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Maybe of interest to some people here: Ozy is holding an intellectual Turing Test for social-justice vs. anti-social-justice
Would this pass?
Edit:
That blog does have some good moments.
Ideological Turing tests often fail because of shibboleths. There’s a difference between not understanding your opponent’s position and not being able to include the correct buzzwords or make the same obscure references.
There have been very few ITT, but as far as I know that is false. Do you have have large experience with ITT that I am missing? Perhaps you are judging by trolls? But you don’t know the baseline of how many people are trying troll and what trolls are trying to do.
Also, just repeating some arguments is considered evil unless you do it in a way that clearly communicates that you personally don’t believe them. After all, someone might be using the ITT to give them plausible deniability to propagate “hateful speech” which they believe is true because they are a hateful person who should be excluded from society. For example, imagine the enemy thinks our king should be killed and has reasons for wanting to do this. If I repeat these reasons in a ITT the king should rightfully be suspicious that I’m using the ITT as an excuse to incite others to regicide.
Also, just repeating some arguments is considered evil unless you do it in a way that clearly communicates that you personally don’t believe them.
I’m only familiar with Intellectual Turing Tests from Leah Libresco running them on her blog, and they seemed to be done honestly.
Are you saying people sometimes troll them? I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
They are valuable in that it is very interesting to see how The Other Side characterises your side’s beliefs and arguments. Some people can do it successfully, and some people produce versions that make you go “What – do you really think we’re gnomes from the Hollow Earth, or something?”
I think his worry is more that, if we staged an ideological Turing test for pro-beat-up-deiseach-and-steal-her-valuables vs anti-beat-up-deiseach-and-steal-her-valuables, taking part in the test could mark him as an evildoer and potential robber, even if he claimed to be anti-mugging. Because any entrant could be using the test as plausible deniability to say something taboo, anyone taking part could be labelled as guilty in the public eye despite the lack of definitive evidence.
I think the solution to this is using pseudoanonymity on the internet.
eh, that would require I have valuables for you to steal 🙂
I think if you actually are familiar enough with your opponent’s positions to understand their arguments fully, you’ll probably have been exposed to enough of the buzzwords that this shouldn’t be an issue. Otherwise, you’ve been getting all your information second- and third-hand, likely from people who likewise disagree.
It’s similar to the best argument for being concerned that Gary Johnson doesn’t know about Aleppo: the idea isn’t that knowing about Aleppo is important per se, but rather that paying a minimum of attention to the Middle East is important and anyone who pays a minimum of attention to the Middle East will know about Aleppo.
Is there an argument against being concerned about Johnson’s ignorance on Aleppo, other than the fact he has no meaningful chance of winning? If he was a major candidate this would be a huge scandal.
Wrong Species,
It’s not clear how smart Gary Johnson is. His frequent marijuana use might have dulled him.
I was pretty dismayed by the Aleppo thing, so I’m probably not the person to defend Johnson on it. If I were to take on the job, I might start by pointing to the results the people who are paying attention to the Middle East have been getting, and asking how much worse inattention could be.
CPZ,
I think the heart of this issue is that Johnson’s response and his follow-up after the fact are evidence that he’s “not a serious politician.”
Not in the “serious politicians have a comprehensive knowledge of the middle east” sense, but in the “serious politicians know how to BS an answer even when they have no idea what they’re actually talking about at all.”
GJ proved he isn’t Presidential material, because one of the things we expect from our top-level politicians is the ability to exude an aura of confidence and authority even when they are completely and totally full of it. The problem isn’t that he didn’t know the answer, it’s that he gave the wrong wrong answer.
While we undoubtedly expect our politicians to be good at faking knowledge, this is not quite the same thing as saying that it’s good for our politicians to be good at faking knowledge. The latter seems to me to work better as a cynically paradoxical conclusion than as a self-evident assumption.
“this is not quite the same thing as saying that it’s good for our politicians to be good at faking knowledge. ”
Well we don’t say it that way, because that sounds bad.
But we can all probably recall a time or 5,000 when a political candidate was asked a question about X and quickly re-directed the conversation to something else without actually answering the question at all. And while rarely they might get called out for that, it’s never treated as some sort of scandal or instant-disqualifiaction sort of moment.
Had GJ done that, this would be a non-issue. The fact that we punish that significantly less than we punish an admission of ignorance is a revealed preference of the electorate as a whole. Admitting ignorance is one of the greatest sins we have as measured by how severely we punish it.
Is there an argument against being concerned about Johnson’s ignorance on Aleppo
Your government and Russia have made an agreement to broker and police a ceasefire in Syria. This has all kinds of ways of going wrong and getting the US on the wrong side of (a) Russian opinion (and do you think Putin is looking for an excuse to fight/cosy up to the US) (b) Syrian opinion (c) international opinion, not to mention if you’re willing to let Russia put the boots on the ground when it comes to the policing/enforcing, are you being clever in not putting more American troops, when your military is already over-stretched, in the field or is it dumb to let Russia have this kind of physical presence?
Even if Johnson is an isolationist who thinks the US has no business sending troops abroad (and I have no idea of his foreign policy), if he’s standing as a candidate in anything other than “this is a way to bring my name and our party to the public notice”, he has to have some kind of informed opinion because if the miracle ever happens and he or a Libertarian Party candidate gets elected to high office, then they will inherit a legacy of what the previous regime did domestically and abroad, and it’ll be too damn late once you’ve parked your backside in the boss’ chair to decide “Okay, so we kind of need a foreign policy, it appears”.
Interpreting it at its most charitable, it was a stumble, the kind of brain-freeze that happens to us all. Looking at the optics of the situation, it gives the impression to the public that Johnson and his party are the joke candidates, to be taken no more seriously than the Surprise Party (I notice that the US rather surprisingly has a distinct lack of frivolous parties by comparison with the UK) since the “candidate” plainly didn’t do his homework on “top topics likely to be sprung on you as surprise questions by interviewer”.
Does nobody else actually think Johnson’s explanation for asking what Aleppo was is totally plausible? The prior probability of him genuinely not knowing what Aleppo was is, presumably, very low. And occasional comprehension failures of this sort (where one has heard perfectly well, but still fails to translate the sounds into recognized words, or in this case goes up a dead end by trying to parse it as an acronym) are definitely things that happen, at least in my experience.
I did, but then I saw the interview. In his defence, he probably had heard of it, but it looked more like he only dimly remembered its existence than like it just slipped his mind.
” The prior probability of him genuinely not knowing what Aleppo was is, presumably, very low.”
I’m not sure the general public agrees with this, particular when you add the conditional prior that he’s a third party candidate – which most people believe inherently makes you a non-serious whack-job.
Even before this incident, the method of attack on GJ was something like “He’s just a Republican who happens to like smoking pot and gay marriage” so him not knowing what Aleppo is just confirms priors that he’s a non-serious joke candidate, it doesn’t run against them in any way.
So what is a “leppo”, anyway? Is it some kind of newly-trending derogatory slang term for lepers? And why would lepers be important in a political discussion?
@ Skivverus
It’s a hare or, more generally, any small mammal from the family Leporidae, especially from the genus Lepus.
I never heard of Aleppo until the brouhaha. In real life, it is good when people are willing to show that they don’t know something. I guess you can’t say ‘let me google that’ in an interview though.
I don’t think that’s true, because shibboleths could require you to know arbitrary levels of detail that may not be very related to the main argument. Imagine that I’m a European pretending to be an American, I’m arguing about the role of the American military, and I know that Americans like to throw in patriotic references, So I casually mention that without Americans in Syria, the streets are going to run red with blood the same color as the Statue of Liberty (I read in some book that it’s made of copper and that’s red). Any American reading that would instantly know that I’m a fake, but it wouldn’t really have any bearing on whether I understand the arguments made by Americans.
I suppose you could argue whether that’s technically a shibboleth, since it’s something I shouldn’t say instead of something I should.
I wonder if this works with ideologies as well as with nations. With nations there’s a lot of stuff you have to know that’s not related to any underlying ideas (like the color of the Statue of Liberty, or how to speak unaccented English); with ideologies you’d expect there to be less.
Is the colour of the Statue of Liberty a shibboleth? It seems more like a “common knowledge” thing.
I can not imagine a European who knows the Statue of Liberty exists and is copper without knowing that it’s green. Especially given its widespread iconic image.
The color of the Statue of Liberty was a particularly bad example, but I can think of a few questions where a non-US-resident would probably miss something that would be considered basic knowledge for someone from here. For example, which of {Iowa, Ohio, Idaho} is the first stop for someone who wants to be the presidential candidate of either major political party. I could even imagine someone answering, “None of them, it’s Indiana,” and feeling clever.
The question of ideologies is hard. Gun control is one that comes to mind, though: a big part of the problem for many gun rights advocates is that gun control advocates thoroughly fail gun-related ideological turing tests all the time by doing things like conflating automatic and semi-automatic weapons or advocating bans of features that simply make a weapon easier to use safely. This usually boils down to questions of culture, which fits the “culture war” context that the ITT (or at least this one) is designed for. Maybe “Cultural Turing Test” is a better name?
Having spoken to someone who is closer to social justice than I am about these issues, the most likely shibboleth that the anti-sj side will run into is that there are people within social justice who are concerned about the toxic culture within the movement. The problems with call-out culture, for example, were first described (though not named) by a second wave feminist in 1976. Probably the biggest risk thing an ITT/CTT participant risks running across is not so much shibboleths but old, discarded and discredited arguments, or missing internal dissent on an issue.
I guess I could see screwing up a shibboleth as a way that an ITT could emit a false negative, but I don’t think it is a big concern.
It didn’t take me much reading and debating gun rights advocates before I realized they flip out about the difference between clips and magazines and if you want to simulate one you’d better get it right. Or that’s the often a wolf/dog/sheep thing going on and you want to be the dog. And so on.
Would I be able to talk exactly about the pros and cons of the various rail systems available for the AR pattern rifles? No, but I’d avoid bringing it up for just that reason.
Jiro, I would reply to your argument the opposite way: American culture is such a global export, I think Europeans could make a good stab at pretending to be American (and some cursory Googling would permit the construction of a fake opinion on the military*), whereas – given the fanfiction I’ve read where Americans have written for British-based fandoms, they often trip over details** (and even professionally published fiction does this) – the reverse might not be the case.
*Though that might trip us up – were I pretending to be an American with an opinion on the role of the military, I’d have been aware of Aleppo which, as any fule kno, a real American recently was not 🙂
**One particular example that springs to mind is a story in the “Sherlock” fandom where the author gave John Watson a favourite baseball team. Yes. I won’t even touch on the “Hogwarts High” versions where American terms and concepts are used wholesale that have absolutely no corresponding usage over here (e.g. sophomore and the likes). Blocks used as measurement of distance in cities, attempts at writing dialect/slang, food and drink – I could go on, though agreed nowadays brand-name chain coffeeshop beverage consumption rather than tea is probably accurate 🙂
@Scott Alexander
Think of debating the existence of God with a Catholic theologian. Would you be able to emulate way the theologian speaks, including all the jargon and obscure references, well enough to fool other Catholic theologians into believing you are one of them?
Probably not. Does that mean that you don’t understand Catholic theology well enough to refute it’s main arguments?
@Gazeboist:
I had always thought a shibboleth was something where there were two “right” answers, but which one you give identifies you as part of one group or another. The original story involved one tribe identifying members of another by having them say a word and checking their pronunciation.
A better example of an American shibboleth would be saying “zee” (Americans are the only ones who don’t say “zed” in English, right?).
@vV_Vv
“Does that mean that you don’t understand Catholic theology well enough to refute it’s main arguments?”
Arguably, yes! I agree that few atheists (even if they do understand the arguments for God’s existence) could imitate a theologian convincingly in general. But when the subject is restricted to arguments about God’s existence, rather than general theology, I think if you understand the arguments you probably do know the shibboleths (“ontological argument”, “first cause” etc.).
vV_Vv:
Probably, yes. Jargon is just the technical terminology used by a particular field. If you don’t understand a field’s jargon, that’s generally a sign that you haven’t studied it in enough detail to refute its main arguments.
sweeneyrod:
Those examples would count as jargon, not shibboleths. A shibboleth would be, e.g., an atheist writing “god” and “bible” with lower-case letters.
Is the colour of the Statue of Liberty a shibboleth? It seems more like a “common knowledge” thing.
I’m a European who had no idea the Statue of Liberty was green until just now. Maybe I just have unusual colour perception (I am red-green colourblind), but I thought it was a light gray colour (which I think of as the default for statues) and the picture on the Wikipedia page still looks that same colour to me.
I also had no idea it was copper. Or that copper turns green as it rusts. Or that pennies turn green as they rest. Or that pennies are made of copper (well, coated with it).
I’m a European who had no idea the Statue of Liberty was green until just now….
Oh common, guys!
Verdigris is the the patina any cupreous metals (brass, bronze, and straight copper) will usually develop when exposed to the elements, and has been used historically as a vivid green pigment. Brownish to black patinas (among other colors) may also develop when aged under certain circumstances or through chemical treatments. Because verdigris tends to run off the statue while the patina is forming and is a real bitch to clean off (e.g.) stonework, it is common to treat statues in the workshop so you don’t stain the pedestal. You may also prefer to control the color for aesthetic reasons. But even if you treat the statue, the color may not stick through the centuries (compare A and B).
I mean, really, what are they teaching kids in metal shop these days!
There are many, many non-green replicas of the statue of liberty (usually because they are made of pewter or a similar metal, but I happen to know of one in the Delaware River that is just a smaller stone miniature), and these are usually silver/gray.
How many kids take metal shop these days?
@The House Carpenter:
It’s not just you.
I’m an American who lives in New York and has seen the Statue of Liberty many times in person (including visiting the island) and even wrote a song about the Statue of Liberty…and it doesn’t look even slightly green to me either. Not in pictures, not in person. I also am red-green colorblind, so I suspect that’s the issue.
(I have a similar issue with “green” traffic lights.)
I ran a picture of the Statue of Liberty through a colorblindness filter, and yup, it looks grey under red/green colorblindness (both protanopia and deuteranopia). Yellow/blue colorblindness (tritanopia) makes it look sort of bluish.
I’m not color blind, don’t think I have ever seen the statue up close, and had no clear idea what color it was. But I have a pretty bad visual memory, so might easily have seen pictures and forgotten.
Mmm, this seems like a big issue. I like Ozy’s ideas and efforts but I can see several ways her minor biases and predilections could lead to sampling bias.
Judging from her talks about Haidt for instance, it’s obvious that Ozy is a non-adapter, and cannot relate to experiences around adjustment, developing a tolerance and so on, which seem like factors in discussions about what SJWs stand and don’t stand for.
*slow, fervent clapping*
…Ozy, if you’re reading this, you’re awesome.
ITT has come up a lot here over the last few months, usually in reference to posters here purportedly failing one. After seeing Ozy’s setup, it occurs to me that the informal use as a description of outgroup-alienating rhetoric is probably way less useful than the formal version of actually attempting to make really high-quality arguments for both sides of an issue.
I wouldn’t do it over on Ozy’s blog for the real test, but walking to work this morning I saw a sign on the back of a lorry which made me think I could probably do a comment on how “Caution: Men at Work” signs are racist, sexist, cis-sexist, heteronormative, The Patriarchy (fault of), and white supremacist.
How to check your privilege and unearth the hidden assumptions we have internalised due to being force-fed them by society:
Racist and white supremacist – because of the symbol used of a black figure with a shovel. Why a black man doing manual labour? Why not a green or purple or any other colour figure, if it is truly meant to be neutral? This of course is the dominant white culture talking, reducing POC to nothing more than the slave and coolie labour of the past, and reinforcing that this is their proper place – to serve their white masters by doing the hard, dirty, physical work their “superiors” are too good to do. And that POC are fit only to do donkey work – the work portrayed is not a Black man working at a desk, as an artist or entertainer or sportsperson, as a scientist, writer, doctor or any of the professions or careers that the white supremacist racist culture reserves for those it deems worthy.
Sexist, cis-sexist and heteronormative – MEN at work? Why not “PERSONS at work”? At least some have begun to address the sexism on show here, with “People working” or “Work in progress” signs instead! But again we see the downgrading of women as incapable of participating in the world of work and that they should be confined to their “proper sphere” in the home. As for cis-sexism, why assume that all the persons are male or male-identifiying? Why not ask them their preferred pronouns? Trans, genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, agender, multigender, Two Spirit and neutrois persons are, once again, suffering erasure here, as the stultifying gender binary is enforced with societal approval as the only possible measure of human condition.
The work shown as being appropriate to “men” is also that of manual, physical labour – the nurturing and caring sphere of human flourishing is ignored, pushed aside into the domain of the female/feminine/woman/thus-identifying persons, and hence any men who do not perform appropriately manly tasks and labour are stereotyped and coded as effeminate, non-manly, lacking in masculinity, and “gay” or queer.
(This is a short gallop, it could be expanded at length to contrive something a college activism group would produce to demand that the administration recognise its grievances and implement its solutions).
Whoops, and here is evidence of how hard it is to get woke! I forgot to be comprehensively intersectional, and neglected to mention how that is also ableist, anti-neurodivergence, and speciesist! And I think I can work in religion, too 🙂
Ableist and anti-neurodivergence – that the person depicted working is able-bodied, able to perform labour without accommodations for either physical or mental challenges, from being able to stand unassisted to being able to follow instructions, focus, not be hyperstimulated or overwhelmed by the environment, etc.
Speciesist – Men at work – but what about the work of non-human animals, those other inhabitants of our planet who have been degraded, enslaved, abused and exploited as labour, entertainment, companionship (specifically for the coerced attribute of ‘unconditional love’ they must pay as a toll for room, board and not being abandoned until they are too old or unwell to perform for their owners), and food?
Religion – men at WORK. The ideal of the Protestant Work Ethic! Human persons must work, they cannot be at leisure, their only value is when they are not being “idle”. Work glorifies God, thus work is compulsory under the Christianist* ethos. This is not alone a socially codified imposition of organised religion as the default state of humanity, it is also a specific denominational one. Thus we get the rejection of unfettered spirituality (as opposed to blind religiosity), non-Christian religions, and indeed the non-religious as all falling outside the compass of “men” who are at “work”.
(*Hey, if the term is good enough for Andrew Sullivan, it’s good enough for me. I was sorely tempted to use “KKKristianist” but that would have been going too far).
Failed the ITT on the first statement.
Which I think was your intent. But if you weren’t intending to mock, then you note that your innate to tendency to demean and mock with derision that which you do not like got in the way of your ability to accomplish what you intended.
HeelBearCub, your response interests me very much indeed. What was so offensive in the intentionally ridiculous farrago? I think a lot of the problem is that there are reasonable and actual points which then get pushed to absurd limits in claims of ever more finely-grained and omnipresent oppressions and structuralisms.
I was mocking how easy it is to take anything and find offensiveness in it, whether intended or not (I was, to be blunt, remembering the false etymology of picnic which got an airing back in the late 90s/early 00s and how it probably would be equally easy to fire up an online storm about the word “niggle” being a racial and ethnic slur, given all the badly misattributed quotations floating around and being reposted and passed on, apparently with everyone believing they are accurate. I’ve seen the solemn lecturing about how Gypsy is an ethnic slur and should not be used, with people spelling it with asterisks in place of a letter as our forebears did with words like “damn”, and arguments over whether the correct term is Roma or Rroma – arising out of a context where the term was not being used to refer to any human person, alive or dead, but in a vessel name like Gypsy Moth).
I do seem to have hit a nerve with you and I’d like to know more. This was, as I said, intentionally ridiculous and not intended as anything for the ITT. But there are ideas put forward in all sincerity which are just as outrageously false, by people who have invested a lot of their own personal identity and comfort in a sense of such, hoping that they are true.
@Deiseach:
I said you were “mocking with derision”, and that I thought that was your intent, but that I wasn’t sure. You seem to be clarifying that this is the case, so I’m not sure why you would be surprised if people caught your meaning.
Given that I think that there is plenty of implicit and sub-textual racism, I suppose you could be aiming this at “me”. I’m not particularly put out by it, but I also don’t think demeaning people for sport is particularly healthy, for discourse or the individual.
But, it was not entirely clear to me what you intended. Your setup made it seem possible, though less probable, that you actually thought this would pass an ITT. That was really the only the reason I commented. I probably would not have done so otherwise.
In any case, I find it odd how much umbrage you take when anyone says anything that you find to be a slight on the honor of the Catholic Church, and yet see no need to respect the beliefs of others.
I certainly wasn’t directing it at any particular person, more a mood that I seem to be detecting.
Perhaps it’s a combination of thinking how easy it is to get people to swallow uncritically something they “see on the Internet” when (a) it should be raising some kind of vague questioning about “that does not seem to fit into the general kind of vocabulary/thought/historical context/derivation of words borrowed from other languages that I would expect” (b) how little checking anyone seems to do – it really does seem to go the pattern of “A says ‘look at what this dreadful person has said/this awful thing has happened’ and B, C, D etc fall into line agreeing that it is indeed dreadful and awful, then J, K and L start on how this is a conspiracy/revelatory of the implicit racism, sexism, whateverism polluting the culture” and away we go
It’s partly to do with a word list I saw, which had the laudable intention of “when writing, don’t always use black and darkness associated words in contexts of evil and dirt and the like, so here are some good associations of ‘black’ and contrariwise here are some bad associations of ‘white'”. And that’s fine – instead of the conventional fantasy Dark Lord, why not go for the Bright Lady who is the Big Bad instead? I have no problem at all with that.
On the other hand, night is dark, and dark is scary for good reasons. The things you can’t see that might be out there waiting to eat you. I’m sure African peoples have stories about the things in the dark of night that might get you if you’re not careful, and I very much doubt those kinds of stories are based on racist attitudes to skin colour.
The original list is harmless enough, but I’m plenty sure there is someone willing to criticise someone else for “don’t use ‘it was a dark and stormy night’, that’s racist!”
Partly it’s to do with what I said much further down about the shock and sadness I had re: the “a vote for Trump is a vote for women-killers”. I thought that kind of ideological propaganda was the preserve of the crazy fringe and didn’t get upset by it as such, because we all have our crazy fringe who say extreme things that have little to nothing to do with what the mainstream think and believe.
But that wasn’t the crazy fringe, it was the mainstream. Someone who is mainstream liberal (as far as I know) uncritically reposted this crazy fringe material and didn’t comment on it other than to say this was why it was important to make sure Trump wasn’t elected.
I don’t care a straw about Trump and I’m not going to get into an abortion argument. But as I said – it’s not the crazy fringe anymore, it’s the middle-of-the-road people on one side (and perhaps on the other as well), and across this gulf fixed between us, what can we do?
Is there any hope for better than all-out war until Our Side wins and then we make sure to crush Your Side once we’re in power? I’m not seeing it any more, which is why I’m sad and shocked. And making derisory exaggerations of the crazy fringe as some kind of apotropaic venting.
Hmm, and I hadn’t seen this before I put the “black figure with shovel = Black men only fit for manual labour” point, but it popped up on my Tumblr dash today:
But you see how easy it is to take an existing point and exaggerate it?
” Someone who is mainstream liberal (as far as I know) uncritically reposted this crazy fringe material and didn’t comment on it other than to say this was why it was important to make sure Trump wasn’t elected.”
I had a similar if less extreme experience.
Some time ago I interacted with someone on a FB climate group and concluded that, unlike almost everyone there on both sides, he was a reasonable and civil person worth arguing with. So I friended him.
The result was that I kept seeing things he linked to. A large fraction were cases of a partisan left group making an indefensible argument in a highly emotive form. Sometimes I would comment, and my friend’s responses were civil and reasonable. But I found it wearing to keep having those links pop up and having to either ignore them or rebut. I tried to tell FB to stop showing me links from him but for some reason that didn’t work, so I eventually and reluctantly unfriended him.
You could mute him entirely (I think the FB term is “unfollow”) without unfriending. (I find I do that a lot, especially in election years.) But there might not be much point for someone you’re not otherwise acquainted with.
If you think that’s politically charged, look for the sign that comes after the area under repair:
END ROAD WORK
It’s right there — an anarcho-primitivist protest against the idea of state-maintained roadways. End road work! End statist roads for poisonous capitalist cars! Let the only roads be our desire lines!
A New Generation of Conservatives is on the rise, study finds
This study seems extremely vague and in violation of the Cthulhu principle. Anyone know anything about this Gild firm?
They literally had the kids describe their own positions as “conservative” or “moderate”.
It just means that the new conservative position on those subjects is now the old progressive one, and the progressive position is moving on to “mandatory crossdressing in kindergarten sex-ed to destroy the cishetereonormative gender binary”.
Being opposed to gay marriage is definitely not a “moderate” position any more, is it? Because you’ll be punished for it.
All 92.5 million Americans that oppose gay marriage are either deep in hiding or are being punished?
Or did you mean in your tiny little bubble that you claim to hate but for some reason refuse to leave, that’s the case?
Why don’t you tell a local newscaster that your family’s pizzeria in East Nowhere, Indiana would decline to cater a gay wedding, and let us know how that works out for you.
I get sent more than a million dollars and my pizza place is open and doing fine a year later? Wow, that’s sounds truly horrific! Kevin O’Connor sure does deserve his spot in litany of martyrs.
And when the second gay wedding comes along, and the third? “Ask people to send me a million dollars to pay the fine” only works as long as the fine isn’t repeated. People won’t send you a million dollars forever, and the requirement to cater gay weddings does last forever.
What fine?
That’s like being happy you fell off a mountain and broke your leg, because when search and rescue showed up two days later you got a free helicopter ride out of the deal.
Or being happy that the police busted into your house and shot your dog and put you in jail for a year by mistake, because you won a million-dollar legal settlement with the city.
@ThirteenthLetter
No it’s not. It’s like some people said nasty things about you on the internet, and then you got $840,000 through crowd funding. Maybe the family who owned the pizzeria disliked getting that money through crowd funding rather than honest work, but since many people would take the deal of a week of internet abuse for a few hundred thousand dollars I think it is not such a terrible punishment in the grand scheme of things.
You’re aggressively minimizing the situation. Saying “some people on the Internet” makes it sound like a couple of trolls making fun of them on 4chan or something, when they were actually attacked by politicians and journalists and activists all over the country, had their reputation smeared with bad reviews, and were in real danger of closing. Again, the fact that they were saved by a crowdfunding campaign does not make what happened to them which required the saving okay.
Furthermore, not everyone has a crowdfunding campaign to save them. Look at those poor bastards running the bakery in Oregon. They were forced to close down, and when someone started a crowdfunding campaign for them too, the crowdfunding site determined that it was too politically incorrect and shut down the campaign. The state hounded them legally and the owner is now working as a garbageman. But tell me again how it works out awesome for everyone in these situations.
@ThirteenthLetter
Which Oregon bakery do you mean? The one that was allowed to keep the $100,000 from their first fundraising campaign (which was shut down), and got a further $350,000 from a second one?
I don’t know on what planet it’s considered awesome to go through an insanely stressful and difficult attack out of nowhere because at the end of it some randos on the Internet might take pity on you and send you some money so you don’t lose your business. I’ll give you a little tip about how normal people act: they just want to get on with their stable and predictable lives. They have families and businesses/jobs and they just want to raise their families and run their businesses/do their jobs. The idea of rolling the dice on some kind of social justice-related payout is not worth it.
He understands that most normal people don’t like having a load of strangers randomly start trying to drive them out of business, which apparently puts him ahead of you in the “understanding people” stakes.
in 1900, 90 percent of Americans were self-employed; now it’s about two percent.
That’s terror.
Do housewives count as “self-employed”? Do they count as “employed” at all? If so, that’s a highly non-central definition you are using, and if not you don’t get 90% employment of any sort in the USA ca 1900.
I might believe that 90% of employed adult males were self-employed at some point in their career, but for even that I’d want details and a cite. And probably all you would be proving if you did is that we had lots of farmers back then.
In my limited experience, British teenagers aged 14-17 seem “more right-wing” than those aged 18-25, in the sense that they are less enthusiastic and slightly more cynical about “tumblr” trans stuff (people being agender etc.) and complaining about right-wing politicians. They aren’t a “new generation of conservatives” though in e.g. opposing gay marriage, unless you count unknowingly sharing memes from alt-right origins.
From what I know of British teenagers – and from my experience of being one in the past – they’re generally further to the “right” on those issues than they will be when they’re older. I’d say this is probably true in most places. 14-17 is the sort of age where you accuse people of being gay as an insult. I suspect it might have something to do with being at the age when you’re starting to become a sexual person, not really understanding it, and being quite insecure about it.
I think this reinforces what I thought about that newspaper piece which went “barring an inconceivable swing back to conservatism in the future”.
It’s not unthinkable or inconceivable because that’s how the pendulum tends to swing over the generations – conservative A begets liberal B which has a counter-reaction in returning to conservatism C which then generates the swing back to progressive D.
80s generation were considered to be the uncaring, ‘greed is good’ in contrast to their 60s hippie parents, and their kids were the Millennials and now the rising generation is more conservative than the Millennials. And so it goes until the end of the world.
I got this link via Nick Land’s blog. Not sure how seriously to take PJMedia; I’ve always had the idea they’re a somewhat more upscale version of Infowars. But it’s an interesting idea/turn of events.
The American left believes it has a duty to inspire certain values around the world. Many on the American left also believe American history is primarily a litany of sin and transgressions against humanity. The argument the author makes is that the latter position makes the former untenable — if you rail at great length and in tedious detail about why America has limited moral legitimacy, people around the world will believe you, and you will no longer be able to inspire your values anywhere because you are American. Duterte’s rant essentially makes that claim: he does not have to listen to an American President complaining about extrajudicial killings because America has no moral legitimacy, and the reason America has no moral legitimacy is because the political tradition that President represents has made a hobby of magnifying America’s sins and self-flagellating for the world to see.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description of Duterte’s rant. 90% of his complaints about America are about its actions in the Philippines, which he doesn’t need American help to learn about. official transcript; unofficial translation
His complaint about America in that rant is that the root cause of Moro extremism is the American occupation of the Philippines over a century ago. I think this is a questionable claim because the Moros seem to be primarily an irredentist group that has mixed Islamism into its ideology — before the Americans, they were fighting the Spanish; after the Americans, they were fighting the Japanese. Now they fight the Filipinos because Catholicism in the Philippines is a Spanish legacy, so both the Islamist and anti-colonial boxes are ticked.
So it seems disingenuous to me to claim that the Moro conflict stems from something John Pershing did in 1906, not when the Filipino army perpetrated several massacres of that population throughout the 20th century. But the basic thought that goes “American occupation leads to Islamic extremism where there previously was none” is a popular one, regardless of whether it’s true or not. And it is a narrative that is primarily pushed by Americans in Cambridge and New Haven.
And it’s not “90%” at any rate — in that rant, he says America has no moral authority on this matter because of the Native Americans, Mexicans etc etc.
The step “people around the world will believe you, and you will no longer be able to inspire your values anywhere because you are American” seems like description of “the people around the world” committing a critical ethics reasoning error, even if it may be an effective rhetorical strategy able to persuade people not too keen to pay attention to rational arguments.
Also, if you keep your mouth shut, it does not mean that suddenly others will. If America really acts against its stated values, the victims and outside observers will find out anyway, and will be keen to point them out. If you don’t admit your moral failings, you don’t gain legitimacy, you just appear a hypocrite.
Not denying the transgressions made by your tribe, even better, doing your best to consistently hold both your tribe and other tribes to the same moral standards should be a major indicator to any observer that you are applying your standards consistently, and worth of listening to. It’s kind of obvious that should you encourage rational behavior that promotes acting consistently and listening to such consistent actors. This has the benefit of being honest and consistent on your ethical position, and most of ethical systems (at least the ones I subscribe to) consider such behavior a minimum standard of moral behavior.
Main failing of some of the American left is not the pointing out the failings, but probably forgetting all the good parts, which include the ideals and historical processes that amongst others, produced situations where the American left to able to point out the aforesaid transgressions and get them discussed and even acknowledged in the US public sphere.
Would you suggest any changes to this supplementation plan for a kind of moderately depressed/anxious/chronically stressed but otherwise healthy 25 y.o. man? Goals include general health, body recomposition and increasing subjective well-being. Any interactions or other drugs worth checking out?
Creatine monohydrate (10 g)
Whey protein concentrate (40 g)
Multivitamin (including D3, K2, B12, folate, zinc)
Cod oil (5 ml)
Curcumin + piperine for bioavailability
Magnesium L-threonate + lavender oil + minimum effective dose of melatonin for onset insomnia
L-theanine (100 mg) + SAMe (for anxiety and depression)
Trial-and-error nootropics, carefully tested one by one: tianeptine, noopept, NSI-189, Selank, bromantane, aniracetam, ashwagandha, bacopa. If legal, controlled microdosing of psylocybin, LSD or MDMA.
Have you done trial-and-error on everything you’re currently taking? Try dropping the multivitamin.
Is going to the doctor(/psychologist etc.) with your problems an option for you? If so, I’d say you should try that first. (Or if you’re absolutely bent on taking the nootropics, go to the doctor as well.)
By the way, it may well be that the multivitamin is not as helpful as you’d expect. You’d be better off eating things that have high concentrations of the vitamins you feel you need, as your body may sometimes have a difficult time absorbing the vitamins if not in the proper, ehm, ‘food’ configuration. (A quick search on the internet suggests that milk and eggs would be helpful for some of the vitamins you listed, though if you’re vegan that would of course not be an option.)
I’d say dump the whey protein and creatine, I’ve never seen the point of these unless you’re into bodybuilding/weight lifting and they have their own little universe of what is good diet where I’m not going to tread. If that’s what you’re going for, you know more about it than I do.
Unless your diet is very bad, you may not need the multivitamins (if you are going to supplement with vitamins, stick with the B vitamins). The magnesium may do you some good (especially for muscle cramps and regulation of heart rate) and so will the curcumin so stick with them, ditto the fish oil. Lavender never did anything for me (except smell nice) but if you find it calming, then that’s good.
No idea about nootropics and all the above is not medical advice or based on studies but rather what worked/helped me when I was trying things I’d read about when looking for advice.
I take creatine anytime I need to work hard after noticing a marked decrease in soreness the day after working when I’ve taken it in the past.
I’ve found that when I increase my exercise level, and am taking protein, the first time I’m sore, but the next time I can do it. Before I started, I was often sore several times. I suspect muscle-building help. (Though it does depend on how much dietary protein you get.)
“Creatine monohydrate (10 g)
Whey protein concentrate (40 g)”
Why are you supplementing with these? I wouldn’t do this unless you’re a vegetarian and/or aren’t consuming enough animal proteins. If you aren’t a vegetarian, then drop the creatine and protein powder and eat a steak instead.
A lot of people can benefit from significantly higher doses of Vitamin D than you’d find in a multi, but you could get bloodwork to test your levels to be sure.
Whey protein is only really useful if you’re not getting enough dietary protein otherwise. I like it sometimes for convenience, but eating real food is probably better in general.
Also, sunlight derived Vitamin D may be superior.
Sure.
Lower the creatine supplementation down to 3g a day. More then that probably isn’t going to help you.
Keep the multivitamin, but do some research on which one is the best. Get a varied one, and maybe add 2 individual pills for the ones that doesn’t have. You may have to do some research on the vitamins that are not water soluble and don’t get pissed out. Also, be worried about heavy metal levels. That’s the main real worry about multivitamins. If worried, just go with a major source like kirkland. Avoid multi’s that have random herbal crap added.
Personal preference, but change the whey to soy. Mostly due to whey being made from cheap brutal factory farming methods.
Cod oil isn’t the only sources of omega 3,6,9. I would avoid individual pills of those, as I worry about the plastics, and just get a bottle of the oil of what you want.
Curcumin and piperine are in supplement industry hellhole. I would avoid them
Things like lavender oil isn’t lavender oil *Per se* Its adding a calming relaxing scent to a certain area you want to sit down and relax. Pleasant aromas, calming aromas help this.
There are more powerful and effective meds then melatonin for sudden sleep, when you really need it.
Avoid the L-theanine (100 mg) + SAMe for depression. SSRI’s are probably a really sophisticated scam. Get some exercise in the sun instead.
Throw away every nootropic. At this point, its a “if there are not articles about mit/caltech professors using it for research, its probably BS”.
What do they use to aid them? Modafinil / caffiene/ adderall, and general good sleep, diet, exercise. Artists use LSD/MDMA, and its both funky and somehow helps them draw images. LSD *might* be useful for some scientific visualization things, but probably not.
Throw away all the nootropics.
Eid question for any muslims/locals here:
Eid al-Adha and Fitr are on a lunar calendar, but seem to focus on meat dishes and sweets/fruits respectively.
Is it just not important to line those up to the solar calendar the way european feast days are? I can’t imagine someone saying “hey, this year you need to get the easter lamb ready in October, and the pumpkins growing in February”
LHN’s comment about the jewish calendar leap month got me curious. al-Fitr is moving from September, to July, to March over a decade because there’s no equivalent solar adjustment in the Muslim calendar.
The standard interpretation I’m used to is that solar calendars only really matter for people who live far form the equator.
With more seasonal variability, annual cycles matter a lot. Without it, you may as well use the moon, which is easier to keep track of.
This applies to Jewish and Christian calendars too: Hanukkah and Christmas were not very significant events on the calendar historically when people were just living in the middle East. But as populations spread north, the festivals that happened to fall close to the solstice gained greater importance.
But even in Indian, Pakistan, Africa, etc. you have a rainy and dry season that corresponds to the solar calendar, don’t you?
Pakistan has a rainy season June-September, but they have to have 10,000,000 lambs/cows ready for slaughter on a date that often doesn’t correspond at all to when you can pasture animals.
But you don’t have those seasons in and around the Arabian peninsula, which was* and remains* the center of Islam.
* To a point, of course. Constantinople is not terribly far from Medina at the scale we’re worried about.
The Hejaz, which is the birthplace and heartland of Islam, has a climate that will kill the unwary in several exciting ways with substantial seasonal variation. Yes, you can die in a flash flood within sight of Mecca. Or maybe you can swim, but your sheep can’t and you’ll starve if they drown. Maybe it would be nice to know a month ahead of time when you should move them to high ground?
Well in that case I’m back to being confused.
EDIT: Or I was, until I took a close look at this wikipedia page. It seems the proto-Islamic calendar had an occasional intercalary month (like many historic lunar calendars), but it was decided politically and ad hoc, rather like the on-average biannual intercalary month of the pre-reform Roman calendar.
Easter is the major Christian feast linked to a lunar calendar, which is why it’s a movable feast. There are suggestions from time to time by secular governments over here to pick a date and stick with it (because that would make the public holiday a regular, recurring date and easier to plan around) but it never seems to come to anything (yet).
Presumably, since it’s linked to the vernal equinox, that does put a bound on the dates it can fall and so there’s not a problem with “get the Easter lamb ready in October”.
Easter’s on the same 19 year cycle as the Jewish calendar, and is fixed on part by the solar year, so its wandering is limited in the same way that Hannukah’s is. The range of dates is even about the same, at a bit more than a month.
The Islamic calendar is not fixed to the year and Islamic law forbids intercalation*, so their holidays cycle all the way around.
* Really, though, who wants to deal with INTERCAL?
It is worth noting that the modern Jewish calendar (the mathematical version rather than the observational one) post-dates the settlement of the Easter controversies (well at least the first rounds of them, the Gregorian controversy was still to come).
I don’t know for sure, but the influence chain may well have been Greeks -> Romans -> Christians -> Jews rather than Jews -> Christians like one might naively expect.
Yes, I think the Jewish and Christian reforms (that is, the Gregorian calendar plus related Easter shifting and the Metonic cycle, anti-respectively) were made at about the same time.
Not Muslim, but having discussed this with educated Muslims –
The feast days/calendar keeps slipping because the time-sense of God is not the time-sense of mortals. It’s an artifact of our limited minds that we think that just because we count “year” from one spot around the sun to another, that therefore the Creator of All would have to do the same.
(And when you think about the wobbles in the orbits, and the movement of the Solar System through our galaxy, and the way that the whole mess is rocketing through empty space, they’re *right*. One year is not equal to the next, and we imagine so in error.)
As for practical matters like availability of lamb, etc, *shrugs* Allah will provide. And so we feast on what we have at hand in that season. Aussies adjust to Christmases with snow well enough, after all…
So why would God go with the moon then? Is his time sense different from mortals for the sun, but the same for the moon?
*I* dunno. Maybe because Allah, in his mercy, understood the limits of the human mind?
(I never asked that, and maybe I should have. I always felt I was skirting too close to the edge in these talks – the Muslim tradition of religious debate is not based on the Western classics, where one can postulate a falsehood in the service of proving it wrong. There was too much room for causing accidental offense.)
Why does Trump use superlatives so often? He seems to use them a lot more often than other politicians. Did he always speak this way, or is this something he’s doing for the election? Is there a way to determine if his way of speaking is helping him or hurting him in general?
Personally, I may agree with him on some of his “policies”, but his arrogance and manner of speaking really turn me off. I can’t stand his braggadocio.
He’s been like that for a very long time. The bad hair and the manner of speech are part of the Trump brand, I have no idea why however.
There’s something oddly appealing to me about it. I’m a long way from Trump politically but earlier today I was watching a press conference from just after Obama released his birth certificate. Trump was there with his weird hair endlessly congratulating himself and telling the cameras how proud he was of himself because he was the only who’d been able to get Obama to release his birth certificate and I couldn’t help thinking “I really fucking hope this guy becomes president of the United States”.
It’s infectious. There’s no contest between massive enthusiasm and nimble action, vs humourless scolding and blatantly feigned hysterics.
“No contest” is an unusual way to describe Hillary being up two points in the polls.
I can’t stand Trump and neither can anyone else I know. And before you lecture me about how people I know are an unrepresentative sample, I’m just using this as an existence proof to counter the claim that everyone has to love Trump.
No, you were just already infected by something else. Something even more virulently deplorable than what we have to offer. (sec. VII esp.)
I mean, is there anyone in your peer group who doesn’t giggle at the national anthem? Or know that, while it might be unavoidable to love your country, you should at least feel ashamed for it?
“There’s no contest between massive enthusiasm and nimble action, vs humourless scolding and blatantly feigned hysterics.”
I interpret that as a comment about the approaches, not the candidates.
Suppose one could somehow prove that if Hilary switched to Trump’s approach and Trump to Hilary’s, Hilary would go up in the polls and Trump down.
That would be evidence that Trump’s approach worked better–even if it didn’t work enough better to make up for Trump’s various negatives.
So when you said “There’s no contest,” you meant “There’s no contest among people who support Trump.”
Sorry: *or who doesn’t think that, while it might be unavoidable…*
“I mean, is there anyone in your peer group who doesn’t giggle at the national anthem? Or know that, while it might be unavoidable to love your country, you should at least feel ashamed for it?”
Yes, many people. I think your assessment of how liberal you have to be to not like Trump is way too high.
Sure. I get a lump in my throat at patriotic displays, can get through the other verses of the national anthem on a good day, have voted for Republican candidates for President since the 1980s, and am repelled by Clinton. But I’m repelled more by Trump.
Same goes for a friend whose fondest political memory was getting to attend the 1984 Republican convention, who proudly identifies as conservative (and makes fun of my wambly libertarianish inclinations), who’s been sporting a Johnson t-shirt for months.
When asked what vote he’d cast if he lived in a swing state, gun to his head, his response was:
“PULL THE TRIGGER, YOU COWARD! PULL THE TRIGGER!!!“
Not just among people who like Trump. People who absolutely can’t stand him end up using versions of his slogans — “Make X Great Again” (though to be fair he took that from Reagan) and “Build an X and make Y pay for it” especially. And not just to mock him, but to describe things they are actually doing or want done.
I think it’s a hard thing to assess, because Trump vs not-Trump doesn’t quite hit the usual liberal/conservative divide. Clinton vs not-Clinton is also unusual, but to a lesser extent. 2016 is a pretty unusual presidential election (hence rising Johnson support, at least for a time). Whether a proper realignment happens remains to be seen, but I think the fact that it’s Clinton as opposed to someone more like Biden running against Trump actually makes it less likely. No matter what happens, everyone will be able to explain away the results, and this election on its own won’t be enough to change the 2018 or 2020 core constituencies.
I think things might be different if I was American – it’s not that I’m super enthusiastic about him, largely that I think it would be fucking hilarious combined with the fact that he’d probably kill fewer people in foreign countries than Hillary would.
I personally do actually blink back tears when I hear “America the Beautiful” (I have nothing against “The Star-Spangled Banner, but the lyrics never quite catch my euphoric tendencies the same way.) While I do have friends who would probably prefer to mock national pride rather than display it, I have an even larger number of friends and family who would never dream of failing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
I find Trump’s tone and style extremely, extremely obnoxious. I remember watching the town halls and debates from 2012, and while I didn’t like Romney’s policies, I never hated his style in the same way. In 2008, I actually very much enjoyed McCain’s speeches and didn’t care for Obama’s vague, transcendental rhetoric. But none of them have put me off in the same way.
I’m not that big a fan of our national anthem, but absolutely love America the Beautiful and God Bless America both. They played the latter every night at Disneyland after a fireworks display in 2002 when I worked there and I consistently choked up every time. I served 6 years in the Army. I voted for Bush but have not voted since mostly because I just don’t care any more.
And I absolutely cannot stand Trump. And I could not stand him way before he had any political ambitions that I knew of.
If you don’t think the national anthem can move you to tears, try watching Jim Cornelison sing it prior to a Chicago Blackhawks game. Dude has some serious skill and the atmosphere of everyone standing and clapping and screaming during it is uniquely impressive.
(If you’re interested, he’s supposedly going to be singing it for tonight’s Monday Night Football game between the Bears and the Eagles, not quite the same atmosphere but still the same vocal talent)
From the other side of the matrix, I’m a supporter of Trump but am very “meh” about our national anthem and other patriotic symbols. I don’t feel anything when hippies burn the flag or blms refuse to stand for the anthem. And yet I love Trump’s rhetorical style.
I like Trump’s rhetoric precisely because it’s obnoxious and overdone. It’s a nice change of pace, I am inclined to backlash against criticisms of it because I see those criticisms as superficial, and it’s enjoyably over the top, almost gaudy in its excess and low quality.
@scott
have you ever had the experience of finding someone annoying, then getting that it was schtick, and then finding it funny afterwards?
The best example of this I can think of was back when Bill Walton called a lot of basketball games as an announcer
for a while I found him to be incredibly aggravating to listen to, then at some point in clicked to me that the whole thing was schtick, and then he seemed like far and away the funniest, most enjoyable guy to listen to call a game
maybe Sasha Baron Cohen is a more relatable example of this, the first time I saw his show, I found it extremely weird, and didn’t really get it, the more I watched it the more I got the schtick and the funnier it became
maybe you think Presidential politics is ‘serious business’ and not the place for schtick, if you do, maybe you’re right for feeling that way
but I think a large part of finding Trump tolerable is to sort of get that there’s a large element of schtick to it
(I’m not really a believer that humorless politics is better politics, but that probably a topic for a different internet comment)
I know I’m late, but this is Donald bloody Trump. The fact that, against the odds, he’s in the running at all is testament to the power of his particular style (the “enthusiasm”.)
That man is squeezing a surprising amount out of his insane Charisma score.
There is something oddly appealing about it, in the sense that Trump would be the guy in the groups of friends everyone kinda likes and no one’s really sure why. But if I imagine him in my group of friends, coming up with actual plans of what to do on the weekend, I think we’d find his dismissive attitude annoying. So when he’s actually running for president, I can see why a lot of people find him incredibly off putting.
I have to admit, I liked the stroke his campaign pulled in getting coverage of endorsement by veterans for him, by enticing the media with a “he’s going to say something about Obama’s birth certificate!”
The grousing in the media afterwards about being tricked and how very dare they was wonderful; look, guys, it’s not their fault if you lot leap at the hint of red meat dangled before your noses because you assume you know what he’s going to say before he says it. If he’s a joke candidate, why pay him the attention of caring what the hell he says about Obama’s place of birth?
His campaign played you like a fiddle, O guardians of the sacred civic flame of the public interest!
This attitude always gets right to my last nerve, so to speak.
Because it’s nihilism even as you loudly complain that people don’t care enough about what matters.
Not only that, he did something similar to what news programs in the US do to their viewers all the time: Run a teaser for something the viewers actually want to hear, then run 20 minutes of barely-disguised infomercials, then have a 10-second blurb that tells little more than the teaser did.
I think it’s even extra brilliant because the “birther” controversy is so incredibly irrelevant to any actual issue that might affect Americans.
It was patently and obviously transparent that the only reason this was a story is because the media was actively searching for ways to damage and discredit Trump. Their motivations were entirely impure and malevolent, so the fact that he was able to play it right back against them is a true stroke of genius.
Like, it would be one thing if he promised to deliver a speech on his future jobs policy but instead pulled a random infomercial and then in the last five seconds was like “oh and I’m gonna create some jobs.” I think that would be kinda scummy on his part. But in this case, I feel like most regular people (and undecided voters in particular) don’t actually give a single ounce about whether or not he thinks Obama was born in America. He has every right to blow off and dismiss and treat as a joke such a non-story.
I have no idea what is or isn’t of significance to those mythological regular people, but I think it is relevant that whether or not someone seeking the Presidency has spent the less five years pushing a delusional conspiracy theory.
It’s marvellous because they plainly all expected him to go “Obama’s not a real American!” and they were getting ready to point and laugh (I bet Jo(h)ns Stewart and Oliver had their scripts ready to go), and instead people are pointing and laughing at them.
“whether or not someone seeking the Presidency has spent the less five years pushing a delusional conspiracy theory.”
You mean like the theory that the Lewinsky case was the work of the vast right wing conspiracy? More than five years back, but I’m not sure that matters.
Tu quoque.
I really wish defenses of Trump [or Clinton] didn’t start with the words “But Clinton [or Trump]…”
Clintonista since the 90s here. I defended Palin because imo the media and her opponents were being very unfair to her. I had a similar impression about Trump on the birth certificate issue; I never heard him saying he believed Obama was born elsewhere, just that Obama’s failure to release the long form b.c. suggested a cover-up of something wrong there. (Maybe some bureaucrat in the 1960s had spilled coffee on it, black PC coffee of course.)
After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner showed the lfbc to roast Trump, my opinion changed to ‘Obama was trolling the Rightwingers all along’.
Trump is a master persuader who knows that if you repeatedly say something simple and direct, many humans brain will come to believe it.
You’re thinking of the wrong Scott A.
The conventional wisdom in hard SF and adjacent fields for about the past twenty years has been that There Ain’t No Stealth In Space. I am probably as responsible as anyone for that consensus, and there seems to be an eagerness to repeat the discussion here, so let’s do it in the appropriate place.
Phrased as an absolute, it’s obviously going to be an overstatement. Concealing a spacecraft from a peer competitor isn’t impossible – it just imposes such crippling limitations that it’s generally not worth the bother outside of very specialized circumstances. If you can plan your sneak attacks six months in advance, certain that the target won’t have changed course in the meantime, sure, that’s doable (but expensive). Or, of particular relevance here, you can deploy stealthed observation platforms that just sit around doing nothing but watching and reporting. What you can’t do, without it being more trouble than it is worth, is have a stealthed spaceship perform the sort of maneuvers necessary to carry out interesting missions against an adversary who isn’t so wholly overmatched that you didn’t need to hide from them in the first place. You can’t, in other words, have Space Pirates lurking in the spacelanes to swoop on unsuspecting merchantmen before the Space Patrol(tm) can respond.
The reason for this, fundamentally, is that space is very big and very dark. Space being big means that in order to move across any useful outer-space distance, you have to command literally astronomical quantities of energy – much of which will by that pesky second law of thermodynamics wind up as waste heat. And space being dark means that astronomical quantities of waste heat will stand out like a lighthouse on a clear, moonless night to anyone who is looking. A spaceship can only remain “hidden” if it keeps its engines turned off – but that just means everybody knows it is in about the place it was when it shut down its (highly visible) engines, and if they need something more precise than that can start a focused search for lesser sources of waste heat.
The only objection I’ve seen anyone raise here is that they can maybe somehow radiate their waste heat in a direction where there enemy isn’t. In which case:
1. Make up your mind. If stealth in space is that easy, how do you know where the enemy is that you can safely radiate waste heat where he isn’t? As noted above, one of the few things that is worth the bother of doing is deploying stealthy observation platforms. Everybody who is serious about any sort of conflict in space is going to do that. Starfleet is going to do that, as are the Klingons. The Space Patrol will do it, and if they don’t the Shipping Guild will, and the Space Pirates will deploy their own stealthed observation platforms so the Space Patrol can’t sneak up on them.
Anyone who doesn’t do this, is so complacent and unprepared for conflict that you don’t really need to be sneaking up on them in the first place.
2. Possibly the idea is to radiate into a very narrow segment of the sky, a tight cone or beam where the enemy is statistically unlikely to be looking. How, exactly, is this supposed to be done?
