This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit, the SSC Discord server, or the Cafe Chesscourt forum.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
We’re having an SSC meetup in Washington, DC next weekend! Saturday, June 24 at 7pm. There will be snacks and blog posts, which are fun to talk about! Details and contact info are available through the meetup directory. (ctrl+f “Washington”)
There will be an SSC meetup in Cambridge UK on Wednesday 21st June! Details: 7pm, the Burleigh Arms. There is a form to fill in here if you’re interested, and contact info is on the meetup directory.
….and here in Helsinki, we have agreed to meet again on Tuesday, June 27, 5 pm. Location same as previously, Kaisla. Contact either via Google group discussion or me directly at sschelsinkimeetup (a t) gmail.com.
I missed this one, but will try to show up to one of these in the future.
I am especially interested in chatting w/ folks on the right in person.
(Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Jutland: The end of the main fleet action
After losing sight of Scheer, Jellicoe took his fleet south, intending to keep the Germans to the west of him, and intercept them when they tried to get home.
(A brief sidenote on geography. The Germans were based out of Wilhelmshaven, near the corner of the Jutland peninsula. Because of minefields laid by both sides, there were two main routes in, either hugging the coast of Denmark past Horns Reef or going through a gap to the northwest of Wilhelmshaven and straight into the Jade Estuary. However, at this point, Jellicoe was directly north of that gap, and in a position to block either route home.)
At around 1840, minutes after the German fleet disappeared, the rear battleships of Jellicoe’s line began to dodge torpedoes. At 1854, Marlborough was hit by one, launched by the Wiesbaden, which was amazingly still afloat despite the pounding she had taken. Despite the flooding through the 20-foot gash in her side, and lost the use of several of her forward boilers, Marlborough remained in the battle line, although she was limited to 16 knots instead of her normal 21. The two men killed aboard were the only casualties among the battleships of the Grand Fleet (excluding the 5th BS).
Jellicoe was not well-served by his subordinates during this phase of the battle, who allowed the Germans to escape without informing Jellicoe or attempting to pursue, except Commodore William Goodenough, commander of the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Goodenough, who we have met previously (his flagship Southampton was the first to give a proper report on the presence of the High Seas Fleet), chased the Germans, managed to maintain contact with their trailing units.
Beatty also declined to pursue the Germans. He instead turned in a full circle ahead of the Grand Fleet, wasting a valuable 7 minutes. In fairness, Lion apparently suffered a gyrocompass failure, but his attempts to cover it up (including producing a doctored track chart in the 1920s) do not reflect well on him.
At 1855, Scheer, for reasons that are not clear, decided to turn east again. He justified this either as an attempt to surprise Jellicoe or to help Wiesbaden, but neither explanation makes much sense, particularly as he put the battlecruisers, lightly armed and heavily damaged, in the van. (Lutzow was badly damaged enough to be sent home independently at this point.) Goodenough spotted the turn and reported it to Jellicoe at 1900. Jellicoe intercepted, placing his line across Scheer’s course again, the battle being rejoined at around 1910. By 1915, the British were shooting even more effectively than they had earlier, and the German van began to buckle even before Scheer ordered another turn away at 1918. (He actually raised the flag to prepare for this turn at 1912, but delayed the execution for 6 minutes.) This was covered by the German battlecruisers and destroyers, in an action known as the ‘death ride’. This charge, into probably the heaviest concentration of naval gunfire the world has ever seen, has been described as ‘the most splendid and least intelligent moment in the short history of the Imperial Navy’. It did achieve the objective of drawing off the British fire from the turning battleships, and the battlecruisers closed to within 4 miles of the British before turning away, covered by the torpedoes of their escorting destroyers. Before firing ceased around 1930, the British had managed to land 25 hits on the German battlecruisers and 12 on their battleships, while of the British ships, only Colossus was hit, taking two shells from Seydlitz.
At this point, we come to the most controversial moment of the battle. The first destroyer attack, by 13 boats, was launched at 1915, six minutes before Scheer gave the order. This first wave launched a total of 31 torpedoes between 1922 and 1930, with the loss of one boat and four others badly damaged. (The second wave didn’t even manage to find the British in the mist on the North Sea.) Not one torpedo hit, as Jellicoe ordered his ships to turn away at 1921, presenting a smaller target to the torpedoes, extending the range they had to run, and giving his ships a better chance to dodge. Some later claimed that he should have turned towards the torpedoes, a tactic that became common during WW2. However, one of the greatest fears the British had was that German destroyers would lay floating mines, which they would then lure the British over (a tactic the Japanese had used in their war with Russia a decade earlier). A turn-towards, in addition to putting the fleet more at risk than the turn away, would have made this a real possibility. Despite the volume of criticism leveled against Jellicoe (some said that he was motivated by a fear of drowning, caused by his near-miss when Victoria sank), he had in fact written a letter to the Admiralty when he assumed command of the Grand Fleet in October of 1914, stating that he would turn away in this situation, to preserve the fleet. Even Churchill, despite his contemporary criticism (he initially suggested that Jellicoe should have used a completely new maneuver to deploy on the center during his first deployment), later recognized that Jellicoe “was the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon.”
At this point, Jellicoe was blind again. His light cruisers were either holding station on him or beating off destroyer attacks. Even the previously-reliable Goodenough failed him, sending an erroneous message stating that the Germans were heading northwest. At 1950, Beatty suggested that the battleships follow his battlecruisers, who were in front of Jellicoe’s line. It is unclear why he did this, as he probably couldn’t see the Germans, either. Jellicoe agreed to give Beatty his leading division at 2001, although his leading division couldn’t even see Beatty at this point. He then sent his scouts directly west, in an attempt to bring the Germans to action before it was fully dark. At this point, Scheer had decided to head for Horns Reef, and was steering directly south, planning to try to get through the British fleet after nightfall.
At 2020 (a few minutes after the official time of sunset), Beatty found the German battlecruisers again. Hipper (who had left Lutzow when she was disabled) was in the process of transferring to Derfflinger when the British opened fire, obviously interrupting his attempt. Again, visibility hindered the Germans, and the British landed six hits on Hipper’s ships, putting Derfflinger’s last turret out of action, and taking only one 5.9” hit in return. The German line had been reversed, and was being lead by the pre-dreadnoughts of the 2nd Battle Squadron. These came within range of the British, taking two hits and having no more success than the battlecruisers, although the Posen of the following 1st Battle Squadron did land one hit on Princess Royal. Finally, the mist descended around 2040, and the clash between the dreadnoughts had drawn to an end.
As a side note, one of the turret officers aboard HMS Collingwood was Prince Albert, later known as George VI. He was proud of being in action there, but sad that Collingwood did not take any hits ‘as she had nothing to show that she had been in the fight’. This was a common sentiment among the officers and men of the Grand Fleet, and Beatty used the lack of damage to claim that they had not actually been in action.
That turned out longer than I thought. It looks like we’ll have two more parts before the series wraps up, covering the night action and the aftermath/analysis.
I’m a volunteer tour guide at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles, and I enjoy explaining battleships so much that I’ve been doing it here for quite a while. This is my index of the current posts, updated so that I don’t have to ask Scott to put up a link when the previous index gets locked down. Please don’t post a reply to this index comment so I can keep it updated as new ones get published and the new posts are easy to find.
History:
General History of Battleships, Part 1 and Part 2
The Early Ironclads
Pre-Dreadnoughts
The loss of HMS Victoria
The Battle of Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
US Battleships in WW2
Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2
Battlecruisers
Battleships after WW2
The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President
The South American Dreadnought Race
Dreadnoughts of the minor powers
Technical:
Fire Control
History of Fire Control
Armor, Part 1 and Part 2
Propulsion
Armament Part 1 and Part 2
Turret vs barbette
Underwater protection
Secondary Armament, Part 1 and Part 2
Survivability and Damage Control Part 1
Misc:
Bibliography
Thoughts on tour guiding
Questions I get as a tour guide
Jutland Part 5
Jutland Part 6
(Note that this post is split due to length)
Life aboard Iowa
Link to updated index, before this one gets locked down
What’s your favorite battle that did not involve battleships?
(And what’s your favorite non-battle ship?)
Hmm. The Battle of Bubiyan Channel during the First Gulf War, but mostly for the image of a helicopter using a dunking sonar as a wrecking ball. Or Midway, if I’m allowed to use battles where the battleships didn’t do anything.
And probably the first USS Yorktown (CV-5). I’ve liked her since I was really young. Not sure why.
(An honorable mention goes to the USS America (LHA-6), which I got to ride aboard last summer from San Diego up to LA.)
Can you expand on this, or point me to a page? Google isn’t giving me anything on it.
My knowledge of this is informal only, but basically after the escorts got destroyed, every helicopter that could showed up and started attacking small boats. One British Sea King didn’t have anything more than small arms, and quickly ran out of ammo for those. So the pilot lowered the dunking sonar, and began to attack with it. Apparently, it worked pretty well, but got destroyed in the process.
I don’t want to derail Bean’s discussion but this is the Naval gazing thread and I just wanted to say that US Navy 7th Fleet has confirmed what I think many of us suspected. The 7 sailors listed as “missing” after the USS Fitzgerald’s collision with Motor Vessel ACX Crystal on Saturday were trapped in containment. Their remains have been recovered from the flooded compartments and their names are:
– Seaman Gunner’s Mate Dakota Rigsby, 19, Palmyra VA
– Yeoman 3rd Class Shingo Douglass, 25, San Diego CA
– Sonar Tech 3rd Class Ngoc T Truong Huynh, 25, Oakville CN
– Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Noe Hernandez, 26, Weslaco TX
– Fire Controlman 2nd Class Carlos Sibayan, 23, Chula Vista CA
– Personnel Specialist 1st Class Xavier Martin, 24, Halethorpe MD
– Fire Controlman 1st Class Leo Rehm Jr., 37, Elyria OH
Fair winds and following seas mates. Your watch has ended. another begins.
Indeed. Tragic, but this is the cost we’re going to pay for having a navy which operates.
On a lighter note, the USN just scored its first air-to-air kill since 1991.
I’m in LA this Saturday for a friend’s wedding and am suggesting to my wife that we visit to the Iowa. We visited the Texas this time last year and really enjoyed it, but could only stay briefly before the heat and humidity got to us – I imagine LA would be easier to handle? Are there other nearby attractions you’d recommend seeing?
LA has much better weather than Texas. It’s been relatively hot lately, but that means you’re looking at mid-80s at most (probably lower on the coast), and fairly low humidity. NWS says high of 76 for Saturday. Anecdotally, I grew up in the Midwest, and of the days I’ve spent on the ship, some have been hot, but none have been the sort of miserable you get there.
If you’re actually looking at being on the ship Saturday, I’ll be there for at least part of the day. Are you on the discord?
In terms of nearby attractions, I’m not sure what you’re interested in. The LA Maritime Museum is next door, but it’s not brilliant. Worth the $5, maybe not worth the time. Lane Victory is also cheap, and not a bad place to go. I’m not sure about other attractions in San Pedro. Further afield, Queen Mary is OK (although she’s deep in the mud and missing engines, and parking is horrible), Aquarium of the Pacific is pretty good.
Thanks… we’d love to visit but after looking at our time and transport options I think we’ve decided to see the Griffith observatory instead. Will have to plan it for our next trip!
Fair enough. The Griffith is pretty good, although the day I went, it was a lot busier than I’ve ever seen Iowa (except for Fleet Week). I personally didn’t get that much out of the visit, but I’ve been interested in space for a long time.
Also, their parking is terrible, and we had a long walk in.
But did anybody actually die, to justify the term ‘death ride’?
OK, granted, with 25 large-caliber hits, probably somebody died. But AFIK no German battlecruisers were sunk in that part of the action. So here’s the thing:
If I recall correctly, and correct me if I’ve missed something, we’ve got five German battlecruisers and almost two dozen battleships, against a superior British force including six battlecruisers and four super-battlecruiserish “fast battleships”. The five German battlecruisers are tasked with finding the British fleet and luring them into battle. Mission accomplished, and if the British fleet wasn’t lured entirely into an ambush it is because their own battlecruisers were able to extricate themselves when they first encountered the German main fleet. During the main fleet engagement, the German battlecruisers matched off against their larger and more numerous British counterparts. When the engagement turned against the Germans, Scheer pulled his battleships out and ordered the battlecruisers and lesser elements, alone, to cover the battleship’s escape.
Mission fucking accomplished.
In addition to completing their scouting and screening roles, every British capital ship sunk at Jutland was sunk by one of the five German battlecruisers, none by the battleships. In spite of sailing into “heaviest concentration of naval gunfire the world has ever seen”, outnumbered four or five to one by proper dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts, none of the German battlecruisers were directly sunk during the battle and only one was damaged beyond repair to be scuttled later.
And yet I repeatedly hear that one of the key lessons of naval combat from World War I (meaning Jutland), is that battlecruisers were a very silly idea because they aren’t survivable against battleships.
So my question: Is this an example of the winner writing a set of extremely misleading history books, to cover for their insanely reckless powder-handling practices that might have just as well doomed actual battleships under fire? Shouldn’t the lesson actually be that battlecruisers, when run by people with not-insanely-reckless ideas of powder handling and damage control, were perhaps the most awesome ships of the early dreadnought era?
Would help if we had more than one major surface action to study. But from that one action, I’m not seeing the case against the battlecruiser.
That three battlecruisers blew up in a couple minutes was well known almost immediately after the battle. the other details you mention were only known later, if at all. I don’t think it’s a case of winners setting the history to cover their assess as conventional wisdom setting the history before all the facts were in, a simple theory that fits with the facts beating out more complicated, if more accurate, theories.
Starting with the nitpick:
Lutzow was actually detached before the Death Ride. So none of the battlecruisers that went on it died. I’m not sure about destroyers, and would have to check sources.
Overall, I’m in agreement with you, with one massive caveat. Simplifying somewhat, British battlecruisers traded armor for speed. German battlecruisers traded guns for speed. They generally were on par with the British battleships in terms of percentage of armor by weight.
That said, the experience of Lion, Tiger, and Princess Royal showed that even British battlecruisers which did not have catastrophic magazine explosions were surprisingly survivable. (This was a pre-war British prediction which Friedman highlighted as being correct if we ignore the cordite issue.) I think you’re right, and that Jackie Fisher, on his good days, was very good indeed.
On the other hand, the Grand Fleet took a total of 2 shells (ignoring the 5th BS, which were intended to be sort of hybrid ships), so we don’t have a particularly good control for heavily-armored ships on the British side. I may have to look over the records for the QEs and the three of Beatty’s battlecruisers not protected by the Maori.
There was something of a cover-up, but cassander also makes a good point. I’m not sure how and when German records of the battle came out, and what was known about the ships which survived.
Wikipedia lists five German destroyers lost at Jutland, four of which have individual pages. Of those four, two (S35 and V27) are described as being lost near the end of the Run to the South (16:26 GMT), and a third (V4) is described as being lost during the night action (02:15 GMT). V48 doesn’t have where or when listed on its page, and V29 doesn’t have a wikipedia page, but google books turns up references to both in “Jutland 1916: The Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield”, by Innes McCartney (V48, V29). From that, it looks like V29 was sunk as part of the same torpedo run as S35 and V27; and V48’s loss is poorly documented, but its wreck was found about 2 miles south of of S35, which seems to indicate it was also lost in the Run to the South.
TLDR: looks like 4 destroyers lost in the Run to the South, 1 in the night action, and none in the Death Ride.
I think the term “Death Ride” refers to the situation (five BCs engaging 24 BBs), not the outcome.
I’ve heard claims along those lines, but I’ve understood them as a shorthand form of the more nuanced and more defensible claim that Jutland demonstrated the superiority of the German BC design philosophy over the prewar British BC design philosophy.
To oversimplify, there are two major purposes for building BCs:
1. To dominate Armored Cruisers in the commerce raiding and sealane defense roles, the way Dreadnought BBs dominate pre-Dreads in the line of battle.
2. To serve as a fast scouting, flanking, and raiding element of the main battle fleet.
Both roles require a fast ship, and you need to sacrifice something else to get more speed out of a ship of a given size. That something needs to be some combination of guns and armor. If you’re designing exclusively for one role or the other, you’d choose different combinations: a sealane defense BC can sacrifice more armor because it can rely on Fisher’s concept of “Speed is Armor” and disengage if threatened by a superior force, while a battle fleet BC needs to be able to stand up to BBs and take a pounding.
German ships were designed mostly for the second role, while British ships were designed for a mix of both roles (the extent of the latter being exaggerated in many casual accounts: Bean talked about this in detail in one of the earlier Battleship threads, about how the British BCs were intended for both roles from the beginning). For example, SMS Lützow, a German BC, and HMS Lion, a British BC, were both about the same size (26,319 long tons and 26,690 long tons, respectively, if I’m reading the tables on Wikipedia correct). Lion had a significantly heavier main battery (8x 13.5″ guns vs 8x 12″ guns) and was slightly faster (28 knots vs 26.4 knots), but Lützow had much heavier armor (a 12″ main belt, vs a variable thickness main belt on Lion that was 9″ amidships and 4″ towards the ends of the ship). The effects of the armor difference do get exaggerated by people who forget or ignore the British ammunition-handling problems and their contribution to the British BC losses, but there was definitely a difference in armor thickness.
I think armor may be vastly overrated as a contributor to warship survivability, particularly at the level of supposed “immunity zones” and impervious citadels off which the enemy’s heaviest shells will bounce harmlessly. Armor against quick-firing HE shells, splinter protection where needed, and something like a protected cruiser’s armored deck seem like cheaper gains. But what gets your ships and crews home to fight another day are compartmentalization, reserve buoyancy, stability margins, redundancy, shock hardening, general robustness, and solid damage control procedures.
Things which, conveniently, don’t require many kilotons of steel and so might fit on a battlecruiser without costing it speed. On the other hand, maybe their fine-lined speed-optimized hulls didn’t have the buoyancy or stability margins of comparable battleship hulls. Bean, do your sources say anything about the relative survivability, aside from armor thickness, of battlecruisers vs. battelships?
The only other survivability parameter I have ready to hand is metacentric height, which was usually identical between the relevant battleship/battlecruiser pairs. The only battlecruiser with proper TDS was Hood, and that set a lot of her size. I’d suspect that things like compartmentalization were also the same, as both types were designed to capital ship standards. The big difference is going to be in the hull form, although I don’t quite have the numbers to characterize it. I will say that beam for both navies usually seems to have had more to do with docking facilities than anything else. The Germans BCs had lower block coefficients, while the block coefficients for the British were fairly similar for both types.
I decided to test your theory on armor by looking at Warspite’s experience at Jutland. She was hit more than any other battleship there, and it should give us a good baseline. I’m using Campbell as my source throughout.
Hits between 1654-1815:
Warspite was hit twice in this period.
1. An 11″ shell that pierced the 6″ after side armor (upper belt, I think), and detonated before it went through the 2.5″ middle deck.
No benefit.
2. A hit on the forefunnel.
No benefit.
There were 13 hits between 1815 and 1900, when she was out of control and being shot at by the entire German fleet. Numbering per Campbell
1. Came in through the side above the belt, bounced off 1.25″ main deck. Unfortunately, I don’t have good data on German gun penetration at the time. Tiger’s main deck was 1-1.25″ thick, so I’m going to go with Probably no benefit.
2. No details, looks to be above deck.
Probably no benefit.
3. Came through 6″ belt, and burst directly behind. Some holing.
No benefit, assuming that the shells would get set off by the BC armor.
4. Strange upward ricochet. Only hit light armor.
No benefit.
5. Deflected off armor gratings in the funnels. I don’t know how thick those were offhand. Will have to do more research on QEs and BCs.
6. Bounced off 1″ armored deck.
No benefit.
7. Set off on the armored deck on impact. Holed deck, caused fire in 6″ battery.
No benefit.
8. Pierced upper part of tapered main belt. Campbell estimates 7.5″, and says this was an illustration of the error of not carrying the 13″ armor to the main deck.
No benefit.
9. Details are sketchy.
No benefit.
10. Shell hit 6″ belt obliquely, and broke up without exploding. Larger part deflected off 4″ barbette. Tiger had similar armor in that area.
No benefit.
11. Deck hit. Penetrated upper deck, burst above main deck.
No benefit.
12. Went through a bunch of superstructure, then burst on main deck, holing it.
No benefit.
13. Hit aft, in thin shell plating.
No benefit.
Total:
Confirmed benefit: 0
Probably no benefit: 2
No benefit: 13
Well, this was interesting. Not a single hit on the 13″ belt, so that wasn’t evaluated. And the QEs had weirdly thin horizontal protection, fairly similar to Tiger. I’ll have to look up exactly why (but not tonight, as I need to go to bed), but that might have hurt them quite badly. I know I picked the test, and it’s bad form to adjust the test after you do it, but I may try to figure out what would have happened if they’d had a thicker deck, and look at the other battleships.
I’m actually starting to wonder if Warspite’s experience had as much to do with the post-Jutland campaign for heavier horizontal armor as the exploding battlecruisers. Several of these seemed like an extra inch would have been very helpful in keeping the shells out.
Another test would be to look at what would have happened to Derfflinger or Seydlitz if they’d been armored like the British battlecruisers. In that case, I should have much better estimates for the penetration of the guns firing at them, which will help.
Thanks for the analysis. #7 and #12 are particularly interesting, because if a shell bursting against your armored deck will hole it then that armor isn’t doing any good at all(*). Particularly if the burst starts a fire in a gunnery space, because now you’ve got nothing but your powder-handling procedures to keep the whole ship from going up.
I seem to recall somewhere, probably Nathan Okum’s work, that penetration for glancing-impact shell bursts is roughly 0.2 shell diameters, which would suggest a battleship or battlecruiser needs a 2.5-3″ deck. The QEs didn’t have that, which is strange for such otherwise well-designed ships. And now I’m thinking in terms of a “protected battlecruiser”, where the #1 priority is making certain nothing gets through that deck to the machinery and magazine spaces below the waterline, and we otherwise just toughen things up above that so they degrade gracefully under the inevitable penetrating hits. Though you’d still want to armor against 6″ HE and the like.
* beyond setting off the fuze before the shell penetrates any deeper
The QEs had a really weird horizontal armor system, with the armor spread across three or four decks. I’m not sure what the designers could have been thinking, or if they were thinking at all. A quick check of my various books shows that both Iron Duke and Revenge were much better protected in that vein.
The only thing that got near the magazines was a big shell fragment (may have been the base, don’t have Campbell to hand) that got thrown basically straight down and ended up in the magazine cooler equipment. But that was at a very different angle from what is was possible for an intact shell to fall.
There were actually a lot of these that put fragments through the main deck, but it was late and I was tired of typing.
I want to build a simple mobile app (user accounts and database querying) that will run on iOS *and* Android. Assume all I know is HTML/JavaScript.
What combination of frameworks or other software could I use to build a scalable prototype with the smallest possible time investment?
For a prototype, none. Grab a tutorial on how to wrap a web page in an app and do that.
For an actual app I will vote for native every time. Take a look at raywenderlich.com and run through a couple tutorials, it’s easier than you think.
You will probably get the best result by investing in learning native app development, but for simpler applications I have found that Intel XDK works pretty well.
It is mostly Cordova underneath, but it is packed into a nice IDE and with a cloud compilation feature that means that you can develop for iOS without a Mac.
Being Cordova, you use HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
The Ionic framework is multiplatform and based on Angular + Cordova, and might be useful for fast prototyping. They have a web tool that allows you to build a simple app from pre-packaged components and preview your app on Android and iOS. You can also build from the command line + your IDE/ editor of choice. You could use a service like Firebase as a starter database while prototyping.
react native
I second this recommendation with the tacit inclusion that React is a good time investment in general.
The Ionic framework is a good choice, especially if you have any experience with Angular. It’s built on top of Cordova, which is even simpler cross-platform HTML/js. React is nice, but with a slightly steeper learning curve, and its ecosystem and community are not quite as robust. On the backend, your options are numerous – firebase is a good starting point.
I’m interested in discussing whether small scale political violence ever advances the perpetrator’s cause. The last decade has seen a number of attacks by people with a clear poltical view, but isolated from a larger campaign of violence. It’s my impression that the consensus is these attacks benefit the side attacked politically. Is this the case? If so, why do such attacks continue?
Depending on how you define “political violence”, the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents resulted in a substantial and enduring reduction in the militarization of the major Federal law enforcement agencies in the United States and in greater tolerance for small cultish groups going off to mind their own business. The Columbine shooting I think marked the beginning of serious anti-bullying efforts in the US educational system.
Alas, only the major Federal law enforcement agencies in the former case, and I am skeptical of the actual effectiveness of the anti-bullying measures in the latter. But it may be that “leave me alone!” is a message that can sometimes be effectively conveyed by small-scale violence.
The Waco and Ruby Ridge cases are complex – one can look at the actions of the Branch Davidians and the Weavers (perhaps as well as McVeigh) as successful acts of political violence – the Feds certainly became much less aggressive afterwards and there was a substantial reduction in the sorts of firearms laws the Feds were enforcing.
Alternatively, one could view the Feds aggressive enforcement itself as poltical violence – with that violence causing such political/cultural backlash that the the Feds ceased using.
Finally, it might be as simple as the Feds learning better tactics. The Feds avoided violence during the Bundy standoff and the wildlife refuge occupation, but still ended up succesfully arresting their targets. (Although the acquittal of some of the occupiers may complicate this perspective.)
But you were specifically talking about “small scale political violence.” I don’t think you can call anything done by the United States government “small scale.”
Violence done by one extended family and/or a modest religious cult against the Federal government, resulting in at least superficially favorable policy changes by the Feds and lasting decades, seems like it ought to qualify.
I looked into that at the time and concluded that the acquittals were due to the prosecutors trying too hard to get a federal felony conviction when the laws and fact pattern didn’t really support one. For some reason, it never occurred to Congress to make “Conspiracy to steal a federal building” a felony, so they tried to stitch together a felony from other laws.
The key charge filed was “Possession of a firearm in a federal facility”. There are three versions of this charge:
A. A misdemeanor charge, based on simple possession without one of the three exception categories applying.
B. A felony charge, based on intending to use the firearm to commit a crime.
C. A murder charge, based on killing someone while committing a violation of A or B.
C obviously wasn’t the case. There was very strong evidence against the defendants for A, but that’s only a misdemeanor. The prosecutors charged B (and didn’t charge A, presumably to close off an option for the jury to show leniency without acquitting), and also charged a second felony, “Conspiring to Impede Officers of the United States”, in order to satisfy the “committing a crime” predicate of B.
The Conspiring to Impede charge was a bit of a stretch, given the way the statute was written. The defense argued that this statute was aimed at efforts to impair specific agents from performing specific duties, while the defendants’ actions were aimed at taking over the building, not at any particular agent or duty. By my reading of the statute, it looks like the defense’s interpretation fits the central intent of the law, and while the text of the statute could plausibly be stretched to cover the case, there’s a long-standing legal document to interpret grey areas in statutory interpretation in favor of criminal defendants. The jury appears to have applied this doctrine to acquit on the Conspiracy charge, which automatically lead to acquittal on the Firearms charge as well, and the misdemeanor version of firearms charge wasn’t charged, so the jury didn’t have the option of convicting on that.
There were other charges against some of the defendants: “Use and carry of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence”, which was dismissed by the judge prior to trial, and various charges of theft or degradation of government property. I haven’t looked into these in detail, but my best guess is that the former really didn’t fit the facts of the case (hence the dismissal), and the latter failed on reasonable doubt due to the difficulty of proving a particular person committed a particular act of theft or degradation.
There were also a number of state crimes which don’t appear to have been charged: “criminal trespass while in possession of a firearm” (a misdemeanor) seems pretty clear-cut, and “unlawful paramilitary activity” (a felony) seems like less of a stretch than the charges the federal prosecutor charged. I’m not sure why not. There’s also a federal criminal trespass statute (a misdemeanor) which also wasn’t brought by the federal prosecutors, probably for the same reason they didn’t charge the misdemeanor version of the firearms charge.
Sources:
Federal prosecution memo for the case
Conspiracy to impede statute
Possession of a firearm statute
Thanks. That’s interesting, and I hadn’t seen it pulled together before.
While it stretches the definition of “small-scale,” I think it’s relevant to ask what role the OKC bombing played in this. Seeing as how McVeigh claimed to have been directly inspired by Ruby Ridge and Waco.
I’d argue there’s never, ever been any serious anti-bullying efforts.
I remember reading “voices from the hellmouth” almost 20 years ago now.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth
After columbine there was a pretty solid anti-bullied movement where the teachers joined in with the bullies adding official sanction to the torture of oddballs.
The reaction to the columbine wasn’t to prevent bullying: it was to categorize kids getting the shit beaten out of them as potential shooters. Because a lot of people are scum. And a lot of those people are teachers and school administrators. They’re not evil but lazy and stupid in a way that’s almost indistinguishable.
What would effective anti-bullying efforts look like?
What about more school choice? These students obviously hate their school because they feel so different from everyone there. They probably wouldn’t shoot up the place if they had somewhere they felt they belonged.
I see the result of this being: the student moves schools a few times, every time being the new outsider and having difficulty breaking into the already established social networks. Thus, they end up hating the school, prompting another move and another bout of outsider-ness. Repeat, all the while disrupting their actual learning because of minor differences in how each school teaches the material.
It might work in limited situations, but I’d expect a lot of students to just never find somewhere they belong.
Totally agree. School bullying is the worst because the victim has no power to leave. The bullies have a captive audience. It’s basically the only situation in life where you’re forced to be around people who you may despise. Very unfortunate.
It Gets Better was a solid effort, though being a specifically LGBT-oriented campaign made it more of a culture war stance and less of being generally anti-bullying.
‘Violence never solved anything’ is obviously bullshit, or at least missing a lot of necessary caveats, including ‘what exactly you mean by solve’? But ‘small-scale violence never did’ is a rather stronger case, if only because predictably achieving large results with small actions is never easy, even for more controllable forms of action.
Perhaps the canonical example of the success of small-scale violence were the actions of Lehi (aka Stern Gang) in post-WWII Palestine, which pretty directly led to British withdrawl without establishing a successor government, and so the rest of Israeli history.
Circumstances were key; they were plenty of larger outbreaks of violence from both sides pre-WWII, but that was before Britain needed US permission to maintain an Empire. Given that, Britain would struggle to engage in any action that could be presented as looking like the American Revolutionary War, and certainly would have been unable to maintain an anti-insurgency campaign against Jewish nationalists.
So ‘small-scale violence’ can solve things, providing both that you are unfussy about your definition of ‘solve’, and have a whole bunch of historical circumstances arranged in your favour. Circumstances that very likely would have enabled you to achieve an equal or better outcome using different tools.
There’s also Operation Ogre, the Basque separatist assassination of Franco’s successor Luis Carrero Blanco. Arguably one of the best historical answers to the question.
Assuming you’re looking for relatively recent examples, George Tiller’s murder shut down late-term abortions in a large region permanently (and all abortions in his city for a few years) which I think his killer might view as a success.
Not even Charlie Hebdo will print cartoons of Muhammad anymore, and at the very least The Independent cited security concerns when choosing not to reprint the famous cartoons following the attack on Hebdo’s offices.
My suspicion is that small scale violence can be very effective when it is in support of a pre-existing custom or norm. Since Westerners are already extremely sensitive about racism and “Islamophobia” a few small acts of terrorism can keep a great many people in line. By focusing violence on people already considered transgressive they could probably altar people’s behaviour quite significantly, but the latest wave of attacks seem to be optimised for grabbing attention not imposing law.
Ironic, since Columbine had exactly nothing to do with bullying.
I thought Columbine was more the start of the “zero tolerance” craze rather than anti-bullying. i.e., “take a bite of a pop-tart and then hold it and say ‘bang bang’ and get suspended.” That kind of stuff doesn’t have anything to do with bullying, either.
It was definitely that. Serious anti-bullying measures came in at about the same time, but I don’t know if there’s a causal relationship.
Zero Tolerance was a serious anti-bullying measure. A stupid, counterproductive one, but the people involved were very serious in their folly.
I think you’re right. I was always under the impression that the anti-bullying measures put into place in the US were meant to address a real and very serious problem: gay and lesbian middle and high school students were victims of endless bullying, and as a result, were killing themselves at a far greater rate than the general population.
Then, a common theme in American behavior: we do something good and nice and necessary, and then out of a well-meaning put poorly thought out egalitarianism, keep doing it and expanding it until it reaches a hysterical pitch and starts to cause serious damage.
So an anti-bullying measure designed specifically to help a specific group of people turns into a set of rules punishing kids for next to nothing, hyper-sensitive children and their parents complaining every time someone looks at them sideways, and schools and teachers spending more and more of their time on unnecessary (and counterproductive) behavior control rather than teaching. I come from a family of teachers, and the stories they tell about this are insane.
@John Schilling
What does not being allowed to play cops and robbers on the playground with finger guns have to do with anti-bullying?
@Conrad: (I mostly agree that this is orthogonal to bullying but) bullying often involves abiguous threats, so schools might enforce not even looking like you might be threatening violence.
What does not being allowed to play cops and robbers on the playground with finger guns have to do with anti-bullying?
In addition to what hog^5 said, it’s also an aspect of the school system trying to solve multiple problems at the same time using the same tool.
Most bullying cases are complicated he-said she-said tales by not particularly reliable children. Some of the teachers might have an idea who the real bully was, but the principal likely doesn’t and the school system and school administration certainly don’t. Confronted with the risk to their kid’s permanent record, which has a chance (probably small) to affect their chances in life, some parents will do anything for their kids, and those parents are more likely to have their kids be bullies (and this isn’t limited to bullying but also other disruptive behaviors). Those parents will direct their efforts at the top end, to the school system itself, and in the area I was in, were willing to use lawyers. Zero tolerance policies take the risk away from the school system and make sure the guilty get punished; that the innocent also get punished is considered a small price to pay.
We’re unfortunately stuck with a choice between a school system that doesn’t punish truly disruptive behaviors, a system that lets the kids who have parents willing to spend time and money to fight the system get away with disruption (which benefits the affluent, connected and privileged), or a system that relies on draconian zero tolerance rules. I’m not sure which is the best option; a lot’s going to depend on where your kids and the kids around them fall, especially the worst of them.
Permanent records don’t exist.
That comment is going on your permanent record.
I thought that one motivation of zero tolerance policies was race. If you end disproportionately punishing members of one race and the rules allow you to use discretion, you can be accused of discriminating and you have no defense against this accusation. If following exact rules with no discretion leads you to disproportionately punish members of one race, you have a defense.
I’m not sure it matters if they exist, if multiple generations of people have grown up being told that they do and a majority have had nothing particularly strongly disconfirm the idea of such a thing at least following you as far as college.
Kids are told it exists in order to intimidate them into good behavior, without any thought given to the possibility that they may – as kids or parents – use underhanded tactics to protect their / their children’s records. It’s self-sustaining at this point, even if teachers and administrators stop using it as a threat, parents and other kids will keep the meme alive.
Permanent records don’t exist.
I used it as shorthand for the long term permanent effects on a kid’s educational path. If you want to maximize your chances of getting in a top university, you look at grades, the difficulty of classes taken, and extracurricular activities. All of the administrative punishments the school can dish out impact at least one of those, if not all three.
This story (google cached link, as original seems to be dead) suggests there _is_ such a thing as a permanent record and some colleges do request it.
1) Seed strategy:
There’s a strategy where you use small scale political violence to intimidate local civil authorities and provoke reprisal, and hope that a combination of heavy handed reprisals from the government and more strategic reprisals from your own enforcers give you increasing leadership over the population and/or world sympathy.
The failure mode is when you either lose the sympathy of the people or the government proves capable of stamping you out and/or outlasts you. I don’t know the details of world history, so I’d welcome corrections and additions even more than usual, but I’d propose:
Arguable successes: IRA, Algeria, Communist China, Iranian Revolution, Cuban Revolution.
Likely failures: Sendera Lumino, Sandanistas, Students for a Democratic Society, etc.
2) Bad cop:
Arguably, small scale political violence can be the bad cop in a good cop/bad cop strategy. I’m more skeptical of this one – I think violence tends to harden your opponent’s position rather than soften it.
3) False flag:
This seems to work best for those who already have power and want to keep their enemies down.
I think we need to analyze it in more detail in each case, personally. For example in the case of the IRA, it’s important to distinguish what we mean by IRA. The stated and consistent goal of Irish Republicanism was the complete independence of the isle from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, complete withdrawal of the British government from the soil of said isle, and a united Irish Republic whose territory consisted of the whole of that isle. By those standards, the Irish Republicans’ attempts to use violence failed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Easter Rising also failed, but arguably set the groundwork for Sinn Féin’s political victories in 1918, so if you count that as being of a piece with the Irish Republican Army’s actions from during the War Of Independence, I suppose you could claim that it was a partial success.
That said, I would argue that this partial success owed quite a lot to timing. If the Brits had really wanted a repeat of 1916 and the mass execution of the Dáil Éireann for treason, they could’ve made that happen (absent a few escaping stragglers), but the aftermath of WW1 made that sort of big military action politically unfeasible even if the current British Government weren’t sick of war themselves (and I suspect they were).
Compare and contrast that with the Anti-Treaty IRA and it’s PIRA/OIRA successors. They continued the fight with the explicit goal of kicking the UK out of those northern counties and re-uniting them with the by-then actually Independent (courtesy of WW2 and further Empire weariness) Irish Republic. That was the goal all the way from the Border Campaign up to the Good Friday Agreement. So, going into The Troubles with the Goal of a united Irish Republic with exactly 0 UK presence anywhere on the soil of Eire, the peace treaty ended with:
-The UK retaining political control over Northern Ireland.
-The Republic of Ireland amending its constitution to remove any claim of sovereignty over northern Ireland.
In return for:
-The right of citizens born in Northern Ireland to choose Irish or dual British-Irish citizenship instead of the default UK citizenship if they so choose.
As far as the large-scale geopolitical goals of the IRA, that is ALL they accomplished! I suppose you could point to the promise the promise that IF, some far off sunny day, a majority of both the Republic of Ireland & Northern Ireland want unification, the UK will step aside as a victory, but I think that’s less of a concession than a statement of a reality that’s been in place since at least the late 60s. Does anyone seriously think that if there had been genuine majority support in both Ireland and Northern Ireland for unification in, say, 1970 that the UK would’ve said “No, and if you try it we’ll consider your attempt to annex our territory an Unfriendly Act”? Really?
So, in the final analysis, I will grant that the IRA of 1918-21 was able to get partial success given: A) widespread popular support so strong that it constituted a majority of the elected government recognized by the citizens in its area of operations as legitimate, and B) an opponent who didn’t really want to fight that war at that time. Not exactly a resounding success.
It’s also only a “seed strategy” in the sense you mean if the aforementioned Easter Rising was not intended to succeed in winning independence on its own. To what extent was that the case? I think that the way the failure of the Easter Rising and the British Response laid the groundwork for the success in 1918 was more happy accident or at least fallback position than actual goal.
And AFAIK, every attempt to –deliberately- follow that sort of “incite heavy-handed response, ride popular swell of support to victory” strategy on the part of armed/militant groups has failed. I don’t believe that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese or Cuban revolutionaries, for example.
Thanks – I appreciate the education.
To clarify the limits of my knowledge:
I don’t know for sure that the Easter Rising WASN’T planned in order to deliberately provoke a heavy-handed response and to allow Sinn Fein to ride the popular support that generated into control of Ireland’s parliamentary delegation.
That just doesn’t jibe with what I’ve read of the period, though I will admit I haven’t read deeply.
Deiseach or any other Irish contributors probably learned more in their primary schooling (I hope so, anyway).
Which success do you mean in the case of Communist China? Tiananmen?
To me that feels like a pretty good case of “we provoked an overblown reaction from the authorities, won the sympathy of the world, yet everyone is still so afraid of the authorities that nothing really came of it”?
I assumed he meant Mao, thus my quibble that I didn’t think that ‘seed’ strategy was applicable to the Chinese Civil War.
If he meant Tienanmen Square that makes even LESS sense, since as I understand it it led to DE-liberalization policies enforced so strongly that in many respects China is still not back to where it was immediately before those protests, and in the meantime has successfully produced generations which no longer view liberalization as nearly so desirable.
Yes, I meant Mao. As I said, my understanding of history is very unsophisticated, and my understanding of the Communist Chinese Revolution is basically (a) Mao said something about the people being the sea in which revolutionaries swim; (b) the US thought for a while that Chiang had a chance; and (c) then it turned out he didn’t.
How about the Palestinians? My perception is that violence against third parties (for example the hijacking wave of the 70s and 80s) was unsuccessful, but that violence against Israel and moderate Palestinians has left the more violent parties in control of the conflict. They haven’t won independence yet, but Hamas controls the West bank, nobody seems under pressure to hold free elections (possibly because the world community doesn’t want to see the results), and the parties most willing to use violence have control over a substantial portion of the aid flowing in.
Mao only survived because George Marshall basically forced Chiang not to wipe him out immediately after ww2 when he was best able to do so.
Edit: Tibor mentions radical Islamic terrorism below, so this is just more detail on the point that Osama bin Laden’s was a “seed strategy.”
Osama bin Laden was upfront (at least at some points, in certain contexts, here’s one link but you can find lots of corroboration pretty easily) that his was a seed strategy. He didn’t really care how many Americans died, and he didn’t expect to overthrow any particular Western government; he cared that Islam was divided and polluted, and wanted to unify it under a caliphate. His goal was using terrorism to provoke Western reprisal to in turn create a unified nation of Islam that was free of–and unified against–Western influence. The story of how his strategy played out (e.g. differences between ISIS and Al Qaeda) offers a lot of additional examples of ways this strategy can play out in practice.
I believe you mean Sendero Luminoso, but that’s a good example of a long-term strategy of political violence that was a near-total failure – Artemio himself declared their ‘war’ lost a few years back.
The Sandinistas, on the other hand, not only toppled Somoza but continue to rule Nicaragua today. They’ve had to moderate themselves over the years to be a viable/electable political party rather than a guerrilla group, but it’s hard to view the FSLN as a failure.
At least in case if Islamic terrorism, I believe the goal is to provoke conflict. The Islamists want westerners to hate muslims which in turn makes muslims hate westerners and bring them to their ranks. The bigger the social barriers between muslim minorities and the majority in western societies, the fewer will assimilate into the larger society which is a positive thing from the perspective of the Islamists. Anything that makes those barriers higher helps.
But it is not inherent to muslims. With IRA for example, I think it was the same principle. For the IRA, the worst thing possible are unionist Irish. For the Islamists the worst thing are westernized muslims.
IS(IS/IL) has openly stated this to be their strategy. Their propaganda magazine, Dabiq, has repeatedly called for “an extinction of the grey zone”. In the pyschology/world-view/paradigm/what-have-you of IS(IS/IL), Muslim and non-Muslim cannot coexist.
Small-scale lethal attacks seem to be a mixed bag.
Consider the US’s history of lynching. Wiki suggests that there were, on average, fewer than 10 attacks / year across the US. But those attacks had huge psychological and political impacts. We still talk about the practice today.
I think it’s small-scale non-lethal political violence that consistently backfires.
People are willing to punch their opponents because punching is satisfying. It’s not nearly as morally-taboo as killing. The penalties are costly enough to make it a good signal. But not so huge as to end your life.
This galvanizes the opposition. Before things turned punchy, the opposition just got the glow of feeling intellectually correct. After things turn punchy, the opposition gets to imagine themselves as correct and physically heroic.
I suspect this triggers a feedback loop. Villains throw a punch. Heroes decide that they’re willing to risk a punch to stand up for the cause. So they march. At that point, you’ve got a big crowd of Heroes.
As you add extra people, the risk to any individual drops. But each person in the crowd can still tell themselves that they’d be willing to take a punch, if it came to that.
The psychological benefits stay constant, but the expected costs fall as more people join. This means that more people are willing to join. And the crowd grows. So the expected costs fall.
An example of this is that antifa kept justifying punching Richard Spencer on the basis that we should stop Nazis before they gain power and commit genocide. The problem is that punching Richard Spencer didn’t stop him at all, as he was very much alive and still commited to his views, perhaps a little more than before.
In this spectrum, it’s the middle ground that’s shaky. They would be better off either doing nothing against him physically, or commiting to outright assassinating him. The justifications they were using for punching him, actually required them to kill him, which at least somewhat suggests they were doing it to feel good. Half-measures don’t work.
Agreed, which really just brings us back to the old saw of “Don’t fight unless you have to, but if you have to fight hold nothing back.”
It did however make it much harder from him to find venues willing to host his meetings.
@abc
In real life meetings are really window dressing, or morale boosting at best. All the important stuff to do with spreading a message takes place on the internet.
We’re all still operating in 20th Century mode, but nobody really needs a “street prescence” anymore to get people to agree with you.
Disagree, if you want to go beyond “get people to agree with you” to organize people to actually do something about it, you still need face to face.
Are the various rationalist meetups simply window dressing and morale boosting?
@abc
Do you really need to go beyond getting people to agree with you? If you have an army of people who will vote like you, that’s all that matters for peacetime democratic politics.
So why do rationalists organize meetups?
Seriously, stop playing stupid. There’s a reason political pressure organizations exist. Even tech-savy causes like the EFF need a physical presence and face to face interaction.
@abc
I had never heard of Richard Spencer until he got punched.
@abc
I feel like that’s more about enjoying each other’s company and the human need to be near other humans. Probably some weird cuddle pile stuff too.
This doesn’t really help information spread any more than it does online. Less so, because it’s the more primitive mode of propagandizing and has a lower transmission rate.
Can you explain why beyond people’s desire to get in close and personal? Now we have other methods that don’t expose you to being shut down or no platformed from a real life space. Why do you think the old methods are still useful politically? Saying that this and that organization believes that they are still necessary doesn’t explain anything, since I believe they are mistaken and operating on false premises.
Because 90% of politics is winning the support of people who aren’t nerds, and only nerds offer their support based on their evaluation of arguments and supporting facts. For everyone else, you need to convey not just arguments and facts but also e.g. confidence and a sense of community. Which is where that “weird cuddle pile stuff” and other silliness about people’s desire to get in close and personal comes in to play.
If the only platforms you are allowed or the only platforms safe enough for you to take are the ones suitable only for conveying mere facts and arguments, then you’ve been no-platformed, or close enough as makes no difference. If the other side still gets to hold their face-to-face meetings because that’s safe enough, nobody violently disrupts their meetings, then that is a gross inequity and something needs to be changed.
@John Schilling
It seems pretty easy to convey emotion without being there in person. Both Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler’s performances are etched into my brain, despite never seeing them in person.
All the most famous speeches that have fired people up have reached the most people through communication technology (radio, tv, the internet). Emotion vs facts is just about messaging, and most political memes you’ll see flying by on twitter are heavy on emotion and light on facts. That’s simply a matter of appealing to people’s natures.
It seems to me like implying that a band can’t be famous today without having live concerts, which just isn’t true. How many people hear of bands by randomly stumbling into a concert, compared to those who hear it on the radio, tv, or internet? Political rallies like rock concerts are for the faithful. They are an experience, but that doesn’t make them the most effective medium for spreading the message itself and galvanizing people around it, fact wise or emotion wise. Once upon a time it did, but we have ways that are far far superior now.
The majority of people who support one political side over another, at this current time of relatively free assembly, do not go to political rallies. Most people are convinced over to a political side by transmitted messages (media, the political entertainment genre etc), or informal peer correspondance. In real life gatherings for political purposes come dead last, and are extremely overrated as necessities in my view.
People have gatherings because it’s fun and feels good, and perhaps because they still think they are as vital to success as they once were in an age before instant communication, and the ability to in effect, hold virtual rallies on the internet (think of the reach a lot of e-celebs have). As for nerds, they seem pretty much the same, because it was the nerds (rationalists in this case) having the quite literal cuddle piles in their gatherings.
Of course, morale and camaraderie are just as easily transmissable over the internet too (Spencer’s alt-right, frogtwitter, /pol/ etc are practically bursting with morale and cameraderie). Most of the downsides are on the individual not the collective level. A modern internet based hippy movement would have a harder time facilitating spontaneous um… “free love”. The alt-right, of course, does not have this problem to begin with.
Because coordination requires trust, and trust is easier to build on face-to-face interaction.
If you’re going to join a team, it’s not enough to know that they argue for the right policies. You need trust: Trust that they actually believe their arguments (they’re not just faking for attention), that they will put everything on the line to achieve the team’s goals (they won’t chicken out when the going gets tough), and that they are competent to implement your aims.
The internet, as you point out, is higher bandwidth for arguments. But face-to-face is still higher bandwidth for all the subtle ques that most people use to build trust.
pretty much
personally I’d prefer it if feel-good progressivism could keep it nonviolent though. Unfortunately they can’t seem to handle that, so low-level meaningless political violence it is.
This is my same justification for dismissing as a hysterical loon anyone who compares Trump to Hitler.
If you REALLY think he’s Hitler, you should be well in the process of developing a plan to assassinate him, even with high odds of the plan failing and ending in your own death.
Shouldn’t having such a degree of confidence in that view require a bit more historical evidence that assassination is a viable means of stopping dictatorships?
Where exactly on the map is the Glorious People’s Republic of SomeGuyKilledTheBadDudeAndEverythingIsNowOkistan?
Let’s say Hitler is responsible for 6 million deaths. If you think your plan has a 5% chance of successfully killing him, that’s 300K people saved via conditional probability. Now let’s say there’s only a 5% chance killing Hitler actually stops the holocaust, that’s still 15,000 lives. Approximately 5 9/11s.
You wouldn’t risk your life to stop 5 9/11s? What kind of selfish monster are you?
The Holocaust was some 11 million deaths.
The problem is that there’s very little information about the effects of assassination. Could killing Hitler have made matters worse, perhaps by having a successor who’s got better sense militarily?
If Black Earth is correct that the Holocaust was slowed by bureaucracies in conquered territories which weren’t completely subjugated, could assassinating Hitler have accelerated the Holocaust?
@nancy
Hitler only “got” to kill 11 million because he repeatedly insisted, against military advice, to a number of huge military gambles all of which (prior to the invasion of russia) succeeded beyond his expectations. Almost anyone else and you just don’t get ww2, and no ww2 means no holocaust.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Anecdotally, at least, the British shelved a mid-war assassination plan on the basis that killing Hitler might aid the German war effort.
@1soru1: as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Spain is a reasonable example of a place where assassinating one particular bad guy (Luis Carrero Blanco) seems to have actually put the country on a different path. But I would agree that such situations are rare and that it certainly doesn’t look easy to know that you’re in one of them ahead of time.
But Spain is also a good example of where assassinating one particular bad guy (Jose Calvo Sotelo) caused far more damage than that bad guy could possibly have done alive.
What about trying for lethality and failing? Last week a left wing radical tried to assassinate a dozen or so Republican congressmen and it seems to have been forgotten already.
Do you think the conversation would be different today if he had succeeded? It’s very surreal. I don’t know what the climate would be like if we were watching a dozen state funerals this week.
To be honest I can’t believe what an awful shot the guy was. From what I understand he had about 10 minutes, against unarmed people, reloaded several times and managed to kill no one.
I mean, the sorts that tend to be anti-Republican are statistically likely to also be anti-gun, so I for one am not surprised.
I’m also not surprised it’s nearly forgotten already. What, are the talking heads that are anti-gun just supposed to up and lambast about how awful it is that someone went after Trump’s ilk and it should never have been possible in the first place?
Wouldn’t that be good outreach to Republicans on the issue? When left wing militias started forming, I noticed some rightists having second thoughts about that whole second amendment thing. This would require the hypothetical left wing article author to get over their own cognitive dissonance, however.
Yes, a radical left winger trying to kill a bunch of conservatives really makes me, a conservative, want to give up my guns.
Are you sure you weren’t just missing jokes about how “that’s it, we should have gun safety laws preventing the sale of firearms to Democrats?” Do you have links to any actual right wingers expressing this idea?
As far as outreach goes, I think you’ll see that none of these Republican lawmakers change their minds about gun rights. This should make it clear to Democrats that no, we’re really serious about gun rights. It doesn’t matter if people are shooting at us, we’re still not giving up our guns.
Can anyone link the “how many children have to die before you support gun control? All of them” meme?
I don’t think anybody questions the sincerity of the Republican attachment to guns. It’s the wisdom of said attachment that tends to get questioned. I don’t really expect the recent shooting to convince anybody pro-gun to change their stance, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a strong argument against gun control.
Qwints below, in partial refutation of the attacker being a bad shot, points out that he was under fire from three capital hill police, part of the victim’s security detail.
Some of us don’t have security details.
The argument against gun control would be that, absent legal restrictions, some of the spectators would have been armed and could have fired on the attacker.
Absent a security detail, who exactly is carrying a gun around at baseball practice? Are you planning on stealing home wearing a holster? Leaving your gun unattended on the bench while you’re at bat? Running back to the parking lot while under fire? There will always be times and places where it is not reasonable to have a gun to hand; if anybody really wants to shoot you, they can wait for one of those times. It seems obvious to me, an Ignorant Canadian who Hates Liberty, that the better answer is to minimize the chance that there’s a guy shooting at you in the first place.
As I said, I do not expect this event to convince gun enthusiasts of anything. Let me assure you that it is not going to convince gun skeptics, either.
No, because I think there is a sentencing increase if you attempt to steal home while armed.
By which you mean eliminate all guns from the continent?
If so, I don’t believe in the possibility for an efficacious attempt, and even if largely successful, deaths by stabbing are possible.
If not, then what?
@iain
That works in Canada, where people are generally civilized and peaceable.
I thought that too, before I moved here. But in the US, at least in certain parts of it, that is fundamentally unrealistic. The appropriate tone isn’t “having a gun on you is the best way to keep the peace”. It’s “Having a gun on you is the only way we have left to keep the peace”.
Seriously, however bad you think it is here, it’s at least ten times worse than that. At least, in some parts. Those people don’t have other options
If you’re armed, it’s robbing home.
Thanks, that’s the distinction I was looking for but not, apparently, on speaking terms with.
Absent a security detail, who exactly is carrying a gun around at baseball practice? Are you planning on stealing home wearing a holster? Leaving your gun unattended on the bench while you’re at bat? Running back to the parking lot while under fire? There will always be times and places where it is not reasonable to have a gun to hand; if anybody really wants to shoot you, they can wait for one of those times.
In general, I agree that you’re not going to carry on your person all the time, and so do the vast majority of gun owners. We don’t pack heat in the shower. We don’t sit around on condition yellow while reading a book or watching Superbowl LIII. We don’t continually unstrap and strap our holsters between being at the plate and on the bench.
However, a coach could quite reasonably carry on the field without creating an inconvenience. Players could store their firearm in their lockers.
It seems obvious to me, an Ignorant Canadian who Hates Liberty, that the better answer is to minimize the chance that there’s a guy shooting at you in the first place.
This is one of the arguments for permitting carry, in addition to the one David Friedman made. Since carriers could shoot back at a lone shooter, a person thinking about doing this, knowing this, would be notably less likely to try it in the first place.
Gun rights advocates commonly note how many defensive gun uses do not involve firing the weapon; depending on how you count them, they may not even require drawing one. (In the limit, they don’t even require having one. Consider that some assailants only have to think you’re armed and they’ll retreat; they’re understandably much less likely to believe that if they’re aware that guns are banned at the premises.)
Advocates also note how mass shootings only ever seem to happen at gun-free zones.
Any spectator who routinely carries a handgun, which some people do in states where doing so is legal. Possibly also other people present other than the actual players.
The logic falls apart when politicians are being specifically targeted. If some untrained idiot starts walking shots in on Paul Ryan, he should get behind some bloody hard cover, not start shooting back.
The best thing he can contribute to the fight is forcing the attacker to choose between repositioning for a clear shot (suicide under return fire) or hunkering down and admitting failure.
Leave the covering fire to the people who aren’t being shot at. They tend to be better at it
Alice Maz is right: congressmen don’t need automatic concealed carry. They need lictors!
Your model does not include the political boost one would get to their career if they were fired upon by a terrorist, and then took out their own gun, fired back, and killed the attacker. You’d be a lock for the GOP nomination whenever you wanted it!
Well, after the bullletholes healed up, anyway.
Then you want to not be poor, not be black, and most importantly not be a violent criminal yourself. But I gather that what you’re really talking about is newsworthy mass shootings of middle-class people, not ordinary criminal-vs-criminal violence.
As an American who actually pays attention, I note that almost all of the newsworthy mass shootings in this country occur in one of our many designated gun-free zones. Yes, we do have those(*). Schools, nighclubs, a few particularly Blue states, etc. And the evidence is, if you want to not be shot at in this sort of incident, you want to stay away from the gun-free zones.
The baseball-game incident is an unusual case: Eugene Simpson Stadium Park is not a gun-free zone that I know of, but most everybody involved was taking time off from their job in the very gun-free District of Columbia. Just not so gun-free that VIPs aren’t allowed armed bodyguards, so it turns out no innocent people got killed this time. And the incident was only newsworthy because it involved VIPs. That’s not a solution that generalizes for non-VIPs.
* For ordinary people, not so much e.g. cops, VIPs, or bodyguards, and of course not for criminals because criminal.
Let me just add that I’ve always found US gun laws rather contraintuitive. Specifically the fact that open carry is legal more often than concealed carry. The czech laws are exactly the opposite, concealed carry is granted automatically with the self-defence license (which is fairly easy to get and cheaper that the driver’s license) but open carry is reserved to the police (the army is not legally allowed to operate inland save for emergency states). This means that even the majority of the people who don’t carry guns (despite the most liberal gun laws in Europe the gun ownership is relatively low, people usually just have a pepper spray or at most a gas pistol for which you don’t need a license) are passively protected by those who do (a possible robber can’t tell who’s armed). Sure the police don’t know either but the laws shouldn’t be primarily made to make the job of policemen easier. Btw, our murder rates are the same as those of Germany which has maybe the most restrictive gun laws in Europe. I always find it annoying when gun control advocates arrogantly talk about how their position is the only sensible solution to the high level of violence in the US, citing “Europe” as an example while failing to see that not all European countries have draconian gun laws like Germany and the UK (which incidentally has more violent crime and a higher murder rate than the Czech Rep and Switzerland with it’s second highest per capita private gun ownership and gun laws almost as liberal as the Czech ones has an even lower level of any crime than Germany). The problem of the US is a lot more complex than liberal gun laws, there seem to be a lot of sociological and cultural factors involved.
The Czech version isn’t exactly unknown in the US; it varies from state to state.
What we do have is a recent historic legacy of civilized towns scattered in a lawless frontier (relatively speaking), where on the trail from San Antonio to Abeline of course you’re carrying a gun, and you don’t want anyone to mistake you for an easy target – but when you get into town you are expected to put the gun away, and if the .45 is still on your hip because you haven’t made it to your room yet that’s maybe OK but only if you’re not being sneaky about it so e.g the bartender knows to ask you to check your gun before he serves your whiskey.
In some places, culture changed faster than laws. And when the culture changed to self-defence = concealed carry, people who wanted to change the laws to stop even that, sometimes didn’t know about the old laws that allowed you to carry a gun openly because nobody did that any more. Carrying a gun openly under the old rules is mostly a protest move, akin to fetishwear at a pride parade.
More generally: Carrying weapons openly is easier and more effective (deterrence + ease of access + did I mention deterrence) than carrying them concealed. I think anywhere carrying arms is a normal thing, or at least a common thing without stigma or shame, the default is to carry openly and anybody who conceals a weapon is perceived as being sneaky, probably looking to kill someone by ambush or some such thing, because why else would they hide it. But where carrying arms is a rare thing and is seen as part of a dangerous lifestyle, the default is to conceal the weapon to avoid alarming people and anyone carrying openly is probably trying to frighten or intimidate people.
The United States still mixes both cultures. And both types of law, inconsistently.
John summed it up pretty well.
Let me give two anecdotal examples of how different presentations coded to me, a pro-gun rights type:
Scenario 1: Sierra Vista, AZ
A bunch of middle-aged white men in jeans, suspenders or cowboy belts and work shirts talking in and in front of an antique/pawn shop next to a gun shop. Work boots or cowboy boots and two have some form of stetson or cowboy hat on. Most of them are open-carrying revolvers in leather holsters.
Reaction: This is a mix of the Western culture combined with the aforementioned political/fashion statement, and since I’m betting a few are the store owners probably a defense against robbery. Nothing to write home about.
Scenario 2: Cape Girardeau, MO
Scrawny (the bad nutrition growing up kind) late teens/early 20s white guy in a threadbare and ripped white tank top, dirty jeans, old sneakers in poor condition, open-carrying a big gold/bronze finished revolver in a cheap nylon holster, safety snap undone, in a Wal-Mart.
THIS guy actually tweaked my antennae a bit because the “open carry as cultural symbol” thing is something I associate with The Mountain West (CO, WY, MT, ID), the Southwest (AZ, NM, UT, rural NV) and Texas, not here in the Midwest/South transitional zone. Add to that that I associate large and fancily decorated pistols with “range toy for guy with too much money” and “criminal status symbol” and from this guy’s scrawny appearance and sallow skin tone combined with attire and presence in wal-mart, I was leaning towards the latter. Add in the undone safety snap (which is at the very least stupid), and…
I didn’t run or call the cops or notify store security or any such thing, but it focused my attention, though seeing that he had a young wife and kid with him later downgraded that some.
@John: when you put it that way it kind of makes sense. I know that I’d see anyone who carries a firearm* openly with a lot of suspicion but if someone told me he was regularly carrying a concealed weapon I wouldn’t find it strange. Despite the liberal (compared to the rest of Europe and some US states) gun laws most people have no first hand experience with guns. I shot my father’s pistol a few times as a child at a shooting range but then he sold it and I haven’t held a gun since (not counting BB guns 🙂 ). I think the laws were made liberal on purpose though. During communism private ownership of weapons was completely illegal (although hunters could still somehow get their hands on rifles, but I think it was heavily regulated abe they probably were not allowed to keep them a at home or keep ammunition) and I think some of the people who drafted the laws after the Velvet Revolution wanted to make sure the population can possibly defend itself against the state. On the other hand maybe it’s just a return to an older tradition, Austrian gun laws are also fairly liberal and even 100 years ago both countries had the same government.
*or an uncovered blade which I’m not sure whether it is actually against the Czech law although I expect the police would want to talk to you if you walked around with an unsheeted sword… btw I was surprised that carrying swords in a scabbard is still illegal in many countries).
Btw the German restrictive gun laws actually come from the Nazi time. Like any totalitarian regime they didn’t want the people to carry guns (neither did the DDR communists) and it seems to have stuck after the war because of all the resentment to anything martial after WW2 in Germany. Even today Germans seem to treat their army like something that doesn’t belong in the polite society.
@John
As someone who has done the latter, this does not match my motives. There aren’t many opportunities in my life for me to present myself the way that I actually like to, and having to hide the same particular aspects of myself over and over makes it especially tiresome. I just relish the chance to go out and be me in an environment where I won’t face social backlash, and I think my friends who do similarly would say the same.
Scalise had a protective detail of three capitol police, Special Agents Crystal Griner, David Bailey and Henry Cabrera, that immediately returned fire.. Alexandria Police responded within three minutes of the first 911 call.
That’s interesting. When I was hearing recounts by congressmen who had taken refuge in the dugout they said it wasn’t until long after the shooting started (about 6 minutes) that they heard return fire. Then again, all after action reports are going to be fuzzy because of the whole “getting at shot at” thing tends to mess with your perceptions and memory.
The conversation would definitely be louder. The republicans would be more outraged. So, the reaction would be stronger.
I think that attack would still have backfired.
The key question if a normal person would feel like they’re taking on an unacceptable risk by expressing their political opinion.
In this case, the shooter is being portrayed as a lone nut. He was attacking a small, identifiable group. And he got killed.
Republican Congressmen might be less willing to make public appearances for a while. And I’d expect them to ask for increased security.
Generic conservative voters would be outraged that someone attacked their leaders. They might carry guns to their next political rally just in case. But I don’t think they’d feel personally threatened.
Perhaps you’re the victim of how the popular media portrays shootings. Although I’ve never been any kind of shootout myself, I’ve taken training classes in self defense firearms.
First, depending on the firearm being used, it’s far more difficult to score a hit than we’re made to believe. However, my understanding is that he was using a decent rifle, so this probably doesn’t apply. But for the record – if you’re using a handgun, then any distance greater than what you could conduct a conversation at – say, 10 yards max – is going to be difficult to hit.
Second, people are much more robust than portrayed. When shot, it’s extremely unlikely that the victim will just fall down dead or unconscious – for that you’d need to destroy the CNS. Indeed, more likely is that in the heat of the moment, they won’t even be aware that they were shot. If the shot were sufficient to knock them down – say, by breaking a leg bone, they’ll still be quite capable of fighting back, at least until shock sets in. A hit in the heart, aorta, or femoral artery, such that the person is likely to die, still affords some time for them to fight back.
Finally, barring the destroyed CNS or major blood vessel (where they bleed out immediately), my understanding of the state of medicine is that if you survive to get to a hospital in time, you’ll almost certainly make it through.
All in all, it’s much more difficult to kill someone with a firearm than portrayed on TV.
While what you say is absolutely true I also shared Honcho’s surprise that no one was killed. By all accounts Hodgkinson opened fire on a tightly clustered group of people at a range of less than 30 yards with a semi-automatic rifle*. He had the initiative and almost every mechanical advantage he could hope for. He should have killed at least one of them.
*I’ve heard conflicting accounts regarding specific make and model (as is typical) but everyone seems to agree on 7.62mm being the caliber.
Doesn’t the “tightly clustered” aspect provide better support for hits than kills? There were quite a few of the former.
