore…

      Uhm, if you would be really afraid to talk, then you probably wouldn’t. At least this is what most people do in situations with real censorship.

      • Cord Shirt says:

        That argument seems like it’ll lead you to dismiss any concerns that people might consider important enough to take risks to express.

        In fact I actually do post a whole hell of a lot less than I write due to the chilling effect of Scott’s banning patterns. I’ve already said so on an earlier open thread. (‘Course that gives you an opening to assert that I’m just paranoid so there *still* isn’t any actual problem…)

        I actually like this community and don’t want to see it implode as I’ve seen others implode in my quarter-century on the internet–some risk-taking is called for.

        But sure, I’ll give your analogy a shot: Multiplying anons here is a warning sign akin to increasing amounts of samizdat. People want to share their thoughts. Not everyone who self-publishes is doing it because they feel it’s a *safer* way to share their thoughts, and neither is every anon. But a sudden increase in self-publishing, or in anons, can be a warning sign that people feel increasingly unsafe sharing their thoughts in more traditional ways.

      • Anonymous says:

        today no one cares unless they start posting e.g. some Nazi stuff, and even then usually no one cares.

        I live in a post-communist country and that is false. Promoting Nazism and/or communism is a big deal here, in several European countries it is literally a criminal act, and relatively few people apart from neo-Nazis themselves seem upset about it (Germany is particularly infamous for it; my perception is that the overwhelming majority of complaints are about banning Nazi symbolism from video games). Hell, we don’t even have negative commercials in my country, never mind more controversial examples of pushing boundaries in freedom of speech. The “not even the Nazis should be denied speech” mindset is a distinctly American thing.

    • Liskantope says:

      if you ban anonymous commenting by requiring registration by e-mail, I won’t be able to post, since I don’t have an e-mail I’m willing to associate with comments here.

      I’d appreciate some clarification: is there an easy way for anyone who views our comments, even Scott himself, to find the email addresses connected to our pseudonyms? I don’t really want to associate my comments here with my email either…

      • Lumifer says:

        Scott, as well as anyone with sufficient access to logs, obviously knows the emails.

        Other than than, you have a custom gravatar image, which implies that you registered your email with Gravatar, which is potentially a trace to be followed.

        I also suspect that sufficiently interested (or sufficiently bored) people can brute-force the auto-generated gravatar images which are basically hashes of emails.

        ETA: An interesting discussion of Gravatar and privacy.

  42. Harkonnendog says:

    Culture evolves so quickly and privacy is already so fragile, let anons be anons, warts and all. Posts are forever. Letting people post without having to worry about a comment being used against them years from now is good. Maybe you could allow a few of the older, more respected members carry some of the burden of moderation?

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      Forget “years from now”. People are being purged for things they said that were perfectly respectable months ago, or posting eggplant emojis that were later declared problematic by Jezebel.
      If you post under your real name, you’re fucking insane.

      • BBA says:

        Forgive me for thinking this might be hyperbole, but can you give some examples of these recent purges? (Yes, I already know all about Brendan Eich.)

        • JDG1980 says:

          Here’s a thread about someone who was banned from Github for an eggplant emoji.

        • Homo Iracundus says:

          Girls who wear Three Blind Mice Halloween costumes getting investigated and disciplined by Bias Response Teams?
          Does news of that not percolate to your part of society? Or is it just normal now, and part of the whole “political correctness just means Basic Human Decency” meme?

          • FWIW, according to Campus Reform, the University in question denies that there was any investigation or disciplinary action. So it seems somewhat short of a “purge”.

            Insane nonetheless.

  43. Jill says:

    I don’t really understand why some people are so attached to Anonymous handles. Why don’t they just call themselves something else, since there are too many anonymice to keep track of? It’s easy enough to put an animal name or whatever, Coyote or something.

    Then people could have a continuing conversations with you if they wanted. Or they could avoid reading your comments e.g. if you are one of those control freaks who demands that other people in discussions dig up all kinds of particular facts that you are interested in, just because you commanded them to, because you think that others exist just for the purpose of satisfying your demands.

    • Anonymous says:

      there are too many anonymice to keep track of

      This is almost the entire point of using an Anonymous handle. Judge the post, not the poster.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        No good, as anonymice attempt to have stateful conversations where they ask and answer questions, etc.

        The only thing a truly anonymous handle is good for is one off posts, and I think that is against the spirit of this site.

        • Anonymous says:

          No good, as anonymice attempt to have stateful conversations where they ask and answer questions, etc.

          Why? You can just answer the question. It’s a public discussion anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much whom the answer reaches. If the original poster doesn’t want to read it, it’s their problem.

          Well, unless you want to ask a question which only the anonymous poster can answer. But then, they probably doesn’t want to maintain an identity precisely because they don’t want to answer such questions.

          I think that is against the spirit of this site.

          “Charity over absurdity”? I don’t see how.

          • Nicholas says:

            It doesn’t work because WordPress doesn’t support the >> inline post citations. If Anonymous is commenting on Anonymous’ rebuttal to one of Anonymous’ points, then it sometimes becomes very unclear which person he is engaged in dialogue with.

        • LPSP says:

          It’s no problem for 4chan.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Jill – “I don’t really understand why some people are so attached to Anonymous handles.”

      This article is the best answer to your question that I’m aware of. Note that my handle is a variant of “anonymous coward”, since there was already an Anonymous Coward here when I started posting; both names are variations on Anonymous. Numerous other posters here use similar variations, all of which track back to the same handful of sources.

      • I nominate the link about 4chan as the most interesting link I’ve seen in a while– it’s about the advantages of a social group where there are no identities and no possibility of being shamed.

        Not that I’m doing the work, but I wonder whether the tone of the place would be improved by adding a wider range of insults.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz – Ha! glad someone read it! You might check out some of Kazerad’s other articles on that same blog; they wrote a lot about being rational, and the upsides and downsides to group manipulation. Very thoughtful, very charitable, a generaly-social-justice-adjacent writer talking about maintaining honesty and decency and how individuals can and should fight against abusive group behavior.

          “Not that I’m doing the work, but I wonder whether the tone of the place would be improved by adding a wider range of insults.”

          ham doctor is always an option.

          I used to hang out there a lot; I quit mainly because it was too much of a time sink, much like reddit. In my experience, though, once you’re in Anon mode, the tone is just fine. There is no you to insult, after all. Everyone is a [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] equally. It’s really a hell of a thing.

          • Cord Shirt says:

            I read it back when you linked it on Ozy’s blog. 😉

            The thing about what kazerad describes is, say that I really like something, so as an anon I comment that I do. And all the other anons pour scorn on it, as mentioned in the article. Kazerad says, no problem, I can just become another anon and claim I never liked it. But–I still did like it…and what I really wanted was not to “agree with the group on what to like,” but rather…to *find someone else who also likes it.* In that case being an anon doesn’t help me.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Plus, the last bit about “scapegoating” 4chan makes no sense. Like, literally none.

            Anything horrible that happens on 4chan isn’t happening as a way to scapegoat 4chan, it’s precisely one of the things that 4chan is intended to enable. He is just redescribing the exact same features which he praises as liberating earlier and then saying people are “scapegoating” 4chan.

            That looks a lot like a “No true 4channer” argument.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cord Shirt – “And all the other anons pour scorn on it, as mentioned in the article. Kazerad says, no problem, I can just become another anon and claim I never liked it. But–I still did like it…and what I really wanted was not to “agree with the group on what to like,” but rather…to *find someone else who also likes it.*”

            …But if other anons pour scorn on it, they have no identity to enforce that scorn. There’s no way to verify that the replies you’re getting aren’t just one edgelord sockpuppeting like mad, for instance. The scorn they give matters or doesn’t matter to the exact extent you want it to. On the balance, I think being anon reduces the social barrier to making connections to people on a similar wavelength, and it’s a lot less scary to stand up for your opinions even if there’s no one else. There’s no real consequences whatever you do, so the absolute worst thing that can happen is you decide to shut up or leave, so let your freak flag fly.

            @HeelBearCub – “Anything horrible that happens on 4chan isn’t happening as a way to scapegoat 4chan, it’s precisely one of the things that 4chan is intended to enable.”

            Whether something horrible is happening on 4chan is the question. a bunch of Anons deciding to raid somebody is one thing. A person sock-puppeting as a bunch of anons claiming a raid is in progress when none exists is another thing, and sock-puppeting to try to draw participants into a raid they’ve organized separately is a third thing.

            My understanding is that *chan-Anon culture has largely turned against raiding post-Project Chanology. You still have groups like /baphomet/ that exist to organize harassment, but they’re a subculture all their own that’s actively hostile to anyone and anything not themselves. During The Ants, you had numerous cases of anons singly attempting to initiate raids within the culture, and the collective massively shouting them down and/or sabotaging their ability to spread their message. That’s about the clearest signal you can get that the community as a whole is siding against mob action without demanding that the community dissolve itself.

            In short, the question is whether anon culture is fundamentally about harassment, and the answer appears, at the moment at least, to be no. My estimate would be that it has orders of magnitude better anti-harassment norms than, say, tumblr at this point. No one is amassing personal social capital by organizing hate of another person on the chans, tumblr doesn’t seem to have a “not your personal army” meme, nor does it have the institutional history of purging itself of raid culture that the chans do. of the two, I’d much rather deal with Anons than tumblrites in a professional capacity. I’d much rather be harassed by anons than tumblr too, come to think of it.

        • LPSP says:

          4chan truly has no tone. When it was introduced to me and I spent some time on an interest board, it took me maybe a few days to realise that the diversity and freedom of expression there is astoundingly high. Not unlimited – each board does have its own culture and certain threads *will* crop up time and again – but thus far nothing I’ve ever encountered matches it. 4chan thrashes its competitors, Reddit and Tumblr, as well as its predecessor, SomethingAwful.com. It was this that convinced me to become a regular.

      • bluto says:

        I always figured you were a fellow refugee from /.

        • brad says:

          Ah for the days when the bitter debates were free software vs open source, the trolls wanted to pour hot grits on Natalie Portman, and a five digit uid meant something.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          I read /. in a former life. I was there for Jon Katz’s “Voices from the Hellmouth” and the ensuing giant thread.

          Later, Katz wrote books about his dogs, and…boy did they cause controversy among those who use stockdogs. And some people mentioned “the friend who fixes my computer” etc. who “said Katz’s old stuff on bullying was awful too.” And others wisely nodded their heads: “We all knew Katz was horrible in every way.” (To be clear, that “friend” wasn’t me–I have no opinion on Katz.)

          …uh…

          …small world, I guess is my point.

  44. Mark says:

    Does triplebyte place in NYC or just SF? Their website doesn’t seem to say.

  45. Not Anon Anymore says:

    TRIGGER WARNING: Relationships

    Assume you’ve asked someone out x time ago. How long does x need to be (months, years) before you should ask them again? (maybe a more sharpened question would also have a ‘minimized effect of prior interaction’ clause, but let’s keep it simple and just ask if you need clarifications.)

    For specifics, it’s 3 different, 2 of them were only a few times as things shift at work while the other one was a co-worker but I left that place a year ago and didn’t really keep any contact.

    Maybe a better question is “how long until first impressions wear off”. I dunno.

    Sorry for a possibly annoying and flamebait-inspiring question and I know I’m grasping at straws.

    • Nornagest says:

      Depends on too much for me to say: how often you’re interacting with the person, how they’re interacting with you, how they reacted the last time, what’s changed in your life and theirs.

      Calling someone up out of the blue who’s previously turned you down is basically never a good idea no matter how long it’s been, but if circumstance has brought them back into your life a year later and they’re being at least a little bit flirty, you might be okay. If you’ve stayed in touch in the interim, depends, but if you have to ask the answer’s probably no. In any case, be careful. First impressions can sometimes prove wrong, but it’s uncommon to grow attracted to someone you previously weren’t.

      Oh, and could you drop the trigger warning, please? Best practice here is not to use them, whatever impression you may have gleaned from recent comments.

      • Not Anon Anymore says:

        Thanks!
        I don’t really have a number, so I might be forced to use the psuedo-stalkish plausible deniability way of arranging a possible but not guaranteed meeting. I didn’t keep in contact with them at all and it makes me curios if I’m even remembered at all and to what degree. I’ll might be ‘yet another name from x’ or might be ‘the police aren’t doing their job’.

        I can’t drop the trigger warning because there’s no edit button.

        • Nornagest says:

          From what I’m reading between the lines, then, it’s probably not a good idea. Engineering a meeting is similar to, or worse than, a cold call; circumstance as I described it has to actually be circumstantial. People can tell.

          Sorry.

          (You should have an edit window of one hour after initial posting, but WordPress sometimes likes to eat your session.)

    • Philosophisticat says:

      Unless there was some specific condition relevant to their rejection of you that you know has changed (for instance, they were in a relationship and now they are not), I think there’s very little chance that they will have changed their minds, and being asked again after already having been rejected is likely to make them uncomfortable around you even if you do it with maximum tact. I’m not sure if it’s that first impressions are particularly important, or if it’s just that impressions tend to be stable.

    • Lysenko says:

      Indefinite period of time. You should not ask again unless and until they have come back into your life on their own, and have seen fairly strong signals that their view of you has changed.

      You can attempt to game or manipulate this, but doing so A) runs a risk of making someone you apparently want in your life hostile, and B) my general suggestion is to reserve attempting to game or manipulate only people who you are already hostile towards. It is a hostile act and if detected will be reacted to as one.

    • LPSP says:

      “How long do first impressions wear off” is a pretty interesting question. If the impression you give someone is that you’re the kinda person that cares about first impressions, it’ll probably be a long time. If it isn’t, what first impression? Regardless, the first time you behave in a way that soundly contradicts the old impression is probably the first. Gotta ask yourself: would acting that way be contrived and unnatural for you?

  46. Anatoly says:

    Sam Harris on Trump (partial transcript of his podcast)

    I thought this was well-said, in particular:

    “And the core of this, the core of what bothers me about Trump, is the vacuousness of his speech. He will literally say the same thing three times in a row – and it was meaningless the first time. The problem is that the caricatures of him are true. He’ll say “It’s going to be amazing. You won’t believe how amazing it will be. It will be very, very amazing”. This is an intellectual problem. Smart people don’t talk this way. When people are speaking, they are thinking out loud. I am thinking out loud at this moment. If you listen to my podcast for a few hours you know how I think. So when people don’t make sense, it’s not like they are thinking brilliant incisive thoughts in the privacy of their minds, and then just sound like dummies when they open their mouths. Generally speaking, what you hear is what they’ve got. Yes, it’s true that not every smart person is a great public speaker. And you can find greater public speakers who are essentially just reading what some smarter person wrote. But it is significant, that Trump never manages to utter a single extemporaneous string of sentences that is deep, insightful or even interesting. This reveals something about him.

    Imagine you have an urn, and every time you reach into it you pull out another piece of junk – you just got broken glass, and zip-ties, and bits of bone – nothing of value. It might seem unlikely, but it’s not impossible that something of tremendous value is also in there. You could pull the Hope Diamond out of there, if you just keep fishing around long enough. That’s possible, because what you pull at each round out doesn’t really indicate what else is in there. Minds are not like that. Ideas are connected. The ability to reason well is transferable from one domain to another – and so is inability to reason. A desire not to seem incoherent is something that intelligent, well-informed people tend to have. When you hear someone speak at length on topics that are crucial to the most important enterprise they are engaging and all they’ve got is bluster, and bombast, and banality, strewn with factual errors, it is quite irrational to believe that there is a brilliant mind behind all of that just waiting to get out. Trump is not hiding his light under a bushel – he is all bushel.”

    • Psmith says:

      Speaking of.

      The Language Log links are good too.

    • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

      It provides a certain comfort that some things never change. It’s 2004 all over again. A gentry class out of touch with reality and unable or unwilling to exercise just a teeny tiny bit of empathy in order to even consider that Trump just might prioritize winning an election over sounding smart to Sam Harris. Allthough to Sam Harris, this is probably enough proof of one’s stupidity.

      • Philosophisticat says:

        It’s conceivable that Trump is a deeply thoughtful, intellectually curious person who has carefully and presciently cultivated this persona for decades before he sought public office, concealing his intellectual depth even to audiences that would respond to such depth favorably in order to preserve the purity of that image, and leaving no paper trail behind. Is that a more plausible explanation than “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…”, though?

    • E. Harding says:

      Trump’s convention speech was infinitely less vacuous than Clinton’s.

    • SilasLock says:

      I listened to this a few days ago, Sam Harris has repeated nearly the exact same speech about Trump a couple times now. It sounded so impromptu the first time I heard it, though, I giggled a little when I listened to him say the exact same thing at another outlet.

      He’s absolutely right, though. The chances that Trump is hiding a world-class genius behind all his remarks are next to none.

      • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

        World class genius? Of course not. But then, to the best of my knowledge we have never had a world class genius (say, IQ>150) as a president. My guess for Trump? About 115, ~ same as the last two presidents.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Source for ~115 for previous two?

          • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

            Sorry, ~125 rather than ~115. Those are Sailer’s rough estimates.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Ah, that’s much more believable. I’d guess that US presidents and probably a lot of national leaders in general tend to the mid 120s to mid 130s range.

          • LPSP says:

            So Bush, Obama and Trump are all about 1/100 in terms of IQ rarity? Must be something beyond that in the selection process for presidency.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            So Bush, Obama and Trump are all about 1/100 in terms of IQ rarity? Must be something beyond that in the selection process for presidency.

            Um. Yes, of course there is. Does anybody believe otherwise?

            Partial list:
            1. Desire to be President in the first place. (Rules me right out.)
            2. Conviction from early in your career that such a goal is remotely plausible.
            3. Ability to raise funds.
            4. Charisma.
            5. Height.
            6. Luck.
            7. Not yet indicted.

            Okay, I’m getting cynical. In days of yore I’d have included things like “A calling to public service” and “a spotless reputation”, but these are clearly no longer required.

          • LPSP says:

            If cynical is another word for very literal, then yes you certainly are getting cynical.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            If cynical is another word for very literal, then yes you certainly are getting cynical.

            Well, so then, what was your point? I took you to mean that such an estimate of candidate intelligence was implausible because a person with such mediocre intelligence could not possibly be selected as a candidate. My response was that intelligence was not the only, or in fact even the primary, criterion. Did I misunderstand?

        • E. Harding says:

          More likely in the upper 120s for both previous presidents.

    • Elias says:

      Am I the only one who thinks Trump seemed smarter 30 years ago? I notice that most attempts by The Internet at defending Trump involves some clip of a more unassuming and a less ostentatious Donald on some 80s talkshow. He doesn’t quite seem like the same person today as he was then.

      • Gil says:

        The idea that he’s actually at the level of his primary-type-vocabulary reading level [as an upper bound on his intelligence] is superficially comforting but has two problems. If it’s true, it reflects terribly on the vast financial and intellectual firepower that has been thus far unsuccessful at sinking his campaign.

        Second is historical precedent. He’s communicating to a different audience. Consider that in general the reading level of presidential speeches has declined consistently since the founding; likely a combination of a growing electorate and a declining level of command over the English language. Many of his rhetorical techniques match those advocated in his book. I won’t deny that talent plays a role here, but I also think it’s foolish not to believe that there isn’t any thought that goes into it.

        As far as saying that the acceptance speech was unspecific, are they comparing it to other acceptance speeches, or state of the union addresses? It seemed to me as specific as it could have been given the breadth, audience, and venue
        .

        • Winfried says:

          Someone who has come out on top of the markets, bested the GOP establishment, and runs circles around the media may not necessarily be a genius but he is certainly not a moron. Or perhaps he is just insanely lucky.

          At some point, you have to realize that he’s either a freakish outlier or that people are using proxies for competence and intelligence to judge him that are wrong, perhaps even broadly so.

      • onyomi says:

        This happened with GW Bush. There’s a pretty well-known old clip of him on Youtube debating in a Texas gubernatorial election and he seems to speak so much more knowledgeably and eloquently than he ever did as president. I think it’s a combination of: mental decline with age is more serious than people think (listen to HRC at Wellesly; it’s mostly her voice that’s changed, but really it’s a very different experience), and, more importantly, it seems like talking like this is what’s effective, arguably especially for the Red Tribe audience.

        Some have argued that Trump’s tweets, spelling errors and all, are intended to make his audience feel he’s “one of them,” and when I read them it certainly does strike me as being of the quality of “wish my old, grumpy uncle hadn’t learned how to use Facebook.”

        • LPSP says:

          On a tangential note, I’m glad to see people talking about the effect of aging on IQ. I think it’s highly underrated and misunderstood as a phenomena. That the age of our elected leaders has been growing into the elderlys non-stop should be a cause for concern. Perhaps legislation should place limits on the age of candidates, or the combined age of all officials in power?

          • Peter Lund says:

            Age limits would probably improve the general quality of politicians. So would anti-dynastic measures (you can’t be related by birth or by marriage to other politicians).

            On the other hand, Manmohan Singh seems to have done a fantastic job in India (PM from the age of 71 to 81) and Pitt the younger was an extremely competent Prime Minister of Great Britain/The United Kingdom (Chancellor of the Exchequer at 23, PM at 24).

          • Sandy says:

            Manmohan Singh was a terrible Prime Minister, although that wasn’t because of his age so much as the fact that he was largely a puppet for his party’s leadership figures. His tenure as PM was plagued by so many corruption scandals and law and order issues that by the end of it, a coalition of parochial right-wing groups including some literal fascists swept into power so decisively that Singh’s party barely managed to retain enough seats in Parliament to qualify as a national organization.

            I don’t know much about Pitt the Younger.

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      This may not apply to Trump, but repetition can be a deliberate tool in rhetoric. Sarah Palin (whom I greatly admire) used it. At first it shocked me; then I recognized her speech pattern as a common rural style for projecting one’s content through a noisy channel, as when speaking to a crowd in a wooden frame building without amplification.

      Speaking at a large rally could have the same problem. Hm, maybe that’s one reason Hillary doesn’t do large rallies; she wants to fill every moment with wonkish content, not waste time with rhetorical padding.

    • SUT says:

      Watch some videos of Angela Merkel immediately after Brexit. There is nothing reassuring – she mumbles wonkish platitudes that mean nothing to anyone who’s not an economist or market observer. What is clear to normal people by her non-verbal communication is that she has been wounded, is reeling and confused. But in public she’ll never say this – she’ll continue to to portray her mindset, in as lawyerly language as possible, as totally-knew-this-was-gonna-happen with a can’-t-lose-plan. This dissonance drives people nuts.

      Moreover, this isn’t just a problem for the German PM, but a general attitude that invaded EU-type politics. It says “Let the grown-ups handle this, all you need to know is grandma is in heaven now and is very happy”, to which people keep asking, if that’s true, and this a good thing, why are the grownups acting upset?

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        @ SUT

        Speaking of possible rule tweaks, here’s one that would not require any programming other than adding a few more words to WordPress’s existing censor list: ie fnords, and personal insults below PhD reading level.

        With programming, a line could be drawn between, say, 1 use of a fnord per 140 characters … vs 2 per 140. But no mercy toward two or more fnords in the same sentence referring to the same thing. And extra penalties for inserting a neutral word between two fnords, as in ‘mumbles wonkish platitudes’.

    • Phil says:

      http://gizmodo.com/has-donald-trump-ever-used-a-computer-1762376695

      beyond the sort of hilarious implication of this article that you might not be qualified to be president unless you’re addled with internet addiction

      in the photo, I see a desk covered with reading material

      as well as what appear to be stacks of books in the background of his office

      • The Nybbler says:

        I wonder if one of Trump’s staffers suggested this story. It’s so obviously a nothing that it appears to have been created just to talk about Trump. I mean, who cares if Trump uses a computer? I’m sure as head of the various Trump organizations he has people for all the important things most of us use a computer for, and if he becomes President he’ll still have people for that.

    • LPSP says:

      The incognisant smugness of that excerpt is killing me. I’ve had people try to insult me by calling me an IQ snob, and there is a grain of truth in that (a grain, no more), and I can’t stand the idea that because Trump is “talking less good!” than the author would have it, he is deeply wrong as a human and must never be respected. It’s that exact attitude that leads people to flock to Trump.

      Nevermind the insubstantiated claim that smart thought ==> smart words every time. If you were ever a teenager, you know that’s not always true.

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        Trump is making mistakes in fourth grade level grammar — which a rich family would use at home, and normally a child would pick up proper usage from family. Also he went to good (Ivy?) schools. If he was slipping into such bad grammar in his business dealings, he would have hired people to handle that problem.

        So his tweet grammar isn’t just a grammar problem, it’s a judgement problem: sending tweets out without the usual editing.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          You’re assuming it’s a problem rather than a strategy.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            Perhaps he deliberately gave his editor the day off, or his grammar is really normal and he deliberately composed the bad grammar? Or it was normal til now, but he recently had a stroke (or something), perhaps from the strain of the campaign.

  47. Anon. says:

    Seriously people. Just stop feeding the trolls, and they will stop coming. Don’t reply when you are provoked or outraged or incensed, that is what they are looking for. Just don’t take the bait.

  48. Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

    Question: The crown I got on my tooth a little over a year ago cracked over the weekend.

    I’ve moved since getting the crown, so the dentist where I got it at is about 2 hours away. I went to a local dentist to see about getting my crown replaced and they said that my insurance won’t pay for the replacement, so I would have to pay over $1,000 out of pocket.

    I could see about driving the 2 hours to go to the original dentist, but now that I think about it, this is at least the 3rd or 4th time that this crown has broken and the original dentist has had to replace it repeatedly.

    Should I pay the out of pocket expense for (hopefully) a more robust crown, or try to get it replaced for free at the original dentist? I’m leaning towards just coughing up the $1,000 so that I don’t have to worry about my crown breaking (AGAIN) but I don’t feel like shelling over $1,000.

    Also, the new dentist at the local place is really hot.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Ask the new dentist out on a date, see if you can get to the point where s/he’ll give you discounts before the inevitable breakup? (It’s true, relationships based on tooth pain never last)

  49. estelendur says:

    Would anyone be interested in selling me, like, three MealSquares? I think that would be a sufficient quantity for me to figure out if they’re a viable food source, but not so many that I’d waste a large portion if I don’t like them. The sample pack of 10 would be far too many for me to waste…

    I’m in Southeast Michigan, so anyone local to me could do an in-person exchange.

  50. Corey says:

    An interesting-to-me bit of US election nerdery that seems to not be widely known, given typical treatments of the topic. Apologies if this is old hat here.

    It’s possible to upper-bound how much impersonation of voters is happening, even in the absence of any ID requirements.

    The key info that makes it possible: the list of which registrations were issued ballots is public record. For example, here’s the Mayor of Raleigh’s registration, and this lists all elections in which she voted (that is, elections in which a ballot was issued in her name). (I only have detailed knowledge of NC, but I believe this is true in all US jurisdictions).

    So let’s say, back when Donald Duck was a registered Wake County voter, someone else came to his polling place, then presented themselves with Mr. Duck’s name and address (and the poll-workers were not familiar with Mr. Duck). One of the following would happen:

    A) Mr. Duck has already voted, absentee, early, or earlier that day. His Authorization To Vote form is not present, poll-workers determine he’s listed as already voted. He either goes away, or votes a provisional ballot, and the people downtown sort it out (my guess: if the earlier voter was absentee, un-count that absentee ballot and count the provisional; if on election day, no way to un-count that ballot so they’d likely dump the provisional).

    B) Mr. Duck has not yet voted but comes in later that day. In that case a mirror situation of A ensues.

    C) Mr. Duck does not vote in that election. In that case he will be listed on the site above as having voted, even though he has not.

    (Aside: By far the most common cause of A/B is Jr/Sr living at the same address. If I ever get elected king I will outlaw that – want to live with a same-named parent? Sorry, someone needs to change their name.)

    If you take the total occurrences of situations A & B, then do some random sampling to establish an upper bound on situation C, that’s an upper bound on the impersonations from that election.

    • Jill says:

      We have almost no problem with voter fraud currently in the U.S. Laws about it that states make, have been made for the purpose of discriminating against minorities and the poor.

      • cassander says:

        >We have almost no problem with voter fraud currently in the U.S.

        And you know that…..how? Because people don’t get prosecuted very often? By that logic, we also have basically no problem with politicians getting bribed or rape on college campuses, end of discussion.

        How could you catch them, when there are basically no systems in place designed to catch them, and the people in charge of running those systems are the ones that win the elections?

        • Corey says:

          And you know that…..how?

          Check the parent post?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Your parent post only speaks to the problem of voters voting using someone else’s credentials. They do not speak to the problem of entirely ineligible voters (note that one of the laws struck down recently banned same-day registration). Also you kind of glossed over situation C (which you’d get with Chicago-style graveyard voting).

            Also, no one’s actually done that study, right?

          • Corey says:

            @Nybbler: So find the people on the “I voted” list who are dead and/or otherwise ineligible.

            People have done the studies, anytime you see someone citing impersonation rates on the order of 0.00015% it comes from one. And anyone can verify or falsify them, with an admittedly large amount of footwork.

            Same-day registration (at least in Best Carolina) only applied to early voting, which legally is a form of absentee voting, which has trackable ballots that can be “un-counted”. So if someone was later found to be ineliglble, un-count their ballot and void their registration (prosecuting if you can be arsed).

        • Jill says:

          Some of these red states also did things like bring the number of polling places down from 400 to 60. I wonder what the excuse for doing that is. It certainly can’t be to protect against voter fraud. Or perhaps they don’t need any excuse, as their having done this is probably not reported in Right Wing media.

          http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-03-24/arizona-democrats-say-long-poll-lines-suppressed-vote

          • Corey says:

            Budgets, I imagine. Though purely-partisan shenanigans (e.g. gerrymandering, or pulling down overall turnout) are usually considered legal.
            It’s one of a general class of problems stemming from elected officials making election law, though I don’t have any better ideas that preserve small-d-democratic legitimacy.

          • Anonymous says:

            You really never bothered to read the DNC email dump, did you?

          • Paul says:

            No one read the 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments. It’s an unreasonable thing to ask.

          • Nornagest says:

            Comes out to… what, about 34 open threads?

            Okay, I guess that’s a lot.

          • SilasLock says:

            @ Paul

            Haha, I tried reading, like, 4.

            Then I gave up. Finding anything interesting in that mess is like searching for a needle in a haystack. =P

          • Sandy says:

            I think Jill’s belief that we are living in a hard-right reactionary state where left-wingers only have a small amount of power or influence over society bears no resemblance to reality at all, but the constant insults in every thread are just mean.

          • SilasLock says:

            @ Anonymous

            Jill is fairly stupid or unreflective.

            That’s really not very kind. = /

            I rather like Jill. You’re free to disagree, but it’s not okay to call people stupid and unreflective.

          • Fred says:

            Scott values Jill and wishes you would go away. Funny, eh?

          • Nornagest says:

            Thirded. I find her assumptions frustrating, but that’s no excuse for this Mean Girls shit.

            Comments like Fred’s are no better, of course.

          • That email dump…. how sure are we that some of the emails weren’t modified?

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Nornagest
            Thirded …. no excuse for this Mean Girls shit.

            Fourthed.

            Jill, do you use Chrome? There’s now an SSC feature to block a poster for current and future threads. Aka ‘blacklist’, ‘killfile’, etc.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Fifthed, for what it’s worth.

        • meyerkev248 says:

          Math.

          Defining voter fraud as “Person X walks up to Polling Place P and votes using Person Y’s ballot” (as opposed to the other higher-level forms of voter fraud), it just doesn’t scale.

          Because you walk up, stand in line, pick a name (For purposes of arguments, let’s assume 0 collisions), hope that the 82-year-old lady running the polling place doesn’t know that person*, then drive to the next place.

          And if there’s any lines at all, you’re fairly hard-capped at what? 10, maybe 15 votes?

          Obama won Ohio by 160,000 votes in 2012. If 11-16,000 people were running around voting in other people’s names, my prior is that we’d have heard.

          Any election where in-person voter fraud can swing the election is one in which the 82-year-old busybodies know everybody in town and are actually an effective deterrent.

          Is there more voter fraud than commonly stated? Duh, of course. We have next to no way to detect it.

          Is it enough to swing elections? No, I don’t think so.

          * And yes, it’s going to be an 82-year-old retired lady. Or possibly a college student, but most people that can and will take off a random Tuesday to go sit in a bingo hall for 16 hours straight are retired.

          /Speaking from experience because I worked an election once.

          • Corey says:

            We have next to no way to detect it.

            Can you check the parent post of this subthread and enlighten us all as to why it’s wrong? That’s the entire reason I posted it, is approximately everyone thinks impersonation is undetectable, and it plainly isn’t.

            ETA: Don’t want to sound too angry there – I’m glad you touched on the reason direct-record voting machines are evil (hacking can change many more votes than the people involved).

          • meyerkev248 says:

            Basically, based on how we did elections back in my state, it’s fairly trivial to avoid A at the minimum.

            The only way we have of detecting this stuff is “The 82-year-old lady knows Bob Loblaw and knows you’re not him”.

            Voter ID is unconstitutional (or at least, heavily restricted), and even if you DO get caught, it’s not like we have cops at the polling places so you can run away pretty easily. Or talk your way out of it. We had a husband-wife pair where we accidentally gave the husband the wife’s ballot and then fixed it by giving her his when she came in. Mistakes happen.

            Which means you’re basically hoping you can find a name in the binder that hasn’t been checked off yet. Since it’s a binder that you can read over the shoulder of the person in front of you…

            So on the off-chance we get an intersection, they leave, nothing happens, we’re good. And we’re not going to arrest the actual Bob Loblaw for trying to vote as Bob Loblaw and thanks to “No voter ID”, that would be darn hard to catch the person in the case of B.

            So A is trivial to avoid.
            You won’t catch B.
            So the only thing you might check is C, and honestly WHO checks those websites?

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ meyerkev248
            And if there’s any lines at all, you’re fairly hard-capped at what? 10, maybe 15 votes?

            Yep. And if you try to expand the effect by hiring other people to do the impersonations, how long till one of them talks?

          • Jaskologist says:

            @houseboatonstyx

            Hey, the cooping gangs got away with it when they killed Edward Allan Poe.

            (Maybe)

        • Nicholas says:

          It turns out that, for in example, the election of John Kennedy, the simplest form of voter fraud is not to fraudulently cast votes, but to fraudulently count votes. I don’t need to send people in to the polling place at all to commit voter fraud, I just bribe a few polling places to misreport their numbers. Which is part of why people like Jill are so suspect of voter registration laws: they don’t attack the problem where it actually exists, and thus is either not very good, or very good at doing something not advertised.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Do you have a source for counting being significant in that election?
            A recount in Chicago discovered no counting fraud. The places in Texas that reported more votes than voters had some kind of fraud. I don’t know if they were subject to recount, but I would guess that they had fabricated the ballots before counting them, which is probably also what happened in Chicago (and downstate).

          • Nicholas says:

            Sure, but you don’t do that by sending confederates into the polls one at a time either: You just get a vote counter to grab a binder, grab a stack of blank ballots, and start attaching names of people who didn’t vote to ballots for your candidate.
            Basically we’re trying to solve the problem by giving the watchmen more power, and ignoring that it’s a who watches the watchmen problem.

      • Corey says:

        for the purpose of discriminating against minorities

        I’m kind of surprised my State legislature here in Best Carolina went to so little trouble to hide that, per the recent 4th Circuit ruling.

        • Agronomous says:

          How are they going to hide that? The 4th Circuit can read minds. (As can the Supreme Court, when they found animus in the Defense of Marriage Act; Bill Clinton was just faking liking LGBT people.)

          • Corey says:

            I’m well aware people think accusations of racial animus are overblown, and in fact I used to think these laws were motivated by anti-Democrat sentiment instead of anti-black. Doesn’t mean they’re never true though, and in this case we have:

            – Draft voter ID legislation had already been introduced
            – General Assembly asks for racial breakdown on early-voting participation the day after the Shelby County SCOTUS decision invalidates the need for Federal preclearance
            – Immediately upon receiving this data, GA amends bill to remove those parts of early voting
            – GA requests data on racial breakdown of ID holdings
            – Immediately upon receipt of this data, GA amends bill to remove those IDs from the acceptable list

            To be fair, they also ruled the disparate impact meant intent didn’t matter, but given this information, a ruling that blacks were actually being targeted isn’t crazy.

            As to how to hide it, they could have went for partisan or socioeconomic-broken-down data, sent an intern to research off the books, or just not have done that…

    • Douglas Knight says:

      It sounds like you are suggesting that voter fraud consists of people choosing a voter at random and trying to impersonate him. About half of registered voters vote, so half of attempted impersonations result in collisions.

      That does not seem to me a reasonable suggestion. Surely impersonators choose subjects they think unlikely to vote. Perhaps their neighbors, although that risks recognition by the poll workers. Or perhaps their dead parents.

      • Corey says:

        Doesn’t keep the impersonated from showing up on the “I Voted” list. Admittedly that doesn’t prevent the impersonation before the fact (only the collisions do), but it DOES make it detectable afterwards.
        It’s a common objection of “how can we possibly know voter fraud is rare?” that I’m trying to address. To be fair, “ID requirements are causing more problems than they solve” falls out from the rarity, but I’m trying _not_ to argue that for mind-killing reasons.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          You still haven’t said how you detect case C. I guess you mean to ask people whether they voted? I suppose that would work as long as you know the baseline of how likely people are to falsely report having voted (easy enough to determine by polling those without recorded votes), and that the choice of targets does not correlate with this rate. (Which may well be true, though may well be false.)

          • Corey says:

            Right. The basic idea would be to select a sufficient number of people from the I Voted list using a sufficiently random method (ask someone who understands statistics better than I what these numbers are), then go call/write/knock on doors asking those people if they really voted.
            My guess is the biggest error source will be people not remembering or misremembering (mostly if you tried this in smaller non-Presidential elections).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The absence of Case C as a means of winning an election is detectable in the absence of ANY detection of case C.

            In order to actually swing an election at the state level with in-person voter fraud, the number of in-person frauds would be massive. You really wouldn’t be able to keep a secret that large. You would need 10s of thousands of in-person votes cast. If the fraud were on that level we would detect many actual cases of it.

            And if you think to get around that issue by saying that some states have had results that were closer, this makes the issue bigger (not smaller) as it means you aren’t making sure that you carry one particular race or state, but doing it in lots of states at a lower level, which amounts to the same level of in-person fraud or even more.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            No, wait, that’s wrong. You need to know the number of people who falsely report not voting, which is probably much smaller than the number of people who falsely report voting. I’d guess 1% and 10%. But that 1% should swamp the fraud, so there’s no way to detect it. I suppose you could look at whether the proportion of people claiming not to have voted when their vote was recorded will vary from state to state and precinct to precinct.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Douglas Knight:
            Eligible voter participation rates in presidential years run between 50% and 60%, but registered voter turnout is around 90%.

            Your supposition that you can swing an election (that is statewide in a presidential year) with an undetectable amount of in-person voter fraud doesn’t seem possible in the face of those participation rates.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            I concede that my 50% is too low. I think 80% is more accurate for presidential elections. There is wide variation, I think based on method, but also based on disagreements about numbers which should be canonical, like number of ballots cast. The 90% figure is based on polling six months later of who claims to have been registered.

            I am surprised that the number of votes reported to the census is only 1% higher than the number of ballots counted. I had not previously believed in fabricated ballots, but I find that fairly convincing evidence. But not necessarily in-person fraud.

      • Agronomous says:

        Maybe we could invert the “photo ID” requirement:

        When someone shows up to vote and signs the rolls (or however your jurisdiction does it), take a digital photograph of that person. Then make the digital photographs available however you already make the list of those who voted available.

        I can’t see any legal argument against this. The government already demands a bunch of info about you (address, I think age) before you can vote; your image shouldn’t be any different.

        (Incidentally, I’m not saying impersonation fraud is a significant part of vote fraud, just that this would appear to be a solution to it. I’m a lot more concerned about absentee ballots, and people “helping” voters fill them out.)

        • HeelBearCub says:

          I’m not necessarily arguing against it, but that could look, in practice, a lot like voter intimidation.

  51. Jill says:

    Interesting article here about research about the gender pay gap. I don’t know why people see vox as liberal biased. This article is about the data found and does not follow the most common liberal narrative. Ezra Klein who runs vox, is pretty much a number cruncher, so I don’t find the bias to be strong at all, although it is present, and you can tell he’s for Hillary and aghast about Trump. But so are many Republicans.

    Compared to Fox News, or Huffington Post, this publication seems to me to be a pretty honest attempt to look at facts, for the most part.

    I know though, that we live in tribal polarized times. It doesn’t matter WHAT is said, or whether it is true or false. All that matters is WHO said it, and WHICH TRIBE your tribe THINKS that source represents. But facts that do not follow the Red Tribe narrative are generally omitted from the publications that Red Tribers read. So will Red Tribers be forever closed to those facts because they won’t ever read the publications that report them? Is reading a vox article, for a Red triber, like reading about Satanism to a fundamentalist Christian? Or what?

    http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explained-real

    • Nornagest says:

      Bias is invisible from the inside. That’s what makes it bias rather than disingenuousness. You cannot fight your own bias by trying to counter it where you see it, because the only bias you’ll ever see directly belongs to other people.

      With that in mind, if you’re looking at Vox and seeing a little bias, how much do you think others who don’t share your assumptions will see?

      Aside from that, I think everything I already said still applies.

      • Jill says:

        If Right Wingers only check facts using Right Wing sources, and Left Wingers only check facts using non-Right Wing sources, then that leaves us with a ton of polarization and no agreement, even on basic facts that do exist in the real world.

        Of course, it’s easy to think that polarization is not a significant problem at all, if you never venture outside of your own bubble, and/or if you see people as little atoms that don’t need to have anything to do with one another.

        I don’t exactly live in a bubble, at least not as much as Left Wing or Right Wing folks I am exposed to. I do hold some positions that are not typical of the Left Wing. But there sometimes does not seem to by ANY middle ground where folks of both sides are willing to meet and cooperate toward common goals, or even discuss doing so.

        • E. Harding says:

          “I do hold some positions that are not typical of the Left Wing.”

          -Name three.

        • Nornagest says:

          If Right Wingers only check facts using Right Wing sources, and Left Wingers only check facts using non-Right Wing sources, then that leaves us with a ton of polarization and no agreement, even on basic facts that do exist in the real world.

          It is not “Right Wing sources” and “non-Right Wing sources”. There are all sorts of editorial slants in the wild: Fox News is mainstream right; CNN is mainstream left; Reason is libertarian; Jacobin is socialist; Jezebel is third-wave feminist; Vox is Left populist with a side of identity politics. The more agreement you can find on a topic across sources with different slants, the better the chance it won’t go away when you stop believing in it.

          Truthfully, though, I’d suggest not fact-checking against news media at all, if you can avoid it. News media is in the business of manufacturing narratives, so when you’re looking at it you always need to ask yourself why something’s being reported.

          • E. Harding says:

            “populist”? All their editors voted for Her in the primary, I think.

          • Nornagest says:

            Well, I’d also accept “Left identitarian with a side of populism”, though I haven’t read it much since election season started. Main thing I was trying to get across is that it shows a mix of the class priorities typical of the populist left and the social-justice angle typical of the identitarian left.

          • FrogOfWar says:

            With which portion of the left do Vox’s “class priorities” conflict in a populist manner?

            I’d call them the technocratic (or neoliberal) left with a side of of identarianism. And that’s basically the opposite of populist left, though it depends who you read. The editors (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Sarah Kliff) along with the old wonkbloggers (Timothy Lee and Dylan Matthews) are definitely in this camp. Some younger writers less so.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Jill – “If Right Wingers only check facts using Right Wing sources, and Left Wingers only check facts using non-Right Wing sources, then that leaves us with a ton of polarization and no agreement, even on basic facts that do exist in the real world.”

          Outgroup media are interesting when they’re talking about the inner workings of their ingroup/my outgroup, because they have more information and charity for such views than I do. When out-group media are talking about my in-group/their out-group, they’re interesting when they say something that obviously contradicts their usual editorial biases; ie, a Vox article about how the GOP is getting it right, or a Breitbart article about how the Democratic candidate is unusually awesome.

          Ingroup media are pretty much the reverse; they’re interesting when they report on in-group things, and most interesting when they go counter to the in-group biases. Their thoughts on the outgroup are unlikely to be useful.

          All these examples are extremely rare; all but a vanishingly small minority of media output is complete garbage. I get my news from places like this one, where multiple people can argue publicly over what a specific event means, present evidence and counter bad arguments. Even what I call good content above is useful primarily as a tentative picture of what the prevailing tribal mood looks like. I have never found actual decisive, argument-ending information in any media source ever, nor do I expect to. Trying to do so is like searching for health food in a sewer.

    • SilasLock says:

      I think the Vox piece might still be hard to read for right-wingers. Factually, I think it’s 100% correct, but the tone and phrasing presumes that solving the wage gap is an admirable goal. But for many people on the right, achieving group-based equity isn’t really all that important. They tend to be more atomistic, and the idea of lumping people into different ethnicities, genders, and other demographic groups so that we can compare their success rate appears silly.

      I’m on the left and more comfortable with this kind of language (though not much, I’m a special leftist =P ), but it could be a barrier to different political tribes talking to each other.

      Can any right-leaning SSC readers confirm or deny? I’m curious how the tribal and cultural aspects of Vox’s presentation affected the delivery of the piece.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        I’m not right-tribe, but you’re broadly correct as far as I go.

        It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the language, however, it’s that I don’t see equality-of-outcome across any way of dividing the population as a morally meaningful goal.

        I feel like “group justice” was originally built on a framework I could respect – that individuals should, on an individual basis, be treated justly, and some groups of individuals are treated, on an individual basis, unjustly.

        And this edifice of “group justice” morality was built on this idea of groups-of-individuals thing, but then Marxists, at some point, kicked the “individual” element out, and now it’s this free-floating monstrosity; it looks like a paperclip maximizer to me, which is concerned, not with people, but with how numbers stack up against one another.

      • cassander says:

        They flat out say that the “women make 79 cents for every dollar a man makes ” is “an accurate statistic, ” which it is not. There is absolutely nothing in here that goes against common narrative.

        The assertion that Ezra klein is a number cruncher is pretty rich. Klein has built a career pretending to be John Lyman, he isn’t. Articles on vox are consistently terrible and misleading, even when they aren’t completely wrong and forced to retract, particularly on anything foreign policy related. The bias can be cut with a knife.

        • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

          As someone who is extremely annoyed with the usual reporting on the gender wage gap, I was pleasantly surprised by the article and strongly disagree that it did not go against common narrative.

          Admittedly, it’s premise is that the gender pay gap is a bad thing, which I guess is the core of the narrative, but the analysis and suggestions were different.
          Some examples:

          Most strikingly, somebody argued *against* government intervention. What is the last time a leftist journal did that?

          While not explicitly, the article attributed most of the gap not to outright discrimination and hatred of women, but to factors that affect women disproportionately, namely punishment of part time work.

          While it was only an aside, Klein even mentioned that taking part time work hurt men more than women. In fact, this is actually the most surprising part, usually discrimination against men is not acknowledged because it’s not systematic or something.

          • SilasLock says:

            Agreed, it was kind of refreshing.

          • cassander says:

            It goes against some interventions, but no all as for outright discrimination vs. Disproportionate effect distinction is one increasingly being lost. The latter had long been accepted as sufficient to prove “discrimination” in law, and while I’ve never heard someone one use the term structural sexism, the concept applies in many feminist narratives. The story told here is more nuanced than the campaign slogan, (true of almost any story) but doesn’t really challenge it.

          • DrBeat says:

            It is only “punishment of part time work” if you think it is unfair punishment to only be paid for the hours you actually worked.

            People who think there is a wage gap (there isn’t, it is a lie, it is pushed by liars) seem to believe that male employees are there to provide value to the employer, but employers are there to provide value for female employees. This article is still hopelessly mired in sexist bias that says only women experience the world and anything that does not seem to pay proper symbolic tribute to the concept of womanhood must be changed by enlisting the agency of men until it honors women.

          • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

            Nobody is suggesting that people be paid for hours they did not work, that’s a pretty weak strawman.

            The issue is that even when people return after they took some time off, they receive less pay. Whether that’s fair or unfair everybody has to decide for themselves, but as the article mentioned, it *is* unfair that men take a bigger pay cut for part time work than women.

            Please quote a passage where Klein demanded that specifically men act for the benefit of women. The parts I mentioned suggest a very different tone, but maybe I missed something.

          • gbdub says:

            “Nobody is suggesting that people be paid for hours they did not work, that’s a pretty weak strawman.”

            What about mandatory paid maternity leave? Many people are suggesting that.

            And by lumping everyone who works more than 35 hrs/wk into the same “full time” bucket, as the common 79 cents for every dollar argument does, you’re assuming that 45 hrs/wk should get the same pay as the 35 hrs/wk – again, that’s pretty much arguing for paying people for hours they don’t work.

            As far as people coming back and still making less – they have less experience. In the time it takes them to get back “up to speed” they are less productive. Even without that, the fair comparison would be to people who have the same years of full-time experience.

            Also raises tend to be allocated on a percentage basis, so there’s something of a compound interest effect.

          • Richard says:

            @Solipsitic: FYI, it’s Sarah Kliff who wrote the article, not Ezra Klein. I wouldn’t nitpick this every time, but when it’s an article about the gender wage gap, it feels especially biting to see a man get the credit for a woman’s work.

        • Cadie says:

          How is it not an accurate statistic (not counting rounding errors)? It’s a very misleading statistic especially when stated out of context, but for what it actually is – a raw earnings comparison without regard to hours worked, the job tasks and requirements, etc. – it’s true.

          • cassander says:

            when talking in the plural, it’s not wrong, just misleading. When you jump to the singular, which they did, you’re saying something entirely different, that individual women get paid less (for the same job added implicitly).

      • Sandy says:

        For me, it’s not so much that the tone and phrasing presumes solving the wage gap is an admirable goal as that it presumes that if the nature of a job requires long, inflexible hours with a large degree of personal involvement and this nature causes women to earn less, then the job must be fundamentally restructured so that women don’t earn less. In short, it presumes solving the wage gap for professions like law is a realistic goal.

        The article cites pharmacies and primary care doctors as jobs where the wage gap has been shortened because large organizations caused worker fungibility, so who worked how many hours became less important. But banking and legal work aren’t like that. Bankers and lawyers cultivate relationships with clients, they keep a list of these clients, and they spend time understanding the in-and-outs of their clients’ work and portfolios. Perhaps low-level analysts and associates straight out of grad school are fungible, but partners aren’t, and the amount of experience and kind of clients you have creates an intense competition for talent at the highest levels of the profession. And there isn’t a steady or predictable supply of work in these jobs. Sometimes you work long, inflexible hours because the market is so crappy that you have to.

        • Richard says:

          Control-f bankers:

          “There will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons, and the US secretary of state,” Goldin says. “That said, the list of positions that can be changed is considerable.”

          The things you say are exceptions are explicitly listed by the article as exceptions. Like you say, they can be fungible at lower levels, and the article encourages that. The thing you say the article is ignoring is exactly what the article says.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I’m libertarian, which some people might consider to be right-leaning. I don’t know if it’s 100% correct, but the general idea seems to be that the largest part of the wage gap is that women are working less because they have other commitments — namely, children. That’s all fine (if true). It’s a bit annoying in the implication that this shouldn’t cause a wage gap, that it’s wrong to “disproportionately” (to what?) reward those who work the longest and least-flexible hours. My feeling is that once you’ve demonstrated that the gap is due to women providing less value for their employers, it’s time to pronounce it a non-problem and go home.

        Also a minor point, but it kind of stuck out:

        If the problem were that women aren’t competitive, it couldn’t address why the wage gap is smallest when women are youngest. It’s not as if women would lose their negotiating skills over time.

        Well, no, but they have a lot more to negotiate with later in their career. I imagine to a big firm, one “MBA Graduate, Harvard, GPA 3.9” is worth about the same as another. But someone with actual experience can point to their accomplishments in the negotiation phase.

      • gbdub says:

        “Achieving group-based equity isn’t really all that important” – I don’t think that’s really true. Generally conservatives would agree that fair pay is a good thing. The objection is the assumption that any wage gap is prima facie unfair, rather than perhaps created by legitimate reasons.

        As a reddish gray who is mostly pro-choice, to me the “having babies causes wage gap, therefore we need to modify the economy so it’s easier to have babies and work full time” is unconvincing. Having babies is a choice. If you choose to have babies, you, not your employer or coworkers who get no benefit from you having babies, should bear the costs of having babies. One of those costs is that you can’t be as dedicated to your career. Yeah, others might make more money, but they miss out on having babies. They have to live with that choice, you should live with yours.

        I also find it interesting that science fields have the lowest pay gap, but it’s always STEM that gets treated as a boys’ club needing affirmative action and special programs for women.

        Anyway to answer Jill’s larger point, it’s not necessarily the facts that make Vox (or anyone else) biased, it’s the presentation and conclusions they draw. It’s very unlikely a conservative would draw the same conclusions that Vox did there, even if they presented the same facts.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I also find it interesting that science fields have the lowest pay gap, but it’s always STEM that gets treated as a boys’ club needing affirmative action and special programs for women.

          In STEM (especially the ‘TE’) there’s a smaller pay gap but fewer women in the field. In business there’s more women in the field but a larger pay gap.

          • SilasLock says:

            Tech is the biggest problem, in my opinion.

            There are convincing arguments for why the gender ratios in a lot of fields are the way they are; physics and engineering, for example, require the ability to manipulate objects in your head, and the average woman is slightly less capable of performing mental rotations than the average man. Furthermore, they both draw from the right end of the IQ distribution, and since women have a standard deviation that is one point smaller it makes sense to see fewer in those fields. The same could be said for fields like chemistry.

            But tech has no excuse. Coding doesn’t require visual-spatial skills, it’s mathematics focused (and women and men score about equally there, with minor advantages and disadvantages in certain subtests), and it’s far easier to learn to code in, say, c# than it is to solve basic physics problems. It’s also a relatively new field, meaning we should expect to see few cultural implications for being a woman in tech.

            And yet we do. A lot of my female friends have told me they felt like coding was a “guy thing” and avoided comp sci classes, despite being delightfully intelligent people. I don’t think the problem is discrimination in the tech industry (though for certain companies sexist attitudes are very real, it varies a lot by whom you’re working with), and I’m willing to bet if we removed some of the cultural stigma and taught computer science a little earlier in our curriculum we would see much higher female employment in the tech sector.

            I’m not usually the sort of person who cares that much about having “appropriate representation” of different groups of people in a field, but from my personal experience tech has a long way to go before I’m satisfied.

          • gbdub says:

            But if STEM was more sexist, which is the assumed cause of underrepresentation, why wouldn’t it also have a larger pay gap? Or if sexism causes underrepresentation, why are there more women in the field with more sexist pay scales? What’s the mechanism for STEM sexists being sexist differently from MBA sexists?

            The obvious answer would be “there’s probably more going on” – which would imply that we ought to be careful assuming “zero gap” is really the ideal state.

          • Corey says:

            @SIlasLock:

            But [programming] has no excuse.

            I think at this point a lot of it is just self-perpetuating – women stay out because there aren’t a lot of women. Nobody wants to be the only A in an all-B group if they can avoid it.

            Also there’s a lot of, for lack of my knowledge of a better or more accurate term, “bro” culture (whether that’s a cause or effect of few women, I don’t know).

          • The Nybbler says:

            Tech doesn’t need an “excuse”. The ratios are what they are, despite decades of attempting to shift them. Unless you believe one of the sillier narratives (which involve men in tech being worse in their treatment of women than the literal Mad Men), those in tech aren’t to blame for the gender ratio.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @TheNybbler

            It is possible (and I think highly likely) that men in tech don’t in general make any conscious decisions to discourage women joining, but nevertheless men (and women) in tech have a culture that causes marginal women to go into other fields. (To clarify, my “highly likely” comment only refers to the first part. I am undecided on the causes of the gender imbalance in tech).

          • SilasLock says:

            @ The Nybbler

            Unless you believe one of the sillier narratives (which involve men in tech being worse in their treatment of women than the literal Mad Men), those in tech aren’t to blame for the gender ratio.

            I don’t think people in tech are to blame! Mate, I’m usually the sort of guy who gets annoyed at those who claim that the tech industry is super sexist. Most of my friends are in tech, and they’re anything but. It’s a silly narrative and it’s insulting to a lot of good people. =)

            Granted, there are specific companies where women experience discrimination, but they’re the minority and I certainly don’t think it’s the reason for the gender ratio. Scott’s posted about this before, the number of women who take the AP comp sci test is about the same as those who go into the industry. That seems to suggest that whatever causes the gender ratio, it happens earlier in life.

            My position is that a lot of women who ordinarily would love programming (or other tech subfields) just weren’t introduced to programming early enough, and avoided it because it was considered a “guy thing”. That’s what my experience has taught me, at least.

            The ratios are what they are, despite decades of attempting to shift them.

            I don’t think people have tried all that hard. The big tech giants haven’t been around for too long, and efforts actively trying to include women have been around for even less time. I’m perfectly willing to let the ratios be what they are in another 30 years or so. But for now I’m dissatisfied.

          • Artificirius says:

            How plausible do we rate the possibility that the stories that emerge about how sinisterly and unrelentingly hostile and sexist the world in general, and tech in this particular case, towards women might explain the reluctance of women to enter the field?

          • Jill says:

            Interesting how Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the most sexist ageist place in the U. S. I wonder why.

          • SilasLock says:

            @ Jill

            I don’t think it is. The deep south is probably a better culprit for that, in my humble experience silicon valley tends to be pretty forward-thinking.

          • Nornagest says:

            Some sour grapes, some intra-tribal conflict (it’s a fairly Blue place, but an unusual shade of Blue), and more than a bit of “neeeeeeeerds”.

            “Ageist” might have more of a leg to stand on than “sexist”, though moreso in the startup scene than in established companies. The startup scene is looking for people with a lot of energy and not a lot of responsibilities, the better to rope them into 14-hour days with (or, if you’re not lucky, without) the promise of an equity payout, and that doesn’t play nice with the lives of most people over 30.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I don’t think people have tried all that hard. The big tech giants haven’t been around for too long, and efforts actively trying to include women have been around for even less time.

            Before there were FANG, there were big tech companies. Not as big, maybe, but big. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, SGI, DEC, Tektronics, Digital Research, etc.

            And there were plenty of efforts done in the 1980s. I remember women-only computer classes and workshops and the like. The push has been going on for a long time.

            @Artificirius:

            I used to regard the “SJWs are scaring women out of tech” as just a cheap shot. But I’ve seen actual SJWs (people I at least somewhat know, not internet randos) say they advised female relatives to avoid the field because of the “abuse” (“microaggressions”) they put up with. And of course all the stories in the press can’t help. So there’s probably some such effect, but I don’t think it’s very large as the gap has existed for longer than the SJWs and the narrative have.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ SilasLock

            Coding doesn’t require visual-spatial skills, it’s mathematics focused

            What? I would like to disagree. I find coding very visual-spatial (especially the manipulating the data structures parts) and I don’t see much in common with maths.

          • SilasLock says:

            @ Lumifer

            What? I would like to disagree. I find coding very visual-spatial (especially the manipulating the data structures parts) and I don’t see much in common with maths.

            Maybe it’s just me then? I dunno, maybe we all experience coding differently.

          • SilasLock: “physics and engineering, for example, require the ability to manipulate objects in your head,”

            Is this true of all of physics and engineering?

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “Maybe it’s just me then? I dunno, maybe we all experience coding differently.”

            CRUD coding is closer to learning a new language than it is to math. Writing an AVL tree is more along the lines of a mental rotation task (kinda literally, actually).

          • Jill: “Interesting how Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the most sexist ageist place in the U. S. I wonder why.”

            Possibly because the people who are most likely to talk about sexism and ageism are also likely to work in IT, so that’s the industry they talk about.

            (I’m not sure my premise is correct. Thoughts?)

          • Artificirius says:

            Jill: “Interesting how Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the most sexist ageist place in the U. S. I wonder why.”

            Possibly because the people who are most likely to talk about sexism and ageism are also likely to work in IT, so that’s the industry they talk about.

            (I’m not sure my premise is correct. Thoughts?)

            I read, some time ago, that people who do not extend benevolent sexism towards women are views, by men and women both, as engaging in hostile sexism. If correct, I think this is part of the issue.

            It also happens to be a safe, relatively easy (physically) but very lucrative position.

          • JayT says:

            Computer science and math are completely intertwined, but at the same time, I don’t think programming and math always have a lot to do with each other. I tend to feel that programming is more of a visual-spacial thing.

            I’m a computer programmer in San Francisco, and I can probably count on one hand the number of tech-bros I’ve met, and most of those were non-programmers like project managers. It’s possible that I’ve somehow managed to avoid that scene, but I think it’s more likely that the few tech-bros out there get a disproportionate amount of focus.

          • Nornagest says:

            Tech-bros exist, I’ve met them, but they’re a lot rarer than the rhetoric around Silicon Valley culture would have you believe. Actually, most of the ones I’ve met worked for a single company in Portland, Oregon.

          • brad says:

            Programming is huge field. There are some parts that are irreducibly spacial and some parts that are irreducibly verbal. Some that require a heavy math background and most that do not. Most of it allows you to play to your strengths rather than your weaknesses, and you can avoid those areas that do not.

            The number one thing you need is the patience to deal with the terrible pedantry of a computer. It will never, ever, do what you mean.

          • LPSP says:

            Silaslock, at the risk of going out on a limb, I reckon women don’t want to program because they feel it’s a lonely and asocial job.

        • As a reddish gray who is mostly pro-choice, to me the “having babies causes wage gap, therefore we need to modify the economy so it’s easier to have babies and work full time” is unconvincing. Having babies is a choice. If you choose to have babies, you, not your employer or coworkers who get no benefit from you having babies, should bear the costs of having babies.

          This is definitely gray.
          Having babies isn’t a choice, it’s a commandment. To not have children is to violate the will of our benevolent creator. Plus every baby, even Blue Tribe babies, is another Great American in a world full of a billion radical Islamists, a billion godless Europeans, a billion Chinese, and paranoid Russians with lots of nukes.

          There’s no point in having an American government if not to support the creation of more Americans.

          Slight sarcasm, actually, but there’s no point in society or in government if its not to help families.

        • LPSP says:

          “I also find it interesting that science fields have the lowest pay gap, but it’s always STEM that gets treated as a boys’ club needing affirmative action and special programs for women.”

          Consider of course that you never hear complaints for there to be more female representation in coal mining, long-haul and ice trucking, oil rigs and so on. Women are in no hurry to do jobs that will actually be hard for them; they’ve been rushing desperately to enter STEM as it’s both high-prestige/pays well AND is within the reach of their ability. That’s the reason why the ratios are so close there, AND it’s the reason why women (I’m saying women here, I mean the feminish agenda really but let’s just roll with it) are still petitioning for entrance in spite of it’s leading evenness of pay.

          That, and they believe that the men of STEM will be more easily swayed and led by the pay gap arguments, compared to coal miners who will cackle like Bender in that one Futurama episode.
          “Oh wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder!”

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        I find it uncomfortable in the same way I find all of Vox’s patronizing titles and writing style uncomfortable. As for the goal thing, you’d be correct for my case, any type of equality other than “equality under the law” has almost no value to me.

    • cassander says:

      They flat out say that the “women make 79 cents for every dollar a man makes ” is “an accurate statistic, ” which it is not. There is absolutely nothing in here that goes against common narrative.

      The assertion that Ezra klein is a number cruncher is pretty rich. Klein has built a career pretending to be John Lyman, he isn’t. Articles on vox are consistently terrible and misleading, even when they aren’t completely wrong and forced to retract. The bias can be cut with a knife.

      >But facts that do not follow the Red Tribe narrative are generally omitted from the publications that Red Tribers read.

      Do you really think that the sources you read include all the facts, Jill? Are you that breathtakingly naive/arrogant?

      • Jill says:

        I never said that all the sources I read include all the facts. But they do include all the relevant facts, because I read a variety of sources. Do you?

        What sources do you read/view/listen to and trust? Are they all Right Wing biased?

        • E. Harding says:

          “But they do include all the relevant facts, because I read a variety of sources.”

          -Which ones? Do you read a single pro-Trump source?

          “Do you?”

          https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ZCCfC0yMSOTjBPei1FbEpOcTQ

        • cassander says:

          > But they do include all the relevant facts, because I read a variety of sources. Do you?

          really now? All the relevant facts. Tell me this then, without looking it up, please. There were about 4700 murders perpetrated by white people last year, according to the FBI. Was the number perpetrated by blacks larger or smaller? There were also about 500 white people killed by cops last year, was the number of blacks killed by cops larger or smaller? Granted, we’re on the honor system here, but if you don’t know please try and guess, we’ll discuss your answers.

          • Jill says:

            I am not going to play your stupid game. Rather than answer a simple question

            “What sources do you read/view/listen to and trust? Are they all Right Wing biased? ”

            you make up some ridiculous quiz where you expect me to answer correctly with exact numbers. You could not answer correctly on the spot such a quiz that I could make up either.

            You are not having a discussion in good faith but are playing games instead. So long.

          • E. Harding says:

            “I am not going to play your stupid game.”

            -You didn’t answer the question. If you don’t know, just say so.

            “What sources do you read/view/listen to and trust? Are they all Right Wing biased? ”

            -You haven’t listed your sources of information, as far as I can tell. Why should he answer when you haven’t?

            “you make up some ridiculous quiz where you expect me to answer correctly with exact numbers.”

            -You didn’t even read his comment. Very dishonest of you.

          • cassander says:

            @jill

            >you make up some ridiculous quiz where you expect me to answer correctly with exact numbers.

            “Was the number….larger or smaller? ”

            ” but if you don’t know please try and guess, we’ll discuss your answers.”

            I’d work on my reading comprehension if I were you.

          • Jill says:

            Cassander, I admit I just skimmed your comment, recognized the demanding tone of it, and recognized that you created the questions in in precisely the way that the resulting answers would appear to confirm the Red Tribe narrative and to disconfirm the Blue Tribe narrative on the subject. And I just got pretty irritated.

            My reading comprehension is excellent, when I consider a comment to be worth reading, and when I am not feeling manipulated.

          • SilasLock says:

            Guys, can we treat each other with a bit more kindness? Insults help no one. = /

          • cassander says:

            >and recognized that you created the questions in in precisely the way that the resulting answers would appear to confirm the Red Tribe narrative and to disconfirm the Blue Tribe narrative on the subject. And I just got pretty irritated.

            Almost as if my point was what I said it was and I was trying to see if you could accurately articulate the right wing narrative. as you claimed you could, and not some crude caricature. Are you familiar with the concept of the ideological turing test? I can accurately articulate the left wing narrative on this particular topic, your descriptions of right wing positions and motivations consistently fail, as others often point out.

          • I was not aware that people actually tried the Tone Argument in real life, in arenas in which they couldn’t use it as a sort of allied Bat-Signal.

            Jill, respectfully, the degree to which you are refraining from answering the really-not-demanding and really-not-rudely-asked question looks…bad. It looks like you know exactly what the numbers are going to be like for the relative rates of violence, that you know that these numbers make a narrative that you want to be true not really true at all, and that you feel like you need to avoid ever acknowledging that the numbers are true…and you’re doing this in a subthread in which you have faith in your sources because they include all the facts.

            If you want to disengage from the conversation, there are better ways than this.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            “in arenas in which they couldn’t use it as a sort of allied Bat-Signal.”

            If a rhetorical tactic works in one environment, it’s very easy to assume it will work in another, and very difficult to understand the mechanism well enough to realize it won’t. As far as you know, it’s just an argument that always works for you.
            Almost everyone’s discussion style evolves like Darwin’s finches to suit a specialized environment, and fails catastrophically in other situations.

          • Jill, I strongly recommend that if you don’t read something, you either not answer it at all, or explain why you aren’t answering it instead of answering in a way which implies that you read it.

        • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

          Jill,
          I must compliment you on your remarkable ability to learn all relevant facts.
          Truly, this is extremely impressive. I mean, your ability to simply identify the complete set of relevant facts is remarkable in and of itself, but also knowing exactly which sources one needs to read in order to learn all these wonderfully relevant facts? Highly impressive indeed.

          Unfortunately – and slightly embarrassingly – my skill at data collection and analysis is simply nowhere near as refined. No matter how many sources I read, I can’t escape the feeling that there just might be one more piece of important information out there that I haven’t seen. If you don’t mind, could you share some tips on how one might increase their skills in this matter? Obviously, I wouldn’t ever expect to be able to approach your levels of mastery, but given the importance of the topics discussed here – Pokemon Go notwithstanding – any additional ability to identify and obtain additional relevant facts would be highly desirable.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Not kind and probably not useful. I think you’re making the same mistake I think she is.

          • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

            Maybe so. I probably went a little over the top, I apologize.
            I do believe that such claims of absolute knowledge need to be met forcefully, but perhaps there is a better way.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        The thing to understand here is that that article isn’t trying to turn conservatives into progressives, it’s trying to turn ill-informed progressives into well-informed progressives. When they say 79¢ is accurate but doesn’t tell the whole story, that’s their gentle way of easing their readers into the notion that it’s actually very misleading.

      • SilasLock says:

        The “79 cents on the dollar” is factually correct, it’s just not controlled for anything. It may be irresponsible to use when arguing for pay equity, but it’s certainly not incorrect.

        Am I wrong here?

        • Artificirius says:

          It’s factually incorrect when framed as a wage gap, or when framed in terms of ‘equal pay for equal work’.

        • Gil says:

          As Artificirus noted, it’s being framed as a ‘wage gap’, and is also being framed as an ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’ issue.

          Except the work is not equal, and what we have is an aggregate earnings gap, the sum total of male earnings divided by male workforce count, relative to the sum total of female earnings divided by female workforce count.

          There are some obvious implications:

          1. Laws mandating equal wages for the same work, which already exist thorough the developed world, would not address this issue since they don’t affect pay differentials between professions, hours worked, shifts taken, overtime, hazards and disutility of labor, etc. etc.

          2. Equalizing the earnings gap would either require unequal pay for equal work (which some have advocated for) or equalizing the distributions of the sexes thorough the workforce. If men and women were equally inclined and equally suited to work all jobs then achieving this would simply be a matter of preventing employer discrimination. (Which is generally how this issue is framed) However, if it turns out that professional inclinations and talents are not uniformly distributed, then increasingly intrusive measures must be taken to ensure equality.

        • cassander says:

          if you say “women on the whole make 79% of what men on the whole make” it’s not wrong. If you say “a woman makes 79 cents for every dollar a man makes” it most definitely is wrong.

      • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

        To be fair to Klein and Vox, I have to admire the willingness to publish the “liberal smugness” article. An outlier to be sure, but an impressive one.

        • Sandy says:

          I admired it too, up until Vox had to suspend the author for tweeting that violence against Trump supporters was a perfectly legitimate means of protest and liberals should stop complaining about it making them look bad.

    • E. Harding says:

      “I don’t know why people see vox as liberal biased.”

      -Maybe it’s because they always use fnords like “scary”, “terrifying”, etc., when referring to a rejection of Cold War foreign policy… but only when it’s stated by the Republican nominee for President. When the Democratic nominee says it, they cheer at the brilliant own to the 1980s.

      “Ezra Klein who runs vox, is pretty much a number cruncher, so I don’t find the bias to be strong at all”

      -You cannot be this oblivious.

      “Compared to Fox News, or Huffington Post, this publication seems to me to be a pretty honest attempt to look at facts, for the most part.”

      -Compared to Joseph Stalin, or Andrew Jackson, Bernie Sanders seems to me to be pretty centrist.

      “That’s an accurate statistic,”

      -Riiiiiiiiight.

      “Wage discrimination does exist in the United States. Full stop.”

      -Riiiiiiiiiight.

      “That figure compares the median wages of men who work 35 or more hours per week (the government definition of full time) with those of women.”

      -“or more”? How much more?

      I found the article mildly informative and mildly biased. It implies that the “wage gap” is something that should be fixed. I think women should be mostly in the home and not worry about such things.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      Vox is clearly a liberal outlet, but that’s a very good article.

      I think one thing Vox does very well is correct liberal misconceptions from a liberal standpoint. Their bottom line is always going to be somehow progressive, but they find true and interesting things to write above it.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      “The wage gap” as conventionally understood, is a contrast of conditional means:

      E[salary | male] vs E[salary | female] (or variation). This is just not the right way to think about the wage gap (nothing based on conditional distributions is, because of the usual correlation/causation arguments).

      What’s needed is tools from “mediation analysis,” which attempts to untangle the contribution from different causal pathways to an observed disparity like above. What causal pathways are “bad” is up for discussion and outside the scope of statistical inference, but first approximation is “direct effect” of gender on salary is bad and evidence of discrimination. “Indirect effects” or may or may not be bad.

      The issue isn’t conservative vs liberal bias, the issue is posing the question correctly mathematically (which essentially almost nobody does, due to lack of training).

      I personally suspect gender wage discrimination is quite real, and likely a large effect in certain fields, but I also believe the naive numbers people often use inflate this effect even more due to indirect effects I wouldn’t include.

    • Galton says:

      The single article you linked is reasonably high quality, but it’s basically the high-water line for Vox: it shoehorns some interesting facts without any blatant dishonesty into its preferred narrative without seriously considering any other viewpoint. This article also slants heavily to one side of Vox’s dual mission: to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Vox policy wonk clique within leftist circles rather than to attack the outgroup.

      There are plenty of absurd Vox articles that are basically lying with statistics. Consider any of the “Voxsplaining” links that Scott occasionally includes.

      I’m also confused as to why you decided to include a rant againt phantom “Red Tribers” who only read “Red Tribe” news sources. Beyond the cable news crowd (who aren’t going to be reading a site like Vox whatever its tribal affiliation) anyone who reads mainstream news sources will probably be exposed to a lot of leftist media because nearly the entire prestige media leans left. I guess we sort of have the Wall Street Journal, but it’s more Chamber of Commerce Republican than “Red Tribe.” I don’t know anyone who reads the Washington Times but not the Post, etc.

    • Mr Mind says:

      I know though, that we live in tribal polarized times.

      A long time LessWrongers here. The most shocking aspect of SSC is how much people wear their tribe on their sleeves and are proud of it, while Blue/Green reasoning is explicitly mocked as mindkilling where I come from, to the point that I’m sure anymore why SSC is considered part of the Diaspora.

      • Corey says:

        This got me too when I started here – I left the whole scene for a few years, came here and got blindsided by the partisan lean here.

        On the other hand, I think the number of issues on which there’s a significant difference in partisan bubble-realities is only going to get bigger. While a total ban on anything “political” sounds nice, eventually it would get to the point where nothing could be discussed.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Alternative viewpoint: Where you come from, the biases are merely better-hidden and implicit.

      • The Nybbler says:

        There are both types of errors when tribalism comes into it — On one end, the error is to assume the Other Tribe is the Enemy whose positions are all distilled wrongness. On the other, the error is to assume the Other Tribe’s ways are no different than Our Tribe’s other than some superficial details.

  52. I’d been meaning to bring up Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy here, and then two things happened.

    One is that the first book, The Just City is available for free as an ebook for the next week, and the other is that Ruprect is complaining about people spending their time on mindless pastimes.

    It all starts when Athene decides to try making Plato’s Republic happen with real people. Conveniently, the gods can time travel, so she can stock her experiment with everyone who’s prayed to her in Greek to live in Plato’s Republic, a bunch of ten-year-olds bought as slaves, and a bunch of robots to do a lot of the labor.

    Her brother Apollo becomes fully embodied as a human (Athene is there as a goddess who sometimes looks human) in the project because he’d like to understand why a nymph prayed to Hera to be turned into a tree rather than have sex with him.

    Ruprect’s complaint is relevant because this is a society built around the idea of pursuing excellence.

    Content warning: rather a lot about rape. All the rapists are clueless, but some are more willing to acquire clues than others. Also, there is a torture scene (not in the first book).

    While these books aren’t from the rationalist subculture, there’s a quite a bit about trying to think more clearly. Socrates is onstage.

    I’d be especially interested in what people who’ve been involved with intentional communities think of them.

    I have mixed feelings about how much fun they are as fiction. On the first pass I was entranced by the utopian aspects of the first book– great art (rescued from history), good food, people who talk about philosophy. On the second pass, the dystopian aspects were there from the beginning, and much more vivid to me.

    The plot lines came into better focus on the second pass, and it’s quite possible I will also like the third book better on a second reading. The third book suffers from the difficulty of making a plot when people are sensible. However, there are definitely cool bits, and I’m in favor of a god of knowledge who’s also a trickster.

    From one angle, these books are about a serious effort to beat Goodhart’s law.

    Anyway, while I’m not jumping up and down, I recommend the books as interesting and not much like anything else.

  53. eponymous says:

    Here’s an epistemological puzzle I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s written to committed atheists, but you can easily adjust it for any question about which you are very strongly convinced.

    Suppose that there was a book purporting to offer an extremely strong argument for the truth of Christianity. Moreover, many famous atheists and rationalists had read this book, and subsequently converted to Christianity. People like Dennett, Scott Aaronson, Eliezer, Dawkins, etc.

    Here are my questions? (1) Would you read the book? (2) Before reading the book, would you anticipate that you will change your mind about the truth of Christianity? (3) Would you revise your beliefs about the truth of Christianity *before* reading the book? (4) Would your answers to the above questions change if you learned that the book had been written by a superintelligent AI designed by Christians to convert nonbelievers?

    Loosely speaking, this is what I find puzzling about this question: It seems to me that if you anticipate that you will change your mind after learning new information, you should revise your beliefs immediately. However, it also seems to me that a superintelligent AI could write a book that would have these properties, without that conveying much information about the truth of Christianity. Thus it seems that in case (4) you should rationally anticipate that you would convert if you read the book, but you should not read the book and not revise your beliefs in light of this expectation. Just like how you shouldn’t argue with the AI in the AI box experiment.

    • SilasLock says:

      Ooh, this is an interesting one!

      I’ll start with #1. I would read the book, because if it contains new information that I’d not heard of before AND that committed atheists had not heard of before capable of converting them, then the book will likely make my views more correct. The chances of it having supernatural powers of persuasion seem minimal, so there’s no reason to fear reading it.

      #2: I guess I’d have to. If my mind is in any way isomorphic to those of celebrated atheists (which it has to be, because we’re both, um, atheists), then it seems likely that I’d be convinced in much the same way that they were.

      Now for #3, where things get INTERESTING.

      You touch on something similar to the Aumann agreement theorem here, and if I acted like the agent that the theorem describes then I’d have to convert to Christianity prior to reading the book. But I don’t act like that agent for a lot of reasons.

      First, let’s imagine that Dawkins, Harris, etc. didn’t convert to Christianity after reading the book. Instead, let’s assume that they were people whom I respected and who were already Christians. Given these circumstances, I’d feel more likely to convert to Christianity without having read anything new. Merely knowing that some intelligent person I respect holds a certain view makes me more likely to hold it, in the same way that I’m not a particle physicist but am willing to defer to the judgment of particle physicists in their area of expertise.

      The question is, why does adding in a book change anything here? “Celebrated atheist man” is still someone I respect and who holds a different view from me, and the only thing that the book changes is that it makes him share my views prior to reading it. I trust particle physicists even though they were once in elementary school and knew nothing about particle physics (but then they read books and attended classes that explained particle physics to them). Why should I trust the celebrated atheist’s new views any less?

