This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Over on EconLog, the thoroughgoing ignorance and misleading implications of Bryan Caplan’s recent claim “there aren’t any nephritis activists” can be remediated by reading Robin Eady’s deeply personal account “The dawn of dialysis: reminiscences of a patient” (2001), as thrillingly fleshed-out in Christopher Blagg’s “The early history of dialysis for chronic renal failure in the United States: A view From Seattle” (2007).
As first-person physician-accounts of the early days of “nephritis activism”, Dr. Eady’s and Dr. Blagg’s narratives are (as they seem to me) seminal to any well-grounded and broad-based historical and moral appreciation of modern healthcare economics.
The ensuing well-known, well-documented, thoroughgoing successes of nephritis activism have inspired and instructed — and continues to inspire and instruct — healthcare activists in every nation of the world.
From Dr. Blagg’s account:
In summary, medically-minded, morally-minded, and economically-minded SSC readers (of all political persuasions) can reasonably hope to gain broader understandings from a study of the history of (to empbrace Bryan Caplan’s phrase) “nephritis activism”.
@article{cite-key,Author = {Eady, R.},
Journal = {British Journal of Renal
Medicine}, Pages = {21--24}, Title =
{Perspective: The dawn of dialysis:
reminiscences of a patient},
Volume = {6}, Year = {2001}}
@article{cite-key, Author = {Blagg,
Christopher R.}, Journal = {American
Journal of Kidney Diseases}, Number =
{3}, Pages = {482--496}, Title = {The
Early History of Dialysis for Chronic
Renal Failure in the {U}nited {S}tates:
A View From {S}eattle}, Volume = {49},
Year = {2007}}
Errata: Upon revisiting Bryan Caplan’s EconLog post, I found that the phrase “nephritis activists” is not Caplan’s but rather originates with Caplan’s “favorite philosopher” Michael Huemer (whose worldview Caplan is promulgating).
—
For further reading, with direct relevance to this week’s SSC topic of “trust” in medical practice, see also Catherine Butler and colleagues: “The evolving ethics of dialysis in the United States: a principlist bioethics approach” (2016).
Aside: the term ‘principlist’ refers to the widely-taught system of bioethics that is presented by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics (7th edition) (2013).
Passages like the following show why Butler’s narrative is relevant to “trust” issues in medical practice:
Errata: Upon revisiting Bryan Caplan’s EconLog post, I found that the claim “there aren’t any nephritis activists” is not Caplan’s but rather originates with Caplan’s “favorite philosopher” Michael Huemer (whose worldview Caplan is promulgating).
—
For further reading, having direct relevance to this week’s SSC topic of “trust”, see also Catherine Butler and colleagues: “The evolving ethics of dialysis in the United States: a principlist bioethics approach” (2016).
Aside: the term ‘principlist’ refers to the widely-taught system of bioethics that is presented by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics (7th edition) (2013).
In brief, these works analyze the real-world workings of ‘Death Panels’.
It is rational to enquire (as Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer do not) whether the workings of “vuvian” healthcare systems that are grounded in the dispassionate rationality of free-market economics — the healthcare system that the Trump Administration and Republican Party are presently working to put in-place — are morally, economically, and practically preferable to the workings of these historical “Death Panels”.
Hearing Rush Limbaugh say “Leah Libresco” several times was a deeply strange experience. You can share in it here (minus the element of surprise).
(I don’t listen to Limbaugh much—since (a) he’s on during the middle of the day, when I’ve just gotten to work, and (b) Twitter will inform me of any under-covered stories anyway—so I’m not vouching for his epistemic hygiene.)
It’s pretty clear from what he says that Limbaugh has never heard of Leah otherwise—hearing him describe her like some kind of infinitely gullible straw liberal is funny for how far off the mark it is.
I think this crowd will appreciate the following quote:
–Popular Law-making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-making by Statute, Frederic Jesup Stimson (1910)
(Via JK Brown at Arnold Kling’s blog.)
As an extension of Machina ex Deus’s interesting comment, Judge Learned Hand — nominative determinism alert! — described the joys of administrating “the Law” so conceived, as follows (from The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand, 1959):
Needless to say, this same joy in entropy-reduction is experienced by all whom society privileges to work (in the sense that Freud defined “work”) — including (but not limited to) medicine, engineering, science … farming, fishing, building, homemaking, child-rearing, … poetry, painting, music-making … and teaching.
Such work is “meaningful” precisely in psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic sense (as discussed earlier this week on SSC).
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971), as extended by Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice (2006) to encompass the just distribution of capabilities, regards the capabilities in which Judge Hand personally rejoices, to be a primary social good, whose unequal distribution is morally justified only to the extent that the capabilities of the least privileged members of society, are by this inequality augmented.
By so valuing human capabilities, SJWs establish solid moral grounds for their social objectives; thus the overall SJW program is, in Judge Hand’s joyously entropy-reducing legal sense, and also in Viktor Frankl’s moral and psychotherapeutic sense, both well-grounded and morally coherent.
Book recommendation:
The Thirty Years War by CV Wedgwood.
Really well written and engaging narrative history of the Thirty Years War. As someone who knew very little about the Thirty Years War (I’ve read a few wikipedia articles over the years, knew vaguely what it was about – Gustavus Adolphus, hanging trees, and Michael Caine) probably the most enjoyable history book I’ve ever read.
Could someone point me to an essay that lays out the argument against gun control, and does a good job of it? There’s a lot out there on this topic, but I’d like to save myself some research. 3,000 words would be just about right.
And if there’s something similar for the other side of the argument, that would be welcome, too.
A decade ago, an American (born in Germany, naturalized citizen) wrote a short and direct essay about his opposition to gun control
He titled it “Why the gun is civilization“. It is as much about the practice of habitually carrying a firearm as it is about the general concepts of gun control.
There are others I could link to. Some of them are longer on the cultural/legal history of the English-speaking world. Others are longer on statistics and studies.
I think the core disagreement over firearms laws are between those who think that making firearms illegal (or making the legal paperwork around ownership and use of firearms very onerous and tedious) will do something to reduce illegal/violent actions by people who are prone to illegal/violent behavior.
Could you narrow it down a little? I mean, *which* argument against the unabridged right of the people to keep and bear arms are you looking for a discussion of?
At the length I am looking for, I expect it is going to be more a survey of the arguments, and less a definitive attempt to nail down the issue for good.
If that’s still too broad, let’s try “it won’t work” rather than “it’s inherently wrong”.
Is that useful?
let’s try “it won’t work” rather than “it’s inherently wrong”
Very useful, thank you. Can I beg of you to narrow it further – do you mean “action X will be (nearly) impossible to enact” (ie, “create and utilize a mind ray that makes all people refuse to physically grasp a firearm because they think the firearm is crawling with fireants”) or do you mean “action X won’t have (nearly) any impact on the homicide rate/mass shooting rate/suicide rate” (ie, “mail t shirts that say ‘my gun doesn’t kill people’ to all known or suspected firearms owners”)
Of course, many things won’t impact the [rate in question] simply because they’ll never be successfully enacted, and many things are immoral to even try because they won’t impact the [rate in question] and so are, de facto, not worth the downsides.
But I really appreciate you asking the question in this way.
I mean the second: “action X won’t have (nearly) any impact on the homicide rate/mass shooting rate/suicide rate”.
Then this very recent article might help:
I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. The article itself doesn’t go into much depth but there are tons of links.
Does “it won’t work” really require anything more than a passing reference to Prohibition and the War on Drugs?
OK, I suppose someone is going to suggest that guns can only be produced in giant industrial facilities which can never ever be suborned by criminals. So let me preempt that by pointing out, A: about half the opiods currently implicated in an epidemic of overdose deaths that dwarfs “gun violence”, are professionally made in giant industrial facilities, B: highly lethal automatic weapons have in the past been designed to be manufactured in extremely austere circumstances, and C: highly capable manufacturing capabilities have proliferated widely since 1943.
People who want guns, will get them as surely as they will get their bootleg whisky. And Americans have pretty much always valued guns at least as highly as whisky. They will not consider laws that don’t allow them to own guns to have any moral significance, and the police will not enforce those laws against anyone they don’t already have reason to arrest. They will try to shut down the black-market dealers on general principle, because organized criminals are the natural adversaries of the police(*), but again see Prohibition or the War on Drugs for the equilibrium result.
* Well, unless they are fully paid up, of course.
I’ve always liked these two videos to demonstrate the austere circumstances that allow gun manufacture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fna9WEO6BjE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FinRqCocwGE
I’m not sure about the rest of your post, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t right. At least if you are using whiskey as a metaphor for all alcohol, which I think you are. I can’t imagine there is anywhere near the constituency for guns as there is for alcohol.
The NRA has somewhat over four million members; is there a pro-alcohol organization that can match those numbers?
In terms of actual users/owners, it’s going to be hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison, but as of 2015 approximately 43% of American households own guns and approximately 56% of American adults drink alcohol at least once a month. So, roughly comparable in casual usage, with firearms having the edge in hardcore political activists.
@massivefocusedinaction
I’ve always liked this series on YouTube, where a guy built a gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvJtjbY9TM
(A complete playlist for the build is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8rkllZFxx4&list=PL3mdxBjtKzBZuMJysETkVr8SdncNZplxy)
He made a .25 caliber semiautomatic in his garage with simple tools, or tooling you can make with simple tools (specifically, his jig for cutting rifling.)
Further videos from that channel show more elaborate pistols as he learned.
Making a firearm is legal, BTW, so long as you’re allowed to own the completed product.
If there were a lot of congresspersons still tweeting about the need for more “common sense” restrictions on alcohol, there probably would be?
@John Schilling
There’s one pro-alcohol group with nine million members in the US. college greek stuff
The NRA has somewhat over four million members; is there a pro-alcohol organization that can match those numbers?
I have no idea, since there doesn’t seem to be one single body in the USA that represents everyone, but there are certainly all kinds of groups representing various sectors of the alcohol industry, from vineyards to wholesalers to the hospitality sector, one of that last being the American Beverage Institute.
And they seem to have been running ads against Utah’s new, stricter, drink-driving laws.
They claim to have “thousands” of members, but their strength comes not from numbers but from being a lobbying group. I imagine if you identified and added up all the pro-alcohol groups, bodies, industry representative organisations, etc. you might hit a million or more.
Some of the best whisky I’ve ever tasted was illegally fermented and distilled. The man who handed me the glass of it is a prosperous retired tech executive who now lives in a rural county in a wealthy blue coastal state, and distills as part of his tinkering with tech. hobbies.
The sheriff of his county knows he makes it, because twice a year, for Christmas and for the Fourth of July, he gives that sheriff a glass quart bottle of the stuff as a gift.
Oh, and he also owns a metal shop and likes to shoot…
This focuses more on mass shootings vs homicide, but isn’t bad.
You could also look at statistical analysis done by Leah Libresco, who tried to figure out what gun-controls laws would work…and came to the conclusion that most proposed gun-control laws would have little effect on most deaths-by-firearm.
From some research that I did five or so years ago:
(Using Fatal Injury Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. Dept. of Health)
(A) In the typical year, there are more Unintentional deaths in cars than there are Intentional deaths by firearm in the U.S.
(B) In the typical year, about 60% of the death-by-firearm cases are suicide
(C) Of the remainder, almost all are homicide.
(D) A small fraction (something less than 2%) of deaths by firearm are coded as “Unintentional”. A similar fraction are coded as “Intentional/Police Intervention”.
(E) Most homicide-by-firearms victims in the United States are over the age of 14, but under the age of 30.
I learned other things, from other sources. (Generally, Wikipedia listings of homicide-rates-by-State, or equivalent listings for provinces in Canada.)
(1) Canada has a national average homicide rate that is lower than the rate in the United States. But certain Canadian provinces (Manitoba and Sasketchewan, if I remember correctly) have rates equal to, or higher than, their American neighbors (North Dakota and Montana, if I remember correctly).
(2) Inside the U.S., some States have strict gun-control laws, and some have very loose gun-control laws. These have little correlation with homicide rates inside the State. Examples like Vermont-vs-NewYork point one way, while Hawaii-vs-Arizona point the other way.
(3) Generally in the U.S., ownership of guns is a suburban or rural things. But violence involving the use of guns is an urban thing.
Most of these lead me to the conclusion that laws about the use of guns don’t have a strong effect on the rates of crime with firearms.
Saskatchewan*
Note that I am actually reasonably impressed that you got as close as you did presumably from memory.
Libresco’s claims are very weird to me.
– in the WP article, she says “I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.”
Australia had 13 mass shootings in the 18 years before the buyback and 0 mass shootings in the 20 years after the buyback. I don’t know if that’s “clear evidence”, but it certainly looks suggestive. How many prior mass shootings should Australia have had, for their number to be reduced to zero to have impressed Libresco? More importantly, why not mention this number in the WP article and let the readers decide if that looks convincing or not? Weirdly, even in the much more detailed 538 article Libresco expresses this number in the following form: “averaging about two mass shootings every three years from 1979 to 1996”. Huh? There’s been approximately the same number of years between 1979 and 1996 as between 1996 and now. Why not just say 13 versus 0?
Then for the effect of the buyback program in Australia on suicide and homicide rates, Libresco relies primarily on what looks like a very weak 2016 study from JAMA that merely looks at annual crime rates and tries to see if the already ongoing crime decline accelerated after the buyback. Seeing as crime was falling before and after the buyback, it’s not easy to discern what kind of effect the buyback program had. That’s why the most prominent study that claims significant effects, Leigh and Neill’s 2010, tries to get more data by looking for correlations between percentages of weapons bought-back in different Australia territories, and changes in crime rates in those territories. It finds a very significant positive effect on suicides and a much less significant and less certain effect on homicides. It’s prominently linked from the Wikipedia page on the buyback program. For all I know it could be flawed, but it certainly looks much more interesting and serious than the JAMA 2016 study (and has 47 citations to that study’s 7). I know about it because I took an hour or two to research the Australian program and the controversy over its effects a few days ago after a Facebook argument. Libresco doesn’t mention it at all.
13 vs 0 is pretty good evidence that something has changed between those two periods, but why think it was the buy-back? There are lots of other potential causes, like whatever caused the secular trend in homicides, and even in non-firearm homicides and suicides. The more you can narrow the time-frame, the more you should believe that you’ve found an abrupt change. A reason to emphasize the rate of 2/3 per year is that it means you can’t narrow the time frame very much.
Wikipedia seems to think that, while there haven’t been many mass SHOOTINGS in Australia since 1996 (though, according to this list there was at least one, and several others attempted mass shootings where the shooter was stopped just before he passed the threshold of four. And it doesn’t give a link to details on the one that reached 5, so maybe only part of the killing was done with a gun?) there have been a similar number of mass KILLINGS, just that the preferred weapon seems to have shifted from guns to arson, bombs, and vehicles, of which there were far fewer before 1996.
It doesn’t go into too much detail about the research and statistics, but I’ve always found Larry Correia’s big gun control essay to be a good overview of most of the relevant pro-gun arguments:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/23/an-opinion-on-gun-control-repost/
We can look around us and see how much bigger and fatter everyone is nowadays than 50 or 100 years ago as a result of changes to our diet and exercise patterns (and mysterious other factors like overuse of antibiotics killing our gut flora??).
Is it possible that changes to our brains and/or nervous systems as a result of, for example, TV, computers, smart phones, and/or nutrition, prescription drugs, social isolation, etc. are equally dramatic, but invisible? The Flynn Effect would be one example, though so too, potentially, might be the widely shared (if not necessarily accurate for being so) that people have shorter attentions spans?
I read a book a while ago that argued the internet is, in fact, affecting our brains and dramatically shortening our attention spans: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. It was decently written, at least in being pleasant to read, and it does cite a few studies proving his point, though I never looked into the studies themselves. At the very least, it’s an entirely plausible theory that meshes well with a lot of anecdata, including my own — I definitely feel it is harder to keep focused the more I am using the internet, smartphones, etc.
“The Internet” is far too broad a subject. Nothing useful will come from generalizing about it as a whole. I read an excerpt of Carr’s book when it came out, and was not impressed.
In spite of the fact that I’m “in tech”, I don’t use it as much as the typical American seems to: I don’t have a smart phone, I’ve never used Facebook, and I’m a recent and mostly-infrequent user of Twitter (infrequent binges, basically).
I get distracted by networking technology a lot: mostly the SSC comments section for the last year or two, but also following links around various sites and mounting accidental expeditions through Wikipedia (where just yesterday I got a much better grasp of Alveolates and other Heterokonts, a grasp which makes no practical difference to my life whatsoever, even if the meeting I was in at the time didn’t, either).
But (and this is important) I also use it to help me focus. When I was a student programmer, I noticed I frequently lost track of higher goals: I’d search a code base for some variable, find all the references, then forget why I wanted them in the first place. So I started keeping an outline of goals, sub-goals, and sub-sub-goals, which helped tremendously.
A couple decades ago, I moved that outline from paper to a text file, gradually added some emacs macros to handle repetitive actions (e.g. checking off a to-do), and hosted that text file on my home server. Once in a while at work, I’ll realize I’ve lost either the thread of what I’m doing, or the particular project I’m doing it for; at that point, I back up and establish a written context again.
I’m convinced there are a lot of opportunities for current levels of technology to assist in cognition (like email used to), rather than disrupting it (like email does now). But many of these require cooperation from a group of other people (e.g. a wiki), so they’re harder to achieve than, say, just writing a flash-card program.
If you think of technology as the problem, you’ll miss all the ways in which technology can be part of the solution.
Just yesterday I was doing the equivalent in a different context. I’m working on my third novel, a sequel to Salamander. Just as with programming, it feels as though I should be able to hold the whole thing in my head but in practice I can’t. I had a long chapter I wanted to rewrite so I created another document, listed the different chunks of the chapter, figured out how to move them around to work better, then implemented those changes on the text of the draft. I also updated my outline of the whole book, which is about one line per chapter.
All of that would be possible with pen and paper but much easier with word processor technology, and would be still easier if I was using software that let me switch between the full text and an outline mode.
Actually, I am (MSWord), but I don’t have the document formatted to take advantage of it. Perhaps I should.
Could I request a steelman of the proposition that gains to the very rich/elite do not benefit society?
It would seem to me that any additional money flowing to the top 0.01% is still put to work somehow. Even if a smaller percentage of it is spent on “consumption goods,” it’s invested somewhere. Likely in private equity or hedge funds that actually do buy large positions and play a huge rule in actually funding start-ups and small businesses. But even if they dumped it into a low-yield savings account, Bank of America will then still loan it out to people who need loans for various purposes.
It would seem to me that the only possible way this could be true is if they literally just took all of their money and stored it in a giant vault of gold coins, ala Scrooge McDuck. Is the assumption that yes, this is what they actually do? Or is there something else I’m missing here?
Who believes in that proposition?
Banks don’t lend based on deposits.
So if the rich suddenly got a lot richer, would we expect excess reserves to rise dramatically across the board?
Banks aren’t (normally) in the business of sitting around and hoarding a bunch of money and not doing much with it either.
As far as the individual is concerned, bank deposits just exist at some level.
It’s not like bank deposits disappear when I buy something, or invest in something – the ownership of the deposit is transferred to someone else.
And, if my business does very well, there won’t be more bank deposits unless a financial institution decides to create it.
Is it sensible to make a distinction between ‘real’ and financial wealth?
You’re not wrong, but I feel like you aren’t answering my question.
If the top 0.01% in America suddenly had their wealth increased by 20% (with no changes to anyone else’s wealth), would that increase excess reserve ratios at banks? Yes or no?
Edit: To re-state, it looks like we agree that there would be three options.
1. They convert the wealth into gold and hoard it in a vault somewhere
2. They give the money to banks, which benefits the broader economy through loans, start-up capital, etc.
3. They give the money to banks, but the banks convert it into gold and hoard it in a vault somewhere
Which of the three do you think happens? Or are there more options I’m missing?
It would make all of the banks go instantly bankrupt if the value of the top 0.01%’s bank deposits suddenly increased by 20%.
If it was an increase in non-financial wealth, it wouldn’t make any difference to the level of bank reserves, unless there was a corresponding increase in financial assets.
When you convert wealth, it’s only a conversion for you. The amount of wealth in each form for the economy as a whole stays the same.
Mark,
I feel like you’re dishonestly avoiding the question by going off on economic tangents.
Let’s say that my huge gain to the top 0.01% is not in the form of “their bank balances suddenly increase” but “they all discover gold buried in their backyards”
What do they do with the gold?
Assuming the answer is “give it to banks”, what do the banks do with it?
Dig a different hole in the ground and put the gold in that one.
They wouldn’t give the gold to the banks though, would they?
I suppose that, lets say a load of farmland just suddenly appeared in the middle of the sahara – well, I guess it’s likely that an increase in assets is going to make the bank more willing to lend money – they’ll increase the money supply.
But I think they would probably be lending the money to the people with the new (non-monetary) assets. Not Joe Blow.
If they make a big success of running the farms it would probably all turn out well for society and everyone would get more/cheaper/better corn – but if we go back to the original example and imagine that it were just gold that the rich guys had found, now what’s the advantage to ordinary people?
It’s possible that there will be a similar increase in money supply and that this might have good effects for ordinary people, but I don’t think it’s guaranteed.
My understanding is that, yeah, reserve ratios would probably go up.
There would presumably be other effects — a boom in the yacht construction sector, and so on — but I think it would be pretty surprising if handing the rich a huge pile of money didn’t increase reserve ratios. If I had to estimate how much, I would guess that reserve ratios would increase in proportion to the overall amount of the windfall that ended up in savings accounts, minus whatever money gets lent out to new opportunities in polo horse rental, etc.
Real Economists are invited to step in and correct me, of course.
In the short term it certainly would, I agree. The banks certainly won’t be able to lend all of the new money out immediately (nor would doing so be a good idea).
But what about in the long term? At some point a new equilibrium is attained, yes?
Thinking of this in terms of handing people money isn’t very useful, since if you print a bunch of money and give it out that doesn’t increase the amount of wealth in the world. You can’t eat dollars.
The relevant question is what happens if valuable resources, such as land or oil, appear and belong to the rich people.
It seems like we have to be better off if the new resources just appear in addition to resources that already existed. Except insofar as the rich use their now greater wealth to say, fund the campaigns of bad politicians.
However, I am wondering about the following: libertarians like George Riesman will argue that, all else equal, it would actually be better for the economy to give transfer payments to rich people than poor people because the rich use a larger percentage of their income on investments likely to increase the capital stock, etc. while the poor just consume most of their income.
This argument seems true to me insofar as we just mean “money,” that is “bidding power” over the resources already existing. If we just printed money and gave it to the rich they’d likely command resources in a way more likely to produce economic growth than if we just printed new money and gave it to the poor.
But what if we just created a new oil well out of thin air and had the option of giving the title to a rich person or a poor person? One might argue that the poor person has a greater incentive to see the well become productive now, while the rich person might sit on it or something for a while until the time is ripe (or more likely, the poor person might lack the resources to develop it). Most likely, the poor person just sells the well to a rich person who then develops it, so maybe the economy was better off just giving it to the rich person in the first place anyway?
(Just talking here about the economy and what grows its productive capacity, not Rawlsian justice, etc.)
The relevant question is what happens if valuable resources, such as land or oil, appear and belong to the rich people.
It seems like we have to be better off if the new resources just appear in addition to resources that already existed. Except insofar as the rich use their now greater wealth to say, fund the campaigns of bad politicians.
You can construct a situation where we aren’t better off, though it’s artificial. Assume diminishing marginal utility. Note that new resources lower the price for existing producers of that resource. If the preexisting producers of that resource are poor, and the consumers of it are rich, then the harm to preexisting producers can in principle outweigh the benefits to the new producers and the consumers.
Until QE in 2008, excess reserves in banks were kept at a _very_ low level; less than 10% of total reserve requirement.
Since QE, excess reserves are off the chart and I suspect much chicanery, but at least until 2008, bank lending was clearly limited by deposits.
With a view to the past, the grotesquely unempathic “Cluster B rationalism” that excessive economic inequality has historically fostered is vividly illuminated by (Confederate President) Jefferson Davis’ autobiographical A Short History of the Confederate States of America (1890).
Jefferson’s self-reported self-image is a “peaceful planter”:
In reality, Davis sailed in 1835 from New Orleans to Havana, Cuba, to help restore his health. He was accompanied by James Pemberton, his only slave at that time. By early 1836, Davis had purchased 16 slaves; he held 40 slaves by 1840, and 74 by 1845. Davis promoted Pemberton to be overseer of the field teams. In 1860, he owned 113 slaves.
Nowhere does Jefferson’s cooly rational self-justification show any empathic appreciation that his privileged social and economic status as a “simple planter” was grounded in slavery and the lash.
Similarly, but with a view to the future, M.T. Anderson’s new SF-noir Landscape with Invisible Hand brightly illuminates the natural compatibility of unempathic “Cluster B rationalism” with efficient free-market economics … as does (spoiler alert!) the meditations upon 21st century techno-institutions that foster economic, technological, and psychological slavery, that are at the heart of (this week’s AWESOME movie) Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049“.
Hmmm … and surely Sean Baker’s present-day blue-collar homage “The Florida Project” deserves mention too?
In summary, few societies — past, present, and future — are more inherently dystopian than those that privilege unempathic Cluster B rationalism in service of unregulated global market efficiency.
Go away, John.
I never understood what everyone’s beef with this guy was, until he replied to one of my comments!
Is it out-of-bounds to remark that specializing “very rich/elite” to “Milo Minderbinder” — Milo being a paradigmatic Cluster B rationalist — illuminates Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961) as precisely the steelman analysis that has been requested?
Such rationalizing self-restrictions are themselves unflinchingly lampooned by Heller! 🙂
It is out of bounds to evade your ban a dozen times.
I think the steelman would be basically what you wrote out: additional money going to the super-rich is, comparatively, less beneficial to society than the same money going to the not-super-rich. This is because the super-rich tend to spend a lower percentage of their income on consumption (I’m pulling this from memory, so this might not be actually true, but I think it is), and also the same amount of money spent on investments like a BoA savings account or stocks contributes comparatively less to the economy than that same amount of money spent on consumption.
And because economics basically always works on comparative advantage and the margins, this gets exaggerated into “monetary gains by the super-rich contribute nothing to society,” rather than “monetary gains by the super-rich are likely to contribute less to society than the same monetary gains by the non-super-rich, based on our current understanding of economics.”
Of course, there’s also the issue that this is a position often taken in opposition to people who insist that the super-rich are job creators whose investments make out-sized contributions to society. Which I believe would be an exaggeration in a different direction and even less correct. So the people arguing this may play tit-for-tat and feel free to exaggerate in their own direction.
I may be mistaken, but I suspect that this is a case of your assuming that the label for an idea (comparative advantage) tells you what the idea is, usually a dangerous assumption (my standard example is the theory of relativity).
I think he means opportunity cost?
That is the closest term I can think of, although I admit my terminology knowledge tends to be quite terrible, and I am very prone to misusing specific terminology in bizarre ways (generally based on over contextualizing it to the first case I encounter of it).
Isn’t it just absolute advantage? If a rich person can use $1 to produce 1 unit of economic good and a poor person can use $1 to produce 2 units of economic good, the poor have an absolute advantage when it comes to producing economic goodness with money inputs.
You’re right, “comparative advantage” means something in economics that’s different from what I meant here. I think Thegnskald’s suggestion of “opportunity cost” gets at it better; that is, you don’t ever just look at the impact of something in isolation, you always compare the impact relative to the impact of doing something else. And in terms of contributing to society, it tends to be better to give $1 to someone who’s not super-rich compared to giving $1 to someone who is super-rich.
If what you mean is “in terms increasing total utility,” that might be true due to declining marginal utility of income. But some of the comments seemed to be talking about something else, involving consuming somehow being better for the economy than investing.
It’s been a while since I studied economics seriously, but I recall learning that the multiplier effect of spending on consumption is higher than spending on investment. I recall being convinced of this through a pretty basic and intuitive argument which I can’t remember at the moment. Is this incorrect or perhaps hopelessly oversimplified?
I think so. It’s part of a model of economics that was very popular about fifty years ago but led to some incorrect predictions thereafter.
Early in his first term, Obama claimed that all economists agreed that stimulus was the proper response to a recession. Thomas Sargent, who got his Nobel for work in macro, commented that the President had been misinformed.
To be fair, macro isn’t my field, and my view is that a course in it is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.
On the reverse, couldn’t you claim that rich people tend to create wealth by spending most of their money on capital expenses (new companies, libraries, cathedrals), whereas the poor destroy wealth by spending money on consumables which go away? So in the short term, the poor getting money means more economic activity, but in the long term less actual wealth in society?
A lot of capital expenses, like all of the ones you listed, require demand for consumption in order to be productive. There are some, probably heavily concentrated in the finance industry, which require demand from people who want to invest to be productive. If I can’t build a profitable widget factory, because the serfs are too poor, I might buy a fiber optic cable instead. So a metric for whether we have too much or too little consumption might be whether the financial industry is growing or shrinking. If it’s growing, we might want more people to spend money, increasing the returns on producing goods for consumption. If it’s shrinking, we might rich people to have more capital so they can keep the industry running and allocating capital well.
ETA: I suppose in addition to catering to investors when widgets aren’t profitable, you could also try lobbying.
What makes you point specifically to the financial industry? It seems to me that a dollar invested in a new bank, or in trading around home mortgages, is probably going to give less actual benefit to people than a dollar invested in a widget factory.
(Of course, I’m talking about the modern First World where there’re already a profusion of banks standing ready to serve just about everyone. If we were in 1700’s America, things might well be different.)
I’m not sure how to interpret what you’re asking.
What made me point to the financial industry is that’s where you make investment vehicles and move them around. If there are a lot of people who want to invest, there’s probably demand for financial sector stuff. Is there some other sector that seems more likely to grow when investment demand >> consumption demand?
Growing/shrinking might not be a good metric for a real-world economy, since as you say, we might currently have more than enough infrastructure for getting capital from investors to producers, and maybe a slow rate of growth as the economy gets larger and more complicated is appropriate.
Ah, @Charles, I think I was misinterpreting your point. What I was trying to say was that IMO in the modern West, we’re already far on one side of the scale: a marginal dollar in the financial industry probably gives less actual benefit to people than a marginal dollar in a widget factory.
I think I agree with that. It seems intuitively true that the growth of the financial sector is higher than optimal, and it would be good if we invested more in goods and research. I have no idea though, whether giving spending $1 on consumption increases the demand for non-financial-sector investments by enough to make it better than investing $1 (in the current default mix of financial/non-financial).
@Matt M
The claim is not that the gains of the rich are of no benefit to society, but that the opportunity costs of inequality are of such a scale that they are no net benefits. Make some reasonable assumptions about marginal utility, and you can see that this claim is quite plausible. A man will spend his first thousand dollars feeding himself, his next few thousand on housing and clothes, his fifty thousandth dollar goes to buy a new car, maybe pay for a vacation. But what does he do with his millionth dollar, his billionth? At some point the ability to directly improve one’s quality of life through increasing consumption hits a point of rapidly diminishing marginal returns.
Of course one might ask, why do the rich continue to pursue ever greater wealth if it isn’t making them better any off? Human motivation is a complicated thing, and some people just enjoy doing things that happen to make them very rich; but I suspect the main reason is the maintenance of social status. As income increases so does spending on Veblen goods, and other forms of conspicuous consumption.
A simple solution to the status signaling arms race is to raise taxes on the consumption of the rich, and spend the funds on social goods for the poor. Under the right circumstances this can even be a Pareto efficient solution, since the relative social position of the rich does not change, but the poor experience large absolute gains.
And yet when you try this, you merely end up bankrupting the yacht-makers.
That’s not all you do. You also raise government revenue that can be spent on public goods, and incentivize the rich towards investment, and away from luxury consumption.
It’s true you’ve put the yacht makers out of business. But compared to the number of people who would benefit from public spending, or those who would be employed in industries created by new investment, how many yacht makers are there really? Small scale craft production of luxury goods, is likely one of the most socially inefficient uses of labor and capital.
I don’t think it’s possible, or even desirable, to stop people from competing for social status. But I do think its fairly easy to encourage them to do it in more social useful ways. Wouldn’t we all be better off is the ultra rich devoted their fortunes to patronizing charitable causes, or high tech innovation? Even supporting the opera would do more public good than yachts and mansions.
So instead of yachtmakers getting paid for building yachts, they end up on the dole with the same money? Except if the yachtmakers are out of business, it’s because you incentivized the rich to switch from conspicuous consumption to investing… which means you don’t actually get the revenue.
But why do you think the balance of investment to luxury consumption should be tilted more? Having rich people compete to be the next Elon Musk produces a lot of good things, but also a lot of failures. And if you overtax the luxury goods, you’ve also limited the investment opportunities; a Tesla is an electric car, but it’s also a luxury good.
The dole is certainly worse.
I think you’re trying to solve a problem which isn’t a problem with a solution that’s worse. Yachts, expensive cars, ridiculously expensive jewelry, or gold-plated everything; these are expensive but the opportunities for status-signaling with them are quickly exhausted among the very rich (all while transferring some of that wealth to the less-rich). Donald Trump’s (pre-Presidential) status wasn’t in his ridiculous gold-plated apartment, it was in his buildings and his branding empire.
If you’re concerned about the rich having too much money, why is the status signaling arms race a problem? It sounds like it accomplishes what you want, by extracting extra money from the rich long after their basic needs are met, and doing so in a way that scales with their income to boot.
To follow that argument, they’re not spending all their excess wealth in status games. Sure, someone with $2 billion might spend $2 million on a yacht, while someone with $1 billion might only spend $1 million, but the first guy still has $999 million more that isn’t going to stimulate yacht-makers.
See my answer to The Nybbler above. I’m not all that concerned that the rich have too much money, I’m concerned that that money is not being spent in a socially optimal way.
Wealth, and ownership are funny concepts, we use them all the time, but they are rarely explicitly defined.
To have wealth is to own things, and to own a thing is to posses a certain kind of socially sanctioned right to use it as you see fit. I don’t know that we have enough information to determine what system of ownership of productive resources is most conducive to the public good. We do know that certain forms of extreme concentration of ownership, in the hands of monopolists, or the state, are inefficient, because they destroy the incentives provided by competition; and we know that requiring the owners of capital to pay a certain percentage of their income in taxes is necessary to provide essential public goods.
There have been some interesting experiments in organizing individual competing firms with ownership distributed among their employees, and I think these experiments should be expanded.
Nevertheless, I remain somewhat agnostic as to what the best distribution of ownership rights is. Perhaps it is the case that a small number of individuals are so talented in the managing of capital that it is best to leave decisions in their hands, but in that case we should do our best to ensure that they are incentivized to manage those resources in the best interest of the pubic, rather than spending their profits on trivial vanities.
@Jaskologist
Because too much of the status signaling arms race revolves around buying things that provide minimal utility or building up large wealth, rather than spending that money on charity or being a mecenas.
If above a certain level of wealth the only/main way to gain status was to lift more people out of poverty and/or pay for science that benefits humanity, then the issue pretty much wouldn’t exist.
But that’s not how the world works right now.
Building up large wealth how? Investing in promising businesses? Making smart bets on commodities? Doesn’t that lift people out of poverty, etc.?
Are you sure? I’m not sure Bill Gates did more good for the world with his charities than in building Microsoft.
Also, I am not that familiar with the status signalling games of the super wealthy, but I imagine “would you like to come to the gala the Met is putting on for my new endowment for children’s art education” is more high status than “would you like to hang out on my new golf course,” though I’m sure it depends on the individual.
Do you really think that you, or any central organization specifically including the government, is capable of figuring out
1) The socially optimal way everyone’s (or every rich person’s) money should be spent
and
2) The best way to get everyone (or every rich person) to spend it that way?
To call this a hard problem seems like ridiculous understatement.
You may know that. I don’t.
You can tax capital. You can tax land. You can tax labor. There is no reason that taxing capital in particular is essential.
Off hand, the only public good I can think of that is essential is national defense, that only if there are other countries with the desire and power to conquer you. And some public goods are privately produced, such as radio broadcasts or this blog. What public goods were you thinking of that are essential and cannot be produced privately?
I am.
I mean have you used any Microsoft products?
Joking aside, there wouldn’t be any charities without the profits from Microsoft, so it’s kind of an irrelevant point. I should point out that Bill Gates is actually a strong advocate of the policy I’m arguing for.
@The Nybbler
You replied to me in two different places, and in the interest of combating comment thread kudzu, I’m just going to respond here.
People benefit from public spending in many more ways than going on the dole; state funded education, health care, and infrastructure projects can all benefit low income people without destroying their incentive to work. Perhaps more importantly, this is an example of the lump of labor fallacy. In a modern growing economy the, with ample capital being invested in job creating projects, the marine engineers, welders and the like who worked in the yacht industry are not likely to stay unemployed for long.
Yachts, cars, jewelry, expensive real estate, gourmet cat poo coffee investment grade wine, 38 million dollar antique Chinese bowls.
You’d be surprised.
looking back through history to the conspicuous consumption of the upper ranks of societies with even more skewed distributions of wealth and social privilege then modern America, I’m not at all convinced that there is any limit on the human capacity to expend wealth on vanity.
No, and rather then have some totalitarian bureaucracy poke through the family finances of the one percent, the policy I’m arguing for would actually simplify our tax code.
What I’m advocating is shifting to a progressive consumption tax. The simplest version would an expenditure tax; under this system households would simply report their income to the IRS, as they do now. They would then take a certain stranded deduction, to cover basic living expenses, and an additional deduction to cover all the investments they made. All other income, including proceeds from loans, would be taxed at a highly progressive rate. This last feature, the tax on taking out credit, might make it a hard political sell.
There are other versions that are more like a kind of modified VAT. Here is Sen. Ben Cardin advocating for one such plan.
What all of these schemes have in common is that they shift the burden of taxation away from income and onto consumption, and eliminate perverse incentives built into the current system.
One of the unintended consequences of taxing income is that we subject investors to a kind of double tax. Consider two taxpayers, Bob and Sarah. They both earn the same income, and pay the same tax rate, but Bob wishes to spend more of his paycheck on goods and services now, while Sarah plans on saving for the future. They both take five thousand dollars out of their bank accounts; Bob to make a down payment on a new car, and Sarah to invest in the stock market. They have both already been taxed on their income, But when Sarah goes to sell her stocks, she is taxed again on capital gains.
To minimize the perverse incentives involved, we tax capital gains at a lower rate the income earned through labor, but think how unfair that is. The very wealthy, who often earn a much higher percentage of their income from capital gains can pay a lower effective tax rate than a middle class person who works a full time Job. The end result of the current tax system is that investment is discouraged, people with trust funds are rewarded, and middle class savers are punished.
Switch from an income to a progressive consumption tax, and not only have you solved these problems; but you have shifted the burden of taxation onto those who are spending the highest percentage of their income on the social status arms race. People for whom paying taxes, on consumption above a certain level, results little or no real loss of utility.
A Tesla is a good counter example of a luxury good that has positive externalities, both because of environmental factors, and because purchasing a Tesla helps to stimulate research and to development into battery electric vehicles.
Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that supply side stimulus (E.g. increased investment, and savings) will do more to promote technological progress then increasing demand. Consumers are limited to buying goods that are already on the shelves, and only X percentage of every dollar spent goes to ameliorate the costs of R&D. On the other hand when more investment capital is available companies will have an easier time raising funds to pay for future investment.
@Hyperboloid
The relevant comparison is not a world where Bill Gates manages somehow to spend all his profits on lavish yachts and caviar versus one where he spends it on charity; the relevant comparison is one where he spends most of the profits on new business investments versus the current world, where he spent a lot of the profits on charity.
I’m not sure the world is better off, on net, for him having made the choice he did. Setting aside the fact that I personally think some of his work in support of e.g. common core was actively harmful, you don’t know how many new jobs and how much more wealth might have been created had he stuck to what he was demonstrably very good at (business), rather than going into something he seems not to be all that great at, or at least, we have no reason to assume he would be good at (charity; have heard, purely anecdotally, that his foundation accomplishes a lot less with a lot more than many others because often lacking on-the-ground knowledge of the people they’re trying to help).
Business and charity are both ultimately ways of satisfying human preferences. Only difference is business does it for a profit and charity does not. It may be easy to assume that, because recipients of charity generally don’t pay to receive charity, the overall benefit to humanity is better because people who have little are getting something at little or no cost to themselves. But business also has a big strength relative to charity, which is price signals telling you what people want and how to get it to them most efficiently. It’s not prima facie obvious that one is better for the world than the other in all cases.
Where are they going to work? Labor isn’t completely fungible; if it were, a lot of issues would be much simpler. They won’t be working in any industry which produces luxury goods, that’s certain. Anyway, I’m less than convinced that your tax proposal will allow for a modern and growing economy.
Your tax proposal is not a luxury consumption tax of any sort; it’s still an income tax. So we take that standard deduction for “basic living expenses”. Now I live in a house in northern New Jersey, a high COL area, so I’m already over the deduction with my living expenses. If I buy a new car or even want to go out for dinner, it’s heavily taxed. So I have to live austerely. It’s not clear what you do with my savings; if savings count as “investment” there’s all sorts of interesting games I can play to evade tax. If they don’t, you’re taxing saving extremely heavily.
The ultra-rich in this system still get their luxury goods. The investment-grade wines and art and such are “investments”. Their yacht is used for “business” and is thus also an investment, or they play games where they form a company to run the yachts and one of the perks of ownership is use of them.
But, the details of the proposal aren’t the biggest issue. You could change them, and your new proposal would have different problems. The biggest issue is just that you’re going after a problem which isn’t a problem; there’s no shortage of investment. This isn’t the time of Louis XIV, and he was the State anyway.
It’s about power.
You can draw a picture of the top 0.01% as wise and wonderful, with the results of their investments benefiting us all far more than anything normal people could think of – but you can also take the opposite view.
So the steel-man is this – the top 0.01% are driven by the logic of their money-game to use their power to undermine civil society and to rewrite social rules to be even further in their favour.
Increasing 0.01% wealth is a signal of this.
I would say that if people with power are acting against the interests of society, they can make things actively worse. In many (non-virtual) respects, life for ordinary (rich country) people hasn’t really improved for a few decades now.
If an investment bank becomes wealthy and decides to pay me to build a fibre optic cable that allows it make transactions 1/100 millionth of a second faster, I’m not building hospitals. Or houses. So, to the extent that there is a hard limit on real resources, they are making us worse off.
That is pretty much it, and my major issue with libertarianism; it depends too much on a framework I don’t think can be built, in which rich people are prevented from manipulating things to their own advantage by some kind of magical cultural forcefield.
Hell, I even agree that the levers of power created to regulate rich people tend to get subverted to the ends of rich people – but those levers of power weren’t created by rich people for that purpose, they were created to deal with legitimate issues. I guess my divergence there is that I think that regulations create more benefits than harms, on net.
The issue is that the benefits are in terms of abuses that don’t happen – which means they are invisible, and thus go uncounted. Whereas the harms are salient and mostly visible.
(Which is ironic, because that is a standard libertarian argument. It is a good one, and deserves more attention. It just isn’t applied to their own beliefs.)
I’m not sure what your definition of libertarianism is. If you mean a society where all interactions are voluntary then the rich can’t manipulate things to their own advantage via involuntary interactions, such as government favor, because if they do it isn’t a libertarian society. In that context, your claim would be that libertarianism isn’t stable, that it will be replaced by crony capitalism.
Or is your claim that even if all interactions are voluntary, the rich can still succeed in manipulating things, perhaps by using clever advertising to fool everyone else into buying junk from them at high prices?
Or do you mean by libertarianism a society where all government restrictions that the left likes and the right doesn’t are eliminated, but government still exists and can impose restrictions for the benefit of the rich?
Or …
I think you have to be more specific to get a useful response.
Libertarians, of which I am one, would generally claim that the benefits, if they exist, are small relative to the harm.
How do you distinguish that theory from “they were created by rich people to benefit themselves, using widely perceived issues as a cover”?
Take the ICC as an example. For data, read Railroads and Regulation, a book by one of libertarians’ favorite socialists.
How about “Land property is theft. You didn’t build that.” and “[At least most of; some technologists *might* differ] The really rich spend their money on owning people.” ?
I don’t know what Thegnskald thinks but I assume this is by far one of the most common lines of critique: “voluntary” and “free will” as concepts understood by libertarians are alien to reality, because it abstracts away many relevant complications.
The problem with any society is the powerful manipulating things to benefit those with power. Any society without a cultural framework to control abuse of power is going to fail.
In a more-or-less market oriented society, money is the most fungible form of power. The advantage of a libertarian society is that power is gained by contributing to the economy. Further, money is fungible… a million dollars is the same whether it comes as one bundle of $1000000 from one person or one million individual $1 bills from one million people.
I don’t know how you distinguish between real resources and unreal resources.
If the rich get much richer and nothing else changes, that means there are more resources out there than before. So even if the money is used to build a fibre optic cable whose only value is to let someone do arbitrage an instant before someone else would, people are no worse off than before.
But they are worse off than in the alternative where wealth increases by the same amount but it goes to people who use it for something useful rather than pure rent seeking. Is that your point?
I think my point is this:
If I build a gun, that’s an increase in wealth. Is the world better off for me having a gun?
It really depends on the society I’m living in, and what kind of person I am.
You are presumably better off for having a gun–that’s why you built it. The rest of the world might be better or worse off, depending on how you plan to use it.
Economics tells us that in a market society, to first approximation, each individual receives the net benefit of his actions–pays the cost of the inputs he uses because he has to buy them from willing sellers, gets the benefit of the outputs he produces because he sells them to willing buyers. So each individual has the right incentive–to take actions that produce a net benefit, avoid ones that produce a net cost.
The second approximation involves things like imperfect competition, externalities, public good problems, … .
The alternative to the market system is one in which individual actors almost never receive anything close to the net benefit of their actions. A voter who votes for the better candidate receives only a tiny share of the benefit, supposing his vote turns out to be decisive. A judge who sets a precedent that makes people slightly worse off pays none of the cost. Market failure, situations where what is rational for the individual is not rational for the group, exists in private markets, but it’s the exception. In the political market it’s the rule.
For longer versions of the argument I can point you to relevant books and chapters.
From what I gather, libertarians tend to argue for the freedom to undertake transactions, within some system of individual property ownership.
This system of property ownership itself cannot be fully voluntary, but it may be either (1) based upon some clear natural principle that only the evil would oppose, or (2) constructed in such a way that, when combined with the principle of free transactions, the original distribution of property rights (and presumably the source of any opposition) becomes irrelevant.
I think the major objection to libertarianism tends to be that they emphasise free transactions without clearly addressing the question of how the property ownership system should be constructed.
Maybe that’s an objection to tone more than anything else.
Friedman: a voter gets a tiny share of the benefit for making a tiny share of the effort. “His vote turns out to be decisive” doesn’t exist – if 4 people carry a coffin, which one carried the coffin?
You are deciding whether to spend a thousand dollars worth of time and effort figuring out who is the better candidate. The benefit from doing that is a very small increase in the probability that the better candidate will win–say an increase by 10^-7. Multiply that by the value to everyone of the better candidate–say a thousand dollars per person times 300,000,000 people. The total benefit from your effort is $30,000. The benefit to you is $.0001. So you don’t do it, even though doing it produces a large net benefit.
You have to think in marginal terms–what is the effect of your action is–not in average terms.
Democratic politics is a bit like deciding what the family is going to have for dinner.
Mum’s in charge and ignores the more outlandish requests. Given a groundswell of popular opinion, and the right ingredients, we might be able to shift her decision in one direction or the other.
One of your family members has done a detailed analysis of what he should be eating and decided on ethical/health grounds to veto the potatoes. We grant him a limited right of secession.
If the dinner is particularly bad, Mum wants some feedback so she doesn’t do it again.
I think that, actually, people enjoy complaining about their bad dinner and thinking about how things could be better. That’s why they do it, they’ll do it anyway, and democracy/mum listening is an attempt to channel that existing tendency into something useful.
The key thing is that we don’t all want to end up eating marshmellow pizza every day because you’ve got three children and they think it sounds swell. That’s the limit of democracy
The mechanisms used for that scale very badly.
“If the rich get much richer and nothing else changes, that means there are more resources out there than before.” – not necessarily. It may mean pure financial trickery, in which case the rich get relatively richer with no new resources available, thus extending their claims over real wealth previously held by other people. Else, even if real wealth is involved, given that resources are finite, it’s possible that whatever good the great extra wealth did its owners is more than counterbalanced by us getting closer to running out of resources – even if you’re optimistic about our ability to improve our resource use, extra resources extracted and used on BS increase our workload.
Assume the 1% / 0.01% are always going to be driven by power to rewrite the rules in their favor. What sort of social structure incentivizes them the most to help the other 99% of society?
It may be that a social structure that doesn’t incentivize that investment bank fiber optic cable instead incentivizes the construction of a big brother Great Firewall of Oceania instead of a hospital.
I think it’s possible to have social structures that limit the power of the most powerful.
Personally, I think that the best thing would probably be to let baby have his bottle, within clearly defined limits. Allow those who are driven by money and prestige to play the money game, encourage them to play it, but ensure that they aren’t able to undermine the commonwealth.
I guess that comes down to culture. You’d probably need to have a class of people who worked for the public benefit – I think a degree of nationalism, or parochialism would probably be useful here.
Personally, I think that the best thing would probably be to let baby have his bottle, within clearly defined limits. Allow those who are driven by money and prestige to play the money game, encourage them to play it, but ensure that they aren’t able to undermine the commonwealth.
Limiting the power of the wealthy by creating a powerful class of lawmakers to rule over them is just trading one devil for another. You’ve traded the 1% with the most money for the 1% with the most political influence (who quickly become rich, and who the rich curry favor with using their wealth). The way you limit power is by limiting power. If you’re going to use political power as a check on the power of wealth, you need a check on political power, and you need to resist the temptation to let the politically powerful accumulate more power. People who want power are going to go where the power is.
@Civilis
Democracy gives 99% the ability to rewrite the rules in their favor and thus gives the 1% the incentive to limit their selfishness to an extent that the 99% (begrudgingly) accepts.
Of course, democracy can also be rewritten in a way that effectively makes it impossible for the 99% to do that, like the EU ‘democracy’ for example.
Sometimes. Sometimes democracy gives favor to the 1% at the expense of the 99%. See ethanol mandates, sugar tariffs, occupational licensing, and the host of rules and regulations that favor small special interests at the expense of the many. This isn’t a surprising result with democracy either, when considering public choice economics.
Something about diffuse costs and concentrated benefits…
@IrishDude
Sure, but if there is an actual democracy, then the voters favor that outcome. I voted for a political party that favors high taxes on people like me, rather than for a political party that favors that I pay low taxes.
If my preferred political party gets power and increases the taxes a bit, it is at my expense, but not against my will.
@Aapje
I don’t know what you mean by ‘actual democracy’, but I don’t think the second part of your statement follows. There are weak incentives to be an informed voter and read 2,000 page bills to see which special interests are getting paid off by bills sponsored by their favored politician. There are strong incentives for lobbyists and special interests to be informed about the details of 2,000 page bills. See Incurian’s statement on diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.
Also, voters may favor policies they think would be beneficial to the many but actually harm them. Have you read The Myth of the Rational Voter? Voters have systematically biased opinions on economics and don’t have the right incentives to reduce those biases. Why spend hundreds or thousands of hours becoming economically and politically informed when your vote has less than one in a million chance of deciding an election?
@IrishDude
Yes, that’s why I said ‘actual democracy.’
Well functioning democracy where the elected officials act reasonably in accordance with voter preferences requires much more than just leaving voters to their own devices to figure out who to vote for.
Can you describe a set of institutions that reliably produce that outcome for a reasonably large polity–say something over a million people?
No, because ‘institutions’ are not reliable in the sense that you can drop them into a society and get a desired outcome. Their functioning depends on their culture, the culture of society, etc.
Within the last 5 years, both of my aging parents had a significant amount of titanium surgically implanted into their skeletons, and today remain hale, and able to walk swiftly and to climb stairs.
Twenty five years ago, they would have been in wheelchairs, would have to live in a handicapped enabled house, probably would require a full time caretaker, and would be begging their doctors for more pain meds.
Those same parents of mine get much of their joy in life by keeping in touch with their growing flock of grandkids and greatgrandkids, via assorted messaging and videophone apps, and by artisinal crafting of stuff which they buy the raw materials cheap online and then sell to collectors, again online.
So, yeah, no. I disagree. Things have gotten better.
I’ll see your happy Skype grandparents and raise you a billion zombified internet addicts.
Yeah, I know have there have been some fantastic developments in technology – but my sense is that people are working longer hours, in less secure jobs, to live in smaller and more expensive houses, with worse public services and benefits, and higher taxes.
That’s definitely how things are where I live.
Contra people working more hours, there was a global decline in annual working hours per worker of 17% from 1950 through 2016.
Contra smaller houses, in the U.S. the average living space per person doubled from 1973 to 2013 as new home sizes increased 1,000 square feet on average and household size shrank.
YMMV depending on where you live though.
Brains, give me brains! I presume you are including SSC commenters, since anyone who can keep up on these threads has to be somewhat addicted. And yet, reading and commenting on blogs is so much more intellectually satisfying than in older days of writing to zines, or older than that, writing letters to each other on intellectual topics. I don’t see how anyone can complain about the Internet being worse than what existed before.
And I’m sure everyone’s highly stimulated brains are so tasty. 🙂
Edit: And what Irish Dude said.
I gather, however, that commuting time has increased since the ’50s, which may be responsible for the impression that people are working longer.
Mr. X’s point neatly links IrishDude’s two factoids.
It also raises the stakes for self driving cars. At least in the United States where we by and large don’t believe in public transportation, self driving cars will enable a very large number of commuting hours to shift from mostly not leisure time (+/- listening to the radio / books on tape / podcasts) to mostly leisure time.
The decline in working hours has come from part time workers working less. The people who work part time jobs are not high earners. So full time workers are working more and part time workers can’t work enough.
Edit: this is just the US. I’m not sure about worldwide data.
Also, that’s per worker. How many working hours are there per family?
@Wrong Species, my guess would be that’s due to the full-time worker benefit cliff, where the cost of health insurance’s skyrocketed over the past decades.
You completely and blatantly overlook the fact that my parents can *walk*, up stairs, without pain, and do not need a live-in nurse, when you snark about their “addiction” to VTC.
If you need to call grandparents talking to their grandchildren an “addiction”, that tells me a great deal about you.
@standing in shadows
Hmmmm… I think you read me as saying something along the lines of
(That’s me doing snark)
No, actually I wasn’t talking about your parents at all – except to say – yes there have been some advances in healthcare, there are good points about information technology, but there are negative aspects to information technology too.
I don’t know, you could probably make the case that whatever advances in medical technology there have been are more important than having a nice job, or living in a reasonably priced house – I’d certainly rather be healthy in a dump than unhealthy in a palace – but I’m not sure how general improvement in healthcare has been.
I really don’t know.
And I’m happy your parents are happy.
Imagine that the top 0.01% only used their money in an ongoing poker tournament among themselves, in the hope of having more than everyone else at a given time. As they make more from other sources, it just gets put into the game. That seems pretty useless.
The top 0.01% don’t do that, of course. But quite a bit of the money winds up in ongoing derivatives investments (often via hedge funds). There is a standard argument for the economic value of derivatives in terms of determining accurate prices, but the extent to which that translates into social value is … contested. So your implicit assumption that the money must somehow be doing some good may not have any real justification. The rich may be mostly gambling on price levels with each other in order to show who has the most money.
If the 0.01% turned their money into cash and played poker with it, forever, that cash is basically a zero percent no-repayment loan to everyone else with money denominated in that currency.
Take it to almost to the limit to see why that’s the case: assume one person accumulates half the money in the world, turns it all into cash, and then just burns it. All the rest of the money in the world instantly is twice as valuable, and that’s twice as in real terms, not nominal terms.
And, if instead of using cash, if they are playing poker with checks or IOUs backed by their investment accounts, that’s completely invisible outside outside those circles. All those investment accounts are still ultimately invested in real stuff and in real people who are using the stuff to make more stuff.
Seems to me like if you burned all the currency the world’s actual capacity to make things would be unchanged; currency is sort of like just a voucher to control a bit of that production that doesn’t change anything if it’s just not redeemed.
You are correct, but miss the point. The real wealth and real productivity in the world doesn’t change. Every dollar (euro, yuan, etc) would then have twice as much claim on the underlying real wealth and productivity.
So if the 0.01% turn half their wealth into pieces of paper and then burn it, the other 99.9% all instantly got that much more wealth.
I doubt this analysis even applies to gold. If someone destroyed half the gold in the world, the value of what is left would be … determined by a lot of complicated factors.
If we’re talking instead about a fiat currency, you’re going to have to do a lot more work to support this kind of assertion.
How much do you know about derivatives?
More digits worth than I am going to post in a public forum, even under an obscured handle.
They all eventually resolve down to real land, or a real building, or a real piece of machinery, or a real shipping container full of real goods, or a real shipping container full of real commodities, or real labor by real people, and real promises to do various things with those real things.
I think this is my favorite BS phrase of the week.
I could go to a racetrack and bet some money on the outcome of a horse race.
I could also go to my broker and enter an options contract on the price of corn in six months.
What is your claim about the difference between these acts, if any?
Does the fact that the latter act is tied to the price of a commodity somehow make it fundamentally different?
Or does my bet on the horse race “resolve down to” real labor on the part of the jockey and horse trainers?
Or what?
The difference between the bet on the horse and the bet on the corn, is the corn farmer gets paid before the corn is auctioned off, and probably gets paid before he even plants it. He’s selling risk in the future, to get stable money today.
That’s actually valuable, for society at large.
You’re making an unwarranted stipulation about the counter-party to the option. It can just be a bet that the price will go the other way.
I could sit here and make up a story about a bookie hedging against an imbalance in the bets he has accepted personally with a few at the track window. I could even add more complex, derivative-like bets to the picture.
The fact that derivatives can be used to hedge has little or nothing to do with the potential for derivative investment to be akin to gambling.
I’m not a huge fan of complicated financial instruments, but they do fundamentally differ from gambling. In gambling, you’re creating a risk for the sole purpose to have something to bet on. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objections to that, and I enjoy going to the casino. But when I step up to a craps table, the dice are being thrown to resolve the bets on the table.
With derivatives, you’re merely shifting risk that is already there. The price risk of corn is a thing that exists, and will exist whether or not somebody can purchase futures. Futures permit that risk to be moved to somebody who may be better able to do something about it.
But what about when the cash settled futures market dwarfs the size of the underlying?
The distinction is not always so clear.
@CatCube
Yeah, but people are not limited to restricting the trade to the actual risk, are they?
It wouldn’t be true for gold because gold has nonmonetary uses. After you destroy half of it, an ounce of gold exchanges for more of other things than it did before, which reduces consumption in non-monetary uses and increases supply, so the stock of monetary gold is more than half what it was before.