It essentially puts you about where punching your target would put you. It comes at the cost of radicalizing the other team, while failing to take out the target. Worse, it demoralizes your own team, because both your moderates and your extremists hate it; the moderates for the attempted act itself, and the extremists for the embarassment of the failure to carry it out.
Would you count the current campaign of terror by Muslims in the west, particularly in Europe as small scale or large scale? It’s certainly been effective at getting aspects of sharia imposed on Europe.
Well, it was made up of individual small scale acts of political violence.
Wait, really? What and where exactly?
In Germany we recently passed a bill which banned civil servants from wearing Muslim headscarfs and there’s been a lot of discussion of extending that to all people in public.
Try publicly mocking Christianity, try publicly mocking Islam. Note the different reactions you get from law enforcement.
Examples?
What happened to the guy who left bacon in front of a mosque for starters.
Googling I find two UK cases and one case in the US (where the FBI of offering a reward, wth). And the cases I found weren’t about leaving bacon in front of the mosques but placing the bacon on doorknobs and throwing it inside the mosque and in one case shouting racial slurs.
Are those what you are referring to?
@abc
Or the Brit who quoted Winston Churchill’s thoughts on Islam in a speech.
Vandalism in the medium of pork products is not really what I’d consider “public mockery”. Tekhno’s example is more pertinent, assuming this thing I found on the Google is the correct case.
This atheist was convicting for insulting both Christianity and Islam. I don’t think the result would have been different if he’d only targeted Christians.
So can you point to examples of people prosecuted who only targeted Christians?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/23/austria.arts
This for example. I’ve read the book, it’s really tame.
@abc
Here’s one in Germany from 2016. Like the Greek example, it is incredibly mild. Do you have any examples of people being successfully prosecuted for equally unobjectionable offences against Islam?
can’t speak to the punishment or so forth, but some twitter activity by what appears to be official police accounts is pretty chilling. if user abc wants to make something out of this discussion I would recommend going there – i’d certainly like to know more myself
I was more thinking of attacks outside of a larger campaign. I would include violence such as anti-police violence (Dorner, Johnson, etc.) or anti-conservative violence (Hodgkinson, Corkins) where the attacker clearly shares mainstream beliefs but where the attack is condemned by essentially everyone in the mainstream.
Define “condemned”. I’ve seen a lot of “condemnations” of Hodgkinson that amount to “his problem was that he acted alone and not as part of a larger effort”.
Let’s turn that around: If your social opponents were sincerely condemning Hodgkinson, would you be able to tell?
@abc
He didn’t coordinate meanness? (sorry Scott)
Is anybody listening to the mainstream, anymore? Trump didn’t get to where he is by mainstream media, and yes, of course the talking heads and established political left have to decry all violence (when not urging people to “fight in the streets” or holding up faux bloody severed heads of their political opponents), but where activists are actually having their conversations, on twitter, on reddit, on FaceBook, lots of people were…less condemnatory. What does it matter if Rachel Maddow says this is awful, but the kinds of people who might do this again are on reddit reading about how the Republicans have to expect this sort of response because they’re so evil?
Does the mainstream matter?
Okay, well, it really, really depends on how you define “small scale political violence” and what you imagine the perpetrator’s cause to be.
Here in Portland, there was an incident recently on the light rail where a man started yelling anti-muslim slurs at two women, and, when several passengers confronted him, he pulled out a knife and slashed their throats. Two of the men died.
CNN quotes him as saying, after the police caught him, “”Think I stab (expletives) in the neck for fun? Oh yeah, you’re right I do. I’m a patriot.” and “That’s what liberalism gets you,” and in court he ranted about freedom of speech.
All of the language is expressly political, right? But the guy sounds exactly like I expected him to after I heard that somebody had been stabbed on the train. Thankfully, I haven’t yet witnessed a murder, but I have seen various people throw these omni-directional tantrums, shouting slurs and expletives at anybody around them.
Here’s my take, from being on the receiving end of a few of them: I don’t think the people throwing them are really differentiating between the people around them. In some cases people are literally screaming at walls, but even when they manage to alight on people, I don’t think they see us as individuals. It’s a holistic attitude: Everybody on the max, or in the public park, or the sidewalk, is just an arm or an extension of the world that has wronged them. We’re all collectively guilty, so we’re all valid targets.
I guess I just needed to put that out there, but I think, in many cases of violence where the perpetrator claims a political justification, the idea of actually advancing any strategic or tactical goals, or, in fact, the idea of advancing any kind of material goals at all is the furthest thing from their minds.
I think there is an important distinction between terrorism and milder forms of political violence. A bunch of idiots having a riot so Charles Murray couldn’t speak at Middlebury was an ordeal for Murray and Stanger (and an embarrassment for the school), but not much like a terrorist attack.
Howso? To the extent that we define terrorism as “the use of violence to achieve political ends” it would seem to me that Murray/Milo related riots are EXACTLY that!
@Matt M
If that’s the definition of terrorism, all war is terrorism, so I think that’s an overbroad definition.
There’s no universally agreed-upon standard, but here’s the general form I’ve always found most convincing:
Terrorism is
1) the use of violence
2) against non-military targets (whether people or places/structures)
3) with the aim of maximizing fear, shock, suffering, or other negative emotions in the target population
4) in order to coerce that target population to take or to cease a specific political course of action.
All war and military operations share 1 and 4. Some actions by militaries, to include the US military, have met all 4 points and should be considered acts of terrorism by a contemporary audience. Not all actions by insurgents or avowed terrorist groups meet all 4 points and should NOT be considered terrorism in the technical sense (though they may well constitute perfidy or other violations of the laws of war).
And I feel like the Murray/Milo protests meet all of those criteria, with the exception of the word “maximizing” in point 3.
They certainly used violence against non-military targets to create fear and shock for the purposes of coercing a target population to cease a course of action they deemed to be political.
Protests that devolve into riots, where maybe a couple people go to the hospital and some property is damaged, aren’t actually all that great at spreading terror. Even Murray, the target of the riots, has continued giving speeches. (Other, better-run colleges have managed to host these without incident.) Lumping them together with politically motivated assassinations and terrorist attacks seems like it loses a lot of important detail–like using “WMD” to mean everything from nukes on ballistic missiles to mustard gas.
Yeah, and following 9/11, millions of people continued to work in office buildings in Manhattan, and other, better-run airlines offered flights that didn’t crash into buildings. What’s your point?
Good enough at spreading terror among e.g. university administrators, which may be a winning strategy.
I agree that no-platforming and especially rioting to shut down speakers you dislike is a very bad thing, and we ought to discourage it. I’m just saying it feels like it fits in a very different category than blowing up a car bomb in a crowded market, or even shooting an abortion doctor with a sniper rifle.
@albatross11
There’s the chilling effect, though. I am a right winger and I’m far less likely to attend any sort of right wing political event or speech because it’s not worth of the possibility of getting attacked. I’ll watch on YouTube instead.
There are a very small subset of political rallies I’d worry about. Though I would worry about going to a talk by Charles Murray, and I think he’d be interesting to listen to. (For what it’s worth, I’ve read several of his books and consider him one of the more important thinkers on social issues right now.).
What counts as small scale? Pinochet is thought to have killed around 3000 people in a nation of over 10 million; that benefited his cause a great deal.
I have started on ADHD medication (thanks to those who advised), and want to give a speech about Better Living Through Chemistry, but a doctor advised me to keep it secret because of risks of medication theft. Any advice?
These medications are common enough so that their blackmarket prices are probably not high enough to justify such worries. I described my taking Adderall in a book I authored.
My use of ADD medication recently became eligible to vote, and I haven’t had any problems in all that time. When I was in college, I had a small safe I kept it in (the kind sold for keeping your wallet in while playing sports or such), enough to deter casual theft. Now, I live on my own, and I keep it in a drawer. When I was still living with my parents, the meds lived in a basket, which I think went into the cabinet when we had company. Never had a problem with that, either. I’d strongly urge you to speak (maybe somebody else will benefit), and just make sure they’re not really easy to steal.
I’ve been using ADHD meds on-and-off for something like 20 years (Modafinil for most of the past year, and Adderall or Ritalin previously), and I’ve never had a problem with theft. The only precautions I’ve taken have been to avoid leaving the prescription bottle or pharmacy bags unattended in plain public view.
I suspect doctors are trained to pushed patients to take precautions against theft of abusable medications, partly because some meds (particularly the higher grades of opioids/opiates) are genuinely a theft risk, and partly because falsely claiming your meds were stolen is apparently a common enough drug-seeking tactic that many doctors are inclined guard against it by refusing to write a new prescription to replace stolen meds unless the patient has filed a police report.
I don’t worry about it. My car, computers, guitar or TV would all net a burglar more money than a month of ADHD medication.
I keep a weekly pill organizer in my bag. But that’s mostly so I don’t have to carry around multiple bottles of vitamins. If someone stole that, I suppose I’d be mildly inconvenienced?
I don’t think medication theft is a big deal, but your car/computers/TV are all much harder to steal with a much higher likelihood of getting caught.
What would life be like if it was like The Sims? In the game, you control your little character in every way. If you leave him alone he’ll go on autopilot, but once you give him commands, he’ll almost always carry them out. The exceptions are something like him starving or needing to use the bathroom, in which case everything gets cancelled and they become a priority. Other than it’s pretty easy to play with your character. You don’t worry about him wasting his time watching tv or getting in to trouble because he does what you tell him.
So imagine that life was like that. Instead of procrastinating, it would be easy to do the work you need to do. Instead of binge watching Netflix, you read a book. Of course, you don’t have to be doing something productive 100% of the time but if you wanted to, it would be trivially easy to override the part of your brain that doesn’t want to. What would that world look like? It sounds pretty good, is there any way it could be worse?
Well, the fact that the controller and the controlled are separate entities – and the controller may not have your best interests at mind – might lead to some less than perfect outcomes.
In this scenario, you’re still the same person. I’m not setting up a scenario where you can kill your “character” and go back to some other world. If your body dies, you die. It’s more like the mind is not as beholden to your base instincts.
Ah, so sort of as if the venerable Ghost in the Machine psychological dogma were true?
Basically, yes.
So what you really want is to be able to switch off the desire to go fuck around when you feel you should be working?
I kinda wish there was a way to switch off and have my body run through a half-hour to an hour of exercise while I sleep or something. Because it’s not the effort that bothers me so much as the boredom.
Podcasts are the best approximation to that I’ve found, although sensory data does still attempt to intrude.
I’m not sure you’re modeling the Sims correctly. More “trivial” needs like Entertainment and Social Interaction still exist, so to a certain extent, you do HAVE to include “Netflix time” for your character. And if I remember right, the character creation system is such that everyone has different needs, or needs they value more than others. So you can create an anti-social character who rarely needs human interaction and can get all they need from a couple hours of online gaming… or you can create someone who doesn’t give a lick about productive tasks and will only be happy interacting with their neighbors, in person, all day long.
After reading about someone who created a “painting goblin” I tried out a similar strategy using a family with 1 adult and 4 children. The children were walled into a basement with 4 compartments and no stairs. They each had the basic necessities and painting equipment. They also got personality traits that allowed them to remain sane in the basement.
They paint constantly, quickly become very skilled and you make a fortune from the paintings and can upgrade everything to top tiers. They can also be kept happy by putting the best masterworks on their own walls.
Interestingly they were way way more successful than any of my previous families in pretty much all ways, the kids were all happy almost all the time with massive numbers of life achievements.
The adult used the free money to do whatever she wanted which included chemistry and the money supply funded her creating of youth potions to keep herself young.
I then had her buy lots of things which yield easy money and saved up a lot until I could let the kids out of the basement.
So now they all get to say young eternally in a lavish mansion filled with their own masterworks.
People might use their newfound abilities to pursue evil goals. Productivity and hard work are only good if what’s being produced/worked for is good. Isaac Newton and Norman Borlaug were conscientious workers, but so were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
I wonder how many potential evildoers were stymied by the simple fact that they couldn’t be arsed to actually go out and do the evil.
Don’t forget the ones who had the willpower but were too thick to pull it off. I’m thinking of people like the shoe bomber here.
Remember the character Clem from Buffy, the affable, low-key demon they hung out with for a while? I remember one of the writers mentioned online at one point that Clem actually was evil, in theory.
It’s just that he liked hanging out and eating snack food (and not getting killed by Buffy) much more than he actually cared about inflicting evil, so he took the path of least resistance. The idea being that for a lot of demons, “Slaying the innocent and destroying the world” is around the same level on the priority list as “Feeding the poor and ending world suffering” is for most humans.
The limited available commands – and the occasional cat burglar coming in to steal your refrigerator – might not work out as well as you might hope.
Something Awful tried this experience with each of The Sims. Here are my two favorite articles on the results: http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/week-life-ithe/1/ (Sims 1), and http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/week-life-ithe-2/1/ (Sims 2). They’re hilarious.
This is basically the mental construct I have to use to get anything done. So for me: no. I don’t see many ways it could be worse, but since that was the question (instead of: “Let’s enthuse about how awesome this would be”), I’ll give it a try:
I can only imagine that the risk would be similar to pain insensitivity. On the face of it: awesome–no pain! On its actual implementation, it can lead the pain-insensitive person to do unwitting harm to themselves. Perhaps operating in such a mode, the focus-insensitive person would be able to so focus on a desired task as to unwittingly let other things slip. I know that this happens in “The Sims” from time to time. I’ll be so focused on a Sim’s particular goal that I let under-represented (in the UI) concerns slide. For instance, I will be 3 days into binge-writing a book only allowing the requisite breaks to refill the meters, that I will be surprised when a batch of friends alert me that we are no longer friends, because I’ve been inadvertently ignoring them.
That’s a good point. I can imagine a society where people try so hard to have accomplishments that they end up with no friends to impress.
I thought people might like to know what this comment section tends to talk about. I mean – we pretty much already know but I thought it’d be nice to have some numbers.
I do a bit of text mining in my job so it was fairly quick to whip something up. I scraped all ssc comments (there are about 343,000 of them, turns out), compared the word counts to an English corpus and then calculated each word’s statistical overrepresentation using a method based on the one outlined here.
I then ranked them by significance. Below are the top 100 words, another 500 are available on this pastebin.
Key: word, then “burst value” (the exponent of something similar to a p-value), and the total frequency.
(Sorry I couldn’t make it look prettier.)
————————————————
trump -81478.36 17990
argument -56316.02 19694
mean -37413.50 23523
wrong -36679.03 20620
moral -36260.09 10500
agree -30571.30 15754
scott -23600.73 13409
arguments -23247.78 8529
right-wing -22862.00 2245
theory -22293.95 10697
guess -21380.51 9381
left-wing -20603.80 2042
ssc -19789.77 4194
long-term -19685.51 1959
whatever -19331.81 11089
humans -18658.22 8650
libertarian -18210.08 4346
disagree -18102.60 5794
obviously -17960.72 9379
rationalist -17465.59 2287
evil -17420.19 6561
obvious -16986.63 9278
weird -16045.57 5383
myself -15402.36 7473
utilitarianism -15229.51 1888
jews -15106.06 4079
god -15100.77 8987
sex -14645.81 9727
thread -14322.23 5393
sjws -14292.01 1464
guy -14257.41 7953
morality -14030.34 3302
correct -14002.32 8210
stupid -13712.49 4911
deiseach -13702.18 1409
racist -13635.74 4147
rational -13426.87 4816
religion -13362.40 5259
libertarians -12942.95 2882
hillary -12489.88 3819
rationalists -12401.60 1287
gender -12266.68 5946
exist -11961.66 7157
outgroup -11766.15 1227
racism -11755.04 3407
assume -11565.37 6962
onyomi -11512.79 1203
feminists -11361.23 2983
sounds -11357.37 6543
liberal -11251.00 5977
politics -11040.28 7279
rationality -10501.54 2239
religious -10420.92 5246
literally -10294.66 5126
gay -10285.37 5569
assuming -10249.53 5220
christianity -10007.34 2616
communism -9956.58 2415
slavery -9886.65 2703
feminism -9843.30 2823
beliefs -9793.47 5384
argue -9764.08 6018
feminist -9665.52 2677
explanation -9661.80 4684
terrible -9661.76 4275
nobody -9584.58 5392
heelbearcub -9535.09 1014
morally -9505.71 2385
reasoning -9493.99 3305
fairly -9397.24 6141
hypothesis -9317.60 3206
bias -9165.31 4456
shit -9143.98 2416
moloch -9113.93 974
ideology -9073.84 2813
clinton -8879.26 4444
alt-right -8794.02 943
sjw -8789.40 1636
bunch -8722.58 4519
liberals -8619.46 3056
hate -8454.84 4750
explicitly -8430.47 3397
edit -8396.76 4213
personally -8124.45 4748
arguing -8072.79 4305
totally -7961.54 4901
moldbug -7860.93 852
guns -7683.95 3957
probability -7671.15 4624
math -7647.82 4234
truth -7572.44 4999
hell -7514.83 4227
impression -7472.23 3809
opposite -7354.36 4323
welfare -7257.57 4148
hitler -7239.74 2054
iirc -7233.47 1226
leftists -7154.07 1566
random -7085.99 4277
existence -7042.38 3925
————————————————
It surprised me a little that “trump” is on top, but I suppose it’s because the corpus hasn’t been updated since the word became a lot more common in general. Otherwise the list looks pretty much as I expected. Thoughts?
Wow, Daisy is sure popular.
“Terrible” seems to me to be something that Scott in particular says a lot. So it’s interesting that it’s also common in the comments even though he doesn’t comment so much.
Wait, what? That’s the first time I read that word here (I think).
Is that an ex-user or another obscure euphemism of the past?
Nah, it’s the proprietor of this blog.
I think I read somewhere that it turns out to be a sled.
You brightened my day.
I’m glad!
For that matter, I thought that word was banned, which was why people kept calling him Voldemort.
“Moldbug” isn’t banned, because check it out. The name of his political philosophy is. But being nerdy geeks, if we’re going to call his followers “Death Eaters” we’re going to go all the way with it.
deiseach -13702.18 1409
*looking for a hole to hide in*
This is definitely the sign of someone who doesn’t know when to shut the hell up 🙂
jews
god
sex
thread
sjws
guy
morality
correct
stupid
deiseach
ah the company you keep
Good thing correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Now I have to go looking for secret bible codes in the SSC wordcloud? People, come on!
Isn’t this what automation is supposed to do for us? 😀
This also gives us agree scott arguments, obviously rationalist evil, assumption onyomi feminists, nobody heelbearcub morally, and assuming aapje nornagest
I clearly assume too much.
“Battleships” is only 536. We must do better, my
minionsreaders!On a technical note, I’m surprised that a lot of the usernames don’t rate higher. Do you know why this is?
Most people don’t refer to others usernames until the subthread goes deep enough. At that point “SJW” has been said three times.
Yes, but my understanding is that the frequencies are based on the difference between our use of the word and the frequency in general use. Some of the usernames shouldn’t appear in general use at all.
Plausible, but what constitutes “general use”? I see “SJW” in the comments sections on a few blogs I read, but never in books, magazines, or newspapers.
I’m not sure what it’s comparing to. In this day and age, ‘General Use’ might come from Google N-Grams or something of that nature, which is processing enough data to get a representative sample of everything.
I’m not sure where the corpus comes from, tbh, it’s a standard one I use at work.
Don’t read too much into the usernames, the method uses a workaround when the word isn’t found in the corpus – it would normally have an undefined significance level.
Maybe a word cloud would be more interesting, give me a sec…
Back again! Here is a wordcloud with the 1000 most overrepresented words, grouped into lumps based on occuring in the same contexts. I think it’s kinda neat, even if I wouldn’t overinterpret it – the semantic network I made it from was very messy. But the dense clusters are legit.
I like how you’ve got a little cluster of swear words and then the word “pretend”.
Heh, so now we have Deiseach clustered with idiots, jerks, self serving, stupidity and progressives. And all very close to Trump. I think you need to start worrying, Deiseach.
That aside I kinda like how under the big long-term and short-term is a tiny yay begging for attention.
My impression is that SJW is not a whole lot more clear a description than All Trite. SJW might mean masked antifas busting heads at a political rally, or a clickbait article about how white women wearing cornrows is problematic, or someone who marches for LGBT rights. The fuzziness of the definition is part of the fun, since you can lump all three groups together and demand that the clickbait-writer answer for the head-bashing antifas.
“no-one” is off by itself.
I think mean is confounded by the fact that it’s a mathematical term, moral descriptor, and has a meaning of… um, meaning as well.
Ah, then, what’s the median use of mean?
The meanings of mean are incommensurable. So median has no meaning for mean.
There are multiple examples of such things. I was noticing that this is case insensitive, so “liberal” and “Liberal” get counted the same. But in my mind, at least, they’re rather different, with the capitalized variety being closer to modern Democrat ideas, and lowercase being more like enlightenment ideas (and, as I’m given to understand, still the common definition in Europe).
Is “onyomi” a poster? Otherwise this feels like an unusual focus on the minutiae of written Japanese.
Yes.
compare discussion
What’s the methodology behind the first list?
Scraped some comments, calculated frequency on SSC/frequency in Brown corpus (ignored words that didn’t appear in the latter).
How do people around here manage your “knowledge”, i.e. stuff you read (papers, blogs, (e)books), statistics you might want to reference in the future, your thoughts about said stuff, etc.
Used to have a text file, a HTML file, etc. Now I just use GoodReads.
I have a Dropbox folder called “hate facts repo”.
IRC logs? I’m not a fan of consistency with myself.
I’ve tried to start using Anki more systematically for discrete facts I learn, but I have not been able to consistently sit down and write Anki notes for things I’ve come across in the last [time period]. One obstacle is that I am I am inefficient at writing notes and any time I spend an hour at it I am disgusted with my low output.
To piggyback on MrBubu, I’m curious if others use spaced-repetition and have found ways to be more efficient or otherwise get over the hurdle?
I use a desktop wiki application called ConnectedText. But I’m probably going to migrate to a web-based wiki at some point…the benefits of the desktop app are not enough to outweigh the lack of cross-platform ability. Hosting your own private instance of mediawiki is really simple if you have some basic computer literacy.
Combination of bookmarking “aha! definitely want to remember this site!” on the computer and “I’m nearly sure I vaguely remember reading something along the lines somewhere” then desperate Googling when I need to find the source to back up a point I’m trying to make.
I used to use Evernote for this, but since they changed their rules for free usage so that I couldn’t run it on all my devices without paying, I’ve moved it to OneNote (which I find doesn’t work as well).
I just keep a text file on my email account, listing interesting articles in one note, specific quotes in another. I’m not sure it’s a great method, but it’s about as good as I can do with my limited technological literacy.
Folder structure, for stuff with a sequence with numbered subfolders (iterated if necessary).
A loooot of bookmark files lying around.
And stuff of a single topic or theme or project that has many files and needs good searchability (e.g. huge texts or manuals broken into single pages or chapters) goes into a Devonthink Pro Office database (Mac only, but with any cheap old mac as server to run on it can be used from any web-capable OS).
I have a blog (link at my name), and I use it almost exclusively for knowledge management purposes. It has evolved over time as content has been added, as any such blog probably should, and it is much more ‘mature’ now than it was when I started out. If you want an example of what you might end up with if you decide to use a blog as a knowledge management tool and then stick to it for half a decade or more, my blog is probably a good illustration/example of where you might end up (I’ve blogged for a decade but I did not emphasize knowledge management particularly during the first years, so those years are irrelevant in this context).
Aside from the blog I also use a goodreads account to keep track of the books I read. In the past my quote collection was limited to my blog, but recently I also exported a substantial proportion of my somewhat large (1500+ quotes) quote collection to goodreads.
Bookmarks are used for the short term; I bookmark stuff (e.g. lectures, quotes, studies…) I might decide to blog later on.
I don’t find my own thoughts on various topics particularly interesting and I try, though occasionally unsuccessfully, to avoid sharing them on my blog except to the extent that they quite directly relate to the content (books, lectures) I cover.
I would note that although my blog is public and people can read it if they know the url, if you’d prefer a system where other people can not read along that is also very easy (just as easy) to set up.
Whenever I learn something, figure out when it would be useful, then add it to the appropriate page in my wiki.
Why don’t fighter pilots spend much of their time playing video games?
Military pilots assigned to combat aircraft don’t get a lot of stick time, because operating modern combat aircraft is very expensive. In well-funded militaries, they typically get single-digit hours per month, which seems more like a hobby than a profession. Even good simulators are too expensive to use routinely.
But do the simulations actually have to be really good to be useful? There is an entire segment of the video game industry devoted to flight simulators. You’d think the military could take the best of them, tune them for realism rather than fun, spend some money on semi-realistic flight controls, and for maybe $20K each have PC-based simulators that are close enough to be useful. And at that price, you could get one for every pilot and have them spend virtually all their time practicing on it.
But for some reason this isn’t done. What am I missing?
What’s your basis for believing that’s not done?
Googling ‘military training video games’ and ‘pilot training video games’ bring back lots of interesting hits
My personal experience playing football suggests an underrated amount of ad hoc training happens through video games
The ex military guys I know also seem to play a ton of video games
If it were done, I would expect the companies producing the games to advertise the fact prominently. Imagine being able to advertise your game as so realistic, it’s used by the USAF. It would be pure crack for armchair fighter jocks. But I haven’t heard of anything like that.
Might be that they are afraid of a negative spin on it.
In my home country every now and then the newspapers pick on video games and the whole “killing simulator for soldiers”-thing comes up sometimes.
I suspect there’s a fair amount of resistance on the military side.
While I was in grad school, I bid on several small-business military contracts (SBIR and STTR) to try to develop my thesis (applying AI search and optimization techniques to missile guidance and spaceship navigation) into a software business. These types of contracts required the technology developed under the contract to be commercializable, and my commercialization strategy was video games (using a modified version of the guidance algorithms for game AI in a realistic spaceship dogfighting game).
Each project had proposals judged by a group of 2-5 people within the military, each of whom rated the project independently. I saw a pretty consistent pattern where most of the reviewers liked my proposals, but at least one of the reviewers on each project saw the video game connection as an indication I wasn’t taking the subject seriously, and that was enough to drop my average score below the threshold for funding.
Being super-realistic isn’t always a selling point, since games often compromise realism in the name of fun. Call of Duty sells a lot more units than Arma.
While the USAF hasn’t done so, the US Army has released a couple games. They’ve done alright; I’ve played America’s Army and thought it was a pretty good military shooter, and VBS1/2 are built on the ArmA engine. But they’re definitely niche rather than mass-market things.
You would expect them to advertise the fact, supposing that the USAF, a branch of the US FedGov, wanted to cooperate in such an advertising scheme. I think that as much as it would benefit the game publisher, it might not be in the interest of a professional fighting force to be seen that way. The US military does use several very accurate (and very expensive, if not exclusive) simulators that run on a PC and are functionally video games, not elaborate and totally immersive training simulation machines.
The US Army has a tank ‘game’ which I’ve seen footage of, but there are no game elements per se (it’s kind of a sandbox/tool box software, with the ability to have a ‘OpFor Commander’ inject pre-programmed scenarios and such in real time) and it’s so realistic as to be boring and unusable to a lay person, as well as classified IIRC (it accurately shows the interior and controls of different weapons systems).
The US Marines and Army adopted Virtual Battlefield Systems 1, a small unit tactics simulator derived from the open market game Operation Flashpoint (which is very realistic for a game sold to regular customers).
@johan_larson
I think that the real issue is that air forces don’t actually want to optimize for maximally capable pilots. If you are an Air Force general, what value does it bring to you personally? Maximally capable pilots are not going to perform noticeably better for the kind of missions being flown today. So you will just be seen as the general who needs much more money to do the same thing slightly better (see the bottom of this comment).
Probably, because they want the pilots to actually do the right thing in stress situations, not go looking for the F1-key, when the actual aircraft is not using a keyboard. You don’t want the simulator to have a feature that is not in the airplane or one that is in the plane, but not the simulator. As planes get upgrades, there are many variants of the same plane and the simulator has to match that.
A combat plane gives important feedback physically, not just through instruments. So if you just use a static simulator, it will feel very different for the pilot.
The F35 simulator will use the same software as the plane, which also means the same bugs & that you even get to debug the plane by using the simulator.
I’ve seen this fallacy before: What if we take something cheap and then add all the stuff that makes it actually expensive? It would still be pretty cheap, right? Hmmm…no.
No, because of Queep. Pilots spend a lot of time doing non-pilot tasks, because:
– A lot of time is spent on planning and debriefing, probably for good reasons.
– Once pilots are above a certain level of competence, the rest of their time can then be used to make supporting personnel obsolete, to make lattes for their boss, etc.
This is really important. What skills are you learning in a PC-based cheap simulator? The onboard systems don’t work the same way (the operations manual for a certain common narrowbody airliner runs 1800 pages, and it has no EW system and a very simple radar), you’re using a keyboard instead of the real control layout, and you can’t turn your head to look around. There might be some value in early training as a means of teaching tactics, but once you’re operational, the most important thing is to make sure that when you need to turn on the jammers, you turn them on in the right mode immediately, instead of trying to find the J key on your keyboard. Training on tactics can take place at the same time you’re training for systems proficiency, and the amount of time involved is close enough that you don’t need to take the risk of mistraining to get more tactics.
I feel like teaching flight procedures would be possible. For instance, this is how you start up an A-10 Warthog in DCS World. I feel like even if the sim doesn’t build the muscle memory for the controls, it’ll at least teach you which switches to flip and when.
(DCS World, admittedly, is not a “cheap” simulator. There’s a reason they sell each individual plane for the price of a full game.)
That is training you build with a checklist in a classroom. That’s even cheaper than DCS World.
There may be some room for computer-aided systems operation training, but computer-aided systems operation training is very much not the same thing as a video game.
Bean is correct.
The flight simulator/trainers I have seen are are terrifically expensive. You have essentially a closed pressurized simulated cockpit mounted on hydraulics and gimbals and gyros, an exact physical rep of the instrumentation panels, and an (also exact) out-of-the-window-view and heads up display for whatever plane you are training on.
Pilot need to develop muscle memory for stalls, spins, banks etc for whatever specific fighter they are training on.
Pressurization? I hadn’t heard of that one, and a search (I have good aerospace library access through work) turns up no mentions of pressurizing the actual simulator. There was some comments on pressurizing things like G-suits to simulate the problems those can cause, though.
I did find some interesting stuff involving the use of G-suits and ‘motion chairs’ which attempt to simulate motion without actually moving the simulator.
Also, I thought that most military simulator work was systems-oriented, not acrobatics. But I’m mostly a naval guy, at least on the military side.
As VR takes hold in commercial markets V-suits will be able to able to provide a lot of the same functionality. Again, I can talk about my personal experience only, and it may be a couple of years out of date.
A huge amount of military tech flows into the commercial markets and gets massively cheaper, really quickly.
This is going to happen with VR.
Its a very symbiotic relationship.
I’m pretty sure that only g-suits are commonly pressurized in simulators (pilots wear a suit with pneumatic bladders that prevents the blood from pooling on on side of the body during high g maneuvers).
I can’t speak for every combat pilot or even most of them, but I have a relative who’s one, and several years ago when I lived closer to him he played a ton of Microsoft Flight Simulator. (He probably plays less now, because kids. But I’ve seen him maybe twice in the last year, so I don’t really know.)
He said it was actually harder than flying a real plane, because he didn’t get the same kind of seat-of-the-pants feedback.
This product category exists, they’re called “flight training devices” or FTDs (because to be a “simulator” you need full motion, according to the FAA). There’s a few lesser categories, too, separated mostly by how accurate their controls and instruments are. These are used in commercial flight schools, usually to substitute as many actual flight hours as possible so as to reduce costs.
Similarly, Lockheed bought the rights to adapt the commercial version of FSX (ESP, I think), and they produce their own software called “Prepar3D,” which I think mostly hits the same sort of market – some FTD manufacturers, flight schools, hobbyists, etc. (The license says it can’t be sold for “personal entertainment”, presumably as part of their own license from Microsoft, but I think that’s mostly ignored).
I know that doesn’t really answer your question, but your suggestions aren’t totally off-base, it just seems they fit more in the cost-saving commercial market.
I Twittered this at Scott and posted it on the Subreddit, but I’d be interested in feedback here too.
I wrote an article about an initiative in the U.S. to give hospitals a quality rating. This is a laudable goal, but the agency in charge (CMS) seems to have made some bad mistakes in executing it.
For example, the model they use is quite opaque, and there are multiple programming issues in implementing it.
As someone in the Subreddit pointed out, this may be a glimpse into a bad future where buggy computer programs issue inscrutable grades that no one understands, but people have to accept them.
Good analysis. This all reminds me of some conversations I had with a kidney transplant surgeon. I had assumed that you would try to go to the best hospital possible, but she said no, “healthcare tourism” is discouraged. If you go get the fancy procedure done two states away at the Mayo Clinic and then there’s a complication months later, the people at your local hospital won’t know what to do about it since they don’t even know what the procedure you had really was. And then, of course, it’s hard to even know which hospitals really are going to give you better treatment. As a nerd, it’s always sobering to hear anything pointing out that even with pretty comprehensive data, it’s ill-advised to make a real cost-benefit analysis.
At least if the metric is inscrutable it makes it harder to overfit to it. Tim Harford in ‘Messy’ writes about UK hospitals gaming the system to get good grades while throwing patients under the bus. He advocates randomising the metric from year to year and keeping it secret. Everyone has a broad idea of what it means to be a good hospital and having a static set of measures is just inviting trouble – Goodheart style. He compares this to school exams where the general topic is known in advance but the specific questions are not.
Interesting – I haven’t read ‘Messy’ yet, but I really enjoyed ‘The Undercover Economist’ and especially ‘The Logic of Life.’
I think it could be good to keep a grading scale close to the vest, but at least it should be directionally consistent! In the system I describe some hospitals would have their ratings improved by doing worse on some measures.
How to design a grading scale? It would be cool to train some model to predict future success or failure of medical operations.
(Incidentally, I was assigning grades in a class on a totally clear-cut quantitative subject last week, and I wish I had a better idea of what makes a good grading system…)
So Brazil, but automated, so the bureaucracy can be even more complicated and pile crap on you ten times as fast.
Wonder if Terry Gilliam is up for making a sequel, in which Tuttle is uploaded a la Tron….
Of interest to me this week was a story about climate and the environment affecting politics. Every 48 or so years, the bamboo plant flowers en masse in parts of India, Myanmar and China. This results in loads (millions) of rats running amok and causing mass famine, known as the Mautam. In 1958, there was a Mautam in the Indian state of Mizoram, which led to death and disease. It also led to the creation of an indigenous group predicated on relief, which later morphed into a full fledged political party and led an armed rebellion against India for 30? 40? years. Incredible.
That is like something from a freaky sci-fi short story.
Plants (and I presume animals) with large numbers of genetically identical individual members do weird things.
Alternately, it’s a strategy to produce so many offspring in a single year that predators can’t eat all of them, ala mast years in oak trees.
I saw a mayfly explosion on the Mississippi one year. One day, millions of flies everywhere. The next day, flies all dead on the ground, covering everything. Sparrows and robins sitting everywhere with bulging stomachs.
I’d like to discuss our conceptual model of racism in America. This is somewhat inspired by conversation in the most recent Links thread, but also something that’s been on my mind for a bit.
Typically, we seem to model racism as “extreme xenophobia,” such that we assume people hate others primarily for being different, and make up various reasons to validate their hatred. Under this model, hatred should directly correspond with how different someone looks, acts, behaves, etc.
And while that may have been true in America for a long time, I’m not so certain it is anymore. Consider the common exchange that goes something like this.
Blue: Racism in America is a huge problem! Look how much poorer blacks are than whites!
Red: Oh really? If blacks are poor due to racism, then why are recent African immigrants from Nigeria on par with whites in income? If we were racist, you’d expect them to have the toughest time of anyone!
I want to emphasize the italicized portion, because that’s what I’m disputing. My theory is that modern racism in America is based not primarily on “he looks different” but rather it is a very specific disdain for stereotypes commonly associated with American black culture, which is different from African culture. Therefore, an American racist encounters a recent immigrant from Africa… someone with an odd-sounding African name perhaps, and who speaks with a French or English accent, someone who is (likely) working or studying, this person stands apart. They are clearly not a member of American black culture, which is the thing that is hated more than “dark skin” is. Even if you’re a strong believer in *thing that shall not be mentioned*, you likely must concede (as the blue person would likely point out!) that immigration to America self-selects the “best of the best” among Nigerians, and that the ones who make it here are likely smarter, more hardworking, more law-abiding, than average.
If my theory is true, light-skinned American blacks could be facing large amounts of oppression, even while dark-skinned recent immigrants do very well.
This is just a theoretical consideration, right? Without assertion that any amount of oppression actually exists?
Yes. Given my tribal leanings, you can infer what I actually believe all you’d like 🙂
Right, thanks. Would be somewhat impolite to roll into a debate on the possible properties of phlogiston and shout that it doesn’t exist. 😉
What predictions does this model give us that don’t also fall out of selective migration or better culture for the immigrant blacks?
Here’s one: Consider second generation African and Carribean immigrants. Your model suggests thst the ones who came here young enough to pick up an American accent (black or generic American) will do *worse* than the kids who came here late enough to retain their accent. The ones with the foreign accent will continue being mentally slotted into the immigrant black category and benefit from ot.
Basically yes. Although accent is just ONE example of things that may signal “I am an immigrant, not an ‘African-American'”
Another prediction: the effect youre describing will work for high achieving immigrants (say a Nigerian coming to the US for his PhD) and for more normal immigrants (say, refugees or people admitted on a family visa). If you could figure out how to look at those groups’ outcomes separately, you might learn something. Though this will be confunded by the difference in abilities–we expect the guy smart enough to get a PhD to do better in life whether or not he’s on the receiving end of a lot of discrimination.
Another prediction might be that signals from African Americans of *not* being part of the dysfunctional culture get ignored.
That wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the main factor is “better culture for the immigrant blacks,” with immigrants who arrive younger picking up the American culture.
Sounds to me like how this type of hatred actually works is not based strictly on the amount of differences, but largely on proximity, relevance, bad blood and whatnot. Consider that during the Reformation Wars, local heretics were given greater priority for extermination than the Saracens, threatening though they were as well. I mean, France allied with the Ottomans at one point, against fellow Christians!
Sometimes, the differences between the groups are astoundingly small, but do not diminish the hatred both feel towards each other. Under the circumstances you give, American blacks would be the familiar enemy, and recent immigrants from Africa would – while superficially similar – not elicit the kind of response. After all, they just came here, the oppressors have no quarrel with them.
Well, sure, traitors before enemies. In Dante’s Inferno the lowest circle of hell was reserved for betrayers.
“Traitor” is a different model than “people with small differences who live near us.”
Interesting. I wonder if this is another example of Scott’s in-group/out-group/far-group schema. African-Americans would be a out-group to the Red Tribe whereas African-Africans would be a far-group.
However, sometimes there is sustained contact in decent sized numbers. It’s one thing for someone to come across one Haitian doctor, but what about in e.g. a small-ish city in Iowa that has a meat packing plant largely staffed by Somali immigrants? In those cases there’s certainly some generalized xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. But is there also some black-skin specific friction that is different than it would be if they were Rohingya instead of Somali?
In this case I would probably fall back on xenophobia, sure. I think if the meat packing plant was staffed largely by non-English-speaking, non-assimilating white-skinned Russians (for example), there would still be hostility towards them from the local populace (see: “The Irish were discriminated against too!” debates)
Or for a more contemporary (albeit foreign) example, the widespread anti-Polish sentiment in modern Britain.
I’m curious if your example was a direct reference to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville:_A_Clash_of_Cultures_in_Heartland_America (with the Hasidic Jews replaced with Somali immigrants).
Also how do I make a text hyperlink?
No, from an article or articles I recall but I’m not going to try to dig up, talking about Somali immigrants working in meat factories in the Midwest (probably from the last year or two). I wasn’t aware of that book or story. Looks interesting.
LESS_THANa href=”https://YOUR_URL”>YOUR LINK TEXT LESS_THAN/a>
Swap the two LESS_THANs for the appropriate character.
As well as writing the HTML, you can also select the text you want to link and click the link button.
Hmm, I don’t appear to have one of those. Just a basic reply box. I don’t see any sort of “advanced features” type button either. I wonder what’s going on.
African-Americans are a fargroup to much of Red Tribe. There’s a huge white expanse in the US, where there just aren’t significant numbers of black people. Obviously not in the old South, but elsewhere.
I think they’re a far group to a lot of blue tribe, too.
I grew up in an extremely liberal part of Oregon where there were virtually zero black people. I used to joke that most of the population was desperately waiting for a black person to move in so that everyone could show them how tolerant a community we were.
A more cynical interpretation was something like “It’s easy to love minorities when your community is 99% white”
and that 1% intentionally sought out and is desperately trying to fit into that community.
And were basically all college professors, or college athletes <_<
Let’s talk about Toronto.
Toronto is arguably the most diverse city in the world. There’s a pretty good chance that, since the last census, the percentage of non-white Torontonians crossed the 50% mark. There’s a little bit of everybody: 12% south Asian, 11% Chinese, 8.5% black, 3% Arab, 3% Latin American, and so on. Despite this diversity, support for multiculturalism in Toronto remains consistently high, even relative to the already high levels across Canada. You might think that this is just minority groups pushing up the numbers against the opposition of the embattled white minority, but I can assure you that this is not the case. As a proxy for multiculturalism as generalized tolerance vs multiculturalism as self-interest, I point to my second link, showing particularly high support in Toronto for “Aboriginal Peoples as a very important national symbol”, despite the relatively low First Nations population in Toronto itself.
The cynical interpretation might be: “It’s easy to see minorities as scary others when your community is 99% white”.
@Iain,
In other words, NAMs only make up one eighth of the population of Toronto. In NYC where I live the black population alone is more than double that.
Nobody is afraid of walking around Chinatown after sunset.
The Pacific Northwest is a small part of the United States and a small part of the blue tribe. Most big cities in the US have substantial African American populations. (Deep NE — ME, VT, NH — is even more racially homogeneous than the PNW, but there aren’t any big cities there.)
@Nabil ad Dajjal:
There are parts of Toronto you don’t want to walk around after sunset, too. If they do not conform to your racial stereotypes, I apologize profusely.
What does NAM stand for here?
Yes, this is one of the thing that annoys me about accusations of southern racism. I’ve lived in the south my whole life. I went to school with black kids, my church is maybe half white, half of my coworkers are black. And then I get lectured by 97% white Vermonters like Bernie Sanders about how awful and racist I am. If I had any problem with black people I’d move to where you live Bernie.
In general, the southern states have a substantial black population, often including high profile elected officials (mayors and congressmen; usually not governors or senators), and they are overwhelmingly Republican. The Southwest and Northwest have small black populations, but the NW is blue and the SW is red, more or less. I don’t think things are looking so good for this model.
@Iain
“Support for multiculturalism remains high” is a non-sequiteur to “Toronto is very ethnically diverse”. Multicultural is the not the opposite of “ethnically homogenous”. It is the opposite of “well-assimilated”.
So, how multicultural is Toronto, actually? I do not mean “count the Shwarma places and Ethiopian/Cambodian restaurants”. Are those various fractions unassimilated? Or are they, as I suspect, mostly sharing the Canadian flavor “Universal Culture” and associated terminal values with minor variations? Do they organize politically discrete ethnic blocs, or are these various fractions scattered across the Canadian political in distributions that approach the national averages? Etc, etc.
In short, I’d like to see more detail in your picture before I conclude that Toronto is an example of “Multiculturalism works” and not actually one of “Assimilation works”, which is something we already knew about the US and Canada.
@Trofim_Lysenko:
In a Canadian context, you can’t draw an easy line between “multicultural” and “assimilated”, because the culture that we ask everybody to assimilate to is basically just multiculturalism plus respect for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
There are distinct ethno-cultural voting blocks among Canadian immigrants, in the same way that, say, white evangelicals are a voting block. For example, Korean Christians in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) were apparently an important swing demographic in the recent Conservative leadership race, giving the social conservative candidates a boost relative to the more libertarian candidate. The federal Conservative party won a majority in the 2011 election by carefully targeting religious immigrant communities in the Toronto suburbs. I don’t know whether this meets your definition of “politically discrete ethnic blocs”, although I personally tend to see it as a sign of Canadian success.
The closest thing to an explicitly ethnic party in the country is the Bloc Québécois, which has nothing to do with immigrants.
As I have argued many times before, the distinction between “multiculturalism” and “assimilation” is a false one. The most effective mechanism of assimilation is welcoming people into the country, telling them that we embrace their cultures within the broader Canadian tapestry, and then ruthlessly indoctrinating their children with hippy liberal ideas about equality and freedom. I believe in Canadian values. I believe that, given the option, people living in Canadian society will tend to choose those values of their own free will. Yelling at people about how they have to give up their culture and conform seems actively counter-productive; it’s like telling a bunch of frogs in a pot on the stove that they should try to boil faster.
Assimilation works in Canada because of multiculturalism.
Notwithstanding all of the above: the point of my original post was simply that Matt M’s line about loving minorities being easy when you don’t interact with them is a facile quip, and doesn’t represent a deeper truth about reality. Toronto indisputably has a massive minority population, and is clearly okay with that.
I think this is one of the main things people think of when they promote “assimilation.”
You say
and
in the same paragraph. I’m intrigued.
Somebody less multiculturalist might say something like, “We do not believe in brainwashing. Our society is based upon free human beings making free choices. Not all foreigners feel this way, so we must take care to invite to join us only those who do.”
I had hoped it would be clear from “hippy liberal ideas” that “ruthlessly indoctrinating” has its tongue in close proximity to its cheek. I think the process of growing up in Canada and going to school here is generally going to be sufficient for most people, particularly if it is repetitively drilled into your head that you can be fully Canadian without feeling like you are abandoning your parents’ culture.
Plenty of people are prepared to claim that public schools indoctrinate kids with liberal ideals when they disagree with those ideals. This is, I suppose, more or less the same idea — the only difference is that in my case I think it’s a good thing.
Iain:
That’s fairly controversial and many Canadians would disagree with you there. In any case, you can certainly tell whether an immigrant has integrated (I sort of prefer this word to “assimilated”, but it largely means the same thing) to Canadian society or hasn’t.
I think this so-called “Canadian multiculturalism” is overblown, and I’m not really a fan of multiculturalism to start with. If the culture of Canada is nothing but multiculturalism, does this make me un-Canadian?
Even this party’s had some measure of ethnic diversity.
So, Assimilation then, got it.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is fundamentally an outgrowth of a very -specific- set of cultural assumptions and values explicitly NOT overlapping with the traditional cultural assumptions and values of quite a few of the previous cultures mentioned.
To the extent that new Canadian citizens are elevating respect for and belief in the legitimacy of those rights and freedoms, or to use an American example the extent to which American citzens are elevating respect for and belief in the principles set forth in our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence OVER the previous culture terminal values…that is the very definition of assimilation.
Everything else, language, food, behavioral rituals whether religious or secular, is window dressing.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I think being an American is a stronger identity than being a Canadian. Or maybe a better way to put it is that the Canadian identity is a lot less about being a Canadian than the American identity is about being an American. So I don’t know if you can make a straight comparison.
We’ve got a far less heroic conception of ourselves, a far less singular conception of our place in the world, etc. Paradoxically, being serious about being a Canadian means not being too serious about being a Canadian.
Joking not joking: the strongest exhibits of Canadian patriotism you will see are Tim Hortons commercials, or when we play the Americans/Russians in hockey.
Amusingly, no one around where I live cares about hockey except when the local team shows signs of beating the Canadians.
dndnrsn:
Canadians are one of the few nationalities I know who not only seriously claim that their country is the best country in the world, but who don’t even think of such an assertion as being nationalistic.
Canadians do have a heroic conception of themselves, but it’s less bombastic and more quietly smug than Americans’.
How does that fit with their past treatment of the First Nations, in particular their children? One would expect that to play a role in their self-image similar to the role of black slavery in the American self-image. Not something one can feel smug about.
Americans feel proud of their civilization (and with good reason) despite their history of slavery. In fact, in this very thread we’ve got a discussion of how American conservatives tend to blame black culture for the persistent worse outcomes of African Americans, while American liberals blame the legacy of racism. (But I’d wager these liberals don’t blame themselves for this legacy of racism.)
Canadians are aware of the history of racism against natives which persists to this day, but I think most don’t think about it very much. It’s not something that keeps me up at night, despite now living in a city with a fairly large native population, many of which are homeless, drug-addicted, etc. Obviously I’m not especially proud of this, but it’s very easy to feel largely unconcerned.
@ DavidFriedman
I don’t see what you’re getting at.
Claiming that the children were removed from thier families for their own good is pretty damn smug. The epitome of smugness even.
DavidFriedman,
I’m pretty sure people notice the moral issues they’re told to notice.
Canadian identity tends to be a bit muted, and I think it’s mostly because we just don’t have all that much weight to throw around, so there’s no point in posturing. Like the Netherlands, say, we can be a good place, a decent place, but we can’t really be a powerful place.
Also, big daddy is just south of us, and it’s the world’s one true superpower. And at ten times our population and more than ten times our wealth, it’s a simple fact that the best they have usually beats the best of ours. The effect is so large that it’s sometimes true even in things we are really good at. For example, Canada cares madly about hockey. We care about hockey the way the US cares about football, while in the US, hockey is something like the fifth-most popular sport. But when Team Canada faces the US national team, it might lose.
This being the case, it feels a bit ridiculous to be all rah-rah about Canada.
@johan_larson
That is merely an argument for not making claims like: we are the strongest/we have most X/anything else that scales with size.
You can also make superiority arguments around claims where scale doesn’t matter, like having better morals, having a fairer wealth distribution, being more tolerant, etc.
You can be the most awesome place without being the most powerful place, but then, if you distrust the most powerful nation, probably better not to brag about lest you entice them to annex you.
Probably not an actual concern at the moment for Canadians, sure.
@Obelix
Really? I mean, we can say “we have one of the best standards of living in the world, and we are really good at xyz”, and it’s more or less a matter of fact. But we don’t say we’re the greatest country in the world like Americans often do.
This is true. Quiet smugness is a big Canadian thing. I don’t know if that’s heroic, per se.
@DavidFriedman
Depends if you’re on the left or the right. As noted elsewhere here, it kind of parallels the way Americans talk about the legacy of slavery. On the right, there’s the usual “jeez can people just stop blaming history already”, on the left there’s a great deal of performative rending of garments that never extends to making the sacrifices and hard choices on their part that would be necessary to start fixing the problem.
EDIT: DavidFriedman raises point; discussed below.
@Randy M
It doesn’t matter how much other countries brag, most Americans are quite delusional to how well their country is performing relative to other Western countries 😛
@dndnrsn
“Greatest” is a highly subjective term. I don’t see how it can’t be compatible with performing better per capita.
@Aapje:
Would you say that the Netherlands is a better country than France or Germany? Would you say it’s a greater country?
That way of putting it assumes that it is clear what the problem is and how to fix it. The outrages I was referring to were a result of being willing to make the hard choices that people thought were necessary to fix the problem.
The present condition of First Nation people in Canada is analogous to the present position of Blacks in the U.S. The program to solve that problem by taking children from their families, shipping them across the country and putting them in institutions where they were forbidden to speak their own language was analogous to U.S. black slavery, although more recent and less extreme.
@DavidFriedman
You are correct. The problem is not an easily soluble one, and “what is to be done” is probably not what we think it is. Adjusting what I said: there are those who think they know what must be done. They usually seem to think sacrifices must be made. However, they seem in no hurry to make their share of those sacrifices.
The Canadian example would be the non-aboriginal person who will loudly say that Canada is built on stolen land (which, to be fair, it is), but does not behave as one would expect someone finding themselves in possession of stolen property to behave: presumably, to give it back, and apologize. There’s a lot of apologies, but very few people packing up, giving whatever land they own to the appropriate group (whoever was living there prior to colonization), and moving back to wherever their ancestry hails from.
It’s more or less the Canadian equivalent of the non-black person who is deeply aghast at racism, while doing everything in their power to live away from black people, keep their kids out of schools with more than a certain % of black people, etc.
I would disagree with you that the residential schools are analogous to slavery; the treatment of aboriginals in Canada as a whole is analogous to slavery insofar as it’s Canada’s historical crime that continues to cause serious problems today.
Aapje:
Indeed, and those are the kind of superiority arguments Canadians tend to make. For example, back in the 1990s Canada was for a few years on top of the UN’s human development index, and back then Canadians liked to mention this factoid, often phrasing it as “best country in the world”.
dndnrsn:
This hasn’t been my experience, I’ve often seen Canadians claim to be part of literally the best country in the world, usually making an argument about values (diversity, multiculturalism, etc.) or quality of life (as above).
@dndnrsn
Yes to both, although the delta to Germany is smaller than to France.
I think that the word ‘greater’ is anti-elucidating, due to the exact subjectivity of the term that is making us have this discussion, so I would prefer to use much clearer terminology.
So a candidate running for office under the phrase “Make the Netherlands better again” wouldn’t be dismissed as a racist xenophobe pandering to the populace’s most base desires?
@Aapje:
So, by some standards, Canada is a better country than the US. By some standards, the US is a better country than Canada. But Americans have a sense of greatness about their country I do not think Canadians do. I think Americans would be far more likely to say “yes” to the question “does your country have a special destiny”, or “is your country the protagonist of the world’s story.”
@Matt M
The previous Dutch Prime Minister argued in 2006 in a debate for a can-do mentality, which he also described as the Dutch East India Company mentality. People generally laughed at him for it. The leader of the Socialist Party argued that this choice of words made us looks bad abroad, since the Dutch East India Company engaged in colonialism and raiding. However, the Prime Minister was not called colonialist for his choice of words, as people didn’t think that he meant that. It was also before anti-racists started rabble rousing, so it might be received differently today.
Geert Wilders has also argued for a new Golden Age. This is not very controversial, since the initial Dutch Golden Age was built on liberating The Netherlands from the Spanish, being more tolerant than the rest of Europe (resulting in capable religious refugees coming to The Netherlands, like Iberian Jews). Less nice things, like slave trade also happened, but that’s not what people think of when they think of the Golden Age.
These are the slogans of the last election:
VVD: Act(ing) normal -> law and order party
SP: Ready to fight -> labor strike party
PVV: Netherlands ours again -> Wilders being Wilders
GroenLinks: Vote for change -> So bland
D66: Chances for everyone -> Let’s make policies that benefit the gifted
CDA: For a country that we want to pass on -> Whatever
Labor party: Advance together -> This is the party that used to fight for both middle and lower classes, pretending that they can still sell that
Animal Party: Plan B, because there is no planet B -> Actually somewhat clever
ChristenUnie: Give faith a voice/vote (Dutch word for vote and voice is the same) -> another clever one
SGP: Vote for life -> against abortion/euthenasia, what else do you need to know?
50Plus: 50 plus points -> There is clever and there is trying to be clever and failing
DENK (= THINK): Thinking of Holland -> A pun, yet completely meaningless
@dndnrsn
Is that positive? Those beliefs sound very dangerous and quite delusional to me. America is the status quo side right now, while nations like China are working to change the world order. And what special destiny? Not seeing much of that either.
BTW, you forgot the notorious ‘leader of the free world’ contradiction in terms (do other nations actually get to be free, or do they have to follow the leader?).
Presumably you could use Canada and the UK as controls, as neither country had plantation slavery, so the vast majority of black people in those countries are or are the descendants of willing immigrants from elsewhere – mostly the Caribbean (of course, most black people in the Caribbean are of slave descent) and sub-Saharan Africa.
The only hard statistic I can think of off the top of my head is that in the UK, Caribbean immigrants and their descendants underperform the native white population academically, while African immigrants (and their descendants?) outperform the native white population academically – this might be heavily the province of Nigerians (and Ghanaians?) though.
Answers contained here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
I think you are modeling the evo-psych just-so story explanation incorrectly.
I think the actual model is that it’s difference plus perceived genetic threat. Thus, a single, different individual from far away is actually prized as a sexual partner. Adding a little bit of genetic diversity is a good thing for fitness. Sure, individuals of the same sex who are in direct competition may be jealous 9 for obvious reasons) but what you don’t get is systemic, widespread hatred for a single person or a small group from far away.
But, if that genetically different person is from an observably genetically different tribe or people near enough and numerous to impinge on your own ability to spread your genes, that should activate the desire to defend your genetic legacy.
Not saying I buy it, but I think that is the predicted in-group/out-group/far-group mechanic.
Right. A few people joining your community is different from a large group displacing your community.
You put this in terms of hate. I would think that racial prejudice more often takes the form of feelings of superiority. We all like to think well of ourselves, and one way to do it is to have a low opinion of others.
That fits the fact that in societies with a strong black/white divide, such as the U.S. south before and after the Civil War, whites had no problem with blacks in lower status roles, such as servants. You wouldn’t want a servant you hated, but you would want one you patronized, saw as loyal but low status.
David, I’ve seen other people model racists as wanting to feel superior, but in my experience, I don’t think that’s a major factor. I’d chalk modern racism up to:
1) Stereotyping: A security guard who follows minority kids around a store, or a taxi driver who prefers non-black passengers probably isn’t doing so in order to feed a personal ego trip – they’re doing it because of a perception of the relative odds of shoplifting or a ride to someplace where they can’t find another fare, or something on that order.
2) Lack of concern/empathy regarding structural issues: The new racism is “white privilege” – the assumption that if a white kid or an immigrant can make it without starting with what feels like money or connections, so can everyone else.
And the evidence is that they’re behaving rationally by doing so.
Occasionally I’ll see a non-black person say that shop-lifting was easy because security focused all its attention on black people.
@Nancy
The relevance of that depends on the effect of more security scrutiny on behavior. A greater percentage of black people are poor and if the increased tendency to shop-lift due to poverty is greater than the depressive effect of more security scrutiny, they would still shop-lift more.
There may also be a network effect at play, where if a large number of poor people live together, they may develop a criminal culture, with better technique (like faraday shielding in clothes/bags to prevent alarms from going off). If shop owners catch these people less, but correctly assess that they catch people with better technique less, they are correct to give higher weight to the more professional thieves they catch.
On the other hand, a lot of business practice is a matter of custom rather than testing. Testing is expensive, both in intrinsic cost and risk that the usual method might be better. (See loss aversion.) Also, in this particular case, it might be difficult to get security to focus on all customers equally.
Also, this isn’t just about poverty and/or perceived poverty. I’ve seen accounts from upper and middle class blacks about being treated as though they’re likely to shoplift.
A custom might have been reasonable when it was established, but is now out of date.
Side effects might be getting ignored. For example, non-criminal black people might be less likely to shop in stores where they are suspected of being shoplifters, or at least spend less time and money in those stores.
Nobody walks around with their paycheck printed on their shirt. So security guards have to use indirect signs to detect poverty, if they want to discriminate on poverty (and poverty is itself an indirect sign that doesn’t perfectly correlate to willingness to steal).
If skin color is seen as a better predictor of poverty than people’s clothing (for example), then my argument is correct. It’s plausible that poor shoplifters wear fairly nice clothes (as they might not have paid for them).
Sure, but no conclusive evidence has been provided that racial profiling is ineffective. ‘Reasonable’ is also a very subjective standard. It’s not unreasonable that the shop owners focus their efforts on those most likely to steal. It’s not unreasonable that innocents don’t want to be regularly bothered. Reality is complicated in that the innocent and the guilty cannot be easily be distinguished.
Who should pay the costs of this reality is a very subjective choice.
The reduction in theft may be worth it. One can wonder why the shops that do this don’t get out-competed, if it truly costs them (a lot of) money.
Side effects can go both ways. Perhaps some very spendy white people prefer shops with fewer black people. Perhaps black people make for bad customers, on average. AFAIK, taxis and restaurants generally consider them bad tippers on average and thus bad customers, as a group. Extra customers are not ‘free.’ They tend to tie up salespeople, so bad customers have an opportunity cost.
Note that I’m not necessarily claiming that any of this is true, but I object to the automatic assumption that it cannot be true and that the cost to shop owners of race neutral behavior is very small or zero.
True, although I’d definitely suspect that “black main in suit” is far less likely to be followed around a store than “black man in tank-top and basketball shorts”
Sure, but I doubt that most of the people who complain were shopping in a suit.
J Mann:
There are two sides to the stereotyping issue:
a. I may have incorrect assumptions about the statistics between races that lead me to overestimate your probability of robbing my store, or underestimate your probability of graduating high school.
b. I may have correct assumptions about those statistics, but be treating you badly because of them.
If we’re in situation (a), then hopefully I’ll get better information and stop assuming untrue things about group statistics.
If we’re in situation (b), then we are facing a tradeoff–for me to treat you better as an individual, I must behave in a less rational way. That may be something I should do or even something the law should compel me to do, but it is a very different situation from (a).
J Mann:
Your second point smuggles in an assumption–that there is a meaningful sense in which white privilege explains the differences in outcomes between blacks and whites. That may be true, but I don’t think it’s so obviously true that anyone who disagrees with it can sensibly be labeled a racist.
In fact the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Sorry for not being more clear – I didn’t mean to state an opinion whether the types of racism I identified were or were not justified/problematic, etc., just to offer them as ways in which someone might be identified as “racist” without being substantially motivated by a desire to see her own group as superior. I thought about putting “racist” in quotes in the main post, but that would be read as expressing skepticism, and I wanted to express no opinion. 😉
For what it’s worth,
(a) I think stereotyping can be motivated by false information, true information, or by an overestimate of an otherwise true trend. I think it’s unfair enough on the individuals that when we can avoid it, we should.
(b) Regarding “privilege” and “structural racism,” I think it would be great if we all had more empathy. I think it’s hard to see when the system is harmful to the oppressed, but we should try. (For example, it’s easy to say that the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine is unfair to minority communities, but you could just as easily argue that it’s motivated by a desire to reduce crime in those communities – I think you have to be thoughtful when you’re tuning rules to make sure you’re likely to be doing good.)
As a potential refinement, outright racism has become low status.
So, I’d expect prejudice to look like an argument about comparative advantage. Assert that different races / cultures have different skills. Then imply that your group is especially good at the things your group considers important.
This has a status gain. Not only do you like your servant, you’re saying he’s exceptionally skilled at serving.
It also has a toxoplasma gain. If the political opposition isn’t on the ball, they’ll argue, “racial and cultural effects don’t exist!” rather than the infinitely more correct stances of “you haven’t proven your specific effects exist” or “you haven’t proven that your effect sizes are large enough to matter.”
Then you get a high-ability servant. And you get to feel intellectually correct.
Except that the opposition is likely to be wrong in both cases. Unless you mean “haven’t proven” in the “evolution is just a theory” sense.
My impression is that the socially acceptable forms of racism (at least in my social class) involve stating openly that racism is wicked and everyone is the same, but then moving to a suburb that has almost no blacks in it, chosen because the local school district is almost all white and Asian.
I haven’t seen much of what you describe in American popular culture, and never in a social setting. You can find some H. Beady people arguing along those lines, but if you’re trying to find a socially acceptable way to hide your hatred or sense of superiority over blacks (or other races), these arguments will not have the desired effects.
And this is the form of racism that I’ve never seen a compelling “solution” to from anyone on the left (as a left-leaning person).
I’m reminded of the adorable racism minigame Parable of the Polygons. Like, yeah, racism is horrible, but I definitely don’t want my kids going to a shitty school. A selection pressure as “benign” as “I want my kids to be with other smart kids” will necessarily result in class (and thus racial) segregation, and literally no one is willing to budge on this, because everyone else will defect in this prisoner’s dilemma if you bite the bullet and send your kids to a worse school so as to fight this sort of racism in the abstract.
The “solution” of the minigame is to work to change the cultural perception of what an “acceptable” environment is. I struggle to see a way to do this in which “my kids goes to a shitty school” ever becomes acceptable to the critical fraction of the population.
I mean, you could make poor schools not shitty, but you don’t do that without solving a problem as hard as “people don’t want to send their kids to shitty schools” in the first place.
My city has at least tried to address this issue. I am not sure they have been successful. The County runs the schools and they have a goal of having no school with more than X% free and reduced lunch students.
They accomplish this in two ways.
1) The old method of busing kids out of poor neighborhoods to better ones.
2) Placing all the programs for advanced students in schools in high poverty neighborhoods and allowing folks to transfer in. The result is folks sending their kids to elite schools in the hood.
This does a pretty decent job of making sure that there are no concentration of poor and minority kids in any school. However, I don’t think there is very much proof that this does much for the minority children themselves as their test score lag other districts in the same state who did not adopt such a policy. And usually what you get is in school sorting as opposed to school to school sorting.
That seems like a great plan to encourage rich parents to avoid your school district entirely.
Little Johnny has to go WHERE if he wants to take AP Chemistry? Nuts to that, we’ll move to the next suburb over.
So you admit that the race of kids correlates with how smart kids are. Good, because this is indeed true, however, the problem is that in left wing circles it’s taboo to say so. Thus, you end up with hypocrisy as people act on facts they now on some level but aren’t willing to openly admit.
@Matt M: Well, you can have a higher-level authority force some level of busing across district lines (or, you know, get rid of school districts altogether – few other countries have them), but parents can and will move even farther away to defeat that. Ultimately the only way to end school segregation is to end residential segregation. And people self-segregate, so to do that you need something like Singapore’s ethnic quotas (which I doubt would fly anywhere outside Singapore).
It’s a hard problem.
Where I live, this is how most of the magnet schools[1] work. Put the (mostly white and Asian) magnet kids in the same school with the (mostly black and Hispanic) kids from the failing school. This raises the average test scores in the failing school, and makes the racial numbers look better, but otherwise probably doesn’t do much for the failing school.
[1] Selective public schools with an entrance exam plus grade requirements to get in.