A heat shield that blocks out half the sky is straightforward enough. Anything narrower than that is actually quite hard, as whatever set of baffles or reflectors you are imagining will tend to reflect, absorb, and/or reradiate the waste heat that it is supposed to be carefully redirecting, such that the entire exit aperture of the system becomes a hemispheric radiator. It is possible to use, e.g., parabolic reflectors around point-source emitters to get around this, but as bean alluded to in the last thread, conservation of radiance is going to bite you. For a given radiator at a given temperature, reducing the area of the sky to which you radiate by a factor of N, absolutely requires increasing the area of the radiator by a factor of N or more.
For example, radiating a megawatt of heat at 1000 K temperature, normally requires a dual-sided flat-panel radiator 3.4 meters in diameter. Radiating that megawatt of heat into a thirty-degree cone, requires a mirror array 46 meters in diameter.
Which, aside from the practical difficulties of hauling it around with you, will absorb 2.25 megawatts of sunlight if you try to operate the thing anywhere near the Earth.
3. You still don’t have an engine. In order to actually go anywhere, a non-magical spaceship has to expel reaction mass, and it has to do so at astronomical velocities. Which, again, requires astronomical quantities of energy turning into astronomical quantities of waste heat, about half of which you ought to expect to show up in the reaction mass. From which it will be radiated some distance downstream of your engine, spacecraft, and clever array of mirrors.
Now what?
I’m a pirate. I know where an enemy is going to be because merchant ships travel in predictable courses (or maybe they filed a course that my confederate leaked to me). They don’t use stealth; it’s expensive and takes up mass and volume they’d rather use for cargo. Or, I don’t care if the merchant sees me on final approach (because I can outrun and outgun them), I only need stealth to get into position to make sure Space Patrol isn’t going to be ambushing me the way I’m ambushing the merchant, and to get away.
And my ship is _Angel’s Pencil_, which answers your other two questions. (that is, it’s light pressure drive based on a massive laser)
1. Being captured by pirates is also expensive. A ship on a Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars can alter its midrange course by five million kilometers at the cost of a ~1% increase in propellant consumption. That’s not an error you’re going to make up on final approach; you’re going to be seen while you maneuver to get into position.
2. The Angel’s Pencil is made of pure handwavium; even Niven admits it is implausible for any level of technology (i.e. if you had the means to make it, you’d make something else that is better at the stated mission of peaceful manned starflight).
3. If you did somehow manufacture an Angel’s Pencil, with a 99% efficient laser for the propulsion system, the remaining 1% would come to fifteen trillion watts, and the resulting incandescent radiators would be naked-eye visible from just under 1 AU away.
4. If you’ve got a laser like that, so does the Space Patrol. They can shoot you out of the sky from an AU away, even if you are jinking and weaving for all your drive is worth and they have to guess your position eight minutes in advance.
Granted, but there’s a catch. If we posit a setting where the merchants routinely make random burns as part of a Spacer’s equivalent to the old “convoy serpentine” you’ve dramatically increased the probability of individual burns going unnoticed.
In the sense that one-in-a-thousand is vastly more probable than one-in-a-million, perhaps. This is the sort of problem that is readily handed over to automation. Is there a drive plume? Check. Is it right on the projected track of a known spaceship? Check. Does the telemetry of that ship indicate a maneuver? Check. Wait, one of those was a “No”? Generate a suspicious-contact report, and focus a Big Eye on the track while the traffic controller stops playing solitaire.
That’s the point though. our hypothetical Pirate has a lot more freedom to maneuver when a
sail on the horizondrive plume aligned with our current velocity vector isn’t sufficient reason in itself to wake the captain.Why wouldn’t it be reason to wake the captain? Space is big, so close approaches will be rare, and thus notable. The captain gets woken up when anything unusual happens.
Space may be big, but the shortest distance between two points is still a conic section. In the scenario above, a drive plume on the same path as you wouldn’t qualify as unusual.
But a drive plume on the same path almost certainly left at about the same time you did, and is going to the same place. For that matter, the captains of the 50 km/s Terra-Jupiter run this year probably all had dinner together before they left Earth, and you’re pretty sure none of them are pirates. A ship suddenly appearing out of the asteroid belt who just happens to be on the same path you’re taking to Jupiter is suspiciously unusual. It’s even more unusual when someone comes out of the asteroid belt on a course that takes them close to you, but doesn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. Certainly enough so that you’ll give them (and the Space Guard) a call.
Also, keep in mind that position on Earth is often analogous to position and velocity in space. A pirate not only has to get close to his target, he has to match velocity as well. At any tech level above nuke-thermal, matching velocity will be a matter of hours or days, leaving plenty of time for the target to get a distress call off, even if the pirate doesn’t immediately trigger suspicion when he sets up the intercept course. That’s unlikely in and of itself. Particularly because the target can run the course of a possible pirate to see if it’s the optimum for what he’s doing. Ships on a non-optimum course coming close? Very odd.
As for why just setting off from somewhere along the course doesn’t work, remember that two objects with different velocities don’t really have the same position, so there’s no reason to assume that someone going from an asteroid on the path to Jupiter would take the same path as someone who left Earth to go there.
The only good option for the ‘pirate’ is to make it look like he has legitimate business being nearby at a similar velocity. Join the “convoy” the target ship is using. This isn’t really scalable, because you have to convince the Space Guard you’re legit each time. It would make a good heist story, but isn’t really piracy.
Edit:
To put it another way the shortest distance between two points may be a conic section (well, it’s still a line, but I get your meaning), but the best route between them varies a lot. The odds of a random ship’s best route taking it near you is very low.
But points aren’t interesting; planets are. As are moons, asteroids, space stations, etc. Thing is, all those things move. So the conic section that is the shortest distance between Earth, today, and Mars six months from now, is tomorrow the shortest distance between two empty points in space millions of kilometers from nowhere.
Any ship on that “path” that hasn’t been in convoy with you from the start, is a ship that is Up to No Good.
One of the consequences of space being vastly hugely mindbogglingly big, is that spaceships do not coincidentally pass close to one another in deep space. Not if they are traveling on anything resembling efficient paths between useful destinations, not even modulo a bit of evasive routing.
There is likely to be a real-time database of ships in space just as there is for ships at sea or planes in the sky. That database mostly exists today, though the current version doesn’t extend beyond Earth orbit or include satellites the US government thinks it can hide. Such a database can be automatically updated with the new trajectory of every spacecraft in the solar system, after every observed burn. Burns themselves are likely to be individually cataloged events. If this information is at all useful, making it comprehensively and universally available will be cheap compared to maintaining interplanetary commerce in the first place – just as it is at sea, in the sky, and in Earth orbit today.
Regularly querying that database and asking, “are any of these other ships on a trajectory that will pass anywhere close to me in deep space?”, is the sort of task that automation is very good for. If the answer is ever “yes”, that ship is Probably Up to No Good, and this will happen rarely enough that the captain won’t mind being woken for it. If after a modest arbitrary maneuver, the other ship makes a corresponding maneuver and is still on an intercept trajectory, they are Definitely Up to No Good. If they do any of the things that might obscure exactly what their trajectory is up to, Probably Up to No Good, and if the error ellipsoid around their now-fuzzy course prediction intersects another ship that pushes it into Definitely Up to No Good while telling everyone who the target is. None of this will be written off as coincidence, nor does any of it require tedious human effort in sorting through all the innocent contact reports – that’s what automation is for.
What do you do when you get the ship, though? It’s a merchant ship, so it’s not carrying around a bunch of extra delta-V. It has enough to stop at its scheduled destination, plus a small reserve. It does not have enough to suddenly change course and head for Port Royal or wherever the pirates are operating out of. If it did, it probably couldn’t stop there. If you want to move the cargo to your ship, your ship is going to have to be considerably bigger than the target, because it’s going to need a lot of delta-V. Oh, and the authorities can see where you go with your loot, even if they couldn’t see you get into position to grab it. And trust me, they will be paying attention. Oh, and any place that gets pirates regularly fencing prizes will receive a visit from warships. Privateering is vaguely possible, but straight-up piracy doesn’t work on any level in space.
In monopolar setting maybe, but the fact that we are discussing combat in the first place implies that the setting is not monopolar. There are plenty of candidates for high value, low mass cargoes that would have a negligible effect on dV. Likewise the attackers objective may not even be “piracy” per se, it’s just that is the classic set up for an opposed intercept.
I did briefly think of a heist (as opposed to conventional piracy) when I was writing that, but didn’t bring it up. That’s somewhat more plausible, but it still leaves a problem, namely that stealing something will always be more expensive and require more delta-V than shipping it in the first place, and that if it’s worth stealing, it’s probably worth sending on a fast ship which the pirates won’t be able to intercept. The chain the pirates have to be able to pull off is also rather long and involved.
1. Get into position without being identified as a pirate.
2. Make the intercept without being dodged. If the target is valuable enough, the insurance company will say ‘dodge till your tanks are empty, and we’ll pay for the tug’. (This has the side effect of thwarting plans where the pirates siphon remass from the target ship.)
3. Have a safe place to go after they get the loot. Keep in mind that they’re currently headed right for the target’s destination, which is presumably hostile to them. It’s going to take a substantial diversion to avoid the Space Guard flagging you down, which means more delta-V, so the astrodynamics aspect is nontrivial. And whoever you stole from is going to ask the authorities you end up headed for to please hand you over. Those authorities are going to need a reason to not do so. If you’re one of their privateers, then they’ll obviously welcome you, but if someone is privateering, any ships they send out will be carefully watched. (And you still haven’t solved the problem of engine burns being visible.) The same goes for ships from planets that harbor independent pirates, with the added issue that it’s really hard to give good cause why nobody has sent a punitive expedition. (There’s manifold precedent in international law for such expeditions.)
All the other objections are scientific/technical, but this one is political. Nobody sent a punitive expedition to Ceres because the People’s Republic of Mars insists that Ceres is totally within its claimed territory and any invasion will be an act of war. Or because the Jovian Union insists that attacking Cerean pirates will just create more pirates and what we need to do is provide those poor oppressed astronauts with good jobs and health care so they don’t feel the need to resort to piracy. Or the President of Earth doesn’t want to call attention to the spike in space piracy because that’ll harm his “We Defeated All The Space Pirates Forever” re-election campaign narrative. Or, etc., etc.
Frankly, I find any of these more plausible than a punitive expedition.
the problem is that while all of those are reasons, none will be perpetual. Sooner or later, someone will decide it’s worth.
Even if the motive is sticking your thumb in Mars’s eye.
Hilarious option (that probably won’t work):
Instead of matching speeds, treat the merchant ship as the slow “friend” in the momentum-exchange maneuver John described. Pass at high speed with no burn, anchor a bunch of sturdy grapples, let momentum point the victim’s orbit towards a pre-arranged target (preferably one of those stealthy passive platforms we’ve been discussing), and release the cables. A second passive confederate (already en route) intercepts you and tosses you away from the cops.
Not recommended for stealing fragile cargo. Or fragile merchantmen, frankly.
@Thirteenth Letter
1. Piracy is not the sort of crime that gets formally excused by civilized nations. If they’re going to engage in it, they call it privateering. But privateering is an act of war in most cases. What made piracy possible was the fact that searching was really hard back in the day (not true in space), nations had plausible deniability (which is hard to maintain when the exact coordinates of the pirate on final get transmitted to you) and that a private group could create a halfway-decent army on its own (very much not true).
The reason it works off of Somalia is that the pirates can blend into the background of general boat traffic. But space travel doesn’t work that way, either. It’s more akin to air travel in that way, and while it’s theoretically possible someone could mount guns on a bizjet and force airliners to land, then plunder them, in practice it just doesn’t happen.
A nation covering for pirates quickly turns them into de facto privateers, and they will have the issues which come from de facto privateering. Also, you have issues reintegrating pirated cargoes into the economy. Any pirate-harboring world will be treated to sanctions and any world covering for pirates will suddenly discover that the customs inspectors are a lot more through, looking for pirated goods.
@Gazeboist:
Really, really unlikely. Tethers are very large, very complex structures, and attaching one to an unwilling victim is not a good way to a long and healthy life.
@bean: It took years of dithering before it was even considered wink-and-nod acceptable to have armed guards on ships traveling near Somalia, and as far as acts of war and punitive expeditions go, was there ever even one of those against a Somali pirate haven? They weren’t particularly secret in any way. (Even the phrase “act of war” sounds faintly musty and absurd nowadays, when you have international diplomats slicing and dicing and insisting that you can make distinctions between the “political wing” and the “military wing” of terrorist organizations, and pretending that massive mechanized invasions of neighboring countries are internal political disputes.)
In general, it’s not a safe assumption that because a pirate is obviously a pirate, everyone is going to leap into action Royal Navy-style and start shelling their hideouts and hanging them from the yardarms. If the current political narrative requires that we not believe an obvious pirate is a pirate, then that’s how it will be.
@ThirteenthLetter
You make a fair point, but the analogy to Somalia breaks down. Remember that position on Earth is analogous to position and velocity in space, which means that ships in transit between two points won’t ever “be near” somewhere in between. That means you’ll need something significantly bigger/more powerful than the space equivalent of a fishing boat to go after the target. Bigger ships are less generic, and don’t blend into the background as well. Oh, and in space, things change relative position, so a nest of pirates is easily routed around by adding a new constraint to the astrogation computers.
Other factors are that the government of Somalia is impotent, and that Somalia isn’t an important trading partner to anybody. In space, the only easy ships to raid are ones that are stopping nearby (I suppose gas giant moons might qualify) and doing that makes the local merchants very upset. Oh, and the ships stop coming.
Another factor might be the general apathy towards sea power among the public and the governments of the world. When ships were the cutting edge of moving things, piracy got taken seriously. Now, air travel is, and we subject ourselves to absurd security theater, and have equally absurd ROEs for dealing with pirates. (Well, the Chinese don’t, but everyone else does.) Space travel won’t have this issue.
I’ve already pointed out that you never see “Air Piracy”, even though it’s technically possible. I suspect that space will be more like air than like sea here.
@ bean
And the Russians X -)
As the Wikipedia charmingly put it
True for passenger transport, but sea freight still dwarfs air cargo. But it’s likely true that the fact that the victims are mostly merchant sailors (give or take the rare cruise ship, which does make the front page) that allows it to remain below the radar for most people.
James Cambias has a hard SF book about space piracy in earth orbit, Corsair, which does that one better: the pirate vessels and their victims are uncrewed and operated via remote and automation, which makes it of even less interest to outsiders. (Much to the frustration of the officer attempting to wage an antipiracy campaign.) But the method is primarily hacking, rather than space stealth.
Accepting that for argument’s sake (because it’s a fun argument): if one wants to write a story about space piracy and be politically realistic, set it in an era when space travel is mundane and boring. Maybe the cutting edge is teleporters or warp drives or getting hooked up to the Matrix, and nobody cares about the practically unmanned fifty-year-old bulk tankers hauling water ice on minimum-energy transfer orbits from Saturn to Mars.
Another difference I’ve just thought of is that we’re assuming the “pirates” want to steal the cargo. Destroying it or sending it hopelessly off course should be a lot easier. Maybe the Mars terraforming project is going to be in real trouble if those tankers full of water ice stop arriving.
I’m aware of that, but omitted it for the sake of brevity. The basic problem is that sea freight isn’t sexy, and isn’t something most people have any interaction with.
@bean Like I said, I was going for “funny” more than “realistic”.
I may come back with something more topical, but:
I’ve always appreciated one element of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space setting: to an otherwise fairly hard sci fi spacefaring setting, Reynolds adds (in addition to I think one other soft-ish element) magical processors that get cold as they run, rather than hot. The primary use for these devices is to glue them to the hull of your ship and give them very large numbers to factor so your enemy can’t see you.
I’m pretty sure that’s just a flat-out thermo violation, on par with using thermocouples to turn waste heat into electricity or heat lasers. In fact, it would be easy to turn one and some other things into a perpetual motion machine.
Like I said, it’s an exception to the hardness of the setting, and doesn’t answer John’s questions. I just happen to find it amusing.
For the record, so did I. It’s handwavium, but directed at the right problem. In the same league as cavorite or scrith,
I was going to say “You mean like the Minovsky Particle?” but I don’t know if that example would lead to more people understanding, or less.
My grasp of physics isn’t great, but it should be possible to launch something in a deniable way from a very long distance, maybe using a gigantic first stage that handles waste heat and a very small second stage that’s just a warhead with some absorbent tiles, then let momentum carry it to the target. Not great for ship-to-ship combat, but very scary if you live somewhere with a predictable orbit.
Roughly speaking, you have to plan that sort of thing months to years in advance, depending on the level of detection technology the target has and the size of the ship/warhead you are launching. Surprisingly, almost everything else cancels in the math – if you start twice as far away, you are four times harder to detect, which means you can run four times as much energy through your engines, which means twice as fast, which means just as much time commitment as if you’d started at half the distance.
For people who can plan sneak attacks in detail months in advance, this can be made to work. That’s one of the viable niches for stealth in space.
If the target is a planet with a suitable atmosphere, I think that in principle you could aerobrake your warhead in it, then do some small corrections to put it into an orbit where it is difficult to detect from the planet surface. Then you can rain fire and brimstone whenever you want by sending an EM signal to it.
Aerobraking would be visible, but it might be mistaken for a meteorite. Or even if the warhead is detected during aerobraking if they can’t shoot it down before it cools down it might be difficult to detect again. They will know that there is a “sword of Damocles” orbiting over their heads, but they won’t know exactly where.
Or even simpler, you can have a large number of warheads going back and forth in Hohmann transfer orbits. When you want to attack, you just signal the one nearest to the target.
The number of orbits required is too large to make any sense. You’re better off holding them at home until you need them.
Thanks, this is a really interesting summary. I think you have a good case for “no stealth in space”.
The only two major exceptions I can think of are:
1. Falsifying information, misdirection, and hacking
Basically, if everyone relies on extrapolating the positions of where ships were last seen…if possible, mess with their observations or the software that computes the extrapolation. Of course, this will require access most of the time, so that’s also impractical in space. But it seems like engine shut-off is a good time for misdirection — if you can send extra propellant in several directions, you will be hard to track.
2. In-system
Planets, stars, and moons provide cover for ships. Distances are still very big, but it’s less dark, so there may be a bit more scope for stealth. Finally, it seems like you can do quite a bit with gravitational slingshots while staying pretty dark, though travel times will be slow.
Gravitational slingshots require objects with lots of gravity; there aren’t many of those, and if there’s any real potential for conflict the potential adversaries are going to be watching very closely. From multiple angles, with stealthed observation platforms.
A clever variant that can work, if you can set it up, is to use momentum-exchange tethers. Launch two spaceships on courses that will pass very near each other at substantial relative velocity. Have one of them deploy a cable – very strong and with a controllable dynamic brake – for the other to grab as they pass. Instant batmobile turn with minimal emissions.
You can also do this by harpooning convenient asteroids, maybe, and I’ve seen that semi-seriously proposed just for the midcourse delta-V in outer planet exploration.
But there’s a very restrictive range of circumstances where that can be done usefully, and a competent adversary will be looking for it – just why, in all the vastness of the solar system, did those two adversary spaceships launch on courses that would cross within cable-grabbing distance? If you’re looking for a works-once clever trick for a stealth maneuver in an SF story. and don’t mind the adversary looking less than fully competent, this one goes in the “plausible” bin.
I think it would help to unpack some assumptions.
Personally, I’m basing my arguments on a tech-base that I would call “plausible near future” something roughly in line with Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama or Heinlein’s late 21st Century (Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Farmers in the Sky, etc…). Most ships have something on the order of a GW of power at their disposal +/- an order of magnitude. and are comparable to modern structures in terms of scale (no 50 mile long battle cruisers here). Propulsion, Sensors, and weaponry are all assumed to based on existing technologies and theory. Transit between planets are on the order of weeks and months.
From this I extrapolate that active sensors are going to largely useless for search / early warning due the tyranny of light-speed lag and the inverse square law. Likewise visual spectrum searches are going to be largely ineffective outside a few light seconds due to the optics required. As such, search and initial target acquisition will likely be conducted via passive sensing of a vessel’s IR or EM emissions. “Stealth” will be determined by the ability to conceal these emissions.
I agree with John Schilling about the roll of “stealthy observation platforms” but covering the whole solar system with them is going to be very expensive given the tech-base described above. As such we can assume that any such network will be a project for large established entities, and that coverage will likely be spotty to nonexistent outside of well traveled routes.
These seem fairly obvious and self-evident to me but now we need to start nailing down details.
Just how noisy is our environment? Is every vessel in the solar system directly allied with Starfleet or do we have a situation where 20% belong to UN Space Command, 20% belong to the Martian Congressional Republic with the remaining balance distributed across any number of independent operators? Likewise, just how populated is our field? Is an exhaust plume departing Io even notable?
Why would the stealthy observation platforms be so expensive? In terms of hardware complexity, you’re looking at something very close to a modern spy satellite. Those are currently running about $4 billion a launch, although I think this has a lot to do with the big drop in production rates in the last couple of decades. During the height of the Cold War, they were about half that. Yes, placing something in the outer solar system is a lot more difficult than putting it in LEO, but we’re in a setting that is working on a multi-planetary scale anyway, so I’ll assume that’s a wash.
Now, we know that a 60-degree cone is about the minimum practical for directional radiation. I’ll shamelessly round that 1 radian (57.3 deg), which makes the math easier. Our cone covers 1 steradian out of the 4*pi that make up a sphere. So we need 13 satellites if we’re securing a single point. This is obviously not the case, but we don’t need to be able to detect all directional radiation all the time. 30 seems like a reasonable assumption for the number of platforms we need. If we assume a 10-year lifetime (probably conservative) and a cost of $2 billion/platform, the annual hardware cost of the system is only $6 bn/yr. The estimated budget of the NRO is about $10 bn/yr.
Depends on the size of the exhaust plume. The technology currently exists to track every big ship on the world’s oceans on a daily basis, and most of the small ones without their cooperation. Given the economies of scale involved in interplanetary travel, I don’t have any problem believing that a medium-sized nation could track everybody.
Edit:
This is intended as a high-end estimate. A low-end estimate would involve scaling from WISE, at $300 million/unit. Assume that production-line costs and milspec deployment/comms stuff cancels out.
It’s not the individual platforms that are expensive it’s having enough of them to cover an appreciable volume of space, emplacing them, and maintaining the network, that gets expensive. If you’re spending $6 bn/yr to keep Mars under observation, that still leaves the rest of the solar system to contend with.
My estimate was for the entire solar system, not just Mars. That’s why it’s 30 instead of 13. Remember, directional radiation increases your sensor signature in the direction you are radiating in, so I can put my platforms farther back. And the platforms are stealthier than your ship, so you can’t be sure you aren’t pointing at one even if I don’t have enough for sky cover.
Add to all this the fact that I don’t need to have continuous cover for directional radiators. Look for the burn, not for the ship in transit. That takes 2 satellites near Mars at most.
Ball is in your court now. What’s your estimate for platform requirements, and why?
What sort of FoR and angular resolution are you assuming for those platforms? Assuming that you want full coverage of the solar system inside Saturn’s orbit a platform with a 20 degree sweep would have to be approx 30 AU (4.2 light hours) out. At that sort of range a ship could easily make a big burn with it’s torch early on and then subtly change course over time using less energetic means without the operators of the panopticon being any the wiser if they aren’t looking at ships in transit. There’s also the practical matter of getting a platform (or 30) out that far in a timely manner without giving away it’s position, or hostile agents taking pot shots at it.
It seems to me that you get most of the functionality for a fraction of the effort by positioning your observation platforms around common routes and destinations. If someone does build a pan-solar system observation network chances are that it would be much more a strategic rather than tactical asset much like NRO satellites are today.
I’m not sure why you’d need to position them that far out, as you do have the ability to scan the telescope. Actually, based on the math John did on AR, it looks like regular housekeeping radiators won’t be picked up by a small telescope at ranges over a couple of AU. Interesting. At least for the moment, I concede this part of the point.
That’s where your plan falls apart. There are very strong limits on how much you can divert your orbit with small delta-Vs, and analyzing that is pretty easy. Ships which have strategically interesting divert options get flagged for extra attention. And there’s no reason not to delegate some telescope cycles to looking at ships in transit. A slightly longer exposure means better sensitivity.
If it’s a strategic surveillance network, then you launch them over a period of time, and let them drift. The platform is a lot smaller than the notional stealth frigate, and thus has a lower signature. It’s also not going as fast, which means a given delta-V has more impact on its trajectory.
Yes and no. Yes, I have no doubt that most constellations will be optimized to some degree to look at obvious trajectories (probably maximum coverage close to the ecliptic). No, in that there aren’t ‘routes’ per se, because we’re in space.
Does it make a difference if the space pirates aim their magic directional radiation gizmo directly away from the Sun? Anyone wanting to track all the burns going on in the Solar System is going to have to put their satellites on the outside looking in, not the other way around.
A platform that just has to observe and report is going to be intrinsically lighter, simpler, and cheaper than a stealth pirate space frigate, and therefore can be launched farther into deep space – on a faster trajectory, even, so the pirates can’t chase it down and sabotage it. As bean pointed out, on the order of a dozen cheap satellites in halo orbits, and you’re outside the piratical sphere of influence looking in, from every direction simultaneously.
And the directional radiation gizmo probably only works when you are coasting anyway. As soon as you try to maneuver, the radiant drive plume will almost certainly extend well beyond the extent of the gizmo’s directionalizing magic.
What’s the tech level that you are assuming here?
At level close to the current human one, sure, there is no stealth in space and there isn’t much anything in space because you aren’t going anywhere far or fast. But at a noticeably higher tech level, well, how useful were, do you think, XIX century discussions about air combat?
On the contrary, his argument works because you are going very far and very fast, and thus you need a huge, hot engine to reach those speeds. If you’re willing to spend months or years to fly between planets, you’ll find it a lot easier to hide. But what good is an ambush you have to plan years in advance?
Hiding behind “future technology” doesn’t really help here, unless you’re so futuristic that you can ignore thermodynamics. Your kinetic energy has to come from somewhere, and whether that “somewhere” is a chemical rocket or an antimatter torch, it produces waste heat.
A guy in the 19th century might not know much about radar and missiles, but he can still point out that, say, an airplane will need wings to fly, so a good way to shoot down a plane would be to blow off its wings. That’s about the level of this argument – your spaceship needs an engine, and engines are hot, so you can find a ship by looking for the heat of its engines.
The XIX-century equivalent is “unless you’re so futuristic you can ignore gravity”.
No, he can’t, because at this point in time heavier-than-air flight is the stuff of raving lunatics, so “air combat” means hot air balloons shooting at each other, if they can into range, that is.
Birds are heavier than air.
^That. Give me some credit, I thought about that example before giving it.
But actually, even if he somehow didn’t know what wings are, he could still say “No matter what future technology you use, gravity still applies, so every airship needs something to push up against the force of gravity. So whether your ship uses hot air balloons or something futuristic I haven’t thought of, you can shoot it down by finding the thing that keeps it aloft and shooting it.”
And if you told him “Well, with future technology, maybe we can just not have the force of gravity apply to our airships!” he’d be equally justified in laughing at you. Future technology isn’t a pass to ignore all known physics.
@ Aegeus
That depends. QM allows things which Newtonian mechanics would say are just flat out impossible.
That’s the general point: while the capabilities of near (in time) technology are reasonably predictable, most of the time, the capabilities of far technology are not.
I like world-building and have strong preferences for it to be coherent, but I also understand that in SF you start with some arbitrary axioms about how the world works and arguing against them using evidence from real present-day tech is kinda silly.
QM is the physics that occurs when certain critical assumptions of classical mechanics don’t hold, and thee fact that those assumptions don’t hold is mostly* obvious. Thermodynamics makes one single assumption: that any distinguishable arrangement of fundamental components is equally likely, weighted by whatever forces are acting on the system. That alone results in the three laws, so there’s no way to get around it by positing a “new force” of some sort. As they say, “vast sections of the hypothesis space have been eliminated.”
* It isn’t necessarily obvious that there is a “fastest speed”, which classical mechanics fails to account for, but hopefully it’s clear that, whatever a particle is, it isn’t a point mass, or even a point mass bound to a latice.
“Yes, but the writer can just make up whatever laws he wants” is not much of an argument. That’s true for literally any ability in any story. Frank Herbert used future technology to make swordfighting viable, for God’s sake.
Yeah, you can do it if you want, but at that point it’s gone from hard sci-fi to science fantasy.
@ Gazeboist
Since we already mentioned XIX century, was this fact obvious to people in mid-1800s?
As to the thermodynamics, how well does it work in singularity points (e.g. the Big Bang)?
@ Aegeus
Hard sci-fi is still a work of fiction. What makes it “hard” is more attention to world-building and to the coherency of the constructed world, but it all is just imaginary nonetheless.
Thermodynamics are absolute. I’m not a cosmologist, so I can’t speak to that specific case, but it’s a very powerful tool to understand the world with, and when tampering with it is carried to the logical conclusion, really weird things happen. Most violations in fiction get away with it because most people remember thermodynamics as that incomprehensible thing from high school physics.
By the same logic, the term “detective fiction” gives the author license to totally ignore standard procedures and techniques used by detectives, the term “military fiction” allows the author to totally ignore military tactics and strategy, and the term “historical fiction” allows the author to totally ignore the relevant history.
@ bean
I don’t understand what that means.
And “really weird things” already happen with garden-variety QM, so..?
Yes. Yes, it does.
You mentioned detective fiction, do you think Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple follows standard procedures and techniques? Is it a problem that needs to be fixed?
You can certainly have your own preferences with regard to which fiction you like and which you dislike. But it seems a bit highhanded to demand that writers curb their imagination and stick to what you consider acceptable.
By the same logic, “detective fiction” gives the author license to totally ignore standard procedures and techniques used by detectives
But they do so ignore them, unless they’re writing a police procedural. The Golden Age “talented amateur with no training but a smattering of general knowledge and a private income sufficient to be a gentleman – or lady – of leisure poking about in murders and mysteries under the noses – and the feet – of the official force” is completely ignoring how ‘real’ police work is done. Or even how ‘real’ private detectives work. Even Raymond Chandler didn’t stick to the reality of the gritty work of the PI. Even Dashiell Hamnett, who was more realistic, didn’t.
There are sub-genres within the overall genre of detective/crime fiction, and you know what you’re getting when you read a particular one – whether it’s a cosy, a translation of the latest Scandinavian best seller, or another pastiche Holmes story. Hard SF is the same, and you can legitimately complain about a hard SF story not being up to snuff on the science but you can’t complain about the same in space fantasy – and you can’t say “the only real SF is hard SF” because bobbins, the field has been full of fantastic inventions and implausible tech since the invention of the genre.
(Sweet divine, that website is horribly designed. Great content, but horrible layout. The author/owner may be crackerjack at the science, but they could really use some ignorant pixel-stained wretch of a graphic designer from the arts side to make it less eye-straining and brain-melting to read).
@Lumifer:
Thermo applies all of the time, in all cases.
Weirder. Much, much weirder, and on a macro scale. Basically, any dodge you use to get around stealth in space is probably going to be trivial to turn into a perpetual motion machine, which means basically infinite energy.
Re the Atomic Rockets quote, I’ll stand behind my use of it, even if the details can be quibbled with. “It’s a work of fiction” is pretty much the antithesis of AR’s philosophy of Hard SF, and it’s a particularly infuriating response to get when you’ve just finished explaining in some detail why the other person’s claims on the technical possibility of stealth are wrong. I don’t think it’s philosophically wrong to write SF that violates physics, but it’s annoying when they’re not forthright about what they’re doing, and particularly annoying when they do it in a debate.
@Lumifer: I’m just pointing out that “The writer can change the rules” is kind of a “Well, duh” observation, so bringing it up in a thread about how to be scientifically accurate about stealth in space is kind of pointless.
Also, you didn’t start this thread by talking about fiction! You just said “At a higher tech level, that might not be true.” So I assumed you were talking about a higher tech level which might actually exist in the future, rather than a higher tech level that an author could invent. So I think I’m justified in complaining that your “higher tech level” turned out to be wishful thinking.
@ Aegeus
I’m actually arguing for something subtly different: the author can set the rules, but once set he should stick with them.
Your (and mine) opinion about far-off tech can be summed up very easily: none of us have any clue. I don’t see much use in pretending that we do.
And of course we were talking about science fiction, not about studies of plausible future technological developments.
@Lumifer:
I have a good clue that thermodynamics will still hold.
But that’s not how this type of debate starts. It’s always about plausible (or at least not totally implausible) technological development, with a strong eye on application to sci-fi. Someone makes claims, gets them shot down, then retreats behind the shield of “it’s all fiction anyway”. Or at least that’s how it looks from my side. Yes, maybe they just came to get some set dressing for their novel, but if so, it’s dishonest for them to pretend that they care about the science involved, and aggravating to have them use that bait and switch. It’s a lot like dealing with pseudoscience people, now that I think about it.
@ bean
The question is not whether they will “hold”. The question is whether the limits imposed by your understanding of them will remain intact.
In any case, I have a name for what you think you have: hubris.
So what kind of claims did I make and how were they shot down? Please quote me.
Energy out must equal energy in. Water doesn’t spontaneously move uphill. These are the laws. They will hold. Yes, there is a dodge or two you might be able to articulate that would let you have stealth in space without violating thermo, but you should offer one instead of just going on about “future tech”.
How is it hubris to say that the laws of physics as we understand them today completely close off the possibility of stealth in space, and that the way in which these laws work make it extremely unlikely that we will ever have it? Both statements are true. Going into the future makes stealth less likely, unless the laws of physics happen to be shaped in ways that are suspiciously convenient. Occams razor says they probably aren’t.
Certainly:
Aegeus:
To which you replied:
Aegeus then pointed out that it was reasonable to assume that an aerial vehicle would have some means of generating lift, which is, in fact, the case. Airplanes do not ignore gravity.
You responded by invoking QM without understanding the correspondence principle (which basically says that areas already filled in on the map of physics are not likely to change).
@ bean
That wasn’t quite the thrust of your argument. I understood you as saying that the laws of physics [notice that “as we understand them today” part is conspicuously lacking] close off the possibility of stealth in space forever and ever regardless of the tech level that a civilization may achieve.
I’ll stick to thinking of that as hubris.
So, my claim is that the XIX century discussions of air combat weren’t particularly useful? And you find that false and you think this claim was shot down..? Oh, boy.
In any case, this is descending into bickering. I think we understand each other’s position well enough.
@Lumifer:
You didn’t quote the second part of my statement, which is that it’s fantastically unlikely that future discoveries in physics will change this, hence why I felt confident in speaking categorically. You’d either have to have a case where thermo is violated or find somewhere to put the heat that the other guy can’t detect. The first is equivalent to the statement that no matter what the tech level is, we won’t invent perpetual motion machines. I feel confident in standing behind that. The second requires physical laws that we have currently not observed, and which have a very low prior of being true.
Stealth in the sense of “cannot be seen at all” is one thing. Making your commerce disruptor look enough like an ice tug that nobody makes burns to avoid you is another.
You just have to hide enough radiated heat to make your combat-grade reactor running in low-standby look like a leaky old commercial system running hot.
And being surrounded by a nice thin cloud of evaporating ice covereth a multitude of incriminating thermal details.
And as for a giant network of thermal cameras blanketing the solar system… The NRO has those covering every square inch of the earth, but the intel never trickles down to ship captains trying to avoid Somali pirates.
There are several reasons for the difference. First, imaging satellites aren’t overhead continually. Far from it. Second, space is a clean environment for sensors. Major engine burns in particular stand out very well. Computers can do the work. That’s not the case if you’re looking for Somali pirates. Third, the timescales are very different. The best commercial ship-tracking service (which comes from the TerraSAR-X satellite) works on something like a 7-hour delay. I believe some of this is so pirates (or other people with missiles) can’t use it, but the unavoidable minimum after a pass is in the tens of minutes at least. That’s enough time for things to change at sea. It’s not enough time for them to change in space.
I note that terrestrial stealth is often “disguise” rather than invisibilty. It’s not that you leave no tracks, it’s that your tracks look like natural events. It’s not that you make no sound, but that the sound has a logical not-you explanation.
I feel like a lot of people are over-estimating the signal to noise ratio in our relatively uninhabited solar system, never mind one where interplanetary flight is routine.
Why do you think this? John’s analysis came from the standard textbook on spacecraft design, which I would assume has a good idea of the noise background. And in relatively clean environments (air search radars) tracks are handled entirely by computer, and have been since the 80s (AEGIS). All of this is based on stuff we can do today. Gone are the days of people peering at scopes, manually marking what they think are tracks.
Now we’re getting into my own area of experience 😉 . My day job is doing testing / QA for sensors and instrumentation at an avionics company.
The difficulty of deriving timely and accurate positions, velocities, accelerations, etc… from noisy and often incomplete information is something that I’m intimately familiar with. As such, tropes like the “Everything Detector” and “Enhance Button” are a personal pet peeves of mine when they show up in an otherwise “hard” setting.
@hlynkacg:
The performance figures involved come straight from conventional astronomy, along with some assumptions about the continued progress of signal processing technology. Read up on modern naval sensors. They do some incredible stuff.
I’ll agree that magic signal processing in fiction is annoying.
That’s the thing though. I’m quite familiar with several of those systems and that’s one of the reasons I’m skeptical.
Conventional astronomy, assumes a stable platform looking at a target of a known magnitude moving along a known orbit. Our hypothetical situation is much nosier. Taking 4 hours to sweep the sky and flag all objects of magnitude > x is a far cry from being able to identify contact y as a vessel on course z with any level of confidence.
If it takes 4 hours to complete a sweep the vessel wishing to avoid being tracked simply has to make sure that their ejection burn takes less than 4 hours.
But you admit that our numbers are correct on the basic principles of detecting that something is there?
Or, I don’t know, we write the software so that the telescope reacquires the target every few minutes until the track has been firmed up?
You can get exhaust composition and the radial component of exhaust velocity via spectroscope and doppler. When you have some idea of range, you can get the drive power. Range comes from multiple stations seeing the target. Drive power plus changes in doppler give you some idea of mass. I’d have to run numbers to find out if the drive plume might be detectable across several pixels, giving better data on direction. So we know roughly how big the thing we’ve observed is, and where it is, and what the burn did.
In the sense that an object of x magnitude will be visible at y range given telescope z, your numbers seem plausible.
My objection is that I think you and John are seriously underestimating the time and difficulty of going from “we’ve detected something” to “we’ve detected a spacecraft”, and from there to “we’ve identified a spacecraft with strategically interesting divert options”.
In a setting with magical signal processing this would be the obvious solution. In a setting where our sensors have to play by the same rules of as our radiators, we start running into complications.
See my comment regarding birds and submarines below.
There are no birds in space.
I do understand your point. If you insist on cataloging everything the size of a bird that your radar can pick up, you’re going to get a bunch of random junk. But there isn’t much of that kind of junk in space. Particularly if we’re looking for drive signatures, the only possible source of confusion is stars. But stars don’t move. When we’re talking about radar, you can point to birds as a source of spurious returns. What plays that role in space?
No, but there are all sorts of luminous transients.
Meteoroids/space-junk burning up in the atmosphere, sunlight reflecting off of satellites, cosmic rays hitting your telescope’s photo sensor, particles of ice catching the light, assholes with laser-pointers, and so on…
So lets say you’re doing your standard sky sweep, and your software flags a potential bogey. At this moment you don’t know what it is, you don’t know how far away it is. You don’t even know if it’s moving. All you know is that there is a point of light that wasn’t there when you swept the same sector of sky 4 hours ago.
So you spend a few more minutes looking at it and assuming it’s still there you conclude “Yes, this looks like a drive plume.” Now things get complicated…
In order to distinguish motion, the target’s relative bearing shift has to exceed the angular resolution of your sensor. The farther away you are, the further the target has to move. This takes time.
In order to determine range you need to have at least two (ideally three) platforms in contact. Alternately you can wait for your detecting platform to move far enough in it’s own orbit you to measure parallax against a known background object. Once again the farther away you are, the further you have to move. This takes time.
Meanwhile your area of uncertainty, is scales with range so at 1 AU an error of 1/3600th of a degree translates into a difference in position of +/-750 km or a difference in velocity of the same divided by your sensor’s dwell time. Your accuracy improves the longer you can observe, but you don’t know if your target has been boosting for 4 hours or for 4 minutes. At any moment he could cut-thrust and you’d loose him.
TL/DR: A sensor system that can give you a target’s range and velocity with sufficient accuracy to determine whether or not that target is likely to intercept another spacecraft days or weeks into the future and do so from a billion kilometers away in a timeframe measured in minutes rather than hours or days is pretty damn “magical” in it’s own right.
Aside from the meteors, why would any of these things even register on e.g. a three-color IR sensor set to look for rockets?
Natural solar-system objects, and for that matter extrasolar objects, are almost exclusively black bodies with color temperatures below 400K or roughly 6000K. Rocket nozzles and plumes aren’t, and can’t practically be made to look like such. Those things get filtered out the way zero-doppler radar returns get filtered out, before any real analysis even begins.
Not if I build the sensor, I’m not. I’m not looking for light, I’m looking for heat, in a temperature range or with spectral characteristics (e.g. hot-CO2 emission lines) consistent with rocketry. There’s not much in nature that is going to match that profile.
An asshole with the right sort of laser pointer might, but either he’s associated with a known contact already or there’s a spaceship full of assholes someplace I hadn’t previously known about. In which case, mission accomplished.
The times and ranges quoted by Bean were for a visible light search, so that is what I replied to. If you want a targeted spectrum search that’s fine, but to get equivalent (or greater) sensitivity you need to be to accept the associated trade-offs in resolution and/or dwell time. Otherwise we rapidly depart the realm of “high-end amateur levels of cost and performance” that you described earlier.
In either case the rest of my reply still applies. Knowing that “something” left Martian orbit at a given time is a far cry from knowing “what it was” or “where it went”.
I’m working on a spreadsheet to analyze these systems. If a zoom system can be installed, this wouldn’t take too long. It might even be possible to see the drive plume spread out across multiple pixels, giving direction on that. And if you have a decent surveillance system, you should get multiple hits. It’s unlikely that you’d see sub-hour burn times in any setting with lots of space activity.
No, my comments were based on math John did for IR searches specifically for rockets.
Will the knowledge be perfect? Probably not. But when correlated with HUMINT, OSINT, and other various INTs, it wouldn’t be too hard to generate probabilities on what and where. And if the probabilities are too high in the wrong direction, you start sounding alarms.
The quote in question discussed using attaching DSLRs to high-end telescopes detect targets of a given magnitude. From this I surmised that we were talking about the visible spectrum and near (λ >= 0.8 µm) infra-red. Moving lower in the spectrum doesn’t change the underlying math much, detection/dwell times will still be based on apparent magnitude. The problem from your perspective is that the increased wavelength of infrared light means that your sensor is going to have dramatically reduced angular resolution.
And this is where your plan breaks down. All of your posts thus far have assumed precision knowledge of the targets position and velocity. Knowledge that you’re unlikely to have given the scenario described.
An error of a few hundred m/s, or a degree or two in your initial track, can leave you with an area of uncertainty larger than a lot of the maneuvers you’re trying to track.
Not really. A submarine doesn’t sound anything like a whale, and there are really good ways to tell a B-2 apart from a bird, namely speed. In both cases, the ‘natural events’ you refer to are the inherent sensor noise you get. The target gets mistaken for static, not for a natural object.
The issue with distinguishing a B-2 from a bird is that if you’ve make your radar sensitive enough to resolve birds at 50 nm your gain is such that random noise either from your platform, your environment, or someone using a garage door opener within several arc-minutes of your target, will be an overwhelming portion your sensor’s return.
The submarine doesn’t have to sound like a whale per se, it just has to be quiet enough that it fades into the background noise of whales, merchant traffic, etc… That 60hz low intensity harmonic that your sonar is picking up could be submarine, but it could just easily be distant merchant traffic, or maintainers leaving a fluorescent light on in the crawlspace.
A general rule of thumb is that as your sensor’s sensitivity goes up it’s angular resolution will drop, increasing the dwell time required to generate an acceptably accurate track.
It took me a second to read “nm” as “nautical miles”. First thought: “Wait, what sort of sensor can’t detect a bird at fifty nanometers?”
Which reminds me of the use of “microns” as a unit of macroscopic distance/time in the original “Battlestar Galactica”.
Funny, I often have the same problem going in the opposite direction. It takes a second for my brain to register the shift from macro scale to micro when talking to our EEs about “separation” and “transmission distances”.
One thing you can do is hide your capabilities, rather than your presence. Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn is not even close to being hard sci-fi, but it does have a good example of what I mean: The main character’s starship has four main propulsion engines, but only uses three most of the time. The fourth is substantially more powerful than the other three, but the fuel (antimatter) is illegal. The character relies on the pretense that he doesn’t actually have any fuel (and couldn’t get it if he tried) to get away with having the drive, and in a desperate situation he can surprise people who think they know what his ship is capable of. And of course there would be no need for a pretense if you haven’t given the enemy a chance to inspect your ship.
Similarly, if you stick to minimal necessary force in any initial altercation, you may be able to avoid revealing the extent and/or sophistication of your weaponry. And of course sometimes people are dumb and don’t realize that a drive is a perfectly good weapon, as in the case of Niven’s Known Space.
You may also be able to get away with hiding the fact that you are an enemy all, depending on the circumstances. After all, at intersystem scales, who cares if they figure out your flag is false as soon as you get within hailing distance? By that time, it’s plausible that they won’t be able to mount an effective response.
Agreed, You don’t have to be invisible, you just have to blend in.
Having an illegal-to-use antimatter engine on your ship isn’t exactly blending in. Dude, this spaceship is, like, rolling probable cause.
That’s not really true. A drive is not well-focused. A weapon is. By the time you’re close enough to use the drive as a weapon, lasers are downright terrifying, and you can’t dodge kinetics.
How? This isn’t the 1700s, where you don’t know someone is there until they pop over the horizon, so false flags only work if they’re intact since leaving base. That’s an interesting story idea, but not practical on a broad scale.
For ships which are obviously ships, false flags don’t work. For ships which are not obviously ships (maybe you glued a comet to the nose), you *may* be able to come in at your target from another star system faster than some of their ships around the system are able to respond. If you bring your whole fleet to knock out a quarter of theirs, you can then defeat the rest more easily.
Ah. I’m not sure that’s a ‘false flag’ per se, but I see your point. Interstellar travel does open up many opportunities that intrasystem combat doesn’t, and I often fail to consider them fully. Of course, this depends on the details of your system for getting between star systems.
Real life pirates were often at pains to choose a ship that looked innocuous.
Indeed so, and even in the transparent depths of space it would be possible to conduct an act of piracy by masquerading as a freighter, even to the point of taking on a legitimate (cheap, partial) cargo and departing the same port to the same destination as one’s intended target. The problem is that, once you hoist the Jolly Roger, you can’t take it down again. Wherever you next make port, the Space Patrol with be waiting with a warrant, explaining “We’ve been watching you, every minute, since you hit that freighter off the shoulder of Orion”.
That suggests a role for a space polity that’s not a pure pirate haven, but a trade center with lots of legitimate business (maybe they produce a scarce resource?) that also doesn’t ask a lot of questions about provenance. The Jolly Roger makes port there, sells its cargo, and buys a new transponder.
If piracy gets to be too much and traffic to New Port Royal slows down in favor of the inferior, more expensive products of Titan, the High Administrator expresses shock at the crime wave and cooperates with the Patrol for a bit to thin their numbers. (“We had no idea the Honest Businessman had turned filthy pirate! The crew has of course been spaced as a warning to others.”) But as long as it’s a source of cheap goods that fell off the back of a spaceship, and of bribes to local officials, the optimal rate of tolerated piracy might not be zero.
With high traffic and relatively standardized ship models, it at least seems as if might be hard to keep track of exactly which ships were arriving and departing, if the departure port didn’t go out of its way to cooperate. Better if New Port Royal has a shipyard that either builds ships or kitbashes them together, so that a new name on the display isn’t an unambiguous red flag.
The problem is that before the Jolly Roger makes port, the Space Patrol is on the radio to the New Port Royal Port Authority, explaining exactly who the Jolly Roger is. The NPRPA then has to explain to the Space Patrol why he wasn’t arrested, which is awkward the first time, and gets steadily worse. Oh, and Lloyd’s of Mars is refusing to insure ships to New Port Royal until the authorities there start cooperating against the pirates, because they’re tired to paying owners whose ships got stolen. Oh, and the Space Patrol Customs Service is under orders to thoroughly inspect all ships from New Port Royal for stolen goods, and confiscate all goods they find.
Plausible deniability is an important point in being able to harbor criminals, and it’s really hard to see how that could happen in this case. The government of Somalia can say “look, by the time we get the message from you, and get someone down there, the pirates have hidden their weapons, and their boat looks exactly like all the legitimate fishing boats from that area” and it’s really hard to disprove that. The NPRPA is going to have a hard time explaining why they didn’t do something when the Space Patrol Ambassador came down to traffic control when the Jolly Roger was a day out, pointed at it, and said “that’s a pirate”.
This sort of thing might happen occasionally, but we’re looking at a heist movie level, not something that could be called proper piracy, and the ship gets abandoned after the job.
Unlikely. Sensor performance is good, and automated track-keeping is well-established these days. The NPRPA will need at least traffic-control sensors. Any place without those will be an effective anarchy, which is unlikely to attract lots of trade, and unlikely to be able to hold off the Space Patrol diplomatically.
I’m not sure that the build rate will be that high. And if it is, get some HUMINT in the yards to keep the bad guys from getting new nameplates for their ships easily. To keep them from swapping ships, designate any ship that is used for piracy as ‘hostile’ well before it reaches port, and announce that anyone who buys it is equally liable to have it seized by the Space Patrol. Now they have to ditch the ship after every mission, which cuts profitability a lot.
I’m curious: how likely is SS Merchant Spacer to have a good telescope pointing in the right direction to see my drive torch? Sure, it’s visible in the right direction, but getting coverage of (say) asteroids around earth requires the efforts of thousands of expensive observatories and many more amateur spotters (as I understand it…) Telescopes are expensive and fragile; how much coverage of the full sphere (at what resolution) do they have? (Note that _no_ spacecraft I know of mount serious scopes, instead relying on ground observation. Heck, Apollo even used ground observations as primary guidance over its own navigation systems.)
Sure, Traffic Control on Earth sees me within a few weeks, but will they be able to effectively warn the spacer, especially in trans-Jovian space with comm lag (and extraordinarily limited bandwidth?) Boosting interceptors seems even harder, right?
I guess this falls into your catch of “adversary I didn’t need to hide from” but I’m not clear that’s true here…Maybe I’m missing something.
Getting good coverage of asteroids around Earth required one telescope, about the size of a large amateur scope, and most of its work was done in the first six months. The “thousands of observatories” have always had far more important work to do; there are ~1200 wannabe Astronomers in the pipeline in the United States alone, and they don’t hand out Ph.D.s for discovering Yet Another Rock.
More generally, asteroid hunting has always operated on a pocket-change budget compared to even low-priority military operations. The entire WIRE mission cost about as much as a single E-3 AWACS aircraft. Assessing the detectability of spacecraft by the frequency with which mostly-amateur astronomers discover asteroids, is like assessing the detectability of submarines by the frequency with which they are found by oceanographers and scuba divers.
So if SS Merchant Spacer is at all concerned with Space Pirates, then yes, it will almost trivially[*] mount a telescope at least as good as the one that found most of the asteroids in the inner solar system, set to sweep the sky every few minutes rather than every few months as it is looking for targets rather brighter and closer than asteroids. Networked with the scopes on every other merchant spacecraft in the solar system, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from science fiction it is that the Spacer’s Guild takes care of its own. And we haven’t even gotten started with the Space Patrol yet – nothing gets past those guys.
* Most of the cost of WIRE was in the spacecraft to which the telescope had to be attached. Most of the rest was in engineering the telescope to operate reliably with zero maintenance. Given a spaceship and crew, the telescope comes back down to high-end amateur levels of cost and performance.
I stand entirely corrected on the feasibility of wide field observation. TIL.
What about decoys?
Tricky, and largely dependent on what you’re trying to decoy. The main issue is that there is no good way to fake a rocket under thrust. You can match a target’s drive output to it’s trajectory to calculate mass.
Passive decoys and sensor spoofing/jamming on the other hand, I would expect to be quite effective.
John, another scenario I’d like you to wargame for me, both to get a better handle on your feelings of the engineering, and because some friends and I worry this scenario kills all realistic interstellar wargames/novels:
I fly my Starship to Sol from Alpha Centauri and park it ~ 1 kAU out in the shallow Oort Cloud. (Take it as read that I get this far undetected; perhaps I’m unreasonable; perhaps my starship is an extremely slow generation ship powered by light sail; perhaps I have long-distance hyperdrive that’s no good in-system.) Given long enough time, I can be observed, but given that we’re still “discovering” notable Oort objects, I have some time. And with that time, I pick a random 1-km wide iceball (of which there are an infinite number), build a fusion plant and nozzle on the surface, and point it in-system, on a collision course for Earth, accelerating at 0.1g.