It’s much more plausible there, since fiat currency has negligible non-monetary uses. Individuals want to hold a certain amount of purchasing power as currency to make it possible to separate selling things from buying things–think of it as a shock absorber. After half the money vanishes and prices have not yet fallen each person has half the purchasing power as currency he had before, so wants more currency. To get more currency you sell more than you buy. But everyone can’t succeed in selling more than he buys because one person’s sale is another person’s purchase, so there is now excess supply on all markets, so prices fall. They keep falling until the purchasing power of each person’s cash balances is back where he wants it, which means prices have fallen in half.
That’s a somewhat simplified story since during the transition the cost of holding cash is lower since its value is going up, but it describes the equilibrium points before and after the change. For fully informed actors, the drop should be instantaneous.
Another difference is that the future market generates useful information.
But although successful speculation is both profitable and socially useful, the profit is not a measure of how useful it is, unlike profits in most other market contexts. Hence it is possible to have inefficient speculation–spending a thousand dollars to get information that is worth two thousand to you but has a social value of only a hundred. That point is not original with me, it’s due to Hirschleifer.
That’s the case someone referred to earlier where you spend money putting in a fiber connection to the market in order to get your bid in a hundredth of a second faster. Correcting prices a hundredth of a second sooner probably doesn’t have much social value, but it might be very profitable.
At a considerable tangent but of interest to me, reputational enforcement of contracts has the same logic–the incentive to do it is not linked to the social value it produces. When you decide not to do business with the seller who cheated me, thus deterring cheating, your objective is not to deter cheating but to avoid being yourself cheated. If it is costly for you to find out whether he or I really defaulted on the contract you can protect yourself by doing business with neither of us, which means it is not in my interest to report his default, which means reputational enforcement won’t work. So the critical requirement is making it possible for third parties to determine at low cost who is at fault in a contract breach.
This is the standard rationale, which I referenced in my OP:
If half of the money in the world were randomly destroyed, this sort of explanation might make sense.
But the original proposal was that we could liken rich people hanging on to their money to some amount of it being destroyed, and therefore improving the lives of others by raising the value of their money*. What those rich people would be doing violates a premise of your explanation.
* Of course, even if you accept the original argument, increasing the value of money in that way would hurt those who have negative amounts of it. That is, everyone in debt.
@Matt M
A rich person could gain money by producing rice at a lower cost than a bunch of subsistence farmers. The farmers would then go into debt, their land would be seized and they would be forced to forego their quaint traditional lifestyle in favor of working in sweatshops.
This would ultimately yield a bunch of money to society at large. So even though the farmers in particular were screwed over, one might suppose the diffuse benefits were worth it.
But then one considers that people are often stupid when spending their money. Sometimes they spend money on things that they ultimately habituate to, providing no long term increase to their happiness despite great expense. Sometimes they spend money on things that actually lower their happiness. They spend money on electronics that disrupt their sleep habits, leading to chronic fatigue and a bad mood. They spend money private entertainment systems in order to spend time on those things rather than their neighbors and friends. Maybe things were better when people had to attend social functions on weekend nights.
So, in the aftermath of Mr. Bigbux’ commercial sorties, one of those farmers who went bankrupt might then spend his extra money as a sweatshop worker on a bunch of consumer stuff. But instead of improving his happiness, it would actually reduce it. Talk about a bad deal!
After a good night’s sleep I’m ready to distill my ideas.
The premise that what’s good for the rich is good for everyone else rests on the assumptions that increases in wealth are inherently beneficial and that the wealth of the rich either trickles down or has a neutral effect on the wealth of society as a whole.
A person could disagree with the premise if they rejected the first assumption and instead thought that increases in wealth were often bad.
A person could disagree if they didn’t believe the second assumption–that the wealth of the rich either trickles down or remains neutral–and instead thought that it lessened the wealth of everyone else. I’m not given to this argument myself, but I will point out there are circumstances where capitalism can work out this way.
A person could disagree if they had some secondary goal, such as achieving equality, which gains to the rich would conflict with. Depending on their priorities, the benefits of wealth could be canceled out by the harm done to equality.
I think those are all of the general reasons a person might rationally disagree with the premise.
It’s necessary to be clear about the distinction between wealth and money. If the treasury prints an extra billion dollars and gives it to the rich their wealth has increased but at the cost of the wealth of everyone else–the real stuff that matters hasn’t changed, they just get more of it and other people get less.
The situation I think you are considering is where the rich get wealth without anyone else losing it–manna from heaven or the equivalent. If the rich are rich largely because their income is from capital and they use the extra wealth to produce more capital–hire people with it to build factories, say–then the capital/labor ratio of the society goes up, which will tend to raise wages and lower interest rates. I wouldn’t describe that as “trickling down,” but it is a benefit for the non-rich.
If the rich spend their money in other ways, I don’t see any general reason to expect their increased wealth to hurt or harm others.
The harm comes from how their wealth-creating actions change society in ways that can’t be expressed in purely monetary terms. A person living in post-industrial civilization today has greater wealth than rice farmers in Burma, but those rice farmers might have things which are of greater psychological value. Closer kinship, for instance.
Furthermore, one might think that it is wealth itself that wreaks physical and mental havoc upon those who possess too much of it. Candy, for instance, takes advantage of people’s dietary compulsions in order to do them harm. Just because people are willing to buy it doesn’t make it beneficial.
I agree that harm could come in indirect ways. Also benefits.
Rich people are a market for expensive new technologies, including medical ones, that may later develop to be inexpensive. Rich people often donate money to what they see as worthy causes, motivated by altruism, status seeking, or both, which may do good. The existence of wealthy people may make others feel worse because they feel inferior, or better because their existence makes the country seem more important.
I agree that there might be social changes not easily analyzed in economic terms, but I find it hard to see why rich people getting somewhat richer would cause such changes either in the rich or the non-rich.
@David Friedman and Red Foliot
To steelman the “rich getting richer makes some poor people worse off” case: a point I don’t often see mentioned:
In China, if you have only say, 1 dollar to eat lunch, you can get a much better lunch than you can in the US, where that would buy you say, a small pack of gum. This isn’t just because labor is cheaper and the cost of producing the same food is somewhat cheaper, it’s because the society is set up to meet the needs of the large number of people there who only have $1 to spend on lunch.
It is also possible to have a good lunch for $1 in the US: it’s going to look like a giant pile of rice and beans or potatoes and vegetables with some seasoning most likely. But no one in the US produces this lunch (you can make it yourself but then you have to do that, plus you don’t enjoy the economy of scale a restaurant making gallons of cheap lentil soup would), because almost everyone can afford a better lunch (maybe they do at that place all the Hispanic construction workers get their lunch which is located in a scary neighborhood).
Related, you might be satisfied with a smaller, cheaper house, but maybe they only build big houses in your old neighborhood now. This is a little like gentrification, but I think slightly different: it’s not about poor people being bought out and replaced by richer people, it’s about poor peoples’ lives becoming worse as a result of society not catering to their needs.
You’ve got two proposotions therein.
The first : you request a steelman of the claim that monetary gains by the wealthy do not cause life for society on the whole to improve. The second : if monetary gains by the wealthy do not improve life for society, this must be because the wealthy are hoarding money without spending it. I don’t think anyone believes either of those as you have stated them. One can’t steelman a strawman.
Moreover, steelmanning is something that one does on behalf of their opponent. IE, if you don’t believe [X], then you are the one who has to steelman [X].
You should also specificy what you mean by “benefit society.” Being more specific there will go a long way to clarifying the whole situation.
—
I think it is true that the rich do benefit society, in important ways, and to meaningful degrees, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We want a market economy, despite the necessity of inequalities. Being poor in America is much better than being poor almost anywhere else. All granted.
But do wealthy people necessarily want to benefit society, or to allow society to benefit from their personal gains? I don’t think that they do, Nor do I believe that we even want them to.
Benefitting society can only mean either of :
(A) other citizens increase in financial power
(B) other citizens enjoy greater tangible benefits without increasing in financial power
(A) is what all people actually want. It’s what the wealthy want because having a great deal of financial power is the exact definition of being wealthy. Making (A) happen for yourself more than for other people is exactly how you become wealthy. If (A) happens for society on the whole, then the wealthy become de facto less wealthy. Widespread (A) is the exact thing the wealthy don’t want. They will prevent widespread (A) to the extent that they can.
This does not require the wealthy to be cackling mustache-twirlers, or to be openly and deliberately stomping on the poor, or to be amoral. Nor is the situation addressed by merely listening to one’s conscience. Asking the wealthy to make (A) happen for society at large is asking them to stop doing what they’ve always done. To be someone other than who they are. To be someone other than who we want them to be.
(B) is good, and definitely happens all the time. But, it’s still a state of dependency. It’s anti-libertarian. It’s erosive of freedom.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Give a man a fish every day, and you feed him for the rest of his life.
Teach a man to fish, and now you have a competitor in the fishing business.
—
I think there is a balance to be struck. If laissez-faire, evil wins, and we have servitude followed by revolution. If communism, we have servitude followed by revolution. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don’t want the wealthy to be so wealthy that we can’t draft behind them, but we also want them to be wealthy enough that it is worth drafting behind them.
I’ve often thought that we just need to make tax collection on the super rich logarithmic (or exponential, depending on how you look at it).
In this scenario, a person strongly motivated by wealth accumulation can improve their wealth position w.r.t. other people (your (A)), so that impulse remains functional.
However, the absolute distance you can get from everyone else is smaller due to taking a greater and greater amount of taxes as you get bigger and bigger. So, Zuckerberg would have, say $100 million in the extreme, which would still be more than all of the other tech executives, but not so much he can continue to be a large-scale asshole.
(I would also extend taxes to cover other things, not just income.)
So, Zuckerberg would have, say $100 million in the extreme, which would still be more than all of the other tech executives, but not so much he can continue to be a large-scale asshole.
I don’t know if I’d characterise him as an asshole, but there is something a bit smug about him.
However, what I intended to say was I think that past a certain limit, it ceases to be about the money as such. The ultra-rich are not interested in Scrooge McDuck-style vaults of cash where they can go swimming in coins, the numbers are what matters, and they matter only as a means of keeping score.
The real importance is in continuing to be Number One, having the greatest market share, growing new markets, and so on. Having what (to the ordinary person) are enormous piles of cash isn’t the point, else they’d happily lie back on their billion-dollar laurels and let some lean young new competitor overtake them in market share in New Guinea.
But they don’t. Measuring year-on-year growth and this quarter is up by 5% on the same time last year could be done in jellybeans not dollars; what matters is the achievement and the maintenance of being The Top. So opposition to taxation is not so much “you’re taking my money!” as “you’re knocking me down a rung on the status ladder!” That being said, I think Facebook etc do have to generate enormous piles of cash merely to keep going because they’re so big, but past a certain point it really is about ‘we got here and we’re staying here at the top of the mountain’, and money works as a proxy for that. Well, and of course having pots of money gives you access to people and places that are the movers and shakers, gives you power and influence, and so on. So it’s not the money itself, because I think if you flat-out asked him Zuckerberg would agree he’s already rich enough.
I think that’s something that should be true, but isn’t necessarily. If it were the very wealthy would be basically indifferent to increased taxes. So long as the taxes hit everyone equally it wouldn’t change the ordinal ranking.
But as it turns out some billionaires seem to have just as strong an emotional reaction to taxation as people whose lives would be significantly better if that money didn’t disappear from their paychecks.
I roll my eyes when someone trots out “taxation is theft” but on the other hand I know people IRL that genuinely seem to *feel* that way. They have this deep, visceral, burning anger whenever they think about paying taxes.
Yes, people are strongly and probably irrationally loss-averse. But as I understand it there’s been little success in finding evidence that higher tax rates reduce the incentive to work among high earners, suggesting that when they are not viscerally responding to the prospect of a loss it really is the status ladder and not the raw numbers the high earners care about.
They have this deep, visceral, burning anger whenever they think about paying taxes.
But that’s why I think it is about more than the money as money. Unless there is going to be something like a 99% tax rate, they are not in danger of having to sell everything they own and end up sleeping in their car.
But the money isn’t just figures on a balance sheet, it’s “this is the measure of my success, this is mine, this is achievement” so handing it over – or worse, having it taken – is like the teacher taking your gold star for getting 10/10 on a test when you’re in First Class and handing it to someone else who only got 6/10 because you already have three gold stars on the classroom chart and they have none.
It’s not fair 🙂
I think it’s the “this is mine” part that you are underestimating. If all people cared about was relative achievement and the resulting status, a high tax rate imposed on everyone wouldn’t much matter.
People have a hardwired commitment strategy against having their stuff taken. Imagine a mugger demands your money. You have $30 you could give him. Your best estimate is that the cost of refusal, fighting or running, is $40. I predict that you (generic you) probably fights or runs. At $400, probably not.
This commitment strategy is rational, even if the act is not. The knowledge that you are the sort of person who will bear sizable costs to keep someone from taking your stuff makes other people less likely to try to take your stuff, and if they don’t try you don’t have to fight them. I have an old article you might find of interest on a positive account of rights, a description of rights not as a moral category but as a description of human behavior.
Governments try to get around this commitment strategy by convincing people that taxes don’t count as someone taking your stuff, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. They are fighting against the “I earned it fair and square and you are taking it from me” response.
Do you find this response irrational in the context of ordinary theft? Are you surprised if people respond to muggers or burglars with a deep, visceral, burning anger?
No, I don’t. That’s why I why I lead in with the line about “taxation is theft”.
While I don’t find it convincing as a matter of political philosophy, I have to acknowledge that it does accurately describes an emotional reaction that some non-trivial fraction of the population feels.
@Brad
I think almost everyone has the emotional reaction, for the reason I sketched. People differ in whether they, like you, special case government taking your stuff and so distinguish it from other people taking it.
Indeed, my best definition of “government” as distinguished from other institutions is an agency against which most people have dropped the commitment strategy they use against other violators of their rights. That might mean not feeling the emotion at all, it might mean feeling the emotion but not acting on it because government has such an overwhelming superiority of power.
For more details, see.
One of the kids I tutor came in seething about how she hates school and she hates her teacher. I asked her what happened, and I learned this little gem: she was getting straight As in all her classes and all her tests, until last week her Geometry teacher changed how the weekly challenge quiz is done. The 4 kids at each table all study the weeks material together, and then they all each take the challenge quiz, without cheating off each other. But now the teacher goes to each table, takes ONE quiz sheet at random, grades it, and all 4 kids at that table get that grade.
!!!
What the everliving…
Public school and public school teachers long ago moved beyond the point of parody, and they are only getting worse.
This kid had every right to be enraged.
What is this teacher trying to teach, except maybe for the smart competent kids to hate everyone else even more?
What counts as “benefiting society”?
Very roughly speaking, what I normally take that to mean is:
Benefited a typical person. Even more roughly, I’ll approximate that as
raised the median real income.
What actually happened to the US economy from 2000-2016,
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective
is that the median income approximately broke even (though they lost for most of that time)
the 4th quintile lost 2.4% of their income,
and the bottom quintile lost 9.4% of their income,
while the economy grew by about 80% in that period,
https://www.thebalance.com/us-gdp-by-year-3305543
So, yes, there is a real case where trickle down failed about half of us.
The figures you link to are for household income, not individual income. From 2000 to 2016, the average household size dropped by about 4%. So on a per capita basis (ignoring the possibility that the change in household size varied by income, which I don’t have data for) your “4th quintile lost 2.4% of their income” becomes “”4th quintile increased their income by 1.6%” and similarly for the other figures.
You are citing nominal figures (not inflation adjusted) for the economy, real figures for household income. If you follow your link and look at the table for real GDP, you will discover that your 80% should be 33%. Further, that’s a total not a per capita figure. From 2000 to 2016, population increased by about 15%. So your 80% growth in nominal total GDP is about an 18% growth in real per capita GDP, which is what is relevant to real per household income.
A rather large difference.
Thanks for the corrections!
Re. the previous thread on Catalonia and secession, a good, brief defense of why, all else equal, small states are better.
It is kind of jarring that two guys in Deutschland would claim that a group of small neighboring states will tend to interact peacefully with one another.
Well, that’s not really a good argument, since the Thirty Years War was mainly north block vs. south block…
It also had intervention by large foreign powers as a central driver. Maybe if Denmark, Sweden (yes they were stronk at the time), and France were also broken into small states, the war would have been isolated to the Bohemian phase.
If you only get the small state peace bonus when no large countries exist to meddle in your affairs, then it’s not a real bonus for the foreseeable future. Large states currently exist, and have significant power projection capabilities.
My favorite vegas-related conspiracy theory was that the dude was an agent of the Spanish government on a wild quest to get them out of the news. Because ye gods, the optics on this whole thing look HORRIBLE for them…
Catalonia is very interesting. Generally, people support independence movements if there is some kind of history of oppression. But the mainstream opinion seems to be that Catalonia has the right to secession simply because of the vote. And yet I don’t think most of the supporters of Catalan secession(other than libertarians) in the US would support secession by Texas and they certainly wouldn’t support it at an individual level. The governments in the world understand better than the common person what the consequences would be which is why you don’t see much official support for Catalonia. I’m guessing that Catalonia won’t become independent any time soon but we’ll see.
by “support”, do you mean encourage and vote for if I had the option? Or do you mean “accept that they have a right to do it”? Because I feel very strongly in favor of the second definition, I have no real opinion on the first.
If there was a strong, serious, and consistent over time desire in Texas to leave the United States I’d support passing a law to create a process for a referendum to be called and for secession to happen.
If Texans decided to go that way I might well support a hardball negotiating stance vis-a-vis exit terms, but that’s different from saying you can’t leave no matter what.
Likewise. Although the problems arise in 54% or whatever close margin vote to secede.
And very different for cracking skulls over a non-binding resolution. I’m no fan of the North’s response to southern secession in the American civil war, but at least Lincoln had the common decency to actually wait for the South to secede. He didn’t send the army in to disrupt the legislate of South Carolina from even talking about leaving in the first place…
He did in Maryland.
Maryland was a special case, because it controlled access to the national capital.
Yes, it was regrettable. But he only did it once and let them meet again later.
Does Austin have the right to secede from Texas?
Does downtown have the right to secede from Austin?
Does an owner of one building have the right to secede from downtown?
Does an owner of a condo have the right to secede from that building?
If Austin wanted to leave TX and stay in the US, no. Secession and revolution are inherently extra-legal question that aren’t constrained by any legal rules.
The internal organization of the United States is not such an inherently extra-legal question. It’s a matter for the US constitution which says that no state can be created from the territory of another state without the consent of that state.
If Austin wanted to secede from TX and the US it would be worth considering but it would be reasonable to conclude that it is too small and too integrated. That’s certainly the case for all your other examples.
Austin has a city level population of nearly a million and 271 square miles of land. The microstate of San Marino, which is an enclave inside of Italy, has a population of 33,000 and an area of 23 square miles. Even if it was a problem, the people could easily ask who are you to decide what is and isn’t reasonable. They want freedom. Why don’t they have the freedom to decide for themselves?
What Bean said about the internal organization of the United States.
Part of me wants to say that everyone should ideally have the complete right to secede from the country, but there can be reasonable exit taxes and border control. I wouldn’t want to secede if it means the Border Patrol would be stationed all around my house. But then, another part of me reminds myself that I would purchase a (hypothetical) house under the presumption that my neighbor isn’t about to declare independence, declare war on the United States, and start firing across the border – or even just strike up music late at night in total immunity to noise ordinances.
Still, I favor secession to a very large extent. I’d say a town or county should be large enough to declare independence, and if it doesn’t work out for them, they have no one but themselves to blame.
This seems like a good time to mention the Great Republic of Rough and Ready, which seceded from the Union for a year in 1850 over taxes. (Wikipedia says mining; I heard liquor.) No one cared, and they reentered the Union the following year.
Of course, California in 1850 was a pretty lawless place, and pretty tenuously tied to the rest of the country.
This is how Lichtenstein works. “municipalities in Liechtenstein are entitled to secede from the union by majority vote.”
I don’t see much of a correlation between the geographic size of the state and freedom:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/economic-freedom/map?page=map&year=2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/human-freedom-index-files/human-freedom-index-2016-update-3.pdf
I’ve brought up my objection to small countries before in SSC, and I don’t think anyone has given me an answer, so I’ll repeat myself.
My issue with small states is how I would feel about the US breaking into smaller countries. Currently I find it very easy to travel anywhere in the US (crossing state borders is a matter of seeing a sign), working anywhere in the US, using the same money everywhere. I do agree that the government might be more competent if it were smaller (although I haven’t noticed city or county government being very competent). But any gains from better government would be out-weighed by the loss of easy travel and trade within the US.
Very possibly. But, smaller independent states can collaborate on things like that; witness the North German Customs Union or the Schengen Agreement, or even the Articles of Confederation back when all thirteen states really were free and independent. I’d imagine that fifty (or more) smaller American countries probably would collaborate to make commerce at least no harder than passing through a current Californian agricultural inspection station.
From just across the border, my impression is that the US is a little too big and a little too diverse, which leads to endless really heated arguments about virtually everything. If the country were divided into smaller pieces along cultural and economic lines, there would simply be less to fight about. For example, I expect Massachusetts and Texas could each separately come up with gun-ownership legislation that would have broad approval within each state, but I rather doubt they could come up with joint gun-ownership legislation that would have broad approval in both places.
If it were possible to split up the US, I think the cultural and economic areas identified in The Nine Nations of North America would be a good place to start.
@Johan. Except that these cultural lines are in truth very mixed up, and I don’t think you’d make people happier by dividing them into regions. I live in Minnesota, and I notice it is included in the “Breadbasket” region in your link. That would put Minnesota in a very Republican region, which would not be a match for much of my state. In the latest election, the biggest split was between urban and rural regions, which are generally close to each other geographically. By the way, I notice thy break up Canada in the link as well as the US, do you agree with this, since Canada is so large geographically?
Maybe in areas of Europe, one can make countries more homogeneous by breaking them into smaller countries, but I don’t see that working in North America.
@Evan. Yes, there are mitigations available to small countries, if they work together well, but never as well as being in one country.
A few weeks ago, we had a discussion on libertarianism. Unfortunately, I don’t think it really got anywhere. I think it’s because I relied too heavily on analogies and for many people, that’s not very convincing. So no more metaphors. I found this article that has some similar thoughts that I do, although I don’t agree with all of it. My question for anarcho-capitalists: in an ancap world, for an individual who doesn’t own property and can’t afford it, how are they in any sense free? Libertarians always say they think people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, but for our property-less individual, they are always at the mercy of some other individual. Is that what freedom looks like?
Well, I vaguely consider myself an ancap. The standard answer would be “everyone would have property.”
You come in to the world with property under anarchocapitalism/libertarianism; that’s the definition of property under ancapism, property is yourself, anything another person willingly gives to you (and fraud doesn’t count,) and anything derived entirely from your own property (and unowned material like, say, air.)
Ancapism wouldn’t be particularly nice for the poor and the disabled, but… no system is gonna be particularly nice for the poor, that’s what being poor means. Most ancaps, myself included, would say that no-one in Ancapistan is going to be as poor as the poorest people in the U.S.; in an unrestricted economy everyone would be able to find some way to provide for themselves.
You should probably visit Reddit’s /r/goldandblack, that’s where all the smart ancaps hang out.
Come on. Self ownership doesn’t mean anything if you can’t express it. And saying that the poor people would be better if you just presupposing one of the main issues of debate. Take the least convenient possible world where people who are homeless in the present would still be homeless in ancapistan. Please don’t fight the hypothetical. It’s tiresome. Now do you think that homeless person is free?
[Note: while sympathetic to the philosophy, I am not an AnCap. I don’t believe freedom is the only consideration in how society should be run.]
It’s an odd definition of freedom you are using. Someone who is mute is still free to talk. The problem is that freedom doesn’t lead to perfect outcomes. People will still suffer under a libertarian system, because people are human. That people still suffer doesn’t make them less free.
Any system needs to deal with the problem of scarcity, that there’s not enough of the things people want to go around. In a libertarian system, scarce things stay with the property owners. This isn’t fair, but because of scarcity, there is no possible fair answer that gives everyone what they want, which would be necessary for things to be fair.
Leaving things with the property owners and letting them trade among themselves (which we call freedom) rewards production of things people want and thus seems to lead to better outcomes than systems where some central authority controls distribution of scarce things and tries to redistribute things to suit their idea of fair.
What exactly does this mean?
Homeless people aren’t allowed to go anywhere or use anything they don’t have permission to in our world either.
In Ancapistan he would be free to walk around on public-access sidewalks, free to work for anyone he wants for whatever pay he wants, free to make use of any unowned property and make anything possible out of the things he has and acquires, free to make love to whomever will have him: just what freedom does this guy have in our world that he doesn’t in Ancapistan?
On private property like malls they don’t allow homeless people to loiter. What makes you think a prudent businessman would do so? They would probably be kicked out any major city. And that’s not even getting in to possible welfare benefits.
Lots of people have compassion and want to help those less fortunate, like people that struggle to afford to buy property. Most people don’t think of every interaction as a business interaction and appreciate other aspects of civil society.
These people would do in ancapistan the things they do under the state, like build tiny house villages for the homeless. Hundreds of volunteers building small, very inexpensive houses, with many people donating money for the materials and land, and even businesses sponsoring the homes for good press.
Homeless people are at the mercy of donors, but entrepreneurs are at the mercy of consumer choices, workers are at the mercy of people willing to employ them, and people that want to eat are at the mercy of those who grow food. We live in an interconnected world where everyone depends on everyone else, and this doesn’t make us less free, at least not in my conception of freedom.
And he would be free to rent housing of lower quality and lower cost than is legally available at present, so might not be homeless.
Not all numbers are equal.
So a quadriplegic with low IQ would do…what exactly?
I have trouble coming up with any jobs except begging.
The key part of trade is an exchange of value. You want to find things that other people are willing to give you money for. It feels good to give money to help those that truly can’t care for themselves, so in a sense, I’m trading my donations to those in need for a feeling of goodwill. Finding someone that truly can’t produce directly is what drives true charity, the voluntary transfer of goods in return for the feeling of helping someone in need.
Supply and demand works even if you don’t think of it. If my community has one quadriplegic asking for donations, it’s easy to collect enough voluntary donations to support them. If there are a large amount of people begging, it’s hard to get enough to help all of them. If some of them are likely scammers, the amount of goodwill you get from charity is lower, and thus less people donate.
If there’s a scarcity of food, it’s likely that in Ancapistan our quadriplegic (or anyone that can’t produce) is going to be one of the ones that ends up short. That’s tragic. But it’s also true that if there’s scarcity of something people need like food in any society that someone is not going to get enough. The trade off to rewarding production of things society needs or wants like food is more food, and thus less of a chance that there will be a scarcity of food and more available for charity to those that can’t produce.
I’ll allocate food in exchange for more food
I’ll allocate food in exchange for more food
But I already have the food… why do I need you to give me what I already have?
Unless you intend to take the food from me, and then give some of it back. And that’s going to require some of the food go to the people doing the collection so they don’t just keep all the food for themselves, people that could otherwise be producing more food themselves so we’re not in this problem. Of course, if there’s a chance there’s not enough food for them and me, you’re going to feed them first, since they have guns.
Meanwhile, our quadriplegic friend is likely behind both the people taking the food I produced and me in the food line, so he’s still out of luck. Especially because I can’t give him my food, since you took all of it.
@Thegnskald: I lol’ed
@Civilis
Exactly and in our current system, we have a central authority that keeps the number of scammers relatively low compared to laissez-faire. So this results in relatively high levels of charity, which I consider good, so central authority is good.
Furthermore, individual charity has a tendency to be extremely racist, sexist, ‘lookist,’ neurotypicalist, etc; favoring the pretty person that we identify with over the person with the worst issues. Hence some level of bureaucracy that makes objective rules is good.
‘Providing for yourself’ involves more than just food, but also housing, healthcare, clothing, etc, etc. That requires way more money than just not starving. However, the actual issue for me is more that having a permanent underclass which never gets the opportunity to use their natural talents because of deprivation is bad for them and bad for society.
The quadriplegic was only the (extreme) example because the other person claimed that there was a job for everyone, a claim that you’re not actually willing to defend, so you changed the topic.
If we take a slightly less incapacitated person, who can have kids, it’s bad if this person can’t provide sufficiently for this kid or raise it well, so it can benefit from education to his or her ability.
This idea that minimizing/privatizing the state results in maximum productivity is a very bad analysis that assumes that people who are not maximally productive merely lack motivation, rather than skills.
We’ve seen in the past that mandatory and government-paid education created huge benefits for society as many people could not acquire skills they otherwise wouldn’t have acquired, resulting in many people reaching a level of productivity that wouldn’t have happened by merely providing incentives.
Two sources of evidence against that claim:
E.G. West, Education and the State
James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree
The first is a description of the history of 19th century British schooling which finds no evidence that the shift to state provided schooling resulted in improvement, some evidence that people in the early 19th century English cities were getting about as much (private) schooling as people in the contemporary Prussian system, which was government provided and compulsory.
The second describes modern very low cost private schools in third world countries which people send their kids to because the government provided free public schools are so bad.
What is the evidence on which you base your “we’ve seen” claim?
Exactly and in our current system, we have a central authority that keeps the number of scammers relatively low compared to laissez-faire. So this results in relatively high levels of charity, which I consider good, so central authority is good.
Can you explain your logic, please? I thought the problem with proposed Ancap societies was that without a safety net, the poor will starve. Now you’re telling me that for some reason this will cause a lot of people to try to scam the system. If you can be sure you’re going to get benefits if you claim disability, that’s an encouragement to scam the system.
Furthermore, individual charity has a tendency to be extremely racist, sexist, ‘lookist,’ neurotypicalist, etc; favoring the pretty person that we identify with over the person with the worst issues. Hence some level of bureaucracy that makes objective rules is good.
There’s nothing stopping the bureaucracy from being any of those things, either, and if the bureaucracy is racist or sexist, there’s no alternative. The bureaucracy is likely to make one-size-fits-all rules that favor the current fashion of the day, leaving gaps not covering the unfavored and allowing scammers to exploit and weaken the system. Private charities like the UNCF sprung up to cover gaps in the system; just about any cause you could name has a private charity to cover it.
We’ve seen in the past that mandatory and government-paid education created huge benefits for society as many people could not acquire skills they otherwise wouldn’t have acquired, resulting in many people reaching a level of productivity that wouldn’t have happened by merely providing incentives.
I used food as the easiest to demonstrate example. For the foreseeable future, we’re stuck dealing with scarcity for everything, including education. There aren’t enough high-quality teachers to give every student a top-quality education, and so we have a permanent underclass created by the differential in educational outcomes between places that can afford top-quality education and those that can’t, and we have an upper class with the political skills to game the system and the resources to pay for private education. The best ideas to fix this involve allowing those that want out to take the money they would have been forced by the system to spend on poor public education and buy private education on the market. That doesn’t save everyone, but it incentivizes people to learn to take action to better their kids education, and it incentivizes people to find ways to provide a better education using less resources.
As long as we’re stuck with scarcity, in every system the poor and disadvantaged are going to get the short end of the stick on just about everything. In order to get rich (or otherwise powerful), you need the skills and connections that also allow you to navigate the system and get the best outcomes in education, or food, or whatever it is, and those skills can’t be taught.
The quadriplegic was only the (extreme) example because the other person claimed that there was a job for everyone, a claim that you’re not actually willing to defend, so you changed the topic.
Toastengineer is wrong; there’s not a job for everyone, so I have no need to defend his statement. Any society has to have a way of accounting for those that are actually unable to provide for themselves, like the very young and old, to take more common examples.
I took the thrust of your point to be that because this person couldn’t provide for themselves, an Anarcho-capitalist society would leave them to die, and I can’t guarantee that, but no society can.
We’re approaching the problem of the underclass, as you put it, differently. Your approach seems to be to set up a government which will guarantee they get promised the necessities of life, and hope that scarcity never gets to the point where you have to deny them something they need because there’s not enough for everyone. My approach is to set up a society which incentivizes production to minimize the chance of scarcity, and trusts in society to see that charity is provided. Both approaches have their flaws. I’m not an Anarcho-capitalist, I approve of some level of a public safety net, but pretending that it doesn’t come with a very high cost to society, including the underclass, is naive.
@Civilis
I have not been arguing this and the comment I made that you replied to did not claim this.
All ‘free money’ situations incentivize scamming and generally require gatekeeping to prevent this. Individual charity givers are probably worse at gatekeeping for various reasons.
Private charity organizations may be equal or better than the government, but there the issue is a free rider problem where those with less concern for the poor can free ride on the greater willingness to give of others. For example, consider a society of 2 rich people (Bob and Alice) and 1 poor person (David) for ease of calculation. Bob considers the welfare you buy with $10 per rich citizen sufficient, while Alice thinks that $20 per rich citizen is sufficient.
Depending on your preferences/politics, I think you can argue that there are two fairish outcomes:
– One where Bob pays $10 and Alice pays $20
– One where Bob pays $15 and Alice pays $15
However, in reality Bob can simply choose to pay nothing and get his way, since then if Alice does pay $20, it still averages out to $10 per rich citizen. Effectively, Bob can extort Alice due to her higher willingness to pay.
So voluntary donations create an anti-democratic outcome that is below the average willingness of citizens to pay.
Per my calculation above, voluntary donations results in extra scarcity for the poor compared to mandatory welfare taxation.
Why not? Perhaps we don’t teach them now, but most of these are acquired skills and thus are learned. If they can be learned, they can be taught.
All ‘free money’ situations incentivize scamming and generally require gatekeeping to prevent this. Individual charity givers are probably worse at gatekeeping for various reasons.
Evidence, please? We know the current gargantuan one-size-fits-all bureaucracies are horrible at gatekeeping.
Private charity organizations may be equal or better than the government, but there the issue is a free rider problem where those with less concern for the poor can free ride on the greater willingness to give of others.
The people that are inclined to be free riders are also inclined not to vote to support charity in the first place. And you simplified example is also ignoring all the downsides of that model of charity. If Alice is choosing to spend $20 directly on a charity of her choice, rather than into a massive central pool, she can direct that money to where it is the most effective. Meanwhile, Bob’s likely supporting the politician that promises to only spend $14 rather than $15 of his money on charity, even if that money is being spent less effectively by the government. At the same time, David is voting for the politician that promises $20 from Alice and Bob, even if that’s more than the amount of charity that he needs.
Further, you’ve indicated the flaw with your own argument: what if Bob’s right that $10 is sufficient? Where’s the extra money going? If he’s right, that extra money is wasted; that’s what gets you the scammers showing up to get the money in the first place. Letting everyone decide how much money to spend crowdsources the problem of determining how much money to spend overall, rather than leave it up to who can best manipulate the political system. In bad economic times, Alice and Bob can decide to spend less, serving as a feedback mechanism that scarcity in resources is starting to be an issue.
Why not? Perhaps we don’t teach them now, but most of these are acquired skills and thus are learned. If they can be learned, they can be taught.
Remember, our example that sparked this discussion was a quadriplegic with a low IQ. We started with the assumption that some people can’t do productive work though no fault of their own, and now we’re expecting that we can somehow give them the skills to socially compete at the top levels of society?
I would guess the opposite. The public welfare is being run by people who make their living running it, not by people who are doing it because they care about the poor. So they are more likely both to permit scamming if preventing it is difficult and, more generally, to make decisions based on their self-interest rather than the interest of people they are supposed to be helping.
The same can be true for employees of a private charity, but the distance between the people who want to help the poor and the people actually handing out the money is shorter, so one would expect the principal/agent problem to be less.
One common solution to this problem is to identify the donor with particular recipients or groups of recipients his donation helps. His thousand dollars will have no visible effect on the total population of poor people, but it means that John’s family eats instead of going hungry or that bright but poor Jane gets to go to high school or college.
More generally, market failure problems, including the public good/free riding problem, exist in the private system. But they are endemic in the political alternative. Consider the mechanisms for making sure programs sold as helping the poor actually do so. If one voter devotes the energy to finding out and voting against politicians who are helping other people under the pretense of helping the poor, everyone else free rides on his efforts.
In modern societies, a lot of government expenditure is sold as helping the poor but goes mostly to the not-poor. Consider the subsidy to higher education. The argument is that it lets some poor people go to college who wouldn’t, which is true. But, on average, people who go to college, including government run and subsidized colleges, come from richer families than people who don’t, and are abler so likely to be richer in the future than people who don’t.
Similarly, programs to raise agricultural prices, in both the U.S. and Europe, are supposed to help poor farmers. But most output in the U.S. (I don’t know about Europe) is from large farms, and higher food prices are a regressive tax–food is a larger fraction of the budget of poorer people.
In a world where the only people who can’t produce enough to provide for themselves are quadriplegics with low IQ, begging should work pretty well. It might even be handled via middlemen, aka charitable enterprises.
What other things would work would depend on how advanced the AI was. At the moment, even people with low IQ are better at some tasks than computers. More advanced technology would reduce the value of an IQ 80 brain but also the costs of being a quadriplegic.
You are also changing the topic. The statement by toastengineer that I challenged (which you can see by me quoting it) is that everyone would be able to provide for himself by getting a job.
I just want to hear what real job (providing actual value to others, so not begging) toastengineer thinks that my quadriplegic would do in Ancapistan. No more, no less.
My extreme example was not an admission that I think that everyone more capable would be capable of providing for himself; nor that I consider ‘basic needs met’ as sufficient for me to favor the existence of Ancapistan.
@Aapje,
I agree with you, but I think an even better example would be someone with a mental illness like severe social anxiety, which prevents them not only from doing labor but from even seeking it out. Such a person wouldn’t even be able to beg; possibly they could dumpster dive.
Sell blood & other fluids, expend extra effort on becoming an artist (or programmer, if they’re just “low IQ” instead of severely mentally disabled), rely on family and charity. I’m not saying that person would have a better life in Ancapistan, probably significantly worse, but that person wouldn’t be thrown in the river either.
If the guy couldn’t move his limbs but didn’t need hospitalization to live, he could work as a security guard or at an information booth or something. Give him mouth controls and he might be able to operate a crane or something.
I suppose I could forsee some kind of “child insurance” parents take out before conceiving that pays for hospitalization of people who can’t support themselves at all. That’s a long shot though.
What does happen under the current system, actually? Does the government pay to keep you hospitalized?
So… what happens to members of a minority when the majority decide their well-being doesn’t matter?
Ooh, and what happens to someone who signs a severely unfair but not illegal contract? Under the current system the state almost always upholds the contract, there’s no reason for them to care that it was specifically designed so that a layman could never understand it. In Ancapistan a judge who upholds deliberately illegible contracts would lose business pretty fast.
It’s not uncommon for a judge to throw out a contract. They do it all the time with pre-nups.
@toastengineer
Selling plasma currently pays ~$60 dollars per week, which is not enough to pay for rent + food + clothes. If you expect more people to have to do this, the prices will just go down even more.
The quadriplegic will also have big trouble getting to the clinic. The quadriplegic is a single person who has to do everything himself (my example, so I get to make up the details), so how does he get to the clinic?
I don’t know what other fluids you think he could sell, I don’t think that sperm banks generally accept uneducated quadriplegics.
In other words, not a job.
What the…
These don’t seem like reasonable suggestions to me, but rather extremely wishful thinking.
In my country, they do.
Why is this relevant? This is no different from Ancapistan, so this is not an argument in favor of Ancapistan.
If we get rid of racism but some people from minority groups are still disadvantaged, does that mean we should have kept racism?
It’s more like you make things better for some races but makes it much worse off for others. I know libertarians believe that everything about the free markets is Pareto improving but there are really strong reasons to believe that isn’t true.
Shouldn’t we argue about that then?
I doubt there are any libertarian economists who believe that, and not many libertarians, provided that they know what Pareto-improving means. If a tariff didn’t benefit anybody nobody would lobby for it.
The more plausible claim is that shifts towards a freer market are usually Marshall improvements (often called Hicks-Kaldor improvements or potential Pareto improvements, but I think that terminology is misleading).
There is no individual who they are always at the mercy of. What I think you mean is that they depend on there being at least one individual willing to deal with them.
Isn’t that true of all social systems? What happens in some alternative society, say a welfare state, to someone who nobody at all is willing to cooperate with?
There is no individual who they are always at the mercy of.A great way of putting it, particularly when combined with the knowledge that in non-libertarian systems, everyone is always at the mercy of the state (aka, the 51% majority)
Welfare systems are set up in a way that that takes away a lot of uncertainty. If I’m over 65 and get sick, I know that Medicare is available. But what about ancapistan? Sure there might be charities but they could lose all their funding or decide to pivot to something else. In theory, the same could happen to states but their nature means it’s much less likely to happen, especially in a democracy where a sizable portion of the population will turn against it.
It depends on which Ancapistan you’re in. Some states aren’t very stable, generous, or reliable either.
Sure but in a developed country there are molochian reasons to believe that things would be worse for the poorest people. In ancapistan, the organizations that take over from the state are going to need to maximize efficiency to compete with the others. Poor, homeless people are grossly inefficient and would probably be kicked out, especially since there isn’t really any kind of public space anymore.
In a democracy where the people are in charge of the government, they choose to take care of the poor. In Ancapistan where there people are in charge of society, they definitely won’t?
About a century ago, when the U.S. was much closer to a laissez-faire system than it is now, about a million people, mostly poor, were arriving each year. They found jobs, found housing. Why would you expect that not to be true in a much richer future society?
1. If 60% of the people want a welfare system but 40% don’t, then a democracy would probably have more people pay in than otherwise would.
2. Some people will only do these kinds of altruistic acts if there is a guarantee that others will join in. State coercion is more coordinated than voluntary giving. If somebody shrinks, they go to jail.
3. Some people like the idea of giving to the poor, but they know they would be tempted to not do so. This makes it harder for them to avoid it.
4. There is good empirical reasons to believe that welfare decreases poverty. If welfare states made no difference, we shouldn’t see it.
@David
Do you think there were no homeless people back then? I don’t really see your point.
I think that almost all of the immigrants were poorer than today’s poor, and few of them were homeless.
Also that they were much better off than if they had not immigrated, and if the U.S. had had a welfare state then it is likely that immigration would have been restricted, as it is now.
I would like to see evidence that there were very few homeless people back then. Even then, your point has now just turned to open borders being better for the global poor. Understandable, but you can have open borders without eliminating the state. Ancap might have more, stronger borders than now, especially in larger countries like the US where you can travel from one side of the country to the other unimpeded.
But you can’t have open borders in a welfare state, as long as there are a substantial number of people elsewhere who are poor enough so that immigrating and going on welfare is more attractive than their present situation.
You know that medicare is available if the people handling medicare are willing to cooperate with you.
The situation in which someone without property in an A-C system is at the mercy of others is one in which all of the others are allied to control him. The equivalent in a welfare state is a situation where all of the clerks find reasons not to accept his medicare application, all of the people in the system who are supposed to keep them from doing that don’t, because they are in on the coalition as well. If they do accept it, no doctor agrees to treat him, because they are in on the coalition as well.
You are assuming uniform and coordinated malevolence, or at least coordinated exploitation involving millions of people, for the A-C system, and not allowing for the implications of that assumption for the welfare state.
And it requires much less coordinated malevolence in the state system because if you are in some group they want to get it only takes a majority of the legislature plus a few judges to deprive you of the benefits of the welfare system. Or make it illegal for you to practice your trade.
You are assuming uniform and coordinated malevolence, or at least coordinated exploitation involving millions of people, for the A-C system, and not allowing for the implications of that assumption for the welfare state.
This.
If there’s total discrimination, it’s more likely that it’s because the law requires it than because every possible provider made that decision themselves. Historically, we had the experience of the Jim Crow laws, which made segregation not just legal but mandatory. Nobody will seat you at the lunch counter because the law won’t allow it, even if they want to.
I said that I wouldn’t use analogies but they can simplify the issues.
A) Take a guy who manages to buy out the entire world throughout peaceful means. Once he establishes control, he says he will never sell. Even though his acquisition of money was peaceful, isn’t he essentially a dictator now? Maybe with the people who sold the land we can say they voluntarily agreed to the situation but their children didn’t. They’re essentially slaves and certainly I would say they are worse off compared to the present situation.
B) A few years later, he offers to sell some of his property but at a price no one can afford. There is practically no difference.
C) He then lowers the price to what the next richest guy can afford. That guy has freedom but the situation is the same for everyone else.
D) He makes it cheap enough that billionaires can afford land but no one else can. Again they have freedom but no one else.
And so on until we get to…
Z) The average person can afford to buy property but the poorest people can not. What is the difference for them between scenario A and scenario Z? At what point, did they stop living a life under dictatorial control in to something more free? Democracy mitigates this to some degree because no one individual has complete control over a territory, which is why I think there is good reason to believe that ancapistan could have significantly less freedom for the poor. An individual vote is worthless but collectively, it gives a voice to people who otherwise wouldn’t have anything.
Not an ancap, but I think this sort of argument-by-induction is silly. Your bad outcome lasts as long as landowners can collude to keep prices high.
Informal agreements work if there’s a handful of landlords. But to coordinate 10,000+ property owners? That takes a government.
And I’m not being flip here. I live in the SF Bay. It’s surreal that people could look at the situation in SF, and go, “You know what we need to keep property affordable? More zoning rules.”
I’ve also sat on a the board of a condo-association. It’s impossible to get 60 people to agree on a snow-removal schedule. A stable rent-fixing agreement between 10,000 people would take some sort of divine intervention.
You misunderstand me. My argument is the same even if they are charging market prices for the land. Think of it more like the super rich guy was only willing to sell a large piece of land(Russia sized) that had a market value higher than what anyone else could could afford. Then he offers a smaller chunk(Brazil sized) and one guy can afford it and so. It doesn’t make a difference whether there is collusion or not. The poor guy has the same problem in scenario Z as he does in A.
While we’re at it: presume Cyborg Jetpack Hitler rises from the dead and somehow assassinates everyone who isn’t a Nazi and anyone who considers speaking out against him immediately explodes. How does liberal democracy deal with this situation?
“Assuming your system has been destroyed through some arbitrary and undefeatable means, your system can never work,” while technically a true statement, is not a very effective criticism of a system.
You are missing the point. When people talk about trolley problems the point isn’t to discuss how likely it is that the fat man stops a trolley. It’s to examine your ethical beliefs. If you refuse to do so, you’re just implicitly conceding that you don’t have a good answer.
Yes, one man won’t buy out the whole world. But scenario Z is obviously plausible. My point is to ask how free the homeless person is in Z knowing that his situation is the same as if he was in hypothetical A.
As it happens my ethical beliefs are based in how likely the fat man is to stop the trolley, and also on the ramifications of letting individuals push others into harm’s way on the personal belief it is a net good.
Without those elements it is not a meaningful moral question, because managing risk is an key element of morality. In fact it has long been my suspicion that the reason people will pull the switch but not push the fat man is their inability or refusal to ignore those elements. If people will not accept the premises of your scenario then you are not getting useful information out of it
Pretty good points.
There are two ethical dilemmas. What to do in the hypothetical scenario and what to do if it was really happening. I would never actually push the fat man, because it’s highly doubtful it would work. But it’s different within the confines of the hypothetical, which is about whether you are willing to murder one to save more. If you handwave it away by saying it won’t work, you’re just avoiding challenging your beliefs. The odd thing is that I never hear libertarians say that The Tale of a Slave is a contrived moral dilemma even though it’s not likely that a slave owner would give their slaves that much freedom.
Again, I need to point out that my scenario is not about what to do in some unlikely scenario. It’s about the ethical difference between the highly unlikely scenario and the likely scenario.
What is the value of a hypothetical whose response doesn’t correspond with reality?
The problem with this is the first statement, “Take a guy who manages to buy out the entire world throughout peaceful means“.
He has something people are willing to trade land for, and enough of it to trade for everyone’s land. The problem is that the more of it he trades, the less value it has. Also, the less land everyone else has, the more value the land he doesn’t own has. Eventually, he’ll reach a point where there’s nothing he can offer that’s worth the cost of more land.
The scenario only makes sense if the person already has absolute control of some necessary non-land resource (he owns all the food and water, as an example), and there’s no way for anyone else to get them without trading with him, so he’s already in control of the world. We’re in the sort of theoretical realm we get when we discuss economics while assuming post-scarcity; we’re assuming conditions that can’t exist.
We’re already in the situation where roughly 200 corporate entities own all the land in the world.
Can computers be considered autistic?
(This post is inspired by this article on Psychology Today which I disagree with)
I believe that computers behave in a way that is similar to at least some autists. Hence in this sense computers can be considered autistic.
In the same way that apes can be considered mentally disabled?
I think both analogies are stretching the meaning of the respective words far beyond usefulness in most if not all contexts, but I can see how they might be interesting to think about.
Agreed. Was Alan Turing an autist? Maybe he was.
Underappreciated works of art anyone?
I’ll offer the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Tall ships, big stars, masculine friendship, exciting sea battles, clever trickery, and a great classical score. Hard to see why this one flopped.
I feel like getting a sequel to Master and Commander is one of the major reasons why we need to hurry up and invent some kind of age reversal technology.
If you believe Aubrey de Grey, getting to early stage age reversal wouldn’t really be that much more expensive than making the film…
I don’t think it actually flopped; IMDB reports $212 million gross over a $150 million budget. Kind of meh.
What it didn’t do, is show the series’ potential for sequels, where the action at sea is complimented by intrigue and even occasional romance ashore. If it looks like just Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany having spectacular 19th-century naval battles with a bit of manly friendship, well, maybe we just saw all we really need of that.
OK, I haven’t. But look to Pirates of the Caribbean for the way to sell a series of nautically-centered but well-rounded adventure flicks; they didn’t wait until the sequels to bring up the possibility that one of the heroes might actually get to kiss a pretty girl or something like that.
The usual rule is that you need triple the production cost to make money. I don’t know if that’s still current in this age of world-wide releases, multiple tiers of secondary markets, and modern marketing campaigns. But the film in question didn’t even pull in double the production costs. And they sure as heck didn’t make another one. It’s a fair bet they lost money, all in all.
It won two Oscars and made a profit. It did not flop.
I think the Aubrey/Maturin novels are underappreciated works of art. As a single body of work, they’re by far the best historical novel I’ve ever read, and should be considered one of the great achievements of 20th century literature.
The movie was pretty good.
The painter Ilya Repin is, I’ve heard, underappreciated outside of Russia. To my eye he’s gotta be one of the most phenomenal painters ever to wield the brush. This painting of his (my favorite) has its own Wikipedia page but I don’t know how much that says about its appreciatedness.
(Haha, “the most A B ever to C the D” is such a funny, gaudy speech pattern, isn’t it? Where does it come from? Sports?)
[Edit to add: OK, the Wikipedia page makes it sound like Repin, and this painting, were on the whole not underappreciated. But I leave the link there so people can marvel at the painting.]
I never heard Helmet’s song “Milquetoast” played on the radio, but I say it’s one of the best hard rock songs ever made. As a band, Helmet has their following, and they’ve influenced a lot of bands that have gone on to fame (e.g. Deftones, Chevelle) but when they tour they still just play small venues and apparently they make little enough that for $10K they’d play your wedding, or your living room. (According to Page Hamilton, during one of his gracefully few between-song monologues.) Though I don’t know if you count as underappreciated once Beavis and Butthead have talked over one or two of your music videos.
Speaking of which, is King of the Hill underappreciated? Well, by definition I’d say it is, since it would be impossible to appreciate it enough, but in the spirit of the OP…eh, probably not.
But another TV show that was the predecessor of The Wire–The Corner–is definitely underappreciated.
I could probably keep going on and on naming more but that’s enough for now and it’s getting close to Miller time.
He’s definitely not underappreciated. I’d love to see the original Reply Of The Zaporozhian Cossacks or the painting of Ivan The Terrible with his dying son someday. The latter has always struck me as particularly powerful.
I like Helmet
But come on. The vocals lack any of the oomph required for a truly great hard rock song
I disagree. There’s something about Page Hamilton’s nonchalant “mimbo voice” delivery that really works great with Helmet’s music. I think it’s because it takes the “drama queen” aspect out of it, which makes it sound heavier and more powerful. Personified, the music would look like a big muscly dude who doesn’t have time for mushy feelings, he just shows up and gets the job done, which is lifting heavy things, pushing heavy things, and smashing heavy things.
The same approach wouldn’t work with, say, Soundgarden, which needed Chris Cornell’s black-gospel-style belting to complete their more richly layered, often very technical instruments. But with Helmet’s “sonic slab sculpting” I think the vocals are perfect as is.
For comparison, Snapcase’s instrumentals are very similar to Helmet’s (indeed Helmet was a central influence on Snapcase), yet Daryl Taberski’s incessant “turned up to 11” screaming revs out quickly and loses power. Sometimes you gotta upshift!
I think Noah is the most underrated movie from the last couple years. Good acting, great visuals and thought provoking, he really managed to examine the psychology of someone who was in his position.
Can’t watch without thinking SUPER BOAT.
Jesus of the People. There have been a number of people who were really quite cranky about the selection of the painting back in 2000. But I like it, and think that it is pretty decent, as far as iconography goes. (A number of people who did think well of the painting seemed to be the sort who didn’t like much art, and even less Catholic religious art, until this one. So, imo, a painting that brought people closer to God. Win-everything.)
Noah’s Ark by Haruko Takino. A stunning piece, imo. I sat and looked at a framed print for an hour.
In terms of movies – I *never* got why the Matthew McConnally movie Sahara wasn’t a huge hit with many sequels. This, to me, was such a great rep of visual artistry, acting, character development, and just a plain fun plot.
Lebor Gabála Érenn seems to be a pretty accurate historical record of the journeys of the British people.
The R1b fellas probably emerged from somewhere near the Don river (Maeotian marshes) travelled down to Egypt where they made King Tutt (99% British according to the DNA evidence), sailed up to Sardina, took over Spain, and then headed over to Britain.
Yet again, the ancient myths are shown to be correct.
Interesting. I assume that the Tower of Babel/Babylon is still fictional though.
Myths usually contain factual information, including Biblical myths. Biblical myths did get certain kings and their names right.
https://www.livescience.com/15388-discovery-channel-tutankhamen-dna.html
Okay, I was intrigued by that comment about the DNA evidence of Tutankhamun, but since I see the link has the dreaded “Discovery Channel” in the URL, I’m not going to bother.
This week’s documentary: Were the Egyptian Pharoahs British?
Next week’s documentary: Were the Egyptian Pharoahs Aliens?
As for the Book of Invasions, it’s a work that tries to marry Biblical history with native tradition (as many European works of the early period tried) and I wouldn’t put too much stress on any underlying actual history; part of it involves an expedition led by Cessair, the grand-daughter of Noah, who ends up in Ireland and the last survivor, after a plague strikes in the wake of the Flood, is a man named Fintán (or Fionntain) who lives for centuries in the successive forms of “a salmon and later an eagle and a hawk, living for 5,500 years after the Flood, whence he becomes a man again and recounts Ireland’s history.”
It inspired some popular art, and a story by H.P. Lovecraft “The Moon-Bog”:
A question for the mathematically/logically inclined out there. Does it seem crazy to anyone that we can’t divide by zero?
Obviously, it leads to contradictions and deep trouble for math, but how do we justify making it an illegal operation? It seems like we weren’t willing to do the same thing for Russell’s Paradox, because of which we destroyed and re-created all set theory. Why weren’t we willing to just ban making Russell’s Set, like we do with division by zero? Failing that, why haven’t we destroyed and re-created arithmetic, given the remarkable fact that the set of real numbers isn’t closed under the four basic arithmetic operations?
I don’t know, but if multiplication by zero always results in zero, then there isn’t any way you can divide a non-zero number by zero and expect an answer that corresponds with the rules you’ve defined.
So the question is whether multiplication by zero should be allowed and what it should result in…
I guess if it concerned you, you’d have to just stick to the natural numbers.
Man… I don’t know. Good question. I guess if you only have (non-zero) natural numbers then you’re still going to have to have a load of non-allowed operations – like 1-1 or 1-2. 1 divided by 2. So maybe just having that one operation not allowed is the best they can do?
Multiplication actually seems the least troublesome under a set-theoretical conception! If we’re generating a set of numbers starting from 1, closing it under addition yields the natural numbers, and closing it under multiplication still just yields the natural numbers. From there, you can choose either division or subtraction without yielding a necessarily open set–one is the positive rational numbers, the other is the integers. But it looks like unless you want an open set, you have to pick one.
To put it a less intensely-mathematical way: if you want it so that you don’t have to make special exceptions for any of your operations (like “you can divide by anything, except zero), you can either have all the (positive non-zero) rational numbers and no subtraction, or all the (+ and -) integers with no division. Otherwise you’ll have to make an exception for zero division.
I guess if you want to privilege operations, you have to be less concerned about equality. Less concerned about the definition of a number.
But then, the numbers are defined by their relations to other numbers, and the relations are the operations.
But I guess we could have dynamically defined numbers so that 1-1 is x which is another number exactly the same as any other? x times 1 is 1x?
But then I think we might have trouble with equality – would (2-2) x 2 + 6 be the same as (2-2) x 3 + 6 ?
I think you’d have to keep the x in there. So 2x + 6 wouldn’t be the same as 3x + 6.
[We not only demand the ability to perform certain operations, we also demand certain relations between numbers – it’s the fact that we demand certain relations that limits the operations we can perform. If we were able to perform any operation, we can just say – this operation results in this —- but we can’t then relate that number to numbers outside of the operation (definition) we’ve already performed.]
Conceptually, dviding a by b is asking how many times b goes into a. 1/0 is no finite number, since you can subtract 0 from 1 any number of times you want. So 1/0 = inf, then? Assuming you are OK with including infinity in your number system. The limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 is either positive or negative inf, depending on whether you approach from above or below, which seems a bit strange. And what about other operations on inf? How about inf/inf? Is it 1? In some cases, that will seem strange: (1000000/0)/(0.000001/0) = inf/inf = 1? That doesn’t look right. So introduce a second concept, NotANumber?
I don’t think this line of inquiry is leading to good places.
I’m definitely not OK with including infinity in my number system. And the observation that I’m making is more or less that that no matter what, this goes bad places. But progress happens, in mathematics as elsewhere, when we traipse gladly into the bad places, figure out what makes them bad, and try to fix it.
Division by n is what undoes multiplication by n. There are a whole lot of operations in mathematics – and in the real world – that cannot be undone, e.g. squaring, the sin(-) function, removing the leading digit of a number, or generally any operation that has the same result for multiple different inputs.
Operations that cannot be (un)done cause no existential crises in mathematics: we are fine with “we cannot do that and won’t pretend that we can”.
Division by zero is impossible, so we decided not to divide by zero. Defining sets by unrestricted comprehension also turns out to be impossible: attempting it leads to Russell’s paradox, and a whole family of similar contradictions. So we decided not to construct sets by unrestricted comprehension.