Suppose we somehow managed to desegregate the schools completely. Somehow got everyone to move to the same district, and ended within-school segregation by ending tracking by ability, adopting a no-student-or-parent-choice curriculum, and assigning students to different sections of the same classes by lot.
Would you expect test scores and other relevant metrics for the black and Hispanic students to go up or down significantly? Would metrics for the white and Asian students go up or down significantly? If they became similar, would they be near the old high level or the old low level?
“That seems like a great plan to encourage rich parents to avoid your school district entirely.
Little Johnny has to go WHERE if he wants to take AP Chemistry? Nuts to that, we’ll move to the next suburb over.”
The school system here is county based not city based. So to do that you would have to go to another county and the surrounding counties are considered to have worse schools because for the most part they are poorer and more rural.
@The Nybbler
My guess is that that set up is worse for all parties. I think teachers teach to the ability level of the median kid in their class. In a class of very mixed abilities you end up teaching way to fast for some and way too slow for others. And I don’t think there is a ton of halo effect of merely being in the same room with smarter kids. Maybe there is some effect on discipline.
I also think you can get capture by the affluent parents of the school leading to decisions that are good /neutral for affluent kids but not necessarily good for poor kids. I observe that at my kids’ elementary school. The school has amazing elective offerings that are great for kids who already are on track. But I wonder if they are a distraction for kids who should be focusing on the 3 R’s.
@eccdog
I expect the architects of such a plan to be unpleasantly surprised to find that the parents have a vote in how their schools are run.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/integration-worked-why-have-we-rejected-it.html
Claims that integration works because more money is spent (in ways that actually benefit students) in schools that have white students.
I’m not sure how to check the research, but it seems at least plausible.
From the article
These statments are fairly vague, but one reading of them is that the black white gap was narrowing while schools were re-segregating. There are some other clues at the bait and switch or moat and bailey here.
Someone who was 40 in 2011 spent most of their years in school from 1970 on, the years where re-segregation was occurring. The most relevant cohort would be kids who experienced integration from 1954-> 1974 (using court decisions as a cut off seems like a fairly neutral starting point). Where is the data from that group?
The framing here is also total bullshit
The jump from 1% of poor students make it to the top 5% to kids who went to integrated schools make it out of ‘poverty’ is about as dishonest as you can get without actually making up your own statistics.
Oh, what measures are those? Details? Not at all suspicious that you throw a one sentence quote in there to support your position with no examination of the context. It sounds perfect… except for that ‘some’.
Given the way the article is written I would say there is a 80-90% chance that the evidence for integration is weak, and that the majority of the effect came from the removal of legal segregation, which cannot be duplicated.
@Nancy Lebovitz
In New Jersey, the low-achieving districts (which, yes, tend to be black and Hispanic districts) spend considerably more than the high-achieving ones.
The Nybbler, the interesting question is what the money is actually being spent on.
@Nancy Lebovitz
This being New Jersey, I imagine most of the money is fed directly into a furnace. However, the implicit proposition that “When schools are integrated, schools spend money on useful things whereas when schools are segregated, white and integrated schools spend money on useful things whereas black schools waste it” strikes me as tailored avoid the issue of the black schools getting more money. What the author claims is
He’s making the usual claim that the black schools are getting a pittance, which probably was true before but is not now. Class sizes in the poorer districts used to be capped at a low level, though this is no longer the case and I don’t have current numbers.
@Jaskologist
That’s a two way street. I occasionally run into parents that are unpleasantly surprised that non-parents (and parents without kids in public school) have a vote in how schools are run.
That’s understandable, but they need to consider that every taxpayer contributes to funding of the schools, not to mention the effect of schools on behavior of future citizens.
I think the current compromise that communities get a say in how schools are run (through elected officials) and parents can then opt to place the students in private or home schools if these don’t meet their standards is reasonable, from a standpoint of the correlation of the influence of various stakeholders, even if optimal educational results are not at hand.
The Nybbler:
I’m sure there’s good data on this, but here’s my thinking:
1. Increasing the range of abilities and understanding in a traditional classroom makes it not work as well. The teacher has the same number of hours per year to teach Algebra 2, but she has a wider range of knowledge and abilities, so she can’t tailor it to what the kids are ready for.
2. Making a classroom work less well will hurt all the kids, but the smarter kids will take less damage, because they can often figure it out on their own, and they often have smart parents who will explain it to them.
3. If it is possible to close the IQ gap between races via an educational program, it requires some massive programs that are way more intensive than bussing students around. So this wouldn’t narrow the gap in abilities between racial groups.
Because of all those, my prediction is that there would be little or no effect on the performance gap across races (in terms of things like achievement tests or subject matter tests) even in the short term, and none at all in the long term. Any short term impact would be due to the smart kids (mostly white and Asian) getting slowed down thanks to the classroom not funcitoning as well, not the less smart kids doing better.
The Nybbler:
I think there’s a sensible argument in there somewhere. Attempting to steelman it:
1. Most of the influential people in our society are white.
2. If their kids are affected by the operation of local schools, they’ll care enough to get involved and push for things to work better.
3. IF their kids aren’t affected by the operation of local schools, they’ll care less. They may still want good education in an abstract sense, but they won’t be as interested or informed or involved, and so there will be less effective pressure on the schools to improve.
That seems like one fundamental argument for putting everyone’s kids in the same school system–it will make sure that everyone cares what happens in the school system. The downside, of course, is that if the school system is an unfixable mess for whatever reason, then everyones’ kids get screwed over. Also, implementing this would involve a massive loss of freedom and well-being for lots of people, and wouldn’t really be workable.
Well here is a bit of a natural experiment.
Wake county (Raleigh NC) schools are my home district they take many measures that I have outlined above to make sure that there are not concentrations of poverty or races at any one school.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools did not have such a policy but instead focused effort and resources on poor schools.
The results
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/education/your-schools-blog/article38113338.html
Now that was just one year and the author says the numbers bounce around year to year, but I have seen other sources stating that poor/minority students did better in Mecklenburg vs Wake Co from previous years. Maybe large scale mixing allows you to hide poor students in overall decent schools and not address their problems.
ETA: I found the most recent raw data
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/accountability/reporting/accdrilldwn16.xlsx
Charlotte outperforms Wake with every demographic White, Black, Hispanic. But yet Charlotte is worse overall and has more bad schools. Simpsons Paradox FTW.
@albatross11
Unfortunately you’ve steelmanned it right into what I call the hostage-taking argument — “We’re not going to let you solve your own problems unless you solve everyone else’s problems too.” Aside from its questionable moral state, people’s response to it tends to be to figure out how to get rid of or escape the hostage-takers rather than solve all the problems.
Furthermore, based on your previous reply, you seem to think that the integration ideal they’re looking for would produce bad outcomes for everyone. And I agree. If that’s racism… well, isn’t everything nowadays?
Hey, it’s a proper old-fashioned racist! Cool!
So do you dispute the evidence on racial differences in things like IQ and criminality?
@ abc
You’ll need to specify what that evidence is if you actually expect people to dispute it. However, I suspect that you already know that, and are not interested in anything beyond low-effort shit-posting.
Racial prejudice means targeting individuals, not groups. Feeling superior to someone based on a group they belong to is classic old-fashioned racism. You can feel superior to an individual (of any race) on the basis of IQ if you want. That’s not racist, it’s just unpleasant.
Also, feeling superior to someone from another race because of statistical differences in IQs, personality types, crime rate, etc., between races doesn’t make any sense.
Yes, true feelings of superiority should come from your army or sportsball team being stronger than theirs, or from you using ironic terms to indicate your cultural superiority.
While this is true of the generic “you”, I suspect it doesn’t really apply to abc.
Certainly it feels like this is how (the non-tautological parts of) class-ism works.
I think this is very likely. An ex-girlfriend of several years went to school in neighborhood with a lot of recent African immigrants, so I got to know some of their kids fairly well; they had darker skin than most black Americans, but they spoke with the region’s standard dialect (their parents sounded African, which is a distinctive family of accents that’s quite unlike AAVE), most of their friends were white or Asian, and when they grew up they married a broad range of ethnicities. A lot like the standard immigrant experience, in other words.
Prejudice based on skin color wouldn’t predict that; even the “growing up black in America” narrative wouldn’t. But prejudice based on culture would.
So would the theory that it’s culture via the culture’s effect on the people who hold it rather than on other people’s attitude to them. Which I think was Sowell’s conjecture–that slavery left American blacks with a culture less functional than either African or Caribbean.
Also true.
The other model that would easily fit this observation is that the immigrants were drawn from the top of their home country’s distribution in terms of intelligence, work ethic, etc., and that their kids got some of that.
For most ways discrimination plays out day to day, it intuitively seems like it would be hard for the would-be discriminator to distinguish between two black guys based on their culture–how does the cop pulling you over or the potential employer considering whether to hire you even know about that stuff?
Accent, and to a lesser extent dress and mannerisms, for both. Location, for the cop. Name, for the employer: something like “Uche Mgbeke” connotes “immigrant family” strongly compared to, say, “Jamal Thomas”.
Of these, I think accent’s the big one. It’s a strong and I think underappreciated marker of culture: you could have two identical white guys in suits, and I’d immediately think totally different things about them as soon as they opened their mouths, if one came out with a Tidewater accent and the other sounded like a dumb hillbilly stereotype.
Likewise “Jamal Thomas” carries a different connotation from say “Nat Brown” or “Jim Strong”
There is more than one African-American subculture.
I strongly recommend the introduction to The New Jim Crow as evidence. The introduction is free if you look inside the book.
The author is a black civil rights lawyer. She didn’t know about the mass incarceration problem, and the effects on ex-prisoners. The NAACP and the Black Congressional Caucus didn’t have it on their agendas. It was hard for her to believe how bad it was until she’d been told a number of times.
That is a powerful piece of writing, at least insofar as Ms. Alexander’s personal experience goes. But I was concerned by this bit: “In less than 30 years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase”. That’s very much at odds with the recent and IMO much better researched discussion we had on the matter here. Alexander cites one Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate”, and I can’t get a good read on whether that’s a reliable source without buying and reading it.
I’m concerned that, moved as she clearly is, Alexander might be grasping at easy answers like “just end the war on drugs already!”, when the more difficult problem might be a million or so black men incarcerated and subsequently marginalized on account of all the murdering and raping.
However, my main point stands: if your first thought is dysfunctional black culture, you’re leaving out a lot of black people whose lives are so remote from that culture that they didn’t even know mass incarceration and subsequent stigma were a problem.
I’ve only scanned the big chart, but it looks as though rape and murder are a small proportion of the reasons people are imprisoned. There are a lot of assaults short of murder and property crimes, not to mention people awaiting trial.
Relevant anecdote: what happened when a anglo-Nigerian comic got stopped by a southern cop :
http://welovemediacrit.blogspot.de/2009/10/oh-im-sorry-maam-i-thought-you-were.html
I am a foreigner to the US, and this was pretty much immediately obvious to me upon moving here. My only confusion was why nobody else seemed to realize this.
Nobody really thinks about it, but for the most part, black people who “act white” are accepted in most parts of this country without a second thought. Hell, this is so common that accusations of “acting white” are explicitly made in the African American community, and it carries a connotation that the person acting white has betrayed his friends and family.
This is actually somewhat confusing to me, because I was led to believe that the reason racism is bad is because it is unfair to hold people accountable for things they have no control over. Nobody has any control over what colour skin they were born with. However, ideas are fair game for criticism and disapproval, under the idea that people choose to support ideas, and so they’re not really suffering if we criticize and disapprove of a given idea, because people can always just stop supporting it. If someone opposes something that is cultural, assuming they have a valid justification for it, is it fair to call that racist?
I mean, there was a pretty strong backlash against southern confederate culture a year or so ago, and this was justified by nearly everyone as a reasonable critical reaction to a set of bad ideas. If anyone had stopped to say that this was racist against southerners, they would have been laughed out of the room. It wasn’t racism. It was the legitimate criticism and rejection of ideas that were demonstrably bad for society. There are certain elements of the analogous culture under discussion that large swaths of the country believe are demonstrably bad for society, and they have what they believe to be reasonable rational justifications for it. Why the disparity?
Race is more or less immutable (modulo some edge cases where someone can pass for a member of another race). Accent is hard to change. Other cultural markers can be changed, at some cost. Plenty of people learn the right fork to use as an adult, or learn how to speak like an educated person in college, or learn how to dress for a professional job on their first professional job or maybe their summer internship.
There are a lot of different potential responses to this answer, but the one that I would favor is that Black culture in the US has been basically squashed except as a rejection of white culture. Between the drug laws, the draft, the highway commission using interstates as physical barriers to contain black neighborhoods, the FHA refusing to back loans to blacks, welfare programs that provided incentives to non traditional homes, the murder and incarceration of black leaders and the public education system it has been difficult to build any kind of identity that doesn’t surround being anti white.
I think this is at the core of the disagreement between red and blue when it comes to racism.
Red says “I’m not racist! I only hate their culture! You know, that thing which glorifies murder, drugs, and misogyny in song. Where people who attempt to improve themselves are dismissed as weak nerds. Where out of wedlock childbirth is common. Why SHOULDN’T I hate that? Why don’t you?”
Blue says “Bullshit. You ignore flaws in other cultures. You would find ANY reason to dislike people who look different than you. Besides, most of the problems with their culture are a direct result of white racism anyway.”
(I’m a red so perhaps I am getting blue’s argument wrong. A blue is free to correct me on this)
No, you’ve got the Blue mode right (the appeal to Johnny Cash in defense of rap is a classic). Blues would probably also point to critiques of misogyny from within the Black community. Some might also critique the idea of the Black community being a monolith, though race essentialism has gained a lot of power on the Left in the last decade.
It seems to me that a huge part of the red/blue split on race, at least in terms of rhetoric, comes down to this: By almost any measure you can think of, blacks are doing pretty badly in the US vs pretty much everyone else. Worse outcomes in school, less income, less savings, more jail time, more out-of-wedlock births, even shorter life expectancy. That difference in outcomes is so obvious that it’s visible to the naked eye, but all kinds of statistics are around to quantify them.
One view (more concentrated on the blue tribe) tends to ascribe this to external stuff–the legacy of slavery, fallout from Jim Crow and redlining and such, ongoing discrimination, etc.
The other view (more concentrated on the red tribe) ascribes these worse outcomes to internal stuff–generally black culture, stigmas against acting white, etc.
These views aren’t mutually exclusive, and probably most members of each tribe have some mix of these views.
But I think the driver here is the huge and visible difference in outcomes. If blacks were doing about as well as whites, we wouldn’t spend any time looking for explanations for that, we’d just say “ok” and move on.
As an illustration of why I think this is so, consider Asians. In the US, Asians do better than whites on (I think) all or almost all those same measures. There was some pretty nasty anti-Asian discrimination (though not as bad as what blacks faced), but nobody feels the need to refer to that to explain why Asians are doing well in the US. It doesn’t seem to need an explanation.
@qwints
Leave Johnny Cash aside, there is a real question in how you square this theory with the cultural geography of racism in the US. It peaks in Appalachia. That’s a culture that looks an awful lot like the one Matt M above has the Red Tribe attribute to African-Americans.
It’s one thing to steelman in order to subject your own beliefs to the best counterarguments possible, but it is quite another to fool yourself into thinking that the steelman is actually a widely held belief because you don’t want to face up to the reality of who you are lying down with.
Or the driver is the tendency of both sides to see the problem in terms of race.
@Brad
Source for the claim that racism peaks in Appalachia?
I would also note that working-class/rural poor Appalachian white culture and cultural cues are right down there at the bottom of the US cultural pecking order, producing a lot of delightfully shuddery “Among The Savage Hicks With iPhone and Hand Sanitizer” ethnography pieces and equal sneering disdain for accents, dress, mannerism, and so on.
So, if you are correct and racism peaks in Appalachia, I don’t think that conflicts with the cultural model. It fits on at least two levels:
1) When you’re near the bottom of the ladder, most people become acutely conscious of losing any more self-image/social status and look for ways to prop themselves up. “Sure, I’m low status, but at least I’m not [insert disfavored group here].”.
2) Outgroup vs. Fargroup distinctions.
What role does the geographic distribution of the people who write about this sort of thing play? While the urban poor are often mostly minorities, the rural poor are mostly white (except maybe in the Deep South?).
Media being largely clustered in urban centers on the coasts, it’s not surprising that their view of poverty and privilege splits largely on racial lines, because that’s what they see every day. There are of course many more poor white folks who can’t be described as “privileged” by any stretch of the imagination (yeah, they may be white, but not only are they poor, they carry their own markers that would instantly get them recognized and discriminated against in high-end culture). But they are out of sight, out of mind for the people setting the narrative.
@Trofin_Lysenko
Here’s a paper for you:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51d894bee4b01caf88ccb4f3/t/51d89ab3e4b05a25fc1f39d4/1373149875469/RacialAnimusAndVotingSethStephensDavidowitz.pdf
Regarding your arguments for compatibility:
What you are saying seems plausible, but it is completely different from what Matt M said. In his model the root of red tribe racism is that the fine, upstanding, hard working, god fearing members of the red tribe hate black culture because it stands for everything they oppose.
If that were what was going on you’d expect it to peak among some group like the Mormons, not Appalachians. Or taking into account your near/far group point at the very least the most economically and culturally successful parts of the red tribe–the southern Episcopalian doctors and lawyers descended from good families going back to before the civil war. That’s not what’s going on.
It may be that your framework is compatible with the larger category of all cultural theories, but it isn’t compatible with the one Matt M laid out.
Brad, what if it’s both? You’ve got two flavors of racism:
1) the overt racial animus, I’m better because I’m white, we don’t take kindly to your type ’round here. That’s probably what your data is capturing as peaking in Appalachia.
2) the attitude Matt describes, basically “African Americans are good people but the poor ones are stuck in a self-destructive culture”
I think 2 really is a fairly common attitude among the red tribe (who don’t consider it racist), more common than 1. It probably doesn’t show up on your poll, but it would get you labeled racist among the blue tribe if you expressed it openly. And frankly, Blue talks a lot more about 2 these days – microaggressions and structural oppression and legacy of slavery and all that. The Red/Blue split really is then mostly about who/what is to blame for the ongoing problems among large segments of the African American population.
Type 1 racism is largely limited to Red sub tribes, apparently in Appalachia, where they have their own self-perpetuating cultural problems.
But interestingly (to me at least) it’s not like black people don’t have their own internal rifts over culture. Before he was outed as a creepy probably serial rapist, that was a big thing of Cosby’s. And there’s the classic Chris Rock bit about black folk vs. n*****s.
@gbdub
As far as it goes, I don’t much disagree. But what binds the different parts of the red tribe together? Why is the attitude among the “high” part of red tribe culture towards poor whites and poor blacks so different? Poor whites are family that get compassion and understanding no matter how much they screw up while blacks are neighbors that are judged by the state of their lawn, their clothing, and so on.
That’s hard to explain using a pure cultural explanation. The unconditional us vs. conditional and revocable us dynamic looks like the classic type of racism.
I don’t think white upper class red or blue tribe members are big fans of the white underclass. (When and where I grew up, they were referred to as white trash, and held in very low regard.)
On the other hand, there is also a good deal of concern about gender discrimination, where the difference in outcomes is not only not huge and visible, it’s ambiguous in sign. Consumption is done largely by couples, so it’s hard to say whether women are really poorer than men. The most obvious outcome linked directly to individuals is life expectancy, on which women do better than men. Auto insurance costs are higher for young adult men than for young adult women, due to statistical discrimination.
The usual difference cited the other way is in wages, but that’s not huge and visible unless you ignore the fact that women differ from men in ways relevant to how much they earn, such as what fields they go into and how likely they are to drop out, at least for some years, to produce and rear children.
Nonetheless, discrimination against women is widely viewed as an issue that must be dealt with.
@Brad
Blacks are a fargroup to Mormons. Not many black people in Utah.
Defensiveness. Poor whites don’t generally blame rich whites for their poverty. If they did, the rich whites would probably tell the poor whites the same things they tell poor blacks. But poor blacks are much more likely to blame whites for their poverty. Which was definitely true at one point, but as white people have internally tabooed racism, passed civil rights laws, engaged in Affirmative Action, it becomes increasingly difficult for the Red Tribe to accept blame for black underachievement.
@DavidFriedman
“Ambigious” seems like the wrong word. The public figures who drive the debate use predicable, post-hoc utility functions.
Treat group outcomes as a bundle of N goods. Neither is dominant. Women live longer. Men pay more for auto insurance.
This looks ambiguous because we can imagine a utility function that would prefer either bundle. Just put all of your utility-weight onto whatever dimension that group has best.
But, people — particularly public figures who advocate for group interests — don’t have to declare their outcomes in advance. They can look at the outcomes and pick whatever weighting is convenient.
Organizations that argue for public policy concessions will focus on areas where their group does badly. The PR person of a women’s advocacy group will give a lot of weight to unadjusted earnings, the risk of sexual violence, and emotional labor.
Big, visible differences make it easy to find people who’ll (often earnestly) argue that a group needs additional resources.
People have an availability-bias, so they’ll put more attention on those areas and change their personal weights accordingly.
David Friedman:
Yeah, that’s a good point. A model that would predict the focus on womens’ issues better is that current concern about discrimination or oppression is based on historical patterns of mistreatment. But then, there’s not much concern about anti-Asian discrimination, and even anti-Semitism (which gets some public attention) isn’t a major burning issue in US politics.
Probably the most simple model is that groups that are effective at organizing politically get more attention to their complaints. Blacks are pretty good at that, thanks to a fairly cohesive identity and a lot of shared culture and shared problems[1]. Women are half the voters, so they’ve got a voice. Hispanics and Asians aren’t so cohesive, since they tend to come from lots of different source countries and assimilate into general Americans pretty quickly. Jews are a visible political force in the US, but it doesn’t seem like anti-Semitism is a big political issue in the US, the way anti-black racism or accusations of racism are.
[1] Though a lot of the stuff done to help blacks out, like affirmative action in educaiton and set-asides in government contracting, don’t really do anything much for poor or even middle-class blacks; their main benefits land on the blacks at the top, whose kids go to Harvard rather than Duke.
I don’t necessarily buy this. There are plenty of “white trash” stereotypes, teen girls and unmarried women who get pregnant are heavily stigmatized even when white, etc.
Now, red tribers are more likely to live among the white rural poor, and therefore see the nuances, while they only see the sensationalized worst aspects of poor urban black culture. But that’s more neargroup/fargroup than “type 1” racism. And coastal blues have their own version of this, generally thinking all southern and/or rural whites are trashy hicks because they don’t live among them.
You mean like National Review’s “They deserve to die, and their whitetrash communities need to die” speech?
” Why is the attitude among the “high” part of red tribe culture towards poor whites and poor blacks so different? ”
From my experiences the attitudes are not different. I grew up in a mid-sized southern city that consistently votes Republican. It was split ~1/3 middle/upper-middle class whites, ~1/3 African Americans (mostly poor but with small middle class), ~1/3 low class whites. The latter two groups were viewed pretty equally by the first. The poor whites were called white trash, rednecks, trailer trash, etc.
Thought experiment:
What would have happened if the Appalachians would have been fed a ‘smurf’ pill on Ellis Island, turning them blue?
Currently they are not recognized as a separate race and thus their very bad average group outcomes are often ignored as they are lumped in with the other groups of whites, who are generally far more successful.
But as smurfs, they would have been visible much more in the statistics and the kind of automatic assumption that often happens about black Americans (bad outcomes is due to discrimination) could then be applied to them.
There’s an Avatar joke here, but I can’t quite make it work.
Forget the insults, who cares. I know plenty of people that call family members all kinds of nasty names, but are still there to bail them out time and time again.
Look at the policy positions. Compare the calls for ever increasing prison sentences for crack, and resistance to lowering them even to this day, to all the compassion in the world for opioid addicts. Compare the ignorant ranting and raving about obamaphones or TANF to how the red tribe treats the incredible growth of SSDI. Not only isn’t it condemned in welfare-queen type language, but all of sudden everyone is an expert on disincentives to work and wants to loosen the rules.
Issue after issue is like this. If the high red tribe were really so offended and disgusted by ‘bad’ culture than they wouldn’t share a tribe with the low red tribe.
Setting aside the question of “to what degree are the tribes are shared?” isn’t just this a fully general counter argument?
ETA:
IE if Democrats were truly opposed to political violence they wouldn’t share a culture with people like Hodgkinson or the Anti-fa.
I think part of what’s screwed over appalachia is that smart and ambitious people tend to leave for places with better jobs, so you might have this pool of smurf-colored dysfunction (genes? culture?), but also a moderately visible smurf diaspora that was more successful.
Thanks for the link, Brad. I am a bit too inebriated to parse academese at the moment but I’ll read it tomorrow on my day off.
That said, have you spent much time in a culturally “red” environment surrounded by culturally “red” people? I grew up in Monterey and Salinas, CA which I think is safe to call a pretty blue space, ditto Boulder, CO where I spent Jr. High and High school. But setting aside time in the Army, I’ve been living for the past 7 years in deep Red territory. Hell, this is Rush Limbaugh’s home town.
In that time, I actually HAVE observed rather more racism on the part of both whites and blacks than I have at any other point in my life in the US, and a cultural (or a hybrid model cultural aspects dominant among higher status/wealth individuals, IMO) model is far more consistent with my observations and discussions with black colleagues than the other one.
As for TANF vs. SSDI, I have not observed any particular disparity there. Generally Red Tribers who are against one are against the other, with most of the ones who are complacement about SSDI being so for entirely selfish reasons (either they or a close family member they like are on it), or because they see it (as many low-information voters do) as simple payback of their personal investment of 10-20 years of social security withholding on their paychecks.
There’s certainly no difference in the way they view “white” drugs vs. “black” ones, though if by that you mean actual street drugs like (around here) meth. And if you mean prescription painkiller abuse we’re right back to the point about low-income, low-status whites and blacks being more alike than different and being different than higher-income and -status whites and blacks.
If Thomas Sowell came out with a -codone addiction I think he’d get exactly as much (and as little) slack from Red Tribe culture as Limbaugh did.
I’m going to begin by saying that the blue/red tribe terminology began useless (as a shorthand for “gun-lovin’ NASCAR-watchin’ good ol’ boys who love guns and NASCAR” vs “latte-sipping champagne socialist elites bickering over whether that production of Turandot was too on-the-nose”) and has become worse than useless (now it’s just shorthand for “right wing” and “left wing” or “Republican” and “Democrat”).
The elite of the Republican party are not even entirely “red tribe” by the original definition. Probably not even mostly. GWB was borne in Connecticut, went to Yale and Harvard, with roots in the Plymouth colony. Even the ones who are “cultural conservatives” from Texas or wherever are educated elites.
@brad
Is this really the case? The compassion I see for opioid addicts comes from left-wingers, because it fits into their disease-theory-slash-utilitarian view of addiction. Every article in the New York Times or New Yorker or whatever I’ve read about the heroin epidemic in small-town America takes a sympathetic view, and usually finds some drama in sympathetic locals vs unsympathetic locals – the latter being, it is implied, Republicans. Even if they’re setting up a good-cop-bad-cop play (“see the sympathy we, the good people, have for these unfortunate addicts, even though they maybe voted for you-know-who; far more sympathy than some of those closer to them, who definitely did”) I would guess that the Republican view of “what do we do about all these poor white people OD’ing on heroin” is much less friendly than the Democrat view, on average.
@ dndnrsn
I disagree that the tribe model is useless.
I hold that there is a significant cultural split in the US that maps somewhat roughly to Scott’s theory of Thrive vs. Survive and that we need some way to describe it. Where people go wrong is conflating culture and politics. Yes one informs the other but they are still separate. There is nothing incongruous in being a “blue” conservative or “red” liberal.
In fact I would posit that “polarization” in the US is what happens when “Red” Democrats or “Blue” Republicans (note that I used the actual party names this time) stop being a meaningful power bloc in their respective parties.
And yet, opiods remain just as illegal as crack is. White people get arrested for drugs all the time. Meth is thought of as a lower-class destructive thing the same way crack is.
And isn’t it a blue tribe meme to point out that most welfare goes to white people? And somehow, that doesn’t result in the red tribe suddenly saying “whoops, guess I’m in favor of more welfare now!”
Is this not true for African Americans as well?
I’ve certainly met a few whose story is basically “Out of my five siblings, I was smart and worked hard and made something of myself such that I am now meeting you in upper-middle class suburbia. The rest of my family is still dirt poor, living off welfare, and each have five kids back in rural South Carolina.”
Or does even entertaining this notion make me racist?
@hlynkcag
I don’t think the situations are comparable. A better comparison would be something like lawyers or bankers, and I do think that Democrats/Blue Tribe is fundamentally okay with them regardless of occasional rhetoric to the contrary.
@Trofim_Lysenko
No. It’s been hours total in nearly four decades.
Are you just explicating the mechanism whereby the phenomena I mentioned takes place on the ground? What I’m saying is that there’s a kind of fundamental attribution error going on. In and of itself, that’s entirely normal. But if the groups are defined on the basis of skin color, that’s a problem. Maybe not if there were also a geographic component and the poor blacks were all far-group while some poor whites were near, but there are substantial black populations all across the old south.
On your larger point, I can accept that there’s a substantial cultural element in a larger sense of this group is Other in part because they speak, dress, and act differently. What I find to be a ridiculous idea is that Matt M’s notion what’s really going on in red tribe is that all the virtuous red tribe folks are super offended by misogyny in rap music and the out of wedlock birthrate. As if there were some sort of ranking of cultures by moral values and how they decided to interact with each one was based on those rankings. As I said above, it’s reifying a steelman which is not a reasonable thing to do.
@dndnrsn
I read and heard several stories about how red states or red areas in red states are treating the rise in opiod addiction as a health crisis and are trying a variety of new approaches, instead of just harsher and harsher criminal law crackdowns.
FWIW as a general matter I think that’s great. I don’t begrudge people that used to disagree with me coming around. I just don’t know if there new nuance would survive if the next addiction wave were centered in black communities rather than white ones.
To take a few steps back, I am sorry to say that although I am a fan of both rap AND Johnny Cash, I’ve never actually heard that argument before. Is it more related to his personal life (drug addiction, failed marriage), or his songs?
If the latter, I would imagine things like “shot a man in reno, just to watch him die” are considered the main culprits… of course the very next line ends with “I hang my head and cry” and the main point of the song is that crime is stupid, mamma was right that you shouldn’t play with guns, prison is terrible, and criminals mostly deserve to be there. This doesn’t seem to be QUITE the same as how Jay-Z and 50 Cent approach the issue of crime and punishment. Most of his songs about crime generally end with the perpetrator going to jail or being executed, admitting they were wrong and deserved their punishment, and encouraging others NOT to follow in their footsteps.
And of course, songs about crime are only a small set of his overall library. Aside from tons of gospel songs, there’s also stuff like “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a salute to a hero of a different race, and perhaps most poignant to this discussion, “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town,” which is about as explicit of a rejection of violent machismo as you’re ever likely to hear.
I’m both a moderate fan of Johnny Cash and don’t think he is a very good example. So can’t help you there. But how about Hank Williams Jr’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” — it has illegal alcohol manufacturing, glorifying vigilante justice, and insinuations of violent resistance to eviction (at least I think that’s what he means).
I too am both a fan of 90’s gangster rap and Johnny Cash style outlaw country and I agree the comparison does not quite work. Most of Cash’s song are cautionary tales.
This is the end to Cocaine Blues
The judge he smiled as he picked up his pen
Ninety nine years in the Folsom pen
Ninety nine years underneath that ground
I can’t forget the day I shot that bad bitch down
Come on you gotta listen unto me
Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be
Hank Williams Jr is probably a better comparison. You can’t find many cautionary tales in his songs and you can find more embrace of bad behavior.
“Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound’ celebrates drunkenness and infidelity
“All my Rowdy Friends” is wistful for days of drunkenness and drug use.
“Family Tradition” also excuses drunkenness, drug use, and womanizing.
Right, I won’t pretend there are NO glorification of violence in “white music”, it just seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
Hell, “Copperhead Road” leaves you on a cliffhanger where the assumed ending is that the protagonist is about to shoot down a DEA helicopter with a rocket launcher or something!
If you want a comparison to some popular rap then how about:
https://genius.com/Bobby-shmurda-hot-nigga-lyrics
———–
I mean, the song bangs. Love it. In fact, I decided to start listening to it because I wrote this post and it’s playing Youtube as I speak. But in case reading the lyrics didn’t clear things up for you: the artist and the people in his friend group who he signs about are all murderers and drug dealers and very happy about this. And in case you think this is all hyperbole on his part:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Shmurda
Oh, and most importantly: the moral of this song is “kill people and sell drugs and your life will be great like mine, women will give you head and you will have lots of money to spend”. I don’t know if I care about this or not, mind, but there it is.
@hlynkacg
The problem is that it started with a stereotype that does not describe the reality of being a right-winger or a left-winger in the US. I don’t know what % of Republican voters are good ol’ boys, but educated professional-class types are a minority of Democrat voters.
The thrive-survive theory predicts voting right (in the US, Republican) or left (in the US, Democrat, although they’re not that left) based on whether one is surviving or thriving, right? But black people vote 90% D, and can they really be said to fit the model? Are they closer to thrive, or survive?
A theory of whether people go D or R that ignores the most reliable D voting bloc (to the point that the strategy becomes about mobilizing votes vs suppressing them among black Americans, not winning them over, for D and R respectively – the Ds know they have 90% of those who vote and likely figure the 10% have insurmountable reasons not to; the Rs likely figure the inverse) seems rather feeble. Both the “tribes” model and the “thrive vs survive” model are built around white Americans, who are 3/4 of the American population…
And, it’s just become political shorthand. We might as well call them the People of the Donkey and the People of the Elephant.
So, white Democrats in the South are not really much of a thing any more, and working-class white Democrats in the north are a weak spot for the party. However, the leadership of the Republican party is a well-educated elite, and I suspect many of them sip lattes when they’re sure there’s no cameras.
The economic-leftist model (which was the left-liberal model of 10-20 years ago; since largely supplanted by a more idpol-friendly model) of the Republican party is that it’s economic elites using various appeals they don’t intend to go through with (to religion, to racism, to anxiety about immigration, etc) to bamboozle non-affluent whites into voting for them.
I don’t think so. Red/blue as used here correlates with party, but it isn’t the same thing.
One of the striking things about the most recent presidential election was a lot of blue collar workers shifting from D to R. I don’t think anyone is arguing that they were shifting from blue tribe to red tribe.
A binary division isn’t going to do a very good job of categorizing everyone–libertarians, for example, make a poor fit with either blue/red or R/D. But it can still point out a significant pattern.
@Brad
It’s not that Reds are “offended” by such things but that they believe they are very bad behaviors that contribute significantly to the poor outcomes blacks experience. Reds think blacks should reject violence, crime, drugs and out of wedlock births not because they’re “offensive” but because they cause poverty and screw up neighborhoods and the next generation. And they think the same thing of white trash, too.
When it comes to heroin, the Red answer is “build the wall.” An awful lot of that cheap heroin is coming from Mexico.
@ dndnrsn
My whole point is that it was never supposed to do so in the first place. Did you miss the part where I said; There is nothing incongruous in being a “blue” conservative or “red” liberal”? Whether someone is a right-winger or a left-winger is tangential to the phenomena we’re actually trying to describe.
On the balance we’ve got two dominant subcultures in the US. One of these subcultures is largely insular and explicitly nationalistic. They pride themselves on being “ants” in a world of “grasshoppers”. The other is largely universalist and thus rejects nationalism. They pride themselves on being “the only ones who seriously consider the big picture”.
The members of the former, being more insular, nationalistic gain and display status through public affirmations of loyalty. Things like public service, going to church on Sundays, rooting for the local sports team, and standing for the national anthem etc… Meanwhile members of the latter display status through the breadth and diversity of their knowledge, experience, and friends. Scott’s Thrive vs Survive comes close to describing this split but there is also an element of HeelBearCub’s Urbane vs Domestic there as well.
As for your last two paragraphs, this is precisely what the “tribal model” predicts, so the exact opposite of “useless”.
@hlynkacg:
OK, so, the ideal way it might be used, and the way it gets used, are two different things. My point is that it’s gotten so muddled up it causes more confusion than it solves. I think “domestic” vs “urbane” would be a better way to put it, because it doesn’t key to the colours used by the US political parties. Or, “localist” vs “cosmopolitan.” Or whatever.
And, does the tribal model predict it? It’s been happening for a while, and has been described before the “tribes” terminology popped up. It’s easy to predict the past – predicting the future’s tricky though.
Now, the terminology of “tribalism” is useful. It describes very well how people take things like political parties and side with them in a way that is extremely unprincipled, but makes perfect sense as far as human social dynamics go.
You’re comparing sentences for crack dealers to compassion for opioid addicts. (I could also mention that those sentences were supported strongly by the community leaders in crack-ridden areas, that they’re not going up now, and that meth is somewhat more comparable to crack and we’re cracking down pretty hard on it.)
You’re also leveraging stereotypes of conservatives (or just Southern whites?) that may only exist in your head. Frankly, you just sound like you’re ranting about how “those people are bad.”
Some kind of factual grounding would help your argument.
If you want to communicate that it’s about the culture, consider including examples of whites who have those behaviours and blacks who don’t.
(I keep seeing example of people who are willing to complain long and hard that their culture is misunderstood, but who are not willing to take basic steps to fix the problem).
Would that help, if the examples were basically “I also hate white people who act black?” I mean, I’m not under the impression that rural, prejudiced, whites would be thrilled if their son or daughter started wearing their pants sagged low, listening to gangster rap music, etc.
Does that prove that you aren’t racist? Or that you are?
In regards to culture, you can point many “Church and Chitlin’s” blacks who’ve found acceptance among the GOP. It is from these ranks that people like Tim Scott, Mia Love, Herman Cain and Thomas Sowell are drawn.
Now I’ve heard progressives argue that the this is simply tokenism and that the conservative desire to separate “the good ones” only proves how racist they really are but isn’t identifying “the good ones” and welcoming them into the fold precisely what MLK wished for when he dreamed that his children be “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”?
Edit:
Furthermore, as Trofim notes above, white people who “act black” specifically the urban NWA flavor of black are almost invariably viewed as low status themselves. It seems to me that “racism” at least when it comes to blacks in the US has a lot more to do with “normies don’t like surly bastards who let thier underwear hang out in public” than progressives would like to admit.
Edit 2: somewhat ninja’d by Matt
Hating on white people who act black could also be interpreted as anti-black racism at one remove, so it would be better to followup on my original suggestion and mention black people you approve of.
@hlynkacg:
Think about that statement for a little bit.
(Me trying an experiment): Why do you think I am specifically pointing this statement out?
no one likes wiggers
source: am one
oh, and hbc: would you do me and everyone else a solid and explain what you mean instead of doing your best Socrates impression? Thanks in advance~
@ AncientGeek
I just did, and you can add several of the guys I deployed with, a few co-workers, and two of the regular families in my church to that list if you like.
@HeelBearCub
I suspect that you’re taking issue with the fact that I feel the need to identify “the good ones” rather than treat everyone equally but I’d rather you just said so.
That said, if that is in fact your objection, my response is that in an argument between Rousseau and Hobbes I’m backing Hobbes. I hold that nastiness and brutality are the default, and that virtue is a choice.
@hlynkacg:
So the majority of white people are the “bad ones” as well?
@HeelBearCub
If only the line between good and evil were differentiated merely by skin color then civilization would be easy, but alas it cuts right through the human heart.
My very generic, broad brush model of the Blue Tribe is that they only assign moral agency to white people. An evil white person is evil by choice. An “evil” non-white would have been good if only he hadn’t been driven to evil by whites. For instance, finding the phrase “the good ones” problematic indicates you think they’re all good ones. Is there any race that’s all good ones? Would be nice to have a cheat sheet for good and evil by race.
Charles Murray wrote a whole book (Coming Apart) comparing the cultures of upper-class and lower-class whites and detailing the dysfunctional behaviors common in the latter group.
Glenn Beck spent a good year practically tongue-kissing photos of MLK on his show. Did that stop people from calling him racist? Trump trots out Herman Cain and black sheriff dude on a regular basis. Does that get him off the hook? For a non-political example, when the NBA stripped Donald Sterling of his ownership rights for the crime of saying racist things to his girlfriend (who was trying to extort him for cash) in private, people pointed out that Sterling chose to employ and pay millions of dollars to a black head coach. Did that matter?
Hell, using the phrase “but I have black friends” is now, in popular usage, taken as a positive sign of racism.
A lot of this comes down to the fact that there is no way to prove what’s inside your heart. So suppose you are a US elected official who goes to church every Sunday with your family, and I accuse you of secretly being a witch. You might say “wait, that doesn’t make sense, I go to church every Sunday,” but I’ll simply respond that of course you do–that’s how you hide the fact that you’re a witch. Similarly, a lack of any previous involvement in witchcraft doesn’t prove anything–any sensible witch would avoid such things. Even impassioned speeches in opposition to witchcraft and a full-throated demand that the laws against witch burning be repealed may merely be ways you seek to shield yourself from suspicion.
For people inclined to believe that you’re a witch, almost any evidence that you offer that no, you’re a Methoidist won’t be convincing. We have a worked example of this with Obama, who had substantial numbers of non-crazy, non-stupid people speculating that he was secretly a Muslim, despite all kinds of evidence to the contrary (years of consistent membership in a Christian church, raising his kids as Christians, drinking, etc.). It kinda sounded plausible to people who wanted to believe ill of him and considered “secret Muslim” to be something disqualifying for a preseident, and they had little reason to think critically about it.
I think the racism accusation has a lot of the same dynamics. (It reminds me a bit of an accusation or rumor that someone was gay, in my youth.) We’re talking about stuff hidden inside your heart, that you’d be ashamed to admit. So all kinds of evidence you offer to the contrary might just be a smoke screen you set up to insulate yourself from the charge of racism. I mean, yes, you associate with a lot of blacks, and hire some for important jobs in your organization. But clearly, that’s just to insulate yourself from the charges of racism we all know are true.
This is amplified in media outrage fests, where there’s absolutely no incentive for anyone in on the feeding frenzy to back up and try to honestly evaluate the accusation, or think through anything. That’s not a good way to get clicks!
@ HeelBearCub
People, you, me, everyone, are a bunch of strategically shaved murder-monkeys. The issue is finding monkeys you’d like to share a pen with.
ETA: …and who’d like to share a pen with you.
Are all forms of that argument bad? How about “homosexuals bad, because more likely to commit suicide” versus “homosexuals more likely to suicide, therefore persecuted”.
Men are much more likely to successfully commit suicide than women. Are men persecuted? Obviously not, their suicides are driven by toxic masculinity and patriarchal culture! (/Sarcasm)
The problem isn’t that all forms of “discrimination can drive bad behaviors” are bad arguments, it’s that they tend to get applied very selectively. There’s the old saw about how if all the markers where men have it worse than women (more in prison, lower scholastic achievement, more suicides, shorter life expectancy, more deaths at work/in warfare…) were applied to a racial minority, there’d be outrage at the obvious discrimination. It’s got a grain of truth to it.
I think you mean that they get applied self-servingly. Selecting for correct causal arrows, moral relevance, etc is just getting things right.
But the causal arrows are fuzzy and possibly unknowable, and “moral relevance” is subjective. The answer to “are you bad because of persecution, or are you persecuted because you are bad” is usually going to be “some of both”. Assigning all the blame to the one of the other is I think “selective” in the sense I was using it. But sure, self-servingly works too.
So what is your point? Stop using any argument of this type? One tribe is entitled to , but the other isn’t? Struggle on with trying to get it right?
You’re asking me to assert an absolute when my whole intent was to show this is a bad form of argument to assert absolutes about.
“Discrimination can both cause, and be caused by, bad traits” is not a bad form of argument.
But “Group A is full of bad people, as evidenced their bad traits, it’s okay to discriminate against them. Group B has similar bad traits too, but that’s understandable because they’ve been discriminated against, so don’t discriminate against them” is a bad form of argument.
In other words, it’s the inconsistency itself that is the bad form.
Why doesn’t that amount to “Struggle on with trying to get it right”?
“
Red: “Oh yeah? Let me tell you about Muslims and Mexicans…”
I mean, that claim is a no-win for Red.
And blues.
And the rationalist response is or at least should be to demand that people define what they mean by “racism”, and then explain why “racism” as it has just been defined is bad. A better approach is to taboo the word “racism” thus forcing people to make specific examples of behavior they find objectionable.
Fair ain’t got nothing to do with it.
Deserve
that too.
I normally would never print a “this article sucks” post – it’s rude and typically dull – but I was blown away last week. So I nominate this as the worst article I’ve read in, say, ten years. Ten is a nice round number: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/against-domesticity.
I challenge anyone to explain how she managed to work “neoliberal” into this piece and still get published. Hell, I challenge anyone to defend this thing. I would say this was a parody of how the hoi polloi view the Manhattan writer set, but if it is, CA hasn’t revealed the joke yet.
My eyes glaze over when I try to read that. TL;DR?
That’s a hard request – the article is all over the place. Maybe: “social media technology props up the patriarchy by erasing the difficult aspects of cooking, thus culturally insulting wealthy Manhattanites by suggesting it’s easy to make Thai soup”?
Thanks.
I don’t particularly understand what’s so damn hard about cooking, in the age when you can find recipes for just about anything you want to make. Sure, there are recipes which are labour-intensive (like Ruthenian pierogis), time-intensive (like European doughnuts), or requiring a modicum of dexterity/precision (like pancakes) or rare ingredients (like Breton beans) – but I’ve never had problems unless I strayed from following the instructions as given. Thai soup doesn’t seem excessively hard (ingredients may be hard to find in provincial places), certainly not more than Breton beans.
I don’t particularly understand what’s so damn hard about cooking, in the age when you can find recipes for just about anything you want to make.
Listen, I have two cooking methods:
(a) I boil it
(b) If I can’t boil it, it goes in the oven
That’s it. I can’t bake (even Yorkshire pudding goes tragically wrong) and my sister got the hand for pastry from my mother, not me. I can follow recipes just fine, it’s that it never turns out the way it’s supposed to (thank God for Delia Smith and her recipe for baking a ham for Christmas, that has saved my life and sanity so that instead of method (a) – boil on top of the cooker in a huge saucepan for five hours plus, I can safely and reliably use method (b) – stick it in the oven).
Cooking is an art as much as anything else, and some people are artists while others of us are “yeah just whitewash the fence and don’t get fancy about it” 🙂
I think Ms Frost is at about my level of culinary talent, but instead of accepting that and adapting to “okay so I can’t make my own Thai soup to my exacting standards”, she’s defensively huffy about it. It’s okay, sister, not everybody is good at everything! But I rather imagine she had a smug image of “housewives? well, aren’t they all dull conservative women who couldn’t cut it in the real world of work?” and she assumed that being a young clever urban professional she could automatically master anything she turned her hand to.
Except now she finds that no, she can’t cook but one of those dull domestic women she liked to vaguely pity can, and that rankles just a little (when talking about her Kentucky grandmother, she seems not to take into account that if you have nine kids and a house and farm to look after, something you can stick on the stove to simmer for six hours and then leave it alone without needing you to stand over it checking it, so you can get on with the rest of your work, is going to be the necessary way of cooking).
I have a friend that needed many attempts to actually make fried eggs His mistake was taking a giant frying pan for a tiny flame and then wondering why the heat wasn’t evenly spread out, his eggs partially burned. He was 20 at the time and had 4 years of cooking lessons in school.
I don’t get it either but some people seem to have anti-talent for cooking.
I once met a woman who insisted she couldn’t bake. Not even cakes or muffins. This woman is a chemistry major from MIT who was working in a lab. To this day I still can’t figure that one out.
You do realize this makes you an English stereotype, right?
Attention, interest, order of operations, substitutes, and expectations.
But can you execute the recipes? I’m an adequate cook, but it takes me ~50% longer than my mom to do basic recipes. She sort of waves her knife at things, and they fall apart. I can’t do that, and I’m not great at stirring two things on the stove while mixing a third. Someone who wasn’t taught anything is going to have to work even harder to get results.
I believe some people are so traumatized by their early failures that they just decide they’re bad cooks and don’t try again. My sister started a fire trying to make instant mac and cheese and hasn’t stepped foot in a kitchen since.
If you can read, you can cook.
I like cooking and am reasonably good at it; however, I could understand complaints from those who do not and are not (and those two, of course, go together; I do have a hard time, however, understanding the “can’t boil water or make toast” level of cooking incompetence which exists, and it is a little hard for me to square being interested in food, but not interested in cooking, though obviously the two don’t have to go together).
Cooking is time consuming: first you have to buy the ingredients, then you have to cook, then after you eat, you have to do the dishes. This is why, even liking cooking as I do, I almost never cook anything elaborate if only cooking for myself; doesn’t feel worth the effort and no one to help do the dishes.
Cooking can be cheap, but only if you know what you’re doing and aren’t attempting to use Mario Batali’s recipe which calls for squid ink, stinging nettles, and saffron. Though one can find cookbooks which include tasty, cheap, healthful, easy-to-make recipes, they are in the minority of cookbooks. Knowing which cookbooks those are itself takes experience.
A little bit of training from someone who knows what they’re doing in e.g. knife skills goes a long way, but a lot of other cooking skills are pretty specific. Can you wrap a dolma? It doesn’t seem very hard to me, but I couldn’t teach my father to do it to save his life.
As for that thing people have where they can either cook without a recipe or cook without slavishly following the recipe, that also just comes from experience. For example, when I first started cooking Indian food, I would very carefully measure out 1 tsp. mustard seeds, 1/2 tsp cardamom powder, etc. because I had no idea what function these mystery ingredients were actually playing in the recipe. Once I had enough experience with these to know which flavors which spices were actually imparting, I could much more successfully improvise and/or play fast and loose with the recipe.
I can cook, I have worked in a few kitchens and bakeries, and have been cooking for my family for the past 8 years. I can wander into my kitchen and rummage through what we happen to have around and produce a good meal without a recipe and frequently without any real measuring tools and just eyeballing (and using whatever pre packaged sizes I started with lke a can of tomatoes).
Cooking isn’t just following a recipe. Either I or my wife make oatmeal for our kids 5 days a week, we do almost the same thing every morning, with the same brand of oats, the same amount of milk, with frozen berries, salt and cinnamon. If you put me in front of a different stove (especially gas vs my electric) or ask me to double the recipe there is a decent chance it burns at least a little to the bottom of the pan (in either of these scenarios I am probably short on sleep due to traveling or visitors so there is that as well). This happens despite having literally cooked oatmeal (super easy) a thousand times.
When you open a recipe there are lots of standardized parts, for example 1 cup of whole milk should translate across virtually every kitchen. However lots and lots of recipes call for non standardized measures, or non intuitive measures, and other semi vague directions. For example
2 small/medium/large eggs
a sprig of rosemary
cook on low/medium/high heat
stirring occasionally/often/frequently/constantly
beat until its the consistency of (pick unclear adjective here)
mix until it coats the back of the spoon
If someone says “if you can read you can cook” they are forgetting that there aren’t universal definitions for all these things, and don’t appreciate that they are fortunate that their personal understanding happens to mesh fairly closely to the average uses for cooks.
Lets take stirring as an example find a bad cook and as them to help you out by stirring something on the stove top, this is a non exhaustive list of things they can do poorly that will negatively effect the outcome.
1. Stirring to briskly (ie basically beating instead of stirring).
2. Stirring the center, or edges only, or stirring the center and the edges separately and not mixing between them.
3. Fiddling with the heat because it looks like it is cooking to fast/slow
4. Not fiddling with the heat when it is cooking to fast/slow
5. Pushing stuff around the pan without anything flipping over.
6. Not taking it off heat (if called for) to stir, or taking it off heat (when not called for) to stir
There are a lot of things in the kitchen that you can do a little wrong without realizing it. Using a medium instead of a large egg probably won’t ruin your recipe, but using the wrong size eggs, not beating until sufficiently “frothy”, not stirring fast enough or long enough as you pour it into hot milk, not removing the pan from heat while you do so, or not babying the mixture when you return it from heat can leave you will a subpar custard, making 2 or 3 of these mistakes will probably leave you with a total crap fest.
> this is a non exhaustive list of things they can do poorly that will negatively effect the outcome.
Two additions to the list, which I have both personally done:
– Not scraping the bottom and sides, and so allowing material that adheres to the bottom and sides to burn.
– Scraping the bottom and sides when they have already burned but the rest of the pot was salvageable.
Gold Jerry, pure gold. There probably deserves to be a separate category for mistakes which are fixable with X at time T, and mistakes that must be fixed with Y at time T+1 and cannot be fixed at time T+2.
I think a certain conflation between cooking and baking doesn’t help. Cooking is fairly forgiving of minor transgressions, and exact measure not so critical. Baking, on the other hand, isn’t.
But leaving that aside, being a good cook requires experience, which requires failure. Persevering in the face of failure is difficult, and in the case of cooking/baking, a far easier alternative is available, IE, restaurants, pre assembled meals, etc.
Given interest, I am certain I could teach anyone to cook. It’s the interest that is the problem.
onyomi, one more thing for possible difficulties with cooking: planning.
This is a part that some people hate, it’s one of the reasons that Blue Apron and the like have customers.
Not doing something that’s called for meets my definition of not being able to read, or at the very least not being willing to. Hopefully it’s obvious I didn’t mean that being able to read is sufficient to cook in the sense of being an Iron Chef contestant. But yes, anyone with literacy should be able to handle every recipe in a beginner’s cookbook on their first try. The only extra advice I’d have is to not serve anything to someone until you’ve tried it out on yourself a few times first.
I don’t cook, for several reasons.
– I was never taught to do so.
– Attempts to do so on my own were a lot of trouble, created a surprising mess, and yielded disappointing results.
– I don’t need to cook, since I can easily enough eat out once per day and choose non-cook options for the other two meals.
My grandpa passed down a pancake recipe which describes the proper consistency of the batter in terms of an obsolete motor oil grade. Also contains the delightful phrase “cook until done”.
I did manage to figure it out (though my sourdough starter still isn’t as good as his was), but it took some experimentation.
Ways to remove something from heat that sound plausible to some % of the population but are wrong
1. Turn off electric burner, leave pan on burner
2. Slide pan partially off burner
3. Move pan to burner that was on recently
4. Lift pan off burner 5-10 seconds later than it should have been.
5. Move pan to other surface, especially one that sucks the heat out.
For an experienced cook “remove from heat” means something specific (but also conditional on the next line). Remove from heat and stir for 5 mins means put the pan down somewhere else, or turn off the gas burner, and continue stirring. For scrambled eggs it means “lift a few inches off the burner, stir/scrape, replace on burner”.
Whether someone turns the burner off or simply lifts the pan is going to leave them with perfectly serviceable scrambled eggs. Again, I’m not talking about turning people into actual chefs.
All of these posts on the joys of cooking are making me really upset about my recent move.
My family just left NYC for the suburbs – well, it’s been almost a year already, Jesus – for all the usual reasons. On the whole, I’m super glad we did. Love owning a house more than an apartment, much better for the kids, etc. etc.
But my commute went from 10 minutes (if I took a cab) to an hour and a half in each direction. And I already work kind of long hours. A terrible outcome for several more important reasons, but for the purposes of this thread: I never get to cook anymore.
I love cooking, but getting home at 8-8:30 and starting to dice whatever ain’t happening. It really bums me out.
This might be another domino falling. After we left the city, my wife and I started to see the possibilities of life outside of it, and they’re pretty fucking great. And now we’re starting to question if we really need to keep working crazy hours just to live in the New York suburbs. Maybe New Hampshire or Maine or Montana or Virginia (you can tell I’ve never been to a lot of America) might be even better.
You just conceded the point, a bunch of directions can reasonably be interpreted several ways, the fact that one mistake in and off itself won’t ruin scrambled eggs* isn’t evidence for your position, it is a demonstration that the simplest of all recipes has some room for interpretation. Most simple dinner recipes are 3-4x as complex as scrambled eggs in terms of steps or ingredients.
* my 4 year old disagrees, he loves scrambled eggs and when I botched a batch in this way as a time saving effort while handling my 2 year old he refused to eat them. Everyone is a critic!
You do realize this makes you an English stereotype, right?
Why do you think there is no world-renowned British Isles cuisine? 🙂
As for the comments lower down about electric cookers and leaving pans on the heat, oh yeah. I was raised in a house with a gas cooker and we only switched to an electric cooker a few years back. Turn the gas ring off, the heat goes off immediately. Leave the pan sitting there, no problem about over-cooking or burning. Do the same with an electric cooker (particularly a ceramic hob) and big mistake 🙂
If by conceded the point you mean I admitted there are trivial disagreements over how to interpret something like “remove from heat” which in simple dishes will not effect the final quality of the meal anyway (my apologies to your 4 year old here), sure. I’d just argue that’s a pedantic point, and that it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who can follow simple directions can prepare a very good meal. The only real disagreement I can see here is over what counts as “cooking”. I think being able to make a handful of dishes fits the bill. Then again, I think memorizing a handful of chord progressions means you can play the guitar. It won’t impress anyone who is serious about the instrument, but it’s more than enough to entertain yourself and others.
Nope. I mean you have conceded the point that literacy alone isn’t enough to follow every, or even most, instructions for an inexperienced cook.
For homework define the terms cream, whip, beat, fold, mix, and stir in an easy to understand (for a complete novice) way. Then specify how you should alter your cooking time and technique for a gas vs electric range for 3 recipes that benefit from the explanation, and then a brief discussion on how to determine how hot your burners are on low, medium and high compared to what the average recipe writer experiences. We will leave adjustments for ambient temperature, humidity and elevation for next week.
Yes they will. My 4 year old notwithstanding crappy scrambled eggs (and still we are talking the absolute bottom of simple meals, half a step above making toast from pre sliced bread) quickly become cold and crappy scrambled eggs after you push them around with your fork for a few mins.
Expectations also matter, people with no experience cooking usually eat consistently (if consistently bad) cooking at take out joints, large chains or from their grocer’s freezer. Putting in any amount of time and effort and having the result come out worse than that makes eating very unappealing.
One reason cooking might be a harder skill for an autodidact to learn than might be expected is that failing *really* sucks. Not only did you fail—which feels bad enough by itself—your ingredients are spoiled, you’re still hungry, *and* you have to clean everything up. It’s a triple whammy of suck.
Beginner mistakes are usually less punishing.
Thai soup’s easy. Vietnamese soup, on the the other hand, is very hard, or at least very time-intensive.
I think it’s meant to be a amusing riff on “housework is annoying.” No doubt the author has a lot to say about Mondays as well, and cribs about half her essays from old “Cathy” cartoons.
The individual points don’t sync well, but I don’t think they’re intended to. It’s sort of an SJ Dave Barry writing purportedly funny observations, including:
– Hipsters who claim that domestic work is easy or fulfilling are annoying. (Cf. any comedy routine in the 90s that mentions Martha Stuart).
– Hipsters who claim that domestic work is easy or fulfilling are degrading the women of the past, who were martyred under the yoke of soul-crushing domestic chores. (I think meant mostly humorously).
– Domestic tasks are annoying.
I liked it. And the throwaway line bashing neoliberalism is mandatory for Current Affairs.
I found it amusing in a ‘smart, well read, somewhat tipsy person at a party going off on a weirdly passionate rant’ sort of way. Maybe the author would find that reaction even more offensive than yours. Donno.
It’s not even the worst I read today.
It’s even semi-correct if you strip away the nonsense: having to do labor is unpleasant to the lazy. Not sure how this is different for household labor vs paid labor or what makes this feminism.
The argument is presumably that neoliberalism has increased the pressure on laborers to work more efficiently, thus making paid labor less pleasant; which has resulted in people finding their happiness in the home.
The author is a commie, who is upset that the proletariat is not resisting effectively. A female Freddie deBoer, as it were.
It seems well suited for hate reading.
What made me initially hesitant to post this is that I LIKED that article you just linked to. I thought it was reasonably interesting and challenging; definitely well written. It’s not like I had something against her work going in.
But articles like the one I linked to just makes me go “ah, another one.” Another person who thinks they’re defending the proletariat from Park Slope by righteously complaining about problems no one else on earth would view as such (“Fathers get too much credit for child care and cooking!” What?). That topic’s been done to death, though, particularly at SSC and by better writers than me, so no need to revisit.
What struck me about this article, though, is it so confused. Just weird unfocused anger in search of a victim. I mean, CA just published “In Defense of Liking Things (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/in-defense-of-liking-things),” which seems to run directly counter to it.
I do understand the point though. Just like the article that I linked to, she is upset that people are prioritizing irrelevant things over effective activism. I suspect she thinks she is being clever/effective by packaging it this way for the current affairs audience (I’m not sure who that audience is, so she may be right, if it’s young women from Brooklyn).
Honestly, she seems like a bright youngster, with critical thinking ability, so with some more life experience and such, she might turn out well.
Very dull but hardly the worst in 10 years. It’s basically a rant on quaaludes, which misses the whole point of a rant. I suspect “neoliberal” got through because the editor’s eyes had glazed over by then; the only real question was whether it filled the ad-hole, and obviously it did.
I was going to object to this:
on the grounds that Whole Foods is a bit high end for the Soviets, but actually my local WF hot bar seems to always be down to nothing but asses and ends, so just add a long line for it and you’re there.
I was going to go off on the part about women and immigrants doing unappreciated highly skilled labor to feed people, pointing out that while cooking CAN be highly skilled labor, it often isn’t, especially when feeding large numbers of people cheaply. But the rest of the article pretty much sapped my will, so, meh.
Yeah, you’re missing some important nuances here. To begin with, all of Amber A’Lee Frost’s writing that I’ve seen is humorous and usually self-mocking in tone. Not to say the main argument isn’t sincere, but it’s supposed to sound a little crazy. I also think many of its points are quite sound: I find those time-lapse cooking videos seductive for making it look so easy, but *of course* it’s not always that easy in practice.
I don’t understand the indignation of commenters here at the statement that housework is real work, and that such work has usually been done by women. Which statement of fact do you dispute? (Chesterton, as I recall, said much the same thing, though he drew a different moral.)
I’m a satisfied Current Affairs subscriber, and have liked some of Frost’s work in the past, but I was not a big fan of this one. My major complaint was what felt like the shoe-horning of patriarchy/misogyny into it. I know she’s trying to be funny, but as you say, the main argument seems sincere.
Sure, the time-lapse cooking videos make it look easier than it is. But so do the image series posted online of DIY carpentry projects. Is that the misandristic suppression of the drudgery of traditionally masculine work? Or is it just that it’s boring to show 20 pictures of someone cutting up pieces of wood with a table saw, just like it’s boring to show a video where someone stands there chopping up greens for a minute straight.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If enjoying things is evil, people are just going to start thinking Sauron’s not quite that bad a guy.
Just a misunderstood champion of orc rights against the systematic oppression of non-humans by Gondor supremacists. I mean, they even call it “The White City,” how much more racist can you get?
There’s actually a book with this premise.
This has been an internet meme recently, though approached from the other side of the political spectrum.
A heroic Maia of the mind like Sauron would never succumb to the vice of altruism, not even on behalf of the orcs who are his allies against the second-handers and whim-worshippers who would deny him his rightful ownership of the Ring they could never create themselves. The 93-minute palantir speech in Athelas Shrugged spells it all out.
A novel written from the orc point of view.
I’m gonna join in the chorus of people saying this wasn’t that bad. The core of the article makes some good points and addresses a genuine issue in housekeeping. She’s exactly right about those Tasty videos – I’ll go ahead and lump those in with the Instagrams of twee “Bento-box” school lunches and precious bathroom decor. It all paints a euphoric, idealized picture of homemaking and it can be fun to look at, but absolutely dangerous for a schlub like me to start making comparisons, as I get up off my sagging couch and dump some chicken nuggets on my kid’s plate while I warm up a frozen pizza. It’s all fodder for the “Mommy Wars”, you know? And it does drive me crazy that all those cute blogs make it sound like it’s easy to have a home-cooked meal and a clean house in just 30 minutes a day! It’s not realistic, and people learning how to do this stuff for the first time had better be prepared to put in the work. Sure, find ways to make it fun if that works for you, but housework takes time, it takes effort, it takes planning and prep. There’s no getting around it. If I could afford a cleaning service I would jump all over it.
Agreed. I have no kids (hence a lot more free time than those who do). I love to cook (my wife does too) but generally avoid complex recipes except for special occasions. I have no talent for presentation (food, decor, or otherwise).
I get lots of compliments on my food, but even I get annoyed by the people that insist on bragging with “You don’t make your own pickles/pizza dough/bacon? But it’s so easy!” And I know how to do all those things, I just don’t want to bother. I try not to inflict that or worse on those without talent/experience/interest.
But pickles are so easy, my 4 year old makes his own pickles! All you need is water, salt, cucumbers and grape leaves.
Hmm? Oh, no I don’t know where they sell grape leaves, we have grapes in our garden, so I just go pick a few when we make pickles. I guess just plant some grapes in your yard and wait 2-3 years, then pickles!
Cooking is just another example of how there is no average.
You don’t buy grape leaves, you steal them from your neighbors.
And if you can’t get grape leaves, oak leaves (or any other leaves high in tannin) work just as well. You could probably even use wood chips, though don’t quote me on that.
Getting suitable cucumbers is harder. If you use the kind you typically get at the store and try to ferment them into pickles, you will get a mushy mess; you need pickling cucumbers, which are smaller, much firmer, and far harder to find.
Be careful with wood chips. A lot of the stuff that is used in landscaping is treated with nasty chemicals that you don’t want in your food. If you didn’t make the chips yourself out of a log, I’d stay away.
Homebrew stores sell food-safe oak cubes. Not sure if that would work, but it certainly has tannin.