I don’t know how to do orbital dynamics to calculate a transfer orbit off the top of my head, but ignoring real orbits for a moment (i.e. imagining my object starts at rest w/r/t the sun), a back of the envelope calculation says you have 200 days before what’s left of the comet hits earth doing 0.05c and everyone dies. If I turn off the torch after 100 days, we go “stealth” (sorry, I know that’s not true) 500 AU out, and hit doing 2.5% of lightspeed after 300 days.
What happens? Can a reasonably-provisioned Space patrol notice, boost to intercept, and redirect before the thing is going too damn fast?
(Obviously the least reasonable thing here is my comet torch, which needs to be doing something like 10-100ksec specific impulse, on a engine the size of a large city, if I want to even have 1% mass fraction here, but I’m curious what you think of a wide class of scenarios like this.
For example, instead suppose I stick the equivalent of 50 Saturn V first stages–absurd, but much less impossible–onto the comet, and enough mining machinery (and fusion power) to keep it firing continuously.) Then we start out doing about 1.5 milli-gee (this goes up as we lighten but that’s not relevant), and we arrive in 5 years doing 0.7% c. This is still comfortably lethal to everyone and everything, and possibly even harder to detect.
)
(Our private nickname for this failure mode of interstellar warfare is “rocks fall, everyone dies”.)
Let’s see. Based on John’s recommended methodology, a 10,000 sec Isp case is actually on the edge of detectability, at least when you start. As you get closer, this obviously changes.
The problem with this kind of plan is that it takes a lot less effort on the part of the space patrol to generate a miss than it does to put the thing on a collision course in the first place. Assuming that the iceball is on course for the center of the Earth, they’d have to push it approximately 6500 km off course to make it a clean miss. Even if they’re limited to .1 m/s2 (conservative), they only have to start pushing a little over 3 hours out. Basically, you have to guard the iceball all the way in, against the entirety of their fleet. If you can do that, why are you messing around with the iceball anyway?
Remember, Rocks Are Not Free.
Yes, this is probably detectable from the start; at 10,000 seconds Isp that’s 1.5E16 watts of drive power, if 99% efficient/shielded you’re still naked-eye visible at 2.5 AU and telescope-visible probably to the Oort cloud – but we can argue exactly what sort of telescopes the Space Patrol will have.
As the iceball proceeds inwards at 0.05c, collisions with zodiacal dust will produce another thermal signature, weaker but much harder to conceal.
But for countermeasures, you don’t have to rendezvous and divert. Even three hours before impact, all you’d have to do is put a mass the size of a large supertanker in its path. Ideally in the form of a supertanker’s worth of volatiles dispersed in the iceball’s path rather than the point mass of the supertanker itself. The impact between iceball and vapor cloud will turn the iceball into a cloud of plasma expanding at ~800 km/s, most of which will miss the target planet altogether and what does hit will be reduced to an impressive but minimally damaging fireworks display.
The David Brin SF novel Startide Rising has an example of this strategy employed against an entire alien battle fleet. It helped that the plucky Earthican heroes were mostly dolphins, their ship designed accordingly and its life support system recently reprovisioned.
I’ve worked up a first draft of a spreadsheet for analyzing space search sensors. I wouldn’t rely on it too heavily. I’m pretty sure I implemented all of the math right, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I missed a couple of important factors. Any feedback is encouraged.
In the spirit of the intellectual Turing test above:
In academia, it seems people often go on at length about what’s wrong with other disciplines whilst having only the faintest understanding of these disciplines. Someone in the last open thread brought up a hilarious review of The God Delusion that compared it to someone who’d only read The Book of British Birds holding forth on biology. I think it’s quite a widespread problem. I read Steven Pinker or Ian Morris dismissing social anthropology, which is my area, and it’s clear they don’t have the slightest clue about the discipline beyond knowing that Margaret Mead got taken for a ride by some young Samoan women and a journalist once defamed Napoleon Chagnon. I don’t mean to pick on these two, examples could be multiplied endlessly and I’m sure no disciplines are innocent.
I’m doing research now, fairly soon to start writing my thesis, and my project falls largely within the subfield of economic anthropology. Most economic anthropology is pretty critical of the discipline of economics – most criticisms working off the idea that when you go and look at what people actually do it doesn’t fit the idealised models you’ll find in economics textbooks – but it occurred to me I’ve read almost nothing about economics from the perspectives of economists besides a few blog posts, a popular history of the lives of economists called The Worldly Philosophers, and about half of Veblen’s The Theory of The Leisure Class. This doesn’t really matter in terms of how my work will be assessed – those marking it probably haven’t read any economists either – but I’ve been thinking for a while I don’t really want to argue against straw men.
I know a lot of people here are economists and most are keen on it as a field of study. What would be your recommendations for books or journal articles for someone who wants to get a fair overview of the field and what economists really think about the world and their own discipline?
I mean… you could start with any micro stuff from the last 50 years?
It sounds like you guys have a lot to catch up on.
I have to say, writing books like “Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in Malaysia” just makes it seem like the whole discipline just exists as weaponized preaching.
I was hoping for useful suggestions rather than sniping.
Economic anthropologists do read some economics but there isn’t anyone at my university who specialises in that area.
To be fair, I have left out economists that we do read like Guy Standing or Karl Polanyi, or Marx because I suspect they’re taken much more seriously in anthropology departments than they are in most economics departments. When I say “economics” I’m talking about the currently dominant theories.
We call it “economic anthropology” because it’s the part of anthropology concerned with the study of economies.
The main thing that gets criticised is the model of human behaviour in microeconomics based on rational actors trying to maximise utility. I was hoping you might narrow things down for me slightly more than “anything in the last 50 years”
Most everyone agrees that humans aren’t rational utility maximizers, but modelling their decisions in any more detailed way is usually not possible. Criticism is easy, improvements are difficult. In the meantime, doing nothing is not exactly a viable option. And it’s not exactly uncommon that assumptions will approximate the truth well enough to be useful even if those assumptions are not literally 100% true. Keeping descriptions generic is important anyway because fiddling with details creates a lot of room for biased tweaking. Have you read the wonderful sociology paper ent
itled Fuck Nuance?Models are often flawed, but this is arguably only a problem when they’re accompanied by overconfidence. A mediocre or even a bad model can still provide you with valuable information so long as you’re aware of their limitations. Overconfidence occurs too often in economists, but that’s a problem common to pretty much any field. Try to avoid the easy trap of falling into a hypercritical adversarial stance.
I am also no economist, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to say “any micro stuff in the last 50 years”.
From what I understand, a lot of what economists do is examine cases where one of the classical assumptions doesn’t hold up. First they document it — similar to what you may do in economic anthropology — but then they investigate the implications for the broader economic structure. Rather than saying “Hey, this is wrong!”, it’s about saying “So it turns out our first-order approximation is wrong in this case, and here’s a second-order refinement.”
This constructive attitude is a very different mindset from critics who try to throw it all away. Note that “constructive” isn’t necessarily a good thing — they may just be building castles in the sky.
I don’t want to be condescending but have you simply read an econ textbook? I don’t mean one of those dumbed down pop science books but an honest-to-god college textbook. That’s generally a good place to start. There’s a free one available here:
https://openstax.org/details/principles-economics
Thanks, yeah a good textbook would be useful. Is this a particularly good one or is its selling point that it’s free?
Because it’s free. I can’t say anything about how it compares in quality to other textbooks but it worked for me. Assuming you don’t want to read all 34 chapters, at least read the first three chapters and the chapter on elasticity for basic economic insights. And then read chapters 19-22 for a macroeconomic primer on economic growth, unemployment and inflation. Pay most attention to chapter three because that’s where they discuss supply and demand curves and that’s pretty much the core of economics.
If that still seems overwhelming, it’s not. Chapter one is incredibly simple and the macro chapters are all short. It would also be immensely beneficial to practice supply and demand graphs. It’s one thing to know that price ceilings cause shortages, it’s another to actually graph it yourself.
My Price Theory is also free online. Hidden Order was rewritten from it as a teach yourself economics book rather than a textbook, so I think better for the purpose but not free.
David Friedman do you have any thoughts on http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/ ? (I think this was Less Wrong’s favorite econ book)
I’m not familiar with it. Looking at the list of topics it sounds as though it might be interesting.
On a more positive note, what can you tell us about your thesis and economic anthropology?
I’m curious, and I think that for everyone here, our level of understanding is just at the “shallow caricature” stage you describe.
My research is on the consumer behaviour of football (soccer) fans. I maybe should have made it clear but my thesis isn’t going to be arguing against economics but – at least partly – against how certain strands of sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology use “consumption” in a largely meaningless way.
I’ll try to find some time later to explain a bit more about economic anthropology because I think some people here would actually find it interesting.
Speaking for myself, yes, we would, thanks.
My research is on the consumer behaviour of football (soccer) fans.
Is this “who buys all the new kits every season” or does it include what kinds of furniture, etc. they buy and what socioeconomic class they fit into it? It sounds interesting and I’d like to hear more. UK, US or Europe? Or all three?
Football supporting having gone middle-class since Nick Hornby, see Roy Keane’s “prawn sandwich brigade” remark and the mockery of “Call Me Dave” Cameron for not being terribly sure which team he supported (when I think most people would agree that if he follows any team sport, it’s much more likely to be rugby), the consumption habits probably have changed a lot 🙂
Can you explain how the concept of consumption is used in meaningless ways? To me, it makes sense that you’d want to distinguish spending of money on instrumental investments from spending money on things someone directly values. There is probably some overlap between those categories, but that doesn’t imply they’re meaningless, so I’m curious about the motivation of your criticism. Is there any more to the concept of “consumption” than that, in the areas you’re criticizing it?
Start with a microeconomics textbook. I’m going to act as an arrogant economist here, but without knowing lots of math and statistics you will never be in a position to judge economics. The best econ blog is MarginalRevolution. The best econ podcast is EconTalk. The key economic assumption is that people respond to incentives, so, for example, if you make an activity more costly people will on average tend to do less of it.
Thanks, I hadn’t thought about podcasts but could be a useful resource.
The standard answer to the idea that you can’t judge economics without knowing a lot of maths and statistics is that economics combines a very simplistic view of human nature with very complicated maths. If the model of human nature is wrong then it doesn’t matter how brilliant the maths is, it will still be based on questionable assumptions.
You don’t need to know a lot of math and statistics to make sense of economics. It’s easier to explain price theory to someone who understands calculus but that’s not a requirement.
One of the most important economics books ever written, Ricardo’s Principles, uses no math beyond arithmetic.
On the other hand, Ricardo had extraordinarily good mathematical intuition.
EconTalk is excellent for applying classical economics to popular issues. It leans libertarian to right wing, as do most Neo-classical economists in the English speaking world, but you can totally argue for a strong welfare state with the logic they present (hell Canada, Denmark and Sweden regularly rank higher higher on economic freedom (a terminal goal of most Neo Classical types) than the US so even a Berniac could probably get some good out of it without abandoning their views.
I also Highly recommend Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize winning economist who popularized the Concept of economic freedom (as well as: Playing a major role in ending the Vietnam Draft, Popularizing the idea of the minimum income, laying the intellectual groundwork for the end of stagflation, and many more).
He’s Usually pigeonholed as rightwing/libertarian but really even his popular somewhat polemical pieces offer a lot for anyone on any end of the political spectrum. He layed the ground work for Reagan, Clinton, Thatcher and Blair’s economics, and thorough that’s a mixed bag to a lot of people, i was always really impressed by his ability and willingness to reach out to all sides of the debate.
You get the impression reading and watching him that he did genuinely want to build up both sides of the discussion, and that he genuinely believed a lot of bad politics and policies were just mistakes that could be corrected without forcing people to abandon their core commitments.
“but you can totally argue for a strong welfare state with the logic they present (hell Canada, Denmark and Sweden regularly rank higher higher on economic freedom ”
Ehhhh I’d be careful with this.
The way the rankings work is that they are an index of various category rankings. At a quick glance, it appears Canada ranks higher than the U.S. largely due to having better ratings in things like Property Rights, Freedom from Corruption, and Fiscal Freedom. But the U.S. is doing significantly better in areas like Business Freedom and Labor Freedom.
It’s entirely possible that the social welfare states who do well on this list are doing well in spite of their welfare states, not because of them. Keep in mind that Greece is ranked #138, and France is #75.
No absolutely, all else being the same a nation with a welfare state will rank lower on economic freedom than one entirely the same less one. But that’s not really how politics works.
It seems the reason nations like Canada and Denmark can rank so highly on economic freedom is that they have a welfare state, and thus aren’t trying to fix all of societies ills through endless pages of regulations.
Indeed their less economically free than Hong Kong, but unless you have a means of getting a strong classically liberal autocracy, then there’s a good case to be made that the road to separation of economy and state, goes through a well defined role for government in fixing social ills directly.
Its a good argument, but by no means the only argument (i’m not sure i support it myself (keep wanting a mechanism to set up more Hong Kongs)).
The point is the logic is rich and versatile enough to support multiple sides of the political spectrum and really increase the richness of debate.
I’m not sure I read that correctly. Did you say that most economic anthropology directly attacks economists; whom most economic anthropologists haven’t read? And that you are required to do the same? Why? Why not just present your findings and ignore economists?
My understanding (of Pennypacker’s comments) is that economic anthropologists and economists are in conflict because the first group is strictly attempting to describe empirical facts, while the second group also wants to be able to model novel situations. The modelers and the empiricists then get in a fight because most members of the one group only come in contact with those in their opposite group who only know about the coarsest results by the first group. The fight is ongoing; Pennypacker could certainly get away with attacking economists or just ignoring them, but wants to cool the fight a little by making reference to their more nuanced results, as appropriate for his thesis. (Or possibly he just wants to set a higher example after receiving his phd and building a bit of influence in his field)
That’s more along the lines of what I meant, although from what I gather economists generally take no notice economic anthropology (which is understandable given that it’s a subdiscipline of an already pretty minor discipline) so it’s not really an ongoing debate. There was a debate several decades ago but it was pretty much internal to anthropology itself between those who adopted ideas from neoclassical economics and those who took their main inspiration from Polanyi. The criticism of economics isn’t along the lines of “these guys have got it completely wrong and all their work is useless” but about denying that it should have a monopoly on the study of economic behaviour. I doubt many would deny that economics can be useful, but they would argue it doesn’t explain everything about economic action.
Most economic anthropology isn’t focussed on attacking economics, but will often include the odd line about how the thing they’re studying conflicts with the idea of humans as Homo Economicus. I don’t really want to go around saying “hahaha, stupid economists, they think all behaviour is just people mechanically responding to incentives and trying to maximise utility”. I know that responding to incentives and maximising utility are part of economics I just suspect that things are a bit more nuanced than that.
You omitted the part where the American Anthropological Association formally censured Chagnon on the basis of that “journalist’s” scurrilous accusations. If you were wondering why Pinker and Morris are dismissive of your discipline, that might be a good place to start.
Our very own David Friedman’s Price Theory is pretty good.
One thing that might be worth reading before you dive in is Milton Friedman’s influential paper ‘The methodology of positive economics’ (PDF), which is concerned largely with rebutting the idea that the idealized models in economics textbooks need to fit what people actually do.
Thanks, I’ve just started reading and it seems useful so far.
My biased suggestion is, of course, my Hidden Order.
The book that put modern economics together, more than any other, is Alfred Marshall’s Principles, written a bit over a century ago.
For the application of economics to what other people think of as fields outside of economics, read some of Gary Becker’s work.
Hope that helps.
I’ve actually been reading anthropology as part of the research for my current book, including I.M. Lewis on the Somali and Evans Pritchard (and others) on the Nuer.
Thanks for the recommendations – anything in particular by Gary Becker?
Your current book looks very interesting. The one thing I always remember about those Irish law codes is the hilarious stipulation that “if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee.”
For Becker: The Economics of Discrimination, and Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.
Unfortunately, our information on early Irish law codes is not very good. None of the original texts have survived. What we have are fragments from those texts included in much later works, written by people who may or may not have understood them.
One of my favorite bits of premodern law is from Lewis on the Somali. The level of violence got higher than the locals approved of, so the two sides got together and agreed to raise the dia, the damage payment for killing someone (corresponding to the Norse wergeld).
Nice to see people who understand economics.
Are you interested in micro or macro? In other words, are you subjects people or nations?
What’s your current level in (non-anthro) economics — surely you’ve taken Econ 101 somewhere at some point?
“Are you interested in micro or macro? In other words, are you subjects people or nations?”
No, no, no, no, no.
The difference isn’t one of scale. The world grain market is a subject in “micro” economics.
Better labels would be “price theory” and “disequilibrium theory.”
Econostatics vs econodynamics?
The issue isn’t scale, the issue is what kind of powers the players have. For example, in micro the interest rates are an external given, but in macro they are an important variable to change/affect. Things like taxation, central banks, monetary policy, etc. just don’t exist at the micro level.
Though it seems pretty much everyone admits now that there is no good macro theory which can explain the current situation, so macro people who are still capable of thinking and not just twiddling the DSGE models are all scratching their heads.
“For example, in micro the interest rates are an external given”
In price (“micro”) theory the interest rates are an equilibrium price on the capital market.
” Things like taxation … just don’t exist at the micro level.”
Taxation fits just fine into micro theory. Consider the conventional treatment of excess burden in a micro textbook.
What doesn’t fit nicely into price theory is disequilibrium, markets not clearing.
So far as the status of macro is concerned, I’ve been saying for a long time that a course in macro is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.
I’m interested in people – for this project at least.
Your post instantly calls to mind behavioral economics – Thaler, Kahneman and Sunstein are all good reads.
Kahneman yes, Sunstein not as much. He’s derivative of Kahneman and not nearly as intellectually exciting to read.
And I should add that behavioral economics is not what he should read if he wants to understand economics as it currently exists. Behavioral is interesting stuff and it may be that twenty years from now it will have had a profound influence on parts of economics, but currently it’s interesting to economists precisely because it isn’t part of our standard picture.
Good point – I should have said that “when you go and look at what people actually do it doesn’t fit the idealised models” sounds exactly like something one of those would say.
There are plenty of divisions in economics, and broadly, one of them is between theoretical and empirical approaches, the latter simply estimating trends and fitting models to measured data. The former seems to be what you’re more familiar with and criticizing. There are plenty of economists critical of the former approach who believe that too many economists, especially in the macro field, discount data when it doesn’t fit theory.
Otherwise, though, economists of all stripes are aware that their models are imperfect abstractions. Nonetheless, they are tractable and useful. In particular, I think just about any economist, other than maybe Mises if you even count him, are well aware that not literally all human behavior is rational utility maximization. At least some amount is pathological, compulsive, maybe even random. But no model requires all action to be rational. First, systematically irrational behavior can still be modeled and is the entire point of behavioral economics. Second, even seemingly random behavior, such as that of a person with a severe psychiatric disorder, is smoothed over and nonetheless fits in a model so long as the behavior is truly random and not systematically irrational, in the same way a Fermi estimate basically works as long as you’re wrong high as often as you’re wrong low. More generally, regression models work provided your errors are IID and symmetric.
What I have noticed is that most slots in the NxN matrix are unfilled. You don’t get botanists criticising classicists, and so in. It’s usually philosophy, theology. Sociology or economics that is on the receiving end,often physics on the giving end.
+1 for the good observation.
I’d love to read some botanists criticising classicists, personally. But yes, Physics Syndrome is a thing.
From my personal experience, the cure for Physics Syndrome is to learn that there is in fact already a model. Hence, I think, why most physicists are cool with economists, and any physicist who complains about biologists has probably only met the worst of their undergrads.
You could add psychology to that list.
IMO, there’s good reason those are the ones that are most criticized. Since they pertain human action (and motivation), and often make normative claims, and subsequent policy suggestions, it’s not unreasonable to demand that some of their research actually replicates.
This is the same reason AGW is under much heavier scrutiny than other areas of the natural sciences. And AGW has far far more solid grounding than the mentioned sciences.
I thought that I got a lot out of reading The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. It’s long, and it’s written in the Enlightenment style (which is a plus for me but not for everyone), but it’s remarkably clear and I think better-suited as an introduction to the subject than a modern textbook.
That is, when I was getting my economics degree there was a lot of practice in the mechanics of econometrics, and of finding where demand and supply curves intersected, and not much discussion of the dynamics that would cause one to think it made sense to conceptualize the world in terms of supply and demand curves in the first place. Smith gives you more of that.
The Wealth of Nations is an interesting and well written book, but I don’t think reading it is a good way of learning to understand economics. Smith didn’t really have a worked out and consistent theoretical structure, as Ricardo makes clear at the beginning of Principles.
One area of the US government that could use great simplification is the tax system. Anyone who has ever filed a tax return in the US knows how complicated it is.
I am very much in favor of a flat tax, with all income taxed at the same rate and no deductions and no credits. In New Zealand, most people do not file tax returns, because their taxes are paid by withholdings on their paychecks. This can only be done with a flat tax. On another thread, someone said that the UK sends most folks a bill each year, instead of making each person fill out a return. That too can only be done with a pretty simple tax structure. So tax simplification can be done.
I think that is the direction that the US should head for. One estimate is that filing these returns cost the US about $230 billion each year. Lots of wasted money.
Most of the complexities of individual income taxes, at least for those who earn low or medium size income, come from the welfare component of US tax returns. Tax rules such as different tax brackets, standard deductions, dependent exemptions, filing status, EIC, child tax credit, are all done so that the poor don’t pay too much in taxes. But this complexity makes it a lot harder to fill out a tax return, plus it makes it much harder to determine how much welfare is paid in the US.
All welfare should be paid by one agency. This is a lot more effective in controlling the amount each recipient receives, and it is also more accountable to the voters to know what welfare is being paid. As it stands, it is very difficult to judge what the lowest income is deemed acceptable in the US, with the confused jumble of welfare programs. The taxes paid by the poor on their income should be one more item the welfare agency takes into account, and if it was a flat tax, it would be easy to determine the amount for each person.
I am curious about how individual income taxes and welfare work in other countries. Are they truly as simple as I have heard? Or am I only hearing about the countries that have simpler taxes. And maybe welfare is pretty complicated in welfare states like in Scandinavia, where there seem to be many many programs for pretty much everybody with a lobby.
It’s fine to be in favor of a flat tax, but having tax brackets doesn’t add much complexity to filing taxes. It’s a calculation that can be done in under two minutes. The vast overwhelming majority of the complexity reduction in your proposal is in the eliminating deductions and credits and then the flat tax part is just sort-of slipped in there.
That said, even with the elimination of dedications and credits, which I’m all for, you still have quite a bit of complexity in just defining what does and does not constitute income. If you work for an employer and get a paycheck it is easy, and that describes a lot of people. But the law needs to take into account those that doesn’t describe.
Agreed. After deductions and credits, multiplicity of forms and statements is the big source of complexity in the tax code.
But brackets do add complexity. A simple percentage is easy to calculate. But with brackets, the percentage changes with the level of income, making it a lot more complex when people get raises, work more than one job, etc. One of the reasons it needs to be easy under my plan is so that welfare workers could incorporate taxes into their calculation of benefits, and having to calculate based on bracket makes it harder. Someone below says that New Zealand does have brackets. I am surprised to hear that, because now I wonder how withholding does incorporate most wage earners, when you need to know second jobs, sequential jobs, etc.
Yes, of course some people’s taxes will be a lot more complicated. I am a corporate tax accountant myself, so I know that calculating business income is often not simple. The idea of simplification is to make it simple for 80% of folks filing individual taxes. And even business taxes could be made a whole lot simpler if legislators truly believed simpler was a valid course to follow.
Arguing for a flat tax on the basis of fairness is at least plausible (although the arguments for a head tax would start the day after it passed). Arguing for a flat tax on the basis of complexity is not, for reasons already pointed out.
What is this calculation on the part of “welfare workers” that couldn’t be done by some application?
You are incorrect. Think of tax brackets of zero tax for the first 12,000, and 10% tax above. Someone making 2000 per month = 24,000 per year, would pay 1200 per year. Withholding of 100 per month easily takes care of this.
But then assume the person worked part-time for 500 per month the first six months, but then full-time at 2000 per month the rest of the year. The total tax due for the year would be 300. But if the employer just took 100 per month withholding for every 2000 per month employee, they would over-withhold in this case. So the employer needs to take into account all previous earnings for the year. The formula would be YTD earnings plus current earnings to the end of the year, then calculate the taxes on these yearly earnings, subtract withholding taken so far, then divide by number of pay periods left. Doable, but I’ve worked with IT; complicated formulas are often screwed up. And the smallest employers won’t have such programming available. Plus of course it is pretty much impossible with more than one employer.
Furthermore, with one tax rate, withholding could also be done on investment income such as dividends, interest, and capital gains. This would be impossible without there being one rate. More than one rate makes all the math a lot more difficult.
Yeah, I don’t think that multiple tax brackets make the tax calculation much more complicated. You can pre-compute the marginal taxes into a massive tax table and just look up the right number, much as it is done today.
The complexity it produces, as I see it, is that it incentivizes a lot of income restructuring and other (ultimately nonproductive) activity designed to lower the tax incidence at the higher marginal rates. Not everyone is in a position to do this, so it raises fairness issues about who is more able to avoid the higher marginal rates.
In the UK (which has four tax brackets if you count the exemption) there’s a system of getting tax forms from a former employer and giving them to the next one in order to get the withholding right. I don’t know how it works for people with multiple part-time jobs. Some poking around on the British government website reveals that they have free software for small businesses to do the withholding calculations and produce the P60 (British for “W2”) for each employee.
This would, of course, never fly in America. Putting Intuit and ADP out of business, are you mad?
@Mark
Okay, I can see how brackets make paycheck withholding more complicated, but that’s a degree separated from making computing taxes owed more complicated.
@Brad. My point is that I’d like to move toward New Zealand’s method where most people don’t even file tax returns because employer withholding takes the exact amount of tax. I agree that brackets don’t make filing your tax return a lot more difficult, because it just comes form the table, but it does make it more difficult to use withholding only.
But this subject has been beaten to death. The main concept is that we should remove all deductions and credits. Even if we keep the brackets, that would greatly simplify taxes. My ongoing theme is to get folks to agree on simplification, even if they don’t agree on all the details. I am glad to hear most respondents agreed to it mostly.
I would like to move away from the presumption that most people have or ought to have a single employer that provides 100% of their income and has access to 100% of their relevant financial data.
@John Schilling
I would like to move away from the presumption that most people have or ought to have a single employer
THIS. A thousand times this.
Aside from the privacy/central control aspects, a sole source of income represents a tremendous risk and what is (imo) an unacceptable level of inflexibility. There may be those who are better off with this option –
– there are almost certainly those –
– but it would be very bad for us and the world if this became the expected standard.
I would guess that welfare and taxes are both simpler in countries where they are less controversial (and thus there is little incentive to hide what is going on or do things piecemeal), and also in countries that tend towards a single national government, rather than the two-tier system the US uses. Compare social security to all the rest of the taxation/welfare structure, for example. It’s strictly national, paid for (at least nominally) by its own dedicated tax, and there is a single uniform benefit being paid. Social security of course also benefits from the fact that giving people money is easier than almost any other sort of welfare (briefly ignoring effectiveness).
Seconding Brad here — simplifying tax forms does not require a flat tax rate. It’s a fairly uncontroversial (though I suspect less so in the US) position that progressive taxation, whereby people who make more pay a higher share of their income, is beneficial to society.
In Canada, the tax system is quite sane. There are provincial and federal taxes, various credits, and tax brackets. In spite of this, an individual (even one with a reasonably complex tax situation) can complete their personal taxes in a few hours.
It’s interesting to contemplate the reason for the difference. Part of it may be due to American’s resistance to taxation. But I think a lot of it comes down to the use of tax as an instrument of policy. In Canada, this is fairly rare — most government programs are in the form of spending. Whereas I have the impression that it’s much more common in the US to have politically motivated tax breaks, which change over time and come with elaborate (politically derived) eligibility stipulations.
“progressive taxation, whereby people who make more pay a higher share of their income, is beneficial to society.”
That’s a new one on me. I get a lot of “It’s fair!” calls, but never one that says it’s actually a benefit to society.
I’m not even sure what it means. The standard argument can be put as “increases total utility.” Is that equivalent to “beneficial to society?”
Probably, but the argument I’ve usually heard is that a sufficiently high income saturates a person’s ability to spend it, creating a drain from the rest of the economy. From there the argument goes that high incomes taxed at a high rate will stimulate greater activity, since the government is obligated* to spend it.
There is also the argument that “necessities” (of course a great point of argument in themselves) occupy a larger portion of a poor person’s expenses, and a progressive income tax is more properly seen as a tax on luxury spending power.
* Assuming the government is not just some guy in a palace, of course.
“Probably, but the argument I’ve usually heard is that a sufficiently high income saturates a person’s ability to spend it, creating a drain from the rest of the economy.”
Consider that U.S. per capita income at the moment, inflation adjusted, is about eight times what it was in 1933. A moderately rich person then was considerably poorer than the average person now. So if rich people then were unable to spend their money, how does anyone now manage to do it?
Besides, what does “a drain from the rest of the economy” mean? Are you imagining dollar bills piling up under the bed? If you don’t want to spend all of your income the usual thing to do with it is to invest it, lend it to someone who wants to build a factory or plant apple trees. And he spends it doing those things.
Presumably “in a bank vault” rather than “under the bed”, but that’s not all that different. The objection to the spending power argument is easily answered with positional goods: if your spending is saturated but you still have more money, someone will find a way to expand your spending. Some of your income that you wouldn’t have spent is recaptured and does manage to contribute to economic growth; positional goods trickle down and eventually reach fixation as necessities-that-aren’t-quite (see our conversation about rent a little while ago, for example). There’s still a lag, though, compared to someone whose ability to spend was never saturated in the first place, which allows a degree of money to get trapped in things like inefficiently used and overpriced land. And of course “the economy grows” is different from “the economy grows as fast as it hypothetically could”.
But the strongest claim I would be willing to endorse on tax schemes, granting for a moment that there is going to be one, is “progressive taxes are non-evil”.
The “drain on the economy” part seems to get the most publicity from Robert Reich. The part of his case I’ve never understood is why, if money is essentially being removed from circulation in the economy to sit still in an account somewhere, why that isn’t just equivalent to decreasing the money supply so we should see deflation everywhere. To be fair you do see low inflation on the official measures, in spite of alleged massive government money printing, so maybe that’s his case?
That aside, I think the argument would go that there is plenty of investment and not enough consumption, due to stuff like wage stagnation. Corporations are sitting on piles of cash and see few opportunities to reinvest it, and prefer stock buybacks to dividends, resulting in slower economic growth as there is plenty of money to invest, but no reason to invest it, since no one is buying due to wage stagnation. Hence the reason people think you should encourage consumption rather than yet more investment. Higher sales taxes would do the opposite of that.
Thus my argument that welfare spending should be done all in one place. As you say, folks often make the argument that the poor can’t afford to pay the taxes. Those are welfare payments. Why should we complicate our tax system include to welfare payments? It is best if voters know how much welfare we pay, which is simply not the case today, with welfare payments coming from dozens of departments, including taxes. It should be controlled in one place, so that agency can make welfare payments in a fair way, and in a transparent way.
There is more to this than welfare. There is also the equalization of income, the whole decreasing of inequality thing. Even not counting the poor, the brackets require rich folks to pay more than the middle class.
But I think that such equalization should also be kept to one agency. Like welfare, no one knows how much the government takes from the rich and gives to the middle class (and of course it goes the other way too, although that isn’t the intent of other programs). The tax code should not be burdened with this complexity. I personally think it is not a good idea to try to equalize incomes by taking from the rich, because I simply do not trust the government to do this in a fair manner. But if it is done, it should be done in a transparent manner, so we can see how much is transferred.
If you’re speaking of EIC, wonks love it because it helps the poor while not discouraging work (it’s equivalent to a negative bracket at the bottom).
As for other tax expenditures, like mortgage interest deduction, then sure, replace them with explicit subsidies (or nothing, as the case may be).
A major argument I’ve seen for a progressive income tax is that concentrations of money equal political power, and it’s bad for individuals to have disproportionate influence.
One branch of that argument is that rich people can manupulate the government to give themselves advantages, and the other is that it’s just plain bad if rich people can affect the government disproportionately.
Taking the money away from rich people and giving it to the government increases the amount of money/power that is concentrated in the hands of a small, elite, few.
Unless you really believe that “we are the government” nonsense.
I just mentioned the argument, I didn’t say I agreed with it.
In particular, I’d say that the war on drugs is partly a result of a government which has the arrogance of excessive wealth.
People who favor high taxes seem to assume that the money will be used for policies they approve of.
>All welfare should be paid by one agency.
The number of agencies is irrelevant, the number of welfare programs and benefits is what matters. And if you try to cut one, even if you plan to spend the money saved on another one, everyone who benefits from it will have activists out in the streets screaming for your head and calling you a monster.
>I am curious about how individual income taxes and welfare work in other countrie
Can’t speak to personal experience, but in most other countries, the income tax is only a small share of total revenue, with much more being raised by a VAT tax. The US is a major outlier in this regard (the rest of the anglo-sphere being minor outliers)
No the number of agencies is crucial. With one agency, everyone could see how much is being spent. Once you have more than one agency, anything can happen, and they start to multiply (that’s why we now have 78 different means tested welfare programs in just the Federal government.
Yes, the activists would scream. My hope is that showing that we could eliminate poverty by making this change would shame at least some of them, and cause the rest to lose their credibility. Probably a hopeless cause, but an important hopeless cause. Another reason to have only one agency — once we allow more than one, we lose credibility on why so and so’s favorite cause has to go away.
I generally favor a UBI on these grounds, though there are a few forms of aid to the poor best given in-kind. Medicaid is the big one – it’s MUCH cheaper than buying healthcare while uninsured.
It’s cheaper for the person receiving it but not for society as a whole.
Medicaid and medicare are subsidized by the rest of society having to pay more than they otherwise would.
@Matt M:
You are confusing two different things.
1) Who pays the cost of Medicaid
2) Is Medicaid cheaper than retail health insurance.
#1 will be the tax base, regardless of how that that money is then “given” to the person in need of health insurance.
#2 is empirically true.
It’s also empirically true that say, an employee of Taco Bell gets access to cheaper tacos than the general public via his Taco Bell employee discount.
But this tells us little about the true cost of making tacos, and does not logically lead to the conclusion that the key to ensuring taco availability is to give everyone a job at Taco Bell.
I think the biggest problem with a UBI is that it greatly increases the cash flow going in and out of government hands, and I am afraid of much of it sticking to those hands instead of passing through.
I’ve heard it said that UBI wouldn’t work because it would so greatly increase our taxes that we’d invoke the Laffer curve and decrease incentive to work. I think those that advocate the UBI say that much of that money goes back to the ones sending it. But I don’t think sending money to government and then getting it back is equivalent to not sending it in the first place.
>No the number of agencies is crucial. With one agency, everyone could see how much is being spent. Once you have more than one agency, anything can happen, and they start to multiply (that’s why we now have 78 different means tested welfare programs in just the Federal government.
Again, the relevant figure here is the number of programs, not agencies. A single agency with 100 programs can be just as balkanized as 100 separate agencies each with one, just look at any U.S. military service for proof. I agree completely on the need to consolidate, but the area to focus on is programs and funding streams, not agencies.
It certainly is a good idea to reduce the number of programs (to one hopefully), but it is even more important to reduce the number of agencies to one. Then that agency can determine how much welfare in total is paid. Right now, nobody really knows. That agency can coordinate the programs so that they work together — every recipient gets the right amount. Not too much and not skipped altogether. I agree that 100 programs would still be pretty terrible, but it’d be a hundred times better than what we have now.
One other benefit of having a single agency, even if it has a huge number of programs, is that it’s still a lot easier to track the money. Everything going to that particular agency can be counted, and it’ll minimize the amount of “hiding” being done elsewhere.
For example, regulations require that Skilcraft be the prime source for a number of products for offices, such as pens, stationery, and cleaning supplies. Skilcraft is a USG program to provide the blind with employment. Their products are usually excellent; their click-type ballpoint pens are the best I’ve used, and I purchased some of their combined red pen/black pen/pencil aviator pens out of my own pocket because I’ve not found a competing product of similar quality. However, they *are* more expensive than going to Wal-mart to pick up similar supplies. That means that there’s a certain amount of welfare spending hidden in the office-supply budget of every single federal and military office in the land. I understand the reason they did it this way–they figured that giving blind people employment and a sense of purpose is better than having them sit in their homes staring at formless blobs and giving them a pat on the head and a check once a month. But it does tend to obscure spending.
>It certainly is a good idea to reduce the number of programs (to one hopefully), but it is even more important to reduce the number of agencies to one. Then that agency can determine how much welfare in total is paid. Right now, nobody really knows.
It could, but probably wouldn’t.
>That agency can coordinate the programs so that they work together — every recipient gets the right amount.
Again, can does not mean will. such an agency would likely, in practice, remain incredibly balkanized. Forcing all the disparate programs under one roof doesn’t magically make things better, just look at DHS. If you close down funding streams though, you naturally start to consolidate the number of agencies.
This is clearly and, I daresay obviously, false. Calculating how much tax you have to pay is only slightly more difficult with a progressive system. It’s just few extra if statements and multiplications. If you use a computer that’s no extra effort at all. Over here in The Netherlands income tax is also automatically withheld from your paycheck, and we don’t have a flat tax rate.
In fact we have lots of deductions. All of the thing you mention as too complicated we have too (different tax brackets, standard deductions, dependent exemptions, child tax credits, etc), but filing taxes is a piece of cake these days, because it’s all done online, and all the calculations are done for you. So all that’s required is answering a series of questions (do you have a mortgage, are you paying alimony, do you support the eduction of a child, etc, etc) and filling in the right numbers at the blanks. And the end you either have to pay extra, or get money back. In the latter case it’s sent to you automatically, no further action required.
The only thing that annoys me in the Dutch system is the lack of automated coordination between different levels of government. Why can’t my municipal and waterboard taxes be automatically included in the national tax tool? Shouldn’t be too hard. But that’s a minor nuisance.
Doesn’t the US have something like that? It kind of sounds like it doesn’t, in which case the problem isn’t bad rules, but bad customer service.
I don’t disagree that tax systems can be too complicated sometimes. But that mostly seems to be a problem for companies, where there are endless regulations and endless loopholes that can be exploited to lower how much you have to pay. But large companies can afford paid professionals, so it’s not really a big issue for them. Simplifying tax rules is still worth it, but mostly with the goal of closing loopholes.
To further expand on my previous post. I do think that tax rules can be too complicated sometimes, but I think it’s mostly interaction between different layers of government that causes this.
I remember last water board elections, I was filling out some online voter quiz while a friend happened to be visiting. One of the questions was “People on welfare should not have to pay waterboard taxes”, with which I strongly disagreed. This rather surprised my friend. “Don’t you think people on welfare need a break?”, he asked.
Perhaps. But water boards should concern themselves with maintaining our dykes and doing other water management. They shouldn’t be setting social-economic policy. If you want people on welfare to have more money, increase benefits. Don’t do it by having them pay less on water board taxes. This just increases complexity and makes things more opaque. It also introduces a weird form on inequality.
Because currently some water boards have tax deductions for welfare recipients and others don’t. Some municipalities have lots of extra benefits for welfare recipients, others do not. The end is result is that exactly how much money someone on welfare actually has to spend at the end of the day is hugely dependent on where they live. It’s also utterly opaque, and even experts don’t seem to agree on a number.
Sadly this is not easy to change. As long as local governments have autonomy on these kind of matters, there will always be differences in policy. But banning local governments from setting their tax rates and stuff like that, would pretty much mean abolishing local government. Not sure that’s worth it.
Exactly, we agree totally here. We should not mix welfare policy with other policy. Then we don’t know how much welfare we are paying, and we are making the job of the welfare people that much more difficult, in knowing how much the poor need.
Oh yes, the US has this in spades. I had thought this was one issue more centralized governments didn’t have. Most US states have an individual income tax, and many cities do also. Similarly for sales taxes (similar to VAT). None of the states are part of the Federal system. Some of the localities are part of their state system, but an annoying number are not.
Don’t think you don’t pay for business tax complexities too. These are all passed on to individuals through prices, wages, and dividends. This is something that is more difficult to simplify, because many business taxes complexities are unavoidable. But this is also something worth simplifying where we can.
I think a national sales tax as a replacement for (not addition to) federal income tax would be much better in many ways: encourages saving and investment instead of discouraging earning, and much lower total compliance cost.
Some will say it’s not progressive enough. Of course, rich people do spend more money, so it is progressive. Second, rich people would only be avoiding taxation on income never spent or reinvested. We want to encourage investment because it grows the economy; we’d rather discourage dissipation of wealth in yachts, etc. and that would be discouraged by the consumption tax. We want to encourage the rich guy who works a zillion hours, lives a spartan lifestyle, and investments all his money back in the company (I know this is somewhat anti-Keynesian, but it seems clear that that guy is doing more for the economy than an idle heir who just spends all the money his parents earned on fun and games).
Possible further concessions to the “not progressive enough/hits poor people too hard” view:
Could exempt certain things on which poor people spend a higher percent of their income: things like food, rent, or medical care. Of course, care would have to be taken to avoid classifying yachts as a form of rent.
If someone wants to object that foreign investment doesn’t directly help citizens, taxing foreign investment like consumption might also be an option to further encourage job creation at home.
Isn’t this wrong? I think the government generally wants to encourage spending, since it helps create jobs.
Investment is arguably a form of spending: on labor, equipment, capital, etc. That does more to help, long term, than spending on a lavish vacation.
That and the whole “we must encourage spending” thing doesn’t actually make sense from a long view every dollar gets spent eventually, that’s why people save (so they can spend later). If a dollar does’t get spent its the same as if it doesn’t exist (money is only a medium of exchange, not a resource which is used or wasted) in which case the dollars that are spent increase in value such that its the same amount of value is spent.
The “we must encourage spending” thing only makes sense if A you think their is some irrationality that is stopping people from spending what its in their rational interest to spend (you certainly don’t want people spending irrationally, that’s how housing bubbles happen, so you only want them to spend if its rational) or B if you have a vested interest in seeing all that spending across time and space happen within a limited span of time (say your term in office). (i do maintain that the only reason Keynes is so popular is he justifies politicians doing what they always want to do (spend like crazy). if the same logical rigor and eloquence had been mustered in favour of thrift no one would have listened).
Rationally we should expect spending to be rather constant people at various points in their lives spending the rational amount for that point, young people spend what little they have, 30 somethings (young families) binge of debt, middle aged save, the old spend sustain-ably.
The current malaise could be that their are too many middle aged for the population to sustain 90s level growth, or it could be politics have created uncertainty (2008, EU, Debt ceiling, deluge of regulations, Brexit, Trump isnt confidence boosting the way Fall of communism, new world order, de-regulation end of history is), but either way its not at all clear that spending is in anyway the real problem. People are probably spending rationally, its the fundamentals that are screwy.
Nice, Luke.
You are the first person I’ve ever heard describe a sales tax as progressive, and the definition of “progressive” implicit in your description is not what most people are talking about when they use that term.
Say that we taxed the first $50k of income at 50% and higher amounts at 10%. Someone making a $1m would indeed pay much more in taxes under that system as someone making $35k. But it still seems plainly regressive: The first person pays an effective rate of 12% and the second 50%. Similarly, a flat tax is not a progressive tax just because wealthier people wind up paying more.
Poorer people often have to spend most or all of their income. With a sales tax they pay a higher rate than those who can save. That’s a regressive tax system.
National sales tax proposals, such as the Fair Tax, usually have a prebate given to everyone that covers what taxes might be paid on ‘essentials’, which makes it less regressive.
“Of course, rich people do spend more money, so it is progressive.”
No. “Progressive” in this context means that the ratio of tax to income rises as income rises, progresses.
It’s a very clever verbal trick. From one side it is simply a description of the mathematics of a tax structure. But the obvious implication is that doing it that way is progress in the sense of progress, an improvement.
I had no idea that there was a ‘technical’ definition of this. I thought it just meant ‘progressive’ in the political sense. Interesting.
I meant “progressive” closer to the sense David meant, but not realizing or having forgotten the technical meaning, I was just thinking of it as “people who make more money pay more.” The key, as he says, is that to be “progressive,” people who make more have to pay more, not just by virtue of paying the same percentage of a higher figure, but also by paying a higher percentage of that higher figure, as they do with income tax now.
So yeah, a national sales tax is not progressive, but could arguably be made so by the sorts of measures I mentioned, where the things poor people spend a larger proportion of their income on are exempted. Also, the fact that everyone has to pay at least a little is a feature, not a bug, to me, because it tends to limit the total amount of taxation people will tolerate.
I definitely didn’t mean “progressive” as in the political ideology.
It literally just means the tax-to-income ratio gets progressively higher as income gets higher.
Eliezer makes a similar point in this Facebook post:
How do you tell the difference between buying finery and buying a piece of parchment?
Note that the answer isn’t “see if a piece of actual paper is involved”. Someone can have a deed to a yacht or other piece of large personal property. “See if they gain any personal benefit” is difficult–the personal benefit from having, say, an expensive statue is just to look at it, which is not that dissimilar from looking at a portfolio of stocks, and of course it raises questions of how to deal with things that are partly beneficial. “Can they sell it later at a possibly higher price” will also fail, especially in the case of certain kinds of collectibles.
It’s actually really hard to specify the distinction between finery and pieces of parchment.
Until Droon has enough parchments to rewrite the tax laws…
Like Jiro said, it’s trivial to come up with ways a system could be gained to give the beneficial use of luxuries and armies of lawyers exist in the arms race of creating and banning them.
Personal experience (in Israel): I got my paycheck taxes withheld automatically. When I worked two jobs at the same time, I got the maximum tax bracket cleared off the second one, and had to fill a one-page form to get it back (I could also have filled it in advance, but I was lazy). Israel definitely has progressive taxation and welfare.
I agree with the people above – US taxes seem ridiculously complicated because they’re used for policy. This seems like a consequence of those checks and balances I’m always hearing about.
Yes, this is mostly the reason. They’re called “tax expenditures” for a reason. Our government loves to hide how it spends money, so instead of directly collecting then spending it, much of it is done by simply passing bills to lower collections to reward something they otherwise would have spent the money on. Lowering all taxes doesn’t have this effect, so we get very tightly targeted and restricted deductions and credits and exemptions.
No, it can be done with brackets, and NZ has brackets.
In New Zealand, most people do not file tax returns, because their taxes are paid by withholdings on their paychecks. This can only be done with a flat tax.
You can get this for most people even with a progressive tax. In the UK the normal case is that you don’t need to take any action about your taxes, they were payed for by withholdings. If you are self-employed or have investment income or various other things you need to file a return, but this only affects a minority, apparently about 11 million from a population of 63 million.
Some of the form complexity is driven by lobbying from Big TaxPrep (seriously).
For anyone capable of filing a 1040EZ (though that’s simple as the name implies) and probably anyone filing a 1040A, the IRS literally has all of the information already, and could very well just send a bill/check, were they allowed to, without any other changes to the tax code. That would save a lot of person-hours across the country.
The problem is that the IRS does NOT know who is going to file a 1040EZ. Sure, it knows that Bob McBobface is getting a salary and how much, but it has no idea about other financial arrangements he had this year.
The precondition for “we’ll tell you what your income tax is” is a radical simplification of the tax code and in particular getting rid of most deductions and such.
Right. And any potential change to the tax code can be spun by a politician as “tax cuts for the rich” and/or “tax increases on the middle class” and is a political non-starter.
Good catch, yes, without tax code changes it would be limited to “here’s your tax; if something’s different file a return” which might not be simpler (e.g. people would have to know what counts as something different enough to make a difference).
Yes. I found out that 1040-EZ is not as simple as I thought it was when I tried to teach my kids to fill it out. They kept coming across things in the instructions that they had no understanding of, such as various other income items, or possible deductions or credits. Even the 1040-EZ is not easy if you actually read the instructions, because of all the possible variables. The Feds don’t know all these variables, so they can’t do anyone’s returns. Congress seems to add more pieces to the tax code every time they meet, and they seem to get Kudos every time they adjust poor folk’s taxes, which just means one more thing they have to figure out.
All welfare should be paid by one agency. This is a lot more effective in controlling the amount each recipient receives, and it is also more accountable to the voters to know what welfare is being paid. As it stands, it is very difficult to judge what the lowest income is deemed acceptable in the US, with the confused jumble of welfare programs. The taxes paid by the poor on their income should be one more item the welfare agency takes into account, and if it was a flat tax, it would be easy to determine the amount for each person.
While I agree that efficency in distribution would be increased if we had one federal Department of the Poors, whose job it was to piggy-back on the IRS and send out checks to those judged in need, I don’t think it follows that effectiveness in relieving poverty would necessarily increase. The ideas behind cash distribution, while strong, are not universally persuasive.
One should also have a bit of humility re: our current technology and information capabilities. It is not possible to know just how much sales, hotel, vehicle and other taxes are paid by poor people – and not just because so much of the lower end of the economy is done in cash or in the grey-to-black market.
I think we do know better what the poor pay in taxes than other expenditures. But it would be better if the tax system was simpler. And remember, we are comparing the ability of this one department to determine how much the poor need compared to how it is done today. Today, no one person can possibly know how much welfare any individual person receives, because there are so many programs out there. If we redirected all the money we currently spend on the 78 Federal means tested programs to sending each person below poverty a check, we would have far more than necessary to end all poverty in the US.
I prefer the idea of state welfare programs instead of Federal, because the standard of living is so different around the country, and it is better for the agency to be a little closer to the recipients, so as to understand them a bit better. Even the state is a bit distant, but there are too many destitute counties out there for county welfare to work.
State-level welfare programs will always be handicapped by their balanced-budget requirements, unless the 49 of them that have it amend their constitutions. Currently the Federal government is the only one that can do countercyclical spending.
The federal government “should” be the only one to do counter-cyclical spending using debt, because it can also print money, which states can’t.
“Should” in quotes because I’m talking about plans/aims more than absolutes.
That is true and I hadn’t considered that. But overall, I still think Federal welfare has more detriments than benefits.
State governments could conceivably do countercyclical spending by saving money in good times – not necessarily in literal hoards of cash – to spend at the bottom of the cycle. But the fiscal discipline do do that is almost impossible to sustain in a democracy, whereas it’s easy to sell politicians and voters on “we’ll put it on the government’s credit card, surely we’ll be able to pay it back later”.
I interviewed Dilbert creator Scott Adams. In the second half of the interview we discussed several topics of importance to the rationality community including cryonics, unfriendly AI, and eliminating mosquitoes. In the first part we discussed Trump as a master persuader.
Magic sex hypnotism guy? Why would you want to interview him?
I have been reading his blog for a long time and find he offers great insights into the world. Adams, Eliezer, and (of course) Scott are my favorite rationalist bloggers. Most importantly, to understand Trump’s political success you need to understand why Adams thinks that Trump is a master persuader. Adams also wrote a fantastic self-help book.
What is your definition of “rationalist” that he is a rationalist?
The obvious definition is the LW diaspora, which is obviously false. And I think that his phrasings impede communication with that community. Perhaps you mean that he has good models of the world, and that you learn them from his blogging? Maybe you should say “correct” or “useful”? I’m not sure that’s quite what you’re saying, but don’t use “rationalist” to mean “correct.”
Rationalist is a vague word, but Adams does capture a lot of what the LW diaspora tries to do. His humans are “moist robots” = evolutionary psychology, he makes testable predictions of his views (Trump will win in a landslide, perceived health problems will with high probability cause Hillary electoral harm), he believes humans greatly overestimate their agency, he often admits when he is uncertain (he isn’t sure who would be the best president), he is willing to risk failure if the costs of failure are low, and most importantly he focuses on winning (see his self-help book for ways of creating winning systems.)
Does he apply the scientific method to his hypnotism stuff?
I think Adams is almost a funhouse mirror reflection of a rationalist. He admits uncertainty strategically, in contexts that ultimately strengthen his position. He sometimes makes testable predictions, or things that resemble testable predictions, and then he remembers them selectively and interprets them creatively.
His methods of communication are so disingenuous that, in the days when he still allowed comments on his blog, there was a popular theory that the whole blog was just an experiment (or perhaps an object lesson) in persuasion techniques. A significant portion of his own fans thought that he was essentially trying to prove that he could persuade people of anything, no matter how silly.
Credit to him for being mostly right about the Trump nomination, but I can’t consider someone a rationalist if they deliberately eschew clear and honest communication.
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of the “rationalist” labeling for him too. Forget the magic hypnotism stuff, he predicted a 99% chance of a Trump landslide. Rationalism is a big tent, but the one thing I absolutely demand is that you be able to calibrate probabilities appropriately.
