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. Also:
1. A study on mathematical ability is looking for people without a diagnosis of autism with a degree in math, or people with a diagnosis of autism with a degree in math, physics, statistics, etc to register and do some brief online tests for them. They asked me to pass the word along. If you’re interested, go to the Genetics Of Mathematical Ability And Autism research site.
2. I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people here recently, which I guess is good, but I want to admit straight out that I’m not able to reply to all of them. This is especially true for “Hey, what do you think about this thing I wrote?” emails. Usually I think that I don’t have time to read it and write up a response, but I feel guilty not doing that, so instead I just say something like “Thanks, I’ll look into that” and then I don’t. Sorry if this is you. Also, please don’t send me links for the link page. If you have a good link for the links page, post it on the subreddit and I’ll probably see it. I’ll continue to accept useful announcements about studies and job opportunities and EA and so on, like the thing above.
3. Thanks to everyone who came to the Chicago meetup today. Picture here. And if you want to stay in touch with the community, there’s a Chicago Rationality Facebook page with information about meetings and stuff.
4. Ward Street is quickly becoming the center of the rationalist scene in Berkeley. We’re trying to encourage that so that as many people as possible can live near each other and it can feel like more of a community. I’ll be staying there temporarily when I first get to California, and I know a lot of other people on the street and they’re all pretty interesting. Anyway, there’s a house opening up there as the current residents leave, and we’d like to get rationalist-adjacent people to move in. It’s three bedrooms, one bathroom, and it costs $4100/month total. If interested (either in renting the whole house with friends/family, or in just renting one room and hoping two other people want the same), email jsalvatier[at]gmail[dot]com and he can tell you more / help connect interested parties together.
5. Probably some decreased blogging output since I’m moving cross-country the next few weeks. I hope to have a couple of meetups in relevant cities if I know where I’m going to be enough days beforehand.
6. Good luck/congratulations to everyone starting/progressing in/finishing residencies this July.
A recent question I got from some people who might be able to affect policy on the matter eg advise various companies – is partisan polarization on social media a problem? If so, what would be the most effective ways that social media companies might be able to help fight it?
Polarization of the moderation mechanisms and TOS, polarization of the users, or both?
It seems one of the main reasons for polarization is that arguments against an opposing side aren’t actually aimed at them but your own side, supposedly showing how stupid and/or evil the other side is.
Maybe adding some new “reaction” features could improve this, like up- or downvotes or “likes” but more specific like Facebook’s recent battery of reactions. I’m thinking something like the delta symbol used on r/changemyview, to say that something actually convinced you to change your mind.
Other reactions could help too, if not to improve quality then perhaps to shine a light on bad arguments’ true purposes, like “haha [the others] sure are bad amirite?” or “this just makes me agree with you even less”. The big challenge would be to craft such things so there are no incentives to use them dishonestly.
My advice is to amplify the polarization as much as possible, in order to increase views/clicks and thereby your bottom line.
Somewhat less flippantly, if I’m running a social media company, what is my financial incentive to decrease polarization ? Is there any evidence to suggest that doing so will substantially decrease revenues — by an amount larger than the amount of money I’d have to spend on fixing the problem ? This may sound callous, but social media companies aren’t charities; and you won’t get anywhere before you can convince them that implementing your social policy changes is actually in their best interest. At best, you’d get a polite yet noncommittal response to the extent of “thank you for your valuable input”; at worst, you will get no response at all.
Civil war is generally bad for the bottom line, unless you are in the arms business.
Luckily, it seems like social media is currently an industry with big, entrenched players, which means that they can spend time worrying about externalities instead of being in a red queen’s race with their competition.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the social media industry precisely in the arms business ? They provide the platform, you supply the outrage. More outrage means more posts, which means more views, which means more views and conversions, and thus more advertising money. Sure, they may be big and entrenched arms dealers, but they’re arms dealers nonetheless.
One of the big reasons Twitter doesn’t get more ad revenue is because advertisers don’t want to be associated with the toxic content on its platform.
Well the whole idea is that any [social] media company gets traffic through angst and controversy — UP to and even past the point that a civil war ensues. The civil war itself is collectively a bad thing but money is made at every step of the way.
it’s basically like poaching an endangered animal. No one profits from extinction and yet…
@Bugmaster
Polarization creates pressure for your company to choose a side (or for one of the sides to choose for you, by boycotting your platform and creating an alternative one), which ultimately cuts your market in half.
I think it’s interesting that in the space of a few months left-wing Twitter users have gone from calls to pull Richard Spencer’s verified status, to calls to ban Donald Trump. These are at the fringe, obviously (Spencer remains verified, and the idea of banning Trump while he is POTUS is absurd), but how long can the center hold?
And then there’s the risk that e.g. you jump right and it turns out most of your right-wing users were bots.
That’s a good point, but how likely are people to actually leave the platform due to its perceived support of the opposite side ? I know they will loudly proclaim their readiness to leave, but how many actually go through with it ?
I remember reading an article a while ago about user behavior in some online game forums (sorry, I don’t recall the game or the article right now; if anyone knows what I’m talking about, please post a link). The forum admins collected a bunch of statistics, and determined that a). the people who loudly complain about each balancing change and threaten to leave are a tiny minority of the forum population, and b). their retention rate is actually higher than the retention rate of ordinary users who never post on the forums but simply play the game.
Speaking purely anecdotally, it seems like people who loudly threaten to leave Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/whatever either never go through with it, or try it and then come back in short order. I could be wrong, though, anecdotes are not data.
It’s a common belief that for every people who complains, you have many more who have the same issue, but who don’t complain. If those people are more prone to leave, it is useful to listen to the complainers, even if they are more loyal.
It’s only an issue if the loud people have substantially different desires than the quiet ones.
This is a misleading idea.
People who post in forums of a game tend to be those who are most deeply invested in the game and it’s community. This alone means they’ll tend to stay longer than most other players. Try comparing them with people who loudly praise patch notes instead of the silent userbase.
They’ll leave eventually. It’s just a wager of how much you can bleed them before they do.
Partisan polarization in social media is unpleasant, but much less troubling than a chilling effect wherein average people feel restrained from expressing their views for fear of disproportionate personal consequences (the two phenomena are not incompatible).
Polarization appears to be most damaging to journalists and journalism – the Twitter news cycle (outrage in the morning, climbdown or retraction in the evening) is contributing to the spread of low-value news and the decline of public confidence in the media. The right has always been more skeptical of the mainstream media, so I suspect a relatively greater degree of damage is occurring on the left. I think we are seeing greater attention paid to the topic of polarization because disengagement with the media is eroding a traditional advantage of the left and center-left.
The influence of social media on the culture of reportage suggests that the Feiler Faster Thesis is reaching its natural limit – or at least that our perceived comfort with rapidly processing information is not matched by our competence. It might be healthier for larger media organizations to rein in their reporters on Twitter and lean more on their comparative advantage in investigative reporting and fact-checking, but this would probably require cartel-like coördination.
For the average person, the accelerated toxoplasma lifecycle manifests as a miasma of snark and nastiness. I don’t know that there is a good fix for this beyond a move to smaller more intentional online communities like the blogrings of the late 90s/early 2000s. There seems to be an inherent tradeoff between associating widely and speaking freely and charitably.
What’s so troubling about this? Why is it so horrible if we develop (revive?) a norm that people ought not to promiscuously spew their political opinions about regardless of audience or how ill thought out they are?
A world with some more reticence sounds rather nice.
How do you propose to get there from here without creating a generation of people who are unemployable because they did so before that norm got established?
I know that there’s disagreement on this point, but as a factual matter I think the number of people that are unemployable today because of something they’ve said on social media or that was captured and posted on social media is quite tiny and there’s little to nothing to suggest that it is going to explode exponentially and get to even single digit percentages.
There may be a small number of jobs (e.g. President) that will de facto only by open to people with “clean” records, but that’s an entirely different proposition from saying many people will be unemployable.
To my mind the real driver of the chilling effect is interpersonal strife not unemployability. I don’t see that as so horrible. We are collectively in the midst of alienating friends and relatives with our collective loose talk and some of those relationships will never be repaired. In a few years hopefully we’ll learn not to do that. Those broken relationships are sad on a individual basis, but not a generational catastrophe I wouldn’t think.
But that’s today. I think that the changed norms you are proposing will tend to increase that effect, by removing the ability to think “Everyone’s said something they regret online, it’s no big deal.”
I think Razib Khan would beg to differ.
I’m not picking on him…its just that his same day hiring and firing by the NYT is a particularily dramatic example.
I feel like one of the issues here is that not everyone seems to agree with what social media actually IS.
If you post a message on your facebook account, do you intend it to be something you’re sharing with close friends and family, or do you intend to be sharing it with the whole world? If you just never bothered to make your posts private, does that change the equation?
I think a lot of people use social media as a way to communicate with people they know. Social media itself; however, is designed to maximize engagement. I recently found myself the target of a whole ton of abuse because I got a notification that a friend (someone I met once and barely know) made a political comment on a different friend’s post, I wasn’t paying a ton of attention, saw that the post had like 50 comments (so assumed it was a somewhat public discussion), and commented myself. Before I knew it, a ton of people I didn’t know were calling me names (and the original poster – the friend of a friend – was being called out by his other friends for comments *I* had made to the extent of “look at all the fascists that are drawn to your posts!”)
This is a weird situation. I’m not sure we are socially adapted to it just yet. Not every post you make that technically *is* viewable to the world is meant as a “LOOK AT ME AND MY OPINIONS WORLD” declaration. Doubly so if you’re just a random person. I make weird comments on Twitter all the time, because I figure like, I’m just some random nobody with 50 followers, who cares what I say? Then again, I’m sure Justine Sacco thought that too.
I think this is a good point, and it brings up one action item: someone should work on educating the public vis a vis the fact that everything they post online a). is absolutely public, and b). will persist forever, and will be associated with their name forever. In addition, c). this applies to so-called “private” messages, protected posts, and whatnot. Clicking that “submit post” button is basically tattooing your post on your face.
I doubt that social media companies would ever take on this task (discouraging people from using their platform is not in their best interest), but perhaps someone should.
Bugmaster,
I disagree. I’d favor the opposite solution. I feel like what you propose is almost, in a way, “blaming the victim.” Rather than say “be careful what you post because who knows who may see it and start a witch-hunt against you!” we should say “Don’t start witch hunts against people.”
The people in the wrong are not those who occasionally make politically charged posts, but rather, those who use said posts to smear and attack and attempt to destroy the lives of such people.
@Matt M:
I agree, but only partially. Yes, I would like to live in a world where people don’t start witch hunts. However, witch hunts appear to be a basic feature of humanity, as strong as the sex drive (if not stronger). I think that creating a society where witch hunts don’t exist is impossible; at least, not without some immense sacrifices. Just as it is the case with the sex drive, there do exist some people who strongly dislike witch hunts, but they are in the minority.
I am not making a moral judgement here, merely a practical one. If a person gets burnt at the stake, it is not his fault, and we should not blame him. However, when everyone around you is walking around with torches and pitchforks, shouting “Hail Satan !” at the top of your lungs is not a smart move. Morally neutral, yes; smart, no.
Right, but I think the question becomes, are we now at a point where we are to assume and to behave as if *every* public space is continually inhabited by pitchfork-wavers?
Is there NO safe venue to say “HAIL SATAN” other than in the privacy of one’s home with only close friends about?
If so, I consider that a very sub-optimal state and I think we should push back against it.
We would be much better off if instead people would just relax and not hold somebody’s irrational post from three years ago against them for the rest of their lives.
One thing that drives me crazy is that people (tends to be the young) do not understand that what is socially acceptable is a moving target and it changes, sometimes in major ways. Acceptance of gay marriage. Obama and Clinton could be seen to be homophobic only 10 years ago.
For example, one can imagine a not too distant future in which identity politics was deemed to be bigoted and racist by the new enlightened color blind society. I’m not very interested in whether somebody is strictly adhering to today’s version of right-think, or yesterday’s.
@Matt M:
I would say “yes”, modulo some rarely used tools like PGP, Tor, etc. I agree that this is a sad state of affairs, but I’m not sure how one would “push back” against it, or whether that’s even possible. Consider that even Scott, who owns this entire blog and is clearly passionate about the issue, now chooses to disable comments on his posts dealing with this very topic. If he can’t “push back”, on his own blog even, then who can ?
It seems like you want the frisson of exhibitionism without the consequences. I guess sometimes, maybe even most of the time, that works out. But sometimes you streak naked through the park, someone captures a picture and you end up on the cover of the Daily News. Keep your pants on and you won’t have to worry.
And no I don’t think that streaking is some sort of fundamental part of humanity and you are being oppressed because people might shun you if they see a picture of you streaking on the cover of the Daily News.
But we’re not talking about people who go way over the top (as streaking would be). I have no sympathy for someone who posts multiple “GOD HATES ____” or “KILL ALL _____” sort of messages.
We’re talking about people who are making attempts at snide humor and missing the mark. Or people who are simply stating their preferred political candidate. Or their own personal religious beliefs. I see the analogy as less streaking and more “women wearing skirts that were showing too much leg in the 1920s”
I suppose it would have been viable to tell them “Men will always regulate what women can wear. This has always been the case and always will be. You can choose to wear short skirts anyway, but that is a tactically poor decision. If you don’t want to be fined or shamed, just stop dressing like a harlot.”
OR you can start a PR campaign where you heavily encourage people to shut the hell up and let women wear shorter skirts, without necessarily supporting the idea that they can go fully nude anywhere anytime they want.
I think the solution is to promote intolerance for witch hunts. And I say this is possible because “witch hunts” used to be literal and are now merely metaphorical. Clearly a reduction in the motivation of people to burn witches is possible.
If people are losing their jobs or their friends for political opinions (that aren’t of the “KILL ALL X” variety) then this is a problem, because the only people who will be able to speak freely are those who either have independent means or nothing to lose. Freedom of expression should not be the sole province of the wealthy and the desperate.
So what if I say…I’m an Islamist?
(I’ve been accused of that here…the defense was that I hadnt said anything supporting islamism, not that it was ok for me to be a witch.)
Is that the same as shouting Hail Satan?
What If i say I’m a fractalist (this is actually true)?
Conrad Honcho
This elevates “political opinions” as some sort of sacred and separate category. I disagree it belongs there.
We all (I think) agree that there’s nothing wrong with a woman leaving her husband for calling her a dumb bitch or someone dropping another person as a friend because he called him a cheap kike, right? What exactly is so different and wrong about a woman leaving her husband because he said a woman’s place is in the home or someone dropping another person as a friend because he said that Jews ought not to be allowed to own media properties in the United States?
@Matt M
The line between okay and way over the top is socially constructed. In Paris maybe you can walk around topless, but not in Omaha.
If you just want to argue that for our society the line should be in a different spot from where it is now, then I don’t see how you can justify all the heated rhetoric about witch hunts and free speech. Maybe I would agree that the line isn’t in the perfect spot now, but tell me that there shouldn’t be any line and if I disagree than I must be an anti-enlightenment authoritarian that hates free speech, and you aren’t likely to make much headway in convincing me of that.
@Conrad Honcho:
Ok, clearly it is possible, but it took literally centuries for actual witch hunts to go out of favor (in most places, at least). I was under the impression that we were discussing some solution that would take years to bear fruit, not centuries. And I just don’t see a way of accomplishing that, without making some prohibitively expensive sacrifices (e.g. killing everyone a la an evil genie or whatever).
@bintchaos:
Islamism (assuming I understand the term correctly) belongs to a different category, because it is a philosophy that heavily promotes the killing of infidels — which most of us here are. Saying “I am going to physically murder as many of you as possible” is different from uttering an unpopular political opinion. However, if you were merely a Muslim, then yes, I’d argue that would be similar to being a witch.
I’m not sure what a “fractalist” is, so I have no opinion on that.
Islamism is the idea that muslims should rule muslims, and be in control of the political process in majority muslim nation states.
Its not about killing people.
That is terrorism.
That’s just plain old Islam.
@bintchaos
By that definition, London is Islamist (ruling non-Muslims doesn’t prevent Sadiq Khan from ruling Muslims as well). More pertinently, so are basically all Muslim-majority countries, which begs the question of what the Islamist militants in those countries are trying to achieve. I think the correct definition replaces the first “muslims” in yours with “Islam”.
Well, if you said that here then the answer would be that I’d love to pick your brain about it as long as it didn’t degenerate into an unproductive squabble about some dumb shit (which is more likely the further from the mean you are, but I’ve had productive conversations with literal Stalinists), but norms here are pretty different from norms on, say, Facebook.
If Facebook had our norms, I’d feed it a lot more effortposts and a lot fewer anodyne complaints about trivial inconveniences of modern life. But it doesn’t, which is the point.
@Brad
I agree with you that one should be able to do these things. I think however we should consider it a virtue to choose to resist the temptation to do these things. Which is kind of what I think people on SSC do, which is why it’s a nice place.
Otherwise, we end up in the situation in which we are in. Ostracization, isolation, dehumanization. The cessation of diplomatic ties is usually a precursor to war. I do not believe that’s a desirable outcome.
Money quote right here.
This is always the view I have when it comes to free speech issues – sure, yes, the 1st amendment only directly affects govt suppression. But that doesn’t mean we can’t promote the higher morality of applying it in daily life as well.
@Conrad Honcho
You think it is virtuous to remain friends / married to someone whose values you find abhorrent?
To me that says you aren’t talking words seriously. While your notion might exhibit a surface level reverence for speech by giving it a protected status, at a deeper level you are showing extreme disrespect for it by treating everything that is said as inconsequential.
I do (though I think the statement makes more sense with “positions” rather than “values”), with a few caveats around what’s bucketed as “abhorrent” and to what degree they act on those beliefs.
It is far easier to persuade friends than enemies. Ostracism breeds only sycophants and radicals.
ETA: FWIW, I usually vote (R) or Other, my wife usually (D). She complains that I’m turning her more toward Other 🙂 Also my grandfather has always said that he hasn’t voted since the day he got married – he just cancels out that of my grandmother. They’ve been going on 50someodd years now.
On the contrary, I consider it serious enough to apply a Rawlsian Veil. If I am wrong about something, I would rather be accepted in my wrongness and effort made to persuade me, instead of being summarily
executedcast aside for wrongthink.I think society would be far better off if more folk applied Cromwell’s Rule – an acceptance, even a vehemently disagreeing acceptance, of wrongthink is how to live that principle.
@Gobbobobble
This kind of thing makes me not want to engage with you:
It certainly isn’t persuading me of anything.
I’ll cop to “executed” being in poor form. But that was a fucking effortpost and your “oh, he used a term I don’t like, QED it’s all worthless” attitude makes me not want to engage with you.
There’s a difference between disagreeing about the optimal rate of taxation and someone telling me that me and everyone related to me ought not be trusted with media ownership.
Am I willing to say with 100% confidence that I am right about the morality of Jews being allowed to own media outlets? I suppose if you want to start talking about what 100% confidence means in a mathematical sense I’d have to say no.
But I don’t see any reason to be so open minded as to strongly consider the possibility that we Jews really are a dangerous fifth column that ought to be suppressed. Saying I ought to seems to be the same kind of denial of service attack radical skeptics try. It comes down to the difference between ad hominem as a logical fallacy and ad hominem as a perfectly valid heuristic.
Life is short, why spend it befriending anti-semites? Do I somehow owe it to the Jews because maybe I’ll change his mind, instead of him mine and then they’ll be one less anti-semite in the world? Or do I owe it to him? Or to myself? What kind of virtue are talking about here?
Again, there’s a difference between this and the optimal rate of taxation. But I can’t say that I know where the line ought to be for each individual and if someone sets it in a difference place than I do that they are unvirtuous.
@Brad
No one said virtue was easy. It’s generally very difficult, which is why it’s a virtue.
This largely depends on the size of the “abhorrent” bucket. And threatening people with ostracization for “abhorrent” views tends not to decrease the prevalence of abhorrent views but to increase the size of the bucket.
In your example, yes, I can completely understand not wanting to have contact with people who think Jews shouldn’t be allowed to own media outlets. I don’t know who these people are, though. I’ve never had anyone express that sentiment to me, and I’m deep in the Red Tribe (culturally) and the Republican party. Never seen anyone say that on FaceBook either. I would agree that anyone who does hold that view is abhorrent, but outside the handful of actual neo-nazis or white supremacists out there, I don’t think that view exists.
What I do see, though, is people banished for wanting immigration laws enforced. Or that marriage is between a man and a woman. Do those views meet your definition of “abhorrent?”
It seems to me that part of the phenomenon going on on social media involves attempts to define a lot of disagreements that were formerly in the “we can agree to disagree on this one” into the category of “If you disagree with me on this issue, you can’t be my friend and in fact may become my enemy.” The really ugly version is to apply this, not only to people who disagree with you on some issue, but to anyone who doesn’t go along with you on unfriending and shunning those with the wrong beliefs.
The guy who wants to forbid Jews from owning media is a misleading example. If a person of integrity reached this position they should not be shunned. But it is almost impossible to imagine someone of integrity doing so, which is messing up our intuitions.
I don’t think these are questions with objective answers. I wouldn’t drop friends that decided to post those opinions, but nor would I condemn as unvirtuous someone that thought they did cross a line for them.
In any event, regardless of views, I encourage and support a no politics on FB norm which was my original point. #BringBackReticence
I’ll retweet that any day. I think FB is the worst possible way to hold political arguments. “Here, let’s have a political argument in front of everyone you know, everyone I know, your family, your friends, your schoolyard chums, your employer and mine, in a political environment in which being wrong means you’re not just stupid but probably evil as well.” This is a bad idea.
Also, FB is pretty much optimally bad (pessimal?) for having an intelligent conversation, as it’s hard to write anything very long.
@Brad
Even if that might be true? I mean, you might not subscribe to believing falsehoods being wrong, but I would seriously consider “is it true?” first, and its abhorrence later.
It’s not even like the Jews are even special in this regard. You could equally well substitute Chinese in some third world countries. The Jews are market-dominant minority, and substantially more tribal/less trust-based (“don’t be a freier”, “good for the Jews”, etc, etc) than the host population (which I’ve also seen leveled at the Chinese, as being “turbo Jews on steroids“). The situation of having the elites be substantially different in ethnic/ideological composition than the ruled masses is not a good one. (Would you even deny that US Jews have distinct and very different ideologies as a group than Anglo-Americans?) It breeds resentment.
An interesting question is – are the Jews doing the media brainwashing (mere exposure and sleeper effects) of their own volition (conscious or unconscious), or are they merely the tools of the other 60% of the American elites, such as happened often in pre-modern Europe? That the Jews own the media doesn’t mean that they necessarily do the brainwashing of their own initiative. They might simply be hired to do so, as disposable middlemen.
albatross11:
I’d say that’s twitter. I hate to sound like an old man, but I just don’t get the appeal.
(263 chars)
Compared to Anglo-Americans at the same level of education and income? I don’t think you would see a big difference between Jews and non-Jews.
True. But the problem is the disconnect between the elites and the masses. The ethnic background of some of those elites is not a big factor, I think. For example, Republican voters rejected various mainstream candidates- none of them Jewish AFAIK- for Trump.
I don’t know who they are either. As far as I know, the claims made by actual anti-semites are that they are overrepresented by some vaguely defined large degree and that they should not be, not that they should be shut out entirely.
There’s a big difference between “should not own all of the media outlets” and “should not own media outlets”, and the usual response to the former is that they don’t, not that they should.
@Brad
Marriage is quite different from friendship because it (traditionally) involves making a solemn vow to stay with that person for the rest of your life, e.g. “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
So no, I do not agree that it is moral to break such a promise merely because the person insulted you (not that they should!) or now has beliefs you find abhorrant. To me, this is a form of (as you say) “taking words seriously”, specifically the words of the wedding oath.
However, it would perhaps be wise to determine if a prospective spouse is a neo-Nazi before making such a commitment…
Even men can’t walk around topless
in central Paris or Brussels, but public urination is fine sundown . Customs vary.
This could certainly be accomplished with social physics algorithms.
Like the EToro study I referenced below where the researchers improved the performance of “copy traders” by artificially slowing their communications.
Social algorithms could artificially reward the desired behavior or slow/starve traffic to sub-nets that violated the desired norms– a kind of cyber-gulag.
Zuckerberg actually tried to incorporate a Machine Learning authentification system for news stories…but ran afoul of the free speech problem.
This is a great article on the problem from Clive Thompson.
But these arent new problems, and like random says the cure is worse than the problems if we cede control to large corporations to shape the general public to their goals.
Heres another link to the EToro study.
1) Who watches the watchers? I don’t trust either Snopes nor Politifact to be non-partisan.
2) When pitching this idea to others, you might want to avoid the term “cyber-gulag.” That does not sound appealing.
@Conrad
If you expect big social media corporations to “fix the Problem”, then they choose the arbiters of truth. Who owns Facebook, who owns Twitter?
Who controls the liberal media?
Cthulu makes a supercharged turn to the left.
Cyber-gulag is certainly a solution they could implement right now, and you wouldn’t even be aware of it unless there was a leaker.
In the EToro study I cited, the researchers determined that the “copy trader” strategy capped trader performance because it happened too quickly. The researchers changed the behavior by artificially slowing the communications networks between traders…and improved performance.
I want “cyber-gulag” to be an unappealing term.
Its really bad.
I’m not sure how your “cyber-gulag” differs meaningfully from the existing practice of shadowbanning, which has a name, is used more or less everywhere, and everyone knows about it.
Not the same at all…not blocking traffic to the cyber-gulag– just slowing it– in discreet and subtle ways…giving the advantage of speedy lateral memetic (Cavelli-Sforza and Feldman) cultural transmission to the preferred ideologies.
I believe the term of art is “hellban.”
Possibly relevant: in the wake of the recent CNN story, there were some (unverified) reports of Twitter’s hashtag auto-complete suggesting a misspelled “#CNNBackmail”. (#CNNBlackmail was trending at the time, so there’s really no excuse along the lines of ‘Twitter doesn’t know what tags are spelled right or not” – not all tags are equal.)
@random
Like I said, trivially easy to redirect or modulate social network traffic into a “slow zone” or gulag influence nodes and basically undetectable unless theres a leaker.
Or by really sophisticated statistical analysis which most humans are incapable of.
As stated, that would require a norm against “promiscuously spewing” well-formed political opinions to an appreciative audience that shares them. I can see contexts where this would be a good thing, but I don’t think it is a practical one. Is that what you had in mind?
Data mining people’s old FB posts to see if they are employable isnt the problem.
The problem is Facebook/Twitter/large social media corporations can penalize speech/ideology it dislikes or promote approved speech/ideology.
Mark Zuckerberg is signalling that he’s running for president– should he divest himself of his business interests since Trump hasn’t done so?
To the commenters that are disputing that social media effected the election– are you comfortable with Zuck running for president and also controlling the supermegaphone of Facebook?
Data mining people’s old FB posts to see if they are employable isnt the problem.
The problem is Facebook/Twitter/large social media corporations can penalize speech/ideology it dislikes or promote approved speech/ideology.
Mark Zuckerberg is hinting about running for president– should he divest himself of his business interests since Trump hasn’t done so?
Are all the commenters disputing social media effects on the election comfortable with Zuck retaining control of Facebook while running for president?
My point is the tech exists right now, and you will never even see it coming.
Are they?
God, no. This sort of shit is exactly why Trump’s failure to divest is such a problematic break with precedent.
(Related aside: anyone know a clever mashup of KGB + FB? I don’t know any Russian so dunno if KGFB actually works)
KGB means the Committee for State Security, so KGFB would be the Committee for State Facebook.
Because such a norm never existed, and will never exist. What you will get instead is a scenario where people pay lip service to keeping one’s political opinions to oneself while continuing to discuss and promote the local dominant political viewpoints and values, then pointing to the supposed norm when someone tries to push back against the mainstream/dominant views. I don’t believe anyone felt particularly constrained to refrain from trash talking communists and their sympathizers over the water cooler in the late 40s to 50s, for example.
Right. And for all the “keep the politics to yourself or you might get fired” signaling, FB is more than willing to toss out a gay rainbow reaction. Nobody demands you keep THAT one to yourself…
The late forties to fifties saw liberals running communists out of liberal organizations in revenge for communists running liberals out of liberal organizations in the late thirties and early forties. There were constrained speech aspects both periods.
Do you actually want this, Brad, or only for people whose opinions you don’t want voiced?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/19/ot78-oprah-thread/#comment-513849
Who sets the bar for when reticence begins and the rate at which giving opinions becomes promiscuous? You?
Who sets the bar for when temperance beings and the rate at which eating becomes gluttony?
Me and every one else.
Late to the party I know. But the answer is that just because just because people don’t state their political opinions doesn’t stop them voting on them.
Yes, it’s a problem. Putting aside political issues, the more partisan noise people are able to spread around, the more personal strife is created in their lives. Social media polarization is making real people unhappy and divided.
As far as a way of fighting it: Maybe if it was, somehow, difficult or impossible to share partisan political articles? Then you’d have a situation where people at least have to make their arguments themselves and in the process put more thought into the question of “do I really want to get into a fight with my friends and family who I know disagree with me,” instead of thoughtlessly starting that fight with at press of a button.
Granted that for a lot of folks it’s already too late and they’ve shed all those friends and family, but there are people all along that spectrum who could be prevented from sliding into that pit.
My answer: yes, it’s a huge problem. One possible way to fight it: employ a deep learning algorithm to penalize anger & reward civility in content rankings, to fight this effect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Actually, you might not even need deep learning. Imagine if reddit made the downvote button 2x as powerful as the upvote button, then relaxed their current rules about voting in subreddits you’re not a member of. Would this result in consensus-building content receiving greater exposure?
So I guess my real suggestion is: build a playground for experimenting with rule changes like this.
People are smarter than deep learning algorithms. It won’t take long for people to find a way of putting uncivil responses in a way that fools the algorithms. At best, you’ll teach people to speak like 19th century British parlimentarians.
Furthermore, there will be corruption; the people making the training sets are likely to slant them to treat one side as “civil” and the other side as “uncivil”.
No, just more brigading.
“At best, you’ll teach people to speak like 19th century British parliamentarians.”
That sounds like a success to me! (Although note that the most famous example of the phenomenon you reference, Churchill accusing people of uttering “terminological inexactitudes” rather than lying, occurred in the 20th century).
That kinda reminds me of Armstrong & Miller’s The History of Predictive Text Swearing sketch.
“Yes, but what will that [“correcting” swear words into obscure words spelled out with the same number keys] actually achieve?”
“Nothing less than this: an entire generation of youngsters with manners, courtesy, and a weirdly extensive vocabulary.”
I don’t think it would be fair to say that Sentiment Analysis is a solved problem; but, even though it is actively being researched right now, it is already frighteningly accurate. If you combine it with online learning techniques, it’s likely you’d be able to circumvent even the 19th century British Parlimentarian obfuscation technique — assuming, of course, that it is actually possible to sound uncivil while speaking like a 19th century British Parlimentarian.
That sounds like a pretty good outcome.
If they’re smart, they won’t do that. If people are only exposed to vitriol from one side, that will make them want to join the other side. Many voters have a mentality of trying choose the lesser of two evils.
I’m confused by this response. Brigading is a key part of what makes my proposal work. I’m suggesting that brigading is a good thing which needs to happen more. Brigading, if properly harnessed, could counter the internet’s default tendency to make rage viral.
I think you need to elaborate on this, because it seems like all it would do is give carte blanche for big subs to ruin small subs.
I think what you’re saying is that, since both sides will downvote things they disagree with, and downvotes are weighted more than upvotes, only noncontroversial content will be upvoted. But that makes a lot of risky assumptions.
1. It assumes that brigaders only downvote things they genuinely disagree with, rather than downvoting everything with the intent of making the target sub or thread unusable.
2. It assumes that the opposing sides are of similar size. If a large subreddit like /r/the_donald or /r/politics decides to brigade a small one like /r/neutralpolitics, the big subreddit has so many more subscribers that you could multiply all downvotes by 10 and they’d still be in the positives.
3. Even if you think that brigaded threads should be a total loss (if they weren’t controversial, they wouldn’t attract a brigade), it’s a very “swingy” strategy – either your thread doesn’t attract a brigade, and nothing happens, or you do attract a brigade, and the entire thread becomes a graveyard. It’s a very inconsistent enforcement mechanism, which means it’s not good for modifying behavior.
4. This is the internet. Everything is controversial. If you’re hoping that /r/politics will become unusable but, say, /r/grilledcheese will be fine, clearly you haven’t seen this bit of internet history.
(One other thing: I’ve observed that most subs which are trying to keep things positive have taken the opposite tack – disabling the downvote button. I don’t think it makes much difference in how posts get sorted, but it does seem to improve the tone. Not sure why.)
Good points. Like I said, we need creativity and experimentation–my proposal was just a starting point.
Vitriol couched in superficially civil language is probably more entertaining to the highbrow observer, but I don’t think it’s much of an improvement.
There are at least two groups of people who will skew the training sets to their own side. One is blatant cynical agenda-pushers. The other is the true believers who actually believe that whatever matches their views is civil and anything opposing it is uncivil. Both are quite well-represented among those interested in this kind of ranking.
Unrestricted brigading just means that whoever is most interested in silencing the other side wins, at least until people start ignoring the vote totals.
Less parliamentarian, more newspeak a la calling shit Muggle Realism & dressing up your insults in often childish terms to avoid getting the banhammer. If you’ve ever visited a highly modern forum like SA or the PA forums, they can be highly partisan and vicious towards people they don’t like, but they have bizzare ways that they’ll insult you because otherwise they’d get the banhammer.
Re: deep learning.
I’m reminded of an old popehat post about the disaster that was Peeple.
Of course this algorithm would be programmed by dispassionate benevolent truth-knowers from academia? Color me as not convinced that just because a computer did it that it must be non-partisan and unbiased.
Social media is already being shaped by highly biased humans. But these humans tend to be members of the shouting class. A deep learning algorithm that’s tweaked by the owners of the social media platform is not susceptible to the same set of Molochian pressures.
I didn’t claim it would be non-partisan and unbiased. But I don’t think it would be very difficult to produce an improvement. Let’s not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
Facebook is already doing that…and the Red Tribe isnt going to like the results.
What does Facebook see as the most blatant and viral posts?
HuffPo or Brietbart?
See if Facebook is willing to accept a 3rd party fact checker that operates from a conservative perspective. Until they have refused, I don’t think complaints of this sort are well-founded.
If the goal is actually to reduce partisanship, as Scott’s correspondent indicates, a good way to do that is to take pains to be as even-handed as possible.
FB is already doing it.
Didn’t you read my comment?
Reality has a liberal bias.
@bintchaos
No, reality has a fascist bias. He who rips his enemy’s babies apart in front of them wins.
…which is why Scott is always unpacking the shoddy epistemics of left-wing news sites like Vox.
Most fact checkers currently have a left-wing bias, but that can be fixed. Facebook just needs to make it public knowledge that they are looking for fact checking groups from all over the political spectrum, and right wing groups will spring up to meet the demand.
@bintchaos
I thought so though when I was still young and
my soul was not yet completely destroyedI was a bit less cynical/more naive.Are we sure bintchaos isn’t just trolling us (in general)?
It might help if people would say what they mean by “troll” or “trolling.”
I take it that a troll is someone who says things not because he believes them but in order to provoke other people. Traditionally, another part of it was posting to a Usenet group, which I think is where the term originated, and then leaving without staying to answer responses, giving the analogy to trolling a form of fishing. That part of the definition seems to have dropped out, at least here.
Speaking as someone brought up in a fishing town, the fishing method is called trawling.
Trawling and trolling are both fishing techniques, different ones. Trawling uses nets, trolling uses lines.
The Nybbler schooling us on fishing. Nominative determinism at work.
The problem with civility is it’s not good for actually changing the minds of the vast majority of people. We’re not thinkers who feel we’re feelers who think.
This is why humor is such a potent weapon. The left has been very good at this for the past few decades, particularly with the Schrodinger’s Clown Nose tactics of people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. “Haha Republicans are stupid and evil!” *Clown nose off* “What I’m just kidding, I’m just a comedian what do I know?” *Clown nose on* “But seriously how stupid and evil are those Republicans, eh folks?”
As soon as things get political people pretend like they can’t understand jokes anymore.
“Comedy” like that tends to be treated, by everyone as serious politics and real criticism, right until someone demonstrates that it’s inaccurate or misleading, at which point that’s okay because it’s just a joke.
Like a crazed archer scattering firebrands and deadly arrows,
Such are those who deceive their neighbor, and then say, “I was only joking.”
Isn’t that what Schroedinger’s Clown Nose means?
We see how much they like it when the roles are reversed, Trump vs CNN video, ha ha. In this case very serious people had very serious things to say about the very serious subject of promoting violence against reporters. Faux outrage is very in.
And absolutely amazing coming from the network that gave a platform to the guy who tried to rush Trump’s stage during the campaign. There is no self-awareness here.
The relevant thing with the Trump video is that it’s the President doing it. Attempts to stifle journalism (or “joking” references thereto) are important in proportion to how plausible their success is. There are few people in a better position to exert control over anything than the US President.
Additionally, anything Trump does (especially novel things like this) is newsworthy by virtue of his position. Negative coverage of this incident is only partly condemnation of Trump based on his inciting violence or infringing press freedom; some of it is “this is silly”.
rlms,
Feel free to get mad when he actually does things to stifle journalism, instead of convicting him for FutureCrime(tm) and extrapolating the latest Trump outburst to the next Cuban Missile Crisis.
Trump is going to troll his critics for his own entertainment. The media does themselves no favors when they act like they are some sort of protected class that is above ridicule. The days of respect for the media ended when Jon Stewart became the most trusted name in news.
This is behavior unbecoming of POTUS and he should knock it the fuck off. (And I don’t give a fuck if a Dem did it first, it’s still disrespectful of the office and, if so, the GOP should set a better example)
Completely agreed. They’re just embarrassing themselves with the level of their conniption fits over every bit of Reality TV POTUS they can get their paws on.
But let’s not act like either party involved is behaving well.
Why should he set a better example when we know the Democrats will merely take advantage of his doing so?
I would say that a fair number of his voters sent him to the White House to stop setting a better example and start using successful tactics.
@Gobbobobble
To be honest I think this is just tribalism. “It’s cute when our side makes jokes but outside of all human dignity when the other side does it.” Obama’s “when they bring a knife we bring a gun” or his Red Wedding joke at the Correspondent’s Dinner. Yes, when the president jokes about having his political opposition surprise murdered, it is totally a joke. But if a Republican did that you’d be calling it horrifically undignified.
I think you have a very rose colored view of our Presidents. Obama was milquetoast, sure, but our Founders were rebels, racists and terrorists, Andrew Jackson dueled people and shot them for insulting his wife, LBJ couldn’t resist literally waving his dick at people, and Bill Clinton used his 22 year old intern as a humidor. If you want to convince me that Trump’s behavior is beneath the dignity of the Office, you’re going to have to convince me first that the Office ever had any dignity.
Not based on how this administration has been running so far…
That aside, the President of the United States is also a citizen and has just as much free speech rights to post a dumb trolly video as anyone else does. I don’t think he should, and I strongly agree with everyone here who is saying this kind of behavior is childish, undignified, unbecoming of the office, and I wish he would knock it the hell off, and no, it doesn’t matter that other people do it too. But you’re going to have to point out how we get from Trump posting a dumb trolly video to journalism actually being stifled in any way at all.
@13thletter
I do not give a rap about Trump’s buffoonery…he’s just Bottom in Midsummer Nights Dream.
What I do care about is he’s vain enough and stupid enough to let KSA and Russia fool him into thinking they are his friends.
And he refuses to listen to his advisers.
Reagan had full-blown Alzheimers for the last year or two of his presidency– but he had good advisors that ran the shop for him.
Kushner is an ME trainwreck.
You think Kushner can deal with Prince Reckless and Bibi?
They are going to eat him alive.
@rlms
And CNN has no responsibility when it comes to giving a sympathetic platform to a person who tried to murder the Republican nominee for President? And the other story mulling about how if someone killed Trump before the inauguration it might result in an Obama holdover. Their coverage is 93% negative, 7% positive on Trump.
We’ve been told over and over again that everything is political. How members of different groups are portrayed in movies or on TV shows, and we have to have serious discussions of how video games make young men objectify women. And yet we’re just supposed to take as given that one of (the?) largest news networks in the world is apolitical and just tellin’ it like it is?
There was more shock and outrage on CNN over a triply-fake wrestling tweet than there was over a deranged man seeped in violent leftist political propaganda shooting Republican congressmen on a baseball field. Take that, the BLM riots, the campus riots, the leftists and illegals beating Trump supporters and jumping on cop cars during the campaign…everything the left and CNN is terrified might happen to them has been the political reality on the right for two years now.
@Conrad Honcho
CNN can be as biased and guttery as they want. Media trashiness is ubiquitous and hence not notable, wherever it occurs, but Presidents making threats (even non-credible ones) towards media companies is interesting (especially in the context of this) and newsworthy.
@rlms
But the media is basically egging people on to kill Trump and Republicans. And that’s not hypothetical, some are actually taking them up on the offer.
Remember, the claim here is influence. That Trump is somehow influencing people to commit violence against he media (which no one has) via his position of authority, using veiled suggestion (a fake clothesline at a fake fighting event with a fake logo is hardly a direct exhortation to violence). Does CNN have no ability to influence people in a similar way?
That’s basically what this comes down to. Trump must act in a certain way because some deranged people might be influenced to do awful acts against the media, but CNN bears no responsibility for anything someone might do under their influence. Not buying it. The Presidency has propaganda power, of course, but so does CNN.
Largely I see the relationship between the media and the political establishment like that between the Catholic Church and the French monarchy. We give you legitimacy, you give us legitimacy, we keep the peasants subdued and we all get rich. The current monarch is upsetting the arrangement and the Church, arbiters of right and wrong and sinners and saints is very upset about it. But you can’t pretend the Church has no power because they have no soldiers. The same is true of CNN.
There are very few people who actively support the Twitter insanity. It’s sole redeeming characteristic in my view is how it exposes the worst of the left for everyone to see. You have the NYT posting front page editorials on how reporters have a moral duty to oppose Trump. Ummmm….OK.
The proper response should have been to be professional, instead they gladly joined in on the low character battle and disgraced themselves. Now they are playing the victim card, the media. Zero sympathy.
But yes, the Twitter stuff is embarrassing for the US. Someone else said “Elect a clown, you get a circus”. Truer words were never spoken, ha ha.
Well…like I said…theres a sort of poignant sadness about Trump– he’s like Bottom, one of Shakespeare’s rustics in Dream.
He so desperately wants to be noticed and admired, and like Bottom, he’s completely shut out from the elite circles of faery and human royalty (read diplomacy and government) that he craves.
Its not his fault that the fates conspired to affix an asses head on him and caused the besotted GOP base to fall in love with him….its a comedy tinged with sadness.
The nobility of the office of Lincoln…forever out of Trump’s grasp.
His tweets are like Bottom’s singing…
I do. But mainly from the libertarian perspective of “anything that brings discredit to the Presidency and/or the state is a good thing.”
See this article by Jeffrey Tucker for more information.
I’ll also remind everyone that prior to the election, comprehensive polling (I think it was Pew, can’t remember for sure) asked Americans about their like/trust in a large number of individuals and institutions. Trump scored the second lowest. Can you guess who scored last? The media.
He won the election by framing everything as “me versus the media.” It’s absolutely no surprise that he spends his Twitter time bashing CNN and not bashing Senate Democrats or the Freedom Caucus or the Ninth Circuit Court or any of the other entities standing in his way. This is the one fight he can plausibly win, and his opponents are gleefully still providing it to him.
And he’s not the kind of guy who’s capable of realizing when he’s going to the well too often.
@tscharf
“There are very few people who actively support the Twitter insanity. ”
What does “very few” mean? Trump’s base is pretty large, and I imagine the majority of people in it support his tweets.
Why? So that they can “loose nobly” and then we can go back to Dems in power being as undignified as they want to Republicans, which behavior you will somehow fail to find worthy of commenting on?
@Conrad Honcho
But the media is basically egging people on to kill Trump and Republicans. And that’s not hypothetical, some are actually taking them up on the offer.
I have to take issue with that characterization of recent events unless there is some aspect of the shootings and rhetoric that I am unaware of. Hell, you yourself later on this comment section:
It was noted that the shooting was “universally condemned” by the mainstream left. Sure.
The idea that it was Fox News and “right wing hate” that drove Rep. Giffords’ shooter was false, and reversing the political polarity doesn’t make the model suddenly accurate.
@abc
I’m so absolutely fucking tired of this rationalization of Trump. When your objection is that your enemies are burning down the village, it is not a motherfucking victory when a nominal “ally” starts burning down the village even better.
I went to bed depressed the night before the election because I thought that the Republican Party had nominated the only possible candidate that could lose to Hillary Clinton. It turned out I was wrong; the Democrats had nominated the only possible candidate who could lose to Donald Trump. Based on that, I believe that literally any nominee would have had a good chance of winning.
Has President Trump done some good things? Absolutely. The nomination of Gorsuch was the biggest of these. However, Gorsuch
was proposed by the Republican mainstream, so we’d have gotten him or an equivalent no matter who the nominee ended up being. So literally any other nominee would have gotten us a solid Supreme Court appointment, only literally any other nominee wouldn’t be making an ass of himself twice a week on the Internet.
I will not apologize for holding my side to a higher standard than the Democrats. “Better than Obama” is not a hard standard to meet.
@Catcube:
First, I haven’t congratulated you on passing your exams, so congratulations!
Second, honest question: were any of the Republican candidates, in your opinion, better than Obama? If not, do you have someone a little more junior in mind?
More like, the enemy are burning down the houses of our supporters, but we will not stoop to the level of burning down their houses.
So you claim to be a “conservative”, what exactly have you managed to conserve over the past ~50 years? Not even women’s bathrooms by the looks of it.
So you’d rather loose under a high standard then win by fighting? Think about it this way. Would you say these “dishonorable” tactics are effective for the Democrats? If so why shouldn’t Republicans also adopt them? Or would you rather play cooperate-rock?
@Eltargrim
Thanks. I finally got the paperwork verifying my licensure last week, so I’m officially registered! Now for my seal to arrive…
As far as potential Republican nominees, Kasich was who I would have preferred, but any of the other nominees (aside from President Trump) would have been at least acceptable in the “better than Obama” category. It’s hard for me to overstate just how much I disliked most of what President Obama did, with special mention for Obamacare. Like I said, not a high bar to clear.
@abc
The destruction of civil norms that govern interaction is very much “our” house, not belonging to one side. The Democrats are foolish enough to tear down the culture that has guaranteed both freedom and prosperity; electing a reality TV star is not going to fix that.
Is President Trump proposing to fix that? Because I would absolutely get behind him on that issue, or if he was going to work on rolling back the grotesque legal legerdemain of Obergefell. However, since his favorite book of the Bible is apparently “Two Corinthians,” I’m not expecting him to get on that anytime soon. Even if he did, I’ll bet he’d fuck that up like he did his travel ban. We’ll see.
The use of these tactics at all, by either side, is a loss. We should be working to make them ineffective, not copying them. What the President is doing is not a “victory,” except possibly in the Pyhrric sense.
no, it doesn’t matter that other people do it too.
Unfortunately that’s the ideal thing to say if you want people to say that you don’t actually care about his being “childish, undignified, unbecoming of the office,” you are just using it as a stalking horse to silence dissent.
@Trofim_Lysenko
Yes, the media and left delegitimize the president, call for people to “resist,” talk about “blood in the streets,” make excuses for “punching nazis” or rioters, and then when someone hears all of this and follows it to its logical conclusion and actually starts violently resisting the nazis with the blood in the streets they say “we condemn political violence!” For a day. And then the next day it’s op-eds about how it’s understandable that marginalized people lash out at the evil Republican agenda…
And I’m not saying this is one-sided. Yes, I condemn the body slamming of the reporter by Greg “Butcher of Bozeman” Gianforte. But yeah, when a propagandist is in your face screaming at you so he can get a nasty quote to smear you with and won’t leave…I can’t say I’m shedding that many tears.
The media is absolutely feeding people a diet of paranoia, outrage, justifications for violence, celebrities musing for political violence against Trump or Republicans. The condemnation of violence seems hollow. We are way past “will no one rid of me of this meddlesome priest” territory. CNN is just terrified someone might do to them what they’ve been egging people on to do to Trump for a year or more now.
From the link
With condemnation like that, who needs praise?
Spare us the crocodile tears, it’s pellucidly clear that it’s all about whose ox is being gored.
I imagine they do not, so we are at a standstill, ha ha. I haven’t seen any actual data, but only many quotes from Trump supporters in interviews wishing he would not be a loudmouth jerk.
There are several flavors to not supporting this, one is that they don’t like boorish loudmouths in general, one is that they just don’t find it constructive to achieving any goals, but I think the biggest one is that they simply don’t care about the the Twitter sideshow at all relative to HRC vs Trump policies.
@Conrad Honcho
Let’s start at the top, then. Can you link me to video clips (preferably) or transcripts for visual media, and prominent op-eds/think pieces for print media, of mainstream media calls for blanket -resistance- to Trump?
The ones I’m aware of have been along the lines of “People should be extra on guard, looking for possible illegal and unethical orders, record everything, and be ready to blow the whistle or resign in protest at the drop of a hat”, which isn’t the same thing.
This article describes a Fox News poll saying that among Republicans:
a. 21% approve of Trump’s tweets
b. 59% wish he was more careful with his tweets
c. 18% disapprove.
53% of Republicans said they thought his tweets were undermining his agenda.
This does not look to me like great support for Trump’s use of Twitter even among his supporters.
i’m assuming his supporters are basically Republicans–that’s not exactly right, but he’d never have won the election without overwhelming support from Republcans and he can’t govern without substiantial support from Republican legislators who in turn care a lot about how Republican voters feel.
Roughly 1/5 of Republicans approve of his use of Twitter, another 1/5 disapprove, and the rest are uncomfortable with it/wish he would be more careful with it. This is not remotely a majority of Republicans supporting his tweets.
Conrad Honcho:
I’ve seen this kind of incitement a lot on social media, but not in mainstream news sources. (Though I guess that depends on what you count as mainstream–I’m thinking big US TV networks and major newspapers.). However, it’s not like I read every newspaper, and I actively avoid TV news (24 hour news channels make you dumber, not smarter, because they’re bad at imparting actual information and their incentives are toward sensationalizing and distorting news to keep eyeballs glued to screens.). So maybe I’m missing something. A quick Google search netted me a whole bunch of NYT op eds talking about resisting Trump by normal political means (protests, calling your congresscritters, court challenges, elections), and I didn’t see anything advocating violence.
I’ve seen stuff advocating violence (antifa-aligned stuff, in particular) on social media, but not in anything I’d think of as a mainstream publication. I think most people have the sense to know that rioting doesn’t help their cause, and that talking about assassinations or other political violence is mainly a good way to spend some pleasant and entertaining hours chatting with the nice boys from the secret service, who take that sort of thing pretty seriously.
@Brad
Isn’t that exactly what I said?
@Others:
I’m not saying CNN is directly calling for violence. Of course not. I’m saying they’re delegitimizing the president with phoney Russian collusion stories, Elizabeth Warren is doing the “people will die!” thing on the Senate floor, Bernie is saying “resist!” Madonna is waxing about blowing up the White House, Johnny Depp is musing about assassination, the NYT is funding the “kill Trump” play in the park. If this isn’t a “climate of violence?” what exactly is?
But the wrestling meme, though, that’s creating a climate of violence against the media right? Not the bloody faux-severed heads and such?
No, you are all over the place in this thread hypocritically claiming that CNN is violating some principles that you hold dear. It’s you clear you have no such principles as your linking to that article so aptly demonstrates.
If you wanted to be honest instead of this faux outrage about CNN’s conduct you’d just post “Go red team, go! Boo blue team!”
@Brad
No, I’m calling CNN the hypocrites. I said “And absolutely amazing coming from the network that gave a platform to the guy who tried to rush Trump’s stage during the campaign. There is no self-awareness here.”
CNN has indulged in extreme effort to fuel a culture of violence against Trump and conservatives and then is crying foul about how a fake wrestling meme is going to get journalists killed.
How am I hypocrite? I know my shit stinks. CNN thinks theirs smells like roses.
@ Brad:
I think you are misreading Conrad. He wrote:
Read that again. The point of it, starting with the first sentence, was that his side, including him, was more sympathetic to violence when it was done by someone on their side to someone on the other side, just as the other side was.
@tscharf
By Trump’s base, I mean his core supporters (the people who supported him in the primary, plus a few others who didn’t vote or tentatively supported other candidates). This isn’t a high proportion of the population, or even a particularly high proportion of those who voted him into office, but it’s still a significant number; I wouldn’t describe something as being supported by “very few” people if every single current college student supported it, and the numbers for Trump are comparable (15-20 million). albatross11’s figures sound about right too me (although given that the middle option presented leans towards condemning the tweets, I think they probably underestimate the number of people who are neutral/lean towards supporting); 21% of Republicans is still a lot of people.
@rlms,
I think that would be the “No true Scotsman” defense or at least circular reasoning that the definition of a core supporter is effectively one that likes his Tweets.
.
There is no doubt a group of people who like this for the entertainment value. If Trump was a normal politician he would have had lobbyists focus group test every potential word ever written on a Twitter feed and bore the populace to tears (as was probably the case for Obama). Trump does it in spite of this because he basically doesn’t give a f***. There are people who “support” this because they know it is just part of the Trump package and one of the reasons they elected him was being a non-traditional politician. This is the bad side of that “feature”.
@tscharf
Not really. I’m not claiming that you can’t be a True Trumpist if you don’t like his tweets, I’m saying that I predict there is a group of maybe 10-30 million people who saw the tweet and thought strongly positive things like “Ha! I like this! Take that, stupid CNN! This is why Trump’s great!”, rather than “*sigh* What stupid thing will he do next?” or “Um! Trump is threatening journalists with violence?! This is deeply concerning!”. I think it’s accurate to call this group his base, but the name doesn’t really matter. The point is that it exists and has quite a lot of people in it.
Its chief strength is that people feel entitled to be as rude and even dishonest as they like and then say, “Can’t you take a joke?”
That is, it is a major component of the problem, not part of the solution.
And on the other side, Party A could ask why the chicken crossed the road and Party B would be shocked and horrified because jaywalking and animal endangerment is no laughing matter. It’s all so tiresome.
I dream of a better world in which chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.
I don’t think this is actually true. Changing someone’s mind on a charged topic is difficult, and rational argument is one of the only methods that sometimes works.
This strategy has *not* worked well for the left. They’ve lost the presidency, the house, the senate, most state legislatures…
Difference between structural power and social power. The left won (for now…?) the culture war.
Those and $5 will get you a cup of coffee.
Funny, I’d say the same thing about social power. No matter how much you “control the discourse,” if Trump says we’re leaving the Paris deal, we’re leaving the Paris deal. If Trump says we’re launching Tomahawks at Syria, we’re launching Tomahawks. If Trump tells the DHS to ban Muslims, the DHS will ban Muslims.
(That last one got overturned, but by the courts, not by Jon Stewart.)
@beleester
Compare how much policy the left has passed in the last 16 years compared to the right. Who looks like they’re winning? Because other than gun control, I can’t think of anywhere policy is moving right.
Police militarization?
@skef
“Police militarization” isn’t something anyone is actually for. I’ll give you the tough on crime wave of the 80s and 90s, but that wave broke a long time ago.
Yet I still see police MRAPs, and shiny new AR-15s in squad cars alongside the Mossberg 500s I remember from my childhood in the tough-on-crime 80s and 90s.
And the courts answer to Jon Stewart.
Not directly of course, but generally speaking, they follow popular opinion, which Stewart molds and shapes.
They’re literally citing Trump’s twitter posts as proof that the motivations for the ban were racist and therefore the ban itself must be. Where the fuck does that come from if not pop culture?
Police militarization seems red-tribe so long as it’s being used to bust pot dealers, sure.
But don’t think they won’t use those MRAPs to break down the doors of people who post offensive messages on Twitter as soon as that becomes illegal.
The left will never object to putting more power in the hands of the state, because they believe that ultimately, they will control the state. Any political defeats are just temporary setbacks. It is their destiny, etc.
Is there some collection of these predictions so that those of us playing at home can tell how well calibrated you are?
Not true at all. I’m not sure why you continually post this kind of crap. Do you really think you have some special information about “the left” that the rest of us don’t and are so are helpfully enlightening us with your naked assertions?
If it’s common knowledge, then the rest of us know it already and you are wasting time. If if it isn’t common knowledge then you need to provide some kind of justification.
I think I posted this one before, but here you go.
Here is my thought process:
1) The police will use whatever equipment they have to enforce whatever laws they are told to enforce. This seems uncontroversial to me. We know they will use SWAT teams to raid houses and shoot dogs (and sometimes people) on anonymous tips of having smelled marijuana. We know they’ll choke a man to death for selling untaxed cigarettes. We know that in Europe, they’ll use the maximum amount of force as is normal for their particular culture, to enforce speech codes.
2) There is absolutely no shortage of people, here, in these comments, who regularly assert that the left is winning the culture war, and will inevitably win the political war as well. That demographics and cultural trends ensure total victory. Some people dispute this, but many do not.
3) We have seen no consistent opposition to police militarization organized on tribal grounds. It’s a minor issue in general, and the opposition it does get seems to have just as many red-tribe libertarians as it does blue-tribe police skeptics. The amount of attention police militarization gets from the “organized left” compared to things like budget cuts to planned parenthood is minuscule. They’re clearly not making it a priority. It seems reasonable to ask why. This is my theory as to why. What’s yours?
@Nornagest
That is almost entirely the product of a Clinton era law turning over military surplus to local law enforcement.
Increased police militarization is more like a Deep State (Shallow State if we’re talking state and local stuff?) issue, not a right-wing issue. No Republican politician is running on a platform of “more grenade launchers for cops!” It’s the nature of the machinery of state to accumulate more power and it’s doing it, but I don’t think anyone on either side wants cops with tanks. If anything it would be used by the right as an argument against foreigners/muslims/illegals/etc. “We wouldn’t need the police state if it weren’t for all these terr’rstical types.”
So no, police militarization is not a right-wing win. It’s an everyone loss.
H.R.1556 – Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act
Sponsor: Rep. Johnson, Henry C. “Hank,” Jr. [D-GA-4]
Cosponsors:
Democratic (20)
Republican (2)
H.R.426 – Protecting Lives Using Surplus Equipment Act of 2017
Sponsor: Rep. Ratcliffe, John [R-TX-4]
Cosponsors:
Democratic (0)
Republican (30)
As a general comment Trump has been a bit wiser in selecting the right enemies. Given the recent poll numbers on trust in institutions where the media is close to the bottom and the police/military are at the top it is politically unwise to attack the top and defend the bottom.
It’s a bit ironic that trust in police has risen over the past couple years, with increases coming mostly from those on the left (the right is pretty much maxed out in this category).
Oct 2016: American respect for police reaches highest level in 50 years
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/25/american-respect-for-police-reaches-highest-level-in-50-years
It is important to note that respect for police doesn’t necessarily translate to thinking they are properly held accountable for bad shootings.
At least some of these clowns have principles. It should also be noted that Republican reps voting records not exactly jiving with the principles they campaigned on is how we got stuck with Trump in the first place.
I’m with Conrad on this one – it’s more of a Deep State issue than a Left vs Right one. It’s just far easier for LEO & mil-ind groups to lobby the Right for more toys when the two-party filter monster has decreed that curbing law enforcement excesses is a Lefty cause.
Police militarization isn’t a right-wing cause under that description. It’s a right wing cause in virtue of 1) police departments wanting the stuff, for a variety of reasons, and 2) it generally being a right-wing cause to support the police, including supporting getting them what they want. Hence the sponsorship pattern.
@Matt M:
Are you telling me that a court shouldn’t use statements made by a defendant as evidence of the defendant’s motives?
If there’s a murder, and someone had previously threatened to kill the victim, that would make them a suspect. This isn’t “pop culture.” This isn’t some novel legal theory that was invented just for Trump. The legal system cares about intent, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
@Cassander: Most “national security” legislation, such as the creation of the TSA, or the Patriot Act?
@Brad:
Who do you think asked those Congressmen to draft that surplus equipment act? Do you think it was Republican voters swamping them with phone calls? Or was it maybe the police outfits themselves?
“We need more tanks for the cops” is not any sort of common discussion on right/Republican internet forums, nor will you find a plethora of thinkpieces on Daily Caller about the need for cops to have grenade launchers.
Basically you’re telling me I and my kind really want something we don’t actually really want. I’m telling you we’re not. I’m opposed to it, just probably not as opposed to it as you are. That doesn’t make it a victory for my side.
Since you don’t want it, and my side is either neutral or opposed, I’m guessing who actually wants it is “the apparatus of the state” which is who’s benefiting from it.
@beleester
The legal system should care about intent in determining whether or not you’ve violated a law. What we’re talking about here is whether or not a law should be passed.
Otherwise we can get situations where the courts can arrogate legal power to themselves by divining what they imagine the motivation of the legislative and executive branches. The comment section here is pretty good compared to most fora, and a quick read should convince you that people can be pretty creative in imagining what evil motivates their political opponents.
Of course, as we’ve seen, the courts actually do this, even though it’s a grotesque abuse of power for them to do so. This also shouldn’t have been a surprise to the President. That’s what’s so infuriating about his handling of the travel ban. He wanted to look like a hero, so on first down he threw a wild 75-yard touchdown attempt against a really strong secondary and got the ball picked off, rather than making a modest 2-3 yard run attempt that would have been a guaranteed gain. If he had kept his yap shut on twitter, and had been a little more modest in the handling of the Executive Order, he could have probably pushed precedent a little bit in the favor of the right; instead, he gave a bunch of left-wing judges political cover to create precedent against the President’s constitutional powers.
He has got to stop crying about bias. He’s right that it exists, but all of us on the right have been crying about it for decades. It shouldn’t be a surprise to him, and he cannot assume it away. He has to plan his moves accordingly.
Police departments are run variously at the federal, state, and local level, so we should be able to test this. Are Republican municipalities more militarized than Democratic ones, or less? Has militarization at the federal level varied depending on whether D or R is in charge?
I’d expect density, among other issues, to confound this badly.
@skef
the law in question was championed by the clinton administration, as part of their anti-crime drive the centerpiece of which was “putting 100k cops on the streets”.
@beleester
Is a thoroughly bi-partisan vice. The bush administration was actually against the creation of the department of homeland security, until it became clear that congress was going to pass it over his veto.
The sponsorship pattern I was referring to was of the laws that Brad linked to, so not attributable to Clinton.
Bill Clinton’s shtick wound up being “here I am, doing stuff, with whoever will do it with me!” That led to a mixed bag which included welfare reform, super-predators, as well as left-wing stuff.
@CatCube:
That would be the Animus Clause, and its associated jurisprudence.
It’s worth noting that this is pretty much Rush Limbaugh’s whole schtick.
Deep learning isn’t a catch-all solution to every problem. Are you familiar with what ‘google’ and ‘skype’ mean on alt-right blogs?
That meme still around? Feels like ages.
I’m not advocating censorship.
No.
@Nikolai Rostov: No, I’m not familiar– what do they mean?
Nope, not a problem. Frankly, I think that whatever happens on social media is of very little consequence.
Why do you say that ? I honestly don’t know whether that’s true or not. At times, it certainly seems like whatever is said on Twitter or Facebook is just random noise. At other times, though, the same social media sites appear to be heavily involved in steering national policy. I’m honestly not sure which case is true… is there a way to quantify this ?
“Appear” being the operative word. Can you give me an example of social media effecting policy?
Well, for one thing, our current President uses Twitter almost exclusively in order to communicate with the rest of the populace. Media outlets amplify his posts, and thus much of the political discussion centers solely around the issues mentioned on Twitter.
Perhaps more importantly, social media platforms are (AFAICT) becoming the core means by which both political parties gather supporters and energize their base at election time (so, about every two years). Additionally, IIRC there’s some evidence that shows that young people form their political opinions primarily (if not exclusively) based on what’s on their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever feed. Now, granted, young people don’t matter much now (since they rarely vote), but they won’t stay young (and non-voting) forever…
Meh. From what I see, this is less of a political discourse that effects policy and more of a weekly loop of Trump post something stupid->Media outrage->Trump posts something else stupid->Media now outraged over new thing, the previous one no longer being interesting.
Ok, but parties gathered support and energized their base before Facebook & co. existed. Maybe they made this process easier, but again I don’t think it changed anything fundamental.
Sounds suspicious. I think cause and effect are being confused here (see also the partisan polarization on social media Scott asked about).
FDR used radio to bypass the media of his day.
Social networks are going to get more and more integrated in to our lives until at some point it’s going to be as voluntary as having an email. Then we’ll be getting our own “social network advisors” to help choose the right instragam filter or have a particularly witty comment. And whoever opts out is a pariah.
I think we’re already at the point where if an employer asks for a link to your Facebook account and your response is “I don’t have Facebook” they will assume that you’re lying and have something to hide. (at least, if you’re under 40)
Untrue or gross exaggeration.
I am well under 40 and have never had Facebook, am a STEM professional and it has never been an issue in job interviews or even spoken about during employment.
I’m not sure about abroad but I’ve never heard of anyone being asked to provide a link to FB in a job interview, let alone it being a factor in hiring (reference country: Australia). In my circles (inner-city, 25-35 yr old, middle class), the shift away from social media is tangible. Stories of people deleting their accounts or leaving their profiles completely inactive are surfacing en masse, and there is a definite cultural shift toward “genuine interaction”.
And FWIW, admitting you have a LinkedIn is pretty much social suicide. Might as well tell someone to add you on Myspace.
Maybe, but my hope is that people will wise up and realise that not every one needs to be aware of every part of your life (do you realy want your mom seeing your pictures from last weeks badass orgy?)
More than maybe. This has been a fear since at least 2012, backed by people in the know: http://bit.ly/2tkba74
In the twenty-something Netflix drama You Get Me, the villain lacks a Facebook page, something a friend of the protagonist takes notice of…er, to her detriment.
Sorry, I am having a hard time taking any article that contains the quote “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer” seriously.
I am yet to see any evidence that this fear has any basis. I think that particularly in the higher tiers of STEM jobs, finding someone to fill a position is hard enough as it is without concerning yourself with whether your applicant has a Facebook page or not.
As far as I can tell polarization on social media just follows from increasing national polarization. It’s just the people we interact with on social media tend to be more diverse than family, friends, coworkers, or neighbors (according to research cited in Everybody Lies) so more polarized conflicts tend to happen there.
Maybe it’s a problem, but trying to control it would be an even bigger problem. Those would be judges of what is OK and what is not OK would be become corrupt and their definitions would gradually expand to serve their ideological purpose. See how the definitions of racist, hate speech, or hate crime have evolved.
I see it similarly to violent video games, they are used more to release frustrations than they are to build them up in my opinion. A net benefit.
This has already happened. All social media companies already employ entire teams whose sole job is to police offensive speech.
I will add that it is very alarming to me how many people support this. There is almost zero evidence that this had any effect on the election outcome. Can we also regulate a partisan mainstream media?
1. Anyone who voted for your side because of partisan social media, raise your hands.
2. Now anyone who thinks people voted for the other side because of partisan social media raise your hands.
Do you see the problem? We are able to decode nefarious attempts to twist our minds, they are not and it must be controlled by our benevolent betters. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s going way beyound what the OP said. The point was “social media greatly amplifies people’s innate tribal tendencies”, not “there’s a secret cabal of masterminds intent on polarizing people”.
“what would be the most effective ways that social media companies might be able to help fight it?”
Two part question. Is it a problem, and how would we fix it. The fixing is where the self elected masterminds come in. Of course lots of social media posts are throwing red meat to your own tribe and disparaging the other tribe. The fear from the enlightened is that the unenlightend cannot tell the difference.
SSC readers are atypical to the point where “we didn’t vote because of social media; they did” can easily be completely correct.
Related to this, I asked a quetsion in an open thread a week or two ago in the aftermath of the shooting of the Republican baseball practice that didn’t go anywhere, but I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. You’re asking if social media sentiment matters, and my observation is that the mainstream doesn’t matter.
It was noted that the shooting was “universally condemned” by the mainstream left. Sure. But then you look on reddit and twitter and there are myriad examples of people definitely not condemning the shooting. While statements of outright support were rare, many people excused the shooter’s actions with tongue-in-cheek statements like “well given how many people are going to die because of the Republican healthcare bill, could this be considered self-defense?” Or “you reap what you sow.”
I could just as easily paint a right-wing mirror image of this where mainstream conservatives disavow any kind of racism or antisemitism, but then point you at the comments section on an article on Breitbart.
Anyone who’s going to get radicalized wants to believe that “the people” (or the “good people” anyway) agree with them. If the mainstream doesn’t it’s either because they’re cowardly, or because they’re “playing the game.” Secretly Rachel Maddow/Sean Hannity want the righties/lefties to get what’s coming to them, but they can’t just say so. So one goes online, to social media, where they’re talking to people in echo chambers and they’ll find plenty of support and rationalizations for their attitudes, regardless of what the mainstream “leaders” say.
So, I wouldn’t just say that social media polarization matters, I would say that if the answer to “does the mainstream even matter anymore?” is “no,” then social media polarization is the only thing that matters.
As for what to do about it, I don’t know. Slate Star Codex is about the only place I’ve seen where people across the political spectrum treat each other like humans. But I don’t think this model is exportable, and it certainly wouldn’t last if it had any actually power, influence or authority.
I’m with Bugmaster. Social media companies want partisan polarization, like they want anything else that increases engagement with their platform. Outrage farming appeals to a wide variety of people, it provokes emotional response, it feels social, it’s viral, it’s cyclical, there’s an unlimited supply of new outrage sources. It’s a practically perfect fit for social media.
Genuinely reducing partisan polarization on Facebook or Twitter can’t be done without also reducing views and clicks. It’s not happening. Maybe you’ll see some phony PR from them deploring the destructive fires of partisan rage, but once the press release is over they’ll get out the hot dogs and marshmallows again.
From the Clive Thompson piece.
But I really want to know…all the SSC commenters that say Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests is just “trump-booing”…how will you feel in 2020 when President Zuckerberg refuses to divest himself of Facebook?
Well, first “divest” is too strong a term. Trump separated himself from the running of his companies and that’ll have to be good enough, and would have to be good enough for Zuckerberg, too. The Founders did not intend for the US to have career politicians. Our leaders were supposed to come from the people, of all (white, landowning, male, respectable, etc) walks of life, and then go back to them when they were done. Having to sell your plantation in order to serve doesn’t fit with that purpose.
So, yes, I would have no problem with President Zuckerberg holding on to his shares of FaceBook, so long as he resigns (or takes official hiatus, whatever) as CEO and from the board of directors as long as he serves. I do think people saying Trump should sell his business holdings (his life’s work) in order to serve are just engaged in Trump booing. The demand is unreasonable, unworkable, and not in keeping with the Founders’ intentions or actions. Also just petty. There’s very little Trump can diabolically do as president to benefit the hotel and golf course business. If that were his aim he would have been much better off throwing money towards zoning commissioners and the like in the municipalities where his properties are.
That said, I full expect that right wing bloviators will use the left’s condemnations of Trump to attack Zuckerberg, ala Alinsky’s Rule #4.
And precedent? What if some future pres. is an arms dealer?
That’s why you don’t vote for Tony Stark.
In all seriousness, do we think any of Trump’s voters legitimately expected him to 100% divest himself from all of his business interests as soon as he got elected?
If you were worried about his owning hotels somehow causing some huge conflict of interest, the time to worry about that was BEFORE the election, not after…
I thought we were discussing what i right, not what is likely.
I probably wouldn’t vote for an arms dealer president.
What’s your solution to this problem then? We only have career politicians or technocrats in government?
The wealthy already have disproportionate influence on politicians….why would they need to be politicians as well?
And that does not disbar anyone from office, because a wealthy person can easily turn themselves into a poor person, if they really want to be a public servant
Because some of them care about the nation and its future? Washington was (likely) the richest man in the colonies. Among the reasons I like Trump is because I don’t think he’s motivated to the office by a desire to enrich himself. If there were laws he wanted passed or regulations he wanted enacted/torn up for his own benefit he’d never have put himself through the ordeal of the campaign. He’d have just done what all the other rich people do and given a few million to each side and whoever wins call up and say “remember those campaign contributions?”
It’s worth noting that he basically bragged about having done that in the past to numerous politicians (most noteworthy, his current opponent)
All the SSC commenters probably don’t agree on whether the sun rises inthe East. Everyone in this conversation is an individual, with his own values and beliefs and ideas, not one member of a faceless uniform Borg collective with shared beliefs.
Two Jews, three opinions? 😉
We are SSC.
Lower your bias and surrender your brain.
We will add your ideological and intellectual distinctiveness to our own.
Your thought-processes will adapt to make the world rational.
Resistance is astronomically improbable to succeed.
I’m sorry, I had to.@albatross11
You were too fast to jump on bintchaos this time. I actually read that statement the same way you did the first time, since my last interaction with her was over just such a mischaracterization.
However, the phrase was
All the SSC commenters THAT SAY…
And not “all the SSC commenters SAY THAT”, which is an important distinction. She’s only referring to the subset of SSC that holds that opinion, and there are some here who do, albeit only a handful if my memory serves correctly, maybe half a dozen unique screen names and 1-2 of our regular conservative commenters.
So, it’s a fair point and not a snipe at a theoretical “SSC Hivemind”.
Truedat…and I do think both tribes are represented evenly in the commentariat– but the Red Tribe is LOUDER and more vehement and higher frequency.
Which are traits I would expect in soldier phenotype.
Leftists and people generally critical of leftists may be evenly represented–indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter group was larger. But people critical of leftists need not be either conservatives or Republicans. My guess is that the largest group of such here are libertarians, quite a lot of them anarchists, which is pretty far from either Republican or conservative.
People who fit red tribe culturally are, I would guess, a small minority. People who consider themselves Republicans a slightly larger minority.
I think the most recent poll had information on political views, but I don’t remember the details.
Looking at the 5% (96) of commenters who are responsible for 65% of comments (or at least who were when I did this), I got figures of 32% left-wing, 36% right-wing, 18% libertarian, 6% other, 8% unknown (some right-wing classified commenters would probably call themselves libertarians). This doesn’t account for variance between commenters in proportion of political comments or comment length, and only looks at a little more than half of the comments (although I expect frequent commenters are more likely to make political statements), but I think it provides a reasonable estimate.
I’ll once again register my objection to the your labeling a poster whose ideologically salient oeuvre consists entirely of anti-SJ posts as being on the left.
@rlms
I missed that at the time, but I want to highlight dndnrsn’s comment:
I’m still gasping for breath after laughing at that.
@bean
Vindicated!
(But seriously, how are you and I immediately-obvious right and left respectively? I think I’m more obviously left than you’re obviously right, but we both kick up a decent amount of noise – naval war posts on your part, dumb jokes and so forth on mine – maybe the sample was from before the battleship posts?)
I don’t think it’s necessarily that. I’m sure that all of us have posters we follow more closely than others. A 0 might just mean that rlms pays reasonably close attention to both of our posts, and doesn’t have to go looking for our political alignment. So even if politics makes up 20% of your stuff and 10% of mine, we’re still going to be a 0. High numbers could mean rare political posts, or someone who is really hard to figure out.