There’s one major difference between the two situations: back when Russell’s paradox appeared, unrestricted comprehension was literally our only known tool for constructing sets! Every other operation of set theory was defined in terms of unrestricted comprehensions. Hence, we were left with nothing and we had to discover new tools, that allowed us to perform some constructions – not all of the things that what we thought we could do with unrestricted comprehension, but at least some of them.
It’s an interesting situation. Imagine that inhabitants of the planet Zorblax defined every arithmetic operation in terms of division by zero, only to discover that division by zero was actually impossible! They would stop using their naive Zorblaxian arithmetic (as we did to our naive set theory), and construct a modern Zorblaxian arithmetic, where they can still add, subtract and multiply, but division is restricted to non-zero numbers. Meet the new Zorblaxian arithmetic: it’s the same as old Earth-arithmetic.
Unrestricted comprehension was a legal operation in the naive set theory, but it is an illegal operation in modern set theory. However, we have sufficiently restricted forms of comprehension that are still available. This should answer your question: we were willing to just ban making Russell’s set, and that’s exactly what we did.
Why would I be wrong in saying this is taking the square roots does?
Because squaring n and squaring -n both give n^2, I think.
Yep, thanks.
That’s precisely not what set theorists did from a historical standpoint. They created ZF, ZFC, NF, all the others! Why was that necessary, if all we had to do was ban Russell’s Set?
To put it another way, why not accept the axiom of extensionality and the “Axiom of Minimally Restricted Comprehension”, which is comprehension with the mere addition of “…except you can’t make Russell’s Set”? Why isn’t that enough?
How do you know that your comprehension doesn’t have a Russel paradox in it somewhere? If you take a set that seems paradox-free, prove something about, then somebody finds a paradox, your proof has to be reevaluated and probably thrown out. So to increase the reliability of math, you want a way to reliably create your sets safely. So you create a set of axioms which avoids the paradoxes you know about and work from there.
If the system I defined (extensionality and minimally restricted comprehension) has a contradiction lurking within it, I’m excited to find what it is–that would be illuminating to discover. Sounds like a cool thing for set theorists to investigate.
And more generally, to the idea that the possibility of a lurking contradiction is in and of itself bad: if what we want is provably paradox-free logic, which is also axiom-based and powerful enough to express some very basic ideas, we already know that that’s an impossible task from the Incompleteness Theorems. The kind of “safety” and “reliability” you seem to want is already known to be impossible. It’s a cruel world, I know. (Or I’m misinterpreting you, but I don’t think so…)
I’m rusty, but the system you defined seems correct, but hard to use. Saying “don’t generate this sort of set” leaves it to the reader to decide whether they’ve done so accidentally and that may not be obvious, whereas saying “use these rules to generate sets” gives people an actual method for creating paradox-free ones.
And I would be curious to know what you mean by basic ideas. The version I know is that you can’t have a consistent set of axioms that can prove *all* true statements about the integers. Which leaves open the possibility that ZFC is consistent and proves almost everything we’ll ever care about, but we’ll never know whether the Riemann hypothesis is true, or even that it can prove or disprove everything we’ll ever consider in all of human history, despite there being some very weird far off true statements independent of ZFC.
“If the system I defined (extensionality and minimally restricted comprehension) has a contradiction lurking within it,”
Although I can’t think of any off the top of my head, I expect that there a lot of Russell-like paradoxes that arise from unrestricted comprehension.
Yaleocon: your system allows defining the set of all things. This would have to contain all of its subsets. A corollary of Cantor’s theorem is that no set can contain all of its subsets. That’s your contradiction.
Bzium: Directly implied by Cantor’s theorem, right? No greatest cardinal–and thus no set of all sets. Burali-Forti also causes problems. Could we deal with them by further minimal restrictions on comprehension? Just forbid “set of all sets,” and “largest ordinal” too, and keep investigating?
It seems like we can band-aid them away–just like (it seems to me) we did with division by zero. Or is there one of these that generates such aggressive “revenge paradoxes” that we really have to give up on unrestricted comprehension?
Alternatively, is this kind of “band-aid” approach just a bad way to go about excising contradictions from set theory?
I’d just like to repeat that division by zero was never band-aided away. It was never something that was expected. People trying to do arithmetic didn’t do it because it didn’t make any sense, and the people who later formalized algebra did so in terms of multiplication and inverses. That the additive identity doesn’t have a multiplicative inverse was known and expected from the start.
Russel’s paradox was not meant to be included in set theory and actually made it harder to do math reliably.
There is no such thing as “minimally restricted” comprehension: there are several incompatible ways of restricting comprehension to prevent Russell-like paradoxes. ZF and NF set theory explore different trade-offs, but they both revolve around restricting comprehension.
Bug report: I tried using Axioms>Comprehension to construct the set {x|x∉x}, but it caused a paradox. What now? Sincerely, B. Russell
Tech Support: From now on, Axioms>Comprehension is limited to subsets of sets already constructed. That should fix the bug.
Bug report: I used to construct the set P(S) of all subsets of a given set S by invoking comprehension with {x|x⊆S}. Alas, the new update’s limited comprehension does not support this construction. What do I do?
Tech support: Comprehensions of the form {x|x⊆S} are available again. They are found under Axioms>Powerset.
Bug report: We used to construct the set of natural numbers – as the set of equivalence classes of finite sets – using the Axioms>Comprehension option. However, the new version won’t let me do that: it’s complaining about some subset limitation or something. What gives? You know how important the naturals are to our industry! Fix asap! Sincerely, outraged mathematician.
Tech support: The newly introduced limitation does break the construction of the natural numbers. We have to add the naturals to the system manually: you’ll find this option under Axioms>Infinity from now on. Tech Support
and so on.
Addendum:
Once you try to formalize the condition “except you can’t make Russell’s set”, you’ll realize that it’s meaningless. There is no deductive system that is just like naive set theory but without the Russell set.
Thanks for the informative–and humorous–response! My problem is with the first fix “Tech Support” made: was it really necessary for it to be that harsh? Why couldn’t the conversation have gone:
Bug report: {x|x \notin x} causes serious problems. What now? -BFR
Tech support: Thanks for the heads-up! We’ve forbidden that operation.
If we did need to make such a drastic move, then all of the remaining fixes Tech Support makes seem to follow. Re-axiomatizations like NF, NBG, ZF/C seem like the necessary next step, and I’m satisfied–much thanks for your clarifications if that is in fact the case.
But what makes formalizing the condition “except you can’t make Russell’s Set” render that condition “meaningless”? (Or how would it bring down all of set theory as collateral damage, or produce other seriously bad consequences for naive set theory?) If you could supply an argument to that effect, I would be very grateful.
The problem is that “except you can’t make Russell’s Set” is vague.
Russell’s paradoxical set can be constructed in many ways. Invoking unrestrited comprehension as {x|x∉x} is just one way. If you just forbid comprehension on the predicate x∉x, Russell can still construct his set by invoking e.g. {x|∃y. x=y ∧ y∉x} or some similar comprehension instead.
So now you have to restrict comprehension further, and somehow rule out every predicate that can be used to construct Russell’s set. I.e. we need some kind of syntactic criterion on which predicates are allowed to occur under a comprehension.
There are many such syntactic restrictions that one could introduce: the choices are incomparable (allow and disallow different paradoxical and non-paradoxical sets), so there is no “minimal” or “best” solution among them. One has to explore the trade-offs.
For example, we could say that a predicate is stratified if and only if it is possible to assign numbers to all variables in the predicate such that if two variables appear in the same equation they get the same number, and if two variables appear on opposite sides of the set membership sign then the one on the right has a larger number than the one on the left. Russell-like predicates (including x∉x and ∃y. x=y ∧ y∉x and all variations) are never stratified, but restricting comprehension to stratified formulas rules out many non-paradoxical sets as well. This is the approach taken by the Russell-Quine family of set theories (TST, NF, NFU).
Another choice we could limit comprehension to subsets of already constructed sets. Again, this rules out both paradoxical and non-paradoxical constructions, some of which are added back as proper axioms. This is the approach taken by the Zermelo family of set theories (Z, ZF, ZFC, NBG, KP, MK).
Once again, much obliged for the response. I think we’re really getting somewhere. We might have even already gotten somewhere, such that I should take my question to be answered and stop insisting that there could be a problem here when there isn’t.
Nonetheless, I still feel obliged to push the thread a little bit further. Dividing by zero isn’t the only problem. Dividing by 1-1 is also a problem; so is canceling out (x-y) from both sides of an equation, where you’ve defined x and y as equal (a move in that sneaky proof of 1=2).
Could the parallelism stand? Should the possibility of lurking division by zero in arithmetic trouble us more than it historically has? Do we need a similarly syntactic criterion in our arithmetic to make it safe?
Your original question was how we justify making division by zero an illegal operation, given that we weren’t willing to do the same thing for Russell’s Paradox.
The answer is that we were willing to do the same thing for Russell’s paradox, the current state of affairs does make forming the Russell set an illegal operation.
Then you had a follow-up question: how come our new set theories forbid lots of stuff, and not just forming the Russell set?
The answer is that there is no minimal consistent restriction we can take. Instead, there are many different – incompatible and incomparable – restrictions. For example, there are consistent restrictions which allow the set {x|x=x} of all sets (e.g. NF), and consistent restrictions which allow all sets of the form {x∈S|…} where S is some previously constructed set (e.g. ZFC). However, there can be no consistent restriction that allows both of these.
Your final question is why we don’t use similar syntactic criteria for division by zero?
The difference is that there is an obvious restriction we can place on division (indeed there is an obvious restriction of any non-injective function). You can just say that you are allowed to divide by a number N if and only if you’ve already proved that N is non-zero. Having a proof of N≠0 is ultimately a very strong syntactic criterion. As long as we respect this criterion, we don’t need to worry about lurking division by zero.
(Epilogue 1. In some sense the N≠0 criterion prevents us from doing some divisions that should be legal. There are numbers that are non-zero but not provably non-zero, and we can’t divide by those, even though these particular divisions would never lead to a paradox. This phenomenon leads us straight to Gödel, but I won’t go down that path.)
(Epilogue 2. There is another parallel, mentioned by other comments: you can have rings where 0≠1, and you can have rings where division by zero is possible, but you can’t have a ring that has both.)
@publiusvarinius, could you expand on your Epilogue 1? Which numbers are nonzero but not provably so?
@Evan Þ
7 and 23.
@Evan Þ:
I don’t think it’s productive to expand on this topic any further: for those who know Gödel’s incompleteness theorems the answer is obvious, and for those who don’t, it won’t make much sense anyway. Here it goes:
Let T(n) be 0 if there is a contradiction of length less than n in ZFC set theory, and 1 otherwise. Let t be the real number in the interval [0,1] whose decimal expansion is given by the function T. The number 1-sgn(t) is non-zero, but ZFC set theory does not prove that it is non-zero.
The wrong attitude here is that you should be able to do any operation on any numbers, as an independent value of its own. Kronecker said “God made the integers, all else is the work of man”, but even that goes too far; negative numbers are the work of man, too. Children start out with natural numbers, and the arithmetics you can naturally do with them, and for most of history this was enough.
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. Thus cast your mind back to when you were a little child and only knew 7-4 and 6/2, but not 4-7 or 2/6. Does it seem “crazy” that you can 7-4 but not 4-7? Not really, because how can you have 4 apples and take away 7? You’ll run out of apples midway. It’s nonsense.
Negative numbers are a useful invention, but they’re only useful because it turned out you can invent them while preserving the commutative and associative and distributive laws of arithmetics, so you can calculate the way you’re used to, open parentheses and rearrange terms and the like. Nobody said “I feel a burning need of knowing what A-B is when A < B, so let's figure something out". Instead, they said "I only have 3 coins, but I owe you 5, how can I keep track of that? Maybe I can summarize my financial situation with a single having-or-owing number?" Which helps explain why it wasn't useful to say define A-B to be 0 when A < B, which makes a certain kind of intuitive sense. It breaks that having-or-owing math though, which was the whole point. Same thing with fractions: the only reason they're useful is because they respect the arithmetical laws.
We started with just 1,2,3… and then went on to invent a whole lot more, but at every step, the motivation wasn't to allow a previously forbidden operation, it was to pack more meaning in while respecting the arithmetical laws. Respecting the laws was the whole point. Now that we went far enough along this route so that everything is possible on the number line except /0, it's easy to see that as a weird exception that signals failure and should be dealt with. But it isn't failure. Since /0 is not possible while respecting arithmetical laws, it just isn't interesting or useful to do. If we couldn't define square roots or 1/5 without respecting the laws, we wouldn't have done that either, and wouldn't have felt the loss. It so happens that /0 is the only "hole" left if you look at operations on real numbers ahistorically as God-given rights and forget they're a patchwork of successive extensions. But to look at them this way is to forget the laws, which have always been the real reason.
I think the key part and underlying principle of this account is where you talk about math as “not God-given” and call ways of thinking which try to treat with math as a pure entity “ahistorical.”
That’s a fine account, maybe even one I agree with, but it seems very contentious; aren’t there people who believe things like the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which take math as a very fundamental thing in and of itself? Either this is a serious blow to those views, or else they’re going to have to find another consistent way around the objection.
@Yaleocon
TL;DR version: Yes we can divide by zero. However it completely messes up algebraic structures of real/complex numbers and we treasure algebraic structures much more than allowing operations to happen (and for good reasons I will explain in a future post in my series).
Full version:
There are many different extensions to real/complex numbers such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_projective_line and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line . We can indeed make it possible to have divide by zero. However algebraic (in the sense of algebra2 above) properties will become horrible. Preserving algebraic structures are much more important than allowing certain operations to take place. I think I will explain it in my introduction to algebraic structures post.
Here is why:
In mathematics we can indeed redefine a lot of stuff. However definitions need to be helpful. One issue with divide by zero is that we still can not define 0/0 in a satisfactory manner. A much worse issue that appears when infinity/-infinity etc and divide by 0 are introduced is that it ruins the algebraic structure of real/complex numbers.
The set of real numbers/complex numbers is a field which is a very good algebraic structure. In a field we have addition, multiplication, subtraction (defined as adding the additive inverse of something) and division (defined as multiplying the multiplicative inverse of something that isn’t zero/the additive identity element). So far so good.
Now we need to define division by zero. This itself isn’t really a problem. We can introduce unsigned infinity which makes our structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_projective_line or one of its variants and declare that c/0=infinity for any non-zero c. In fact we can even declare that 0/0=1, 0, infinity or something else if we want to. However this breaks the algebraic structure (field). To make something a field everything other than 0 has to have an additive inverse. However this is no longer possible because infinity literally has no additive inverse. Similarly algebraic structures are ruined when it comes to multiplication. Hence what we have introduced is a legitimate extension of real numbers which unfortunately completely messes up the algebraic structure of reals.
Similarly we can introduce a +infinity and a -infinity. Now we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line or one of its variants. Now what the heck is…(+infinity)+(-infinity)? Leaving it undefined completely ruins the algebraic structure to its core. Declaring it to be 0 is just slightly better because associativity of addition completely fails by (1 + (+infinity) ) + (-infinity) = (+infinity) + (-infinity) = 0 while (1 + ((+infinity) + (-infinity))) = 1 + 0 = 1. So what we get is just a really bad algebraic structure.
If we had a nice extension of real numbers /complex numbers we would probably have used it extensively in math research instead of real numbers/complex numbers. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it to happen.
Maybe I should address this issue in the next post of the Explore Math with AT series?
WARNING: Please do not attempt divide by zero in homework, exams, etc unless the problem explicitly asks you to explore this idea.
Thanks for the warning, much appreciated–I’ll stick to talking about zero division in my philosophy classes, and go with the traditional approach in my math classes 🙂
You’re welcome! You can do that in your math classes though as long as you don’t do them in your homework, quizzes, tests or exams. Your math instructor is very likely to be a formal mathematician or someone who at least received an education in formal mathematics so this discussion will go somewhere.
This is an excellent summary of the problems that result from defining division by 0, and 0/0, in different ways. Thank you for the explication–although I had already understood the mathematical problems resulting from it, and was more asking about why we approach a similar problem differently in set theory, and what the philosophical implications of the two approaches are.
My question (or, at least, the question I was trying to ask) is: if the immense problems resulting from this coerce us to say “do not divide by zero” and merely restrict division to the other members of the field, why didn’t the explosive results of Russell’s Paradox coerce us to say “do not make that set?” Instead, we abandoned the idea of two-axiom set theory as a lost cause (to the extent of now calling it “naive set theory”!) and decided to re-axiomatize from nothing. Why the (seemingly) inconsistent approach?
Sets are real, division is fake.
AT mentions that division is multiplication, but doesn’t give it as much emphasis as I think it deserves. Divide by X means find Y such that XY is the identity (1, in arithmetic) then multiply by Y. There’s nothing you can multiply by 0 to get 1, so you can’t do anything. We already knew that was how algebra works and nobody was surprised by it. For the purposes of calculus/analyses, people did have to figure out how to divide by zero (you disguise it by calling it “h” or “dx”, so math doesn’t notice), but in terms of arithmetic, there wasn’t anything to be gained from a system where zero had an inverse as far as anybody could tell.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to do set theory, and some sets contain paradoxes, you can’t have confidence that your results will actually hold. People do still use naive set theory talking about things and even for proving things, but if the goal is to have a logical underpinning for mathematics, you can’t just ignore that it’s inconsistent, so people found a way to create the objects we needed without the paradoxes.
This seems fraught. How are we defining “the objects we need,” independent of naive set theory? And if we’ve already presupposed the objects we’re looking for (with reference to a flawed system, no less), how do we know that the problems lurk in the way we theorized it, rather than the concepts themselves?
We need to have axioms that allow something to exist. We need to be able map things that axiomatically exist onto concepts we want to describe. “The ordinals of set theory -> the integers” is a mapping that works and has allowed us to translate a lot of results into a pure logical basis. There are certainly other sets of axioms that result in objects we could map to the same things, but sets were in vogue at the time, and so we got formalized sets.
A common first assumption, I think, is that the universe makes sense –
it doesn’t have paradoxes – so the problem must live in our systems, rather than the concepts we’re describing. That could be wrong. But that way lies nihilism or something.
Let’s say the ordinals proved something crazy about the integers. I’m not saying they do, but let’s say they somehow did–we got some profoundly unintuitive result, which contradicts our typical understanding of how the integers work. Would we say “ok, I guess 2 and 2 make 5 under some conditions,” or would we (more likely) say “ok, looks like this was a bad mapping for the integers”? (Maybe you’re just totally unwilling to entertain the counterfactual; that’s one way out.)
I submit that in this case, we would say “the ordinals turned out not to model the integers well.” In that case, we’re letting our intuitions about the integers overrule our “definition” of the integers. That involves presupposing that the integers make sense–and if we’re willing to make that assumption, why do we need a mapping at all? Why not make “the integers” things that axiomatically exist in the first place? It seems like the alternative is just an end-run around that anyway.
I’m not sure whether by “something crazy” you mean a contradiction like “2+2=5” or something intuitively dumb but logically true. In the first case we’d try to throw out that particular logical underpinning and come up with a new one, saying ZFC was a bad mapping. In the second case, we’ll bite the bullet and say “okay, I guess the integers are weirder than we gave them credit for” unless/until it turns out to actually be a contradiction. People mostly haven’t argued for throwing out the current system because of Banach Tarski, after all.
And yeah, “the real world makes sense” is a pretty normal assumption, and most people do all their work starting with the integers existing. But if you try to model mathematicians in terms of doing what’s most convenient rather than having “rigorously analyze and define things” as one of their terminal values, you’re going to spend a lot of time confused.
Because in naive set theory what we have is a true inconsistency in axioms which completely destroys a theory. On the other hand in algebra the problem you described is at most something that isn’t too nice but is still easy to work around. In fact there is a reason why the additive identity (aka 0) in a field explicitly has no multiplicative inverse.
There are serious consequences if we want to find a multiplicative inverse to 0 aka we destroy even more algebraic structures.
Attempting to define a multiplicative inverse to the additive identity is very bad. Similarly, it seems, attempting to define a set of non-self-containing sets is very bad.
These both seem like “true inconsistencies in axioms”, at least insofar as “there are multiplicative inverses” and “there is an additive identity” are axioms. (Are these not axioms? If so, how do we recover the existence of non-integer reals, or the existence of zero?)
In the first case, we resolve the issue by saying “do not attempt to find the multiplicative inverse of the additive identity.” Why can’t we similarly say “do not try to find the set of all non-self-containing sets?” What makes one inconsistency “truer” than the other?
One difference is that lots and lots of things don’t have multiplicative inverses. If you look at the integers, they have a perfectly acceptable ring (has + and *) algebra, but the only numbers with inverses are -1 and 1. “Things have inverses” is not an axiom, it’s a property that some rings have and others don’t. The most invertable elements any ring can have is everything but 0, and when that’s the case it’s a special ring that we call a field.
In general, you don’t define inverses. You define your ring and then you find the inverses that exist in that ring. If you tried to define an extension to the reals or complex plane which contained a multiplicative inverse for zero, either it wouldn’t work (as in your new structure would not meet the definition of a ring), or maybe you would get a new additive identity and now that wouldn’t have a multiplicative identity.
Not to be a smart ass, but what about the trivial ring? Every element is invertable and it isn’t a field.
Yeah, I should have specified rings with more than one element. Good catch.
There are other approaches as well; it is an area with a lot of weird explorations.
So you can construct a mathematical system built on limits which allows this kind of nonsense, but without equals signs, such that infinity approximately equals infinity. The problem goes away, but you deal with other weird nonsense as a result.
Fundamentally the issue is that mathematical operations always involve losing information – once you notice that “2” conveys less information than “1+1”, you start to see the issue. 0 has unique informational properties (consider that every mathematical equation has an infinite number of terms with a coefficient of 0).
This is… interesting. If you think this is true, then would you also say that every “definition” is a synthetic, and not analytic, proposition?
To put it another way, is it possible that “1+1=2”, where “1”, “+”, “=”, and “2” refer to the things we usually think they do (if there are such things at all, mathematical realism is weird) could turn out to be false? Or are they true by definition in an utterly inevitable way?
Edit to clarify importance: if 2 inescapably conceptually entails 1+1, then it has to convey as much information as 1+1, so for it to convey less information, we may have to do this kind of extreme skepticism about the necessity of analytical truth.
In mathematics proper, they are true by definition. This is different, critically, from how math is actually used by most people, whereby it reflects a truth about reality itself.
To illustrate the difference, think about linear algebra. Suppose you have a formula to calculate the number of tents and bedrolls your army needs shipped, based on the number that deteriorate in a given month, and the number they have, and you find they have sufficient bedrolls but need 32 tents.
The mathematical calculation erased the bedrolls, because it is calculation what needs to be shipped – it is a destructive process which strips away all information you don’t need to give you the answer you do need.
Likewise, knowing that a table is 32 square feet doesn’t tell you whether your 16 square feet map will fit on it. You lost information by multiplying your dimensions together.
Zero is a weird number. It’s not really an amount, it is the negation of an amount. It’s a null set. So it makes sense to me that ways in which you manipulate an amount don’t make sense for when there is no amount.
I am not a mathematician in any sense, but this is what makes sense to me.
Would having a tagging system (probably one where anyone can tag comments) make it easier to search ssc? Would it be worth the trouble?
Does not sound worth the trouble to me, but I’ve never gotten the hang of tags anywhere (even email folders never seem to work out for me…)
I usually use ctrl-F or equivalent to search for a comment in a thread/post. If I don’t remember what post it was under, google search with ‘site:slatestarcodex.com ‘ usually works.
Tags are fantastic organizational tools, but not without their pitfalls. Contrast tagging with hierarchy or bucketing. An email from my insurance company about late payment — does that go in the insurance folder or the banking folder or TODO or ? TAG ALL THE THINGS
One problem to solve is tag normalization. If you have 10 things tagged ‘insurance’ and you tag something new as ‘insurnace’, is it lost forever (to your search for ‘insurance’)? Assume tags are lowercase and there are no typos. What about multiple words? Spaces, hyphens, underscores?
What’s the history of breast size?
I saw a picture of Francis Howard, who for some reason seems to be wearing an extremely low cut top in all of her portraits, and it got me thinking – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a historical portrait of a woman with large breasts. There are those ones in a cave in Sri Lanka drawn by the horny monks, and I think I’ve seen some in Thailand too… but in general not so much.
When was the first real woman with large breasts?
[The reason why I was looking at pictures of Frances Howard is that Terence Trent D’arby’s mother was called Frances Howard, and I read an article claiming that Terence Trent D’arby is half Native Armerican, half hillbilly, and I had always thought he was African-American, so I wanted to see what she looked like.]
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman with small breasts in historical art from the Indian subcontinent or Cambodia. Some of that goes back pretty far.
But not as far as the Venus of Willendorf, a figurine carved somewhere around 26,000 BC — although she’s highly stylized.
There is also the Venus of Hohlefels, from somewhere between 35,000 BC and 40,000 BC.
In both Venuses (Venii?) the figure’s arms are under the breasts, suggesting they may be pushing the breasts up. So, put an asterisk after those Venii!
Since you asked, it’s a third declension noun, so the plural is actually Veneres.
Smooth.
Ancient Egyptian seems small breast. Mesopotamian seems a bit more of a mixed bag.
I wonder if it’s an Indo-European thing – Hittite fertility statue
Prevalence of Amorality
How to measure amorality in a society? What’s the prevalence of amorality in the West and in the entire world now?
Are you measuring by actions or by belief?
By belief. Amorality isn’t an action. We can measure crime rates and how antisocial human behaviors are. However it is hard to tell immorality from amorality based on actions.
I would say that amorality is operating on ‘system 1’ where the relevant social incentives have not been designed with reference to human emotions.
So, I suppose taking a shit in the toilet is a somewhat moral action, because, despite the fact that I’m operating on system 1, the whole idea of a toilet has been designed to prevent disease, keep horrible smells away, etc. and if I was challenged, I could come up those reasons as a justification.
I don’t know. I guess something that doesn’t really have a good justification? Or an unattractive justification? Like – I kill homeless people – oh… because they are weak? Is a bad justification immoral or amoral?
Bad justification immoral, no justification amoral.
Still listening to the de Becker interview, and the bit about unsolicited promises brought back a memory.
When I was younger I had a few instances of a man saying “We won’t do anything you don’t want to do”. It’s even conceivable that it was the same man forgetting he’d already said it to me before.
My immediate reaction was that this was not a safe person to be around. At the time my reaction was a mixture of “I wasn’t even worried (arguably, I was naive, but it was also a different world) so why are you bringing this up?” and “I don’t know whether you’re trustworthy, so why should I believe your promise?”.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has had that said to them?
It seems to me that de Becker is cherry-picking about evidence for the value of going with intuition, but it doesn’t mean he’s entirely wrong.
And I might as well include this about it being considered rude for a woman to turn down an unwanted hug.
May I recommend you reread the bottom link, and try to interpret it as if a man were writing it, and giving advice to other men?
Rules of courtesy are intended to de-escalate situations, to build social trust. (Mostly. A few are intended to make it harder to stab your neighbor at the dinner table. But there is an element of building social trust to that too, I guess.)
I feel like there is a lack of… proportionality, all throughout that post. Implying it is okay to break someone’s hand for touching your shoulder, for example (movies always portray this psychopathic behavior as okay, for some reason).
The problem of rudeness, isn’t that not showing somebody trust is considered rude – that is part of the core of what rudeness is – the problem is that people simplified “rude” from “A violation of social etiquette” to “wrong”. Most people don’t really quite get why being rude is usually wrong, and certainly don’t get when it is correct.
This is really old, really important social technology. And yes, there are elements of risk involved in it – that is what allows it to work, to build social trust, like a falling exercise. There is a gulf here, and I don’t know what to do with it.
You have a point– “There is one thing I try to hammer home–for myself as much as for my students–in an attempt to override that societal conditioning: If someone places an unwanted hand on me, that person has forfeited the right to said hand. If it is on my body, it belongs to me, to do with as I think appropriate for the situation. That might mean a pointed but low-key removal of the hand from my shoulder, or a blatant and painful pinky-finger twist, or something more aggressive.”
That’s very extreme, though even there she’s mostly talking about responses well short of breaking bones.
On the other hand, what do you make of this? “If you tell a woman her “appropriate” boundary is within an unwanted hug–when her ability to strike is impaired, her ability to flee gone, and her body possibly at the mercy of another person’s strength and mass–you’ve decided you’d rather see her come to harm than upset the “civilized” nature of an event.”
Perhaps the author ought to consider what happens when people decide that civilisation isn’t important. It isn’t generally very good for women, or anyone else for that matter.
I think it’s clearly true that people ought to be able to refuse hugs. But I think there’s a big difference between being grabbed in an alley, where realistically if they get a grip on you you’re no longer in control of the situation, and being hugged at a social event. There seems to be a common trend for martial artists to end up living in a sort of “code yellow*” world, and forgetting that we have society so that you don’t have to do that. I think the world where we agree to be considerate about touching people and to shun people who violate that instead of reacting violently is way better than the one where a hug in any situation can be grounds for violence.
*code yellow
Interesting about martial artists and code yellow. I had a roommate I was good friends with who was a serious scholar and practitioner. Myself, not so much, but we both used to love watching MMA and UFC. Once at a party, it seemed like fun (to me) to lightly roughhouse, in the manner of a very lighthearted slapfight. Like, put your dukes up and see if you can get touches in. I was rewarded with a stunning blow straight to the bridge of my nose which honestly took me about 5 minutes to recover from, in terms of being able to relax and have a good time again. He apologized many times and said I shouldn’t have done that, and it was his training responsible for the snap reaction.
There’s a common trend for low grade, overcompensating martial artists to live in constant code yellow. It sounds like your friend was on the up and up by virtue of realizing that he made a big, unreasonable mistake and all was well, but disproportionate response like that really isn’t okay or even understandable.
If “But my training” is someone’s excuse for misinterpreting benign play as a serious threat and instantly escalating in reaction before having a chance to think, they need to stop that brand of training immediately and replace it with something better at distinguishing genuine threats from normal social behaviour.
FWIW, I don’t think you were at all out of line, and I hope your buddy eventually got a handle on himself.
That is the simplification of rude to wrong, although “appropriate” is used.
On the one hand, if someone tries to shake your hand, it is rude not to reciprocate.
On the other hand, if they just sneezed into that hand, being rude is – well, appropriate.
You can be politely rude about it, say, “I am sorry, I am a bit of a germophobe” (most people won’t recognize the right word there). Likewise, for a hug, “I am sorry, I am not comfortable with that.”. There are levels of social escalation.
I get the impression the woman who wrote that doesn’t want to deal with the layers of social etiquette, and feels constrained by them. But she has somehow arrived at the conclusion that the etiquette is designed to hamper women, and women’s ability to defend themselves – rather than largely being built around building sufficient trust to make people feel like they don’t need to, because people who feel like they need to defend themselves are overly quick to, say, break somebody’s hand for touching them.
So it comes across as intensely paranoid.
Okay, a man took my hand to kiss it. How do you think I should have responded?
“I’m flattered. Also married[/dating/currently enjoying being single/a lesbian/not a big fan of saliva].”
My hand is already in his hand. What do you suggest I do physically?
If you’re trying to kiss somebody’s hand, you’re more gently lifting it than holding it. You can pull your hand out easily. (and hopefully smoothly offer it to shake, as a way to salvage everybody’s face)
If for some reason he’s gripping your hand and you wouldn’t be able to accomplish the first one, say ow, twist your hand out of his grip (the trick is to put pressure on the side being held by his thumb) and shake out your hand with an offended look on your face.
You can jerk your hand away, but you don’t need to shoot him in the face.
I pulled my hand out hard. He said “You didn’t have to do that” and gave me a dirty look. End of interaction.
I don’t see that I owed his feelings much of anything.
Generally the only time men kiss women’s hands, afaik, is at social events when being introduced. Assuming this was the case, I don’t see why physical response is necessary. A jerk back is probably not unwarranted if you are particularly uncomfortable with physical touching, but it does escalate slightly from faux pas to almost a struggle, though if he did not promptly let go he would come off looking worse.
If someone you don’t know tried kissing your hand outside of introductions at a party or some sort of expected foreplay, that’s pretty weird. I expect it’s the kind of thing only done if someone is being excessively formal and overtly old-fashioned, or trying to suggest the beginnings of a romance.
Well, that’s a philosophical point, I suppose. Who’s feelings do you feel you owe consideration?
Depends on the setting.
Unless you attend much nicer parties than I do, you can just – gently – take your hand back.
I say gently, because if he restrains you, it will come as a total shock when you then punch his throat. Or, you know, whatever.
The trick there is making him escalate to physical force first.
It was not a social event. It’s been a while but I think I was huckstering. (Selling my wares at an sf convention.)
If I had to guess, he’s heard of hand-kissing, thought it sounded cool, and thought it was a way to get more intimate contact than he usually could.
I actually did think I owed his feelings something, in the sense that I didn’t attempt to injure him, verbally insult him, or damage his reputation.
On the other hand, was it unreasonable for me to impose some cost on him? The suggestions here have mostly been that I should have handled matters in some way that didn’t leave him feeling bad at all.
@Nancy
I don’t think anyone here thinks you need to worry too much about his feelings in this case. (Anyone here, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).
In a more formal setting where hand-kissing might be seen as socially appropriate, maybe a little (him feeling bad is fine, but giving him some mechanism to save social face would be appropriate).
Eh, from the telling of it, he made the bigger error. Not sure I’d even say you made an error, though I could imagine particularly graceless ways to remove yourself, I assume it wasn’t a scene.
Basically, think of the other thread, Different Worlds. You can interpret his behavior as attempting to steal a bit of unearned physical contact, or of someone with foreign customs or lacking social skills. Both you and him are probably happier if you assume the latter than the former, in which case you endure for a split second and it’s done. After which time, you probably step back and angle you body away from him or otherwise give signals that you aren’t open to contact, and if he persists, it gets harder to interpret charitably, and you likewise get more explicit.
Would you be willing to endorse for a split second a kiss on the mouth from a strange man under the assumption that he just must have poor social skills or foreign customs, Randy M?
Sure, but no tongue.
Seriously, though, a kiss on the mouth is at least a couple steps above a kiss on the hand, intimacy-wise. I might still tolerate it — briefly — if I had a good reason to think that it was meant innocently, but that’s a lot more of a stretch. Foreign customs are about the only plausible explanation.
Kissing on the cheek is a lot more plausible as a gender-neutral equivalent. And tolerating it does seem like the polite thing.
I don’t think all body parts are analogous.
If a strange man is kissing people on the cheek, I’m not getting in line; but if it happened in the course of introductions, I would let it pass. Not that I’d make it easy on him or reciprocate, but at that point, what’s the benefit of making a scene? And I know there are cultures where that’s done, so…
Nancy did not ask for advice on what to do if a man kisses her mouth. Hands are generally less intimate than mouths (do need to break down the list in more detail?). Note in my initial response, I also recommended gently rebuffing him in the not unlikely event it was a tentative romantic gesture.
I also said her jerking back isn’t unwarranted and she didn’t make any error. Not sure what box you’re trying to put me in here.
Pondering the etiquette involved in the specific situation…
So, he committed the first faux pas, in initiating an inappropriately formal / familiar gesture. (As, in a non-formal setting, hand-kissing is considered a pretty familiar act.)
You responded in a way that called out his faux pas – which, amusingly enough, is itself a faux pas, as you aren’t supposed to call attention to other people’s minor breaches of etiquette. (I’d also guess you were reacting in startlement to a social situation you had no reason to anticipate being in, and not deliberately.)
Then he responded in a way which called attention to that, committing the exact same social error. I’d guess he was expecting your reaction about as much as you were expecting him to try to kiss your hand.
I would hazard a guess that you actually do feel kind of bad/guilty about the situation, because it has stuck with you.
The short of it is – he created an awkward situation, probably out of ignorance, and things got predictably awkward. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else, sooner or later. You just happened to be the lucky individual who got to show him the error of unilateral out-of-context period formality.
Honestly, this sounds to me like a genuine, in-the-wild case of “m’lady.”
I know someone else who did m’lady.
For years.
I disliked him intensely (not the the only woman who did), but he never crossed the line to an extent where I was willing to lose my temper with him.
Honestly, I think you were fine just pulling your hand away, and your reaction seems appropriate.
The consequence of letting him do it would be slight discomfort and no tangible harm, so in terms of proportionality, that’s the cap for the costs you can reasonably impose in retaliation. There don’t seem to be any systemic effects or feedback loops in play (If we don’t punish this now, think of how things will be if everyone starts trying to kiss hands as a greeting! Madness!).
So he made a failed advance, you removed your hand, he gave you a dirty look, you gave him a dirty look back. This all sounds pretty reasonable to me.
“If you tell a woman her “appropriate” boundary is within an unwanted hug–when her ability to strike is impaired, her ability to flee gone, and her body possibly at the mercy of another person’s strength and mass–you’ve decided you’d rather see her come to harm than upset the “civilized” nature of an event.”
I think the person who decided that the point at which a woman is physically “at the mercy of another person’s strength and mass” is within an unwanted hug has never actually been a woman grappling with a man. The actual boundary where you are living at the mercy of another person’s good will is a hell of a lot further off than that.
With a firearm, you could draw the line at 20 foot or so. Before the invention of Samuel Colt’s equalizer, it was much much further away.
We live our lives within murdering distance of each other, all the time. When we are talking about “civilized conduct” we are talking about how to define what is appropriate inside that distance. And it’s perfectly legit to argue about this. It’s well established that different cultures have different social distances, and different acceptable body motions.
The use of violence in self-defense, the infliction of actual physical injury on others, is only permitted when one holds a reasonable belief that one is them in imminent danger of physical injury(*). That is the law of the United States and most of the Anglosphere, and I believe the standard of most civilized societies everywhere,
And in most every civilized society everywhere, it is very much Not Reasonable to believe that an unwanted hug or hand-kiss in an otherwise amiable social context is likely to lead to injury. Pull away, yes. Shout, demand the ostracism of the offender from that social group, summon the police to arrest a persistent offender, you have options. Some of these options may involve briefly surrendering to a minor indignity to avoid escalation to violence, which civilized society does expect you to do. Sorry if you were mislead on that point.
When people talk about not just violence but literal maiming as a response to exceeding social boundaries, “that person has forfeit the right to said hand”, then they and not the unwanted toucher are proposing to replace civilization with something else. And it will be fun and rewarding at first and it will satisfy your sense of justice and mine in this instance, but it isn’t going to end with something just like civilization except that women are allowed to do violence to creepy guys who deserve it.
* Or if they are protecting a third party from imminent injury, or some other rare cases of no particular relevance here.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-ringo/a-theory-on-las-vegas/10155111388257055/
This is a discussion of “psychotic breaks” caused by rare reactions to psych meds– Ringo’s wife had one, and it’s not a crazy theory that the Vegas shooter had one. I’m sorry for the facebook link, but the discussion has some good stuff.
Probably too much planning for a psychotic break.
Did you read the post? His wife spent months on a psychotic break carefully planning to kill a bunch of people. She had their names and addresses and was tracking their movements.
I’m skeptical, but all the easy answers are gone here. Maybe he was converted by ISIS months ago. Maybe he had a months-long psychotic break.
Yeah, the more that comes out, the more it sounds a _lot_ like Ringo’s post. I hope it doesn’t turn out to by Cymbalta or similar drug; that seems likely to trigger a “war on the mentally ill” where anyone who has ever seen a psychiatrist is suspect. (much as Columbine resulted in a “war on the bullied”). At least if he really was a ISIS agent, we already hate those guys pretty maximally anyway.
But he started buying the guns a year ago. A 12 month psychotic break that no one noticed?
ETA: And yes I read the article, and I’m not sure the “I wanted to do it right” idea works either, because he could have done a lot more. He didn’t even set off the bombs he brought.
I know a couple of guys who could do that. Retired, wealthy enough, widowers or singles, focused on their hobbies, decent house, far rural land, very few friends.
I visited one a few months ago, he was a teacher of mine from many years ago. I think we exchanged less than 100 words in a two hour visit. But I did notice that my Christmas cards were still up on his fireplace. The past 5 years worth.
There are more of those men than you want to be comfortable knowing they exist.
Regarding the equifax hack:
1) I think it is pretty despicable that they were hacked in the manner they were hacked (i.e. an unpatched server) and speaks to something like negligence. There’s no way to be completely safe (see #3 below) but they could have and should have done better than this.
2) But I find myself annoyed at the righteous indignation of Senators and Congressmen. The organization they lead — the US Federal government — had its own massive, terrible hack and the responses to that were very different. None of them called for Obama to be impeached, but several have called for the CEO of Equifax to be fired. None of them proposed laws providing compensation for those whose information was disclosed by their organization but they are demanding Equifax provide compensation. I don’t think any of them are aware of the full technical details of how the organization they lead was hacked but expect the CEO to have that info at his finger tips. Etc.
3) The larger, insoluble, problem is that we are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to prevent this kind of thing from happening. We could have “jet liner” quality engineering in software but it would mean much much higher costs for development. Which not only means directly higher costs for what software would exist but it would also mean many fewer features. Not everything could be online and instant and free and super convenient. Revealed preferences say people don’t care.
We can try to legislate some sort of penalties that will force companies to care but if the choice is between going out of business now because everyone prefers your competitor with better prices, more features, and a super convenient purchasing process or going out of business later because you got hacked and owe umpteen billion dollars in damages rational business people are going to pick the latter every time.
Personally I am deeply annoyed that they attach a contract to the ability to find out if your information was stolen. Seriously not cool. Like, fuck you guys, and I half want my information to be stolen so I can sue you. And then on top of that they offer “free” identity protection for a year – after which they’ll auto-renew and bill you. Fuck you guys twice.
Data leaks and hacks happen; that is regrettable, but for practical purposes unavoidable.
For the way they have handled it, however, their organization should be burned, and the ground salted.
Simple heuristic: If you’ve applied for credit in the US, you can safely assume your information was stolen.
Just want to chime in and say that, at least according to their FAQ, they will not auto-renew and bill you for their identity protection. The FAQ says they will simply cancel the protection. Found here: https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/frequently-asked-questions/#tab-2
I would be interested in talking shop with the other developers around here about how to protect against these sorts of hacks.
Last I heard, it was a bug in a third-party library that allowed for arbitrary code execution. Let’s put aside for the moment the importance of keeping libraries updated with the latest patches. Assume that, given zero-day exploits, there’s probably a code execution hole somewhere in your stack.
What can I, as a developer, do to mitigate against that threat? I’m coming up empty.
There’s are two things I can think of.
First, at the architectural level you can specify things that can prevent or mitigate the damage from code having exploits. Things like stack randomization and W^X. They may also be language specific configuration or settings that likewise can help.
Second, you can defensively code around library boundaries. For example, if you are passing a string from the user to third party display library you can sanitize and/or bounds check it yourself even if the framework claims it is doing so for you. This has the downside of reducing the benefit of using the third party library in the first place.
Logging.
More logging.
And then auditing.
You should ask yourself “what if someone got a foothold on any of my app servers? How would I know?”
For sensitive data, when your application needs it, it requests $SUPER_SENSITIVE_DATA from a different server. That server, in turn, logs your application’s request, decides on its own if you are allowed to have it, and then gives it back to you if you are.
This audit log should be reviewed both manually and programmatically. Generate a report of how many requests were made for SUPER_SENSITIVE_DATA every day, and if it’s more than a stddev over normal for that time period, throw an alarm. Maybe if a threshold gets passed it generates an alert and stops responding to that specific application server until a manager figures out what is going on.
Be very sure that your audit log doesn’t become a source of attacks. Don’t log raw requests without encoding, and don’t log sensitive information without encryption. (Ideally this is asymmetric encryption, where you can write it with the key on your server but you cannot decrypt it because that key isn’t on your server.) This has the benefit of meaning you can give relatively junior people the job of analyzing the logs because there is no sensitive data in them.
I like the idea of asymmetric encrypted sensitive information in logs. That’s clever.
A lot of the indignation around the Equifax hack concerns the implications that the senior management was aware of the breach and covered it up while they made arrangements to mitigate the damage to themselves. It’s like discovering the captain of a sinking ship got away in a lifeboat, then announced to the passengers that the ship was sinking.
Security breaches are a part of life, and I can’t fault a company that’s done at least some amount of effort to prevent that for having one. But if you have my data, and you get breached, you are obligated to let me know in a timely fashion. There may be innocuous reasons that it took so long to announce the breach, but there’s definitely evidence of misconduct. If the possibility of a breach is so great you need to CYA by exercising stock options, it’s already well beyond the point where you should have informed the public of a potential breach.
The issue with the US government is the massive scale and division of responsibilities. As someone affected by the OPM hack, I’m pissed at the stupidity of the government, but there’s no evidence that there was an attempt by anyone in the government to profit or otherwise benefit from a failure to do their duty to inform the public. If the buck stops anywhere for the OPM leak, it’s at the head of the OPM, who should have been called before congress and asked the same questions the head of Equifax was asked about the breach itself, but there’s no evidence the head of the OPM was criminally negligent.
Congress acts as our representatives in the political process. As our representatives, they have a duty to act on our behalf by asking questions. There’s a sort of conflict-of-interest involved in their investigation of the OPM breach. In the case of the Equifax breach, Equifax senior management needs to answer questions by both those they have a fiduciary duty to represent (the company’s investors) and by the public as stakeholders in the information that was lost, represented in this case by congress. In the case of the OPM breach, congress is both a very divorced senior management with little direct oversight (OPM is an independent agency of the Federal government) and representative of the stakeholders (US citizens who had their data lost).
As far as making data breaches impossible, it’s not going to happen. What’s more important is setting up multiple layers of defense: making the data less valuable if stolen, making it harder or riskier to use stolen data, and (most relevant) making sure appropriate action is taken to minimize damage when a breach occurs.
There was nothing practically gained by Congressmen yelling at Equifax, but it’s one of the reasons you get compensated for being a CEO: because a bunch of petty tyrants can force you to testify and they yell at you.
Consumers were not choosing convenience here. As much as Equifax keeps on calling us their “customers” we are their product. They acquire information about our creditworthiness and sell it to others who want that information.
Also, the head of OPM was indeed fired as a result of the breach.
Did HFAR change his name?
Yes. I did because Scott believes that it is a bad idea for me to have the term “rationalist” in my name.
Yeah, I think that’s for the better.
I remember thinking, that those institutional Rationalist/CFAR people
are way weirder, than I thought after reading some of your comments. I have no problem, that you think you are super rational and all, but that brand is already taken.
More Babylon 5 talk.
John Schilling in a previous thread talked about how Sheridan basically appoints himself dictator-for-life and probably is not a good guy. But our Terracentric view has caused us to ignore the real monster in the series: Delenn.
She had no respect for the institutions that made the Minbari great, and brooked no dissent. We get hints of this early in the series, when she steals a body from the Warrior Minbari because she doesn’t approve of their showmanship. She lets the humans take the fall for this, exacerbating an already tense political situation, until she is finally caught, at which point she humiliates the Minbari warrior in question and pretty much tells him that she’s in charge and he can just suck it. Shockingly, that character recurs as an antagonist to her in the future.
Later, when the Grey Council did not act the way she felt they should in the Shadow War, she summarily disbanded it. This ruling council had kept order for a thousand years, to the point where intra-Minbari murder did not exist. After Delenn’s stunt, the society almost immediately fell into civil war.
Delenn, having learned nothing, and not actually seeming to consider her own responsibility for all of this, charges in again to the rescue. She sets up a surrender, and then changes the terms at the last minute, ultimately leading to her having near-unilateral power to re-make the government as she sees fit. So what does she do? She sets up a new Grey Council, but this time, we are assured, it will serve the interests of the “workers.”
We don’t see how that all turns out, but I think we’ve got enough examples from Earth history to guess.
Oh, there’s one more thing I forgot to mention. Before any of this happened, Delenn was almost single-handedly responsible for the Earth-Minbari War, which nearly annihilated humanity.
None of these experiences ever cause her to doubt herself.
What your analysis — and John’s, to a lesser extent — ignores is that this was the year of the Shadow War, a once in a millennium occurrence with the stakes literally being the fate of the galaxy (and with THREE likely dystopian outcomes — domination by the Shadows, domination by the Vorlons, and extinction of most of the younger races to deny them to the other side during the war). So the concerns which applied during the inter-war period were far less important. Civil war among the Minbari? Who the f— cares, if keeping the peace means the Shadows win?
Except that it is civil war among the Minbari that lets the Shadows win. Or would have if the story had played fair, though perhaps the forced abbreviation of the fourth season cost us too much of that plot to see clearly.
The ultimate victory in the Shadow War came mostly from the younger races making a united stand behind “A pox on both your houses; though the cost be extinction we will not be pawns in your game!”. The Minbari, especially, can convincingly do that so long as they do stand united. As it was, the Shadows and Vorlons both should have just laughed at that empty posturing and gone recruiting among the various anti-Delenn factions of the Minbari civil war (and Earth’s, and the recent Centauri dynastic conflict, etc).
Does Delenn actually care about the Shadow War? When Delenn ordered that humanity be wiped out, she already knew that the Shadow War was coming, and that humans had an important part to play in it. But she had a sad, so screw all that.
Remember, all of that is before the series proper. You’d think nearly obliterating a sentient species would have given her a little less certainty about the clear righteousness of her actions.
My recollection is that Delenn didn’t find out about humanity’s role in the Shadow War until after she voted to exterminate us.
And “she had a sad” is pretty uncharitable here. She was asked for her vote literally while she was holding her race’s great leader – and her personal mentor – dead/dying in her arms.
Witness has it right, I think. The Minbari had just gone through their version of 9/11 and Sarajevo combined, on first contact with an upstart new race, and Delenn was on the spot for the worst of it.
“We are at our best when we move together, and we are at our worst when we move together. When our leader was killed by your people, we went mad together. We stayed mad for a very long time, a madness that almost consumed your world, until finally, before it was too late, we woke up together. ”
And Delenn was front and center for that part as well, the first to look into the soul of what it meant to be human, or at least what it meant to be one particular human, and offered up the biggest “Oops!” in the history of two worlds.
Delenn + Sinclair, that’s a team I might have trusted to rule the galaxy if it were not fated otherwise on at least two levels. Delenn + Sheridan, brought out the worst in each other.
Delenn + Sinclair, that’s a team I might have trusted to rule the galaxy if it were not fated otherwise on at least two levels.
Yes, because Sinclair is not the Great Hero and Successful Kid that Sheridan was! His career is stalled when we meet him, he’s regarded with suspicion because of what happened during the Battle of the Line (unlike Sheridan, who comes away with a glowing reputation as Star-Killer and the ego-boost for Earth of being the Only Human To Defeat A Minbari Cruiser), and he’s a colony kid. He’s someone who knows self-doubt, struggle, and what it’s like to be at the mercy of those with power over you – both your enemies and your superiors. He’s someone who has learned to choose mercy the hard way, having been tempered in the fires. He was regarded as a failure; his posting wasn’t a plum job, as Babylon Five was regarded as a white elephant (and possibly cursed with it) and the mood had swung from peaceful co-operation to a much more jingoistic one on Earth, so he was sent there as “we have to keep the Minbari happy so we need to send someone, but if you screw up – as you probably will – we don’t really care and if we need to throw someone to the wolves to keep the powerful aliens happy, you’ll do because we don’t care about you and you’re not important enough to matter”.
And I loved his argument for why it was still possible for the Narn to perform their ceremony (you could tell he’d been educated by Jesuits).
Delenn and Sheridan reinforced one another, because of their similarities, which unfortunately included the training of “you don’t question the captain’s orders”. They had both been put on the path to success, both were accustomed to succeeding in what they did, and both of them had the view that they were sincerely trying to do what was right. Sinclair knew the value of doubt and could have moderated Delenn; Sheridan was primed to never let doubt get in the way of achieving the goal.
Yes, that part was quite clearly on display in “Comes the Inquisitor“. Though JMS was perhaps showing some level of self-awareness there, in that the two people in that story with maximal self-assuredness in their own self-righteousness were Satai Delenn and Jack the Ripper.
I do think Lennier may have been on to something when he noted that Delenn’s greatness was her ability to inspire other people to try to create the more perfect world that she insisted on believing in. But those other people weren’t Delenn; even Lennier couldn’t live up to that standard, and as you note, bloody civil war ensues.
I rather liked Delenn, at least in the earlier seasons, but yes – the prospect of her and Sheridan teaming up to rule the galaxy (for its own good, of course, since the galaxy couldn’t do it for itself) should have had everyone running screaming to the Shadows/Vorlons for protection because living under the Benevolent Rule of Your Wiser And Better Despots For Life who can use the combined military might of two worlds and a quasi-paramilitary force (the Rangers) to invade and overthrow your regime/planet if you fail to appreciate the wisdom and grace of their better way – yikes!
Both of them absolutely self-assured that they were doing the right thing, and no qualms about mutiny, knocking down structures in place to govern and resolve disputes, setting themselves up as the new sheriffs in town to be obeyed (or else) – Sheridan telling the minor worlds in the League that they could bow to his wishes or they’d be steamrollered over – did he not notice any vague resemblance in his methods and attitudes to President Clark? Worse, they both go through various tests to inculcate self-doubt and come right out the other side with not a scratch on their amour-propre thanks to their wills of adamant, even more convinced that they are doing the right and only thing.
I’m starting to seriously think that Delenn really is a monster and force for evil. I’m only halfway to Schilling’s Sheridan position. I think he was a decent man whose actions during the Shadow and Earth Wars were for the best overall. Where he failed was in setting up institutions that would live on after him; especially egregious since he knew he was living on borrowed time.
Oh I don’t think she was a monster. But I do think the show wasn’t able to resist the temptation of “If they can’t be good on their own, then we’ll make them be good – for their own good!”
That is, they set up Sheridan and Delenn as the Voices of Reason and Only Sane Men in their respective political/planetary establishments, and since they were fighting for the right and for the survival of the younger races, then anything they might have had to do to attain those ends was justified. And of course, being the heroes, despite some attempts at shades of gray and morally dubious areas, basically they were the Good Guys.
It was the whole problem of “We don’t torture anyone, only the Bad Guys do that and we’re the Good Guys, so when we do it it’s not torture, it’s enhanced interrogation or the ticking time bomb or whatever”. President Clark was a bad guy out for personal ambition and what he thought was right, making dicey deals with the Shadows, and acting autocratically and unilaterally and setting up behind the scenes plots where he had people assassinated but could have the appearance of keeping his hands clean (and I’m not for one minute disputing that Clark was a bad guy). Sheridan declares mutiny and takes over the space station and lets shitty crap go on like how Lyta Alexander was treated (she did a lot for The Cause but when it came to letting her have living quarters aboard Babylon Five when she had problems finding independent employment, it was all “Sorry babe, we’re now running this place as a commercial business and if you can’t pay rent, you’re out”, thus driving her back into the devil’s bargain with PsiCorps and demonstrating that the brave new world of Sheridan’s revolution wasn’t too accommodating to those who fell by the wayside. Since Lyta had suffered a lot through her contact with the Vorlons, I thought this was very shoddy, given that for fuck’s sake couldn’t Satai Delenn at least put her on the embassy pay roll and pay for her quarters or something? “She was eventually arrested aboard Babylon 5 for supporting terrorism by John Sheridan (whose contact with Vorlons gave him immunity to her Vorlon-enhanced telepathic abilities) in late 2262.” Yeah, well maybe if you hadn’t fucked her over in her hour of need, Sheridan, she wouldn’t have ended up driven to these extremes? He commits mutiny and seizes the station and starts his own freedom fighting struggle – including shooting on ships with former colleagues – that’s great. She starts fighting for her own cause, she’s a terrorist. Also please note Sheridan’s Marty Stu abilities granted as needed for the plot – he’s not a telepath, nobody can have contact with the Vorlons without adverse effects, she’s now super-powered due to Vorlon interference, but HE CAN RESIST HER. Bah, humbug!) – anyway, Sheridan acts like a little tin god at times but that’s cool because he’s the Good Guy.
But at the end, (or at least this is the impression I get), Sheridan is very much amused by any notion that EarthGov can discipline him (or even have the right to do so), and that it’s purely at his own pleasure that he returns to answer charges, and doesn’t take over power. He does give off the impression of “Well, sure you could put me on trial over charges of mutiny and seizing the space station and firing on EarthGov military ships and all that, but hey, look out the window – there’s the White Star and you know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it started blowing this city to hell if I don’t come back aboard. And it just so happens I’m married to the new head of the Minbari Ruling Council, and if you try locking me up, Minbar might kind of declare war and you wouldn’t like that. And by the way, President of Earth is too small a job for me, so you can keep it; I’m going to be President of the new Interstellar Alliance that means Earth’s ambitions to be the power in the galaxy are overturned and if Earth doesn’t behave itself it’ll pretty much be a backwater. Oh, you’re dropping all charges and letting me go and maybe giving me a medal to boot? Yeah, probably the best decision all round”.
I will grant you that the particular ways the shows her being treated, literally tossed out of her apartment, are basically lazy and contrived, but the basic idea that our heroes would treat her like crap is totally plausible.
Most of them are human, who have spent their whole lives in a society that hives telepaths off from the rest of society as much as possible. They’ve been trained all their to think about telepaths as little as possible, and would have had not the super creepy organization that runs the separate telepath society worked to corrupt and overthrow their government.
One of the best things about B5 is the way it portrays telepathy. It takes it seriously as something transformative and downright terrifying for the mundanes, postulates responses to its existence, and takes them seriously. Lyta’s story is a good example of that, problems with byron aside.
The “used and tossed aside” storyline for Lyta would have been bad-tasting but acceptable, if it were carried through consistently for everyone, but it wasn’t.
We see Garibaldi being treated as carelessly, and it’s hard to escape the thought that this is pay-back for him not being enthralled by the Cult of Sheridan; yes, Bester’s meddling with his mind is at the back of it, but at the same time, somebody needed to point out to Sheridan that a cult of personality was forming and this was not a desirable trait for the resistance if they ever hoped to make it out the other side and have him as galactic figurehead, else they’d just be replicating the same old patterns that made it necessary to remove Clark from the office he’d schemed to get.
Byron and the telepaths sub-plot never quite worked, because it was all too easy to make jokes like “In the end the mass of hairspray Byron applies every morning spontaneously combusts and the tragedy is complete” (I have never seen such a mass of glossy hair in one place at one time as when all the rogue telepaths were gathered together). It didn’t work for me because they all behaved more like sulky teenagers than people who really were suffering under the regime as it was. And the non-human worlds seem to have different attitudes to telepathy, though yeah, if they’re biased against humans, it’s probably not so easy to get asylum there whether or not you’re a telepath as well.
But the wider point about how Lyta was treated was that it sent the message “Join the rebellion and once they’ve squeezed all the use out of you that they can, you’re tossed aside – unless you’re a favourite of one of the leaders”. Really, you’d be better off sticking with the baddies (Earth’s government and the Shadows) than throwing your lot in with the good guys!