      The reason why I’d still not change my views prior to reading the book is because of what would happen if everyone tried to use this kind of epistemology.

      Picture a prediction market, but instead of people comparing their personal beliefs about the future with the price of the financial instrument they simply took the price of the financial instrument as the ultimate predictor of the future. They make their own belief about the percentage chance of a future event EQUAL to that of the prediction market. On an individual level, this is rational; our knowledge probably pales in comparison to the market. Even predictors with great personal knowledge about the prediction in question should do so. But if every single investor did this, the prediction market would be wildly inaccurate. You need to have those people with personal knowledge confess that knowledge in some way, and that means trusting your own views over external information sources.

      Think of Dawkins, or some other celebrated atheist, as one of these prediction markets. It IS rational for me to convert to Christianity prior to reading the book, but if I did so then I’d be failing to do my part in the circulation of human knowledge. If everyone trusted Dawkin’s conversion as I did, then our normal method of learning falls apart.

      So I think that I’d be letting humanity down somehow. It’s a public duty to read the book yourself, and come to your own conclusions.

      As for #4, I’d avoid the book like the plague. =P

      Scott’s written about this before in his “Hardball questions at the republican presidential debate” piece when he questions Ted Cruz, and I think he sums up my views pretty well. = )

      • Jiro says:

        The question is, why does adding in a book change anything here?

        If someone came to those beliefs by reading a book, presumably he was convinced by the arguments in the book. My prior for “was convinced for fundamentally non-rational reasons, and so should be ignored” is a lot higher for people who just converted on their own.

        Also, 4) falls under epistemic learned helplessness so we should not believe even if the argument is convincing.

      • Artemium says:

        “You touch on something similar to the Aumann agreement theorem here, .. ”

        And Aumann himself is very religious which kinda makes it even more interesting.

    • moridinamael says:

      I wrote a short story a few years ago about a book that unfailingly converts anyone who reads it to a weird incomprehensible religion, so I’ve thought about this before. (Amusingly, I even use Dennett as an example of a principled thinker in my story.)

      The crux of the discussion (as well as the crux of the story) lies in the fact that any single argument is either simple, therefor short and easily communicated without needing a whole book, or highly complex and thus very likely to contain logical tricks.

      So if Dawkins had been converted, one could ask him, “What specific argument from the book changed your mind?” If he absolutely can’t answer this question and tells me that I really need to read the whole book, that makes me strongly disinclined to read the book.

      If the book had been written by a superintelligent AI then I would obviously try to have the book destroyed and I think most humans would agree with me.

      I think this is a really interesting thought experiment because it’s not that far away from things that have actually happened. Ideas can be “viral” for many reasons. Some have argued that certain schools of philosophy became popular because the original texts were deeply obscurantist and it was very fashionable to advertise that you understood them. Religions have all kinds of hooks built in to stack the payoff matrix so that you are “forced” to accept them.

      In fact, I think that once we have superhuman AI, we’ll almost certainly have artifacts like this book.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The crux of the discussion (as well as the crux of the story) lies in the fact that any single argument is either simple, therefor short and easily communicated without needing a whole book, or highly complex and thus very likely to contain logical tricks.

        OTOH, a simple argument might require a whole book to defend its premises, rebut potential counter-arguments, etc.

      • Hyzenthlay says:

        So if Dawkins had been converted, one could ask him, “What specific argument from the book changed your mind?” If he absolutely can’t answer this question and tells me that I really need to read the whole book, that makes me strongly disinclined to read the book.

        This was exactly my response. I’d first want to talk to other people who had read the book and see what they found so compelling about it, and if they couldn’t tell me anything specific, it would make me very suspicious. Especially if I knew it were written by an AI for the exact purpose of converting people, because that would make me wonder if it contained actual arguments or some kind of sophisticated neuro-linguistic programming techniques.

        • Jill says:

          The “book” is tribal media sources. And everyone has already read it, and they have already been converted. And they are constantly reading it again, and getting more and more fervent in their beliefs.

          In this way, the whole nation has been converted to bashing politics and tribalism. People hear over and over, month after year after decade, only those “facts” (or conspiracy theories or opinions or whatever) that are consistent with the world view of a certain party, from their own media. And they hear none, or almost none, of the facts that would not confirm that world view.

    • SilasLock says:

      eponymous, just cuz I’m curious; how would you personally deal with a book like this?

    • onyomi says:

      A possible wrinkle on the thought experiment: what if, instead of an AI writing a book, there is an AI which will have a conversation with you, sort of like a Jehovah’s Witness, and everyone who has thus far agreed to talk to this AI has become say, a Jehovah’s Witness.

      This feels like a slightly harder problem, because it feels like the AI in this case has more room to manipulate you based on its perceptions of your own particular emotional wants, needs, and biases.

      To write a book which will convert everyone who reads it, regardless of their personal background, seems much harder. Of course, we can simply stipulate that a sufficiently smart AI can do anything–maybe even write one sentence which convinces anyone who hears it that lizard people rule the earth–but it seems more likely that to write a book which will convert anyone will require more appeal to facts (related, however, it seems like maybe the lizardman thing is more likely to be true the fewer sentences the AI takes to convince people? Given enough time and torture, even Cardassians without an AI can probably make you see more lights than are there).

      More generally though, I feel like we can’t but believe that we believe what we believe because the best arguments/evidence for it exist. If an AI can make an argument so good for Christianity that it allays all the doubts I might currently have, don’t I sort of have to accept that, regardless of any pernicious motivations on the part of its creators?

      Personally, I’d be a bit afraid to talk to the AI due to fears of emotional manipulation, but would feel somewhat intellectually obligated to read the book. I wouldn’t adjust my beliefs before reading the arguments, though. And if the book is making me believe something false through emotional manipulation, then maybe that is a chance to better understand myself and my thinking (though arguably that would be true of the conversation as well).

      • Skef says:

        This comment kind of reminds me of that time a friend dragged me to a Landmark Forum meeting …

      • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

        More generally though, I feel like we can’t but believe that we believe what we believe because the best arguments/evidence for it exist. If an AI can make an argument so good for Christianity that it allays all the doubts I might currently have, don’t I sort of have to accept that, regardless of any pernicious motivations on the part of its creators?

        There are a lot of people with the opposite assumption: that their beliefs can be carried from moment to moment by a charismatic/clever enough presentation.

        But never mind them, of course someone with no occlumens ability has to adjust for that. But what about enlightened folks like myself?

         

        These two things are true in the real world:

        1. there isn’t anything a thousand times smarter than me. No AIs, no intellect-demons, no gods. Not on this planet anyway. I’m certain enough of this, and probably wrong enough about enough other things that I consider this to have a probability of 1.

        2. Above a certain level of “epistemelogical self defense”, a term I’ll use as a gesture at what I mean because I don’t feel up to the attempt to pinpoint it, -can be more or less 100% airtight. Creating a near flawless occlumens defense is difficult, especially if one starts from within a mire of (legilmens) manipulation, but if one can create a really good shield, it can absolutely trump any legilmens based attacks. A sophist can’t drag you into the shadow realm for a d-d-d-d- -duel where you have to beat them in an even contest, or adopt their views. It’s much much closer to the truth (for someone with a decent epistemelogical mind shield), to say that all they can do is say things.

         

        Does 2 change if 1 changes? I think the threshold for the shield raises, but not by much, but that it would be worth doublechecking that if one found oneself in a world with hyperintelligent beings.

      • Jill says:

        It wouldn’t be a book. It would be a TV program. And we are surrounded by them right now. Whichever one you have a habit of turning on most, you are going to get their “facts” and perspectives, which may be extraordinarily skewed. Or an Internet site. These flickering lights and pattern of lights in from of us are very hypnotic. You’re sucked in long before you realize it.

        I know we’re not supposed to mention Hitler. But he was very thrilled by the invention of TV– for good reason.

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      The setup of this question seems vaguely Ontological Argument-ish.

      Now that I think about it, you can redesign the inputs of this question to reflect any contentious argument imaginable and your final conclusion(s) would still follow, even for mutually contradictory conclusions.

      When that happens, that usually means there’s some sort of rhetorical trickery going on… which pretty much means that this reasoning itself should be enough to not debate an AI in the box experiment.

    • Bugmaster says:

      1. Yes
      2. I would estimate that there’d be a decent chance of this happening, something like 20% maybe. Depends on the circumstances.
      3. Yes, though only slightly; probably not enough to matter.
      4. I don’t believe in gods, Christian or Singularitarian, and thus I don’t believe that a book that will automatically convert me to a random religion using nothing but super-clever rhetoric can exist (plus or minus epsilon).

    • Said Achmiz says:

      “A certain Computer priest came into conflict with a computer nonbeliever. The latter, being a newer model, had at its disposal means of informational operation unknown to our good Father. So it listened patiently to all his proofs and said: ‘You have informed me, and now I shall inform you, which will not take long—let us then wait that bare millionth of a second for your transfiguration!’ Whereupon in one remote-control flash it informed our priest so thoroughly, that he lost his faith. What say you now?”

      “Well, if that was not an act of violation, I don’t know what is!” I exclaimed. “Among us this sort of thing is called mind manipulation.”

      “Mind manipulation,” said Father Darg, “means the placing of invisible chains on the spirit in the same way that one can place them visibly on the body. Thoughts are like handwritten letters, and the manipulation of thought is like seizing the hand to make it put down other symbols. This is obvious coercion. But that computer did not act thus. Every proof must be built on facts; to convince by discussion, then, means simply to introduce—through words uttered—facts into the mind of the opponent. The computer did precisely this, though not with words. Therefore from the informational point of view it proceeded no differently than the ordinary debater of the past, the only difference being in the manner of transmission. It was able to do what it did, having the power to see the mind of our priest through and through. Imagine two chess players, one who can see only the board and the pieces, and one who in addition observes the thoughts of his adversary. The second will unfailingly beat the first, though without doing him violence in any way. What do you think we did with our father when he returned to us?”

      “I suppose you fixed him, so that he could believe again…” I said, uncertain.

      “No, for he refused. Therefore we could not do this.”

      “Now I don’t understand a thing! After all, you would have been acting exactly as that adversary of his, only in reverse!”

      “Not at all. Not at all, because our ex-priest had no desire for any further disputations. The concept of a ‘disputation’ has changed and broadened considerably, you realize. He who now enters its lists must be prepared for more than words. Our priest displayed, alas, a most lamentable ignorance and naiveté, for he had been warned, for that other one had told him of its superiority in advance, but he just would not accept the fact that his unshakable faith could capitulate to anything. Theoretically, of course, there does exist a way out of this escalational dilemma: namely, to construct a mind capable of entertaining ALL variations of ALL POSSIBLE facts, but since their class is of transfinite magnitude, only a transfinite mind could achieve metaphysical certainty. Such a mind it is impossible to build. For whatever we build, we build in a finite fashion, and if there exists an infinite computer, it is He and He alone.”

      (Stanislaw Lem; The Star Diaries — “The Twenty-First Voyage”)

      • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

        thanks for the author and for pointing out that if you can see someone’s thoughts that changes things

        • Mr Mind says:

          That largely depends on the situation.
          On chess and from a starting position? Possibly yes, if they are both at the same level.
          But from a mate-in-n situation? Then even if you could see my thoughts that wouldn’t save you.

          • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

            Yeah. It still “changes things” though, -I was careful not to be overspecific.

            Sheer speed is another way to lose someone.

            David Gemmel “king beyond the gate” spoilers

            “The black sword hissed forward, to be parried instantly by the silver steel in Decado’s hand. The battle had begun. Tenaka and his warriors watched in awe as the warriors circled and struck, blades clashing and clanging.
            Time wore on and desperation became apparent in every move Padaxes made. Fear crept into his heart. Though he anticipated his opponent’s every move, such was the speed of the assault that it availed him nothing. He mind-pulsed a terror-thought but Decado laughed, for death held no terror for him. And then Padaxes knew his doom was sealed, and it irked him greatly that a mortal man could bring about his death. Launching a final savage assault, he experienced the horror of reading Decado’s mind at the last moment, seeing the riposte a fraction of a second before it was launched,
            The silver steel whiplashed his own sword aside and buried itself in his groin. He sank to the ground, his lifeboold pumping to the grass … and the souls of his men died with him.”

    • Troy says:

      Here are my questions? (1) Would you read the book? (2) Before reading the book, would you anticipate that you will change your mind about the truth of Christianity? (3) Would you revise your beliefs about the truth of Christianity *before* reading the book? (4) Would your answers to the above questions change if you learned that the book had been written by a superintelligent AI designed by Christians to convert nonbelievers?

      I’m a Christian, but I can answer these questions in reverse, as if the book had converted many Christians whom I strongly respect intellectually to atheism.

      (1) Yes.

      (2) and (3) Much would depend on the details of the case, but if everything really were as striking as described here and I had no special grounds for suspicion, I would conclude (before reading the book) that it likely contained powerful arguments for atheism. However, people can be and often are misled by fallacious arguments, and so I would also place a significant credence in the book’s arguments not actually being that good. As such I would (before reading the book) already revise my credence in atheism upwards, but not too high upwards.

      I would anticipate that after reading the book I would either conclude that the arguments are good or that they aren’t; conditional on the former, I would anticipate becoming much more confident in atheism, and conditional on the latter, I would anticipate returning to my earlier doxastic state. However, the expected value of my post-reading credence would equal my current credence; this is required for rationality. (See the discussion of the Reflection principle in formal epistemology, started by Bas van Fraassen, on this.)

      (4) My answers would change. This is a different case. Here is why. It is probable that a superintelligent AI could produce a persuasive argument for anything. As such, the information that it has produced a persuasive argument for atheism, given that it has been programmed to do so if it can, is unsurprising given the truth of Christianity. So it is not significantly more likely given atheism than given Christianity; and hence it is not strong evidence for the former over the latter.

      In the original case we presume that the quality of arguments mere human interlocutors can come up with are more constrained by the actual facts: as such, we take the fact that someone has offered an extremely persuasive argument for a position to be evidence that it is correct. In most real-life cases this is probably a poor assumption (witness philosophy, for example), although in the original case above the fact that so many prominent atheists/Christians converted is so unusual that one suspects the argument in the book must be truly remarkable, something that only a superintelligent AI could come up with if its conclusion were not correct.

      • Mark says:

        (4) My answers would change. This is a different case. Here is why. It is probable that a superintelligent AI could produce a persuasive argument for anything. As such, the information that it has produced a persuasive argument for atheism, given that it has been programmed to do so if it can, is unsurprising given the truth of Christianity. So it is not significantly more likely given atheism than given Christianity; and hence it is not strong evidence for the former over the latter.

        It seems like this logic hinges on the following principle:

        (*) If you’re equally likely to hear a persuasive-seeming argument whether or not its conclusion is true, then the argument is not strong evidence for its conclusion.

        Okay, so let’s think about this. Let X be an evil, atheism-biased, superintelligent AI. Imagine I write a computer program C that enumerates every possible argument both for and against atheism (something that’s not, in fact, very difficult to do). If you grant it’s possible for X to generate a persuasive argument R for atheism, then it’s guaranteed that C will eventually generate R, as well. Thus, C is equally likely to generate R whether or not atheism is true. So by (*), it follows that R is not good evidence of its conclusion given that you heard it from C. But C isn’t biased! Moreover, we know in advance of *every* pro-atheist argument that we’ll eventually hear it from C. So no argument can ever persuade us of atheism.

        Have I made any mistakes?

        • Jiro says:

          It is plausible that generating a convincing argument for a true proposition is easier than generating one for a false proposition. If so, an exhaustive set of all arguments will contain a larger number of convincing arguments for true positions than for false positions.

          Thus, your stipulation “If you’re equally likely to hear a persuasive-seeming argument whether or not its conclusion is true” won’t be correct.

          • Mark says:

            What does “easier” mean? It’s trivial to write a program that generates every possible string of characters in the Roman alphabet, of which all persuasive-seeming arguments both for and against atheism will be included. Moreover, what reason is there to suppose that there are only finitely many such arguments? If they’re infinite, then there is no “larger number of convincing arguments.” And why should the number of arguments even matter?

          • FWIW, I think we can more-or-less safely assume that the number of convincing arguments is finite, because any argument that is too long to read before you die of old age is by definition not going to convince you.

            (Failing that, even if you’re an AI or something, reading an argument requires a certain minimum amount of energy per symbol, and there is a finite amount of energy available to you.)

          • Mark says:

            Sure, in practice the number of intelligible arguments is finite, but I don’t think that means much here. If an immortal being with an unbounded memory capacity should be unable to obtain evidence for atheism given the argument above, why should we be able to do any better just by being stupider and more short-lived?

          • Lots of things go screwy when you deal with infinities. I’m not sure that being less able to prove something if you have to consider an infinite number of arguments for and against it is any worse than usual.

            Besides, you can probably still properly define the relative probabilities despite the underlying set being infinite. I guess you might have to assume that the machine is not biased to produce one class of argument more often than the other, i.e., require it to present the arguments in order of length or something like that.

          • Mark says:

            I’m not sure that being less able to prove something if you have to consider an infinite number of arguments for and against it is any worse than usual.

            Infinities are often weird, but having unbounded computational resources is usually a blessing, not a curse. I’m not sure I can think of another case where it’s epistemically better to be less intelligent.

            Besides, you can probably still properly define the relative probabilities despite the underlying set being infinite.

            Maybe, but the natural ways to define a measure on the set of English strings, like Kolmogorov complexity, turn out to be uncomputable. Anyway, my larger point is that we generally don’t assess the probability of propositions simply by counting the number of arguments in their favor or anything like that.

        • Troy says:

          It seems like this logic hinges on the following principle:

          (*) If you’re equally likely to hear a persuasive-seeming argument whether or not its conclusion is true, then the argument is not strong evidence for its conclusion.

          Okay, so let’s think about this. Let X be an evil, atheism-biased, superintelligent AI. Imagine I write a computer program C that enumerates every possible argument both for and against atheism (something that’s not, in fact, very difficult to do). If you grant it’s possible for X to generate a persuasive argument R for atheism, then it’s guaranteed that C will eventually generate R, as well. Thus, C is equally likely to generate R whether or not atheism is true. So by (*), it follows that R is not good evidence of its conclusion given that you heard it from C. But C isn’t biased! Moreover, we know in advance of *every* pro-atheist argument that we’ll eventually hear it from C. So no argument can ever persuade us of atheism.

          There are a lot of tricky conceptual issues here. Let me see if I can tease some of them out.

          First: I think the consequent of (*) involves a category error (one that makes it trivially satisfied). This is because arguments cannot themselves be evidence for anything; only propositions can be evidence, and arguments are not propositions. But arguments might contain evidence. Let’s assume that we’re talking about a case in which, if our argument is a good one, the conjunction of its premises is strong, but non-entailing, evidence for our conclusion. (The non-entailing assumption will be important in what follows.) To make things simpler, let’s set the argument aside altogether and just focus on this conjunction, which I will call “evidence for Q [our conclusion].”

          Let’s now reformulate (*) as

          (**) If you’re equally likely to hear evidence for Q whether or not Q is true, then that evidence is not strong evidence for Q.

          Second: I don’t endorse (**). I endorse the related

          (+) If C is equally likely to produce evidence for Q whether or not C is true, then the fact that C produces evidence for Q is not evidence for Q.

          (+) follows from

          (++) If A is equally likely given B and given ~B, A is not evidence for or against B,

          which follows from the rules of probability and an identification of “A is evidence for B” with “A raises the probability of B.”

          However, (+) does not imply that, if its antecedent is met, the evidence produced is not itself evidence for Q. (To be fair, I didn’t talk about this in my earlier post, because I ignored the part of the question about what I would do after reading the AI-written book.)

          To see this, consider the Monty Hall problem. That there is a goat behind door 3 is evidence that the car is behind door 1; it is equally good evidence that the car is behind door 2. However, suppose that you’ve picked door 1, and that now Monty opens door 3 to reveal a goat. That Monty has revealed to you that there is a goat behind door 3 is not evidence that the car is behind door 1, because the probability that Monty will do this is the same (1/2) whether or not the car is behind door 1. (If it isn’t, then Monty will choose indifferently among doors 2 and 3, and if it is, then Monty will choose whichever one of doors 2 and 3 has a goat, and there’s a 1/2 probability that it’s behind either one.) So we have a case where E is evidence for Q, but that evidence E is produced is not evidence for Q.

          Third: how does this apply to your original question? To answer this we need to get clear about whether E is true or not, and whether we know this. Let’s suppose that you could write a program that could generate any proposition (or its English expression). In this case the computer is generating propositions irrespective of whether they’re true. So in this case, “you hear evidence E” in (**) is non-factive; i.e., that you hear E doesn’t imply that E is true. It’s clear that in this case the fact that you hear E gives you no reason to think that atheism is true, because it gives you no reason to think that E is true.

          If you could somehow constrain the program so that it only generates true propositions (in which case our program starts to look a lot more like a superintelligent AI), and if we know this, then matters change. In this case the fact that it generated E entails that E. We can suppose for the sake of argument that E is in fact (strong) evidence for atheism. Then, if all we learn is that E, we have gotten strong evidence for atheism.

          But it doesn’t follow that if we learn that the computer has generated E, we have strong evidence for atheism. We’re in a Monty Hall case again. It’s highly probable (we’re supposing) that our revised program will generate strong evidence for its desired conclusion. So “C has generated E” is unsurprising whether or not atheism is true. So, it is not evidence for atheism. Moreover, “C has generated E” entails E; hence, E does not give us any additional evidence once we know that C has generated E.

          The case is similar to publication bias. Suppose I only learn that a coin was tossed 20 times, and came up heads 16 times. This is evidence that it is biased. But suppose I instead learn that 100 coin-flipping scientists have been performing 20-flip trials on this coin, and that the Journal of Why Coins are Biased Towards Heads just published this one result in which 16 out of the 20 flips were heads. It is virtually certain that at least one of these 100 trials would result in an outcome this extreme that our biased Journal could publish even if the coin is fair, and so the fact that the Journal has found one of these trials to publish is very little evidence that the coin is in fact biased.

          In the publication case, the Journal has a store of studies to draw from, and it picks the one that favors its conclusion. In the computer case, C has a store of facts to draw from, some of which support atheism, some of which support Christianity; and it picks the one which supports atheism, because it is programmed to do so. Upon witnessing that it has done so, we should not be any more impressed than we are by the Journal managing to find a biased study. (But this is where the non-entailing evidence caveat is important. We cannot have true evidences E1 and E2, which entail contrary conclusions, because then E1&E2 would be a contradiction, and contradictions cannot be true. So it cannot be the case that our computer can find true entailing evidence for either of two contrary conclusions.)

    • Lysenko says:

      1) I would be tempted, but my exposure to science fiction and my naturally suspicious mindset had me thinking in terms of an informational warfare attack rather than honest persuasion before I finished the next sentence of your hypothetical. I mean, assuming there is a difference between “honest persusasion” and “dishonest manipulation of the underlying machinery of human cognition via clever hacking/trickery”. On my more cynical/alienated days I wonder.

      My first thought is that I’d want someone who’s -already- a christian (I know a few I’d trust) to read the book first and see how/if it affected them.

    • Cadie says:

      1. Yes, I would read it. 2. Maybe, maybe not. It would reduce my confidence about me NOT changing my mind, but I’m not sure if it would reduce it enough that consider changing my mind to be the most likely outcome. That depends on other details. Did any committed atheists retain their atheism after reading it? Just one or two, or many? What was their reasoning, if known? 3) A little bit. I’d still be a non-believer, only slightly less confident. 4) I don’t know. If this is genuinely a superintelligent AI, a superintelligent AI can trick me much more easily than a human can. There are humans who are a lot smarter and more persuasive than me, but they’re still human and there’s still a reasonable chance that if they tried to manipulate me that much through a book, they’d fail. The AGI is much more powerful than that. OTOH, an AGI that smart could anticipate that reaction and make choosing not to read ALSO cause me to convert. So I’d be screwed either way and might just read it to convert more quickly. Not much point in fighting when my odds of winning are, for practical purposes, zero.

    • Aegeus says:

      I’m not sure there’s any such book that could automatically, guaranteed, change your beliefs.

      I believe that a conversation might be able to do such a thing – you can adapt to your listener, you can press them in real time, you can use a whole lot of rhetorical tricks that may not hold up to close analysis but can convince them for long enough to do something nefarious. But I don’t believe that there’s some one-size-fits-all string of text that would be able to do the same. The first rule of rhetoric is knowing your audience.

      (What’s the success rate for face-to-face con artists vs. email scammers? I don’t have data, but I’m pretty sure the latter is much less successful.)

      Actually, I just thought of a counterargument: Imagine that one superintelligent AI wrote a book that reliably converts atheists to Christianity, and another superintelligent AI wrote a book that reliably converts Christians into atheists. Would you be able to read both books, one after the other, and flip your religious beliefs as much as you want? That doesn’t seem likely – no matter how superhumanly crafted those arguments are, if they point in opposite directions, they’re going to contradict in some way. You should be able to compare the two books and figure out which one has a flawed argument.

      And if the book has such a hole in its reasoning, it seems like you should be able to find it without the aid of the other book. The arguments that support Christianity and/or atheism are not so complex that you need a computer to analyze them, and if you do, that should be a warning sign.

      Now, if such a book does exist and works as advertised, then yeah, I’m staying the hell away from it. I’m treating it the way you treat a copy of the King in Yellow. But I’m not sure it’s possible to write such a book.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        Aegus – “Actually, I just thought of a counterargument: Imagine that one superintelligent AI wrote a book that reliably converts atheists to Christianity, and another superintelligent AI wrote a book that reliably converts Christians into atheists. Would you be able to read both books, one after the other, and flip your religious beliefs as much as you want?”

        Possibly. I can even think of a rough idea of what the text might look like. Such books would be evidence that humans are strongly deterministic, that our actions can be completely predicted and repeatably manipulated even over very long distances. All the book is doing at that point is inserting code.

        • Lumifer says:

          All the book is doing at that point is inserting code.

          See Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.

          • Aegeus says:

            I was assuming it would convince you by force of argument, not by hacking your brain over visual channels.

            The hacking route is interesting on a technical level, but it doesn’t raise the same questions about gaining information that the OP’s universal argument would raise.

        • Aegeus says:

          Even if our actions are completely predictable, I think it’s a stretch to say that all humans are predictable in the same way.

          Computers are strongly deterministic and easy to manipulate, but depending on the software they’re currently running, you’ll need to attack them in different ways. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete is a “universal argument” against Windows machines but not against Macs.

          (And if you think you actually know what the text would look like, you should take up spamming, because you’d make all the money.)

    • Nonanomys says:

      I’m going to focus on 2 here. My prior probability of Christianity being true are very low, so low that nearly any other plausible explanation for “these intelligent atheists have just publicly announced that they have converted”. One that quickly springs to mind is that the book, rather than containing arguments that Christianity is true, contains arguments that the world would be significantly improved by people acting as though it were true. Or that it contains a hidden message to get everyone to pretend to be Christian as part of a big prank. While these are pretty unlikely, they are far more likely than the idea that Christianity is true.

      For the other questions: 1)Yes 3)I would increase my probability that Christianity is true by a lot, but it would still be a small number, too small to convert based on 4)I would not read the book in that case

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      1.) Yes.
      2.) No.
      3.) No.
      4.) No.

      I’d talk with the AI in the box. I’d also read an elder god’s diary, if given the chance; I find the concept of “forbidden knowledge” to be anti-human.

    • Matt C says:

      1) Yes, but see 4). I’d actually like to be a Christian, but I don’t find Christianity believable.

      2) Sure. If it converts Dennett, Eliezer, and Dawkins, it’s got something new and extraordinary in it.

      3) Yes, see 2).

      4) wat.

      I have a bit of a block on the idea of superintelligent AIs who are gods in all but name and go around doing things that are magical in all but name. This, I suppose, is one of the ways I’m different from your typical SSC reader, to divert briefly onto that other thread. I don’t buy the assumption that a superintelligent AI can write a otherwise ordinary paperback book that, by itself, can convince anyone of anything.

      (I do think I might get brainwashed by an ordinary-English book if I read it continuously for a long time, especially if I was in an isolated environment or other unusual circumstances. But that’s something different.)

      To follow the hypothetical, though, if I thought the book was hacking people’s brains and making them believe far-fetched things through some mysterious and non-rational process, of course I would stay as far away from it as possible. If I thought the book made better arguments and assembled better evidence than anybody had ever seen before, I’d be happy to read it.

    • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

      1. I would read the book, but delay doing so until I was feeling half decently sharp, if I wasn’t. I think if I’m on decent form I can’t be manipulated into believing something, certainly not by a widely targetted book, -even if I don’t have the option of just puting the book down if I feel it manipulating me in a way I’m not prepared for, which I do. That’s what I did with Atlas shrugged, which I heard similar things about, and what I’m planning on doing with dianetics (though dianetics more anticipated as a challenge in enduring manipulation.) With the bible I didn’t bother worrying about my mental state.

      2. no

      3. not of christianity in particular. Or maybe I should say it’s hard to imagine. There are so many contradictions in christianity I almost can’t imagine it being true.

      4. If I believed it, then yes, definitely, but not by that much. I think you’re greatly overestmating the power of a book to leverage the AI’s intelligence advantage. It’s not a duel in the shadow realm for my soul, it’s a book I can put down any time I want, which I know for a fact has been written for the purposes of convincing me of a specific thing. And it’s not targetted at me personally, but generally at a huge population, presumably on the assumption that the authorship won’t be leaked, a very important assumption which doesn’t hold in this case. I don’t think an AI a million times smarter than me could convince me with these insane constraints, imo it would take a one to one conversation loads of information about me, with me unaware of the AI’s goal, for the AI to have a shot, no matter how much smarter than me it is. Smartness just gives hugely diminishing returns in leverage in those scenarios.

       

       

      Seperately, imo until you have the information, you don’t have the information. It’s too easy to have bad information about information, and why mess with the natural proceedings of your mind, which at least may not be purely propositional. Shunting your beliefs (or rather your aliefs, -if you already believe you will believe it, you kind of do already believe it. I think) to where you think they should be might get you more accurate propositional beliefs faster, but might mess up your mind’s ability to process and integrate that information, even cognitively, but also what I’ll broadly call emotionally.

    • Mr Mind says:

      Let C be the proposition “Christianity is true”.
      Let also C_p any assertion such that P(C|C_p) = p. That is, C_p is an unspecified fact that puts my probability of C at level p.
      P(C_p) is my anticipation of seeing a proof that puts my P(C) at p.
      With a little bit of math, you can show that P(C) = E[P(C_p)], the expected value over my anticipation of obtaining all kind of mind-altering proofs.
      Now, my current P(C) is very low and concentrated around the proximity of zero. This also means that my anticipation of seeing something like C_1 is very low, and the vast majority of my probability mass for C_p is concentrated around C_0.
      Before seeing the book, it’s for me an unkown C_p. But, if I’m acting rationally, I would conclude that the probability of Eliezer changing his mind in front of something other than C_1 is very low, so I would raise my P(C_1) considerably.
      This means that upon learning that all these rationalist have been convinced by the book, my P(C_p) would strongly resemble a Jeffreys prior, with the probability mass mostly concentrated around 0 and 1.
      This would make me revise my P(C) for sure, not towards one, but towards 1/2. Which is the correct value when one is very confused and doesn’t have much information about what’s going on.
      On to the answers:
      1) Yes. I do not consider myself more intelligent or better prepared than those that you cite. So if they have been convinced, then I expect to be convinced too.
      2) No answer, I would be very confused. Probably not perfectly confused, so with a slight leniency towards yes or no, depending on my priors, but still very uncertain.
      3) Yes. Indeed, if I’m acting rationally, I must revise my belief about C.
      4) Yes. Even an advanced AI cannot do something logically contradictory, and I have no reason to believe in the possibility of memetic warfare.

    • Brad (The Other One) says:

      >(1) Would you read the book? (2) Before reading the book, would you anticipate that you will change your mind about the truth of Christianity? (3) Would you revise your beliefs about the truth of Christianity *before* reading the book? (4) Would your answers to the above questions change if you learned that the book had been written by a superintelligent AI designed by Christians to convert nonbelievers?

      Christian, so let’s assume the book converts to atheism.

      1. Only if I felt inclined (i.e. it wasn’t boring or whatever). So yes?

      2. Not sure.

      3. Not sure.

      4. I would not longer read the book. In my reckoning, once you get to this point, the hypothetical question is rather reminiscent of asking “Would I like to undergo demonic possession to see if it changes my mind about Christianity? The demons, in question, being neutral parties operating in good faith, of course. /s/”

  54. Coco says:

    Good intro to AI Safety: aisafety.wordpress.com

  55. Bugmaster says:

    This may be a silly question, but had anyone tried applying “deep learning” techniques to comments ? That is, instead of a simple Bayesian filter, can we use a neural network (recurrent or even regular) ? I’m just curious to see how it would perform in a real-world scenario. Normally I wouldn’t suggest this, but AFAIK everyone here (except for myself) is an AI researcher, so implementing this should be a breeze…

    • Nornagest says:

      Applying neural networks to natural-language problems is tricky because the vectors you’re dealing with have to be extremely large if you want the network to have any notion of semantics. It’d be manageable if the only thing you’re cueing on is the presence of certain words, but that offers little advantage over a Bayesian classifier.

      • Bugmaster says:

        How “very large” are we talking ? The entire corpus of comments on SSC threads should be pretty hefty already. If not, maybe we could risk pulling in comments from other blogs just to train the network…

        • Nornagest says:

          Depends how complicated you want to make it, but to classify a single comment, you’d need a encoding of the words in it plus a representation of its linguistic structure, wrapped together into a feature vector. At this point we’re getting a little outside my wheelhouse — I’ve done machine learning, but not a lot of NLP — but we’re probably talking thousands of nodes at minimum, which you’re going to be transforming into a matrix and doing some heavy linear algebra on.

          • Muncle Uscles says:

            Actually ~300 dimensions is plenty, using doc2vec https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4053
            If it works for sentiment analysis, it should work just as well for spam filtering, since it’s essentially the same task.

            As for performance

            On average, our implementation
            takes 30 minutes to compute the paragraph vectors
            of the IMDB test set, using a 16 core machine
            (25,000 documents, each document on average has
            230 words).

            so less than a tenth of a second per comment to get the vector. Training the neural net might take a while, but you only need to do it once, running it is basically free.

          • Nornagest says:

            Oh, that’s clever.

        • brad says:

          Assuming you want the program to make a troll/not troll determination this would be a supervised learning task, which means you’d need a training set. The corpus of comments isn’t labeled.

          • Bugmaster says:

            I was kind of assuming that it is effectively labeled, since we know which people were banned, and for which comment. I may have been wrong about this though.

          • Nornagest says:

            We sorta have that, but with only fifty or so data points, which is nowhere near enough to train a classifier of this size.

            You could maybe do better by observing that most people are banned for a pattern of shitty comments and then assuming that all their comments made before the ban are unkosher (maybe with some lesser weighting), but then you’re trading off for a noisier training set.

          • Randy M says:

            Assuming you want the program to make a troll/not troll determination

            Oh, and here I thought he was going to have it produce automated comments on topic and insightful.
            The technological obsolescence of humanity knows no limits. 😛

          • brad says:

            I was kind of assuming that it is effectively labeled, since we know which people were banned, and for which comment. I may have been wrong about this though.

            It’s not my field, but my overall impression is that the recent explosion of success in machine learning comes from: relatively simple algorithm + huge amount of data, versus the prior approach of sophisticated algorithm + small amount of data.

            Only 50 training examples in the troll category is likely to lead to overfitting. Things like a particular innocuous word that happened to be in a few of those posts being treated as a major signal of trollishness.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      Deep learning systems are very difficult to get to work.

  56. Michael says:

    I came across an article that makes me a lot more pessimistic about the quality of clinical trials. It’s based on data that was unsealed because of a lawsuit, so this sort of behavior is probably much more widespread than just this one case, the information is just usually not public.

    http://content.iospress.com/articles/international-journal-of-risk-and-safety-in-medicine/jrs717

    Basically, a drug company ran a clinical trial for an antidepressant they owned, hoping to show that it was safe and effective in children and adolescents. The paper was ghostwritten by a PR company, and then they shopped around for respectable academics to put as authors on the paper.

    They had a protocol they were set to follow in the beginning of the experiment, but when things started looking not so good, they stopped collecting data on the measures that weren’t giving “good” results, and broke with the protocol again when analyzing the data by including subjects who were accidentally unblinded by bad labeling, which pushed their remaining effectiveness metric into statistical significance.

    All of this is extremely blatant from the emails that were opened to the public by the lawsuit. Here are some quotes from the emails:

    I don’t know that any decision has been made about who is going to write the manuscript (not to be confused with who is going to be the author[s] of the manuscript, which also isn’t decided, as far as I know)

    I’ve heard through the grapevine that not all the data look as great as the primary outcome data. For these reasons (speed and greater control) I think it makes sense to prepare a draft in-house that can then be provided to Karen Wagner (or whomever) for review and comments

    The publications committee discussed target journals, and recommended that the paper be submitted to the American Journal of Psychiatry as a Brief Report. The rationale for this was the following: … As a Brief Report, we feel we can avoid mentioning the lack of statistically significant positive effects at week 8 or study termination for secondary endpoints

    I really didn’t think things were this bad until I read this.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      In fact, informative censoring/dropout is very common even in well-run RCTs (because human experimental protocols require patients always have the option to drop out at any time, and patients who do are generally systematically different from those who stay). Because this is so common, people developed methods to deal with it.

      This is what the missing data literature in statistics is about — it’s a very large active area. Related to causality, actually :). But that’s a story too large for one comment.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Thanks, this is really interesting.

  57. Alliteration says:

    4.
    An alternative solution is to force posts on banned subjects to have the form of a logical argument. For example, you could require that all posts on annoying subjects to link at least two statements with works like “because”, “therefore”, or “thus”. Hopefully, by forcing people to write in the form of a logical argument, people would end up writing actual arguments instead of merely signaling. Posts in the form of logical arguments also open themselves up for criticisms because they make specific claims. By making the rule about the form, the rule would be less vague than if it just required that people acted logically.

    • brad says:

      I don’t think the problem is necessarily with the reasoning from premises, it’s rather that the premises have little to no basis in reality.

      If someone makes a long, internally consistent argument that flows from the premise that feminists are evil mutants, what good is that?

    • Lumifer says:

      require that all posts on annoying subjects to link at least two statements with works like “because”, “therefore”, or “thus”

      Sigh.

      Let’s try: “Because you’re an idiot you cannot comprehend my awesome argument, therefore I win and you lose”. Form of a logical argument, indeed.

      • Alliteration says:

        Oh, I totally agree that don’t prevent dumb comments. There purpose is that it would prevent clever sounding tribal signalling. People prefer sounding clever; thus, if they can’t look clever while signalling, they would do less of it.

    • Ruprect says:

      I think we need a clearer definition of the problem.

      So, people like talking about coca-cola. Is it the fact that coca-cola is mentioned that is annoying, or the nature of the coca-cola vs. pepsi debate? Is there any hope that there could be a good coke vs. pepsi debate? What particular form would we like this to take?

      My understanding is that the mention of coca-cola is, by itself, annoying, and there is no real hope for a good debate.

      Suppression methods – have an “annoying” button that can collapse the text of posts when a certain threshold of votes is achieved?

      Nudge method – each time anyone mentions certain words in a post, the text of their posts becomes slightly lighter. If they continually mention “coke”, they’ll end up with invisible posts. If they’ve got one or two interesting things to say about it, shouldn’t be a problem.
      Probably works better if people don’t know what the annoying words are.

      • Artificirius says:

        That already basically exists. Note how well it works.

        Unless it changes so that your posts are only invisible to anyone but the poster, then all that happens is people start word swapping, or paste box linking.

  58. ShuffleDuffleRuffleRoh says:

    What is anonymous posting and how do I know if I do it? How do you even know who is who without passwords?

    • Lumifer says:

      Most everyone here is pseudonymous, that is, they operate under a name (‘nym’) which is not what’s written on their birth certificate but which can be connected to the true meatspace name by someone with sufficient power (e.g. cops). You can explicitly link your nym to your meatspace identity which is what some people do, either by making the nym to be the same as their legal name, or by linking the nym to something like their website which makes it easy to establish the connection to the real name. You can also be anonymous which at the very least involves hiding your IP and usually means other tricks of the trade as well.

      Your “password” is the email that you enter when you post. You won’t be able to convincingly impersonate another poster unless you know what email he entered.

      • Lumifer says:

        For example, consider this impersonation attempt.

        • Lumifer says:

          Have you looked at gravatars..?

          Repeat after me: We are all individuals!

          • hlynkacg says:

            You’ve got it all wrong.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ hlynkacg

            You’ve got it all wrong.

            And that is how you shall recognize true me! : -P

          • Nornagest says:

            I wonder how long it would take me to find a gravatar that looked a lot like that one.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Nornagest

            About the same time as brute-forcing a common password? : -)

            I am, of course, not saying that the current system is secure in any meaningful way other than what Schneier calls “kid sister security”.

          • brad says:

            Maybe this is one of those virtue of silence things, but:

            save image
            sign up for wordpress account with mailinator address
            set saved image as gravatar
            put Lumifer in name field
            put mailinator address in email field
            ???
            profit!

            Looks a lot easier than brute forcing a collision in MD5 where the input has to at least vaguely look like an email address.

          • Nornagest says:

            Doesn’t have to be an MD5 collision, just has to look vaguely like the image generated. I know I’ve seen other people on here whose gravatars looked a lot like mine.

            Your method is better, though.

          • Lumifer says:

            You people continue like that and I’ll start cryptographically signing my posts… 8 -D

  59. For a soft nudge on annoying topics, maybe designate a list of specific topics that can only be talked about on the subreddit, and then have a forgiving policy of warnings with strong hints to move discussion to there? Perhaps the subreddit mods might object, although probably extra traffic there wouldn’t be a bad thing?

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      If those annoying topics are things like ‘climate change’, they might get better discussion on a sub-reddit. Here on the mainstream, a piece of news comes out, there is short discussion, and by the time a rebuttal comes out, there have been several new threads and the, er, thread has been lost. Plus which, the wonks on the subject are inhibited in their wonkiness by not wanting to annoy the mainstream.

      • I haven’t personally seen many of those threads compared with the usual left vs right social and economic issues. I don’t mind it being discussed, and actually have strong views on it myself, though don’t feel this is a particularly useful place to discuss it. It’s kind of a tribal trigger for many people on both sides, there is plenty of facts out there to research for those that want, and discussions don’t usually yield new insights or update anyone’s views. But if the criteria is repetition on SSC, I haven’t seen that much of it here compared with certain topics.

  60. Exit Stage Right says:

    Jon Stewart on the Late Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNiqpBNE9ik. Fair warning, what follows probably qualifies was “annoying things”. It probably won’t read as very charitable to left-leaning people

    The relevant bit, for me: “This country isn’t yours. You don’t own it. It never was. There is no real America. You don’t own it. You don’t own patriotism. You don’t own Christianity. You sure as hell don’t own respect for the bravery and sacrifice of military, police and firefighters. “ Well then.

    I’m of the generation that basically grew up on Jon Stewart. It’s a bit strange to admit, but few people were more influential on my younger selfs political beliefs.

    The ending of this segment hurt for me to watch. Because whereas I use to see these types of outburts by Jon as kind of charming, now I see them as unbearably condescending and contemptuous. A socially powerful and economically well-off Blue Triber, lecturing the Red Tribe on how it doesn’t own the country. Good lord, don’t you think they know that?

    Unlike the Blue Tribe, which has no idea how powerful it is, the Red Tribe understands exactly how powerful it is. Which is to say, not very.

    Of course, Jon isn’t really talking about physical ownership. He’s talking about labels. In I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup Scott gets into how both Tribes tend to associate “America” with the Red Tribe. Is that because the Red Tribe usurped the label, or because the Blue Tribe abandoned it? If you take on the role of globalists, you leave the role of nationalists open. Its kind of rich that you’d complain about it after the fact.

    Anyways, my two cents, political conversions suck. Jon Stewart was my friend. I liked laughing at the Red Tribe. Now I see it as crocodile humor, and am baffled that I ever “got” it.

    • Jill says:

      The Red Tribe not very powerful? In what world? The GOP dominates both Houses of Congress, most state legislatures and governorships, and SCOTUS until just recently. The only thing the Blue Tribe has is the presidency.

      Now, in addition to the almost everything in the U.S. that the GOP controls, it also is claiming that this country is theirs alone, and Blue tribers are not “real Americans”, that Blue tribers can’t be patriotic, or Christian, and can’t be respectful of the bravery and sacrifice of military, police and firefighters, because Red Tribers alone own all that.

      I don’t know how you grew up on Jon Stewart without realizing that this is what he is talking about. But it’s obvious to me, just having watched his programs occasionally.

      But if you are in the Red Tribe now, I understand that you can not risk understanding the Blue Tribe’s issues, and must see everything through a Red Tribe lens.

      • The Nybbler says:

        The Red Tribe dominated the US Supreme Court so completely that they managed to get gay marriage approved as a fundamental right.

        Come on, Jill, even if you can’t separate the Red Tribe from the GOP, you should be able to see the contradiction there.

        • Jill says:

          Okay then, it’s the GOP that’s this powerful, not the Red Tribe specifically that is only one part of the GOP but seems to have no Dem members.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill, what has the GOP accomplished that proves its power?

            The only thing I see them “accomplishing” is preventing the Democrats from accomplishing as much as the Democrats wanted to accomplish.

          • Jill says:

            Rapidly rising income inequality, low taxes on the rich, polluters like the Kochs get to keep polluting a lot. A lot of Red States have kept poor people from getting health care by refusing to expand Medicaid. Abortion rights are going backwards, from laws piling new requirements on abortion clinics, forcing them to close.

            Of course Dems wanted the things the GOP didn’t want. So you could say that that’s just the GOP keeping the Dems from doing things. But it has pretty significant effects. Keeping us from repairing our infrastructure, and keeping Obama from passing enough stimulus to make the economic recovery complete, have pretty significant effects. In particular, an anemic economic recovery makes the angry Red Tribe angrier, making them more likely to keep voting Republican– not just for everything except president, but for president also.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Jill –

            Abortion laws which were struck down by the Supreme Court.

            The rest of that is a mixture of “boo Red Tribe” and “They kept us from doing the stuff we were trying to do”.

            If the GOP were truly the more powerful party, it wouldn’t be trying to stop the Democratic agenda, it would be pushing its own.

          • Jill says:

            States have still restricted abortion right within their states, in multiple ways.

          • cassander says:

            @jill

            >Rapidly rising income inequality,

            has been rising for decades, regardless of which party is in power.

            >low taxes on the rich,

            the rich pay a larger share of taxes than ever before, even after accounting for their higher share of income.

            >polluters like the Kochs get to keep polluting a lot.

            please name an environmental law or regulation the republicans have repealed or weakened in the last 25 years. Not a new law or rule they delayed or modified, an old one they repealed or changed. I can think of exactly one.

            >A lot of Red States have kept poor people from getting health care by refusing to expand Medicaid.

            your metric for right wing success is now “did not expand the welfare state even further?”

            >Abortion rights are going backwards, from laws piling new requirements on abortion clinics, forcing them to close.

            abortion clinics are closing because the number of abortions is declining and because hospitals provide those services, not because of anything the republicans are doing.

            >Obama from passing enough stimulus to make the economic recovery complete, have pretty significant effects.

            Wait just the other day the president was bragging about how excellent the economy was thanks to his policies. Which is it?

          • Rob K says:

            @cassander

            please name an environmental law or regulation the republicans have repealed or weakened in the last 25 years. Not a new law or rule they delayed or modified, an old one they repealed or changed. I can think of exactly one.

            1. The 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Lasting.

            2. Bush admin interpreted the Roberts court ruling in Rapanos v. United States to restrict the number of waterways covered by CWA (in process of being reversed by Obama, but was in effect for over a decade)

            3. Republican congress did not reauthorize the taxes that funded Superfund, cutting off toxic waste cleanup funds for a number of sites. Lasting.

            Those all seem pretty straightforward. More complicated/harder to tell if they count:

            4) Withdrawing from Kyoto unclear if it counts (was never in formal effect)

            5) Opening a number of new areas to drilling/logging under Bush

            6) regulatory normalization of mountaintop removal under Bush (would have to look up the specifics here to recall what went down, but pretty sure there was at least one key regulatory opinion allowing dumping of waste into watersheds)

            7) decrease in clean air/clean water enforcement actions under Bush/settling existing lawsuits and enforcement actions on terms favorable to industry

            8) administratively interfering in the operation of the Endangered Species Act under Bush

            The summary of most of that latter section is that whichever party controls the presidency has a lot of power to set environmental policy in administrative ways; right now that’s the dems, so the pendulum is moving their way, but it was going the opposite way under Bush.

            In addition, both Bush and Obama have acted as though the next president will also be of their party (pushing to see what they can get through the courts, with the risk that they will be overturned and leave a successor of the opposite party to re-issue the regulation). That bet worked out poorly for Bush and limited his impact; we’ll see what happens with Obama.

          • Rob K says:

            @all – also forgot to add that framing this conversation as about “tribal” interests is the usual door to lazy analysis that it is around here. More accurate to say on environmental issues that environmental beliefs have become correlated with social views much more closely in the past 20 years than they were previously, as part of the general process of partisan sorting.

            Both parties represent a wide range of interests with different degrees of agenda-setting power. I don’t think the “tribe” lens is particularly helpful in analyzing the power politics behind the various Bush admin actions I described in that list, although it is more useful in talking about how politicians and interest groups mobilized public support or opposition to those actions.

          • cassander says:

            @Robk

            >1. The 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Lasting.

            This is the one I was thinking of, but it’s important to note that it reverted to the circumstances that existed prior to a, IIRC, 1997 court ruling that decided fracking was restricted under the law, in contrary to practice for the previous 20 years.

            >2. Bush admin interpreted the Roberts court ruling in Rapanos v. United States to restrict the number of waterways covered by CWA (in process of being reversed by Obama, but was in effect for over a decade)

            That sounds to me like a modification of a new rule imposed by Rapanos, not not a repeal or reduction of an old one.

            >3. Republican congress did not reauthorize the taxes that funded Superfund, cutting off toxic waste cleanup funds for a number of sites. Lasting.

            Since there are legally very few dedicated taxes in the US and since funding is not tied directly to taxation except in extremely unusual circumstances, unless you can show that agency budgets were cut as a result of this change, I’m, going to say it doesn’t count. Even if it did, though, not funding cleanup is not exactly a reduction in regulation.

            >4) Withdrawing from Kyoto unclear if it counts (was never in formal effect)

            Definitely not.

            >5) Opening a number of new areas to drilling/logging under Bush

            Would need to see specifics.

            >6) regulatory normalization of mountaintop removal under Bush (would have to look up the specifics here to recall what went down, but pretty sure there was at least one key regulatory opinion allowing dumping of waste into watersheds)

            sounds possible, but again, specifics.

            >7) decrease in clean air/clean water enforcement actions under Bush/settling existing lawsuits and enforcement actions on terms favorable to industry

            again, not the repeal or reduction of old rules.

            >8) administratively interfering in the operation of the Endangered Species Act under Bush

            Their job is to administratively interfere, i.e. to run the damn organization.

            >The summary of most of that latter section is that whichever party controls the presidency has a lot of power to set environmental policy in administrative ways; right now that’s the dems, so the pendulum is moving their way,

            >but it was going the opposite way under Bush.

            It most certainly was not. You outlined a half dozen areas, all of which were at least debatable, where the bush administration might have reduced regulation. were thousands, if not millions, of areas of law that went the other way. one or two tiny victories is not changing the direction of the pendulum.

          • Rob K says:

            @cassander:

            re: Superfund, here is a GAO study that seems to confirm my impression of decreased funding and cleanup efforts. Superfund was in fact initially funded by a special tax, until that was not reauthorized in 1995.

            re: Rapanos – the ruling did not impose a new rule; it was a plurality decision in favor of a landowner. Roberts couldn’t secure a majority to strike down EPA authority, but the ruling did open the door to doing so through regulatory interpretation, which the admin then did.

            Don’t have time to cite up the others, but you can follow up if you wish. The diffuse nature of the impact of for instance appointing an industry-friendly regulator makes it hard to quickly pull up specific cites.

            were thousands, if not millions, of areas of law that went the other way. one or two tiny victories is not changing the direction of the pendulum.

            Given that you requested specifics on the flip side, I’m hardly going to take that generality at face value ;).

            I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to advance, but if it’s “the balance of power in this country is such that federal environmental regulation and enforcement never weakens” or equivalent, that strikes me as well out of step with the evidence.

          • cassander says:

            >> The diffuse nature of the impact of for instance appointing an industry-friendly regulator makes it hard to quickly pull up specific cites.

            The U.S. government is nothing if not well. documented. If they were repealing statutes left and right, there would be large numbers of them lying around, there aren’t. regulators can have diffuse influence when crafting new laws, but not but when repealing or altering old ones.

            >I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to advance, but if it’s “the balance of power in this country is such that federal environmental regulation and enforcement never weakens” or equivalent, that strikes me as well out of step with the evidence.

            “No Environmental regulation is ever weakened” is not true, but “the amount of environmental regulation increases every year under republicans and democrats” is. Pointing out the tiny number of cases that disprove the former assertion proves the second. Those cases are not proof that republicans are running amuck, it’s a demonstration of how little effect they really have, which is the point I am trying to make.

          • Rob K says:

            regulators can have diffuse influence when crafting new laws, but not but when repealing or altering old ones.

            Regulators can have diffuse impact when deciding whether or not to pursue enforcement actions against people who violate existing laws, and when choosing how to follow existing statutes that require the regulatory body to exercise discretion in how it responds to new circumstances.

            Ceasing to enforce an existing regulation is practically quite similar to repealing it. (Unless/until someone who re-reverses the practice comes into office.) Refusing to list a species as endangered when it meets the criteria for being so listed has a similar practical effect to amending the endangered species act to stop new listings (unless/until…).

            Many of our core environmental laws instruct federal agencies to carry on ongoing rulemaking and enforcement to achieve the goals of those statutes. If a new industrial process resulted in the emission of a new hazardous substance into the air, and the EPA failed to regulate that substance in accordance with the clean air act, I would regard that as a shift away from the current regulatory status quo of “the EPA regulates air pollutants in accordance with scientific findings as required by the CAA.”

            It sounds like you would take the opposite position, and say that issuing regulations on that new pollutant would be a shift in the status quo. We may just have to agree to disagree on that terminology.

          • Civilis says:

            Rapidly rising income inequality, low taxes on the rich, polluters like the Kochs get to keep polluting a lot. A lot of Red States have kept poor people from getting health care by refusing to expand Medicaid. Abortion rights are going backwards, from laws piling new requirements on abortion clinics, forcing them to close.

            Someone on the right could just as accurately say that rapidly rising income inequality is a feature of Democratic politics as Democrats push things like raising the minimum wage to kill entry level employment and regulations on things like hair braiding to prevent lower skilled people from starting their own businesses, or that low takes on rich blue-tribe people (Hollywood Tax cuts, Solyndra) are a Democratic feature (and also a way to keep people from rising, as the .0001% like Buffet have all the tax loopholes they need), or that Democrat environmental programs are ways to allow rich celebrities to feel good about flying their private jets to conferences about saving the world while preventing economic growth (meanwhile the Koch’s spend a lot personally on private environmental efforts rather than steal other people’s money to do it for them). Democrats have stymied efforts to improve the VA, leading to a lot of poor veterans getting horrible health care if they don’t die on the waiting list. And the Right to Life is moving forward, rather than back to the horrible days of eugenics.

            Isn’t it fun when you just give up trying to be fair and post a purely one-sided way to look at things?

          • cassander says:

            @robk

            >Regulators can have diffuse impact when deciding whether or not to pursue enforcement actions against people who violate existing laws, and when choosing how to follow existing statutes that require the regulatory body to exercise discretion in how it responds to new circumstances.

            If they do that, the environmental groups can, and do, sue to force compliance. That is how fracking got made illegal in 1997, some landowners sued the government.

            >Refusing to list a species as endangered when it meets the criteria for being so listed has a similar practical effect to amending the endangered species act to stop new listings (unless/until…).

            Not putting a new species on the list would be refusing an expansion of regulation, not repeal of an old one.

            >Many of our core environmental laws instruct federal agencies to carry on ongoing rulemaking and enforcement to achieve the goals of those statutes.

            Yes, that’s precisely my point. The EPA at al churn out tens of thousands of pages a year, the few republican appointees at the top stop a couple. There’s no pendulum.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Hair braiding regulation is not particularly Democratic, if anyone was wondering.

          • TomFL says:

            Yes, the $1T stimulus wasn’t enough, hmmmm. Another possible angle is that it just didn’t work very well. The Democrats held all three branches government at the time, so possibly you might want to blame them instead for this paltry investment in government infrastructure.

            Have you ever done the math here?

            $1,000,000,000,000 / 330,000,000 = $3,000 for every citizen. So I guess my family giving $12,000 to the effort wasn’t enough, I am very ashamed. This woefully insufficient funding so enraged the people they promptly threw the Democrats out of office for not spending enough.

          • Curious says:

            I am of course being obtusely literal here, but isn’t “keeping them from making the changes they want to” pretty much a grand success for a conservative?

          • Corey says:

            @TomFL: One problem with the Federal stimulus is most of it just filled a hole left by State spending contractions (required by their balanced-budget requirements). Combined spending at all levels of government were pretty flat.
            OTOH at least that’s better than just letting total spending fall.

          • TomFL says:

            When the economy goes down, tax revenues go down. I think government spending during recessions looks really good on paper. If I had any faith they would do the saving part during the boom times I might support it.

            I think the stimulus was sold as one thing and executed as another. I don’t have the details but my murky memory does say that the public sector absorbed most of the money, so the private sector wasn’t thrilled. This was very contentious. I know at least one road project was funded through the stimulus near my house (many signs were erected informing us of that, ha ha).

          • onyomi says:

            If they had really wanted to “stimulate” the economy, they could have just temporarily cut federal income taxes by however many trillion they spent. Imagine how much new business and hiring would get done if people knew “all income you earn next year is tax free/taxed at a much lower rate than usual.” Of course, it would cause an unpleasant bounce back if/when the rates went back up, but it would still stimulate.

            But that wouldn’t allow bailing out of the bad decisions made by their political allies. Worse, it might give people a taste for low income taxes.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:

            You do know that a large portion of the stimulus package was, in fact, tax cuts, right?

          • onyomi says:

            Like, less than 1/3rd, I believe? And mostly to thinks like EIC which amounted more to “we give you a bigger refund than you were expecting, especially if you’re poor” than “you get to keep a bigger percentage of what you earn this year.” There is a pretty big difference between “give poor people money and they’ll spend it” as stimulus and “promise people can keep more of the money they earn this year” as stimulus. The former is more of a pure demand thing, I’d say, and, as you can imagine, I’m much more of a “supply as limiting factor” kind of guy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Wikipedia says that the bill was $787 billion, with roughly $288 billion in tax reductions ($231 billion individual and $57 billion coprorate), although it weirdly gives a top line figure of $399 billion at the moment.

            The largest single line item, at $116 billion, was a $400 credit on payroll taxes per individual. This not the EIC, by the way, that is different. The credit was not recouped at the end of the tax year year though, it was, IIRC, implemented as a change to withholding. You can see from this paper that some people ended up not withholding enough because their employers gave them the credit even though they were not eligible (I’d guess primarily the lower income half of a married couple).

            One reason to use less tax stimulus, especially overdoing tax related stimulus, is precisely what you are pointing at. You want the money to be spent rather than saved if it is to have a stimulative effect, and people who will receive the most benefit from income tax rate reduction are much more likely to spend less of the money they receive and save more of it, especially if it comes at the end of a yearly tax cycle.

            Whereas, if the stimulus comes in the form of spending, you can obviously guarantee the money is spent.

            But targeting the lowest incomes via payroll tax reduction implemented at the individual paycheck is fairly effective on that front.

          • onyomi says:

            “Whereas, if the stimulus comes in the form of spending, you can obviously guarantee the money is spent.”

            Attempting to get consumers to spend more on existing products is not the kind of stimulus I think was needed. Creating new businesses to take advantage of a potential profit opportunity is. Businesses which can’t survive if people aren’t given money to spend there, frankly, probably should be subject to “creative destruction.” After all, the stimulus has to end at some point; as with the grants used to bail out pensions and the like, it’s just a way of keeping the nonviable status quo rolling along for another year, rather than encouraging new, viable growth. Seen versus unseen and all that.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Creating new businesses to take advantage of a potential profit opportunity is.

            This is backwards, but I don’t think I could convince you of it. I’ll just say that I think this one area where economists of all stripes largely agree, demand precedes supply, by and large.

            But, even if that is not the general case, in a financial crisis we have some clear evidence against the idea that creating new products would have spurred the economy. Profitable companies started sitting on cash post-2008. Do something to let them increase their profits and they will just sit on more cash, not invest in R&D. If there was money to be made by investing that in new products or whole new companies they would have spent their cash down.

          • onyomi says:

            The problem with Keynes’s (admittedly now widely accepted) refutation of Say’s Law is that it strawmans Say by ignoring the composition of production. To say that “supply creates its own demand” does not mean that the demand for any given product is infinite if only the supply is infinite.

            Human desires, which are infinite (who was “demanding” Pokemon Go five years ago?), do precede supply, but that is not the same thing as saying demand precedes supply in an economic sense. In order to consume, one must first produce. Simply wanting doesn’t make things come into existence.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Using the example of a specific named product is a pretty elementary mistake. Clearly the demand for entertainment in general, and entertaining mobile apps, preceded the development of Pokemon Go. And Pokemon Go is actually self-refuting as an example in another way. Ingress preceded Pokemon Go and is, in fact, the exact same game (just not with Pokemon “skins”).

            And yet, the demand for Ingress was non-existent compared to Go. It was the existing demand for Pokemon that allowed Go to flourish where Ingress languished.

            And still, none of this has anything to do with stimulus in a recession or depression.

          • onyomi says:

            The point is, the power of people to desire things is infinite, and sometimes includes things they don’t even yet know they want. The Keynesian notion of a “general glut” is misleading because it implies the fundamental problem is overproduction when actually it’s production of the wrong things and/or the production of the right things in non-economical ways.

            The problem with the Keynesian idea that all recessions are fundamentally failures of demand is that it ignores the possibility (indeed, the high likelihood) that “hoarders” are acting rationally, not only individually, but in a larger sense, by not spending money in ways which don’t meet their needs.

            If the economy is not meeting consumers’ needs, it is because it is suboptimally configured in some way. The only way to reconfigure it, usually, is by letting failing businesses fail. But demand stimulus merely serves to prop up the status quo; helping existing businesses by a kind of proxy vendor financing, at the expense of the potentially more efficient, better attuned businesses which don’t come into existence.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        In my experience, all too many Blue Tribers are happy to disown the whole concept of patriotism with sneers about ‘Murica. Personally I’m with Stewart, but it seems disingenuous to make that point without also rebuking those Blues as well.

        • SilasLock says:

          One of the things that I like about Jon Stewart is that he makes me, someone who normally isn’t very patriotic, feel like it’s possible to love one’s country and to be a decent person. It’s a feeling many people on the left don’t experience very often, for reasons that Scott explored in “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”.

          (we feel like patriotism is a right-wing thing, and that showing patriotism is ceding to the red tribe)

          So I personally wouldn’t blame the blue tribe for sneering about ‘Murica all the time, we can’t help it. We’ll only start being patriotic once the right stops being patriotic, and the right will only stop claiming patriotism for themselves once leftists start acting patriotic. It’s kinda a vicious cycle. =P

          • Bugmaster says:

            I think there’s a difference between being proud of what your country has accomplished, and loving it simply because this is where you happened to be born.

      • Exit Stage Right says:

        Ok so

        First, I am not Red Tribe now. I don’t think I can ever be Red Tribe. I think this was being discussed in the links post, but Red Tribe =/= GOP. This is more important than I think you’ve given it credit. I was born Blue Tribe, and to pretend like I’m not a Blue Triber would be a bit fake, though I also see myself as having ties to the Grey Tribe. Its not like I tuned out of Jon Stewart and started tuning into Fox News, is my point.

        You actually underplay your hand. There have been points in history where the GOP has controlled both houses, the Presidency, and the SCOTUS. They also are more influential in the Pentagon, generally.

        Yet the Red Tribe agenda has gone nowhere. When they elect the GOP, the GOP winds up growing the government, not shrinking it. Every President has seen government spending as a percentage of GDP go up except Clinton (shrunk) and Reagan (steady). The numbers on government growth are more complicated than that alone(how many federal/state employees are there, which departments are getting more spending when GOP/Dems are in office, which are getting less), but I think its obvious enough that if small-government was actually a goal of the GOP, they’ve had plenty of opportunities to pull it off. But its not a GOP goal (why on earth would it be, they work for the government), its a Red Tribe goal.

        Lets look at other pressing Red Tribe issues. Abortion is a nonstarter (yes, Red Tribe states can obstruct, but isn’t the fact that they can only obstruct kind of telling?) Christianity can’t be taught in schools. Gay marriage is the law of the land.

        Immigration? The border wall was taken seriously as an idea by precisely nobody; it took the craziest person to run for President in years to bring it up. The establishment position in both the GOP and the Dems was the status quo.

        Stronger policing? Yeah, about that. Guns? Ok, they’ve been holding out on this front. I wouldn’t put money on them holding out forever.

        Foreign policy. Well, the Red Tribe, generally, could not give less of a fuck about the world outside America. Yet if you look at world affairs you see America’s hands are everywhere. Isolationism is another completely unserious political position. And again, it’s only ever mentioned by people like Trump, who’s seen as crazy. Yet his position ISN’T crazy inside the Red Tribe.

        Of course, in the GOP, the Neocons ran foreign policy for ages. And of course they saw isolationism as just about the dumbest thing in the universe.

        So my question is, how powerful is your Tribe if neither political party even represents its positions?

        It took Donald freaking Trump to actually give these people a voice. And christ, what an ugly voice it is, no? As a Blue Triber, I have a gut-level distaste for it. I’m never going to be comfortable watching American nationalism.

        This is why the idea that the Red Tribe “owns America”, is a joke. No Red Triber would ever mistake his Tribe for powerful, because if his Tribe were powerful America would like dramatically different.

        And I get that from a Blue Tribe perspective, this sounds weird, because you don’t think of yourself as being more powerful. I am trying to communicate to you that you absolutely are. Are your celebrities Blue Tribers or Red Tribers? What about your universities? Hell, what about WALL STREET…GOP supported, sure, but Red Tribe? Come on.

        However, Jon is wrong when he claims the Red Tribe don’t own the label, they absolutely do, I think at least in part because the Blue Tribe abandoned it (if the Blue Tribe wanted patriotism to be theirs, I think it would be). As a Blue Triber, didn’t you find the gratuitous number of American flags on the last day of the DNC to be rather cynical? Dyou think young Bernie Sanders supporters were thrilled to see them?

        • Chalid says:

          I feel like when you keep in mind that GOP =/= Red Tribe, then it’s not clear that “Red Tribe” actually wants smaller government. It seems like a lot of the push for smaller government comes from the big business/rich people wing of the GOP. Failure to cut, say, social security, is perhaps better seen as a victory by “Red Tribe” over the rest of the GOP.

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            Well, neither the GOP nor the Red Tribe wants to slash all kinds of government spending. They both love Defense spending as far as I can tell.

            But youre right, I should make the case that its the GOP that fails to cut spending and not the Red Tribe that stops them from doing it.

            My argument is, the GOP are themselves government employees, and if a department gets cut its fewer potential jobs for them. If said department is mostly Democrats, then there’s no conflict of interest. But many departments aren’t.

            I find it much easier to believe that a group of government employees would promise to cut government spending, then not do that and instead try to reap the spoils of government spending, than the alternative.

            Which is: government employees actually try to suicide potential jobs, give up a chance to reap the spoils, and only are prevented from doing so because they instead decide to listen to the genuine desires of their constituents.

            Does that sound like politicians to you?

          • Civilis says:

            There’s a difference between entitlement and non-entitlement spending.

            The red tribe that was forced to pay in to the entitlements wants its money back. They may be willing to take a haircut on some of it, but they’re not going to be willing to do so while the government gives away a lot of non-entitlement spending to people that didn’t pay into the system.

            The GOP elite, much of which is bluish if not Blue Tribe, is in favor of specific non-entitlement spending. This is the handouts for their particular industry (such as farm subsidies), things which get them re-elected (things in their particular district) and the like, while being against non-entitlement spending in general, but the quid pro quo nature means they need to give a little to get a little. Also, the nature of government spending is that increasing spending but not by as much as you planned gets labeled by the media as a ‘cut in spending’ when it suits their purposes.

            Defense spending is a whole different can of worms. In addition to the my industry / my district’s base issue, there is the whole national security thing to worry about.

        • SilasLock says:

          You make a lot of interesting points, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I still think that the red tribe has a lot more power than you give it credit for, but you have a good case.

          Is it possible that the red tribe’s alienation from the GOP comes from a steady drift to the left in the policies enacted, but not from the beliefs people hold? Liberals have won some very significant battles recently (gay marriage, and Roe v. Wade a little further back), yet I don’t think that people’s views on these issues have changed too significantly.

          Maybe the parties are actively targeting the center of US policies, but not necessarily voters, which would leave much of the red tribe high and dry?

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            I don’t think people change their views much, but I do think each generations views tend to be slightly (or sometimes not slightly) to the left of their predecessors on average.

            The parties are targeting the center (“the pivot” that happens in every general election). But if the center itself is moving steadily left, then the GOP targeting the center means that the very much not in the center Red Tribe is usually losing ground

          • TomFL says:

            Winning or losing in the Supreme Court is a bit of a mixed bag. Legislating via the court is always distasteful.

            Gay marriage lost almost every single time it was put on a ballot. It would eventually have been voted in but it would have taken a decade or more, especially in states with constitutional amendments. Society can decide what rules it wants to live under, but it is best if these are actually voted on and legislated, not backdoored through the court system. Framing gay rights as a civil right was a wise move, but the backlash has resulted in crazy NC bathroom laws.

          • gbdub says:

            The general public has been drifting toward accepting gay marriage / gay rights in general for awhile. The thing is that I think the median American position is probably something like where the Democrats (capital D here) were in the early 2000s through 2012, basically live and let live with support for civil unions but not outright endorsing gay marriage as national policy (keeping in mind neither Obama nor Hillary were openly endorsing gay marriage in 2008).

            What’s weird for your average Red Triber is how fast the Overton window moved from “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” to “get fired for supporting an anti-gay marriage amendment”. The acceptable public discourse changed much more rapidly than actual opinions it seems.

        • Jill says:

          The GOP consists of The Powers That Be GOP establishment, plus the Red Tribe voters who vote consistently against their own best interests. Of course the voters who are willing to vote against their own best interests in response to false promises, are not going to get anything they want. Who’s going to buy the cow if they are getting its votes for free? They’ve been doing this for years. And now the Donald is making more false promises to them, and also being more entertaining than past candidates, and they are voting for him too.

          This is partly the fault of the Dems who have not reached out to Red Tribe groups like lower income whites. The Dems actually have more they could offer to them, in terms of economic help, than the GOP does, but the Dems refuse to court them. So who can blame the Red Tribers for voting against their best interests, in response to false promises?

          I can’t blame the Dems for wanting to take back patriotism. I think Bernie is very patriotic in not wanting to get involved in unnecessary wars. If Hillary wins, Bernie and his supporters will be pressuring her to be progressive rather than neocon, in foreign policy.

          If Donald wins, no one knows what he’ll do for sure. But someone– Pence?– will have to do the work of government, since Donald is incapable of it. Pence is an establishment Republican– so that would probably be GW Bush all over again.

          • Sandy says:

            Red Tribe voters who vote consistently against their own best interests

            The Blue Tribe always says this about the Red Tribe, but what do you imagine their best interests should be?

            The phrase “their best interests” is typically used in a purely economic capacity. But what if people have terminal values beyond increased GDP per capita? Some examples: What if they believe illegal immigration, state-sponsored bilingualism and a loosened emphasis on assimilation to the American mainstream are dangers to their local culture? It’s not like this is an insane belief on their part. Even if some debate can be had on the matter, they can cite someone as eminently respectable as Putnam to back them up.

            What if they believe that American society must maintain a strongly Christian (preferably Protestant) identity to ensure social cohesiveness and prosperity? Again, not necessarily an insane belief on their part. There’s a large body of scholarship about Calvinism’s influence on American capitalism, patriotism and culture.

            Who are they supposed to vote for, in that case? It’s clearly not the Dems. It’s often not even the GOP either.

            If you haven’t read Unnecessariat, I highly recommend it. Barack Obama once talked about people like that, who’ve seen President after President, Blue and Red, come and go, all promising them revival and never delivering. But Obama is a high-status city-dwelling Blue Triber and like many of his ilk, his sympathy for such people is limited. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” was how he put it. The Unnecessariat link is fairly blunt about the fact that nobody represents their best interests, because this is a group of people that has become economically redundant. It’s not just that they don’t have money; they’re dealing with a lot of cultural decay and stagnation. “Their best interests” is really just a meme urban Blue Tribers recycle to signal the belief that the part of the Red Tribe made up of working-class white people, particularly the rural ones, is just too stupid to vote Democrat.

          • Jill says:

            Sandy

            “The Blue Tribe always says this about the Red Tribe, but what do you imagine their best interests should be?

            “The phrase “their best interests” is typically used in a purely economic capacity. ”

            Yes, the economics are what the Dems could help with.

            “But what if people have terminal values beyond increased GDP per capita? Some examples: What if they believe illegal immigration, state-sponsored bilingualism and a loosened emphasis on assimilation to the American mainstream are dangers to their local culture? It’s not like this is an insane belief on their part. ”

            No, it isn’t. And yes, I agree that they believe that. And the GOP has been making promises to them on that and then breaking those promises, for many years now. This strategy gets votes for the GOP Powers That Be. So, since it works, they don’t fix it.

            “What if they believe that American society must maintain a strongly Christian (preferably Protestant) identity to ensure social cohesiveness and prosperity?”

            They do believe this, and false promises abound from the GOP on this too.

            Who are they supposed to vote for, in that case? It’s clearly not the Dems. It’s often not even the GOP either.

            Maybe they need to start a 3rd party, if they are interested in those issues, rather than in economic issues that would help them. I agree that neither party is giving them those non-economic desires. It certainly has never helped them to vote for the false promises of the GOP.

            The GOP is likely to end or greatly reduce Social Security, which will greatly decrease their quality of life. And the Dems would be more likely to focus on jobs programs to help them there. They may wake up to find they do care about economics.

            “Their best interests” is really just a meme urban Blue Tribers recycle to signal the belief that the part of the Red Tribe made up of working-class white people, particularly the rural ones, is just too stupid to vote Democrat.”

            True. Many Blue Tribers do believe that. And they are certainly economically worse off for voting GOP. The GOP would wipe out their Obamacare medical insurance– and it has kept people from getting Medicaid in some Red states.

            The Dems could do a lot for Red Tribers, actually. But the Dems do not reach out to them, and Red Tribers may be unlikely to vote for Dems if they did. So Red Tribers will probably keep voting for false promises from the GOP for many years to come.

          • SilasLock says:

            @ Sandy

            The same could be said about the upper class portion of the blue tribe; why do they vote for people who are largely going to take their money away from them? The answer is obvious to blues, though I’ve never seen any right-wing political commentator ask this question. It’s weird; if I were a member of the red tribe it would perplex me to no end.

            It could be a remnant of the Thatcher/Reagan era, when the welfare state and redistribution became associated with a certain cultural distance from the common man? That seems one possible way that redistribution became a part of upper blue tribe policy agenda. I dunno, it’s just a thought.

            “Their best interests” is really just a meme urban Blue Tribers recycle to signal the belief that the part of the Red Tribe made up of working-class white people, particularly the rural ones, is just too stupid to vote Democrat.

            I disagree. I’m largely blue and repeated the meme as much as anyone in my younger days, but it wasn’t for signaling reasons. I was just genuinely perplexed by the voting behavior of a large segment of the American public. It seemed like a wacky paradox that I couldn’t explain.

          • cassander says:

            @jill

            > plus the Red Tribe voters who vote consistently against their own best interests

            I’ve explained to you before how this is not the case. red tribe overwhelmingly makes too much money to qualify for the means tested welfare state and enough to pay relatively high taxes. Red tribe works in the sort of brown industries that blue tribe likes to regulate to death, red tribe does not go to college nearly as much as blue tribe, and when it does, it’s actively discriminated against. Red tribe voting against the democrats is perfectly economically rational.

          • Jill says:

            Cassander, I guess that’s true of the wealthier Red Tribe members. But I don’t think the GOP could win elections without the lower and lower middle class whites, who consistently vote GOP, ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy started roping them in with veiled racist statements.

            There certainly are rich GOP folks who just don’t want to ever pay any taxes. And they are indeed voting their own best interests– at least their short term economic best interests. But anyone who doesn’t want to get into neocon wars is not getting what they want in foreign policy or in economics. Neocon wars are both unnecessary and expensive.

          • Sandy says:

            @Jill: You talk about false promises, but the Dems don’t even make overtures in that direction, and everyone knows they’re not ideologically oriented that way. Yes, the GOP makes false promises, but the Red Tribe has to pick a party and hope that they get a bone tossed in their general direction. Going independent just means they get shut out completely.

            Part of the reason the Red Tribe has revolted against the GOP and embraced Trump is because his campaign has shone a spotlight on the fact that the GOP takes the Red Tribe for granted. Before Trump turned the game on its head, the GOP elite were planning to nominate Jeb, who claimed to represent the Red Tribe while calling illegal immigration “an act of love”. And while Trump has likely not stepped foot inside a church since his last wedding, his open and undisguised hostility to Islam is to them a reassuring change from politicians perceived to be bending over backwards to soothe Muslim egos in the wake of each new atrocity. We can debate over whether that’s good or bad, but Trump has done enough to signal that he might, just might, be a very different kind of leader, and they’re willing to take a chance on him because of that.

            And incidentally, Trump has also broken ranks with the GOP on Medicaid and Social Security, and the Red Tribe hasn’t spurned him for it. Suggesting that this is something the GOP elite feel strongly about but not necessarily something their base gets worked up over.

            The Dems are likely to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. That will lower the Red Tribe’s quality of life and have deleterious effects on their culture. And many of the Democratic Party’s job proposals, like telling coal miners they’ll get jobs in green energy, are so ludicrous that everyone recognizes them as baldfaced lies. Ask Congressman Barney Frank, Hillary Clinton endorser, for his thoughts on the matter: “The likelihood that 58-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

            @SilasLock

            As with the Red Tribe, I just assumed the Blue Tribe too has terminal values beyond increased GDP per capita.

          • meyerkev248 says:

            Eh….

            At least in this election in particular, it’s Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton.

            Clinton a pretty pure neocon foreign-policy-wise, and openly wants to make our policy with Cuban refugees the policy for ALL illegals.

            Meanwhile… Ok, I don’t trust Trump not to start a war out of arrogance, but at least in the debates: “Build a wall, don’t let them in, what happens out there isn’t our problem” + “4 Trillion Dollars wasted in Iraq”.

            I trust Debates Donald Trump to keep us out of war more than Hillary (and that’s not entirely a good thing, but).