A better metric, probably impossible to automate, would be to look at political percentage. And then number of political posts it takes to classify.
@Brad
I agree to an extent, and I think it would be reasonably consistent to classify Aapje as “other”. On the other hand, I remember seeing him arguing for a minimum wage recently, and using self-identification when possible seems sensible.
@bean, @dndnrsn
The it was the second iteration of my program that produced the list of authors, so the political orientations of some people were fresh in my mind when I ran it. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to classify e.g. Lumifer without looking at any posts. On the other hand, I think you two are frequent enough posters that I might have been able to classify you without any posts anyway (I’ve got a good memory for this kind of thing).
@rlms
Are you ‘othering’ me? 😛
Anyway, I object to the idea that being anti-SJ means that someone is not a lefty. When the objection is that much of SJ:
– treats similar people differently, just for their gender, race, etc
– has strong biases against certain genders, races, etc, ignoring their problems
– has an anti-science/anti-truth culture
– often fight for policies/laws that have disparate impact
– etc
Then IMO, none of these can be described as advocating an increase in equality, but rather the opposite. It’s like arguing that Bernie Sanders is not a lefty because he opposed Hillary. It matters whether someone opposes Hillary because he thinks she is not socialist enough or too socialist. It also matters if someone opposes SJ because he thinks they are (generally) not egalitarian enough or too egalitarian.
Also, I disagree with the notion that biases can be determined from what topics people talk about (most), without taking the context into account. Imagine that you have two people who fell in the water and cannot swim, named Bob and Alice. 10 people have thrown a rope to Alice and are pulling her to safety, while no one is bothering to help Bob. Then a person who cares equally about Bob and Alice’s well-being would logically focus his entire effort on helping Bob, as Alice is getting disproportionate help already. However, some people here would apparently call that person a ‘Bobbist’ and/or someone who doesn’t care about Alice.
PS. I’m pretty sure that if you made me dictator, there would be very little confusion about whether I was a lefty or not.
@rlms
I disagree with this. I think ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ or at very least ‘left wing poster’ and ‘right wing poster’ are socially constructed facts determined by others about you, not a self identification.
More like ‘generous’ and less like ‘lesbian’.
How much difference will you solitary vote make? You need to envisage a situation where some people are saying “we can’t have that awful person, who is still profiting from arms as the president”, ,and other people are saying ” but we never made anyone else disinvest!”.
@Brad
I agree that they are social constructions, but for the purpose of classifying people it is easier to seem impartial if you go by self-identification. Anyone who I class in a way that differs from their self-identification is certainly unlikely to support my results, and people who agree with them might do the same.
Fair enough.
Sorry about that, bintchaos, I misread your comment.
I would say use social media to encourage people to meet in real life. Suggest friends that share one or two interests but otherwise differ. Polarization seems way worse online than in real life – I’ve had plenty of heated political discussions face to face, but the worst face-to-face pales in vitriol to the average online argument. Much of the problem seems to be that we’ve replaced much of our in-person friendships with online interactions – some of that may be hard to fix because it is integral to social media itself.
Maybe you could implement friends “fading” off your feed if you don’t meet them / direct message them frequently. A lot of real online blowups seem to be drive-bys by friends of friends who take something the wrong way.
What is the least polarized social network? Maybe Instagram? Where you’re basically encouraged to show off cool shit you’ve done rather than rant about political topics?
I’m not sure how to articulate this exactly, but polarization feels like a symptom of the ever expanding concept of “identity” – people aren’t just disagreeing with you, they are attacking who you are. How do we dial that back to where it’s okay to compartmentalize your politics, where having friends with different opinions is a sign of maturity and not of weakness?
“but the worst face-to-face pales in vitriol to the average online argument…”
Agreed. I was fairly recently part of an impromptu, at-times-borderline-heated-but-mostly-civil argument at a vegan donut shop in Oakland with an antifa-sympathetic lefty. It takes a lot more nerve to play dirty with someone when they’re RIGHT THERE. It also helped that we were sitting cafeteria style with lots of meatspace onlookers. Too easy to embarrass yourself with the kind of over the top rhetoric people casually deploy online.
I think it is a problem, at least user-side – it’s gotten me to leave plenty of places in frustration and worsened my experience in others. But I think the ways to reduce it are the opposite of what most companies are doing and therefore probably bad for the bottom line. And I am skeptical of technological solutions, because I’ve seen the same website act dramatically differently at different points in time with no change in the underlying architecture, or different boards on the same website.
That said, I think getting rid of the share button would help; if people want to echo something, make them make the extra effort to copy and paste the link and maybe even say why they’re linking it. Like/share counts can serve as a show of partisan strength, low-effort partisan mudslinging very often gets high ones counts, and people tend to be much more civil when discussing these things one to one than when echoing the (often inflammatory) opinion of their team. (And conversations often continue in the tone which they start, too.)
Also, bans inflame tension; the warriors on one team are thrilled with their scalp and look for more, those on the other team feel persecuted and bitter about it, especially if their friend or someone they followed got kicked out. Ideally, you wouldn’t ban anyone (except spambots, but spambots aren’t people) – and the anonymous imageboards where I spend most of my time these days hand out bans rarely. But if you must ban, have clear rules, apply them in an even-handed manner, and give people warnings and temp bans and a way to appeal; permabans should be a last resort for someone completely incapable of not starting fights. The purpose is to create a functioning community, not to purge the enemy.
If the big social media company sees you as a trouble maker they will just throttle back your comms.
Facebook and Twitter can easily analyse all your connections and throttle back the whole trusted network that you depend on to spread memes.
A cyber-gulag for troublemakers.
Might there be a market for a near Twitter clone called “Nice” where you must be nice to everyone, and users flag people who are not nice?
Not right now…
But President Zuckerberg could easily adjust FB algos to make us all be nicer to each other.
For the common good, you know.
I don’t think anyone honestly believes this is a problem. Rather in my experience when someone says “social media is becoming too polarized” he means “our attempt to use social media to insult enemy tribe members is being stymied by the enemy tribe members using it to insult us”.
Also agree with this. Nobody complains about excessive polarization from their own side. It’s hard to even notice it sometimes.
I disagree. If you have friends with very different political and social views, it’s pretty frustrating to have even people whose views you basically agree with start a pointless fight on your wall with other of yor friends from the other side.
Hell, there’s people on this very board who I feel that way about.
Not that I use social media, but I’d want them to link polarized political topics to a wide range of opinions from experts and politicians: at least 30, and not the same thirty every time. Maybe just have it randomize whose opinion you get. Solution To Pollution Is Dilution, and such.
No. Removing bubbles won’t fix the problems we care about. It might make things worse.
Consider how ideas get spread. The common pattern is: (1) Event happens that counts as newsy (2) Professional content-creator writes an article (3) article is posted to professional news site (4) fans of the site read the article (5) some of them click share (6) ranking algorithms show article to (some of) that person’s friends (7) friends read and / or comment.
The biggest complaint I hear is that content is getting increasingly polarized. There are headlines like “10 Ways [Opposition Figure] Will Doom Us All!” that take extreme stances in one direction or another.
The trouble is that content-creation happens way upstream of social media. And the content creators are mostly professionals (or zealous amateurs) who are doing more research than simply skimming their Facebook feed.
The next complaint is something like, “Those [outgroup members] are totally ignorant of the arguments for [position]. If only they saw arguments by [ingroup new source] they’d come around.”
But, I don’t think this is true. There are profoundly few articles that approach issues in a high-level abstract way. (This blog is a notable, and welcome exception). Instead, news articles center around a thing that happened to specific people at a specific time.
The authors might mention that the event ties into a broader trend. But the story is nominally about an individual thing that happened. This makes these stories un-compelling to people on the opposite side.
For instance, I’m generally in favor of a less restricted housing market in the Bay Area. I have friends who disagree and like rent-control or anti-gentrification efforts. They’ll post articles about how some sympathetic person was kicked/priced out of their apartment.
Since I’m not already onboard with their political views, the stories don’t really resonate with me. My reactions might be, “that does sound unfair, and probably illegal. They should sue their landlord in court and I wish them the best,” or “that doesn’t sound illegal. It’s sad that the people are unhappy. But all policies come with downsides.”
The only events that attract a bunch of comments from both side are ones with enough shades-of-grey to become properly toxoplasmic.
Finally, I think bubbles produce better content.
If I’m writing for a reasonably homogeneous audience, then I can assume some common ground. I don’t need to re-derive or re-argue all of the basic ideas in every article. Instead, I can take the basic stuff as given, and then go on to talk about the deeper or more interesting points.
A side benefit is that the low-hanging fruit gets picked when you’re in a bubble. “Creationism is Wrong!” articles were satisfying so long as there were creationists to respond to them. Posting that argument on [atheist-dominated site] is going to get a much less enthusiastic response.
On the other hand, if I only have 1000 words, and I need my work to be accessible to everyone on the political spectrum, I’m not going to get past the absolute basics. And every fight devolves into shouting about the same first principle.
It’s important that content-creators make an effort to read things that the opposition writes. People writing for the Jacobin should know what’s being said on Breitbart.
But that’s a VERY different proposition than saying that politics would be better if we merged the comment sections from the Jacobin and Breitbart
A reasonable nudge might be to select some professional writers or institutions to provide a balance of views with charitable presentation, and have them show up on users’ feeds by default (subject to opt-out).
Problems include selecting such writers and institutions in the first place, and moderating reaction threads to their posts. It’s hard to get those decisions well-made without overstepping the boundaries of the “platform” role. I’d suggest user voting for both, after some dedicated study of voting systems that could produce reasonable outcomes.
I wonder about the possibility of an opt-in service aimed at preventing “your best arguments.” It’s probably a programming nightmare, I’m a project manager by trade not a programmer so I’m used to setting unobtainable goals, but here goes:
1) Add button to twitter/facebook/etc social media allowing you to in some way promote a post as a “strong argument” for your side.
2) The app aggregates your promotions to identify your leanings on various issues, as well as aggregating the community’s promotions to identify “best arguments”
3) At regular intervals, the app then presents within your standard social media feed arguments that oppose your identified stance that have been identified as “best arguments”.
Thoughts?
As has been argued elsewhere, people very often see nonsense that matches their biases as ‘their side’s best argument.’
It would make more sense to promote posts that get upvoted by people with different beliefs and demote posts that only get upvoted by people with similar beliefs.
Sure- I wonder if there’s some amount of self-selection that would fix that. In other words, if you were the type that would go out of your way to sign up for an anti-bubble filter, you may be inclined to promote your side’s real best arguments, rather than “red meat”
The usual way to address this is to look for smart, thoughtful people to see the best arguments from the other side. Social media now tend to do the opposite–an offensive and stupid argument from the othed side is a lot more fun to forward to all your friends.
If polarization is caused by an “echo chamber” effect — you see updates from your friends, but your friends all think the same way you do — then the solution is to provide a way out of the echo chamber.
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook could provide a “Nearby” feed that shows you public posts made by everyone in a one-mile radius around your phone’s GPS. You can still use your usual feed to keep in touch with your family, but there’s also this other thing that exposes you to viewpoints you might not encounter normally.
A potential drawback to this is that it makes the Idiots Talk To You problem pervasive. Anything you post, no matter how tangential to politics, becomes subject to culture warriors jumping into your comments section quoting canned talking points from their politics blog. My hope would be that it wouldn’t be that bad, because there aren’t actually that many culture warriors per square mile — you might have to block one or two of them, but after that it would be conversation with real people.
The hope would be that the Nearby feed would be popular enough that people would look at it in parallel with their Friends feed. The non-hope would be that social network engineers would say: “well, people don’t like configuring their settings, so let’s not provide a setting — instead, let’s just mix local and friends content together in one feed and refuse to provide an opt-out!” I don’t know why social network engineers always say this, but this is what they always say.
Ooh I appear to be first… EDIT: Well almost.
(Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or the SSC subreddit but I’m trying here because there might be some who aren’t on the subreddit but are interested in this.)
Scott writes about a lot of things here, from science to politics to AI to psychiatry to charity to relationships. But my favorite articles tend to be the ones about how disagreements work – how we construct and tell politically driven stories, how confusion fuels conflict, how words are used as weapons and how different people see the world in different ways.
I’ve been thinking about disagreement in particular as an object of study for some time, trying to synthesize theories about it, understand the nature and origin of ideological, intellectual and emotional differences etc. With increasing subcultural fragmentation and more material available online than ever before I think more focus on this is both desirable and feasible.
Now I wonder if people here are interested in taking part in building a repository of writing on this topic (scientific publications, books, articles, blog posts).
I created the subreddit r/erisology (from Eris, the goddess of discord) a couple of days ago for this. It only has a handful of subscribers and various links from my collection, but I’d love it if others would like to add stuff as well. I’ll be working on adding the most important posts from SSC and LW etc. and help would be great.
I don’t intend for this to be “culture war” heavy at all, except perhaps as dispassionate analysis. The point is to study social verbal conflict and its roots, not so much to take part.
Here’s a more concrete list of subtopics:
*The slippery meanings of words and how it contributes to misunderstandings
*How conceptual systems and bodies of knowledge work, differ from each other, and change over time
*How narratives are constructed and propagated
*Cognitive biases and heuristics – what shortcuts we use to interpret and evaluate information when we form and maintain wordviews
*How rhetoric and the actual social (rather than the artifical rationalized one often studied in philosophy or debate clubs) process of argumentation works
*The mechanics of cultural and psychological unity and disunity
*Basic perceptual, cognitive and emotional processing differences that cause people to form different ideas about the world and other people
*Construction, perception and cognition of concepts.
*Ways to improve public discourse
*Tastes: why do people like different things? (And argue about it).
*Practicing putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they see the world – i.e what being different people thinking in different ways feels like “from the inside”.
Etc, etc.
Yes! This sounds super interesting, this is basically exactly my interest area. And I can confirm that there is at least one person here who is in the union of “isn’t very active on the ssc subreddit” and “would be interested in your post”. Also I love the name of your subreddit. In any case, subbing immediately.
Great to have you on board!
Since you mention it, I bet Scott could write an amazing (physical) book on the topic. I’d buy a copy.
Related:Agnotology
Hm. That article kind of bothers me a bit, for several reasons. First, I don’t think ignorance should be considered the same thing as disinformation or doubt. Ignorance is a ”null” state I my mind.
Second, focusing on truth vs. falsity like this is counterproductive and makes it virtually certain than any agnotological results will be weaponized and pulled into the vortex it’s studying. Erisology, to me, is meant to be broadly methodologically relativist – a phrase from the sociology of science I often find annoying and overstated but not without its merits. Basically, when studying argumentation and the proliferation of ideas, truth and falsity are to be treated the same (we’re supposed to act as though we don’t know the truth).
Furthermore, reinforcing the idea of straight truth vs. falsity means reinforcing an unhelpful simplification that makes people think ”if I’m right, then they are wrong, and I have no reason to understand them”. The article brings up some examples, most notably about tobacco, but most controversies are not clear cut like that and it would serve us well to focus less on jumping straight to ”is X right or wrong, good or bad” and more on asking ”what does X mean? how does X work? in what context and against what background does X seem reasonable?”. That’s required before we can address X being good or bad productively but is often skipped entirely.
Most controversies are ultimately about narratives and worldviews rather than pure facts, and often what’s considered facts are underspecified statements (requiring interpretation) and carrying implications and judgments to such an extent that they’re perhaps better seen as “compressed narratives”.
Map-and-territory is a thing, and different maps can say different things without contradicting the territory – i.e both can be valid while contradicting each other in some way. This is a highly important practical consequence of accepting that the map is not the territory.
Maybe agnotology and erisology can be seen as complementary, as grabbing hold of different parts of the elephant. The prescriptive vs. descriptive parts of the story, or (if you want to use Jung-Myers-Briggs terminology) as analogous to judging vs. perceiving cognitive functions.
What you intend and what’s likely to happen are two very different things. Given that the articles of Scott you seem to admire appear to be rationalizations to avoid having to confront object level problems with his side.
It’s true there is a risk, which is why I’m trying to make a certain level of relativism a cornerstone.
With regards to your second sentence, you have to be more clear. I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but on the surface it doesn’t look like something said in good will.
Scot’s most mentioned article on disagreement, “The Toxoplasma of Rage” discusses an elaborate theory of how misinformation spreads based on several examples. All the while he meticulously avoids noticing the most obvious thing all his examples have in common, namely that in all the examples it is the same side spreading all the misinformation.
“It’s obvious you guys started ganging up against us first, don’t try to accuse **US** now”
More seriously, this could well be an artifact of his chosen examples. For example, looking at the article, it doesn’t appear to include climate change.
So why didn’t he include any examples?
Ah, yes good old “hide the decline”.
I stand corrected. It’s an artifact of your evaluation of which side is spreading misinformation.
Write because some people, apparently including yourself, will ignore evidence that contradicts your worldview, no matter how obvious it is.
In any case, the fact remains that Scott didn’t include any examples that weren’t his side behaving badly. Notice that your example of global warming doesn’t fit the paradigm of a concrete specific event about which a false story spreads despite fairly concrete evidence contradicting it.
Hey. Don’t be a dick.
Scott can notice whatever he wants to. As it happens, he finds himself in a blue environment and was raised in one such environment, which is why he’ll notice both good and bad behavior from that tribe more than that from the other side.
But then again, why would I even stoop to that level? Who cares? A post here is hardly conclusive evidence. True Caliph or not, some post of Scott’s is far, far, far less than you need to bring up the evidence you do.
And even if it did, the one person you engage to you accuse of some nonsense because of some silly reasons.
Be nice. Don’t accuse your opponents of bad faith the moment they disagree with you. This place aims for better than that.
So can we – and what we notice is that Scott observes bad behavior by the blue tribe and makes really florid excuses for that behavior (“I’m safeguarding free speech by preventing anyone on the right from speaking”) while assuming without (bothering to document) there’s just as bad behavior from the tribe that he hates.
Since his post (1 May 2017) about how Vox and CNN are pure and neutral and are really really trying to be as honest as humanly possible – unlike those monsters on the other side – Vox published intentional lies misrepresenting the state of genetic research with regards to race and intelligence, CNN was caught orchestrating a fake “Muslims for peace” demonstration, fired 3 reporters for fabricating a story about spurious links to Russia by a hedge fund manager who’s linked to Trump, and had an on-air personality get caught on camera admitting that there’s no substance to the Trump / Russia story. This was almost exactly a two month period. Did Vox and CNN decline precipitously since Scott wrote that article?
Scott is far better and far more honest than his fellow tribe members to whose faults he’s willfully blind. Pointing out his willful blindness is fair game.
SSC is the blog where that one guy on the left argues against his own sides very, very often. It’s that one place where the most famous of his posts are those where he argues against his own people. It’s the blog where you and a slew of other rightists go about their day just fine. It’s the place where you can go to defend fascism or white nationalism and not have anyone bat an eye.
None of what you’re saying about this place checks out. Last time Scott argued against the right, it was on a post directly after one he went off about his own side – and at much greater length, to boot. Go read this blog more. Go think about what you’re saying more. And if you want to tell me you did both, just go. There is no being familiar with this blog and arguing as you do in good faith.
Shouldn’t that be “eridology”? eris, eridos, eridi, erida
Beyond my Greek skills, to be honest. Do you really use grammatical forms like that with proper names?
Naval Gazing:
Jutland: Aftermath
(Series Index, Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
Upon returning home, the immediate analysis of Jutland was as a German victory. The Germans had lost one battlecruiser, one pre-dreadnought, four light cruisers, and five destroyers totaling 62,300 tons and approximately 2,500 men killed. The British total was three battlecruisers, three armored cruisers, and eight destroyers, 113,300 tons and about 6,100 men. The Germans also managed to get into port first, and put out a press release while the British were still on their way home, listing British losses accurately, but neglecting to mention the loss of Lutzow. The British government managed to bungle the messaging, and the resulting public perception of a defeat deeply shocked the British. The beginning of the Somme pushed it off the front page just as a more nuanced view began to come out.
The High Seas Fleet only sortied into the North Sea three more times. The first, in August, was an attempt to repeat the bombardments that had taken place earlier in the war. The British, warned by Room 40, attempted to intercept, but were spotted by a German zeppelin (the weather during Jutland had kept the extensive German zeppelin reconnaissance force grounded) and Scheer managed to avoid action. Another sortie, in October, was cancelled due to poor weather.
In 1917 and 1918, the High Seas Fleet remained in port, only leaving to aid in the capture of the Gulf of Riga, in the Baltic, and make a raid on a convoy between Britain and Norway in April of 1918. That failed due to faulty intelligence, and the Grand Fleet’s attempt to bring the Germans to action also failed.
Jellicoe was made First Sea Lord in December of 1916, with Beatty taking over command of the Grand Fleet. The German U-boat campaign was becoming increasingly worrying, and in February of 1917, they began a second round of unrestricted submarine warfare. The U-boat campaign is outside the scope of this article, but it came worryingly close to brining the British to their knees.
The German fleet quickly began to disintegrate as the men faced horrible conditions, in particular a lack of food. (This was a common problem in Germany due to the British blockade.) In August of 1917, 200 men were arrested, and two executed, and at least one German captain was pushed overboard by his men. In late October 1918, Scheer decided to launch one last do-or-die sortie against the Thames Estuary (which, in practice, would have simply been a suicide mission). The sailors refused to raise anchor, and the sortie was cancelled, but the revolt that began there quickly spread to Kiel and within barely two weeks it had brought down the German Empire.
As part of the Armistice, the High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow. Conditions there were, if anything, worse than those that the fleet had faced during the war. The Germans were not allowed off of their ships, and had limited food and mail. The admiral in command, von Reuter, switched flagships due to a group of sailors who would stomp on the deck above his cabin all night. On June 21st, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to be signed, although a last-minute delay was added. This was apparently not communicated to von Reuter, who ordered his ships scuttled at 1120, to keep them from falling into allied hands. Of the 16 capital ships in Scapa Flow, only one, the battleship Baden (commissioned after Jutland) was beached before she sank. This was a great relief to the British, who had wanted to avoid the major shift in the balance of naval power that the distribution of the German battleships would represent. Nine German sailors were killed during the scuttling, the last casualties of the war, and most of the wrecks were salvaged over the next few decades. A few ships remain on the bottom of Scapa Flow today.
(Post continued below due to length limit, which is apparently a thing.)
(Post split because I exceeded the length limit, which I didn’t even know was a thing.)
Jutland: Analysis
From a century away, Jutland was clearly a British victory. They never lost control of the North Sea, and the blockade was ultimately a key factor in the end of the war. The simple analysis of losses ignores the fact that the German fleet was on the whole much more badly damaged than the Grand Fleet. After the fleets returned home, Jellicoe had 23 battleships and 4 battlecruisers ready for immediate action, while Scheer had only 10 battleships. The German ships spent a total of 40% more days in drydock than did the British in the aftermath of the battle.
There were many lessons learned on both the technical and operational sides by the British. (I don’t have good sources on the Germans here, and frankly their doctrine worked about as well as it could at Jutland.) The destruction of the battlecruisers was obviously worrying, and Jellicoe and Beatty agreed to blame inadequate ship design instead of the true culprit, suicidal magazine-safety practices. (I go into this in more detail in my column on battlecruisers.) They also discovered that their armor-piercing shells were not good at anything other than a hit at right angles to the plate, to the point where some German 8” plates had survived hits from 15” shells (which should not have happened at the ranges in question). Improved shells were developed, but did not reach the fleet until April of 1918. Charles Dreyer, the captain of Iron Duke at Jutland, estimated that an additional 6 German ships would have been sunk if these ‘Greenboy’ shells had been available there based on the hits actually made.
Ultimately, the most important lessons came from the night battle. The British needed better tactics, equipment, and doctrine there. Post-Jutland photos of Grand Fleet battleships can often be recognized by the ‘coffee-box’ towers around the mainmast, for the new searchlights. These allowed the lights to be warmed up without being visible, and concentrated them amidships so they didn’t give away the ship’s course.
Jellicoe was sacked as First Sea Lord in December of 1917, due to political infighting dating back to 1909. After the end of the war, a major fight began between Jellicoe’s and Beatty’s supporters over the responsibility for the lack of an overwhelming victory. Beatty’s interest in self-promotion became particularly problematic when he became First Sea Lord. The British media was soon full of salvoes from supporters of both admirals, with Beatty placing his thumb on the scales of the official records. He continued to claim that the battleships had barely been engaged, ignoring the fact that they had in fact fired as many shells as his battlecruisers. He also denigrated Hugh Evan-Thomas’s contributions, and refused to own up to his own mistakes. Jellicoe tried to stay out of the controversy, and it finally began to die down in the mid-30s. The final blow to it was Jellicoe’s death in late 1935, followed months later by Beatty’s.
One interesting point I just recently found in a different book concerns the German name for the battle, Skagerrak. This is the strait between Denmark and Norway/Sweden, although the battle took place well to the south of the Skagerrak. The Germans did not know of the British system for keeping track of their ship movements, and thus believed that the battle was a chance encounter during a British attempt to break into the Baltic.
Jutland: Alternate History
This brings us to the what-ifs of the battle. What could either side have done better? Could Jellicoe have won a victory on the scale of Trafalgar? If so, what would have happened? Could Scheer have managed to do enough damage to the British fleet to break the blockade?
The daylight battle looks strangely resistant to what-ifs. The broad strokes of the runs south and north would not have been badly affected if Indefatigable and Queen Mary had not blown up, or if Beatty had handled the 5th BS better. Despite all of Beatty’s mistakes, he did lead Scheer to Jellicoe as planned, and Jellicoe made the right decision when it came to the deployment. This is a massive tribute to Jellicoe, that fixing any problem doesn’t actually make the British position that much better when the deployment starts. Scheer also fought skillfully and well, and to get a significant difference in the outcome of this phase, we have to introduce more mistakes on one of the flag bridges. A change of mind on Jellicoe’s part during the turn-away is likely to have lead to losses among the Grand Fleet. In all probability, these losses would not be enough to change the balance of power in the North Sea, although a particularly bad day might have seen relative parity between the combatants.
The night action is a different story. Here, the British screwed up by the numbers, and I’d discard the real history as a particularly stupid what-if by German fanboys if I was in an alternate universe. There are lots of factors here. British feelings of inferiority in night-fighting, lack of initiative among the fleet, miscommunications and general lack of communication, and Jellicoe’s distrust of Room 40. If any of these had changed, the results might have been very different.
A night action between the capital ships would have been very risky for both sides. Even I haven’t been able to figure out exactly who was where and doing what at a given time, so it’s really hard to give concrete predictions as to the results of a given ship choosing to open fire. Night gunnery did not become feasible except at short range until radar arrived, so it’s possible that several small actions between capital ships could have been fought without it turning into a general engagement. The destruction of Black Prince is the prototype for this, and Moltke and Seydlitz probably should have been destroyed by the British.
But what if Jellicoe had gotten enough information to figure out that Scheer was making for Horns Reef, and had intercepted him there at dawn? This requires somewhat more competence on the part of the chain between Room 40 and Jellicoe, but not enough to strain plausibility. As dawn breaks, the Grand Fleet opens fire at the Germans starting down the channel to the Jade. They have good gunnery conditions (geography and strategy both put them to the west, with the window closing when the sun comes over the horizon), and almost certainly sink at least Seydlitz, who was in real trouble at that point. The obvious wildcard is the weather, but it’s not impossible to imagine the High Seas Fleet pinned against the Danish coast unable to return effective fire and eventually destroyed.
In that case, there might have been huge repercussions. With a battle fleet now unchallenged, the British might have been able to enter the Baltic. This had been a long-time project of Jackie Fisher’s, although he was out of power, his plan to land troops on the Baltic coast of Germany was always a bit of a long-shot, and was very unlikely after the failure of Gallipoli. However, the real prize in the Baltic would be the ability of the British to reach St. Petersburg. This would have massively improved the ability of the British to support the Russians, and might well have forestalled the Russian revolution, or allowed a more effective allied intervention after the Russians pulled out of the war. The results of that are well outside the scope that I’m looking at, but are potentially massive.
Another benefit to the British would be in the war against the U-boats. Early in the war, the British planned to attack the island of Borkum in the North Sea off of the Jade, but this plan was abandoned due to potential German interference. With the main mechanism for said interference gone, the British might have been able to turn Borkum into a base for their campaign against the U-boats, which could now be intercepted closer to Germany, where they had less room to maneuver. Also, the High Seas Fleet provided much of the manpower for the U-boat force, and the loss of that manpower would not have helped the Germans.
But what about a German victory? This is hard to arrange, and involves several strokes of bad luck or even more serious mistakes by the British. Even the loss of half a dozen battleships would have been survivable without a major change to the war, as the British had that many either in the yards or about to be completed. But if we ignore all of that, what is the result of a German victory that breaks the blockade?
This is where the US enters the picture. The US business community was not happy with the British blockade, and I’ve even seen suggestions that the 1916 fleet was intended to be capable of breaking it. If the Germans were able to resume trade with the US (and that’s a big if, and one that I don’t want to go into here), it’s entirely possible that the US would stay isolationist, particularly because in this situation unrestricted submarine warfare would be unlikely to occur. This greatly strengthens Germany (if nothing else, the food shortages either disappear or are greatly mitigated) and weakens the Allies. I’m not sure where the war (or the world) would go from there.
Apologies for how long this one ran, but I couldn’t bring myself to split it in half and stretch this series (which has already run a full month) another week. Next week, we’ll have the column I promised on life aboard the Iowa. After that, it looks like we’ll be taking a step away from battleships into the world of net-centric warfare.
Was the fleet a good investment for Germany? Would Germany had been better off in the war if it had a much smaller fleet and the resources instead invested in the army?
No and yes. Basically, the German fleet, so far as it was justified, was built under what was called ‘Risk Theory’, an early version of deterrence. When the British entered the war, that went out the window, and the Germans were stuck trying to find some use for their ships. I’m not sure exactly how useful a bigger army would have been (I seem to recall that the limits on the 1914 campaign were logistical, and a bigger army wouldn’t have helped), but it couldn’t have been worse than what they did have.
With the benefit of full hindsight, Germany’s best alternate investment of the resources would probably have been supply trucks and armored cars.
Logistics were indeed the bottleneck for the initial German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914, and the big problem was that horse-drawn wagon trains that they relied on for moving supplies from the last intact rail head (a bit behind the pre-war border, I think, since heavy fighting tends to tear up rail lines and there’s only so fast even the best engineering corps can restore them), and those don’t go much faster than marching soldiers, so a rapid advance leaves the supply train struggling to keep up. And in addition, as the round-trip gets longer and longer, the throughput of the system gets worse and worse. And it doesn’t help that you also have to ship in feed for all your horses and rations for your teamsters.
Trucks (even pre-WW1 models) go quite a bit faster than horses, and they can move more cargo per volume of fuel than horses can per volume of feed. Motorized logistics did exist in WW1, but not on a large enough scale to make a difference. A heavy investment in trucks in the late pre-war years could have pushed the logistical limit of the German advance a bit deeper into France, and it wouldn’t have needed to go much deeper in order to allow Germany to capture Paris or at least come close enough to it to shell rail yards and factories and deny France the benefit of their main transportation hub and industrial center.
Armored cars were introduced not long before the war (an American model in 1912 and a Belgian model in early 1914), and the Belgian model in particular proved effective enough in early fighting that Germany developed their own in 1915. During the initial offensives, a large force of armored cars would have been quite a bit more useful as scouts, raiders, and flankers than the horse cavalry historically employed in the role, and they could have let the Germans be more combat effective particularly during the latter stages of the initial invasion with a smaller and easier-to-supply force. Better scouting would have made a bit difference at the First Battle of the Marne, perhaps averting it entirely as the French had scuttled their plans to abandon Paris for and instead launched a successful counteroffensive because one of the German armies had turned and exposed its flank to a French army it didn’t know was there.
Other options would include expanding the engineering corps so rail head could be extended faster, stockpiling nonperishable food in preparation for a blockade, or just adding a few more infantry divisions to reinforce the Eastern front early in the war so Germany could win bigger victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, allowing them to push deeper into Russian territory and forcing Russia to pull back forces from their offensive against Austria.
The limiting factor of trucks in ww1 was off road performance. Trucks were faster than horses, on roads, but tactical mobility requires off road abilities. ww1 era engines and drive trains really lacked the ability to make trucks that could carry more than a horse, faster than a horse, for lower logistical requirements than a horse.
Even if you assume that such a truck could be designed and built, though, you have the question of numbers. The model T assembly line opens up at the end of 1910, and the millionth car (which was was much less technically ambitious than one that would be needed for carrying cargo for troops in muddy fields) wouldn’t be produced until 1916. If the entire german army had realized the importance of the assembly line and trucks in 1911, then immediately began a crash program to build them, , they might have been able to build a few hundred thousand of them before the war started, but not enough for the whole army. It’s worth remembering that even in ww2, only the US managed to mechanize its entire army. it’s hard to imagine the possibility of the germans doing that 20 year earlier.
@cassander
He wasn’t proposing a fully mechanized force. The idea was to use trucks to bridge the gap between the railheads and the front-line distribution depots. Roads are easier to build/fix than rail lines, and the technology was definitely there for roadbound trucks to be superior to horses. The Voie Sacree proves that rather convincingly.
@bean
You’d still need hundreds of thousands of trucks. I don’t have numbers for germany, but in 1914, there were something like 300k motor vehicles in all of france and the UK combined. I grant that, in hindsight, a crash program of that sort might have paid off, but there’s no possible way for people to have known that at the time.
Bean’s correct: I was proposing partially motorized logistics, not WW2-style motorized infantry.
The armored cars were a separate proposal, as a partial replacement for horse cavalry during mobile operations in the opening weeks of the war. The off-road performance problems Cassander brought up could be a deal-breaker for those, since the success of Belgian armored cars in 1914 might have been a product of operating defensively on intact internal roads rather than offensively and having to cross fought-over terrain.
Edit, since Cassander replied while I was typing: when you say hundreds of thousands of trucks, would that be for a full motorized logistics train from the rail heads, or is that the minimum you think would be necessary to have a large strategic impact?
On the hindsight question, these are the key pieces of info I can think of that Germany would need in order to conclude that a crash truck-building program would be necessary and beneficial:
1. Realize the limitations of horse-based logistics to support their war plans. It seems like German logistics corps should have known their own capabilities and limitations at the time, but perhaps they did but weren’t being listened to by the general staff.
2. Realize that the rail heads would be stuck at the pre-war border for the critical period. German pre-war plans did definitely underestimate the likelihood of Belgium refusing the German demand of unopposed passage, and they underestimated the effectiveness of Belgian defenses (not by anywhere near enough to lose, but enough to delay the advance and capture less Belgian infrastructure intact).
3. Realize the benefits and effectiveness of motorized logistics. It was new enough and the stakes were high enough that it’s not surprising they didn’t leap to large-scale adoption of supply trucks as soon as they were viable, since it wasn’t immediately clear how viable they were and how valuable the could be in wartime.
4. Realize how urgent the situation was. Nobody know that a general European war was going to break out in 1914 until the July Crisis was well underway, and without that knowledge, there’s no sense of urgency to justify a crash program.
@Eric Rall
Bear in mind, the critical element of a motorized force largely is a motorized logistics train. It wasn’t tanks that determined if your division was mechanized or not in ww2, it was if you had trucks and half-tracks you had for your support elements.
I’m thinking the minimum necessary to replace horse transport for moving supplies from the railhead to the troops. That was a job for millions of horses in real life, the vast majority of which would be used in logistical roles, and that those can be replaced at a ratio of something on the order of 5 to 1. the german army mobilized something like 700,000 horses for the early stages of the war. so I’m figuring they need to replace an absolute minimum of something like 100k trucks to replace them
As a rule, the logistics guys were not the most highly regarded in the german army. this was a problem that demonstrated itself repeatedly in both world wars.
It might have been viable by 1920 or so, I have serious doubts it was even possible before then.
@Cassander
Don’t the logistics guys generally suffer a certain respect deficit compared to combat troops in most/all militaries? The Germans were relatively crummy at logistics in WWII – postwar the generals blamed Hitler for this, but then again, they would, wouldn’t they? Were they worse than the other militaries in WWI (as opposed to, especially later in the war, being surrounded and choked off from needed resouces)?
@dndnrsn says:
Generally, yeah. Less so the British and American armies though.
This is a hard question to answer because you need to account for the fact that the germans in both wars were laboring under a rather large material deficit vis a vis their enemies. a substantial part of their logistical troubles were simply the result of them not having enough stuff to go around.
After accounting for that, though, I think it is fair to say that the Germans were worse at logistics. Their great offensives persistently have an issue with running out of steam at the crucial moment, far from the launch point, with exhaustion of men and material always a prominent reason for the failure. Either they’re actually worse at physically physically delivering supplies, or they simply weren’t adding a sufficient factor for the tyranny of distance in their calculations. Where other armies would pause and rest, they would often take one final swing, and lose all.
About a hundred thousand of those were cavalry horses (104 four-squadron regular regiments at 709 riding horses per regiment, 6 six-squadron regular regiments at 1057 riding horses per regiment, and 36 three-squadron reserve, landswehr, or ertatz regiments at 532 riding horses per regiment). Still, that leaves 600,000 draft horse to be replaced for full motorization, which at a 5:1 ratio would mean 120,000 trucks, which I agree is utterly implausible by 1914.
Setting aside for the moment the difficulty of deciding to motorize in 1910 without the benefit of post-WW2 hindsight, I decided to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how many trucks Germany could afford if they’d abandoned naval construction at the start of 1911. A Model T runabout cost $680 in 1911, and when truck models were introduced in 1922 (they appear to have existed pretty early, but they weren’t offered as a factory option until them), they cost about twice as much as the runabouts, so assume a $1500 cost for a truck in 1911 (doubled and rounded up).
A BB or BC cost between 45 million and 60 million goldmarks at the time, or 11.25 million to 15 million dollars, so it could be traded off (unrealistically assuming a near-instant ramp-up in truck building capacity) for 7.5k to 10k trucks. A quick scan of wikipedia turns up 10 German BBs or BCs laid down between Jan 1911 and July 1914, giving us somewhere between 75k and 100k trucks worth of naval construction budget, or enough to replace between 60% and 80% of Germany’s draft horses, or to increase Germany’s post-railhead logistics capacity by a corresponding percentage.
Unrealistic things about this analysis:
1. I don’t know when money was committed for German naval construction. For simplicity, I assumed the date the ship was laid down. It was probably on some kind of milestone plan, so Germany might have been able to save some money by cancelling existing orders in 1910-11, but wouldn’t have had the money saved that was due to be paid after August 1914 for ships that weren’t completed by then. Since construction was accelerating during the period, I probably overestimated the money theoretically available.
2. It costs money to rapidly ramp up construction capacity, so I probably underestimated the cost of trucks by using something close to a normal production cost rather than a crash program cost.
3. I didn’t account for money saved on operating costs of cancelled ships, nor for money saved on lighter ships if those were also cancelled. But neither did I account for the maintenance and operating cost of the trucks.
4. Again, this is a purely theoretical exercise with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t disagree with the arguments for why it was staggeringly unlikely in 1910 for any country to launch a massive crash program for military trucks.
To get enough trucks for a war Germany could have taxed horses and subsidized trucks to get its farming and industrial system to use trucks that could then be borrowed by the army during a war.
@Eric Rall
Those numbers seem reasonable to me, though I’d add one further assumption that we’re assuming that germany in 1910 was actually capable of designing and building a truck capable of replacing 5 horses over muddy terrain, and I’m far from certain that’s a given.
@Cassander
Bit of column A, bit of column B, is at least the answer for WWII: going into Barbarossa, they had one general in charge of supply trains and one in charge of supply trucks (and I think that was only for trucks that were not assigned to lower-level units in particular). They had some ludicrous number of different models of truck. They also when planning for Barbarossa appear to have adopted the “we only have resources to x, therefore, we will be able to win by doing x” mode of thinking.
WWI, everyone had the same logistic, reinforcement, communication trouble, didn’t they? It’s not like any army was ever able to exploit breakthroughs in the ways the generals wanted, due to a simple technological lack. The 1918 offensive failed due to overall lack of supplies and exhaustion of men – what indication is there that a failure to deliver stuff where it was needed (above and beyond the problems everyone had) was a factor?
@dndnrsn says:
I agree with all of that. Though it’s worth pointing out that the ludicrous number of models came about largely (but not entirely) because of a lack of resources. They had to requisition all the trucks they could get from the civilian sector and defeated armies across a dozen countries to fill out the ranks because german industry couldn’t make enough in the time they had. Again, it’s hard to tease out the difference between skill/attention devoted to logistics and the difficulty of making do with less.
Everyone had similar challenges. Every country has a shell crisis in 1915, for example, and they’re remarkably similar. And one must account for the scale of german operational success generating outsized problems.
That said, I still think it’s fair to speak of the german tendency towards “one last swing”. It’s most notably on display in 1918, but also visible at the Marne and Verdun, and it definitely speaks to a systematic downplaying of the importance of logistical factors. Added to that, you have to look at how the germans managed the war economy as a whole, and there’s general agreement that they did a poor job in both world wars.
Both in victory and defeat, Germany’s way to win was quick decisive operations, so they planned with the assumption that would work. Nobody likes the guy who says “hey, we’re gonna lose.”
Verdun was a case of something that was supposed to be decisive getting spun later on as having intended to be a campaign of attrition. The British did this too, more than once, in the war.
The High Seas Fleet must go down as one of the greatest wastes of money in all of history, for the reasons bean elucidates.
bean mentions the possibility that without the high seas fleet, the British might have reached St Petersburg and stiffened Russian resistance to Germany. Preventing that wasn’t a waste of money.
Even in WWII, the Russians used clouds of horse cavalry with a tank somewhere inside. Something similar could have worked in WWI.
Buying one of the world’s largest fleets of battleships to guard a single choke point is, I would submit, a great waste of money. Torpedo boats, submarines, and fast minelayers are cheaper. Also enough of an army to make sure the Danes don’t complain when you lay mines in their waters, but that doesn’t take much.
Germany didn’t have a High Seas Fleet in WWII, and yet the British never even tried to operate in the Baltic and instead took the very long way around to get to Russia.
Churchill looked at refitting a couple of the Rs or QEs with bigger blisters and thicker decks to use in the Baltic. I suspect that technological changes between WWI and WWII had a lot to do with the British reluctance. Better mines, better torpedoes, and particularly better aircraft are going to make narrow seas bad places to be.
I think the crews of the Petropavlovsk, Hatsuse, Yashima, Navarin, Kynaz Suvorov, Sissoi Veliky, Formidable, Irresistable, Goliath, Triumph, Majestic, Pommern, Suffren, Regina Margherita, Gaulois, Cornwallis, Danton, Viribus Unitas, Szent Istvan, and Brittania would take issue with the implied claim that WWI-era mines and torpedoes weren’t more than good enough to sink WWI-era battleships. It would be easier to compile a list of battleships sunk by something that wasn’t a mine or torpedo.
For either defending or forcing a narrow, shallow strait like the Oresund, dreadnought battleships are absolutely the wrong weapon. The High Seas Fleet makes some sense as a deterrent or a defense against distant blockade, not so much as a defense against Baltic incursions.
John, you’re slipping. What about Audacious?
In seriousness, I do think that it would have been easier to force the Baltic in WWI than in WWII. You’d still need to do it very carefully, but the Oresund doesn’t have shore guns shooting at you, so you can cover your minesweepers better, and there aren’t a bunch of Stukas right off their bases attacking you.
Edit:
I suspect lessons learned from WWI may have played a part, too. Quite a few of those were sunk in ways that may not have been clear to the British at the time. Also, some were pre-dreadnoughts deliberately risked in ways that would not have been acceptable for more modern ships. (This was a problem when there weren’t disposable battleships in WW2.)
Drat. Anyone else, and I’d have gotten away with that slip.
Actually, it maybe does. The Danes mined and defended the Danish straits from 1915, in de facto collaboration with Germany, as part of the terms for their neutrality being respected during the war. So either British minesweepers are attacking the coastal defenses of a neutral power in that power’s territorial waters, in which case Danish guns are shooting at them, or Denmark isn’t neutral any more, in which case German guns are shooting at them. Possibly German and Danish guns.
And from a prewar perspective, the various diplomatic and military strategies to ensure the Oresund closed to the British, have to be cheaper than the High Seas Fleet.
What’s particularly interesting is that that’s about the only slip you couldn’t have gotten away with. I don’t actually memorize the list of ships lost and causes, but Audacious was traumatic enough to the British to show up a lot.
I have to admit ignorance on this. Friedman (Fighting the Great War at Sea) didn’t cover this very much. He did mention it as a possibility.
A good point. On the other hand, Denmark was pretty valuable to the Germans as a neutral transshipment point for running supplies through the blockade, so I don’t know if it would make sense to bring them in as a belligerent. On the gripping hand, they didn’t expect the war to last that long.
The German fleet in being kept the British navy only half as effective as it would have been otherwise. In the long run, the Germans should have simply skipped the whole war, but naval expenses weren’t a huge blunder compared to the failure to have a fish pond every half mile across the whole country. You’re on the Prussian General Staff, you know outside food might be cut off, you don’t prepare internal food sources? Dumkopf. I’d know the German word, if they had.
Alistair Horne thought the British should have made an amphibious attack on the Kaisershaven canal in WWI. The German fleet was one big reason they never did. It might have held. I think it would have failed and the Germans would have, at the tactical level, won a battle with high explosives fought in their own cities. And at the strategic level, surrendered a couple years sooner.
On reflection, I think John Schilling is right about going through the Baltic to St Petersberg.
@engleberg
As John and Bean point out, there were much more efficient ways of shutting down the baltic.
The point of the british fleet was to allow the british to blockade any enemy they wanted, the high seas fleet in no way prevented that.
@…there were much more efficient ways of shutting down the Baltic-
Yes, on reflection, I agree.
@The point of the British fleet was to allow the British to blockade any enemy they wanted, the German high seas fleet in no way prevented that-
There are lots of points to maintaining a fleet in being, and everyone in every navy at the time had read Mahan. The chance of a bunch of battleships showing up over the horizon seriously hampered the British. Look at the fuss in Africa over a couple cruisers. This wasn’t WWII, when battleships were doable targets for every air force. If the Germans had a High Seas fleet in being in WWII we’d never have dared to try D-Day (WWII we’d have sunk it from the air, but not in WWI). Without a German fleet the British raids on Zeebrugge would have been continuous assaults, not raids. British battleships that knew they could retreat and repair unhindered would have sailed into German ports and shelled them. Maybe Copenhagen, like Nelson. The Germans would have usually won those fights, sort of won, fought with high explosives in their home towns.
@engleberg
You’re sort of right on this one. I’d point to Borkum as a much better bet than the Baltic if the Germans had no fleet, and that could have been a very serious problem for the U-boats. Part of the issue, though, was that the British didn’t have that many places to use battleships that were being shorted because they had to keep ships facing the Germans. Between the pre-dreadnoughts and the French, they could cover their other tasks.
This was very much not true during WWII. The rise of the Italian and German navies badly upset British plans in the Far East during the mid-30s. Tirpitz alone caused all sorts of issues, most notably PQ-17, but also tying down a substantial amount of British naval power until she was finally sunk. I’m still not sure she was worth it, but in fairness, the entire German war effort is basically impossible to analyze on that basis.
Some googling leads me to believe that the British already knew that their shells were prone to premature explosions and breaking up at steeper angles, but that they thought that the problems could not be easily fixed. They also probably believed that the battles would be fought at closer range where the shells would hit with a more shallow angle, so the problem would be less.
Then Jutland and some other engagements showed them that the Germans had in fact solved some of those issues and (partly) based on recovered unexploded German shells, the British then redesigned their shells to have stronger shell bodies, a more stable fillers and better fuses*.
Also, amusing to read that the greenboys were painted green to distinguish them from the old shells, which is where the name comes from.
* The latter two seem to be linked, because if you make the explosive harder to detonate, then you logically need a very good fuse to get it to explode.
I’m trying to get a copy of Riddle of the Shells, but this looks to be mostly correct. Jellicoe did try to get improved shells when he was controller, but that project died with his successor.
This, I don’t think is quite true. The British may have tested their shells in the way you’d expect if this was true, but their ideas on battle range changed quite frequently. Overall, they expected battle at longer ranges than the Germans did, although the ranges at Jutland were, IIRC, somewhat shorter than the ranges the maximum ranges they expected during the decade before the battle. I’d have to go through books to get numbers.
This has been a really interesting series, thanks Bean!
On a different note, I got some sad news last week. Bob DeSpain, one of our volunteers at Iowa, passed away. Bob was 92, and one of three remaining survivors of the USS Hoel, one of the ships sunk during the action off Samar, for my money the greatest battle in the history of the US Navy. He would usually work a table in Iowa’s wardroom, selling copies of Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. I have one, with his signature next to his picture in it. It was a tremendous honor to know him.
But did the Germans know this? I mean, certainly they knew how badly their ships had been damaged, but did they understand how (relatively) lightly the British had gotten off?
It seems plausible that, with three modern British capital ships spectacularly blown to bits during the battle vs. one pre-dreadnought on the German side, and one German ship scuttled after heavy damage vs. an unknown number of British, the early newspaper accounts might accurately reflect a German belief that the High Seas Fleet had given far better than it got in spite of being outnumbered 3:2. And in a fair fight, on account of the clever planning for submarine ambushes and zeppelin reconnaissance coming to naught. Similarly, if the British failures in magazine safety and night fighting doctrine could be easily corrected, that also isn’t knowable to the Germans.
The strategic situation that (IMO correctly) lead Germany to decide it needed to risk battle at Jutland hadn’t changed, and after a few months of repairs they still had the fleet that “won” at Jutland. So why wasn’t there a rematch?
In particular, you note the August 1916 sortie where the High Seas Fleet turned back after a zeppelin spotted the approaching British fleet. That seems like exactly the situation the Germans had tried to set up at Jutland, where superior reconnaissance would compensate for inferior numbers and allow the German fleet to engage the British at a tactical advantage. Maybe, given the dismal performance of the British in the night action at Jutland, deploying ahead of the British fleet but just out of visual range at sunset.
High risk, high reward, but that’s a much better use for the High Seas Fleet than staying parked in the Jade and slowly starving. More generally, why not sortie every month and actively court a Jutland II, instead of sailing only three more times and turning away from battle when it is offered? The most likely outcome, given what we now know, is that the Germans lose Jutland II and III and don’t have enough ships left for Jutland IV, but that’s still better than what they did. And as noted they probably couldn’t have know how much the odds had shifted, so it is strange that they didn’t try.
I think they probably did. They knew that they’d had to run away from the British battleships twice, and that they hadn’t managed to kill any of them. And they hadn’t been engaging long enough to do a lot of cumulative damage, either. Both sides seemed to have a reasonably good handle on how much damage they’d done to the other. I was actually surprised how closely the claims of the various gunnery departments correlated with the hits from the other side’s records. So they knew they’d gotten pounded when their T was crossed without hitting back very hard.
The Kaiser had previously been very reluctant to let the fleet fight. The previous commanders had been very cautious, and Scheer had been appointed specifically to use the fleet more aggressively. After Jutland, the Kaiser clamped down again.
I’d have to check sources, but that particular action was, IIRC, rather weird. Nobody is quite sure why the Germans acted as they did.
They weren’t necessarily actively courting Jutland. The idea was to defeat the British in detail, which they weren’t really able to do. They thought the action happening where it was was an accident, not a deliberate engagement on the part of the British. Their strategic thinking was rather muddled, but I believe that they were also worried about the Baltic, and would rather not expose it by throwing away their fleet. German strategy in general is just baffling.
Missed this the first time. The Germans didn’t have night-fighting totally sorted out. At Jutland, they had the advantage that their strategy (run for Horns Reef) didn’t require fancy coordination to work, and most units proceeded independently or as part of a small group of ships. The more complicated part, the destroyer attack on the Grand Fleet, was a failure. I really doubt that they’d actively seek a night action, particularly given their lack of plotting capability. The perfection of plotting was what made night actions possible in WW2. The Germans didn’t even have rudimentary plots at that point.
My favorite point of departure for a German victory at Jutland is clearer weather, allowing the Zeppelin scouts to go up. Assuming minimal butterflies from this in the beginning of the engagement, this would make Beatty’s mistakes in the Run to the South much more expensive. If Scheer got advance warning via the Zeppelins that Hipper was leading Beatty towards him and what the course and position were, then Scheer could have deployed to ambush him more effectively rather than the historical meeting engagement with the leading edge of Scheer’s line of battle steaming parallel to him. I’m not sure whether this would mean crossing his T or splitting the battle line to deploy on both sides of Beatty to try to box him in. If the Germans managed to sink Beatty’s entire force including the Queen Elizabeth fast battleships (not sure how plausible this is: Beatty would be facing huge numerical odds in a very disadvantageous position, and his fleet hasn’t practiced the Battle About Turn maneuver that Scheer historically used to escape Jellicoe crossing his T in the main fleet action, but we’ve already discussed how hard BBs and BCs are to kill, and Beatty’s ships had a significant speed advantage that they could use to get away if they survive long enough), that’s a rather nasty blow to Britain. Nowhere near enough to break the blockade or even to even the odds for a future engagement, but it would leave Germany in a much better position for future engagements.
After destroying Beatty’s force, Scheer could declare victory and return to port, or he could use the combination of Zeppelin reconnaissance and having Hipper’s BCs now operating unopposed by Beatty to try to set up a fleet engagement with Jellicoe under favorable terms.
That might work, but it does bear pointing out that the weather on the North Sea is usually horrid, and that might well have protected the British. The Germans did get some Zeppelins up on the morning of the 1st, and they weren’t that effective. If visibility was good, then the British might well have seen the Germans soon enough to be able to avoid the trap. Also, I don’t think we should ignore the fact that the Germans probably would have had similar signal problems to the British in doing something fancy. And that German doctrine was to run for home if the Grand Fleet was sighted, which it would have been in that case.
There’s also the possibility of the german u-boat screening line working as intended, either before the battle or taking out a bunch of ships on the way back from it. It seems to me that the germans never really took proper advantage of their ability to lure the british fleet out at a time and place of their choosing.
They never understood that ability. And U-boats were never that good against alert, escorted ships.
U-boats were very limited about what they could vs warships largely because of their low underwater speed and limited endurance, but those advantages can be largely mitigated if you know where the enemy is going to be and when. The idea is to send out the U-boats then sortie the HSF a few days later somewhere where the grand fleet will drive right over the u-boat line to get to. IIRC, the germans had some subs stationed outside of british bases for this purpose, but that positioning was problematic for a few reasons. I’m thinking somewhere closer to the main action, but still separate from the fleet.
Yes. I got that. Still wouldn’t work. The Germans didn’t realize how well the British could find them, so they wouldn’t have tried to stay in one place with U-boats waiting in ambush. The exits of the ports would be the best place to put the U-boats unless they could get U-boats that could keep up with the fleet and be positioned tactically. The Germans never built that kind of submarine, but the British did, and it didn’t work all that well…
I don’t mean waiting in one place, I meant doing something highly provocative to lure them out, like shelling portsmouth.
To get to Portsmouth, they’d have to run through the channel. They’d find the Grand Fleet behind them, and be hunted down. No chance of that. (Not to mention whatever defenses Portsmouth had.) They tried raids on the east coast of England several times, and it didn’t work. That was what Jutland was supposed to be, before the British ran them down.
I was able to get answers to the questions about sea cabins on British ships in WWI from last week. At least the QEs and Rs had them for the captains c1918 (plans in Raven & Roberts). I don’t have deck plans for earlier classes, but I think they existed there, too.
Cool! Thank you for checking.
Anyone have a take on “Democracy: The God That Failed”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed
Huh, I read this book a couple years back when I was in the practice of writing mini-reviews for my blog, but I can’t find the blog post about it anywhere. I must have forgotten to write one.
I remember finding it good, but not great. Probably depends on your existing views and how familiar you are with HHH and his arguments. You probably already know this, but the main unique POV the book advocates is that not only is democracy generally bad (you can get this from pretty much any libertarian book), but that monarchy is actually superior. The main argument is that in a monarchy, the state is essentially the private property of the monarch, who then has incentives structured to ensure he takes good care of it not just in the short term, but in the long-term as well. In a Democracy, there are few long-term incentives and quite a lot of short-term ones. I found it a pretty compelling argument and I haven’t heard much of a counter to it, other than appeals to fairness.
How much of the book is theoretical vs empirical?
IIRC, mostly theoretical. Hoppe is still Austrian school, after all!
A monarch has much better incentives to take care of the state and much worse incentives to take care of people. If the monarch can institute forced labour camps, “citizen happiness” doesn’t enter into consideration except in terms of “unhappy citizens might overthrow the state”. If the monarch has overwhelming strength of arms on his side, rebellion isn’t a risk and he will throw people into labour camps where they work sixteen hours a day because he has no incentive not to.
I believe his was response to this was something to the effect that for monarchs, the real threat was rarely some sort of popular uprising/peasant revolt, but rather, attempts at takeover by opposing factions and dynasties within the same general upper-class sphere.
If you do a poor job managing your kingdom and are seen as a tyrant, and next door is another king who is far less tyrannical, and your various priests and advisors and lords and everyone else decides it might be better to be ruled by the neighbor king, your days are probably numbered.
So citizen happiness isn’t an incentive even in the marginal way I described. That seems like an obvious problem with monarchy, given that most of us would prefer a state that increases citizen happiness to one that doesn’t.
This is always the threat for rulers, in any system, because there is only one system – oligarchy. The peasants can’t do anything without leadership. As long as leadership stays loyal, you’ve got nothing to worry about from the masses.
Which is curious, because the regimes that tend to do such things have historically strongly tended to be non-monarchical. (Never mind that during the times that monarchy was the status quo, people *had* to work those long hours, or starve, due to low labour efficiency due to primitive technology.)
Definitely one of the key insights from the book, from what I remember; it’s been a while since I read it.
(My own view is to extend this insight beyond just “monarch as owner of state” to lower levels of hierarchy in a more general propertization of authority. Because, as others noted in this thread, Iron Law of Oligarchy — no monarch is truly “absolute”, and power is always shared amongst an elite; the logic that applies to a monarch applies to them as well.)
For a counterpoint, see The Dictator’s Handbook. It basically argues that the number of people that a leader has to please to stay in power, called the “selectorate,” has a powerful influence on the behavior of the leader. Roughly, if you only have to please a few people to stay in power, you might as well just use the tax money to buy them all Lamborghinis, rather than building new power plants for the teeming masses. In contrast, in a democracy, the selectorate should be very large, so leaders should have to provide public goods.
I think this is an oversimplification in a lot of ways, but it’s at least an interesting way of thinking of the problem.
I haven’t read it yet (it’s on my list), but I’m familiar with the general thesis from my time among the Nerks. I was about to post a comment about democracy actually, and couldn’t find anywhere to fit it in the topic about polarization above, and I’m also interested in whether Hoppe addresses this specifically.
I wonder how much democracy and political polarization are connected, and to what degree we can correct that without crippling democracy. If you banned political speech altogether, you might bring an end to the grip it has over everyday life and interaction, and then voting would become a highly private act between you and the voting booth. This is sort of the other end of the axis from the “lets just bring kings back” solution. By its very nature, however, this solution cannot be. There would be no way for political parties to communicate their policies to the public, rendering the system unworkable, outside of just labeling one lever left and one lever right and calling it a day, since we all pretty much have two party systems anyway. It’s also difficult to define political speech and police it in a way that is itself not politically biased. It seems then that political polarization is part and parcel of democracy and that all attempts to minimize it will fail, because democracy needs at least two fired up sides in order to function, or it will eventually fall into disuse.
Theoretically the purpose of democracy is so that the government is checked and corrected by the people, but this is never actually so, and instead people settle into one of two coalitions that remain relatively fixed in terms of policy prescriptions over time periods of generations and arguably beyond into history. I wonder if the real purpose of democracy is just to act as a pressure valve, and not to be a way of improving the government as is typically imagined. The common will is not rule by experimental scientists and engineers, after all. This makes me believe that the best halfway house position would indeed be to call the system’s bluff, and install not a monarchy, but a two party system that automatically rotates every four years – by agreement to renew the truce – between the left house and the right house. This simultaneously frees people from the need to become part of a political army, while avoiding the lingering question that monarchical absolutism raises; “Whose King, exactly?” In this case, both sides have their elites that agree to rotate. So basically, the current system without all the pretense and hassle.
The Atlantic has an interesting article about how to deal with North Korea. To summarize: all options are bad, but some are worse than others.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/
Some thoughts:
1. What do our local allies (South Korea and Japan, in particular) want done about North Korea? They’re the ones who have to live with whatever policy is adopted, with far more direct consequences than anything the US faces.
2. As far as I can tell, the ball is basically in China’s court right now. They could shut down North Korea within a couple of years just by ending their shipments of various supplies. They choose not a do so because a) the failure of North Korea could get them millions of desperate refugees trying to cross border, b) a takeover of NK by SK would put a close US ally right on their border, and c) anything that’s a thorn in the side of a US in South-East Asia is a good thing. But I have to ask, what might China want in return for their assistance in getting rid of NK?
3. Since NK is continually advancing toward making ICBMs that could reach the US mainland, some sort of small-scale ABM system would be a good thing to have. How difficult would it be to build such a thing?
There’s also to be considered that slapping crippling sanctions on an aggressive nuclear power could possibly have negative consequences for China.
I mean, obviously China would win any war vs NK. But they might have to put up with Beijing getting nuked in the process.
Also d) if China is the cause of any North Korean collapse, about a thousand ballistic missiles get launched in the general direction of Beijing, several dozen of them nuclear. That’s what the House Kim Family Atomics are for, to make it intolerably expensive for anyone to try and bring down the Kim Dynasty.
We don’t normally think in terms North Korea waging war against China, because we understand that the particular combination of arrogance and stupidity that would be required for that is far out of character for China but somewhat plausible for the United States and/or South Korea.
Something so incredibly valuable that it would be worth a dozen atom bombs falling on Beijing. Good luck with that.
I’ve always been skeptical about the refugee issue. It wouldn’t be that hard for China to put extra security on the border to keep the masses from flooding in. And it’s not like they have any scruples about mass deportations for the ones who do get across.
>what might China want in return for their assistance in getting rid of NK?
Taiwan.
But North Korea probably has a plan to threaten China with atomic weapons if China turns against it.
From what I hear, the new South Korean government, and perhaps even the populace that elected it, don’t particularly want U.S. protection. When North Korea first invaded, we were rightly or wrongly concerned about containing the spread of Communism as an ideology, but I gather we are less worried about that since the fall of the Soviet Union. Even our worries with regard to China seem to be about China as China, not the promulgation of its ideology.
What American interest would be compromised by telling South Korea, “OK, you don’t want us, we’re gone?” and letting them deal with the problem of North Korea?
Presumably that would result in the North invading the South pretty soon. If they did that without fear of American reprisals, might they do it more gently? Might they even achieve a rapprochement and unification without an invasion?
Is there any chance at all that doing that would make North Korea feel secure enough that, when it decided it was time, it would invade South Korea without also nuking Los Angeles, just to cover all its bases?
I may be Pollyannish here, but I sort of wonder if the best prospect for solving the problem of North Korea is to give its people high-bandwidth exposure to South Korea.
Didn’t they say the same thing a few years ago? And the US started noisily making plans to withdraw, and suddenly the idea was dropped.
I imagine John Schilling would have good and well-sourced answers to your questions about a “gentle” reunification; my personal guess would be “no way in Hell”.
South Korea has no intention of allowing itself to be invaded by North Korea, and to that end the South Korean security state has established an army powerful enough to stand against that of the North AND invited twenty thousand or so American soldiers to take up residence with a promise of more to come if the balloon goes up AND threw a hissy fit when the US pulled all the tactical nuclear weapons out of Korea in 1991 but grudgingly accepts that we could still unleash thermonuclear Hell from more distant bases at need.
The North Koreans not only understand that they have no chance against those odds, they think those odds only make sense if the US and/or ROK are planning to invade them. And they aren’t entirely off base in that, between the comments and plans about “making” North Korea give up its nuclear arsenal and the similar thoughts re human rights abuses north of the DMZ.
The current government in Seoul may want to dial down the emphasis on the US contribution to South Korea’s security, but they almost certainly don’t want it to go away. And if they did, they wouldn’t be allowed to – the only question is whether there would be a military coup before they were voted out of office. There is approximately zero sentiment in South Korea for “Hey, an invasion wouldn’t be so bad if the North did it gently and those pesky American cowboys stayed out of it, because Reunification Yay!”.
The current government in Pyongyang has no intention of invading South Korea, but does have contingency plans to do so if they think that’s the only way to keep South Korea from invading them. Nuking Los Angeles, in addition to being technically infeasible at present, is almost certainly also a last-ditch contingency plan, not a “hey, let’s do this to cover all our bases” thing. Threatening to nuke Los Angeles is a very useful capability for North Korea, actually doing it is rather less so.
Both nations envision reunification as something that will happen when The Other Side’s horribly corrupt government collapses, leading to a massive humanitarian crisis and their troops being greeted as liberators when they move in to restore order. Both nations also understand that their governments, while not horribly corrupt, may undergo periods of relative instability and want to have a strong enough security posture to not tempt the other guy when that happens. Which includes whatever sort of alliances they can swing in their favor (except not with Japan because reasons).
Well, that had always been my model until I heard some of the things their new President was saying. I suppose I should remember my own new President and update my priors — or, rather, revert to my priors.
simple solution- open up trade with them as much as possible.
NK will never accept that solution. A trade in goods is a trade in ideas, and the ideas of US/SK are the thing NK fears importing the most.
In an isolated state you have a zero sum situation where individuals must climb over each other to advance. Once there is an outside offer you will see cracks, even if illegal cracks, as it will provide a new outlet for ambition. The “leadership” won’t allow it, but it will happen anyway.
The south koreans fear re-unification, because it will cost trillions of dollars and they’ll get stuck with the bill.
It has been this way for a while. the best deal I can see the US offering china is our support, or at least non-resistance, to the replacement of the kim regime with a chinese puppet that will open up economically and not build nukes.
They do have an actual ministry devoted to the issue. Not the most prestigious posting in the ROK government, because they are mostly just playing a waiting game at this point, but I’ve talked to them and they didn’t come off as terribly frightened. As with e.g. German reunification, this is something that’s very important to them for ethno-nationalistic reasons; if it comes to that, South Korea is a rich country and they’ll dig deep into their pockets to make it happen.
@John Schilling
I didn’t mean to imply it was something they were opposed to on principle, they definitely aren’t. But it’s definitely something they would rather happen…..a few years from now, and it always will be.
Worth noting, the United States could shut down North Korea within an hour, just by pressing a button.
And with roughly the same consequence. Millions of North Koreans dead by way of the four horsemen, and a massive humanitarian catastrophe for the rest. A world-class geopolitical conflict over who gets what, and a massive insurgency of heavily-armed regime loyalists hiding out in mountain and city alike. And a dozen or so non-DPRK cities in East Asia nuked along the way, for another million-plus dead.
If you think there’s a moral difference associated with who is the first one to launch a nuclear missile in this game, when the end result is predictably the same in most every respect, fine, but what’s in it for China to take the megadeaths of blood off our hands and onto their own? Why is it in their court rather than ours, when we can both end the “problem” and we are the ones who seem to feel it is a problem?
It would make sense for the USA and its allies to plan a coordinated first strike on DPRK if they had the means to destroy DPRK nukes on the ground or prevent them from launching.
It seems reasonable to me that with enough investment in anti-ballistic missile tech and a thorough enough first strike, NK wouldn’t be able to do anything except sit there and die.
However from a political point of view, it’s always better to kick the can down the road. This is how NK will grow and eventually become a really threatening monster.
Eventually? Did you check the news this morning?
I’m suspecting that the apparent dissolution of the USA society is in considerable measure due to the long working hours, and, generally, the “hard work” by which Americans have started to distinguish themselves from the rest of the West in the past fifty years. Simply, the logic is that by just focusing on consciously defined tasks leaves too little for informal interactions that are arguably essential in keeping a society together. I suspect that the ubiquitously recommended “hard work” can be a road of personal gain for a small minority of people, and that for a society in general, it is a road to ruin.
I won’t actually ask a question because I took a hobby of following the advice no.3. here:
It sounds like that advice is specifically meant for “first day on the job”-situations. Even then, I’d disagree with Nr. 2 and Nr 3.
I’d recommend (gently) correcting people if it’s relevant to your job, just try not to bruise any egos.
But most of all, *definitely* ask questions. Ask them early and often. You don’t want to risk being an effective observer of an event that hardly ever happens. And if you’re asking a simple question 4 months in you might get some weird looks (though you should still ask it if you feel you should know the answer!). Even worse if you’ve worked there a while, a new guy comes in, and he asks you the simple question you didn’t want to ask, and you don’t have an answer. “Why can’t patients wear shoelaces?” is a great question to ask if the alternative is not asking and finding out too late this applied to belts as well.
Mind you, nothing’s stopping you from being an effective observer in addition to all that.
For signalling purposes, yes, not asking questions makes you seem smarter (as long as you can avoid making the mistakes that come with not knowing the answer). But asking questions makes you seem interested, curious and sincere, so I don’t think you lose much.
I’ve been in so many classes and presentations where at the end they ask if there’s any questions, and there’s just silence. For a good 20 seconds. Then someone tentatively raises their hands and asks a question. Then all of a sudden it turns out that lots of people had questions, but nobody wanted to be the first to ask anything. And then there are the presentations where “nobody” had questions, and I can’t help but wonder how many people missed an opportunity there.
TL;DR: being an effective observer and asking questions is not mutually exclusive, and not asking questions is a bad strategy if you aim to improve fast.
FWIW, I’ve specifically told multiple junior-level employees multiple times, “if you don’t understand something, don’t try to figure it out, just ask”. There are two reasons for this:
a). Your time is valuable, and not just to yourself. If you spend all your time on figuring out some basic idea that everyone else already understands, then you will surely grow and evolve as a person; but meanwhile, your work doesn’t get done.
b). If you don’t understand how something works, and decide to use it (or worse, change it) anyway, you are very likely to break everything (or, at least, the piece of the system you’re working on). Sure, you can fix it later, but… see above.
Perhaps the “always ask first” advice is appropriate for software engineering where almost all the concepts and names are invented by someone at the company, and won’t ever occur outside a very narrow context. Even the lifetime of the ideas is limited to perhaps 2 or 3 years.
Or perhaps that advice will be our undoing. I’ve seen an amazing number of people blindly follow the guess of the first person to encounter a problem, after finding a record of the event on a forum, only to find out the advice was wrong.
This may be true about specific ideas, but is staggeringly false in general. Ideas such as memoization, I/O vs CPU bottlenecks, exponential complexity, copy-on-write, layers of abstraction, source control, etc., have been around for decades, and are likely to stick around for at least as long. Most junior programmers I’ve encountered were unfamiliar with at most of these (and many others besides). Also, none of these ideas were invented by anyone at my company, I’m sad to say.
Many other Western nations seems to be dissolving in much the same way.
I think that part of it is simply that people simply have many more options to self-segregate, which leads to fairly homogeneous communities that develop strong tribal features.
As for work, I don’t think that it is the hard work so much (are people actually working longer hours than in the past?), but rather the stagnating wages, uncertainty and forced flexibility that has become far more prevalent. I think that there is a general sense of hopelessness among many people who may never be able to achieve a stable pleasant life. People in the past would often work to own a house, be married, get children and have a steady, well-paid job and then this would generally last them a lifetime. For many people today, buying a house may remain out of reach, relationships frequently don’t last and jobs come and go, where you can easily go backwards in pay during parts of your life.
The pressure on women to be more like men also tends to results in them spending much of their fertile years having a career and then scrambling to have some kids as the window is closing. In the past, the many housewives ensured that local communities would always be fairly lively and those women would police their community pretty strongly. Today it’s much easier to live close to people and rarely interact with them.
In any case, I don’t think you can pin it on one single cause.
This.
My first instinct was to say, “justify your claim that society is dissolving” but it’s quite clear there are plenty of available examples one could use to try and claim so.
But I think “justify your claim that the US is dissolving significantly more in comparison to other (developed/western if you’d prefer) nations” is sound. There is political polarization occasionally leading to small-scale violence in the UK and France as well.
As the “dissolution of society” has moved forward, working hours (per worker) have dropped.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
A somewhat larger number of people started working, however hours worked per capita hasn’t changed drastically (and has declined significantly since the 90’s).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eh4g
What do you mean by dissolution of society, and who do you think is working more hours?
This seems like a good excuse to link one of my all-time favorite essays: Bertrand Russell — In Praise of Idleness
As both a manager and a coworker, my observation is that employees that don’t ask questions are generally terrible employees- and the best employees ask more questions than many of their coworkers combined!
Most people I read say the dissolution is due to rejection of traditional religious values.
Social Media is the new church.
Another story: http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
Some questions about democracy v. autocracy and a hypothesis about the alt-right:
I finally got around to reading The Dictator’s Handbook, the book a few have mentioned and on which that youtube video I’ve linked a couple times is based, and it’s really great. To try to summarize some of the main arguments:
The important difference between democracy and autocracy is the size of the ruling coalition: all governments (indeed, all human organizations) have rulers/leaders; the key point is how many people they need to keep happy in order to maintain their authority. Though no one can rule alone (need support of the powerful in your society and especially the army), rulers have an incentive to keep the group they need to keep happy as small as possible and the number of potential replacements for those people (“interchangeables”) big so the backers know they’re replaceable.
How well a government does for its people is a function of the extent to which the leaders have to keep them happy/productive to reward the key supporters/pay the army. This explains why natural resource-rich nations are often terrible places to live for the commoners–because the ruling coalition, in effect, doesn’t need them (enough wealth to keep everyone whose opinion matters may be generated by hiring foreign contractors to extract the resource). In fact, making things better for them may be a big risk: starving people with no infrastructure are less likely to revolt.
Anyway, ancap has long been my first choice, but I’ve also long been back and forth about my second choice: democracy, benevolent dictatorship (Lee Kuan Yew), rule by “the experts”? Democracy clearly has serious problems: bickering blocs voting themselves concentrated benefits with diffuse costs, regulatory capture, “myth of the rational voter,” etc. etc. King Donald Trump could take 1% of the national GDP and spend it on building crazy casinoes and otherwise leave us alone and I’d be much happier with that state of affairs than with the current government (see the part about gold mining in Planetary-size Nutshell), and some of Hoppe’s “God that Failed” arguments make sense: (small d) democrats have an incentive to think short term, while monarchs think of the state as their private property they can bequeath to their children and try to enrich it to the extent possible over the long term.
But is there really such a thing as the dictator who gets to just build casinos and otherwise leaves everyone else alone? Or the wise monarch so confident in his position he can focus his wealth on benefiting the people at the expense of powerful backers, even knowing the more educated they get the more likely they are to demand democratization? Probably not. Even if nominally appointed for life, he’ll need backing of the powerful to stay in power or else leave a big vacuum.