There are also food-safe hardwood chips sold for use in smoking and barbecuing. I’ve got some of those that bought off Amazon I use for oak-aging homemade vinegar.
What role are the grape leaves playing? Natural yeasts? I use a live yoghurt starter with good results, but have grape vines on the front balcony, so am open to the possibility.
The grape leaves add tannin which inhibits an enzymatic reaction that would break down some of the cellular structure, in short they help the pickle stay crunchy and not go mushy.
They’re a source of tannins, which inhibit the pectinase enzyme which would otherwise break down one of the carbohydrates in the cucumber’s cell walls over the course of a long ferment. If you let the pectinase run rampant, you’ll wind up with soft pickles instead of crunchy.
I’ve seen recipes variously calling for grape leaves, oak leaves, horseradish leaves, a pinch of black tea leaves, or a splash of red wine as a source of tannin. I’ve also seen recipes that call for cutting off the blossom end of the cucumber, which is where most of the pectinase in the cucumbers is stored.
I see. Thanks to you both. I think I’m achieving something comparable by accelerating the ferment using the lactobacilus starter – certainly I get acceptable levels of crunch up to a couple of months later, after the ferment has completed. But perhaps I’m missing out on heretofore unknown levels of crunchiness. I’ll give it a try next time.
I don’t make my own pickles, but if I have to take sides between the people who make their own pickles and the people who are annoyed by it, then I’ll have to take the side of the makers.
Really, the issue is that (a) it is actually not that hard to make your own pickles and (b) the world is full of fulfilling things to do, so (c) it’s not easy to learn to make your own pickles AND become a proficient ballroom dancer AND learn to speak Russian AND have a successful career AND raise a family AND grow your own produce AND train a show dog AND make insightful webcomments, which is why I concentrate on that last thing to the exclusion of the others, as well as hygiene.
The people who say “hey, you should try making your own pickles, it’s easy!” are actually right, and they’re sharing something they enjoy, which puts them in the same good but mildly annoying place as the people who tell you that you need to travel more or take up bike riding or give up Diet Coke. They’re just sharing what works for them, and if you’re happy with your life, put it on the pile of “maybe I’ll try it someday,” along side ice fissure spelunking and sex trapezes.
I’ve tried making pickles, but they smelled off a bit and I was worried about contamination, so I haven’t tried it again.
Kimchi and sauerkraut are both easier than pickles and use the same basic process, so they might be worth trying first.
How can one be easier than the other? They are both just “put vegetables into salt water”–right?
Pickles are more sensitive to fermentation time, mostly. Whether you ferment sauerkraut for a week or a month, you’ll end up with perfectly good sauerkraut; whether you end up with good pickles depends on your tolerance for sourness in pickles and on the cucumbers you picked and on the amount of tannin in your solution.
Fermentation proceeds faster in higher ambient temperatures, so that matters too.
How would you know if the kimchi was spoiled?
(Actually I love it, but that was a gimme.)
We subscribed to Blue Apron this month, and they love “quick pickles” – basically 30 minutes or so soaked in vinegar and spices.
During the summer, my dad used to always have a big jar of pickled watermelon rinds in the fridge. Man, I loved those things – I’ll need to figure out how to do it.
let’s see:
Amber A’Lee Frost
Complains of misogyny
yeah, that’ll do it every time. I’ll never forget my first introduction to her – Freddie posted an article by her to prove sexism was real, and then the article contained no proof of sexism but rather proof of stupid behavior on her part. That’s also when I started to wonder if Freddie was honestly that thick on these issues, as opposed to pretending for progressive cred to enable his pushing of socialism.
Freddie seems honestly thick on racism/sexism/etc. AFAIK, he believes quite strongly in the SJ model of privilege.
You are both using a particularly non-standard version of “thick” which appears to mean “disagrees with me personally”.
Pretty sure that *is* the standard version.
@episcience
I mean: using obviously cherry picked evidence and based on circular logic.
I disagree on some matters with David Friedman, but he is not thick on the matters where we disagree, as the disagreement is at a high level of complexity. His wrongness nor my wrongness is obvious.
I think both Freddie and Amber would disagree with your characterisation of their views on racism and sexism. I thought part of the rationalist ethos was “steelmanning” opposing viewpoints, not dismissing views contrary to your own as idiotic or obviously wrong.
An accusation of circular logic or cherrypicked evidence cannot be agreed or disagreed with; it either is, or isn’t.
I’m willing to accept views contrary to my own. But Freddie’s and Amber’s are pretty idiotic. And this brings up the question: how, precisely, does one make a determination of idiocy while dodging your accusation? Beyond empirical falsehoods, what could warrant this accusation? Nothing? If so then I reject your paradigm and will continue to call “thick” anyone whom I deem worthy of the title.
@episcience
This argument makes no sense, as “steelmanning” is a truth-finding exercise. The idea is that many people are very poor advocates for their position and therefor, that you cannot conclude that their conclusions are wrong just because their arguments are wrong/inconsistent/etc. Instead, you try to fix their position by eliminating the wrong arguments, addressing the inconsistencies, try to find better evidence, etc; while trying to keep the original conclusions. If you can do so, then you can conclude that a solid defense of the position is possible. If not, you weaken the conclusions to something that can be rationally argued for, resulting in a more reasonable claim.
Steelmanning is not a defense of the reasoning ability of an advocate of an opposing viewpoint, but the opposite. You dismiss him/her as being incapable of making a good defense of a particular viewpoint, so you do that job better yourself.
To summarize, steelmanning is based on the assumption that people can honestly have very poor arguments for opposing viewpoints and thus is fully consistent with AnonYEmous’ claim that specific people honestly have have very poor arguments for their viewpoints.
I think you have this entirely inverted. Steelmanning is an attempt to get around your own cognitive biases and failures of reason. We’re strongly tempted to focus on the holes and weaknesses in arguments we don’t like, so we compensate by making a concerted and conscious effort to focus instead on their strongest argument.
@Jaskologist
I think that my description is very similar to yours, although mine is better (but I would say that).
The point of my description is also that you don’t reject an argument completely because it has issues. However, I disagree that you should merely focus on the strongest argument, because doing that puts you at the mercy of whatever cherry picking the other person did.
If your goal is actually truth-seeking, letting yourself fall victim to one of the main ways in which people are deceived is not productive.
It’s pretty rough. In particular this:
is untrue for almost all values of “burns”.
I think it’s basically “here’s a thing I (for the purposes of squeezing out an article to a deadline) don’t like, therefore I will analogise some of its aesthetic features to other things my audience and I don’t like.” without nay unifying central thesis.
So you get, “cooking is used to keep women in the house, which is terrible, and is also increasingly being done by men, which steals credit rightfully accruing to women, and is being made easier and more approachable, which undermines the significance of important female labour”.
I’m a bit surprised we didn’t get cultural appropriation into the mix. That feels like the easy way to go, but maybe it would have made it uncomfortable for her to enjoy and assess a Thai soup under any circumstances.
Also, sorry Julia Child, but champagne is a pretty terrible match with dessert. Have it with fried chicken!
This seemed pretty bad to me because it seems pretty demonstrably false. I’ve gotten a lot into cooking over the last couple of years, and all of the most applauded chefs/cookbooks/recipes in that time have been pretty complex. Kenji Alt-Lopez is one of the most popular chefs out there (his book The Food Lab is great) and he has a meatloaf recipe that is so complicated it inspired a 30 minute podcast.
I was reminded of articles like Stop Saying Learning to Code is Easy.
It’s not the same (the article I linked feels more constructive), but the general frustration with how demeaning “It’s easy” can feel translates across
This article’s posted a link in the subreddit, but I think this may be the more congenial venue.
I’m bringing up this article because, well, Klein is missing one crucial point and I think that point might be extremely instructive to the history of the last forty years or so.
See, unless I am seriously misremembering, the Oath Keepers are a bit misrepresentative when it comes to the militia movement. Most of the militia movement (Posse Comitatus, Sovereign Citizens et al) derive back to the John Birch Society and a few other groups that took the label Americanists back in the 1970s. Oath Keepers, however, is something of an outlier – they are fundamentally* a Christian Right organization. And that’s important to the general thrust of Klein’s argument, because by Klein’s schema the Christian Right’s original conception of liberty isn’t natural liberty – it’s hegemonic liberty (with Christ as the ultimate hegemon, of course), especially in the more elite and more Prosperity Gospel parts of the movement. Or to put it in the Albion’s Seed schema, the Christian Right is the largest Cavalier movement in modern America, and the only one with a mass following. (I doubt it’s a complete coincidence that the Christian Right really took off as a political force at about the point when the traditional Cavalier rationales stopped being acceptable in polite society, though other late 60s/early 70s social changes were also involved.)
(* – pun fully intended)
Now, there’s a reason I said original conception of liberty, and it’s the same reason I consider this distinction instructive: I think there’s been something of a fusion between the hegemonic and natural concepts of liberty, and while there’s elements of this dating back at least a century or three I think it’s gone into overdrive in the last 50 years or so driven on overlap between the far edges of the hegemonic liberty Christian Right and the natural liberty Americanists (the classic example of said overlap being, of course, the aforementioned Oath Keepers). That, in turn, might be one of the drivers of modern American polarization; I think there’s an argument to be made that this synthesis brought a bunch of relatively apolitical people with Borderer-ish ideals from the center into Red Tribe, at the cost of hollowing out the center. (I’m not even sure how much confidence I’d put in that argument being right – somewhere between 25% and 50%? – but spitballing here.)
(Aside: I wonder if a better phrasing of natural liberty would be “freedom to be left alone”.)
You have some kind of source for this? Everything I’ve seen suggests that they’re as secular as anybody. Here’s the article where Stewart Rhodes first published the idea for the organization. Here’s a mission statement of sorts on their official site. You’ll note that the only mention of religion is to explicitly rule out “acts of aggression against any person based on…religion…”, Christ is never invoked at all, and God is only invoked in direct quotation or reproduction of the official US government serviceman’s oath. (edit: God is also invoked in quotes/paraphrases of George Washington. Mea culpa. Still, pretty anodyne American civic deism stuff.). I’d link the wikipedia page for more of the same, but too many links tends to trip the spam filter. Hell, even the SPLC doesn’t characterize them as religious or religiously motivated–far-right extremists, but not Christian far-right extremists.
Herp derp, I am in fact apparently seriously misremembering; that’s what I get for posting before double-checking. Oath Keepers only date back to 2009 and I did most of my studying the Christian Right a year before that, that makes it extremely unlikely that they are the group I’m thinking of.
Double-checking, I was almost certainly thinking of the Promise Keepers and remembered the wrong name. Either that, or my screws crossed with Posse Comitatus, which is the militia movement with Christian Identity ties (I was remembering that Posse Comitatus was secular, which on review is definitely incorrect), but my understanding is that Christian Identity is distinct from the Christian Right and has its origins in the John Birch/Liberty Lobby circles.
I don’t think Promise Keepers were political. They may be “right wing christian” to the extent that every unabashedly hetero-normative gender segregated group is non-progressive, but they weren’t political, afaik.
I made the same mistake. 🙂
The bite I found too big to swallow was something else. Klein seems to be saying that once you grant that secession is morally justifiable, there’s no limit to secession and subsecession and subsubsecession except finally a war of all against all. Perhaps that’s true in theory, but one would imagine that in practice there would be many factors that limit it. A subgroup could finally be homogeneous enough that they substantially agree on most things, or on enough things to make the pain of even peaceful secession too great. A subgroup could finally be small enough that fear of neighboring subgroups would be enough of an incentive to voluntarily give up further division. And way at the other end of the process, a government could rule gently and even-handedly enough that most everybody buys in, whether they agree with everything or not.
It’s sort of the old security distinction between intentions and capabilities. I might firmly believe that I or my county or my state have the right to secede, without in any way being inclined to do so. (Did I say “might”? I nearly think I could strike that.)
That’s not to say everything’s rosy. The Oath-Keepers would not have codified their list of Orders They Will Not Obey unless it seemed to them they might be given such orders, and the list would not be controversial if there weren’t highly-placed people who are inclined to give such orders.
Maybe. Obviously there will be a lot of people who disagree with their commitment not to ‘disarm the American People’ or the one about secession, but I don’t think, for example, there are very many officials who are raring to blockade cities and ‘turn them into giant concentration camps.’ I think it’s pretty much expected that any government would be set against an internal group which supports secessionists, regardless of the morality of secession.*
I read Klein a little differently- I think he’s arguing that whether or not you grant the morality of any one secession, once you actually accepted that it would end up devolving down to individual levels, at which point the government would not function. You’re right that things never really devolve to the individual level, and that we’d have towns or states or clans, but there would be a trade-off. If the United States dissolved the federal government, there would be a serious sea change in power structures across the world.
*Frankly, it seems to me that the only OTWNOs that get issued regularly in America are the ones about warrant-less searches and confiscation of property without trial, which really seem to go unremarked upon by such groups.
I may be dim, but your summary sounds right to me, and it’s what I thought I was saying.
Absolutely. But that observation is one of the things that would make me reluctant to participate in a secession.
Klein seems to be saying that you have to choose between deeming any secession to be illegitimate or else resigning yourself to whatever devolution many levels of freely-chosen secession leads to. The third way, just, I don’t know, governing well so that nobody cares to secede, doesn’t seem to occur to him.
Maybe I’m just fighting the hypothetical here. If he’s asking me to choose between “California may not legitimately secede from the USA” and “Joe Schmo may legitimately secede from the Free Republic of Larkin Road of Mendocino”, I’m good with that. (I’d pick the latter.) But it seems as sterile as trolleycar problems.
Does Klein oppose the separation of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire as well?
Unless you support world government, there simply has to be some cut off point. You can’t say that all secession below the level you are comfortable with leads all the way to anarchy, but that the level you are comfortable with is stable, without supplying some fairly substantial reasoning as to why this is so. To say that secession is bad because it leads to further secession that leads to disfunction is simply not a quantifiable argument, because you have to address why already existing historical divisions haven’t inexorably broken all the way down to collapse. You have to decide where the scale economies lie. The question is totally about what size government needs to be to be functional, not about secession. That’s much more difficult than simply writing off secession as a solely destabilizing force.
At every scale of reality, phenomena that are comprised of competing forces have a size range they can operate in. Soap bubbles are found in a certain size range where they are stable for the longest periods, because their existence is a constant battle between gas pressure and surface tension. Stars only exist in a certain size range because without nuclear fusion it is not a star, and once you pile on enough mass to ignite, radiation pressure is in a constant fight against gravity. Once you go outside of these parameters a phase transition into something else occurs. (As an aside, does anyone know if any Marxists, particularly Lenin, ever adressed the “what size range can human society within government exist” question? This seems lurking implicitly in dialectical materialism – which is all about competing forces and how they produce “the transformation of quantity into quality” – but it all seems to be time based rather size based).
I’m not opposed to world government on principle, so there’s no inherent contradiction there.
But from a pure thought perspective, it’s not clear why if secession is acceptable, individual secession isn’t allowed. Certainly, in the counterfactual world where the mere existence of guns ensures that anyone has the ability to freely determine their own destiny (defending themselves against tyranny from any external sources), there’s no reason why an individual couldn’t “secede” and hole themselves up in a remote cabin, pay no taxes, and threaten to shoot anyone who comes near. Or do something more disruptive.
Obviously, in a practical sense there are real limits, but the majority seem to be the ordinary ones that all warlords struggle with.
As for the bit about the thirteen colonies, I can confidently say that had I been present, I would have much preferred any of the peace compromises proposed by Lord North or John Dickinson. With a long view of history, it doesn’t seem like Canada or Australia are markedly worse off for not rebelling (though of course things would have been very different were it not for the “shot heard round the world” pushing places like France towards democracy).
Part III will go up Monday June 26th.
@klein
But if you’re predicting that calls for secession lead to further secession movements down the chain, why doesn’t this work in the other direction? Forming the EU, for example, didn’t lead to an outbreak of serious movements for world governance. There are people who believe in world government, or world societies such as communists, but they are a marginalized minority much like the people who want everything to devolve down to the county sherrif level.
I don’t think this sort of a deontological rights model is the best one for predicting the downstream outcome of secession movements on further calls for secession. Usually a secession movement is only going to succeed when there are a large group of people with a particular grievance secession adresses. Further secession after that might no longer adress that grievance. Purely philosophical objections to being a part of any government at all don’t hold much sway at any time outside of a very very small group of people.
I think it does have an effect under certain constrained conditions, and say, Britain seceding from the European Union might empower the Scottish independence movement, but that’s not because of some abstract deontological desire to secede from larger governments, but due to pre-existing faultlines based on specific issues of grievance. For example, it’s very unlikely that Brexit would lead to an outbreak of county level nationalism, and in time lead to anarcho-capitalist revolts everywhere.
In the American context, the movement for state’s rights is similarly based on grievances that appear more abstract but probably have a more specific historical core to them. The simple fact is that state’s rights inside the context of the union has some weight among conservatives, whereas outright splitting the United States up into separate states does not, and going down to the county level being batshit insane to most people on the right. Maybe it should in the world of deontological consistency, but I don’t think this is what we’d actually see if the state’s rights movement was actually successful. The oathkeepers will probably be never more than a minority. They might even decline if further powers were transferred to the states.
Canada and Australia didn’t rebel, but they still left British rule in the end. Unless you are arguing that violent secession is what justifies a secession singularity, whereas peaceful democratic secession doesn’t.
I thought the deontological question was a relevant place to begin the discussion, as the question of “whether any secession is legitimate in theory” seems like a necessary prerequisite before we can examine the legitimacy of any particular movement.
Politics is just war by other methods, that no violence occurred does not change the question (any more than it would have if the USA decided to peacefully accept the existence of the CSA).
Obviously it’s not especially “useful” (yet), but I’m planning to get to that stuff in a big way later in the series.
Well, I’m keeping it bookmarked.
Topic: Security personnel behaviour.
Thesis: Their rudeness is largely counterproductive for their security systems’ goals (at least the nominal ones).
To be rude, in the sense of being insulting and contemptuous, is to cause stress without giving an acceptable reason. Stress wonderfully concentrates the mind. It focuses it on eliminating the cause of the stress. Since in the case of rudeness there is no conceivable cause in one’s own behaviour, the person stressed by the security officer
a) becomes keenly focused on understanding things like:
the police work, the policeman’s mindset, the exact way particular a operation of theirs is being run
b) develops a sizeable grudge against the police and some wider group of people to which they belong and which they serve. *
Generating (a) + (b) is something no security system should wish for (excepting some special cases). Generating (a) + (b) is also an indication of a conceptual systemic flaw, a strategic disaster.
* The above was just an abstraction of my own reactions to a couple of incidents, both slight & run-off-the-mill, with the police personnel of Central & Eastern Europe.
If this argument were an ocean liner, I’ve no idea what icebergs it could come across, I’ve no idea how far it could go, what space it could cover.
But I’m pretty sure it’s better than thoughtless placidity about security staff rudeness.
Eh, I thought the purpose was twofold:
1) To indulge in their power over you; they can be rude and you can do nothing about it
2) To provoke you into escalating the situation to the point where they can use violence, which again you can do nothing about.
Thinking while typing here, so this isn’t particularly coherent.
Law enforcement as a career appeals to a number of different types of people; some are the ‘protect and serve’ mindset, while others are of the ‘respect my authority’ mindset. Some law enforcement jobs are going to be better than others, with more pay or prestige but requiring more skills and effort to obtain, so there’s going to be some sorting with the best law enforcement officers (skill and effort, not necessarily mindset) being predominantly found at the jobs that require their skills.
At the top, the federal agents. If I recall right, at one point you required a degree in law or accounting to be a FBI agent. Below that, it’s a little murky; I can’t say if a NYPD detective is generally more prestigious than a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer. In most cases, I’d say that those trained (however loosely) to make arrests and carry a service weapon out-status glorified night watchmen who sit and monitor a metal detector day in and day out.
I think, at some level, that it’s good that society can find a productive use for people with the ‘respect my authority’ mindset, especially one where that mindset can be controlled. There are always people that want to ‘indulge in their power over others’, and they will always be drawn to jobs that let them carry that out.
I think the number of people that want to use violence against others is rather rare these days, especially in the ‘respect my authority’ mindset, and it’s a good thing we’ve bred that out. However, I think that the stresses inherent in that mindset, coupled with the fact that the TSA is staffed with people from the lower skills and effort end of the potential law enforcement distribution means that mistakes, rudeness and even violence is unavoidable.
It’s very true that the TSA has much lower recruiting standards than law enforcement or investigation agencies, but I think it’s hard to say how much of the negative press is due to that versus the fact that the TSA process umpteen bajillion people per day while most metal detector posts rarely have a queue.
In some sense, it’s a perfect storm.
Flying is stressful even without the security theater. The TSA has a lot higher chance to make a mistake than the security guy at your local courthouse due to the high stress, and the higher traffic means more opportunities to make a mistake. Further, a lot of people have flown, and have had to deal with the TSA’s indignities, meaning stories about TSA screw-ups are things people can identify with. For many people, the TSA is the only real security they have to deal with; I’ve worked at two jobs which required me to go through a metal detector every day, and I’m used to it. Someone that isn’t used to it, especially someone having to hustle kids with them, is a prime grounds for something going wrong.
At some level, it’s a companion to all those ‘jobs going away thanks to automation’ stories. We have a case where too many jobs seem to be defined by requirements unobtainable by a significant fraction of the workforce, especially unwritten requirements. It would be great to weed out the ‘respect my authority’ mindset people from taking jobs with law enforcement, but there’s no way to do that and if we did we wouldn’t have enough people interested in taking the jobs.
I also have SOME sympathy for the TSA, based on how most people just completely ignore them. Pay close attention to what people around you are doing. No matter how many times the TSA lady rudely yells “EVERYONE HAS TO TAKE THEIR SHOES OFF” my estimation is that up to 1/3 of people will still try and go through with their shoes on. No wonder they’re grouchy…
I have some sympathy for individual TSA workers, many of who are probably reasonably nice and responsible people. I have no sympathy for the organization.
They have set things up so that their employees get to go through my luggage when I am not present. That’s an obvious opportunity for both theft and vandalism. The simplest solution would be for the note they put in your suitcase saying they have searched it to include an ID number for the employee who did so. That way, if there were a lot of complaints about one employee, they could investigate.
The private organization that they subcontract security to at SFO does that. TSA, as of the last time I got such a note, doesn’t. The obvious explanation is that they don’t care if their employees rob or vandalize the luggage–perhaps even that they prefer not to know about it.
As some further support for that view, when it actually happened to me and I tried to report it to the local TSA office I called many times, never got anyone to answer, never got a call back.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable stance.
The TSA is sort of the ultimate nuisance; it’s annoying to deal with at the airport and you can’t really pretend that it’s in service of any real purpose, given how consistently it fails tests to measure how good it is at catching weapons. Heck, waiting in line at the DMV, I can at least tell myself that the whole system of licensing and registration serves some positive end.* The TSA just feels like the system forcing me to take my shoes off for the sake of annoying me.
The only other time I had problems at a checkpoint was when I took a trip to visit relatives in Canada. The border guards started by asking some pretty reasonable questions about weapons and contraband, then got weirdly fixated on the fact that we were planning to give the relatives a home-made quilt and kept asking for more details about it, staring at it suspiciously. Maybe they thought the quilt was worth enough to assess a gift tax or something.
*Honestly I have no idea if it does or not.
There’s a real problem in trying to evaluate the performance of someone you don’t want to deal with. What does a positive interaction with a police officer look like? Perhaps “I was speeding, but he let me off with a warning,” but in most cases, if you’re interacting with a police officer, it’s not a good thing and you’re not going to be in a mood to rate the officer’s behavior well even if he does nothing wrong.
The other side of the evaluation process is that any system that penalizes employees for poor performance based on evaluations by ‘customers’ (loosely used) incentivizes bad behavior by ‘customers’. An obvious example is tips; if you know your tip depends on tolerating a poor customer, you accept behavior you wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. The one time you can count on a poor evaluation is a dispute between the customer and the employee, even if the customer is at fault.
The TSA by its nature is victim of both problems. If they’re doing their job, you don’t notice them. Nobody wants to interact with the TSA, therefore almost any interaction is going to be regarded poorly. Any legitimate complaint is going to be lost in a sea of frustrated travelers that blame the TSA for something beyond it’s control, and the TSA’s reputation is in the sewer anyway, so there’s no reason to worry about customer service reputation.
Someone who was much better acquainted than I about getting into fistfights with strangers told me that the worst thing you can say to someone who is acting threatening is “I don’t want any trouble”. That always guarantees a fight.
This is because the type of person who would get into fights with strangers is always looking for weakness. If they find it, they are encouraged to lash out. Police always make sure to never project weakness for this reason. Some people would mistake politeness for weakness so most police are ruder than they need to be.
Some security personnel are trying to act like police in a situation that does not call for it.
There is certainly an aspect of that.
Between working in EMS and in the service industry I’ve had occasion to deal with quite a few belligerent drunks and the most reliable way to deescalate that sort of thing was to project calm.
Interesting! So if “I don’t want any trouble” is the worst thing to say, what’s the best?
Getting aggressive may work but also carries a significant risk of further escalation if you misjudge so I’d recommend against it unless you’re absolutely sure of your position.
As I said above IME the most reliable method of deescalation is to project calm confidence (even if you don’t feel it). More often than not they’re either trying to intimidate or get a rise out of you and if you don’t seem intimidated or risible they’ll either back off or switch tactics.
Just posting to say that I really like that use of “risible”.
What sort of things would one say while projecting calm?
Depends on the context, I’d say the main thing is you don’t want to be perceived as, weak or afraid, belligerent, contemptuous or indifferent. So acknowledge them, their apparent grievance, then offer a response that provides an out to deescalate.
An example from personal history: I’m leaving a bar when a large gentleman follows me outside and accuses me of stealing his girlfriend’s bag. Looking back it was kind of like a CRPG with the following options up on screen:
a) *panic and run*
b) “FUCK YOU I DIDN’T STEAL SHIT”
c) “Really? You think I look like someone who’d grab a knock-off Prada? As if.”
d) Looked at the bag I was holding, saw he was correct, apologized profusely, went in with him, gave it back to his girl, grabbed my bag which I’d left in the adjacent booth,wished them both a good night and went on with my life.
My guess is a-c would have ended badly, and I’m pretty sure the dude was expecting b, he was kinda confused by how I handled it as I recall. If d hadn’t been an option, maybe I would of offered to help him find it or think of who else might have grabbed it or some-such.
I would like to solicit the community for some career advice, if I may. A friend very recently brought to my attention the need for people to enter the field of cyber security, and the great number of high-paying jobs available in that field.
I’m in my early 30’s with an undergraduate degree in Finance, and I’ve worked in that field for years but I’m ready for a change. I’m reasonably intelligent, and I would say a little above average when it comes to meddling with computers and technology, but I have no coding/programming knowledge up to this point.
I like the idea of working in cyber security, but I also wonder if this is a field for the type of person who has been writing computer programs since their teen years, and I would be hopelessly over my head trying to get started now.
Does anyone here with related experience/knowledge have any advice?
I grew up as a programmer, and now I manage a team of developers. I need to consider security concerns all the time, and work closely with our Information Security department. So from that perspective…
The field of “computer stuff” has grown immense. When I was just starting out, in the mid-80s, it was small enough that one could imagine a person (maybe Wozniak) being so gifted as to know pretty much everything. That’s not the case anymore. The field has grown so much that to be of any value, one must concentrate on a relatively narrow aspect of it. One can’t really even be said to be “a programmer” anymore, because there are so many different disciplines involved. As a result, nobody’s got anything anywhere near the whole picture, at least in any detail, and they don’t have deep skills across many areas.
None of the security people I work with are programmers at all, nor are any of the programmers I work with security experts.
Being successful as a computer security expert is going to require (in my estimation) a surface understanding of programming and development methodologies. You’d also need some understanding of communication theory. Most significantly, how the layers of the modern networking stack work, in terms of how they’re accomplished in the various devices and software involved.
So no, there’s not particular requirement that you have significant programming experience. But there still is a goodly amount of very technical stuff that you’d need to learn to be effective.
Even then it was an illusion. Wozniak was a whiz at everything low level, but I don’t think he ever showed any talent at, say, databases; he didn’t write the upper levels of Apple DOS, for instance.
He did write Integer Basic, though.
Then he wrote the game Brickout, in Integer Basic.
(That kind of blew my mind when I learned it several years back: I knew he designed the hardware down to the chip level, and the video graphics system, and wrote the monitor, but I didn’t realize how high he went in the software.)
I don’t have related experience and knowledge, so I’m sorry to be the first person posting here.
But I CAN give you information gleaned just from being older than you and having gone through a major career change myself. I’ve got two points to keep in mind:
1. If this is something you want to do, or you think you want to do, jump right in. There is absolutely nothing on the face of your plan that looks concerning. It’s a good, reasonable plan; the only thing holding you back would be the fear of starting something new. https://xkcd.com/1768/. I suspect you’ll be glad you did.
2. The, I don’t know, general tenor of these times occasionally seems to suggest that “computer programming” is easy. At least that’s the impression I get every time I read something suggesting that we can help people whose careers have been offshored by “teaching them to code”. Judging by my friends in the industry, that’s not true. It’s like anything else – you’re going to go learn how to do it, and then you’re going to start with the simpler jobs and work your way up, learning more as you go. Nobody ever suggests that we handle unemployment by offering courses on building suspension bridges. The career you’re talking about is complicated, hard work. That’s why it pays well. I only mention this on the off chance that you think you’re going to jump in and start leading a team that designs security systems or something. Otherwise, don’t worry – you won’t be over your head, you’re plenty young enough to make this move, so get started and have fun!
This is a tangent and I hope not to hijack Alyosha’s query. But to stick in my two cents –
The task of coding to program computers really is easy, or at least it is for certain people. Nevertheless, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of really bad software out there.
The thing is that the coding is just the tip of the iceberg of software development. There are other facets to the process of developing software that are much more difficult. Two things in particular stand out in my mind.
First, before you even start to contemplate how you’re going to write the code, you must first determine exactly what the program is going to need to do. There’s a really significant engineering process involved here, optimally involving the determination and writing of requirements; investigating user interaction models to ensure usability; documentation; and testing. Unfortunately, most programmers get there either by studying computer science (which teaches the programming side involving symbolic logic, etc., but completely ignores the engineering side – although this picture is now improving somewhat); or through a certification program which, deals mainly with the pragmatics of writing workable code and less so on the engineering aspects.
Second, most development efforts are a team activity, extending over time through many successive releases. This demands an understanding of software lifecycle and development methodologies, that try to help us work together without stepping on each others’ feet; progress toward a goal as expeditiously as possible; and maintain quality as the system evolves. This is largely separate from the actual coding, and the best practices for all of it seem to evolve even more rapidly than artifacts like programming languages.
Computer security* is a huge area with a ton of niches. However, I’d say there are three general clusters based on the background and mindset of the people that dominate each. One of those clusters is formed around programmers including, but not limited to hackers. One around network and system administrators. The third is around those with accounting, legal, human resources, and physical security backgrounds.
In terms of trying to break in without a programming (and presumably with out admin) experience the third is probably the best bet. That’s the world of certs, and online masters degrees, and giant multinational consultant operations as employers (some in-house too). There’s certainly plenty of money in it, I know IT security auditors that do very well, but it seems kind of dull to me.
*Cyber to my ear connotes government or giant government contractor. Plus companies like Walmart.
I have a book recommendation. Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering, webbed for free. I really enjoyed reading it, even though security is only a peripheral interest and nothing to do with my job.
For a fun view into the programming-oriented part of computer security, you could do worse than trying out a CTF (capture-the-flag). The idea is that a vulnerable system of some sort is set up, and you are invited to try to find a way in. The flag-capturing comes in when experienced security folk race to see who can figure it out first, but CTFs are frequently left online to be completed later at your leisure. There are a number of CTFs that are designed as educational exercises. My first recommendation, picoCTF 2014, has unfortunately been taken offline due to funding constraints; I’m not sure whether picoCTF 2017 is still available, but you could try signing up to see. I scrolled back a bit in their twitter feed, and found a link to angstromCTF, which does still seem to be up.
My favourite CTF, and the only one I’ve had the patience to work through in its entirety, is microcorruption, which simulates a low-level device and asks you to hack it using carefully chosen passwords. The user interface is top notch, although it might be a bit much if you’ve never programmed before.
Your friend is correct, and no, in my experience you do not need a lifetime’s experience in programming to be a solid security analyst. Experience: 3 years at a security consultancy.
If you genuinely think you would enjoy it, I would point you toward application security (as opposed to information security). AppSec is basically all about composing your application the way that it should be. As an analyst, you could have a toolkit of 10 things and cover, probably 80% of AppSec problems. Actually, there’s a link for that. If you familiarized yourself with the OWASP top ten and could speak cogently to what to do about them, you’d acquit yourself well in any AppSec interview.
AppSec is a better path (I would say) because it’s more recent than infosec–which has been around as long as people have been trying to get into computers they weren’t supposed to be. InfoSec has become so robust and well managed (er… usually) that intruders have turned their attention from directly attacking the hardware and data (infosec) to instead try to dupe an application into accidentally divulging information or changing data.
My major caveat: talk to an appsec person. In my experience it includes a LOT of staring at obtuse application scans and trying to figure out what the scanner actually saw.
You probably don’t need to know programming for computer security work, but you might want to learn anyway–it’s a fun hobby. It may also give you an unfair advantage against other security people.
Gonna go ahead and advertise Agora again. It’s seeing a little bit of use now, so you can see what it looks like in practice. Any thoughts?
https://agora-2866.nodechef.com/
I hope this isn’t too controversial for the comments, and apologize in advance if it is.
—-
So let’s talk Islamic terrorism.
I’ve been thinking on this for a long time. The story doesn’t make sense.
The following statements are facts that I believe to be true and reliable:
* Islam is the motivating factor for the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks worldwide.
* Islamic terrorism poses a grave and urgent threat to the safety of the western world.
* The vast majority of Muslims (or possibly ‘Muslims in the western world’) are totally normal, happy, friendly, peaceful people, who want nothing to do with violence or terrorism.
* The powers that be are acting creepily Orwellian in their attempt to downplay the fact that this is Islamic terrorism, to the point that direct lies are routinely published in major media sources.
* Factions who are incredibly opposed to specifics of Islam, for weird inexplicable reasons, defend it. (eg. people who hate the patriarchy but support a philosophy that explicitly subordinates women).
And I think I can square these seemingly contradictory facts with the following:
“There are internal divisions in Islam, such that the violence is perpetrated by one faction, not the whole of it. The people who appear to be defending the violent faction are actually attempting to draw this distinction, and exonerate the other factions, but are very bad at it. The violent factions, on the other hand, are actively muddying these waters to smokescreen their actions”
To attempt to draw an analogy, it’s as if, say, (1) Calvinists started a global campaign of terrorism; (2) the Muslim world characterized this as “Christian terrorism” and started bringing consequences indiscriminately against all Christians; (3) factions friendly with Catholics tried to defend themselves but the best they could do is “this is not Christian terrorism” when it clearly is Calvinist terrorism (which is a branch of Christianity); and (4) the Calvinists actively muddied this distinction to confuse critics.
So now I would like to learn more about the specific internal distinctions within the Islamic faith and polities, so I can follow up on this hypothesis and better understand the scenario. I’ve tried to do some reading but it’s all sufficiently foreign to me. One thing that has started to come up a lot are Wahhabism and Salafism. These appear to be radical minority factions, similar to, say, hard line evangelical conservatives in the US. They appear to be NOT representative of the Islamic mainstream, but also appear to be fairly dangerous and actively responsible for much of the terrorism. These are some kind of highly politicized, hyper-conservative, hyper-authoritarian branches of Islam that are stoking the fires of nationalism powering things like ISIS.
Given that I was able to research this in about four hours on wikipedia, it’s really weird to me that nobody ever seems to make this distinction in the public conversation. Like, lots of people shout “Not All Muslims” but this never really comes across as reasonable or convincing when people hear terrorists talking about their Islamic faith. It would be really easy to say “Not All Muslims, just Salafists” or whatever on the end. It would help to make this distinction concrete in the minds of Westerners, and it might re-assure Muslim communities that they aren’t going to do their part to keep the peace, only to be turned on by overzealous white folks concerned with safety and security.
If I am correct and this small faction does pose a credible threat to the west, this might also help convince people of the necessity of defending ourselves appropriately. I imagine the thought process of most people on the left is something along the lines of “I know plenty of muslims and they are all great folks, they would never do this”. If you could show them that, no, actually people _*are*_ doing this, but we know it’s not your friends, and we are not going to retaliate against them for something they didn’t do, it might allow people to be more realistic about these things.
Anyways, these are my scattered thoughts on this subject, and any feedback (especially from people who are familiar with the details of this subject) would be muchly appreciated
I think that distinction is made fairly frequently and explicitly.
Here’s a Judiarcy Committee report from 2003 entitled: “TERRORISM: GROWING WAHHABI INFLUENCE IN THE UNITED STATES.”
From that report, Chuck Schumer (Democratic Senator from NY):
Googling Wahhabism + Terrorism, the first link is a Huffington Post article entitled “How Saudi Wahhabism is the fountainhead of Islamist Terrorism.”
Also on that page are pieces from PBS Frontline, New Statesman and a facebook group with 20,000 followers called Muslims against Wahhabism/Terrorism. There’s also an NYT article stating that the West has (wrongly) deemed Wahhabism as responsible for Muslim radicalization.
I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the terrorist attacks against the west were generally committed by people who were radicalized later in life and sought out militant sects.
When I read about these, the ‘standard’ story is: Muslim immigrants come to the UK to escape some regional conflict, or just go get higher wages. Their kids grow up culturally Muslim and feel separate from the UK mainstream culture. Europe has high youth unemployment in general, and especially for children-of-immigrants.
As a result, the kids and their peer group hold a certain amount of resentment for the UK. Eventually, they start returning to Islam out of a desire to reclaim a sense of identity. At that point, they kids are looking for people who appear to both ‘authentic’ (read: conservative) and critical of the west.
If this is true, then there’s a sense in which we could blame the ISIS-specific sects. But it’s not really people who are born into those small fractions who are the threat.
Instead, there’d be a large number of people who aren’t personally members of the zealous sects but see those sects as people who are devoting a large and sincere amount of energy into Islam as a religion.
It would be similar to how the median Calvanist would be moderate in his personal life. But, deep down, they’d recognize that their moderate pastor is making practical compromises. They might not want to follow a strong fire-and-brimstone preacher. But they’d respect what the person is doing.
This would make it very hard to single out one group as ‘the bad ones’.
This is more or less correct.
Except there is another aspect involving the middle east. A number of Gulf states, most notably, but not only, Saudi Arabia, have a lot of Muslims who got rich through basically no effort on their part besides living at the right time in the right place that happens to contain oil. Contrast this with the economic situation in the rest of the Islamic world. As such I suspect they feel vaguely guilty about this, and just as the stereotypical “limousine liberal” supports radical socialists “over there” to assuage his guilt, these rich Muslims support radical clerics in the west to assuage their guilt. Thus the imam in the mosque the ordinary Muslims go to is likely to be radical as is the imam at every other mosque in the neighborhood.
@Drew:
The median homegrown (born in Europe or wherever) terrorist seems to be a guy who feels both disconnected to whatever European culture it is and to the culture of his ancestry. So he responds by adopting a really extreme form of Islam.
I’m not sure what you mean by this exactly. Does it mean a grave an urgent threat to the safety of each and every individual in the western world? Most of them? A grave and urgent threat to the continued existence of the nations of the western world in their current forms? Something else?
Regarding Islamic terror as an existential threat was all the rage 15 years ago.
When it came to nuclear attacks and dirty bombs, we were told “Not ‘if’, but ‘when’.”
“When” never came, and the losses were deemed acceptable, so we moved on to other things.
Nobody’s nuked a city (yet), so that’s good. On the other hand, we now have de facto and sometimes de jure prohibitions against blaspheming Islam in nearly all Western countries. There are different kinds of existential threats.
Was the actual explicit de jure prohibition against blaspheming Christianity (and only Christianity) an existential threat in the UK before 2008? What about the current similar law in Greece? Does application of Germany’s blasphemy law to Christians constitute an existential threat, or is it only a problem when used in service of Islam?
Always factor the opposition to a thing in as part of the threat of the thing. Part of the threat of Islamic terrorism is the inevitable and slowly growing recourse to something fascist-like as a solution, since nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
The fact that terrorism kills comparitively few people compared to other things is a fact that has by now, time and time again, empirically been shown weak as a way to deconvert anti-Islamic radicals. They yet persist, and grow more radical over time. Aesthetics are what attracts people towards movements like Islam, and it’s also what attracts people to movements like National Socialism. There is a radicalizing nationalism along with a radicalizing Islam. A unilateral solution where only the nationalists disarm won’t work, so there has to be some multilateral solution that adresses the problems of both parties without invoking oppression of either side as a solution. Difficult.
Terrorism is an existential threat because if you get enough terror attacks for a long enough period of time, you gradually break down people’s faith in the prevailing system. It feels like a betrayal. Then at some point you need a trigger, a moment where you get so many terror attacks in a row, or some image, something so heinous that you can ratchet the right up to the next level of radicalization. We’ve already been through several periods of “stepping up”, and at some point if not literally fascism, then at least a fauxcism near enough awaits. First you start getting white nationalist lone wolf attacks, as we’ve seen, and then in turn this creates more Islamic terrorism, and then you’ve got something like a low level civil war going.
Whether you think that’s rational or reasonable is irrelevent, the only things that matter are what the masses of the right think, and where we are in terms of mass radicalization, and tit for tat attacks. The moment you start getting nationalist attacks tit for tat with Islamic attacks, we’re already on a road to a dark place.
The alt-right simply didn’t exist back in 2010 in a way that would allow it to be name dropped by a Presidential candidate as a rising threat. Even on SSC, we have a fair few commenters floating mass deportation and executing the imams of radical mosques and so on. The fact that an ostensibly rationalist place like SSC that would have leaned progressive in the ’00s now has commenters espousing positions that would have got you censure on conservative websites back then, must be some evidence in the “holy shit, the right is radicalizing” pile. Throw Trump on there too.
This is the real threat of a radicalized minority group launching psychologically jarring attacks on the majority group. About half of every society seems to be right wing, and that side of the majority group is getting all the more ready to launch some attacks of its own, whether terroristically or politically.
The number of deaths isn’t the critical factor. On one end of the scale you have de-politicized deaths from car crashes and so on, and on the other you have Franz Ferdinand. How many deaths of what form can the system survive?
The very fact that the left is desperately trying to cool the right down about Islam is part of Islamic terrorism being a problem. The lack of realisation of this stems from the delusion that the right can be cooled down by the use of statistics on death rates. No, you have to offer a different solution, or you’ve got nothing, and this will simply continue. It’s a failed tactic. It’s a dud. It’s not going to convince anyone save a tiny tiny rational minority of people.
@Wency
Deemed acceptable by whom? Who’s “we” here?
That is really an excellent analysis.
Two things that generally accepted to be true about terrorism are:
1. The [game end goal] object of terror is to break the compact of protection between the government and the governed. Islamic Terrorists are saying, “see your government cant protect you” to their target population. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written something on this, and he is working it out through the medium of the Black Panther comic over the last year. I can see if I can find the reference if anyone is interested…I think it was the Atlantic.
2. Terrorism works. The sans-culottes were terrorists, the American revolutionaries were terrorists. I think you made that point in a comment upthread. We need to make a distinction between islamic terrorism and the sort of general principles of terrorism. The end goal of Islamic Terrorists is a world ending storm that pits all the believers against the non-believers.
The very fact that the left is desperately trying to cool the right down about Islam is part of Islamic terrorism being a problem
That isnt really why the Left is doing that. Its more that the Left knows that RW attacks on muslims play right into islamic terrorists goals. Of course islamic terrorism is part of Islam. In complexity science, we use the analog of the human body to model complex social systems. Jihad is in the DNA of the Quran. What type of jihad gets expressed depends on what the environmental triggers are. A complexity science solution would be to change the environment.
That is why the left pushes the idea of stop bombing muslims on the other side of the world to force them to accept your preferred form of representative government. They are trying to change the environment that causes expression of the violent type of jihad.
By saying islamic terror isnt part of Islam, well they are doing that for the same reason Bush did…because if you are going to fight all the muslims in the world, and try to get them to stop reading Quran, you will fail. So the idea that somehow there are these moderate muslims that are going to follow a version of Quran that US wants to push…wont work in the current environment.
“Deemed acceptable by whom? Who’s ‘we’ here?”
Collectively, by Western societies. Or if you want to name people, take the mayor of London, and the culture that led him to tell people to “get used to it”.
If you think the West’s response has been proportionate to a threat it imagines to be existential, then the West either doesn’t much care if it ceases to exist (plausible), or it’s had an utter failure of imagination. The UK took sterner measures to defeat the IRA. If we wanted to be draconian, we could perhaps have held Islamic immigration steady after 9/11 instead of allowing it to increase, for example.
While it’s true that Islam is contributing to a reaction among certain members of the Western right, I’d argue that events like the Rotherham rapes and cover-up are more influential than Islamic terrorism per se, at least among the intellectual right. Terrorist attacks may influence the mainstream more, since they receive far more media attention than other sorts of transgressions, and because it’s more politically acceptable to complain about terrorism (as the Rotherham cover-up demonstrates).
I thought your summary was excellent, and your list of “foundational claims” serves the discussion well.
The move from “Islam is the problem” to “Salafism/Wahabism is the problem” is a necessary but insufficient step in the right direction, in my view. What we are interested in w.r.t minimising harm from terrorism is identifying specific beliefs which motivate specific behaviours, which in this case are 1) Martyrdom and 2) Jihad. These beliefs are nested within Islam, as outlined in the Qu’ran and it’s supporting texts, and are central to the ‘practice’ of Salafism.
There are ISIS-inspired terrorists who know nothing about Islam, have emigrated to the middle east from rich western countries, who have no cultural upbringing in the Muslim world – they are simply attracted to the doctrines of martrydom and jihad. So they effectively come into the system at the lowest level of nesting, completely ignorant of Salafism/Wahabism above them and Islam above that.
So when Majid Nawaz gets on twitter to criticise western liberal schmucks denouncing “terrorism” in the wake of [insert recent muslim terrorism episode], this is what he is getting at. Denouncing terrorism is trivial. Identifying and debasing the specific beliefs responsible for motivating violent action is what’s necessary.
Okfine.
If “salafi-wahhabism” is the problem, why isnt Trump doing anything about it?
Conservatives should actually pay close attention to this constructed adaptive invasive strategy as a model for “Taking Back America”.
Obama’s game theoretic strategy was “Let’s you and him fight” (KSA v Iran).
Our current President just put his thumb on the scales for KSA in the Qatar crisis.
Read the posts you reply to. I said the specific beliefs of martyrdom and jihad are the problem, since they motivate violence.
As Nancy points out below – it’s possible to be a Salafist and not be part of the immediate problem of terroristic violence.
Denounce the specific motivating beliefs, not the classifications.
If I can believe what I hear on the BBC, it’s not even all Salafists. There are quietist Salafists who believe they should stay out of all politics. I think they don’t even vote.
I thought the quiet Salafists just didn’t think now was the right time for the Caliphate. So they’re all for what ISIS is doing, just not yet guys.
Two points:
One, the Wahhabi sect, while small, is exceedingly influential due to their ties to the house of Saud, which controls both the money inflow from the Saudi oil sales and access to Mecca. Wikipedia contains numbers that suggest that some 90% of funding for Islamic religious causes is Wahhabi.
Two, it’s not just the Wahhabi sect. The US has had a beef with Iran for a while. Hezbollah has carried out a number of attacks against the West, some of which have been outside the Middle East.
Central problems:
a) being able to tell apart non-terrorist inclined Muslims from terrorist-inclined Muslims before they do anything,
b) free press fanning sectarian violence by its very existence.
If you mix those with Muslim immigration, you are reliably going to have a civil war on your hands at some point, or decades-to-centuries long unrest issues in the best case.
As one data point against the hypothesis that the Democrats were hacked more during the election, not because there was any preference in targeting, but because the Republicans are better at keeping their data safe: the RNC kept their voter database, containing information on 198 million potential voters, in a publicly accessible AWS bucket. Oops.
What does that have to do with the security of email accounts?
Come off it, dude. There’s more to infosec than emails. PII is not a joke. From TFA:
There are certainly arguments that could be had here, but your out-of-hand dismissal is decidedly non-constructive.
The non-security of the database is troubling. However, Iain’s connecting of that to the hacking of the DNC was just political snark. One can have secure email hosting (the things that were being targeted by the hackers) while having a wide open voter database that nobody knew about or bothered to attack.
Eh, I disagree. I think it was presented fairly rationally. Additional evidence relevant to previous discussion. As I perceived it, the closest that came to snark is “Oops” and even that’s low-key (and appropriate) enough that I assumed I was just being oversensitive due to Iain’s status as a Prominent SSC L*.
Highly doubtful they were the only things. Both a successful breach and turning up material worth leaking is required to make the news. So we haven’t heard much about failed attempts or successful breaches that only revealed e.g. catering plans.
Security Through Obscurity is no excuse. If somebody had found it during the campaign and wanted to use it, they could have. You can argue it’s not as big a deal as the email server (and I’d probably agree) or that really we should not be surprised at shit infosec from all big orgs (and I’d still agree), but neither of those absolves this of being a Major Fuckup.
I do not think it is unreasonable to suspect that an organization’s attention to security in one area is correlated with its attention to security in other areas.
Podesta’s emails were hacked not because of an insecure email system, but because he was the target of a phishing attack — that is to say, social engineering. If you manage to build an organization that is not susceptible to phishing, you do so by having an extremely robust security culture, with dedicated security people poking around looking for problems. If you are leaving your databases full of PII unsecured, then maybe you need more security people poking around.
In particular, the Podesta phishing attach succeeded due to an incompetent IT security person, who mixed up “legitmate” and “not legitimate” in his response. That’s likely to show up elsewhere in an IT security scheme.
Also, as I’ve pointed out before, at least some RNC emails were hacked, just not leaked for some reason. Apparently, none of them enjoyed Pizza.
link text
What was in this database that the GOP needs to protect from leaking?
If it’s just raw voter analytics of the sort that you get when you throw a bit of money at a Big Data firm and say “give me voter analytics”, then they’ve still got their copy to work from, the Democrats presumably already have an equivalent, and it’s not like either of them care if a copy falls into Libertarian hands. Unless there’s some legal liability, for the PII release, it’s just going to come down to outsiders lobbing “Ha ha your infosec sucks!” snark, and I doubt that’s going to hurt them significantly.
If, on the other hand, the data has already been processed in a way that infers details of the GOP’s strategic planning, that could hurt. But I haven’t seen any indication of that – and if the data was found by someone who doesn’t like the GOP, I kind of would expect something like “…and here we see the GOP is courting the White Racist Vote!” to have leaked by now. Perhaps the data was found only by people who don’t like the GOP but were too ethical to peek and so settled for the less damaging attack.
Whether or not your infosec sucks, depends not so much on how impenetrable your email system is, but how good you are at segregating the stuff that absolutely must be protected from that which merely should be.
@John Schilling:
Okay, but pdbarnsley also just posted evidence that older RNC emails were also hacked. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, there is still no evidence for “the RNC had better infosec” beyond the mere fact that the Russians didn’t leak anything.
This kind of micro-targeting data is precisely the sort of thing that the Republicans want to keep secure. In terms of political decision-making: the Democrats absolutely have their own version of this database, but that doesn’t mean this one wouldn’t have been tremendously valuable to them. Parties put a lot of effort into making sure that their voter databases are more accurate than those of their opponents. In a broader sense, this kind of data is a potential treasure-trove for criminals looking to engage in some good old identity theft. You shouldn’t be able to do anything with only the information contained in this database, but the sad reality is that lots of important institutions have terrible security.
No rational security team is going to draw a line and intentionally put this stuff on the insecure side of it.
It feels like people are clutching at straws here in an attempt to sustain belief in a proposition that was never particularly well-supported in the first place. By far the most parsimonious explanation is that, like most large organizations, the RNC has slipshod security practices, and can be penetrated by a sufficiently dedicated attacker. The burden of proof is on people who would like to claim otherwise.
To a first order, assume everybody’s email is hacked. If the Republican email contains things like “Here’s a pointer to the data dump with our raw analytics; if you need the processed version with the strategy stuff stop by my office” and the Democratic email contains things like “Here’s our master plan to make sure Those Idiot Berniebros don’t ruin things for us”, then the RNC has better infosec.
But my question is whether “micro-targeting data” is a proper description of what was left unprotected. A map, or a map with cross-hairs printed on it?
If it’s just the map, the Democrats aren’t going to learn anything from it, they aren’t going to trust it enough to use it themselves, and while I don’t doubt that there are cybercriminals out there who would find it of value I also don’t think either political party really cares as long as they aren’t liable for it.
Okay, but what is your evidence that this is the case? Do you honestly believe that nobody working for the RNC ever wrote an email critical of Trump? I see no reason to believe that Republican staffers are categorically more security-minded than Democratic staffers, or that they never ever say anything that could potentially be spun as damaging.
Bear in mind that the vast majority of the DNC’s emails were precisely the sort of bland pablum that you put in the mouths of the RNC. The bar here is not just being in the habit of keeping your emails inoffensive. The bar is ensuring that every single email that ever crosses RNC servers cannot be twisted by a hostile opposition and a drama-hungry media to look bad. That is an extraordinary claim, and demands extraordinary evidence, not just “well, it seems plausible”.
The bar is somewhat higher than “somebody working for the RNC wrote an email critical of Trump”; on the DNC side you had top-level executives calling Sanders a liar and suggesting a political attack on his religious beliefs.
Maybe there was equivalent behavior on the RNC side, but I think that’s something you would need to provide evidence for. Right now, your argument seems to be. “We know the DNC did something election-losingly stupid; obviously the RNC must have done things just as stupid but everybody who found out about it is covering it up because they are pro-Republican conspirators, so stop calling the DNC stupid”.
Source? The best I can come up with is this email, which is about Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager, in relation to claims about the Nevada convention that Politifact rated as false.
As for the atheism thing: here is the entirety of that email chain. Please excuse me while I fetch my smelling salts. One guy said a dumb thing to three other people, one of whom had the audacity to reply with “amen”? What an unprecedented outrage!
If you want to characterize those emails as “election-losingly stupid”, or confidently assert that nobody at the RNC would ever say anything remotely similar about Trump, I really don’t know what I can say. As far as I’m concerned, the odds that everybody at the RNC took Trump completely seriously from day 1, and never said a single nasty thing about him, are essentially nil.
My argument is as follows. We know the DNC’s private communications contained statements that opened them up to political attack. We knew this even before the leak. This is because the DNC is an organization made up of people who say things, and given a sufficiently large sample of things being said, it is inevitable that some of them are going to open you up to attack.
The RNC, incidentally, is also an organization made up of people who say things.
If we accept, as you say, that to a first order everybody’s emails have been hacked, there are two possibilities:
a) Nobody who managed to get their hands on the RNC’s emails decided to release them.
b) The RNC has somehow found a magical, 100% foolproof way to prevent any of its staffers from ever saying a dumb thing in an email.
Option A seems very plausible to me. It is, after all, the status quo in most elections.
Option B strains the bounds of credibility. In the absence of any sort of affirmative evidence — say, RNC employee handbooks laying out detailed expectations for email content — I don’t understand what would cause anybody to prefer Option B. (Well, “motivated reasoning” is one possibility, but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.)
(I just spent a couple minutes on Google looking for any evidence that the RNC had particularly good infosec. I didn’t find any, but I did find this account of one email security technique that was not enabled by the DNC, RNC, or Trump campaign, but was used by the Clinton campaign. This is, again, not dispositive — but it certainly doesn’t strengthen the case for above-average infosec practices at the RNC.)
The RNC is a different entity than Deep Root Analytics, which was the firm hired by the RNC that was responsible for the insecure data.
The DNC allowed themselves to be hacked. I say “allowed” because FBI called them multiple times to warn them they were under attack, but they thought it was a prank call and did not act on it. Later, they also refused to let the FBI investigate the servers to determine the culprit and relied on a private company named CrowdStrike instead.
I don’t see what the RNC could have done to prevent this besides hiring a different firm. The breaches are not comparable.
Ask in the request for contract that bidders disclose the result of their SOC 2 compliance audit.
So on 6/17 Scott posted a link about a correlation between higher education and brain tumors. That reminded me of this research showing that thinking appears to cause DNA strand breaks in mouse neurons. (Summaries here and here.)
It sure seems like brain cells somehow use DNA to store state, possibly using one of the epigenetic mechanisms we discovered recently. And then perhaps a primary function of sleep is to repair the DNA damage? Maybe.
That’s a surprisingly contentious assertion among electrophysiologists of my acquaintance.
A later study, Activity-Induced DNA Breaks Govern the Expression of Neuronal Early-Response Genes, found that the DNA strand breaks pretty much all happened in the promoters of a small set of early-response genes and helped them be expressed faster. The DNA breaks are repaired within a maximum of 2 hours.
So the connection you noticed between learning, DNA strand breaks, and tumors probably has something to it – surely there’s always some increased cancer risk when you start breaking DNA strands? – but it looks like the strand breaks aren’t being used to store state. They’re being used to help speed up learning. (And then quickly being returned to normal.) If I’m reading this part correctly:
…they’re hypothesizing that the DNA is being cut in order to free it from the chromatin loops that keep it nicely organized but slow down access to it. Neurons are cutting through the usual procedures for DNA access in order to speed up the job.
Good find, BTW. I enjoyed digging into that!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. For computer-science oriented people, there’s always a temptation to think about DNA as a sequence, rather than as a physical object which has a structure. The idea that the DNA strand breaks might result from changing the DNA structure to express genes faster or differently did not even occur to me.
I’ve read a few other papers and summaries that seem to suggest that DNA methylation is important to how the brain functions. For example this article goes so far as to say that “DNA epigenetic marks are crucial for cognitive functions.”
Is it widely accepted that neurons store state via methylation or other epigenetic changes? The Bender and Weber article seems to imply that it is, but I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of it.
Interesting, but I’m not sure if it could explain the tumor thing. Don’t brain tumors usually grow from glial cells? Can neurons become cancerous in the adult brain?
Distinguished readers, commenters, lurkers and others of Slate Star Codex!
Further to an entanglement I have gotten into regarding bintchaos and their perception that I was threatening them personally, either directly or by implication, to doxx, harass and generally out them via an attempt to locate universities offering a course in socio-physics, I wish to appeal to a jury of my peers!
I promise, upon my solemn word of honour (and if that is not sufficient I am willing to take an oath compatible with my religion) that if a simple majority (e.g. if ten people respond, four say “no I did not think you meant that” and six say “yes I did think that”, then the six are deemed to win) respond to the question: Did you think, perceive, or take it to be meant that Deiseach intended to doxx or otherwise harass bintchaos by talking about what universities they might be attending for a course on socio-physics, then I will voluntarily absent myself and abstain from commenting on this site for a period of four weeks, commencing with the end of the vote.
Anyone who wants to say “yes you were” or “no you weren’t”, please reply to this. I’ll give it a couple of days.
I think bintchaos is being over-sensitive (and frankly, I think they’re not entirely honest in their allegations of being genuinely terrified by the hatred I’m spewing at them) but I recognise and admit that I may be under-sensitive to how I come across and may be more aggressive in tone than I intend to be. Intention doesn’t count so although I wasn’t trying to doxx bintchaos (and don’t even know how to do that even if I wanted to), what matters is if I sounded as though that were what I was doing.
I’m serious. This is a matter of honour with me: I have been accused of a scandalous behaviour that I personally consider cowardly and dishonorable, and so I must answer this charge as best I can, and trial by jury will have to suffice.
Yes or no, and four weeks’ guaranteed silence from me if “yes” wins. Start voting now!
No, but making a big to-do of it makes me wonder if a few weeks’ cooloff would not be such a bad idea.
No. It may have been a bit further than you should have gone, but there was a fairly obvious inference that could have been drawn from the information you posted, and you didn’t even attempt to hint at it.
I am inclined to agree with Gobbobobble. While I do not think you meant any actual harm I do feel that your interactions with Bintchaos have been unnecessarily antagonistic. I see no need for “four weeks’ guaranteed silence” but I would urge you to simply disengage from her and perhaps take a few days to cool off.
This is also a friendly reminder that your perfectly welcome to join us in the Naval Gazing or Cooking threads. 😉
Edit: Might I also suggest that an apology may be in order at a later date but that for moment discretion is the better part of valor.
Might I also suggest that an apology may be in order at a later date but that for moment discretion is the better part of valor.
I’m too steamed right now to offer a sincere apology. I will try to get into a charitable and repentant frame of mind and get myself to a point where I can do so, without mentally tacking on (“and….” not so charitable sentiments).
If bintchaos wants to stick around and engage with everyone else while I’m engaging in “silence, exile and cunning” and is prepared to accept an apology when I’m back, then that’s probably a good time to do it.
I have a conflict of interest, since I enjoy your posts, but I’ll take a look and vote as honestly as possible.
Without reading the posts in question, my first thought is (a) you know whether you intended to threaten to doxx the other person; (b) they know whether they interpreted you to be doing so. It’s possible that either of you are lying, but isn’t the whole situation best resolved by “I apologize if you understood me to be threatening to doxx you – I assure you that wasn’t what I intended to express and that I would not have done so.”?
No, you didn’t intend to doxx, unless you are Moriarty from the Sherlock revival.
That said, bintchaos has said before that she isn’t confident in her ability to read context, so I’d probably just leave it at that rather than pile on. I find your forthrightness refreshing and charming, but you and bintchaos probably aren’t a very productive mix in large quantities.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ssc-block/omoblondlbpljpjpegjknicfhoicjfnk?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog
I can’t speak to your interactions with user bintchaos because I made wise use of this Chrome add-on. Use it yourself, and soon you will be able to say the same thing!
…seriously, user bintchaos pretty much confirmed that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t care to find out because it would be too hard. If you want to engage with his perspective, there are plenty of places you can find it, but why bother?
My reaction to Bintchaos’ comment was that she was paranoid–nothing you posted implied any desire to dox her or organize an online mob against her.
I didn’t bother to say so, both because I’m arguably biased and because she seemed to be announcing her departure.
Well, if we are to have a jury, we should have the opportunity to debate.
The instructions from the judge indicated the question we should answer is:
I submit that Deiseach did intend to “otherwise harass” the complainant. It is not required that the question of doxxing be answered in the affirmative for the jury to return a guilty verdict.
Less cleverly, I think it’s pretty clear you were attempting to antagonize bintchaos and disparage the seriousness of the academic field they chose to highlight. Had the location of study been Cambridge or Oxford, I don’t think you would have referenced it. So I do see the reference to geography as a part of “otherwise harass”.
Fair points.
On the other hand, I do think the geography was at least somewhat relevant. Bintchaos was talking in a difficult-to-understand manner about a field that none of us understood very well, and claiming that strong conclusions could be drawn from it. This isn’t necessarily proof that the field is useless/irrelevant, and one part of doing due diligence on this is looking at who else may believe this field/be doing work there. When the sum total of apparent academic work is two universities which are not particularly prominent, this is relevant information.
I think you are now using “harass” in a sense weak enough so that many posters, Bintchaos among them, would be guilty of harassment. There is a large difference between “trying to make someone you are arguing with look bad” and “trying to organize an online mob attack on someone you are arguing with.
By your definition, wasn’t Bintchaos’ post accusing Deiseach a clearer case of harassment than Deiseach’s post?
Go read everything Deiseach posted to bintchaos and examine the pattern. It’s not merely one comment that establishes the harassment.
I would say bintchaos could be read as (generally) insulting, but not harassing. More in a casual manner based on assumptions she is making about the competence of her interlocutors. As to her response to Deiseach’s “doxxing” post, I really don’t see how you get harassment from that.
Can you expand on the distinction? I would have said that Deiseach was insulting to Bintchaos.
Doxing people and organizing internet flash mobs against them are forms of behavior that most people here strongly disapprove of. Confidently claiming that someone else is doing so when she isn’t looks like an attempt to get other people angry at her, which is what I thought was considered harassment in this context.
@David Friedman:
So, I am going off of a sense of meaning that maps with the dictionary definitions:
– subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation.
– make repeated small-scale attacks on (an enemy).
All of those things seem to match what D did, but, if bint was pressuring or intimidating it was defensive (it could also simply have been genuine).
D was aggressively and repeatedly specifically targeting bint. Not so the other way around.
Given: I was raised in a bubble of wealth and privilege that I completely understand. I had a graduated set of welsh ponies growing up (section A, section B, section C). My ponies all had fucking permanent cards if you know what that means. I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club. So how do you think my parents or my university would feel if I’m exposed as an “Islamist apologist” on the inter-webs?
But I also perfectly understand what stalking is. I have been stalked. So I get @Deiseach subtly implied threat at a visceral level, fight or fight level.
The very worst thing about stalking imho is how you question yourself…it must be my fault somehow…should I have been nicer…should I have been meaner…should I have ever made eye contact… should I have run away like a scalded cat in the beginning …did I draw this on myself…
This commentariat just validated my anxiety hormonal cascade.
“I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club. So how do you think my parents or my university would feel if I’m exposed as an “Islamist apologist” on the inter-webs?”
Is this a joke?
If not, I don’t imagine that it’d be any worse than for anyone else, and maybe better?
@Mark
Maybe it wouldn’t be…but it might because I’m a defector from a very rich and powerful tribe.
Not a convert.