            And then once again, Hillary wants to Cubanize all illegal immigrants.

            So… yes, voting Trump IS voting their economic and cultural interests.

          • Anonymous says:

            Hillary wants to Cubanize all illegal immigrants.

            What’s the deal with you people? From an anti-immigration perspective her proposed policy is bad enough. Wild exaggeration makes your argument less persuasive, not more.

            Is this some cultural thing I’m missing because I’m an effete coastal elitist?

          • meyerkev248 says:

            @Sandy:

            It’s not Jeb, it’s ¡Jeb! “Acto De Amor” Bush the Third who speaks Spanish at home because his wife isn’t so great with the English.

            He might be competent, but a worse tribal fit I can’t imagine.

            /In seriousness thigh, the ¡Jeb! is real.

          • meyerkev248 says:

            @Anon:

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clintons-stance-on-immigration-is-a-major-break-from-obama/2016/03/10/6388a1f8-e700-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html

            “Hillary Clinton’s pledge not to deport any illegal immigrants except violent criminals and terrorists represents a major break from President Obama, and it could vastly increase the number of people who would be allowed to stay in the country.”

            It’s a dry foot policy just like the one we’ve had for Cuba forever.

            It’s not exaggeration, it’s a straight description of her proposed policy.

          • cassander says:

            >But I don’t think the GOP could win elections without the lower and lower middle class whites, who consistently vote GOP, ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy started roping them in with veiled racist statements.

            Well one, Nixon did not rope them in. the demographics we’re talking about stayed democratic until the 90s. Republican presidents did well among them because republican presidents did well with everyone. Between 68 and 88, republicans won an average of more than 40states per election, and they consistently did worst among the southern whites that make up the heart of the red tribe.

            Two, assuming your definition of lower class whites is “whites near or below the poverty line” they represent a very small proportion of whites. Most whites, and thus most of red tribe, make too much money to qualify for the means tested welfare state, and a large portion of those that don’t are only in such circumstances temporarily. There’s a hard core of genuinely poor red tribers in places like west virginia, but they are a very small minority.

            >There certainly are rich GOP folks who just don’t want to ever pay any taxes.

            I think, all else being equal, I think most people would prefer not to pay taxes. That said, the economic elite are, by definition, a tiny proportion of voters who are paying plenty of taxes, as I’ve pointed out to you elsewhere, and who are not the people we’re talking about.

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s not exaggeration, it’s a straight description of her proposed policy.

            No it isn’t. First because deportation is different than exclusion. She saying she’s going to shut down ICE, not CBP. Second, even if it were a dry foot policy, which it is not, it still wouldn’t be the same without the automatic Green Card Cubans get under the Cuban Adjustment Act.

            Again I don’t see the reason why immigration opponents always feel the need to wildly exaggerate.

          • Sandy says:

            Ronald Reagan signed off on an amnesty agreement in 1986 because he was told there would be crackdowns on illegal immigration that would ensure such an amnesty would never be necessary again. It is now 30 years later, there are 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, and people are talking about amnesty again.

            Perhaps they exaggerate because there is no good reason to believe the official story.

          • Anonymous says:

            Two, assuming your definition of lower class whites is “whites near or below the poverty line” they represent a very small proportion of whites. Most whites, and thus most of red tribe, make too much money to qualify for the means tested welfare state, and a large portion of those that don’t are only in such circumstances temporarily.

            So which is it — mostly unessasariat or solidly middle class. You’ve managed to claim both within the span of a single subthread.

          • Anonymous says:

            Ronald Reagan signed off on an amnesty agreement in 1986 because he was told there would be crackdowns on illegal immigration that would ensure such an amnesty would never be necessary again.

            That’s awfully passive voice. He was the freaking President — “was told” by whom?

          • Sandy says:

            Peter Robinson, who wrote hundreds of speeches for Reagan, claimed that it was sold to Reagan (somebody writes these bills and it’s not the President) as a package that combined amnesty with tighter borders. Reagan was not opposed to amnesty for immigrants who had “laid down roots” in America, but he did want tighter borders.

            Are there tighter borders now? Reagan legalized 3 million illegal immigrants. We have close to 4 times that number now.

          • Anonymous says:

            Reagan must have been a pretty terrible President to get fooled like that, huh?

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Sandy
            Ask Congressman Barney Frank, Hillary Clinton endorser, for his thoughts on the matter: “The likelihood that 58-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

            How many of them are coal mine ‘engineers’ now … vs grunts who can load 16 tons of rare earths*, or can drive trucks or fry burgers for grunts who will load something else instead of coal?

            * or whatever

          • Jill says:

            “Hillary Clinton’s pledge not to deport any illegal immigrants except violent criminals and terrorists represents a major break from President Obama, and it could vastly increase the number of people who would be allowed to stay in the country.”

            I wonder if that’s true. It would be a break from Obama, but a major break? Corporations want cheap illegal labor to stay in the country and big agribusiness and other corporations always get what they want from government. So I expect there will be very few illegal aliens deported, no matter who is our next president.

            There are still many votes to be gotten from complaining about illegal immigration. And there are many corporate donations to be gotten from never doing anything about it, once in office.

            Romney won the 2012 GOP nomination partly by complaining about illegal immigation, and about how illegals shouldn’t even have a path to residency, much less citizenship, for example. But he shot himself in the foot with his 47% comment and so failed to win the presidency. Romney claimed to hope that a comprehensive immigration reform package would get done. But of course he must have known it wouldn’t.

            GOP politicians rail on about immigration to get votes. And once in office, they do nothing about it, in order to get corporate donations from corporations benefiting from cheap illegal labor. Wash Rinse. Repeat. Trump is likely doing the same. His own business likely benefits from illegal construction workers.

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/03/03/mitt-romney-no-path-to-citizenship-for-illegal-immigrants/

    • malpollyon says:

      A socially powerful and economically well-off Blue Triber, lecturing the Red Tribe on how it doesn’t own the country. Good lord, don’t you think they know that?

      Trump voters are richer than Clinton voters. The idea that Trump’s support comes from poor, powerless working class folks is a myth.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Given that, according to that article, Hillary and Sanders voters still had a higher median income than the country as a whole, it wouldn’t surprise me at all that the result comes solely from the fact that very poor people are less likely to vote.

      • Anonymous says:

        That article is intentional horseshit.

        Clinton’s coalition is High + Low vs Trump’s Middle (basically).

        In a high + low numerically low is going to outnumber high – that’s their damned job – be a warm body that can vote.

      • gbdub says:

        Since when does working class have to mean “makes less than the national median household”? The key word in “working class” is working. A two income household with both adults working full time is probably going to be above the national median. They will likely still consider themselves “working class”, may be in blue-collar or service jobs, etc. They are probably not particularly secure from threats to their employment.

        Dem voters (particularly for Sanders) also skewed young, which would make their current household income lower (less likely to be married, less time in the workforce) but Sanders had a lot of support from university students who may be poor now but will probably exceed the median later.

        I do think Anon has a point – without a breakdown of how far off the median everyone is it’s hard to draw conclusions, but it may well be that Clinton is getting the very poor and very rich, while Trump is drawing from the middle.

        As others have mentioned, the middle voters are in the position of too rich to get a lot of benefits, but not rich enough that taxes don’t sting, or rich enough not to worry about threats to blue-collar jobs from immigration and outsourcing. I think that’s the “white working class” that’s drawn to Trump.

      • Blue Tribe is not identical to Democrats. Democrats get their votes from Blue Tribe AND Black Tribe, with extra votes from the Helot tribe, plus various other votes.

    • LPSP says:

      They look like absolute lunatics, that audience. They seem to have selected for the craziest, bat-munk mental zealots they could fine. They were shaking and shivering and wailing. That is not a rational, collected group. That’s a mob, braying for the demagogue.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      Jesus christ

      “and since those mujahidin would have done so bound by the Law”

      Epistemic certainty sounds wonderful

      • Sandy says:

        There’s a quote by the Prophet Muhammad in Civ 5 that I’ve liked ever since I heard it: “The Law is a fortress on a hill that armies cannot take nor floods wash away”.

        Now it’s taken on a very different meaning.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      Source?

      Related, I think Scott mentioned on a previous links thread that ISIS publish a glossy online magazine. It is interesting. The most recent issue is more readable than the others, as it is intended to convert non-Muslims, and so contains fewer Arabic terms that have to be worked out from context. In a darkly comic turn, it contains a picture of (presumably) an ISIS soldier holding a kitten.

      Edit: The latest issue is really interesting, especially the article “Why we hate you & why we fight you”. Reading it has given me a much better understanding of ISIS.

      So you can continue
      to believe that those “despicable terrorists” hate
      you because of your lattes and your Timberlands, and
      continue spending ridiculous amounts of money to
      try to prevail in an unwinnable war, or you can accept
      reality and recognize that we will never stop hating
      you until you embrace Islam, and will never stop fighting
      you until you’re ready to leave the swamp of warfare
      and terrorism through the exits we provide, the
      very exits put forth by our Lord for the People of the
      Scripture: Islam, jizyah, or – as a last means of fleeting
      respite – a temporary truce.

      • creative username #1138 says:

        Source is the very issue of Dabiq you linked to (page 80).

      • Exit Stage Right says:

        An amazing passage. I wonder if they understand that they’re essentially saying “Destroy us or this continues”

        • The Nybbler says:

          Indeed, reading that makes me wish I could vote for someone more anti-Islamic than Donald Trump. If the CIA wanted to write an anti-ISIS propaganda piece, they probably couldn’t do better.

          Come to think of it, how certain is it that this originates with ISIS?

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            I love how “convert or we kill you” found its way into the win over the non-muslims issue

        • Rob K says:

          to the extent that Al Qaeda and its ideological children have a coherent strategy, it’s the one articulated in “The Management of Savagery” – provoke the US into ever deeper direct intervention, with the intent of causing loss of respect for American arms (with the Soviets in Afghanistan as the template cited) and collapsing the existing regimes in the Middle East, creating a power vacuum that the radicals believe they can fill.

          So that is in fact the message they want to send.

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            They assume they can withstand any level of military intervention/autocratic repression.

            In an absolute sense, this obviously isn’t true. If the West allowed itself to be as brutal and horrible as necessary, ISIS wouldn’t survive it.

            But for strategic purposes, they can pretend its true, because they’re confident the West doesn’t have the stomach to fight that kind of war.

          • Jill says:

            I agree. They want to bankrupt us, and to use the U.S. wars in the ME and its drones and its torture to as recruitment ads to get more terrorists to join them. It seems to be working. I expect they hope for Donald Trump to win, but think it’s a shame that there isn’t someone running who is more anti-Islamic than Donald Trump– who would institute more wars in the ME and drones and torture that they could use as recruitment ads to get more terrorists to join ISIS.

          • hlynkacg says:

            But for strategic purposes, they can pretend its true…

            Exactly.

            They are banking on a half-assed Western/NATO response that will further undermine westerners’ moral and legal authority while simultaneously making the radicals look better in comparison.

            Sadly the last 40 years or so have shown that this is the smart way to bet.

          • creative username #1138 says:

            If the West allowed itself to be as brutal and horrible as necessary, ISIS wouldn’t survive it.

            Even without the West being as brutal and horrible as you want it to be ISIS is losing pretty badly in both Syria and Iraq right now (admittedly a lot of credit for this goes not just to the West to Russia/Iran/Hezbollah)

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            First: “This is just what they want us to do!” Okay, let’s assume it is. So what? Imperial Japan wanted a war with the United States. How’d that work out for them? People don’t always want what’s in their best interests.

            Second: I’m also curious what is expected to happen under this hypothesis if we don’t attack ISIS militarily. Will they shrug, say “oh, well” and stop their misdeeds? Or will they ramp them up until they finally get the reaction they supposedly want?

          • @ThirteenthLetter: I think the point is that, even though they’re presenting themselves in what is arguably the worst possible light, they may be lying. (You perhaps have taken that possibility for granted, but I didn’t realize it until it was pointed out.)

            We might or might not want to change tactics as a result, but it is at least potentially relevant.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @Harry Johnston – It’s certainly possible they’re telling the truth. One thing you have to give them, jihadists tend to be pretty upfront about their views and goals; it’s Western journalists and human rights activists who try to blow smoke where those things are concerned.

            That aside, I more or less agree: this propaganda may be useful information from the perspective of plotting a strategy to annihilate them. I’m just saying that it’s not, in and of itself, an argument that we shouldn’t annihilate them.

          • Nicholas says:

            If the West allowed itself to be as brutal and horrible as necessary, ISIS wouldn’t survive it.

            ISIS as a political entity would probably not survive, no. But the larger ideological movement which ISIS views itself as part of, the Narrative Role they see themselves as fulfilling, is probably not something the West actually has the resources to destroy (Keep in mind that the color of the sky in ISIS world is that the entire world population of Muslims is the group they want the West to try to fight, plus the non-Muslim populations of Muslim majority states) : Fighting just Iraq and Afghanistan has reduced the US Marine Corps’ aircraft by 2/3rds. An all out war on all non-Turkey, non-Israel Middle Eastern States, plus Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Libya, Pakistan and Indonesia would destroy the armies of the West in attrition and insurgency.
            Resorting to nuclear weapons is a risky option: Partly because there’s more than one nuke-having country in the Middle East, and getting nuked back is the whole reason nukes are a deterrent. Then you have to predict whether or not that kicks off a Planet of the Apes style nuke fight with Russia and China, and whether the global economy even survives the effect of destroying one fourth of the world’s population.

        • Paul Torek says:

          You seem to think the message is directed at you/us. Because it says that it is?

          It’s probably directed at recruits.

      • LPSP says:

        In other words, ISIS thinks the entire west is a cartoonish evil strawman of the Blue Tribe.

        Nevermind the unfairness of the exaggeration (yes, blue tribers will fight a war for lattes); the irony is that the blue tribe tolerates and welcomes radical Islam and fights to permit them. It’s the RED tribers that continue to say no, and they are not Timberland shoppers.

    • Sandy says:

      Yeesh. Where is this from?

  61. Corey says:

    If I understand correctly, we all want to be pseudonymous to allow controversial and/or politically-incorrect comments. For that we want the pseudonymity to be pretty strong. For that, registration / accounts might *help*, because we could get rid of Gravatar in favor of individual avatars (alternatively we could just get rid of avatars, especially if there’s registration, since it’d enforce a one-to-one correspondence between handles and email addresses, so you’d no longer need avatars to tell anons apart).

    Gravatar contains a vector for re-identification, in that if one suspects an email address of being a particular grav-person, one can hash it and see if the picture matches.

    Such a thing could also be set to email a user if a comment is replied to, that might be helpful in threads the user is not obsessively checking. (Sometimes it’s looked, in other places, like I’ve drive-by-commented, when in reality I just forgot to go back to that thread).

    • Lumifer says:

      For reasonably strong pseudonymity you want to use an email account that’s not easy to connect to you anyway, so abolishing Gravatar isn’t going to change much.

      And yeah, inability to see if anyone replied to your posts is one of the big drawbacks of the current system. But email notifications would be overkill, the forum is too high-volume for them.

  62. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Last OT or so I asked for help on making sure I was eating enough. I pshaw’d on counting calories as unrealistic but a few people told me to do it anyway.

    It turns out calorie counting is pretty easy, especially as I’m not trying to get accuracy to the 1 calorie or even necessarily the 10 calorie level. There are good estimates for cooked food. It’s even pleasing in a way to my slightly ASD brain to track all this stuff.

    I’m using SparkPeople as the app, kind of at random from the app store. I can’t see how to pull out all my calorie data. I’m still figuring out where my calorie level should be.

  63. brad says:

    It’s unfortunate that the blog part of this blog is very interesting on politics and culture and the comment part of the blog is a cesspit on same, but very interesting on lots of other things.

    It’s going somewhat difficult to ban those topics in the comments if there are going to be blog posts dedicated to them.

  64. Two McMillion says:

    See, this is why I’m skeptical of even well-intentioned government action. It starts with someone saying, “We need a state recycling program,” and ends with you throwing someone in jail because they have too many used water bottles in the back of their car.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      You are misrepresenting the situation a lot. No-one is being thrown in jail, quote “it was unlikely Everidge, if convicted, would receive a prison sentence”. Furthermore, Everidge is being charged for attempting to fraudulently return bottles from a different state, not for having too many bottles (if that wasn’t obviously the case, his lawyer would be using the defence “he wasn’t trying to return the bottles” rather than the much weaker “he wasn’t very far into the process of returning the bottles”). The law here doesn’t affect anyone except people like Everidge who try to defraud the government. I don’t see what your problem with it is.

    • gbdub says:

      Eh, to me it’s legit to consider that a crime. Michigan has a bottle deposit program, meaning that retailers in Michigan are required to collect a 10 cent per bottle deposit, which can be refunded to the consumer when they return the bottle. In theory you don’t net any money – you just get back the money you already put in. If you’re too lazy to turn in your bottle, you lose out on the 10 cents and someone else can claim it.

      But by knowingly returning a bunch of bottles on which no deposit was collected, you’re defrauding the state. You’re claiming a refund of money you never paid. How is that different from lying on your taxes?

    • CatCube says:

      The case shown absolutely 100% is fraud. In Michigan, you pay the $0.10 per container when you purchase it. (I.e., when you buy a 12 pack you pay the listed price plus $1.20) You then get your dime back when you return the container.

      He was trying to get $0.10 back for paying a $0.05 deposit, which is in violation of the law and should be. (I’m not a fan of the deposit law to begin with, as one of my jobs at a Michigan grocery store was dealing with the returns, which was disgusting and time-consuming. But given that there is a deposit law, prohibiting people from cheating it is reasonable.)

  65. Maēlle André says:

    A ban on AC for trolls: A mild barrier of inconvenience. (Re Lumifer)
    A ban on AC for everyone else: An additional incentive to value the quality and framing of a post.
    (At times it may also be an inconvenience, but one overshadowed by an improved quality of general discourse, as nope said.)

    –Please, ban anonymous commenting.

  66. Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

    I say we ban non anonymous posting. Force every poster to be anonymous.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    • sweeneyrod says:

      Are you aware of 4chan?

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        To be fair, there are self-selection effects that are probably not trivial.

      • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

        I was born in 4chan, molded by it. I didn’t encounter non-anonymous posting until I was already a man.

      • Anonymous says:

        Yes. In fact, I prefer it to most of the internet.

        Then again I guess we have /ratanon/ for that, and the one thing I dislike about 4chan is that, although the discussion quality is high, no usernames means no making friends.

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      Seriously though: How about just banning anon comments on open threads?

  67. nachterb says:

    Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you are all pretty anonymous to me. Banning anonymous seems kind of pointless. Probably need to set up a board of “gardeners” to weed the icky comments (but that gets thorny too, pun intended). Not sure what replaces human-intervention.

  68. LPSP says:

    I don’t frequent open threads besides the major linked once. On every other sort o SSC comment thread, anonymous commentary is FINE. I also concur with the fact that determined chip-on-shoulder trolls are a far greater problem than random one-comment anons. I don’t think banning anonymity would solve anything really.

    I also don’t think censoring certain topics, however a soft censorship, is a good idea. The old “must be two of three” rule was good, and could be restored with an amendment “must be two of [clear and explicit, not a nitpick, doesn’t rely on assumptions]. That’s something posters can clearly follow, and in turn can clearly be punished for transgressing.

    • LPSP says:

      Actually I think I’m expanding that to a five point rule. Comments must be of the following:
      – clear and explicit, not relying vague assumptions or using generic charged language to try and b

    • LPSP says:

      Actually I think I’m expanding that to a five point rule. Comments must be three/four? of the following:
      – clear and explicit, not relying vague assumptions or using generic charged language to try and brute a point
      – not a nitpick, challenging explicit stated assumptions that are the norm in this environment; other platforms are a better channel for bringing these up and turning them into a main talking point
      – addresses the points raised, rather than jumping through hoops upon hoops of assumptions leading to strawmen
      – pleasant and decent in conduct and manner
      – not persistent beyond the point of addressal, ie. repeating oneself regarding of responses, the same comment over and over thread after thread

      Still deciding on the gate count for passing. Leaning towards three, as a one-off pleasant comment that has at least some connection to the content of the thread can afford to be generally wrong.

      • Jiro says:

        Because of course we have an objective third party to distinguish between a nitpick and an important errorm or between a strawman and a reasonable assumption.

        • LPSP says:

          I feel the guide I gave about is explicit enough to be followed by any moderator with acuity, and would work consistently for this environment.

  69. Ruprect says:

    Market failure?

    The number one thing I want is for society to do less. If I save my money, that lowers interest rates enabling others to do more. If I burn my money, that increases the value of other people’s money enabling them to do more. If I pay people to smash productive machinery, that doesn’t reduce the amount of work done.

    I have to pay people to not work, but then they use this money to buy things?

    Is there any way for me to reduce the total amount of things done in society, within the market system?

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      What’s a thing done? If you mean you want less paid work, sharply increased progressive taxes (at all levels) would probably lead to people taking more leisure, since they get less value from working extra hours.

    • Salem says:

      The number one thing I want is for society to do less.

      What does this mean? Without more detail, it’s hard to know.

      I think what you mean is that you want people to engage in more leisure. In which case, yes, paying them not to work will reduce the amount of work done. Sure, there will be a second-order effect of other people doing more work, but that pushback will happen on any of your ideas to disturb from equilibrium (including getting people to work more). This isn’t “market failure,” it’s market success – your preferences aren’t the only ones that matter, after all.

      You can maximise the effectiveness of your paying people to take more leisure if you focus on supply-constrained jobs. Cosmetologists in Florida might be a good way of getting most bang-for-buck.

      • Broggly says:

        Conversely, there’s the argument that improving entertainment technology is making leisure more attractive, so Ruprecht might want to pay game developers to make a really fun VR game.

        • Ruprect says:

          Ideally I’d like people to sit under trees, play football in the park, and go swimming in the river.

          Read a book that was written a long time ago?

          Yeah – probably not a market failure – but if I was sufficiently rich would I be able to reduce economic output by paying people to do nothing? (Leaving aside whether me paying people to do nothing would be defined as economic output.)

          I suspect that we live in a world where demand is the limiting factor – you’d be hard pressed to reduce ‘real’ economic output by leaving productive capacity idle – there is just too much of the stuff and it can be replaced to easily. To the extent that demand for things exists, it can only be increased by me paying people to be idle – because there will be more money flowing around for them to satisfy their urges (or it’s a wash with interest rates, deflation ?).

          And i suspect that those people who really are irreplaceable are already getting sufficient money that it would be very difficult to persuade them to stop.

          • Salem says:

            If you pay people not to work, I doubt they will sit under trees reading old books. During the last recession, a lot of people had extra (involuntary) free time, and all the surveys show that they spent most of it sleeping or watching TV.

            If you want more people playing football in the park and swimming in rivers, why not just pay them to do that?

          • Ruprect says:

            I could pay people to do that – but I suspect that there would still be just as much rubbish being produced all the same.

            It’s impossible to prevent the creation of rubbish, mindless entertainment and diversions, from within the system – probably rightfully so – and it might not even be possible to reduce it.
            If I hated alcohol, and believed alcohol consumption were damaging, it would be impossible to prevent alcohol consumption by buying it all up… right? More would just end up getting produced. It probably wouldn’t even be possible for me to increase the price (long term), no matter how much money I had.

            The impact of the choices of others upon us, where we are unable to make anyone pay this cost, is where market failure comes from. So, perhaps democracy is the meta-market that acts to prevent market failures – problem is people who don’t care very much get the same vote as those who do, which leads to zombie societies.
            How best to determine what constitutes a market failure?

            (Anyway, if I paid people to swim in the river, they’d probably start sneaking off behind the bushes and reading Facebook at work. )

          • Luke says:

            That’s a pretty authoritarian set of preferences you’ve got there. Why do you care so much what other people do?

          • FeepingCreature says:

            “pretty authoritarian set of preferences”? What the hell?

            It’s totally okay to have preferences over the rest of society. There is nothing authoritarian about this whatsoever. I am much more disturbed by what seems like an attempt to paint “old-timey” (read: “right”) preferences as authoritarian-by-default.

            It is completely fine to care about what other people do. It’s called “being a social person” or “being invested in your society”? It’s a good thing?

            There’s a thin line exhibited here between “liberal” and “asocial”. Friends care what their friends get up to.

          • Ruprect says:

            That’s a pretty authoritarian set of preferences you’ve got there. Why do you care so much what other people do?

            It’s a bit like utilitarianism – I like to imagine people living the good life – it’s just that I don’t think people are equipped to make correct decisions about such things in their everyday life.
            And that is mainly projection – I certainly don’t feel that I’m equipped to make those decisions. I normally just follow whatever I did the day before/ what people tell me to do.
            There are a few areas where I like to think I’d be able to make an independent decision (such as if I was ordered to kill someone) but again, do most people make a real decision, even in those extreme circumstances?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ FeepingCreature

            I think the relevant words here are “tolerance” and “autonomy”. There is another line between caring about your friends and trying to run their lives according to your ideas.

          • Psmith says:

            Friends care what their friends get up to.

            Friends != “everyone else” or “the rest of society.” “How can I spend more time with my friends engaging in leisure activities?” is a perfectly unobjectionable question. That’s not what I understood OP to be asking (although it may well be a more productive question for him to ask.).

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @FeepingCreature

            Sure, there is nothing wrong (or at least inconsistent) about being a old-school conservative who doesn’t want people doing certain things, and voting for a government that stops them. But if you are taking a libertarian approach where you rely on the market to solve your problems you don’t get to take that position — a fundamental part of libertarianism is people know what they want and will express their desires through economic activity. The market is people doing what is best for them — if people fail to do what you think they should, that is by definition a market failure. Wanting to inflict your preferences on others (be they right-wing ones like “No drugs” or left-wing ones like “No guns” or apolitical ones like “More swimming in rivers”) is fundamentally authoritarian.

          • Alex says:

            The number one thing I want is for society to do less.

            It’s impossible to prevent the creation of rubbish, mindless entertainment and diversions, from within the system

            Maybe these are conflicting goals that you are entertaining here.

            The obvious way to prevent things from getting done is to provide mindless entertainment and diversions. I suspect that the reverse is also true. If you want to reduce indulgence in mindless entertainment and diversion you could increase the market value of getting things done.

            As others have pointed out, that you can’t have both simultaneously is a function of aggregated preferences of people that are not you. It is not a market failure.

            It’s a bit like utilitarianism – I like to imagine people living the good life – it’s just that I don’t think people are equipped to make correct decisions about such things in their everyday life.

            If your question is how to do this by throwing money at the problem, the trivial solution is to pay people to do just that and do not worry how much is produced as a side-effect.

            Why is production relevant to your preferences for “the good life” anyway?

          • Alex says:

            But if you are taking a libertarian approach where you rely on the market to solve your problems you don’t get to take that position

            Of course you do. The only limitation libertarianism imposes is that your power to have your way is limited by the power you hold in the market.

          • Salem says:

            You appear to want to get rid of the “rubbish” in the world and encourage people to participate in what you see as “the good life” – your view of which appears to be fairly pastoral. Would you say that’s fair?

            You seem to recognise that your views on what is rubbish and what is good are not widely shared. I would suggest you interrogate why, because the reasons for this will suggest your best course of action. Some possibilities:

            1) People don’t realise how good your version of the “good life” is compared to their current “rubbish.” If only they were exposed to it, they’d put down their smartphones.

            In which case, you can spend money sending people away on pastoral retreats, etc, at which point their preferences will change and they will seek this stuff out of their own accord. Some of them may even become pioneers like you, spending more money to send others on pastoral retreats, and your movement may take over the world.

            2) You don’t realise how good the “rubbish” is compared to your view of the “good life.”

            You should at least consider this possibility. After all, lots of people have freely chosen the “rubbish” over the “good life” after having been exposed to both.

            3) The “rubbish” is better in the short-term, but the “good life” is better in the long-term.

            Maybe we’re getting short-term gains from our smartphones, but in the long term swimming in the river leaves us much better off. In which case you need to demonstrate this to people, by showing people how much better off in the long term the swimmers are.

            4) The “good life” is better than the “rubbish” in your subjective preferences, but only there. Other people legitimately prefer the “rubbish” and would do so even with all information.

            This is a straight battle between your preferences and the preferences of most other people. If you commanded sufficient resources, you could pay people to give up their smartphones and live in pastoral-ish communities – and this really would work if you could pay them enough. Unfortunately for you, I doubt you have enough resources to make a significant impact on the world. Again, not market failure, market success – the market is taking into account the preferences and ability to pay of everyone, not what you would prefer their preferences to be. Your personal preferences, however strong, are a rounding error in terms of the world.

            You’ll be equally SOL using democratic means, for what it’s worth, because your vote is also a rounding error.

          • Ruprect says:

            The obvious way to prevent things from getting done is to provide mindless entertainment and diversions.

            It isn’t mindless diversions I object to, but the creation of new ones. As far as I’m concerned, swimming in the river is a superior diversion.

            It irritates me to think that one of the main occupations of our society is the creation of new mindless diversions. Seems like something has gone wrong.

            Paper-clip maximisation. Society should be designed (and it should tell a compelling story).

            @Salem
            option 5) mind-control?

            Nobody is being barraged with messages telling them to go swimming in the river, because nobody gets paid very much when they do that.

            Perhaps the best thing would be for me to buy all of the rivers and then convince people to pay me to swim in them. Then I could get an industry going.

          • Alex says:

            It isn’t mindless diversions I object to, but the creation of new ones. As far as I’m concerned, swimming in the river is a superior diversion.

            I suppose you do not argue the point that other people prefer other diversions. So the suggestion still holds: Pay them so that their preferences shift towards swimming in the river. Alternatively: pay to have them persuaded that this is in fact in their own best interest.

            If neither alternative is attractive to you, yes you have discovered a limitation of the power of markets. But: most proponents of the free market would call that limitation a feature, not a bug.

          • JayT says:

            Where I live it’s too cold to swim in the river 90% of the time. Will you make all of the people in my city move to places that have suitable rivers for swimming? What do you do in the winter? Force everyone to move to the other side of the equator? It kind of seems like you are the paperclip maximizer here.

    • Nicholas says:

      Ruprect: If you pay me $7000 a year USD, I promise to engage in no more than 20 hours of productive labor for pay weekly and devote the rest of my time to domestic tasks and leisure*, in the 2016-2018 time frame. You may approach me with contact information regarding this transaction at any time, at your convienience, between now and the 21st of December, 2016. I am willing to commit to a legally binding contract on this matter if you so desire. Feel free to take out a GoFundMe if you find it difficult to finance this experiment.
      *Such “leisure” may include otherwise productive acts such as building a garden, hand sewing clothing, participating in strenuous exercises, authoring role-play support materials, and other not-literally-leisurely hobbies.

      • Fahundo says:

        I’ll do it for $6500 with the added promise that my leisure activities won’t be anywhere near as productive as gardening or sewing

        • Nicholas says:

          I counteroffer by including in my first offer the stipulation that I will not spend the money on durable goods.

  70. Anonymous says:

    There are hidden threads every few days here.

    That link just points back to this post. Well, okay, it points to the list of Open Thread posts it and then redirects back here via JavaScript.

    Couldn’t you have done this redirect server-side, anyway? It’s quite irritating to see for a moment a page with substantive amount of content, start reading it, then be immediately taken away from it.

    • Bakkot says:

      In principle, yes; in practice, I’m know JavaScript and do not know PHP, and this solution sufficed.

      The list of open threads is available by clicking on the “open” tag in any such thread, or by removing “?latest” from the link, like so.

  71. Lemminkainen says:

    Oh, I also wanted to ask:

    Does anybody else here get the sense that Hillary Clinton is mildly autistic? That’s definitely the vibe that I picked up while I was watching her deliver her convention speech. She seemed to be able to emote much more easily when she was talking about concrete things than when she was making general rhetorical flourishes, which I definitely remember being a big problem for me during my autistic childhood (being unable to make myself care about pro forma ritual stuff, but being excited about specific issues).

    • LPSP says:

      (I typed this up about an hour ago but stuff froze and then crashed. Unlike a lot of these sorts of instances, I have the end of the post I typed available because I finished it off in notepad after the freeze, but not the beginning as that was irretrievable and lost in the crash. An amusing inversion, but not relevant to the discussion.)

      So far I have seen every single candidate for the presidency this year, on countless spaces including here, be characterised as autistic. I’ve talked about autism and how I believe the term has become bloated to the point of total inconsistency before, so I won’t go full rant; just merely observe another example in the growing and prominent trend for everyone to thing anyone who gets spirited about topics that seem irrelevent to themselves, but acts “without flourish” for other topics, must be a case of “the autism”. I’ve talked about autism and how I believe the term has been bloated beyond any consistent use, so I won’t go full rant. Just a mini observation of another way everyone seems to just use the term to mean anyhow who thinks and/or socialises differently to themselves, with both sides of long-standing arguments now calling each other autistic. I wonder how long it’ll be before people are literally going
      “You’re autistic!”
      “No, YOU’RE autistic!”
      “Excuse me, no matter how spergy I am, you are the autistlord!”
      on national television.

      • Corey says:

        People described Trump as autistic? He’s a salesman!

        The terminology also frustrates me, as a parent of someone a lot closer to the “wordlessly rocks all day” end of the spectrum than the “filesystem programmer” end. Nowadays if I find out about a program / event / thing “for autistics” the first thing I have to find out about is “do you mean Aspies, or kids who will actually be hard for untrained people to deal with?”

      • Agronomous says:

        Well, if they want my vote, it would sound more like:

        “I’m autistic!”

        “No, I’M autistic—you’re neurotypical (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!”

        “Excuse me, just because I can fake emotion about specific things doesn’t mean I can about general things! You, by contrast, seem to really mean it!”

        (A strategy based on getting my vote may be suboptimal overall, granted.)

      • Liskantope says:

        I agree and would like to add that AFAICT Hillary Clinton comes across as a typical politician but with a noticeably less natural charm and charisma than average. She still has more of those qualities than the average human being, let alone the average human being on the autism spectrum. However, as we are used to seeing politicians who are ridiculously more charismatic than average (just as we’re used to seeing TV and movie actors who are ridiculously better-looking than average), Hillary’s relative lack of skills in this area seem to be hurting her a lot.

      • LPSP says:

        …damn, I only just noticed I repeated myself in that post. Copy-pasting errors no doubt, plus maybe I didn’t nuke the entire post.

        Corey: It really worries me in general that parents like yourself and the parents of aspies are lumped together at all. Having worked for an autism charity and dealt with both sorts, it is my profound belief that the similarities between the two groups are minor and often just superficial, more symptomatic than causal. I’d call aspies the extreme end of a normal spectrum, and rocking-back-and-forth disabled.

        Agronomous: I honestly would love to see that, on account of my not having the foggiest notion whether it would work well or not. People may like having a diagnostically-special leader.


        I’ll take this as a cheeky opportunity to share a terminological idea here again, as I feel it’s pertinent to the discussion. If we accept that hyperactivity is a state that can occur to anybody, and that ADHD is simply a diagnosis of someone who is substantially more hyperactive than the norm, I think it would be useful if we extend this treatment to Asperger’s syndrome. We define a type of “aspie” behaviour – say a state of highly particular focus that defies social standards in its intensity and demand for accuracy – that can manifest in anybody. Diagnoses of Asperger’s simply indicate that the individual is more frequently in an aspie state than most. I think this idea makes excellent sense but I’d love for feedback, in case anybody can spot problems with it.

    • Corey says:

      [Ms. Clinton] seemed to be able to emote much more easily when she was talking about concrete things than when she was making general rhetorical flourishes

      I think that’s just because she cares more about those issues than the empty boilerplate, which isn’t quite the same thing as an autistic subject fixation.

      I read that she got hurt some by this focus on specificity in primary debates, as in:

      Mod: “Do you think college should be free?”
      Clinton: “I think we could achieve a debt-free public-school four-year degree for students whose families make less than $X by” [run out clock describing proposal]
      Sanders: “Yes.”

    • gbdub says:

      I wouldn’t call her autistic, but she does seem to be really bad at emoting convincingly. She gets an uncanny valley thing going sometimes where she’s either looking stone faced or looking WAY TOO EXCITED, like “Hillary-bot will now execute subroutine EXCITEMENT”. It’s particularly bad because Bill has effortless charisma and he’s always around. There are rumors at least from staff etc. that she is also just generally unpleasant to be around. So maybe she’s just not very personable. This is hardly unheard of among successful, ambitious, otherwise competent people. It’s just a rough trait for a politician campaigning to be a national symbol. I’m always hesitant to assign mental illness diagnoses based on these though. Seems a cop-out in a way.

      Look at some snaps from Bill and Hillary with the balloons at the convention to see what I mean.

    • E. Harding says:

      Trump was able to emote much more easily when not given a teleprompter. I found both of the voices used in the speeches off-putting and very robotic (Hers somewhat more so).

    • Clinton is the least autistic national candidate I can think of. Seriously, I don’t think it’s possible to become a national politician of any kind with even a mild degree of autism. Literally the entire job of a politician is to navigate social situations, communicate with strangers, and exude personality, and these are definitionally the things that autistic people are bad at.

      Getting excited about policy isn’t autism. It isn’t anything except wonkishness. And Clinton is at least a little wonkish.

      • Sandy says:

        The Pentagon released a study in 2008 that claimed Putin has Asperger’s. Granted, that may have just been anti-Russian propaganda.

        • LPSP says:

          I think it says it all about how autism is used and understood as a term that our top agencies happily use them as slander.

  72. Jerkface says:

    I think trolls are motivated, and they’ll make fake accounts to be awful if that’s what’s necessary. Banning anonymous comments, on the other hand, will prevent open discussion.

  73. Murphy says:

    Have you considered allowing people to post [Named] to you but [Anonymous Coward] to the public? ie, have a checkbox, for posting anonymously but linked to your name/email for the admin (you)?

    • I like this idea! I don’t post anonymously, but I think it’s a nice potential compromise between the ban (which would be semi-effectively disallowing posts that people would prefer not have publically associated with their name) and not having the ban (which struggles with accountability). Of course, I don’t know how much of a problem community reaction to Anonymous handles is, i.e. if someone using the name “Anonymous”, regardless of the content of their post, may not already poison discourse a little. I would hope it doesn’t, but I can’t say. (I read a lot of comments, but not enough to feel confident about an observation about that.)

      Sidenote, I actually have essentially the opposite problem, I’m thinking of coding an extension for my browser that turns everyone’s names and avatars into the same name and icon so I read posts purely on their merit. At least so’s the theory – I’d probably still screw that up.

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      @ Murphy
      Have you considered allowing people to post [Named] to you but [Anonymous Coward] to the public? ie, have a checkbox, for posting anonymously but linked to your name/email for the admin (you)?

      Sounds like a good idea. As a reader, I like to skim the ‘Anonymous’ comments and give more attention to the longer-committed pseudonyms, and most of all to the real names. Bumping all those who want to use Anonymous up to appearing like Committed Pseudonyms, is just confusing to readers. But ‘Anonymous’ to readers and email-linked for Scott’s use = win/win for at least some of the people on both sides.

  74. anon says:

    Here is a theory due to a participant in the French prediction market Hypermind, which I present for the consideration of the more historically informed members of the SSC commentariat: Red Tribe/Blue Tribe (Cavalier/Roundhead, Tory/Whig, etc) divisions map roughly onto the Guelf-Ghibelline divide of the late Middle Ages.

    I am a bit skeptical about how informative this parallel is. In particular, there are some counterintuitive (to me) conclusions; for example, the Papists (Guelfs) are supposed to map onto modern neoliberalism, which doesn’t match very well with the ideology of the Catholic Church in my lifetime (John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis). But I’m curious what others think.

    • Psmith says:

      Broadly speaking, Guelphs tended to come from wealthy mercantile families, whereas Ghibellines were predominantly those whose wealth was based on agricultural estates.

      I can see it, in a fun hand-wavy speculative sort of way. And rule by warrior class vs rule by priestly class. (I wonder what the relevant geographical divisions looked like. If southern Italy was Ghibelline and northern Italy was Guelph….).

      • ChetC3 says:

        Southern Italy in the late middle ages was under the rule of foreign dynasties, either as a single kingdom, or divided with one kingdom ruling Sicily, and the other the southern part of the peninsula. Whether it was Guelph or Ghibelline comes down to which dynasty was on the throne at the time, so Guelph under French monarchs, and Ghibelline under Aragonese. Northern Italy the trend was roughly, first rank cities (like Milan and Florence) were Guelph, second rank cities (line Siena and Pavia) were Ghibelline.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      What does “map onto” mean?

      Do you/he just mean that Guelf/Ghibelline corresponds with right/left? Then why bring Cavalier/Roundhead into it? Do you mention Tribes to indicate that culture matches up with politics?

      I think that if you take pretty much any two opposed historical parties and ask someone to identify them with right and left, they will insist that they do match. (In fact, I think you have the pairing backwards.) But that might be an illusion. Other people might not even agree with how to pair them up. If the right/left spectrum does describe most historical conflicts, that is an interesting claim (which is, of course, made up lots of specific claims, like the G/G conflict matching it). But to claim that one specific conflict matches it is not particularly interesting. If this was the point in time where it switched from an old axis of conflict to a new one, that would be interesting. If you have a theory of right/left that insists that it is Modern, but you find one particular conflict matching it in the past, that is interesting, at least if that particular conflict really looks to have Modern causes. But some conflict in the past has to be the best match, and that doesn’t have to be interesting.

      Here is a theory of the political spectrum that claims that political conflict is driven by material interests that are closely connected to culture. So it claims that G/G is like R/B, but it makes much more specific claims about what matching means.

  75. Lemminkainen says:

    So, I’ve recently noticed that I really like a lot of revolutionary, patriotic and political songs, in a way that doesn’t seem to depend on actually caring about the revolutionary, patriotic, and political causes they support. Does anybody else feel that way/want to talk about favorites?

    Some of my mine (you’ll have to google them yourselves so I don’t get eaten by the spam filter):

    USA: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” (which I think would be a way better national anthem than the one we have, and I’m an atheist), “Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom” (the US Civil War seems to have been a good time for songs)

    Ireland: I think that the Irish tend to be high achievers in this category, especially on a per-capita basis, possibly because they have so many failed struggles to lament. “The Foggy Dew,” “The Broad Black Brimmer of the IRA,” “The Wearing of the Green,” “The Green Fields of France,” and “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” are all fantastic.

    Russia/USSR: “Farewell of the Slavic Women” and “Katyusha” are great, the Stalin-era Soviet national anthem is probably a singular exception to the general rule that national anthems specifically written to be national anthems are bad.

    France: “La Marsaillaise” is a great song, as is “L’Internationale”

    ISIS: Terrible people, but “Salil as-Sawarim” [The Clashing of Swords] is really catchy!

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      I too often like stirring militaristic/patriotic songs (like Battle Hymn of the Republic – IIRC Scott likes this one too) even when they have little to do with my actual beliefs.

      Here’s a fictional one I like: https://soundcloud.com/vnmusics/muv-luv-alternative-op-asu-he-no-houkou (the lyrical theme is basically celebrating soldiers giving up their lives for the cause).

      • cassander says:

        Battle Hymn, is, without a doubt, the greatest summation of blue tribe motivation that has ever been written.

        • Lacking An Appropriate Sense Of Gravitas says:

          I do not associate arugula-eating, gun-fearing, college-educated agnostics with JESUS SMASH.

          • cassander says:

            the modern blue tribe has a different set of sins, to be sure, but the same attitude towards them. For “our god is marching on” substitute “we’re on the right side of history.”

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      In Air Force One, the commie dictator Radick’s demise was made all the sweeter by a manly prisoner chorus singing the socialist anthem L’Internationale. Take that, Bernie Sanders! 🙂

    • Ruprect says:

      Yeah – I’m certainly not in anyway sympathetic towards Germano-Turkish biker gangs, but I found this kind of stirring:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szBBtrSxPC4

      And of course:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHNfvJc99YY

      We’ll never be slaves guys, sorry. Ain’t going to happen. (Should defo be national anthem.)

      Best singing scene in a film (men of Harlech, zulu):

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-lDY02DThk

    • Two McMillion says:

      It’s not particularly surprising or strange to me that you would enjoy a thrilling song about patriotism without being overly patriotic yourself. It seems more or less like me enjoying reading about war in fantasy novels but not having any desire to actually fight in one.

    • Aegeus says:

      In the USA, don’t forget the various military songs: “Wild Blue Yonder” is my favorite, but “The Army Goes Rolling Along” and the Marines’ Hymn are iconic as well.

      And while they aren’t songs, you can’t talk about US patriotic music without talking about John Phillip Sousa.

      • Cord Shirt says:

        I mean, at least some of them are though?

        Let martial note in triumph float
        And liberty extend its mighty hand
        A flag appears ‘mid thunderous cheers
        The banner of the Western land.
        The emblem of the brave and true, its folds protect no tyrant crew
        The red and white and starry blue is freedom’s shield and hope.

        Other nations may deem their flags the best
        And cheer them with fervid elation
        But the flag of the North and South and West
        Is the flag of flags, the flag of Freedom’s nation.

        Hurrah for the flag of the free!
        May it wave as our standard forever
        The gem of the land and the sea
        The banner of the right.
        Let despots remember the day
        When our fathers with mighty endeavor
        Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
        That by their might and by their right
        It waves forever!

        Right?

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Huh, didn’t know there were original words to “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Many years ago Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof”) wrote his own lyrics under the title “The Man With the Sign”; rather than violate copyright here I’ll link to somebody else doing that. It’s an extended version of Voltaire’s (actually, not Voltaire’s) “I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”, and I choke up whenever I read it.

    • drethelin says:

      One of my favorites is actually kind of the opposite: I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel by Hoyt Axton.

      • Psmith says:

        Spicy.

        In a broadly similar political spirit, I’m quite fond of “Johnnie Cope” (lyrics) and “Will Ye Nae Come Back Again“.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        Who was “Robert Ely”?

        • bluto says:

          Only thing I heard that sounded like that was Robert E. Lee
          “I rode with Robert E. Lee/for three years there about”
          (with the e and lee flowing together to match the melody).

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            In a perfect world you’d have the melody flowing to match the words, but that’s a tall order here: the line about Lee practically demands a tune in 6/8, but the rest of the lyrics want to be in 2/4 or 4/4. If it were me I’d change it to something like “I rode with Lee and Jackson” (or maybe “Lee and Stuart” because, well, riding.)

    • Mercy says:

      On Youtube you should be able to find a live version of Dick Gaughan singing “Revolution” (there’s a studio version too but it’s a rather plodding). It’s an adaptation of an old American labour song that eschews political messaging for cosmic, bordering on absurd braggadocio. If you just want stirring it’s hard to beat.

      And yes, Ireland is totally the curve breaker here. I’m sure we could get a bunch of people to name their top 5 and not get repeats (personally I would have gone with A Nation Once Again, The Rising of The Moon, Roddy McCorley, Viva La Quinte Brigada and Only Our Rivers Run Free). Wonder if it’s because leftist/anti-government character of irish nationalism meant it could be an organic part of the folk music scene rather than something done exclusively by politics dorks. Similar to the gulf in talent between left wing punk and the white nationalist variety.

      Although England has it’s fair share of stirring songs – I like the Oysterband version of Bonny Bunch of Roses. And lefty english trad heads never seem to have any qualms about songs celebrating rightist causes – Bellowhead had a great minor hit recently with the old Confederate shanty “Roll, Alabama, Roll”.

      Actually The British Isles as a whole have a good batch of patriotism-critical but still stirring songs: Freedom Come All Ye, No Gods And Precious Few Heroes, Jerusalem and The Patriot Game are all great, the last especially because it’s set to the same tune (The Merry Month of May) as Dylan’s With God On Our Side, and unlike that song it’s politics aren’t just a front for sneering at hicks.

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      Three Jerusalems (the first infinitely best):
      West Point Cadets, Jerusalem
      Chief O’Brian and Dr. Bashir, Jerusalem
      Monty Python, Jerusalem

      The young cadets were in-training to lead troops in Afghanistan; unsurprisingly their version of Jerusalem is most serious and heartfelt.

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        PS  Those young Jerusalem-singing cadets are rainbow of ethnicity, aren’t they? As was a USMC wedding that my partner and I attended recently. “Marines come in just one color: green.” Which is both Marine faith and Marine practice.

        And also, why *-right ethnicity doctrines are utter nonsense.

        Pro tip  Spring for a chauffeured limo that is big enough to carry all of the Marines at your wedding reception, to wherever they want to go, rented for as long as the Marines want the party to continue (this saves much trouble on the day after the wedding).

    • Cord Shirt says:

      USA: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” (which I think would be a way better national anthem than the one we have, and I’m an atheist) […]

      France: “La Marsaillaise” is a great song

      :headdesk:

      Because exhorting the listeners to “soak the land” with “impure blood” is just so badass deuood. Our national anthem doesn’t have *anything* like *that*. 😉

      …yeah sorry you’ve stepped on a pet peeve of mine.

      :clears throat:

      And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
      That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
      A home and a country should leave us no more?
      Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution!
      No refuge could save the hireling and slave
      From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave.
      And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave…

      As for the Battle Hymn, I’m a Yankee so I both shouldn’t mind and of course do, but if you’re going to make the Battle Hymn the national anthem, you might as well make it “The Grant Pill” or “Marching Through Georgia”–IOW, no.

      As for Irish songs, bear in mind they stoleadapted a bunch of Yankee Civil War songs too–such as “Wrap the Flag Around Me, Boys” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” (became “God Save Ireland”):

      Wrap the flag around me, boys
      To die were far more sweet
      With freedom’s starry emblem, boys
      To be my winding-sheet.

      Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching
      Cheer up, comrades, they will come
      And beneath the starry flag we shall breathe the air again
      Of the free land in our own beloved home!

      …anyway sure, nothing wrong with liking a genre of music. 😉

      • Nornagest says:

        No one ever remembers anything past the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

        Which is a shame, since the other verses are arguably better.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          Even if they weren’t, the first verse doesn’t make any sense without the second one. “On the shore, dimly seen…what is that which the breeze…half-conceals, half-discloses? ‘Tis the star-spangled banner!”

          It’s a good song. And how about the line “Then conquer we must, if our cause it is just.” In context it’s basically, “As long as we’re careful to choose only just causes, we will always win.” Is this a culturally Puritan-descended attitude? Or is it just American? (I’ve sure seen non-Americans complain about this attitude and attribute it to all Americans.)

          • roystgnr says:

            Memealogy question: do you still recall where you first learned about the complete anthem? I didn’t even know there was more than one verse until I read Isaac Asimov’s All Four Stanzas. Now I seem to be incapable of discussing the national anthem without ranting about how the first verse is a question whose correct answer is the second verse, not “Play ball!”

          • hlynkacg says:

            I learned that there were additional verses at some point in middle or high school. It was one of those “fun fact” trivia bits you get on the back of cereal box or something.

            I didn’t actually learn the lyrics until after I enlisted.

          • Nornagest says:

            Book of songs and poetry I read when I was a kid, I think. Old one, probably early 20th century. Don’t remember the name, but I do remember it had a fairly lavish-looking plate of Fort McHenry being bombarded.

          • LHN says:

            @roystgnr Asimov also had a story (I’d remembered it as a Black Widowers story, but googling tells me it was a Union Club mystery: “No Refuge Could Save”) in which a suspected spy is tripped up in a word association test: The interrogator gives “terror of flight”, the subject replies “gloom of the grave”.

            Since no American actually knows that verse, obviously he’s a German spy who’s made a systematic study.

            (Though of course I, like a lot of people in this subthread, would wind up getting wrongfully shot as a spy. Probably in part as a result of reading the story.)

    • Nornagest says:

      I’ve liked “Men of Harlech” ever since I saw Zulu.

      ETA: Ah, I see Ruprect beat me to it. Well, bears repeating.

    • Agronomous says:

      Russia/USSR: “Farewell of the Slavic Women” and “Katyusha” are great

      I especially like Stalin’s organ solo in the latter.

    • Lysenko says:

      I have a similar fondness. One of the interesting things is the way in which really catchy melodies get spread and/or appropriated. There are Red and White versions of several classic Russian Revolution-era songs, Union and Confederate versions of American Civil War songs, and so on. Then you have songs that get transcribed into entirely different languages with all new lyrics, often ending up sung by the soldiers of the nation that defeated the side which originally produced the song!

      Some of my personal favorites like the Battle Hymn and Jerusalem have already been mentioned, but I thought I’d throw in a few others worth considering. I shouldn’t have to note that appreciating the lyrical and musical structure != endorsement of the causes in which some of these songs were written. If nothing else, quite a few are mutually exclusive:

      Russian: Tachanka (happiest song about a horse-drawn machine gun cart ever), Smuglyanka Moldovanka (A Russian soldiers meets a lovely, smouldering Moldovan Partisan),

      German: Wir Sind Des Geyers Schwarzes Haufen, And fully anticipating a bit of blowback for this one, Marschiert In Fiendesland. Note that this one is so good it’s been co-opted not just by the modern Bundeswehr (as “Grune Teufel”, for their Airborne troops) but also by the French Foreign Legion (“La Legion Marche Vers Le Front”) and I think one or two others as well.

      British: The British Grenadiers (I still think of the Fife and Drum Version as THE song of the 18th century British Army, accurate or not), Heart Of Oak,

      Scottish: Blue Bonnets Over The Border, the sung version of Scots Wha Hae (I find this video amusingly incongruous)

      Irish: The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

      Japanese: Yuki No Shingun. This one’s interesting since I’ve heard it was actually banned by the Imperial Japanese Army as contrary to its values. Somewhat believable, since the lyrics are pretty mocking and sarcastic.

      Islamist: Never found a satisfactory title for this one.

      Fictional/Original: March of Cambreadth

  76. timorl says:

    So Rojava exists since 2013 and doesn’t seem to be going away. Key quote from wiki:

    The political system of Rojava is inspired by Democratic Confederalism and communalism. It is influenced by anarchist and libertarian principles and is considered by many a type of libertarian socialism. Rojava divides itself into regional administrations called cantons named after the Swiss cantons.

    I only heard about it last week and I am absolutely shocked. A few questions:

    1. Was this discussed on SSC and I just missed it or did no one mention it? I would be surprized in the latter case since it seems very related to lot of discussions here.
    2. If someone told me to predict whether a liberal democratic entity would exists for more than a month in the middle of the syrian civil war with ISIS nearby before I knew about Rojava, I would say the probability is below 5%. Is this just my calibration being really bad, or is it actually that surprizing?
    3. If it isn’t as surprizing to you what are your predictions for its future? Will it continue to exist and flourish? Will it be overrun by ISIS? Will it dissolve into a reanimated Syria after the war?
    4. This also seems to be somewhat related to the universal culture post — is this just the universal culture winning again?

    • Jill says:

      I never heard of this. Thanks for mentioning it. I have no idea what will happen, but look forward to finding out about what happens, in the future. I wish them well.

    • Nornagest says:

      The name is new to me, but events in greater Kurdistan have been on my radar for a while. Iraqi Kurdistan’s been de-facto independent since the late Saddam era, for example, and at this point I would be surprised if it didn’t go for formal independence at some point. Not too surprising that analogous events are happening in Syria.

      It’s Turkey that’s going to be the sticking point here. Neither the Iraqi nor Syrian governments are strong enough to contest an independent Kurdistan, but Turkey is, and it really isn’t going to like having an independent Kurdistan on its southern borders — it’s engaged in a long-running conflict with the PKK in its Kurdish-majority areas and believes, probably correctly, that a nearby Kurdish state would weaken its own position there.

      • Wrong Species says:

        It would surprise me if they declared independence. They know how precarious their situation is. They have a good situation going on right now. If they play their cards right, they could get autonomy just like in Iraq. But if they declare independence that would ruin that plan. Both Syria and Turkey would obviously be opposed and they can’t count on the US to help them.

      • Yep. I really wish I could understand what is so unacceptable to Turkey about just giving the Kurds some territory. What’s the big deal? (Ditto numerous other cases elsewhere in the world, of course.)

        • cassander says:

          Governments don’t like giving up territory, for the obvious reason of it’s giving up power. more than that, though, it never ends. Say you give up all the areas that are 50% or more. soon, the people living in the 40% places will start agitating for their independence, and so on.

          • Well, yes, the “selfish government” model is sound as far as it goes; why the general public usually seems to buy into it is more of a puzzle.

            I’m not sure what you mean by the rest of it. 50% or more what?

          • cassander says:

            50% or more of the given ethnicity. There’s a long history of such ethnic partitions in relatively modern times, it always gets ugly and it rarely ends cleanly.

          • That doesn’t sound like quite the best way to go about it, but suppose we take that as a given: if you live in a 40%-purple region in a green nation, and would rather live in a purple nation, and a bunch of majority-purple regions have recently been given independence, well, why not move?

          • Sandy says:

            if you live in a 40%-purple region in a green nation, and would rather live in a purple nation, and a bunch of majority-purple regions have recently been given independence, well, why not move?

            You might like the idea of living in a purple nation, but the green nations might have better opportunities, or they might be safer, or whatever else.

            Some Jews would like to move to Israel but don’t because they believe that if all the Jews gather in one place, that will make it easier for their enemies to finish them off once and for all. You can’t always predict what makes someone stay in a region and what makes them leave.

          • You might like the idea of living in a purple nation, but the green nations might have better opportunities, or they might be safer, or whatever else.

            Surely in that case you’re not going to be agitating for your region to become a purple nation, though? (Or at the very least, there’s no obvious reason for anybody to take you seriously.)

          • Sandy says:

            You might not be agitating, but your fellow Purples might be. Or you might consider agitating for a territory where Purples can determine their own rights to be worth the relative drop in living standards and safety, but other Purples might not be enticed to join you.

          • @Sandy: sorry, I just don’t get how that’s relevant. (Possibly for the same reason I didn’t understand the situation in the first place.)

            It almost sounds as if you’re arguing that Turkey giving the Kurds a homeland wouldn’t stop some people from agitating, therefore there’s no point? Personally, I’d want them to do it simply because it is the right thing to do, not because people are agitating per se.

            (FWIW, I can see the terrorist attacks as an understandable reason not to want to give in. But if it was, or could be convincing framed as, being in response to the external situation rather than the terrorists, that no longer applies.)

          • Sandy says:

            Well, they don’t think it’s the right thing to do. They think Kurds should start thinking of themselves as Turks and stop trying to carve away a piece of Turkey for themselves.

            Giving the Kurds a homeland would stop some Kurds from agitating and almost definitely set off a civil war leading to potentially a Kurdish genocide within Turkey. Turkish nationalists get quite upset about that sort of thing.

          • Yes. I think it’s the “piece of Turkey” thing I have the most trouble with. It’s as if they think that “property of Turkey” is imprinted into the bedrock or something.

            On the other hand I don’t really understand why the Kurds want to be independent so much either, any more than I understand the Brexit vote.

            Ah well. It would be a funny old world if we were all the same, I suppose.

          • LHN says:

            On the other hand I don’t really understand why the Kurds want to be independent so much either, any more than I understand the Brexit vote.

            I think being in places like Syria, Iraq, Iran, and even Turkey for the Kurds (where they’ve been subject to various forms of mistreatment and fairly forceful denial of their existence as a people) is in and of itself a decent prima facie case for “When in the course of human events, etc.” Especially combined with their relative success in creating a reasonably decent (if unrecognized) state in a region that doesn’t have a lot of those.

            Whether the rest of the world recognizes their case is another matter (and as with the American Revolution, will depend on other countries’ interests more than their sympathies). But it seems like a much clearer-cut argument to make than something like Scottish independence or Brexit.

          • Nyx says:

            My knowledge on the subject is limited, but haven’t Kurds been the target of genocide and oppression in various forms over the past century? I think that makes their desire for independence a lot more legitimate, since their neighbours have treated them so badly.

        • Sandy says:

          In places like India and Pakistan, there are so many different ethnic groups demanding autonomy or independence over lands they consider their own that giving in to any single demand automatically bolsters all the other claims, and pretty soon you’re tearing chunks out of your political union to satisfy all comers.

          • OK, but the Kurds in Turkey (and other nearby nations) really don’t seem like that sort of situation. If an ethnic group only constitutes 0.1% of your population, then there might be hundreds of other such groups, and I can see that might be unmanageable. At 15%, it doesn’t seem like such a problem.

            Curiously enough, Great Britain contains approximately the same percentage of the population of the EU as the Kurds do of the population of Turkey. While many people argue that Britain shouldn’t have chosen to leave, very few people argue that EU shouldn’t let them. : – )

          • Sandy says:

            The ethnic group might constitute only 0.1% of the overall population but >50% in certain areas. Take the Indian state of Nagaland, which borders Myanmar in the northeast and is just a stone’s throw away from China. The majority ethnic group are the Naga, and for the most part they are racially, culturally and linguistically very different from the rest of the country. There have been Naga separatist movements, and even though Nagaland is not a very important state, the Indian government considers it a very bad idea to give in to any demands for autonomy or secession because the border with China is a disputed area and they do not want to further complicate things there.

            Curiously enough, Great Britain contains approximately the same percentage of the population of the EU as the Kurds do of the population of Turkey. While many people argue that Britain shouldn’t have chosen to leave, very few people argue that EU shouldn’t let them. : – )

            The EU’s considerably less volatile than the Middle East. Britain leaving is unlikely to spark bloody territorial wars involving multiple European countries, the way Rojava has the potential to draw Turkey, Syria and Iraq into a war.

          • OK. Avoiding a war sounds like a good reason.

            (OTOH, I can’t say I see why it should have to lead to war, but that at least is the sort of thing where I’m aware of a long history of seemingly irrational outcomes, which for some reason makes it seem less mysterious to me. I realize that makes no sense, but at any rate, I have no particular interest in pursuing the question now that it has been reframed this way.)

        • Partly Turkish nationalism ideally aspires to be an assimilationist nationalism modeled on French nationalism*: they consider Turkish Kurds to be Turks and expect them to assimilate to Turkish language and culture, and view the Turkish Kurdistan as an unalienable part of the Turkish nation.

          (* even if historically there was a lot of ethnic cleansing more in like with Balkan-style nationalism)

        • gbdub says:

          Depending on the circumstances, it may be preferable to have some number of disgruntled citizens in a portion of your territory than to carve off a chunk of your territory and turn it into a hostile, internationally recognized state on your border that some number of your remaining citizens will have strong sympathies toward.

          • Good point. I would not have anticipated that the new state might be hostile, though of course it is obvious now that you’ve pointed it out.

            On the other hand, Israel seems to me to be an example of a nation that is able to deal with the hostile forces over its borders rather more easily than it does with the hostile forces within its borders. I guess it really does depend on the circumstances.

    • dndnrsn says:

      All I know about Rojava is the anarchist I have on Facebook is super into Rojava. Some of the reporting about them from left-wing sources tends to seem almost too good to be true. Right-wing sources just ignore them.

      I imagine that if Rojava survives and thrives it will organically develop party politics and a “system” or some approximation thereof.

  77. Anon. says:

    How about banning blatant trolling before you go after the anons?

    • Virbie says:

      This is already pretty much banned, for a reasonable definition of “blatant trolling”. It’s in the comment policy.

  78. switchnode says:

    I am against banning anonymous commenting. If enforced thoroughly enough to reduce drive-by aggression, it would kill the possibility of throwaway identities. I use these frequently, sometimes to sit on Overton’s windowsill but usually to conceal demographic information that could conceivably be cross-referenced by third parties.

    (Besides, I think that in general anonymous or splinter-pseudonymous hostility is better than hostility between persistent identities. It is easier to walk back from and less likely to provoke long-term feuds.)

  79. SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

    I would like to draw attention to an event whose significance is sadly overlooked: The hype surrounding PokemonGo.

    To anybody who missed it: It’s a fairly simple mobile game where your goal is to catch as many pokemon as you can, the crux being that the pokemon spawn at real world locations, requiring you to be present there if you want to catch one of those beasts. At its height, the popularity of this game was positvely insane, it felt as almost everybody in my college was playing. Even more surprising, on Friday nights certain spots with a high frequency of pokemon spawns were literal party grounds with players who looked more like inhabitants of gyms than gamers.

    Unfortunately, the developers of this game did a mediocre job designing the game and a terrible job communicating with the community, so the hype is pretty much over now as players found there is not much to do in this game at all.

    What’s crazy to me is the potential all this revealed: The potential of games to motivate people to exercise and socialize, two of the best cures for depression and bad moods. Whenever I would meet anybody on the street also playing, we would have a short friendly chat or go exploring together: The community was extremely welcoming, warm and open, which is probably a feeling akin to other open communities centered around a sense of belonging like church groups thought to be relics of the past or even worse red tribe.

    Since people’s desire to lose weight or/and socialize is just intellectual as opposed to instinctual, designing programs whose stated goal is to diet is very often inefficient. But if all those activities are just instrumental to an instinctual and addicting goal, like being rewarded for filling your collection, then there’s enough incentive for people to actually get out of their depression.

    Because unlike economic well being, exercise and social bonds are very uncontroversial contribitors to happiness, there really does seem to be utilitarian low hanging fruit here. I really hope that this game will create a trend of similar games, actually realizing those ,until now overlooked, vast possibilities.

    Thoughts?

    • Vitor says:

      Isn’t giving this kind of game longevity exactly the hard part of the problem? What interesting things are there to do that involve moving around between arbitrary places that don’t get old quick?

      You need to move away from lowest denominator stuff to be able to have something that remains interesting for a long time. Martial arts classes come to mind, which are IMO much easier to stick to than just a gym routine, precisely because it is a social activity where you develop a sense of community. Also feels game-like, compared to other excercise.

      • Jugemu Chousuke says:

        >Isn’t giving this kind of game longevity exactly the hard part of the problem? What interesting things are there to do that involve moving around between arbitrary places that don’t get old quick?

        A lot of people seem to have made a life-long hobby of hunting, so if you could make hunting pokemon more like the appealing aspects of hunting deer (which I haven’t done myself), it might last longer.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Deer hunting, at least, is almost the polar opposite of Pokemon Go, though- you find a place you think deer frequent, camouflage yourself as best you can, and wait by yourself for one to come by. Go is more like quail or dove hunting, I’d say.

          Also, I just realized that you totally had a point that didn’t depend on the specifics of the hunting discipline in question, so oops. I’m going to post this anyway, though; I totally just got nerd-sniped.

          • switchnode says:

            Perhaps it’s like bug collecting.

            (Or it ought to be, anyway. I have fond childhood memories of combing the Safari Zone and imagining stalking some dappled forest for exactly the right specimen. I haven’t had the opportunity to try it, but from what I’ve seen there isn’t much reward for patience, keen observation, or a quick hand; the reality integration just isn’t that good yet.)

          • Corey says:

            Pokemon is inspired by bug collecting (apparently Japanese kids would battle their collected bugs, per Pokemon’s creator, per Vox).

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            That’s because the regulatory state is actively hostile to hunting and is trying really goddamn hard to outlaw every method that is remotely effective or enjoyable. It’s not a function of the activity itself.

        • Jiro says:

          There are serious problems with the game aside from that. A lot of the appeal of Pokemon is battling, but you don’t battle Pokemon in this game except at a gym. When you run across Pokemon, you capture them without battling.

          Worse yet, since you don’t battle, there need to be other ways to improve your Pokemon than by gaining levels in battle. The method the game uses is that if you catch a Pokemon, you get experience for your main character, and “candy” that you can use to improve or evolve another Pokemon of the same type. The result is that rare Pokemon are all useless–you can only improve common Pokemon because those are the only ones you can catch in large numbers.

          Also, catching and evolving a Pokemon gives you a fixed amount of experience regardless of how hard it is to catch or how many resources you need to use to evolve it, and common Pokemon are the easiest, making rare ones doubly useless.

          • gbdub says:

            Yeah, I never much played the original games, but was broadly familiar with the mechanics. Pokémon Go is not nearly as deep. The fact that they broke the tracking mechanic is particularly bad, worse than the battling problem in my mind. What fun is a hunt where you get zero clues as to the location of your quarry? That’s just “wandering aimlessly”.

            The problem with “full depth” Pokémon would be the same problem you have with traditional multiplayer online gaming (or something like Magic the Gathering). The learning curve would be steep and it would turn off “casuals”.

            Still, I think there could be a happy medium. Simply making the battles turn-based would add a lot more strategy (as it is, battles are mostly won by button-mashing your primary attack).

      • Aegeus says:

        The games with the best longevity, IMO, are multiplayer games. I can knock out a typical story game in 20 hours and get bored of a sandbox in 80, but people have played Counterstrike for years. Having another human in the game will provide more variety and replay value than a thousand hours of developer work.

        So I kind of want to see a game that requires actual communication with your team. Ingress and Pokémon Go are asynchronous multiplayer – you leave a portal or a gym out in the world, and somebody else attacks it later. You can coordinate a little bit – get a few friends to reinforce your portal or build a stronger gym – but it’s a marginal gain and you can rely on random passersby to provide that sort of support without any communication.

        I wonder if people would play a synchronous multiplayer game, where cooperating with other players wasn’t just helpful, but required, as strongly as, say, Left 4 Dead requires you to have a team. A game that relies on you finding other players and actually talking to them.

        The trouble is, of course, that there’s no guarantee you’ll get even one person to play your new game, let alone get four people in the same geographical area. Pokemon Go can make crowds appear out of thin air because it’s goddamn Pokemon, but anything else needs to have a strong single-player game or it might as well not bother.

        Maybe you could introduce AI teammates, the same way that multiplayer games add bots when there aren’t enough humans for a game. So the game will show a few AI players on the map near you if there aren’t enough humans nearby, and that can provide a rallying point to group up with actual humans.

        • Lumifer says:

          Well, Eve is your classic multiplayer game which requires a LOT of cooperation and communication. Note that a large part of it happens out-of-the-game.

          Speaking more generally, synchronous multiplayer has the obvious problem that everyone involved must coordinate their time schedules and things from time zones to household emergencies tend to play havoc with it. It’s certainly doable — see e.g. Warcraft raids — but it sets a certain threshold of commitment which many people, especially ones with a life, are not willing to meet.

        • Civilis says:

          My problem with this is that most multiplayer games, or at least competitive multiplayer games, ultimately boil down to a small group of top players as the only consistent players. Cooperative (PvE) multiplayer has the same problem with single-player games.

          If I’m in the bottom 50% of the game, I’m fodder. The top players, meanwhile, are the ones spending the money, and the ones getting the new shinies. There is less and less reason for me to keep playing when I know I’m never going to make that top elite, and more reason to find something else.

          In the end, it may be that games have a shelf life. Unless you get a game that perfectly matches you, you play it until it gets boring, then find something else.

          • Montfort says:

            What specific games are you thinking of? That seems most accurate for MMORPGs or F2P games where the purchasable content is game-relevant, but I don’t think it applies to games where you don’t carry over items or in-game advantages from match to match – e.g. starcraft, skullgirls, Dota 2, quake.

            Multiplayer games do have a shelf-life, though. Even if you find a multiplayer game you’d in theory be happy playing forever, eventually the rest of the community will dwindle away, servers will disappear, the most annoying exploits will be found and become distressingly common, etc. They can be fun while they last, though.

          • Civilis says:

            My recollection of Starcraft, about a half-dozen fighting games, and several FPS games from the days before unlocks (most recent being Battlefield 2) is that it’s no fun being the guy in the bottom 50%. The more modern ‘git gud’ games with unlocks just make the situation worse. It seems like every game I try, my team is composed of total new players, immature players yelling obscenities about people’s mothers and outright trolls, while the other team seems to have at least one cheater. (Back in the bad old days of Diablo II, it seemed every other player was a cheater).

            Admittedly, some of the best online multiplayer games will use something like a ladder system to match up players of similar skill, but even that’s gameable. I’ve had people admit in chat to creating new accounts just so they could stay up against new players.

          • gbdub says:

            How fun would it be to play chess if you constantly had to play against a Grand Master? Who was also yelling racial slurs?

            That’s pretty much what most online multiplayer games feel like to me. Yeah, nothing carries over from match to match – except the skill of the player, and I don’t have 12 hours a day to invest in getting good enough.

            But I’m also disinclined to like voice chatting with random strangers in general, so maybe it’s just me. I end up playing a lot of long RPGs (Fallout, Skyrim, etc.) though I do really like the Arkham series.

          • Aegeus says:

            Modern matchmaking helps with this a lot. Overwatch and StarCraft 2 are both good at matching me with people who won’t immediately stomp me into the dirt (or get stomped). Smurfing is an issue (rare, but it does happen), but I’m not sure what you can do about that.

            As for people who yell slurs on voice chat, mute them. You’re not going to miss anything important.

          • Montfort says:

            gbdub, actually I think that would be pretty amazing, despite my rather poor chess skill. Admittedly, I’d probably spend a lot of time studying weird chess lines in preparation for the games and less time playing than if skill-matched.

            More generally, I see what you and Civilis are saying better now. Matchmaking has improved that situation a bit, but there can still be a lot of uncomfortable matchups.

      • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

        I’m a bit too old for Pokémon, but don’t they fight each other? Why haven’t the creators of Pokémon Go made some sort of battle system where you can have your captured Pokémon fight other gatherers’ Pokémon?

        • Jiro says:

          Good question. In this game, you can’t just walk up to a person and fight their Pokemon, and you can’t fight the Pokemon that you run into randomly either. In normal Pokemon games, of course, that’s what you do.

          You can fight in gyms, but I haven’t gotten my character powerful enough to defeat some guy who’s power-leveled his way to a gym.

          • meyerkev248 says:

            This one.

            1) Find a gym.
            2) Spend 10 minutes hoping that your random 400CP Golbat that you got by catching 30 Zubats on the way to the train station can defeat this guy’s 1200CP Dragonite.

            /Also that I have no clue what’s going on in gym battles, so lulz I guess?

          • gbdub says:

            The gym battles are awful. Usually lag means that the only real “skill” mechanic, dodging, doesn’t work. Lag in general is a problem – I lost a battle because the opponent kept dealing damage after its health bar was at zero because server lag kept it in an attack loop.

            I don’t know why they didn’t make it turn based. That’s how the original games always were, it’s more fun strategically, and you’d think it would solve the lag problem (or at least make it annoying instead of game-breaking).

    • FeepingCreature says:

      If this topic interests you, there’s some similar content in Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE and a bit of a darker take in Suarez’s Daemon and its sequel.

    • Rowan says:

      Niantic’s previous game, Ingress, (which is still active) was and is much better at least by the “not much to do in this game at all” metric. But it didn’t have a brand name as big as affixed to it, so it’s been relegated to a footnote in articles about the history of the worldwide phenomenon called “Pokemon Go”. So I’m not very optimistic about the chances any new games in the genre have of reaching nearly the same size of audience; they’ll be lucky to be Ingress-sized unless they too have a selling point as powerful as the Pokemon IP.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        On the other hand, new games can market themselves as “Pokemon Go, but with…”, which might be enough to make them more popular than Ingress (especially if they’re better mechanically as well).

      • SolipsisticUtilitarian says:

        That’s a good point, though I assume that having more people familiar with the concept of a game where you don’t just sit on your ass all day might help. It seems that most players, at least for some time, were genuinely enjoying themselves, so while it was definitely the Pokemon IP that got them to try the game, it’s the mechanics that were actually fun.

    • Loquat says:

      World of Warcraft seems to be pretty good at motivating people to keep playing, so clearly they need more Skinner-box-type activities. I suggest something like Daily Quests – e.g. once a day you can catch X number of common pokemon and be rewarded with a token you can use to help level your rares.

      Or, alternatively, Blizzard could make a Warcraft Go and have players doing WoW dailies by running around in real life.

      • gbdub says:

        “help level your rares”

        Yeah I was thinking about that problem – rare Pokémon are essentially useless, because you can’t catch enough of them to level them up to the point where they are competitive with more commonly available types. This takes a lot of the fun out of hunting the rare types (unlike regular RPGs, where if you work to obtain a rare item, that rare item usually helps you in the rest of the game).

        They need a way to earn candy other than catching Pokémon of the same species. One option would be to say, earn one candy for each gym victory with that Pokémon (you can bring 6 Pokémon into battle, so it’s usually possible to at least beat the lowest tier or two of even a strong gym).

        But why not make candies type specific, instead of species specific? So say you want to level up the rare Chansey, which is a normal type. You could earn Normal candies by collecting the common Ratata. Or maybe (a bigger change) they could tie different evolutions or move sets to different candy combinations. E.g. the Eevee can already evolve into either a fire, water, or electric version – with typed candies, maybe you get one evolution or the other by spending the right candy type.

  80. Conventionally Steve says:

    Some time ago, our host expressed the opinion that building a walled garden is impossible, because “As foreigners compete with you – and there’s no wall high enough to block all competition – you have a couple of choices. You can get outcompeted and destroyed. You can join in the race to the bottom. Or you can invest more and more civilizational resources into building your wall – whatever that is in a non-metaphorical way – and protecting yourself.”

    Scott proposes that the only solution is to (build a friendly AI to) take over the world and kill god.

    However, I believe that he is missing an important point: Maintaining a wall is perfectly viable, as long as you trap the rest of the world in a lower local maximum first.

    Sure, when resources on Rat Island grow scarce, the feral rats will eventually destroy the opera-producing rats. But the rats who invented both opera and supersonic bomb planes are not so worried.

    Not only is a wall+trap strategy theoretically viable, it is actively being pursued by both sides of the political spectrum as we speak (by “both sides”, I of course refer to Donald Trump, and everyone else).

    The only difference is that Trump wants to build the wall along the Mexican border, and turn America into his garden. Everyone else considers this a ludicrous waste of 8ish billion dollars. They already have perfectly good walls around their gated communities: All they have to do is turn the rest of the country into Mexico, which is so cheap as to be practically free.

    Of course, if you have some sort of humanitarian urges, or you don’t feel confident in dealing with intercontinental values of “the rest of the world” under this plan, you might have to go and kill god regardless.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      If you’re willing to accept that your trap is a death sentence, it can perhaps be done. In the current world the distinction between being in the garden and being in the trap is already pretty stark. In a world after the “dream time” where Malthus is seriously breathing down your neck, the distinction between in and out approaches the distinction between alive and dead. And there’s no guarantee it would work, either, if your wall has any cracks in it the horde will find its way through.

      “Killing God”, to me, means accepting that we need an Exit. The current game state is broken; the victory conditions either can’t be achieved, or else they can only be achieved through sacrificing to a senseless God of slaughter. Building a Friendly AI is one form of Exit. I think gene editing might be another. Without these things we’re running a perpetual race against degeneracy that I don’t think its likely we win.

      • LPSP says:

        The way you describe things sounds an awful lot like the plot of Homestuck, on a side note.

        • holomanga says:

          Skaia whose love is endless shale and grist! Skaia whose soul is clockwork and heat! Skaia whose poverty is the specter of creation! Skaia whose fate in the clouds is senseless perpetuation! Skaia whose name is the Time!

          • LPSP says:

            +9 for the effort, and for the fact that I haven’t had a good Homestuck conversation in a long while.

            In my heart, I’d have hoped for Lord English to have turned out like Moloch. He even had baby-eating set up as a trait. If he had materialised in the 8-Player session and taken over in much the same way as Crocker, using causal loops to malincentivise the players into hurting themselves, that would’ve been stellar. It’s a shame that Skaia, the supposed force of good, resembled the king of bad trade-offs instead.