In a democracy, at least the number of people he has to please is relatively large. He may end up doing so by doling out a million favors to a million and one groups, but overall he’s more beholden to being thrown out of office if he really botches e.g. disaster relief (GOP post-Katrina). And the authors also point out that while nominal tax rates in many democracies seem quite high, they are actually low compared to the effective tax rate in dictatorships, where dictators may e.g. force you to sell all your coffee beans to them at a heavily discounted rate and then sell them on the world market at a huge markup. If you’re only allowed to sell your product to the government, and for only 10% what it’s worth, you have an effective 90% tax rate.
Anyway, I could go on, but what got me thinking about the alt-right: recently some libertarian friends have been complaining that all their libertarian friends are turning alt-right. Even here there seems to be some sense that maybe all us libertarians are really just secret Trump apologists. My thinking is that this may be because, seeing so many problems with democracy, many libertarians are starting to see something like a Putin as somehow preferable to continuing the current course. But as Putin has moved Russia back in the autocratic direction, corruption is up and individual freedoms are down! Of course, I don’t think we can slide so quickly into autocracy in the US because of our longer history with democracy, but we could certainly move in that direction. I always call FDR “our first fascist president.”
The “bigger ruling coalition=better results and more freedoms for the people” argument leads me to think that this is probably a red herring (strong man nationalism). Though I am totally in support of e.g. a less bellicose foreign policy (actually this is oddly one area dictatorships seem to do better in a certain way: they are apparently less likely to get bogged down in hugely expensive, interminable international conflicts because they don’t actually care as much whether they win so long as the ruler stays in power; waging a war which is dragging on and going badly, on the other hand, usually spells doom for a democrat (LBJ).
So… uh, libertarians! Don’t embrace identity nationalism as a 2nd-best option for achieving libertopia* because it’s too likely to become more like… well, Putin’s Russia? Or, indeed, the US under FDR, which wasn’t actually so great, though many claim to have remembered a fond sense of common purpose (but then many former Soviet bloc citizens fondly remember a sense of common purpose…)
Also on the other hand, I think the theory supports ancap quite well, though the authors never bring it up, of course. Having the lawmakers and law enforcers beholden to the widest swath of people to whom their laws apply seems to be the general formula for better government, and private companies, in general, seem to be much more beholden to their customers than the average state judge, policeman, or soldier is to the citizens.
*Also, I still think that if you do care about identity–racial, cultural, whatever, then secession is still your best way to go. I think the odds of having the “white Christian English speakers only” mini nation among the several nations the US splits into are much higher than God Emperor Trump somehow just making the US one giant nation all based on white, Christian identity.
A bit of a brain dump; I just had a whole bunch of ideas about this I kind of wanted to think through.
I have always believed that there were never very many true libertarians to begin with. Everybody objects to government power when it is used to implement policies that go against their preferences. To me American libertarians look like a coalition of :
1) Jeffersonians.
These are people who idealize the pre-civil war, pre-industrial society of the early republic. They view the United States as first and foremost a nation composed of federated communities of small property holders. Consequently they have little problem with state coercion on a local enough level, in fact they see federal interference in the prerogatives of local government to be a form of tyranny even if it is in defense of individual rights. They are apt to make arguments based on natural rights, the constitution, and the wisdom of the founding fathers. They tend to be non interventionist in foreign affairs. Of all the types of libertarians they are the most likely to be religious.
2) Laissez Faire Liberals
Neo-liberal is a near synonym for this group but is sometimes used in a more expansive way. Their primary concern is the defense of free trade and the efficiencies of the free market. They see capitalism and democracy as being fundamentally linked and believe that expanding state power over the economy will lead to political tyranny. They do not really object to state coercion that does not directly threaten the workings of the free market, and tend to except a limited, and often very paternalistic form of the welfare state (if only as a necessary evil). They are apt to cast their arguments in terms of neoclassical economics and the utilitarian benefits of economic efficiency. In foreign affairs they are internationalists and tend to value the US role as guaranteer of the liberal world order.
3)Reactionaries
These people are basically frauds who’s libertarianism is a paper thin cover for tyrannical impulses. Their real problem is with democracy, and they only object to state power when in wielded against their interests on behalf of the (supposedly) ignorant masses. They believe that society has a natural class of rulers (a category that almost always includes themselves, or people with identical preferences) and that popular franchise is little more than mob rule. Their deep preference is for some form of powerful authoritarian (sometimes fascist, or quasi fascist) government, but they see modern democratic states as a means for the undeserving rabble to loot their property. They have few illusions about the popularity of their views, and support libertarianism only because they believe the best that they can hope for is to neuter democracy by limiting state power. In foreign policy they are opposed to the liberal world order and wish to destroy it by allying with authoritarian state like Russia.
It’s the last group that has been leaving libertarianism for the alt-right as Donald Trump seems to have opened new political possibilities for them.
And the most charitable thing I can say about that is that you are explaining yourself poorly, if I were being uncharitable I would say you were engaging in sophistry.
I’m not sure whether, when you refer to libertarians, you mean the relatively small number who self-identify as such or the much larger number who generally favor individual liberty in both economic and social matters. I’m guessing the former.
The economic definition of “fascism” is a system that combines state control with nominal private ownership. That seems to describe the First New Deal. FDR ended up backing away from it, but it was his initial policy.
The latter may be much larger than the former but it is still so small as to be a non-factor in American politics:
https://www.voterstudygroup.org/reports/2016-elections/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond
See figure 2 and accompanying text.
It seems obvious to me that calling FDR “our first fascist president” is just an insult and appeal to tribalism amongst the broad libertarian “Red Team” tribe. Of course, it seeming obvious to one person doesn’t matter too much I suppose :).
I do think that there’s something to this comparison. FDR was operating within the global great depression, when the “old ways” of doing things (for the US, laissez-faire economics with “panics” every decade or so) was just not working. He definitely moved the US more in the direction of Nazi Germany, simply because the US started out very far from state control of the market, and FDR brought it closer.
This just goes to show how I (sjw/anticorporate liberal) see Fascism’s main evil differently than the Libertarians. I think that establishing universal (for non-Jews) healthcare was one of the few good things Hitler did, and his racism and totalitarianism was the main problem. I can definitely see the libertarians thinking the same things are bad, but flipping the order and seeing his repressive state as the more important problem.
So there’s two sides to this issue I suppose. Surprising!
Most libertarians would regard the “universal healthcare” as a bad policy but I’ve yet to meet one who finds it worse than the holocaust. However, if I exaggerate a bit, one leads to the other. That is, more state control of, well, everything, increases significantly the chances of something this horrible happening. Holocaust would have been be a lot harder to pull off if Hitler hadn’t had a considerable police state to work with. Making private ownership of firearms illegal meant a lot less trouble with the German population (not everyone was a huge fan, especially towards the end of the war). Similarly, Stalin would have never been able to purposely starve millions of Ukrainians to deaths without the complete* state control of the means of production in the Soviet Union. Imagine Hitler or Stalin in 1920s US. Even if they somehow got them elected, they couldn’t do much. They’d have to start like FDR and before they could transform the country anywhere close to being an oppressive police state, they’d be out of office. As for the “business as usual”, well, most libertarians would probably argue that FDR’s policies actually made the depression far worse than it could have been. I remember David Friedman pointing out another recession a few years before it which was treated in a standard way and blew over very quickly. I don’t know enough about this topic to have a firm opinion but it might as well be true. You had the biggest recession in history precisely while trying to treat it with something other than laissez faire policy. It could be because that policy was not longer effective or it could be that departing from it is what made the depression so spectacular.
If you believe that expanding the state is bad on its own, because it usually doesn’t even serve its stated purpose well (and sometimes actually reinforces the exact opposite of it), then you will see that as doubly troubling. You don’t need to see state owned healthcare as “worse than the holocaust” to do that.
Now, I would not call FDR a fascist for the same reason I don’t like people calling Trump a fascist. It is just painting things black and white. But Onyomi used scare quotes and made it clear (I think) that he is well aware that this is an exaggeration, so I think that’s fine.
*save for the illegal black market which managed to save many many lives and was vastly more efficient than the state owned agriculture.
Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists wrote a short book to promote Fascism in 1936 called “Fascism: 100 questions asked and answered”.
In it, he tries to explain how fascism is different from the New Deal. The answer he comes up with is this: the New Deal relies on “Jewish capital”, whereas fascism does not. That’s it.
It’s also interesting to see where Mosley thought fascism should be limited. For example he considers the nationalization of healthcare would go too far in the fascist direction.
Basically, today’s ideas about fascism have little connection with the actual beliefs of fascists. That’s how you end up thinking the connection between the New Deal and fascism is “sophistry”. Check out Three New Deals by Schivelbusch.
There’s a subcategory of 3 (with maybe a little of 1) that explains a lot of the “libertarian” movement to the alt-right. These are the people who are very strongly interested in one particular right – the right to exclude nonwhite people from their activities – and would back anyone remotely respectable who would give them anything on their pet issue. These are the sort of people who’d vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George Wallace in 1968, despite their having practically no positions in common besides opposition to the Civil Rights Act.
But these aren’t the “reactionaries” you describe, as they have no philosophical objections to democracy as it existed before 1955 or thereabouts.
Hmm. Perhaps, though personally I’ve never run across anyone who characterized themself as a libertarian but who was primarily concerned with that one particular right. Libertarians are famously (though unfairly) stereotyped as conservatives who want to smoke pot, so it’s hard for me to imagine a white separatist deciding to call themself a libertarian.
I’m feeling an interesting tension here. I want to accuse you of the non-central fallacy, tarring libertarians by association with someone who by hypothesis claims to be libertarian but is not typical of libertarians. But I don’t want to be accused in turn of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. It’s a puzzle.
I’m referring obliquely to the readers of those Ron Paul newsletters. (And for the record, I believe Paul when he says he didn’t know about the content.)
Anyway, I could go on, but what got me thinking about the alt-right: recently some libertarian friends have been complaining that all their libertarian friends are turning alt-right. Even here there seems to be some sense that maybe all us libertarians are really just secret Trump apologists. My thinking is that this may be because, seeing so many problems with democracy, many libertarians are starting to see something like a Putin as somehow preferable to continuing the current course. But as Putin has moved Russia back in the autocratic direction, corruption is up and individual freedoms are down! Of course, I don’t think we can slide so quickly into autocracy in the US because of our longer history with democracy, but we could certainly move in that direction. I always call FDR “our first fascist president.”
I think there’s a connection between FDR and the movement on the right from libertarian to authoritarian, but for a different reason.
The dictionary definition of fascism is “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition“. It’s hard to look at the US during world war II and deny that, at least comparatively, the US government during the war was far more autocratic in many of the ways listed, although not truly dictatorial. The questionable part is the nation and race part; while the US propaganda during the war and even the WPA art before the war was somewhat nationalistic by modern standards, it’s looking at it by the American definition of nation and not what, say, Mussolini would consider a ‘nation’. (If any US president could be described as both authoritarian and thinking of nation and race above the individual, I’d think it would be Wilson, for example, his support for ‘The Birth of a Nation’.)
What does this have to do with the libertarians becoming Alt-Right? We accepted FDR’s authoritarianism during the second world war because national survival was believed to be at stake. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact” is the saying. There’s a political cartoon showing the four quadrant political diagram, with authoritarian at the top; a T-34 flying an anarcho-communist flag is traveling up the left edge racing a helicopter flying an anarcho-capitalist flag heading up the right edge. The caption is “race you to the top!”
I don’t want to get into a “who started it” war, as there’s no right answer and it doesn’t matter to the debate. What matters is the libertarian right sees an increasingly authoritarian left with a declared intent to use the power of the state to suppress their opposition, and many see the only way to survive in the short term is to risk your principles by embracing whatever it takes to survive (and it’s likely that the same logic applies to the left). Somebody is going to control the power of government, and if the other side is the one in control, loyalty to your principles may mean nothing. [Edited to add:] I don’t think libertarians suddenly believe that government is a force for good; however, controlling it means it can’t be used against you.
Yeah, it’s pretty much what I’ve noticed as well; the hard right and hard left have become convinced that the other side will win / is winning, and have decided that all-out war is the solution.
Of course, if you accept either prior, you should also decide on the solution of all-out war. It’s just that both priors are ridiculous.
I think “just bake the fucking cake” is a very strong meme. I spent many years arguing with conservatives/Christians to leave the gays alone, and you don’t get to tell them what to do, it’s none of your damn business. And then as soon as pro-gay forces have cultural control they want to force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes. “Nobody should be telling anybody else what to do” doesn’t seem to work well in the real world. It seems our political nature abhors a power vacuum.
I think a lot of that decision fell out of existing antidiscrimination law. If you have laws against discrimination agaings protected classes by businesses, and then you change the laws to include gays as a protected class, you get the wedding cake thing.
That was the point. If you are using laws — any laws — to force people to do what you want them to do, you have lost your moral claim to say to other people that you don’t get to tell them what to do, it’s none of your damn business.
To my mind, this is a serious issue with the way our antidiscrimination laws work. To a first approximation, one of the best arguments for a live-and-let-live kind of support for individual liberty is that it’s none of your damned business whom I sleep with, or how we do it, or how many people are involved, and it’s no skin off your nose what I do anyway. Personally, I have always found this a pretty compelling kind of argument–it’s a big world, some people want to do weird things I want nothing to do with, so why not let them get on with it and leave them the hell alone, expecting only that they return the favor?
To the extent we start using the state to coerce actions–requiring you to bake cakes for gay marriages, requiring you to associate with people you despise, etc., we lose that argument. I’m sure that has an impact on arguments w.r.t. transgender rights, now. If we add transgender people to the list of protected classes against whom employment and business discrimination is forbidden, then you’re not allowed (in principle, anyway) to refuse to hire a transwoman to watch your kids even if you think transpeople are creepy perverts[1], even if you have a deep religious or moral objection to transpeople. That may (or may not) be the right policy, but it absolutely undermines the argument that people who find transpeople morally objectionable should still support transgender rights, since it’s none of your business and no skin off your nose.
The very short distance between recognition of gay marriage and widely publicized cases where people who morally objected to gay marriage were legally coerced to do things like make wedding cakes for them is something that I expect to come up again and again in the future, as we see arguments for more expansions of rights.
[1] As far as I can tell, the definition of pervert is just someone who likes kinky things that are sufficiently socially unacceptable to get them shunned.
Where do you get these beliefs?
Transparency International rates Putin’s Russia no more corrupt than Yeltsin’s, probably cleaner.
Individual freedom is a more subtle topic.
Putin may have moved in an autocratic direction, but has Russia? He has personally consolidated power, but at the expense of less transparent autocrats.
Glad you liked the book. I thought it was very interesting.
I think of the libertarians who have gone alt-right or whatever as “libertarianism in one country” types. A lot of them seem to have adopted an attitude along the lines of “only some people can actually do libertarianism, so a libertarian society needs to keep out those who can’t.” They identify those “some people” generally as either Europeans in general, or Anglo-Saxons etc in specific.
(For all I know, this is an HHH idea; I haven’t read his stuff and only have a vague idea of it)
Libertarianism as a walled garden. It works well so long as the people in the garden don’t want to exercise power over each other. Unfortunately that is a rare desire among humans. And an awful lot of people who think they fit the mold absolutely don’t want to be telling anyone else what to do. I mean, unless of course they’re doing something wrong.
Ironic since the demographic most obviously attracted to libertarianism is white and male.
To be honest, I’m kind of curious what would be the difference between a libertarian state and a white nationalist state.
The libertarian state would likely have more black people, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics, for one thing.
A white nationalist state would have either an established religion or a strong civic substitute; in the US, probably the latter as there are far too many variants. A libertarian state would have neither.
In general I’d expect a white nationalist state to tend towards communitarianism rather than individualism, as a libertarian state would.
This gets into the question of heritability of political views, on which I don’t have a strong opinion, though I suspect it exists to some degree.
For example, white people might be more likely to have the “cowing to authority really irks me” genes and white Americans might be a non-representative selection of those Europeans most likely to have those genes. Therefore, it may not only be no coincidence libertarianism mostly got started here, it could be that we’re the only place with even close to the number of people with the right sorts of predispositions (this is somewhat contradicted by much of the initial intellectual firepower coming from Austrian Jews, however; maybe they had a confluence of genetic and historical circumstances driving them to become intellectuals who hate the state).
It could be that libertarians are more likely to be people with a contrarian streak and that contrarian streaks are more common in white males. Or there could be some purely historical reasons which would not limit libertarianism’s appeal to other groups.
Conrad:
In a libertarian society, nonwhites would be welcome, as long as they were able and willing to carry their own weight and live by the rules of the libertarian society. The purpose of the government would be to maintain and enforce the minimal set of rules on which the society was based, not to further the group interests of the white race. Probably nobody would care if you married outside your race, and certainly the law wouldn’t take any notice.
I suppose. I guess I’m saying that if you started a real libertarian state, it would wind up looking very white. Didn’t John McAfee talk to the Libertarian party and say “you’re 99% white and you should feel ashamed?” So you’d have a state that’s 99% white, with the non-whites agreeing to live by the same rules as the vast majority whites. Non-white are welcome in the Libertarian Party now, and they’re not showing up.
I’ve only ever read one of Richard Spencer’s speeches so I don’t know exactly what kind of government white nationalists want, but I gathered that they’d be tolerant of a small minority with no political power (e.g., there were black Nazis and even tolerated Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, etc). Given that in a libertarian society, there would be practically no political power anyway, that reduces to the same system: a tolerated minority with no political power that agrees to live by the white man’s rules.
ETA: “A libertarian state would likely appear to be a white nationalist state, whereas not all white nationalists states would be libertarian.” Agree or disagree?
@ConradHoncho
Well here is a socio-lab experiment for you to examine.
Its just one city, not a whole state.
The Short Unhappy Life of a Libertarian Paradise
Disagree. A libertarian state would have open immigration. If libertarians are correct in their views it would also be very prosperous hence a magnet for immigrants, many of whom would be non-white.
I doubt a white nationalist state would be libertarian. It would almost certainly have restrictions on immigration, and it would probably have different legal rules for whites and any non-whites it included.
@Conrad Honcho:
Nazi treatment of Jews who cooperated with them – for example, the councils they set up in ghettos – was largely to kill them last. There were a few cases of important Germans who had, or were rumoured to have, Jewish ancestry, and policy seems to have been to either ignore it, or to officially declare them not to (I think in one case, the official government position on one guy was that his Jewish father had been cuckolded by a gentile?)
1) We just had a thread within the past week or two in which one of our main libertarians argued that short of ancap, immigration restrictions are reasonable. A libertarian state falls short of ancap by definition.
2) The idea that non-white people would be welcome in any libertarian society depends on certain assumptions about cultural and economic reasoning that are mostly coincidental. If the most fundamental aspect of libertarian thinking is non-coercion, a group of white supremacists could form a society completely consistent with libertarian principles by simply freezing out non-whites from all interactions.
Disagree for the reasons I said. A librtarian state might be a comfortable place for white nationalists to live (complete freedom of association means no antidiscrimination laws), but I would expect a lot of nonwhites to come live there, especially if things seemed to be working out well. A libertarian state would have no welfare, so the only reason to come would be to work. That would not seem so entirely foreign to the average Salvadoran coming to hang drywall, or the average Indian doctor or Chinese engineer.
Good points. My thought experiment was ill-conceived.
Which is to say, there would be a ton of power with very few people having a say in it.
“I think in one case, the official government position on one guy was that his Jewish father had been cuckolded by a gentile?”
There were slews of court cases claiming illegitimacy — either a person’s own, or the parent’s — and so pure German blood. Many of these cases were supported by the mother or grandmother swearing she had committed adultery and in fair number of cases the alleged father swore to it, too. (The Jewish father tended to be dead or divorced at that time, and the alleged German father was often dead, too.)
With full family support, sometimes. There was one case where a mother said her son was not the son of her Jewish husband but of a Bavarian peddler, and an uncle accompanied his nephew to the court so that when they came out and assumed that the short, dark man was the nephew, he could correct them, say he was the pure Aryan uncle, and this tall blond man was in fact the nephew petitioning on those grounds.
@Mary
Thanks for expansion. I’m trying to recall the guy’s name – I don’t think this one required a court case even, because he was someone important (a general?).
Except that Donald Trump actually did get himself elected President of the United States of America, which is as close to God-Emperor as it gets. Meanwhile, secession has been a non-starter since 1861 and will be for as long as there is a United States of America. And the “several nations the US splits into” is, in addition to being highly speculative, highly optimistic as well. If the United States of America goes down, it doesn’t do so by politely spawning mini-nations that are then left to do as their citizens please. A Balkanized America will be about as peaceful as the actual Balkans were before NATO got involved, and should not be taken as anybody’s last, best hope for achieving any positive goal.
What odds do you put on the US becoming a stable, brazilified kleptocracy?
Kleptocracy is too strong, think more like greece or italy. the issue isn’t so much outright theft and bribery, but a political system that revolves around massive handouts to the politically organized at the expense of everyone else, wrapped up in moralizing language.
Outright bribery like the Clintons taking a half-billion dollar bribe from Microsoft’s competitors to sic the Justice Department on Microsoft and oops, break the dot-com boom? Even the Marcos family only did that once every decade or so. Or maybe the Clintons building a billion-dollar slush fund?
I don’t see stable kleptocracy. Brazilified kleptocracy, sure. Our governors are too incompetent for stability.
This is sort of how I imagined Tiberius from I, Claudius. He didn’t quite as much “build casinos”, as “oppress and torture a small company of close associates”, but he ran the Empire well, and the commoners he left well alone.
OTOH, you can see things like government spending in Britain starting to rocket up directly after the so-called Glorious Revolution.
Except that, as the late Justice Scalia said, that issue was “settled at Appomattox”. Have you read any of the decision in Texas v. White?
“Indivisible” is in the Pledge of Allegiance for a reason. Secession from the US has been ruled completely and totally illegal and forbidden, no matter the reason, no matter how popular, for all time. The only way you can get the US to break up is for it to collapse first.
(And if the US collapses, then probably global civilization collapses, and if global civilization collapses, then the fragile and irreplacable framework for maintaining industrial civilization will probably be damaged beyond all hope of repair, and if that happens, given that the original Industrial Revolution cannot be repeated, we’ll be stuck unable to really advance beyond eighteenth century technology, and thus stuck on Earth until some global disaster renders us extinct.)
What if the left wants to secede?
They’ll find a way to make it legal then!
First, I find this exceedingly unlikely. Because why would they want to? And because it’s not in their character. (Insert Vidal quote on Puritans, citation to Stuntz “first culture war”, and so on. Yankees have been the more the side of moral crusading and less the side of live-and-let live for at least a couple centuries.)
Second, I’m not sure how they’d be able to make it legal. (Particularly given the number of people out there who are like my 4th grade teacher.)
Why? to get away from that horrible Red Tribe of course.
At least, that’s the stated motivation I’ve seen among leftist calls to secede. Often followed by rhapsodies about the way the United States would collapse without them.
@Mary
Sure, until they realize that the horrible Red Tribe is doing horrible Red Tribe things in their Red Tribe country, violating [fill in blank]’s unalienable human right to [fill in blank], which the “international community” cannot tolerate, and that those Red Tribe people need to be made to stop, so it’s time for them to receive some “regime change”.
I can’t find it at the moment, but I recall an article over in far-right webspace, arguing against the white nationalist types who are “we just want to be left alone in our small white ethnostate.” The author pointed out, suppose they got that ethnostate they want? What happens then? The answer is not “they get left alone to do as they will”; because such a state is essentially anathema to the post-WWII world order, the “international community” would never stop trying to undo it, and so they’d need, from day one, a vigorous and proactive foreign policy and the means to back it up.
I mostly put these in the same category as threats to move to Canada if Republican X is elected; not to be taken seriously as a literal proposal, but only as an emotional display of disapproval. They may talk about CalExit, but I think actually leaving like that would be unthinkable, at least partially because it would be admitting defeat. As Richard Fernandez of PJMedia said recently,
Serious secession talk will likely not happen till things in America get much worse, politically, socially, and/or economically than they are now. But if things do get much worse than they are now, I see no reason why it couldn’t happen.
(Yes, I’m aware of the irony.)
The Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t have legal force, and secession is not mentioned in the Constitution. There is Supreme Court precedent declaring unilateral secession illegal, but it left open the possibility of secession by mutual consent of the states. (The reasoning also strikes me as kinda shaky, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer.)
Realistically, though, this falls under the category of law that’s less black-letter legal or illegal and more about your ability to make your opinion stick through persuasion or force. Does China or Taiwan or the Philippines or nobody own some tiny stupid islands in the South China Sea? Well, who’s got the rest of the world on their side? Who has the biggest guns, and are they actually willing to commit them?
First, I note you linked to the same case I did, Texas V. White. And though I don’t recall where, I know I’ve seen legal reasoning as to why secession by mutual consent of the states is not permissible either. (Mainly relating to the idea, again held forth in Texas V. White, that the intention in the Constitution is to create an irreversible compact, that a “more perfect union” is definitionally indissoluble.) In short, once you’re in, you’re in forever.
Indeed, just ask that question with regards to any proposed “national divorce”.
I agree that this is the right thing to be doing, but think the answer is less straightforward than you seem to.
And if a state tries to secede, do dissenting counties have West Virginia rights to secede from YOU?
Probably. While you can’t leave the union, there’s no problem redrawing state lines. It just requires the consent of the state legislature and the US Congress. The conservative northern Californians who want to break off and form the state of Jefferson absolutely have a legal path to do so. Just it’ll never happen because they’re outnumbered by the liberals in the south and there’s no reason for them to let the northerners (and their electoral college votes) go.
That’s why I cited West Virginia. Remember how it got ” the consent of the state legislature” — so to speak?
Nothing is “for all time” and nothing is set in stone.
If there is enough political will, Texas or California or whichever state will be able to secede. There was no right to secession guaranteed by the Czechoslovak constitution but the country split anyway (and without much problems), simply because there was much more political will to do so than to prevent it (more accurately a lot of desire to split off on the Slovak side and mostly apathy and desire to stop constant arguing about nonsense like whether the federation should be called Czechoslovakia or Czecho-slovakia on the Czech side). I think secession is actually significantly easier in a democracy. Yugoslavia, while not really a dictatorship in the early 90s, was not exactly a democratic regime and despite the overwhelming political will (outside of Serbia at least) to split, they wanted to prevent that resulting in a bloody war. On the other hand, if Texas really decided to leave, I cannot imagine other states willing to start a war to keep it in. What would be the point?
And it is not just with secession. Islamic (or Jewish) law theoretically prohibits interest rates – the solution is basically to call it a different name. Stoning children to death for disobeying their parents was too hardcore even for ancient people (I wonder how that thing came to be in the first place, I abhor the thought of some tribe somewhere in the middle east actually practicing that in 2000-3000 BC or so), so despite it being The Word of God, they found ways around it. The God gave us the laws, he also gave us the loopholes. The same with a constitution or anything else that’s written on paper. Unless there is a will to enforce laws, they won’t be enforced. Writing it down in a holy scripture like the Bible or the Constitution or having a religious leader declare a fatwa or a verdict of the Highest Court might increase its prestige significantly and reinforce its support but neither can turn the tide.
One of the reasons I eventually concluded that anarcho-capitalism, assuming it works as expected, is probably a better way to go than minarchy despite its potential weaknesses like national defence (which, as David Friedman nicely defines, is a defence against nations) is that no matter how well you write your constitution, people will find ways around it. So far nobody has found a secure way to prevent the state to grow, or at least a way other than revolution, which tends to be very expensive in both lives and property, plus, unless you are North Korea where there is no way you could possibly have more all-encompassing state, there is no guarantee that the result will be much better than what you started with.
While I cannot imagine other states not starting a war to keep it in. The point? First, precident. If you let one group who wants to leave go, what about the next one, and the next one? And further, let me post again that Fernandez quote from upthread.
I just don’t see our leaders being willing to let even one small scrap of territory openly leave their grasp. Have you ever known a bratty kid who, when told to share a toy, then broke it on the principle of “if I can’t have it, no one can”? Because that’s how I expect our leaders to ultimately behave; to, in the end, prefer even “radioactive wasteland Texas” to “independent Texas”.
Add in people like my 4th grade teacher. Possibly the worst grade I ever got on an essay that year was in social studies, when we had to write about something in local state politics, and I profiled the Alaska Independence Party and argued that they may well have a point. When handing back these papers, my teacher, Mrs. Johnson, took time to specifically lecture me about my paper. That she was unhappy that, because the grading rubric emphasized mostly spelling, grammar, and such, she couldn’t fail me on that paper like she wanted to, that she never wanted to see anything like my essay ever again, because seceeding from America is evil and forbidden, and she wouldn’t have it in her classroom, because it’s the same as arguing in favor of slavery.
It’s like the one commenter over at Marginal Revolution who, every time genetic engineering comes up, argues that using CRISPR or any other such techniques to repair genetic diseases is morally equivalent to the Holocaust, because they are both eugenics; implicit there that “eugenics” is a single entity morally speaking, which must be praised or condemned as a whole, that to praise anything that can be classed as “eugenics” is to equally praise all things that can be classed as eugenics, including Nazi “eugenics”. The same holds for folks like Mrs. Johnson and seceeding from America. Secession from this country, to them, is a single entity in moral terms. To praise any secession attemp from the US is to praise all secession, including the South’s attempt to leave in defense of slavery, and therefore makes you morally equivalent to the worst Southern slaveholder. To condemn the South in the civil war, you must equally condemn all other secessionist movements in America, because secession is secession is secession.
Well, your 4th grade teacher was apparently a not particularly smart ideologue, but I’m pretty sure these people are an exception rather than the rule. By the way, I am surprised that 4th grade kids write political essays 🙂 I can’t remember having any political opinions when I was 10 I’m not even entirely sure I knew what political parties are back then.
But imagine that say 80% of Texans want independent Texas. Is the federation going to prevent that through war? I doubt it. They will try to prevent it diplomatically, especially since Texas is rich and provides tax money to the federal budget (same reasons the Spanish don’t want Catalonia to leave…but I’m pretty sure it will happen eventually). But they are not going to start bombing Texas because of that. The US is not Yugoslavia.
Also, Texas is a Republican fortress, so for many Democrats this might be something they’d welcome. At the same time some Republicans might sympathize with the motives of Texans to leave so they would also support that. Similarly with an even more hypothetical Republic California, except with the roles reversed.
But you indeed need an overwhelming support for that, significantly more than 50% of the population of the separatist region. It is not like leaving the EU, which, as of now, is still rather far from becoming an actual state (and hopefully it will stay that way).
By the way, creating more smaller countries by the decision of their inhabitants seems like something almost always positive. But at the same time, most of the separatist movements have nationalist motivations and those are unfortunately often paired with protectionism, which is less desirable. I wonder if there is a way to stir support for separatism while keeping an “open to the world” ethos. My midterm ideal for Europe, and basically the world, would be a multitude of small (in terms of population, small means more or less under 10 million for me, that means Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine would all have to be divided into smaller countries, the rest of Europe is already there now, although I’d like even these countries under 10 million to be at least as federal as Switzerland) which cooperate and have no movement of goods and labour restrictions amongst themselves.
They did last time. What do you think has changed? Is the federal government of the United States, in your estimation, weaker than it was in 1861?
As with the last time, they wouldn’t just declare war on the day of succession. They would, as with last time, lay claim to all of the Federal institutions and property in Texas, without which the remnant of “Texas” would not be a politically or economically viable entity, and when the Texas secessionists moved to seize these necessary bits of Texas, then there would be bombing. And skies filled with drones. Maybe even tanks in the streets. But all in morally righteous self-defense, because Texas attacked the Federal Government just like South Carolina did back in the day.
Right. The Yugoslav government in 1991 was an extremely weak one, and made only the most half-hearted efforts to forcibly stop Slovenian secession. As a result, everyone else in Yugoslavia decided to secede as well, except for Serbia because there was nobody left for them to secede from. Now there is no more Yugoslavia.
The United States is not Yugoslavia. The United States Government is not going to do that.
People are wimpier.
Onyomi said it first.
Public opinion and political beliefs. Going to war to stop a bit of country going its own way is no longer seen as acceptable behaviour for a state. In a similar vein, I don’t expect the US army to murder Native Americans to make way for white settlers, nor do I expect the UK to go to war to protect the international drug trade, or the Italians or Germans to conquer random bits of Africa as a way of showing off to the international community.
If you’re talking Leviticus 20 (or Exodus 21), “curses” father or mother was much more than “said nasty words to.” It was much more like actually working maliciously against your parents. Naturally, you shouldn’t stone your kids even if they sell your family heirlooms to buy crack, but the offenses were more severe than you make them out to be.
What’s your basis for that?
I don’t know the linguistic details. But Maimonides goes to great lengths to interpret the passage as imposing a bunch of requirements on how the disobedient son must act to qualify for stoning with the conclusion that it will never happen, and that isn’t one of them.
That’s Tibor’s point – the law got re-interpreted so that it would never happen. If there’s a law you “can’t change,” but there’s widespread will to change it, then people will find a way to make the law inoperative.
@DavidFriedman
The comments on the version of the Bible I read.
But we’re playing chicken and egg here. You guys seem to think the rules came first, and were then interpreted to mean the actual behaviors. I think the behaviors came first, and then the rules were written to describe workable behaviors. So, the behaviors for which a son or daughter is worthy of stoning came first, and were described as “curses.” The “curses” rule didn’t come first, and was then reinterpreted to mean “only really bad things worthy of stoning.”
@Conrad:
You are talking about a different passage than I am:
No cursing mentioned. And the original reference was to stoning, which is in my passage and not in yours.
“Stone him to death with stones” is my new favorite phrase. I really hope it will displace “kill it with fire”, which has gotten kind of passé.
People nowadays will not really believe that you can kill people with stones. At least, they will feign that if you throw stones at someone, he’s NOT entitled to shoot you to death because they won’t admit you initiated the use of lethal force.
@Mary
Stoning as punishment involves a large number of stones and a restrained victim. I’m pretty sure deaths from cases where a single person throws stones at someone with the ability to move are infrequent; it’s only a lethal attack in the same way that throwing a punch is.
Yah, I’m going to have to push back on this one. Any thrown rock heavier than a few ounces is likely to do significantly more damage than a simple punch if it connects. It’s easily a lethal attack on par with a bat, or low caliber pistol.
I suppose that one of the disadvantages of living in a relatively peaceful society is that people rarely have occasion to learn this.
I’d much rather get hit with a brick than even a .22 round. A bat sounds comparable, though.
Definitely depends on who threw/swung it.
I think it does depend heavily on the size of the stone. My mental image of a stoning is a crowd of people throwing relatively small stones, and I think that’s supported by this. If it takes tens of minutes for a crowd to stone someone to death, an individual attacker throwing stones (of the same size) is probably not more threatening than one throwing punches. I definitely agree that a stone on the scale of a brick can easily be a lethal weapon, and I think most people would agree, so I assumed that was not what Mary was talking about.
@Randy M: Exactly. If he’s called David, then shoot first, ask questions later.
For such judicial stonings, the size of stones to be used is limited, exactly because otherwise the death would too quick and painless.
Yes, and that’s why I explicitly mentioned the stone’s weight in my initial reply. Personally I think Hollywood has led a lot of people to simultaneously overestimate the lethality of things like knives and firearms while underestimating the seriousness of simple blunt force trauma. Characters in movies routinely survive things like a frying pan to the head with no ill effects and James Bond’s little pocket pistol is shown blowing grown men off their feet.
Meanwhile in reality a fist-sized rock on the order of 12-24 oz thrown by a reasonably athletic adult will easily break bones. And thanks to modern medicine having a 6 inch gash or .22 or even a .38 caliber hole in your side isn’t nearly the crisis it once was.
This is an area where I think fiction (particularly TV and movies) imparts negative information–watching them makes you dumber instead of smarter. Unless you’re regularly involved in either violent conflict or cleaning up after it, you probably have intuitions about how dangerous various things are (getting shot, knifed, hit with a bat, hit with a rock, etc.) that come from TV shows, and that have almost no connection to reality. (If I wanted to get good information on this, I’d start by asking people who worked big-city emergency rooms.)
This is certainly my situation: I have TV images in my head of what happens when someone gets shot or hit in the head with a heavy object, but almost no actual data. My intuitions, based on the thousands of fictional violent incidents I’ve seen, *feel* like knowledge, but of course they’re complete bullshit, enough so that I could easily be entirely wrong about my intuitive ranking of how likely each of these is to kill, permanently disable, or temporarily disable a person.
My sense is that most of us carry a huge amount of “knowledge” about the world that has this same property–it feels like we know a lot about something from reading/watching fiction (or news coverage made of carefully selected noncentral examples and with lots of relevant but boring details omitted), but our intuitions are crap because they’ve been trained on bad data. I suspect this comes up a lot in politics, particularly where voters are trying to reason about war and policing–both things heavily covered in fiction, but as I understand things, not at all *accurately* covered.
an individual attacker throwing stones (of the same size) is probably not more threatening than one throwing punches.
That’s because the punch-throwing one is profoundly dangerous and easily lethal. The “knock-out game” has, with a single punch, left people profoundly disabled and other people dead.
More people are killed annually by hands and feet than with shotguns and rifles combined.
@Mary
Sure, but the relevant question isn’t how much harm punches do in total, but rather what the likely effects of a given punch are. I think that the chances of a single punch causing severe damage are small enough that shooting your attacker is not typically justified (although part of the difference between shooting an unarmed attacker and one with a knife/gun is that the one with a weapon is more likely to have lethal intentions).
You have grossly underestimated the danger of that punch in a manner that recklessly endangers lives.
Let’s do some stats! According to this, ~10 people per year are killed in the UK by a single punch. According to data here, there are ~100000 cases of unarmed assault in England and Wales each year (in terms of orders of magnitude, the proportion of cases without a weapon, variance from year to year, underreporting, and one-punch death statistics possibly drawing from a wider region than England and Wales don’t change much). If we assume that each case of assault is a single punch, that gives a figure of 0.01% lethality. Even including all homicides only increases it to 0.1%, and that’s without accounting for the fact that most assaults include more than one punch. People generally completely ignore probabilities of death less than 1/10000, so I think that taking the drastic step of shooting someone to prevent it (with a ~10% chance of killing them) is often likely to be unwarranted.
I don’t normally read Kevin C posts for the absurd pessimistic fatalism, but this one is more ridiculous than most, and someone should call it out.
So, the original industrial revolution cannot be repeated. The industrial revolution based on biofuels and scrap rather than coal and ore, and with technological innovation augmented by libraries, will likely be much easier to pull off. Somewhat lower in peak intensity, perhaps, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Have you read any John Michael Greer? Or Gribbin’s Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique? I find a convincing case to be made that “biofuels and scrap” might get us back to maybe “age of steam” mid-1800’s tech, but it definitely won’t get us into space. I’m not the only one who’s convinced that we have only this one shot at becoming a multi-planetary species, and if we screw it up, will never get another.
Why do you say “If” ? My feeling is that we’ve already missed our shot. It would take trillions of dollars to do anything interesting on Mars or even on the Moon; and, barring unforeseen circumstances, no geopolitical institution on Earth has that kind of money to spare, and they likely never will.
Heh. I mentioned The Dictator’s Handbook elsewhere in this OT. What a coincidence! The thesis of that book is really elegant (full disclosure: I haven’t read the book.)
I guess the big question is, how big is the size of the “real selectorate” in actual democracies? We make a big deal out of voting, but it seems like there is at least as much power in the deep state these days. The justices of the supreme court, the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, various functionaries in universities and government bureaucracies, have a huge amount of power. In fact, more than half of the federal budget goes to so-called “mandatory spending” on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Politicians can’t touch these programs without provoking a huge backlash.
To put it bluntly: Would you rather be Trump, constantly watching your back and worrying about re-election in 4 years? Or a high-level functionary in, say, the SEC, quietly making policy by fiat?
Are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid safe because of the bureaucrats who run them, or are they safe because of the people who benefit/stand to benefit, or both?
These would be the people who were almost unanimous in their desire for the President of the United States to be Not Donald Trump?
There is power there, but you may be overestimating it – particularly if you refer to them as the “selectorate”.
I would argue that they’re safe because of the people who stand to benefit. For example, look at the huge electoral disappointment Theresa May suffered in Britain, partly because her government proposed capping certain benefits to retirees. (Of course, there is a lot of other stuff going on in Britain which confounds this analysis somewhat, but this specific decision did get discussed a lot by the opposition.)
This really highlights another flaw in the Dictator’s Handbook analysis: democratic leaders may do something which appears good for everyone in the short term, but which is actually bad in the long term. A lot of culture war arguments hinge on a debate over whether this is in fact what is going on with various government programs and decisions. But this is topic where it’s really hard for people to be rational: if the government gives you $100, you will probably find a way to rationalize yourself as deserving that $100. If the government gives your company a huge tax break, you will probably argue that OF COURSE you need that huge tax break just to stay competitive in the modern world, because of reasons X, Y, and Z. Warren Buffet is the only real counterexample I can think of. But he’s about to retire anyway, and it’s very easy to say that the next generation should be more virtuous than you were.
Well, Nate Silver argues that Trump would probably not even be president if Comey had not announced that he was investigating Clinton. Institutions are powerful, and I expect there to be more battles inside our government as people try to use the power of the institutions for Team Red or Team Blue. Remember Bush and Obama’s battles against “leakers”? Or Reality Winner?
Also, how much of Trump’s agenda has actually been implemented? Obamacare looks as alive as ever. Immigration has been reduced a bit, but not to the levels that Trump claims to want. We still have boots in the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we’re still involved in Syria. Basically, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, almost all of what Trump has done seems like it could be undone by a Democratic president in a few weeks. I predict Trump’s most lasting legacy will be his supreme court nominees.
They do actually mention the tendency of democracy to be short-sighted, though seemingly don’t provide any opposing examples where long-sighted autocracy had good results (they talk about e.g. Singapore but claim its experience may be hard to replicate; personally, I think it has at least something to do with geographic size). They clearly come down on the side of democracy as overall superior to autocracy, but I don’t think they want to claim democracy is better in every way.
One particular problem they point out is democracies’ tendency to use small autocracies as proxies to achieve geopolitical goals to the detriment of the citizens of those countries (see e.g. our support of Saudi Arabia…)
On the other hand, they are more likely to engage in calculated, effect wars of aggression. That’s how kings turn into emperors.
Now that I’m reminded of the idea to build a spatio-temporally high-density community of LW-sphere people in physical reality, I’m calling a quick poll: am I the only one who considers those efforts, well, a lil’ bit scary? Far too conductive situation for groupthink that will lead to catastrophic (at least in scope of individual human lives) failure modes?
Some time ago someone linked in a OT to another (a couple of years earlier) OT discussion considering then-relevantly-active case of surprise babies resulting from an experiments with “the rationalist version” of free love (not all biological adult parties being agreeable about the consequences), and personally I got quite uneasy reading the ensuing discussion as it took granted various assumptions and followed down a path that I’d consider very very far removed from what is considered normal and ethical course of action here in the rest of the Western society. (And if I recall, some of the participants turned up, being very defensive.) And that’s the only case I’ve heard about; I find it unlikely that all Bay area entanglements of regular human lives that turn problematic with a rationalist spin get discussed in public.
Is there any effort paid to pre-emptively correct for these kind of situations? “Let’s build a ghetto of our own” does not sound like that.
I neither live in (nor around) the Bay Area, nor do I consider myself a “rationalist”, so my opinion is probably worthless. Still, if someone came to me and said, “hey Bugmaster, let’s build a community full of people who think exactly the same way about exactly the same things as we do”, I’d probably run away really fast.
You sound awfully stressed, Bugmaster. Just have another glass of kool-aid. You’ll feel much better very soon 🙂
Agreed. Next thing you know, you’re the United States of America. Who would want that?
You jest, but the Puritan colonies of the USA a). were, by all accounts, quite dreary places to live, and b). almost went extinct due, in part, to the very same problems we’re discussing.
You mean, the Puritan colonies as distinct organizational units went extinct, not the people themselves. AFAIK, the Puritan-descended Americans number in the tens of millions.
Yes, of course, your interpretation is correct.
Which was the death of ” people who think exactly the same way about exactly the same things as we do.” It was a quite sudden and very thorough collapse.
Why do you think people join these communities? Because they don’t feel like they belong among other people. What is so wrong with trying to find people you at least have something in common with?
That’s one answer and a pretty extreme one at that. How about:
1. Because they want to feel like part of a special group or club
2. Because they put a very high premium on being able to anticipate how their housemate/neighbour is going to think or act
3. Because they want to be around people they can signal intelligence to, without being thought of as a know-it-all
Loaded question and the wrong one at that. The question is what are the risks and do they outweigh the benefits associated with Answers 1) – 3).
To my mind the risks are:
a) Formation of thought-‘silos’ / lack of exposure to views and arguments outside of the group
b) Fragmentation of the community into smaller sub-communities that simply echo the ‘outside world’ (i.e. the micro starts to look like the macro anyway)
c) Tendency to have elitist attitudes reinforced, exclusion of potentially suitable housemates/neighbours on the basis of your evaluation of their intellectual character
The mission seems to be how to prevent such a community from turning into Less Wrong’s tryhard Fight Club minus the philosophical drive and muscle definition.
Why can’t nerds do anything without people assuming the worst of them? You don’t know anything about these people, so stop speculating on their ulterior motives in the most uncharitable way.
Funny, I thought the same thing when I read your post.
In one bite you allege that people who want to form these communities:
and they are
Compare these two claims to my suggested alternatives and see which is more of an unfair jump.
Also, if you care, the term ‘nerd’ is not one I would apply casually to all LW/SSC.
Yes, sometimes it goes horribly, but isn’t this also how most every human community got started? At some point groups of people said “Screw this, screw this place, and screw all of you!” and that’s how humans left Africa for Europe and Asia, and left Europe for the New World, and the east coast for the west coast, etc. I definitely think one of our problems today is that there’s no where else to screw off to.
If a portal to a New Earth opened up and you could go off to live with just people of your Tribe (whatever that may be) and just not have to deal with all those backwards Others, would you go? Better question, would everyone else let you go?
ETA: I do think, though, that the problem a rationalist community would have is that reason is far more useful for telling you what is, and not how you ought to act. I recall reading on an SSC open thread that religious intentional societies have a much higher success rate. i.e., a colony based on some non-millenarian branch of Christianity will probably work better because its founding guidelines are designed around not behaving in ways that make people want to kill each other.
I mean, yeah, I’d go just because transdimensional portals are super cool. However, I would find the environment oppressive. I’d much rather got to a place where people disagree with me sometimes; and not just on trivial matters, either.
In response to your edit:
I think there’s a difference between “rationalists”, and upper-case-R “Rationalists”. Lower-case rationalists are just people who try to avoid mental biases as much as possible; as such, they probably don’t exist as a coherent group (or, arguably, at all). Upper-case Rationalists have a very specific set of beliefs regarding e.g. cryonics, polyamory, AI, and EA; they also share a common jargon and a shared cultural heritage (e.g. HPMoR, the Sequences, etc.). As such, they absolutely do constitute a distinct tribe.
I want to know Descartes and Leibniz’s beliefs regarding cryonics, polyamory, and AI.
So does the AI, but nobody has been able to pry the two of them away from their shared harem since they were unfrozen
AI think, therefore AI am.
I’ve definitely seen this and I think that SSC has a lot more rationalists than Rationalists. I’ve never met a real life Rationalist, do they exist?
Apparently, they are all living together in some polyamorous house in the Bay Area somewhere 🙂
Yes. I already made that decision once, when I chose to move away from my home town. I would make it again… under the right conditions.
I don’t think that making a community of rationalists wouldn’t necessarily achieve that, though. The focus could be put on the intellectual diversity within the rationalist community. It’d be a bit of hard work to keep this focused (and not just have it be a circlejerk about being poly), but when your community’s main feature is a commitment to inquiry and thinking about where the hell your values come from, then that might be an interesting recipe for new ideas.
Of course to avoid the cult problem, and odd social dynamics, it would probably make more sense for this to be a camp/retreat for 1 or 2 weeks, rather than an intentional community. The consequences of social ostricization would be much less, since people could just “wait it out.”
Any possible link to this thread?
Groups of like-minded people come together all the time without causing “catastrophic… failure modes.” I mean that’s basically every church, every club, every political advocacy group. I don’t see why rationalists (big R or small R) coming together would be any worse. Unless you seriously believe that they are going to create skynet or the next world religion. Which is absurd, since that’s obviously scheduled to happen at Google and Facebook, respectively.
I think this is a case where you really ought to just have the object-level debate about polyamory rather than try to have some meta-level debate about rationalists meeting IRL. The meta-level argument seems extremely weak. Personally, I think stable monogamous relationships are “better” than polyamory. But I also don’t think it’s any of my business if people want to choose one over the other…
It seems like a lot of the variance in discomfort here arises from varied opinions on the degree to which “let’s build a Rationalist+ community” implies “where the members will have reduced ease of access to non-Rationalist+ individuals”.
The truth lies somewhere between “let’s build a community to which we can teleport at any time, requiring no changes or location or other permanent commitments which might detract from our individual memberships in other communities” and “let’s build a one-way portal to out own private dimension”. I think the most productive thing would be to determine where specific proposals fall on this spectrum, which ranges of the spectrum are desirable, and which subsets of proposal-space are likely or easy.
“Privilege” is arguably the fundamental concept of the American Left today. I attempted to explain “Privilege Theory” and describe some broad criticisms of it in practice:
https://randomreadingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/06/26/a-critique-of-privilege-theory/
“The worst part of this Privilege Theory moral paradigm is the psychological incentives it creates in its followers. It makes privilege a vice, and lack of privilege a virtue. By extension, characteristics which are ostensibly good in reality are bad in morality, and vice versa. Having money, not being arrested, being treated with respect, and not being sexually abused are all objectively good things in our lives, but basically make you a bad person whose opinions are tainted and irrelevant. Meanwhile, being poor, being arrested, not being respected, and being sexually abused are all objectively bad things in life, but make you a good person whose opinions are accurate and relevant.”
FWIW, I think the first part of your article — the steelmanning portion — is probably accurate (although I’m not a social justice person, so I could be wrong). However, it could definitely benefit from some editing. At the very minimum, you should add some subject headings, e.g. “Privilege Basics”, “Epistemology”, “Ethics”, and “Solutions”. I would also try to think of a way to shorten your paragraphs (though, admittedly, I don’t know how).
One piece of content I would change is the paragraph that starts with this:
In your example, the white oppressor and the black oppress-ee are engaging in diametrically opposed behaviors. But I don’t think that the majority of SJWs have such a scenario as their core example of privilege (though some do, surely). Rather, they would say that, because or privilege, the exact same behaviors produce radically different outcomes for the black kid vs. the white kid. If both students were caught smoking pot at the same time, the black kid would go to juvie and have his career prospects ruined; whereas the white kid would get a slap on the wrist and go on to Yale. Similarly, if both kids applied to Yale, and had the exact same grades, then the white kid would get in just because he’s white — which, by the way, is why we need Affirmative Action.
Paragraph length is something I’ve always struggled with while writing. I tend to swing back and forth between too long and short.
I take your point on the standard SJW scenario, but in my subjective experience with SJWs, the “outcome-based” scenario is just as, if not more common. I’m considering adding in the other side.
The two scenario’s can coexist. I believe that a person can both be treated worse in the same situation than a person with a different trait and also that they can be pushed to self-destructive behavior. The former can plausibly cause the latter.
For example, men who are victims of domestic violence are more likely to be denied appropriate help, like counseling that doesn’t presume that they are the perpetrator, which may cause them to engage in alternative forms of treatment, like doing drugs or drinking. The latter can in turn cause new problems.
Of course, one could give a similar example for women.
My main point of disagreement is the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. Most of the bad things in SJ results from having to rationalize away all kinds of inconvenient facts that clash with the tribal notion that some traits make people exclusively oppressors or the oppressed.
These days, affirmative action means that the black kid with the same grades would get in, whereas the white one wouldn’t. Still, I agree with the example about smoking pot.
And also at the opposite end of the spectrum, an asian kid pretty much needs to walk on water to get into a top school.
My biggest problem with the concept, related to your “makes good things into bad things” argument is that it suffers from something maybe analogous to “Copenhagen ethics.”
For example, imagine a small country with only East Asians. It is a wealthy, peaceful nation and the residents enjoy a very high average standard of living. Do the people living in this country enjoy “Asian privilege”? It seems strange to say so when there is no one of any other race living there. But then suppose this country experiences a big influx of white immigration and the whites are, on average, much poorer, less well educated, and more prone to criminality than the native Asian population. They enjoy significantly worse life outcomes, are discriminated against as employees, are more likely to be targets of police suspicion, often unfairly, etc. Now are the Asians in this country enjoying “Asian privilege”?
It seems to me that they are not enjoying Asian privilege. Rather the whites are suffering from the effects of bias against them, in addition to many problems they brought with them at higher rates than the native population. The idea that in the homogeneous case the Asians are not enjoying “privilege,” but in the case where the poor whites come they are seems strange. If anything, we probably assume most of the rich Asians wish the poor whites had not come. They don’t feel “privileged” by their presence, even if it means they are relatively wealthier by the standards of their new, poorer society.
That is, it is almost as if being in contact with poor people makes you a worse person for not being as poor as them. But if you just happen to live somewhere with no poor people then you’re fine. Like if the influx of whites was due to a liberalization of immigration laws on humanitarian grounds, the “privilege” framework would seem to impute more need for guilt and self-examination on the part of the Asians who did enact such a law relative to before or the hypothetical case in which they remained closed.
It reminds me a bit of another pet peeve, which is people from very racially homogeneous parts of the USA or the world lecturing e.g. white Southerners about how horribly racist they are.
Well, to challenge that a little, it’s certainly true that the existing citizens in your hypothetical might have advantages that they don’t realize. Let’s say that there’s a benefit to having family members or family friends in hiring and mentoring positions.
The new immigrants won’t have those established networks, and it might take decades for the networks to even out, if they ever do. In those circumstances, if we imagine a native born citizen lecturing an immigrant, it would be good for the native to appreciate her existing advantages.
That doesn’t answer the question of what duty it creates, if any, but in that hypo, at least, it’s there.
… Why? It’s fundamentally a relative concept; it talks about the differences in experiences between two groups.
It is impossible to read anything by anyone writing about privilege and not see them mention that being privileged is not a moral condemnation.
And yet it’s also impossible to spend any time around these people (like, say, at my university) and not get the sense that a significant and influential subset of these people actually do consider it a moral condemnation – and they can get their way. When we consider the increasingly stringent and unreasonable standards applied to, say, “harassment” or “bigotry”, and the punishments which can come with these, it becomes even clearer. Classic example: https://500hats.com/im-a-creep-i-m-sorry-d2c13e996ea0
The poor sap is so indoctrinated he appears to believe it himself. He dared to show romantic interest in a woman? In a semi-work, semi-social setting? Quel horreur!
As far as I can tell, it’s classic motte-and-bailey.
SocJus privilege talk was the impetus for Scott’s classic motte-and-baily essay.
So, Tedd, I completely understand that when speaking to the enemy, social justice advocates make strict assurances that they are not being morally condemned for their privilege. But as soon as the evil oppressors are out of earshot…
Also it doesn’t even have to be intentional. We must remember that most everyone is stupid. For every C.S. Lewis writing beautiful apologetics for the Christian way of life we’ve got 100 bible bangers who just want to scream hellfire at sinners. For every calm and reasonable discussion about the ways in which social and political structures have differential (and unfair) impact on different groups of people you’ve got 100 bitter minorities who want an excuse to scream “kill whitey.”
I think this is something that will happen to any movement or system of social control. You will have at the base the thoughtful, true believers who understand the system and why it’s good and will live by it anyway, and then a free-floating contingent of people looking for anything to give them social power. 30 years ago, that contingent was attracted to religion. Today that contingent is attracted to social justice, because screaming “SINNER!” at someone is more likely to backfire on you than hurt them, whereas there’s still power is screaming “RACIST!” This too will eventually change.
Why then, not just use the word “lucky”?
“Recognize how lucky you are to be a white, middle-to-upper class American.”
I feel like if you are “lucky” to be something, it implies that thing is better than the alternative. The whole point of “privilege” is that it’s a bad thing. The idea is that the privilege should either wrack you with guilt throughout your life, or at the very least, the fact that you were handed so much unjust benefits should make you weak compared to others. The unprivileged are supposed to feel superior to the privileged, a dynamic that doesn’t really exist with “lucky”
The point of privilege is that it is instrumentally good but morally bad.
“Lucky”, unfortunately, does not lend itself to the sort of motte-and-bailey you can pull off with the aid of the older meaning of “privilege”: you can no longer insinuate that your outgroup are a select few who aren’t subject to the same rules as the rest of us, and if called on it plead that you’re accusing them of nothing worse than ordinary good fortune.
1) It is entirely possible to read quite a few things by people writing about privilege in which there is no mention that being privileged is not a moral condemnation. Links available on request, but we can start with Freddie DeBoer and John Scalzi and go from there.
2) It is also made quite clear that disputing or refusing to acknowledge and repent of one’s white privilege IS a moral failing, making one complicit in an ongoing systematic oppression and abuse of various minorities.
That is NOT AT ALL what I get from Scalzi. Indeed, he has written in grateful terms (no “repentance”) about the privileges and advantages he received, getting a scholarship to a topnotch private school, etc.
@Larry Kestenbaum
Ironically, I think privilege proponents could achieve* a lot more if they simply emphasized gratitude rather than guilt.
*Of their stated goals, at least. Though I think part of the problem is that at least some privilege proponents seem to use “privilege” as a more of rhetorical stick to silence people saying things they don’t like.
Yet he wants the rest of us to don the sackcloth and ashes for being straight white males playing life on “The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”.
Privilege itself may not be seen as needing moral condemnation, but being insufficiently apologetic about one’s privilege sure seems to be condemned a lot. And the easy way to demonstrate that one is sufficiently apologetic, particularly for those not inclined to humility, is to call out and condemn other people who aren’t apologizing for their privilege.
@Larry Kestenbaum
Perhaps I should’ve structured the comment differently, but to be clear 1 and 2 were so numbered because they are independent and separate points, not related to one another. My only point re: Scalzi and DeBoer was that they have written articles about privilege that do not contain the statement or explanation or clarification that being privileged is not something to be condemned, and that therefore the statement “It is impossible to read anything by anyone writing about privilege and not see them mention that being privileged is not a moral condemnation.” is not actually true.
Point 2, OTOH, was general and not aimed at any specific writers, though if you’d like me to be specific I can provide examples. Scalzi AFAIK has not said that denying privilege was immoral, simply stupid and dishonest (he compares it to being a ‘gravity-denier’), but I stopped reading his non-fiction output some years back so I may have missed something.
This usually seems a little insincere, at best. Sort of how “No offense but…” or “I’m not racist but” is almost invariably followed by something at least a little offensive / racist.
The idea of racism as a moral evil is a relatively modern notion. And what it is that constitutes racism is under continuous revision.
When someone says “I’m not racist but” — I interpret it to mean the following: “I accept the idea that racism is a moral evil and yet have to qualify this statement because of the ambiguity surrounding what it actually encompasses and am at least subconsciously aware that someone is going to consider what I have to say falling into the category of racism”
Typically it’s because they have to say something directly or indirectly unflattering about a non-European racial or ethnic group
but causing physical or psychological harm isn’t their intent.
People that reject the idea that there’s anything wrong with Racism as such don’t make such prefaces.
A: I think black face for halloween costumes shouldn’t be considered racism.
B: I’m not a racist but I think black face for halloween costumes shouldn’t be considered racism.
Does A appear the same amount of racist as B?
It also strongly implies something about the cause of those differences. If Group X has the same experience before and after the arrival of Group Y, then the causal implication of “privilege” does not apply to group X’s experience and you probably ought to chose a different word.
For example, imagine a small country with only East Asians. It is a wealthy, peaceful nation and the residents enjoy a very high average standard of living. Do the people living in this country enjoy “Asian privilege”? It seems strange to say so when there is no one of any other race living there. But then suppose this country experiences a big influx of white immigration and the whites are, on average, much poorer, less well educated, and more prone to criminality than the native Asian population. They enjoy significantly worse life outcomes, are discriminated against as employees, are more likely to be targets of police suspicion, often unfairly, etc. Now are the Asians in this country enjoying “Asian privilege”?
No, they’re experiencing a combination of “native privilege”, “class privilege”, “education privilege”, etc., for which “Asian” is a useful but inexact proxy, and it’s only the hypothetical scenario which makes the Asian proxy useful.
The original term, meaning “private law”, had predictive value. You could speak of feudal nobles having privileges and mean something. You can speak of whites under Jim Crow as having privileges and mean something, because what qualified as a white and what legal benefit they gained was codified. The problem with the privilege language as used today is that it is almost inevitably applied not directly but across a succession of proxies, and the predictive value of those is hidden by the sheer number of variables involved.
I’m willing to grant that “wealth privilege” and “education privilege” have some predictive value, even if there’s no legal distinction. If we take “white privilege” as a proxy for a combination of “wealth privilege”, “education privilege” and other advantages more typically found in white Americans, I can see the temptation to generalize, but to talk of a specific poor, uneducated white American using “white privilege” makes little sense. For that matter, as per the original post, talking about “wealth privilege” and “education privilege” makes little sense when you can talk about “intelligence privilege” or “attractive privilege”.
Any society will condition people to choose the path of highest reward / lowest risk. If being “not privileged” is rewarded, then people will choose to present themselves as “not privileged” or define “privilege” to their benefit. In that case, being able to define oneself as “not privileged” becomes a privilege, and we’ve entered the territory where general claims of privilege (or lack thereof) cease to have usefulness.
From my experience, those arguing privilege seem to have a level of education, social skills, intelligence, and access to communications that puts them well into the privileged half of the public.
“From my experience, those arguing privilege seem to have a level of education, social skills, intelligence, and access to communications that puts them well into the privileged half of the public.”
I tried to write a section on this, but I couldn’t quite figure out how without it sounding like an Ad Homninem. Privilege Theory advocates aren’t just in the privileged “half” of the public, they tend to be in the very highest strata of privilege by the most typical outcomes. Some of the biggest SJW controversies happened in places like Berkeley and Yale, where even the most mediocre students are among the most privileged people on earth. Even being in America at all makes one ultra-privileged by global standards.
So we have a weird situation where people are are more privileged than 99% of people on earth are yelling at the people who are more privileged than 99.9% of people on earth for not properly checking their privilege.
But I’m not sure what to make of this.
@fahertym
Isn’t that just the same phenomenon as many wealthy people complaining that they can’t make ends meet, claiming that they are middle class, etc?
It seems to me that this is (similar to) the outgroup homogeneity effect, where people are less able to see the great gaps between people who are both far away to one side, while very aware of the gaps of those very similar to them.
So people then tend to rate the experience of the really badly off as very similar to those who are just a bit worse of than them, while similarly rating the experience of the really well off as very similar to those who are just a bit better off than them.
The flaw in the economic analysis is that jobs listed (social worker, caseworker) have pay that over time has fallen and fallen to the point where they aren’t competitive with jobs that don’t require any bachelor degree, much less a fancy one from Berkeley. Likewise journalism is more precarious and low paid then ever. Artists never made any money. Public interest lawyers can’t make their loan payments. Even humanities and social science professors don’t make an especially good salary, at least outside of a few specialties that mostly aren’t germane to the discussion.
If it’s all about aggrandizing their class interests, then they are doing a remarkably poor job of it.
@Zephalinda
I think your argument can’t be compatible with this group being really powerful in our society.
If it were then some minor advantage relative to the absent-the-ideology-world wouldn’t cut it. If the group were really powerful, all those calls to raise salaries would have worked, not maybe kind of, sort of slowed the decline.
If this is class warfare then the class in question is losing badly.
Also, the calls for more money contradict your claim that it isn’t about money but rather social capital. If money didn’t matter then why the calls to raise those salaries?
To sum up: either the marxist analysis doesn’t explain what’s going on or the group in question is quite weak. Or both.
@Aapje
“Isn’t that just the same phenomenon as many wealthy people complaining that they can’t make ends meet, claiming that they are middle class, etc?”
Probably yes. To use Scott’s Outgroup/Ingroup analogy, it’s kind of like the German Nazis hating the German Jews and liking the Japanese even though the Nazis are far more similar to the former than the latter.
Another factor to consider is that pretty much all intellectual movements originate from wealthy, educated privileged people. They have revolutionary ideas about how “the world” operates, but they live within their own social groups and don’t know much outside of it, so they work to achieve their goals within their limited purview. At least the Marxists should get credit for trying to spread their ideas to poor people.
If it were then some minor advantage relative to the absent-the-ideology-world wouldn’t cut it. If the group were really powerful, all those calls to raise salaries would have worked, not maybe kind of, sort of slowed the decline.
What has happened is that the supply of graduates in the social justice adjacent fields is higher than the demand. Left-leaning professors in the academy encourage funding for their programs, hoping to turn out more socially-conscious graduates able to enact social change, only to find out the marginal utility of each additional diversity studies graduate is minimal and that these graduates now demand jobs. Having created a supply of specialized labor, they then had to create a source of jobs (such as community organizer positions) or funding (such as art grants).
Ultimately, though, not all influence is equal. The ability to change the curricula at a major university is very different than the ability to get money from the government. Governments are pressed for money, and the return on specialized social labor is low, and university professors are finding that they’re not as privileged as a group as, say, public school teachers, when it comes to prioritizing spending.
Yes. Consider the essay’s Mary versus, say, a Zoya, also black and female, born an albino in Africa, whose family kept her out of school to keep her from being murdered by witchdoctors for body parts.
Why is Mary entitled to full credit when she is starting with American privilege?
Privilege is a squishy enough term that it’s hard to have a clear conversation with someone who doesn’t agree with you – you usually need to unpack it before you can discuss it.
– I think you’ve got the baseline definition down. There are a couple nuances I see often, however.
— One is that privilege is often used as a shorthand for lack of knowledge. SJ twitter is full of people talking about how exhausting it is to take to white guys, because white guys think they know everything and you have to “spoon feed” them into understanding you. I tend to think this kind of etymologically arrogant stereotyping is dangerous, because the woke member of the conversation assumes that he or she doesn’t really have to challenge his or her own ideas or try to apply charity to the white guy because he’s a white guy and what do they know, but of course, I guess I would think that, because I’m a white guy.
— Another is that privilege often reduces to confidence – that a privileged individual walks into a room or an interview or a problem without much fear of discrimination, and this confidence is a virtuous circle, whereas the anti-privileged live an a environment of self-doubt and rage, constantly shaking with anger over some microaggression or other. (Ray Gillette to Sterling Archer: “Why do you always act like everything is just going to work out for you?” Archer: “Because it almost always does!!!”)
Last random comment on privilege: Moldbug has a funny but not helpful bit someplace about how in an environment where one group is allowed to use language reserved for them alone, and another group is required to atone for offenses to the first group, those are literally “privileges.”
Really excellent essay. The steelman at the top was particularly well done, but I thought several of the critique sections were good as well.
I take exception to this though:
Depending on where exactly you want to draw the line, the American left is 30-90 million people. As you point out in your blog post most people have a realist view of the world. I’d say overwhelmingly so. It can’t be the case that a non-realist theory is the fundamental concept of the American Left when the overwhelming majority of the people that make up the American Left accept realism.
While vaguely positive references are more common, the strong form of privilege theory is a fringe position. That said it is certainly still worth discussing and your blog post does an admirable job of that.
Only if you assume intellectual consistency.
Thanks for the comment.
I take your point on the American Left, so I’ll modify my statement:
I think Privilege Theory is largely derived from the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, the latter of which IS a fundamental concept in the American Left. The difference between the two is that Privilege Theory is built on a non-realist view which extends into epistemology whereas the Veil of Ignorance is only concerned with ethics. Privilege Theory is foundation to the American academic Left, but you’re right it hasn’t penetrated too strongly into the standard progressive mindset. In my experience standard progressives still have enough of a Bullshit Sensor to reject Privilege Theory.
You should read Nietzsche, specifically his Genealogy of Morals, because it looks like you’ve partially re-invented his concepts of ressentiment and slave morality / Slavenmoral.
The idea that the weak, whether weak as a matter of fact or just within their own minds, invert the ‘good’ of the strong to create their conception of ‘evil’ is at the heart of his critique of Jewish and Christian morality. Any marker of health, wealth and beauty which the strong naturally value is feared and hated by the weak as a symbol of oppression. That fear and hatred cannot be directly expressed towards the strong but is redirected back onto themselves as self-hatred and anxiety. The weak tear themselves and one another down while calling it virtue.
Privilege is the most explicit I’ve ever heard of anyone else being about this process. It is a precise inversion of values, with anything you might call good fortune being labelled as a social evil.
I have read the Genealogy of Morals and definitely see the similarities. It’s interesting that both Nietzsche and SJWs are both anti-rationalists on opposite sides of the Master-Slave Morality dichotomy. We could probably build a paradigm wherein the Alt-Right sees itself as the Nietzshean response to SJW slave morality.
I’m also a big fan of Ayn Rand, and although her comparison with Nietzsche is typically overblown, this is one area where they overlap considerably.
The alt-right is the Nietzshean response to SJW slave morality. People talk about Nietzsche like his political views are this esoteric thing but that’s because they don’t want to face the truth. He most strongly resembles the right when you take away religion. If he was alive today, he would probably be a techno-commercialist.
I think you’re making a common mistake regarding Nietzsche.
The Alt Right is, first and foremost, about trying to protect our people. An economic policy of protectionism, a foreign policy of non-entanglement and defense, and a domestic policy of conserving what’s left of our communities and traditions. It’s a last-ditch attempt to stop the decline of western civilization.
Those are exactly the sort of instincts Nietzsche would deride. He would respond that the things we take meaning from and want to defend are already beyond saving. That the only way forward is to create new values, values which a more beautiful and more wicked humanity can follow.
Leaving aside that if you throw away the values you have no standards to say that humanity is more or less beautiful or wicked, why does he assume we have to share his value of deserting things that other people call past saving?
The term alt-right has certainly narrowed in the last couple years. I meant it in the more expansive use that includes people like Nick Land.
I thought the first part of your post was doing alright until this:
This is no part of privilege theory as I understand it. If you want to build it in to your target, fine, but then you’re leaving out a massive swathe of people who talk about privilege, especially those outside of the few academic departments where these radical postmodern views are popular.
Then, of course, your first criticism was of the postmodern thing. I stopped reading at that point because I thought the piece was going to be addressing me and the people I know who like to talk about privilege but none of them hold those stupid views. They think that facts about privilege are things you can find evidence for and know in the perfectly ordinary, non-postmodern sense.
Ask yourself: how many in the American left do you think hold the view that “there is no way to determine what is ‘true'”?(Hint: very few) Then ask yourself if this is really fair to include in a discussion of something you want to identify as “arguably the fundamental concept of the American Left today”.
Okfine, I’ll bite on this– the biggest, baddest basilisk there is.
The premise that mathability is separable from g.
An old survey of MI (Multiple Intelligences) Theory.
Apparently, my IQ is not high enough to parse this comment. What is “g”, how is it different from IQ, how are they both different from “mathematical ability” (what is that, anyway ?) and why is the whole thing a basilisk ?
If I interpret the term “mathematical ability” in the most naive fashion, as “ability to solve math problems quickly and correctly”, then I’d argue that “mathematical ability” depends on both innate IQ and training; as such, it is not synonymous with either. But this interpretation sounds rather trivial, so it must be wrong, given that you’re talking about basilisks…
Out of my depth here– I thought the whole ceaseless blog discussion of Murray Racial IQ Theory presupposed a basic understanding of psychometrics and the inclusion of g (general intelligence factor) as part of the shared vocabulary of the SSC commentariat?
I’m not smart enough to be an official member of the “SSC commentariat”. So, can you explain your terms (or link to some explanation thereof) ? You don’t have to, of course; saying “my comment is not relevant to lay people” is a perfectly reasonable position (no sarcasm, I genuinely mean that).
Pardon for being snippy.
I always recommend Dr. Haier “The Neuroscience of Intelligence” for history, current standing, and future research in IQ and g.
If you just want a definition of g, wiki is fine.
The idea that there are different kinds of intelligence has a long contentious history and the survey I linked above is an evaluation of current and past research.
If there is genetic linkage between autism spectrum disorder and an ability to be better at math, that would possibly validate one kind of MI theory– that mathematical ability is somehow different than the other modalities of g.
Ok, that makes sense, but why is it a “basilisk” ? Either the MI theory is right, or it’s wrong; either option sounds interesting to me. But again, I’m not familiar with the field, so I’m surely missing something…
I think the biggest basilisk there is the biological basis of behavior and especially the biological basis of intelligence. Witness fury over Murray Racial IQ Theory and the He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named concept of aich-bee-dee…what if there are basic measurable statistically significant differences in red brain/ blue brain biochemistry?
Or in male/female brain biochemistry?
Given that we do our thinking with our brains; our brains are made of biochemistry; and red people think differently about some things than blue people; why wouldn’t we expect their brains to be different ?
I think the less trivial position would be not merely, “red brains are different from blue brains”, but rather something like, “red brains are different from blue brains right from birth, these differences are innate and cannot be changed, and they predetermine whether the child will grow up to be red or blue”. I think this is the position which would get me banned from this blog if I were to defend it, but:
a). This position is almost certainly a caricature; most people (well, most non-SJWs, I guess) would probably say that biology is a factor that affects our thoughts with some weight between 0 and 1, but few people would be so bold as to claim either exactly 0 or exactly 1. Also,
b). Being banned from this blog is not a “basilisk”, it’s just an arbitrary rule made up by one guy (who happens to run the blog, so it’s his right to do so).
As a refresher here are the tribal definitions:
There’s no gene that determines whether one likes or mocks American football.
@bugmaster
But that is observably false.
Educational attainment changes red brains to blue brains, or at least red phenotype to blue phenotype in the young.
I have linked multiple studies on this.
@brad
I understood those positions to be caricatures from Dr. Alexander’s outgroup post.
And you dont know that– there may be a VLS (Very Large Sample) convergent gene network in the future of cognitive genomics that describes an inherited preference for american football over “futbol”.
Interesting that Dr. Alexander’s outgroup post doesnt include educational attainment in its description of the Blue Tribe. Is that because EA is furiously contested as being a Blue Tribe attribute by the Red Tribe?
Sketches, not caricatures. I don’t know exactly how you are using the terms “red” and “blue” and as far as I’ve seen you haven’t explained.
For example:
Did these studies use the terms “red brain” and “blue brain”?
Also aliens may invade the planet.
@Brad
Since one of the distinguishing features of the grey tribe is their use of the mocking term “sportsball,” which like all facets of human behavior can be best explained by a single variant gene, there clearly is a football mocking gene, but the wild type allele is near fixation in both the red and blue tribes.
Voting record is used as a proxy for conservative and liberal tendency.
So no, red and blue are just shorthand descriptives.
“highly educated ” is not the same as educational attainment. Educational attainment is commonly used as a proxy for IQ.
Successfully unpicking the fabric of our genome is far more probable than Alien Invasion.
Like Dr. Alexander I suspect destruction of our species is coming from within the house.
Like from our very own Kaiju Eiga.
(Monster movie)
That’s not what’s meant by red and blue tribe. If you mean that just say liberal and conservative or democrat and republican.
“Educational attainment is a term commonly used by statisticians to refer to the highest degree of education an individual has completed as defined by the US Census Bureau Glossary.”
Certainly looks the same to me.
If you mean IQ, say IQ.