I suppose the real-world explanation was that Patricia Tallman was fighting with the producers over her salary which is why her character was replaced by Talia Winters for the second season (and why, according to Wikipedia, she didn’t appear in any of the post-show material: “Lyta was intended to appear in the Crusade episode “The Path of Sorrows” as part of a flashback, but Tallman’s salary could not be negotiated”) so maybe this was why she was written out, but the way she was written out seems, in conjunction with the disputes over money, like a rather uncomfortable way to remind the actress to “if you don’t play ball with us, you won’t work on this show”.
It’s been a long time since I watched the show, but wasn’t membership in the Interstellar Alliance an entirely voluntary affair? Also, the Alliance doesn’t actually run any of the member states; they continue to be ruled by whatever internal government was there before.
It’s basically just the same Space UN as they already had on the station, except with all member states given an equal vote instead of everyone in the League of Non-Aligned Worlds getting lumped into a single vote, and with its own military.
Now, the UN having its own military might be problematic in all kinds of ways – but Sheridan did not actually run anything inside the government of the various member states. He was basically the Secretary General of the UN, if they had a navy.
The Centauri Republic volunteered to join the Interstellar Alliance. Then Sheridan held a closed-door meeting, the Centauri ambassador explicitly not invited, wherein the rest of them decided to expel the Centauri and wage total war against them, leading ultimately to the orbital bombardment of their homeworld and a surrender under rather Versailles-esque terms.
I do not believe they volunteered for this, and I do not believe they would have been spared this if they had refused on principle to join the IA in the first place.
I had to do some Googling to refresh my memory, but from what I’m seeing in various Wikis, it’s not like they declared war on the Centauri because they tried to oppose the Alliance, or refuse membership, or something. They declared war on the Centauri because the Centauri military were attacking civilian ships without provocation. (Due to the Drakh trying to get another war going, although of course they didn’t know that.)
Also, the war declaration was over the strenuous objection of Sheridan, complete with him getting a big dramatic Bruce Boxleitner monologue about how awful the member states were for demanding another war so soon after the last one, but he did it anyway because those were the terms of the Alliance, which doesn’t seem to support the whole ‘Sheridan as dictator’ narrative.
They actually did know that, or at least very strongly suspect it. In a private conversation with, iirc Delenn and Garibaldi, Sheridan said that he didn’t believe that Mollari at least was involved in the attacks and that someone else was pulling the Centauri’s strings. He went ahead and orchestrated the war with the Centauri anyway.
And, again, he did it without giving the Centauri ambassador a hearing. No matter how evil you think someone’s actions may be, if you can’t be bothered to hear out their ambassador before starting a bloody total war, I get to call you a bloodthirsty murdering tyrant.
I feel like that may be a fair charge against the Alliance in general, but since Sheridan made basically that same argument and was overruled by the voting members, I still feel more sympathetic to him.
(I am apparently unusual around these parts in that I actually quite liked Sheridan.)
a big dramatic Bruce Boxleitner monologue about how awful the member states were for demanding another war so soon after the last one, but he did it anyway because those were the terms of the Alliance
A real Pontius Pilate moment; washing his hands of the blood but letting the war go ahead. He could have said “If you want a war, get someone else to lead it for you” and stepped down, but he didn’t of course (because if he’s in charge at least he can put some limits on it and steer the course of future history to a better place and so on and so forth).
I know I’m rather unfair to Sheridan, but JMS did write him as this Big Freakin’ Hero and even his mistakes are glorious, and he is the Destined One of Prophecy and all the rest, which put me off a bit.
But then again they needed the Centauri War to set up the Drakh for the new spin-off series Crusade, given that the Shadows had gone over the event horizon. That Crusade more or less sank without trace was ironic.
Sheridan knew the Centauri weren’t ultimately responsible for the attacks on non-aligned shipping, and therefore someone else was, and he sat on that information. He denied the Centauri ambassador the opportunity to make that case on his own. He said and did nothing to stop the League from voting for a war he knew to be unjustified, and then offered up his personal forces to support the war. When the Narn and Drazi launched an unauthorized orbital bombardment of Centauri Prime, he took no action against them in spite of their megadeaths worth of war crime vastly exceeding the alleged Centauri offenses that supposedly justified that war in the first place.
Sheridan’s every word and action, and every strategic silence and inaction, led inexorably to that outcome. Either Sheridan was an incompetent buffoon, or Sheridan preferred that outcome to the alternative, and in neither case is “look what you made me do” an adequate defense.
Reasons why the president of a dubiously legitimate new administration might want to start a short victorious war against an enemy that everybody else already hates, are left as an exercise for the reader. Fortunately, this can have no possible relevance to current events.
It’s been a long time since I watched the show, but wasn’t membership in the Interstellar Alliance an entirely voluntary affair?
My impression of that is that, post- the whole Shadow war and overthrow of Clark’s regime and shake-up of the galactic power structure, membership in this was more along the lines of “nice solar system you got here, be a pity if anything happened to it” – that is, anyone determined to go their own way would be in danger of being regarded with disfavour as “What, don’t you trust Good
Dictator for LifePresident Sheridan, Hero and Saviour of the Galaxy? What have you got to hide, you freedom-hating Shadow lover?”But then, I mistrusted Sheridan hugely by the end of the whole arc, so my impressions may not be credible 🙂
that’s definitely harsher than it was portrayed as, though I grant you I don’t think you’ll like “All the species joining up under Hero Sheridan because he’s just so damned awesome, only for them to sometimes squabble until the great patriarch reluctantly gives them their well deserved paddling” any better.
You have some interesting points about Delenn, but your analysis is also flawed in several respects. For example:
Branmer (the dead Minbari leader) had been a high-ranking leader in the Religious Caste for most of his life. As the child of a mixed-caste marriage he had the option of changing castes, and did so during the Earth-Minbari War out of a sense of reluctant duty. He had explicitly stated his desire NOT to be a symbol of war, and his wishes were specifically that his body be cremated and the ashes scattered in Minbar orbit.
Instead, the Warrior Caste used his body to wave the bloody flag, explicitly disregarding both his stated values in life, and his wishes for how his remains were to be treated.
In that context, it’s pretty clear that Neroon and company were very much in the wrong. The reason he had no recourse but to “Suck It” is that a complaint that “How dare she take her friend’s body and dispose of it in the manner he explicitly requested! We were using it to stoke up political dissent against the stated policy of a majority of our ruling executive body!” (6-3 split, Worker and Religious caste council members voting against the Warrior caste) would not go over well.
I’d also add that she doesnt’ “disband” the council. What she did is make a speech stating that if the council was so deadlocked and useless that it couldn’t act against a clear and present danger not just to an ally but to their own people, then it was no longer a legitimate authority. After years of building tension and dissatisfaction, that crisis was the tipping point that led to the dissolution of that government, but it’s hardly the case that “Everything was going just fine until Delenn came along and dissolved the peaceful, stable, healthy, and fully functional government”. There’s quite a lot of worldbuilding and foreshadowing going on establishing that under the Utopian Space Elf Crystal Spires And Toga society of the Minbari lies quite a lot of festering wounds, simmering tension, and unresolved social and political strife.
It’s been years since I watched the show and I’m going on shaky memory, so you’re correct about Delenn’s motives but I do remember thinking it was terrible implementation.
Now, maybe she and the Religious Caste went to the Warrior Caste and politely asked them to hand over the body per the deceased’s requests, but I don’t remember that.
I think the problem was that in this episode the show went for the cool “mystery – intrigue – whodunnit?’ plot and then gave us Delenn’s justifications in the end as a resolution, but not realising (or caring?) that it made no sense – so instead of trying to resolve this sensibly, the Warriors are telling the Religious get knotted (and y’know, I could understand why they’d do that; for a ‘three equal castes’ society, the Religious caste does seem to go about acting like “we are the boss of you”), then Delenn does some sneaky body-robbing and lets the suspicion fall on Earth as the patsy (not very good way to avoid re-starting the Earth-Minbar war) and only at the very end is the justification as above “he wanted this and not the big Warrior State Funeral” pulled out to keep us thinking well of Delenn (instead of “why is this kook allowed to be the Minbari Representative when she damn near kicked off another war and is fomenting division at home?”)
As I said, I mostly liked Delenn, but the show had a distinct tendency to let its favourites (the designated Heroes) pull very autocratic stunts and get away with them because They Knew Best.
The Warrior Caste was absolutely acting poorly. That doesn’t mean Delenn acted well.
If she didn’t like what they were doing with the body, she could have appealed it to the Grey Supreme Court, or whatever institution Minbari use to resolve disputes. If that didn’t come out with the verdict she would have preferred, the proper thing to do is nothing. Sometimes you don’t get your way. Delenn doesn’t seem to have such a concept; she is an authoritarian to the core, and anybody who disagrees is simply steam-rolled over.
As you said, Minbari society hah a lot of unresolved social and political strife. It hah that in large part because of Delenn. Delenn says, “We stayed mad for a very long time, a madness that almost consumed your world, until finally, before it was too late, we woke up together,” but that “we” isn’t actually true. The Minbari race did not wake up from the madness. The Grey Council never told them why they had surrendered unconditionally to a defeated Earth, tossing away all the sacrifices they had ordered the Warrior Caste to make in the first place.
That’s why the warriors were still waving the bloody shirt. And when Delenn continued to respond to any differing opinion by shutting it down entirely, she prevented any of that tension from getting released in a healthy manner. Instead, it was bottled up until it exploded into a civil war.
The great project of civilization is figuring out a way for people who want different things to accept that sometimes they don’t always get their way. If you have a vision of politics where you never lose, you are envisioning a polity that exists as your slaves. If that group decides they don’t want to be your slaves, things fall apart quickly. You have to be able to lose.
tldr; Delenn is How You Got Trump.
tldr; Delenn is How You Got Trump.
Delenn is How You Got Sheridan 🙂
Poor Sheridan, I’m very hard on him! I think he’s a good military leader, which doesn’t necessarily translate into he’s a good peace-time leader. And the set-up for Crusade, where Sheridan (for good reasons in the plot) ends up resuming a role as captain in a space battle does not help the impression of Generalissimo Sheridan, El Presidente. The main fault, though, is the kind of behaviour described here:
This means that Sheridan issues orders and acts unilaterally in ways that require blind obedience from others – “I can’t tell you how I know, I can’t tell you why I’m doing this, but you have to obey me to the letter and just believe me that there’s a good reason for it”.
People questioning this are behaving sensibly, but because we the viewers know what is going on and they don’t, they look like the bad guys obstructing the really vital things that need to be done for the safety of Earth and Sheridan looks like the hero.
If we didn’t know what was going on, we’d have to decide for ourselves whether or not to trust Sheridan, but we never have to make that decision since JMS makes it for us – we get the information that the others don’t.
Liberation movements are how you get dictators generally. Hugo Chavez, Hafez Assad, Park Chung-Hee, all the way back to the Little Corporal and beyond. It’s a recurring formula. Start with one corrupt government, doesn’t matter what kind, democracy, monarchy, another dictatorship, but almost certainly a strong kleptocratic component leading to gross economic hardship for everyone else. There will be protest movements and revolutionary cells, of course, but they won’t have the power or the organization to do anything.
There will be an army, of course, and it will be organized and powerful, and however much everyone else is suffering the army will at least be well-fed. Now add a charismatic field-grade, or maybe low-end general grade officer (not the Supreme Commander) who notices that lots of people are going hungry, the army has the power and the organization to stop this, and nobody else does. Maybe he should start talking to his fellow officers and do something about this?
Fast forward one bloody little civil war, and our heroic military officer is now a President. Maybe he even won a fair election; who else is anyone going to vote for? But he’s not a politician, he’s a military officer. He’s got a big hammer, and all his problems look like nails. He makes decisions, and he thinks they are good decisions (they probably mostly are), made in consultation with his trusted advisors, and people aren’t doing what he orders them to do. To a military officer, that’s mutiny. There’s still a war going on, more or less, and anyone who doesn’t obey orders in wartime needs to be shot. He’s got men with guns to do that. Anyone who isn’t one of his obedient subordinates, must be the enemy because there is no third category. And the peace and prosperity that are supposed to come at the end of the war, never quite do because there is always opposition and that opposition always looks like (incoming self-fulfilling prophecy) enemy action.
That, and not Evil Politicians scheming and blackmailing and murdering their way to power, is how dictators tend to come about in the real world. And after giving us the cartoon version with President Clark, I was hoping and half-believing JMS was willing to sacrifice the reputation of his favorite character to show us the real version in action. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done properly on the big or small screen.
Still waiting, alas.
people aren’t doing what he orders them to do. To a military officer, that’s mutiny.
Exactly how Sheridan comported himself after taking over Babylon Five and declaring independence, and ironic to me because he was the original mutineer, so having smashed the chain of command, what leg are you standing on, again?
I was hoping and half-believing JMS was willing to sacrifice the reputation of his favorite character to show us the real version in action.
I think he was hamstrung by having written his ending already and giving glimpses of it all along; we knew how the end was going to work out (Sheridan had twenty years left and then would go off with Lorien, etc) before we got to season five and the way post-successful rebellion Earth and the Interstellar Alliance would work out, so Sheridan had to be this glowing, heroic character of legend that we knew he would become; the flash-forwards to the future where Ivanova and others are all saints and quasi-Arthurian legend figures surviving in the myths and stories and real history is lost, jumbled, or suppressed helped set that up.
If they’d dropped the silly telepath sub-plot and worked on “The glowing heroic legend is Delenn’s work in creating and fostering and spreading the legend because she is blinded by love but also because it’s politically useful, the winners get to write history, and she never learned to re-assess her own sense of utter certitude so she has to push the story that everything they both did was for the greater good and worked out for the best, but the reality beneath that was a lot messier and darker”, it would have been better.
But that would have been another show, and really all-in-all, Babylon 5 was something new and never tried before, and we can’t carp too much that it wasn’t perfect and perfectly done, given all the bumps they hit along the way 🙂
to be fair, none of the Minbari politics in the show make much sense. the shadows are running around blowing stuff up, and the warrior cast still doesn’t want to get involved, despite the fact that fighting for the vorlons against the shadows is basically the organizing principle of minbari society.
Of course, there’s also the problem the whole basis for their society is proven to be a lie, and no seems to even notice it, much less deal with it in any way.
Yeah, Minbari social organisation seems to be sorely lacking. The Worker Caste seem to have a very raw deal, with both the Warrior and Religious Castes ordering them about and making decisions that affect them with little to no consultation from them. I was half-expecting the civil war to break out when the Workers said “To hell with the both of you”, downed tools, and used their expertise to build weapons to take on both Warriors and Religious, but that’s not how it happened.
Because Delenn is Religious Caste, we get everything filtered through that lens, and the only good Warrior Caste members are the ones who come over to her side. I can see why the Warriors would hold off on getting into a war purely on the say-so of the Religious Caste, because it is a matter of internal politics; but because the Shadows are (up to a certain point before the whole of the truth is revealed) the Bad Guys, their reluctance makes them look bad, while it isn’t unreasonable (if the Grey Council never told the whole of Minbar why they stopped the war with Earth): “you started a war, then you stopped that war without telling us why, now you want to start another war and there’s every chance you might decide to stop that as well without giving us any reasons; maybe we don’t want to do that?”
the official JMS explanation was that the minbari civil war gets short shrift because of compression required by the need to compress everything for season 4. I don’t really buy this.
I mean, if I squint right, I can see it. One of the points of the series is supposed to be that the Vorlons really are just as bad as the shadows, in their own way. The show hints* at this I can’t help but think the original plan** was to have the big shadow/vorlon showdown come towards the end of season 4 instead of the beginning. I assume that some of that extra time would have been used to show that the Vorlons were not the good guys, and one way to do that would have been through the societal collapse of the Minbari, who were always their favorite kids. But I fully admit that this would be a dramatic re-ordering of events, and given the total lack of interest JMS seems to have in exploring the notion that the vorlons were bad once they depart the stage, I have to admit that it’s probably wishful thinking. But I tell you, the version of the story where the Vorlons take a more active role, where their authoritarian ideology (and its failures) is made explicit, and where Sheridan comes to articulate a meaningful third way, is fantastic.
* hint is not really a good word for B5, which has the subtly of a sledgehammer. This is by no means always a bad thing.
** original in this case meaning the direction JMS was planning for season 4 while writing late season 3, not the imaginary original plan that he’s always sworn to have in his back pocket.
Related topic; a few less-known board-ish games.
2-6 players:
Concept: A language game in which you try to convey something using a polysynthetic language made out of pictures. Quite cool, ignore the points system.
The Captain is Dead: Coop board game in which you are in the middle of the worst Star Trek episode ever. Quite fun, hard to.play with fewer than four people.
Mysterium: Clue + Dixit. Psychics try to solve a murder using dreams. A co-op (ish) game which may lead you to despise the ghost dispensing the dreams.
Dixit: Technically a better known game, Target often has it, but to clarify the above: A game with a bunch of cards with weird artwork, one player puts a piece down with a phrase intended to convey the artwork well but not too well, everybody else puts down artwork to try to deceive the others into picking theirs, then everybody but the original player votes on which art they think was the original. The original player gets points iff at least one person gets it right and one person gets it wrong; everybody else gets points based on whether they guessed right or if they tricked somebody into picking their artwork.
7-12:
Telestrations: Telephone Pictionary. Each person draws a picture to communicate an idea, hands it down the line; the next person writes down the idea they get, and pass that down. Until everything is hopelessly mangled, then everybody shows the history of their original idea, and where it went horribly wrong.
Funemployed: A mixture of improv and Apples to Apples. Some of you may seriously hate this game, others will love it, fundamentally you have to be able to enjoy playing the fool for laughs.
Deception: Social deduction game in which everybody plays a detective, one of whom is a murderer, and one of whom is the forensic scientist, who knows who the murderer is but can only communicate this with a limited set of highly-interpretable hints.
I’ve played Mysterium and own Dixit, and I can recommend both games. Mysterium was fun and I’d like to try it again—we weren’t doing so hot most of the game, but we figured it out on our last chance! Dixit we’ve played a few games of; it’s well-received, but I find we don’t quite have a strong enough pool of references for it to go too well. I also always lose, which annoys me to no end. 🙂
Deception has a very similar “feel” to Mysterium, in spite of being radically different games. Part of it is that the ghost/forensic science play very similar roles, part of it is that the aesthetic somehow meshes well. Either way I recommend it.
My friends and I have always loved deduction/deception games like Werewolf and Resistance, so I’ll check it out, thanks.
I love Concept but I am terrible at the hardest difficulty level. I want to be good at it, and I am usually pretty good at “guess what I’m thinking” games, but it is just beyond me in a way I can’t figure out.
Everyone should try it once just for how mind-bending it is. I like to describe it as “Kanzi the bonobo, the board game.”
There’s a game on Steam called “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.” One player is on the computer, and is confronted with a “time bomb” which must be defused by solving a series of logic puzzles. All the other players have copies of the bomb defusal manual, and must interpret the puzzles the defuser describes, and look up how to solve them in the manual, and relay the answers to the defuser. This often involves multiple back-and-forth instructions on how to get the defuser to (safely) uncover the next clue.
One that is a regular hit with family and friends for me is Codenames a game with a grid of words where one person on each of two teams alternate giving out a clue and the number of tiles it applies to. The two clue-givers can see the solution of which tiles are theirs, which are the other teams, which are neither, and which one is the “auto-lose” for whichever team selects it. They have to get their team to find all their tiles first, but the bigger the number they give, the wilder their team’s guesses might get based off that one clue.
Spyfall is fun as well, where everyone except on person know what the location is. Players then take turns choosing one person and having them answer one question, then the answerer gets to pick another person to ask a question to. Players cannot ask a question of the person that just asked them one. The spy can stop the timer at any time to guess the location but loses if they are wrong. Everyone can attempt one accusation during the game, and if it is unanimous save one person, the game ends and the role cards are checked, otherwise play resumes. When the timer ends, players deliberate and try to vote on who the spy is, if they are wrong, the spy wins, otherwise everyone else wins. It is a fun game of trying to be vague in referencing the location to suss out who doesn’t know it without giving away the game to the spy. It usually ended with someone going too far with puns and tipping the spy off to the location.
My personal favorite is Avalon, by the same people that made resistance but many of the roll cards have special abilities with fun interactions, like merlin knowing who the evil people are or the assassin who can guess who merlin is at the end to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The game itself is political voting to choose teams to go on quests by a rotating “leader”, that when the vote succeeds, give the quest goers chances to secretly defect if evil. Evil wins by causing total gridlock on the quest-goer selection for five failed votes in a row or causing the group to fail three or more quests. Add in some opportunities for players to view other player’s role cards, and the political machinations turn into conspiracy theory laden he-said, she-saids.
Avalon always plays exactly this way for me: Good guys get enough quests, bad guys win some of the time by killing Merlin. I have never seen the bad guys successfully mess up the quests.
(Too many veterans of social deduction games in my crowd, and too many of the players know one another’s tells.)
Regarding social deception games like Avalon, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is good. I also quite like Coup. I don’t think it’s any better than similar games with multiple players, but unlike Avalon/Mafia/etc. it can be played with two people (it feels like a more fun version of heads up poker in that format).
If you play Coup, make sure you’re playing the rebellion version. I thought the original was pretty boring, and the extra mechanic makes the game worthwhile.
Have you tried mixing in some of the other roles like lancelot, oberron, or Mordred? I find that they tend to shake things up for a game or two after we switch them in. But I’m biased towards Oberron, because evil one all three times I got him. Also my group tends to have a certain meta-strategy that works sometimes that we call “playing the long game” (also gets thrown as an accusation a lot “they’re not good, they’re just playing the long game!”) where evil players worm in early by helping the first or second quest, then helping to fail the later ones. This mirrors our other meta-strategy of the “dream team” where once a team succeeds there is a lot of momentum to keep them on future quests, with new additions being the ones more scrutinized for failures. Evil tends to win more on quests when we get higher in number of players too.
I second Codenames as a good party game.
Since I have at least two people here who know codenames, I want feedback on the following scenario.
I was playing a game and I was the “codemaster” or whatever. We quickly fell behind by a couple points when, in an early round, I gave a clue and a #5 and they only got 2 answers before uncovering an enemy card. So after this, in future rounds, I adopted a strategy of intentionally giving more numbers than I had in mind for a particular clue, under the logic that my team “needed more guesses” to catch up, and that they could use the clues from the past rounds that they didn’t fully guess, combined with my new clues, to find the crossover and catch up.
But instead, they gave up once they exhausted the obvious answers to my clue, leaving guesses on the table. Eventually this obviously failed and the other team won.
After the game, when discussing the strategy, I was annoyed at them and they were annoyed at me. My position was “we were behind, guesses were valuable, so I intentionally gave you more and you threw them away!.” There’s was “the number is a part of the clue that has value, and by choosing a number that did not represent the actual amount of clues you identified, you made that piece of information useless, making it harder to win!”
We still argue about my brilliant/terrible (depending on who you ask) codenames strategy to this day.
So who is in the right here?
I don’t have the rulebook handy, but I thought there was a part that said if you get to the number given, but you missed some for a previous clue, you get to pick one more to try to make up the ones you missed. You should have trusted your spy to take advantage of that and only given a high number as a last resort.
ETA: Looked up the rules, my memory was correct-ish they can guess up to what you said+1, whether or not they missed something before. So if you could have caught up by getting one extra per turn, you should have given good numbers. If you didn’t think that could work, might as well give them the chance to guess, though it’s hardly in the spirit of the game.
ETA2: Apparently you’re allowed to say “unlimited” so that would have been better than high numbers.
Charles, yes, that’s correct.
And I did consider that, but we were sufficiently behind that I was in “last resort” mode and figured they would need more than one “extra” guess.
So who is in the right here?
Nobody, really. You were trying (and failing) to communicate a different piece of useful information than they expected, which is well within the spirit of Codenames.
I seem to recall a rule where you could state “0” as your number, at which point your team could keep guessing until they missed, which would probably have worked better (although it’s an obscure, and maybe optional, rule).
Is that after accounting for the extra guesses they get? Per the rules, the guessers can guess one more than the number given by the codemaster. I’d say that its a mix of failures. They were in the wrong on a few turns after leaving so many on the table by not guessing to try and connect with those initial five, but you are wrong after that for not readjusting your strategy on the fly to their tactics.
Plus, you could always go with an absurdly high number on the last turn you think you’ll have to tell them to swing for the fences rather than obscuring your hint information on other turns.
I strongly considered doing this, but at that point it was clear to me that they weren’t getting my point, so I went with the exact number they would need to clear the board and win the game. Which only failed because, with only one left, they accidentally revealed the last enemy spy and won it for the enemy.
I highly recommend Hanabi if you enjoy this sort of “how do I convey this information within the scope of the rules”. It’s a ton of fun with the right group but can be frustrating with wide gaps in players’ logicomancy.
Giving a higher number than the actual number for the clue is a totally reasonable part of the game’s strategy. (I actually thought it was mentioned in the rulebook, although I don’t have it handy to check.)
You have to play it by ear. If I had just given a clue with 5 matches, and they left some of them on the board, but their discussion was going in the right direction, then I might pick the hardest of my remaining words, give a clue very tightly tied to that word, and then add guesses equal to the number of words from my previous clue they had been considering. For example: if I said “Place, 5”, and they guessed London and Japan before running into the enemy’s America, but Mexico, China, and Buffalo were the three remaining words that they had been considering, then on my next turn I might say “Arachnid, 4”, hoping for them to guess Spider, Mexico, China, and Buffalo. If they got stuck on Buffalo as an animal and their discussion had not mentioned Buffalo as a place, I might say “Arachnid, 3” instead.
Yeah, this is basically exactly what I did, except they got to Spider, and then quit, because there were no Arachnid words remaining.
I’m on your side, then. It’s reasonable for them not to have figured out what was going on at the time, but it was a good play on your part.
Very different mindset from how I’ve played the game: if I say there are X that match, there are X that match, not X-???. If they guess wrong on round N, that might mean I try to pick words that match more in round N+1 to catch up, but I’ll still accurately say how many words match; that way they can use the extra 1/round to catch up by round N+2 or N+3 without second-guessing “wait, did he mean there were really four that matched [N+1 word], or was it only two and he’s trying to catch us up, or really six and he got burned by our missing some the last time?”.
On the other hand, I only played it on two occasions; not enough time for a metagame to coalesce, really. (Bridge comes to mind; “two clubs” means different things under different conventions)
The entire game revolves around interpreting the spymaster’s ambiguous clues. Uncertainty about which numbers apply to which clues is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
I have seen this strategy succeed in practice, and I can’t think of a time when it’s backfired.
My ultimate team captain runs board game nights at his place every month. I don’t go often, but the last time I went, there was one simple game that I found really fun, which would work for 4+ people, called Snake Oil. There were 2 decks of cards: one with types of customers (e.g. beach hobo, cheerleader, rapper, etc.) and the other with nouns. Each round, one person is the judge and picks a random customer card. Everyone else has 10 noun cards in their hand, and they get to choose 2 of those to put together to invent a new product, and they have some amount of time to give a pitch to the customer for why they need their product. Whoever the judge chooses as the best pitch wins that round. For example, someone tried to sell a Pizza Slide – a slide with pizzas at the bottom – to a beach bum, or a Glitter Toilet to a cheerleader.
Very simple game but a lot of fun and a good way to provide introverted people with a good excuse to let loose at a party. And it’s a game that’d be pretty easy to create oneself, just by making their own cards – or some other card-less method for distributing words. Also easy to modify. I’m tempted to try playing this with some friends using a Cards Against Humanity deck.
(As an aside, some friends and I once tried to play pictionary with a Cards Against Humanity deck. It didn’t work very well. I had the card “A robust mongoloid” and had a heck of a time trying to express the Greek letter rho, a statue bust, and the country of Mongolia by pictures and then get people to string them together. I failed).
If you can get over the “your hand must stay in order” hurdle, Bohnanza is another good gateway game.
So, because it occurs to me these things might be useful to some of you, the introvert’s low-effort guide to being popular (as an adult):
First, read Geek Social Fallacies. Those are important. Particularly the part about mixing friend groups.
Pick a group. Given the audience here, pick a weird group. Normal people are boring. Board games and swing dancing tend to have a good balance of introverts and extroverts – you want a few extroverts, if for no other reason than that they usually like to keep tabs on the social group. Make friends with a few. If you fancy, you can think of them as your spy network. (How do you make friends? Walk up to somebody you want as a friend and tell them you want to be friends. Yes, that works.)
Planners are popular people, and small gatherings are way more efficient, in terms of both time and social energy, than one-on-one communication, in terms of gathering a social group. Start attending somebody else’s stuff, accumulate a small group of friends and acquaintances, then start planning yourself – work with other planners to avoid conflicts, and they’ll be happy to have somebody else helping out. Preferably stuff that is different from what you or other people normally do; escape rooms, tea parties at a local tea place, bowling, putt putt – whatever – but for some groups, staying in and playing board games or one-shot D&D works too. Keep the group less than ten people. Six is a good size for most activities. Once you have a few people attending smaller gatherings, you can move on to larger; that is its own topic, however.
Basically, it comes down to this: People who plan stuff to do are in way shorter supply, in any given group, than people who want to do stuff. Somebody mentioned in one of the previous threads a D&D group that fell apart, and I think someone else suggested the host was really the only friend everyone had. Not necessarily; nobody else is a planner, so nothing got planned.
This seems like good advice for ‘geeks’. Do you have any recommendations for ‘nerds’?
[A geek is an unusual person with normal social desires, a nerd is someone who has discovered something more interesting than social stuff.]
I am uncertain what you are looking for; if you desire popularity, this will work. If you don’t, then I am not sure advice on popularity is useful?
I want to be popular with a few people, say five, but not a group of five people.
Just have five friends who may or may not know each other, who I can commiserate and celebrate with when something noteworthy happens.
But I don’t want to have to do some mad juggling act of all the social dynamics of five people. Just have five relationships with five cool people. And not have to do anything in particular to maintain those relationships.
Relationships generally take maintenance; your best bet is to find five people who also don’t like putting maintenance work into relationships, and ignore each other most of the time.
But to a certain extent, what you are asking sounds kind of like “I want a dog, but I don’t want to have to feed or walk it” – that is, it doesn’t sound like you want five friends, it sounds like you want the idea of having five friends.
Yeah, maybe. I feel like I’ve been abandoned by friends quite a few times – it’s very sad. I guess it might be a kind of effort-relationship-maintainance mismatch thing.
Where can I find people who are like me?
How can you tell if there is something seriously socially wrong with you? Is that the kind of thing you can go to the doctor about?
@Mark
I think I’m a bit like you there. My recommendation is to have activity-buddies more than friends. Find somebody who goes to the gym regularly and lift weights with them once or twice a week. Find another person who runs and run with them. Go to a trivia thing or a pickup game with other people. They won’t expect/want a lot of interaction outside of the activity you do with them, but they’ll be available to talk to.
You can go to a therapist, they might be able to help with that sort of thing.
Effort mismatch is a probable cause; also, most people are incredibly insecure and assume you don’t like them if you don’t make that effort.
Activity partners is a good suggestion.
You might also look at the reasons for your interactions, or lack thereof; if you just don’t enjoy being around other people most of the time, that is a different situation than if you, like me, just have trouble remembering that it has been three months since I have talked to X person.
I have a fairly low amount of social mana, and frequent interactions make me feel like I am mentally unraveling. (The closest analogue I can think of is going without sleep for a few days). So my recommendations are kind of built around that – by having less frequent interactions with more people, I get more efficient use out of my limited people-time.
So I guess the start of a strategy is figuring out what you need to strategize for.
As for people like you – well, I see something of an issue there, in that you don’t seem like you would want to be in a group, so a group would be a bad place to look for you. A bit of a conundrum; I suspect you might need a matchmaker of sorts, but the specifics would depend on the social resources you have available.
The US Supreme Court has nine justices. Three are Jewish (Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer); five are Catholic (Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor); one was raised Catholic but may now be an Episcopalian (Gorsuch).
I understand the Jewish over-representation. But why so many Catholics? Catholicism is popularly associated with many things, but elite work of the mind isn’t one of them.
Are you trying to make Deiseach literally explode, or something?
TheAncientGeek, thank you for your concern for the state of my continued bodily integrity 🙂
johan_larson, a previous link post of Scott’s explained it all. It’s all the fault of the Jesuits and their evil plotting for world domination (naturally).
Good to see the Secret Global Domination Plan is proceeding successfully! 😉
Shhh! We don’t want them on to us! Or so advises my Jesuit confessor.
No, no, Nick, it’s okay! This is the Internet, nobody will ever see it, pick it up, and broadcast it to all and sundry! 😀
Because Catholics are awesome, that’s why.
Mostly because Catholic social, and political thinkers have been the intellectual core of the anti abortion movement; and appointing “pro life” judges has been a major conservative political priority ever since roe v. wade.
Given the shift in the center of gravity of American protestantism from WASPy northern Methodists and Episcopalians, to southern evangelicals; I suspect that non Hispanic Catholics, as a highly urban northern population, have above average educational achievement compared to other Christian groups.
What’ average achievement got to do with anything? The average 13th century catholic was an illiterate peasant, but Aquinas was still Aquinas.
This has intuitive appeal. But does it match Sotomayor? What is the actual record for Republican / conservative appointees since Roe v. Wade?
Catholicism isn’t popularly associated with “elite work of the mind”, but that’s because it’s huge and theologians and canon lawyers are a small subset. But it has a very deeply rooted legal and philosophical tradition–much more so than any Protestant group (because it’s older and larger, among other things).
The Catholic theological tradition has a lot of similarities with legal scholarship: multiple authorities, most of whom were wrong about at least some things, and very few of whom are self-evidently applicable to the question at hand, spread over a lot of times and places. (Just for an example–St Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, almost certainly the most important systematizer of theology, argued strenuously against the Immaculate Conception which was stated as official doctrine 600 years later.) And Jesuits in particular are famous for “casuistry”–the application of general principles to specific cases–but it’s a key piece of the Catholic toolbox generally.
So the intellectual training of Catholics and Jews aligns well to the kind of scholarship needed for lawyers–how do you make sense of the disparate authorities, and apply them to the specific case at hand?
There is also a political reason: Catholics are perceived on the Right as less likely to “evolve” toward whatever is currently fashionable than others. While this isn’t true all the time (see Kennedy, Anthony) it is probably an accurate perceptions.
There seems to have been some comment back at the start of September over a nominee to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (I don’t know if the woman in question has been appointed or not). Background – she’s a Catholic mother of seven who is a law professor at Notre Dame and has written on Catholic Judges and Capital Cases. She may be anti-death penalty but that doesn’t mean she’s one of the good Catholics, like Justice Sotomayor:
‘Cos you know, she might be sorta anti-abortion in her personal views and plainly can’t keep that out of her legal decisions. Unlike all the pro-choice judges who are perfectly capable of not letting their decisions about abortion law cases be affected by their personal views and beliefs that abortion is a woman’s right. I’m using abortion as an example because that seems to be what Senator Feinstein is really worried about:
Yes, I’m snarking, because by her views in the linked paper, she’s not one of the ‘hanging and flogging’ crowd, but that’s just not good enough for Senators Feinstein and Durbin. Imagine if a senator had asked Judge Kagan about her Jewishness and was she an “orthodox” Jew (or one of the nice, liberal Reform kind instead EDIT: seemingly she was raised in an Orthodox tradition but now identifies with Conservative Judaism)?
I mean, if recusing yourself because you don’t think you can give an impartial judgement is not good enough, what do they want? “No I’ll never recuse myself, I’ll make a judgement based on what I personally think the law should mean”? Or is that only okay for judges helping the moral arc of the universe to bend towards the right side of history via emanations of penumbras?
What you’ve said re the ridiculous Senate proceedings is right, Deiseach, but I have to point out that that abstract is misleading; the Catholic Church does not oppose the death penalty in the way it opposes, say, abortion or euthanasia, and Catholics are free to disagree and believe that capital punishment is licit. See the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, later bishop of an obscure province:
Well, I am glad to see that Senators Durbin and Cruz are in accord: you don’t like abortion, you don’t like the death penalty, what good as a judge are you gonna be if you don’t like killin’?
I mean, it’s not like there’s been any work done by the Church on a consistent approach to these matters, like the Seamless Garment or nothing. The temerity of a judge having principles by which they approach how they live in a consistent manner, including their philosophy of their work! Thank goodness for all the judges on the progressive side who said, with tears in their eyes and a crack in their voices, “I really really believe in this issue but I’m so sorry, the law won’t let me decide in favour of you getting an abortion/same-sex married/voting while being black. I personally hold these as my principles, but the stern voice of duty holds me back from filtering my judicial decisions through the lens of personal ethics”.
Such a pity nobody can get gay married in the USA because the Supreme Court judges all agreed to set aside their ideological positions and only rule on the law as the law! Oh, wait…
I suppose I’m mostly annoyed over this because of the whole tussling over the appointment of judges in America due to “we need to get one of Our Guys on the bench because they have the Right Beliefs and they’ll progress our cause”. The Democrats do this every bit as much as the Republicans, so it’s a bit disingenuous of Senator Feinstein to be all “Judge with strong personal beliefs? That they don’t compartmentalise from their everyday life? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!” She’s made it pretty clear that she’d love a judge who had elsewhere written or stated in a speech that “I am really strongly convinced that abortion is indeed a right, and I’m going to push hard in my judgements to further the cause of reproductive justice”, so it’s not ideology qua ideology (or even religious belief) she objects to, it’s “your beliefs are the wrong kind because they don’t chime with what I believe is right, true and proper”.
Like, I’d respect Feinstein’s position if it were “I don’t think judges of any stripe – liberal or conservative – should make decisions outside of strict interpretation of the law and law alone”, but it’s not: it’s “you’re not on my side so I’m afraid you’ll make decisions our side won’t like, and never mind what the law will or won’t support when it comes to that”.
It’s funny you bring this up, Deiseach, because I had the same inkling reading this New Yorker article this morning (don’t ask me how I arrived at a seven year old article). Sorry, enormous quote coming:
Oh, and lest my feelings on that long quote be mistaken, let me say I have literally no idea what “relying on reason, by respecting all the words the framers wrote, by facing facts, and by seeking to understand their meaning for living people” means, or what “want[ing] the application of the Constitution to change with the times” entails, or what “understand[ing] the values and purposes underlying the Constitution and the laws” means. As far as I can tell, these are about one million times more subjective than relying strictly on the text of the document, read according to the meanings which the words held at the writing of said document. The New Yorker will tell me that’s a very convenient philosophy for someone whose worldview is conservative, but as far as I can tell, that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.
I don’t know what could be more liberal than an originalist reading of the 9th and 10th amendments.
TBF, prior to 2016, Senator Feinstein was Capitol Hill’s Most Likely To Be An Agent of Satan, followed closely by Lamar Smith.
That abstract sounds an awful lot like a better-written version of some of the anti-Catholic pamphlets from the Twenties that I’ve come across.
The explanation I prefer for the dearth of Protestants on the High Court is that judges need a proper understanding of guilt.
When will we get our first antinomian justice?
We’d need to know where in the pipeline the disproportion shows up. What is the Catholic proportion of
1) lawyers
2) prosecutors
3) judges
4) graduates of the big four law schools
5) prosecutors from the big four law schools
6) judges from the big four law schools
It seems the Supreme Court used to be majority Protestant (the Episcopalians, who are a tiny denomination but over-represented historically in positions of status, power and influence) with a lone Catholic here or there, until Antonin Scalia’s appointment in 1986 which seems to have been the start of a flurry of Catholic nominees, resulting in the situation today.
I wonder if during the days of the Moral Majority etc., Catholics were seen as compromise choices? They ticked off some of the boxes on the Republican list and some on the Democrat list, so if nobody was willing to give in on appointing A over B, well how about C?
Re: the queries in the comment above, I have no idea what the big four law schools are, but according to Wikipedia:
John Roberts College: Harvard Law school: Harvard
Anthony Kennedy College: Stanford Law school: Harvard
Clarence Thomas College: Holy Cross Law school: Harvard
Ruth Bader Ginsburg College: Cornell Law school: Columbia
Stephen Breyer College: Stanford Law school: Harvard
Samuel Alito College: Princeton Law school: Yale
Sonia Sotomayor College: Princeton Law school: Yale
Elena Kagan College: Princeton Law school: Harvard
Neil Gorsuch College: Columbia Law school: Harvard
Huh? Justice Thomas’s law school was Yale, not Harvard. I recall this because he really hates Yale now. He thinks they admitted him on race and not merit.
Aren’t Episcopalians pretty much the closest you can get to being Catholic without actually being Catholic?
They’re basically the American branch of High Church Anglicanism, so yes. I was surprised to find there’s only a million and a half of them; it’s been one of the larger churches in most of the places I’ve lived.
Not after Episcopalianism’s liberalization, at least as far as Catholics are concerned. Those who don’t care about doctrine may find the church architecture fairly similar, though.
No.
Source: am Episcopalian.
Depends on what aspect of Catholicism you want. Church services focused around communion [1]? We got that. Smells and bells and classic hymns? Not universal but easily found. Pomp, circumstance, cathedrals, rituals for days? Ditto. Properly recited creeds? Sure!
What do we actually believe? Fucked if I know. Seriously, I was raised Episcopal and all I know of what we are supposed to believe is “Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.” I really couldn’t say what church doctrine is on deep theological issues, or if we have any. I think far fewer episcopals care.
The one doctrinal difference that is important to me: Catholic mass is a closed sacrament for members of the church in good standing (don’t ask me the details.) Episcopal churches, by in large, openly and explicitly offer the blood and body to whomsoever wants it. Since communion is, to me, the heart of the ritual, I find episcopal service much more welcoming (though it’s been a long, long time since I saw a catholic mass.)
(I am told the reason Catholics restrict communion is that the sacrament is sacred, powerful, and could do theological damage to those who aren’t properly prepared for it. I am not sure why, see above, Episcopals disagree; if I had to guess, I would say that we decided Christianity is about spreading the good news and the salvation.)
[1] I was, like, 22, before I realized that Communion wasn’t the defining aspect of a church service for some Christian denominations.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11,
Much can turn on the meaning of the word “unworthily,” of course; if the Episcopalians have some theological explanation for all people being worthy, then power to them.
Regarding the Catholic practice, a nondenominational Protestant friend once made the argument to me that, since the Eucharist is a source of grace, why shouldn’t that grace be available to everyone? Well, by Paul’s admission, it shouldn’t be available to everyone, which he agreed with, but he disagreed that anyone who believes himself worthy should be denied. Yet for Catholics there are further restrictions in the case of obstinate, manifest grave sin: that is, someone who persists in their sin despite warnings, and whose act is objectively sinful (there are some acts, obvious ones being murder, rape, etc., which are always wrong, even if someone, say, has no culpability for them whatsoever), and whose sin is grave in matter (some sins are more serious than others). I think the justification for this more or less speaks for itself: being “manifest,” i.e. being objectively sinful rather than something that simply happened in their minds or something, it is therefore clear to everyone involved that the person is sinning (again, even if they have no culpability whatsoever; we are not judging the state of their souls, just the sinfulness of the acts themselves), so it is imperative that the priest protect the person from harming themselves further the way Paul suggests they would.
50 years ago, yes. But today I pattern match Episcopalians to “mainstream liberalism + Nice Jesus.”
I think this is also the cause of their dramatic decline in membership. When you can’t get any better moral teaching or standards out of church than you would from watching Rachel Maddow, why bother getting up on Sunday morning?
This is a heavily contested topic; Catholicism saw a dramatic demographic change in the 70s which is variously attributed to the liturgical and catechetical confusion following Vatican II, to rebellion from Humanae Vitae and sexual ethics in general, to some effect from outside culture, to the increasing cultural acceptance of Catholicism destroying its distinctiveness—and in America we’d be in straits just as bad as Episcopalianism if not for Hispanic immigration. I’d say that, to put it neutrally, the failure was of previous generations of Catholics to impart to newer generations what the faith was and why it was important, but as to whether to blame Vatican II, or the failure to really respond to the sexual revolution, or what, I don’t really know.
Sounds like the consensus is roughly “yeah, they used to be” – which coincides with the period Deiseach said they ran SCOTUS. And ~roughly when Episcopalians became more distinct, SCOTUS started to have more Catholics.
Wouldn’t this support the notion that there’s something Catholicism includes that leads to over-representation in the judiciary? As opposed to them being a compromise group.
Side question: Episcopalians are no longer as close to Catholics as they used to be – is it so much so that some other Protestant sect would be the closest now? I feel like some responders interpreted my post as “aren’t Episcopalians basically Catholic?” I was, admittedly ineffectively, more getting at “maybe Episcopalians got the job because something both sects have is good at it, but Popery had too much baggage for Catholics to join them”
I suspect, though I haven’t really looked into this, that Catholics have more in common these days with Lutherans. Rather incredibly, we even agreed on a joint declaration on justification, which was one of the primary stumbling blocks to Catholic-Lutheran unity (although there are many). (A lot of Methodists signed too!) And of course, there are the Orthodox, though they aren’t Protestants.
Thanks!
D’oh, of course. I’ll have to go turn in a Crusader Kings card for forgetting about them.
Aren’t Episcopalians pretty much the closest you can get to being Catholic without actually being Catholic?
Church services focused around communion
Oh, these are vexed historical questions! Episcopalianism is a branch of Anglicanism, and depending on the particular era of history, either or both was more Protestant than at other times. The official name before today’s name change of The Episcopal Church was The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Due to the Anglophilic tendency from its heritage, you had tussles between the High Church party and the more Reformed tendency over whether Episcopalianism/Anglicanism was Catholic or not (please note, not Roman Catholic; Branch Theory was developed to uphold the claim that the Roman Catholics were a Catholic Church but not the Catholic Church and there could be other Catholic Churches).
Episcopalianism has always been small and has been haemorrhaging numbers over the past forty years or so, but since it was the Established Church pre-Revolution and kept a fuckton of property, money, and influence as the church of the leaders in society (George Washington was raised Anglican and buried in the Episcopal Church) – see the National Cathedral, which is an Episcopalian church.
It gets confusing, but pretty much: see Ritualism and Tractarianism.
As for Communion, again, vexed question. Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion? Depending on your theology which it is, and prior to the late 19th/early 20th century, it would have been a morning service once a month specifically for the celebration of Holy Communion, not a weekly service.
Really it was post-Vatican II changes in Catholicism and the upheavals within Anglicanism that led to weekly services of Communion as the main service modelled loosely on the Mass, but naturally some of the High Church/Anglo-Catholic types in both Britain and America had been doing this in their own way for years 🙂
The Anglican/Episcopal Church wasn’t established in all of the colonies. In Connecticut and Massachusetts the very low church Congregationalists were state-sponsored, even after the revolution (since the First Amendment didn’t apply to the states before the 14th Amendment). A few centuries of schisms and mergers later, the largest descendants of these churches are the painfully liberal United Church of Christ and the even more painfully liberal Unitarian Universalists, who don’t even consider themselves “Christian” anymore.
BBA, you are of course correct; the religious history of America is complicated by the fact that the most famous group of settlers, the Plymouth Pilgrims, were Dissenters and that America was seen as a place to escape whatever form of state church control you had at home (so this is why Maryland was heavily Catholic in spite of being settled under an Anglican king) and the tendency from the start to fission off into their own little sects and sub-sects. It would have been more correct to say that Episcopalianism as a branch of Anglicanism was the established church de jure but not de facto, but I do think it is largely correct to say that it was always socially and sometimes temporally (thanks to land grants from various monarchs and having rich parishioners) powerful, disproportionate to the number of members.
Catholics restrict the Eucharist much more tightly than Anglicans/Episcopalians, because they think of it differently–they think it’s much more powerful.
To use a very non-religious analogy: Episcopalians and most Protestant think of the partaking of Communion as similar to a puff off a joint; you could reasonably offer it to an acquaintance, and it’s very unlikely to do any significant harm (or good). Catholics and the Orthodox think of it as more like a really high dose of acid; no one who knows what they are doing would give it to someone who isn’t well-prepared.
There is no big four, there’s a big three: Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. And Stanford is iffy.
Law as a profession is something immigrant groups in the second generation have traditionally gone into. The small firm and solo practitioner model means that lawyers can bypass discrimination that existed or exists in a lot of other fields.
The Italian and Jewish judges (Scalia, Alito, Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer) are decedents of the Ellis Island generation, and Sotomayor is a product of the Great Migration from Puerto Rico to NYC which peaked in the 1950s.
Although Roberts, Thomas and Kennedy are also Catholic, I would bracket them separately from the above judges. Thomas in particular is sui generis. HW Bush needed a black conservative plausible supreme court justice. There weren’t that many to choose from.
Something weird I just noticed is that The West Wing has the same imbalance: all of the first season regulars are Jewish or Catholic except Sam and Charlie (who don’t seem to have a specified religion).
Apparently Sorkin made Bartlet Catholic at Martin Sheen’s request, so of course his wife Abbey is Catholic. Toby and Josh are Jewish. But what surprised me is that Leo and C.J. are Catholic. They are both from the Midwest, which I’ve always thought of as generally very Protestant (outside of Chicago — Leo’s hometown, so I guess that explains him?). Particularly, C.J. is from Dayton — are there a lot of Catholics there? (Martin Sheen’s hometown, apparently, so that’s one! Wow the internet is good at collecting trivia.)
On the one hand, Sorkin isn’t careful with continuity, so its possible he made them Catholic because it was handy for one scene and the internet has never forgotten (Idk what that scene is — in fact I never remember C.J. or Leo’s religion being mentioned in the show, but then not sure I would). But I wonder if Sorkin chose unusual spread spread intentionally, or if unintentional whether he realized it.
Quoting from old memories, so take this with a grain of salt. I remember hearing an interview with a member of the cast of the Wonder Years, and at one point the subject of the episode that took place during the Apollo 13 mission came up. During that episode the mom stops in at a church and lights a candle. And the actress who played her objected, pointing out that for that time and part of the country and social class, there was no way her character should be a Catholic.
To which the powers that be replied, “You’re right, but don’t worry about it. The candles look great on camera.”
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that we shouldn’t read too much into what people do on TV.
For a long time Catholics were a prominent Democratic caucus. Part of the reason many have split for the Republican party in more recent decades is social conservatism (abortion being probably the primary issue here). It’s still a deep divide, though; you have a lot of Catholics, especially in Blue areas, taking positions like that they believe abortion is wrong but a woman has a right to choose.
Well, looking up facts on Dayton, Catholics seem to be the single largest Christian denomination at 15% – seems to be only 48% religious, if this is to be believed, but hard to know how that is derived: church memberships, people in the census ticking off religious or not, or what.
So going by this, if you’re from Dayton and you’re religious, best chance is that you will be Catholic.
Dayton has the University of Dayton, which is run by sisters, I think maybe Marians? It also operates charities of some kind in the city, because a friend of mine went to work there after graduating; I don’t think it was Catholic Charities, but I don’t remember what it was.
Thanks to both of you (Nick and Deiseach)! This was illuminating, and now I’ve got another website to check demographic factoids when Wikipedia falls down on the job 🙂
We can always blame the Jesuits: packing the Supreme Court, the West Wing, what next? 🙂
I have a low pain tolerance, and I’d like to have a higher pain tolerance. Preferably without, you know, suffering lots of pain in order to do it, but it’s getting in the way of things I want to do, like give blood. Any suggestions? (I ask here because SSC tends to have dozens of experts on all sorts of bizarre fields, even ones as strange as this.)
Thanks.
Lift weights to failure.
You can start small and work progressively up. This one activity will totally reset your attitude towards “difficulty”, and not just in physical areas.
That is quite an interesting idea. I feel similarly about extended periods of water-only fasting. It sort of lowers your hedonic threshold or something.
I am also curious whether others have other ideas about achieving similar effects. Cold water baths come to mind.
How extended are we talking?
Personally I’ve gone as long as 9 days, though that’s actually not that long by the standards of some. Done 5 days several times and 1-2 days countless times. The effect gets more profound in various ways the longer you go (that is, not eating for 24 hrs on five separate occasions is in no way equivalent to not eating for 5 days, though it may be calorically), but even 24 hours has some effect, I think.
@onyomi
Cool, might give this a try.
@Orpheus, if you haven’t done it before, I have a lot of thoughts and experiences I can share in more detail at some point if you’re interested, but the number one recommendations are: drink lots of water, don’t try to be too active (it can actually be tempting because it can make you feel more energetic but results are better if you rest as much as possible), get up slowly from lying down (you’re likely to experience orthostatic hypotension after the first day or two), and begin eating again gradually, ideally with something light and high in water, like fresh fruit.
All that being for fasts of more than 36 hours or so. If you’re just doing say, 24 hours, it’s more like “intermittent fasting” and you can pretty much do whatever you’d normally do (if anything you may find you have more energy than usual sometimes).
Of course, it is absolutely contraindicated in cases of anorexia, malnutrition, and type 1 diabetes (I’m assuming you don’t have any of those, but just in case).
@onyomi I will keep that in mind, thanks!
Hmm. Thanks for the recommendation. Any particular recommendations for sites explaining how to learn to do that by myself? I hear there’s some danger of hurting yourself if you do it wrong, and I’d prefer something I can do at home to some to something where I’d need to go to a gym to do it first.
Two suggestions: go to failure on a machine (or with body weight exercises), not using free weights, at least not without experience and a spotter. You’re in much bigger trouble if your muscles give out with a heavy bar sitting on your shoulders or above your chest than sitting on a leg press machine or doing pushups.
Second, use slow movements, especially on the negative. This will not only increase the intensity of working with lower weights (and using lower weights itself reduces the chances of injury), it eliminates momentum, which is a common cause of joint injury.
You could get a half cage squat rack with spotter bars for not too wildly much money. I’ve got a Bodymax CF415, which splits into two sections that you can store in the corner of a room, so it doesn’t even take up that much space. That has adjustable height spotter bars so that it’s basically impossible to get yourself trapped under a heavy bar unless you’re really going out of your way to be an idiot.
[edited to add: a lot of people on the internet recommend either Starting Strength or Strong Lifts 5×5 as good sites to teach you proper technique. I try to follow the latter programme and he isn’t really into the whole lift-to-failure ethos for the purposes of building strength – he considers adding a bit of weight each time to be far more important – but perhaps lifting to failure is more important if it’s not strength but pain resistance that you’re specifically trying to increase]
I used both Starting Strength and Strong Lifts 5×5 as guides when I started lifting about 8 years ago. I think they were helpful, though obviously I don’t have a parallel world to check against where I started lifting using some other program as guides or just looking at YouTube videos (of which there are a heck of a lot more today than there were back then). At the least, I haven’t ever hurt myself lifting, and I’ve had good success building both mass and strength in response to the lifting.
I think the good thing about those is that they offer simple easy-to-follow programs of a handful of lifts that cover a huge portion of your muscles.
Is there any reason why, for the stated purpose, weight lifting is better than just doing pushups or situps, which require no equipment and not much instruction?
After a certain point, doing more reps at a given weight (including bodyweight stuff) is basically just doing cardio. Doing cardio to failure is certainly unpleasant, but it’s a different type of unpleasant than lifting heavy, and I don’t think it scales in the same way.
Situps in particular are also a lot harder on your back than most of the weighted alternatives. Pushups can give you RSI problems in your elbows too, but that can be mitigated with correct form.
Just as a sort of… anti-testimonial data point:
A few years ago I stopped my usual routine of mostly machines and body weight exercises+a few free weight exercises to try strong lifts 5×5 and starting strength almost exclusively for a year or two… and got weaker.
Perhaps it was due to a previous back injury from deadlifting, but I spent so much time and effort trying to avoid injuring myself with the squats and deadlifts by maintaining perfect form, etc. that the actual intensity of the exercises went way down. I just won’t dare go to failure or even close to failure on something like a heavyish squat or deadlift. The result was my muscles were ultimately not working as hard as I could safely, comfortably work them on the machines.
Also, some of my smaller muscle groups got weaker: people claim a good squat, deadlift, overhead press, or bench press will still work your abs… yeah, maybe a little, but not to the extent actually doing situps will.
@lvlln
No offense meant as it is certainly possible it was the best choice for you or you did the program better than I did, but one thing to take into account: if you had little previous weightlifting experience, any program of resistance training you had started would have resulted in significant gains because that’s what happens when you first start weight lifting, be it with machines or free weights.
Do you like spicy food? Do you think you could grow to like spicy food?
I don’t like spicy food, but that’s an interesting idea for an experiment. Thanks.
Raise your blood pressure. Holding your breath may work for that.
http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/577601/Needles-frightened-hold-breath-study-Spain
That looks like magic, but it might work. A lot of strange body-magic turns out to work. Thanks!
I’ll echo Win’s exercise suggestion but recommend body-weight exercises, at least to start, to minimize chance of injury. Get to the point where basic push-ups, pull-ups, squats, etc… start feeling trivial then start adding weight.
Cold showers also help.
Hmm. If you think it’ll work… thanks.
I started taking cold showers this summer as a way to cool my body after I decided to take on an arbitrary challenge of not installing my window AC unit at all and relying purely on a fan (so far, so good!). From my experience, I think they might indeed be useful for increasing pain tolerance.
I prefer my showers stinging hot, and I found cold showers quite painful at first. I’d usually stand it for about a minute at most, feeling pretty miserable the whole time. I began to practice mindful meditation during these sessions, and I found that this helped me tolerate the pain better, and that tolerance became better as I practiced meditation more. Paradoxically, I could feel the shocking coldness of the water more viscerally and more palpably than ever before, but I felt the accompanying pain and unpleasantness much less than before. It felt to me more like I was noticing the cold and experiencing it for what it was, instead of causing that cold to make me feel pain. I wonder how much the rational knowledge that I could step out of the shower at any moment and thus the shocking cold presented no actual danger to me played a part in making the more palpable sense of cold translate to a less palpable one of pain.
So my pet theory is that cold showers can help pain tolerance to the extent that it’s a way of practicing mindful meditation under conditions that normally cause pain. I think mindful meditation in general and also under similar conditions might be worth a shot for raising pain tolerance.
I should also note that this didn’t suddenly make cold showers completely pain-free or pleasant for me. Well, I do enjoy it occasionally, but on cold days particularly, the additional cold is just too much and I do need to get out of the shower after like a minute. But I also think that my ability to handle those are marginally better when meditating and due to practice meditating.
Uh. Is there a reason you want a high pain tolerance?
Personally, it means I often bleed all over the place before I notice I have been hurt, and have frequent unexplained bruises. (“How did you do that?” “No idea, probably ran into something”)
Also, since I often don’t notice pain, when I get, for example, joint injuries, I frequently re-injure myself because I don’t notice when I am doing something that hurts.
Pain is kind of useful. We have it for a reason.
I think there’s a bit of a distinction between a high pain threshold and a high pain tolerance. If I’m not expecting it, I can react embarrassingly strongly to pretty mild hurts, and I’ll pretty much never have an unexplained injury from normal daily life. But if I know to expect it, and I don’t psyche myself out too much, I can do a pretty good impression of being a tough guy. I think the second part is what @Aevylmar is looking for, and I’d second cold showers and difficult exercise, but the exercise has to be something you enjoy. Making yourself do something you hate because it hurts is not going to have any good results.