@bintchaos
If you’re really worried about being doxxed, I’d suggest that you don’t give details like ” I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club.” Being charitable, you’re freaking out over a speck Deiseach has placed in your eye after you’ve shoved a log there.
@Bean
good advice probably.
I have to admit that one thing D said that really stung was something about my privileged bubble upbringing– that was just the first thing that came to hand. Its incredible the investiture in equestrian sport for the kids of the well-off. What would be great for American culture would be for every child to have a pet, to have exposure to nature, exposure to training and manners and honor and discipline. And I’m not just in the meritocratic bubble due to ancestry, I’m also in the bubble of what Dr. Haier and others call “genetic luck” for IQ and g.
Would you guys call that white guilt?
@bintchaos
You’re wandering off-topic. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not going to do anything to improve your reputation, which could use a bit of polish at this point.
HBC said earlier that the high-status act here is to explain something clearly, the highest-status being to do so so clearly that people change their mind. I have many political disagreements with HBC, but on this, he is spot-on.
So, if you want to start to earn status here, my advice:
Pick one topic. Something non-political that you like and know a lot about. For me, that’s battleships. For you, maybe hunting and Welsh ponies. Write something on it, that someone who has been on a horse once (me) can enjoy. Do your absolute best to make it comprehensible and accurate. You are trying to make people understand, not to impress them with how smart you are. Post it. Answer any questions, and be polite. Keep doing this until it’s become a habit to write to make people understand. Over time, you can venture into more political topics as you learn to express yourself clearly.
(And whatever you do, don’t attempt to do this with a topic you don’t really understand. I’m still dubious of your claims of expertise in several areas, and doing this is a good way to expose any gaps in your knowledge, because you’re throwing away the ability to hide them by being difficult to understand.)
@Bint
Maybe it’s time to pack it up and stop digging?
Someone from the upbringing you describe, of all people, should understand that if you have to tell people that you have high IQ, g, class, taste, style, etc, you probably don’t.
So perhaps try using that high g to avoid being ridiculous, rather than just telling people about it.
Status as a Smart Cookie, worried about personal security, continuing to give personally identifiable details: pick no more than two.
I’m just going to repeat what I said before I put that ass on hide: bint, until you’re willing to grow politically, you’re not going to do well when discussing political topics.
This isn’t even just about you being wrong – it’s about you being dime-a-dozen. I can find the “reality has a liberal bias” perspective wherever I want it. The SSC perspectives aren’t quite as rarified as some might think, but they’re certainly harder to find than yours. So why bother?
@ AnonYEmous
You’re not helping.
I’m offering good advice in an unpalatable way. If bint can’t take it, that’s honestly fine by me. If he takes it, great!
But the bottom line is that, until he stops it with that attitude, or at least starts learning to cloak it, he will not fit into the political conversation, no matter how much respect he gets for posting about battleships or whatever. At best people will just ignore it out of courtesy.
Unpalatable advice is rarely taken even when it’s good, which suggests to me that offering advice was not the primary purpose of your post.
Like I said, not helping.
@AnonYEmous
I concur with hlynkacg that your comments are unhelpful, and in fact less productive than anything bintchaos has posted. Calling her “he” is childish and petty, and trying to gatekeep which political perspectives people post is pretentious.
Personally, I like bintchaos’ comments (and I say that despite having had a long argument with her previously). If you find them worthless, I think that is due to your mindset not their content.
eh
I had a comment all written out, but on reflection this really is meaningless. I’m going to cease engaging entirely, as I had planned to before Deiseach’s comment. If you enjoy engaging with user bintchaos, I urge you to continue, or not as you desire.
I agree that that describes Deiseach’s rhetorical stance towards Bintchaos. It wasn’t the meaning I was thinking of.
Bintchaos makes repeated small-scale attacks on her enemies too, but I’m not sure any of the targets are present, although she may think they are. Thus she has repeatedly attacked high IQ conservatives for what she sees as their failure to educate low IQ conservatives, which seems to mostly mean their failure to join the left-wing crusade against Trump, although issues such as evolution and climate are presumably mixed with that. I think she thinks I’m a conservative, although it’s hard to be sure.
I interpreted Bintchaos’ charge, pretty much out of the blue, that Deiseach was trying to dox her and raise a mob against her as an attempt to intimidate Deiseach. I gather your view is that it wasn’t aggressive because Bintchaos really believed she was being attacked.
That’s possible, but given the past record, in particular the point when she made two demonstrably false statements about the evidence she had linked to and, called on them, made no attempt to either defend what she had said or retract and apologize for error, I’m not willing to take her claims as gospel.
@David Friedman:
Both John Schilling:
and Trofim Lysenko:
brought up doxxing before @bintchaos did.
I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club.
Gosh darn it, and I have a pippin of a family anecdote about riding to hounds with the baronet! But the votes are in and the result is close, and I’m not going to reveal it save to say that I’m taking advice on board and will voluntarily absent myself from commenting for a bit and most importantly not engage with or about bintchaos.
Well, after this last comment. Radio silence for the rest of the month, at least.
(But dash it, I really want to tell that story about my grandfather and Sir N- H-. No! The path of duty is a stern one! Resist!)
Bintchaos is not on trial. I find HBC’s argument compelling, and vote to convict Deiseach.
I dont want her convicted.
I just want her to acknowledge that the real reason she attacked me was because she looked stupid in front of her tribe on Ghazali.
Another thing I know about Mean Girls is when they cross a line (like doxxing) they immediately round up their posse of loyal tribalists to execute a public out-group shaming of the victim and absolve themselves of any ill intent.
I really do have a lot of personal experience with Mean Girls…they put me ahead a grade in 3rd grade and I’m a nerd by temperment and appearance.
Uhh…. And what if she denies this because it isn’t true? I re-read the relevant exchange, and I don’t see either of you coming out as looking particularly stupid. I’m not sure who is right, but I’m also totally ignorant of Islamic philosophy.
This board runs basically 100% nerd. You aren’t going to get much in the way of special status with things like this. (Yes, I was also gradeskipped.)
I’d like to voice my vote in dissent of this one on the grounds that (Especially in light of Bint’s directly previous comment here) this is exactly the type of status terrorism, provocation followed by claims of victimhood, and kafkatrapping that I want to see SSC avoid at all costs.
Bint, you’re not the outgroup at all, especially because of nerdiness. You’re being called out for making claims and refusing to back them up. Reference ‘Very Interesting’ last thread slow pitching you questions to demonstrate your competence, which you completely deflected. You’re transgressing by trying to be manipulative in casting this as a bully/victim situation, and people are pushing back.
I agree with Deiseach on approximately nothing at the object level, but object very strongly to someone trying to paint her as some kind of queen bee highschool mean girl in a bid for sympathy after she called you on your bullshit. I have even less tolerance for preemptively framing anyone who disapproves of this tactic as tribally circling wagons. Please take these shenanigans elsewhere.
Seconding Barely matters.
@bean
yeah, but I bet you didn’t have social anxiety disorder when everyone else got breasts.
D called me an incoherent philosopher based on {apparently} her reading of Ghazali’s title and her misunderstanding that Ghazali rejected logic and reason. I corrected her. Qays corrected her. Then she launched three attack comments at me including the first one where she said Ghazali would align with christians today. Which would never happen if you have read ANY of Ghazali’s works. And her next two comments were personal attacks on me, and I only learned about her creeping on my blog later.
Why would I want to comment here? You win.
@Barelymatters
“Very Interesting” was obviously a one-off sock puppet intent on “outing me” as a Dr. Hsu stealth commenter with evil intent.
So I cant comment at Steve Hsu’s blog anymore either.
And yet, here you are…proving my prediction.
You are actually attacking me while defending D and casting her as blameless. She is not innocent.
All she had to do was google Social Physics. Or google psychohistory if she hadn’t read Asimov either.
Try it.
One more thing guys.
And I really believe this is true.
@bintchaos
There is a wide space between “blameless” and “Mean Girl” caricature.
If you intend to stick around, some hopefully-more-friendly-than-exasperated advice: read up on Cromwell’s Rule. Dial back the condescension, let your ideas stand on their own merits, be willing to acknowledge a point here and there, and you just might convince some people of a few things.
@bintchaos
No, mostly because I’m a guy. I was also the 2nd shortest person in my 8th grade class. I didn’t get social anxiety disorder from that, either, but that’s beside the point. You’ve tried to play several cards to get sympathy/victim points, including Aspergers and ‘growing up nerd’. These are all things which are common here, and trying to use them to get special status is just going to make you look ridiculous.
I don’t care about the object-level dispute you claim set it off. I read it over, and didn’t see a clear winner either way, and I’m a lot more like the audience she’d be playing to than you are. And I flatly reject the claim that what she did was doxxing or otherwise a clear violation of rules. It was at most impolite under our norms, and those are norms you’ve been violating left and right.
I have done my absolute best, both as a Christian and a rational member here, to be polite to you. I don’t want you out, although I would appreciate it if you’d respect the board norms, such as not trying to play victimization games and focusing more on comprehensibility and clear communication.
Thirding. And don’t feed utility monsters. bint may claim to be very upset, but shouldn’t get special deference for that.
Hence the user name?
Part of it, yes. There’s another joke, but I can’t explain it without breaking pseudonymity.
Pseudonymity is important. You never know if some little bastard is trying to dox you and foil your assassination schemes.
Fortunately this handle is foolproof.
@Bint
I’m “proving your prediction” because you’ve preemptively cast any disagreement with you on this matter as *insert negative caricature here*. That’s exactly what I’m objecting to when I mention Kafkatrapping. Cut it out.
Had the location of study been Cambridge or Oxford, I don’t think you would have referenced it.
No, I would indeed have done so. In fact, I was going to say “Well, okay, Princeton and Harvard offer courses in this, so it’s legit” but then I saw that they were not currently offering such courses (they did social physics back in the day, I can’t remember what the dates were but certainly not “I am studying this now in 2017”).
Mentioning BYU and Warsaw was not trying to say “and these podunk outfits are the only ones dumb enough to think this is worthwhile”, it was meant to be humorous “bintchaos could be commenting from Poland! Or Utah! (Or Australia, Antarctica, the Moon, Mars, you get the drift)”.
Please do me that much credit for honesty in an argument, and if you can’t, then I ask you to at least allow that in our exchanges where we have been at loggerheads, I have not pulled the “Why is this big, rough man being so mean and horrid to me?” stunt, and that is the last critical word I will utter about bintchaos.
Deiseach, I don’t think you’re trying to doxx, but now that people have pointed out that bintchaos values her pseudonymity and that posting details has the potential to identify her, I do think it would be appropriate to treat identifying information with caution.
So I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose, but I do think you should quit doing it.
If the edit window is still open, recommend you remove the names.
You guys are making this way too complicated.
D just went to bitch-slap me/ “slang a bottle upside my head” because she tried to reference “Incoherence of the Philosophers” to call me an “incoherent philosopher” without having a nanowafer of knowledge about al_Ghazali and got her bigself called out for it.
Do you honestly think I haven’t been bitch-slapped by a bigger, stronger, older, more popular Mean Girl before? I’m a nerd! I’m used to that. It was the segue into stalking/creeping on my blog and the exposed naked hatred that scared me.
Then SSC circled the wagons.
end of story.
And you’re still circling the wagons.
If SSC supports a duty to believe the most schoolgirlish accuser, SSC will spend all its time rehashing The Prime of Miss Jean Bintchaos. Or Miss Deiseach. Anyone think they will find a Welsh Pony under this pile?
What Deiseach has been expressing towards you isn’t hatred, it’s contempt. Both negative emotions, but different ones.
It is probably both…but I’m not scared by contempt like I am by hatred…
Still, I think I can tell a Mean Girl when I see one at this point.
All due respect, David, but you have no relevant experience to base your judgement on.
OTOH now that I understand your attitude towards me wasn’t witchtesting but an honest search for data you hoped I might have on islamic jurisprudence. I apologize.
I misjudged you.
So you once said to me that if I claim to be a witch I should expect to be tested!
hahahah
I get it.
Four days cooling down might be good for your mental health, and an apology good for your relations with bintchaos, but that’s up to you. All I saw, and all I called you out on, was a minor unintentional foul in the heat of an argument and no harm done unless someone pursues the matter further. The calling-out was to ensure that such pursuit could not happen except by overt malice, which I think is rare here and which I didn’t see from you.
Yes, you were trying to otherwise harass bintchaos (at the very least, it is reasonable for bintchaos to feel harassed). Bintchaos had expressed concern about keeping her academic and family life as private as possible from the personal life in a thread you replied to. After that, you read through her blog, find an old reference to a textbook, research what schools it is linked to, and post the names of the schools without seeming to make a point (e.g. it would have read quite differently if you had cited the schools to show that she was lying about her field of study).
I believe the clear and sincere intent was to show that the field of study was one not highly regarded by the academic community at large on account of having been taken up only by a handful of third-rate universities. Absent the (not unreasonable from the other side) perception of doxxing, the obvious path for the discussion to follow would have been whether the same field was being pursued elsewhere under a different name, or with different textbooks, or whether there were concentrations of true academic excellence at those normally unremarkable schools.
post the names of the schools without seeming to make a point
Okay, I accept – looking back on it – that I shouldn’t have mentioned the name of the schools. I was trying to find out if socio-physics was a real thing and by Googling found a site giving lists of universities where socio-physics or social physics were taught, and those two were the only universities (on that site) currently offering such courses.
I meant it to be a light-hearted throwaway line but bintchaos seems to have taken it as an attempt to track them down and then do something to cause them harm personally or in their reputation. Ouch. Well, that joke died on its arse!
This isn’t how people ask genuine questions. It can be how people signal “More attention, please!”. So: Here you go, I guess.
I phrased it like that to show that I am taking this seriously. bintchaos accused me of trying to doxx them and claims to be frightened of, and threatened by, me. I take that as seriously as an accusation that I stole their money or smashed in the windshield of their car.
This is not a “ha ha only joking guys” offer, it’s genuine and sincerely meant. Unless we are to take it that bintchaos is only tossing chaff about and claims of feeling afraid/being triggered/attempts at harassment are part and parcel of The Discourse, so they need no more be responded to than “I saw you with the Martians in that flying saucer last night stealing cattle”, then I have to take their assertions seriously and respond to them in kind.
It is a matter of my honour. I am making a solemn promise and I intend to abide by it: if people in the majority think that was, or could be interpreted as, an attempt at doxxing or harassment by threat, then I will take my lumps. Else, people can accuse anyone on here of anything they like, and repeat elsewhere that “The SSC crowd do this, that and the other”, and it’s a free-for-all in the slander stakes.
My reply in that thread would’ve been made some hours ago, but I am unable to post at work.
Deiseach, I didn’t take your posts to be threatening. However, I believe that we should take Bintchaos’ statements about her own emotional state as sincere, absent evidence to the contrary. Whether that says anything damning about your words or her ability to engage in the back and forth of online debate is left to the interpretation of individuals.
So, that said, I think that you were definitely venting spleen. Not hatred, but certainly pique, and to someone unused or unequipped (whether by inclination or experience) to deal with that in an open and uncontrolled forum, that was probably hard to handle. I think at the very least the “I feel afraid/threatened” statement should be taken as a big red flashing TIME OUT on the discussion and a chance to let things settle, and I think that even if it wasn’t sincere it was thrown out as precisely that sort of signal because in certain sociopolitical circles that’s the ultimate rhetorical trump card.
I’m not going to tell you you need to take a personal time out, but I strongly recommend not replying to any more of Bintchaos’ posts for a very long time, even if they come back.
That said, if I was going to be uncharitable and take a hostile point of view towards your conduct, I would frame this very subthread as an attempt to leverage your popularity to shame and ostracize her and “win”. I won’t go so far as Skef does below, but it seems somewhat uncharitable. On the other hand, this blog doesn’t have any sort of private message system you could use to reach out to anyone here you trusted to -privately- ask “Hey, back me up here, am I being a dick?”, so I understand the desire for vindication of your conduct.
So, in summary, having rambled on, I think that you should:
A) not engage Bintchaos in any future posts for at least the next month or two or until she has somewhat acclimated to the climate of SSC, whichever is longer.
B) let -this- sub-thread die as well. You’ve heard from several regulars stating that they didn’t think you were being intentionally malicious. Take whatever comfort you need from that, and take the opinions about tone for what -they- are worth, too.
I enjoy your posts, and I value you as part of this commentariat, if that’s not too presumptuous for me to say given my own relatively brief time here, but this is an instance where discretion and forbearance are better going forward.
I would frame this very subthread as an attempt to leverage your popularity to shame and ostracize her and “win”.
Your point is apposite and only something that dawned on me afterwards. I do not want this to be a popularity contest or to come across as “regular trying to get noob kicked out”. I do want it to be an even-handed “is it reasonable to read this as an attempt at doxxing?” evaluation by third parties.
Plainly bintchaos and I can’t sort this out between us; I say “I wasn’t trying to doxx you”, they say “oh yes you were!”; they say “I feel scared of you”, I say “oh pull up your big girl panties and stop with the ‘poor little me’ act”. So for the sake of the site – so nobody can come around later on and say “Hey, I hear you guys like doxxing people!”, I don’t want to let this go as “And you see what that gang over at SSC are like – somebody tried to doxx me and nobody said or did anything about it!”
If the answer is a majority “yes, this reads like doxxing”, then I’ll abstain for four weeks and if there is any kickback, then people can point to “No, look, we made a decision and there was punishment” about it.
My vote is “no.” I like to think that in this house are many mansions.
No, but in your posts you come across as being upset at bintchaos, yet very invested, which is a poor combination that has IMO led to unproductive and unkind back-and-forths.
So I suggest you voluntarily abstain from commenting on the offending threads or to bintchaos if she comes back, for at least a week.
I definitely will stop engaging with bintchaos, as there seems to be nothing fruitful resulting from it and I get crotchety about what I perceive as them dancing around the question and then I verbally smack their knuckles.
Biting my tongue is good advice, thanks!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ssc-block/omoblondlbpljpjpegjknicfhoicjfnk?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog
seriously, it’s a lifesaver.
Wasn’t doxxing, or even anything close to doxxing. Attempted victory by moral authority.
That said, since the open threads are xbox hueg, I’ve taken to navigating them by skipping through new comments from a few specific folks. Deiseach is one of these, and has been consistently entertaining these past few threads, but it’s largely been at the expense of beating the same drum. The tune is pretty simple – “bintchaos is neither as educated nor knowledgeable as they present”.
I could march to a couple more verses, especially given the consistent violations of community norms, but I could also see where binti’d be feeling some pressure.
Attempted victory by moral authority.
Yeah, probably. I was trying to find out if there really was such a course as socio-physics being run anywhere in a third-level institution, and I can’t deny part of that was as much “I know they’re trying to make themselves look big and important but I’ll take them down a peg” as it was “so what the heck is socio-physics anyway when it’s at home?”.
Why wouldn’t you just google Social Physics?
Dr Pentland and MIT are the top hits.
Apologies to Dr S. for this mess.
I understand that SSC is a minmally regulated self-organizing complex adaptive system.
Its WAI.
What I learned from this re SSC:
Stalking and sock-puppetting are fine…but doxxing is where the community draws the line.
SSC is 100% nerd…just not “my kind” of nerd– i guess there must be red and blue nerds [lol].
Mean Girls will be mean…its what they do.
I’m done now.
Shouldn’t you reply here?
I mean according to commenter protocols as explained to me repeatedly?
Guess when I said I was done you felt free to slip in the blade one more time.
here, I will help you.
Like I said, Im not afraid of Mean Girls.
I’m afraid of Angry Stalkers that might dox me. I think that’s healthy.
And Bean, you have no idea what kind of Mean exists at rich white catholic private girls schools.
I pray you never find out.
I think you might perceive yourself as more exceptional than you are.
I think you’re fine.
Really I don’t think they’re being terribly productive to conversation in general, so the best tack might just be to roll your eyes and move on.
Agreed. There’s no profit in having this fight.
Unfortunately, accusations of bad behavior here serve as a superweapon. “Ignore the superweapon” is often a bad idea.
No, by default. I don’t give a damn edgewise.
Remember when Scott suggested two reporters who disagreed write an article together? Could we get politicians to do this? I am thinking of writing an email to some representative of mine encouraging them to do this. I want the commentariat to give me any ideas they think will boost the odds of this actually happening.
Current ideas:
Get people to sign a petition.
Suggest a specific, nonthreatening issue.
Send the idea to my state representative, instead of my federal representative.
—
Does this have any chance of working? Will the idea even make it past spam filters?
My recommendation: find others who would like to see the project happen and are willing to donate money (split evenly) to the campaigns of those who participate. Bonus points for somehow crowdfunding the idea.
(Alternate suggestion: make it a charity drive, donating the cash raised to a very nonpartisan cause, encourage participants to raise campaign contributions independently by advertising their participation in the project).
(Also, congratulations on posting the comment that got me to register an account.)
That is an excellent idea. Cursory googling shows that a site called Crowdpac is capable of raising enough money to attract attention in some state races. And the fundraiser could attract some media attention, which would help even more than the money.
Other than pitching my idea there, I am wholly ignorant of how to raise political money, and having it attached to a separate charity runs into the similar problem that I have no idea how to raise charitable money. Would I spam companies in the relevant district, put up fliers, or set up a lemonade stand?
Yeah, I don’t have great knowledge on that front. I just know that petitions are mostly worthless, phone calls and letters can work if you get enough of them, but willingness to part with your own money (and especially convince other people to part with theirs) over an issue/event/whatever sends a strong signal of seriousness and commitment.
Don’t really have much to contribute but encouragement 🙂 This is a great idea and I would really like to see it work.
What state are you in?
Indiana. But in a few months I will be moving to Ohio. I think I will try a quick and sloppy attempt here in Indiana, and use the likely failure to inform my attempt in Ohio.
My version of the idea was to get two statisticians with very different political views to collaborate on an attempt to estimate the false positive rate in the criminal justice system–what percentage of the people convicted of crimes are innocent. But it never happened. It’s a crucial fact about the system, and nobody knows it.
What torpedoed the attempt?
Wouldn’t adversarial collaboration be even more difficult on this subject than most? The justice system is already supposed to separate the guilty from the innocent. If we have a reliable method of figuring out when it was wrong, we should be using that method for the justice system.
There have been some attempts to figure it out after the fact, using the introduction of DNA testing, and a few people have published estimates, but on weak evidence. There are other possible approaches based on evidence not available at trial.
I’ve tried to get people interested in the idea on and off for a long time. One of my colleagues is involved with an innocence project, so I talked to her about it. She wasn’t interested. I wasn’t sure if the reason was that she was already busy with other things or that she was afraid the false positive rate would turn out to be low. It’s not the sort of work I do myself, so it’s just been a matter of floating the idea to law professors and getting no answer.
The problem is surely that crimes differ (greatly), which probably impacts their false conviction rates substantially.
For example, for murder we generally know that a crime occurred and the only point of contention is whether the suspect did it. For rape, the point of contention can (also) be whether a crime occurred at all. So I would expect certain types of mistakes to be more common for rape cases.
Honestly, how does one go about determining the rate of false positives? If you can do that, doesn’t that implicitly mean that you can tell who did the crime or not? And if you can do that with certainty, why can’t the justice system?
@AnonYEmous
Some measurements are fairly accurate on the aggregate level, but not on the individual level. If those exist for false convictions, they can be used to assess the correctness of the legal system, but not the correctness of individual cases.
Imagine a weighted coin. For a single coin flip, I couldn’t tell you if it is wrong. But if I flip a million times and it lands on ‘heads’ 80% of the time, I can be highly confident that the coin is unfair. But then I still can’t say that any specific coin flip among those 1 million ought to have been different.
Similarly, we might be able to determine that X% of convictions are wrong, but not the specific convictions that are wrong.
Sure. How do you acquire one which works for this problem?
Your given example relies on prior knowledge of coin flip probabilities. We don’t have that for criminal convictions, so that’s a no-go. Got any other ideas?
As a first cut, would it make sense to interview selected prisoners and ask them to explain how they ended up in prison? That’s not perfectly reliable, but it’s at least a good starting point.
If you could start with all (say) rape convictions in the days when DNA tests werent yet available but semen samples were kept, you could get a really good estimate of false positives in rape cases. The confounder there would be whether more careful investigations were the ones that kept samples.
Sure, but this is just a subset of “being able to tell who really did the crime”.
This is fine for determining the number of rape cases where it really happened but they got the wrong guy. On the other hand, you miss out on all of the cases of consensual sex or even nonexistent sex claimed as rape, which are conveniently the hot-button issues. That also means you’re not getting the full story vis-a-vis false positives, but I guess you could establish a baseline rate of sorts.
Yes.
More specifically, almost all convictions in the U.S. criminal justice system are the result of plea bargains, not jury trials. If you have gotten in a fight and the prosecutor threatens to try you for attempted murder if you are not willing to accept a plea bargain for assault, it may make sense to accept the deal, even if you think you are innocent of both.
So we would expect false convictions via bargained guilty pleas to be more common for less serious offenses. But most of the evidence used to try to establish the false positive rate is from DNA testing on convictions from before DNA testing was available, and that’s most likely to be murder and/or rape cases. So the estimates from that, which run around 3%, may be much too low.
Method one: (Risinger, 2007))
1. Count up the number of people convicted of rape+murder over a period before DNA testing was available, that being a crime likely to leave tissue evidence.
2. Count up how many were found to be false convictions by later DNA testing.
3. Assume that all dubious cases got tested (this is the weakest part of this particular attempt).
4. Take the ratio. Deduce a minimal factually wrong error rate of 3.3%.
Method two: (Roman et. al. 2012)
Take advantage of a random collection of tissue evidence that happened to have survived in Virginia, covering a variety of crimes. Test it all. In each case, conclude whether the result of the testing would have been evidence for or against conviction. In about 16% of the cases the evidence would have made conviction less likely. (My analysis of their results)
Method Three (Gross et. al. 2014):
Look at the statistics of people awaiting execution who got their convictions reversed, and try to use statistics to figure out how many would have eventually been. This one struck me as the weakest. Conclusion: 4.1%
My proposal:
Get a friendly jurisdiction to let you test tissue evidence for every case for which it survives from before DNA testing. If that’s too costly, test a random sample.
There are two obvious problems. One is that a jurisdiction willing to let you do this may be one that correctly believes it rarely convicts innocents. The other is that offenses for which tissue evidence survives are themselves a non-random sample of all offenses.
Method I have thought of but not really worked out in detail:
Look at the statistics on cases where A was convicted of a crime to which B later confessed. Try to use fancy statistics to figure out the probability of this happening conditional on A being innocent.
Those are a few examples. The critical point is that you are using information not available at trial, whether due to a new technology or due to events, such as the confession of B, that occurred after the trial.
What is the difference between Roman et al and your proposal?
Why do you call Roman et al “weak”?
Why do you quote 3%, when Roman et al get 15%?
So basically “find out if they really did it or not” and the mechanism is DNA testing, or maybe confession by another source.
This is fair enough for this specific instance, but I really don’t think there are many others. And both of those examples are by necessity extremely limited; these days people actually use DNA evidence, and before it was a thing DNA evidence probably wasn’t collected as often. But the results you draw from DNA evidence seem fine as a minimal baseline rate; I already pointed out some of the problems replying to another poster.
EE, while false identification in rapes is probably no longer a problem, the rate of false identification in rapes before the advent of DNA is suggestive about the rate of false identification today, in situations where there is no DNA, which is most situations.
I think academics papers should be written more like a dialogue. When you write from one perspective, you only have to do the bare minimum to engage your critics. But adding another person, just as knowledgeable and intelligent, really forces you to be the best you can be.
If Plato’s anything to go by, this would just give us a lot of “clearly you’re right, Socrates, and I am a blithering idiot”.
Okay, here is a first draft of the letter. Since the faster way to get help on the internet is to post the wrong answer, I haven’t put too much thought into the structure or formatting of the letter. Anyone who wants can post comments.
In case we want a coordinated email campaign, does anyone have a clever date in mind?
I really dislike your second paragraph. A legislator isn’t going to see legislation as a method to ‘find the truth.’ That argument is anti-persuasive, as it exposes you as a starry eyed idealist.
A more persuasive argument is that it is hard to find a compromise when starting off from what divides, rather than what binds people; and that this method has a far better chance to result in legislation that is supported by both sides and that gets approval from swing voters (<- this is the bit where you appeal to the naked self-interest of the politician).
And don't call it something distinct from bipartisanship, because 'a better form of bipartisanship' is an excellent way to sell this plan. By painting this as not being bipartisan, you are anti-persuasive, because if the politician is to gain from this, (s)he needs to be able to connect this to an existing meme. By isolating adversarial collaboration from the most appropriate near meme, you are lowering the value to the politician.
As hog^5 says below, the incentives are wrong — this requires a politician to announce respect for someone with a contrary opinion. Later, they get hammered in primary for softness.
It seems to be pretty common for two legislators from opposite sides to jointly sponsor a bill for something both approve of. The Rohrabacher-Farr (originally Hinchey-Rohrabacher) Amendment, later introduced into the Senate by Rand Paul and Corey Booker, would be an example.
Dana Rohrabacher has been accused of a variety of things but not, I believe, softness towards Democrats.
Yeah, but the proposal is for them to work with somebody on something they disagree on.
Maybe I’m being too cynical, or I’ve been called names by the opposition too many times.
I can’t imagine this working with politicians – all the incentives are wrong. But this has not even been accomplished with journalists/pundits/speechwriters/whatever Steve Bannon is, and these sorts can be easily motivated by paying them. This is a good enough gimmick for a quarterly magazine. Has any progress been made in this direction? Assuming not, there are concrete things to do right now:
1) Write a standard contract that can be used when commissioning writers who probably hate each other.
2) Call up Current Affairs or N+1 to find out what they did. AFAIK the editorial staffs of both publications have an average age of 14, so presumably running a magazine isn’t that hard. Still, we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.
3) Kickstarter.
4) Begin compiling a list of thoughtful people who already have established intellectual commitments but who don’t have a regular writing gig (e.g. Freddie deBoer), or who are so unbelievably productive that they will write for cheap.
I think I will try this instead of Witness’ idea. I will try it after the petition/letter campaign, because that takes very little effort.
by my best guess tell, since 10 different people have commented in this thread, 50 to 100 people are watching it. I am going to tap those people for information. Does anyone have any opinions on what such a magazine should look like, or how it should operate?
Again, posting the wrong answer in hopes that someone will correct me:
I think that there would be a small staff of writers would contractually write a few articles per quarter (What is the right price here? $50/article? $200?). If there was a large demand for a particular topic with particular authors, the magazine would reach out to them for a one off deal.
I have no idea what the right editor/word ratio is, or how much an editor needs to be paid. I assume it would start out small enough that only one editor (me, though I think I would be rubbish) would be needed.
Most articles would be posted online as soon as they were written, and all of them would be in the quarterly magazine available only to subscribers. After being in the magazine, every article which hadn’t been online yet would slowly trickle onto the website.
If a lump some of cash was needed quickly after the initial kickstarter money ran out, a dollar auction could be held for particular adversaries and topics.
When is it all right to feel afraid? What about acting on that fear?*
I’m referring to non-obvious conditions, not like falling from a tall height or actually being attacked/in danger.
Terrorism is fairly rare in the US, but the government does and spends a lot to try and mitigate it. Campus rape is also fairly rare, but activists and the government do a lot to try mitigate it too. Most black people aren’t criminals, most white people aren’t seeking to oppress and hurt minorities. Yet in certain circles you have people cultivating a culture of fear
, where many lives are at stake, and those who don’t take it seriously are then considered “part of the problem”.
Another example is Muslims. IIRC, most Muslim Americans don’t want to impose sharia law on the US, and most Americans don’t want to kick out/attack Muslim Americans. However, if you go to certain groups/tribes you get a lot of fear about either the former or the latter.
Also, is it all right to have different standards for individual vs group in terms of fearing things/acting on that fear? think of a person who would cross the street if they saw a teenage male walking towards them at night. Is it all right for the individual to avoid that male, but not ok for society to advocate for teenage males making themselves “less threatening”?
*I think Scott has posted about this, but I can’t recall it.
I think you need to distinguish between the emotional experience of fear, the involuntary and unaware behavioral biases due to emotional fear, and the deliberate behaviour of perceived-harm-avoidance (or whatever you want to call it).
IIRC, most Muslim Americans don’t want to “impose sharia law on the US.” They want, at most, Islamic law for themselves. It was pretty normal, in past Muslim societies, for different ethnic groups to be under different law.
To impose it on the U.S. they would need to control the government, and they are currently a very small minority.
Weren’t the Muslims basically always at the top of the ladder, though? I don’t relish the idea of imposing Jizya or Janissaries much more than I do sharia.
In Muslim ruled societies, I believe that a controversy between a Muslim and a non-Muslim went to a Muslim court unless the parties agreed to a non-Muslim court, but I’m not certain. And the penalty for killing a non-Muslim was, I think, usually less than for killing a Muslim.
On the other hand, various features of Muslim law applied only to Muslims, such as the prohibition on drinking wine.
My point was rather that, just as Muslim ruled societies allowed non-Muslims to conduct their activities under their law, it wasn’t unreasonable for them to want societies ruled by non-Muslims to do the same for them.
Ah, fair enough. I haven’t read your book (draft?), are there modern examples of different courts for different folks (Belgium, maybe?)? IANALS but I’m pretty sure in the US at least the parent system (the Constitution and the relevant state constitution) would pretty severely restrict the reach of enclave systems (i.e. no you cannot enter a contract that you agree to be executed if the religious police catch you committing adultery).
You also have to differentiate between hardcore support for and engagement in Bad Thing, tacit approval of Bad Thing, indifference to Bad Thing, and opposition to Bad Thing. Consider various pieces of rhetoric:
When Hitler took power, only ~3% of Germans were members of the Nazi party.
Only 5-6% of colonists took up arms against the British in the American Revolution.
“It’s not just that Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic and arachnophobic bigot, it’s that his supporters don’t care!” — everyone on /r/politics
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
“The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful so it’s stupid to get worked up over terror.”
It’s hard to reconcile these observations. I’m tempted to say the “peaceful majority” doesn’t matter. The vast majority of Nazis were peaceful. 99% of Nazis never gassed a Jew. The problem was the peaceful majority supported, enabled, or didn’t oppose the ideology and political structure that eventually led to the gassing of Jews.
The commonality of X is far from the only consideration. @Conrad Honcho touched on this.
Other important factors include the harm of X, how the frequency or severity of X will change over time, the influence and moral standing of the people practicing X, the reaction of the general populace when X happens, and how hard is it to prevent X.
The super-intelligent heuristics that I came up with just now: It’s good to be afraid when the expected harm of an event to a group you care for exceeds your personal tolerance. It is good to act on that fear when the value of the harm prevented exceeds the cost of implementation over the lifetime of the affected group.
That doesn’t say much, because these factors are hard to calculate, but putting numbers on these things gives you a model rather than using your gut every time.
Campus rape is also fairly rare, but activists and the government do a lot to try mitigate it too.
How common rape is (and particularly campus rape) is a hotly debated topic, and the numbers change dramatically depending on how someone defines rape. The most-cited study focusing on college-age women says that 1 in 4 will be raped. That study has also been criticized a lot for having confusingly worded and misleading questions, and I don’t think the numbers are that high, but I also think it’s probably not rare.
I do agree, though, that overall the things that people are afraid of are not the things most likely to harm them, and that there are a lot of groups invested in inflaming fear for political purposes.
when you look at actual crime stats, campus rape is rare to none-existent, which is what you would expect given the lack of other violent crime on college campuses, itself largely a phenomenon of the demographics of the attendees.
@Hyzenthlay
That would be by Mary Koss, who is an extremely poor researcher, who injects her bias into her research.
For example, her studies assume that every woman who had sex after drinking alcohol was raped, even if the woman in question doesn’t consider herself to have been unable to consent. Of course, by those lenient standards, many men would have been raped as well, so she simply excluded men from her studies (arguing based on a single source that is not even available online that they don’t suffer from rape as much as women, which is a horrible reason to not collect the data in the first place). Most other studies exclude men and/or use sexist definitions which excludes almost all rape of men by women (only counting sodomy perpetrated against men, which is not the common type of rape that women perpetuate on men, for obvious reasons).
It requires very careful cherry picking to pad the rape/assault numbers for women, while still pretending that men are rarely raped/assaulted.
A more recent study found that 1 in 4 of college seniors experienced sexual assault since entering college and 1 in 8 were raped. Note that the survey was sent out as a mail with the subject ‘Campus Climate Survey.’ I’ve seen anecdotal claims that some/many students deleted the mail because they thought it was about Climate Change, while activist feminist students had been made aware of what it was and they were thus more likely to answer. AFAIK, activist feminists (believe that they) have experienced sexual assault & rape substantially more often than other women, so one would expect some bias to higher numbers due to this. The survey had a very low response rate in general.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics also did a survey where they found that the yearly rate of rape was 7.6 per 1,000 for non-student college-age women and 6.1 per 1,000 for students. So these are drastically lower figures to the previous survey. The BJS study uses different definitions though.
PS. Note that activists quite often equivocate sexual assault and rape when they cite prevalence statistics.
The thing I’ve never understood about the “1 in 4” figure is how it ever passed the smell test. It requires one to believe that college campuses are quite literally the most hostile environment for women in the country by an order of magnitude.
I think you have this backwards. That statistic was made up to fit a narrative that a surprisingly large amount of people already believed.
It requires one to believe that college campuses are quite literally the most hostile environment for women in the country by an order of magnitude.
College campuses have a whole lot of young, middle-class, white males. How could they NOT be one of the worst, most violent, horrible, places on Earth?
This is the kind of terrible comment that detracts rather than adds value to the comment section here.
@ Matt
I’m inclined to agree with Brad on this count.
Why? I’d love to hear an alternative hypothesis.
You correctly point out that a statistic like that is essentially unbelievable (in the most literal sense of the term) on its face, and yet, millions of people DO believe it.
My best explanation is that they believe it because it confirms their existing beliefs.
How could one possibly believe that Harvard has a higher incidence of rape than Somalia without invoking the line of thinking I just outlined? You asked the question, I’m giving you a plausible answer. If you find my answer implausible, or if you have a better explanation, feel free to provide it, rather than just telling me to shut up.
“feminists believe stupid thing that serves their purpose”
there you go
Alternative hypothesis: we don’t have the concepts/language to discuss problems with the current sexual culture, which is caught in a nightmare twilight zone between the Olden Days and the Brave New World of sex positivity.
@hlynkacg
I think your question has an incorrect premise. The belief in “1 in 4” doesn’t require the belief that college campuses are any more hostile than anywhere else in the country if one also believes that everywhere else in the country is just as hostile to women. The people claiming “1 in 4” or even “1 in 5” tend to describe the USA and Western society in general as a “rape culture” where rapes of females by males regularly happen and are excused/covered up/accepted, to the extent that official stats could easily be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.
@Matt M
I think your explanation is a little too complicated. The “young, middle-class, white” is unnecessary. As an aside, the boogeyman of the people who wholeheartedly buy and repeat the “1 in 4” claim is more “old, upper-class, white male.” But really, it’s just the “male” – specifically a cis straight male in the case of the “1 in 4” statistic – that matters. And cis straight males make up a significant proportion of most college campuses, as well as most other parts of society. Like I said above, the belief in “1 in 4” doesn’t imply a belief that college campuses are any safer for women than anywhere else.
All this is just my impression from being part of social groups whose members uncritically repeat the “1 in 5” claim – “1 in 5” tends to be far more popular than “1 in 4.” It’s possible that the people who buy the “1 in 4” claim act differently, but I suspect that they’re somewhat similar. It’s also likely that one person’s impression is not a particularly accurate guide, so take all this with a heavy dose of salt.
I think most people aren’t especially numerate, so they don’t check claims which are more or less in line with their prejudices. I also think extreme claims can have the effect of shutting down people’s capacities if they aren’t good at getting their system1 somewhat offline.
Because almost nobody does basic sanity checking of claimed numbers in news stories. It’s shockingly common to see numbers quoted, even in top newspapers and such, that are obviously wrong and impossible, if you spend five minutes thinking about them.
AnonYEmous:
That’s not a feature of feminists, it’s a feature of humans. Most people accept claims of fact that support their beliefs more easily than claims of fact that challenge them, and almost nobody bothers doing a back of the envelope calculation/Fermi estimate to figure out whether some claimed fact is even consistent with observable reality.
It’s easy to forget how massively unnatural things like logic and probability theory and numerical reasoning are. Even most smart people find them really hard to do well. When you reflect on how we evolved, it’s a miracle we can think at all.
Upper-class, maybe, or at least the upper half of the class distribution. White, definitely. But I’m really not sure about “old”. “D*debro” (bowdlerized because filter) connotes young, and there is no equivalent slur for old ciswhitemales.
then it is a feature of feminists by definition, thanks for playing homie
nah but seriously, feminists believe way dumber stuff than normal people and on the regular no less. I mean, what is blank-slate theory if not really dumb, but perfect for the ideology? How about “drunk sex = rape”? And of course the college rape statistics mentioned here are almost humorous in their idiocy.
But maybe you’re somewhat right; the big difference with feminists is not only that they get dumb-ass ideas, it’s that they manage to hold on to them through various means, mostly shutting up people who disagree with them. That’s also a big problem.
Nobody really believed it. People just enjoy repeating dramatic-sounding bullshit on Facebook, and don’t care if it’s true or not.
If people really thought it was true, families would bring their daughters home from college immediately. Nobody did that. Nobody even considered doing that. Because nobody really believed it.
@ lvlln
That just makes the claim more absurd. I may no longer be in a position to observe a college campus directly but I can observe my immediate surroundings and peers. Where (and with whom) are these people living that would make a 20 – 25% incidence rate for rape in a 5 year span sound remotely plausible?
On the whole though I think Nancy and Albatross have the way of it. People aren’t especially numerate, and thus fail to “sanity check” the claim.
AnonYE, I suggest presenting your argument in a more focused way. Right now, you’re running afoul of your own
The majority of human beings hold at least one, if not several, fairly dumb and untrue beliefs if only because it’s easy to do so in any sphere where you aren’t forced to test your beliefs against reality and suffer the consequences when you’re wrong.
At the very least, I suggest that if this is the argument you really want to go with that you provide some measure for “way dumber” and “on the regular”.
The “rape culture” narrative posits that when women claim being raped by men, they are by default not believed and punished by having their honesty and virtue questioned. Furthermore, the narrative posits that many women and men know this, so women tend not to report their rapes, and men tend to feel emboldened to rape willy-nilly as long as they leave plausible deniability.
Given that, the answer to your question is that they’re living the same places everyone else is living at, with the same people everyone else is living with. The fact that the people around them don’t appear to be raping or being raped doesn’t imply that there isn’t a whole lot of rape happening, whose reporting is just being suppressed. That’s rape culture.
If this looks to you like an unfalsifiable belief system, I think there’s a darn good reason for that. And I think history has shown that huge swaths of people buying into unfalsifiable belief systems is the norm rather than unusual.
It requires one to believe that college campuses are quite literally the most hostile environment for women in the country by an order of magnitude.
Students on college campuses drink and party a lot (or at least, that’s my stereotype of them) and if that’s true, I don’t find it hard to believe that there would be more rapes on campuses than in other types of environments. Having sex with a drunk person isn’t rape, but someone who’s really drunk and too out of it to resist is probably more likely to get actually raped.
But yes, the Koss study is pretty terrible, because it doesn’t differentiate between “having sex with someone who is basically unconscious/unable to resist” (rape) and “two people drinking together and then having consensual sex” (not rape). And the latter situation is way more common than the former.
Most of the women in that study who were classified as rape victims didn’t consider themselves as such. Which makes the “listen and believe” mantra kind of ironic. “Believe women! Unless they say they weren’t raped, in which case, don’t believe them because they’re clearly just in denial.”
In generally I think it’s just really hard to get accurate numbers on rape. It is an under-reported crime so just looking at crime stats won’t give you the whole picture. But also there are a lot of people who have a motivation to exaggerate its frequency, so a lot of studies about it just aren’t very good.
Having sex with a drunk person isn’t rape
The people who believe in “1 in 4”, generally speaking, STRONGLY disagree. In fact, I think that’s a large part of why this is believable to many that we haven’t discussed yet.
It turns out that there really is no strong agreement on what “rape” actually is.
If you’re flexible enough with the definition to include things like “you repeatedly asked someone for sex and they eventually gave in” (which many colleges consider sexual harassment at least), then you can get to a place where 1 in 4 is entirely believable.
Sure, let’s put it like this: feminists believe in dumb things that cannot be easily falsified in many cases, and more importantly, they think you are a bad person if you try to discuss critically or disprove these dumb things, which then justifies them attacking you for attempting to do this (which they will do), all while trying to indoctrinate people into their beliefs at every opportunity.
It’s not that we haven’t had other groups try to pull this crap before; they just usually get censured by society until they learn to keep it to themselves. Well, in the modern era, anyhow.
As for extra-dumb beliefs, pretty much any variation of blank-slate theory. Usually people will try to extend this to races, but personally, even as a pretty girly guy, I have a ton more in common with the average male PoC than the average white woman. And that was true even before I became a total wigger. Purely biological sex differences are huge – breasts, genitals, and hormones – and certainly much more relevant than skin color. The bottom line is that women and men, across cultures and across the world, have patterns of behavior, likes, dislikes, interests, and desires, which line up remarkably well and without blemish. Despite this, the belief of feminists is that this is all due to some type of oppression. This is extra-strength dumb.
Oh yeah, you’ve also got the wage gap, which posits that employers aren’t smart enough to pay women less for the same job and thus profit greatly. Actually, at this point feminists have mostly moved on from that form, and now argue that women’s labor is just valued less – which I guess admits that employers are smart enough to pay women less for the same job, but instead complains that they manage to get away with it because…reasons? This is where a basic understanding of economics could come in handy, but feminists – admittedly, like many – do not possess such an understanding.
That said, I will admit that the problem isn’t even so much that these things are extra-strength dumb, so much as, again, saying so makes you a bad person. Maybe there’s some truth to blank slatism, or some truth to the second version of the wage gap. But try having that conversation in public and see how far you get.
Usually people will try to extend this to races, but personally, even as a pretty girly guy, I have a ton more in common with the average male PoC than the average white woman.
I don’t know about race specifically, but I’ve always had the opposite impression in terms of culture: I probably have more in common with a man from my own social grouping (middle-class American) than I do with a woman from a radically different class or culture.
There are certain sex-related differences that remain pretty stable across the board, but as far as overall personality/values/interests, culture/class seems like a better predictor of commonality to me than either race or gender.
@Matt M
I think a big part of the problem is that when intoxication is involved there is a big gap between what we culturally consider rape, and what is legally considered rape (or, some variety of sexual assault; many jurisdictions have gotten rid of “rape” as a crime and replaced it with some variety of sexual assault). In Canada, for instance, for someone to be intoxicated enough to not be able to consent, they have to be really wasted: drunk enough to not be aware of what is going on, not be aware they have the choice not to consent, etc. The legal standard is not “would not have done that if sober”. However, the line of “this is a bad person” is crossed a ways before that, and the line of “this person can be considered a rapist” is, in most people’s minds, crossed before that.
Example: Alice and Brenda go out on a date (I’m using women because it might engage people’s system 2 more, and because same-sex sexual assault and sexual assault by women are among the most underreported forms of sexual assault). Brenda ends up rather more drunk than Alice, and they end up back at Alice’s place. Alice initiates sex, Brenda consents – verbally, or not. Brenda would likely not have consented sober, and Alice knows what she is doing – she is taking advantage of Brenda’s drunken state to get some sex. However, Brenda is fully aware of what is going on, is not blacking out, etc. This is not criminal on Alice’s by the legal standard in Canada, and I would guess the legal standard in the US is similar. However, most people will instinctively think “Alice is a shitty person”, and possibly, “Alice is a rapist.” I would judge Alice; and it would be a fair thing to tell women “hey, stay away from Alice when you’ve been drinking; she’s not safe to be around if you’re drunk.”
The issue with statistics comes in where words like “intoxication” are used, but how intoxicated is not described. Most people will fall towards the cultural rather than the legal standard.
Brenda would likely not have consented sober, and Alice knows what she is doing – she is taking advantage of Brenda’s drunken state to get some sex.
How drunk is Brenda? There’s a big difference between someone who is pleasantly buzzed and has lowered inhibitions and someone who is still conscious but stumbling around and can barely speak a coherent sentence. But both mental states might result in people doing things they wouldn’t do while sober.
I mean, most people drink with the awareness that it lowers their inhibitions, and some people drink specifically for this reason. So “would not have done that if sober” does seem like a pretty low bar to me, in terms of counting something as rape. Alice is probably behaving selfishly and unethically in this example, but in my mind there’s also a difference between “selfish and unethical” and “rapist.” And in order for it to qualify as the latter, the victim has to be in a state where they actually can’t consent (i.e. their mental capacity is diminished to the point where they’re incapable of thinking or making a decision).
Granted, this can be kind of a fuzzy line and if you’re a decent person who doesn’t want to take advantage of someone else, you probably should avoid going near that line at all.
But I also think there’s some level on which people are responsible for decisions they make while drunk, if they make the choice to get drunk.
@Hyzenlathy: closer to the former than the latter, for the case of the example. The case law in Canada puts the bar pretty high – in the case that as far as I can tell (IANAL) set the standard, the victim was so drunk she mistook one of the guys having sex with her for a different guy and didn’t recognize her own sister shortly thereafter.
Most people would personally consider someone a rapist before the law did. I would not say “well, she wouldn’t get convicted in a court of law, so no harm in inviting her to parties” – the standard for “thinking someone is a bad and predatory person” is a lower standard than “should be punished by state authority.”
Matt M, I think it’s not just that people don’t agree on what rape is, they chose definitions of drunk which support their point of view.
If you want to believe that intoxicated sex is rape, you imagine the drunk person as clearly barely able to communicate if at all, and certainly not able to react quickly or forcefully.
If you want to believe laws against intoxicated sex are ridiculous, you imagine someone who deliberately had a few drinks, possibly with the purpose of lowering their inhibitions.
Neither side seems to be invested in coming up with more sensible laws.
My problem with the mainstream feminist stance on this issue is that it seems perfectly clear what one could do to reduce this problem of drunken (semi-)rapes: take measures against drinking.
However, you generally see feminists react violently to this suggestion, using various fallacies, generally based around the claim/assumption that only men can be rapists and claiming that men should be changed/be restricted. The debate then becomes about which groups should suffer, rather than efficacy of the measures.
At that point, the revealed preference is that they don’t consider these huge claimed numbers of rapes as a good reason to take the most effective measures, even if those may inconvenience women (as well). The result is that I see a lot of the rhetoric as hyperbole, not as true beliefs.
—
If one believes that only men rape, then another logical solution presents itself: separating men and women (like women-only colleges). Yet again, this is generally rejected.
This fits a pattern that I very commonly see in SJ, where there is an immense willingness to inconvenience/harm the outgroup to achieve desired results, yet extremely little willingness to inconvenience/harm the ingroup.
For me, it is evidence that a main motivation is harming one group and/or seeking unfair benefits for another group, when such a pattern exists.
@Nancy Lebovitz
There’s a lot of confusion between what the actual criminal law is, what various authority figures teach about moral sex, what colleges enforce using their own administrative rules, and how people at large use the word rape (which in turn affects surveys).
Under the New York State Penal law, if a person voluntarily takes alcohol or drugs that impairs their judgment the standard for lack of capacity is physically helpless which the law defines as “a person is unconscious or for any other reason is physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act”.
That’s a pretty high standard, and the burden of proving every element beyond a reasonable, including the lack of consent, is on the prosecution.
I understand that some MRAs still object to this on the basis of implied or prior consent, or the basis that they think being married gives them the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, but in the context of colleges it is hard to see the argument that it is too restrictive.
Consent is a silly moral standard. The classic example of it failing is when two really drunk people have sex, and it also often leads to question begging (calling a situation rape because there wasn’t consent because the victim is of a class that by definition can’t consent). A better moral standard (in my opinion) is expected benefit/harm to the other person. However, this can’t be directly translated into a legal system, so we use a combination of consent-based law, “common sense”, and obviously non-rape cases of “non-consensual” sex not making it to court instead. A consent-based moral standard also has at least one advantage over a harm/benefit one: it is harder for would-be rapists to convince themselves/convincingly argue that someone did actually consent when they didn’t than that expected benefit actually exceeds expected harm.
@Brad
Implied or prior consent doesn’t mean ‘the right to do whatever they want.’ Implied consent refers to the defaults of the culture that you are part of, where certain behavior is considered normal/reasonable and for these, explicit consent is not needed. Prior consent refers to agreeing with the partner on the rules beforehand, but not in the context of a specific event.
If you are part of a culture where it is normal for partners to just steal a kiss, not asking before you kiss your partner is implied consent. If it is not part of that culture to slap your partner on the rear, then doing that cannot be defended by implied consent.
However, if you and your partner have agreed that slapping each other’s rear without permission for each slap is fine, then this is prior consent. This overrides the defaults of society.
Of course, some people may dislike the defaults of the culture and at that point the burden is generally on the person who wants to deviate to make that clear. So this is sort of the reverse of prior consent, but similar in that an agreement in the context of the relationship overrides the societal default.
Note that implied and prior consent are obviously all around us, which makes the people who apply the same concepts to sex consistent with the rest of society, while those who oppose it are advocates for special rules for sex.
PS. I have great trouble seeing your equivocation of the two terms with ‘the right to do whatever they want’ as a good faith argument. Both the fact that two distinct terms exists, as well as the obvious meaning of the words ‘implied’ and ‘prior,’ should make it abundantly clear that your interpretation is most likely false.
Aapje, it seems like you always read what I write in a strained and maximally hostile manner which is why I rarely respond to you.
In this case the implied or prior clause was separate clause from the one mentioning marriage. Hence the comma and the repetition of the word basis.
@Matt M
I’ve never been able to get anyone to admit it. They generally retreat to the motte of “no, ‘drunk’ in this context only means when someone’s unresponsive and almost passed out, not just having had one or two drinks and loosened their inhibitions”
I’ve even deliberately tried to lead people into the “would not have done if sober” standard and they won’t admit to actually believing that should be the standard. Maybe I’m arguing with the wrong people though.
@Brad
I think he misread “or” as “on”, with the result of seeing “on the basis” repeated, resulting in the form “A on the basis of B on the basis of C” suggesting “A <- B <- C" rather than your intended "A <- (B or C)"
The repetition of the word "basis" doesn't actually help with this, so the distinction between the two forms rests on only a punctuation mark (and most people randomly sprinkle commas anywhere in casual writing) and two extremely similar looking words. Even "or on the basis" might have been enough to make it clear.
@Brad
I’m going to try very hard to resist snarking. Please take a look at this statement and compare it to statements with similar animus directed at “SJWs” that you are so fond of railing against.
@Gobbobobble
I don’t see what the problem is exactly. Some MRAs think that implied or prior consent should allow for sex with an unconscious person. I’ve seen that very argument here. Aapje comes close to making it in the very next response. I don’t even necessarily disagree, especially with respect to prior consent.
As for the second part, yes a pretty hostile way of framing the position that the marital rape exception ought to be reinstated, but it is entirely accurate. When the marital rape exception was in place that the accused was married to the victim was a complete defense to the charge of rape. Case over. And there are indeed people that hold that the marital rape exception ought to be reinstated. I’ve had that discussion in these very comment sections.
Also, I was careful to caveat my statement with “some”. I didn’t say “MRAs believe” like the ubiquitous “SJWs believe”.
Finally, MRA is primarily a self descriptor whereas SJW is primarily a strawman.
I took the last critique re: libertarians as a fair cop, but I’m rejecting this one.
In any event, the entire point of my comment was to suggest that the NYPL definition of rape is a high bar and that even people that are very unhappy with college rape adjudication standard or that used in some surveys ought to be mostly satisfied with it.
@random832
Hm, maybe “wrong” isn’t the right word for it, but in my social circles – the ones with people who behave as if they believe the “1 in 5” statistic – the “would not have done if sober” is the standard, and any attempt to differentiate between that and “unresponsive and almost passed out” when it comes to determining rape or consent is just rape apologia and a reflection of rape culture. I see it as sort of a “one drop [of alcohol]” rule.
In fact, I myself was convinced this was the correct standard until fairly recently. It made a lot of sense to me that if someone is not 100% in control of their cognitive faculties, they can’t reasonably be held responsible for their choices. It was only when thinking things through and realizing that no one is ever 100% in control of their cognitive faculties, and that it makes sense that there should be some responsibility for someone choosing to decrease their cognitive control – i.e. we hold drunk drivers responsible – and that interpersonal interactions are always negotiated along hazy, non-clear-cut lines that I realized that this simple “one drop” standard was not reasonable.
But, again, I saw this as the standard everyone seemed to buy into, and its simplicity makes it very easy to do so. Perhaps it’s more that the people buying into this standard were the loudest, and there was approximately zero pushback I observed from anyone else among my peers. The zero pushback is perhaps more evidence of a fear of the social punishment that comes from such pushback, which I’ve observed can be quite severe – it certainly motivates my silence – than evidence that many people buy into this view.
A better moral standard (in my opinion) is expected benefit/harm to the other person.
I see a lot of issues with this. For one thing, people aren’t always good at predicting what will be beneficial or harmful, either to themselves or another person, and particularly if we’re talking about benefit/harm from a psychological standpoint.
For another, it’s feels kind of infantilizing. It implies that a person’s actual decision doesn’t matter, or that people aren’t moral agents. This might be a personal bias, because I’m libertarian-leaning and place a lot of importance on personal choice.
I can see particular cases where a harm/benefit calculator would work better, such as with non-verbal disabled people who can’t consent in the usual sense of the word (because the alternative is to say that they can’t have sex at all, which seems pretty cruel). But consent, despite its issues and gray areas, seems like a more logical standard for society in general than “is this ultimately beneficial or harmful to the person?”
@Brad
I misread and I withdraw my suggestion of that you may have been acting in bad faith. I don’t think I wrote in a maximally hostile manner though.
I’ve seen unconscious sex brought up in the context of:
– kissing a sleeping partner
– waking a partner up with sex
The first seems to fall within the implied consent standards of Western society. The second can IMO be negotiated in advance, but should not be initiated without prior consent.
In general, I believe that men and women should be treated as adults, rather than children, which means that they have to tell people if they don’t want to be treated according to societal standards. If they want to deviate from societal standards, that should generally be respected. And by respected, I mean both the people they interact with, but also lawmakers and other busybodies.
@lvlln
I don’t think that the ‘regret standard’ is compatible with blaming/convicting the other person.
IMO, it is utterly absurd to expect not just mind-reading, but also expect a person to accurately predict the future mental state of another person. Many people cannot even do this for themselves, so to expect people to be able to do this perfectly for others is to expect them to be superhuman/godlike.
This is actually a good example of how mainstream feminism doubles down on patriarchy in some respects. After all, the idea that men have to decide for women is one of the major underpinnings/pretenses* of patriarchal societies. When the patriarchal narrative is compatible with a female victim narrative, it has generally been adopted by mainstream feminism.
* There is a lot of evidence that many/most people in patriarchal societies/setups are perfectly aware that women can decide for themselves and/or can decide for men. So in reality, you regularly see that there is a understanding in patriarchal societies/setups that decisions are made in unison or quite often by the women, while pretending that it was the decision of the man. For example, this is evident from sayings like ‘happy wife, happy life.’
Oh I get it. You meant it in the same sense as if one said “I understand that some feminists also object to this based on rampant innumeracy, or on the grounds that *All* PIV sex is rape, but given the context of modern life, their concerns are safely ignored”. Which is technically a true statement, while being at the extreme end of weaksauce in terms of good faith due to lumping in other good criticisms in with these obvious ridiculous ones, all while simultaneously generating a lot of heat.
Parallel to the way that I doubt we could find an “All PIV Sex is Rape” feminist that you would endorse as sensible, I don’t think you could find a single example of anyone who believes “Marriage means you can do whatever you want to someone” that the “MRA’s” (Self named or not) here would not line up beside you to denounce.
I’d say you should think more on why people are reacting poorly to your statements if the reasons are still mysterious to you.
@Barely matters
If I dig up some posts on SSC of posters that think we should reinstate the marital rape exception would it change your mind? Because if it won’t I’m not going to bother.
As for why some posters are reacting poorly, it is not a mystery to me at all.
To steelman the marriage thing… I have seen MRAs argue that refusal of sex should be grounds for divorce on the basis of that being what the “marriage contract” is, and I have seen feminists argue that a threat of divorce or even a breakup of a sufficiently stable non-marital relationship (the issue is financial dependency, so let’s call “living together” the line) is coercive and that sex by someone who considers such a thing is rape. Neither of these positions is obviously even particularly extreme, but they are nonetheless obviously incompatible with each other.
@random832
Isn’t ‘grounds for divorce’ completely meaningless in the West now? You no longer need any reason, but ‘I don’t want to be married anymore.’ So any man or woman who is unhappy enough with the amount of sex to want to divorce is already fully legally empowered to do so.
It quite amusing/sad to see left-wingers working to undo major left-wing victories. It’s not that long ago that people were trapped in bad marriages because they didn’t get permission to divorce and the ability to leave those marriages was seen as a major gain, primarily for women.
But I guess it’s quite impossible that a man would ever be trapped in a bad marriage and even if he is, he deserves that for his toxic masculine desire to have a pleasant life. So as long as women get to leave marriage at will and men are at the mercy of women, we are on the path to gender (in)equality, as is the goal.
Posts on SSC do not prove one way or another whether an idea is central to a label. Besides the obvious weakman potential, there is the question of whether the label even applies to the poster.
How would you respond if a comparable test was proposed about something SJW-y?
@Hyzenthlay
By and large, I think both standards produce the same outcomes. Central examples of rape where the victim is expressing non-consent obviously fail under the consent standard, but also fail under the benefit/harm standard because people who express non-consent are almost certainly going to be harmed by sex. Likewise, if someone consents you can generally assume they will benefit from sex. A lot of the time, the benefit/harm calculation is basically reduced straight to the question of whether there’s consent, because most people care a lot about it.
But benefit/harm works a lot better in the edge cases I can think of. Having sex with young children is unethical regardless of how enthusiastically or informedly they consent, because they are likely to be harmed by it. Having sex with your drunk-almost-to-unconsciousness husband with the knowledge that he has been fine with that every time you’ve done it in the last 50 years is ethical, even though there isn’t consent (for that specific act, which is what the consent standard generally seems to require).
I agree to an extent that it is difficult to predict benefit/harm outcomes, in that people are likely to misestimate in their favour. This is a point in favour of having norms/guidelines associated with consent: explicit/enthusiastic consent is good, don’t have sex with really drunk people etc. But that’s because these guidelines are reliable heuristics for estimating expected benefit/harm, not because those rules are absolute standards. And if you blindly follow those heuristics, you can make mistakes in both directions: having sex with really drunk people can be OK if you know them well and know they will be happy with it, and having sex with people who have explicitly consented can nevertheless be unethical if there are other signs it will harm them.
@Gobbobobble
Quote from Barely matters:
” I don’t think you could find a single example of anyone who believes “Marriage means you can do whatever you want to someone” that the “MRA’s” (Self named *or not*) *here* would not line up beside you to denounce.”
(my emphasis)
Examples of SSC commenters supporting a marital rape exception fit those requirements.
rlms, technically they would not so fit; if marital rape includes every not previously explicitly consented to encounter, an exception decriminalizing it would not necessarily also allow assault or battery or otherwise “whatever you want to do.”
@rlms
Okay, well then that’s pretty shitty requirements that could be used to prove damn near anything. Like I could say that we should build more pyramids and worship cats and by those standards someone could use that to claim that it’s a central tenet of communism.
by MRAs, do you mean actual MRAs, or just people in the quote on quote manosphere?
@aapje
Agree that this doesn’t make much sense. Not only is no-fault divorce now universal in the US, but even when fault was required to file it had for an even longer period of time not been used to determine property division, custody, or spousal support.
I have seen the argument, I won’t attempt to characterize by whom, that no fault divorce ought to be eliminated and that fault be reintroduced as a factor in property division, custody, and spousal support determinations.
@Brad
Women initiate divorce ~69% of the time and studies find that divorce is much harder on men, causing more health issues, more alcoholism, more suicide, they are more likely to end up alone, etc.
Furthermore, divorce courts seem quite biased against men on the whole.
So I think that a good argument can be made that divorce has disparate impact on men and I understand why an advocate for men might want to make divorce a bit more difficult to initiate and/or seek to reduce the burden on the man when the woman caused the divorce by sleeping around. It does seem unfair that if a woman sleeps around (in a monogamous relationship) and is found out and the couple divorces due to this, the man ends up worse.
The most analogous situation to divorce law in employment law are jurisdictions where firing employees results in the payment of a termination fee. AFAIK, all jurisdictions that have such a law include a ‘just cause’ exception, where some behavior, like stealing, results in the fired employee not getting a termination fee and sometimes, also no benefits.
So the stance of a hypothetical advocate for men who wants the divorce court to take culpability into consideration, does seem consistent with fairly common legal principles and laws that have been enacted by a majority of the populace in certain jurisdiction. So I don’t consider it a radical stance.
I personally favor assigning custody more fairly and greatly reducing spousal support. If marriage is going to be/remain an institution that one can leave easily and if we have a society where women get a better education on average than men, it seems that not much of the original justification for spousal support remains.
@AnonYEmous
I don’t read the manosphere. I’m not even sure what it is exactly–pick up artist stuff?
I was thinking of posters at SSC. For more own edification (not as an attempt to prove anything) do you think that you, aapje, dr beat (I think), and other regular posters at SSC that post about these topics are fair representatives of “actual MRAs”?