I agree that 99% seems way too high and I wouldn’t be willing to bet at these odds, but Adams predicted Trump’s rise when everyone else thought Trump was a political joke who had no hope of winning the Republican nomination so I don’t think it’s reasonable for us to rely on our political intuition to dismiss Adams’ probability estimates as being non-rational. It’s possible that future historians armed with a much better understanding of human psychology will say that given Trump’s persuasion skills Adams’ estimates of the odds of Trump winning were consistently better than, say, Nate Silver’s were.
It’s also tough to tell with Scott Adams when he’s being 100% serious and when he’s clearly exaggerating for rhetorical and/or self-promotion purposes.
My guess is the 99% figure is not his true best estimate of Trump’s chances of success, but rather something he said knowing it would draw attention to him and traffic to his websites. Does making a calculated exaggeration for the purposes of self-promotion preclude one from being a rationalist?
I don’t know if I’d call him a rationalist or not, but I was also a regular reader of his blog long before the Trump presidential campaign and he definitely has a lot in common with other rationalist bloggers.
“I agree that 99% seems way too high and I wouldn’t be willing to bet at these odds, but Adams predicted Trump’s rise when everyone else thought Trump was a political joke who had no hope of winning the Republican nomination.”
And I’m saying that any credit he deserves for that makes him a good political analyst or something, but doesn’t make him a rationalist.
I can’t find where I thought he said 99% chance, but I see 98% chance here.
There are various ways of grading probability, like Briar score. I’m pretty sure that given his 98% figure, if Trump doesn’t win, Adams’ overall Briar score, even given his success on the nomination issue, will be worse than that of pundits who pooh-poohed Trump at the beginning (when Adams first got into the Trump-predicting business, the markets gave Trump 5% odds, so the average pundit probably only made a 95% wrong prediction, not a 98% one).
Also, there was a bizarre incident in June where Adams wrote that he’d decided actually, Clinton was a better persuader than Trump, because she had called him racist, and now he was going to lose. After that I don’t think he ever really referenced that school of thought again. But this means that if Trump loses, he’ll be able to point back and say “Look, I predicted this!”. If you’re a rationalist, you don’t play both sides of the argument, you clearly and explicitly change your probability estimate and admit you were wrong before.
(also, saying “Hillary called Trump racist” is about the stupidest reason to change your mind I can think of, let alone to call Hillary a master persuader. This is American politics. Everyone calls everybody racist. This is like saying a defense attorney is going to win a trial because he’s a master lawyer, then saying maybe the prosecutor will win, because he also seems to be a master lawyer, based on his bold strategy of arguing that the suspect was guilty.)
Scott A.
“Everyone calls everybody racist” in American politics because if you can convince voters your opponent is a racist you win. Adams thought that Hillary started doing an effective job of labeling Trump a racist and wrote that if Trump couldn’t overcome this label he would lose, but, from what I remember, Adams always thought that Trump had the means, motive, and opportunity to overcome this label. Adams wrote that Hillary’s best move was getting nearly everyone in the media to label Trump as “dark” because this was a fantastic way of persuading voters that Trump was a dangerous racist. Hillary’s basket of deplorables comment was so damaging to her because, as I think Adams said, it made Trump’s alt-right (or whatever) backers seem cute rather than evil.
“But this means that if Trump loses, he’ll be able to point back and say “Look, I predicted this!””
What he wrote was:
“I now update my prediction of a Trump landslide to say that if he doesn’t give a speech on the topic of racism – to neutralize the crazy racist label – he loses.”
If.
“(also, saying “Hillary called Trump racist” is about the stupidest reason to change your mind I can think of, let alone to call Hillary a master persuader.”
His argument was that “crazy racist” was an effective label, not that “racist” was. And he didn’t credit Hilary with discovering that, he credited her supporters.
I think whether or not Trump wins, we can be confident that Trump giving a speech on racism wouldn’t be the deciding factor between a Trump win and a Trump loss, let alone a Trump landslide and a Trump loss. His credences are clearly screwy.
I think it’s a mistake to take being rational as a necessary condition on being a rationalist. I’m not sure whether we should understand rationalism as an ideology or as some other broadly social phenomenon, but either way one can be a rationalist without being a good rationalist. Taking appropriate calibration as a necessary condition is a problem for the same reason.
Philosophisticat: If he were a huge fan of the LW Sequences and talked about superintelligence all the time, then I’d be prepared to call him a “bad rationalist”. Since he doesn’t talk about rationalist stuff or think in a rationalist way, I’m happy to just call him a non-rationalist.
If he self-identifies as a rationalist (as in the LW category, not just “a rational person”), I might change my mind, but I’ve never seen him do this.
@Scott
I don’t follow him, but everything I’ve seen suggests that he is a non-rationalist, as you say. I was just commenting on using the fact that someone’s credences are wacky to disqualify them.
So much of what Adams writes about is talking about putting yourself in situations where you have multiple ways to win, and no ways to lose. So right off the bat his writing is never going to have easily testable claims. He tells you that right up front.
He may well be a rationalist, but I don’ think his writing is.
JayT
“So much of what Adams writes about is talking about putting yourself in situations where you have multiple ways to win, and no ways to lose.”
If such situations exist shouldn’t a rationalist take advantage of them?
Sure, but that’s why I say he may well be rationalist, but his writing isn’t.
Like Scott says,
That is obviously not Scott Adams. He explicitly says that he purposefully plays both sides of every argument he can.
I think Adams can be rather perfectly described in Harry Potter vocabulary as the “Defense Against the Dark Arts” professor who seems just a little too enthusiastic about how awesome and powerful the dark arts are.
And the “death eaters” all support Trump…
I think you accidentally added a few extra words there. Unless secretly Adams is the reason for Trump’s success and eliminating Adams eliminates Trump.
Edit because I didn’t feel like making a new post: Thanks for the explanation.
Let me rephrase what I meant as a prediction: Ten years from now when social scientists discuss why Trump won 2016 in a landslide their starting point will be Scott Adams’ hypothesis that Trump was a master persuader.
Pretty certain their starting points will be Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and the political machines that thought either of those would be a winning candidate if only the machine said so.
Trump is losing against one of the most (the most, really) unpopular candidates from either party in memory, doing worse than one would expect from a generic republican. I would expect a master persuader to do a bit better than that. I don’t think there’s anything to explain that the “idiot who stumbled into a favorable political environment” hypothesis doesn’t cover perfectly well.
I think “antipopular” (a word I just made up right now) better describes what’s going on with Clinton. Kerry was an unpopular candidate: nobody could be bothered to care about him. Clinton is a candidate who is actively disliked by wide swaths of the country, which is fairly unusual even modulo any kind of enhanced tribalism.
Agree with Gazeboist. If “losing to unpopular Hillary” means Trump is some sort of idiot failure, what does that make Bernie Sanders? Or Martin O’Malley for that matter.
High negatives don’t mean what they used to. What they mean is that you’re a celebrity and you have name recognition and that counts for a lot in today’s society.
@Matt M
Winning in a primary is different to winning the election.
I’m so tired of hearing that thrown out there as a justification to just entirely dismiss everything we saw happen last year.
Explain HOW it’s different in this particular instance. Even among Democrat primary voters, I’m willing to bet that Hillary had higher negatives than Martin O’Malley by a factor of 10. So why did she do so well and he do so poorly?
Someone whose own party leadership wanted to see him fail. Also, he self-identified as a socialist, so it’s pretty impressive he went as far as he did.
one of the bad guys from the Wire.
She was anointed by party leadership, who had their whole balled-up fist on the scales in her favor the entire time?
Eh.
I mean, Carcetti completely turned his back on all the good things he set out to do, and promised, in exchange for more political power.
Well, yeah, but in a show about gangsters, drug dealers and other assorted fine fellows, a politician doing politician things doesn’t seem like too high in the “bad guy” scale.
I didn’t say losing to Hillary shows Trump to be an idiot. Politics is fickle, and I think success has much less to do with individual brilliance, even specifically political brilliance, than a whole host of other considerations. I said his current position against Hillary is weak, weaker than you’d expect from any generic republican running against someone with Hillary’s negatives, and provides no evidence that he’s some kind of master persuader.
What shows Trump is an idiot is all the things he says and thinks, and all the clues to his personality from his long history in the public eye.
@WHtA:
That was a major point of the show though; a lot of the gangsters were just doing the only thing they knew how to do. Meanwhile Carcetti had a good opportunity to help people as mayor and he threw it away because he would rather be governor.
I am not the least bit convinced that Ted Cruz would be doing significantly better against Hillary than Trump is now, or that Trump would be doing significantly better against Bernie/O’Malley/whoever than he is against Hillary now.
You are basing this all on your “expectations” which are themselves not based in any particular facts other than what the official political consultants tell us should happen based on what happened 4-8-12 years ago. How did listening to the official political consultants work out for Jeb?
It’s convenient that your “expectations” are defined in such a way as to confirm your priors about Trump being an idiot.
Personally, I think this is all a long-game by the media to firmly establish that if Trump somehow DOES win it’s all Hillary’s fault and only because she was so terrible and corrupt and bad and literally anyone else would have beaten him so clearly he has no mandate and there is no movement and we can all just pretend this never happened.
@Fahundo: I thought the point was that, in the end, Carcetti was pretty much stuck in the same way, constantly having to compromise in order to have the power to implement the changes he wants to, which always get postergated.
You guys are completely misunderstanding the message of Bernie’s results.
First, examine Joe Biden’s decision not to enter the race. He wanted to, but he judged he had no shot against Hillary. Hillary had the fundamentals of the primary on lock.
Now look at what Bernie said privately (and I think publically) early on. He didn’t get in the campaign to win. He wanted to put his ideas out there and shift the Dem platform and HRC’s positions and the Overton Window (which he was pretty successful at).
It wouldn’t surprise me of O’Marley was a candidate mostly to give HRC another establishment candidate to run against.
For a variety of reasons, HRC did not have a particularly enthusiastic base. That’s what let Bernie outperform his fundamentals in caucuses and small states. That’s the only reason he sort of kind of had a shot if you squinted.
I think if he was content with staying mayor, he could have delivered on most of his promises. He was certainly making headway with the police department. His only given reason for not taking aid from the governor was that it would make his own gubernatorial campaign weak.
I feel like the Republican leadership was far more anti-Trump than the Democrat leadership was anti-Sanders.
The Democrat leadership had an alternative they all agreed on, though, which made things easy. If it had come down to, say, Trump/Kasich early in the race, the republican leadership might have had a far easier time fighting him.
There’s also the possibility that the Republican leadership respected the will of the members of its party and so only used non-corrupt means to oppose its dispreferred candidate. Clinton stole the primary from Sanders, she did not beat him fair and square.
@suntzuanime:
That’s pure B.S.
Could be, but until China hacks the Republican Party’s emails I’m bound to consider good faith as at least a possibility.
@suntauanime:
People in the Democratic Party organization preferring Hilary win is much different than what you are alleging.
Hillary won because she actually got more votes. She performed in line with her polling.
@Philosophisticat
Most candidates in recent history underperform generic candidates from their party. The problem is that “generic Republicans” don’t exist, and when they exist they don’t win nominations because who gets excited about generic Republicans, and when they do win nominations, the media rushes to paint them as not generic because nobody wants to read about Generic Republican. Instead, they get to be VP picks instead; both Hillary and Donald picked generics as their VPs, because generics are popular, but they themselves are not very generic at all.
I think if you ban the people who bring up Robin Hanson’s most controversial couple of posts every time he’s ever mentioned, then you ought to start banning people who bring up “magic sex hypnotism” every time Scott Adams comes up, and for the same reason.
I don’t know what the “magic sex” part means, but hypnotism seems pretty central to Adams’ intellectual identity. I think his whole argument is that his work as a hypnotist allows him to understand hypnosis-style persuasion techniques that the rest of us can’t see. This seems different from citing a random idea Robin mooted one time.
I think it is the same because it references a few of his weirdest posts of all time as a way to discredit everything else he says. If it were just “hypnotism guy” or even “that shill for Trump,” these would be more fair, because he talks about hypnotism and Trump a lot.
Hypnosis as a way to have better sex is just one of many, many contexts in which he’s discussed hypnotism and is not a core feature of his intellectual identity. But it’s arguably the oddest, most salacious thing to which he’s ever applied hypnosis, and so gets brought up by someone almost every time he’s mentioned on here.
It would be like an economist who wrote a post about “the economics of incest” or something. And the remaining 99% of his posts are applying economics to less scandalous sounding aspects of life. But every time his work comes up someone says “oh, economics of incest guy.” Yeah, economics is central to his intellectual identity, but that’s not what’s being emphasized in such a case (yes, incest sounds more scandalous than “sex,” but “sex hypnotism” is intended to sound bizarre and crackpotish in a way just “hypnotism” does not).
@onyomi
Reminds me of this old joke:
You’re only ever as credible in the public eye as the least credible thing you ever say. Say enough things, and people are bound to find a salacious opinion they can use to load you with negative effect and not take you seriously. I think it’s why EY is a lot less esteemed these days than he was in 2008. Just pick his MWI overconfidence, fanfiction, taste in art, or whatever else discredits him the most to your target audience. Then no one reads the Sequences.
I’m very impressed that Scott has mostly been able to avoid the Scottish goat effect, despite writing a lot on a bunch of topics (see his fairly positive rationalwiki page). But if he keeps writing and getting more popular like I anticipate, I have no doubt that he’ll hit a bit of ceiling.
“Scott Alexander? Isn’t he that sexist alt-right sympathizing crazy cult white dude who believes in Moloch? Why would I take anything he says seriously?”
The way I see things working with most writers/thinkers that people actually care about is:
A.) they write well and accurately on a non-controversial topic, struggle for recognition before breaking into the public conscious. If they make errors, it’s probably not seen as a big deal for anyone except other researchers in their field. Examples: Most of the prestigious researchers who lead fields, Including big names that reached out publicly like Steven Hawking, Lisa Randall, even maybe Francis Collins, Jerry Coyne (?)despite being a devout Christian! They fuck people, which society deems to be acceptable.
B) You go into controversy but be very very careful, about it. You keep your controversial speculations mostly to yourself and only let them known to a wide audience when you have good data to back them up. You keep your very controversial conclusions relatively quite and don’t stray far from your area of expertise. Examples: Steven Levitt, Arthur Jensen, Robert Putnam, Simon Baron-Cohen, kinda Gwern?
They might fuck a sheep, but they do it far from the public eye or in a community that’s accepting of that.
C.) they get into controversial issues or are very willing to wade into issues that go beyond their expertise. Not afraid to be contrarian or iconoclast. They eventually get well known enough that the laser beam is turned in on them. They have very supportive supporters because they are smart and have a bunch of interesting hypotheses for interesting things. But they also get a lot of haters who dislike what they say and their presumed overconfidence, put a lot of effort into finding their mistakes so that they can dismiss them when they aren’t too careful. Examples: Probably most famous popular intellectuals, Charles Murray, Jared Diamond, Stephin Pinker, Greg Cochran, Judith Rich Harris, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Judith Rich Harris, Robin Hanson, Scott Adams, Malcolm Gladwell, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a lot of famous economists, most investigative journalists. It’s not a coincidence that I can name a lot off the top of my head even though they’re probably less common than the other types. They can be a lot of fun.
They like to fuck a lot of things, and occasionally a sheep can get in there and now they’re Mcgreggor the Goat-fucker for life.
I see Scott as a definitely in the C.) pile as long as his politics/sociology speculation stuff is more popular than his psychiatry. As such he should definitely anticipate a lot more haters and not-nice labels.
““Scott Alexander? Isn’t he that sexist alt-right sympathizing crazy cult white dude who believes in Moloch? Why would I take anything he says seriously?””
Most of my left/SJW leaning friends already react this way when I link to this blog. Sorry, Scott!
I think this is similar to “catechisms”/the infamous bingo game, but for people. For each prominent person who offers arguments for the opposition, a quick, easy dismissal should be ready to hand. A strawman version of the superficially oddest-sounding or most controversial thing they ever said is one of the most effective.
Yudkowsky? You mean the Harry Potter fanfic cult leader? Scott Alexander? Oh, Moloch guy? etc.
I don’t think it would work nearly as well if it was out of character.
Although people like to preemptively bring it up a a lot, I’ve never seen Yudkowsky dismissed as fanfic guy. He does get hit with the MWI, but that’s much more characteristic of the larger criticism. Likewise I’ve never seen “oh Moloch guy” for Scott Alexander. He gets tagged for being too friendly/charitable to the far right, but again that’s not picking on some outlier post but, whether you agree with the critique or not, something that is actually based in sustained reality.
Similarly, Hanson’s verboten post is entirely characteristic of what makes Hanson, Hanson. It may be the strangest or most salacious outgrowth of it, but it isn’t some random, out of character, off topic musing. Ditto for Scott Adams and the mass sex hypnotism post. He regularly makes fantastical claims for hypnotism and he has a significant prurient focus.
“I don’t think it would work nearly as well if it was out of character.”
While I agree that a label with no basis in reality will have a harder time sticking than one with some resemblance to reality, I think the point of saying “oh, magic sex hypnotism guy?” each time he comes up is not to convince regular Scott Adams readers that he’s a crackpot, but rather to dissuade would-be Scott Adams readers from ever reading or considering any of his other ideas because, after all, why would you want to waste your time with “magic sex hypnotism guy”?
Scott Alexander may be harder to caricature than Scott Adams, Eliezer, and many others because he is more humble and measured than most, which is to his credit. But it’s still not intellectually honest or charitable toward those who leave themselves more open to it.
Moreover, maybe Scott Alexander is prevented from sharing his “one weird trick” to something and other such maybe half-baked yet potentially interesting ideas for fear of his forever being tarred with it.
@onyomi:
It’s not the weird ideas, it’s the lack of epistemic humility.
Alexander has that in spades. Usually “one note takedowns” tend to target positions that are offered without it.
Now, I’m not saying that works for everything. You can be as epistemically humble as you want about a position like “Maybe that holocaust wasn’t really so bad for those who were/are Jewish” and it won’t matter. But if the idea is just weird…
@HBC,
My point is not that we shouldn’t criticize Scott Adams’s weird ideas and lack of humility when discussing his weird ideas and unrealistic predictions. I’m just saying that, when discussing an opinion of his largely unrelated to “magic sex hypnotism,” it’s poor form to always say “why would you ever listen to anything said by magic sex hypnotism guy??”
Like if someone brought up Eliezer’s views on AI and someone retorted “why would you ever listen to a Harry Potter fanfic author and avowed human popsicleist??”
Saying things that are substantially more insane than what most people say is Bayseian evidence that listening to you isn’t worth it.
Also, remember that real-life arguments often involve a lot of trust that the other person is not misrepresenting things, taking them out of context, or omitting relevant information. Saying insane things can reduce that trust.
We weren’t discussing an opinion of his. Someone posted an interview with him, and someone else quite reasonably asked why anyone would want to devote substantial time listening to him given, ya know, his tenuous grip on reality.
If you don’t want to get worked up about it, fine.
But please let’s not pretend this is good intellectual practice.
Re. “not discussing an opinion of his”: no, it was worse, because by saying “why would you want to talk to sex hypnotism guy,” you’re implying that the fact he once talked about something weird means he has nothing of value to say about anything else.
If what you really mean is “Scott Adams has never written anything of value because I’ve read a sample of his writings on various topics and they are all crap,” then say that.
If what you mean is, “the probability of his being right about other issues is slightly lower since he wrote about better orgasms through hypnosis that one time,” then say that.
“Why would you want to listen to sex hypnotism guy?” is, again, dismissing a person’s whole body of work with an example of his oddest piece (also, I haven’t seen anyone bother to actually refute the sex hypnotism thing; it is just question-beggingly assumed that someone writing about “better orgasms through hypnosis” is an idiot and should never be listened to about anything again, just because that sounds weird).
I hope none of you ever have a kid who does something embarrassing in school. Are you going to say, “well, son, since you did cry that one time in front of your classmates, they are just being good Bayesians by calling you ‘crybaby’ for the rest of your life and refusing to be your friend, since, after all, they had to adjust their priors of you being a crybaby in light of such evidence.”
Again, writing insane things is Bayseian evidence that the rest of his work is not worth paying attention to.
It is good intellectual practice.
@Jiro,
Again:
If what you really mean is “Scott Adams has never written anything of value because I’ve read a sample of his writings on various topics and they are all crap,” then say that. That would be rational and intellectually honest.
If what you mean is, “the probability of his being right about other issues is slightly lower since he wrote about better orgasms through hypnosis that one time, and I know something about hypnosis and/or orgasms and know what he said is crap,” then say that. That would be rational and intellectually honest.
Mockingly dismissing everything someone ever wrote with a strawman version of the most controversial thing they ever wrote is not good intellectual practice. In fact, it’s a way to avoid being intellectually challenged.
You are being deceptive about what was involved. It wasn’t you could go to a hynotist and have a better orgasim, which claim in any event would put the burden on the one so claiming.
It was rather that Scott Adams is able to mass hypnotize via blog post because he is some sort of god among men:
If your response to that tripe is “well no one has disproved it!!1!”, I invite you to refute the time cube website.
Besides, branding Scott Adams “magic sex hypnotism guy” is exactly the sort of thing he would celebrate as the technique of a master persuader. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
“Besides branding Scott Adams “magic sex hypnotism guy” is exactly the sort of thing he would celebrate as the technique of a master persuader. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
I’ll agree with you that branding him “magic sex hypnotism guy” is very much like the techniques he claims Trump uses: branding Jeb as “low-energy,” etc. But to extent you think that is effective you are also conceding that Adams had a good insight!
Also, one of Adams’s biggest arguments is that most people are not acting rationally most of the time. Most people on this blog pride themselves on rationality to one degree or another. So to the extent they engage in or are convinced by labels like “magic sex hypnotism guy,” they are, like most people, most of the time, not being rational, which is precisely my point in calling it not good intellectual practice. Unless we think Trump is a model of good intellectual practice.
Personally, I’ll note that his posts on “sex hypnotism” were among the first things I read by him outside of Dilbert comics, and I found them weird and offputing. But I’m glad I didn’t just dismiss him after that since I’ve since found many other things he’s said on other issues very insightful. Considering how little marginal effort I had to expend to realize he had something of value to say outside a few weird posts, it would have been bad practice for me to have dismissed him right away, much less encourage others to completely ignore him on the basis of a catchphrase.
So, it’s certainly not that I’m defending the sex posts specifically, but rather arguing against a kind of (anti-)intellectual gotcha-ism which indeed bears a strong resemblance to political soundbites, whereby everyone gets dismissed for their weirdest, most embarrassing moment rather than engaged with, resulting in survival of the most cautious and skilled at sound-bite crafting.
Can you point to a post of his you think is excellent?
For political soundbites:
1) Since they are soundbites, they are usually out of context. It’s hard to say the hypnotism quote is out of context.
2) The soundbite doesn’t go away if the politican disavows what was said in the soundbite. If Scott Adams says “the hypnotism post was total nonsense, because X”, and appeared to be sincere about it, I’d accept it.
“If your response to that tripe is “well no one has disproved it!!1!”, I invite you to refute the time cube website.”
My response is “I think his tongue is firmly in his cheek.”
But I haven’t read enough of his stuff to be confident I am correct.
I said I wasn’t going to defend them, but re. evaluating just how crazy the “sex magic” posts are:
My impression is that they were not entirely tongue-in-cheek, though I think some of the more self-aggrandizing and prurient sounding bits are.
What I found offputing about them was not that the very idea was crazy on its face, but rather the notion of reading a middle-aged man telling me repeatedly what a great orgasm he was going to help me have.
But, on its face, the notion that one could, through verbal direction, prime/psyche people up over a period of days to expect a better-than-average orgasm with the result that many of them actually experience/remember a subjectively better-than-average orgasm is not that implausible. It may be wrong. It may feel icky to read. But it’s nowhere near Time Cube level crazy.
“Can you point to a post of his you think is excellent?”
Most of his posts are very brief and do include a fair bit of the tongue-in-cheek with the result that you generally have to read many of them over time to get a sense of what he really thinks about anything in a more systematic way. His book “How to Fail at Almost Everything…” is much better in this regard.
However, he has lots of posts which briefly make excellent points. For example, he called this “dark” thing almost immediately and was subsequently proved absolutely right, as, once I was listening for it, I noticed Tim Kaine and other Hillary representatives, as well as Hillary herself, using it at every possible opportunity.
So no sex this time, but plenty of magic. I’m still completely puzzled why you & James would think anyone even remotely in the same ballpark as rationalists would have an interest in this charlatan. He’s like an anti-gwern.
Have you read any Robert Cialdini? His new book, “Pre-Suasion,” especially, offers copious citations of psychological research. Do you also consider him to be a charlatan?
Though not as careful or measured, much of what Adams writes seems to be just off-the-cuff observations from a similar perspective, so it’s hard for me to see completely dismissing Adams, unless you think Cialdini is also crap.
(That said, if someone is interested in learning more about what Adams describes as “persuasion,” I’d recommend Cialdini’s books over anything Adams has written.)
Never heard of him. But if he covers the same topics and has even one tiny shred of intellectual honesty in his approach then why in the world would I want to read or listen to Adams over him?
“Tongue-in-cheek” sounds like a fully general excuse to me.
(N.B. The post above this one has been stealth edited.)
I just made a comment that I think was auto-deleted for including a link.
Google “Scott Adams rationality engine” for a sample of some of his pre-Trump work. He literally had a system he named the rationality engine that he used for debating topics. You can say he wasn’t doing it right and that it’s not REAL rationalism or that he’s just appropriating the language or whatever, but if you look at what he’s doing, it makes a lot of sense that a lot of people would associate him with rationalism, or even think of him as one.
It seems to me like most of the people here defending Adams are people who actually read his blog pre-Trump, and most of the attackers are people who don’t know anything about him other than “he thinks Trump is smart and that he can hypnotize you into having an orgasm”
It’s not a matter of “real” rationalism. I don’t claim Big Y’s version and its offshoots has any particularly great priority claim to that word. It’s just a matter of “this” rationalism.
Like if you were on an Ayn Rand forum and mentioned objectivism. There are other kinds of objectivism, but in that place you’d be expected to know what was meant.
In this case, Adams, not only has nothing to do with “our” version of rationalism his values, style, and interests seem nearly opposite.
As far as not having read all his posts, guilty as charged. The ones I have read lead me to think I shouldn’t invest any more time.
“(N.B. The post above this one has been stealth edited.)”
I only edit when, so far as I can tell, nothing has since been added in reply. I didn’t write the parenthetical in response to what you said, but I guess it is a response to it.
And yes, I would recommend Cialdini over Adams in general, but that doesn’t mean Adams never has anything valuable to say.
Re. this election and all his posts on Trump, his view amounts to: “Trump is a natural master at the sort of ‘influence’ and ‘persuasion’ skills described by people like Cialdini, and those skills are more important to determining election outcomes (and many other life outcomes besides) than command of facts or specific proposals.”
Though he may sometime sound like he’s being anti-rationalist when he constantly points out how non-rational people are being, there is also a sense in which he’s being quite rational: if the goal is, e. g., to win an election, and elections are decided largely on non-rational, emotional levels, then looking at what’s going on on a non-rational, emotional level is actually the most rational thing to do.
It was in response to the phrase “tongue-in-cheek” disappearing and making that sentence of the response seem a non sequitur. You could see how that would be annoying, right?
I mean, I guess. But, again, I didn’t see your reply before making the edit. I guess this is a general problem with the edit feature, and maybe I should use it less, but it also makes me more polite in another way, since I frequently edit my posts soon after I write them to try to fix what, upon reading what I wrote, feels to me like bad tone.
I agree, and would extend this principle to other public figures.
I’ve said this before (other places maybe) but Adams is the real persuader here, not Trump. I’m not sure about “master level,” since his game seems pretty transparent, as shown by the number of comments here calling him out on it, but he’s used the election to attract a lot of positive attention to himself. Start with an interesting, unusual hypothesis (Trump = master persuader), riding the coattails of the most controversial, ongoing, and attention-grabbing event of the year (Trump and the overall election), make a bunch of varied predictions some of which will probably come true (Trump will win the nomination, Clinton will have health problems, record voter turnout, etc), and keep up a stream of well-written and enticing blog posts promising secret knowledge to your audience (plus plug your book a lot).
But the best part is that he actually managed to convince what I expect is a largely liberal readership that Trump is not a raging buffoon who won by appealing to anti-establishment sentiment and outgroup hatred, but actually a subtle mastermind who they should all be in awe of. Adams’ blog almost makes you respect Trump, or at least consider it – that’s quite a hard thing to make liberals do, and why I give Adams way more credit as the great persuader than Trump, even while expecting that most of his remaining predictions about the election are going to be wrong.
“what I expect is a largely liberal readership”
Curious as to where that assumption is coming from.
I used to read (and comment) his blog regularly before the Trump stuff and I think the community there was mostly libertarian-leaning. I would honestly say it wasn’t *that* different from the community here.
Any thoughts about whether Putin is a more powerful persuader than Trump? It seems to me that Trump is giving more to Putin than he’s getting back, and Putin is actually in charge in a more challenging environment.
Putin’s persuasion techniques likely utilize far more wet works than Trump’s.
No doubt, but it takes persuasive ability to get into the position to have other people be violent for you.
Back in 2011, Noah Smith argued against the “Great Vacation” theory of unemployment by noting that if there were all these people voluntarily withdrawing from the labor market then that would indicate lower supply which should result in higher wages. But we didn’t have higher wages so that indicates a demand side problem. Obviously conditions are different now, but I think I agree with him. However, isn’t his reasoning flawed? Lets say that unemployment was down but productivity was way down. Shouldn’t we expect the productivity numbers to overpower the lower supply of labor?
Someone would have to look at many other things he has written, but I’m reasonably certain Noah knows that and didn’t mention it because labor productivity did not drastically decrease after 2008.
But productivity growth has slowed since 2008.
Slowing growth =/ “productivity is way down”
“Productivity is way down” isn’t exactly well defined but productivity growth is a lot slower than it used to be, is it not?
What constitutes an electoral landslide? Scott Adams predicted that Trump would win in a landslide. How do we adjudicate that? (He also predicted that Trump would be seen as “running unopposed” by the time the conventions were over.) Above, James Miller reiterates this prediction.
Does it mean winning 55-45? 60-40? What if many vote for a third party? Should we then look to the difference? ie, should 50-40 counts like 55-45? Or should it be based on electoral votes? Perhaps red pixels in the Mercator projection?
Well, the Wikipedia article uses electoral votes and apparently considers anything above 75% to be a landslide victory (the lowest victory listed comes in at 76%). That’s good enough for me.
Question about that Wikipedia page. The page shows 14 electoral college landslides from 1900 to 1988. That was over the course of 23 presidential elections, so based on this data it seems about 64% of presidential elections ended in landslides. However, since 88 we’ve had 5 elections (Trump vs Hillary will be our 6th). None of these have been landslides, and Trump vs Hillary is not shaping up to be a landslide either, at least not yet. The probability of seeing 6 non-landslides in a row, assuming each election has an independent 64% probability of being a landslide, is less than 1%. Is this just a coincidence?
Possible theory that explains this phenomena: Just like every industry, the media industry is getting smarter over time. Presidential elections are a topic viewers are interested in, so the media tries to create as lengthy a campaign season as possible by e.g. baselessly speculating about who might choose to run. Additionally, close races are much better for viewership than landslides. So whenever one candidate starts to do well, the media will attack that candidate to even things out and maintain viewer interest.
I’m probably reading too much in to the data… the 1800s only had 7 landslides, and the end of the 1800s coincides with a landslide-free period that’s longer than our current one.
The difference in ’88 forward is ideological sorting and homogenization of the parties, which has gradually become further and further baked in.
When parties more heterogenous, and their were liberal and conservative Democrats and Republicans, a Democrat in New York or Illinois felt no particular constraint in voting for a Republican from California.
If looking at voter turnout, which Adams also predicted to be record-setting, it looks like breaking 65% would both be the highest since 1908 and beat the very high (compared to recent decades) 2008 turnout.
If going by margin of victory of the popular vote, > 20% would put the winner in the top six (including themselves), > 15% in the top 12, and > 10% in the top 20 – for all U.S. elections. So probably somewhere in the > 15-20% victory margin range.
Personally I’d like to hear any kind of remotely quantitative Bayesian evidence for predicting a landslide victory for Trump. Planning on listening to the Adams interview in a bit. Considering it requires disagreeing with the conventional wisdom, most analysts, prediction markets, and fivethirtyeight.com, the prediction would seem to require extraordinary evidence beyond just “I’ve got a hunch.”
> Considering it requires disagreeing with the conventional wisdom, most analysts, prediction markets, and fivethirtyeight.com
I don’t on balance think it’s going to happen, but I am willing to give some amount of consideration to it, in significant part because I expect the errors made by all these groups are correlated with each other and nonrandom. That’s what happened with Brexit, after all.
Earlier in the year, I placed some weight on the possibility of Hillary getting indicted about her emails.
Currently, I place some weight on the possibility of something drastic happening to her health. Presidential campaigns are hard on the human body.
Agree that Adams is a dummy. But those two scenarios hopefully serve as examples.of plausible reasons someone might believe, maybe assisted by an error in reasoning or two, that Trump is likely to solidly win.
Something significant happening to Clinton (e.g. conspicuous health problems, yet another major scandal) would change the analysis. That’s the way I think Trump is most likely to win – Clinton falls into a coma or something before the election. Could be wrong, but aside from that I’m inclined to just go with what fivethirtyeight.com says – they’ve got a pretty good track record so far, and will only have a more accurate prediction as the actual election gets closer. Though their odds have been changing in favor of Trump – he’s currently at a 40% chance, up from a low of 10.8% back in mid-August.
Three things that I think are going to be factors:
A. Trump has generally done better than polls and pundits have predicted, hasn’t he?
B. In several European elections, the anti-immigration candidate/party has done a few percentage points better than predicted. Brexit ditto.
C. Predictions markets have been off, too – they predicted Brexit would fail.
I’m mentally adjusting Trump’s chance of winning (according to Silver) upwards by a few points on account of the above.
A. pundits yes, polls know. Trump has generally done exactly as well as polls have predicted, until it became mathematically impossible for someone to pass him (at which point I think the guys planning to vote for Cruz or Kasich just lost heart and stopped going to vote). The argument by the pundits pessimistic on him was that the polls were overselling him.
Didn’t 538 predict for a while, based on polling, that he had slim chances of taking the Republican nomination?
Of course, that doesn’t prove 538 wrong – we could live in the world where something with a 1% chance of happening happened.
Fivethirtyeight has also been pretty explicit that the primaries are much harder to predict than the general election.
That is true.
I’m still expecting a bump for reason B.
@dndrsn – I don’t think their purely poll-based predictions ever went much below 40%. Nate Silver said the model was very inaccurate for primaries though, and judgement might be better (the first part is definitely true, based on past primaries).
Nate Silver gave Trump a 2% chance of winning the primaries. When those predictions didn’t pan out, he later said that they hadn’t built a proper statistical model when they released. (Raises the question: how many times has he made a non-model prediction that didn’t turn out so badly he had to issue a correction later?)
So, why read Scott Adams? Because we have entered the bizarro world where his track record is at least as good as the professional political pundits.
Bizarro world indeed.
Let’s put it this way. If a couple years ago, someone had said “Donald Trump is going to be the 2016 Republican candidate, and thanks to part of his fan base being a motley crew of far-right internet people, the Democrats will do a news release about how Pepe the Frog is a white nationalist symbol, and going into October he will be closing the gap on Hillary despite such exploits as insulting the family of a dead soldier” …
Are you going to think that person is that much more out of it if they go on to add “and one person who predicted Trump’s winning the nomination was Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who is also a sex hypnotist”?
Sex hypnotism is the most normal thing here.
I can see two possible arguments to predict Trump winning by a large margin.
1. Because of Trump’s negative public image, lots of people who are planning to vote for him don’t say so. I don’t know if polls vs performance in the primaries fit this or not.
2. Trump did very well in the Republican debates. One could argue that he is a much more competent demagogue than Clinton, hence likely to do very well debating her, pushing his poll results from nearly even with her to well ahead of her.
Neither of those strikes me as very likely, but I don’t think they are impossible.
2 seems possible, but the accuracy of the polls on Trump’s support in the primaries is decent evidence against 1.
Although perhaps the sort of people who would vote in Republican primaries are more resigned to public deplorability than the electorate at large.
The fivethirtyeight statistical model is also weighted by the reliability of the polls, so they’ve probably considered such factors and taken them into account when assigning the weightings.
At least the debates will probably be entertaining as hell, if completely shameful and embarrassing for the entire country.
In the UK that’s known as the Shy Tory factor.
Somehow I find this hilarious.
I think it should be based on Congress. If you win the Presidency _and_ your party gets filibuster-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, that is a landslide.
No, Reagan won in a landslide in ’84, winning 49 states, but Democrats retained control of the house.
Landslide is a shorthand for “Electoral College Landslide”.
Gary Johnson said something stupid again. =(
I’ve been bullish on Gary compared to most libertarians and right-wingers because I have bleeding heart tendencies. But he’s showing a worrying pattern of thoughtlessness.
So the attack dogs are going after him now they’ve decided he’s taking more votes away from Clinton than Trump, huh?
The right-leaning libertarians I follow on Twitter have been loudly making this declaration for a couple weeks now, up to and including that the Aleppo question was a set-up for this exact purpose.
It’s tempting to see what Ken and the Popehat gang is up to now, but it’s the same impulse that makes people watch car crash/cult suicide aftermath videos on liveleak.
Why? I’ve always found Popehat to be unusually good and reasonable.
They haven’t posted anything election-related in the last couple of weeks.
I second the ‘good and reasonable’ endorsement, and I’d identify as more of a right-libertarian.
You haven’t noticed him becoming more and more frantic and unhinged at his Johnson’s dysfunction? And the disintegration of his NEVERTRUMP gang?
No. Link?
This seems to me to be a much more innocent mistake. Though no doubt the media will pounce on it.
Everybody makes stupid mistakes on occasion. That’s not really a problem. It’s both normal and something that won’t affect job performance (elementary mistakes like that will be caught by advisors long before they make it into policy).
Not knowing what Allepp is is more worrying, because it points towards a lack of general knowledge, or perhaps a lack of interest in current events. To some extend that’s also something that advisors can help with, but a President who often doesn’t know what is going on will definitely be less effective.
Yeah, this is trivial.
Agreed. If this gets as much attention as Aleppo it suggests that the media really are after him.
Well, it is a trivial mistake, and probably down to the rush of having to have an immediate response to news that is still breaking.
But you could argue this is more serious than the Aleppo slip, because this is domestic news of very great local and national interest. And taking the opportunity to slip in “I was governor of New Mexico” to remind people that yes, I’m now putting in for the top job, plus a bit of flattery to first responders (vote for me, folks, and your friends and family vote for me too, you can see I’ll be on your side!) in the middle of what should be focussed on the event and the places and people attacked is somewhat opportunistic – then again, politicians are opportunists and if they come across as vultures using tragedy to profit, that’s the risk they run.
A little slip on its own isn’t much. But a chain of little slips? He really can’t afford any more, not unless he does want the media deciding he’s a human disaster and portraying him that way.
I think it was fairly obviously a slip of the tongue though, not a lack of knowledge. I would wager that he meant to say there were no deaths, but accidentally said there were no injuries.
Oh yeah, a slip of the tongue plainly. But a guy getting some attention because he’s running against Trump and Clinton can’t afford little slips – or not to make a habit of them, because they will add up in the public mind.
So what was he like as Governor of New Mexico? Are his former
subjectspublic whom he served “10/10, would recommend” or “let the nation have him, at least that will get him out of our hair”? 🙂I realize now that I misread your comment. I thought you were saying this was a worse mistake, not that it was a more damaging mistake.
As for what New Mexicans thought of him, when he was reelected he won by 10%, and he was running as a Republican in a fairly strong Democratic state, so I assume he was fairly well liked.
I haven’t even heard of it aside from this link (and I heard about the aleppo thing from three independent sources), so looks like the media actually did not give this an inappropriate amount of attention.
Why is the newspaper comic strip business the most pro-incumbent business in the universe?
There are obviously innumerable funnier (if often more niche, admittedly) webcomics out there which may, in a few cases, be equally or more profitable, but I’m pretty sure most webcomics do not make as much money as comics like Beetle Bailey, most of which are by dead people and their sons and grandsons milking the same sad punchlines decade after decade.
I mean, I used to enjoy Peanuts and, of course Calvin and Hobbes (the sole known case of someone gracefully bowing out while ahead), and there are occasionally a few chuckles elsewhere, but it’s mostly terrible.
But what I really want to focus on is: yeah, I know newspapers are struggling and read mostly by old people; I know businesses in general are risk averse and stick with what they know (Hollywood sticking with franchises and established big names), but really, the level of stagnation in this particular area seems almost staggering. Like you could write an economic paper on what went wrong or something.
A) Few webcomics or webcomic artists are “fit for print” for a variety of reasons. Format, reliability (nobody wants to have to print “sorry, Miura’s on hiatus again” notices), content, etc.
B) Everyone who would enjoy that content is already getting it online, and probably not subscribing to newspapers at all. There’s no actual marketing opportunity there. Are you going to tell a bunch of 20 year olds they can pay $400/year (really) for a NYT subscription to read the same comics they’re reading right now?
C) A lot of newspaper subscribers are legacy. People (and companies) that buy them out of habit/to appear respectable, etc. Making large changes to your format in the hopes of getting more readers risks some of those subscribers thinking “wait, how much am I paying for this rag every month?”
D) Most of these papers are already doing “youth outreach” stuff in their free digital editions. The NYT does manga reviews, for example, to appeal to 30+ year old librarians who want to be Hip.
“wait, how much am I paying for this rag every month?”
My dad claims that he stopped paying for his newspaper subscription years ago, but they just keep delivering it. I guess they can claim their circulation numbers are still up?
Nothing went wrong.
You aren’t the audience (nor am I).
Who is the audience? Old people who fear all change?
Well, yes and no.
Newspaper comics have to be grockable by everyone who opens them. Unless we are talking about some niche weekly paper or something.
So comics will be necessarily dominated by a form of lowest common denominator humor. This is also true of half-hour broadcast TV comedies. The most popular ones engage in what we would call tired, but others would call time-tested, tropes that are mined for reliable laughs.
Most people who pick up a newspaper are perfectly happy to get a reliable small chuckle out of the comics. And it’s been that way for a long time. Every now and then something new gets thrown in the mix, but mostly “the old reliable” tropes got mined by whatever comic was there.
Newspapers in general are in trouble, and get fewer and fewer new (young) readers, making it even less likely you get an editor who will do more than add a comic here or there.
Calvin & Hobbes is not unique. The Far Side and Bloom County are two more comics that lasted only the 80s (though Breathed’s career is more complicated).
Yeah, I had forgotten about The Far Side.
I’d add The Far Side there.
Webcomics have pretty much sucked away both the supply of and demand for new newspaper comic talent. Artists don’t want to deal with the censorship and other loss of creative control, editors don’t see any reason to include anyone new when the audience is satisfied with the same old strips. If your dream in life was to sell out and become the next Jim Davis, too bad.
ETA: I’m thinking specifically of Frank Cho and Aaron McGruder, both of whom had brief, controversial runs in the funny pages around the turn of the millennium, and neither of whom is even imaginable as a newspaper comic artist today.
I attended a speech by the editor of one of the larger newspapers in the capital of my province. She said that they most hate mail she ever received was when they forgot to add a comics section. I think a lot of people would be mad if they dropped any specific comic.
I feel like print newspapers are stuck in a “lame and irrelevant” spiral whereby they’re too afraid to alienate their small remaining audience by changing anything yet guarantee they’ll continue their descent into irrelevance by never changing anything.
Aversion to comics page changes long predates the Internet. A newspaper comic was a known gravy train when Siegel and Shuster were shopping Superman around. (They wanted to be the next Flash Gordon.) Though they couldn’t get any bites, and so took a chance on the new monthly ten cent comic book format. (Whether that was a good choice depends when you ask them.)
I was going to say it predates the decline of the newspaper, but that’s been going on for the better part of a century. When I was growing up, we had two competing newspapers. But decades earlier a major city might have half a dozen or more. I don’t know if there was more frequent change on the comics page in the days of the Yellow Kid, but I’m inclined to bet it was pretty risk averse even then.
I realize you didn’t actually claim otherwise, but just for the record, Mort Walker is alive. Old, but alive, to quote Morgenstern.
Also, if you find yourself having trouble enjoying newspaper comics, you should check out The Comics Curmudgeon.
I don’t know. I remember talk about newspapers choosing to have fewer comics pages and printing the comics smaller, which led to less flexibility for the comics creators.
I would leave the possibility open that newspapers have a death wish, but then it would be necessary to explain why.
Newspapers are in a death spiral, which isn’t quite the same thing as a death wish. They absolutely have to print more and more blatant, intrusive, annoying advertising, or they can’t make payroll and they shut down next month. They absolutely have to keep printing the sorts of content the audience values, in a conveniently accessible format, or the audience will migrate to getting that same content via the internet over the next few years. Except the only place for the blatantly intrusive advertising to go is in the same place the desirable content already is, meaning the audience starts to leave and the advertisers start to demand lower rates for the same content and you have to cram in still more advertising…
Comics getting shrunk is part of this dynamic. As is the part where the Sunday comics sheet is hidden inside an unlabeled advertising sheaf, forcing the reader who wants the comics to at least flip through every sheaf of advertising they’d otherwise roundfile at first glance.
So, a question to the readers here about that most important topic, Harry Potter fanfiction, specifically, the Harry Potter Sacrifices arc, by Lightning on the Wave.
I got pointed at this set of fanfic off of (IIRC) someone’s Tumblr. I picked up a copy of them in .doc form a while back, got nerd-sniped working out the most efficient way to convert .doc files to something Calibre-readable, and ended up the entire honking lot of them on my Kindle. I’ve been chipping away at them for a while, through a mixture of genuine interest, horror (very rarely the horror the author expects me to have), and occasional hate-reading.
Has anyone else here been pointed to this? I mean, on one hand, I have to applaud the author for simply getting down such a long and coherent story, even in the relatively simple medium of Harry Potter fanfic. On the other hand…as I crest into Book 5, the phrase “The Left Behind of Harry Potter fanfic” is coming to mind more and more strongly. I feel like this series is an encapsulation of a subculture’s bad habits of thought just as the Left Behind books are, and wonder what other opinions people might have on it.
Has anyone else read this? Does anyone else have any opinion on the series as a whole?
Have you considered setting up an automatic timer to get an idea how many hours you’ve spent reading harry potter fanfiction?
I’ve never been pointed to it, and the words “eventual HPDM Slash” and “Harry’s twin Connor is the Boy Who Lived” set off some alarm bells, so under most circumstances I’d probably skip it.
But I tried reading it anyway, and the badfic alarms kept getting worse. Everyone in Connor’s life has been preparing to fight the Dark Lord even though they have no way of knowing he’s returning (it sort of gives you the feeling they’ve been reading ahead in the script). Harry has been studying magic long before going to Hogwarts and is almost strong enough to fight Death Eaters. Wizards can sense each others’ power levels like we’re in Dragonball Z. A brief stop at the Potions Classroom station of canon, to show off the new and improved Harry some more. And that’s where I gave up, at about 15 pages in.
I can see why you might call it an encapsulation of the subculture’s bad habits, because there’s just a lot of warning flags here. Like, it’s not bad on a technical level, there are no spelling or grammar errors, but everything about this fic is telling me to get out now before things get worse.
Yeah, you nailed a few of the big ones early on. I mean, I was fine with the drastically-revised magic system and world history (even if it did strip out most of the Harry Potter-ness), and the HPDM slash isn’t terrible in and of itself…but all of them added together are screaming warnings in the tongue of Shibboleth.
I may post a review somewhere if I manage to make it through the entire series, but I would be really interested to know what anyone else who’s read it, especially people like me who aren’t in its target audience, thought of it.
I tend to stay far away from Harry Potter fanfic these days so my only advice would be “don’t” 🙂
Though I have seen some very favourable reviews of it, so it might be okay writing. Still doesn’t tempt me into reading it, though.
(The furore over “The Cursed Child” is helping keep me far away from Potterverse; I’ve seen one person who liked and defended it versus a whole lot who think it’s really dreadful).
I quite liked the Cursed Child. :/ I thought it was a worthy addition to the canon.
I don’t understand why people waste their dear time reading things that they know are likely to be terrible? And I really do not know why you bother with Harry Potter fanfiction. Not only is fanfiction generally not worth reading, for all the same reasons that no self-published, or published by vanity press or by niche ideological or religious mini-publishers are, with more added on, but we’re talking about a series whose original books are fairly terrible, so I’ve never wasted my time reading them.
Please don’t feed the blatantly obvious troll.
Robert Liguori doesn’t seem like a “blatantly obvious troll”, and how was I “feeding” him?
Well played!
I mean… sometimes trolls tell the truth.
If a book is self-published or vanity-published, it means no publisher was willing to pay for it, which is a fairly good signal of poor quality. The existence of publishers filters out all the good works from the pool.
But if fanfiction is self-published, well, that’s the only option. Publishers can’t take fanfiction, because of copyright issues. That means that, while the pool of fanfiction does contain a lot of unpublishable crap, it also contains some actually good writers, who could probably have gotten published if they had chosen to write original fiction instead of fanfic. And thanks to technology and user recommendations, it’s quite easy to filter out the good authors from the crap.
I’ll ignore the obvious bait and point out something more interesting: Fanfic can be better than the works that it’s based on. Good authors can take apart a work of fiction, pick out the good parts, cut out stupid or contrived plot points, patch holes in the worldbuilding, and generally make it a better story than the original.
(Fun anecdote: Jim Butcher said that he got the idea for the Codex Alera books when someone bet him that he couldn’t write a good book based on a lame idea. The challenger gave him a prompt of “The Lost Roman Legions, with Pokémon” and he turned it into an awesome fantasy adventure.)
Publishers can’t take fanfiction, because of copyright issues.
While that is true, there are the authorised sequels etc. (such as writing a follow-up to “Gone With The Wind”) and the unauthorised works like Wide Sargasso Sea, a response to Jane Eyre, as well as the rash of catchpenny crazes like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies etc.
You get a lot of it in genre fiction, like the unstoppable flood of Holmes pastiches – some excellent, but some really atrocious. I’ve read fanfiction that is, as you say, much better than these official and legal professionally written things. Ditto with Robert B. Parker’s various detective series which are being carried on by new writers, and there have been authorised new adventures of Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot.
As for turning fanfiction into original fiction, there’s the Cassandra Claire affaire where she took her Harry Potter fanfiction, filed off the serial numbers, and had it professionally published as original fiction under the series title of The Mortal Instruments.
I have certainly read fanfiction that is much better than the professional version, and I’m sure it’s a training ground for people who want to go on to become professional writers. But it is free writing distributed for the price of nothing by people who love a particular fandom and are inspired to make something by it, and it’s fun for most people, both readers and writers. It’s art, even if the majority of it is low art.
@ Deiseach –
I too have read fanfic that is heads and shoulders above the average ‘pro’ fiction, and better than the original, to boot. However, I’m going to quibble on a couple aspects.
Firstly, Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the ur example of a Fandom, and also tumbled into that happy period before any of Walt Disney’s works began earning money. So authorized or not, SH fic abounds, and is subjected to the same standards as the rest of pro-fic – does the publisher think it will sell? Likewise, Jane Austin.
Secondly, the estate of Margarette Mitchell attempted to sue the pants off the author of Wind Done Gone and in the end settled out of court.
Thirdly, the list of people who admit to using fanfic as training wheels is increasing annually, but as 50 Shades of Grey amply demonstrates, the drama of Fandom is also increasingly wrapt up in those publishing histories. There is more to fic than just art.
Having said all that – heck yes, it’s art – and yes, it has a tradition separate from “professional fiction”. I would argue, though, that there is a strong sense of “doing it for the love of the art” running through literary fiction of all genres, and this is, in part, why the late lamented affair d’canines came into being – many professional writers come from socio-economic and fannish backgrounds that resist the idea of the reader is happy, the author gets paid, and push back against populist work that reflects the need to move units off the shelf.
I’ve read some excellent self-published fiction.
HPMOR– it’s uneven, but where it’s good it’s very good. Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation, an impressive account of Hermione’s year after the end of Deathly Hallows. The main thing wrong with it is that it isn’t finished, and I’ve pretty much given up hope.
The Martian was self-published. Marko Kloos’ milsf was self-published, and I liked the first three books a lot, though I grant I’ve bogged down in the fourth book. (Warning, the story is good, but the science is inexcusably bad.)
Torchship is self-published, and quite a bit of fun.
I would like to see an award for best self-published sf.