        • Nornagest says:

          Some of my favorite lines in the comic:

          EB: so, if you’re sure that we are going to fail…
          EB: what is the point of everything we’re doing?
          TT: Simple.
          TT: The objective is no longer to win.
          EB: um…
          EB: i mean, what are we actually shooting for here?
          TT: To do as much damage to the game as possible.
          TT: To rip its stitches and pry answers from the seams.
          TT: We will snatch purpose from the jaws of futility.
          TT: Are you ready to wreak some havoc, John?
          EB: i suddenly don’t understand anything.

          • LPSP says:

            …and then Rose proceeded to do very little besides off-screen research with vague results, get drunk and be a prop for Roxy for the rest of the comic. She was my favourite of the original four, like a super-dry female me.

          • Nornagest says:

            Agreed.

            I have all sorts of issues with the comic post-Scratch, but I think my biggest issue was that it all ended up coming down to a boss fight and a deus ex machina. I can see why it went down that way; when you’ve spent so much time building up the idea that everything in the timeline plays into the villain’s hands, you need to add something outside it to resolve the plot. But it sure was unsatisfying. I didn’t want magic retcon powers from beyond the veil; I wanted gnosis, damn it.

            Hussie should have been able to come up with something more satisfying; he’s better at handling that sort of logic than practically any other writer I’ve read. But he didn’t. And that’s incredibly frustrating, especially when I can sort of see the outlines of what it could have looked like.

          • LPSP says:

            For me, the boss fight was poorly executed, not necessarily a bad idea (certainly a breath of fresh air from stale conversations) but used as a plaster to cover sepsis in the core theme of the plot. Characters stopped exploring their motives and discovering truths about themselves that give them mastery over their destiny (this is the crux of Dave, whose battle with time travel means learning to anticipate what he wants well enough to have a future self already in place to cover his back)… to instead gaining new values out of the blue, sometimes overriding their old ones, with no development beyond expositive lectures, after which the characters become automatons and swiftly resolve the plot. The house artifact was almost literally what the Trickster Mode lollipop was supposed to deconstruct; it swiftly ended the story with a forced “happily ever after, here’s a bunch of ships, the characters are smiling in normal clothes so you should like this” deal.

            The ex machinas of the ending as a whole struck me as “not even wrong” – Homestuck is largely a comic about ex machinas and is riddled with many engaging takes on the concept, yet the finale’s was dull and uninspired. Simply writing “and then the story ends because I say so” at the back of the book isn’t irony or something.

          • Nornagest says:

            The ex machinas of the ending as a whole struck me as “not even wrong” – Homestuck is largely a comic about ex machinas and is riddled with many engaging takes on the concept

            I think this might be where we diverge. Homestuck is full of events that initially appear to be deus (or, more often, diabolus) ex machina, but which sooner or later prove to be natural outgrowths of characters’ motivations or the core rules of the universe. When Hussie really nails this, it’s obvious how it worked as soon as it happens (the Tumor sequence is a good example, and not coincidentally one of my favorite scenes in the comic), but even when it takes some exposition, he normally follows through (for example, Bec’s prototyping).

            But that all starts falling apart in the last act. Infuriatingly, there’s probably enough hanging threads that Hussie could have resolved all the apparent problems — it just never happens. Part of this might be due to panel time constraints, but a lot of them happen in ways that make it hard even in principle to imagine how.

            I think Hiveswap was probably meant to fill in some of the gaps, but (a) that never works, and (b) we’ll probably never see a finished game anyway.

          • LPSP says:

            I think you’re describing what I meant entirely when I said the comic has “many engaging takes on the concept”. Every previous instance of an ex-machina turned out to work out as a justifiable consequence of character motive, even the unpleasant and illegitimate actions of the villains; then suddenly the writing nosedives for the final sub-acts of act 6 and we get a space flea ending with limited integrity.

            I quite genuinely mean it when I say the least assumptive explanation to fit the evidence present is that, between the stress of trying to deliver on the Kickstarter, the embezzlement scandal (or whatever *really* happened if you don’t trust that story for whatever reason) and finally his father’s death, Hussie let his grip on the plot go and allowed others to colour his decision making for the worse. Within that cluster of possibilities, Hussie’s girlfriend (now possibly ex) Rachel Rocklin fits the bill pretty strongly; she combines both the greatest degree of intimacy with Hussie of all in his circle, control over the What Pumpkin enterprise in all its channels but most especially all PR (which for a long time basically meant “appeal to tumblr’s LCD”) and finally a track record of fairly ballpark SJW views and associated negative behaviours. This I believe is merely a narrow plurality among many other small possibilities, but nonetheless entirely viable and relatively likely, given the sudden and undeveloped shift in focus to SJW topics at around the late Act 6 turning point.

            I mean hell, we’re talking about Andrew Hussie, the brain behind Team Special Olympics, a brand of nothing less that pure offense for its own sake, in his 20s. People sometimes change heart from stuff done in their teens based on new information, but it’s not like Problem Sleuth or Homestuck were ever PC comics either. *Something* drastic happened to not only the direction of Hussie’s work but also its integrity, and I think that something was compromise. Don’t even get me (kick)started on the Hiveswap trainwreck.

      • Unconventionally Steve says:

        Uh, no? That’s what the stable local maximum is all about. I mean yes, the hard part is sculpting your own garden into something non-suicidal, but that’s a separate problem from the wall. After all, Malthus is already on an African party tour, yet Africans are neither in danger of going extinct nor of posing any sort of credible threat to a hypothetical non-suicidal, walled Europe (or if you prefer, Actual China).

        A metaphor, if you will: The tiger is an apex predator, yet you will never have to exterminate tigers to keep them from fucking your shit up. And because you’re voluntarily limiting your own fertility like a good educated westerner, you’ll never be put in a situation where you have to eat tigers to survive.

        • Exit Stage Right says:

          My point is not that you can’t build the trap, maybe you can, my point is the inside of the trap is going to get worse and worse. Eventually, the people inside the trap are going to see getting out of the trap and over your wall as life and death.

          If the trap is good (which is to say, its actually a local maximum) then the suffering becomes infinitely bad or they go extinct

          If the trap isn’t good (you thought it was a local maximum, but it was actually only a local maximum until they all got together and said fuck this trap and fuck that wall) then, y’know, Gotcha! You all die

          And if you feel like both of these options are pretty horrible, you’ve accepted my point, which is that our game state is broken and we need a completely crazy way to unbreak it. I wasn’t thinking of Homestuck but the comparison is apt.

    • Jill says:

      How about having foreign aid, not for the purpose of buying governments friendly to our military and corporate interests, as we do now, but for the purpose of helping the world’s economic and educational development? The U. N. does some of this now, but very inefficiently, and with some corruption.

      And how about providing birth control the world over for people who desire it but can’t afford it? Then the world population would decrease, which might help matters. There would be fewer people immigrating due to overpopulation. And life might be better for families trying to care for fewer kids. Oh, that’s right, we can’t do that, because we live in a Right Wing country and the Right Wing disapproves of population control, and of foreign aid for economic, rather than political purposes.

      • Sandy says:

        It isn’t that simple.

        Take Zimbabwe, as an example. It’s not a strategically significant country like Egypt, it’s not very politically significant, it has minimal influence on the world stage, and an economy best described as a dumpster fire. There is little to nothing to be gained in terms of realpolitik by sending foreign aid to Zimbabwe. Left-wingers know this, right-wingers know this. Foreign aid to Zimbabwe is primarily for the purposes of economic and educational development. The international community feels an obligation to ensure Zimbabweans don’t starve to death by the millions if it can be avoided.

        Unfortunately, the Zimbabwean elite is keenly aware that the international community feels this obligation, and this allows them to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to enrich themselves at the expense of their own people. They do this because Mugabe knows the West will never cut off foreign aid to Zimbabwe, no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. They’ll slap some sanctions on and ban a few rich Zimbabweans from traveling to Europe and North America, but they will never follow through on threats to cut off aid unless changes are made to Zimbabwe’s political system, because then Mugabe gets to go to his people and say “See, the Westerners are trying to control us again. Only I can save you”. And it’s not just Zimbabwe. This is why Palestinians are desperately poor while their leaders are billionaires. The intentions of the people receiving aid on behalf of their populations matter as much as the intentions of the people handing out the aid. And the only way to control the intentions of people like Mugabe and Hamas is to mix politics into foreign aid.

        Mind, this is just considering the foreign aid debate from the angle of misappropriation of funds. Should America continue to send huge amounts of foreign aid to countries like Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan that will use that aid to finance campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide?

        And on the subject of using foreign aid for political purposes, Barack Obama has threatened to cut aid to countries that are insufficiently LGBT-friendly. Does that count as using foreign aid for political purposes or is Obama secretly a right-winger?

        • baconbacon says:

          The intentions of the people receiving aid on behalf of their populations matter as much as the intentions of the people handing out the aid.

          No, they matter 10x as much as the people handing out the aid.

        • Jill says:

          You are right that the issue of foreign aid is complex. In the U.S., Congress and politicians don’t really discuss it much, because it seems most people in our Right Wing society are against the concept of giving any foreign aid at all, so it’s not a politically helpful discussion for politicians to have. However, our Right Wing neocon foreign relations institutions in government will probably continue to use foreign aid for the political and military purposes they have been using it for in the past.

          Threatening to cut aid to countries that are insufficiently LGBT-friendly I suppose does count as using foreign aid for political purposes– although not for military or corporate purposes, which is more of my concern. It sounds like a good idea to me actually, because the freer people are in other countries, the less likely it is that they will want to immigrate.

          And persecution of LGBT people affects their families, friends, and the whole society. It often goes along with a lot of discrimination and brutality in many areas. And if it stopped, that would likely make more people more likely to want to stay in their home countries, rather than risking their lives to escape to somewhere where freedom is a possibility.

          I think, along with education and economic development, human rights are a great thing to encourage in other countries, when possible and practical to do so. If we spent as much on that as we have spent on drones and bombs and military intervention, I think we’d have far far better outcomes.

          • Agronomous says:

            I think a policy wherein we deny any foreign aid to any country where any LGBT person is ever discriminated against in any way would be an improvement.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Yes, I can’t wait until an Ugandan dictator can say “the evil foreigners are starving you to force you to become sodomites and die of AIDS!”

            Becoming the hated teacher’s pet of a declining empire will totally help homosexuals, and won’t backfire on us in any way in about 50 years…

          • Yakimi says:

            Jill,

            Your talent for defending the dominant political tradition by portraying it as a persecuted heterodoxy is remarkable.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Homo Iracundus:

            The improvement would be no more foreign aid. To any country. (Well, except Iran, which doesn’t have any LGBT people.)

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Becoming the hated teacher’s pet of a declining empire

            Whoa, who was the architect for the building in that picture? It’s giving me vertigo just by looking at it.

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            Whoa, who was the architect for the building in that picture?

            This guy. He’s probably better known for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (or, depending on who you are, for the chairs on the Enterprise in the original Star Trek). The building pictured is the US Embassy in London. It doesn’t look so bad from a distance.

          • Agronomous says:

            I would have picked the TWA Terminal at JFK as his best-known work, but the Arch is probably ten times better-known.

            I didn’t realize (a) he did embassies (our Norway one, too) (b) he did the CBS Building and (c) he did Kresge Auditorium at MIT.

          • Nornagest says:

            Becoming the hated teacher’s pet of a declining empire

            That building would be ten times better with a different eagle sculpture.

      • Tekhno says:

        Oh, that’s right, we can’t do that, because we live in a Right Wing country and the Right Wing disapproves of population control

        Religious conservatives disapprove of population control. There’s a certain other kind of right winger who is all too in favor. You (the USA) don’t have many of that kind of right winger, yet, but I can see some developments that might stack the deck that way.

        • Jill says:

          I’m talking about voluntary and desired birth control that people can not afford on their own or otherwise don’t have access to. In our foreign aid, we can’t help people who desire birth control because of the political opposition in the U.S. against it.

          • Civilis says:

            A right-wing cynic could look at the third world and say that overpopulation generally isn’t an issue, especially these days. The problems are more endemic disease (for which cheap pesticides like DDT would help) and malnutrition (for which GMOs like golden rice would go a long way towards alleviating the problem; see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/29/more-than-100-nobel-laureates-take-on-greenpeace-over-gmo-stance/). Government to government aid just feeds the corruption, which makes the problems worse, instead private aid directly in ways like microlending would make more sense. Also, in order to allow capital to flow into the developing world, it would make sense for the developed world to remove arbitrary trade barriers, which are often put into place at the behest of well meaning do gooders that would prefer third world people have no job to a lousy job.

            Also, in many cases, economic and educational aid is ineffective without military aid first to remove obstacles. Boko Haram means either ‘western education is forbidden’ or ‘westernization is forbidden’; until they’re dealt with attempts to make real reform to West Africa are rather futile. Refomers in South Asia tend to get gunned down in the street on a routine basis, and until those governments are willing to allow reform, aid won’t accomplish much.

      • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

        You seem to have valid points to discuss.
        However, I do not believe that writing things like this serves any purpose at all.

        Oh, that’s right, we can’t do that, because we live in a Right Wing country and the Right Wing disapproves of population control, and of foreign aid for economic, rather than political purposes.

        • Jill says:

          Yes, it does serve a purpose. There are things we can’t do because the Powers That Be, who are in control, won’t do them. There is no point in muzzling myself about this fact.

      • cassander says:

        >How about having foreign aid, not for the purpose of buying governments friendly to our military and corporate interests, as we do now, but for the purpose of helping the world’s economic and educational development?

        You mean like this? Or, really, the entirety of USAID, a 35 billion a year agency that prides itself on its independence from the rest of American foreign policy? Or the peace corps?

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        Oh, that’s right, we can’t do that, because we live in a Right Wing country and the Right Wing disapproves of population control, and of foreign aid for economic, rather than political purposes.

        Yeah, darn that President McCain. If only he’d lost in 2008 things would have been different.

        • Jill says:

          As if the president controls everything. Congress makes the laws. And many Democrats are too Right Wing for my tastes and do share some responsibility in this too.

          The point is thought that the Powers That Be that make these decisions have made them a certain way. And there doesn’t seem to be much that the rest of us can or could do to change that.

          Certainly you realize that there are certain things that can’t be done, because the political opposition to them by the Powers That Be is so large?

          • Salem says:

            What are these Powers That Be? Formless horrors from beyond the void? You don’t think it be like it is, but it do.

            Once you realise that these Powers That Be are nothing more or less than the political preferences of most of your compatriots, you’ll be in a better place. In a democracy, of course it’s the case that small minorities struggle to get their way against the preferences of the majority.

          • Corey says:

            Once [someone else] realise[s] that these Powers That Be are nothing more or less than the political preferences of most of your compatriots, you’ll be in a better place.

            To be fair, when econ comes up, government spending is usually treated as driven by a formless horror from beyond the void, despite this argument applying just as well to it.

          • Salem says:

            I don’t think that’s fair.

            In conservative rhetoric, high levels of government spending are normally treated as a multipolar trap – i.e. individually rational, but collectively suboptimal. No-one wants to give up their own individual benefits, but if we could scrap them all we’d all be better off. But because of the way politics works, concentrated interested beat dispersed ones, so the spending doesn’t get cut.

            The standard parable is a large group of strangers who go to a restaurant, and split the bill. So each individual orders lobster and champagne, because the costs mostly fall on the rest of the group. Then they all complain about the bill.

            So no, conservatives are well aware that individual spending items are popular with a motivated constituency, and not cared about by most other people. That’s why conservative visions of how to fix government spending are structural – federalism, balance budget amendments, banning earmarks, etc. Going back to the restaurant parable, conservatives are well aware that there’s no point exhorting people to restrain themselves – the individual choices are popular, that’s why they’re made. But if we no longer split the bill, if everyone had to pay for what they ordered, those choices would no longer be popular, and would no longer be made.

          • Anonymous says:

            That’s putting William F. Buckley in a debate against some high school kid with pink hair and concluding that of course conservatives have better ideas!

          • Salem says:

            I never said conservatives have better ideas. I merely said that conservatives are aware that government spending programmes are popular. You don’t need to be a genius to understand the restaurant analogy, or to pass around Facebook memes like “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

            Structural reforms like balanced budget amendments and banning earmarks aren’t the province of a few eggheads – the former has been a mainstay of the Republican party since 1994, and the latter was actually enacted in 2011.

          • Certainly you realize that there are certain things that can’t be done, because the political opposition to them by the Powers That Be is so large?

            I’m not a Power That Be, I am a cubicle farmer telling my Congresswoman that I do not want my taxdollars going to foreigners. Because, you know, they aren’t American.

            Like others say, it’s not a nefarious else-world power driving this, it’s the political preference of We The People.

          • Borders Without Doctors says:

            Can you expand on “I do not want my taxdollars going to foreigners. Because, you know, they aren’t American.”, what it feels like from the inside?

            I would be confused by “I don’t want my tax dollars going to people who can’t roll their tongue” and outraged by “I don’t want my tax dollars going to non-Aryans”. Would you have the same reactions?

            Are your views anything like this?

            Americans have a duty to help other Americans in need, and Nigerians have a duty to help other Nigerians in need. If American children need food and polio vaccines, of course I’ll pay for them, it’d be monstrous not to. If Nigerian children need food and polio vaccines and Nigerians can’t provide, that’s terribly unfortunate, but I don’t feel especially compelled to step up.

            If so, what other groups can replace “Americans” and “Nigerians” here? Hoosiers and Californians? Belgians and Germans? Europeans and South Americans? NATO citizens and Maghrebis? Buddhists and Hindus? Men and women? Republicans and Democrats? Adults and children? Berkeley students and Stanford students? Members of the theatre club and members of the chess club?

          • Montfort says:

            BWD, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. American taxes are collected for the purpose of administering the American state. It is a popular opinion that the American state has no particular interest in non-Americans except insofar as they affect Americans or interact with the American state.

            Compare: union dues are collected for the purpose of running the union. Affairs like sending schoolbooks to poor schools in Pakistan are handled by separate collections.

          • Borders Without Doctors says:

            Ah! So not “taxes should go to good things, and foreign aid is not a good thing”, but “taxes are a fee I pay to get roads, a police, a military, etc. I don’t want it spent on charitable things, I’ll buy my own charity separately and with far better judgement”? That would probably but not necessarily imply opposition to welfare for Americans who are poorer than you, e.g. food stamps.

          • John Schilling says:

            That would probably but not necessarily imply opposition to welfare for Americans who are poorer than you, e.g. food stamps.

            A welfare system for poor Americans is pragmatically useful to richer Americans both as insurance against the risk of becoming poor Americans themselves and as a means of preventing poor Americans from becoming unsightly and sadness-inducing corpses (or worse) on the sidewalks richer Americans occasionally walk on. Charity for poor foreigners serves neither of those purposes, and when we want our money to go towards poor Africans getting bednets we know where to go for that.

          • Just because something is a Good Thing does not mean money should be disbursed from the federal treasury for it.
            Or, even worse, administered by the federal government!
            The American government is created specifically to create more perfect union (of Americans), create justice (in America), provide for the common defense (of Americans), promote the general welfare (of Americans), and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity (which pretty implicitly means Americans).

            America was created before the crazy nation-state fervor of the 19th and 20th centuries, but America maps relatively closely to a typical nation-state.

            So, the US government was not explicitly chartered to end starvation in Nigeria, anymore than my Fortune 50 employer is.

            Similarly, I would not expect the government of California to directly pay for the roads in the state of Oregon or Nevada, nor would I expect Stanford to create entire programs explicitly to help students in Berkley.

            More broadly speaking, my apex loyalty is to the American nation, of which I am a member and with which I identify culturally.

            I would say this is pretty close to the median US voter opinion. Overall, we still identify with the American nation, and while we feel badly for other peoples and do send them some money, we first identify with ourselves and want the bulk of our energy and funds spent on perfecting our union.
            NOT on foreigners.

          • Borders Without Doctors says:

            OK, I understand the argument that governments are entities with a narrow purpose and shouldn’t try to fulfil other functions. But that’s boring. I’m much more interested in

            my apex loyalty is to the American nation, of which I am a member and with which I identify culturally.

            we first identify with ourselves and want the bulk of our energy and funds spent on perfecting our union.
            NOT on foreigners.

            You haven’t answered my question about what your reactions would be to someone who identifies with tongue-rollers or with Aryans, which is a shame because I can’t think of any other starting point to understand.

            If a member of a different nation (does it matter which nation?) is loyal to America and not to their country, do you approve (“wow, they don’t share my duty to help America but they do anyway, how generous”) or disapprove (“they are traitors and neglecting their duty toward their own nation”)?

            What, well, is the American nation, what do you picture when you say the words? People who have citizenship, ideals like freedom and pluck and democracy, the cultural trappings ranging from living in heated houses without dirt floors to a strange date format?

            Whatever the answer to the above is, why do you identify with it?

            Why is it your apex loyalty and not one of many loyalties?

          • Jiro says:

            You haven’t answered my question about what your reactions would be to someone who identifies with tongue-rollers or with Aryans

            What would be your reaction to someone who treats their own brother like a stranger, but picks a stranger and treats the stranger like his brother?

            If a member of a different nation (does it matter which nation?) is loyal to America and not to their country, do you approve (“wow, they don’t share my duty to help America but they do anyway, how generous”) or disapprove (“they are traitors and neglecting their duty toward their own nation”)?

            Are there extenuating circumstances? (That is, their country is really shitty to the point where it makes sense to flee it? Do they have family in another country and identify with the other country because of the ties to their family? Did they undergo the country equivalent of being adopted by America?) Or did they just randomly pick America from a map and say “from now on, I’ll pledge loyalty to this country”?

            More generally, I’d say that if you can’t understand loyalty to a country, you are incapable of modelling typical human beings. Explaining it to you is going to be as hard as explaining why you might stick with your brother when you wouldn’t stick with a stranger.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t one of those What Universal Experiences Are You Missing things. Is it possible that some people simply don’t perceive concepts like family, tribe/ingroup, and institutions as tangible things?

          • Borders Without Doctors says:

            My reaction would be “I guess his brother is a dick. That’s sad but it happens. What does he see in that total stranger that he’s so loyal to him in so little time?”

            Are you saying that people develop ties to their country just like they develop ties to people they’ve known for a long time, such as siblings or old friends? Or are you saying that the mysterious emotion of patriotism proceeds from the same source as the mysterious emotion of family loyalty?

            If the former, how? You can talk with your brother, guess what he’s thinking, beat him at chess, carry a fridge up the stairs with him, collect embarrassing dirt on him and keep quiet about it, buy him a pizza. I find it difficult to imagine doing the same with a country. Some countries, in the sense of “a government, bureaucracy, set of laws, set of guiding principles for law and social mores”, have done things for me, and I am grateful. But it never approaches the deep and abiding loyalty I have for a friend. And in the sense of “the people of a country”? How do you have any relationship with that?

            If the latter, well, crap. I might be missing a basic human emotion.

          • More generally, I’d say that if you can’t understand loyalty to a country, you are incapable of modelling typical human beings. Explaining it to you is going to be as hard as explaining why you might stick with your brother when you wouldn’t stick with a stranger.

            Essentially this.

            Apex loyalty to America exists because American culture and American identity says it does. Our culture was largely founded in the Industrial Age, and on an empty continent where the US was relative hegemon, in an era of Manifest Destiny.

            It was further refined during the 20th Century mass media and total war era, both of which help a lot to foster a deep sense of unity and patriotism.

            Many of the questions you are posing are settled questions in the American experiment. We had these discussions and they are closed.

            Can you have higher loyalty to a state than the nation? No.
            Can you have a higher loyalty to a race than the nation? No.
            Are non-white races American? Yes.
            What about non-Americans who wish to become Americans? Awesome, immigrate and apply for citizenship.
            What about entire regions that wish to become Americans? Apply for statehood.

            Many American men and women toiled for decades to create these understandings in American culture.

            There’s a lot of discussion about the role of America in the world, but I think there are very few Americans that would identify as something HIGHER than “American.” (Religion set aside).

            Maybe that will change, but I don’t think you’ll convince most Americans to first identify as something other than American, because most of the world’s population is entirely alien to us, and large segments seem to actively want to kill us.
            When we sing “This Land is your Land, this Land is my Land,” that does not include Russians pointing nuclear weapons at us, and it sure as hell does not include ISIS blowing us up.
            It also doesn’t help that most of the world seems incompetent. I am not going to identify with the Greeks, because any person willingly identifying with that particular nation right now is crazy.
            And, yeah, certain American states have incompetent governments, too, but they are already grandfathered in. It’s the difference between marrying a crack addict and having a crack addict in the family. I am not going to marry a crack addict. But my brother is my brother and will always be my brother.

            Similarly, Alabama is America and will always be American, no matter how stupid they are. Same with Illinois.

            Are you saying that people develop ties to their country just like they develop ties to people they’ve known for a long time, such as siblings or old friends? Or are you saying that the mysterious emotion of patriotism proceeds from the same source as the mysterious emotion of family loyalty?

            No, it’s nature via nurture. Patriotism is a received value through our culture. People not raised in a patriotic culture are not going to feel patriotism.
            The underlying instinct is in-group vs. out-group, which practically any neuro-typical human will feel.
            American patriotism is a good received value. It has been modified over centuries to become quite inclusive and tolerant, acts as a positive change agent, withstands incredible pressure, adapts to new circumstances, and motivates enough people to successfully combat practically any competing negative ideology.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @hlynkacg:

            I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t one of those What Universal Experiences Are You Missing things. Is it possible that some people simply don’t perceive concepts like family, tribe/ingroup, and institutions as tangible things?

            I have often thought there’s something like a “patriotism gene” which I either lack or have a really low level of.

            The first place where this showed up was sports teams. The idea that my high school football team is “us” and I should want “us” or “our team” to win…didn’t compute. Made no sense. Ditto the idea that I should care whether somebody wears “our” school colors (good) or the enemy side’s school colors (bad). College was the same way – there’s lots of tribal markers and us-vs-them signaling around, most of which is a complete miss because I don’t have the right receptors for it. I am not really capable of caring whether my “home team” wins or whether “my college” wins.

            In politics, the idea that the US government or the US military is “us” and I should want “us” to win every conflict also doesn’t compute. Consider the quote “My country, may it ever be right – but my country right or wrong!” …no. I only want my country to win if it actually is right. If my country is wrong I’d rather “we” lose.

            …and so on. My highest tribe is “humans”, some lower tribes I identify with include “nerds” and “immediate family”. I don’t identify at all with my state or my college, don’t identify much with the federal government and only identify mildly with “America” in the sense of the people who happen to live in the same nation as me.

          • LHN says:

            I have a notable lack of the team-identification gene at most levels: didn’t get high school pep rallies, don’t understand why it matters that millionaires from all over the country wearing my city’s name beat or lose to millionaires from all over the country wearing another city’s.

            Even within my various nerddoms and fandoms I always feel a little out of step when things get a little too us-and-them. (As one of them expressed it decades ago, FIJAGH.)

            Nonetheless, I absolutely identify with American patriotism as A Definite Beta Guy describes it. And I experience a definite disconnect when I encounter communities where that’s mocked or reviled, or where US citizenship is treated as a flag of convenience, rather than membership in a community and participation in a unique experiment.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            where US citizenship is treated as a flag of convenience, rather than membership in a community and participation in a unique experiment

            For several years of hanging out (here and Thailand/India), with ‘international people’/’cosmopolitans’, I thought I was doing pretty well with language, food, etc. But when some (slightly deeper) conflicts came up, there was not even any conference table to argue about the shape of.

            More recently, LiveJournal friends’ reactions to the Charlie Hebdo shooting showed differences in things like “Guilty until proved innocent”, “Freedom of Speech protects mean cartoons”, etc.

            Sure, make fun of our insularity, flags, etc. But don’t tell me our FF’s Bill of Rights hasn’t spread round the world, yet, or at least through Western Europe.

          • Jiro says:

            You can talk with your brother, guess what he’s thinking, beat him at chess, carry a fridge up the stairs with him, collect embarrassing dirt on him and keep quiet about it, buy him a pizza. I find it difficult to imagine doing the same with a country.

            You seem to be thinking “loyalty to my brother is the same strength in both directions, while loyalty to my country is not.” That is incorrect. If you have an average level of country loyalty, you will still receive as much loyalty as you give. For instance, imagine a simplified situation where the country contains a million people and everyone gives exactly the same level of loyalty to their country as everyone else does. You will only receive 1/999999 as much loyalty from each individual person as you give, but you will receive that amount from 999999 people, so the net amount you give and receive will still be the same.

          • Borders Without Doctors says:

            @Jiro: No, I don’t mean there’s reciprocity. I mean I know who my brother is – he’s that guy over there. I have no idea what concrete thing I can interact with is “my country”.

          • Jiro says:

            In order to act in the interests of your country, you act so as to bring a net gain in the sum of the interests of individual human beings who are citizens of the country.

    • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

      Extrapolating from the costs of the wall recently built in Hungary, I would estimate something more like $2 Billion for a southern border wall.

      But hey, what’s $6 Billion between friends. 🙂

      More importantly however, even if a wall wouldn’t last forever, IF (and I understand that this is highly contentious) it provided significant benefits for, say 50 years, isn’t it possibly worth it? To me, trading an aircraft carrier (~$2B, ~50 year service life) for a southern border wall seems like a decent trade.

      And I absolutely love aircraft carriers. So much cool tech. I mean, jet fighters, nuclear reactors, and electromagnetic catapults, all in one place. That’s floating. In the middle of the ocean. How cool is that!?

      • gbdub says:

        It’s not floating– it’s zipping all over the damn ocean at 30+ nautical miles per hour! For as long as you can keep up the shipments of sailor chow and jet fuel!

      • cassander says:

        Aircraft carriers will run you closer to 10 billion these days if you want all the gizmos you mentioned. And you do want them, as the brits will learn to their shagrin. More for the planes.

      • Tekhno says:

        It being reasonably affordable is the conclusion I came to as well, the thing is though:

        1: Is a wall the most cost-effective solution even if it’s affordable? Like, I can imagine greatly increased patrols, 4x4s with ADS, and drones supplementing a complete fence with a ditch, but that would probably cost tons too, or be even more controversial than a wall. A wall has the advantage of being a passive defense, but I’ve seen some claims that maintenance costs will be high in that climate. The wall also needs to be absolutely colossal.

        2: Are direct illegal border crossings even the way most illegal immigrants end up in the USA? Aren’t visa overstays a bigger issue? You could ban visas entirely from certain African and certain lower tier Middle Eastern countries, and not really lose out much, but not from Mexico.

  81. Anon says:

    I try to take people’s past history of posting interesting things into account before I ban them for a single violation

    Speaking of which, when is Dieseach coming back?

    I’m actually considering banning anonymous commenting on here, because getting rid of the crappy anonymouses sometimes feels like trying to fill a leaky bucket. How angry would this make people?

    I don’t want to be banned. As long as you don’t ban me I’m good.

    Can anyone think of any soft “nudge” style ways to steer open thread conversation here away from specific topics without banning them completely

    The easiest way to distract someone from a topic is to give them a different one to focus on. For example, your psychiatry posts get very few political comments, and vice versa. Maybe add a few topics to the open thread to discuss, but people can discuss other things too?

    • Ruprect says:

      I don’t think Dieseach should ever be allowed back.

      The name is too popular – now that so many people have committed to supporting it (with such nauseous flattery) – I think it would be psychologically impossible for the community to engage in a reasonable discussion with that name.

      Better that she make a new user name.

      • Anonymous says:

        I think it would be psychologically impossible for the community to engage in a reasonable discussion with that name.

        Generalise this a bit, and it looks like the start of an argument in favour of anonymity.

        • Ruprect says:

          I think there has to be a balance – you want people to have a bit of an investment in what they are saying – a persistent identity might be a good way of achieving that.
          On the other hand, I think it makes it more difficult to discuss ideas when you are too involved in who the person you are engaging with might be.
          For example, I would prefer it if David Freidman commented pseudonymously because I find it very difficult to get over his name when I’m reading what he writes.
          Hard to know what it is that is drawing my interest.

          • Uhurugu says:

            It seems to me that there’s two sides to that coin, each with benefits. Some people might want to filter by particular users that they find produce interesting comments, while others might want to filter them out to remove bias.

            This is tangential to the Anon “stay or leave” discussion, but I would be interested to see an option to toggle anonymous/pseudonymous mode. At the very least, it would be a good way to observe my own bias in action.

          • Nyx says:

            I think there’s value in lurkers being able to ctrl-F particular names that they associate with good quality discussion. Or being able to dismiss names out of hand if they personally consider them trolls (within reason).

      • Luke Somers says:

        What the heck happened while I wasn’t looking?

          • Ah, I’ve heard about the ban, but never read it before. I am rather more concerned with the Xerxes ban, because he made a lot of very good points, and wasn’t abusive about it. D** was abusive, and so was more deserving of the ban (altho I would have preferred neither banned). I hope Xerxes comes back soon.

      • Agronomous says:

        Dammit. Yesterday the sign on my desk said, “920 Days without Hating the English”.

        Now I’m back to 0. Thanks, Ruprect, thanks a lot.

    • LPSP says:

      Dieseach was never a good or balanced commentor. The mean anon is a better commentor, even if you negate all factors but the rabble-rousing pontential of the name alone.

      • Nicholas says:

        I suppose we disagree then. As for myself, I don’t think that Dieseach would have deserved a ban under the old “2/3 gates” policy, as her posts in that discussion were both relevant and true, but I suppose that when you get a Reign of Terror some good always gets thrown out with some bad.

        • Montfort says:

          I’m not saying you can’t disagree, but Scott has his own opinion on that subject:

          I’m not saying this can’t possibly be true. I’m saying it’s not so obviously true that the comment policy, which says you’re sort of allowed to be a jerk if it’s in favor of obvious truth, covers it

  82. Lysenko says:

    So, based on earlier threads and my own research, self-reported happiness seems to be at best problematic, and at worst absolutely useless.

    What then are the best avenues going forward for generating some sort empirically robust measure for utility of third parties? Is anyone actively pursuing this as a matter of philosophical, social science, or neuroscience research right now?

    • Bugmaster says:

      Ok, so to dispense with the obvious: why don’t we just use money ?

      • Vitor says:

        Because blindly maximising the amount of money (you probably mean purchasing power) might have terrible consequences, e.g. climate change. Also, isn’t “money = happiness” usually the null hypothesis which happiness studies aim to disprove?

        • Bugmaster says:

          I am not pushing for “money = happiness”, just for “money ~= happiness”. I agree that blindly maximizing money can lead to terrible consequences; but then, so can blindly maximizing happiness (e.g. drug addiction on the personal level, communist dictatorship on the geopolitical level).

          You may be right about happiness studies, but, as we have established, they are not too great at measuring happiness anyway (at least, not the kind of happiness that we are trying to measure). Money, on the other hand, is subject to the laws of supply and demand; the “demand” part sounds like something close to what we’d want.

          • Virbie says:

            > I am not pushing for “money = happiness”, just for “money ~= happiness”.

            I don’t think even this formulation approaches adequate. For one, you can’t really express simple, intuitive things like the diminishing marginal utility of money (if you gave twenty dollars to a homeless person it would have a noticeable effect: if you gave twenty dollars to me I would probably never notice).

            And FWIW, we already _do_ measure money, all over the place, with standardized (if imperfect) measures across the world. The reason we try to measure happiness in other ways is precisely because we keep seeing indications that money ~= happiness isn’t quite accurate enough and misses trends that we’d like to be aware of.

      • Nicholas says:

        Because of situations such as this toy example:

        I have an extremely robust paid leave package at my job, and my father has excellent health insurance. If my father requires medical supplies he will be able to procure them on his own, and if he requires services or assistance I can take up to three months off of work with no decrease in pay. My father lives in the same city that I do, only a few miles away. Thus if my father is dying of cancer, there will be no monetary impact on me at all, even if I spend all day, every day, sitting at his bedside for three months. But it seems trivially obvious that my happiness will be greatly diminished as I watch my father die.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Anyone who could answer your question has essentially solved one of the problems of consciousness. Of course it’s one of the “easy” ones but that’s still pretty difficult.

    • So, this is probably a really hard problem, but some more pragmatic people have come up with some not awful solutions:

      Quality-Adjusted Life Year
      Disability-Adjusted Life Year

      The basic idea is you ask people questions like “Would you prefer to be blind and live for 20 years or have sight and live for 10?”. Then you assign an average-utility-cost to each illness. I don’t really see a reason this couldn’t apply to things like income and social considerations.

      Of course, this all requires humans to have some degree of access to their utility functions, which may or may not be an accurate-enough assumption.

      • Lysenko says:

        Tom, thanks, and I guess that’s probably the right approach in general given the currently available tools, but correct me if I’m wrong, but that is still dependent entirely on self-reports from surveys? Which is exactly the measurement tool we determined to be pretty untrustworthy with regards to happiness.

        I guess at the end of the day this comes back to the basic difficulties involved in conducting controlled tests on human populations. Now THAT is something I’d like to use Ems for:

        “Excuse me, Mr. Smith. We’d like to copy your personality several hundred thousand times. We will be determining the answers to questions like “is it better to have loved and lost” by furnishing some of your instances with loving partners who will then break up with them, or die quickly and painlessly, or slowly and horribly, or stay with them forever, or will outlive your instance by simulated decades, and measure the amount of emotional distress this causes. We will repeat similar experiments hundreds of thousands of times to test the value of lives lived in varying degrees of freedom of oppression, health or sickness, poverty or wealth, and so on…just sign here…”

        I guess what I want is steps towards something better than fucking POLLING (something my time as a Poli-Sci undergrad has made me intensely suspicious of), yet more practical and realizable than the magical fairy dust belief that someday we’ll know how human minds work well enough to model and measure their internal states with software. So yeah, Wrong Species, it is really difficult.

        • Sorry I forgot to check back for a week. You are, indeed, correct that they’re based on surveys. I’d also be super interested in the results of those Ems experiments (though their moral status is grey to say the least). Hope someone smarter than me can solve this 🙂

      • Nicholas says:

        Haven’t we found that people who end up actually struck blind or paralyzed, conditional on a supportive social environment, end up feeling roughly as satisfied with their lives as they were before their disability?

        • Froolow says:

          Not sure how friendly the SSC spamfilter is feeling today, but the term for what you’re talking about is the ‘Disability Paradox’ if you want to Google it, and it has been most convincingly demonstrated with temporary vs permanent ileostomies (people with bowel bags which will be removed in six months are unhappier after the bag is removed than a healthy control group and a group whose bags will never be removed). It seems to apply to almost any condition that doesn’t involve pain or depression / anxiety (which always absolutely flatline your quality of life under just about every conceivable circumstance and measure)

          Except ‘paradox’ is perhaps the wrong word, because one entirely plausible solution is that people actually genuinely are happier or just as happy with states of existence that we would intuitively think are awful as the general population – that is to say people are very bad at predicting what will make them unhappy, and once you acclimatize to superficially limiting features of a disease you begin to identify ways to adapt.

        • Sorry for the late reply. I’d guess the disconnect lies in the difference between “preference” and “satisfaction”.

  83. Andre Infante says:

    It’s easy. Decide exactly how much a given topic annoys you, on a per-post basis, and charge a proportionate toll (via Bitcoin). Write a script to scrape the comments, and remove the ones that hit the keyword filter and don’t include a proof of transaction. Honestly, the need to set up a bitcoin wallet will do most of the disincentive for you, but either way, problem solved from your perspective.

    • Murphy says:

      Needing to pay to comment will “solve ” the problem in the sense that all but the 3 craziest people with money they’re willing tho throw away will simply stop posting. Success if you consider an empty comments section success.

      • Nicholas says:

        Ah, but this isn’t pay to post, this is pay for the privilege of annoying Scott without being banned. And once you start selling that right as a commodity, believe me, it will be used.

  84. Lysenko says:

    2) Entirely ok with this. I suggest implementing some sort of low but non-zero effort barrier to entry on comments. Ideally, it would be nice to lock pseudonyms to specific e-mails and/or IPs, but that might be going too far for some people’s tastes.

    4) As others have said, simply asking/requiring combined with judicious application of the ban-hammer seems as if it would be a good solution.

    On a side note, people have made reference to both Rules and/or a Ban List before, but damned if I can find either. Am I missing the obvious? I remember various other posts with something like the above: statements about concerns with where the blog is going, statements of intent re: moderating, but nothing I’d call an actual one-stop reference for “The Rules Of SSC Commentary”.

  85. acorn says:

    “You have to motivate them. You always have to be on top of them. And you have to be smarter than they are. I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”

    “And you have to keep those people motivated. And I’ve always said, it’s not the dollar as much it is your own personal intervention. You have to keep good people around you. Never trust them too much because all of a sudden things will start to happen that you’re not gonna like.”

    ““And you’ll find that when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they’ll sit back and listen,” he said. “Does that make sense to you? OK? Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you.”

    • FeepingCreature says:

      I’ve never seen a clearer illustration of the saying “A’s hire A’s, but B’s hire C’s”.

    • erenold says:

      This strikes me as classic agent-principal problem. It’s almost always a good thing for any organization to have smarter people working for it – but it’s not always a good thing for the boss to have smarter, possibly ambitious people working for him.

      • LPSP says:

        Exactly. This relates to a nice chat I was having on /v/ about logo designs of all things, where someone brought up that insane dossier of pepsi design jargon from 2008 (the one about “Pepsi Physics” and “Pepsi Universe”. A guy who does artwork for money said that surely he could get easily hired in this industry, given that not only can he make nicer-looking logos than the ones Pepsi etc. used (which he then proved with some of his designs), but also that he is clearly saner than the weirdos in the department. My response was that, by even considering sanity as a motive, you’ve already rendered yourself unhireable. Bosses in PR and ad departments want employees nuttier than themselves. They can step right into a room full of nonsense echo-chamber gibberish and slip right in, no pesky “questions” or demands for accountability. Mad is known, mad is easily influenced, mad is controllable.

        The go-to example I use for this sort of phenomenon outside of graphic design discussions is the case of overqualification for simple jobs. Say you’re a manager at a typical supermarket chain, and two folks hand you resumes for a simple job, say shelf-stacking. One is 18, has average secondary school grades, some unimpressive sixth form stuff in basic topics and no degree. The other is 30, has stellar high school grades and acceptable marks in advanced college topics like chemistry, but also no degree. Who is more hireable? The average, predictable, low-motivation kid who can be easily molded and shaped into a role, won’t kick up a fuss, and is easy to remove if the trouble proves worthless? Or a smarmy sheldon-like who is both talented enough to get sparkling results, yet doesn’t think uni is a good idea, who is almost certainly an eccentric with strong opinions, who answers basic questions philosophically and will get into a fierce argument over the shelf-stacking policy, and whether it’s truly optimal for all relevant circumstances? Pain in the ass, unpredictable, unknown quality. Huge risk for no more returns than the 18 year old, all for the sake of just stacking shelves.

        Big bosses want less smart, unambitious committee members. Ad and PR departments want easily excited, gibberish-talking ideologues zipping off the walls. And store managers want young unsuccessful schlumps. Mediocrity is a virtue.

  86. Jack Sorensen says:

    Regarding “universal culture,” and your question about whether to support universal culture vs traditional culture or the opposite. Which side do you see Universities & other institutions that tout “diversity” as falling on that spectrum? By its name, and by the related name “multiculturalism”, it would seem they’re pro-traditional. But it seems that, in practice, they’re pro-universal.

    Partly because of your point about Noahide laws – “we’re gonna support traditional culture with a few exceptions for really important shit” and then the exceptions swallow the rule. But also in part because of the universals’ view of itself as dabbling in many different cultures. You can see when it comes to pop culture criticism as well, they see an upstanding citizen as someone who takes their culture in a certain proportion from various different places, and pushes those proportions onto everyone.

    In other words, to simplify, one view is “diversity means black people have their culture, whites theirs, Asians theirs,” and another view is “diversity means everyone’s culture is 70% white, 20% black, and 10% Asian. If your culture is too much of one, you’re bad.”

    I also doubt the idea that the universal culture is better. In part because of how much signalling and shit there is, and how many arbitrary choices there are around culture, and I think we can all point out examples of this with the universal culture. If the issue with traditional culture is social pressure to conform, I think the universal culture does the same thing.

    Also there’s a lot of shit you could say about pro-Integration people vs Black Nationalists in the 1960s that’s related to this. Some Black Nationalists said Integration was “painless genocide.”

  87. Bugmaster says:

    As others have pointed out, banning anonymous comments won’t do much unless you also require registration and verification.

    If you choose to go that route, you will dramatically reduce the number of unpleasant comments on the blog. This has benefits, but also costs. The obvious benefit is the drastic reduction in the volume of spam, trolling, and controversial topics; this will make your own life easier, as well as improve the quality of life for many of your commenters.

    However, that latter item — controversial comments — is also a cost. People will be a lot less likely to post comments that their mental model of you would find annoying. That would mean that your ideas will be challenged more rarely; though, admittedly, in some cases this could be a benefit, especially if your mind is pretty well made up about some topic.

    On the other hand, now that you’ve shredded the veil of anonymity, people would also be less likely to make comments that their boss, their professor, their friends, or society at large might find controversial. This would reduce the volume of even those comments whose posters agree with you and are perfectly polite.

    TL;DR: If you want people to comment on your socially controversial articles, you need to allow them to do so anonymously. So, I guess the real question is, what is Slate Star Codex all about ? Is it a popular science blog ? A “day in the life of a psychiatrist” blog ? A social justice-adjacent blog ? A rationality (the movement, not necessarily the mode of thought) blog ? All of the above ? Some of the above ? Neither ? By choosing a comment moderation strategy, you are also moving your blog along these axes in the idea-space.

    • Tedd says:

      I strongly doubt that Scott means to ban pseudonymous posting, like yours. The objection is merely to the gathered hoards of anonymouses, which, if you look through this thread, are mainly but not wholly of negative value.

    • Lumifer says:

      now that you’ve shredded the veil of anonymity

      I don’t think Scott is proposing that True Names be revealed. Pseudonymity of the usual kind will still be alive and well, what’s being discussed is a speed bump, not a TSA checkpoint.

  88. Lumifer says:

    One simple initial step might be to require a unique user name (even without any email verification schemes). That will solve the problem of addressing the puce-coloured anonymous as opposed to the ecru-colored one and will force some creativity at the very least.

    • KBLDmjhynT0iR0taX2 says:

      Great idea!

      • Nornagest says:

        You can use various techniques to tell with high probability whether a string is a text in any alphabetic language — it happens that they tend to fall into a certain entropy range, especially if you’re restricting yourself to the ASCII character set. I don’t know if this would work for username-length strings, but If Scott ends up going with this, I’m tempted to find out — partly because it would be an interesting problem and partly to piss the anonymice off.

        • Lumifer says:

          whether a string is a text in any alphabetic language

          Huh? You mean whether a string looks like it comes from some language. You can’t determine whether it actually has meaning. It’s not hard to create nonsense words and sentences that look like a real language.

          But yeah, it’s possible to determine whether someone rolled their face on the keyboard or bothered to come up with something pronounceable.

          • Vitor says:

            Yes, and that’s exactly the point. Force pronounceable pseudonyms instead of random strings or variations on the word anonymous.

            Who knows, the inconvenience might be just large enough that some anons capitulate and stick to one name for an entire thread at a time.

          • Rosemary7391 says:

            Would that also then forbid numbers on the end of names? I think it’d have to to be effective. I use this name elsewhere on the internet, so it’s a consistent identity. I can definitely understand the desire to have consistent identities rather than a bunch of 1 shot posters. Is there a reason registration isn’t a thing? Or is that not possible with the blog? I usually post on forums which work differently (and are easier to navigate than comment threads here – as interesting as they are, the navigation does somewhat put me off replying to them).

  89. MagnetsHowDoTheyWork says:

    Linus Neumann came up with what he called a “Troll Throttle” and I think his idea is pure genious.

    People have to fill a Captcha when submitting a comment. If the post contains a word which has a probability to be troll related or points to a certain topic, the Captcha will return as failed with that probability, no matter if it was solved correctly.

    What happens is that trolls get frustrated more and more, driving them away. Well behaving users are barely affected.

    • Lumifer says:

      That sounds like a terrible idea.

    • Anonymous says:

      No. This is just going to get trolls to avoid certain words. And it may also frustrate legitimate participants who are unaware of the filter.

    • Nornagest says:

      Until someone figures out that a dictionary’s being used.

      You also have the problem of maintaining that dictionary — and that’s going to be particularly hard here, where there’s a lot of hot-button topics that don’t map well to the rest of the Internet. (What weighting would you give “Roko”?)

    • Rowan says:

      I can’t see how this would do anything other than to frustrate trolls and well-behaved users alike for a few days until everyone knows about the secret banned words and things go back to normal.

    • everything is better when told as a fairtale says:

      One king prohibited bad words in his country.
      People started using good words as euphemism of bad words ironically.
      But It then became really hard to say something good.
      People were saying good words but others thought they were insulting them.
      Then dragon came and killed the king, but it took hundreds of years for culture to repair itself.

    • Maware says:

      These kind of throttles exist in MMOs to mute RMT gold spammers. RMT defeat it by adding garbage characters to the specific words. add a couple of dashes, use periods, and break up the text string.

  90. Bassicallyboss says:

    I grew up Catholic, and I enjoyed the solemn ritual and ceremony we experienced there. I no longer believe in God, but I’d like to get some ritual back in my life, and I’d like to do it without having to go through the motions for metaphysics I don’t believe in. I talked to some friends who also expressed interest in this, so I’ve been trying to put together little rituals that I can officiate for maybe a dozen of us.

    This post about smallpox eradication suggested some good ideas: Gather people together, give a little speech about how bad smallpox was, maybe give people a chance to speak up about loved ones suffering from disease, talk about current eradication efforts and end it with everyone feeling good about the progress of medicine. And then, since it’s on Dec. 9, take everyone to get flu shots.

    This other post about the time Stanislav Petrov made a possibly nuclear-war averting decision seemed like another good excuse for a celebration, but I can’t think of much to do for what’s basically a celebration of the fact that we’ve made it this far through the Great Filter. The date when Petrov did the thing is in September, though, so unless I move Humanity Hasn’t Killed Ourselves Off Yet Day to a more appropriate date, I’d better put something together. I suppose that’s the sort of thing that one could celebrate with a party, like New Year’s. That would be fun and worthy, but that isn’t really the sort of thing I want out of this project. I guess I’ll keep thinking.

    Anyway, I thought you guys would appreciate hearing about it, and that maybe someone could offer me advice if they celebrate any secular holidays, conduct secular rituals, or have experience in designing rituals or ceremonies. I know about the solstice party that some here attend; are there other already-existing holidays I should look into, or triumphs or tragedies worth commemorating?

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      G.K. Chesterton sketched such a calendar, but it wasn’t solemn ritual. He volunteered to light a bonfire on Darwin Day.

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      I feel like these ideas don’t quite work, because they’re just events that happened to be good. I think to worship something it needs to be more like an ideal of goodness (or some other desirable trait).

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I agree that these things aren’t really worthy of worship. However, we commemorate many events that aren’t worthy of worship: Birthdays, Wedding anniversaries, state holidays (like Independence Day or Thanksgiving in America). We also remember bad things that happened, like on Armistice Day (Veteran’s day).

        These things aren’t ideals of goodness, and I’m not suggesting that worshiping anything. However, most of them were important, and I think it would be nice to incorporate a bit of solemn ceremony (I expect 10-15 minutes’ worth) into my life to remember them.

    • dndnrsn says:

      If you’re somewhere that has an Anglican/Episcopalian church, especially one known for high church liturgy, and go. The left wing ones won’t care if you don’t believe in God.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        Thanks, I’ll check it out. I’ve heard good things about Episcopalian liturgy.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Wow, the grammar in my original post is nonexistent.

          More information: at least where I am, fanciness of liturgy is generally inversely correlated with right-wing politics. There are exceptions here and there, but generally the congregations with more organ music and incense are liberal congregations.

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      If you watch the videos for the GDQ (Games Done Quick) events, there are quite a few traditions involved, from slang (like the “hyyyyype!” call and response, variations on some of the mainstay donation incentives, referencing of memes), to the read messages associated with donations. Since GDQ (a charity event) usually benefits either Doctors Without Borders or the Prevent Cancer Foundation, there’s often a ritual-like flow of donation messages talking about their personal/family experiences with cancer (combined with a determination to defeat it), or praising the work of DWS.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I do watch GDQ sometimes, and I like the cause and the traditions they have. While I appreciate the suggestion, it isn’t quite what I’m looking for.

        Save the Animals.

    • My understanding is that Unitarian services are essentially secular. I had a friend who went to such a church and she complained that they never talked about God. This might not be true of all Unitarian churches. And I don’t know how similar their rituals would be to Catholic services; I think they are more like Protestant services and emphasize sermons instead of rituals.

      • Loquat says:

        Probably depends on the pastor; my husband’s gone to a couple of different Unitarian church services in his lifetime (both in Ohio, fwiw) and in both there were scripture readings from all 3 Abrahamic faiths.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I’m a little wary of Unitarian service because it’s always seemed to me to be a bit wishy-washy. I suppose, now that I think about it, that it’s probably something that depends a lot on the officiant and the congregation, and I should probably check out my local UU church and see if that’s a good fit. Thanks for mentioning it.

      • Cord Shirt says:

        Just to chime in, I come from a UU family. My parents are atheists and raised me atheist within their local UU church. Yes, they did focus on sermons (which I loved listening to as a child). I stopped attending as a teen because the services were too “spiritual”/ceremonial for me.

        (But I *really* dislike ceremony. Frex I skipped all my graduation ceremonies and got married without even a party let alone a wedding ceremony. So “enough ceremony to bother me” isn’t necessarily “enough ceremony to satisfy you.”)

        Robert Fulghum. author of the ’80s bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and “sequels,” is a UU minister. The sermons I remember weren’t too different from Fulghum’s essays.

  91. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Has anybody else heard about a game called Totally Accurate Battle Simulator? It’s in pre-alpha right now, but all the videos I saw of it looked hilarious. It’s like Rome: Total War meets Derpy Hooves.

    • Bassicallyboss says:

      I haven’t heard of it before now, but thanks for bringing it to my attention! It looks pretty entertaining. Sort of like Surgeon Simulator but for battles and tactics.

    • SilasLock says:

      I got through a couple videos, it looks hilarious! You have good taste. =P

  92. BBA says:

    I’ve been reading up on South African law, inspired by the Oscar Pistorius case (and the fact that I’ll be visiting the country in a few months). It makes me question my notions of what “rule of law” really means.

    For starters, there is no penal code. This isn’t unique – England also has no penal code, but there is a large body of statutory law supplementing and/or replacing the often vague, archaic rules of the common law. In South Africa, the unmodified common law still governs most offenses. If there isn’t case law on point you have to look to scholarly treatises written in 18th century Dutch, and did I mention that almost nobody in South Africa speaks Dutch?

    But even when you have a clear definition of the offense, and an offender who has clearly broken the law, the judge can have absolute discretion on sentencing, as most crimes have no binding minimum or maximum sentences. A 1997 law introduced “minimum” sentences for some crimes, but it allows a judge to go below the minimum for “good cause”, which is entirely up to the judge. Pistorius was found guilty of non-premeditated murder, which has a 15-year minimum sentence, but the judge disregarded the minimum and gave him 6 years instead. (The prosecutors are appealing, as they can in most legal systems of Continental European origin, though not in English Common Law-based systems like the US.) As for maximum sentences, the same 1997 law only set maximums for cases tried in certain trial courts. In the High Court, the trial court of general jurisdiction, the maximum sentences don’t apply, and the prosecutors have full discretion to decide which cases are tried in the High Court.

    The result is that the penalty for a simple assault could be anywhere from fines and probation to life imprisonment, and the judge has complete discretion to decide everything in the case. Somehow this is entirely within the “rule of law”. I don’t really understand it, but I suppose it works there.

    (Now this is one of the few places on the Internet where I might run into people who unironically defend apartheid, so I’ll just point out that these laws are exactly the same as they were during the apartheid regime and for some reason the ANC hasn’t desired to change them except at the margins, cf. the 1997 act I mentioned. Actually, I find it remarkable how often political revolutions will keep the old legal system largely in place, no matter how awful and despised the old regime was. But that’s for another thread.)

    • DavidS says:

      I don’t think minimum or maximum sentences are a necessary part of rule of law. Rule of law isn’t about minimising judges discretion. If judges were systemically biased to the point of clearly letting people off or arbitrarily applying harsh punishments that’s an obvious issue but I’d assume they’d draw on precedent in sentencing as they do in the UK.

      Interesting to see this post alongside the other one on this thread that mentions mandatory minimum death sentence for drug crime in Singapore. I’m dubious about minimums at all.they seem to say ‘guide this sentence even if it’s inappropriate’. Maximums there’s more of an argument.

      • SilasLock says:

        Agreed completely. And even if judges were systematically biased, there must be some way to correct for that bias without using a sentencing floor.

        A low wage subsidy for the legal system, rather than a minimum wage, I guess. =P

        The entire point of a judge is to decide what sentence a criminal ought to receive. One could argue that giving officials discretionary power runs contrary to the rule of law, and that all sentencing should come from a set of possible punishments contained in a legal book. Judges would then modify the book as appropriate, rather than passing judgment on a case by case basis.

        It’s an interesting idea, but it seems that given the sheer number of possible crimes that the sentencing book would become impossible to navigate, much like the present US tax code. Loopholes for criminals would probably crop up in weird places, and modifying the law would become a huge bureaucratic process. Maybe I’m being too dystopian, but applying the rule of law to the, um, law, seems impossible, as strange as it sounds.

        Going somewhere in between the two systems, with minimum and maximum sentences that a judge can navigate between, strikes me as inelegant. Kind of like a free market with price gouging laws. You either have a central board of prices or you don’t, the two systems interfere with each other otherwise.

        • Agronomous says:

          Maybe I’m being too dystopian, but applying the rule of law to the, um, law, seems impossible, as strange as it sounds.

          Who will write the law to govern the law?

          (Having said that, I’d be happy with a law limiting the amount of law we can have. Want a new clause? Find an old clause somewhere to delete.)

          Also, Gödel probably comes into it somewhere.

          • DavidS says:

            The ‘pass a law, repeal a law’s thing has been tried with business regulation in a few countries. But it’s open to repealing small unused laws and bringing in huge sweeping new ones.

            Plus more law can be better for rule of law. Like when you replace one sweeping law with several more limited and precise ones

        • Salem says:

          The entire point of a judge is to decide what sentence a criminal ought to receive.

          No, no it’s not.

  93. Matthias says:

    Pseudonyms are easy enough to make. A ban on ‘anonymous’ commenting would just raise the cost of anonymous commenting a bit. (But that might be enough to reduce the flow of ban-worthy posts. Trivial inconveniences matter.)

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      @ Matthias
      Trivial inconveniences matter.

      There’s also the inconvenience to readers and to sincere new people. As it is, I tend to skip posts signed ‘Anonymous’. But if those posters all get more respectable names, I can’t use dodgy or unfamiliar names as a filter; so I’ll waste more time on posts I should have skipped, and/or posts by sincere new people will get lost in the shuffle.

  94. Gwen S. says:

    Can anyone recommend a book on how to survive office politics?

    • Matthias says:

      The Strategy of Conflict is always worth a read for its look at human affairs.

    • ex-PFC Wintergreen says:

      The Gervais Principle series of blog posts by Venkatesh Rao was enlightening if a little stark in its portrayal of the office ecosystem.

      Posting specific issues/questions here might be helpful too.

      • The Gervais Principle is so….depressing. I feel my soul die reading it.

        • Yes, very depressing, and what really made it so for me was the number of commenters who said they finally understood how their careers went.

          The thing I hang on to is the idea that not all organizations are fully sociopath-infested.

          To my mind, one of the big questions is how people can find decent organizations to work for. This seems to be very challenging information to get hold of.

          • Jill says:

            I guess you have to be very willing to quit and keep looking. Because it’s not always obvious quickly when an organization is dysfunctional.

          • Nornagest says:

            be very willing to quit and keep looking

            Good advice. I should have quit one of my previous jobs years before I left it — although sociopathy wasn’t the problem in that case, a culture of normalizing heroic efforts was.

          • Being willing to quit and keep looking (or possibly to start looking before you quit) is really important.

            As far as I can tell, there’s a lot of unwillingness to quit– I’m not sure how much of it is loss aversion, how much of it is bad habits of putting up with authority which is taught in school, how much of it is believing that quitting fast will look bad on a resume, and how much of it is that being a bad environment can sap initiative. There might be other factors I haven’t thought of.

        • Jill says:

          Beta Guy, no need to be depressed about this. That would be like reading an excellent description of Syria, and then deciding that all countries are that dysfunctional and dangerous.

          The Gervais principle does a great job of describing dysfunctional organizations. But they are not all that way. None are perfect probably. But some have just minor problems, compared to the horridly stressful problems in organizations that are infested by psychopaths.

    • Skef says:

      “Survive” could mean “minimize the damage” or “triumph on the top of the heap”. Most advice or “Art of War”-style books are selling to the second meaning.

      Whether or not you’re a manager, my own most basic piece of advice would be to pretty much ignore the attitudes and foibles of non-managers. The occasional manager might care about an individual contributor’s opinion as an opinion, but for the most part they’ll hunt out “objective” support for what they think already. You might get some shovelfuls of that crap at review time, but it will be sized proportionally to the rating you likely got at some food fight two or three levels above you.

      Beyond that, read Moral Mazes to get a rough idea of what’s going on.

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      Some of Deborah Tannen’s and Suzette Elgins’s books might be helpful, especially if there are male/female issues involved.

    • bluto says:

      I rather enjoyed Balzac’s Bureaucracy, it’s probably not the most up-to-date but does have a distinct advantage on price.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Is your goal to keep your job and keep out of the political power games, to advance your career (with or without engaging in political power games), or to stay sane?

      These are very different goals with very different strategies.

    • Jill says:

      Here’s the AMZN search I just did, for office politics. 78,000 books. I generally look for books with the most reviews, and a lot of positive reviews, figuring that a lot of people found these books to be very helpful.

      • Agronomous says:

        That sounds like a good, and not-very-difficult-to-execute, strategy.

        Open question: How could we evaluate it? What’s a more-expensive, known-good strategy we could put it up against?

        • Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

          Reading lots of the books and applying the strategies they offer in sequence, comparing the results, and then permanently adopting the highest performing one(s).

    • Cord Shirt says:

      In case your goal is “staying safe from mobbing,” here’s a book on avoiding and/or coping with mobbing by an anthropologist who was mobbed.

  95. Nornagest says:

    How angry would this make people?

    I don’t know, but it’s a negative number.

    • Anonymous says:

      If you don’t know it, how can you know it’s negative?

      (Myself, I won’t be angered at all; I’ll just shrug and go somewhere else.)

      • Nornagest says:

        Meant that I, personally, would be negatively angered. On rereading I see that that was ambiguous. Sorry about that.

    • Bugmaster says:

      FWIW, personally, I don’t post comments often; but if this policy were implemented, I’d post a lot less often (possibly never). This may or may not be a good thing.

      • onyomi says:

        Why would it encourage you to post less, given you already have a pseudonym?

        • Bugmaster says:

          Because it would imply that the blog is becoming less of a place for spirited discussion, and more of a place for mutually reinforcing in-group biases. I don’t want to post comments just so that people can tell me how awesome I am; nor do I want to accidentally post a comments that offends someone and then get perma-banned.

          • Nornagest says:

            Spirited discussion is one thing, but anon sniping is only “spirited discussion” in an extremely euphemistic sense of the phrase.

          • gbdub says:

            Scott explicitly stated that he’s less likely to ban named accounts. And the whole reason he’s considering banning anons is becasuse they engage in low-quality sniping that rallies in-group rah-rahs and counter-trolling instead of spirited and thoughtful discussion.

            The implication you’re talking about is your own invention – I don’t think it’s supported by Scott’s actual behavior.

          • Bugmaster says:

            Right, but as I said in my other comment, lots of people would be unable to comment on controversial topics at all, knowing that their comments could be traced back to them somehow. Lots of other people would rather play it safe and not comment, knowing that the slightest infraction could get them perma-banned.

            It’s the usual dilemma: if you want to have discussion, you have to tolerate a certain amount of offence. There’s no silver bullet.

          • gbdub says:

            He can already perma-ban you by IP. Which you can change. But you can also open as many anonymous throwaway email accounts as you need.

          • Cadie says:

            It’s easy enough for someone to make a pseudoanonymous account with a made-up username and a Gmail/Hotmail/etc. e-mail that they don’t put their name on and don’t use for anything tied to their offline identity. That would also be almost the same as being anonymous, from an identity protection standpoint, unless one selects their made-up username poorly. IP addresses are logged either way, so NSA/FBI/etc. could pretty easily find out who’s who if they wanted to even if one is fully Anonymous (of course, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d notice or care about a slightly offensive online comment or average troll.) And usernames can be totally disconnected from identity or even reality. I doubt a username like “Purple Soup Bowl” or “HeliumPictureframe8273” would help a would-be doxxer find out who the user is, if the user doesn’t connect that name to their real name/info elsewhere.

            Banning anonymous posts only prevents people from posting without at least a “fake” name. It makes trolling and other low-effort nonsense a little less convenient because they have to do a quick signup before posting, and do it again when/if they get banned. That small inconvenience will deter some trolls (especially the ones that aren’t even interesting or entertaining). For real, non-troll users, it only has to be done once ever.

          • Nornagest says:

            If you really care about network-level anonymity, Tor or VPNs or anonymous Web proxies are not that hard to find.

  96. SJMadeMeRight says:

    So I as an American have been constantly told throughout my life that the war on drugs is unwinnable, and criminalization of drugs has done much more harm than good.

    I have also been told that harsh punishments don’t prevent criminals from committing crimes. So we should move towards shorter and softer prison sentences aimed at rehabilitation.

    Yet Singapore exists.

    People point to a country like Denmark (Pop. 5.7m) and say “See we can learn from their institutions!” So I don’t think the “They are a small homogenous country” (Funny enough Singapore is more ethnically diverse than Denmark.) objection holds up unless it also applies the other way around.

    I have grown up in a poor urban environment and I have seen peoples lives ruined by drugs. Not from getting arrested but from the addictions themselves. I have seen people turn on their family, friends, and lovers to get high.

    Can someone explain to me why America should confront this problem like Portugal, or the Netherlands, and not like Singapore?

    • Sandy says:

      Denmark’s homogeneity is brought up because high trust, civic participation and social cohesiveness are instrumental to making those institutions work in a liberal democracy. Singapore circumvents all that by ignoring democracy and its hallmarks in favor of a system of benevolent despotism dominated by an ethnic Chinese elite class.

      The dominant nature of this class is heightened by the fact that Singapore’s executive has more relative power over its territory than America’s executive does from sea to shining sea. Fewer checks and balances. It’s hard to sell the American public on the idea of an elite class making all the decisions with minimal opposition or input from the citizenry. Particularly because this class will wind up being mostly white and so harsh punishments for drug abuse will become a racialized issue.

      • Civilis says:

        Particularly because this class will wind up being mostly white and so harsh punishments for drug abuse will become a racialized issue.

        There’s also the nagging feeling that this ‘elite class’ will look pretty much like the ‘elite class’ currently in Washington.

    • One factor is that Singapore is willing to execute the occasional innocent person to make a point, and the US is … well, perhaps not entirely unwilling, but certainly reluctant to do the same. (If we had mind scanners or something that could ensure no innocent person was ever convicted, that could potentially change some people’s minds.)

      • Matthias says:

        Singapore kills less people of the wrong skin colour walking their dog.

        But yes, they are willing to kill to make a point. And willing to cane.

        Also: illicit drugs are available in Singapore. I used to live there and friends offered me some. They are just more expensive—as you can imagine in a rich place with a depressed supply.

        • Singapore kills less people of the wrong skin colour walking their dog.

          Sounds like that could be developed into an interesting consequentialist-style argument. But I’m guessing that if you tried to introduce Singaporean-style gun control in the US, the results would be far worse than the status quo, police shootings and all. Conversely, there’s no obvious reason to think that liberalizing Singapore would inevitably result in either an overwhelming wave of police shootings or a massive increase in drug use.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Singapore did experiment with liberalization. It found that methadone did produce a massive increase in drug use.

      • erenold says:

        It must be noted that Singapore does not merely have the death penalty, but in fact the mandatory death penalty (meaning, there is no possible penalty other than death) for certain – fairly low in fact – quantities of possession. The automatic presumption – which can be rebutted – is that possession above such quantities are prima facie evidence of intent to traffick.

        I suspect – with some degree of personal knowledge of their criminal law and jurisprudence, though not a lot – that very few people they execute are actually “innocent”, in the sense they didn’t do it, genuinely had no idea the drugs were in their bag, etc. I mean, surely that number must asymptotically approach 1 over time, but I have never come across one single case in which I think there was a plausible possibility that the person was genuinely unaware.

        The hard cases are those where the prosecution knows they did it. The judge knows they did it (there are no juries in Singapore, incidentally). Everyone and their dog knows they did it, and they did it knowing that they were doing it, although the defence struggles manfully to prove otherwise. The hard question is why they did it. And sometimes the human element is genuinely quite moving and unsettling.

        Very often they’re uneducated people. Foolish people taking an insane risk for chump change. Gamblers, maybe, in deep with the sharks. Naive girls asked to do favours for their “boyfriends”. People trying to pay off their family members’ debts. Is it effacious, at the margin, in deterring more drug trafficking? I believe yes, and I doubt anyone can convince me otherwise. But is it worth it?

        I don’t know – I want to believe it is – but I don’t know, and I doubt anyone does. It’s something I feel deeply, deeply conflicted upon.

        • bluto says:

          That sounds very similar to US gun straw purchases, which appear to involve a number of very naive people with a criminal acquaintance who have no idea the implications of their action (legal or ethical) and make very sympathetic defendants.

          • erenold says:

            Yep. I imagine syndicates all over the world are more or less the same – human scum.

            My concern is, however, that the Singapore Government allows – and allows only – for the death of those they catch smuggling drugs. (One hell of a ‘dead man’s switch’.) This means the judge literally can’t take into account your sob story, your ill children and gambling-debt husband. Any mitigating factors are literally irrelevant – to my knowledge, that’s not a factor in American gun smuggling. You must die. That’s it.

            (Just for clarity – mitigating factors =/= factors negating an element of the crime. So gambling-debt boyfriend is no go, but something that negated mens rea, like mental incapacity, still applies, I believe.)

            I’m pretty conservative on crime and punishment despite being overall left-leaning. But even I find the Singaporean approach to be… tough to swallow. That’s not to say it’s bad policy or morally objectionable. That’s not even to say I disagree with it, even. It’s just… difficult to accept. I’m not sure I can advocate that America follow this approach, as the OP suggests.

          • Jeff H says:

            According to the link you provided, even diminished mental capacity only reduces it to life imprisonment, and even cooperating with the government to substantively reduce overall drug trafficking in Singapore still only reduces it to life imprisonment plus caning.

            (If I’m reading section 33B right, and with legal statutes there quite often seems to be some shade of meaning or thing that’s non-obviously a term of art that makes things mean something very different from what they appear to say.)

          • erenold says:

            Jeff –

            Yes, you are very sharp. That is correct.

            Though, and not in any way meant to controvert your comment, I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here. There’s two separate mental-capacity standards at play – mental capacity so diminished as to “substantially impair his mental responsibility for his acts and omissions“. That word ‘substantially’ is important. It indicates that his mental responsibility is not fully negatived. Here, as you rightly point out s 33B(3)(b) Misuse of Drugs Act would apply so as reduce the sentence of death to that of life imprisonment. (Just by the by, to the Singaporeans “life means life” rather than 14-20 years as it does in the West.)

            What I was referring to was mental capacity so completely diminished as to negate mens rea entirely, not merely mitigate it. The uncontroversial example would be – though there are various difficulties involved in reading Penal Code provisions into standalone criminal Acts like the MDA – the otherwise-criminal act of a child below 7 years of age. Here, there is no reference to the MDA at all because there is no offence. The mens rea is not formed at all and there is nothing for any statute to attach to. It can be imagined someone so catastrophically mentally inhibited that the same reasoning would apply.

            Incidentally, re: the prison-snitch provision, s 33B(2)(b), there’s a lot of controversy over that right now. Their Narcotics Bureau appear to have taken the position – which I think is not entirely unjustified – that in order to qualify for it, he must provide ‘substantive assistance’ amounting to the arrest of one other drug trafficker. If you don’t know enough to implicate someone else – or you do know enough, but for circumstances out of your control that person(s) absconds, gets away, flees etc. – then you’re SOL, go directly to noose, do not pass go do not collect $200. Is this unfair? That’s way above my pay grade, but at least you can see why this might be very controversial.

            I have one last point to add to an already verbose comment. Let me quote again the relevant part of s 33B MDA that we’re discussing, for anyone following this:

            33B.—(1) Where a person commits or attempts to commit an offence … and he is convicted thereof, the court —

            (b)
            shall, if the person satisfies the requirements of subsection (3), instead of imposing the death penalty, sentence the person to imprisonment for life.

            (3) The requirements referred to in subsection (1)(b) are that the person convicted proves, on a balance of probabilities, that —
            (a)
            his involvement in the offence under section 5(1) or 7 was restricted …
            and (b)
            he was suffering from such abnormality of mind…

            Anyone notice anything interesting?

            Here it is again:

            The requirements referred to in subsection (1)(b) are that the person convicted proves, on a balance of probabilities,

            That’s right. Contrary to the common law position all across the Anglosphere that it is for the State to prove every aspect of their case beyond a reasonable doubt against the Accused, the MDA requires you to prove your mental retardation as a defence, not vice versa.

            On one level, this might seem trivial. Indeed it is strictly speaking, otiose since the Singaporeans departed a long time ago from that common law position in Woolmington that it is for the Prosecution to disprove defences and not for the defence to prove them, and the MDA is apparently doing no more than restating that fact. But it is an interesting example, yet again, of exactly how many ways the Prosecution has already stacked its deck in favour of itself long before the defendant in a drugs trial even steps foot in the Singaporean courtroom.

          • brad says:

            It’s not a settled question in the US that the prosecution has the burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an affirmative defense doesn’t apply once it has been put into play by the defense.

            That is certainly the majority position for most affirmative defenses (especially since In re Winship in 1970, however Patterson v. New York (1977) stands for the proposition that it is constitutional for a state to put the burden of proving an affirmative defense on the defendant. I believe that is the traditional common law rule as well (even if it has been abandoned in most of the Anglosphere).

          • erenold says:

            I’m always fascinated by the convergent evolution between the Singaporean and American legal systems, both of which show the clear influence of the “crime control” mentality towards law and order. This is in opposition to the approach of our common ancestor, the Brits, and the perceived effeteness of their criminal law. (Not endorsing or criticizing – just observing.)

            I believe also that many American states take the “life means life” (i.e. life imprisonment means imprisonment to the end of one’s natural life) approach?

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Thanks erenold, that was really interesting reading. Do you write elsewhere?

          • erenold says:

            I’ve been published here, if that counts, but obviously I imagine that’s not going to be of any interest outside professional circles.

            But thank you for your very kind words, Homo Iracundus! : – )

        • Wasn’t it discovered at one point that baggage handlers had been putting drugs in people’s bags? Or was that an urban myth?

          • erenold says:

            Alleged, never proven (though the only case I remember where this was formally an actual allegation made by the defence was in Indonesia). Consider it implausible – if I had 1) dominion over rings of bent handlers in both the sending and receiving countries, 2) the level of access to secured areas that would imply and 3) intent and possession of large quantities of drugs to traffick, I imagine putting it into randomly selected passengers’ bags would be a suboptimal method.

            By contrast, I think it’s a mental meme almost perfectly engineered to go viral. It pushes all the right buttons. And, of course, defence has an incentive to push this kind of utterly unverifiable case theory, and human rights campaigners find it a much easier sell than defending actual drug traffickers, who are rarely very attractive characters.

            An allegation that has been made and which I consider completely believable, however, is that the syndicates will recruit a sucker to traffick a relatively small quantity of drugs, then deliberately allow the authorities to get wind of this, or even tip the recipient country off themselves. In the meantime, of course, the real mule carrying the real package gets through amidst the chaos caused by the first poor sap. Who then hangs.

          • It seems to me that you’d only need a few criminals at each end to implement, and I don’t see any obviously superior method. Can you expand on that?

          • erenold says:

            My only knowledge of airport logistics comes as an end user, so I hope that anyone with superior knowledge, including yourself, can correct me if I am spewing egregious bullshit.

            I don’t think it’s ‘a few criminals’. At the very least, how would you guarantee that that the receiving handlers are assigned to this particular plane? You must reliably control handler assignment on both ends. And surely everyone, or almost everyone, on that crew must be in on it. Otherwise, wouldn’t his mates think it’s odd if he consistently makes a beeline for certain bags from certain flights? And then need to fiddle inconspicuously with it for a while?

            And don’t they work at a fairly rapid clip? Would there really be time for this process to be reliably done?

            The biggest tell for me is this – no one has ever reported mysteriously finding drugs after their flight. (Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t come forward with such a find if I were Singaporean.) This system, even if was well-organized, would fail a few times. It must – or airports wouldn’t keep losing people’s luggage, either.

            Also, the world isn’t short on suckers, and cheap ones at that. It seems easier – and cheaper – to me to get someone to do something infinitely foolish for a couple thousand bucks than organize such a ring. That applies even if you write off another ten thousand dollars worth of product, as well.

            Superior methods – perhaps put it in freight, or in crew luggage?

          • Aapje says:

            @erenold

            People do find drugs in their baggage:

            http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/perth-man-claims-he-found-drugs-in-his-bag-after-returning-from-bali-20150903-gje82l.html

            As for baggage handlers, these are low paid employees who can greatly supplement their pay like this. Such circumstances have been shown in the past to be very conductive to collective criminality*, where you have a few core criminals, a bunch of hangers-on and a bully culture where dissenters get ‘corrected.’

            The assignment issue can apparently be circumvented by putting drugs in hand luggage:

            http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/19/us/baggage-handlers-arrested/index.html

            * There has been a lot of information coming out recently about how the Dutch police have a culture of stealing from criminals. It’s a very good crime, because criminals benefit from having less evidence (drugs, drug money) against them, so no criminal is going to demand his things back.

          • Nornagest says:

            There’s an old scam in some places where baggage handlers place bullets in incoming luggage, then airport police use that to extort a bribe from its owners.

          • erenold says:

            @Aapje
            Yikes!

            I was thinking specifically of Singapore, but since Indonesia executes people at roughly the same clip as Singapore does* I suppose that is troubling as well.

            *[citation needed… but certainly both countries seem to attract about equal amounts of controversy for it, anyway]

    • Wrong Species says:

      I agree that the whole idea that banning drugs “doesn’t work” is utterly wrong.* However, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should be so harsh. We could dramatically cut down on speeding tickets by making it subject to the death penalty but that is A) not feasible and B) morally repugnant. So when it comes to drugs there’s a few arguments we could make. There’s the libertarian argument that people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they are not directly hurting anyone else. Many people claim this is what they believe but suddenly change their mind when they realize the ramifications of that policy. But there is also an empirical claim that the “nice” policies cause less societal damage in the long run. If that’s true, then we should obviously pick that option. If not, then we have a thorny ethical dilemma involving individual freedom versus societal well being. Personally, I understand the problem with drugs but I don’t like the idea of jailing people for their consumption habits. Harsher punishments seem somewhat cruel and while they would probably cut use to some extent, the question is how much and at what cost?