@Aapje
I don’t really wish to debate divorce more broadly. Certainly not here, buried at the bottom indent of the not-current open thread. I was just saying that *if* divorce law were to change such that fault was once again legally relevant then treating refusal to have sex as fault would be a more live issue than it would be under the status quo. The position that both of these things should happen is, in my opinion, more reasonable than the position that the marriage as an affirmative defense to rape rule should be reinstated.
For what it’s worth, the rule in traditional Jewish law, as per Maimonides, was that if a wife refused intercourse with her husband (a “rebellious wife”) the husband was to divorce her and she did not get her ketubah, the money that normally went to a wife when her husband died or divorced her.
@DavidFriedman
AFAIK, in most of Western history, although not so much in the present, the continuation of the family line was considered of great importance.
I’d say OK for me and Aapje, and so forth. Sorry to be touchy, especially given that I like to broad-brush feminists, but I do feel that a lot of people that don’t call themselves MRAs get lumped in, as opposed to feminism where everyone takes the title and they fight it out amongst themselves. So uh, just don’t take it to a bad-faith place, please.
Certainly in Jewish culture. If a man died without a son, his widow was supposed to marry one of his brothers in order to bear a son who would be considered the son of her previous husband. “Levirate marriage.”
@Brad
Would it change my mind how, exactly? To think that there are some assholes I disagree with on SSC? I fully agree with you there. You’re more than welcome to find some of those quotes, and I’ll stand right beside you in telling them that their stance is awful.
My point being that you can find someone on every side thinking and pushing for absolutely horrible things, but we have a sanity check where we say “Oh, those are fringe nuts and I (Along with $group in general) definitely don’t support them”, and move on. Outgroup homogeneity makes it way easier to take those noncentral examples as active parts of the movement, and your statement definitely comes off as you doing exactly that.
I mean, we could just ask. Does anybody here actually support the idea that “being married gives you the right to do whatever you want, whenever you want” to your spouse? I’d be really surprised if we had any takers, but I’m ready to be surprised here.
What the marital exemption says is that forced intercourse with your wife is not the crime of rape. Killing her is still the crime of murder.
My guess is that even when the marital exemption was good law, not very long ago, beating up your wife in order to make her have sex with you would count as assault.
@DavidFriedman
Yes, you’re correct, and I know. I’m quoting Brad’s original words here.
A few Americans, 7% according to a survey, are being mocked for believing that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. But these Americans are of course correct as brown cows exist, produce milk, and milk is by far the main component of chocolate milk. (From Nate Silver’s 538 podcast.)
Are you suggesting that 3% of Americans enjoy pedantically answering surveys (and 4% are lizardmen)? That does seem plausible.
That’s kind of what Nate Silver was suggesting, minus the lizardman part.
I think Overly Pedantic Respondent can be considered a subtype of lizardman.
I don’t think so. One is intent on being technically right and the other enjoys being flagrantly wrong.
I tried to find the text of the question. From the comments:
So basically the dairy industry did a survey for a campaign about milk. Various news outlets reported ” … Milk … ” and Nate Silver responded with ” … Milk … ” prompting you to note that ” … Milk … ” and me to clarify that ” … Milk … “.
So we should treat this as a public relations learning experience.
Yep.
This seems apt, somehow.
And probably a good one after that recent hullabaloo about milk being a symbol of white supremacy.
So it wasn’t a serious survey, it was an “interesting and fun facts” survey? If it was phrased in that manner (i.e. the questions were all light-hearted and humorous), then no wonder some people responded in kind: “sure, brown cows give chocolate milk! ha! ha! okay, do I get my Moo Cow Cap now?”
I don’t think anyone has discussed this, but shouldn’t Lizardman’s Constant be subject to how funny the wrong answer is? “Chocolate milk comes from brown cows” seems amusing enough to bump it to 7%.
I’m relatively new here, so I don’t know if even mentioning this guy is off limits since he’s a culture-war lightning rod, but I found these two podcast episodes with Jordan Peterson to be excellent:
Joe Rogan podcast #877 and #958 with Jordan Peterson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USg3NR76XpQ
Those are nearly 3-hours each, and I’m finding each one worth multiple listens. The guy’s a genius with a great ability to speak extemporaneously.
Culture-war things are banned (or at least supposed to be) on specific hidden open threads, but if the post doesn’t mention it you can talk about anything (as long as you do so vaguely truthfully, kindly and necessarily, and don’t use banned words).
I think he is indeed a great speaker; very passionate, articulate, and engaging. I think his opposition to compelled speech laws is commendable, and perhaps even courageous. At the same time, though, I find his religious/philosophical positions to be mostly bonkers. Sad, but true.
I completely agree that his weak spot is his religious/mythical fascination. For a while I was really put off from him after his difficult conversations with Sam Harris highlighted these weak spots. But after listening to him on the two Rogan podcasts, I’m a fan again. He’s more clear than anyone right now on the way our currently PC culture war is just rebranded Marxism in a new guise, and he’s more courageous than just about any public intellectual I can think of. Despite his shortcomings, I wish we had a hundred more like him.
I first heard of Peterson through Sam Harris’s podcast and actually just in the past week listened to both of those Joe Rogan interviews. I agree he’s an excellent speaker with a lot of charisma. His ability to explain things simply and with uncanny clarity reminds me a lot of Sam Harris, actually, which makes the semi-disasters of his appearances at Harris’s podcast quite ironic in retrospect. I also couldn’t help but notice that both Peterson and Harris seem to elevate “telling the truth” as the highest virtue or perhaps the most important thing one can do for the betterment of humanity.
I do find Peterson’s obsession with religion and mythology to be a little hooey. He seems to connect dots which it’s not clear are actually connected, constantly coming back to things like “the hero myth,” “slaying the dragon,” “saving your father from the underworld,” “the snake in the garden,” etc. What makes this easier to swallow than otherwise is that he makes it explicit to the listener that he’s not talking about these in literal terms – unlike actual cult leaders, he says that these myths can be useful even if you don’t have an iota of belief in them.
And I think that connects with the fact that he’s a clinical psychologist rather than an academic or religious leader. He’s not concerned with discovering things about reality, he’s concerned about helping his patients accomplish their goals, and he defines “truth” around that concept – what’s useful for that goal, rather than what reflects empirical reality? That’s where I start to lose him a little, and that’s what made his 1st appearance on Harris’s podcast so bad, but I can appreciate where he’s coming from.
His explanation of social justice warriors seems a little bit of an ad hoc just-so story, but I can’t deny that it’s 100% consistent with their observed behavior. I think not enough research has been done about how this group came about to really confidently assert any explanation, but the way he speaks, he seems quite sure of himself. I admit, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s a clinical psychologist, Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, Erika Christakis is an early childhood educator, all professions where you’d expect them to have some empirically based understanding of how people and groups of people work.
I do highly recommend anyone to check it out if they’re interested in modern culture war issues. I expect he’s not going anywhere anytime soon, since he sees YouTube and online platforms like it as the future of education where he can do more to teach than traditional avenues like universities (which he sees as too corrupted, or in an inevitable slide towards being too corrupted) or books, and I think he’s got a point there.
actually him being a psychologist makes a lot of sense in that regard
basically as I understand it he subscribes to the consequentialist notion of truth: you should believe as true what will be good for you, and society should believe as true what will help society
the problem is: who makes that call? And it can’t be the members of the society themselves, or they won’t actually believe it, which defeats the whole purpose. For example, Christianity: people like Petersen may convince themselves to believe for the greater good, but if everyone’s just pretending does it really work? Probably not, so it has to be decided by some elite or whatever, and that makes it highly vulnerable to being wrong about what people should believe, both accidentally and purposefully
but as a clinical psychologist it makes sense on two axes: first, your patients are in some sense not fit to judge what they need, since they need psychological help, and second, you as a clinical psychologist are in a position to be that elite, and be a responsible one with enough learning and experience to usually be correct, plus you can consult other clinical psychologists and professors and so forth
don’t think this works for society as a whole though. At best it demands the enlightened leader, and that usually ends poorly.
But Peterson’s whole point is that it’s evolved. The behavior comes first. Monkeys came out of trees and acted in ways that succeeded long-term for monkeys. As the monkeys figured out how to talk they started trying to describe notable ways of being a successful monkey, for the monkey now, the monkey in the future, the monkey’s family, the monkey’s community. And he doesn’t mean proposing possible ways of being a successful monkey and then debating them. He means abstracting out the features of already proven successful monkey behavior.
So the stories aren’t invented, they’re discovered. And dismissing as mere superstition important stories that articulate ways of acting in the world that are useful for individuals and groups is therefore extremely foolish.
Just to be clear: we’re talking about Christianity here, right?
So, what, the Bible…evolved? You may argue that a certain way of living associated with Christianity evolved, but the bottom line is that the religion itself was written and thus invented, whether by whatever Roman Emperor or by the apostles themselves.
And by the way, another problem emerges, namely that Christianity and religion generally have proven themselves to be totally vulnerable to atheism, or maybe “neoliberalism”, or whatever. So if you were the man on high picking Christianity to push, you done fucked up, because however good it is for the people who follow it, it’s not good enough to convince them of its goodness.
That’s Peterson’s thesis, yes. Although he talks about lots of other mythologies, too, including Buddhism, ancient Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian mythologies. Early people observed human behavior, abstracted useful knowledge of modes of behavior that “work,” and attempted to articulate them. But articulation of such concepts is hard, and took a long, long time.
I’d say it’s the other way around. Europe has abandoned Christianity, their birth rates are in the toilet and in another hundred or so years they’ll have been replaced by Islam.
Also, what you’re describing is basically what Nietzsche said. He wasn’t happy that God was dead, he believed that Christianity contained within it the seed of its own undoing (highest moral value is Stating the Truth. The perfect man spoke truth and suffered anything for it). Without God, the core would be ripped out of western civilization and men would have to become ubermensch and forge their own values, which is very, very hard. Hitler, Stalin, others would eventually attempt to do this and fail catastrophically and horrifically because invented ideologies are pathological.
Watch the Maps of Meaning lectures, they’re really insightful and entertaining.
ETA:
I believe Christianity has within it the seeds of its own resurrection, as well. The history of Christianity is a pattern of abandonment and revival. Don’t judge the faith by its current ~50 year malaise when we’re working on a 2,000 year time span. Christianity’s not dead yet.
@AnonYEmous:
It makes some sense to describe the Bible as having evolved. The Hebrew Bible plus the New Testament are not the result of one person writing in one place at one time.
I think this is actually exactly what Peterson argues. Christian myths are false because they were invented, but the reason those myths became so popular is that they resonated with behaviors we as social animals figured out were beneficial to our survival. So he considers them “true” in a religious sense, which he considers to be the highest value of “true,” rather than an empirical sense.
Again, this is where things sound a bit hooey to me, perhaps even new age-y, but I can appreciate that he’s not asserting that Christianity or any other religion is literally scientifically true. So according to his vision, even if no one was actually a Christian, that would be fine, as long as they bought into the way of living it espouses. And it’s not like that way of living is uniquely Christian anyway – things like taking responsibility for one’s life, strengthening oneself to face dangers, preventing needless suffering, using dialogue to adjudicate conflict, etc. doesn’t belong to Christianity. He seems to find the myths of Christianity useful as metaphors for those concepts which he believes evolved from social animals struggling to survive for millions of years.
It’s a good point that history isn’t over yet, so we don’t know just how fit his principles are. Maybe a form of fascism or totalitarianism espoused by Islamists or SJWs is actually the one that would lead to survival of humanity, and the principles of personal responsibility he espouses will actually doom humanity to extinction. I think he convinces himself that this is not the case by looking at history and evolution. I do think his case based on the history of USSR and Communist China, as well as behavior of chimps in dominance hierarchies are pretty strong, but I’m honestly not sure if he’s onto something or just fooling himself with very nice sounding charismatic words. Just-so stories can sound very convincing.
But that just means that Christianity contained the seeds of this failure all along, doesn’t it? Is it any accident that pretty much every Christian country who got moderately wealthy has promptly entered a death spiral?
And sure, I won’t pre-judge Christianity. But this is rather the point: who is the person who makes the call? Whoever it is, if they’re wrong, they’re fucked. And especially problematic is that they can’t exactly have a large-scale debate about it, because the entire enterprise depends on secrecy – either that, or everyone subscribing to consequentialist truth and mouthing along with everyone else. Maybe that actually works and I’m an elitist for thinking it doesn’t, but I think it doesn’t.
This is not how people decide if they like something or not. It’s certainly not how they decide if they believe something or not.
How many people in how many places? Two groups at two times? I’m shamefully unaware of Hebrew religious history, and I know there’s debate about Christian religious history.
How do we know it’s Christianity’s fault and not wealth’s fault, or the fault of something else that correlates with wealth? Japan’s birth rates are even lower.
(I think the rich Gulf petrostates have high birth rates, but petrostates are a weird case and most of them are tiny.)
That’s not how evolution works. It doesn’t matter how people decide if they like or believe something. What matters is whether societies that do or don’t like or believe something survive/thrive relative to other societies that do something different.
Then let’s rephrase: Christianity, when it comes into contact with wealth, fails to a large degree. Other systems may fail even more prodigiously. But life doesn’t grade on a curve.
Cool, but the problem is that the religion grew popular, ultimately, because people believed in the God himself. The Bible isn’t considered to be popular to non-Christians. Why?
@AnonYEmous says:
Maybe, maybe not. The last time this happened Islam got to the gates of Vienna.
You do. I do. We do, individually and together.
The following is just my opinion rather than Peterson’s. He doesn’t predict the future. I believe that Christianity is a faith that flourishes under persecution and suffering. An awful lot of people discover their faith during times of extreme distress. Illness, death, war. And the common atheist trope is that this is fear of dying, or punishment in the afterlife or something, but as a believer who found my faith through suffering, I don’t think it is at all. I think it’s a way of dealing with the suffering, and finding right ways to act and think that make the suffering okay. It clicks one day and you get it, but it’s very difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
This becomes the self-correcting nature of Christianity. Obey the precepts, do the rituals and you get a workable, high trust society. As you abandon them, people fall into moral and spiritual decay, which results in material decay as well. And when they’re really suffering is when they discover, personally, what made Christianity work all along, and the Truth of it. So I gaze into my crystal ball and think things will get way worse, and then they will get better, and Christianity will snap back. Whether or not this happens before Europe is consumed by Islam remains to be seen, but the idea that atheism or neoliberalism or whatever it is is the last ideology on the Tech Tree and we’re just waiting for everybody else to catch up is unlikely to be true. This is not the end of history and we don’t just go by a points victory in 2050.
If we are talking about evolution, cultural competition, or anything analogous, isn’t that exactly what it does?
@AnonYEmous
No. The religion survived and thrived because its followers out-bred, out-competed, out-expanded and/or conquered others who had a less workable memeplex. That’s evolution, applied to memetics.
This is the problem with Dawkin’s meme theory of religion. He sees it as a virus. Essentially a useless or destructive pathogen, when in fact it’s more like a symbiotic relationship with the host.
This is how you wind up with people saying things like “if it weren’t for Christianity we’d be exploring the galaxy by now!” No you wouldn’t be. You’d be in mud huts probably without the Church preserving and expanding knowledge and generally telling people not to murder each other too much.
I’m not seeing the problem here, could you break it down further? Christian myths obviously predate Christianity and the Bible by quite a bit, and Peterson’s point seems to be that those myths survived because societies found them useful. I haven’t heard him say anything about the specifics of the history of Christianity, but I think his point would be that because these myths were popular, they ended up in Christianity, not the other way around.
But this is precisely the downfall in regards to religion. It works fine as a way of life, as a culture, and as shared myths. I can cop to that and I agree with its insightfulness.
But if it comes to a religion, something which requires belief? I don’t think most people can consciously choose belief. Again, maybe I’m wrong.
Not really. You’re either trending upwards, trending downwards, or neither. If christianity causes downward trends, it doesn’t help that other ideologies do too – you’ll still end up with zero people. Either that, or an incredible amount of sortition and selection a la Ideocracy, in which case as usual we’ll see, a reality which makes leaving it up to a few elites a really bad idea.
But…so far as I can tell, the growth of Christianity came from conversion. How do you know that the various religious bits and pieces and myth of Christ didn’t just appeal to people in a way that isn’t evolutionary? Evolution is strong, but it most certainly produces artifacts.
I guess.
@lvlln
Not exactly. Peterson says (essentially) there are only a limited set of workable monkey behaviors, so everyone who tells stories about successful monkeys will tell similar stories. For instance, he talks about how the tiny native American tribe he talked to had basically the same Flood story as the bible (and others) despite being separated by 12,000 years. (The flood story being a metaphor for “there is a time for prehistory before which nothing remains”)
Epistemic status: I’m talking about my own personal conversion experience. If conversion to faith experiences were easily articulable and transmitted via interweb you’d all already be converted.
When I had my religious conversion experience a few ideas crystallized in my head which were “there is only one well” and “I see a dim view of a more perfect geometry.” Suddenly I saw bits of God and Christ and the Holy Spirit in everything that contained some part of “Truth,” especially in any sort of narrative story of heroism or suffering. LoTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, the Matrix, etc. And I know some of that’s intentional, some of it’s not. The point is everything sounds the same, everything rhymes because you’re just experiencing different aspects of the same universal truths.
Difficult to articulate, which is among the reasons I sympathize with Peterson’s argument that “articulation is hard, and comes after behavior.” But in my view, Christianity didn’t take the stories from earlier stories. Everyone took the stories from the same, singular well (God).
@AnonYEmous
I had a long response but it gotten eaten, or a broke a rule. Either way long story short:
You can “choose to believe” by either making a Leap of Faith (see Kierkegaard) or by just doing the behaviors so well there’s no difference between your actions and those of a believer, and then just…stop pretending you don’t believe the things you’re clearly acting like you believe. I call this “stop LARPing.”
Also, as for spreading and making people, religious communities make children. The problem with secularism/atheism is it puts no emphasis on reproduction and has many memes against it. Long term this is evolutionary/memetic failure.
It’s not about “elites deciding.” It’s a bottom-up thing, not a top-down thing. We talk about low birth rates in the US or whatever, but my church is full of families with children.
@AnonYEmous:
INFODUMP TIME; TL;DR: biblical scholarship complicated
The Hebrew Bible was put together by various ancient Jews over a period of probably a millennium, and consists of various different sources, sometimes in the same document (eg, there’s two creation narratives in Genesis, and two versions of the story in Job) – in some places, the editing is smoother than others, but generally scholars think they can spot the different versions by various means (eg, in parts of the Hebrew Bible, by the use of different names/pseudonyms for God).
Jews traditionally subdivide the Hebrew Bible into the Torah (“teaching”, 5 books traditionally associated with Moses, consisting of an account of the supposed history of the world/Israel plus a bunch of laws and such), Nevi’im (“prophets”, further subdivided into some books giving further history of Israel, the important prophetic books, and some lesser prophets), and Ketuvim (“writings”, consisting of poetry, wisdom literature, and some stuff that appears to have been written late and didn’t fit anywhere else).
The books of the New Testament mostly seem to date from the mid to late 1st century to the early to perhaps mid 2nd century (scholars, of course, disagree). They consist of the gospels (accounts of Jesus, consisting mostly of things he’s supposed to have said and things he’s supposed to have did; there’s various debates over the sources of the different gospels but the important bit is that Mark was probably the first; Matthew and Luke appear to have used Mark as a source, to share another source often called Q from, imaginatively, the German for “source”, and probably had their own sources too; John was probably the last and is very different from the others), Acts (Luke 2 basically), Epistles (a whole bunch of letters, some written by Paul, some forged in Paul’s name to address stuff that came up later, an anonymous letter traditionally associated by Paul, and some letters by other guys), and Revelation (this is the one with all the monsters).
In both cases, what books were official was decided upon fairly late in the game. We know when better for Christians than for Jews. We also have more stuff that didn’t end up in the Bible (IIRC) for Christians than for Jews, some of which was really really wacky. There’s also some stuff Jews composed but didn’t become official for Jews which Catholics have kept around.
The whole thing is made complicated by the fact that, although I used the word “forgery” earlier, that’s a little bit mean and inaccurate. We are more sticklers for things like authorship and historical accuracy and such than used to be the case. With the pseudo-Pauline letters, for example, you had a situation where new problems came up, so somebody wrote letters in Paul’s name addressing them, probably thinking something closer to “well, this is what Paul would think about this, based on what I know of Paul” than “suckers!” Or, some of the prophetic books explain past events as though the books were written before those events, to explain why they happened via the format of “this is what’s gonna happen and why”. Or, the Gospels were written to fit the understanding of the world of the communities they came from: you can read all of them as answering the question “so how exactly does a peasant Jewish religious leader, executed in horrible fashion by an imperial occupying power, bring about salvation for all mankind”, for example.
And this isn’t even going into the history of either religion after the canons were laid down. So the point of this infodump is that in fact it is pretty accurate to say that the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Judaism, and Christianity all “evolved”.
But if it comes to a religion, something which requires belief? I don’t think most people can consciously choose belief. Again, maybe I’m wrong.
I know I can’t, which is why I’ve always found Pascal’s Wager style arguments ridiculous. His suggestion is “just go through the motions and eventually you’ll start believing.” Maybe some people’s minds work that way, but I don’t think everyone’s does.
I attended church as a child/teenager and was surrounded by believers for years. I didn’t dislike it and found some of the rituals soothing (partly just because I enjoy rituals and routine), but it never moved me an iota closer to actually believing.
If you agree with Jordan Peterson that the myths are useful, regardless of their historical accuracy, you can also chose to use the myths as guidance, without actually believing in God.
A subset of Western Christians do seem to believe like this, either by no longer defining God as a thinking entity (for example, by equating God with nature) or sometimes actually calling themselves atheist. The latter even has a wiki page.
@Conrand Honcho
It sounds to me like you’re just restating what I stated, substituting “God” for “popular myths,” with the understanding that popular myths became popular because our social ancestors observed that peers who behaved in a certain way tended to create successful societies. Which is a fine just-so story and, as far as I can tell, the only way I’ve seen that actually allows for religion being compatible with empirical reality. This, combined with the fact that he doesn’t ever ask you for faith or even suggest that you trust him without taking small incremental steps to try out his suggestions is why I find Peterson’s case compelling.
At the same time, it IS a just-so story, and I haven’t seen evidence that the hard empirical work necessary to prove that this story is actually true has been done, which is where I find Peterson a bit cult-ish. Yes, we see the same sorts of stories popping up over and over again, but No, that doesn’t prove or even strongly assert that they aren’t just coincidence or that they have any sort of relationship with how real societies in the real world involving real humans actually work. We humans are incredibly good at pattern matching and confirmation bias.
You forgot Dr Who.
> it can’t be the members of the society themselves, or they won’t actually believe it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism
So, for about half the day, this open thread was blocked by my workplace’s filters (Our Internet AUP allows for personal use during breaks, but software blocks a lot of sites and content), but ONLY half the day, as “Content: Gaming”. As of yesterday OT 77.75 was suddenly blocked for “Content: Marijuana”.
Is it tripping on keywords or somesuch? If so, it can’t be that sensitive because that entire discussion of, well, gaming, E3, and Steam accounts didn’t trip the ‘Gaming’ block the way something did today…
Color me confused.
Is “gaming” on the filter as being about games as we understand them, or is it filtering to keep out online poker and sports betting? Perhaps someone was discussing prediction markets?
I’m able to access wikipedia articles and even online general articles about betting/table games topics (I work at a casino and have used wikipedia to explain Blackjack and Baccarat to my team during slow times for example), so I’m guessing not, though I suppose there could be a whitelist.
The bit that confuses me is the page suddenly becoming -unblocked-, after being blocked for hours. I can only assume that a post was deleted.
There’s a perception that police in the US shoot unarmed people more than they used to and/or are less likely to face punishment than they used to. This is usually tied in with the idea that police have become militarized. This isn’t just from left-wing activists – I’ve seen more than one criminal defence blogger make the claim, and they, uh, tend to hold a lot of opinions that would make them unfit to be left-wing activists.
Is this the case? Is there a way to quantify it? I know from doing light Google research that US police shooting numbers are often rather sketchy and speculative – record keeping seems to vary a lot from place to place.
Assuming the answer is yes: what could be done to reduce the number of people killed due to police overreaction/screwups/etc?
I think at least one of the arguments made is that the degree of danger associated with being a police officer is both low and falling, which suggests that police should act in ways less tailored to minimising the risks they face and more tailored to keeping the people they interact with alive and healthy.
As for reducing it: our general response to seriously socially undesirable activity is to criminalise it, work to catch the people who are doing it and gather evidence of their infractions, and then punish them. That feels like a decent starting point here, too.
There’s probably a balance to be struck between treating shootings by police as a matter of occupational negligence (you will be disciplined/fired) and treating them as flat-out crimes, not dissimilar to shootings by not-police. I’ve got some sympathy for the view that the punishment should be fairly certain but not excessively severe (for a lot of crimes, actually) if only because that makes it more likely that police will be willing to enforce the rules against their colleagues.
Kind of easy to say when it’s somebody else’s life on the line, isn’t it?
That’s why they get the very high total compensation considering the job requirements. Taking hazard pay and then refusing to be exposed to hazard is dishonest.
And all I’m saying is it’s much easier to define how much hazard is acceptable when someone else is facing the hazard.
It’s also easier to exaggerate when the taxpayer is paying for it.
It’s generally up to the employer to decide the terms of the employment and the employee to take it or leave it. But there’s this weird thing where many on the right start spontaneously humming L’Internationale the second we are talking about cops instead of teachers.
It’s worth noting that protective services work isn’t unusually risky by the standards of hands-on labor. It’s a lot worse than white-collar work, but construction workers die on the job about twice as much, and vehicle operators more than twice.
Dunno how that ought to hash out in terms of compensation.
To have a high-trust society, the police have to be accountable too.
Personally, given the policy choice, I would rather compensate more (though most police are already well-paid considering their socio-educational background) and require more restrictive rules of engagement, than compensate less but offer qualified immunity from most abuse-of-power complaints. In fact, I would argue that the latter system exacerbates the problem, because it is more attractive to people who tend to exercise power in a potentially abusive way (because they can max out that part of their “compensation package” more than the mild-mannered).
As should be kind of obvious in the context of a debate about people who are not police being killed by people who are police, everyone’s life is on the line in this discussion.
I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the institution we rely on to, well, protect and serve, should try to avoid killing too many of us, even if that increases the risks they face. A police force optimised to maximise the safety of the police would leave the precinct only very rarely, and wouldn’t work all that well.
Obviously you’ve got to compensate people for what you’re asking them to do, but, as others suggest, the market seems to do a better-than-reasonable job of that already.
Along with the money and the benefits, have you ever heard of a male stripper dressing up as a health economist, just to pick a random profession?
I used to know a guy who did a pretty good Tax Accountant set, but it relied heavily on subverting the trope and doing a Clark Kent Takes Off His Glasses transformation. So your point here is solid with respect to the social benefits of police work. Police/Fire/Ambulance are some of the easiest roles to play straight for status on the stage.
I’ll file that piece of knowledge, and mental image, away in case it becomes useful in the future.
Thanks
I suggest an alternative rule, worry more about keeping people alive and less about them being healthy. Allow greater latitude in the use of non-lethal force and less for lethal force.
Right, because going to jail for a few nights on bullshit charges wasn’t a costly enough disproportionate outcome of not Respectin Mah Authoritah, now we can also look forward to hospital bills! I would bet actual money on insurers refusing to cover costs associated with such altercations, since clearly it’s Joe Commoner’s fault for not kowtowing deeply enough.
If the cost of fewer people getting killed is a larger number of people getting bruised, I call that a win. What do you call it? and please, “Respectin Mah Authoritah”? Can we not leap straight to emotional digs at rival tribes?
Lawl. If you mean, Jock Tribe, sure. Red Tribe, not really.
The monopoly on violence needs to be carefully monitored. One doesn’t need to be a bleeding heart liberal to know that if a cop is having a bad day he or she has a lot of leeway to make yours even worse. The consequences of asserting one’s constitutional rights are already alarmingly high – I’d rather not add “feel free to smack Obvious Criminals around if they get lippy”.
Cassander probably meant “red tribe”, and I think he’s right, but I have a related point: if you treat cops like a hostile rival tribe, they’re going to act like a hostile rival tribe. Ditto for minorities of all stripes, members of weird religions, jocks, nerds, and short people, but it seems especially worth thinking about in the case of cops, because they carry guns and act under color of law.
Trust goes both ways. If you want enforcers of any kind of norms to have productive relationships with the people they’re enforcing norms over, you need to ensure they’re using their powers ethically without making them feel hamstrung, or unappreciated, or like they need to bend the rules to get their jobs done. Do any of that and you’ve got a recipe for perverse incentives. Stricter rules of engagement are not an unqualified good in this context.
That’s a hard needle to thread, and I feel like a lot of damage has already been done, but we definitely don’t want to make it worse.
I’m not saying cops are a rival tribe. I’m saying they’re human beings, prone to all the same sort of failings and biases as the rest of us. Allowing more leeway in the use of violence will inevitably lead to even greater misuse of violence.
Trust is a two-way street, yes. But since they are the ones with the guns and the connections to prosecutors, the onus is on them to demonstrate accountability. When they can act with impunity and anyone wronged by the police has to just put up with it or face even worse, it does not exactly win hearts and minds.
Now I’ve liked most if not all of the cops I’ve met personally. Good folk in it for the right reasons. But when one bad apple can turn your life upside down (or just shoot your dog) on a whim, well, I’d really rather decrease the incentive for meathead bullies to join up. Not give them the extra allure of bruising folk who dare to slight their egos by claiming to be human beings with rights.
I’m saying this is not true, not inevitably. Misuse of violence can happen when license to use violence is extended to “meathead bullies”, to use your phrasing. But it can also happen when options involving less, no, or earlier use of violence are closed, or unattractive for other reasons.
Rules of engagement work by closing off options, and they’re typically a pretty blunt instrument. There are subtler ways for bad dynamics to be created, too: if any use of force automatically leads to an investigation, for example, then you’re incentivizing “shoot him dead and sprinkle some crack on the corpse” in some situations that might have been resolved with a nightstick or Taser, because dead men can’t tell their side of the story.
Sure, I’ll concede that.
I still think that this would be the healthy police culture to have. Though perhaps “review” would be a better term than “investigation”.
If we can get a law saying that any time dashcam/bodycam footage is “missing” then Law Enforcement automatically loses their court case, I will gladly support one allowing them more appropriate application of nightsticks and tasers. But accountability has to be demonstrated before granting more responsibility.
This is admittedly a rule exaggerated for effect. The point I’m trying to make is that in the current climate they need to do something big and splashy to earn the public trust. Or make some honest goddamn statistics available to watchdogs, and have departments actually willing to act on them. And unions that will rigorously excise bad eggs instead of hiding them behind the blue shield.
Power corrupts. Without functional accountability, it is inevitable. With credible accountability, I agree with you.
Perhaps a middle ground would be “if any use of lethal force automatically leads to an honest investigation, then you may have more leeway with non-lethal force”. I don’t think this is sufficient, and undecided on whether it would even be a net gain, but it’s a start.
I have very little confidence in my ability to design better rules of engagement for the police from my armchair. So what I’d like to see is a serious commitment from, say, the DoJ, to collect data on police use of violence and police shootings. I’m much less concerned with sending anyone to jail than I am with noticing which departments are having problems, and which sets of rules of engagement/department policies/enforcement strategies works at reducing these things. But this has to start with the data, or we all end up arguing from our mental images of police shootings cobbled together from imagination, news reports (with a bias toward sensational and outrageous stories), and TV shows.
As far as shootings: The Washington Post database shows that a lot of police shootings involved an armed person getting shot or a violent crime in progress, (That’s drawn from police reports, so it might not be entirely reliable, but it’s the best data I know of.). That suggests that the total number of avoidable police shootings might not be all that high. Some of the cases where the person shot was armed were avoidable (that’s the claim in the Philando Castille shooting–it looks like the cop just panicked), but a lot of them probably weren’t. Similarly, some cases where the police intervened in a violent attack might have been resolved nonlethally, a lot of thr time, shooting the guy was exactly what we want the cops to have done. And there is no way to avoid some tragedies–if you put thousands of cops pr year in situations where they’re scared and armed and have like three seconds to make a decision, some of them are going to panic and kill someone who wasn’t really a threat. That’s what you get for using humans instead of robots for law enforcement.
The DoJ is implementing a collection plan as of last year, but even assuming no serious bumps in the road by way of poor local and state police participation and/or record-keeping, etc, it will be years before we have a particularly robust data set.
I doubt that will satisfy anyone to whom this is quite literally a life or death struggle against the murder of the downtrodden.
@Gobbobobble says:
I agree, but since the role of the police officer is inherently one backed by force, we need to think about where to give them licence and where not.
My logic is simple, I’d much rather we have several people who don’t deserve it get beaten up than one killed. I also think that cops who constantly fear which hunts for the use of force might not be very good at their jobs. Hence, a two pronged approach, one, give them wider latitude to use non-murderous force in exchange for extreme oversight of (and with severe penalties for improper use) the use of murderous force.
At the risk of going back to terrorism vs chairs, the total number of blacks shot dead by police last year was 233. Of those, 145 had guns, so maybe a plausible first cut estimate of the number of blacks needlessly killed per year by the police is around 88. (Some people with guns shouldn’t have been shot; some without guns should have been.). This is a rough estimate, but I doubt it could be off by a factor of two. So we’re talking about maybe 100 killings of blacks by the police a year that could be prevented if we could really get a handle on police shootings of blacks. That’s worth fixing, but it doesn’t seem like so much of a life and death struggle by the downtrodden. It’s roundoff error in traffic deaths, and a small fraction of all murders.
There’s more to this than the number of people killed– one is whether you can trust police to be helpful rather than destructive, and another is the risk of being beaten.
It has recently become popular among a segment of people to (smugly) cite how much more likely one is to die in a tragic banana accident than from a terrorist attack, to dismiss fears of terrorism as ignorant and probably racist.
I’m curious what kinds of murders this logic applies to, and if there is a consistent rule.
Nancy:
I agree that’s also an issue. But the one that’s capturing lots of attention for the last several years, and that Trofim eas commenting on, is police shootings of black men. So it’s worth spending some time trying to work out how many peoples’ lives we might save if we eliminated all the unnecessary police shootings of blacks. My estimate is less than 100, and given the data we have, it’s hard to see how that could be off by more than a factor of two or so, though if I’m wrong, I’d like to see why.
@albatross1
Police shootings are not directed exclusively (or even primarily, despite the attention directed this direction by a particular stripe of activist) against black people. Get the full dataset and adjust numbers upward accordingly.
It might not change your underlying point, mind.
@cassander
Beatings and other ‘hands on’ policing also cause deaths, so it’s not as clean a dichotomy as you present.
Also, many US police officers work solo and it’s risky to try to subdue someone physically without superiority in numbers.
@Aapje
The point is to create, or more accurately clarify, a very strong distinction, to create a culture where the attitude is “you can do what you need to do, but if someone dies, there will be serious investigation and consequences” and to create a situation where we can judge people on concrete results, not nebulous intent.
An extreme example of doing this is traditional Cheyenne law. Casual violence seems to have been fairly common. Kill a fellow Cheyenne, on the other hand, and you are exiled from the tribe, more or less whatever your reason, at least for a period of years. And ceremonies are required to purify the tribal totems.
That’s obviously a laudable goal, cassander, particularly since killing destroys evidence as well as ending a life.
I will say, though, that something like this was the idea behind routinely issuing tasers, which were intended to be used instead of a gun, in situations when the officer would otherwise have shot the target. Needless to say they ended up being used much, much more broadly than that (there’s no “don’t shoot me bro” video) by opening up the option for a less consequential form of violence.
Maybe the many extra incidents of people being tased (which is mostly nonfatal, but is a pretty big deal in the context of public order policing) are a worthwhile trade for some small number of averted shootings, but you are talking about a geometric growth in the number of incidents as a result of a new technology loosening rule of engagement for “minor” violence by officers.
Radley Balko’s “Rise of the Warrior Cop” is worth reading if you haven’t yet.
I don’t think there is good data on police shootings nationwide, which makes it hard to know if the shootings are becoming more common or just get reported more often.
The FBI’s homicide reports show justifiable homicide by police officers, and I don’t think there was an uptrend in those numbers, but they also didn’t get reports from all police departments. The Washington Post and the Guardian have collected data on when civilians are killed by the police for the last couple years, and both have websites where you can see the data. The Washington Post even has a very nice web frontend for simple queries on the data. But that doesn’t tell you much about long term trends–it only goes back to 2015.
Washington Post fatal police shootings database
This lets you drill down a bit. In 2016, they counted 963 fatal police shootings. About a quarter (233) of the people shot were black. More than half were claimed in the police report to have a gun. (I don’t know how often the police threw down a gun after the shooting to justify it–I suspect that would be a bad strategy, given the extremely low fraction of poiice shootings that end up with the cop prosecuted, but I really don’t know for sure.). There is a lot more detail if you dig around.
For reference: blacks are about 13% of the population, so they’re shot at about twice the rate you’d expect if police shootings were random. However, blacks also get arrested at a disproportionate rate. From this data you get blacks accounting for about 28% of arrests. (This reflects the much higher black crime rate.) The most plausible model to me is tha more hostile interactions with the police = more opportunities to get shot.
I think you can get far more out of spending half an hour digging through the numbers on the Washington Post website and doing simple calculations than reading or listening to almost any debate or news story about police shootings.
There’s this study done by a Harvard economics professor on the subject, where he looks at the likelihood of blacks being shot given comparable circumstances relative to others races. The findings: police officers are more likely to use force in general in apprehending blacks, but their likelihood of shooting blacks, specifically, is the same as it is for other races.
However, this doesn’t mean that blacks aren’t unfairly, disproportionately shot. The author admits that his study doesn’t cover the likelihood of blacks being accosted in the first place, and suggests it’s this area where blacks could be getting screwed over.
So, not a greater likelihood of being shot once pulled over, just a greater likelihood of getting pulled over in the first place.
Relevant: Philando Castile was pulled over 52 times before the incident that resulted in his death. “Driving while black” is a phrase for a reason.
Some time ago Scott urged skeptics to “look through the evidence that Russia was involved in the hacking” of Democrats during the 2016 elections. So I looked and ended up finding something very interesting instead: evidence that someone is trying to make it look like Russia hacked the Democrats. The best part is that this evidence is out there and can be verified by anyone. It is not difficult but not completely trivial either, and having some CS/IT experience would probably be helpful. And that’s why I thought of coming here: the place with the highest concentration of very smart, very techy people that I regularly attend. I would like you to look at the evidence and tell me what you make of it.
Some background. On June 15, 2016 – three days after Julian Assange stated he’d be releasing some “great” Hillary emails and the same day CrowdStrike (a company hired by the DNC) made a claim about Russian injection of malware onto the DNC servers – Guccifer 2.0 published some DNC documents that he claimed to have obtained by hacking. Guccifer 2.0, who named himself after a hacker recently in the news, said he was a Romanian hacker responsible for the upcoming leaks. Pwn All The Things, with his 10s of 1000s followers on Twitter, did some quick analysis and concluded that Guccifer 2.0 left accidental Russian fingerprints on the files. His work was then cited by numerous journalists and today Wikipedia authoritatively states that Guccifer 2.0 was “a persona that created by Russian intelligence services to cover for their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Now, in February 2017, /u/tvor_22, with his 24 followers on Medium, published a much more detailed analysis of the metadata in Guccifer 2.0’s files. He discovered that what Guccifer 2.0 actually did was first create a Russian stylesheet template using a copy of MS Word registered to “Warren Flood”, and then copy-paste the contents of the original DNC documents into the pre-tainted template while changing the author name to “Felix Edmundovich [Dzerzhynsky]”. Now, Warren Flood used to be a White House employee, but he is actually not the author of any of the actual DNC documents. (We know this because the documents were later published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails batch. Not all of the Guccifer 2.0 documents ended up in the actual Wikileaks but the first three did.)
This is it, in short. There is much more information, misinformation and speculation surrounding Guccifer 2.0, and it’s all highly interesting. But what I’d like to focus on today is /u/tvor_22’s and Adam Carter’s analysis of the metadata. I inspected the Guccifer 2.0 files myself and tried to come up with an alternative explanation for all of it, but so far have been unable to. (I’m hoping some people here will be interested enough in this subject to play with it themselves and either verify or poke holes in the analysis.) The most important part of the argument is that docs 1, 2, and 3 all contain the same Russian stylesheet RSIDs. They also have the same author and creation timestamps (afternoon of the day the docs were published.) Given that RSIDs are random numbers generated upon save whenever an element is added or edited, this means that all 3 docs derive from the same document.
Anyway, I hope people do have a look for themselves. The documents leaked by Guccifer 2.0 are still up on his website! Links for those who are interested, containing all the sources and reference material information needed:
Minimally guided version for people who want to do all the work themselves.
A slightly more guided version.
Thanks for taking the challenge and digging through to the primary sources!
While /u/tvor_22’s analysis is clever and interesting, it doesn’t really shift my opinion from when I first read about the documents’ author being “Felix Edmundovich” – on balance more likely to be a frame job than a Russian state-sponsored leak, but the frame-job was done so incompetently that there’s a high probability of trolling or some sort of triple-bluff n-dimensional chess going on that I don’t understand.
Do you have the sense that this is the strongest or most important evidence for Russia’s involvement in the DNC hacks? Or did you pick the piece of evidence you thought was weakest? Not accusing you of cherry-picking, I’m genuinely curious: Scott seemed to refer to some publicly available, well known body of evidence, but I’ve yet to find one. Most people I’ve seen arguing for the Russia-hacking connection cite the consensus of the intelligence community rather than specific evidence.
I’m bringing up Guccifer 2.0 and the metadata in his files for two reasons. First, I believe he is central to the claim that Russia actually interfered with the US elections by releasing DNC documents to the public as opposed to just hacking the servers. And second, I think the detailed metadata analysis showing that Russian fingerprints were left on purpose is virtually unknown. It took me hours of digging to come across it. (Since it hasn’t received a lot of scrutiny, there very well might be some errors in it. I’d like more eyes on it to see if people come up with better interpretations of all the available metadata.)
Now, if the analysis is correct, then, in itself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t Russia. As you mention, it could have been some sort of a triple bluff thing. But if so, then it was awfully bizarre in itself and very unsuccessful. Bizarre, because, say, why choose the obscure name of Warren Flood, who wasn’t even a DNC employee at that time?
Unsuccessful, because, as far as I understand, Pwn All The Things, with his 10s of 1000s of followers on Twitter, took the fingerprints at face value. He called it a Russian opsec fail. His analysis was then repeated by journalists. Moreover, /u/tvor_22 says he got blocked when he questioned Pwn All The Things’ view of things. This could have been for variety of reasons. For all I know, /u/tvor_22 may have been asking his questions in a rude way or something, but the bottom line is that most people don’t seem aware of the additional evidence he uncovered.
There is much more to this story that seems worth discussing and that I plan to go over with people here in the future, but for now I’m hoping to get some opinions on whether or not the available metadata, including the matching Russian style RSIDs, means that the original DNC documents were copied pasted into a pre-prepared Russian stylesheet template prior to being published on Guccifer 2.0’s website.
Also, from the recent WikiLeaks release of the lost CIA hacking tools, they have a tool called “UMBRAGE” which allowed the CIA to leave behind evidence fingering other states/hacking groups to cover their tracks. These tools were floating around for at least a year before the DNC hacks, meaning anyone could have done it, and fingered Russia.
Even without UMBRAGE, it seems obvious to me that any motivated hacker would want to implicate someone else in the hack, particularly if they planned on making the information publicly available (that is, the victim is going to know they were hacked when the information is released and then go look for a perpetrator as opposed to situation in which the information obtained is used privately and the victim may never know they were hacked). The very fact the IP addresses traced back to a Ukrainian proxy was a red flag for me. I’m pretty sure the first rule of being behind 7 proxies is “don’t have the last proxy be anywhere near you.”
I just started a blog which I hope is vaguely in the same style as SSC. I plan on reading about a different random topic I’m interested in every week and writing my thoughts on it.
My first article is a comparison between Dr. Stephan Guyenet and Gary Taubes on nutrition and weight gain: https://randomreadingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/first-blog-post/
Second article is a critique of the way scientists tend to view politics by examining Guyenet’s political recommendations: https://randomreadingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/dr-stephan-guyenets-default-scientific-statism/
Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to reading your thoughts on other subjects.
Thanks! I really appreciate it.
The season finale of the TV series American Gods was on Sunday, and this episode featured Jesus or rather Jesuses since there were a lot of them, matching different conceptions of what this fellow was all about. But still, Jesus was portrayed as a god like all the other gods we saw in the series. And that’s a big no-no for a monotheistic religion.
Anyone know what the reaction to this series has been among Christians? I’m not hooked into the ecosystem of Christian commentary.
Nor am I any longer, but I was for long enough to probably accurately model the response: “Liberal Hollywood attacks Jesus by presenting him as ‘just another god.’ Not only that, but they present him as if there are diverse sub-groups of Christendom with an idiosyncratic view on him!!!”
To test my trust in my mental model of Christian reflex-surface-reactionism, here are some top-level google results for ‘christian response to jesus on “american gods” starz’:
Gizmodo article. I’m going to try to only talk about the obviously “Christian” responses.
http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/christian-movie-reviews/5-things-christians-should-know-about-i-american-gods-i.html Shockingly evenhanded, though bent in support of Christianity. Haven’t seen the show, but I have read the book and this seems pretty fair, just-the-facts style reaction. Nice going Christians.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/march-web-only/in-american-gods-deities-of-myth-meet-modern-world.html Another pretty even-handed review. This seems to predate Jesus’s appearance.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kateohare/2017/04/american-gods-neil-gaiman-starz-bryan-fuller-trump/ Whiny self-indulgence about why the show is just plain bad–before we even get to the “possibly incredibly offensive” Jesus scene. I painfully recall writing movie “reviews” like this when a film didn’t mesh with my cultural sensibilities. More of what I expected.
That’s the extent of the obviously Christian sources on the first page of Google, so maybe the Christian community is getting it’s stuff together and accepting that it exists in a broader culture. I struggle to make that align with my current experience of a very openly intolerant batch of Christians. I might theorize that there exists a tech-savvy, more-open strain of Christendom that is more likely to come to the surface on a Google search, but that’s a just-so story that I am constructing to fit my data set. So: I’ll try to be more aware to re-frame my thoughts on Christians. Update the ol’ model.
Those probably don’t watch these kind of shows, so they don’t bother writing reviews about them.
Interesting. Did they also have a Sunni Allah and a Shia Allah? (rhetorical question)
No, it was about how Easter was turned from a pagan into a Christian holiday. So Allah would have been out of place.
I haven’t heard anything about it (nor seen the show, though having enjoyed the audiobook I’d like to at some point). I expect that’s largely because it’s been released on an obscure cable TV channel (OK, it’s one I’ve never heard of, not one of the big networks), and only people who already like the book are likely to try and watch it (or even know about it).
I suspect had it been broadcast through someone like CBS, or even HBO or Netflix it would have gotten a much bigger reaction. I also suspect that like any community as loosely-defined as ‘Christian’ you’d find a pretty wide range of views about it all written by prominent Christian commentators:
There will no doubt be a (probably large) group that find any portrayal of Jesus that doesn’t fit into their understanding of him to be offensive. There will be another group who will say that this show will make those watching it want to talk more about Jesus, which Christians can use positively to share what they believe. Another group will say that it’s a shame to see Jesus portrayed in such a way, but it’s not our job to defend him from popular culture. Another group will say there are much more important things to be thinking or talking about. Another group will say we really liked the show because it’s clearly fiction and okay to separate that from your religious beliefs.
Similarly I have a few pagan friends – their reaction to these types of shows tends to vary around “it’s good to see our god[s] portrayed in popular culture, though that’s not really what [Odin] is about,” with varying degrees of positivity/disappointment/anger depending on how well they thought certain gods were depicted.
Lot of interesting material in the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group’s report “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond“, but what I found a bit surprising, and which I think may of be particular interest is Figure 2, a scatterplot on a standard two-axis model with an economic axis and a social axis. What first really stood out was the economically “conservative”, socially “liberal” quadrant — the “libertarian” corner. While I expected it to be less populated than it’s neighbors, I didn’t expect it to be so sparse. Nor the opposite corner — the “populist” corner — to be as dense as it is. Also interesting is where the centers of the Clinton voter and Trump voter clusters lie.
(The comparison to 2012, for the analysis of the “swing” voters, in both directions, and the data as to what motivated the “Romney to Clinton” and “Obama to Trump” groups to make those shifts is also a point to note, as is the analysis of the major divisions within each party’s current constituency.)
This is interesting. Obviously, libertarianism, like certain other philosophies, is much larger on the Internet than in the world. Still, I’d be interested in comparing that quadrant map to 2012, if it existed. Anecdotally, it seems that libertarianism’s heyday has passed, if the abundance of ex-libertarians in certain circles is any indication. But as an ex-libertarian myself, I’m sure my perception is biased.
I recently (last 15 minutes) submitted a rather long, somewhat personal comment that seems to have disappeared shortly after being posted. Did the blog eat it? Did I get flagged (either by a machine or by Scott) as a spammer? I haven’t been active at all recently, but I have made sporadic comments here over the last couple years, and I don’t think my community impact was negative. I have the contents copy and pasted elsewhere, so no harm no foul, but I am curious about what happened.
Weirdly, just before refreshing the page to find it gone, I saw “You can longer edit this comment” (or some such) in place of the blue edit link that normally shows up at the bottom of comments.
You probably used a banned word. No, I don’t have a list.
Test: Muslim Muhammad.
Well, not sure what caused it, but I’ll try posting again.
My posts are very frequently swallowed up by the comment system for no reason at all. I have made it a habit to cntl+c my posts before submitting.
WordPress, or the shoggoths, or something seems to eat comments at times. I think it might have to do with length, or number of links. Or maybe the phases of the Martian moons 🙂
It’s not pure links. Unlike my normal method, I posted the latest battleship index straight into the system. It was ‘awaiting moderation’ for most of a day, but I could still see it while logged in, and it didn’t disappear.
Somehow it ended up in spam. Since it looks like you posted it successfully since then, I haven’t taken any action.
Thanks! You can delete this thread if you’d like.
I’ve been going through an interesting time personally in the last year, and this seemed like the right community to reach out to and see if there’s anyone else with a similar experience. Apologies for how long and meandering this ended up; it touches on a lot of ideas that haven’t yet had time to crystallize in my mind. In one sentence, I would describe it as my personal journey towards a philosophy of defaulting to kindness.
Imagine you are jogging on a trail just wide enough for two people to walk abreast of each other. At every entry point onto the trail is a sign that says walkers should keep right so that people moving at a faster pace can pass them. You approach (from behind) a pair of women walking lackadaisically next to each other, wandering back and forth on the trail, etc. You might be considering one of the following three options:
1) Jog around them (perhaps even going off the trail briefly); say nothing.
2) Gently address the problem (“I don’t know if you saw, but the sign says…”; “Could you please move over?”; On your left!”) while continuing on your way without significant delay.
3) Jog past them, or even stop to confront them, and say something aggressive (“Can’t you see the sign says…”, “You’re in the way!”).
For most of my life I would have taken option 3 in a heartbeat, perhaps justifying it to myself as follows: I do not have to feel guilty about breaking social norms, since the social contract is already being breached. Worse, their obliviousness makes other people hesitate to correct them for fear of being rude. If the women cared to think about others they would realize that they were being inconsiderate; they should be told off for not thinking along these lines. Even skeptics who disagree with my approach should agree that I am doing a service for the community. Once they admit that, then they’re just showing that they’ll let the confines social roles prevent them from doing what is right.
My choice is not merely the best one: it also shows that I am abnormally righteous and intelligent. I am willing to shoulder the burden of performing weird antisocial behaviors for the benefit of my community, and I do this because I can see through heuristics (“don’t be unpleasant to strangers”) and use cost-benefit analyses instead.
In truth, I think I just enjoyed being mean, and was good at coming up with excuses to do so when it couldn’t come back to bite me.
We don’t know that the women are *actually* negligent here. Maybe one of them is grieving the sudden loss of her husband, and they didn’t quite notice where they were because they were focused on more important matters. Even if they are negligent, I can accomplish my goals in a socially better way. If I run off the trail to pass them, that may even be enough to give them the hint they need; if not, a few “On your lefts!” from my fellow joggers will probably get the message across, and they’ll feel a bit embarrassed when they finally get it (or see one of the signs!).
I think this serves as an illustrative example of what, in my head, I thought of as being a grizzled cynic.
It’s easy for naive liberals to feel sorry for rent-controlled grandmas whose landlords want to hike up their rents. The cynic sees that Grandma is living alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Manhattan, that other people need somewhere to live too, and Grandma is actively harming the as-yet-nameless future tenants who would live there and make better use of it than she does. Not to mention that Grandma has no real claim to that place—the landlord owns it, remember! The cynic doesn’t merely want the market to come in and work its magic; he sees that Grandma is a selfish person who’s willing to harm others because she’s too lazy to move, and the naive liberals paint her as the victim.
The wise cynic is no fan of his fellow college students who are there due to athletic scholarships or affirmative action. They took seats away from more qualified students; who knows how those faceless students’ futures will be impacted by going to a worse school? Not to mention the anguish the rejection put them through. As willing participants in a system that takes away what other people deserve, the athletes have Fired The First Shot. It is therefore acceptable to remind them that they don’t belong, and that they should feel Very Guilty if they struggle academically.
(I’m not making any object-level claims about what social / economic policies are correct in either of the above cases, just outlining my motivated reasoning in both.)
The cynicism pill was a powerful drug. Anyone can come up with good arguments for obvious statements; I could show off how smart I was by coming up with “good” arguments for statements most people disagreed with. This combined favorably with the allure of cynicism, which feels like a mark of maturity, and I was hooked.
I’m not sure where I’m headed now; I do think I had a bias towards meanness (sometimes disguised as “honesty”), and I’m working to counteract that now. I’ve given some thought to volunteering at the local soup kitchen, just to work my Niceness muscles, but have always managed to come up with excuses why it’s too inconvenient. I don’t know how many of my political opinions had motivated “find good excuses to do things others would call mean” reasoning behind them, but there’s probably a lot down there that I need to reexamine.
I do feel myself changing, more quickly than I remember changing at any previous point in my life. On trigger warnings, I’ve gone from “make the crybabies broaden their horizons” to “unsure and somewhat uncomfortable” and to “meh, I don’t really understand it, but the people asking for them seem sincere enough, so just help build Community“. I used to be the kind of person who would gleefully go to a Draw The Prophet event (if I knew how to draw), and would laugh off “imagine your [monotheist] friend was here” objections as attempted emotional manipulation.
If I had to pick one common thread uniting all of these changes, it would be “lower your prior probability that you are being hoodwinked”. The trail girls aren’t taking advantage of social norms to get away with being inconsiderate, they’re just oblivious. Grandma’s not playing with our heartstrings to stop us from kicking her out. Student athletes are not evilly rubbing their hands together over how they don’t deserve what they have. Not nobly rejecting their scholarships is just them seizing an opportunity for a better life for themselves, which is a pretty low bar to start demonizing people for. When I was applying to schools I remember desperately hoping my legacy status would get me in to one of my top choices, which was pretty un-noble of me and yet somehow I didn’t care.
I’m told that caring about / trusting / not being hoodwinked by other people makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, but is there a better word for the set of concepts I’ve been trying to point at?
Generosity?
Congratulations on making this journey. Very few people, I think, are capable of changing in this way. If you happen to be in North Carolina or DC I’d be happy to meet up with you sometime.
I think “giving people the benefit of the doubt” is maybe what you are looking for? Also “forgiveness” maybe? Or “Solidarity?”
If I had more than one word to describe it, I’d say that you seem to be shifting from blaming individuals to blaming systems in which individuals are embedded. Individuals are often misguided, oblivious, and self-interested. The way to fix societal problems is to promote norms that reduce misguidedness and obliviousness (and self-interestedness when possible, though often that’s asking too much) and to try to design institutions that work around and with people’s flaws.
We’re all on the same team. If we handle the next century right, astronomical quantities of resources and technology will be at our disposal, and as long as everyone gets a slice of the pie–even if the size of the slices differs by many orders of magnitude–we all can be satisfied.
(More or less. Of course there will still be conflict and rivalry and jealosy, especially in the long run as people get used to the initial windfall. But for a while at least we’ll have peace and celebration, and in that time we can set the groundwork for what comes later.)
*blush*
Thanks! I didn’t post here for congratulations, just as a place to find other…”rational-minded noncynics”? Yeah, rational-minded noncynics, who might have some perspective for me. But I’ll take your positive reinforcement too.
Unfortunately I’m rather far from both those places. Currently in California, visiting from New York.
That’s an interesting take. I hadn’t put it in those terms at all.
I’m okay with your other examples, but this one still bugs me. Why should people get a free pass to being generally oblivious to social norms? I feel like I don’t, in most cases.
I don’t really care whether they are engaged in some vast conspiracy to violate social norms and get away with it or not. “Being aware of the social norms” is, itself, a social norm. Obliviousness is not an excuse.
Enforcement of social norms is only permitted against those of lower or the same status. If you are on the bottom in status, you may not enforce any norms, but all norms may be enforced against you (even those invented in the moment by higher-status people).
this is a tee-up to a sick burn
Just Kidding. Look, how about this: I hereby give you one. Pass it on, and then the next person passes it on, and then everyone is a little bit happier. And that should suffice to answer your question, as well.
That’s not the strongest line in what I wrote.
I could see an argument for telling off the two girls if we knew they were acting maliciously, since “you’re inconveniencing other people” is apparently something they already knew. There are Nicer ways to still handle the situation if there’s no malice in what’s going on.
I interpret the norm as fuzzier than the discussion suggests. It’s easier to chat with your friend side by side than one ahead of the other. So the real norm is not “always walk single file on the right” but “if a jogger is coming up behind you, move right to let him pass.” Hence “on your left” is a perfectly reasonable response.
That might not be the case if there were a lot of joggers, but it doesn’t sound as though there are.
The context where I usually see this issue is not jogging trails but moving walkways at airports, where the advantage of being side by side is less and the opportunity to just jog around them mostly nonexistent.
I agree with this, and therefore think that the aggressive forms of option 3 are way over the top. A nice calm “on your left” seems like the best option.
Agreed. But if they get huffy about having to move (which has certainly happened to me), all bets should be off. At that point they’ve been politely informed that they are inconveniencing others, and have chosen to continue.
It seems to me that one thing you’ve noticed is fundamental attribution error. It’s a general default tendency for most people to think that poor behavior of others is caused by their character, while poor behavior of yourself is caused by circumstance. I think identifying and attempting to overcome this bias is an important part of empathy (though I wonder if it’s ever possible to fully overcome it).
I try to use an inversion of that error as my interpersonal heuristic. Basically:
In dealing with other people, acknowledge that no one has made ANY decisions here. They’re all just processing out the function of their genetics and circumstances–neither of which are their fault.
In dealing with yourself, acknowledge that the awesome power of “Humanity” only works if the individual agents actively engage as if they had 100% free will and volition.
Thus: I am responsible for every action and mistake I personally make, but no one else is. Obviously, I’d like it if everyone followed this same heuristic, but some people just don’t have the circumstances (and I suppose on some level: genetics) to come to that conclusion.
Retail: The Philosophy?
I mostly take this same approach- it works wonderfully interpersonally, but it’s a little risky by one’s self- if you happen to have a number of unlucky and challenging circumstances all arrive at once, and are philosophically attributing all of them to a defect of one’s own deliberate and voluntary behavior, it can get a bit overwhelming. At my current rate, I get that feeling every 6-12 months, and have to remind myself at that time that I can spare some of the forgiveness for myself as well!
PS: Two examples of “bad circumstances aligning” to give you a sense: In the first, I had a brief stint of depression that culminating in losing my very-well-paying job, started a divorce (which involved losing basically all of my savings and both of my beloved pets), and sat through an eight-hour dental surgery (they rotated doctors!), in the space of a week. The second confluence was a two-week bout of pneumonia while I was trying to close escrow on buying my first house, dealing with repairs gone badly and work emergencies blowing up while I was out sick- my first day that I felt well enough to go to the office, still on antibiotics and generally miserable, my compact sedan got crushed between an SUV and a minivan on the way to work, had to kick my door open in the middle of a busy highway facing the wrong way in traffic, the whole nine yards. You have to remind yourself that some things really shouldn’t all be laid on your own conscience when they stack too high!
If you don’t mind the question, was the depression caused by the three events, or did it cause the 3 (or first two) events, or was there some interplay where problems at the job and home precipitated the depression which snowballed into the job loss and divorce?
Believing that one’s opponents are just insincerely trying to increase their own power will usually lead one down the wrong path, yeah. Most people are sincere about what they believe. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea to let them get away with acting on those beliefs, though, such as in the case of:
It is upsetting to see your religion mocked, absolutely. But in a nation based on Enlightenment principles, you have to tolerate it, and people who refuse to tolerate it are far more dangerous than the people who do the mocking.
I do not dispute this.
You seem to be undergoing a personal transformation in order to be a more caring person.
However, don’t fall into the trap of assigning motivations to political issues and then judging the issues based on motivations. Maybe you were enforcing norms out of the joy of being mean, but that does not mean norms should not be enforced. You don’t have to think that the women blocking the path are awful people to ask them to move so that the path is not blocked. Likewise you can understand why a grandmother would not want to move and still think it is a bad idea to control rents.
I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t declaring any particular solution to be right in any of the political cases I brought up. Just that my old feelings were probably colored by the fact that I enjoyed thinking of clever reasons to be mean to people.
One can derive correct conclusions from faulty premises.
It makes me sad to read things like this. :/
#3 seems like the correct behavior. #2 is also acceptable, I suppose. I usually do #1, because I hate and fear interacting with people (especially confrontationally, especially strangers)—but this is a personal failing of mine! I try to overcome it (sometimes successfully). I admire people who don’t share my character flaw. When I see someone confronting bad actors, standing up for social norms, it gives me visceral relief and reassurance about the state of our society.
Norm violators should be punished. That you went from being one of the few people in today’s society willing to shoulder the responsibility of norm punishment, to no longer being willing to do this, makes me sad indeed. It makes me even sadder to see this change held up, and supported, as an improvement.
Please consider that this change may not be nearly as positive as you suggest.
(N.B. the “Grandma” example is a bad one, imo, but the other two are spot-on)
If someone non-maliciously breaks a rule, why should they be punished when a gentle correction will work just as well?
I think “bad actors” is an exaggeration for the trail example.
Political examples are less about what is correct and more about what sorts of arguments I was motivated to think of. I tried to include variety.
If you ignore the trail blockers and go around them, they will get annoyed at all these other people going by them, and use their status to push for some sort of rule against this sort of behavior on the trail.
If you gently admonish the trail blockers, they will get all huffy and self-righteous and question you on why it’s so important that YOU get by at that particular time.
If you harshly admonish them, they’ll be shocked by your rudeness and you’ll be gone before they have a response. While they will never, ever, believe they are in the wrong, they may then decide the trail is full of assholes, stop using it, and tell their friends the same. A win of sorts.
> While they will never, ever, believe they are in the wrong
This seems like a harsh judgment for two people who are just being a bit inconsiderate about trail space.
I’m not sure what the severity of the offense has to do with my judgement on how resistant they will be to believing they have committed one.
There is a certain moral threshold for how bad a person you have to be to be inconsiderate about trail usage, and another moral threshold for how bad a person you have to be to get angry at other people pushing back on your encroachment of a public good. I think knowing someone is below the first threshold is only weak evidence that they are below the second.
More broadly, to us outside observers the evil-women and the good-women are equally counterfactual. I don’t mind trading off some chance of antagonizing away the evil women (which I think is unlikely anyway) in order to be nicer to the good women (who are not bad people and don’t deserve to be treated as such).
And the second threshold is lower than the first.
This is the most buckwild way of viewing the world I have ever seen. It is very foreign to me. Are you exaggerating for humorous effect, or is this actually what you see as the full range of likely outcomes for this social interaction?
If it’s the latter, might I suggest that you get a new peer group and/or get out and have more face-to-face interactions with other people? It is quite common in the real world to have disagreements with strangers and have them resolved amicably. The scenarios you outline here imply that you believe everyone who disagrees with you, or even trivially inconveniences you, is an idiot and/or an asshole.
Will it? (It won’t.)
But, ok. Are you saying you do still gently correct people? You don’t just let it go?
There’s a certain sort of person who is oblivious to rules. They break a rule not because they’re aware of that specific rule and are blatantly flouting it, but because they just don’t think about rules, most of the time; the notion that almost any part of life has rules, and that those rules are there for reasons, and that breaking those rules harms other people—these ideas just don’t occur to such a person. This person just does whatever they feel like, unless stopped/punished/prevented—not out of malice, you understand!—but just because… well, why shouldn’t they…? If you ask them why they did a thing, they’re usually genuinely mystified, and vaguely offended, that you’re challenging what, to them, is a perfectly ordinary action, which they have every right to take.
Such a person almost certainly didn’t deliberately break the rule. Are they “bad actors”?
Yes. Yes they are.
Punish them.
I actually think these people are WORSE than those who know what they’re doing is wrong, but break the rules anyway. It takes a very special level of arrogance and narcissism to not even understand that rules exist and that they apply to you as well.
@Matt M:
Yep, basically agreed.
I don’t think there’s a general right answer. Norms exist for a reason, and the proper respect for a given norm depends on the reason it serves and how well it serves it: I’m a lot happier with #3-style responses, especially from random people who aren’t getting paid to enforce the norm, when a violation could e.g. actually get someone killed (failing to do proper safety checks on climbing or diving equipment; negligently pointing live weapons at people). If it’s there for e.g. aesthetic or convenience reasons, or if its usefulness is unclear, then I’m happier with #2-style responses and even then mainly from people with actual authority.