It’s not that I want a pain tolerance of 100/100, or even 90/100. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories along the lines you’re giving, and I don’t want to be all the way in that direction. I just feel that I have a pain tolerance closer to 20/100, and I’d like to get up to 50 or 60 or maybe even 70, if that makes sense.
I feel like there are probably studies out there proving me wrong, but I’ve always felt like there’s no such thing as a general “pain tolerance” and that you have a different tolerance for different kinds of pain, depending on your history, exposure, physiology, etc.
In general I think I have a very low tolerance for most things (especially heat/burning, I always burn my tongue on coffee that others can drink). But I also have a skin condition that occasionally results in quite painful boils that have to be dealt with medically, and during these painful procedures, the doctors often comment that I have a high pain tolerance compared to most people they see for those things.
First, It almost certainly would have radicalized the populations of Laos and Cambodia, strengthening the Pathet Lao, and Khmer rouge. Second, even if you succeeded in somehow completely closing the Ho Chi Min trail through either country, all it would have accomplished is to drive the Vietcong supply lines into eastern Thailand.
And then what? I suppose, extend the demilitarized zone all the way to Rangoon.
The proposed DMZ would have indeed extended all the way to Burma. The idea would be to put the Southern Vietnamese guerrillas in the same position as the South Korean guerrillas, who you’ll notice didn’t accomplish much. You joke about Rangoon but Burma and Thailand were both pretty easy sells, Laos and Cambodia were the sticking points.
Compared to what? The Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge both eventually overthrew the incumbent government. How much worse could they have gotten? That indicates to me that the Laotian and Cambodian governments ought to have abandoned neutrality in favor of a US-backed alliance. Ultimately their neutrality didn’t keep them out of the conflict.
The Khmer rouge only took power in Cambodia after we first helped to overthrow the government, and then invaded the country in search of Vietcong supply lines. Up until that point the Sihanouk government had been very effective in maintaining a careful policy of neutrality with regards to the conflict next door. Similarly, the Pathet Lao owed much if its strength to the resentment that rural Laotians felt against the American bombing and intervention in their country.
The northeastern provenances of Thailand were the base of the Thai communist party, that was waging a low grade insurgency against the government in Bangkok. Try to extend the McNamara line, gravel mines, napalm, marine fire bases ext., all the way across Laos and over the Mekong, and all you’ve done is traded a war in Vietnam for a war in Thailand. In one sense the domino theory was very true, and every American bomb knocked a dozen a dominoes.
This notion rests on the basic fallacy that led to so much misguided American policy in southeast Asia, the idea that Vietnam was another Korea. In reality the situation was almost exactly reversed. In Vietnam, you had a southern regime that was dominated by colonial era collaborators, and held little in the way of legitimacy in the minds of it’s citizens, in the north you had a nationalist government dominated by the people who had led the fight against the French and Japanese. In Korea, it was the northern Communist regime that was imposed by foreigners, and the south that had the genuine nationalist credentials. To put the Vietcong in the same position as the Communists of south Korea would have required completely transforming the political realties of Vietnam. And short of occupying the country for decades, or committing genocide, it’s not clear how that would be possible.
The second paragraph hits on one of the important points – the Southern government didn’t really have the confidence of its people, not to the extent it needed to fight off the North.
@hyperboloid
The north Vietnamese government was, in absolutely no sense, a popular or legitimate government. Millions fled from the north to the south when the communists took over, and millions more fled the south when the north conquered it. there were many flaws in the South Vietnamese government, but its opponents were a totalitarian nightmare, and the Vietnamese repeatedly demonstrated, at great personal risk, that they did not desire communist government.
@dndnrsn
They fought off the north, for more than a decade, and could have continued to do so had congress not made it illegal to give them the ammunition and spare parts their lavishly equipped army required to function.
And air support. The South Vietnamese military relied on US logistical and organizational support, far beyond just giving them stuff. They suffered from huge desertion problems and significant corruption. The civilian government was no better. They probably could have held off the North indefinitely as long as the US propped them up, but they were never going to be self-sustainable. It was a major mistake on the US’ part not to push harder for reform early on.
If Sihanouk’s neutrality policy was so effective, why were the NVA running forward operating bases in his country? Anyway, establishing an Indochina DMZ in the early 60s would have meant no need to invade or bomb either country. The whole point is that it would have been a better policy than what actually happened (the US takes one step at a time into the muck).
Full disclosure, I believe the only real difference between Korea and Vietnam were a) geography and b) the North deciding wage a guerrilla/propaganda campaign before launching the invasion. I also believe the latter factor to have been the result of lessons learned from the Korean War on the part of the NVA.
Whether the North Korean government was “imposed” by foreigners is a matter of semantics but Kim Il Sung and crew absolutely were heroes of the resistance against the Japanese. The Southern government on the other hand contained large numbers of Chalabi-style expats and outright collaborators. I’ll also note that South Korea in fact was occupied for decades and rooting out the guerrillas involved actions which, while perhaps not “genocide”, did involve killing a lot of people.
Any followers of Sidrea’s blog have a list of top posts they recommend? Julia Galef tweeted this post today, I really liked it and realized this is the blog Scott links to in his Staying Classy piece.
I’ve been waiting for the CW OT to post some recent siderea.
Medications dangerous to the elderly. Did you know a person can be taking a medication safely and usefully for years, but then they get older and their body can’t handle it as well? I didn’t know this, but there’s even a handy list. I’m not linking to the list because there’s a lot of sensible stuff in the post.
Liberty-Loving Female Physicians. Surprisingly, this isn’t about abortion. It’s about EHR and HIPAA.
Doctors, Aging, and the Great Advice You Cannot Take This is about the extent to which old people have specific medical needs, and it’s good to have a specialist. However, in the US there aren’t nearly enough specialists, at least partly because Medicare doesn’t compensate them adequately.
Culture war:
“(Personally, I think that Medicare doesn’t demonstrate that single payer is the answer to the problems of the American healthcare system; Medicare demonstrates that the problem with the American healthcare system is that it is run by Americans. Single payer may be a great idea, but an American single payer system will continue to manifest the problems of systems run by Americans; I’m pretty sure Americans would figure out a way to implement single payer which is horribly bureaucratic, ridiculously costly, provides terrible care except to rich people, and somehow isn’t actually single-payer any more. It’s our gift.)”
Massless Ropes, Frictionless Pulleys: Coordinative Communication— Here’s an important older post. Communication takes time, effort, and sometimes money, but the costs of communication tend to be neglected.
Speaking of people getting paid– I’m underlining that siderea has a Patreon. This is a hint. She writes good stuff.
Eh. Not entirely convinced. The argument seems to rely on calling a geriatrician a specialist. But in the sense that the word is used in American medicine they aren’t specialists. They are first line doctors like pediatricians and primary care physicians. In the pay part she compares them to dermatologists but doesn’t mention the average compensation of peditricians which is the closest analogy. It turns out pediatrics is right down there with family medicine (without OB) and internal medicine.
Then on the question of adequate compensation, if the basis of comparison is the wildly overpaid American specialist doctors like radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology and dermatology you get one answer, but if you compare to physicians around the world (yes, even after accounting for medical school costs and malpractice insurance) you get a very different answer.
Perhaps the upshot should be reducing the compensation of orthopedidic surgeons and not increasing that of geriatrician. That will reduce the gap and make geriatrics a relatively more appealing option.
Nancy –
Thank you! I particularly liked that one about transaction costs (but I do wish Siderea could take the next step and realize the implications for regulation.) That one means that there are at least a couple Siderea posts that I find valuable in depth.
Please feel free to post the CW one on the OT.
Quote of the day at ColoradoPols.com’s open thread (a widely read Colorado politics blog): “All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.” — Scott Alexander
Neat.
ETA: actually only “All good is hard. All evil is easy.” is quoted, which leaves off the main point about “stay away from easy.” As is, it could as easily be read as an exhortation to evil. Sigh.
I completely disagree with that quote. On Star Trek:Deep Space 9, the main character says “it’s easy to be a saint in paradise”. It really just depends on your incentives.
It might be the sadist in me, but I love watching the ongoing process of Scott getting dragged kicking and screaming into being a Major Political Thinker.
@nornagest
I’m not even sure what the right form of apology to offer for the accidental sadism involved in trying to give our host Scott credit for the words of a different Scott Alexander. I guess I can just hope our host finds it funny, a la “Major Major Major Major” from Catch-22.
Pretty sure you’ve got the wrong Scott Alexander there.
quotes.net is wrong to attribute it to the screenwriter; it is the motivational speaker
Well dang. Yodelyak got the wrong Scott Alexander, and I got the wrong wrong Scott Alexander.
This just proves that two wrongs don’t make a right.
They do, however, make a left – Leftists just double down on their errors!
/s
This is a question that, to ape the subreddit, is very much discussing, not waging the culture war. Please attempt to do so as much as possible in replies.
What’s a group that I should feel acceptable about using as a central example of low status? I was having a conversation where I wanted to utter the sentence “I mean, obviously I wouldn’t want to be associated with Xes, that’d make me look terrible!” but realized I didn’t know what a value of X I should feel good about using would be. The obvious answer that enters my head is “furries” or “bronies” but both of these I don’t feel good about because they’d be punching down; it’s true that furries are generally low status and I’d rather not people paint me as one, but I don’t like emphasizing them as losers–I’m sure many are nice people who don’t deserve sneers.
“Nazis” or “the KKK” is another possibility, but both feel too likely to raise political tensions/issues where I don’t necessarily want them. (Also, recent events make it clear that they have a bit of a motte/bailey thing going on; I’m happy to say I oppose lynching, but when Seattle politicans brand cleaning sidewalks as white supremacist….)
Is there some group which is clearly identifiable, not likely to raise political passions or have a motte/bailey thing going, which the majority of interlocuters will recognize as low status, and that I shouldn’t feel bad as reinforcing in that status?
Best practice is probably to use a group that was low-status but is now pretty much gone.
Maybe gypsies?The Cagots are probably *almost* perfect except that they’re not very well-known. Second best option I think is carnies. Yeah it’s punching down, but you probably aren’t going to meet many and most of them are probably just there temporarily, it’s not part of their identity, it’s just a particularly bad part time job.Gypsies still exist as an ethnic group, although prejudice against them is not really a going concern in the United States. Is in the UK and parts of Europe, though.
I do like “carnies”.
Luddites seem to be a common example.
Juggalos
(I originally intended that as a joke but it may well be the best serious answer as well)
So you want a universally-low-status group that deserves their status and wouldn’t raise political tensions?
I’d say “Stalinists,” except that probably isn’t as universal as you want. Maybe something like “pedophiles,” except people might think of you as weird for bringing them up out of nowhere, plus there’s some overkill going on there too (with, say, fourteen-year-olds being arrested for having sex with each other.)
Really, the best idea would probably be to name something mildly humorous, totally out of left field, and nonexistent, like “The Coalition to Torture Cute Kittens.”
Agreed. Or just completely lampshade it by saying, “look, I would never want to be included with ‘insert low-status group you don’t like here’, but…”
Back in the Before Time, in the Long, Long Ago (so like 2006 before social media shaming and the Culture War were a thing), I had a joke I used occasionally that “hey man, I am the least racist person you will ever meet…except against Eskimos. Blubber chewing bastards…” As a southerner, saying that in the south, it’s a little funny because…how could anybody possibly hate Eskimos? Neither I nor anyone around me has ever met an Eskimo. It’s absurd. Would get a chuckle.
Well one day I was in Oregon with a group of people and I made the joke, and an Asian girl looked at me completely deadpan and said “I’m an Eskimo.” I blanched and started apologizing profusely and she said “nah, just fucking with ya, I’m Japanese.” Got me so good.
I don’t tell that joke anymore.
SSC commenters?
If you want a group that both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe recognize as low-status and yet feel no sympathy for or tribal valance toward, the answer is “tweekers”. Or maybe “NAMBLA”.
I don’t see how you can use a group as an example of low status without punching down. The very act of distinguishing yourself from them is you saying they are losers.
In principle there are low status groups that I am, or should be, ok punching down to. Bronies aren’t one, just because they’rem ostly nice/fine people who just have a particularly dweeby hobby.
I mostly agree. If the question is “what group do we all despise” then the “most correct” (or “most Christian”) response is “we should not despise anyone, and certainly not whole groups of people by default.” But I think the question isn’t quite right…
When Andrew Hunter (OP) says
What’s a group that I should feel acceptable about using as a central example of low status?
The context seems to be “what is a group whose name I can use in illustrative examples of “bad-despised people” where ‘everyone’ agrees with me that this group embodies that status and won’t be upset with me for saying so”.
To which I say, “good luck” – this is asking for permission to do impermissible things. Our multicultural society has multiple outgroups and an over arching ideal that *no one* be an outgroup. (No wonder we’re jacked up.)
Some examples that might get you further than others – either “felon” (or “violent felon”) or “slumlord”.
If you put the sentence “I worked hard for years before becoming a medical doctor” into a low-grade translation algorithm, and then translate it back into English, it might come back: “I worked hard for years, but then I became a drug dealer.”
I think it is broadly relatable that a person would resent a translation error that caused them to be introduced at a professional conference, by virtue of a translation mistake, as a lazy drug dealer instead of a hard-working doctor. It’s not likely to offend any group you don’t mind offending. It’s still probably not universal.
Any example of low status will raise political passions, because the more utopian leftists think the whole status system is counterproductive. You can probably get away with using ‘cockroaches,’ since all us inferior, less well-adapted organisms resent their perfection, but even that might not fly in hard utilitarian circles.
The utopian leftists are not alone – there’s a bit of conventional Christian thinking that looks at the dismissal of class and status as an ideal as well.
It should be noted that utopian leftists and Christians are not mutually exclusive categories.
My go-to ok-to-ridicule group is NAMBLA, a group working to make pedophilia more socially acceptable. Way, way outside the Overton Window.
As recent events have shown, the Juggalos almost seem to revel in their low-status position.
The Amish are unlikely to complain if you use them as low status.
A Weeaboo or Weeb is essentially a low-status anime/manga/Japanese culture fan. It’s unlikely to offend too many people because the rest of us anime fans are convinced we’re not the Weeaboos.
Actually, Juggalo seems like a pretty good choice.
Juggalos are good though. You might as well choose some other good-but-powerless group like nuns.
Chaotic good, maybe
Amish are unlikely to complain–they are in favor of humility. Stricter Amish affiliations are referred to as “lower.”
But I don’t think they are generally viewed as particularly low status.
Sounds like a real-world analogue of Terry Pratchet’s dwarves who hold it far more noble to live one’s life in the depths of the mines than to spend too much time interacting with the world above ground, such that the title of Low King signals great honour.
Sneetches.
In an office-work context, secretaries and people who work in the call center.
Which highlights how stupid status can be: good secretaries exemplify the old joke about “do you want to talk to the person in charge, or the one who knows what’s going on”.
But it is true: early in my career, it became obvious that groups that had a lot of secretaries and call center employees were lower-status. (For example, the Toastmasters group at a former employer; no professionals joined it, because most of the people involved worked in the call center.)
This is pointing in the right direction. Try this:
Telemarketers.
If feeling generous, prefix with “rude” or “persistent.”
If you’re going to go profession wise, there are a lot that are disreputable as a group. Charles F said ‘carnies’, above. As an IT person, spammers. Classically, used car salesmen.
In an office-work context, secretaries and people who work in the call center.
As you say, stupid, because do you really think secretaries and reception staff don’t know who does and who does not have the “ugh, the little people” attitude? And that they aren’t more willing to do favours, extra work, etc. for the ones who don’t have that attitude, whereas for the others it’s “The phone is ringing in Mr X’s office? Well fuck him, it’s technically five minutes past my quitting time and I’m not going to lift a finger outside of the hours I’m paid to work for him. See how he feels about the work the ‘little people’ do then!”
In your situation, why not just say “I wouldn’t want to be associated with those people.” Is there some reason you’d need a specific group to point at?
If you’re just looking for something you can use as an example and not actually trying to look down on someone, you could pick something humorous: “If people spread rumors that I’m into high-stakes Morris dancing, I’d be ruined!”
That’s too absurd for people to think that you really do hate Morris dancers.
Reading the question and the responses, it seems to me that there are at least three kinds of “I wouldn’t want to be associated with X’s.” Deciding which category you are looking for might make choosing easier.
Category #1: “Those people pursue bad goals and/or by inappropriate means”–everyone agrees that they are a BAD group. This cluster gets Black Bloc, KKK, various kinds of predatory criminals, and so on.
Category #2: “Those people pursue really weird goals and/or in really weird ways”–everyone thinks they are nuts. Here you get bronies, Juggalos, high-stakes Morris dancers, and so on.
Category #3: “These people are low-status, but what they do is important and valuable” –everyone wants them around, but… Here you get secretaries and shelf-stockers at Wal-mart, janitors and call center workers, and so on.
Lawyers? Politicians?
Is there a reason that they have to be actually low-status, instead of “high status but people like to hate them”?
How about smokers?
For some reason my first thought was these guys from Waterworld. Definitely low status.
>What’s a group that I should feel acceptable about using as a central example of low status?
Well, it doesn’t have to be an ethnic or occupational group…
How about axe-murderers?
On second thought, to pick a somewhat lower status group,
How about unsuccessful axe-attempted-murderers?
If the US sent large troop formations into those countries early in the war to interdict supplies, they would/should have gone whole hog and established (actually, extended) the DMZ along the 17th Parallel across the entire peninsula. That would likely have been decisive; subsequent events showed that the guerrillas in South Vietnam weren’t enough to topple the government there. However that represented a much larger political, diplomatic, and military effort than the US was willing to exert at the time (possibly ever).
As for the hypothetical effect of reactively attacking supply lines and depots across the western border, the effect probably would have been the same as later on: a decrease in enemy activity in South Vietnam until those efforts ended, followed by a resumption after a few months of recovery.
“Why We Never Talk about Black-On-Black Crime“: A friend on Facebook (okay, you can stop snickering now) linked me this article earlier this week, which – referencing its sources against the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI every step of the way – argues that:
* Both white and black violent criminals normally victimize people of the same race.
* Both white and black poor people have roughly the same violent crime rate.
* Therefore, they conclude, “black-on-black crime” is not a serious problem. The problem is poverty, and that stems from white supremacy, and the solution is more social programs.
Thoughts? The only hole I can see in their argument is the last step where (together with throwing in a non sequitur on white supremacy, when the statistics actually point more toward class warfare if any progressive cause) they say we need more social programs to help poverty instead of programs to help poor people become more law-abiding. However, I’m definitely not the most conversant with crime statistics, so I very well might have overlooked something.
Regardless, they do seem to have shown that we should at least rephrase the problem as “poor people crime” instead of “black people crime.”
Yes, but according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, that seems to be adequately explained by their different poverty levels.
Interesting, especially when put together with the BJS report. If you take both at face value, they don’t seem to make sense; one or the other probably has some statistical error? Either that or the effect’s far more complicated than I thought.
A very cogent point. Perhaps the issue is more generational poverty rather than temporary poverty stemming from economic downturns? That’d make sense, since it seems to me it’d work through intermediates such as ingrained bad habits and subcultural norms.
Indeed; what I’m arguing is that if these statistics are true, we should attack it from the right direction and get at its actual cause.
A possible explanation for the apparent paradox is that poverty can have a strong impact on the culture of a community, but not so much on the individual. In other words, the rich person in the poor community is a more criminal than the rich person in the rich community.
Yes, but according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, that seems to be adequately explained by their different poverty levels.
I’m not sure their conclusion is supported by the data, and I’m pretty sure the conclusion isn’t what you’re stating here.
From the BJS summary:
Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).
As you say, re-bining people by poverty level appears to change the ratios of violence. However:
The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels.
Additional confounder: to what degree are WNH and Hispanic Whites well divided? If those categories aren’t being clearly reported, then the whole set might be…well, not useless, but certainly suspect.
How does a study of nonfatal violent victimization explain anything about who is committing homicides?
The BJS study you cite, suggests that there is a modest and non-racial tendency for poor urban residents to beat up their wives/husbands/neighbors, and to point guns at each other, more often than rich urban residents do such things. Rural residents, maybe the same but they are less likely to call the police about it. This seems fairly common-sense obvious to me; there’s a whole cluster of behaviors that involves A: beating people up for no good reason and B: kind of not being good at making money.
But you don’t figure out who is killing people, and why, by looking at who is getting beaten up and why. Killing is very different than beating, and perpetrators are often different from victims.
Your argument makes facial sense, but AFAIK sociologists do normally measure homicides as a good way of measuring violent crimes across different reporting rates. Cf. Scott’s monumental “Anti-Rxionary FAQ” where he looks at the homicide rate for the last century and a half to show that Progressivism doesn’t increase violent crime.
Now that I write that out, I see that judging changes in violent crime across time is different from judging them across ethnicity – is that what you’re getting at here?
The one characteristic every victim shares with his or her killer is having lived in the same moment.
The BJS study is doing the opposite, measuring violent crime excluding homicides (and also measuring victims as opposed to perpetrators). It’s exactly the wrong way around.
@Evan Þ
Murder rate has the advantage that it’s the violent crime most likely to come to light, but the disadvantage that better health care turns murder into attempted murder or aggravated assault. Hundred years ago, if you got shot in the gut, your chances of living are much worse than today. If you look at the FBI crime stats, reported violent crime in total is something like 2-3x as high as it was when they started counting (1960, as I recall).
Trauma medicine’s a lot better now and that’s probably made a mark on the murder stats, but “reported violent crime” has some pretty serious issues too, because the culture around low-level violence is changing. I’d bet at fairly long odds that if I punched an acquaintance in the face today over some minor quarrel, they’d be much more likely to report it as an assault than if my grandpa had punched an acquaintance in the face in 1960.
The reverse might be true of someone in a culture where trust in the police has been declining over that period, but that just underscores the problems with using reporting statistics to make intercultural comparisons. For all the problems with murder as a basis, it’s at least pretty hard to hide a dead body.
Sociologists spend a lot of time looking for their lost keys under streetlights. I understand that it may be difficult getting statistically sound data out of the genuine darkness that is so much of human social interaction, but that doesn’t make the streetlights a valid sample.
@Nornagest
I did note that’s the advantage of looking at homicide rate. Still, saying “well, the homicide rate is lower than it was in 19xx” can miss a lot.
It definitely does not, according to the FBI stats. Those state that whites and blacks commit roughly similar numbers of crimes. There are ~9 million blacks living below the poverty line compared to ~25 million whites, meaning even if you attribute all crime to those below the poverty level, blacks are still committing crimes at 3x the rate of whites.
https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf
You also have to control for population density. Someone here presented fairly convincing evidence that poor black urban people still commit more crime than poor white urban people, but I haven’t looked into that study too closely (I would highly appreciate a critical analysis of it).
Neither The Root nor BJS says this.
Many years ago I read a book about crime and the use of guns in the United States.
In the first chapter, almost as an aside, there was data indicating that Blacks in the rural areas of the United States have lower rates of violence/homicide than Whites in rural areas of the United States…while the reverse was true in urban areas.
It’s possible I’m mis-remembering. I can’t find the data right now. Maybe the ratio of urban/rural homicide rates was incredibly different for Black than it was for White.
Which leaves me with questions:
1. How many researchers have compared urban-vs-rural rates when they compare homicide rates in the United States?
2. Do those comparisons complicate the Black-vs-White comparisons?
3. Do those comparisons complicate the poor-vs-non-poor comparisons?
I imagine that the results of such a study would depend almost entirely on how one decided what counted as urban vs. rural. Not in a cherry picking to find the desired result sort of way, just that any such distinction is going to end up fairly arbitrary, with lots of reasonable sounding ways to cut off, any one of which would produce dramatically different results.
I’ve read that one unfortunate side effect of integration was the decline of black-owned small businesses. If that’s sufficiently true and relevant, perhaps the language barrier provides some shielding from that effect for Hispanics. Yadda yadda yadda, more stability, less hopelessness, etc?
Not to say this is the only factor, of course. Just thought it was an interesting hypothesis.
So I think we’re past the “don’t politicize tragedies” window on Nevada, though it seems the motive is still quite unclear. But a few meta-thoughts I think may hold true even if the motive turns out to be very different than expected:
We were recently talking about “different worlds,” which, to me, really emphasized just how important the “narrative weavers” are in society. Different people may unconsciously chose to watch different “movies,” to use Scott Adams’ term, but the “movie makers” are also super important because they provide the options.
It seems to me lately that the “movies” on tap are increasingly… enraging, for lack of a better word. In the US, for example, the two mainstream “movies” are:
a. a narcissistic, racist, sexist, billionaire with poor impulse control just got elected to the highest office because a bunch of idiots and white supremacists hate foreigners and experts and may well start a nuclear war. or
b. all the elite institutions of government, academia, and the media are staffed by crypto-Marxist globalists intent on betraying Joe Sixpack’s interests in favor of destroying the traditional culture in hopes of achieving an impossible utopian ideal.
Of course, there are other, less bleak (and more bleak) narratives one can find if looking hard for them, from the economists “we’re richer and living longer than at any other time in history” to the techy’s “AI Jesus will save us,” but none of these are mainstream.
The shooter’s brother noted that the shooter could be a very “confrontational” guy. For example, people smoking near him so enraged him that he would carry around a cigar for the purpose of blowing smoke in their faces.
At any given time a certain percentage of the population consists of eccentric, angry, confrontational people. Yet in some societies there are mass murders and in some there are not (no, it can’t just be the presence or absence of guns, though it’s arguable that effects the extent and nature of the carnage; someone intent on killing people and himself could plow a car into a crowd, set up a bomb, etc.). It sounds like the shooter was an angry, confrontational guy. There is probably no version of reality in which someone with his genetics+environment did not grow up to be an angry, confrontational guy. Question is, is there a version of reality in which he doesn’t become a mass shooter.
We recently had a very similar, if less competent attack on congresspeople playing baseball. That shooter’s motivation was explicitly political. We don’t yet know if Paddock’s motivation was political. But what I am wondering is whether we aren’t setting ourselves up for this sort of thing, essentially, by purveying only “toxic” narratives.
I mean, even I find politics today incredibly enraging and I am a pretty meek guy. There is no possible narrative that will turn me into a mass shooter because I’m probably just genetically not a confrontational, risk-taking person (a coincidence he was a professional gambler?). In a personality with no “sparks” you can pour any amount of gasoline on it and it won’t explode. But at any given time there are always a few people in society with “sparks”: question is, do they stop at blowing smoke in peoples’ faces or something much, much worse?
A 30 day cooling off period should be instituted, after which it becomes mandatory to politicise a mass tragedy. Perhaps a citizens council of a few hundred people randomly drawn from across the nation with a few also from the victims families could debate the way forward with testimony from academic experts and pro and anti lobbies. Legal expertise would be provided to draw up laws for each position and point out their wider implications, then the laws are changed (nor not) from the council’s majority vote.
Something to consider:
Should a mentally ill person be allowed to own a gun?
What is the lifetime chance of mental illness?
Yes, someone with an eating disorder, or high-functioning autism, or any number of other things that fall under the fuzzy category of “mental illness,” should be allowed to own a gun. So should everyone else, until it’s proven otherwise by due process of law. We need some more specific criterion before you go stripping people of the right to self-defense, or anything else that falls under the category of Constitutional rights.
Who defines “mentally ill”?
Can opposition to the ruling regime be deemed mentally ill?
And why does it fall on me, the Democratic straight-ticket voter Manhattanite who thinks this city’s ultra-strict gun laws work just fine, thank you very much, to point out this hole?
In many parts of the Internet, proposals to restrict guns from the mentally ill are always accompanied by someone suggesting that wanting to own a gun is proof that you’re mentally ill.
Are you Ok with mentally ill people flying planes, then? The problem you are complaining about is a special case of one that has to be solved in many other cases.
Their own planes? Yes, absolutely.
I wouldn’t want them flying a commercial airliner, but I don’t need the state for that – I’m reasonably confident that American Airlines isn’t going to hire a raving psychopath as a pilot.
Germanwings, on the other hand…
But as has been pointed out elsewhere, the actual effect of “we shouldn’t let mentally ill people do [X]” is really only that you lose the ability to diagnose mentally ill people in any vaguely X-adjacent space except after the fact.
Seems to confirm my point below, that laws banning the “mentally ill” from doing X will only serve to discourage people from seeking mental health.
You’re right. They’d hire him as an executive instead.
@Matt
Do you believe that someone flying their own plane cannot harm anyone else, or that the right to property overrides the right to life?
Of course they can. And people can also harm others with cars, or pressure cookers, or fertilizer bombs. And yet, we don’t forbid the “mentally ill” (one of the vaguest common terms we use in society) from driving, cooking, or planting a garden.
The right to life and the right to property are one and the same, BTW.
So I take it you approve of debt slavery?
I believe there’s a distinction between the two precisely because I don’t approve of that and a category of similar things.
People with a mental health record can end up being restricted in certain ways, and the sky hasn’t fallen in.
Yes, I do.
I didn’t say the sky would fall in. I said that people would be marginally less likely to seek treatment for mental health concerns. Given that death from suicide is a couple orders of magnitude more common than death from mass shootings with semi-automatic rifles, this seems like a fairly important consideration. I’d also throw out that conventional wisdom seems to be that even under present circumstances, the biggest thing we can do to prevent suicide deaths is to encourage people to seek help – and that social pressure to not appear mentally ill is the primary reason they do not do so.
Might taking the guns way from your unstable veterans lower their suicide risk?
It might, but I doubt it. There are other countries where gun ownership is virtually zero (I’m thinking Japan here) that still have high suicide rates.
But this is a debate worth having. Is suicide largely a product of easy access to guns, or is it largely a product of untreated mental illness, and to what extent will taking rights away from those who are diagnosed with mental illness discourage people from seeking treatment?
I don’t have the magic answer to any of this, but these are important questions that need to be discussed, not just dismissed with loud shouting about the rate of mass shootings in England or whatever.
The act of saying, “we should take guns away from unstable veterans”, increases the difficulty of identifying unstable veterans in the first place. Since unstable veterans are subject to (and sometimes the cause of) many harms beyond just suicide by firearm, this is unlikely to be a net win.
Take it to the point where someone is holding a gun to their head. You would still do nothing?
I would, but I admit to having some rather non-mainstream opinions about freedom and autonomy.
How exactly will the people doing the background checks know that someone is mentally ill? Will HIPPA privacy laws not count for mental illness, but any time you are diagnosed, that information is sent off to the government?
Can you stop being mentally ill, or if you have a single nervous breakdown in college do you lose that right forever?
I don’t like this argument. To put it simply, “mentally ill” is something which is already administrated by many experts and taught in colleges and so forth; it seems like there’s already a lot of ambient defenses against simply declaring someone with certain political movations “mentally ill”. I guess I could see it happening to, say, Trump supporters, but I think there’s enough cultural agreement on the issue as to make this a bit different from similar issues.
OK, we can stop right there, as you’ve just said that over 40% of the country might fall under such an abuse.
In fact, while there is (fairly recent) strong protection against long-term commitment, there is almost no protection from being declared mentally ill. Laws like Pennsylvania’s Section 302 and California’s Section 5150 allow anyone to be committed for 72 hours based on the word of a mental health professional or a police officer. Holds under these laws can be and are used to permanently revoke firearms rights. Gun rights advocates are well aware of this, and suspicious of any expansion.
Back during the 1964 campaign, quite a lot of psychiatrists polled by Fact magazine diagnosed Barry Goldwater, whom they had never met, with various forms of mental illness, including “paranoid,” “schizophrenic,” “obsessive,” “psychotic,” and “narcissistic.”
No shortage of Washington Post columns claiming the same about Trump on a daily basis.
And this is why we have the Goldwater Rule! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule
People are, of course, free to talk about whatever they want, but I was kind of really hoping this wouldn’t turn into another “gun control” and/or “is legislating in the wake of a tragedy appropriate” thread.
What I’m personally interested in here is the question of whether or not our current going narratives in the US (and arguably in the West?) are so toxic compared to the past as to increase the likelihood of the most marginally stable members of society going off the deep end.
Yes. But,
I don’t know. The Vietnam War era also had very, very toxic narratives. “The US government is drafting young men to go murder innocent Vietnamese people” and “Commies are trying to subvert and corrupt our country and take over the world.” Both were serious problems, and also both close to truth.
Today I would say the situation is not nearly as bad, but the narratives do not much resemble reality.
If you’re using mass tragedies as your cue for new laws, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of really crappy laws. Mass tragedies are rare and dramatic; good law needs to be mainly concerned with the common and mundane, because that’s where all the potential disutility is.
Exceptions might apply for civilizational or existential-level risks, like asteroid impacts or nuclear war. But this ain’t one.
And that’s all I’m gonna say on the subject, because three days isn’t long enough and I already hate all the new memes like poison.
If you’re using mass tragedies as your cue for new laws, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of really crappy laws. Mass tragedies are rare and dramatic; good law needs to be mainly concerned with the common and mundane, because that’s where all the potential disutility is.
I posted this a few years ago, I think. I forget where. Facebook maybe.
If you act hastily , you will get crappy laws, if you do nothing, you will get more tragedies, and acting carefully is actually an option. The UK had good gun law before Dunblane, and better afterwards.
So how have other nations managed to do this impossible thing?
In what percentage of cases.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
One might as well ask how other nations manage to provide their citizens with better health care at a lower cost then we do. What do you hate freedom, or something?
Being smaller and more homogeneous -> more relevant and efficient governance -> populace that is generally more deferential and trusting of authorities?
There’s also got to be some cultural impact from hegemonial vs post-imperial/post-dominion thinking. Though that’s probably just another source of individual vs collective attitudes.
They haven’t. Mass shooting happen in other countries as well. Some of the data is summarized in a Politifact account.
Of the countries covered by the research they cite, deaths from mass shootings per capita are lower than in the U.S. in seven countries, higher in three.
That’s only counting mass shootings–presumably there is some substitution to other forms of mass killing, such as stabbings in China, in places where guns are harder to get.
@DavidFriedman
Based on that chart, the US is significantly worse off per capita if we compare the US as a whole and Europe as a whole. (About twice as bad)
(And if you compared by US state, and EU country, I’d imagine the difference between the worst US states and the worst EU countries would be even bigger
But that’s just a guess, I don’t know how mass shootings are distributed in the states)
and even further, if you compared Europe as a whole to individual US States it probably wouldn’t even rank in the top ten
johnjohn,
The claim David was responding to was not “Other countries do a marginally better job at preventing mass shootings,” but rather that other countries have “eliminated” mass shootings.
@matt m
I really really don’t get the point of your comment.
No one talked about eliminating mass shootings entirely.
And if you want to be completely anal about what the debate is about (which you, for some reason, seem to want be)
Then the linked data actually strongly supports TheAncientGeekAKA1Z point. Because they’re only talking about frequency and not severity. In which case the US looks extremely bad per capita
The original comment from Paul was “we can’t do anything to prevent this”
AncientGreek then said “other nations have prevented it”
Which is not true. Other nations have made it slightly less of a problem, but they haven’t prevented it.
@Matt M
I think e.g. Liechtenstein has prevented mass shootings.
By drawing a small enough border, sure.
I’m sure there are specific counties in the US that have never experienced a mass shooting, either.
In fact, probably 90% of them.
Those laws didn’t stop the Cumbria shootings. The fact is, these types of things were exceedingly rare both before and after those laws. The murder rate in the UK hasn’t fallen any faster than the murder rate in the US since they passed those laws.
The UK hasn’t. France hasn’t. Brazil certainly hasn’t. Norway hasn’t. Why didn’t their gun control stop mass shootings?
All law is about mitigation, not elimination.
@Matt m
Ok, if the point literally was to show that at least one mass shooting had happened in at least one other country, then I guess you’re right. The data is completely clear
But do you honestly think, that TheAncientGeekAKA17s point was that NOT A SINGLE ONE had happened outside the states? Is that really, how you chose to read his post?
Just noticed I’m wrong about my interpretation of the data, they only looked at a limited amount of European countries.
So my criticism of the way the data is interpreted is probably wrong.
I would love to see a more complete data set. Especially one that separates mass shootings by US states
As I said,
the UK had good gun law before Dunblane, and better afterwards.
The post-Dunblane legislation was not the beginning of gun control.
I interpreted his implied claim as that there were countries whose institutions made mass shootings essentially impossible. That could be true, but the fact that the U.S. is not strikingly worse in this regard than other developed countries for which the data were available is sufficient to show that it isn’t obviously true, which was what he was implying.
Gun control in respons to a mass shooting is the equivalent to terrorism control in response to 9/11.
Anti terrorism is a thing. What point are you making?
The measures taken after 9/11 were poorly suited to actually stop terrorism and restricted civil liberties with a very thin justification. I expect anti-gun measures after a shooting to do likewise. Specifically going after Bin Laden did work, but that’s the equivalent of catching a specific shooter, not enacting an anti-terrorism law.
Where “after” means “soon after”?
Anti terrorism policies have benefits, though they are very hard to measure. They also have huge costs. Like the bottom line for DHS or TSA, or all the collective hours spent in security lines, having photos taken of their genitals (by Rapiscanners — you think I’m making this up), removing their shoes, throwing away water bottles and toiletries, etc.
It would appear that the vast bulk of the damage from 9/11 was inflicted by the U.S. government on hundreds of millions of innocent people across the globe.
I read a study once (sorry, this was a bit ago, so no link handy) suggesting that on net, even under very generous assumptions about the value of human life, the TSA and post 9/11 airport security is a huge net loser in terms of economic benefit. That’s not even considering the costs of the global war on terror.
Is there any evidence that focusing more on mental illness will actually lower the chance of a mass shooting?
As far as I can tell, no. Most mass shooters do not have a history of mental illness unless you count something like “was once on antidepressants” which captures so much of the country that banning all of those people from firearm ownership would essentially be a de facto repeal of the second amendment.
And then you’d also have to ban their family from owning as well, because it would be a meaningless law if they could live in a house with guns.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Noted, good point.
And then you’d also have to ban their family from owning as well, because it would be a meaningless law if they could live in a house with guns.
Why isn’t the law that bans felons from owning guns a meaningless law now?
@Anatoly; it is pretty useless. G. Gordon Liddy used to brag that his wife owned a gun which she kept on his side of the bed.
Oh, good, then Congress can just pass a law making flag burning illegal again; after all, that’s just a de facto repeal of the First Amendment.
It is.
Does anyone seriously believe that a sufficiently motivated felon cannot obtain weapons due to the existence of such a law?
The law might be theater, but this isn’t the right question. Like somebody else said earlier, it’s about mitigation, not elimination. You have to ask whether the extra inconvenience means fewer felons end up with access to guns, and then what effect that has on rates of violence.
That’s totally fair.
I suppose in the felon example, the risk of stripping the rights of an innocent person is considered minimal, due to the beyond a reasonable doubt standard of conviction in the criminal justice system. (As well as the fact that if you’ve been falsely convicted of a crime, losing the right to buy guns is fairly far down the list of wrongs that have been done to you).
If “mental illness” had to be proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of your peers, I’d be much more comfortable with the idea of gun bans for the mentally ill. Not fully comfortable, but more comfortable to be sure.
Are laws generally expected to bring about less of something. or eliminate it entirely?
That might be the case if most felony convictions were the result of jury trials, but they aren’t–something over ninety percent of criminal convictions are the result of plea bargaining. The fact that someone is willing to accept a minimal punishment in order to avoid the risk of a much larger punishment if he goes to trial is weak evidence that he is guilty of anything.
David,
That’s certainly true, but I don’t think that most people are aware of that or see it that way. Common conception is that if you take a plea bargain, it’s because you were guilty.
I think laws should be expected to make society better off. Laws which try to do that by reducing something bad should not reduce good things by equal or greater amount.
If a law that reduces violent acts by repealing the Second Amendment ends up increasing violent acts by removing the ability for otherwise non-violent individuals to deter violent individuals who don’t need a gun to be violent, then that is a law which isn’t accomplishing its goal.
If a law that reduces violent acts by banning certain firearms accessories ends up increasing violent acts by impairing the ability for otherwise non-violent individuals to deter violent individuals who don’t need that accessory, then the same principle applies.
If the net affect of any such law is unknown, then one is forced to resort to heuristics such as expert advice or observing what else its advocates or detractors appear to want, and hope that it’s reasonably accurate. If the law’s advocates say they want a de facto repeal of 2A…
Is that actually a good thing aside from the constitution? Invert the idea of gun ownership being a right into the idea of gun ownership being a privilege, so that only well-trained people with completely clean records can own guns. Would that lead to worse outcomes?
There have been cases
(Dunblane, Virginia, Aurora) where at least informal concerns were raised but not acted on. These would have been prevented by a system with a strong presumption against ownership.
If we only allowed well-educated people with clean records to have free speech, I doubt the outcome would be worse. Unless you count deprivation of free speech as a harm in itself.
Wouldn’t that create an incentive for people in power (be they politicians, sheriffs, judges etc…) to have those who speak out against them arrested?
Obviously it is, since those with no say with steadilly lose out in zero sum games.
/me waits for the dots to be connected…
@JohnSchilling
The arrangement to avoid glamorising ISIS was put into place without branding it as an anti free speech measure. Did I mention that no one is a free speech absolutist? People will accept obvious common sense exceptions to free speech readily, so long as the c word is not used.
@TheAncientGeek: I just responded to this elsewhere.
Is there a reason you are saying exactly the same thing in two places, other than liking to hear yourself talk?
Yes.
If getting assistance for mental health issues puts you in a category of “the government can now restrict your rights”, people are going to be very reluctant to seek help.
The exact use-case I’m thinking of here is military veterans (macho gun lovers who are ALREADY reluctant to seek help). Tell them that if a doctor diagnoses them with PTSD they can never legally own a gun again, and watch as suddenly the answer to every question to every doctor becomes “Thanks doc, I feel fine!” regardless of what is actually going on inside.
This is a very important point for all people that think barring “mentally ill” people from owning guns is a good idea. If being diagnosed with something restricts your rights, the main effect that will have is to stop people from seeking help, and it would probably be more likely to lead to more problems, not fewer.
Being barred from something they really need, like a job or a place to live, might well motivate someone to dissimulate about their mental health. But a gun in not the staff life.
What about driving a car? We’re seeing plenty of terrorist car attacks (mostly in Europe, which I’m sure is a huge coincidence). Not being trusted to use physical force eliminates entire categories of jobs from consideration (police, military, security). And if your mental illness makes you prone to violence, why shouldn’t we be able to control where you live (like we happily do for certain sex offenders)
Owning a gun might seem like some minor luxury to you but to many it is not. It’s something they greatly value and enjoy. And is among the very few rights explicitly guaranteed by the constitution. If they can take that away, they can take whatever else they want away, too.
The thing about this particular killer is that for almost any law you can think of, I don’t see how it would have prevented him killing a lot of people, unless it were a law that somehow encouraged greater community cohesion, or, perhaps, something like stricter obligation to report and involuntarily commit, those suffering from mental illness.
He had no criminal record
He apparently spent years accumulating weapons secretly
He was extremely concerned with privacy, paid cash for his house, put up some big fences and hedges his neighbors complained about
Obviously smart, put a lot of thought into the attack; if guns had been really hard to get he would have figured out a different way to kill people with a bomb, a car, whatever; trivial, even significant inconvenience would not have stopped this guy
Seems like there was some record of mental illness; supposedly he filled a huge valium Rx at some point soon before the shooting, but as others have pointed out, if you take away the rights and threaten to involuntarily commit anyone who might be helped by valium you’re basically going to sentence a lot of people to either buying black market valium, or suffering unnecessarily with untreated mental illness.
The main point that sticks out to me, as with many of these killers, is the “lone wolf” nature of the person; usually the person is described as “keeping to himself,” the brother said this was a neighborhood were people mostly kept to themselves, etc.
I can’t help but think this results, in part, from our new “bowling alone” society, though, again, that may be my own priors.
I think what annoys me the most about the calls for gun control in the wake of a mass shooting is that the vast majority of the time, this is overwhelmingly true for the vast majority of “common sense reforms” being proposed. In most high-profile shootings, most of the restrictions people immediately demand would have made little to no difference in preventing that particular shooting. (In this particular case, Hillary Clinton managed to tweet something about silencers, which were not used in this attack, before I even heard about the attack itself… it may also be worth noting that she seemed to get her understanding of how silencers work from hollywood action films rather than from reality)
Which to me is the exact definition of “politicizing a tragedy” in one of the most despicable ways, because it is clearly relying on emotion to drag people to a conclusion the facts do not support (this would be the left-wing equivalent of the neocons using 9/11 to start a war with Iraq).
Like somewhere in a drawer in every left-wing thinktank is a big long list of gun control regulations they want, and whenever there’s a shooting, they open the drawer and dust off the list and demand all these things without even taking 30 seconds to actually look and see if the things on the list have any relation at all to the shooting that happened.
I find this offensive, not so much as a conservative or as a gun owner or anything else – but as a rationalist-adjacent person. It’s so blatantly illogical and dishonest and relying on emotional manipulation, and I wish more people would speak out against it.
perhaps in an objective sense, but looking at the immense backlash against any attempt at gun control, it sure seems like there are a whole lot of people who don’t agree with you. What will you do if they refuse to seek out mental health treatment and get hurt as a result?
What I’d say to the “we need to take swift, decisive action in the wake of a tragedy” people is, fulfill this requirement and I’ll at least take you seriously, if not necessarily support you:
Explain to me how your proposed measure would have plausibly prevented the particular tragedy in question. If you can’t do that then I’ll assume that you are, yes, just dusting off something you already wanted before for other reasons because the timing seems good. THAT’s what I, at least, object to about “politicizing” tragedy: not that “doing something” in the wake of a tragedy is per se always bad, but that using a tragedy to cynically advance your pet policy that wouldn’t have prevented it anyway is shitty.
@MattM:
Can you expand on this, specifically what silencers do in reality?
I saw a friend comment approvingly on that post, and thought to myself “wait don’t silencers have a whole host of drawbacks?”, then spent some time on Wikipedia trying to learn what suppressors do, but I wasn’t able to confirm it was actually wrong
On the sound scale, a gun with a silencer firing a bullet puts out the same decibels as a jackhammer. That’s the main issue really – a silencer might make it slightly easier to commit crimes, but it’s a pretty slight increase.
You say that as though it’s a bad thing. If a law would save lives it’s justified. It’s not a strong counterargument to say that it wouldn’t work in some particular case, because no law works in every case.
A cynic is an idealist’s name for a pragmatist.
At least someone is trying to do something. Is complacency so great?
TheAncientGeek –
Yes, burning social trust is a bad thing. I feel like this shouldn’t need to be said.
ETA: Also, keep in mind other people don’t want the something done, that is being done. I don’t understand what isn’t painfully obvious about this; suppose, say, a bunch of right-wing states “do something” in response to an abortion doctor doing unethical shit, which just happens to both fail to prevent that unethical shit, and also just happens to make it harder for women to get abortions – is this okay, because they are “doing something”?
Have some theory of mind, man.
Cars are dangerous and driving is restricted in various ways and for good reasons.
There are certainly types of mentally ill person I wouldn’t want to gove a badge and gun too. Do you disagree?
You just refuted your own point. It does make sense to restrict certain categories of
disturbed individual.
I find your reasoning generally quite strange. It is as if you are arguing that the baseline is one where anyone is allowed to do anything, but it clearly is not.
A gun is not a necessity, so it is anomolous to treat it as a right,
The slippery slope argument is so bad , it is often called a fallacy.
Constitutions that are too easy to change are a bad idea; constitutions that are too difficult to change are also a bad idea. if a rule has bad consequences, why keep it?
What you are referring to? People piggy-back their wish list onto the events of the day all the time. When there is an ISIS attack, the right dust of their list of immigration restrictions, for instance. It’s not like the anti gun people are the first to defect…that individual is lost in the mists of time.
Abortion is controversial, the murder of adults is not.
I hate to bust in on the ignorance parade, but…
Cars aren’t restricted. Anybody can own a car, anybody can drive a car. You can drive 200mph without a seatbelt, license, or insurance perfectly legally.
What is restricted is the use of government-owned roads, and certain kinds of privately owned public easements, such as parking lots.
TheAncientGeek –
“They do it too!” is always a shitty excuse for shitty behavior.
Maybe, but you can’t burn trust that’s been burnt. And complacency isn’t great.
How is this a response to the point being made? Abortion is perfectly legal in America; so is the owning and use of guns. “Unethical shit” is not necessarily perfectly legal in America, and neither is murdering people. Abortion restrictions is controversial, and so are gun restrictions. So, clearly, if an abortion doctor is doing things that are monstrously evil and an abuse of his responsibility, people may raise ways to restrict abortions so as to prevent such things. It sounds like the analogy is correct in all the relevant ways; is there any relevant respect in which it’s disanalogous?
I also point out that someone has put forward a principled defense of complacency.
Perhaps that’s true. But when you see something like:
and you are aware “they do it too”, it makes you wonder if the lady doth protest too much.
Kind of like when you see someone claim that they hold a deep, principled, unshakable commitment to free speech norms but some how every single thing they get outraged about is people on the left violating these purported norms and every time someone on the right violates those purported norms, it’s either silence or “that’s different!”
And a UK citizen can evade the guns laws by flying to the states, which also means nothing relevant.
@moonfirestorm
When shooting a gun, sound comes from three sources:
1. Muzzle blast: the sound of the gasses violently escaping from the barrel
2. Sonic boom: the shock waves created when the bullet goes through the air faster than the speed of sound
3. Moving parts of the firearm
The muzzle blast is the thing that most shooters care about and why many want suppressors*, since that is what causes hearing damage to shooters themselves unless they wear hearing aids. A suppressor doesn’t eliminate the entire muzzle blast, but reduces the decibels and duration of the muzzle blast. It also changes the sound of the muzzle blast which can make it harder to recognize the sound, but also makes it much harder to hear where the sound is from.
Even if you eliminate most of the muzzle blast, the sonic boom is still very loud. Subsonic munition can bring it down a bit, at the expense of range and effectiveness, but that works best for small, short range munition. Long range munition like subsonic .308 rounds still produce between 121 and 137 dB. That is still very loud. It’s louder than an ambulance siren.
When targeting people, silenced weapons are most effective for snipers or for commandos who want to kill sentries, as single shots are far easier to mistake for something else than repeated shooting. Furthermore, the difficulty to locate the shooter is much, much higher if he only shoots rarely. When many shots are fired, the flames coming from the muzzle are relatively easy to spot.
So the idea that a person could shoot hundreds of people without them hearing that they are being shot at or without the police figuring out where the shooter is, is not very realistic. It’s based on a huge exaggeration of the effectiveness of suppressors.
* This is a better name than silencer, since it doesn’t actually silence fully
A couple of problems here. First, subsonic .308? Are you talking about .308 rounds that have gone far enough to go subsonic (which is beyond normal engagement range, although I can’t say how far offhand), or is that a typo for supersonic? (I suspect the second, as a subsonic round isn’t that loud.)
Second, I think the dB comparison is off. Those may be the dB values based on maximum peak pressure, but that’s a very short peak, where an ambulance is a lot more consistent. I agree that supersonic bullets are definitely not silent (they make a distinct ‘crack’), but I don’t think the metaphor is a good one.
“[X] is not a necessity, so it is anomolous to treat it as a right,”
I really, really, hope you don’t mean this.
@ moonfirestorm
The main thing is that for those down range (getting shot at) the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier and smacking into things at high velocity is going to be much louder than the sound of gun itself and silencers do nothing to reduce that. Thier main benefit is hearing protection for the shooter. Even then, the retort of a conventional firearm with a detachable silencer/suppressor is still going to be something on the order of 100 – 120 decibels at the muzzle which isn’t exactly subtle. Making a gun “Hollywood quiet” requires extensive modifications to the action itself and restricting yourself to low-power/subsonic ammunition.
In short, silencers don’t really silence.
Come on, Brad. I preemptively volunteered the example of the Iraq was as one of when the right engaged in this behavior in a shameful way which I reject as immoral and blameworthy.
Terror attacks and immigration restrictions are another common example, yes (although terror attacks by people with refugee status are becoming increasingly common).
To act like I’m somehow pretending this is one-sided is incredibly dishonest on your part.
And just for context for those who haven’t seen it, here is Hillary’s tweet.
Her logic is premised on the notion that people only ran away because they heard gunshots, and that if the shooter had access to silencers, they would not have heard any gunshots.
Both of which are quite clearly false.
And once again, this is what she chose to talk about hours after the shooting. A hypothetical law about a piece of equipment the NRA wants to be easier to obtain (but currently isn’t), that wasn’t used in the shooting at all.
This is about as low as it gets, people.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
I disagree with this entirely. Saving lives is not a sufficient condition for a law being justified. Especially since the same law might both save and take lives. Even if a law saves lives on net, one has to consider the exact details of whose lives are saved and whose lives are taken and how that affects incentives and therefore behavior in society.
To say that a particular law wouldn’t work for a particular case is a very poor argument for the position that that particular law is not justified, because the law may be justified by its general effect on most things, not on any specific case. However, it IS a very good argument for the position that this specific case shouldn’t push us into passing that law. If that law is justified, then it is justified regardless of the specific case which it wouldn’t have prevented, and so arguing that this recent specific case which the law wouldn’t have prevented should compel us to pass that law is dishonest.
I mean, if you believe you’re an ubermensch who truly knows what’s best for others and you’re justified in using dishonest means to manipulate people into passing policy that you just KNOW is good regardless of the assessments of others who would also be subject to the policy, I guess that’s fine, but I think that’s likely to lead to bad outcomes, especially since that promotes the norm of your opponents also considering themselves ubermensch who are also justified in using dishonest means to manipulate people into passing their favored policy.
It might also be the case that we’re already well along this path, but it’s also not clear to me that continuing to escalate is likely to lead to better outcomes compared to finding ways to deescalate by discussing policy in an honest manner.
“We have to do something. This is something. Therefore, we have to do this.” I don’t find that line of argument convincing. The status quo might suck (IMHO it definitely does wrt guns in the USA), but it’s extremely easy to make things much much worse and extremely hard to make things better, even conditioned upon everyone having the best intentions.
My personal object-level opinion on this is that we need a strong, continuous 2nd Amendment repeal movement in the USA, one that honestly makes the case that freedom to own guns shouldn’t be an inherent right. One that isn’t reactionary to mass shootings, but incorporates them along with actual statistics on violence involving guns and science on what sorts of concrete societal changes are likely to follow if it is repealed. My naive speculation is that if we did this, we might have a glimmer of a hope of actually repealing it around the time my great-grandchildren retire.
More importantly, the question at hand was not “is it correct to treat [X] as a right,” the question was, “will millions of people be significantly more reluctant to seek help for mental issues if they are afraid [X] will be taken away,” the answer to which is, unequivocally, yes.
@Nick,
Well, if complacency is great, maybe you could go around saying explicitly that the correct response to Vegas is nothing.
@lvlln
I am in favor of keeping the second amendment. However, your post is entirely excellent (again) and makes me glad I didn’t jump in earlier and say the same things worse.
If you object to short-termism in favour of long-termism , that is fine, but everyone else has just objected to short termism, and offered nothing else, which adds up to nothing.
I’ll say it.
The correct response to the Vegas shooting is nothing. I have yet to see anyone make a proposal as to how it might have been prevented without also introducing a large number of potential problems and side-effects that might very well lead to even more deaths on net.
Where can I find your post attacking calls for immigration restrictions in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting by someone born and raised in the United States because you are “a rationalist-adjacent person” that hates arguments that are “blatantly illogical and dishonest and rely[] on emotional manipulation”?
I looked at this thread:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/15/open-thread-51-75/#comments
and all I found from you was pushback against gun control. You didn’t respond at all in thread where Le Maistre Chat suggested the real problem was allowing Muslim immigration.
If you expect others to go against their object level positions to call out arguments with meta-level problems, perhaps you should lead by example.
The correct response to Vegas is nothing.
Well, of course the milquetoast, NRA-friendly measures don’t work. But I don’t think you have considered the really radical measures.
A law prohibiting media coverage of mass murders, or allowing coverage only under strict restrictions as to form and content enforced via prior restraint, would save lives. There is no doubt about this. A significant fraction of mass murderers are either copycats or attention-seekers or both, and terrorism only works to the extent that it draws attention. Cutting off the supply of attention will probably save more lives than trying to cut off the supply of guns.
And if there’s any social benefit to having pictures of the massacre on page one of every newspaper in the country, rather than a text description on page three, I’m not seeing it.
So, Geek, are you in favor of such laws? Are you going to argue for such laws with the enthusiasm you show for gun control? And if not, why not?
Sure I have. But as someone who generally believes that guns are an effective deterrent to state violence (a far greater threat in the grand scheme of things than individual crime), I lump those into “things that would probably do more harm on net”
The correct [legislative] response to Vegas is nothing.
(Curses. Ninja’d again.)
Well, I’m not a free speech absolutist,and things like ISIS videos are already censored.
Never bring a gun to a nuke fight.
Tell that to North Korea, North Vietnam, ISIS, etc.
SAC did have plans to nuke American cities, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t as part of the first-line plan for dealing with internal unrest. Or the second-line plan, or for anything except maybe dealing with bioweapon attacks (and training, obviously).
@AnonYEMous, Aapje:
Thank you for your explanations of suppressors/silencers. I agree that they wouldn’t seem to have any relevance to the attack.
OK, but Stephen Paddock probably wasn’t a member of ISIS, and he seems to have been a bigger threat to ordinary Americans than all of ISIS combined, so what speech restrictions are you proposing in response to this shooting?
I’m serious. If you’re not just blowing smoke with “I’m not a free speech absolutist” and “If it saves one life…”, you should be out waving banners for the cause of censorship. What are your proposals, and where can I see you arguing for them?
This is kind of a nitpick, but I’m pretty sure that if you add up the death tolls of the Orlando and San Bernardino shootings, they still come out higher than the Las Vegas shooting, albeit not by all that much.
Also, I’m not so sure if I would say “probably” about him not being at least inspired by ISIS. Claiming unrelated attacks, while it has happened a few times recently, is not exactly common for them, and the way that they’re doubling down on this one is unheard of. Admittedly, they’re in a pretty desperate situation, so it being a false claim is far from beyond the realm of possibility, but I wouldn’t give more than 50/50 odds against it, at best.
Am I the only one who feels a little bit of tension between the “people do this so they can get famous” assumption and the fact that many mass shooters (seemingly including this one) do NOT leave a detailed manifesto describing their life, their struggles, and their exact motivations for mass-murder?
Why would anyone focused on fame and being remembered not promote themselves to the maximum extent possible? If he did it for ISIS, why wouldn’t he say so? If he did it because he hated Trump-supporting country music fans, why wouldn’t he say so? If he did it to spite his ex-wife, why wouldn’t he say so?