Does anyone know any intelligent blogs or other links about religion/spirituality specifically for atheists? I’m interested in picking up religion for mental health reasons – I’m not coping well with existential angst, getting older, fear of dying, all of that good stuff. Being an atheist, which is the intellectually “correct” position in my mind, has not brought me any happiness nor has it led me to making “better” life decisions. I believe that if I acted as though religion were true, I could eventually convince myself of it and thereby improve my well-being. I don’t care about being intellectually correct, I just want to stop lying awake at night worrying about death.
Unfortunately, I’ve spent so much time being an atheist that most religious or spiritual material is….icky to me. I don’t even know where to start to find communities that are full of religious people who decided to believe those things on purpose, rather than being convinced of its inherent correctness or whatever.
I recommend Book 3 of De Rerum Natura, ideally in the Martin Smith translation. It was composed for someone in precisely your situation. The section on the fear of death begins at line 830.
I’m not really completely sure what you’re looking for, but if you’re looking for blogs that are less likely to seem icky to an atheist, I’m an atheist and I read Fred Clark’s blog, as well as Adam Kotsko’s. I’d probably recommend Clark more than Kotsko, and probably neither will work for your purposes if you are at all politically conservative, as while they may not be in the habit of saying things that offend atheist sensibilities, they are both pretty liberal and connect that to their theology.
This is both a good and a bad time (the former because it’s more available, the latter because it’s trendy and there’s a lot of bullshit practitioners) but have you considered finding an ayahuasca group? Traditional religions are a bit oversold as solutions to the problems you’re dealing with, and given your current outlook a sub-cognitive approach seems much more likely to be effective.
Epistemic Status: when I was nine I decided I was probably an atheist; my actual opinion now is that the question is foolish, but most conceptions of God that people evangelize strike me as unworthy of worship. I’ve also never really experienced the issues you describe as a part of atheism.
How’s the rest of your life? You can deliberately cultivate a community that will give many of the social benefits of religion. It will be harder than just joining a church(/synagogue/mosque/temple of another kind), and it won’t directly address any fear of death etc, but it will give you a sense of belonging and relevance, plus a set of things to think about other than dying.
On another, similar note, the deliberate decision to focus on improving the world immediately around me (on, essentially, universalizability grounds) also helped with some fear of the immensity of the task of fixing everything.
The two religious authors I like are C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. They have not persuaded me to be a Christian, or even a theist, but they come across as intelligent and thoughtful people and good (in GKC’s case extraordinarily good) writers.
Chesterton’s probably the foremost writer in the English language. Some of his essays are entirely without peer in my experience, and The Man Who Was Thursday isn’t far behind. I think he can be thoroughly enjoyed almost regardless of anyone’s beliefs.
(I’d argue the other main contenders are Shakespeare and Stevenson, in case someone wants referents to what’s a fairly strong assertion.)
You’ve piqued my interest. Could you name a couple?
I’ll suggest the collection All Things Considered, and the specific essays (from outside that collection) “On Lying In Bed” and “The Toy Theatre”.
Oh, and just for safety’s sake, let me underscore that this recommendation is on the basis of the writing as such. If you expect to be blown away by the ideas… well, you might be, but that’s not what’s advertised, anyway. The writing, on the other hand, is sparkling and unmatched. If you disagree with that, I am ready to be blamed. 😀
The thing to remember about Chesterton is that he’s a journalist. He’s not an intellectual, he studied as an art student for a bit then dropped out of that and got into writing for a living. So he presents things from the level of “ordinarily intelligent and reasonably well-educated man”, not a specialist, a theologian, a philosopher or anything more advanced than that.
His autobiography is great fun:
So enjoy the writing 🙂
Deiseach, I have to quibble with “ordinarily intelligent”. I agree with all the rest, but it seems perfectly obvious to me that Chesterton was quite extraordinarily intelligent; one of England’s greatest intellectual giants of the 20th century.
Intellectual, on the other hand, specialist; certainly not that. Very much an ordinary man in that sense.
Somewhere there is a comment by Shaw on Chesterton’s book about Shaw. It amounts to “every fact he could have checked he got wrong, everything that required a perceptive understanding he got right.”
Good heavens, what an idiot I look. It ought to read “greatest mental giants”, of course.
Half joking here but become a transhumanist.
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I kinda think that transhumanism has made me worse! If death isn’t something inevitable but is instead something that can and should be defeated, there’s absolutely no comfort in platitudes and it feels even more horrible.
Are you signed up for cryonics?
I’m in a similar situation: I’ve been attending various churches lately and attended my first ever Roman Catholic mass yesterday… while still being a near-atheist agnostic.
> I don’t care about being intellectually correct
In that case, just go to church or synagogue or whatever you feel is appropriate and participate (but do so honestly; e.g. don’t take communion). If asked, just say you’re an interested agnostic. (Being good rationalists, we know that no belief should be assigned probability 0, so this is technically true.)
After a while you might find yourself starting to believe. I suspect this might happen to me.
But in any case, I’ve come to believe that taking part in religious rituals is a normal part of being human. The feeling I get in church now is a sort of gladness at being surrounded by people of good will; I feel uplifted — not necessarily by the presence of God, but by the presence of humanity.
What’s the probability that there is at least one belief that should be assigned a probability of zero?
Why not just join a church, synagogue, mosque, etc? Just fake it til you make it. Maybe if you hear enough about how God loved us so much that He sent His Son to suffer and die for us, or whatever, you’ll start to believe it.
Or, just see if you can take a basic comparative religions course at a university. The study of religion, outside of theology departments, tends to be quite secular.
Comparative religion courses won’t help; the issues he’s facing are not knowledge gaps. A happier, better life is a matter of practice and habit.
I’m going to agree with you on the “fake it till you make it” part (or, as lambdaphagy would put, LARPing). Learning to trust God generally involves a whole lot of spiritual trust fall exercises, and I suspect most common religious practices are beneficial even without the belief component. Either way, meeting regularly with well-adjusted, virtuous people is going to rub off on you in a positive sense. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
The good(?) news is that humans are pretty good at deciding to believe in things. Start acting like they are true, and the intellect will follow, much like smiling will make you happier*. It is not logical, but it is often true.
*Unless that was overturned with the priming stuff.
I found that approaching religion from a secular standpoint made me less atheistic. I find that a lot of people – even people raised religiously – don’t actually know that much about religion in general, or even theirs in specific.
I’ll second David’s author suggestions. Try particularly Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” and Lewis’s “Surprised by Joy”.
Also well worth a look is the Ship of Fools forum. It is a forum rather than a blog, very wide-ranging, and populated mostly by Christians who don’t take themselves *too* seriously. Extremely well-moderated and interesting, and you are certain to find a sympathetic ear or fifteen.
Religion may not help with fear of death. If you’re lying awake worrying about your mortality, consider if this might be something to do with depression.
It’s hard to look the fact of your own inevitable death in the face, and even harder, as you get older, to realise the time behind you is greater than the time ahead of you, and death is coming closer all the time.
Religion helps, but it may not be the kind of “well, if I convince myself I have an immortal soul, then accepting I’ll die won’t be so bad as that’s only my body, I will continue on” reassurance you may be looking for. It’s entirely possible to believe in the soul and an afterlife and still lie awake at night thinking about death and the shortness of life left to you.
Most major religions have scary afterlives as well as heavenly ones, so you may add a new worry. A religion that offers a nice and assured afterlife is
Wicca scrolling down from there finds Theosophy. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity have savior gods each with his own heaven to take you to (Krishna, the Pure Land Buddha, and Christ, respectively).
Of all these, only Christianity requires intellectual belief in certain doctrines.
You’ve stated you don’t care as much about truth-value, but regardless I would recommend Derek Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons”. He starts from thought experiments (teletransporters, callosotomies, etc) and derives truths about the nature of identity which are deeply unintuitive and fundamentally change the way you will think about yourself and your own death. It’s hardcore philosophy reading and if that presents a barrier to entry I would recommend skipping the first third of the book about the properties of consequentialism and jump right into the thought experiment sections. Should be able to find them without too much trouble.
I’m also surprised nobody has mentioned Sam Harris. His main focus is meditation but the broader concept is spirituality for atheists. Consider listening to this reading covering chapter 1 of his book, and if it catches your interest you can dive in more fully.
First, it isn’t possible to alieve something on purpose. You can create a highly functional lie, pretend to yourself that you believe something, but deep down inside you’ll know for certain that it’s a lie, and your discontent shan’t go away. What you are trying to explicitly do is to force yourself into doublethink, and that requires a certain obliviousness which attempting to do it consciously makes impossible.
Second, even when doublethink is successful, it is a kind of violence against the self and a repression of the intellect; my sincere request would be to not do it.
You may well ask, “OK, but what then? What do I do about the problems? Are these not the only options I have? Are my only options not a simulacrum of belief on one hand, and depression on the other?”, and the answer is that absolutely not; you’ve operating under a totally false dichotomy, probably the result of not knowing about the options. It is definitely possible to transcend the fear of death while still alive, but neither ‘atheism’ nor the various ‘mainstream’ religions (or non-mainstream whacko cults, for that matter) can teach you how to do it. It is understandable that you’d do so; (I suspect) I know how uncomfortable and even painful the state you find yourself in can be.
You are in luck, and have some august company; these are the same questions that troubled the Buddha, and this discontent is also the starting point of the actual ‘spiritual path’ (I use the term because it’s the only one I know; please don’t reify it) the initial goad for which is almost always the discontent that you now exhibit. Classically, it is death, disease, old age, and finally the possibility of something more that drive this process. ‘Rationalists’ and ‘atheists’ find themselves in the (very uncomfortable and depressing) intermediate state – they have pierced the cocoon of comfort that the popular religions provide (this is, in fact, their psychological purpose and primary draw of those systems), and find themselves facing these realities naked and head-on without the possibility that the suffering they bring may in fact have a ‘solution’ that doesn’t just consist of using comforting BS to numb yourself to reality. It is notable that the thing the Buddha saw after seeing death, disease, and old age was a sadhu – and ascetic, a renunciate – due to which he opened himself to the possibility that there may, in fact, be something more he could do, that perhaps suffering could be transcended. (Without this possibility, you get stuck in a depressed half-life, which I think is the misfortune of some of the best rationalists, IMO.)
Again, you are in luck; there is. Starting from the very starting point that you have, other people have in fact made the journey out of suffering (though not pain; they are not the same), some with guidance and some on their own, have left behind valuable advice for people in your position, and a number of such people exist today and can guide you at the points where you need it.
I see that you are still looking outside yourself for solace and succor – with the idea that some religion, something out there, shall provide a means to alleviate your suffering. Note that though outside support may be absolutely necessary to you now, and you should not hesitate to take it as and when required, eventually you shall (have to) recognise that the process that you are going through is your own, that your life is your own, and that this is not just me preaching but a structural truth of the human condition. (And please, no doublethink; that’s a terrible and self-negating abdication of your own authority and life.)
Partially because of the false dichotomy under which (I think) you’re operating, I see that you’re ‘prematurely optimising’, in a sense – reaching for a solution without properly being with the problem, perhaps because it feels too painful to be with the problem. The thing is, this leads to an obviously sub-optimal solution – that of reaching for a ‘mainstream’ religion – and I’m afraid you may waste years on that pursuit without it actually doing anything for you except wasting your time and energy, the only things you really have. You cannot ‘untake’ the Red pill of honest questioning that undid the mainstream religions for you, I’m afraid; you’ve outgrown them, and you can’t ‘ungrow’ until they fit again. The only way for you now is forward, not back – and going back is impossible in any case.
Based purely on what you’re telling me, and presuming that your discontent is intense (it definitely sounds like it) and your search sincere, I’d suggest starting with Sam Harris’ book ‘Waking Up’, followed by Jed McKenna’s Enlightenment trilogy (please read the whole trilogy) as an introduction and an orientation. The latter is useful not merely for its practice advice (which I find somewhat ‘dry’) or specific content, but for the various ways in which it demolishes the BS that tends to accrete around things ‘spiritual’. The third book also deals explicitly with the stage/state you find yourself in.
My own search, to try to make sense of my experiences during and after a meditation retreat (to which I had gone with no expectations and which I thought would at most be something nice to try – and which I definitely did not expect would completely shake up my life and identity) led me to the practice tradition of Shaiva Tantra; or rather, I kept searching until something made sense, and this was the first thing that did. After that, things really ‘clicked’ for me. This may not click for you; I don’t know what will. Finding something that does is also part of the process. In case you’re interested (and I am by no means implying that you should be, this is just the system I’ve found made sense of things, rings true, and works for me right now), I’d recommend two things to begin with: the book ‘Tantra Illuminated’, by Christopher Wallis, and the 40-Day Awareness Challenge to get a taste of what practice is and what it does, when it comes around in January next year. Additionally, you can look at the three videos (in order): What is the Purpose of Yoga, What is Awakening, and 8 Pitfalls on the Path of Awakening.
(Speaking purely for myself, meditation in general and the Shaiva Tantrik tradition in particular has been absolutely transformative in my own life. I am much calmer, less anxious, more open, just happier in general, and life is more vivid as well. I’m also less prone to BS, both others’ and my own.)
For actual practice recommendations, you have a variety of options. If you prefer a somewhat more dry, less ‘spiritual’ sounding approach that is reliant almost entirely on your own effort, then Adyashanti’s ‘The Way of Liberation’ (freely available on his website) is quite concise (I’m tempted to call it ‘enlightenment in ~45 pages’), and may even be a complete teaching. You will, of course, require more specific things as you go along – I’d suggest at least Adya’s book ‘True Meditation’ to go along with it.
There is a large variety of Buddhist traditions, of varying quality; and many others besides. It is possible to spend years in a difficult search – I did, at least two, before I found what ‘clicked’ for me – and my recommendations are meant to help guide your search in the right direction.
If the only I do with this post is to convince you to re-evaluate what you’re proposing doing to yourself, and consider that ‘doublethink+religion’ and ‘depression’ aren’t your only two options, and that I have made the best effort that I can to let you know that wasting years on uncomfortably repressing your doubts and playing along with a religion that you do not believe in is not your only alternative to depression, and that you are in a particularly painful stage of the natural process of human growth and that there is a next step and that you are damn well capable of taking it (and the next ones after that, if you so choose) and ‘coming out the other side’ (so to speak) then I shall consider myself to have succeeded (even if you decide to go ahead and do this unfortunate thing anyway).
Or maybe everything I said is totally inapplicable to your situation, and finding a ‘mainstream’ religion and numbing out with the feeling of community that you think it’ll give you is exactly what would be right for you; what do I know about you other than this short post, after all, and who am I to tell?
I wish you good luck. If you have further questions, feel free to ask – I’d be happy to answer them, if I can.
Aneesh Mulye – “First, it isn’t possible to [believe] something on purpose. You can create a highly functional lie, pretend to yourself that you believe something, but deep down inside you’ll know for certain that it’s a lie, and your discontent shan’t go away.”
To the extent that such a thing is knowable, I have explicitly believed things on purpose at least twice in my life, moving from Christian to Atheist, and then back to Christian, each time as the result of a distinct conscious choice. I am highly confident that it is possible to choose your beliefs; in fact, I am somewhat confident that all beliefs are downstream of personal choice.
This is why I used alieve as opposed to believe; I think the distinction is meaningful.
Secondly, did you make the choice to believe something while knowing and being convinced that it was as a matter of fact not true? Collapsing a state of uncertainty into one of two ‘gestalts’ (that’s the closest word I can think of) that you’re teetering between, or undergoing an organic process of changes in beliefs (even if a part of that process involves a conscious choice), seems to me very different from consciously deciding that you’re going to simultaneously know that something is not the case yet try to ‘believe’ it anyway because you expect doing so shall bring you some benefits.
Finally, if you’re open to sharing it, I suspect that a more detailed account of how you did what you did, or of how/what the process (of changing beliefs) was for you may be of great use to Casey, if he/she/[pronoun] decides to go down that road.
@Aneesh Mulye – “This is why I used alieve as opposed to believe; I think the distinction is meaningful.”
ah, nuts. I thought it might have been, and should have googled the term. Also, apologies for the thread hijack. This question is one I’ve been thinking about a lot for the past month or two.
“Secondly, did you make the choice to believe something while knowing and being convinced that it was as a matter of fact not true?”
I was convinced pretty solidly convinced Atheism was absurd, but Christianity made me miserable, so I decided to stop believing in it. The absurdities and certainties switched polarity in fairly short order. Some years later I concluded that Athiesm was not good for my mental health, and that I had likely been doing Christianity wrong, so I decided to try believing again. The polarities shifted back fairly quickly. Strong family connections and lots of mental stress probably made this process a lot easier for me.
“Secondly, did you make the choice to believe something while knowing and being convinced that it was as a matter of fact not true?”
I would agree that Believing something that you know to be false won’t work. On the other hand, I think “known” is just another term for belief as well, and most of the interesting linkages of belief chase their own tails down long chains of recursion rather than being rooted in simple, straightforward fact. Lots of people argue over whether or not God exists; few people argue whether 2+2=4. I think this is because there are a lot of good reasons to believe either side of the former question, and no good reasons to believe one side of the later question. Introduce conflicting values, and I think 2+2 would likely be as fraught a question as the existence of God or Capitalism vs Communism or which candidate to vote for. I posted a thought experiment based on this idea a few threads ago to illustrate the idea.
The point being, you can’t believe something is true if you know it to be false, but “knowing it to be false” is itself a belief. There’s always axioms at the end of the chain, and axioms are always open to reassessment.
“Finally, if you’re open to sharing it, I suspect that a more detailed account of how you did what you did, or of how/what the process (of changing beliefs) was for you may be of great use to Casey, if he/she/[pronoun] decides to go down that road.”
Past the above, I doubt my personal experiences are terribly relevant. There is an idea in Atheism and the Rationalist movement that belief should be forced by evidence. I think there’s a very limited extent to which this is true, but the world is too complex and bias too subtle for our minds to truly work this way on the questions that really matter to us. I think we believe what we wish to believe, what we find it useful to believe. Further, I think it’s healthier to admit this is what we’re doing, and do it consciously and as responsibly as we’re able. Other posters had the right of it: if one wants to believe, immersing oneself in a healthy community of believers while cultivating doubt in ones’ own certainties is a good way to get there.
How common are recursive dreams for people? How common are multilevel recursive dreams? For those who have them, what’s the experience like?
I woke up this week from a five-level dream (dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream). That’s not super-unusual for me anymore (It happens, say, once every month or two), but it used to be incredibly unusual – I remember getting a multilevel dream a few years ago and freaking out a bit. Two-level dreams I’ve always had (I can remember one from when I was six or so). Also, I often get recursive dreams in clusters- I might get a fortnight with a bunch of them, then a few months without any.
I only remember ever having one recursive dream. It involved me lying in bed, sleeping, having a short nightmare, waking up panting, then immediately going back to sleep and it happening again and again (with a different nightmare each time). It was weird.
I’ve only had a three-level dream once that I can remember. Two-level happens often enough that it’s not a bizarre situation anymore; I don’t think I had any until adulthood, but now I get them every few months.
Usually when I have them, the second dream – when I “wake up” and don’t realize I’m still dreaming – is boring. The first one might be weird or might not; the second is almost always mundane stuff, like I wake up and realize I’m going to be late for my shift at Dairy Queen and the dog ate my car keys. We don’t have a dog and I haven’t worked at Dairy Queen since 1997, but that sort of thing is still very realistic and logical compared to most dreams. Then I wake up for real.
I used to have them quite frequently as a child and young adult, but less so nowadays. For me they always had a nightmarish quality. I’d wake up, relieved, from a scary dream, and then realise with dismay that I was still dreaming, and feel trapped in the dream. Sometimes I’d even “wake up” and tell my parents or my husband about the dream, before realising I was still dreaming.
I just posted something like this in an older open thread as a reply to something (something akin to ‘what common beliefs of the rationalist community do you disagree with), but might as well do it here as well since it will probably get discussion here.
I don’t understand why people are afraid of unfriendly AI. I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re likely to be created.
And, even if they are created that I haven’t seen any evidence they are likely to be particularly damaging. This part of it seems to be often taken as an (IMO unfounded) assumption without adequate support.
I’m willing to talk about both aspects of it, but to me the second one is more salient because I haven’t seen much discussion on that particular issue.
Let’s get the inevitable out of the way. Have you read The Sequences?
Yes.
Have you read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence?
This isn’t really an irrelevant question – Superintelligence is by a wide margin the single best information source on the subject, imo. You can pretty much skip everything else and go straight to it.
What kind of evidence are you expecting to see for each of these points? Both are in the end entirely theoretical since no strong AIs yet exist, so you cannot point to a bunch of computers and say “see, no unfriendly AIs have been created/done any damage”.
So what you’re saying is that you disagree with the theoretical arguments put forth by the likes of Yudkowsky and Bostrom. Of course you can find a good number of other experts in the AI field that don’t support ideas of unfriendliness or even the development of strong AI, but what specifically is it that you don’t agree with amongst the theories that you have read?
I suppose the crux of it is that Yudkowsky and Bostrom assume that an above-human-intelligence agent would inherently have the capabilities to overpower humans opposing its behavior.
I don’t think that follows.
For the record I do think that strong AI is possible.
I’m gonna answer this including your post just below this to abstemious; the main issue with your conjecture that AIs would have to empirically verify any kind of discoveries or inventions is simulation. A sufficiently powerful or intelligent AI could avoid actually testing things in reality by simply simulating a reasonably advanced model of the universe and testing its own propositions within that simulation. Thus, the AI could avoid having to give any kind of signal to humanity that it was testing dangerous ideas, or have to wait for its experiments to conclude in real time or other such limitations.
There would be no need to rely on mere collected information from wikipedia or whatever. Assuming the AI had access to the physical laws of the universe it could begin simulation and later testing in that simulation.
The arguments against this that I can foresee are as follows: First, simulations may not be nearly accurate enough for that kind of testing. To this I would argue that in any hard takeoff scenario a self improving AI will inevitably have enough power after some time to create an accurate enough simulation. Either you disagree with hard takeoff or you prevent the AI from having enough power and thus it isn’t a strong AI in the first place.
Second, one may suggest that an ‘accurate’ simulation is not enough, and that a perfectly accurate simulation is needed right down to the quantum level. In this case, power arguments may have merit even in a hard takeoff scenario. I don’t really have the expertise to comment on this objection; I would guess that it is true for nanotech at least, but many other damaging innovations could be tested in more basic simulations.
A third argument that I could imagine is the argument that the AI would not be able to create a simulation since it would lack the physical laws in the first place. This I think is fairly ridiculous but I’ll still address it. I don’t think anyone would bother to create a strong AI and then completely seal it off from any kind of information or physical stimuli; even if they attempted to give it only very limited information, then a sufficiently intelligent AI could most likely infer a huge amount of physical laws anyway and thus overcome this.
I’ve always had a problem with the idea that the AI can just simulate everything it needs to know to have all its new stuff work right the first time – if you’re going to operate in Earth’s biosphere, you need to know a whole lot more than just the laws of physics. If you’re trying to build robots, for example, a sufficiently clever AI might be able to completely simulate phenomena like rust, metal fatigue, etc, but it would be unable to prevent problems like a previously un-studied species of mildew eating its newly invented super-plastic. Biology is full of surprises like that, and the AI can’t possibly anticipate them all unless it manages to fully analyze all species on the planet, which is such a ridiculously massive project there’s no way a pre-world-conquest AI would be able to do it without science-fiction-level advances in technology.
Assuming that strong-AI immediately and freely wins is probably too strong (i.e. give it an internet connection and within the day it will be swallowing meatspace with nanotech).
But the bootstrapping angle is compelling. Consider that we only have a general understanding of how our intelligence came to be (a tractable but computationally AWFUL gradient search over phenotypes), and lack the ability to modulate it even if we had the first idea of where to begin. Versus an AI with access to both its source code, first principles used to design that source code, and computational resources needed to compile/build/learn its mind. And given that you’ve already granted strong AI, its starting point is the level of the scientists and engineers who designed it
Sure, maybe you could unplug it (though a person with even middling intelligence could make seed money on mechanical turk or some such and rent an anonymous compute-box somewhere, purely through a terminal with web access) – or keep it in the box and not let it out. But if it can happen once, it will probably happen again. It’s a monotonic power equilibrium.
Its starting point is the level of the engineers who built it.
They don’t know how to derive “how to be more intelligent” from first principles.
If they knew how to make an AI more intelligent than the one they made, they would have done that.
Where is it getting to information necessary to think itself to greater intelligence?
I never said that. I wouldn’t expect intelligence to be convex.
The first principles it has are sufficient to build itself from scratch. That represents a huge basis of mathematics, computer science, possibly neuroscience, psychology, etc. ad nauseum. It can do novel science at the pace of a capable researcher (is that too strong of an assumption?), without fatigue and with perfect goal alignment (compared to monkeys shackled to dopaminergic nonsequiturs). It does not need sleep, can clone/fork/(merge?) itself simply by allocating cores and memory.
I’m not antithetical to the idea that AGI is *way* harder than many believe it to be. But if you start by assuming it, even if that is as smart as it can ever get, seems like meat is already on the way out (a la Hanson ems).
I think the argument goes like this.
At some point, people will create an AI that can understand English instructions. Like, you’ll be able to say “build me a house”, and it will go read Wikipedia to find out what a house is, and it will ask you clarifying questions about what sorts of features you want your house to have, and it will read an architecture textbook to figure out how how to design a house, and it will survey available properties to find a good place to put a house that meets your criteria, and then it will design a house and hire someone to build it for you. None of this is super difficult — everything you need is on the Internet these days. A patient human could do it. Computers think faster than humans; they can do it faster.
Note that this is not an AI in the “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that” sense. This AI has no free will and does not act unless following orders. Only crazy people want to build an AI that acts on its own. Eventually someone will build one as an art project, and we’ll have to deal with it then. But we’ll have problems long before that happens.
The problem is that this obeying-English-instructions AI is too powerful. Here’s something that’s not super difficult: hacking the Internet. You could tell the AI: “get me a copy of Donald Trump’s tax returns” and it would figure out where the tax returns would be stored, and then it would figure out who Donald Trump’s accountants were, and it would research ways of getting at information that isn’t made deliberately public, and then it would try a series of spearphishing attacks and zero-day exploits to get their passwords, and then it would hack every account they owned and send you the data.
You could tell the AI: “destroy that city”. It would start by researching what a city was and what it would mean to destroy it, and then it would start breaking things until the city stopped working. Electrical utilities, water utilities, traffic lights, bank accounts, self-driving cars: all of these things can be hacked. Combat drones can be piloted remotely; airplanes run by autopilot; nuclear launch codes are, ultimately, stored in computers. We discover new and exciting vulnerabilities in our software every year; an AI can discover those vulnerabilities much faster.
And none of that is the real problem. The problem is that some doofus is going to say: “AI, get me world peace, please”. The AI will research what world peace is, and it will figure out that human-on-human violence is not peaceful, and it will notice that the easiest way to ensure world peace is to kill all humans. Or, someone will say: “AI, get me world peace without killing all humans”, and it will kill all humans but one. Or, someone will say: “AI, get me world peace without killing any humans”, and it will put a sterilizing agent in the water supply so we don’t reproduce.
So the problem we want to solve is how to tell an AI: “get me world peace without doing anything I don’t want you to do”. This is the problem of creating Friendly AI, and it’s harder than you’d think, because the AI can’t just look up “list of all the things you don’t want me to do” on Wikipedia. People are working on it, but it’s really really hard, and if they slow down their own AI-building efforts in order to make sure they get a Friendly one, somebody else will build theirs faster and take over the world first (and probably destroy the world in the process).
Or maybe all this is wrong. Maybe thinking is much harder than our experience suggests, and even running in a modestly-sized datacenter, it’ll take an AI days to read an architecture textbook and weeks to design a house. Maybe computers are much harder to hack than all our experience suggests, and even an AI won’t be able to break into things like plane autopilots. Maybe all the information in Wikipedia and Youtube and everyone’s email account isn’t really sufficient to understand meatspace, and everything the AI does will be full of comically stupid mistakes, and it will need lots of human supervision and the humans won’t let it do anything evil. Maybe the AI will be smart enough to use existing toolsets, like turning the combat drones on and off, but it won’t be smart enough to manufacture killer robots or invent nanobots or bioengineer custom viruses — so we’ll just have a finite number of things to disconnect from the Internet, and once we’ve disconnected or destroyed all those things, it won’t be able to hurt us.
Nobody knows. We’ll probably find out, though.
This is the main disconnect that I have.
I don’t think the ability to manufacture killer robots or nanobots or superviruses is only a question of being ‘smart enough’.
To manufacture killer robots, it would have to attempt to physically manufacture killer robots, have the initial attempts not work for various reasons, refine the design and process, test them to see if they actually work, etc. For the viruses it would need to have humans to conduct lots of biological experiments on to learn how to make these viruses.
In other words, being superintelligent doesn’t give you a free pass on information theory. To me it seems like many people imagine a superintelligence to be something that’s able to violate the Parable of the Horse’s Teeth, to just sit there spinning its gears and produce procedural or phsyical knowledge from only its own thoughts, without having to perform empirical experiments in the outside world. I think there’s no way that all of the information in Wikipedia and youtube is sufficient to understand meatspace. There’s a really big difference between knowing about something and knowing enough about something and knowing the right kinds of things about something to be able to actually DO it.
To use an appropriate quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This goes for the AI as well.
The argument isn’t really dependent on the fact that a strong AI would definitely be much better than humans at that kind of generalized problem solving, just that it might be. It certainly seems plausible that an AI would be really good at that sort of thing.
The way I conceptualize problem solving is that for any given problem, there is an infinite number of plausible solutions and steps in those solutions. The process of solving the problem is then following a pathway of steps which hopefully leads to the solution, and only really considering a small number of possibilities for a meaningful amount of time. The human brain does a bunch of this automatically, and the longer we work on a specific kind of problem, the better we get at telling which pathways are likely to yield useful results.
If an AI is using a similar process, it seems reasonable that it would be way better at it than a human would be. It could run through possibilities much faster, tweak its algorithm to check a wider or narrower set of possibilities, and incorporate a bunch more data than humans can. It could also check most possible solutions almost instantly through simulations or the like, especially with programming problems. Even limited completely to computer systems, wiping out everyone should be possible. Also, if an AI were capable of improving itself, it would probably end up being smarter than we can really imagine, in which case it could totally kill all humans if it wanted to.
All of the above is pretty much just speculation from someone who’s understanding of AI comes mostly from sorta remembering Gödel Escher Bach, but it doesn’t have to be definite. I think there’s maybe a 5% chance of unfriendly AIs being a problem(though I’m probably being overconfident), but a 5% chance of everyone dying is still something which is totally worth worrying about.
Also, the people who actually work with and understand AI seem to be worried about it, which seems like a pretty solid reason to be worried about it myself.
When virtual reality gets good enough it could perform experiments there. And before you object that VR isn’t similar enough to reality remember that we’re talking timescales at least 30 years from now, and probably much longer. Will VR perfectly imitate reality? Probably not but it could reach the point of good enough for any practical purpose.
Also it doesn’t necessarily have to perform experiments. If you have it interact with people long enough, it could have a good understanding of meatspace long before it carries out its plans.
What about less physical scenarios, like crashing the stock market or taking over an automated defender system.
I think you might be right!
I think enough of our stuff is now attached to the Internet that an AI could still get really scary. (And it’s going to get much worse once we deploy self-driving cars.) But, yeah, maybe it won’t actually be an extinction event. Hopefully it won’t actually be an extinction event.
There’s whole engineering discipline devoted to doing just that.
You can’t develop new foundational science without new physical experiments, true. (although in practice you can squeeze more knowledge out of existing experiments than the human experimenters themselves typically do) But you can use existing science to do new engineering, and I would be surprised if human extinction isn’t achievable solely via new engineering. You’re talking about robots and viruses, not teleporters and unobtanium.
Finite element models are powerful, but it’s also easy to lead yourself down the primrose path without reference to external reality. Designs that check out in the computer still often require retrofit or redesign once construction starts, because the darned world doesn’t always turn out to match your model.
At the very least, a “dangerous” AI can easily be as bad as a cabal of a million smart experts, all working together in perfect harmony in order to try to Take Over The World(tm) (because that’s how you ensure the world is *safe*).
I am not really sure what they can or can’t accomplish, and would prefer not to see that.
I’ll suggest something very non-Yudkoskian here: We don’t need to program an AI to perfectly implement human values. We need to program an AI to implement human values as well as a human can (or a committee of humans).
There’s this unspoken assumption that having an AI not understand that “world peace” implicitly means keeping humans alive is equal to not having an AI understand whether it’s better to live 5 minutes closer to work or make 5 dollars more per week.
What has been the result of every contact between two peoples at significantly different levels of technological development?
The Skraelings sent the Vikings home with their tails between their legs, so if as implied the result is the same every time, why, it must be just peachy to be on the lower end of the development ladder at contact. Paleolithics rule!
If I remember rightly from Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the Greenland Inuit were more technologically advanced than the Norse in the specific fields of surviving in the deep Arctic … and the Norse, through a few bad decisions and unfeasibly long supply lines eventually found themselves without decent metal weapons, and thus with no military advantage over the Inuit.
Humans are more technologically advanced than algorithms in the specific field of surviving in meatspace, and we’ll have control over what weapons the AIs have at the start of any conflict.
Yes I agree John Schilling.
As another example, humans have now gotten to the point where we can unilaterally dominate over other life on earth… kind of.
But humans have been at about the same level of intelligence for approximately 50000 years. The intelligence itself was not sufficient to directly lead to our increased capabilities. It indirectly led to it through development of knowledge and understanding, and it took us 50000 years to get to that point.
In addition it’s pretty obvious to me that humans’ capability of understanding things is far above the extent to which we actually understand anything, i.e. anatomically modern humans can attain a vastly greater technological and scientific level than we currently are at.
I have a good friend from one of the remotest areas of africa, where people hunt with spears and think the earth is flat. It only took him a few years to get up to speed and do original research with the rest of us. It took humanity 50000 years to get there the first time.
So I think that while an AI may be a lot better than humans at designing new technology and devising new scientific theories, it will remain comprehensible to us, looking at its actions in hindsight and interpreting the fruits of its investigation, for a lot longer than most people here seem to expect.
The A.I doesn’t have to “overpower” us to be dangerous. It merely has to suggest a course of action that is dangerous, whose danger we can not see.
Consider for a moment invasive species. Through out history humans have introduced foreign species into new enviroments in an attempt to solve some problem. Many times these new animals ended up causing other problems the humans did not foresee. For example in Australia, the cane toad was introduced to help curtail the cane beetle population to help keep sugar cane alive, and now cane toads are a huge pest.
Now suppose we have an A.I that we use for advice. We have some problem X (For example beetles are eating our sugar crops), that we are trying to solve. We ask the A.I “How can we solve X?” And the A.I gives a course of action for how to solve X (introduce cane toads).
Since the A.I is so much smarter than us, we won’t necessarily be able to understand all the consequences of the plan it suggests. So if we are going to do what the A.I suggests, then the A.I needs to know to not suggest plans that would be contrary to our other values/goals. Cane toads are a bad plan because we don’t want to bring so much harm to the native wild life.
Now “human values” are not something that we can merely be listed and then checked off by the A.I. That is the problem of friendly A.I. How do we get it to suggest/take actions that conform to our values?
Playing off of the Scott Adams discussion …
The central question for making sense of this election is whether Trump is clever or lucky.
Almost everyone but Scott A thought Trump didn’t have a chance of winning either the nomination or the election. He won the nomination and did it comfortably–by the time the convention arrived it was all over.
One possible explanation is that he was lucky. He had a bunch of characteristics that, under almost all circumstances, would have doomed his campaign as most of us expected. Some unlikely series of accidents made those just the characteristics that this time, in the Republican nomination contest worked. If that’s the story, lightning is unlikely to strike twice–Hilary will win. Call it Theory A.
The other possibility is that he was clever. He was doing things that all the rest of us thought would lose but that he, correctly, believed would win. If that’s the story, he may well pull it off again. That’s Scott A’s theory. Theory B.
The conditional probability of Trump getting the nomination is low on Theory A, high on Theory B. Most of us are Bayesians. We should revise our prior in favor of B.
At the moment, he is running a pretty close race to Hilary–betting market odds 33%. The conditional probability of that is also lower on A than on B. We should revise the probability of B up a little farther.
If A is correct, he will almost certainly lose the election. If B is correct he might still lose, since being clever might not be enough. But he might well win.
I think it’s a third option:
He’s not really either clever or lucky. He just happens to have a set of characteristics that passively make other people like him and want to nominate him. He’s trying to get the nomination, and what he does to try and what he’s like ends up being what the right people support.
As an analogy, I wouldn’t say that Usain Bolt wins all those races by being particularly clever or lucky. He’s fast.
Your third option appears indistinguishable from “lucky” as defined above.
I think his recovery from the post-DNC drop strongly points to “clever”; someone merely lucky would have spiraled out of relevancy at that point. Trump changed his tack slightly and recovered.
Clever seems like a catch all for any sort of political/charismatic talent.
In a world without stopwatches, does Usain Bolt win all 100m dashes because he’s fast or lucky seems like a similar question. There aren’t easy ways to compare campaign effectiveness in different periods.
There’s a difference in that “clever” implies he’d probably also do better than people expect in office, while “lucky in that he has this specific sort of charm” means he’s good at this particular thing, which wouldn’t correlate with a generic measure of success or intelligence, and means that winning this election more easily than his doubters expect doesn’t mean they’re wrong about his ability to actually hold office.
(In Trump’s case, I’d say there’s another complication – even if his charm is a result of his being a master manipulator with superhigh IQ, he’s a seventy year old man with no experience in politics – and while high IQ can make up for lack of experience, it helps a hell of a lot less for the elderly. Manipulation, OTOH, would be something he started learning when young).
“If that’s the story, lightning is unlikely to strike twice–Hilary will win.”
I’m not sure this logically follows. A “political moment” might conceivably last up to a year or so. It’s possible that the “lucky” conditions Trump found himself in that allowed him to win the GOP primary were not necessarily exclusive to Republicans, but were conditions shared among the nation as a whole. It’s also possible that those conditions would not have meaningfully changed within the span of about one calendar year.
As evidence for this, I offer the Trump campaign’s claim that he attracted a lot of independent or at least non-traditional voters to the GOP primary and did significantly better with such people than his competitors did (I haven’t looked into this myself – it’s possible that it isn’t true). If true, that would indicate that the same lucky conditions which helped him win the primary could help him win the general as well.
Or it could be that he’s getting lucky in a different way. Among most correct-thinking people I know, the consensus seems to be that the only reason he’s even remotely competitive is because Hillary is far and away the worst possible candidate the Democrats could have nominated. There are people who seriously believe that if she collapsed dead tomorrow, Tim Kaine would win 80% of the popular vote because nobody hates him and he doesn’t have any scandals. This is going to be the narrative if Trump does win – that the only reason he did is because Hillary sucks and is corrupt and everyone hates her and that literally any other Democrat would have defeated Trump easily.
He’s explored running for political office for at least the past 30 years, so at least some of this is that the timing is finally right, which is both luck, because he has no control over wider social conditions that help him, and clever, because he had the restraint not to run back when conditions were not right.
Ya i was going to say, Persistence and Effort seem like the real deciding factors here.
He’s spent 30+ years branding himself as the embodiment of success and the american dream( for a wide cross-section of the american non-elite public), and floating the idea of him as president the whole time.
He’s indistinguishable from the cliched hallmark version of american success and business at this point, by his conscious design. It would be freaking weird if he wasn’t a surprisingly strong contender for president.
We would have to consider seriously the possibility that democracy was an effective system of reasoned policy and rational argument, if Trump just fizzled out.
All the theoretical frameworks we have of democracy predict this is exactly the kind of strategy that should work and has worked in the past, see Rob Ford in Toronto, Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, Barrack Obama in Washington, all cases of successful branding beating out other more experienced/rational candidates (in primaries and generals).
The only reason the elite media didn’t see it coming was that they were too used to sneering at the trump brand to recognize its value.
Like if you grew up in the non-urban middle class, and just thought of Trump as a successful and famous (if slightly weird) business man for a good chunk of your life, then this isn’t surprising. I distinctly remember on multiple ocassions hearing or reading him say something about running for president, or one of his hangers on mentioning it and i thought “Ya, i could imagine it”. Apparently outside of the sneering class a lot of people could imagine it,
Trump values his brand at 4 billion dollars,
the odds of him winning the White-house is 40% (538 poll tracker),
If anything he might have valued it rather low.
I think you’re wrong about the phrase “sneering class”. People who use the phrase “media elite” seem to do so with a lot more sneer than the actual media ever put in their words.
Of course, I mostly see them through the outgroup, so they may just be equally likely to sneer (going by the “how would you feel about your son marrying a member of the opposite party”, I’d guess they’re about 60% more likely to sneer). But they’re definitely not significantly more respectful.
I think “lucky or clever” is a false dichotomy. He can be both and something else altogether.
Trump is good at being manipulative. I guess that is clever.
He is also more populist than any Republican politician in recent memory, when the electorate, especially the Republican electorate, has been trending populist. That’s more about luck.
Populist demagogue arises in uncertain times is an old pattern. Sometimes that is because the politician harnesses the rhetoric, without truly being that demagogue, and sometimes they really are just a demagogue.
If it was a coincidence that he happened to say stuff populists approved of, and ran with it, that’s lucky.
On the other hand, how do we know that he didn’t see a niche for populism and fill it?
@dndnrsn:
Trump seems to have always been playing the demagogue. His reaction to the Central Park 5 seems like a fairly classic appeal. I find it really hard to believe the birther bullshit was Trump making a clever opening foray into politics to position himself as the populist choice in 2012 or 2016. I think that was just him giving voice to what amounts to a playground taunt about Obama’s name (and dad).
The Republic base clearly wants someone who proposes “down to earth” solutions and they aren’t very comfortable with anyone who looks like they are patrician. Folksy and angry is where they are at. I think both the Republican base reaction to Sarah Palin in 2008 and the entirety of the 2012 Republican primary process really illustrate how embracing that base is of someone who is populist and uncomfortable they are with someone aristocratic.
I think they were looking for a populist and they finally found one. But still, if Trump wasn’t running against such a crowded field, he probably still loses the primary. If Jeb? (or Rubio) had more personality than wet cardboard, either of them would be the nominee, and the field would never have been so crowded in the first place.
One is tempted to give credit to Trump for recognizing that the field wasn’t strong, but everyone in the field also recognized that, which is why there were so many in the field.
Trump was indeed lucky in the field he faced. He was also lucky that it looks like the other plausible candidates all hoped he would take their rivals out for them.
Well, could he have filled another niche?
That’s the luck argument, that knowing your moment isn’t enough in presidential politics because if you only have one moment it probably won’t come in your lifetime.
I don’t think that counts as a comfortable victory, given the way the Republican primary is structured. By the time Trump’s rivals had withdrawn, 83% of the votes had been counted, with Trump winning 49.6% of the delegates to date and expected to win 58+3% of the remaining votes. That’s roughly equivalent to a 51/49 election where the loser gives his concession speech before the mail-in ballots are counted.
As phrased, you are implicitly limiting Trump’s luck to manifesting in Trump’s characteristics. I believe the biggest subset of the “Trump got lucky” phase space has to do not with Trump’s characteristics but with those of his opponents. Do I really need to enumerate their individual and collective defects here?
If there is a path to a Trump victory in the general election, it runs through the same phase space. This is the year that both major parties threw their weight behind people capable of losing elections to Donald Trump.
Winning half the votes when there are more than two competitors is a lot better than winning half the votes when there’s one competitor.
51/49 is a small win in a two person race, but Trump had 3-5 viable competitors cutting up that 49%. It ended up being fairly comfortable. For the last few weeks of the Cruz and Kasich campaigns all of the talk was about whether or not they could force a contested convention, not whether or not they would win the nomination.
Right, but given the mechanics of the GOP delegate selection process, Trump’s odds of victory take a substantial dive right after the first floor vote when “his” delegates become unbound. It was not impossible for him to win at a contested convention, but pretty much by definition – and especially for Trump – any race that ends with a contested convention is a very close race. And he was within a percent or two of a contested convention.
Sure, but by the time it got to the convention Trump’s lead was insurmountable. just because at one point the race was somewhat close doesn’t mean he didn’t win comfortably. Bill Clinton lost 11 of the first 12 states to vote in the 1992 primary, but by the end he was so far ahead there was no question he would win.
Trump’s lead didn’t become “insurmountable” until 83% of the votes had been cast and counted. Just about any 51/49 election will result in a statistically insurmountable lead by the time 83% of the votes have been counted. There is absolutely not contradiction between an election being genuinely very close, and an election’s outcome being known with certainty at the point where 83% of the votes have been counted.
The fact that the US primary election system uniquely calls for pauses at various stages in the voting and vote-counting processes, doesn’t change that. In almost every other US presidential primary of this century, the outcome was known with certainty and the losers had conceded when less than 17% of the votes had been cast. That the best you can say about Trump is that his lead was insurmountable by the time it got to the convention, that’s the proof that this was a close election.
I think there’s a lot wrong in this post.
As I mentioned upthread, the fact that Trump is in the position he is against a candidate as disliked as Hillary is not impressive or surprising and doesn’t suggest he is very clever. Just about any Republican running against Hillary would have greater odds. You have to make your assessments of bayesian evidence against the background of other facts, including what we know about the political circumstances.
Also, and relatedly, it’s false that it’s almost certain that he will lose if Theory A is true. Given what we know about how partisan elections work and about Hillary’s weakness as a candidate, just about anyone with an “R” next to their name would have at least a decent shot at winning, without needing to be especially clever. This is why the thought about “lightning needing to strike twice” is also wrong. With a little less confidence, I’d go further and suggest that his chance of winning on theory B is only slightly higher than his chance of winning on theory A. Too many of the factors that will determine whether he wins are out of his hands. People overestimate the importance of brilliant decisionmaking for getting elected. Politics is largely about being the right kind of person in the right place at the right time. And the chance of theory B is so low given everything else we know that even if Trump wins in a landslide the probability of Theory B being true will be low.
Stepping back, though, it’s very easy to find facts that are Bayesian evidence for just about anything you like. The fact that Trump’s odds are greater than 10% is evidence for Theory B. The fact that his odds are less than 90% is evidence for theory A. If his polls go up it’s evidence for theory B. If his polls go down it’s evidence for theory A. If he doesn’t drool on the podium in the first debate, it’s evidence for theory B. If he doesn’t reduce Hillary to tears, it’s evidence for theory A. You can go on and on and get basically no useful information from this exercise. And if you pick and choose your propositions carefully, you can make it seem like there’s lots of evidence going one way, because there’s always lots of evidence going both ways. What matters is the total evidence, and the evidence provided by the mere fact that he won the nomination is swamped by all the other things we know.
If you see someone in a fight, and they’re flailing around in a way that looks drunk and clumsy, and they manage to win, the fact that they won is bayesian evidence for them being a brilliant fighter whose talent is beyond observers’ ability to appreciate, rather than genuinely drunk and clumsy. And the more drunk and clumsy they look, the more unlikely it is that they win on the assumption that they aren’t a brilliant fighter. But that doesn’t mean that the more drunk and clumsy they look while winning, the more confident you should be that they are a brilliant fighter. This seems like the kind of reasoning that people pushing this “Trump’s apparent political incompetence + winning -> Machiavellian mastermind” are falling into.
Trump isn’t doing particularly well. Maybe he’s doing well for someone who looks as incompetent as he does, but that doesn’t tell you much. When Donald Trump makes decisions that seem to informed observers stupid, this is evidence that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the whole episode remains on balance evidence that he doesn’t know what he’s doing even when he ends up successful (of course, in reality, his obvious political blunders have hurt him).
a) I like the analogy. +1.
b) Alternative: Trump is clumsy in ways some people think should matter, but actually don’t?This reminds me of the attitude of playing Go which goes “make your first three moves at random places not on the first line, then build on that.” For amatuer players that probably won’t noticably effect your win percentage – begining moves aren’t meaningless, but amatuer games are usually decided on midgame mistakes, not razor-thin margins. An amatuer who makes his first three moves at random might look like he’s flailing, but it would make him neither better nor worse.
c) Where did you get that gravatar? You would think googling “cat with moustache” would work, but it hasn’t helped.
I think it’s definitely true that Trumps defects matter less than observers thought they would.
I made this avatar myself. I took a picture of a cat, and I summoned every ounce of my photoshop ability to draw a moustache on it. I’m very proud of it, and hope that someday it will stand as a testament to mankind’s artistic potential.
I am also willing, for a hefty sum, to draw a moustache on a photo of a cat of your choosing. Talent should not go to waste.
There are other possibilities. Maybe he’s *bold*, in the sense that he’s willing to try strategies that others aren’t willing to try for getting elected. (For example, instead of speaking carefully in anticipation of fact-checkers and critics, bluster your way through every statement to appear “alpha” without worrying about the truth of your words. Instead of apologizing when the media calls you out, double down and count on the low approval rating the average American gives to the news media to pull you through. Etc.)
It’s also possible that he’s clever but only in particular domains. Many of Trump’s “businesses” consist of him licensing his name to others. Trump can be a master of personal branding and manipulating the media without being remotely level-headed on policy questions.
What is the SSCC’s opinion about a cashless economy?
Is it good (because of convenience, more difficult to make transfers on a black market)?
Is it bad (loss of anonymity in transactions, dependence on banks)?
Will it happen or not?
Are alternatives to official money like bitcoin viable, given its volatility and that governments can limit its usefulness?
I’m a fan, on the grounds that carrying a plastic card is a lot easier and safer than cash, and having a log of all of my transactions is handy for both budgeting and fraud prevention. It’s a little bit weird at times – I’m able to buy things because I have a number on a computer somewhere, and my employer pays for my work by incrementing that number once a month – but it’s super useful.
I doubt Bitcoin would see a huge following even if the government did nothing against it and the exchange rate held steady. Bitcoin is designed to act like cash, which is great if you want your transactions to be untraceable and irrevocable, but that’s a double-edged sword. If you lose your password or get hacked, your money is gone, as surely as if you had thrown a briefcase full of dollar bills off a cliff. People like the features that banks offer – trust, convenience, legal oversight – and don’t really care about the features that Bitcoin offers – anonymity and irrevocability.
(Old joke on Reddit: “Bitcoin is a group of ancaps discovering why financial regulations exist, one theft at a time.”)
I think there’s value in its existence, much the same way that there’s value in Tor or other encryption tech, but it’s not something you want or need to use in daily life.
Is losing your password or being hacked any more likely than losing your wallet full of cash or being robbed?
I think you would see (legitimate) people storing their cash in banks, but keeping a small amount of bit coins for things they don’t want to be tracked. Basically what most people use cash for today.
One of the scarier bits in The Handmaids Tale (from memory) was women losing access to their bank accounts and credit cards. A centralized system means you’re vulnerable to a centralized attack. That vulnerability isn’t just about any particular group– governments can turn agasint anyone.
“loss of anonymity in transactions”
Why is this listed as a bad? That anonymity only really serves illegal or black market or otherwise immoral transactions, and you list eliminating or making those more difficult to be a good of cashless economy. If you aren’t planning on making illegal purchases, then you have no cause for worry.
Who gets to decide what’s immoral then?
I’ve worked for born-again Christians and for hardcore feminists, and I wouldn’t want either of them to know about the contents of my bookshelf or my nightstand. Everyone has aspects of their life which they don’t want on public display whether that’s physical or intellectual.
Total transparency means the only form of security is security through obscurity: as soon as anyone decides that they want to look, they’ll be able to dig up enough dirt to destroy you. Nobody is so clean that they are immune to that treatment.
Well, first, I mostly meant things that technically aren’t illegal because of loopholes or exceptions (usually put in place to protect the privileged and allow the law to be used as a tool against the oppressed), but probably should be.
As to your initial question, we live in a democracy, so the answer is “the people, primarily (but not entirely) through their representatives, subject to the demands of tolerance and of respecting the rights of the under-represented and of not perpetuating systemic prejudice.”
Can you give any examples of said things? I’m drawing a huge blank.
So, essentially, majority opinion unless the majority disagrees with you. Nice. Good to know.
I’ll add you to the list of people I don’t want to see my bookshelf.
subject to the demands of tolerance and of respecting the rights of the under-represented
So vague as to be functionally useless. Do you tolerate everything? How about tolerating intolerance? Are there some things that simply cannot or should not be tolerated? What about competing tolerances – we’re seeing that with religious liberty versus newly acquired legal rights in things like same-sex marriage, whether it’s baking wedding cakes or signing marriage licences.
How under-represented does your group have to be? What counts as under-represented? If there are no traditional orthodox Catholics who think extra-marital sex is a sin and marriage is only between a man and a woman on the board of the Student LGBT Alliance, should the Alliance be forced to allow them to be officers? (I’m using the flip side of the decision that university Christian organisations would not be recognised as official student bodies or allowed on campus unless they permitted non-Christians to serve as officers).
The failure modes can be really bad.