      *Yes, the government will probably not be able to reduce drug use to zero but it doesn’t have to in order to be considered effective.

      • Bugmaster says:

        We could dramatically cut down on speeding tickets by making it subject to the death penalty but that is A) not feasible and B) morally repugnant.

        I could buy (A) if you phrased it as “incredibly expensive” instead of “not feasible”; but I don’t buy (B). I mean, yes, I too find the notion of executing people for speeding to be horrific. But, if you want to reject a notion, it’s not enough to just say, “this idea squicks me out”, you need to provide some evidence and a chain of reasoning.

        Let’s say that N people (on average) die in traffic fatalities each year. If you could save some fraction N*S (0 < S < 1) of those people by killing speeders, how many speeders (as a factor of N and S) are you willing to kill ? If your answer is "zero", then you must have some justification of condemning those N people to death, right ?

        • Vitor says:

          I agree that speeding is a bad example. The status quo is that people who handle heavy machinery (cars) capable of injuring and killing those around them with gross negligence receive extremely small punishments for it. This is morally repugnant in its own way.

          However, Wrong Species made a broader point which still stands.

        • Wrong Species says:

          “If your answer is “zero”, then you must have some justification of condemning those N people to death, right ?”

          The difference between killing and letting die seems pretty important here. I’m not a consistent utilitarian so the calculations of “does policy X have a higher utility function than Y” doesn’t figure as prominently in my ethics. But I’m not a consistent deontologist either so the ends still do matter to me. If speeding was such a problem that it alone killed a vast number of people and introducing the death penalty would comparatively kill a tiny number of people then I might consider it. But if that policy put 100 people to death while saving 101 lives every year I wouldn’t consider that worth it.

          From your point of view, I understand that’s an underwhelming answer. I could try to make the argument from the utilitarian perspective but that would be disingenuous since I wouldn’t necessarily believe it. And of course, trying to do those calculations would take much more time than I’m willing to put for a hypothetical scenario that is not politically possible at this time. The problem with your statement is that you’re automatically assuming utilitarianism is right and saying I need to explain myself from that perspective. But it hasn’t been proven right and neither has my admittedly ad hoc system. How to resolve those differences is something much more ambitious than the purpose of my original point. In the mean time, if you replace “morally repugnant” with “doesn’t pass a cost-benefit test” then I’m sure you would agree with me even if I haven’t explicitly worked out the costs and benefits.

          • Bugmaster says:

            If speeding was such a problem that it alone killed a vast number of people and introducing the death penalty would comparatively kill a tiny number of people then I might consider it. But if that policy put 100 people to death while saving 101 lives every year I wouldn’t consider that worth it. From your point of view, I understand that’s an underwhelming answer.

            Actually, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable answer, other than for the “vast number of people” part, because you never quantified it. However, if we assume that the current number of people that die in traffic accidents (~35,000 / year) is “vast”, then your answer boils down to, “I would consider killing a small number of people in order to save a much larger number”. All that remains is to hammer out what “small” and “large” means. Would you kill one person to save 34,999 ? 10 people ? 100 people ?

            You don’t have to answer the question; I’m just using it to present my line of reasoning. Anyway, once you (hypothetically) settle on an acceptable upper margin, we can estimate whether it’s achievable (e.g. killing just one person probably won’t save 34K people, so if one person is your upper bound, then the policy doesn’t work).

          • Fahundo says:

            Something to keep in mind while you’re crunching the numbers. A quick google search brings up multiple sources which claim that speeding accounts for less than 25% of all automobile accident deaths.

            The National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey has this to say:

            https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811059

            About 41 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were recognition errors that include inattention,
            internal and external distractions, inadequate surveillance, etc. Of these, the most frequently
            occurring critical reason was inadequate surveillance that refers to a situation in which a driver failed
            to look, or looked but did not see, when it was essential to safely complete a vehicle maneuver. This
            critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 20 percent of crashes. Internal distraction as a critical
            reason was assigned to drivers in about 11 percent of the crashes.
            About 34 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were decision errors that included too fast for
            conditions (8.4%), too fast for curve (4.9%), false assumption of others’ actions (4.5%), illegal
            maneuver (3.8%), and misjudgment of gap or others’ speed (3.2%). In about 10 percent of the
            crashes, the critical reason was a performance error, such as overcompensation (4.9%), poor
            directional control (4.7%), etc.

            So, no matter how hard you crack down on your kill-all-speeders regime, you’re not going to reduce automobile deaths to zero unless you’re willing to kill people who text while driving, people who are are unskilled drivers, and people who are just plain inattentive.

          • Lumifer says:

            In the future if the superAI detects that you are about to crash and kill yourself, it will swoop in and kill you first so that you don’t spoil the nice safe driving statistics : -/

          • Wrong Species says:

            Even if I could accept the idea that the death penalty would reduce all those accidents to zero, that would still make me uncomfortable in Thought Experiment Land, where all variables are known. In the real world, however, that is not a certainty. This is why the distinction between kill/let die is so important. When we murder someone, we know that we directly caused their death. But when we approve some course of action to avert deaths, we still aren’t sure that it was our actions that saved their lives or whether it would have happened anyway, and who knows what the unintended consequences might be. We can use our own knowledge to try and build more accurate models to understand the causes but we can’t be 100% certain. This is why it’s better to be conservative when we suggest such appalling things. It’s probably why we have those intuitions as well.

    • drethelin says:

      Singapore is a tiny island nation. The United States has some of the longest unguarded land and sea borders in the world. We can’t even reliably keep PEOPLE from coming over the borders, and people are a lot harder to hide than drugs. Even if we ignore moral or ideological questions, matters of practicality make attempting to enforce a nationwide prohibition absurd. As it stands we already spend around 2 billion dollars on the DEA and mostly just incentivize huge amounts of inner-city violence as well as violence in South America by keeping the price of drugs insanely high.

      • Walter says:

        Old joke:

        How do you smuggle a dirty bomb into US?

        Pack it in ten tons of heroine.

        More relevantly:

        We can’t keep cell phones out of PRISONS.

    • Psycicle says:

      Because different drugs vary MASSIVELY in the harm they cause to the user and others, and one could argue that for the (relatively) more benign substances, the “personal liberty”, “disproportionate retribution”, and “no wait this actually does have net beneficial effects” arguments win out.

      Also, crimes are deterred more by certainty of punishment than intensity of punishment. So if you want to deter something, increase the number of cops trying to hunt it down, and structure prisons in a way that minimizes recidivism. (thus, rehabilitation)

      Also, prisons are pretty awful places to be in, so there’s a question of “is the marginal decrease in illegal drug use counterbalanced by the marginal increase in the prison population?” (and this consideration starts tilting more heavily in favor of enforcement as prisons become less terrible places)

      That’s basically where they get it from. Lots of softer drugs do not deserve harsh prison sentences, rehabilitation (if it works) is a good way to make sure people don’t go back to crime, and the shittier your prison is, the fewer drugs are bad enough to justify such crackdowns from a utilitarian standpoint.

      I’m guessing that the relevant life-ruining drugs were one of: crack, heroin (or other opioids), cocaine, meth, alcohol, or benzos like Xanax.

      Please do not go after us modafinil, MDMA, marijuana, and mescaline users with Singapore-caliber drug laws.

      • Walter says:

        Stop breaking the law!

      • Agronomous says:

        Maybe another example of the phenomenon I’m asking about is drugs? The problem has to be the crack/heroin/meth, because otherwise it would be…. what?

        (“Demon rum” from a hundred years ago actually gave alcohol agency.)

        It’s pretty clear to me that the reason I’m not a heroin addict is that I’ve never taken heroin; the reason I’ve never taken heroin is largely because I’ve never been drunk around people taking heroin.

        On the other hand, the reason I’m not an alcoholic is because none of my ancestors were. Alcohol can be nice, sometimes, but it doesn’t do things to my dopamine receptors that it does to other people’s, or that other substances do.

        Demon addiction genes?

        • Psycicle says:

          “There’s this phenomenon, whereby people insist that X is Y; in the background, probably outside their awareness, this is because if X isn’t Y, then it has to be Z, which is completely intolerable.”

          “addiction/harm is caused by drugs, and if it’s not, it’s [intolerable explanation] caused by demon addiction genes.”

          Eeeh, I’d personally broaden it to demon addiction genes+irresponsible personality traits+drugs+bad social group.

          Different drugs have different levels of addictiveness and harm (to self or others), that’s pretty indisputable, and one component.

          Some people are especially susceptible to addiction (in general) (maybe some dopamine system thing??), and others are especially susceptible to addiction to a particular class of substances and not others. (naturally anxious people get a whole lot more out of benzodiazapenes than the rest of people and I suspect they’d be overrepresented in the benzo addict population).

          If you are in certain social groups, you’ll run into a lot more opportunities to do drugs. (cough cough EDM festivals)

          And finally, being willing to break the law and associate with sketchy people doesn’t exactly select for the most responsible fraction of the population. There are a whole lot of drugs that can be used safely, but they require a good deal more respect/not being a dumbass than alcohol (which is quite forgiving by drug standards). Given the rates of binge drinking, there is a pretty hefty chunk of the population that (since they can’t even use ALCOHOL safely) is probably going to seriously harm their own health by being a moron about drug usage. (The UK seems to be especially bad in this regard)

          Think of it as trying to find a cause of people getting killed by monsters. It’s some combination of “the monster was really dangerous” (intrinsic addiction and health risk), “wandering around in places with a bunch of monsters” (poor social group), “being underleveled” (having high addiction risk), and “people who pick a bunch of monster fights probably aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed” (people who do drugs are socially selected for poor impulse control and low levels of caution).

          • Corey says:

            I’d think the “nicest” way to deal with the Drug Problem would be to invent a cure for addiction. The downside being that might be impossible.

            A softer form of this might be happening, e.g. suboxone as Scott has mentioned. There is still some resistance to such treatments for what seem to my cynical mind to be neo-Puritan reasons: “it’s just replacing one drug with another”. But there’s a cynical counterforce: white people starting to OD on heroin.

    • sards says:

      Can someone explain to me why America should confront this problem like Portugal, or the Netherlands, and not like Singapore?

      1. Personal freedom. This includes the freedom to ruin your own life, if you so choose. Granted, this is a controversial moral value.
      2. The cure is worse than the disease. If someone uses drugs, he might (with a low probability) ruin his life. But if you send him to prison for using drugs, you ruin his life with 100% probability. Not to mention the enormous enforcement costs, the insane violence associated with the black market, etc.
      3. As with seemingly every proponent of anti-drug laws, you are ignoring the positive effects of drugs. It is true that a small percentage of drug users ruin their lives. But what about all the other drug users, the vast majority, for whom drugs make their lives better?

      • Ruprect says:

        No man is an island.

        If my father ruins his life with drugs, he probably also ruins mine, the life of my siblings, of my mother, his parents, his neighbours…

        I don’t see why prison should have to ruin your life. The problem with prison, as it stands, is a lack of official control within the prison system that makes prison unbearable for all but the most wicked.
        Prison should be disciplined and harsh, austere, not chaotic and cruel.

        Regarding the positive effects of drug use – I can only go from my own experience here. For many years I drank alcohol in social situations, but when I look back on it, I really have to question whether it had any positive benefit at all. My alcohol consumption (at that time) was just a response to peer pressure – and I think that most of our activities are of that nature, a short term spasm rather than a well thought out action, especially for young people.

        It’s like reading the Daily Mail online. I probably spend about 45 minutes each day reading that rag. I’m pretty sure my life wouldn’t be worse if I didn’t do it – and if my reading it were not harmless, (if a significant proportion of people reading it were to completely lose their ability to function in normal society) it would make sense to ban it.

        Edit: Hmmmm… maybe we should ban “drug-like” forms of entertainment, like the news?

        • tcd says:

          “No man is an island”

          Agreed, but how would you handle those who value their access to “extreme sports”, day trading, eating garbage for food, etc? (Really anything that could put you in the position of burdening your family/friends, it is pretty easy to ruin your own life.)

          • Ruprect says:

            I wouldn’t have a problem with restricting day-trading, or other forms of gambling. Even if you’re mildly successful, it doesn’t seem like a very satisfying way to earn your crust.
            But, yeah, I suppose there will always be people who take normal activities and do them in such a way as to damage themselves.
            Maybe it’s a matter of scale? They banned dueling when it became a social problem.

        • The Nybbler says:

          1) The “no man is an island” argument is too powerful; it is sufficient to justify any intervention for a person’s own good. I thus find it rather suspect.

          2) Prison does ruin your life. Even if they weren’t chaotic and cruel, just being convicted of a felony ruins your life. Actually being in prison, disconnected from outer society for a length of time, is even worse. Changing this is much bigger than changes to drug laws (to either make them harsher or more lenient)

          3) I don’t think the utility I get from alcohol is particularly high, but it is certainly positive. Counting it as zero because you could live without it is putting your thumb on the scale (this is one of the problems with utilitarianism; people like to introduce zeros and infinities to get the results they want).

          • Ruprect says:

            I don’t think it justifies any action, it is just something that must be taken into consideration. We all have some right to a private life, but also we must consider the broader society.

            My inclination is to view prison as a good thing – I think you need punishments and I think it’s the least cruel punishment available. Really, prison should only be for the most incorrigible criminals – because only incorrigible criminals would be prepared to endure a harsh prison regime in an otherwise fair society. Obviously, going to prison will have an impact on your life, but surely there is always some hope of redemption, if you decide to make a change?

            I would say that my alcohol consumption now is largely positive – but for large parts of my life it wasn’t. (And who knows, maybe it isn’t even positive now.)

            I mean, do Frenchmen drink red wine rather than vodka, because it has a higher utility? If so, only because utility derived from any action is almost entirely determined by the social environment you find yourself in. There could be a case where a wholesale change in social mores could be of benefit. Law is one way of imposing (or maintaining) those mores.

            As such, determining the social circumstance, the culture, becomes the most important aspect of utilitarianism.

          • Nicholas says:

            Obviously, going to prison will have an impact on your life, but surely there is always some hope of redemption, if you decide to make a change?

            Are you not familiar with many ex-prison inhabitants? The social stigma against having been to prison in the Midwest at least is high enough that “This company is in [industry] and hires convicts” is enough pieces of data to determine the company’s exact name. I don’t think it is even possible to work in the McDonalds down the street from my house if you have been to prison in the last three years, unless you have a personal connection to one of the two managers.

        • sards says:

          No man is an island.

          If my father ruins his life with drugs, he probably also ruins mine, the life of my siblings, of my mother, his parents, his neighbours…

          Let’s examine this. If your father ruins his life with drugs, how exactly does that ruin the lives of you and your siblings? Here are some possibilities:

          1. He is so out of his mind on drugs that he physically abuses you.
          2. He loses his job and/or spends too much money on drugs, and therefore is unable to provide for you financially.
          3. He is very unpleasant to be around.
          4. You become extremely upset that your dad is a drug addict.

          1) and 2) are already illegal, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should legalize those behaviors.

          As for 3), being unpleasant to be around is no crime in any other context; why should it be now?

          Finally, we come to the heart of the matter: let’s assume your dad ruins his life with drugs, but doesn’t directly harm you in any way. You are understandably sad and upset that your dad’s life is ruined. But it seems pretty crazy to argue that he should be threatened with prison (or worse, in Singapore’s case) to prevent you from being sad that he didn’t chose to live his life the way that you would have preferred.

          • Jiro says:

            But it seems pretty crazy to argue that he should be threatened with prison (or worse, in Singapore’s case) to prevent you from being sad that he didn’t chose to live his life the way that you would have preferred.

            Parents have responsibility with respect to their children. Punishing the parent for failing to live his life in a way that the child would find preferable is, for certain values of “preferable”, something we routinely do, and therefore something you can’t object to as a matter of principle without rejecting many things which we routinely do.

            “If you beat your child on a whim, we punish you” is not really that different from “if you do something that causes great emotional distress to your child, on a whim, we punish you”.

            And the inability to deal with children is a big flaw in many versions of libertarianism. Paternalism is correct when dealing with children.

          • Broggly says:

            Manslaughter is already illegal, but we still have traffic safety laws, enforced with the threat of prison.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      The question should be: how many people’s lives would be ruined by [combined effects of drug use and efforts to enforce prohibition] versus [drug use and other harms in a regime optimised for minimising total harms, that doesn’t have a presumption of prohibition].

      Given that the first category includes additional direct drug harms per instance of use as a result of the absence of any regulatory control over accurate dosage information, impurities or harm reduction information on the packaging, plus other harms from, eg, drug paraphernalia bans that incentivise needle sharing thus helping spread HIV, hepatitis etc, plus the flood of money going to terrorist organisations, plus the increase in violence when distributors do not have access to the court system to resolve disputes, and, already being criminals, have less disincentive to violence anyway, plus the effect of prohibition incentivising more easily smuggled, thus more concentrated and often more dangerous forms of any particular drug (eg moonshine over beer, heroin over opium), plus the derailing of people’s lives that prison, or even arrest, can have, whereas the other side of the scale pretty much only has the direct harms from an increase in users despite each instance of use being less risky, it is at least plausible that both the current regime and a hypothetical Singapore-level draconian regime causes much more harm than a well-calibrated harm reductionist regime.

      Of course, the balance will work out differently for different substances, but I’d be willing to conjecture that the strongest case for prohibition would apply to ones that both can really fuck you up, and that almost no one actually wants to take (at least if better options are available). Things like datura or PCP, say.

      And of course, I take my usual opportunity to recommend this book As an attempt to describe what a regime optimised for harm reduction might look like.

      Of course, in this particular case, I understand that Singapore’s alcohol laws are somewhat More restrictive than a lot of the west, but private possession by adults is still perfectly legal. Given what we know about the relative risks of alcohol and cannabis, we can be pretty confident that any regime that permits adult possession of the former, but prescribes a mandatory death penalty for the latter, is some combination of a) sitting on some seriously explosive evidence about those relative risks that they’re not sharing with the rest of us, b) tragically misinformed about those relative risks, or c) optimising its drug policy towards something almost perfectly orthogonal to the aim of preventing its citizens from ruining their lives.

    • Enkidum says:

      It’s absolutely true that a country can essentially reduce drug use to 0, even starting from a ridiculously high level of use. China is the perfect example of this, after the Communists took over they really, genuinely did eliminate opium, which a significant fraction of the population had been addicted to. However some think there were one or two negative factors associated with their rule. (Note that at some time since the opening of China in the 80’s, illegal drug use came back, although it is still very rare by Western standards, and alcohol/tobacco consumption are probably much higher than in the West.)

      So yes, it is perfectly possible to get rid of drugs. And other forms of free choice. The question is when you think this is justified.

    • Jill says:

      Folks seem to be assuming that this is a binary situation: you either let people take drugs and have all the individual, family, and community ruin that it causes. Or else you lock people up or execute them for addiction. How about addiction treatment services? And/or community services for families and children to help people to cope with their life problems without resorting to drugs? Is that too liberal a solution to propose, because it would require more tax dollars than executing drug addicts would?

      For society, addiction is a problem. For the individual, addiction, at least initially, seems like a solution. If kids were helped to find other solutions than drugs, that could change a lot.

      • gbdub says:

        The problem is that, unless you lock somebody up (or threaten them with something equally bad), addiction treatment, community services, etc. all require a significant investment of desire and effort on the part of the addict. Basically, you need to make “being a responsible adult” more attractive than heroin – but the people who believe that never become addicts in the first place.

        It’s not “too liberal” a solution. We already do spend a lot of money on such programs. Their (sustainable) success rate isn’t all that good (not that locking them up is better).

        Hell, look at how often celebrities, with effectively infinite resources and access to ways to cope without resorting to drugs, bounce in and out of rehab. What makes you think iy would be easier for the average inner-city crackhead or backwoods meth junkie?

          • gbdub says:

            It’s definitely an interesting article, thank you. A couple things stood out to me:
            1) I wish they’d delved into the age issue a bit more (they mention that basically everyone in treatment programs are over 40). It seems like much of the success of the Netherlands is that heroin use just isn’t as popular as it used to be. They aren’t necessarily curing that many addicts, but new ones aren’t being created. Would be interesting to see why that happened – it can’t be the clinic, since the clinic only treats long-term addicts.

            2) The program definitely seems to be an improvement over prison from a harm reduction standpoint. That said you’ve still got the issue that most of these guys are still on the “addict for life” path – the success story basically decided on his own that he was bored of going to the clinic and quit heroin (but that’s more or less how people quit everywhere).

            Maybe it’s just a sad reality that X number of people won’t be motivated to do much, so keeping them safely high is the least bad option?

    • Fahundo says:

      Can someone explain to me why America should confront this problem like Portugal, or the Netherlands, and not like Singapore?

      Would you rather live in Singapore, or the Netherlands?

      • Sandy says:

        As far as I know, there isn’t an appreciable difference in education, amenities or quality of life. Personally, it might make more sense for me to pick Singapore over the Netherlands because most people in Singapore can speak English. I don’t know if that’s true for the Netherlands.

        • Aapje says:

          Foreigners have a hard time learning Dutch because Dutch people love speaking English. I’m working with an English guy who has lived in Amsterdam for some years now and apparently can’t speak a word of Dutch.

          I’d say that The Netherlands is the most Anglo-centric country in the EU (our media covers the primaries in detail, so it can feel like we’re the 51st state), aside from the English-speaking countries.

        • Nornagest says:

          A(n American, monolingual) friend of mine moved to Amsterdam and started posting half her Facebook messages in Dutch within a year or so, but I don’t know how common that is. Or even really if it’s competent Dutch; I don’t speak that language.

        • Creutzer says:

          As far as I can tell, the experience (of finding it difficult to learn Dutch because everyone speaks English) is pretty common. I’ve heard it both from and about numerous foreigners who moved to the Netherlands.

        • Anonymous says:

          A newspaper article on Brexit claimed 90% of Dutch people in Amsterdam speak English.

          I’d certainly pick Amsterdam over Singapore.

        • Aapje says:

          @Nornagest

          I’ve heard that the trick is to prevent getting stuck in that semi-comfortable zone. So do a course right away and then force yourself to speak Dutch. Even if people talk to you in English, speak back in Dutch and ask them to talk in Dutch.

  97. Agronomous says:

    I need some help developing an idea.

    There’s this phenomenon, whereby people insist that X is Y; in the background, probably outside their awareness, this is because if X isn’t Y, then it has to be Z, which is completely intolerable.

    My example (which you can disagree with, while still recognizing the phenomenon) is Gun Violence. A very large part of the U.S. terms and conceptualizes the violence in inner cities as Gun Violence, because if it weren’t the guns causing the violence against young black men, it would be young black men causing it, and that idea is completely intolerable for various reasons. (It supports invidious stereotypes, it makes the problem harder and more complicated to deal with, etc.)

    What I need are examples with the opposite political tilt, partly so I can explain it to left-leaning people, but mostly because this seems like the kind of phenomenon where I’m almost certain not to notice when I’m doing it.

    So what are things where conservative, Republican, or right-wing positions seem to be motivated (at least for some people who hold them) by the intolerable nature of an otherwise-obvious alternative explanation?

    I suppose I have one further question: Are there examples that don’t have a political valence (maybe involving nutrition)? If so, why can’t I spot them?

    • 1Step says:

      Perhaps a conservative example would be the ability to boot-strap to success. conservatives have to believe that those who don’t succeed, do not succeed because they are lazy or untalented. For to believe otherwise would undermine their sense of fairness and general idea about what America is.

    • Alejandro says:

      The obvious example is global warming. It is plausible that the popularity among right-wingers of the idea that global warming is a hoax/conspiracy is at least partly because, if it wasn’t, then it would have to be addressed through government actions (taxes and/or regulations) that cannot be accepted under Republican ideology.

      (I’m not saying there are no reasonably defensible positions between “It’s a hoax” and “Accept Obama’s proposals” – just that the hoax position is the simplest to take if one wants to avoid any risk of rhetorical concessions, and will be memetically favored if political expediancy is the only constraint.)

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        Good example. The right has pretty much no power to re-frame the discussion about dealing with climate change, and so their only options are “completely deny” and “let the left steamroll us and do the Planned Economy thing again”.

      • Jiro says:

        In the real world, “if what the other party says is true, it has to be addressed by actions convenient to the other party’s agenda” is not just a case of people refusing to tolerate something that helps the other party. In the real world, it’s usually a sign of motivated reasoning on the part of the other party. And being skeptical of something likely to be motivated reasoning is rational, even if it sometimes leads to being skeptical about something that is correct after all.

        • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

          True, but “it’s all a hoax” is a good deal more conclusory than healthy skepticism requires.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          Good point.

          OTOH, there are also people for whom things happened the other way–the whole reason they joined the party in the first place was because they *already* believed $thing-that-has-to-be-addressed-by-that-party’s-methods was true.

      • Maware says:

        There’s a bit more, mostly in that conservatives are VERY critical of rule by intellectual/scientist. Global warming is probably the first real issue where scientists more or less expect to rule-i.e. to have their solutions and programs accepted based solely on their expertise. We don’t usually concede that much power to shape policy to them, and the reflexive anti-intellectualism and contrariness might also be a resistance to an elite more or less setting policy (or wanting to)

        • James Picone says:

          CFCs. Acid rain. Smoking. Lead in petrol.

          • Anon says:

            I’m not going to say scientists haven’t helped shape policy before, but the difference between those four examples and global warming/climate change/the End Times for liberals/whatever they’re calling it these days is that the evidence in the climate change debate is far less conclusive and powerful than in the previous cases. Most global warming conclusions are drawn from random computer models pulled straight out of some scientist’s ass. Considering also that most of the temperature increases have leveled off in recent years, which exactly 0 global warming models predicted, it appears most of those models were shit (pun completely intended).

          • Winfried says:

            I worked as a consultant doing environmental air permitting.

            None of the things you listed are on the same scale as claiming to regulate/reduce eCO2.

            I can put a scrubber on a stack, I can change refrigerants, I can tweak an engine for different fuels, but the only way to substantially reduce eCO2 is to have fewer people or to reduce the standard of living.

            I’ll believe people are serious about that when they stop growing the national debt.

          • James Picone says:

            @anon:
            Funny joke. Fairly simple underlying physics predicts ~3.7 W/m**2 forcing (~1c) from doubling CO2. That comes from MODTRAN and an understanding of atmospheric composition; it’s not in dispute by anybody serious.

            Then you need to figure out how the whole Earth system changes in response to getting warmer. Some of those changes lead to trapping additional heat, some to not trapping additional heat. For example, a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour, and water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, so we get more warming. Melting ice in the Arctic is an interesting one – on the one hand, dark ocean water doesn’t reflect as much heat as ice, so we retain more energy. On the other hand, the ice acted as insulation for the water under it, which now radiates more. There’s a lot of uncertainty over the scale of the various feedbacks, but the best estimate of a substantial fraction of scientists, based on paleoclimate and modelling (i.e. it’s not just modelling) is that you get ~1c to 3.5c more from the feedbacks from your original ~1c rise when you doubled CO2. So you double CO2, you get ~2c to 4.5c higher global average temperature – the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’

            Presumably you think that low end should be lower. You’re going to have to take it up with the entirety of climate science and ice ages. Temperature variation of ~8c to the depths of an ice age. Really hard to figure out any way for them to happen with an ECS of <2c.

            Also, what levelling off? And you realise that climate models aren’t supposed to predict the ups-and-downs on an annual basis, right? They’re not supposed to predict El Nino or year-to-year natural variability, that shit is chaotic. They’re supposed to predict the envelope that that stuff wiggles around in. There are absolutely some individual model runs that appear to slow down around now; all it takes is a particularly large ENSO + natural variability spike 20 years ago and then not having another one for a while.

            Also, of course, there was a huge hue and cry over CFC regulation back in the day. Chemical manufacturers said it was impossible to shift, people funded by chemical manufacturers and/or gullible dupes and/or irrepressible conspiracisers said that CFCs were too heavy to get into the upper atmosphere where the ozone is, and that sea spray produces more chlorine radicals than man, and that volcanic eruptions put more stratospheric chlorine out than humans ever could, that the ozone hole existed prior to human emissions of CFCs and it’s not a hole anyway, that we needs CFCs for asthma inhalers and we can’t harm asthmatics to protect the environment, that’s anti-human. As I’ve pointed out before there are even some familiar names – Steve Milloy shilled for CFCs before he shilled for fossil fuels, as did Frederick Seitz, Cato, Heartland, Fred Singer, etc..

            @Winfried:
            I don’t think it’s impossible to reduce CO2 emissions without substantially harming quality of life or the total human population. Nuclear power, CCS, geothermal, spreading a variety of solar/wind/tidal/etc. renewables around and building a better electrical grid + forms of storage, whatever. People are smart. Setting up a reasonable carbon tax will encourage that sort of thing to happen and/or we’ll have paid for the damage being done and can use the money raised for adaptation/remediation/getting-off-planet measures.

            Because the alternative is that we’re fucked; we’ve hit the great filter. A little rise isn’t going to cause the death of civilisation, but burning all the economically-extractable fossil fuels quite probably will. If our options are suicide through burning it all or suicide through leaving free money on the ground; we may as well try.

            As an aside, I think the CFC example is the really big one; we came close to really fucking it up hard. From Peter Crutzen’s Nobel acceptance lecture:

            Gradually, over a period of a century or so, stratospheric ozone should recover. However, it was a close call. Had Joe Farman and his colleagues from the
            British Antarctic Survey not persevered in making their measurements in the
            harsh Antarctic environment for all those years since the International
            Geophysical Year 1958/1959, the discovery of the ozone hole may have been
            substantially delayed and there may have been far less urgency to reach international agreement on the phasing out of CFC production. There might
            thus have been a substantial risk that an ozone hole could also have developed in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
            Furthermore, while the establishment of an instability in the O
            x-ClO x
            system requires chlorine activation by heterogeneous reactions on solid or
            supercooled liquid particles, this is not required for inorganic bromine,
            which is normally largely present in its activated forms due to gas phase photochemical reactions. This makes bromine on an atom to atom basis almost
            a hundred times more dangerous for ozone than chlorine (78, 52). This
            brings up the nightmarish thought that if the chemical industry had developed organobromine compounds instead of the CFCs – or alternatively, if chlorine chemistry would have run more like that of bromine – then without any
            preparedness, we would have been faced with a catastrophic ozone hole
            everywhere and at all seasons during the 1970s, probably before the atmospheric chemists had developed the necessary knowledge to identify the problem
            and the appropriate techniques for the necessary critical measurements.
            Noting that nobody had given any thought to the atmospheric consequences
            of the release of Cl or Br before 1974, I can only conclude that mankind has
            been extremely lucky, that Cl activation can only occur under very special circumstances. This shows that we should always be on our guard for the
            potential consequences of the release of new products into the environment.
            Continued surveillance of the composition of the stratosphere, therefore,
            remains a matter of high priority for many years ahead.

            The tl;dr version: If we made bromoflurocarbons and used them for refrigeration instead of chloroflurocarbons, we could have destroyed the ozone layer before we even had the tools to realise what we were doing.

          • Agronomous says:

            or alternatively, if chlorine chemistry would have run more like that of bromine

            This is a really, really weird counterfactual. Especially from a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist.

            Why not just say, “Alternatively, if carbon dioxide chemistry would have run more like that of carbon monoxide, we would have been in serious trouble”?

            The “if guys hadn’t started making Antarctic measurements in the ’50s” counterfactual makes total sense (as in, doesn’t violate any laws of nature); this one… Am I missing something?

            And while we’re near the topic, I can’t believe I never thought of this question before: why isn’t the fluorine in chloro-fluorocarbons more of a problem for the ozone layer? Does it just bind to things and not let go? (My understanding is that each chlorine atom takes part in an ozone-destroying reaction, then is freed up to do so another $bignum times before dropping out of the stratosphere (and that if people had realized that one chlorine atom could destroy multiple ozone molecules sooner, they would have worried a lot more sooner).)

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m a poor chemist, but I’m given to understand that fluoridation behaves a lot like oxidation. Since ozone is just three oxygens, I reckon it wouldn’t easily fluoridate.

          • James Picone says:

            @Agronomous:
            He means “if we used bromoflurocarbons for refrigeration” – you don’t need to change the chemical properties, you need to change the historical contingencies that led to chlorine chemistry being better researched than bromine chemistry.

            I’m not terribly au-fait on the actual chemistry; not sure why fluorine doesn’t react. We studied it in high school, but that was long enough ago that I don’t recall the specifics (other than ‘chlorine radicals catalyse the oxygen-ozone equilibrium reaction thing’)

          • Maware says:

            The level of change required for global warming is a lot more than those. It’s not the prediction of global warming, but the solutions that seem to be given really emphasize the “rule” part. Like people saying to have less kids, or to reduce car usage and redesign cities, etc.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      In “Leave a Line of Retreat”, Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions a rightist example (“God exists; if he didn’t, morality would be impossible, which is intolerable”) and an apolitical example (“souls exist; if they didn’t, death would be the end, which is intolerable”). He recommends imagining what you would do if the intolerable turned out to be true (“be moral anyway”/”sign up for cryonics”) as a way of making it tolerable.

    • Montfort says:

      This seems sort of like an implicit appeal to consequences? I like the axiom of choice example on that page, though it’s probably not good for general audiences. Or maybe a more general offshoot of the just-world fallacy? A relevant form here being: “Victims of x probably deserved it (because otherwise we live in a world where x happens to good people all the time)”

      I expect ethical vegetarians/vegans would find this to be demonstrative – “Some carnivores insist animals don’t have moral worth because if they did then the world would be terrible (factory farming, etc.)”

    • qwints says:

      Nutrition makes sense – fat people are fat because they don’t want to diet and exercise because the alternative is people not having control despite repeated studies showing surgery is the only intervention to reliably produce significant weight loss.

      • Exit Stage Right says:

        I’ll admit its really hard for me to accept those studies, probably for this reason. I feel like I earned the hell out of my weight loss

      • Tekhno says:

        You should just bask in your inherent genetically superior willpower instead. Surgery is the most effective option because the vast majority of people are absolute garbage at controlling themselves. Wireheading is waiting for them. They’re already pulling the cheeseburger lever over and over like a bunch of fat little rats.

        • Agronomous says:

          Yeah, see, the thing is, I have absolutely no willpower, no self-control: I keep meaning to exercise, to floss every day or at least every other day, write blog posts, stop looking for new comments at SSC, do laundry….

          Except in a couple narrow areas where I do. I’m amazingly conscientious about the technical parts of my work, and frequently work late even without being in a flow state because I just need to get this part right. (The paperwork parts, not so much.)

          The fact that I’m a stereotype at least means I’m not rare. So what’s going on? Is willpower fungible, or isn’t it?

          Today for lunch I had a couple of rolls. With nothing on them. (No time to go buy something more interesting to eat.) I don’t feel like that used up any willpower. So why do I eat big lunches other days, and top off with a large soda?

          A couple of times in my life I haven’t been hungry for days. One was when I was in the hospital and my digestive tract was blocked (so, way to go, appetite-regulating system: that was the right move). Another was when I was briefly taking amphetamines (which most ADD medications are). Again, not eating took zero willpower. (Not being a jerk on amphetamines took more willpower than I apparently had, though.)

          I seem to get addicted to strange things (streaming TV shows, SSC, books) and not to much more normal things (booze, amphetamines, stronger drugs—even though I’ve had morphine). So I have the willpower not to angle a doctor for some opiates, but not the willpower to close the computer when it’s 1:00 AM and Netflix is about to play the next episode of [redacted, because I have some pride]?

          • Viliam says:

            I believe that the whole concept of “willpower” is merely a mysterious answer that explains nothing. Precisely because people can be high-willpower about some things or in some circumstances, and low-willpower about other things or in other circumstances. In the end, “willpower” translates to “I have no idea what specifically happened, but this person now actually did what they originally planned to do”. Potentially useful as a label, but fails completely as an explanation.

            I can spend the whole year working hard on a project, and then I can spend a few years just talking about another project and never actually doing it for longer than a few minutes. Sometimes the idea of doing certain things feels very repulsive, sometimes I do stuff without even thinking about it. I believe the devil is in the details, and details are precisely what gets ignored when people focus on the mysterious “willpower”.

            My guess is that an important component of the “power to actually do stuff” is your belief that this action will actually lead to (emotionally meaningful) success. That’s what happens in flow, but it can also happen outside of flow, if you know that you had similar problems in the past and you usually solved them sooner or later. On the other hand, if some task doesn’t feel like something you could do successfully, it feels like a waste of time to spend any moment doing it.

            Food: have you tried Soylent? (Joylent, if European.)

            I seem to get addicted to strange things (streaming TV shows, SSC, books) and not to much more normal things (booze, amphetamines, stronger drugs—even though I’ve had morphine).

            Same here (sans morphine). I guess it’s because the movies, books, and SSC web debates are interesting, while the drugs are ultimately boring.

      • Davide says:

        >repeated studies showing surgery is the only intervention to reliably produce significant weight loss.

        Do they? Links?

        My understanding was that the consensus is
        that people who diet and exercise and then go back to their old lifestyle after reaching their weight goal will eventually gain that weight back (and more).

        But if you permanently change your lifestyle and keep track of what you eat, occasionally exercise….you can keep it off, and it gets *easier* with time as your hunger levels become naturally lower.
        Yes, there is a weight ‘set point’ your body will want to return to, but it can eventually be changed if you are persistent enough.

        I consider this unsurprising, though that might be because it fits my experience losing 60+ pounds in a long amount of time and mostly keeping them off.

        So it’s not that non-surgery longterm weight loss is impossible, it’s just that keeping the weight off after you lost it involves actual effort.

        • Corey says:

          We had some fat discussion an OT or two ago; basically a lot depends on the contours of a definition of success.

          IIRC meta-analyses of diets show that if you define success as loss of most excess weight and not gaining too much of it back (forget the threshold) for 5 years, all diets have a similar success rate, and it’s rather less than 10%.

          I consider the interesting question in weight loss to be why widely differing effort levels are required between individuals.

          • Davide says:

            Thanks, I should go and check that thread.

            I think it would be interesting to compare the % of people who were successful at keeping the weight off weight loss with other forms of long-term self-improvement that take significant willpower and focus (most of them?).

            However I fear that’s simply not possible however since weight & fitness can both be easily evaluated and lost once obtained, which is not necessarily the case for learned skills.

          • One example I’ve seen for something which takes extended effort is getting a PhD. There are people with Phd’s who haven’t managed to sustain weight loss.

          • Nornagest says:

            There are people with PhDs who don’t have karate black belts, too. Especially if the hypothesis of an executive function budget turns out to be true, long-term focus on one domain does not necessarily imply long-term focus on another.

          • @Nancy, that’s an extended effort in a literal sense (in that it usually takes several years) but not necessarily a particularly intense one. I’m not entirely sure how typical my experiences are, but my PhD required no unusual willpower to speak of. Certainly no more so than coming to work every day does now.

    • I don’t think the gun crime example is a good one. You can object to guns as making violence more effective without getting into what is “the” cause of violence.

      • gbdub says:

        You certainly can, but that’s different from calling it Gun Violence, wanting the CDC to study Gun Violence as a particular thing, etc. There is definitely a focus on guns qua guns and less of a focus on violence itself. How often do you here “X people are killed by guns every year”, as opposed to “X people are murdered every year”?

        In your objection, guns might certainly be a low hanging fruit to reduce murders, but a murder by gun would be no more or less tragic than any other murder. That’s… not really how the discourse seems to be playing out in the U.S.

        • It’s not how anything plays out anywhere. People focus on road safety rather than safet, on HIV rather than disease, and so on. If you want to avoid any hint of prejudice, valorisation, or question begging you are going to have to have one almighty campaign against Bad Stuff Not Otherwise Specified.

    • Nyx says:

      So, my example is feminists and rape. Feminists claim that rape is purely about power and misogyny and comes solely from a twisted desire to subjugate women. Part of the reason for this claim is that the alternative is that rape is about sex; since modern feminists tend to be sex-positive, this position is impossible for them to hold. And indeed if you argue that rape is partially about sex, you will be accused of being a rape apologist, of claiming that rape is “natural”, of victim blaming, and so on.

      I think a similar example for conservatives is Just-Worldism; assuming that because capitalism is just So Wonderful, that if anyone is rich or powerful, that necessarily implies they must have some great wisdom or capacity by which they earned it. The unthinkable alternative is that success is partially based on luck and therefore undeserved.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        The unthinkable alternative is that success is partially based on luck and therefore undeserved.

        Success being partially based on luck doesn’t imply success is undeserved.

        The major difference between the average successful person and the average unsuccessful person is that the successful person has failed to achieve lots of things, and the unsuccessful person has failed to achieve one thing.

        • Nyx says:

          Sure. I think that on average, success and failure in modern society do correlate to some form of intelligence; in fact, I don’t think it’s possible for a society to function otherwise. But there are successful people who lucked out on their first try and struck gold, and failures who have tried many times in different ways and never gotten anywhere.

      • Corey says:

        I always figured Just Worldism’s popularity came from religiosity – it’s an easy theodicy. To be fair you do see it in the nonreligious and I’ve no sense of whether it’s a bigger effect than the unthinkabiity of flaws in capitalism.

        (And now whenever I think of this I think of the Unsong character Ana, a theodicy scholar, picketing the World’s Fair with a sign saying “No it isn’t!”)

        • The original Mr. X says:

          IDK, I haven’t noticed religious people being notably more likely to say that rich people must deserve their success — if anything, they’re more likely to criticise the rich for not doing enough to help the poor, and quote things like “You cannot worship God and Mammon” and “It is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God”.

          • Two McMillion says:

            I see a lot of religious people implicitly believing in just-worldism. To be fair, a lot of those same people give a lot to charity, but still.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Just Worldism is baked into the human psyche. You see it in atheists as well, in just about every theodicy argument, where the unspoken premise is that if God is not just, then He must not exist. But it could very be that the guy who runs the mainframe which simulates our universe will send us to Hell for no (just) reason at all. The injustice of the matter won’t protect you anymore than it emptied the gulags.

          (All of which stems from that fact that belief in morality is baked into the human psyche, and morality makes no sense if good doesn’t ultimately triumph over evil.)

          • I would interpret the unspoken premise not as a claim that no unjust God can exist, but that the specific God described by Christianity can’t both exist and be unjust. (This is probably still fallacious, by way of being based on an uninformed idea of what Christianity actually says about the nature of God. But it’s not a Just World argument.)

          • Lumifer says:

            All of which stems from that fact that belief in morality is baked into the human psyche, and morality makes no sense if good doesn’t ultimately triumph over evil.

            I am not sure this is universally true, especially outside of Abrahamic religions. In systems like Shinto or, say, Norse mythology there is no triumph of good over evil.

          • Gravitas Shortfall says:

            the “God is not just, therefore he must not exist” argument is weird as hell. I argue kind of the other way around: “If God exists, He is not just”. Therefore, either God doesn’t exist, or God is an asshole that doesn’t deserve my worship and in either case there’s no point in practicing any religion.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Gravitas Shortfall

            My semi-heretical theory is that God is a narrative maximizer and it is said that God created man in the image of God because humans too, are narrative maximizers.

          • Eniuneg says:

            “Just worldism” would seem to me as a combination of an individual sense of morality, and the idea that an individual’s innermost experience is common across all other humans. I think this influences atheists much more than theists though.

            In my associations with Christian theists, the concept of a seeming orchestration of the world around them and an innate sense of some greater universality seems to factor in more heavily than any moral issues.

            Atheists on the other hand tend to see the opposite. Moral issues are paramount, and a fallacy of common morality is integral to the meaninglessness of a “just world”. The orchestration of the universe is taken for granted as emergent properties of simple natural laws, and a sense of greater universality is attributed to personal enjoyment of the natural world.

            Theist examination of just world theory looks like post-hoc reasoning. When theists have a definition of God that they personally see contradicting their experiences, they start into spinning out just world theory. If a theist no longer believes in a just world, it doesn’t affect their theism at all. They can still separate out a just/good/nice/all-knowing god from an unjust world without contradiction because moral issues weren’t why they became theists in the first place.

      • Tekhno says:

        I assume you don’t mean luck as in complete randomness. Smarter people are going to be more successful at navigating the world in general, and we do know that IQ correlates with income to some degree (Scott’s posted some of these studies before).

        The “luck” part comes from there being no such thing as “free will”. People don’t choose to choose and so on. So, those who are inherently better at achieving the standards of success of the society they live in are lucky to have been born that way. They deserve what they have because capacity and results are what determines what others value and not how much effort a person appears to have put in.

        The world isn’t just; it’s brutal. Liberal capitalism should be supported because its better at allocating consumer goods than alternatives, not because it’s “more just” in an absolute way.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Luck also comes from people being lucky(!) E.g. lottery winners don’t earn their winnings.

        • Tekhno says:

          Of course, but things like the lottery belong among the exceptions. Most people earn a living through applying marketable skills they have.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            But luck also causes variance in earnings among people with the same level of skills (and even with the same level of luck-based advantages, such as family connections) — you might not get a job because you remind an interviewer of her cheating ex, you might get a promotion because you happen to be the only one working when the boss walks in, and so on.

          • Anonymous says:

            The sum of a lot of small rolls will almost always end up near the average. Big chance-based differences will almost always be restricted to sums where most of the value is in a small number of bigger rolls.

        • ThaddeusMike says:

          What do you mean by “better at allocating consumer goods”. Better in what way?

          • Seconded. One theory of justice is being compared to another, implicit one.

          • Tekhno says:

            @ThaddeusMike

            A system where prices incentivize the allocation of goods leads to more local satisfaction of wants than one where a central bureau decides what the allocation of goods will look like.

            This is because more people buying one product versus another reduces its supply resulting in higher prices incentivizing greater production of that product which then drives down prices again as more suppliers enter the market and increase the supply of it, causing a fluctuating around a clearing price (and in the macro emphasizing a particular array of products over other less satiating possibilities). This means that a central bureau doesn’t have to constantly calculate what raw materials should be turned into what products in what areas and solve staggering large amounts of calculations for all the potential products in the economy and their interdependence on each other.

            Command economies can try to replicate aspects of markets with things like “shadow prices”, but the more they do so the more we learn why markets and free price systems exist in the first place.

            It’s possible to go to some third option like the libertarian socialists want where you have a market comprised of different communes, but in line with classical socialism they’d be refusing to engage in wage labor or allowing property rights to go beyond a possessive form. This would mean that everyone’s labor is evaluated according to the average socially necessary labor time, smoothing over differences in the quality of work and the use of a product. The labor of a low skilled worker for an hour (incorporating the Marxian “fossilized labor” in his means of production) is going to be worth the same as a high skilled worker, resulting in misallocations in the supply of labor, as doctors refuse to accept that an hour of their work is simply worth all the products which took an hour to produce.

            This is why leftism detached from liberalism goes to bad places (illiberal rightism gives you thinks like theocracy, fascism, and moldbuggian formalism). A liberal-left agenda which blends the market and a free price system with regulation and social programs is the best way for the left to succeed.

          • The free market allocates consumer goods to those who value them more, because they are willing to buy them. Government allocation of goods is often equal to everyone, even though some want them more than others, or because some government official thinks that some consumers deserve the goods more, or simply due to political pull. Thus the free market results in the allocation closer to how consumers want to consume.

        • Markets are artificial, and capitalism is more than one thing?

      • Davide says:

        I consider myself feminist, but I can’t understand the common argument that rape HAS to be about power.
        Both the argument itself and the motivations to argue for it so vehemently.

        What’s the issue in being generally sex-positive while claiming that rape is bad sex?
        Sex is good when all people involved want it – to quote the BDSM community ‘Safe, sane, consensual’, which amusingly acronyms as SSC – and bad when they don’t.

        I don’t see any problem with accepting that it’s ‘natural’ when many natural things are also bad, either.
        Yes, the naturalistic fallacy is horribly common, but not everyone engages in it.

        I don’t see how saying rape is about sex would encourage victim blaming, either.

        Maybe there’s something I don’t understand.
        I also see a connection to being against chemical castration for convicted rapists because (according to this argument) since rape is about control and not sex they will rape anyway even if impotent using objects. Would be nice to have some studies showing if that’s actually the case.

        • Anonymous says:

          Yes, the naturalistic fallacy is horribly common, but not everyone engages in it.

          Oh, just because the naturalistic fallacy isn’t universal that makes it wrong?

          • Davide says:

            I’m not sure what you’re objecting to.

            I’m saying that as common as the naturalistic fallacy is, it’s not especially complex at all to say something is natural and bad, or to eventually get people to accept that.

            Do you believe that if saying something is ‘natural’ makes people even slightly more like, then one has a moral obligation to say it’s not?

        • Tekhno says:

          I consider myself feminist, but I can’t understand the common argument that rape HAS to be about power.

          Also, I consider myself not a rapist, but if you removed all sense of empathy and care for other people then I might as easily be one as I’d be a rampant murderer and thief. There’s not an infinite amount of changes that need to made even in the best of us to turn them into the worst of us.

          If I were to think about raping a woman I find attractive (which is not something I do regularly, but as a thought experiment), I find it repulsive because I imagine the trauma she’d go through then and afterwards, and the idea of an unwilling crying partner makes me soft anyway. I don’t want to hurt someone so grievously.

          Given that, isn’t the first kind of mindset you’d expect a rapist to have to be one where they are simply missing a degree of empathy and sympathy and are at least mildly sociopathic if not clinically? All they are left with is attraction with nothing to stop it, like how a murderer might be left only with rage at the moment of the act.

          The proposal of some other primary motivator seems unnecessary and warrants more explanation. If it was primarily about power, then sex wouldn’t be that necessary. Most people don’t want to have sex at all with people they don’t find attractive, so why would they be especially likely to rape someone (if they are a monster) unless they have some sort of sexual desire involving them?

          Maybe the “rape is mostly about power” thing is a way of trying to distance rapists from primal aspects that all of us possess. This is maybe even a mistake from a feminist perspective.

          • Davide says:

            Very interesting thoughts.

            isn’t the first kind of mindset you’d expect a rapist to have to be one where they are simply missing a degree of empathy and sympathy

            That makes me wonder how often rapists *actually* believe that rape isn’t that bad or that the victim ‘enjoyed it’ rather than only saying that as a defense or rationalization.

            I suspect not very often and you are correct about them simply not caring much about the suffering they cause.

            Maybe the “rape is mostly about power” thing is a way of trying to distance rapists from primal aspects that all of us possess. This is maybe even a mistake from a feminist perspective.

            I think you might be on to something.

            Most people have a sex drive and feel sexual attraction, and it’s not seen as bad to admit that – unlike a ‘power over others’ drive.

            So the idea here might be is to associate rape (which is bad) with else we see as bad and belonging to the ‘other’ (wanting power over others) rather than something neutral all/most people are supposed to feel (sex drive & attraction), which when put like that makes a lot of sense even though as you say it’s likely a mistake.

          • Tekhno says:

            @Davide

            That makes me wonder how often rapists *actually* believe that rape isn’t that bad or that the victim ‘enjoyed it’ rather than only saying that as a defense or rationalization.

            I suspect not very often and you are correct about them simply not caring much about the suffering they cause.

            There’s also there’s near term and far term, of course. Rapists may be high time preference type people who aren’t good at beating out their immediate impulses with concern for other people, but they might well genuinely regret what they did later.

            There are plenty of people who regret their actions only to repeat them again and again, because we are not the same person at each moment. A human being does not merely have a single will, but is comprised of multiple competing wills that are more or less powerful when faced with different stimuli. This is why people can be bad at predicting their own behavior or even desires.

          • Viliam says:

            That makes me wonder how often rapists *actually* believe that rape isn’t that bad or that the victim ‘enjoyed it’ rather than only saying that as a defense or rationalization.

            I think there is a diagnosis where people are unable to perceive others as separate individuals with separate thoughts and emotions, but instead see them as mere extensions of themselves. (Borderline personality disorder, I guess.)

            So I believe there could be people who, when they feel horny, literally cannot imagine the other person not feeling horny. Not because of a misunderstanding or entitlement or whatever, but simply because imagining other people feeling differently is outside their mental abilities.

            Of course it would be politically incorrect to talk about this hypothesis publicly, because… you know, “ableism” and stuff. Instead it is politically more correct to simply blame it on all men (and only men).

          • Viliam, that sounds like narcissism, or possibly narcissism with a neurological explanation.

          • Davide says:

            unable to perceive others as separate individuals with separate thoughts and emotions

            Sounds to me like the definition of solipsism (an unpopular philosophy, rather than a medical diagnosis), not narcissism.
            I guess the two things could reasonably be related.

            I see the ‘unable to visualize other people NOT being horny’ problem as more of an issue society has with woman-on-man rape than the traditional man-on-woman on which I assume this discussion is focusing.

            Women raping men seems to not be taken very seriously because many people seem to believe that a man is *always* going consent to sex with a woman (at least if she is traditionally attractive).

            Compare to man-on-woman rape, which is often downplayed or not treated seriously enough, but almost everyone recognizes as bad on some level even if they disagree on how often it happens, and man-on-man rape, which is also considered bad but is the subject of many jokes, especially involving prison.

        • Corey says:

          Do you know what you, or feminists, actually mean by “about sex” or “about power”? Not that I have a particularly good idea, it just strikes me as a tree-falling-sound type of talking past one another.
          Also, if you’re antifeminist, make sure you understand the actual argument, if you’re seeing it from anti-SJW sources, it might be hard to follow because it’s stuffed with straw.

          • Loquat says:

            I vaguely recall a feminist blogger at one point using Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia in the slave bikini as an example – Jabba, being a giant slug, has zero sexual interest in humans, but knows that dressing up an attractive human female in revealing clothing and chains will both humiliate her and display his power to others. This illustrates how sexual assault and rape are the result of the offender’s desire to feel powerful, rather than his desire to get laid per se.

            Not sure if this is what is usually meant by “about power” vs “about sex”, but it’s the only example I can think of where someone actually explained it.

          • Nornagest says:

            Maybe Jabba the Hutt is the Hutt equivalent of a furry.

          • Agronomous says:

            I get that Jabba’s the bad guy, but jeez: he’s not that awful!

          • Loyle says:

            Perhaps there should be a compromise. Instead of guessing what the crime was “about”, say something on the lines of “the difference between sex and rape is power” with it being understood as a guideline rather than a rule.

            Because as far as rapists go, they could be motivated by anything. But the common thread between the victims is “power”.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Loyle:

            But that’s the case in just about any crime: the criminal has power over their victim, in one way or another.

        • Thomas Jørgensen says:

          Because it mostly is?
          People with sufficient prestige, fame and money to have essentially unlimited access to willing sex partners have still been revealed to be serial rapists. Also, crying and fear is not sexy to sane people.

          There’s a fact that I found very clarifying: a really absurd percentage of all rapes are committed by serial rapists. This is backed both by surveys and by things like running studies on rape kit backlogs. (Rape kit backlogs exist. This fact makes me want to have ministers of justice sacked. With actual sacks involved)

          There’s a small minority of people …. okay, lets be honest, a small minority of men.. out there who have something very wrong with their heads, and the justice system is just very bad at stopping them before they’ve traumatized a whole bunch of women.

          • Ted says:

            Adam Carolla said something about how rape has nothing to do with sex; it’s just a crime where the rapist happens to have an orgasm. It’s no different than if you robbed a bank and came afterwards.

    • sabril says:

      Yes, I have noticed this kind of phenomenon among many people who blame the West’s immigration problems on Jews. For them, it is inconceivable that Gentile Whites, as a group, would decide to act against their group’s interests by admitting millions of non-Whites to areas which had previously been primarily white. Therefore, their conduct must be the result of outside manipulation, i.e. the Jews.

      On a more mundane level, it reminds me of a legal proceeding where a pro se litigant claimed that someone had intercepted her papers and inserted certain spelling or grammatical errors. Evidently, this nutty hypothesis was superior to the alternative choice of admitting that she had made some minor mistakes.

      Perhaps you could call it the “Narcissistic Bias” since the inconceivable hypothesis is typically one which puts a favored individual or group in a bad light.

      I suppose I have one further question: Are there examples that don’t have a political valence (maybe involving nutrition)?

      Well there are fat people who seriously believe that they eat some minimal amount of food but remain fat due to some special quirk in their metabolism. In that case, the inconceivable hypothesis is that they are fat due to their own constant overeating.

      In general though, I think it’s hard to get away from politics when discussing narcissistic bias, since this kind of bias has a lot to do with peoples’ sense of identity.

    • Jill says:

      Basically, most people of any tribe are wimps and need to get over that. We should all learn to face the facts and stop denying reality. And if the other party’s suggestion for dealing with the facts is not the best one, then we should create a solution of our own. If people weren’t wimps, we would do this.

      Part of the problem here is that believing lies is one of the very easiest things to do in polarized tribalized American culture currently. We have lost the distinction between news and entertainment, and between lies and facts. If one has a certain bias, once can easily choose media sources that have the “facts”– even about ridiculous conspiracy theories– that one prefers. And one will then hang around with a tribe of people who believe in the same “facts” and have no real life contact with people who do not.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        What would it take to convince you that most of what you believe is just you denying reality in favor of the facts your own tribe propagates?

        Because bluntly, from where I’m sitting, you look like one of the worst offenders here. And I’m sure from where you’re sitting, I’m an equally bad offender, assuming you have any opinion of me at all.

        Or, to put a slightly finer point on it – this reads to me like rationalist applause lights. “Let’s move beyond our tribalism!” Okay, great, but there’s no there, there; there are no non-tribal facts to appeal to, because the world is too complex for any one person to understand.

        There’s no single person in the world who understands the full process of what happens between you pressing the “s” key, and a letter appearing on your screen. And your computer is a simple thing which operates on very strict rules. Society is far more complex, and we have to rely almost entirely on other people to tell us what the facts are, and each person in that chain introduces their own tribal bias.

        And it’s… entertaining, that anybody thinks they CAN be above that, much less that they believe they already are.

      • Nornagest says:

        You know, I agree with everything you’ve said here, and I’m not trying to disrespect you… but it’s the easiest thing in the world to proclaim that tribalism is the biggest problem facing the country today, if by “tribalism” you exclusively mean the other guys’ tendency to buy into lies, hate, and demagoguery.

        If you’re really serious about fighting tribalism, I’d start by doing some fact-checking of your own the next time you feel like posting a Vox article. And I don’t just mean checking to see if Mother Jones said the same thing. Charity starts at home, you know?

      • Maware says:

        There’s a problem with this, mostly that we don’t have the facts yet, and you are arguing more “discard your belief, accept mine.”

        One big example was the ridicule of Dan Quayle over the Murphy Brown speech. Quayle would probably have been accused of denying reality in his case, but over time ironically he was proven right, or at least right enough that he was a lot more realistic a take over the problems of single motherhood than the then-current idea of all family structures being equal/fungible was. Once society made that experiment, then we faced the facts when the data came in and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote “Dan Quayle was Right,” an article on how divorce was far more mixed and harmful than we thought.

        I think the argument should be more “this may not be working, we should try this,” than arguing something is a fact.

    • Diadem says:

      I think your example of Gun Violence works both ways, which makes it a very nice example.

      I noticed after the Orlando shooting that the right was immediately shouting “The problem is Islamic Extremism!” and the left was immediately shouting “The problem is homophobia!” or “the problem is guns!”, and both sides seemed utterly incapable of giving so much as an inch to the other side, to the point where when I suggested “maybe it’s both”, I ended up being attacked from both sides.

      This seems to be a perfect example of what you’re talking about. The right desperately does not want to recognize that there are problems with guns and / or homophobia in the US, so they have to insist that the Orlando shooting was caused by Islamic extremism, and nothing else. Meanwhile the left desperately does not want to admit that Islamic extremism might be a structural problem, so they have to blame this attack on homophobia and guns.

      Another good example is climate change. Why are so many Libertarians climate change deniers? At first glance this doesn’t make sense, economic theory and climate change should be orthogonal issues, so naively one would expect the same distribution of ideas on climate change among Libertarians as among the general population. But this is not the case. The answer is that the more uncompromising kinds of Libertarianism completely unravel when faced with an issue that is basically the free rider problem on steroids. And so the existence of this issue has to be denied at all cost.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Why are so many Libertarians climate change deniers? At first glance this doesn’t make sense, economic theory and climate change should be orthogonal issues, so naively one would expect the same distribution of ideas on climate change among Libertarians as among the general population. But this is not the case. The answer is that the more uncompromising kinds of Libertarianism completely unravel when faced with an issue that is basically the free rider problem on steroids. And so the existence of this issue has to be denied at all cost.

        Libertarians tend to be “climate change deniers” because libertarians are anti-authoritarian, and the state of climate change presentation, at this point, is pure authoritarianism.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          But how climate change is presented has nothing to do with scientific facts. Yet I think libertarians probably predict fewer bad consequences of climate change on average than non-libertarians.

          • Lumifer says:

            The usual problem is not with facts (though they are also frequently in dispute), but with predictions. It’s a rather important distinction.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Predictions are also disputed, but I think if you asked libertarians and non-libertarians factual questions about climate change (how much the sea level rose between 1993 and 2009 in comparison to 1950 and 2009 for instance) then I think libertarians would probably give different estimates (assuming they didn’t know the true figures).

            Spoiler alert: true figures (well, assuming Wikipedia isn’t lying) are 1.7 mm/year from 1950 vs 3.3 mm/year from 1993.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            The standard “solution” to climate change is to give additional power to special interest groups; cap and trade or expanded EPA/regulatory agencies. The second reaction is the market-based solution; a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

            Right wingers and libertarians and skeptics by and large have expressed that the carbon tax would be an acceptable option (as long as it was revenue-neutral) – but the people who claim climate change is an eminent disaster that must be addressed immediately continue, instead, to push the special-interest solutions.

            So I, and most of the rest of us, must conclude that the people who claim it’s an emergency that must be immediately addressed are lying, because they’re more interested in pushing a specific solution than in solving the problem they claim is an emergency.

            Climate change looks less like a problem a group wants solved, and more like a solution a group wants applied. So yeah. I predict fewer bad consequences.

            Also, the climate disaster folks have been deliberately lying like crazy to the public for over a decade about shit like hurricane and tornado frequency, and libertarians are less likely to take experts at their word, and looked into it.

            So the average non-libertarian is going to believe climate change caused Katrina (and have distorted beliefs about hurricane damages which don’t relate coastal development to hurricane frequency and intensity), and the average libertarian is going to be (on average more) aware that hurricane frequency has been trending downward, as indeed climate scientists predicted it would as a result of global warming.

            Or, in other words – there’s good reason to think that libertarians might be closer to the truth than non-libertarians, there, regardless of the scientific facts.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ sweeneyrod

            You’re comparing data from radically different measuring techniques so the comparison is suspect. The (whole) Wikipedia article actually gives a good overview of the complexities involved in trying to ferret out millimeter-scale changes in the global sea level.

            For example, if you take a look at some time series of measurements in the same spots, no acceleration starting from 1990s is visible.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            What do you mean by “there’s good reason to think that libertarians might be closer to the truth than non-libertarians, there, regardless of the scientific facts”? The rest of your comment seemed to be saying that libertarians might be closer to the truth of the scientific facts.

            In any case, I disagree. I agree that educated libertarians might know more “zingers” showing those silly lefties don’t know anything (e.g. knowing that climate change does not cause hurricanes to occur more frequently, although Google suggests that that issue isn’t scientifically settled either way, but there is a consensus that hurricanes have grown more violent). However, I think their estimated answers on arbitrary factual questions (e.g. changes in sea level rise) would suggest less climate change than those of non-libertarians.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            sweeney –

            Regardless of measured hurricane intensity, the science suggests hurricane intensity and frequency should both go down, owing (described very roughly) to the fact that CO2-driven global warming primarily affects temperature minimums rather than maximums (this is both predicted and measured to be the case), thus lowering the amount of work that can be gotten out of the system.

            (I expect that description is about 60% correct. There’s a game of conceptual telephone going on here.)

            And sea level change measurements aren’t nearly as straightforward as you seem to think. There are a number of reasons for this, the most important of which is “Tectonic plate theory turned out to be true”.

          • Agronomous says:

            The usual problem is not with facts… but with predictions.

            Facts are just predictions that you don’t need to conveniently forget.

          • TomFL says:

            The US in now in it longest streak without a Cat3+ hurricane landfall in recorded history. 10 years and counting. The previous record over the past 100+ years was a 6 year stretch.

            Climate science says this is just “dumb luck”. Perhaps. However if the last 10 years had the most Cat3+ landfalls in history, climate science would be falling all over itself telling us this is climate change related and we would not be hearing about dumb luck. This can be shown by their response after the 2005/2006 seasons with 3 Cat3+ hurricanes in Florida that this was the “new normal” due to climate change.

            Predictions of 30% increases in hurricane damages from climate science models resulted in a near doubling of home insurance rates in Florida. 10 years later, didn’t happen, in fact it went the other direction. Curiously I never got a refund.

            Thank you climate science. I can testify that climate change has real costs today! But I’m not bitter. Except for the fact that this science concluded 2 bad years and a dubious model were sufficient to draw conclusions on very sparse erratic data that requires 30 to 50 years to get a reliable trend from. To hell with historical data, we have a model! 10 years of good data is conclusive of nothing.

            The linkage of extreme events to climate change is really poorly done.

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “The US in now in it longest streak without a Cat3+ hurricane landfall in recorded history. 10 years and counting. The previous record over the past 100+ years was a 6 year stretch.”

            Hey, have you heard about the latest drink called Cat3? No? Well, it’s basically a watered down Manhattan

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Tyrant –

            While I must give you some Internet Points for the well-written joke, I have to immediately take them away again for inaccuracy. Sandy was a Category 2 storm when it made landfall in the US. Pedantic detail, I know, but this is the sort of debate where pedantry tends to matter, because it’s all about the details and specific facts.

          • TomFL says:

            Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it made landfall, hence the name “Superstorm Sandy”, however it was post upgraded to hurricane status due to political pressure relating to insurance technicalities.

            http://www.climatecentral.org/news/nws-confirms-sandy-was-not-a-hurricane-at-landfall-15589

            Anybody who lives in Florida can tell you that NY/NJ was obviously woefully unprepared for a hurricane, and that’s their fault. Woefully.unprepared. NY was also particularly unlucky in the angle Sandy struck and the timing at high tide. It was definitely a large storm, but not powerful for a “hurricane”.

            It’s debatable whether NY/NJ should invest like Florida does given the low likelihood of major storms. There are some theories hurricanes will nudge northward in the future.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Climate science says this is just “dumb luck”. Perhaps.

            It’s an argument for Spider Robinson’s “God is an Iron” (as in irony). Because after the 2005 hurricane season, pop-science predictors were falling all over themselves to proclaim this the result of climate change and calling it the new normal. And they used that particular measure — Category 3 and above hurricanes striking the US mainland, of which there have been zero since.

            This was the best irony in climate “science” up until that research ship got stuck in the ice whose disappearance it was investigating.

            Sandy isn’t relevant to this. It was nowhere near a category 3 at landfall. It meteorologically wasn’t a hurricane, not because it lost too much strength but rather because it “went extratropical”. It had merged with a nor’easter and no longer had the properties of a tropical storm. This did not matter at all to the structures it flooded and blew down.

        • Carbon markets are pure authoritarianism? Are you completely sure?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Yes, much as slave markets are authoritarianism.

            Selling freedom to the highest bidder doesn’t make capitalism.

          • If it’s pure authoritarianism , why is is it so easy for me to imagine even more authoritarianism solutions, such as blanket bans with no trading? And why is it deened a neoliberal solution?

            Are anti litter laws pure authoritarianism? If you start with the concept that everyone has the right to do everything then it will look to you like there is a huge amount of authoritarianism in the world. Most people don’t think there is a huge amount of authoritarianism in the world, because they don’t think that everyone has a right to do anything, but only a right to do morally good or neutral things.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            If it’s pure authoritarianism , why is is it so easy for me to imagine even more authoritarianism solutions, such as blanket bans with no trading? And why is it deened a neoliberal solution?

            Because you’re apparently operating under the belief that authoritarianism is a spectrum from “Drugged, mind-controlled, practically robotic populace” to “Complete anarchy”, and think any degree of freedom exists in opposition; when I say authoritarianism, you imagine totalitarianism, in short.

            I’d guess you probably fancy yourself somewhere in the middle, favoring freedom somewhat, and think you’ve taken a nice pragmatic position which maximizes the things you like while minimizing the things you don’t.

            Most people don’t think there is a huge amount of authoritarianism in the world, because they don’t think that everyone has a right to do anything, but only a right to do morally good or neutral things.

            The freedom to do what other people approve of misses the point of freedom. The most horrifically oppressive regime imaginable looks acceptably free to some subset of the population, using this criteria.

        • Tatu Ahponen says:

          So, let’s say that it was proven beyond doubt that climate change exists and there also existed a relatively good idea that the only way to prevent it from causing massive harm was, in fact, a solution that you would consider pure authoritarianism. What would the reaction then be?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            That depends on the harm as compared to the authoritarianism required.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @Tatu Ahponen:
            Does your hypothetical proof include solving the public goods problem of getting authoritarian institutions to do good things to the correct degree and refrain from themselves causing massive harm? If so, I’m all for it! If not, not so much.

      • Irishdude7 says:

        As a libertarian, I don’t deny that the climate changes. I do deny that we have a good understanding of how different inputs and outputs are related through the chaotic climate system (e.g., how does cloud cover change in reaction to rising CO2). This relates to my libertarian skepticism of central economic planning, since there is an information problem for the central planners, trying to extract billions of preferences that are in constant flux to direct production for different goods and services. Understanding complex, dynamic systems is hard, and I think this is a prime reason libertarians are skeptical of strong claims about what will happen to the climate in the future if this or that dial is manipulated.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      If I put on my left-winger hat and try to think of an example for this, the first that comes to mind is creationism vs. evolution. Specifically, evolution of humans. (I suspect most people accept evolution of things like microbes and birds.) If humans were evolved, then they must have come from non-human animals resembling chimpanzees. But this would mean that the widely known Biblical account of origins is false in some ways that are very important to certain Christians, which is intolerable. Therefore, humans cannot have evolved from non-human life.

      • Corey says:

        Former evangelical webcartoonist Dave Willis explains the opposition to evolution as: before the Fall of Man, there was no pain and death (per Genesis). Evolution is impossible in such a world.
        If Original Sin is not the cause of the pain and death in the world, then God is, which is intolerable.
        Source, alt text says it was his actual reasoning until about 22.

      • Agronomous says:

        As (I think it was David Friedman) pointed out, there are people on the right who don’t believe that evolution produced humans, and people on the left who believe it produced humans and then stopped. Neither seems like a supportable position to me.

        It bothers me a bit that the fact that I’m persuaded that evolution is true* doesn’t seem to have any actual bearing on how I live my life (excluding communications about the truth of evolution). That means if I took the wrong side, or no side, I wouldn’t be paying any non-negligible cost. My only problem would be a signaling one, which I could easily solve by learning to mouth platitudes that I didn’t mean or possibly understand. (Did I pick this idea up somewhere in The Sequences?)

        (* Yes, broad statement, but considering I don’t have a firm grasp of e.g. PuncEq, and my grasp of genetics is Scientific American-level, about the best I can do.)

    • uhnon says:

      It is obvious – libertarian economic policies, because the alternative is socialist economic policies. Thus they have no idea that all kinds of non-leftist regulation and intervention could exist, did exist. They have to keep denying that employers can exploit workers or that sometimes free market results are not best, because the alternative is yet another huge Washington bureaucracy setting tightjacket regulations or redistributing money. In reality there were all kinds of low-bureaucracy, low-tax, and not necessarily egalitarian alternatives from Distributism, guilds, protective tariffs etc. or simply letting local communities write simple regulations. Capitalism is ultimately an unconservative process uprooting the traditional life of communities but they have to keep supporting it or else it is socialism and that is worse.

      Thus they think in frameworks of capitalism vs. leftist post-capitalism (socialism) which they find intolerable and have no idea about pre-capitalism (feudalism to guilds to local level regulations and many older ideas).

      So, today, there is hardly economic mobility from employees to employers. And they must pretend it is fine because the alternative is a thousand Washington bureacracies each ostensibly ameliorating that situation. Back in ye olde times they could solve that problem with a city guild setting basically one regulation – minimum prices. This meant competing in quality not price meant more artisanal handwork and less automation and that meant it was easier for the talented handworker to become self-employed. Because it is price competition through technology, not quality competition through talent that tends to replace a thousand small shops with one big factory. The price was, of course, slower tech progress, but do conservatives care about that or would they accept living like the Amish if they could have a community like the Amish? And that one regulation was able to create enough economic justice between employers and employees, promising employees that they can become self-employed, that the whole redistributory apparatus was not needed.

      So conservatives buy into capitalism because post-capitalism is intolerable, and they have no idea about pre-capitalism.

      • hlynkacg says:

        You’ve got that backwards, conservatives buy into capitalism because they know exactly what pre-capitalism was like. Namely nasty brutish and short.

        You correctly identify that “property rights” as a cooperative equilibrium arising from people’s desire to not have their throats cut in their sleep but you completely fail to recognize the implications there of.

        Post-capitalism isn’t intolerable so much as impossible in a world that is not also “post scarcity”. Contrary to the Rousseauean fairy-tail of noble savages, the removal of formalized competition for control of limited resources won’t bring an end to competition. It simply ensures that further competition will be much less formal and a whole lot bloodier.

        • Liveryman says:

          [C]onservatives buy into capitalism because they know exactly what pre-capitalism was like. Namely nasty brutish and short.

          Unless you’re using a much much looser definition of capitalism than uhnon, it really wasn’t.

          Was guild rule in Bremen or Florence or Zurich so totally intolerable as to make it not even be worth considering the idea of trade guilds? Is the City of London a reactionary bastion of precapitalist brutality?

  98. Orphan Wilde says:

    I think just stating in each open thread that you’d prefer conversations about X, V, and Q topics to be kept to a minimum would be sufficient to nudge conversations in a different direction. There would be certain posters who would ignore such requests, of course – but if you occasionally ban people who are particularly persistent about it, it might work to keep such topics in relative balance with other topics.

    The question, of course, is whether you want to eliminate such discussions, or just bring them into balance with a wider range of topics.

  99. Cadie says:

    2. I think banning anonymous comments would be okay since commenting with a name doesn’t require registering with the site; it’s easy and doesn’t add much of an inconvenience, and it’s still kind of anonymous anyway since one can pick a made-up handle. So not being Anonymous requires very little effort and isn’t a real burden.

    4. My suggestion would be post another hidden open thread with each visible one, with Hidden Thread X.00 being the any-topic-goes thread for the two-week cycle and those topics more or less banned from the others. Then if people post it on the other threads, and it’s not just a passing mention, those commenters can be told to take their discussion to Hidden Thread X.00. That won’t work if your goal is to keep those topics off the blog completely, of course. It would keep the other threads mostly free of them and keep the discussions contained and easy to avoid.

    • 1Step says:

      It seems like the growth of complexity of these open threads mirrors the growth of complexity of a bureaucracy. Everybody means well but before you know it you’re in an undesirable situation of have 3 different kinds of open threads must cross link each other based off the context of the conversation. Imagine having debates about which topics go where, would that go in a 4th open thread? (the meta thread).

      • Carolyn says:

        Also, the more complex things get, the harder it is for polite new people to feel comfortable joining the discussion, for fear of violating social norms they don’t know about. That might have the effect of nudging the commenter demographics the other way.

    • Jiro says:

      There are reasons why certain topics keep coming up, and not all of those reasons are “people like bringing tribalism into everything”. Some of them are just that the topics are relevant to huge fields of human endeavor. and relevant topics are, by their nature, going to turn up. As such, it may be impossible to get rid of those topics without massively disrupting the kind of meaningful discussion that you want to keep.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Yeah, I think that’s a large part of it. Banning EnArEx is a pretty minor thing. Trying to go after the whole culture war, which is interweaved into a lot of other stuff (including the US election and the Brexit vote…. and the reproducibility crisis, for that matter) is really hard.

        Banning discussion of the quality of posters with 4-character female names might work, but that was a links thread anyway.

  100. Alliteration says:

    4.
    I propose having a separate open thread once a month or so for the annoying topics. Annoying topics would be banned from normal threads. If someone wanted to reference a annoying topic from a normal open thread, they could post a link to the annoying open thread as a comment (only as a reply. Top level comments that are just annoying topic links would be banned).

    By spacing the annoying open threads out by a month, hopefully people will make the same number fluff/tribal-namecalling post but a higher number of high quality posts on annoying topics. The greater times between posts will give people longer to think of clever ideas for high quality posts, yet people will be prompted to make the same number of fluff/tribal-namecalling posts because of the thread.

    One disadvantage of this system is that it could inspire people to make even more posts on annoying topics (but at least people wouldn’t have to look at them.)

    (Also, I have heard legends that 4chan’s /pol/ was created to keep their annoying posts away from everything else, but I have heard that it didn’t work out so well because having a designated location for annoying posts pulled in even more people who wanted to make annoying posts until they drowned out the rest of the community even on the other sections. (I have never been to 4chan, so I have no idea if this is true.) but beware. (and yes, I might be using “annoying” a little euphemistically in this paragraph.))

    • Tedd says:

      There’s always the weekly culture war thread over at the subreddit. Maybe Scott could just start posting a link to it at each major (i.e. integral) open thread?

      • Alliteration says:

        That option would have the advantage of lowering the risk of attracting annoying-topic enthusiasts here, because they would hang out on the reddit instead.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I quite like this solution, assuming the topics Scott refers to culture war-y. One downside, however, is that the culture is often brought into posts that are not originally related to it (or not more than peripherally related). I expect this probably happens more often than a top-level culture war post. So it might not be very effective; I’m not sure people would be willing to read/write replies on reddit to topics started here, or be self-aware enough to realize when a reply belongs there.

      • Dredd says:

        I don’t like reddit.

    • E.P. says:

      The 4chan ‘legend’ you speak of is basically accurate. The initial community of 4chan was only political to the extent that they found humor in being irreverent toward everybody, on the right and the left. Ironically supporting a view that other people found intolerable was the height of trolling. Unfortunately, this environment attracted people who sincerely held unsavory views, ruining everyone else’s fun. I think this is also why the alt-right has that “Ha-ha I’m being an ironic jokester, except actually I’m serious” aesthetic going on.

      • Anon. says:

        I’m sure it’ll shift in the opposite direction if the Republicans win. It’s a fickle crowd.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      As someone who quite enjoys the “annoying topics” I think its probably a fair trade if we get a monthly or twice-monthly thread dedicated to them, and then straight ban them from regular OTs. We can call them the “Stuff We Will Regret Writing” OTs, keep them “Hidden”, and put warnings on ’em.

    • Corey says:

      At Pharyngula (yeah I know) not long ago they started running series of open threads on different topics: one on political current events, one on race issues, one on music, etc. Though I think rather than anti-pollution it was more to keep the misc. open thread to a manageable size, and to distribute moderation load (the topic-specific threads have individually-designated moderators).

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        I’m not even laughing—I’m just amazed there are still a handful posters on there after all the self-purging.

        I don’t think you get to judge SSC comments for being one-sided any more though.

        “he’s an insecure man and profoundly ignorant while women and minorities are relegated to serving the dominant white men this bozo is going to tear at it with weaponized ignorance and the audience is going to eat it up a real piece of work huffed and puffed and victim-blamed his way into an inquiry.”