I agree with lvlln here.
As an external observer of America, it seems pretty clear to me that “an armed society is a safer society” was a plausible theory, and I suppose it’s good that somebody tested it, but it’s empirically false. A society where easy access to guns is legal, and carrying guns for self-defense is normalized, turns out to involve a lot of people getting shot. (Mass shootings are only a tiny component of this; stuff like suicide fatality rates, trivial gun access for criminals, police having to be constantly ready to shoot first, and the fatal escalation of confrontations when guns are close to hand all seem more important to me.)
I don’t know how the US gets out of its current hole. I agree with lvlln that it doesn’t happen quickly. It’s not just a legal change; it’s a cultural one.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s about “fame” exactly, at least not as we generally use the term. It’s more about people who feel powerless wanting to leave their mark on the world. It’s like an artist who doesn’t sign their work and refuses to give interviews, or an author who uses a pen name. They might not want people to know about THEM, per se, but they want people to remember what they DID.
And regardless of whether they leave a manifesto or any other explanation of why they did what they did, knowing that the news media is going to be talking about you 24/7 certainly fulfills that requirement.
Is your implicit assumption “whatever is, is justified”? If not, I don’t see how you can get from the fact that people convicted of sex offenders are restricted to the conclusion that the restriction makes sense, which you need for your argument.
If that is your assumption, why doesn’t it also imply that the present lack of the gun control legislation you presumably support makes sense? Either the fact that the legal system has a rule is evidence that it’s a good rule or it isn’t–you can’t have it both ways.
Being free to express your views in print is also not a necessity–billions of humans have survived without it. Neither is being free to follow the religion of your choice.
So your argument applies equally to the rights–by your account not rights–guaranteed by the First Amendment.
@bean
That is not a typo. Here are decibel measurements. For supersonic .308, suppressed decibels are between 138.6 and 149.7. For subsonic .308, suppressed decibels are between 121.3 and 137.1.
Note that a lot of hunters are very unhappy with subsonic ammunition, due to its inaccuracy and lack of killing power on larger game such as deer or hogs, because the bullets don’t expand when they go so slow. So body shots and even neck shots are far less lethal as a result. If it has trouble killing deer or hogs, it has trouble killing humans.
Bonus video: super slowmotion video of transparent suppressors being fired. You can see the hot gases collecting in the suppressor and dying out there, rather than exiting through the muzzle.
Out of all the obnoxious arguments I’ve seen in this space, this is one of the most obnoxious, if only because thirty seconds of honest thought about it should have shown that it was stupid.
Empirically, rebellions and insurgencies usually fail. It turns out that the bigger, better armed, better funded force usually wins; who knew? But when we hear about a truck bound for Mayadin full of DShKs, we don’t go “eh, we have Hellfires, it’s probably fine”. We shoot one of those Hellfires at it and blow it up. Because those weapons are a force multiplier; because in ISIS’s possession they mean a longer and more expensive fight for us and our allies, despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly match our firepower no matter how lax we feel like being.
If I had to bet on the outcome of a hypothetical American insurgency, I wouldn’t be betting on the insurgents. But the fact remains that suppressing an insurgency would be more expensive in money, resources and lives than suppressing e.g. Occupy was; and suppressing an insurgency armed with AR-15s would be more expensive than suppressing one armed with shotguns and air rifles. Governments are quite aware of this. Arms therefore act as an deterrent toward things that could spark one — without anyone firing a shot.
Now I’m curious. I am assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the context is mass shootings, not suicides, gun accidents, or other lethal outcomes associated with firearms.
What radical measures would prevent someone who wanted to kill a lot of random people and was willing to die in the process from doing so?
That might be true, but I don’t think we know it. There are a lot of variables that could affect the rate of violence in a society. We don’t have an example of a society just like the U.S. except with much stricter restrictions on gun ownership.
Consider the much simpler question: Does making it legal for ordinary citizens to carry firearms increase or decrease violence? The first serious attempt to answer that question, by Lott and Mustard, produced support for legalizing concealed carry. It set off a long academic controversy which, so far as I can tell, is still unresolved. I think it’s clear that the predictions of the opponents of the change–large increases in violence as ordinary people lost their tempers and pulled out guns–have been contradicted by the data. But we still don’t know whether allowing concealed carry makes violence somewhat more common or somewhat less.
A typical .308 comes out of the gun doing Mach 2+, and they’re surprised when something doing less than half that is fairly ineffective? Hmm…. Methinks the ammo isn’t the only problem.
I’d be very interested to see the noise source breakdown from a subsonic .308. I suspect it’s still mostly noise from the firing. There just isn’t that much noise that can come from a small, subsonic chunk of metal. The quietest guns bear this out. The De Lisle Carbine was measured at 85.5 dB, as opposed to 117-140 dB for modern suppressed pistols.
Sometimes the medium is the message, as a kind of famous guy once said.
And a whole lot of famous people rather self-evidently don’t care what they get famous for, why people remember their name, so long as they do. If your model of fame is “a tool that increases the number of people who listen to my political arguments”, you’re missing an awful lot of human behavior. The Vegas Shooter is famous. He may remain famous longer as an unsolved mystery than as a man with a known but petty motive.
Or maybe he had some more specific message that we haven’t yet seen. Maybe he really was radicalized by ISIS months ago, kept his own trail squeaky clean so nobody could pre-empt his attack in the planning stage and trusted ISIS to get the word out after the fact. Maybe there was a manifesto that Vegas PD is sitting on because they don’t think this sort of thing should be publicized. I’m betting on “just wanted the attention, didn’t care what for or how he got it”, but it’s still early.
Even if all this were true though, couldn’t he have easily done more? Wouldn’t a crazy, wacky, manifesto increase his fame?
Take the Batman guy for instance. At least he went all out. Picked a very theatrical venue. Showed up to court with a giant red afro. Deliberately talks as if he’s cosplaying as The Joker. This is man who is doing it for the effect, and is trying to maximize his own fame and importance.
Most of these other guys… I dunno, I just don’t see it.
My personal object-level opinion on this is that we need a strong, continuous 2nd Amendment repeal movement in the USA, one that honestly makes the case that freedom to own guns shouldn’t be an inherent right.
As a strong supporter of 2A, I’ll come right out and say that I think this would be an extraordinarily welcome method of going about it. It would be honest, rational, and above-board.
I also happen to think it would run out of steam quickly, because I believe that the honest, rational, and above-board argument for gun rights is much stronger*. But even if it petered out, it would still be educational. (And on the off chance that it won the day, it would likewise still be educational.)
*The value of a reasonable equalizer in personal defense is based on the natural inequality of personal defense, and the empirical evidence that there exist people willing to exploit such inequalities to get things in ways we would all consider illegitimate. So far, that reasonable equalizer is a personal firearm; no other innovation beats it in equalization and effectiveness**.
**That it is lethal is also valuable in indirect but very real fashion. Namely, permitting anyone access to guns by default sends the message that, by default, everyone is being entrusted with lethal force, and the responsibility for applying it. Many Americans take this cultural value seriously; it’s evident every time I attend a shooting event, or even an informal get-together. It’s everyone’s personal piece of power, apparent whenever one points it downrange and puts a real hole in a real target. A vote or a stump speech is nowhere near as palpable.
So how come when the second amendment was interpreted such that it didn’t protect an individual right the reaction wasn’t “Well I disagree but the amendment was drafted in 1790 and is kind of outdated, so let’s get a movement together to put a new amendment in with very clear updated language”?
Because it seems to me what you are calling “honest, rational, and above-board” is playing the game to lose and since you want them to lose, that works for you.
Are there any policy issues that you support where you think it would be possible to win at least partially victories at the statutory or case law level, but out of principle you forswear those options in favor of only working towards a constitutional amendment?
When you have two parties stuck in a defect-defect loop, and one suggests “maybe we should stop defecting”, it’s not a convincing argument for the other to say “if you *really* believed that you wouldn’t be defecting!”
I think most 2A supporters regard the 2A as very clear, albeit awkwardly worded.
The fact that all the precedent modern gun control relies upon was rooted in highly-motivated rulings supporting disarming black people in the South, and that gun rights we’re otherwise never touched, suggests maybe they have a point.
But at any rate, do you think it would be impossible to amend the Constitution to remove gun rights? Why?
As someone with a bit of experience with suppressors, I wanted to add a bit more information.
Using suppressors also comes with downsides. Standard firearms are balanced to be as comfortable as possible for expected uses [citation needed]. Suppressors weigh a lot more in real life than they do in video games. Looking at several models for 5.56mm suppressors find that they all weigh nearly a pound. Suppressors screw onto the end of the barrel of a gun, which means that it’s located to as to create the greatest moment of torque. This makes the gun much less comfortable to hold for long periods of time.
Next, suppressors have to handle a large amount of force. This means that either they need to be really heavy, or they can’t handle a large amount of fire. There are suppressors rated for full-auto fire, but see again, heavy. Someone who uses a light-weight model with a high rate of fire is much more likely to see failure combined with something exploding in their face.
Finally (my favorite). Banning suppressors for about-to-be-murderers is just dumb. The standard threading for suppressors is the exact same threading used on standard automotive oil filters. What this means is that the difference between someone who changes their own oil and someone who’s committed a Federal felony subject to a 10 year prison term is making a hole through the bottom of an oil filter. No special tools needed! If you’re lazy, just use a hammer and piece of rebar. So if the shooting in Vegas wanted to use a suppressor and didn’t want to buy a real one legally (a pain, but not actually hard), or buy one illegally, they could have made one on the spot trivially.
As another gun person:
A suppressor is, properly considered, a piece of safety equipment for shooting ranges. They fuck with the bullet a bit, making them suboptimal to use otherwise – which is why they aren’t generally used by the military, though they do have a few niche uses you can research if you are interested. (Seriously, if they made snipers deadlier, don’t you think we’d be putting them on our snipers’ rifles?)
A suppressor won’t protect your hearing alone. Standard ear muffs won’t protect your hearing alone, although they do make the volume level comfortable, like listening to music at too high a volume lev. In both cases the gun is still loud enough to harm you. (You can also mix ear muffs and ear plugs.)
Together, they bring the noise to a safe level.
People talking about silencers have watched too much TV.
@Thegnskald
I object to the wording but leaving that aside I think it is impossible because we not only have a supermajority requirement but we have a supermajority requirement as against highly non-representative bodies.
States representing about 5% of the population can block a constitutional amendment, and within those states either the governor or a majority of either House of the legislature can exercise the state’s veto (except for Nebraska which only has one House). So potentially as few as 2.5% of the population before counting turnout and gerrymandering can block a constitutional amendment.
I think a majority and even super-majority could be built up over time. But not near unanimity.
States are one of two ways to pass amendments, the other being the legislature.
So what is to prevent it from happening there?
No, that’s not true. There are two ways to propose amendments: 2/3rds of each house of congress or a convention called by 2/3rds of the states.
Either way a proposal doesn’t become an amendment unless it is ratified by 3/4ths of the states.
Ah, my mistake.
So which 12 states do you expect to be controlled by the 2.5% of voters determined not to pass an obviously good amendment?
ETA:
This probably comes off as trolling, but I think you are being very disingenuous by claiming the issue is that a tiny special interest group would sabotage the amendment. The problem isn’t the tiny special interest group, and you know it. The problem is that most US citizens, including those who support restrictions, would oppose such an amendment.
This isn’t a case of minority opposition preventing social change. This is a case of a minority wanting social change the majority strongly disagrees with.
Again, I object to your language. I didn’t suggest that my preferences are “obviously good”. That’s your own trolling, to use your term.
What I suggested is that over time my preferences could be a majority (they might even be now) or even a reasonable sized super-majority of the *population* but are unlikely to anytime in the foreseeable future be the near universal required for a constitutional amendment.
Aside from Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Delaware I would expect the other 14 smallest states (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, Idaho, West Virginia, and Nebraska) to be comparative laggards were there to be increasing support for repealing the second amendment across the nation. The next one, New Mexico, might not be, but the three after–Kansas, Nevada, and Arkansas–likely would.
Does it really need to be nigh-universal, though? We need the legislature of 3/4 of the states to ratify the amendment, which means we need legislatures of 38 states to ratify it, which means we need 50+ε% of the legislature of 38 states, which means we need about 50% of the population of 38 states to support ratifying it (obviously there’s a lot of room for freedom in translating from the desires of the populace to desires of the legislature, but I think for any given position, approximating the proportion of the legislature with the proportion of the population isn’t too bad. At the least, I think huge swings where, say, 95% of the population is needed to achieve a 50+ε% advantage among the state legislature would be very rare outliers).
This seems like a very high bar to cross, especially in this political environment, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say it’s nigh-universal. It’s certainly true that just 2.5% or even less of the population can hold up an amendment by being in the right places, but I think it’s also true that overcoming them doesn’t require us to win over the other 97.5% – just a proportion of them in the right places to overcome the 2.5% in those areas where the 2.5% have that outsized leverage.
@David Friedman:
My understanding is that this is the most comprehensive meta-analysis. A few highlights, although I invite you to peruse it yourself:
Moreover, while we don’t have an example of a society exactly like the US but with no guns, we have a number of other developed nations that restrict guns and are reasonably similar. Canada is one example. The UK is another. Both of them have much lower rates of gun homicide. I think you have to be willfully blind to look at the unusually high firearm homicide rate in the US (given that it is a wealthy, developed country), the uniquely high rate of gun ownership, and (especially) the cultural attachment to guns as everyday implements of self-defense, and not detect a pattern.
On concealed carry specifically: concealed carry permits belong disproportionately to conscientious, law-abiding gun owners — precisely the people you would expect to be responsible with their gun usage. If we could rely on everybody to be conscientious and obey the law, a lot of problems would be easier. I am reminded of a conversation a few threads ago, about the difference in safety between driving and flying. Driving allows you to take personal responsibility for your own safety, while flying leaves you reliant on another. Nevertheless, flying is a lot safer than driving, in large part because you don’t have to worry about all the ways in which other drivers are making a hash of their personal responsibility. In an analogous way, the downside of widespread gun ownership — even to a responsible gun owner — is that you don’t just have to worry about your own gun.
… compare rates of gun homicide, and not homicide.
@Randy M:
Be my guest. Sort that list by (per-capita) rate. The US is #94. Tell me which countries above the US on that list you see as reasonable comparisons. Based on my quick scan, it looks to me like the next most homicidal developed nation might be Belgium, down at #149, with less than half of the US homicide rate. Canada’s at #158, with just over a third of the US homicide rate. Australia’s at #179. The UK is at #183: the US has 5.3 times more homicides per capita.
Thanks, that’s one step towards making an honest comparison.
Thanks for the link. I find it less convincing than you do. Some comments:
Currently, forty-one states either permit concealed carry without a permit (ten states) or are “shall issue” states, meaning that the issuing authority must show a reason to refuse to issue a permit. Only a small minority of states are “may issue,” meaning that the issuer has discretion on whether to issue. So while someone with a criminal record might not be able to get a permit, I don’t think there is any restriction to the conscientious.
If you look at the article’s summary of the concealed carry controversy, which I followed in its early stages, you see a back and forth debate, at least in part between people who want to get one answer to the question and people who want to get a different answer. The same pattern, and some of the same players, seem to show up in other parts of the controversy.
Part of the problem is suggested by bits such as
or
If you look for enough different things, you will get significant results for some of them whether or not there is anything really there–I don’t remember Scott’s term for that problem.
How did the rates compare before restrictive laws went into effect in the U.K.? I’m remembering that when GKC got married, he went into a shop and bought a revolver to protect his bride with.
Switzerland is the usual counterexample. Because of their military system, possession of firearms, including fully automatic firearms, is widespread, but the murder rate is considerably lower than in either the U.K. or Canada.
And none of the three is all that much like the U.S.
It might be pointless for me to respond to this, since Gobbobobble’s reply summed up the main problem with this line of thinking and anything else would just be pedantry on my part, but there are a lot of other problems with this line of argument that I wanted to address.
First, there has never been any time in US history where the second amendment was interpreted such that it didn’t protect an individual right. The Supreme Court has held, explicitly, that the second amendment protects an individual right as far back as Presser v. Illinois in 1886, and no decision, not even Miller as some anti-gun advocates would have you believe, ever overturned that decision. There have also been state Supreme Court decisions that call it an individual right as far back as the early 1800s.
Even the Miller decision never said anything about it not being an individual right. It only said that it applied only to the sort of weapons an average militia member might reasonably be expected to use as their primary service weapon. Owning those weapons was still an individual right, though. There has never been any confusion over what a right being reserved for “the people” means.
(And, as others have pointed out, that decision was used mostly as an excuse to ban the guns most likely to be used by/affordable to black people, but that is neither here nor there.)
Heller never overturned anything in the Miller decision, either. It didn’t need to, because the Miller decision never said anything about whether or not the second amendment was an individual right, in the first place.
It’s true that there have been times where the second amendment was interpreted less broadly than it is today, and there have also been times when the courts turned a blind eye to it and ignored violations of it that would have been quickly stamped out today, but there has never been a time where it was not considered an individual right.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there ever was a point in history where it was not considered an individual right. Even in this case, there would be no need for pro-gun advocates to make the argument you’re suggesting.
Even if it were not an individual right, there is no amendment banning personal ownership of firearms; all they would need to lobby for is regular legislation allowing it. On the other hand, a blanket ban on and confiscation of guns would clearly violate the second amendment, so the only way to honestly lobby for such a thing would be to lobby for the amendment to be changed. That argument might make sense if there were an amendment banning the private ownership of guns, and if that were the case, then yes, the appropriate action for the gun lobby to take would be to lobby to have that amendment changed, (just like when we banned alcohol via amendment and that didn’t work out the way we hoped) and trying to work around it and pretend that the amendment just doesn’t say what it clearly says, because they don’t like it, would absolutely be dishonest, and far from above-board.
(As far as it being “rational” goes, I believe that was in reference to the idea that almost every other gun control proposal short of a blanket ban and confiscation would be ineffective, and thus irrational. But such a ban would clearly be unconstitutional, so the only honest, above-board, AND rational approach is to lobby to get rid of the second amendment.)
Are there any policy issues that you support where you think it would be possible to win at least partially victories at the statutory or case law level, but out of principle you forswear those options in favor of only working towards a constitutional amendment?
It’s hard for me to think of one. The sorts of things I would support the federal government doing, such as national defense or negotiation of treaties, are already authorized by the Constitution, so I don’t have to insist on an amendment.
Vorkon, meanwhile, gave an even better argument than I could have on why 2A was never interpreted as not being an individual right. I can only add that to do so would be to somehow assign different meanings to “the people” in the Second than it has in the First, Fourth, Ninth, Tenth, and Seventeenth Amendments, among perhaps other places.
And the US states with roughly similar ethnic makeup as Canada, Belgium, and Australia, have similarly low homicide rates.
But those nations don’t have as many rednecks as the US as a whole does, among other things. Not as many Borderers and Cavaliers and other cultural groups with vaguely associated backgrounds. When Scott looked into this, that was by far the biggest factor. Gun ownership was a minor perturbation by comparison.
So show me the modern nation where half the population comes from honor cultures, half comes from dignity cultures (or now victimization cultures), some damn fool tries to force them all to live under the same laws, and they don’t end up with homicide rates comparable to the United States. If all you’ve got is countries with the same number of factories per capita, or whatever “developed” means in this context, you’re going to need to explain why I should consider that at all relevant.
@Paul Brinkley
It’s fair enough to not to have anything that qualifies, but from my perspective it makes your praise of lvlln ring a little hollow.
You think it is admirable that he is trying to go about accomplishing his (and my) goal in the most difficult way possible, but him not accomplishing it is exactly what you want. And championing the principle costs you nothing because there’s nothing you want that the principle says you have to do the hard way.
Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that exactly, but when Gobbobobble said you were proposing “why don’t we stop defecting”, that wasn’t quite right was it? It sounds like you don’t think you were defecting to begin with. So really it was more like “why don’t you stop defecting” or more accurately but also verbosely “it’s great that you are one the good ones that isn’t defecting unlike those other gun control advocates”.
The set of issues over the last hundred years where:
– a right or prohibition exists in the Constitution
– which could be limited legislatively or on the state or local level in some legal environment
– but for which an amendment was contemporarily at least vaguely plausible
…is pretty much empty aside from gun rights. Abortion might count depending on how seriously you take Roe’s implicit right to privacy, but it’s more common for its opponents to deny that right, and honestly that’s probably a stronger legal position (I’m saying that as someone who’s generally pro-choice). Narrow attacks on First Amendment rights are common, but the right in its broad sense is so sacred that repeal isn’t going to happen short of a cartoonish dystopia.
Disputes over the Fourth Amendment all boil down to quibbling over wording, and the rest of the Bill of Rights is either totally uncontroversial or basically a dead letter. The Equal Rights Amendment was a case of pushing for amendment over local action, but didn’t infringe substantially on the existing text. Extensions to the franchise, like lowering the voting age in the Sixties or adding women early in the 20th century, couldn’t really be done except with an amendment.
Repeal of Prohibition, maybe? That’s all I can think of.
The eighth amendment and its sharp restrictions on the use of the death penalty might be a good candidate.
It’s a cheap shot, but I’d respond to this by listing the states that didn’t ratify the ERA.
I’m sorry if I’ve missed anything in this super-mega-thread, but a few things I didn’t see anyone mention:
– I’m told suppressors make it impossible for bullets to be linked to specific guns through forensic ballistic analysis. That may be outdated but that’s the explanation I was given for why they’re banned.
– To the people who say “guns aren’t a necessity” – you do realize a large proportion of Americans live in places where animal attacks are a real concern, right? You can argue for city-wide bans of firearms, but a nation-wide firearms ban would be straight-up murder.
– This has been brought up but I didn’t see it really addressed; why is “gun violence” special? I don’t really understand how banning firearms is supposed to reduce homicide in general, especially mass murder; everyone has a car and explosives are pretty easy to make.
Don’t give me the “people can’t make bombs” thing; the recipe for ANFO is on Wikipedia – heck, it’s in the name – and you’re not gonna stop people buying diesel and stealing fertilizer.
– How is a gun ban supposed to work anyway? Any machine shop can make a rifle. Sure there’s gonna be way less market for firearms than drugs but I doubt anyone who really intends to murder someone would have trouble getting their hands on one.
Didn’t some journalist look in to how long it takes to get a gun in the U.K. and manage to get a hold of one by the end of the day?
It sounds like you don’t think you were defecting to begin with.
It’s true that I don’t think the gun rights side is defecting. Quite the opposite; I can think of no occasion on which it got its way by making an end run around the amendment process.
I want lvlln to fail at one level, but at another level, if he’s going to succeed, I want it to be a pure success, and that means a new amendment. Otherwise it’s an end run.
…I can think of one thing now that I’d like to see change, and that’s the “first past the post” system of electing Presidents and Congress. I’d like both to switch to some form of IRV or Condorcet – I realize anything could be gamed, but I suspect these would be harder, and more importantly, would give voters more viable choices. But that would probably require an amendment; if so, then anything less would strike me as illegitimate.
This isn’t borne of me simply wanting guns around. It’s borne of me wanting respect for the law upheld. If anything can be made law by abusing the legislative process, no matter how righteous one may consider it, I expect it to look like a sham. The more such shams are pressed onto the public, the more I expect the public to lose respect for all laws, legitimate or not. I think it’s unfair to hold my respect for constitutional process against me.
In the wake of our national tragedy in Las Vegas, it is far past time to enact a commonsense policy with broad support among the American people: corporate tax cuts.
If you disagree, you have blood on your hands.
@toastengineer
Striations on the bullet are created by the rifling of the barrel (there are grooves in the barrel to make the bullet rotate, which greatly improves accuracy). Suppressors don’t have rifling and high quality suppressors don’t touch the bullet. Low quality suppressors may cause a burr or slightly mess up the striations, but it’s doubtful whether that makes a comparison impossible.
It also only matters if the police finds the gun, but not the suppressor. I wonder how many people throw away their expensive suppressors? Not many, I think.
If they do throw their suppressor away, it’s more likely to be a homemade one. They are not that hard to make, nor do they require special equipment and obviously people can’t be stopped from doing that.
Also, suppressors aren’t banned in the US, they require a background check + a $200 tax stamp. So the person who explained you why they are banned was clearly ill informed.
@JohnSchilling
The arrangement to avoid glamorising ISIS was put into place without branding it as an anti free speech measure. Did I mention that no one is a free speech absolutist? People will accept obvious common sense exceptions to free speech readily, so long as the c word is not used
The US has much more of than other places.
There are known techniques for
reducing it.
The US, uniquely, has a lobby dedicated to blocking such measures.
Any chemistry lab can make meth. How is a drug ban supposed to work?
Poorly, and with a great deal of collateral damage.
Which arrangement is this? Because I don’t see any shortage of high-profile media coverage of the carnage when ISIS attacks Orlando, Nice, etc.
Then why don’t I see you arguing for such restrictions w/re mass murderers generally? They would do far more good, and if you are correct they would be “readily accepted” whereas proposals for gun control never seem to go anywhere in part because they do incite the opposition of absolutists.
Why are you arguing for the impossible strategy that won’t do any good, instead of the allegedly easy one that would?
Much the same can be said of “knife violence” in the UK. Is this the sort of thing we have to look forward to, when the Coalition of Ancient Geeks have managed to ban guns in the United States,
And any high school shop class, makerspace, or even decent home workshop can make submachine guns. How is a gun ban supposed to work, again?
@John Schilling
“Much the same can be said of “knife violence” in the UK.”
Can it? How does the UK’s knife crime rate compare with the US’s?
“And any high school shop class, makerspace, or even decent home workshop can make submachine guns. How is a gun ban supposed to work, again?”
TheAncientGeek’s point is that although illegal meth labs are possible, banning meth nevertheless has some effect.
@rlms
Granted, but I am under the impression that AncientGeek believes the impact of the War on Drugs has been largely negative. As such “what makes you think the War on Guns will turn out differently” seems like a reasonable rebuttal.
A lot of people do prohibitions wrong. The people who really really want something, get it (economists call this “high-value uses”. It reduces more casual (low-value) use. There are also supply-side effects (e.g., you can make alcohol out of a ton of different foodstuffs, basically by just leaving it in a cabinet for too long). Elasticities matter on both sides, and there are always salient differences that people elide over far too quickly. It drives me nuts whenever someone says, “Banning Drug X can’t work because alcohol prohibition didn’t work,” or, “Banning guns works as poorly as banning Drug Y.” How come no one ever invokes banning drywall with asbestos?!
For example, prohibition of alcohol. It probably cut down a lot of casual use (and reduced the negative effects of this casual use). But difficulty in truly reducing supply (what are you going to do, ban fruit?!) meant it would always be an uphill battle.
Moving to another example, prohibition of other drugs likely reduces consumption (regardless of what you see in the Rorschach test of Portugal). Different drugs have different supply-side issues (yes, we can probably do a lot to eliminate poppies without having to ban all fruit; meth can be made with cough drops; most of these drugs take up less volumetric space than alcohol, which is relevant for some enforcement efforts).
Guns are, yet again, their own thing. Probably the most relevant issue for this discussion is that prohibition cuts hardest at casual use, while “high-value” uses are mostly still achieved (even if some are made more difficult). That is, if you’re a sport target shooter or someone who likes to hunt a couple weekends a year, you’re probably not going to own a gun post-prohibition; if you’re fearing for your life in the face of a rival gang or planning some brazen murderin’ to get in the papers…
No. Individual cases of restricting the rights of the mentally ill have individual justifications, which are generally too obvious to be worth stating. On the other hand, the principle that anyone should be allowed to do anything irrespective of the risks to others is extraordinary, and requires much more support than it has so far been given, ie. nothing.
It is not a physical necessity. It is a necessity for maintaining a society with certain freedoms.
Now your argument is circular. The right to bear arms is a necessity for maintaining a society with certain freedoms–the freedom to bear arms.
Was the remark meant to be ironic or something? The very wording of the second amendment is its “being necessary to the security of a free State.”
I don’t assume that the person I am arguing with agrees with that–the fact that something is in the Constitution doesn’t mean it is true. My point was that he started with the idea that rights were only relevant to necessities, writing:
Then, when I pointed out other rights he presumably believed in that were not for necessities, he tried to revise his claim in a way that made it entirely empty:
He wasn’t willing to admit that he didn’t believe what he said the first time, although he obviously didn’t.
If that argument is so compelling, why aren’t there strong pro-gun-right movements in every country that doesn’t have gun rights?
You are assuming that people need guns to protect themselves from other people with guns. That’s a Molochian equilibrium. The actual anti-gun argument is a special case of Eluan equilibria being better.
@DavidFriedman
I never said physical necessity. so I am not reneging on anything. Rather, it is my opponents who are strawmanning me.
You can prevent mentally ill people from owning legal guns, and you can prevent legal arsenals, to name two pieces of low hanging fruit.
@ControlsFreak
..you are not going to put together a personal arsenal of 39 legal weapons any place that has strict gun laws.
@JohnSchilling
yes, there was a rise in knife violence, and measures were taken. Nobody said “do nothing”. What is your point?
The amusing part here is the way “Gun Control Works, Just Look At the UK and Australia” ignores the actual data coming out of those countries…
UK Homicide rate 1967-2015 (scroll to figure 2.1, handgun ban was January of 1997)
Australian Homicide Rate 1989-2006 (NFA was 1996)
Meanwhile countries with more permissive gun ownership laws and even reasonably strong gun cultures also in Europe are quietly ignored, even the ones that actually have lower rates of homicide than the “Look at these awesome confiscation countries” like the UK and Australia. It’s surprising, but there are still a few countries in Europe with a national Shall-Issue CCW (something that the US does NOT have). This is all without going into the elevated levels of other violent crime such as robbery, assault, home invasion, etc.
A cursory review of the evidence over a decent timescale, rather than deliberately cherrypicking in order to get the results you want to see, will show you that the homicide rates were far lower even before their extreme gun control policies, that while you can find downward inflection points in the trends they do NOT correlate at all with gun control measures (this is similarly true of US gun control policies at both the national and state level).
There are certainly regulations that are useful. However, most of the ones that are useful have already been enacted (along with many that are NOT useful), and the remaining low-hanging fruit have been thoroughly poisoned by those who see the only acceptable long term goal as total confiscation.
It has the effect of the stuff being cheap, plentiful, and highly available, and yet full of toxins. It has the effect of providing cash employment to jittery young men who have unnaturally heavy oddly shaped metal weights in the pockets of their jackets, to bring the topic back to origin.
Two such young men I passed on the sidewalk on my walk to work today, not in a blasted out slum, but in the downtown heart of thriving growing city. We nodded to each other as we passed.
I’ve never felt need or desire to purchase from them what they have for sale. However, I am confident that if I do, they will be faster, prompter, and less inclined to demand copies of my IDs and paperwork and filing reports to the multiple busybody Federal and State level agencies than my experience would be if I walked into any of pharmicies I passed on the same walk, and then attempted to get the attention of the dead-eyed apathetic wage slaves attending the pharmacy desk and attempt to purchase a bottle of cold medicine that actually works.
So, yeah, in short, the meth ban doesn’t work. At all.
….
For the same reason that there wasn’t a Better Business Bureau in Soviet Russia, and isn’t a Recreational Opioid User’s movement in the United States today.
Pro-X-right movements are for things that are on the edge of the local Overton window, or more probably the local government’s limit of tolerance. Things that are legal but in danger of being banned, and things that are illegal but widely practiced and without effective enforcement. If a thing is seriously we-will-actually-put-you-in-jail-for-this prohibited, everybody who actually cares enough to do it will by definition be a criminal dealing with the black market, and will be highly disinclined to call attention to that by joining the associated pro-X-right movement. Everybody else, except for maybe a handful of extremely naive and/or selfless idealists, won’t care enough to do anything.
@AncientGeek
So, I post graphs from the official government sources showing that trends in homicide rates are completely untethered from the respective major gun control legislation in the two countries you’re using as your primary example, and your idea of a convincing rebuttal is to quote raw numbers for the last year.
I believe the operative phrase is “That’s not even an argument”.
It looks like the Australian link didn’t paste correctly, so I’ll include it below:
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
I believe I have links for statistics prior to 1989 if anyone is interested, and David Friedman has more data in the next OT, but that link should be sufficient to establish that, again, the homicide rates were quite low before the legislation, that the trendline starts prior to the National Firearms Agreement (a modest downward trend this time predating the legislation by nearly a decade, rather than the upward one of the UK ), and that there is no correlation between passage of the NFA and an inflection point of that trendline.
“Necessary to achieve some goal” is an empty criterion. “Necessary to achieve a particular goal that I am in favor of” makes “necessity” sound like an objective standard when it’s just shorthand for “what I think is needed for results I want.”
I asked:
AncientGeek answered:
Unfortunately, not all potential mass killers are as lacking in ingenuity as you are. There are lots of ways of killing lots of people that don’t require even one gun, let alone an arsenal.
This is exactly the type of blithe statement that led me to make my original comment. It comes with no analysis for why it’s right; it’s just a bald assertion. It’s like if someone talked about banning meth, and responded to, “If you were planning on spending a week droppin’ chemicals in a hell of an extended bender…” with, “…you are not going to put together a week’s worth of meth any place that has strict meth laws.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. Either way, you clearly haven’t argued for your conclusion.
@CF
It’s based on how things work in the UK. If you apply for a second gun license, the authorities will want to know why one is not enough. The logic of “if it is almost impossible to get one gun, you are not going to get 39” is not that mysterious.
@DavidFriedman
No shit. Although that is trotted out multiple times each time we have this debate, I had completely forgotten.
Well, I had better make my usual rebuttal: is it still completely pointless to save just one life?
It is still the case that I can show and have shown how specific legislation would have stopped specific incidents.
Well, I had better make my usual rebuttal: is it still completely pointless to save just one life?
To which the usual counter is “it is, if it costs lives somewhere else”.
No, you have not. I just reviewed every post in this thread and at no point have you made specific policy arguments about specific incidents.
The closest you come is to say “The UK had good laws before Dunblane and better ones after”, and the claim that stronger gun control laws will prevent “arsenals”, which is A) an unsupported assertion that is trivially disproven by a number of so-called “arsenals” found in high gun control countries, and B) irrelevant to the discussion.
If you had bothered to educate yourself on this issue, you would know that while many active shooters amass large numbers of weapons, the actual killing is done with one or two, making the “arsenal” argument a red herring.
Quoting myself:
Quoting PB
To which the usual rebuttal is: if not having guns costs more lives than having guns, where are all those dead bodies with bullet holes in them coming from?
Your claim was:
Still waiting for the specific real-world legislation that would have prevented specific incidents. So far, you’ve offered
“stop mentally ill people from owning guns”, which A) does not address mentally ill people obtaining someone else’s guns or illegal guns, and B) does not address people not previously adjudged mentally ill (as in Vegas and in fact Dunblane).
and
“stop people from putting together ‘arsenals'” which I already pointed out is a specious point as active shooters do not actually need or in fact use ‘arsenals’.
So, again, which SPECIFIC legislation would stop which SPECIFIC incidents, which was your claim?
@1Z
I think I see your claim more clearly, with:
That’s probably as true as saying, “You can prevent legal meth stockpiles,” so I think we’ve found a point of agreement.
Yet another appeal to to “only perfection is any good at all”. You need to think in terms of the marginal life saved.
I have addressed Vegas and
Dunblane separately.
.
Now you need to argue for a 100%, substitution principle.
I asked:
AncientGeek answered:
I pointed out that there were ways to kill lots of people that didn’t involve guns. He replied:
If that is your rebuttal, you are conceding that your answer to my question was false. I didn’t ask “what radical measures would save one life.”
Saving one life is not pointless but neither is it equivalent to preventing someone who wanted to kill a lot of people from doing so, which is what I asked about. And while not pointless, it’s less worthwhile than saving hundreds or thousands of lives.
No. Not even a little bit. Like, this is really really dumb, and it’s why I originally commented about elasticities.
39 isn’t even that large. I know lots of people who own more than that, and guns aren’t even their primary hobby.
They just kinda… accumulate, just like power and hand tools do for people who do woodcrafts, kitchen appliances and pantry items do for foodies, or boxes of knitting and sewing tools and notions do for people who are into textile crafts.
Once again, your claim was:
Not “Marginally mitigated” (which you still have not presented evidence for, I might add), not “Made somewhat less likely to occur”. Stopped.
You have set the terms for your claim. I am simply holding you accountable to your own statements in this thread. If you would like to formally state that your claim that you have demonstrated how specific policies would have stopped specific incidents was false, we can talk about questions of mitigation.
Regarding Dunblane, you have made two statements:
1)
Which is an opinion that doesn’t even rise to the level of argument by assertion. Ok, so, you like the UK laws. This proves…what, exactly?
And you also claimed that Dunblane
2)
This is what is called an assertion, for which you did not and have not provided even rhetorical, much less empirical support. The only specific policies you have suggested is banning the ownership of firearms by the mentally ill and preventing the creation of ‘arsenals’. We have a great deal of empirical evidence showing that arsenals are not a contributing factor to mass shootings and that in fact mass shooters generally use only one or two weapons. We also have many cases, to include Dunblane and Vegas, where the shooters did not have a diagnosis from a mental health professional adjudging them mentally ill, and thus would not have been restricted.
So, again, want to perhaps reconsider your claims?
@CF
If you have a valid argument based on explicit and defensible premises, by all means display it.
Is there a point to that? You are surely not arguing that large arsenals pose no problem?
I’m pretty sure that’s precisely what he’s arguing, and if he’s not, I’m going to do so now:
The Las Vegas shooter did not need so many weapons to cause the damage he did. Simply swapping magazines more often, and swapping back and forth between a small handful of rifles as the others overheated, would have worked just fine. No, I have no idea why he brought so many either, but I assume it has something to do with whatever power fantasy, sense of helplessness, paranoia, or whatever else drove him to do what he did. It’s just one of the many, many things that’s been making it so hard for people to understand his motive and reasoning.
Unless you have an army to equip, or poor enough security as to make them easy to steal, (or four arms, I suppose) 200 guns are no more dangerous than 2.
So who is supposed to have the solution to save hundreds or thousands up their sleeve..me or you?
It’s easy to suggest to measures that could be implemented quickly with minor effects. Call those type (a) solutions.
It’s very difficult to come up with measures that
could be implemented quickly and make a major difference. As everyone knows, immediate mass disarmament means honest citizens are disarmed and criminals aren’t. Call those type (b) solutions.
It’s also possible to come up with long term solutions that could make a major difference. Call those type (c) solutions.
But I’m not choosing type c) solutions over type a) soluitions: approaching a radically different end-point gradually means doing it incrementally, you are turning through 180degrees 1 degree at a time.
Now is the moment when I suggest re-reading my previous comments and then quit wasting my time on you. You have to at least try if you want other people to engage.
You should check the relevant law in the United States. It is often referred to as the Gun Control Act of 1968. In the phrasing of that law, a person who has been adjudicated as “mentally defective” cannot legally purchase a firearm.
However, your question reminded me of something.
Under many circumstances, the political-advocacy arm of the NRA is opposed to such measures.
But under some circumstances, that political-advocacy arm works to encourage better cooperation between State-level handling of mental health problems and the Federal-level handling of background checks for firearm purposes.
For example, this story from 2007 is about the NRA’s political advocacy arm collaborating to help the various States report mental illness to Federal agencies.
If that reporting had been in place before that point in 2007, it’s possible that the gun store (and the Federal background check process) would have denied the gun purchase to the shooter at Virginia Tech.
You’re hypothesis is that political polarization causes more indiscriminate mass shootings? I don’t see the connection. Other than the Scalise shooting, I can’t see how that would work. The killer in the movie theater shooting in Aurora said “Terrorism isn’t the message. The message is, there is no message.” How did political polarization lead to that shooting?
Not necessarily polarization per se, maybe more like “sensationalism” or excessive use of the “fear and rage sells” tactic among prominent narrative weavers? I imagine these latter will correlate with and maybe help cause polarization, but not quite the same thing.
Or maybe it’s more of a general societal breakdown thing.
Or perhaps it’s only an illusion that these things are happening more often now than in the past; I’ve read stats to that effect as well.
But it certainly seems like there are times and places where this happens more than others. I guess I’m really trying to get at the question of what causes that, if we assume a stable base rate of mental illness (though I’m not ruling out the possibility that some populations are just more prone to the type of mental illness that leads to this; certainly men seem to be more so than women, for example). I personally don’t buy it’s availability of guns; or even if it is, not just availability of guns, since Switzerland doesn’t have more mass shootings than Norway.
Toxic media narratives? Breakdown of social cohesion? Too many prescription drugs in the water…?
*Edit to add: I will admit, as I further survey all the speculation about the shooting, that, even in attempting to go meta and reflective here, I may still be participating in a general, problematic trend: to try to interpret every tragedy as “yet another example of the particular thing I think is ruining society.” I am personally quite concerned about this toxic political culture, societal breakdown etc. so maybe this is just me trying to fit something senseless into that box.
Unfortunately, due to the way fragility works, you can have the absolute numbers getting better (showing extra stability) and all that is happening is the pressure is building up.
This typically happens in financial systems (and governments) which are artificially dampened, but is also true of wars. Many small skirmishes tend to produce less overall deaths than mega-states keeping the peace artificially leading to less-frequent mega-wars (like we saw last century, with tens of millions of actual war deaths, and many more government-caused deaths).
For example, in the US, crime is dropping and has been for decades. In exchange, we’ve imprisoned a huge proportion of the population. So…are things better? Objectively, yes—if you ignore the criminals themselves. But maybe things are worse than say, the mid-20th century in terms of overall criminality.
I don’t think we have the data to say that. WWI is usually attributed to a breakdown of alliances in a highly multipolar system, but artificially keeping the peace was not involved — if anything, many of the powers were looking for a war, albeit a smaller, more conclusive, and much less bloody war than the one they got. WWII followed from the mishandling of WWI’s armistice terms, and from a set of historical circumstances that made aggressive dictatorial government uniquely attractive.
“Mega-states keeping the peace artificially” is a fair description of the Cold War period, but that really was relatively peaceful compared to the first half of the century, even taking into account the nasty brushfire wars that popped up every now and then.
It occurs to me that crimes prisoners commit against other criminals aren’t counted as part of the crime rate. Should they be counted?
I would say yes, and specifically that they should be counted as criminal negligence by prison officials.
Which is not to say that the specific assaults, etc, should not also be counted as the responsibility of specific perpetrators, but if you’re looking to measure the problem in hope of guiding efforts at solution, you need to focus on the people with the real power in the relevant environment.
You said something about the “Bowling Alone” thesis in another comment. I can see the relation there. These mass murderers generally are loners. If they were surrounded by a community of people that would have two effects. One is that they would probably be less motivated to actually commit these acts. And even if they wanted to, their lack of privacy means it would be harder to build up a weapons in order to prepare for an attack. Maybe there would also be some kind of release valve for them too.
So the solution to mass murder is… to force everyone to be socially involved? Not what I’d call a good tradeoff. It’d be like high school… forever.
@The Nybbler
No, but passing a law that requires gun owners to be members in good standing of an organized gun club might be a good idea. If nothing else it would serve to screen out some of the more obvious psychotics.
@hyperboloid, how do you define “organized gun club”? Do they need to be licensed and have a defined list of activities, and if so, who chooses that list and administers the licenses? Or if you don’t say that, how do you stop someone who hates the law from just signing up anyone who wants to as members of the Do-Nothing Nominal Gun Club?
I see what you’re getting at, but like with many good things, I don’t see how the government could enforce it enough to do net good.
Mass murderers are generally loners, but there are exceptions– notably Manson, but also the Beltway shooters and the Columbine guys. And, of course, bin Laden.
There are plenty of harmless loners, too.
Let’s do some blue sky speculation. If we wanted a society where people liked people enough to not be murderers (not necessarily enough to socialize), how would we do it?
So, wouldn’t have helped with this latest; he could have simply joined a club (unless you play games which make organization of such clubs very difficult to impossible, which is the usual trick with such laws). And it means only extraverts get to exercise their rights. IMO they’ve got enough advantages as it is.
@nybbler
It doesn’t sound very pleasant to me either. But I think it’s the historical norm. Maybe we aren’t very well adapted to a world with a lot of privacy. And maybe if we were raised in that world, it wouldn’t bother us as much.
My God. That is simultaneously more terrifying than the 1984 “boot stamping on a human face” quote, and also a significantly more accurate representation of what that sort of society would look like.
The historical norm is grinding poverty and rule by tyrants, so I’m not really all that impressed by appeals to it. Anyway, most of us DID grow up in a society like that; that’s what I was getting at with my “high school” remark.
@nybbler
Hunter gatherers weren’t ruled by tyrants. That’s what I was trying to get at. I don’t think they had much in the way of privacy but from what I’ve read, they seemed reasonably happy. Maybe that’s our natural environment and taking us out of it has caused all manner of psychological problems. Call it “The Original Utilitarian Society”.
Evan thorn
Doesn’t the UK have a rule like this? How do they do it?
If you told me to write a law like that, I’d do it by imposing nontrivial training requirements and implementing them through civilian-run gun clubs. Require that buying a gun or getting a CCW permit requires passing a marksmanship test or getting X hours of training through an accredited club; come up with some reasonable accreditation scheme (you could probably even do this peer-to-peer); put some defensive rules in place so that San Francisco can’t just deny accreditation to everyone; and put the club’s name on the purchase form along with the customer’s. That keeps guns out of the hands of the clueless, implies at least minimal social contact, gives sellers somewhere to call if they suspect a straw purchase, and still doesn’t give law enforcement or the Feds broad or intrusive powers that they didn’t have before.
I’d actually be in favor of this, at least for handguns (long guns are way less dangerous from the perspective of everyday criminality despite being more useful for mass shooting, and IMO there’s a stronger argument for them on 2A grounds), if I thought there wasn’t a good chance of slippery-slope issues leading on from it. But I do, so I’m not.
@Brad
The Netherlands has a law like that and a person has to have been a member of a club for a year before the gun club may sign a form to allow the person to get a single shot firearm in .22LR caliber. In that year, the person has to have shot during at least 18 sessions. Of course there is also a background check. Then after having been a member for two years in total, the person can get all weapons that are used for sports shooting, including semi-automatic guns.
Note that the club has discretion whether to sign the form(s). They can choose not to, even if the person has passed the legal requirements.
That sounds like a potential response to someone buying into a somewhat paranoid narrative of powerful, unaccountable people growing increasingly hostile to his interests–a sort of nihilism, indiscriminate lashing out in fear and anger born partly because the media culture buys clicks with fear and anger.
But it could just be the 1-in-a-million crazyness. The population is increasing, and growing in isolation and diversity.
In context — the theater was showing The Dark Knight Rises — it just sounds like someone LARPing the Joker.
Possibly, though in this case that formulation is doing a disservice to LARPers.
But it isn’t incompatible with Ony’s idea, was my point.
That connection was made explicitly in the wake of the shooting. I recall, perhaps faultily, that one of the people who knew Holmes said he “always preferred the bad guys” in films or something.
I am pretty sure that the increased media scrutiny of mass murders have increased mass murders. Not all mass murders are political, but I think they are all about seeking attention. They are seeking attention about their political cause or just as a claim to fame in society. I think everyone knows that killing a bunch of people will make them famous for at least a few days, and maybe their name will be spoken for years to come. I think this is the most common cause for mass murders.
It is kind of ironic that it is the media’s intense scrutiny of these events that is the biggest cause for future such events, when the scrutiny itself purportedly is about ending such murders. These intense discussions about “What to do?” immediately after large murders not only never achieve anything, but cause more in the future. I am not suggesting we stifle discussion about ways to stop mass murder (although simple everyday individual murder is a much bigger problem), but doing so as a response to such an event is not only fruitless but self defeating.
You’re not wrong, but attempts to suppress this sort of dynamic have been failing since before mass media was a thing. The phrase “Herostratic fame” comes from the Greek arsonist Herostratus, who burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus because he wanted to be remembered; the Ephesians responded by killing him and subjecting his name to an early form of damnatio memoriae.
You can judge how well it worked from the fact that I’m sitting here, talking about him, by name, 2400 years later.
Attempts to suppress a specific story, or prevent people from saying the name of the killer, or something along those lines are doomed to backfire, but we can still always attempt to make the media less sensationalistic in general, not as a response to any one particular incident.
Admittedly, attempts to do THAT have also historically been failures, and you’ve got Moloch fighting you all the way, but it still seems less doomed to failure than suppressing a specific story.
And I really think that it’s our best bet for preventing incidents like this. One thing that often seems to get overlooked when talking about the differences between the US and other countries in regard to mass shootings, (aside from the usual stuff, like looser gun laws, a less homogenous population, greater poverty, population density, and gang activity in the areas most effected, and a generally more violent culture) is just how sensationalistic our mass media is. Mass shooters not only know that they’re going to get their 15 minutes of fame, but that we’re going to be arguing about them, nonstop, for weeks or months.
Not that I have any idea what to do about it, other than generally complaining about the media and avoiding sensationalistic stories, but I don’t think the issue can be overlooked when discussing the causes of these things. (In short, Onyomi’s original post on this subject is spot-on.)
@Vorkon. yes. I am very much against LAWS being passed to avoid such sensationalism. Government regulating the media is a solution is much worse than the problem (and unconstitutional in the US anyway).
But I’d be very happy if someone could do a study showing that sensationalizing mass murders makes them more likely, and then somehow getting this ingrained in the consciousness of the public (this last is the most difficult). I want the media itself to feel guilty about all the publicity, and the public to give them the stink eye for doing it. If that happened, then maybe most news sources would provide minimal coverage, and only the tabloids would focus on it. There is no particular reason that the killings in Vegas are more newsworthy than than the terrifying uptick in murders in Chicago in the last few years.
Social question: Every now and then someone says something about how you shouldn’t pet unattended dogs, and I’m a little confused as to how I should be interpreting this and as such how seriously I should be taking it.
That is to say — obviously you don’t just reach out and pet a dog, right? You extend your hand so it can sniff you, see how it reacts, see if it seems like it wants you to pet it, etc. And I have a hard time imagining that there would be some danger in petting a dog that is clearly acting friendly towards you. So I’m wondering if these admonitions are in fact meant to be directed towards people who don’t consider it obvious that you don’t just reach out your hand and pet a dog without first seeing if it wants you to, and not towards people like me who know better. Because I’ve had people tell me this, warn me against doing this, even when putting out my hand so an unattended dog that was clearly acting friendly could sniff me. Which doesn’t seem right.
But the other possibility of course is that maybe some dogs are more aggressive than I might realize, and might be signalling it in a way I don’t know about (I’m not exactly some dog expert and I haven’t had to deal with aggressive dogs) so that even just sticking out your hand so they can sniff you might be dangerous. (I have a hard time believing this to apply to the case I mentioned where the dog was clearly acting friendly, but maybe when that’s not the case it could apply.)
My suspicion is that the first one is true, that this is just some misdirected advice whose originators looked at it through a common sense filter instead of checking it for other interpretations and which was then passed on with unchanged wording by those who did interpret it otherwise (much like… well, you all know 😛 ), but I’m wondering if there really is some reason I should refrain from doing this with dogs that seem friendly!
I think that advice is mostly directed towards children, who might have no idea that just going to pet a strange dog could get an aggressive response. But there are dogs that will act friendly and then turn aggressive with no apparent warning, too; I’ve been told abused dogs sometimes act like that.
At a dog (or cat) show, you are expected to keep your hands to yourself, and not pet any dogs (or cats) unless invited to by the owner. That’s because of the possibility that you’re (unintentionally) spreading disease. Judges that touch the animals use hand sanitizer after each one.
I thought it was because you’re supposed to ask a human companion for permission before approaching a dog, and if their human is gone you can’t get permission so there’s no polite way to approach the dog. I didn’t think it was a safety thing.
Unattended dogs are, to my mind, likely stray dogs, which (i imagine) are somewhat more likely than average to have weird behavior problems, such as seemingly-random violent behavior triggered by fears or aversions to things we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as fear- or aversion-inducing.
When I was a kid I was bitten by a German Shepherd –not a stray, but the pet of a family friend!– because although he was used to shaking hands with people, I tried to shake hands with him and got some aspect of the ritual wrong, which spooked him in a way that triggered his “give that kid’s hand a hard warning bite” reflex. The bite broke skin, gave me two neat little hole-shaped cuts in my hand for a few weeks. Scared the bejesus outta me at the time, too.
I agree that the advice isn’t so much *wrong* as it is not accurate enough. However, 1) we-as-humans use general rules/stereotypes when making a bad call on the margins has pretty serious consequences 2) even *other dogs* miss read each other’s intent and communication (plus most dogs tend to nip where we humans would yell) and 3) kids are idiots around dogs. I lived in a neighborhood where, when walking the dog, kids would bail out of the yard, yelling can I pet your dog please can I pet your dog and be out in the street with their hands on my brown dog mutt before they got to please.
You would like my five year old; she runs up to passers-by and asks “Excuse me ma’am, may I pet your doggy?”
I do love five year olds like that.
I’m a dog owner. My personal position is that I always ask a human companion before touching someone else’s dog, and I want people to do the same before touching mine (I always say yes.)
I pretty freely pet dogs tied up outside the store, however. My rationale is: any vaguely responsible dog owner won’t leave a human-aggressive dog unattended. (I do so carefully, of course–presenting a hand back first for them to sniff without getting in their face, etc.)
Other owners may have other positions.
As a non-owner, my perception is that EVERY dog owner thinks their dog is sweet and kind and would never ever harm anyone… right up until they do.
In my experience, not so much. I also have small kids who ask permission, and every one-in-ten-or-so dog owners explain to my kids that no, their dog doesn’t like strangers or is too excitable or some other polite excuse.
I don’t let strangers pet my dog. She was a rescue mutt, and as such she has some strange behavior towards strangers. She will act fine at first, and then bark her head off if they do something that spooks her. She’s never bitten anyone, but I suspect that’s largely because I don’t let many people touch her. It’s a shame too, because to people she knows, she is the most loving, friendly dog I’ve ever been around.
As a child of veterinarians, what Matt said is close enough to true that it’s not a bad idea to treat it as true.
I think that most claims that a dog is ‘sweet and kind and would never ever harm anyone’ are a faulty perception that behavior by the dog to someone higher in the social hierarchy is the only way that the dog can behave.
Dogs can become confused about the social hierarchy, resolving it by fighting. Or they can decide that someone (usually a small child) is lower in the hierarchy and try get the person to take orders. Then if the person doesn’t respond to small corrections, the dog may bite to get the person in line. If the person then attacks the dog, the person can be mauled.
I think my minor superpower is that dogs never get the impression I might be below them in the status hierarchy. I have quite a lot of experience of dogs causing other people a ton of trouble, in the form of aggression or disobedience, and me none at all.
I have never owned a dog and cannot understand dog body language. I wouldn’t pet an unattended dog, because I wouldn’t be able to tell if it was being friendly or not. Like, I remember instances from my childhood where dogs acted towards me in a manner that I interpreted as a terrifying attack, and I was told the dog was just trying to be friendly—so I don’t think any intuitions I might have about friendliness and unfriendliness are likely to be reliable. So I think the advice makes sense for people like me, who have never owned dogs. It may not make sense if you have owned a dog and are capable of telling whether a dog is friendly or not. Then again, the advice could be sensible if different breeds use different body language (I don’t know if that’s the case).
I’ve never owned a dog either, but I’ve always found them pretty easy to read. If the eyes are wide, ears up, posture erect, mouth open with tongue out and slack lips, then it wants to be friendly. Ears back, eyes tight, posture crouched but weight forward, tongue in and lips pulled back means it’s being aggressive. Really quite similar to human body language, if humans had tails and more mobile ears.
Cats are harder to read — that takes experience, and some of their cues are counterintuitive, e.g. body still (with optional twitching haunches) and face looking comically surprised means that something’s triggered their prey response and is about to get pounced.
Celebrated Peter Sellers sketch: “Does your dog bite?“
Any thoughts on the SC gerrymandering case being heard this week?
If I’m reading wikipedia correctly, it seems the previous 2004 SC decision was based less on gerrymandering’s actual constitutionality and more on the lack of a good metric for determining gerrymandering. Have there been any advancements in metrics since then?
Plaintiffs say yes. The Wisconsin case used the fairly simple metric of the “efficiency gap”, that is, comparing the number of “wasted votes” for each party’s candidates.
As I understand it, there are some other proposed standards, and (per Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in comments from the bench) the Wisconsin Assembly plan at issue goes “over the line” on all of them.
that is, comparing the number of “wasted votes” for each party’s candidates.
ehhhh. I’m not sure that I buy this entirely. What is the point where the efficiency gap is insufficient to be concerned about? (No, seriously, how do we tell that even if one side wins, it was a fair election and any challenge is obviously a delaying tactic instead of a reasonable doubt of the outcome?)
From a practical standpoint, I think that gerrymandering (that is, the effect of drawing irregular complex boundaries unfixed to a geographic feature and not linked to the lower government divisions) is a bipartisan vice, and not likely to get better. I think the best pick is to have representatives at large, and I think its odd that the party that wants to do away with the electoral college isn’t floating that.
Part of the reason that gerrymandering is a hard problem is that it seems hard to make a distinction between “weird geographic lumping of humans arising organically from human social activity” and “weird lumping of humans that was imposed from the outside” in a consistent, objective, reproducible way. The State is trying to look at the human landscape, and in the act of seeing it, distorts it.
I’m not really impressed with the comments from the bench in this case, either, esp in the wake of other cases, where the idea of “one man, one vote” wasn’t given nearly as much weight.
Doing away with regional representation would severely reduce minority representation; that isn’t as substantive an issue with electing a president, since you have the same general issues there anyways.
On the contrary it would tend to enhance it.
If we had at large elections of 535 legislators using a party list, there would be something like 11 libertarian legislators. Under the current system they get none, because they are a minority everywhere. Supposing there was one or more parties aimed at African-Americans we would expect them to collectively get around 66 seats (- adjustments for differential turnout and felony disenfranchisement). That’s compared to 50 today. This theory largely plays out in practice in Israel which has a distinct Arab party and party list proportional representation.
Yeah, the correct criticism is that you wind up with too much weirdo representation, like in Isreal. Can’t wait to see the Neoconservative party courting the Black Panther party and the Tankies to shore up their center-authoritarian coalition.
That assumes moving to a proportional representation system; I assumed, say, statewide elections for every state position, rather than this-precinct-votes-for-this-state-representative. (So still regional, I guess, for a given value of regional.)
I guess the problem comes down to the atomicity of voting; everybody votes for the governor, so the majority wins.
There are two senator seats; if everybody voted for one candidate for each of the two seats, you’d still get majority-wins. If, on the other hand, everybody voted for one senator, and the two most popular won, you’d get closer to representation.
I would like to see a move to statewide proportional representation combined with a drastic increase in the number of congresspeople. I think the latter is an important (although admittedly politically improbable) component.