Chesterton’s fence is a good argument for giving established norms the benefit of the doubt, though.
Wondermark gave me a nice heuristic a while back, which I’ve tried to remember:
http://wondermark.com/c1293/
I’m impressed you’ve remembered it for so long with such an itchy butt! Props!
You’re looking at the gap between stages 5 and 6 of Kolhberg’s theory of moral development.
Stage 5 is rights-based social contract thinking. People imagine moral conflicts a civil trial. Each party states their position. They lay out the rights / duties that support their case. Moral reasoning is about ranking the rights, and deciding in favor of the person who’s able to appeal to the most-central principle.
Apply that to the Grandma augment. Stage 5 reasoning might be something like:
Stage 5 is emotionally satisfying because there are “correct” answers. You find the highest-precedent right and uphold that. You’re not denying someone’s lower-order rights. You’re just noticing that they’re trumped, so don’t apply.
The big limit of Stage 5 reasoning is that, per the trial metaphor, you need identifiable parties. And you’re appealing to ‘rights’, which are binary in a way that our true goals are not.
Stage 6 is closer to “social optimization” in the sense of economics. Instead of routing everything through rights, you try to reason in terms of a social utility function that takes everyone’s well-being into account.
So, the Grandma Argument would go:
In theory, Stage 6 could be joyful. The solutions are higher net-utility than Stage 5 (since you’re optimizing for max net-utility, instead of min right-violations).
And, in theory, we could imagine clever trade-offs that re-distribute these utility gains so everyone’s better off. But, in practice, it’s almost impossible to find policies that actually do that.
Instead, you’re often shifting harms around. Often from an unidentified and disparate group (‘people who haven’t moved in yet’) onto an known and sympathetic individual. This feels like Triage. Necessary, useful, but grim.
To go through the other examples:
Stage-5 approach to running is, “look for a correct set of rights and duties.” And then the debate is if the women have the right to occupy the whole path until they know someone’s coming. Or if the runners have a right to a clear left lane.
People don’t always want to derive things from 1st principles, so I’d expect a bunch of analogies about cars or boats.
Stage-6 was your concern for the minimizing the net harm summed over all interactions. Rather than a rule, you’re looking for some policy that would make individual interactions go as well as possible.
To really see the difference, propose the scenario to a group of friends. Then suggest a $1 ‘fine’ for walking left.
I think you’ll get a split between, “Fines are a penalty for for breaking social duties. It’s immoral to treat them like indulgences,” and “How do we optimize the value of the fine so that widows can pay it — like an indulgence — but rich people can’t?”
The first one is a Stage 5 argument about rights. The second one is a Stage 6 argument that financial penalties are a bad proxy for utility loss.
College admissions is also a Stage 5 vs Stage 6 splt.
The standard Stage-5 argument for affirmative action is that a duty to promote racial equality trumps a duty to have equal treatment by the state.
This leads to people arguing that a given school’s affirmative action policy is just, without discussing the magnitude of the race-based ‘boost’ that the college wants to give.
From a social-optimization perspective, it would be surprising to suggest that an 800-point SAT boost was wise. And similarly surprising to suggest that a 5-point SAT boot was particularly important.
I’m skeptical of this, based on intuition I’m not sure I can convey well. “Excuses” implies that you reasons you gave to yourself were not genuine but intend to mask baser reasons. However, the reasons you describe sound pretty reasonable, there are even commenters that are defending them, and seem to me more like genuinely held principles that you now judge as mistakes than as excuses. It’s possible that they functioned as excuses during the transition period when you started changing your mind but still haven’t changed your habits.
I acknowledge that you know more about your psychology than I do, and this reduces how much people should take my complaint seriously.
The reason I found arguments in favor of being mean was because I wanted to be mean, not because of any merits those arguments may have had.
Good comment.
I think what you’re describing is sort of fundamental attribution error and sort of about being charitable. For me, it tends to be ‘what other motivations might explain this (norm-breaking) behaviour other than maliciousness’. And usually if you actually think about it, and think about in what situations you might behave in an identical or similar manner, maliciousness as a cause is so far down the list of probabilities. And it’s not even that they may have a ‘good’ justification for ignoring said social norm, sometimes you just don’t see the sign or you forget. Many people do seem to characterise that approach as being a ‘do-gooder’; which is something I tend to take as a positive thing, with the caveat that occasionally, yeah, people are just being dicks and you might need to guard against that possibility to some extent.
I’d counter some other comments in that, in your scenario, I think taking approach 2 is more effective in terms of changing behaviour than approach 3. From a personal standpoint that’s something i’d respond to far more graciously. I’m more inclined to have a more visceral response in approach 3 and deliberately antagonise you, especially if my initial motivation is non-malicious. I also think it’s a more powerful approach for making change generally. If you attempt to understand the motivation of actors in circumstances where they are making decisions detrimental to others or society, I think you have more chance of changing it by addressing those motivations.
I’m actually much more likely to do 2 or 3 now than I used to be, and consider this a good thing, because I used to get walked all over.
Old ladies on a trail maybe deserve a pass and a polite “on your left”. It is after all more pleasant to walk with someone side by side, and so long as you’re not blocking anyone that’s perfectly fine.
I think a better example would be people talking loudly or using their cell phone in a movie theater. There is zero excuse for not knowing that this is very bad behavior, and essentially everyone who does this is well aware of the rule, but thinks that for whatever reason or circumstance, they are special and the rule should not apply to them.
So they get an immediate 3, and deserve it. I stand by this because, on the sort of aggressively oblivious ass who thinks it’s okay for them to screw up everyone’s viewing experience, a polite request is going to result in them getting all indignant at you for daring to question them and cause a greater commotion. A more aggressive “hey, turn that off!” is in my experience more likely to work the first time.
There are certainly times when 3 is justified. Unless someone’s life is on the line, I would prefer to stick to (at most) 2. You have plenty of practice being meek; I do not. I want more before I begin wielding the dread power of meanness again.
There are jerks out there who think the rules don’t apply to them, for sure. I am probably morally justified in giving them a 3 in that situation. But it’s unlikely to change who they are as a person, and it’s an odd battle to decide to pick—that I must get angry at and berate this person for talking on their phone in the movie theater, for taking up an extra seat on the bus.
Do I have to act because my dominance is being challenged—they are trampling my rights, and I’m letting them?
In defense of cynicism (as opposed to just being mean): you’re right not to be mad at the grandma in the rent controlled apartment. She’s just trying to live her life, and taking what was freely offered.
But that doesn’t make rent control good, or something you should be happy about. Rather, it just means you need to direct your ire at the people pushing for bad policy because they know that accusing their opponent of grandma-hating will get them re-elected. They deserve ire because they’re practicing their own brand of abusive cynicism. Like the movie theater cell phone user or the aggressive driver, they are not only violating social norms, but taking advantage of others who are too polite/timid/swayed by manipulative emotional appeals to call them on it.
I continue to be amused at how many people step in to comment on what the correct answer to the political issues I brought up is. 🙂
This reminds me of Be Nice, at Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness. Just because there is a posted sign doesn’t mean that it is the Social Contract. Maybe there is a simple misunderstanding or maybe there is a war. Maybe there was a war and you have lost. In that case, you should concede gracefully.
IMO, the critical flaw here I’d say is the self-congratulatory aspect. That by escalating the situation, you are somehow doing a service because others won’t and these people need to be taught a lesson. This encourages you to take the confrontational approach at every opportunity. I guess you kind of acknowledge this, but it’s important to note that the motivation is the real problem, not necessarily the action itself. I would say 1, 2, and 3 can all be correct responses to social norm breaking, but which one is appropriate should be judged by situation. If a woman is putting her purse on the seat next to her on the bus, this is a violation of social norms. But if the bus is not crowded and there are many open seats, it’s probably best to just ignore it and find a different seat. On the other hand, if the bus is full, then addressing the issue is best. But this is not a particularly severe violation, and a polite request will likely solve the situation. If she refuses, then it may be time to escalate.
Now there are times when going straight to 3 is appropriate. Particularly flagrant violations, especially ones that can’t be attributed to simple absent-mindedness, should be admonished harshly. To use the bus case, if the person were laying down across a bench of seats, that would probably warrant a 3 approach. The example others have given of talking during a movie is another one. For the specific example of the women on the road, a non-confrontational approach (such as yelling “excuse me” or “on your left”) should suffice. There’s not much harm in what they’re doing. Now, if they were doing this and the path were busy, such that many people were having to go around them, then a harsher approach might make sense.
(I guess practicality is another concern. The guy who sits at a green light because he’s texting on his phone is a pretty big violation of norms, but I wouldn’t recommend following him home so you can read him the riot act.)
Your other cases of affirmative action/athletic scholarships and rent control seem to fall into a different category. The students and the grandma aren’t actually doing anything wrong–it’s the system that’s causing the problem. I guess you’re worried about whether you’re not showing enough sympathy to people who come out worse with the change in policy? But almost any change will benefit some and detriment others. Now that’s not to say you *shouldn’t* have sympathy for those who end up worse off. In fact, if you think you’re supporting the change *because* it hurts those people, you should probably start worrying about cynicism levels. But recognizing that an idea doesn’t have to be strictly beneficial to everyone to be a good idea isn’t inherently cynical.
I guess to summarize in terms of SSC articles, contrarianism doesn’t necessarily make you right and you should err on the side of being nice to people, but any policy decision usually has tradeoffs, because the ones that don’t have already been implemented.
Ziglar v. Abbasi
I have to say I really love Part II of the Thomas concurrence. Briefly, it suggests that modern qualified immunity doctrine is completely unmoored from any kind of statutory or common law basis and is essentially made up out of whole cloth. This seems to me to be very hard to dispute as a factually matter.
It’s unfortunate that every last liberal member of the court is so enmeshed in the culture of stare decisis that they wouldn’t even consider joining. It’s hard to overstate the difference on this axis between Justices like Douglas, Brennan, Marshall, and even Stevens on the one hand and your Kagans and Breyers on the other. If you look at Breyer’s dissent on the main Bivens question, it’s pretty milquetoast – “In my view, these claims are well-pleaded, state violations of clearly established law, and fall within the scope of longstanding Bivens law.” Where is the forthright and passionate advocate for returning to “the heady days in which this Court assumed common law powers to create causes of action”?
Is it just me, or does this sound like a play-by-play of blernsball?
I’d be curious to know what you’re getting at though, if you’re able to dumb it down 1-2 notches.
I don’t know what blernsball is, though maybe that’s your point.
I can try to elaborate.
The case I linked at the top of my post came down from the Supreme Court yesterday. A group of people that had been detained after 9/11 sued a variety of federal government officials both for being detained and for being mistreated while being detained. At issue was whether or not that lawsuit could go forward.
In order to understand the exact issue you need some background. During Reconstruction, Congress passed a law called the Klu Klux Klan act. Among its other provisions was this one, today codified at 42 USC 1983 and often just referred to as 1983:
Although pretty broad on its face, this provision mostly languished in obscurity until the 1961, when the Supreme Court interpreted it to allow plaintiffs to sue state police officers that they claim had violated their constitutional rights. (Monroe v. Pape) Today it is the primary vehicle used for such lawsuits. (More on that later.)
However, if you go back and look at the language it pretty clearly doesn’t apply to officials acting under color of federal law. And indeed there is no other parallel statute that does apply to federal officials. In 1971, the Supreme Court held that a case could nonetheless be brought against Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents that had conducted a search and made an arrest in violation of the Constitution. It held that the Constitution implied a cause of action. That case was Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents and cases brought under it are sometimes referred to as Bivens actions.
Eventually the 70s ended and the court got some new justices — Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O’Connor, with Rehnquist elevated to Chief. These justices did not care for the notion that the Constitution implied any sort of cause of action. They thought (in some cases think) that if there is going to be a cause of action, it is up to Congress to create it.
The Court never quite got rid of Bivens actions but the case decided yesterday was one in a long line narrowing the doctrine and/or refusing to extend it to new circumstances. In this case the Court ruled the 9/11 detainees could not sue the high level government officials for ordering them detained and frequently strip searched, and while they held that they might be able to sue the prison guards for mistreatment, they set a high barrier for the lower court to judge the issue.
In terms of my second paragraph, part of what I was saying is that the liberal wing of the Court today is qualitatively different from the Justices that were on the Court that originally created Bivens and many other pro-civil-liberties doctrines. Breyer wrote a dissenting opinion in yesterday’s case but it argued on a relatively narrow grounds dealing with individual prior cases. It was essentially defensive in nature, rather than a full throated defense of the correctness of implying causes of action from the Constitution in general.
The first paragraph referenced Thomas’ concurring opinion. In it he begrudgingly agreed with the controlling opinion on the main Bivens issue — he would prefer to all but eliminate Bivens actions altogether. However, he wrote an entire second section on the issue of qualified immunity, inviting the bar to bring a case asking that it be struck down.
Qualified immunity is a doctrine that grew out of 1983 cases and was then imported into Bivens cases. The doctrine has to do with what standard a state official should be held to when he is sued for violating someone’s constitutional rights. Under the current rules it is not enough that constitutional rights be violated, there is a much higher bar involving proof, among other things, that the officer violated clearly established law as determined by the Supreme Court.
What Thomas’ concurrence said is that this extensive qualified immunity doctrine, which makes it much harder for a plaintiff to win a 1983 case, ought to be tossed out because it isn’t based on the statute or the Constitution but was put in place by Justices on the basis of their own views of public policy.
While in one sense this is a very “conservative” viewpoint because it sounds in judicial restraint and political branch supremacy, in another sense it could appeal to the “liberal” wing of the court because they tend to be more solicitous of the rights of the people as against the police, prison guards, and other state officials. However, as I lamented, all the current liberal justices are so myopically focused on precedents and reasoning from them that I don’t think any will accept Thomas’ invitation.
Hope that was both clearer and interesting.
Indeed! Thanks! And best of luck to Justice Thomas, qualified immunity IMO is basically quasi-legalization of the Nuremberg defense.
Thanks so much for your explanation. I am not equipped to weigh in on the discussion, but I would recommend LEADING with this kind of point-by-point explanation if you’re not reliably expecting your audience to be equally well versed on the subject.
I would have just scrolled on past if not for the apt Futurama reference.
From a conservative non-lawyer, the biggest problem with liberal justices is that they’re so myopically focused on precedents.
By continually focusing on precedents and how we can cleverly lawyer a current case to be almost like but just different to another case, and not referencing original intent is why we are where we are. For example, the first amendment was originally passed to ensure that people could publish their thoughts on their government and check its powers by effectively threatening chances of election or reelection of candidates that they oppose. However, by slowly mutating the “meaning” of the amendment, inch by inch, we’ve come to a situation where legal understanding of the first amendment absolutely guarantees your right to ride a float with an 18′ dick down Main Street, while a colorable argument can be made that publishing a documentary opposing a major party candidate right before an election when it would do the most good is illegal. Completely turned the amendment inside out.
Thanks, that is interesting and informative.
For the record, blernsball is a variation on baseball with comically inscrutable rules from the show “Futurama”.
really appreciate this writeup, and especially the elaboration. Very, very good to hear that Qualified Immunity is starting to show cracks; it’s one of those things that, when I learned of it, the love of my country died in my heart.
agree with Wency
understand if you don’t want to put in the effort though
🙂
Bivens has been in trouble for decades now, and there is not one on the Court who will step up to champion it. It saddens me. Where there is a right, there must be a remedy, people!
For those software developers out there, here is a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek blog post with interesting stats purporting to show that developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs.
The stats used were taken from the raw data from the Stack Overflow 2017 developer survey.
From the post:
I suspect it’s causal, but the causation goes the other way. The Google style guides (except for go, because Rob Pike is such a troll) calls for spaces; I imagine many later tech company guides are based on them, especially for C++. I’m pretty sure Apple’s code uses spaces (IIRC the Darwin source uses spaces). So chances are if you’re at a high-salary tech company you’re using spaces, leaving tabs for the riff-raff :-).
Doesn’t matter nowadays. If you’re not using an automatic formatting tool you’re wasting your time. I haven’t even bothered to get my emacs style approximately correct; I just write what I want, let it make a mess of my code and run clang-format over it. There was an ongoing war at my previous company over 80 vs 100 (or other) columns; at one point I suggested it would be simple enough for the heretics to solve it by reformatting it on open to 100 columns and back to 80 on save. This was barely practical at the time (there would have been a significant amount of code for which that process would introduce spurious changes) but it’s probably eminently practical now.
Microsoft also uses spaces, which I think predates the Google style guide. I suspect preference for spaces over tabs comes from the days of 80-column command window text editors: horizontal space was at a premium, and many environments defaulted to 8-character tab widths, so coders got in the habit of using 2, 3, or 4 spaces instead to fit more text in a line. The practice got established and entrenched in culture and various codebases (established company style guides, programming teachers requiring style guide compliance for course projects, open-source codebases (GNU uses spaces, for instance), etc).
!!
Shades of Silicon Valley (the HBO comedy)– my friends that work there always say that isnt a comedy, but a reality show.
I can’t speak to the dynamics of the tech world, but I grew up a couple miles from the house the characters live in, and the portrayal of the local culture hysterically on point. I nearly lost it the episode where everything goes to hell because the weather was slightly below freezing.
I love it so much…I laugh so hard I cry sometimes.
Especially Guilfoyle and Richard.
But Guilfoyle the best of all…in their different aspects they are the Hero-Nerds of nerddom.
I disagree, Guilfoyle is good, but Jared is easily the best/funniest character.
The correct answer is tabs then spaces, each in the right amount. Set the background color on tabs to be slightly different if it worries you. If you have a column length restriction (generally a good idea, although 80 seems increasingly crotchety), pick a tab length and enforce by that.
It amazes me how many times I’ve begun this conversation with the other person mystified as to what I could even be talking about, and ended it with the person admitting that is, in fact, the correct approach but it’s “too hard”, as if he was some kind of super-producer.
Seconded.
Using a mixture of spaces & tabs is bad practice in a language that has significant whitespace (e.g. Python). Say my editor is configured to translate a tab to two spaces, and your editor is configured to translate a tab to four spaces. Then I could see this code:
if failure_mode():
fix_things()
blow_shit_up()
While you see this code:
if failure_mode():
fix_things()
blow_shit_up()
(Assuming 4 spaces before the first line, 8 spaces before the second line, and 2 tabs before the third line.)
Python has a -t command line option that issues a warning if it thinks something like this might be going on. Unfortunately it’s not enabled by default.
This would be a bad mix of tabs and spaces, but it doesn’t really apply to what skef and I are talking about.
I use tabs to take the starting point of every code statement to the same indent level.
I use spaces to make individual lines within the same code statement more legible.
What’s the point?
Is it that different people working on the same codebase can use their preferred indentation widths by customizing editor’s tabstop settings, while preserving the pretty alignment on multi-line statements?
Sounds nice, but multi-line statements get used when a statement would go over line length limit. And which statements are those depends on the indentation width. People who used smaller indents would produce code that was fine for them but had overlong lines on screens of people using a larger one. So you need to standardize the indent width anyway. At which point you might just use spaces and mixed style looks like a pointless overcomplication.
The people who say it’s too hard are/were right…in the absence of a gofmt-style utility that does this on save/commit.
I strongly suspect Go’s largest unique contribution to software engineering over the next 20 years will be how it popularized automatic code formatters.
I don’t know IFF I have standing to ask this…but could we restart the discussion of islamic jurisprudence between DAVIDFRIEDMAN and QAYS without all the culture war stuff?
I would very much like to ask Qays what his interpretation of mutawatir is…I was told that it was something like “unbroken transmission and continuous signaling”. Arabic is hard.
Now that I understand David’s reasons behind his questions I’m more interested in his approach…but to reiterate a caveat I’m way more focused on theory (tafsir) than practice (islamic jurisprudence).
guess not.
tant pis
I’m not Qays, but since he hasn’t responded yet let me offer my less expert explanation.
In order for a hadith to be considered an entirely reliable account of something the Prophet did or said, it has to meet two conditions:
1. It must have a reliable chain of transmission (isnad). All the links in the chain, from the original source to the person who wrote it down, must be considered trustworthy transmitters, both honest and careful. That, I think, is what qualifies it to be in one of the standard collections, such as that of Salih Muslim.
2. There must be several independent and reliable chains of transmission for the same hadith–how many varying with the school. I believe that’s what makes it mutawatir
As I mentioned in the exchange, there is an alternative version of 2–multiple different reliable hadiths with the same implication. A prominent example is the claim that the Prophet said something like “my people will never be agreed on an error.” That’s the basis for consensus as a source of authority.
And even within Sunni Islam, different madhhib have major(?) disagreements over which hadith are legitimate?
Ah…Thanks. So in jusrisprudence is isnad and reproducibility. Like I said, my primary focus is on tafsir, and mutawatir is described as “continuous signalling or unbroken transmission”.
But I see…its like the difference between theory and practice. In jurisprudence isnad and reproducibilty are determinants, tests of whether something is in continuous transmission.
I don’t understand what that means. Typo?
The isnad is the chain of transmitters. The quality of the isnad is one of the things determining how sure you are that the hadith is true. The number of parallel isnads for the same hadith is the other thing.
It’s perfectly reasonable except that the bottom line, if both tests pass, is certainty not probability. In that respect it reminds me of Ayn Rand’s approach to things.
A couple of weeks ago, I inadvertently took a rather large dose of 5-HTP.
Later while at work, I was listening to music on headphones (a daily occurrence) and had a just utterly transcendent reaction to an album that is something that I normally just play as background music.
5-HTP is supposed to be a seratonin precursor, so I’m wondering, is there a link between seratonin and how much you will enjoy music?
The album, in case any one cares, was In Return by Odesza.
Looks like you just experienced the poor man’s version of a rave on MDMA
What does everyone think about cargo delivery with rockets? Elon Musk gave a presentation on Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species:
If we find a way to commercialize the Mars Vehicle for terran use, we could reduce the ticket price for a trip to Mars even further. Rocket Spacelines, anyone?
This has been around since the 50s, and hasn’t gotten anywhere. Concorde hasn’t been repeated, and a rocket is going to be a lot less efficient. The transatlantic market is probably your best bet for this, and I expect someone to have tried it if it looked even remotely viable anywhere other than Musk-land.
Boom is a YCombinator company. Some of their engineers are ex-SpaceX.
Don’t forget reuse. Constant workhorse reuse (300 tons). You’ll have significant price reductions. Oil prices are dropping too, because of electric vehicles.
I’m aware of Boom. I also work at a major manufacturer of airliners, doing regulatory compliance work. Boom may or may not know how to build an airplane. They definitely do not know how to turn that airplane into a vehicle they can use to carry paying passengers.
Concorde was reusable, too. The problem is that throwing things fast is usually less efficient than throwing them slowly, particularly when the fast thing has to carry its own oxidizer and the slow thing doesn’t.
And it’s not like jet airliner development will be standing still that whole time.
There’s also the NASA/Lockheed project, which looks more realistic to me simply because Lockheed isn’t a Silicon Valley-backed startup. But it’s also much earlier in the planning stages than Boom.
I wonder if we’ll ever see another supersonic airliner again, or if Concorde is it. In which case I’m a little sad – I never got to fly faster than sound and I never will.
Could always buy one of those flights in a surplus MiG.
to add to what bean said, there’s a real limit in terms of practical utility of fast transport based on the cost/time of packing and unpacking. If it takes you a day to load your cargo vessel, the value of the difference in transit time between 10 minutes and 10 hours is pretty marginal. In order to actually be useful, very vast cargo delivery (e.g. anywhere on earth in less than an hour) almost by definition, has to operate at the retail level. Above that level, processing delays rapidly wipe out and advantage in transit speed, even before you consider cost.
I have to say, sometimes it seems like Musk is trying so hard that it looks like not-trying. I mean, this is the sort of idea a 10-year-old would sketch on a napkin. I have seen cartoons where this method of transport is employed. At what point does “Hey, dig a giant bank deposit partial-vacuum tube – but for people!” (see also Futurama) or “We could get it there faster by rocket!” (see also The Incredibles) no longer qualify as helpful?
Long-distance transport is easily solved by painting the entrance of a cave on one side of the Earth, traveling through said cave to the other side, then laughing as your adversary tries to run through a rock with black paint on it.
Yeah, I don’t know what to think about Elon Musk. On the one hand, some of his ventures have been spectacularly successful. On the other hand, most of his proposals are comedically absurd. So, what’s going on ? I can think of a few hypotheses:
* Musk is the tech equivalent of George Lucas or arguably Gene Roddenberry: someone who is basically totally bonkers, but who has a highly competent team that keeps him away from any mission-critical stuff. His successes should be attributed primarily to his team, not to him personally.
* He’s got a complex long-term plan in play, and part of that plan requires him to move the Overton window a little. The best way to do so is to pretend like he’s trying to move it by a lot, then compromise against the inevitable backlash, thus ending up exactly where he wanted.
* He’s just trolling people for the lulz.
* He’s simply trying to make as much money as possible, be it by releasing useful products or by defrauding investors.
isn’t it also true that most of his successful ventures are just sucking off the government teat? The only one not included here is SpaceX, and I’ve heard some very good and very bad things about that, but either way I heard they did, in fact, have problems with rockets blowing up.
SpaceX relies fairly heavily on the government teat. NASA has/is cost-sharing development of Dragon and Falcon 9 under commercial cargo and crew programs, and are of course major customers for the final product. And they’ve sold rockets to the DoD and continue to seek additional contracts and development money from them.
Now, this is no worse than any other government contractor, and the Falcon 9 is at least commercially viable, unlike Atlas/Delta. I don’t think SpaceX goes away if NASA disappeared tomorrow. But they’d not be as far along as they are now without government dollars.
Yeah, I wanted to leave that part out, since at the end of the day selling the government a product is a bit different than government subsidies. Don’t know about cost-sharing development, though.
SpaceX has had 36 launches of their various Falcon rockets. They’ve had 2 RUD events (rapid unscheduled disassembly – ie, it blew up), and one more mission where a problem with the booster led to a loss of the secondary payload (IIRC they were launching an ISS resupply mission – they could probably have saved the secondary payload but NASA stepped in and exercised a clause in their contract saying ‘we want all the rocket’s resources dedicated to making sure our cargo makes it’).
Some of SpaceX’s competitors (Atlas and Delta) have better records in recent times, but are much older technology. The US’ early foray into rocket design had a much, much higher failure rate. Also, SpaceX’s cost/kg to LEO is anywhere from half to a quarter of that of its competitors (a best guess, most companies don’t price publicly).
So, they haven’t got the best record yet, but for a new company they’re doing really well.
Happy to see that the private sector is at least as good as the DoD in utilizing creative acronyms!
This is a common misconception – Atlas V and Delta IV are Atlas/Delta in name only. Other than the Centaur second stage, which can more credibly be called a continual evolution since the 60s, Delta IV and Atlas V are brand new vehicles that first flew in the 2000s.
I agree with this, but there is a tendency of certain SpaceX fanboys to insist that SpaceX never takes a dime from taxpayers while ULA is a horrible government-sucking military-industrial hegemon, when in reality both are commercial government contractors that provide a service to the government for a negotiated price. So I was trying to preempt that.
ULA charges too much, and got some sweet deals when they were the only kids on the block, but it’s not as clear cut as Elon would want you to believe.
@gbdub Aha – it appears that you are correct and I assumed too much – they are new vehicles.
However, both were in development long before SpaceX was even founded, and both by established heavy-hitters in the aerospace industry. I still think SpaceX’s safety record is impressive considering their circumstances.
@dodrian
Yes and no. Rocketry is very hard, and we blew up a bunch of the things learning how to do it. And yes, SpaceX is starting from scratch. But there are textbooks, articles on lessons learned, and people you hired from Big Aerospace. SpaceX has a bad habit of not paying attention to that. There’s a fine line to walk here, because some of the old rules are stupid, and others are really important, and it’s not usually obvious which is which. They seem to default to the first interpretation. It’s a way of making progress, but I do wish their attitude was less “stop bothering us with all of your rules”.
@bean
Good points.
For some unrelated fun, let’s try replacing SpaceX in your post (after the first sentence) with any silicon-valley type startup and Aerospace with their industry, seeing how many still fit your paragraph. Eg., Uber/ Big Taxi 🙂
But yeah, I get your point, it’s a lot more serious when you’re spending millions of dollars on a single launch and intend to stake peoples’ lives on the safety of your rocket, instead of just ‘disrupting the home juice industry’.
I would say that all of his ventures have been spectacularly successful. Comical absurdity is limited to proposals that don’t become ventures. Knowing the difference is a key indicator of wisdom.
As for “sucking off the government teat”, I’m confused – who are the small-government libertarian ideologues here? The United States Government is by far the biggest player in the US economy. If it decides it wants ISS transportation, rapid uptake of electric cars and household solar power, jobs in economically depressed regions, enough to pay for them, and says “this is what we want and this is how much we will pay”, then there should be no shame or disrepute in providing the services requested.
Never said there should be shame or disrepute. But it’s clear that, absent subsidies, his “successful ventures” wouldn’t work at all. The question is whether or not his success at selling to the government carries over to actual business sense, and I’m not sold that it does.
Selling to the government is an “actual business”.
I do think there’s a qualitative difference between:
1) Selling a rocket to launch a payload, that happens to be a government payload.
2) Getting paid by the government to develop a product for the government from scratch, that may or may not be something you plan to sell commercially later
3) Getting paid directly/tax credits/low or no interest loans to do something the government wants you to do, but doesn’t directly provide a service to the government.
SpaceX participates in 1 and 2, as does everyone who is anyone in the rocket business.
Tesla and Solar City do a lot of 3. For example, electric car buyers get a significant federal tax credit. And Tesla is selling California ZEV credits to other car companies in a cap-and-trade like scheme.
Anyway, to me 1 and 2 seem like “doing business with the government” where 3 seems like “getting a subsidy” or “sucking the government teat” if you want to be uncharitable.
Even given the cost savings that Musk is proposing, my guess is that the only organizations that would have a need and the money to do this sort of high speed global delivery would be state level actors, e.g. the military.
About the only use cases I can think of are medical samples and certain types of mail, and the latter’s been tried. (There are even stamps.)
The bandwidth of a milk jug full of compact Flash cards hurtling across the sky at 12,000 MPH is probably pretty high, but I can’t think of many situations where you’d need that much data that fast.
The military already has this system, and has for 60 years. But they seem to have found that nuclear weapons are the only things worth paying the premium to be able to deliver in this manner.
The upside of nuclear weapons is that you don’t have to worry about collateral damage from the rocket itself landing forcefully near the intended recipient.
Also, if you are ever in the situation where you need to send someone some atomic fire, the added cost of the ICBM is probably negligible to the assumed benefits.
Bean can correct me if I am wrong, but I would guess that e.g. Boeing would pay real money for a couple of suborbital delivery vehicles based out of Seattle, that could deliver spare parts in an hour or so to any airport where a Boeing airliner is stranded for lack of a backup turboencabulator or whatnot. Putting up two hundred passengers in a hotel overnight, refunding their tickets, and patching together a day’s worth of scheduling fubar due to a misplaced widebody, is expensive. So is maintaining a warehouse with a stockpile of every sort of part used by every Boeing jet within easy reach of every major commercial hub.
They probably won’t pay enough real money for a private spaceship, even at SpaceX’s more optimistic price predicts, but it’s not many orders of magnitude beyond reality. And no, 3D printing isn’t nearly capable of solving this problem.
Hmm. If we ignore all of the practical difficulties involved (such as the fact that most ATC systems are not set up for the short-term arrival of suborbital delivery systems), that might or might not be worth something. My group works on projects with timescales of weeks to months, but I know some people who might have a better idea of how common this is.
I talked to one of my friends who works short flow, and he said that this sort of thing happens a lot.
Depends on what sort of flight characteristics they have once they’ve descended to altitudes (say, FL 450 and below) where ordinary aircraft are operating. I don’t know the answer to that one, but it’s not obvious that they’d be different enough to pose an insuperable problem.
Cost of suborbital delivery rocket: Eleventy billion dollars
Cost of backup turboencabulator storage at the airport rent-a-shack: $20/month*number of airports you use.
I think thirty years ago there’d be a case for being able to dispatch The Guy Who Knows What Buttons To Press anywhere in the globe at short notice, but their salaries are already a pain before any strapping-you-to-a-rocket hazard multipliers.
Try 10 times that (turboencabulators don’t like to be stored except between 60 and 70 Farenheit, and the humidity needs to be kept between 25 and 28%, and they still need function checks every six months), and you have a thousand parts you need to store for each airplane. And they cost an average of $2,000 apiece. American, the world’s largest airline, flies to 350 destinations. Let’s assume they only fly two models to each. That’s a total of $1.4 billion in parts inventory, and $140 million/month in storage. American had a profit of $2.6 billion last year. You can see the problem.
How well is it going to handle mach-20 then?
Because I’m not leaving it hanging outside, it doesn’t care how fast it’s going.
Being less snarky, a lot of aerospace parts are vulnerable to corrosion, and other forms of degradation while sitting on the shelf. With careful packing, G-forces shouldn’t be a huge issue.
If you aren’t sharing a platform (ie your airport isn’t 20-30 miles out to sea) then by the time you load, lauch, land, unload, and then ship the 20-30 miles to JFK, go through security and then finally fix the plane. 30 mins is a pipe dream, it is always going to be 2+ hours, and realistically 3-4 unless for some reason people are totally cool with a 20 mile ride out to the floating airport and all that cost of moving millions of passengers around is worth getting those parts quickly (which it won’t ever be).
Maybe there would be a market for human organs if they were unharmed by the extreme travel, where you build the hospital as close to the landing pad as possible (a floating hospital for organ transplant surgery sounds terrifying to me, but perhaps it could work).
I think John was assuming you could land at the same platform. I’m not sure why a suborbital payload carrier couldn’t land at an airport, particularly if you kept it small, and landed in a manner that is comforting to the airport authorities. Landing like an airplane would be a lot more acceptable than landing a rocket on its engine.
As for organ transplants at sea, the current USN hospital ships don’t do them, but I’m not sure if that’s because of an inherent limitation of a ship as a platform or because it’s not worth it to give them the capability. Also, we currently don’t have a worldwide organ market, so there’s no need for that kind of delivery.
There are multiple barriers to this kind of market, but one of them is the length of time organs remain viable for transplant. The graph here has heart and lungs having less than 10 hours as a best case scenario, and 3-4 hours in a a typical case.
I’m a long way from an aviation expert but just clearing out the emergency flight path would often be extremely expensive. For busy airports causing a 5 min delay on one flight landing means a 5 min delay on dozens to perhaps hundreds flights if it happened at the wrong time. For the set up to be worth the capital cost it you need lots of deliveries, so you are talking about near constant but random interruptions.
At sea at least you have enough potential flight paths that you could dedicate a single one for these landings.
If you can manage to land like a civilized person, 90% of this goes away. The controller slots you in like they do anyone else, even if you start at a higher altitude and airspeed. They should have at least an hour’s warning of your arrival, so it’s not going to be last-minute diversions everywhere.
And if the service is frequent enough to cause lots of interruptions, then it will get scheduled (although depending on demand, the scheduling could be only used on an as-needed basis, so that FedEx can bring 1 rocket to JFK per hour, but that rocket can come from anywhere, subject to launch clearance from there, because it flies over everything else). If the only people using it are Boeing, Airbus, and the military, then a normal airport only has to deal with it once in a long while. (The organ-transplant people probably can’t use it because they have to get the organ to somewhere with a rocket, and they can’t afford to have enough rockets sitting around.)
My concerns certainly sound conceptually addressable, I would still be surprised if this was something in the next 20-30 years, but I am no futurist.
Considering the time-scales I’m pretty sure that landing arrangements would be made prior to launch. IE mission control would be on the phone with the receiving airport and verifying that ATC will be prepared to receive them 27 minutes hence prior to the vehicle even lifting off the pad.
Edit: ninja’d by bean
@hlynkacg
But then you may need to wait for a slot to become available, while the organ is getting ripe.
I got the impression that Musk was implying that the Mars Spaceship technology could be used with minimum adaptation for Earth suborbital flights (running the numbers on the proposed Mars Spaceship it looks like well within the delta-v and TWR to do that without a booster).
If we’re now wanting it to land like a conventional plane we’re talking a major redesign. If we want it to be able to take off again like a conventional plane (assuming Space X doesn’t want to have to send or maintain a truck to recover it and take it to a launch pad for reuse) that’s an even bigger redesign – to the point where the only bits being reused are the rocket engines (maybe) and heatshield.
It would be really cool, but at this point I don’t think it’s helping to subsidize the Mars Missions any more!
@dodrian
It’s way too big to make sense doing that. This thing has more capacity than a 747 (by a factor of 2 or so), and you’re just not going to get better operating economics. Given Concorde, it’s safe to say that the market for ultrapremium high-speed tickets just isn’t that big. BA made money on their service, but that was after the government basically wrote off the planes themselves. Air France didn’t make money at all. The important thing is going to be running high enough frequencies that it’s the same speed or faster for any given departure time. That means much smaller rockets. Frankly, when starting out, single-person capsules might make sense. If nobody buys that flight, just cancel it.
I’m working off of John’s hypothetical about Boeing (or someone else who occasionally needs to deliver parts Right Now), not Elon Musk’s version. The system is a lot smaller, and it’s probably not scheduled. Also, I’d guess it doesn’t carry people, except maybe for tourism.
This is a capability that CTS should have by default as it’s supposed to be able to be able to both land and take off from an unprepared surface (AKA Mars).
@bean
Fair enough!
@hlynkacg
From the the technology standpoint it could take off nearly anywhere, sure. But then we’re back to the political/logistics problems of now wanting a rocket launch in (presumably) the middle of an urban zone, with air traffic, range safety, etc. etc. to consider, which again is a long way away from Musk’s original proposal, which I assume used floating launchpads to specifically circumvent these issues. But as bean said he’s not strictly talking about Musk’s original design.
This seems like it’s bordering on the most fraught application of the technology, given the airspace issues. Do you really want your sub-orbital landing area anywhere near a busier airport?
Come to think of it, this is quite similar to an obvious problem with his .2-mile-a-day tunnel proposal: how to transport all the displaced material. All cows seem to be spherical in Musk’s world.
It is a common theme of innovation though. You have to have confidence/faith that difficult barriers can be overcome to launch ambitious projects, which naturally means you are sometimes going to be very obviously and embarrassingly wrong.
Depends heavily on how you land. If you insist on using the Elon Musk-approved method, then no, it won’t. I’m pretty sure John is thinking of something which lands like an airplane. Compatibility with standard airspace schemes would be mandatory to this model, and basically means that you become an airplane at 40,000 ft, and don’t have anything too dangerous onboard when you land. The result might well look like some of the early shuttle sketches, when they were planning a reusable winged booster and orbiter.
Aren’t you adding extra time (and probably cost) then? How fast can you decelerate (seriously I don’t know), the space shuttle doesn’t land on a normal tarmac, right? You have to get below supersonic speed before you hit any populated areas as well, correct?
At a guess, 15 minutes or so, and yes, it’s probably more expensive. But you can land at airports, instead of in the middle of nowhere. That’s probably worth it.
How fast do you want me to decelerate? It depends on a lot of factors, most notably trajectory, thermal protection system, and shape.
It does not, but this isn’t the shuttle. The shuttle is an early 70s design, and had a lot of weird design drivers we can skip here. You could make something which could land on normal tarmac, although you might have to haul it home on the back of an airplane.
This, I’m not sure on. The shuttle went subsonic at ~25 km up, about 5 minutes from landing, and I don’t recall hearing that it was considered particularly disruptive. On the other hand, it didn’t fly very often. This will be smaller.
The space shuttle could land on any normal airport with a 8,000 foot runway, which was a plot device in at least one amusing story but never in practice. The 12,000 foot runway at LAX would have been adequate for routine operations, if anyone had wanted to do such a silly thing. The biggest problem from a traffic-control problem would be the inability to fly holding patterns or conventional missed approaches, but that can probably be accommodated.
I wouldn’t rule out vertical landing either, because most of the airspace that would be used is airspace ordinary airliners have no interest in. You’d want the actual pad to be offset from the runway by half a mile or so, but most large airports should be able to fit that in somewhere. Noise pollution issues on takeoff would probably be the big issue there.
More generally: Major airports don’t simply monopolize every bit of airspace for twenty miles around and say “nobody but scheduled airline flights allowed”; they tend to be located in major cities where there are lots of people who need that airspace for lots of different things, and ATC is quite good at facilitating that. This would be one more minor inconvenience from their point of view, and probably less inconvenient than the average police or traffic helicopter.
The economics are still seriously questionable, but the traffic coordination isn’t going to be a showstopper.
I’m not at all an expert on this stuff, but my rough understanding is that most of the multiple uses in busy areas are in virtue of allocating separate volumes of space with shapes appropriate to need. With a suborbital system that doesn’t land like an airplane that practice seem less viable — the thing is going to come all the way from the edge of the atmosphere to the ground. So unless you make a substantially sized vertical “hole” for it, you’ll have to time-switch, and therefore carefully integrate the system with air traffic.
About every other weekday, I fly directly over the Los Angeles Intercontinental Airport at 2500 feet altitude. Sometimes I tell ATC as much as twenty minutes in advance that I want doing this, sometimes only five. And if I’m willing to stay at 3500 feet, I can do it without asking permission.
This isn’t me abusing privilege, it’s one of their preferred procedures. The airspace directly over an airport is in very little demand because that’s the one place where everybody either landing at or taking off from the airport will be safely out of the way on the ground. The existing corridors are laid out horizontally north to south, for aircraft transiting in those directions, but setting up a vertical corridor from the surface (offset from the runways) to 10,000 feet would be about as easy an airspace modification as you could hope for.
If you plan to fly your suborbital vehicle out of LAX, the noise abatement issues could be a showstopper. If the vehicle is small enough, you might set it up to land at LAX and then be trucked up to Mojave Spaceport for the return flight. Or you could make Mojave the suborbital terminal and add ~45 minutes for a local delivery flight to any LA area airport. In either case, Boeing’s central spare-parts delivery terminal (or whatever hypothetical killer app we’re looking at) should probably be in a relatively unpopulated area.
I’m not sure either is necessary. If it’s an SST(S)O vehicle, you can load it up with a tiny bit of fuel and fly it to Mojave, then load it up for the flight home. Because you’re running really light and not going very far, you shouldn’t make too much noise.
Anyone know what kind of items make up the bulk of services like FedEx same day?
I don’t, but I do know that FedEx looked at buying Concordes as freighters, and did ship a fair bit on the Concordes when they were flying.
Well… at the end of that paragraph he admitted “there are some intriguing possibilities there, although we are not counting on that”
I sort of love how, in a paper about bootstrapping a city on the surface of Mars, the least believable thing is a secondary application of the technology for doing point-to-point delivery at very high speed on Earth.
You mean “what Musk wants to believe is the most believable thing”? Because I definitely think the bootstrapping a city on Mars thing is harder, and has even fewer obviously worthwhile commercial applications.
NYC to Tokyo is ~6,000 miles, in 30 mins that is 12,000 miles an hour. What cargo is there that we value so highly that we want it across the ocean that fast that also would be unaffected by the g forces associated with that kind of acceleration? And how are we landing a rocket going 12,000 miles an hour?
Super rich guys who want to flaunt their adventure-seeking bonafides.
That’s what Virgin Galactic is supposed to be for.
1. It seems like a tiny market. How much stuff needs to be shipped so quickly to the other side of the world? This is especially true now that we have the Internet, 3D printers, etc.
2. To make good on the promise of 25 minute transport, it would have to be a private rocket, carrying 1 item. Really expensive.
3. Safety/nukes. Which country is going to want unscheduled rockets flying around, landing close to major cities? Imagine such a rocket being fired from America to Russia, during a crisis. Security measures are going to be huge, which means that those 25 minutes are probably end up just a small part of the total travel time, mostly due to bureaucracy.
The easy confusion with ICBMs is probably part of why we don’t have these. The current rule is that if one flies, they all fly. That’s why all of the proposals to put conventional warheads on ICBM-like vehicles fall apart. Giving a potential bad guy ready access to something which can be turned into an ICBM seems like a bad idea, particularly when you have no way to shoot it down if he’s successful in getting one off the pad.
So a working ABM system is a prerequisite for this coming to pass. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.
Except TSA baggage screeners would be in charge of the ABM system monitoring the Intercontinental Ballistic Delivery Units.
You’d be sitting on your lawn expecting a package when a rain of burning metal destroyed your neighborhood, followed by a little note fluttering down that reads
1. That’s what we need to find: the market. Military transport? Disaster relief? Spaceliner?
2. Why? SpaceX’s ITS (Interplanetary Transport System) launch vehicle can carry 300 tons.
3. That’s a problem for later. How about commercializing the London and New York; Amsterdam and Buenos Aires; Sydney and San Francisco routes first?
FTFY.
Anyway, the problem is, what’s the likelihood that a single customer needs to have 300 tons of something half an hour from now? Organizing 300 tons of anything at either end is already going to take longer, by more than an order of magnitude (probably at least two) than a half hour travel time.
I don’t think the “Is it a nuke?” problem is unsolvable. After all, Russia doesn’t go on high alert every time a subsonic jet approaches their airspace, because most of them are scheduled airliners. When things other than nukes commonly go suborbital, we’ll stop treating everything suborbital as a likely nuke.
A Boeing 747 freighter can carry 100 tons from Shanghai to LA in 11 hours for $260,000.
That’s my point. A rocket that could do that for 10 times the price would be a remarkable engineering achievement. How often does saving 10 hours (over a total transit time of probably a couple days) justify an order of magnitude cost increase?
That’s not really how air cargo works. They run basically like a normal airline, but with cargo instead of passengers. There are obviously charters, but even then, I doubt you can charter a 747 on less than a few day’s notice. It’s just not necessary in most cases, and in the few it is, you presumably make some sort of deal with the air freight people ahead of time.
I’d expect any suborbital rocket to focus on the small-scale market. It’s safer, cheaper, and you’re a lot more likely to fill your rocket. Load factors are important in this business.
This is reminding me of the historical novels by Turtletaub (Turtledove writing under a pseudoname),e set in the eastern Mediterranean in the generation after Alexander. The protagonists are the captain and cargomaster of a trading galley.
One of the background issues is the question of cargoes. A galley is considerably more expensive to run than a sailing ship. On the other hand, it delivers faster and if necessary against the wind. So an earlier example of the same issues being discussed here.
@Moaaz Bukhari
My point is that if someone wants to send a new Formula 1 car part to the other side of the world, you can’t wait for other customers to fill up the rest of the space with high priority items, if you are going to achieve the promised travel time.
So you’ll end up with either a mostly empty rocket, a rocket that is 99% filled with low priority items for which you get fairly little money or a long wait before enough shipments have accumulated to fill the rocket.
This was the point where I started filing most of what Musk says as publicity hype for his public-private partership fundraising. It’s not really even dreaming, just “how can we get people thinking about sweet-ass rockets today?”
I don’t see what’s wrong with such publicity.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does mean that it’s a waste of time to cost out all of his wacky proposals, because many of them simply aren’t intended to be practical suggestions at all.
It would be a bit like wasting your time trying to figure out how fast Warp 9 is in Star Trek, or how many horsepower the Millennium Falcon’s engine has.
I’m sometimes surprised that we haven’t seen more of the opposite of this. E.g. slow sail-driven, computer managed container ships. (Trains arguably fall under this heading, given the low grade requirements, but have obviously been around a while.)
I’ve seen proposals for that in the past, but they haven’t gone anywhere. My guess is that the extra expenditure on wages and capital eats up the fuel savings. You can’t really cut manning more than you already have, and you need more ships because the existing ones are going more slowly. Also, you probably get paid less because you’re slower.
So maybe if there’s an energy crisis on the longer side, but probably not otherwise …
Natilus is trying the opposite. Large cargo drones that take 3x longer to deliver but at half the cost of regular air freighters.
As any homeowner knows, weather (acute and chronic) is the #1 cause of expensive home maintenance. If your propulsion architecture is basically “grab hold of as much weather as possible and hang on”, and your work site is the literal middle of the ocean, you wind up needing a fairly large and expensive staff of maintenance workers who spend most of their time doing busywork.
The trade of fast vs. slow in commercial shipping is definitely a thing, but it’s a thing done with propulsion systems that can be enclosed in steel-walled rooms and tended by maybe half a dozen people.
Sky Sails – adding a robotically controlled kite to a container ship reduces fuel costs by about 5%.
What does maintaining a robotically controlled kite do to labor costs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocket_Post
Can someone give me a quick summary of bintchaos’s most controversial positions?
As far as I can see, she’s a super-high IQ Islamic revert who supports ISIS. Her family are old money, or otherwise dangerously connected power brokers, who wouldn’t tolerate such treachery, and she is therefore deeply concerned about being exposed.
She thinks that Conservatives are dum-dums, and probably doesn’t have much time for the sadly deflated Trump supporting working class males.
Is that about it?
[
Something I’ve been wondering about – this might be uncharitable, or rude, or off-base, but it’s been on my mind for a while, so I’ll just throw it out there.
Above, some of the veteran posters give bintchaos a bit of advice about how to gain status, or get along, in the ssc comment community.
Firstly, is the idea that status is the primary conscious motivation behind social games related to the ssc Aspergerish tendency?
It’s a bit “Yes, fellow human, I also enjoy eating the chocolate. I enjoy the nutritional values.”
Secondly, in my opinion as a veteran comment reader, I think it’s alright for people to be stupid and wrong, as long as they are also somewhat open minded and kind. There might be limits to that, but, I feel like y’all are a bit too harsh on the weirdy-beardies who rock up here occasionally – Sidles, Moon, bintchaos. You need at least some of these characters to make things more interesting.
(Not that any of those people are stupid – all highly intelligent as far as I could make out. They just seem to have unpopular (“wrong”?) opinions.)
]
They somehow managed to get their twitter account suspended, which is an impressive feat for anyone without a frog avatar. From what remains it looks like the usual “start fights with well-known people to drive traffic to my blog and get attention” thing. Engaging on the merits may not be productive, but I’d enjoy being proven wrong.
Congratulations to Scott for being big enough for that now.
Her actual positions as far as I can tell are nothing exotic — basically your standard naive millennial progressive suite, although with more sympathy than average for euphemism. She is interested in Islam and long on its future prospects as a belief system, and in particular has shown sympathy for Salafist positions, but has not actually claimed to be Muslim in my hearing. (Similarly, she likes dropping hints that don’t quite claim privileged knowledge about any number of things — classified intel, all sorts of academic stuff — but seem to at a casual reading.) I don’t think she supports ISIS beyond trite oppressed-brown-people rationalizations, which I don’t much care about being as no one’s blown themselves up over them yet. Your take on the rich-girl thing seems accurate, though I’m not sure how seriously to take it.
Nothing we haven’t seen before, in other words. Her real problems here are lack of charity, presumption of intellectual superiority, and an endless supply of weak excuses for both. That is, being neither open-minded nor kind.
ETA:
Sort of, but not the way you seem to think. The idea is that it’s a primary unconscious motivation for most people, and implicitly that a conscious understanding of it helps ‘spergy types get along in neurotypical society.
How well that works is left as an exercise to the reader.
It seems sort of rude to talk about someone instead of to them.
Ask her yourself, since she appears to be still posting?
It’s flattering.
She has ascended to topic-hood.
For the record, I would not include bintchaos in this group I’m about to describe, I haven’t been following her conversation much.
That said, the trouble with moon et. al wasn’t them being wrong. I daresay most of us consider most others wrong on most points, that’s why this place is interesting. The problem was the combination of extreme lack of charity for the positions of others combined with a preening moral superiority that made it clear they had no interest in the ideas of others. If you want to say I’m full of shit, by all means do so, but do it by explaining why I’m wrong, not by prattling on about how woke you are. Moon, sidles, and the rest kept making the same mistake over and over again, despite repeated requests to knock it off.
There’s no real point in engaging with someone who makes vague and insulting generalizations about large groups that are emphatically untrue in order to back up their preconceived notions.
“but dont right leaning posters do that a lot here” yeah, and I now fully acknowledge that this is a problem.
I had a flashback to the run-up to the 2012 election, when on another blog a certain Islamophilic commenter was oddly knowledgeable about–no, you know what, it’s probably a coincidence, and I’m a cudlip for even thinking otherwise.
No evidence for “super-high IQ.” Almost certainly significantly above the national average, not obviously above the group average.
No clear evidence that she supports ISIS.
She is worried about being exposed, but I don’t think she has made it clear why.
And you left out her attachment to socio-physics, which seems to be someone’s grand theory of social behavior modeled on physics, perhaps via metaphors. She is also fond of game theory terminology.
Not just terminology, but opaque jargon. It’s maddening.
Have you considered the Occham’s Razor that it’s just a large green humanoid with regeneration and vulnerability to fire and acid?
Failure to adhere to one of the two acceptable positions: right wing liberatarianism, and right wing authoritarianism.
Don’t be a dick.
As an outgroup, that looks pretty accurate to me.
I thought Dr S was a libertarian before I ever commented here.
I question your objectivity on this subject.
ETA: Okay, maybe this deserves a more detailed reply. It’s not an uncommon charge; it’s almost a cliche, really. But when survey after survey shows Scott’s readership to be mostly leftist or liberal (seriously, every reader survey for years has said this), then we’re looking at a pretty odd outgroup, even if conservative voices here are louder (the surveys track commenters, not comments).
Either way, contentless partisan sniping like TAG’s is something I need like I need more holes in my head, and you should not encourage it.
Just a nit, but by common usage the proprietor of this blog would be “Dr. A” (at least under his preferred pseudonym). He’s also the author of the non-libertarian FAQ, so while he understands and to some extent sympathizes with the philosophy, he can’t really be accused of being one of us.
“us”, because the confusing part is that I think I am the only person here who can be properly titled “Dr. S”, and I am a card-carrying Libertarian. Well, card-owning; my wallet was getting a bit fat.
@Nornagest
Rightly so.
I thought Dr. A. was a libertarian based solely on his output and writing style.
I perceive libertarians as being vastly too high verbal for me…I’m too impatient to wade through all that verbage for a few nuggets of information.
And I don’t understand what the composition of the SSC commentariat has to do with Dr. A.’s perceived politics.
Two things. First, it’s evidence as to what is an outgroup relative to the views expressed in Scott’s writing. Whatever Scott identifies as politically (he has not stated this directly for a while, but I get the impression it’s something in the neighborhood of “aieeee get it off me”, which I can respect), he clearly isn’t othering or alienating the whole left side of the political spectrum if he is read primarily by them. (He might still be othering or alienating parts of that spectrum, and probably is. But that’s everyone these days.)
Second, Scott rules with a pretty light hand here. Most of our norms are self-enforced, so the above applies almost as much to the commentariat at large as to Scott’s writing.
This has nothing to do with Scott, it is about the arrival of a small number of loud and frequent right wing posters, who have no connection with any kind of formal rationality.
They have been happily sharing ridiculous claims like “the UK is a tyrany”. Honestly, i don’t mind rational right wingers who actually check facts and so on.
They piled on bintchaos and they drove Herbert Herbertson off the blog entirely. When less wrong melted down, pretty much the same thing happened then. ….including shooting the messenger.
I think Eugene Nier had a hand in Less Wrong‘s demise — or rather its final decline into total irrelevance years after everyone interesting had left — but that wasn’t because he was a right-winger, it was because he was a large-scale abuser of the voting system. The same thing would have happened if it had been, say, requireshate. No one cared about the other right-leaning posters except, perhaps, you.
Moving back to SSC, I think you’re getting, shall we say, a motivated view of what’s going on here. Deiseach’s probably been the most critical of bintchaos of anyone; she’s not a right-winger, she’s been here about as long as anyone (though she is not as far as I know a LW veteran), and she has a long history of making valuable posts. Same goes for most of her other critics (though I might be tooting my own horn a bit there, as I’ve occasionally been one of them).
It seems pretty unfair to single someone out to compare Eugine, even if hypothetically. If you have to name someone, why not someone who really did abuse a system, like MsScribe or requireshate?
Fair enough. It is now requireshate.
Citation needed. I can believe this from a driveby snipe but I highly doubt a regular would seriously say that (maybe kevin c or suntzu, but they’re the board’s doomsayer and designated jester).
@Gobbobobble
See here.
@rlms
All right. It reads as exaggeration-for-effect (or potentially a difference of definitions) to me, but point conceded.
Herbert Herberson left because he couldn’t handle people who disagreed with him. As for the other, in deference to the rules of this blog I’ll only say I do not believe she is posting in good faith.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
This matches my observation. Over the last 3-6 months we’ve gotten 2-3 new prolific right wing posters that never post anything other than attacks on “the left” or the like, and not very interestingly at that, to go with the 3-4 we already had.
This class of sentiment continues to strike me as closeminded and silly.
That describes quite a lot of commenters here, perhaps even a majority, so doesn’t distinguish Bintchaos. Belief in Sociophysics, red brain/blue brain, interest in Islam all do.
None of those people are attacked for being stupid and/or wrong, but for being insufferably smug, unwilling to acknowledge opposing points, intentionally obscurantist (not Moon), and taking unsupported pot-shots at opponents. So I find that an odd defense of them.
yeah, exactly
Right, so from your perspective they were uncharitable and closed-minded.
I guess when J.S. rails against the “alt-boetians”, or Moony Jill starts going off on one about right wingers, I don’t really take it seriously. I don’t find it annoying because I lack the decency to treat their views seriously.
Perhaps banning them is a greater mark of respect than tolerating them.
Perhaps not though. Perhaps I just like their style.
I mean, you need to believe in something before you will look for it, and you need to look before you can see.
As such, obduracy has its benefits.
And there wasn’t anything particularly abhorrent about their fundamental beliefs.
Right, which is why I disagree with you that we are “too hard” on them, at least given your own stated metrics.
Anyway, they got honest engagement at first, that faded to the verbal equivalent of eye-rolling.
In Jill and Sidles cases, it was the style that got them banned, not the beliefs. They were sent off for being irritating in a way that derailed threads, after warnings, not for hating the right or anything.
Yes, I think you are right. I need to reformulate my position.
I’m going with this: I don’t mind closed minded or obscure people as long as they are somewhat humorous…. hmmm… not humorous. Decent?
I would actually put the recent Sidles as a way to do this right. He was obscure and confusing, but not disruptive. (He shouldn’t have tried to evade bans, but that’s a different issue, and it’s possible that we’d all learned to carve out exemptions in the general rule of taking people seriously.) Bintchaos and Moon were/are both… thermodynamically inefficient. A lot more heat than light was generated by their participation. Obviously, politics is less efficient than non-political issues, but there are quite a few left-wing participants here who manage to be reasonable discussion partners and don’t cause the sort of drama we’ve seen recently.
@bean
So this is all on me?
I wasn’t targetted, repeatedly strafed, and ultimately hate-stalked by a particular member of this fine community?
I have to get this paranoia under control…
[edit:I didn’t realize that was to Bean, so on reflection I’m deleting what looks like dog-piling.]
It would be prudent. I think you were the only person here who interpreted her listing the only two universities she could find that taught courses in sociophysics as a deliberate attempt to doxx you. That is evidence of what, in common usage, is labeled paranoid.
Deiseach repeatedly strafed you. I don’t know what beyond that you consider hate stalking.
Deiseach was not entirely innocent, and I won’t claim otherwise. As Randy said (and then deleted, but I’ll continue to credit him), she’s not the best at letting go. But your attitude that you were walking innocently along until she jumped you without provocation and brutally attacked you is no closer to the truth of the situation. You’ve repeatedly been unclear in a manner I find difficult to believe is not deliberate, tried to play stupid status games, and generally done things that are not in keeping with the overall tone here. When you’re called on this, multiple posters (myself included) have offered advice, which you ignore, and continue to act as if we’re the ones in the wrong. When you go to a foreign country, you don’t act as if they’re the ones in the wrong for not using the manners you use at home.
A subthread here disappeared, right?
No, it seems to respond to some discussions at the bottom of recent threads. Despite my sanctioning it with so many replies, I don’t think it’s a good trend to have threads for the purpose of calling out posters.
No, no not yours a different one.
@Mark – “Above, some of the veteran posters give bintchaos a bit of advice about how to gain status, or get along, in the ssc comment community.”
my advice to Bintchaos, and to sidles before her, has mainly been about getting along and not about status per se. Mainly this is because people who post the way they do tend to be extremely disruptive. They annoy people without persuading them, they deplete patience for their adoptive tribe from the side they attack, and don’t actually advance their own tribe’s interests in the bargain. Basically, they make everything worse for everyone. Given how often they tend to post, they make everything a lot worse really fast, too.
“Firstly, is the idea that status is the primary conscious motivation behind social games related to the ssc Aspergerish tendency?”
Maybe, sorta-kinda. Are you familiar with the classic formulations about how everything in human behavior is status-seeking? I don’t particularly agree with that view or find it useful, but I think it’s a pretty influential one around here.
“Secondly, in my opinion as a veteran comment reader, I think it’s alright for people to be stupid and wrong, as long as they are also somewhat open minded and kind. ”
I generally agree. I rather liked sidles, and thought he was getting downright coherent last time he showed up. Moon seemed to fail at being open-minded, even by the standards of people who generally agreed with her, and she banged out a ton of posts every thread all of which were pretty much impossible to respond to. Bintchaos, I’m hoping will hang around, but I’m not too optimistic.
It’s not the wrong opinions that do it either. There’s a way of framing things that is conducive to having a discussion, and a way that is not conducive. If I make a statement about how I’m right and you’re wrong, and then when you disagree I just tell you that’s what a wrong person would say, and when you offer evidence I dismiss it out of hand as bad evidence with no explanation why, and when you ask questions to try and get justifications for what seem like unsupported assertions, I say “because that’s what the truth is” and refuse to engage further, the problem isn’t that I’m wrong, it’s that I’m demanding that you listen to me while actively refusing to listen to you. That’s a really rotten thing to do, and it makes people angry, especially here where everyone is trying really hard not to do it themselves.
What kinds of random things do you wonder about other SSC readers?
I’m putting together a survey and am ready to field ideas for more questions. So far my categories are:
– You/your family
– Life/work
– Body/abilities
– Lifestyle/preferences/misc.
I’m trying to stick more to the kind of random stuff that wouldn’t be picked up in Scott’s regular survey to his readers. (No politics or ethical views, for instance.) I figure it’d be interesting if some unexpected patterns jumped out (e.g. if SSC readers disproportionately owned pet fish and were over 6 feet tall).
– Mother’s maiden name
– Street where you grew up
– Name of first pet
– Model of first car
– Last four digits of Social Security number
Thanks. I’ve added questions for each of those. I went ahead and added “All-time favorite sports team” too.
-Password for SSC account
Level of mutual regard and fascination.
Best estimate of the year of:
– the first successful manned expedition to Mars
– fusion of >80% of humanity in the global hive mind
– the Second Coming
Is that a trick question? They are obviously all the same year.
Shhh! Don’t tell the advertisers! They won’t pony up big bux for the expedition if they think J-man is going to hijack the news while it’s going on.
ObSF: The Year of the Jackpot
I think you mean Year of the Megamillions Jackpot with Megaplier. 😉
Hail fellow worshiper of Martian Cyborg Jesus!
Not sure if I should be surprised at the complete lack of serious responses.
Thanks!
I have a few “taste” questions and am inclined to add more. Any other ideas besides taste in music*?
I’m not asking about stuff like age or personality scores because my survey is meant to cover more unusual/non-SSC-ish topics that wouldn’t show up in Scott’s surveys.
*I’m having trouble thinking of what to ask about music. I’m not terribly interested in knowing “What kind of music do you like” but it might be interesting to see if a disproportionate number of SSC readers listen to a certain not-very-popular band, etc.
Which of these do you treasure most: your intellect, your sex-appeal, your net worth, or your humility?
I have a question for Bintchaos, and an implicit argument.
As I understand her position, it contains at least two different elements:
1. She regards herself as a “hard sciences type.”
2. A lot of her views are based on socio-physics.
That suggests that she considers socio-physics an example of a hard science, which raises the question of why. I can think of at least three reasons why one might view some set of ideas as a science:
A. Consensus. Most people working in the relevant field(s) accept it. Examples would be Darwinian evolution, classical physics (within the context where it is applicable), special relativity, quantum mechanics, neo-classical economics. That doesn’t prove it is true, of course–classical physics was accepted back before the limitations of its applicability were recognized. But it’s a pretty good reason to regard something as true unless you have some good reason to think it isn’t.
B. Internal logic. A lot of the reason I believe in Darwinian evolution is that it makes strong logical sense. Without looking at the actual evidence, that gives me a pretty strong reason to believe it. That isn’t true about classical physics, special relativity, or Q Mech. It’s closer to true about neoclassical economics, but only if you accept assumptions that are less obviously correct than the assumptions of evolution.
C. Evidence. One particularly persuasive form of evidence is successful prediction. Your theory says something will happen, other theories say it probably won’t, it happens. Repeat a few times and you have a pretty good reason to think the theory is true.
The question is which of these is your reason for regarding socio-physics as a hard science, assuming I am correct in thinking you do. Or is there some other reason?
It pretty clearly does not fit A. It seems to be a reasonably new approach to the questions studied in sociology, political theory, history, and perhaps some related fields, one which most people in those fields have never heard of. I don’t know enough about it to tell whether it fits either B or C, but presumably you do and can explain why.
Did she ever explain what sociophysics is and how it’s relevant to her argument?
I don’t think she ever explained what it was beyond social science invented by a physicist or how it generated her conclusions, but perhaps she can correct me on that.