Yes, but not that when it is unpacked that it will result in every historically contingent aspect of culture being associated with a particular gene. It’s absurd to believe that there is a football versus soccer gene.
Cool story.
How can I tell if I’m red brain or blue brain if I’m not American?
Can you actually be banned for defending a position? I tend to think not, since nothing happens when people say it might be true that “Jews really are a dangerous fifth column.”
@Mark
Arnold Kling has a good model: “Liberals [Blue] see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors. Conservatives [Red] see the world as a battle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians see the world as a battle between freedom and coercion.”
Just wait a couple of months until Bintchaos has her red/blue braintesting machine in working order.
sigh.
I keep telling you, soldiers/explorers…soldiers/explorers!
I think you’d find in any rational taxonomy, both soldier and explorer would code as “red”.
@Nybbler
That is a useless definition, because then the two phenotypes could not function as a CCP.
Which leads to the conclusion, given that the observable data fits Nybbler’s point, that your CCP model may not be the best fit.
It certainly may not, but the beauty of my soldier/explorer model is that it absolutely does not depend on between group differences in g.
Why is that feature particularly desirable?
Because complexity is difference in scale, and requires cooperation at one scale and competition at another.
If both phenotypes have exactly the same traits, it doesnt work. Sure theres some overlap.
And g? lol, means less fighting and resistance.
That’s an idiosyncratic and non-standard definition of complexity, which is generally understood in terms of interdependency of variables or rules in a system, but we’ll set that aside for a moment.
In your theoretical model, what specifically are the two scales, and why is cooperation required at one scale and competition in the other?
What about the willingness to do mathematics, and the aptitude that some people display for it? A lot of people have the intelligence for math but do not like it and aren’t good at it as a result. Maybe the high percentage of graduate students with autism in mathematics as compared to other fields is just an accident of cultural history that has made math tolerant of eccentricities. (Something notable even at the high school level) I don’t see people like Paul Erdos in say history though.
Something about aspies that I have noticed in myself and others in the cohort, is the tendency to obsess on single issues until they are …satisfactorily resolved? Like the protagonist of The Accountant the driving need to finish the puzzle, the task, the math problem at hand.
People that like hard problems are drawn to mathematics and physics.
Heres an Atlantic article on US newfound ability to win the Math Oympics.
Notice the students have all come out of extra curricular programs and inner city talent searches…a new pedagogical ecosystem that gets around the horrors of NCLB.
Anyways, read the whole article– I think for me, the satisfaction/completion/joy in solving a hard math problem is critical.
Interesting article. Notice that it’s mostly happening online and in extracurricular activities such as math camps, mostly private. It almost looks as though there are better ways of kids learning things than in the current public school system, some of them enabled by new technology.
Going back to one of our earlier exchanges.
It would be very surprising indeed if the public school system (or any school system that didn’t heavily subdivide students based on ability) was good at educating the top percentiles. Optimistically, the system optimises for educating the majority of students who are mostly close to the average; there’s no reason that the methods chosen for that should work for outlying students (in either direction). Pessimistically, the system optimises for keeping students relatively ruly, and there’s no reason it should educate anyone except by accident (but my education inclined me towards the optimistic view).
Hmm, what would heavy subdivision look like exactly?
I live in a part of Germany where until recently after four years of elementary school students would be sorted in three different kind of schools.
That system is pretty much in shambles and is being slowly dissolved right now, however it is impossible to judge whether that is necessary due to the changed times or due the reforms themselve.
To teach Olympiad-level students properly, I think you’d need to give them at least some classes with only the top 1% or so of students, or put them in classes for the top 5-10% of older students.
@David
Yes, NCLB has forced the evolution of private extracurricular $$-and-volunteer-infused math camps, after school groups, etc– a whole pedagogical ecosystem.
And it works!
US was shut out of the Math Olympics for 21 years, but has won the last 2 years.
Capitalisma si!
Its the American way.
But somehow I don’t think deVos’ idea of “choice” includes anything on a par with Mathnysium, Bright Circles, or the Russian School.
I think she is talking about private catholic or christian schools.
@rlms
But that isnt what is happening– its the good old secret sauce of upper SES parental involvement.
@rlms
I’m pretty sure the slow and repetitive common curriculum I received in Ontario elementary schools aimed lower than that. There was so much repetition. They must have taught us long division four times over the years. I’m guessing it was aimed at the middle of the lower half of students, so the 25th percentile.
(Things improved markedly in high school, once we separated into advanced, general, and basic streams.)
@john_larson
I don’t think that the amount of repetition in elementary school should be looked at like that. The things you learn in elementary school are suppossed to be so firmly lodged into your head that you can never get them out of there. Compare that to middle and high school were everyone already expects 80% to be forgotten a few years after graduation.
About fifty years ago I spent three summers as a councilor in a camp for gifted children. It isn’t a new ecosystem due to NCLB, although it may have grown in later decades.
You know this how? She is a supporter of school vouchers. They can be used at religious or non-religious schools.
So far, your comments on DeVos are unsupported by data. All they show is that you accept for gospel the factoids generated by critics of the voucher movement and/or the Trump administration. They could be true, but you have shown no reason to believe they are true.
If vouchers were available in an area with a large enough population to support a school specialized to gifted students, can you think of any reason why it would not come into existence?
@DavidFriedman
well, we certainly know nothing about her actual motivations, because she is uncredentialled and her family money comes from the souless rapacious pyramid scheme known as AMWAY.
She is another “business” person thrown at a complex non-linear problem.
Also her relationship to military-industrial complex mercenary Erik Prince creeps me out.
But thats on me.
Not an American, so I can’t talk about NCLB specifically, but it seems to me that it is futile in general (in any country) to expect a school to do a good job at preparing students for the Math Olympiad.
There is nothing “joyful” about how math is typically done at school. And even if you could fix this, school is a mass-production factory, and it cannot care about the six best math students in the country, simply because the classroom contains more than six students, and they all have to be taught.
Extra-curricular activities have much better opportunity to focus on the elite (and ignore everyone else) and to optimize for doing math the “joyful” way (and ignore all the bureaucrats from the department of education).
So I suspect that any country that does well at the Math Olympiad internationally, will have a good extra-curricular program. In other words, that this is how it is done everywhere, not a specifically American thing. (Perhaps the specifically American thing was not having those extra-curricular programs in the past?)
In other countries it is done within their school systems.
There is no commercial private pedagogical ecology developed around mathematics.
The Netherlands actually built a math curriculum to ward off a NCLB style program.
@bintchaos
Preparation for the IMO might be done within the school system as in physically located in schools, I don’t think it is done within the school system as in in regular maths classes unless there are countries with very powerful magnet schools that take the best few thousand students around. Preparation for national olympiads is done by many private schools that can afford it, I imagine that also occurs in the US (although perhaps to a lesser extent).
But the US didn’t win for 21 years– and now has won 2 in a row.
I’m not blaming NCLB for US not winning for 21 years– it wasn’t even around for part of that.
But whatever we were doing wasn’t working…
It is true that NCLB has damaged US OECD standing in math and science.
And I do think the rise of the “pedagogical ecology” described in the Atlantic article directly contributes to US 2 wins in a row.
Reading more. Lots and lots more, particularly (though not exclusively) papers in your field.
Editing the work of others. You can’t change everything, so you have to figure out what changes are actually important. This is easily transferred to your own writing.
Practice brevity. Purple prose in scientific writing is harmful to the reader and to your chances of publication. Be clear and concise, and very slightly repetitive.
This is chemistry-specific, but adhering to the IUPAC writing standards has helped me keep my typographical style consistent and understandable. Inconsistent use of symbols is confusing for the reader.
If you’re writing for a particular purpose (e.g. grant, specific journal), keep their requirements in mind before you touch the keyboard. For documents with particularly stringent restrictions (my last grant application was one page!) make an outline of your intentions before you start writing.
Finally, get feedback. Either from coauthors (who are going to be reading it anyway, so it’s convenient) or from peers. Try to ask people who you know are good writers, either by direct evidence (their papers) or indirect evidence (lots of grants!). If you’re uncomfortable sharing parts of your work with your close peers, your university may have a writing support centre. The centre at my university is used by everyone from freshmen writing their first essay to PhD candidates writing their dissertation. That said, the longer your document, the more specific your questions should be. Don’t inflict the full body of your dissertation on anyone but your committee.
A question for those who know US history. Have other presidents been as petty as Trump? Nixon maybe?
Maybe it’s biased reporting, but looking at his twitter feedaside from generic political messages, his shows a lot of tweets disparaging his enemies and bragging in silly ways.
How do you quantify “pettiness” ? Trivially speaking, Trump posts on Twitter way more than Nixon did, but that’s just because Nixon didn’t have a Twitter account.
LBJ was known to have quite a way with words, including calling Gerald Ford “so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time” (and suggested Ford “played too much football without his helmet on”, also said “Ford’s economics are the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking”). To the Greek ambassador, about Cyprus: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked good …We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long…”
He also bragged that his, um, fishing tackle (which he nicknamed ‘jumbo’) was so large he needed his pants cut specially. There is a recording of him ordering pants by telephone, which includes lines like: But, uh when I gain a little weight they cut me under there [in the nuts region]. So, leave me, you never do have much of margin there. See if you can’t leave me an inch from where the zipper (burps) ends, round, under my, back to my bunghole, so I can let it out there if I need to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3GT9UN7nDo
Also this: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ybmv3/til_lyndon_b_johnson_once_urinated_on_a_secret/
I kind of wish I could have seen an LBJ twitter account.
From Robert Caro’s excellent biography:
In fairness, that was when he was Senate Majority Leader–he may have toned it down by the time he became president.
I don’t know if this story about Kennedy fits what OP is asking for, exactly, but maybe it does, who knows.
Plus one for Caro, I started on Passage of Power and I’m 80% of the way through and it’s excellent.
The big difference is that LBJ really tried to cultivate a public persona that was, you know, NOT SOMEONE WHO SWINGS THEIR DICK AT PEOPLE, and the media at the time let him. He had a Texas ranch, and right after he became president, he brought the press along to a 13 day vacation with the Chancellor of West Germany. He tried hard to project an “affable texan patriarch” persona and it worked.
Either Trump knows what he’s doing or he doesn’t. Either he just acts, attacking whenever he feels like it, or he makes calculated attacks at times and places of his choosing, mindful that it’s very on-brand for him to be attacking his opponents. I can’t really pick between these two.
I’m suspicious of the Ford economics quote. Why would anyone talk about his economics? During his presidency, sure, but that didn’t “happen” to this country until after LBJ was dead. Maybe he was important during Nixon’s first term, but why attribute the economics to Ford rather than Nixon? And before that he was the leader of a tiny minority.
Indeed, that one is quite possibly apocryphal; it has become popular since the 2005 documentary _Fuck_, but you can also find it in the 2002 _Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson_ and the 1999 _Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton_. But that last one notes the remark was untaped.
The oldest reference I found was 1986, _All the Presidents’ Wits: The Power of Presidential Humor_ which quotes it as “They’re the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.”, referring to Nixon’s policies, not Ford’s.
Maybe it became “Ford” for alliteration.
Calvin Coolidge came up with a lot of zingers but characteristically kept them to himself.
Seriously, Trump has compared himself to Andrew Jackson, and I think it fits. A typical description of Jackson is “combative, quick-tempered, and thin-skinned”.
Not all of them, if this story is to be believed!
Ha, I was expecting the OTHER well-known (and also apocryphal) Coolidge zinger:
Hostess: “Mr. President I’ve made a large bet that I would be able to make you say more than two words.”
Coolidge: “You lose.”
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=veep+realistic&spf=1499108907109
brings back a lot of interesting results
and not because the characters are inspired by Trump
its worth considering the hypothesis that the biggest thing separating Trump from everyone else in Washington is that Trump doesn’t bother with the thin pretense of not being petty
(whether there might actually be some value in maintaining that pretense, I’ll leave as an open question)
Wow, people actually showed up for the Chicago meetup… the message section of the post about it seemed to be all “I’m constantly in Chicago all the time… except when that meetup is happening! Sorry!”
Rationalists are like the Spanish Inquisition…
I’ll second everything that Eltargrim has said and add for the love of all that is
holyscientific, use a citation manager. They are a huge huge time saver and also make finding that one reference you only sort of remember downloading a lot easier, although nowadays that feature is only marginally more useful than Google Scholar. I’m fond of Mendeley, EndNote is also popular but it was too buggy for me.Other resources: InCites can help you find a journal to submit to, I suggest starting as high as you can reasonably expect to and work your way down. Your PI probably has ideas, and also look at the journals that you’re citing a lot, they’re probably going to be relevant for your work too.
Make your figures look good! Invest the time in learning how to use Illustrator or some free equivalent, it’s worth the effort. Remember, every time you make a figure in Powerpoint Charles Darwin kills a finch.
Dedicate several hours every single day to working, and actually work doing that time. I combined Beeminder (see sidebar) with the Pomodoro technique and it looks like I’m going to finish my dissertation ahead of schedule and without paying a dime. A friend of mine on the other hand signed up after I told him about it and he’s down about 130 dollars over the last 6 months. But he also finished a publication that he’d been sitting on for awhile so I’d call that a pretty fair value.
Keep at it, and good luck!
I’ll second Mendeley. My writing workflow is research via Google Scholar, Scifinder, and Sci-Hub, organization via Mendeley, and writing via TeXMaker. Rather than use Mendeley’s BibTeX options, I export the citations from Google Scholar into the appropriate BibTeX file. I find that Mendeley has a hard time handling some of the titles in my field, and has an annoying bug with the initial A. The name Aaronson, A., becomes Aaronson, a.. Very frustrating.
Pomodoro has been helpful when I have a dedicated block of time to write, but often I need to toss down paragraphs in between other responsibilities. My melts are a fickle mistress, and students need guidance. I use Toggl to keep track of how I’m splitting my time between projects, and if I’m not spending enough time on writing I can block off a protected chunk.
I heartily endorse working in something better than Powerpoint/Excel. I spend far more time than I like wrangling with Office products. With how my lab is made up, though, it’s one of the only options that allows us to share. My datasets are mercifully small, so it’s not the worst thing in the world (sorry finches!).
Oh, and one other writing tip for papers: have all of your figures substantially finished before you start writing at all. You don’t have to have them journal-formatted yet, but you don’t want any surprises from that last experiment ruining a couple weeks worth of writing. Having the figures finished and organized helps you communicate the story your data are telling.
Continuing the tradition of a series of informative posts I’d like to gauge the interest in the vein of a discussion on autism/autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I’m finishing up a PhD in neuroscience, and I was thinking this would be a helpful way to practice talking with an audience that’s smart but (mostly) without domain specific knowledge, very handy before my defense in August. Here’s a not exhaustive list of what I was thinking of covering:
Why do we see more autism now?
Why is there a sex bias in diagnoses?
What are the genetics of ASD?
How does ASD compare with other neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. ID, schizophrenia, Williams)?
What are some common co-morbidities, and what do they signify? N.B this would focus on anxiety disorders because that’s what my dissertation is on, might spin off a separate post on others like epilepsy that also crop up a lot.
Do animals get ASD?
What does the spectrum part of autism spectrum disorder signify?
Depictions of ASD in popular culture, anyone who got it right?
What’s the deal with vaccines/Andrew Wakefield?
I also want to say upfront, I am not a clinician; I’ve never treated someone with ASD professionally (although I work with a lot of people who do), nothing that I say should be thought of as in any way representing therapy or medical advice. I do not personally have ASD (although I know many individuals who do); I score within a standard deviation of average on the autism spectrum quotient test. So, I’ll be approaching these issues from a researcher’s perspective, but I would welcome any input from the clinical side, or from individuals with autism who’d like to share their experience.
If there are any comments, or concerns or specific topics you’d like me to cover (from above or otherwise) please let me know!
Those are some interesting questions I could rattle on for awhile about, added them to my list!
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s two years ago now, and I’ll be looking forward to this. I don’t have any input in particular to offer, though if you’re going to ask specific questions, I might have good answers.
I’m extremely interested in autism! I would love to know more about life outcomes for high IQ autistics (including co-morbidities), and why people with exceptional math ability seem to have a high rates of autism,
This would interest me.
Mark me down as interested. Where will you be posting? (I vote for here, or hereabouts, since I don’t read the subreddit.
I’ll be posting here, since I also don’t read the subreddit. I’m aiming for every OT, or at least every other OT.
In reference to Scott’s letter to himself, I wanted to ask the community on their opinion of the Bay Area, and on moving in general. I finished my phd in neuroscience recently, and I’m looking for what to do next in life now that I’ve decided against academia. I currently live in Houston, which I actually like, but have never lived in a “global city” (e.g., New York, LA, Paris, London, Boston, etc.). I’m not inclined to move, but after reading Scott’s post (and a few other incidents) I’m wondering if maybe I’ve grown complacent. Are these places the new Athens? Should I consider moving there solely because of the sheer opportunity? Is there anyway to get a feeling of living in these cities without committing to moving there?
(I should perhaps note that this wouldn’t be a move of desperation. I get along with pretty much everyone, enjoy my life here, and run a growing science outreach organization. I’m just trying to get a feel for the opportunity cost of staying in a “lower tier” city)
I don’t have much to add to this other than to say that I recently moved to Houston and have enjoyed it quite a bit!
If you’ve lived here a while you might not fully appreciate the cost of living differences (including the lack of a state income tax) in comparison to here and someplace like NY or Bay Area. But it’s big. The choice isn’t just “live like I do now but with smarter people around” but rather “live in a smaller apartment with less take-home pay but with smarter people around.”
If I can keep finding employment in Texas, I’ll probably never leave!
I moved the the SF Bay area for seven years, and found the experience disappointing. For me it was just a place, no better or worse than any number of mid-size to large communities. That’s odd, since the Bay area is the heart of my industry, but it’s the truth. The jobs were just jobs, the shops were just shops, the people were just people.
I think you need to ask yourself what you are hoping to get out of being in one of these places. Is it a job you can’t get elsewhere? That would be a good reason to move. Or are you into some sort of odd edgy cultural events (like live opera, say) you can’t get in smaller places? That would also be a good reason to move. But if not, don’t bother. It’s expensive, and not worth it, given your tastes.
The Bay Area has nice weather, lots of good ethnic restaurants and grocery stores, and very high housing costs. I don’t find myself having an unusually large number of productive realspace interactions here, but others may.
I think that if there is a new Athens, it’s the internet.
There is a huge benefit to living someplace where all your friends live, but I don’t think there’s any particular benefit to living in the Bay over other places unless your friends happen to live in the Bay. (It is an equally good argument for living in a small town in Iowa if all your friends live there.)
Also, don’t move to the Bay if you don’t love having roommates.
I currently live in Sydney (a less-ugly, much more expensive Houston, more or less) following six years in London (which qualifies as a world city, IMO). I would consider a move to Houston if I could find appropriate work there.
I preferred my lifestyle in London, but that probably has something to do with not having to cover the full cost of living comfortably there on my own.
I think the key argument for moving up the world city scale (I think Houston is a lot closer to the top than to the bottom, based on a couple of weeks spent there and the experiences of my relatives) is career opportunities (and probably also pay, if not net standard of living) in many (most?) elite professions. You’ll do better work with better people (though probably also more of it) and with better prospects for advancement. If that’s not true in your profession, you should probably skip it.
The other key benefit is a deeper bench of interesting people and stuff, particularly if you value cosmopolitanism for its own sake. I like being able to get Azeri takeout and Nigerian groceries, but I can’t defend it as a terminal value. You can make up some of this difference with time and effort, particularly somewhere like Houston, which is not exactly Indianapolis (sorry, Indianapolis).
I suppose you can make an argument that the globalists who flock to London etc are more similar to each other than [insert something here about salt of the earth], and if you buy that you should probably skip it.
I actually lived in Indianapolis before Houston. It’s better than you think! And even cheaper!
(general point taken though)
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for about a decade, and I love it.
It’s the first place I’ve lived where I didn’t feel like I was an outsider. There are a lot of software engineers here, which makes it feel like home. I could point out a laundry list of stuff which is good here: stuff you can do outdoors or at the beach, skiing, the good weather, good food, and so on, but that’s not really what makes the place unique.
If you are in software, you can move from company to company whenever things get boring or you find something better. I think one thing people miss about smaller cities is that even if they have “good jobs” they’re often only with one or two employers. Which leaves you no real choice if the work is boring or you hate your boss, or whatever. That’s how people get stuck in Dilbert-like situations, because they live in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Intel is the only game in town (just to give a random example).
I don’t know what you’re planning on doing– whether it’s neuroscience related or not. Or what the job market is like for you. I think the biggest thing to think about is where you want your friends to live. You can interact with people anywhere, but it’s hard to really be someone’s friend if they live halfway around the world.
One piece of advice would be, don’t reduce the difference between those three to a parenthetical aside.
Papers are easy, relatively speaking. They flow organically from the research you are writing the paper about, and they are generally targeted at a forgiving audience. You can write a decent paper in a day or two, so any motivational issues are amenable to e.g. caffeine-based solutions, and you should be doing all the writing while the research is still fresh in your memory.
You can’t really do that with a dissertation, which means you need a more structured and organized approach. One which really has to begin when you start doing the research, long before you start writing the dissertation proper. It helps if you consider writing your lab notes and interim papers as if they will turn into chapters of the dissertation – that probably won’t be literally true because they will be too disjoint to just stitch together like that, but they should at least contain all the information you’ll need and convey all the insight you would otherwise forgotten.
Then, as you close on the deadline, you’ll need to set aside specific blocks of time to do the writing. If you just do it in your “spare time”, and particularly if you don’t actually have a deadline, it won’t get done.
Grant proposals can be as easy as papers, with the advantage that you are writing about research you haven’t done yet and can thus imagine up a trouble-free process with clean and convincing results. But you need to understand your audience, because different funding agencies have different ideas about what they want to see. It is really helpful if you can read through a sampling of some other successful grant proposals for that agency.
From my personal experience (mostly experimental physics), I found writing my Master’s thesis and dissertation easier than writing papers, especially for the more prestigious journals. I disliked the short length limit and the required ‘marketing’ in the introduction.
It seems to me that people talking about issues in ‘rationalist’ and adjacent communities don’t pay enough attention to status as a powerful non-arbitrary force.
From http://lesswrong.com/lw/p1f/notes_from_the_hufflepuff_unconference_part_1/:
If there are only a few high status people in a group, then 1) naturally everyone will cluster around those people and 2) the group is a low status group.
What raises status? Beauty, fashion, achievement, wealth, being ‘cool’, social ability, sexual and reproductive success, conformation to certain ideals. A very good indication of the status a group has is how many young and beautiful women accrete to it.
The complaint can be raised that these criteria are unfair. This is an illegitimate complaint. Social animals will have dominance hierarchies, and however who is on top or who is on the bottom is decided, it will not be ‘fair’ to those on the bottom.
Rationalists seem to want to get away from this sort of thing. But they also want to avoid being sexless outcasts who are held in contempt. Regardless of how they might protest that the former ideal trumps the latter, they are human. When human beings are sexless outcasts who are held in contempt, they become sad and avoidant. That’s not a rewarding or worthwhile social situation.
One approach is to try to beat the normies at their own game, or at least be competitive, despite handicaps. In a way this path is self-defeating from the ‘rationalist’ perspective, because taking it means implicitly rejecting some core ‘rationalist’ properties and values.
We should remember that the position of ‘rationalists’ is nothing new. They fit into a paradigm ubiquitous in human history, a bunch of males driven away from the wellspring of reproductive success and power. These men could do nothing, in the hopes that disruptions not of their own making will open a place for them near the wellspring before they get old or die. This is essentially what peripheral males do in the modern era, despite the modern era being uniquely unsuited to this strategy. The only serious way of opening holes in a dominance hierarchy is removing a goodly fraction of its members. As events like the black death and big wars become less common, the viability of waiting for space to open up plummets.
Instead of doing nothing peripheral males often band together to become the disruption they need. What makes this interesting is that the skills and proclivities needed for this are very different from those needed to scramble semi-peacefully within the hierarchy. The type that excels at organized violence is very different from the type that excels at disorganized violence and bluff.
Practical steps on this path would include founding a militia or PMC. ‘Dragon Army’ but this time with real guns! The goal doesn’t need to be anything as dramatic as revolution at home. It could simply mean fighting in the sort of little brushfire conflicts that dot parts of the world, perhaps carving out a space abroad. That sort of activity and capability in and of itself might raise the status of the group appreciably. I would describe it as like a bunch of healthy sharp teethed wolves edging their way towards another pack surrounding a fresh kill. There doesn’t necessarily need to be violence for our heroes to get some scraps. And those times when that other pack is significantly weaker, as will be the case in some places around the world – well, a wolf’s gotta eat.
I reckon they would also include getting very rich in tech, which is not nearly as exciting (at least, not to me) but probably more practical. But it ain’t my circus.
In general, this comment seems to conflate descriptive evo psych with the normative, deriving an ‘ought’ from an evolutionary ‘is’. Our genes care about reproductive success, hence about status, but there’s no reason why we (or ‘rationalists’) should, at least if it’s incompatible with things we prefer. (You hint at this incompatibility yourself where you say that that path “means implicitly rejecting some core ‘rationalist’ properties and values”.
I mean, in some sense I personally tend to agree that it’s nice to have young and beautiful women around, and to that end appealling to them is a good thing, which probably means chasing something like status. But if the ‘rationalist community’ is more interested in things like interminably discussing libertarianism or writing long posts about battleships* than playing status games, then I don’t see why they shouldn’t.
* A friendly dig, I swear!
I don’t really know how to parse this and can only guess at what you really mean, but under the only interpretation I can give it, the last sentence – “might raise the status of the group appreciably” – seems wrong. “A weird cult of bay area intellectuals carve out a niche in Somalia with guns” might have some things to recommend it, as a scenario, but good optics are not one of them.
I for one commit to joining the Dragon Army if they pivot to Somali piracy.
I’d subscribe to the podcast at least.
I care whether people like me – people who think like me, people with personalities similar to mine – thrive, or are wiped from the face of the earth.
People automatically care about whether they are treated like losers or treated like winners, even when the former isn’t overtly cruel. People automatically care whether they enjoy the other sex’s companionship. This, I claim, is at the root of the misery that envelops ‘rationalist communities’ – the reality of low status existence.
I point out that there are two routes to status. One is playing these ‘games’ I briefly describe. The other involves crewing warships, rather than writing long posts about them – but retains the fundamental interest and character.
‘Good optics’ are not status, and are not power which can be used to seize high status positions.
You still need to provide citation that being a soldier correlates with reproduction.
Crewing warships doesn’t get you much status; some, sure, being a sailor beats being a fry cook in the status department any day of the week. But being an officer or better yet, captaining the warship, is a whole lot more status … and for that, you need to play the games. There’s one overwhelming element in all status hierarchies, the one which the military makes explicit: leadership. Doesn’t matter how good you are at doing anything, your status is limited if you’re not leading others.
Some of the highest status groups in American society include sororities, yoga, and that thing where you buy jade eggs to put in your vagina. These are far lower-status than groups like the US Congress, which is notoriously full of ugly old men.
Anyway, I don’t think my brain was designed to keep track of status hierarchies in groups of 300 million people. It was basically designed to keep track of status hierarchies in groups of a few hundred people, like the rationalist community. Our local high status people (hi Scott!) are probably not particularly high-status to the rest of the world, but that’s fine, we evolved in an environment where there was no rest of the world.
I find it kind of strange to talk about “high status” as if this is a single universally agreed upon thing. Is Trump equally high-status at a state dinner, a #MAGA rally, and an Indivisible protest?
Who use their status to bang young and beautiful women.
But Congress itself is definitely an identifiable group of people and definitely has very few young and beautiful women in it. Even Congress-and-environs: congressional staffers are mostly male, as are lobbyists, and one imagines that most policy wonks are not exactly lookers.
If you’re saying the status of a community is measured by the capacity of those in it who are attracted to young beautiful women to bang young beautiful women, then you should have said that.
Ikarnal did say that the measure of status was attractive young woman accreting to a group, which is not the same as becoming members of the group. If congress gets e.g. more attractive female interns than other groups, then by that standard congress has more status than other groups even if it were still purely a boy’s club.
A crude metric to be sure, but not without merit.
Well I didn’t make the original statement, but yes that’s basically what I think. To the extreme, “girls don’t like boys girls like cars and money.”
Also, unless the high status people actually have some power over you personally, it doesn’t really cost you anything to laugh at their pretensions, while they laugh at yours. A free society can support thousands of different status hierarchies, and nobody has to salute or kowtow to anyone they don’t want to.
Young, fertile, beautiful women aren’t doled out evenly to all micro-hierarchies. They concentrate at the top of the ‘real’ hierarchy of status. There are plenty of micro-hierarchies made up of low status males. ‘It doesn’t cost you anything’ – no, it costs you a great deal. These males don’t being romantically/sexually unsuccessful, and they don’t like that they don’t command any respect in the wider world. They don’t like their situation for the same reason they don’t like being burned: it’s something that damages their chances of reproducing, of bringing more people like them into the world.
@ilkarnal
I remain unconvinced that there’s a “real” status hierarchy, as if all of humanity was in some Medieval Great Chain of Being.
Success with women will depend on the women in the micro-hierarchy. Gang leaders and Wall Street bankers both are successful with women, but not the same women.
Just as an aside, there must be some of the world that looks like you’re describing, but it’s not much like the world I live in. I work in a place full of scientists and engineers and mathematicians. Most of the guys I know are married or have long-term girlfriends. Many have kids. (I’m married and have three kids, FWIW.). Other people I know in my field are mostly married or long-term paired off.
And yet, I’d be willing to bet that there are more involuntarily-single engineers than there are athletes, military officers, politicians, possibly even mid-high ranking gang members.
I am curious though. What profession would people guess/expect to have the highest proportion of involuntarily single men in it?
There’s a bunch of fields where men would have little opportunity for relationships; certain military jobs, roughneck in a remote area, sailors (aside from the by-the-hour sort when they hit port). All these are expected to be temporary by the men, though.
The generally low-status jobs (e.g. retail) don’t seem to result in lack of relationships. I would expect that night shift work would be likely to however. So I’d say night shift work. Then nerdish professions.
I suppose “NEET” doesn’t count as a profession.
This seems like the kind of question on which there is probably good data somewhere. My intuition would be that marriage tends to track with having a steady job that pays the bills, but I don’t really know that.
As mentioned downthread, ‘how many young and beautiful women accrete to it’ implies some separation between the young and beautiful women and the group I am talking about. If I said ‘a good indication of how shiny a thing in the water is how many fishies swarm around it,’ the response that a swarm of these fishies swimming around together must be the shiniest thing in the whole world is not particularly insightful. The response that food thrown into the water must be super duper shiny is equally uninsightful. Yes, young and beautiful women do not EXCLUSIVELY pattern their behavior on finding high status mates. The fishies don’t exist SOLELY to swarm around shiny things. My point is utterly unharmed.
Your brain is also designed to keep track of markers of status, including an individual’s beauty and the attitudes they receive while out and about. If ‘the rationalist community’ was completely segregated you would have more of a point. But in that case the lack of young beautiful women – a consequence and marker of low status – would be felt even more keenly.
Trump is ‘high status’ wherever he goes. Status isn’t a question of whether you are liked. When a general is captured he goes from being someone who gives commands to someone who must obey them. He is still a general to those who captured him, and treated very differently from the common soldier. This different treatment could be putting him on trial and executing him, while the common soldier quietly survives internment. It could be having a formal dinner with the officers of the other side while the common soldier starves.
The point is that there are people who are important, and people who are unimportant. People who are high, people who are low. Big people, small people. Get it?
Why should we care about this? Because even if we don’t care about being scorned and mistreated generally, women very clearly care about this – a lot. And women, specifically young fertile women who tend to be beautiful, are important not only for a man’s happiness and equanimity, but for the continued existence of his line, of his people.
I think you are using “status” to mean “power/notoriety”. There are a lot of contexts where Trump would be neither liked nor respected, and I would say that makes him low-status in those contexts. That he would still be notable and in some ways influential is a different thing. The problem with your definition is that it means status isn’t necessarily desirable: your general who is executed where a private wouldn’t be would prefer not to have such a high status.
That isn’t a ‘problem.’ It neither makes the definition contradictory, nor interferes with the notion that we should want more status. Something can be good in general, yet sometimes backfire.
Eh, I’m with ilkarnal on this one. Status = importance, not necessarily popularity. They will often go together, but not always.
If Trump walks in to an Antifa rally, he instantly becomes the most important person in the room. They may tie him to a pole and poke him with sharp objects and throw things at him, but everyone will stop and pay attention to him. He will command everyone’s interest, over any other person. That is status.
Definitions are subjective, but I still think mine is more useful/common. By the importance/power definition, wanted criminals and people at the centre of media frenzies are high-status because a lot of people are interested in them, even though those roles are undesirable. Also, a general status ladder that covers society at large is of limited in use in my opinion. What is the ordering of status between (assume the dead ones are still alive): Pablo Escobar, Tony Blair, Taylor Swift, Bin Laden, and Stephen Hawking? What about someone on death row, a severely mentally disabled person, a homeless person, someone ostracised from their community for being gay, and a drug addict?
Don’t a lot of media-obsessed serial killers end up with a ton of female groupies offering to marry them while they’re in prison?
Jeffrey Dahlmer certainly has more status than some random thug who shot a clerk during a liquor store robbery, does he not?
Just as an aside, the kind of woman who was going to throw herself at a serial killer was never someone you would have benefitted from having a romantic relationship with. Crazy people make bad partners.
@Matt M
“Jeffrey Dahlmer certainly has more status than some random thug who shot a clerk during a liquor store robbery, does he not?”
That is the thing in question! I would say no. He might have more adoring female fans, although as albatross11 points out I don’t think they’d have been particularly valuable, but if released from prison he would have a lot more difficulty finding a job, friends, and a place to live, and is probably a lot more likely to have other prisoners attempt to murder him. He is better off in some ways (fame, likelihood of writing a bestselling book about his experiences), but worse off in others. I don’t think it makes sense to describe this as an overall generic increased status.
Right, he doesn’t need a job, because he can write a book that is guaranteed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, even if it sucks. That also takes care of any problem finding housing or whatever.
I mean I guess we have to agree to disagree at this point, but I just want to be clear that I really do disagree a whole lot…
I think that there are different status hierarchies. A notorious criminal is low status in some (like respectability) and high status in others (money, dangerousness).
I don’t think that it is necessary for status to be universally advantageous for it to be properly called status, because otherwise you can argue that status doesn’t exist at all. There is no trait you can name that doesn’t results in lower status in some contexts and higher status in other contexts.
Height, good looks and being physically fit.
@reasoned argumentation
1. Reddit short people forum + incel forums
2. Incel forums and here
3. Anti-fat shaming forums
Next.
Those are three groups that exist to complain that the members have low status and having the three traits I mentioned marks you as an outsider not as low status within the group.
I bet that at a reddit short people meet up the tallest guy there* is still the highest status – hell, especially there. Same for the other groups.
(* The “world’s tallest midget” so to speak)
I would push back against height for women. I know a lot of tall girls who hate being tall and are incredibly self-conscious about it.
@reasoned argumentation
In outsider groups, having the outsider trait(s) gives you group status.
The argument was that there were contexts where any given trait gives you higher status and I believe that this qualifies. Your objection that this higher status is extremely limited, to small environments, merely means that the contexts in which that higher status exists are very limited.
Distinguishing between a traits that give you high status in a many contexts and few contexts is also possible, of course, but it is a far more subjective claim where you have some rather arbitrary threshold. Then you will have people with marginally higher status than other people, but who pass your fairly arbitrary threshold and thus get sorted into the ‘having status’ group, despite only having epsilon more status than some who get sorted into the ‘no status’ group.
His objection is that height is in all likelihood positively correlated with status among participants of the annual Reddit Short People Meeting and Symposium.
This sounds plausible to me.
@publiusvarinius
A guy is dismissed because he is still a decent amount taller than his girlfriend. He would have higher status as a role model if he had been shorter.
That reddit thread fits my model.
The dismissal of the guy was that he’s not a member of the group – not that he’s a low status loser.
Medieval Europe and Buddhist States seem to have survived with a class of rationalists or mystics who vowed to be indifferent to nubile women.
But maybe they made themselves so high status that young women were throwing themselves at them, rather than shrugging off low status.
Militias of intellectuals roving the world for dragons to slay is one of the many signs of the
WW2apocalypse :).Isn’t one of the rationalist values trying to perceive and overcome one’s biases? If so, then the clustering that you are describing seems like a (very human) failure by the rationalist community to account for their biases towards clustering and towards talking to people they find attractive. Again, not too embarrassing for a generic tribe, but if the whole point of the tribe is to avoid this sort of thing it’s kind of indicting, isn’t it?
One other hypothesis is that this is similar to properties of online forums like the 90-9-1 rule (90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% post). If the people who are clustering around the high-status individuals correspond to lurkers, and the high-status individuals correspond to posters, then this seems like an apt comparison, especially since a lot of the rationalist community happens online. Maybe we have been trained badly by our environment?
But it seems like the duty for the 90% is to begin to comment, and the 9% is to begin to post. If they do then this problem goes away and the community becomes more flat. However this seems very unlikely (due to bystander effect).
Probably the best solution is to just start new conventions which only attract “posters” and “commenters”, and then abandon them when too many “lurkers” start showing up, in a sort of “slash-and-burn community organizing” style. It may be crude, but to belabor the agriculture metaphor, when you don’t know what the fuck fertilizer is, slash-and-burn is all you have.
or…
@neaanopri
Is the irrationality the clustering itself or the reasons why people cluster?
If people are not equally gifted, it seems only logical to cluster around the gifted, to maximize outcomes. For example, Scott is a very good writer, better than most. So if I were to stop reading him and would shift to reading one of the less gifted writers, I would be be worse off.
@Aapje
I don’t think it’s a question of irrationality, but a question of what peoples’ goals are. You’re definitely right that I’d much rather spend my reading time reading Scott’s blog than a worse one. If I was at a conference, Scott’s panel would have to be quite crowded for me to go to someone else’s. This is fundamentally a consumer-focused mentality.
It seems like there’s a split between consumers and content creators. I’d like to postulate that it only makes sense for content creators to go to conferences. Content creators can produce content at the conference, and make connections with other content creators. A consumer, who has no plans to do anything at a conference but watch, is only taking up space, and taking part in an experience that solidifies their membership as a consumer in the rationalist community.
This isn’t bad, but it’s not very good either compared to the benefit a content creators brings. In a conference, it’s best to have enough crowds to fill the venue but not enough to crowd it. That’s the optimal number of consumers to let into a conference, and more takes away from the event.
You seem to want a community of only highly capable people, which has obvious advantages to the members (like all highly elitist communities), but also enormous downsides.
No movement/cult is going to be influential to society as a whole without having large number of consumers. Furthermore, the consumers tend to subsidize the creators, so many/most of the content creators will be forced to stop doing that if you get rid of the consumers.
Neither of which are especially well-served by the conference setting in itself. If you had only those goals, you wouldn’t do a conference with lectures, but a different setup with many more workshops, discussions and such.
It seems to me that at minimum, the consumers are the ones who enable/pay for the setting which then allows content providers to achieve their side goals, where many of them can’t afford to merely travel to meet other content creators without being subsidized by consumers.
I think that this is mainly a problem for the consumers. The content creators can self-segregate if they want some ‘creator time,’ including away from the conference grounds. They already often seem to do so.
Somewhat related to the talk about forming communities. Last year Elieezer published his idea for movable housing that makes it possible to create communities on the fly. I think something like that would be awesome, especially when you want to avoid astronomic rental prices in Bay Area.
https://steemit.com/startup/@eliezeryudkowsky/movable-housing-for-scalable-cities
Did Eliezer just reinvent the RV?
Yes in a way. Imagine luxurious, self-driving vehicle optimised for smooth ride. You can easily work from there remotely. While you sleep it can drive you anywhere in 200 mile radius. Drones can deliver you food and other stuff. After work it drives you to downtown SF where you drink few beers with your friends. Then you go to sleep and next morning you wake up on a beach in your mobile housing community.. There are bunch of interesting ideas around it.
Infrastructure. Infrastructure, infrastructure.
You’re multiplying the problem of finding somewhere to park , because you will need somewhere to empty your chemical toilet and take on fresh water.
I mean, a version of this already works…but it occurs outside urban centers, and there are reasons for that.
But that’s just not that different from an RV!
They don’t work in cities right now is the thing. You could make a large building which has RV-size parking spots on many stories, which would let you go to cities as well as rural areas.
One technology that might make this easier is making a shipping container sized apartment.
The problem is that unless the storage space is modular, you’re still building a fixed number of units in a city. Maybe you could fill the empty space with storage units ad-hoc?
I haven’t checked this morning, but there is a small RV that routinely parks on the street beside our house. That’s in San Jose.
My guess is that that’s one way in which some people deal with the high rental costs in the Bay Area. I’m not sure if they are there all the time, perhaps driving off somewhere occasionally where they can empty and refill as necessary, or if they have a home somewhere fifty miles further south where land is much cheaper and spend part of their time there.
So basically the highest form of life is the street gang? Of course, when I’m making $SALARY as a programmer in silicon valley, I’m sure that’s because I’m peripheral and unnecessary to society.
We live in a modern society, not a tribal one. We’re all better off that people decide to improve society and work to gain success rather than loot, murder, and kill to get that.
I would defend the idea that the most powerful and admirable form of human organization is the army. Street gangs are what people too disorganized to form proper military organizations create, they are not the ideal.
A sexless loser who makes $SALARY is not respected and will not proliferate. If you’re fine with being low on the totem pole and with other people and their children proliferating from the fruits of your labor while people like you are bred out of existence, so be it. In practical terms you’re a castrated slave in a half-gilded cage. This situation makes leaves most men quite unhappy.
Those who would lose battles are much better off when the battles don’t happen. Those who would win are much worse off.
There is not enough space in the universe for everyone’s potential offspring, just a small fraction. Who gets to shape the future of humanity will be decided by who gets pushed off the island, and most will inevitably be pushed off the island. Right now ‘rationalists’ and those similar to them are being outbred by relatively unintelligent, disorganized, and unscrupulous people. These competitors are not much of a threat in a war, but they clearly have the upper hand when plentiful peace is guaranteed.
Decide whether you’d like the future of humanity to look like their societies, like what we have now, or further out on the vector from their societies to ours. That is the fundamental question of our time.
You are confusing two different issues–sex and reproduction. We are “as if designed” for reproductive success. But we are, in Dawkins striking metaphor, revolting robots–we don’t choose to act in the way that maximizes reproductive success but in the way that best achieves our goals, not identical to those of our genes. I have three children. I could easily have reared six or more if that was at the top of my list of priorities.
Someone who want sex and can’t get it is in that respect a loser. But in the modern world sex is much more readily available than reproduction, the two now being separated by contraceptive technology. Someone who gets sex but does not produce children is a loser only if he wants to produce children.
While not precisely the same thing, they are deeply interrelated and I am not ‘confusing’ anything.
For sure. And, for sure, the unhappiness in ‘rationalist’ communities has to do with being in situations that were not conducive to reproductive success in the past.
I want to solve two things I regard as problems – the aforementioned unhappiness, and the steady removal of the genes that create what I regard as an admirable phenotype from the gene pool. The latter bird is partially slain by the same stone that kills the former, but not entirely. I’ve got another stone lined up to finish it off, but that’s a different story we can’t get into here.
>the unhappiness in ‘rationalist’ communities
Is this true?
In my experience, yes.
Yes, LW-types are very depressed. See these 2014 LW numbers. The most recent SSC Survey has more ambiguous numbers.
But, not all of us really consider ourselves part of the “rationalist” community. When I sliced the numbers up for polyamorous vs non, depression and other mental illnesses came screaming back. Polys are about twice as likely to be formally diagnosed as depressed and anxious as monos.
@Jaskologist
Intriguing! Do you have any thoughts as to why that may be?
It’s a bit weird that polyamorous people would be more depressed and anxious, because Ozy did a survey where polyamorous people were found to be more extroverted, more open, more narcissistic and more psychopathic. AFAIK, there are all traits that are negatively correlated with anxiety and/or depression.
I think it’s really easy to forget that both those studies are of different but overlapping weird groups, and should not be taken as any kind of representative data ever.
We get the disclaimer right on top of the study, but then later on people still act as though these numbers actually mean something.
The studies having error bars large enough to potentially give completely contradictory findings is exactly what one would expect here.
@Callum G,
I have thoughts, but only of the ill-informed kind, mitigated slightly by the fact that I pretty much expected the results to come out that way. (I pre-registered to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted not to post if the result came out in the opposite direction.
Anyway, my uninformed conjecture: the poly life is bad for your mental health. 95% of our ancestors had multiple children by their mid-20s. If you’re going on 30 and still childless (especially if female), your genes are going to be screaming at you that something is wrong, we are facing extinction. It doesn’t surprise me that that would manifest as depression and anxiety.
It still intrigues me that polys get more depressed when married.
Jaskologist: I’d worry about confounding variables. Poly people are more likely to be queer, and queer people are more likely to be depressed; is it possible to just look at the heterosexuals?
I’m not sure that poly people in general are more likely to delay children than monogamous people of a similar class background.
Aapje: My survey was of polyamorous people and was looking at the correlation between high sociosexuality and various traits. Since there were no monogamous people in my sample, it cannot possibly be generalized to compare polyamorous and monogamous people as a whole.
I did specifically seek out non-rationalist respondents; it was posted on polyamory Facebook groups and subreddits.
Listen, friend. I was not very successful in love either in college or my early twenties. But later in life, it all became a lot easier.
What changed? Well, for one thing, I stopped trying to score with women in my immediate social circle or random encounters. It’s just a waste of time most of the time. Unless the random number generator drops something truly impressive in your lap, just forget about it. You can find more women online than you will ever have time to meet. So do that.
Trust me. If you have a reasonable salary coming in and you know how to dress yourself so you don’t look homeless, you WILL find someone. You do NOT need to go to Somalia and become a pirate. Metaphorically or otherwise.
Huh. That seems entirely out of line with my experiences. In all the cases I’ve seen online dating has been a waste of time. but in a social circle in real life, people sort of naturally pair off. Maybe the particular strategies are mostly irrelevant and people just get better at finding relationships over time, or maybe it just takes a long time to be successful, and people attribute their success to whatever strategy they adopted before that.
I think for a lot of engineers, there are just a lot more guys than girls in their social circle. In that case any kind of dating that brings in people from outside that circle will be a lot more successful.
This has been the exact opposite of my experiences, just FYI.
Online dating has gotten me a smattering of first dates, a small few amount of second ones, and a few hookups, almost exclusively with fat AND unemployed women.
Having money does not randomly solve things, nor is physical appearance as simple as “don’t look homeless.”
If you pick a random American off the street, the chance that they’ll be overweight is at least 36% according to the CDC. Picking a random woman from an online dating site probably increases that percentage, but not as much as you might think in my experience (all the usual caveats apply: sample size of 1, different situation, etc.).
Most women I know who are 30+ are interested in things like having a family, getting a house, taking care of their parents, going on a vacation every now and then, etc. You can’t do those things without money. And I believe the average SSC reader is probably in a better position to have that money than the average American. That’s all I was trying to say– I certainly wasn’t trying to imply that money is everything.
All I’m trying to say is: before you become a Somali pirate, listen to a little wisdom from someone who is getting way too old. Women in their 20s might be impressed by someone with a cool haircut, who plays in a cool band, who plays sportsball, etc. Once they hit 30 and beyond, women will be more interested in someone with some kind of career going on, someone more grown-up. And you will age more gracefully than they do, and still be attractive to younger women when you are older. Which is one reason why younger men sometimes feel frustrated: they are competing with all the older men too.
Just as one more anecdote, my experience is like pontifex. I am older, so I used classified ads in my 20’s, not online dating. But I had essentially zero luck with women into my early 20’s, until I put an ad in the paper. I have been married for 35 years now to someone who answered my ad.
I have always considered the reason to be that I am much more articulate in writing than I am in person, so a written ad worked much better then random meetings. But I suspect that is true of many SSC readers and commenters.
@ Mark
The previous time I looked at a printed newspaper, the classified ads section was almost gone, and did not include relationships.
However, there were still ads over the place. I wonder what kind of $SALARY you would need to afford the rates for just buying a freaking large non-classified ad?
@nimin. Yeah, this was in the 80’s, when all alternative newspapers had personals sections. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it wasn’t enough that mattered, and I am a cheapskate.
Does anybody here like explaining cryptography? I have a couple of questions about codes used in popular books. (Spoilers for Cryptonomicon and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore)
At the end of Cryptonomicon, our shocking twist is that the British weren’t using a completely random method of generating their OTPs, and so they were breakable. I understand that using the same OTP more than once is a cardinal sin and it can very quickly reduce the security of your messages, but the emphasis placed on perfect randomness seems overblown. Would a preference for E’s over Z’s due to somebody peeking at the tiles they were drawing, really allow a practical attack on a pad that was only used once? If the person drawing the tiles were so bad at their job that they drew them in perfect etaoin shrdlu frequencies, do you think, even with modern techniques and hardware, you could make progress on a message encrypted with that pad?
The (not very) shocking conclusion of Mr. Penumbra’s… was that the guy who was super famous for creating a typeface and writing an encrypted book had hidden the key to the cipher in his typeface of all places. And without the information encoded in the characters themselves, not even all of Google’s computing resources could possibly unravel its mysteries. But was that code actually hard. Ciphertext letters could usually map to 1-3 different possible letters in the cleartext, depending on how many ticks there were in the particular piece used to print that letter. That seems like about the same order of complexity as using phone keys. You might not always be able to recover the message perfectly, but you can get a lot of it, and maybe figure out the rest from context. Would that book have posed a challenge for a modern cryptographer with a laptop?
Eh, I’d say that part of Cryptonomicon is more toward the middle than the end. (I’m about 80 pages from the end right now.)
I had a good reply to this that was eaten 🙁
The shorter version-
* I don’t remember that part of Cryptonomicon and didn’t read the second book. So this is based only on your post.
* If we take as a model of the first weakness:
1) Alice and Bob share one gigabytes of almost random data.
1a) The almost part is that byte 0x25 occurs 1/225 of the time instead of 1/256 of the time. All other bytes appear with equal probabilities.
2) Each time they want to send a message to the other they take the message, xor it with the next part of the OTP, and broadcast the resulting ciphertext over the air.
3) Eve intercepts all the ciphertexts.
3a) Eve knows exactly what the weakness is in the OTP generation process.
3b) Eve knows nothing about the plaintexts except they are likely in English.
3c) Eve cannot inject any known plaintexts or actively manipulate the process in any way.
I can’t think of any way that Eve would be able to recover the plaintext. She can distinguish messages from random, which is considered a vulnerability, but I don’t see how she’d recover the plaintext.
* I’m less clear on the second scenario. If what you saying is that there’s a substitution cipher where the known information is something like:
a – can be b,i,z
b – can be u,m,s
…
z – can be r,w,q
I’d think that would be easy to break using statistical techniques.
If I’m interpreting Charles F correctly, then it must be the part where Lawrence Waterhouse meets some Qghmlians (maybe right around the time one of them knocks him out for intruding at the dance with Mary? I’m a little hazy on it, myself*…) and they tell him that the Brits are using their odd language (which I take to be something like Welsch) to generate the code, just like the Americans are using Cherokee. I also remember something about a woman–somebody’s wife?–who was supposed to pick letters out of a bingo spinner with her eyes closed, but had started opening her eyes and, perhaps subconsciously, had begun reaching for certain letters so that it wasn’t random anymore.
*Edited to add: PS. I’m hazy because my reading sessions on this all come between 8-11pm when my brain is shutting down the lights and getting me ready for sleep. Usually when I start again the next evening I have to scan the last page or two before my bookmark to get my bearings again. This probably isn’t the best way to read a book with lots of fascinating and important details in it, and I’m kind of surprised at how much of it I’ve retained as it is.
That’s the part I was talking about. And @Brad’s response is what I thought for the slightly incompetent pad-producer. I’m still curious how bad my very incompetent pad-producer would be.
I also think 3b seems like a very dangerous assumption. I think we should assume that an adversary might have some cribs or structural/format information.
I would expect that you could figure out some general information, like what language the messages were sent in. But what about specifics? If you suspected it was a report on the next city they were planning to attack and you had a list of three-letter city-codes, could you make any good guesses about which city they were going to attack by seeing which codes were high-ish probability in lots of places throughout the text?
If the message(s) is long enough and the airport codes are repeated enough times things start to look a lot better for Eve.
In my example above, the most frequent bytes in the ciphertext should be:
0x20 ^ 0x25 = 0x05
0x65 ^ 0x25 = 0x40
That’s because a key byte is disproportionately likely to be 0x25 and the 0x20 (space) and 0x65 (e) are disproportionately likely to be plaintext bytes. With an appropriate comparison corpus we can calculate how over represented we should expect these bytes to be.
But what if we start seeing overrepresentation of 0x7d (0x25 ^ 0x58. 0x58 = X) and also 0x67 (0x25 ^ 0x42. 0x42 = B) and 0x6d (0x25 ^ 0x48. 0x48 = H)? Maybe that means BHX is appearing a lot of times in the message and the target is Birmingham International Airport.
That was it (some had different numbers of possibilities, but I can’t imagine that would change much). And basically the answer I expected. Just thought I might be missing something.
To tie it in to modern cryptography – a stream cipher is an algorithmically generated one-time pad. Many of them do have the problem that the generated pad isn’t quite random (ironically, Pontifex/Solitaire from Cryptonomicon is one of them) but the issue is usually that you can predict the next character from the last, and thus if you know part of the plaintext you can predict the rest.
If you have an English message encrypted with a one-time pad with etaoin shrdlu frequencies but in truly random order, I don’t think you could get very far. At best, you’d have a few “most likely” candidates but couldn’t certainly say which was true. If, instead, you had one English message encrypted with another English message you could probably recover both (though words may be transposed between them).
But the character who breaks the ciphers was a super-genius and I’m willing to suspend disbelief.
The best I could come up with would be to analyze messages against a few particular words or phrases you’re interested in (similar to but not exactly the concept of “cribs” discussed elsewhere in the book). If you correctly assume an approximately correct biased frequency distribution, you can identify which messages are more likely to contain those words. And by correlating that info with traffic analysis data (the location, time, etc the intercepted messages came from), you should be able to draw some useful conclusions. For example, if the words “TURING” and “ENIGMA” have a high probability mostly in messages sent from Bletchley Park, you can deduce that Alan Turing is at Bletchley Park and is working on something that has to do with Enigma. And if you also find that “ULTRA” has a high frequency from Bletchley Park and from various high-level command centers, that suggests that ULTRA is a codeword for something that has to do with the work at Bletchley Park and is of interest to various senior Allied commanders and their staffs. And it’s not a big jump from that to the hypothesis that Turing’s work at Bletchley Park involved breaking Enigma and that Enigma decrypts are being shared with Allied commanders under the code name ULTRA.
It’s nowhere near as good as actually reading the messages, but you can still draw valuable conclusions from it, or at least generate valuable hypotheses for spies and analysts to try to confirm.
I guess most of the work would be done by the fact that they re-used the same pad, and the non-randomness would be less important.
I hope this doesn’t get me banned, as I do enjoy posting here quite a bit. I believe it falls within the rules, as I find it to be both necessary and true.
bintchaos is an obvious troll. I call upon the entire community to stop engaging with this person. Furthermore, I implore Scott to consider removing them from this place. I find them to be far more generally disruptive to useful dialogue than Slides or Moon ever was.
Regardless of my personal feelings in this specific case, I’m not sure that your request is reasonable. If Scott were to honor it, doing so would set up a dangerous precedent, where anyone can get anyone else banned just by asking Scott to do so (assuming it was done in a sufficiently emotional manner, perhaps). Don’t get me wrong, I understand where you’re coming from, I just think that the cure may be worse than the disease.
Much like an OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) cook or chauffeur wrongfully imprisoned in Gitmo for 15 years, if I wasn’t a
trollintellectual terrorist when I came here, I have surely been turned into one by now.And don’t I get a warning first by protocol?
I’m totally neutral on the object-level assertion of the OP and basically in agreement with Bugmaster’s response, but…uh…did you just admit to trolling here? You coyly crossed it out and wrote intellectual terrorist, but I don’t know what you mean by that.
I dont know what you mean by trolling.
Please define.
My comment implied no particular definition, only remarked on the fact that whatever definition YOU use, you seem to have admitted to doing it. By asking you about it I meant to give you an opportunity to clarify further so that you aren’t banned on a technicality or something. (I don’t know if that could happen…but if it could it strikes me as kinda unfair. Or, fair but unfortunate? Or something. So, just in case it can…)
So for example, if you crossed out trolling and wrote intellectual terrorist because you think the two are synonymous, then that’s kind of an admission of doing SOMETHING that most people would agree isn’t appropriate here. But if you crossed out trolling and wrote intellectual terrorist as a way of saying “I’m not trolling, what I do is within the rules but you guys would probably consider it intellectual terrorism” then I want to prompt you to clarify that, for your own good.
Also because I’ve never seen the term “intellectual terrorism,” I don’t think, and am just plain kinda curious how you’re using it.
Yeah, I highly doubt any attorney would advise someone in GITMO to say “Well, if I wasn’t a terrorist before, I surely am now!”
Okay, I don’t think most of your posts are trolling, but you’re definitely trolling here. Please don’t.
(To answer the question, Scott often rattles before he bites, but he doesn’t have to per protocol. And if he did, it would be his protocol and he could change it.)
I’m not sure that’s where this is headed. Bintchaos has repeatedly violated community norms like “listening to the other posters” and “not playing victimhood games” and “not spewing lies about the content of source links and refusing to accept correction about those lies”, and continued to do so after being called out on it. She’s proven uniquely good at creating lots of heat and no light. Scott can and should remove posters who are on the net obviously bad for the comments, even if they haven’t technically violated any rules. (Although I think that bintchaos pretty much always fails truthful, and usually fails kind.) And I get the feeling that even those of similar political beliefs are pretty much fed up with her, which is probably a good metric to use in these cases.
Edit:
Note that this is covered in the existing rules:
“If someone is bad in a way that doesn’t technically violate the letter of the rules, I reserve the right to ban them anyway.”
Fair enough, I guess; I usually only skim the comments, so don’t know enough about bintchaos’s style of commenting to form a definitive opinion. Still, personally I’d rather click the “Report” button, than pressure Scott (or any other blog admin, really) in public.
The report button is currently not working. I saw this as the next best alternative.
Bah, I did not know that. Fixing that button should be priority #1, IMO.
The button is erratic, but I think people find that most problems are fixed by logging out and logging back in.
Please click the report button of the report button, then.
If you can’t figure out how to do that, you’re not meta enough for SSC.
But he’s asking Scott to do so because he believes that user bintchaos is a troll. Personally, I just think she has a deeply unproductive mindset and is unwilling to change it, but it comes out to about the same. Either way, he’s not trying to carve out a new rule where bannings occur upon request; he’s trying to include bintchaos into a category which already warrants banning (I believe this site bans trolls, and if it doesn’t then it’s at least reasonable to argue that it should). So it establishes a precedent where others can be accused as trolls and banned, which would be pretty unfortunate indeed if it got out of hand and non-trolls received the banhammer, but at least you have to actually convince Scott that the user in question is a troll.
Personally, I took Matt’s advice long ago.
Ok, well, hypothetically speaking, what if I posted the exact same comment as Matt M, but replaced “bintchaos” with “AnonYEmous” ? What’s the difference ? You might say, “the difference is that I’m not a troll”, but isn’t this what anyone else would say, too, bintchaos included ?
I guess what I’m saying is this: I want to discourage public witch hunts, regardless of whether or not witches actually exist.
Also, seems like it could lead to a situation where people’s ability to post could ultimately depend on a popularity contest.
But isn’t this the exact same flaw as we already had?
After all, trolls are already banned. Therefore, redefining me into a troll is already enough to get me banned – in other words, if Scott judges me to be a troll, he can and will already ban me! Yes, calling me out as one makes it more likely that I’ll get banned, but by a very small amount. And this is a pretty small community; I bet we can handle it.
I understand SSC as a minimally regulated self-organizing system.
Dr. Alexander would prefer that trolls lose the desire to post here and just leave.
But he reserves the right to ban if it becomes enough of an irritant.
Someone tried to get me banned because I “was an Islamist”, but figured he had a better chance of getting me banned because of violating comment timeline protocol. Honestly, that seems kind of anal.
Probably a lot of rogue commenters either get bored or conform to protocols.
Me, I’m still charmed by the idea of Trump as one of Shakespeare’s rustics, marching about and singing to himself to show that he is not afraid.
I do think SSC is making me a better commenter…just not in the ways that most people here would desire.
Right. I am not suggesting an era where we vote people out like this is Survivor or something. I am hypothesizing that a broken report button combined with a busy personal life may be preventing Scott from realizing the scope of this person’s behavior. Therefore, I am trying to specifically draw attention to it. If Scott says, “Nope, this person is obeying the rules, sorry,” I’ll drop the matter and never bring it up again.
I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but I feel like “Slides was banned for far less than this” is a salient point here.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen another Sidles, here or anywhere.
It’s helpful to establish common knowledge. Everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows.
I agree that bintchaos is an obvious troll, and commit to not engaging them in any way.
I don’t like the idea of calling on Scott to ban people, so I can’t endorse that part.
I don’t think bintchaos is a troll. When she cranks up the schoolgirlish pop-sosh I think she might be a fiftyish vice cop. Entrapment!
She’s not dumb or mean.
Personallly, I’ve found some of your comments pretty bad,. Matt.
Imho Matt’s problem is that he’s not always very literal, which makes some of his posts come across as bait. In general I think posters here should strive to be more literal. In a context where many of us disagree with each other, exaggeration and metaphor can prevent communication. Here “exaggeration” includes exaggerating one’s certainty.
Is bintchaos going to be excused for non literallity?
His does make an awful lot of useless or worse than useless posts about “the left” or “feminists” or what have you that display zero charity, provide zero evidence for claims, and sometimes don’t even make an argument.
Probably not the worst though.
Strongly disagree. Just because you can’t or won’t engage with bintchaos’ comments productively doesn’t mean no-one can.
Yes. But is there anyone here who has managed to do so? Serious question. Because if there isn’t, then I’m not sure why she should stay around on the off-chance that someone someday is able to.
Well, my own interactions so far have been, at least, not awful. FWIW.
I’ve had at least one productive discussion with her, and react to her less comprehensible comments in the same way I did to Sidles. They do have information content.
My 2¢.
S(he) provided reading recommendations and explanation when I wanted to learn more. That’s not trollish imo. But I’m not on a level to enter debate with him/her, can’t speak about that.
More as a general remark, because idk much of the history of this blog: Beware of seeing one troll instead of entangled idiosyncrasies in emotionally loaded domains. It would help if the annoyed parties just could abstain from replying to a known irritant, as someone recommended.
Also, a technical thing: If someone composes replies from the mail-notifications they miss the edits and also are more prone to mess up comments order. This could be remedied with a blog software that lends itself better to debate, and should not be treated as intended trolling —
in dubio pro reo.
That’s beside the point, IMO. She’s a poster who makes the comments significantly worse, and doesn’t seem to be trying to change. Why should be irrelevant to the decision on banning.
(A related question. If I set up a fake account and began to ‘troll’ as a reasonable, thoughtful liberal, would this be in any way objectionable? Let’s assume that I play it completely straight, as an ITT, and don’t go anywhere near anything that might look like concern trolling.)
It may not be intended trolling, but there’s a norm that you don’t insert comments in the middle of a bottom-level string. She’s continued to do it sporadically after we figured out why it was happening and asked her to stop doing it. It may not be trolling, but it is rude.
Speaking of blog software that lends itself better to debate, has anybody else around here visited agora? I spent some time there a while back after seeing it advertised here, I think, but haven’t really kept up with it. If some of the performance issues got worked out, I’d be really interested in seeing what an SSC open thread would look like in that format.
Can you elaborate? I’ve been here for several years and can’t figure out what behavior this describes. Is this comment of mine an example violation?
If so, well, any post from Scott seems to result in hundreds of comments even before I manage to finish reading the post; it’s hard to imagine an alternative to wading into the conversation at whatever point it has reached when I arrive. But if it really is a norm here I’ll try to follow it.
Doing this.
(This was written after Larry Kesterbaum’s post below. The most straightfoward way to get there involves WordPress reply links, which I don’t have enabled, but there is another way that involves URL encoding.)
Fascinating.
There is? What does this mean, exactly? I shouldn’t respond to comments that already have responses?
I had no idea about such a norm, and probably violate it constantly. Nobody has complained about my behavior that I know of.
If you reply through the web interface, you will not be able to violate this “norm” accidentally; it takes a (tiny) bit of technological know-how and effort. It basically makes your reply go somewhere in the middle of the thread, above comments that were posted before it.
My understanding is that replying via the form on emailed comments defaults to the undesired behavior, which is presumably the interface bintchaos uses.
Neither of you guys are violating it. What he is talking about is when the software has reached the limit of indenting and you reply, your reply goes after all the posts that have already been made at the maximum indent level. So that the maximum indent level is in chronological order.
Until recently it was impossible to screw this up by accident, one had to do it on purpose. Apparently the email notification widget now allows people to accidentally do what before was only malicious. It does not force one to do so though.
Once you are aware of how the notification widget screws things up you can take an extra step to put things in the correct order (i.e. click the reply button on the parent post instead of just starting to type) but bintchaos refuses to do so, apparently not caring that it annoys the rest of us.
Ah, I see. Thanks, I am relieved.
I disagree about bintchaos compared to Moon. Moon/Jill was just a progressive who insisted on doing the arrogant lefty act even though no one was impressed. Bintchaos at least distinguishes herself with the whole “social physics” thing. I think she has more of a communication problem than anything else.
I, for one, think that people like bintchaos, or Jill, or even Sidles* are a credit to the community, in their own way. They’re content creators, or, well, content-production catalysts. They make the comment section much more lively. I like having a small amount of these people around, much like I enjoy a bit of spice in my soup, but would barf if the soup contained far too much.
* A marginal case, due to the anyone-been-as-far-as-decided factor. I will report him whenever I see him, because – rightly or wrongly – he’s supposed to be banned, and my “brain is infected with four prime directives”. 😉
I agree. Bintchaos has improved the quality of her(?) posts, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
But then, I never understood what was so bad about Sidles. Unless it’s a slippery slope thing.
Sidles is incomprehensible. Reading his posts is like subjecting yourself to some early chapter of the Book of Punishment.
Nonsense … here he is with his alt making perfect sense:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/07/ot75-the-comment-king/#comment-496798
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by risk of structural failure
I can dig this.
I find the spectacle of the conversations to be entertaining as the SSC equivalent of a particularly ridiculous soap opera plot or David Friedman wrestling 20 midgets for charity.
On the upside, I’ve noticed that examples of respectable people complaining that the comment section has a terrible far-right bias have mostly dried up since Bint has taken up the cause, which is nice.
She’s annoying, and while part of me wishes she would learn from the piles of criticism and start arguing clean, (rather than just asserting whatever she wants, dropping buzzwords and obscure scifi references, throwing out some links and expecting her audience to prove her case for her while complaining of being victimized by everybody), even if she doesn’t I think she’ll play a decent foil for a bit until the novelty wears off and people stop responding.
I haven’t seen anything that rises to the level of deserving a ban so far.
The commentariat just needs to learn how to ignore some people. If you find engagement with someone fruitless, stop engaging. I never for the life of me understood why people kept feeling the need to respond to Sidles. He would have been harmless as the resident eccentric if only people had been willing to accept that there was no there there.
well be of good cheer…it is an artifact of my neurotype that I get obsessed and then lose interest pretty quickly.
I’m really a transient.
You are just interesting to me in the moment…there is some very outré discussion here….some things I have never heard before that are wildly outside my conventional Blue Tribe academic existance– but remember– I was born Red Tribe and turned in undergrad. A dog raised by cats? Or a cat raised by dogs.
I don’t get the sense that bintchaos is a troll. The “social physics” equivalent of a mall ninja, I could believe. I think she’s a young college student who hasn’t yet realized that taking a bunch of assertions and drizzling jargon over them is not convincing, nor does it contribute to the discussion. She confuses disagreement with her as not understanding her positions, but if I’m correct on the “young college student” thing, she’s hardly alone in that flaw.
OTOH, bintchaos does share the exact same flaw in thinking as Jill/Moon: any political tension is the sole responsibility of the right, and any nastiness on the left is merely angels responding in kind to the provocation of these evil mutants. Jill at least had the advantage of being extremely interesting when it came to therapy. (Scott linked to his end-of-year posts from his internship, and some of her comments are a very good read.)
At the end of the day, I don’t think that bintchaos should be banned. Yes, she generates heat, but not nearly as much as Jill did.
What is a mall ninja?
A mall ninja is a derogatory term for someone who is, uh, the best way to put it would probably be someone who has a cargo cult relationship to martial arts, weaponry, etc and passes themselves off as more knowledgeable and experienced than they are.
Ah, okay. Someone who goes to a more retail, consumer-focused, less demanding dojo.
I was thinking of someone who enjoyed sneaking around malls as an affectation for some reason.
It also gets thrown around with regard to guns – guys who are not soldiers or cops or whatever, but do have vests with lots of pockets and flashlights and lasers on everything.
Though in the gun case, isn’t the more specific term “tacticool”?
I guess that might be appropriate.
I have a glock and a CCW license, a deer rifle and and an old Browning shotgun that I got when I was 7.
I grew up shooting Blue Rock.
Often someone who doesn’t go to a dojo at all; the malliest mall-ninja I’ve ever met was a guy who tried to learn staff fighting by imitating the animation in the arcade fighting game Soul Calibur.
The term’s more about your relationship with martial arts as a concept than where, or if, you train, though. Buying a lot of cheap ninja weapons (or, worse, ninja clothes) from novelty stores or Army surplus shops, spending more time reading e.g. Black Belt magazine than actually training, trying to learn stunts without putting in any effort on the basics, etc. are all hallmarks of the mall ninja.
(Actually going to a school that calls itself “ninjitsu” sometimes is, too, but some ninjas are merely naive, or misinformed, or have the misfortune to live in a small town that doesn’t have any better schools.)
@Randy M
I haven’t stepped into a mall in about a decade (been living in towns too small and been doing all my shopping on the internet), but there used to be a knives and macho male accessories store in just about every one.
It would tend to be light on the practical, high-quality blades for camping, survival, actual fighting knives, etc, and heavy on the cheap but shiny fantasy replica wallhanger swords and rattling katanas, klingon daggers, blowguns, “Tactical” slingshots, and the like.
That’s where the “Mall” in “Mall Ninja” comes from. The guy who goes to that sort of store, and buys stuff like this thinking it’ll be an awesome for self/home defense.
Oh, man, you’re one of todays lucky 10,000:
The term came from the story on this webpage:
http://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/
There isn’t really any similarity in terms of content, style, or tone, but I think that bintchaos and NIP might be the same person.
I don’t think she’s anyone we’ve seen post before…not here, anyway.
Sidles wasn’t a troll, he was a high IQ nut. Moon wasn’t a troll, she was a not so high IQ ideologue.
I’m not sure what Bintchaos is, but my guess is young, less well educated and intelligent than she thinks she is, and used to snowing people who are less well educated and intelligent than she is. Also more uncritical of blue tribe ideological orthodoxy than she should be, or than she realizes.
But I can’t see any evidence that she is a troll–someone who is posting things not because she believes them but in order to mess up other people’s conversations.
Besides the name “Daughter of Chaos” itself? Considering the number of times she’s tried to snow people _the same way_ (with a bunch of buzzwords and nothing behind them, on the same topics she’s already demonstrated mere surface knowledge of at best), she’s either far less intelligent than she thinks, or she’s trolling.
I’m not “snowing” you.
The EToro study is a fact. The researchers just artifically slowed between trader comms to change their behavior, to change the behavior of copy traders.
Not a hellban, not a shadowban, just a little slow down.
Easy for a big social media company (Twitter, FB) to do, just gulag the undesirables into their own set of trusted networks and isolate them by slowing comms of their influencers going in and out.
I honestly dont understand why a sub-population would choose extinction over adaptation.
Guess Herbert was right.
sheesh, its not that hard– I just really, really , REALLY like mathematical chaos.
And I want to thank SSC for making me a better commenter and making me think.
I’m still just charmed by the idea of Trump as one of Shakespeare’s rustics…marching about and singing to show that he is not afraid.
I never would have thought of that except for here.
I suspect i’m in the minority here, but the poster in question and the types of views espoused do not bother me at all, and I would consider it egregious if they resulted in a ban.
Why are people so sensitive to this kind of thing? Am I right in viewing the stroppy, neurotic agitation at far-flung views as a very recent internet-age thing? I read SSC every day and am of a mind to learn as much as I can from whatever posts I can. “Learning” here means by both positive and negative example.
I would also point out that most of the rallying calls for bans seem to be coming from a very small number of very frequent posters. If this is true, a self-imposed cooling-off period might be useful.
I don’t object to the views, I object to the style. I object to the constant characterization of the entire comments section as some sort of right-wing hivemind. I object to the constant misquoting of source documents and statistics and refusing to apologize or retract when called out for it.
I like posting here specifically because there are people whose views are the near opposite of mind, but whom I can still engage in constructive debate. If bit was a right-winger, I’d like to believe I’d still be calling for the ban (although I’m sure we’d all like to believe we are fair and just and unbiased creatures like that, so maybe I wouldn’t be)
I’m just tired of seeing interesting comment threads derailed into the exact same shitslinging match week after week. Ignoring an individual doesn’t solve that problem unless everyone does it.
where have I derailed threads?
I dont talk to commenters where I have nothing to add like on Tinder dates and male sexual frustration.
Or on living in the bay area or how diabetes models ASD.
I do think that a draft farmcorp is an insane idea– only 2% of Americans farm.
I think Trump is a charmless buffoon domestically, but the Founders built pretty well, although Trump is incredibly destructive to fragile global equilibrium because he actually thinks KSA and Russia are his friends.
But this commentariat isnt really interested in FP.
I guess I derailed the 3body thread, but it was kind of obvious that no one had actually read the book.
Sorry.
Ban bintchaos? I couldn’t disagree more.
She’s a student, who has a bunch to learn about rational argument, and seems to be improving in the limited time she’s been here.
Are all of her comments worth reading? No. Are most of her comments worth reading? No.
But come on, I don’t read half of what Deiseach writes either, and I’m frankly this close to reporting her for her egregious, repeated shootings of the Common Barrelfish (once I can figure out whether to send the report to the EPA or Fish and Wildlife).
Some of what bintchaos writes is interesting, and some is even responsive. The rest can be ignored, even the parts where she runs at David Friedman with her staff held high like a modern-day young Musashi.
Keep bintchaos in the comments section. Think of it as an investment in the future.
Seconded!
The funny part about the anti-bintchoas backlash is that part that most annoys many posters about her posts is when she makes vast sweeping generalizations about the Right without any sort of justification. Turns out the shoe isn’t so comfortable on the other foot.
Thanks for that sweeping generalization based on… what evidence exactly?
I agree that Bintchaos should not be banned. Some of the ideas she offers are unfamiliar, hence interesting. They are probably wrong–most new ideas are, which is often why they are new. And she has an unfortunate habit of treating conjectures as facts and presenting them with inappropriate arrogance, possibly reflecting a similar habit in one or more of her professors.