In the last Links thread, this was posted: http://www.salon.com/2001/04/12/science_women/
Did anyone else read it? Does it stagger anyone else that this was the state of the left 15 years ago? I mean, these are sane people I could very happily live and exchange ideas with! Frankly, the fact that in many cases it must be these same people who are now intractable maniacs scares me more than a little.
(As an aside, reading this article not only blew me away but blew away the left’s claim that it’s the right who have been getting more aggressively partisan and out-there, at least in my eyes.)
No, that’s Cathy Young. She was a heretic then and she’s a heretic now.
Could I ask you to expand on that?
She was never a leftist. Young and Christina Hoff Sommers are more along the lines of old-school liberals or “equity feminists”. They believe in the social/political/economic equality principles, but not in the rape culture/toxic masculinity/misogyny-is-steeped-into-literally-everything arguments that have come into vogue relatively recently. The latter dogmas are now signifiers of feminist authenticity, so Young has become “the darling of men’s rights activists and libertarian basement-dwellers across America“.
She’s a heretic to both sides, now. She was embraced for awhile by the proto-alt-right because of her anti-SJW writings, but now that she’s also anti-Trump and pro-immigrant, the alt-right and anti-semites have come out in force (on Twitter) against her.
Sounds great, thanks for the recommendation.
“Proto-alt-right”?
Not all people you dislike are interchangeable, and not all people you dislike are morally deficient because you dislike them.
Check out that beam.
Er, what? There was clearly a pro-GG/anti-SJW group that liked her writings until Trump became a thing, at which point the knives (and anti-semitism) came out.
Pro-GG/anti-SJW still likes her. The large, vast, overwhelming majority of pro-GG/anti-SJW are not the alt-right and do not like the alt-right and do not support the alt-right.
The confusion between them and the alt-right is higher than would be expected, due to the efforts of malicious abusive liars conflating the two groups.
It’s so unfair when other people treat me as part of an undifferentiated mass but it is totally cool when I do it.
When did I say Urstoff was part of an undifferentiated mass?
There is a specific group of people who are doing things. I said that specific group of people did things. You can’t claim that since I don’t like wrongly being conflated with groups I have nothing to do with, I am not allowed to identify when groups do things.
In your absurdly broad definition of “social justice”.
I’ll concede that, although there definitely seems to be overlap between the two groups (what are Milo and his followers, if not that exact intersection of groups?). So yes, all normal caveats apply: #notallGG
Urstoff: GG pretty much ended the honeymoon with Milo once he hopped on board the Trump Train.
Anon: Okay, so you’re just following me around and shitting on me for the sake and purpose of following me around and shitting on me, then?
The article above is written by Cathy Young, who as far as I can tell hasn’t changed her positions much, if at all. Whether or not she was considered representative of the left at the time is a question for someone with a better memory of 2001.
Not only Cathy Young. Larry Summers is still a fixture of the left. Being a blacklisted heretic of the academy doesn’t mean there is no place for you in the mainstream power apparatus of actual policy and decision makers.
Scott, what do you think about the new RDoC system that NIMH is creating?
Not that new anymore – the guy who invented them has already left NIMH and moved on to bigger and better things (ie Google).
I appreciate what they’re trying to do. Everyone suspects that the things we call “depression” and “schizophrenia” are mishmashes of a bunch of different underlying conditions – kind of like if pulmonologists diagnosed “shortness of breath” but didn’t understand the difference between pneumonia, lung cancer, and having just exercised too much. This obviously makes them hard to treat, and probably some of our current medications work for some underlying causes and others work for others – which leads to a philosophy of “just try whatever until something works”. I agree it would be really neat to finally figure this stuff out, find out exactly how many kinds of depression there are and what causes each of them, and then clear up some of this confusion.
I’m less sure that dividing things up into a nice little matrix and demanding that researchers point to exactly which part of the matrix their research fits into is the best way to get to this future. Just to give one example, one of the few really great discoveries in psychiatry was the discovery about ten years ago that some weird psychoses were caused by antibodies to the NMDA receptor and could be treated with plasmapheresis. This is exactly the sort of triumph of biological psychiatry that NIMH wants more of, but it wasn’t done by somebody focusing on some particular neurological circuit and filling in a matrix. I don’t really know how research funding works, but I assume the effect of this will be to redirect research funding from other things into things that can easily fit the neurological-circuit model, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
A lot of people I read in the psych research community are not impressed and think it’s kind of a stunt.
Thanks.
Where do you go to keep up on this? I’m interested in trying to keep tabs on things.
I can understand why people might think of it as a stunt, but I think there’s too much momentum for this system to just go away. I think your pulmonologist example is a bit too close to reality for the status quo to exist for much longer (several years though).
I want to start a long, salacious comment thread so I’m going to go with the most gosspiy topic possible:
Who do you have a crush on in the rationalist-diaspora scene? Besides me, of course.
>>/ratanon/
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, that wasn’t even a SSC comment! I had to literally USE my MASTER DETECTIVE SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE of COMMUNITY DRAMA to GO to SOME RANDO’S TUMBLR to find out that you were talking about” continues to be my favorite comment on that subreddit. The capital “USE” and “GO” just crack me up. Thank you anon, bless your posts.
Deiseach and Keranih, assuming that this site counts as part of the scene you refer to; not something I expect to go anywhere in either case due to the whole “hundreds if not thousands of real-space miles away” and attendant logistical considerations, but them’s the breaks.
As for why I’m answering this question at all, I’ll chalk it up to “longstanding personal character flaw”.
Recently, after watching a vampire movie with my wife, she turned to me and asked me if I would become a vampire if it was the only way to save her from some unspecified danger.
To be a vampire is to be immortal, but to survive at the cost of human blood. In the movie we watched, the human was inevitably killed when a vampire fed. Being a vampire introduces additional health risks (primarily exposure to direct sunlight, which can be lethal), but generally removes the normal human health hazards. For the purpose of this discussion, I’ll assume that the average human lives H days, the vampire needs to feed once every F days, and that the vampire lives V days longer than an average human after accounting for the additional risk. Additionally, I assume that a vampire can create other vampires, but that no vampires at all exist if you do not choose to become a vampire.
My question is this: at what N, M does it become moral to become a vampire, not to save your spouse, but for its own sake? At the point where H=V/2=F, the vampire needs to feed only once in its lifetime, and lives twice as long as a human. In this scenario, the total life-years break even, and the only moral factor remaining is an intuitive opposition to the infliction of negative externalities. How much additional time do you feel needs to be added before the vampire’s drinking is a morally positive transaction?
Building off this, would it be a moral choice to become a vampire so as to infect the world’s top scientists, assuming:
H=V/2=F
H=V/2=20F
H=V/10=200F
Bear in mind that the scientists are likely to do a lot more good when given brains that don’t decay due to age, and that the total life-years saved may outweigh the downside of having to feed the vampires.
Finally, it seems like in traditional fantasy vampires do live significantly longer than humans (although they have to feed relatively frequently). Assuming the vampire scientists really do enough good for the world to balance out 1 human life per day per vampire, might the best fantasy system of government actually be some sort of vampire aristocracy?
Could I as a vampire feed on wild deer like they do in the Twilight series?
Let’s assume not, since that reduces the moral tension too significantly. You could, however, choose to feed only on very old people, so as to minimize the loss of QALYs.
Well, if you want to ramp up moral tension…
You only “get” as many years as you take, and quality matters, so feeding on the infirm really does very little good. As you become hungrier and hungrier, you become less and less coherent and more and more feral, until you are Lestat subsisting on frogs and ready to drain the first baby that comes within scent.
This reminds me of a somewhat related question:
I think it’s generally somewhat accepted (though it could be wrong) that most scientists/artists/thinkers actually tend to do most of their best, most influential, creative work fairly early on at some sweet spot between having enough experience/knowledge to make a real contribution and the onset of age-related cognitive decline/rigidity. There are many exceptions, of course, but they seem like exceptions (or cases of “old scientist continues to fruitfully dig into the field he pioneered in his 30s and 40s,” as opposed to “70 year old invents new branch of physics!”).
What I’m wondering is whether there’s any consensus as to: to what extent is this just age-related cognitive decline and to what extent is it that a given brain tends to pick the low-hanging fruit which that brain is prone to notice in whatever area it’s good at, and, after that, subsequent innovations by that same brain, even if it remained as healthy as ever, would be much slower in coming (though that could change also if progress were made rapidly around said brain; though that also raises the question of how well even an ageless brain would be able to avoid getting “stuck” in old paradigms younger brains might never have gotten set in).
In other words, if we could have an Einstein vampire (Einstein who lives for centuries and experiences no age-related cognitive decline), would he just keep making breakthroughs decade after decade? Or would he make the discoveries Einstein brain is likely to make and then settle into a pattern of valuable-ish but not revolutionary work?
Dick Gross proposes that it’s just the result of selection on noise: people who don’t make discoveries early leave the field.
Not the ones who have tenure, and it doesn’t take that much in the way of discovery to make tenure.
Gross is a mathematician answering the question: why do mathematicians do their best work before the age of 30? Most of them don’t have tenure when they do their best work. But maybe mathematicians are an extreme example and physicists do their best work in their 30s, after tenure. Onyomi mentioned Einstein who did his best work after he got tenure, but he did his Nobel work before the age of 30. One could examine the list of Nobel Prize citations. A substantial number of them are doctoral theses, although often the advisor is also credited.
I’d wager you’d need to freeze aging and attitude/values/motives at the 30’s to get the endless pioneering effect. 20’s would be more dynamic but ultimately too sloppy/irresponsible/fickle to make consistent progress, while 40’s has already calcified and become rigid, albeit in a pragmatic and tough sense but still limiting to innovation.
Honestly most forms of age-locked immortality suck. Immortals should be able to visit any bio-chrono milestone they’ve actually reached, or earned in years. I mean this more than a 600 year old vampire could appear as an 80 year old if they wished or a teen, but if someone really jumps over the idea of turning into a kid again then sure, why not.
I want to add the obligatory note that this phenomenon varies by field. Philosophers often do their defining work in mid or late career. Architecture is famous for late-career work (which may be partly due to opportunity, but I doubt that’s the whole story). Fiction-writing seems kind of mixed.
The experiment I long ago proposed was to pay someone who had made important discoveries in his youth and was now, say, fifty, to switch fields and see if, in the new field, he made a new set of important discoveries.
Or, of course, find someone who did it on his own and look at the results.
My impression, by the way, is that although the pattern may hold for science it does not hold for literature.
Here’s a biography of Turing award winner Richard Hamming.
Conclusion: It’s important to be “young”, where “young” is defined as “under 46”. (If Hamming retired at 61 after 30 years in Bell Labs, that would make the first 15 years of his tenure the years when he was 31-46.)
This reminds me of a “who would you rather bang” guy talk I had once that wound up devolving with questions like “ok, would you rather sleep with number 4 on your list, or have a threesome with 16 and 17?”.
Don’t leave us hanging. What was the answer?
My answer was #4, since my top 4-5 are women I actually know and have had crushes on, and there’s a significant drop after them when the “hot models and actresses” category starts. The other guy went with the threesome, on the argument that there was very little difference among his top twenty. What would you choose?
Those activities are only good if all the options are bad, and the challenge is picking (and justifying!) your choice of lesser devil, or devil-you-know as it may be. I used to devise sadistic ones with the guy across the hall in my first year.
I trust you know that the only possible answer to such a question is “Yes, of course, dear”? : -)
Yes, of course. 🙂
The doctrine of Agree & Amplify disagrees.
I never really went in for pickup culture. In this case, I’m having trouble even seeing what the”Agree and Amplify” would be.
“I’d become a vampire even if you didn’t need saving”?
I found most of the examples in your link to be needlessly combative; I want to make her feel loved, not assert dominance.
Yeah but you probably aren’t dark triad.
No clue either.
Honestly, I figured the whole vampire question was fishing for a scenario to jill off to later: you as the sparkly immortal protector. I would say play along with it and emphasize the parts she thinks are hot.
That’s probably a good sign. It shows that you’re not already a vampire at least.
But yeah, part of relationship game is that you’re walking a tightrope. As long as you’re a known quantity there’s a lot less room to be attractive, and if you can’t maintain attraction then the relationship is over. Flipping that frame back on her, having her work to maintain your attraction, is a way to avoid that.
In general, the more comfortable a woman is in a relationship the rougher things get. You don’t ever want to be taken for granted.
“Nope. Team Jacob all the way!”
I’m rooting for Team Abraham.
Not to mention team Buffy X -)
Does the vampire have to kill the human when they feed – that is, is it the blood itself (in which case, blood donations to build up a stock as in a blood bank would work) or is it the death and transference of the human’s life energy that sustains the vampire?
Are humans to vampires as cattle are to humans? (That is a problem with Vampire Aristocracy rule, if they don’t think of humans as equals or as servants but as “Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs”).
Could there be vegetarian vampires (surviving on blood substitutes)?
A lot of vampire fiction has explored these questions 🙂
We’re assuming that they have to kill when feeding. Humans and vampires are on equal intellectual footing, all else being equal, but vampires don’t suffer age-related degradation or normal diseases. No vegetarian vampires, due to the human blood and kill when feeding requirements. I think that those rules lead to the most interesting moral tension, but if you have a different scenario in mind, don’t hesitate to share it (just make it clear where the “vampire rules” differ).
I’m unfortunately not read in vampire fiction, although my wife is.
Has anyone mentioned the obvious solution to the moral tension over being a vampire? Use your vampire powers to kill and feed on only evil people. Hitler isn’t around any more, and there is some risk of making mistakes, but there ought to be a fair number of obvious targets.
Who gets to judge who’s evil? As a vampire, you’re hardly a dispassionate observer. Maybe if you only eat criminals who are on death row, but then either you’re fighting the state, or the state is suddenly incentivized to put a minimum number of criminals on death row per year, which also seems bad.
Anne Rice had a couple of solutions. I can’t remember whether her vampires were telepathic– if they weren’t, I think it would be too hard to find suitable prey.
In any case, one solution was to kill people on the verge of suicide and the other was to kill murderers.
I’m not sure having the world’s top scientists around longer would be a good thing.
(I’m ignoring what Onyomi mentioned above about aging, since vampires in particular ought not to have that problem.)
Fields progress at least in part by the distinguished researchers of the past being replaced by newcomers. Both Tesla and Einstein, for example, towards the ends of their lives were fighting doomed rearguard actions against what would become the next generation’s paradigms. If old researchers could hold their fiefdoms indefinitely, there wouldn’t be any room for new talent to rise up and challenge their ideas.
Beyond that, it’s very rare that a single genius will pull far out ahead of the pack. More often, once the body of evidence exists for a position to be arrived at you see one team scooping the other competing teams by a very small margin. The most brilliant scientist and the 100th most brilliant scientist are still operating on roughly the same level.
It sounds like the right answer is to vamp everyone who looks promising, feed every vamp-scientist in proportion to the work they do to save lives, and when their work stops saving lives, promptly cut off their human supply (and heads, if necessary).
Assuming that we can use threats to make our vampire scientists science on demand, of course.
Utilitarian ethics where we’re permitted to do very bad things end up with people enslaved and consumed oddly frequently, I find.
Which is kind of the opposite of Rebel’s suggestion that a vampire aristocracy might be the best form of fantasy government. I agree with you, though, that there has to be someone else to decide when a given vampire’s not justifying their upkeep anymore and take the appropriate action, otherwise you risk ending up with lots of useless vampires who don’t want to commit suicide, hanging around eating people for no benefit, eventually inspiring a human rebellion.
Of course, any situation where vampires have a realistic expectation of dying when they stop producing enough is likely to be bad for vampire morale and inspire a vampire rebellion, so in general I think any scenario where vampires must kill humans to survive is going to be ugly for at least one side if not both.
What you should do is to make someone a vampire if the probabilistically average benefit they will produce during their extended life exceeds the probabilistic cost of making them a vampire and feeding on people. When doing so, you also precommit to letting them live until they die.
If the vampire ends up being useless after a certain period of time, then since you have precommitted you still have to let him live.
You’re essentially buying insurance, except the “payoff” of the insurance is the lifetime of free eating that the vampire gets after he stops producing and the “payment” for the insurance is (discoveries the vampire makes during his productive years – cost of the vampire eating during those years). Insurance compaies don’t benefit when they pay off, but they have to pay off since they have precommitted to doing so, and without this precommitment they wouldn’t exist in the first place.
(Note that assuming vampires are considered people, everyone else’s scruples about killing them can serve as precommitment. This is also similar to the answer to killing one person to save five people with their organs: “sorry, I’ve precommitted not to kill innocent people so I’m not going to do it even if it brings a utilitarian benefit.”)
A Chomptroller, if you will.
I think that this is likely true in most cases, but you might be able to work with it depending on the parameters. If a vampire only needs to feed once every year, feeding vampires old humans with life expectancy under a year might be a worthwhile tradeoff, even assuming that the vampire isn’t producing significant results. This would of course require heavy regulation and likely be wildly unpopular and prone to abuse, so I overall agree with you it’s likely to be unfeasible. One problem that vampires introduce to a state is the requirement of a minimum death count per year; without vampires states may or may not have the death penalty, but with vampires they have an incentive to have a “death penalty quota” per year.
The Laundry has got that covered.
To out the inside joke, The Laundry Files is a series by SFF author Charlie Stross about the eponymous branch of the British Government charged with Defending the Realm against various eldritch and apocalyptic horrors. Two of the latest novels involve vampires, of which the few surviving British specimens are on the Laundry’s payroll on account of their utility. The Laundry absolutely has the resources to track them down and kill them wherever they go (now that it knows they exist). It also has access to blood from hospice patients that will keep a vampire “alive” at a moral cost tolerable to the British civil servants running the show. Assuming there’s a benefit to offset that cost, or all bets are off.
Not sure, but I think one of the vampires recently became King of the Unseelie Court, while still being a loyal subject of the British Crown. Not sure how that’s going to work, given that said Court includes tame vampires of its own. And yes, the lives of sentient beings are explicitly part of the keeping-vampires-fed equations, no animals or sublethal feedings allowed.
Hey, I’ve read that! The one where he introduces vampires, at least, not the second one. Did he actually establish that feeding on live animals doesn’t work? I know the blood of dead animals (and dead people) doesn’t, because he sets up his vampirism to be the result of eldritch interdimensional parasites that must feed on the brains of living victims via blood magic, but I don’t recall if any vampire characters ever tested animal blood that wasn’t from an already-dead animal.
Best comment ever.
An issue with that solution is that it’s often not clear at the outset which avenues are actually promising, or what is likely to save lives. Assuming we can actually build a system which can support vampire scientists and terminate them when necessary, the rewards system can’t be set up on the basis of “your work will save X lives, so you get to eat Y humans”, since we don’t know in advance what X will be, but have to feed them as we go.
I agree that utilitarian systems where one group gets shafted tend to break down. I’d be really interested, though, in seeing a story where the human protagonists revolt against their vampire overlords, only to discover that the system worked better under the vampires.
Just off the top of my head, I’d expect such a story to require at least one of three preconditions:
1) The vampire overlords include one or more super geniuses and/or mages, capable of inventing/forseeing/etc things humans just can’t. Without them, humanity will be materially worse off.
2) Humans are really bad at governing themselves, whether that’s due to existing conflicts among human subgroups, because the vampires dominated all government so there aren’t enough humans who know how to govern, or whatever. (Analogies to real-world colonialism and its aftermath go here)
3) There’s some worse threat out there that the vampire overlords were holding at bay, and that the humans either didn’t know about, or didn’t know the full extent of.
Robert Liquori:
“It sounds like the right answer is to vamp everyone who looks promising, feed every vamp-scientist in proportion to the work they do to save lives, and when their work stops saving lives, promptly cut off their human supply (and heads, if necessary).”
Ack! I say, Ack! Ack! Ack!
I will unpack my emotional reaction so that mere humans can understand it.
The current problems in science are the result of scientists being rewarded with fame and money. How much worse would things get if they were rewarded with life itself?
Incentive programs are not the One Weird Trick That Will Make People Do What You Want.
If you’re creating vampire scientists primarily because they are the geniuses who are expected to create wonders over their long lifetimes to benefit humanity, the first thing they’ll use those smart brains and long lifespans for is to figure out a way to get out from under enslavement by humans (maybe second, how to enslave the humans and make them their cattle, maybe not). They’ll also do just enough brilliant breakthrough work spread out over enough time that it will never quite be worth it to cut off their heads, because give them another twenty years and they might just crack [insoluble problem] for you. (If they’re anyway smart at all and have self-preservation instincts, they won’t give you everything they can at once or in the start of their careers, because they know you’ll chop off their heads as soon as they are no longer useful, so better to always keep something in reserve).
If you think a group of vampire geniuses with decades (or even centuries) to work on the problem can’t figure out a way of getting themselves out of the control of the mortals, you’re very sanguine.
you’re very sanguine
ISWYDT
This whole conversation is why I don’t think utilitarian’s can be trusted with anything important.
If we’re sticking to the “feeding is fatal” and “no blood substitutes” paradigm I would argue that the only moral response to finding out that vampires exist is KILL IT WITH FIRE and suspect anyone who suggests otherwise of being a Renfield .
Becoming a vampire is never a moral choice. Vampires are not human, they are explicitly anti-human eldritch abominations walking around in skin-suits killing people. You’d feed a feed a bunch of people to said abominations on the off chance that they’ll be useful in the future? What are you? The villain in a pulp fantasy story?
Even if we accept the premise that vampires are nominally human, IE they retain the souls (or what ever you want to call it) of who they were before being turned, you still have the old “brilliant doctor is also a serial killer” type problem. Sure you can argue that the positive utility generated by Dr. Lector’s brilliant work outweighs a certain number of people a year getting served up with fava beans and a nice chianti, but my response is going to be something to the effect of “Do you want Nazi quietus experiments? Because this is how we get Nazi quietus experiments.”
I don’t see a reason to deny vampires the status of moral persons. At the very least, it would seem worthwhile to research synthetic alternatives for human blood (ala True Blood).
Vampires having a workable alternative to feeding on humans obviously changes the calculus which is why I prefaced my reply by stating that I’m assuming the standard “gothic horror” paradigm.
My 3rd paragraph is a direct response to this.
Granted, vampires are “monsters” with goals orthogonal to those of mankind. But I think that deontological absolutism of the “Kill it with fire” type is premature. I’ll also grant that any attempt to keep vampires around in a controlled condition is likely to fail spectacularly.
Let’s assume that vampires are human in the sense of “moral person”. Let’s further assume that there’s some mechanism such that we can keep their population from exploding. Given these conditions, are there some set of parameters where we can make a beneficial trade?
I propose the following scenario; vampires live for an average of 101 human lifetimes, and need to feed every ten human lifetimes. Society sets up a completely voluntary “vampire lottery”, where 1 in 11 participants becomes a vampire, effectively gaining 100 lifetimes, and the other 10 become vampire food. I think that this lottery would have some appeal; if nothing else, you might expect a lot of cancer patients on death’s door to take the gamble, since they have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. In a situation where no vampires exist, running this lottery over the set of cancer patients means that we save just under 10 percent of them, which seems like an improvement over the system where we have to lose them all. Is there no variation of this sort of system where you would agree it’s better than the alternative?
Note that in this situation the number of humans eaten is the same as the lifetime number of humans the vampire will eat, so that the system is stable over multiple iterations. In the early lotteries, there would likely be more victims and less vampires, while later lotteries would approach stability.
Do you want Nazi quietus experiments? Because this is how you get Nazi quietus experiments.
What’s a quietus experiment? Google’s giving me nothing.
It’s a reference to the exposure and respiratory trials conducted at the Dachau Concentration Camp during WWII. the Nazis’ work was of very high quality and informed the US military’s own post war studies.
As a result the “Butchers of Dachau” have arguably saved many more lives in the intervening years, than they took, so by Rebel’s reasoning above, the Allies should have kept Dachau open. After all, who knows how many more lives the Nazis could have saved if given the opportunity.
@dndnrsn, @hlynkacg
Thanks for asking and answering the question, respectively. I was wondering that myself.
@hlynkacg
I think a fundamental difference between the quietus experiments and the ‘vampire lottery’ I proposed is that no one chose to be the Nazi’s guinea pig, but people could choose to opt into the lottery, and can stand to benefit from it. What do you think of the scenario I described?
I’d like to add that I’m not necessarily in favor of the systems I’m proposing (although I’m not particularly against the vampire lottery, either).
@hlynkacg: I’d read about those experiments before, but I’d never heard them referred to as “quietus experiments”. Where’s that from? Again, seems unGooglable.
And, I imagine similar reasoning was behind the US decision to employ scientists like Strughold after the war, instead of hang them.
As I understand it “Quietus” was the official label for the project and how my instructor referred to them when I was going through SAR School. I’m actually some what surprised that google is turning up nothing. I distinctly remember seeing the term used and in contemporary documents and transcripts of the Dachau trials.
I don’t know whether this would have been a good idea, but I’d have asked the reciprocal question– would you become a vampire for my sake?
Also, there are non-fantasy versions of the question. Would you become a hit man to save my life? Join the military when they’re fighting a war we both think is immoral? (Assume that only combat positions are available.)
And as for life span as reward, there’s Vance’s To Live Forever by Jack Vance.
Does anyone have some decent long essay or textbook length material on GMOs? I have some anti-GMO friends who’ve been bothering me about the issue lately, and I want some reading for all of our general education. Pro and anti welcome.
Me: I’m presently anti-anti-GMO; I have major concerns about corporate agriculture but look at most fear of GMOs as irrational fear of biochemistry. I have a math, CS and chemistry background, and I come from a family of doctors. I’m comfortable with research papers.
Friends: Vary from no science background to basic college level science education. All are comfortable with reading hard stuff and thinking rationally.
Thanks!
This immediately comes to mind: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/are_gmos_safe_yes_the_case_against_them_is_full_of_fraud_lies_and_errors.html
But anti-GMO people tend to be fairly conspiratorial and think anyone who writes positively about GMO’s is paid by Monsanto. Hopefully your friends are just underinformed rather than part of the tin foil hat brigade.
Also, here’s an IQ2 debate on the issue: http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/genetically-modify-food
Thanks, this is perfect!
William Salatin of slate has had several good columns on this.
In terms of ‘corporate ag’ I would ask what other areas of the economy you want to be free of market efficiency.
Edit – William Saletan, my bad. And was nija’ed pdq by Urstoff.
BOOYAH
Obvious straw-man is obvious. “Corporate agriculture” also includes huge bipartisan farm subsidies received primarily by the largest few agribusinesses, patents and intellectual property of genes and organisms (see the attempt to patent pigs in Europe), and stuff like suing competing farmers into bankruptcy after your seeds blow into their fields. Aside from other potential problems like reliance on monocultured crops and centralized control of the nation’s and world’s food supply.
“and stuff like suing competing farmers into bankruptcy after your seeds blow into their fields. ”
Assuming that’s the Canadian case from some time back that I read about in some detail, it’s pretty clearly bogus. The farmer in question was deliberately breeding back to the patented strain.
Is there another case I don’t know about that better fits the story?
The case was a bit more complicated than that – Schmeiser’s 1997 crop included seeds that allegedly arrived in his field by wind (or some other similar method), which he noticed being Roundup resistant, saved and replanted in 1998. Claims against him for the 1997 crop were dropped, and he lost the case with Monsanto over the 1998 crop, which he had planted using the probably-blown-in seeds he saved from 1997.
There was also the 2011 lawsuit with the Organic Seed Growers Trade Association, which ended with the Court of Appeals agreeing contamination was inevitable but that Monsanto wouldn’t be prohibited from suing due to an agreement not to sue where the contaminated fields contained less than 1% of Monsanto-patented canola.
So yeah, it appears an epidemic of agribusinesses “suing competing farmers into bankruptcy” for seeds blowing into their fields is a myth, though with some basis in reality, especially when you include their various other lawsuits against farmers for saving seeds, use of private investigators to spy on them, etc. If any of the four other points I mentioned are incorrect, let me know, but I don’t think the misstatement substantially changes the point that Big Ag isn’t exactly an archetype of laissez-faire market efficiency. Personally I have more complaints against the subsidies than anything else, especially as the corn and soybean subsidies drive down the price of meat, with various negative consequences I’ve already argued about here before…
If I remember the case correctly, Schmeisser harvested crop from along the road that other farmers who were using Roundup Ready seeds drove their trucks along, planted the seeds, sprayed the plants with Roundup, harvested the crops that were not killed, planted the seed–possibly one repeat. Very clearly trying to breed back to the Roundup Ready from seed spilled by his neighbors.
(For those not familiar with the case, Roundup Ready seeds were immune to the herbicide Roundup, which could thus be used to kill weeds without killing the crop).
I was unable to find anything saying that – the claim was that he was spraying Roundup to eliminate weeds near a public road, noticed some canola had survived, tested the Roundup on a few acres of his own field, and found ~60% of the plants were resistant. A neighbor had planted the resistant seed in a neighboring field in 1996. That Monsanto dropped the claim against him for the 1997 crop, despite ~60% “contamination,” and canola seeds are apparently easily dispersed, seemed like inconclusive evidence in his favor. However, since he has as much reason to reduce his culpability as Monsanto does to aggressively litigate potential infringements and avoid bad precedents, and since I wasn’t there, there doesn’t seem much reason to take either of them at their word.
Not that I read it all, but what seems to be the final judgment is available here.
It’s the monoculture that is the most worrying, apart from the “use our herbicide on our patented crops to increase yield so we get you coming and going: want to buy our seed, pay our prices plus we’re the only ones who produce the particular herbicide, use any other and it’ll kill the crops, so we’re your sole supplier for everything, buddy”.
Putting all your eggs into the basket of “99% of growers use the one strain of GMO seed” is going to end up with problems along the line, as witness the Great Famine, monoculture and lack of resistance to a particular blight strain exacerbated by seasonal climatic conditions.
To be fair, those problems are best addressed directly, rather than trying to limit genetic engineering itself. E.g. patent policy is a public policy choice.
I’m in no way opposed to genetic engineering or GMOs, in case I gave that impression. Not even big corporate agriculture really, just some of their shittier practices.
It’s pretty heady stuff, to say “strawman” and then pull out “corporate ag is bad b/c ag subsidies”, which is a function of government, not agriculture.
David Friedman covered most of the lawsuit stuff, and I’ll just say that the business w/Monsanto suing farmers was for breach of contract – ie, they bought seeds under a specific agreement, when there were other seeds they could have bought, and then violated that agreement, and were sued for that violation. Is this really something we want *discouraged*?
As for the rest…ag subsidies are a hot mess whereever they are and under whatever rules they are enacted – look at the EU for a particularly horrific example of how to not do it, and they *deliberately* work to cripple large corporate farm firms – it’s not fair to blame corporations on something that is badly done when it’s monastery farms or the king’s dairy.
Patents on bio inventions are still being worked out, but if you can own and restrict the use of specific lines of livestock – which people have been doing for forever – then I don’t see what is wrong with getting a patent on a specific line of pigs (and it’s really not at all worthy to imply that *all* pigs would be trademarked.
Again, monocultures have been an issue since forever – see cotton, tobacco, and rice – it’s an issue of what makes money, not of corporations. (There is room to argue, even, that corporations live longer than men, and so a corporation farm is more likely, on average, to take the long view than any individual person.)
And finally, for the idea that “the nation and the world’s food supply is centrally controlled” – no. That’s not how it works. Regionally advised, okay. But also in constant flux and fighting off upstarts and innovators left and right.
(Same as the idea that Monsanto, etc, is pushing “just one strain of GMO corn/wheat/grass/ect” – this is one of the ways I can tell who has actually listened to a Monsanto sales rep, and who is just repeating talking points. Rep would rather sell you five different varieties matched to five different soil/moisture/tillage requirements on your place, than sell you enough to plant the whole farm and have to give you a volume discount. And the catalog changes every year.)
There is *potential* for rent-seeking and regulatory capture, for sure – but we’ve already had the discussion about how to keep businesses from controlling government actions on their rivals – reduce the amount of government acting on that sector of the economy.
But nobody wants to do that.
I have some worry about genetic engineering and creating super-foods. Crops that grow quickly, and can survive under harsh conditions. Could they spread out and dominate the eco-sphere? Perhaps we could create the best invasive species of all time?
I am less concerned about safety issues. The phyto-chemical distribution of the drugs can quite likely be properly accounted for by testing the plant thoroughly.
I am slightly concerned about some variables in GMO’s being maximized without account for others. I have already read that the speed of growth and size of the plant has created plants with less vitamins/minerals per calorie. Should there be laws saying that plant X isn’t plant X unless it has at least the mean nutrient count of the same species 40 years ago?
Invasive species – maaaaaaybe. To be invasive, the crop doesn’t just have to be good at surviving, it has to be good at spreading itself around, which immediately rules out major GMO crops like corn and beans which have been specifically bred NOT to disperse their seeds upon maturity. For the crops that do spread their seeds around a bit more, there’s the issue that the harsh conditions you’re likely to see on a farm are not the same as the harsh conditions you’d see in the wild – for example, in the wild being herbicide resistant is pretty useless because nobody sprays herbicide, but because nobody sprays there will be lots more competition from weeds than is allowed on a farm.
Nutrient content – the trouble is, this isn’t just a function of the plant’s genetics, it’s also a function of growing conditions, especially the nutrient content of the soil. A crop grown in mineral-deficient soil, with nothing added by the farmer to compensate, is going to be low in minerals regardless of whether it’s Monsanto’s latest or an heirloom with a 200-year pedigree. And if you don’t control for growing conditions, determining the nutrient count for purposes of your suggested laws would quickly become a farce.
At a slight tangent, I have a blog post from a while back on the claim that CO2 fertilization makes crops less nutritious. I think it’s a pretty clear example of how to lie while telling the truth.
re: “Invent superweed that jumps out of containment and spreads across the planet, ripping up asphalt and topping skyscrapers as it goes”:
– Okay, so I exaggerate. But ag scientists do test the heck out of hybrids, and the odds of us creating a kudzu by accident are not great, much less to create it and let it loose. Ag breeding, after all, takes something that happens in nature, and them amps up that quality, generally at the expense of several other qualities. So the auroch becomes the cow, and can make milk (or beef, but not both) and along the way becomes a weaker, milder version of its ur-self.
re: “GMO crops aren’t as nutritious as the wild type” – so much depends on what you mean by “nutritious”. There’s some interesting (but still incomplete) work on the gluten typing of historical wheat varieties vs the more modern (nonGMO) types, but in most cases, the “nutrition” profiles are not that different, and where significant, are in micro nutrients that aren’t an important part of that crop anyway.
For the most part, plant breeding has been in response to consumer demand, which has been for aesthetics (size, color, etc) and price and less for flavor. Consumers *will* buy for flavor, but it’s a secondary thing.
Again, this is totally not something you can blame corporate ag on.
It was something I read in Michael Pollon’s book “In Defense of Food”
I read, though I might be mis-remembering it, that vitamins per calorie have decreased over the past 40 years with natural brreding methods, not GMO methods, due to an emphasis on food size.
A suggestion to counter that is to use some standards for nutrients for food to consider that part of the crop.
A suggestion to counter that is to use some standards for nutrients for food to consider that part of the crop.
I fully support consumers using a nutrient profile to pick their produce. I’m not crazy about using such a thing for licensing/regulating ag products.(*)
Aside from the obvious – what, iceberg lettuce is illegal now? And mushrooms? – there’s an easy way to get licensing for your new supersized melon that is high on water and low on Vit C – just restrict fertilization and water for the crop submitted for testing. Boom! that crop is smaller than its potential, higher in nutrients, and passes standards.
(*) I’m ambivalent about source labeling and even more torn about things like milkfat percentages for fluid milk and species-testing for meat, because people *will* water the milk and sell you Wazu beef that is actually 100% Dobbin.
I’m not sure if I should link to this.
But.
Someone I otherwise respect has this on their Tumblr.
Read the headline: “Trump’s New ‘Pro-Life’ Advisor Thinks Too Few Women Die In Childbirth These Days”
Guess what the subject is about. I’ll give you a chance to think about it.
[think]
[think]
[think]
[think]
Ready? It’s abortion. I nearly said “of course”, but what’s “of course” about that headline?
Woman who is pro-life thinks there should be no abortions. This gets translated into “Gender-betraying bitch who has sold out to The Patriarchy thinks Real Proper Women who have the kind of sex they enjoy should be forced to get pregnant and die to punish them for their sinful sex-having, the sluts”.
I don’t care two hoots about the politics of this piece, or that it’s about Trump and the election. I probably shouldn’t expect anything else from Wonkette, right? (It’s under the Gawker umbrella, I discover. Well, of course it is. Of course it is). I don’t even want to argue about abortion. But I’m just so tired of this strident screeching about who is and who isn’t a real woman, a real feminist, and that the consensus of all sane, not to say right-thinking people, is that abortion for any or no reason at any stage of pregnancy is just the bees’ knees and the only people who disagree are bad evil rich white cis het Christian men who hate and despise women and want to control them, and self-hating women who have sold their souls to gain approval/jobs from those men.
I’m too disheartened even to swear, and I was going to tackle the religion bit but decided to drop all that – but the sneering about Susan B. Anthony is interesting, since apparently she did indeed have something to say about abortion, except that they claim it wasn’t her but a man writing under her name (though that would seem to contradict their position that she was a progressive activist who didn’t take no shit from no men) – and Wonkette and its ilk seem to have no problems with the fact that there isn’t even an Emily behind the famous Emily’s List, as long as it serves a cause they like.
I don’t know what my point is, or if I even have a point, besides that the wells of discourse have become so poisoned that I don’t know if it’s even possible for people with different views to converse anymore (and discourse itself has become a loaded term). But here is someone I like and respect, as I said, linking uncritically to this piece, and so I have to take it that this is indeed their view of the matter – that Marjorie Dannenfelser wants women to die for having the wrong kind of sex. And I’m not even going to get into an argument with them over this because I know it’s no use – it will only stir up anger and dudgeon and not change any minds.
I’ll be the Bad Guy in this if I say “Some women are indeed opposed to abortion. And it’s not because they want women to die”. Because being anti-abortion rights means you’re evil, correct? No ifs, ands or buts. Anything you may say to the contrary is only falsehood to mask your real intent: you’re a damn stinkin’ foetus-lover who prefers that real women die instead of a blob of cells, and think that they should die because the sluts had sex for pleasure.
I think I want to cry, but I have no tears.
So a partisan site makes some slight exaggerations in an attempt the paint the other side in a negative light. This is surprising or noteworthy why?
If you oppose abortion even when a women’s life in in danger, that means you want more women to die in childbirth. That’s technically correct, though it’s disingenuous to frame it like that, because you are presenting something that is a side-effect of the true goal as if it is the the goal.
But c’mon, that kind of framing is not noteworthy. It happens all the bloody time, on all sides of all issues.
some slight exaggerations
And this is what I’m talking about. Not Wonkette – I don’t expect anything else from them. But the “them and us” entrenchment of views – “they said something critical about the perfectly harmless and true things we said, let us circle the wagons!” – that is depressing me from both sides.
The “slight exaggeration” you say is that “Trump’s New ‘Pro-Life’ Advisor Thinks Too Few Women Die In Childbirth These Days”.
Suppose I quoted a headline about “Clinton’s New ‘Pro-Choice’ Advisor Thinks Too Many Babies Survive Gestation These Days”. Would you consider that a “slight exaggeration” that is not worth getting upset over if you support abortion rights? Or that it doesn’t mean pro-choice and pro-life people can’t have a calm, rational discussion of the matter, just because those crazy baby-murdering fanatics take exception – who knows why? – to the neutral terms used to describe them?
Linguistically, the purpose of the word ‘slight’ there is not so much to describe the exact scope of the exaggeration, but to state that I don’t care about it. It’s a form of sarcastic dismissal I guess. Compare a statement like “So he gave a few cents to charity, who cares”. You could say that about someone whether the amount given was big or small.
(Now that I am thinking about this kind of construct, I see that I did the same thing again in the first sentence on this paragraph. The word ‘exact’ could be left out without changing the meaning of the sentence, and would, taken literally, be inaccurate (since the word ‘slight’ is anything but exact), but it still adds emphasis. Sorry for rambling a bit, but I just love these kind of subtle style figures)
That all being said, even taken literally I don’t think calling it a slight exaggeration is far from the truth, in this case:
Honestly, yeah. My main objection to that sentence would be the use of the word ‘babies’ there. It’s fetuses. It’s only a baby after birth.
I mean such a headline would obviously be disingenuous in the same way the original headline is: It’s confusing a side-effect of the goal with the real goal. On reflextion, I should say that perhaps ‘exaggeration’ is entirely the wrong term to use here. It’s not exaggerating someone’s views, it’s twisting them. But as twists go it’s a pretty minor one.
In both cases, the proper response to such an accusation would not be “no” but “Yes. That’s not my intention, but I accept that as a consequence”.
But as I said earlier, the exact size of the twist is not the point. Whether it’s a small twist or a big twist, the point I was trying to make is the question: Why do you care about this specific example? This kind of thing is common as dirt.
And in case that’s still too subtle, let me be blunt: I am accusing you of making motivated arguments. You are saying that don’t care about abortion or the politics of this piece, only about the dishonesty of the rhetoric it uses. But if that were true you wouldn’t have singled out this particular piece on this particular subject.
It’s not the piece, it’s the person who linked it.
I’m used to the “common as dirt” pieces and I generally ignore them. Why do I care about this specific one? Not for its content, which is the usual. But because it’s the usual, and the person who linked it never tried to soften it, or argue that “our real need is for [whatever]”, or acknowledged in any way that it was partisan propaganda, no, this was straight-up truth in journalism.
And had the person been someone I considered unreasonable or prejudiced or otherwise “Well, of course they’d like this”, then I wouldn’t have been affected. But they weren’t. That’s what hit me hard.
Suppose you are acquainted with someone whether it’s through work or a hobby or a friend of a friend or you meet them at Cousin Maurice’s wedding. They seem intelligent, friendly, and pleasant, and you find yourself enjoying your interaction with them and even finding things in common that you both like or agree upon or “oh yeah, that is really bad, isn’t it?”
And then this seemingly sane, normal, pleasant person suddenly, in the same tone of voice and with the same expression, begins spewing the most outrageous and offensive bile. Imagine for yourself what it is – maybe it’s about women, or gays, or non-whites, or whatever.
It’s nothing you’ve never heard before, and if your new acquaintance were a certain type of person (we all have a mental image of the kind of person who would say something like that) you wouldn’t be at all surprised. But they seemed so nice, so normal, so easy to have a discussion with, even if you had differing opinions.
And now you suddenly discover that you can’t even talk to them about this because you are one of the bad evil wicked murdering villains who want to destroy and bring down the good people, the people like them.
And you can’t even talk to them about it. There’s no hope of going back to “why do you think this/why do you think I think that/can you see what I mean here”. There is only – well, I don’t know what. What comes next? If we are all going to be in entrenched camps ripping out each other’s eyes, what happens?
I think “babies survive gestation” assumes the very thing under question: are fetuses babies? “Advisor Thinks Too Many Babies Are Born” or “Advisor Thinks More Babies Would Be Killed” would be closer. And in either case, I would regard it as a blatant partisan attack that isn’t worth getting upset about.
@ Diadem
If you oppose abortion even when a women’s life in in danger, that means you want more women to die in childbirth. That’s technically correct, though it’s disingenuous to frame it like that, because you are presenting something that is a side-effect of the true goal as if it is the the goal.
No need to take it quite that far. Compare: “X would prefer a world where Y number of women die and no abortions are performed, to the current situation; though his first preference of course would be a world with better medical care so that the women could live too. [So we should all get behind better medicine.]”
I think your expectations of Wonkette are far too high.
Also, it’s election season which is a good time to take measure of a woman or a man. What will she or he do to assure the victory of the forces of light and to prevent That Monster from being elected?
“and to prevent That Monster from being elected?”
Do people think it works? One might argue that the people who find it persuasive are already committed to vote against Trump, anyone currently inclined to favor Trump will be more likely to do so in response, and at least some neutrals will react the way Deiseach does, making them less likely to vote for Hilary, more likely to vote for Trump.
Especially neutrals who are anti-abortion.
It reminds me of the pattern I think I see on FB climate arguments. People on both (all?) sides post in a way that lets them have fun insulting their opponents and boasting of their own intellectual and moral superiority and that, I think, makes observers less likely, not more likely, to support their side.
But it’s possible that I overestimate the observers.
It’s not about persuading the neutral observers, it’s about consolidating support for one’s own side, ego-reinforcement, and trying to emotionally hurt those you disagree with.
Bullying works.
Does bullying work? Evidence? Are people likely to abandon a position because people who disagree with it call them names?
I can see it working if almost everybody disagreed and attacked you, but the context I’m observing is one with significant numbers on both sides, and the behavior is being done from both sides.
I agree with ego-reinforcement as an explanation. “trying to emotionally hurt those you disagree with” is sort of right, except that it isn’t actually designed to hurt them so much as to let you feel as though you are attacking them. More like winning a video game against NPC’s than like winning a real battle.
I take the pattern as a case of pursuing a private good while pretending, to yourself and others, to pursue a public good, and doing it even if the former activity harms the latter goal.
If the behavior only works when only one side is doing it, and the other side is doing it, your side better damn well start unless they want to be crushed.
People underestimate how much bullying works because people try to keep up a brave front in the immediate bullying interaction, to avoid losing face. But you will learn which sort of things tend to expose you to bullying, and you will try to avoid those things in the future.
The fact that it’s a strategy that’s survived many election iterations makes me wonder. On the one hand, its survival may be attributed to it being a successful way to generate clicks.
On the other hand, I can think of a few benefits to it. In your climate change example, it seems to be a successful way of barring the opposition entry to the Overton Window. It’s possible that people do it as a way of marking out social territory, and that if the bulk of the territory is dominated by one tribe, people will tend to go along with the dominant tribe. It makes me wonder if the downside of driving away thoughtful neutrals is outweighed by the upside of incorporating hostility towards That Monster in less thoughtful or experienced neutrals.
On a related note, does anyone know if propaganda is effective? My prior is that it is, and this sort of article seems like it serves the same function.
It survives election iterations not because it is adapted to and good at winning elections, but because expressing contempt for people who disagree with you is a sacred act more important than winning elections.
The purpose is not to convince uncommitted others, the purpose is to prove your loyalty to the tribe and your commitment to the cause in the time of the Trials. Win or lose, someone will be fed to the hyenas and you’d better fling poo fast and far in order to not be that someone…
Wonkette is a little snarky.
You misspelled “poison.”
Let them shriek in their echo chamber. Who willingly follows this uncontroversially-valueless trash? It’s like going on Stormfront and being outraged. What did you expect?
What did you expect?
I didn’t seek them out. I would’t ordinarily mind (if, for example, I’d stumbled across it while reading a news or opinion piece elsewhere).
It was more that “Here is someone with whom I have at least some commonalty, given that I generally like their work and can agree with them, linking to something about as subtle as ‘witches will steal your penis, come to our witch-burning next Saturday!’, and plainly seeing nothing to disagree with in it, nothing over the top, nothing extravagant or overdone, and using it to urge against voting for Trump because this is what would happen should he come to power: women would die because they’d be forced to remain pregnant. And so what hope is there for any kind of communication across the breach, any kind of discussion where, even if we do not come to agree on a common position, at least we can discuss rather than rave and spit at each other?”
Stormfront isn’t popular and powerful.
Nor is wonkette.
It’s not powerful, but it’s definitely more popular than Stormfront, isn’t it?
As always the breakdown is the same: Given the prior that cows and fetuses are both equally people, being pro-life and being a vegan are ethically interchangeable. Which makes politically pro-life positions look as ridiculous as the vegans who want to make it a criminal act punishable by life in prison to eat meat. But there is a cost, sometimes including death, of pro-life political policies. Which makes political pro-life movements looks like the vegans who want people who use animal-derived insulin to die instead of continuing to produce demand for animal harvesting.
And that seems, from inside this perspective, to be ridiculous. Not just in the ordinary way that people sometimes are, but to the point that you can’t empathize with the position at all. What sane person would sacrifice human happiness to increase the well-being of pigs or bloatflies? So you begin to expect (because these people certainly aren’t acting detached from reality, or like they only care in a passing way about their
vegan eco-terrorist cellhuman reproduction politics.So you begin to expect, in the fashion of things, that this is a Hamletian crazy-like-a-fox scenario. That the ridiculous belief that fetuses are people is a motte of some sort, with an inscrutable end-game that can only be achieved covertly. So what are the consequences of pro-life policies replacing pro-choice ones?
“Given the prior that cows and fetuses are both equally people”
How common is that prior?
The pro-life belief that fetuses are people is a motte, but not that motte. The motte is “I think it is wrong to kill fetuses because I have a principled belief about killing etuses” and the bailey is “I think it is wrong to kill things that my religion tells me it is wrong to kill”.
Religion works that way; it tells people to do arbitrary things, and they then obey and do arbitrary things while irrationally ignoring the bad consequences of them. They don’t secretly intend those bad consequences.
I’m an atheist, but I think it is, uh, impolite, to kill humans. That’s my “motte” if you really think it deserves the name.
You might as well have said “Given the prior that pro-choicers are right and pro-lifers are wrong”, since that’s effectively what you said anyway.
Eh, I’ve flirted with the idea of being an anti-choice vegan. I mostly lean towards anti-life non-vegan though.
Given the prior that cows and fetuses are both equally people…
Interesting choice of comparison.
A cow is a sentient[1] being. A human fetus may not be sentient, a human infant may also not be fully sentient.
A human child, or a human teen, or a human adult, is usually understood as sentient.
A cow is not a sapient[2] being. Neither is a fetus. Nor an infant under the age of 2. Somewhere between childhood and teenage years, sapience is fully expressed.
Most of the cultural and legal rule-making intended to keep humans from killing other humans (whether infant, child, teen, or adult) appear to be rooted in the idea that one sapient being should not end the life of another. [3]
The same rules are usually not applied to sentient animals. (Even though there are behaviors judged as wrong, under the reason of cruelty towards animals; the rules about not ending life are typically not applied by humans to animals.)
The big question is, does a human fetus have the same right to life as a human infant?
An infant may not be fully sentient, but is only potentially sapient. A fetus is likely less sentient, and still potentially sapient. In most cases, both depend on their mother for food, nourishment, and protection from the climate.
If an abortion stops a beating heart (or a waving brain) of a fetus, is it the same level of wrong as ending the life of an infant?
[1] Sentient–responds to sensation, has some evidence of awareness, self-awareness, and consciousness.
[2] Sapient–the ability to reason at the abstract level. Not necessarily become a rationalist…maybe just be a rationalizer.
[3] Both utilitarian and virtue-ethics arguments are available on this subject, but search for them is left as an exercise for the reader.
It’s impressive that so many people like to blather about the mental characteristics of fetuses, infants, and children without, apparently, ever having interacted with any of them.
Some stories about my not-yet-two-year-old daughter:
* She knows her letters and numbers, reads picture books and tells me about what’s happening in short sentences, responds to verbal requests, and in general anyone who thinks a two year old child can’t reason or think is either woefully ignorant or a bloody fool.
* When she was an infant and couldn’t yet crawl (~4-5 mos or so), she had figured things out well enough that she would pull on the handle of a mirror her cups were towered on in order to knock them over and put them in her mouth. I also used to play the cups game with her: take three cups of different sizes and colors, put the pacifier under one, mix them up, and let her find it. Which she usually did straight off.
* When she was internal, and had started to kick, I used to play games with her – push back on her foot and she’d kick harder. She’d also kick Mommy’s iPad whenever she tried to rest it on her stomach. Once when we were all asleep in bed during an enormous thunderstorm there was an extremely loud lightning strike right outside that startled her – she started kicking and punching and acted very distressed, and my wife and I had to sing and pat her stomach for five minutes to get her to settle down.
In short, every factual statement you have made about the mental capabilities of infants and children is wrong, and obviously so to anyone who has actually interacted with children ever. Maybe you should work on improving your facts before you try coming up with complicated philosophical arguments to explain the non-existent facts that you think you know.
@ Deiseach
“Too Few Women Die In Childbirth These Days”
This reminds me of statements like “If your aim never misses, you should advance to harder targets” … “If your first attempts never fail, you’re being too cautious” … “If none of your calves die, you’re using too much antibiotic” … etc. It sounds like a twist on a reasonable argument, such as “Currently the danger of death in childbirth is too low to merit /whatever/”.
I was curious about the original statement, but couldn’t read on through the flames.
From a rationalist perspective, these are good points though.
I once talked to a consultant who claimed that if you aren’t late for at least one flight every quarter, you’re wasting too much time at the airport. He was 100% serious.
I’ve also had debates with non-libertarians where they’ve made challenges to me like “Prove that the roads would be safer if they were privately managed” and my response is usually something like “I make no such claim – it’s entirely possible the current roads are TOO safe and the market equilibrium would reduce safety in the name of greater efficiency or cost savings – which would be fine if it was a true reflection of the preferences of individual customers” And yes, they have spun that as “So you’re saying the problem with government is not enough people are dying in fiery car crashes??!!!”