1) More seats to split up means more granularity. If there are 5 seats in your state, a party needs 20% of the vote to get one. If there are 10 seats, you only need 10%
2) Twice as many congresspeople should be about twice as expensive to buy off, if conventional wisdom about how much influence lobbyists have is correct
On the other hand, more congresscritters means more public money being spent on the care and feeding of congresscritters. And it would slow government down even more by exponentially increasing the number of network connections – giving a bunch of power to parties with effective whips and deep pockets.
It solves the wrong problem. We divided Congress because the founders thought it would be the most dangerous branch. And maybe it would be if they hadn’t. But as things stand now the executive branch is the most dangerous branch. Any move which further weakens Congress makes it a less effective check against that most dangerous branch. And increasingly the number of Congressman makes Congress weaker by increasing the difficulty of coordination.
Where is the evidence that Congress even wants to be a check against the executive branch? IIRC, most gains in executive power over the last couple decades have been Congress voluntarily giving power away, rather than some sort of scheming power-grabs by the executive.
I think that’s a symptom of their weakness. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. Congressmen can’t win. Congress as a whole theoretically might be able to, but no Congressman can solve the coordination problem to wield that power. Since they can’t win, the next best move is to keeps their heads down.
A plausible theory.
I would say that they aren’t just “keeping their heads down”, they are actively performing a “Take my power, please!” bit.
It’s the difference between giving the bully your lunch money when he threatens to beat you up, and giving your money away to the first big guy you see so that he doesn’t even have to threaten you.
Of course, lunch money here means “ability to impose their will on others across the country” and not any material deprivation, status, or other privileges.
If the eight years of every GOP congressman trying to block everything the Obama administration ever tried to do isn’t enough, then we’re now nine months into every Democratic congressman trying to do the same w/re the Trump administration. And through all of this, congressmen of both parties agreed that the rules of congress should implicitly require supermajorities for most controversial legislative acts.
The theory I like best is that at some point Congress got it into their heads that actual governance is unpopular with voters. (And they might be right.) So just make the schmuck who has term limits anyway, and everyone in the country already knows by name, do the hard stuff. If people are too busy watching the prez to look closely at what you’re doing, all* you need to do is loudly agree with the most popular opinion of the prez to get re-elected.
The answer to that question is, indeed, what the parties are arguing about (although Wisconsin is also arguing the position suggested by the Court’s farther-right members, that there is no workable test and it’s a political question best kept out of the courts). You can find some good articles on all sides, as well as the argument transcript and any of the filed documents, on SCOTUSblog.
I tend to be sympathetic to the plaintiffs. I am not a great fan of line-drawing to distort votes and stack decks as opposed to actually winning hearts and minds, but I have no idea whether the models they’re proposing are good ones. The Chief Justice brings up a good point, in that cases like these will inherently be seen as the sort of pure-politics you-win decision-making as Bush v. Gore was… but I’m not sure that refusal to address gerrymanders will stop people from coming to see votes as undemocratic.
I think the chief’s concern could be mitigated in part by eliminating the special procedures for districting challenges. Viz. three judge District Court panels and then mandatory review by the Supreme Court.
The development of case law in the appellate courts would move the focus in the Supreme Court from individual yes/no decisions to more bloodless reviewing and tweeking multipart tests. News media would still report winners and losers but I think that would be leavened by at least attempts to talk about the decisional rules.
With the current procedure there’s basically no development of case law because each case ends up before the court not bound by precedent.
That’s not a bad answer, honestly. The more I think about it, redistricting cases don’t really “explode” when they’re not being decided by the Supreme Court. I’m not sure if that’s because people perceive the high court as a more political court or simply because a court deciding the Wisconsin case is otherwise only deciding the case in Wisconsin, but I have a sneaking suspicion that keeping cases out of the Supreme Court would largely keep them beneath the notice of the electorate.
For all those in the Terry Pratchet thread a couple of OTs back – thank you. I bought and read Going Postal and while it was not quite as solid imo as Night Watch, it was a good read that I enjoyed a lot.
(Brief thoughts, then even briefer ROT13 spoiler discussions.)
Part of the reason I hesitated to pick random Pratchet books was because I had heard he had a tendency to be anvilish in a progressive manner. (He didn’t, really, in this book, or, probably more accurately, he did so in asides that were both….em…small, and acknowledged by the text as being deliberate signalling. At any rate, I didn’t mind.) He *does* embody progressive ideas, but at the same time makes me think of the horseshoe theory of politics, in that there is much in the worshipful way that monarchs, gentry, despots, and other absolute rulers are treated by the story that I think an far right sort would appreciate. The status of nobility, +/- “special destinies” are the bits about fantasy that bother me on a fundamental level. (Not, you know “I can’t stand to read this because of the way the women/non Caucasian races are portrayed” way, but in a “omg, you know, I really can see that GRRM never saw a horse before he started writing GoT” way.)
Guvf jnf whfg nobhg rknpgyl jung V arrqrq. Bhe ureb vf hajbegul, ohg vf ghearq gb gur cngu bs evtugrbhfarff naq tvira n pnyyvat, ortvaf nybar naq svaqf pbzenqrf, fgnegf n pbjneq ohg snprf punyyratrf, fynlf n qrzba, naq jvaf gur snve znvqra. Ur nyfb erfrgf gur sbegharf bs n bapr terng ubfg onpx gbjneqf vgf sbezre tybevrf, fgehttyrf ohg pbagvahrf gb crefvfg, naq ng gur raq jvaf orpnhfr bs gur fxvyyf ur oevatf sebz uvf onq obl qnlf. Nyfb gurer vf QRNGU, jub vf rire terng, naq n jubyr ubfg bs fgryyne frpbaqnel punenpgref.
V nz abg fher jung gb guvax bs gur grpu natyr – naq gur rivy onaxre/ohfvarffzna vf gur bar cebterffvir ovg gung obgurerq zr – va cneg orpnhfr V obhtug vagb gung fb rnfvyl.
The whole “past glories” and tyrants thing still bothers me, though.
Again, seriously, thanks for the rec.
The Discworld books are very ambivalent on the subject of kings, in a way that feels very British to me — most Americans would cast the king as an autocratic villain or a saintly monarch or a flawed ruler as befits that king’s character, without giving much thought to how monarchy as an institution works (even GRRM does this), or they wouldn’t cast a king at all and that would be that. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen an American work that explores the legacies of monarchy, and the ways it appeals to people, in the way that Pratchett and especially middle-period Pratchett does. Helps that this tension is absolutely central to Sam Vimes’ character, of course: he is not comfortable at all with the mantles he ends up wearing.
I never noticed any of that and I’m pretty sensitized to that sort of thing. Well, other than in Equal Rites, but, you know, it’s what it says on the label. Even that was just “women are indeed full-fledged human beings.” If he ever went further left than that I never noticed. I mean, there’s a lot of mention about how cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork is and how that’s really a pretty nice thing, but again, nothing further than what you’d expect from your average /r/MURICA poster.
I don’t think Prattchett is so much pro-autarch as much as he is pro-heroic leadership. There’s an abundance of “hereditary nobles really suck” stuff along with the “this is a king and he sure is a good dude.” I mean, the message of Carpe Jugulum is “authority that treats people like human beings is really great, authority that treats people any other way must be destroyed with force”, being a story about a good king taking back his kingdom after being displaced by vampires.
Going Postal was written before Pratchett started to go deteriorate and his books suffered. I don’t think he was especially anvilicious – he was still decent at showing instead of telling, and you could read things different ways. The politics he got through in most of his books was a decent, goodhearted progressivism – Golden Rule type stuff. Hardly what the world would be worse for for more of.
Going Postal is one of my favorite Discworld stories, if just for Mr. Pump, and if not just for Mr. Pump, then Mr. Pump’s Specific Conversation with Moist.
Has anyone else here ever experienced a sudden and massive change in their subjective experience of the passage of time? I know people’s subjective experiences of the passage of time tend to increase gradually as they get older, which is why time passes like molasses when you’re a child but entire years go by in the blink of an eye when you’re elderly, but to my knowledge this change is supposed to happen slowly, just a little bit at a time.
A year ago, right after I graduated college, I moved back home for a while until I could find a job. The day I moved my stuff in, I went to bed, and when I woke up, the entire next day passed very quickly. I thought it was just because of the excitement of being done with college and the general stress of moving, but time continued to move fast the day after, and the day after that, and now, a year later, I’m still experiencing time moving incredibly fast every single day. Minutes turn into hours, and hours into days, and I can’t stop it.
Even when I’m doing unpleasant activities, it only slows the passage of time a little bit. An 8 hour shift at work used to feel unbearable. I’d check the clock, feeling that a couple of hours must have passed, and it would turn out to only have been four minutes since the last time I checked the clock. Now, when I check the clock at work, an entire hour has passed when it feels like only 20 minutes ought to have.
It’s great that work is passing by so quickly, but the speeding-up of time has also been affecting enjoyable activities. I sit down to read a book for an hour and I look at the clock and four hours have passed. I get off work and suddenly it’s time for me to go back even though I just finished my previous shift (and my shifts are a normal length of time apart, so this is a subjective experience problem and not an objective fact about my shift schedule).
Did something happen to me? I didn’t start or stop any prescription drugs (or any other kind of drugs) near the time that the change happened. I didn’t get into any accidents that could have caused any form of brain damage. Does this happen to a lot of people and no one ever talks about it because it’s normal? I knew time would move like this for me eventually, but I thought it would happen when I was 60 or 70. I’m only 23, and the change occurred in literally a single day.
Is your life now more predictable than it was in the past?
Everyone I know seems to feel this way, I think this is called aging. When you’re a kid, summers seem to last forever, and why shouldn’t they? When you’re 10, a year is 1/10th of a lifetime. When you’re 50, it’s 1/50th. And if you go by total quantity of memories and experiences rather than just pure time, the curve is even sharper.
I don’t think it was a one-day transformation for me, but I think something similar has happened to me recently. It’s not so much on the hour or day level though as the week level.
I’ve experienced that too, specifically in college, but I chocked it up to my life actually turning into a featureless blur of general unpleasantness; remembering nothing because absolutely nothing pleasant or surprising actually happened.
I also started actually completely losing time (look at the clock, it’s 10 AM, look back to Word, struggle to think of something to write, look at the clock, it’s 7 PM) during that time but that’s probably unrelated.
Maybe you’ve gotten better at achieving flow? [Insert Peter Watts reference]
I find this happening to me when I am carrying out long complicate procedures. Something about needing to think in terms of long blocks of time, planning ahead, sometimes forgetting where I am in the sequence…
Isn’t this pretty common? Like sitting in the dentist chair versus sitting at your desk playing Civilization is orders of magnitude different. Or sitting in class waiting for the bell to end class versus sitting in class cramming before the bell to start the session.
My sense of time has also radically changed very gradually since being young. Seasons pass like weeks used to.
Heh.
I have had months disappear on me even as every single day dragged by slowly.
Truth vs Unity
Truth and unity are sometimes incompatible values. For a tribe to do something together it’s usually beneficial that they agree. Sometimes it is better for a tribe to collectively believe in slightly wrong ideas compared to some among the tribe believing in correct ideas while others don’t. However if conformists make mistakes it is much harder for them to correct their mistakes compared to non-conformists.
I personally value truth but not unity. However I do respect that others believe that unity is sometimes valuable. Well it is indeed sometimes valuable but it should not affect epistemology. Unity is usually used as an excuse to believe in and defend factually incorrect views and persecute those who have factually correct ones that aren’t that common. Hence we should oppose it at least in epistemology.
It is indeed true that without any unity there can be no functional societies. Hence maybe we can somehow have some form of unity in actions but not ideas? We don’t have to believe in some woo or questionable beliefs in order to cooperate or not harm each other, right? I think rationality is the way out.
Claiming ‘rationality is the way out’ is cheating. You’re smuggling in a values system, and saying that if everyone followed this value system there wouldn’t be any conflicts of value systems.
I could just as easily make the claim that if everyone does what the Pope says we could have unity, and it wouldn’t matter if they believed different things.
Rationality is merely a set of epistemological tools instead of values. If anything it helps you do whatever you want to do better.
The way the world works is that people have values and then use tools to turn those values into actions. If the values differ and the tools are the same, the actions will still be different.
Social pressure enforces similarity of values and similarity of actions. Having a shared set of epistemological tools doesn’t do this unless you think that humans are fundamentally the same and the only reason why they arrive at different conclusions & actions is because they reason differently. The Big 5 science proves this wrong.
You especially should know that it is wrong, since I know that you are aware of having highly different desires compared to the average person. Or do you think that rationality will make everyone conclude that, say, their biological drive to have sex should be ignored? If you think that, you are wrong.
I don’t think people should have similarity of values at all. In fact I believe any attempt to homogenize the thought space is harmful.
Sharing the same epistemological tools ensure that human behaviors will be largely reasonable. This is one of my goals in the proposal.
I do have some values I want to promote as well. One of the most important ones is selfism. If everyone can be selfish in the sense of promoting their own individual interests and capable the world will probably be a better place. From a selfist point of view it is indeed unreasonable to reproduce or maybe have sex with a non-robot at all.
Do you have any basis for this claim? For one thing, most instances of persecution are about things that you would consider values, or else would consider both sides wrong. For another, persecuted individuals can be wrong too, vastly more wrong than the group; practices that (I take it) you call persecution, like censuring people, locking them up, or killing them, are more about protecting the group from individuals who have gone too far than about protecting the group from individuals per se. Finally, I don’t know of very many instances of people appealing directly to unity, and even if they did, I doubt they’re doing it in order to defend views they know to be wrong; remember, everyone thinks they’re defending the correct views, even though not everyone can be right about that.
I have seen appeals to unity to suppress epistemological issues before. The point here is that anyone who does not talk about facts as is but instead appeal to morality or other irrelevant issues to settle epistemological differences are de facto conceding that they got it wrong.
I don’t think any disagreement in values or even actions should result in any punishment. However harmful actions should.
You may be referring, implicitly, to Aumann’s agreement theorem. Very basically stated, if two people apply rigor to a set of common priors/axioms, they must agree. If they don’t agree, one of them is incorrect. That drills everything down to the level of formal math.
But, people’s priors aren’t necessarily common. Thus it isn’t always possible to resort to Aumann’s. A subsequent paper attempted to define the distance between priors. I can’t claim to really understand the math therein, but, for a certain inter-priors distance ε, the degree of allowable disagreement is bounded from above by ε. IE, if your priors are very different from your opponent’s, then you are permitted to disagree with them by a larger degree. When ε = 0, we have Aumann’s. When ε > 0, we don’t.
People’s priors are all so terribly different. This can limit our ability to operationalize rationality in the spirit of Aumann’s.
I think you’re overstating this.
We have to start with the goal of “good enough.” Society will function if its actions, whether deliberately coordinated or examined collectively, are “good enough.” For certain questions, the range of “good enough” answers is very narrow, and the necessary degree of agreement rises to the level of absolute, ε = 0 truth. EG should we dump our sewage into the river upstream or downstream of our town? For certain questions, the range of “good enough” answers is very broad, and the necessary degree of agreement permits ε to be greater than 0. EG which is better, cherry pie, blueberry pie, or apple pie?
What happens if ε is nearly 0, but the resultant range of answers does not include any that are “good enough”? Enter the gadfly. This is a member of a society who speaks stridently and dissidently in order to cause societal change. Importantly, the gadfly can only perform their function if they are speaking from within the society they seek to change. They must have a low ε with the culture’s other members on most other questions in order to maintain credibility.
So what you describe as unity is actually essential to operationalizing rationality within groups. It presents a mechanism for setting and resetting ε in order to produce “good enough” answers to important questions.
Interesting. That’s why I can not actually cause any social change. LOL my values are completely alien to most humans. Pretending to agree with other people can be painful, you know.
@.
LOL I can’t talk about concrete social issues because of the warning you know.
My disagreement with every tribe alike is actually on the meta level. For example I reduce morality to care/harm and freedom/oppression. At the same time I don’t value fairness, loyalty or purity at all. Most of the value-related differences between most people and me can be reduced to several key differences, some of which might be biological (i.e. oxytocin-related differences etc).
The Aumann theorem assumes not just common priors but common knowledge of posteriors. This is an incredibly strong assumption. On Planet Earth, people lie. Actual human epistemic behavior might be better understood as layered defenses against an adversarial environment of hostile agents and memes.
I would say that it human behavior is set up to deal with an environment where most people are bounded altruists and decent minority are non-altruists or psychopathic. Furthermore, that environment features different levels of intelligence/rationality.
Interesting.
My default hypothesis is that most people are psychopathic while a minority is sadistic in addition to being psychopathic.
@AutisticThinker
What is more interesting is hearing the definition of “psychopathic” you’re using to make this statement remotely plausible.
@CatCube “Psychopath” literally means what it means in psychology.
There is no way for me to distinguish sincere stuff and polite bullshit. Hence my idea is at least a useful heuristic. There is only one person who I know is almost certainly not psychopathic, namely myself because I actually did a psychopathy test and scored pretty low. (I also did a sociopath test in which I scored even lower.)
At the very minimum I know that humans don’t care about me which is almost certainly a correct statement.
You’re accusing most people but not yourself of “persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits”???
@Aapje : I think we agree. I’m just saying that hostile agents exist. And they might not be the most dangerous part of the memetic environment.
If you keep an open mind, something dangerous might get in.
@AutisticThinker
Most polite bullshit is social, not anti-social. For example, kids/people are often taught to say sorry even when they think they are not in the wrong. This is useful because different people often have different, usually self-centered perspectives on things. When both people apologize, the self-centered perception usually favors the apology by the other person more strongly than the loss of face caused by their own fake apology, so negative emotions are reduced on the whole, making both people happier. It allows them to move on and cooperate later on, creating potential for positive utility in the future, that couldn’t happen if they held a permanent grudge.
You are presumably not equipped to translate such experiences/teachings in intuitive responses (especially since there are vague limits to these things), which makes it really hard to act as other people expect and need, for their coping mechanisms to work.
Where you are wrong is that you see this as other people trying to harm you. They offer the same courtesies to you as to others. Like you are not equipped to handle what they see as the best way to interact, they are not equipped to handle what you see as the best way to interact. And you being part of a small minority, they are not going to give up what works for them, to benefit you.
This is no more unfair than it is unfair for Japanese people not to all learn Dutch if I move to their country. They are not trying to harm me by not making that huge effort, they simply prioritize things that result in high utility over this very costly thing that provides low utility.
@Nick
Because it is clear from empirical evidence that humanity couldn’t care less about me?
Whether they are psychopaths or not it is reasonable to de facto consider most humans psychopaths due to my situation. I consider most humans to be indifferent or hostile agents unless they can prove themselves to be benevolent (i.e. petting a cat/dog/rabbit etc, being vegetarian for non-religious reasons or helping someone certainly makes me believe in this null hypothesis about you less. On the other hand torturing a bug or insulting people for the sake of it is going to make me believe that you are likely a very hostile agent).
For example between Nornagest and Hans Frank I certainly consider the former to be likely benevolent or at least not malevolent while the latter was a very hostile agent.
@Aapje I do not see most people as inherently malevolent, just inherently indifferent. Psychopaths don’t harm people when they can’t get anything including pleasure out of it. On the other hand sadists do that. Both groups are predictable anyway.
@AutisticThinker
Psychopath refers to behavior that is harmful to society in general. If you use it for behavior that is merely harmful to you specifically, then you are abusing the term in a way that causes miscommunication between you and others.
I suggest using more clear language.
My casual impression is that most people sometimes pet a dog or a cat, which suggests that your null hypothesis may be poorly chosen.
Matt Sharp is almost as sad about not being Elon Musk as the rationalist community is:
https://www.wired.com/2017/10/elon-musk-rentals-song/
Eric Raymond recently recommended some sf novels by Karl Gallagher, a new author. They are quite good–I read all three of them in the course of the past week, which was spent visiting Iceland, and had finished the third before we got on the plane to return.
They are also relevant to SSC concerns. The setting is a future in which Earth and a bunch of other planets have been taken over by rogue AI, with no living humans left. The next bunch of planets over (a gate system of transport), the Fusion, are all heavily networked, understandably paranoid about AI (just researching it will get you either lynched or convicted and hanged), basic income societies with a very inegalitarian social and political structure and a sizable population of “stipend kids.” Beyond them is the “disconnect,” a bunch of planets that are much more libertarian/laissez-faire/culturally diverse, still concerned about AI dangers but much less paranoid.
The series explores AI related issues, problems with the Fusion setup, and much else. Eric described them as very much like Heinlein, which I think is fair. His one complaint was too much sex, which is to some degree true–but a lot of it is plot relevant.
The titles are Torchship, Torchship Pilot, Torchship Captain.
I read the first one some time ago, and while the setting was interesting, the plot was poorly constructed. IIRC, it felt like it was adapted from a series of short stories, so there was no single plot thread that connected the series of happenings.
I liked the first two quite a bit, but not so much for the third.
I might reread the series because it seemed to me that the third book didn’t remind me well enough of the premises from the first two.
I have a really culture-war-y question. I preface this by acknowledging this, and that my own experiences mean that I’m not likely to come at this in a particularly unbiased way. That being said:
There is a…rhetorical tactic, for lack of a better term, that I’ve found draws very definite and hostile responses from the (again for the lack of a better term, and I apologize for the imprecision and loaded nature, but which I do think is describes an actual worthy-of-a-descriptive-phrase group in society) “pro-SJW” side. The base point of it is that you take a claim that is made about a particular group (e.g., “The disproportionate number of police shootings against blacks clearly demonstrate widespread racism in society.” or “On the numbers alone, tech is ridiculously pro-male.”), find an unfavored group for which the statement is similarly true, and make your own statement in return (“The disproportionate number of police shootings against men clearly demonstrate widespread misandry in society.”, “On the numbers alone, tech is ridiculously pro-Asian.”) In the rare occasions when people try to play “But that’s different for our favored group!”, you just look a little closer, and find another unfavored group with which to repeat your earnest, parroted claim. I say rare occasions, because most of the time, when I engage with this tactic, either the person I’m talking to leaves immediately (in unmoderated spaces, or moderated spaces not dominated by (and again imagine slightly cringey finger-quotes here) “pro-SJW” moderators), or I catch an official sanction from the moderation shortly thereafter.
So, first, what do people think about this tactic? Is it super-trolly, or a valid rhetorical strategy, like Socratic questioning? My own feeling is that it is not optimally earnest, but that it is very effective; it lays out clearly the degree to which the stated fact is merely a justification for an existing preference, and makes it obvious the degree to which special pleading for favored groups is being invoked.
I am very, very cautious of assuming that assuming I’ve stumbled across an armor-piercing tactic which is Super Effective against my ideological enemies because They Can’t Handle the Truth. This is the kind of thing which everyone should look twice and thrice and yet again at any evidence which seems to support this kind of hypothesis…but I’ve taken as good a look as I am able at the cases where I’ve used it, and this tactic seems to motivate (again, finger-quotes) “pro-SJW” people to end the conversation with me with an alacrity and finality I don’t seem to see with (what seems to me) far ruder responses.
So, what do you all think?
I’m not sure, but I think the answer has either “systematic” or “power” in it. Not being sarcastic here, this is pretty much the same as when conservatives say “can’t blacks be racist too” and liberals say “no, because they don’t have power”. But I don’t think I could make this make sense if I tried.
Mmm. The whole power thing is a conversation I’ve had before, and one that has lead to me using the tactic, because simply asking “I’m [insert group here]. Do I have power?” produces heat but no light.
If $attribute leads me to have power, how can I convert the power from $attribute into real, useful-to-me work?
The theory says you already do, it is just invisible to you.
And the definition sometimes move again if you propose an example where a black person most certainly does have power- such as the authority of a military officer over subordinates or a prison guard over prisoners- to saying that that power doesn’t count because it’s not systematic enough.
Yeah, the goal posts are forever moving.
While I think that the idea of ‘centuries of oppression’ is extremely overblown (seriously, no 18 year old has experienced ‘centuries of oppression’), I also think that there is something to the idea of broadly held social biases being included in the weight of how we treat each other.
I think the weight given to “institutional biases” is all out of proportion and even at more realistic levels is used to remove agency, responsibility, and independent adult status from individuals, but I also think the manner in which we have been brought up, having become accustomed to it, has an effect, and should not be totally discounted.
(But people who think that having been subject to bias imparts, as a blanket effect, the ability and desire to never exhibit bias to actual live humans are *seriously* deluding themselves.)
@keranih
The issue is not the claim that there are broadly held social biases, but the claim:
1. that these social biases are overwhelmingly held by white people/men/etc
2. that these social biases are merely selfish, rather than used in service of what people perceive as a just society
3. That the social biases mainly work along the axes of race and gender, rather than class, ingroup preferences, etc
People who make one or more of these claims tend to do such things as claim that men objectify women, even though it’s common for women to criticize female looks and all the things that counts as objectifying women when men do it; happen to men by women as well.
So for me the issue is not so much the weight given to “institutional biases,” but that the perception of how these biases work is very much incorrect.
@ Aapje –
I don’t think I disagree much with you – at least I pretty largely agree with the claims you point out and the impact of them.
I have seen some anti-identity-priority people, though, who completely reject the idea of “institutional bias”, and I don’t agree with that.
I think that there are very few people who don’t believe in institutional bias. Pretty much all discussions I see where institutional bias is debated are about:
– whether one specific form of institutional bias exists and/or
– the size (or even sign) of the effect and/or
– whether some institutional bias is just
For example, both AA proponents and traditionalists think that some forms of institutional bias are just, although they obviously disagree on which ones.
In debates, people who oppose each other very strongly can perceive each other as denying that institutional bias exist, when a specific claim that institutional bias X exists is completely denied by one person, but is a core belief of the other person. However, that perception is usually an artifact of inferential distance where denial of X is interpreted as denial of all institutional bias, because the person can’t imagine that someone who denies X does believe in other forms of institutional bias or because the definition of institutional bias that the person uses is itself biased.
That is because you are talking about completely different things.
Systemic oppression isn’t the same kind of oppression as individual oppression; it is about trends, rather than specific things.
So a black person is more likely to be treated a certain way; a specific white person being treated the same way once doesn’t constitute a trend.
Imagine a society of 90% Zerp, and 10% Gerp; they both hate each other, for our purposes. The experiences of Zerp and Gerp people, even though they both hate each other in parallel ways, nonetheless are going to be different, because it is easier for a Zerp person to never have to deal with Gerp people.
That’s what they’re talking about; the difference in experiences.
(I think it is wrong anyways, however, because it treats majority groups as monoliths, assigning meaning on the basis of scrutability.)
Yeah, but a specific black person or woman who is treated a certain way is also not a trend, but just a data point.
It’s very common that individual experiences are used to claim systemic oppression, where individual experiences that match the narrative are accepted, but those that diverge are not. That then makes the narrative unfalsifiable and also results in an extreme perception of reality (since only the more extreme data points are accepted).
That is not a given. If people self-segregate, many Gerps can actually deal with other Gerps 90% of the time, not 10%. Simplistic models/analogies can be very deceptive as reality is a lot more complex than a box with differently colored balls that bump into each other when you shake it.
But I object to your analogy even more because I think that ‘hate’ is a very bad way to describe all the instances where people are treated differently for their race/gender/etc. Many cases are well-intentioned attempts to deal with cultural differences, attempts at rational choices based on (perceived) group differences, etc. It’s a huge mistake to classify these all as intentional oppression as that classification can not explain negative intragroup behaviors, sacrifices by members of one group for members of the other group and other behavior that doesn’t involve members of one group harming members of the other group.
The analogy is intended to explain the concept in a neutral way, not to correctly map onto reality.
My impression of the tactic is that just throwing out that comparison is super trolly.
Putting Scott-post levels of effort into researching the differences and trying to identify what points contribute to each groups over/under-representation is cool and worthwhile.
My problem with just calling hypocrisy and leaving is it seems like a transparent attempt to distract from a real discussion of a problem by pointing at something harmless, something harder, or a legit problem that is just not the thing they wanted to talk about.
basically:
seems like an accurate description. And it’s a low-quality strategy (Bulverism?) because it doesn’t address whether the existing preference/special pleading is actually bad. Or the merits of the things they’re suggesting in support of those preferences.
I feel that simply conceding the framing in terms of what positions, regardless of their relative truth content, get assumed to be good-faith real problems and which are assumed to be distractions from the same is going way too far.
Like, in a discussion of police brutality against groups, would you assume that one of my examples was definitely given in good faith, and one definitely wasn’t? If so, why would you? If we accept the statements given as given honestly, as actual arguments meant to start from a position of neutrality and argue towards a point based on a real-world fact, why shouldn’t we accept similar statements about differnet groups if the same fact is true?
And if we don’t accept that, then why aren’t the people making the original statements super-trolly?
In a general discussion of police brutality against groups, both examples could come up and not be trolling. In a discussion about racism, the person who made the second comment would be trolling (or maybe not trolling and just accidentally low-quality). And the opposite for a discussion about misandry.
Giving some group control over the context and allowable examples and assuming things outside of that are distractions would be bad. But anybody can find two numbers that are different. If you want to bring up your two numbers, you have to explain why it’s appropriate to compare them to the disparity that was already brought up. Like, presumably you’re aware that men are involved in more violent/high profile crime than women, so of course they’re going to be shot disproportionately. Are you saying their comparison is ignoring the same factors? Who can tell? You just added two numbers and a ton of condescension. Show your work.
Or better yet, I think, talk to people about the things they want to talk about and save the basic premise questioning for places where that’s appreciated.
Seconding this.
This is generally used as a rhetorical trick, not a substantive one. It doesn’t contend with the meat of the argument being presented; it just attempts to hijack the conversation into a discussion of something else. I assume that somebody somewhere must have asked this sort of question in a true spirit of inquiry, but in practice it always seems to be a setup for some sort of “checkmate,
atheistsSJWs!” It’s a prima facie sign of bad faith. It’s not surprising, then, if people decline to spend time explaining what they see as the distinction. (Assuming, of course, that they have a clear conception. There are plenty of people out there who support ideologies they can’t fully explain. That’s a fact about those people, and not necessarily about the ideologies they support. You would not like your own ideological stances to be judged on the basis of their least compelling adherents, either.)I think you’re assuming the initial argument was in good faith. If the initial argument is framed in a way that assumes bad faith, then you either need to throw out the frame or just not have the argument.
“Tech is sexist against women because there’s more men than women in tech” is a bad faith argument. It assumes the only reason there aren’t more women in tech is because the men in tech are sexist, when it could just as well be lack of interest on the part of women. And as soon as you step into this frame, you’re basically screwed, because you have to make an argument that can be construed as sexist (“women are less interested in tech than men”) in order to reject the “men are sexist against women in tech” argument.
If on the other hand you reframe, “yeah, I totally agree with you! And have you noticed how sexist the elementary school teaching profession is?! It’s almost all women! So oppressive!” Now the shoe is other foot and they essentially have to make your argument for you, that no, it’s not that elementary school teaching is institutionally sexist it’s that fewer men than women are interested in teaching elementary school.
Is the Socratic method a bad faith technique, since you’re asking questions you (presumably) already know the answer to, in order to make your opponent make your argument for you?
No, it’s not a bad faith argument. It’s just a bad argument. “What about men being shot / Asians in tech / male teachers?” is in bad faith not because the premise is false, but because the people who raise the question transparently don’t care about the issue itself, and are just using it as a smokescreen.
The Socratic method is (at least in theory) aimed at finding truth. This sort of whataboutism is generally aimed at scoring points. People can tell the difference.
Why do you have to care about the issue itself to use it as a test of an argument class? This basically demands that we throw out Proving Too Much as a technique due to ‘bad faith’.
Of course they don’t care about the issue. The entire point is that the issue is built on false premises and therefore should not be cared about.
Is it wrong to make the “Why are you worried about terrorism? More people die in car accidents” argument unless you care passionately about auto safety?
What are your goals? If you want to look good to your allies and third parties, it’s a solid tactic (like all gotchas). In terms of changing minds, it might work on a small proportion of unsophisticated SJ people, and provoke some sophisticated ones into presenting good justifications for their opinions. Generally, I think making the same point in a less confrontational way “OK, but it seems to me that you could say the same thing about [men/Asians]. What makes that different?” is likely to be more productive.
Well, my usual goals are to expose what seems to me like clear and obvious hypocrisy, and to repay low-effort rhetoric with low-effort rhetoric.
In my own experience, asking why a given unfavored group is different will more often than not produce a statement which may or may not be true about the groups, but one which almost certainly doesn’t apply to all groups, and one which I can easily find another comparison for. But this then turns into a giant sprawling multi-layered completely unproductive argument.
Take the power argument mentioned above. This is something I’ve seen happen directly. Bring up an unfavored group suffering discrimination, and you’ll often be told they have structural power. Bring up another group which doesn’t have structural power but which does make the comparison obviously not generally true, and there will be another reason for that group, and so on, until the original argument is long gone.
Someone willing to use special pleading once will do it again, I’ve found.
You should think about your goals more.
Expose to whom? If you are trying to expose it to a neutral audience, maybe it works. Maximizing the ratio of your opponents hostility to your own may well help this goal (at what cost?). But if you are trying to convince an audience that leans against you, I am skeptical that this is a good idea.
It is certainly true that there are liars out there. Probably you should expose them to the world. Exposing them to themselves doesn’t seem very helpful. If you are going to engage with someone, you probably should have some glimmer of hope. Producing a sprawling argument may not seem productive to you, but it seems to me the best way to make people suspicious of simple slogans.
Vengeance? Whatever floats your boat. But vengeance is not compatible with most other goals. You should probably not try to accomplish both at once.
Well, it’s not trolling. Trolling is when you say or do something deliberately offensive just to piss everyone off, that you also don’t really believe.
You’re actually just laughing at them, by returning a “true fact” that mirrors their argument. Or rather, making a joke of their “argument” because—really—it’s not an argument at all. But the key aspect is laughing.
SJWs, if they are anything, are deadly serious people. Laughing at them is basically their kryptonite, which is why they disengage immediately.
Is it a valid rhetorical strategy? Absolutely. Also: effective.
It’s not particularly nice to laugh at people who usually genuinely care for others, though, so I guess it’s up to you if you want to continue being what is colloquially known as “a dick.”
Honestly, I could cop to the given definition as trolling for this case. I don’t, for instance, think that the gender gap in police brutality shows that society is structurally misandrist. Saying that I do could certainly be construed as mockery, but I feel that there’s an implied “I don’t believe you actually believe in your reasoning. If you did, then you would agree with the statement ‘N’, given here, where another group meets the premise you put forward but you do not accept the conclusion for them.”, but much shorter and punchier.
I’ll have to think about the point of mockery, though. It…doesn’t feel like I’m laughing, to me, but I can imagine how others might see it that way. Thanks for that point of feedback.
What you (probably) believe is that there biological differences between men and women leading men to act more impulsively or violently than women. So when you bring this up, it implies that blacks are similarly more impulsive or black than whites. Which offends your interlocutor, even if they wouldn’t buy the premise that men and women differ.
In the last open thread someone posted a link to an article about slow cookers vs pressure cookers vs a regular oven. It was pretty interesting and had some great info on taste differences between them.
It also had a laughably terrible argument about safety. It boiled down to arguing that it was safe to leave the oven on unattended because fewer people die from fires started by unattended ovens than fires started by unattended slow cookers. It totally ignored the issue of the denominator in each case.
That’s about as far from the culture war as you can possibly get, but if I was in a discussion and someone said something like that I’d be very unlikely to try to convince him he was wrong. There would have to be some special circumstance or I would just change the subject. Perhaps paradoxically when an argument is too far wrong it becomes less worthy of engaging. If there’s a whole group of people nodding their heads to the terrible argument, I’m even less likely to step in.
As I said, there are special circumstances — if I’m being paid to do a job and leaving this wrong notion out there would hurt my employer than I feel more obligated to step in. Or if it involved a long standing friend that I knew would be able to see the problem and would appreciate the correction. Or if it was in the context of a debate and I thought I could sway the audience by pointing out the issue with the argument and it won’t hurt me more than it’ll help me (because I get kicked out or because people think I’m a dick, etc).
In this case, I guess the last part may or may not apply. You have to apply your model of the audience.
Here, I think, we can talk about base rates respectfully and without people assuming too many things, at least on the topic of appliance safety.
But if I was in an environment in which people really wanted to make the point that pressure cookers were safe because of the total number of accidents, and social sanctions were applied to people who questioned this, I’d totally start deploying “My pet hippo is definitely safer than a dog. Look at how many people in America get mauled by pet dogs versus pet hippos on average!”
Then again, I definitely have less sensitivity towards fear of being excluded from social groups on the internet, or being thought a dick, than most people. But personally, if taking an accepted statement of the type “Group X has property Y, therefore Z should apply to them.” and changing out X from a favored group to an unfavored group while holding Y equally true is being a dick, then I’m proud to be a dick.
…I also may have just invoked the meta form of my tactic there. It’s late and I can’t quite tell.
Clearly there are non-trivial numbers of people that revel in being “super-trolly” online.
If you think it’s a lot of fun, or for the greater good, or whatever — go forth and troll. I can’t stop you and don’t especially want to try.
But yeah, it’s generally super trolly (in the broad contemporary sense, not in the narrower but older usenet sense).
@Brad
My experience is that I sometimes think that a claim is laughably terrible, but if I try to counter it, I find that it is quite a bit stronger than my initial impression. The process of crafting a counter-argument puts my snap judgement to the test.
A risk of not engaging is that I am actually wrong, in whole or in part, yet never get to realize this since I dismiss criticism out of hand.
I would generally say that truly bad arguments have a fairly short and clear explanation of why they are wrong. Now, many people may not come up with the best counterargument or don’t have the skill to write incisive rebuttals. However, I think that it is a major red flag when no one in a community is willing or able to do this.
For common bad (types of) arguments, you often see that some person or people create effort posts to point out why the (type of) argument is wrong & then many others refer to this by linking to it or by putting a name to it (like motte-and-bailey).
If a community doesn’t do this, it strongly suggests that there is a taboo against taking some counterarguments seriously, because the consequences of them being true would be too severe, rather than the issue being the level of effort that people are willing to put in.
A fact provides evidence for another claim only against a set of background information. For all but the most simple issues, “X shows/proves/provides evidence for Y” really needs to be understood as “X [together with background] shows/proves/provides evidence for Y”. Your interlocutors might find your tactic obnoxious because it uncharitably ignores the background and makes no effort to fill it in, where filling it in might show your Gotcha! analogy to be misapplied. Some of your interlocutors might have trouble articulating the relevant background – others may be perfectly capable of doing it but identify your behavior as a low-effort bad faith point-scoring tactic and reasonably judge that you’re not worth engaging.
You should also probably readjust your definition of “effective” if annoying people to the point where they stop engaging with you gets read as a success. Even if what you think you’ve done is rendered your opponents speechless and exposed their intellectual bankruptcy for the world to see, to a reflective observer who is not already on your side, it’s not likely to look that way.
Instead of dropping in your “there are more homeless men than women, checkmate SJWs!” and watching smugly while your liberal professor’s jaw drops and he runs out of the room in shame, consider possible relevant disanalogies and background claims which might undermine the symmetry, even if you don’t think they’re true. This shows some thought and willingness to be charitable on your part and even if people still blow you off at least you’ll look less bad.
This kind of reference to a nebulous set of background facts, which conveniently are assumed to always cover assumptions favorable to the Favored Groups and excuse those of the Disfavored, is one of the reasons I do find my punchy formulation useful.
If there are additional salient background facts which mean that for Group X, property Y implies Z, and this is not true of all Group Xes, then those facts should damn well be brought up in Y. If they cannot be easily and cleanly stated in advance, then Y sounds a hell of a lot more like an excuse than a real piece of reasoning, and when Y keeps getting riders attached to it, and always ends up being merely a piece of rhetoric to demonstrate how bad/good a Favored/Disfavored group has it and never actually cleaves into the set of potential Xes, the whole thing seems obviously like a justification.
If a fact is being stated as a genuine piece of reasoning, then the background qualifiers for which Xes Y makes Z true of should be obvious and straightforward. If a moment’s thought can’t call up the complete list, then you clearly do not actually believe Y being true of an arbitrary group means Z, and therefore, you’re not advancing an actual argument. And the fact that Y needs to invoke the concept of background facts instead of containing them is super-convenient.
Also, this entire premise only happens in one direction. No one thinks that people making the original statements have considered “Wait, let’s think of all the ways black people are disanalogous to white people to explain the police violence rate.” before they made their statements.
The original statements are presented as complete and sufficient because they sound persuasive on their own. They sound as though property Y is sufficient entirely to explain the truth of Z. If they are incomplete-but-earnest statements, then a reformulation of them shouldn’t be any ruder than the original statement.
—
What I see here is that there are a set of “For group X, Y is true, therefore Z.” statements which are taken as normative. Challenging these statements is seen as rude and disruptive, even though they are, by everyone’s admission, incomplete and non-persuasive in isolation. They seem to serve merely as signposts, reminders that “For group X, Y is true.” is a point which has been agreed upon. If these statements are meant to be neutral arguments, then swapping out X is a perfect way to test their truth. If they’re rhetoric, then there’s nothing wrong with repaying them with symmetric rhetoric.
And if the only reason that statements like this make me look bad is because people really, really want to keep the statements applying only to their Favored Groups, without putting all the attributes that make their groups Favored in their initial statement, then I’m comfortable looking bad.
Your punchy formulation is obnoxious, but you’re right that the original framing is as well. It’s an appeal to an unstated principle which wouldn’t hold up to examination if it was stated. Your formulation is a reductio applied to that principle, but they were pretending the principle didn’t exist, so it looks like a non sequitur.
Actually trying to get the principle out in the open doesn’t go any better. In general, this group has no meta-level principles; the ones they state or appeal to implicitly are invented ad-hoc because they think they sound good. If you attempt to use them in other contexts, they’ll just move to the object level or apply another principal. This has the effect of creating something that looks like a system with axioms, conclusions, and chains of logic leading from one to the other, but it is not; it’s all “painted on”; the axioms, conclusions, and the chains of logic are all axiomatic.
It’ll come off as super trolly because if you want to react to that argument it derails everything.
The only way to react to something like
“The disproportionate number of police shootings against men clearly demonstrate widespread misandry in society.”
in earnest when you’re talking about police violence against blacks, is by having a long discussion on whether the two situations are in fact equivalent or not. Which makes it look like you don’t want to deal with the actual topic at hand.
You might think that the reason they react so negatively is because “They Can’t Handle the Truth”, but from their point of view, the deflection and “whataboutism”, will make it look like you’re the one who can’t handle “The Truth”
“Whataboutism” isn’t a logical error as such, but it does come off as awfully trolly in a debate, like something akin to the gish gallop. There’s no limit to how much “whataboutism” one can pour into the debate to “poison the well”
So if your intent is to truly change minds, I don’t think you’ve found your “super weapon”
(I’m making no value judgments in this post, just trying to describe how I think most of your opponents will perceive the interaction)
If the rail your argument is on depends on special pleading for your group, why shouldn’t it be derailed? It’s a wrong (or at least incomplete) argument.
And accusations of “Whataboutism” are entirely a matter of framing. The only reason they are a thing at all is because people implicitly accept that statements about the properties of some groups are Done, and are valid topics for discussion and concern, and Not Done for others. Again, no one says “Hey, knock it off with your trolly discussion of silly racial stuff in this serious conversation about misandry, we’re talking about a man who was shot by the police (who happens to be black.)”
Agreed.
I think most people are aware on some level that statements like “The disproportionate number of police shootings against blacks clearly demonstrate widespread racism in society.” consists of countless unstated assumptions.
They’re intuitively aware that it’s more like
“The disproportionate number of police shootings against blacks (combined with implicit assumption A, B, C, D…) clearly demonstrate widespread racism in society.”
and when you shoot back with
“The disproportionate number of police shootings against men clearly demonstrate widespread misandry in society.”
the natural reaction is something like
“I don’t have the hours, days, or months to spare, for explaining you all the reasons why you’re wrong™”
Because you’ve already telegraphed that if they did go into implicit assumption A, your reaction would be “but then what about X, Y and Z?”
I just don’t think cracking the debate wide open will make most people want to engage with you. Even on less incendiary topics
Isn’t this just a variant of Spurious Correlations? To view it with charity : it’s a request for something more than mere correlative statistics, asking for rigor in identifying root causes. To view it without charity : it’s a deliberate obfuscating maneuver, designed to smokescreen the obvious root causes.
As a tactic I don’t think it will have much traction unless applied as a sort of adjunct. You won’t convince anyone based on this tactic alone, but you might be able to use it gently to support a request for rigor.
This all boils down to the idea that correlations are a chimera of [restating priors] and [updating].
I think people of all sorts tend to be impervious to arguments of the form “Using the reasoning by which you concluded A implies B, we can conclude that C implies D, but we know that C implies D is wrong or at least controversial, and therefore you are wrong to conclude that A implies B.”
I think in the specific case you brought up, other people above have it right that while SJWs are literally claiming “Statistical disparity is evidence of oppression,” that’s not what they mean. What they actually mean is “statistical disparity in the context of a world in which group X has been historically oppressed by group Y is evidence of oppression.” I think this issue is exacerbated by SJWs tending to expect others to be extremely good at picking up unspoken context, and people who argue against SJWs often being people who lack the capacity for picking up context as well as the median human (at least, that’s my perception – it may not reflect trends at large).
I don’t know the reason why they’re so opposed to stating the italicized part when you challenge them, but certainly that’s behavior I’ve seen often. I think there’s a widespread belief that the italicized part is an unquestionable truth, something that everyone ought to agree on as being so obviously true that any statement that questions its veracity has got to be trolling or just plain evil.
My pet theory is that there’s a very real fear that the empirical evidence supporting this belief isn’t quite as rock solid as they believe/want to believe/were taught to believe/is useful to believe, and so they want to avoid pointing attention at that underlying belief, lest that attention lead to scrutiny. I’m largely basing this on my own experience as a proto-SJW in my college years (I graduated before modern SJWs really became a thing, but I was very much part of leftist groups whose attitudes and tactics that modern SJWs seem to have adopted and taken up over 9,000) dealing with cognitive dissonance introduced by real empirical findings that clashed with my deeply held beliefs about the state of the world, and deciding that the correct course of action was to shut myself and others up whenever discussion headed toward analyzing reality empirically in such cases, and even outright stopping my brain from thinking if I find myself analyzing it in my head. But that may just have been me, and I may be doing pattern-matching too aggressively. It’s just that the patterns seem to match so darn well.
I don’t think they mean this. I think that they have reserved the phrase “has been historically oppressed” to mean always and only “is a group we favor”.
See: Asians, Jews.
I note again that I am seeing in miniature the structure of argument that lead to the formulation of my tactic. The original statement made was made with no implication that historical oppression was a necessary component, and when the extra condition is added, there are still other groups to which the new component applies, and which still makes the original statement very much nonsense.
I believe in holding people to what they say. I also believe that there is a great deal of room for charity when people say “Apologies, clearly I overstated my original claim, here’s a more nuanced version which I think can be held to rigorous standards.”
But this isn’t what I see. I see people making claims which are clearly justifications after-the-fact and not evaluations of every group X which has property Y, and when they’re called on it, adding the qualification Y-1, again without actually looking at the set of groups in X to see if applies in all or even most cases.
Replying to an agreed-upon, socially-normy “X group has Y property, therefore Z.” with a reformulation in the exact same manner with different X can be rude, certainly. But in a world where the original statement is intended as an earnest argument and not a proclamation of allegiance dressed up as one, a counter-statement isn’t any more rude than the original statement.
I think I chose my words poorly. I agree with you that “has been historically oppressed” seems exactly equivalent to “is a group we favor” as defined by general usage. I think the issue is that their fundamental belief is that “has been historically oppressed” automatically implies “is currently oppressed,” and that under “is currently oppressed,” any disparities that are not in the “currently oppressed” group’s favor is automatically evidence of that current oppression. Both of these have no justification logically, but also both of these seem to be very stable beliefs that are impervious to reasoned criticism.
So I think they THINK they implicitly mean “has been historically oppressed,” even if they really do implicitly mean “my favored group.”
It’s circular, and it falls apart under scrutiny. What you are doing by providing an example of the exact explicit logic they’re using is pointing a spotlight at the implicit belief that they didn’t state. And that spotlight is terrifying, because it invites scrutiny.
So it’s easier to just claim – sans evidence – that such arguments are mostly made by bad people in bad faith, therefore they can’t waste time in the off-chance that you really are just asking in good faith. That way, they don’t have to scrutinize their own fundamental beliefs, which carries the risk of them changing their minds.
Also as an aside, I find your description of your experiences with this type of argument to be very reminiscent of what Freddie DeBoer described in his essay about people espousing the pro-campus-censorship position. Different topic, but similar space involving similar (in my experience, quite often the exact same) people.
Great essay, thanks for sharing
You might think you are making a similar argument, which will expose hypocrisy. But the intersectional feminist/anti-racist approach is more nuanced than how you are presenting it. The idea is that, through a combination of forces, a marginalised group is oppressed and a powerful group is privileged in a number of subtle and variagated ways in different areas of society.
It is not a claim about individual members of groups (most of the time), nor a claim about specific actions of organisations, or even organisations more generally. The argument is on the level of societies and cultures, and they are (in their minds) picking up on an area such as police violence as evidence of the overall thesis of society oppression/privilege for the group in question.
Without showing that (say) Asians control various levers of legal, cultural, and historical power, your argument doesn’t really strike at the roots of their beliefs, and you are not really engaging with what their (unstated) premises are.
But Team SJW has not shown that their designated outgroups control various levers of legal, cultural, and historic power. And their arguments for the fact that this has been done almost always turn back to claims about group differences.
I also note that these arguments are again entirely one-directional. The groups you mention never say “Look, the combination of forces mean that women are just oppressed. We can’t expect them to fairly compete with men in a large number of arenas. These are structural forces, and held so constant we can expect them to apply to all women, all the time, simply because they are women. The fact that this one woman seemed to score better than the male contenders in this trial? Almost certainly trial error. She’s laboring under systemic oppression, and for the benefit of our organization, we need to face the facts on the ground, and hire privileged to the extent we legally can.”
There’s no argument here, is my problem. I don’t perceive nuance. I get zero sense that the theories being advanced are based on actual reasoning, and that they won’t be abandoned as soon as they lead to a conclusion that is not the conclusion that is desired.
That’s fine — I’m not mounting a object-level debate here, just pointing out the meta level disconnects. I think that if you criticised liberals/leftists with an argument as in-depth or as nuanced as this comment, you aren’t trolling, missing the point, or arguing in bad faith. I was just responding to the tactic you made in the top-level comment, which most on “Team SJW” would find unconvincing for the reasons I’ve already stated.
The idea is that, through a combination of forces, a marginalised group is oppressed and a powerful group is privileged in a number of subtle and variagated ways in different areas of society.
I think this is the defensible and not-actually-too-crazy version of identity-focused politics.
I think this is *not* the version largely used in practice, and I think the efforts of the more mature people in that group to police the more crap version are practically invisible. To quote: “I would engage you on this, but I have no interest in hearing how you think blacks possess any privilege when they clearly don’t.” (From one of fandom’s founding SJW’s, just about ten years ago.)
Exploring Math with AT 1: Formal Mathematics vs Informal Mathematics
Most non-mathematicians aren’t aware of formal mathematics. Instead all the mathematics they have learned and used such as algebra1 [1] and calculus are informal mathematics. So..what’s the difference between formal mathematics and informal mathematics? Well before we can illustrate the difference between two kinds of mathematics we first need to introduce what is formal mathematics.
Let’s play a logical game first. There are a collection of objects[2] which we refer to as S. Now let’s define a binary operation * (i.e. something that takes two objects in S as inputs and produce an object in S) that satisfies the following property:
(G1) For any a, b, c in S we have (a*b)*c=a*(b*c)
OK we just got…one abstract binary operation and one property, right? What can we do about it? Great! Let’s choose four objects we can find in S, x, y, z and w. Do we know whether ((x*y)*z)*w=(x*y)*(z*w)?
Hmmm good question! Since the only condition we have are the fact that * is a binary operation on S and the fact that * satisfies (G1) we have to use them if we ever want to get something done. Let a=x*y which is in S due to * being a binary operation, b=y, c=z. Apply (G1). We get ((x*y)*z)*w=(a*b)*c=a*(b*c)=(x*y)*(z*w). So the weird equation we pondered isn’t really that weird. In fact it is factually correct based on the conditions.
What we have just done is a proof in formal mathematics. Welcome to the secret world of mathematicians!
In formal mathematics everything has to be proven using deductive reasoning. There are axioms (such as ZFC) and definitions we assume to be correct. Then the job of the (formal) mathematicians is to prove implications of axioms and definitions called theorems[3]. All mathematicians are (formal) mathematicians.
So what’s the difference between informal mathematics and formal mathematics? Well, the difference isn’t about what people discuss but how the stuff people discuss is discussed. In formal mathematics everything has to be either a part of some axiom/definition or it has to be proven to be legitimate, correct mathematics. Proofs have to be reasonably rigorous [4].
There is a formal mathematics version of natural numbers such as this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers and there is a way to learn and teach complex analysis within informal mathematics (e.g. Only calculations and memories of certain results are required. No proofs necessary!). The most well-known subject both formal mathematics and informal mathematics cover is probably calculus. In informal mathematics people do learn what a limit is in some vague way but either do not learn the formal epsilon-N definition or just look at it without doing anything about it. There are lots of calculations but little reasoning. On the other hand in formal mathematics proofs are emphasized while calculations aren’t. There is a joke that if you deal with integers above ten you are probably not doing formal mathematics which is accurate for most formal mathematicians.
[1] The word “algebra” has at least three completely different meanings. In informal mathematics “algebra” refers to some of the stuff people learn before calculus involving manipulation of mathematical symbols such as adding, subtracting, solving equations, etc. Here I use “algebra1” for that purpose.
In formal mathematics there are at least two meanings of the term, “algebra”. “Algebra” can refer to the study of some abstract system involving a set/class/etc and some (usually binary) operations that satisfy certain properties. This will be referred to as “algebra2” in the rest of this post. For example “linear algebra2” and “abstract algebra2” are algebra2.
For mathematicians who know some about algebra2 there are also another meaning of the word “algebra” which I refer to as algebra3. An algebra3 is an algebraic2 structure which is basically a vector space with a binary operation called multiplication. Lie Algebra3s, Associative Algebra3s, Group Algebra3s, Hopf Algebra3s etc are all algebra3s. The research on these algebraic2 objects are in the field of algebra2.
[2] Mathematicians usually call these collections “sets” if they are not particularly weird and call these objects “elements” of the sets.
[3] We also call some theorems lemmas or corollaries. These are terms unrelated to whether a result is correct. Main theorems are usually pretty clean. Lemmas are the more technical stuff what are required to prove a main theorem. Corollaries are simple implications of main theorems. You can simply think of all of them as theorems.
[4] In actual research papers mathematicians don’t often offer rigorous proofs. However to an expert in the field the gaps can be filled in and the results can be understood (i.e. proven on their own). That’s why rigor is still implicitly around even though there can be large gaps between steps in a proof.
Is algebra2 also called a group, and algebra3 also called a ring? If so, is there a reason to avoid using the common names? It might make things clearer and make typos like the one at the end of the algebra3 paragraph where it calls all of the “algebra3″‘s “algebraic2 objects” less common if you used the common words.
Also, I think using TeX would improve things a lot, and there are extensions (e.g. TeX all the things in chrome) for displaying it in mathjax.
Lastly, let me know if I should delete this comment to avoid putting clutter in a two-part post
No. Algebra2 is an area of mathematics, not a particular class of mathematical objects. Algebra3 is this thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra_over_a_field
A group is a set with one binary operation that satisfies three nice properties. A ring is a set with two binary operations (usually called addition and multiplication) with some nice properties. A ring is certainly an (Abelian/commutative) group with respect to addition. An algebra3 isn’t necessarily a ring at all. However a (unital) associative algebra3 is indeed a ring.
I don’t think an intro post requires TeX though future posts likely do.
I got confused here, thinking that vector spaces already have a binary operation called multiplication and ended up reading up on that. Turns out I they do but what you wrote is still correct.
For the record:
A vector space V over a field F has two kinds of multiplications. Regular multiplication in F and scalar multiplication of scalar and vector (resulting in a vector).
But algebras also have an additional, third kind of multiplication that not an intrinsic part of every vector room: Multiplication of two vectors (resulting in a vector), I imagine the cross product probably qualifies as an example.
So my initial notion of “Wait if that’s true then isn’t every vector space an algebra3?” is in fact not true.
Scalar multiplication and multiplication are completely different.
Here is why. Let A be an algebra3 over field K.
Scalar multiplication: A*K->A
Multiplication: A*A->A
The crucial difference is that to be a multiplication instead of a scalar multiplication you must multiply two elements of your algebraic structure which is A here and obtain an element of the same algebraic structure. On the other hand in scalar multiplication you let an element of your algebraic structure multiply something else (i.e. an element of K).
The former is an operation in any module/vector space structure while the latter is a real multiplication (we only get a magma here). If the multiplication is associative and unital we get a ring structure.
The cross product is something else. This is only available for K^3 (K is a field. You can think of it as R or C) and related algebraic structures. You don’t have it for general K^n. It is in fact a Lie Bracket. K^3 together with addition and cross product constitutes a Lie Algebra.
That was interesting. Thanks for doing this.
You’re welcome! 🙂 I’m glad that you (and hopefully others) enjoy it. 🙂
The next post in this series will be in OT86 which will be a gentle introduction to algebraic (i.e. algebraic2) systems. I won’t force you guys to do exercises in group theory or something. Instead I will just introduce the cool ideas, namely the spirit of abstract algebra (i.e. abstract algebra2). From groups to Lie Algebras (i.e. Lie Algebra3s) the spirit of (abstract) algebra never changes.
SSC, whom do you think is an overlooked or underrated figure in history?
I’m going to restrict to people who are no longer alive. I’m also going to restrict to people you think folks here probably haven’t heard of; just use your best judgment on this, we probably don’t need to hear for the 37th time about our Lord and Savior Stanislav Petrov. A little biographical information or neat facts is of course welcome.
Karel Bossart, designer of the Atlas, the first US ICBM. Responsible for major advances in rocketry, but overshadowed by Korolev and Von Braun.
She was born into a noble family, then orphaned and forced into exile. At 14, she married a much older foreign mercenary. Following his death, she took command of his army and became very powerful and wealthy thanks to the devotion of her troops and the magical powers her enemies attributed to her. This biography might sound like it belongs to a certain Game of Thrones character, but I’m actually talking about Begum Samru, the 18th century Indian warlady. Other facts about her: she converted from Islam to Christianity at the age of 28 and thus became India’s only ever Catholic ruler; her great-grandson was the first British Asian MP; and the inheritance of her massive fortune is still being disputed today (if your surname is Reinhard, investigate your ancestry!).