I think it’s Ising models applied to opinion formation rather than atom spins.
Here’s a means/ends question for the commenters here:
When, if ever, is it acceptable to knowingly lie about a fact to convince someone of a true principle. It is sadly the case that bad arguments are often simpler and “stickier” than good arguments. Even worse, producing good arguments is harder than producing bad arguments, so bad arguments come to dominate all popular discourse. The strictly truthful have a seemingly impossible task if they value the truth. Should people practice the dark arts in defense?
This is closely related to a “killing one to save many” question, but does the fact that lying is a less severe moral infraction than killing affect the answer?
So then it turns out you need to keep the person fooled forever about the lie you told them, no matter the consequences, or your support base will turn on you regardless of your principles’ actual merits.
You’ll need to be a very good liar, and the best liars train themselves to believe their own lies. You can see where this is going.
Exploiting our opponents’ delusions is my side’s entire strategy, and it seems to be working relatively well to chip away at the foundation of their ideology.
You wanted a moral argument, but “that’s a shit means bro” is a consequentialist one, I guess?
And even if you don’t the people you thus recruit will believe those lies, and if you’re successful eventually your movement will come to be filled with those people.
Nah, you just introduce them gradually to the inner teachings. Look into the history of the words “esoteric” and “exoteric”.
I have, I see a bunch of cults that tend to implode for the reasons I described. For example, the Gnostics claimed to be the esoteric inner circle with respect to Christianity. Note what happened to the Gnostics and to non-Gnostic Christianity.
Note that “introducing them gradually to the inner teachings” is exactly how science works.
This assumes you need a personal relationship with the person. Let’s say you decide to use twitter to support your bumper sticker arguments and convince 1000 people of your position. Even if 100 of them defect, you’re still up 900.
Distinguish arguments from facts. Facts are much more available than arguments. Someone who cannot understand a good argument will probably carry on not being able to understand it.
I pass no judgment on the morality of if. But I think you need a better plan. At the very least you need to consider the consequences should your lie be revealed because it almost surely will.
Depends on your definition of “revealed.” It is likely that someone will demonstrate that you lied. It is much less likely that the people fooled by your lie will believe him–especially the ones who wanted to believe what you told them.
For a real world example, I believe I have demonstrated that the source of one of the most prominent factoids in the climate debate lied in print about his own work. Almost nobody who is on his side of that dispute is willing to believe it.
That will not apply evenly. In-group people will forgive the liar, out-group people never believed him anyway, so you are going to sway the undecided.
In defence of the first claim, note the way you have forgiven climate change denialists for their many lies.
Could you fill that out? Who counts as a denialist, what has he said that is clearly a lie, and in what sense have I forgiven him?
@David Friedman:
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that you have said don’t find incorrect claims by climate change “skeptics” or “deniers” interesting. Therefore, you don’t care to keep track of what claims are made, by whom, and don’t care when they are wrong.
That sounds about right. That doesn’t mean I have forgiven anyone for anything. If I notice that someone has made claims I consider incorrect I lower my probability that other things he says are true. So far as correcting them, there are plenty of other people out there willing and able to correct mistaken criticisms of the current climate orthodoxy, many fewer willing and able to correct mistaken defenses of it.
For some evidence, not in the climate context, that I object to people who agree with me saying things that are not true, see this on gun rights and this on a fellow libertarian.
Bias doesnt’ feel like bias. What might it feel like instead?
The consequences may be no more than “we believed the right thing for the wrong reasons”. Is that so bad?
If implemented by humans in reality instead of in a thought experiment, you probably have to consider the possibility that you are wrong about the big thing you want people to believe. You *know* that only through socialism can we become more prosperous, or that the only long-term hope of the human race is an aggressive program of eugenics. It’s just that the ignorant proles don’t understand the subtlety of your brilliant reasoning. So you can solve the problem by lying in a good cause. Only, you’re actually wrong, your socialist utopia will be an impoverished hell-hole with border guards’ guns pointing inward; your eugenics program will sterilize a lot of harmless weird people and be hijacked to do a bit of ethnic cleansing but won’t do much else. And the facts people needed to figure out whether your claims were true or not were the ones you successfully lied about, so your initial error became everyone’s error.
I discussed this in an old blog post with a more recent example.
Let me offer the many player version of the problem. Suppose you are a climate scientist and inclined to view AGW as a problem. You therefor deliberately slant the presentation, perhaps also the conclusions, of your professional work towards high estimates of the problem. If, for instance, you are making an estimate of climate sensitivity, you make a series of judgement calls each of which tends to give a higher rather than a lower value. If you notice yourself doing it, you justify it on the grounds that since AGW is a problem, you don’t want to risk understating it.
The overall effect of putting CO2 in the atmosphere, however, is too big a problem for any one person or even any small team to solve–it involves not only complicated physics but statistics, economics, chemistry, biology, ecology, … . So your belief that it is a serious problem is based one percent on your own work, 99% on other people’s work. All the other people are slanting their work for the same reason you are slanting yours. The combined effect is to give you (and all the others) a considerably inflated estimate of how serious the problem is. Which gives you even more reason to slant your work, possibly even to the point of deliberate dishonesty–you can’t be too scrupulous with a planet to save. Further feedback occurs.
The result may be to misrepresent a minor problem as a world threatening catastrophe, with everyone involved believing that the conclusion he is arguing for is true even if he is slightly misrepresenting his part of the evidence.
If you are going to be tactically dishonest you should allow for the possibility that other people are being tactically dishonest as well, hence that some of your beliefs that you think justify your dishonesty may be the result of theirs.
Indeed. You should allow for the biases of the people, politicians, who are eventually going to act on your proposals. they are biased to act slowly, act late, and do things on the cheap. Assuming universal rationality is not rational.
So it’s something that can go wrong. What about the alternative? Does that have a downside?
Let’s assume that we all agree that lying to people in order to convince them of a true principle is perfectly acceptable. This notion ends up being propagated to society at large, and now the overwhelming majority of people in the world believe it and act accordingly. Did we make the world better, or worse ?
Wetter.
If the notion propagates then people will know you’re lying to them anyways, meaning you failed from the start
This is part of the problem to begin with: we cannot all agree on this. It must be a shadowy cabal, a conspiracy if you will. Because if people know they’re being lied to they won’t believe the lies!
Worse, they won’t believe the truth either.
Yeah, this is the biggest problem with top-down “lie to the proles for their own good” strategies. The people who should be able to speak with authority about the safety of vaccines or the dangers of smoking or the consequences of global warming have already been seen to lie routinely for their political and social causes, so it’s pretty easy to imagine they’re lying again.
One of these is not like the other.
You are someone else who needs to distinguish lies from simplified explanations.
I am not sure what “acceptable” means here. If it is known that you do it, people will conclude that you are not to be trusted.
It’s not acceptable.
“Acceptable” is a bad argument. It elides the difference between what the speaker accepts, and what everyone else does.
I’m answering his question. Furthermore, I’m taking a moral stance on this issue, not appealing to popular support.
I’m not sure I disagree with your moral stance, but to play devil’s advocate:
There’s a famous story in Buddhism called “the parable of the burning house.”
Basically, it goes: a man comes home to find his house is on fire, but his children are still playing inside. He yells at them to come out. They don’t listen. He then says “I’ve got some great new toys out here for you (specifically, I think a new cart, maybe made of gold)! Please come out and see them, quickly!”
The children, lured by the promise of toys, safely leave the house. The excuse offered for the lie about the cart is that the “vehicle” of the Buddhist law is better than any cart, because it ferries you over the sea of suffering to the bliss of nirvana, etc.
This story is used as justification for something called “expedient means,” which, though I think “lying to get people to see the truth” might not be doing it justice, is still sort of like that.
Anyway, without getting too much into Buddhism, whether or not its techniques are good and whether or not this burning house is a good metaphor them, a more basic question: is what the father did in the parable wrong?
Or to get closer to the original question, if we posit that x is true, but also posit that the fastest way to get people to see the truth of x is basically to lie to them, play a trick on them, etc. is it wrong to do so, especially if one believes that the truth of x leads to eternal salvation?
IMO, that’s just an excuse for taking a shortcut. It’s not mortal sin or anything, but neither is it right.
From a consequentialist perspective, the morality of authoritarianism is entirely predicated on the correctness of the authority.
For example, in Onyomi’s story, the authority knows that his kids are in danger of dying and knows how to get them out of danger. But imagine if, say, the front door was trapped and the fire brigade was on the way. The kids might die instead of living.
So that’s really what it boils down to – are you right or not? Problem is, the more people you rule over, the more likely that any dictate you make will not work for everyone, and the more information you would need to work effectively. Of course, most forms of authoritarianism usually prevent the information the authority needs from reaching the authority – it would be dissent against the monarch, or whatever the case may be. Not to mention that the authority needs to be a good person.
@onyomi
That has the same problem as any example based on an emergency. Which is that an emergency is a special situation where violating the usual moral rules may be justified. It compounds it by using actors who are not adults.
Believing that adults who do not change their course are going to eventually suffer really bad consequences is a different situation.
@Nybbler
To further play devil’s advocate, how much urgency does one have to sense before one is justified in suspending the normal ethical boundaries?
So, what’s the moral status of telling people they should meditate because it’s a good method of losing weight?
@onyomi et al:
I don’t think we really need to invoke consequentialism for the Buddhist parable. We can just say, “the harm of a lie is in believing it, internalizing it, carrying it forward. Telling someone what they need to hear in order to take an immediate action, and then immediately revealing the truth once the danger to them is averted, does no harm.”
You can say the same thing about some of the instructional untruths that people have called out, like electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom or DNA looking like a ladder.
It’s not hard to come up with scenarios in which lying is the best thing to do. If the Nazis are searching for Jews to murder, please lie about whether or not there are any Jews hiding in your attic. If you’re in the middle of a war, you should feel free to lie about your planned troop movements and what all those researchers in that lab are working on.
But as a general guide to behavior, this is pretty awful. If you base support for some true belief on a platform of lies, you end up having to expand your lies to protect that platform. Elezier has some quote about “once you tell a lie, the truth becomes your enemy,” and it applies here.
If your argument for the wrongness of kicking blacks around was made on the basis of noble lies–say that there are no differences in abilities between blacks and whites, or that the whole concept of race is biologically meaningless–then in order to keep arguming for not kicking blacks around, you have to call any discussion of racial IQ differences pseudoscience, and spread lies about genetics. One downside of that is that it leaves your general structure of beliefs weaker. Probably a bigger downside is that your efforts now make everyone more ignorant about an increasing footprint around your original lies. If race must be biologically meaningless, then shouldn’t you demand that mainstream medicine stop talking about differences in disease prevalance across races? If abilities must not differ across races, then shouldn’t you assert that differences in IQ scores or achievement test scores or graduation rates are proof of bias?
One likely outcome (which I think has happened many times) is that powerful social forces are unleashed toward suppressing information and asserting lies, powered by the desire to support some good idea or belief. And that makes everyone dumber.
Defense of what? “A good argument supports X, but people won’t understand it , so I’ll use a bad argument instead”.
When, if ever, is it acceptable to knowingly lie about a fact to convince someone of a true principle.
I think it’s acceptable to lie about a fact if the intent is not to deceive; it’s not lies we object to but deception. Any instructional lie has to be taken with the assumption that the truth will eventually come out, and has to be based on that realization that it’s not the lie but the exposure of the truth that teaches the lesson.
I can think of two examples:
Recently, I had to submit to a number of medical procedures. I’m afraid of doctors and especially needles. I made sure the medical staff were aware of this in advance of any bloodwork. Inevitably, I’d get a reassuring lie like “you won’t feel a thing” or “this won’t hurt”. It’s a lie, and I knew it was a lie going in, but being distracted from my fear made it easier. Being told that it wouldn’t hurt made it hurt less. It’s the same with a parent trying to get their child to try something new and saying “this tastes good, try it!” That’s a lie as well, and you know the child is going to know it’s a lie right away. Still, even if the needle does hurt or the food doesn’t taste great, the lie has imparted an important principle, that your fear makes things worse than they would otherwise be.
Telling your kid that a particularly unpleasant food tastes good imparts another valuable principle, that people in authority sometimes lie. You want them to use their own judgement, to not blindly trust any authority. It’s best if they learn this in a controlled, safe environment from someone that they know is not going to do any worse than discomfort or embarrass them. This one principle can only be taught by lying to them; better a harmless lie than a harmful lie to be their exposure to the principle.
[Added:] The ever popular ‘Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide’ petition and asking people to agree or disagree with quotes while giving a false author are examples of instructional lies. Like the above examples, they have their power not in the lie but in the revelation of the truth.
At some level, any effective lesson about the power of lies (and, reflexively, any lesson about the power of the truth) is going to involve demonstrating that power, making those principles impossible to teach without lying. It’s an odd specific meta-contextual problem, and I don’t think teaching any other principle benefits from lying.
I think a couple of quotes from pratchett fit here…
And from the science of discworld:
A “lie-to-children” is a statement which is false, but which nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie.”
“Yes, you needed to understand that” they are told, “so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true”
There are many well known lies-to-children including that electrons orbit the nucleus like a little solar system, DNA looks like a spiral ladder etc
Do you watch television? Why?
No: Who.
What does the World Health Organization have to do with this?
You are right that capitalisation is significant, but you’ve got the wrong capitalisation.
Mostly trying to parse your answer, and failing.
Well, I thought it was funny.
Who is The Doctor.
You hate Dr Who so much that you don’t watch TV because you might see the series accidentally? 😉
I never saw Dr. Who, but I used to read a mostly-links blog by a guy who loved it. This blogger annoyed the crap out of me so I assumed Dr. Who must be a lousy, overrated show that is just as annoying as he is and for the same reasons. I have made no attempt to update my assumption.
You mean broadcast television? Then no, not since 2007 or so. Too many ads.
I do watch a lot of video, including material that first aired on TV. But I watch it on iTunes, Netflix, or Prime Video. Or if it’s just not available there I’ll pirate it off YouTube. But there’s not a lot of stuff there anymore.
As to why? It’s entertaining. I enjoy it. The best of modern TV is excellent.
No. Too many obnoxious ads.
I do not watch TV proper because I don’t have one and I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did.
I don’t really watch shows online because it takes so much effort. I can never sustain interest in a show long enough to spend several days or weeks or months watching all of it, and I like regular sleep too much to binge-watch.
My wife and I will occasionally watch Top Gear in the evening, or something else that is not plot-based.
That said, I am putting in a lot of effort to overcome my show-watching weakness so that we can watch Jane the Virgin because it is one of the best things ever made.
Yes. I enjoy watching TV and discussing it on the internet, and I want something to do while I work out. Other than sports, I could probably cut the cord and live with whatever’s on netflix, but my family likes having TV, and we do like watching live sports.
Yes, because I love Jeopardy and football. Everything else I can do without.
Wife and I watch basically one show at a time through streaming on Amazon Prime, at a rate of about 3-4 nights a week. As to why, because there are enough good shows to do so, and it is entertaining and relaxing. (I regret to reveal that my life is not optimized)
Right now we are watching the Americans. We’ve seen Dr Who, Eureke, Deadwood, and Rome within the last couple of years.
The Americans is fantastic. I really like how Jenning’s will do the most horrific things possible in their line of work and the show doesn’t condemn them or justify it. It just is.
Hypothesis: Watching TV has become a marker of low class.
In a few years, Charles Murray will be able to add “Do you watch more than an hour of broadcast, cable, or satellite (i.e. non-internet-streaming) television per week?” as a question in his Bubble quiz, if he hasn’t already.
John D MacDonald was saying no one he knew watched television regularly in the late 70s. You may be making a more-and-more story out of this. That is, people who read a lot don’t watch as much tube. This has remained constant, but intermittently noticeable. When people notice this, people say, more and more people who read a lot aren’t watching as much tube.
Only with company, and no live broadcasts. Except for one Saturday morning cartoon once a week, which I catch regardless of whether anyone’s over.
It’s a nice pointless bonding experience, like playing cards.
Given GA06, should we just start assuming that polls have about a 5 point left-wing bias? These complete and utter failures are getting embarrassing.
Oversampling issues aside, I have another question.
This was apparently the most expensive House election in history, costing over $50m in advertising alone, with the Dems outspending Repubs 2 to 1.
Is there any sane case to be made that spending $50m to give any individual candidate, a say, 20% extra chance to win, especially in a minor election that won’t even effect party majorities? I’m personally not an effective altruist, but this sort of campaign spending seems the opposite. Huge blobs of money wasted in a factional dispute, where neither candidate will significantly impact the lives of their constituents.
I know doing so may be questionable in terms of 1st amendment rights, but every election I think more and more we really should have limits on campaign spending.
There may not even be a sane case to be made that spending $50m extra gives a candidate a 20% extra chance to win.
That politics is largely a confidence game, where things like momentum and the appearance of changing momentum matter a great deal.
I think you can bet every journalist on Earth had an article ready to go celebrating the Democratic victory here, and explicitly saying “This may seem like a random, unimportant Congressional district, but it actually matters a lot because they ‘flipped’ a district, which is a clear indictment on Trump and evidence that the Democrats are going to kick ass in 2020!”
Is printing that headline worth $50 million though, even assuming that $50 million would’ve granted them victory?
Beyond that, no matter how much you spend, the other party will spend enough to keep a safe seat competitive. These sorts of fights give a marginally small benefit to citizens, and are only becoming increasingly expensive.
I’d wager money I could get a bum off the street and he wouldn’t be able to do $50m in damages as a House Representative.
When the potential payoff is embarrassing Trump, no price is too high!
(I’m seriously starting to wonder if Trump is trying to destroy the left the way that Reagan destroyed the Soviets – get them to waste all their money in an arms race of negative campaign ads)
Reagan didn’t destroy the Soviets with an arms race, the Soviets destroyed themselves with their own economic system.
Dems badly need a tangible win, and need to sell the narrative that “Trump will doom the Republican Party” to keep people engaged through the 2020 midterms.
This seemed as good as any a place to get one, unfortunately their tactics were apparently better at generating out-of-state donations than in-district votes.
The economic system was a bigger problem than the arms race, but the arms race put stress on the system that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Would it have collapsed anyway, or developed into some kind of Communism-with-Russian-characteristics? Sure, probably. But it probably wouldn’t have been in the early Nineties.
Cuba’s still limping along with a command economy, although the (small) private sector’s grown somewhat in the last twenty years.
Yes. Going by twitter and reddit, there are a lot of people (the kinds of people who gave money from out of district to Ossoff) who believe Trump is Gigahitler + Voldemort and if the GOP is not stopped everyone is going to die.
I thought Trump’s victory would maybe snap some of the polarization insanity. When Trump won the New Hampshire primary Huffington Post ran in “WAR IN EUROPE” letters the headline “NH GOES RACIST SEXIST XENOPHOBIC!!!!” No they didn’t. New Hampshire has a heroin epidemic and they want the wall to help stop some of the cheap heroin that’s flooding their state. I wondered if when Trump won the election the people who believed that sort of thing would stop and ask, “wait, maybe I’m wrong about the motivations of my political opponents?” No. My FaceBook feed after the election and since is still full of people who would rather believe that half the country, their friends and neighbors and family members, are literally Nazis.
I don’t know if there’s a way back, either. Once you’ve been screaming that Trump is Gigahitler for a year, you can’t walk it back and say “weeeelllllllll maybe we were exaggerating about the extent of the Hitlarity…” No. There is no compromise with Gigahitler. Bloody severed faux-heads, murder fantasy plays in the park, shooting up the baseball fields…that’s not stopping any time soon.
@gbdub
I wonder if those two are anti-correlated. Obviously no one’s going to complain if their party’s candidate is getting lots of donations from outside their district. But if you’re not really partisan and just looking for “best person for the job,” I could see getting very annoyed by outside interference. Is the candidate going to represent your district, or the politics of the backers? I’d be tempted to vote the other way just to flip the bird to the outsiders and say “this is my congressman, go buy your own!”
Cuba isn’t a good comparison, first the Russian revolution happened during WW1, the Cuban during the 50s. Second the USSR financially supported Cuba for years, there was no such entity supporting the USSR in that way, and finally the USSR had geopolitical aspirations for its entire existence which dwarfed those of Cuba (though Cuba did have some).
The evidence for a major response to Reagan’s spending is mixed, and non definitive. At best it was one of many contributing causes and not at all worthy of the position many seem to attribute to it.
@Conrad Honcho
There is not…I don’t mean this as flippant or shallow, but when two sub-populations are diverging and theres no cross-migration then the result is (at minimum) psuedo-speciation.
–Sewell Wright
I suspect that there is one way migration though, that of young college graduates turning blue.
Interestingly however the drive towards actual speciation (lack of interfertility) is stronger if there is physical proximity, but sufficiently separate ecological niches. The reasoning is this: a hybrid offspring between the two separately specialized subspecies will have inferior fitness as it is not well-suited to either niche. So in situations where such a mating could occur, there is positive selection to avoid it happening at all and/or to avoid actual gestation if it does take place. In cases where geographical separation makes such mating impossible in the first place, there is no pressure to develop any such avoidance or interfertility adaptations, though genetic drift will eventually do the job anyway.
@bintchaos
What about people turning Red as they age? Every generation of young liberals thinks their ideology will be running the place as soon as those old evil conservatives kick the bucket…until they turn into the new old evil conservatives.
Red and blue refer to cultures, not ideologies. As far as I know people don’t spontaneously start watching NASCAR when they turn 40.
However, events that used to turn people more conservative–or were somewhat more correlated with being conservative, however you want to see it–namely marriage and child rearing, are more rare or occurring later for the younger generations, aren’t they? This may have affect and increasingly blue tint.
I wonder how that will wash out with the genetic component, though.
I think you are badly underestimating how much damage the federal government can do.
The federal budget is about four trillion dollars. Suppose ten percent of that is spent on activities that do net harm–the War on Drugs, the Farm Program, … . That’s a cost of four hundred million wasted plus damage done, say five hundred billion total. Suppose we distribute the blame to Congress per capita. The each congressman is responsible for about a billion dollars worth of damage.
That’s very much a back of the envelope calculation and there are lots of things wrong with it in both directions. But I think it suggests that you are badly underestimating the scale of government activities, hence the importance of elections.
Attributing all of the government’s harm to congress, and then dividing it evenly, is I think wrong.
Handwave 1: About 90% of what the government does, good and bad, is done by the bureaucracy working on autopilot. You can blame that on congressmen of earlier generations when the system was still in the process of being carved in stone, but it is beyond the scope of congressmen working in today’s lithobureaucratic era.
Handwave 2: About 90% of what congress does have the flexibility to do, is done by the party apparatus acting under party discipline and either following the President’s lead or following the minority imperative to block whatever the President attempts.
That leaves $10 million/year for damage within the scope of an individual congressman’s independent authority, presumably horse-trading “You support my damn fool program and I’ll go along with the party agenda on everything else”.
Still, a representative who was trying to do harm, or trying to do good but competent only in the horse-trading and not the policymaking, or who is elected to three terms, should be able to cause $50 million in damage.
@DavidFriedman I think you’re overestimating the differences between any two random given politicians. If you take average Democrat and average Republican, they will probably agree on most things. Drug war? Bipartisan support. Farm subsidies? Bipartisan support. Pork projects and military spending? Bipartisan support. The actual party differences these days seem to basically be down to how much immigration we want, who gets guns, whether Trump is Gigahitler, and how we solve healthcare. The rest is all cosmetic based on which pork projects you like better.
If anything, I’d say Bum on Street would probably be against a lot of the things you hate, like the war on drugs.
(Also keep in mind that this spending does not guarantee a win, only offering a slightly larger chance of one. The exact number of damage or benefit possible is arguable, but we’re pushing up to the point where it’s worth reconsidering whether the right to spend $50m on a campaign and the benefits of electing people good at fundraising outweigh what we’d get out of an election where any candidates war chests were limited to say, 1 year’s salary for the median worker in that county.)
Fun fact (which my friend told me about last night at pub trivia, so I don’t have a source to hand): more campaign money was spent on GA06 than the entire 2011 Canadian federal election.
That’s only true if look at spending per party. The big three Canadian parties averaged 33 million CAD, while the two GA candidates were each supported by 30 million USD. Which is bigger depends on whether you use 2011 or 2017 exchange rates.
10 years ago the claim was that we must make 1st amendment sacrifices because money was definitely buying elections outright. Now the claim is that we must make sacrifices because the money is wasted and that’s harmful.
When the problem reverses but the proposed solution is identical, I can’t help but suspect the sacrifice is the actual goal.
I don’t know what the name for this is, but it is definitely poor reasoning. If you were to change the passive voice to put in who is doing the claiming it would be even clearer what’s wrong with your argument.
We had a thread trying to name this once. My favorite was “hivemind fallacy.”
Well then: registrationisdumb, what did you think of the Citizens United decision at the time? It would be really cool to hear from someone whose position on it has changed, because it was such a polarizing/binary issue at the time.
Brad and Chalid: a link to a left-wing writer who disagreed that money was buying elections in 2004 would do a good job of disproving my argument. (Ideally one that believed speech should be restricted anyway.)
I was actively engaged with the left and the democratic party until 2010. I met nobody with this view. The “hivemind” was real, not a fallacy.
Money doesn’t outright buy elections, but a large disparity can help. And a severe lack will torpedo a campaign (good staffers and ads cost at least some money). The problem is that untethered campaign contributions make the electee beholden to big donors ahead of constituents.
A) I don’t believe that registrationisdumb is a particularly left wing.
B) https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission-aclu-amicus-brief
C) Those you were surrounded by until 2010 were not a random sample, and in any event your recollections of them are surely tinted by your current bitterness towards “the left”
The ACLU (to their credit) made a constitutional argument against the law because it “threatened speech that lies at the heart of the First Amendment”, which isn’t consequentialist opposition based on a belief that money was not buying elections.
Good proof would be someone saying “I oppose this law because the problem isn’t real, not because I care about freeze peach”.
In fact, the CU decision itself isn’t really a vital point, in that someone could have supported the law for other reasons, even through they didn’t believe in the problem it was purporting to solve.
Good proof for what?
You claimed there was some nefarious plot to undermine the first amendment via a series of bad faith arguments. “When the problem reverses but the proposed solution is identical, I can’t help but suspect the sacrifice is the actual goal.”
You didn’t actually say who this nefarious plot is being undertaken by, but based on your follow up, I take it that it is supposed to be the dastardly leftists.
As proof of this nefarious plot you point to unnamed people who purportedly claimed ten years ago that the first amendment needed to be sacrificed because money bought elections and to registrationisdumb’s comment that perhaps election money would be better spent on bednets. Apparently registrationisdumb is a part of the hive mind that you are certain is real because 7 years ago you were “engaged” with the left.
Now you insist that the only way to falsify your incoherent theory is to find someone on the left that back in 2004 didn’t money in elections was a problem. How that would in anyway relate to your original claim that there is a nefarious plot to undermine the first amendment I have no idea. I would think that the fact that the most aggressive and effective defenders of the first amendment are on the left would be some evidence against this theory, but apparently I haven’t understood all the epicycles.
Can I ask you how you came to find this site in the first place and what made you decide to start commenting here?
This is not a productive response, and looking at your other comments in this thread, I think it’s pointless to continue interacting with you. Have a good one.
“what did you think of the Citizens United decision at the time?”
I wasn’t quite as politically knowledgeable at the time, so it probably boiled down to “The Daily Show said the Koch Brothers are evil, so this must be evil too!”
So I’m on the same side of the issue, but coming to the table with different knowledge, and apparently against the team that I was previously on. I didn’t particularly think that that corporations should have the same Consitutional rights as people then, and I don’t particularly think that today either.
In terms of “buying” elections, the word “buy” is way too simple of an explanation. It’s true only in the same sense that an athlete will do better if they have fancy shoes, a good manager, a dietitian, and a personal trainer. If I have $100 to fund my campaign, and the opposition has $1,000,000,000 of course I’m gonna lose. But every dollar you spend has increasingly diminishing returns after a certain point.
As for my political affiliation: Fuck the blue tribe; fuck the red tribe; fuck the gray tribe. All of them are looking out for their own interests and not yours. I’ll vote for the guy who fixes shitty zoning regulations where I live, cleans up our water supply, and works to keep up the quality of our libraries and state parks.
Makes a lot of sense, thanks for the reply. Finding myself in much the same boat these days.
Man, one of the most underrated good things about Trump’s win was that it got the left to shut up about Citizens United for a few minutes.
Achilles de remilla:
Glenn Greenwald defending the citizens united decision.
ACLU’s statement on Citizens United
Sorry, I should have said more clearly that I was looking for disagreement based on what Greenwald calls “policy grounds”: on (1), not (2). Because the beliefs that money is buying elections but it is also unconstitutional to restrict speech don’t conflict with each other.
Greenwald and the ACLU were both arguing on constitutional grounds, and I don’t deny there was dissent from the prevailing consensus along those lines.
What I never encountered was anyone saying “no, money does not buy elections”, rather than “free speech trumps regulation”.
Achilles:
It seems like the only way to have a useful opinion on whether money buys elections is to look at some data on the actual impact of money on elections. I understand that the expected answer to the question is bound up in ideology right now, but it’s quite possible that we live in either:
World #1: Money really does buy elections. Once I have two or three times the money you have, your situation as my opponent in a major election is pretty much hopeless, and all you can do is hope I have some kind of scandal before election day.
World #2: Money really doesn’t buy elections. Having more money, even lots more money, gives you a small advantage, but is typically overcome by other factors like incumbency, party, appeal of your message, etc.
There is no way we can reason from first principles to find out which world we live in. (And which world we live in may change over time, as the importance of advertising changes.). The only thing we can do is try to find a way to analyze existing data to figure out which world we’re living in. To the extent a liberal and a conservative political scientist looking at the data are good at their jobs, they ought to tend to come to the same answer.
The free speech/principled argument is the one you actually can get to from ideology. You don’t need to analyze how money is actually affecting election outcomes to know that you’re not okay with putting the government in the business of regulating political speech. (In the same way, if you are a supporter of the second amendment, you don’t have to analyze the impact of gun ownership on crime rates to know that you’re not okay with banning guns. Whether the guns are causing or preventing crimes is entirely irrelevant to the argument.)
I’m belaboring this point a bit because I think it’s very important, and often missed. All kinds of questions of fact get turned into questions of ideology (or worse, questions of morality), and that’s pretty much an algorithm for making it harder to think straight about those questions.
Those are really good points, thank you. I can see why I didn’t encounter anyone at the time making the factual claim I’m asking for examples of.
It was immensely frustrating to sit in the middle of a conversation with a group of friends who all accepted #1 as unquestionable fact, so that any disagreement about policy could only be expressed through ideological arguments.
People only had false equivalences to choose between, and so none of the eternal intraparty debates were solvable. Which, come to think about it, is why I ended up drifting away from the scene entirely.
I checked the Daily Kos liveblog threads the night of the special election, and saw a lot of interesting but very discouraging conversations. At least there’s some reflection happening these days.
@Jaskologist
The problem, like in Brexit and the 2016 election, is you cant poll the voting booth.
Poll aggregators deal with lag despite their best efforts.
Also, most poll aggregators are Blue Tribe and so exhibit blue confirmation bias to some extent. Why are they Blue Tribe? Because being a poll aggregator requires university training.
Anyways, you should be watching the aggregate shift, not the results of a single election. A shift from a 20% win to a 5% win is mega. If there is a national shift of >8% the GOP will lose the house.
According to Pew, college graduate+ political affiliation as of 2016 was 53/41 D/R. So there are lots of Republican college graduates available to be poll aggregators, even if fewer than Democratic college graduates.
High school or less runs 46/45 D/R.
These figures are for Republican or leans Republican, Democrat or leans Democrat.
Thats where Social Physics might help to understand the dynamics…why dont those conservative graduates choose to become poll aggregators– I think some become pollsters, not the same thing– the famous quants like Silver and Natalie Jackson, Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, Andrew Gelman.
But yes, what I said was wrong– there are plenty who could become quants if the only requirement is a university degree. Why do you think there isnt a Nate Silver on the right, David?
Right. I’ll bite. How does social physics explain this?
(To be useful, this explanation should not require the use of google. Everyone here is smart, and most understand at least basic physics.)
OK…what I said was dumb. If the only requirement to become a poll aggregator is “a college degree” then yes, there are plenty of conservatives that could be poll agreggators. But what if another requirement is that they have the specific degree, set of degrees, and also the desire or personality traits to become one? Right now we are in the middle of a data revolution…I dont know how aware the SSC commentariat is of that– I have seen some references to how Big Data is changing the field of cognitive genomics (again Steve Hsu is awesome on this, and even though I’m “a liberal” I go there first). I better define Big Data–
I will use Dr. Pentland description.
I think people here may be most familiar with this through Dr. Hsu mention of datasets for genomics research on the order of 80,000, 100,000 or even a million samples.
So another term used in modern Social Physics is Reality Mining (Pentland 2006). The idea that vast “rich” (as opposed to impoverished) databases can be harvested and maintained to do fine-grained examination of social structures and causal phenomena and idea flow.
So there is a kindof a big data goldrush right now.
Of course, the first application from the business community is to sell more stuff, and there are already commercial products available. Also to improve performance, and there are commercial products for that. But for a study about what kind of college education and social indicators shape peoples career choices its perfect!
hmm…this IS a lot harder than trading links to supporting papers in twitter combat.
Less tolerance for fraud on the right? I do not believe Nate Silver is intellectually honest. Not just “biased” but that he is purposefully deceptive.
@Conrad Honcho
Could you explain what you base this on?
His statistical methodology is sound as far as I can tell.
While he hasn’t ever published the ingredients of his secret sauce he always does a with-and-without comparison.
Doing what Nate Silver does is only half the battle. To become the right-wing Nate Silver you also have to get the good left-liberals in the press corps to report on what you do the same way they report on what Nate Silver does.
@bintchaos
If you don’t know his methods, how can you determine that it’s sound? Nate’s pattern (and the pattern of many other political statisticians) is propaganda. They return the result the people who pay them want. So all during the presidential campaign Nate and pals were paid to produce polls that say Trump is down by 10+ points and can never win and this all horrible for them so that the news anchors can have Democrats on TV to be asked “why do you think your message resonates so well with all the good and smart voters?” and then have the Trump surrogate on to ask “the polls show everyone hates you and that you’re the Devil, why do you think everyone hates you?” And then just before the election the results will mysteriously tighten (when they inexplicably stop oversampling Democrats by 20 points) so they can claim some kind of accuracy for the next cycle. It’s just a propaganda con-game, not science. Nobody pays you to tell the truth.
The right-wing press could support a right-wing statistician if it wanted to.
So why dont they?
It seems like that might deal with the accusations of oversampling and secret thumb on the scale moves?
@Conrad Honcho:
You say many things that I disagree with, but this one is just wrong.
The 538 election forecast included links to all of the input polls. (See here, for example, for the national polls.) If you wanted to double-check Nate Silver’s work, you could look at those polls yourself and verify that they did indeed show the race tightening towards the end of the campaign. This is why all the other polling aggregators showed the same effect. (Take, for example, the Upshot.) In previous elections — especially midterm elections — where the Republicans have been ahead, Nate Silver has consistently reported them being ahead. In 2012, your narrative was flipped: Obama’s lead widened in the final days of the campaign. (Or should that be “mysteriously widened”?)
If you want somebody to build a model that crunches all the available polling data and summarizes the likely outcomes, Nate Silver is your man.
If you still want to claim a conspiracy, you have to do it at the level of the individual polls. At that level, though, “nobody pays you to tell the truth” is just false. Polling companies make money because people pay them to produce polls. Election polling is how they demonstrate that they are good at their job. Nobody who wants good data is going to hire a polling company who consistently bombs the election. Even if you’re just looking for a fake poll to push a narrative, you need a polling company with a reputation for putting out good polls.
@bintchaos
That’s interesting, but it’s not “how social physics explains this” it’s “how social physics could explain this if we had used it” and I’m not convinced. Yes, being Nate Silver takes more than a college degree. But the only fields which are so dominated by the left that the right shouldn’t be able to scrape up a competitor somewhere are things like race/gender studies which basically have leftism built into their basic architecture. Data analysis isn’t one. Until you have numbers, I’m going to continue to believe that the problem is not just lack of candidates.
@Nancy Lebovitz
It could, and he would get exactly as respect and outside attention as anyone else who works for Fox News does.
@Iain
I’m saying they try to be “correct” just before the election because that’s the only time you can check their work, but during the year-long media cycle before the election they serve to drive a media narrative for propaganda purposes.
I can’t prove it, because I can’t prove what the vote would look like in July when the July poll is released, but similarly neither Nate nor you can prove he’s right. My model of Nate is “in any race that isn’t an obvious Republican/right lock, predict a Democrat/left win.”
When he starts predicting right-wing upsets (for races that actually wind up being right-wing upsets…or even ones that don’t) I’ll update my model.
If you want correct polling, well, that’s what internal polls are for.
@Conrad Honcho
If something can be predicted by quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, means, doesn’t that indicate it wasn’t an upset?
EDIT: Michael Moore predicted Trump’s victory, for example. But he did so on qualitative grounds, as a pundit.
Conrad:
Nate Silver publishes his methods and commits to them in advance, doesn’t he? How do you imagine he’s shading them? If you mean in the narrative articles written around the numbers, maybe, but the numbers he gets from his aggregation models don’t seem like they’re susceptible to an immediate bias. They may be biased in some long-term way (over-weighting polls that are biased toward Democrats, say), but not in a short-term way about a particular race.
@dndnrsn
I don’t know if the definition of “upset” matters enough to distinguish between quantitative or qualitative means. My point is that no, Silver is never going to predict a blue Mississippi, but anywhere close he’s just going to pick blue and massage numbers until he gets to it so pundits can drive blue bandwagon / red demoralization propaganda.
On Red places on the Internet, the joke is to continuously downgrade the quality of the material in his last name based on his predictions. First he was Nate Copper, then Nate Tin, and I think now he’s down to Nate Quantum Foam. The Blue Tribe still thinks he’s actually doing something objective with numbers, all evidence to the contrary.
@Conrad Honcho:
It seems like he gets it from both sides, though. Before the election, he was getting all sorts of hostility from left-wingers who said he was being too nice to Trump’s chances, for whatever reason.
@dndnrsn
Which is also part of the issue. I mean, imagine if he actually predicted 300+ electoral votes for Trump, Brexit, or GA06. He’d have been crucified by his followers.
What does “crucified” mean in this context? His supporters would say bad things about him in the interval between his predicting Trump-300+ and Trump actually scoring 306 EV? Not clear why he would care, if he were confident he would be vindicated soon enough.
@John Schilling
You’re forgetting that in the court of public opinion, if he predicts it and it happens then it’s (at least partly) his fault. And I wish I were joking.
There are right wing statisticians, defining right wing in terms of which side takes what position on an issue. The first serious statistical work I know of on both concealed carry and the effect of the death penalty was done by people offering evidence for the position conservatives liked (Lott&Mustard and Ehrlich). That then set off a controversy with serious statistics employed on both sides.
I expect the Republican party employs people to do statistical analysis, just as the Democrats do. So the question is why the left wing polling analysts get more attention than the right, assuming they do. I gather that in this election, most of the polling analysis turned out to be wrong, with Silver a partial exception. Were there people with the opposite bias making more accurate predictions but getting less attention?
Yeah, for Nate Silver, making a wildly unpopular prediction that turns out to be right when everyone else is wrong is exactly the problem he dreams of having.
Just for anyone who never saw it and needs a laugh.
@bean
I’m sorry, I wrote a long comment with some specific examples in it and the SSC comment monster ate it. It must have had a bad word in it.
When this happens I get a timeout for a while and I cant comment.
It maybe this thread is just getting too cumbersome for me to navigate successfully, the nesting is too deep.
Maybe a reboot on the next thread?
@bintchaos
Sure. My biggest question is how Social Physics is different from simply applying Big Data techniques to social data. Because that seems like the kind of thing which the patent office would call an obvious extension of prior art, and I’d think a more accurate name would be something like mathematical sociology.
@Conrad Honcho:
Are you claiming that control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms was an obvious Republican lock? In the final predictions, only the Washington Post and Daily Kos had the Republicans above 80% to win, but 538 nevertheless had the Republicans ahead, wire to wire.
This seems very much like you are spouting received tribal wisdom, rather than an honest evaluation of Nate Silver’s reliability.
@Iain
Doesn’t that fit my model? If the Daily Kos and WaPo say “Republicans are going to win” that’s a lock, right? Those aren’t exactly right-wing shill organizations.
When did Nate Silver become politicized? He’s one of the least political pundits there is.
No, not really. Silver wants to be right frequently across a broad range of topics, not to have one or two glorious stands of being right, and has based his entire career on that.
@Wrong Species
Does reality have a liberal bias?
@Conrad Honcho
If you think I’m a liberal you clearly haven’t seen my other comments. While political polling is often mixed with object level politics, it doesn’t have to. And Silver, more than anyone else, has tried to separate the two. Does this sound like an ideologue to you:
Everyone believes reality has a bias toward their point of view, or they’d have a different point of view.
So, there’s this interesting claim floating around that says, basically, some combination of pollsters and Nate Silver are trying to improve the prospects of the Democrats in elections by lying about their results.
Nate Silver’s numbers seem to come pretty clearly out of the polls, and there are other poll aggregators (electoral-vote.com, for example) that do a much simpler and harder-to-game aggregation strategy that track closely with his numbers. So let’s focus on pollsters. If pollsters are biasing their results, then the aggregators will automatically report biased results unless they notice this bias and introduce some kind of unbiasing term in their models.
Pollsters want to look good in terms of their predictions, so the claim I’ve seen is something like this:
A. Pollsters lie about their numbers to bias their results toward Democrats early in the race.
B. In order to avoid being caught, they slowly decrease their bias as the election gets nearer, so that they can both help their preferred party and also look like good predictors.
Let’s imagine there are two pollsters. One is employing this biasing strategy, the other isn’t. How will we tell the difference?
Here’s something that won’t distinguish them: seeing the error between the poll’s predictions and the election results get smaller as you get closer to election day. That will happen with both of the pollsters. (It should be a bigger effect from the biased pollster, but polls get more accurate as you get closer to elections, just because voters change their minds over time–asking me how I’m going to vote in six months will give you a less accurate prediction of my vote than asking me a week before the election.)
But there is a pattern we should see in the bias-strategy pollster. Poll results are basically predictions about how the vote will come out. A pollster who is biasing early results toward the Democrats will have early poll results that consistently overpredict Democrats’ results. Looking at a single election isn’t so useful here, because the predictions are very noisy. But if you look at a few hundred races for governor and congress, the bias-strategy pollster will show this pattern. Further, we should see the bias (consistently in the same direction) going down as the election gets closer–polls 6 months out give Democrats a 2% advantge, 3 months out it’s a 1% advantage, etc.
Now, if we see that pattern, that’s not 100% evidence of the biasing strategy being in use–you could imagine some weird effect of who answers their phones or something creating this bias. But it would at least be some reason to suspect the pollster was running this strategy.
If we don’t see that pattern, then either the pollster isn’t running this strategy, or he is, but some other biases in who answers their phones or something is pushing in the other direction, and they’re lucking into being more accurate than they want to be.
So, has someone done this analysis and shown a consistent (not cherry-picked) bias of this kind?
Not to mention that “slowly decrease their bias as the election gets nearer” would be a great way to hand republicans a ready-crafted “Real American Underdoge coming from behind to whup the establishment” narrative as the polls tighten.
So as a manipulation strategy it seems risky at best.
@Conrad Honcho:
First of all, if there’s anything rationalists should be opposed to, it’s statements of the form “I have no evidence of this but I believe it anyway” or “I can’t prove this, but can you disprove it?” That’s the textbook conspiracy theorist’s argument and shame on you for using it.
But anyway, it sounds like your model could be disproved if Nate Silver predicts a win by a Republican with a narrow margin. It’s not a lock, and it’s plausible for the Democrats to win, so he has an incentive to predict a win for the Democrats to increase their turnout.
For instance, the North Carolina, Indiana, and Missouri Senate races in 2016, where he predicted margins of +2.2, +2.5, and +0.7 for the Republican. Or Iowa, Colorado, Alaska, and Georgia in the 2014 race, where the Republicans were leading by about 2 points.
Your model also needs to explain the changes over time. For instance, if he’s trying to sell the narrative that the Democrats are winning, why would he start off by predicting that they’ll lose the Senate? Or are you saying that even in September, two months before the elections, it was already obvious that the Republicans were going to win?
(If Nate Silver knew it was a lock two months in advance, he’s an even better predictor than I thought he was!)
The “Nate Silver of the right” is Kellyanne Conway. It just turns out that the press coverage you get for correctly predicting a red-tribe victory is SLIGHTLY different from the press coverage you get for correctly predicting a blue-tribe victory. Who knew?
@beleester
Do we live in a world where conspiracies don’t exist? If we don’t, what is the rationalist who cannot get data one way or the other to do?
Actually, the tribal affiliation or beliefs of the poll aggregator should have much less impact on their predictions than on the predictions of people just doing the pundit thing–someone like Nate Silver spends a lot of time thinking about his models and then uses those, not his feelings. He famously missed seeing Trump as a serious candidate early on (he’s in good company) by doing a kind of pundit-type analysis rather than a numbers and models analysis.
It should be noted that Rodney Stooksbury, the Democratic candidate in 2016, raised $0 compared to Tom Price’s $2 MM and may not have actually existed.
In the recent special election Ossoff outspent Handel by $19 MM, and had the advantage of definitely being a real person who actually existing and ran ads and talked to people and went on TV.
I’m not sure that the fact that a real human being with a multimillion dollar warchest improved on the performance a penniless phantasm can be generalized to the country as a whole, where the baseline in key districts is usually a hard fight between experienced politicians rather than a 12-year incumbent going up against the real-life equivalent of a twitter egg avatar.
Okay that’s funny.
That second link made my day.
Its a trend– the democrats are still losing in deep red districts– they are just losing by less.
cite: special elections in California and Kansas.
I’m skeptical that the results of these special elections are strongly indicative of how the 2018 midterms will play out, mostly due to losing the incumency advantage and disproportionate national fundraising. I did some quick searching to find out more.
The Georgia election is the most egregious example, but for all three I checked there’s been a general pattern. In 2016, a long-term incumbent with a major fundraising advantage absolutely crushed a fairly weak challenger. In the special elections, the fundraising advantage was eliminated or reversed, and the Democrats had swung hard right from their 2016 candidates.
For example, in Kansas in 2016 Mike Pompeo, a 6-year incumbent, spent $1.4 MM, while Dan Giroux, who had never run for office before, spent $250k. Dan’s issues included infrastructure spending, fair trade, ending the gender pay gap, and reducing the cost of student loans.
In the special election, Ron Estes spent $500k compared to James Thompson’s $700k. Further, Thompson was a Republican until 2016, a veteran, and campaigned on things like “Fighting For Our Constitution” and “Fighting For Our Rural Way Of Life”.
In Montana in 2016, incumbent Ryan Zinke won after spending $6MM, compared to Denise Juneau’s $2.5 MM. Juneau had a serious campaign, but it looks like it was focused on Native American issues, plus standard Democratic platform things like fighting the gender pay gap and raising the minimum wage.
In the special election, both candidates spent around $2.5 MM, and neither was an incumbent, although Gianforte did bodyslam a reporter from the Guardian- almost as good! Rob Quist’s website shows him wearing a cowboy hat in literally every picture, and his top issues were listed as tax reform to help small business and protecting the Second Amendment.
The bottom line seems to be that culturally-red Democrats with traditionally Republican policies backed by massive fundraising can close the gap in deep red districts.
There’s definitely some warnings to be seen here for Republicans. Voters could turn on them in 2018, especially if there’s a recession or they’ve failed to make significant progress on their legislative agenda or Trump’s campaign promises before then. But the special elections so far are less a sign of impending doom and more a small red flag.
DVR, you are hilarious. This post made my day.
As Nate Silver has been angrily tweeting: the polls called the race a dead heat. The average polling miss in a House race is 4 points. This is exactly the sort of outcome that you should have seen as likely based on the polls; if you thought the polls said something else, then the problem lies with you, not the polls.
This is not just hindsight, either: he was cautioning people that the race was a tossup before the vote, too.
I think @jaskologist must be referring to dem in house polls, which gave Ossoff a slight edge. as far as I know no poll aggregator called it anything but a toss-up.
Why does this seem so familiar?
But consider the source; Silver has to defend the polls in order to defend his livelihood.
I don’t think pollsters get to spend the entire race saying Ossoff was leading (often by large margins), then tighten the polls at the last minute and claim they were vindicated because the final poll wasn’t off by much, any more than I would get to claim vindication if I made 19 very bad predictions, but my last prediction was only a little bad. Basically all the polls prior to the very end were garbage if you wanted to predict the result. Why shouldn’t I treat future polls more than 2 days out from the election as garbage as well?
The final polling wasn’t very good either. They claimed “toss-up.” Handel won by ~4 points. That’s not really very close. How many toss-ups have gone R so far? Because if Silver declares (hypothetically) 4 races toss-ups, and the Republican wins them all, he’s actually doing pretty poorly from a Bayesian perspective.
tldr; Pollsters can’t just pretend away the previous 2 months of polling that got it wrong, and the most recent polls didn’t get it very right either.
You seem to be implying that pollsters knew all along that Ossoff was going to lose, but lied about it (?) until the very end. The obvious alternative explanation is that, over the course of the campaign, the vote shifted in Handel’s favour. This does not seem to me to be a particularly implausible scenario. We have campaigns for a reason: over time, the messages put out by the parties involved sway the opinions of the voters in one direction or another. The electorate is not a static entity. If there is late movement towards one candidate, then polls taken before that movement are obviously going to look wrong. That doesn’t mean anybody did anything wrong; it’s just an inevitable hazard of polling.
What is the hypothetical justification for pollsters even putting their thumbs on the scales? People keep claiming that they’re trying to encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans — but if that were the case, then why is it that the Democrats aren’t winning? If the pollsters have so much power that it’s worth publishing deliberately misleading polls, then you have to believe that the Democrats were actually even further behind, and the pollsters managed to drag them close to the finish line but not across?
Polling is hard. Margins of error exist. There is no need to postulate elaborate, ineffective conspiracy theories when simple statistics suffice.
Yes, that’s exactly what I think. Again, we can’t prove it one way or the other because we have no idea what the actual vote would have been two months ago, but the pattern fits.
If Dems are winning: tell the truth that Dems are winning. When they win, claim you predicted it so you can command attention next cycle.
If Dems are losing slightly: lie and say Dems are winning. If they still lose, blame margin of error. Otherwise maybe you add a few points and Dems actually do win because bandwagon effect. People are more motivated to show up to be able to say they were on the winning team in a close race than they are to “go down fighting” in a close loser.
If Dems are losing badly: tell the truth the Republicans are winning because you can’t spin away a 10+ point swing. Also lends to credibility in future elections.
Polls are just part of the advertising budget. The better question is, knowing this is possible, why wouldn’t political machines do it?
Probably because the size of the conspiracy would be staggering. You wouldn’t just have to have pollsters in on it, you have to have every high level policy manager and strategist on every winnable campaign clued in with the relevant details so that they would know how to really interpret the poll results and be able to target ads and visits for their campaign.
The only way around this is if polling numbers effect the outcomes of races, but ad spending and speeches don’t, which is a crazy proposition.
I do agree with you, but couldn’t help but think “you’d need some kind of List. Of Journalists. An organized ‘JournoList‘, if you will.”
I’m fairly agnostic on the mechanism of the dysfunction. At this point, we seem to still be at the “admitting we have a problem” stage. Polling seems pretty broken. Maybe it’s just impossible to poll a race with any reliability in advance. If so, that’s a good thing to know!
But yes, it does seem to consistently be broken in one direction lately.
It’s not consistently in one direction. Parnell, the Democrat running in the SC05 special, considerably outperformed the pre-election polls yesterday.
@baconbacon
But the stakes involved are also staggering. How many trillions of dollars is the Presidency, Congress and Senate of the United States worth? If there’s anything worth rigging, isn’t that it?
90% of the news media in the US is owned by 5 corporations, which all have similar interests. How tough is it to buy a couple of nerds to give the news media “data” to drive their talking points?
Right now, my heuristic listed above seems to be working. If it’s a big race garnering lots of media attention and Nate says it’s close but the left is squeaking it out, bet on the right. When that heuristic fails I’ll change it.
@Achilles_de_Remilia
This is nonsense.
Conservative journalists had access to JournoList. The contents of JournoList were leaked. That’s why you know about it. If journalists were actually engaged in a large scale conspiracy to falsify polling data, do you really think the controversy would have been about Jeremiah Wright? Given any conspiracy, organized through a defunct mailing list or no, do you really think it is plausible that zero young journalists, hungry for fame, decide to blow the whole thing open and instantly make a name for themselves?
@Jaskologist:
This seems like a clear case of confirmation bias. What are your data points? Brexit, Trump, and GA06? In all three of those, the actual polls indicated that the outcome was uncertain. (The punditry surrounding the polls may not have reflected that, but if that’s your complaint you should be a steadfast member of Team Nate.) As one counter-example, right-wing parties have been consistently under-performing their polls in European elections since Trump’s election. Were French pollsters trying to drag Le Pen to victory?
@Conrad Honcho:
So, like, the 2012 election? Look at the polls here, and tell me that it was obviously foreordained that Obama was going to win.
The issue isn’t whether it is worth rigging, but whether it is possible to rig. It isn’t. Conspiracies of more than about forty people cannot be kept secret, no matter how much it would be worth if they could.
People are no damn good at keeping secrets. If the secret is an illicit one, such that you can’t count on random outsiders in your culture to help you keep it, then you have to keep it small. By the time you’ve got fifty people involved, three of them have blabbed to e.g. pretty girls they are trying to impress but who weren’t impressed, and some reporter or detective is tying those narratives together. Positing a really, really valuable secret, makes it worse – it’s now more blabworthy for impress-pretty-girls purposes, and more likely to be pursued by reporters and detectives who get wind of it.
@John Schilling
Media figures defect all the time and say yes, the media is biased and make up the narrative and then hunt for “facts” and pollsters are just PR firms who return the results the people who commission the polls want. And they write an article and they go on some Fox News show like Sean Hannity and say “yes, the liberal media is just carrying water for the Democratic party” (of course Fox is carrying for the Reps) and everyone says “huh, amazing, there you go” and then that’s it and it’s right back to the next spin cycle.
Your model of what happens when you spill the big secret is wrong. The media does not rush to investigate itself. They ignore it. And most people who like the things the media says (i.e., the blue tribe) ignore those people, too, or dismisses them as partisan hacks lying for the other side.
How tough is it then for one of those nerds to write a book and make millions more after the fact? Only one has to decide to come clean and become a national bestseller overnight, and from a $ standpoint the Ds would have to pay every single one of them more than anyone could make individually on that book deal to keep them all quiet, and the more they pay them and the deeper the conspiracy goes the more that book deal would be worth.
So where are the pollsters who defect and say “yes, we deliberately skew the results in favor of Democratic candidates in the early polling and then bring them back to reality just before the election so we don’t get caught”?
That, specifically, is what you accuse pretty much the entire polling industry of doing, so that, specifically, is what we should see some of them saying as they defect or otherwise blab.
@Iain
That still fits with the “if it’s close, he’s going to call it for the Dems” model. Show me something where Nate calls a squeaker for the right and then it turns out to be an upset for the left. The goal is to drive left-wing turnout up a point or two by telling them they’re going to win but it’ll be close. What he will not do is things that will depress left-wing turnout in a close race.
How about John Podesta’s emails where they’re plotting their oversampling bias to get the most out of their media polling?
@Iain
How soon they forget.
Nate got famous in the 2012 “rise of the quants” epic triumph.
Remember when Rove had a public meltdown on FOX when the team called Ohio?
When Orca sank and OFA ruled the GOTV wave?
GOP was utterly blindsided by OFA and the dream team relational db.
And these conspiracies haven’t. Alex Jones has TOLD you that the world is run by baby-eating lizard-people. It’s right out there in the open!
Silver is angrily tweeting that the polls called the election a tossup, but that the media spun the polls as a landslide.
Anyway, that’s what I think I read by him.
So what else is new?
Yes, failed to read downthread and made a dumb post I’d now delete, but that’s girly.
@all
To start, I’d like to apologize for my own confirmation bias.
When I started here I didn’t know a lot of the consensual knowledge. I didnt know what steelmanning was and I still dont entirely understand muggle realism. But I was taken aback by the initial hostility and suspicion– that I was a troll or a moby doing a lazarus from the banhammer. I also don’t understand why when you dont understand something you wouldnt just google it. That is a part of my world view. Also in my bubble I guess…things you think are buzzwords and jargon are common shared language for my cohort. Social Physics and sociophysics are not the same thing to me. Socio-physics is just what it sounds like, application of properties of classical physics and mathematics to social systems, been around a long time– from 1800s actually, with the conceptualization of society as a vast machine. In the 20th century sociophysics became more quantitative by pairing social indicators with statistical regularities like Zipf and the gravity law. Now, in the 21st century we have new kinds of data and can extract statistical regularities within human movement and communication. When I say “Social Physics”, that is the 21st century application of socio-physics formulae and expressions to Big Data. I would think conservatives would be very interested in this…in theory we may be able to analyze and describe the social forces and idea flows that power Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Its been difficult for me communicate what I do know because of constant strafing attacks by D. To facelesscraven, the reason simple TfT is an accurate model now is polarization– all games have become zero-sum games.
I think the rule of thumb would be, if I want to understand something, I will google it. If I want someone else to understand something, I will explain it, not assume they will go google it based on a mention. There’s a lot of comments on just this site, the ones that require homework to even evaluate the relevance of will not garner much positive attention. See also the discussion Brad started about a recent Supreme Court decision.
Citation needed.
– There’s no wikipedia page for anything called “sociophysics”.
– A Google search does not seem to turn up any university departments of sociophysics, anywhere.
This is, as I’m sure you realize, highly suspicious.
More searching turns up the following:
1. This book, whose author page says:
[emphasis mine]
Now, this fellow also has no wikipedia page. He does seem to be featured in a few articles in your less-respectable outlet, your various Breitbarts and what-not, with titles like “French physicist Serge Galam says math supports Le Pen victory, correctly predicted Trump, Brexit”. Hmm.
Galam’s papers on the subject have hundreds of citations. This speaks for him being a real academic doing respectable work. Beyond that, I can’t say much about the field.
2. This humorous post at LanguageLog. I daresay this does not support any claims about “sociophysics” being a respectable science (the author does not even seem aware that there’s a “real” thing by this name which is very unlike his humorous conception).
3. Not much else.
—-
For comparison, let’s see what happens if we stumble across the term “psychophysics” (having never heard of it before), and think “hmm, sounds fake, lol”:
– Wikipedia page, with history and summary of the field, and links to papers and such
– Courses and degree programs studying psychophysics at many major universities
– Several international conferences
– A journal
A stark contrast.
I did google socio-physics and it said the same you did: socio-physics is just physics models applied to society. But that doesn’t tell us anything. You made some big claims without explaining how it’s connected.
Look upthread where I [hopefully] do a better job. I’m sorry, I should have done it here, but I was replying to someone else. ^^^
Forget google. Can you point to some journal articles and the textbooks needed to understand them?
Without those it just comes across as “trust me, my personal model of psychohistory predicts everything”
And, no offense, coming from an undergrad student that kind of claim can’t help but sound sophomoric.
I did up there^ with quotes/definitions from Dr. Pentland’s book.
??
I thought we already had the discussion where I’m not a follower of Hari Seldon?
Which would be easier to create:
(1) A deadly engineered virus that targeted people of a particular race.
or
(2) A (nano?) tiny robot that took a dna sample and sent off the results for a 23 and me analysis and then killed you if your percentages were wrong.
I feel like 2 would be the better weapon.
#1 is something that might plausibly be done in this generation (for some races, with a substantial margin of error). #2 very much isn’t.
1 would probably be easier to commit genocide with, but you’d kill a lot of innocents and fail to kill a lot of the people you’re trying to kill, but 2 would probably be a logistical nightmare to make that many killbots and do that many DNA tests.
Depends on how accurate you want your disease to be.
[Caution: quick and dirty summary of complex science. I would appreciate someone knowing more about biology correcting any faulty facts or logic.]
People with a certain genetic abnormality in producing blood cells have increased malaria resistance. In some cases, that gene is dominant, which results in a generic disorder called sickle-cell anemia after the shape of the cells. The genetic abnormality, and hence the disorder, is concentrated largely in Africa and parts of India. In a sense, malaria is a naturally occurring disease ‘targeted’ at non-Africans, it’s just very inaccurate in its targeting.
One could presumably engineer a disease that would target the abnormal blood cells resistant to malaria for a disease targeted at Africans, as long as you were satisfied with 20% of the people affected would be outside of Africa (and a lot of Africans would be immune). Likewise, if you could isolate a genetic trait common to a particular race or ethnic group and a means to exploit that to kill them, a disease would be relatively easy, but you’d have to be satisfied with natural genetic variation protecting a lot of people.
The tiny robot has all the problems associated with nanotech. Given the right assumptions, nanotech is effectively magic. If it can take a genetic sample and send it out for processing, it can look up their family tree on the internet. For that matter, it could also look up their posting habits and you could have a nanotech agent capable of targeting SSC posters. If nanotech isn’t magic, it’s pretty much going to be much easier to use a human agent to take the sample and send it out (or the nanotech is going to be basically indistinguishable from an artificial virus anyways).
If you engineer a disease where the virus needs a particular genetic variant in the host in order to spread effectively, but kills essentially everyone it infects regardless of genetic makeup, you might be able to aim for some kind of non-linear effects where it effectively wiped out populations with a high frequency of the variant while not spreading much at all in others.
Neither method is going to give a very exact match for the usual understanding of who’s of which race.
Perhaps the best bet would be targeting the genes which affect appearance. Good luck.
I think the targeting of any such virus would be statistical, just like different prevalance and severity of diseases across races works now. My understanding is that you can almost certainly predict what someone will say his race is (or what an observer will say his race is) by a DNA test, but those aren’t looking at a single gene, they’re looking at a whole bunch of chunks and then doing a kind of statistical distance measure.
It’s hard to imagine a virus managing that. Instead, you’d probably have some allele that was in 80% of whites and 20% of Asians and 10% of blacks, and the virus would make people with that allele much sicker than people without that allele. (In the best-for-the-virus-writer case, the allele is something that controls a molecule on the membrane of the cells the virus needs to infect, and the virus targets that molecule to gain entry to the cell.).
As an example of that, there’s a variant of one of the surface molecules on T cells and macrophages that won’t allow entry of HIV. People with that variant almost never get infected with HIV.
Could you do it with multiple viruses? Each by itself makes you only mildly sick, but there is an interaction effect such that if you get three out of four you die. Each of the four is targeting a different allele. That ought to increase the percentage of the target population killed a little, decrease the percentage of the non-target population killed a lot.
Another response to the VOX response from the links thread:
http://quillette.com/2017/06/21/vox-goes-junk-no-good-thats-bit-intelligent-progress/
Also, there was mention of basilisk ideas in that thread.. this linked article claims
A senior colleague once told me that the gravatar “quilt” icons WordPress assigns us are rife with usability problems. That was maybe a year ago, so having incubated on that I now kinda wonder if the icons might inadvertently give impressions about the users they’re assigned to. Hypothetical examples I just made up:
– People with simpler gravatar icons are perceived as easier to understand
– People with pink or baby blue icons are perceived as less aggressive
– People whose icons are pointier or more saw-like are perceived as more aggressive
– People with black-on-white icons are perceived as having a more official status
I haven’t reflected on whether I’ve been “tricked” in any of these ways by people’s icons–it’s possible, though obviously the effect could wear off after becoming familiar with different users–but I do wonder if there is an effect.
I wonder how this relates to swastika-like icons.
Or more generally, icons that resemble other things. For instance, if your icon happens to be the same color as a distinctive brand (e.g. T-mobile) will there be some unintended cognitive association there?
My icon looks a bit like a crab–sandy color, four eyes, a thick “shell”, spindly legs–so I wonder if on some level I am perceived as having crab-like qualities such as robustness or hermit-ness (to say nothing of being delicious when boiled and dipped in butter).
I think that’s stretching it a bit.
The only conscious association I have with gravadars is Buddhism since they somewhat resemble mandalas. Sub-consciously something like your crab is too specific I think, though after this post I might get hungry when I see you.
Edit:
Upon closer examination I now associate you with peanut butter on toast. I am not hungry anymore.
Well…’s gravatar is sedate and orderly, like a European roundabout, in a staid mustard yellow. I assume he is calm and contemplative but not particularly open to new ideas. Feel free to engage with him, but do not expect too lively an interchange, though it is sure to be cordial.
Nornagest, on the other hand, is a wild rush of arrows swirling round haphazardly in a blue torrent, with a bastion of calm and aloofness in the center. Expect a variety of surprising insights to come forth that never end up resolving satisfactorily.
John Shilling is a little turtle shaped go-kart of purple, revealing his tendency to contribute slow and steady in a politically moderate tone and to be unlikely to take offense.
Iain is a neon green buzzsaw, dangerous to underestimate, incisive, and prone to growth.
rlms is a protective ring of blue candles around central diamonds; valuable insights, for sure, but of course carrying a torch for the blue team.
I think we’ve just invented a new type of horoscope.
So, who’s gonna be the Mr/Mrs Fortune that will tell new users their future every open thread?
Randy M is very insightful for an infant.
Odd. When I’m logged out “Hide” hides the comment and all child comments, but when I’m logged in it only hides the comment itself and leaves the child comments alone.
Can the logged-out “hide” behavior be applied to the logged-in behavior?