But she’s young.
There was an interesting article in the Washington Post on Sunday on the move to change the way dentists are licensed to allow an intermediate class of ‘Dental Therapists’ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-unexpected-political-power-of-dentists/2017/07/01/ee946d56-54f3-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html). I think this story has some relevance for contemporary American health care policy, in that it shows the ability of an interest group to slow down changes which would make care cheaper, at least for low income Americans.
What’s interesting is the description of the American Dental Association (ADA) as a lobbying group on par with the NRA in terms of power. On the one hand, I don’t see the ADA as being able to motivate a lot of voters. On the other hand, it’s a single issue group composed of white-collar professionals. I was surprised to see the ADA’s political donations generally go more to the Republicans (although they seem to follow popular trends; they went heavily Democratic in 2008 and 1992). It makes sense as in my experience most dentists are small business owners, not tied to the complex big-picture health care system with all its political complexities like doctors are.
What would provide some insight into this is some numbers, especially the cost of dental care in the US versus other developed countries (my guess: the US is more expensive, but not nearly to the level of the difference in cost of regular health care) and the change in US dental expenditures per time (increasing but not as much as heath care).
Has anyone else run into this story before? Does this seem like something where we might be able to isolate or rule out some factors in comparing trends in the cost of regular health care between the US and other developed countries?
When I was a candidate for Michigan House of Representatives in the 1998 Democratic primary (spoiler: I lost), I received many questionnaires from interest groups eager to find out my orientation on their specific issues and/or influence me before I got elected. Based on these questionnaires, some of them would then make contributions from their Political Action Committees.
The one I got from the dental association was one of the most memorable, because of its extreme humility, as if dentists were a pariah group desperate for allies. Imagine a communication from the Toxic Waste Haulers Association, or from an organization of African-Americans or Jews circa 1925. “We know a lot of people don’t like us…” (not exactly in so many words).
The first question was simply: “Do you know any dentists?”
That being said, many years earlier, in high school, I read the book Dentistry and Its Victims, written under the pseudonym “Paul Revere, DDS”, which denounced the ADA’s absolute prohibition on criticizing another dentist’s work. The author was obliged to bite his tongue and not honestly explain to a patient why the dental work they had paid thousands of dollars for was now falling apart.
@Larry Kestenbaum
Did you answer honestly or did you try to hack the questionnaires/PACs?
When I ran for the Massachusetts State Senate (I lost) I got so many questionnaires that the only reasonable thing to do was to ignore most of them.
I answered honestly the ones I liked. The others, I ignored.
I don’t remember if I returned the dentists’ questionnaire or not.
Whatever you write in those questionnaires does not die. It could be used against you many years later.
Also, when other candidates received contributions from certain PACs, I could surmise what kind of craven answers they gave.
Almost none of the organizations sending questionnaires had any popular following. What they have is money, and (contrary to conventional wisdom) money just isn’t all that important in electoral politics.
I’d probably be one of the first people in line for Dental Therapist care if they got licensed. I’ve never had a cavity (and probably never will, since at 35 I’m long past the high-risk age), my gums are healthy, and my wisdom teeth are long gone. I just need someone to clean my teeth, chide me if I’ve gotten lazy about flossing, and look me over for new low-probability problems and refer me to someone who can handle them if I get them. A dentist’s extensive training on cavities, fillings, root canals, crowns, bridgework, root scaling, etc is pretty much wasted on me.
I suspect pretty much everyone is in line for Dental Therapist care, since most dental work for most people is about cleaning and routine care. At my dentist, the therapist spends a lot more time with me than the dentist. The dentist spends a couple of minutes looking at my teeth and asking the therapist questions. I heartily approve of this. I assume this is done without official certification of the therapist; probably it is technically “under the direction” of the dentist.
I would be interested in comparative costs also. The prices indicated here seem to indicate lower costs in Europe than in the US.
I just had a crown put in — it was a little over $1000. Fillings are maybe $500 I think? My dentist I think is a little more expensive than others in this country, but not greatly so. I’d love to hear of comparative prices from commenters in Europe.
Is that $1000 just the cost for the crown or the entire visit? Prices may not be comparable if you are including things beyond just one specific treatment.
Maximum price for a standard crown in the Netherlands is €232,54.
There are different types of fillings. Fillings that involve multiple sides of the tooth are more expensive. A basic filling on one side costs €22,20, 2 sides €35,41, 3 sides €45,98 and more €64,48. Using composites adds €10-20 to those prices.
These maximum prices are set by the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa) (link in English), which is an autonomous administrative authority, falling under the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. The NZa regulates the healthcare market and sets maximum prices for treatments where there is not a well-functioning market that can set fair prices.
Yes, $1000 is what I pay for everything — the two visits as well as the materials.
It does appear that dentistry is much cheaper in NL and UK than US, but not enough that I would consider dental tourism.
The UK dental system isn’t run in the same way as the NHS: dental practices are run privately, and sometimes contract with the NHS. Getting dental care on the NHS incurs charges if you are over 18, and private dental care is more common than private general healthcare. There are some prices here and here; it looks like private dental care is somewhat cheaper than in the US.
I always thought this was the colloquial explanation for the “bad british teeth” stereotype. That medical care was free, but dental care wasn’t, therefore…
To my understanding, the origin of the “bad british teeth” stereotype was that Americans care about straightening and whitening to an unnatural degree. I think I’ve occasionally heard the other side, with British people thinking that Americans (or American celebrities anyway) have creepy unnatural smiles.
@Matt M
How old is the stereotype? It has to be newer than 1951 (when charges were introduced) for that explanation to work.
Proofreading by, and long arduous conversations with, older, more experienced colleagues.
If I have an online survey and want to signal-amplify it so that lots of SSC readers take it (its topic is SSC-specific), aside from waiting up all night 2 weeks from now hitting the refresh button so I can be the first to post on the next unhidden Open Thread (which probably will be called “Thready Lee” and have a picture of Rush performing, if that hasn’t been used already…or else maybe “Open Jillette” with a picture of the famous atheist/libertarian illusionist/entertainer–what are the odds both have already been done?), is there a way I can reach Scott and a) get him interested in helping me and b) get him the link? Scott occasionally mentions people having emailed him but I have no idea where that email link is, if it’s posted on this site somewhere.
I’d post it on the subreddit. Also, Scott’s email is on his about page, but I’d assume from point 2 on the open thread description above that emailing him would be significantly less preferred.
I don’t have a Reddit account and would like to avoid creating one. (There must by now be a shorthand way to refer to the idea that people should generally be able to expect not to be forced to sign up for this or that website or service in order to conduct some basic activity such as contacting someone! I don’t know what that shorthand is.)
Any other options, I wonder?
I don’t have a time restriction…I guess in a worst case scenario I could just wait until Scott seems to have less tumult in his life and just email him then…
If you have a tumblr account, sharing it with @slatestarscratchpad might be an easy way to get it on his radar. Even if you don’t, I think it might be possible to send asks anonymously.
Sigh.
Note that they will not provide you with your sequence if you participate according to the more detailed writeup: https://maths.autismresearchcentre.net/docs/MathsStudy_PIS.pdf (Which is both wasteful and immoral, IMO.) They also don’t sound like they’re very big on sharing data in general, so if you’re in the UK, maybe it would be better to try to get into the Biobank if you want to help research…
Note also the name at the top of the letterhead. This is Simon Baron Cohen’s study, for whatever that’s worth.
Making it all the more disappointing.
More disappointing because you expect better from SBC or because that’s exactly what you’d expect from him?
This is the first installment of my read-through of Western epics. This will go in chronological order, breaking each epic into chunks of around 1,000 verses.
Epic poetry goes back to the Babylonians, but it was the Iliad that made tropes all later poets would use. Greek oral tradition had many epics, but according to Aristotle in the Poetics, Homer’ s were on a higher level than the rest. He credits this to “unity”: whereas a crude poet would try to tell the story of the whole Trojan War or all the deeds of Heracles, the Iliad fills more than 15,000 hexameters with scenes related to the Wrath of Achilles. It begins with the Trojan War already in its eighth year and end with Troy undefeated.
The epics attributed to Homer are divided into 24 books each, so I will cover them two at a time.
The first trope we’re introduced to is the invocation of the Muse, in which the poet prays for inspiration from a minor immortal so he can recite with verity events that happened before he was born. Only by divine inspiration could the poet vouchsafe that he was relating true events from his people’s history rather than just making things up. Much later, after Aristotle, the purpose of following this trope would be reduced to stating the theme.
Why did Achilles get mad? Well, it seems that once when the Achaean army was dividing slave girls from a sacked town supreme commander Agamemnon picked one whose father was a priest of Apollo. When her dad came offering a ransom, all the soldiers said it was fitting to ransom her, but Agamemnon refused, boasting to the priest that she would grow old in Mycenae, forced to weave every day and mate with Agamemnon every night. Oh and don’t show your face around here again or I’ll kill you. Understandably, the priest prays to Apollo for justice and Apollo sends a plague. A seer tells Agamemnon the obvious, to which he replies that it is beneath the supreme commander to sleep without a slave girl, so upon freeing the priest’s daughter, he’ll have to steal the slave girl of one of the Achaean princes. Achilles calls him out as a horrible person and Agamemnon takes his girl, Briseis. Achilles lays hand on his sword hilt to slay Agamemnon but Athena stops him, raising the philosophical question of how the poet and his audience understood human behavior. Were all wise acts the goddess of wisdom acting and not your own will? Hmm.
Anyway, Achilles withdraws to his tent. He tells his nymph or goddess mother Thetis the sad story and asks her to petition Zeus to make Agamemnon lose. Action moves to Mt. Olympus. Zeus grants Thetis’s petition because she once released a hekatoncheire to save him from the other Olympians. Hera bickers with him. Hephaestus begs his parents not to fight, reminding Hera of past domestic violence that included Zeus hurling him from Olympus to Lemnos, a fall which though not fatal required him to be nursed back to health by the Lemnians.
We’re into a weird area here. The gods here seem to have little to do with the powers of Greek paganism. This is more like how moderns treat them in comic books, etc. And yet this was considered divinely inspired.
On to Book 2. Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream that will cause him to make a fool of himself and disperse his army if he trusts it. Trust it he does and makes a big speech about how they can all go home if not brave enough to see the fated fall of Troy through. Turns out the soldiers dislike Agamemnon so much that they jump at the chance, and Troy would have won if not for a pro-Agamemnon speech supplemented with argument ad baculum by the much greater orator Odysseus standing between the men and their ships.
Then we get the catalogue of ships, according to which the Achaeans sent more than 1,200 ships with at least 63,500 soldiers as rowers. On the one hand, the geography of the contingents is widely believed to accurately represent the Mycenaean period rather the end of the Greek Dark Ages when the poet would have loved. OTOH, that’s a lot of soldiers for a Late Bronze Age campaign. Ramsesses II only had a field army of 20,000.
Book 2 ends with a second catalogue, the Trojan allies. These come from Europe North of modern Greece and western Anatolia, which just might correspond to an LBS league of city-States outside Hittite imperial control, Assuwa. In any case, catalogues of troops would become another mandatory trope of the genre.
Your thoughts?
Off-topic (unless “hmm” is an invitation), but this is the sort of thing Julian Jaynes cites in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argues that the ancients were not conscious in the same way we are.
I was aware of that!
I keep hearing about Jaynes and should probably read the book. Does he address breakdown of the bicameral mind in the 16th century Americas and among Australian aborigines? That always seemed like the biggest objection to such a cognitive change In historical times, to me.
It’s been decades since I read it, but I don’t think so. I suspect that’s partly because there’s a lot more primary source material for ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.
Note that he is not claiming that unified consciousness is the result of a biological change; I think it’s closer to say that it was a cultural invention, a new way of the mind understanding itself. (Perhaps a very loose parallel could be drawn to things like the scientific method?) In any case it spread throughout the pre-classical world much faster than a genetic mutation would have, and there’s no need to imagine a mutation that somehow affected Greeks and Native Americans despite their geographical separation.
I don’t remember if he guessed it was something that sprang from the demands of living in big cities for the first time, though that notion would have an interesting potential frisson with Seeing Like a State.
He doesn’t talk about Australia, but he does talk a little about a few American civilizations.
Be warned. The book is really bizarre, as I’m sure you can guess from the description. It’s also almost certainly wrong in its most literal sense. If you can’t put up with that then it’s not really for you. If you can, then it’s really fascinating. I think of it more as an intuition pump than a scientific theory. And once you back away from the most extreme aspects of the theory, some of its claims might even be true. Daniel Dennett explains what parts of the book he found useful:
I was thinking the exact same thing. A neat idea and a hypothesis that’s nearly impossible to test. Still neat though.
Edit: I haven’t read it either, most of my understanding of the theory comes from this article.
Bits and pieces:
1. A very cool map of the main Greek/Trojan heroes and where they came from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Homeric_Greece-en.svg
2. English is lucky to have many, many good different translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in various styles, and you can choose according to your taste. The most famous ones are not necessarily the best for you. I’ve looked at a few (by no means all of them, or even many) and emerged decidedly a fan of Stanley Lombardo’s translations. I highly recommend them for their strong and vivid poetic voice.
3. Book 1 has the first of the several occurrences of the epithet “wine-dark sea” that’s troubles generations of translators and commentators. William Gladstone, the 19th century British Prime Minister, thought it meant Homer was color-blind. Linguists noticed, while studying languages with few color terms, that blue seems to be one of the last among basic color terms to appear. Apparently the Hebrew Bible has no word for blue either. Is it possible that for Homer and other Greeks of his time, the language didn’t distinguish between dark purple and dark blue?
4. There’s a famous poem in Russian, by Osip Mandelshtam, in which the narrator has insomnia and tries to help himself fall asleep by reading through the catalogue of ships from Book 2.
For strictly utilitarian purposes, you don’t need a name for a color that doesn’t exist in your world (obviously), and you also don’t need a name for a color that exists only in one context. If the only thing in your world that is dark blue is the sea, you can just call it “sea-colored” if you need to call out the color at all. But for poetic purposes, “sea-colored sea” doesn’t really cut it and so a poet can be excused for stretching a comparison.
Absent fancy chemistry or a wealthy trade economy that can import exotic natural products, nature provides a limited palette of pure primary colors, and in Homeric Greece, what other than the sky and sea would have been blue? I think indigo dyes and blue eyes both came to Greece later than that, at least in significant quantity.
And see “orange”; this is definitely a thing people do and it isn’t limited to ancient or primitive people.
For strictly utilitarian purposes, a blind man shouldn’t be attempting to describe color at all!
Nature provides a lot of colors in spring time. I don’t know what flowers are native to Greece, but I’d wager that some of them are blue. Also some birds. And, importantly, jewelry. Between the sky (which the Greeks were so obsessed with studying that they accidentally invented philosophy), large bodies of water (which are a big deal to every civilization), and things you buy/pick to impress women, was there really no need to describe this color?
I prefer one of the following explanations:
1. The sea really can look wine-colored, especially at the right time of day.
2. Homer was blind.
Blue is one color that plants don’t give us much of. Possibly since there’s so much blue in the sky that blue plants don’t do a very good job attracting bees.
Blue flowers are less common, but not absent. Borage is native to the area, medically significant, and even believed by some ancients to have been the “nepenthe” Homer talks about. The Greeks named the delphinium flower as well, which comes in blue, although I don’t know if it did in that area at that time.
Also, I’ve got some weed in my lawn that makes tiny white and blue flowers. No idea what it is.
They’re out there, is my point. Not as common as yellow flowers, but still plenty visible.
Why is wine-dark sea troubling? I mean, the sea is clearly not wine-colored, but the idea of a sea as dark as good wine never really bothered me. I guess I always figured the “dark” was more important than the “wine” part.
It’s one way to understand it, to be sure. But note that “dark” is not in the original (which simply says “wine-like”). This, combined with a lack of a word for blue, and other somewhat bizarre color descriptions in Homer, led many people to suspect there’s more to it than that. More on this and on the wine-dark sea in this longish well-written article.
Strictly speaking, the original says “wine-faced” (οἶνοψ) rather than “wine-like” (which would be something like οἰνοίδης).
I don’t know Greek, but I have read that face (πρόσωπον) is spelled with an omega, and thus wine-face would be οἰνωψ (which does seem to mean dark). Whereas, -οπ comes from ὄπωπα (same ωπ eye!) and ultimately ὀπή. Or maybe somewhere else.
Actually the last element is from ὄψ (eye, face), rather than πρόσωπον. Though according to Liddell and Scott both οἶνοψ and οἰνώψ are found in Greek, presumably based on the needs of the metre.
Occasionally ωπ turns into οπ, so maybe that’s what happened here. But why are you so sure? And even if that is what happened, how do you know it means face rather than the more common eye?
Because the word is οἶνοψ, not οἰνοπρόσωπος? Why isn’t that good enough?
Because whereas the meaning of “the wine-faced sea” is fairly clear (the sea has an appearance similar to that of wine), “the wine-eyed sea” makes no sense whatsoever.
It could be an expression like ‘beer goggles’.
“Wine-dark” is an English poetic translation of something more literally rendered as “wine-like.” There is not much reason to believe that is supposed to describe the color and no reason at all to think it means dark.
We do, in fact, know a lot about Homeric colors, and they’re pretty weird compared to the palettes of other languages, which is probably what Gladstone was talking about, not this one example.
Goethe also addressed this issue when he did color theory, concluding “the Greeks were weird”.
Actually, I took that too far. The reason that people consider it a color and render it as “wine-dark” is that there is a slightly different, but probably unrelated word that in classical Greek is a color and in a Roman-era Greek lexicon is defined as dark.
Actually, I’ve been assured by people that they’ve actually seen a sea look pretty wine-like. (In the midst of a cheerful discussion about what color the sky and sea are.)
I’ve seen it. While the color hard to describe precisely I’d say deep, clear, water near sunrise/sunset is closer to being a “dark purple” than anything else.
Re: Hebrew Bible and blue
Here’s a good stab at someone who knows a lot about the Hebrew Bible working through the question: https://goddidntsaythat.com/2012/05/29/q-and-a-what-color-is-the-blue-of-the-bible/
AREOMAGAZINE: Here’s a new online magazine that I think may be interesting to this crowd. Their stated mission is “to support free expression, humanism, rationalism, human rights, science, and defend the values of the Enlightenment.”
Here is a popular recent article:
https://areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify-as-a-feminist/
I’m supporting them on Patreon and encourage you to do likewise if you agree with their mission. They are just trying to get off the ground and I’d like to see more of this kind of journalism.
Nice article, thanks for the tip.
The Chicago SSC meetup photo (link is the same as Scott’s above, just repeated here for convenience) was fascinating to me. I don’t know who any of those people are, or whether any of them are commenters here whose handles I’d recognize, but the general look kinda matched the sort of faces I imagined seeing if I met a bunch of y’all in meatspace.
I also don’t know which of those characters is Scott or if he was even there. But just based on what I imagine Scott looks like, he’s the guy giving the double thumbs up. I don’t care if this is right, but I am curious if other commenters who are also naive to Scott’s appearance would make the same guess.
BTW, was that picture taken in Grant Park, toward the northern end, facing south? I lived near there for a short time, looks familiar. Did you guys patronize any nearby dining or coffee establishments?
My guess for Scott would have been the guy with the hat.
For me that was maybe a second guess, but I thought the hatted guy looked too young.
A fedora in this day and age would have to be some sort of fancy counter-signalling and I can’t imagine Scott taking such a sophisticated approach.
A year or so ago on some forum I no longer visit, I codified the politics of white male’s hats. I.e. what are the politics of the white male based on the hat he’s wearing, given very little else.
(White male because they’re the most divergent group, politically, so it’s the most interesting set with which to conduct this exercise.)
A fedora marks you as liberal or libertarian (i.e. blue or gray tribe) if you’re under the age of about 40 or 45. If you’re over that age it’s more ambiguous.
BTW, there are basically no reliably “conservative” hats except, arguably, cowboy hats and trucker caps. (We presume, for this exercise, that whatever hat in question is without symbols, logos, explicit messages, or politically-coded patterns such as hunting camo.)
What about if there’s a black velvet yamaka underneath it?
@brad: Still probably blue or gray tribe. Maybe especially so. Except won’t go in for the Israel-bashing sometimes found among others in those tribes.
Hmm. I wouldn’t consider haredi red, blue, or gray. They have their own thing going on.
Is “haredi” pronounced like “hair dye”?
Anyway, there of course will always be pesky outliers. Although, it also kinda fits that Mr. Pesky Outlier is below the age of 45 and wears a fedora.
ha-ray-dee
If you want to be really authentic the ha part is somewhat guttural.
I’d instinctively know to pronounce it gutterally if it was spelled Xaredi. Haredi is just asking for Hair Dye.
Can you tell a person’s political views based on the fact he almost never wears a hat?
@onyomi
Partially, he is less likely to vote for the Bald People Party.
My normal heuristic is that to find the group leader, locate the hottest girl and see who she has her arm around.
Or is this just an excuse for you to find the hottest girl? This wouldn’t work in a mixed age environment outside of Hollywood.
I mean, it’s a picture, and I have eyes. So I don’t need much of an excuse in the first place.
So which one is actually Scott?
He’s the one to the woman in the red shirt/grey skirt’s right.
So the one with his arm around the hot woman.
What if the hottest girl doesn’t have her arm around anyone?
Then she is the high-status person.
Could be that every male at the function is sociosexually below her in status.
OK in that case I think James Miller’s assessment carries forward:
A true high status male has the confidence to let his female partner move about the party on her own, even when someone declares it’s picture time.
This kind of confidence (I would think) is more common among guys older than their mid-20s, and who don’t live in Hollywood.
Then the heuristic fails and I’ll have wasted precious fractions of a second that I’ll never get back.
I’ve been in contexts where I think I was the highest status person in the room and I can’t remember ever having the hottest girl in the room with her arm around me.
Alas.
@Barely matters:
You’re not giving heuristics enough credit. Just because they only take a few moments to update or back away from doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be invested in properly. It’s easy to return stuff to Walmart but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a serious attempt to take the right item off the shelf in the first place.
I don’t know what all you think “barely matters”, but heuristics are important to get right, dangit!
I’m still riding high on nailing this one.
That matches my former mental image of Scott pretty well. When I first saw the picture of Scott with Astro Teller see: http://unsongbook.com/authors-note-8-textbook-erica-indianapolis/, I assumed Scott was Astro, and was surprised at how similar he looked to my mental picture of him.
It looks like both those guys are in the Chicago photo! One is in the front in the green shirt and blue pants, and the other is partially obscured behind the grinning bespectacled guy with the open checkered shirt.
It’s pretty funny that there’s a bit of detective work for the average commenter to figure out what the fuck scott looks like
Law 1: Scott shall never be photographed alone.
Law 2: If there is only one other person in a photograph with Scott, that person shall also be in another photograph with Scott, taken in some other place and time, so that Scott can never be discerned by process of elimination.
OPSEC people, OPSEC.
Hmmm… so what is the hidden message in this picture?
Green T-shirt guy is doing a penguin-hand – the guy behind is pointing up… you’ve got Scott giving the thumbs up, and then the woman next to him pointing to the floor.
What does it all mean?
And of course, if it wasn’t occultish enough, Mr. Muscles on the far right is giving the sign of the devil.
Also, everyone is looking directly into the camera–except three people (big leaning guy on the left, woman in red at center, and up-pointer behind her), who are all looking at the same point somewhere on the ground to the left of the camera.
This being Chicago, I suspect those may be a gang sign.
If the guy on the right is reading this:
Do you have a rationalist lifting blog? Can you link it?
If not, can you start one?
I always imagined Scott as being very young looking (early twenties maybe). Not sure why. Maybe I read something about him being in residency or medical school and I thought he was referring to undergrad. Or maybe it was because I was pretty young when I started reading this blog, and I sort of assumed the author looked like myself.
The guy who most closely matches my original mental image of Scott is the one in the green shirt, behind the woman in red. When I found out which one was actually Scott, I was a bit surprised, but in retrospect it made much more sense than my initial assumptions.
Reflecting on my own initial assumption (that Scott is the one giving the double thumbs-up–I’m pretty sure this isn’t right but I don’t care for the purposes of this discussion), I wonder if it’s because I know Scott is a polyamorist, and the only other polyamorist I’d really gotten familiar with before that was Patri Friedman, who is, uh, short of stature. And wears a (kind of) beard and seems like he has a lot of energy–and also writes very well about many different ideas. So maybe that somehow created a visual association in my head…
Why’s that?
Ex-polyamorist.
Oh, OK. Noted. Haven’t been following closely.
Because I was still basically imagining Scott as an undergrad, when he’s actually (I think) older than thirty. After reading this blog for a while, I figured out Scott was about 10 years older than I originally thought, but I never actually bothered to add 10 years to his appearance. So when he described treating patients and things like that, I was basically imagining scenes from Doogie Howser M.D.
All the photographs I’ve seen of Scott are completely incorrect, for two reasons:
1) Photo Scott looks far more confident than the real Scott could ever be about anything.
2) The real Scott clearly has wide-open, anime-ingenue eyes, not the smiley-squinting ones in the photos.
If I were better with Photoshop, I’d link to an image of the real, Platonic Scott in my mind.
From @Nornagest
I think that cooking is awful and the only reason I do it is that all of the alternatives are either worse, or involve finding a SO who likes cooking for me, which is still a work in progress. Some of the worst parts for me:
1. Buying things is too distant from cooking them. It’s easy for me to think that on Tuesday I’ll want to figure out how to use some vegetable and not just make the same bean+rice burrito as always. Or decide against making something because of all of the steps involved.
2. There are two entire rooms in my house dedicated just to storing and preparing food, and they’re stocked with a ton of equipment that I basically never need. That seems like a huge waste.
3. Cleaning and maintaining those rooms and the equipment is a pain.
4. Cooking is just about the only cheap way to feed yourself healthy things and it seems to require a stable address? When I’m stuck living out of a hotel/car/other non-house I’m limited to mostly raw foods and bread, which sucks.
5. Cooking is boring. Listening to audiobooks sort of helps, but I usually can’t read, and even with housemates, it’s hard to effectively make it a social activity.
It seems like attaching public kitchens to grocery stores/food stores would make a lot of that better. Cooking in a shared kitchen would allow people to socialize instead of staring at a not-yet-boiling pot. It might mean less monotonous tasks if there were, say, central stations that made the really simple stuff like rice and pasta. It would mean I could have decent food in cities I didn’t live in. Cleaning and maintenance could be streamlined and handled mostly by somebody else. I wouldn’t have to devote living space to food beyond probably a hotplate+microwave+crockpot and storage for a couple staples. And I could buy what I need for a particular meal instead of having a spice cabinet just in case, and a crisper full of things that might get used.
What are other common complaints about cooking and are public kitchens worse in some way?
Also, has anybody ever seen something like this? The closest thing I’ve seen was Home Economics class, which was way more fun than cooking at home.
I certainly sympathize with some of your complaints about cooking, though I’m not convinced having communal kitchens is better. For one thing it means travelling to another place to make food, potentially in inclement weather or at inconvenient times (I guess in a dense city they might be plausibly open 24/7, but in a dense city space can be very expensive). If you don’t want to do that, you’re stuck ordering pizza (defeating the cost and health benefits of cooking for yourself).
Specific to your points:
#1) Food wastage & storage problems are a planning failure. Meals should be planned before shopping – on the spectrum between a full week’s meals planned before a big shop (more cost effective and efficient), or just one meal in advance (allows for more spontaneity). Having a public kitchen wouldn’t actually help this problem – except maybe allowing for common communal spices. But then, spices don’t spoil, and storing them at home doesn’t take up much space. Not to mention that you can save money by buying food that doesn’t spoil (dried pasta, rice, beans, cans etc) in bulk when sales are on.
#5) If cooking with housemates is not fun or social (different from my person experience!), why would a public kitchen be any more exciting?
Presumably you’d have to pay a fee to use such public kitchens, and have people maintain and clean them. I guess you’re arguing that it would be cheaper to pay this than to maintain your own kitchen at home (which does get expensive!). Why not increase their efficiency by hiring not only cleaners, but people willing to cook in them? If that’s the case, then perhaps it would be better to have ingredients delivered directly from suppliers, rather than each person bringing their own? The people in charge of cooking could publish a list of what they’re best at, and then… Oh wait….
The phrase “public kitchen” makes me just want to go running to the relatively pristine, pure, sterile cleanliness of the Taco Bell drive-through.
Supermarkets have public bathrooms that they are supposed to keep clean. How clean is the men’s room at your local supermarket? I don’t trust that same managerial oversight–not to mention clientele*–to keep a hypothetical attached kitchen in decent shape.
Now, a small stand-alone building that houses a kitchen and functions like a co-op or a city garden plot…that could be interesting, but only if there was a major barrier to entry mostly based around hygiene and conscientiousness.
*This got me thinking, who’d be most likely to use said kitchen? My guesses:
– Homeless people of varying levels of mental fitness
– A few (but not most) poor, single moms
– A few (but not most) poor, single college students
– Immigrants and international college students from developing nations
– One or two rationalist type individuals
That’s sort of true, but I think it’s missing something. From the angle I like it’s at least a little bit a skills failure. If you’re good at cooking you don’t really need to plan much, and you can take advantage of sales. And second, planning a meal, shopping, coming back, getting around to preparing the meal, thinking of adjustments for next time, is a bit more of an effort and not quite as tight a feedback loop as going to the store, getting staples and some sale ingredients for a meal, then making it there. I’m not entirely convinced by this, honestly, but I think a division where the things I take home are things I know I can handle, and if I’m unsure of something I only buy it if I’m going to cook it right then, might be helpful for me personally.
Because kitchens in houses are tiny and poorly ventilated, and coordinating is hard. Two (or maybe three if you have a big kitchen) people working on the same thing is pretty good. But often people don’t want to eat the same thing, and trying to prepare several different meals at once in a normal kitchen is a nightmare. It’s possible that there’s no good way to arrange a room so more than three people can be within interacting range and also have room to cook, but I’m not discounting the possibility yet.
Probably not in the short term, but if full kitchens stopped being a requirement in every apartment, I could imagine it working out that way in the long term.
Sure, you could integrate the grocery store with the public kitchen instead of just attaching them. That might be better in some ways, though I might want to see some improvements in automatic checkout machines first.
I’m not sure how much the last bit was a joke, but I don’t think you necessarily have to take it all the way to restaurants if you want to avoid paying people to cook for you.
I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about the restaurants, but there’s a more serious point underneath it.
Both restaurants and grocery stores are notoriously low-margin businesses (at least in big cities, where the communal kitchen idea has any chance of working). We can do a cost-analysis that either builds upon a grocery store, or takes away from a restaurant.
If we start with a grocery store, we’re now asking them to add on an extra space for the communal kitchen, the purchasing and upkeep of equipment, and staff to keep it organized and clean. We’re expecting them to pay for this either through the increased traffic brought from people wanting to use the kitchen (probably not enough given the already slim margins), or with a usage fee.
Or, we can imagine it as a restaurant where you cook your own food. The restaurant still needs most of what it already has, but saves money on staff costs (no waiters, no chefs, only a manager and a few cleaners needed). Unfortunately, many of these staff are already paid for directly by the consumer through gratuity (in the US at least), so it doesn’t seem like in the end the price would be much less than what a restaurant would charge you in the first place.
Either way you’re going to be paying a chunk more for food, though in the long run as you point out probably less than keeping and maintaining a kitchen.
Now it seems to me that communal living is on the rise, where people are likely to have their own rooms but a shared living space and kitchen. That might provide more value for you – though it’s usually still expected that you clean up after yourself.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense coming from the direction of the owners than the consumers. I’ll have to think about that. Thanks for clarifying.
When I was a freshman in college I lived in a dorm. The dorm had a kitchen space that you could access by asking for a key at the front desk. Although the dorm probably housed 200-400 students, it seemed like only half a dozen of us ever used the kitchen space. The kitchen was OK, not great. (I don’t remember seeing the space advertised, either. I think I found out about it from an upper-classman friend.)
Is this generally the situation in the US? In UK university accommodation there is usually one kitchen per 5-10 students, of varying quality.
Some dorms are basically apartments, each with their own private kitchen. The dorm I lived in (described above) was more like a hostel. Each floor consisted of a hallway of rooms and two big shared bathrooms per floor, one for each sex. (The public kitchen was part of a building common to the whole complex.) Generally there are a range of accommodation styles between those two extremes. There might be outliers too. I’m not an expert.
My dorms in college had one (small) kitchen for 60ish students, and it was pretty much always a disaster. Most students didn’t use it, partly because you had to buy a meal plan at the college dining hall as a condition of living there.
This used to be a retail concept – Dream Dinners, Let’s Dish, and similar, was a real big flash in the pan 10-15 years ago. Most of them closed up within a year, but I believe there are still a few around. You could see if they have something like that in your area. Google one of those or do a search for “freezer meal party.” You can sign up on your own but it is typically marketed as a fun outing with a group. Typically it is kind of like a Blue Apron concept, in that they choose the meal options and provide the ingredients – so you can’t for example just bring in your own groceries and prep them. But the idea is to walk out with several ready-to-heat or freeze meals to store at home.
I don’t see how this would work. If they are only looking at the genetics of autistics with strong mathematical abilities are t they ignoring the possible greater number of autistics with those same markers but low math skills?
Anyway, there’s a house opening up there as the current residents leave, and we’d like to get rationalist-adjacent people to move in. It’s three bedrooms, one bathroom, and it costs $4100/month total.
…am I the only one who sees this as an anti-rationalist advertisement?
Like, people who would pay that much to rent that sort of house aren’t rational, they’re fucking bugshit crazy???
Hyperbole aside – that’s enough to rent a three-bedroom, one bath house, with a nice yard, for six months where I live, with quite a bit left over for utilities. Not in the *best* neighborhood, no, but in a decent-enough school district (6-7 on a 1-10 scale). 1K would get you a 4 bedroom, two bath, plus yard. Not a major tech center (that’s about 90 minutes away) but the unemployment rate is less than 6%, with a mix of blue collar, health, government and tech jobs.
So my (for real, explain it to me like I’m five, pls) question is – if people are trying to make the world better by donating extra funds to various charities, and by reducing inequality, etc, etc…why is moving to Berkeley and other parts of the Left Coast even an option?
(Obviously it’s a big draw for many. But I don’t get it. Please help me understand.)
Hah, no. I’m right there with you. But I’m also not clear on why any sane person would want to live in a place with a population density higher than about 3K people per square mile.
You weren’t the only one, keranih. Making Rationalists a subset of Bay Aryans makes the whole EA thing look just like standard “Look, I’m so rich that I can pay $4100 for rent and still have money to give to charity!” Leftism.
I think it would be interesting to discuss where rationalists ought to live.
Some have done just that, there is a project to start a rationalist hub in Manchester, UK, see here for more. Personally I think they made a mistake in discounting my home city.
In order to maximize influence they should go where the money is: https://howmuch.net/articles/where-the-money-is-by-metro-area
I propose LA. Cheap suburbs, lots of money, and no entrenched memeplexes to displace.
The reason for moving to San Francisco is because other rationalists live in San Francisco. And coordinating to change that will probably fail.
A Bay Aryan is the most noble thing to be, speaking
Sanskritlike a computer. Paying the rent due a kshatriya (landlord) and giving alms tobrahminsMIRI are just the price of entry.I feel like I’m stating the obvious, but the Bay Area is filled with people who have very high incomes, and if you have a very high income, you don’t mind spending more money on rent, especially since housing is one of the few ways you can spend money that actually improves your life.
Anyway… $4100/month is under $50,000 a year; 1/3 of that is $16400/year; a quick search suggests a new college grad entering a big tech company can get $150-$200k/year total pay (and of course senior guys will make more, possibly much more) – why would they even blink at that kind of rent?
SF rent is more than double Seattle rent. Do Aryan tech companies pay that much more than Seattle tech companies?
Also, not everyone moving to the Bay Area because Rationalism is employed by a tech company. Do Aryan psychiatrists earn six times as much as psychiatrists where keranih lives?
I am replying to the 6th comment of yours that I have read where you use the term “Aryan” to refer to people in the Bay Arya–er, Area.
The first time I thought it was so clever and funny that I actually smiled out here in meatspace.
The second, third, and fourth times I smiled inwardly, savoring the cleverness.
The fifth time, I appreciated it quietly.
The sixth time I got annoyed, finding it cheap and trite and somewhat afoul of Godwin.
I hope you don’t make it into a Thing. Can’t we just call people in the Bay Area “suckers” or “The Westward Coastal Elite” or something?
I like “suckers”! The second one is a mouthful. The “renting rich”, maybe?
Double rent does not require double pay to justify it.
If a Seattle worker gets paid X after taxes, and pays 0.25X in rent, then moving to the Bay Area and paying double rent, e.g. 0.5X, is justified if he gets paid just 1.25X.
Assuming that affects nothing else. But, of course, the grocery probably has to pay double rent, and that shows up in the prices, and so on with other stores.
Mary, that’s true, but I’m not sure it scales evenly.
I haven’t pulled any actual numbers, but based on Scott’s posts it feels to me that Bay Area rent is roughly double equivalent Houston rent.
And yet, I suspect buying a footlong from Subway does not cost double there what it does here.
Data not perfect, but it looks like San Fransisco is roughly 35% more expensive than Houston (not including rent).
Sure everything else gets more expensive too, but it doesn’t matter. This same concept applies just as well to every other expense as well. Just substitute 0.4X for all expenses instead of 0.25X for rent and you get a similar result. A doubling of expenses is still justified by just a 40% raise.
The cost of living adjustment problem looks to me to be conceptually impossible to ever do perfectly, or even particularly well. There’s an inherent fuzziness at the heart of the concept.
Taken to its extreme: Based on numbeo estimates on the one hand, and this guy on the other, it looks like Houston is about 40% more expensive.
True, but I gave the warning as the data for the site is crowd-source and prone to a lot more errors (self selecting bias, potentially small sample size, etc) than you’d get if someone were to attempt to directly compare the two cities.
Don’t forget our progressive tax system and the fact that mortgage interest but not rent is deductible.
the Bay Area is filled with people who have very high incomes
Emm. I’ll allow that there are a lot of people there now with high incomes, because the people with low incomes can’t afford to pay the rent. And so they *left*.
The median household income in the USA is $56K this year. Why wouldn’t anyone choke on spending nearly 90% of that on rent alone?
And if you say “because the rationalist community isn’t the median of the US population” – welp, there you go.
Also – double check that link – to my read, the average starting salary was $105K, and it was only with starting bonus AND stock dividends that $150K came into view.
OTOH – I can see why rationalists put so much thought into UBI, considering that the Bay Area seems to be attempting to price the average human out of the area.
Without intending at all to offend our host I think the explanation for why the Rationalists are in SF is that the various Rationalist projects are funded by, or those organizing them hope they will be funded by in the future, wealthy tech workers and owners living in the Bay Area. The leaders of these organizations need to be near the donor base, and around that nucleus forms the rest of the community.
The median household income in the USA is $56K this year. Why wouldn’t anyone choke on spending nearly 90% of that on rent alone?
Another way to put it – purely in monetary terms, would be that if you make say $250k/year, living someplace that makes you 10% more productive is, very crudely, worth spending maybe $15k/year more on rent. The right living situation can *easily* make you 10% more productive. Indeed, the difference can be vastly more than that.
And that’s ignoring the non-monetary benefits of course.
Also – double check that link – to my read, the average starting salary was $105K, and it was only with starting bonus AND stock dividends that $150K came into view.
which is why I said “total pay,” not “base salary without stock awards or bonuses”
True, but low housing costs can also contribute to productivity. For half the cost of Scott’s house he wants to split 3-4 ways, I live in alone a brand new two-bedroom apartment that’s about a 5-minute drive (or 30 minute bus ride, door to door) from my downtown office. I use one of the bedrooms as an office when I want to work without being in the office. Because the apartment is new, the walls are thick, and I have no roommate, I can have complete silence and concentration whenever I feel like, and I never have to bother with doing chores or ensuring I’m not disturbing others. I can get to work quickly and easily without wasting time commuting.
I imagine if you threw me in some random Bay Area “group home” I’d be significantly less productive than I am here. (Maybe that’s why all the tech companies want their employees to essentially live on campus)
At the other extreme… there are $10,000/month apartments in Manhattan that are completely justified, because it means the occupants who are earning $2M/year have just a five minute walk to their offices.
The marginal tax rate around $250k a year in California is ~40%, a 10% boost in productivity isn’t worth it when you consider the higher cost of living outside of higher rent, and that assumes you capture 100% of your improved productivity in salary, without your company capturing any of that productivity. Since the company is eating large non salary costs by organizing in a high cost area this seems unlikely to be true on its face.
One interesting thing about living in places with wildly different costs of living and correspondingly different salaries is that in effect, you face a very different set of prices in one place than in another.
Imagine moving from St Louis to San Jose. Your salary goes up to compensate your increase in costs of living.
The higher costs of living are mainly concentrated in housing and stuff you have to buy locally–you pay more for your groceries and such. It’s as though you just moved to a world where housing prices went up and car prices went down, and the price of anything you can order online went *way* down.
and that assumes you capture 100% of your improved productivity in salary, without your company capturing any of that productivity. Since the company is eating large non salary costs by organizing in a high cost area this seems unlikely to be true on its face.
No it doesn’t, it just assumes the fraction of your productivity captured by you is unchanged. And I don’t see why employee fixed costs should enter into it.
And in expectation over the long term you will indeed capture much of your increase in productivity. An increase in productivity this year may not change your pay this year that much, but it leads to faster promotion or better projects or what have you.
I live in a more expensive area because I have an irrational fear of:
1) People with a different accent to me.
2) Areas I don’t know very well.
I don’t know how common that is, but once you’re in somewhere, once you’re comfortable, it’s a big risk to move.
Oh, I think that in your situation, that’s actually reasonable.
I mean, you own up to the fears being irrational, and that’s not something that goes away instantly.
It doesn’t make moving into such an area rational, but that’s not what you’re doing.
It is literally 4 times my mortgage payment (including taxes and insurance in escrow) on a 4 bedroom 2000 sq ft house in a Phoenix suburb.
If I literally doubled my salary, and had a spouse that made almost as much, I maybe wouldn’t gag on that number. I don’t particularly want a roommate as a 30 yr old.
No wonder polyamory is so popular there – it’s the only way to make rent!
As usual, it turns out the tribe’s seemingly immoral or irrational behavior is actually rational in its environment.
But then why isn’t polyamory more popular in Manila or Mumbai?
Dating your roommates is a terrible idea. You break up with them and then you’re stuck together until one of you can find a way to move out. (That said, I rarely listen to my own advice.)
In the Bay Area can people afford not to date their roommates?
Much to my grave displeasure, you do not get a discount on your rent for fucking your roommates. (I know, right?)
The idea being, if you had a significant other who you didn’t live with, the significant other would be spending lots of time at your place, or vice versa, with no rent being paid. Also, the s/o or you would be NOT spending time at the place the s/o or you ARE paying rent for.
If you’re staying over at someone’s place two or three nights a week you’re probably going to move in together so you can share a room and split the rent. (People tend to move in together quickly in the Bay.) But because of this lots of people already have someone they’re sharing a bedroom with and it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to convince their partner to sleep on the couch on a remotely regular basis.
My implication was that you would move in with the people you were already dating, not to start fucking your roommates – where I live two adults cohabiting is more than enough to comfortably own a home if they both work, or if one works but has an above average salary. And this is how most of the people I know do it – they ditch roommates as soon as they are sufficiently committed to their romantic partner to move in together or they themselves have enough for their own place (which doesn’t take long on an engineer’s salary).
In the Bay Area, it appears that for a “family unit” of romantically paired adults to own a home together, the size of that family unit must be > 2.
It was a joke.
Own schmown, they make it sound like it takes a two-income family unit to rent a room.
A three-bedroom house is not rented by one person, or even one family. Each of those bedrooms will be inhabited by a separate, probably financially independent person or couple. If the house contains more than one room which is not a bedroom and does not literally contain a toilet or an oven, those are magically now bedrooms, and it can be inhabited by an additional person or couple. (Depending on the preferences of the house, relatively exposed rooms may be partitioned with a privacy screen to become a bedroom.) So those three rooms are shared by three households, for a rent of $1367 a month. Financial guidelines suggest not spending more than a quarter of your income on rent, so this is accessible for anyone with a salary of $60,000. Average person in tech makes, what, $125,000-$150,000? So it is actually quite reasonable.
A lot of people who are trying to earn to give are trying to transition into programming. If you want to do that, it is really really helpful to live where there are lots and lots and lots of people hiring programmers so eventually one of them will decide they really need an incompetent junior developer. Top boot camps make you sign a contract that you will only live in SF or NYC for a year after graduating, because that’s how important it is for people who are trying to become programmers from a non-programming background.
Of course, you have to like having roommates. But there are a lot of advantages to living with friends. You don’t have to go out of your way to find social interaction. If you have a kid, your roommates will probably babysit sometimes. (The parents I know are unanimous about not being sure how on earth one raises kids without roommates.) Sometimes you have a roommate who cooks and then you can get delicious homemade biscuits, or a roommate who throws parties and then you don’t have to do the organization. Pretty much the only downside from my perspective is lack of space (which is a pain, I admit, but at least it’s less to clean) and the inevitable conflicts about whose turn it is to do the dishes. And the Bay itself is a pretty cool place to live: you shouldn’t underestimate the benefit of living where your friends do.
I had a job in Menlo Park during the first housing-shortage-causing boom of the 90s. The worst of it was concentrated between Mountain View and San Mateo, and after a bit more than I year I solved by problem by moving to San Francisco, which back then was not that much more expensive and less packed to the gills. (Although people were already angry about the comparatively small intrusion. Shortly after I moved, a member of my family, in an inspired act of passive aggression, sent me a copy of Hollow City*.)
But during my time down south, there were largely two options. One was a tiny, crappy room someone would convert in their house. The other was group homes like Ozy Frantz describes. The market being what it was, the group homes would have elaborate, multi-stage interviews in an attempt to find some sort of room-soul-mate. Everything about you was on the table — hobbies, job type, background.
I find it difficult to express how distressing this situation was for me, and I would guess anyone else who wasn’t Belle of the Ball material. I have no problem with roommates, and am responsible in that role. But I’ll take a pass on the Black Mirror-esque every-house-is-auditioning-for-a-reality-show nightmare.
* I thought, in my defense, that being gay gave me at least a little non-tech credibility for that locale, but everyone is a critic.
I have little enough love for the SF Bay Area, but just the first sentence of the Amazon blurb made me not want to read that.
Its underlying thesis, which is never quite stated outright, just endlessly danced around, is that the influx of merely well-off and largely tasteless tech workers is undermining the delicate ecological relationship between artists and the super-wealthy.
Most of the people I know move in with friends-of-friends, I’ve never had the interview thing happen. (Of course, that makes it harder to live in the Bay if you don’t have friends-of-friends.)
Ha! I’ve always thought those things were scammy, with their money back guarantees etc.. Now I think I’ve got the trick: if you fail to find a job as a programmer you will probably have to move out of SF or NYC because you will not be able to afford to live there, therefore you will have to pay contract breach fees to the coding camp. Clever business model.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve never really became friends with a roommate, acquaintance at best, and I’ve seen decade-long friendships dissolve once they became roommates.
Better still – if you post a negative review from somewhere in Nebraska, everyone will assume you’re some dumb hick who never belonged in the IT world anyway!
I have literally never known someone who had to pay contract breach fees to the coding bootcamp, and I have known dozens of people who went through one. Over 90% of people who go to a bootcamp get a job in software engineering afterward. App Academy used to let people sleep on their floor for free indefinitely before they ran into landlord problems and had to stop. That would be a very unusual thing to do if your business model were “live off contract-breaking fees” rather than “train people to take a job in an industry where the crappy entry-level jobs pay you $100,000 a year, take a cut of their first year’s income.”
How many do you know who weren’t local to the bay area in the first place?
That was not actually the business model vV_Vv suggested, as I read it. Unless you consider repudiating a money-back guarantee (and thus, in a wider view, their obligation to provide sufficient quality training to actually get people employed) to be a “fee”.
I mean, if there’s a money back guarantee, that means there’s money up front, which isn’t consistent with “take a cut of their first year’s income”
All of them?
I think you are confused, but I’m no sure what you’re confused about. App Academy’s business model is that they take a cut of your first year’s income. If you don’t stay in SF or NYC actively looking for a job for a year (which, again, for much of a/A’s history meant “sleeping for free on our floor”), then you have to pay tuition costs. If you stay in SF or NYC and look for a job and don’t find one, you don’t have to pay anything. There is also an option to pay tuition upfront, if you prefer. This is all communicated upfront and people who can’t afford year in SF/NYC generally don’t go (and would probably have an equally hard time paying tuition, anyway).
In terms of business model this is far less sketchy than, say, the average college.
I’m mainly confused about whether or not you and vV_Vv are actually talking about the same entities (or entities with the same business model as one another).
One dissenting voice. When our kids were very young we had housemates, a couple, friends who rented our third floor in Chicago where houses are bigger than around here. As best I remember, they did little or no babysitting. We moved to California when our daughter was about five and her brother two, and have had no housemates since.
On the other hand, my wife hasn’t been employed since we moved to Chicago and I’ve had academic positions that left me with a lot of flexibility and time, so particularly favorable circumstances.
The maximally charitable way of putting it is that there are jobs available in the SF Bay Area, especially for technically inclined people, which aren’t available anywhere else. This can — especially for youngish types willing to share space — help offset the insane housing market.
A slightly less charitable way of putting it is that it’s probably not the best cost-of-living adjusted place to live, even after taking job opportunities into account, but that it presents intangible social and networking opportunities for smart, technical save-the-world types which would be difficult to find elsewhere.
An outright uncharitable way of putting it is that living in the Bay is fucking stupid, but it’s cool, so people with more hubris than sense do it anyway.
When you can move to Manhattan — not the New York City area but the island itself — and get cheaper cost of living and a shorter commute, you know the Bay Area has gotten crazy. But the weather is better in the Bay Area.
I kinda like having a winter.
I suppose that living in the Bay Area is cost effective if you work at Google, Facebook or something like that. But if you are a psychiatrist, or probably even if you work at some lowly startup, in terms of finances and general quality of life it’s probably not worth.
Of course if you really want to live close to some specific people who live there, it may be specifically worth to you.
Let’s change the geography a bit.
I live in one of the most expensive cities in Michigan.
The house we last occupied (in the city of Ann Arbor) has about 900 square feet, zero charm, faces a busy street two miles from downtown, and we expect to sell it for about $230,000. Maybe more.
Meanwhile, an hour’s drive away, in Lansing, the state capital, a friend of mine recently bought a 1200 square foot house, which needs work, but is charming and livable, in a quiet, tree-shaded neighborhood, one mile from downtown, for $19,000.
Okay, she got a good deal. Maybe the house is really worth $25,000. But that’s still almost a factor-of-10 difference compared to our smaller and less appealing house.
I can snicker about high rents in Berkeley, since ours are much lower, but people elsewhere in Michigan can snicker about the high cost of Ann Arbor housing.
Lansing and Ann Arbor (two places I am very familiar with) have opposite housing-cost patterns. In Ann Arbor, the closer you get to downtown, the more expensive it is. In Lansing, the closer you get to downtown, the cheaper it is.
No surprise, Ann Arbor has a popular and thriving central business district, whereas Lansing’s was leveled by the urban renewal program in the 1960s; after a long interval, it was finally rebuilt with bland concrete office buildings.
Ann Arbor has next to no crime. Lansing has significant crime. As of 2012, for example, the two cities had almost the same population (about 115,000), but Lansing had almost five times as many violent crimes.
Lansing’s city government is widely seen as dysfunctional, whereas Ann Arbor’s city government is well regarded.
Ann Arbor is growing, with more people and more jobs, whereas Lansing is shrinking, as jobs disappear, people move away, and cultural institutions wither for lack of support. Unsurprisingly, Ann Arbor’s mood is upbeat, and Lansing’s mood is dark and gloomy.
Housing costs do serve as a crude metric for overall livability. All told, notwithstanding my high mortgage payment, I never have occasion to wonder why I live in Ann Arbor instead of Lansing, but my friend who bought the cheap house often thinks she ought to be living in Ann Arbor instead.
Is there any money in being an identical twin for twin studies? It’d be a lovely backup career!
Also interested. What about in being a mirror-image twin?
I cringe when people here use the word “normies” (I think it’s a recent thing?).
Wonder if others have the same/opposite reaction.
I don’t like it either.
Would “muggles” be better?
Probably not.
Remember how Dawkins wanted to rebrand atheists as “brights”? That went really well, too.
(Whoa, the Brights are still around, and their website has a recent Bulletin listing their “Four Pillars of Action”. Amazing.)
No, it’s a hundred times worse.
Grow up, read Tolkien, and call people Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, like an adult.
+0.5
(Half a point off for still going with the fantasy dork-fest “I have an inhaler and a pocket protector, please stick my head in a toilet and flush” stuff.)
That was the joke!
Oh. whooosh Hope you’ll understand why, on here, it was reasonable for me to miss that.
I mostly see that among Neal Stephenson fans, not Tolkien fans.
I like it.
Yes. It sounds stupid even if it’s (semi-)ironic.
“Normies” is a diminutive, which makes it sound condescending.
“People of ordinary intelligence” is a clear and neutral phrase. Or if that’s too long, “the normal” (pl) would be fine as long as the context makes it clear that what is being compared is intelligence.
Sometimes it’s more condescending to not be condescending. If someone calls me a normie, I assume it’s a good natured joke. And sure, they might be more intelligent than me, but who cares.
If someone feels they have to tiptoe around the fact of my normal intelligence, I feel like they probably think it’s a bit shameful to be normal.
Right. Calling someone a “normie” can be okay when it’s kind of self-deprecating. “You’re a normie” implies “I’m a weirdo”.
Hence “muggle” is worse, since it’s the opposite – it means “I’m a Wizard”.
“Normie” means “people of ordinary intelligence”?
Depending on who’s talking, “normie” can mean anything from “people without geeky interests” to “people who aren’t, or aren’t indistinguishable from, pimply virginal 40-year-old 400-pound anime-obsessed basement-dweller shut-ins caked in Cheeto dust”.
The word “Chad” is a good proxy for the latter.
Normie is just the normie way of saying normalfag.
It’s from 4Chan and similar fora. Here’s some taxonomy:
“Normie” is the antonym of “incel”. A “normie” is someone with a normal social life, friends they see in person, romantic or sexual partners, etc.
“Chad” and “Stacey” are caricatures of extreme “normies”, that is, people who with minimal effort can do many things that are evidently impossible for “incels”.
An “incel” is a man who is “involuntarily celibate”, that is, unable to have sexual relationships with women, mainly because women want nothing to do with him. People who identify with the “incel” label tend to be very angry and misogynistic, and see “normies” as the enemy.
A much milder version of “incel” is “FA”, which stands for Forever Alone. The terminology doesn’t sound milder, but the online communities of FA’s are generally non-political and much less misogynistic. Of course there is an overtone of hopeless depression, bemoaning bad luck in life, and frequent talk of suicide, but most FAs entertain hopes of becoming a normie some day.
There are also people who identify as Forever Unwanted, which is an intermediate category between FA’s and incels.
KV (Kissless Virgin) and KHV (Kissless Hugless Virgin, or Kissless Handholdless Virgin) are abbreviations used in all of those groups, openly declaring just how little physical attention someone has received from the opposite sex.
A “wizard” is a male virgin over age 30.
I think these identifications are becoming more common, (1) because of pervasive social changes which have disadvantaged less-educated, less-affluent, less-attractive and less-well-socialized young men, and (2) because it is much easier now for someone to isolate themselves from all social contact besides the Internet.
Most seem to hate ‘normie’ men at about equal levels, but their hate for men somehow goes unnoticed.
Hmmm, I’d prefer to break this down a little bit.
In general, I’m not sure this captures the problem. People who are angry enough about being celibate that they go on forums and complain about it and voluntarily self-identify as FA do not strike me as a bunch of uneducated, poor, ugly, aspies. The whole point of complaining about involuntary celibacy is that you have a plausible case to be made that your celibacy is unjust. The complaint is, “I AM educated and I DO have money and I’m NOT ugly and I CAN socially interact, and yet still nobody will have sex with me.” Obviously (with ego being what it is) they may be wrong on some of those points, but that’s the general idea here. My guess is that someone with a high school diploma, no job, a horrific facial disfigurement, and a diagnosis of severe autism, would not be on the internet loudly complaining about the unjustness of their celibacy. They may bemoan their fate, but they clearly see that their circumstances make them an undesirable partner. The anger comes when you believe your circumstances make you desirable, and yet, you achieve no results. Breaking it down one by one.
Less-educated – I plainly disagree. Scott claimed in Radicalizing the Romanceless that high IQ and education achievement increase the chance of virginity, not decrease it, and I tend to believe this.
Less-affulent: Leaving all other variables constant, I’m willing to believe that this correlates with sexual attainment. Of course, all variables aren’t usually constant. If you achieve financial success through a nerdy, male-dominated profession, and if you responsibly save your money rather than buying $100 dinners for first-date Tinder girls, I’m not sure it helps you much. (Source: Anecdotes from my own experience. I managed to increase my income from $35k to over six figures in the span of a few years. It has made zero appreciable difference in my romantic life).
Less-attractive: Willing to concede this a bit, although it’s worth pointing out that it’s not THAT uncommon to find examples of traditionally unattractive people still being successful. The extremes are things like burn victims and disabled people who still find love and happiness with relatively normal spouses. I think most people who complain about FA consider themselves (and might very well be correct) of at least average attractiveness, and have probably been told by others they are as well (perhaps too inclined to believe this rather than thinking people are just being nice).
Less-well-socialized: I’ll give you this, but it’s sort of a chicken or egg question. A 30 year old male virgin is assumed to be less well socialized. And the fact that they are a 30 year old male virgin is sufficient to prove it.
Originally, I did break it down, but the comment was already too long, and way outside the scope of “taxonomy”, so I rolled all that stuff up together.
I’ve seen plenty of FAs complain about each of those deficits. And high-IQ people can be less educated if they don’t have access to resources for getting credentials.
In particular, there’s a lot of discussion among FA’s about how not being physically attractive (including being very short or having seemingly unmasculine features) is increasingly a social death sentence, and that the trend toward greater salience of physical features is, as you say, unjust.
It is well documented that almost everyone unconsciously attributes positive personality traits to attractive people, and negative ones to unattractive people. Obviously that tends to aggravate the social isolation of people who are seen as ugly, not just from potential romantic partners, but from co-workers, classmates, employers, neighbors, etc.
For example, the popular dating site OK Cupid has a “Love Is Blind” day, when pictures are temporarily blacked out. An FA guy (on Reddit’s foreveralone forum) wrote:
Another writes:
And still another:
You wrote that “The anger comes when you believe your circumstances make you desirable, and yet, you achieve no results.” Maybe that’s how self-identified “incels” feel. Among FAs, a group for which I obviously feel more compassion, I see anger and despair over being judged against an unattainable standard of attractiveness.
Interesting. Sounds like we both just have different anecdotal experiences. Most of the FA guys I’ve met are people who seem pretty darn average, and are frustrated in terms of “I’m pretty darn average in most areas – so why are my results so ridiculously below average? Something’s not right here and I don’t know what it is!”
I’m sure there are plenty of people who complain (justly or unjustly) that certain factors (mainly physical appearance) are assigned more importance than they should, but I feel like that’s a different sort of complaint. At least you know what’s wrong, even if you’re powerless to change it.
As a bit of a side-note, we should all thank Tinder. If nothing else, it proved pretty decisively how important physical appearance actually is, AND gave people a pretty reliable metric to judge how attractive they are to the opposite sex. I used to think I was about average in attractiveness, but the vast majority of my friends get like 5x the amount of matches I do. Whoops!
But one can certainly rail on about the unfairness of it all. And they do.
Tinder is an engine for making physical appearance even more critical in the real world of relationships.
In a way, I’m grateful that I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. If I were a young man today, I think my deficits would be judged far more harshly than they were in that context.
Did it change things? Or did it just properly reflect what was already true?
The other cool insight from Tinder – the most efficient play from the male perspective is to swipe right on everyone. Another good reflection of the realities of dating markets.
I’m not so sure. The alternate theory is that they don’t believe that women value these things, possibly because they have been told that it is misogynistic to believe that women do value income or looks. So, we arrive at the conclusion: “Chad” is rich and handsome but a jerk, and believing women care more about money and looks than personality is wrongthink. And the “incel” may be no prize himself in terms of social interaction, but (possibly skewed by ego) at least he’s better than Chad. And, at least if he has a diagnosis, he may have been told that it’s “ableist” to hold his poor social skills against him. If he’s also fat, he may even have encountered spaces where he’s told that discrimination against that is wrong (and missed the subtext that it’s only wrong when applied to women).
What’s the point of having such an event if they’re not going to follow through and shame everyone (of any gender; I seriously doubt that only men had such an experience) who stopped replying after the pictures were revealed? Give them a sarcastic “Love is blind, but you’re not” achievement or something.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to buy some widget, you’d go to Sears, examine the two or three models they had available, ask questions, and pick one. Maybe Montgomery Ward across town had different ones, but unless you were very diligent, you wouldn’t know that.
Nowadays, for many things, there is a vast online market. Instead of knowing a lot about two or three choices, you know a tiny bit about a thousand different choices. If prices are comparable, you’re likely to pick the one that, at first glance, looks best to you.
The change in the dating market parallels this. Instead of just a few members of the opposite sex in your immediate social space, who you know pretty well, you can choose from among a thousand faces on Tinder. Of course you’d narrow your choices to the best looking faces.
At least, that’s the way it works for most women. For a man, as you say, his best strategy is to swipe-right on every face, since he’s not the one who gets to choose.
Supposedly, to women, 80% of men are below average attractiveness. So, no surprise that many men get zero matches on Tinder no matter how much they swipe-right. Sure, such a man knows exactly why he was unanimously rejected by hundreds of women, but we shouldn’t be surprised when he complains that this hyper-efficient relationship marketplace is unfair to him.
I have no idea.
@random832
Prejudice generally involves a dichotomy, where differences are exaggerated in both directions. The stereotype of men is that they go for looks, submissiveness, etc, while the stereotype for women is that they go for personality, income, assertiveness, etc. So it’s not surprising that men get confused, especially when outliers in wealth and status can overcome a huge looks deficiency and are highly visible (see Trump and his wife, for example).
A lot of advice to men is how they can be better to women (like doing more chores*), but not how they can be more attractive to women. Most people seemingly cannot even grasp the difference.
* Which studies show correlates with less ‘sex having,’ suggesting that this may be considered unattractive by women.
My model of human dating is that people weigh looks against other features to decide whom to date, so poor looks can be compensated somewhat by other qualities**. The uglier the person, the smaller the chance that they will have great qualities that compensate sufficiently. In a ‘rich’ environment where people have to filter their dating opportunities a lot, people will then ignore the people who are so ugly that they need to have quite strong qualities to overcome that, because the effort to success ratio is too low.
A ‘Love Is Blind’ event can plausibly result in some people getting a chance to show their qualities, so that after the reveal, the other person would be willing to date. On the other hand, studies show that people think that looks predict other qualities, so you’d expect the opposite too, where people start imagining that their charming pen pal is an Adonis. So then the reveal could be a major letdown, causing a very negative reaction, which is stronger than their negative feelings if they knew how ugly the person was in the first place. If the second effect is greater than the first, the event would seem useless.
** One such quality is chance to reciprocate, which results in the counterintuitive result that the best looking people get fewer messages than the slightly less good looking.
Back when I was a teenager trying to pick up girls in chat rooms, I used to dread the eventual picture reveal (hers not mine). Not because I was worried she’d end up being ugly, but because I was worried she’d end up being so attractive I’d know, for certain, nothing real could ever come of it as she was far too out of my league (or that “she” was a fake/catfishing attempt, if it was like, clearly a professional picture of a model)
Or, to put it more directly, almost everyone unconsciously attributes good qualities to attractive people, and bad qualities to unattractive people.
@Aapje
That was… kind of my point. It is regarded as misogynistic to believe that there is a difference, and my suspicion is that the ‘forever alone’ types are people who have internalized that so much that they may honestly not know why they’re unattractive after following all of that advice.
Do advice givers in these communities ever suggest something really crazy like I dunno, hear me out, it’s pretty off the wall, interacting with women in real life?
Dialing the snark down to 0, it just seems to me that yes, obviously it’s hard to date through a superficial medium if you are superficially unattractive. But there are other mediums! And if you want your other qualities to shine through I can’t imagine a better means than building a house with with Habitat for Humanity or somesuch. Well maybe a dorm, but there’s generally much less vomit around a build site, so that’d still be my #1.
It’s also worth noting that the stereotypes about what men value in women (youth, attractiveness, etc.) are largely true.
So a young male consuming popular media about male and female desires looks at the portrayal of male desires, finds that they do, in fact, match his own desires, and concludes that the media is probably getting it right for women as well.
Except that they aren’t. In fact, they’re almost the opposite. Media says that women want nice, respectable men who are good providers. So the young man expects that in his future, his ability to attract young and pretty women will correspond with his upright behavior and income potential.
When that doesn’t work, he becomes noticeably frustrated, and this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. I maintain that romantic comedies are far more responsible for the behavior of say, an Elliot Rodger, than violent videogames are.
@Matt M:
What about Rodgers’ behaviour had to do with romcoms? He clearly seems to have thought that he deserved for women to be attracted to him, without him doing very much to attract women. None of the romcoms I’ve seen (admittedly, not many) present the ideal man as a stable provider. In romcoms, men are rewarded for pushing boundaries. Which is a bad message, but a different kind.
If anything, for young men, the problem is the “action movie romance subplot” situation, where the protagonist attracts a woman by dint of being the protagonist and doing protagonist things, without doing anything romantically-focused. While men who are strong, successful, etc do tend to attract women, only very rarely can a man attract women by being strong, successful, etc, without trying to attract women as well. TLP wrote about this.
Both men and women receive a lot of terrible messaging about what the other sex wants. But I don’t think men are receiving their particular sort of terrible messaging from romcoms.
For every non-traditional way to find a date, at least one of two things happens
1) The high-status guys find it
2) A group of women complains very loudly about men who are in the activity to meet women, how they are horrible and creepy and misogynistic.
That’s enough to discourage most of the dateless. The rest… well, they’ll show up, see the people around them pairing up, and note bitterly that nothing has changed for them. If you don’t know the steps you can’t dance.
dndnrsn,
Perhaps I was wrong to single-out romcoms. I don’t watch many of them so it’s possible I’m not characterizing them correctly.
I think media in general characterizes romance as, well, sort of how Vermillion puts it. That’s it’s just a natural product of being a fairly decent person in the general proximity of women such that “your qualities shine through” and then you magically have a girlfriend. People who expect this are bound to be sorely disappointed.
And I think that’s largely what happened with Rodger. He was utterly convinced that all he had to do was to not be a dick, to show up, to be around women, to show himself generally intelligent and capable and polite, and that he would get the attention and the respect of the female gender. And not ONLY did that not work, but it actually got him the opposite. It got him scorn and ridicule.
Maybe it’s more sitcoms or action movies than romcoms that are the culprit here, I don’t know. But a whole lot of people (myself included) grew up believing “just be nice to women and they will like you” and were horrifically disappointed that this turned out to be a fantastic lie. Some of us handled it more productively than others. I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen more cases like him though…
@Matt M
Did he do any of those things? I’ve only read secondhand accounts of what he wrote, but what I’ve read suggests a very bitter guy whose attempts at worldly success (with women or otherwise – I gather his problems did not begin and end with lack of success with women) involved a great deal of magical thinking – he took the statement “you are the protagonist of your own story” a lot more literally than most people do. Most people, additionally, do not kill other people, no matter how bad things get.
It is true that men have been told false things about women, and false things about how to deal with women, and that women have been told false things about men, and how to deal with men. There are a great deal of unhappy men, and a great deal of unhappy women, but they are unhappy in different ways, because they tend to have different problems, because they have been told different false things, and thus take different wrong ideas into the dating/romance/sex “market”, which treats men looking for women and women looking for men differently. Additionally, there is advice that is good that is wildly interpreted. For example, “nice” is actually a positive quality, but “passive aggressive” is not.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of false things do you think women have been told about men?
@Matt M
A few thoughts, not guaranteed to be organized well:
The romcoms I’ve seen tend to promote an ideal of True Love (often based in serendipity). Love is something that happens to you – this is the distaff equivalent of “women will fall in love with you because you’re the protagonist.” I have met young women deeply resistant to the idea that they should be working to find the relationships they want – that it’s something that’s supposed to just happen. Related: you’re far more likely to see young women being exhorted to be aggressive, active, etc in their careers than in their love lives.
Both men and women tend to typical-mind regarding what they think the other sex wants (to see what I mean, compare complaints regarding hetero dating by men and women to complaints regarding same-sex dating by either). Cultural messaging probably encourages this more than it used to.
To some extent, young professional-class women (professional-class women being something very rare up until a few decades ago) are being sold a “life plan” that works far better for their male counterparts. It works better for their male counterparts because men get an extra decade or two of trouble-free fertility, by and large. Among other reasons.
You can see a lot of what is going on by comparing the various different dating complaint standard formats. Each sex/sexuality combo has one or more. The straight female ones tend to be either “eew why do all these losers and creeps keep hitting on me,” “why do the guys I have casual sex with turn out to be jerks,” or “now that I want to settle down, where’s the One True Love I was promised?” What people are unhappy about, and how they express that unhappiness, are great clues into the assumptions they held going into whatever has made them unhappy.
Compare the Redpill to The Rules.
@Matt M
Women have been given very poor dating advice when it comes to their long-term interests. For example, I don’t think they are properly warned about The Wall and how fleeting fertility is.
Jask,
That’s almost the same thing though, isn’t it?
I say “men have been given bad advice on what women are looking for”
The response is “ah, but women have also been given bad advice as to what they should be looking for.”
But these are basically the same complaint. That women are looking for the “wrong” (for lack of a better word) things, not just in ways that harm men, but in ways that harm themselves too. Such that when the “nice guy” looks at a girl dating a jerk and says “She’d have been better off with me,” you’re essentially saying that he’s right.
@ Jaskologist
What you’ve said here is on point, and very hard to convey in a way that your audience will be receptive to. As someone who spent his late teens and early 20’s working in strip clubs and advising the other dancers that maybe they should consider maxing out their RRSPs before buying more cocaine (Which went over about as well as you would expect), I’m not sure how to actually pull it off.
I remember a part in Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise that talked about why market crashes were so hard to predict, and why nobody listens to the people who do manage to predict them. The gist was that you have more to lose personally by being a dissenter during the good times, and are incentivized to keep dancing while the music is playing, and then when everybody fails to see the crash coming you can point to everyone else who is in the same boat and argue that it was impossible to avoid. (I hope I’m not getting this too wrong, and highly recommend checking out the book itself)
Talking about the wall seems to follow a similar trajectory, in that the women who benefit most from their youth will usually shut the negativity (ie, Haters) out and go find someone making more positive predictions. It’s not until they’re over the wall that they’re willing to talk frankly about what they wish they’d done differently.
I do agree that a lot of those women are set up for failure in a similar way to the men who are being instructed on how to be *useful* to women when they’re asking about how to be attractive to them.
@Matt M
But that’s confirmation bias. People notice unpleasant guys with confidence (“jerks”) getting girls more readily than they notice pleasant guys with confidence getting girls – because the latter does not rankle, and thus is less noticeable. Likewise, unpleasant guys without confidence do not get girls more than pleasant guys without confidence.
The number of women who date men who are bad news is probably equivalent to the number of men who date women who are bad news.
Further – I don’t think the correct statement is “women are looking for the wrong thing”, or “men are looking for the wrong thing.” Rather, people are doing the looking itself wrong.
@Barely matters
What % of strippers’ income is reported? I would assume that if they are getting tipped heavily, there’s a high level of non-reported income. Which would make the RRSP less advantageous.
@ Nybbler
I think I wasn’t clear with what I meant by putting yourself out there IRL. For one I don’t think the point should be finding a date, because it doesn’t match well with the setting. It’d be like if someone at a singles bar and started refinishing a cabinet. But if you find a community to be a part of, something you can really sink your teeth into, that will be the first step.
The point I was (poorly) trying to make is that people are attracted to a lot of things, passion more than anything else. This quote from the Sparrow gets at what I mean,
So find a small group of people doing something you care about and ask to join in. Make yourself useful. Help people with their projects and start some of your own. Grow as a human. And that’s what happens before the pairing up step. Incidentally, it’s also how people gain status.
@Dndnrsn
Based on the couple I’ve prepared taxes for, not very much. In the cases of the ones I’ve been with, both were reporting significantly less income than the basic personal deduction, while earning well over double that amount. At that point, given that they won’t be paying any taxes anyway, underreporting income is just leaving money on the table (In this case, by giving them only a very small RRSP maximum in the first place), even ignoring the fact that those contributions are further tax deductible.
I’m using RRSPs as shorthand for the purposes of the previous comment (Besides, you’re right that a TFSA would be much better for their situation, but I don’t think those existed until a few years later.), with the full recommendation falling along the lines of “Hey, you see Olga over there? Know how she’s 45 and has to hustle way harder than she used to with diminishing results? One day you’ll be there too, and you’re going to wish you had saved enough money that you don’t have to keep working here, just like she does now. Please save some of your bucks now, ok?”
Uniformly they’d thank me for the advice and say they appreciate that I’m looking out for them. They’re still going to party this weekend, but they’re definitely going to start saving soon (God knows they don’t want to end up like Olga). We’re in our 30’s now, and I still have a bunch of them on facebook. For the most part, their lives have turned out roughly how you’d expect.
From here, I’m really happy that at least *I* took my advice.
*Edit*
Through this I’ve managed to completely sidetrack the broader point I was initially making about The Wall and women being encouraged to make shortsighted choices as if conditions will always be as favourable as they are at 18. The older strippers who served as the cautionary examples for the younger ones were in the position that they now had no one who wanted to marry/take care of them, and now that their looks had faded, no marketable skills. Which is what I think Jaskologist was driving at.
Vermillion,
I just want to say that I think you’re totally wrong. If a guy says he is desperate to meet women, and your advice is “go do habitat for humanity, there’s women there you could meet” then he’s going to take that literally.
You can push back and say, “But no, you can’t go there TO meet women, you have to go there just to build houses and then maybe if you’re good at building houses women will start to notice you.”
But that doesn’t work. Because the guy doesn’t WANT to build houses, or he’d already BE at habitat for humanity. You can say “fine, not habitat for humanity, find some other public service you can perform that also attracts significant interest and do that instead.”
But that thing probably doesn’t exist either. It certainly doesn’t if you’re a nerd who works 60-80 hours a week and prefers to spend their off-time pursuing nerdly hobbies.
But hey, fine, you want a girlfriend right? Nuts to your preferences, suck it up and go do a thing like that anyway. So you go and do the thing. But don’t you dare let anyone know that you’re there to meet women… that makes you a creep and a loser. So instead, you do what you’ve always done in life, you keep your head down, you treat everyone with basic courtesy, you accomplish the tasks you are given, and that’s all. You do this and you wait for the women to suddenly notice you, for them to strike up conversation, to give you the slightest sign they may be willing to talk to you without reporting you to the police. But it never comes. She’s distracted by the better-looking dude who is constantly flirting with her in between complaining about how needy his girlfriend is. Is he there just to meet women too? Nah, couldn’t be – because he’s clearly not a creep. He’s handsome, and other women want to be with him too, so he must have something going for him, right?