Good ol’ Umeshisms.
Are there any any fiction readers out there?
I am having a bit of trouble figuring out who to read next. Ideally what I’m looking for is an author with a great sense of humour – the authors mentioned below should help illustrate what I mean by that – and a style that’s relatively undemanding to read. I’ve pretty much depleted Wodehouse, Pratchett (not completely, but I’m saving the few remaining Discworld novels for special occasions), Jasper Fforde, Tom Sharpe, Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris, among others. Non-comedy writers I like include Agatha Christie and George R. R. Martin (also read pretty much all of their stuff). Any brilliant/very funny authors I should know about? I’m mainly looking for authors who consistently write/wrote enjoyable books (preferably a lot of them…), not specific books; I read a lot, I’m at roughly 100 books this year so far, and a good work of fiction will not take me long to finish, regardless of how great it might be.
Not sure if this is the right forum, but I have the impression that I might get better answers here than I might get e.g. at r/books.
I originally intended only to post the above query on the subreddit as I find it easier to keep track of things on the subreddit because there are fewer comments there, but I realized that what I dislike about these threads – the massive number of comments and the high level of activity – also should be expected to increase the probability of ‘success’, broadly defined.
I was quite in love with Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series, but everyone I’ve pushed it on didn’t care for it. So, uh… maybe nth’s time’s the charm?
“everyone I’ve pushed it on didn’t care for it.”
– I like that recommendation, it’s the kind of recommendation I could see myself giving (at least I could see myself giving it if I had friends who cared about which books I read, which I however currently do not…).
It looks like an interesting work I’ll want to take a look at when my present life situation, which makes me limit fiction reading to ‘enjoyable stuff that doesn’t take much work’ for now, has changed (likely in a matter of months). Thanks.
Wolfe’s probably the greatest writer currently alive, but is he funny? Also, for a questioner who finds Dickens to be a too heavy cognitive load at the moment, Wolfe’s plots would almost certainly be a very unhappy match. I’m not even sure the very extensive and deliberately obscure vocabulary in New Sun would fall inside tolerability.
So, as much as I would recommend any book by Wolfe unreservedly to someone making no provisos, I have to say I’d very strongly advise US to skip him until he feels more relaxed and able to concentrate.
Thanks for the additional details, anon.
Perhaps try Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint is super funny.
In the other thread I recommended Gaddis’s JR to someone, I’ll recommend it to you too. Possibly the funniest book of all time, but it’s probably not your style.
Thanks for the recommendations, I hadn’t heard about either of those – I’ll have a look.
Dick Francis (British racing-oriented mysteries – look for his older stuff, not the newer stuff written by his son) Dry Brit wit, with deeply satisfying characters.
Lois McMaster Bujold – Not always funny, but frequently so. SFF of the military/space opera sort, but lighter fare (*) than most of that sort.
Connie Willis – Adores slapstick. Also Agatha Christie. “To Say Nothing of the Dog” is side-splitting hysterical sitcom. Others of her books are far less light.
Kage Baker – esp “The Empress of Mars” and “The Graveyard Game”.
Janet Kagan’s “Hellspark” and “Mirable” – alas, she is no longer with us, but both these are fun delightful books.
I shall think anon and perhaps have more.
(*) Well, it *looks* lighter, for sure.
“alas, she is no longer with us” – well, I find it hard to hold that against her, I’m assuming that she’d have liked to be (my dad’s roughly her age and he doesn’t seem to mind being alive)…
Dick Francis looks exactly like the sort of thing I was thinking about – at a first glance he looks quite promising. ‘Dry Brit wit’ – that’s the stuff… The others were not the sort of authors I had in mind, but that’s no reason to assume they’re not great (no reason to blame *them* for *my* limited mind…).
“I shall think anon and perhaps have more.”
Please do.. And thanks for the recommendations.
(To the people ‘below’ – I’m out of time for now, but I’ll get back to you soon…)
Dick Francis is good. His protagonists are pretty similar to each other but he explores a range of settings, starting with the horse racing world that he knew as a champion jockey and branching out to other worlds that he (and his wife) presumably came to know after he retired as a jockey and became a successful author.
He explores an interesting range of ideas, including prejudice against the rich (High Stakes) and, from the other side, how an extremely rich man ought to deal with problems of his adult children that could perhaps be solved by money (Hot Money).
Dick Francis really is a marvelous writer – and is one of the things I point to when people sneer at Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. He is one of several authors I would not have read, had the books not been available in that format.
(I think that RD was a function of the limits of the publishing industry & international copyright law, and that Kindle/etc is a far better fix, but we didn’t have Kindle/etc back then.)
‘Write what you know’ was never bad advice, and if that was mostly what Francis did then that’s just one extra point in his favour. But I’m not sure he needed it – I must admit that of the recommendations in this thread (so far? people keep coming up with stuff I might like, it’s awesome and completely different from what I’d imagined when I originally made the query – compare with the r/slatestarcodex thread, in which there is exactly one reply, which is a book – not author – recommendation…) this was already the author I’d decided to pick next – I’ll probably start out reading one of his works tomorrow or the day after, when I’ve finished the fiction I’m currently reading.
The early Dick Francis books are set in the racing scene, which the author knew. In the later ones there is generally some connection to that scene, but it isn’t the central part of the background.
Apparently a good deal of the research was done by his wife. She, for instance, was the pilot of two, and flying airplanes shows up in several of his novels.
After she died he said that she could have been listed as coauthor. I’m guessing that she didn’t want to be. And the next book after that felt to me like the first draft of a Dick Francis novel.
However he did it, in the later books he has gotten into some other world and used it as his background. And they work.
OH! I do have one! Barry Hughart – Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.
You can find them at used books stores, but your better bet might be to get the whole set on digits.
So glad it seems you are finding some useful things to read.
One for your “try later, when brain is more forgiving” stack – The Steerswoman and its sequels.
Those are good. But if what you want is humor, you might try an older fake Chinese series–the Kai Lung books.
I’ve actually become a bit exhausted by now checking out all those authors/books people keep throwing at me, so I think I’ll wait a bit before ‘researching further’ – but this thread is one I’ll come back to, more than once, in the future, and all the suggestions will be evaluated at some point. Thanks for the further suggestions.
“So glad it seems you are finding some useful things to read.”
And I’m very grateful to all the people who contributed here, even those whose suggestions might not be exactly what I was looking for (and for all I – and they – know, it might be that those books were just what other people were looking for…).
I had no idea the Hughart books were available as ebooks. (Thanks, keranih!) I’ll be forever grateful to the proprietor of the (alas long-defunct) Chicago SF bookstore The Stars Our Destination[1] for making it her personal mission to push Bridge of Birds on anyone who came in.
[1] I took my wife there on our first date when she was living in Hyde Park in the 90s. Where’s our movie, Hollywood?
BTW, if you haven’t read it, Hughart’s letter to readers/autobiographical sketch on the Amazon page is worth taking a look at: https://smile.amazon.com/Chronicles-Master-Li-Number-Ten-ebook/dp/B005ISOYLK/
“I took my wife there on our first date when she was living in Hyde Park in the 90s.”
If it was early 90’s my wife and I were living in Kenwood.
[adjacent neighborhood]
1993. But while you won’t remember (I doubt I even spoke to anyone), we also briefly crossed paths some years earlier when I looked into the SCA (under its nom de student organization of the “Medieval and Renaissance Society) during my first weeks at the U of C.
(I didn’t wind up joining, but I knew a fair number of people who were involved.)
“(I didn’t wind up joining, but I knew a fair number of people who were involved.)”
Then we probably had friends, or at least acquaintances, in common.
Interesting. I’m looking forward to having a go at his (and his wife’s) stuff..
(this was a response to Friedman’s 3:02 pm comment..)
Somewhat outdated, but I’d still say the animorphs series. I re-read it a few years ago as an adult, and realized I really did not appreciate it enough as a kid. The Dresden files also seem up your ally – lots of fun and sarcasm, but also a serious side, and incredibly readable, especially starting around book 5 (one of the few series I know that starts strong and improves over time). Also, A series of Unfortunate Events.
A bit different in style from the others, but I’d also recommend the Jim Herriot books – If you like both pratchett and Agatha Christie you might enjoy them.
Seconding Dresden Files. Maybe a bit too pulpy and action oriented for this person, not sure, but I love them.
I like Dresden Files a lot, although I don’t find it to be particularly well written.
From what I can tell from a brief skim, the Animorphs series does not look like the kind of thing I was going for (and I don’t think I’d like that series). I may give one of The Dresden Files novels a try to see if I like the stuff. The same goes for Snicket. Herriot I actually considered reading a while back, but for some reason I never did (I can’t remember why not, but most likely I was reading some other author and I just forgot about him), so I could certainly see myself giving him a try.
Thanks for the suggestions (and thanks to 27chaos and Incurian for their remarks and additional details).
For old thrillers that are fun and not very demanding, you might try the Saint stories by Leslie Charteris, preferably the earlier books.
In that case, Manning Coles.
Oh yes! Manning Coles!
The ghost ones, right? Brief Candles and such? Those are very funny.
Except that one… The Far Traveler? That one is also very silly, but has some seriousness underneath it. I wouldn’t say it’s demanding, though. I would actually say it’s the best of them. But a little more serious.
Anyway, seconding that!
This thread is turning into a pure goldmine, but see my (second?) answer to keranih – it’s exhausting to check out all those authors, and I’ve already decided which author to start out on next.
But I have a sense that this thread might turn into one of those gifts that just keep on giving for a long time to come. Thanks!
I’m surprised no one has recommended Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels yet. Perhaps because they’re not comedy in the sense that most of the other authors you mentioned are– still, the humor’s there in a quiet way. With 20 books in the series, it’ll keep you off the streets for a while.
Ehhh, they’re… ok. If you can put up with Sedaris and Bryson they’d be pretty tolerable. If the man actually knew anything about sailing they’d have been much better.
Can you expand on this? My impression was that they were supposed to be pretty historically accurate, and he used a lot of primary sources to write them, but I couldn’t find anything arguing one way or the other.
I’m curious as well, also about what HI meant with his ‘if you can put up with Sedaris and Bryson’-remark…
Incidentally Bryson did test my patience from time to time and I did think during a few of his books that I was mostly reading him because ‘I didn’t know who else to read’. Some of Sedaris’ stuff was similar, but a couple of them I did find *very* funny indeed.
I liked the Aubrey/Maturin books.
One of them has on the back the following blurb (by memory, so probably not verbatim):
“C. S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels have given great pleasure to me and many others. These are so much better that it is almost unfair to compare them.”
Signed Mary Renault.
Speaking of whom, you might enjoy her historical novels, although they are not particularly funny (or cheerful). But very good.
With a recommendation like that, it can almost only disappoint you..
Lois McMasters Bujold is good if you like fantasy and science fiction. So is C.J. Cherryh.
For fun and not very demanding thrillers you might try the Modesty Blaise books.
For mysteries, Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout is the author).
keranih also mentioned Lois McMasters Bujold, seems worth having a look at (though not my current first choice among the authors mentioned). C.J. Cherryh I might check out later, my initial impression is that her stuff might be a bit ‘too serious’.
The Modesty Blaise novels I had never heard about, I’ll have to think about that one.
Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe I almost certainly will give a shot; after skimming wikipedia I’m sort of surprised I’d never heard about him/them. I don’t know if it’s ‘sufficiently light’ to read now/in the near future, but if not it’s an author/series to have a go at later.
Thanks for the suggestions.
my initial impression is that her stuff might be a bit ‘too serious’.
My thought is that your impression is probably correct – she is my favorite author eva, but I think she is Not What You Want, at least right now.
And while you are considering Modesty Blaise, also check out the romance-adventures by Madeleine Brent – Moonraker’s Bride, Golden Urchin and The Long Masquerade are my favorites.
Thanks for the additional recommendations.
I am a huge Tad Williams fan, but I think my appreciation is out of proportion with the actual quality of his work. His best books are all immensely long fantasy* works that take a very long time to really get started: Otherland; Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn; and Shadowmarch. Note that MST is a deliberate homage to Tolkien, and also the book series that made Martin decide to write ASoIaF.
Neal Stephenson is amazing and funny. If you want laughs from him, your best bet is probably Snow Crash, which I sometimes think of as the book that destroyed cyberpunk. Though I’d be remiss not to mention Reamde, a near-future thriller-type which … well, there’s a particular moment in an apartment complex in about the middle of the book, which I enjoyed very much, especially in the context of what came after.
Susanna Clarke is quite funny in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (two gentlemen bring magic back to Napoleonic Britain), but again it’s a bit slow to start, and in this case you have to deal with a great many utterly detestable characters in the early parts with minimal relief. I haven’t read her book of short stories, but now that I know it exists I’d like to. I will also say that she’s got a thing for footnotes, which you might like as a Pratchett fan.
Also worthy of note is Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss, which is a hilarious tale of a young man’s university hijinks, plus some rather interesting recursive storytelling, all hidden inside fairly straightforward fantasy epic (itself a commentary on master-of-all protagonists).
* Otherland is actually … I’ve heard it been called post-cyberpunk, and that’s kind of right. But it’s got a fantasy novel’s structure.
Completely agree about Neal Stephenson. Very funny, very well written, thought-provoking, even educational sometimes… he’s basically the best and you should read everything he wrote (except maybe Anathem :P).
I am very angry with Reamde because it has this dialogue [spoiler free]:
Executive: We could do X to transform Problem Y into Problem Z and then crowdsource Z
Engineer: You know X alone solves Y, there would be no need to crowdsource anything.
Executive: Don’t bother me with technicalities, make it work.
And this utter nonsense might be an accurate description of corporate politics. What do I know.
BUT:
The Executive is a main characer with which we are supposed to sympathise and who generally talks sense. And unbelieveably the Engineer then goes on to solve incredibly hard problem X off screen and they do unneccessary step Z because the Executive said so and nobody ever calls him on it and everybody still acts as if that made any sense.
And maybe this also is an accurate description of corporate politics, though out of character for this particular Execeutive. But it is certainly not what I want from a Stephenson novel.
And that isn’t even the worst part.
The worst part is that Z is basically an advanced version of what would later become the author’s real life kickstarter project.
I can only read this so that the author was so in love with his idea Z, that he had to have it in the novel even though he knows that the way he introduces it is bullshit (he has a character saying so) and probably also knows that it breaks one of the main characters.
It’s disgusting.
I didn’t interpret it that way. The way I read it he said, “I understand X alone solves Y, but Z would be great publicity for our company.”
I do not think that this would be a sound publicity strategy. AFAIR this is never discussed later in the book, which is part of what bothers me, but any public claim that Z somehow contributes to Y is an obviuos lie that would backfire. The author may rule that this works in his universe but I cannot suspend my disbelief.
What makes this feel like a betrayal to me is that this is Stephenson and in his earlier novels publicity would never have taken precedence over engineering.
Names are noted – Tad Williams doesn’t sound like the sort of stuff I’m looking for now, and the same probably goes for Susanna Clarke – but maybe later? Neal Stephenson? Not sure. (Don’t know what to think, based on brief skim of wiki).
“a hilarious tale of a young man’s university hijinks” (I find that sentence weird. Maybe that’s just me. University hijinks? I probably have to read more about this to make sense of it…)
Rothfuss is a brilliant writer, but he takes an awful lot of pages to get the plot not very far and I find his protagonist irritating.
Agree with the above analysis of Rothfuss. Also he has a lot of heavy-handed feminist themes, and his idea of martial arts is about as realistic as a Bruce Lee movie. The coolest part about Kingkiller Chronicle is how it subverts the usual trilogy structure. Instead of the middle novel being the dark one where things look hopeless, then the heroes make a comeback in the third, you’re told from the beginning that the main character screws up royally and ruins everything by the end, but you get to watch him through a series of greater and greater successes until that point, wondering how it’s going to end up happening.
Yeah. The most glaring part was where the guy tortured a bunch of bandits to death for raping some women, then felt incredibly guilty about killing them (but not about killing them cruelly! just about killing them!) and had to be reassured it was the right thing to do. Immediately followed by him breaking a random straw misogynist’s arm and getting high fived for it.
The other somewhat-frustrating part is that we keep swinging on whether the protagonist is an uber-super-ultra genius or just a moderately smart guy. Also his love interest is even more annoying.
I would have given it to the several hundred pages set in a superior nation ruled by matriarchal wise-women kung-fu masters where men are rightly treated as second class citizens who never rise to the level of their female betters. He’s also apparently the advisor for the feminism club at his alma mater.
That aside, as others said, his writing can be very poetic, funny, and clever, has a really creative magic system, and is good at stringing you along with interesting plotlines and mysteries.
He also plays a mean game of D&D.
In the TOR reread, a kind of background consensus in assumptions emerged that Kvothe must be screwing things up and making dumb mistakes subtly in the background, for the sake of foreshadowing and eventual thematic consistency. There were some details that implied this, though I can’t get into them without spoilers. I think this is partly true, though only partially. Kvothe is more tolerable when you interpret his awesomeness as an artifact of a biased storyteller who’s hamming up his greatness for the sake of his reveal. I do think Rothfuss kind of glorifies Kote’s depression and suffering as redemptive, which seems self indulgent and I don’t like.
The endgame seems pretty clear:
Nzoebfr be n eryngvir bs uvf orpbzrf xvat bs Ivagnf, naq xvyyvat gur Znre vf cneg bs gung cebprff. Xibgur trgf cvffrq va uvf hfhny jnl naq zheqref jubrire vg vf, gura zntvpnyyl punatrf uvf anzr gb Xbgr vafgrnq bs qbvat fbzrguvat fnar, gurerol oernxvat uvf cebzvfr gb Sryhevna naq erfgnegvat gur perngvba jne. Gung be Xibgur’f svtugf jvgu Nzoebfr rfpnyngr gb Xibgur bcravat gur sbhe-cnar qbbe, gb gur fnzr erfhyg.
And hence Cthulhu.
I’m not seeing it…
Xibgur nyernql fnvq ur’q xvyyrq gur xvat bire n jbzna, fb nyzbfg pregnvayl Qrnaan, va snpg V’z thrffvat gur xvat be fbzr haqreyvat vf ure zlfgrevbhf fhvgbe nyernql. Sryhevna’f Perngvba Jne fgbel vf cebonoyl vaibyirq, ohg zber yvxryl guebhtu gur Znre’f obk juvpu jnf fhfcvpvbhfyl fvzvyne gb gur bar hfrq gb genc gur zbba va ure fgbel. Gur qbbe va gur nepuvirf vf cebonoyl vaibyirq gbb, ohg V’z abg fher ubj. Tvira nyy gung, naq gur Punaqevna, Ebgushff unf n ybg bs ybbfr raqf gb gvr hc va gur svany obbx, naq V’z abg fher ur’f npghnyyl tbvat gb qb vg, irefhf yrnivat gurz unatvat sbe gur arkg gevybtl.
Punatvat uvf anzr naq gung jrnxravat uvz vf pyrire gubhtu, V unqa’g gubhtug bs gung bar.
Criticism/information like this is in some sense just as valuable as are recommendations – as Schopenhauer noted, ‘A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.’ So thanks for adding this information (to Zombielicious and pku as well).
GK Chesterton is good, both fiction and nonfiction.
“He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing.” (wiki)
That one is a big no-no for me.
But thanks for the suggestion.
It would normally be for me also, but he’s good. I think he’s more a conservative writer than a Christian one. It’s not that he is someone I always or usually agree with, but he’s reliably interesting and entertaining. Christian inspired works of fiction can be good in the same way any kind of religious folklore or values inspired book can be good.
Here’s a poem of his I like, as a sample: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47918 this is as religious as he ever gets when writing, and it’s still IMO great.
Unrelated, if you haven’t read a Redwall book or two, you might like that. They’re pretty YA at times, but I think the original at least is worth a read for anybody. The reason it comes to mind is that there are like a couple hundred of them, though you should probably stop long before that point for the sake of your sanity, as they descend into predictable formulaic episodes fairly quickly.
“Christian inspired works of fiction can be good in the same way any kind of religious folklore or values inspired book can be good.”
Religious folklore also does not interest me and never really has, and if I interpret the way you use the term ‘values inspired book’s correctly then in my experience when people write those kinds of things they’re usually pushing some message, either explicitly or perhaps more commonly a bit more subtly – and I in general do not like when authors do this kind of thing. If I know an author is trying to push some message, regardless of the message and whether or not I think I might agree with it, it’s unlikely – though admittedly not completely out of the question that – I’ll want to read his stuff (this is one manner in which I have changed over time, incidentally – I felt differently about this 10 years ago). I want good stories, not messages/opinions; opinions are boring (and come to that, what about opinions about opinions? Those are probably boring^2 – you must be falling asleep now, reading this…). I like this quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne:
“Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. […] A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.”
Chesterton is the sort of author that I would probably enjoy spending a bit of time on wikiquote reading, in order to later quote some of the good stuff on my blog or on goodreads; I often blog quote posts on my blog which include quotes I have come across that way, and I’ve read and quoted a lot of people with whom I violently disagree(/d) about a lot of stuff – but usually I limit my reading of such people to collections of quotes, I don’t find it worthwhile to read the stuff in full.
On a different note, I don’t really much care for poetry in general.
Despite ‘disagreeing’ about the probability that I’d like Chesterton’s stuff, I should note that I appreciate that you took the time to add those recommendations and comments. And I should note that as I have yet to read his stuff on wikiquote, I might well end up actually reading some of his books – perusing wikiquote is something I enjoy doing from time to time, and aside from using it for blogging purposes it’s also one of the mechanisms I have employed in the past to decide what/who to read next; when I really like the quotes I find on wikiquote, I’ll often give the specific author a shot.
You might like might like The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. Technically children’s books, but I enjoyed rereading them recently (possibly as I caught more of the British political satire). A. A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh) wrote an old-fashioned mystery ala Agatha Christie called The Red House Mystery, which I vaguely remember liking. Also the Sherlock Holmes books, if you’ve not read them, and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Speaking of Jonathan Stroud, I enjoyed his Bartimaeus trilogy but liked Lockwood&co better.
I can tell from the description on the wiki that I would be unlikely to like Stroud’s stuff. The Red House Mystery sounds interesting, I’ll give that one a go.
I have read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories published by Doyle, and I read a few of Sayers’ books (4). Didn’t feel like reading any more of her stuff after I’d read those; the books were sort of okay, but not more than that, and I couldn’t help thinking while reading her books, especially the last two of them, that there had to be better books out there which I should be reading instead.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Oh, and I’m glad to find someone else who likes Jasper Fforde! Did you see this news story at the time?
I did not.
I almost spilled my tea reading that headline… 🙂
I recently finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” series, and loved it. It’s a grim world, somewhat like GRRM’s, but also splashed through with black humor. Most of the characters are excellent (one fell very flat to me, but didn’t ruin the experience), and the writing is engaging throughout. I highly recommend it.
Neil Gaiman, maybe, for some of the dry Brit style? He co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett and otherwise I’d particularly recommend starting with American Gods (which incidentally feels oddly like Steven King to me: don’t know if that’s good or bad for you) or Neverwhere.
This might sound insulting but really isn’t meant to be – when taking book recommendations, worth taking into account that I suspect your taste doesn’t necessarily distinguish particularly well-written books. Christie is often talked about as having fun plots but not being a very good writer stylistically, and I think the same is 100% true of Martin (which is why he’s better on TV). So if some people recommend a book for humour/plot and others complain about clunky writing, I’d guess you should pay more attention to the first bit than the second.
I found Good Omens unreadable – I tried out reading it twice, putting it away for a while after having given up on it the first time around, and that’s one more attempt than most books get – and that was the first Pratchett book I did not like (out of 30 or so at the time) – coincidentally it was also the only Pratchett book I’d read who had Neil Gaiman as the co-author. From that experience I decided I did not want to read Gaiman, if he could ruin a Pratchett book there’s no way I’m giving him a chance. Maybe that’s harsh, but I really didn’t like that book, and I had the distinct impression that the parts I didn’t like were the parts where Gaiman’s metaphorical fingerprints were on display.
As for Christie, you’re not the first person who has told me this about her so I definitely do not take it as an insult, and the point is well made. In a way it would be weird to expect of Christie to be as sophisticated in terms of word choice etc. as are some other authors, who might obsess for hours about how to get the exact wording of a particular piece of (unimportant?) dialogue just right, considering how many novels she published during her lifetime; you need to take short cuts to get that many books published, and of course that will sometimes tell. In general if a writer is very good at X [e.g. telling stories] it can sometimes compensate for Y [e.g. occasionally deficient character development/portrayal] – there are all kinds of tradeoffs at play when trying to evaluate quality, and what you ultimately want out of a novel is going to be important in terms of which aspects to pay particular attention to. I’m incidentally also one of those people who find Christie’s international intrigue/’spy-stuff’ and most of the last of her works almost completely unreadable, so I’m definitely not one of those people who find everything she wrote amazing.
I wouldn’t take that as strong evidence against Gaiman – I didn’t particularly like Good Omens either, despite generally liking Gaiman even more than Pratchett. I think it’s the somewhat incoherent nature of the joint writing that makes it unlikable to some people, not either of the individual authors.
Also, I completely disagree about Martin stylistically – I found his style as his strongest point (I remember last time I decided to re-read the first three ASOIAF books, a few years ago, I was remembering the plot and thinking “why did I like it so much again?”. Then I started reading it and went “oh right, this is really well-written.” It fades a bit with the later two, but it’s the only thing that made me have the ability to actually get through ADWD).
“I think it’s the somewhat incoherent nature of the joint writing that makes it unlikable to some people, not either of the individual authors.”
Right, that might well be true. It’s probably really difficult to make a project like that work, regardless of how talented the authors in question are. You like him even more than Pratchett, having read both? In that case I’m going to have to reconsider and give him a second chance, by reading some of the stuff he wrote *all by himself*…
I very much like NG, but I’d put him in the same stack as CJ Cherryh – probably denser and deeper than you want in this moment. JMO.
Cherryh is generally pretty dense, but a few of her books– Merchanter’s Luck in particular– are comfort reads for me.
(I sort of wish she hadn’t abandoned the Union-Alliance world, which I liked, for the Foreigner series which I never got into. That said, it’s probably just as well she didn’t just churn U-A stories out forever.)
My very favorite Cherryh book is The Paladin. It’s in the same nameless genre as my first novel (but, of course, much better)–neither fantasy nor alternate history but historical fiction with invented history and geography.
Which is why she is one of the people I dedicated my book to.
Paladin was the one I was considering recommending for US. It’s one of the few ones I’d say was “upbeat”.
(My personal fav of CJC’s right now is the Nighthorse books. I’d like it if she wrote more of those. And more Morgaine. And more aliens/humans ones – I appreciate her ‘deep dive’ in Foreigner, but I fell out of the series about book four and haven’t caught up.)
I’ve enjoyed the Foreigner books.
My main complaint about Cherryh is that she is very good at doing people under extreme pressure, in a terrible hurry, and overuses it. The Morgiane books are an early example.
What do you think about the Chanur books? One of them is my standard example of how to deal with a currently politically hot topic (gender differences) without making it feel as though that’s what you are doing–it fits perfectly into the structure of the world she has drawn.
CJC also has this *really* strong pattern of slow build for 15/16ths of book, and then throws in five books of action & implications –
– only half of which is immediately visible to the pov character/reader –
– in the last quarter-quarter of the book. With the result that one lies on the floor, mentally exhausted but also with a sense of already? That’s it?
*ahem*
I imprinted on the Chanur books early, along with the Morgaine books, and love them for the adventure. Okay, and for the Dinner.
The socio aspects didn’t hit me until later, when I was rereading (Legacy might be the one you’re speaking of) and went, wait, what, that’s actually kinda skeevy, isn’t it?
Which it was. Not as bold a move as SM Stirling with the Draka, nor as obvious as Suzy McKay Charmas with the Motherlines books, but yeah, there was a point where one had to say, this isn’t really right, what they’re doing here.
I admire the heck out of a writer who can do that, and do it *subtle*.
I found Christie (and Jane Austen) much more approachable after seeing the films, which supplied the world-building that the authors’ contemporary readers did not need.
Dickens seems to meet most or all of your criteria.
Dickens is too much work.
Try A Christmas Carol. I’ve never been able to get through any of his other stuff, but ACC is both charming and bite-sized.
I already read that one. And David Copperfield.
Mark Twain, then?
Better than Dickens, given my current mood and cognitive load. But I’m not sure. The Innocents Abroad was good, and so was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. However I had to give up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn halfway through this spring, and that experience didn’t do a lot to motivate me to look for other Twain novels to read.
Twain essays are a lot of fun.
Twain’s essays. That’s not an option I had on my radar at all, but those might be worthwhile. Thanks.
George Macdonald Fraser wrote enough fiction to keep you busy for a while. The first Flashman novel is an all-time great and the rest are merely very good. A fair bit of superb nonfiction too. Quartered Safe Out Here is one of the best WWII memoirs around.
Can also recommend Raymond Chandler. Deadpan, but very funny, and some of the best American writing of the 20th century imo. (Had the same English teacher as Wodehouse, and I won’t go so far as to say they read alike, but if you read enough Chandler you can maybe see a faint resemblance.).
“Fraser’s Flashman is an antihero who often runs from danger in the novels. Nevertheless, through a combination of luck and cunning, he usually ends each volume acclaimed as a hero.” (wiki)
Sounds a bit like the character Rincewind from Discworld, if you’re familiar with Pratchett. I mention this because Rincewind is one of my favourite characters in the Discworld series.. Yeah, definitely worth giving a shot.
Raymond Chandler is good, but I read all his novels a decade ago (15 years ago? Something like that) and I generally much prefer novels to short stories (so I don’t feel a great desire to have a go at his short stories).
I suspect Rincewind owes something to Flashman, though they’re very different in personality. Both are cowards, but Flashman is also a cruel, lascivious, ruthless bully. Whereas Rincewind just wants to not die.
Seconded Flashman in that I find them incredibly easy, relaxing and enjoyable reading.
The Flashman books also teach you a good deal of history in an entertaining form. And I love the way the author uses his footnotes:
“This account seems unbelievable, but is supported by [real historical source X]”
“For this incident, the only source is Flashman.”
I actually liked the later Flashman novels better than the first, perhaps because the protagonist becomes less unpleasant as he gets older.
The author’s slightly fictionalized stories of his army experience are a lot of fun. You can get all of them in one Kindle as The Complete McAuslan.
Yes, definitely. I think the first one has a certain snap and verve to it that the others don’t quite match, but Flashman goes from being a genuinely nasty character to a more-or-less lovable scoundrel over the course of the series.
Absolutely. His Black Ajax, about 18th-century prizefighter Tom Molyneux, is also very good, and put me on to Pierce Egan’s Boxiana. And I can see The Reavers and The Pyrates being particularly appealing for Discworld fans, too.
Dumas.
I found The Three Musketeers completely unreadable when I tried reading that one, and I’ve never read anything by Dumas since I tried that one out. On the other hand that was back in middle school, and tastes change (my tastes certainly have). I don’t know.
But thanks for the suggestion.
Really? I’ve been on a classic literature kick lately and I found Dumas to be one of the easiest to read out of that whole genre – and Three Musketeers being significantly easier than say, Count of Monte Cristo. Tons more readable than say, Dickens (or most of the famous English novelists)
That’s interesting to me. As mentioned it was a very long time ago. I probably should not trust my own impressions/evaluations from back then, then, but instead approach Dumas as if I’d never heard of the guy, the way I’ve never heard about some of the other people mentioned in this thread. Though in this context it should also be noted that Dickens is not really an alternative worth including in the analysis here (as I stated above, ‘Dickens is too much work’).
I’m just speculating here, but one thing that might have played a role might be that I read a bad translation of the work. Back then I only read novels in my own native language, Danish, and as I learned some time ago from a blog written by a professional English-to-Danish translator, most Danish translators aren’t paid very well, to put it mildly. And at least to some extent you get what you pay for.
For something I like as leisure reading that isn’t fiction, try Casanova’s Memoirs, preferably the more recent translation, which is based on the original text, which finally turned up, rather than a version edited by someone else.
I was reminded of it by the mention of The Count of Monte Cristo, in part based on it–the protagonist’s escape from imprisonment is an exaggerated version of Casanova’s real escape from under the leads in Venice. I gather that Felix Krull is also in part based on the Memoirs.
The autobiography of a reasonably successful gambler, con man, scholar, adventurer in the 18th century sense.
What he said. I found Dumas to be probably the easiest reader of his contemporaries in the canon; in fact, I thought that was his distinguishing feature, both while he was alive and to posterity. He also seemed to be a decent touch at comedy. Using the Three Musketeers as an example, d’Artagnan’s arrival in Paris is pure farce.
That’s why I recommended him without comment. There’s no accounting for taste, though. And not all translations are created equal.
Also, since Steven Brust was mentioned, it’s worth pointing out that he wrote a series called Khaavren Romances which is essentially Dumas set in the Brust’s Dragaera universe.
Dumas’s style (with some credit to the style of Brust’s favorite Dumas translator), but the characters are less cheerfully amoral than the Musketeers. (Which tends to make me like them better than the originals.)
Grew up on David Brin and so may be biased towards thinking his books are better than they actually are (to the extent that taste can be objective :P); Bujold and Cherryh have already been mentioned, but I’ll add one more to their recommendations.
Steven Brust has an impressive range of writing styles; the humor is understated and woven into the stories, though, so not something you’d be able to really explain if someone hears you laugh.
Will probably see about picking up some of the titles others have mentioned here myself.
David Brin and Steven Brust, noted (will look them up later), and yet another + to Bujold and Cherryh.
I must add here that I find the number of suggestions and ideas people have contributed here in this thread simply great and almost overwhelming. I had no idea my query would spark such activity here, but I’m glad that it did – and that others might benefit as well from these exchange, as Skivverus might do in the future (‘Will probably see about picking up some of the titles others have mentioned here myself’).
Donald Westlake is worth trying out, I’d say, specifically the Dortmunder series, which tend to be heists where everything goes wrong, sometimes with nigh-Wodehousian levels of plot thickening. (His non-Dortmunder stuff tends to be hard-boiled crime fiction, as far as I know – not to my taste particularly.)
http://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/1900
Pick and choose the ones you have not read. Proceed to read a brief summary of the style of the books to see if it fits within your liking.
Though, most of those books are not quite so filled with humor.
Christopher Moore for comedy.
Given that we’re already linking to Thing of Things this OT, what do you guys think about this?
I tried to read ‘On the Sexual Nature of Man’ carefully but John C Wright wrote it in a style you normally only see in old translations of foreign works. A few years ago I had more patience for that. Now I just make a ‘vrooom!’ noise in my head as I skim through the prose.
Anyway, it seems like that odd brand of Christianity-by-way-of-Stoicism that makes me love Catholics. Imitating Aurelius’ asides to atomists, his position is that one should act as though the church is correct on sexual matters even if one is not a Catholic. The bulk of the article is him attempting to show that Natural Law type teachings are correct from a secular angle.
I’m broadly sympathetic. I’m the world’s worst Stoic and also becoming increasingly conservative despite (because of?) being a sexual degenerate. But at the same time he seems to be making a much weaker argument than he could be.
Edit: How did I miss Bill Clinton’s crooked penis on my first scroll-through? Currently dying of laughter.
I wonder whether he means that as a metaphor for corruption or if he has inside knowledge of Bill’s willie.
Huh, a more interesting bit even than Bill Clinton’s penis seems to have evaded me.
(Bolded for emphasis.)
Is that orthodox?
I can see that, especially given that Mary is supposed to have been a perpetual virgin. But I can’t imagine that it’s church doctrine.
I mean, the orthodox wouldn’t call Joseph a cuck, but he did raise a child (Jesus) who wasn’t his own.
I guess I had always assumed that Jesus was still supposed to more-or-less be his even without the actual act of conception?
I mean, as far as I know Jesus’ list of miracles doesn’t include being haploid. Even if he wanted to use as much of Mary’s DNA as possible he’d still need a Y chromosome. So if he’s going to do it anyway he might as well use Joseph’s metaphorical rib rather than creating more from scratch.
Plus at least one biblical author traces his genealogy through Jospeh, which makes no sense if he’s not actually Joseph’s descendant. This isn’t a minor point: one of the prophecies he’s supposed to have fulfilled is being descended from King David.
Well, obviously the Bible doesn’t tell us anything about the contents of Jesus’ DNA, nor is there any record of how he much he resembled Joseph*. At any rate, Mary had a baby in her belly and Joseph didn’t put it there.
* But note that in Mark 6, the people in his hometown snidely refer to him as Mary’s son.
Plus at least one biblical author traces his genealogy through Jospeh, which makes no sense if he’s not actually Joseph’s descendant.
Eh. As WP points out, that lineage is doing a lot of work, and technically isn’t correct wrt what was accepted at the time of whobegatwho.
I was taught that the whole point of including Ruth, Tamar, and Bathsheba was to highlight the longstanding tradition of slightly skeevy marriage situations being brought under the tent, so to speak, and thus to rejoin the people making much of the length of Jesus’s gestation(*) to STFU.
(*) New parents are amateurs at everything – they can’t even get it right, how long the baby has to bake, and so they tend to pop the first one early. After that first one though, they tend to settle down and take a proper 9 months with the rest of them.
I think the genealogy through Joseph is a legal genealogy, with Joseph in the role of adoptive father.
I note that the wording changes when Joseph is mentioned, to something translated as “Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus.”
I’m told it makes sense in a tradition of Jewish symbolism at the time: Claiming patrilineal descent from David was necessary for theological reasons, but Jewish law and identity was at the time primarily matrilineal, so it wouldn’t be considered a literal or legal claim.
In Jewish tradition, if a man died without offspring (male offspring?) his wife was supposed to marry his brother, so-called levirate marriage, in order to bear children who would count as the first husband’s children. So that’s at least one situation where biological parentage and legal parentage are split.
There’s quite a lot of that among the Nuer, a group in southern Sudan who were the subject of some famous early anthropological research. The literature distinguishes between genitor (biological father) and pater (legal father) and there are a number of situations in which it is accepted that they are not the same man.
Or if he refuses to marry her, she has to throw her shoe at him. Apparently there’s a whole ceremony.
Jesus was Joseph’s, but God apended a bit of pizzaz onto the end of the Y chromosome. The whole controversy of the virgin birth is because Mary was a teen out of wedlock; virgin was a mistranslation of young woman.
Jesus is basically Sephiroth but good.
The whole controversy of the virgin birth is because Mary was a teen out of wedlock; virgin was a mistranslation of young woman.
Look, please just say “It’s all lies and the kind of accretion that gathers round a figure who becomes famous, particularly when spirituality is involved – there are no gods, it takes a man and a woman to become pregnant, and virgin human females don’t have babies without having sex. The Jesus-cult was competing with other popular gods and demi-gods in the Classical world so they wanted and needed a semi-divine origin for their own cultic hero to make him appeal to the masses”.
I can accept people who hold the above view. I accept the Virgin Birth myself. But it drives me up the wall when people try to eat the cake and have it – provide a ‘reasonable’ explanation for why the rubes and suckers back then thought such arrant nonsense that we moderns know better can’t have happened. Accept it or deny it, but don’t be wishy-washy about it.
I know all about the almah translation thing (which only got popular when liberal Christians wanted to dump embarrassing miracle stories without dumping “So Jesus was this special guy, you know?” as well). I also know that even back then, people knew “you don’t get babies without sex”, as you point out, and saying “God did it” would not have convinced a Jewish village anymore than it convinced you. “And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly” – because adulterous women were stoned to death, as we see later on:
I have no idea what the fuck you’re on about.
LPSP, what I am on about is don’t give a rationalised answer to “why did people think Jesus was the son of God/why did they think a virgin could have a baby”.
I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe but don’t give cutesy-poo answers where you’re only looking for a laugh. Drop the “yeah, people back then were so dumb, they swallowed the idea that a woman who had sex outside of marriage could be a virgin”.
Oh, and by the bye, had she been pregnant by Joseph, it would not have been considered “out of wedlock” as they were formally betrothed. So your exegesis, whatever about your knowledge of video games, sucks.
That is what you are going for by the “virgin was a mistranslation of young woman”, is it not? That is what almah refers to, which you apparently know, unless you are simply regurgitating something you read or heard somewhere else without knowing what you are talking about.
LSPS, you said that Jesus was conceived by Joseph and the only reason anyone thinks otherwise is a mistranslation. But Deiseach quotes Matthew which states very clearly that Jesus is not the son of Joseph. Maybe Matthew made an error translating Hebrew into Greek, but that would be an error about prophecy, not an error about Jesus. If he’s trying to shoehorn Jesus into prophecy, then he’s distorting facts about Jesus and it doesn’t matter what the prophecy said. She went on to psychoanalyze you, which drowned out the first point.
(If we are concerned about virginity and not just Joseph, Luke is even clearer.)
“Oh, and by the bye, had she been pregnant by Joseph, it would not have been considered “out of wedlock” as they were formally betrothed.”
Also, for what it’s worth, a child born out of wedlock had the same legal status as a legitimate child as long as he wasn’t a momser–the child of a couple who not only were not married but could not have been.
I had always heard the almah issue raised in connection with whether Isaiah 7:14 is a prophecy foretelling a virgin birth for the Messiah or not, something on which Christians and Jews disagree. (Short version: “See, this was the fulfillment of your prophecy.” “That’s not what it says.”)
The Gospels, by contrast, are AFAIK pretty unambiguous on the subject.
I don’t think ancient Greek is as strict about the sexual habits or lack thereof of young women like ancient Hebrew. Indeed, according to the LXX, Genesis 34:3 calls Dinah, who was raped by Shechem, a “virgin” after being raped.
Besides, there’s another Jewish virgin birth that was written around the same time as the gospels: The Second Book of Enoch. It’s apparently an apocryphal Jewish work form the late 1st century. The last part, the Exaltation of Melchizedek, says that Melchizedek was born of a virgin, Sofonim (or Sopanima), the wife of Nir, a brother of Noah.
All of the cool people were born from virgins back then. Like how we have millions of cop-drama TV shows these days (YEEEEEEEAAAH).
“LPSP, what I am on about is don’t give a rationalised answer to “why did people think Jesus was the son of God/why did they think a virgin could have a baby”.”
Why? Why are you on about this?
I mean, the orthodox wouldn’t call Joseph a cuck, but he did raise a child (Jesus) who wasn’t his own.
Just like step-fathers, adoptive fathers, and foster fathers do today. Are they all “cucks” too?
These people have a sexual obsession and not the decency to keep it to themselves. Any post with that word in it in any form can be skipped.
I think you’d be surprised at how much you can find on alt-right or anti-feminist blogs that would say yes, absolutely.
“Don’t date single moms” is starting to become part of the “man code” for a lot of people.
Then men who are unwilling to date single mothers should also have the consistency of their code not to create single mothers either; that is, do not get your girlfriend/cohabiting partner pregnant, then break up with her and leave her holding the baby or do not divorce your wife and leave her with custody of the child(ren).
Single mothers only get to be single mothers with the help of single fathers.
It’s a different audience. The premise is largely “If she wouldn’t have dated you 10 years ago, don’t date her today.”
The very general idea is that women who are young and unattached and pretty and fun go for the “bad boy” types, who unsurprisingly have no future, get them pregnant, and split. The women learn a lesson, and in their 30s, are now looking for the responsible, dependable, nerdy guy they wouldn’t have given five seconds of their time to back during their youth. And so, the guy who for most of his life was totally undesirable but not finds himself in a position of strength, has a duty to “teach them a lesson” and refuse to enable her previous bad decisions.
That’s not inconsistent. If I don’t like driving a used car, it’s not inconsistent for me to buy a new one – despite the fact that buying a new car leads to the existence of used cars.
Cars are goods that exist to be used, after which they lose much of their value. This is exactly how these kind of men few women. It’s sexist and extremely dickish, but it’s not logically inconsistent.
You guys are reading way too much into this. The context was a throwaway joke about how marrying a virgin is a good way to avoid raising someone else’s kid, even if it didn’t work out that way for Joseph. Dealgood asked if it was the orthodox view that Jesus was not Joseph’s biological son. It is.
That’s not casting aspersions on Joseph. If God asks you to do Him a solid, “yes” is the wise response.
Yeah, looks like I was a bit unclear and this subthread ate the discussion I was hoping for about natural law and sexual mores.
It’s my own fault for invoking the dark god phpx. I feel like I understand Christianity a bit better at least.
Anyway, sorry about that.
There’s quite an old tradition of Joseph being cuckolded.
Hear an unspeakably lovely version.
I’m trying to come up with a good joke playing on the phrase “I am the Alpha and the Omega” but just can’t.
Sorry I derailed. But I’m not terrible comfortable critiquing Ozy’s article. A lot of the argument boils down to “it’s working just fine for me!” and I don’t know how to critique that without critiquing the person, which feels mean even when they invite it.
Suffice it to say that a lot of the SJ community look like very damaged people to me. That they have surrounded themselves with other damaged people to the point that they don’t even realize how abnormal this is just makes it all the more pitiful.
OK, one last bit. If your sexual arrangements have not lead to the raising of children, then they are not sustainable/do not work on any timespan worth taking note of.
You mean like the entire timespan of your life? Why would anyone care about that? Heaven is forever, amirite?
You’re assuming that Jaskologist doesn’t already have kids, and wont anytime in the future.
Fond though I am of children, I don’t follow the argument. Surely one can have a society in which different people do different things. If half the population produces an average of four kids each (surviving to reproductive age) and half produces zero kids, the population maintains itself.
Society moves forth, yes, but will be filled more with people who are like them and less like you. Which is what I think Jack was going on about, at least.
Well, there are other ways of influencing people than genetically. If a person shapes the culture but has no children he will have lots of people who are somewhat ‘like him’ (or influenced by his ideas at least)
GKC produced no children. But has several among commenters here.
Chesterton on children (as a tangent in an essay on how he mixed up the authors of a quote in an article):
I was under the impression that Ozy plans to have kid(s) with their husband.
Creationist claims that Creationism accurately predicts low levels of Junk DNA: http://blog.drwile.com/?p=15215
(I am not saying this is correct. Though it does suggest that the claim that creationism makes no predictions is false.)
The whole Popperian paradigm is oversimplified and people who try to use the literal definition of falsifiability as a “gotcha” to disregard something because it’s not Capital S Science are fools. Creationism isn’t false because it’s unscientific, it’s false because of the weight of evidence against it, just like anything else.
I mean, if they did make the advance prediction (I don’t see an actual cite to it), then they do score some points, but they’re still far enough behind in the game they won’t be mounting a comeback.
I think people make the slightly different claim that Creationism isn’t not-true, but rather sits outside the set of things that can be true or false.
Well, that claim is pretty clearly not-true.
“Blue is a better colour than red”.
True, not-true, or judged by different criteria?
If you wave it off by saying “it’s a meaningless nonsense statement”, then what are (for example) graphics designers and people charged with revamping company logos doing when they make statements like that*? Plainly in their context it’s not a meaningless nonsense statement, and equally plainly it’s not a ‘scientific’ true/false statement.
*Do you know why bulldozers and construction equipment all tend to be yellow/orange and not other colours? Apparently, because that’s an “ugly but efficient” colour and that fits with the idea of what the equipment is for – or so we were all told in a marketing class I had to do for a course years back. And why is yellow considered “ugly but efficient”? All to do with those kinds of focus groups and questionnaires and customer surveys etc. that data is gathered from – the public has spoken!
Meaning is subjective. For graphic designers, ‘Blue is a better colour than red’ may be a succinct way to phrase a whole palette of intuitive judgements about legibility, distinctiveness, and their own personal sense of aesthetics; for which judgements they may or may not even have a more precise means of expression.
Without a context to place this statement in, though, yes, it is meaningless.
“then what are (for example) graphics designers and people charged with revamping company logos doing when they make statements like that*? Plainly in their context it’s not a meaningless nonsense statement, and equally plainly it’s not a ‘scientific’ true/false statement.”
In that context it is a true/false statement which could in principle be tested by measuring people’s response to the two different versions of the logo. It isn’t “better” but “better for this purpose.”
I agree. I think the science vs. pseudoscience debate has much too big of a mindshare in the “skeptic” community. Creationism, astrology, etc. simply don’t have the evidence, and trying to do an end-run around that by disqualifying them on a philosophical technicality seems like the wrong way to think about it.
This prediction passes through the intermediate step of “creationism implies animals should be efficient”, which is also implied by evolution, so it still fails in making a prediction that would distinct itself from the accepted alternative. Though I guess this would back both of them against a third hypothesis that did not expect animals to be efficient.
From the claims it seems like creationism made the prediction more strongly and should get more credit. A priori, both evolutionism and creationism might have predicted slim lean DNA, but when evidence seemed to show DNA bloated with junk, evolutionism said “huh, junk DNA, better go update the theory” while creationism said “no, God would not create something so inelegant, I defy the data“. Obviously if DNA does turn about to be slim and lean the latter is much more impressive.
And if someone says things that seem to be logical, but are contradicted by all the outside authorities, you should say “I defy your reasoning” for the same reason that you shoulkd say “I defy your data”–it is likely there is something wrong with the reasoning and you haven’t figured it out yet. Of course, if you do that, you pretty much end up defying everything unusual that Eliezer has written.
So this is another case where Eliezer tries to get people to become rational because he thinks they will believe what he says, and Eliezer fails because they actually become rational and reject it using the rationality tools he himself has provided.
Wait, are you saying that Eliezer is a creationist? I’m a bit confused what his name is suddenly doing in this middle of this discussion.
It’s a tricky one. Sometimes the wild-eyed crazy guy yelling nonsense is indeed a visionary, and sometimes he’s exactly what he appears: a wild-eyed crazy guy yelling nonsense.
Do academies stultify? Does received opinion fossilise? Is it possible for the experts to be wrong? Sure! But sometimes they’re right and the old, stuffy, stock answer is the correct one.
Check all the reasoning to see if there are any obvious errors, and then for unobvious ones. Ditto the data. And if you’re not an expert yourself, just wait until the experts eventually shift to a different answer 🙂
That “defy the data” link goes to an essay by Eliezer.
In which he unintentionally explains why you shouldn’t believe in rogue AI, cryonics, or any of the other ideas specially associated with Eliezer (except that he doesn’t have data for those ideas, so you have to substitute experiment->theory).
Ah, I missed that. Thanks.
It’s one of the more lovable things about EY, tbh.
“And if someone says things that seem to be logical, but are contradicted by all the outside authorities, you should say “I defy your reasoning” for the same reason that you shoulkd say “I defy your data”–it is likely there is something wrong with the reasoning and you haven’t figured it out yet.”
I am perhaps biased on this question, having grown up in the family of someone who defied the orthodoxy of both his field and the general intellectual climate and, on the evidence, was right–at least, he got a Nobel Prize for it and had a very large effect on the field.
When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I remember being told by another student, one who had probably taken only one introductory economics course, that he couldn’t take economics at Chicago because he would burst out laughing. Within a decade or two the position at Harvard on at least one major issue the schools differed on (the Phillips Curve) had shifted to “Of course we all know (the Chicago position) is true, but …”
I’m trying to leave a comment but for some reason this site keeps eating it. Strange.
*edit* And now it’s allowed. Hmm. Some word censor? The word ‘crackpot’ is not allowed?
Out of curiosity, but who was that? If your name is not a pseudonym, I take it you are related to Milton Friedman?
Yeah, sometimes people who defy the accepted consensus are right. But it’s worth remembering that generally they aren’t. I don’t think that should stop you from going against the consensus, but it should influence the way you go about it.
There are dozens of people out there who claim that the theory of relativity is wrong, and who have their own alternative theories. The scientific establishment doesn’t take them seriously. At the same time there is MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which makes roughly the same claims, but isn’t considered crackpottery.
What’s the difference? Many things. MOND was proposed by someone who was very much an established scientist, who clearly knew what he was talking about. MOND was created to address real open questions, instead of imaginary deficients, in the consensus view. And finally and perhaps most importantly, it’s a much more modest proposal. The proponents of MOND don’t make wild claims that all scientists are idiots or that science is entirely misguided. They recognize how unlikely their own theory is, they just claim it is an alternative worth investigating.
Going against the consensus is a worthy effort. But you should start by very clearly recognizing that you are going against the consensus, and the strong prior that generates against your hypothesis.
“I take it you are related to Milton Friedman?”
Correct. My father.
@Deiseach:
Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Asimov’s Corollary to Clarke’s law: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion—the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
(It’s a real quote from Asimov. Google it.)
Anyone here ever read Mr. Money Mustache? Primarily of interest here for being an attempt to undo hedonic adaptation and reconnect with our by-1900s-standards wealth.
I worry that this sort of thing might only work for those who don’t need it–those with good marshmallow-test scores, high conscientiousness, strong resistance to peer pressure (or good power groups), high intelligence for DIYing, and low risk of being seen as lower class.