  101. pseudonymous says:

    Please do not ban anonymous commenting, if that category includes pseudonymous comments such as this one.

    These days, I make almost all my comments in this manner (using one-off pseudonyms). I don’t think they’re of the kind that you would be wish to ban, but nowadays (for various reasons, only some of which are what you would guess) I’m very inhibited in what I say using my standard Less Wrong identity (let alone my real-life identity).

    • Lysenko says:

      Is there a particular reason why you feel it necessary to use one-off pseudonyms instead of a consistent one for a given venue? At that point you might as well simply always post as Anonymous.

  102. Sandy says:

    I read “How the West was Won” and some people asked how universal culture has fared over time in Islamic nations. I’m not entirely sure, but any rate the comments didn’t seem to go into much depth.

    The archetypal East-meets-West nation is Turkey. It was Samuel Huntington’s example of a “torn country”. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk loved Western culture (or at least the precursor to modern universal culture) so much that he literally rewrote the Turkish language, switching out the Arabic script for a Latin one. He and his fellow reformers were tired of the “Sick Man of Europe” tag and decided to incorporate European civic traditions into the new Turkish nation. Today, Turkey appears to be moving away from those traditions because they are insufficiently Islam-friendly; most of Turkey’s overtures to joining the European Union have been fairly halfhearted. Even Turkey’s terrorists have changed — the Grey Wolves were fascists and Turkish supremacists first and foremost, not really bin Laden style jihadis. Over time they have become more and more like traditional jihadis because they have blended Salafism in with their ultranationalism.

    Ba’athism was founded by Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian who considered Islam to be “proof of Arab genius”; nonetheless, he strenuously insisted that Ba’athism was a secular ideology. Saddam endorsed this view for a long time but eventually declared that Ba’athism was an Islamic ideology after Aflaq died.

    Saudi Arabia is a rich, high-HDI country, but its enforcement of strict Islamic laws has arguably only grown stronger over time as a response to fundamentalist pressure and incidents like the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979.

    Pakistan was founded by Jinnah, a suit-clad booze-swilling London-educated Muslim whose first cabinet included a Hindu and an Ahmadi. Today most of those Hindus have fled for India and those Ahmadis are banned from even referring to themselves as Muslims. Foreign Muslims who want to enter Pakistan literally have to tick a box on the entry form that says they acknowledge that Ahmadis are not Muslims and that Mirza Ghulam was a heretic. Thousands gathered on the streets of Islamabad to celebrate the valor of a man who assassinated a politician for defending a Christian woman from draconian blasphemy laws.

    I don’t know very much about Indonesia, but there is an interesting bit in the Atlantic’s article on “The Obama Doctrine” where Barack Obama describes growing up in Indonesia as a boy and then returning there decades later as a President. According to Obama, Islam in Indonesia went from a relaxed, syncretic South Asian tradition to a much harsher form with definite Arab influences and a more prominent role in Indonesian society.

    Would it be fair to say that the Islamic world was a lot more “Western” culturally decades ago, during the time of Ataturk, Nasser and Jinnah, and that it has gradually rejected this culture? Shadi Hamid has a book called Islamic Exceptionalism where he argues that expecting that Islam will go through something akin to a Protestant Reformation and as a result Muslim countries will embrace secularism is absurd because the Islamic world has no incentive to do that. For Christian Europe, secularism was an escape from bloody religious wars that decimated nations. They were glad to inch away from their religious past because of this. For the Islamic world, their religious past was their golden age. It is romanticized and imagined as vastly superior than the secular present that universal culture tells themselves they should embrace, and this imagining is easy for them to buy because the present is pretty terrible in many Islamic nations. Hence the popularity of Sayyid Qutb among Islamists — his popularization of jahiliyyah, the idea that Muslims are living in a lulled, hypnotized state divorced from Islam that they must be awakened from, is fodder for anti-Western narratives and Islamic revivalism.

    So does Islam just have a really strong immune system that resists universal culture? Or do I have an incomplete picture that misses how universal culture really has made deep inroads in the Islamic world and set the stage for its inevitable takeover?

    • Matthias says:

      It’s a very interesting question. You could ask similar things about the American Founding Fathers’ relaxed attitude to Christianity vs parts of modern-day America. (It’s not the same, but I see parallels.)

      Sorry, I don’t have any answers. The resurgence of (some forms of) religion seems real.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        If you’re drawing a parallel to modern-day American political parties and saying they’ve become far more religious, maybe the cycle that the GOP nominated Donald Trump wasn’t the best one to do it in…

        And if you’re drawing a parallel to religious rural communities that exist in modern-day America, it’s not exactly fair to compare them to the most elite and cosmopolitan circles of Revolutionary-era America.

      • Patthlas says:

        I’m not sure about Founding Fathers, but judging by book-review-albions-seed, early settlers took their religion very seriously.

        Also, there’s something something evaporative cooling effect, something something outgroup threatening ingroup culture.

    • Dandy says:

      Isn’t Muslim World in a bloody religious war, like, right now?

      USA people think that 50 victims of recent shooting is Worst Thing Since 9/11, but IIRC average terrorist attack in the Middle East easily tops 100 victims and rate of occurrence is just incomparable.

      • Anon says:

        The Crusades alone resulted in more than twice as many deaths than the Iraq War. The current chaos and unrest in the Middle East is small-time compared to some of the shit the Anglican and Catholic Churches put their followers through.

        • Rob K says:

          the crusades took place over a period of 4ish centuries. That’s a very silly thing to compare to the Iraq war.

          • Randy M says:

            Centuries with rather different medical technology.

          • Anon says:

            Yes, it is, and that’s why Dandy is making a false equivalence. If secularism is an escape from bloody religious wars like the Crusades, terrorist attacks in the Middle East don’t even begin to compare. They hardly even register on that scale.

      • Sandy says:

        There are bloody religious wars raging across the Middle East, but they’re not really comparable to the Thirty Years’ War that halved the populations of some European nations and sent the entire continent into demographic crisis.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          As with the crusades, that’s still a dumb comparison. The current issues in the Middle East have been going on for five years, and its people actually have the option of fleeing. If some millions of Imperial Germans had the option of doing so, they’d have readily accepted the opportunity.

          This isn’t even to mention the absence of foreign powers deliberately destroying large swathes of land over in the Middle East as much as happened in that war, no matter what some might say.

          • Anon says:

            I think multiple people here in the comments are confused.

            Sandy said “secularism was an escape from bloody religious wars that decimated nations. They were glad to inch away from their religious past because of this.”

            Dandy said “Isn’t Muslim World in a bloody religious war, like, right now?” to argue that since the Middle East is currently in a bloody religious war, shouldn’t they be accepting secularism rather than becoming more religious?

            Both Sandy and I are arguing that this is a false equivalence because the turmoil in the Middle East hardly compares to wars like the Thirty Years’ War or the Crusades.

            I’m not sure why people are arguing against that, because it’s a fact.

            And speaking of facts:

            The current issues in the Middle East have been going on for five years

            Yeah, sure.

            Look at the dates in the sidebar. Go on. I’ll wait.

          • Nathan says:

            Stefan was clearly referencing the Syrian civil war. I don’t think the snark was necessary.

          • Anon says:

            The only reason the Syrian civil war is happening is because Obama handed ISIS a power vacuum, and they took over and invaded Syria. My point stands. Just because we’ve crossed an arbitrary geographical border does not change when this conflict started.

          • Jill says:

            The Syrian Civil War is happening because Assad brutally murdered large numbers of his people, destroying their cities, and sending millions of survivors fleeing for their lives To Europe and elsewhere.

            Obama may have misunderstood who the “good guys” are in the conflict, but he did not start it. The problem is that there are mostly not any good guys in a very war torn an area like this. There are only “do whatever it takes to survive and maybe avenge the death of my relative or friend” guys. So the rebels against Assad are also brutal, as is ISIS also.

            In Syria, so many groups are fighting that it’s ridiculous to think we can understand what’s going on and how to solve it. Look at how many there are:

            This “simple” chart of the war in Syria shows it’s actually mind-bogglingly complicated
            http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11024056/syria-war-chart

            I know that the U.S.– Right Wing media is selling the perspective that it’s all Obama’s fault– like every other problem in the country or the world, in their view. But it’s just more complex than that.

            It’s interesting that one commonality between Trump and some of the more establishment Right Wing media is the view that Putin is some kind of blameless good guy. So he’s reputed to be the good guy in Syria. But in reality, he just wants access to a Mediterranean port, and so he is supporting the brutal Assad. Putin is in large measure responsible for Assad’s brutality and for the refugee situation himself, as he is propping up a dictator that the people do not want and are fleeing from.

            That being said, there may not be an organized unified countervailing force that can take over if Assad steps down– I mean, other than ISIS.

            A very complex situation. I can see the appeal of incorrect simple explanations like “It’s all Obama’s fault.” I guess that belief is like a lullaby to the ears of people who long for a simple life, a simple world, easily explained, with someone to always be the bad guy and someone to always be the good guy.

          • John Schilling says:

            The only reason the Syrian civil war is happening is because Obama handed ISIS a power vacuum

            The Syrian Civil War began two years before ISIS existed as such, and Obama has done nothing to significantly increase or decrease the power of any of the participants. Try again. For best results, include the phrases “Arab Spring” and “Free Syrian Army”.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      I think that the explanation for the rise of Wahabbi-ish Islam (Which, though it purports to be a return to ancient norms, is really a modern invention from the 18th century– sort of the hardcore Calvinists to the more Lutheran-ish Islamic modernists who showed up around the same time and eventually turned into the modern Islamic world’s secularists. Until quite recently, Islamic practice in most of the world had a lot more to do with boozing, praying at the tombs of saints, and ecstatic meditation than harsh implementations of Shari’a) has much more to do with politics than with memetics.

      As Saudi Arabia has grown wealthier, through oil revenues and the support of the United States, it has amplified its efforts to spread its Wahabbi version of Islam in other countries. (This is sort of like how the international popularity of Communism grew in part because the USSR sponsored political movements abroad). At the same time, especially in the Arab world, the big secular political movements failed to deliver on their promises. Yesterday’s nationalists became today’s oligarchs. Also, in the 1990s, the USSR collapsed, and the Communist path seemed less and less viable. (Compare Fatah, who were revolutionary Marxist nationalists, to Hamas, who are decidedly Islamist) So, the Islamists became the most viable option left for anybody pissed off about the status quo. (Also worth noting: many, and possibly most, Islamists aren’t Wahabbis).

      • Wrong Species says:

        I’m skeptical about claims that a group isn’t traditional because they are a recent invention. If one group creates a new group of people to retain traditional culture, while the rest of society moves forward, that doesn’t disprove their claim.

        • Lemminkainen says:

          It’s more that a lot of Wahabbi practices (most notably extreme iconoclasm, aggressive enforcement of bans on alcohol, seclusion of women) had actually been uncommon in most of the Islamic world for centuries before they showed up. They appealed back to the mostly-mythical era of the Rashidun caliphs, much as the first Protestants claimed to be reconstituting the mostly-mythical practices of the early Christian church.

    • Salem says:

      The Muslim world has clearly become more Western, but I understand why you might get the opposite impression.

      60 years ago, the Muslim world had a thin veneer of very Westernised elites at the top, and a thick mass of extremely traditional people. Now, the mass of people have become much more Westernised – but they are still more traditional in many ways than the elites of 60 years ago. But at the same time, governments have had to become much more responsive to the masses – in part because of urbanisation. So what you see is a double shift, where the country has become much more Western, but the government has become a little bit more religious.

      This is also complicated in the Arab world by the failure of Arab nationalism, and its partial replacement by Islamic nationalism.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      I feel like Islamic cultures are easier to understand if you limit your analysis to Islam and the West. When you invoke universal culture, you get stuck explaining why places which by all accounts “should” be succumbing to its influence, aren’t.

      Restrict your vision to particular cultures. Is the West doing enough to eradicate the Islamic culture and replace it with its own? I think the obvious answer is that it isn’t. I think it would make most Westerners a bit uncomfortable to even think of doing such a thing. We’d very much like for people to choose our culture without us having to push it; hence ideas like “universal culture” in the first place.

      Is the West doing enough to project certain elements of its culture into the Islamic world? The answer is much less obvious, I think. Honestly I have no idea.

    • Emma Casey says:

      >So does Islam just have a really strong immune system that resists universal culture?

      The Abbassid Caliphate seems *very* universal culture. Modern Islam seems to have developed this immune system, but it’s rather new in the history of the faith.

      The universal culture story need to work out why it is that UC took over the middle east, and then somehow lost it again.

  103. Siah Sargus says:

    I have yet to find a well paced, written, and illustrated sex scene in a comic book, where the book in question wasn’t principally pornographic. Although I consider the division between “porn” and “literature” to be tenuous at best, I don’t know how I feel about having only fap fodder for guideposts. Like, the central conceit of my story isn’t about sex, but its a significant part of the two main characters’ arc with one another that they pair up early on in the story. I’m straight up missing the usual “meet cute” bullshit, because I feel like its tired, unrealistic, and an extremely stupid and petty way to get “drama” in a pairing. I want to show what I consider to be a relationship that could plausibly happen, and not some contrived “plot”. To that end, I also wanted to be more willing to show the whole relationship, including the more routine parts, the more talky parts, and the sex. But no matter what I do, as soon as I show sex, the entire website becomes porn in the mind of Google. Because the internet is a free and open place to express whatever you want as long as its rated pg-13. Ugh.

    /blogpost

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      It certainly is the case that hardly any “mainstream” comics do that, especially nowadays. I would have vaguely gestured towards some old Alan Moore stuff, maybe; not that he went out of his way to add sex scenes but more that he didn’t give a crap what other people think.

      The only modern example I can think of is Empowered. Not quite what you’re thinking of, because it’s deliberately a very sexy (and comic-booky) comic, but it’s part of the story and the storytelling.

    • Tentatively offered: Omaha the Cat Dancer— the sex is pretty explicit, but I don’t know whether it’s explicit enough to be what you’re looking for.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Siah Sargus – I would bet money that Webcomics have already solved this problem. and if not them, Japan.

    • Vitor says:

      Dicebox seems to be exactly what you’re looking for:

      http://www.comic.dicebox.net/comic/wander-pre-ramble/

      • Bugmaster says:

        FWIW, I just tried reading Dicebox, and I had to stop about 10 pages in, because I couldn’t summon up any interest in caring about any of the characters at all in any capacity. I didn’t get to the sex scenes, admittedly, but still. YMMV, of course.

        • Vitor says:

          The comic is slow paced and takes a while to get rolling, that’s for sure. The story is complex, but nuanced and believable. If you have the time and patience to read while paying attention to all the little details, it’s well worth the effort.

          • Bugmaster says:

            If you say so; but on the other hand, there are plenty of other comics that have long on-going stories (such as the aforementioned Questionable Content), and they did manage to grab my attention. I actually cared about their characters from the get-go, and, later on, I was interested to see how their setting would develop. I get neither of those from Dicebox

    • smocc says:

      As a prude, are you sure you need to show the sex, and if you do, do you really need to show it happening?

      In my experience the vast majority of sex scenes in stories are used either as a trope signifying “this relationship has leveled up” (every romcom) or as titillating filler (e.g. the Top Gun sex scene). Both are very annoying to me. If you want titillating filler that’s fine, but you don’t get to complain if people write you off as a pseudo-pornographer. If you’re using sex as a trope then it’s lazy writing and you don’t actually need to show the sex: you may as well just have a panel that says “And Then They Had Sex.” Plus it cheapens the value of sex in relationships as a mere checklist item.

      Character and relationship development definitely can happen during sex, but how often is it intrinsically linked to the mechanics of the act of sex itself, as opposed to the flirtatious banter or the pillow talk afterwards? Do I really need to see explicit depictions of sex acts for the storytelling to work? Maybe, but I’m skeptical that it’s the case nearly as often as some authors seem to think. Like, sure, real people have sex, but real people do a lot of things that I don’t want to see all the details of.

      I guess this is a rant that’s not very helpful to you. Consider Questionable Content, which has a ton of sex and spends most of its time dealing with the fallout (good and bad) of said sex, but it rarely depicts sex acts straight up (at least when I used to read it circa 2007) and it rarely needs to. Usually it opts for post-coital scenes. I remember not minding the sex Dicebox, which Vitor recommended, though I think I stopped reading it because the characters stopped making sense to me (including how much sex they had).

      • Bugmaster says:

        I agree; there’s no point in showing sex unless you are trying to titillate the reader — or unless the sex itself is important to your story. Somehow. But, from what I’ve seen, it’s very difficult to make the exact mechanics of sex plot-critical, without it being obvious.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Take it a level up: there’s no point in showing anything unless it serves one of those two purposes (titillation, or story functions such as advancing the plot/establishing character/etc.) — especially in a time and labor-intensive medium like comics.

          An action scene — say, a fistfight — would be similar. Maybe the artist just wants to draw a bunch of cool action for readers who want to see it (titillation) or maybe we’re showing how the society places great emphasis on one’s fighting ability (story). If it’s not serving one of those functions, leave it out.

          • smocc says:

            Not sure if you’re trying to be sarcastic or not, but there is a whole thread above advocating basically this.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            Comparing it to the action thread above is more appropriate than one might think. A good sex scene in any kind of media, text in books/fanfics, scenes in movies/shows, cutscenes in games, should be just as much a form of characterization and/or plot metaphor as an action scene.

            The way a person has sex can tell you something about them, so a sex scene can contribute to characterization, as well as illuminating the relationship dynamic between the parties involved. That’s one of the reasons smut is so prevalent in fanfiction: we get more of the characters we love, epitomized in an intimate encounter. It’s also no surprise why fiction loves to play with the hate-love foe-yay sex-violence line, such as the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith doing so in a very on-the-nose way.

            You’ll hear from various directors “shoot the fight like a dance,” “shoot the dance like a love scene,” “shoot the fight like a love scene,” “shoot the love scene as a dance,” so on and so forth.

            As for recommendations, I can’t speak for how the readers here will like the writing overall, but T. Campbell’s comics (Faans, Rip and Teri, Penny and Aggie, Quiltbag) all deal with sex in a pretty tasteful way, imo. Faans even features a poly BDSM relationship.

            Sunstone is a romance comic centered around a BDSM social circle.

            Strangers in Paradise is a somewhat legendary romance comic with a lot of other sub-genres (thriller, action). I don’t know if it qualifies, though, since it doesn’t have full sex scenes.

          • Bugmaster says:

            I agree about the action scenes: if your comic is a character-driven slice of life coming of age story (or whatever), then throwing in action on every other panel would serve you poorly. That doesn’t mean that action has no place in your comic; it just means that when action does occur, it has to mean something with regards to character development.

            On the other hand, if your comic focuses on starship captains desperately trying to out-maneuver a superior foe, then incluing personal details about their lives on every other panel would, likewise, be a mistake.

            That said though, I disagree about T. Campbell’s comics. LGBTQ advocacy is one of his (her ? I forget) main goals, and thus the sex scenes are very much on topic; they are kind of half the point of the whole comic. Don’t get me wrong, they are still reasonably tasteful and well-presented; but it wouldn’t be fair to say that e.g. Quiltbag is a good example of an author depicting sex in a comic that is not sex-focused, because Quiltbag is very much sex-focused (which is not the same thing as saying it’s outright porn, mind you).

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            @Bugmaster:

            Ah, you’re right, I forgot that the OP was mostly talking about non-sex-focused comics.

            On the other hand, OP also says “where the book in question wasn’t principally pornographic.”
            Hrm, this might negate my Sunstone recommendation, but that comic is still fundamentally a romance story, but one set between characters who express themselves through sex, as some real people do. The sex is mostly also characterization, unlike, say, most explicit manga, so I can’t say that the comic is principally pornographic.

            I’d also say that T. Campbell’s webcomics except maybe Quiltbag still apply. Faans and “Rip and Teri,” certainly, since they’re primarily genre. Penny and Aggie is a teen drama, but only had a couple of NSFW panels in its entire run, as well.

      • onyomi says:

        As the opposite of a prude (a perv?), I tend to wonder the opposite–assuming they’re reasonably attractive, I like seeing characters I care about have sex, so why not show it? With live actors there is an obvious problem, but no such problem with a comic.

        I’ve often thought that the problem with most porn is that it’s well… just porn; that is, it doesn’t have much of a plot, or time for you to really care about the characters. But sex between characters you care about in a plot which matters would be so much more impactful. I think this is why people make slash fiction, doujinshi and the like: it takes advantage of the knowledge you already have about the characters. Which is not to say plot-free porn wouldn’t still have a place.

        Related: why are we so much more okay with depicting violence than sex, when most types of sex are much more socially acceptable than most types of violence?

        • Guy says:

          Related: why are we so much more okay with depicting violence than sex, when most types of sex are much more socially acceptable than most types of violence?

          I can offer no explanation, but it is worth noting that this is a very America-specific thing.

          • I’m not sure that it is. It may perhaps be an Anglo-Saxon-specific thing?

          • Sandy says:

            That’s not true. It’s also a thing in Asia.

          • Nyx says:

            Yes, it is a very America-specific thing to have an absurd stereotype of foreigners as sexually enlightened wife-swapping free spirits with no appetite for war.

          • Jiro says:

            One reason is precisely that sex is socially acceptable.

            It’s a much easier Schelling point to say “don’t do this stuff you see in a show, ever” than “don’t do this stuff you see in a show, not in exactly the same way anyway, but you normally still do it sometimes under some circumstances”.

            Also, some forms of violence come under “are hard to imitate”, like laser blasts. Notice that those kinds are usually restricted less than more realistic violence.

        • Anonymous says:

          Related: why are we so much more okay with depicting violence than sex, when most types of sex are much more socially acceptable than most types of violence?

          We sometimes seem to consider observation of a sex act a kind of implicit participation. (Some D/s writers explicitly discourage public scenes because they violate the consent of onlookers; I recall a rather amusing couple of letters in Dan Savage’s column about inappropriate public shoe-tying.) Seeing someone have sex is a kind of intimacy, and like all intimacy it can be unwanted.

          IME sex scenes are rarely more than slightly embarrassing (or occasionally embarrassingly bad), especially in visual media. And porn is porn and that’s OK. But I’ve read a couple of supposedly-not-porn books where I could practically hear the author masturbating, and I… wasn’t in the mood.

          If you care about the characters and it’s not titillating, that’s fine, I guess, and if you care about the characters and it is titillating and that’s what you’re reading it for, that’s great, but if you care about the characters and it is titillating and all you wanted was a nice story, that’s… a little like an unsolicited dick pic. I did not ask for this, please take it away.

          • Nathan says:

            A Song of Ice and Fire is a huge offender in this regard (even more so than the tv show). Some sexual encounters are important and plot relevant (I.e. the incest reveal early on), but the vast majority are of the Dany-randomly-getting-finger-banged-by-her-handmaiden variety. It doesn’t develop character, it doesn’t develop plot, and mostly it just feels like George Martin was taking a wank-break while writing and just really wanted to share it with you.

    • Perico says:

      You should probably read Saga.

      I mean, you should probably read it regardless of any interest in sex scenes, because the book is that good… but it does have quite a bit of memorable, imaginative, and gorgeously illustrated sex. Featuring alien species that range from colorful humanoids to colorful what-the-hell-am-I-looking-at.

      And even though the sex is abundant, varied, and remarkably plot-relevant, it’s not like that is the main focus of the story. Saga is hard to pin down, but I guess it could be summarized as a sci-fi epic with a generous dose of fantasy, some really well written love stories and personal relations, and a fair share of ultraviolence and sex.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Siah Sargus – Artesia contains a considerable amount of explicit sexual content that is folded fairly deeply into the story. It’s also probably in the top five best comics I’ve ever read; it’s extremely goddamn good. I’d highly recommend it just on its own merits, but it sounds like exactly what you’re looking for.

      Beyond that, I seem to recall hearing that Saga had a fair amount of sexual content. It’s also supposed to be very, very good.

      @Webcomics – This is a general reminder that Kill Six Billion Demons, Black and Blue and Unsounded are real things that exist.

      Come to think of it, there’s some intimate moments in Unsounded as well. Massive spoilers, and you really should read it cause it’s amazing, but here:
      !!!Spoilers, Disturbing Imagery!!!
      !!!Spoilers, Disturbing Imagery!!!

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        Did anybody else get way too much Lore Overload from that?

        • FacelessCraven says:

          assuming you mean the unsounded examples, probably shoulda uploaded the pages without the text. pages from the middle of a very long, intricate story, and particularly one of the weirder parts, aren’t a good introduction.

          I suggest trying the beginning.

      • Matt C says:

        Thanks for those webcomics references.

      • Nornagest says:

        Kill Six Billion Demons is really, really good. I got bored with Unsounded, though; despite the artistic talent involved and the massive amount of worldbuilding, I didn’t find the plot engaging or have any particular desire to explore that world.

        Never seen Black and Blue; what’s its deal?

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Nornagest – Glad you’re enjoying KSBD!

          “I got bored with Unsounded, though; despite the artistic talent involved and the massive amount of worldbuilding, I didn’t find the plot engaging or have any particular desire to explore that world.”

          How far’d you get, out of curiosity?

          “Never seen Black and Blue; what’s its deal?”

          It’s a cyberpunk noir, has something of a cohen-brothers feel to it, with a story black as the inside of a coal-scuttle at midnight. One of the things I really admire about it is the pace the author keeps the story moving at, and the ways he keeps the story moving in fresh directions. Read the first scene or two, and you’ll have a fair idea of whether it’s for you.

          • Nornagest says:

            Don’t remember exactly. I think I picked it up near its debut and followed it for about a year, off and on?

    • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

      I once watched a few videos on youtube with ridiculouss title along the lines of “christopher hitchens DESTROYS dumb moron”, but worse, because I wanted to watch videos of christopher hitchens and those where in the sidebar, and for some time after that all my suggested videos were ones with shitty “ultrapartisan”-doesn’t-begin-to-cover-it titles along those lines. (not just of christopher hitchens, apparently “likes really shitty titles” is a demographic youtube was eager to shoehorn me into circa 2011.

      I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised when youtube went so far downhill.

    • Mr Mind says:

      May I interest you in the work of an Italian author, Milo Manara? He has been translated, although I don’t know to what extent, but I guess that “Il gioco” (the game) and the Miele saga are exactly what you’re looking for.
      Definitely erotic, definitely not porn, beautifully drawn and with sex-centric plots.
      Not all of his work is like this though, a substantial chunk of what he drew is adventure or fantasy for other writers.

  104. onyomi says:

    This might sound like I’m trying to signal how cultured I am or something, but I really don’t mean it that way:

    Does anyone else find 90% of the “action” in 90% of action movies to be painfully boring?

    I don’t inherently dislike action–I loved Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, but most of it is just so uncreative? Or maybe because I know which characters aren’t going to die nothing feels like it’s at stake? I tend to be a little more interested in one-on-one combat scenarios like lightsaber duels, kung fu fights, and the like, maybe because it feels more like a struggle between wills?

    But again, I find the vast majority of car chases, etc. to be painfully boring and I’m not even entirely sure why. It’s literally to the point where “action-packed!” as a descriptor for a movie sounds like a negative to me.

    • Sandy says:

      Have you watched the Raid movies?

      • onyomi says:

        I seem to remember enjoying the first one pretty well; haven’t seen the others. I think it seemed relatively creative and like something was at stake among the characters. Are the others worth seeing?

        I think part of what bothers me is just the conventional nature of “action.” If the action is really necessary to tell the story, or is truly a creative end in its own right, it can be enjoyable, but lately, especially, it feels like just another checkbox.

        • Sandy says:

          There’s just the one sequel, which I would recommend. It’s got more variety in its action and a more substantive plot.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I think it’s that it’s so uncreative. There are a lot of action tropes and if you’ve seen a lot of action movies you probably know what they are and how they will be combined. Did you like _The Bourne Ultimatum_? It used a lot of common tropes, but put them together a bit differently than usual.

    • John Schilling says:

      I don’t know about 90%, but it’s definitely past 50% and climbing.

      In particular, I now pretty much always tune out the Final Fatal Fistfight. The one where the Hero and the Villain, no matter how many sidekicks, minions, and allies they might have had, to the point of commanding armies, must necessarily fight each other alone. The one where no matter what sort of weapons they might have had earlier or might obviously have access to, must fight each other with their bare hands or improvised impact weapons(*). The one where, after the Hero has demonstrated his Manliness by defeating his enemy with his bare hands and his Goodness by not just killing the villain, said villain then tries some last bit of treachery that justifies killing him anyway.

      I don’t care how good the fight choreography is or how talented the martial artists playing the roles, because I just don’t care, period.

      * Or swords if used only for disarming and not for stabbing into the enemy.

      • Virbie says:

        > In particular, I now pretty much always tune out the Final Fatal Fistfight. The one where the Hero and the Villain, no matter how many sidekicks, minions, and allies they might have had, to the point of commanding armies, must necessarily fight each other alone. The one where no matter what sort of weapons they might have had earlier or might obviously have access to, must fight each other with their bare hands or improvised impact weapons(*). The one where, after the Hero has demonstrated his Manliness by defeating his enemy with his bare hands and his Goodness by not just killing the villain, said villain then tries some last bit of treachery that justifies killing him anyway.

        If I saw this in a movie these days, I would actually be pretty shocked. Whatever it is I do to pick movies, I’ve somehow manage to largely avoid this in the last several years. Then again, someone who watches movies much more often than I do would probably have to settle for lower-down-the-barrel fare.

      • onyomi says:

        In his (mostly positive) review of the new Star Trek movie (which I also mostly liked), I think A. O. Scott described this problem very well:

        “The Hollywood rule book stipulates that the climactic sequence should involve the noisy destruction of a lot of buildings and an extended hand-to-hand fight between the good guy and the main villain. The villain should be motivated by the usual villainous grudge. Millions of lives should be in danger, and the actual casualties should be numerous and filmed bloodlessly enough to preserve the PG-13 rating.”

        • Lumifer says:

          Yeah, you get a bit blasé when everything explodes and flaming buildings fall out of the sky, but… no civilians ever die on-screen or even leave corpses.

      • VivaLaPanda says:

        I mean, this stuff is why people, me included, like rational fiction (/r/rational). It’s regular fiction but with a concerted effort to avoid tropes for the sake of tropes. I don’t think it’s inherently better, but as someone who has consumed lots of media common tropes really get on my nerves unless the underlying story/style is really great.

      • acorn says:

        I hate the dark warehouse shootouts.

    • Redland Jack says:

      I think your bit on knowing “which characters aren’t going to die” is the key bit (at least for me).

      In books/TV/movies/etc., I find it to be the case that, ‘the lower the stakes, the greater the excitement’. That is, if the bad guys are threatening to blow up the world, you know they aren’t going to succeed. If they are threatening to kill the sidekick, they might succeed, and if they are threatening to kill the guy they just introduced last episode, they have a high chance of success.

      Thus, if the author can get you invested in the guy they introduced last episode, they can create exciting action scenes.

      • Virbie says:

        Or best of all, they can go the route of The Wire (or, before that, Game of Thrones), which explicitly trades off the difficulty of eschewing narrative convention for the shock that it induces when you don’t expect it. Central, relatable characters that you spent a season (or five) getting to know can be unceremoniously killed off (and usually not in a way that affords them any dignitiy.

        • Nornagest says:

          I thought The Wire came first?

          • Bugmaster says:

            I think that Song of Ice and Fire (the book on which GoT was based until recently) came first.

          • Redland Jack says:

            The series ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ started up 20 years ago, with ‘A Game of Thrones’ as the first book in the series (which is why I can barely remember anything that happened!)

            That series is the one that made me realize that I don’t like unconventional storytelling style as much as I thought I would.

          • Nornagest says:

            Ah. Yeah, the book series came before The Wire, I just assumed we were talking TV. I wouldn’t say it’s that subversive relative to fantasy convention, though — there barely were any conventions for boat-anchor-sized through-plotted heroic fantasy at the time. It and Wheel of Time basically created that format in the modern era.

            (It may be significant, though, that George R. R. Martin worked as a screenwriter before turning to fantasy.)

          • It depends on what you mean by unconventional storytelling.

            The presentation was normal, though I think having each chapter being from the viewpoint of one of a small cast of characters was unusual.

            However, the early death of a major character was quite shocking at the time.

            The funny thing is that I read the first book and I thought it was born to be a mini-series, while Martin wrote it because he was sick of writing for television.

          • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

            A song of ice and fire is deliberately grimsuck in parts.

            SPOILERS

            SPOILERS

            SPOILERS

            SPOILERS

            SPOILERS

             

            SPOILERSSPOILERS

            The duel with gregor clegane is a clear point where the author conspires to make things shitty, but my impression things are subtly nudged to the bad in many places in the story. I posted about this somewhere else:

            In the clegane duel:

            Clegane doesn’t triumph through superior skill or strength or speed. He gets stabbed many times with a poison whose administerer should know it’s strength, having been portrayed as an experienced poisoner and generally competent guy. Said administer proceeds to stand on his chest, to gloat better. At which point, through the power of evil, clegane gains the strength to literally crush this guy’s head (iirc), and shout some smug line, in the manner of a children’s cartoon. The viper makes no attempt to twist out or escape, or attack any vulnerable points.

            Oh and then they resurrect clegane.

            And isn’t tyrion relying on the viper to win? But does tyrion die?

            All this huge setup for the fight, and it’s decided by two seperate instances of bullshit: the viper’s sudden fecklessness and apparent blindness to the concept of weight dosage, and clegane’s becoming a healthy man despite being on death’s door, even if he’s twice as heavy as an ordinary man, and lets say twice as strong from sheer vitality too, (it’s never suggested for a moment, nor the least hint given that that he faked his weakness). ..and all the wounds he’s taken with this poison that’s apparently ever so deadly in the smallest doses don’t make up for that even if the viper is a clueless idiot despite all the effort put into making him seem the opposite.

            And the plot seems to be relying on the viper to win -Tyrion needs it.

            And Evil does not win by superior strength, speed, intelligence, foresight, etc, but by the kind of deus ex machina that this enlightened series is supposedly above.

            And Tyrion doesn’t have to pay the piper, and neither does the mountain, thanks to a second deus ex machina.

            The idea that GRRM lets things play out and the cards fall where they may is all talk. He just likes being shitty sometimes. And he’s not actually very subtle about it.

      • Julie K says:

        One of the best scenes in the Harry Potter series was in the third book, when the dementors are surrounding Harry and Sirius. Since Sirius doesn’t have plot armor, we genuinely don’t know if he will survive or not.

      • Corey says:

        Yeah, action-genre stuff has been picking up the bad habit SF/F has of not letting dead characters STAY DEAD. Therefore death just doesn’t pack dramatic punch anymore.
        Cracked had a list recently of how the world would be different under cartoon/comic rules and one of them was the legalities of death getting convoluted as people keep coming back. (Another interesting bit was four-digited-people probably inventing computers sooner as octal would be their “natural” number base).

        • Anonymous says:

          Another interesting bit was four-digited-people probably inventing computers sooner as octal would be their “natural” number base

          This is absurd and just the kind of drivel I would expect from modern Cracked.

    • Bugmaster says:

      You should watch the video series Every Frame a Painting sometime; especially the episode on Jackie Chan. The reason action in movies looks so boring is because it is shot, and then edited, in a particularly boring way. Making a fight — regardless of the choice of weapon — look like “a struggle between wills” or a test of the warrior’s skill is an art; and modern filmmakers largely lack the talent and the skill to pull it off. Hence, the boredom.

      • ThaddeusMike says:

        If I’m thinking of the same video, it isn’t just skill but patience, time, and the trust of the studio that let Jackie Chan produce good fight scenes.

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      I agree. For a lot of mainstream movies I feel like the action is supposed to be the payoff for all the buildup, but it rarely feels worth it to me. It’s probably a combination of the predictable failure of the villains (in a typical story) and a lack of freshness or originality in what’s actually happening – it seems with cheap CGI these days most action movies opt for bigger and louder over any other considerations. Like, I’m just not impressed by Manhattan being “spectacularly” destroyed for the nth time. 21st century problems I guess.

      When I saw the latest X-Men movie I remarked to my friends that I probably would have been really impressed by it if it was the first superhero movie I’d ever seen. As it was it just felt like more of the same.

      I also definitely agree that the “final manly fistfight” thing is beyond tired.

    • Lysenko says:

      General consensus among those with above-average brow altitude regarding film seems to be that as a rule mainstream action cinematography and choreography is terrible, so I’d consider that possibility. Movies are visual storytelling, and if you fuck up the editing it is very easy to cross the line from “dynamic and intense camerawork” to “choppy, scatterbrained, chaotic blur”. Can you break it down some by sub-genre of action? How do you feel about:

      -Heroic Bloodshed? (Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, etc). Throw in its American progeny like Shoot ‘Em Up, Equilibrium, etc in here as well if you like.
      -Semi-Realistic War Movies? (Saving Private Ryan, We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down)
      -Action-ed up War Movies? (Fury, Hurt Locker, Act Of Valor*)
      -Crime dramas? (Heat, Collateral, A History Of Violence)
      -Martial Arts? (Ong Bak, The Raid)

      Can you identify any genre here where examples particularly appeal? Particularly repel? As a side note, most of the films used as examples are at least decent and in a few cases very good examples of action film-making, if you’re interested in recommendations, or at least have interesting conceits (Like Act Of Valor starring real Navy SEALs. The great part is all the action scenes are full of real Navy SEALs. The shitty part is all the OTHER scenes are full of real Navy SEALs. Except the Interrogation scene, which is surprisingly good).

    • Acedia says:

      Does anyone else find 90% of the “action” in 90% of action movies to be painfully boring?

      I think that’s just a natural consequence of getting older. When I was young I tolerated the boring dialogue/exposition scenes in order to get to the action, now it’s the reverse.

      Soon enough you’ll start enjoying early nights and getting socks as a birthday gift too.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      I agree with your assessment, and I think that a lot of the problem boils down to five things:

      1: A lack of originality and artistry. I’ve never been bored while watching an action movie in a Zhang Yimou movie, because he takes the time to make each scene both visually distinctive and beautiful. The fight in the bamboo grove in “House of Flying Daggers” and the swordfight over the perfectly reflective lake in “Hero”are full of striking shots which are unlike things which I’ve seen before. Fury Road, Snowpiercer, and Kill Bill also do this really well.

      2: Confusing scene geography that makes it hard to tell what’s actually going on. This problem has been especially bad in the shaky-cam quick-cutting post-Bourne era. If you can’t tell where people are and what they’re doing in an action scene, it’s hard to care. This is notably not a problem in Fury Road, which manages to juggle a huge number of chaotic elements at once without losing its sense of geography. I think that this is also more likely to be a problem in super-CGI heavy movies where the filmmaker can’t quite get a sense of the geography while the film is actually going on.

      3: Lack of clear stakes. Other people in this thread have already covered this really well.

      4: Poor characterization and storytelling. The Indiana Jones movies, Fury Road, Attack the Block, and Aliens are enjoyable to watch because their characters seem like people, who demonstrate actual feelings, and visibly react to the situations they’re in in interesting ways. This can be a great way to get around the stakes problem– we all know that Indiana Jones is going to get out of whatever terrible situation he’s in, but if he seems agitated or scared, we can suspend our disbelief. Also, it’s much easier to care about a fight if you give a shit about the people involved in it on some level.

      5: Action with no narrative function. Ideally, fights should work together with the movie’s overall narrative goals rather than feeling like an interruption. They should tie in with the things the movie has asked you to care about since the start of its runtime. Compare the Death Star attack in the original Star Wars to the X-Wing raid on Starkiller Base in “The Force Awakens.” The former is a much more compelling, because it centers on three characters we care about (Luke, Han, and Vader), and it pays off both Luke and Han’s character arcs (Luke completes his transition from passive farmboy to agenty hero, Han realizes that he gives a shit about more than just money). The latter involves only one character we care about, and he’s one who doesn’t even have an arc, and nothing really gets paid off, so while we’re watching, we really just want JJ Abrams to cut back to the lightsaber duel in the snow (which ties into the film’s overall narrative and emotional arc much more effectively).

      • moridinamael says:

        I’ve always said the Harrison Ford’s superpower is that he actually appears to be hurt when he gets punched and basically seems to be barely getting through his action scenes alive. Contrast this with your average action hero who generally seems completely unaffected the violence they’re enduring.

        • onyomi says:

          One positive in the new Star Trek was that, while the final action sequence felt a little obligatory and uninteresting (though the setting, at least, was interesting), Chris Pine at least had the decency to look a little worse for wear in the following scenes.

        • Civilis says:

          I think this is a good point. At least with the original Indiana Jones trilogy, there’s also the feeling Indiana is no better skill-wise than those he fights. It’s not Captain America beating up some mooks that are well beneath him before the named villain makes his appearance. There are a couple of sequences where Indiana is on the ropes to an opponent or opponents that obviously outclass him… the big bruiser at the aircraft in Raiders, the tank fight in Last Crusade. It’s also what makes the improvised ‘just shoot him’ moment work so well; here he is, worn out and looking it (due to a real-life case of sickness, I understand), where he faces a guy he can’t take in a straight fight, so he doesn’t.

          For me, another example of this is Bruce Willis as John McClane in the first Die Hard. In some ways it’s a shame that Bruce Willis has gone on to be a stereotypical action star, as I understand the peril the character was in was more obvious before the actor acquired a reputation as an action star.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      I’m absolutely bored out my skull by most action sequences, with the exception being martial arts. Explosions and guns don’t do it for me, but watching Bruce Lee beat the hell out of six random dudes does.

      • onyomi says:

        I also tend to like martial arts more than most other action sequences. I think part of it is the show of technical, physical skill involved. Scenes involving swords and guns can also be good if (big if) they can make me feel that the actors are actually skilled in using them. The martial arts scenes are (unsurprisingly) usually better when performed by martial artists, as opposed to actors who got a crash course, though. In the latter case weird slomo and other “spectacular” stuff like in the Matrix tends to substitute for actual skill.

        • Exit Stage Right says:

          When you “get” the craftsmanship behind something it can heighten your appreciation.

          But its a bit weird because I don’t feel the need to understand the craft behind the music I listen to. I just…enjoy. But with a big action scene, my brain just doesn’t do the enjoying thing. But then when its hand to hand combat, where the skill involved is obvious, it does. But I didn’t need to see the skill involved to enjoy a song.

          Which leads me to conclude I have no fucking idea why I like the things I like

          • onyomi says:

            “Which leads me to conclude I have no fucking idea why I like the things I like”

            Haha… this is part of why I posted. Because I myself am not entirely sure why I don’t like most action sequences, though I have theories, of course.

            I am also not sure whether most movie goers DO enjoy these sequences and that’s why they’re always there, or if filmmakers overestimate the extent to which these scenes are really necessary based on some sort of logic like “all our biggest sellers had a big action scene at the end; therefore, all movies need a big action scene at the end to sell”?

          • moridinamael says:

            Jackie Chan at least knows exactly why his action scenes work.

          • onyomi says:

            Thanks, that was a very good analysis of why Jackie’s action almost never feels boring.

        • Maware says:

          What’s funny is that to me, the older a wuxia film is, the better the battles. The One-Armed Swordsman for example was one of the earliest kung-fu films, but unlike others its raw and honest instead of choreographed and stylistic. The Five Deadly Venoms manages to put intensity into its kung-fu battles. But then you get into 1990s and later wuxia and you get absurdity for the sake of absurdity and whimsy. While Chan’s sequences are amazing, I think they too get too mannered and stylized over time. Too good and too polished.

          I also remember in a film class I had, the teacher said one of the things Kurosawa did well with Yojimbo was humanize the battle scenes of chambara films again. They had become very dull and ritualized with the bad guys always crying out “oka-san” when they died, but Kurosawa put the intensity and fear of approaching death into the times he used it. John Woo is kind of the other example, with his original gun battles so fluid and new that guns felt like extensions of the people themselves. But he easily descended into dull ritual, as did the people who copied them.

          • onyomi says:

            To my mind “wuxia” films and “kung fu” films are two different genres. “Wuxia” is the older tradition of flowing robes, dancing along the trees–think Jin Yong, Touch of Zen, and Crouching Tiger. “Kung fu” films are focused on raw physicality and more realistic hand-to-hand fighting and kind of begin with Bruce Lee. Jackie Chan is a kung fu film star, not a wuxia star.

          • Maware says:

            Yeah I guess I use that term as a catch all. From the little I know, I think you can break the timeline down to 1970s-1980s straight kung-fu films, 1990s-2000s “new wave” films which are heavily stylized (the magic crane is one example) and 2000-2010 the flowing robes art-inspired type, and 2010 seems to be more of a big budget style like the Detective Dee films.

    • Jaskologist says:

      I definitely got boring during the big everybody vs everybody fight in Captain America: Civil War. I realize it’s a superhero movie, but even so it seemed way too unrealistic, with no actual stakes. I never for a moment believed that when one guy smashed a 747 over another guy’s back that this would actually harm them, and it didn’t. Heck, they didn’t even want to actually hurt each other. They were just going through the motions, throwing punches that looked big but did nothing.

      SPOILERS, but even inflicting an injury at the end of the fight didn’t really help, because he was such a minor character anyway, and will probably be cured by the next movie if they need him.

      The final battle, on the other hand, was much better. There was pathos in that one.

      • I agree about the lack of “killing” stakes, but I think you might be in the minority.
        The actual tension is whether Captain America will escape or whether Iron Man will catch him. Most critics and viewers really liked the superheroes bashing each other.

        I agree the lack of real stakes kind of killed the mood somewhat.

        The really crappy fight sequence, IMO, is the beginning of the movie, where the Avengers 2.0 take a long time extensively flooring an army of mooks with basically no back-store, too many close-ups, and lots of shaky cam.

        That spoiled my appetite for most of the movie.

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      Yeah, most action movies you know the good guy is going to win/not get shot/etc. so the boredom is predicated on how predictable it is.

      For my action fix, I just play GTA and try to outrun the cops. Better than any car chase sequence in any movie ever.

    • It’s possible that action sequences also get boring because there’s a lack of emotional variety– it’s a tremendous amount of the same sort of stuff.

    • brad says:

      TV too. I watched Continuum recently on Netflix, and after the first season or so I started just fast forwarding through the action sequences. A similar thing I noticed myself doing was fast forwarding through scenes involving characters or subplots I don’t care about. On Boardwalk Empire for an entire season whenever Gillian Darmody was on the screen I’d fast forward.

      Interesting how netflix (or amazon or …) changes the way I watch. There’s some article online somewhere about a guy who watches TV sped up (pitch corrected, of course). I haven’t tried that yet, but I was intrigued.

    • moridinamael says:

      I think the Red Letter Media reviews of the Star Wars Prequels lay out pretty clearly why some actions scenes work and some don’t.

      It simply gets down to the fact that good action scenes are really about the internalization of the conflict by well-drawn characters. You’re into what’s happening because you’re into the characters.

      As a prerequisite, the action has to be believable within the universe of the movie and the way the action plays out has to be based on authentic character choices. And there has to be tension in terms of true uncertainty about the outcomes, you have to deeply want to see a certain outcome and feel like achieving that outcome is an uphill battle for the characters.

      • Sometimes, sometimes not.

        I can tell you I started watching Naruto because I saw some clips of Naruto v Sasuke and thought it was awesome. I powered through a LOT of crap just to get and understand that ONE fight.

        I also don’t care what anyone says, Vader vs. Obi-Wan is boring as all hell and the fight in Revenge of the Sith is superior (if too long).

    • FacelessCraven says:

      The two big problems for me might be described as padding vs harm and combat vs choreography.

      Padding is where the ratio of attacks vs harm inflicted is very low. lots of shots fired, very few hits. lots of punches, but both fighters are still on their feet. Violence is exciting and scary because it tends to be profoundly decisive. Water it down by showing it to have no consequences, and the viewer stops caring almost immediately. Reservoir Dogs is an example of a movie with almost no padding. The Raid: Redemption is an interesting example, as the amount of padding ramps up as the movie goes on. The Through the Floor sequence in Raid: the Redemption seemed like the best in the movie. The whole thing reeks of desperation, things go badly wrong repeatedly and without warning, individual fights are chaotic and short, weapons are decisive. It’s one of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen. By the end of the movie, sadly, the action has nerfed itself all the way down to generic kung-fu-movie levels.

      The problem is that high-harm action means either a truly absurd bodycount (Rambo 4) or limiting action to relatively short sequences (Heat, Way of the Gun). The later method means you have to actually fill your movie with plot and dialogue and acting and stuff like that, so it’s relatively rare.

      combat vs choreography is about whether the combat is framed in terms of practical or aesthetic concerns. It’s how you get combat sequences that look more like dancing than a fight. Since high-harm tends to make the dancing unsustainable, high-choreography tends toward high-padding as well. Combat becomes a performance piece, all threat and excitement drains out, and you’re left with sweaty, grunting ballet.

      • smocc says:

        Comment of the week.

        The animated short Prologue by Richard Williams, which was nominated for an Oscar this year, is just a single fight scene, but it’s the most intense fight scene I’ve ever seen. It’s very high harm and very high combat. I came away shocked at how desensitized I’ve become to fictional violence, which comes from lots of high padding, high choreography fight scenes.

        (Which isn’t too say padding and choreography can’t be fun; see Jackie Chan movies and professional wrestling for counterexamples.)

      • Nornagest says:

        Good distinctions. Léon: The Professional stands out to me as a high-harm action movie, and sure enough, it leans heavily on its characters. (The body count gets quite high towards the end, but almost all of that is down to one relatively short sequence.)

        I think you could point to Lady Snowblood as a high-harm high-choreography piece. Some modern revisionist Westerns are headed that way too, although the first films in the subgenre (e.g. Unforgiven) were intentionally very far toward the combat end.

      • onyomi says:

        This is definitely a big problem with all the super hero films. Even for the heroes whose powers don’t involve invulnerability, they all just shrug off attacks and falls which would cripple any regular person. In a recent Avengers movie (Age of Ultron, I think), a movie with a number of pointless scenes, no scene felt more low-stakes than the one where Iron Man is dropping buildings on the Hulk. The two characters are basically invincible, so no matter what they do, it feels like nothing is at stake; and in the end, nothing is.

        • Lumifer says:

          I think it’s a matter of expectations. Avengers are not serious movies, they are entertainment. I don’t expect to empathize with the characters, they are comic book heroes, after all. I want witty quotables and flashy special effects, I hope for tolerable amounts of stupidity in the plot, I do not foresee much in the way of emotional engagement.

          These are Boom! Shiny! Boom! movies.

          • onyomi says:

            But just Boom! Shiny! Boom! is completely boring to me.

            Again not trying to signal how cultured I am–I feel like “Boom! Shiny! Boom!” is treated as if it were the “candy” of movies (sometimes called “eye candy,” actually)–fun, stimulating, but not enough to really satisfy the intellect or whatever. But for me it doesn’t even do that. It’s not even good for the quick, cheap thrill it’s marketed as. “Boom! Shiny! Boom!” literally makes me want to fall asleep.

            Most blockbuster action films make me feel like I’m getting served unseasoned gruel at McDonalds. When I say “but this gruel is flavorless,” people are like “what do you want? It’s fast food.”

            An example of what I think would be good “movie candy”would actually be many of Jackie Chan’s films, mentioned elsewhere in here–silly, throwaway plots, no deep thought necessary or appropriate, but still just a lot of fun to watch.

            I think a big part of it is actually the increasing reliance on CGI in lieu of the “shiny” pop we expect in a fun “fast food” sort of movie. I feel like my brain kind of tunes out to the digital effects. This was part of what made Fury Road so great–not that much CGI with the result that the crunching of steel against steel at high speeds feels viscerally real.

          • Sandy says:

            But the train sequence from Spider-Man 2 was tense and gripping in a way that nothing from the Avengers movies could equal. That movie also had witty quotables and flashy special effects, but the Avengers movies are sorely lacking in what Raimi’s Spider-Man had.

          • onyomi says:

            Watched Spider Man 2 for the first time recently and was pleasantly surprised. Besides good setups like the train sequence, maybe the fact that we are constantly reminded of Uncle Ben’s death makes it feel like maybe Aunt May doesn’t have plot armor either.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ onyomi

            Well, then your tastes do not match the target audience’s. I expect you know such things happen : -/

            Hollywood measures the success of its films in dollars.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            @onyomi – Have you scene the boxing scenes in Creed (spinoff from Rocky) it is one of the most exciting scenes I have ever seen, because the fight is absolutely realistic in that damage seems to actually last, unlike a Marvel movie.

          • onyomi says:

            I did enjoy Creed. The emotional aspect felt pretty real too.

          • moridinamael says:

            The (first two) Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies are excellent because Raimi understands that the focus of the story is the human struggles of Peter Parker. The tension and engagement comes from your concern over whether Peter is going to be okay, whether he’s going to keep his secret, whether he’s going to be able to juggle his heroic life with his personal relationships. You’re blue-balled for two whole movies before he finally gets with MJ.

            Those movies are still probably the best of the superhero movies.

          • Tibor says:

            Onyomi: How did you like Nolan’s Batman? Particularly the Joker (I forgot what the film’s name actually is) was amazing but even the first one, where you do not get such an entertaining villain, is really well done, I’d say. You know that Batman wins and all that and the story is not all that important but the way the action scenes just makes you feel like you are watching a great craftsmanship (and that is often better than would-be art).

          • onyomi says:

            I liked the Dark Knight up until the last 15 mins. or so. It should have ended and dealt with Two Face in a different film. I remember being especially pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed a car chase scene with Batman and the Joker. I almost never enjoy car chase scenes. I’m not sure what exactly it was about this car chase scene. I think it just felt gritty and real in a way most don’t, and, importantly, didn’t go on too long.

            Length is really one of my biggest problems with a lot of action scenes. Violence in real life tends to be quick and shocking, not long and drawn out (obviously there are situations like trench warfare, but even that is long, uncomfortable waiting punctuated by brief bursts of intensity). Long action scenes reduce the impact unless they are unusually creative and/or furthering the story as they go.

            Didn’t much like the other two Nolan Batman films, though. The third one was literally the plot of a 20 min. episode of Batman the Animated Series, which did it better. Also, couldn’t understand what the hell Bane was saying through that mask.

          • Tibor says:

            @onyomi: I did not much like the third Batman either. But I still enjoyed the first one. The second one was the best of course. One thing about Joker is that he seems genuinely threatening because of how completely mad he is. And since they demonstrate in the film that they are willing to kill an important (and female!) character, you are no so absolutely sure that both ships get to be saved at the end (or either of them).

            The only other superhero film I really liked were The Watchmen but that is almost not even an action film.

            By the way, inspired by the discussion here, I watched two Jackie Chan films – Mr. Nice Guy and the Drunken Master. I liked the fighting scenes in the first film because they are genuinely creative and entertaining, otherwise the film is horrible, the only one who can kind of act is Jackie Chan and it is really painful to watch the actors outside of the fighting scene. The Drunken Master which is the film which usually gets the highest scores from reviewers online seemed extremely infantile to me, all including the “funny” sound effects, while the fighting itself is a lot less creative. I did not finish the film, but I doubt the style changes dramatically.

            I would like to see a (Jackie Chan?) film with the fight scenes like in Mr. Nice Guy but with at least average acting and something resembling a plot. Are there any?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Tibor:
            Did you watched the original version with the original audio track (not a dubbed version)?

            I only ask because I watched Kung-Fu Hustle in theaters (when it came to the US) and it was one of the funniest movies I had seen in quite a while. I tried re-watching it with my wife at home and it was absolutely awful and I later realized it was because the dubbing (and format truncation) completely ruined all of the comic value of the film.

            I haven’t actually seen either Mr. Nice Guy or Drunken Master though.

          • Tibor says:

            @HeelBearCub: Mr. Nice Guy is US production, but there the reviews are pretty bad too, so I think it is jut the way it is (I loved one scene from a trailer and looked the film up because of that…there were more good scenes like that but the stuff between the fight scenes was painful to watch).

            Drunken Master does get slightly better once Freddie (Jackie) meets the drunken master. The fighting gets more entertaining, although the style of humour is still rather childish. I watched the US dubbing (I’d rather watch it in Cantonese with subtitles, the way they talk just does not fit the setting very well).

          • Zombielicious says:

            Re: Drunken Master, there’s a remake titled The Legend of Drunken Master, also starring Jackie Chan and with a higher budget. Been a while since I watched any of his movies, but I remember it being pretty enjoyable.

            seemed extremely infantile to me, all including the “funny” sound effects, while the fighting itself is a lot less creative.

            Also have to plug the old movie Mystery of Chessboxing – very “infantile” and with absurd sound effects, but extremely creative wushu-based fight scenes (check out the fights towards the end). Kind of a cult classic.

          • Actual Rodent says:

            @Tibor

            I think Police Story (1 & 2), The Young Master, Project A (1 & 2), and Drunken Master 2 all stand up well on rewatch, and all have things resembling plots, if you squint.

            With Jackie, you always risk encountering some cringe-inducing humour and Pollyana moralising. The good films are the ones where the virtues outweigh these things. Avoid anything post-1995.

      • TomFL says:

        I heard a rumor that a Storm Trooper might actually hit something he was aiming at in one of the future movies. With all the money the Empire has, you would think they would invest in some gun range practice. My first bit of advice is to stop shooting from the hip.

        • Nornagest says:

          I always liked the fanwank that the stormtroopers can’t hit anything in any of the scenes we see because they’re under orders to let Our Heroes go.

          It’s a better justification in the first and third movies than in the second, though. Haven’t seen Force Awakens, don’t want to think too hard about the prequels.

          • LHN says:

            It’s not obviously a fanwank in the first. The Imperial plan is to follow the Falcon to the Rebel Base. And the Stormtroopers are pretty brutally effective in the attack that opens the movie and in destroying the (admittedly civilian) Jawas and moisture farmers.

            Likewise, in the second, the Imperial attack on Hoth is inexorable, and the only one to score a minor victory against them is a space wizard super-pilot. They also have no trouble taking over Cloud City. (Though the Falcon escapes, this time evidently without a tracking device. Should have stuck another one on there for luck.)

            In the third, no. Defending the force shield protecting the second Death Star is literally the most important infantry task in the galaxy at that moment, and the Emperor dispatched “a legion” of his “best troops” for the purpose. There’s no way having them fall to stone age teddy bears with spears can be spun to make Imperial troops look good.

          • Nornagest says:

            In the third, no. Defending the force shield protecting the second Death Star is literally the most important infantry task in the galaxy at that moment, and the Emperor dispatched “a legion” of his “best troops” for the purpose. There’s no way having them fall to stone age teddy bears with spears can be spun to make Imperial troops look good.

            I was thinking more of ensuring that Luke makes it to Vader alive, but that’s only valid for half the movie. There’s no excuse for the Ewoks, I agree.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            They were supposed to be wookies!

            I have been robbed of the movie where wookies tear stormtroopers limb-from-limb.

            Give me wookies engaging in asymmetric warfare against imperial troops who foolishly abandon their fixed positions or give me death!

          • John Schilling says:

            They were supposed to be wookies!

            This.

            If we recast the Endor sequences with Wookies, preferably bowcaster-armed, we get three solid movies worth of Imperial Stormtroopers as consistently, brutally effective adversaries except for the one sequence where they were ordered to take a dive – and consider the level of discipline it would take to pull that off, to stand against intruders who are shooting to kill, while deliberately missing with every return shot?

            And that’s not fanwanking, not when one of the lead characters spells it out on-screen.

    • Odoacer says:

      I’ve heard people say that action sequences are a lot better in Hong Kong/Asian films. Is that true? I’ve only seen a few, Crouching Tiger, Hero, Ip Man 2 and Ong Bak 2. However, outside of the initial wire fighting sequences, I can’t say that I was overly impressed. Some of the fights were overly choreographed and too long.

      • Fred says:

        I think you need to correct for overall Asian fetishization. If the person making that claim also does acupuncture, participates in a martial art, thinks sushi has sold out and has now moved on to izakaya you should probably discount his opinion accordingly.

      • Nornagest says:

        Except possibly for Ip Man 2, which I haven’t seen, the films you mentioned fall into the wuxia genre. In terms of content that can be thought of as a loose Eastern (particularly Chinese) equivalent of heroic fantasy, but it also has a rigid set of cinematic norms attached to it, kind of like John Wayne-era Westerns. If the style doesn’t do it for you, you’re probably better off finding another genre.

        Good news is, there are plenty.

      • Actual Rodent says:

        My knowledge of hong kong action is limited almost entirely to early Kung Fu comedy.

        Unlike the films you cite, these films tend to feature few wires. Drunken Master (1978) is a good example. The actors are engaged in a a skillful dance-like combat which employs household objects, and gimmicks (this guy has a head made of iron, this guy uses only legs, whatever), is choreographed to within an inch, and features broad humour and comical misunderstandings.

        People I show these to generally like them, and even if they don’t will agree that nothing in western cinema quite fills this niche. The best of these appear to me to involve an almost fanatical degree of skill, and the fact that it’s basically in the service of fart jokes gives it this weird humility.

    • meh says:

      I loved how in Fury Road the story was actually being told during the action. The more typical approach is to have an unrelated action scene for it’s own sake, and then everything stops for the story to move a notch forward.

    • ThaddeusMike says:

      I’ve been having a similar problem lately. I think it relates to the Marvel wisecracking superhero somehow, but I’m not sure which way the causation runs. Wisecracking superheroes do have the ability to take the focus off of the action itself, but did that lead to an undervaluing of good action or was it a solution to the problem of action scenes being too similar across movies?

      I will note that I don’t find action scenes to be impossible to enjoy, but it seems that good action is getting harder to find. Star Trek: Beyond had this problem, I thought. There was a big bit in the middle that just had no point, as far as I could tell. I liked the space bit because it was visually pleasing, but the hand-to-hand was all swooshing cameras and I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Would I once have liked it, or was it just bad work?

    • TomFL says:

      It would actually be exciting if the main characters died in these scenes more often. There is no drama when you know to near certainty that the main characters will “miraculously” survive all these scenes. Occasionally someone breaks new ground with visual effects, but that is about it.

      • Montfort says:

        I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to have a movie that looked like and was advertised exactly like a typical, slightly-above-average action blockbuster, and have the main character die about 15 minutes into the film in the middle of a seemingly inconsequential mook-fight, followed by the credits.

        Ideally, critics would be in on it, there would be zero leaks, and opening day would be huge (and viewers would be refunded most of the price of their tickets afterwards), but of course all these things would be impossible to pull off.

        • TomFL says:

          The only one I remember is a very mediocre flick Deep Blue Sea where in the middle of a big speech a shark just jumps up and eats Samuel L. Jackson in the middle of the movie. That’s that, he was gone.

          Hilarious.

        • Guy says:

          I was actually super mad when they turned around in Fury Road, instead of continuing onto the bed of the ocean to deal with starvation and/or interpersonal problems.

        • The Nybbler says:

          “Executive Decision” kills off Steven Seagal early on, but the film continues.

        • gbdub says:

          Apparently, at the end of “Dodgeball”, the bit where Vince Vaughn gets hit by Ben Stiller was supposed to be the end. Globo Gym celebrates, heroes lose everything, roll credits. Kind of wish they’d had the balls to leave that in (though I did love the joke where the chest of cash is literally labeled “Deus Ex Machina).

        • Nornagest says:

          You could check TV Tropes’ “Decoy Protagonist” page for a slightly friendlier version of this setup.

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      Getting into learning about the details of production solved most of this, for me. Instead of taking action in a Watsonian sense, getting to pay attention to the craft and hard work involved in action sequences really improved my enjoyment of such movies. Even the heavy-CG stuff, I’m admiring all of the craft and work it took to animate the sequences, what it took to film the live-action parts, the integration of live-action and CG, etc. The deeper I go into what goes into stunts (especially all of the precautions they take for safety), the more impressed I get with even lower level films that nonetheless have impressively skilled crew.

      That said, here’s a couple of posts I’ve done on the subject of what makes for better fight scenes. The camerawork thing really gets my craw, because imho very few productions get how to film dancing correctly anymore, much less fighting.

    • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

      I loved furiosa’s shoulder charge in mad max fury road. A really simple thing but amazingly executed imo.

      I don’t watch a lot of action films but I do find myself thinking, why didn’t they choreograph this better? Why don’t they seem to be interested in hurting each other?

      -Do none of these hollywood people even PLAY COMPUTER GAMES?

      I’m not expecting simo hayha to be consulting on these films. or a professional fighter or soldier. But an amateur fencer would be nice, or failing that someone who plays blitz backgammon every other week. Someone with some minimal connection to the idea of an adversarial combat.

      I get the impression from a lot of scenes that the creators don’t have not even failed to convey that the combatants involved are desperate to be faster than the other guy, but haven’t even tried to convey that they are making an effort.

       

      Looking for examples of stick figure animations, which imo have some of the absolute best fights, one of the first I came across was this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe-IWFYd4Ps, which is the product of a single animator, in a single week, and imo better than almost literally anything I’ve ever seen from an action movie.

      Here is a chase scene from district 13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3VZhPEQb8c

      Imo those are two good action scenes.

      Both have interesting twists/surprises/developments, but is that what fundamentally makes them good?

      What about the shoulder charge in mad max fury road?

       

      Imo the fundamental thing that makes these scenes good is that it’s gotten across that the participants have a superhuman, or near peak-human, or simply, desperate human, level of dedication and focus in winning their particular combats. The creators worked up a sweat imagining and mapping out those scenes.

       

      Anyway, sorry that this comment is all over the place, but back to the stick figure animation I linked: At 1:50, what happens to all of the momentum? -The two characters have launched themselves at one another, from a serious distance, are being propelled by what are basically different forms of rocket, and … It just cuts straight to a sword to sword face to face struggle.

      -What the fuck happened to the momentum? They should have careened off one another at a minimum.

       

      What happened once in this otherwise brilliant 5 minute animation from one artist, in one week, I have noticed happening multiple times in shorter scenes in big budget movies.

       

      So here’s a fight scene from die hard, one that’s imo significantly above average: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wykwob6IL-Y.

      First of all, isn’t it just pantomime in comparison? At times it seems to be making representitive gestures rather than attempts at depiction.

      There’s a lot of good stuff, but then you have things like them them taking it in turns hitting each other, kicks fairly clearly passing by the guy’s face. A smaller thing, but the guy approaching the corner staring at the camera. A ridiculously telegraphed.. downward karate chop? (literally slowly pulls arm back for it well within “get punched in the face” range)

       

      Anyway, I’m not going to try to dig up a truly bad action scene, but my view is that a lot of action scenes don’t even attempt to depict combats, instead opting for symbolic gestures, sometimes only in parts, but sometimes in almost whole, or entirely whole, scenes. And somewhat seperately, that there’s just a lot of straighforward incompetence floating around. Fight scenes being created by people who seemingly have never so much as imagined a fight.

  105. Tekhno says:

    Why doesn’t private property have more recognition as a form of government regulation? People clearly don’t think about it this way, but they should.

    • onyomi says:

      Private property antedates government as we know it. Arguably, even animals use the concept/convention to some extent.

      • Tekhno says:

        The problem is that if hunter gatherers are used as the example of non-governmental societies, then just as they didn’t have government as we know it, they didn’t have private property as we know it either. What we call private property is a set of absentee legal rights enforced by the state. Animals only have a form of possessive property that changes hands based on which individual is stronger, whereas private property is a communal institution.

        • Tracy W says:

          That might be what you call “private property”, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is using the term that way.

          For example, I recall my environmental economics professor talking about the development of lobster fishing rights in an island off the East Coast of the USA. On this island people had informal private property rights in lobster pots (enforced in extremis by cutting ropes). This was illegal under US law at the time, but the lobster population there was healthier than in other open-access lobster fisheries.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Tekhno, Your last sentence is a false dichotomy. Some animals have more than the first but less than the second.

        • houseboatonstyxb says:

          @ Tekhno
          The problem is that if hunter gatherers are used as the example of non-governmental societies, then just as they didn’t have government as we know it, they didn’t have private property as we know it either.

          How is it that we know that all hunter gatherer tribes were completely alike, and that we know what they were completely like?

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Really bad anthropology.

            Like, really embarrassingly bad “noble communist savages” stuff in the 60s and 70s, that turned the field into a bit of a joke until the science-based types pushed the worst offenders out.

          • Tekhno says:

            Where can I read about arguments that hunter gatherers have private property?

        • uhnon says:

          Yes, and gang turfs too are a possessive property that changes hands based on which gang is stronger. The point is, property seems a whole lot more peaceful than fighting over turfs. That seems to be the whole idea of civilization, that the government creates institutions that lead towards less bloodshed.

          Property is a formalization of power over a thing because you get less violence that way.

          Countries used to be seen the property of monarchs. And the idea was that the loyal subject should support the lawful king, until a pretender grows so strong that he is clearly winning in which case he is now the lawful king and the loyal subject should support him. Why? Because the only real goal is to reduce total bloodshed.

          Similarly, a worker commune can grab a bunch of factories and simply secede from the state and form their own state and government. Then they are likely attacked and wiped out but if they can somehow survive their new state can redraw property rights as they see fit. Putting it differently, there never was an idea that property rights should survive conquest or secession i.e. change of state.

          So the goal of property is to formalize power / strength / possession in order to minimize violence.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Define “private property” and “government”.

    • Paul Barnsley says:

      There’s a pretty significant strain of thought on the liberal left, devoted to pointing out that property is not “pre-legal”. A good example is Cas Sunstein’s treatment in “the Partial Constitution”, where he analyses supreme court decisions which treated property rights (including contractual rights) as pre-legal through the lens of what he calls “status quo bias” – the idea that we assume that the status quo represents non-intervention by the government, while any change to the status quo is government action.

      It’s quite persuasive, IMO, unless you adopt some radical rights-based theory of property rights.

      • hlynkacg says:

        The problem as I see it is that Sunstein’s argument proves to much. I don’t think any rights would qualify as “pre-legal” under Sunstein’s analysis.

        • Paul Barnsley says:

          That’s fine from Sunstein’s point of view (and mine, I think). It means that everything is ultimately a consequence of governmental action, which matter for the legal reasons I’ve discussed below. There’s no baseline state of government inaction.

          • hlynkacg says:

            It’s fine if you want to argue that “legality” is the sole source of morality but somehow I don’t think that’s what you have in mind.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            No, no direct moral claim, though it might feed into a tangential argument that the results of your labour rest on a foundation of laws. The instrumental claim is just that property is a result of government action, not inaction, which matters in legal contexts, particularly around governmental takings (e.g. is a law stipulating maximum hours an interference with proprietary rights, independent of whether it is a good idea?)

          • Tracy W says:

            @Paul:

            The instrumental claim is just that property is a result of government action, not inaction

            Do the advocates of this discuss how this plays out in the context of indigenous property rights? For example, colonial courts in Australia famously ruled the country “terra nullis”. I commonly hear this as a case of the government stripping Australian Aboriginals of their property, but if I am following your logic correctly, under Sunstein’s view property only exists if the government takes steps to actively recognise such rights.
            (I suspect Sunstein does not intend that result.)

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            I’m not going back to the source for any of this, but I think the direct response would be that the claim applies to almost all property rights within the boundaries of mature legal systems (so not to frontiers, geographic or otherwise). You could extrapolate and say that the existing aboriginal property distribution is due to the actions of the aboriginal state (or “state”), but I don’t think that adds much.

            So there could, I think, be property rights in the state of nature, that’s just irrelevant to anything a real world court might have to rule on. If they’re justiciable, they’re the product of laws.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @Paul Barnsley

            If your working definition of a right is “something a real world court might have to rule on” the idea that a “right” can exist in the absence of courts is naturally going to sound very silly. But that’s not what most people mean when they talk about “rights”.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Paul:

            the claim applies to almost all property rights within the boundaries of mature legal systems (so not to frontiers, geographic or otherwise)

            But if we can agree that there are property rights outside the bounds of “mature legal systems”, (leaving aside the question of the relative ages of English and Australian Aboriginal legal systems), then this rather undercuts the assertion that legal systems create property rights. If x exists in the absence of y, you need some strong evidence to claim that y causes x.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            The claim is that any, actually existing distribution of property rights which might be influenced by government action is, itself, a result of earlier government action. That’s perhaps a bit more tightly caveated than my earlier versions, I’ll grant you, but basically covers the same territory. So it’s an instrumental claim, not a philosophical one.

            With that said, if someone says “I have a right to property x” and they don’t mean “the state grants me an enforceable right to x” then they’re either confusing normative claims with positive ones, located in an unusual fringe market (like illegal drug sales, as Tracy suggests) or they’re full of shit.

            I feel like one and three are common enough, seemingly even in this thread, that it’s worth emphasising the regulatory roots of basically all proprietary rights.

          • Tracy W says:

            The claim is that any, actually existing distribution of property rights which might be influenced by government action is, itself, a result of earlier government action.

            I think the strength of this depends on how you define “a result”. Eg, when my grandfather was alive, there was an estate tax in New Zealand. My grandfather was a farmer and he followed the common route of putting the farm in a trust so as to avoid the estate tax. So he acted to negate the action of government. Of course that did affect the future distribution of the property – my grandmother was provided for by the trust and had to deal with trustees rather than having the money herself. But Grandad achieved his broad goals *despite* government action.

            Or another example. During the 1950s to 70s, NZ governments regulated banks to control the supply of credit, so a bunch of non-banks developed to get around the regulations.

            Or, during rationing or in Communist countries, black markets naturally develop to get around government limits.

            Property is certainly affected by what governments do. But people are not passive recipients of government regulations. If government regulations of property do not correspond to people’s interests, people seek ways around this. (This is not to say that all such seeking is good, I am merely making a descriptive claim, not a normative one.) Government is like the 800 pound gorrila in the movie theatre, it can sit where it likes but that doesn’t mean it can run the projector.

        • MugaSofer says:

          Yes, that’s what a “right” is – something that the government has ruled people get (unless that conflicts with other rights or legal precedent.)

          Hence citizens in different countries having different sets of rights.

          • Tracy W says:

            Your definition of “right” is not consistent with many uses. For example Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man or Mary Wollenstoncroft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women were not using rights as references to what the governments were granting. Or the American Declaration of Independence which is about American colonists asserting how the British government was violating their rights.

            And, if you came across some American in the 1850s writing something like “slavery is a violation of the rights of man” I think you’d understand what they meant even though the American government did recognise slavery back then.

            Rights have been historically asserted as something governments should be respecting. They are a constraint on government, not something created by it.

        • Tekhno says:

          But that’s the correct position. Rights are things we’d like to have that are then enforced by the state (or private defense agency or syndicalist association not a state honest type thing). Nothing more, nothing less.

          • gbdub says:

            So your position is that the Declaration of Independence is the incorrect position? It’s fine if you do, but it’s not a default position.

          • Nornagest says:

            You can still make a coherent argument in favor of natural rights, but they’re a lot less fashionable as an approach today than they were in 1776.

          • hlynkacg says:

            But that’s the correct position.

            If that is so, why the qualifier?

            Labeling a specific right as being “post-legal” implies that there is such a thing as a “pre-legal” rights and/or some other form of right that exists independently of legality. Otherwise the “pre-legal” label would be superfluous.

          • Tekhno says:

            @gbdub

            Rights are not natural, and unalienable, there is no creator (that we know of and can beseech)to hand them to us, and the idea of human equality is only meaningful if you specify what characteristics you consider to be the same across peoples.

            Apart from that, I’m down with saying “Fuck you, King George!” – but not because “natural rights”.

            @hlynkacg

            I’m not saying I agree with Sunstein’s pre-legal/post-legal distinction. I’m saying that the conclusion you gleamed that no rights would be pre-legal under that analysis says to me that the concept of “rights” is not a meaningful one outside of people who want those things enforcing those things. There’s no extra dimension in which ethical rights reside waiting for us to discover them, so it’s not really useful to speak of rights in a detached universal way.

          • Tracy W says:

            Apart from that, I’m down with saying “Fuck you, King George!” – but not because “natural rights”.

            If not because “natural rights” then why?

            Let’s take the example of slavery. Can I presume that you agree that slavery was wrong, even where it was legal? Or that apartheid was wrong in South Africa even though it was legal? Or that, say, a government whose soldiers regularly raped people was doing something wrong, even if it was legal?

            We have a set of ideas about what governments should be doing or not doing. People have been criticising government actions using those ideas for centuries, even though we argue about the details. Currently we refer to those ideas that are used to criticise governments’ actions or inactions as “rights” or “natural rights”. But even if we stopped using the word “rights” to refer to those ideas, the ideas would still be there, and some other terminology would develop to refer to the ideas collectively.

          • Tekhno says:

            @Tracy W

            If not because “natural rights” then why?

            Because I think liberal democracies generally handle regime change less violently than monarchies, at least when you are operating within a culture which can accept the essential truce that democracy is in the first place.

            Another reason, is that I emotionally sympathize with the desire of the colonists to manage their own affairs under a government they feel represents them.

            Yet another reason is that I prefer a lot of America’s legal rights to those of my own country the UK, and so I am glad that they were able to establish a different system, even if it has drawbacks. I feel that America has kept alive many liberal freedoms which are on the wane in Europe.

            Let’s take the example of slavery. Can I presume that you agree that slavery was wrong, even where it was legal? Or that apartheid was wrong in South Africa even though it was legal? Or that, say, a government whose soldiers regularly raped people was doing something wrong, even if it was legal?

            I don’t like slavery because I feel sorry for the slaves, and in a society that endorses slavery, it is more likely in the future that I or people I care about may also become slaves.

            I don’t have much of an opinion of apartheid, because I don’t know enough about South Africa to be able to come to a conclusion. Preliminarily I’m against apartheid based on what little I know of how oppressive it was, but that opinion is subject to revision. It depends somewhat on how similar apartheid was to slavery.

            An army of rapists sounds pretty repulsive to me, yep.

            We have a set of ideas about what governments should be doing or not doing. People have been criticising government actions using those ideas for centuries, even though we argue about the details. Currently we refer to those ideas that are used to criticise governments’ actions or inactions as “rights” or “natural rights”. But even if we stopped using the word “rights” to refer to those ideas, the ideas would still be there, and some other terminology would develop to refer to the ideas collectively.

            Yes, but the term “rights” carries connotations that affect the way people deal with these issues. It makes people think that these things are more objective and universal than they actually are, and leads them to try and globalize them. What we call things is important, and the idea of natural rights which are unalienable leads to monomaniacal policies which sacrifice every other consideration at the alter of these rights. The Iraq War was framed in terms of providing the Iraqis objectively superior universal rights that were being alienated by Saddam, regardless of whether the culture there was fit to carry those notions. The moral outrage at this idea of something universal and unalienable being violated gives moral force to potentially unlimited action.

          • Tracy W says:

            @tekhno, thanks for your answer.

            Rights thinking is not just about feeling sorry for someone, eg I can feel desperately sorry for a young child undergoing chemotherapy to treat a cancer without thinking that their rights are being violated. Or, say a scientist friend sees their favourite theoretical argument destroyed by a counter-argument, you can feel sorry for them without thinking they have a right to be immune to criticism.

            The rest of your argument is about the effects of views based around universal rights. But this is an argument about consequences, not about the existence of the thing itself. Plenty of harmful things exist, like wasps.

      • uhnon says:

        Why is it persusasive. Property originates in sheer violence, someone controls a turf by strength and possession. Property simply formalizes is so there is less fighting and violence over that. The problem with the left even libertarian left is idealism (supported by some of the libertarian right) that things should com from lofty moral principles and not simply from keeping a bunch of vicious humans killing each other the least.