@ Aapje
Women’s actual partner preferences aren’t much spoken of, I think, because women prefer not to speak about them.
@ random832
I think those who are physically unattractive are perfectly aware that being unattractive is a problem.
@ Vermillion
Actually, advice givers in those communities strongly counsel against resorting to online dating and hookup sites. Offline opportunities are not being neglected — remember, these are guys who have experienced total failure in sometimes many years of in-person efforts.
That being said, a large and growing proportion of all real-world couplings now start online. And the culture is rapidly adapting to that. Pretty soon, in-person approaches will come to be seen as creepy and dangerous, or as oddball as, say, going to a bookstore to buy a book.
@ Matt M
Do we have to bring up an aspiring mass murderer, as if he’s the epitome of lonely young men? It’s like holding up James Hodgkinson as a typical Bernie Sanders supporter.
@ Barely matters
Seconded.
I think it’s worth remembering our host’s recommendations, from Radicalizing the Romanceless:
@Barely matters
I wonder how likely the CRA or IRS are to go after strippers for possible unreported income. I have no idea what typical cash take-home is for a stripper, though, so I don’t know how high they would rank as targets.
Habitat for Humanity seems like a strange suggestion for meeting women. The volunteers at every HFH work day I’ve been to have been 100% men. Generally speaking, volunteer construction work doesn’t interest many women.
Larry,
I certainly did not mean to imply Rodger was typical of lonely men, and I apologize if I did so. I bring him up as an example of the “worst-case-scenario” for what male loneliness and alienation can lead to.
I probably shouldn’t admit this in public, but when I read his manifesto I was nearly moved to tears… because of how much I related to it. To this day I feel grateful that in my late teens/early 20s I had a female friend in my life who was able to back me down from a lot of my anger and frustration (she never put out though – lolfriendzone). I think there are a lot of guys out there who generally feel as he felt, they just have better impulse control or a more developed sense of morality or are less narcissistic or, who even knows what.
@dndnrsn
Small potatoes in my experience. I’ve never known a stripper who has mentioned being audited. From the ones I know, they don’t seem to be shy about buying new cars and other easily traceable assets that would be dead giveaways of shenanigans, so I presume it doesn’t happen often.
@Larry
Yeah that was at the top of my mind for some reason. My chapter in college was a mix of both men and women and looking back the guys typically did the labor and the girls the fundraising. Still a fair bit of crossover though.
@Matt M.
I was very nearly a wizard. Not a KHV or KV, but for various reasons it didn’t get a lot further than that till I was about 27 or 28. I certainly engaged in a fair bit of magical thinking in the decade before that: 1) hang around girls 2) a miracle happens 3) girlfriend. Success rate was about what you’d expect.
I don’t know what advice would have been good for you in your 20s, I definitely don’t know what to tell Kevin C. now, all I can do is say what I wish I could have told myself back then.
It took a lot of steps, and maybe that path was narrower than I thought.
@Vermillion
My experience was that what appears to have attracted my first girlfriend was not something I went into thinking “gee, I sure hope this gets me a girlfriend” – but at the same time if I hadn’t been told she was interested in me, hadn’t asked her out, etc, nothing would have happened either. There’s stuff that is both good in and of itself, and also attractive to women, but a lot of guys are either misinformed, or choose to misunderstand, because the second bit is the scarier part.
I read somewhere that people whose income is mostly cash are incentivized to report it properly by the fact that reporting less income makes it harder to get credit. If they want to get a loan for that new car, they need to be able to show that they have enough income to make the payments, and tax-reported income is (supposedly) how people who don’t get regular paychecks do that.
I can’t find anything on it now though (search terms I tried just find stuff about the earned income tax credit or debt cancellation being taxable), so no idea on the veracity.
I would take a credit hit for a 25-30% boost in income.
why do you think that “normie” refers to intelligence
it might correlate but it’s mostly about the divide between online people (usually channers) and offline people
I think I first saw the word “normie” used in this comment.
Kevin C seems to be using it to refer to people of normal intelligence, as opposed to his own high intelligence.
I first saw a variant of “normie” used, I think, on 30 Rock, when Jenna and her cross-dressing boyfriend start “norming” (not acting like total freaks) as a way to derive sexual titillation.
Well my bad then. That’s not the, uh, normal usage.
I’ve heard “normie” used by one of my kids who’s in a magnet program, as the slang for his schoolmates who aren’t in a magnet program.
Normies are basically just mainstream, normal people. With a dog and 2.4 kids. Obviously there are highly intelligent normies.
Sorry, from now on I will try to use “mundanes.”
How about “civilians”?
Civilians, used informally like this, tends to mean “anyone not involved in the relevant activity/lifestyle/etc. you and I are involved in” but does not connote an inherent quality of those people.
Why invent fanciful terminology that makes you seem like an uptight snob, when good well-known down-to-earth colloquial phrases like hoi polloi exist?
“Mundanes” is a term of at several decades standing. Alas, it means “person not involved in science fiction fandom (or several related fields)” so repurposing it here would lead to a LOT of confusion.
Jask:
…thus outing yourself as a resident of Xanth, with the implication that you have magic ability just like those who talk about muggles 🙂
Wasn’t “mundanes” (as in “don’t freak the mundanes”) used in SF Fandom long before <shudder> Anthony?
Yes.
I actually had Babylon 5 in mind.
No worries; Babylon 5’s producer had the fannish definition of “mundanes” in mind.
He also had something to say about “lurkers”, and that wasn’t terribly flattering either.
I nominate “plebs”.
I support this as long as we can agree to use the short e version.
I really like it, but I always interpret it in the r9k usage.
Nobody else seems to be saying it, but it really doesn’t bother me. It seems like a mild slur against people in power, which is by my book fine.
“If you don’t stop calling me ‘normie’ I’m going to start calling you ‘Cliff’.”
Agreed. I tend to be (though not always consistently) against diminutive nicknames applied to any group but one’s own.
As it seems to refer for most to people of average IQ, I suggest something more to that point, i.e., Meanies. 🙂
I like it, but I see there’s some variance in what it’s understood to mean. As I use it, it’s not about intelligence, social aptitude, or sexual success, but adherence to popular/mainstream culture, having normal interests, being unreflective, etc. This (source) is a kind of normie.
Community building.
If don’t think there has ever been a successful attempt at building a community based on values. Values are just weird things that a community has – you really don’t get to choose them.
And, if you can choose to be a member of a community, you can also choose not to be part of it. You begin questioning it – “hmmm… I wonder if Billy really *is* a rational person? Maybe there is someone more rational I could commune with….”
Such thoughts kill community.
So, if you really wanted to build a community with a certain set of values, you should build lots of communities (proximity based loyalty) and then build some selection mechanism for values.
Any community where a majority can’t use a pair of giant chopsticks to solve a programming kata on their friends’ computer screens gets scattered to the winds.
Or, rationalists should just form communities, a hundred strong, randomly selected (from the rationalist diaspora), and you have to be in that community forever. And, if the community fails, you lose a million dollars and it goes to the surviving communities.
I do: the Amish.
I also want to abstract your statement out and turn it into a question:
Has a lasting, functional community ever been built that wasn’t based on values?
I don’t think that the Amish are a community that have been built on a set of values. They are a community with a set of values.
Being Amish comes first – then you get to have the values. It’s not really a lifestyle choice.
Any community where what you are is more important than what you think. So, most of them?
You don’t become a Rangers supporter because you want to hate Celtic. You are a Rangers supporter and that is why you hate Celtic.
I think that the only time where a community might be built on what you think is where what you think is so peculiar, unobtainable, and vital that it can become ‘what you are’.
Very rare. Maybe impossible.
Each Amish community uses an ordnung–i.e. a set of guidelines based on their values–to determine what they should do. Those who won’t do it are considered no longer part of the community.
That’s an extreme example, but even in a modern Western society that is supposedly very flexible, when a bunch of people decide their values are different they inevitably start to identify as not part of the mainstream community. Yes, sometimes what bonds them is primarily something other than values–race, for example–but it’s typically values that determine the degree to which they’re a part of the surrounding community.
Monasteries.
With periodic need for reform, but over a period of generations.
Yes, of course. Good point.
Although, in many cases, perhaps monasticism is an expression of values held by the broader community?
A silly hypothetical:
For time immemorial, most burger lovers liked ketchup over mustard. But in 2017, there’s a sudden huge preference shift towards mustard.
Burger Joint A has a singular Sauce Division to handle all their sauce production. When the 2017 mustard shift occurs, the Head Saucer has no particular reason to favor ketchup over mustard and reacts accordingly to the new preferences (doesn’t renew contracts with ketchup consultants and brings in mustard consultants, shuts down company ketchup factories etc.).
Burger Joint B has their sauce production split into two divisions, a Ketchup Division and a (much smaller) Mustard Divsion. When the 2017 mustard shift occurs, the Head Ketchuper has strong reason to favor ketchup production over mustard and tries various strategies to ensure her division’s continued relevance (discredits pro-mustard studies, calls in some favors and convinces the board to mantain funding, starts futile advertising campaigns on how great ketchup is etc.). Because of the further specialization in their corporate structure, Burger Joint B has an employee with perverse incentives and responds less quickly to the shift than Burger Joint A.
=
Is there a particular term for costs incurred by Burger Joint B’s overdivision? A quick chat with Professor Google talked mostly about individual overspecialization, but I didn’t find anything on this more corporate level.
(I posted this at the very tail end of another open thread and didn’t get any replies, apologies if you’ve read this before)
It could generally fall under the principal agent problem (the ketchup division head is an agent of Joint B, but his own incentives are to maximize ketchup use, even if the cost is less burger sales).
The Nobel Prize winning economic text that deals with these types of problems within firms is The Nature of the Firm. This is a scanned copy, it’s likely there’s a more readable formatted copy elsewhere.
More precisely, one of the two classic articles for which Coase got the Nobel. The other is “The Problem of Social Cost.”
Let be be finale of seem. There is no VP but the VP of ice cream.
I do remember reading this post before, and I also remember a lot of responses, including my own (as a matter of fact mine was the first comment and the first thing I said was about the principle agent problem, so deja vu).
Maybe you should go back to that earlier comment and find the responses.
I was wondering how the discussion has been going regarding “intelligence”. I’m not so concerned with the significance of differences in measured group IQs, but rather that there does seem to be accumulating evidence that the set of cognitive skills that IQ measures is important in modern life and seems to be growing more important as we go into the post-industrial age. There are some bad social effects when the ability to be productive in a society hinges on just one skill.
A sample is the research behind this review https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZaEY0UjluV1djOG8/view
There’s also a bunch of contamination within the blogosphere of people who clearly have a deep urge to prove that IQ is really, really important. (Indeed, this is explicitly warned against in”The Bell Curve”.) This implies that a lot of the discussion out there can’t be trusted as being unbiased.
I guess what I really care about is (1) that quality research on the subject continues, and (2) the discussion isn’t taken over by people whose politics determines their science.
If the dark forest theory is true, why not extinguish all stars in the galaxy preemptively, just to be sure? Keep a few nearby stars around for yourself of course. You’d attract attention from other galaxies of course, but does it matter on those timescales? Andromeda is 2.5mly from us.
[I have deleted my own comment because bintchaos posted one along the same lines (not as clever as mine) and just to be safe I don’t want to be saying the same things as a self-described intellectual terrorist.]
Grow up.
lol– we dont have the technology to do cleanse/hide yet.
That’s why.
Our own level of tech is irrelevant, whatever the optimal strategy is would already have been carried out. Unless we happen to be the first, which is improbable (and tantamount to anthropic reasoning).
Even if life is rare enough that we’re the only ones in our galaxy, we should be observing other galaxies where this is happening. We don’t, so: life is extremely rare and we’re the only ones, or galactic conquest is feasible without destroying the suns, or fundamental tech limits make the strategy implausible (doubtful), or it would attract too much attention?
sheesh.
Once you cleanse you are visible to the other Cleansers
If firing on another civilization revealed you, no one would ever do so, because you’d immediately be destroyed yourself. It’s not worth destroying some civilization that may destroy you with <1 probability if doing so means you're destroyed with 1 probability.
If that was how it worked, when 187J3X1 was destroyed it would immediately destroy all but 1 of the hunters within range of each other. Civilization A destroys 187J3X1, reveals itself. Civilization B destroys the now-visible A, reveals itself. Civilization C destroys the now-visible B, reveals itself. Repeat until a civilization reveals itself and there are no hidden civilizations left to destroy it.
Oh sorry, i forgot part of the Cleanse/Hide paradigm.
Probably we should revisit this after you read the third book– kk?
“fundamental tech limits make the strategy implausible (doubtful)”
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a doubtful solution to the issue?
I tend to see it as the most plausible. The time scales and sheer numbers seem to be an obvious issue with the life is rare/we’re the first arguments. But I don’t see an equivalent problem for the technology argument. It seems equally plausible that there could be a defined upper limit as there might be no defined upper limit. Remotely extinguishing suns as a practical application seems like it’s such a high bar to set that if there is an upper limit then it seems plausible that it might be the main constraint.
Well, once you extinguish the first few stars, you’ve started the clock on every other civilization in your galaxy (and close enough to matter) to try to ramp up technologically and end you before you end them. Of course, there may not be any such other civilizations, but if not then extinguishing stars was probably useless to begin with (depending on minimum time from biogenesis to interstellar civilization).
Hmmm. . . .
As a possible interesting tangent, the implacable hostility of all alien species was once THE dominating trope of science fiction, a la War of the Worlds. But in English-language science fiction, that was pretty early. C. S. Lewis noted the switch to peaceably possibility in his lifetime. And, indeed, I’ve seen the change plausibly attributed to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series.
Science fiction is not speculation about the future, it’s a transposition and deconstruction of your present in a fantastic setting.
War of the Worlds was written at a time when in Europe everybody was fighting everybody else, when state nationalism was the dominant political ideology and people from different countries saw each other as inevitably alien and hostile.
Star Trek TOS, made during the Vietnam war era, has a United Federation of Planets (the USA) in a cold war against the Klingon Empire (the USSR). Star Trek TNG, made during the Bush 1 and Clinton era, has a cold war between the Federation and the Romulan Empire that is winding down and it focuses more on inter-species diplomacy etc. Later installments don’t have a cold war theme.
Huh, so Voyager might just have been bad because there was no interesting politcal climate around when they wrote it.
Science fiction is not speculation about the future, it’s a transposition and deconstruction of your present in a fantastic setting.
Only sometimes, only sometimes.
War of the Worlds was written in 1897, in the middle of one of the longest continuous stretches of peace central and western Europe had seen in centuries. Pretty much all the players were constantly getting involved in minor colonial rebellions, but the Franco-Prussian War, ending in 1871, had been the last great-power conflict on the continent.
(The Russo-Turkish War was a few years later, if you want to count that.)
All the lights in the sky are our enemies, then? Who the hell do you think we are?
I’m curious what other people think of the Three Body Problem and Dark Forest books. I thought they were cool ideas but so badly written in terms of characterization and narrative that I recommend reading their wikipedia plot summaries instead of the actual books. Though I have to wonder if that’s the author’s, translator’s, or Chinese literature’s fault.
I bounced off Three Body Problem early and hard.
I’ve only read the Three Body Problem. It starts off as a book with a decent premise marred by poor writing; but, halfway through, it degenerates into a random collection of really stupid ideas coupled with some of the most abysmal writing I’ve seen anywhere — and yes, this includes fanfiction. I am somewhat surprised a book such as this was published at all.
I don’t imagine anyone here has read any of Nick Turse’s books, and especially not his FOIA book on ‘Nam, so I think it isn’t possible to relate to Wenjie’s dilemma.
Much like Turkeys and Shooters.
Having gotten through The Dark Forest as well, it continues along those lines. Pretty cool concept, but then it just introduces a bunch of stuff at a ridiculous rate, without really exploring the consequences other than the rails the author wants the plot to follow. I think you could make some cool books with the basic setup that the author presents, but it doesn’t look like any of them are going to be made.
I just picked up the third book for the heck of it, I didn’t realize it was already translated and it’s cheap enough on Amazon to get closure. From the Wiki summary, I’m not particularly hopeful that it’ll improve, though.
So?
Any sci-fi is how we test drive a future before it gets here.
chacun à son goûx
And like I said, 3body will never have the powerful resonance for anyone here like it did for me, because of reading Kill Anything in the same week.
Its like Blomkamp Oats Studio and Firebase and Rakka…and indeed, the original District 9.
The sloppier sci-fi writing is, the less likely it’ll match well to any possible future. This is particularly relevant if the writer fails to fully explore the technology they present.
Ideally, there should be no good toehold for the question “but why couldn’t they just X”, because if there wasn’t a good answer for one of those questions, when that future comes people will just X, and half the book goes out the window because real life doesn’t follow the plot rails.
I’m happier in a world where the 3 Body Problem series exists than one it doesn’t, but I’m even happier than that in a world where the 3 Body Problem series exists and was written well.
Good heavens, SF has never been about predictions. I’ve read some good essays by Heinlein and Asimov about how that doesn’t work. (Heinlein once pointed out that something he was credited with predicting had already existed at the time he wrote it into a story.)
The dark forest theory assumes that every civilization in the galaxy is going to expand without bound, hence conflict over resources is inevitable with other civilizations. The follow-up reasoning – diplomacy and early warning are impossible without FTL, so getting the first strike is essential – depends on this assumption.
But doesn’t that equally apply to your own civilization? If you decide to destroy all the suns in the galaxy that you aren’t currently using, haven’t you simply destroyed the resources you predicted you would expand to? Thus hastening the inevitable conflict? (Let’s not even get into the amount of resources you’re sinking into your fleet of sun-destroying battleships.)
If you destroy all the other stars in the galaxy, then your endlessly-expanding civilization suddenly has nowhere to expand to. So you need to develop a civilization that can stay stable without expanding, or all your territory will fall into civil war, fighting over the last remaining suns in the galaxy.
But if you can develop a sustainable civilization that only occupies a couple of star systems instead of endlessly expanding across the galaxy, then war isn’t inevitable, because you don’t need to conflict with other civilizations for resources. This destroys the foundational assumption.
In other words, maybe the forest is dark, not because we’re all afraid of getting shot by other hunters, but because we’re all content to stay around our own campfires and nobody feels the need to set the whole forest ablaze.
It doesn’t seem to me that people here discussing 3Body have actually read the book. Remember, the Trisolarians desperately want a new home planet to colonize because theirs was so horrifically unstable and inhospitable– because of the three body problem. The character development was fantastic, but definitely chinese-flavored.
I happened to read Nick Turse’s FOIA book on VietNam (Kill Anything That Moves) in the same week that I read 3Body. I really didn’t know much about the Vietnam War, I didn’t take much history or philosophy coursework, preferring math and science. I completely identified with Wenjie pushing the button to invite the destruction of mankind after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. I would have done the same after reading Kill Anything if I could have.
There are so many parts of the 3Body cycle that I just loved so much…the Wallfacers, the Sophons, Big Shi the detective, the ETO, the Trisolarians…
I especially loved the concept of the 3Body game as a vector for a colonizer religion.
When the movie comes out next year the books will become vastly more popular.
Cixin Liu is an engineer and a mathematician– so I loved the hard science in the books.
The Trisolarans are different from the Dark Forest hunter civilizations: they don’t have the technology to silently destroy stars (or fixing their solar system to have fewer moving parts would probably have been easy).
In fact, by the Dark Forest theory you need a lot of luck on the part of both civilizations: if Ye Wenjie’s message had been heard by a hunter civilization, Earth and its solar system. would have just been gone. If the Trisolarans had responded to the message with their colonization attempt, only to find that the message was a decoy from a hunter civilization, the Trisolarans likely would have given away enough information to be totally destroyed (since their technology is massively outclassed)
That might be another problem with the Dark Forest theory: why wouldn’t you set traps for other civilizations to fall into before they get up to that tech level? Set up a planet with a bunch of signals, be carefully watching the vectors of anything that approaches that planet, and hunt back along the trail for nascent civilizations that could develop into a threat?
Actually, looking at it a bit more, I think Liu made a lot of weird assumptions about the technology of hunter civilizations.
Their ability to look at other systems for signs of life can’t have the same range as their “destroy the sun” ability, or the moment they discover a new civilization they can figure out its tech level and whether or not they need to destroy it. If they do, now they push the “destroy the sun” button a few seconds later (Maybe this is too late? But if they’re both hunter civilizations, surely there’s some travel time on whatever tech they’re using to destroy suns, so even hitting it immediately should be MAD). If they don’t, they can colonize it for decoys and resources.
Now granted, you could look at a civilization and think it’s your inferior, and whoops: turns out it was a whole other level of advanced that made a dummy low-tech civilization to deceive you. But presumably they could also just have the tech to stop your sun-destroy button, and figure out where it came from, right? For this to work, every civilization has to be really confident about what the absolute highest level of technology possible is.
You haven’t read all three books– dummies tech and low tech are already two potentialities– ways of hiding and camouflage in the cleanse/hide paradigm– another is signaling “we are not a threat” …and destroying suns isnt the only mechanism to destroy potential threats.
And in 3body Earth was a low tech civ that destroyed a star as proof of concept just by broadcasting the coordinates with a [relatively] primitive comms system and then used that as a detante threat with the Trisolarians.
Making communications that cause other civilizations to destroy stars is not the same as having the power to destroy them yourself, mainly because (a). you can’t precisely target it, merely appeal to the other civilization’s incentives, and (b). if everyone has the same tech level as you, no one is destroying stars.
If the Trisolarans could destroy stars without leaving a trace of their origin, or change the local laws of physics as we see in Death’s End, their problems with their stars cease to become real problems: that’s about the level of physics mastery that you’d need to start doing solar system level terraforming. It’s likely that most civilizations in the same situation as the Trisolarans will solve their local resource problems before getting to Dark Forest hunter level.
Probably not invisibly, which is a problem if you have Dark Forest hunter civilizations out there looking for a target, but this conversation started out using the Trisolarans as a counter-example for beleester’s point that “sitting quietly around your own fire is a stable equilibrium”, so we shouldn’t be assuming that Dark Forest hunters are the default.
But the Trisolarians couldn’t sit around the campfire because eventually the campfire was going to burn them up.
Agreed, if the Trisolarans just sat in their solar system and did nothing with their current technology, they’d eventually be dead.
But they didn’t have the technology that let the actual Dark Forest hunter civilizations blow up stars with no trace of the weapon that did it, or do things like changing the way dimensions work in regions of space.
Once they get that level of technology, they should be capable of doing stuff like booting two of their suns out of the system, or shielding their planet well enough to go straight through a star.
So the civilizations that are advanced enough to choose between sitting around the fire or going hunting shouldn’t have local existential threats the way the Trisolarans do.
I’ve been having quite a few of these discussion with my friends, so I’d like to take a stab at it. Something which seems very obvious to me, and which nobody I have talked with has agreed with, is that decision theory is the most important part of philosophy, and that figuring out all of the ways values can be turned into decisions is the most interesting thing to discuss. So who does SSC side with?
Basically everything seems like X to me once I’ve discovered it, until I discover the next thing and that becomes X instead.
Among the things that seem more important and interesting than figuring out how to turn values into decisions are figuring out
a) what the correct values are
b) how to form justified beliefs
These are especially more interesting because the differences in plausible candidate answers to these questions have much more impact than the differences in plausible candidates in decision theory – compare the upshot of the debate between kantians and utilitarians to the upshot of the dispute between causal and evidential decision theory.
In order for things to be interesting, there has to be an emotional element. It has to talk to your fears, passions, or perhaps some fundamental aspect of experience.
I don’t think there is any reason why decision theory couldn’t be interesting, but I don’t see why it should be more interesting than anything else.
I also think there is a bit of a danger that if you abstract away values, and focus only upon the process of living, you make things less interesting because you are diminishing the human element.
I’ve been thinking about the autism spectrum a lot recently. Why is it a spectrum? What are the epistemological criteria to unite some types or symptoms into a spectrum, while distinguish some others as separate disorders, illnesses, problems?
It seems that with a spectrum we should expect severity of different symptoms to vary considerably, with many actual cases at different levels of the symptoms. But when we think about or speak with people on the autistic spectrum, the distribution seems to be [I don’t have hard data here and welcome challenges] bimodal. There’s “classic autism”, also called simply “autistic disorder” clinically (not to be confused with the broader diagnosis of ASD), or “low-functioning” colloquially. Scott’s post Against Against Autism Cures describes typical cases and symptoms eloquently. And there’s “high-functioning autism”, in which people have problems with language and/or social communications, but are generally able to function independently, do not have extremely violent outbreaks, do not exhibit extremely repetitious and fanatically rigid patterns of behavior, etc. The Asperger Syndrome, earlier a separate diagnosis that emphasized problems with social communications but not language, has been folded into the autistic spectrum with the recent revision of the DSM (DSM-5).
Why are high-functioning autistics considered to be on the same “spectrum” with the “classic autistics”? Is there in fact a large percentage of “mid-functioning autistics”, who for example have average or above average IQ but are still prone to extremely violent outbreaks and self-injury? At least anecdotally, this doesn’t seem to be so. Classic autism seems to be sharply defined and easy to diagnose with very high accuracy at age 3+. What if classic autism and HFA have completely different underlying causes?
I found much food for thought in a book I read recently, Late-Talking Children: A Symptom or a Stage? by Stephen Camarata, who appears to be a completely mainstream and respected researcher in development disorders (he’s a professor at Vanderbilt with lots of hits on PubMed). Camarata’s focus in the book is on speech delay of all kinds, not specifically ASD, but he talks at length about how children who are late to develop speech are very often diagnosed with ASD based almost solely on this criterion, which he considers scientifically wrong though pragmatically understandable (in many places an ASD diagnosis “unlocks” resources to help to the child that will likely be of value whether they’re “really” autistic or not). Camarata seems to think that a broader diagnosis “on the spectrum” (what in clinical terms would be either PDD-NOS or Asperger’s in the previous DSM-4 classification, or non-severe ASD in the current DSM-5 one) is quite often an overdiagnosis, due to lax criteria, of a language delay that’s likely to pass, or problems with social communication (what we like to call “socially awkward nerds”). If such overdiagnosis is common, that would go a long way to explaining the rising prevalence of ASD as a whole (“1 in 68” in recent estimates).
By way of analogy, Camarata offers: “Imagine the problems that would be created if a child could be diagnosed as being “on the blindness spectrum.” This “spectrum” could cover everything from not being able to see at all to simply needing glasses or even slight myopia. Imagine the needless alarm that could be spread among parents when they heard such a dire diagnosis. Imagine the vast sums of money that could be drained away from helping genuinely blind people to be spent on a vastly larger number of other people, whose only problem is that they need glasses. Also imagine the latitude that a concept like “on the blindness spectrum” would provide for a clinician who made that diagnosis for a child who later turned out to have 20/20 vision with glasses.” The newest edition of the DSM offers, in addition to ASD, categories of “Language disorder” (including both receptive and expressive language, i.e. understanding and speech) and “Social communications disorder”. Camarata seems to think that many if not most cases currently diagnosed as ASD but not the severe subtype (not “classic autism”) should in fact be diagnosed as Social Communications Disorder, Language Disorder, or even language delay that doesn’t rise to a disorder.
In a more recent article by Camarata I read today (it’s on sci-hub), he offers a different, more detailed analogy with the “diabetes spectrum”, which includes pre-diabetic people, as well as type-I and type-II diabetics. The parallel is between “classic autism” and type-I diabetes (that requires insulin injections, and for which diet and exercise are not reliably useful interventions). If we couldn’t measure blood glucose levels, and lacked understanding of what insulin’s role is, then our very broad diagnosis “on the diabetes spectrum” based on symptoms like obesity, fatigue, thirst, etc. will lump together very different conditions which have different underlying causes and for which different interventions are needed/will work.
“I hypothesize that, as in the diabetes spectrum example, classic autism has an altogether different mechanism from a biomedical perspective than the broader autism spectrum, and that current researchers are in precisely the same situation as physicianscientists more than 100 years ago before Banting, Best, Collip, Campbell, and Fletcher (1922) discovered that a digestive hormone, insulin, secreted by the pancreas is an effective treatment for classic, type I diabetes. Ironically, the broader diabetes spectrum was born when Himsworth discovered (in 1935) that there were diabetic patients who were not responsive to insulin treatment. These type II (insulin resistant) patients now form the overwhelming majority of diabetic patients in the US.”
Camarata’s book resonated strongly with some of my own thoughts and experiences, and basically convinced me to see the autism spectrum as a dubious construct. Would love to see more opinions about this, including counterarguments and links to contrary data/opinions.
I don’t think the claim about diabetes is historically accurate. Wikipedia says that the two types of diabetes were distinguished 1500 years ago. It’s pretty simple, not just because of the association with age, but because of the course of the disease: young people with diabetes die in just a few years.
On the other hand, the several sources I find making this claim say that it was achieved by Sushruta and Charaka c500AD. But that date is way off. Sushruta lived more like 500BC. But he is clearly talking about type II and not, I think, aware of type I. Charaka definitely lived BC, but with a big range of uncertainty. Here Charaka distinguishes two types of honey-urine, though I can’t tell if it is our modern distinction.
Maybe 500AD is the date of the earliest surviving manuscript, but if you don’t trust the integrity of the manuscript, you should attribute the result to the manuscript, not the person.
I recall that Robert Tattersall talked extensively about the history of the disease also pre-insulin in his brilliant book Diabetes: The Biography, but unfortunately I can’t justify taking out the time to hunt down a quote. But it is certainly true that the fact that different types of diabetes existed was known long before the discovery of insulin; I think Tattersall actually mentioned in his coverage that medical textbooks during the 19th century didn’t devote time to the young people who contracted the disease because those were hopeless cases anyway (that is, they were described as hopeless cases in the textbooks…), and they all died anyway, no matter how you treated them. An important early character to mention in that context is Oskar Minkowski, who discovered in 1889 that if you removed the pancreas in dogs they developed (what we would now recognize as type 1) diabetes.
Tattersall writes:
While this contradicts Camarata, it also seems to reject the common claim that it is easy to distinguish them. Maybe some ancients did, but the knowledge seems to have been lost.
I think at least one ancient writer also distinguished between thin and fat, but it was not clear to me that he was talking about type I vs II, rather than advanced vs early type II. If he mentioned age, it would have been clear. (Avicenna distinguished hot and cold diabetes. Both involved weight loss, but hot emaciation.)
“it also seems to reject the common claim that it is easy to distinguish them.”
I’m not sure I follow? Young/acute/thin -> bad outcomes (‘bad type’), ‘fat diabetes’ -> gradual onset and mild course (‘good type’). That would make the conditions easy rather than hard to distinguish, no? …and match the wikipedia distinction you mention above.
One thing worth keeping in mind when evaluating pre-modern medicine characterizations of diabetes and the natural history of diabetes is incidentally that especially to the extent that one is interested in type 1 survivorship bias is a major problem lurking in the background. Prognostic estimates of untreated type 1 based on historical accounts of how long people could live with the disease before insulin are not in my opinion likely to be all that reliable, because the type of patients that would be recognized as (type 1) diabetics back then would tend to mainly be people who had the milder forms, because they were the only ones who lived long enough to reach a ‘doctor’; and the longer they lived, and the milder the sub-type, the more likely they were to be studied/’diagnosed’. I was a 2-year old boy who got unwell on a Tueday and was hospitalized three days later. Avicenna would have been unlikely to have encountered me, I’d have died before he saw me. (Similar lines of reasoning might lead to an argument that the incidence of diseases like type 1 diabetes may also today be underdiagnosed in developing countries with poorly developed health care systems.)
It’s easy for us to say that young/thin/acute is a cluster that is easy to distinguish, but we have the benefit of hindsight. Was it actually easy? Well, did they do it? They definitely did it before insulin, but maybe only a century before insulin. If Avicenna told them about two clusters and they couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, that suggests that it wasn’t that easy.
Everyone says that Aretaeus was talking about type I. If that is true, the survival bias wasn’t that bad. There may well be an opposite bias, where doctors get reports of acute illness. Indeed, Galen describes diabetes despite only witnessing it twice. I think neither Aretaeus nor Galen reports the sweetness of the urine.
Right, thanks for clarifying and adding additional details, that makes sense.
One thing I was considering adding to my remarks about survivorship bias is that it is not in my opinion unlikely that what you might term the nature of the disease has changed over the centuries; indeed it might still be changing today. Globally the incidence of type 1 has been increasing for decades and nobody seems to know why, though there’s consensus about an environmental trigger playing a major role. Maybe incidence is not the only thing that’s changed, maybe e.g. the time course of the ‘average case’ has also changed? Maybe due to secondary factors; better nutritional status now equals slower progression of beta cell failure than was the case in the past? Or perhaps the other way around: Less exposure to bacterial agents the immune system throughout evolutionary time has been used to having to deal with today means that the autoimmune process is accelerated today, compared to in the far past where standards of hygiene were different. Who knows? I don’t, and I know a lot about diabetes research. Maybe survivorship bias wasn’t that big of a deal, but I think one should be very cautious about which assumptions one might implicitly be making along the way when addressing questions of this sort of nature. Some relevant questions will definitely be unknowable due to lack of good data which we will never be able to obtain.
Once you had me thinking that it might have been harder to distinguish the two than we might think it is today, I started wondering about this, and the comments below relate to this topic. An idea that came to mind in relation to the type 1/type 2 distinction and the ability of people in the past to make this distinction: I’ve worked on various identification problems present in the diabetes context before, and I know that people even today make misdiagnoses and e.g. categorize type 1 diabetics as type 2. I asked a diabetes nurse working in the local endocrinology unit about this at one point, and she told me they had actually had a patient not long before then who had been admitted a short while after having been diagnosed with type 2. Turned out he was type 1, so the treatment failed. Misdiagnoses happen for multiple reasons, one is that obese people also sometimes develop type 1, and if it’s an acute onset setting the weight loss is not likely to be very significant. Patient history should in such a case provide the doctor with the necessary clues, but if the guy making the diagnosis is a stressed out GP who’s currently treating a lot of obese patients for type 2, mistakes happen. ‘Pre-scientific method’ this sort of individual would have been inconvenient to encounter, because a ‘counter-example’ like that supposedly demonstrating that the obese/thin(/young/old, acute/protracted…) distinction was ‘invalid’ might have held a lot more weight than it hopefully would today in the age of statistical analysis. A similar problem would be some of the end-stage individuals: A type 1 pre-insulin would be unlikely to live long enough to develop long term complications of the disease, but would instead die of DKA. The problem is that some untreated type 2 patients also die of DKA, though the degree of ketosis varies in type 2 patients. DKA in type 2 could e.g. be triggered by a superimposed cardiovascular event or an infection, increasing metabolic demands to an extent that can no longer be met by the organism, and so might well present just as acutely as it would in a classic acute-onset type 1 case. Assume the opposite bias you mention is playing a role; the ‘doctor’ in the past is more likely to see the patients in such a life-threatening setting than in the earlier stages. He observes a 55 year old fat guy dying in a very similar manner to the way a 12 year old girl died a few months back – very characteristic symptoms, breath smells fruity, Kussmaul respiration, polyuria and polydipsia…). What does he conclude? Are these different diseases?
A small sidenote: The observation you make about the benefits of hindsight reminded me of one of the things I really enjoyed about reading Tattersall’s book; namely that he makes it clear to you as a modern reader how many things we do take for granted when discussing/analyzing diabetes today. He spends a lot of time on the history of the disease throughout the book and the coverage makes it clear that a lot of things which are totally obvious today were not at all obvious to people living in the past, and he goes into some detail in terms of explaining why these things were not obvious.
Wouldn’t reduced selection pressure be a major reason for increase of Type I diabetes? Used to be if you had it, chance of surviving to reproduce was close to nil.
@Nybbler:
I’m not a geneticist and this is sort-of-kind-of near the boundary area of where I feel comfortable providing answers (given that others may be more qualified to evaluate questions like this than I am). However a few observations which might be relevant are the following:
i) Although I’ll later go on to say that vertical transmission is low, I first have to point out that some people who developed type 1 diabetes in the past did in fact have offspring, though there’s no doubt about the condition being fitness-reducing to a very large degree. The median age of diagnosis of type 1 is somewhere in the teenage years (…today. Was it the same way 1000 years ago, or has the age profile changed over time? This again relates to questions asked elsewhere in this discussion…), but people above the age of 30 get type 1 too.
ii) Although type 1 display some level of familiar clustering, most cases of type 1 are not the result of diabetics having had children who then proceed to inherit their parents’ disease. To the extent that reduced selection is a driver of increased incidence, the main cause would be broad selection effects pertaining to immune system functioning in general in the total population at risk (i.e. children in general, including many children with what might be termed suboptimal immune system functioning, being more likely to survive and later develop type 1 diabetes), not effects derived from vertical transmission of the disease (from parent to child). Roughly 90% of newly diagnosed type 1 diabetics in population studies have a negative family history of the disease, and on average only 2% of the children of type 1 diabetic mothers, and 5% of the children of type 1 diabetic fathers, go on to develop type 1 diabetes themselves.
iii) Historically vertical transmission has even in modern times been low. On top of the quite low transmission rates mentioned above, until well into the 80es or 90es many type 1 diabetic females were explicitly advised by their medical care providers not to have children, not because of the genetic risk of disease transmission but because pregnancy outcomes were likely to be poor; and many of those who disregarded the advice gave birth to offspring who were at a severe fitness disadvantage from the start. Poorly controlled diabetes during pregnancy leads to a very high risk of birth defects and/or miscarriage, and may pose health risks to the mother as well through e.g. an increased risk of preeclampsia (relevant link). It is only very recently that we’ve developed the knowledge and medical technology required to make pregnancy a reasonably safe option for female diabetics. You still had some diabetic females who gave birth before developing diabetes, like in the far past, and the situation was different for males, but either way I feel reasonably confident claiming that if you look for genetic causes of increasing incidence, vertical transmission should not be the main factor to consider.
iv) You need to be careful when evaluating questions like these to keep a distinction between questions relating to drivers of incidence and questions relating to drivers of prevalence at the back of your mind. These two sets of questions are not equivalent.
v) If people are interested to know more about the potential causes of increased incidence of type 1 diabetes, here’s a relevant review paper.
@Nybbler:
A few additional remarks.
i) “Temporal trends in chronic disease incidence rates are almost certainly environmentally induced. If one observes a 50% increase in the incidence of a disorder over 20 yr, it is most likely the result of changes in the environment because the gene pool cannot change that rapidly. Type 1 diabetes is a very dynamic disease. […] results clearly demonstrate that the incidence of type 1 diabetes is rising, bringing with it a large public health problem. Moreover, these findings indicate that something in our environment is changing to trigger a disease response. […] With the exception of a possible role for viruses and infant nutrition, the specific environmental determinants that initiate or precipitate the onset of type 1 diabetes remain unclear.” (Type 1 Diabetes, Etiology and Treatment. Just to make it perfectly clear that although genes matter, environmental factors are the most likely causes of the rising levels of incidence we’ve seen in recent times.)
ii. Just as you need to always keep incidence and prevalence in mind when analyzing these things (for example low prevalence does not mean incidence is necessarily low, or was low in the past; low prevalence could also be a result of a combination of high incidence and high case mortality. I know from experience that even diabetes researchers tend to sometimes overlook stuff like this), you also need to keep the distinction between genotype and phenotype in mind. Given the increased importance of one or more environmental triggers in modern times, penetrance is likely to have changed over time. This means for example that ‘a diabetic genotype’ may have been less fitness reducing in the past than it is today, even if the associated ‘diabetic phenotype’ may on the other hand have been much more fitness reducing than it is now; people who developed diabetes died, but many of the people who might in the current environment be considered high-risk cases may not have been high risk in the far past, because the environmental trigger causing disease was absent, or rarely encountered. Assessing genetic risk for diabetes is complicated, and there’s no general formula for calculating this risk either in the type 1 or type 2 case; monogenic forms of diabetes do exist, but they account for a very small proportion of cases (1-5% of diabetes in young individuals) – most cases are polygenic and display variable levels of penetrance. Note incidentally that a story of environmental factors becoming more important over time is actually implicitly also, to the extent that diabetes is/has been fitness-reducing, a story of selection pressures against diabetic genotypes potentially increasing over time, rather than the opposite (which seems to be the default assumption when only taking into account stuff like the increased survival rates of type 1 diabetics over time). This stuff is complicated.
I don’t have a lot of time or a lot of motivation to participate in this discussion, but now I’m doing it anyway.
As for diabetes (where to start?)…
The majority of patients on insulin in the US are type 2 diabetics, and it is simply wrong that type 2 diabetics are not responsive to insulin treatment. They were likely found to be unresponsive in early trials because of errors of dosage, as they require higher levels of the drug to obtain the same effect as will young patients diagnosed with type 1 (the primary group on insulin in the 30es). However, insulin treatment is not the first-line option in the type 2 context because the condition can usually be treated with insulin-sensitizing agents for a while, until they fail (those drugs will on average fail in something like ~50% of subjects within five years of diagnosis, which is the reason – combined with the much (order(/s, depending on where you are) of magnitude) higher prevalence of type 2 – why a majority of patients on insulin have type 2), and these tend to a) be more acceptable to the patients (a pill vs an injection) and b) have fewer/less severe side effects on average. One reason which also played a major role in delaying the necessary use of insulin to treat type 2 diabetes which could not be adequately controlled via other means was incidentally the fact that insulin cases weight gain, and the obesity-type 2 link was well known.
Aside from the ‘both conditions are responsive to insulin’ there would be lots of other arguments one might make here. One would relate to pathophysiology. Type 1 is autoimmune, and most cases of type 2 are not, but some forms of type 2 seem to have an autoimmune component as well (“the overall autoantibody frequency in type 2 patients varies between 6% and 10%” – source) (these patients, who can be identified through genetic markers, will on average proceed to insulin dependence because of treatment failure in the context of insulin sensitizing-agents much sooner than is usually the case in patients with type 2). In general type 1 is caused by autoimmune beta cell destruction and type 2 mainly by insulin resistance, but combinations of the two are also possible (added a comment on this early on here, but then decided that this is too complicated a topic to address here), and patients with type 1 can develop insulin resistance just as patients with type 2 can lose beta cells via multiple pathways. The major point here being that the sharp diagnostic distinction between type 1 and type 2 is a major simplification of what’s really going on, and it’s hiding a lot of heterogeneity in both samples. Some patients with type 1 will develop diabetes acutely or subacutely, within days or hours, whereas others will have elevated blood glucose levels for months before medical attention is received and a diagnosis is made (you can tell whether or not blood glucose has been elevated pre-diagnosis by looking at one of the key diagnostic variables, Hba1c, which is a measure of the average blood glucose over the entire lifetime of a red blood cell (~3-4 months) – in some newly diagnosed type 1s, this variable is elevated, in others it is not. Some type 1 patients will develop other autoimmune conditions later on, whereas others will not, and some will be more likely to develop complications than others who have the same level of glycemic control.
Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are quite different conditions, but in terms of many aspects of the diseases there are significant degrees of overlap (for example they develop many of the same complications, for similar (pathophysiological) reasons), yet they are both called diabetes. You don’t want to treat a type 2 diabetic with insulin if he can be treated with metformin, and treating a type 1 with metformin will not help – so different treatments are required. If you transfer that part of the diabetes situation to autism you might similarly expect different kinds of interventions to help different subtypes of autistics, so you’d for example expect people to write books about how it’s important to match the intervention with the need of the autistic – i.e. books like this one. Another aspect of the analogy: Both types of diabetics are sick and need treatment because they’re not doing well. When you are dealing with autism, the sort of outcomes you look at in outcome studies tend to be major life outcome variables. When you look at those, they are really shitty regardless of whether you look at the ‘milder’ end of ‘the spectrum’ or not. I believe Scott talked about this here before, but it’s obvious from the outcome studies if you look at them. For example:
“NAS statistics show that only six per cent of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (12% of those with Asperger Syndrome (AS)) in the UK are in full-time employment. This compares with 49 per cent of people with general disabilities who are employed.” (from this book).
“Recent reviews of outcomes for individuals with ASD through the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NTLS2) have indicated that, as a group, individuals with ASD have low rates of employment, independent living, and lifelong friendships (Newman, Wagner, Cameto, & Knokey, 2009). This longitudinal study followed 11,000 transition-aged students with disabilities from 2001 to 2009. The age range of youth and young adults included in this study were between 13 and 26. This sample included 922 students with autism spectrum disorders. Outcomes recorded for this sample included the following findings […]: • 32 % of this sample attended post-secondary education of one type or another • Only 6 % achieved competitive employment • 21 % had no job or post-secondary education experiences at all • 80 % continued to live with their parents • 40 % reported having no friends” (link)
So even if some subgroups of autistics are quite different from other subgroups, if you’re an autistic you’re probably not doing well, and you might benefit from ‘treatment’ (…’help’? …’support’?). I could go a bit further: If the goal is to have a diagnosis which captures the fact that people with that diagnosis are likely to do very poorly in interpersonal relationships and in terms of labour market outcomes, then autism seems at least historically to have been an excellent instrument in view of results like the above. If diagnostic criteria are currently slipping and ‘nerds’ get a diagnosis these days, you’d expect to see better outcome profiles in future studies, so that’s probably one thing to look out for if one is worried about diagnostic creep. I’m not aware of outcomes having improved significantly over time, to the extent that the diagnosis is not still a very good predictor of poor performance in a large number of life contexts. A lot of variability is hidden in the averages, just like a lot of variability is hidden in the ‘type 1’ diagnostic marker, no doubt about that, but is it enough to justify a split? I’m not taking sides there, I don’t find that discussion particularly interesting. It might be that for some purposes a split is useful and for other purposes it is not really necessary to condition on subgroup.
Thank you for the detailed and rather interesting information on diabetes.
On autism outcomes, we have to be wary of the quality of the data and the confusion between “classic autism” and ASD. I tried to chase the references to the stats you quoted. The NAS data from UK appears to be from an online survey on the charity website; their more recent number is 16%, from ~2K self-selected responders. The NTLS2 case is even more troubling. If you look at their sampling methodology, it quickly becomes clear that they were surveying students with classic autism, and not ASD. This isn’t stated outright – in fact the word “spectrum” doesn’t appear at all – because in 2000 when NTLS2 was being planned, thinking of autism as a spectrum was not yet prevalent, nor did DSM-4 include anything about the autistic spectrum. NTLS2 looked for students age 13-16 in 2001 receiving special education under various labels (note that this excludes at the outset students that had been diagnosed but did not need special ed by the time they reached age 13), and they include prevalence estimates for all the labels. “Autism” has just ~7800 students out of 20M population – one in 2.5K – and they mention repeatedly that they had to treat it as one of the special cases where they had to lower their sampling goals, to be able to meet them at all. These very, very low prevalence numbers make it clear that in the terminology of 2000, PDD-NOS and Asperger’s are not part of this “autism” label; to further verify this I looked at a few data tables to see e.g. that 75% of the sampled “autism” students were receiving speech therapy at ages 13-16. These weren’t “aspies” or “socially awkward nerds” or HFAs. Clearly NTLS2 was sampling – and then tracking for 10 years – mostly or exclusively students with classic autism.
And yet as your quote demonstrates, the NTLS2 results are quoted as poor outcomes for “individuals with ASD”. Nor is it an isolated case – just by searching for NTLS2-related studies, I see again and again studies which claim they’re showing something about poor outcomes, or results of various interventions, for ASD in general. This is exactly the problem that Camarata warns about, and one of the reasons he says that replacing a sharply defined clinically stable diagnosis of autism with a much much broader and clinically unstable ASD was not necessarily a good idea.
I’m not sure what to say about your last paragraph – you write it from the assumption that “autistics” (meaning ASD) as a group is a given, and possible results of future studies are needed to “justify a split”, but I’m questioning the choice (and asking for the original justifications, which remain unclear to me) to treat them as a single group in the first place. They were not treated as a group until recently – formally, in fact, until 2013 when DSM-5 came out, informally I guess until early 2000s, and I think it’s fair to ask what was/is the justification to have “the autistic spectrum”, before requiring a justification to “split” it. If there are high quality outcome studies which provide such a justification, I couldn’t find them. I strongly suspect that children diagnosed as PDD-NOS or Asperger’s as opposed to autism in the 2000s ended up with much much better outcomes on the average, but I don’t know – and didn’t find with some simple searches – good studies that carried out such comparisons.
Thanks for letting me know that you liked the diabetes observations I included in my comments above.
I would definitely agree with you that there is a limited amount of high-quality data and -studies on long-term outcomes for the ASD diagnostic group as a whole, especially if what you’re looking for is good outcome studies on adults – I have made that complaint myself in the past. This book, which I read in the past, is a research publication which tried to collect all the knowledge that was published on these topics, but the result was in my opinion a poor book which mostly just displayed how little we actually know about these things. But my starting point is that you don’t seem to find studies on ASD individuals which do not find them to perform poorly compared to non-autistics. This is as far as I know regardless of which countries you’re looking at, and regardless of whether you’re looking at data from the 70es or the 2000s. If you know of data suggesting otherwise I’d be happy to learn about them; I think I recall e.g. a few HFA studies having found ‘better outcomes’, but they’re still poor. I’m well aware outcomes vary across individuals and I’m sure the researchers do as well.
In terms of whether it’s ideal to have one autistic diagnostic group or two (…or three, or…), I maintain that to a significant extent the answer to that question relates to what the diagnosis is supposed to accomplish. If it makes sense for researchers to be able to distinguish, which it probably does, but it is not necessary for support organizers/providers to know the subtype in order to provide aid, then you might end up with one ‘official’ category and two (or more) ‘research categories’. I would be fine with that (but again I don’t find this discussion interesting). Again a parallel might be made to diabetes research: Endocrinologists are well aware that there’s a huge amount of variation in both the type 1 and type 2 samples, to the extent that it’s sort of silly to even categorize these illnesses using the same name, but they do it anyway for reasons which are sort of obvious. If you’re type 1 diabetic and you have an HLA mutation which made you vulnerable to diabetes and you developed diabetes at the age of 5, well, we’ll start you on insulin, try to help you achieve good metabolic control, and screen you regularly for complications. If on the other hand you’re an adult guy who due to a very different genetic vulnerability developed type 1 diabetes at the age of 30 (and later on Graves’ disease at the age of 40, due to the same mutation), well, we’ll start you on insulin, try to help you achieve good metabolic control, and screen you regularly for complications. The only thing type 1 diabetics have in common is the fact that their beta cells die due to some autoimmune processes. But it could easily be conceived of instead as literally hundreds of different diseases. Currently the distinctions between the different disease-relevant pathophysiological processes don’t matter very much in the treatment context, but they might do that at some point in the future, and if that happens the differences will start to become more important. People might at that point start to talk about type 1a diabetes, which might be the sort you can delay or stop with gene therapy, and type 1b which you can’t delay or stop (…yet). Lumping ‘different’ groups together into one diagnostic category is bad if it makes you overlook variation which is important, and this may be a problem in the autism context today, but regardless of the sizes of the diagnostic groups you’ll usually still end up with lots of residual (‘unexplained’) variation.
Just to be clear, I don’t really find myself in any need of having to defend current diagnostic practice in the area of autism – or for that matter historical diagnostic practices. I’m not a clinical psychologist, I don’t go around making autism diagnoses, and I was certainly not asked when they decided to make changes to the DSM (…well, maybe I was asked, as I belonged to one of the diagnostic groups affected by the changes proposed, but I certainly did not answer…). I agree with you that a nonverbal autistic is very different from some other individuals who also have autism diagnoses. These things are not areas of disagreement between the two of us.
I’m too lazy to start hunting down other relevant outcome studies, but Scott mentions a few of them in his own previous coverage of these topics. A quote from the post:
“Six studies have assessed what percent of adult autistics have a job – they find 22%, 21%, 31%, 4%, 4%, and 4%. The two that found rates in the twenties limited themselves to high-IQ autistics and so are unrepresentative.”
This is sort of an illustration of what I meant. Scott goes on:
“adults with Aspergers (recently collapsed into the autism diagnosis) are ten times more likely to be suicidal than other adults.”
“The happy, independent autistic people whom most of us know and whose stories get told in the media are four to ten percent of the autistic population. What about the other extreme, the forty percent who are institutionalized?”
I don’t think 40% of all with an ASD diagnosis today are institutionalized (I’d guess the number would be lower, but how much lower is anyone’s guess), but on the other hand I think his main point stands.
Razib Khan again argues the thesis (with reference to Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather) that the Fall of Rome was a rapid process, this time with analogies to our own situation.
A bit which stood out to me:
(Emphasis in original)
Do we really count a century-long process as fast? Or 75 years, even?
I would. That’s “within living memory” range.
Doesn’t that make the fall of any empire a rather quick process?
If an empire is around for hundreds and hundreds of years–potentially dozens of generations–a mere 3 or 4 generations seems fast, yes.
I don’t know how fast the typical civilization falls; my assumption is that it’s a relatively slow process–debated while it’s going on, not readily apparent to all even after it’s over, etc.
Ah, but I’m comparing it to the fall of other empires, not so much to its lifespan. And 75 years seems like a perfectly ordinary timespan for this kind of thing to happen.
What do you count as the fall of an empire? Does it have to dissolve, or is conquest fair game, too? If the former, seventy-five years is a slow process moreso than a quick. If the latter, it’s purely a military matter.
Consider the other empires of antiquity, the Achaemenid, Maurya, and Qin/Han empires. The Achaemenids went from being perfectly fine to Greek conquest in a period of ten years, after which it ended up being partitioned into many pieces, with no native Persian rule becoming reestablished for the next two centuries. Much faster than seventy-five years.
The Maurya lasted for slightly longer, but the decline is usually noted as starting after Ashoka’s death, and took about fifty years or so. Again, not as long as it took for the western Roman Empire.
The Han dissolved in a matter of about thirty years, though one could make a case for it also having been fifty or so.
But really, what empire does take longer than seventy-five years to fall apart? You could argue that it took the Turks some centuries to conquer the Eastern Roman Empire, but do we equate being conquered to falling apart? What do we make of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, giving that 75 years is about its entire lifespan? Of Austria-Hungary going from being there to being gone by sheer treaty? Of the Brits being the dominant world power in 1910, and not even doing very well by European standards fifty years later?
I suppose that on a level of ‘it lasted this long and things went sour this quickly’ you could call 75 years fast, but as compared to other empires, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Do you know of any examples where things went noticeably slower?
You know what, I was mentally substituting the word “civilization” in for “empire” by mistake. You’re probably right.
That’s very gracious of you. I can see how for many people it’d seem like a rapid change – and in an absolute sense, I suppose it might be. But relatively, as compared to other empires, it doesn’t seem especially unique.
I’d argue that all the disasters that the Romans suffered were recoverable until the Vandals conquered Africa, the breadbasket of the Western Empire, in 430. At that point the clock was ticking and Rome needed to get it back quickly to maintain its economy. They tried but the Huns distracted them. And some very unlucky winds in one sea battle.
How does the old punchline go, in relation to how a man lost his money? “Slowly, then all at once”?
But then, I wonder if a better term for the later years of the Roman Empire would be “senescence” – that is to say, that the later years of Western Roman Empire were driven by the national equivalent of old age, with the end of the Emperors (or some other event somewhere in the 450-550 range, but I’d lean towards 476 given my understanding of the Roman worldview) as the point when the Western Roman Empire died.
My own, probably idiosyncratic, view is that the Roman Empire didn’t fall until 1453. I think the Western half of the empire became unrecoverable after Justinian’s failed attempts at reconquest and the rise of Islamic Power (which definitely was sudden!) sapped the resources and attention of the Empire.
As a side note I just visited Mission Santa Barbara and was amazed at how Roman it felt: Mission Santa Barbara
My view is that the term “Roman Empire” misleadingly conflates a long series of successor states, and that it’s the term’s equivocation between the various “Roman” states that is at the root of the debate over when the “Roman Empire” fell.
The Principate was established by Octavian’s defeat of Marc Antony in 33 BC and fell with the stalemated civil wars following the assassination of Severus Alexander in 235 AD.
The Dominate was established over the course of the 280s as Diocletian’s “Roman Empire” conquered the Principate’s other rival successor states and consolidated power over most of the Principate’s former territory.
The Dominate declined gradually in the West over the course of the 400s, being replaced by the Gothic, Frankish, etc kingdoms which had originally been established as vassal states within its boundaries. The kingdoms gradually recognized less and less authority by the Dominate’s Western Emperors until Odoacer effectively abolished the office by forcing Romulus Augustus to abdicate in 476 with no successor.
You could make the argument that the Dominate persisted in the East until 1453, but there are also arguments for institutional breaks in the early 600s and the early 1200s. The former is Maurice’s assassination in 602, the near-complete collapse in the face of the Sasanian invasion, and the reestablishment of Constantinople’s authority by Heraclius which came with significant institutional changes: abandoning Latin as the official language of government in favor of Greek, switching the Imperial title from “Dominus” (“Lord” in Latin) to “Basileus” (“King” in Greek), and possibly establishing the Theme system (although more recent scholarship appears to attribute this to Heraclius’s grandson instead).
The latter is the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, leaving the Crusader-established Latin Empire and three separate Greek successor states (the Despotate of Epirus, the Empire of Nicaea, and the Empire of Trebizond). Nicaea conquered the Latin Empire in 1261 and more-or-less re-established pre-Fourth-Crusade institutions and ruled a rump “Roman Empire” from Constantinople until 1453.
If you buy both episodes as institutional breaks, I suppose that gives you the Dominate through 602-ish, the First Byzantine Empire through 1204, and the Second Byzantine Empire through 1453.
“Roman Empire” is a really strong brand. So in some sense it’s true that it was a lot of qualitatively distinct states, but in another not, because of shared culture and branding becoming a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ottoman Sultans used the Roman Empire branding themselves, in fact.
Okay, so if we buy that, when did the Roman Empire fall?
Is modern Turkey the Roman Empire?
Didn’t Hitler claim continuity of reign from Charlemagne? (who was crowned Roman Emperor I do believe…)
So did Caesars (Czars) of Moscow, claiming relation to Byzantium, further connected via the tradition of Orthodox Christian belief.
As far as I know, Putin does not use that style.
i think your breakdown is very reasonable – I probably would have agreed with you strongly a few years ago. However, I do think their is a cultural thread that connects all those states that allows one to consider them one empire with many different governmental sub-units, similar to the dynasties of Chinese History. For one aspect of that continuity I’d recommend “The Byzantine Republic” by Anthony Kaldellis. His thesis is that republican norms never left the Roman Empire and in some respects grew stronger during its Byzantine phase. Any would-be emperor needed the peoples’ support to obtain power and Justinian was unique in his use of violence against the citizens of Byzantium. Anyway, I’d highly recommend it if you have the time.
I’ve been thinking a path to de-polarizing the country would be getting people out of their hometowns and into other people’s hometowns for a while. Combined with various calls that farmers can’t get Americans to work their fields, it got me thinking about some kind of Agricultural Draft, where all the youth get rounded up to grow crops in other states for a few years.
So: what are the practical, economic and legal problems of implementing a non-military draft?
What’s the punishment for the youth who refuse to comply?
Don’t know. Maybe a general work license dependent on completion.
This would backfire as it would give an excuse for able-bodied young people to be on government assistance their entire lives. Don’t support a law you are not willing to put people in jail for violating.
I’m pretty sure the standard way you play this game is that the refusenik is denied not only a work license, professional license, drivers license, eligibility for university, ID valid for getting on a plane or entering a government building, etc, but also any entitlement to any sort of government assistance as well. Oh, does this mean they starve to death? Not our problem, tovarisch, perhaps they should have followed directions.
This idea assumes that polarisation is related to time spent in geographical location. I find this to be a weak candidate for explanation.
Legally, perhaps the least-bitter pill to swallow would be implementing it as part of a “work for welfare” scheme, where unemployed youth get sent to the farm and govt pays
the kid welfare and the farmer gets compensated for housing and food.
Practically – I think a lot of young men would rather spend a fixed term compulsory military service than go work on a farm.
This sounds a lot like Americorps. If nothing else it could be added to the Americorps repertoire. Might be a tough sell since farms are for-profit operations.
The “agricultural draft” idea was (and perhaps still is, I don’t know) implemented in the Soviet Union, as well as in Nazi Germany. I’m more familiar with the Soviet version.
The official party line was that the effete young intellectuals need to get their hands dirty with the noble and proud work of the actual heroes of the Revolution — the heroes being peasants, and the work being agriculture; specifically, the harvest. This process was known as (rough translation) “going potatoing”, since the harvest often involved potatoes. The reality was somewhat more complex: firstly, the Soviet Union simply didn’t have enough manpower to collect the harvest (which requires significantly more work than growing the crops), due to virtually nonexistent industrialization; secondly, harvest time coincided with a string of national holidays, which means that the usual peasant manpower would’ve been right in the middle of their annual binge-drinking by the time the crops ripened.
Punishment for shirking your mandatory patriotic duty was typically Soviet; it ranged from being denied entry into the Party, to jail time, to expulsion from university, to being sent to the concentration camps outright. Note that I rank “expulsion from university” as being worse than “jail time”; the reason for this is that university enrollment was the only thing that would keep you from being drafted into the Soviet Army — which was really no better than a concentration camp.
The effectiveness of “potatoing” was… about what you’d expect from a mandatory draft instituted by a brutal dictatorship. As far as I’m aware, the practice of sleeping in unheated wooden barracks in subzero weather, and pulling up crops with your bare hands for several weeks in a row, never made any of those effete intellectuals wiser, kinder, or more patriotic. A large portion (in fact, the majority) of the crop was lost year after year, no matter how much untrained slave labor the Soviet Union threw at it.
EDIT: Yep, looks like the practice is alive and well even today.
I really doubt there was a lot of harvesting done in subzero weather (I don’t know if you are measuring in C or F, but true in both). But other than your exaggeration, I agree with your point. I have also heard much about the Chinese sending out urban workers to the farm for “political education,” I think really they meant punishment for not saying the right things. This was probably a major component of why China maintained its backwardness through its Mao period, despite its obvious potential since his death. Farming may seem romantic to urbanites who don’t do it, but the history suggests that sending city people out to farm is extremely non-productive.
I think Chinese “political education” was a little more broadly based that punishment would explain.
I did read an account of one woman about how her group would rush through the mandatory parts to get to the unofficial parts where they treated people for illness and injury, because they were all medically trained.
I think sending urban youth out to the villages was in part a solution to the problem of urban unemployment, since they knew that unemployment was a problem of capitalist societies, not socialist societies.
What are you talking about? City folk have just as much nitrogen in their corpses as country folk, making them excellent fertilizer.
Why did you specify non-military?
Military drafts are currently legal, and the military features harsher conditions and more life-and-death activities than I’m thinking of. I don’t like the idea of mandatory boot camp or mandatory time in hostile countries, and I’m wondering if the current government has the authority to issue a draft for non-war activities or if that’s exclusive to the military.
Yeah, I feel like having a bunch of cops point guns at you and load you onto a bus where they truck you off to some farm to do menial labor for years (instead of doing some much more productive thing you imagined yourself doing instead) would not exactly endear you to the farmer and their culture very much.
If we rounded up Palestinian children and forced them to work in Israeli office buildings (paying them a nominal salary, of course, we’re not slavers here!) do you think this would help or harm relations in the middle east?
I feel like this thing only has a chance of working if it’s totally voluntarily. Perhaps you subsidize or incentivize it in some way (a very far-left friend of mine did Teach for America and ended up in a very rural community and claims it expanded his outlook and is now much more sympathetic to the white working class), but you definitely can’t force it.
Assuming Israel and Palestine are a good analogue, the goal would be to get Israeli children doing something in Palestinian businesses as well. Probably still wouldn’t work but I think it would have a chance unless someone attacked the children.
Having the state take them away by force and hand them over to a bunch of people whom you don’t trust and whose culture you despise doesn’t count as an attack?
Sounds a lot like the Indian schools founded in US and Canada.
Would these kids get force-educated into Judaism too?
My idea was primarily getting people to move through various parts of the country and getting a feel for local issues. Agriculture’s the first thing that occurs to me as a low-skill non-dangerous national benefit that happens all over the place.
I can’t think of a mutual benefit for Israel/Palestine, partly because starting something like that would require they recognize the other as a state with legitimate and mutual interests. US states have common ground to work with.
(Do US youth despise farm owners? If they do, that seems like something that should be addressed.)
The youth may not but the parents very well might.
Or, to be more specific, they don’t despise “farm owners” but they may very well despise “Trump voters” and hey, guess what…
If the problem is farm owners being Trump voters, is there a Hillary voters equivalent occupation?
College Professor?
Sure. The parents of farm kids probably wouldn’t be thrilled about their kids being taken to the bay area to work for Facebook either. Especially if the kid, you know, would himself to prefer to stay on the farm.
I dont understand this line of discussion at all.
Would youth enjoy working on a layer factory farm or a high production wheat or orchard farm? Mostly working with machines.
There just aren’t many small farmers out there anymore– agriculture is big business and any picking that isn’t automated is manned by migrant workers– what youth core is going to want to pick strawberries? Its back-breaking low status work.
You are trying to to recover a culture that is dying.
Time travel to the past is impossible because of closed form time curves.
Conservatives/libertarians keep trying to go to the past.
We can only travel to the future.
Organisms must adapt or go extinct.
Not surprising; it’s based on half a dozen top-of-the-head questions getting smashed together and thrown haphazardly into a roomful of analysts.
I think all the questions have been answered now. Rousing success!
Actually, Bint, it depends on which agricultural sector you’re looking at.
For livestock, yeah, about 99% come from “factory” operations (though even there not all of them are agribusiness-owned). For fruits, vegetables, and dairy however that drops to about 66%.
However, since 88% of all farms in the US are small family-owned ones, and since 58% of all direct farm sales to consumers comes those small farms (‘small’ defined as gross cash income of <$350K), it's simply not true to say that they don't exist anymore.
Source: 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture Typology Report.
Mind you, that doesn’t make this whole wacky re-education through cross-tribal labor thing any less of a horrible and impractical idea, but it’s always worth updating your perceptions to match reality.
I didn’t realize just how much of the US was still small to mid-size family farms until I moved out to flyover country and started interacting with farm families.
That sounds like a statistic that greatly exaggerates the significance of small farms, since most agricultural output isn’t sold directly to consumers. Am I missing something?
@David Friedman
Depends on what you’re looking at. I’m talking in Bintchaos’ terms, which was family farms no longer exist in any significant way. I’m not disputing that they no longer account for the majority of agricultural output, just that they are
A) still extant and far more numerous than many people, her included, seem to think, and
B) still comprise more of the business sector than than expected, albeit not nearly as much as they used to.
If you want to look at it in terms of overall output, Small Family Owned (Gross Cash Farm Income <350K) and Midsize Family Owned ($350K-<$1M) account for 24.2% and 22.8% of production respectively. So, still a good-sized chunk of production, and still the vast majority of the 2.1 million extant farms in operation as of the last census.
As I conceded initially, this is very uneven, with certain sub-sectors like Livestock production dominated all but exclusively by the small number of large family-owned and non-family owned farms.
Interesting link.
It looks like moderate sales farms ($150k to $350k) are making reasonably efficient use of their land – at 2.83 acres per $1000 annual revenue vs 2.27 for all farms. The rest of the small farm categories (low sales, part time farmers, retirement farms) are considerably worse.
These low efficiency farms make up 38% of the total farm acreage in the US, but only 12% of the revenue.
No, I just mean family farming has radically declined as an american way of life.
You are still talking about less than 1% of the US population (small farmers) hosting/employing a large number of drafted farm-core youth.
A horrible idea that is unworkable, and seems to depend (like all the ideas to force Cthulu to turn right I’ve seen surfaced here) on time travel back to the magical land of Conservative Brigadoon.
@Bintchaos
I agreed with you that it’s an unworkable idea, but your original claim wasn’t that it had radically declined. It was:
which as I pointed out, is not actually true. As I said, even if I agree with your overall point, it is useful to update your individual map to better match the territory.
To turn right? Did you totally miss the context? Forcing class enemies to labor on farms isn’t an idea with a right wing pedigree.
@Trofim
Splitting hairs over the definition of many?
I mean many as in relative to 1950, the first time rural population of US dropped to less than 50% (43% in 1950).
Less than 2% of citizens are farmers– 88% of those are small farmers.
US Farmers declined from 23 million to between 2 and 3 million today(depending if secondary and tertiary operators are counted , or just primary operators.And yes, its an awful idea for a lot of other reasons.
It may not be right-wing per se, but when your communist revolution relies heavily on the agricultural countryside as a substitute proletariat and is extremely anti-intellectual, there’s at least an argument for regarding it as (no pun intended) “red”.
@bintchaos
No, distinguishing between two entirely separate and distinct statements. Even if I agree with your overall point and position, it’s worthwhile to differentiate:
1)”There aren’t many small farmers anymore in the current market because the market is now filled with agribusiness-owned factory farms.”
and
2) “There aren’t many small farmers anymore relative to their numbers in 1950”
Those are two entirely different claims, and while #2 may have been what you meant, it wasn’t what you said.
Contrast how you reacted to my point, and how I reacted to David Friedman’s challenge to the information I provided.
you’re right…I should have articulated that better before speaking…what I was really thinking about was what would the forced re-education camp youth farm workers be doing?
I should have cited farm employment stats or land mass under cultivation, because automation has taken a lot of farm jobs– for example harvesting dwarf orchard stock with combines and ripening warehouses of combined fruit with plant auxins (fewer jobs for pickers). I wasn’t really thinking about relative numbers of small and large farms.
And how many of those farms are self-sufficient? Where family members dont work outside of the farm?
But again, the weaponized steelman defense. If I am wrong about one fact, then you can ignore the body of my argument.
I’m not sure what would make you think that, since I said several times I agree with your underlying argument 🙂
The Thirteenth Amendment comes immediately to mind. The Supreme Court’s reasons for cravenly refusing to apply it to the military draft would not apply.
This whole discussion reeks of the Cultural Revolution.
That would solve the Red Tribes academe problem, except American youth are in the Blue Tribe for the most part.
You need a revolution of youth, but the only youth on board in significant numbers are the Pepe-le-frogs of the al Trite.
This is a horrible idea on every level.
The system you’re describing isn’t unique: it’s known in China as Láogǎi (reform through labor). Except your plan is somehow even worse, because that system was ‘only’ used for political prisoners while you’re talking about doing this to the entire population of young adults.
This would almost certainly foster a sense of national unity, but it would be unity in opposition to the tyrannical government doing this to them. Which is somehow not what I imagine you had in mind.
Various European countries with the military conscription have a civilian service as an alternative for conscientious objectors. According to this, 1/3 Austrian men choose the civilian option. I don’t think there are any terrible problems with the idea of national service (although it might be difficult to implement in the US since it actually uses its military, and hence probably needs to hold its members to higher standards than Austria) but I can’t see it being very beneficial. I don’t think European countries that have it are much better off than ones that don’t.
Force labor is bad
If you’re thinking of forcing people to do things, why not start smaller and force them to have a reasonable media diet? Maybe ban on social media and tv and mandatory balancing of good but biased sources like NYT would be enough to mitigate the problem significantly.
Continuing from here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/open-thread-78-75/#comment-517430
@genisage
If we consider that a line which consists of points does not share points with a line consisting of no points, and is therefore parallel to such a line, then axiom two will always be broken, for all lines.
So I think we have to assume that a line cannot consist of no points?
If a line A has no points, then for any point X, any line passing through X will be parallel to A, because they have no point lies on both this line and A. Since axiom 2 demands there be only one such line, it follows that any point X lies on only one line. This by itself is not a contradiction, it only becomes one when you add axioms 3 and 1. Axiom 3 gives you three points, axiom 1 lets you construct three lines with them, axiom 3 again guarantees that these lines are all distinct, and *then* you have a contradiction, looking at two distinct lines passing through one point. This is essentially part of @genisage’s proof.
Right, thanks. Makes sense.
What do you think of this anti-CFAR screed?
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6787
This one is a bit more measured and makes a prima facie reasonable point: there is not much evidence that CFAR/Less Wrong techniques actually work.
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6789
Is that surprising ? Virtually none of the other self-help motivational programs work, why should CFAR be any different ?
As regarding his first article, which consists of one giant (and somewhat inflammatory) comment, I think he’s wrong in one respect. He attributes the failure of the Berkeley Rationalist community to “what happens if you take a bunch of socially inept, above average intelligence, and mentally ill people and have them try to do stuff together”. However, I personally would expect that failure mode from any community who made a concerted effort to build an insular enclave, gated by the participants’ strict adherence to some very specific set of ideological norms. It doesn’t matter what the norms are, the result is usually the same.
No self-help product claims to be standard. They all claim to be special, unique, and powerful — unlike all those other garbage self-help products.
The second one seems on the mark. They are not good at evaluating their own products by their own epistemic standards.
Related to this book I’ve recommended before: why don’t more doctors (and indeed people) think of obesity as equivalent to “food addiction”?
“But you can quit cigarettes, alcohol, etc.; you can’t quit eating!” You might protest. Yes, but you can quit eating addictive food processed to increase the dopamine hit you get through the addition of salt, sugar, oil, and processes like frying, drying, etc. which increase caloric density.
“I eat salt, sugar, oil, and french fries and I’m not fat or suffering heart disease!” some will say. Okay. Some people can drink and not become alcoholics. But overwhelmingly it seems alcoholics don’t do well with the advice, “drink less.” They have to quit because, for whatever reason, they are unable to use the substance in moderation.
So our first advice to people looking to lose weight is, and probably should be: “get more exercise; try eating more fruits and vegetables; try cutting out refined sugars,” etc. etc. But for people who are really obese, why isn’t the advice just “stop eating all these addictive types of foods”?
I mean, maybe it is? But I feel like it isn’t put so draconianly. Even for very obese people, instead of telling them to stop eating the addictive stuff, they may simply be told to try counting calories, reduce portion size, etc. But isn’t this equivalent to telling an alcoholic to start keeping a careful log of his drinking? To drink with smaller cups? It might help, but probably not.
Which is not to say it’s easy to give up addictive foods. I haven’t. But I’m also not overweight. However, it’s a fair amount of effort for me to stay that way, and includes exercise, periodic fasting, trying to eat more of the low-density foods and less of the high, etc. etc. But I was also never really, really obese.
Anyway, I don’t mean this to sound preachy, or like “I’m the one with the one, true weight loss holy grail solution,” I’m just suggesting that it seems to me like overeating is wholly analogous to addiction and I’m not sure why it isn’t treated a bit more that way, medically and socially.
My guess is that it’s because cooking and eating together is so universal and socially acceptable, whereas people are okay with looking down on smoking and drinking as problematic, even sinful (I once heard an older Hispanic lady tell a smoker, “you shouldn’t do that… God doesn’t like it…”). And, since everyone has to eat something, though they don’t have to smoke, it’s easy to lump eating healthy food and unhealthy food all under the same activity heading: “eating.”