Also, in the same way that most female political leaders are right-wing rather than progressive feminist types, the only plausibly trans (Wikipedia claims he wore a veil and makeup, and kept a male harem) leader I know was the 3rd Caliph of Córdoba (presumably a fairly conservative place by modern standards).
The Caliphate of Cordoba doesn’t get much attention at all. I knew about the Muslim presence in Spain, but I’d assumed they got taken over by the Abbasids along with the rest of the Muslim world until I read The Long Ships.
John Wilkins. If you haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, the most you’ve heard of Wilkins is probably the Borges essay poking gentle fun at one of his projects (referenced in the SSC blogroll). But Wilkins may be more or less single-handedly responsible for our modern concept of the scientific community–subsidized by various states, but in itself apolitical. By ingratiating himself with all the powerful religious and political movements of the day, he was able to ensure the survival and patronage of the Royal Society through an extremely chaotic period in European history, and set a precedent for pluralism in the process.
He also hit on maybe the most consistently effective plea for science funding that’s ever been made: “One day, if we keep studying, we’ll be able to visit the moon!”
Hooke was another figure Stephenson was trying to rehabilitate, at least for his scientific contributions. Rebuilt London after the 1666 fire, and he made contributions to physics, horology, and microscopy, among others.
All these are well-known, but in small circles: I’m curious whether they are well-known on SSC.
The majority of people alive today owe their lives to this chemist, who developed a process that is critical to modern agriculture. Fritz Haber, who developed the process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen in the air.
Modern conscientious objector status in the US owes a good bit to these two men, who died chained to their cell doors at Fort Leavenworth after months of abuse. Joseph and Michael Hofer
Haber I knew, the other two not.
I once read a work of fiction which speculated that the real genius behind the Haber-Bosch process was Haber’s wife Clara. I don’t know enough about the actual history to know if that’s plausible or completely fanciful, but it was interesting!
Titus Lucretius Carus isn’t overlooked, in that he’s quite famous, but most people don’t know that he discovered Brownian motion in the first century B.C.
Judging from its English translation, De rerum natura is a very beautiful poem filled with exquisite detail. It undermines itself on the moral philosophy front, mostly because Lucretius’ passionate intensity contradicts his message about tranquility. But when it comes to natural philosophy, the argument he makes for atomism is much better than one would expect.
From Book II, lines 127-141:
Now obviously Lucretius wasn’t a scientist and didn’t approach the problem scientifically. If he had the world might have been very different. But given how critical that observation was in the history of science it’s remarkable to see it so far before it’s time.
Gotta disagree here. He theorized, but saying that he “discovered” it is overly ambitious. Rather, he inserted it into Epicurean metaphysics to justify free will existing, which he was having a hard time with, given his otherwise hard-determinist primitive atomism. Moreover: Brownian motion doesn’t involve the kind of causeless action Lucretius wanted. Even deterministic systems can be chaotic systems. and if Lucretius had been more of a scientist, he would have investigated the real causes of the chaos, rather than postulating a cause in a completely ad-hoc way (to satisfy a purely philosophical doctrine, no less!).
As a matter of philosophy and of science, I have to side with Cicero, who rightly ridiculed him over this “swerve” doctrine.
William Marshall.
David Ricardo.
John Wilkes.
Blacula, or the 1st Earl of Pembroke?
If we’re going with unappreciated figures from twelfth century English history, I go with empress Matilda, the woman who was in great part reasonable for putting her son, Henry II, on the throne.
The first Earl of Pembroke was Gilbert de Clare. William married the fourth Countess, Isabel de Clare, and the title was recreated for him. So the Marshall was the first Earl in the second creation of the title.
He was also regent of England.
Matilda was also, along with Stephen, responsible for a pretty ugly civil war.
There isn’t enough bile and venom in the world to give Woodrow Wilson half the reputation he deserves. The man was a monster in human form, there was practically no bad idea from the early 20th century he wasn’t in favor of, and didn’t try to ham fistedly implement.
He was was an exceptional even by the standard of his day who re-segregated Washington DC and the federal civil service He was a eugenicist and a prohibitionist. His meddling in world war one cost millions of lives, 100,000 of them american. While waging that war he had tens of thousands of Americans jailed for dissent, including one of his opponents in the 1916 election. Despite this immense cost, his intervention achieved none of the objectives he sought to achieve, as he threw away an amazingly strong diplomatic position through sheer pigheadedness while laying the groundwork for communism, nazism, world war two and and virtually every subsequent conflict of the 20th century. He was a man so arrogant and self righteous that he ironically invaded countries to “teach them to elect good men” and that Georges Clemenceau called him JC (Jesus Christ) in private correspondence.
All in all combined the absolute worst aspects of the american character in one man, the parochialism and racism of the South married to the puritanism and intellectual arrogance of the North. And despite all of this, he’s still relatively well thought of today.
I rarely agree with you on political matters, but on this one I’m definitely with you.
Seconded: Wilson is earnestly attached to his ideas, and forceful in implementing them–and they are terrible ideas.
I agree that Wilson was terrible. He seems to be dropping in people’s esteem, but more due to his racism than his horrible interventionist foreign policy – when he deserves to be loathed for both. The adjective “Wilsonian” should be an insult.
The adjective “Wilsonian” should be an insult.
I’m reluctant to do this, despite the convincing evidence presented here. Same goes for Andrew Jackson. Mostly because I really like the way Walter Russell Mead presents both adjectives as accurate descriptors of American foreign policy (along with Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism). Jacksonianism and Wilsonianism come off as steelmen of the vision of two otherwise dastardly individuals, and I have little problem making the distinction (after all, all four had not-so-great moments).
On the whole, attempts to “bring [peace/democracy] to the world through foreign intervention” have probably caused more harm than good, and that’s when intentions were actually good (which often they aren’t). The best case scenarios (WWII and Korea) were to some extent fixing the results of Wilson’s intervention.
Were there any pre-modern era presidents that weren’t racist? Lincoln freed the slaves but also made unambiguous statements that could only be interpreted as white supremacy.
During a debate with Douglas he said:
Well, yeah, I’ve seen people condemn the abolitionists because they weren’t enlightened enough by today’s standards, even. But Wilson was probably more racist than the standard for white Americans in his context, and more recently. People are trying to get Wilson’s name taken off stuff, not Lincoln’s.
As for Lincoln-Douglas, regardless of Lincoln’s actual positions, he was trying to minimize what Douglas was pushing, the idea that Lincoln was an abolitionist who wanted racial equality.
Funny you should mention it…
@Incurian
Race protestors campaigning against the man who gave the fucking Emancipation Proclamation – I am now seriously wondering whether thecollegefix is an Onion-type site.
Far be it from me to take the side of screeching campus SJWs, but the emancipation was a tactic to help win the war, which was the only thing he ever cared about, period. He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart or his inherent belief in the equality of man or any of that nonsense he gets credit with today.
Lincoln was genuinely and consistently against slavery. It’s the entire reason the South seceded! They were terrified that an open abolitionist had been elected President.
He was also a principled man who placed his duty to the Union above his personal moral beliefs, hence his comment that he would preserve slavery to save the Union. It is however very unlikely that someone who was not against slavery as Lincoln was to have used emancipation as a tool of war. It certainly seems very convenient for a man who abhors slavery to conclude that the best way to keep the rebel states in the Union was to free their slaves.
He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart or his inherent belief in the equality of man or any of that nonsense he gets credit with today.
Granted, but he still did it. If you’re more interested in results than purity of motive, this should count. Which would they have preferred as president at the time: someone genuinely believing in racial equality who didn’t manage to get Emancipation or someone who cynically hopped aboard the abolition wagon and got it passed?
But that brings us back to the problem that it is perceived all this statute toppling is more about virtue-signalling and public exercising of power (“we can do this now because we’re on the up and you’re on the down of the wheel of fortune, so too bad for you!”) by one bunch, and stringent demands for purity by the new inquisitors of another group (thought crime!), and not about the actual crimes or flaws of the persons commemorated by the statues and memorials.
I think if the argument were made in terms of “This statue of Lee (or whomever) was erected in the 50s by a racist group for racist reasons”, it would be easier to be sympathetic for calls to take it out of public view. But as it is, it really is “screeching” about “Lee was a racist and a fascist!” and ignoring “yeah, but he didn’t take the opportunity offered to him to lead a guerrilla resistance after the war, which would have drawn things out much longer and made the affair even bloodier and more vicious than it had already been; he did what he could to get the south to accept the terms of surrender and go along with the reconstruction”.
I’ve been reading the Flashman novels recently, and they’ve introduced me to all sorts of interesting characters from the mid-1800s. Ranavalona I of Madagascar is a particularly memorable one, as is James Brooke, founder of the Brooke dynasty in northern Borneo.
Ignacio Anaya, credited with the invention of nachos.
He’s not overlooked in the field of mathematics, but to the population at large I think very few people know who Leonhard Euler is, and I think that’s a shame. He’s arguably the most influential pure mathematician to have ever lived, and from all I’ve read sounded like an all around nice guy. In terms of accomplishments he should be as well known as people like Einstein, but he is not.
Not even just pure mathematics. The equation he developed to determine the buckling load of a compression member is used in engineering to this day.
Oh yeah, his influence touches pretty much everything. We couldn’t having this conversation without his work. I was just saying that as a pure mathematician, he’s arguably the most influential.
Joe Medicine Crow.
Interesting.
Note: We need to fight more enemies who have horses.
Or, you know, just fight with more allies with horses.
But ‘stealing an enemy’s horses’ is one of the four tasks you have to do to become a war chief. I don’t think an ally’s horses count. Although in the Middle East, there probably isn’t that much difference.
Once you steal the first horse, they’re no longer an ally 🙂
I think this one might be my favorite so far.
You might like this also: Horse Soldier by Corb Lund (fan video.)
I only recently learned about Émilie du Châtelet. This surprised me, because she’s the person who came up with the idea of conservation of energy. Like, you’d think she’d be mentioned in every high school physics class, right? It’s not like she was little-known at the time, some obscure figure who did the real work while someone else stole the credit or some other story like that. She seems to have been well-recognized for her work at the time, best as I can tell, and just seems to have been somehow largely forgotten since then. Hell, if nothing else I would expect I’d have heard of her from feminists trumpeting her as an example of a great female scientist, you know? Posted up there on the classroom walls alongside Marie Curie and all them. And yet I honestly only learned about her recently. Possibly this is just a gap in my own knowledge, but it really seems like she just isn’t well-known these days, so I thought I’d point her out.
Do you know what her contribution was?
Wikipedia says that Huygens proposed that kinetic energy* is conserved in elastic collisions. Most people didn’t notice, because they were distracted by the claim (also made by Wallis and Wren) that vector momentum is conserved and Descartes’s scalar momentum is not. Leibniz noticed and elaborated on Huygens. He promoted energy as work, meaning complementary with gravitational potential energy (for constant gravity, as on the surface of the Earth). He suggested that heat is random motion, so kinetic energy is conserved in inelastic collisions. ‘s Gravesande demonstrated that the deformation of a certain inelastic collision is quadratic in the velocity, thus providing support for the importance of kinetic energy. du Châtelet replicated these experiments and promoted kinetic energy.
A lot of the debate is hard to follow because people were confused. People believed that work and vis viva existed and had to be identified, rather than trying to propose new laws. In particular, Leibniz, ‘s Gravesande, and du Châtelet all seemed to be arguing against conservation of momentum, on the grounds that there can be only one conserved vis viva. And yet before them Huygens had endorsed both conservation laws. du Châtelet’s contribution may well have been addressing something so confused we can’t understand it.
* this seems to say that Huygens did not identify kinetic energy, but merely described the result of the elastic collision and Leibniz extracted from this the invariant.
Oh, huh, you’re right. That’s odd; I guess I was just reading too fast earlier because I remember looking that that same page! Or maybe I’m just remembering wrong and somehow failed to check there.
Yeah looks like other people did in fact propose conservation of kinetic energy earlier.
Ah! I think I see my mistake. If you look at the paragraph on du Chatelet, it says that other people knew about conservation of momentum but didn’t distinguish energy from momentum. That… seems to contradict what’s written earlier, about other people proposing conservation of kinetic energy, which is clearly distinct from momentum. Maybe her contribution was conservation of energy as a general principle? It looks like earlier people maybe only thought of it as holding in special cases.
Hard to say based on that; would probably have to investigate more in depth to determine precisely. In any case it pretty clearly seems like my simple description of her as the person who came up with conservation of energy is misleading at the least and her contribution is less than I thought. Thanks for correcting me there.
In philosophy, I think Thomas Reid is quite underrated. If he’s brought up at all it tends to be only for his (decisive) objections to Locke’s theory of personal identity, but his work is actually full of gold. He has an absolutely devious argument showing that visual space is non-euclidean (!), before non-euclidean geometries were even discussed by mathematicians (!!).
In the world of Jazz, Rudy Van Gelder. Gelder was the producer/recording engineer for almost every album of consequence in jazz from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, including Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil,” Sonny Rollins “Saxophone Colossus,” and hundreds of other albums me and every other jazz nerd in college listen to on endless repeat.
It’s astounding to me to think one man had such a huge, albeit imperceptible, influence on my art form. It makes wonder if, had Mr. Gelder not applied his magic to all these influential records at a time when audio recording quality was just beginning to exit its primitive phase, would they be as enduring? Charlie Parker’s records, for example, sound horrendously shitty, and are very hard to listen to today. Would that fate have befallen the jazz masters of the 50’s and 60’s, at least to some extent? Very possibly yes, but thanks to Mr. Gelder, not something that came to pass.
Zeng Guofan (though I think he is well known in China). During the Taiping rebellion, the empire was losing control of the situation, and rebels were overrunning Hunan. The government needed someone to organize and lead an army against them, and it was essential to put the right person in charge. Vindicating every western stereotype of Chinese degeneracy, they decided on Zeng Guofan, a literature professor and Senior Deputy Secretary of the Board of Rites. He was an excellent poet, and deeply knowledgeable in Confucian philosophy. As of a few years before he had a high political role in the army, but no real military experience; he was however deeply knowledgeable on Confucian philosophy. Needless to say he and his lieutenants turned the tide of entropy and eventually crushed the rebels.
OMG, this guy is the basis for Kindo Marana in The Grace of Kings! Man, I should actually go learn Chinese history so I can get more of the references in that book 😛
Incidentally, I highly recommend this book (The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu) to anyone who is a fan of high fantasy, especially Game of Thrones — its basically a more cheerful less explicit GoT based on Romance in the Three Kingdoms and apparently other awesome bits of Chinese history 😛
Ephialtes, the guy who came between Themistocles and Pericles in the sequence of “architects of Athenian imperial democracy.”
The record on him is a little hazy, but it appears that in the early years after the Persian wars Athens was steering towards a government in which a small council of senior politicians, the Areopagus, exercised the most governing power. Ephialtes used conflict with Sparta and internal political maneuvering to weaken that body and pushed towards more popular government, laying the groundwork for his successor, Pericles, to construct the full fledged democratic system of the mid 5th century.
Given how tightly Athenian democracy and Athenian naval empire were intertwined, he may have changed the history of the Mediterranean world pretty dramatically.
Not to be confused with Ephialtes of Trachis who betrayed the Greek army at Thermopylae. There are a few cases like this- for instance, the name Eratosthenes can refer both to a mathematician known, among other things, for calculating the circumference of the Earth and to the victim in an Athenian murder case where he had been caught in adultery with the killer’s wife.
The name Ephialtes means “one who leaps upon/onto”. For this reason, it is the Modern Greek word for “nightmare”, which apparently dates back to Galen.
Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Mostly-beneficent Catholic dictator who put Portugal on a solid footing after decades of sectarian conflict. Really, it’s worth following the link to read about the history of his rise and rule, but the wildest thing to me is the fact that he got his power largely by threatening to resign unless he was given more power–and the people then in charge, recognizing how desperately they needed him and his incredible competence, simply gave him more power.
He saved Portugal from both fascists and communists, balanced the budget and drove economic growth, separated church and state, opposed racism and Nazism and helped refugees escape Germany (if remaining diplomatically neutral in WWII).
He was also an authoritarian dictator. His “Estado Novo” has earned the label of “fascist” from some, and even if it wasn’t anti-Semitic or waging aggressive wars, he made broad use of secret police and at least one prison camp to “keep order.” He supported Franco, and earned praise from him. These might be justifiable given a history of failed Republicanism in Portugal, such that he enjoyed popular support when he took power, and threats from Communists and syndicalists were a powerful motivator in a lot of his more repressive actions. But there’s no denying that his rule was distinctly illiberal. Also, his colonial policy was typical of the time, perhaps leaning toward the worse side–but what was typical for the time was so bad that this doesn’t reflect well on him. There are a lot of ways to look at him, but if the criterion is “overlooked”, then this complex, obviously brilliant, and notable figure makes the cut.
Cool, thanks for making me aware of this guy!
I haven’t finished the Wiki article yet, but how did he remain Prime Minister of Portugal until 1968 despite dying in 1940?
Where does it say he died in 1940?
…er, I misread “1970”. That’s embarrassing.
Can I nominate Talleyrand? I feel like he should get a prize for surviving so many upheavals of the French Government despite being so prominent — every time there was a change in power, he had a big target on his back. And he got a surprisingly good deal for France at the Congress of Vienna. (My understanding of it is basically: France in 1814 was like Germany in 1918, but France actually came out ahead in the peace negotiations.)
Also for Americans he was the instigator of the “notorious” XYZ affair, which gets points for having a cool name (but it’s actually kind of boring).
There is a biography of Talleyrand by Duff Cooper–who was the only member of Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet to resign over Munich. It’s very good, clearly pro-Talleyrand. I had first encountered Talleyrand in a Kipling story which has a description of him, in exile in America, playing dice, right hand against left, and “looking at his face, it was a wonder that the poor dumb cubes dared disobey him.”
(From memory, so not verbatim)
Fascinating character. By Cooper’s account, everyone who didn’t know him hated him, everyone who knew him liked him. He resigned from Napoleon’s government before the Russian invasion after giving up on the attempt to persuade Napoleon that conquering the world was a really bad idea.
He resigned from Napoleon’s government before the Russian invasion after giving up on the attempt to persuade Napoleon that conquering the world was a really bad idea.
To be fair, that would seem like an impossible task. Hindsight (and probably ordinary foresight at the time) tells us why Talleyrand was right, but from Napoleon’s point of view it was “I started out a nobody from Corsica and now I am Emperor of France. Everybody at every step of the way has said ‘there’s no way you can do this’ but I did it.”
I first encountered him in The Eight by Katherine Neville, and this was intriguing enough that I read most of a biography of Talleyrand (may have been Coopers, I don’t remember — it was definitely very sympathetic to Talleyrand). Weirdly, I got the impression that I would hate him if I met him in real life — he was so slippery! But I absolutely loved reading about him 🙂
Yelü Dashi, founder of the Qara Khitai khanate. Being a forgetful person I can’t recall much of why, but I remember while reading Michal Biran’s The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History thinking he came across like some sort of “East Asian Alcibiades” what with the double-dealings and political chicanery. He’s also on the list of candidates of historical figures who may have inspired the legend of Prester John.
Norman Borlaug.
Yes, he’s dead (2009), and while you’ve heard of him, 99% of the people around you haven’t.
I seriously want to get a picture of him to hang in my house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Winsemius , apparently.
Tangential to the Different Worlds post:
How many people here have noticed or experienced some form of group bullying in the workplace, even if it’s really subtle? What did you think the reason for the bullying was? Do you feel like on some level the reason the person was getting bullied was at least partially because of their actions and/or lack of competence?
I bring this up because I’m one of the ones working in the tech industry who feels like people are either over-exaggerating about sexism/harassment or things must really be worse at most companies and I’ve been lucky enough not to work at any of them. Of course I could also be blind to a lot of minor forms of ‘abuse’ that don’t seem important to me but when built into an overall pattern they can be really detrimental to a person. The micro-aggression theory. I’m somewhat biased against that, but willing to accept there can be some truth to it.
But reading through some of the posts in the other topic had me reflecting on what might constitute bullying/harassment. The only pattern of hostility or bullying in the workplace I can think of came in the form of low-key group bullying of the weakest member on the team. It reminded me a lot of playing team sports as a kid/teenager, I can think of a couple instances where I witnessed and even participated in ‘bullying’ whoever sucked the most or was dragging the team down with their performance. This generally took the subtle form of no one really being friendly or hanging out with the kid, but could also escalate into taunting and even some minor physical abuse. And as cruel and horrible as that sounds, from a group dynamics perspective it makes a lot of sense. We were working together to win, and if you weren’t doing your part why should the rest of the group get dragged down by it? Looking back it was definitely pretty shitty since we were just playing a game that didn’t have any real impact on our lives or general survival.
But what about situations where someone performing terribly really does have a significant impact. For instance as part of a software development team. Which brings me back to the low-key group bullying in the workplace. Before thinking about it I wouldn’t have really considered it bullying in the traditional sense. There’s not any intentional abuse, people don’t go out of their way to cause problems/suffering in the persons life. It’s more like everyone gets fed up and tired of that one person who can’t understand simple programming concepts and either screws things up or can’t get their work done without someone holding their hand. And eventually their mess is going to fall on the rest of us to pick up. So they slowly get ostracized. People stop helping them as much. And why should we? For the most part we had to figure this shit out ourselves, and when we did need help we knew the right questions to ask and earned at least some respect of the person we’re asking. I can’t tell you how frustrating it can be to try and answer a question when you know the person doesn’t even have the foundational understanding to truly grasp what you’re saying. I’ve only worked about 6 years in software development, but I’ve seen this kind of situation unfold for a few people. One of them eventually found their footing and I think and hope things generally got better for them. A couple others
basically washed out, they probably got jobs at another company where the cycle might have restarted or they changed careers. Can’t say I know for sure.
I guess this is all to say there’s likely some issues around sexism in tech that starts well before anyone is hired (social programming / cognitive development from a young age), but a lot of the real bullying and harassment in the workplace actually comes in the form of ‘taking out the weakest link(s)’. And while it might not be the nicest or most efficient way of handling things, I can understand why it happens, and honestly I’m not sure I’m going to act any differently if I notice it happening.
But I’ll gladly hear counter viewpoints/experiences compared to mine.
I’ve seen individual bullying at workplaces, but group bullying seems much rarer. Only times I can recall seeing anything like it is when the team/dept leader was themselves leading the bullying, and other group members participated as a way of becoming closer to the seat of power (probably mostly unconsciously, but who knows- a lot of people are more sociopathic than is largely acknowledged).
In practice, bullying at a workplace is pretty easy to stop (in the US) if the department head is smart and cares to stop it- simply fire the offenders. In practice, people find reasons not to fire people, are willfully blind to problems in their department, etc., etc.
Aside from the bullying coming from the Social Justice crowd (which was endemic, and some of which you can now read on Breitbart), the only clear incident of bullying I saw at Google was when one very senior person responded (via email; none of this was in-person) to a question from one of my more junior teammates by essentially telling her he didn’t have time for her stupid questions. He didn’t put it quite that blatantly (and I don’t remember exact words), but it was clear enough and upset her. He was in the wrong and I told him so (also in clear terms; the “stupid” question was about a piece of code he was responsible for and wasn’t working properly), and he backed down. But I (and my manager and basically anyone who had the misfortune of dealing with him) already knew he was an asshole before that incident, so I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with sexism.
Why would you consider upholding the current state of affairs (subtle passive-aggressive psychological torment that apparently can go on for a long period of time) preferable instead of working to solve the problem without prolonged periods of making people miserable (either try to uplift the weakest programmer or kick them out)?
I’d personally leave such workplace if I could, because barring miraculous hiring decisions, there’s always going to be someone on the team that does not perform as well as the ones who perform very well, and whether they become the designated target is out of their control (whether the company hires someone who is less capable than them is down to luck).
Well its not an automatic pick on the weakest link, they have to be both bad enough that it has noticeable affects on the team, and despite others trying to help they still aren’t improving.
I agree with you that there should be a more reasonable way of handling it, like going to the manager and having them eventually let the person go. But its almost never that simple in a corporate environmemt. Fact of the matter is, once someone gets hired there is a myriad of factors that make it really difficult to let them go. The people that interviewed and hired them don’t want to look stupid or wrong, even if they are quite bad at their job they can usually at least accomplish simple tasks and finding a replacement can’t be done immediately and your nearly always trying to meet a deadline of some kind, and on top of all that even here in the US managers are reluctant to fire people unless they have some clear and provable reason lest they file a lawsuit and all.
And overall I probably came across as too aggressive in describing the situation. I was reluctant to call it bullying and before reading scotts post I wouldn’t have. Its not really a concerted effort and some of my colleagues are more tolerant of bas coworkers. But theres definitely a subtle shift I’ve seen after someone has been sucking at their job for months and shows no improvement. People start getting shorter with them and stop helping them as earnestly. And it bleeds into the social relationship too, its hard to talk and go to lunch with someone that is actively making your job more difficult than it would otherwise be if they were even adequate at their job.
I’ve been bullied at Google. I am not sure how to identify the group, per se, that bullied me–the best label I could give them would be “normies”. The people who think they’re cooler than those dweeby engineers who work in bizdev or sales or PM or whatever. (Yes, there is a major, powerful group at Google who thinks they’re higher status than the engineering staff. This is the biggest difference between now and when I started. It’s incredibly sad, to me.)
The most blatant example of this: I once was sitting in a conference room alone waiting for an interviewee. Two recruiters at a nearby desk, who thought I couldn’t hear them, spent a good twenty minutes talking about how ugly I was and how pathetic I looked / was dressed / was as a person. (I suppose this is not, perhaps, a central example of bullying; since they seemed to not think I could hear them, they presumably weren’t doing it with the intention of hurting me directly. Nevertheless, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of this class, so I cite it a lot.) Since they still work at Google to my knowledge, and in my best estimation nothing would have happened had I filed complaints against them, I tend to cite this as the day I decided Google was no longer a place meant for people like me.
(And of course I’ve been verbally abused by various SJW types; a prominent one I won’t name but who you know if you follow the press acounts of Google shit tried to get me fired once. But I’m not even counting that.)
Interesting — having had some contact with Google, I’m really surprised that anyone with a brain thinks they’re higher status than eng there. It was fairly obvious, at least to me, that eng absolutely runs the show and everyone else serves at their pleasure. PM seemed like it could sometimes be the tail that wags the dog, but always with a nod to the supremacy of eng.
Care to elaborate on the dynamic you’re referring to?
This was true eight years ago. It is not true now.
I am a little reticent to spill too many beans/reveal private information, since I do respect my confidentiality obligations, but suffice to say that the status games have totally changed, and evil losers like me are expected to perform subservience.
Been bullied, and seen bullying.
In the cases of the bullying I’ve seen, it’s because the bullies in question have asshole personalities. They targeted other people because those people annoyed them.
Like, in one instance, the bully was picking on a quiet, overweight guy who had trouble fitting in. He eventually left the company. The bully immediately went on to another girl and started making fun of her because she was ditzy.
The guy bullying me was just because he was an asshole that never thought he was wrong, liked to tell other people what to do, and yell when things weren’t done according to his way (even if his way was impossible). At one point he yelled at me because I said I needed to play around with a query to get the results I wanted, and he said that he knew how to do it off the top of his head to get exactly the results he wanted. So I came to his desk, and we spent an hour as he fiddled with the query…
And still didn’t get the results he wanted. Because the results he wanted was impossible (fields did not exist in our system). We literally had a team of 70 people manually doing what he wanted, and he assumed he could just automate those jobs away because he was so smart.
That guy was a known asshole, though. He was eventually called out on it, because one of our business partners complained about him. So it was a known issue.
So, nothing specific about the victims. Just asshole perps.
In the previous thread, All I Do Is Win mentioned:
I’d like them to expand on this in this CW permitted thread. Gorusch doesn’t seem like a particularly alt-rightish judge, is it because of his strong commitment to the first ammendment (which nowadays greatly benefits these groups)? Or because a Hillary-chosen judge would be much worse? Or some other reason?
The alt-right (in the US at least, which is what I primarily follow) believe that the conception of the United States, originally, is fundamentally compatible with the alt-right. Since Gorusch is an originalist, he’s de facto helpful to alt-right political goals.
However, that’s a long-term thing. In my lifetime, the most effective weapon progressives have had are the courts. Having Gorsuch on the Supreme Court greatly reduces the effectiveness of that attack vector. Ironically, I’m not sure reducing this attack vector is actually helpful to the alt-right. Here’s why:
Relying on the courts to settle cultural issues, when the momentum for the culture has been clearly moving towards progressive ideals, has been a huge strategic mistake. Literally every single cultural issue that has been decided preemptively by the court “discovering” some heretofore unknown right in the US Constitution has caused the issue to metastasize in the body politic. When that happens, essentially, the culture becomes frozen at that point in time, sides lock in, and because the court decided the issue, legislative fixes become impossible as a cultural mechanism to release the tension.
Instead, the country has a gaping wound that can’t be healed through normal cultural processes. Abortion is the prototypical example, but I would also put gay marriage in that category now. What’s frustrating to me is that these issues were clearly moving in the right direction (and did so in other Western nations), but in the US, activists got greedy and felt it Had. To. Be. Done. Now. So instead of these being dead issues (with the right answer) today, they’re live issues with open wounds, political footballs to be tossed around every election.
(In 4GW terms, progressive ideals “won” at the legal level, but lost at the moral level. That’s a terrible tradeoff today.)
The correct thing for the Supreme Court is to never get out in front of the culture. Every time they do, they damage their own legitimacy and make it impossible for the culture to continue to evolve towards progressive ends.
So IMO, Gorsuch is actually not as clear of a win as the alt-right thinks it is (nor is Trump, actually), and may be a blessing in disguise. By causing these issues to be solved by the culture going forward, not the courts, I think a much more lasting peace can be achieved in the progressive direction. That’s not at all what the alt-right wants. 🙂
Interracial marriage was a hot cultural issue where public opinion was moving towards progressive ideals when the court reached out and preemptively settled it. It didn’t turn into a gaping wound. Ditto for condoms. That’s two counterexamples for posited rule that only has two examples for it.
I can’t tell if you are joking or not. The country literally passed the 14th amendment specifically to address racial inequalities in application of the law. Interracial marriage is clearly an example of that, the court didn’t need to go out on a limb there or get “in front” of the culture.
I’m suggesting that all issues be addressed that way, with amendments when necessary.
I think you are wrong about the facts regarding public support for gay/interracial marriage over time, see here.
These guys didn’t seem to think so:
and in terms of getting out in front of the culture:
https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/bb8ic2qate-wa_cbgc2ifg.png
(Loving v Virginia was handed down in 1967)
P.S. Update the language a little bit and this is something I could imagine reading from some of our H B D friends.
@Brad What the heck happened between 1995 and 1998, that’s a huge jump!
The data is here:http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/163703/Interracial_marriage_130725.pdf
It looks like there was a sharp increase for both whites (45-61) and blacks (68-77). The was a large drop in no opinion (15-9) over those two polls but not enough to explain the jump. It isn’t mentioned in gallop’s writeup http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx
In short, I don’t know.
@rlms
I don’t think those polls measure what you think they measure, which is the legal acceptance of interracial marriage—but that’s what the Supreme Court ruled on.
People can believe miscegenation is a bad idea, while also believing it should be legal and is protected by the Constitution (as amended).
If anything, opposition to miscegenation has risen in the last 10 years, not decreased. That’s alarming. (I haven’t seen a similar trend opposing gay marriage.)
@ManyCookies
My guess would be a change in the polling method.
> …abortion… gay marriage… interracial marriage… condoms… oh, and courts preemptively settling cultural issues…
I usually categorize these topics by whether or not they involve a deep philosophical rift rather than simply being the hot political potato of the day. Abortion involves a hotly-contested and very deep philosophical question – what constitutes “[human] life [with moral value]”. That’s about a deep of a philosophical question as we’re likely to see, so it’s no wonder that the topic is a gaping wound regardless of what the Court said.
Interracial marriage was very much, “Race is a thing; marriage is a thing; what are we going to do about it?” At best, you could say that theories of racial inferiority/superiority were at stake, but those were always more politically-motivated rather than presenting a truly persistent philosophical rift.
Condoms are even more trivial. “We have this stupidly simple tech that stops pregnancy. What are we going to do about it?”
Gay marriage could have fallen on this end of the spectrum, but it comes in the midst of a massive philosophical debate. What is sex? What is gender? What is sexuality/orientation? What is marriage? This one has the potential to lead to a much longer gaping wound, because people simply weren’t asking these types of questions fifty years ago. (Some people might be reopening the questions, “What is race,” and, “What is marriage,” but they weren’t particularly live at the time.)
That’s a good way of looking at things! Thanks.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Look at what is happening to gay marriage. Ever since the Supreme Court ruling in 2015, it has continued its upward pace. Even christians don’t seem as motivated in opposing it as they used to.
But let’s say that you’re right when it comes to abortion. It does look pretty stable since 1973. But that doesn’t really matter. A stalemate is a progressive victory because abortion is still legal. Maybe the support for abortion would be higher without Roe vs Wade. Either way, conservatives can’t win unless they can overturn it.
Yes, Christians aren’t as motivated to oppose gay marriage as they used to be. That’s is true. However, it’s not because they have accepted gay marriage, it’s because it’s not an issue they can win on right now. In the future? Sure, because it’s still an open issue at the cultural level.
The culture is actually moving traditional in Gen Z, at least amongst white people (according to a study of ~40,000 Gen Z students done recently), with reduced support for gay marriage and enhanced support for traditional marriage. This is an alarming development, and not at all what I’d expect. Young people are typically less conservative, and we’re seeing the exact opposite.
Outwardly, everything is great, progressive culture is everywhere respected and ascendent. Internally, the numbers look bleak IMO.
One of the reasons I come to this site is to see how progressives are dealing with these types of changes. So far, they’re not even aware they’re happening, much less formulating a coherent response. That’s troubling.
Isn’t Generation Z full of kids under 18? Assuming your reference is right(and I’m highly skeptical), I wouldn’t really trust the political opinions of teenagers to be stable.
@Wrong Species
Yes, this is a survey they’ve been running for a long time to track political attitudes for that age cohort (i.e. not just Gen Z, but the ones that came before it too).
Result: Younger generations are becoming markedly less progressive, at least among whites and asian males.
I’m going to need to see this survey.
Especially true outside of the universities, and it’s getting noticeable.
I’ve started to come to really enjoy tutoring and teaching the kids born after 2000. It’s like a sea change. And the other old farts who have the opportunity to teach kids outside the of the Political Commissar structures of public school and the universities are noticing it too.
So many of the kids make fun of the tumblr addicts and the SJW ragejoys they know in their public schools. They trade memes and zingers about clueslessness from and their antipathy towards the cohorts born between about 1960 and 1999.
And they are rediscovering chastity, which surprises even me. A few weeks ago I asked one of the kids about the bracelet he was wearing, and he flipped it over to show me it read, in big block letters, “NOFAP”. Even an old guy like me was able to figure out what that meant.
It’s a trend that folks have been noticing in the Catholic Church for a while—a fair number of young Catholics (millennial-age and younger, that is) are quite conservative. It’s very much a thing in France, too. Rod Dreher has been writing about it, First Things has been writing about it… I’m not sure who else. Scares the wits out of old liberals, though!
“A right-wing justice is bad for the right” fits in the category “telling one’s opponents that something which is straightforwardly bad for them and good for you, is for some complicated reason really the reverse.” I have a strong prior against such things being true.
He put a fake club in his yearbook called “Fascism Forever” to troll the liberals he argued with. I disagree.
Trolling liberals is sufficient to get categorized as “alt-right” now?
If not that, what would you say the alt-right’s central characteristic is?
Necessary but not sufficient, surely, however central or noticeable it is.
Presumably, the desire for a white ethno-state.
I do have to commend Gorusch for apparently being one of the first ever /pol/ posters.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous
I think most people would say Milo is centrally alt-right, and I’m fairly confident that he doesn’t want an ethnostate.
Milo is not centrally alt-right. He did not include himself in his guide to the alt-right, for instance. That’s if you’re using the motte, where the alt-right is your internet-savvy white nationalists and white supremacists. Milo is central in the bailey (those to the right of Hillary who aren’t with the establishment GOP, including most Trump supporters) but the bailey isn’t very useful. I suspect Gorsuch is simply an establishment conservative.
What the alt-right is depends on what time period you’re talking about.
Richard Spencer initially coined the term in 2007-2008 as a rebrand of white nationalism to separate pro-white advocacy from anti-other advocacy (klan, nazis).
No one cared because identity politics weren’t quite as virulent then and few people have ever been interested in white nationalism.
Slowly the term expanded as other people wanted a description for “right-wing-but-not-Republican,” like monarchists. I first heard the term in 2015 as a reference to Death Eaters.
Then Trump happened. Lots of people who reacted strongly against the regressive left but also hated the neocon GOP establishment got lumped into the alt-right. This is the time during which Milo wrote his “establishment conservative’s guide the alt-right” article on Breitbart, and it included everybody from unironic nazis to 4chan trolls to paleoconservatives and social libertarians. This is also the context in which Steve Bannon said Breitbart provides a platform for the alt-right, which was an unforced error giving everyone cover to claim Steve Bannon is a white nationalist (he’s not). Also, during this entire period, still practically no one had ever heard of Richard Spencer.
Once the election was over, Spencer is on camera doing “heil Trump” stuff and the alt-right instantly collapses back into “white nationalism only.” And then Charlottesville killed the whole thing. If your initial goal was to separate pro-white advocacy from klan and nazis, then Rule Number Zero should be “no klan, no nazis” and instead they marched with the klan and nazis. And during the first major event that anyone might have paid attention to them. And even while protesting for something that’s object-level popular (the vast majority of Americans, including black Americans, are against taking down Confederate statues). One should always be very glad to have political opponents this incompetent. Spencer is so incompetent at politics I’d give even money he’s controlled opposition.
To be honest, I would taboo the term “alt-right” because when someone says it I have no idea if they mean “no really, just pro-white stuff,” “pretending to be pro-white only when really just nazis,” or “le ebin frog may-mays.”
Why explain by malice what you can explain by stupidity? Spencer is a grad school dropout – so he’s spent a bunch of time in academia. Right-wingers in academia seem, in my experience at least, to have a tendency to adopt a style one could call trolling – they’re unlikely to convert anyone, so they may as well ruffle their feathers. You can see the smirk on Spencer’s face when he says “luegenpresse” in the “Hail Trump” video.
Why not both?
I find his choice of statements and issues so bizarre I can’t even call it trolling. For instance, he’s against the RAISE act which would dramatically reduce legal immigration, and likely bias it towards anglosphere countries with requirements like “must speak English.” While this isn’t “white ethnostate,” you would sure think it would align with his interests. Nope. He apparently wants unskilled 3rd worlders that middle class whites would lord over, or something? That sounds like “white supremacy” and not “white nationalism.” It’s so bizarrely and weirdly inconsistent and incoherent that I find it hard to believe the man believes the things he purports to believe.
And to be so casually incoherent about politics so extreme they make you a pariah and get you literally punched in the face on the street…it just seems very odd. It’s so incredibly stupid, for someone who doesn’t seem incredibly stupid, I have to give equal weight to malice.
Extremists have a tendency to “consider the good the enemy of the perfect”, so to speak.
Then again, who knows? After all, intelligence agencies have “infiltrated” far-right groups by essentially creating them.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker have few peers when it comes to trolling liberals, but they are certainly not alt-right.
They troll everyone though.
If you troll liberals (progressives might be a better fit of a word here)
exclusively, you’re probably alt-right.
Doesn’t the alt in alt-right imply a certain degree of trolling the “default”-right?
Hmmmm, maybe. Personally, I see it as less of “we also troll the right” and more of “unlike those wusses in the traditional right who cowtow to the left, we openly troll them”
Like, if someone on the left calls you a racist, the traditional right response is to provide a list of five reasons why the left are the REAL racists. The alt-right response is to say “**** you, who cares” or something like that.
Hmm, that makes sense. I still disagree that trolling liberals/progressives is sufficient evidence to predict alt-right over *-right, but I can see where you’re coming from now.
I suspect the continued disagreement stems from how badly the verb “troll” has been tortured in recent years. Perhaps what I’m getting at is that the label alt-right implies a not-insignificant degree of disrespect for the default-right, and the 6-o’clock-news definition of “trolling” appears to be roughly “being openly impolite toward”.
That said, I agree that the alt-right label is more likely to draw people who are willing to be brazenly disrespectful, because establishment parties are much more disinclined to work with people who don’t play by the rules. IMO Charlottesville makes a pretty good case study for whale cancer.
The alt-right’s view of the traditional right is that they’re pushovers (I think the 4-letter c-word they use is banned). I expect this means they’re simply not worth trolling.
Gorsuch is also a very “safe” answer to that question in the sense that he appeals widely to the right in general, but is also far enough right that it seems somewhat reasonable to suspect that a standard milquetoast republican might not have nominated him.
It’s something that can be spun as uniquely Trump, something that the left wasn’t able to stop or hold up, and will never be able to reverse.
Air Travel – Safety Part 2
(Effort post index, including series index)
Trigger Warning: Frank discussion of airliner crashes
Last time I discussed safety, I talked about the standard procedure for addressing airplane-level structural problems found before they cause a crash. But the majority of aviation incidents today are more complicated, mostly because of how good we are at finding purely mechanical problems before they bring down a plane. I’m going to neglect terrorism and other outside factors throughout, as that’s a rather different discussion.
When people think of plane crashes, they tend to think of the plane slamming into the ground, and everyone onboard being killed immediately. While this does happen, it’s actually fairly rare. The last crash of this type by a major commercial airliner was that of Flydubai 981 in March of 2016. The exact cause is still under investigation, but it appears to have been a piloting screw-up in difficult weather conditions. (EgyptAir 804, two months later, is still of undetermined cause.) In the US, the last mainline crash where everyone onboard was killed was that of American Flight 587, in November of 2001. That crash was due to structural failure after the co-pilot overused the rudder to counter wake turbulence from the plane taking off ahead of them.
Somewhat more common are various incidents where the plane impacts the ground slowly enough that some or all of the people onboard survive. The most prominent recent example of this is Asiana 214, the 777 that crashed when the pilots brought it in short at San Francisco airport in 2013. This kind of incident ranges from extreme cases where only one passenger survives (surprisingly common) to cases where everyone is evacuated safely, such as the US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson.
And then there are the cases where something goes badly wrong, but the plane itself is only damaged (although it may be subsequently written off), and everyone aboard survives.
To illustrate these better, I’m going to look at some prominent incidents, and what they tell us about what causes planes to crash. This will be weighted towards recent events, although I may throw in a few older ones.
Air France 447: An A330 flying from Brazil to Paris crashed in the Atlantic in June of 2009, killing all 228 onboard. The investigators were unable to find the ‘black boxes’ for two years, which delayed the final report until 2012. The case was particularly mysterious because there were no obvious problems with the airplane before it hit the water. The sequence as eventually pieced together runs as follows:
1. The pitot tubes (the devices that provide airspeed data) iced up as the airplane was flying at the upper edge of a storm over the Atlantic.
2. The flight control computer detected the loss of airspeed data, disabled the autopilot, and switched to an alternate control law. (The Airbus fly-by-wire system has different control laws for different situations, like a lack of air data.)
3. The pilots overcorrected for a roll induced by the turbulence of the storm, and put the airplane into a steep climb for reasons that are not really understood.
4. The pilots ignored several stall warnings, and continued to try to climb. The Airbus flight computer normally prevents the pilot from flying into a stall, but it was inoperative due to the use of the alternate law, so the airplane stalled. Also, the stall warnings became inoperative due to the extremely high angle of attack. [John: since aerodynamic stall is caused by high angle of attack, this is a major oversight]
5. The pilots were unable to return the airplane to normal flight before it hit the ocean.
Ultimately, the cause of the crash was that the pilots did not fly the airplane properly. Reducing angle of attack during a stall is the standard and only way to resolve the problem. Why they continued to pull up is unknown, as this is piloting 101. A possible contributor is the design of the fly-by-wire system. In normal mode, it provides stall protection, not allowing the pilot to fly into a stall, and the pilots may not have realized that this protection was no longer in place. Obviously, if the pitot tubes had not iced up, there would have been no crash. The so-called ‘swiss cheese model’ is often used to describe air crashes. In this model, there are a number of layers (pilots, airplane, maintenance, etc), each with holes in them. When the holes line up, an accident occurs. Good systems have few or small holes, while bad systems have larger holes. In this case, we can identify at least three layers, the pilots themselves, the pitot tube icing, and poor procedure/training in alternate flight modes. Any of these three not occurring would have saved the airplane.
Sidebar: Black boxes are not actually black. There are two of them, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR), both colored bright orange. They are incredibly durable, and record on a loop until power is lost. The data on the FDR is very comprehensive.
Asiana 214: I mentioned this above, but it’s another case where poor piloting and external factors interacted to cause a crash. Asiana is a South Korean airline (North Korea has one airline, Air Koryo, which is famous among airline geeks for being rated as the worst airline in the world), and Flight 214 was a 777 from Seoul to San Francisco. On the day of the accident, the instrument landing system on the runway was out of service for maintenance. This forced the pilots to use a visual approach. The pilot flying the plane was new to the 777, but experienced on other airplanes. The command pilot was a new flight instructor, but with a lot of time on the 777. They came in too low and slow, partially due to a belief that the autothrottle was running when it was in fact not [John: there is some disagreement whether an autothrottle should be used at all on a visual approach]. The landing gear and tail struck the seawall, while the rest of the plane slid almost half a mile down the runway before coming to a halt. Two of the escape slides deployed inside the fuselage, and had to be punctured to clear evacuation routes. Of the 307 onboard, only three died. Two of them were not wearing their seatbelts on landing and were thrown clear, dying on impact. (This is why you should always wear your seatbelt during takeoff and landing.) The third was run over by a rescue vehicle, possibly after also being thrown out of the airplane.
Our slices of cheese are again more complicated than simple pilot error. The crew also failed basic piloting, but the missing ILS, the misunderstood autothrottle, and the inexperience of the crew also were probably contributing. Many Asian airlines are known for placing more reliance on automation than US and European airlines do, which probably played a part. [John: The common factor in these two is that when the automation stopped working, the human pilots didn’t understand what was expected of them]
Sidebar: Human factors is really important in a lot of these cases. It’s tempting to blame the pilots for not understanding the autothrottle, but if we do that, we never see improvements. We’ve learned a lot about how to design good interfaces from incidents like this, and because the pilots never will be perfect, the rest of the system needs to be as good as possible.
I’ll probably continue looking at crashes later, but that’s enough for today.
This was fascinating, bean, thank you. I’m just baffled that anyone would not be wearing their seatbelt on landing.
Sorry if this is off-topic; there was an airplane that disappeared over, I think the Indian Ocean about a year ago. Was any trace of that ever uncovered?
(edit Yes, the Malaysian one, thanks)
If you’re thinking of the Malaysia Air flight, I believe some pieces positively ID’d as part of the plane have washed up, but we still don’t have a good idea what happened or even where the plane ultimately crashed.
The closest I can think of is MH370, which was back in early 2014. They did finally find one part on Renunion. Best current theory (and I actually got to talk to one of the NTSB guys involved) was that the pilot decided to do his best Bond Villain impression and make the plane disappear. He almost got away with it, too. The engine transponders were installed after AF 447, and neither Boeing nor Malaysian knew about them.
You mean commit suicide, or sell it on the black market?
There’s no black market for 777s. You could e.g. sell the passengers to ISIS for ransom or propaganda purposes, and that was one of the early (almost certainly false) suspicions, but there’s no practical use for the plane itself outside of legitimate air commerce.
I don’t actually imagine such a thing being possible due to pretty much every air flight being noticed, monitored, and tracked by someone if it goes anywhere interesting, but I can’t see a Bond Villain(tm) plan being “crash plane mysteriously and mock the authorities from a watery grave”.
John is spot-on. Something like that is not particularly useful unless you’re planning to move people from one international airport to another. And they’re very closely tracked. It’s not like a car where you can change the plates. Boeing has a system where you can get information on every single jet they’ve ever made. There are half a dozen different databases maintained by recreational plane-spotters. If it turned up on the black market, someone would notice.
As for mocking the authorities from a watery grave, “bond villain” is how the NTSB guy described it to me.
I presume that it would also be impossible to sell parts off of it? As in, anything big, expensive and assembled (like an engine) would also be tracked with a serial number or something?
Hmm…..
Everything has a serial number. And I mean everything, except maybe the rivets. But there are still records of what batch those are from. On the other hand, all of the work that goes into tracking all of this stuff makes certified parts very expensive, so a market grew up in parts that had fake certs. The FAA cracked down on it in the US a few years ago, but if you’re selling to operators in parts of the world with less stringent regulators, you might be able to sell some of the parts that way, and alter their serial numbers or get them ignored. But this seems absurdly high-risk, given that you’ve murdered a couple hundred people to do it, and you can’t rule out that someone will figure it out. Also, you have to dispose of a 777 carcass, and believe me, those things are big.
I’m just letting my bad-technothriller-plot skills run wild as a theoretical exercise, but could the airframe have value even if unflyable? I know rogue states like North Korea can’t just go and buy 777 blueprints to build their own knock-offs. So you slip a team of secret agents aboard, fly the plane to North Korea, put plane in a deep hangar and the passengers in a hidden mass grave, and a decade later Air Koryo gets something that looks remarkably 777-like.
@Civilis
Can’t they? Paying the right people to do a little industrial espionage seems a lot more practical then steeling an airplane, and killing it’s passengers.
I recall seeing similar speculation in the immediate aftermath. I just don’t think it’s plausible. That kind of reverse-engineering is a lot harder than it sounds, and you could get about 90% of the design art by slipping agents into Boeing or (more likely) a Chinese heavy maintenance shop. It would probably be easier and cheaper for Air Koryo to get widebodies from the Russians, but I can’t see why they’d want them in the first place. Also, if that’s what you are trying to do, then there are easier ways to do it. Have someone hijack an airplane and demand to be flown to North Korea. Once it’s on the ground, impound it for whatever reason. It’s not your fault that some nutjob chose to fly it to you, and even if your involvement comes out, you didn’t murder a bunch of people in the process. That’s the big problem I have with all of the plans to get the plane itself. Killing the passengers is a much bigger deal, and it’s hard to impossible to see why someone would do that as part of a plot to get the plane itself if they weren’t trying something so heinous they didn’t care. Also, the plane went the wrong way for North Korea, and everyone else can just buy 777s.
I guess I was coming up with a creative way to ask ‘how valuable are the trade secrets on the construction of a commercial aircraft?’ Yes, we know China’s going to both try to get compromised individuals into Boeing to get them details, and any aircraft we sell them they’re going to reverse engineer. But presumably, China can’t just order one Boeing 777, no spare parts. Any aircraft sale to China’s going to have to include enough commercial aircraft to legitimately fly, and the purchase price is going to include a de facto ‘you’re paying for the planes and the reverse engineering you’re going to do on them so you can build your own knock-off’.
Which is why they ordered lots, with spares. There’s a couple reasons Boeing isn’t that scared of this kind of reverse-engineering. First, reverse-engineering is really hard, particularly on the level of design a modern airliner is working on. You can’t just copy parts blindly. China still has to buy fighter engines from Russia, IIRC, and modern commercial engines have the same issue. Second, big airliners are operated internationally. That 777-copy isn’t going to be much good if nobody else will give it a certification because it’s a shameless ripoff of a Boeing product and Boeing is very unhappy about this. Third, I’m not even sure it would be economical. Boeing is building a lot of them, and you’re essentially having to build the entire parts chain over from scratch. Pirated cell phones, AIUI, work by the factories overbuilding parts, and selling the extras on the black market. Not going to happen here.
China has rolled out their A320 knockoff, or close enough as makes no difference, and it probably did involve some degree of reverse-engineering of actual A320s.
They still, after a decade of trying, can’t build engines for it. They’ll probably get that right in a few more years, but only with the active assistance of I believe mostly Russian engineers. Modern jet aircraft are almost defined by their engines, and the best (i.e. only economically competitive) jet engines are almost impossible to build without having a team of first-rate metallurgists who have already spent a couple of decades building modern jet engines.
Reverse-engineering won’t help you there, because the issue isn’t knowing what the finished product looks like but knowing how to make it. Having a complete 777, or for that matter having a complete set of blueprints for a 777, won’t let you actually make one. You need a detailed knowledge of the manufacturing processes.
[ed: ninja’s by bean, of course]
A couple of points on this:
1. They at least made it look somewhat different, which definitely means they had enough understanding to do a lot of their own engineering.
2. It’s a narrowbody, which means mostly domestic or short international flights. They can do just fine with it even if the FAA/EASA deny certification.
3. It’s not really competitive with the A320neo and 737Max. All of the orders (except for one from GE leasing, which will probably go to a Chinese operator) are from Chinese airlines.
Basically, it’s a potential threat to Boeing/Airbus, but it’s not one they can solve easily, and it’s also not huge. Bombardier is a bigger concern.
These types of accidents seem like a hard problem. On the one hand, rule 1 is “fly the plane”. If in either case the pilots had done the “1st day of flight school” thing when the automation failed, the accidents would have been avoided.
On the other hand, automation has prevented a ton of accidents, and there are plenty of scenarios where trusting your instincts instead of your instruments will make you very dead.
Just to be clear here, “automation” and “instruments” are two different things. If you are flying an airplane in an environment without a visible horizon, you absolutely need to use flight instruments to maintain stable level flight or you will die. Depending on the aircraft, you may also need to use instruments to e.g. maintain center of gravity withing acceptable limits by shifting fuel between different tanks. No exceptions.
This is not automation. Instrument flying, from Jimmy Doolittle on down to the present, can be accomplished by a human pilot observing mechanical instruments and by his own judgement making direct inputs into mechanical flight controls without so much as an analog feeback controller anywhere in the system.
I am aware of the difference between automation and instruments, but it’s fair to note it. Point was there are times when you need to trust things other than your personal perception and rely on what (you think the) the machine is telling you, and times when you shouldn’t, and deciding when to flip from one mode to the other is a nontrivial user interface problem.
It really isn’t. I read a lot of NTSB reports for work and people who trust the automation instead of their instruments produce NTSB reports (get in accidents) far more often then the inverse.
Is a stall condition difficult to recognize in a large powered aircraft? When I was training for my PPL in gliders, we spent quite a bit of time dealing with stalls: how to recognize them, when they are likely to occur, and how to get out of them. Is it just harder in an airliner?
I don’t think it should be. I strongly suspect that the pilots simply didn’t realize what the deactivation of the primary control law meant in the moment.
The part that concerns me is that they didn’t recognize, “low airspeed, nose-high attitude, rapidly dropping altitude.” Maybe I’m limited by my low experience and all of it in light aircraft, but those three things together should scream “STALL!” even without warnings from the cockpit flight systems. And unless something is radically different, recovery is mostly just pushing forward on the stick to drop the nose and gain airspeed.
I mean, it’s easy to see the mistake if they were at a low altitude where that didn’t become apparent in the time you had before you hit the ground, but these guys had what, three minutes?
Part of the problem is that nobody other than test pilots ever deliberately stalls an airliner. Training is all done by flying to incipient stall and then immediately recovering; the test standards IIRC allow for only 100′ of altitude loss, which is not possible for a full stall. Flight simulators can’t accurately model a full stall, though people are working on it, and I don’t believe the operators’ manuals for any of the current airliners allow deliberate full stalls for training.
Some airlines have, post-447, been sending their pilots to “upset training” programs using either surplus military trainers or old Gulfstream bizjets (which do allow full stall), and of course your typical US airline pilot is going to have 1000+ hours tooling around in an F-16 or a Cessna for their hands-on stalling experience. But someone who went through ab initio training to become an airline pilot may have basically learned, even though that wasn’t the intent, that actual stalls are mysterious and scary and certain death to be avoided at all cost, which fortunately Airbus’s automation will mostly handle for you.
Why can’t flight simulators accurately model a full stall? I am intrigued.
Fundamentally different aerodynamics, with turbulent flow detaching from the upper surface of the wing, that don’t occur anywhere else in normal or even most abnormal flight operations. You’d have to do substantial wind-tunnel testing to measure the raw aerodynamic inputs for a stalled-flight model, and there has been no demand for that because Everybody Knows that nobody ever ever really stalls an airliner in the first place.
There’s talk of changing that, but as far as I know nobody has yet rolled out an airliner simulator that actually does full stall behavior.
http://aviationweek.com/awin/full-stall-simulators-take-shape
It seems that it’s just because they haven’t been programmed with the proper response for that state. This seems to be a lot of extra effort, because it’s a special state that rarely happens, so you have to do a lot of work to figure out how the specific plane responds during a full stall.
Edit: ninja’d
Making a wide-body airliner fall from the sky but recover safely sounds like fun.
Hypothetically, if I bought one of these aircraft, got all the proper qualifications to fly it, and then went out and repeatedly stalled it and spun it, what would happen?
Well, you’d have invented the world’s most expensive extreme sport, for one.
You’d be operating outside the placarded limits and the specifications laid out in the owners’ manual. I think that this is legal if and only if you register the plane as an experimental aircraft, at which point you can no longer charge people money to fly in it. Not sure if there’s a way to recover costs for providing flight instruction in an experimental aircraft. And going from experimental back to certified operations is a tricky proposition as well.
So, as Nornagest says, a very expensive extreme sport. But legal, so long as you do it without endangering people on the ground.
Hmm, if you want to do it above 18,000 feet, say to duplicate the Air France 447 experience, you’ll need to be flying IFR, so air traffic control is going to have to clear this. I suppose technically you could just ask for a block altitude clearance and not explain why you’re going to be using the whole block over a 15-second period…
I’m not an airline designer, but I’m guessing after a few iterations of this, something rather important breaks from repeated stresses well above what are expected in normal operation, and you fail to recover.
Imagine the reaction at Boeing HQ when they got wind of it.
Marketing: This is great exposure, if he doesn’t crash. If he does, not so much.
Eng: We sure would love a chance to inspect that aircraft after a few rounds of aerobatics.
Finance: Our stock is trading heavily, but it’s approximately level, ironically enough.
Execs: I picked the wrong day to stop drinking.
If we ever meet in person, remind me to stand far away if you think something might be fun.
Wait. There are commercial Vomit Comet operators, and they can charge money. No idea what part of the FARs they’re under though. But if you can’t stretch those to cover, you’re probably right about the legal basis.
You’d be surprised. The planes are quite tough. Although I would want a really good fatigue inspection after every run.
Service Bulletins: No! They’ll inspect it, and find some crack in some stupid location caused by this stupid person flying the airplane in a stupid manner, and the FAA will come up with a stupid rule that we have to fix the thing. And we will have to explain to engineering why they can’t do it the way they want. Repeatedly. It will be a stupid waste of time we could better spend on satisfying the whims of the FAA and engineering which are less stupid, or in some cases not stupid at all.
They weren’t too happy the last time.