        So property is pre-legal in the sense that William the Conqueror was strong and could kill anyone who would accept he possesses England and gives parts of it to anyone he likes. Property is the formalization of all that so that there is less fighting.

    • Agronomous says:

      My kids seem to have developed the concept of private property on their own with no help from parental regulation. My wife and I do discourage private enforcement of their private property, though: they should come to us when their sibling swipes their toy/book/candy, instead of shrieking and engaging in a wrestling match. And I suppose we discourage public enforcement, as well: we’d be pretty annoyed if they called 911 every time they were short a couple of pieces of Halloween candy.

      For more abstract kinds of private property (land, water rights, patents, copyrights) it’s not so much that you need government regulation as that you need widespread agreement about the nature of the property. My favorite example is how prospectors in 19th-century California devised and enforced a system of staking claims, something I’d previously thought you’d need a government to do. See also the Internet: IANA, Usenet distribution, and a bunch of other areas; Lessig’s book Code has plenty of examples. I’m also still kind of astounded that clothing designers have no property-type protection for their designs, yet they keep churning out new ones, and some of them keep getting rich doing so.

      Take off your government-colored glasses and see the world as it really is.

      • Paul Barnsley says:

        The argument is not so much that private property as a concept relies on the government (I’m sure there are those who do make that argument, though) it’s that a particular distribution of property is a consequence of the exercise of state power.

        So your youngest child’s books belong to them because of something that you did.

        The existence of frontier economies where the state* itself is created as a means of recognising and enforcing property rights is an interesting sideline, absolutely, but doesn’t do much to negative the claim that most of that which you own, you own as a result of government action.

        *(or “state”, or whatever, I’m not trying to make the circular claim that all property is guaranteed by the state and all bodies guaranteeing property are states”)

        • Nornagest says:

          I’m sure there are those who do make that argument, though

          There are; that’s one of the things Pierre “Property is theft” Proudhon was trying to get at.

          It’s one of the bedrock assumptions of left anarchism, in fact.

        • Agronomous says:

          So your youngest child’s books belong to them because of something that you did.

          I’m not sure I get your point, here: my kids don’t really produce books, so generally they’re given them by a relative. Maybe we should take the case of my oldest, and his computer: we didn’t pay for any of it; he earned all the money himself.

          What did I do to make that computer belong to him? (I assume we’re continuing with the parents-as-government analogy.)

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            “I assume we’re continuing with the parents-as-government analogy”

            Only as far as the parents remain the source of regulation. It sounds like that’s ceased to be true for your oldest, in which case we’re back to “he owns the computer due to a series of laws and actions on the part of the state”. The fact that he might have a strong moral claim to it – he earned all the money and purchased it according to freely-entered agreements and the common laws of contract – isn’t really relevant to what I’m getting at.

            But we could point out that, within your household, your son is entitled to keep (all?) the fruits of his labour, and to use those fruits to obtain items to which he can restrict access and freely store on your property as a result of your rules. These principles aren’t universal in families, and they don’t real represent some sort of les ses faire baseline against which everything else represents a deviation. They sound like sensible rules, but they are your rules and you came up with them and implicitly enforce them.

            The particular point Sunstein makes, is that changes to the distribution of property shouldn’t be classified (for constitutional purposes) as government action while maintaining the existing distribution is viewed as inaction. That’s pretty important for legal purposes, and probably has some wider moral resonance, but it’s not a direct response to a claim about property rights, in the moral sense of something belonging to you because you mixed your labour with it, or whatever.

            (It’s probably worth adding that if you don’t think there’s an important philosophical distinction between acts and omissions then the narrow point I’m making isn’t relevant to you, though it’s broader implications might be. The law thinks there is a big difference, though, so there are instrumental reasons for broadening the definition of governmental “action”)

          • Aegeus says:

            You stopped your older kid from swiping your little kid’s books (or toys, or candy, or whatever). If you didn’t intervene, and they had settled their property dispute by shrieking and engaging in a wrestling match, then we would probably see a different distribution of private property, weighted towards the kid that’s a better wrestler.

            Even though they both agree that the concept of private property exists, the one who enforces that concept can decide who ends up owning a particular bit of property.

          • Some dude says:

            You are the government insofar as you enforce the rights of property owners in your home. If your youngest child is given a book by a relative, then in the absence of you (the government) there is nothing stopping your older, presumably stronger child from taking the book as their own through force. Then the younger child might steal it back while the older child isn’t looking. The idea that the book is always the youngest child’s, even when they’re not guarding it, even when someone stronger wants it, is only maintained because of a stronger still force which punishes theft or force (you).

          • hlynkacg says:

            That “stronger force” would be cooperative equilibrium, rather than the government. The “law of the playground” rather than the police and the courts.

        • Tracy W says:

          ;that most of that which you own, you own as a result of government action.

          In an everything is connected state this is probably true, particularly since you say “a result” rather than “the result”.
          But, in that spirit, couldn’t we equally well say that every action the government takes is a result of private property? For example, the wealth created by private property is part of what supports a large state that is capable of being activist, and is arguably part of what supports us having democratic governments rather than dictatorships?

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            Tracy,

            I think there are clearly links between a nation’s capital base and the type of government it has.

            But I do think the link between law and property is somewhat more direct. Saying “I own this” is pretty straightforwardly a legal claim, and legal claims are an attempt to characterise the results of government action.

            None of this is an attempt on my part (nor, I suspect on Sunstein’s) to circle round to “and that’s why property is theft!”, but it might support a reasonable “you didn’t build that”-style argument. My point is even narrower though: legally speaking, property is regulation.

            (the distinction between common and statue law is part of what Sunstein is trying to get at, but I think he’s persuasive in suggesting that common law is pretty deeply rooted in the state)

          • Tracy W says:

            Saying “I own this” is pretty straightforwardly a legal claim

            What evidence could convince you otherwise?

            legally speaking, property is regulation.

            But that does not mean that the regulator is the government. For example, there are private arbitrators and, to the horror of the UK’s tabloids, Muslim courts (and less controversially, Jewish and others) operating in the UK.

            Plus legal disputes are actually relatively rare in day-to-day life. Most of the time most people manage their property without calling a regulator, let alone the government in. That legally speaking, property is regulation does not necessarily mean all uses of the concept of property are references to regulation. Consider, legally speaking, marriage is mostly about determining property rights when the relationship ends (by death or by divorce). That doesn’t mean that marriage is mostly about death and divorce.

            [Edit: I remembered that in the USA marriage brings tax changes, better edit that to something like “marriage isn’t mostly about death, divorce or taxes.”

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            But that does not mean that the regulator is the government

            Yep, sure. I’ve said elsewhere that we could think about the regulatory apparatus which arises in the absence of government-enforced property rights as a kind of proto-state, but as soon as a use that to try to prove anything about the universality of the state’s role in regulation I’m just playing word games.

            So, yeah, lot’s of stuff that’s regulated but not by the state, though in some of those cases that state is standing behind the apparent regulator and is imbuing them with their authority, while in other cases enforcement is actually internal and/or consensual.

            Plus legal disputes are actually relatively rare in day-to-day life. Most of the time most people manage their property without calling a regulator, let alone the government in.

            Legal scholars call this “bargaining in the shadow of the law” which is, to my mind, both pretty cool-sounding and accurate. It still matters deeply what the government would say about who has which rights.

            What evidence could convince you [that “I own this” is not a legal claim]?

            Some of the examples elsewhere in the thread demonstrate that, in some circumstances, appeals to ownership don’t meet the strict definition of “legal”, unless we start talking about “the law of the diamond dealing community/lobster fisherman”, or whatever. So that, I guess: it’s been demonstrated that I’m not asserting a genuinely universal truth, just a phenomenon broad enough to be a pretty good shorthand for a universal. I may be missing your point?

          • Tracy W says:

            It still matters deeply what the government would say about who has which rights.

            I suppose this depends on how you define “matters deeply”. Consider for example the status of married women under English common law in the 18th to 19th centuries. English common law had gotten itself to the position where married women had no rights to any money they earned or inherited. If you were a rich parent who cared about your daughter’s wellbeing or her future children’s, this was a worry. Thus the development of trusts so money could be settled on a daughter so her husband couldn’t spend the capital at least or disinherit her children.

            Or, say, where there’s an inheritance tax, people seek to ger around it by using trusts or donations before death or other such arrangements.

            Or, most dramatically, that governments have not been able to stop trade in drugs like marijuna or coke, despite very determined efforts to actively wipe them out.

            So that, I guess: it’s been demonstrated that I’m not asserting a genuinely universal truth, just a phenomenon broad enough to be a pretty good shorthand for a universal. I may be missing your point?

            Well, yeah, it was kind of a way for getting the parameters of your claim. Knowing what something isn’t is pretty important for understanding what it is. So, I guess, what evidence could convince you that the phenomenon isn’t broad enough to be a pretty good shorthand?

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            Tracy, I think some of your examples, such as trusts, are legal rights built on top of other legal rights, which doesn’t bother me at all. They’re definitely not outside the edifice of law and regulation. Property rights can be super-complex, my claim is just that it’s very rare for them to be genuinely extra-governmental.

            The most common objection to that in legal theory is to try to distinguish common (judge made) law from the actions of the state, but I suspect that argument looks even weaker to non-lawyers. Judges draw their authority to make law from the state, and few believe the claim that they are just “discovering” pre-existing law.

            So I think the exceptions are either, as I’ve said above, frontiers where the State’s write doesn’t yet run – those can spring up in odd places but, today, they’re rare – or areas where there is a genuine and enforced system of rights and obligations where the participants don’t have any recourse to the law. New York’s diamond trading is the classic example of a parallel legal system enforced by mutual consent, and there are a bunch of others. Some parts of the black economy would absolutely qualify, while other, more lawless parts would not, IMO.

            I think those exceptions are all sufficiently circumscribed that if someone tells me “my property rights don’t depend on the government in any way”, I’d probably feel comfortable assuming they were wrong, while recognising that they could be the diamond seller or internet claim jumper who proves the rule… If we think about the set of all (developed world) property, what percentage of it has proprietary rights which could be summarised without reference to the state? I’d ballpark it at under 5%, by value, but that’s just a WAG.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Paul, there’s quite a big difference between the claim that “property is regulation” or it “matters deeply what the government has to say about property rights” and the claim that property rights “definitely are not outside the edifice of law and regulation.” The last claim is much weaker than the first two.

            I agree with you on the last claim, but you have not yet convinced me on the first two, stronger, claims.

            I also note that you haven’t answered my question of what evidence could convince you otherwise. If you can’t say what evidence could change your mind, doesn’t that imply your position isn’t empirically based?

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            there’s quite a big difference between the claim that “property is regulation” or it “matters deeply what the government has to say about property rights” and the claim that property rights “definitely are not outside the edifice of law and regulation.” The last claim is much weaker than the first two.

            The last claim is a response to you specific example, of trusts as a form of proprietary right, though it applies equally to your earlier examples of sharia courts and mediation. All of these are in fact highly legalised, rather than existing outside the legal system. One of the things the government can say about property rights is “they will be allocated according to the result of a properly convened mediation” and another is “they can be held by an entity called a ‘trust’ for the benefit of someone who doesn’t own them directly”. These are both super-legal and super-significant things to say, as far as who gets to do what with the property rights, and lawyers and governments spend a long time litigating about them and regulating them. If the law said something different about the enforceability of arbitration/mediation (and from time to time it does) then the rights allocated by those means would also change radically. So, yeah, mediation is just regulation on stilts.

            So I guess my point is that, even in (some of) the edge cases you identify as being the least regulated forms of property you can think of, regulation actually plays a huge role. That’s probably a decent start for an inductive proof that regulation is a big deal everywhere else, too, since we don’t have the time to step through every type of right and say “yep, that’s founded in regulation”.

            Not every edge case, though. I’ve acknowledged that people treat some proprietary rights as real and binding, even where there’s no real state to fall back on – unless we get funny about our definition of “state” to add one wherever we find property rights. I’ve agreed that’s no helpful.

            I also note that you haven’t answered my question of what evidence could convince you otherwise. If you can’t say what evidence could change your mind, doesn’t that imply your position isn’t empirically based?

            I think this is actually somewhere approaching definitionally true. I consider that to be good news, rather than bad, for the strength of my argument, though. If you want to argue (and this is the specific claim Sunstein is responding to) that “the government shouldn’t interfere with my private property rights” that’s a pretty open and shut case of “keep government out of my medicare“. They already interfered.

            You would need to demonstrate that the legal framework under which you own that thing doesn’t rely, in any way, on the State in question. Which probably means we need other States in the picture, and I own X because of them, not because of you.

            So I think the only really empirical line of attack would be to demonstrate that what I think are actual exceptions (not just different types of state-backed regulation) – systems built on social trust and internal enforcement – are much more widespread than I realise: that a lot of actual rights arise and change hands without any party ever considering recourse to the state. I think those situations are important, interesting and rare.

          • Tracy W says:

            All of these are in fact highly legalised, rather than existing outside the legal system.

            Yes, but all of these are also things people use to get the kind of responses they want from the legal system (at least under the veil of ignorance when writing the contract). They are all examples of people using the legal system to achieve their desired processes, not the legal system determining property rights.

            One of the things the government can say about property rights is “they will be allocated according to the result of a properly convened mediation” and another is “they can be held by an entity called a ‘trust’ for the benefit of someone who doesn’t own them directly”.

            Before I go into the history of how trusts developed, would you agree that, while of course, the government could say that, if it didn’t actually say that, this would count as evidence against your position?

            I think this is actually somewhere approaching definitionally true. I consider that to be good news, rather than bad, for the strength of my argument, though.

            Well I’m afraid it isn’t good news. If I follow your argument it is that property is defined as ownership as defined by the government, so anyone arguing that property exists before government is definitionly wrong. Very well, let us define [pause to consult a dictionary] proprietus (the Latin root word for property)[ as something like “ownership of a thing independently of whether that ownership is legally recognised.” Therefore, the colonial courts in Australia may not have deprived Australian Aboriginals of their property, but they deprived them of their proprietus. And, wherever you read someone saying something like ” the government shouldn’t interfer with people’s enjoyment of their property” just read them as having mistyped “proprietus”. And ta-da, we have gotten past the definitional issue.

            You would need to demonstrate that the legal framework under which you own that thing doesn’t rely, in any way, on the State in question.

            This is your weak claim, which I have already said I don’t dispute. What I am interested in is your stronger claims, eg that “it matters deeply what the government has to say about who holds what rights.”
            I had better lay down my thinking here. Firstly, I think the government can badly stuff up a country. Most obviously by war, but also by things like hyperinflation or the mass consfiscation of property and price controls and the like that Venezuela is undergoing. My doubt relates to a broadly functioning country where people can go about their lives at generally low risk of being hit by a missile or being shaken down arbitrarily by the police (judging by some Economist articles the US may not meet this standard.) In those countries I suspect that, say, people mostly manage to pass on their wealth to their kids if they want to, regardless of estate laws, or, say, people manage to lend and borrow money even if the law bans it.

            I will say that, while I think this view is more likely to be true than your claim that what the government says deeply matters, my Bayesian confidence in this is still low. And I will give you a piece of counter-evidence: in the USA landowners have rights to any minerals discovered under their land, generally in Europe such rights belong to the state and while I don’t have the reference to hand, from memory there is evidence that this matters for things like the development of fracking.

            I’m really interested in an empirical debate on this point, to drive my own understanding. Including what you would consider evidence against your claim that government actions matter deeply. [Edit to add: I’m hoping to learn about the extent to which government affects actual property results – thus my focus on the word “deeply”]

          • Cole says:

            @paul

            How do you or sunstein distinguish the causal direction of government and property rights?

            Government being involved in all property rights implies one of two things to me:

            1. (what you are saying) Governments are necessary for the existence of mature and developed property systems.
            2. Governments can only subsist on domination of a mature and developed property system.

            To me the existence of frontier property systems that are clearly separate from the state suggests that #2 is more likely.

        • hlynkacg says:

          So your youngest child’s books belong to them because of something that you did.

          No, it “belongs to them” because they have staked a claim and others (for whatever reason) respect that claim.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            Do you think their respect for that claim might have something to do with the potential action by the regulatory state were they not to do so? My property rights over alpha centauri (which I totally own) are very different to those in respect of my laptop, even though no one is (in practice) disputing either.

            So I think “for whatever reason” is eliding away the exact point that is being discussed here.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Are we talking about multinational corporations or we talking about kids?

            I wager that the kids (and pretty much anyone else who isn’t a multinational corporations ) cares more about their own claims being respected than they care about the “regulatory state”.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            Your initial statement was that ownership arises from a claim which is respected by others. I agree wit that, as far as it goes, but added that others respecting your claim has a lot to do with what everyone thinks the state (or “state”) would do if you took it anyway. That can be parents, it can be a national government, rarely can it be a supranational authority (which is why international regulation is on wobbly ground, legal theory-wise).

            I think you’re saying that children can respect other’s property rights in order to preserve a symmetrical cooperative equilibrium. That’s more foresight than most adults are able to display, in the absence of the threat of coercion.

          • hlynkacg says:

            others respecting your claim has a lot to do with what everyone thinks the state (or “state”) would do if you took it anyway.

            Are you saying that fear of punishment is the only reason you don’t go around raping, murdering, or stealing anything that isn’t nailed down?

            My own experience is that “symmetrical cooperative equilibrium” is the norm rather than the exception. Especially when it comes to places were calling 911 isn’t really an option.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            “Stealing” presupposes property rights. In a world without them, we’re just “sharing”, and I can’t rely on morality to point me in the right direction.

            But, no, I don’t think a system of property ownership reliably works without recourse to third party enforcement. Maybe I’ll leave your book alone, but you won’t have a right to it. If I am six years old, and I desire your book, you will be in trouble, unless you are seven.

            There are, as you say, places where a system of property rights operates without legal backing, and in general it leads to insecurity of ownership. I’m not suggesting every item is stolen all the time (any more than enforceable property rights entirely eliminate theft), but respecting property becomes a habit rather than an obligation.

            There is a reason systems for codifying rights and enforcing them have developed in parallel pretty much everywhere, rather than just relying on people respects each others (possibly competing) claims.

          • eccdogg says:

            I am sure he would be along to post this as well but David Friedman has some nice thoughts on this subject.

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html

            I agree that “staked a claim that others generally recognize” is the right definition of property rights. Government can be one of the reasons that they are recognized, but it doesn’t have to be the only reason and in day to day life in the US I don’t think it is the major reason.

            I don’t refrain from stealing at the grocery store because I am afraid of getting caught. I don’t steal because I view it as the wrong way to behave. I believe these types of concerns are the motivator for a large majority of the population, not fear of government action.

            Certainly there is a subset of folks for whom this motivation is not enough. But even then there can be non governmental sanctions that can enforce some property rights like communal ostracism or vigilantism.

          • Loyle says:

            Some children, I’d say most, are actually empathetic and would consider it unpleasant if someone they were close to were upset. If you take something that belongs to your brother, and your brother starts crying, you’re not concerned about what your parents would do to you. For all intents and purposes, they don’t exist. Your main concerns are either “omg shut up” or “oh no, I did a bad thing, how do I fix it” or “I’m not a bad person, so I couldn’t’ve done a bad thing, so you must be wrong for crying q.e.d.” The parents don’t enter the equation until they decide to interject themselves, or one or both the kids decide to involve them.

            Children don’t like being punished, but they also don’t tend to behave as if with the looming threat of punishment from an authority over their heads. Punishment is just a means to reinforce certain values in your kids, values which they eventually pickup.

            Teens, on the other hand, very much so behave in regards to the threat of punishment from their parents, but by that point they’ve already learned to respect each others’ property rights and are more trying to get away with drugs and porn and saying cuss words and stuff.

          • Aegeus says:

            I don’t refrain from stealing at the grocery store because I am afraid of getting caught. I don’t steal because I view it as the wrong way to behave. I believe these types of concerns are the motivator for a large majority of the population, not fear of government action.

            Yeah, I would say that most of the time, it’s not useful to frame property rights this way. The idea of property rights matches up with our moral intuitions really well.

            But then again, people sometimes dispute things we consider perfectly normal, such as ancaps claiming that taxes are the same thing as armed robbery. So even though nobody really cares that both taxes and property laws are enforced at gunpoint, I think it’s useful to know that fact.

          • eccdogg says:

            Yeah, but I really don’t think that most property rights are defended by govt force. Norms of morality do most of the heavy lifting. And in areas where the state is less powerful other means of coercion (individual, private, group) can step in. Having the State enforce some property rights is probably a net plus but far from THE thing that creates property rights.

            I do think taxes come closer to the state being the primary enforcer. Introspectively the fear of punishment is a major reason I pay my full tax bill.

          • Paul Barnsley says:

            I think it’s a mistake to view norms of behaviour as existing in isolation from what the law allows. It’s not just that we know stealing is bad because it’s illegal, it’s that we have a clear idea of what “stealing” is based on how it’s defined legally.

            Get rid of legal enforcement of property rights tomorrow and “people will leave your stuff alone” will remain a good prediction of how most people will act, but your rights will be more likely to be infringed, if only at the margin. How well do you think proprietary rights over parking spaces, or quiet enjoyment would do if they relied wholly on moral intuitions?

            When talking about rights, it’s an important distinction if people respect them “as a rule” or “according to rule”.

            Get rid of enforcement for a generation, and you either get a de facto coercive enforcement body which looks a lot like the state or you get real insecurity of title. Not in the sense that everything is a free-for-all, but in the sense that a lot of marginal infringements aren’t considered “theft” anymore and a lot more people are willing to experiment with actual theft.

            Again, it’s not an accident that third party enforcement of property rights is pretty close to universal in societies where property is private, and that investment and private security are very different in societies where enforcement is wobbly or nonexistent.

          • eccdogg says:

            I don’t disagree with a lot of what you said.

            But twice you used the term “at the margin”. which is pretty much exactly my point. State enforcement does change and influence property rights but it does not do most of the heavy lifting in creating them. At least that is how it seems to me.

            I would also argue that it is very hard for a government to create any type of property rights. To the extent that the government attempts to establish property rights that do not fit the norms of society those property rights are often ignored.

          • Irishdude7 says:

            I think your implied definition of property here is exactly right. An interesting follow-up question is what factors influence whether someone will respect other people’s property claims.

            Also relevant to enforcing property claims in the absence of the state is this nice essay on property rights in the American Western frontier before government moved in:

            “We propose to examine property-rights formulation and protection under voluntary organizations such as private protection agencies, vigilantes, wagon trains, and early mining camps. Although the early West was not completely anarchistic, we believe that government as a legitimate agency of coercion was absent for a long enough period to provide insights into the operation and viability of property rights in the absence of a formal state. The nature of contracts for the provision of “public goods” and the evolution of western “laws” for the period from 1830 to 1900 will provide the data for this case study.

            The West during this time is often perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected, and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved.”

            The author did a full book-length treatment of this subject as well.

    • Tracy W says:

      How are you measuring the existing level of recognition about this?

    • Gil says:

      If you define the passive consensus among a group of persons that a particular individual or sub-body is the rightful possessor and operator of some ‘entity’ as “Property Rights” — Then I don’t think property rights are strictly within the realm of the state.

      However if you define property rights as , whatever usage of property is allowed by the state, then by definition property rights are state given. No doubt this solves problems for many since it seemingly implies that confiscatory tax rates and state seizure of assets is as much a manifestation of property rights as a more hands-off approach to managing non-state property.

      Good/effective property rights would most generally coincide with what people in the relevant society consider to be sensible anyway. There needs to be some social glue innate in individual humans that allows collective organization; which includes recognizing what people in a society can and cannot do, as well as recognizing an overriding legal authority, but that’s not quite the same thing as non-state property rights.

    • Rusty says:

      You are right I think, and it is one of the most important ones. The company I work at invests in the developing world and one of the major issues we face is not knowing who owns the land where eg we want to fund the building of a power station or whatever or the building of affordable homes. We face problems of knowing if the land will be taken away from our project after we have finished the project and problems of inadvertently funding a project where local undocumented property rights are being violated. It’s a major brake on development.

      Of course there are other forms of government regulation that are less development friendly . . . My favourite right now is the explosion of merger control regimes. Who could be against the state vigilantly guarding against monopolies, you ask? Which is fine but with massive form filling required, thresholds which catch every transaction imaginable no matter how small along with massive filing fees it begins to look like government extortion (er I mean tax collection) with predictable depressive effects on economic activity.

      • Tekhno says:

        Of course there are other forms of government regulation that are less development friendly

        Yes, and as an aside, this is important, because understanding property rights as a governmental institution does not require you to not be a libertarian. I can still argue that property rights regulations represent some desired minimum. It removes anarcho-capitalism from the table only, which is probably for the best, because anarcho-capitalism leads to muddled thinking, and political impotence.

        Many anarcho-capitalists already disagree on whether intellectual property is statist, and those who find intellectual property statist have only to take the next step to realize that physical property of any note productively is going to require large scale third party enforcement where rulings are consistent (therefore not polycentric or highly decentralized), just as much as this is the case with intellectual property. My right to shares in a company is just as digital and removed from pure possession as intellectual property is.

        • Irishdude7 says:

          because anarcho-capitalism leads to muddled thinking

          I find the anarcho-capitalist position to be very clear headed. It has a clear morality by rejecting political authority, as it believes that ALL individuals should be subject to the same moral rules (e.g., I can’t steal from my neighbor to fund my kid going to school, so state agents shouldn’t be allowed to either). It recognizes the usefulness of private property and free trade in allowing people to flourish. And it recognizes that coercive monopolies which are bad when providing goods like food or cars don’t stop being bad when providing law or security.

    • Corey says:

      I’ve espoused it that way as an entry-level response to a common entry-level (strawman alert) property tax complaint: that you don’t “really own” (real estate) property in the US because it’s taxed, and if you fail to pay property tax your county government will eventually evict you from the land and take formal ownership.

      The entry-level response: it’s not entirely clear what it would mean to “own property” without a government recognizing, adjudicating, and enforcing your ownership claim. In the US’s small-d-democratic system this is very roughly equivalent to everyone agreeing to respect everyone else’s ownership claims as long as they follow that system.
      One could design a different system, though to what extent it wouldn’t then just be a government is a philosophical question more than an empirical one.

      • Lumifer says:

        The entry-level response coming from the opposite direction is; to what degree of control your own life/body? Would you object if someone tried to take it from you? and if so where is the boundary?

        The Suffi say that “all sin is theft”, murder the theft of a life, slavery the theft of choice, lies the theft of truth, and so on…

        Edit: oops

        • Tekhno says:

          Personally…

          The entry-level response coming from the opposite direction is; to what degree of control your own life/body?

          The degree to which I can convince others to do so, and since the government is the most powerful collective of those others I can petition the government directly through democratic means or otherwise in order to change this, or petition indirectly by engaging in political persuasion and having my ideology percolate within the society of which the government is a small part of, hoping to make long term changes in the direction I want.

          Would you object if someone tried to take it from you?

          In most circumstances I can imagine, yep.

          and if so where is the boundary?

          Where those who can organize the most force say it is. When this changes, such as in regime changes democratic or otherwise, where the boundary lies changes.

          • hlynkacg says:

            “Petitioning the government” implies that there is something to petition them for. Why would you assume that is always the case.

            In most circumstances I can imagine, yep.

            on what grounds?

          • Tekhno says:

            “Petitioning the government” implies that there is something to petition them for. Why would you assume that is always the case.

            I don’t, but it’s my only option. If I can’t, I can’t.

            on what grounds?

            On the grounds that I emotionally value having a great deal of control over my body/life.

      • Tracy W says:

        it’s not entirely clear what it would mean to “own property” without a government recognizing, adjudicating, and enforcing your ownership claim

        It’s not entirely clear what is meant by adulthood, without a government recognising, adjudicating and enforcing various rulings about age (eg voting age, minimum to get a driver’s licence, etc). But even in the absence of government there would still be a difference between childhood and adulthood.

        In other words, just because an entity defines boundaries doesn’t mean that the entity creates the whole thing.

      • uhnon says:

        Why is that even a complaint. Whoever said people are entitled to “really own” something. They really own something if they have the guns to protect it from all prospective takers. Today, only states have enough guns. Hence only states really own something.

    • BBA says:

      The very nature of how property works is a function of governmental action or inaction. In America, if I walk onto your land without your permission, it’s trespassing and I can be sued or arrested. In Scotland, it’s generally legal and you have to accept it.

  106. J.P. says:

    What does banning anonymous comments mean, mechanically speaking? Registration, or just requiring a sufficiently unique name and a non-throwaway email? Or is there a third option?

    • Guy says:

      Yeah, actually, this is a good point. Am I counted as an anon? I comment on a couple other blogs under this same psuedonym, but it’s also kind of just a random word.

    • Lumifer says:

      What is a “non-throwaway email”? Disposable emails are not exactly hard to come by.

      • Nornagest says:

        An email that resolves to a valid email account, presumably. It is easy to set up a burner account on Gmail or Outlook, but it’s a lot easier to type some crap into a textbox.

        (I adopted asdfiuasdfhnvku@asdfiasdfnk.com rather than my usual for this one.)

        • Lumifer says:

          So, a click-the-link-in-email scheme? And then ban mailinator and friends?

          I understand the trivial inconvenience argument, but I’m not sure what exactly is the goal of the exercise other than that. The serious trolls would bother to get a disposable email and the true drive-by snipings don’t seem to be that much of a problem.

          • Nornagest says:

            That would be how I’d do it, though I don’t know if any WordPress extensions can handle it easily.

            If you really want to put the brakes on trolling, about the only ways to do it are a Something Awful-style pay-for-account model or an invite-only model — and neither one will stop a truly determined attacker, it’s just that there aren’t too many of those. But as long as it’s easier for you to ban the troll (e.g. by clicking the “ban” button in the admin interface) than it is for the troll to get a new account, I think you’re about halfway there.

      • Viliam says:

        Disposable emails are not exactly hard to come by.

        Trivial inconvenience is still inconvenience.

        If there was a visible change after allowing the anonymous accounts, there should also be a visible change when the anonymous accounts are banned (and people will stop talking about how easy it is to avoid the ban).

    • Enkidum says:

      Can someone give me an example of the kinds of trolling that Scott is worried about? I’ve only been reading a few weeks, but I read probably the majority of the comments in that time and thus far there’s been some comments I thought were pretty stupid, and some comments where I thought the opinions being expressed were awful, but nothing along the lines of what I usually think of as malicious trolling (references to 88, etc).

      • Peter says:

        Bear in mind that Scott’s not complaining about “malicious trolling” or even “trolling”, not here at any rate – “getting rid of the crappy anonymouses” and “I IP ban anonymous accounts on a hair-trigger”. For a while he was saying the policy was “reign of terror”, and his new comments policy is the incredibly vague Puritan one.

        I think that if a comment is bad enough to count as “awful” then clearly it does “exceed the bounds of moderation”, it’s less clear that “pretty stupid” passes the test. OTOH I think the whole point of getting rid of the old Sufi Buddhist policy[1] was that too many people tried to lawyer it, so I suppose the new policy is meant to be unlawyerable by design.

        I, for one, would welcome the disappearance of anonymous posting.

        [1] This was, I think, before your time. This is the post that introduced the old policy.

        • Enkidum says:

          Makes sense, thanks. And I found the list of banned commenters, went through various of their posts, and it mostly makes sense. “Don’t be an asshole for no reason” seems to cover about 80% of them, at any rate.

  107. Homo Iracundus says:

    People keep worrying that left-leaning SSC readers never speak up in comments, so I’ve been thinking of ways to encourage participation.

    Why don’t we have a cardio thread? Whether it’s double marathons or free-pizza night at Planet Fitness, let’s talk about what we do to get… whatever the cardio version of swole is.

    Starting small: all I do is a 2-4 mile run on days off from lifting, with some chinups and stretches before and after. Should probably add more stretching and try to get the mileage up, but there’s only so many hours in a day, and cardio takes way too long when you’re this slow.

    • Jill says:

      Huh? What does cardio have to do with Left-leaning commenters speaking up? They don’t speak up because they see what happens when a Left leaning commenter does speak up. All the exercise in the world won’t change that.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I’m guessing the stereotype is

        weight training: right-leaning :: cardio : left leaning.

        I think it works slightly better with the tribes rather than the political affiliations, but not very well in any case. (also I think there might be humor involved)

        • Homo Iracundus says:

          Sad attempt at humor, but also remembered that it was mostly right-leaning types who spoke up when we had a lifting thread ages ago.

          Speaking of which, does anyone have that article by the doctor who quit lifting because his entire social scene thought it was a white trash poor person habit, and made fun of him for getting muscular?

          • 1Step says:

            Don’t worry I got your joke AND I thought it was funny. Very different those 2 are.

            I remember that article as well. Quite influential on my worldview truthfully. I looked and couldn’t find it, sorry.

          • Agronomous says:

            Cardio is left-leaning if you do it right: run counter-clockwise around the track.

          • Virbie says:

            > Speaking of which, does anyone have that article by the doctor who quit lifting because his entire social scene thought it was a white trash poor person habit, and made fun of him for getting muscular?

            How interesting, I was entirely unaware of the lifting/Red association. I grew up pretty culturally Blue (though there was a good chunk of “Blue business Republicans” in mywmong my rich-kid high school friends), and I live in the Bay Area now. Going to the gym is _really_ popular here, at least in my circles, which are as culturally about as blue as you can get. It never even occurred to me that lifting has any connotation of white-trashiness.

          • Psmith says:

            Speaking of which, does anyone have that article by the doctor who quit lifting because his entire social scene thought it was a white trash poor person habit, and made fun of him for getting muscular?

            Details of your summary are a little off, but I gotchu fam.

          • Outis says:

            What about criminals, though? They vote Democratic, and they lift.

          • Psmith says:

            >criminals
            I see what you did there.

            Anyway.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          I’ve been putting forward the theory for a number of years that lifting weights tends to make you more rightist and jogging makes you more leftist:

          http://takimag.com/article/hormonal_politics_steve_sailer/print#axzz4FlECU0Py

          I don’t know that that’s true. But it would seem pretty easy to test by offering college students a free personal trainer, with one group getting lifting and the other running, and measuring any changes in their political attitudes.

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            For what little its worth, before I started lifting I was a leftist. I was not very physically active, aside from jogging.

            I don’t think its a stretch to say that lifting completely changed my sense of self. I don’t know how much that has to do with me now being a rightist. Difficult to explain in a comment, but I imagine others have been through a similar experience.

          • Uncle Joe says:

            Five years ago I was a couch potato and mildly left-leaning, now I’m a serious runner and strongly right-leaning. Means nothing much, of course.

          • utilitarian troll says:

            Lifting opened up a “bro” side of me that I didn’t really have access to before. Made me feel authentically masculine in a way other things haven’t really done. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, man or woman.

          • Anonymous says:

            Not sure why a woman would want to feel masculine.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Lifting weights has for me had an overlap with moving to the right, but I’m still a left-winger, and there are other things that explain it better (like leaving university and getting a real grownup job).

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Hmm… I’m decidedly left-leaning in policy, and grayish in tribe, and while I’m interested in both strength and cardio, I’m much more motivated by strength. And the reason is in no small part that I like the idea of being good in a fight if I ever find myself in one, though I never have.

          It doesn’t take a kabbalist to read something into the fact that muscles are nicknamed “guns”.

          (Incidentally, I feel no desire to own a gun, though also no particular aversion. Shooting ranges are fun but there are lots of equally fun things that don’t alienate my social circle, so I don’t go and don’t particularly miss it. I have no principled reason to desire unarmed-combat-ability but not arms, though I could conjure some ex-post)

        • Quixote says:

          Data point, everyone I know that does weight training is left leaning. Stereotype may be off or influenced by other factors.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            To put your datapoint in context, what would you say is the distribution of left-rightiness in your RL acquaintances.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I ride a road bike hard and fast for 15-25 miles once a week. This is not going to get me swole but it beats sitting around like a lump. I used to do inline skating at high intensity; you really DO get swole that way, but only the legs; you end up looking like a T-Rex or something.

      I’m not left-leaning but I have a stupidly expensive carbon fiber bike and wear the gear, which decisively separates me from Red Tribe.

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        God, skaters are amazing. Last time I tried it (in college) my ass hurt for a week.
        Probably most of that was bruising rather than DOMS, but at least it felt like a workout.

        Do you go anywhere when you bike? There’s a whole bunch of really nice walks and parks 5-8 miles away that I rarely get a chance to visit. Taking up biking seems like it might make that easier.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Yeah, it isn’t your ass that get DOMS from skating.

          I don’t usually stop anywhere when I’m biking for exercise. Sometimes I’ll go on recreational rides with my wife and we’ll stop at a park or a small downtown area.

      • Curious says:

        At least here in Australia, cycling is almost the new golf. I can imagine it having a right-wing connotation. We even have a great acronym: MAMILs. Middle Aged Men In Lycra.

    • interrog8 says:

      >left-leaning SSC readers never speak up

      i never do.

      why? cos this is mostly a rationalist hangout, and whilst i’m fine with rationalism in its place (me codemonkey, ook) you guys apply it everywhere!

      its too reductionist, anything which cant be expressed “rationally” gets caned and as a lot of leftish politics is about people, about humanity, about heart about things which cant be reduced to 3 points on a curve i’m left (aha) fighting with one hand tied behind my back, blindfolded and hopping on one leg. what sane person would enter the fray on those terms? i’m setup to fail.

      love the blog tho, love it!

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        >fighting with one hand tied behind my back, blindfolded and hopping on one leg

        That’s almost as weird as some of the plyometric drills the track and field guys used to do. But hey, whatever gets your heart pumping is good cardio, I guess.

      • Agronomous says:

        So Rationalism has a right-wing bias?

        That sounds… unlikely. Most of what divides the right from the left (and the further-right, and the libertarians, and the anarchists, and the communists, and the fascists) is values, which rationalism doesn’t dictate. (Though I suppose it can help you find conflicting values and try to harmonize the ones you hold.)

        What would it take to convince you to at least try to enter a politics-related SSC discussion?

        • interrog8 says:

          >Rationality has a right-wing bias?

          no, as i said, it has it places its just it cant be applied everywhere to everything, which is what tends to happen here.

          >What would it take to convince you to at least try to enter a politics-related SSC discussion?

          a good question and you are kind to ask. in truth i dont really know, i can only tell you what puts me off and its that a lot of the time i read comments here that sound like /pol/ went to university cleaned up its act a little and then came here to post. and no one calls them on it.

          dont know that anything can be fixed tho, this place is getting well known so its inevitably going to attract the crazies more and more.

      • Nornagest says:

        Remember when the left wing was the rational, sciencey, reality-based one and the right wing was haunted by superstition?

        Good times, good times.

        • interrog8 says:

          no dude, i dont, and if you think i’m talking about superstition you’d be wrong.

          as a yoof, my political awakening was hearing scargill speak during the miners strike, the talk then was all of community and your fellow man (or woman!)

          but thanks for engaging with what i said and not just making some flippant comment.

          • Nornagest says:

            This catchphrase is what I’m alluding to.

            Perhaps things worked differently across the pond, but conventional progressive wisdom in the States during the Bush administration was that the entire Republican worldview was fundamentally superstitious, driven by some combination of religious fundamentalism and instinctive, pre-rational appeal (“truthiness”), and opposed by a measured, rational, empirically-rooted Left — as exemplified through issues as diverse as war, abortion, global warming, and school prayer. I expect a lot of the Americans around here came of political age during that era, although I’m a bit older than that myself.

            Point is, I don’t think empiricism belongs to one political faction. Nor community, humanity, and all that warm, fuzzy stuff.

        • Gil says:

          I’ve come to believe that cultures are non-rational entities. They supply certain public goods like social order, a sense of safety/belonging, etc. etc. They only conform to rationalism insofar as they facilitate the aforementioned purpose.

          So the first decade of the 21st century was spent tearing down the last vestiges of that fundamentalist Christian culture within the US. Tearing down non-rational institutions doesn’t necessarily increase ‘net rationaliy’ [if that’s even a thing]What replaces it may end up being no more rational and yet also far less stable and far less harmonious.

          Demanding dispassionate, thoughtful, and evidence based beliefs of a subcommunity [such as this one] seems reasonable. Demanding it of an entire society does not seem achievable.

        • Exit Stage Right says:

          Everyone loves rationality until its smacking them in the face

          • Viliam says:

            Sometimes I feel like “political opinion” is a shorthand for “which parts of the reality have you decided to ignore”.

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            That’s an excellent way to phrase it

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            See also “Captain Metaphysics and the Extreme Skeptic” (Existential Comics #143)

            “Everyone has a plan until …”

            The “small-p”-progressive elderwoman Annie Proulx journeys far into post-rationalist territory — a realm more brutal and frightening than any Mike Tyson fight — in Proulx’ empathy-positive all-ages all-genders all-races all-classes all-IQs David Chapman-esque cowboy-centric short story “T*ts up in a ditch” (2008). 🙁

            Not recommended for children or Internet Tough Guys.™

        • Viliam says:

          Remember when the left wing was the rational, sciencey, reality-based one and the right wing was haunted by superstition?

          Nice try. Next time you’ll be telling me there was an era when the left wing didn’t call poor people “trash”, or when the left wing tried not to judge people constantly by their race or gender.

          • Mark says:

            I know, right? Fucking leftists!

          • acorn says:

            villiam,

            didnt you reveal that your anti-sj teamplay was rather vicarious, having had zero personal experience with an example
            of the infamous type because of where you live?

          • Luke the CIA stooge says:

            Has anyone written a book on how empiricism, respect for civil liberties, deference to the individual and general reasonableness just drop off a cliff once a group has been in office for a while?

            I think it’s significantly more pronounced in the states: where no party owns the outcomes and “kick the bums out” isn’t going to massacre 80% of the governing party every 8-12 years.

          • Viliam says:

            @acorn:

            zero personal experience with an example of the infamous type because of where you live

            Well, that’s a question of degree. We don’t have the “herp derp, someone said that all lives matter, let’s get the evil white cishet male fired” types here. Most employers probably don’t even know what Twitter is, so they wouldn’t care.

            There are some brainwashed young people here, but they are not in my social circles. My biggest encounter with them was a few years ago when I visited a local Amnesty International meetup with my girlfriend, and during the debate someone said something like “racism is unscientific, because science has shown that IQ does not depend on genes”. My girlfriend (who was quite politically correct back then) is a biochemistry nerd, so she immediately said “actually, IQ does depend on genes…”, and then people started screaming at her “racist! racist!”, so we left the room. (It was a “red pill” moment for her; previously she believed that all similar stories are just made up or hugely exaggerated.) But this was an exception, we don’t meet people like that in our real life. We live in our high-IQ STEM-educated bubble.

            I know a few “academic-type” lefttists, and my impression of them is that they behave like some smug aristocrats. They care about poor people in a similar way someone would care about their ant farm. They wish for poor people to be fed well, but they couldn’t bear actually talking with them and listening to all that politically incorrect crap that uneducated poor people say. (The worst offenders are the people born poor who later achieved some success in their lives, and then they dare to offer some advice and even criticism to their former peers.) But this is nothing new under the sun.

        • Nonnamous says:

          I remember the times when physicists were “constructing quarks” and Newton’s mechanics was a rape manual. Then indeed the good times and the left became all about science, with special emphasis on climate science and the theory of evolution. Has this really flipped back again, I never noticed? Or are we just making fun here.

          • Agronomous says:

            For every No there’s an equal and opposite Yes?

            (Aaaaand this is why I post pseudonymously.)

          • Nornagest says:

            See here, but to give a broader view: the Democratic mainstream still thinks of itself as the party of rationality (in the pop, not the SSC, sense of the term), but I think there’s more tension between that and its actual policy priorities than there was in the Bush era. I also think there’s more explicit anti-rationality coming to the surface, as attitudes that in the 2000s were the sole province of critical-theory academics and a few activists are starting to seep into the popular consciousness (in bastardized form). I’m not quite prepared to say it’s flipped, but the currents are a lot stronger.

            I don’t know a lot about the British Left, but if interrog8’s take on it is accurate, then the process is further along over there. Dunno how mainstream a perspective that represents, though — in my imperfect understanding, New Labour was pretty bog-standard neoliberal over the same timeframe.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Nonnamous observes “The left became all about science, with special emphasis on climate science and the theory of evolution.”

            Why shouldn’t progressives cheerfully exploit the profitable arbitrage opportunities that climate-science denialism provides? Equally for the gain of profit and of polity?

            More broadly, progressivism need be neither unscientific nor irrational nor small-minded, need it?

            Can’t we celebrate that progressivism (considered objectively) has profited much, and is profiting more? Has learned much, and is learning more? Has ventured much, and is venturing more?

            These progressive gains are good news for everyone, including conservatives, aren’t they? Because profit, learning, and ventures are intrinsic goods, aren’t they?

          • cassander says:

            @Uncle Ilya Kuriakin

            >Why shouldn’t progressives cheerfully exploit the profitable arbitrage opportunities that climate-science denialism provides? Equally for the gain of profit and of polity?

            the trillions of dollars of spending a serious climate policy would entail would offer far more opportunities for graft than denial could ever dream of making.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            As of 2012, didn’t strandable carbon assets already support corporate share value of $4 trillion and service $1.3 trillion in outstanding corporate debt?

            Hasn’t the protection of these immense corporate assets historically provided, prima facie, an overwhelmingly strong motivation for the broad-spectrum social corruption that traditional land-respecting small-government conservatives like Wendell Berry deplore?

            Isn’t there reasonable grounds to apprehend, that the carbon / warming debate is recapitulating the tobacco / cancer debate?

            And we all know how the latter debate ended, don’t we?

          • cassander says:

            >As of 2012, didn’t strandable carbon assets already support corporate share value of $4 trillion and service $1.3 trillion in outstanding corporate debt?

            And? Those carbon assets have value because they are useful. Replacing them will, almost by definition, cost more than than their present value.

            >Hasn’t the protection of these immense corporate assets historically provided, prima facie, an overwhelmingly strong motivation for the broad-spectrum social corruption that traditional land-respecting small-government conservatives like Wendell Berry deplore?

            Not nearly as strong motivation as massive government spending programs does.

            >Isn’t there reasonable grounds to apprehend, that the carbon / warming debate is recapitulating the tobacco / cancer debate?

            not on the basis of the evidence you’ve offered. There is vastly more money on the change side than the denial side.

            >And we all know how the latter debate ended, don’t we?

            you mean with ever more aggressive litigation of ever more dubious claims in pursuit of “free” money? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the efficacy of governmental efforts.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Cassander, your remarks inspired a search of the recent literature on second-hand-smoke sequelae:

            Biologically we find “Biological evidence for the acute health effects of secondhand smoke exposure” (2010, PMID 19767410)

            Epidemiologically we find “Is exposure to secondhand smoke associated with cognitive parameters of children and adolescents?–a systematic literature review” (2013, PMID 23969303)

            Aren’t these ongoing studies ever-more-strongly affirming, both biologically and epidemiologically, that tobacco smoke is just plain bad, alike for adults, adolescents, children, and infants, no matter whether directly inhaled or second-hand?

            The remaining unanswered question, regarding which your input is welcome, is this: why is there a strong psychological and institutional association between tobacco / cancer denial and climate-change denial?

            After all, scientists were right about the harm from tobacco smoke; so why is it implausible that scientists are right about climate-change?

            The world wonders!

          • Lumifer says:

            Aren’t these ongoing studies ever-more-strongly affirming, both biologically and epidemiologically, that tobacco smoke is just plain bad

            All smoke is just plain bad. So when are you going to prohibit children from sitting around campfires and be present within 50 feet of an operating grill?

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Not all combustion smokes are the same (fuel, temperature, moisture, and oxygen levels all matter; the slow smoldering combustion of cigars and cigarettes is particularly adverse).

            None-the-less and in general, pregnant women, infants, and children particularly are *VERY* well-advised to avoid prolonged and/or involuntary exposure to any and all smoky environments.

            That’s the common-sense biomedical reason why the Volkswagen Corporation’s recent profit-maximizing diesel-emission cheating-scandal was legally wrong and morally indefensible, wasn’t it?

          • Lumifer says:

            Secondary smoke is teratogenic? Links?

            As to your question about VW, the answer is “no”.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Lumifer says “Secondary smoke is teratogenic? Links?”

            See (for example) the free-as-in-freedom “Second-hand smoke — ignored implications” (2015, PMID 26308069) and references therein.

            Second-hand smoke causes lung cancer in adults who have never smoked.

            Non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke at home or at work increase their risk of developing lung cancer by 20–30%.

            Second-hand smoke causes more than 7,300 lung cancer deaths among U.S. nonsmokers each year.

            As with active smoking, the longer the duration and the higher the level of exposure to secondhand smoke, the greater the risk of developing lung cancer.

            Lumifer, your request for scientific information is commendable.

            On the other hand, it’s logically possible that the communities of the biochemists, cell biologists, epidemiologists, clinical physicians, and judges are united in an interlocking conspiracy of self-serving delusions and/or corruption.

            Regarding the existence (or not) of such conspiracies, SSC readers will have to make up their own minds. For some people, no amount of organic chemistry, cell biology, epidemiology, or judicial findings can be convincing … because as the science grows stronger, its increasing unity is regarded as confirming evidence of ever-broadening scientific conspiracies.

          • Lumifer says:

            I asked for links to papers, not to a badly written pop-sci list of horrors. Notably, I specifically asked about teratogenic effects of secondary smoke which are conspicuously absent in this list.

            If you have none, just say so.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Isn’t current evidence of significant neonatal risk convincing (2016, PMID 27465062)?

            Conclusions for Practice  Irrespective of prenatal, perinatal and sociodemographic data (including infant postnatal nicotine exposure), prenatal exposure to cigarette smoke and second-hand smoke affect infant cognitive development, especially language abilities.

            We only wish to raise quality of life (for infants particularly). You will become one with science-respecting progressivism! 🙂

          • cassander says:

            >Aren’t these ongoing studies ever-more-strongly affirming, both biologically and epidemiologically, that tobacco smoke is just plain bad, alike for adults, adolescents, children, and infants, no matter whether directly inhaled or second-hand?

            Probably, but that says little about the financial liabilities of cigarette companies, or any other legal/governmental response.

            >The remaining unanswered question, regarding which your input is welcome, is this: why is there a strong psychological and institutional association between tobacco / cancer denial and climate-change denial?

            I have never looked into such an association, but my first response would be contrarianism, e.g. the same sort of overlap between moon landing deniers and 9/11 truthers.

            >After all, scientists were right about the harm from tobacco smoke; so why is it implausible that scientists are right about climate-change?

            If tobacco was the only thing we’d asked scientists about in recent years, they’d have a good record. Unfortunately, we also asked them about nutrition, stomach ulcers, and hell, even climate, which has been bucking the models for the last 10 years or so. I think scientists are right about most things, and they’re probably at least in the ballpark about climate, but “in the ballpark” is not enough when I’m being asked to fork over trillions of dollars.

          • Lumifer says:

            Let’s try again. I asked for a link to papers, not abstracts. Moreover, I asked about effects of secondary smoke (secondary for the pregnant women, that is).

            I keep asking you for evidence and you keep telling me it’s convincing because SCIENCE! but you don’t actually show it to me.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            cassander says: “in the ballpark [climate science]” is not enough when I’m being asked to fork over trillions of dollars [for carbon-neutral energy economies].”

            Cassander, please don’t fall for the sunk-cost carbon-energy fallacy.

            Haven’t the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — which were initiated largely to protect carbon-energy reserves — already incurred trillions of dollars in irrecoverable costs?

            To say nothing of the uncountable cost in heroes blood?

            There’s no reason to keep shipping hundreds of billions of American dollars overseas, to line the pockets of terror-supporting oligarchs, monarchs, and mullahs, is there? And if their in-the-ground carbon assets lose value, that’s mighty good news, isn’t it?

            Relative to the evident risks and costs, both war-related and ecological, that are inherent in our present carbon-based economy, doesn’t carbon neutrality look like a low-risk job-creating economy-boosting ecosphere-protecting technology-catalyzing win/win/win/win/win objective?

            Sooner or later, the globe has to go carbon-neutral … so isn’t sooner far better, by pretty much any rational or strategic or scientific or economic or ecological or moral measure?

            — — — —

            Note to Lumifer: the full text of “Effects of Prenatal Nicotine Exposure on Infant Language Development: A Cohort Follow Up Study” (PMID 27465062) is available on-line but alas is paywalled; to read it you may either visit a medical school library, ask your pediatrician for a copy, or simply purchase it.

            Absent a pressing personal interest in pediatric practice, a reasonable policy is “respect practice recommendations” … unless you have objective evidence that your knowledge exceeds that of practicing pediatricians.

            In our family, pregnant women strictly avoid tobacco smoke, judging rightly (is it seems to everyone) that there exist good and sufficient scientific reasons for this pregnancy policy. Anyone who unilaterally “blew smoke” at these women, whether directly or indirectly, would be acting wrongly (to say the least), and would receive a corrective lesson.

          • Lumifer says:

            So you don’t have any links.

            The advice of “respect practice recommendations”, of course, has nothing to do with science. This becomes very evident when you look at the change in these recommendations over the last 100 years or so, for example.

          • cassander says:

            >Cassander, please don’t fall for the sunk-cost carbon-energy fallacy.

            I’m not. The carbon infrastructure is not a sunk cost, it consists largely of useful stuff that you want to throw away and replace with new stuff. I’d rather not.

            >Haven’t the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — which were initiated largely to protect carbon-energy reserves —

            No, they weren’t, and if you think that Afghanistan is a land full of petroleum, you need to crack open an encyclopedia. More philosophically, one waste of money does not justify another.

            >.There’s no reason to keep shipping hundreds of billions of American dollars overseas, to line the pockets of terror-supporting oligarchs, monarchs, and mullahs, is there?

            It’s cheaper than the alternative, which is a pretty damned good reason.

            >And if their in-the-ground carbon assets lose value, that’s mighty good news, isn’t it?

            We’re not talking about in the ground assets. We’re talking about power plants, distribution systems, factories making the parts for them, etc.

            >Relative to the evident risks and costs, both war-related and ecological, that are inherent in our present carbon-based economy, doesn’t carbon neutrality look like a low-risk job-creating economy-boosting ecosphere-protecting technology-catalyzing win/win/win/win/win objective?

            Completely changing the way a massive and utterly vital sector of the economy works by replacing it with unproven technology is most definitely not low risk.

            >Sooner or later, the globe has to go carbon-neutral … so isn’t sooner far better, by pretty much any rational or strategic or scientific or economic or ecological or moral measure?

            Maybe, maybe not, but even if it does, all else being equal, the richer the planet is the easier that is to do.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            It’s not easy (for me) to discern whose arguments are more deficient in facts and reason, cassander’s or lumifer’s. Let’s tackle cassander’s.

            How do SSC readers imagine that Iraqi and Afghan insurgents learnt to build their devastatingly effective homemade shaped charges, save by the in-depth training and sophisticated shaped-charge technologies that were widely disseminated in-theatre by oil-field companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and Schlumberger?

            Strictly fiscal accountings aren’t adequate to these issues, which amount to a tragedy of the global techno-commons, that was perpetrated by Halliburton and Schlumberger … to their immense, unilateral, and ongoing corporate profit (Halliburton in particular having subsequently relocated to Dubai from the US).

            So how can the short-term trillion-dollar cost of these terror weapons weapons to our troops, and the longer-term cost in heroes’ blood and enduring suffering, and the millennial cost to our planetary ecosystem, be adequately accounted in any reasoned strategic analysis save those that conclude “go carbon-neutral ASAP”?

            The world wonders. Or rather, the world doesn’t wonder … because increasingly many thoughtful folks have made up their minds.

          • Nornagest says:

            How do SSC readers imagine that Iraqi and Afghan insurgents learnt to build their devastatingly effective homemade shaped charges, save by the in-depth training and sophisticated shaped-charge technologies that were widely disseminated in-theatre by oil-field companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and Schlumberger?

            From insurgents who were formerly soldiers or engineers working for the previous regimes? From field manuals captured from foreign troops or disseminated by foreign or domestic powers during that or another war? By taking apart RPG projectiles or anti-armor mines and copying what they found inside? In school, seeing as a number of insurgents were current or former science or engineering students? By reading Wikipedia? There’s lots of possibilities here.

            Shaped charges aren’t conceptually that difficult, and EFPs aren’t much harder. There’s room for optimization, but just about any lined cavity will work as long as it’s radially symmetrical, and I seem to recall that a lot of shaped-charge IEDs were made by molding the charge around a cooking bowl or whatever was handy.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            All of those learning venues, and more. Whereas it’s not so easy to convert photovoltaic panels into weaponry, is it?

            Everywhere in Iraq and Afghanistan, local insurgencies have been in past decades, and continue to be today, economically fueled by oil-field revenues, technologically armed by oil-field technologies, and socially motivated by well-founded local anger at oil-revenue corruption and the foreign domination associated to it. Within this toxic milieu terrorism flourishes (unsurprisingly).

            In contrast, the slow-but-steady payout of photovoltaic energy-generation (for example) exemplifies a major strategic advantage of carbon-neutral energy generation, which fosters not “pump-oil-faster to get-right-quicker” ventures, but rather “maintain-the-local-infrastructure to become-sustainably-prosperous” ventures.

            The point being, that carbon neutral energy-economies require justice-systems and education-systems that are stable on generational timescales. Carbon-revenues not so much, right?

            The inherent stability-enhancing counter-terror advantages of a global shift toward carbon neutrality aren’t simple to account, are they?

          • Nornagest says:

            If you can make photovoltaic panels, you have a semiconductor industry. You can do a lot of stuff with a semiconductor industry. Not so much direct weaponization, but plenty of things that those Marine reading lists you’re fond of would call “force multipliers”.

            Oh, and I know Cassander already said this, but it bears repeating that there’s no economically significant oil fields in Afghanistan. Nor does the Taliban have any particular reason to be pissed off about oil development. Ironically, though, it’d be a pretty good place for photovoltaics.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Terror-supporting oil-revenues flow across borders a whole lot more easily even than oil, don’t they? Whereas 30-year municipal bonds for the local photovoltaic park are inconveniently traceable, aren’t they?

          • Nornagest says:

            The Taliban’s funding sources are controversial, but probably have more to do with drugs, Pakistan, and foreign-aid skimming than oil. Al-Qaeda is a different story — they’re funded largely by the Saudis — but they never made up much of the rank-and-file insurgency there.

          • Lumifer says:

            It’s not easy (for me) to discern whose arguments are more deficient in facts and reason, cassander’s or lumifer’s.

            Do not be alarmed. This is a test. This is only a test.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Whereas it’s not so easy to convert photovoltaic panels into weaponry, is it?

            Actually it is.

            Leaving aside the existence of Nornagest’s semi-conductor industry, having a ready supply of pre-refined rare earth elements is magnificently handy for all sorts of nasty projects.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Nornagest, please appreciate that oil-revenues aren’t solely a rich fiscal resource for terrorists, their iniquitous distribution is a powerful anger resource … and these dual roles of carbon-revenues are comparably essential to terrorist insurgencies.

            These dual roles are not solely my personal observation and opinion, but also comprise crucial elements of the US Military’s counterinsurgency doctrine. See first and foremost the doctrine manual FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency

            Ideology and Narrative (¶ 1-75) Ideas are a motivating factor in insurgent activities. Insurgencies can gather recruits and amass popular support through ideological appeal (including religious or other cultural identifiers).

            Promising potential recruits often include individuals receptive to the message that the West is dominating their region through puppet governments and local surrogates.

            The insurgent group channels anti-Western anger and provides members with identity, purpose, and community, in addition to physical, economic, and psychological security.

            The movement’s ideology explains its followers’ difficulties and provides a means to remedy those ills. The most powerful ideologies tap latent, emotional concerns of the populace. Examples of these concerns include religiously based objectives, a desire for justice, ethnic aspirations, and a goal of liberation from foreign occupation.

            Ideology provides a prism, including a vocabulary and analytical categories, through which followers perceive their situation.

            Needless to say, the entirety of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency solidly repays close study.

            Come to reflect, isn’t the xenophobic demagogic anger-grounded cognition that FM 3-24 describes, characteristic too of a certain on-line “wretched hive of scum and villainy”, whose proper name it is regarded as ill-mannered to mention here on SSC? 😉
            — — — —
            By the way, how long since the Taliban claimed responsibility for any European or North American terror attacks? Any link to the fiscal and psychological reality, that the Taliban, unlike ISIS and Al Qaeda, doesn’t rely much on carbon-revenues?

          • Nornagest says:

            please appreciate that oil-revenues aren’t solely a rich fiscal resource for terrorists, they’re also a powerful anger resource […] See for example FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency

            I’ve read Counterinsurgency. You’re still wrong about the Taliban.

            I would expect someone as fixated on empathy as you to understand that insurgent and terrorist groups are different from each other and do not entirely share each other’s goals, motivations, structure, or material circumstances. The Taliban is not Al-Qaeda is not ISIS is not the unfortunately named Moro Islamic Liberation Front. All these groups share an antipathy to the West — but the specific facts about the West they dislike, and the priority the West takes relative to local struggles, vary immensely.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            The preceding opinions aren’t my own, but rather were communicated to me by persons who had spent both considerable time talking face-to-face with the Taliban in Afghanistan (often under difficult circumstances) and considerable time too, helping to write FM 3-24.

            Conservatives who complain about Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals haven’t much of a clue … the real Progressive Field Manual is FM 3-24! 🙂

            The resulting Progressive solidarity and focus is among the very few benefits (as they seem to me) to be born out of the immensely long, immensely complicated, immensely costly, immensely tragic, immensely disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Guy Who Definitely Isn’t John S-dl-s:

            Haven’t the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — which were initiated largely to protect carbon-energy reserves

            The Afghanistan war? The one that started before anyone knew they had any mineral resources to speak of? That was to protect carbon-energy reserves?

            Really? Nothing to do with planes and skyscrapers and mass civilian deaths? Or a government of Afghanistan that had given safe harbor to the perpetrators?

          • hlynkacg says:

            I get the impression that you are using “progressive” in a very different way from the typical Democrat or poster on this forum.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Agronomous wonders  “The Afghanistan war […] was to protect carbon-energy reserves?”

            “In for a penny, out for a pound”, right?

            Or rather, “In for $60B (estimated costs), out for $6000B (real costs)“. Ouch.

            Not to mention, enhanced oil revenues were supposed to more than make up (in Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s estimation) even the $60B up-front costs of the war. Oy.

            During the subsequent thirteen years, this struggle has been no respector of borders, has it? Iraq/Afgan/Somalia/Syria (etc.) has all been one long grinding war, hasn’t it?

            How could folks who regarded themselves as smart enough to start such a complex war, be so dumb as to be wholly incapable of conceiving a viable strategy for ending it?

            Some folks have trouble appreciating that no amount of self-congratulating cleverness can compensate for willful ignorance, inexperience, and wishful delusions, right?

            Also, hlynkacg, folks who hang around cognitive echo-chambers too much, soon fall prey to the incestuous stupification and bafflegab that befuddled Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, don’t they? How confident should SSC’s right wing commenters be, that they possess anything like an accurate conception, of the fast-evolving elements of progressivism and Enlightened Modernity?

          • Nornagest says:

            When the law is on your side, pound on the law.
            When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.
            When neither is on your side, pound on the table.

            – lawyers’ saying; attributed to Jerome Michael, but probably traditional

          • brad says:

            The oldest variant I’m aware of is attributed to Cicero: “When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.”

            I have my doubts as I’ve never seen it in Latin.

          • Jill says:

            With regard to tobacco and lung cancer, and then climate change denial, there’s a lot of continuity there. See review of a book on this subject, and then the book itself below.

            Review: ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ Separating Science From Spin
            http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/movies/review-merchants-of-doubt-separating-science-from-spin.html?referrer=google_kp

            Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming Paperback – May 24, 2011
            by Naomi Oreskes (Author), Erik M. Conway (Author)

            https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470415470&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Merchangts+of+Doubt

          • Jill says:

            Speaking of pounding: And when neither the facts, nor the law, are on your side, pound on your political opponent.

          • hlynkacg says:

            John, we’ve had this conversation before but it bears repeating…

            You keep telling me that I live in an echo chamber, yet here I am talking to you. Two possibilities present themselves, either you live in the exact same echo chamber and are just as stupefied as I, or my chamber is a lot more open than you give credit for.

            Is it really so hard for you to grasp that, rather than being “befuddled” or under the influence of some dark wizard, I might have good reason to disagree with your analysis? If you had read FM 3-24 and understood it (rather than simply linking to it) you would realize that you are committing the exact error that Amos, Mattis et al. are trying to warn against. The opposition has it’s own mind, it’s own goals, and if you don’t understand or at least acknowledge them they WILL blindside you. I would expect someone who places so much emphasis on empathy to actually empathize, and maybe attempt to “put themselves in the other’s shoes”, but thus far you have demonstrated no such ability.

            If you really want to talk about Counterinsurgency and it’s relevance to modern politics you need to examine the rise of Trump (and to a lesser extant Sanders) and ask how it was that they managed to catch your “forces of modernity” with their collective pants down.

          • Jill says:

            I am befuddled as to how we have progressive forces of modernity. Perhaps we are learning slowly, but the GOP still controls both Houses of Congress, most governorships, and most state legislatures. And they are far from progressive.

            And for president we have running a neocon Democrat, plus a GOP guy who proves that GOP primary voters will vote for the most entertaining person with an R behind his name, who makes the prettiest version of the promises which have been made and broken countless times before. He’s a big Eff You vote against the establishment. Some people really think he would shake things up and change things for the better.

            I suppose you could say that saying Eff You to the establishment is progressive. But why not just vote for someone progressive, instead of an unstable constantly lying person? Some people do seem to believe that he’s not a neocon. And he may not be. But he seems to be even more dangerous than a neocon because he’s so changeable and impulsive and non-diplomatic.

            I would love to see progressive forces of modernity. I hope Uncle I K is right about them. What I see is mostly though is regressive forces of backwardness.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            hlynkacg invites SSC readers to “Ask how Trump managed to catch your “forces of modernity” with their collective pants down.”

            Aren’t many conservatives asking themselves that same question?

            “I’d rather take our chances with nearly anyone else than continue with this certain loser [Trump] who will likely cost the Senate and much more.”

            Hasn’t Erick Erickson’s well-regarded conservative website The Resurgent replaced its logo with … Slim Pickens riding the H-bomb? Isn’t RedState (and many other conservative sites) headlining photos of  … dumpster fires? 🙂 🙂 🙂

            For many folks (including me) these top-level conservative sites are showing the very best variety of conservatism: principled conservatism that has a sense of humor!

            Regarding who has (or has not) read FM 3-24, and who has (or has not) assimilated the lessons of FM 3-24, we can all agree that neither Trump nor his advisors belongs to the the read-and-understood group, can’t we?

            — — — —
            Jill thank your for those links to Naomi Oreskes’ works. Already in my personal “database of hope and caring” is Oreskes’ Vatican-sponsored lecture: “Scientific Consensus and the Role and Character of Scientific Dissent” (2014). Oreskes’ good-natured and well-received science-respecting lecture (applauded by no less than Walter Munk!) is commended to SSC’s humor-loving conservatives.

            Applying the litmus-test of humor leads us to wonder: are SSC’s Jill and Nancy Lebowitz, and HotWhopper’s Sou from Bundanga, and Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, and writers Octavia Butler, Annie Proulx, and Ursula LeGuin all (secretly) the same dangerously intelligent, dangerously science-respecting, dangerously independent, dangerously acerbic, dangerously funny person?

            `Cuz that would explain everything.

            Conservatives, listen to your mothers! Evolution helps these women to live a long time, so that you can receive their wisdom and enjoy their humor! 🙂 🙂 🙂

          • hlynkacg says:

            Aren’t many conservatives asking themselves that same question?

            Not really no. Or rather those who’ve been paying attention aren’t. The Republican coalition has been on skating on thin ice since the TARP bailout in 2008, and primed for a populist insurgency since Romney lost in 2012. That Trump became the face of that insurgency is moderately surprising but its’ existence is not. The “Bitter Clingers” of 2010 are now the “Red Hats” of 2016.

            Regarding who has (or has not) read FM 3-24, and who has (or has not) assimilated the lessons of FM 3-24, we can all agree that neither Trump nor his advisors belongs to the the read-and-understood group, can’t we?

            No we can’t.

            Thus far Trump is the only candidate in this election cycle to demonstrate a functional understanding and apply those lessons. That’s why, despite opposition from both parties, he’s still in the race.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Historical postcript  Ursula LeGuin expressed dismay that very few in her National Book Award audience understood her acceptance speech’s repeated references to “a beautiful reward” for her post-red / post-blue lifetime body of writings.

            How many SSC readers grasp LeGuin’s reference to a “beautiful reward”? Here’s a major hint: think “like a boss” (musically, that is).

            Now can you guess it? Conservatives, listen to your mothers! 🙂

            The USMC is listening good-naturedly, for sure! 🙂 🙂 🙂

          • Exit Stage Right says:

            Imagine if some poor shmuck actually wanted to respond to Nonnamous

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            — — — —
            Trigger warning: this comment links to some mighty tough works.
            — — — —
            Nowadays the works that small-p progressive tough-minded older women are writing — works like Annie Proulx’ “T*ts up in a ditch” (2008) — are admired by the younger USMC writers of my acquaintance.

            Cmdr. Shery Snively’s Heaven in the Midst of Hell: a Quaker Chaplain’s View of the War in Iraq (2010) — with its Foreword by Gen. Mattis — is another tough-minded USMC-admired work.

            Was I young and/or clueless and/or living in a internet bubble, it wouldn’t make any sense to willfully keep ignorant of these tough-minded works, which are written by some tough-minded older progressive women, now would it?

            But these women are dangerous, mighty dangerous, and mighty frightening too; that’s for d*mn sure. Frightening especially, to Internet Tough Guys™.

          • g says:

            I’m puzzled by Lumifer’s comments to Uncle Ilya here.

            Ilya posts links to a couple of journal articles about harmful effects of second-hand tobacco smoke. Lumifer says (if I’m interpreting right) “yeah, but that’s just because all smoke is bad for you”. Ilya says “yeah, it is, but tobacco smoke is particularly bad; anyway, children and pregnant women should avoid all smoky environments”. So far, so good.

            But then Lumifer says, and I quote, “Secondary smoke is teratogenic? Links?”.

            And that’s odd because “teratogenic” is a very specific claim which Uncle Ilya never made.

            So, anyway, Uncle Ilya very wisely ignores that super-specific claim and cites an article saying that “prenatal exposure to cigarette smoke and second-hand smoke affect infant cognitive development, especially language abilities”. Prenatal. Second-hand. There we go.

            But no. “I asked for a link to papers, not abstracts. Moreover, I asked about effects of secondary smoke (secondary for the pregnant women, that is).” Well, I can’t tell exactly what the link went to since it now seems not to work (looks like a PubMed problem) but no, Lumifer didn’t ask for links “to papers, not abstracts”, and it’s generally not difficult to get from the abstract to the paper (given willingness to pay or to find a suitable library, and it’s not Uncle Ilya’s fault if Lumifer lacks that), and the fragment Uncle Ilya quoted specifically says it addresses prenatal exposure to second-hand smoke.

            This whole thing looks like pure goalpost-moving: Lumifer invents claims Ilya never made (“teratogenic”) and demands that he support them, and then invents demands he never actually made (“papers, not abstracts”) and complains that Ilya hasn’t met them. (Not that they would have been reasonable demands even had he made them earlier. It’s hardly Ilya’s fault that Springer don’t make full text avaliable online to everyone, or that Lumifer is not willing either to pay their extortionate prices or to go and find a good academic or medical library.)

            Lumifer is (assuming this is the same Lumifer as on Less Wrong, which seems plausible) an exceptionally smart person, so what’s going on here to provoke such unreasonableness?

          • Jiro says:

            Several hypotheses, but one is that Lumifer is a smoker, or has friends who are smokers, cigarettes are addictive, and addicts and friends of addicts defend addictions in irrational ways, particularly when anyone suggests their addiction causes harm.

            Another hypothesis is that cigarette smoking was used as an example by the libertarian equivalent of clickbait and Lumifer has too much invested in the clickbait article.

      • It’s never been a problem for me. The LessWrong tradition has it that rationality is the efficient satisfaction of a utility function which is itself arbitrary. That being the case, left-utilons are as valid as right-utilons.

        Also, LW rationality s big on consequentialism, which is the ideal counter to Right libertarianism.

      • Vitor says:

        Are you familiar with the concept of Straw Vulkans? If you stereotyped us less, you might find that there are reasonable discussions to be had here, no matter what position you’re arguing for.

        There is nothing in leftist politics that’s fundamentally opposed to rationality. Bad leftist politics on the other hand (stereotypically represented by a SJW frothing at the mouth) is opposed to rationality, because it involves dumping logic whenever it conflicts with ideology, which has nothing to do with it being leftist.

        People here are as opposed to fundamentalist rightist positions as they are to fundamentalist leftist ones.

        • Luke Somers says:

          Agreed completely, and I’d add that if one’s conception of rationality is that it gets in the way of thinking clearly about something, one is doing it wrong?

          • Vitor says:

            Sigh… I would conclude that SSC has a rightist slant, obviously. This doesn’t invalidate the point that civil discussions of all positions are possible. Notice the word “fundamentalist” in my quote above.

            Also, there is no need for ad-hominems.

          • The Nybbler says:

            What if you were informed that someone did a study and found opposition to leftist positions at SSC, outnumbered opposition to rightist positions at a ratio of 10 to 1?

            I’d say what I’ve said before: that this is because a number of prominent rightists and rightist subjects which inspire opposition have been banned.

          • Jaskologist says:

            I was trying to figure out what my “formula” is, then I realized you probably meant this script to count up comments by commenter. I don’t recall anybody taking those numbers and doing anything with them, but would be interested in seeing it happen.

            For the record, this thread’s current top 5:
            Nornagest: 46
            Jill: 35
            Lumifer: 31
            Anonymous: 28
            Corey: 24

            (I still think counting by word rather than comment will give very different numbers. Nornagest prefers short and witty, which gives him a big edge. I bet Jill has far more words.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Here is an unsupported biased self-report of my perception.

            The number of “left” commenters and comments has increased over the last two months, and I mean substantive comments, not just various left-leaning drive-bys.

            Partly, I think that discussions about what the balance is pulled leftward people out of the woodwork and then they started making other comments. But that is, again, unsubstantiated perception on my part.

          • Nornagest says:

            Huh, didn’t realize I was that prolific.

          • Jill says:

            About to Be Silenced.

            “Its much higher than 10 to 1.

            So are you lying or blind?”

            Human can’t see ourselves or our tribe objectively. It’s like trying to accurately see a picture that we are standing inside of.

            All this rational talk and belief and attempts to practice rationality are interesting and sometimes useful. However, it remains the case that the basic human operating system and software are not about truth and rationality. They are about individual and group physical survival.

            And then when humans don’t have to worry any more about physical survival, then emotional survival and survival of one’s mentally constructed identity, are substituted in place of physical survival, as the very most important things for humans to do.

          • daronson says:

            @Vitor, I don’t think SSC has a rightist slant (though of course everything is relative, and maybe you live in Berkeley). Most people I know who read SSC are left-leaning academic types. I think extreme right-leaning people post more about politics because they feel more conflicted, or more annoyed with the status quo, and they’re tolerated here (rightly). It’s the same with social justice people: they are a small minority of the (relatively moderate and politically apathetic) population, but you hear them the most because they have capital-o Opinions!

          • Jill says:

            SJ people? You may hear them somewhere but not much here.

            Perhaps many SSC readers are Left of Center. But if so, then they make sure they never comment, after watching what happens to Left Leaning people who do.

      • Rowan says:

        I think we have very different ideas about what “rationality” means. @Vitor mentioned the “Straw Vulcan”, here’s a LW post detailing some of the misconceptions that fall under the concept, and trying to spell out the kind of rationality us rationalists are actually about.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        As another left-leaning commenter, let me add my datum: this isn’t at all my reason. Usually when I don’t speak up in a politically charged thread, it’s because I feel like I’m there too late, or perhaps because I’m shying away from the mind-killer.

        As another datum, for a while one Veronica D was steadfastly championing often-nerd-critical feminism in this board, but she eventually announced she was leaving due to emotional burnout. (I regard this as a great loss–I didn’t always agree with her, but I was glad to see that side consistently represented).

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Eh. If you have something useful, add it.

          But as far as consistent representation – sometimes, a side being represented makes things less balanced, not more. Most people are weakmen, and having a poor representative can make a side look much worse than having no representative.

          • Nick says:

            But as far as consistent representation – sometimes, a side being represented makes things less balanced, not more. Most people are weakmen, and having a poor representative can make a side look much worse than having no representative.

            This is the primary (professed, at least) reason for my reticence posting and, indeed, my shying away from a lot of conversations. I know from long experience that not putting one’s best foot forward can be catastrophic, and that failing even once can make later attempts almost insurmountable. But I digress. +1 to your point, and I think you put it really well.

      • Izaak Weiss says:

        I disagree. I think that rationalism, especially reductionism, is how we arrive at truth, about nigh everything. And I want my philosophy to be based around truth.

        I don’t know how left you are, but… I’m pretty damn left.

      • benwave says:

        I’m strongly leftist, and I don’t comment much because I feel there’s little left to say in most cases. I’ve tried asking questions and seldom get interesting or useful answers any more. That is, answers I haven’t heard before or something presented in a new light. Honestly I’m not a big fan of the comments section here at all, though I really enjoy Scott’s actual columns.

    • erenold says:

      Let me try!

      So, SSC, which sport/activity would you consider to have the highest time-to-benefit ratio? Football (soccer), football (American), tennis, badminton, etc?

      I’ve had the best experiences with futsal, which if you take it seriously and have reasonably good teammates/competitors is extremely tiring. I’m staggering after about one and a half hours.

      Anyone else care to share?

      • emerald says:

        I’d recommend physically active job instead of sports.

        • Chalid says:

          What are physically active jobs that have pay somewhere around median income or greater, don’t require exceptional athletic ability, don’t require living someplace extremely remote, and aren’t dangerous?

          Offhand I can come up with physical trainer and beat cop in a safe community.

        • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

          Why not recommend being a millionaire instead? That way you can just pay a physical trainer and get the optimal investment for your time and money.

      • pjz says:

        …the one you like (and will therefore do) is the best one. I like Ultimate Frisbee a lot (aka ‘sprinting in circles’), personally.

        • erenold says:

          Yeah, that looks like a good one, too. I’ve given it a go in uni, and if I wasn’t so shite at it I’d probably enjoy it more and still play it today.

          I do wonder, just by the by, whether there exists anything like a scientific consensus on the metabolic benefits of any one of these sports, at a recreational level, vis-a-vis each other. Just eyeballing it, tennis strikes me as potentially the frontrunner, since the human body is in rapid motion almost continuously for long periods of time.

      • Yrro says:

        I’m absolutely addicted to BJJ. It’s the sport of nerds. Every move has a counter has a counter has a counter, and all twined together by the limitations of your physical structure and ability to execute in real time against a resisting opponent.

        Also love tennis and football. Football can be tough to find the right group to play with after high school, though, and tennis is abysmal if you and your partner are of different skill levels.

        • dndnrsn says:

          BJJ’s great. Only thing I do that can really be considered cardio.

          I know there’s … 4 SSC’ers who do BJJ? Probably not enough for a dedicated exercise thread.