But… I’m not saying we should make chicken nuggets immoral, but maybe it’s possible, without demonizing cooking and high calorie foods to also be more aware of their addictive nature, and how many can’t handle them responsibly? I think it’s like, if you’re one of the people who can handle your vodka responsibly (or can’t, but drinks it anyway), you don’t enjoy drinking with the AA evangelist who makes you feel bad about it (holier-than-thou, we might call it… geez why is the connection between temperance/indulgence and virtue/sin so strong??)
Related, if we could more generally decouple the, imo, not really logical connection between addiction and moral failing, we’d probably end up with better drug policies.
Why not? It worked for smoking.
My understanding is that a big part of gastric bypass surgery’s benefit (when it works) is that it imposes a draconian diet post-surgery.
Won’t the results be hopelessly confounded by sampling bias? I mean, it’s an internet survey, advertised in places like this, with 7x autism incidence 2.5 stds IQ compared to the population.
Part II of my blog series “On Secession” got a fair bit of discussion on a previous open thread.
We are now onto Part IV.
(Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV)
I haven’t noticed this series before, but I have read all four parts now. Why is this called “On Secession?” I thought you were going to talk about whether secession was justified or something. Are you actually going somewhere, or is this just general impressions about crime?
Part IV was mostly about Sheriff Clarke. This is the first I’ve heard about this guy, so I don’t know if your strong negative portrayal of him is reasonable or not. It is interesting that you portray him as rather racist and unfair to Blacks, and it took me looking him up on the Internet to discover that Clarke himself is Black. Not that a Black guy can’t be racist against his own race, but I would have thought that warranted at least a mention by you.
On a national basis, I do think that the strong push by activists like BLM to fight against cops shooting Blacks as a racial thing instead of a police thing is an irrational and ineffective approach. When cops shoot White people it is treated as business as usual, but is an outrage whenever a Black person is shot. Even though Whites are shot more often than Blacks. I think I even read somewhere that shooting of Blacks as percentage of stops by police is lower than those of Whites (yes, Blacks are stopped more often, but that is a whole other issue). I believe I also read somewhere that Blacks shooting of cops is a higher proportion of the total than that of cops shooting Blacks.
Even more, it seems that working on the protocols that cops use when dealing with civilians to better de-escalate violence and potential violence is a much better method of lowering cops shooting people than trying to decrease the supposed racism of cops. I am trying to envision how anti-racism training would ensue. Would the trainer tell the cops that Blacks are no more likely to shoot them than Whites, which every cop knows is a lie? I am not sure if shootings can be decreased by better training, but it’s got to be more effective than trying to eliminate racism.
I do agree that the warrior theme for cops, such as what Gorssman preaches, is a bad trend. And yes, Yanez did take that training, but it is a huge jump to say that caused him to shoot. By the way, why are you so sure that the jury was wrong to acquit Yanez? It seems that they thought it was not beyond a reasonable doubt that Yanez thought Castile was reaching for a gun before he shot. I wasn’t present in the courtroom, but I can see that might be a reasonable conclusion.
The fact that their “poster boy” cases tend to be based on lies and involve things like a black who has just held up a convenience store going for the cop’s gun before being shot, really doesn’t help.
Specifically, that blacks are more likely to commit crimes.
Please count me among the cringers in respect to appellations like “normies” — ditto for “muggles”, “brights”, “Chads”, “Stacies”, “FA’s”, “KV’s”, and “wizards” — on the grounds that these terms pejoratively restrict progressive cognitive aspiration.
As an antidote, consider the examples of Alfred Tarski and Georg Kreisel, who were celebrated equally for three traits: (#1) extraordinary ratiocinative intelligence, (#2) their passionate romantic/erotic entanglements, and (#3) their creative mathematical accomplishments.
Many SSC readers rate themselves highly in respect to intelligence (trait #1); less highly in respect to romantic capacity (trait #2); and no SSC readers at all — that have been noticed by me at least — have publicly claimed significant mathematical creativity (trait #3).
All three of these capacities strengthen with practice, and this provides motivation to study two in-depth works about Tarski and Kreisel: Anita Burdman Feferman’s collection of essays Kreiseliana: about and around Georg Kreisel (1996) and Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman’s scholarly biography Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (2004).
What’s nice (and unusual) about these two works is that they cover the romantic passions of Tarski and Kriesel in comparably thorough depth to their mathematical passions. E.g., in the Tarski biography we read:
Take notes, romantically challenged SSC readers! 🙂
Especially commended are Verena Huber-Dyson’s memories of her long-ago affair with Kreisel in her essay “Thoughts on the Occasion of Georg Kreisel’s 70th Birthday”, and the broader social and mathematical context for the Dyson-Kreisel affair and the Dyson-Tarski flirtation that is provided by Anita Burdman Feferman’s essay “Kreisel on the Telephone: an Appreciation.”
Another (related?) topic of perennial interest to SSC readers is the entangled relation between cognition, ratiocination, logic, and truth, with special reference to the potentialities and dangers of 21st century advances in AI. Here Piergiorgio Odifreddi’s essay “Kreisel’s Church”, with its many references, is an invaluable resource (the title punningly refers to the Church-Turing thesis and to Kriesel’s views upon it). The rich and still-developing history of the Church-Turing thesis, however, deserves its own long SSC comment! 🙂
Can every SSC reader reasonably aspire to combine creative, passionate, ratiocinative capacities in the style of Tarski and Kreisel? An action-oriented approach to learning may be best … begin like Tarski, by memorizing and practicing, and then (upon a propitiously flirtative occasion) reciting Goethe’s “Heidenroslein”.
References follow — happy thinking and romancing! 🙂
@book{cite-key, Address = {Cambridge, UK}, Author ={Feferman, Solomon and Feferman, Anita Burdman}, Publisher =
{Cambridge, UK}, Title = {Alfred {T}arski: Life and Logic}, Year
= {2004}}
@incollection{cite-key, Author = {Anita Burdman Feferman},
Booktitle = {Kreiseliana: about and around {G}eorg {K}reisel},
Editor = {Odifreddi, Piergiorgio}, Pages = {43--49}, Publisher =
{A.K. Peters}, Title = {Kreisel on the Telephone: an
Appreciation}, Year = {1996}}
@incollection{cite-key, Author = {Verena Huber-Dyson}, Booktitle
= {Kreiseliana: about and around {G}eorg {K}reisel}, Editor =
{Odifreddi, Piergiorgio}, Pages = {51--73}, Publisher = {A.K.
Peters}, Title = {Thoughts on the Occasion of {G}eorg Kreisel's
70th Birthday}, Year = {1996}}
@incollection{cite-key, Author = {Odifreddi, Piergiorgio},
Booktitle = {Kreiseliana: about and around {G}eorg {K}reisel},
Editor = {Odifreddi, Piergiorgio}, Pages = {389--415}, Publisher
= {A.K. Peters}, Title = {Kreisel's Church}, Year =
{1996}}
And now for something different. OT 78.5 had a fun comic book recommendations thread, and I thought maybe we should continue, but maybe more in spirit of “discussion on comics SSC commentariat reads” than “listing bestsellers”.
I already gave some recommendations back there. Most of those I listed there were from the category “read them ages ago, remember liking them, and I have a hunch that the other people will probably like them, because they are quite well known and popular”. During the past week, quite many other titles have popped into my mind, but I’m going to start by listing only two. Both of these were the kind of books that I didn’t think about them immediately when prompted to give recommendations: in other words, they are not as big superstars as the names mentioned in the thread I linked to, but they are not obscure either (at least, not on the eurocomics front). I know the OT is quite US-based, but we do have other European readers besides me, and I checked that these are available in English (but not sure if widely distributed); I’ll use the English names.
Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat. (There’s also an animated film that I have not seen.) Adorable stories, adorably told. One day, rabbi Abraham in pre-ww2 French Algiers finds out that his cat can talk. This has various implications (is it possible for talking cats to be Jews? …the titular cat is not particularly observant, though), and we also observe the complications of the ordinary life in rabbi’s family.
Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié, A Chinese Life. Li Kunwu’s family lived through the very interesting parts of the history of China; this is (at first) a biography of his parents’ lives and (later on also) his autobiography. From the perspective of one family, we observe the history of China after the war, starting from Mao’s reign, through incidents such as Sputnik and a Cultural Revolution (and various others), and then the gradual shift to capitalism and prosperity.
Only the first of my suggestions is really a comic book but here goes:
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel is a favorite of mine. It’s a standard Superman story, but told from the perspective of Lex Luthor. You get to see a ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of the planning and preparation which goes into a typical comic-book scheme, all narrated by Lex’s attempt to justify his vendetta against “the Alien” to himself. It’s afflicted by the juvenile sort of maturity where sex and dead kids makes something adult, but doesn’t take it to Frank Millar levels of grimdark. Overall it’s a strong story leveraging one of DC’s better villains.
Most people have already read Maus and it’s sequel, but it’s still very good. It’s about the holocaust, which is pretty overplayed these days. Unlike most of that genre however Maus is less about the holocaust itself and more about how it revealed and shaped the character of the artist’s estranged father. Vladek Spiegelman isn’t portrayed as a hero, or even a particularly good man, but he’s very human and engaging. You can feel the tragedy of his situation while still understanding how the personality which helped him survive the camps drove a rift between him and his son. The quality of the art is very good and never fails to put you in the story.
This last one is cheating because it’s not illustrated. But Soon I Will Be Invincible is a really good book which, like Lex Luthor: Man of Steel looks at a superhero / supervillain conflict from the villain’s point of view. The book came out before Megamind but from what I understand of that film the two have a very similar premise. Either way, it’s a very compelling inner look at both a criminal genius and a fledgling superheroine in a comic-book esque world.
Dunno if I count as within SSC, but heres my current favorites–
just to add some variation!
Black Panther, I have collected every comic since Ta-Nehisi started writing the reboot.
And of course Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan).
Peerless.
Do any SSC commenters read manga?
I am (used to be, really) more of an anime guy, but Berserk and Billy Bat are pretty good, and I assume so’s Monster because the cartoon version was great.
I can confirm the Monster manga is good. Forgot to include that one in my post.
Same as Whatever Happened To Anonymous.
Aside from a few one-shots the only manga I have read is Nausica of the Valley of the Wind.
I find extensive reading on monitor to be exhausting and getting actual manga was not possible for me (selection, censorship and price issues).
If we’re including manga recommendations, I have a few.
Ares (Yes, I know it’s actually manhwa) is a series about a mercenary getting into fights and looking for the guy who killed his master. It’s basically a shonen series, and it doesn’t do a lot that’s really out of the ordinary, but it distinguishes itself by having particularly well put together story arcs and distributing time in the spotlight well among a variety of interesting characters, and having good action.
Runners up in this general category include: The Breaker (very standard shonen, but has the comic equivalent of high production values), Ruler of the Land (kind of overlong, pretty funny, lots of variety) and Veritas (genre-savvy MC and plenty of violence)
Holyland is a more seinen-style coming of age story about a nerdy kid learning to fight. Partly a platform for the author to showcase his experience with a variety of martial arts. Partly commentary on the lack of real emotional bonds in young peoples’ relationships.
Runners up in this general category include: Gekiryuuchi if you just want the violence, PK if you want the violence without any of the realism, Kenji if you’d rather read a similar shonen. Wolf Guy? Maybe?
Akumetsu is a series about the breakdown of Japanese culture and politics. It’s really good and you should read it. I can’t think of a lot like this, so I’m stretching the category to include: C: Money of Soul and Possibility Control, which was kind of a heavy-handed way of saying the Zaibatsus/financial industry are recklessly gambling with the future of the country, and Eden of the East, which was about NEETs.
Kimi ni Todoke is better as an anime than a manga, but both are good. It’s an adorable story of a shy nerdy girl and the end of the first season is a crime against storytelling but I guess financial pressure to milk good series or something. Highly recommended.
I find Prison School hilarious. It’s ecchi/femdom, and if you have any sense you’ll stay away, but maybe some people here are as terrible as I am. For a less objectionable version, try Sundome.
If you just want to be sad, try Elfen Lied or Saikano.
Other things I like, in no particular order: One Punch Man, Dungeon Meshi, Upotte, Houshin Engi, Karate Shoukoushi Kohinata Minoru, Teppu, Baki the Grappler + sequels, All Rounder Meguru, Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari, Vagabond, Hinomaru Zumou, Piano no Mori (way better than Your Lie in April), Arago, 1/2 Prince, Yureka, Ranma 1/2, Beelzebub, Kenichi, Uzumaki, Noblesse.
wow, a true connoisseur!
That is impressive.
I’m just a dilettante by comparison.
If you like horror, definitely check out Junji Ito.
Junji Ito has done some of the scariest stuff I’ve ever read, along with and sometimes alongside some really intense bathos.
“Uzumaki” is stronger on the scary, “Gyo” stronger on the bathos.
Junji Ito’s horror is super interesting. Uzumaki is probably his most famous, but I think The Hanging Balloons is the best place to start and possibly the best return on time.
For horror, also check out the Higurashi series. I think it does a better job of being scary, but the content will be much more familiar and less engrossing.
Also Franken Fran and Pet Shop of Horrors are pretty good monster of the week style horror series, but they can both be hit and miss.
Agree on all of the above– Uzumaki gave me nightmares for weeks.
I saw spirals everywhere IRL.
There’s something really dreamlike about Junji’s best stuff. He can (and does) do body horror really well, but mixing it with a general sense of disquietude is what elevates it.
Hellstar Remina is another good long story. The Enigma of Amigara Fault is a great short, high impact piece. Oh hey here’s a link.
I’m more of an anime guy, but I read the occasional manga. Eyeshield 21 was amazing – the most incredibly over-the-top story about American football that I’ve ever read. It’s really more of a martial arts story than a sports story, full of secret techniques, clever trick plays, battles of strength and skill, and so on. Even if you’re not a football fan, I’d recommend it.
I’m also more likely to watch anime than read manga – I was actually discussing Attack on Titan with my sister recently, and we had basically the same problem (she’s only read some of the manga, I watched the show and then started on the manga) which is that it’s a lot harder to tell characters apart when they’re all silent black-and-white drawings than it is when they’re in color and also have different voice actors. My foray into the manga issues that pick up where the show’s second season ends was marked with frequent occurrences of “Wait, who the hell is that?”
Also working my way through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood currently, and when I’m done with that I plan to watch more of Sword Art Online.
… not really that much nowadays. I fell out of the loop concerning the scanlation genre several years ago, and while there’s decent selection of printed mange available where I live, the expense of buying blindly would be just a bit too much in the long run.
Random aside: Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that, when logging in with a username and password here, one is asked to “prove their humanity” by solving a simple addition problem?
As if performing simple mathematical calculations is what distinguishes humans from machines?
I think I’ve replied to someone mentioning this before – what proves your humanity isn’t your ability to solve the problem, it’s your ability to understand the form (and if someone programs a computer to do it, the form will be changed).
Yes yes, I know this is technically true and actually is effective, blah blah blah.
It’s still funny though, damn it!
SCOTT: Please do a meet up in SALT LAKE on your way out here. I need proof once and for all that you are not actually an artificial intelligence posing as a human, nobody can write posts with as many random links as you can bro. Nobody. Sorry I just used the term “bro”, I don’t think that is really acceptable in this setting.
Thanks for all your work and safe travels-
j
As a recent SL transplant I would be happy to come out to a meetup here too!
Interesting news: scientists discover why Roman concrete hardens on exposure to sea water, unlike modern concrete which weakens.
For those who want a more technical look at it, here’s the journal article. Thankfully, it’s open access.
I think CNN is being very unwise today. Much more unwise than usual.
Well, that’s horrific.
http://codes.findlaw.com/ny/penal-law/pen-sect-135-60.html
—–
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
Data.
How does that apply? Yep, the polariziation we keep talking about here extends to trust of a particular media outlet. What does that have to do with whether or not CNN is blackmailing somebody?
Don’t just puke a link into a comment, provide analysis.
I did, further down.
CNN is winning is my analysis.
I think Trump’s “bad” behavior, CNN’s “bad” behavior, O’Keefe’s “bad” behavior, are pretty much noise at this point, not changing any minds.
And none of the above changes the basic equation of Cthulu slowly, inexorably swimming left.
Only one side is adding reps.
I mean, I trust the KSA more than the DPRK, but that doesn’t mean I trust the KSA in any meaningful sense.
hahaha, you are have no idea.
KSA is employing a constructed adaptive strategy to push Indonesian Islam to the right, e.g.: Cthulu is swimming right towards Wahhabism in Indonesia.
The Red Tribe should get pointers from King Salman and Prince Reckless to learn how to redirect American Cthulu.
Jakarta had a christian governor for years– now he’s in prison on a blasphemy sentence.
Trump just gave KSA a free hand in the 30 year old GCC slap fight between KSA and Qatar (while his mil advisors looked on in shock– US major airbase in the
WoTWar on ISIS is in Qatar.)And meanwhile stabbing the US in the back with the other hand by colonizing Indonesia with Wahhabism.
An interesting tangent, ’cause yeah that’s exactly the sort of shit I’m talking about re: KSA, but completely missed my point 🙂 I’m trying to say your link doesn’t prove much because it’s effectively asking people whether they prefer Tweedledee or Tweedledum.
No it is not…KSA is orders of magnitude more powerful and more populous than NK.
House Saud is the Guardian of the Two Holy Sites, the Defender of the Faithful for a quarter of the global population.
My main point is that Trump is a foreign policy moron being manipulated by his vanity and inexperience.
…the other link. The one about CNN. Does the perennially obnoxious habit of replying-by-email-to-jump-the-line also deprive you of thread context?
KSA: 31.54 million people
DPRK: 25.16 million people
This is a strange new definition of “orders of magnitude more populous” that you are using.
@John Schilling
I read “orders of magnitude” as only applying to “more powerful,” which makes a lot more sense.
(I have problems distributing things across conjunctions properly, so I don’t doubt your reading is the more natural)
Population of KSA: 28,160,273 (July 2016 est.)
Population of North Korea: 25,115,311 (July 2016 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sa.html
@Charles F
I explained that– KSA has Mecca and Medina– KSA is actually the head of dar ul Islam, because all good muslims are supposed to do the haaj.
Indonesia: 202.9 million muslims— 87% of total population.
The article I linked is about KSA spreading Wahhabism in Indonesia by building mosques, sending Wahhabi clerics to staff them, building gender segregated universities, bring young Indonesian muslims to KSA to study with famous Wahhabists, etc.
KSA is orders of magnitude more powerful in terms of influence– NK is just a pimple in comparison.
China owns what…1.4 trillion in treasuries?
NK is a fantasy problem, a “look! a squirrel!” moment for Trump.
@DavidFriedman
here I fixed it–
Once in their life, if they can. But being the ruler of two of the three holy cities doesn’t make you “the head of dar al Islam,” any more than being the ruler of the third does. That’s the caliph, not whoever currently controls Mecca. There hasn’t been a widely accepted claimant to the caliphate since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Do you think that when the Fatimid caliphate was a going concern, they considered the Abbasids, who controlled Mecca, to be the heads of Islam? Do you think the western Umayyadds did? Have the Iranians announced their allegiance to the KSA yet?
North Korea has a nuclear arsenal and the ability to deliver it to nearby Asian countries now, probably the U.S. west coast in not all that long.
You keep complaining about the fact that the Trump administration treats the Saudis as our friends. Whether wise or not, that’s also been the policy of previous administrations for quite a long time.
@David
You are now just throwing radar chaff at my argument, which is that KSA is employing a constructed adaptive strategy to push wahhabism into Indonesian (relatively “moderate” by US terms) Islam. The example of the christian jakarta governor who is now in prison for blasphemy instead of “coasting” to re-election and the construction of multiple mosques and universities staffed by wahhabi clerics are proof of concept. Also gifted young students get offered full scholarships to train in islamic jurisprudence in KSA, a whole of generation of incoming young cleric-jurists sympathetic to KSA brand Islam.
Haaj means Mecca and Medina– I assume you are referring to Qom as the third city? Even Shi’ia go to Mecca for haaj.
KSA is the Guardian of the 2 Holy Sites– they dont claim to be amir al-mumineen (the Caliph).
The Abbasids are not really relevant to this contemporary discussion of evolution of islamic culture in Indonesia.
More radar chaff.
Trump gobsmacked his military advisors, indeed the whole ME military community by publicly attacking Qatar. They have been trying to walk it back ever since, and Trump just goes on with more clueless buffoonery.
Do you think NK will attack US or Japan w/o China sanctioning a move like that? China holds 1.4 trillion in US treasuries. Not happening.
You think Obama was a friend to KSA?
You are naive.
What do you think the Iran treaty was all about?
I said nothing at all about your argument. I was pointing out that one of the claims with which you supported it was not accurate.
The three Holy Cities of Islam are Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.
Correct. Hence they do not claim authority over the Islamic world in general, which is what your “the Defender of the Faithful for a quarter of the global population” was implying. Amir al-Mu’minin either means the caliph or an independent ruler of a Muslim state, which is the sense in which it applies to the ruler of Saudi Arabia–in which case it doesn’t imply authority over Muslims in other Muslim states.
They are, however, relevant to the question of whether control over Mecca and Medina implies authority over all of al-Islam, which was the question for which I was offering them as evidence.
I think the ability to launch a nuclear attack against the U.S., Japan, South Korea, or China is an effective lever to limit what any of those states does against North Korea.
There is no Guardian of the “three” Holy Sites as a title.
KSA influence is tied to its physical possession of Mecca and Media.
There is no haaj to Jerusalem.
And Sauds are spreading wahhabism in Indonesia via their influence.
Its really a clever invasive adaptive strategy.
So no.
“complicated by the regime’s self-proclaimed role as Defender of the Faithful.”
You are just bloviating about things you have no knowledge of.
Rude.
You were the one who suggested that the third holy city was Qom.
What the three holy cities of Islam are is not an obscure fact. And it is of some current relevance to Middle Eastern politics.
You were the one who brought up “3 holy cities”– something I had never heard of– I wondered if you meant Qom as one– the Shi’a attempt at making their own Mecca.
Shi’ites still make haaj to Mecca.
And your “3 holy cities” fantasy has nothing to with KSA.
Haaj is one way KSA spreads Wahabbism in Indonesia– an offer of haaj and study in KSA– then return to Indonesia as a prestigious high-status cleric trained in the land of the two holy sites..
KSA is much more subtle and much more powerful than NK.
Trump’s latest buffoonery in publicly attacking Qatar for “sponsoring terrorism” is playing right into King Salman and Prince Reckless’ hands– they plan to take over the GCC.
Yeah, because Israel is demographically unsustainable, probably in this century. Oops, I forgot, Kushner is going to solve the Israel/Palestine problem.
My bad.
And what is China doing in all your scenarios? Are you modeling a pre-emptive nuclear strike on NK as a two person game between US and NK?
@Nornagest
pas du tout
I’m not rude– Friedman is Stupid.
KSA tried to kill the US fracking industry and North Seas oil drilling, supplied 19 of the 20 hijackers for 9/11, turned Egypt’s fragile attempt at pluralist democracy into a military coup.
They are not your friends.
And now you’re getting’ all wound up over the Hermit Kingdom blustering and launch tests.
Just ignore NK and let China deal with them.
The one does not preclude the other.
But I have a lot of evidence that Prof. Friedman is not stupid.
Sheesh. I didn’t expect to kick off such a kerfuffle with an off-the-cuff metaphor for how trustworthy Trump vs CNN are. Sorry folks.
@Salem
I didn’t say that in context— I said Friedman’s continued digging on the “3 holy sites” is stupid. He’s wrong.
And its stupid to trust KSA more than NK on empirical evidence.
Does that mean Trump is stupid?
Because I’m afraid that’s exactly what it means.
Why tell such obvious falsehoods that anyone can check?
EDIT TO ADD: Lol, and then you go back, edit your post, and put in the “in context” line, what a coward you are. Anyone can scroll up and see the context. Have some decency and apologise to Friedman, for your own sake if nothing else. The deeper you dig, the stupider you look.
No, he’s correct. And, fwiw, while I’m not a practising Muslim, I was always brought up to refer to the three holy mosques.
The King of Saudi Arabia is guardian of the two holiest places, which is a big responsibility. But it doesn’t make him the head of the Muslim world, and it doesn’t diminish al-Aqsa.
Im not a coward– I often edit my posts to make clear what I’m saying because people have complained about my impulsive shoot first style.
Friedman is arguing that KSA doesnt have the influence I claim they have.
But there is nothing in Quran or ahadith about making haaj to al-aqsa.
All muslims are supposed to do haaj.
5 duties.
KSA is exploiting the haaj and its position as the Guardian of the Two Holy Sites to seed Indonesia with extremist wahhabist clerics and jurists trained in KSA mosques.
KSA is publicly shaking Trump’s hand and ganking America in the back with the other hand by propagating Wahhabi Islam to the 202.9 million “moderate” muslims in Indonesia.
Possibly relevant to the question of which one of us is “just bloviating about things you have no knowledge of.”
Now you are just being petty, because I fragged your Defender of the Faithful argument with a Brookings piece.
Al-Aqsa is not included in the “two holy sites of KSA” description to my experience, although it is also a “holy site”.
Muslims don’t make pilgrimage to al-Aqsa– it is not a requirement of the duties of a muslim.
Because the Kaaba is not there.
I really wish you would stop trying to lecture me. I’m not your student.
bintchaos:
With the extraordinary insights your social physics and game theoretic models give you on the world, I recommend that you look into Tetlock’s prediction tournaments and start making and recording falsifiable predictions.
@bintchaos:
FWIW, I often edit my own posts for punctuation, broken HTML markup, etc. But if I make any changes to the actual wording or even content of the post, I usually add a note at the bottom, something like “EDIT: wording”, or “EDIT: fixed incorrect apple/orange ratio”. I’m not saying this is the One True Comment Policy ™ or anything like that, but I think it’s a reasonably good one.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you but it seems, here and in other exchanges, as though your view is that as long as you believe your conclusion is correct it does not matter whether the purported facts with which you support it are true, hence anyone who points out that they are not is “throwing radar chaff at my argument.”
In this particular case, one of the facts that you thought supported your argument was that “KSA is actually the head of dar ul Islam, because all good muslims are supposed to do the haaj.” I pointed out that controlling Mecca did not make the state that did it the head of Islam and offered two historical examples of situations where substantial parts of the Islamic world rejected the authority of the state that at the time controlled Mecca (and Medina).
In the same thread you wrote that the KSA was “the Defender of the Faithful for a quarter of the global population.” I pointed out that that was not true. The title either refers to the caliph, which the ruler of the KSA isn’t, or is an honorific for a Muslim ruler which implies nothing about authority over Muslims elsewhere and is not unique to one ruler.
If you are going to make false statements about Islam and I notice, I am likely to call you on them. I find it striking that you came on here posing as someone well informed about Islam and then casually admitted ignorance of a fact that any Muslim, or anyone who had studied the history of Islam, would know–that the three Holy Cities are Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is one of them is of some importance in current Middle Eastern politics.
I know very little about the situation in Indonesia at the moment, so am in no position to either dispute or confirm your account of what the Saudis are up to there. Given how careless you are with facts, I’m not prepared to take your assertions as good evidence.
You have completely forgotten the context of the argument. The only two cities included in the Guardian of the Two Holy Sites are Mecca and Medina. You were disputing the power and influence of KSA in the Muslim world. One power KSA owns exclusively is the power of haaj, visiting the Kaaba in Mecca. Haaj is one of the 5 pillars, an obligation of every muslim. I linked an article explaining how KSA is exploiting the power of the haaj in Indonesia by building mosques and universities in Indonesia, and by giving young students scholarships to study under Wahhabi clerics.
You may dispute that KSA has the authority to assume the other title, “Defender of the Faithful”, but I do not think they care a whit about your opinion.
Brookings.
Weaponized steelman defense– “You are wrong on a point so I dont have to listen to anything you say”
I find, much like House Saud, that I do not care about your opinion either.
Inshallah I can block you somehow.
🙂
More precisely, you have been confidently wrong on multiple factual claims, so the fact that you say something is only weak evidence it is true.
I believe you can block me, although I’ve never had any need to figure out how. But that doesn’t keep me from seeing your comments and responding to them, it merely protects you from the embarrassment of reading my reply pointing out that something you said wasn’t true.
As I think someone else pointed out, you can be arrogant or you can be ignorant, but being both works poorly.
You didn’t, by the way, say whether I was correctly interpreting the quote of yours I started with.
You were being rude, and now you’re being ruder. Do yourself a favor and take the hint, rather than digging yourself deeper.
Reading OT79, I have updated towards onyomi’s position, and now believe that bintchaos is a deliberate troll.
Only a slight exaggeration–every Muslim who can accomplish it.
That, as you pointed out, includes Shia Muslims.
So, by your argument, Saudi Arabia is not only the head of Sunni Muslims, it’s the head of Shia Muslims as well.
You might want to let the Iranians know.
@Friedman
This is the statement I was responding to.
My position is that–
1. KSA is vastly MORE influential and therefore more powerful than DPRK. It is more populous in influence, although only marginally in territorial population.
2. KSA is vastly LESS trustworthy because right now KSA is working diligently to spread wahhabism while head-faking a new crack down on terror for Trump’s benefit, which is actually just Saudi exploitation of Trump in a 30 year-old contest for control of the GCC.
So I dont care.
I dont know what the Abbasids or Shia or Jerusalem have to do with this discussion other than you trying to show you are the resident Islam expert here.
Fine, be the expert.
idc.
As I tried to explain, what they have to do with is whether particular claims you made in support of your argument about the KSA were true.
You still have neither confirmed nor denied my conjecture about your approach–that you don’t think it matters whether the evidence you offer for a conclusion is true or not, as long as you believe the conclusion is. That fits your repeatedly ignoring or blowing off an argument of the form “this particular fact you assert isn’t true,” viewing it as chaff, a way of avoiding dealing with your conclusion.
I agree that CNN’s behavior here is bad, but according to the author’s twitter the apology was made before CNN contacted the gif-maker. Since CNN could have legally published the name anyway, I don’t see how it can be coercion for them to say ‘under present circumstances, we’re not publishing, but we might do so in the future if things change.’
I mean, I get that the argument would be ‘CNN is threatening to publish his name if he ever takes back his apology or offends them again’, but I would be more than a little surprised to see a New York court buy that without more supporting material.
I cannot, for the life of me, imagine this isn’t coercion. By internet meme standards, this thing is incredibly tame. I probably see over a dozen memes every day that are far more “offensive” than this one. No serious memer would ever apologize for something like this unless they were coerced somehow.
You are mixing up colloquial usage and a legally defined crime.
The New York Penal law doesn’t care at all what a reasonable memer (ha!) would or wouldn’t do.
Yeah, the author on twitter said Hanasshole had apologized before we called him, not contacted him. They could have e-mailed him.
I would have said he might have got scared when Trump tweeted it and the whole thing got so big, but apparently this began when he came onto Reddit to brag about being the originator of the thing.
So clearly something happened to scare him before CNN called him, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it were CNN e-mailing or writing him a threatening letter.
I, personally, do not care about the legal definition.
I am telling you this apology is not-genuine. I take it as seriously as I’d take an apology video made by an American soldier captured by ISIS (who assures us that he is being treated kindly and humanely and his apology is genuine and he felt this way far before his capture). I cannot “prove” CNN coerced this guy any more than we can prove ISIS coerces such victims. But it doesn’t matter. It’s overwhelmingly obvious to anyone with a functioning brain what is happening here.
Then why would you post in a sub-thread talking about the legal definition?
I, personally, do not care about whether or not Matt M thinks this apology is genuine.
Honestly, my only interest is whether or not this is a misdemeanor. It’s obviously morally pretty reprehensible.
Obvious to who? Not to CNN, apparently.
Does Brad agree that this is morally reprehensible behavior on their part?
I’ll note that on other forums, I’ve seen plenty of other people defend the notion that this apology is totally genuine and non-coerced.
We can’t tell from the outside if it’s genuine or forced, since he is faced with incentives that would cause him to apologize regardless of whether he really wanted to / felt bad about what he’d done.
I’m inclined to agree with you that coercion is likely, but this sort of shit does not help your cause at all.
@Matt M
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/03/ot79-open-road/#comment-519165
Facebook never fails to let me down. Just saw one with CNN logos photoshopped over the twin towers and Trump’s head onto an oncoming jet.
Think this one goes viral?
Q. What’s the difference between Donald Trump and CNN?
A. One is a thin-skinned bully whose obsessive pursuit of petty vendettas leads to self-inflicted damage. And the other is President of the United States.
What are “things” that could “change”? Most of “that” is his behavior. They sure seem to be threatening to dox him if he reverts his behavior, which seems to be straight-forward coercion. The other thing that could change is CNN’s knowledge of the past.
Well, knowing Kaczynski’s history, my first (or, at least, second) guess might have been his status as a private citizen. Didn’t Kaczynski make his name by digging up past statements and throwing them at campaigning politicos?
@Jordan D
There are a couple of different versions of this from CNN, and I think the only thing even halfway consistent with all of them is that he posted the apology and deleted his account after they initially contacted him but before he returned the call, so he was writing it under the conditions “CNN knows who I am and I don’t have any idea what they’re going to do with that information”
The entire class of blackmail/coercion crimes consists of attaching conditions to not publishing something that would otherwise be legal to publish. Even if (maybe especially – I think the federal definition of blackmail might actually require it) his own conduct may have been criminal.
There’s at least one other plausible explanation. CNN does have extensive resources, but they aren’t magic. This guy 1) took credit for an element in a major news story and 2) apparently left enough of a trail in his postings to lead back to his real identity. Anyone with access to the information in that trail (which he apparently partly deleted before hand) might have tracked him down too. Or gotten close enough for him to hear about it somehow.
Given the further attention, it would be surprising if his name doesn’t come out now one way or another.
Well, yes, but I think CNN could successfully argue that they’re not posting that to threaten him, but instead to say that, e.g., if he later runs for office or begins posting more stuff about CNN that they want to defend against, they don’t feel bound to avoid bringing this up. I’ve never practiced in New York, but my state has substantially identical language and the courts would not enforce this if CNN could show that they had a legitimate reason for this posting other than to silence the gif-maker.
(As a matter of ethics, I don’t think that finding out who made a stupid .gif is newsworthy, but nobody ever consults me about what to do News at.)
Then why not just say “CNN has withheld his identity at the present time” or even add on “CNN reserves the right to reveal his identity” but without the vaguely threatening shit? I can’t think of a good reason to include any of the other words they did, outside of them being true. Maybe as an explainer to people even more rabid than them, but fuck those people too.
You just legalized blackmail.
I have the legal right to publish some particular piece of information that would be damaging to you so I ask you for money in exchange for not publishing it. That’s textbook blackmail.
You have to be at least a little more specific than this, because you’ve also described something completely routine, as long as the agreement is worked out in a court or through arbitration. People hand over money in return for silence all the time.
This makes me want to photoshop a Temple of Doom heart-ripping-out GIF with CNN’s logo on it
Seriously, F these guys
Did you see the Data?
CNN is winning.
I don’t see any reason for the trend line to be inflected at this point.
All conservative strategies seem to be dependent on time travel to a magical land of the past.
Did you read the statement?
The fact that this (presumably) got past both the editorial board and legal department points to a serious lack of competence and/or perspective on the part off all involved. CNN may be more popular than Trump, but being popular didn’t help Gawker did it?
???
meaningless comment.
Do you think ethics matter any more? Democrats are learning to be Sinners.
All that matters is that in two divergent subpopulations without cross migration (Sewell Wright), only one is adding reps.
Yes, I think ethics matter. But even if I didn’t, competence arguably matters more. You can get pretty far as an evil dictator so long as the trains run on time and you don’t give your opponents easily exploitable lines of attack but CNN is clearly not in that position (ex 1 & 2).
As for “Democrats are learning to be sinners”, are you implying they weren’t “sinners” to begin with?
I don’t think that ethics matter at all. Everyone’s got his own ethics; what matters is what you can reasonably get away with doing in the real world. If CNN can blackmail random redditors and thereby benefit financially, they will keep doing it, regardless of how bad it makes you feel.
Yeah, I mean how is “here’s how we tracked down some guy on Reddit who made a meme” even a news story to begin with, even without the veiled threats? The level of tone deafness is breathtaking.
And it’s not like the GIF was someone being decapitated; it was a frickin pro wrestling match. It was funny. He shouldn’t have to apologize at all.
And now the author is on twitter defending himself saying “hey, this guy is middle-aged, not 15…” So that makes it okay to intimidate him? If anything, the “15 year old” part made it seem a little less sinister because it was like “little johnny learned his lesson,” not “we’ll doxx this dude if he makes fun of us again.”
You know, we have a guy in Congress who actually bodyslammed a journalist. Only it was a real bodyslam, not fake like in professional wrestling.
—
4chan et al have this thing where you can post arbitrarily vile things, but their one sacred value is maintaining anonymity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people will now try to dump on their sacred values, too. You know, for fun. I am sure they will understand, as they are familiar with the genre.
And Buzz Aldrin punched a moon-landing-denying journo who wouldn’t leave him alone. A press pass doesn’t give you the right to harass folk like a goddamn paparazzo. While I can’t morally condone physical responses, they’re understandable and it’s not like they’re the only ones in the wrong.
Not really. This is doxxing for profit, silencing dissent, or maybe petty revenge. 4chan could be accused of the last, but not really the former two.
In what way was the Congress-critter-turned-wrestler harassed? Here’s a witness who was in the next room:
“This happened behind a half closed door, so I didn’t see it all, but here’s what it looked like from the outside – Ben walked into a room where a local TV crew was set up for an interview with Gianforte. All of a sudden I heard a giant crash and saw Ben’s feet fly in the air as he hit the floor. Heard very angry yelling (as did all the volunteers in the room) – sounded like Gianforte…”
He was a public servant hopeful being interviewed or setup to be interviewed. In what way is this like the paparazzi/celebrity relationship? This is not about his private life being sold to the tabloids, this was about his actual positions as a guy in an election.
Gianforte just didn’t like unfavorable coverage from the Guardian. Obviously the logical step here is to slam the guy to the ground.
—
But sure, assault (did you know Gianforte was charged with assault?) is understandable. Trump’s meme video of him bodyslamming CNN is all just a joke.
I had heard the Guardian dude wasn’t taking the hint to go away. Should have verified that before posting. Not gonna take your sourceless word for it, but yeah poor rigor on me too.
Do you truly not understand the difference between “understandable” and “justifiable” or are you just deliberately conflating them to justify your anger?
ETA:
Good. Are you expecting me to be outraged by this for some reason?
I mean, sure, I understand Gianforte’s assault. I understand that in the context of his character as a thug with anger control problems who doesn’t belong in office. In that sense it’s understandable to me. I assume you meant something else.
—
But as you recall, this discussion is about Trump’s video and about how funny it is. I don’t think it’s that funny, because of guys like Gianforte.
All right, that makes sense. I think that it’s mildly funny in and of itself; that it doesn’t warrant darkly positive anticipation of memers getting what’s coming to them.
The part where the goddamn POTUS himself reposted it is what makes the whole ordeal a shameful farce. But we live in the bizarroland where that’s just any given Tuesday on Trump’s Twitterfeed, so I’m getting numb to it by now.
@Ilya Shpitser
To me it falls into the realm of “play stupid games win stupid prizes.” How much could you take of someone coming into your office and shoving a recorder into your face so they can try to get something they can use to disparage you and refusing to leave could you take before you hit him?
“Provocation” is still a defense. It’s harder to find a jury to agree these days because of all the After School Specials and what not, but we do not expect people to be perfectly rational automatons in the face of blatant hostility.
Extreme example, but if a white supremacist in a Klan robe goes into an NAACP rally and starts screaming “n****r n****r n****r!” at everyone and refuses to leave, should one of the attendees deck him? No, they should not. Violence is not acceptable. But on the jury I would never vote to convict the puncher of assault. Nor would I consider him a “thug” with “anger management issues” who’s unfit for political office.
@Conrad Honcho
Gee I wonder what else in this very discussion that could apply to that for some reason I can’t quite grasp you have a very different opinion on.
Maybe CNN’s President should have bodyslammed the memer.
Brad, is there a difference between hot blooded anger and cold blooded revenge?
Also, have I said either of them are right or good?
I didn’t even know about the real-life bodyslam and am not certain the creator of the meme did, or was intending to reference it. I’m also skeptical Trump was thinking of that when he re-tweeted it.
In any case, the meme doesn’t depict Trump hurting a reporter. It depicts Trump comically pretending to pummel CNN the entity, as represented by a giant logo for a head. And it wasn’t even a meme depicting real violence against a cartoon entity. It was a meme riffing off a type of violence everyone knows is a theatrical spectacle.
Knowledge of the news of the actual bodyslam puts it in a slightly different light, but it’s still hard for me to imagine anyone intended or perceived the original meme as condoning violence against actual reporters, and I don’t believe CNN’s concern is genuine if that’s why they claimed they did this (it’s because it’s embarrassing, not threatening, is why).
@Conrad Honcho
What is your opinion on the punching of Richard Spencer? If it is condemnatory, where can I get a copy of the rules on when assault is reprehensible and when it is people getting their understandable-if-not-actually-just deserts?
@rlms
I can’t speak for Honcho, but I think we can distinguish between
1) Richard Spencer giving an interview
2) Richard Spencer quietly lifting weights at the gym
3) Richard Spencer giving a Heil Hitler salute at a Holocaust remembrance event.
Spencer-punching in cases 1 and 2 should be completely verboten. Spencer-punching in case 3 (which hasn’t actually happened, BTW) is excusable though not justifiable.
Kekism is a religion of peace.
Getting body slammed occasionally is just part of the reality of being a journalist and journalists should just get used to it because there’s no turning back the clock on progress.
“But on the jury I would never vote to convict the puncher of assault.”
It wasn’t a punch, and he was already charged and I think sentenced, so at the very least your intuitions aren’t shared here. I think you are barking up the wrong tree if you expect people to find bodyslams in the face of ??provocation?? a relatable act.
Gianforte’s story about the reporter barging into his office is a lie by the way. He was being interviewed in another room. Also, there is a very easy cure for that sort of thing — stop the interview and call security. That’s what normal people do.
Spencer punching in any of those cases is a crime, and should be. “He was expressing offensive political ideas” is not a justification for assault, and we don’t want to live in a society where it is.
@The Nybbler
To my knowledge, option 2 hasn’t occurred, so it is completely irrelevant. I can’t really see any important differences between option 1 and Gianforte bodyslamming a journalist, other than the fact that the thuggery of a congressman is more notable than that of a random protestor.
IMO Spencer-punching is less empathize-able due to the proximity and planning. If (if!) a journo is acting like a paparazzo and getting in your face about it, lashing out is understandable as a heat-of-the-moment response, condemnable as it is. And they probably should resign over it, lord knows politicians have been made to for less. I can understand the emotions behind the person who comes home to their spouse cheating on them and reacts with violence, but I’d still vote to convict them.
Hearing some guy you don’t like is giving a talk to people you don’t like so driving out to protest and maybe take a swing at him… that’s premeditated, so gets no sympathy from me.
I think the media cycle is short enough these days that it is possible to publish an article in hot blooded anger.
@The Nybbler
You did great though. I would have said exactly what you said.
@ Conrad Honcho
I hope all further posts by you start with the phrase
“I can’t speak for Conrad Honcho”
Well, okay, losing your temper and smacking someone is understandable. But it’s also:
a. Assault and battery, which can and should have some criminal and civil consequences.
b. A demonstration that you don’t have all that much self-control.
That second one might be pretty important in deciding whether or not to put you into positions of power where you might be making snap decisions under a lot of stress. And this is also something that, at least to my mind, has a very different flavor when done by a 50-year old man than when done by a 20-year-old man. A 20-year-old hothead might get wiser with the addition of gray hairs; the 50-year-old hothead is probably a lot less likely to calm down over time.
I wonder if a lot of his defenders are implicitly making the following argument…
We don’t know what was said between the two, whether there was any history, etc. But we do know that this man has led a successful enough life such that he was in a position to get elected to Congress. What are the odds that can happen to a person who is such a hothead that they think nothing of going around assaulting every person who causes them minor annoyance? The odds seem very small. Therefore, it is likely that this reporter did something to provoke him, and therefore, the bodyslam was likely at least partially justified.
And I actually think this is a coherent argument. The alternative is hard to believe…. that someone with the patience and self-control of a four year old managed to get himself elected to Congress (without having the last name Kennedy)?
Perhaps you have a higher opinion of Congressmen than I do….
Well in actuality it will come down to tribal loyalty.
Red tribe will believe there’s no way WE would elect/almost elect someone with temperament of a four-year old.
Blue tribe says “of course that’s what red tribe would do! why should anyone be surprised?”
There’s an audio recording of the assault. Here’s a transcript, with a link to the audio.
You could postulate that Jacobs did something physical after “Okay, speak with Shane”, but that’s largely incompatible with this account from Fox News reporters who were present:
Based on that evidence, it seems very hard to make the case that Ben Jacobs was out of line in a way that would “justify” physical assault.
I think the fact that the same user had also published an antisemitic chart of allegedly Jewish CNN journalists was already out there before CNN got involved with the story.
So he’s an obnoxious little shit. Still not grounds for doxing.
(As a side note, as a Jew I feel like charges of antisemitism have been flung around by the ADL and its ilk for so long as to become meaningless. At this point Nazism has been dead for decades, we’re accepted by everyone who matters, and the few Western antisemites who remain are more properly mocked than condemned. And I just don’t see why non-Jews should care.)
But the fact that HanAssholeSolo is racist or antisemitic isn’t why he’s under threat of being punished. He’s under threat of being punished for embarrassing CNN with the wrestling meme. The method of punishment is exposing him as a racist. If he were a sex pervert they’d expose him as a sex pervert and if he were a tax cheat they’d expose him as a tax cheat.
The story is not “antisemitic meme goes viral, who made this thing?” The story is “man who helped Trump say mean things to CNN is a bad person.” The lesson is do not fuck with CNN or they will find your dirty laundry and punish you. It just happens that this guy’s laundry was easy to find and very dirty.
May I ask a question? Why is preserving anonymity a “sacred value?”
Who gets to decide how obnoxious a shit someone has to be before their name should be made public? Is there an honor code somewhere for these things? This honor code is what you seem to be consulting here.
Let’s say it wasn’t CNN, let’s say it was some other private guy with beef. What then?
I’d say you should never be allowed to reveal a persons name because anything that is suffieciently bad should be handled by a judge but I live in a country with anti-hate-speech laws.
Ok, but what’s your moral intuition here. I looked into this, and I don’t think revealing names is illegal (but it’s complicated, and definitely illegal for some types of info). So it’s not a law thing, it’s an ethics thing, right?
@Ilya Shpitser
Yes.
1) I don’t think preserving anonymity being a sacred value is the issue here. Assume preserving anonymity is a neutral value. There’s neither value in preserving anonymity or removing it. In this case, doing so hurts HanAssholeSolo. The one and only reason CNN is interested in removing his anonymity is to hurt him, because he was a participant in the mocking of CNN. It’s not like CNN goes around trying to unmask every racist asshole on the internet. I don’t think they’ve ever unmasked any random racist assholes before. They went after this one for contributing to something that was not racist or antisemitic or anything like that, it was merely negative for CNN. So the issue is CNN’s vindictiveness. Removing the person they want to hurt’s anonymity just happens to be the method they have to enact their vengeance, so anonymity is not central to the issue.
2) I do think the preservation of anonymity is a sacred value because Truth is a sacred value. Anonymity allows one to speak Truth to power. Without it one would have to already have power (or be completely desperate) in order to speak. The Founding Fathers used anonymous speech to criticize the Crown without getting hanged.
The line is true threats. The definition of a true threat varies by jurisdiction, so it winds up being like pornography: you know it when you see it. Generally something of the form of “so immediately threatening to life or property that it cannot be ignored by a reasonable person.”
Really it’s not. I’m saying that the bad thing in this is CNN not acting as journalists but as persecutors. Doxxing for racism (if he doesn’t behave as they like in the future) is just the method of their punishment, but it wouldn’t be any different if they used their investigative powers to find him cheating on his wife and inform her, or if they paid a kid $5 to put poop in his mailbox. Doxxing and racism are non-central here, because nothing about the offense (anti-CNN wrestling meme) had anything to do with racism.
That private guy would probably be prosecuted for blackmail. Coercing others into behavior you want under threat of revealing their secrets. That is the definition of blackmail. CNN will not be prosecuted because corporations are above the law.
Let’s say a Democrat makes a gif that embarrasses Fox News, so Fox News digs through their online history and discovers that he’s cheating on his wife. “Fox News has discovered that the creator of the awful anti-Fox meme is a philanderer. That’s the kind of dirt bag who supports Democrats and disparages the fine people here at Fox News. But after we sent him an email, he promised never to do it again, and thought this may be a warning to other people out there not to engage in philandery or disparaging Fox News. Fox News has decided not to reveal the philanderer’s private information but reserves the right to do so in the future.”
That okay with you? Cheating on your wife is a pretty scumbag thing to do. Deserves what’s coming to him, agreed?
Honestly, I feel like the whole debate is pointless. The guy is going to get doxxed. That’s inevitable at this point. Left-wing hackers may do it. Some CNN employee may leak it anonymously. I don’t know how, but there’s too many people out there who want to know who he is and I doubt he covered his tracks exceptionally well.
Someone will find out and it will become public. CNN was probably hoping/expecting it would happen before people even got around to realizing their disclaimer was technically blackmail.
“Removing the person they want to hurt’s anonymity just happens to be the method they have to enact their vengeance, so anonymity is not central to the issue.”
Ok so is the point here that we are worried about powerful interests being able to punish people (the Thiel/Gawker affair is another recent example)? In that case it was sort of more complicated because Thiel used uncontroversially legal methods to enact his vengeance on Gawker, because Gawker was incredibly stupid.
I agree that we should worry about this.
But I think my advice to this kid is the same as my advice to Gawker: “maybe don’t be so shit next time.” In fact, I don’t think enacting vengeance by lawful means is quite so simple. One could probably dig up some dirt fairly easily, but it’s only really damaging if you have been either exceptionally stupid, or sort of evil.
The problem we’re dealing with is that our culture and especially our social intuitions are not set up to handle the volume of easily accessible public or quasi-public discourse that anyone who’s active online generates. The Internet has moved stuff that would previously have become publicly known through gossip (which we are culturally suspicious of, for good reason) into the realm of public statements, and that’s tilted the balance of power in social conflict far towards offense.
Ten years ago this was only a problem for a few hopeless nerds, who no one cared about, and for people whose business involves dealing with large amounts of possibly-sensitive information from the general public, viz. journalists, medical practitioners, lawyers, and clergy. Every one of the latter has developed strong anonymity norms.
Now it’s everyone’s problem, and we’re starting to see similar norms evolving in the wild. I don’t know if they’re perfect. I certainly don’t think they’re sacred. But they’re trying to solve a real problem, and short of a credible death threat or something in that neighborhood, willfully bucking them because you personally feel some anonymous commentator is being a jerk is, at the very least, hella rude.
I agree with you. “People in glass houses should not throw stones.” That said, CNN sending the message “make fun of us in a highly visible way and we’ll ruin your life” is…I honestly don’t know. I think we’re in uncharted territory here. I don’t know what happens next.
The problem is that he’s not really getting punished for “being shit.” Millions of people are shit on the internet every day and suffer no punishment, and CNN seems fine with that. As has been pointed out, they are not part of some huge project to doxx every racist on the Internet.
He’s getting punished for being critical of CNN. THAT is the crime. Racism, anti-semitism, whatever, is just the thing they happened to find to justify it. If he wasn’t those things, they’d find something else. Short of being a perfect person who has never done wrong, the relevant example being made here is not “don’t be racist” but rather “don’t criticize CNN”
This is the general problem with causing the internet to fall on someone–99.999% of the time, the same crime gets zero punishment; every now and then, someone gets their life wrecked. This looks very little like justice, and a lot more like burning a witch as a form of public entertainment.
The problem with CNN’s actions has to do with the huge power imbalance. And the irony here is that this is also the problem with Trump putting out joke memes about beating up CNN. It’s a better world when powerful people do *not* feel entitled to crush much weaker people who piss them off–enough so that we ought to push back on that even at the very beginning, where it can be waved off as a joke or showing mercy to some racist creep online.
Is CNN really that much weaker than Trump? I don’t see that as a vast power imbalance (particularly given that the entire rest of the government doesn’t seem inclined to allow Trump to do very much of what he wants) at all.
Also, if Trump is fighting CNN, he’s doing it on their turf: media and public opinion. Yes, he technically has more power as the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces…but he’s not sending the Marines into the CNN Tower. In the battlefield of media and public opinion, Trump is the underdog.
Or at least, he would be if CNN didn’t stop constantly shooting itself in the foot
1. I don’t think there should be much difference between what you do in the heat of the moment and what you pre plan. That’s just rewarding people for having bad tempers. Also senators should be held to higher standards and don’t bodyslam people without good reason isn’t even a low standard.
2. One difference between this and gawker case is that this guy was some random loser and going after them makes you look crazy when you’re a big institution or celebrity. If someone’s hitting you from your weight class you have more of an excuse.
After thinking about this more: independently of the specific thing with that reddit idiot and CNN, what I think the larger takeaway here is this.
4chan et al were these obscure corners of the internet where folks could engage in their troll hobby in relative obscurity and protect their anonymity. Now that people will conflate (possibly fairly, possibly not) vile alt-right stuff online and these types of communities more generally, probably there will be attack and pushback in general on them (in the only way 4chan et al will care about, which is revealing identities).
—
People who compare 4chan 20-somethings posting pictures of Pepe gassing Jews, or whatever the latest fad is down there, to Thomas Jefferson writing anonymously about the excesses of the Crown elicit an eyeroll from me.
There is no “truth to power” issue in that type of trolling. If you want to defend the principle of anonymity in the community with that type of content, the argument you have to make is something like: “whenever you defend a principle, you by necessity find yourself defending scoundrels.” And then people might still disagree. Free speech isn’t an absolute, either, and privacy isn’t even explicitly enumerated in the Constitution as a right, to my knowledge. A lot of that content really comes dangerously close to hate speech, especially now that it’s basically mainstream to say “hey maybe we should ethnically cleanse America of non-whites and Jews in order to save it!” Which is still slightly hard to believe for me, but that’s the timeline we live in, apparently.
As someone said above: “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
If they did that, they’d deserve the eyeroll. The Declaration of Independence was not anonymous. The usual anonymous-speech example is the Federalist papers, authored by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay as “Publius”.
“Truth to power” is a modern left-wing concept; anonymous speech does not rely on it. Certainly Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were powerful enough in their own right.
Approximately every time someone says that, there’s some central example of free speech they would shut down if only that pesky principle wasn’t in the way. “Free speech isn’t absolute, therefore this isn’t free speech”.
Sure, it’s definitely not so noble. It’s more comparable to posting pics of (or photoshopping) the king of Thailand in embarrassing situations. It serves no productive purpose but why the hell does it deserve to be shut down?
Try trope 3
Neither is marriage but that doesn’t seem to stop people from promoting the idea that everyone should have access to it.
Remember folks, if it’s not in the Constitution it’s not a right, and certainly not something people can desire for society.
Oh hey trope 1.
No it isn’t. You should try hatereading less fringe bullshit.
Ilya Shipster:
First, it’s clear that CNN doesn’t have any legal obligation to withhold the troll’s identity. They can publish or not as they decide. So what we’re talking about here is not about laws[1], it’s about what kind of behavior we should try to encourage via social norms and social pressure.
Second, I agree that a lot of people use the relative anonymity of the internet to be jackasses of various levels of nastiness, ranging from being intentionally offensive (which isn’t illegal but is kinda embarrassing) all the way up to plausible death threats or SWATting, (which is illegal and ideally would end with the perps sitting in a jail cell somewhere).
Third, I think that there is still a lot of value in both anonymity in political / social discussions, and in the existence of weird mostly-isolated little communities where people discuss ideas that are creepy or offensive to the neighbors.
Politics, like war, is about winning. One pretty effective technique in politics is to silence some ideas by making a big nasty example of people who express them–doxing them, mobbing them online, getting them fired, etc.
I think it’s possible to move the world toward one in which this tactic is less (or more) effective and widespread. I don’t think it’s possible to move the world toward one in which this tactic is more carefully applied, or applied only to really bad stuff that maybe 90%+ of the SSC commentariat would agree is genuinely nasty. If the tactic is available, it will be used by amoral political actors against their opponents, whether their opponents are monsters or jackasses or thoughtful people with weird viewpoints.
Short form: I see some value in pushing back on disclosing identities of people who express offensive ideas anonymously on the internet, even though most of those people are expressing really awful ideas (and often ones chosen to be offensive rather than ideas they actually believe).
[1] I don’t think the stuff that’s come out so far would come anywhere close to meeting the requirements for actually violating blackmail laws, though I’ll admit I’m not any kind of expert on those laws so maybe I’m just wrong.
Minor sideline: I have never seen anyone anywhere I’d consider remotely mainstream proposing ethnically cleansing the US of all nonwhites and Jews.
“One pretty effective technique in politics is to silence some ideas by making a big nasty example of people who express them–doxing them, mobbing them online, getting them fired, etc.”
Thinking nasty things about CNN is not one of those ideas.
Did anyone say it was? I’m pretty sure that was a description of CNN’s behaviour.
This paragraph is really terrible. On the balance I don’t think they should have posted his name, but at least I could see arguments for why they might have.
I can’t see any legitimate argument for the position that the newsworthiness of his identity turns on his apology and promise never to do it again. This is pure pettiness.
That’s some Gawker-level dickishness. CNN has been utterly unwatchable since Jeff Zucker took over – are they still talking about Flight 370 or have viewers finally gotten sick of it? – and now clearly their morals have declined as much as their journalistic quality.
Could the president go after Time Warner on RICO grounds?
If there’s a colorable argument that this constitutes extortion under New York law, then any evidence that higher-ups at CNN ordered the extortion would constitute racketeering activity under federal law. A second such act at any point during CNN’s existence would then be enough to move forward with a RICO case. Which means that the heads of CNN could be threatened with jailtime.
I’ve been disappointed in the administration before but this is their chance to slay one of the giants of the MSM. The case would almost certainly be thrown out but the investigation alone could be enough to bring the current media culture down.
Edited to add: As Trump is learning right now, a federal investigation can create new crimes even if the original charge has no chance of sticking. Catch a few CNN top brass telling inconsequential lies to an investigator and you can slap them with a felony charge of interfering with a federal investigation. He could collect a lot of scalps that way.
Nabil:
I don’t suppose Trump thinks this way, but I would find a politically motivated use of the Justice Dept to go after some hostile media source really chilling[1]. If that becomes a normal part of life in the Trump administration, it will also become a standard part of the political toolkit, wielded by Democrats as well as Republicans. There isn’t some edict from God that guarantees that the US will always be a free society.
But Trump doesn’t seem to worry about precedents much. He seems not to be concerned with damaging institutions or violating norms that exist for some reason that he doesn’t immediately see. My sense is that a huge amount of the practical stuff that keeps the US functioning well is this institutional stuff and these norms, and once you bulldoze them, they can easily just disappear and leave us all a lot worse off.
[1] I also think there would be enough institutional resistance to this, between the Justice Department and the courts, that it would never actually work. But a more competent and ruthless Trump could probably do it, and we’d miss that bit of Chesterton’s fence after it had been bulldozed away.
The thing about having a civil society is that it takes two to tango.
If one side is tip-toeing around so as to avoid damaging the foundations of American civil society and the other isn’t, then you’re effectively rewarding the carelessness of the latter.
The norms underlying our society have been systematically and deliberately undermined by generations of radical political movements. In each case, the original radicals won and become the new mainstream at the cost of another chunk of norms. This generation’s radicals have already gotten a lot of what they wanted and are gearing up to repeat the cycle.
I’d rather not break American civil society. But it’s on it’s way out one way or another. Hopefully we can win quickly and salvage what’s left of it afterwards.
Nabil, the risk of a tit for tat strategy is that it’s easy to sink to your perception of the other side’s misconduct instead of the conduct that a third party might see, which produces a race to the bottom.
I think if you’re going to do tit for tat in a subjective area, you should make a special effort to try to interpret the other side charitably.
@J Mann,
I’m not very well-schooled in game theory but I’m skeptical to what degree strategies for an iterated prisoner’s dilemma generalize to the real world.
The way I was taught growing up is to never start a fight, but to always be ready to end one. You don’t respond proportionately: you respond with the required amount of force to make the other guy lay down and stop fighting.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Not that I’ve had much experience with this sort of thing since leaving high school. But what I learned growing up is that it’s important to start a few fights for a couple reasons. There’s the obvious one where if people know that you might punch them, they’re not going to mess with you as freely. And eventually you’re going to get into a fight, so you want to be the one to choose it, since the meaner groups do have a tendency to pick on people who won’t fight back, so if you get in a couple fights first, you’re less of a target.
@Charles F,
So the “beat a guy up on your first day in prison” philosophy?
I don’t know how applicable that is to normal life. I’m a big guy so I might have a warped perspective: most of the guys you’re talking about gravitate toward easier targets.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Well, I wasn’t exactly qualified to beat anyone up, so more like punch some guy just to prove you’re willing to resort to violence, and then get beaten up for it. Repeat at least once to send the message that you’re not overly afraid of losing. And more like when people start testing you than as soon as you’re there, but pretty much the same idea.
Unfortunately (?) I don’t think it’s very applicable to adult life. But then again, however ready you think you are to end a fight, the person who decides to be the aggressor thinks that they’re better than you, and being the one reacting is hard.
This thread seems like it ought to be relevant.
@hlynkacg
I think if we’re talking about how to avoid escalating to a fight, it’s worth mentioning that there are a few different kinds of encounters. For a better discussion of it from somebody with way more experience, I recommend Meditations on Violence, but here’s my take. (As I implied earlier, I’ve successfully avoided serious fights for a while now)
a. Posturing (a.k.a the monkey dance). Somebody (often a belligerent drunk) doesn’t like you. You bumped into them or took “their” seat or just looked at them wrong. Now they’re going to hold eye contact, push your chest, and then punch you. This is the situation where averting your eyes and backing off (projecting lower status but not fear) is okay. They win, they’re dominant, no fighting necessary. If they’re really belligerent or you don’t back down, expect a big looping right haymaker after they shove you. Any self-defense class will give you some way to respond to that, but deescalation works well here.
b. Intimidation/feeling you out. You’re not entirely sure whether they’re mugging you or begging, or whether talking or picking a fight. IME more often done by a pair. Involves not very aggressively invading your personal space a bit (one common tactic I’ve seen is faux stumbling towards you) and if there are two, moving to either side of you so it’s hard to watch them both. This is the time for maintaining calm confidence, establishing a bit of space without (initially) retreating past a normal distance, moving to keep both of them in sight, and generally not showing weakness. If you say you’re not looking for trouble, they’ve found an easy place to make trouble.
c. Group monkey dance. No personal experience with this in adult life, thankfully. If there’s a group of people posturing, it can lead to some one upmanship to your detriment. You can’t just defer to the person in the lead because then the person below them will take a swing and it all escalates. And you probably can’t radiate enough calm confidence to stare down a group of more than a few people unless you’re a very impressive person. Just awful. Practice running away really fast I guess.
d. Traditional mugging (knife or gun). Also no personal experience. Just give them your stuff if it’s an option. Don’t go with them to a secondary location if there’s any way to avoid it, it doesn’t end well. Not sure if it’s any use in practice, but self-defense classes will tell you to toss your wallet on the ground and that if they look at the wallet, they’re probably after money, but if they look around for witnesses, you need to start preparing for them to try to harm you.
e. Violent mugging. (probably not knives or guns, maybe a bat) Again, no personal experience. Sometimes it’s easier to beat somebody up before they have a chance to resist. Stunning/damaging them and then demanding money or bringing them to your secondary location. The important thing is to “beat the freeze” and then respond as violently as you know how. Every moment you spend taking damage before you respond makes it more likely you’ll completely lose control of the situation.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, do read Meditations on Violence. It’s very readable. Told from a practical point of view, with very little massaging to try to sell a clean framework. Covers a pretty wide variety of ideas (without the best organization, unfortunately) And the author is just pretty interesting in general.
@ albatross
While I agree with you on the whole I feel the need to point out that Obama joked about sicing the IRS on his political opponents and that when the IRS was caught doing exactly that it was treated by most of the media as a non-scandal so I’m not sure that particular fence hasn’t already been bulldozed.
If it were up to me, I’d have the DOJ issue a public statement to the effect of…
“We saw that, and seriously considered filing charges. However, in the interests of supporting a free press the DOJ has decided to let this particular incident slide on the understanding any further misbehavior on the part of CNN or it’s affiliates will be prosecuted to the maximal extent of the law”.
…The intent being to (hopefully) reestablish the fence, without de facto legalizing extortion.
Is this the part where we pretend that groups of people who name themselves after how much they hate taxes should not be assumed to be more likely to be tax-evaders than anyone else?
Do you mean that the IRS was auditing them on their own initiative, because they seemed like the sort of people who would evade taxes, or that the president should be allowed to pick a crime that some of their opponents might plausibly commit more than average and start investigating whether any of them might have committed that crime?
If it’s the former that seems unlikely to me to be what was going on, but I don’t have a huge problem with neutral profiling.
The latter seems more likely to have been what was going on, and even if it’s true that the targeted groups committed enough tax fraud to justify the profiling, I don’t think we should encourage targeted investigations against political opponents.
Given the phenomenon of “limousine liberals” who demand higher taxes generally, yet still employ armies of accountants to minimize their own individual taxes (and take advantage of every so-called-loophole in the book), it doesn’t seem to be a given that conservative groups (even ones that may have something related to taxation being evil within their names) are more likely to evade taxes than liberal ones.
Wasn’t Al Sharpton once under investigation for tax evasion? Bruce Springsteen famously benefits from generous farm subsidies for property he owns but is never present at.
@ random832
No, this is part where we (hopefully) reach a compromise where Republicans agree not to sic the DOJ on the Democrats’ allies and Democrats agree not to sic the IRS on Republican allies because the alternative is treat using the organs of the state to attack political opponents as “fair game” and that’s likely to turn ugly.
As I recall, the scandal was about the division of the IRS that regulates nonprofits. There are several categories of nonprofit organization (charities, civic groups, professional football leagues, etc.), none of which are subject to corporate income tax, but only contributions to charities are tax-deductible.
One rule that applies to charities but not to other types of nonprofit is that charities cannot engage in lobbying or other political activity. So the ACLU, for instance, is a civic group, not a charity, and contributions to the ACLU are not tax-deductible. They have an affiliated charity, the ACLU Foundation, to which contributions are tax-deductible, but they can’t be used for political activity. The ACLU and the Foundation have to keep their finances separate in order to avoid falling afoul of tax law and being subject to major penalties. Clear?
Now, circa 2009 there were several newly-formed organizations with “Tea Party” in their names that claimed to be charities. Since charities can’t engage in political activities, and “Tea Party” is a political term, the IRS was suspicious that these groups truly qualified as charities, and in internal communications listed some political terms that would flag a proposed charity for further screening before approval. (The list of terms also included left-leaning terms like “Progressive”, but since it was only used to flag new applications “Tea Party” groups got the most flak.)
Now, there’s a colorable argument that the IRS was just trying to uphold the law, and there’s no sign that these were orders from on high directly targeted at conservatives. On the other hand, I can’t rule out the theory that this was a clever plot to enforce a neutral regulation in a neutral-looking manner that just “coincidentally” turns out to hit conservatives worse.
But for the record, this was not a “tax audit” in the common sense of the term, nobody was required to pay more in taxes, and there is no evidence that any organization was wrongly denied charity status, some just had their rulings delayed by a few months.
There were something like seven hard drives that simultaneously(ish) failed, making it impossible for the IRS to hand over emails related to the issue. (Or maybe it was seven employees whose email histories were unrecoverable) That makes me a little bit skeptical that the orders weren’t at least from on high-er than they were willing to admit, though I have no great reason to believe it involved any person in particular. (They might even have been covering up something entirely unrelated)
Not sure what to do about plausibly decentralized, accidental targeting of opponents, but trying to explain away one side’s attempts while asking the other to cut it out probably won’t work. (Not saying that’s what you’re doing, just that I’m making an effort not to make excuses for the left (possibly) doing this sort of thing)
Wut.
The NFL is no longer non-profit, but when I went to law school they were. The teams never were though.
IIRC the NFL is not non-profit, but it does have a unique/specific exemption from anti-trust statues.
Whether that is correct I don’t know. But the central figure took the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid testifying to Congress, which strongly suggests that there was evidence she wished to conceal.
@Charles F
Sounds implausible. If that’s the excuse I agree it’s extremely suspicious.
Sounds extremely plausible. This is government IT we’re talking about. A “small” detail like this can mean the difference between Watergate and a nothingburger.
@Gobbobobble
Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(6), read it and weep!
My recollection is that pretty much all of the conservative organizations in question were declaring 501(c)(4) status, the same as the ACLU, meaning they can lobby and prosyletize until the cows come home, but aren’t allowed to have electioneering as a primary activity. (The IRS arguably has a partial excuse here when it comes to the groups that used the actual name “Tea Party”– that word “party”.)
30% of the targeted groups were 501(c)(3) (89/298).
@BBA
Seems like it’s (a little bit) closer to the seven hard drives situation based on this. They claimed two separate hard drive failures early on, then that article talks about five more employees who had had hard drive issues. They asked about 82 employee’s emails though. So it’s a far cry from the version where they asked about seven drives and wouldn’t you know it, all of them crashed.
hlynkacg says:
Absolutely. The next Democratic administration is the earliest opportunity for that though because the last one did sic the IRS on Republican allies and Republicans refraining from doing something similar establishes the precedent that Democrats can do that with no repercussions. To have a civilized norm you have to establish that collective punishment will fall on the side that breaks the norm. Once the punishment is established then the norm is established (or removed entirely if the side who broke the norm chooses to persist).
That’s an interesting alternate history. Here in this timeline, the IRS investigated more liberal organizations than conservative. The media spent weeks breathlessly reporting every twist and turn in a non-scandal which will now live forever in half-remembered repetitions on the Internet.
Could you be a little more precise in your claim, preferably with a link to the data? I don’t know if you mean that they investigated fifty out of a hundred conservative organizations applying and sixty out of a thousand liberal ones, or if you mean that they investigated lots of liberal organizations and promptly found they all qualified, a smaller number of conservative ones and took many months deciding whether they did, or …
You think that is consistent with the central IRS person involved refusing to testify on the grounds that doing so might incriminate her? The obvious explanation is either that she was doing something illegal or that she was concealing something she or others had done which would look very bad if revealed. Do you have a different explanation consistent with your view of the story?
hlynkacg:
I agree that was bad behavior, and I’m glad it caused some powerful people at least some heartburn. Similarly, the Clinton administration had a scandal involving somehow accidentally ending up with FBI files of a bunch of their political opponents. I don’t really think that got enough attention or pushback–it always seemed to me that this was about a thousand times more concerning that whether Clinton was sleeping with one of the the interns.
@Albatross
Yes I remember that, but I also remember it as simply one in a long string of similar scandals. What you know, or what you find concerning, is not as important as what you can prove in court. The significance of the Lewinsky affair wasn’t that he had diddled an intern, it was the existence of a ironclad proof that he’d lied under oath. Perjury is to Clinton what Tax Evasion was to Al Capone.
In any case I’d rather not go any further down this particular road.
Agreed. On the list of productive uses of our time, a rehash of the Clinton Wars seems like it’s *way* far down the list.
I was honestly shocked that CNN’s story includes a threat to dox some doofus for offensive reddit postings. (I’m taking CNN’s word that this guy’s history includes more offensive material than the wrestling gif, although I probably shouldn’t.)
Have any lefty authors opined on this, or is it all Breitbart and Washington Times?
I guess to be fair, some of the righty sites name people like the screaming Yalie woman in the Christakis video, so maybe media doxxing is the new normal.
FWIW, on other forums, I’ve seen various people post screenshots (I’ve made no attempt to verify accuracy) of this guy making all sorts of horrible comments about blacks, jews, Muslims, etc. Pretty much the most extreme stuff you can imagine.
If accurate, his behavior in this case makes perfect sense. Even if the CNN GIF is ridiculously minor compared to other things he’s done, it’s the thing CNN is mad at him for and they are the ones with the power to make him permanently unemployable, if they so choose.
These “horrible comments about jews” that are the “most extreme stuff you can imagine” are an image that shows who at CNN is Jewish* – ya know, exactly like how progressives report on the distributions of racial representation in everything.
* Haven’t checked the accuracy of the claims in the image.
The fact-checking on the CNN picture is exactly as good as you would expect from such an upstanding, thoughtful fellow. Here’s one example of an Arab Christian being included.
From screenshots I’ve seen that was the tamest of things. I also saw explicitly racist things against blacks as well as calls to kill all Muslims. Parts of that may be hyperbole or attempts at trolling or whatever, but let’s not pretend he was just pointing out “facts.”
Note, I don’t think any of that is newsworthy. CNN is taking revenge on him for embarrassing them, and the method of said revenge is exposing his racism, but if he were a sex pervert or a tax cheat they’d be exposing that instead.
I would say that’s the problem, yes. It’s like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. CNN isn’t investigating racism or antisemitism on the Internet to discover who’s doing it and why, nor were any of his racist or antisemitic memes newsworthy (as in, they were not viral or popular, and if anything all CNN has done is invoke the Streisand Effect). CNN can’t attack HanAssholeSolo for making a meme embarrassing them, so they’ll get him some other way. The lesson is the same: do not fuck with your betters at CNN or they will find some way to wreck you. It just happens to be that in HanAssholeSolo’s case the way to wreck him was very easy to find and effective. But I’m sure if he’d been a sex pervert or a tax cheat or whatever it’d be the same story.
Is there another kind?
Yes.
New York Times had an article on it.
Vox. WaPo.
Thanks –
1) I was going to argue with whether WaPo is a lefty site, but I can see it.
2) I never thought I’d write this, but that Vox article is pretty good.
The Vox article is good, so of course the writer is being attacked by left-wing journos over it (including Sam Biddle).
I think the Vox article was good, but 2/3rds of it was still on the topic of “why doxxing is bad” rather than “why news outlets acting vindictively towards people who mock them is bad.” The doxxing for racism was just the method of revenge. If CNN’s revenge for the wrestling meme (which was not racist or antisemitic in itself) had been to put a sack of dog poop on his front porch and light it on fire, I don’t think 2/3rd of their article would have been about the dangers of flaming dog poop. They’re missing the meta (corporate media giant blackmailing random critic) for the object (doxxing is bad).
@J Mann
Washington Post is probably about as left-wing as the NYT is. Which is to say, by US standards, it’s left-of-centre.
Popehat
Thanks, all!
I think it’s pretty clearly standard legal covering your ass boilerplate. They’d didn’t think it was newsworthy to reveal his identity given the facts that they knew at the time. Those facts are obviously not set in stone and they’re not giving him blanket anonymity. For example, if this guy ran for elective office that he was doing this sort of thing is something voters would like to know.
The idea that CNN would try to extort some nobody about some troll memes is frankly silly. It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of others doing the same thing. The news story is that the President is wasting his time surfing the Internet finding this sort of meme and thinks it’s the sort of thing he should be sharing with the American people.
There was no need need for any such covering of asses. There is no legal principle that would bar CNN from naming him in a future article after not naming him in this one.