Those are the only people likely to be interested in the first place, but having it reinforced and encouraged is a good thing. When my friends are talking about buying a Tesla, I know there’s no good reason to be tempted, but that acquisitional/status seeking part of the brain is insidious.
My concern with the frugal community is that it can seem small-minded. As a global/social initiative it has ecological benefit, but from a personal-utilitarian perspective you probably should be wary of darning your socks rather than developing or applying a specialized skill. Division of labor is real.
I read his site for a bit.
I found some of his stuff useful. Some of it is a bit over-the-top (no, I’m not going to ride a bike year-round to avoid paying for a bus pass). Some of it seems a bit clueless about the fact that most people are not engineers or whatever he is – I have neither the aptitude nor the education to do a lot of the DIY stuff.
For me, it was part of a few different things I came across when I was transitioning from university to real life. It was a good thing I absorbed some stuff about saving and investing. I seem to be conscientious enough to actually handle saving and investing instead of blowing my money, but having resources on the subject was useful. I needed to absorb the message “start saving NOW”. So, it isn’t just for people who don’t need it.
As usual, what are you optimizing for?
My main objection to the extreme frugality can be summed up as “So, you are going to be very poor for some years in order to be very poor for the rest of your life?”
A “moderate” interpretation of the “Moustachian” mindset is actually pretty easy:
Prepare your own meals whenever possible, cut down on the booze (where I am, at least, it’s taxed heavily), get a library card, etc etc etc, and use the money to set up index funds in some tax-advantaged account or other.
The second half of that is just boglehead-ism. So it’s the first part that really separates out the community.
Honestly, “The Elements of Investing” by Malkiel and Ellis is probably a better source than MMM. He gets attention, though.
But at this point it’s not “Moustachian” in any way — it’s just plain-vanilla mainstream frugal living, one that many people practice by necessity or by natural inclination, or because their (great(grand))parents having lived through the war/Great Depression/etc. brought them up this way.
This is true. MMM gets attention, though.
In some ways I was raised to be frugal – I’ll almost always buy the store brand, I calculate the price per unit of stuff to find the best deal, etc – but I’m doing stuff I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t come across the attention-grabbing but ultimately kind of silly MMM style stuff.
While climbing the local mountains, homeschooling kids, reading, writing, playing instruments, tinkering with Craigslist parts bikes, teaching part-time…sounds pretty great to me, yeah. But I suppose your mileage may vary if you work for reasons other than paying the bills, or if you have expensive tastes. (And good partners are positional goods, to some extent.).
That why I started by asking what are you optimizing for : -) People’s preferences differ and they pick different trade-offs.
In its most basic and crude form the trade-off here is between free time and things that money can buy.
I don’t especially want to stop working at 40. Especially not if all I have to look forward to for the 40 years after that is penny pinching.
The MMM people remind me of cross-fitters and vegans.
I feel the same way. In a lot of ways I understand the appeal of scrimping and saving to make sure you don’t owe anyone anything, but at the same time, I like the fact that I eat at the best restaurants, go on exotic trips, own nice cars, and live in a big (for the Bay Area) house, even if it means I won’t be retiring until I’m 70. I’d rather spread out the enjoyment I’ll get in life rather than try and save it all for later when later may never come.
Especially considering there’s a non-zero probability you’ll drop dead before you reach the age where you can finally start enjoying all that money you saved.
Couldn’t that be used as an argument against any long term planning for your future?
@ Acedia
No, this is argument against extreme delay of gratification, not against planning.
“Life is uncertain, eat dessert first” : -)
Part of the difference is, I think, just that I wouldn’t enjoy “eat[ing] at the best restaurants, go[ing] on exotic trips, or own[ing] nice cars”. Doing all of those things because you get a lot of enjoyment out of them makes perfect sense. What I’ve seen, though, is a fair number of people spending money on things that they don’t actually enjoy a whole lot because of social pressure.
You may be in an occupation that will let you make that choice. Many, possibly most of the retired people I know didn’t really get it. The company merged or folded. The organization offered a generous retirement incentive which was absolutely voluntary, except that everyone knew that if the numbers weren’t reduced enough by attrition there was a good chance they’d shortly be reduced by staff cuts without the financial sweetener.
Finding a job gets harder as one gets older, finding one with comparable pay and benefits even more so. And that’s if your health holds up to the point that you’re even able to, which is always a gamble. Some people have skills that remain in demand or even increase due to circumstance (e.g., COBOL programmers circa Y2K). But a lot start to look less attractive to employers next to someone younger and fresher-looking.
For most people, there still needs to be a balance between present and future needs. Voluntary lifelong financial asceticism is a minority hobby. But “I’ll just work longer” isn’t necessarily a realistic option for everyone.
I’ve read him. I don’t agree with him on everything (I experimented with biking when I was in college; it didn’t work), but I like his ideas.
Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme is also pretty good. I recommend his “Frequently Asked Questions”, “How I live on $7,000 per year”, “How to retire in 5 years”, and this awesome reddit comment.
I’ve read MMM. He really doesn’t have that much to say, compared to The Tightwad Gazette of years gone by, but he’s far more inspiring to guys who want to cut corners. *shrugs* Different strokes.
Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of Mr Money Mustache lately. While I think the chances of me developing the pantheon of skills to not have to outsource any home repairs are slim, I have been trying to take to heart the not-buying-unnecessary-stuff philosophy, and also the cook-more-meals-from-cheap-but-healthy-ingredients part.
I am also intrigued by the invest-in-low-expense-ratio-index-funds part of it, but being just starting out, I’m a good couple of orders of magnitude away from having enough to buy into Vanguard UK’s funds directly, so would need to go through one of the intermediary banks or other organisations. I was actually planning on raising the question on an open thread here – anyone got any good advice about how to get started with a good index fund in the UK?
I read, and am a fan of the philosophy, but my own preference is to point out that the numbers and the ideas, rather than the specific recommended actions, are the takeaway. That is to say, it’s an important skill to be able to evaluate something like investing in your own DIY skills or dropping your current car usage to 10% in terms of “How hard will this really be?” and “What will I gain from this?”
The ability to simply choose to not do a thing that is The Expected Thing That People In Your Socioeconomic Class Do is huge; even people who drive cars and hire handymen for minor repairs should know that they have the option to do a lot less of this.
I always do wonder about the people who refer to the extreme frugality folk as poor. MMM in particular isn’t poor, and doesn’t even live much like a poor person; he instead spends his life looking for areas of comparative advantage. If you’re having great, restaurant-quality meals at an incredible discount because you’ve done loads of comparison shopping for ingredients and learned how to cook them yourself, then you’re doing the opposite, in several respects, of eating like a poor person.
Preferences are preferences and all, but I find it just odd. If you are going to invest all the time and energy into running a tiny restaurant why not enlarge it a little bit and have a small restaurant? Because you have some sort of mental block that equates work to terrible?
Personally I have zero interest in spending ten thousand hours becoming a restaurant quality chef or spending hours a week scouring my local produce stands for excellent, inexpensive ingredients. I pay other people to do those things and do what I’m good at instead.
You make it sound like he is coming out ahead, but that’s only the case if you happen to have the strange meta-hobby of enjoying doing everything yourself. Or (and I think this is more common) an extreme aversion to spending money. If the intestinal pain of turning over money overwhelms any enjoyment you get from whatever it is you are buying then of course you are going to look for any way possible to avoid buying anything.
Barriers to entry. It’s probably a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to run a restaurant that can serve two families than to cook similar-quality meals for your own family. This would be less true if we didn’t have the regulatory barriers we have in the US, but even without them, customers make everything difficult.
Because that means you need to hew to a consistent schedule, as opposed to doing what you want when you want to, and you value being able to do what you want when you want to.
Also, I think you overestimate the work that “restaurant quality” entails, assuming that the restaurant you have in mind doesn’t have three Michelin stars. (And indeed there are restaurant chefs who do when they want when they want to, but the only ones who stay afloat doing that are at the celebrity level.).
And, for that matter, it’s mighty hard to break even in the restaurant business, let alone make money. (Outside of places like New York and LA, the problems you face have more to do with attracting customers than with the high prices of the various inputs, but it works out about the same over the long run.).
Seems like a perfectly normal desire to me, but I guess that’s what makes horse races.
It’s a flexibility in theory more than practice if the plan is to make all your own meals. Everyone has to eat. And you can’t bail out of the plan because your savings have to last 40+ more years. I suppose going to tuna fish and ramen noodles is an option if you decide doing what you want, when you want no longer includes making restaurant quality meals.
Seems pretty normal to me, too, but then I like watching handymen at work so I can figure out what they’re doing.
And being able to cook totally is still an increase in flexibility. We do weekly meal planning with the plan of cooking everything from scratch most of the time, but if we’re tired or sick, takeout is still an option.
I suspect most of the people who would consider doing this already more or less know how to cook and do other household tasks for themselves, and thus don’t need to invest huge amounts of time into acquiring those skills. My parents taught me to cook when I was in my teens, and I’ve been cooking for myself for many years; I’m not at the level of a 3-Michelin-star chef, but I can certainly do as well if not better than the typical fare you get at a diner or an Applebee’s, for less money. Not to mention, cooking at home makes it waaaaaaay easier for my pre-diabetic husband to be aware of his sugar/starch intake, as opposed to restaurant meals where dressings and sauces could be full of sugar you wouldn’t necessarily notice.
Even just trying to stay on a basic diet is so overwhelmingly much easier cooking from scratch.
Plus, I like cooking and my wife really appreciates having a nice meal waiting for her when she gets home.
You also don’t have to be a great cook to impress friends, family, romantic partners, etc.
Everyone always says nice things about home cooked meals. I wouldn’t take that to mean they are actually impressed.
Revealed preferences are revealed : -)
I’m not saying I’m turning out fine-restaurant-quality meals, but yeah, revealed preferences. If someone eats what I cook one time and subsequently is willing to take me up on the “I cook, you clean” deal, I take that as a compliment.
Then again, I was lucky, because my mother is a very good cook and I’ve picked up some tricks over the years.
“if you happen to have the strange meta-hobby of enjoying doing everything yourself. ”
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
As an economist I can see much to be said for specialization. But I also see the emotional force of Heinlein’s point.
Doesn’t do anything for me. Just comes across as machismo.
If you can give orders, you can get by without most of the rest. If you can’t, you’re stuck doing much of it yourself, like it or not.
Me too. Modus ponens/modus tollens, I suppose.
(source)
Heinlein is being very selective about what tasks he puts in his list at the same time he is pretending to tell you to be a generalist. Why is designing a building in the list, but planning how to get somewhere using a bus map not? Why doesn’t he say we need to know how to forge a sword or make a pair of shoes?
Of course the answer is that if he really puts a lot of such skills in the list, it would be obvious that a human being either can’t learn them all, or would be wasting his time by doing so. So he makes a list of “skills I know or would like to have known” and acts as though that’s the same thing as not specializing.
Specialization is great in stable environments. In times of upheavals those heavily specialized die out first.
I am a fan of that Heinlein quote.
Right, when the zombie apocalypse comes I sure am going to wish I knew how to gut a pig.
Actually, I have no problem with pessimists. Even when they are assholes about it; not a big deal. It’s only when it goes from worrying about the apocalypse to hoping it comes so they have their moment to shine that it crosses a line.
More succinctly, stop taking pride in not having your act together
If you’re going to insist on acting like a 3 year old don’t be surprised when people treat you like a 3 year old.
The latter is effectively subsumed by planning an invasion, which is on the list.
I’m female. I adore Heinlein’s quote.
To me, the idea is that all humans have a responsibility to stretch their brains to handle a variety of challenges.
(Division of labor is one of the signs of advanced civilization, so that us-who-can’t-handle-screaming-women still have viable contributions via cooking and manure pitching.)
It was A Thing, on a social site I was on mumble-mumble years ago, to list the things on the list one had done, or had trained to do. Very few of us had done all of them.
@ keranih
Given the last item of the list, I’m surprised the number of people able to post about it is greater than zero : -/
Modern medicine is a marvel, iddinit?
Conventional wisdom says that helicopters are dangerous. I say that’s bullshit. I have personally survived 3 helicopter crashes, good luck finding someone who can say the same thing about airliners. 😉
“Heinlein is being very selective about what tasks he puts in his list at the same time he is pretending to tell you to be a generalist.”
If you think the point of the list is that those particular things are the ones you should be able to do, you are missing the point.
One reason people remember the quote is that Heinlein could write.
The point of the list isn’t that you should do that exact list of things. But the point of the list is that you should do a list of things of similar scope. And that has the same problem: that scope isn’t really very broad, and making it broad would also make it impractical.
Yes, but it’s not a frugality thing, it’s general flexibility and not being limited by your peer group stereotypes — a hugely useful ability with respect to not only money.
Ah, but have you looked at costs? Division of labour greatly increases productivity and all these meals that you’ve learned to cook and are now cooking — how much time did you spend and what is your time worth? What is the opportunity cost of you becoming and being a cook?
I find it really odd that cooking at home is where so many people have chosen to argue about the cost-benefit calculations, when it seems to me like this is one of the big wins – at least when you have access to a reasonable kitchen and grocery store.
It takes me about 10-15 minutes a day to prepare breakfast and lunch and 30-45 minutes to prepare dinner, but I’m also doing that for three people, not just one. If you’re not getting delivery, it’s probably about the same amount of time to go to the restaurant and pick it up. Plus I usually watch TV or read a book while cooking anyway. The only real excess time spent is grocery shopping, and I’ve gotten that time down extremely low between meal planning, bulk buying, and occasional grocery deliveries.
As far as time spent to learn – I learned to cook by just cooking meals for myself, not taking classes or whatever, mostly during times in my life when I was a lot poorer than I am now when eating out just wasn’t financially an option. Now that I do have money to eat out, I find the difference in quality compared with my own cooking just isn’t very high.
Division of labor within the household is great – it’s way more efficient for me to cook most things than to have everyone cook their own meal (and not very effective for the 2-year-old), but outsourcing cooking outside the family just doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to spend money.
I am a big fan of home cooking — I cook a lot. But then I enjoy the process and appreciate the advantages of being able to eat precisely what I want at this particular moment : -)
However the post I replied to mentioned “loads of comparison shopping” and “restaurant-quality meals” which I interpreted as fancy dishes with lots of ingredients and considerable prep time.
I’ve seen people who rarely cook do fancy dinners: they pick an unfamiliar recipe out of a cookbook with 20 different ingredients, go shopping specifically for these ingredients, and then spend half a day (or more) on prepping and actual cooking. That is not particularly time-effective.
Like you, I make dinners from scratch in 30-40 minutes, usually, but I don’t “comparison shop” for which of the three stores has the best tomatoes today and I avoid complexity in preparation.
Oh yeah, that sounds about right. I’ve seen novice cooks do the same thing plenty of times, and that’s probably why they think that cooking is such an enormous chore. It is, if you only do it rarely. If it’s a regular part of your day, not so much.
“However the post I replied to mentioned “loads of comparison shopping” and “restaurant-quality meals” which I interpreted as fancy dishes with lots of ingredients and considerable prep time.”
Not how I interpret it.
Yesterday my wife and daughter were both tired and my daughter suggested I do something about dinner. I made a 13th c. lamb and noodle dish that we are fond of. I didn’t time myself, but I doubt it took me more than half an hour, if that. I would guess total ingredient costs, to feed four people, of about four dollars. My son made a fruit salad. I don’t know how long he spent–his fruit salads are more time intensive than mine.
To me, “restaurant quality” means “we enjoy it as much as a restaurant meal.” That describes pretty much all of our home cooked meals, whether done by my wife, by me, or occasionally our adult daughter. It doesn’t mean that we have as many different things in the meal, or as wide a variety across meals, as when we go to a restaurant.
But then, the restaurants we go to when we don’t feel like cooking are mostly local ethnic–Chinese, Japanese, Italian or Indian. Not elaborate meals.
On time cost, it’s not clear which alternative is cheaper. Figure that going to the restaurant involves a ten minute trip in each direction plus fifteen minutes waiting to be served. For four people that comes to almost two person hours, which is significantly longer than it took me and my son to make dinner last night.
On the other hand, as my wife points out, that’s time when we may be chatting with each other, reading a book in the car while someone else drives, and the like … .
I’d love to get that lamb recipe off you. I’ve got a freezer and a field full of the damn things, and am learning a lot of new ways of cooking lamb.
Vaguely-middle-eastern foreshanks came out very well the other day, but my first batch of merguez sausage was a bit under-spiced. Would really like to try something with noodles.
And re. the thread: my typical cooking time during the week is about 30-45 min, mostly spent shitposting on my phone and picking beans/squash/etc. in the garden. Cooking up batches of stuff on the weekend takes longer, but it’s mixed in with puttering around the house.
Our sad Anonymous friends eating mealsquares and hotdogs every day are welcome to that lifestyle.
@ David Friedman
Well, I’ve never been subjected to horrible home cooking, so my baseline is that normal restaurant food isn’t more tasty, it’s just different. It’s strange to me to consider “restaurant quality” as a synonym of “delicious”. Restaurants which serve very yummy food certainly exist but they are rare and, unfortunately, tend to be expensive.
Outside of travel, if I eat out I typically want something unusual. So for me “restaurant food” usually means “exotic”, but I know that I’m… not quite representative of the general population and I suspect that for normals “restaurant food” means “fancy”.
“I’d love to get that lamb recipe off you. ”
Rishta. 13th century Al-Andalus. It’s in How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg and Armor a Turnip.
Lots of other medieval Islamic recipes that we do with lamb–often they just say “meat” and leave it to you to decide what meat to use.
I don’t suppose you are raising any fat-tailed sheep? The tails are a common ingredient in the cuisine and my grocery store for some reason doesn’t carry them.
$4? Where are you getting your lamb?
I get my lamb from Costco as boneless legs of lamb, I think from New Zealand. I cut it up in one pound chunks and freeze them.
The recipe used one pound. Plus some lentils, some chickpeas, half a stick of cinnamon, four cups of flour, a little salt, and water.
The tails are a common ingredient in the cuisine and my grocery store for some reason doesn’t carry them.
Fat tailed sheep are very much a niche market in the USA. Frankly, there are other breeds which outperform these sheep even in the SW where they would be a good fit. And importing ruminants into the USA has been a right bugger due to FMD and BSE/scrapie.
See if you can find a halal butcher in your area, who might be able to point you at a source. Alternatively, remind me where you live (New England, Gulf, the Great State of Texas, etc) and I can ask for sources.
Someone who shares my medieval cooking hobby found a source of fat tailed sheep, I think somewhere on the east coast, and I have a little of what he bought in the freezer. He gave it to a friend who brought it to Pennsic for me, I brought it back here, keeping it cold all the time. But it would be nice to have a source somewhere closer.
I’m in San Jose, CA. If you find someone raising fat tailed sheep somewhere in northern California, I would definitely be interested.
Try this listing here – for Karaku sheep breeders. I am also asking amongst mah peeps for someone in your area who stocks FTS meat.
(No promises.)
Wow, what interesting animals. The carcasses look very different than my mostly-coopworth/texel mutts. Even cropped long, the tails on mine are too small to be worth saving, unfortunately.
Is the taste very different?
Will definitely try that recipe—thanks for the link! Had roast rolled breast w/ stuffing tonight, loin chops last night, so might be taking a break from lamb for a few days.
Thanks. The only ones in that list that say they have fat-tailed sheep are far from me. I could try emailing the closest ones.
Relevant.
(I first read about this sort of thing through Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme, but same deal.).
Other people have made this point already, but it’s worth amplifying:
Money and effort spent on keeping up appearences is not necessarily wasted. Failing to keep up appearences has real costs.
Frugality is a virtue. But like any virtue, when taken to an extreme it is a vice. In this case it is miserliness.
One useful tip I have to determine whether it’s a good idea to spend money or not on some item is “is this thing enabling an experience”?
Dropping a few bucks on Starbucks coffee every day is somewhere it might be smart to economize by finding a better alternative, as is drinking 5 or 10 dollars of beer every evening.
Having coffee or a few beers with a friend, though, is the sort of thing that it seems like a quality-of-life hit to abandon.
Fascinating– to me– article about race and political correctness, with a Right of Center Ivy League professor here. I think he makes some excellent points that are food for thought, whether one agrees with them or not. He attempts to get beyond ideology sometimes, into specific factors affecting, or affected by, our national conversations about race.
An Ivy League professor on what the campus conversation on race gets wrong
Brown University’s Glenn Loury: “We’re arguing about labels, about what to call our holidays or which portraits to rearrange on the wall.”
http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12915036/race-criminal-justice-inequality-glenn-loury-ta-nehisi-coates
Donald Trump Jr. posted an analogy about Muslim refugees on Twitter. It goes: if I offer you a bowl of skittles and tell you that three of them have been poisoned at random, would you take a handful? The inference being, clearly, that since you can’t tell which refugees are going to wind up planting bombs in Times Square, it’s best not to take a chance on any of them. The responses to this analogy from the left have been “It’s dehumanizing! People aren’t skittles!” and howls about this legitimizes bigotry. This amuses me because I was on Twitter when this analogy first surfaced a few years ago, except then it wasn’t about Muslim refugees, it was about feminists arguing that they must assume all men are rapists or potential rapists because they obviously can’t tell from a glance (and it was about a bowl of M&M’s back then). And it’s only dehumanizing if you take metaphors literally, which would seem to defeat the whole point of metaphors — when someone says “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea”, I doubt anyone indignantly points out that people are not fish.
But people are selective about their literalism; when someone says “George Bush created ISIS”, they all know what that’s supposed to mean, but when Trump says “Barack Obama created ISIS”, they assume he must mean it literally and dash out sneering fact-checks about how Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the real creator of ISIS, you orange cretin.
Who was the last person admitted as a refugee that committed a terrorist attack in the United States?
The Tsarnaev brothers’ family entered the US on a tourist visa and claimed asylum once in the country. So, not admitted as refugees, but they did claim asylum.
So far, it’s looking like the guy responsible for the bombings in NYC and NJ this past week was.
(Edited to add: Is there a difference between refugees and asylum-seekers? I could imagine there at least being a legal distinction.)
What are you basing that on?
All the New York Times says is:
None of the stories I’ve seen have even said when he came over beyond vague “he came over as a child” but the above leads me to believe it was probably prior to the most recent invasion of Afghanistan. However, I haven’t seen any indication as to how this was.
CNN:
Makes it sound to me like he came in under his father’s asylum. I’d count that as him being part of the asylum process, too. And I think most people would lump refugees and asylum-seekers under the same general policy prescriptions, even if there are probably legal distinctions.
I wonder why the New York Times doesn’t have this. Unless of course I missed an article – I find their website rather poorly laid out.
(Also in response to dndnrsn)
There is a distinction: a refugee applies abroad to come in and an asylee is here and applies to say.
That sounds like a fairly minor or technical difference, but in practice the procedures they go through and the selection they undergo is very different. Of relevance to the question at hand, refugees undergo much more rigorous background and security checks than any other group of immigrants.
I figured as much from doing a little bit of research. If refugees into the US are carefully screened, then I can see why conflating the two is misleading.
Is this a US distinction, or a general one?
If someone comes into a country illegally (let’s say they pay someone to smuggle them across the border) and once there says they are fleeing persecution – are they an asylum seeker, or a refugee?
I believe the asylum / refugee distinction dates back to the post-WWII treaties and so isn’t US specific. But I wouldn’t stake my life on it.
In regards to the hypo, under US terms they’d be an asylum seeker, unless they were Cuban in which case they’d be a parolee (without the need to claim persecution).
What I find myself wondering is whether people entering Europe are technically refugees, or asylum seekers. I don’t think that visiting the German embassy in Damascus and claiming refugee status is the norm. If someone hires a smuggler to get them into a European country, then travel to somewhere like Germany, and say they’re fleeing Assad/ISIS – are they a refugee, or an asylum seeker?
If they’re actually asylum seekers, then the talk of refugees is misleading. Most mainstream* politicians, media sources, etc who are against letting refugees into the US and Canada sort of present the idea as being like what’s happening in Europe (pictures of trails of people trekking through the Balkans, rickety boats full of people across the Mediterranean, etc) – the idea is sort of “we’ll have no ability to control who comes in; they could be terrorists!”. But in fact the US and Canada have a significantly better position when it comes to being able to do that, for geographic reasons.
*of course, non-mainstream opponents of letting them in have other reasons.
Careful screening isn’t very relevant to children, which is what both the Tsarnaevs and Rahami were when the immigrated. But more to the point, the Tsarnaevs were admitted in violation of the policy of no asylum for Chechens. They were almost certainly admitted for being violent allies rather than peaceful victims. Rahami’s father was also a violent ally, although it’s less clear why he was granted asylum.
@dndnrsn
Normally I’d say they were asylees but there may be some EU wrinkle whereby an asylee in one European country is transformed into a refugee if another European country agrees to take them from the first. I’m just spitballing, the EU process on this is beyond my knowledge.
But in US terms demagoguing against refugees when you mean asylees is IMO highly unfortunate. I’d be much happier to see reforms / cutbacks to the asylee program (which is riddled with fraud) than the refugee program (which is much better from a good government / EA perspective).
Why limit it to the US? Do you think we are drawing on a different pool than other nations?
First, because Junior is presumably commenting on what the US ought to do. Second, yes the US selection and screening process is fairly unique.
So is that a blanket prohibition on using consequences of European social policy to inform that of the US, or just as applies to immigrants?
In what ways?
Eh. Since you are kind of coming off as a dick, do your own homework.
Lol.
Pot calling kettle black much?
I think the vast majority of Somalis in America are resettled refugees or the children of resettled refugees. Somalis are also the largest single group of Americans who have joined or attempted to join foreign terrorist organizations since the rise of ISIS and al-Shabaab.
To be fair, that point was widely ridiculed at the time too. With several parodies involving black people, muslims, etc.
This is the problem with “people in group X supported position Y; now people in group X support position !Y.” There are a lot of people in group X.
Now, find specific people in group X who supported Y and now !Y, and we’re getting somewhere.
I was also amused by the poisoned sweets analogy turning up again. I think the problem with both analogies is that rapists are a much smaller proportion of men that don’t seem like rapists (and terrorists a vastly smaller proportion of refugees) than three sweets are of a bowl of them. However I guess you could claim that the proportion of rapists is high enough that the analogy is valid. I don’t think you could do the same with terrorists — they are fewer than 0.001% of refugees.
Another issue is that you can set the bowl of candy down and go eat a sandwich instead, and nothing bad happens to you or others. That changes if the bowl of candy is actually the set of all males, and not eating the candy means avoiding interaction with them or imposing sanctions on them. Likewise, if the bowl of candy is the set of all refugees, and not eating the candy means turning them away.
What percentage of the people who say it’s a bad analogy meant to associate refugees and immigrants with poison and terrorism also agree that all men should be treated as potential rapists?
Skittles cannot suffer for not being eaten. Refugees suffer when immigration is restricted. That’s why it’s dehumanizing and a poor analogy – one is an inanimate object, so there are no ethical considerations or tradeoffs involved. Failing to make the distinction says something about your value of human life outside of your ingroup.
Are all restrictions on immigration inherently dehumanizing? As far as I know there isn’t a single country on Earth whose immigration policy is “Anyone can come here whenever they want – no questions asked.”
I don’t know if all immigration restrictions are inherently dehumanizing (though I am a fan of open borders, or at least more open than we have now), but justifying them by comparing people to poisonous skittles is.
What percentage of the people objecting to Trump’s analogy today were objecting to the feminists’ analogy at the time that was made? Brief, awkward throat-clearing about the feminists’ behavior years later is of little value.
not to mention that the immigration version seems significantly more defensible.
Believe it or not, not everyone’s life revolves around what the mean internet feminists have said this week. They get far less attention than the son of, and lead figure in the campaign of, one of the Presidential nominees. If you’re really claiming that “all men are potential rapists” is such a widespread and commonly accepted belief outside of some feminist internet bubbles, that seems like an extraordinary assertion requiring some real evidence.
Does this count? “feminist internet bubble” seems like an uncharitable description of Vox, much less the state of California.
So you found a random article on Vox that doesn’t give any empirical evidence to support your claim, nor does the author argue the claim, nor is it a reason given for why he supports the law he’s talking about…
So no, I think it counts about as much as if pulling some random opinion by some random conservative on some awful conservative legislation automatically means that all conservatives are women-hating, jingoist bigots. Moreover, even if it did, I’m not sure how two wrongs make a right and the issue of what anti-rape laws should be determines the optimal immigration policy. Your best argument against letting refugees immigrate is that liberals are evil hypocrites? It’s drivel.
I believe the thrust of the OP was indeed that accusation of hypocrisy, not an argument against refugees. (To be fair, the argument was pretty much irrefutable, so there’s not much to talk about there.)
Here’s the issue: If I decide not to eat the skittles, nobody gets hurt. I can throw the entire bowl in the garbage and nobody will care. But if we decide not to take in refugees, they’re going to continue to be stuck in a war zone, where they will most likely suffer and die. In other words, the flaw in the argument is that it implies the refugees are not deserving of moral concern, that we can just shut them out and not care what happens to them. So this really is a “dehumanizing” argument.
I’m willing to say that this argument was stupid too, and for the same reason – nobody cares if you throw out a bowl of M&Ms, but if you treat all men like rapists, you will probably hurt the feelings of actual people who deserve moral concern.
The metaphor of “There’s plenty of fish in the sea” only compares people to fish insofar as they both have very large populations, so it’s unlikely to lead people to evil conclusions.
The problem with both arguments is they baldly assert absurdly high percentages to seed inaccurate perceptions of risk and steer people towards “if it saves one life” reasoning. The Skittles argument is not merely an argument against refugees, it’s an argument against any immigration, period. Illegal, legal, even tourism; there have been far more terrorists on tourist visas than refugee visas.
(This logically leads you to the immigration policies of North Korea, which I assume suffers from near-negligible immigrant crime.)
The difference between the two arguments is that men are half the population and are owed equal protection under the law, while foreigners only have what rights of entry we explicitly grant them. Thus it seems to me that the second formulation is significantly more defensible than the first regardless of whether it’s ultimately a good idea or not, which begs the question why the second formulation is a mark of the deplorables, while the first was generally acceptable to the dominant culture.
Since it had nothing at all to do with state action, equal protection under the law has no application. It was individual women saying that they personally had to act as if all men were potential rapists.
The fourteenth amendment, like the first, only restrains the government. It’s not a tough concept.
…as part of an explicitly political movement arguing for explicit political policies which do, unequivocally, involve the state violating equal protection.
…And again, foreigners have no right to enter at all other than what we collectively grant them, so what is the objection to Trump Jr’s statement?
So now prejudice is just like chilling freedom of expression, in that we’re only allowed to complain if the government does it? Careful now, Anonymous, the foundations of decades of propaganda are shifting under your feet as you casually pull that block out.
Sorry, I don’t recall you being my mother. I’ll do what I please, even if that includes (gasp!) thinking that equal protection, like freedom of speech, is a concept that’s larger than the details of how any one state might presume to enshrine it into the law, and that even if someone’s behavior is technically legal that doesn’t make it immune from criticism.
The rest of us are free to think you are a fucking moron for claiming that equal protection of the laws has anything to do with private conduct.
Freedom yay!
I suppose it’s okay if private businesses want to set up separate water fountains, too?
Non-discrimination and free speech aren’t just constitutional rights, but also ideals any free society should uphold. Empowering a powerful and unaccountable private sector to violate them at will upholds the letter of the constitution but exerts in practice a mighty chilling effect on anyone seeking to exercise these rights.
Being blacklisted for your ideas or your race or gender might not be quite as bad as being thrown in prison, but it’s nonetheless more than worthy of fanatical opposition.
No one is saying otherwise. Just that words have meaning.
Also, how is women tweeting that they need to act as if all men are potential rapists for thier safety like separate drinking fountains for black people, again?
Do you also support when white women cross the street to avoid black men? What about when they patronize businesses which will protect their honor by keeping away those scary dangerous
blackmen? After all, it’s all about safety.Same sentiment, different era. Being paranoid about [demographic group] because of differential crime rates has a lot of ugly implications.
“Us”? What, you got a mouse in your pocket?
“Non-discrimination and free speech aren’t just constitutional rights, but also ideals any free society should uphold.”
For the record, I am an anarchist libertarian who does, in fact, believe that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate in any way they choose, including based on race.
BUT I think this quote is very important and cannot be emphasized enough.
People say things like “the first amendment doesn’t mean freedom from consequence of your offensive speech” when justifying the efforts of people to utterly destroy the lives of random strangers on Twitter guilty of the crime of saying something not so kind. But perhaps it’s worth asking why the founders bothered to include freedom of speech at all?
Generally speaking, the government exists to help individuals more efficiently protect and exercise the rights that they, themselves, already have. In other words, if the people who were debating the bill of rights at the time thought it was appropriate to destroy someone’s life for saying bad words, why would they feel the need to prohibit the government from doing that? Because they assigned a positive value to the concept, to the idea, of free speech.
Even if the first amendment is not literally/legally violated by Twitter mobs, the concept and the idea of free speech certainly is. Personally, I am convinced that we simply no longer value it at all. If a constitutional convention were held today, clear exceptions for “hate speech” would be added and free speech would be dead (as it already is in Canada and much of Europe).
And if you happen to be such a person who does not place a high value on free speech, then shouldn’t you want the first amendment to be overturned? If hate speech is destructive, why should preventing and punishing it rely solely on the invisible hand of the market?
I don’t see how that is relevant, in two senses. Firstly, protection under the law of men is irrelevant; the argument is that women should treat them with suspicion, which is not legally prohibited.
Secondly, as I understand them, both arguments are just “Not all x are bad, but some are, which means interacting with any of them is poor risk to take.” That is sometimes a good argument (e.g. “serial killers are like skittles”) but in the refugee terrorist case it is clearly not (since such a small proportion of them are bad), and in the male rapist case it is slightly less clearly not (since flaw is that the cost of not interacting with men outweighs the benefits, which has less of a clear parallel to the skittles analogy than the flaw with the refugee argument).
Is it an uncharitable reading of your statement to interpret it as “a fearmongering-worthy proportion of men are rapists”? Because I thought the male rapist case is clearly not a good argument for the same reason as the refugee terrorist one.
Also, I’m curious, how do you square that with the outsize proportion of refugees who are young men? Even if only a tiny proportion of refugees are terrorists, by your own logic a large proportion of them would be rapists.
Agreed on both points. The feminist / M&M formulation of the fallacy, as I recall, was an attempt to justify suspicion by individual women in personal interactions, not to justify a particular law or policy.
And in any case, as SSC isn’t a law blog, whether or not a viewpoint maps onto (United States) law is of secondary concern compared to how rational it is. In both cases it’s not.
@Gobbobobble
I don’t know what proportion of men are rapists, but it is orders of magnitude higher than the the proportion of refugees that are terrorists, since that is so low. The only number I can find for refugee terrorists is 0.00038%. Reasonable estimates of male rapists can be up to 10%. I personally don’t think that the higher figures are accurate, but it certainly seems that the true number is greater than 0.1%. The higher the figure, the more convincing the argument (if 20% of refugees were terrorists, the skittles analogy would be very convincing). So I think the skittles-rapists argument would be strong, if it were not for the fact that treating all men with suspicion has quite a lot of costs that outweigh the gain (whereas I don’t think you even need to consider that in the skittles-terrorists case).
There is no reason to treat refugee young men differently to US-born young men in terms of regarding them as potential rapists. If a policy is good for one, it is good for the other. But in any case, the proportion of refugees to the US who are young men is not overly large. This source gives a figure of 2% of the total being single men “of combat age”. It seems possible that they might have an odd definition of “of combat age” and being single isn’t necessarily relevant here, but using these stats you can see that the gender balance is pretty much 50-50, and taking the claim from the other source that 50% are children (i.e. only 6% of the total are under 20 but not children) it seems that the proportion of young men is pretty low — at most 10% or so.
Except for, you know, all the rapes committed by refugees.
Seriously, we really haven’t learned anything? Nothing at all from what has been going on in Europe?
Letting those people in was a mistake, and the innocent are still paying for it. Even Merkel admits as much now. It’s the height of insanity to look at that situation and then do the same thing to ourselves!
@Dr Dealgood
Do you have any stats on that? Specifically regarding American refugees, who are carefully selected by the State Department, as opposed to European “refugees” who are firstly not always fleeing warzones, and secondly largely selected by ability to survive dangerous boat journeys. Although I would also be interested in stats that show European migrants as being disproportionately likely to rape.
“I don’t know what proportion of men are rapists, but it is orders of magnitude higher than the the proportion of refugees that are terrorists”
Surely true.
But if I have correctly followed this argument, it starts with an objection to the Trump refugee analogy based not on numbers but on the fact that human beings are not pieces of candy. That objection applies equally well to the rapist analogy.
@David
That may be an objection, but it’s not the one I make. I think that the analogy would be correct if, say, 10% of refugees were terrorists.
This difference in the two skittles bowls is the pros of the non-poison skittles. A woman who never interacts with men, or trembles with fear at the sight of men or whatever the extreme, no-chance-at-poisoned-skittles position is, then cuts herself off from most employment and likely all romantic opportunities. While men can try to understand her risk-averse anxiety, ultimately she is losing a lot. (And the moderate view, that she should approach unknown men with some wariness in situations where she is especially vulnerable, is actually rather sensible and not particularly offensive).
Whereas with immigration from war-prone areas with populations extremely divergent from majority American/European culture, the downside of a moratorium, for the host nation (the one the executive has a stronger duty towards) is what, really? Slight economic inefficiency if we assume all people are basically fungible? Having to deal with slightly more civic trust? Having to learn how to make ethnic food from a book?
Obviously the refugees lose a lot in not being granted free admittance. Nicer conditions, escape from civil war (well, open civil war), social welfare, etc. But we as a nation can discuss if the extent of humanitarian obligation might fall short of open borders throughout the western world and what other steps might meet these needs.
Loathsome feminist rhetoric inspires equally loathsome white supremacist rhetoric, take 300. I wish they’d stop pretending to be left-wing or liberal and join their natural allies on /pol/ already.
Both stances are horrifying.
Neither of the metaphors is horrifying, although both may be being used as part of bad arguments.
The characteristics of the candy relevant to the metaphor are that there are lots of pieces, most are good but a few are bad, and one cannot readily tell which are which. Those characteristics are shared by men and refugees.
I have way too much invested in the moral high road to hop off for a political jab, but I can’t fault other people for accepting what is and isn’t effective and following suit.
Instead of skittles, I prefer computing probabilities.
Hows this algorithm?
1. Locate sub-populations X1,X2,X3…XN out of the total set of indiciduals.
2. Compute list of total events Y of interest.
3.Compare probabilities of sub-populations, pruned in whatever way necessary to be an intelligent comparison, to create event Y.
4. No longer speak in skittles analogies and actually have some interesting data.
Every single thread has a post of this sorts.
We got it the first time. We get it now. Why does this seem to be such a popular point to make?
A certain number of US citizens are going to turn terrorist too….basically, people aren’t safe.
Donald Trump may wish that I should starve to death, but I plan to keep living and so keep eating. Since pretty much every wholesome domestic foodstuff on the supermarket shelves has about the same poison content as his hypothetical Skittles, I think I’m going to go with a diversity of foodstuffs whose tastes I favor and hope for the best.
Have people here heard of the Von Mises Institute’s solution to the world’s economic problems, called the Chicago Plan? 100% reserve banking sounds like a great idea to me. Does it to you?
“Irvin Fisher, a Yale economist whom Milton Friedman called America’s greatest economist, said that the plan would greatly reduce the severity of business cycles, probably eliminating booms and busts. Bank runs would be impossible, making deposit insurance unnecessary, and it would greatly reduce the amount of public and private debt.”
An Unorthodox Solution to the World’s Economic Problems
https://www.mises.ca/a-solution-to-the-worlds-economic-problems/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q8q2hfIPAA
Is that sarcasm or are you serious?
Usually the only people I hear talking about opposing fractional reserve banking are hardcore libertarians and Objectivists. It’s kind of an unusual position to hear from you.
Anyway, I’d say test it out somewhere small and far away from where I live. I’d be thrilled if it turned out to be a workable policy but I’m not too keen to wager to whole economy on it.
Yeah, when you eliminate the booms, you can’t tell you’re living in a constant bust.
I don’t know enough about economics to know how, exactly, such an idea would work out in practice (and I’m not sure anyone does, though I think the most probable concern would be, as Suntzuanime says, that while it would prevent credit bubbles, the cost in probable slowed growth might not be worth it), though I will say I think there’s something somewhat fraudulent about how fractional reserve banking is practiced today: namely, despite the Great Depression, runs on banks, FDIC, etc. etc. I still don’t think the average person really understands how it works. I think the average person thinks of banks like virtual safes with nice lobbies. You give them your money and they hang on to it for you.
There’s nothing inherently fraudulent about “you give us your money and we promise to give it back to you on demand and will keep at least x% of that sum on hand to make sure we can,” but I don’t think most people who deposit their money understand that’s what’s happening. Maybe I’m underestimating the average bank customer… I hope?
And why is this a problem? An average person, generally speaking, has no clue how the world works.
It may not be a problem for its functioning. If I’m correct that many people don’t understand this then it clearly already functions at least reasonably well despite this.
Whether or not people understand what they’re getting into is relevant primarily to the question of whether or not it is a fraudulent practice, as a minority of Austrian economists argue. If you think you are just giving your money to the bank for safekeeping but are, in fact, extending them a loan, you are arguably being defrauded, since you don’t know what you’re getting into (though I’m sure it’s there in the fine print no one reads).
Put another way, some Austrians will say the bank is committing a fraud by, in effect, creating a kind of fictional dual ownership. This gets to the question of whether money is just a kind of claim ticket for a certain amount of, e. g. gold, or else more of a promise of a promise. Of course the reality today is much more like the latter, but people tend to think more in terms of the former, I think (that is, they don’t realize their money, in effect, “multiplies” when they put it in the bank such that there are more claims to it than actual funds).
This is a separate, somewhat philosophical/ethical question from that of whether or not fractional reserve is to blame for the business cycle. Maybe not one anyone outside a small circle of libertarian property rights purists cares about, but it is a question.
I don’t know.
How many people have seen “It’s a Wonderful Life”? It’s laid out fairly simply and clearly when the run on George’s bank starts.
I think Lumifer’s point is that, by the standards which would call fractional reserve banking “fraud”, almost every interaction an ordinary person has with an organization constitutes fraud. Which makes fraud perhaps not seem all that bad, although there is some appeal to the notion that we humans are nothing but sheep being herded by a pack of duplicitous demons known collectively as “society”.
> If you think you are just giving your money to the bank for safekeeping but are, in fact, extending them a loan, you are arguably being defrauded
No, because the bank is not promising you that it will take your banknotes and put them into its vault to await the time when you want them back. The bank is taking your fungible money and promises to give you back the same sum when you ask for it.
If you are mistaken about what’s going on, that is not fraud on the part of the bank. And it’s not like it is a secret — anyone who cares even a little bit can easily find out how banks work.
Besides, are bank runs really a problem in our days? FDIC is well-funded and when was the last time depositors in a US bank actually lost their deposits?
“How many people have seen “It’s a Wonderful Life”? It’s laid out fairly simply and clearly when the run on George’s bank starts.”
It also takes place about 70 years ago and during the Great Depression. I’ll bet you most people think “things were sure crazy back in the 40s but banks don’t work that way any more! now we have computers and stuff to ensure that sort of thing never happens again”
The don’t think banks loan money anymore? Hardly. No, if anything post-2008, they think bank’s are being too speculative with deposits.
The do think that it wouldn’t be possible to create a small town bank run by accidentally handing the bank’s cash to someone inside a newspaper, I’ll grant that.
Now mind you, just as there are plenty of people who have not bothered to consider whether the McRib is actually made out of pork ribs that have been magically turned into meat, there are plenty of people who don’t really care what happens to their money as long as the can get to it when they want. And some huge sub-set of people that don’t have any money in the bank at all.
But broadly, I think the idea that bank deposits and lending are ungrockable to the populace and therefore banks are defrauding their customers seems like it confuses “doesn’t care” for “has been misled”.
Yeah I am pretty skeptical like Dealgood and sun. I haven’t looked much into the idea of 100% reserves, but it seems like it would decrease available credit tremendously. While I believe the debt level in the US is too high, I don’t think it should be zero either. When banks have 100% reserves, how do banks make money? I assume they would have to charge customers for holding their money, since they couldn’t lend it out.
On the other hand, maybe it does make sense. No one would be able to invest or lend money except to the extent that they have money. If everyone is treated like banks, then people couldn’t buy stocks on margin either? It would make the economy a lot more stable. I’d be curious how much invested capital would drop. I have mixed feelings.
Slightly higher margin servicing like P2P lenders, so the banks get a fee for doing the paperwork on loans that individuals select and fund?
Being dead is a lot more “stable” than being alive.
You don’t want a stable economy, you want a growing economy. The stone-age tribes in the Amazon have had a very stable economy for millenia.
@ Jill
The banks are over my head, but Elizabeth Warren might have something readable to say about them.
I’ve been thinking about a previous post of yours, which ended with the idea that each real life problem might require work from several different angles at once, and the combination would be different for each problem. — What would be a neat term for that attitude? ‘Pragmatism’ is sort of a Boo Light for both sides, but could it be rescued if coupled with some widely-approved word?
Could you re-post a sentence from that comment, so I can Google the thread?
Bank runs would be impossible because banks would be impossible. Booms and busts would be eliminated because the economy would never rise above what we now consider a bust.
I’ve heard variants on this idea many times before; it is emotionally appealing to people who do not understand economics, but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t a Very Bad Plan wrapped in emotional appeal. And I am surprised to see the Von Mises name linked to this one, because I’m pretty sure Ludwig would not have approved.
Rothbard, who was a Mises disciple, opposed fractional reserve banking. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mises did but don’t know.
I do, however, have Human Action on my bookshelf. Mises criticizes Fisher’s proposal and argues instead for free banking. It isn’t clear on a quick read whether he thinks private banks would be able to function on a fractional reserve system or not, but I think it’s pretty clear that he (unlike Rothbard) doesn’t think they should be prohibited from doing so.
I don’t know why you would think that a 100% reserve system would result in the economy being in a permanent bust. Like Mises, I favor free banking, and I expect we would end up with a fractional reserve system, but the only significant advantage would be economizing on the cost of producing the monetary base. An FR system based on gold (for example) can provide the same monetary services as a 100% reserve system and tie up less gold doing it.
It’s a mistake to confuse money with credit. With or without fractional reserve, in order for someone to borrow someone else has to be willing to lend, which means that someone has to forego present consumption in exchange for future consumption. The fact that the firms which act as middlemen in much of that market are also associated with providing monetary services is accident, not essence.
If the effect of a 100%-reserve law is merely that the front end of “First National Savings and Loan” is broken into “First National Savings” and a quasi-separate “First National Loan”, I expect the law would be quickly amended with a “that’s not what we meant!” clause.
In order for someone to borrow, someone else has to be willing to lend, yes. The pool of willing lenders becomes vastly larger if you can promise that, A: they won’t have to bother with the pesky details of what is being loaned to whom for which purpose, and B: however much they have put up to lend, they can get all of it back immediately on demand even if the loan they made has not come due. The latter, in particular, is the service that fractional reserve banking provides, and it is necessary to providing the volume of credit our relatively prosperous economy requires.
If you insist that nobody can offer the “you can have all of your money back immediately on demand” service without keeping all of the money (or its near-equivalent) actually on hand at all times, that source of credit dries up.
“If you insist that nobody can offer the “you can have all of your money back immediately on demand” service without keeping all of the money (or its near-equivalent) actually on hand at all times, that source of credit dries up.”
Suppose you do your lending by buying stock on the stock market. You can have your money back immediately on demand by selling the stock.
It’s true that, in that case, you are accepting some uncertainty in how much your stock is worth. You can eliminate some of that by buying into an index fund, by buying bonds instead of stocks, by hedging in the future market, and if there was a big demand for doing the last there would be middlemen doing it for you.
In any case, in the limit of zero fraction all that means is that providing a stock of money isn’t tying down any real resources. That’s the same advantage I already mentioned. You don’t have to spend real resources digging gold out of the ground in order to put in a vault–or mint it and have it circulating as coin.
If I do my “lending” by buying stock on the stock market, that’s no help at all when e.g. Toyota needs to pay for a shipment of steel today that won’t generate revenue until they turn it into a shipment of cars three months from now. It also isn’t much help if my neighbor is looking for a mortgage to buy a house.
Providing long-term capital investment for starting or expanding businesses, is a small fraction of what banks do. Mostly, banks don’t do that because the stock market does. If that’s the only kind of lending we are left with in the world of 100% reserve banking, that’s going to be a huge loss to the economy.
Hi. I’m mostly new here. I don’t know if this is the right place, but I figure it won’t hurt to ask, so I will. If I’m wrong, tell me where to go. There seems to be a lot of material here, and I find it fascinating, but I would like to immediately figure out where to start and begin solving my problems if this is at all possible. (I know it won’t just happen on its own, but I’ve heard good things) What are the top ten (or whatever number you feel appropriate) most *effective and applicable to daily life/normal problems* takeaways from LW and SSC and the diaspora/wherever else there are aspiring rationalists?
Note: I do not mind looking at links, but I would like a little summary of each one – I am terrible at finding main points and I focus on the details too much.
…what are your biggest problems? The answer to that will probably change suggestions significantly.
I have problems with productivity/focus/procrastination.
I have several things about myself I’d like to change (not *exactly* bad habits but something similar but more emotional). (Such as my dislike for changing clothes and going outside)
I get strange thoughts and beliefs once in a while and I’d like to figure out where they came from and stop them. (Such as suddenly appearing “So-and-so hates me” (they don’t) or “Not washing my hands will destroy the world and kill me”).
I am very bad at knowing what other people will do next and badly need an actual guide to social skills which gives me steps to follow instead of vague woo.
I would like more tools in my toolbox to generally change my mind and the way my brain works. Currently it works badly.
To solve your problems? Is that what this blog is for? I just read this because the folks are pretty smart and have rational takes on various issues. Well also Scott has some good ideas too, but Scott has become less important than the commenters as I get more involved.
But then I have little interest in Scott’s medical expertise — maybe that’s what drew you to this blog?
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_materials
The main ides from the sequences are probably something like:
All models are wrong but some are useful
“Right” and “wrong” is not a dichotomy but a continuum.
If you want to be right there should be a way to prove you wrong. You don’t get rationality points for making unfalsifiable claims.
Saying you are rational doesn’t make you so.
Everyone is biased, including you.
If you want to get closer to the truth, you can’t stop your inquiries once you have found a way to defend a cherished belief. Seek out strong rebuttals.
In fact, if you are scared of learning something that challenges your beliefs, that probably means you need to study that more.
And something that isn’t in the sequences but I find useful as a framing device: you and your opponent can both be “right”. Let’s say that you and I are on opposite sides of an issue. Let’s say that you have 100% confidence in belief in issue X and I have 0*. However, we discuss the issue and you come away at 85 and I at 10. Congratulations, you won the argument! Maybe I changed your beliefs more than you did mine but you still changed my mind. That’s progress. Not only that but most people struggle to admit a good point in the middle of a debate. It’s only after they have quietly contemplated the issue will they see that you had a point. So that 10% could be the seed of a bigger change. So you shouldn’t necessarily be discouraged by your lack of progress in a debate. You can’t tell what is going on inside their mind.
*You should rarely have 0 or 100% confidence in your beliefs. Especially when it comes to something ideologically motivated.
This was actually said by George Box since the 1970s but this specific quote is from his book published in 1987.
Two simple tricks to make your internet arguments 20% less annoying:
1. The Principle of Charity/Chesterton’s Fence: If large numbers of people support something that sounds crazy to you, odds are there’s some reason why. There may not be a good reason, but you should figure out what it is instead of dismissing them. There might be some useful insight at the core, or some common ground you can share.
2. The Motte and Bailey and The Weak Man: Two fallacies which both hinge on the same thing – combining something reasonable-sounding and something crazy-sounding and saying they’re the same. Pay close attention to which one you and your opponents are arguing about – don’t accuse the guy who’s arguing a moderate position of being a moonbat conspiracy theorist just because he happens to have moonbats on his side, and don’t try to defend an extreme position by equivocating it to a more reasonable-sounding one. If you can separate the two, you can avoid arguments where you’re talking past each other, each accusing the other of supporting something they don’t.
My daughter has issues with chronic pain from Ehlers Danlos syndrome and some depression. She started Cymbalta this week. Any thoughts beyond the stuff on the package label of things to watch out for/best practices/better alternatives? We looked up patient feedback on the internet (I know, big mistake!) and are pretty worried.
Like most meds in the SSRI/SNRI class, it’s a bit of a crapshoot to find which one works the best. Cymbalta’s discontinuation syndrome is notoriously harsh even within its class, so just make sure that if it ends up not working she tapers off very gradually.
Thanks!