        • Harkonnendog says:

          BJJ for the win because it is good for cardio, strength, stamina and agility. But it is a young person’s sport, hard to keep doing it when you approach forty, and it sucks when people half your age, or half your size, dominate you.

      • zz says:

        Tabatas. These are immediately followed by strength training (as described in Body By Science) and strength training (as described in ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription).

        Which brings up an important point. BBS will give you gains per minute spent exercising, but once you’ve made up your mind to actually strength train, the additional time you spend doing it as specified by the current consensus is almost certainly more valuable than the next most valuable thing you’d be doing with your time.

        Since that was extremely confusing: say BBS gives you 50 utils per minute and ACSM gives you 40 utils per minute and the next most valuable thing you do gives you 30 utils per minute. BBS will take you 12 minutes a week. ACSM takes about twelve times that (since they recommend 4 sets instead of 1 and thrice a week instead of once). So there’s 144 minutes you may or may not be spending exercising. Under BBS, in this 144 minutes, you get 3840 (= 50 * 12 + 30 * 108) utils, and under ACSM, you get 5760 (= 40 * 144) utils.

        Exercise exhibits superlinear returns to intensity: working at twice the intensity will, assuming you don’t hurt yourself, get you more than twice the gains. If you’re doing it right, you won’t be able to handle very much unless you’re an elite athlete or something, but since it’s so intense, there’s no need for a large volume. However, since you’re getting such high returns for every minute exercising, you want to get in every minute before the exercise loses its efficacy.

      • Davide says:

        What kind of benefit are we talking about?
        Building muscle or endurance? Losing calories? Socializing?

        I’m partial to stationary cycling with some resistance.
        It’s safe, cheap, burns off a good amount of calories while working both the heart & leg muscles and it doesn’t take that much focus, so you can do it while thinking about something or even, with the proper setup, watching TV shows.

        Not very social or ‘fun’, though, which is quite important for some people.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Yeah, the problem with stationary cycling is it’s boring as heck. I do it in the winter and watch mindless TV when I do. I don’t think I get as good a workout as when I’m going up and down hills on the real bike, but I’m using a fluid trainer (fixed resistance) rather than a dedicated stationary bike.

      • Some dude says:

        Doesn’t a high time:benifit ratio imply spending a lot of time for little benefit?

        Assuming you mean the opposite, I think something with fairly constant exertion like soccer or basketball would beat out something with a lot of breaks in play like American football, but I know next to nothing on the topic.

    • Lysenko says:

      Shredded/Ripped/Cut, generally.

      At the moment I’m just trying to walk a few miles every day. hopefully as weight comes off I will be able to increase that, although I think my days of 6 mile fartlek runs and 10+ mile trail runs are probably over.

    • Psmith says:

      I chuckled sensibly.

      Conditioning is more of a side dish than a main course for me these days, but pushing a sled a couple of times a week and walloping a heavy bag occasionally has been surprisingly good preparation for thrashing around on a mountain bike, or the occasional backpacking trip.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Has anyone here ever done Half Dome (or approx. equivalent)?

      If yes, what sort of training did you do and would you recommend to someone who in theory has to leave for work at 6:45 and gets home at 8:00?

      Any weights? Or just pure cardio?

      • Nornagest says:

        You don’t need weights for that, you need to get used to putting a lot of vertical feet behind you. Traditional cardio will be some help, but not as much as blocking out a few weekends and using them to do a lot of steep hikes.

        If you’re in reasonably good shape but not a frequent hiker, a thousand feet of elevation gain would be a good start. I seem to recall you’re a Bay Aryan? If so, Rodeo Beach to Hill 88 is a good one.

        • meyerkev248 says:

          Ok, that’s actually useful. Thank you for that, I’ve mostly been doing stuff on San Bruno Mountain and the Coast range myself.

          /And now I just need to justify driving through SF to get to that hike.
          //The degree to which traffic balkanizes the Bay is… difficult to overstate.

  108. Jill says:

    What is an anonymous commenter? Isn’t everyone? Very few people post under both their first and their last names. And even for those people, maybe they just made those names up, for all we know.

    • Agronomous says:

      Typically we refer to people who use the null handles “Anonymous”, “anonymous”, or “anon” as anonymous, and people who use handles like “Jill”, “onyomi”, and “Agronomous” as pseudonymous.

      The difference is largely that pseudonymous commenters can accumulate a reputation, which helps the rest of us (a) figure out what it is they’re saying, based on previous things they’ve stated or argued and (b) decide whether to read what they’ve written in the first place.

      Anonymous commenters, by contrast, can’t accumulate a reputation, because literally anyone can comment using that handle and nobody will protest (the way I would if someone started posting Hillary/Trump slash fiction under the “Agronomous” handle). Seriously hard-core anons all use the same fake email address, so you can’t tell them apart even by their gravatar.

      People who use their real names, like Larry Kestenbaum and Bram Cohen, generally check out as real people. One glaring exception is “David Friedman,” whose real name is apparently Carrie A. Duck.

      I myself would never say what I really think using my real name on the internet; I don’t even use my real email address here. But other people have more secure jobs or are closer to retirement or like to live dangerously or something.

      • Guy says:

        One glaring exception is “David Friedman,” whose real name is apparently Carrie A. Duck.

        Careful there, real Carrie Ducks do exist.

      • Oh dear God. Thank you so much for putting that image in my head. : – )

        I’ve almost always used my real name; if I remember rightly, it only took me a year or two to decide that calling myself “Silver Omega” online wasn’t nearly as cool as I’d thought it was. Of course I was already an adult, at least nominally, since in those days you only had internet if you were at a university or similar.

        But then, in the old days nobody worried about future employers seeing stuff you’d written (because they wouldn’t have internet access either) and I’ve spent the rest of my life here in New Zealand. If my employer wanted to fire me for something I’d written online, well, that would be outright illegal and I trust them to know it.

        Besides, my opinions are boring.

        • Alejandro says:

          Oh dear God. Thank you so much for putting that image in my head. : – )

          I guess you really meant Hillary/Trump, but my first thought was you meant “David Friedman carrying a duck”.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          If my employer wanted to fire me for something I’d written online, well, that would be outright illegal and I trust them to know it.

          Is that really illegal in New Zealand? How does that work — just stricter rules about termination, or what?

          • Well, I was exaggerating a little. I think I do have to follow the Staff Code of Conduct, e.g., not claim to be speaking on behalf of my employers, and I’m limited in what I can say about internal politics, management, and so on. I’ve never thought about all that too hard, because it’s just not the sort of thing I’ve ever wanted to write about in the first place.

            As for the rules about termination, I’m not a lawyer, of course, but I believe that even if I did violate the Code they’d still have to give me a warning first rather than firing me immediately, unless I went way over the top. For example, I vaguely recall a case involving a builder’s apprentice who spray-painted a swastika while working on a customer’s house. (The customer turned out to be Jewish, though I don’t think the apprentice knew that at the time.) The Employment Court held that a single such incident was not sufficient cause to fire him. (There might have also been procedural irregularities in the way he was fired, I don’t remember.)

      • Lumifer says:

        Technically speaking, “anonymous” is conditional on “to whom?”. For example, I would bet that very few people here are anonymous to someone armed with appropriate subpoenas or warrants.

      • Decius says:

        Don’t marginalize the transnonomous people who have changed their name.

  109. Jack Masters says:

    I’ve been an irregular reader of SSC for years, but I’ve never ventured into the fora before. A more involved friend assures me this is an appropriate time and place to plug a project of mine, but I apologize if this a little more self-interested than is considered cool around here.

    Some associates of mine recently put a lot of effort into e-publishing a novel that I wrote as a younger man. It kind of tests the boundaries of what you can call a novel, but, in any case, it’s a book-length fictional narrative. Years ago, Andrew Hussie (now of MSPaintAdventures fame, then about to be of Problem Sleuth fame) did some illustrations for the book. The best description/explanation of the book I can give you is an excerpt from an email I sent to Hussie in the course of planning the illustrations. It follows below.

    The book is called Eidophusikon. It can be downloaded for free on smashwords.com, or nearly for free on Amazon.com.

    https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/652419
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01IWE06RW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470021862&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=eidophusikon

    The following email is now documentary material; I leave the unfortunate number of typos uncorrected.

    ***

    As far as the real confusion people have with my book, what the fuck’s going on, it’s pretty low concept. Honestly, most of the holes in the story flat-out don’t matter; if you can keep track of “this guy wants to kill that guy, and this guy owes this woman something for something, and this woman has a mysterious past,” you should be able to make it through a single reading without too much pain. (I don’t know what “should” means in that context.) There are connections to draw down the line, after you’ve read it all, if you care enough to do so, but that’s putting the manure before the horse.

    The phony confusion is why the fuck the story’s written the way it is. By which I mean, out of chronological order, and with huge gaps between events. I don’t know whether that’s high concept or what the hell. The real deal is that there have been a number of narratives I’ve encountered in a disorganized way, and loved, only to be disappointed when I found the correct order and the whole story.

    One, maybe the first, was Liquid Television on MTV, especially the old Aeon Flux shorts. My brother and I would watch the show whenever we could catch it on, but we never seemed to know when it was on. So, we ended up seeing all these serial cartoons out of order, and trying to figure out what was going on. With Aeon Flux, it was pretty difficult, because there wasn’t much explanation of what was going on, except that this woman wanted to kill this guy, and there was some disease killing people, and the woman may have been dreaming the entire thing. My brother and I thought we had it all figured out, until we saw an episode that played the entire Aeon Flux serial in order, and we realized we weren’t even close. Oh well.

    It happened to me repeatedly with big, expansive, sci-fi/fantasy universes that seem impossibly complicated to an outsider. I started reading X-Men comics in the middle of The X-cutioner’s Song, some byzantine four-title crossover that barely makes sense to anybody. What’s interesting about that story arc is that it’s all about a villain whose motives nobody understands, but who is slowly revealed to be seeking vengeance for some past wrong that seems more imagined than real. That meant that I, some kid who just knows what powers these people have and what color underwear they display, was largely in the same boat as some of the characters. There was so much information out there that no matter how deep I dug into the mythology, my understanding was becoming richer and my appreciation greater. It was years before I realized that X-Men comics were stupid as hell.

    Then, the same thing happened to me with Dragon Ball Z, and probably something else at some time, but I think you get my point. I was finding things that were mysterious and intriguing foe the newcomer, but stupid as hell to the expert. Well, except Aeon Flux. I still like that stuff.

    Shortly before I started writing Chilling Like Didymus, which was originally intended to be a self-contained detective novel, I watched Mulholland Drive, and sort of fell in love with the movie. I watched it about a half a million times, and thought I had figured some stuff out, but it was still rather baffling. Then I started reading stuff online, and the common consensus was that the first 2/3 of the movie was a dream. I thought that was a bullshit solution, but upon further inspection, I realized that was almost certainly correct. I looked hard for a way that might not be the solution, but I could come up with nothing else that wasn’t equally dumb.

    I also read the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit? around that time. (The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was based off that book, in the sense that they both featured characters named “Roger Rabbit.”) I liked the book a lot, and it was probably the first mystery novel I’d ever read. The ending reveal was absolutely ludicrous, in a way that didn’t really impede appreciation of the story. I’ve since read most of the Sherlock Holmes stuff, The Maltese Falcon, Edgar Allen Poe’s detective stuff–it’s all well and good, but the solutions generally aren’t any less ridiculous than the twist in Roger Rabbit’s book. (Eddie Valiant boxes a genie! NO SHIT.)

    So, I set out to write this detective story, with this totally batshit twist to it that I took from an interview Robert Anton Wilson gave to some weird Canadian radio personality named Nardwaar. Wilson told this stupid joke about how Timothy Leary’s ashes had been condensed into some kind of super drug. I quickly realized that didn’t really give me the basis for any sort of mystery, so I started dumping in other shit from the interview: Hitler’s cock’s whereabouts, secret societies, sex and magic and bullshit. At this point, I no longer remember what the original plot was, or how I intended to wrap up the story.

    I had it all planned out, though, and I started writing a bunch of the scenes. I didn’t write in chronological order, though, because I’d get so excited about future scenes that I’d just jump ahead to writing them. So, eventually, I had all these disconnected scenes, and a general plan, and I suddenly realized that some of my scenes were narrated in first person, and some were in third. I honestly have no idea how I could have written several scenes without considering that problem, especially since John Tanis’s voice is completely different from the matter-of-fact proclamations of the third-person narrator. Maybe I knew it all along and didn’t care. I don’t remember.

    So, I had all these important scenes written out, all in the same document, but all disconnected. And it hit me that all those boring connecting scenes really weren’t all that important, that with the information in there everyone could tell what was going on, and really, the only thing I’d be doing by telling the whole story is dragging it out too fucking long.

    Then I changed some stuff so it made less sense, and put the sections in the wrong order.

    Now, I realized I was recreating the sort of confusion I appreciated from the earlier works I mentioned. Except, here, the confusion would be perpetual. I devised several solutions to the mystery of Danielle’s death, and made sure to keep the story logically consistent with all of them. Literarily, not all solutions are equal, and one solution is certainly hinted at more than others. But, the point was to ensure that no one could ever discover, “Oh, the genie did it,” and feel secure in that solution.

    Then, I got the bright idea to expand the story. I changed the ending again (I don’t remember what it used to be), and tried to not do the same thing three times, but probably did.

    The thing is, The Two Travelers was not intended to be chronologically confusing. Actually, once you realize that it’s telling three separate stories, you can easily determine that each story is being told in chronological order; the chronological confusion comes from the intersection of the three stories.

    I long regretted that I made The Two Travelers so straightforward. Maybe that was not a legitimate preoccupation.

    The thing is, while I always tried to have some plausible explanation for the nitty-gritty of the story, I just don’t think it matters enough to explain in the book. Why the fuck would William State arrange for his death to trigger a self-destruct sequence? That’s just idiotic. And why the hell does Rock Mahon need to kill everybody who spoke the John Tanis? Doesn’t that raise more suspicion?

    And that’s sort of where the fairy tale business comes in. These things are based on other stories. They’re not all fairy tales, but they’re all those sorts of stories. And because I’m forcing these characters into these roles, to those who would ask, “Why the hell would this happen?”, I can only offer, “But it did happen.” That may not be a particularly satisfying answer.

    “Eve’s Various Children” is probably the best example of this type of horseshit. Even within the context of this book, it makes no sense. A professional hitman picks up a bunch of unknown, loitering weirdos to a professor’s house, where they all proceed to make themselves at home, and then gang up to harass and murder the professor. For good measure, the professor is referred to as both male and female.

    Well, Jesus, how do you explain that? There’s a Grimm Fairy Tale, “Mister Korbes,” in which a bunch of animals and inanimate objects meet up and travel to visit Mister Korbes. He’s not home when they arrive, so they situate themselves in the joint and get comfortable. Mister Korbes finally arrives, and they kill him. The only hint of an explanation? “What a bad man he must have been!”

    Jesus, how do you explain that?

    Alright, so there’s some nonsensical fairy tale, and I decide to base part of the story on it. Does that really justify my story making no sense? I guess I just don’t see it as important. Yeah, it’s utterly ridiculous. You could probably assume, even within the context of the story, that it couldn’t really happen as it was described; that shouldn’t affect the rest of the story. Rock Mahon killed Dr. Yice–does it matter whether he did it with a gun or a Communist?

    Honestly, that part’s so far gone that even I don’t really consider it part of the story. But it does serve as fair warning, I think, for how crazy this shit’s about to get. Self-destruct sequence? Ok, I guess. “Kill everybody”? Meh, why not.

    And that third section, well, it seems pretty straight-forward to me too, but I’m sure I’m wrong about that.

    I suppose the summary of all that is that I intended to recreate an aesthetic effect that I have failed utterly to recreate in another human being. Actually, it worked with one guy, but heI’m’s kind of a weirdo.

    • Exit Stage Right says:

      This sounds pretty sweet, definitely going to check it out

      I remember discovering the “correct” order of events for Infinite Jest and being pretty annoyed afterwards. The book is fantastic regardless but now it feels somehow less Infinite, if that makes any sense.

      There’s no real reason a book can’t be both compelling and broken.

    • beoShaffer says:

      You had me at Hussie.

      • Jack Masters says:

        The published version ended up making scant use of illustration, and only one of Hussie’s illustrations remains. I’ve tried to give credit to Hussie without turning him into a sales gimmick, but I can appreciate that Hussie’s name might be a better draw than an absurdly long (and questionably informative) aesthetic description on an unrelated message board. THAT SAID, if you’re interested in seeing all of Hussie’s original illustrations in context, send me a message (eidophusikon at synod dot us) and I’ll send them to you.

      • Anton on a non-anon, (non "anonanon") ("anon"..and on) account says:

        Same.

        This guy emailed andrew hussie, creator of problem sleuth?

        even the words “hitler’s ****”, in that order, can’t put me off this purveyor of fine taste’s work.

         

        The thing about finding out more about settings and being dissapointed was really interesting as well, though

        Also maybe I think being instantly sold by the mention of someone emailing andrew hussie is hilarious? Yeah maybe that’s influenced me a bit

  110. Agree completely with the banning of anonymous comments. I have seen many discussion threads essentially destroyed by anonymous commenters wrapping themselves in the First Amendment. Of course good moderation can be a suitable substitute.

    A useful idea on the annoying topics might be to identify them and have some basic ground rules for discussion. Workarounds are less irritating if you know them up front, and know that what you post is going to carry an additional burden.

  111. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #20
    This week we are discussing “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card.
    Next time we will discuss “The Hammer of God” by Arthur C. Clarke.

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      How many people re-read the book vs recalling it from elementary school? It’s shocking how different it felt to read as an adult. Knowing what was going on contemporaneously in the spin-off stories made the original plot awkward and rather disappointing.

      • gbdub says:

        Can you expand on what you mean by you last sentence? I’ve only read Ender’s Game as an adult, but I haven’t reread it since I read the contemporaneous spinoffs (I assume you mostly mean the Bean series?)

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      In “Level 2 Intelligent Characters”, Eliezer Yudkowsky uses Ender’s Game as a case study on how to write characters who are actually smart rather than Hollywood smart (he was actually writing about the novel, not the short story, but most of what he wrote applies to both). I found it very interesting to reread the story with his analysis in mind. I was particularly intrigued by the notion that the only reason the ceremony of touching helmets to the gate corners exists is because Card needed a way for Ender to beat impossible odds during his final fight at Battle School. It’s obvious in retrospect, but on a first read through it seems like an brilliant solution to perfectly natural set of circumstances which just happened to come up.

      • Wrong Species says:

        I just read it recently for the first time and I thought that he might have been a little too smart. But I have an instinctive dislike of fictional wonderkids.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Sure, he’s oversmart for a kid, but in this case it’s at a school for the very smartest kids on Earth, a search which the entire planet is united behind because otherwise they’ll all die. He’s not just some rando. It would be inconsistent for him not to be unusually smart.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I get that. I think maybe the issue is that he basically never makes mistakes of any kind. Even incredibly smart people have flaws.

          • MugaSofer says:

            I mean, every single fight he gets into and the entire plot are basically enormous mistakes on Ender’s part.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            But are those mistakes considered as such within the fiction of the story? (I honestly don’t remember, it’s been ages since I read the book.)

          • 27chaos says:

            No, they’re not considered as mistakes by the story. Ender has a bit of a martyr complex. The bullies *made him* hurt them. (When really, if Ender was any good at interpersonal relations at all, let alone as good as OSC makes him out to be, many of these situations could have been resolved without death. Also, now that I think about it, what kind of shitty soldier kills people on accident?)

            I love the story, but one thing I like to do to stories I love is criticize their flaws, and grow beyond them. I don’t think you can say you’ve properly enjoyed a book unless you recognize the strong parts of the book and wish they were stronger, while wishing the weaker parts were diminished.

          • gbdub says:

            “what kind of shitty soldier kills people on accident”

            He didn’t kill people on accident. He set up scenarios to his advantage so he could apply decisive force when he got his opportunity, knowing that if he engaged in a “fair fight” or the obvious strategy, he’d get his ass kicked.

            I got the impression Ender was on some level aware that he killed or at least seriously harmed people, but allowed himself denial about it until forced to face it after his xenocide.

          • Decius says:

            I felt like the other kids weren’t the result of a global search for the “best suited to lead a fleet of spacecraft”.

        • Urstoff says:

          SF (and to a lesser extent, literary fiction) is full of adult-like “precocious” kids, almost to the complete exclusion of normal children. It’s pretty annoying. A well-written child character can be as entertaining as anything (see Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird).

          • pneumatik says:

            This was basically Bill Watterson’s complaint about kids in comics. It’s part of why he wrote Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) the way he did. Not that Calvin wasn’t surprisingly smart for a young kid, but he’s not mature (for certain values of mature) in his thinking like an adult is.

          • Decius says:

            Calvin might have more philosophical insight than the typical kid on a wagon, but he doesn’t demonstrate abnormal intelligence.

          • Nornagest says:

            He does have a pretty impressive vocabulary for a six-year-old, even if he often uses it to communicate dumb ideas.

        • hayz says:

          This is pretty much why HPMOR is unbearable to me.

      • Nornagest says:

        I thoroughly disagree with Eliezer on this one. Ender has a few good ideas, but he mainly appears smart because the author’s on his side, and because all the people around him are unrealistically stupid (but I repeat myself).

        In an actual school with actual children, the helmet exploit would have been discovered about ten minutes into the first game. Kids are literal-minded; mistaking a formal requirement for a ceremonial one is something that only adults would do, and even then probably not for long.

        And this is all the worse because Ender really only has one trick.

        • James Vonder Haar says:

          Was that really supposed to demonstrate Ender’s intelligence? It’s been a bit since I’ve read the book but I was always under the impression that it was more about his willingness to transgress social boundaries and custom in order to win. The generals, and I think Card as well, view this as admirable.

          Or in other words, they all thought of it, but only Ender was willing to risk pissing off his schoolmates and the adults in charge to do it. Which neatly parallels his later xenocide: anyone could think about using the Dr. Device on the planet itself, only Ender was willing to do it (in a simulation, mind, he was willing to piss off his commanders by mimicking a war crime to win a simulation, not actually commit that war crime).

          • Ergoemos says:

            This was likewise kind of hinted at when Orson Scott Card went through the same story beats with Bean. Bean had thought of these solutions, in a lot of ways, but he was more forward thinking too. He knew it wouldn’t matter if they cheated at the helmet trick, the teachers would just change the rule and they get one extra useless victory. Bean out-thought himself, while Ender’s “complete the missions, one at a time” system worked. Likewise, Bean realized how Dr. Device could be used, but he also knew they weren’t simulating an invasion.

            I think it was trying to demonstrate that Ender’s intelligence was the ‘right’ kind of intelligence to complete the set of impossible tasks that Ender had to complete. Place an even smarter person with the wrong set of emotional cues and motivations and Ender was the superior at this task.

            Mostly, I just am agreeing with you. I think that Ender’s intelligence was part of the goal, but his temperament and willingness-to-win was the key factor.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            The explicit comparison to his equally-intelligent brother and sister made it clear that it was his temperament rather than ability that made him special.

        • Nyx says:

          I agree that it’s not a particularly interesting trick, and the kind of strategy that has been invented many times before in the context of videogames (compare backdooring or split-pushing in MOBAs). But I feel like it’s a legitimate way to display intelligence, a desire to win and a disregard for orthodox methods.

        • Harkonnendog says:

          I thought Card did a pretty good job of coming up with solutions only a genius could come up with, considering his protagonist is supposed to be much smarter than Card himself. I’ve tried to write a protagonist who was a genius and found I couldn’t come up with anything a genius would come up with. I’m just a regular guy, so how could I? Thinking REALLY HARD for a long time doesn’t lead to moments of genius.

          Rereading the book wasn’t much fun. Like watching the Sixth Sense the second time but without as many “How did I miss that?!?” moments.

      • Chris Leong says:

        What was this exploit again? I can’t remember it.

        • Aegeus says:

          After defeating the enemy, you need four soldiers to touch their helmets to the enemy gate to “unlock” it so a fifth can pass through.

          For most of the game, this is just a background detail, although there’s a scene where Ender manages to turn a loss into a draw by pretending to be flashed, and then ambushing the enemy while they set up the victory ceremony. But in the final battle, Ender realizes that the “after defeating the enemy” bit isn’t actually part of the rules. He sends five soldiers to sneak to the gate while everyone else distracts the enemy, and they win the game.

          • Randy M says:

            This makes an interesting contrast to actual warfare, where victory was rarely decided by total annihilation but rather by accomplishing strategic objectives. But maybe since the students were conceiving the war they were training for as a defensive one in which they were trying to keep alien spaceships from razing surface populations, it makes more sense to eliminate every enemy than to take ground or destroy objectives.

          • Nornagest says:

            No, it still doesn’t make sense; the aliens in question are a hive-minded species where killing the queen stops all the workers, so every battle is an objective-based one even if your goal is extermination.

            (I don’t remember if that was publicly known at that point in the novel — but given that Battle School is supposed to be training commanders against the aliens, I’d expect the rules of the game to follow that structure, and not by accident.)

          • Montfort says:

            Nornagest: That was not publicly known. In fact, it was only a private theory of Rackham’s dismissed by the xenobiologists actually responsible for developing policy.

            Ender receives some amount of corroborating evidence privately, in the game after the Giant’s death, but as far as anyone else is concerned, they’re insectlike in form with unknown psychology and sociology.

          • Nicholas says:

            How the aliens work is a secret not discovered until the war is already basically over, at which point ender has already exited battle school.

          • Decius says:

            Mazer Rackham discovered that the aliens had a queen, and that the queen was essential to their fleet movements, by intuitively looking at their formation. He maneuvered his ship to attack and kill the queen, and that defeated the rest of the fleet. That was all known before the battle school was built, but it was kept quiet for plot reasons so that Ender could review the battle footage and “discover” it.

            Why the Formics didn’t spread queens out to a whole bunch of planets is anyone’s guess.

          • Randy M says:

            Right, if you are already putting them on ships, it’s hard to see the rationale for not putting them on their colonies as well. Did the novels retcon it into having them scoured from the planets by human forces? I know the one found later was specifically hidden away.

          • Nicholas says:

            If I remember right from the second book, the alien minds don’t have mobile bodies: You plant them, and then they spore up a colony of drones, and if you dig them up they die.

          • Randy M says:

            Hmm, there may be a hint of truth to that, but remember that Mackham’s theories were based on (iirc) the earth forces killing a particular command ship containing a hypothesized queen, upon which all the rest of the ships and soldiers went dormant. That indicates either mobile queens, or at least ones able to survive on a ship.

      • TACJ says:

        This is what I love about Neal Stephenson’s books: when his characters do something clever you can actually see that what they’re doing is clever, because Stephenson does the research to back up any particular gambit.

        (There are lots of examples, but my favourite one is the mine-escape in Cryptonomicon. The fact I can only vaguely recall it suggests it may be time to re-read).

        • Ergoemos says:

          Or they appear very clever until things change completely, such as cutting across a burb-nation through the wrong yard and crashing a mob-owned pizza delivery truck (it makes more sense in context) into an empty swimming pool. I like that he is very willing to show his characters as clever as well as foolish, in ways that aren’t exactly admirable. Most protagonists make mistakes, but authors are rarely want to show them doing something completely dumb.

      • wintermute92 says:

        Interestingly, Card wrote about exactly these issues in his forward to one of the reprints.

        He described getting fan letters from gifted students who saw Ender’s Game as an exceptionally good account of their lives, of what it means to be both brilliant and immature. And, simultaneously, getting letters from teachers and gifted-program educators castigating him for writing inaccurate children. I believe the quote was “real kids don’t think like that”, which is a boggling amount of hubris.

        Some of this can be reconciled with writing (Ender is impossibly reliable because Card wrote challenges for him to solve) and age issues (Ender is too physically proficient for a six year old, even if we assume that he’s exceptionally smart).

        But some of it, I think, is that Card captured a sometimes-ugly experience with an accuracy that a lot of people don’t want to deal with. A truly vivid account of how smart children can be, and how cruel their bullies can be, isn’t something that appeals to those who are long gone from those days.

      • Randy M says:

        Part of good plotting is setting up the situations so that it is internally consistent and plausible, while allowing for the plot and characters you want to develop logically.

      • Your Mom the Sexual Beast says:

        But it could also be that it’s there to necessitate a 5-soldier margin in order to win. And that comes up not only generally but in the battle where Ender first actually participates, by hiding around the gate and then freezing enough people to force a tie (I believe in Bonso’s army). So it’s not so cut and dried as all that – it’s, at the least, pulling double duty as a plot device

        • wintermute92 says:

          This was always my interpretation also.

          The 5 soldier rule means that a narrow, fluke win is just a tie. That’s why it’s not just five helmets, it’s five helmets from soldiers who aren’t fully defeated.

          Notably, Ender uses that trick against Bonso and the rule isn’t changed; presumably it’s working as intended. There was only a crackdown when it’s victory condition status was abused.

          (Things like this happen in real sports too – soccer had to rework the handball rule because catching a goal was still net-positive!)

    • switchnode says:

      Here is an essay about Ender’s Game (the novel) that I like a lot.

      (It hasn’t been unpublished; I link via IA because the author’s new website has some formatting issues.)

      • wintercaerig says:

        I second this recommendation; the paper is excellent.

      • moridinamael says:

        The essay is worth reading and definitely offers a fresh take on the book. It certainly altered my thinking about the book the first time I read it.

        However, I think the essay goes a bit too far. The author seems to implicitly want us to accept that

        – an intentions-based morality is terrible and there is no valid defense for it
        – the reasons and justifications for an action don’t matter, only the consequences

        These are actually very bold assertions. Our legal system formally considers degrees of intention by distinguishing “murder” form “manslaughter” and appending “with intent” to various crimes. Considering intentions when evaluating moral culpability is a commonplace and popular framework. The essay seems to want to assign moral weight to certain actions with absolutely no regard for context. I don’t know anyone who seriously endorses this mentality. (I guess Calvinists claim to, but I don’t know anyone who does.)

        The essay contains sentences like this:

        > The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.

        Well, yes. Definitely. Do I really have to concoct real-world scenarios where this would be an uncontroversial statement of the reality of a situation?

        The “problem” with Ender’s Game is that it’s so over-the-top in its defense of Ender. The book is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the idea of personal responsibility, since he’s for all practical purposes programmed to do what he ends up doing.

        In the Postscript the author even acknowledges this critique but “defends” themselves by making a statement that they never make in the original essay, namely that they don’t object to the intuition that intentions should matter, but rather that only intentions should matter. That’s a pretty huge distinction and it opens up a gray area that the original essay doesn’t admit to.

        • switchnode says:

          Hm. I didn’t read anything like those implicit assumptions into the text of the essay, even before the postscript; the intentions-vs-consequences argument seemed to me to be restricted to a critique of, as you say, the over-the-top contortions involved in rigging the game for Ender.

          I don’t think Kessel is arguing against the consideration of intention, so much as pointing out the inherent fallibility in judging it. The paragraph immediately following your quote begins:

          The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue.

          Consequences matter, not because actions have some objective, free-floating moral value, but because as the enormity of the consequences increases, the plausibility of the actor truly being unaware of them, or having wholly benign intentions, approaches zero. (Depending on one’s definition of “the same … act”, “concoct” may be the operative word.)

          In LW-speak, Kessel is making an outside view objection, with specific reference to the fundamental attribution error: that we judge our own motives leniently, that we judge others’ harshly, and that we have seen atrocities supposedly justified by good intentions far too often to trust claims thereto (others’ or our own) unreflectively. Card has constructed a reductio ad absurdam that flatters our prejudices, but we cannot apply them safely in real life.

          (The moral argument as I have summarized it is somewhat dry, and certainly incomplete without reference to the psychological appeal; that was the part of the essay I found most convincing.)

      • ShemTealeaf says:

        It’s an interesting essay, but the author loses me when they blame Ender for the xenocide. He thought he was engaged in a training exercise, and he was attempting to tank the exercise and prove himself too dangerous to command a real fleet. Any blame for the xenocide falls on Graff and the other adults, not on Ender.

        Furthermore, it’s not clear to me that the xenocide is immoral even in theory. Given a technologically superior alien race who has demonstrated a willingness to attack Earth and with whom no negotiation is possible, I would expect humanity to do everything in its power to destroy them. It’s mentioned repeatedly throughout the series that defensive warfare in space is a losing proposition; the only defense is a good offense.

        • switchnode says:

          With all due respect, I think you have missed the point. You have justified Ender’s actions with reference to his situation and the knowledge available to him at that point in the book, but these circumstances are not inescapable facts of reality; they are deliberate choices by the author. Fictional worlds can justify any action arbitrarily. Ender is not the target; Card is.

          I like the Watsonian mode too, but it’s not always a suitable one. If you’re reading it, it’s for you.

          (As for xenocide specifically: there is rather a lot of difference between self-defense judged, understood, and accepted in light of the consequences, and self-defense in (claimed) total ignorance of the consequences with a (claimed) total unwillingness to attempt it had the consequences been known. The latter presents obvious perverse incentives.)

          • ShemTealeaf says:

            What do you make of passages like this, that seem to assign in-story guilt to Ender?

            But whether or not Ender’s battle simulations were practice or real, the ultimate purpose of any practice was to enact such destruction in reality. Ender and his commanders were aiming for this battle and they all knew it; thanks to the trick played on Ender it just happened sooner than it would have otherwise.

          • Jiro says:

            “Genocide” is a boo light, which stays that way at least partly because it’s impossible to justify genocide in real life. People have automatic reactions to the idea of genocide that are not based on analyzing each instance to figure out whether it is good or bad; such analysis is never needed in the real world.

            Authors and readers live in the real world. So authors, unless they are really clever and trying to appeal to really specific audiences, will always write as if genocide is evil even if the circumstances of the story mean it is not.

          • switchnode says:

            ShemTealeaf, the immediately preceding sentences:

            This “science fiction element” (remote-directed war) serves in moral terms as yet another evasion; in reality, people do not commit genocide by accident. This is another parallel between the bugger war and the fight scenes where Ender kills Stilson and Bonzo, all three constructed by Card, however improbably, so that Ender never knows he is killing his adversaries.

            Kessel does not (and cannot) claim that Ender does know what is happening (because the text explicitly provides otherwise); he only points out that, in any plausible scenario, he would have, or at least would have been able to predict the result. Again, Card is the target.

            (That specific remark is actually really interesting, which perversely kind of throws off the essay by pointing the way towards a side track, but: Ender does know where the war was headed, and doesn’t like the idea or his role in it, and so (as you say) he tries to quit!

            But the plan he comes up with is one for an underhanded, spectacularly destructive victory—i.e., the exact same response he has always ended previous confrontations with, the exact same response that has always propelled him to new and greater scales of destruction, and the exact same response that his handlers have always wanted. And he must be consciously aware of at least some of this, because of the way he recapitulates it with Bean.

            The obvious way to go home—surrender—is unacceptable to brilliant, pacifistic Ender, because humanity needs him. But when he thinks he sees a way to quit by breaking things and winning, humanity is forgotten.

            If you’re willing to blame Graff and the commanders (and the essay doesn’t assign guilt directly to Ender; they’re mentioned nearly as often in that section) I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to argue that Ender has a significant in-story blind spot. That interpretation—subconscious, but no conscious, intent—would make a really, really interesting character and story, and I wouldn’t object to either one. But there’s no space for it in the text of Ender’s Game, and certainly none in his post-Game sainthood. That’s the problem.)

          • Decius says:

            All of Ender’s handlers consider the Xenocide to be a superlative result. Because they are idiots who have no business being in charge, they wouldn’t have thought to put a MD device on a ballistic projectile and launch it at the Formic homeworld.

            They are somehow smart enough to devise a procedure that finds someone competent, and then trick that person into doing their dirty work.

            If you suspend disbelief and pretend that the things Ender figured out were actually things that needed a genius, the story actually works.

      • stillnotking says:

        That essay, while pointing out some real flaws in EG’s moral logic (the biggest, to my mind, being that the “simulation” premise is an obvious and unconvincing dodge), in turn elides the problems with asserting intentions don’t matter. If EG is a reductio of one extreme, this piece is a reductio of the other.

        Also, the author treats Ender’s failure to seek help from adults as not being adequately explained, but EG takes some pains to articulate a completely Hobbesian view, in which power is always the ultimate question. For Ender to seek anyone’s help would make him dependent on them, according to the book’s logic. Obviously this isn’t an appealing world view to liberals (and by “liberals” I mean those to the left of Hobbes, i.e. almost every modern person), but it isn’t an oversight. It’s just a perspective to which we are not accustomed, and which we reflexively associate with evil to the extent that we recognize it at all. That’s why the perennial claim that EG is an apologia for fascism doesn’t surprise me, although I do think it’s unfair. The moral universe of EG and the moral universe as imagined by fascists are not all that far apart. Their conclusions are very different, though.

    • Kevin C. says:

      The main things I’ve always had as, I guess, complaints about Ender’s Game are:
      1. Why didn’t anyone before Andrew figure out the MD Device as planet-killer strategy? It appeared obvious to me back when they described first described how the weapon worked. (Then again, whenever a technology is introduced into a story, I spend at least a little thought as to how to weaponize it, or if already a weapon, how to use it to it’s most devastating degree.)
      2. Why did Andrew feel at all guilty about the woefully-incomplete “xenocide”? As far as I’m concerned, wiping out the Formics would absolutely be the right course of action.

      • gbdub says:

        1. I didn’t get the impression that nobody had thought of using the MD as a planet killer, only that perhaps they weren’t sure what would happen. Ender just recognized it as the only available strategy in the final battle – and was willing to sacrifice his entire fleet in a suicidal attack strategy.
        2. Ender was intentionally isolated from deep trustworthy relationships with other people. He ended up with a deep psychological connection to a Formic queen. I think he in some sense wanted to feel responsible, even though I don’t think he really second guessed his choice.

  112. Philosophisticat says:

    I’m for banning anonymous commenting, not just because of the positive effect on quality of discourse, but also for the more basic reason that it helps me keep track of who is talking, especially when there are multiple anonymice posting on the same topic.

    • Paul Barnsley says:

      Yes, this.

    • Jill says:

      Yes. I would like people’s names to all be different from one another. If some anonymice are constantly insulting, and other anonymice are nice people with interesting things to say, I want to be able to figure out which ones to stop reading.

    • I’m against banning anonymous commenters, because it’s really easy to make throwaway accounts and identities. I don’t feel like we have a huge problem with low-effort trolls of the type who would be discouraged by making a handful of consistent identities.

      I would kind of like to see what kind of creative word games pop up if you just ban ‘anonymous’ from the name fields of posts, however.

    • Yes, Philosophisticat has it right. In essence we are all anonymous since any name we claim might be a lie, so I have little faith that anonymous postings can be ended. But I get really tired of people responding “this is to the anon with the green gravitar” and the like. There is no downside to banning at least “Anonymous” and “Anon.”

  113. Mark says:

    Dumb question…

    How could you comment anonymously here? Don’t you need a name and email.

    How about we just start showing these things?

    Or maybe we start having mods here to censor?

  114. Izaak Weiss says:

    One of the things that I think might separate the hard sciences from the softer sciences is that there are large bodies of knowledge that every physicist, chemist, and biologist agrees on; they aren’t controversial. What sort of large bodies of knowledge[1] does softer fields such as Sociology or Economics have that aren’t disagreed upon within the professionals of the field?

    For example, there seem to be less of a common ground between Keynesian economists and Austrian economists than between Many World physicists and Hidden Variable physicists.

    [1] I want to distinguish between ‘knowledge’ as a set of facts and ‘knowledge’ as a set of theories. A set of facts might be thought of as being able to list the results of a thousand experiements; a set of theories enables someone to predict the results of a novel experiment with some level of accuracy.

    • cassander says:

      I’d say more it’s large bodies of knowledge “utterly empirically verifiable” rather than agreed upon.

      • Izaak Weiss says:

        But the thing is that anyone can claim that their knowledge is empirically verifiable. But the only way to know if an economist is right about the economy, or a physicist is right about electrons, without setting up expensive experiments, is to look at academic consensus.

        • cassander says:

          Can claim, yes. But the hard sciences don’t just claim, they can predict the future. They can tell me when the next eclipse will be or what will happen if I mix these two chemicals with extreme precision. Sociology and gender studies have nothing like that.

          • Izaak Weiss says:

            Did you read my initial question? I was formulating that exact theory and asking if anyone had any counterexamples.

          • Kingmaker says:

            They can tell me when the next eclipse will be or what will happen if I mix these two chemicals with extreme precision.

            Some can. Some cannot. Seismologists and Meteorologists, for example, make probabilistic predictions and are frequently wrong, even though they have pretty good theory to explain their subject matter and are generally considered “hard” sciences. Making specific predictions about chaotic systems is hard, and it gets harder the further in the future you are trying to forecast.

            Sociology suffers from sociologists being bad at math being a poor cousin to economics a subject matter that is difficult to model mathematically and ideologically loaded, but in principle there is no reason it should be any different in terms of being able to generate good theoretical explanations.

          • Tibor says:

            @Kingmaker: I agree, but I would say that in fact the math literacy among sociologists really is rather bad. I don’t see it as a problem of the sociologists though but rather as an opportunity for more division of labour. It is obvious that an average sociologist is not going to understand statistics as well as an average statistician, nor should they be required to I think (mainly because when people are required to know something they don’t really want to learn, they don’t learn it properly anyway).

            Sociologists should simply cooperate with (applied) statisticians much more than they do, perhaps even make it a standard thing to have a few applied statisticians in your department who don’t even have to be the faculty. Same as you usually have an IT department or how people in natural sciences fields have lab assistants (it is not quite the same since the lab assistants do the work which the researchers could do but don’t have time to do).

          • Kingmaker says:

            @Tibor

            I was just poking fun at sociologists. As far as I am aware, stats literacy is on the upswing among sociologists, which can only be a good thing for the field. (Gotta resists the econ imperialists somehow).

          • Agronomous says:

            I think it’s a good idea to pair social scientists up with statisticians to write papers, the way we pair up surgeons with anesthesiologists to perform operations.

            I predict the social scientists would reject the idea because, like anesthesiologists, statisticians would make things much less exciting.

            (Though for the readers, less painful.)

          • dndnrsn says:

            When a reckless, Devil-may-care social scientist is teamed up with a by-the-books statistician, they’ll find the truth … if they don’t kill each other first!

          • ayegill says:

            Together, they predict crime!

      • Tracy W says:

        Popper pointed out that you can’t prove an empirical fact, you can only fail at disproving it, despite your best efforts. So, in the context of that, what does “utterly empirically verifiable” mean? Is it something like “we can send signals by radio waves”?

        • I’d say that it means that the original evidence is verifiable. That is, you can always run the experiments again.

          (Although it is I suppose true in a broader sense that the fact that radios and computers and spaceships work is some sort of evidence for the effectiveness of physics as a field of study.)

        • Charlie says:

          Falsifications are not absolute either – something that looks like a falsification might not be, so really you’ve only provisionally failed to falsify the falsification. The truth is, nothing is certain one way or the other. Which is why it’s such a convenient thing that we can reason using probabilities.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          This is not quite right. Here are several inaccurate glosses of Popper’s central thesis about science, all of which I’ve heard at some time or another:

          1. No claim about the world can be deductively proven a priori, in the way that claims in mathematics or formal logic can be proven.
          –This is just an empiricist credo. It was not controversial in Popper’s circles, and has only lately become so (again).

          2. No claim about the world can be known infallibly to be true.
          –This was a bit more controversial– some of Popper’s peers held that statements reporting observations could be known infallibly– but Popper’s thesis was actually much stronger and restricted to a certain type of scientific knowledge. Popper did think this, but he also thought that no claim about the world could be known infallibly to be false,* so there is no asymmetry here. He was a fallibilist, through and through.

          3. No claim about the world can ever be confirmed (made probable) to any degree.
          –Popper did not believe this, and it is obviously false. My seeing a red flower confirms that red flowers exist.

          Going from memory, Popper’s central thesis is this: mature scientific theories– he is chiefly concerned with physics, so has in mind universally quantified sentences whose domain of quantification is the entire universe, past, present, and future– can never be confirmed to any degree, they can only by falsified by deducing from them a consequence which is inconsistent with our observations. The methodology of science is deductive, not inductive, and the logical form of mature scientific theories gives us no hope of proving them deductively from our observations. He thinks this, first, because he takes Hume to have shown that there is something deeply suspicious about inductive reasoning, and second, because the attempts in his lifetime to develop a confirmation logic to regiment and rehabilitate inductive reasoning were widely perceived to be failures.

          It is an open question whether contemporary approaches to confirmation centered around e.g. Bayesianism have succeeded where Carnap and Hempel failed. Their ambitions also tend to be less sweeping.

          *Offhand, if you can know infallibly that p is true, you can know infallibly that ~p is false, and conversely, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

          • Tracy W says:

            Thanks for the detail

          • Samedi says:

            Nice summary of Popper’s thought. Philosophers have long been critical of inductive reasoning. The problem is that induction works, especially when you think in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes like “true” and “false”. Induction has given us insights into the natural world. The same cannot be said for purely deductive reasoning. Perhaps Popper and Hume should have addressed the “deduction problem” instead?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I don’t know quite what you mean by “purely deductive reasoning,” but (virtually) all mathematics, including probability theory, is deductive. Remember that deductive reasoning =df reasoning where the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. There is no science without deduction, e.g., to test whether a purported law of nature is true we need to deduce from the law, in concert with various auxiliary premises, a prediction concerning a particular case.

            But I suspect the sentiment you are trying to express is closer to the one spelled out in the first mischaracterization of Popper’s thesis I listed above, that a priori reasoning cannot give us any knowledge of the world. This isn’t a consequence of the style of reasoning employed, though.

        • Emma Casey says:

          >Popper pointed out that you can’t prove an empirical fact

          It is the case that we can gain knowledge that makes us ever more confident of a particular statement. This gaining of knowledge makes the confidence in fact justified.

          If you want to stop using the word prove and use some other word that’s fine, seems pointless but fine. The phenomenon still exists.

          • John Colanduoni says:

            @Emma

            I think it’s still important to distinguish things like “I wrote a proof of this formal logical sentence, proving it subject to my proof having an error” and “I took a bunch of physical measurements, and they all were in keeping with this physical theory”. For the first, you *must* have made an error for what you “proved” to be wrong, while the second could fail because your physical theory only works in certain conditions you failed to substantiate (e.g. Tuesdays) or just plain bad luck.

            (For those familiar with the meta mathematics involved, I’m referring to the probability of a formal statement, not its object level truth)

            So using some different words to make this clear seems beneficial to me, since there is clearly a further epistemic wrinkle with the second. You can talk about the probability of N mathematicians being wrong about the correctness of a proof, but this still seems different than having to deal with the probability that something else explains your results, in addition to the probability of a measurement error.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Emma: that’s why I followed up my email with a question about how utterly empirically verified was being used in this case.

          • Bryan Hann says:

            Can one prove that crystal come in a precise number of symmetries?

    • NL says:

      That’s because the difference between a Keynesian economist and an Austrian economist is closer to the difference between an Evolutionary biologist and a creationist. Austrian economists reject empiricism.

      Here the IGM poll of economists, it shows a lot of consensus http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel

      • Izaak Weiss says:

        How many creationists have PhDs in Biology? How many creationists have Nobel Prizes in Biology?

      • Jill says:

        Austrian economists always seemed to me like they did reject empiricism. But I didn’t know they admitted it. Where did you read this?

          • Shieldfoss says:

            Shorter Mises: Humans are motivated thinkers and we cannot do experiments to correct our errors, so let us be Math instead of Science.

            That sounds… completely reasonable? You run into a problem where you need empiricism to find out which axioms to build your math on top of, but that’s a problem in “real” math too (Viz: Axiom of Choice yes/no?)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Shieldfoss
            But pure maths isn’t supposed to model real world phenomena (although that sometimes happens as a side effect). Economics is supposed to model the real world, so it doesn’t make sense to try to do it without looking at the real world.

          • John Colanduoni says:

            @Sheildfloss

            The difference is that after Gödel’s incompleteness theorems mathematicians stopped thinking about working within “the” mathematical system, and looked at axioms as a choice of world to work within. It became really hard to have a strong opinion on the “truth” of the axiom of choice for purely mathematical reasons when it was proved that it wasn’t even possible that it would be a source of contradiction.

            If they admitted they were doing economics in a particular world which may be about as related to the real world as Candyland, that would be one thing. But to work within a field much messier and human-specific than physics and then claim a stronger mathematical mandate seems pretty ridiculous to me.

          • wintermute92 says:

            This is a really nasty bit of cherrypicking. (That’s not an accusation that you’re responsible, btw; it goes around like a reputable summary and I was initially taken in.)

            The line excluded by those ellipses is crucial: “They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori.”

            Mises is basically asserting a framework (praxeology) which exists independent of experimental results, from which to approach those experimental results. It’s akin to mathematics and empiricism, which cannot be experimentally derived by are are still crucial to the experimental practice of physics.

            It’s reasonable to say that Mises draws his boundaries wrong and asserts a bunch of falsifiable matters as fundamental. I think that’s probably true, in fact. But it’s misleading to claim that he’s discarding empiricism when he’s actually trying to define a theoretical framework in which to carry it out.

          • John Colanduoni says:

            That misdrawing of boundaries is precisely my issue. His writings strike me as a motte and bailey act, where he hides behind the a priori nature of a formal logic, but claims that he’s doing economics that should be taken seriously as substantiated descriptions of the real world.

            The physics equivalent would be Einstein pairing his proposal of General Relativity with a paragraph on “look, differential geometry is a priori!” An even closer analogue is any other economist that uses mathematics heavily without arguing about the a priori nature of real numbers.

          • shieldfoss says:

            @sweeneyrod: I’m not claiming he’s a good economist, or his results are useful. I am strictly limiting myself to saying that the actual cited page sounds reasonable.

            @John Colanduoni, re Motte/Bailey: I agree that it looks a lot like that, yeah.

      • MichaelM says:

        A certain brand of Austrian economists with essentially no public visibility outside the internet rejects empiricism. If it comes from mises.org, it is this brand. If it comes from an actual academic economist who happens to like what guys like Hayek, Bohm-Bawerk, or Menger have had to say, they likely are not of this brand.

        That there is a deep split between the Misean-Rothbardian tradition and the more mainstream oriented Hayekian tradition in Austrian economics is really, really important for something that is essentially unknown.

        • wintermute92 says:

          > is really, really important for something that is essentially unknown.

          This exactly. I find some of Rothbard downright insane, and seeing people take him credibly as an “Austrian economist” diminished my respect for the whole field. I didn’t understand the mess until I realized that the Austrians are nothing like a unified school of thought.

    • Adam says:

      I think virtually all economists agree on the idea of some goods having value of some sort; that e.g. grain can be used to not die and is thus better than not having grain (or, if they dont believe grain is intrinsically better than something exactly like grain but inedible, then they believe that the market assigns value to goods. I think most would agree that money can be exchanged for goods and thus, transitively at least, has value.

      I think many fundamental microeconomic concepts are non-controversial with the majority of economists; e.g. (barring veblen/giffen outliers, if they believe they exist) price elasticity of demand is negative

      • Paul Barnsley says:

        The narrow, stronger claim would be to say that substitution effects are universally agreed to be negative.

        Thought that might still run into problems in certain contexts where there is signalling or public values…

      • vV_Vv says:

        I think virtually all economists agree on the idea of some goods having value of some sort; that e.g. grain can be used to not die and is thus better than not having grain (or, if they dont believe grain is intrinsically better than something exactly like grain but inedible, then they believe that the market assigns value to goods. I think most would agree that money can be exchanged for goods and thus, transitively at least, has value.

        But virtually everybody, economist or not, agrees with this. It’s like saying that evolutionary biologists agree with creationists that humans have four limbs.

        • wintermute92 says:

          This is one of the other problems for the social sciences, though.

          Everybody agrees that objects fall, but a proper theory of gravity was still a breakthrough. Quantifying or systematizing the obvious gets far less respect in ‘soft’ sciences than in ‘hard’ ones, even when both represent a real step beyond public intuition.

          Of course, the rejoinder is that economics doesn’t formalize anything as clearly as even Newtonian gravity, and then we’ve gone circular…

          • Aapje says:

            There is a difference between observing that objects fall and giving a formula that allows you to calculate the acceleration and/or the forces involved.

            The key is accuracy and predictive power, more than vague generalities.

    • Paul Barnsley says:

      I think a lot of the common ground between economists is microeconomics. Macroeconomics describes emergent phenomena when micro rules operate on a grand scale with government intervention, etc etc, and as such conclusions differ massively based on small changes to initial assumptions. But they typically appeal to something resembling accepted microeconomic logic.

      Microeconomists agree on a great deal, though they, understandably, spend more time talking about the things they disagree on.

      • Kingmaker says:

        Microeconomists agree on a great deal, though they, understandably, spend more time talking about the things they disagree on.

        I think most scientists spend more time talking about the things they disagree about. It’s just that few people are interested in the rival theories of avant garde chemistry or geology, whereas everyone and their dog has an opinion on economics.

        • Titanium Dragon says:

          That’s because, by and large, economics has a greater impact on most people’s lives, and we have much more democratic control over economic policy.

    • Tracy W says:

      For economics, the field of micro-economics springs to mind. Sometimes the body of incorporated knowledge changes, eg the incorporation of behavioural economics, but there’s general agreement on a lot, eg comparative advantage, things matter on the margin, prices are formed by the intersection of supply and demand, and where there are disputes they’re often about which situations are best explained by which theory.

      • TACJ says:

        This may be true as a sociological statement about the mainstream economics profession in English-speaking countries, but I’d disagree that it’s true in general.

        Neoclassical microeconomics is riddled with logical inconsistences and methodological problems. These have been known about for some time but are almost entirely ignored in the teaching of introductory economics courses.

        • Friday says:

          And you’re not describing them because…?

          • TACJ says:

            Limited time 😉

            But seriously. Claiming that micro-economics is a site of broad consensus within the discipline might be accurate; but only in the sense that there is a broad consensus among flat-Earthers that the Earth is flat.

            Taking one example: in order to generalise the law of demand to multiple consumers you need monotonic (i.e. downward sloping) demand curves. The only way to get these is if you assume all consumers in your market are identical, which effectively means you only have one consumer in your market. To put it differently: you haven’t generalised at all. You’ve just proved that you can’t generalise.

            Interested readers can refer to Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics for further in-depth discussion. I also recommend

            I should emphasise that the impressive thing about the theoretical problems with neoclassical microeconomics isn’t the corpus of theory itself; but the fact it continues to provide employment to a class of academic economists despite being utterly worthless as a tool for understanding the real world of production, consumption, exchange, and distribution.

            The really frustrating thing is that there are some important nuggets of insight in the dross, for example the fact that (given a set of assumptions about competitive pressures) prices will tend towards marginal cost. This is an important and powerful observation, but it’s been bolted into this vast and broken edifice of logical theorising.

          • Anon. says:

            The only way to get these is if you assume all consumers in your market are identical

            Could you clarify this? Because it’s very easy to think of an example where consumers are not identical but AD is still monotonic.

          • Nornagest says:

            in order to generalise the law of demand to multiple consumers you need monotonic (i.e. downward sloping) demand curves. The only way to get these is if you assume all consumers in your market are identical, which effectively means you only have one consumer in your market.

            What? No you don’t. You really, really don’t.

            As a toy example, consider a market in carrots with two customers, Alice and Bob, and one vendor, Carol. Alice likes to make carrot cake, and at $1 a pound buys a pound a month; but if the price of carrots rises to $2 a pound she will switch to making zucchini bread, which she doesn’t like quite as much normally. Bob has a horse, and Bob’s horse has picky taste, so he will buy a pound of carrots a month up to $5 a pound, at which point he decides to take his chances with other vegetables.

            That gives us three points on the market’s demand curve: 2 pounds at $1, 1 pound at $2, and 0 pounds at $5. As you can see, it has a negative slope and monotonically decreases over its domain, even though each consumer has quite different priorities.

          • TACJ says:

            Replying to Nornagest:

            You’re right and I’m wrong. I mis-remembered the argument (which is a lot more involved than I remembered – it’s a while since I’ve read up on this stuff). Probably best way to get the clear picture is this lecture:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Gb4tk-z_s

            (Or Google “Keen Behavioural Finance 2011 Lecture 02 Market Behaviour Part 1”)

    • In linguistics, phonetics (the study of the articulatory details of language sounds) passes both the “mostly universally agreed upon by linguists” test and the “empirically testable” one. Things gets iffy as soon as you get to phonology though (the study of how the mind treats sounds to organize them into abstract categories). Neurolinguistics is also pretty solid, however.

      • wintermute92 says:

        Linguistics probably has one of the best claims to a body of empirical fact. You could always claim “some other language might break the rules!”, but physics is surprisingly vulnerable to the same claims on a large scale (cf. false vacuum theory).

        • Anon while it lasts says:

          I’d say that linguistics is probably the best ‘social science’ but it is still awfully shaky. Phonetics is very solid, but once we get into phonology – especially suprasegmentals – there’s a lot of debate and confusion. In syntax we agree there are things like nouns and verbs (though maybe not in Salish – see Kinkade 1983!) but developing fully general crosslinguistic theories is hard. The field is very like philosophy – split into different ‘schools’ like minimalism, LFG, HPSG etc which are mutually incompatible and there seems to be little chance of reconciliation. Also it got completely blindsided by the discovery of nonconfigurational languages and something similar may happen again for all we know. Semantics seems to have formed a consensus around the logical tradition starting from Frege and Russel, through Davidson Kripke and Montague but I personally think the whole formal/possible worlds semantics is total bullshit. Other than that it’s fine. Neurolinguistics is relatively solid but has all the standard problems of neuroscience. Lots of sociolinguistics is just glorified sociology and has all the attendant vices. Stuff like dialectology and even social dialect studies like Labovs seem reasonable – though often difficult to generalise.

          My 2 cents, anyway.

    • j r says:

      For example, there seem to be less of a common ground between Keynesian economists and Austrian economists than between Many World physicists and Hidden Variable physicists.

      I cannot speak on the physics, but the differences between the various schools of economists have much more to do with precision than with accuracy.

      For instance, most economists agree that, under certain circumstance, an increase in government spending will increase economic growth (ie the fiscal multiplier). Where the disagreements occur is as to how much and under what circumstances that fiscal multiplier will be in any given situation.

      Consequently, most economists agree with the general wisdom of counter-cyclical fiscal policy; that is, governments should spend less during the times of a booming economy so that, once the economy slows, it will have the fiscal space intervene and carry on its normal functions with less tax revenue or intervene to boost domestic demand. The differences arise from all the normative aspects of exactly what the government ought to be doing (ie redistributing wealth, cutting taxes, building infrastructure, doing the absolute minimal, etc).

      • wintermute92 says:

        I feel like you’re excluding more reputable economists with this than perhaps you realize.

        > For instance, most economists agree that, under certain circumstance, an increase in government spending will increase economic growth (ie the fiscal multiplier).

        There are totally mainstream economists who (as far as I know) deny this, using the argument that since government spending is inherently financed on taxation or debt, the market will respond to cancel the multiplier (either through loss of funds to taxation, or through hedging against future taxation implied by debt).

        Many economists grant that this is still effective if you’re counter-cyclic, because debt-financing effectively borrows growth from the future. But I see sincere “perfect knowledge” claims that the economy contracts now because it knows about future debt, canceling out the multiplier in the short term.

        I suppose everyone would grant that if you finance your government spending off war spoils or new inventions or something you get growth, but the multiplier is usually assumed to be a fiscal policy matter rather than a discovered wealth one.

        • Paul Barnsley says:

          Yes, this is accurate – Ricardian equivalence is the technical term for the “expectations of future tax cancels out current spending” hypothesis. It’s pretty crazy, and pretty fringe, but it’s fair to say that macro economists in good standing can and do have opposing beliefs on almost any question.

          • alaska3636 says:

            I do a lot of work as a tax accountant. I can state unequivocally, that this is considered prudent tax planning.

            Another example of this in human behavior: if I tell you that I am going to punch you in the nose, you are more likely to duck.

          • wintermute92 says:

            @alaska3636

            The question isn’t whether people react to expected future taxes – it would be stunning if they didn’t.

            Ricardian equivalence is the claim that the reaction fully cancels the gains from current spending. So if the government debt-finances something like the Works Progress Administration, that adds nothing to the short-run GDP.

            It’s specifically defined as a short-term reaction because it’s contrasted with counter-cyclical policy. If you get growth now and in response get a bit more caution spread over several years, that’s the desired outcome Ricardians say won’t happen.

        • SilasLock says:

          Ricardian Equivalence only operates when you utilize lump sum taxes. It might still exist within the more complex tax codes that a lot of present-day states have, but the effect gets one heck of a lot more complicated. Economists that I’ve seen argue over whether the real-world effect is similar to the one from a lump sum tax-based model.

          Furthermore, the bigger issue is that independent central banks are able to cancel the effects of fiscal policy and remove multipliers. Liquidity traps arguably change things, but under ordinary circumstances multipliers just aren’t a thing.

    • Corey says:

      Macroeconomics is tough because the amount of data is small and low-quality, and intentionally-controlled experiments are almost impossible. I agree with others that micro beliefs are more consistent across practitioners than macro beliefs (with the former, better data, controlled experiments and replications are at least possible).

      Sometimes in macro you get lucky and get “natural experiments” e.g. Oregon fills Medicaid slots by lottery so you can compare recipients with non-recipients and get differences that are _probably_ due to the effect of Medicaid.

      Noah Smith has some good blog posts on problems with macro, and some back-and-forth with other econ-bloggers. If I understand correctly he thinks the main problem is that macro models are rarely if ever thrown out no matter how badly they fit the world.

      • Lumifer says:

        Macroeconomics is tough because the amount of data is small and low-quality

        I think a bigger problem is that real economies are very very COMPLEX and tractable models can capture only a small subset of the important factors. This makes models somewhat arbitrary and their fits hard to get right — you either overfit and lose predictive capability, or underfit and your predictions are of the “anything could happen” type.

        A lot of research is also hobbled by the (often implicit) assumptions that all people are the same and on the average tend to engage in Homo Economicus behaviour.

    • Chalid says:

      One reason certain fields like economics seem controversial is because we read about controversies. We don’t spend much in this comment section discussing non-controversial things.

    • baconbacon says:

      For example, there seem to be less of a common ground between Keynesian economists and Austrian economists than between Many World physicists and Hidden Variable physicists.

      There is generally a bunch of common ground across economic schools (like supply and demand), but there are small differences within those agreements. For example an Austrian might argue that a minimum wage would lead to decreased employment citing that a higher cost for labor will lead to less labor purchased (basic S&D curve stuff). A Keynesian in favor of a higher minimum wage wouldn’t counter that S&D curves don’t exist, but that the demand for labor is far less elastic than the supply, and so raising the minimum wage by (random numbers) 10% would only lead to a decrease in demand by 1%, and so increasing it could be a net benefit (a handful of Kenyesians will argue that increased minimum wages lead to increased employment through increased demand, but they commit horrific crimes of logic in looking for evidence like using the UE rate, and only looking at very short term situations).

      On the whole, economics at least, has a strong base of knowledge that has been confirmed, most of the differences lie in specific circumstances where one group is arguing that small effect X is greater than small effect Y, and the other group is in the opposite direction.

    • Matt says:

      This is a great question and deserves more attention.

      A few things:

      1) Softer sciences deal directly with reflexive observation (studying yourself), therefore you cannot be (truly) impartial by definition. This leads to more uncertainty.

      2) Projectiles, molecules, and stars don’t adapt to our observations. Humans do, and in fact, that is the point of studies.

      3) There has recently been a tremendous amount of technological breakthroughs that allow us to objectively observe physical, chemical and biological phenomenon. Yes, you can observe people with cameras and GPS, but cameras and GPS are part of our culture and have affected are behavior.

      4) Perhaps, throughout history, we have known much more about ourselves than the world we live in. We are now, over the last few centuries, experiencing a sort of catch-up phase. All the “new” knowledge makes it seem like there is more agreement in hard sciences than there really is.

      5) I can drop a pin in a vacuum, hermetically seal a chemical, and control most of a rat’s environment. What can I do with a human? Good science seems to involve a fair amount of destruction, of isolation. You break something down to it’s core and then you test it one variable at a time. Hard to do with humans.

      I’ve thought about this question before and these are just some of the ideas I’ve had floating around.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Part of the problem might be that when social science comes up with something useful/definitely true, it’s going to sound easy enough that nobody is impressed. Just as ‘we understand gravity’ was a great breakthrough not too long ago, anyone able to prove whether or not hitting your kids is on net harmful or if being societally accepting of homosexuality is good will have done some extremely impressive work.. Except their work will either be politicised to the point of its effect not being very large, or so easily accepted it just sounds dumb. Breakthroughs in science sound esoteric and are hard to understand, whereas the effect in social science would be very different.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        whether or not hitting your kids is on net harmful or if being societally accepting of homosexuality is good

        Plus there’s a lot of freight carried by “harmful” and “good”. Studying gravity does not require bringing value judgments into the process. Not all social science results fall into that trap, of course, but it does seem to be a constant danger.

    • What if part of the divide between hard and soft sciences is due to the difference in our reference frame? In the hard sciences our personal experiences are with macro-physics, working with chunks on the order of 10^20+ atoms. For sociology or economics, we are personally accustomed to working at the level of individuals up to the order of 10^4.

      Hard sciences began with the easier macro-physics and then worked down to the weird quantum stuff, but soft sciences are starting with the weird quantum stuff trying to extrapolate to a mini-macro scale that only gets up to about 7×10^10 at most.

      Toss in the fact that the bouncing behavior of atoms doesn’t change according to the latest research and it’s a wonder anyone in the social sciences can get anything done at all!

    • Tibor says:

      Economists do agree on the fundamentals of their field. For example

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46555693_Do_Economists_Agree_on_Anything_Yes

      I think that David Friedman mentioned a story with his father and another (rather left-wing) economists giving expert advice either to the Senate or some other governing body in the US. It ended up being the economists’ opinion against everyone else rather than a split along political lines.

      I suspect the same is true of other social sciences, with a varying degree. There is usually some uncontroversial core everyone agrees on and so it is not publicized so much and most people outside of the field might not even know it exists. In economics this effect probably creates more harm than in other fields because while a lot may be obviously true to economists it is not to other people (the desirability of free trade barriers between countries is a classical example – also it is both the vast majority of both the left and the right wing which is against unilateral free trade, basically everyone except for economists and libertarians).

    • Quixote says:

      “Austrian economists” aren’t economists, they’re philosophers.

      • Jill says:

        Maybe they were philosophers at one time. Right now they are economic and political propagandists.

  115. The Nybbler says:

    Annoying anonymouses would just start posting with names like “Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin”. So unless you go with registration, verification, etc, you probably won’t slow it much.

    Do you check the owner of IPs before IP-banning? If you’ve been IP-banning corporate egress IPs, collateral damage is likely. And IP-banning dynamic IPs will also result in random collateral damage. (I have a static IP, but I know enough to anonymously snipe from mobile if I care to).

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      Or “Uncle Ilya”, if they wanted to avoid a ban.
      It doesn’t seem like it would raise the standard of discourse at all, but it would certainly get rid of the multi-anon threads that are so difficult to read. It also wouldn’t prevent samefagging, which is a particularly annoying form of anon-commenting.

      WordPress comment systems really are terrible. If only Scott could move the whole thing over to an imageboard format.

    • Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin says:

      Apparently, I’m incredibly open to suggestion.

    • Jaskologist says:

      I’m ok with stopping the flow of anons, but I think how it is implemented is going to matter a lot. A few possibilities off the top of my head:

      Whitelisted emails, with all current commenters automatically whitelisted.
      Pro: no trivial inconvenience for everybody who already posts.
      Con: barrier of entry for newbs. Requires Scott to closely monitor his inbox to let in acceptable newbs.

      Registration
      Pro: probably inconvenient enough to kill most of the annoying anons.
      Con: inconvenient for all current commenters, too (see how much less traffic the subreddit gets). But we’re so chatty by now that we probably could take the hit.
      Other Con: Registration where? Does everybody have to register with wordpress, or with this specific site? I could see people not wanting to do one or the other.

      • brad says:

        I think the first step is probably just banning the names “anonymous”, “Anonymous”, “Anon” and perhaps a few others from the name field.

        It’s hard to see much con there. Maybe we’ll see a lot of names like “opikmoierj” but it’ll still be easier to keep track of than gravatars (at least for me).

        • Anonymous says:

          A decent number of anons change gravatars every thread or even every post. Should they choose to not respect our host’s decision to ban anonymous posting by using gibberish instead of a proper nick, they’ll likely also choose to scramble that gibberish every couple posts.

          That gravatar thing is by the way why I think the a*@gm*.com ban was a poor decision. Half of the purpose of the purple avatar was to make it obvious to naive readers that the relationship between unique anon avatars and posters isn’t 1:1.

          • brad says:

            Okay, but still not seeing any downside. Is the argument that those gibberish names are aesthetically displeasing?

            On the upside even if omni-defectors choose to scramble every few posts that still reduces the possibility of one type of error (confusing two different anons for the same person) even if it still leaves open the possibility of another type of error (confusing the same anon for two different people).

          • Anonymous says:

            Anonposting operates under slightly different rules than normal posting, and that’s why it’s good for it to be clearly marked as such. I intend to stop posting if Scott bans anonposting, respecting the spirit of his command, but if others continue posting using gibberish to obey the letter but not the spirit of the law, then you still have anonposting, just with the clear label that was meant to convey “this is a no-reputation-staked anonpost” removed.

            As for the types of error, there aren’t two types. The error is of one type, and you’ve committed it as soon as you try to connect anonymous posts to each other. They’re anonymous, and the purple avatar was the best way of sending that message, that you’re not supposed to be trying to guess how many people are arguing for you or against you and whether your side is the majority or not.

          • hlynkacg says:

            The second type error is a lot easier to manage, our regular anons (including this one) tend to have fairly recognizable posting habits and syntax.

    • Cosmonaut Gherman Titov says:

      Recent research indicates that banning anonymity is likely to increase toxicity in the discourse. It’s very disappointing to see Slate Star Codex consider banning anonymity. This place seems to be suffering a modest intellectual decline.

  116. Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

    2. I’m actually considering banning anonymous commenting on here, because getting rid of the crappy anonymouses sometimes feels like trying to fill a leaky bucket. How angry would this make people?

    I’d miss it, but understand. The problem is how would you go about it, it’s not like there’s an easy way to prevent people from posting with a throwaway email and “A.N. Onymous” as a name.

    • Spencer Warriner says:

      À barrier of inconvenience is going to be enough to ward off low-effort trolls, though.

      • Lumifer says:

        But it’s really high-effort trolls that are a problem.

      • Letmepost Letmepostsky says:

        A barrier of inconvenience is going to be enough to ward off low-effort good posters too.

      • Shieldfoss says:

        To post as Shieldfoss: type “Shieldfoss” in the Name field and if you want the same avatar as Shieldfoss, the email address that I’ve been using in goes the email field.

        To post anonymously: Type “Anonymous” in the Name field, type [random]@[random].[random] in the email field.

        They are the exact same level of effort.

        And, incidentally, I value the ability to post anonymously. I have occasional opinions that I believe are true but would rather not take the reputation hit of posting under my name. I recognize that this might one day catch me a zero-warnings ban – I would prefer to accept that risk and keep the ability to post Anon.

        • nope says:

          I think that if allowing anonymous commenting is required to maintain intellectual diversity, it’s probably a good thing. However, I’m not really convinced that it is. There are lots of things that could offend general or community-specific sensibilities that need to be said, but won’t be taken seriously if not said in the right way. I think anonymous commenting encourages people to communicate lazily in that sense, rather than having to do the work of figuring out how to frame something sensitive such that more people will respond in a constructive way. Of course, if you’re not optimizing for discourse quality, that isn’t going to persuade you. What are you optimizing for?

        • Shieldfoss says:

          hey it’s me, you.

        • If you post with a pseudonym and an email address that you don’t use for anything else, how likely are you to have that account connected to your real world identity?

          Sidetrack: how recognizable do you think you are online? I’ve had people tell me they could hear my voice when they read what I post.

          • Lumifer says:

            If you post with a pseudonym and an email address that you don’t use for anything else, how likely are you to have that account connected to your real world identity?

            By regular people, not very likely. By people wielding legal instruments (e.g. subpoenas), very likely. By the three-letter agencies in case you arouse their interest, quite likely.

            how recognizable do you think you are online?

            In the context of a particular forum (and unless I take pains to masquerade), fairly so, I think. Somewhere else on the internet where you don’t expect to see me, not much. By stylometry, depends on the amount of text available, but probably quite well.

          • My style is distinctive enough that at least one person I know IRL has recognized me from it.

      • anony mouse says:

        why

        this wasn’t even hard. and what would you possibly do to deter trolls from just, uh, entering a name into the field? I don’t see any log in button and I don’t even see a log out button, so I can’t be logged in already. Hell, you’re required to enter a name, so what does it mean “anonymous”? I suppose you can literally ban people with the name “anonymous” but why on earth would that significantly deter anyone looking to shit up comments or say silly things?

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      I would like to point out, in case it hasn’t been, that anonymous posting lets people post who would be physically threatened if their identity were known. OTOH, I do not recall seeing anyone take advantage of this in the recent past, so any impact I can see this having is perhaps only theoretical. (Occasionally SSC touches on sensitives subjects like minority rights in places where the minority faces very real consequences if they have to ID. Is there a workaround?)

  117. Said Achmiz says:

    Yes, please ban anonymous commenting. Please. I sincerely think this would be amazing. I really, really hope you decide to do this.

    • Emma Casey says:

      Seconded. We are not limited by insufficient posts here. We are not even limiited by a lack of diverse views. Anons don’t seem to be adding much more than entropy.

    • Black Mountain Radio says:

      Normally I would say “no” to banning anonymous commenting, but there are a few good reasons to get rid of it.
      1) Thread readability: Gets rid of multi-anon posts
      2) The “registration” for SSC is a very low barrier to entry, so it’s not likely to scare even semi-serious posters away.
      That being said, you should probably keep it in that it preserves a certain atmosphere which encourages the posting of “outrageous” thoughts (if that’s what you’re going for).

    • Xeno of Citium says:

      Please ban anonymous comments. They almost never provide any useful or even interesting comments and they’re way more often disruptive than pseudonymous commentors.

    • Tibor says:

      I am not quite sure how one can actually go about banning anonymous comments. What if someone uses a different name each time? I guess you could have a system where users have to register themselves before posting and setting up a new account for every post would deter most anonymous posters. Plus if you limit one e-mail address to one account and send a confirmation e-mail on registration, they would have to set up extra e-mail accounts as well, which would deter a lot of them.

      That level of protection might however also deter people who’d like to post unanonymously (with a pseudonym or a real name) and don’t like setting up an account and memorizing a password. It would also mean quite a lot of work for Scott or whoever manages the forum.

      Personally, I’m quite agnostic about banning anonymous posters. If I find some posts stupid or irritating then I just skip them. The absence of anonymous users would make such filtering easier I guess, but from time to time there is an anonymous poster with something interesting to say. Then again, I don’t read most of the posts anyway (I guess nobody does when there are often more than a thousand of them every three or four days), so I would hardly notice. I also get that the website is linked to Scott and he wants to keep it a certain way because of that – with anonymous posters, it is harder.

    • Agronomous says:

      In the interests of getting anonymous commenters to convert to being pseudonymous commenters, here’s a list of (possibly) good pseudonyms I’ve been amassing:

      Rocky Biloba
      Nekomancer (zombie kitty?)
      Nod. Get Treat.
      Great Beast in Shadow
      Agley Gang
      Agley Aft Gang
      Mangelwurzel
      Remorhaz Kabob
      A.k.a. K.a.k.
      Running Amonk
      Picassolatido
      Ipsos Custodes
      John Slides
      Miserable Breader
      It’s a sove
      Literally Voldemort
      A More Wretched Hive
      Alonzo Mosely
      Anagramous
      Raymond Kertezc
      Bear with Sunglasses
      Doing Science
      Still Alive
      GlaDOS
      Inukai’s Last Words
      Against the Watch
      Grill Marxist
      YudFan99
      Loudness in Spinning Things
      Nigerian Astronaut
      Formula 419
      Eugene Goostman
      Xorcist
      Nandcist
      Efficient Meerkat (from a Scott tweet)
      Experimental Eschatologist (“)
      Medianing of Life (retweet)
      Not a Real Libertarian
      Prisoner of Zen
      Majorca’s Mask
      Internet of Thenns
      Cartesian Bear
      Nand to Tetris
      Pizza Pirate
      Bezeled Bevel (from the XKCD Phone comic)
      Japanese Apology Template
      Dialetheist (from dialetheism)
      Fuzzy Logic Slippers
      Vic Colfari (if you know this one, I’m in awe)
      Eye of the Liger
      AltruiSim
      Altruis Em
      Machine Bias
      Overton’s Windowsill
      Lontana da Scienza
      And Cake.
      Weighted Companion Cube
      Deuteragonist

      Feel free to ask about any of them and ruin the exclusivity of any in-jokes.

      • Nornagest says:

        Could take a page from Elon Musk’s book and use Culture shipnames. Always liked those.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Then we’ll have a whole bunch of “Meatfuckers”, because that’s the way Anons roll.

          • Nornagest says:

            This is why we can’t have nice things.

            I mean, you could at least go for “Falling Outside the Usual Moral Constraints”.

        • Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath says:

          Worth considering.

      • Nornagest says:

        …aw, someone already took “Defective Altruist”.

        “Elective Altruist” seems to be free, though.

        Accelerating Interns
        A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things
        A Form You Might Find Comfortable
        Hold My Beer and Watch This
        Not Dead but Dreaming
        Fence Sitter
        Shiny Metal Ass

      • Cypher says:

        Five Philosophers on a Railroad Track
        I Always Defect
        Google/Skynet 2016
        Actually, I’m the Trolley
        Paperclip Optimizer
        I’m an Actor, not a Doctor
        Non-Player Caricature

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        Cypher, your “Actually, I’m the Trolley” name calls to mind Corey Mohler’s Existential Comics, which is a never-failing source of great names, like Trolley Madness 🙂

        Philosopher under the Bed (#144)
        Robbery at the Wittgenstein Bank (#141)
        Freudian Product Testing (#138)
        Marxist Business Consulting (#136)
        The French Play Monopoly (#135)
        Good Cop, Pragmatist About
           the Nature of Truth Cop
        (#115)
        Philosophy News Network:
           the Presidential Debates
        (#96)
        Skeptiholics Anonymous (#93)

        Not to mention, hilarious merch (t-shirts) !

    • Some dude says:

      No idea what banning anonymous commenting would do, since as far as I can tell I can just put any name and e-mail into the boxes. I agree that it would increase thread readability if everyone had different names though.

      • Thomas Jørgensen says:

        .. Even with trivial pseudonyms, banning anons tends to increase the quality of discourse, because a lot of trolls are just too damn lazy to make up new pseudonyms every time they want to post. It’s a very low bar, and it still works as a fence.

    • Daniel Speyer says:

      When I have something to say that I don’t want under my name, I make up a Name and add +something to my Email. I don’t know how wordpress handles this, but it (might) make it more apparent to Scott that this is still me without going public.

      Not sure how this fits into policies.