Both the “reserve the right” sentence and the entire proceeding “we aren’t naming him because he apologized” paragraph are garbage journalism. There’s no legal angle that changes that analysis.
I agree extortion isn’t the right frame to look at this through, but it is extremely petty and unprofessional.
I would actually agree that it’s an ass-covering, but it’s a weird amalgam of a legal ass-covering combined with an ass-covering intending to signal to their blue-tribe base that they totally hate this guy and totally will give him the life-destroying doxxing he deserves if he violates PC norms ever again.
Please keep in mind, half my Facebook feed is filled with people who are enraged at CNN for not destroying the dude’s life. Because he’s a racist piece of shit who is helping Trump destroy the first amendment. He deserves to be punished and CNN are weak, pathetic, and probably engaged in a conspiracy to help Trump because he’s good for ratings.
A couple of points:
1) I don’t see how it could be an amalgam that includes legal ass-covering because I don’t see any legal issues at play. If anything the “reserve the right” sentence introduces legal problems not avoids them (though on the balance I still think there isn’t a legal issue).
2) I have very little sympathy for complaints of the form “my Facebook feed is filled with …”. Surround yourself with less shitty people.
And don’t extrapolate from the shitty people you choose to surround yourself with to any larger groups of people unless you have some good reason to think they are representative (such as random selection).
Do you have good reason to think they aren’t? Other than the fact that you don’t like what they have to say?
Look man, I don’t claim that my personal anecdotes are the same as scientific evidence. But you aren’t exactly offering any scientific proof that I’m wrong, either. My opinions and my theories based on my own personal experience may be scientifically invalid, but you act like it’s some sort of horribly offensive act for me to even offer them at all.
If you want to offer your own theories, go right ahead. But it’s a little tiresome to see you show up every time I’m offering a personal anecdote just to say “YOUR PERSONAL ANECDOTE MEANS NOTHING”
Your personal anecdote do mean nothing. You want to offer them as personal anecdotes, well at least that’s just useless and not worse useless. But when you use them to slander huge groups of people that you know fuck-all about that is a horribly offensive act and you should feel bad. Even if you call those slanders theories.
As I said the other day, just what exactly do you think your endless baseless claims about “the left” and “the blue tribe” are adding to this site? Do you really think anyone reads one of these posts and says to himself “Hey Matt M says the left believes they will ultimately control the state. Before I wasn’t so sure, but Matt M is a known expert on the left so if he says it must be true!”
Some fun context: the reporter (Andrew Kaczynski) who did this also helped make Justine Sacco infamous.
So by the sacred rules of tit-for-tat we don’t give him a break for making one mistake.
I was thinking that if CNN wanted to credibly threaten to dox an enemy, they picked the right guy for the job . . .
Another thing. Are any of the commentariat familiar with agent-based computational economics and social simulation?
The topic sounds fascinating and I’d like to read more, but I’m having a trouble finding a good starting point beyond Wikipedia. Can you recommend good references? (A good textbook or overview article would be ideal.)
edit. To clarify, I’m not sure which one of the ~large amount Google search results I should read, and I can’t possibly read them all. I could (of course) just blindly sample the search results (that’s what I usually do in situation like this), but the field sounds like it would align with the interests of SSC readers, so some of you might know about it, and it would be more efficient to have actual recommendations.
I’m not 100% sure if this is covered by the 3 day rule for current events because it includes recent developments but it’s a case which has been going on for months now.
Anyone else here been following the Charlie Gard case?
Short summary:
Charlie is an infant who is dying from a mitochondrial disorder and is currently at St ormond street children’s hospital in the UK.
Charlie’s condition is a progressive mitochondrial disorder, and currently means he cannot see, hear, move, cry, swallow or breathe unaided. He has severe epilepsy, has suffered severe brain damage and has been kept alive with a ventilator, regular suctioning of his lungs and feeding by tube. Heartbreakingly, the medical opinion is that Charlie can probably feel pain.
There is a potential treatment, “nucleoside bypass” (though since I can’t find the details on google scholar that may be a marketing name that every news report has picked up), which maybe, possibly, might slow or halt the progression of the condition but not reverse it. To be clear, the brain damage is done, the brain tissue is dead.
That’s best case. The most likely case is that it simply won’t work because the treatment has never ever been tried on anyone with this specific condition, not even in mice.
So to be clear, the absolute most optimistic best case realistic scenario if the treatment works as well as it possibly could for the infant charlie and he survives is basically “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTNM0oZkdhUGRVeBpo6NOz3VrDDlw8r5OGUM11eDiVf0uIWJK4J
it’s an extremely sad case but the reason it hit the media is because of a fairly fundamental dispute about life vs quality of life.
Basically the doctors involved came to the conclusion that it would be unethical to prolong charlies suffering because there’s no realistic chance of recovery and he’s suffering. The hospital could do the treatment in-house, some of the worlds top experts on neurological mitochondrial diseases are literally next door, they have the capability. but they decided not to, again, because suffering.
The parents want to take the child out of hospital in the UK and take him to some clinic in the US who’ll take about a million pounds to try out the treatment.
It went to court because the medical team felt strongly enough that it was not in charlies best interest. The court sided with the hospital, it climbed all the way to the high court and the european court refused to hear the case because they were unlikely to come to a different conclusion. The courts agreed with the medics that charlies best interests would not be served by taking steps which would keep him alive longer in a state of suffering.
Somewhere along the lines the information about the reasoning seems to have become extremely garbled.
Then it got politicized, it got politicized hard though mostly it got politicized abroad.
Somehow the narrative became a complete falsehood that the reason was anything to do with money.
So then we had Trump tweeting a vague offer to take the child for treatment as if it’s some kind of money/charity issue.
The catholic church weighed in with the pope offering to treat charlie in the Vatican hospital.
I mean the catholic churches position at least sort of makes sense to me even if they have full information since the catholic position on suffering is somewhat out of line with my own, that there’s nothing inherently bad about a long life of blinding agony ( “offer it up” and all that) as long as nobody intentionally inflicted it because ultimately suffering is ephemeral and it’s all about what happens after that and there’s a vague cultural view that lots of suffering in this life sort of puts you in a good position for the next.
but then there’s all the other groups. And I’m not sure if it’s a fundamental disconnect where they’re just kind of assuming that if you throw money at a problem anything is curable or just blind optimism with people believing that of course there will be a miracle that sees charlie healthy and happy in a few years because that’s how story books would go.
The newspapers aren’t helping with half of them running big spreads on “child who got same treatment as one proposed for charlie gard” with lots of smiling pictures which completely fail to mention that the child had a much milder condition for which the treatment had been tested and didn’t already have horrible brain damage. But people read that and believe in miracles.
There also seems to be some additional disputes between those who believe you basically own your children 100% and anything which interrupts that is bad vs people who believe you’re only a guardian. Add to that the dispute about whether a guardians duty is to preserve life at all costs or to reduce suffering.
There’s also of course the very basic dispute of pain vs death. In this case the courts seem to have sided strongly with the position that there’s worse things in life than mere death.
Any thoughts?
I think part of the issue is that there’s a whole lot of people who abhor feeling helpless.
Medical technology is good. The amount of disease today compared to that of the world in the past is tiny, and our world’s doctors can do a great many things. Even when people do die of disease, there is very much effort to save them; even people struck with harsh cases of AIDS or cancer are kept alive for long stretches of time, all to make sure they can live for a while.
Doctors saying ‘there is nothing we can do’ is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way, then. Why aren’t they doing their best to save the child? Aren’t they doctors? Aren’t they supposed to make them better, to try something, to do anything at all?
I really, really don’t think ‘there is nothing we can do for this child’ is something many people can accept. I feel like there is a gut level objection to anything of the sorts, and in rejecting that position, we’ll find anything to excuse our position: they’re greedy, they’re lazy, they’re bad people, and so on, and so on. That doctors might genuinely believe something is out of their hands, that someone is better off not living, is something that large amounts of people simply don’t appear to be willing to accept.
I’m really curious as to what we think the motivation of the parents are. In your version of events, the best case scenario seems to be that they are simply stupid, and do not properly understand the professional medical opinion that keeping their child alive is tantamount to torturing it. Are they suspected of somehow being politically motivated to embarrass the NHS? Are they members of some
extremereligious sect that values “sanctity of life above all”?Presumably, the people most concerned with acting in the best interests of the child are the parents, not the state. So I’d like to hear theories as to what is causing the parents to make the seemingly “incorrect” decision here.
Of course, the cold-hearted rationalist in me says “If the treatment has never been tried, it has to be tried eventually, and we might as well try it now, for the good of science and for the benefit of future victims of this disease.” But I’m sure that makes me a nazi or something.
Actually, the parents agree with you that keeping the child alive like this is pointless, but they want to see if the US treatment has a chance. The key difference is they basically don’t accept that Charlie’s brain function is as bad as the Ormond Street doctors say. They think that Charlie is much more aware than the doctors give credit, that he recognises them, responds, etc. It’s probably wishful thinking, but it’s understandable in the circumstances.
Given that these people are going through an incredibly difficult situation (the mother in particular seems to be having a breakdown), speculating that they have sinister motives is very unfair.
Funnily enough, the High Court seriously considered your point about the good of science and future victims:
If they’re anything like other parents I’ve encountered with children very definitely doomed to die young then there’s a few strong candidates.
The most likely in my view is some variant on:
Stage one: “the doctors are wrong wrong wrong. My child isn’t dying”
Stage two: “My child will be ok. I heard about this one treatment in [far off land] and lots have people have said it will fix them right up”
Stage three: “If we sell the house and our kidneys and raise money from everyone we know then we can afford treatment in [far off land] from [miracle worker]”
Even parents with children born with complete anencephaly who physically have no brain will still coo and insist that their child is so smart and will be completely normal one day while clutching a brainless almost-corpse.
This happens to people who are smart and rational and sane because the urge to preserve and care for your child is pretty much one of the top drives there is in humans and our minds typically don’t cope well with being told there’s literally no hope.
I’m quite sure the parents honestly believe that their child can be saved and brought back to normal or something approaching normal and I don’t think they’re stupid.
It doesn’t matter if you’re Von Neumann or a normal human: when faced with something like that a huge fraction of people will delude themselves because the need to delude themselves is already inside all their defenses.
On a related note, while I believe the american doctor in this case is acting in fairly good faith this is also why I have an utterly visceral hatred and utter contempt for woo-sellers, magic men and various flavors of health related con-artists who offer fake “treatments”. They prey on people when they’re at their absolute most desperate and weakest and they do so extremely successfully.
I have little doubt that the parents intent is above reproach I also believe that what they actually want to do would be a bad thing for their child.
Re: “good of science.” this is where research ethics comes in.
If you want to experiment on a mentally competent adult you need their consent but you can do a hell of a lot of crazy things if you can get their consent.
If you want to experiment on humans who are not capable of giving consent then you have a much higher bar to pass: any treatment you try must at least potentially be for their own good.
Without that rule we’d be back to the days of people experimenting on mental patients and orphans simply because those people cannot stop you from doing whatever you want to them.
The medical opinion in this case was that it wouldn’t be to the childs benefit. If you were to experiment on the child then you wouldn’t be doing anything to help them, you’d be using them as fodder, increasing their suffering without their consent to further your own goals.
If the medical opinion was that the treatment could be in the best interest of the child then you could try the treatment because a positive outcome would be to the benefit of the patient.
Thanks for this excellent post. I would add two additional issues.
Firstly, that doctors are jerks. Or, to put it less provocatively, the ethics and norms of the (British) medical profession run counter to lay people’s expectations. It’s not just life vs quality-of-life, it’s issues like consent, information, and transparency. For example, doctors routinely allow patients to die on quality-of-life grounds, but they do this without getting informed consent from the patient. And they defend this on the grounds that having such a conversation with the patient would be cruel! Patients see their relationship with the doctor as customer-provider, or principal-agent, but doctors see it more like caregiver-dependent*. The Charlie Gard case makes this particularly salient.
Secondly, there is the question of who decides what a child’s best interests are. Part of the reason this case is so controversial is the widely held view that parents have a very large leeway in judging those interests. So, for example, if parents decide it’s in their child’s best interests to go to St Cuthbert’s, raised as a Catholic, and be disciplined with corporal punishment, then we defer to that – but we’d also defer if the same child had been homeschooled, as an atheist, with no discipline at all. They are the guardians, and there are systems to make sure the parents aren’t abusing that authority, but as long as they are making reasonable decisions, we must defer rather than substitute our own judgement.
The Gard case clashes strongly with those intuitions. The courts gave short shrift to the parents as guardians, and substituted their own view of the best interests of the child. A lot of people find that scary, for reasons that go well beyond this case in particular.
*This may be partly due to the realities of our healthcare system – most of the time, doctors are not answerable to patients, but my experience of private medicine is very limited.
I’m curious as to where “must” and “scary” come from.
I can see several pragmatic arguments for setting up a society such that parents have this very broad discretion. But the fundamental rights approach to the question seems to treat human beings, albeit minors, as a kind of private property and I find it disquieting.
The argument isn’t that minors are private property, just that the parents, not the state, are their proper guardian. If the state is their proper guardian, would that make them public property?
I imagine those who think we have an obligation to defer to parents have lots of reasons:
* British law (most obviously the Human Rights Act).
* Consequentialism (I know my own child much better than some social worker).
* Tradition (this has always worked in the past).
* Belief in limited government (by what right does the state get involved?)
etc.
Where does the “scary” come from? Well, if the government is forcing you to let your child die, maybe they’ll interfere in your parenting in lots of other ways. Maybe more interference would be a good thing – my mention of corporal punishment was intended to highlight that there are lots of other controversies here. But it’s not hard to see why lots of people who think deference to parents is useful are upset.
I don’t see why they should be anyone’s property.
Language like “the right to raise one’s children as one sees fit” pattern matches to how people talk about property rights, especially land.* That’s what I’m questioning. As long as the discussion is in the realm of “this seems to work better than any alternative idea” I’m fine with it.
Compare the rhetoric surrounding Terri Schiavo or other medical power of attorney cases. There the conceptual framework tends to be along the lines of “this is what he would have wanted”–not “so-and-so has the right to decide what happens to his mother as he sees fit”.
*At least to me. I could be completely off base here.
Help me out here, since this thread is the first I’d heard of the case: Are they? Or are they saying “we’re the government that foots the bill for your child’s healthcare and we’re saying that we’re done, appeal denied, end of story.”?
Like if they were literally forbidding the parents from spending their own money on treatment, then you’d have a point. I’m not saying they aren’t, since I’m ignorant of the particulars of the case, but it sounds bizarrely unlikely to this Yank.
This is what they are doing. The parents have raised the money necessary for the treatment, and others (most notably, Trump and the Pope) have offered to have it provided for as well. It is not a question of money.
Thanks, I was missing this piece. That is concerning, then.
Is there some loophole involved with the logistics of transferring, or does it actually boil down to “no, attempting this treatment would constitute [something illegal, I dunno, torture, child abuse, etc]”?
There’s no loophole about transfers. It’s simply that this (or any) treatment was judged to be against the best interests of the child, because it would prolong the child’s suffering for nil or negligible chance of success.
You can read the High Court judgement here it’s short and very readable.
Thanks, that was a good read. Definitely a thorny issue.
‘I don’t see why they should be anyone’s property.”
If you insist that deciding on the healthcare of a child is treating them as property, then treated as property they shall be. Because there’s no way that a child under the age of five (and probably older) can decide on healthcare.
Or are they saying “we’re the government that foots the bill for your child’s healthcare and we’re saying that we’re done, appeal denied, end of story.”?
That would be murder in the first degree because the government seized control of the healthcare system.
Indeed, that’s what many Americans hate about the notion of government-provided healthcare: it will obviously and conspicuously hand power to the government to do that kind of thing. The government does not need more excuses to allow it power over people.
@Mary
When people talk about people treating children like property it’s not just about healthcare, it’s about the chain of logic through which they reach their conclusions about who should get to make decisions.
In this case the same system which would protect a child who’s parents wanted to treat it’s cancer with homeopathy is making the more controversial choice that suffering is more important than death.
But some people take a very strong position that “my children are mine. Full stop. Nobody else should have any rights over them” and can be extremely wary of any system which could interfere with that even if it’s sometimes to the detriment of some children. Their position is akin to property rights.
Meanwhile many people only view parents as special in that most of the time parents are at least trying to be good parents and mostly care about their children more than any other individuals would and making them the default guardians is the pragmatic choice but they’re much more willing to allow the state to override guardianship if the parents are making choices that a judge agrees aren’t good.
By that reasoning, doesn’t everyone else think the children should be property of the state?
No. We have a lot of mental gymnastics going on in our society wherein we believe certain things are “private property” but at the same time, where we believe that the state can come in and dictate the terms of use of said property at its own will.
To use a non-human example, the government has incredibly heavy-handed regulation of many key industries (up to and including “you cannot open a new plant without our permission”) and yet, few people would suggest that the state, oh, I don’t know, “owns the means of production.” Oh no, that would be socialism! The state doesn’t own the coal plant, you see, it just reserves the right to tell the owners what to do in any and every capacity it feels like, and jail them if they refuse to comply.
No. But it is illuminating that it comes up so much. It seems like I was correct property is the dominant metaphor here. The instinct seems to be that if parents don’t own them then the state or someone else must.
Whereas in other cases of decision making incapacity, the language is very different. If a health care proxy has his choices overruled by a court there may be a sense of affront, but it is on behalf of the incapacitated person not outrage over the interference with the rights of the health care proxy. But with children it is all about parental rights, the parents are the putatively aggrieved party not the child.
Until children are old enough to assert self-ownership, someone must.
I mean, let’s boil it down – if the children in your example are property of themselves, do they get to make the decision? Why or why not? I, as a person over 18, can go get any legal medical treatment I want. I’m pretty sure I can just walk out of a hospital at any time. Do the children in your example even have these rights? If not, doesn’t that point to them basically being the property of someone?
Now, this brings up ugly examples of parents who place “property rights” over “the good of the child”. But I’m sure I can find governments doing the same thing.
See the next paragraph after the one you quote. There are other situations where people can’t make decisions for themselves where we nonetheless don’t treat that incapacity as turning them into someone else’s quasi-property.
Here’s another analogy: under the business judgement rule directors of corporations are given very strong deference as to control over the corporation. Except in situations that structurally give rise to strong conflicts of interest they are very very rarely second guessed. Yet the nonetheless no one talks of “directors rights” or is “scared” that the government might change that. If the government were to step in and bypass the BJR in a particular case in order to protect shareholder interests, the retort wouldn’t be “that’s treating the government as owning the corporation” (well based on his answer above Matt M might, but most wouldn’t).
That’s a good analogy, Brad. @anybody, I’d be interested in what libertarian circles have already considered for things like “Parents as majority shareholders in Child Inc” as a means around the perennially difficult problem of jiving the limited agency of minors with libertarian principles.
So this is interesting: the idea here is that someone in a coma is barred from making decisions because they literally cannot, being in a coma. That brings up the question: are children just adults waiting to get out? If so, then the “real” person, the adult, also literally cannot make decisions, being in a coma of sorts. But I still feel like there’s an issue here of there being a person there already. To put it another way, the ownership of the comatose happens by default and so no one views it as “property” because the person literally can’t make the decision for themselves, but children can in fact make decision for themselves. The model of child-as-comatose-adult does map to a lot of stuff, though. Get back to me on this.
I don’t know the precise way that corporate property works. But as I understand it, the only difference here is the emotional charge. I’d also imagine that, if a government actually has to step in, the behavior of the director is analogically equivalent to child abuse, and people are usually fine with governments interceding in those cases. I appreciate the analogy, but I’m afraid my lack of knowledge on the subject makes it hard for me to engage as fully as I would like.
What does “property” mean, beyond the legitimate authority to control a thing? Note that we’ve already got the concept of property held in trust, so a thing can be property even if the owner is constrained from broadly exploiting it for his own private benefit.
The relationship between a very young child and its ultimate guardian, is going to be sufficiently property-like that people are probably going to default to property-like language in describing it. And most legal systems are going to draw at least informally on their extensive body of well-developed property law to deal with analogous situations that occur with minor children. So if people want to play games where they carefully launder their language and legal precedent of property-like terms while saying of others, “…but YOU talk of children as ‘mine’ like you were trading in slaves, you monsters!”, when there’s little actual difference beyond maybe who the owner/guardian/whatever is, I can recognize that this may be an effective debating tactic with some audiences but it gets an eyeroll from me.
Which means they are trusting the judge, who has less information than the parents and cares less about the children. The usual response is that this is only happening when the parents are unusually bad ones, while the judge isn’t an unusually bad judge–but that ignores the fact that there are bad judges as well as bad parents.
Two bits of evidence on the other side. In the course of the Texas FLDS case, the relevant authorities took several hundred children away from their parents. The original reason was information conveyed in a phone call that turned out to be entirely bogus–the caller claimed to be a woman in the FLDS community, wasn’t found when the community was raided, turned out to be someone with no connection to the FLDS and a history of bogus phone calls. This was discovered fairly quickly, but the authorities avoided mentioning it in their public statements.
The actual reason, pretty clearly, was to either prevent the children from being brought up in their parents’ (polygamous) religion or force the parents to abandon the religion in order to get their children back. If curious I can point you at a series of blog posts I made at the time giving details.
Some years back, we were interviewing a potential hire who had graduated from Cornell Law School where he had done volunteer work providing legal services to the poor. I asked him whether, in his experience, the power of the authorities to take children from their parents did, on average, net good or bad. His response was that he could not speak for the nation as a whole, but in Ithaca where he had been working it on average did harm.
In a way, my point is the same as the distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. There are surely cases where the authorities taking children away from their parents, or making a decision for the children against the will of the parents, does good. It doesn’t follow that the authorities having that power does good. If on average it does bad, then a parental right to make such decisions is a good legal rule, whether or not it follows from a right in some normative sense.
@David Friedman
You’ve written about the FLDS case before and linked your blog post. To put it mildly I don’t share your moral intuitions on the matter. Per your blog post, parents were pressuring their teenage daughters to act as concubines for much older men.
Rather than an example of unusually bad judges and perfectly fine parents it reads to me like a good example of unusually bad parents and a morally upright judge that was unfortunately overruled by a higher court.
Contrary to this being a bit of evidence for the other side, I’d be very happy to offer it as evidence for my side of the argument.
It seems like I was correct property is the dominant metaphor here.
No, it doesn’t. That’s your metaphor. That other people talk using it — because there’s no other way to talk about what you said — does not give you the right to attribute it to other people.
Especially when someone is pointing out a flaw in your argument.
“jive” != “jibe”
If they believed that, it might have been an argument for taking a handful of teenage girls away from their parents. What they did was to take several hundred children, male and female, from infants on up, away from their parents.
And they repeatedly lied about it. At the initial hearing, one of them testified that women in the FLDS settlement said they knew the woman who made the phone call–who didn’t exist. They announced numbers of teenage minors without explaining that they were refusing to accept documentary evidence of age, hence “minor” meant “someone we have decided is a minor.” Take a look at how the numbers claimed shrank when the higher court looked at them. Or the two pregnant adult women whom they held until they had their babies with the claim both were minors, only to then, when they had control over the babies, conceded that they were eighteen and twenty-two.
Where, by the way, in my blog posts do I assert that parents were pressuring their teenage daughters to act as concubines for older men? That was more or less the claim in the phone call, but the woman who made it had no connection with the FLDS or the Texas settlement, as was discovered within a few days. The call claimed she was in the settlement, and they knew that was false once they raided it.
Their actions were found illegal first by a unanimous decision of the Texas appeals court and then a unanimous decision of the Texas Supreme Court. They were found legal initially by one judge on the basis of false, in part probably perjured, testimony.
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/05/my-views-on-flds-v-texas-interim.html
As I said I am happy to take this example, as summarized by you, as making the case for my side of the argument. Your abhorrence of government interference is causing you to make excuses for very bad behavior.
I think even most people that have the “don’t you dare tell me how to raise my kids” attitude would be uneasy with your outrage over Texas’ actions in this case. If you think otherwise, respectfully I believe you misread the American public. Cases where CPS intervened because of spanking or because kids were allowed to play in the park by themselves would be much more universally condemned.
@Brad
Wait, you’re OK with government employees telling a bunch of lies to a court, so long as they’re pretty sure that the people they’re pursuing are doing something wrong?
And you’re misreading that excerpt. David isn’t claiming that there’s evidence that FLDS committed abuse, he’s saying that if evidence appeared he’d probably believe that evidence. He still thinks the cops need to actually come up with the evidence.
@CatCube
David Friedman’s stance doesn’t appear to be “FLDS acted badly, but the government behaved improperly in the investigation so they shouldn’t have been prosecuted” but rather “FLDS did no wrong, and the government behaved improperly”, as justification for “parental power over children should be stronger than it is, and governmental power should be weaker”. Brad is saying that most people would disagree with the “FLDS did no wrong” part, and would’ve been quite happy for the government to interfere (disregarding concerns about them doing so in unlawful ways).
@CatCube
He said “I think it likely that the FLDS pressures young women into what they consider marriage.”
He apparently doesn’t think that’s abuse, but if someone else does (and I think most would) then it follows that ‘David is claiming that there’s evidence that FLDS committed abuse’. I don’t think I’m putting words in David’s mouth here.
There is a lot of dancing back and forth here between legal and moral questions as well as between substantive and procedural questions.
Go back to DF original post where he introduced FLDS:
My claim is that FLDS is a very poor example to justify this because they are unusually bad parents.
I’m not trying to justify perjury or suborning it — I’m saying from a 20,000 ft view this is the type of case* where most people think children ought to be removed from parents. Which makes it a poor example to offer for the proposition that parental rights ought to be very strong because they have better information and care more about their children.
* I.e. a community where fathers are coercing their teen daughters to be concubines for their friends
this is the type of case* where most people think children ought to be removed from parents
In which case the first question is about it is whether it actually exists or is a figment of the authorities’ imagination, in which case the very people you are advancing as the children’s guardians are the abusers.
That depends on whether their views were based on what actually happened or the heavily biased accounts in the major media. How many of those people even know that the initial phone call on which the raid was based was known early on to be a bogus call from a woman with a history of such and no connection to the FLDS?
Please note that there was no evidence ever offered that any of the people in the compound that was raided were young women being forced into marriages with older men. There are legitimate reasons to criticize behavior that some people in the FLDS probably engage in. But that doesn’t justify seizing several hundred children, taking them away from their parents, repeatedly lying in public about the facts of the case, holding adult pregnant women prisoner on the pretense that they were minors, and only giving the children back after unanimous verdicts by both the state appeals court and the state Supreme Court that the actions were illegal.
And I doubt that most people, fully acquainted with the facts, would disagree.
More precisely, there was no real evidence that anyone in the compound raided, any of the people whose children were taken away, had done anything wrong. There has been evidence from other sources that some people in the same sect have done things I would regard as wrong, but probably not things that should be illegal.
Unless I missed something in the controversy, the sole evidence that someone in the compound was a young woman forced into marriage with an older man was the original phone call, which was a fake and known to be a fake early on. Beyond that there was the claim that some women in the compound were minors who were or had been pregnant–a statement that would have been true of pretty much any community in Texas of similar size. The number was greatly exaggerated in public statements by the authorities involved.
There’s an important distinction here:
a. The FLDS is, to my mind, a creepy cult that’s probably bad for its members, particularly for its kids.
b. I still want the state to have a high bar before they’re able to imprison adults or take away children. That is, I think the state needs to show that the people being imprisoned have violated actual written laws, or that they are unable to care for themselves, or that the kids are actually being abused (in terms of what the written law says is abuse).
My reasoning for (a) is probably the same as the reasoning of the prosecutors and police involved in the raid, and Brad for that matter. My reasoning for (b) is that it’s pretty easy for the authorities to justify cracking down on weird people in pretty nasty ways, and there is a long history of that happening. If I don’t want the state raiding rationalist poly homes to take away the kids, or Wiccan homes to take away the kids, the only way I know to prevent that is to make the state actually have to clear that very high bar.
Your claim seems to be, given the facts of the case, that if some members of a religious sect do things connected with the doctrines of that sect that make them bad parents, that justifies taking away the children of all members of that sect. Is that your position? I don’t see how else you can defend what was actually done in the FLDS case.
To put the same point at little differently, is it your view that adhering to a religion that justifies some actions that we qualify as child abuse makes someone a bad parent who should have his children taken away, whether or not there is any evidence that that parent ever abused any child?
My claim is that the facts of the case show that the judge who initially authorized the seizure with no evidence save claims by the authorities credited to an unnamed informant plus a phone call by that time known to be false, was a bad judge, and the state child protective authorities very much worse.
You are retreating back to outrage over procedure instead of addressing substance.
Your original claim was, in part, that we ought to think that parents are more likely to have their children’s best interest at heart than state officials. In furtherance of that claim you offer a case where parents — per *your* analysis* — treated their children terribly and state officials violated rules in an attempt to get children away from their terrible parents.
Yes, people might be outraged about the rule violations, but in terms of the original claim it goes exactly to the opposite point of what you are offering it for. The state officials cared more for the children than the parents.
If you want people to be outraged about police abuses, you don’t offer the example of Mark Fuhrman framing a guilty OJ Simpson.
* I never read any of the media accounts, biased or otherwise. My entire knowledge of this case comes from you.
That is not even close to true. It was a case where some parents arguably treated their children badly and the state responded by taking away the children of other parents of the same religion, with no evidence ever offered that those parents were treating their children badly.
How do you get from “some FLDS parents pressure their daughters to become the second wives of older men” to “this male infant should be taken away from his mother because she is a member of FLDS”?
I assume we both agree that some Muslims commit terrorist acts. We probably also agree that people who commit terrorist acts should be punished for doing so. Following out your principles in this case, it follows that the fact that someone is a Muslim is a sufficient basis for arresting him and punishing him as a terrorist.
Do you really want to take that position? Can you point to any relevant difference between that conclusion in that case and your position in this one?
I think you may be saying something different here from what I got from the blog post.
Are you saying that:
1) Third party after the fact observers (i.e. us) have no good reason to believe there was concubinage of minors going on in the compound before it was raided?
Or are you saying
2) The authorities at the time of the raid were not in possession of accurate evidence that minor concubinage was occuring at the compound?
If it’s #1, I’d have to revise my position. I thought your blog post said the opposite.
Correct. The only evidence ever offered for that was the original phone call, known to be false as soon as they raided the compound and discovered that the woman who supposedly had called from it wasn’t there. Beyond that, there was evidence that a few minor women were either pregnant or had had children, but not that they were second wives of older men forced into marriage by their families. Once all the false claims were eliminated, the rate does not seem to have been higher than elsewhere in Texas.
One of the adults who they held until she had her baby was the wife of a monogamous marriage.
It’s possible that you are misreading my blog post because you assume that “FLDS” means that particular compound. It’s the name of a religious sect, most of which was elsewhere. There is evidence from a different location that they practiced polygamy–certainly they claimed to believe in it–and at least one case of a woman who claimed, very likely truthfully, to have been pressured by her family into a marriage she didn’t want, although I think as a first wife.
Suppose, however, that there really had been evidence that some young women in the compound were second wives of older men, having been married by family pressure. That might possibly justify taking teen aged daughters away from their parents to prevent such a thing happening. How does it justify taking a one year old boy away from his parents?
As best I can tell, there are two answers. The political answer is that the legal changes used to attack the FLDS in Texas, the raising of the age of consent from 14 to 16 and making polygamy a felony, were initially introduced into the Texas legislature by a representative local to the FLDS compound, and described at the time as targeted at it. Taking the children away was a way of driving the FLDS out of Texas.
The ideological answer, as per one of my blog posts:
“the only justification offered by the CPS for seizing male children was that they were being brought up to be child abusers—which is to say, being brought up in their parents’ religion. It sounds from some news stories as though the implicit deal being offered to parents was that if they would accept suitable psychological counseling, they would eventually get their children back. Combine those two and it looks as though the idea was to force people to renounce their religion, holding their children hostage until they did.”
Under U.S. law and international convention, attempting to destroy a religious group by taking their children away is the crime of attempted genocide.
I don’t have any problem with taking all the kids away from parents that have sexually abused one of their kids. I think that policy makes a lot of sense. Even if the abused child is a girl and the others are boys.
That’s fair if you can show that sexual abuse actually occurred.
Otherwise you’re simply taking children away from thier parents because you find thier religion icky which is what David Friedman is objecting to.
I accept the correction as to the facts laid out in the first part of David’s post. My last post was in response to the second part that starts with “Suppose”.
You are letting the vagueness of “sexually abuse” do a lot of work. The actual charge is that some FLDS parents pressure their daughters into marriages with men who already have one wife. I cannot see how that is a reason to take away sons, or one year old daughters. And calling that “sexually abusing one of their kids” is a considerable exaggeration. Would you feel the same way about parents who pressure their daughters to marry someone they really don’t want to marry in an ordinary monogamous marriage? If not, why?
Parents quite often pressure their kids to do things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
You say you are responding to my second hypothetical. It was:
Are you arguing that that justifies taking away all of the children of all parents in the compound, which is what was done? If it turns out that one of your neighbors, who happens to be of the same religion as you, has mistreated his kid, is that justification for taking your kids away?
Go back to the original argument. My claim is that the case is evidence that government authorities with the power to take children away from their parents can massively and indefensibly abuse that power.
Minor daughters and not marriages.
I find it disturbing that you are okay-ish with this. I doubt you would be if it was the state that was doing the coercing instead of the parents.
I don’t think it is any sort of exaggeration. Child abuse by proxy is still child abuse. There are cases where mothers are charged for conspiring with their boyfriends to abuse the mother’s children, this is a similar situation.
And again, I don’t have a problem with all the children being taken away from both sets of couples (i.e. those doing the pressuring and those doing to raping) in this sort of case.
Yes.
See the recent PBS two part series on Child and Forced Marriage in America.
No, I’m not arguing that though I can certainly see why you would reasonably think I am.
But I am arguing that all children should be removed from both couples in the forced concubinage arrangement.
You seem to be outraged that the purported rights of parents are being violated. While any real system of justice requires due process and I would certainly agree that merely sharing a religion with terrible people ought not to count as evidence, why is the concern with the parents and not the children?
There seems to be a moral blindness, and willingness to look the other way, when it comes to bad acts by parents and a laser focus on bad acts by the state.
why is the concern with the parents and not the children?
Because that is the subject matter under discussion.
Were we discussing another matter, we might have come to this case discussing whether what the authorities did was child abuse, and whether the children should have the right to sue them.
Especially when the rights of the children are, in these discussions, frequently a transparent veil for the rights of government authorities to abuse both parent and child.
I wrote:
Brad replied:
“Not marriages” because they are not legally recognized, due to the fact that the government forbids polygamy? Marriage as an institution long predates its control by governments. They are what their society recognizes as marriages.
What counts as a minor is a matter of state law—marriage below the age Texas raised its age of consent to prior to the case has been normal in most human societies, including this one, through most of history.
…
I asked:
He responded:
Our original argument was about whether the power of the state to take children from their parents is dangerous because it will sometimes be misused, hence the claim that without that power some parents will mistreat their children is not sufficient to justify the power. Are you now agreeing that what actually happened in the FLDS case was an outrageous act of abuse by the authorities? If so, why are you surprised that I was outraged at it? Why aren’t you?
He wrote:
In particular, the children of the wife who you are calling a concubine should be removed from her? That, after all, was what was happening, supposing that the mothers in the Texas case were second wives—I don’t think there was any evidence that they were, but they could have been.
Is your definition of “concubinage” the status of a wife in a polygynous marriage? Because such are illegal in the U.S. at the moment, because you are confident that it is never in the woman’s interest to be in such a marriage, or for some other reason?
Brad wrote:
Where do you get that? I am arguing that giving the state power to remove children from their parents will sometimes do very bad things to the children, that the Texas authorities were guilty of mass child abuse. It’s true that they were also guilty of perjury, slander, and false imprisonment, the latter two offenses against the parents, the first against the legal system.
If you don’t like that case, consider the treatment of Amerind children by Canadian authorities not all that long ago—removing children from their parents and shipping them across the country to institutions were they were not permitted to speak their own language, in a large scale attempt to convert them from what was seen as a disfunctional culture to the majority culture. And that was by one of the world’s more civilized governments.
Brad seems to think this is an argument about whether parents have an intrinsic right to control their children. But if he looks up the thread, he will see that it comes from his response to a post of mine in which I wrote:
Yes, I accept that your claim that there wasn’t, and still isn’t, any reason to believe that the specific people that had their children taken away were participating in trading children for sex. Thus removing those children was an abuse.
The rest of the responses are part of the discussion of the hypo you raised regarding the counterfactual where that was such evidence. Specifically whether it would justify taking away all the children of both sets of parents (i.e. the siblings of the girl that became a concubine and the children of the man that she was forced to sleep with).
If you want to be a moral relativist, then I certainly can’t stop you.
But then I wonder where you get your outrage against the government from? Why not give them the benefit of your moral relativism, I’m sure by their own lights they are doing the right thing just as by the members of FLDS they are doing the right thing.
Meanwhile most of the rest of the society you live in is outraged when teenage girls are coerced into having sex with older men. Especially when their parents are doing the coercing. If that wasn’t the case 300 years ago or today in interior New Guinea, that’s neither here nor there.
If she is still underage then she and her children should be removed from her master.* If she is an adult then alas there’s nothing to be done. Though certainly an eye should be kept on those children.
*Apparently the usage is: concubine:master::wife:husband
Neither legally nor socially do we recognize plural marriages in our society. I’m not going to use a usage that is neither descriptively nor prescriptively accurate. Concubine is a better fit on both accounts. If were were speaking biblical Hebrew instead of American English maybe it would be a different story.
Again, I’m not a moral relativist. So I don’t need to accept “what was seen as” to be equivalent to “what I see as”. I’m happy to examine the case on the object level.
To sum up my problem with your position: A parent has in some ways even more power over a child as a state does over a citizen. Parental power is even less based on consent than the governmental power. So why do parents get a pass?
Again, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you would be a lot less tolerant of different beliefs if it was the state that was coercing people to enter specific marriages. If say, teen orphans in a state run orphanage were auctioned off to men in the community and heavily pressured into marrying the winners.
Continuing my exchange with Brad:
He wrote:
My hypo was on the counterfactual where there was evidence that someone in the compound was pressuring a daughter to marry an older man who was already married. The issue was whether that justified taking away all of the children of all the people in the compound.
I wrote:
Brad replied:
I don’t want to be a moral relativist, as it happens. Is it your view that right and wrong are made by the Texas legislature? If not, why is their definition of the age of consent relevant?
My guess from what I know of history is that many past marriages in which the bride was under sixteen were successful ones, probably not a lot fewer than where the bride was over sixteen. Marriage is a risky business, not obviously more risky in the past.
Brad wrote:
You don’t have to go to New Guinea. England raised the age of consent to thirteen in 1875. Age of consent in the U.S. in the 19th century varied by state from ten to twelve (source here). Hawaii only raised its age of consent from fourteen to sixteen in 2001.
Define “coercing.” Assault and rape are illegal and should be. Pressuring your daughter to do something you think she should do and she thinks she shouldn’t is not. Do you think it should be?
I wrote:
Brad responded:
You are now dealing with a wholly imaginary world of masters and slaves. You will note that after the raid, when the mothers were under severe pressure to abandon and denounce the sect in order to get their children back, none of them did. Do you have any evidence that any wife in the FLDS anywhere was forcibly prevented from leaving her husband’s home? If so, that would and should be illegal.
I wrote:
He responded:
And you accuse me of being a moral relativist. How does the legitimacy of a marriage depend on the view of most of the U.S. population? The part of the society FLDS members live in does recognize plural marriages, which is what is relevant to them, except when outsiders to their society attempt to impose their views on it. What is now the state of Utah recognized them until the U.S. army imposed the view of people elsewhere on them.
If it turns out that a majority of the world’s population does recognize plural marriages, almost certainly true in the not too distant past, will you reverse your terminology? Is there some reason why the relevant population for determining what is a marriage is that of the country, not the world or the town? Would you similarly refer to a woman whose husband had been divorced as a concubine if you happened to be living in a Catholic country? Henry VIII had only one wife but five sequential concubines?
Would you use similarly loaded terminology for other cases of relationships disapproved of by the majority—describe homosexuals as perverts in America a few decades back?
He wrote:
You know this how?
I wrote:
Brad responded:
That is false. Parental power over a teenager, which is what we are discussing, is based more on consent than governmental power. A parent cannot, for example, execute a child for disobeying his commands. A government can execute a citizen.
I am in favor of abolishing laws that let a parent force a runaway teenager to return, that being the only sense in which the parent has power not based on consent. I took that position, in print, more than forty years ago.
You continue to ignore my argument. Let me try again:
If the state has the power to take children away from their parents, that might produce a benefit for the children in the case of sufficiently bad parents, it might produce a loss for the children in the case of sufficiently bad judgement by the state authorities. I have offered you two examples where it produced a large loss.
This is a consequentialist argument about the consequences of alternative legal rules and you keep trying to treat it as if I was making the moral argument that I explicitly disavowed in the post you responded to. Saying “in those cases I disapprove of the government’s action,” which is what your “I’m happy to examine the case on the object level” amount to, does not respond to the argument, since you are not going to be the one controlling what the government does. You might as well respond to an argument against a law allowing the state to punish suspects without a trial by saying that of course you are only in favor of it when the suspects are guilty.
Brad wrote:
I think it much more likely that in such a system children would be pressured into marriages not for their own benefit but for the benefit of the ones pressuring them, in your case the people collecting the auction money, than when it is done by parents. Part of the argument for preferring parental authority to authority by others is that, while nobody can be trusted to be a perfectly benevolent agent for another, a child’s parent is more likely to act in that way to the child than any other adult.
I appreciate the engagement. I don’t think we are going to see eye to eye on the issue of children marriages (including polygynous relationships) or coercion to enter them, but I’ll continue to think on the rest of what you’ve said.
The most important point isn’t about this particular issue. It’s that in deciding whether government should have particular powers, the question is not whether there are ways those powers could be used that would, on net, make the world better rather than worse, but whether the way in which those powers can be expect to be used would do so.
This is true and a problem, but what alternative do you suggest?
I don’t even think there are any, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking? I’m objecting to the conceptualization of parental control over their children as a fundamental right. At least in this particular post, I wasn’t objecting to any specific rule about how decisions about children are made.
That said I would expect moving from a rights based framework to a pragmatic justification would eventually lead to some divergence.
This conceptualization is the underpinning for the decision-making model. If you’re interested in doing anything other than protesting against it in a token sense (and I’d join you if that’s all) then fair enough.
So, what does this mean?
I’m not sure. I have to think it through. You are welcome to help me brainstorm.
But off the cuff, how about something like vaccines.
In a rights world we have a fundamental right vs the possibility of a public health issue, but not one that looks like an immediate crisis. It’s a tough one, we don’t want to violate fundamental rights except in extreme circumstances. Does this really qualify?
In a pragmatic world, we have the principle that in general its better to let parents decide what’s best for their children because: we aren’t sure what’s the best so it’s good to have some diversity instead of a mono-culture, plus that’s how it’s always been done, plus we don’t really have the administrative resources to make all the decisions, plus this way if someone terrible gets in charge he won’t be able to control your children, etc. On the other side we have the same public health concerns.
In the second world, I think we have a stronger case for mandatory vaccination. We don’t have to treat the other side of the issue as a black box of “fundamental rights — do not touch”, instead we can look at each of the pragmatic justifications and see how well or poorly they fit the specific question at hand.
To anticipate an objection, maybe this kind of reasoning could be applied to anything and we end up in a situations where parents get no deference at all. And if that world is worse than the one where parents are treated as having a quasi-property right over their children then maybe we should just swallow the “grossness” of that position and leave it be. I don’t know.
so utilitarianism?
this won’t be polished, but let me put forth my thoughts: all of this really boils down to whether or not you think parents or the government make the right decision (or are generally more likely to, etc)
It seems to me that parents are more likely to want to make the right decision and have the right reasons, with two significant exceptions thus far: firstly, a lack of knowledge, as for example in the second world. This extends to superstitions and similar. And secondly, an inability to face up to the harsh truth, possibly owing to the ingrained need to pass on DNA (post by Murphy, Ctrl+f anencephaly). Also, I guess there are some bad parents.
So it’s tough; I think giving control over to first-world parents usually produces the best results, but there are clearly times where the parents puts something else above the best interest of their child. Then again, the government is who it is.
“I’m objecting to the conceptualization of parental control over their children as a fundamental right.”
Whom you propose to put in their place? Because babies and toddlers are not going to control their own lives. To object to parental control only makes sense if you have a superior guardian to replace the parents. To object in the abstract is a double standard, since they are not being compared to inevitable replacement.
@mary
Choosing not to make something a fundamental right doesn’t mean you discard it entirely.
We have no fundamental right to drive yet people can drive around just fine. But it does mean that when someone is caught driving drunk they can be stripped of the privilege of driving much more easily.
making something a fundamental right makes things like that much harder. When parenting gets considered a fundamental right (and in some countries it is because someone wrote it into the constitution) you get crazy things like systems which keep sending abused children back to their abusers because it’s so so hard to strip someone of a fundamental right.
And where does a fundamental right differ from other rights?
And does your removing it from the parents mean, in reality, that you are insisting that social workers have the fundamental right, and so you get crazy things like systems which keep snatching happy, unabused children from their homes (abuse in itself) and sending them into foster care where they ARE abused, and sending abused children back into the homes where they are abused?
Because governments have a sufficient history of abusing their powers that lots of people are uncomfortable with giving the state the right to say “We’ve decided this person’s life isn’t worth living, so we’re not going to try and keep them alive, and nor is anybody else.”
Right. Even if we can all agree that some lives are so awful as to not be worth living, we may still have a hard time working out a way to put someone in the position of deciding whose life is not worth living and so should be ended. There’s a *lot* of opportunity for abuse of that power, both for well-intentioned reasons and to accomplish other goals (saving money on healthcare costs, ridding the world of people with sufficiently serious intellectual or physical disabilities for some ideological purpose, etc.).
As I already said on the subreddit, I have 0 sympathy for the NHS in this case.
As Matt M points the fact that the treatment “has never been tried” is a non argument. Assuming the science behind it is sound (I’m not a pediatric neurologist, so I don’t know) someone will have to be the first so why not Charlie? The issue is that the hospital had 3 choices here. 1) Pull Charlie’s plug and and end his suffering immediately, 2) Perform the experimental treatment and potentially prolong Charlie’s suffering. 3) Fight a long protracted legal battle and definitely prolong Charlie’s suffering. The fact that the NHS went with option 3 puts the lie to the idea that they care about the “needless suffering” of this particular child.
Honestly, this whole debacle makes me want to take up the fiery sword and start stacking NHS bureaucrats like cordwood. I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to maintain the level of restraint and decorum that Chris and Connie Gard have displayed were I in thier shoes.
You may need to consider that “prolong” can mean different things in different outcomes.
Lets imagine they went with option 2.
potential outcomes:
It doesn’t work at all and charlie dies shortly thereafter.
This seems fairly close to ethically neutral.
It does work and it stops further degeneration.
This is the horror-movie outcome. Full on “I have no mouth and I must scream”. And it could go on indefinitely, years, decades if the treatment is even more effective than expected.
The hospital applied to the high court in mid april and the courts ruled really quite quickly in the hospitals favor. it’s not like it’s spent years in court. Every challenge that’s slowed the courts down have been from the parents.
You seem to have a
heads=NHS is evil
Tails = NHS is evil
kind of thing going on there.
FWIW I see both options 1 and 2 as, at a minimum, ethically neutral. Option 3 is the only obviously evil choice, which is naturally the one they went with because nobody involved wanted to be stuck holding the buck. It’s pure fucking Moloch complete with child sacrifice.
To recap:
# Euthanasia being at a minimum ethically neutral is a contentious position, to say the least. I’m not going to argue one way or another on it, but you should at least be able to agree that it’s controversial. And hopefully also that it would not require a large shift in values for someone to come to a different conclusion.
# It sounds like from the hospital’s perspective, 2) has such a low probability of success (can’t fix existing brain damage) as to be basically reducible to the consequences of 3), though by a different path. And would require diverting NHS resources from other children who could benefit more. Say what you will about “death panels” but that’s how the calculus works.
# Assuming my below discussion with Murphy is accurate, 1) is what the hospital wanted and it was the parents who turned it into 3). One can argue for legalizing euthanasia within the bounds of reasonable discourse – it is definitely a party foul to call for heads to roll for not engaging in extralegal euthanasia.
I empathize with your position, I do. But such vehement, disgust-laden excoriations of folk for not operating outside the bounds of their position (and the current legally proscribed morality) is really not constructive.
I find it interesting that you consider option 2 neutral.
Would I be right to guess you’re hardcore non-consequentialist.
Option 1: illegal to implement but lets call it 1 unit of suffering.
Option 2: legal but anything from 1 to [very large number N] units of suffering
Option 3: legal to implement but >1 to [small bounded number M] units of suffering depending on how many appeals are lodged.
but I get the feeling you don’t consider the moral culpability for the difference in units of suffering between options 1 and 2 to lie at the feet of whomever chooses option 2 .
but you do seem to consider moral culpability for the difference in units of suffering between options 1 and 3 to lie at the feet of anyone who chooses option 3 (but somehow not also at the feet of anyone who increases the size of M though things like appeals.
Is it?
The NHS’s whole case is predicated on the idea is that it is better for Charlie to die than to continue to suffer. Functionally speaking, there is no difference between a doctor “pulling the plug” to ease a patient’s suffering and administering a lethal does of painkillers to ease a patient’s suffering. The outcome and the intent are identical, in either case.
I understand this this, and if it was NHS footing the bill I would agree with you. However, they aren’t footing the bill, the parents are. If the issue were one of “diverting NHS resources from other children” it is in the NHS’s interests (and in the interests of those other children) to let the Gards leave with thier son. As it stands the NHS is expending recourses (both medical and legal) on what they insist is a lost cause, simply to keep the parents from taking their business elsewhere. That’s why I label it “pure fucking moloch”.
I was including “pulling the plug” in my definition of euthanasia. If this is non-standard, my apologies.
While I think I’m at least loosely of the same opinion as you, there is definitely a values-level dispute over right-to-die issues. That’s what I meant by contentious.
I don’t think it’s fair to lambast the doctors involved for taking the route that disentangles them as much as possible from such issues in their day-to-day. It’s reasonable to just try to do their jobs within the system they’ll have to keep working in for in all likelihood the rest of their careers. If they want to donate to or participate in advocacy groups in their free time, more power to them. But I don’t think life and death legislation is an area we want to encourage civil disobedience in, particularly that skewed toward the death side.
I can understand where you’re coming. It’s definitely an edge case of child abuse law, and moderately nanny-statish. (And I definitely get the anti-nanny-state angle, but then your ire should be directed at politicians, not doctors). But I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s an edge case. And that the hospital staff are using the tools they have legally available to prevent what they consider the greater evil. From the judgement linked above, not even the doc in the US thinks it likely to do much good: “but why not try” is their proposition at issue.
I don’t think it’s really Molochian child-sacrifice to answer with “because doing so would cause an additional X amount of suffering for no real gain”. One could make an Omelas-adjacent argument about a society that allows its citizens to purchase hope with the suffering of their children.
@Gobbobobble
That last line, wow.
I was talking about this with my SO last night and she had a much harsher view than I did. I can’t bring myself to take a negative view of the parents but my SO in the past has had to make a similar call about a dying family member and been in disagreement with other next-of-kin and had a much harsher view of choices like that that pretty much lined up with your “purchase hope with the suffering of their children.” comparison.
Pople who are not utilitarians usually distinguish between action and inaction.
Yes, and going to court to prevent someone else from taking their child to a hospital which proposes to treat their disease, falls solidly on the “action” side.
Even pulling the plug on a ventilator or writing ‘DNR’ on a chart are technically actions, and close enough to homicide to at least give non-consequentialists pause. This case, though, isn’t even in a gray area. It’s straight-up homicide in thought, word, and deed, and can only be effectively defended on the grounds that This Time Euthanasia is Good.
Either you are going to let untold numbers of children die of this disease, or someday, someone is going to have to treat a child with some treatment that has (obviously) never been tested before.
That you hypothesize a horror-movie outcome for the later scenario does not strike me as good enough reason to not even try to save those children.
“Those children”, presumably being future disease victims, can hopefully be treated before the bulk of their brain has been destroyed. That’s still not much of an argument for “treating” what seems to expert medical opinion to be a mouthless thing that has nothing left but unheard screams.
If there’s an argument that Charlie Gard isn’t that mouthless thing, based on anything resembling reason. nobody seems to be making it.
I suppose there’s also an argument that Charlie is a conveniently-available test article that should be anesthetized, treated, observed for what useful data we can get, and then painlessly euthanized. Nobody seems to be making that argument either, which is a good thing because it’s the sort of argument that makes the vast majority of humanity want to round up all the consequentialists and send them to reeducation camps.
Your “hope” is as relevant as the “horror-movie” claim. Why should your hope trump the view of someone who thinks they will not be treated earlier?
And, at that, not be treated earlier precisely because of the arguments you made?
Is option 1 even a legal choice for the hospital? To make over the express wishes of the parents?
IANABrit, but I would imagine with a single-payer system there’s a shitton of red tape and legally mandated opportunity for the family to contest major decisions like pulling plugs. Would appreciate it if any of our friends across the pond could illuminate me on this.
that’s pretty much what the court case was.
The family contesting the decision.
hlynkacg seems to believe that if a doctors isn’t willing to ignore the law then they’re not fit to be a doctor or something to that effect.
Ok, that’s what I suspected. Thanks for confirming 🙂
While I agree with the point behind this, that docs are not immoral monsters for following the law, the tone is about as helpful as hylnkacg’s vehement condemnations :/
As I understand it a primary doctor in the UK has the authority to deny life support without consulting the patient or next of kin. I remember about reading about such cases in the past (IIRC the Dr. disconnected a comatose adult’s the nutrient IV without consulting and against the wishes of their wife/husband circa 2008) and to my knowledge the rules haven’t changed. To that end, assuming the NHS is correct, the most ethical course action for all involved would have been for the primary doctor to pull Charlie’s plug and then beg forgiveness knowing that the court would rule in the hospital’s favor.
That’s kind of frightening, but okay. I don’t know whether that’s accurate, but I can better see where you’re coming from now.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I still don’t think that makes
so obviously correct as to deserve the vitriol you’ve been slinging.
” has the authority to deny life support without consulting the patient or next of kin”
Technically that’s pretty much the case in all countries under all systems. Otherwise if there were a bus crash and the doctors only had 5 life support machines and 7 patients who needed life support machines to survive then the doctors could not make the choice in triage to allocate the life support machines to the 5 patients.
But there’s a reason the hospital had to apply to the high court. They couldn’t legally just have someone nip into the room and turn off the life support machines while the parents were out to lunch.
Rule of law and all that.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to be the person trying to “beg forgiveness” for breaking the law like that.
This is absolutely true. The NHS, at any time, could have said “terribly sorry but it’s our bed and our equipment and we’ve decided to allocate them to someone else”. The hospital did not need the high court’s approval to pull Charlie’s plug, they needed the high court to stop the Gards from hiring thier own NICU and taking him elsewhere after they “released” him.
Rule of law and all that.
@hlynkacg
I suspect that if a hospital had unallocated resources that they refused to patients who needed it they’d quickly find themselves under a lot of scrutiny.
Going through the high court is the standard workflow even if there are other routes normally only employed in emergencies and it’s probably the most reasonable and just.
As I understand it a primary doctor in the UK has the authority to deny life support without consulting the patient or next of kin.
One notes the inherent conflict of interest, since such plug-pulling can cover up malpractice.
I think one quick injection of potassium and secobarbital could have solved this conundrum without any fuss. If nobody at St. Ormond’s was willing to do that, it is presumably because they wanted Charlie’s suffering to end but they also wanted their own hands kept clean and with no possibility of being accused of being babykilling muderers. Which is understandable, but:
The clean-hands contest and the “least likely to be a babykilling murderer” award are going to go to the people who positively act to prolong Charlie’s life. Wanting Charlie to die quickly but also wanting everybody else to affirm that you did the right thing by arranging for Charlie to die quickly, offering up as a compromise only that you will passively “let” Charlie starve or asphyxiate, isn’t a plausible outcome. Easier for everybody else to do nothing and accuse you of being a babykilling murderer (even if they privately sympathize). For Charlie to die quickly and painlessly, either someone has to kill him in secret, or someone has to stand up in public and say “I, me right here, I decided Charlie should die.”
Charlie’s parents plausibly have the legal and moral authority to do that, and the public might plausibly accept that. Charlie’s primary doctors, maybe. Passing the buck, at best gets you purely legal cover but it makes it look like a bunch of bureaucrats have been granted the power of life and death over innocent babies with loving parents and it gives everyone else an excuse to wash their own hands of it at your expense even if they actually like the outcome. So expect to be accused of being a babykilling murderer, a lot.
Screw that, swap his O2 feed with N2, quicker, safer, and doesn’t show up on a tox-screen but yes the core issue is that these NHS doctors would rather see a child suffer horribly than own up to thier decisions which in my eyes makes them fundamentally unqualified to work in the field of medicine.
The UK currently has no right-to-die legislation.
The netherlands has the Groningen Protocol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol
It seems unfair to blame the doctors for the choices of UK politicians to not implement legislation that could allow a legal choice to actively end someones life to be made.
To be fair: the doctors have stood up in public and even gone to court to publicly say that they’ve decided dying is the better outcome for charlie. But our system of legislation is fairly deontological and doesn’t cope well with anyone intentionally killing anyone outside of war.
It would be more accurate to state that the UK does have right-to-die legislation; the Suicide Act of 1961 as amended. There is also the right to refuse treatment, and make an advance directive to that effect. It may not give the results you want, but the law is very clear.
Then you probably ought not intentionally kill anyone, or at least not act all surprised when you are treated like a bloody murderer when you intentionally kill someone.
And that includes putting them in a “hospital room” where they will be quietly left to die and actively preventing other people from taking them to a hospital room where someone is offering to provide medical treatment that might prevent them from dying.
Catholic view here:
Traditional Catholic teaching, while stating that euthanasia is completely off-limits, also condems therapeutic obstinacy and recognizes that there is no obligation to keep someone alive using extraordinary, or pain-inducing, means. There might, on the contrary, be a duty to refrain from such means. Therefore I do not think that, in this instance (and assuming the description in the OP is absolutely correct) removing technological aides (while providing a sub-lethal morphine dose to prevent pain) would be obviously wrong.
The position of Pope Francis leads me to think that he thinks the child’s condition is not irreversible and as dire as outlined in the OP. I don’t know how he reached that decision, as he is not medically qualified nor has (apparently) a medical source unavailable to the court.
I understand his desire to voice the need to not “stop fighting for life too soon” and his concern for good practices, but I fear he may (as he has been wont to) been too quick to provide a comforting, “pastorally-sensitive” answer rather than the informed, intelectually consistent one. I do not doubt his personal holiness or love for the Church, but I bemoan his somewhat cavalier attitude to intellectual rigour.
The reason this is an outrage isn’t because the treatment is definitely going to work and the kid will be OK. In all likelihood the docs are right and the parents would have been a million pounds poorer with nothing to show for it.
The reason it’s an outrage is that the NHS has no right to tell parents how to treat their children or how to spend their own money. It would be one thing if the parents were trying to foot the UK with the bill for this treatment but it’s quite another to be told that you can’t spend your own money to try and save your child.
This is part of a pattern where western states seem to have decided that parents are inconvenient and replaceable stewards of their children, who can be pushed aside whenever the whim arises. It’s a tyrannical and disgusting violation of parental rights.
I think this is where the narrative got garbled.
it isn’t about money.
Imagine a hypothetical world where parents wanted to spend a million bucks to take a healthy child for a some procedure that could leave them blind, deaf, dumb, paralyzed and in agony for the rest of their long, long, long natural lives.
Would a well run country say “It’s your money, you can do what you like with it.”
Or would the state step in and say “we can’t allow you to subject a citizen to this”
It seems fairly clear cut when talking about a healthy child.
Now in this case the alternative of course isn’t a healthy child. Instead it’s a child who will die soon and is already blind, deaf, dumb, paralyzed and in pain. The parents want to take it for a procedure that if it fails changes nothing but if it works could leave the child blind, deaf, dumb, paralyzed and in agony for the rest of their long, long, long natural lives.
the state step in and say “we can’t allow you to subject a citizen to this”
It mostly seems to rest on the precept that it’s possible for suffering to be a worse outcome than death.
I’m curious in what kinds of cases you would be willing to see parents stripped of their right to decide for their children.
If you’re a utilitarian, there’s no distinction between maiming a healthy child and using medicine to prolong the life of a suffering child.
Add that to the list of reasons why utilitarianism is an inhuman moral system.
Providing a sick child with medicine is in the child’s best interests because it is in the child’s best interests not to die. And even if you think that’s a debatable question, it’s a debate for the parents to have not for the state. If anyone is in the position know the best interests of an infant it’s them and not a bunch of government bureaucrats.
There are some clear-cut cases, like incest neglect or severe beatings (i.e. not spanking), where it’s obvious that the parent is not acting in their child’s best interests.
This, on the other hand, is a case where the parents are obviously acting towards the best interests of their child. Hell, they went above and beyond the call of duty and put a million pounds on the line plus court fees trying to save their child’s life. They seem a bit credulous but their parental instincts are unimpeachable.
Interesting.
You seem to weight pain and suffering as basically irrelevant and continuing to live as long as possible as almost infinitely important.
it seems like a big old sacred values thing where some people consider mere pain and suffering as a trivial materialist nothing while others are weighting it as a sacred value of [reducing suffering] vs sacred value of [preserving life].
I don’t think this is as boring as a conflict between utilitarians and others.
I think it may be a more fundamental conflict between different flavors of deontologist and between consequentialists and non-consequentialists.
I’m a utilitarian and there’s a big difference there for me. You have to look at the outcomes of the next best options too. In both cases you can end up with a suffering kid but the result of doing nothing is a healthy kid in the first and a dead kid in the second. So the maiming is much worse, and whether the medicine is immoral at all depends on your views on quality of life.
@Murphy,
For some people involved, absolutely.
In this case though the sacred value I care about is “mind your own damn business.” The government shouldn’t be forcing people whose loved ones want to let them die to live. And they sure as hell shouldn’t be killing people whose loved ones want to pay to keep them alive.
Personally if it were my kid I’d hope that I was clear-headed enough to pull the plug. But that choice belongs to me and my (future) wife, not to some committee at a hospital.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
problem is that most people don’t want you to have that absolute right if, for example, you want to take your child off chemo meds and put them on homeopathic remedies.
Or say your religion bans painkillers and you want to stand back and let your child scream while refusing painkillers for them.
In those cases people are typically fairly ok of saying “no we won’t mind our own business, your child is not your property, you are guardians not owners”
This is sort of an edge case of the same system. The doctors are of the opinion that the parents choice could lead to suffering with no real possibility of gain. Because it’s not the common case that what the hospital and courts are saying boils down to “let them go, stop trying, you’re just hurting them more.”
Similar scenarios probably isn’t very uncommon with end of life elderly care but in that case there can at least be some data on the individuals own wishes when the next of kin insist that you should ignore the DNR and saw open their ribcage for one last attempt at re-sus.
@Murphy,
Your point about painkillers is interesting because it’s a more nuanced than you’d imagine. Until fairly recently it was common to operate on newborns without anesthesia. The thinking, as far as I understand it, is that anesthesia is always risky and there’s no reason to expose an infant to that risk when they won’t remember the pain anyway.
Even for older children, anesthesia was considered optional for many procedures. My mother had a lot of unanesthetized dental work done growing up because her parents couldn’t spare the money for Novocaine injections. It wasn’t pleasant for her but it was hardly child abuse.
If a parent is concerned about the risk or the cost of using anesthesia on their child, I’m not going to second-guess that choice. I wouldn’t make that choice if it were my children but that doesn’t mean I get to play mommy police and force everyone to do things my way.
When it comes to homeopathy and alternative medicine, I’d rather charge the practitioners with fraud than the patients with negligence. We generally don’t punish the victims of con artists for being credulous and I see no reason to make an exception here.
I used to wonder why a certain generation viewed going to the dentist as such a horror show and why there seemed to be a disproportionate number of older people who seem so traumatized about the dentist they’re willing to ignore massive infections/abscesses until they’re literally dying.
It hadn’t occurred to me that some people would take a “fuck it, they’re kids, it’s not like their pain matters to me and they can’t stop us” attitude.
Holy shit.
Re: con artists
There’s plenty of dangerously bullshit medical beliefs and not all of them require easily jailed con-artist practitioners. You’ll also see parents letting their children die from easily treatable infections because they believe they need to trust in god and prayer or parents who let their child die because they’re incompetently trying to feed it a bad vegan diet or parents who really try their best but are utterly incompetent to raise children safely due to their own severe learning disabilities.
Even if you’re a utilitarian this is a silly comparison.
A healthy child should have a net positive happiness and maiming him turns that into a net negative. A dead maimed child has a net neutral happiness and keeping him alive turns that into a net negative. The first loses more happiness than the second.
Should we assume all of those will be incurable for the rest of their lives?
If the child is blind, deaf, dumb, and paralyzed because the relevant brain tissue has been destroyed, then yes. Basically, you are left with the hope that maybe someday we’ll figure out how to make cyborgs and think it would be a good idea to build one where the “human” component is a bit of cortex that has known nothing but decades of pain, isolation, and despair.
There is perhaps a case to be made for cryonics here. Euthanize and then freeze Charlie. But condemning an actual person to a life of actual suffering based only on a vague notion that maybe someday magic technology will make it all better, no.
I find it pretty scary – it simplifies to me as if you take your family member to the hospital and they find that he or she is “probably” suffering and that their scientific opinion is that there won’t be a recovery, they can refuse to release your family member to a doctor with a different opinion, keep them in the bed, and turn off life support, letting them die.
There was a discussion on thingofthings a while back about whether we ethically should reduce insect populations because we believe that their lives is one of suffering, and it strikes me as somewhat arrogant to say that someone else’s life isn’t worth living. If we respect the infant or insect, shouldn’t the question be whether they would choose to live, not whether we would want their life?
Also, ethically, Charlie’s life doesn’t have to be one of suffering, does it? Granting that he likely feels pain, don’t we have drugs for that, and wouldn’t a life of several more medicated months be superior to letting him die by turning the ventilator off?
“keep them in the bed, and turn off life support, letting them die.”
…after applying publicly to the high court where you have a right to argue your case re: what you believe is in the best interest of the individual.
There’s lots of mundane reasons they may refuse to release a family member to you, if they believe you’re abusive or simply lack competence. This seems a fairly minor implication of that. The more mundane examples tend to be things like parents who want to treat their infants cancer with homeopathy.
painkillers are far from perfect. Keeping someone from feeling pain without giving them so much that you kill them is hard. It’s extra hard when the person cannot speak to tell you if they’re still in horrible pain.
But I think your final paragraph kinda hits one of the central disputes on the head:
many see it as self evident that extending life no matter what is inherently good while many see no inherent value in mere duration when pain and suffering is extremely likely with no hope of improvement.
Shouldn’t this be a feature rather than a bug from the NHS’s point of view?
Then we’re back to control of care if the guardians disagree with the medical team.
If the parents want to go with a low dose of painkillers to minimise chance of death while the doctors want to go with a high dose to minimise chance of significant suffering then you’re back to court.
And yes it is often treated as a feature by many medical systems the world over because acceptable side effects can include death when treating extreme pain in end of life care.
We don’t have to prevent Charlie from feeling all pain – we just need to give him enough drugs that he is likely to feel more pleasure than pain, so that utilitarians find his life worthwhile and therefore permit his parents the opportunity to pursue that goal.
In that vein, we don’t need to limit ourselves to painkillers – we can also prescribe pleasure enhancers.
Seems like an open-and-shut case. If euthanasia is allowable ever, it must be allowable here.
Grounds: extreme suffering, ~zero quality of life, ~zero potential life outcomes, unbounded emotional turmoil for all involved, unbounded financial cost for those involved, opportunity cost of treatable patients. The governing motive should be compassion.
Personally I don’t care tuppence for the needs of doctors to test their mettle with long-shot experimental procedures. The choice between an additional paragraph in some specialist’s keynote speech and minimizing unnecessary torment aint no choice at all.
The question isn’t whether it is allowable, but whether it can be done against the parents’ wishes.
Yeah, I would probably personally euthanize my child if I were in that situation, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good precedent for doctors to be allowed to kill people without the consent of their guardians.
Does Scott or anyone else have experience with “mindfulness”-based therapy?
My therapist recommended this approach to me last week. Apparently it is related to the article below. If you download the Headspace app you can see the exercises I’ve been doing.
www dot actmindfully.com.au/upimages/Mindfulness_without_meditation_–_Russ_Harris_–_HCPJ_Oct_09.pdf
The app has 10 days’ worth of ~5ish minutes meditative instruction clips, all of which seem to be roughly the same (though I’m only on day 8, so what do I know). Then once they have you hooked on meditation they charge you for additional packages (which I have not bought).
I’ve found it sort of…marginally helpful? It gives me a good feeling of clearheadedness after I do a session, helps me relax a bit before bedtime, and (as a bonus) makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable at the prospect of being duped into believing some hokey new-age meditation thing. I’d appreciate having someone with domain knowledge tell me whether or not it’s a scam so I don’t have to figure it out myself!
I’m 30 days into headspace and my impression is that the general meditation hasn’t seemed to be very helpful yet. I definitely enjoy the guided meditation while I’m doing it, and I feel good for a while afterwards, but the part where I carry mindfulness into my everyday life hasn’t really happened yet. The sleep module, however, has been great. So far about 1 in 3 times I’m asleep before it’s over, instead of taking the usual 30-50 minutes. All of the things in the module are things I’ve done on my own, but for some reason being guided through them on a set timetable seems to help me. So the whole thing is worthwhile for me just based on that.
As for the focused collections that you get by paying for the app, I’m not so sure. The creativity sequence has not seemed useful to me, but I haven’t finished it yet, so maybe. The training sequence is the one that has actually managed to affect me outside of the meditation sessions a bit, and it seems like it makes me a little bit better at both exertion and form when I’m training. And I haven’t tried the rest yet.
So, not exactly a veteran’s perspective or the outside view you actually asked for, but that’s been my experience. If you want to try it for an extra month without paying (includes the paid bundles), I have a voucher to give away. If you want it, you can email me at cmfrayne at gmail dot com.
This seems roughly like what I expect to have happen. I have sorta promising results for bringing mindfulness into my everyday life? But they feel like the sort of thing that might fall through and my optimism is very cautious.
Good to know about your experience with the sleep module.
Any data is good to have. Thanks for the input!
I may well take you up on that voucher offer. I’m meeting with my therapist tomorrow, and I still need to finish the first 10, so we’ll see. Thanks again!
P.S. Might be worth posting this to the new thread instead of here.
This is fair, but I got impatient waiting for tomorrow. Also I have something else to post in there and felt some guilt about spamming the new thread.
I’ve not used Headspace, but I’m a pretty big fan of mindfulness meditation in general. It helped me a great deal in my late teens and early twenties, by practicing the skill of observing one’s own thoughts and actions dispassionately, and recognizing patterns and “instinctual” actions. Observation is the first step towards understanding, and understanding your own feelings and thoughts is key to changing them (if that’s desired!).
Arnold Kling writes
and also
File under things that blow my mind.
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts spoke at his son’s graduation. My initial reaction to seeing the headline is a general eye roll, OK the top 1% lead a different life than the rest of us, but no big deal whatever Ivy League school he went to was always going to land some kind of a big name to give that speech.
But it wasn’t a university graduation.
It wasn’t even a high school graduation.
It was a 9th grade graduation (from a 4 year boarding school).
This is just, insane right?
I think this type of thing is relatively common in DC. I may be mis-remembering the specific person, but I could have sworn someone I knew who grew up there insisted that Al Gore spoke at their elementary school graduation while he was the sitting Vice President because he had a kid/nephew/somebody who was also attending the school.
I’m not sure what the objection is. Favoritism, sure, but that’s the same for an Ivy League graduation. Is it somehow beneath the dignity of the Supreme Court for its Chief Justice to speak to 9th graders?
Are you complaining about the practice of having ninth-grade graduations, or the practice of having Supreme Court justices speaking at them? I agree with the first; ninth grade is more a step on the way to a larger achievement than an achievement in itself (though I suppose it might be different at some weird boarding schools?) But if it’s worth having, and if it’s worth having someone speak there, why shouldn’t the Chief Justice be that someone if he wants to?
I have no idea, but I had the same suspicion as you — it might be a bigger deal at the weird boarding schools. It’s functionally impossible to drop out of the 9th grade in a public school (unless you deal drugs or assault people on the regular basis, I guess), but boarding schools might actually have some sort of a stringent exam designed to weed out X% of students, just like in a university. I have no idea whether that’s true, though.
Where I live, 8th grade graduations are commonplace. I also had one (from my K-8 school). These aren’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but they routinely happen and the parents and grandparents show up and take pictures and take their new graduates off to dinner afterwards and such.
I can see the appeal of asking some famous person with a connection to one of the graduates to come give a speech at the graduation ceremony.
Finishing eighth grade’s a bigger thing in my circles, too. You’re generally moving from middle school to high school, and to the first year that’s going to show up on the transcripts you give to college. That’s understandably bigger than moving from the first year of high school to the second.
They are, after all, the transition from primary to secondary education.
@Evan Þ
There are school systems – even public ones – where high school is three years and the end of ninth grade marks the transition between middle school (often grades 7-9 and called “junior high”) and high school.
The school in question, had anyone bothered to google it, is “An Independent Junior Boarding School for Boys Grades 6 to 9.”, so they were graduating from the school, not from one year to another within the school.
It isn’t about want/not want, it is about such a ridiculously high expectations baseline. Generally you would expect some correlation between the level of achievement and prestige of the speaker. For the majority of the kids at this graduation this will be maybe their 3rd or 4th highest education level achieved. Having a supreme court justice at 9th grade graduation implies who as a high school graduation speaker? Then who as a university speaker? Then what happens for those who get a graduate degree (though they don’t all get their own major ceremonies).
Generally yes. But “one of the students fathers happens to be really prestigious and doesn’t mind speaking for 10 minutes at an event he was going to attend anyway” is a non-general case, and makes perfect sense given the context.
Like, if Derek Jeter coaches his son’s little league practice, would you rant about how ridiculous it is for a little league team to hire Derek Jeter as a coach?
Not a good analogy.
Why isn’t it?
Why are you insistent on modeling this as something like “school hires a ridiculously prestigious speaker for spoiled rich kids” rather than something like “school asks for parents to volunteer to speak at graduation and selects the most prestigious one who happens to volunteer”
Is anyone else other than Scott looking for/will have available living space in the Bay Area? My current lease in San Francisco is running out, and I need to find new accommodations sometime in early August.
contact: bnbowman@gmail.com
As an autistic rationalist I have two questions.
First of all, does Aspergers/HFA enhance rationality?
Secondly as an autistic rationalist I believe no taboos in thought should ever exist. By using social conventions to ban a topic we are making it less discussed and as a result popular views on that taboo topic is less likely to be accurate compared to popular views on regular, non-taboo topics.
May I ask what does the community think about these questions?